"It's nothing, Laurent. It happens sometimes when I come out here. In the capital, I have to take it for the crowds. But here I forget."

He sighed. "I understand." He knew she was lying.

"Laurent. . ."

"Yes?"

She saw something moving. A house serving drone, skittering down the handrail, clutching her apathy bracelet. She took another deep breath, her panic receding at the sight of it.

"Will you do it?" Nara reached out and took the bracelet from the drone.

Laurent clutched her shoulder, and she tasted his struggle, the fight against his conditioning, his upbringing, his own gray soul, against a planetary landscape rolling beneath him, virgin and defenseless.

"I hope not," he said.

Her fingers closed around the bracelet, and the drone backed away. But Nara didn't activate the flow of apathy yet.

"Don't," she asked.

He looked behind him, as if the Emperor might be listening from the bedroom. But it was just more servos, a small army of them arranging things in front of the fire. In the flickering light, they looked like mad insects building a miniature city.

Laurent Zai nodded quietly and whispered, "All right. I won't. I promise you."

Four days to make promises, he had said an hour ago.

Nara slipped the bracelet onto her wrist unused, and swallowed. Godspite, her mouth was dry.

"Dinner, then?" she said.

Part 2

ALCHEMICAL

Above all, a soldier must be willing to die.

--ANONYMOUS 167

Commando

The second rendezvous went considerably better. H_rd successfully jumped from the recon flyer to the dirigible, and over a few hours it lifted her to approximately eighty kilometers altitude.

The commando looked down over the entanglement facility. From this height, it was smaller than a palm at arm's length. The dirigible's vacuum sphere had quadrupled in size during the slow ascent. H_rd pressed her face to a rebreather tank. The decline in pressure during the assent had been considerable; her ears were ringing, and she'd felt a blood vessel burst in one eye after an hour of climbing. A Rix commando could take a wide variation of air pressure, but this was the lowest she'd experienced since hull-breach training. There was no weather up here in the mesopause, but it was unbelievably cold. The ablative suit--recovered, like the rebreather, from a supersonic aircraft emergency store--was insulated enough to keep her from freezing. H_rd found, however, that she missed her sable coat.

Well, she would be warmed up soon enough.

The positioning device in her hand beeped, Alexander's signal to her. It was almost time to drop. The entanglement facility seemed off-center to her, but the compound mind had carefully calculated the wind direction and speed.

With a strangely unRix thought, h_rd hoped that Alexander hadn't made any mistakes.

She had to hit an area roughly ten meters across, after a fall that would take more than twenty minutes. Alexander had used its weather satellites to find the snowdrift, which filled a thirty-meter deep glacial rift inside the array's defensive wire. The compound mind had introduced a few nanos disguised as snowflakes into its cloud-seeding efforts. These had fallen into the drift and doped the snow. Over the last few days, the nano colony had changed the structure of the ice crystals, expanding the drift, leaching carbon from the soil for structure, and creating a colloidal foam that would compress smoothly when h_rd struck it. The snow had swelled up into a hill that rose ten meters above the surrounding landscape. Thus, h_rd's fall would be broken gradually over almost forty meters.

Of course, she had to hit the trench dead center. She held the positioning device firmly in her free hand; it would guide her to the target area.

H_rd prepared herself, swallowing to adjust the pressure in her ears. She checked the straps of her mission pack.

Then the dirigible motors cut. The signal to drop.

She unlocked the muscles in her hand that clung to the dirigible's payload basket, and slipped into the void.

Weightless again. Freefall was an old friend.

The rush of air built slowly, worsening the cold on the unprotected parts of her face. Her ablative suit was designed to fight fires onboard aircraft. A few nanos--programmed by Alexander and delivered through a medical pack--had altered it sufficiently to make it invisible to Imperial radar.

Or so Alexander's models predicted.

She rolled into a ball, protecting the positioning device and watching its numbers move. The altimeter showed her to be still accelerat   137 ing. Terminal velocity for a human was about sixty meters per second on Legis. As close as h_rd could estimate by the rolling altimeter, her speed had passed that. Probably the air up here was thin enough that terminal velocity was noticeably higher, and she would actually be braking as she descended into higher pressures.

