"To intercept it as far out as possible. Outside the planetary defenses, in any case, in an attempt to damage the Rix communications gear. We're to keep the Rix ship from contacting the compound mind."
"A frigate, against a battlecruiser," Hobbes protested. "But, sir, that's..." Her mouth moved, but silently.
"Suicide," he finished.
She nodded slowly, staring intently into the colored whorls of the airscreen. However quickly Hobbes had grasped the tactical facets of the situation, the politics seemed to have left her speechless.
"Consider this as an intelligence issue, Hobbes," Zai said. "We've never had a compound mind fully propagate on an Imperial world. It knows everything about Legis. It could reveal more about our technology and culture than the Apparatus wants the Rix to know. Or..."
Hobbes looked up into his eyes, still hammered into silence.
"Or," he continued, "the Lynx may have been chosen to suffer the sacrifice that I was unwilling to make myself."
There. He had said it aloud. The thought that had tortured him since he'd received the pardon and the orders, the two missives paired to arrive and be read together, as if to indicate that neither could be understood without the other.
He saw his own distress reflected in Hobbes's face. There was no other interpretation.
Captain Laurent Zai, Elevated, had doomed his ship and his crew, had dragged them all down along with his miserable self.
Zai turned his eyes from the still speechless Hobbes and tried to fathom what he felt, now that he had spoken his thoughts aloud. It was hard to say. After the tension of the rescue, the bitter ashes of defeat, and the elation of rejecting suicide, his emotions were too worn to keep going. He felt dead already.
"Sir," Hobbes finally began. "This crew will serve you, will follow any orders. The Lynx is ready to..." Her voice failed her again. "Die in battle?"
She took a deep breath.
"To serve her Emperor and her captain, sir."
Katherie Hobbes's eyes glittered as she said the words.
Laurent Zai waited politely as she gathered herself. But then he uttered the words he had to say.
"I should have killed myself."
"No, Captain. You weren't at fault."
"The tradition does not address the issue of blame, Katherie. It concerns responsibility. I'm the captain. I ordered the rescue. By tradition, it was my Error of Blood."
Hobbes worked her mouth again, but Zai had chosen the right words to preempt her arguments. In matters of tradition, he, a Vadan, was her mentor. On the Utopian world she came from, not one citizen in a million became a soldier. In Zai's family, one male in three had died in combat over the past five centuries.
"Sir, you're not thinking of..."
He sighed. It was a possibility, of course. The pardon did not prevent him from taking his own life. The act might even save the Lynx; the Navy was not above changing its orders. But something in Laurent Zai had changed. He'd thought that the threads of tradition and obedience that formed his being were bound together. He'd thought that the rituals and oaths, the sacrifice of decades to the Time Thief, and the dictates of his upbringing had reached critical mass, forming a singularity of purpose from which there was no escape. But it had turned out that his loyalties, his honor, his very sense of self had all been held in place by something quite delicate, something that could be broken by a single word.
Don't, he thought to himself, and smiled.
"I am thinking, Katherie, of going Home."
Hobbes was silenced by the words. She must have been ready to argue with him, to plead against the blade again.
He took a moment, letting her renewed shock subside, then cleared his throat.
"Let us a plan a way to save the Lynx, Hobbes."
Her still glittering eyes moved to the airscreen display, and Zai saw her gather herself in its shapes. He recalled what the war sage Anonymous 167 had once said: "Sufficient tactical detail will distract the mind from the death of a child, even from the death of a god."
"High relative velocity," Hobbes began after a while. "With full drone complement deployed, I'd say. Narrow hull configuration. And standard lasers in the primary turrets. We'd have a chance, sir."
"A chance, Hobbes?"
"A fighting chance, sir."
He nodded his head. For a few moments after the orders had come, Laurent Zai had wondered if the crew would continue to accept his command. He had betrayed everything he had been raised to believe. Perhaps it would be fitting if his crew betrayed him.
But not his executive officer. Hobbes was a strange one, half Utopian and half gray. Her face was a reminder of that: molded to an arresting beauty by the legendary surgeons of her hedonistic world, but always shrouded with a deadly serious expression. Generally she followed tradition with the passion of the converted. But at certain times she questioned everything. Perhaps, at this moment, the gap between them had closed; her loyalty and his betrayal, at the juncture of the Risen Empire.
