The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency)

by John Scalzi

  And perhaps that was the reason for her sadness. Had Nadashe been even a tiny bit kinder, or more wise, or simply fractionally better as a human being, she and Cardenia (and also Grayland II, now in all her glory, waiting with her empty teacup for yet another meeting) could have been friends, and perhaps even more than friends. Confidantes.

  Even now, Nadashe represented positive things to Grayland. She was smart and confident and beautiful and all the other sorts of things that Grayland had always had a hard time seeing in herself, and still did. To have won the friendship and the confidence of such a creature would have meant the world to her. To have missed that because Nadashe simply couldn’t see her, and didn’t feel like she was worth seeing, felt like a genuine tragedy.

  You just miss having friends, Grayland’s brain said to her, and that was true enough. She thought back to her dear and departed Naffa, who had been all the things Nadashe could also have been, had Nadashe wanted that. Grayland’s heart ached for Naffa, not in a sexual or romantic way, just in the way you miss your dearest friend, the one person who just gets you.

  Marce gets you, said the part of her brain that was a fifteen-year-old girl. And, well. Maybe he did at that. Grayland thought back to their first night together and was warmed with an almost languid happiness at the memory. The two of them had been ridiculously awkward with each other and then suddenly they weren’t, as the Oh God what is happening is this actually going to work commentary track was replaced by the Holy crap this is actually working and in fact is pretty amazing commentary track, which in turn was replaced by no commentary track for once, thank God, just happiness and contentment. For the first time since the loss of Naffa, and in a completely different way that was not unexpected and yet still entirely unanticipated in its scope, Grayland felt her whole self again.

  Marce did that for her. Naffa had done that for her. Grayland sensed that Nadashe could have done that for her too, given all her strengths, which would have complemented Grayland’s own.

  But Nadashe was … Nadashe. She was not the sum of her qualities. She was something else apart from that. Something that didn’t want what Grayland had to offer, except for her position, and what it could do for the House of Nohamapetan.

  Obelees Atek reentered the garden, with Archbishop Korbijn in tow, Korbijn wearing a simple and conservative suit rather than her full archbishop’s finery. Grayland smiled at this. Korbijn was sending her a message that she was paying attention to Grayland’s own muted sartorial choices.

  Grayland smiled and rose to greet her visitor and put Nadashe and the entire House of Nohamapetan out of her mind. Nadashe was gone now, and everything she had ever wanted for herself and her family was in the past tense, and everything she was or could have ever possibly been to Grayland had now slipped into the past as well. Grayland allowed herself to feel both the relief and the sadness she felt at Nadashe’s passing, and then put it aside to deal with Korbijn, and her real and present concerns.

  Goodbye, Nadashe, Grayland thought. I wish you peace now. And I hope you will stay dead.

  Chapter

  11

  After a day of hiding and skulking around with mercenaries, which was a thing too tedious to recount or indeed ever to think of again, Nadashe found herself on the You Can Blame It All on Me, her mother’s personal fiver.

  Nadashe thought it was an almost unconscionable extravagance that her mother used a fiver to haul herself from star system to star system, but on the other hand her mother didn’t really live anywhere else. The fiver was her home, even when it was parked in orbit over Terhathum. She never went down to Terhathum, or Basantapur, its largest city.

  Well, that was the deal, wasn’t it, Nadashe thought to herself. Dad got Terhathum. Mom got the rest of the universe.

  Nadashe was tucked quite comfortably into her own private apartment on the Blame. It was the one her mother always kept for her, because it was a whole huge goddamn spaceship, and she could keep an apartment for a couple hundred of her closest friends if she wanted. And in fact she did travel with an entourage of friends and lackeys and what have you. She was a countess, and she was the head of the House of Nohamapetan, and she was a narcissist who needed and wanted attention. All of these things conspired to have her travel with a village in tow. But the villagers were kept on the other side of the ship’s ring from Mother and her quarters. The only living quarters on her side of the ring were the ones for her and her three children.

  Two now, Nadashe said to herself, and sighed. She wasn’t ready to have that conversation with her mother.

  But she didn’t have to, yet; Mother wasn’t on the Blame. She was down at Hubfall, where she was being told the horrible news that her daughter, the traitor, the murderer, the imperial assassin, had gone up like a firework in a botched escape attempt that killed her, three guards, a driver and the Lord Teran Assan.

  The presence of Assan was a spicy bit of news that the media glommed onto and ran with. Everyone loved the idea of Assan, obsessed with the traitorous Nadashe Nohamapetan, planning her escape with her witless lawyer as their go-between. The lawyer who, incidentally, had jumped to his death while his family was at the zoo looking at miniature giraffes and long-haired otters.

  Nadashe pursed her lips at that thought. Alas, poor Dorick. He had had no idea what he was getting into, and probably continued to have no idea, up to and including the moment whichever of the countess’s bodyguards it was pushed him out of that window. At least his family would be well cared for, as long as Dorick had told his wife where his stash of money was, and also the authorities didn’t find it.

