Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  He met Vaile in the Emperor’s Wing, where she looked entirely at home in her elegant receiving suite. The view from the window showed only the snowy gardens and the nicer palace buildings. She had managed to get one of the prized fourth-floor suites just below the Emperor’s own rooms; Kiem had never quite figured out how Vaile managed things like that.

  “Every time I need you, you’re on Rtul,” Kiem said. He threw himself across one of Vaile’s armchairs with his legs over the arm and watched her pour two coffees from an ornate pot. The syrup she added to it smelled of flowers. She was carefully dressed as usual: today’s bracelets were set with Eisafan bluestone and matched the flint-studded gold bands that secured her braids. She might look as if she had nothing better to do than have a chat, but Kiem knew that was an illusion. Her calendar right now said Kiem and her aide had only given him ten minutes.

  “Kaan this time, darling,” Vaile said. “Why do you think I’m slipping brandy in my coffee? You never need me these days, anyway. You haven’t gotten yourself arrested for ages.” She ignored Kiem’s protest that he’d never technically been arrested and continued, “You’re taking this better than expected.”

  “Which bit of it?” Kiem said. “The bit where Internal Security is investigating my partner? Or the bit where he casually breaks it to me that we’ve stopped him from talking to his family for two years?”

  Vaile frowned delicately. “I haven’t kept tabs on Thean affairs at all, but that does seem odd. No, I meant the part where the Emperor married you off to someone three weeks before the Resolution renewal, and Internal Security didn’t tell you he was under investigation. I wonder if they told the Emperor. They’re not known for their frank and open communication.”

  “This has been a massive screwup, and it’s all a horrible mistake,” Kiem said. “Jainan just needs some space. What I want you to do is explain to the Emperor that Rakal’s people need to back off and find another way to settle the Auditor.”

  Vaile gave a musical laugh, then put her cup down and said, “Oh. You’re serious.”

  “You’re on the Advisory Council,” Kiem said. He had very little idea what the Advisory Council actually did. He was starting to realize he had very little idea how any of the Empire’s machinery really worked. It had never been his problem until now.

  “Internal Security has never reported to the Advisory Council,” Vaile said. “They’re like the military; they go straight to the top.” She shook her head regretfully. “Kiem. I know you don’t really pay attention, but do you know what’s going on at the moment?”

  Kiem thought he had a fair handle on it—we’re about to sign a Galactic treaty and it turns out one of our representatives was murdered—but that, from Vaile, was a loaded question. “Probably not as much as I need to, huh?”

  Vaile gave him a sudden assessing look, her head tilted, but it was so quick that Kiem might have imagined it. “You know about the Resolution treaty renewal. Are you aware that, behind the scenes, all the vassal treaties are being frantically renegotiated right now? There are teams of diplomats arguing over commas while we all smile at each other over coffee.”

  “I thought we just rubber-stamped the treaties we already have,” Kiem said, somewhat bewildered. “This whole thing is only a ceremony.”

  “The renewal ceremony seals them,” Vaile said. “The Resolution wants a sector frozen in amber. You can understand, really; it has thousands of worlds to deal with. So we make terms for each renewal, then everyone is largely stuck with them for the next twenty years, under threat of breaking with the Resolution. Of course the vassals are agitating for better terms. They always do. It’s just that Thea’s flare-up is so recent and the dratted newslogs seized on it, and that makes it so much harder to get any serious negotiations done.”

  Kiem realized his leg was moving restlessly, but the movement felt wrong in Vaile’s delicately arranged apartment, so he made himself stop. Vaile was a politician through and through; that had been obvious since she was fourteen. Kiem accepted that she knew more than him, but however he tried to make the puzzle pieces fit, there were still some missing. He could feel rusted parts of his brain trying to move. “So they’re renegotiating,” he said. “But—we don’t have a Minister for Thea, do we? The Thean Ambassador told me.”

