by Alec Saracen
Salmi laughed bitterly. “Oh, I’ll bring Chang down. You can count on that, Ambassador. I’ll see him pay for what he’s done.”
Zhai shivered in relief. So, she thought Chang was behind Landing, just like the rest of Tor did. That simplified things. The truth had to come out, but if he let it slip now, redirected anger at the Coalition – it might just be enough to keep Chang in power, regardless of Salmi’s efforts.
God, the power of that knowledge, he thought. As potent as the bomb that had flattened Landing. It was the truth on which Tor’s destiny hinged, the fulcrum that could reshape a world.
“I’ve called in aid,” he said. “From Bayard. Shouldn’t be longer than three days before it starts coming in. Whole ships full of relief–”
“They’re dying,” Salmi burst out, misery dripping thickly from her voice. “So many dead and dying, and I can’t help them. How could anyone do this? I don’t – I don’t understand. How can you be that – that callous, to burn human beings like – matchsticks? A city? I knew Landing meant nothing to them, but this – I – I just can’t…”
Her pain and devastation were tangible. Zhai tried to imagine watching New Toth, his adopted home, burning like Landing, but it was inconceivable, too absurd for it to seem plausible. Yet so the destruction of Landing must have been for Chrysia Salmi, and she had seen the unearthly antimatter blaze shatter her home all the same.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “It’s – awful.”
How inadequate that word was, he thought. How small next to the enormity of Landing.
Unbidden, thoughts of Xanang rose to the surface of his mind, and an aching, cavernous sense of loss with them.
“Yes,” Salmi said distantly. “It is.”
“If there’s any way we can help–”
“I’ll tell you.” Salmi audibly drew in a deep breath, and when she spoke again he tone was composed, though brittle. “I apologise for coming to you like this, Ambassador, without consent. I’ve breached your privacy. It didn’t seem important next to – next to Landing, but then that’s how they think. Fix your eyes on something big, and you stop noticing anything small at all. Like people. But it’s all people in the end, isn’t it?”
Then she was gone, back to her desperate efforts to keep the lights on in Landing, and Zhai was alone once more.
He sat deep in thought for a time, ideas chasing each other in circles in his head, stuck in an endless holding pattern.
At last, he rose and went to the kitchen. Lho was perched on a footstool there, stirring a deep pot of beef noodle soup. The extractor fans were turned off. Lho had always liked her kitchen to be brimming with steam and smoke, and Zhai's brow was damp before he'd taken two steps.
“It's not ready yet,” Lho snapped. Despite everything, Zhai smiled.
“I'm not here for that.”
Lho squinted at him suspiciously. “Then what?”
“I have to make a decision, Lho,” he said. “A big one. The biggest I'll ever make, probably.”
Lho stirred in silence, inviting him to continue.
Zhai drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It was us. The Coalition. We bombed Landing. One of the other factions, the ones who tried to kill me, but it was still the Coalition. And I don't know if I can stand to be part of it any longer.”
Lho took the news as if he'd told her that he was having difficulty choosing between two neckties. “So leave it.”
“I've given so much of myself to the Coalition, I'm afraid that if I take away what's left, it'll kill me. I can't leave. But I can't stay.”
Lho stopped stirring, leaning her spoon against the side of the pot. Her eyes glinted like gemstones in her wizened face.
“Gumiego,” she said, “I heard your mother say something very like that to your father once. She told him she could not stand to live on Xanang for another moment, but nor could she leave it to the fohu zho.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing,” Lho said, shrugging. “Nothing at all. Which was the wisest thing I ever saw him do. Her heart always listened to him, and he knew it. It had to be her decision.”
“So she stayed,” Zhai said heavily, “and died for it.”
“She did not abandon Xanang,” Lho said, her voice crackling with a political energy Zhai had never heard before. “Until the end, she fought for justice, because she had to.”
“But she died.” Zhai could hear the bitterness in his own voice, feel it sliding off his tongue. “She abandoned us.”
