“Your top mission is to get the high consul back,” Trejo said. “Dr. Cortázar will walk you through everything he’s done so far. We’re hoping a pair of fresh eyes will find something he hasn’t.”
Elvi looked over at Cortázar. He wasn’t looking at her. So this was why he was pouting. Trejo had called his competence into question. That was going to be unpleasant.
“While you do that, I’m going be getting things back under control,” Trejo said. “The Voice of the Whirlwind’s still a few weeks shy of her shakedown, but we’re not stationing any crewed vessel in the ring space, and we’re keeping the transits short. Whirlwind’s going to be protecting Laconia. Tempest is staying in Sol. There’s a situation there that needs an eye on it, and Sol’s the most unruly system we have to worry about.”
“And the traffic control?” Elvi asked.
“We can’t hold the inside of gates,” Trejo said. “So we’re going to have to take the outsides. We have two hundred and eighty Pulsar-class destroyers to police thirteen hundred and seventy-one gates.”
For a moment, Elvi saw the enormity of what Trejo was facing press down on him. The bright-green eyes focused on nothing, and the cheerful, confident face only looked tired. But a moment later, he was back.
“I’ll be deploying those to systems most likely to have high traffic. We’ll get the comms network back. And after the Whirlwind’s ready, we’re turning all the construction platforms over to generating more antimatter charges. That brings us to your number two priority. I think we can all agree this tit-for-tat see-if-we-can-be-reasonable plan hasn’t gone so well. We’re going to gear up to fight this war for real. Anything you can find that will give us an—”
Adrenaline flooded Elvi’s bloodstream. Her heart hit her ribs like a hammer. “Are you fucking crazy?”
Ilich and Kelly shared a look as if she’d confirmed something. Cortázar sneered.
“I’m sorry,” Elvi said. “Wait. No. I’m actually not. Are you fucking crazy? Did you not see what just happened?”
Trejo bowed his head. His scalp glimmered at her through his sparse hair.
“I understand that this is a hard conversation for you right now, Doctor. You’ve been through a lot. But I’m a military man, and the fact is that we are at war. We have been at war since the first time a ship failed a transit.”
“Those things killed—”
“I know what they did.” Trejo’s voice was harsh. It pushed her back into her seat. “And I know why they did it. Because they got hurt. That means they can be hurt, and unless they find some way to sue for peace, I intend to prepare our forces to hurt them again. Candidly, I don’t like it. We’re going up against something we don’t understand with unfamiliar tools on a battlefield whose constraints we’re working out as we go along. It’s a stupid war, but it’s ours. If it can be won, I intend to win it. You’re going to help me.”
A hundred objections rose in her mind, but fell back at the sight of the bright-green eyes.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Good. Please begin your review with Dr. Cortázar and keep me apprised of any insights or progress.”
I will Elvi said at the same moment that Cortázar said We will. Trejo accepted the answers as if they’d been the same. When he spoke, he spoke to Elvi. “If you disapprove of my plan of action, it’s easy to stop me. Just get me my boss back.”
“I’m going to try,” Elvi said.
Elvi walked back to her rooms before she left the State Building for the Science Directorate. She wanted to clear her head, but it wasn’t clearing. Every thought she had seemed to fight its way to consciousness like it was swimming through gel. Her leg ached worse now, and the sleepless hours were starting to weigh on her, pulling her toward bed now that she had obligations. Or maybe she was just realizing that her time of healing after the trauma was over, and she wasn’t remotely okay.
The grounds were beautiful. Better than the best luxury resort. The weird leathery fliers they called sunbirds were out, flapping high above the buildings and looking more like bats than birds. Something like a dragonfly zoomed past her, wings buzzing here both the same as and entirely differently than they would have on earth.
The scale of it all was too big. There were too many billion people in too many hundred solar systems for anyone to really understand. For any human to really understand. Maybe that was why Winston Duarte had decided not to be human anymore. Him or his daughter either. It made her wish she’d majored in mathematics instead. They hadn’t sent any mathematicians to Ilus. And without Ilus, she wouldn’t have been the nearest thing to an expert on the wounds in reality that those dark things left. And she wouldn’t have been recruited by Laconia. And she wouldn’t be here. One little change early on could have meant a whole different life.
She turned the last corner before her courtyard, and there, out in the gardens, Fayez sat. One leg ended in a bright blue pod the size of a boot where his missing foot was already starting to grow back. The other was stretched out on a bench. And leaning against the back of the bench, James Holden.
As if he had felt the pressure of her gaze, Holden looked up and waved. He seemed both older and as though he hadn’t changed at all. She started toward the bench, leaning more on her cane than she’d had to before. The gel in her leg felt like it was burning. Hours more standing and walking through Cortázar’s labs sounded awful.
As she approached, Holden and Fayez exchanged a few words, and Holden walked off briskly. By the time she got to her husband’s side, Holden had disappeared behind a hedge.
Fayez moved his good leg and gave her room to sit. There were dark pouches under his eyes, but his smile was as amused and sardonic as the day she’d met him. Or the day she’d married him. Or that one time when they’d almost died because a terrorist had booby-trapped a landing pad.
“I think I must have lived my life wrong somehow,” she said.
“I know the feeling,” he said. “But then I see you, and I think something must have gone right. Even if everything else treats me like my previous incarnation killed a priest.”
She took his hand, wove her fingers with his. The future looked a little less bleak.
“I just had the most interesting conversation,” Fayez said.
“I could say the same,” she said. “But mine’s classified, so why don’t you go first.”
“Well, he was being awfully cagey. But I think our old friend Holden just told me Cortázar’s plotting murder.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Teresa
Nothing was the same anymore. She tried to pretend that it was. That her father was only sick, the way normal fathers were sometimes. She woke up in the morning, and Muskrat was there. She walked through the gardens and the State Building the way she always had. Everyone she saw treated her just the same, except Ilich, who knew the truth.
She assumed that everyone thought her father was in deep consultations with the best minds of the empire because of what happened to the Typhoon. They had faith in him. He was Laconia. She thought the guards stood a little taller when she walked by. That the cooks at the commissary saved the best dishes for her. It wasn’t because she deserved them. It was because she was the closest thing they could get to him, and they wanted to make their offerings. They were scared by what they’d seen. She was too. But they had a story where everything would be all right, and she didn’t.
The closest thing she had was Ilich, and he was gone now more than he was with her. When he did see her, the only lessons they did were the new rules. Don’t tell anyone about the high consul. Don’t act frightened. Don’t leave the grounds of the State Building.
She tried watching her favorite films and newsfeeds, but they didn’t hold her attention. She tried reading her favorite books, but the words all slid off her mind. She tried running the length of the security wall as fast as she could for as long as she could until the pain and exhaustion made it impossible to think or feel anything. It was as close as she came to peace.
And in the afternoons and early evenings, she went and sat with her father. He suffered Kelly to bathe and dress him, so whenever she came he looked trim and neat. She sat beside him at his desk and used his displays to go over simple mathematical proofs or the diagrams of ancient battles. Sometimes he would nod at the images, as if deep in thought. Sometimes he would pat at the air around her head like he saw something there.
She found herself really looking at him. Staring. His cheeks were rough from old acne scars. His hair was a little thin at the temples. The skin at his jaw was soft with age. And there were other things. The opalescence that sometimes made his skin shine like mother-of-pearl and other times nearly vanished. The darkness in his eyes, like storm clouds.
The more she looked, the less he seemed like her father—the great man who strode the universe and her personal life with the confidence of a god—and the more he seemed like . . . just someone. The worst times were when he looked sad. Or frightened. He didn’t particularly notice when she cried.