There was someone else too. A man with dry riverbeds in his mind. Another man who had been changed. James Holden, the enemy who had shared his enemy, back before Winston Duarte had broken, and in breaking, become.
With infinite effort and care, he pulled the unbearable vastness and complexity of his awareness in and in and in, compressing himself into what he had been. The blue faded into the color he had known as a man. The sense of the storm raging just on the other side, of the violence and threat, faded. He felt the warm, iron-smelling meat of his hand, holding nothing. He opened his eyes, turned to the comm controls, and opened a connection.
“Kelly,” he said. “Could you bring me a fresh pot of tea?”
The pause was less than might have been expected, under the circumstances. “Yes, sir,” Kelly said.
“Thank you.” Duarte dropped the connection.
A medical bed had been put in his study with an aerated foam mattress to prevent bedsores, but he was seated at his desk as if he had never left it. He took stock of his body, noticing its weakness. The thinness of its muscles. He stood, clasped his hands behind him, and walked to the window to see whether he could. He could.
Outside, a light, tapping rain was falling. There were puddles on the walkways and the grass was bright and clean. He reached out for Teresa, and he found her. She wasn’t nearby, but she wasn’t in distress. It was like watching her traipse through the wilds again, only without the artificial lens of the cameras. His love and indulgence for her was vast. Oceanic. But it wasn’t pressing. The truest expression of his love was his work, and so he turned to it as if this were any other day.
Duarte pulled up an executive summary the way he had at the start of every morning. Normally it was a page long. This one was a full volume. He sorted by category, pulling out the thread that addressed the status of traffic through the ring space.
Things had, putting it mildly, gone poorly in his absence. Scientific reports of the loss of Medina Station and the Typhoon. Military analyses of the siege of Laconia, the loss of the construction platforms. Intelligence summaries of the growing opposition in the widely scattered systems of humanity, and of Admiral Trejo’s attempts to hold the dream of the empire together without him.
There had been a time not long after her mother passed when Teresa had decided to make him breakfast. She had been so young, so incapable, that she had failed. He remembered the crust of bread heaping with jam and a pat of unmelted butter perched on top of it. The combination of ambition and affection and pathos had been beautiful in its way. It was the kind of memory that survived because the love and the embarrassment fit together so perfectly. This felt the same.
His awareness of the ring space was clear now. He could hear the echoes of it in the fabric of reality like he was pressing his ear to a ship’s deck to know the status of its drive. The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time.
“Admiral Trejo,” he said, and Anton startled.
It was the fifth week of Trejo’s combination press tour and reconquest of Sol system. He sat in his cabin, spent from his long day of glad-handing and speech-making with the local leaders and officials. He was the visible face of a nearly toppled empire, making sure no one knew how close he’d come to losing it all. After the hard weeks-long burn out from Laconia, it was exhausting. He wanted nothing more than a stiff drink and eight hours in his bed. Or twenty. Instead, he was on a video call with Secretary-General Duchet and his Martian counterpart, both of them on Luna and near enough that light delay didn’t interfere. The politicians were lying through their smiles. Trejo was threatening through his.
“Of course we understand the necessity of getting the orbital shipyards up and running as quickly as possible. Rebuilding our shared defenses is critical,” Duchet said. “But given the lawlessness that has followed the recent attack on Laconia, our first concern is security for the facilities. We have to have some guarantee that your ships will be able to protect these valuable assets. We don’t want to just paint a target on ourselves for the underground to aim at.”
You just got the shit kicked out of you, had your factories blown up, lost two of your most powerful battleships, and are scrambling to hold the empire together. Do you have enough ships to force us to work for you?
“We’ve suffered setbacks, that’s true,” Trejo drawled, the way he sometimes did when he was angry. “But there’s no need for concern. We have more than enough of the Pulsar-class destroyers to provide total security for Sol system.”
I just reconquered you with two dozen of those ships, and I have a shit-ton more of them I can call in if I need to, so fucking do what I tell you to do.
“Excellent to hear that,” the Martian prime minister said. “Please let the high consul know we will spare no effort to meet his production schedule.”
Please don’t carpet-bomb our cities.
“I will let him know,” Trejo replied. “The high consul treasures your support and loyalty.”
Duarte is a drooling moron, but if you give me the ships to hold the empire together, I won’t have to glass your damn planets, and maybe we all win.
Trejo killed the connection and leaned back in his chair. The bottle of whiskey in his cabinet called to him gently. The freshly made bed was much louder. He had time for neither. The underground was still running riot in thirteen hundred systems and more. And that was just his human problem. After that, there were the gates to deal with, and whatever within them kept turning the minds off in whole systems at a time as it sniffed for ways to exterminate humanity.
No rest for the wicked. No peace for the good.
“Connect me to the Association of Worlds rep, Sol system. I don’t remember her name,” he said. No one heard him but the ship.
CONNECTING NOW flashed on his screen. Time for more smiling lies. More veiled threats. More—and he used the word as an epithet—diplomacy.
“Admiral Trejo,” said a voice from behind him. It was familiar but so unexpected that his mind scrambled to place it. He had a brief, irrational idea that his attaché had been hiding in his room this whole time and had only just now chosen to reveal himself.
“Anton,” the voice said, lower and as intimate as a friend. Trejo turned around in his chair to face the room. Winston Duarte stood near the foot of his bed, hands behind his back. He wore a loose casual shirt and black trousers. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. His hair was mussed, as if he’d only recently woken up. He looked like he was actually there.
“Security alert,” Trejo said. “This room. Full sweep.”
Duarte looked pained. “Anton,” he said again.
In milliseconds, the ship had swept every inch of his cabin looking for anyone or anything that wasn’t supposed to be there. His screen reported to him that the room was free of listening devices, dangerous chemicals, unauthorized technology. He was also the only person in it. The ship asked if he wanted armed security personnel to respond.
“Am I having a stroke?” he asked the apparition.