  “Poor old boy,” Vaile said briefly. “Faculties failing even before he retired. I met him last year.”

  “So who’s doing the negotiating?” Kiem said. “How can Thea get different terms if there’s no one in that post?”

  Vaile hesitated. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. There was a layer of careful politeness over it. Vaile had always been able to turn her various manners on and off like a switch. Kiem used to know how to get past it to her unfiltered self, but he seemed to have lost the knack as they grew older. “I haven’t paid much attention to Thea. I assume the Emperor has it in hand.”

  That was a nothing answer if Kiem had ever heard one. “So you can’t help,” Kiem said, more of his confidence draining away. He’d been relying on her more than he’d realized. “Well, can you … I don’t know, recommend a lawyer for Jainan?” There was already a list of lawyers on his wristband; Bel had left it there ten minutes after he’d told her what was going on.

  Vaile picked up her coffee cup and ran her finger around the curve of it. “There are many fine legal firms that work with the palace. If you think about it, though, it might be better to distance yourself from the entire thing. Have you both considered a holiday? The north wetlands are quite bearable at this time of year, if you don’t want to go off-planet.”

  “Vaile,” Kiem said, cajoling. “Come on, you don’t really think the wetlands are nice.”

  “They have a certain bleak beauty.”

  “Vaile.”

  She made a soft, frustrated noise and pushed her cup away with a clatter. “All right, Kiem. If you want my real advice, dearest cousin, you won’t go near a lawyer with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Why not?”

  “Kiem,” Vaile said, with a bluntness that meant Kiem was finally getting a real reaction. “The treaty is on a knife-edge. Whoever is playing games—and I honestly don’t know who is, but I suspect it’s everyone—knows these are high-stakes negotiations that won’t come around again for another twenty years. We will sign a treaty, or the Resolution will step back and we’ll find some real empire like the High Chain swarming through our link before the year is up. Nobody should be willing to go that far. But the moment—the moment—you engage a lawyer without consulting Her Majesty, you are setting yourself up in opposition to the Emperor. She has the legal system, the police, the secret agencies, and to some extent Parliament under her command. What political base do you have?”

  Kiem automatically took a gulp of his floral coffee. It was syrupy and tasted of dead plants.

  “Exactly,” Vaile said. “The only advice I can give is this: sit tight and don’t make waves. It will sort itself out. If you want to do something, get Count Jainan to write down everything he remembers. He may need it for his defense.” A discreet chime came from her wristband. “Bother. I have to go to Council.”

  “Ugh. Okay, okay, I get the point.” Kiem felt rather like he’d just been slashed up with an ornamental hatpin, but he had asked for it. He swung his legs back to the floor. “No dramatics.”

  “I’m not sure you could get by without dramatics,” Vaile said. “But be careful, Kiem. The water gets deep very fast.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to make trouble,” Kiem said. He got to his feet as Vaile’s aide poked his head around the door to end the appointment. “I just want some answers, and nobody’s given me any yet.”

  CHAPTER 13

  There were fifteen days before Unification Day, and Jainan was sleeping badly again.

  He was aware he was a liability, though Kiem was polite enough not to voice it, and he was also painfully aware he could do nothing about it. Internal Security would continue to investigate him whatever happened. Un
til they cleared him, the Auditor presumably wouldn’t instate either of them. He could only imagine the Emperor had discussed the possibility of replacing him, replacing Kiem, appointing a whole new couple—but that would change nothing. Prince Taam was dead, and Thea was unhappy, and until Iskat produced some answers, the Auditor wouldn’t instate anyone.

  Jainan still had the College project to complete, and part of him held on to the vain, quixotic hope that showing Operation Kingfisher an easy way to fix their mechanical problems might calm some of the tensions between Iskat and Thea. And Kiem had indicated it was good social capital for him personally: at least Jainan could be useful there. The day after the disastrous quarterstaff practice, when Kiem and Bel were out, Jainan moved his research into the main room. He’d spent long enough on the pure mathematics. It was time to go into the Kingfisher files.