“She did.” Lho shrugged. “You know, you were the only thing that gave her pause. If it had just been your father, there would have been no choice at all. She would have put Xanang above her own life in a heartbeat, and above his. But yours?”
“I can't have mattered that much. She still did it.”
Lho met his gaze steadily. “She did. She thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Xanang still isn't free,” Zhai said. “If she'd known–”
“She still would have done it,” Lho said, with total certainty.
“Why?”
“It was right.”
Zhai shook his head. “It was futile.”
“Yes.” Lho picked up her spoon again. “And it was right.”
The peppery steam in the kitchen was making Zhai's eyes water. Sweat, moisture, and tears combined to trickle down his cheeks. “She didn't have to stay.”
“Have a little pity for her, Gumeigo. Impossible choices are impossible. They only bring regret.”
“How do you make that kind of choice?” Zhai said, to himself as much as to Lho. “It's too much.”
Lho made a derisive noise in the back of her throat. “It's not too much. If you have the strength to leave the Coalition, leave. If you don't, stay. You either have that strength or you don't, and you're the only one who knows. I can't help you any more than that, Gumeigo.”
Zhai stood there for a while, wordlessly watching Lho stirring her soup. She was adjusting the flavour with herbs and spices all the while, drawing it closer to perfection. Zhai found himself wishing he'd dedicated his life to food and not politics. There were foolproof recipes to follow. He could get food right.
The rain had intensified by the time he returned to his office, his nose still full of the kitchen's aromas. Macard was almost invisible behind the waves of rainwater crashing against the window. Government news channels were taking the opportunity to stop talking about Landing and instead extol the virtues of the drainage system under Macard's roads. Zhai watched for ten minutes, barely able to pay attention, and finally switched it off, listening to the pounding of the rain instead.
Well, Ambassador, he thought. Do you have the strength?
He delved deep into his own mind, hoping that he would find that he didn't. It would be a good excuse. Everything he'd done, all his lies and regrets – it would wash them all away, if he could just say he had never been strong enough to do otherwise. Submitting to the vast, faceless power of the system that had co-opted him was nothing to be ashamed of, he told himself. Damn near every politician did it. It would justify his entire career. He had lacked the tools to do anything differently. He’d had no choice, not really. It had all been inevitable.
But as he probed himself, searching for that validation, perversely hoping to find that final weakness, he found nothing. He dived deeper, analysing, calculating, identifying the strands and connections that bound him to the Coalition. One by one, he tested them for their strength, and one by one they fell away, rotted to nothing. He would lose his home. So what? There were other homes to be made. He would lose his job, his friends, his money, his reputation, his status – but they seemed irrelevant, ephemeral things to him now.
At last, he found one intact, at the very bottom of his mind: a way back. An unbroken connection, still holding firm, the single thread connecting Zhai and Coalition. It was simple force of habit.
Habit. The other bridges could be rebuilt in time, if this one survived. All he h
ad to do was what he'd always done: take the Coalition's side, tell its lies to the world, ignore its faults. That was all. And he had a lifetime's experience doing just that. Habit was his friend, so easy and familiar, so charismatic, so simple to follow. You could build anything on habit.
Habit, he thought. Is that all?
And just like that, with the faintest touch of his mind, the bridge shivered and turned to dust, and Zhai's last way back disappeared. He was adrift. He was alone.
He was free.
*
With Zhai locked in his office, the embassy lapsed into inactivity. Grey Hawk left the others watching the news and went looking for medical supplies, hoping to find something better than the gel packs to treat her burns. Before long, she ran into Ceq.
She was shuffling down the corridor, one hand on the wall and the other in front of her, ready to warn her of obstacles or break her fall. Grey Hawk took a step towards her, and Ceq stopped.
“I don't want your help,” she said.
“You're blind, aren't you?”
“None of your business, Liberator.” Ceq started walking again, shoving past Grey Hawk. “I don't need eyes to see.”
“Is your V-sight that good?” Grey Hawk asked, following her.
Ceq grunted. “Good enough. Don't you have something better to do?”
“Not really. Looking for medical supplies.”
