The imperial guard pushed the door open and Marce Claremont walked into the ornate and cavernous room where the executive committee was having its first meeting of the morning. Marce sported a folder and eyes as large as plates as he took in the baroque design of the immense room and realized that no matter how long he stayed at the imperial palace he would probably never get used to its ridiculous sumptuousness. It was, in a word, excessive.
He reached the table where the executive committee sat, save the emperox, who was still recovering from her assassination attempt. The member at the head of the table, the one Grayland II told him would be Archbishop Korbijn, essayed him quietly. Marce bowed to her and briefly scanned the table for the other person he was looking for, Nadashe Nohamapetan. He’d never seen her before but he recognized her quickly enough—younger than any other member of the executive committee, and bearing a strong family resemblance to her brother Ghreni. She looked back at him, neutral, as she should have, because she had no idea who he was, or what he represented.
“You’re new,” Archbishop Korbijn said, to him.
Marce nodded. “Yes, Your Grace. I am Marce Claremont, the emperox’s new assistant for science policy. I was hired just yesterday on my arrival from End.”
This got Nadashe’s attention, but she hid it well; if Marce hadn’t been directly looking for a reaction, he would have missed it.
Korbijn smiled and acknowledged the committee. “This might be a lot for your second day.”
“Yes, Your Grace. It’s a lot. More than you know.”
“I understand you have an update for us on the emperox’s condition,” Korbijn said.
“I do, and I have another piece of business that the emperox wished me to present to the committee, if you will indulge her wishes.”
“Of course.”
“The emperox’s condition is improving,” Marce said. “She’s still suffering from the effects of cold and hypoxia from being trapped in that leaking tenner spoke, but fortunately her guards—or what remained of them—were able to retrieve her before she suffered any genuinely life-threatening injuries. She was lucky. Luckier than the five guards who were lost protecting her, and the four guards who were lost trying to rescue Lord Amit Nohamapetan.” He turned and nodded to Nadashe. “My condolences, Lady Nadashe, for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Of course.” Marce turned back to Korbijn. “Dr. Drinin has told her that he wants to keep her on bed rest and observation for a few more days, to let her body heal further, and suggested to her that this executive committee be allowed to handle any issues that come up. I believe he was hinting to her that this committee should take on the parliamentary authorization of force against End and its rebels.”
“What did the emperox say to this?” Korbijn asked.
“She said that absent her presence, the committee may act in her stead to implement the authorization—”
“No time like the present,” said Upeksha Ranatunga, who in parliament had voted to send the troopship Prophecies of Rachela to End.
“—but only after I presented this committee with the second piece of information she wished to share with you.”
“And what is that?” Korbijn asked.
“This,” Marce said, and opened the folder he was carrying, which contained nine printed documents, each containing a substantial number of pages, stapled together. He began distributing the reports to the committee members.
“What is this?” Ranatunga asked.
“It’s an early draft of a scientific paper my father received several years ago, from a doctoral candidate named Hatide Roynold. She’d sent it to him because, although my father was the imperial auditor on End, he was there performing another task given to him by Emperox Attavio VI. My father was a Flow physicist, as I am, and the late emperox had him collecting data on the health of the Flow streams inside the Interdependency. Attavio VI was concerned, despite the best assurances of nearly all reputable Flow physicists, that these critical trade routes might collapse.”
“And will they?” Ranatunga asked.
“It’s happened before,” Marce said. “Most obviously we lost the Flow stream to Earth, our ancestral home, more than a millennium ago. Another stream collapse, involving the Dalasysla system, happened a couple hundred years later. However, since then, the Flow streams have been remarkably stable, a fact which has allowed the Interdependency to thrive and prosper.”
Korbijn shook the report, which she was not bothering to flip through at the moment; others on the committee had also set them down; Nadashe Nohamapetan had put hers down to make some notation on her tablet. “Does this paper suggest the Flow streams are collapsing?”
“No,” Marce said. “The paper actually proposed that the streams are likely to undergo a radical shift, rearranging themselves over the course of a very few years. Most of the Flow streams that we have now will go away, but they’ll be replaced by emerging ones that will allow trade in the Interdependency to continue—but with End the nexus of the new Flow stream network, not Hub.”
“Is that accurate?” Korbijn asked.
“That’s what Roynold wanted to know, which is why she sent the draft to my father, who had written an earlier paper along the same lines, the findings of which he discussed with Attavio VI, with whom he shared a friendship. It was by Attavio’s request that he stopped publicly researching the topic, but the early paper was still out there. Roynold supposed that he was the only person who would take her seriously on the topic.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing; he was researching privately for the emperox. The only person I think he ever shared the draft with was me, because I was working with him on his research. And publicly, at least, Hatide Roynold stopped researching on this topic. Her doctorate addresses another vector of research entirely. But the imperial guards have just spoken to her overnight. It turns out that like my father, Roynold had a private patron who allowed her to continue her research on the topic of the Flow streams shifting. Nadashe Nohamapetan.”
All eyes turned to Nadashe, who smiled. “I knew this was coming,” she said, and addressed Korbijn directly. “Hatide is a friend of mine from university. She came to me in financial straits and wouldn’t take charity. So I funded her research on this topic instead. I gave her a stipend to finish this and her other work, and she gave quarterly updates. Which I never read because that was never the point.”
“I’m sorry, Lady Nohamapetan, but there is reason to believe otherwise,” Marce said.
Nadashe turned to Marce and would have glared a hole in his chest if she could. “And what reason is that, Mr. Claremont?”
“It’s Lord Claremont, Lady Nadashe,” Marce said. “And because your brother suggested otherwise.”
“To whom?”
“To us,” said Emperox Grayland II, from the doorway. Everyone stood, except for Marce, who was already standing. He smiled at Grayland’s sudden appearance. They had not planned it when they had spoken earlier, but he could tell she had been agitated when he came to her and disclosed what Kiva Lagos had told him, along with his own personal information. When the emperox told him the things she knew, everything, appallingly, fell together. After she had made calls to follow up on loose ends, the two of them planned this presentation, which Marce was to deliver.
But she also made him wear a microphone so she could hear the entire exchange, which is why she had a response to Nadashe Nohamapetan when she was too far away to possibly have heard what she was saying as she walked through the door. Marce had to admit it made for a nice psychological effect.
Grayland walked slowly to the table and waved at everyone to sit. Archbishop Korbijn moved to sit elsewhere besides the head of the table, but Grayland signaled she should stay where she was. She reached Marce and leaned on him instead.