Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  “Right,” Kiem muttered. Their voices seemed to echo too loudly in the Observatory Hall. “The Emperor will have the station turned upside down.”

  “She would have to start searching on all the planets the fakes came from,” Jainan said. “That fake was not a five-minute job. Someone planned this.”

  Kiem rubbed the back of his head. “What do we do?” he said. “I’m out of ideas, Jainan.”

  “I have nothing yet,” Jainan said, his voice clipped, but it sounded more like frustration than panic. Even that gave Kiem some hope.

  Kiem was distracted by the sudden chiming of his wristband. “Bel?”

  Jainan frowned. “Isn’t she off the clock? I thought she went to the bar.”

  Kiem checked the message. “She wants to meet up,” he said. “She’s flagged it urgent. I’ll see what’s up.”

  “I’ll leave you to sort it out,” Jainan said slowly. “There’s something I want to see about Gairad’s work.”

  As they left, there was a flash from behind them. The Auditor turned. As he opened his hand, the remnant appeared, shattered to pieces. His expression was something like disgust. He shook his head at his staff and stalked away from the remnants and the Observation Hall, disappearing into the closed Resolution offices already established in the bowels of the station. Kiem had a feeling they wouldn’t see him emerging any time soon.

  * * *

  Kiem left Jainan to his project and made his way to the Transit Module, where Bel had given her location. It was unlike Bel to be cryptic in her messages.

  Bel was standing in front of the huge light-partition that marked the entrance to the shuttle docks when Kiem came out of the airlocks and hurried over to her. Everything was not okay. He looked at the vacuum capsule hovering beside her, and her travel coat, and the expression on her face, and said, “Oh, shit. You heard from home.”

  “My grandmother,” Bel said. “I need to go, today. Now, if it’s okay.” She brushed her braids back from her face, then did it again when they immediately fell back. “I don’t have time to arrange cover. I’m sorry.”

  The investigation and remnants suddenly seemed much less urgent. “Hey, no, it’s okay! Have you got a shuttle ticket? Can I get it? Should I call your family and say you’re coming? Can I—”

  “No!” Bel took a breath. They both had to step back out of the way of travelers hurrying to the immigration gates. “I just need to go. There’s a shuttle going to an Eisafan hub tonight, and I should be able to get a last-minute ticket if I camp out at the ticket desk. I can get to Sefala from there.”

  Her face was even more strained than it had been when he’d arrived. Colors reflected off it from the gates behind them: blue for commercial travel, red for Imperial. Kiem felt helpless and slow. He held out his hand. “Well. Good luck.”

  Bel clasped his hand. “Give my best to Jainan.” Her fingers felt chilled. She pulled away after a split second, all business. “You’ll need briefings for the rest of your appointments while you’re here. I put together a handover file. It has the current state of everything we know about Taam as well.”

  “I don’t give a shit about my briefings,” Kiem said. “Your grandmother—all right, all right.” This wasn’t the time to start an argument about the relative importance of his schedule. “Give me the briefings.”

  “Promise you’ll read them,” Bel said warningly. Kiem’s wristband beeped as she transferred the data.

  “I’ll read them,” Kiem said. “Top priority.” He wanted to offer to book her a flyer, or something pointless like buy her food for the journey, but she would already have those in hand. There was no point telling her what they’d just learned about the remnants. The treaty would be signed, or it wouldn’t, but either way it would take a couple of years for the megapowers to move, and there was nothing either of them could do about that.

  She gave him a mechanical smile and something halfway to a salute, and then turned and started walking to the blue commercial gates. The vacuum capsule bobbed behind her.

  Kiem’s optimism had been well and truly punctured. He turned away just before she reached the gates.

  The Imperial gate had a constant stream of travelers on treaty business. Even apart from the hundreds of guests, there were phalanxes of stressed-looking aides and organizers as well as a trickle of soldiers.

  One of them was Colonel Lunver.

