After a long moment, her lover mustered the courage to ask, “What’s wrong?”
Miocene said, “Nothing.”
Then she rose from the bed, looking at her nightgown with a confused expression, as if she couldn’t remember asking for it.
Again, she said, “Nothing.”
Then Miocene told Virtue, “Wait here. Wait.” She took a step toward the room’s back wall, ordered her uniform to cover her body again, and for a third time, with barely a whisper’s force, she said, “Wait,” as a doorway appeared in what looked like polished red granite.
“But,” he sputtered, “where are you-?”
The door closed and sealed behind her.
That the Master’s apartment had secret places had been no surprise. As First Chair, Miocene realized that the complex layout of rooms and hallways left spaces for privacy, or avenues of escape. The only surprise was that these secret places were at least as ordinary as the public ones. They were blandly furnished, and more than not, without clear purpose. The largest of the hidden rooms had been improved already during her tenure, then filled with severed, slowly mummifying heads. It seemed an appropriate means of storing the disposed captains, cruelty and banality perfectly joined together. But the room behind her bedroom was much smaller, and no one, not Virtue or even Till, knew that it contained a hidden hatchway that the former Master had had installed during some recent attack of paranoia, the hatchway leading to an unregistered cap-car that had been built on-site, ready for this exact instant.
Once under way, Miocene made certain that no one was searching for her. And only then did she re-examine the message that had found its way to her on one of the oldest, most secret channels employed by captains.
“Here’s what I propose,” said the familiar voice, and the very familiar face, speaking to her from a holobooth inside a certain way-station deep in the ship.
A booth she already knew well, it turned out.
The woman smiled, her black hair short and downy, her features bright and smooth as if the flesh and nose and the rest of her had just been regrown. She smiled with a mixture of smug pleasure and vindictiveness, telling Miocene, “I know what the Great Ship is. And I really think you need to know, too.” Washen.
“Meet me,” said the dead woman. “And come alone.”
When she first saw the face and heard those unlikely words, Miocene had nearly muttered aloud, “I won’t meet you, and certainly not alone.”
But Washen had anticipated her stubbornness, shaking her head with a genuine disappointment, telling her, “Yes, you’ll meet me. You don’t have a choice.”
Miocene closed two of her eyes, letting her mind’s eye focus on the recorded message, on those deep, dark, and utterly relentless eyes.
“Meet me in the Grand Temple,” said Washen.
“In Hazz City,” she said.
“On Marrow,” she said.
Then she almost laughed, and looking at the Master’s imagined eyes, she asked, “Why are you afraid? Where in all of Creation could you possibly feel as safe, you crazy old bitch of bitches?”
Forty-six
A fleet of old skimmers and sleeks and retrofitted cap-cars fled across the endless hull, dressed to resemble the battered hyperfiber beneath, their engines masked and muted, and every vehicle surrounded by false cars—holo-echos designed to be obvious, hopefully looking dangerous or weak, the projections begging the Waywards to fire at them instead of tormenting phantoms that might or might not be.
Orleans was steering one of those phantoms.
An EM pulse had pushed its AI pilot into insanity, leaving him no choice. The same pulse had killed its main reactor, leaving them depending on an auxiliary that whispered to the driver. “I am sick. I need maintenance. Do not depend on me.”
The Remora ignored the complaints. Instead, he looked back at the passengers, a whisper-signal carrying his minimal question:
“How soon?”
“Ninety-two,” said a white-as-milk face.
Minutes, she meant. Ninety-two minutes, according to the latest projection. Which was too long, and what could be taking so much time…?
But he didn’t ask the question.
Instead, he spotted a Wayward dragonfly lifting up off the horizon behind them, trying to catch them. Too late, he whispered, “Target.” Two baby men in the back of his skimmer had seen the enemy, and they were aiming at the fly’s weakest centimeter. But their ad hoc laser needed too much time to charge up, and a burst of focused light swept away holoprojection—a column of purple-white light dancing along the hull with an eerie grace, searching for something to incinerate.
Too late, the boys cried out, “Charged. Fire-!”
But Orleans had jerked the wheel, spoiling their aim, and where they would have been was blistered with the raw energies, a trailing EM scream stunning everything electronic within a full kilometer. Every lifesuit seized up for a horrible instant. The skimmer’s controls obeyed imagined orders, ignoring real ones. With his private voice, Orleans cursed, and he regained control after everyone’s living juices had been jerked savagely by the gees, and he cursed again, sharing his feelings with the others. Again, a voice said, “Fire.”
Their weapon was tiny compared to the Wayward’s, but it had sighting elements ripped out of one of the ship’s main lasers—elements meant to find and strike dust motes at a fantastic range—and the soft narrow bolt reached up into the bright lavender sky, then reached inside the armored target, bringing it plunging down to the hull, where it belonged.
There was a little cheer.
Pure reflex.
A dozen new phantoms appeared beside them, but none looked convincing. Orleans saw that immediately, and he realized that their projectors were mangled now, failing fast, and he erased the phantoms before the Waywards noticed.
Better to depend on your own camouflage now. And if he could, catch up with the rest of the fleet, then get lost among their coundess phantoms and deceits.
That seemed possible, for a little while.
The woman behind him, eavesdropping on a secure channel, leaned forward and shoved him on a shoulder, his suit’s false neurons too fried to feel more than a slight pressure.But he appreciated the pressure, the touch. Orleans leaned back into it, and again, he asked, “How soon?”
“Forty,” she replied.
The sabotage teams were back on schedule. And in twenty-two minutes, they would be inside the bunker.
The woman almost spoke again, but her voice was interrupted by the complaining voice of the skimmer’s reactor. “I am failing utterly,” it declared. Then with a prickly pride, it told Orleans, “I will last another eleven minutes. I promise.”
He said, “Fuck,” to himself.
Then with a whisper, he told the others, “Sorry. No roof for us.” Then he asked, “Any ideas? Anyone?”
There was no sense of surprise. What Orleans saw in the faces and could practically taste in the ether was nothing but a weary disappointment that evaporated in another moment. Two weeks of war had done it. Emotions were as flattened and slick as new hyperfiber. Then because it was expected, the gunnery boys said, “We should turn around. Turn and charge the fuckers, and kill a few of them!
They wouldn’t kill anyone, except themselves.
Orleans turned in his seat, showing them his face. Hard radiations had blistered his flesh, leaving mutations and weird cancers that appeared as lumps and black blisters. Amber eyes dangled, and his tusks were misaligned. But his defiant mouth announced, “That’s not a choice.”
Dozens of faces closed a wide, splendid assortment of eyes—a sign of the purest Remoran respect.
‘I know a place,” he confessed. “Not a bunker by design. But it’s got a roof Then he turned forward, muttering, “At least I hope it does,” as he wrestled the skimmer into a new course.