Tyre put out her trembling and bloody hand to the icon.
Not authorized, the icon blinked.
She swore. Kax was still alive and on-station. As far as the Lynx was concerned, he was still in command, and was the only analyst qualified to make this judgment. Tyre cleared her second sight and looked down to where Rogers cradled the data master's head. Kax seemed hardly to have a face at all. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if he still had second sight, even though his eyes were destroyed.
There wasn't time to ask. Kax could hardly breathe; he couldn't be thinking clearly with an injury like that.
"Rogers," she ordered. "Pull the data master out of the room."
"What?"
"Pick him up and drag him from the room. Get him off the station." Tyre said it with all the force she could manage. Her ragged voice gave the words an authority she didn't feel.
Rogers hesitated, looking at the other two ratings.
"Rogers! The Lynx won't recognize my rank with him in here."
"But there's more glass out--"
"Do it!"
Rogers jumped, then stooped to gingerly lift the wounded Kax. He pulled the bloody man toward the doorway, his shredded uniform scraping across the glass and out into the access shaft.
Tyre breathed deep, and touched the priority icon again.
"Please listen," she murmured to herself. The icon shifted in the air, folding into a bright point, and requested her missive. She attached the compiled frame showing the host of blackbody drones and gestured the Send command.
A few seconds later, Hobbes's voice responded.
"My god," the ExO said. Tyre breathed a sigh of relief at the woman's tone. At least Hobbes understood.
"Where the hell's Kax?"
"Injured. Blind, I think."
"Shit. Get up to the captain's planning room, then," the Executive Officer ordered. "And get ready to explain this."
"Aye, aye."
"We'll have to accelerate immediately. We'll lose the manifold for good," Hobbes continued, talking half to herself. "You better be on the mark with this, Tyre."
Tyre swallowed as she pulled herself from the webbing.
If she was wrong, her career was ruined. If she was right, the Lynx was in very deep trouble.
Senator
They looked up at her with startled expressions, curious and wary. Their eyes reflected the hovering globe that lit her path, igniting with the crimson flash of night predators.
Nara Oxham wondered if small rodents were ever let loose in the Diamond Palace's darkened halls, entertainment for the Emperor's pets. Of course, it seemed unlikely that risen animals would make very aggressive hunters. As she passed, the felines remained piled together on the low window couch, regally watchful, but as soporific as fat old toms. Perhaps like dead humans they were content to contemplate black paintings and go on endless pilgrimages. Nara could see the ridges of the symbiant along the felines' spines, payment for the cruelty their kind had suffered during the Holy Experiments. They were dead things, she reminded herself.
"Senator."
The inhuman voice came out of darkness, and Oxham started.
"My apologies, Senator Oxham." The representative from the Plague Axis stepped to the edge of her globe's light, but remained politely distant. "My biosuit allows me a certain level of night vision; I had forgotten you couldn't see me."
The slight hiss of the biosuit's filters was barely audible in the silent hallway. Nara tried not to imagine the representative's diseases straining to escape, to infect her, to propagate across the human species.
"So you can see in the dark? Not unlike the sovereign's house Pets," she said, gesturing at the flashing eyes.
There was a pause. Had her insult found its mark? Through the opaque faceplate, the representative's expression was invisible. They had sat on the War Council together for weeks now, but Nara didn't even know if the thing inside the suit was male or female.
Whatever it was, it had cast the deciding vote in favor of the Emperor's genocide.
"Except that those cats will live forever, Nara Oxham. I shall not."
The people of the Plague Axis could not take the symbiant, which resisted all disease and physical defect as part of its cure for death. For that reason Oxham and her party had counted the Axis on the side of the living, allies against the Emperor. It hadn't worked out that way.
Oxham shrugged. "Neither shall I." She turned and walked toward the council chamber.
"Senator?" the representative called softly.
"The sovereign requests we attend him," she answered without stopping.
The soft, pearly floor of the council chamber glowed coolly in the Diamond Palace's night. The dead never liked bright rooms at any time, but the lighting in gray places always varied slowly, reflecting daily and seasonal shifts, even equinoctial precession on more eccentric planets.
Senator Oxham and the Plague Axis representative were the last of the nine counselors to arrive. The dead admiral hardly waited for them to settle before beginning her speech.
"There is news from Legis."
Nara closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then forced herself to watch.
The airscreen filled with a familiar schematic, the decelerating Rix battlecruiser arcing toward Legis, the hook-shaped path of the Lynx darting out to engage it as far from the planet as possible. At this system-sized scale, the two trajectories were touching now.
Nara's sudden dose of apathy would take some time to wear off, so she watched the faces of her colleagues through the translucent image. The other pink senators, Federalist and Utopian, and the plutocrat Ax Milnk wore harried and sleepless looks. Even the Loyalist Henders looked nervous, unready to learn that he had voted for mass murder. The faces of three dead members of the War Council were like stone. The admiral spoke evenly, the general sat at attention, the risen sovereign stared into the middle distance over Nara's head.
She could feel nothing, but a lifetime spent comparing what eyes and empathy told her had given Nara an instinct for reading bodies and faces. Even with her ability dampened, the aspects of the dead men and woman betrayed disquiet.
Something had gone wrong.
"The Lynx and the Rix engaged some thirty minutes ago," the dead admiral continued. "At last report, the two ships have reached second contact."
Nara's jaw tightened. First contact was when the outer drone clouds overlapped, with shots fired between them; second contact meant that the primaries, the Lynx and the Rix warship proper, had engaged each other's drones. Beginning with second contact, human lives were lost.