The Partisan vessel that had fired early, prematurely revealing our advantage, ended up costing us dearly in this second wave. The new round of Grandiloquy starships had witnessed the fate of their predecessors and did not repeat the mistake of trying to fire on us. Instead their engines flared—and though the gale’s discharge forked over their surfaces, the thrust of their engines catapulted them out of range of us.
“Damn it,” Neveni snarled, smacking a nearby wall. “Think how many more we could have had!”
Instead of making a devastating dent into Tyrus’s forces, we’d obliterated only a fraction of his starships. We swerved in our orbit past the debris of shattered hulls, glittering as their internal fires ruptured into space.
A few Partisan vessels expended their weaponry trying to catch those enemy ships who were fleeing, but Neveni growled, “Flash a message at them: cease fire! They’re too far away. Don’t waste the ammo.”
That was a significant downside to relying on projectiles rather than energy weapons.
You could run out of them.
She turned to me as that second wave receded, the light of the scorched and ruptured Grandiloquy vessels playing across her face. “We should have gotten more,” she said hoarsely.
“But you got a great many,” I soothed her.
Her teeth flashed in a vicious grin. “Oh, yes.”
My gaze fixed on the windows overlooking the field of Partisan vessels, this crude fleet coasting on the momentum they’d built outside the gale, now swinging in orbit around a dead planet, circling like sharks, awaiting the next reckless approach of the Grandiloquy.
“Once they limp out of here,” I warned her, “he won’t send another wave without synthesizing projectiles of his own.”
But even Tyrus, with his army of synthesizers, could not match the Partisan stores, amassed over years on end.
“The wisest course for him would be retreat,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if—”
“Oh, he won’t.” Neveni gave a heady laugh. “I didn’t tell you—I prepared an incentive to keep him close.”
The incentive, I discovered quickly, was a series of fabricated holographic images of me. Since they’d been crafted with equipment we could not activate within the gale, I couldn’t watch them, but Neveni described them in enough detail to give me an idea of what Tyrus would see.
They showed my torture and mutilation at the hands of the Partisans. After a few hours passed without a new attack, Neveni ordered the holographics to be encased in a probe and launched out of the gale.
The images also carried a demand from the Partisans: that the Emperor himself come in person to discuss their terms.
“He’ll never risk himself like that,” I told Neveni.
“He’ll risk others, though,” she said with contempt. “He won’t be able to stop himself. And I’ve readied other probes with even less pleasant images. Every hour he delays, they’ll get worse.”
The probe required time to travel through space, propelled as it was by a crude launcher. We waited in a strange atmosphere of elation mixed with tension. Some played card games to pass the time, as their sophisticated gaming devices could not be activated here; others tried to doze. For my part, I paced the corridors restlessly, then sparred with Anguish until both of us were too battered to continue. We ended in a draw, much to the disappointment of the small audience of Partisans who had gathered to watch while placing furtive bets on the outcome.
At last the Arbiter’s alarms blared, sending Anguish and me sprinting back to the command nexus, where Neveni impatiently waited. She directed my attention toward the view screen, asking urgently, “Can they fire on us?”
I saw that the next wave had arrived, and this time Tyrus had launched his own security drones… thousands of them. The Partisan vessels were taking the offense, blasting missiles through the rain of drones.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. It was possible that the drones could each get off one shot before shorting themselves out.
Possible.
But Tyrus did not bank on mere possibilities.
“Wait,” I said, divining his strategy. “Neveni—he wants you to waste your firepower. He knows you’ll run out of projectiles. Don’t fire!”
Her wide eyes flitted back to the view screen. She surveyed the incoming thousands and then roared, “Flash the message: ‘CEASE FIRE!’ ”
The decision seemed to drain her of strength. She staggered back a pace, wringing her hands as she anxiously watched the window.
Meanwhile, the Partisan vessels flashed their windows, one to the other, the message spreading through the fleet. But some disobeyed it. Here and there, vessels continued to fire on the bots.