After five minutes of falling, warmth began to bloom in the suit. It grimly crossed her mind that she was heating up from reentry friction. But h_rd dismissed the thought; she couldn't be going that fast. The temperature increase was just the heat trap of the stratopause. After ten minutes total of falling, the air gradually began to grow cold again. She was passing through the stratosphere, approaching the cold air of the tropopause.

Extending her arms slowly, h_rd began to take control of the descent, slowing herself and angling toward the entanglement facility, now as big as a dinner plate below her. She swallowed constantly to keep her ears clear, and watched the numbers on the positioning device roll as she angled her free hand and legs to guide her fall. Her coordinates seemed only incrementally closer to the target. Of course, she was a few minutes from entering the tropospheric wind currents that would push her toward the target snow drift.

H_rd had low-orbit jumped once in training, but that was with a purpose-built Rix suit, parafoil, and artificial-gravity backup. The situation was somewhat different when wearing a retrofitted, improvised Imperial suit and landing in a pile of snow. It wasn't the equipment that had her nervous, though.

She had faced death at every stage of this mission. It was nothing short of fantastic that she had survived this long. But h_rd had realized during these relatively quiet minutes of freefall that Rana Harter had stolen some of her courage. H_rd found that she wanted to live, a strange desire for a Rix commando.

Perfect, she thought. To encounter fear for the first time while falling--at sixty meters per second and without a parachute--into a heavily guarded enemy facility.

"Love," h_rd said bitterly. The rampant wind tore the word from her mouth without comment. After fifteen minutes had elapsed, the longitude and latitude on the positioning device began slowly moving toward the target values; the tropospheric wind was pushing her toward the landing area. And it was getting warmer again, moving toward the merely freezing temperatures of the polar surface.

The entanglement facility was now visibly increasing in size from moment to moment. The sensation of falling became less abstract; h_rd finally saw the ground rushing toward her. She extended hands and feet and angled her body, swooping to bring herself closer to the target area. The positioning device finally beeped; she had matched the snowdrift's coordinates.

The commando could see it below her now, the winding, snow-filled rift reflecting starlight with pale luminescence. From aerial photographs supplied by Alexander, h_rd had memorized the exact spot she needed to hit. She tucked the positioning device into her pack and began counting down.

The altimeter read 6,000 meters. A hundred seconds to go.

She swallowed fiercely now as air pressure built, cupping her hands to guide herself gently to the target over these last few moments. Invoked by a mental command, her body went through an impact preparation sequence. She expelled the air from her lungs completely, let her muscles relax, rebalanced the ratio of strength and flexibility in her plastic ligaments to favor the latter.

By the time her internal count had reached eight seconds, h_rd was physiologically ready for impact. The deepest part of the trench lay directly below her, no farther than looking down from the top of a medium-sized building. At half a kilometer and falling, details on the ground gained focus rapidly. Rocks and a few scrub bushes became visible, and the moire weave of a retransmitter dish's arc scintillated in one corner of her vision.

After twenty minutes of falling, it was odd how quickly the snowbound earth was rushing up at her.

Five, four, three . . .

The surface of the altered snow broke with a pop as she crashed through. She later realized that a thin layer of frost had formed over the nano-doped snow. This brittle crust of rime was at most a centimeter thick--and probably couldn't have supported more than a   139 few grams of weight. But at sixty meters per second it packed a punch. Like the surface of water at high speed, it had for a moment the force of concrete. The impact broke h_rd's nose and split her lower lip, and opened a bleeding cut over her right eye. But then she passed into the colloidal pseudo-snow, which caught her in its foamy arms, slowing her descent. The Rixwoman came smoothly to a stop.

She opened her eyes in total darkness, her head ringing from the impact of breaking the crust. Testing each muscle and joint in turn, she found herself to be uninjured except for the insults to her face. She sat up, orienting herself in the darkness of the cold, compressed foam-snow around her, and looked upwards.

