by Alec Saracen
“In the building.”
Zhai rolled his eyes. “Hiding, huh?”
“Maybe she just doesn't want to talk to you.”
“I'm sure she doesn't.”
“I think she's afraid of you,” Ceq said, after a moment.
That got Zhai's attention. “Afraid of me? She's a cutting-edge cyborg commando. I'm a fat old man. What's she got to fear?”
“The same thing Thier does.”
“Which is?”
“You know what.”
They came to a stop in the reception area, past the last of the armed guards.
“What, corruption?” Zhai said. “Am I really this harbinger of moral disease to everyone? Do they think I'm – infectious, somehow? Is that it?”
“Are you?”
Zhai stared at her wordlessly for what felt like a very long time. Ceq looked back at him, her eyes betraying very little. All Zhai gleaned from them was a faint shadow of judgement, though not in the sense of condemnation. Rather, he felt like he was on trial, and everything he said or did was being logged in a vast catalogue of evidence behind those dark, watchful eyes. If anyone in the galaxy could give him an impartial trial, he supposed it was probably Ceq. She was his prosecutor and his defender, both judge and jury. Though hopefully not executioner.
“I don't know,” he said at last. “Maybe. But it's my job to change people's minds, Ceq.”
“Ever really thought about that phrase?” Ceq mused. “'Change people's minds'. The more you do, the worse it sounds.”
Zhai opened and closed his mouth, realising as the words were on their way up through his throat that he couldn't disagree.
“Maybe,” he said again. Somewhere in the vast ledgers of the court in Ceq's mind, a mark was made and a case strengthened – though whether it was for or against him, he couldn't say.
Sam arrived within ten minutes, and Zhai and Ceq hurried across to the car as soon as it appeared. Zhai slid in next to Sam.
“How'd it go?” Sam asked.
Zhai blew out his cheeks. “About as well as could be expected, really. Thier's finally agreed to work with us. We won't get anything done for a while, but – promising signs. And that makes our position much stronger in general, because we have another viable option apart from the Hactaurs.”
“You really think ResTore can run a planet?”
“No,” Zhai admitted, “but they'll keep Tor out of the Coalition for good. I think the Devvies are going to have to admit defeat on this world.” He made a mock gun with his thumb and forefinger and mimed shooting. “Take that, Peck.”
“They've been quiet,” Ceq murmured. “Maybe they're up to something.”
“Not much they can do now. Killing me won't do much for their cause.” He considered it further, and added: “Though they'd probably do it anyway, out of bloody spite.”
“Things look good for us, then,” Sam said. “Well done, boss.”
Zhai shrugged. Tactical success in a political meeting usually left him with an elated glow for an hour or so, but his 'victory' over Thier had produced nothing of the sort. “Honestly,” he said, “I think things might have gone this way even if no Coalition ambassador had ever set foot on Tor.”
“You never know, though.”
“True,” Zhai said, settling back. “You never do.”
*
Blue Bull drew the short straw and was left to protect Thier. Despite his repairs, he been unable to completely restore his leg. A stationary role guarding the surviving ResTore leadership made sense for him, though he didn't like it. He stalked off to scout out the perimeter of Thier's hideout as the other Liberators left one by one, muttering over the communal channel about missing out on the real action.
Blue Wasp and Red Wolf left first, leaving Grey Hawk in the ResTore command hub. She made a handful of minor adjustments to her gear as she waited for the minutes to pass. She was itching to throw herself into the heavy fighting engulfing Landing, but they had agreed to return separately to their headquarters to restock and work out a plan of action first. Leaving together might have drawn attention to Thier's sanctuary, and nobody wanted to risk endangering him again after they'd gone to so much trouble to rescue him.
Grey Hawk allowed her eyes to fall on Thier, sitting numbly in the centre of the room like the nucleus of an atom. He didn't look back. His conversation with Zhai, which Grey Hawk had covertly listened in on from another room, had drained his battery to critical levels. How he was still awake, she had no clue. Sheer force of will, perhaps.
