As preposterous and shattery as love, she thought. "I must prepare for war, Senator Oxham."
"I leave you, Your Majesty," she managed.
Nara Oxham wound her way out of the garden, blind to its distractions, blending the Emperor's words into one echoing thought:
To lose him, should he fail.
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Katherie Hobbes paused to gather herself before entering the observation blister. Her report was essential to the captain's survival. This was no time to be overwhelmed by childhood fears.
She remembered her gravity training on the academy orbital Phoenix. The orbital, stationed low over Home, was reoriented every day at random. Through the transparent outer ceilings and floors, the planet might be hanging overhead, looming vertiginously below, or tilted at any imaginable angle. The orbital's artificial gravity, already compromised by the proximity of Home, was likewise reconfigured throughout the academy on an hourly basis. The routes between stations (which had to be traversed quickly in the short intervals between classes) might require a dozen changes in orientation; the gravity direction of each corridor shifted without pattern. Only a few hasty markings sprayed onto the rollbars showed what was coming when you flipped from hall to hall.
The objective of all this chaos was to break down the two-dimensional thinking of a gravity-well-born human. The Phoenix had no up nor down, only the arbitrary geography of room numbers, coordinates, and classroom seating charts.
Of course, in the career of a naval officer, gravity was one of the mildest crises of subjectivity to overcome. For most cadets, the Time Thief, who stole your friends and family, was far more devastating than a wall turned overnight into a floor. But for Hobbes, the loss of an absolute down had always remained the greatest perversion of space travel.
Despite her long career in arbitrary gravity, Hobbes maintained a healthy fear of falling.
So, as always, stepping into the captain's observation blister brought on the old vertigo. It was like walking the plank, Hobbes supposed. But a plank was at least visible. She knew not to look down at her boots as they passed from the hypercarbon floor of the airlock onto the transparent surface of the blister. Instead, Hobbes kept her eyes focused on Captain Zai, finding security in his familiar form. Standing at a graceful parade rest with his back to her, he seemed suspended in space. The black wool of his uniform blended with the void, the piping of the garment, his head, and the trademark gray gloves hovering disembodied until Hobbes's eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was almost noon down at the palace, so the sun was at the Lynx's stern. The only light came from Legis XV, a full green bauble shining over Zai's left shoulder. At the 60,000-klick distance of geosynchronous orbit (a long day, that world), it was not the angry, bloated disk it had been during the rescue attempt. Now it was merely a baleful eye.
Hobbes looked at the planet with hatred. It had killed her captain.
"Executive officer reporting, sir."
"Report," Zai said, still facing the void. "In doing the postmortem--" The word froze in her mouth. She had not considered its original meaning in this context.
"Appropriate choice of terms, Executive Officer. Continue."
"In doing the PM, sir, we've discovered some anomalies."
"Anomalies?"
Hobbes looked at the useless hard encryption key in her hand. She had carefully prepared presentation files of the findings, but there were no hard-screens here in the observation blister. No provision for hi-res display, except for the spectacle of the universe itself. The images she intended to show would reveal nothing in low-res synesthesia. She would have to make do with words alone.
"We have determined that Private Ernesto was killed by friendly fire."
"The railgun bombardment?" Zai asked sadly, ready to add another measure of guilt to his failure.
"No, sir. The initiate's varigun."
His hands clenched. "Idiots," he said softly.
"A governor-override was triggered on the initiate's weapon, sir. It tried to warn him not to fire."
Zai shook his head, his voice sinking deeper into melancholy. "I imagine Barris didn't know what the alarm meant. We were fools to have issued him a weapon at all. Stupidity in the Political Apparatus is no anomaly, Hobbes."
Hobbes swallowed at the blunt talk, especially with two politicals still on board. Of course, the captain's blister, featureless and temporary, was the most secure station on the ship. And Zai was beyond punishment in any case. The death of the Child Empress--her brain was damaged beyond reanimation by the Rix blaster, Adept Trevim herself had confirmed--constituted an Error of Blood.
But this wasn't like the captain, this passivity. He had been quieter since his promotion, she thought, or perhaps since his captivity on Dhantu. As Zai turned around, Hobbes noticed the slight creases in the line of his jaw marking the physical reconstruction. What a star-crossed career, she thought. First that unfathomably horrible imprisonment, then an impossible hostage situation.
"That's not the only anomaly, sir," she said, speaking carefully now. "We've also taken a good look at Corporal Lao's helmet visuals."
"Good man, Corporal Lao," Zai muttered. The Vadan gender construction sounded odd to Hobbes's ear, as it always did. "But visuals? She was cut off by the field."
"Yes, sir. There were, however, a few windows of transmission. Long enough for armor diagnostics and even some visuals to upload."
Zai looked at her keenly, the lost, philosophical expression finally leaving his craggy features. Hobbes knew he was interested now.
The captain had to look at the visuals from Lao's helmet. The weapons and armor of orbital marines communicated continuously with the ship during action, uploading equipment status, the health of the marine, and pictures from the battle. The helmet visuals were low-grade monochrome at only nine frames per second, but they were wrapped three-sixty, and sometimes revealed more than the marines themselves had seen.
Zai simply must look at them before he put a blade of error to his belly. And it was up to Executive Officer Katherie Hobbes to make sure that he did.
"Sir, the entry wound on the Rix commando looks like a direct hit."
There. She'd said it. Hobbes felt a single drop of sweat mark a course down her back where standing at attention left a space between wool and skin. A careful analysis of this conversation, such as the Apparatus might one day make, could draw near the theory Hobbes and some of the other officers had begun tacitly to entertain.