  Her mind appeared to be on her own business, but she caught sight of Kiem and immediately slowed. “Your Highness,” she said, giving him a curt nod. “Leaving the station four days before the treaty? Where are you going?”

  Kiem usually liked to be helpful, but something in him bristled at the question. “Seeing off a friend,” he said. “Why, where are you off to, Colonel? How’s the investigation?” he added, needling slightly.

  It had an electric effect on Lunver. Her whole body stiffened, and she stepped in front of Kiem as if she could stop him from going anywhere. “What do you know about the investigation?”

  “Your investigation,” Kiem said. He wasn’t going to be intimidated. “You were trying to find out if anyone in your unit was helping Taam embezzle. You told us you would, remember?”

  For a moment Colonel Lunver looked more furious than anyone Kiem had ever seen. “This is unhinged,” she said. “You accuse Prince Taam—your cousin—” Words seemed to fail her, and she had to work her mouth for a split second before she found her voice again. “Where has this come from?” she said. “Why are you bringing it up now? You may think you’re above a treason charge, but I assure you that you aren’t.”

  “Wait, what?” Kiem said. He stared at her. “You’ve known about this for days. We spoke about it in the flyer when your unit rescued us.”

  “We spoke about nothing of the sort,” Lunver snapped. “I remember every part of that flight. I don’t know what you would gain from making up something as irresponsible as this.”

  Kiem was used to the military overlooking unpleasant truths, but this took the prize. “You can pretend it’s not happening all you like,” he said. “If you don’t do the investigation, Internal Security’s going to. You can try and cut me and Jainan out of the loop. We’ll find out anyway.”

  Lunver’s fury transmuted into something else, something that Kiem could have sworn was doubt. She narrowed her eyes. “You had better not be passing your theory around the station.”

  “Not yet!” Kiem said cheerfully. “Good day, Colonel Lunver. Let me know how you get on.”

  The wave of unaccustomed annoyance washed him back to the residential room they’d been assigned in the station proper. Jainan was out. Kiem couldn’t remember where he’d said he was going.

  It was too early to dress for dinner, and he didn’t have any appointments. He could pay some social calls, but for once Kiem didn’t feel up to listening to the Minister for Trade talk about his latest longevity treatment. He was perfectly capable of operating without Bel. He just wasn’t used to it.

  He sat at the cramped desk and grudgingly put up Bel’s briefings on the wall-screen in front of him. A collection of glowing circles unfolded on the screen, each spilling out text and data. He opened the most prominent, as Bel had clearly meant him to read it first, and realized belatedly what it was: she’d gone into the newslog archives to research Operation Kingfisher. Kiem frowned. He hadn’t asked her for this.

  He skimmed through the newslog extracts in chronological order. Taam and the High Command had clearly managed to keep most of Operation Kingfisher secret. Even the extracts from Thean newslogs were mainly opinion pieces with no details, but there were snippets in technical journals that might mean something to Jainan.

  Disappointingly, Audel’s name wasn’t mentioned at all. Kiem supposed that made sense, if she’d only been in the military for a short time and wasn’t a senior officer, but he’d hoped for something. Maybe something that would make him and Jainan feel better about Internal Security’s instructions.

  There was a sudden flurry of materia
l from two years ago, after the accident the adjunct at the College reception had mentioned. It was hard to cover up two deaths, though the military press liaison seemed to have done their best. Kiem started skimming faster, then stopped when he got to the faces of the two people who had died in the explosion.

  They were both strangers: a young private in military uniform and a Thean civilian with long hair. The Thean had light eyes and a clan neckscarf tied in a way Kiem thought indicated a man; he was smiling for some kind of graduation photo. Kiem felt something in his chest twist. He didn’t have the knack of imagining disasters from reports. He hadn’t reckoned on being hit in the face with a real person.