Ceq's head moved fractionally towards her. “What for?”
Grey Hawk raised a hand to her ruined face. “I’m guessing you don’t get much detail with V-sight.”
Ceq paused for a moment to negotiate a kink in the wall. “I can see – shapes,” she admitted. “Not much else. Why?”
Grey Hawk smiled, then grimaced at the pain it brought her. “I survived the bomb,” she said, “but my head's still organic, for the most part. Well, right now it's mostly gel packs.”
“I thought you couldn't feel pain.”
“Not in most of my body. When all the skin on your head's burned to a crisp, though...”
“Shit,” Ceq said after a moment. “I didn't realise.”
“Probably better that way. I'm not a pretty sight.” Grey Hawk chuckled under her breath. “Not that I ever was.”
Ceq shrugged. “I thought you looked pretty good.”
That surprised Grey Hawk into silence. “Thank you,” she said, after a moment.
“No worries.” Ceq paused. “Have you seen Zhai?”
“Isn’t he in his office?”
“I didn't see him go.” Ceq shuffled on a few more steps without speaking. “Why did you tell me?” she asked abruptly. “About Naro?”
Grey Hawk told her what she’d told herself. “Because you didn't know.”
Ceq shook her head.“Bullshit.”
Grey Hawk sighed. “All right. Because – because I don't like liars. Especially not ones who get away with it.”
“Better. Still bullshit.”
“What do you want me to tell you?” Grey Hawk said, annoyed.
“How petty you really are, Liberator.”
Something in the flat truthfulness of Ceq's voice stung Grey Hawk into honesty.
“I wanted him to be seen as what he was.”
“Because...” Ceq said, as if she knew the rest of that sentence.
“Because that was the way to undermine him,” Grey Hawk said. “The truth.”
“Keep going. Why undermine him at all?”
“He deserved it.”
Ceq nodded to herself. “And you decide what people deserve, do you?”
“Don't pull that shit on me,” Grey Hawk said, suddenly angry. She roughly grabbed Ceq by the shoulder and spun her round, looking into her sightless eyes. Somehow, even though Ceq couldn't see her, Grey Hawk felt like a specimen under a microscope. “Yes, I do. We all do. I just put it into practice.”
“You know, maybe you should be his bodyguard,” Ceq said. She reached up and plucked Grey Hawk's hand from her shoulder, then turned and walked on, leaving the Liberator behind. “You're more like him than you know.”
Two hours later, Zhai called an embassy-wide meeting.
The screens had been turned off, leaving a large clear space in the middle of the room where Zhai stood, his small audience clustered before him. Grey Hawk sensed an edginess in the room, as if the air itself had been sharpened. To Grey Hawk's left, Lho and Ceq stood either side of Nouridh-Salter, all three wearing different yet equally impenetrable expressions. Lho held a small screen that Grey Hawk recognised as a personal translation unit.
Outside the window, rain hammered from a sky of lead.
“All right,” Zhai began. He paused, though not for effect. From the strained lines of his face, Grey Hawk could see an almost physical effort to get the words out, as if he was drawing them up from a very deep well. “Earlier today, we discovered that the antimatter bomb which was detonated in Landing was brought to Tor, on our own ship, by Peck and her agents. I believe it was supplied to them by significant figures in the Developist and Revanchist hierarchies as a weapon of last resort, to be used if Tor appeared to be in danger of securing independence rather than joining the Coalition. The purpose of this mission is and always has been to keep Tor independent.” The weary ghost of a smile passed over his lips. “I hope this, at least, does not shock anyone here.”
In another room, that might have got a laugh. Here, there was only a deathly, anticipatory silence.
“This calculated act of barbarity,” Zhai went on, “is out of keeping with the ideals and ethos of the Coalition. That is what I suspect most of you believe, and you are welcome to your own opinion. After all, we all serve the Coalition.” He paused, bowed his head for a moment, and looked up. “However. I have personally come to believe that this is not unusual behaviour from the Coalition. I have come to believe that I am colluding in a corrupt and poisonous system, and that I am complicit in this atrocity. All my professional life, I have supported an organisation which has enabled, perhaps even encouraged, the kind of mindset that would slaughter civilians by the thousands for political gain.”