She finished her adjustments and folded the rifle up. Enough time had passed that she could leave safely – or as safely as anyone could do anything in a city erupting into civil war – but her eyes kept returning to Thier. Even inactive, he was the room's centre of gravity. Every now and again, one of his subordinates hurried over to him, at which Thier would wearily lift his head and confer with them. His body language screamed that he needed sleep. Thier wasn't listening to his body. In the brief time she had known him, she had come to admire the man's commitment to ResTore, though his determination was threatening to become foolhardiness.
In a quiet moment, she sauntered over to him. He didn't look up at her.
“I'm leaving in a minute,” she said. “Blue Bull will take care of you.”
“Thank you,” he said tonelessly.
She nudged him with her elbow. “Hey. Get some sleep, eh?”
“We're at war,” Thier said. “Sleep can wait.”
“War can wait. You need sleep. Surely you can delegate.”
Now Thier looked up, with eyes all the more striking for the livid bruised flesh of his face. “I could,” he said, “if I had my deputies. Half of them are in military cells. The other half are dead. ResTore is bigger than me, Liberator.”
“We're trying to trace other prisoners. We'll rescue them if we can, but things are–” She shrugged. “I don't think the same trick will work twice. It barely worked once.”
“I know,” Thier muttered. “Understand, though, these are my friends. My oldest allies. I've been at their weddings, toasted their children...”
Grey Hawk gently placed a hand on his shoulder as his head sagged again. “War is loss,” she said.
Thier let out a quiet grunt of laughter. “There's a Yustrid quote for everything, isn't there?” he said. “The paradox of war. 'Though we win the world by force of arms, we lose worlds within us. War is gain; war is loss.'” He sighed. “Perhaps I should have been a Liberator. It might have been easier than this. How I envy you, Grey Hawk. You act. You have a righteous cause, and the means to pursue it.”
“It's not easy,” Grey Hawk said quietly.
“No,” Thier said, after a moment of contemplation. “I suspect not. I'm sure the reality is less romantic than I like to think. Let me dream, though.” He glanced up, and they spoke the same Yustrid quote simultaneously: “'We must always dream.'”
They chuckled together for a time, until Thier's laugh turned into a hacking cough. Some of his advisers looked over in alarm, but he waved them away.
“Thank you,” he said, still wheezing. “Truly. You saved my life. You might have saved my world.”
“You can repay me by going to bed,” Grey Hawk said severely, and Thier chuckled again.
“Very well. I suppose I can take a few hours. Once I've announced my survival.” When he looked up at her, he was smiling slightly. “Stay the course, Liberator. We both seem to have become – entangled – with Ambassador Zhai. I'm in no position to reject him, as much as I'd like to. You are. Be careful of that one.”
“I am,” Grey Hawk said, without much heart. She glanced at the blocked-out windows. “I should go.”
Thier nodded. “Of course. Go. Liberate. I've kept you too long already. There are lives to be saved.”
And lives to end, she thought.
“I'll see you again,” Grey Hawk said. “When this is all over.”
“I hope so,” Thier said, and pointed at the door. “Now go
. Tor needs you.”
Grey Hawk went to war.
*
They made it out of Landing without incident, though it took nearly an hour. A steady stream of cars was leaving the city, never jamming the roads but never leaving them empty either. The neutral parties were slowly bleeding out of Landing. Ceq watched the nearby cars with anxious alertness, as if daring assassins to suddenly leap out of the woodwork and take aim at Zhai. None did.
Overhead, the clouds were thickening, boiling down to a thunderous, concentrated essence. Zhai watched them hanging motionless through a virtual skylight, wondering whether native Torians could sense the coming of the monsoons. How would the world change when the rains came? That was the one factor he found impossible to estimate. It might change everything – or nothing. Would it suppress the poorly equipped rebels, or would it hamstring an unwieldy military instead?
And that was just the physical impact. Instinctively, Zhai sensed that it might introduce a hitherto unknown element into every political equation, even those he presumed solved, as if the scouring rains could unearth a buried hoard of secrets from Tor's collective psyche. It was a strange, irrational feeling, which only convinced him further that the storms to come would bring with them unpredictable upheaval. Look at me, he thought. Gumeigo Zhai, weather diviner. You can take the boy out of Xanang...