  The data coin Gairad had handed him at the embassy contained an absurd amount of raw material. Professor Audel had asked Operation Kingfisher for their unclassified materials, as the Imperial College was traditionally permitted to do, and the military had responded by burying them in a mountain of largely useless information. Jainan knew this was Empire politics. The military didn’t like to be questioned.

  On one level, Jainan knew he had been putting off this work because it was more complicated. He moved the file dumps around the desk, trying to make some sense of the material. Professor Audel wanted him to go through and see what he could find out about the extraction methods the military was already using, because she wouldn’t be able to make the case for her new method without that. Gairad thought she could reconstruct them if she could just find a plan of Kingfisher’s spaceside refinery; Jainan was meant to try other angles. It would be detailed, painstaking work, but he had done that sort of work before.

  The other reason he had been putting it off was that this was Taam’s operation.

  The files mentioned Taam a lot. He was somewhere on every major document, usually on the clearance list. Seeing his name gave Jainan a minor jolt every time, as if someone’s hand had just brushed against the back of his neck.

  He was in the middle of a particularly tricky calculation when the door slid open. “Wait a moment,” he said with some exasperation.

  The door shut. It took only a split second for him to realize he had just snapped at someone. Jainan’s heart hammered as he reflexively cleared the wall and turned around. It wasn’t Kiem, but it wasn’t much better: Bel was watching him quizzically. She said, “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “I thought you were at that school fete with Kiem,” Jainan said. Bel was carrying a large cone of cotton candy and a novelty balloon. Jainan took a moment to register them.

  Bel looped the string of the balloon around a chair arm and gingerly placed the cotton candy cone on a side table. “He won the raffle,” she said. “Be glad he found someone else to donate the twenty boxes of smoked fish to.”

  Jainan’s mind was still half in his calculations and half preoccupied with the panic of realizing he’d snapped at his partner’s aide. He couldn’t remember how to hold a normal conversation. He swallowed. “Good?”

  “I should warn you, I left him trying to find a design you’d like at an almond-cake stall run by thirteen-year-olds. Do Theans eat almond cake?”

  “Yes,” Jainan said. He cleared the desk as well and waved a command sign to wipe the filter he’d put over the windows, hastily getting rid of all signs he’d occupied the room. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Bel shrugged. “I’m space-born. Home baking makes my skin crawl. Think of all those hands that have touched it. Are you all right?”

  Jainan’s head was still too full of equations for the question to really sink in. “Yes,” he said. “I was just working on … on Professor Audel’s project.”

  “I’m going to get some paperwork cleared,” Bel said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  It was only when she disappeared into the study that he realized she had not objected to his use of the main room even though he’d snapped at her. Kiem probably wouldn’t mind if Jainan was using the space for the Imperial College’s project. Jainan’s clan flag took up half the wall here already. He felt an odd feeling of space, at that, and he wanted to stretch out his arms and marvel at the freedom of the empty room. He pulled up his files again.

  After some more meticulous trawling, he straightened his back and sighed. The military had redacted swathes of every useful document. There wasn’t really enough here to put together a complete picture.

  He idly pulled all the financial documents onto the table instead and ran through them: many of the suppliers had figures for their equipment listed on the open net, or he could make educated guesses. There was at least more to work with there.

  Ten minutes later, Jainan raised his head and frowned at the wall in front of him.

  What he was reading didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t an accountant, but he was numerate and used to reading closely for detail, and he couldn’t make any of this add up. There was a lot of funding money going in that wasn’t accounted for in the outputs, even by the most generous estimates.

  Of course, there had been disasters. Jainan scanned the incident reports. He had seen Taam come home in a vile mood more than once after a bad day. Jainan had tried not to disturb him at times like that, but sometimes Taam let hints drop, and once, Jainan had seen a newslog report about a piece of rig that had exploded and set back work by months. But even the disasters wouldn’t account for this.