  No one as yet had seemed to suggest that Nadashe might still be alive. The escape scene featured a body for everyone plus one extra, and what was left in all cases was hardly identifiable. Assan’s presence, for example, had been identified by a titanium signet ring he was known to have been proud of. Nearly everything else had melted, burned and turned to ash. The only ones who knew Nadashe was still alive were the mercs who had retrieved her, and who Nadashe was sure would all find themselves at the wrong end of some death-dealing weapon sometime in the reasonably near future, and the crew of the Blame, none of whom would have any intention of speaking about her presence to anyone else, because their lives and jobs depended on it.

  Well, and Nadashe’s mother, who was no doubt wailing up a storm right now down on Hubfall. Nadashe imagined her mother gnashing her teeth and rending her garments, all for the benefit of the various local and imperial investigators who would be looking for something, anything, to suggest that this escape attempt was something other than a horrible failure.

  Let them look, Nadashe thought. Meanwhile, she was safe, she was secure, and as much any place could be called it, she was home. The beds were unspeakably soft and the bedclothes were warm and caressing, the food was exquisite, the showers were hot for as long as you wanted them to be hot, and the clothes weren’t all the same fucking shade of orange. Nadashe celebrated by eating a ridiculously large sandwich, taking a forty-minute shower, and then falling asleep under a pile of blankets for most of a day.

  She woke up to her mother sitting in a chair beside her bed. The countess had been watching Nadashe while she slept. Nadashe wondered how long it was that her mother had been watching her, and also, idly, at what point the watching would transmute from warmly maternal to something else entirely, something not quite seemly.

  Nadashe propped herself up and smiled at her mother. “Hi, Mom,” she said.

  The Countess Nohamapetan slapped her daughter hard across the face.

  “That’s for killing your brother,” she said.

  Then she slapped Nadashe again.

  “What’s that one for?” Nadashe asked.

  “For getting caught.”

  Nadashe rubbed her cheek. “I thought you’d be more upset about Amit.”

  “I’m absolutely furious about it,” the countess said. “He was my favorite.”

  “I know. So did Ghreni.”

  “I di
dn’t make a secret about it.”

  “You might have. Other parents do.”

  “I loved your brother. And he would have made a fine consort for the current emperox. And then there would have been a Nohamapetan on the throne.”

  “I have to tell you, Mom, that wasn’t going to happen.”

  “It could have been managed.”

  Nadashe smiled ruefully. “Have you met the new emperox? She’s not manageable.”

  “I learned that.”

  “So did I,” Nadashe said. “Early on. And when it was clear she wasn’t going to marry Amit, it was time to try again. There are a lot of Wu cousins. We could have made it work.”

  “You didn’t have to kill Amit to get to her.”

  “There were other complications.”

  “Your damn fool plan to take over End. And yes, I know about that,” the countess said when she caught Nadashe’s expression. “You and Amit and Ghreni. You weren’t as clever as you thought you were about covering your tracks when you skimmed accounts to pay for your little adventures. That Kiva Lagos person is going through our financials for the last decade. You’ve put the entire house at risk.”

  “That’s mostly on Amit,” Nadashe said. “He was the one cooking the books.”

  “But you were the one telling him to do it,” the countess countered. “You’re the smart one, Nadashe. You were always the smart one.”

  “I am what you made me, Mom.”

  “Not smart enough to keep Rennered Wu, though.”

  Nadashe groaned, fell back on the bed and put a pillow over her head. “I’m not listening to this again.”

  The countess removed the pillow. “You had one job. Become the imperial consort. I wanted it. The emperox wanted it. We spent years managing that. And you let it slip past you.”

  “For the last goddamned time, Mother, I didn’t let it slip past me. Rennered decided he liked fucking a variety of people and didn’t want to narrow down his enthusiasms.”

  “You could have dealt with that.”

  “I did. He and I had that conversation. I told him he could stick his dick anywhere he wanted, as long as I was the one he had children with. I thought that was what he wanted. A political marriage with benefits. But it turns out he wanted me to be jealous. Or something. He wanted monogamy and true love, and he wanted sex with just about anything that moved. And he was offended that I offered him the sex, which he was going to have anyway, instead of the monogamy, which he had no intention of practicing. He was a pig.”

  “You could have still brought him around.”

  “If you really believed that, Mom, then you shouldn’t have had him killed.”

  The countess shrugged. “He hurt you. I was angry. And anyway you’re right. The window for you with him was closing, and we couldn’t risk him marrying someone else.”

  Nadashe gaped at her mother. “You were just saying I could have brought him around!”

  “I was agreeing with you,” the countess said. “I thought you’d be happy about it.”

  Nadashe closed her eyes. “God, you are so exhausting, Mother. Please pick another topic.”

  “Marriage.”

  “That’s the same topic.”

  “Same topic, different players.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jasin Wu.”

  “What about him?”

  “You should consider marrying him.”

  “He’s already married.”

  “This is a small detail. Also he has no children, which is useful.”

  “Useful for what?”

  “We’re going to make him emperox.”

  Nadashe sat up for this. “He’s not in the line of succession.”

  “He’s a Wu. When Grayland’s gone, whatever ‘line of succession’ there was will be tossed to the wayside. What’s left after that is negotiation.”

  “There will be other Wus who want to be emperox.”

