Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  Jainan’s head snapped up. Ressid’s face was hard and intent, her elbows propped on the table.

  “No, you don’t,” Jainan said, and her image flickered and disappeared.

  * * *

  Hold on to yourself, Jainan thought helplessly as another set of lights and emotion rose up around him. It swallowed his conscious thoughts like the sea.

  “Well? What did she say?” Taam demanded.

  They were in their rooms. The sky outside the windows was dark. Jainan blinked and remembered what was going on: they had just come back from a commemorative dinner to mark an Iskat anniversary of some victory or other. Jainan had been seated next to High Duke Tallie, who chaired the Advisory Council—a dull name for a group with enormous power over how the Empire was run.

  As the conversation came back to Jainan, the muscles in his back coiled up in embarrassment. “I mentioned it.”

  “Subtly?” Taam said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re no bloody good at subtle,” Taam said. “What did she say?”

  Taam wanted a committee seat. Jainan had at first had no idea why he wanted Jainan to make the request for him, but he’d found out soon enough: Duke Tallie was a woman of ironclad opinions, and the ones she held about Taam were scathing. Jainan hated asking favors at the best of times. He could still feel the humiliation of it pricking at his cheekbones. She hadn’t even been scathing about Jainan himself, just given him a look as if she couldn’t believe he’d had the audacity to make the request. “I don’t think she liked the idea.”

  “Of course she won’t like the idea!” Taam said. He threw off his jacket. “Stupid cow can’t see past the last time we argued—you were supposed to talk her around!”

  Jainan had put a stop to most of his self-destructive behaviors, but not all, and now he felt one of them rising from somewhere deep in him. “How do you expect me to do that?” he asked softly. “It’s you she doesn’t like, Taam.”

  There was a moment of silence, as if neither of them could believe he’d said that. Then Taam moved. He grabbed Jainan by the front of his jacket, and Jainan had to fight for balance as the high collar tightened around his neck. “You’re a damned liar!”

  “I tried,” Jainan said, though any apology would be too late now. He had to take breaths carefully, around the grip on his throat. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t—I’m not subtle. I’m not good at this.”

  “That’s bloody obvious!” Taam said. He bore forward until Jainan felt the back of his legs hit the desk, only just keeping his balance. “What use are you? If you can’t even talk around one old woman, what fucking use are you?” Taam tightened his grip.

  Jainan’s jacket collar was suddenly his enemy, cutting off his air. “I—” he said, struggling for coherence. “I—I—I’ll speak to her next time—”

  “You’re just looking to undermine me, aren’t you?” Taam said. “You’re always in my bloody accounts, you eavesdrop on my conversations—I think you’re trying to sabotage my operation.”

  “What?” Jainan said. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t remember what, not with the pressure on his neck.

  “Admit it!” Taam said. He gave Jainan a shake, not much, but enough to punctuate the demand. “You’ll do anything you can to get at me! You’re skimming money from my operation!”

  Jainan felt a peculiar rush of anger. You never needed him, a voice in his head said. You hate him. You could get rid of him so easily.

  A wave of abhorrence went through him a split second after the anger. That was wrong; he absolutely needed Taam—he was a treaty representative. Something was wrong. “This isn’t real,” he found himself saying, but the minute he’d said the words, he couldn’t remember why he’d said them. He had thrown up a hand in front of his face. “I can’t—Taam, I’m sorry, I can’t remember.”

  Taam gave him one last shove and released him. “What fucking use are you,” he said, but it was more of a rhetorical question. He had lost the edge of his rage, as he often did. He backed off a couple of steps and turned away as if he felt the first hints of embarrassment. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” Jainan pulled his jacket straight and didn’t rub his throat. It wasn’t real, but what was real? This room, Taam’s fury at Duke Tallie, Jainan’s failure at dinner: those were real. Whatever he had been trying to remember slipped away entirely. He felt himself settling into his surroundings like a wheel in a track it had traveled before. It was almost comfortable.

