by John Scalzi
“Oh, you snide fucking piece of shit,” Kiva said out loud as she read that last bit. “You really think you’re being clever.”
I’ve kept you alive for now, but I obviously can’t have you at Hub. So now you are on your way to Bremen. I believe you know what I have planned. I have reason to believe it will happen soon. If I am successful, then it’s possible I will recall you, to retrieve my property, and to discuss with you, as your family’s lead negotiator, the disposition of the House of Lagos in the new regime. After all, you were so considerate with the House of Nohamapetan while you were privileged to look after its interests. I look forward to having a Nohamapetan return the favor.
If I’m not successful, then I regret to say that I will likely not be in a position to send further instructions to Captain Robinette and his crew with respect to your disposition. By this time, I’m sure the captain has told you what that will mean. And before you suggest to him that my failure means that he won’t get paid the remainder of what’s owed to him, you should know that he knows that the remainder is already in an escrow account back at Hubfall. Sorry to disappoint you on that.
I’m afraid there’s not much more to say, other than that you should wish me luck. Your life depends on my success.
Enjoy Oktoberfest!
NN
Kiva read the letter, read it again, read it one more time just to be sure, then tore it up into small pieces, went to the crew head down the passageway from her broom closet, tossed the torn-up bits of letter into the head, pulled down her pants, sat on the head, and pissed all over them. This action did not change the overall tenor of Kiva’s current circumstances, but it did make her feel better.
Having done that, Kiva returned to her broom closet and considered her situation, and what advantages and assets she had at the moment.
Advantages: She was fucking alive, which honestly had come as something of a surprise to her after being shot in the face. The captain was correct that she didn’t look very pretty at the moment—her face was a mass of subdermal bruises and pockmarks where the drug-laden bits of powdery shot had gone into her skin, to be absorbed—but that wasn’t anything she was worried about. It wasn’t going to slow her down any.
Assets: Her brain. Her body. Not her face, per se—see above re: bruises and pocks—but everything else inside and out was working on all cylinders. Plus her current state of being, which was fucking pissed.
Not just fucking pissed at Nadashe Nohamapetan, to be clear, although Kiva was indeed righteously fucking pissed at her. Nadashe had had her shot in the face, kidnapped and put into space on a ship that was basically a case of fucking lockjaw waiting to happen. Nadashe needed to get an attitude adjustment, and Kiva very much wanted to be the one who gave it to her.
But the person Kiva was most fucking pissed at was herself. Senia had been right: Nadashe had found Kiva where she wasn’t looking. Kiva had walked into that meeting with Drusin Wolfe confident that she had the upper hand, that Wolfe and Nadashe were going to fall for her plan exactly as she had intended. She had been overconfident and underprepared, and it ended up with her being shot in the face and with her fate in the hands of a fucking Nohamapetan.
Kiva paused briefly to think about Senia, who almost certainly thought that Kiva was dead and who was having to deal with that. Kiva felt something stab at her, something that she was not entirely sure she’d ever felt before—grief, but not for the dead (which would be her, and she was not), but for the living, who had to sit with their own grief for the dead. It wasn’t fair to Senia to have to deal with this grief, and while Kiva was never one to delude herself that the world was anything close to approaching fair, this felt like a special flavor of out-of-bounds, something very particular that she would need to repay Nadashe for.
So, yes. Kiva was fucking pissed. Pissed at Nadashe. Pissed at herself. Pissed for Senia. And pissed to be on a ship that was apparently made mostly out of rust and spunk, hurtling toward fucking Oktoberfest, whatever the fuck that was.
Kiva had fucked up. It was time get her own back.
She had fifteen days and just under a couple of hours now to do it.
So Kiva got to work.
Chapter 16
Marce Claremont did not consider himself a man prone to emotional seesaws, but he had to admit the last several days had genuinely messed with his head.
First, the realization that Cardenia—the woman who, yes, actually, he was very deeply in love with despite the impossible fact that she was also Grayland II, emperox of the Interdependency—had lied to him. Not in a small way, like that she enjoyed the way he gave foot massages, or even in a large way, like cheating on him with some other member of her court because she was emperox and who was going to stop her. She had lied in the largest way possible, by entrusting him with an impossible task—a task upon which billions of lives were riding, a task the failure of which would flatten him forever into the dirt—and then withholding the information that he might use to solve that impossible task.
It was difficult even now for Marce to convey both the anger and absolute crushing disappointment he had felt when he realized what Cardenia had done, and the almost insulting rationale she had given for doing so. Asking Marce to find a way to use the evanescent Flow streams to save billions without giving him the highly advanced science that was used to create the Rupture was like asking someone to cure a highly contagious disease, and then not telling them about germ theory, all the data about which you just happened to have right there in your hand.
Cardenia had pointed out that the last time humans had this particular set of knowledge, they had almost wiped themselves out and had ultimately put themselves into the situation they were in today. Marce couldn’t argue against that, but he had argued that was then, and the circumstances were different now, and that no one working with that data today would be so stupid as to use it for those same ends. Cardenia had laughed in his face then, and something inside him had fallen out of love with her in that moment.