  “There’s only one serious competitor, Deran Wu. And we’ve already taken care of that.”

  “How?”

  “Deran supports Jasin’s bid to be emperox and gets his supporters to fall in line. In return, when Jasin is emperox, he gives Deran sole control of the House of Wu. No more of this ‘board of directors’ nonsense that keeps the house paralyzed.”

  “And the other cousins are just going to fall in line for this.”

  “By the time it’s done they won’t be in a position to argue. You’ll be meeting both Jasin and Deran soon enough. You can judge how serious they are about the plan.”

  “And Jasin will have me as consort.”

  “Yes, he’s already agreed to that.”

  “He tried to have me murdered in prison.”

  “He didn’t know you as a person yet.”

  “Also, there’s the minor detail that I’m supposed to be dead.”

  “We’ll fix that. We’re already fixing it. You were already fixing it. I know how you were working on shifting the blame for everything to Amit. Deran Wu laid it out for me. I told him to keep doing it.”

  Nadashe was genuinely shocked. “You just said Amit was your favorite.”

  “He is. Always will be. But he’s also dead, and we need you alive and relatively unimplicated. Jasin is offering you a throne.”

  “In return for what?”

  “Obviously, for us helping to unseat Grayland.”

  “‘Unseat’ is such an ambiguous verb, Mother.”

  “We don’t have to kill her,” the countess said. “Isolating and exiling her would work just as well.”

  “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “She is already doing it herself with this visions nonsense. She’s alienating the church and she’s about to alienate the parliament. Some of the noble houses are already turning against her. It’s just a matter of time. That and we remove some of her key allies. Starting with Kiva Lagos, who is just causing trouble for us anyway.”

  “How do you plan to remove her?”

  “Let me worry about that, Nadashe.”

  “Grayland’s not actually that close to Lagos,” Nadashe said. “Getting rid of her benefits us more than it wounds her.”

  “I have something else to wound her.”

  “What?”

  The countess was silent for a moment. “Did you know that Grayland was going to make you a hostage?”

  “How was she going to do that?”

  “She told me was going to commute your death sentences and have you serve your time on Xi’an. Somewhere you would always be within reach. It was her way of letting me know that if I ever got out of line, your life was forfeit.”

  This got a wry smile from Nadashe. “She doesn’t know you very well. Or our family.”

  “That’s not the point,” the countess said. “The point was that she thought she could get to me through someone she thought I loved. Control me with someone she thought I loved.”

  Nadashe noted the construction of her mother’s sentences but didn’t say anything about it. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to make Grayland feel what she wanted me to feel. I’m going to make it known that I can touch the people she cares about the most.”

  “And who does she care about?” Nadashe asked. “Enough to make an example out of?”

  Chapter

  12

  Marce Claremont watched as the Oliveer Bransid turned on its floodlights and illuminated the outer hull of the structure it floated next to.

  “You wanted to see Dalasýsla,” Captain Kinta Laure said to him. She pointed toward the bridge viewscreen. “There it is.”

  “There it is,” Marce agreed. The Bransid was illuminating only a tiny area of Dalasýsla’s hull. The primary habitat structure stretched on for klicks, a long cylinder that used to be filled with humans and all of their lives. Beyond Dalasýsla, blocked by the structure, the giant planet of Dalasýsla Prime lurked, roughly the size of Neptune back in humanity’s home system.

  “It
’s amazing it’s actually still here,” Captain Laure said.

  “It was in a stable orbit when the Flow stream collapsed,” Marce said.

  “That was eight hundred years ago. That’s a long time for any nonnatural object’s orbit to stay stable. The other moons might have perturbed it gravitationally. A passing comet could have done the same. An impact from a meteor or outgassing from damage might have nudged it. Probably did nudge it, since Klupper here”—Laure acknowledged one of her bridge crew—“tells me that in fact Dalasýsla isn’t in a stable orbit anymore. It’s beginning to spiral into the planet.”

  Marce frowned. “Is that going to affect us?”

  “Not unless we’re here in about a hundred years,” Laure said. “Let’s try not to be.”

  Marce nodded at this and turned back to the viewscreen. Superficially Dalasýsla didn’t look substantially any different from any number of large spacebound human habitats; humans had settled on six or seven basic large habitat designs that could scale up and allow for some semblance of standard gravity by rotation. Dalasýsla was a modified O’Neill cylinder, a model that had not undergone major revision for centuries. It was efficient, relatively simple, and just worked.

  That is, as long as you had the people and resources to make it work. When you ran short of either, you developed problems.

  “It’s dead?” Marce asked Laure.

  “It’s dead,” Laure said. “Long dead. We took its temperature on the way in. No substantial difference from anything else out here. Cold on the inside as it is on the outside. Your team will be wearing suits to go over.”

  Marce nodded again. His small team of scientists would have been wearing suits regardless. Eight hundred years is a long time. No one wanted to contaminate anything, or be contaminated. “So we shouldn’t worry about bringing along our marine detachment,” he joked.

  “You’ll bring along your detachment,” Laure said. “Just because that place is dead doesn’t mean it can’t kill you.”

  “That’s a fact.”