  Taam had cleared every document.

  Jainan brought some of the files onto the table and paged through them. Usually work was a distraction, a pleasant way to lose himself in something during his solitary hours. But now all he felt was underlying discomfort and something else, something like nagging curiosity. He caught himself looking over his shoulder—Gairad was right, it had turned into a tic—and made himself turn back to the table. Kiem was out. Bel was in the study, and Jainan was alone. He could read what he liked.

  He set himself to track every credit he could. The space by his elbow filled up with notes and copied fragments of text. There was a peculiar, visceral appeal to working like this, with his heart in his mouth and bile at the back of his throat. He tried chasing different strands, specific funding allocations. Most of them petered out somewhere in the stack of documents.

  The money wasn’t necessarily missing. It might have been classified. The military wasn’t required to hand all its secrets to academic engineers with bright ideas. But if it was missing, someone should have caught it.

  Taam had been in charge of Operation Kingfisher. Taam should have caught it.

  Jainan pushed back from the table and rose to pace across the room. There was a word for what he was doing right now, and that word was betrayal. He shouldn’t have agreed to scrutinize these files. The inner workings of the military were none of his business, even if it hadn’t been his own partner running the operation. And anyway, the military was huge and presumably run on a tight rein. What were the chances he could spot something from an incomplete pile of files that had never been seen before? He must be missing something.

  He looked down at the slim silver band around his wrist. It pulsed with soft light as he worked. Bel had saved most of the data on his account, so Taam’s backup account was still there on his wristband, sat unobtrusively in a back layer.

  Taam had never given him the passphrase. But Jainan had lived with him for five years, and—thinking this felt like more of a betrayal than the rest of it—Taam had not been an imaginative man. Jainan had a fairly good idea of what his passphrase might be. He tried it.

  A stream of nonsense text covered the wall. Jainan recognized the format; it wasn’t a backup. It was a message channel. He stared at the garbled text, feeling simultaneously like a criminal and sick with disappointment. It was wrapped in its own layer of encryption, of course. Taam wouldn’t leave sensitive data in the clear. The only things that were even half-readable were the destinatio
n addresses, and they weren’t the neat form entries that might note which planet or organization should receive the message. They were strings of anonymous characters, which Jainan could only guess was some sort of encoded military relay.

  “Not that I want to pry into your business,” Bel’s voice drawled from the study door, “but want to explain why you’re using Sefalan raider relays?” She folded her arms and gave him a smile that showed her teeth. “Your Grace?”

  Jainan had let down too many of his protective barriers to hide his shock. “Raider relays?”

  Bel frowned. “These aren’t yours, then.” She stepped farther into the room and looked over the documents on the walls before Jainan could pull them down. “Those are Taam’s messages?” She flicked one of the projections with the back of a fingernail. “Wonder why he was talking to raiders. Those are fence drops. Don’t suppose you saw any of his valuables going missing?”

  Significant amounts of Kingfisher equipment had gone missing. Jainan sat back down abruptly. “I need to send this to the authorities,” he said. “Now. Yesterday. I—” He put his head in his hands. “You’re taking this straight to Kiem, aren’t you?” The files on the walls seemed to be closing in. Causing a scandal of that magnitude for the Imperial family, fifteen days before the Resolution treaty had to be signed, would be the most damaging thing he could possibly do. It would destroy Taam’s reputation, damage Kiem, and affect the chances of treaty renewal. Kiem would blame him.

  “I’m not his enforcer,” Bel said. “I’m not your enemy either, so you can stop looking like I’ve got a capper at your throat. Are you seriously just going to send it all to Internal Security?”

  Jainan lifted his head and swallowed down bile. “This is—” He couldn’t say embezzlement. That was a crime. He could feel Taam in the room beside them, incredulous and impatient. “This needs official attention.”