Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  They skimmed around the sheer cliffs and into the first of the ravines. This one was too close to the city to be really wild and there were a couple of cabins nearby, but when they shot out of the first valley and into the next, Kiem got the reaction he had been hoping for. Jainan took an audible breath.

  The ground fell away beneath them into a deep gorge. A river crawled far below between dark pines that weren’t yet snowed over, and mountains climbed up dramatically on either side. “It’s beautiful,” Jainan said.

  “Glad you think so,” Kiem said. “Made it myself, obviously. It took me ages to get all the trees in the right place.”

  “I see,” Jainan said. “What a shame you couldn’t get the river straight.”

  “It’s supposed to be crooked,” Kiem protested. “It’s artistic.”

  “Is it,” Jainan said. A smile was threatening to tug up the corner of his mouth. He leaned forward to get a better view of the rushing torrent below. Kiem brought them down until they could see the white foam and the chunks of ice tumbling through the current from higher up the mountains. “There’s an unwise thing teenagers do on Thea,” Jainan said, apparently as a non sequitur.

  “What’s that?” Kiem said.

  “They take the flybug down as close to the water as possible and turn it sideways to try and dip the fins.”

  “That’s a terrible idea,” Kiem said. He eyed the water speculatively. “We’re definitely not going to do that.”

  “No,” Jainan agreed, in exactly the same tone. Out of the corner of his eye, Kiem saw his hand go up to tug his safety harness tighter.

  “How long do you have to keep the fin touching the water for?” Kiem said, in the spirit of inquiry.

  “I used to be able to do four-second runs,” Jainan said. “Some people got up to five.”

  “Right,” Kiem said. He took a hand out of the dash to check his own harness. “Haven’t tried to flip this thing in years.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jainan said. “You only need to get it halfway to a full flip and balance it there.”

  “Oh, well, that’s all right then,” Kiem said. “No way this can go wrong.”

  “If the trees look like they’re pointing downward, you’ve gone too far.”

  Kiem reached up to flick off the stabilizers. “You realize Bel is going to kill us if we crash out here without her,” he said, but then his hand froze as he thought about that. He glanced at Jainan, remembering the last time Jainan’s partner had piloted a flybug. “Uh. Maybe we shouldn’t.”

  Jainan shook his head. “This is relatively safe,” he said. “You can’t turn off most flybug safeguards. You would have to break them. But if Bel would object—”

  “No, I mean, she’ll kill us because we didn’t let her join in. Bel has speeding tickets from every subdistrict in the city.” Kiem flicked off the last of the automatic stabilizers and firmed up his grip in the steering mesh, feeling the filaments all around his hands. “Are you holding on?” He gave Jainan a moment to grab on to something, and then dived.

  The river came rushing up to meet them. Kiem had turned the filaments to the most sensitive setting and could feel every buffet of air against the flybug’s shell through the tingle in his hands. He gripped the steering, a surge of adrenaline going through him that he hadn’t felt in a while, and turned to veer sideways across the river. They tore straight at the oncoming forest.

  “Tree,” Jainan said.

  “Noted!” At the last second, Kiem yanked them around to bear straight down the course of the river. The sharp turn took the flybug diagonal, and Kiem slammed on the manual tilt with his foot at the same time. They swerved wildly. Kiem’s harness dug into his side as the world spun in front of him. He frantically kicked it back the other way as he felt them flipping and tried to steer downward at the same time.

  The side fin hit the water with a shock that echoed through the filaments and up his arm. Kiem whooped, but he could only hold it a moment. The buffet of the water surface on the fin physically hurt his hands through the mesh—the flybug was reaching its limits and was letting him know.

  They plowed into an eddy, bounced off a piece of floating ice, and flew in a sickening arc upward while Kiem fought for control. He just managed to pull them up in time to avoid the trees.

  The flybug skimmed the treetops and climbed slowly, while Kiem let his head fall back and realized he was laughing.

  Jainan let go of the dash in front of him. He flexed his fingers, his attempt at a thoughtful expression completely failing to hide his smile. “One and a half seconds.”

