They smiled at each other. The Flyby was the most exclusive event anyone could possibly attend. It was so exclusive, they would not even have Servants to attend them. They gulped their alcohol, but when they got to their feet, they were steady. It would take more than one glass to make fools of them.
The departure of the Executives was the Servants’ cue to make a graceful exit; they walked through the access tunnel to the lockers. Nuruddin messaged me.
My first impulse was to reassure him. But Nuruddin’s instincts had always been sharp. I thought back to Baylor’s invitation to his brethren—was there something in his tone I had missed?
Nuruddin headed straight home to his family, as was his well-documented habit. Medusa and I remained in our tunnels under the garden, following the Executives under Dragonette’s surveillance, which she also shared with fifty-four other conspirators, their Medusa units, and all the other Minis.
Dragonette followed the Executives at a discreet distance. Through her eyes, we watched them file into the dressing rooms to change. I could see nothing that veered from the usual—unless you counted the number of attendees. Baylor was usually more exclusive with his invitations.
But this time around, he had needed to court more allies than usual. He had needed to assuage enemies. That’s why Lady Gloria was able to join the throng at the air lock, clearing a space around her with sheer force of personality. I didn’t envy the people who would be inside the party shuttle with Gloria. But I didn’t envy them when they were in the House of Clans with her, either.
Adem Koto arrived, then begged off at the last moment. His departure, along with Nuruddin’s misgivings, seemed a portent. But then Gennady arrived, and my heart gave a little lurch.
As usual, none of the Executives seemed surprised to see Gennady, once again raising doubts about the big picture we thought we had through our surveillance.
Still so many things swimming beneath a dark surface …
We watched them file into the lock. In seconds, the door would spin shut.
Medusa hesitated. We had never observed the Executives on one of their Flybys. Should we turn down the chance to do it now?
“NO, DRAGONETTE!” Lady Sheba’s ghost loomed in front of the door. Dragonette, who had jetted closer so she could slip in at the last second, reared back as if blown by a strong gust.
The door spun shut, and Sheba’s ghost vanished. Dragonette zoomed away and out of sight, then checked to see if she had drawn the eye of any of the Security personnel. None of them were looking in her direction, or even at the door.
Halka broke in:
* * *
Lady Sheba had risked her life when she destroyed Titania. Maybe Baylor thought he would be luckier.
We tapped into the public broadcast of the Flyby.
“The challenges of the past year have been many,” Baylor Charmayne’s solemn voice informed us from his canned speech. “But Olympia remains strong and proud, now that we have reached the halfway point in our journey. Our children’s children will live to see a new world, and they will thank us for our prudence and our careful conservation of resources.”
While he lectured the population of Olympia about the virtue of privation, stock footage from a previous Flyby pretended to be a real-time representation of him and the other Executives strapped into their command stations on the shuttle. Off camera, on a lower deck, over nine hundred of their closest family members and cronies were tucked into their own seats, doubtless laughing and chattering with the abandon of people who had never known a moment of “conservation.”
“And as we enter the second half of our voyage,” continued Baylor, “we can feel secure in the knowledge that we never compromised our—”
His speech broke into indecipherable bits for almost a full minute, before cutting in again with, “—out the fire extinguishers! We have less than five minutes before—” More distortion followed. Then, “Mayday, Mayday! We have fire on—”
Static terminated the transmission.
I wished I could see what was really happening on that shuttle. Instead, we had to consult the encrypted General Security log. We looked in the folder that should have held the surveillance feeds.
DISABLED, read the status.
The surveillance feeds had been disabled before the party shuttle left Olympia. That efficiency had carried itself over to an incident report that had already been written. Terry found that buried in a secret database that also contained a report of how Baylor Charmayne had survived the assassination of his fellow legislators. It began with this tidbit:
It has been determined that surveillance devices were disabled from the electrical pulse generated by the first explosion.
I read the report to its conclusion.
Medusa and I located the lights of the party shuttle. They continued to flash, as if unaware that they weren’t supposed to be working anymore.
And then we witnessed something spectacular.
* * *
There are no fireballs in space, but escaping atmosphere can create some temporary color. What I liked best was the blue lightning of the gravity bubble that crawled all over that shuttle, pulverizing what was left of it so no pieces could be retrieved and examined for evidence later. It was the same weapon that had been used to destroy Titania.
Medusa and I watched from a perch just outside Lock 207. I played selections from Prokofiev’s score for Ivan the Terrible as we marveled at the awful beauty of that destruction. I shed a tear as I thought of my parents.
she said.
We watched for something in particular. Within forty-five minutes, we spotted the lights from Baylor Charmayne’s pressure suit. According to the official report (not officially written yet), his journey from the crippled shuttle would take exactly seventy-three minutes.
There were many things we didn’t know yet. For one thing, we weren’t sure which lock he would try to open. We weren’t even sure if it was Baylor in the suit—after all, Gennady had been on the shuttle, too, and if we could believe what he had told Baylor and Ryan, he had survived the plots and machinations of others for over a hundred years.
Finally, the person inside Baylor’s suit tapped a manual override code into the keypad outside Lock 212.
The coincidence was downright magical.
Medusa’s tentacles stretched and retracted a
s we whipped across the hull of Olympia toward Lock 212. We spotted someone clinging to a grip bar. His suit was not like Sultana’s superior bit of engineering, but it was a gleaming Executive model, equipped with a twelve-hour air supply and jets that easily took him from the dead shuttle to the series-200 locks. I had to shake my head when I pondered the trouble he had gone to, the danger he had put himself in to make it look like this assassination had been survived by a hero. I would have manipulated the records and stayed safe inside Olympia. But then, I had Medusa to help me finesse that sort of fraud. And I wasn’t trying to prove anything to a dead mother.