"A fighting chance, then," he said.
" 'No more can a soldier ask for,' sir," she quoted the sage.
"And the rest of the crew?"
"Warriors all, sir."
He nodded. And hoped she was right.
MILITIA WORKER
Second-Class Militia Worker Rana Harter stepped back nervously from the metal skirts of the polar maglev as it settled onto the track. The train floated down softly, as if it weighed only a few ounces, and sighed a bit as it descended, drifting along the track a few centimeters on a thin, leftover cushion of air, like a playing card dealt across a glass table.
But the delicacy was deceptive. Rana Harter knew that the maglev was hypercarbon and hullalloy, a fusion reactor and a hundred private cabins done in teakwood and marble. It massed more than a thousand tons, would crush a human foot under its skirts as surely as a diamond-tipped tunneling hammer. Harter stood well back as the entry stairway unfolded before her.
There was plenty of room here on the platform. Tiny Galileo Township seldom provided passengers for the maglev, which could have easily accommodated its entire population. This stop, the last before the polar cities of Maine and Jutland, was mostly to take on supplies. But Militia Worker Rana Harter was at last going to step onto the train. She had lived here in the Galileo Administrative Prefecture her entire life. Her new posting to the polar entanglement facility would be the first time she had left the GAP.
Rana waited for someone to appear at the top of the entry stairway. Someone to invite her aboard the intimidating train. But the stairway waited, impassive and empty. She looked at her ticket, actually a sheaf of plastic chits ribbed with copper-colored circuitry and scribblecodes, which the local Legis Militia office had provided her. There wasn't much on the ticket that was human-readable. Just the time when the train would leave, and something that looked like a seating assignment.
The northern tundra of Legis XV seemed to stretch out, infinitely huge, around her.
Rana waited at the bottom of the stairway. She couldn't bring herself to go though a door without an invitation. Here in Galileo township, such boldness felt like trespassing. But after a half-minute or so, the warning lights along the stairs began to flicker, and the ambient hum of the entire maglev raised a bit in pitch. It was now or never, she realized.
Had she waited too long? Would the stairway fold up as she climbed it, crushing her like a doll in the gears of a bicycle?
She placed one tentative foot on the lowest step. It felt solid enough, but the maglev's whine was still climbing. Rana took a quick breath and held it, and dashed up the stairway.
She was just in time, or perhaps the stairway had been waiting for her. At the top, Rana turned around to take a last look at her hometown, and the stairs folded themselves back up, curling into a single spiral that irised closed like an umbrella. And Rana Harter, flushed more from nerves than from the short climb, was inside the train that would take her to the pole.
Her seat was several minutes' walk toward the front of the train. The maglev's acceleration was so even that when Rana looked out the window, she was surprised to see the landscape already whipping by, the snow and scrubgrass smeared to a shimmering milky blur.
Rana knew that her reassignment had been the result of the Rix attack a few days before. The Legis Militia was shifting onto war footing, and she'd read that strategic targets like the entanglement facility were being heavily reinforced. But as she passed the hundreds of soldiers and workers on the train, the scale of the Rix threat finally struck her. The maglev seemed full; every seat was occupied until she reached the one that matched her ticket. Rana's nerves twinged again, her guilt rising like a tardy schoolchild's as she took the last empty seat.
The soldier next to her was sleeping, his chair pitched back so that it was almost a bed. Her seat was certainly comfortable, designed for half-day journeys. A small array of controls floated in synesthesia before her, marked with the standard icons for water, light, entertainment, and help. She waved them away, and folded herself into one corner of the chair.
Rana Harter wondered why she had been assigned to the entanglement facility. Surely it was the most important installation on Legis XV. But what could the militia need her there for? She wasn't any kind of soldier. The only weapon she was rated to use was a standard field autopistol, and you could empty a whole clip from one of those into a Rix commando without much effect. She'd failed her combat physical, and didn't have the coordination for a quick-interface job like remote pilot or sniper. The only thing Rana had turned out to be good at--the reason she'd made second class in just a year--was microastronomy.