  “I’ve got the hang of it now,” Kiem said. “Next one will be at least three seconds.”

  He half expected to be told there wasn’t going to be a next one. But Jainan was clearly as bad as Bel about flying, because all he said was, “I think the next valley may have another good river for it.”

  “How am I the most sensible pilot in this household?” Kiem said. “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Jainan said mildly. “I’m sensible.”

  “You only pretend to be sensible,” Kiem said.

  “I never pretend,” Jainan said. “Perhaps try a little more speed next run.”

  “Do you want a go?”

  Jainan hesitated. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  Jainan looked torn, as if he was getting away with something. “Yes.”

  At the next valley, Kiem switched the flybug’s controls to Jainan’s seat. Jainan’s first failed try turned into a four-second run on the next pass, which Kiem completely failed to beat in several subsequent attempts. The next ravine brought them to a system of canyons filled with glittering tunnels of light, where they realized at the same moment that they’d been stunt flying all the way to the tunnels and shared a mutual sheepish look. The moment their eyes met, Kiem broke into a snort of laughter, and Jainan reverted to his poker face.

  Kiem took them into the tunnels. A diffuse light flooded around them, the pale color of eggshells, and the flybug shifted of its own accord as the tunnel slotted them into a traffic pattern. Blocky freight flyers zipped around them. Kiem took his hands out of the steering mesh and flopped back against the seat.

  The tunnels were dull, and there wasn’t anything else to do, so they started to talk idly. At least Jainan talked idly, and Kiem, who was now aware of the rarity of that, listened with a feeling in his chest like he had been thrown a ball made of glass and tried frantically to make his own answers casual. They talked about Iskat and Thean culture and what they’d grown up with. Somehow they got into Thean music, and Jainan went as far as attempting to find some song he knew on the flybug’s system before discovering the signal was unusably bad.

  “Oh, yeah,” Kiem said, mentally cursing the signal for putting a wrench in the conversation. They were in an overground section of the route, weaving through a dry gorge. “Sorry about that, there’s a big dead zone over the mountains, and we’re on the edge of it here. Tacime deposits near the surface.”

  Jainan raised his eyebrows and looked at the ground below. “Tacime?” he said. “Ah. I forgot Iskat is swimming in it. Still, I would have thought you’d have stripped it out.”

  “It would have ruined the mountains if we stripped it out for every tunnel,” Kiem said apologetically. “We just kind of deal with the dead zone.” In its processed form, tacime did a great job at fueling spaceships, but in its natural form, its main property was blocking communications. It probably did other things; Kiem wasn’t a scientist.

  “It’s not a problem,” Jainan said. He turned to the stored music. The upbeat chiming of a popular track from some time ago came out of the hidden speakers. As soon as he heard the first few notes, Kiem pulled one hand out of the steering mesh and clapped it to an ear, groaning.

  Jainan looked at him quizzically. “Sorry,” he said, turning it down.

  “No, it just takes me back,” Kiem said. “Not in a good way. I must have been back in university when I
put that in the system.”

  “It brings back … bad memories?” Jainan said.

  “Not really,” Kiem said. “Just, you know.” He waved a hand. “I got into a lot of scrapes back then. This was playing everywhere at one point. It was probably on the speakers when I got exiled.”

  “What did you—” Jainan said, and then stopped himself.

  “—get exiled for?” Kiem said, completing the question. “Uh, there was a. Um.” He tapped his feet on the floor. This was surprisingly hard. “We may have started a fire on a night out.”

  “How?”

  “By accident. With fireworks. Nobody was badly hurt.” Kiem paused. “We were drunk.”

  Jainan didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not proud of any of that,” Kiem said, mainly to fill in the silence. “I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

  Jainan was silent for a while longer and then said, abruptly, “No, I can’t see you doing that now.”

  “No,” Kiem said, immensely relieved.

  “But it fits with…” Jainan trailed off. Kiem winced internally, knowing that Jainan must have picked up some of Kiem’s history from the newslogs. “Why did you change?”