Still, for the moment, there was peace in the car. Sam was preoccupied with his watch, his brow furrowed in deep concentration. Ceq stared absently out of the window. Zhai found himself watching her, wondering what was going through her head, if anything. Ceq's peculiar intelligence was foreign to Zhai. She could come out with a casual, devastating insight one moment and seem utterly vacant the next. It was there, though, there was no doubt about that, and it was dangerous. Zhai was finally beginning to understand how deep she could go. Her analytic facilities struck like needles, boring hair-wide shafts into his mind that granted her a near-perfect understanding of some tiny aspect of him. With enough time, those aspects could add up to a psychological portrait of Zhai that nobody else had managed to paint. Even Grigori Thier's penetrating gaze couldn't reach those depths, and though his insights were broader than Ceq's, they were also clumsier.
Not for the first time, Zhai wondered whether V-sight might have dimensions beyond the limited understanding of Void science. Humankind had spent so many centuries rationalising the Void and V-abilities that even documented effects like prophecy and future-sight were treated with suspicion. Magic had become science, and nobody wanted to change it back. Still, though, when Ceq looked at him, Zhai found it rather easy to believe that her eyes saw beyond the physical, whether she knew it or not.
They came to the ruins of a checkpoint, and rolled through without even slowing down.
Zhai glanced at the empty seat next to Ceq, where Grey Hawk had sat on that first journey. Her absence left an unaccountably large hole. They had barely spent a few hours in each others' company, and yet somehow Zhai felt that he knew the woman very well. In fact, she fascinated him. He recognised a certain spark in her mind that he knew glowed within his own, an innate political intelligence that shone through thick accreted layers of Liberation propaganda. If Ceq was right and she was afraid he would corrupt her, that fear was misplaced. Given time, Grey Hawk would corrupt herself. She was too smart not to.
A few minutes down the highway, with Landing still looming large behind them, the muted footage on Roshi Comet's news feed, which had been playing silently on the car screen, suddenly switched from footage of two VTOLs hovering low over a building as soldiers rappelled down from their bellies to a blank screen. Zhai noticed and turned up the volume.
“–himself, who is broadcasting live from an unknown location. I repeat, this is coming to you live from ResTore, and we'll see it just as soon as – here we go, folks.”
The image changed to the ResTore logo, then without fanfare to Grigori Thier, now sitting at a desk in that same converted changing room – though Zhai noted it had been carefully rearranged to prevent it from being identified as part of a gym to eagle-eyed government viewers. On the screen, his swollen, purpling face looked even worse, and Zhai wondered if a rare cynic in ResTore had touched it up before release to emphasise it.
“Twins, he looks terrible,” Sam muttered.
“I will keep this brief,” Thier said. His exhaustion was still plain to see, but the video transfigured it into a natural, weary dignity that Coalition video staging experts would have sacrificed limbs to achieve. “I am alive. I am free. If not for the valiant efforts of several friends of Tor, I would be neither.” He paused to compose himself, closing his eyes for a moment before continuing. “I fear that the government has made its intentions clear. We are at war now, a war that may save Tor – or ruin it. To Cowden Chang, the man who claims a presidency to which he has no right, I say this.” Thier leaned forward, every scab and abrasion on his face in clear view. “We will not surrender our world to you without a fight. ResTore has shunned violence, but you have forced it upon us. To the people of Tor, I say this. There is pain coming, and death, and despair. They will seem insurmountable, and without unity, they will be. I bleed with you. I share that pain, I share that despair. If death comes for me, let it come, because I am one man, and you are a world. We suffer together. We march together. We fight together. And if we are strong, and if we let no pain deter us, no despair break us, no death end us, we will survive, and we will be free.” He sat back, the fresh energy that had animated him as he spoke suddenly fading away, leaving Thier looking old, tired, and wounded.
On the other side of the car, Ceq suddenly jerked upright with panic in her eyes.
“We will be free,” Thier repeated, and the world ignited.