The sky was just visible through the twenty-meter-deep hole she had made. Her own outline, almost comically exact, showed for a few moments before the foam-snow began to collapse, covering her. H_rd breathed deeply and fast, storing oxygen before she was enveloped by the foam. She would remain here motionless for thirty minutes or so. The impact shock of her landing would have registered on the facility's motion sensors, but if she stayed still, the snow-muffled, momentary vibration would read as simply a cleaving of the snowdrift: an event well within the natural stochastic rumblings of the arctic wild.

The darkness covered her. After the rushing air, especially the frigid layer of the tropopause, the foam-snow brought a blanket of warmth. H_rd felt blood dripping into her eye from her cut, and tended to her wounds as she waited. That brittle crust of ice represented a small error in Alexander's plan, she noted to herself, the sort of hairline mistake that was magnified a thousandfold in a mission of this difficulty.

No system, not even a compound mind, was perfect. A very unRix thought, but true.

After she'd waited the requisite time, the commando began to tunnel out of the drift. She kept an eye on the positioning device, not trusting her own magnetoreceptor direction-finding cells this close to the pole. Her oxygen reserve was limited, and any wrong turn that led her into an unclimbable wall could be deadly. It would be rather banal to drown in this foam after surviving an eighty-kilometer fall.

The nano-doped snow was strange stuff. In the readout light of the positioning device, she could see the tiny bubbles that made it up, composed of water structured by large carbon molecules. The substance seemed dry when touched gently, but under shock it disintegrated into a wet, somewhat slimy substance. In her hand the bubbles broke down quickly into water; even her low body temperature was sufficient to disrupt its stability. When the warm winds of spring came, all evidence of how this trick had been performed would be gone forever.

H_rd reached the edge of the foam, and climbed from the trench into a drift of real snow. She raised a periscope through the crust first, and surveyed the area. There was no sign of an Imperial response to her landing. She pulled herself from the drift and dusted snow and foam from her. The ablative suit had torn on impact, and a few icy trickles of water already numbed her feet.

The Rixwoman crawled away from the landing zone, careful to keep her distance from the area of doped snow. Anyone stepping on that part of the drift would plummet to the bottom of the trench, softly but ignominiously. There were also vibration sensors to be wary of. H_rd moved slowly and haltingly, an uneven motion designed to mimic natural processes.

The commando searched the horizon for the telltale glimmer of microwave arrays. The threads of the off-line repeaters glowed like spiderwebs all around her, the nearest thirty meters away. With her painstakingly slow and interrupted crawl, it took h_rd five minutes to traverse the distance.

The main portion of the device was roughly the size of a fist. From this central mass radiated the microwave receiver array, the slender filaments that gathered the civilian communications of Legis bound for translight transmission. The transmitter stick rose from the center of the fist, a decimeter-high antenna that forwarded the data to the entanglement facility.

The repeater also sported four legs and two manipulator arms. The hordes of them that dotted the tundra functioned as a single entity. They moved slowly, but quickly enough to disperse or gather them   141 selves as their throughput required. The whole system was distributed over thousands of square kilometers, making it difficult to sabotage and impossible to destroy from space without megatons of explosives. These repeaters were a hardy system, a wartime backup to the vulnerable hardlines, meter-wide cables through which the data usually flowed. Once the Imperials had realized that the compound mind had successfully propagated, they had isolated the facility. The repeaters had been taken off-line by hand: hundreds of militia workers moving through the snow on foot and disconnecting the repeaters individually. The facility's input had been reduced to a single hardline connection, a low-bandwidth coupling that the military tightly controlled. Alexander was cut off.

The Imperials assumed that any measure undertaken by hundreds of humans by hand would be irreversible without similarly crude measures. But Alexander had other ideas.

H_rd looked at the repeater closely. Its power pack seemed out of alignment, tilted to one side at an angle of about fifteen degrees. She refocused her eyes into their microscopic mode, and noted the simple measure the Imperials had taken. The receivers were still working, still sucking up the vast quantity of data that Legis produced, but the repeater was physically disconnected from its power supply. Tilted those few degrees, the pack was disjunct from its contact, thus all off-planet transmissions were halted here, a few kilometers from their goal. H_rd approved of the awesome simplicity of it. The thing actually functioned like some pre-spaceflight switch. Again, the crudeness of the Imperials impelled a certain grudging respect from the Rixwoman.