  Kiem had a whole repertoire of jokes to smooth over that kind of question. It was easy to deflect, because he hadn’t changed—he’d just been an irresponsible teenager with more rank than sense getting on everyone’s nerves, and now he was an irresponsible adult who tried not to. That didn’t excuse anything. But Jainan hadn’t meant that.

  He stared ahead at the snow-covered canyon and said, “I started acting out fairly early. You know how my other parent was Prince Alkie? They passed when I was fourteen. Neurological disorder. My mother didn’t cope very well, and neither did I, and somehow we made each other even worse when we tried to talk about it. Or about anything else, really.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jainan said.

  Kiem flashed him a sideways grin out of habit. “Don’t be sorry.” Jainan’s returning glance was grave and thoughtful. Kiem’s smile felt too fake to keep up; he let it disappear. “It took me a few years to realize I was just playing things up for attention. You know, it really hurts when you realize you’re doing what millions of teenagers have done before, especially when it takes you until your early twenties to realize it. I dropped out of college after that, stayed away from bars, then I got Bel.”

  “Mm,” Jainan said. He didn’t sound censorious or pitying. He didn’t come back with a flurry of probing questions either. Kiem usually floundered when he had to talk about his parents, but this felt oddly like touching bedrock. Jainan said, “What happened with Bel?”

  Kiem seized on the change of topic with some relief. “She came about a year ago from one of the programs I worked with,” he said. “You know, bright people who don’t have the qualifications for whatever reason. I was starting to get asked to the odd event by charities and other people, but when Bel turned up, she figured out that was where I could actually be useful and packed my schedule full of it. Turns out she was right.” They were skimming near the edge of the tunnel, close enough to see the unevenness of the rock wall beside them. “The job was just supposed to be a reference while she found a more permanent place.”

  Jainan frowned. “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Well, she hasn’t said she wants to go yet, and I’m not bringing it up if she doesn’t.” Kiem drummed one of his feet on the flybug’s floor shell. “Hey, is that the exit?”

  It was. Kiem lunged for the route indicator to bring them out of the tunnels. They shot out into the open air, the flybug slowing to a coasting speed, and both of them fell silent.

  Below stretched a singly uninviting expanse of barren tundra. The spine of mountains rose up behind them like fangs splitting the landscape from beneath; Kiem hadn’t been to this area before and wasn’t regretting that choice. “Scenic, huh?”

  “There,” Jainan said. “Is that it?” He pointed to a toy-sized sprawl of buildings a couple of kilometers away at the same time as a blaring siren came through the flybug’s audio.

  “Hah, the good old military hello,” Kiem said. “Mother uses that as her morning alarm.” He keyed their security codes into a response burst.

  Ten minutes later they were gliding into the depressing confines of a standard Iskat military base, pieced together from gray fly-and-drop sheds, rows of generators, and a training ground hacked out of the ice. Kiem parked their flybug and waved to the guards who came to meet them. They were handed over to a helpful young trooper who looked about sixteen, had a strong plains accent, and had clearly never done anything quite as exciting in her life as check in two civilian visitors.

  Hvaren Base was bustling. Every desk had a soldier at it. Jainan scanned the walls, which had a firework display of different visualizations that presumably had something to do with engineering, while Kiem listened to the trooper breathlessly recite base safety procedures.

  “Uh, we were supposed to meet Major Saffer,” Kiem said, when the trooper stopped to heave in a breath. “Is he around?”

  “Scheduled for eleven hundred hours, sir!” the trooper said. “I will take you on a tour of the base so you’re not bored!”

  “Gosh,” Kiem said. “Can’t wait.”

  He hadn’t reckoned with the effect of offering an engineer a tour of an engineering operation. “I would like that very much,” Jainan said, a gleam in his eye that Kiem recognized. “May we speak to the unit responsible for the propulsion design on the screens?”