“Idiots!” Neveni roared. “Flash it again!”
And sure enough, when Tyrus’s drones reached us, a few dozen attempted to power up weapons—only to succumb to the forked electrical discharge caused by their own systems rupturing. The others coasted past, and the only hazard they posed was as floating debris.
Neveni, bathed in sweat, gave a giddy laugh. “Keep flashing that message,” she told her Partisans. “Make sure everyone got it. The bots can’t do anything but drain us dry firing on them.”
I followed her from the command nexus to the adjoining chamber, designed for a commander’s respite. She waited until the doors closed behind us to collapse against a wall, sagging with relief.
“God,” she said. “God, I thought we were done there.” She slid down the wall, laid her head in her hands. “If they’d been able to shoot,” she said in a muffled voice, “I would’ve gotten us all killed.”
I reached out and gripped her shoulders, pulling her back to her feet.
“But we’re alive,” I said. “You outmaneuvered him.” I felt a flicker of venomous satisfaction as I pictured Tyrus’s face now that his oh-so-clever ploy had backfired.
Yes, I knew whose side I was on. My earlier bout of weakness now seemed like a distant dream. I would not allow myself to feel pity again for a monster who deserved none.
“Well done,” I told Neveni fiercely.
She gave me a bloodthirsty smile. “Think this merits the next probe?”
I grinned at her. “I trust it’s a horrifying one.”
“Thoroughly appalling. It would make you proud.”
31
THE CREW slept in shifts. When my turn came, I lay restlessly on a cot, listening to the snores and sighs of a half-dozen Partisans sleeping around me. My brain felt swollen, overheated by racing thoughts. No position felt comfortable. That anyone could sleep amazed me.
This entire plan hinged on Tyrus’s continued devotion to me. If he decided that preserving me was not worth the effort, we’d lose. He and the remainder of his well-supplied armada could simply wait outside the chaotic gale until our stores ran out—until we starved or tried to flee.
I thought of the exhausted faces I’d passed in the corridors today. I felt the weight of every soul aboard this vessel, and across the Partisan fleet. Whether or not they knew it, all their hopes were pinned on a singular thing: the obsession of a madman for a creature made in a lab.
If Tyrus abandoned me, their blood would be on my hands.
Stop.
The Partisans had chosen this. With their eyes wide open, they’d decided to wage a violent resistance. They knew that the stakes were life and death.
But we would win, because he would not abandon me. I knew it.
I twisted in the sheets, then shoved them off, breathing deeply of the stale air. How could I feel so certain of his continued fixation? Why did that certainty feel just as painful as the fear that he might let go? The idea that he still loved me despite everything that had passed between us—despite the fact that I’d arranged this plot only to kill him—made my stomach lurch. But I refused to name this sick, shrinking feeling. It could not be guilt.
Instead I forced myself to remember the agonies he had inflicted: his sword through my chest. His malignant space ri
pping through the Halcyon. His taunting smile as he arranged so many deaths.
Perhaps he loved me. But what did “love” mean from someone like that? What kind of “love” could promote such abuse? None that I wanted. None worth valuing.
The door slid open. I recognized that oversize silhouette. Glad of the excuse to abandon the cot, I rose to my feet and followed Anguish out of the room.
The auxiliary lighting cast a greenish pall over the pale, curving corridor, and the smooth white floor. Anguish settled against the wall, folding his massive arms as he gazed down at me.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” I asked.
“Why aren’t you?”
I hesitated. Anguish would not be able to dispel my fears. And I was no child, to want false comfort.
Anguish spoke first. “You’re afraid he won’t come.”
I was startled. “When did you come to know me so well?”
“When I started to call you my family.” He left no pause for me to digest this remark. “He’ll come, Nemesis. He cured me, didn’t he? Why would he have done that, but to please you?”