With her smallest finger, she clicked the power pack back into the correct position. That was it. The lethal wire and two thousand kilometers of wilderness protected nothing but this simple switch.

Her mission was complete.

She crawled slowly back to the edge of the landing zone and buried herself in a few decimeters of the snow-foam, leaving only a breathing hole. She would wait here for a few more hours before making her rather noisy escape.

Before covering her head, h_rd looked back and saw that the repeater she had fixed was already moving, making its beetlelike way across the snow.

Alexander was inside the wire.

Senator

It was good to be back in the halls of the Senate Forum. The air seemed to be cleaner here, the wash of politics more pure.

The Senate was an unruly chamber, of course, more so now that the special war session was in full swing. But the numberless details of the Senate's agenda balanced each other, blending into a shape as smooth as the rumble of a distant ocean. The noisy debates here were a relief for Nara Oxham after the demands of the War Council, where each crisis came into absolute focus, and lives were in play with every vote.

"You were right, Niles," she said as they walked together back toward her offices. Oxham had just presented the last few days of the council's work to the full Senate.

"I knew they'd love you, Senator. Even the lackeys were standing by the end."

"Not about that, Niles," she said, waving away his praise. The speech had gone well, though. Captain Laurent Zai had made them all look brilliant. The Lynx's attack on the Rix battlecruiser had given the Empire its first victory, a gift to the propaganda effort. Counterattacks in an interstellar war could take years to mount, time spans over which even the most resolute society's morale could falter. But Zai had struck back against the Rix in a matter of days.

"In any case, I have my speechwriters to thank for that."

Niles began a sputter of protest at this.

"I was referring, in any case," she interrupted, "to when you cau   143 tioned me about losing my way in the council. Forgetting why we came here. You were right to warn me."

"Senator," the old man said, "I never thought that was a likelihood. I just had to say something. I get paid to advise you."

Nara smiled at her counselor's clumsy modesty. The world seemed bright to her today. She'd played the Senate like some Secularist street gathering back on Vasthold, pulled the bright tracery of their emotions through the courses that Niles's speech had mapped out for her. The moment in which she'd captured them had come early, the critical juncture when she could feel their agreement with the council's war plan coalescing, reacting to her words like a flock of birds turning in unison.

The sharp flavor of the captive crowd still lingered in her mind, and Nara savored the way it blended with the sunlight penetrating the high windows along the Forum great hall. But the pleasures of politics were trifles compared to the real source of her joy.

Laurent Zai had survived, escaping death again.

Of course, only a handful knew that his success in battle had saved an entire world. It seemed fantastic now that the War Council had contemplated something so monstrous. She wondered what the two living counselors who had voted for the Emperor's plan had felt as the hour of genocide had approached.

To Senator Nara Oxham, it seemed that she had emerged from the crisis with far more power on the War Council. She'd been the first to vote against the plan, so her voice was now second only to the Emperor's. The once unanimous council was beginning to develop fault lines, the living against the dead, Senator Oxham against the sovereign. The Emperor hadn't lost a vote yet, but Oxham could see him steering away from ideas when she voiced opposition to them, reluctant to force any issue that she might raise a majority against.

But the majority was there, silent and waiting to assert itself against any future genocides.

In his mind-reading way, Niles interrupted her thoughts. "But if you want some more advice?"

"Earn your keep, Roger."

He waited another moment, until they had crossed the threshold of Nara Oxham's private domain. Her offices had been almost doubled in size to match her new council rank, the ever-mobile walls of the Forum pushing against the surrounding senators' territories, a fat man jostling his way onto an elevator. They walked past a score of staff, half of whose names she didn't know yet.

When they reached Oxham's personal office, Niles continued.

"You are restricted by the hundred-year rule, of course."

Nara nodded warily. She'd explained to Niles why she couldn't discuss the council's contingency plan if the Lynx had failed. He was allowed to know of the rule's invocation, but mention of the forbidden topic still made her vaguely nervous.

"But I'm not restricted," he continued. "I can make suppositions, and give you advice. Let me talk, but don't confirm or deny anything."

"Is this a good idea, Roger?"

"Nothing in the rule says you can't listen to me, Senator."