Now the faces around the circle were shocked. Nouridh-Salter's face was slack, his mouth half-open.
“As a result,” Zhai said, his voice perfectly level, “as of this moment, I hereby resign my post of ambassador, renounce my Coalition citizenship, and declare my personal and political defection from the Coalition.”
Nouridh-Salter spluttered in disbelief. “Wh– defection? Are you mad?”
“Possibly,” Zhai replied. “I don’t expect any of you to follow me. In fact, I very strongly advise against it, especially for those who have family and loved ones in the Coalition. It would be best if you return to Coalition space immediately, for your own safety. I will send a message with you announcing my defection, and confirming that you all remained loyal.”
“Listen here,” Nouridh-Salter hissed, breaking ranks and marching right up to Zhai. He towered over the ambassador. “This is insanity. Leave Tor if you must, but don't fucking defect. Think about everything you'd be leaving behind, for God's sake. Are–”
“Harod,” Zhai said, with a cold and certain calm that instantly silenced Nouridh-Salter. “This is what's right for me. I know it is. Tell Sekkanen I'm sorry, but I have to do this.”
“No you don't! You don't have to do this at all!” Nouridh-Salter sounded on the verge of tears. “We didn't do this, Zhai, it was Peck! It was the Devvies!”
“It was all of us. Believe what you believe, Harod, but accept this. My decision is made.”
Nouridh-Salter rocked back on his heels, chewed his lip, leaned in. “You've been under a lot of strain,” he whispered. Grey Hawk's hearing could still pick it up. “The assassination attempt – they’d understand. Take it back now. Say you were ill, or blame it on stress. Don't do this, not now. You don't want this. You're not seeing clearly.”
“I'm seeing more clearly than ever before,” Zhai said, refusing to whisper back. “I'm sorry, Harod. I really am.”
> Nouridh-Salter stepped back, looking like he’d been sucker-punched. “I don't believe what I'm hearing.”
“Believe it.” Zhai turned his gaze to the others, who had been watching the drama unfold in shocked silence. “Leave tonight, while you still can. Captain Umbiba, you are no longer under my command – you are now under Harod’s authority.” The big military man nodded stiffly. “Sam, Ceq, you’re now attached to Harod as well.”
“Hell no,” Ceq said. “I'm staying, boss.”
Sam, on Grey Hawk’s other side, had gone even paler than normal during Zhai's speech, but now he stepped decisively forward. “So am I.”
Zhai looked from one to the other, conflicted. “It won’t be safe here – and if you stay, the Coalition won’t take you back.”
“Not a chance,” Ceq said. Sam mutely shook his head.
“Are you sure? Think about what you're leaving behind.”
“We're seeing this through, boss,” Sam said.
Ceq nodded. “To the end.”
“All right,” Zhai said, after a moment. Grey Hawk saw him blink rapidly. “Thank you.” He looked around the others. “Anyone else feeling suicidal?”
Fleischer coughed. “Not me, boss. Sorry.”
“Me neither,” Tetaine said quickly, clearly grateful that Fleischer had spoken up first. “I – I can’t. I just bought a house–”
Zhai chuckled, cutting him off. “Good. Go back. Don’t let me ruin your lives.”
Lho, who had been following everything on her translator, stepped forward, and Zhai looked stricken.
“No, Lho,” he said in Qienchuan. “It's too dangerous.”
“If you think you're getting rid of me that easily,” Lho said, “think again.”
“I won't have you die on my watch. Go back to the Coalition.”
Lho visibly bristled. “Listen, boy.” Grey Hawk's subtitles gave two alternatives for 'boy': 'child' and 'fool'. “I've spent all my life in the company of your family, and that's not going to stop until I run out of Zhais. I'm staying.”
“Please don't,” Zhai said, openly pleading. “At least stay away from Tor until this is done. I’m not going to get you killed, Lho.”