Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

The chair was the same pearly shade as the walls outside. As Jainan sat in it, it reformed itself underneath him, holding him gently in place. Jainan lifted a knee experimentally, and it released him. He settled back down.

  The Auditor smiled, the last of the light-streams fading around him. “You’re a hard person to disquiet, Count Jainan.”

  Jainan, who felt disquieted most of the time, chose not to answer that. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “I assume you have something relevant,” the Auditor said. “If not, this will be a waste of both our time.”

  It would have helped if Jainan could have seen his eyes. “Has Iskat told you what has come to light about Taam?”

  The Auditor’s lack of reaction just strengthened his feeling that they hadn’t. The Iskat establishment preferred to keep things under wraps until they had a result. That would be fine when it wasn’t playing with the safety of all their planets—which, of course, was exactly what Jainan was doing now. He made himself breathe out and explained, surprised by his own steady voice. Taam’s death. The embezzlement. Internal Security’s pressure to find a suspect. Aren and Lunver’s investigation. Professor Audel, whose guilt Jainan had never been sure about. The flybug accident. The odd mass readings from the refinery.

  The Auditor leaned back in his chair, inscrutable behind the alien field over his eyes. Jainan couldn’t tell if he was listening. Now that Jainan looked closer, he could see the structure of the eye-covering in more detail: it was anchored by a pair of black, lacquer-like pieces that attached discreetly to the skull on either side of his head, then the field arced unsupported across his face. The visual effect of the non-colors was undeniable; Jainan’s eyes actively hurt examining it.

  “You think the remnants are in this mining refinery?” the Auditor asked.

  “Would they cause a mass distortion?” Jainan said.

  “No,” the Auditor said thoughtfully. “Nothing noticeable on the basic sensors you have here.”

  Jainan forced himself to say it. “I think he may have sold them. They may be on the Sefalan black market.” If they were, it would take more than four days to find them. “They may even have already gone through the link.”

  “Possible but unlikely,” the Auditor said. “No ship goes through a link without a scout to pilot it. It takes complex measures to smuggle a remnant on board the same ship as a scout without them noticing, and I doubt this backwater is capable of that level of sophistication. Ah,” he added dryly, as the colors shifted on his face. “I have been notified that I shouldn’t have deprioritized my etiquette module. Accept my apologies.”

  “I am not overly concerned with apologies,” Jainan said, the underlying dread making him blunt. “What does this mean for the treaty?”

  The Auditor folded his hands in silence. As he did so, Jainan was suddenly aware of the absolute, deadening silence in the chamber. On a station there was always the background hum of life support systems, but here it was as quiet as deep space.

  “The situation is interesting,” the Auditor said. “By not presenting the remnants by the deadline, Iskat has broken our nonproliferation terms.”

  Jainan’s veins ran with acid. He said nothing.

  “Thea’s representative, on the other hand, is trying to work with us.” The Auditor’s voice was a soft monotone in the stillness. “If the Iskat Empire is no longer a Resolution signatory … other arrangements could be made.”

  And just like that, the crystal shape of the treaty in Jainan’s mind shattered into seven parts. “You mean cut Iskat loose. Draw up a separate treaty.”

  “It would have to be done fast,” the Auditor said. “It is unwise to be outside the Resolution for any length of time.”

  Jainan was so far out of his depth, it felt like someone had punched a hole in the hull of the Auditor’s ship, and he was hanging over the void. “The remnants need to be found. There are still four days until your deadline. You could extend it.”

  The Auditor regarded him. Then he reached for the corner of his desk and gave it a gentle push; the whole thing slid smoothly out of the way, lining itself up against the wall, leaving nothing in between him and Jainan. He put his hand up and touched one of the lacquered pieces on the side of his head. The field around his eyes changed and faded.

  Behind the field—though some distortion remained—his features came into view. His face was spare and space-pale, with prominent cheekbones and shockingly normal dark brown eyes. It should have been reassuring. Jainan was profoundly unsettled.

