“He does sometimes,” Kelly said. “Having people around agitates him. Give him a little time to settle.”
Trejo muttered something but didn’t object. Elvi waited with the others, watching the man who had, however briefly, been the god-king of a galactic empire. All she saw now was a lost man. She remembered feeling the force of his personality the first time they’d met. The sense of being in the presence of something vital and irresistible. She saw something in the way his jaw fit against his neck that reminded her of Teresa. It was easy to forget that they were also people. Father and daughter. The same complicated, fraught relationship that human beings had been navigating since they’d developed language. Before that, probably.
Without really knowing why, Elvi stepped forward and took Duarte’s hand. He considered it like it was a pleasant surprise. She knelt, smiling gently, and his gaze swam through whatever dark waters he lived in now until he found her.
“We just need to scan you, sir,” she said. “It won’t hurt.”
His smile was gentle and filled with an unspeakable love. He squeezed her fingers gently and let them go. She stood back, getting out of the light and the scanning radius. Duarte looked around the room like a beneficent king in his dying hours until his attention landed on Cortázar.
“All right,” Trejo said. “Let’s get this done before—”
Duarte stood, his head tilted at an angle like he was remembering something half-forgotten. He stepped away from his chair. Ilich made a small, frustrated hiss.
“All right,” Trejo said. “It’s okay. Let’s just get him back in position and try this again.”
Duarte stepped over to stand before Cortázar. His attention seemed as focused as Elvi had seen since his fall. Cortázar smiled and bowed his head like it was something he knew he was supposed to do. Duarte’s jaw worked, his mouth opening and closing, but the only sound he made was a small oh. He moved his hand in a soft gesture, like he was fanning away smoke, and Cortázar’s chest bloomed out at the back. It was so slow, so gentle, that Elvi couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Not at first.
It was as if Cortázar were an image projected on mist, and the mist was being blown away. Nothingness swirled through his chest, his face. And behind him, floating on the air, spirals of red and pink, gray and white, as ornate and beautiful as ink dropped into water. The air filled with the smell of iron. Of blood. Cortázar sat on the floor, his legs folding under him, and then slumped to the side with a long, wet exhalation. The left half of his head was missing from the jaw to the crown. His heart was still trying to beat in the open theater of his ribs, but the man was gone.
They were silent and perfectly still. Duarte looked up, his attention caught by something that made him smile like a child seeing a dragonfly, and his hands rose aimlessly. Trejo put the scanner down on the bed, turned, and walked quietly out of the room, pulling Elvi along with him. Ilich followed, and then Kelly, shutting the door behind them. They were all pale. The State Building was shaking under them, tremors that matched Elvi’s heartbeat. She fought to breathe.
“All right,” Ilich said. “Okay. That happened. That just happened.”
“Major Okoye?” Trejo said. His normally dark face was pale and gray.
“I have never fucking seen anything like that. Ever,” she said. “Holy fucking shit.”
“I agree,” Trejo said.
“He knew,” Elvi said. “That’s what this was. He knew about Teresa. Did you tell him?”
“What about Teresa?” Ilich asked. “What did he know about Teresa? What did she have to do with this?”
“Let’s not lose focus here, people,” Trejo said, leaning against the wall. “Mr. Kelly, would you escort the high consul to fresh quarters until we can get these cleaned?”
Kelly looked like Trejo had just asked him to put his hand in a meat grinder to see if it was running. For a moment, Elvi thought the man would refuse, but Laconians were a breed apart. Kelly nodded and walked stiffly away.
“We can do an announcement without him,” Trejo said. “I can do it. As his . . . acting military commander. Pleased to accept the position. Thank him for his faith in me. Like that.”
“We need to shoot him,” Ilich said. “Whatever that thing in there is? That’s not the high consul. I don’t know what the hell it is, but the only sane thing any of us can do right now is put a bullet in its brain.”
Trejo drew his sidearm, took it by its barrel, and held it out toward Ilich. “If you’re sure that’ll kill him, be my guest.”
Ilich hesitated, then looked away. Trejo holstered his pistol. “Major Okoye.”
“I know,” she said. “Another top priority. I’ll get right on it. But . . .”
“But?”
“I know you told Cortázar to give me full access. I’ve never been entirely certain he did.”
Trejo considered it. From the far side of the door, something rattled. A thump, like a piece of equipment had been bumped into, knocked over. If it had been a sound of violence, it would almost have been better. Trejo pulled out his hand terminal, thumbed in a code, and adjusted something she couldn’t see.
“Major Okoye, you are Paolo Cortázar. You want to go through his room and check his underwear, you go right ahead. See what he’s been eating. Check his medical records for sexual diseases. Read his letters to his God damn mother, I don’t care. That man’s life is an open book to you starting now. Find something useful in it.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Elvi said.
“And Major? I know you were a civilian before you were appointed. You didn’t come up like the rest of us, so I’m going to make this clear for you. If you say one more word about surrendering the empire? I will have you before a court-martial, and then I will have you shot. This is a war now. The rules have changed.”
“Understood,” Elvi said. “They’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
“Ain’t that the God damn truth,” Trejo said. Then, “Colonel Ilich, you’re with me. Let’s draft this announcement.”
Elvi walked out of the State Building like she was in a bad dream. Even the bite of the wind felt less real to her. Shock, she thought. I’m in emotional shock. That happens when people die in front of you.
At the lab, Dr. Ochida waved to her as she passed, and then looked concerned when she didn’t wave back. She knew that she should have stopped and talked to him, but she didn’t have any idea what she’d have said. In the private lab—her private lab—Xan and Cara were sitting in their cage playing a word game they used to pass the time. They paused when she came in, but didn’t ask her what had happened. What was wrong.
The uneaten half of Cortázar’s sandwich was still on his desk, wrapped in brown paper. Elvi threw it in the recycler and opened her work environment. All the reports and data feeds she’d been poring over for weeks. She split the screen and, with her new permissions, pulled up Cortázar’s. She backed both up to the functional index.
His was a hundred and eighteen entries longer. Elvi felt something like anger, something like dread, something like the mordant pleasure that comes from being proven right about something shitty.
“What an asshole,” she said.
Chapter Forty-Four: Naomi
The burn was long and it was punishing. Even with the crash couch distributing the pressure along every possible square centimeter of her body, Naomi ached her way through the hours. The only solace was the breaks for food and the head, and she kept those brief.
Laconia was a slightly smaller heliosphere than Sol, with nine planets, only one of them habitable. A single gas giant with somewhere between eighty and a hundred moons, depending on where the line was drawn. Two large planets out past that in the deep, and a rocky captured planet hardly larger than Luna with a retrograde orbit that swung high above and far below the plane of the ecliptic. Five planets in closer to the sun, the second of them being her target and the heart of the empire. A transfer station at the gas giant, and the alien construction platforms that orbited the inhabited world. That was her battleground, and she meant to have her forces diffused through it. On the enemy’s side, the Voice of the Whirlwind at Laconia proper, the Rising Shamal and her sister ship, plus four more Storm-class destroyers.
Her couch on the burn was almost as isolated as her old shipping container. Her time, even if it was painful, was her own. She studied the maps until she could see them with her eyes closed.
And in the back of her mind, Bobbie waited. The memories and habits of decades spent breathing the same air, drinking the same water, being part of the same organism had made the woman a part of her. And the Bobbie in her head had a lot to say.
A campaign like this is an argument. You’re trying to persuade the enemy of something. Talk them into it. And this time, here? You need to teach them that the danger of staying in place is greater than the danger of coming after you. For it to work, every lesson needs to support that one single thought.