  Taam threw himself down on the sofa. Jainan recognized this mood of grudging regret; he would be easier to deal with tomorrow. “I just wanted someone who could pull their weight,” Taam said. He stared up at the ceiling. Jainan had been monitoring his drinks and he hadn’t even drunk that much, but clearly it had been enough to make him pensive. Jainan felt a stir of pity. He didn’t let it show. “I just wanted someone I liked.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jainan said. There was nothing else he could really say. He turned away to make Taam some coffee.

  The cup disappeared before he could pick it up. The walls turned gray and started to dissolve, and now the whole room seemed to be fading around him. He felt himself lose a thought that had been very important. He could no longer remember what it was.

  CHAPTER 26

  “What do you think?” Kiem asked.

  Bel craned her neck to survey the shuttle docks. The docks on Carissi Station were a vertical grid of enormous glass tubes, ranging from a few meters across to large enough to hold a freighter. A honeycomb of elevators and stairs ran up and down the space in front of them, filled with people flowing on and off ships from the Transit Module.

  A row of docks had been cordoned off for the military behind a semitransparent screen of red light that hid the left-hand row of the grid. There were a couple of obvious routes in, but both went through access gates controlled by troopers.

  “You’ll need to get us past the guard,” Bel said. “I can break the protections on any of the small people-carriers, but I need close access.”

  “Right,” Kiem said. He would bet this was a control gate like the one outside his mother’s office, which meant it would need the army’s daily passphrase. “Gairad, you’ve been temporarily promoted to aide. Try to look like you’re a huge fan of Iskat.” He led the way toward the nearest access gate, firing up his wristband as he went.

  “The Imperial Military is a fine institution,” Gairad said unconvincingly, trailing behind Kiem and Bel. “I love the Empire.”

  Kiem’s call on his wristband took some time to connect. “Hey,” he said brightly when it did. “Sergeant Vignar! It’s been a while. Did you catch the race yesterday?” Gairad gave him a sideways incredulous look as they climbed a flight of stairs. Bel was busy watching their surroundings. “No, I was traveling, I’m out in Thean space. You’ll laugh at this—General Tegnar finally set me up with a commission. Strategic comms on Operation Kingfisher. Yeah, Major Saffer hasn’t filled it since he got his promotion … it’s nearly a sure thing, with General Tegnar breathing down his neck, but I still have to do the assessment interview. Only thing, this is really embarrassing, I’ve forgotten the passphrase. My mother’s going to space me—”

  He wandered toward the access gate while he listened. After a couple more minutes, he wound it up with, “Thanks, Sergeant,” loud enough to be heard by the trooper on duty. He put both his hands on the table and gave her his best smile. “Hi. Kiem Tegnar and aides. Passphrase Tetra Green One. We have a shuttle booked.”

  The electricity under his skin peaked as the trooper looked up. Everything seemed to hang in the balance. Kiem was very aware of the weight of the capper hidden at his waist, and even more of Bel’s artificial stillness beside him.

  It broke as the trooper waved them through. For the first time in several years, Kiem found himself wishing his mother was around so he could say thanks. It was an odd feeling.

  “Hey, dozy, pay attention,” Gairad muttered. “We’re the smoke screen.”

&
nbsp; Kiem gave a start. Bel had levered open the airlock to the launching tube at the end of the line and was leaning over the shuttle inside, attaching something that looked a bit like a suction cup to its door. Kiem had given up being surprised by what Bel had apparently been sitting on in her luggage this whole time. He angled his body so he and Gairad were covering her completely from view.

  Bel hissed as the door slid open. “Got it. Let’s go.”

  Kiem and Gairad squeezed through the airlock into the tiny shuttle behind her, stumbling as they hit the transition to zero gravity. The interior could have sat six people, but only if those people were very good friends. “Do we need to talk someone into giving us clearance?”

  “Nothing will be inward-bound while that freighter leaves,” Bel said, her eye on a blocky supply freighter. “So we just slip out behind it.” She must have noticed Gairad’s suddenly pale face, because she grinned and said, “Don’t panic, I’ve done this before.”

  “Suddenly everything about your speeding fines makes sense,” Kiem said. He snapped himself into the zero-grav restraints. The interior had no windows, so he tapped his fingers on his knees and watched the glass walls recede on one of the pokey viewscreens.

