Oh, she thought as she walked to the flier. He’s frightened.
At the flier, Muskrat balked, and before Teresa could coax her in, Ilich assigned one of the guards to go back on foot with the dog. The flier’s door closed with a deep clank, and they lurched up over the trees. Even though the body of the flier had looked opaque from the outside, it was no darker than tinted glass from her seat. She could see the State Building clearly as soon as they cleared the top branches.
“How did you know where I was?” Teresa asked.
Ilich shook his head, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. When he did, his voice had more like its usual tone: patient and gentle. The difference was that now she knew it was a mask.
“You had a locator implanted in your jawbone when you were born. There is never a moment when security doesn’t know how to find you, and your safety is part of my sacred duty.”
It was like hearing a language she almost understood. She could pick out the meaning of each word, but she couldn’t quite make sense of the whole. The idea was too foreign. Too wrong.
“Your father felt it was important for you to have some experience of rebellion and autonomy, so he permitted your excursions so long as they didn’t take you too far from the State Building. He said he was solo free-climbing on the surface of Mars at your age, and that he learned things about himself that way. He hoped you would find use in the same independence and solitude.”
Solitude. He didn’t know about Timothy, then. There was nothing on any world that would make her tell him either. She felt the buzz of outrage in her throat. “So you just let me think . . .”
The flier passed over the outer wall of the State Building and curved around to the east. They weren’t heading for the landing pad but the lawn outside the residence. A single figure stood in the gardens, watching them pass. She thought it was Holden.
“I respected your autonomy and your privacy to the extent that security protocols permitted,” Ilich said. “But I needed to be able to find you in case there was an emergency.”
“There’s an emergency?”
“Yes,” he said. “There is.”
Her father smiled at her, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes deeper than she remembered them. The opalescence in his iris was more pronounced, and something seemed to glow from under his skin. His study had been a bedroom, back when he’d still slept. That hadn’t been for years. Now it had a desk hand carved from Laconian wood with a grain like sedimentary rock, a wide table, a shelf with half a dozen physical books, and the divan where he was sitting. Where he had been sitting when the change came.
“Father?” Teresa said. “Can you hear me?”
His mouth changed into a little o, like he was a child seeing something marvelous. He reached out, patting at the air beside her head. She took his hand, and it was hot.
“Has he said anything?” she asked.
Kelly, her father’s personal valet, shook his head. “A few things, but none of it made sense. After it happened, I came to see him, and he was like this. Just like this.” He nodded to Cortázar, sitting on the edge of the table. “I got Dr. Cortázar as quickly as I could.”
“Your opinion?” Ilich asked. His voice was cool, and her father didn’t react to it at all. “What’s wrong with him?”
Cortázar spread his hands. “I could only speculate.”
“Then do,” Ilich said.
“The . . . event. The lost consciousness? It seems to match what Admiral Trejo reported from Sol system. The theory I always heard was that it’s the weapon that killed the protomolecule engineers. However their minds were organized, this . . . effect broke it. Well, the high consul has been making himself more and more like the builders for years now. It might—might—leave him more vulnerable to the attack than the rest of us.”
Teresa’s chest hurt like someone had punched her sternum. She sank to her knees at her father’s side, but he was frowning at something behind her. Or nothing.
“How long before he gets better?” Kelly asked.
“If I had been permitted to have more than one test subject, I might be able to guess,” Cortázar said. It was the same tone of voice he’d used to say Nature eats babies all the time. It made Teresa’s skin crawl. “As things are? He could come back to himself in a moment. He could be like this for the rest of his life, which in his case could be a very long time indeed. If I can take him to the lab and run some tests, I might get more insight into the question.”
“No,” Kelly said, and it was clear from his tone it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. “The high consul stays in his rooms until . . .”
“Until what?” Cortázar said.
“Until we have this situation under control,” Ilich said, firmly. “Does anyone outside this room know about his condition?”
The high consul’s terminal chimed, a high-priority connection request. The three men looked at each other in alarm. Her father scowled, then farted like the blare of a trumpet. The perversity and indignity of it cut Teresa like a blade. This was her father. The man who ruled all humanity through his vision and audacity. Who knew how everything was and was supposed to be. The body in front of her was only a crippled man, too broken to be embarrassed. The chime came again, and Kelly grabbed it with his hand terminal.
“I’m afraid the high consul can’t be disturbed,” he said as he walked out of the room. “I can accept a message for him.”
The door closed behind him.
“I can bring some equipment here,” Cortázar said. “It won’t be as good as having him in the pens where the real equipment is, but I could do . . . something.”
Ilich ran a hand over his scalp, his gaze flickering from her father to Cortázar to the window that looked out over a bamboo garden in some different universe where the sun still shone and life wasn’t broken. Teresa shifted, and Ilich looked at her. For a long moment, their eyes were locked on each other’s.
She felt a wave of panic. “Am I supposed to be in charge now?”
“No,” Ilich said, as if her fear had resolved something. “No, High Consul Winston Duarte is in charge. He is deep in consultation with Dr. Cortázar on matters critical to the state of the empire, and cannot be disturbed under any circumstances. It’s easy to remember, because it’s true. He specifically ordered Kelly to keep anyone but the doctor here and you, because you’re his daughter, away from the residences until further notice. Do you remember him saying that?”
“I don’t—” Teresa began.
“You need to remember him saying it. He was sitting right here. It was just after the event. We all came back to ourselves, and he told Kelly in front of you that he needed Dr. Cortázar, and that he couldn’t be disturbed. Do you remember?”
Teresa pictured it. Her father’s voice, calm and sturdy as stone.
“I remember,” she said.
Kelly came back in the room. “Something happened at the ring. The Falcon made an unscheduled transit. Now it’s putting out a distress call. A relief ship is on the way, but it won’t be there for hours. Maybe as much as a day.”
“All right,” Ilich said. “We need a secure channel to Governor Song and Admiral Trejo. Someone will have to take over coordinating the military. Apart from them, no one can know anything.
“Until we get the high consul back to himself, our little conspiracy here is the empire.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Naomi
The plume of energy that came from the ring gate was invisible to the naked eye. An optical telescope would have seen at most a few flares of brightness where bits of matter caught in it glowed for a moment as they were ripped apart. Moving at the speed of light, it flared into the space where ships coming into Auberon or preparing to leave it were most likely to be, widening like a wave with distance, hundred thousand kilometers after hundred thousand kilometers, spreading out like a cone. If it became less powerful as it spread, it wasn’t enough to help the San Salvador. The Transport Union ship had been slow moving out of the restricted zone, and almost instantaneously, it and everyone aboard it became a cinder.
Naomi sat in the commissary and played the newsfeed of its loss in a loop, watching the ship flare white and die so quickly the frame rate couldn’t quite make sense of it. She had spent very nearly her whole life on ships and stations. She’d been on six ships that had suffered micrometeorite hits, two that had lost atmosphere from them. Once, she’d had to drop core to keep her reactor from blooming out like a tiny, brief sun. She’d jumped between ships without a suit, and the feeling of breathing vacuum still came to her in nightmares decades after the fact. She would have said she was intimately aware of all the dangers life outside an atmosphere could hold.