From a distance, a low crummp made it into the momentary silence of the planetarium. One of the adults in the audience started to take in a sharp breath, and then stopped.
“And I think that’s about all the time we have for today,” Marce said. “Thank you all for coming, and I hope you’ll come again another time. We’d love to see you.” A day when someone isn’t clearly shelling someone else only a few klicks away. He flicked up the house lights and waved good-bye to the children as the adults filed them out of the room. One of the adults looked back and mouthed the words thank you to him. Marce smiled and waved again.
“Still giving tours in the middle of a war,” said someone new, in the back of the planetarium. “That’s noble. Stupid, but noble.”
Marce looked up, saw who it was, and smiled again. “Well, technically, we are nobility, aren’t we, sis?”
Vrenna Claremont, in her full constable uniform, smiled back and started walking down toward her brother. “Being a noble on End is like being the richest person in a trash heap. It doesn’t mean much. Especially now, when the duke is about to get his ass handed to him and rebels are running about liberating his property. It’s not a stretch to assume other nobles will find their stuff similarly liberated.”
“My stuff is a bunch of books in graduate housing,” Marce said. “I think they’ll be disappointed.”
“You’re a professor now. You should move out of graduate housing.”
“I’m resident master. Saves on rent.”
“A count’s son, worried about rent,” Vrenna said.
“We are really unimpressive nobility, it’s true.”
There was another crummp somewhere in the distance, and it didn’t sound as distant as the last one.
“I’m doing a really good job of not panicking right now,” Marce said.
“I noticed that,” said Vrenna. “I mean, I wasn’t going to mention it. But I noticed it.”
“We can’t all have ice water in our veins.”
“I don’t have ice water in my veins. I just know how far away those explosions are, so I’m not going to worry about them right now.”
“How far away are they?”
“About five klicks. The docks, where the duke’s forces are trying to bury a contingent of the rebels under shattered cargo containers. It probably won’t work. Most of the rebels are long gone from there, moving to occupy strategic resources. You and I are going in the other direction anyway.”
“We are?”
“Yes. Dad sent me to collect you.”
“Why?”
“One, because there’s a war on, and although I don’t expect that shelling is going to get any closer, there’s no guarantee the university, including your graduate housing, isn’t going to be on fire by the time the sun sets today.”
“That bad,” Marce said.
Vrenna nodded. “Yup. You may not remember this, but the house has a watch set on it by the Imperial Marines. If a rebel comes within a klick of it they’re likely to be vaporized from space. That makes it the safest place on the surface of the planet right now.”
“Did Dad tell that to the duke?”
“You know, I think he might have skipped mentioning that to him.”
Marce grinned again at that.
“Two, Dad wants to show you something.”
“What is it?”
“Data.”
“Anytime you want to be less ambiguous, Vren, that’d be great.”
“He said you would know what it was, and that it wouldn’t be something we’d talk about out loud in public.”
“Oh,” Marce said.
“Yup.”
Another crummp.
“That sounded closer,” Marce said.
“It wasn’t. But we should leave anyway. We wait any longer, someone might take it into their heads to start taking potshots at the skimmer.”
*
Someone took a potshot at the skimmer anyway, several times during the flight.
“Go faster,” Marce urged his sister.
“Anytime you want to fly a skimmer just over the city rooftops, without crashing into some random chimney, you let me know,” she replied.
In lieu of bothering his sister further, Marce looked out the skimmer bubble at the streets of Opole. Most of the residential streets were untouched, with only a few glimpses of people carrying things out to their cars, as if packing for a move. The main streets, however, were clogged with cars, and several were jammed to a standstill.
That took effort; Marce suspected some drivers had disabled autodrive to take control of their cars directly, either in a panic or because they suspected the government was somehow going to disable their movement. The end result either way was that these newly independent cars were messing things up for everyone else.
And every now and again, Marce would see columns of soldiers moving along the streets, armored vehicles among them, off to secure and/or liberate one strategic element of the city or another.
“This isn’t going to end well,” Marce said to his sister.
“Does it ever?” she asked, banking toward the Warta, the wide river that ran through Opole. She flew the skimmer to the middle of it, far enough away from either bank to discourage any further potshots. Marce suspected that technically his sister was flying the skimmer illegally—skimmers were supposed to use automation and stick to specific air routes within the city to avoid problems with other air traffic. The middle of the Warta was not one of those routes. He also suspected that today local law enforcement had other things to worry about.
Presently the skimmer left Opole behind and the land rose into rolling hills, the Warta meandering gently between them, suburbs and then rural villages nestled up against their inclines. A small tributary of the Warta branched off, into another set of hills; Vrenna followed it and within minutes was at the house.
“The house” was technically Claremont Palace, named for the province district that their father had been made count of, nearly forty standard years earlier, and from which the family now took its name. There had been a previous count, whom Marce had never met, having not been born yet; he had been persuaded to give up the title by accepting an appointment to the imperial court. The story Marce had been told was that the fellow needed very little convincing. Better to be a functionary at court than a noble on a planet of exile. The previous count departed so quickly he left most of his furniture and at least a couple of pets, cats who had been perfectly fine with the new tenants, his father had told him, so long as the food kept coming.
“Come on,” Vrenna said, as they stepped out of the skimmer, on the landing pad near the garage. “Let’s not keep Dad waiting.”
Their father, Jamies, Count Claremont, was in his office, watching the revolution on the wall monitor. He saw them enter and pointed to the monitor. “Look at this nonsense,” he said to them.
“Welcome to the revolution,” Vrenna said.
Jamies snorted. “It’s not a revolution. The ‘rebels’ are probably funded by merchant guilds who want an import tax break. Or something. The duke wouldn’t allow it. Or something. So the ‘rebels’ will take down the duke and install an ambitious noble in his place, who will cut the tariff. It’ll be rubberstamped by the emperox, because no one out there cares what happens to End. And because they think in another twenty years we’ll all just do it again.”
“Won’t we?”
“Not this time.” Jamies went to his desk, retrieved a tablet, and handed it to Marce. “We finally got it. The smoking gun. And the last bit of data I needed for the prediction model.”
Marce took the tablet and started scanning through the work there. “When did this happen?”
“Six weeks ago. A ship called Tell Me Another One experienced a Flow anomaly and then recorded a transient Flow shoal, consistent with my model. It’s observed, recorded, verified, and tracked. Everything about it fits. Everything about it is exactly what we’ve been looking for. It confirms everything we’ve suspected about the Flow.”