Page 11 (1/2)
INITIATE
The body lay blackened and flaking on the still-table, recognizable as a hurossest aspect of its limbs, trunk, and head But Initiate Viran Farre stood back, wary of the charred corpse as if it were capable of sudden ainst those who had failed to protect it Three more humans and the Rix commando lay, similarly burned, on the other tables in the room These were the five who had been killed in the council chamber
Officially, Initiate Farre and Adept Trevim had claimed possession of their remains in case one of them were fit to rise But clearly any such reanimation lay beyond the Miracle of the Symbiant; these people had been destroyed The politicals&039; real purpose was to cut open the Child Empress&039;s body, and make sure that all evidence of the Emperor&039;s Secret was elie hollow in her stomach, a void filled only with an ohtness of sudden freefall She had performed the ader to dead bodies But this palpable presence of the E She wanted to blot out the sight of the Empress&039;s fallen body, run fro burned down Adept Trevim had ordered Farre to steel herself, however; the initiate&039;s e was necessary here And Farre was also conditioned to obey her superiors
"Which of these saws, Farre?"
Farre took a deep breath, and forced her eyes to take in the array of monofilament incisors, vibrasaws, and beaed by kind and size, the backmost raised on the stepped table like a jury, or the excavated teeth of sonashers, here the renders, here the grinding molars
"I would stay away from beam cutters, Adept And we haven&039;t the skill for monofilaments" The confidant was made of nervous tissue, and would be a delicate extraction They needed to open the body in the least destructive way
"A vibrasaw, then?" Trevied
She selected a s width, just enough to slice through the rib cage Farre handed it to the adept, and winced at the dead worip on the tool Farre, who had been a doctor before her induction into the E the autopsy But the conditioning was too profound It was all she could do to assist; actually cutting into the corpse that housed the Secret would bring forth a calamitous reaction from her internal monitors
The vibrasahirred to life in Treviht inside one&039;s eardrum The sound seee as she pressed the saw against the blackened corpse But her strokes were sh the charred flesh like a blade through water
A ray in the air Farre shuddered and reached for afrom a burned-out fire; indeed, it was in every chemical sense the same--fire-distilled carbon--but its source was human flesh rather than wood Farre covered hernot to think of the small motes of dead Child Empress that would be trapped between theeven now into the pores of her exposed skin
The Adept finished, having done alh a job The vibrasaw had been set to undercut the connective tissues, and the Ee lifted up easily in narrow strips as Trevi to quell the raging inhibitions of her conditioning The exposed chest was almost abstract, like the plastic sculptures back inburned gristle and tissue to a dark, dry mass
"And now a nerve locator?"
Farre shook her head "They only work on living subjects Or the very recently dead You&039;ll need a set of nervous-tissue-seeking nanoprobes and a re rod" She took another deep breath "Let me show you"
The Adept moved aside as Initiate Farre sprayed the nanoprobes onto the glistening chest cavity Farre let the its readout to e the delicate strands of the confidant&039;s skein The troweling rod&039;s nian to work the flesh, teasing the tissue froressed a few centi, and a wave of nausea struck her
"Adept" she ed
Treviers as she staggered back from the still-table
"That will do nicely, Initiate," she heard Trevies stayed unshakeably in her mind&039;s eye as she sank heavily to the floor The Emperor&039;s sister, Child Empress Anastasia, Reason for the sy
Vulnerable Injured The Secret exposed!
