She shook her head. “Hugin totalled.” Sheer bad luck, a parasite-bomb impact just as her drive was cycling out a new pellet. Twelve dead. “Lothbrok mostly made it.” If the biotechs could repair tissues so riddled. “Ragnar, no losses.”
“A successful engagement,” the Intelligence Officer said. “But . . . .”
“But we still don’t know what the shit happened with that-there original intercept.”
“Strategos . . . ” The merarch hesitated, then continued. “Strategos, admitted all we’ve got is what downloaded to optical storage befo’ they bought it . . . but somethin’ catastrophic did happen. If’n I didn’t know better, I’d say point-blank parasite bomb hit, with a chain fire in the feed tubes fo’ the drive. But there weren’t no parasite bombs travellin’ with that cargo pod.”
“Incorrect, Merarch. There were five.”
For a moment the man looked blank, then his eyes widened slightly in shock. Their gaze met in agreement: With the fighter, its own weapons. “This is speculation, an’ not to go on record. Understood?”
He nodded. They were silent for a moment; his voice was slow and musing when he continued: “ ’Bout the prisoners . . . we kept them in filterable-virus isolation an’ did a complete scan, as per usual.” Security had gotten even more paranoid of late, now that Alliance nanosabotage capacities were approaching the size level of Draka gene-engineering skills. Not to mention the ever-present nightmare of data plaque contamination; the Alliance’s superiority in compinstruction was indisputable. The Domination took what precautions it could—offline backup systems for all essential functions, manual overrides, physical separation—but there were limits to what could be done in an environment as dependent on computer technology as space.
“Well, somethin’ sort of odd came up. Very damn odd. The biotechs found somethin’ on six of the seven livin’ prisoners, some sort of latent . . . weeell, virus or somethin’ back in the central nervous an’ limbic systems. Very tricky, very; they only found it on ’count the discrepancy in the neural DNA analysis was the same on each. Wouldn’t have found it, say, two years ago; it would have come out as the usual noise garbage.” The cellular codes of any mammal have far more information capacity than they need.
“So we blipped the info to Biocontrol Central.” Yolande waited while the man moistened his lips. “Order came back, freeze in place. Then about two hours latah, a priority-one command to wait fo’ a courier. One came direct, with orders to turn them ovah to the headhunters. That an’ wipe the data an’ forget we’d ever seen it.”
“Castle Tarleton?”
“No, from the Palace. From the Archon’s office, an’ under his personal code.” They exchanged another glance; he had placed his life in her hands with those words. A calculated risk; that Eric von Shrakenberg was her uncle was widely known. That she met regularly with him on more than family matters was not.
“Well.” For the first time in the interview, Yolande smiled, a slow cold turning of the lips. “Well, we can’t argue with that.” Normally there would have been a bureaucratic gunfight; Aresopolis was War Directorate territory, after all. “Not that I don’t love to trip our esteemed colleagues up as much as anyone, but in this case . . . ”
She grinned at the thought of the slow disassembling the Security Directorate would use on the prisoners, and the other officer turned his eyes aside slightly. Yolande Ingolfsson’s feelings concerning the enemy in general and Americans in particular were well-known, but still a little disconcerting to meet in practice.
The grin faded, to be replaced with something resembling a human expression. “And, Thomas . . . ” The first name was a signal, and he leaned forward, an unconscious expression of attention. “ . . . I have an odd feelin’ about this. That data had better really disappear. Or I think we might.”
“What data?” he said.
She nodded. “Ovah. Service to the State.”
“Glory to the Race,” he replied formally, and the rectangle went blank.
“Fade,” she said, and the lights dimmed. “Review, casualties.”
Her mouth thinned; this was a disagreeable chore. Theoretically, the unit commander . . . No, she had ordered the action. The general policy was set higher up, but she made the operational decisions. It was her responsibility. A figure in the form-fitting vacuum skinsuit blinked into existence before her, turning toward the pickup and laughing, bubble helmet in one hand. A cat hanging in midair beside it, obviously unused to low-G and falling in spraddle-legged panic. The figure was young, with fair hair cropped close. Data unreeled below: Julian Torbogen, born . . . Very young, only a year older than her oldest. A face with the chiseled, sculpted look the Eugenics Board was moving the Race toward, but an individual for all that. The dossier listed it alclass="underline" pets, hobbies, grade evaluations, favorite foods, friends, love affairs, hopes {habitat design is so complete an art!), hates.
Yolande called up the medical image and placed it beside the laughing youth. Explosive decompression is not a pleasant way to die, especially combined with a wash of radiant heat that melts equipment into flesh across half the body. Two-thirds of the face was still there, enough for the final expression to survive.
A long moment, and then she closed her eyes and began to dictate. “Dear Citizens. As your son’s commanding officer, I . . . ”
It took an hour to complete the messages: they were brief but it was crucial to give each one the individual attention it was due. These were Citizens, the hope of the Race. Cells must die for the whole to live. But we must mourn them, because we are cells who know what we are. That is our immortality.
She shook off the mood and rose, calling the lights back to normal. Coming home, she thought wryly. Half her existence these days seemed to be spent in illusion and shadows, riding the silica threads and photon pulses, until she could hardly tell waking from sleeping.
“Call Tina,” she said to the machines that always listened. “Brandied coffee, please.” Absurd to use a form of courtesy with a computer, but it was another connection to real life.
This outer room of her sanctum—was this home? As much as anyplace, the last five years. A long box-rectangle, her desk at one end. Lunar-basalt tiles, covered by fur rugs from animals created by biotech. Leather-spined books, and shelves of real wood, expensive on Luna, but Loki knew there were some compensations for this job. The outer wall was set to a soft neutral gray for concentration’s sake; it was a single blank sheet five meters by ten, a thin-film sandwich holding several hundred thousand thermovalves per square centimeter. It could be set to display anything at all, well enough to fool even an expert’s eye until you touched it, but she was suddenly weary of vicarious experience. And of the fresh clean recycled air.
“Transparent and open,” she said. It blinked clear and slid up with a minor shhhh as she walked out onto the balcony.
That was near the top of the ring wall, a lacy construction of twisted vitryl, filaments of monocrystal titanium-chromium-vanadium alloy and glass braided together. Those were words; the reality was smooth curves of jade-green ice, thin as gossamer, stronger than steel. The sky above was of the same material, a shallow ribbed dome across the hundred-kilometer bowl of the crater. A thousand meters over her head one of its great anchor cables sprang out, soaring up and away until it dwindled into a thread and disappeared into the distance; the sky was set to a long twilight now, and she could just make out the blue-white disk of Earth. She walked to the waist-high balustrade, looked out and down.