The two had argued and fought, and Marce said some fairly unforgivable things before storming off to sulk in his bachelor quarters, which were about half the size of Cardenia’s personal bathroom. He stewed there for a bit, while Cardenia went off to commune with her ancestors, or whatever it is that she wanted to call what she did in the Memory Room. Marce had meant to get some work done but instead went over the details of the fight in his head, playing them over in a constant loop, with special attention given to Cardenia laughing in his face.
He expected that the more he ran that moment in his head, the angrier he would get. But in reality the more he ran it in his head, the sadder and more depressed he got. It took him a good long while to realize why: It wasn’t that he was wrong, it’s just that Cardenia wasn’t wrong either, and she was probably more not wrong than he was. He was a scientist and frankly not the most astute observer of the human situation. He would never abuse the Rupture data like that and couldn’t imagine any of the scientists that he would work with would, either. They were busy trying to save the universe, after all.
But he had in the moment forgotten that Cardenia was also Grayland, and what she had to deal with on a daily basis: the grinding opportunism and political maneuvering of the world she inhabited; the number of people who wanted something from her or would be happy to take something from her; the depressing reality of knowing that there were people—forget people, entire conspiracies of people—who would think nothing of killing Grayland to get her out of the way of their own selfish goals.
Cardenia—Marce’s girlfriend, the woman he knew he loved—was sweet and kind and awkward and a little goofy. Grayland II, the emperox of the Interdependency, could not afford to be any of those things. And they were the same person. When he had said his naive words to Cardenia, it was Grayland who had laughed at him. Because Grayland knew better.
This realization about the nature of their argument did not make Marce feel better; it made him feel much much worse. It made him feel ba
d enough that he knew he needed to go over and apologize to Cardenia, no matter how annoyed he was that she wouldn’t give him the Rupture data.
That resolved, Marce splashed water on his face and was preparing to head back to Cardenia to grovel at her when he received the call from Senia Fundapellonan that Kiva Lagos had been murdered in Attavio VI park.
Marce took the news like a punch in the gut. Marce hadn’t seen much of Kiva since he had arrived at Hub and become involved with Cardenia, and Kiva had been busy enough on her own, with managing the House of Nohamapetan’s affairs and recently with her new relationship with Senia. But Marce looked back fondly on their travels to Hub and the time they had spent together, and he appreciated that she was solidly an ally to Grayland in a time when she sorely needed them.
Senia had called Marce because she knew that he was absolutely the quickest way to get the news to Cardenia; the news would eventually filter up to her, but it would otherwise have to go through several channels to arrive on her doorstep. Marce expressed his condolences to Senia and then carried himself through the vast expanse of the palace and arrived in Cardenia’s apartments just as she was exiting the Memory Room.
He told her about Kiva Lagos. And then, after they had both stopped crying about that, she told him she was giving him the Rupture data.
“I honestly can’t process that right now,” is all Marce could say to that.
Kiva Lagos’s body was identified via fingerprints and DNA. The death confirmed by the hospital, her body was, in accordance with her written legal instructions, sealed into a low-temperature transport casket and shipped out on the next available transport to the Ikoyi system. Even Senia didn’t arrive at the hospital before the body was sealed up; she had three minutes with the casket before it was shipped out on an expedited basis to make it to the That’s Just Your Opinion, Sir before it disembarked.
In a sad irony, the Your Opinion entered the Flow shoal to Ikoyi a little over an hour after the This Indecision’s Bugging Me—bearing the Countess Huma Lagos, Kiva’s mother and head of the House of Lagos—arrived at Hub for a meeting of the house’s various system directors. Grayland asked Marce to be her representative to the Countess Lagos, to pass along her private condolences and to assure the countess that her daughter’s public disfavor with the emperox had been manufactured.
Not only did the Countess Lagos not appear at all concerned about her daughter’s public disfavor, she also did not appear particularly concerned that her daughter was, in fact, dead. “Did you see the body?” she asked Marce, in her daughter’s office at the Guild House, when he came with the emperox’s condolences.
“The body was identified in two ways,” Marce said.
“That’s not what I asked you,” the Countess Lagos said.
“I didn’t see the body myself.”
“Nor did Miss Fundapellonan. She told me the body was sealed into a casket before she got there. Nor did any of Kiva’s staff here at the Guild House see her to identify the body, either at the House of Nohamapetan or the House of Lagos. The only people who saw her were the emergency technicians who ferried her body to the hospital, and the doctors who pronounced her dead when she arrived. None of whom know her.”
“There were the fingerprints and DNA,” Marce noted.
The Countess Lagos gave Marce an indulgent look. “Lord Marce, remind me. Are you the pleasant young man my daughter used as a fuck toy on her journey from End to Hub?”
“I … wouldn’t have put it that way, but yes, my lady.”
“She thought highly of you, in several categories.”
“Uh, thank you.”
“But for the purposes of this conversation, I seem to recall that just before you jumped from End, your ship was overtaken by pirates and you were required to pretend you were someone else, which required a fake DNA sample. Is that correct?”
“It is.”