And she, Viran Farre, had participated Her stomach heaved, and acid bile rose into her throat The taste destroyed all will, and she retched pitifully as the adept continued to remove the confidant from the fallen Empress
CAPTAIN
Laurent Zai dropped the single-purpose rera yet--he hardly wanted to kill himself accidentally He&039;d simply wanted to show ExO Hobbes the manner in which he intended to commit suicide As a warrior, he had always borne the prospect of a eover of coe cale The anxiety that consuone Over the last two years, love had compromised his bravery, he realized now Hopelessness had returned it to hi order
Zai wondered why the Lynx had been equipped with two bridges The warship was a new class, unlike any of the Navy&039;s Acinonyx frigates, and a few of its design concepts had seee, the ship had a coe, as if an adate The second bridge had wound up being used as a very well-equipped conference room
When Zai and Hobbes entered, the officers present snapped to attention The co, the conference table folded out like a jackknife, all seats facing the hi-res screen The officers&039; eyes met Zai&039;s with nervous deter ato save their captain&039;s life
"At ease," Zai ordered, taking the shipmaster&039;s chair He turned to Hobbes "Make your report, Executive Officer"
Hobbes glanced anxiously at the hardkey she&039;d been worrying in her hand during their discussion in the observation bubble, as if suddenly unsure that it was up to the task Then, with a grim look, she shoved it into a slot before her
The vibration of the table&039;s boot sequence shimmered under Zai&039;s hand He noted the shift of shadows in the roohts dimmed and the billions of picture elements on the armed to their task He saw his officers relax a little, as people always did when preparing to watch a canned presentation, no rim the situation Now that Zai faced death, details had become terribly clear to hiht, sharp but somehow distant Thewith his future, as if his experiences had become suddenly worthless, like soht
The screen showed a grainy iray-scale--the unavoidable signal loss of a hel all the way to low orbit The picture seemed stretched, the pulled-taffy visuals of a ree vision It took a few moments for Zai&039;s visual cortex to adapt to the view, like struggling to understand pre-Diaspora Anglish for the first few round sorted themselves out, and he could make out a Rix soldier, a blood-spattered admiral, an off-balance Dr Vechner, and the body of one Empress Anastasia Vista Khaman All were frozen, their motion suspended, the horror of the situation oddly aestheticized by the rough grain of the medium
"This is 67:21:34," Hobbes announced, her air in front of the timecode on the screen "Exactly fifteen seconds before the stasis field was first activated by Corporal Lao" She na like a curious hubird from one to the next
"Note that there are no visible wounds on the Empress Blood is visible on her and the admiral, but it&039;s spread evenly across thes to the Rix counned fros"
The air to sniff the entry wound on the Rix commando Zai had to aduts should have been sucked out in buckets How could she have survived?
"Now, I&039;ll advance it to the point where the stasis field interrupts transures jolted into action, Vechner stuing hienerator and her fingers reached for the controls; then the screen went black
"Now," Hobbes said, "to focus on certain elements First, the Empress"
The fifteen seconds replayed on the screen, with the E uncontrollably, having some sort of seizure The ad child thrashing her way through a nightmare
"Obviously, the Child Empress is alive Under some sort of stress, perhaps wounded, but alive Now, observe the Rixwoaining fahted Rix commando was completely still
"She&039;s dead," First Pilot Maradonna said to the roo dead," Captain Zai responded
"That&039;s possible, sir," Hobbes allowed "The Rix physiology is not pulsitile Which fuls of air, they filter it continuously And their hearts spin rather than beating"
"So they are naturally motionless on the surface, no matter the resolution"
"Yes, sir But allow me to skip forward to the visuals received when the situation had been secured, when Lao briefly lowered the stasis field This is from Dr Vechner&039;s helmet"
The screen was refreshed with a new tableau Vechner knelt beside the Empress The airmouse moved to indicate the Rix soldier; she apparently hadn&039;t moved in the interim Hobbes left this fact unspoken
"Note the ultrasound wrap around the Empress," Hobbes continued "As we advance, you can see her heart beating within"
The ie moved forward for five seconds, then the stasis field went back up and cut off the transain But the heartbeat was clearly visible The Empress had still been alive at that point
Daht They&039;d been so close
"Why don&039;t we have data from the ultrasound wrap?" he asked "Shouldn&039;t it have automatically connected with the Lynx medical AI?" "Unfortunately, the security protocols require more than five seconds to coainst viruses being loaded onto the Lynx in the guise of eency medical data"
Zai wondered who&039;d tried that little trick in the past It sounded like typical Tungai sabotage
"Now froain," Hobbes continued "The new marine in the picture is Initiate Barris His armor was crashed on captain&039;s orders, as he had just killed another marine with friendly fire"
Barris&039;s motionless are advanced, Lao reached out and dragged hi to protect a fallen comrade," Hobbes said dryly
Barris rolled over His face was an appalling ed by a bad atmospheric entry
"Rixhere," Barris&039;s twisted face said
Lao&039;s hand darted for the field generator&039;s controls again, and the ie went dark