“No. It’s fine. Everything is fine. There won’t be any repercussions.”
Lara eased herself back into her chair, plucked her blouse straight. Biryar stepped closer, but didn’t take his seat. His blood was still electric. What if someone had seen them? What was he going to say to Mona, because he had to tell Mona. It would be a betrayal not to. He swallowed.
“I didn’t mean to spook you,” Lara said.
“I’m not spooked,” he said. He meant to follow it up with I’m married, but what came out was different. “I’m Laconian.”
Lara quirked a smile, and he thought there was regret in it. She took her handheld, her finger hovering just above the button to start the recording again. Her eyes were asking if he was certain, but he was himself again. Or no. He was Governor Rittenaur. That was better. She tapped the button, and the seconds began counting up again. Biryar put his hands on the back of his chair, pressing into it like it was a podium. He thought back to where the conversation had been.
“I’m really very happy to be here,” he said. “Auberon is a fascinating planet with a great future before it. I hope that my service here will help it come into its rightful place as one of humanity’s great centers of science and culture. And I know the High Consul has the same ambitions for it.”
He nodded sharply, more to himself than to her. That was the right answer. That was what he was supposed to say. Who he was supposed to be.
Lara tilted her head. “Do you want to sit down?”
* * *
The yacht was a small one, and the old man didn’t like it much. In all the time Agnete had been with him, he had only used it three or four times that she knew of. He’d grown up in a coastal city, but she didn’t have the impression there had been a lot of yachts involved. The fact that he was in it now meant he was running out of places to be that he was certain the local security forces weren’t watching.
He sat with his arms out at his sides. Two days of stubble competed with his thin mustache. The sun was overhead, the light glimmering off the water and his false arm. He was smoking a cigar as thick as his thumb and as long as his finger. The city rose up at the horizon like a mirage.
The woman sitting across from them had gone by KarKara when they’d first met her. It was Lara now, which suited her better.
“I swear to God, I had him.”
“We shouldn’t have rushed you,” the old man said.
“I didn’t rush. I had him. We had rapport. We had shared jokes. He was into me.”
“And then?”
Lara opened her hands. “Then the moment came, and he backpedaled. I don’t know. Clearly he and his wife have a monogamy agreement, and he’s taking it seriously. Maybe that’s a Laconian thing.”
“Did he say that?”
“No, it’s a guess,” Lara said. “He was babbling by the end. Lots of words, but none of them meant anything.”
“What do you think of him?”
She considered. Agnete could see from the way the woman held her hands that Lara almost liked the mark. There was nothing like being told no to make someone attractive.
“That man needs something,” Lara said, “and he needs it bad. But it’s not what I was offering.”
The old man blew out a cloud of white smoke and watched the wind shred it. “That’s what I think too. Is he maybe into guys?”
“That’s not it,” Lara said. “I’ve met maybe one person in twenty who claims to be monogamous and actually is. I think this guy is really into his wife.”
The old man muttered something obscene. Then, “I don’t get it. He’s not looking for money. He’s not looking for kink. What is it with this guy?”
Lara said, “I think he’s looking for a way out.”
“Of what?”
“His own skin.”
“Well I’m looking for a way not to take that literally, but this fucker does make it hard.” He looked out over the water. Something large and pale passed under them, but didn’t break the surface. The old man sighed. “Maybe we should just kill him.”
Agnete said, “Why were they fighting?”
He shifted his head to look at her. Agnete met his gaze without flinching. “He and his wife were fighting about something. And then they stopped. Maybe there’s something in that?”
The old man weighed the idea while he took another puff on his cigar. His eyes shifted up to the sky, but he wasn’t looking at anything. Or not anything that was there.
“He have any friends?”
Lara shook her head. “None that he ever talked about. He doesn’t do relationships with people. Just responsibilities to them.”
“So just the wife, then, as far as you know. Sex and friendship. That’s a tough knot to unwind.”
“I think he really loves her,” she said. Again the little twitch of regret. They were going to have to be careful how they used her, moving forward. She was going to talk herself into falling in love with Rittenaur if they took their eyes off her.
The old man made a deep, soft sound. Like satisfaction. The yacht bobbed on the waves. “I forget, you know? I just forget.”
“What, boss?”
“How complicated people are. How many kinds of hunger we’re working with.”
“Not following you.”
The old man shrugged, and the fake arm almost matched the real one. The movement was still just a little asymmetrical. It made him seem jaunty.
“There was a guy I knew back in Sol system used to say that money was like sex. You thought it would fix everything until you got a lot of it. Because that’s what we all reach for. Anything we need, anything we want, anything that’s grinding us down, we can get high or rich or laid and make it better. Only if that was true, people would eventually get enough drugs or money or sex and be happy.”
“We’d be out of jobs,” Agnete said.
“But Rittenaur…” The old man went on like she hadn’t spoken. “This guy lives his whole life in this culture where it’s about…”
“Duty,” Lara said.
“So,” Agnete said, “the way a normal person tries to get out of the hole by putting a needle in their arm or fucking a pretty body or working a hundred hours a week, he tries to get out by being a good man.” She said the words slowly to see if they sounded true.
