A hand outstretched: the music stopped, mid-phrase. The dancers stopped, held their poses. Silence, then, but for Six’s harsh breathing. He lay where he had fallen, in a widening pool of blood, struggling not to make a sound. Hostite knew already it was a crippling blow. He might live, and walk, but he would never dance again, even if the joint held.
“Steel,” the Chairman said. “Our thanks for your service. It is ended.”
Before anyone else could move, Hostite moved, his obsidian blade slicing through the air and Six’s throat. He bowed to the Chair’s box.
“Continue,” the Chair said. Hostite returned to his place; the music resumed mid-phrase where it had paused. Two still knelt, having no partner. Three and Eight moved with the music, dancing, avoiding both Two and the dangerous bright blood. It honored the honorable dead, to dance before them, around them.
At the end of that figure, the Chair gestured again, and again the dance paused. Now Hostite closed the dead eyes, and made the gestures and said the words that sent Six’s soul on its way. Servants came, rolled the body into a sling, and carried it out, to a soft drumbeat; others cleaned and dried the floor.
The last figures were as beautiful as anything Hostite had ever seen; the final pairing of Silver and Gold, Sun and Moon, surpassed art and entered the realm of spirit. Above death, above life, were the eternal fires, and so the dancers moved.
Afterward, in the Dancers’ Hall, they all knelt to honor the memory of Steel, and with the edge of a keen blade each added a drop of his or her own blood to the winding sheet. Pelinn looked pale, and no wonder after such a first night; Hostite gave her a hug, and held her until her body quit shivering. “You did well,” he whispered. “You did very well.”
Goonar Terakian and Basil Terakian-Junos had the combined investigative skills of any newshound in history, and more than three times the discretion. Their profits came not from revealing information, but concealing it. It had not taken them overlong to figure out that the drunk who’d accosted them back on Zenebra Main Station had been a New Texas Godfearing Militia member, and that the New Texans (as the Terakians privately referred to them, as opposed to the Texans of the Lone Star Confederation, who were perfectly respectable, if unfailingly sneaky, at “doin’ bidness”) were engaged in terrorism against the Familias Regnant.
Since Goonar and Basil had reported to their respective fathers as soon as they were back aboard Terakian ships, the Terakian family had a head start on the Familias Regnant’s Fleet when it came to planning. They had followed, from a discreet distance, every evidence of Fleet’s rescue of Brun Meager . . . and the more obvious evidence of her father’s mental instability.
Now Goonar and Basil had met again, this time on the family’s private resort on Caskadar. Their distant cousin Kaim, the only family member presently serving in Fleet, had taken leave due and was now sprawled on a couch on the wide veranda of Sea Breeze, glaring at the rain that poured steadily, as if from a vat overhead.
“My only leave in four years and it has to be raining!” Kaim had never been patient.
“It’s autumn,” Goonar said. “It’s just the fall rains . . .”
“I hate planets,” Kaim said. Goonar glanced at Basil, who shrugged. He looked almost as sulky as Kaim.
“You chose the time,” Goonar said, with more asperity than he intended. “You know about the climate—”
“I know more than that.” Kaim sighed, stretched, and beckoned to the other two. “Listen—what have you heard about rejuvenations going bad?”
“Well . . . there was always that story that the Patchcock-made stuff was tainted somehow. A Benignity plot, I heard, with a spy found right in the factory, wasn’t it?”
“That’s just bad drugs,” Kaim said, waving aside what had been 27% of the market share, and the disgrace and financial ruin of a Family with more than a dozen Seats in Council as if it were nothing. “What I have is evidence that the primary process may be faulty. Nothing hard yet. They’re still blaming it all on something wrong with that batch of drugs. But according to my sources, some of the first repeat Rejuvenants are showing mental deterioration. Lord Thornbuckle, for example.”
“I don’t see that,” Basil said. “She was his daughter; there’s nothing induced in his reaction.” Basil’s own daughter, just three now, had left that smear of jam on his chest. Goonar pitied her future suitors.
“I know I’m not a parent,” Kaim said. “But still—risking the security of the entire Familias—”
Goonar grunted, and put out a hand automatically to tap Basil’s shoulder. Kaim had been almost bragging about not fathering any children, as if he wanted the family to investigate his reasons. Basil had attitudes. That left Goonar to play peacemaker, as usual.
“Thing is,” Goonar said, “if it’s a matter of some drugs being bad, that’s very different from the process itself being flawed. Kaim, haven’t some of Fleet’s senior officers been rejuved?”
“Yes, but only once. None of them have had multiples, unless one of ’em’s had it done privately, not through Medical Branch. All the first ones were volunteers, done forty or more years ago, when there’d been enough civilian experience. It wasn’t made standard with flag rank for another twenty years. Then they started giving senior NCOs rejuv about ten years ago.”
“So . . . seen any crazy admirals lately?”
“There’s always Lepescu,” Kaim said. He had reported to the family about Lepescu before.
“He was born mean,” Goonar said. “That kind existed before rejuv.”
“I know that.” Kaim shifted uneasily. “Look—this is still very, very classified.”
“Yeah, right,” Basil said. He crossed his heart elaborately and spat to the left.
“It’s not the admirals—at least, I haven’t seen any crazy admirals, not that I see that many. But there’s a medical directive out on senior NCOs . . . anyone rejuved in the past ten years is being called in for immediate evaluation. And I have solid data that at least eight master chiefs have had negative performance evals in our sector alone, in the past half standard year.”
“Sounds like a bad drug batch to me,” Goonar said.
“Yeah—if the admirals, who’ve been rejuved longer, haven’t gone loopy, why would you think it’s anything else?” asked Basil.
“Mostly Lord Thornbuckle,” Kaim said. “I just cannot fathom a man of his caliber—his supposed caliber—getting us involved in a war to save that brainless twit of a daughter.”
Goonar reached out for Basil’s arm again, and found it, as he expected, knotted with angry muscle. “Trust us,” he said mildly. “Fathers are like that. Even yours.”
“But it could also be intentional,” Kaim said. “If someone wanted to ruin Fleet, making master chiefs nuts would be a good way to go.”
“And who would be doing this? Who would have access?”
“Across the whole organization—if it is that widespread—it would have to be sabotage in procurement, or upstream from them. Another traitor . . .”
Goonar shrugged. Kaim’s father, if not Kaim, had always had a thing about conspiracy theory, and that’s why his son had had to go into Fleet, because he had ignored profit for politics too long and couldn’t afford to launch his son as a family member should, with his own ship-shares.
“All organizations have some traitors,” Goonar said.
“Yes, but . . . what the NCOs are worried about is that it was a plot to start with, so that they could justify not giving rejuv to enlisted personnel. I don’t see that myself—admirals cost more and do less; everybody knows the senior NCOs are more valuable—but it’s spooking ’em. And having ’em spooked would suit our enemies. The Benignity, I can see them doing something like this, through agents of theirs. Fleet brass is worried about more traitors in the operational end, like Garrivay and Hearne, but why wouldn’t the Benignity suborn procurement as well?”