  The trooper looked slightly taken aback and then doubly enthusiastic. They’d done it now. Kiem followed Jainan to the engineers’ corner. Luckily Jainan could have carried that conversation in his sleep, and at least it got them away from the unit on the other side of the room who had the intimidating look of people who wanted to talk about Trade and Export.

  As Jainan got deep into the details of however mining worked—he hadn’t mentioned the Imperial College project, which was probably the best approach—Kiem started to count the people in the room. There were only a few dozen, but he saw insignia from three separate divisions, so either the army had started splitting divisions or Kingfisher had about three hundred people, and most of them weren’t in this room or at the palace. The Kingfisher emblem, a jagged silver badge that could just about be a bird midstrike if you squinted, was more prominently displayed than any of the division insignia. There was another memorial photo of Taam at the back of the room, wreathed with gray flowers.

  Jainan turned from one of the screens to a holo-abacus floating above one of the desks. One of the engineers had gone to find the person who made it. “You’re having fun,” Kiem said under his breath.

  Jainan looked sideways at him, startled. “No, I’m—” He stopped.

  “Sirs!” the very helpful trooper said, popping up like a weather alert. “Major Saffer has arrived back at base. Please follow me!”

  It was an unnecessary announcement. Just behind her, Aren was removing a heavy outdoor coat. He strode past his trooper, extending a hand. “Jainan! And Prince Kiem. Good to see you. I was hoping to catch you a bit earlier, but I got delayed, sorry about that. You had some questions about Taam and Kingfisher?”

  Time to get to work. Jainan had frozen; Kiem automatically shook Aren’s hand. “Good to see you, Aren. Have you got somewhere we could talk?”

  CHAPTER 15

  “Embezzlement?” Aren said, stopping in his tracks. “That’s impossible.”

  They stood in a snowy, windswept gravel yard outside the gray monolith of the base. Aren had taken Kiem’s suggestion they talk somewhere quiet and invited them to see the hangar, an enormous shell of a structure large enough to hold a small spaceship.

  Kiem pulled his coat around himself in the cutting wind. “Yeah. I know,” he said. “But I’ve seen the evidence. We can show you.”

  Aren didn’t immediately ask for proof. He took off his uniform hat and tugged at his hair, disordering the pale curls. “I would have seen—I mea
n, Taam dealt with the budgets, I’m only on personnel and logistics, but I can’t believe I could have missed it.”

  “We should take this inside,” Jainan said quietly. “This is not something any soldiers should overhear.”

  “No,” Aren said. “Fuck, no. Let’s get inside.”

  He gave the hangar door his bios and ushered them in, rubbing his forehead every couple of seconds as if he’d been physically stunned. They stepped into a dim cavern.

  Despite the situation, Jainan let out a low, soft breath. A scale model gleamed above them, suspended several meters above the ground and ringed with an observation catwalk. To Kiem’s eyes it looked like a space station, but he could see REFINERY MODEL 002 stenciled on the side, along with another jagged Kingfisher logo. There were other models, some in their own vacuum units: engines and odd combinations of pipes and liquids. Jainan couldn’t keep his gaze away from them.

  “Our design models,” Aren said absently. “I was going to give you the tour, but that’s just become a lot less relevant.” He stopped at the foot of some catwalk stairs and turned, leaning against the railings. His face was pale and determined. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  It was the wrong place to lay out Jainan’s painstaking evidence trail, so Kiem kept it short: the equipment. The obfuscated finances. The encrypted messages sent over relays that Bel had identified as fence drops used by Sefalan raiders.

  “But why?” Aren said, sounding baffled. He focused on Jainan. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you’re lying. But why would Taam risk it?”

  Jainan had rested a hand on the railing beside him, and his knuckles were clenched tight around it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I may—I may be wrong.”

  Aren’s silence left a gap open, and in it Kiem found himself turning over in his head what would happen if they were wrong. None of this chaos would help the Auditor decide that Iskat and Thea were voluntarily entering into the treaty. And even if they were right, they were no closer to an answer—embezzling or no embezzling, Taam was dead. If it hadn’t been an accident, then someone had killed him.