I leaned back against the wall beside him, our shoulders brushing. In friendship, one took comfort from such proximity. It showed one was not alone. “Perhaps he wished us to feel reassured, lulled into complacency—so it would have more impact watching him murder all those people on the Halcyon.”
“Perhaps,” he said neutrally. “But I don’t think so.”
“No?” Bitterness crept into my voice. “He healed you just in time for us to watch the lies spread across the media about an evacuation. He guaranteed we would feel strong, restored, capable—and then, all at once, thoroughly powerless. From one perspective, healing you was just a new way to hurt me.”
“More evidence that he will come,” Anguish said evenly. “For why should he wish to hurt you if he did not care?”
“Hatred?”
Nodding, he turned toward me. “Possible. Love and hatred are not always inseparable. Certainly I hated my… Cygna.”
I blinked. He rarely spoke of her. And never so personally.
“I hated her with every breath,” he said. “I cursed my fate that I loved her—that I lived and breathed for such an unworthy, despicable creature. I prayed that a day might come when I would awaken to feel only revulsion. But the entirety of my being, the entirety, pulsed with need for her.”
Tears pricked my eyes. I pressed a hand over my brow to disguise them. “It’s cruel what we are.” Held hostage to our own genetic design, destroyed by our inbuilt capacity for unwavering devotion. We had been created to love villains—to gladly offer our throats to their knives.
“No,” he said softly. “No, Nemesis.” He pulled my hand away and looked on my wet cheeks with a small, fleeting smile. “I begin to think we are not so different than they are. Our bonding process is artificially induced—but the result is no different from what they feel toward one another.” He raised a palm. “Sometimes, toward us.”
I hesitated, then spoke carefully. “I think Neveni didn’t understand how she made you feel.”
His jaw tightened. “It is the past.”
“Not for you.” I’d heard him murmur her name in his sleep. I saw his face when we spoke of her.
“We may all die soon. It will be irrelevant.”
I laughed. “Don’t be so optimistic, my friend. You may still survive to hash it out with her at some point.”
His lips curled. “If we survive, and the young Emperor lies dead at your feet, then I vow on all the stars, she and I will have a discussion.”
A sudden blare of alarms sobered us. Wordlessly we turned and sprinted toward the command nexus. My passing glance at a chronometer showed that just over six hours had passed since the last assault. More than enough time for Tyrus to receive and review Neveni’s latest holographic image, as well as its reiteration of the Partisans’ only demand: that the Emperor come in person.
He would not do it. I’d spent a great deal of time convincing Neveni that he would, that he could be driven to do so. But Tyrus would be deliberate.… If I were truly a hostage, as he believed, then he had to suspect we would both end up dead if he made the error of surrendering himself.
In the Arbiter’s command nexus, Anguish and I discovered the eight gathered Partisans looking visibly perplexed by a strange sight on the windowed screen.
There were a series of laser beams cutting through the gale, directed straight into the planetoid we orbited.
“What is he doing?” Neveni asked me, as though I’d know.
I shook my head.
“They’re coming from too far away—they can’t be strong enough to harm us,” she reasoned. “Or the planet.”
We soon lost sight of the beams as the Arbiter arced around the curve of the planetary body. In the forty minutes it took us to orbit back around, everyone in the command nexus debated the possible purpose of the lasers. Other passing vessels communicated their theories with flashing lights. The act of speculating gave the crew license to voice fears they’d been trying to suppress. The fear, once voiced, provoked wilder and wilder suggestions.
By the time we rounded the curve of the planet once more, the atmosphere was unsettled and tense. The vessels directly before us, with a view we did not yet have, flashed a message back to us.
“ ‘Hologram,’ ” Neveni interpreted, her brow furrowing. “What? How could it be…” She fell silent as we glided into view and saw the holographic projection.
The lasers, positioned outside the chaotic gale, projected inward like a makeshift holographic emitter, forming words that unfurled across the clouds.