  Sitting still was agony. It felt like there was a pile of coals lodged under his rib cage, and all he could do was hang against the straps as they accelerated and watch the lighted bustle of the docks give way to black space. The viewscreens flickered and sharpened to brighten the pinpoint scattering of stars. Kiem knew their slow glide was an illusion—the other habitats in the cluster were kilometers away—but he wanted to shake the controls to eke out some speed. Jainan had been taken hours ago. He must be bored and tired, Kiem told himself. He must be sitting there wondering when Kiem and Bel would turn up. Other options were unthinkable.

  The silver shells of the other habitats in the cluster rose around them, mainly automated manufacturing plants and storage stations as big as asteroids. The Kingfisher refinery came into view with the excruciating slowness of a planet turning toward the sun.

  “Hah!” Gairad said, leaning forward. “Look, I was right about the secret module. They have detection fields,” she added sharply. “Bel! You’re flying right into them!”

  Bel’s mouth was, unusually, a straight line. “Kiem, permission to corrupt comms.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t completely block their signals,” Bel said. “Not without a proper rig. But I can corrupt them, which will give you some time before they reset.”

  “How long?” Kiem said.

  “Maybe twenty minutes. No messages in, no messages out. Not even if the habitat is on fire.”

  “There’ll be safety controls,” Gairad said.

  “All safety controls have a fail state,” Bel said.

  Gairad opened and shut her mouth, and then said, “How do you know how to do that?”

  “Do it,” Kiem said, watching the refinery fill their screen.

  He couldn’t see where the detection fields began, though Gairad went tense a few seconds later, anxiously watching some antennae protruding from the shell of the refinery. Their shuttle slipped away from the well-lit side of the refinery with its docking lights, around the curve of the habitat to the module Gairad had pointed out on her plan. It all looked the same to Kiem, who wasn’t an engineer or a pilot. All he knew was he would have drilled into layers of rock to find where they were holding Jainan.

  It took them another endless three minutes to close with the hull. “There,” Gairad said. Kiem took his eyes off the time display to recognize the cracks in the hull ahead of them as a set of docking ports, unlit and closed. There were a couple of emergency pods, flimsy one-person things with enough fuel for a single hop, so people must use it occasionally.

  Bel had brought up a separate screen to communicate with the refinery’s systems and was flicking her way through docking commands at high speed. It didn’t seem to be going well. “The main dock wants keys we don’t have.”

  “Emergency,” Kiem suggested, snapping himself out of his straps. “They must have an emergency port. One of those tiny ones.”

  “I’m a systems breaker, Kiem, not a combat specialist,” Bel said, in a voice that was nearly a snap. “I can’t protect both of you if you try and fight your way through a chokepoint!”

  “Bel,” Kiem said. She paused, one hand hovering in the air in front of the screen, and gave him the most hostile look he’d ever seen from her. “Bel,” he repeated. “Look at us. If we have to fight, we’ll get slaughtered anyway. Our only hope is to get in quietly.”

  Bel clenched her hand, deleting her docking commands, and breathed out. Her face relaxed back into a more familiar expression. “Okay,” she said. “Emergency port. We’ll open it quietly. You two had better not get yourselves hurt. Kiem, you do the bridge.” Kiem gave her a thumbs-up and floated to the release lever by the shuttle’s hatch.

  “Wait,” Gairad said, “has he ever done an emergency bridge?”

  “I’ve seen safety vids,” Kiem said, pulling the lever.

  The side of the shuttle blew in with a bang. Kiem hadn’t been expecting it and was blown backward, slamming into the opposite wall of the hull as the emergency docking skin filled a third of the shuttle with a pale, jelly-like mass. He scrambled dizzyingly around until he could get his feet under him.

  The door hissed open behind the skin. Kiem recoiled at seeing hard vacuum behind it, but the semitransparent bridge gel did its job, sealing the door and keeping the atmosphere inside. “Help me extend it.”

  “Oh, God,” Gairad said, but she pushed herself across the shuttle and thrust her hands into the pale gel.