  Kiem summoned all the scraps of clan heraldry he’d picked up from Jainan and identified the scarf pattern as representing Deralli, one of the largest Thean clans. He scanned the attached text. The victims’ photos hadn’t been published at the time; Bel had dug them out of some archive. The young Thean man was listed as a civilian consultant, but it didn’t say anything about what he’d been doing on the mining probe or where the military had employed him from. Bel had managed to find some history from his name: his family, his clan lineage, his education. Kiem felt nauseous but kept reading. It felt like a duty.

  When he’d finished, he pushed the chair back and stared at the corner of the ceiling. Two people had died. Two people not even connected to Taam, with lives ahead of them and families left behind to grieve them. Someone had let these disasters happen, if not engineered them outright. Someone had hacked into Kingfisher’s systems; someone had embezzled its funds. Someone had killed Taam.

  It would be neat if it was all the same person. Kiem spun up a picture in his mind: an embittered saboteur, anti-military, anti-Iskat, looming in the shadows. The whole picture fell apart when Kiem tried to put Professor Audel in it, because he couldn’t believe Jainan was so wrong in his judgment of her character. Maybe it was someone else. Maybe someone Kiem didn’t know at all.

  The thought came slowly, from some cold and distant part of his mind: Internal Security must want that cackling saboteur as well, especially now, four days before the treaty. It would be so simple to have an enemy.

  He stared at the dead young Thean on the screen. This wasn’t really about facts, it was about people. People were many things, but by and large they weren’t masterminds. They always wanted something. They always had a reason for what they did.

  Something uncurled in his head.

  Kiem spun back through the Thean’s history. There wasn’t much more there: a handful of research papers, memberships of some political groups at his old university. Kiem wanted to go and shake some answers out of Lunver and Agent Rakal, but he’d tried that before and hadn’t got far. Perhaps, for once, he should hold off. For once he needed to think.

  CHAPTER 22

  Jainan ended up in Carissi Station’s outer control room. He hadn’t planned to. He had been thinking deeply about Gairad’s mass analysis and the remnants, and it had occurred to him: he was the Thean treaty representative. He was married to an Imperial Prince. Why not see if they would allow him into one of the control rooms? The assistant staffing the door had barely batted an eyelid.

  Now Jainan was in front of an array of screens and viewports, watching the rest of the orbital cluster as each shining habitat followed Carissi Station in its slow, unending curve around the planet below. The refinery was the last of them, a stately mass of spheres following the smaller modules. He’d spent an hour here already. A shift change buzzer had sounded halfway through, but he’d ignored it, and nobody seemed to realize he shouldn’t be there.

  It was aesthetically compelling, maybe, but the readings on the screens were more valuable. Gairad had put Kingfisher’s official mass readings in her diagram, then scribbled all over it with requests for Jainan and Audel to check her work because her calculations weren’t making sense.

  She was right. Jainan had spent some time puzzling over the inconsistencies in the readings: Carissi Station’s instruments were much more accurate than anything from public sources, and Kingfisher’s official figures didn’t match what they were telling him. Operation Kingfisher had drawn up plans that showed their refinery as smaller than it really was.

  Jainan took a quick look to see if anyone was watching him use station equipment without authorization—Kiem was bad for him—then tweaked the viewscreens to show the Kingfisher refinery in detail. Most of the unexplained mass was concentrated on the underside of the refinery, where the diagrams showed nothing but an outer hull. That was a storage module.

  There was no reason to leave a storage module off your official diagrams unless you wanted to hide what was in it. Jainan found it suddenly harder to breathe.

  Taam had been buying as well as selling. That was where the money had gone.

  But buying what? Jainan stared at the viewscreens until his eyes watered. It gave him no answers. Whatever he was buying must have been significant, to distort the mass readings this much. Where had he gotten all the money? Surely not just from selling surplus mining equipment?

  Jainan felt cold. General Fenrik had submitted the remnant they called the Tau field. It had been in military hands. Had Taam been in possession of the real one? Had he sold it?

  “Sir?” a station official said. “Can I ask what you were doing on the screen—are you all right?”