“ ‘Discuss terms. Radio frequency 101.1,’ ” Neveni read.
Her gaze darted between the message and the lasers still directed at the planet below us. The intersecting beams of light stirred a bright cloud of auroras in the planetoid’s scant atmosphere.
“I know what he’s doing with the lasers,” she exclaimed. “He’s manipulating the planet’s electromagnetic field to generate radio waves. Someone—quick, help me tune our transmitter to that radio frequency.”
I felt a lurch of alarm, fearing this might be a trick to lure the Arbiter into powering up and exposing itself to the ferocity of the gale. I didn’t know what this radio technology was, but Neveni’s Partisans were familiar. Using components scavenged from the ship itself, they swiftly constructed a rudimentary radio. The inelegant snarl of wires lacked even a computer interface but would function within the gale without risk to our vessel.
The Partisans activated the device. A harsh, static buzzing resolved into the sound of a man’s voice: “… reading me?”
“We read you,” Neveni said in return.
After a few moments’ delay, the man’s voice came again: “Stand by for the honor of addressing our Divine Emperor.”
Neveni rolled her eyes. “Lucky me.”
After another brief delay, Tyrus’s voice lashed into the air. “Partisans. I contact you to discuss terms. First, I demand proof of life.”
Neveni cast me a calculating look. “What proof?” she replied.
Another long beat. “Sagnau.” Tyrus spoke her name as though it were something distasteful. “You will ask my wife—”
He used that word. He still used it.
“—exactly what she asked for herself before we returned from the Transaturnine System.”
Pain stabbed through my heart. I remembered that day—a glorious, haunted day. We’d made love for the first time. We’d known we were on the cusp of disaster. Tyrus had made a suggestion.
We’d just lost a year in the Sacred City. We understood that Pasus had probably seized control of the Empire in our absence. Tyrus had suggested we fly toward the black hole and wait decades, or maybe centuries, before returning into a future in which no one would know us. In which we could be free.
I’d felt so tempted. Had I but given in to my impulse, how much suffering might have been avoided! Instead I’d believed T
yrus would never be at peace if we ran from the responsibility. I believed it would be the best thing for him if we returned to the Chrysanthemum to face Pasus.
I’d chosen wrong. In some parallel universe, we were still together right now, caught in the pull of the black hole. In that other timeline, there was no Venalox, no keying into the scepter. No confrontation in the ball dome, no sword through my breast. Only an Empire we’d abandoned to its fate, and the two of us, happy and hopeful together, eternally in love.
Stop.
“I asked him to ban Servitors,” I told Neveni.
Neveni sent the answer over the radio. My attention shifted to the auroras dancing on the surface of the planetoid below. Our radio transmissions were being sent there, reinterpreted by those lights, relayed onward. Such an elaborate system of communication to bridge the distance between us.
“I thank you,” said Tyrus at last. “For assuring me she is alive—and revealing that she’s onboard the Arbiter with you.”
Neveni cursed. Our eyes met, and I shook my head—let it go—the only consolation I could offer. It was the speed of her reply to him that had exposed my location. Had I been onboard another Partisan vessel, they would have needed to use their light system to pass my answer along to Neveni, causing a delay of several more seconds.
Tyrus continued. “Your holographics made your terms explicitly clear, Sagnau: I offer you my death to prevent hers. But I have no reason to believe she’ll be alive after my blood has been shed.”
“You’ll just have to trust me,” Neveni said venomously.
A delay as the signal reached him, and then his reply: “As Nemesis trusted you before you betrayed her? I’ll make no such mistake. I’ve already erred in tolerating the existence of the Partisans.”
Neveni gave an incredulous laugh, one that would not reach him in time to interrupt.
“You did serve a useful function, for a time.” The new malice in Tyrus’s voice put me on edge, had me instinctively shifting my weight in preparation for attack. “The Partisan assaults on your fellow Excess were a large part of why my family stayed in power.”
The Nemesis Page 20