“It’s all right,” Thrawn said. His voice was calm, but Ziara could hear the disappointment beneath it. “Considering how many millions I cost the Boadil, neither of us should be surprised by their vindictiveness.”
“You didn’t cost anyone anything,” Ziara ground out. “You didn’t take the liner too close to that planet. You didn’t ignore the engineers who warned the electronics were having trouble with the magnetic field twists. You didn’t push the engines and scramble the thrusters in the first place. If I were the Boadil, I’d be looking to nail the liner’s captain to the floor, not you.”
Except they wouldn’t, she knew, feeling the sharp edge of bitterness. The Boadil were political allies with both the Ufsa and her own Irizi family…and the liner’s captain had been Ufsa. Thrawn was the only scapegoat available for the mess, and so he’d received the full brunt of Boadil anger and embarrassment.
“Thank you,” Thrawn said. “But you don’t need to be angry on my behalf. Together we saved eight thousand lives. That’s what’s important.”
Ziara nodded. “Yes. Absolutely.”
“So,” Thrawn said, his tone businesslike again. “With my command gone, I no longer have convenient passage off Csilla. I presume the fleet will take note of that and find me transport to wherever post they next assign me.”
“Hopefully, they won’t need to go out of their way on that count,” Ziara said. “I’ve already put in a request for you to be reassigned to the Parala as one of my officers. If that’s approved, you’ll leave with me.”
“Thank you,” Thrawn said, inclining his head toward her. “I noticed a number of hotels clustered around the spaceport. I can find housing there while I await my new orders.”
“You could,” Ziara said, pursing her lips thoughtfully. The thought that had just occurred to her…
The family wouldn’t be happy about it, she knew. But right now she didn’t really care. Thrawn had been unfairly dumped on, and if she couldn’t fix it she could at least show him that he hadn’t been abandoned by the entire Ascendancy.
“But I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “We’ve got at least a few days, more likely a week. Why don’t you come to the Irizi homestead with me?”
“To your homestead?” Thrawn echoed. “Are strangers even allowed?” A muscle in his cheek twitched. “Especially strangers from rival families?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Ziara said. “I’m blood, and I’m an honored member of the fleet who just helped save eight thousand lives. I don’t know how far all that will take me, but I’d rather like to find out. You game to find out with me?”
“I don’t know,” Thrawn said hesitantly. “I don’t want you to get in trouble on my behalf.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Ziara said. “Did I mention that my grandfather was an amazingly passionate art collector?”
Thrawn smiled. “If I haven’t mentioned it recently, Ziara, you have a knack for seeking out and exploiting your opponents’ weaknesses. Very well. Shall we once again charge headlong into danger?”
“We shall,” Ziara said. “Besides, we’ve just survived an encounter with a malicious gas giant planet. Really, how bad could my family be?”
The area around the Csaplar spaceport was loud and busy, crowded with people, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment of all sorts. The Irizi homestead was about three hundred kilometers to the northeast, on the far side of the city. Ziara got them a two-person express overground tube car and they headed off.
Across the city. Not, as was usually done, around it.
She wasn’t supposed to do that, she knew. Thrawn wasn’t supposed to know the truth about the Ascendancy’s capital city—no one except senior syndics, flag officers, and the Patriarchs of the Nine Families knew the full truth—and there were plenty of tunnel car routes that would avoid the aboveground sections entirely.
But once again, she didn’t care. The fleet and Aristocra had treated Thrawn shamefully, and her lingering anger over that had awakened a peculiar but surprisingly delicious sense of defiance.
Besides, she reminded herself as they left the spaceport and headed through the buildings and parks and the maze of other overground tubes, it would be an interesting tactical exercise to see how long it took Thrawn to figure it out.
Not long at all, as it turned out. They’d crossed a little more than a third of the sprawling metropolis, and she was watching his expression closely as he stared out the viewport, when his eyes suddenly narrowed. “Something’s wrong,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Ziara asked.
“There don’t seem to be any people here,” Thrawn said. “Not since we left the spaceport area.”
“Of course there are,” Ziara said, pointing across the way at another tube car paralleling theirs in the distance. “You can see two people right there.”
“They’re the exceptions,” Thrawn said. “The other cars we’ve seen have been empty.”
“Maybe they’re just too far away for you to see inside,” Ziara said, feeling both guilty and surprised at how much fun this game was. “You can see that the car exteriors tend to be reflective.”
“No,” Thrawn said. “The empty cars ride higher on their rails than the full ones. We’ve also passed through three connecting loci, and there were no cars or passengers waiting at any of them.”
He turned, fixing her with such an intense look that she reflexively drew back a little. “What’s happened to our capital, Ziara?”
“The same thing that happened to the whole planet,” Ziara said quietly. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have done that to you. But you’re not supposed to know.”
“To know what? That the people of Csilla are gone?”
“Oh, they’re not gone,” she said. “Well, yes, most of them are, but the big exodus happened over a thousand years ago. What they taught you in school about how changes in the sun’s output and the slow freezing of the surface forced the population of Csilla underground is mostly true. What the histories leave out is that the numbers that were moved below were a far cry from the four billion who’d been living here at the time.”
“Where did they go?”
“Other planets,” Ziara said. “Mostly Rentor, Avidich, and Sarvchi. The Syndicure and fleet headquarters were kept here, along with a lot of the cargo and merchant facilities. Some of the families moved their homesteads to worlds where they already had strong presences, but most didn’t want to leave Csilla entirely.”
“They also moved underground?”
“Right,” Ziara said. “My family’s new homestead—well, new as of a thousand years ago—is in a huge cavern about two kilometers below the surface. Still on our same land, of course. The Irizi are a bit obsessive about territory and history.”
“So how many people actually live on Csilla?”
“Sixty or seventy million,” Ziara said. “Though all the official records put the number at eight billion.” She waved at the city around them. “All the rest of this is just for show.”
“For whom?”
“Our visitors,” she said. “Our alien trading partners.” She felt her throat tighten. “Our enemies.”
“So a few continue to live aboveground to create the illusion,” Thrawn murmured. “Light and heat are also maintained. Tube cars continue to travel across the remaining cities, pretending to be the traffic of a thriving population.” He looked at Ziara. “I presume that on the far side our tube will descend into one of the tunnels?”
She nodded. “There are a few hundred people in Csaplar at any given time. They’re rotated out frequently so they don’t have to put up with the conditions up here for very long. The rest of the city—the real city—is spread out in caverns, mostly concentrated around the Syndicure complex. More illusion for our diplomatic visitors.”