Rana Harter had a brainbug, it turned out, something her aptitude officer called "holistic processing of chaotic systems." That meant she could look at the internal trajectories of a cluster of rocks--asteroids in the under-kilogram category--and tell you things about it that a computer couldn't. Like whether it was going to stick together for the next few hours, or break up, threatening a nearby orbital platform. Her CO explained that even the smartest imperial AIs couldn't solve that kind of problem, because they tried to plot every rock separately, using millions of calculations. If there was even the slightest observational imprecision at the front end, the back end results would be hopelessly screwed up. But brainbugs like Rana saw the swarm as one big system--a whole. In deep synesthesia, this entity had a flavor/smell/sound to it: a deep, stable odor like coffee, or the shaky tang of mint, ready to fly dangerously apart.
But why send her to the polar facility?
Rana had used equipment like the repeater array up there, and even performed field repairs on small repeater gear. But they didn't do astronomy at an entanglement grid, just communications. Maybe they were retooling the facility for defense work. She tried to imagine tracking a swarm of enemy ships dodging through the Legis defenses.
What would the Rix taste like?
Movement in her peripheral vision distracted Rana from these thoughts. Standing in the aisle was a tall militia officer. The woman glanced up at the seat number, then down at Rana.
"Rana Harter?" "Yes, ma'am." Rana tried to stand at attention, but the luggage rack over her head made that impossible, and she saluted from a crouch. The officer didn't return the gesture. The woman's expression was unreadable; she was wearing full interface glasses that entirely obscured her eyes, which was odd, because she also had a portable monitor in her hands. She wore a heavy coat even in the well-heated train. There was a birdlike quickness to her motions.
"Come with me," the officer ordered. Her voice was husky, the accent unplaceable. But then, Rana had never been out of the GAP except in videos.
The officer turned and walked away without another word. Rana grabbed her kitbag from the rack and wrestled it into the aisle. By the time she looked up, the woman was almost through to the next car, and Rana had to run to catch her.
The officer was headed toward the back of the train. Rana followed, barely able to keep up with the taller woman. She banged another worker with her flailing kitbag, and muttered an apology. He answered with a phrase Rana didn't recognize, but which didn't sound polite.
At the frantic pace, they soon reached the luxury section. Rana stopped, her mouth agape. One side of the carpeted corridor was filled entirely by a floor-to-ceiling window. In it the tundral landscape rushed by furiously, blurred into a creamy palette by the train's speed. Rana had read that the maglev could make a thousand klicks per hour; right now it seemed to be doing twice that.
Across from the window was a wall of dark, paneled wood, broken by doors to private cabins. The silent officer walked slowly here, as if more comfortable out of the crowded coach sections. They passed a few servants in Maglev Line uniforms, who stood at attention. Rana wasn't sure whether their stiff posture was out of respect for the officer, or just to give them room to pass in the thin corridor.
Finally, the officer entered one of the doors, which opened for her without a handkey or even a voice command. Rana followed nervously.
The cabin was beautiful. The floor was some kind of resin, an amber surface that gave softly under Rana's boots. The walls were marble and teak-wood. The furniture was segmented; Rana's brain ability asserted itself, and she saw how each piece would fold around itself, the chairs and table transforming into a desk and a bed. A wide window revealed the rushing tundra. The cabin was larger than Rana's old barrack hut at Galileo, which she shared with three other militia workers. The luxury of the surroundings only made Rana more nervous; she was obviously inadequate for whatever special operation she'd been assigned to.
She felt guilty, as if she were already screwing things up.
"Sit down."
Here in the quiet cabin, Rana listened carefully to the officer's strange accent. It was precise and careful, with the exact pronunciation of an AI language teacher. But the intonation was wrong, like a congenital deafmute's, carefully trained to use sounds that she herself had never heard.
Rana dropped her kitbag and sat in the indicated chair.
The officer sat across from her, a decimeter taller than Rana even with them both seated. She took off her glasses.
Rana's breath stopped short. The woman's eyes were artificial. They reflected the white landscape passing in the window, but were brilliant with a violet hue. But it wasn't the eyes that had made her gasp.
With the glasses removed, Rana could finally see the shape of the officer's face. It was eerily recognizable. The hair wasn't familiar, and the violet eyes were almost alien. But the line of the woman's jaw, the cheekbones and high forehead--were all strangely like Rana's own.
