Page 12 (1/2)

"I can feel it," he said flatly

Oxham smiled Thirty years into their shared career, and he still hated when she made appeals to her empathy It offended his sense of politics as a human enterprise, as the human enterprise Niles still felt that the offshoots of synesthetic iue Axis? Heand the dead, and the Plague Axis were a sort of twilight zone They were the carriers of ancient diseases, and the repositories of the old congenital defects When huenetic destiny millennia before, too few traits had been selected for, and hordes of inforenists had realized that es: sickle cell conferred resistance to dorenius; certain cancers stabilized whole populations in ways that were not entirely understood The Plague Axis, germline-natural humans subject to every whim of evolution, were essential to ineered population They were the controls in the vast experiment that was Imperial humanity

But to have theht have her own infirht of lepers

The senator brought forward the list she and Niles had constructed By tradition, the council would have ninethe Eate real war power to the council, all factions had to be represented The major power blocs of Empire were relatively fixed, but the individual pieces that would fit into each of those places at the table were as variable as cards in a hand of poker How the Emperor filled those spaces would deter these thoughts, a chinal that broke through all other data The note was low-pitched, the steady, awesoan But it carried a froth of higher frequencies: the indistinct breath of a distant sea, the fluttering of birds&039; wings, the stray high pitches of an orchestra tuning The sound was sovereign, unmistakable

"Council is called," Nara Oxhaht falling away fro on the here and now, like soht

With his dataveil reh liaze He spoke carefully

"Nara, do you remember the crowds?"

He ns, when she had finally put the terror of er I remember"

Unlike those of most of the Ee to the media feeds There, politics was a kind of street theater Issues were fought out face-to-face in the dense cities, in the house-to-house cos, and around park bonfires Impromptu debates, demonstrations, and out-and-out braere the order of the day To escape her old fear ofspeech at a political rally But with a willful perversity, she had only partially suppressed her eain At first, the roiling psyches of the crowd assuo and conflict, a hungry stor glut of passions But Oxhaer behind the protective barrier of the apathy drug With her imented by the public address syste like a wild horse, worked their e That day, she found that on the other side of terror could be foundpower

Niles nodded; he had watched those powerful memories cross her face

"We&039;re very far from them now, those crowds In the pretense of this place, it&039;s easy to forget the real world that you caotten, Roger Re as you For me, it&039;s only been two years, not ten"

One hand went to his graying hair, a smile on his face

"Just reislation will now represent acts of war: violence will be done and lives lost in the naer You have to understand, the Rix frontier isn&039;t as far away as all that Not for me"

A frown appeared on his face She hadn&039;t told anyone, not even Niles, about her affair with Laurent Zai It had see And noas, in Niles&039;s frao

"Someone very close to me is there, Niles He&039;s at the front I&039;ll keep him in mind, as a stand-in for all those distant, threatened lives"

Roger Niles&039;s eyes narrowed, his high forehead wrinkling with surprise His powerful lad to know that she could still keep sos secret from her chief advisor She was pleased that she had told no one; the affair remained hers and Laurent&039;s alone

Senator Nara Oxham rose The sound of the Imperial su; the chi into perpetuity Oxhaet louder should she fail to answer its suain, easing back into data Oxhaone, he would worry her words, and would plumb the vast store of his datatrove to discover whom she meant And that eventually he would discover Laurent Zai

And it crossed her ht already be dead

"I take your concerns with er This war is very real"

"Thank you, Senator The trust of Vasthold is with you"

The old ritual phrase, to which Senators were sworn before they left Vasthold for fifty years Niles uttered it so sadly that she turned to look at his face again But already the veil had fallen over hi an empire&039;s worth of data for answers toa war

For aequipht of Empire upon him, and she stopped at the door She had to show him, to let Niles see the token of love she carried

"Roger"

Oxham held up a s circuitry A single-purpose ree It was hest priority translement net, one-time encryption, sealed eyes-only under Penalty of Blood--and keyed to her DNA, her pheromonal profile, and voiceprint

Niles looked at the object, his eyes clearing She had his attention

"Iin the War Council Will it work fro, the Rubicon Pale extends froerryal fiction

"How long will it take the is XV?"

His eyebrows raised at the planet&039;s name Now he knew that her lover was truly at the front

"How long is the e?"

"One word"

Niles nodded "Entangled communications are instantaneous, but unless the shared quantu were physically transported directly from Home--"

"They were," she said

"So he&039;s--"

"On a warship"

"Then, no ti Oxhan of her intentions "May I ask what the e is?"

"Don&039;t," she said EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Hobbes stood nervously at attention as Zai worked gestural codes at the small interface beside the observation blister&039;s door

She stared down into the void The usual vertigo created by the transparent floor was gone, replaced by the crushing weight of failure A dead, eht taste like a ue fouled her e rescue, the sleepless hours spent poring over every frae She had not saved her captain, had only ed to make him furious

There seeid spine of Zai&039;s Vadan upbringing No way to convince him that it had been the politicals and not military personnel who had botched the rescue The initiate had gone down against the captain&039;s protests, waving an imperial writ; why couldn&039;t Captain Zai see that he was blameless?

At least they should take the evidence before a military court Zai was a hero, an elevated officer He couldn&039;t throw his life away for the sake of brutal, pointless tradition

Executive Officer Hobbes was fro the military classes She had rejected the hedonistic ways of her own horays, their traditions and discipline Their lives of service rays otherworldly to Katherie, uninterested in the brief pleasures of the flesh For Hobbes, Captain Laurent Zai ee, his craggy face uncorrected by cosery

But underneath, Hobbes could see the wounded hu on Dhantu, the ret every time he lost a "man"

And now her captain&039;s sense of honor deray traditions that Hobbes found so co seemed simply barbaric, a brutal web in which her captain had trapped himself, a willful and pathetic blindness Zai&039;s acquiescence was far er

He turned from the controls

"Steady yourself," he ordered

The floor lurched, as if the ship had accelerated Hobbes barely kept her footing, the universe becoed around her Then the transparent surface under her stabilized, and she sahat had happened The blister had beco free of the ship, tethered only by the ship&039;s gravity generators, filled only with the air and heat trapped within its walls The gravity felt wrong, cast across the void by the Lynx&039;s generators to create a tentative up in this so returned with a vengeance

"We can talk freely now, Hobbes"

She nodded slowly, careful not to disturb her plaintive inner ear