  “You should make terms,” the Auditor said. Something about his voice was thinner, as if there had been extra harmonics before. “I say this not as role four-seven-five, or any of my committee roles, but as a human citizen. I’m not supposed to do that, you understand. How much Galactic politics are you aware of back here?”

  At the question, Jainan felt like a village fisherman who had never left Thea. He knew of some of the megapowers, but Galactic politics were too far away to be of much concern on Thea when Iskat was right on their doorstep. “Not a great deal.”

  “You should understand your threats,” the Auditor said. “I know the Iskat Emperor does. The megapowers have been chafing for decades—after all the consolidation last century, there are very few tiny sectors like yours not protected by a Resolution treaty. Do you understand what that means? Some hungry powers are looking for places to expand, and there is almost no fair game. No new links have opened in the last thirteen years.”

  Jainan wished Kiem was here to ask questions. He had a knack for picking the obvious ones that clarified things. Why had Kiem turned off his wristband? “Why are they expanding?” he said. “I thought the Resolution was supposed to keep things in balance.”

  The Auditor laughed—a strange, dry sound, as if he didn’t produce it much. “Do you know how big a territory the High Chain rules?” he said. “You’re sitting here with seven planets and a total population in the low billions. The High Chain owns a third of the known universe. Without assistive tech, the human brain cannot effectively comprehend either their population or the distance between their borders. The Resolution was drawn up by a balance of megapowers. We are a skeleton group overseeing a fragile truce. Do you really think the Resolution isn’t, itself, half under the Chain’s influence?”

  “Oh,” Jainan said.

  “The Chain is old and slow and may not be your main threat. No—the minute you leave Resolution protection, the powers that will be scrambling fighters and plotting routes are Kaschec and the Enna Union, both military megapowers that need quick victories to prop up their demagogues at home. Kaschec owns territory nearer to your link and has better passage agreements, so I’d expect them to get here first. You might have months. You probably have weeks.”

  Instead of panicking, Jainan felt he was watching the machinery in his head as it kept ticking over, heavy and relentless, crunching this new information and its consequences. He imagined Thea standing alone in a sector annexed by a Galactic megapower. The Resolution promised stability. How much independence would Thea manage to keep if the rest of the sector was at war? “What if Thea somehow managed to agree a treaty in four days?” he said. “What about the other planets? Sefala? Eisafan?”

  The Auditor gave a fluid motion of his shoulders that could have passed as a shrug. The chair shifted under him. “They have not volunteered information as you have for Thea. We don’t generally encourage schisms in treaty signatories, but we encourage remnant use and deceiving the committees even less.”

  Jainan was surprised at his own lack of dread. Everything seemed very clear, clearer than it had for the past five years, as if the beginnings of a breeze had stirred in his head and the fog there were melting away. He barely needed to stop to consider Kiem, and Bel, and Audel and her students. “I need the whole sector to be part of the treaty,” he said quietly. “Even Iskat. I have … links.”

  The Auditor gave him a long look, from those disconcertingly normal eyes with their alien political views
. He reached up and touched the lacquer headpiece again; the field swirled back over his face.

  “Then find me those fifteen remnants, Jainan nav Adessari of Feria.” The Auditor’s mouth, now the only visible part of his face, curved up in something that wasn’t a smile. “You have four days.”

  * * *

  A shift change buzzer sounded in the narrow corridors of a hostel as Kiem knocked on the door of the guest room assigned to Professor Audel. The attendees from the Imperial College had been assigned to hostel rooms in the Transit Module; they’d clearly run out of guest suites in the nicer residential areas.

  It was the second door Kiem had tried. It was locked, but an occupancy light glowed softly. Kiem tried the bios sensor.

  A voice from the speaker said, “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”

  The door slid open to show a small set of rooms with a pokey living area cramped by a desk and chair. Several screens were open above the desk. The window opposite the door, sunk in the wall to give the illusion of a view, was currently set to a projection of a beach that seemed faintly alien to Kiem.