Rana Harter shut her eyes. Perhaps the resemblance was just the result of nerves and lack of sleep, a momentary hallucination that a few seconds of darkness could erase. But when she looked again, the woman was just as familiar. Just as much like Rana herself.
It was like peering into an enhancing mirror at a cosmetic surgery store, one that added a hairweave or different colored eyes. She was transfixed by the effect, unable to move.
"Militia Worker Rana Harter, you have been selected for a very important mission."
That oddly inflected voice again, as if the words came from nowhere, were owned by no one.
"Yes, ma'am. What... kind of mission?"
The woman tilted her head, as if the question surprised her. She paused a moment, then looked at her handheld monitor.
"I cannot answer that now. But you must follow my orders."
"Yes, ma'am."
"You will stay in this cabin until we reach the pole. Understood?"
"I understand, ma'am."
The woman's precise tone began to calm Rana a bit. Whatever mission the militia wanted her for, they were giving clear enough orders. That was one thing she liked about the militia. You didn't have to think for yourself.
"You are to speak to no one but me on this train, Rana Harter."
"Yes, ma'am," Rana answered. "May I ask one question, though?"
The woman said nothing, which Rana took as permission to continue.
"Who exactly are you, ma'am? My orders didn't say--"
The woman interrupted immediately, "I am Colonel Alexandra Herd, Legis XV Militia." She produced a colonel's badge from the voluminous coat.
Rana swallowed. She'd never even seen anyone with a rank over captain before. Officers existed on a lofty level that was utterly mysterious when viewed from her own small, nervous world.
But she hadn't realized how truly strange they could be.
The colonel pointed at the corner of the room, and a washbasin unfolded itself elegantly from the wall.
"Wash your hair," she ordered.
"My hair?" Rana asked, dumbfounded anew.
Colonel Herd pulled a knife from her pocket. The blade was almost invisibly thin, a shimmering presence as it caught light reflected from the patches of snow passing the window. The handle was curved in a strange way that made Rana think of a bird's wings. The colonel held it with her fingertips, a sudden grace evident in her long fingers.
"After you have washed your hair, I will cut it off," Colonel Herd said.
"I don't understand..."
"And a manicure, and a good scrubbing."
"What?"
"Orders."
Rana Harter did not respond. Her mind had begun to whir, to accelerate into a blur as featureless as the passing landscape. It was her brainbug, going for a quick flight, buzzing toward that paralyzing moment when a host of incoherent, chaotic inputs suddenly resolved into understanding.
She could just glimpse the operations of the savant portion of her mind, the maelstrom of analysanda madly arranging itself, seeking to collapse from a meaningless flurry into something concrete and comprehensible: the curve of the colonel's knife, somehow like an outline remembered from a ship-spotting course in her astronomy training; her strange, placeless accent, the words slow and prompted; the collection of hair, fingernails, skin; the colonel's inhuman eyes; and the woman's avian movements that fluttered like sunlight on bicycle spokes, the smell of lemongrass, or Bach played fast on a woodwind...
With a burst of sensation across Rana's skin--the rasp of talons--coherence arrived.
Rana had been trained to give the results of her brainbugs quickly, spitting out the essential data before they had time to escape her mind's tenuous grasp. And the rush of knowledge was so sharp and clear, so shocking this time--that she couldn't stop herself.
"You're a Rix, aren't you?" she blurted. "The compound mind's talking through you. You want to..."
Rana Harter bit her tongue, cursing her stupidity. The woman remained still for a moment, as if waiting for a translation. Rana's eyes darted around the room, casting for a weapon. But there was nothing at hand that could stop the sudden, birdlike alien across from her. Not for a second.
Then Rana saw the emergency pull-cord swinging above her head.
She reached up for it, yanking down hard on the elegant brass handle, cool in her hand. She braced herself for the screech of brakes, the wail of a siren.
Nothing happened.
Rana fell back into her seat.
The compound mind, her own brain told her. Everywhere.
"You want to impersonate me," Rana found herself compelled to finish.
"Yes," the Rixwoman said.
"Yes," repeated Rana. She felt--with a strange relief after trying so hard not to all day long--that she would cry.
Then the alien woman leaned forward, one fingertip extended and glistening, and with a touch, thrust a needle into Rana's arm.
One moment of pain, and after that everything was just fine.