“Only it doesn’t work for him any better than that other shit does for the rest of us,” the old man said. Then, a moment later, “Look at the wife. If he loves her as much as Lara thinks, she’s the weak spot.”
“What am I looking for?” Agnete asked.
“Whatever’s there. Every addict has to hit bottom,” the old man said. “Maybe we can help him with that.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Agnete said.
“I know it didn’t exactly work, but…” Lara hesitated, afraid to ask. “Our thing?”
She was asking about the debt her attempted seduction was going to pay off.
“How much did you owe us?” he asked.
“You know exactly how much,” Lara replied.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s off the books now,” the old man said. “But stay out of my casinos. You’re very bad at poker.”
Business concluded, they watched the sun speed across the sky and dive for the horizon. The water was turning golden as they angled back for shore. The old man made them all steaks on the little range, the meat decanted fresh from the growth disk.
When they got back to civilization, Agnete put her resources into the wife and Xi-Tamyan Agricultural Concern, where she had offices. She wasn’t looking for something in particular—an affair, an illegal drug habit, a second life. Anything.
Even so, it took her days to find it.
* * *
Biryar didn’t know what he had expected from Mona when he told her. Anger, perhaps. A sense of betrayal. A rupture in their marriage at least, an estrangement at worst. He had laid out all that had happened: the interviews, the connection that had been cultivated during them, and—with his heart in his throat
—the kiss. Mona sat across the breakfast table from him, listening to every detail. Only at the end, when he outlined all the precautions he was putting in place to see that it never happened again, did a line of concern draw itself on her forehead.
“She just stole a kiss?” Mona asked. “That’s all?”
“But I allowed myself to permit a sense of… of intimacy that made it possible,” Biryar said. His eggs had grown cold and thick while he spoke. “This was my fault. It will never happen again.”
She’d taken his hand then, and when she spoke there was a seriousness in her voice so studied and careful that he suspected there was amusement behind it. “Thank you for treating me with respect. I mean that. But I’m not angry with you at all. Don’t beat yourself up over this, all right?”
He kissed her fingers, and the subject had never come up again. He went back to his duties with the relief of having dodged a bullet. He policed himself more harshly, wary of any other transgression. Biryar the man wasn’t to be trusted. There was only room for Governor Rittenaur, so he tightened his control and pushed out anything besides duty and decorum. It was the only way.
He attended meetings with Suyet Klinger of the Association of Worlds and approved the trade agreements for the Transport Union. He stood witness at another execution when Overstreet discovered a Laconian guard who had been extorting sexual favors from a local man. He made his reports to the political officer back on Laconia and received guidance that tracked back to Winston Duarte himself.
That he couldn’t sleep, that his food tasted strange and left his stomach upset, that the sunlight began to give him headaches, that he sometimes had the weird oppressive sense of drowning at the bottom of an ocean of air, that was only his acclimation going slowly. A few more weeks, and he would be fine, he was sure of it.
He was able to maintain the illusion that everything was under control until the day the one-armed man reappeared.
The conference was in Carlisle. It was the third-largest city on the planet, and fewer than a million people lived in it and the area around it. It was in a higher clime than Barradan and in the northern hemisphere where the seasonal shift made the air was cold and the daylight periods slightly briefer. The trees were similar to the ones in Barradan, but with the cold weather, they had shriveled, wrinkled, and gone limp. The dark trunks bent toward the stony ground. The reception and Biryar’s speech had been planned for a courtyard in the center of the mayoral complex, but a storm changed direction as Biryar’s transport left Barradan, and a cold and bitter rain was pelting down from low clouds when he arrived. As his liaison rushed him from his transport and into the mayoral complex, Biryar sniffed the air, hoping to find some hint of the minty smell of wet Laconian soil. Rain on Auberon smelled like nothing. Or it smelled like an open sewer, and he couldn’t tell any longer. One or the other.
The liaison apologized his way down the wide, pale hallway. The change in the weather had come with no warning. They hadn’t thought they would need to shift to the secondary venue—a public theater just across from the complex—until the last moment. It would only take them a little time to have it ready and the audience of local business and government leaders taken there. Biryar swallowed his annoyance and made himself as gracious as he imagined Duarte would have been in his place.
The waiting area belonged to the mayor herself, part of her private apartment. If he would make himself at home and be comfortable…
In fairness, the waiting room was pleasant enough. A wide glass window looked out over a vast, wild landscape. Rough, toothlike mountains rose above the city, halfway lost in the gray of the storm. The rain that struck the window froze there for a moment, then melted and dripped down. When the clouds finally cleared, the landscape would be encased in ice. Ice like a second skin. Ice like a shroud.
His speech was on the importance of maintaining robust trade with the other systems and Laconia’s commitment to keeping the economy of Auberon strong. He knew it by heart. Instead of reviewing it again, he sat on the little couch and looked out at the weather. The door opened behind him, and a man in a crisp white jacket and matching gloves came in carrying a tray with a thermos of coffee, two cups, and a plate of pastries.