She nodded slowly.

"One: You're happy, Nara Oxham. Because your lover survived, because the war took a good turn. But my guess is that you're also happy that the Emperor's contingency plan didn't have to be enacted. He must have had one, in case the Lynx failed."

Oxham started to nod, but willed herself to absolute stillness. No matter how secure her offices were, there were methods of interrogation which could plumb memories of any conversation. They were playing a dangerous game with an ancient law. And although Nara had senatorial privilege, Roger Niles did not.

"Two: The Emperor's contingency plan was . . . extraordinary enough that he decided to shroud it with the hundred-year rule."

Nara blinked, then looked out the window at the noontime effulgence of the capital.

"Three: I personally believe that anything too extraordinary would not have the vote of Nara Oxham."

She wanted to thank Roger, or at least to smile, but kept her face still. "All of which means," Niles continued, "that you either won the vote, and the Emperor is hopping mad at you, or you lost, and earned some modest displeasure. In either case, Laurent Zai's victory made this extraordinary plan unnecessary, and His Risen Majesty looks like a monster for whatever he contemplated. And he's got you to thank for dividing the council. He wanted to spread the guilt."

Oxham wondered how Niles had realized all this. Perhaps he had read the faces of the other counselors during her speech, or perhaps he'd detected preparations for the Emperor's plan somewhere among the volumes of data he digested every day. Or maybe the invocation of the rule had been enough, and the rest was Niles's conjecture.

"In short," he continued, "you have committed the ultimate sin: winning a moral victory against the Emperor."

She couldn't resist. "A moral victory, Niles? I thought you said that was an oxymoron."

"It is, Senator. I believe you'll discover that your victory contains several internal contradictions. For example, although it has given you more power than you've ever had, you're also in far greater danger."

"Aren't you being dramatic, Niles?"

He shook his head. "It couldn't be more obvious, Nara. If I'm right, if Vrrt not crazy, you've directly antagonized the most powerful single man in the coreward reaches of the human expansion."

She shrugged, returning her face to a neutral mask, and stared out the window. A world had been saved, her lover was still alive. Niles's warning couldn't completely overshadow the joys of this bright day.

But it still troubled her that Niles had deduced all this. Did he have spies on the War Council? Nara Oxham looked at the old man, and saw the lines of concern on his smooth face. Then she understood: All the evidence he'd needed had come from Nara herself. He could read her as easily as she could read a crowd. Understanding the masses was a politician's art, but understanding politicians was the necessary genius of a counselor.

He was an empath's empath.

"You call that advice, Roger?" she said after a while.

"No, Senator. I call this advice: Be careful. Move slowly. Watch your back. Assume that the Emperor is setting a trap, waiting for you to make a mistake. Don't." "Don't make mistakes? That's good advice, counselor."

"It's damn good advice, Senator. The next one could cost us all dearly."

She sighed, then nodded.

Roger Niles sat finally, sinking heavily into one of her visitor's chairs.

"There's another thing, Senator. I have to apologize."

Oxham's eyes widened. "For what, in heaven's name?"

He swallowed. "For saying that Zai's death would be for the best."

"Ah." Nara thought back on that moment. She'd never been angry at Niles for those words. They'd been his way of alerting her to the peril of loving an officer at the front. It was Niles's job to warn her of danger, as he had done a moment ago.

"Roger," she said, "I know you're glad that Laurent is still alive."

His eyes darted away. "Of course. No one should lose their lover to war. But at least his death would have been final."

"Roger?" she asked. She'd never seen the hard expression now set on his face.

"Did I ever tell you why I went into politics, Senator?"

She tried to recall, but the concept of a Roger Niles before politics was unthinkable. The man was politics. Nara shook her head slowly.

"The love of my life died when I was twenty," he said, forcing the words out slowly. "A sudden hemorrhage. She was from old Vasthold aristocracy, in the days of hereditary elevation."

Oxham blinked. She'd had no idea that Niles was that old. Before she'd become an Imperial senator, he always claimed to spend the time between electoral cycles in coldsleep, only living in the months before elections, extending his life through generations of political battles. But she'd never believed that could really be true.

Hereditary elevation? He must be ancient.