A blinding light erupted on all sides, pouring into the car with the brilliance of the sun. Zhai cried out and instinctively shielded his burning eyes with his arms, far too late to make a difference. The awful blaze of the light was already fading. He heard Ceq and Sam shouting in wordless shock and pain, but he couldn't see them even when he cautiously uncovered his eyes. The world had been replaced by an angry pulsating blob of nameless colours.
“What–” Zhai began, and the blast wave rear-ended the car with a dizzying jolt. Zhai heard himself screaming as the back of the car was lifted up and slammed back down, the safety belt driving the wind out of him. The car screeched to a halt as the emergency brakes cut in. Zhai jerked forward and was flung back, his heart jackhammering away in his ears, and he braced himself for another impact, shrinking into himself, trembling, his lips moving soundlessly in terror.
Nothing happened.
In a daze, he fumbled for the seatbelt release and then for the door handle. Tor's hot, moist air flooded the car. He stumbled out, ignoring the moaning of Sam and Ceq, and steadied himself on the door, still blind. Vision was returning, slowly, the edges of the blotch of not-colour starting to fade, light edging its way back into his world. He blinked rapidly, tears trickling down his face, trying to clear his eyes. A dull pain throbbed behind them.
Coherent thought escaped him. All he knew was that he had to see again. Sight was advancing slowly inwards, forming a moat of reality around the blind spot, but even the sight he had was smeared, shimmery, confused. He saw green, and grey, and white. Shapes resolved themselves. The car swam into view in the corners of his vision. The road returned.
“Boss,” Ceq was saying, with a pleading urgency in her voice. “I can't see, boss. I can't see...”
But Zhai paid her no attention. He took a stumbling step forwards, drawn towards the terrible sight before him like a moth to the flame. Another step, and another, and another, and at last he stood still. There was no mistaking what he was seeing.
Zhai stood there in utter, dumb horror, his mouth hanging open, his mind blank, transfixed by the towering spectre of the mushroom cloud.
24
In his dreams, it came to Zhai again. It hung before him in the silent violet wash of the Void, undulating with hyp
notic slowness, a thread of the universe unspooling. The soft light emanating from it transfixed him.
Zhai was entrapped, snared. Any motion was glacial, as if his dream-body had the mass of a star. Invisible forces held his limbs tight.
He could hear the throaty thunder of a distant ocean.
Something was pressing in all around him, holding him in thrall like an ancient insect in amber. The supple Void thing was slowing, and Zhai had the disquieting sense that it too was being drained of power and motion, the life drawn gradually from its glowing coils. It was fading, and the ocean’s roar rising.
The light suddenly intensified. Zhai struggled to shield his eyes, but his arms refused to obey. The shape of the Void thing grew brighter and more brilliant, burning with nuclear intensity.
Zhai could feel his retinas frying, disintegrating under the punishing glare. His clothes turned to ash. His skin flashed red and sloughed away like strings of hot glue. Muscle and ligament and bone boiled into nothingness, and still the light grew, penetrating him, dissolving him down to his component particles, annihilating him–
Zhai woke, and half the world was gone.
As he stumbled to the shower, only the periphery of his vision was left to him. A sightless blob of non-colour dominated the world, a nuclear tattoo seared onto his eyeballs.
He let the hot water wash over him, barely feeling it. As he let the air streams blast him dry, he glanced at the mirror. The blind spot hid his own face from him.
Zhai watched his fingers mechanically going through the motions of dressing him. He had no recollection of picking out a suit or shirt.
The screen in the main room was playing to a silent audience. Zhai glanced at his watch, which he also didn't remember putting on, and after angling it so that he could see its display at the edge of vision, saw that it was barely six in the morning. Umbiba, Tetaine, Harod, and Sam were already awake.
At first, Zhai didn't comprehend what he saw. It was impossible to focus properly on something he could only see out of the corners of his eyes. Even in that peripheral ring of clearer vision, the world was dim and blurred. He saw dark shapes against a lighter background, blocky and regular, and it took him a few seconds to work out that they were Landing's evacuation towers, silhouetted against a clouded sky.