  Gairad sat on a flat couch under the window, staring disconsolately at the alien beach. There was nobody else in the room.

  “Did you want the professor?” she asked, without bothering to look up. “She’s out.”

  Kiem shifted one of the desk chairs and sat down facing her. The room was so small that he took up most of the available width between the desk and the opposite wall, cutting off the route to the door. Gairad’s eyes finally flickered to him.

  “No,” Kiem said amiably, “I don’t want the professor.”

  “Jainan?” Gairad said. She straightened up from her slouch, putting her feet on the ground. “He went to the control room to check my refinery data.”

  Kiem leaned back in the chair and brought up one ankle to prop on his opposite knee. “Did you know Professor Audel was under investigation?”

  “No,” Gairad said. Kiem kept his eyes on her face and noted how quickly that answer had come. She added belatedly, “Why? What for?”

  “Internal Security is saying she compromised Kingfisher’s systems.”

  Gairad’s hands curled around the edge of the couch seat. “Why would she do that? Kingfisher already gave us the data she asked for.”

  Kiem lifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “Did they? Too technical for me to understand, really.” He leaned forward a fraction. “Internal Security thinks she used your account, though. As well as her other students’ accounts. That’s a shame. Jainan didn’t want you involved.”

  To give Gairad credit, her expression had the same low-key hostility she’d shown Kiem when they’d first met. She wasn’t giving anything away, and Kiem wasn’t sure of anything, not yet. “She didn’t use my account,” Gairad said. “She didn’t do anything.”

  “No,” Kiem agreed. “She didn’t use your account. You’d barely trust the average Iskaner to pass you the salt; I can’t see you handing your teacher your private keys. On top of that, you’re clever and technical enough to keep up with Jainan; there’s no way you wouldn’t notice if Professor Audel was using your account in secret.”

  There was no trace of a slouch in Gairad’s posture now. “What do you mean?”

  “You broke into Kingfisher’s systems,” Kiem said bluntly. Gairad laughed outright, short and incredulous. Kiem waited for her to finish before he carried on. “What were you after?”

  “This is bullshit,” Gairad said, squaring her shoulders as if she might start a physical fight. “I don’t know where you got that idea from. I’m here to pass my study program and get my shipping license. I already had to come all the way to Iskat for it. Why would I take a risk like hacking an Iskat army system?”

  “Good question,” Kiem said. “May I use your screen?”

  Gairad frowned, looking for the trap, but after a moment she waved permission. Kiem gestured to his wristband and threw up the picture of the young Thean who had died in the accident.

  “I don’t know who that is,” Gairad said.

  “Fairly sure you do,” Kiem said.

  “Why would I?” Gairad said defensively. “That’s a Deralli neckscarf. Whoever he is, he has nothing to do with Feria.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Kiem said. “I think that’s why Internal Security didn’t make the link. Iskaners deal with your prominent clans, because that’s who takes up political positions on Thea. We know just enough about clans to think we know how Thea works. But not everyone thinks clan society is the most important thing, do they? I read your article.”

  “You barely read anything,” Gairad said. Kiem grinned at her, which didn’t lessen the tension but instead spun it out. Gairad took a moment to think, which was the first crack in her defenses Kiem had seen. “What article?”

  “The one you wrote for your Pan-Thean Interest Society back at Bita Point University,” Kiem said. “Fascinating newsletter you guys had. I liked all the cartoons of the Emperor, they really nailed her scowl. Our friend”—he gestured to the face on the screen—“was a member too. From his bylines, it looks like he joined two years before you. You would have crossed over. I think you knew him.”

  “So I was at university with someone who’s now dead,” Gairad said. “So what? You don’t have proof of anything. Fuck off.”

  “I’m curious,” Kiem said. “And the reason I’m curious is because Internal Security wants to bundle this all up together. They’ll sacrifice both Professor Audel and Jainan if they have to.” It was supposed to be a lie. As Kiem said it, though, it felt close enough to the truth that his chest tightened.

  Gairad went white. “They wouldn’t.”