"So when Sarah died, they took her away," he said. "Made her one of them."

He looked out at the window at the bright city.

"I rejoiced, and praised the Emperor," he continued quietly. "I saw her in the hospice, and she tried to say good-bye to me. But I thought it was just ritual. I assumed she would come back. We were   147 closer than all the lovers in history, I thought. But she didn't return. After a few months, I tracked her to the gray enclave where she .. . lived."

"Oh, Roger," Nara said softly. "How awful."

"Indeed. They really are gray, you know, those towns. As gray as a weeklong rain. By then Sarah hardly knew who I was. She would squint when she looked at me, as if there were something familiar about my face. But she would only talk about the steam rising from her teapot. If she looked away for even a moment, when her eyes returned they had to learn to remember me all over again. As if I were some faint watermark on reality, less real than the steam.

"There was no one inside her, Nara. The symbiant is a trick. Death is final. The dead are lost."

"How did it end, Roger?"

"They politely asked me to leave, and I left. Then I joined the local Secularist Party, and buried myself in the task of burying the dead."

"Politics," Nara said. "We're alike, aren't we?"

The old counselor nodded in agreement. Nara Oxham had turned to political life to overcome the demons of her childhood. She had turned madness into perception, vulnerability into empathy, a terror of crowds into raw power over them. Roger Niles had turned his hatred into a tactical genius, his supreme loss into relentless purpose.

Niles was every bit as fixated as the Emperor, Oxham now saw. Plumbing a thousand newsfeeds for every advantage to use against the grays, Niles was exacting his slow revenge against an immortal foe.

"Yes, we are the same, Senator," Niles said. "We love the living rather than worship the dead. And I am glad Laurent Zai is alive."

"Thank you, Roger."

"Just do us all a favor and be careful, Senator, so that you're still alive when the captain returns."

Nara Oxham smiled calmly, and felt newfound power in the expression.

"Don't worry about me, counselor. There are more moral victories to come." Captain

Laurent Zai looked down upon the glowing airscreen with displeasure.

The bridge was alive again, filled with voices and the floating runes of synesthesia, animated by interface gestures and those of human-to-human communication: palms upturned in frustration, fingers pointed, fists shaken.

The airscreen showed the frigate's new configuration. In the aftermath of battle, the Lynx was a different ship. Cone were the gunnery stations and drone-pilot berths, the launch bays and rows of burn beds. Crew cabins and rec space had reappeared. Long low-gee corridors had been created for moving heavy objects up and down the ship, and there were huge new open areas for stripping damaged components down to parts.

Zai shook his head. His ship was half-junked.

What the battle hadn't destroyed, the repair crews were pulling apart, cannibalizing, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Were the Lynx to face an enemy now, they would be utterly defenseless. But the frigate was well past the Rix battlecruiser. The enemy still pursued them, accelerating at its maximum of six gees, but to cancel the 3,000 kps relative velocity between the warships would take the Rix half a day, by which time they'd be 75 million kilometers away. After matching vectors, it would take them another half-day to return to the Lynx.

Well before that moment came, the frigate would have maneuver capability of its own.

The main fusion drive hadn't been touched in the battle. It was, however, the Lynx's only remaining means of creating power. The singularity generator--the frigate's auxiliary energy source--was operable, but the shielding that the engineers had stripped from it now. If the generator were big banged, there wouldn't be   149 enough countermass to keep the black hole in place. Armor was being stripped from all across the Lynx to build new shielding, but that left her gunnery hardpoints less than hard.

Indeed, all the frigate's defensive systems were compromised. With the loss of her bow, the ship had no forward armor; two full-time gunnery crews were required to man the forward close-in defenses, picking off any meteoroids that threatened the hurtling ship. The drone magazine had been damaged by flockers, and its launch rail destroyed by the frigate's last desperate acceleration, so there was no way to field a large complement of defensive drones. Worst of all, the ship's energy-sink manifold was gone for good, scattered across millions of kilometers of space.

Little hard armor, no defensive cloud of drones, no energy-sink, Zai lamented. Come at the frigate with kinetic or beam weapons: Take your pick. He wouldn't have an answer for either.