“And before that, to get on our ship at all, you assumed a fake identity, which required both false fingerprints and irises. At least, that’s how the story was told to me. Also correct?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, Lord Marce. Let me ask you again. Did you see my daughter’s body? Did you or anyone who knew her see her body?”
“No.”
“And would you agree that her quote-unquote body was sealed into that casket with unseemly haste and shoved into a passing ship almost as quickly?”
“That was per her instruction.”
The countess made a dismissive sound. “Lord Marce, you are certainly a pretty young man, but I don’t think you’re all that bright. Kiva has no particular attachment to Ikoyi. She hasn’t lived there regularly since she was a child. And our family is neither religious nor holds with any special burial rites. Do you know what I plan to do with my body once I am dead?”
“I do not, Countess.”
“Neither do I. I’ll be dead and I won’t give a shit. If I’m at home my children will decide what to do with it. It’ll probably be liquification since that’s the standard for Ikoyi habitats, but they could prop it up with sticks and twirl my corpse around like a puppet for all I care. If I die on a ship, they can toss me out over the side. And I’m the Countess Lagos. I don’t see any of my children caring about it any more than I do, much less Kiva, who you know from experience is not exactly sentimental.”
“I do indeed,” agreed Marce.
The countess smiled. “So, again: No one saw the body, and it was shipped off with unseemly haste under dubious instruction by people unknown. And now the ship allegedly carrying her body is in the Flow, is it not? I do not usually take sucker bets, Lord Marce, but if you wish to bet me that the ship arrives with that casket still inside it, I will happily take your marks.”
“So you think Kiva is still alive.”
“It’s more to say that until I can see her body with my own eyes and lay my own hands on it, I find it unlikely she is dead.”
“Have you told this to Senia Fundapellonan?”
The Countess Lagos’s face became serious. “No. It would be cruel to do so.”
“Even though you think your daughter’s alive.”
“Lord Marce, do you love my daughter?”
“I was … am fond of her.”
“But you don’t love her.”
“No.”
“Senia Fundapellonan does.”
“I understand.”
“I am glad you do.”
“If that’s not Kiva in that casket, who is it and where is she?”
“I’m not a detective, Lord Marce. But if I were I suppose I would check to see if any young woman of similar height, color and build to Kiva has gone missing in the last several days. I might also try to find that ambulance that brought her to the hospital. I have a suspicion it might be hard to find.”
“I’ll have someone look into that,” Marce said.
“Do. As for where she is—you said that she was working with the emperox to introduce chaos into the plans of Nadashe Nohamapetan?”
“That’s what the emperox told me, yes.”
“Then I assume that is exactly what she is doing.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“As do I, Lord Marce. In the meantime I will pretend in public to grieve over my daughter.”
“That might be wise,” Marce said. “How long do you plan to stay in-system?”
“Indefinitely,” the countess said. “I have my business to attend to. I am led to believe the Imperial Navy wants to have a meeting with me about a task force they wish to assemble in Ikoyi space. And beyond that, whatever is happening with the emperox and my daughter, I want to be here for. I can’t imagine it will be anything less than spectacular when it finally plays out. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
* * *
And then there was the Rupture data.
From it, Marce learned two things. The first was that the scientists of the Free Systems, the loose confederation of star systems that occupied the same space as the I
nterdependency did today, were enormously advanced, at least in their understanding of the Flow and its dynamics. Marce could spend the rest of his natural-born life exploring the data that Cardenia had, with great reluctance, surrendered to him, and still not have scratched the surface of what it had to show him.
There was so much data here, so much understanding of the nature of the Flow that had previously been hidden to Marce, that he was genuinely angry at it. Observations and structures that his father had spent thirty years gathering data to describe were sketched out here in appendices—so well-understood as to be almost trivial. The idea that all of this information, all of this knowledge, had been flung down a memory hole for fifteen hundred years briefly brought Marce to a state that could only be described as existential despair.
But only briefly, because, after all, he had the data now. What he wanted to do was wallow in it, luxuriate in it, follow the threads of the data at his leisure to see where they led and what they meant. But there was no time for that. Right now, Marce still needed to save billions of people, or at least to see if it was possible. With great reluctance, he put aside nearly all the data to focus on the material that he could see was relevant to the problem at hand.
The second thing he learned was that the scientists of the Free Systems were not nearly smart enough.
For example, they understood that the Flow vibrates, but they didn’t understand that it’s a liquid.
Well, approximately. Trying to describe these underlying mathematical realities of the Flow into human language was like trying to describe the contents of a dictionary through dance. The Flow in fact neither vibrated nor acted like a liquid in any way that the human brain understood either of those two concepts. It was more accurate to say that across several dimensional axes, some of which nested inside others and still others which expressed themselves fractionally, there was a resting frequency to the Flow that could be manipulated locally by adding energy to it—and in doing so Flow shoals and streams could theoretically be induced to expand or contract or move in conventional space-time. This is how the Free Systems had collapsed the Flow stream out of their part of space; they’d created a hyperspatial equivalent of a resonator, chucked it into the Flow stream and set it off, collapsing that particular stream. That was the Rupture.