  “Jainan fought to keep you out of this,” Kiem said. “He thinks he has a clan obligation to you. I’m not Thean so bear with me—do you have one to him?”

  Gairad was silent. She looked away.

  There was a small, ordinary noise behind him: a door sliding open. Gairad’s eyes flicked over his shoulder. She wasn’t surprised, Kiem realized. She’d sent a ping he hadn’t seen.

  “Your Highness,” Professor Audel said, “what an unexpected honor to find you here.”

  Kiem turned in his chair. He started to get up politely, but Professor Audel waved him back down. “Professor. Not good news, I’m afraid.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. She stood in the doorway, untidy in traveling clothes, with strands of hair coming loose from their clips and a vague look in her eyes. “Gairad, I think I’m going to have to alter the fish nutrients. Do you think she’s looking peaky?” She opened a screen that hovered above her wrist, showing a feed to some sort of aquarium.

  “Professor,” Kiem said again.

  “You must be here to find Jainan? I don’t know where he is. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to steal Gairad to look at—”

  “Don’t bother,” Gairad said. “He knows.”

  In the two seconds of silence that followed, Kiem’s tentative conclusions rearranged themselves with a swift lurch.

  “Ah,” Professor Audel said softly. She didn’t sound vague in the slightest anymore. “What, exactly, does he know?”

  Part of Kiem’s hindbrain noted that Gairad was on one side of him and Audel on the other. He stretched out his legs in his chair, smiling, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. “Internal Security never dropped their investigation into you,” he said. “I was just having a chat with Gairad about it. Informally.”

  Audel stepped forward, closing her wrist-screen briskly. The door shut behind her. “Can I convince you that Gairad wasn’t involved?”

  “Not really,” Kiem said apologetically. “I’d just convinced myself that you weren’t involved, actually. Did either of you kill Taam?”

  “No!” Gairad said, with an indignation that rang true to Kiem’s ears. “What do you take us for, murderers? We’ve been trying to find out who killed him!”

  “Gairad has a regrettable tendency to the dramatic,” Professor Audel said. “But she’s c
orrect. I’m afraid we can’t help you with Taam. However—would you mind…” She pointed to her wrist.

  Kiem looked down at his wristband. He hesitated for a moment, but Bel was in the shuttleport on her way to Sefala, and Jainan could use the station comm system if he really needed to get hold of Kiem. He turned it off. “I wasn’t recording.”

  “Oh, I hope not, but I am admitting to criminal access of information,” Audel said, “so forgive me my quirks. How did you find out?”

  “Internal Security has been after you for days now,” Kiem said. “Since you called us at Hvaren Base. They brought us in to help.”

  “Tch,” Audel said. “They really haven’t dropped it, then? That makes the next step harder.”

  “What are you trying to find?” Kiem asked.

  “The truth,” Gairad said, failing to disprove Professor Audel’s character assessment.

  Professor Audel didn’t answer immediately. She tapped the screen on the wall, where the young Thean smiled in his graduation photo. “Rossan was one of my student researchers. My first one after I left the army, as a matter of fact. When I came back to the Imperial College, I decided to carry on working on regoliths, because I thought it could be done so much better than the military was doing it. Rossan was on one of their mining probes as our first embedded civilian observer in Operation Kingfisher. We fought tooth and nail to get him there. His death was a catastrophe.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kiem said. It sounded completely inadequate.

  “It was also very convenient for Kingfisher’s officers,” Audel said. “But why go that far just to throw off some academic researchers? We weren’t a threat to them. That was when I started wondering what else Kingfisher was doing. I wanted to replicate their methods and improve them—of course I did, I’m an engineer. But I also wanted to know why they needed so many non-engineering soldiers on a mining operation.”

  “Taam was using it as a personal credit source,” Kiem said. “He was selling off equipment. Jainan found the money trail.”

  “Wait, that doesn’t fit,” Gairad said, with a quick look at Audel. “Stuff’s been coming in these past few weeks.”