  Jainan moved away from the screen and turned, absently hearing the question like the buzzing of a fly. “I don’t need it anymore.” He began to walk to the door, barely seeing the rest of the control room. His mind was full of moving parts that ticked over every few moments and fell into new positions. It wasn’t only Taam who had something to hide. Kingfisher had something to hide.

  He tried to call Kiem, but Kiem’s wristband was dead. There was no point leaving a message; Jainan needed to talk to him. This whole thing had grown too big for them to keep quiet about it. If he was honest, it was too big even for Internal Security.

  Jainan screwed up his courage, activated his wristband, and sent off a brief, formal meeting request to the Emperor’s Private Office about discrepancies in Operation Kingfisher.

  A cold sweat settled on him as soon as he’d done it. The audacity of it was beyond anything he’d ever attempted. But neither Internal Security nor the military had solved Taam’s murder, or what Taam had been doing at Kingfisher, or where the missing remnants were, and time was running out.

  He had walked through half the station before he recognized where he was. His subconscious had been problem-solving without consulting him, and he realized his feet had been taking instructions from it just as it presented him with an unwelcome conclusion like a lump of plutonium.

  He looked up at the closed door to the Auditor’s quarters, which had an ACCESS DENIED sign over it. The control panel glowed red beside it. Jainan reached out slowly and gave his skinprint and retina scan to request entry.

  “The Auditor is not seeing visitors,” a Resolution staffer said, their face appearing on a screen midair.

  Jainan had been prepared for that. “I am a treaty representative,” he said. He probably still was, despite the REVOKED status. It wasn’t as if they had an easy replacement. “I have information about the remnants.”

  He had expected he would have to argue. But instead the staffer’s eyes tracked something on their eyepiece, and they said, “Enter.”

  The screen disappeared, and the door opened. Jainan stepped inside.

  The room was surprisingly small, even for the station. Like the temporary Resolution office on Iskat, they’d hung some of their odd textile-screens around the walls, but there was only one tiny desk, and all in all the room looked like an afterthought. The staffer was leaning back on a chair behind the desk, looking bored and uncomfortable. “Go on in,” they said, gesturing to the opposite wall. One of the textile-screens lifted itself aside as if an invisible hand had pulled it.

  It was an airlock. Jainan realized they must be next to the hull of the station. The Resolution h
adn’t installed themselves on Carissi; they’d just docked their ship and stayed there.

  The airlock yawned open. The impression behind it was one of relative darkness; Carissi kept most public spaces brightly lit. Jainan cleared his face of expression and stepped through it.

  The first thing he noticed was that the Resolution ship had dispensed with station gravity. Or no—not exactly. Jainan nearly overbalanced in his first step beyond the airlock, but managed to land his foot on the polished black floor and ground himself. Each movement felt supported, as if something had anticipated where he was going to go and was helping him. The air felt treacly around him.

  Past the airlock, the passage sloped upward at a sharp angle. Jainan used the odd gravity to help him up, each stride much longer than it would have been on the station. The walls around him lit up gradually as he climbed, glowing a pale, featureless pearl. The slope seemed endless. Every few meters he would pass a closed, arched doorway. He could not see the end of the passage.

  As he passed one door, it sprang open, falling downward into the floor. Jainan stopped short. Behind it was the Auditor.

  The narrow chamber beyond was set up in a disturbingly staggered way—not completely zero-grav, but furniture hovered at different levels, or was attached to the hull halfway up the wall. The Auditor sat at a desk suspended at the height of Jainan’s shoulders, surrounded by streams of light with no meaning to Jainan. The light-streams dissipated and gradually faded away as the Auditor looked down at him in the doorway.

  “Come in,” the Auditor said. He opened a hand to a chair on roughly the same plane as him.

  Jainan considered the problem then gently tested to see if the oddly helpful gravity would get him all the way up. It wouldn’t, quite, but a careful step took him to a rug floating at waist height, and from there it was a fairly easy step up to the chair.