  A fierce rush of joy went through Kiem at the prospect of finally doing something. He kicked his foot into the gel to stretch it, forcing it to bulge outward from the doorway, and attacked the rest of it with vigor. Gairad did the same, both of them squeezed back-to-back in the cramped door, until the skin had stretched out enough to bridge the last meter to the hull of the refinery. Bel cycled through some more docking prompts.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Kiem said, pressing the skin to the hull of the refinery. He tried not to think about the vastness of space on the other side of the semitransparent gel. “Is it—”

  “Got it,” Bel said.

  Gairad yelped and slammed her hand on the skin, finishing the seal just as the emergency hatch slid open. The gel was starting to solidify into a hard, waxy shell, forming a narrow, air-filled tunnel between the shuttle and the refinery’s hull. Kiem slithered through it first.

  He fell out onto a metal floor. As he picked himself up, his eyes had to refocus: the space was enormous, as if this whole module was just an empty shell. The only lights were blinking indicators and dim glows in the distance, highlighting the dark clutter all around them without being enough to see by. It looked like a warehouse.

  “We were wrong,” Kiem said. It was hard to remember to keep his voice low when his chest felt like something was ripping inside it. He pressed the toe of his boot against one of the nearest pieces of machinery, repressing the urge to kick it. “He can’t be here. This isn’t a detention block, it’s storage for some kind of mining rig.”

  White light flared. Gairad had clambered through the tunnel, feetfirst and swearing, and now fished a marble-sized flashlight out of her pocket. It lit up their surroundings like a miniature star.

  Bel had frozen in the act of picking herself up, staring at the nearest pile of clutter. “Kiem,” she said. Her voice sounded very distant. “Why am I looking at a stack of reaper warheads?”

  Kiem stopped just before nudging another rack with his foot.

  Gairad was already moving over to a nearby rack with the flashlight. “These are military drones. Guess we are in the wrong place.” Kiem could hardly bear to listen. Anything could be happening to Jainan while they were in the wrong place. But if not here, then where? Gairad was still restlessly moving around. “Why the fuck would you put an armory up here?”

/>   Kiem’s scattered thoughts realigned in a new, cold direction and then slowed to a halt. Bel was wearing a grim smile. She was having the same thoughts.

  “Usually,” Bel said, “you stash your weapons as close as you can to where you plan to use them.”

  Kiem’s skin was numb, like they had plunged into hard vacuum after all. “I would know,” he said. “The Emperor would—she wouldn’t marry me to Jainan just to turn around and invade Thea, that’s—” He looked around at the military hardware hiding on the Kingfisher refinery. “That’s not … possible.”

  “Coup?” Bel suggested. “Does the Emperor have to know?”

  Gairad wasn’t looking at either of them. She was moving among the piles, pulling aside coverings to check what was beneath. She looked down at the abstract silver emblem printed on a storage rack. “Prince Kiem,” she said, in a preoccupied tone. “What is a kingfisher?”

  “Oh—they got culled into extinction,” Kiem said, his mouth on autopilot as he ran his fingers over the side of what he now recognized was a tank drone. It was the last one of a whole row. “Two-meter wingspan. Venomous. The bioengineers didn’t realize their prey instinct would include humans.” He looked over and saw Gairad’s expression. “There were some weird design fashions around the time Iskat was terraformed.”

  “What the fuck,” Gairad said. “Who names their operation after something like that?”

  “The military?” Kiem said. He squinted into the distance, trying to see how far the row of tank drones stretched. “Fairly standard. Something macho.”

  Gairad turned around to glare at him, but for once Kiem didn’t feel it was directed at him personally. “There is something seriously wrong with Iskat.”

  Kiem took his hand away from the tank as if it were suddenly hot. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m starting to think you’re right.”

  Bel emerged from a shadowy aisle between the stockpiled weapons. “Model 46–5 fluid disruptors, various reaper-grade missiles, gas launchers,” she said. “And that’s just scratching the surface. Can the military invade an allied province with no excuse? At least on Sefala the congloms were already racking up the body count.”