“Put them on the table here,” Biryar said. “I can serve myself.”
“You know, Governor,” the old man said as he placed the thermos and cups on the table at Biryar’s side, “I have got to give it to your security people. I’ve been trying to see you for a while now, and they’ve got your place buttoned up tighter than a horsefly’s asshole.”
The old man smiled. Even before Biryar registered the glint of metal between the man’s cuff and his glove, he remembered the thin mustache.
He’s come to kill me, Biryar thought, and a thrill ran through him. He felt the weight of the sidearm on his hip, even as he sensed that a gun probably wasn’t going to help. He knew enough killers to know that he wasn’t one, and that the man facing him was. He nodded solemnly.
“I was wondering if I’d see you again. You’ve been hard to find as well.”
The one-armed man sat down across from him and spoke as he plucked off his gloves. “Well, I was worried that we’d gotten off on the wrong foot. That’s my fault. I come on a little strong sometimes. You want some coffee?”
“Cream, please,” Biryar said. His heart was tapping against his ribs like it was desperate for his attention. He let his hand casually drift toward his hip.
The one-armed man’s voice was harder. “If you pull that gun, it’ll mean we’re having the worst version of this conversation. Honest to Pete, you’ll wish you hadn’t. No sweetener?”
“No,” Biryar said. He let his hand drop to the sofa, near his holster but motionless. It was dangerous to move forward, but he wasn’t going to give up ground either. He imagined pulling the gun and firing. How quickly could he do that? How long could it take? The rest of his life, maybe. “Just cream.”
“Good choice. I like it black myself. The older I get, the more bitter shit suits me. You ever feel like that?”
“Sometimes,” Biryar said.
The man held out a coffee cup on a saucer, and Biryar nodded toward the table. He wouldn’t take it. The old man was holding it with his prosthetic hand. How fast was the mechanism? What weapons were concealed in it? It was like watching a snake that he knew was venomous, and wondering how long a bite would take to stop his breath.
“What can I do for you?” Biryar said, trying desperately to make the words sound casual. As if he were in control. “Or are you here to make good on your threat?”
“Nah, we’re past that. But I am here on business, as it were,” the man said, putting the coffee cup down on the table. “I have something for you. Kind of a peace offering.”
“I didn’t know peace was an option between us. I was hoping to have you tried, sentenced, and executed.” The provocation struck home. The man smoothed his mustache. Biryar knew he shouldn’t have said it, but the fear was shifting in him. Turning to something like courage. Or anger. Or a mad, dark, rushing hope that Biryar didn’t wholly understand.
“I get that. But let me ask you something. Hypothetically, there’s someone in your organization. Laconian, not one of ours. Let’s say they’re making up projects in your name, using them to falsify work orders. Fudging the budget. That’s a problem for you, right?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“I do. But I’d like to hear you say it just the same. If it’s not a problem.”
The one-armed man looked distracted by the conversation. A few centimeters would put his hand on the pistol. The angle made it awkward to draw. Biryar shifted his weight a little to make it easier, and the one-armed man shook his head like he was reading his mind.
“Misappropriation of Laconian funds is at best larceny, at worst treason,” Biryar said. “One is a prison sentence. The other is death.”
“What about a governor’s pardon? You can do that, right?”
“No Laconian is a
bove the law,” Biryar said. “That is what discipline means.”
“That’s what I thought,” the old man said. His eyes locked on Biryar’s as he drew a handheld from his pocket. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry about this.”
He held it out. Biryar’s gaze flickered down to it, and then back up, ready for the attack. It took a few seconds for what he’d seen to register. Mona Rittenaur. Almost against his will, his eyes drifted back down. The old man kept holding it out, and this time Biryar took it.
The financial records were marked as Xi-Tamyan, and the spreadsheet listed Mona’s name. And monetary amounts. Budget levels and outflows. There were other names, and one rang a bell. Carmichael. The woman whose research had been unfairly canceled. The one they’d fought over. The one-armed man forgotten, he shifted through the files. Mona’s name was highlighted. And the words cooperative government programs. If programs like that existed, he would have known about them. He would have had to approve them. He hadn’t.
The storm had grown worse, the wind so terrible, it was shaking the building itself, making the walls shudder, only it wasn’t any louder. And the beige surface of the coffee was smooth and still. Something else was shaking. Biryar put down the handheld.
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” the man said. “I’m just letting you know that one of your own stepped a little off the path.”
“Blackmail?”
“For blackmail, you need an ask. I don’t want anything from you. I have this information. I’m giving it to you. That’s all. I’m being the good guy here.”
And now it was his duty to tell what he’d learned to Major Overstreet. And it would be Overstreet’s duty to arrest Mona. Biryar would have to recuse himself, so they’d send her back to Laconia for trial. His Mona. The woman whose fingers he kissed in the morning. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to see her sent to the Pens. It was like trying to imagine being dead.
Or he could hide the information, make her scrub away all sign of it. Cancel the projects. Erase the financial trail that led to her. Then, when Overstreet found them, they would die together. His sternum ached like he’d been punched there. Everything under it was hollow. He could hardly draw a breath.
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