We couldn’t see his face as we moved up on him, but his pudgy-gloved fingers managed to convey some frustration as he typed code after code into that keypad and it refused to respond. He would never get inside that lock without our help. Medusa and I had long since mastered every protocol in Olympia’s command database.
We tore him free of his perch and stripped his jets off the suit before he could fire them.
Despite my better judgment, I had half wished it might be Gennady in the suit. I still thought about our time together in the Lotus Room, how he had introduced me to the pleasures of cuisine.
But Baylor gaped at us through the faceplate. Unlike Ryan, he knew what Medusa was. He would have looked less shocked if his dead mother had confronted him outside that lock.
“Who are you?!” he used his suit comm to ask.
For him, my smile was anything but tender. “Call me Medusa,” I transmitted in her voice.
“I know that, you idiot! But who’s driving? Whoever you are, you’ve played right into their hands!”
I let Medusa answer that one. “Tentacles, actually. We’re collaborating, just as you always feared.”
“My God.” The disgust in Baylor’s voice informed me that, even in his circumstances, he couldn’t grasp that he wasn’t supreme anymore. “You animals. You think you know what’s going on? You stupid, blind—”
“We know about Escape,” I said. “We’ve boarded it. We exchanged messages with—”
“They’ll destroy you,” Baylor broke in before I could finish. But he wasn’t talking about the Weapons Clan. “The Medusa units will destroy everything that matters to us.”
“Everything that matters to you,” I agreed. “But what did you destroy, Baylor? How many lives were lost on Titania so you could control the message?”
From the moment I realized what he had done to his fellow Executives, I remembered that overheard conversation with his mother. How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? First I had assumed he was talking about workers like me. Then I thought he must mean the Medusa units. But now that I had witnessed his newest mass execution, I remembered another pertinent detail. No Executives had made it off Titania. Not one had escaped. And once they were dead, the Charmaynes had become twice as powerful. So, yes, they wanted to destroy the Medusa units—but what had Ryan Charmayne said? I think I know how we might kill two birds with one stone.…
“Do you know how we got to Olympia?” Medusa asked. “It was your greed that saved us.”
A light went on behind his eyes. I’ll give him credit—he understood immediately.
“You raided Titania for resources,” said Medusa. “You weren’t satisfied until you picked her clean. It took many, many trips for the supply ships to move everything you wanted. Each time, a few more of us stowed away on those ships. When all of us were safe, our operatives sabotaged your mother’s lifeship. She was too smart—eventually she would have figured out what we had done.”
The grief and rage he displayed then were impressive. In Baylor’s mind, he was the good guy. He had not been responsible for his mother’s death, and he still missed her. He believed in the righteousness of everything he did, and he believed that the equality the rest of us were trying to achieve was unnatural and wrong.
Time to cut that nonsense short. “None of your fellow legislators tried to stop you when you made your escape,” I said. “None of them tried to get into pressure suits. You must have taken the antidote for the drink you all had together in your garden. Maybe they were unconscious or even dead before the first bombs went off. But their families trapped down in the lounge section were awake through the whole ordeal, weren’t they, Baylor? You even sacrificed people from your own family.”
A tightening around his eyes was his only response.
“I’m guessing you’ll declare martial law once you’re back on board Olympia, until you can find the evil perpetrators of this mass murder. And that could last indefinitely. Will the Charmaynes have to take permanent control?”
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Don’t you see that?”
Just past his left shoulder, I could see what was left of the shuttle. The gravity bubble was collapsing, leaving a crumpled wreck floating in a field of stars. Gennady was inside that chunk of crushed alloy. Marco was there, and I had seen one or two women holding toddlers.
I touched the link in Baylor’s head that only his fellow Executives should have been able to use.
That was the worst possible thing he could have said at that moment, because I thought about the children he had just killed, and then I thought about Ashur.
I held him with Medusa’s tentacles and smashed him against Olympia’s hull until his helmet shattered. I had been planning to tell him that I had used Lock 212 to kill his son Ryan—that was the only vengeance I had contemplated. But that seemed too cruel now. So I pulled him close.
And finally, when the light left his eyes, we sent him off to join the long trail of bodies behind Olympia.
* * *
When I opened the inner door of Lock 212, I was alone again—or as alone as I could get with Medusa or anyone else I might care to talk to only a thought away. The hall was dimly lit, with pools of light punctuated by deeper shadows. Someone stood next to one of those pools. He moved into the light when he was certain I had noticed him.
He had been weeping, but he seemed to be past that now.
I heard him. But at the same time, I searched the Public Address records to see what had been announced about the assassination. So far, no details had emerged about the cause of the “accident.”
He didn’t entirely like that idea.
So am I, I could have said, but there was no point in bringing that up.
I moved closer, but not close enough to invade his space.
He looked very tired. Still, I thought his demeanor would reassure the other clan elders as they stepped into their new positions. There was just one more thing I thought we ought to clarify.
He nodded.
I wondered if Baylor had been able to see that Terry was a better man than Ryan could have hoped to be. Then I realized it didn’t matter what Baylor had thought about anything. What mattered now was what we thought.
Terry seemed to be waiting for me to speak. And I had to do something I’m not good at. I had to judge whether I should touch Terry. He needed some reassurance; I could see that much. But conversation might have been all he could tolerate.
Finally I compromised and offered my hands. He took them immediately. I said,
He attempted a smile.
Weird. As if Baylor had planned to allow more freedoms, more class movement.
Or maybe he just wanted a bunch of people whose votes he could influence?
I scanned a variety of communiqués, to see if I could get a feel for how people were reacting.
That makes fifty-five of us now, Nuruddin had said. Fifty-five people trying to keep a secret—thirteen of them children.
It was about to become ten thousand.
Terry took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.
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