“Am I on active duty?”
“I don’t think you need to concern yourself with breaking protocol, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then bourbon sounds great, sir,” Tanaka replied. Admiral Milan spent a minute fussing at his desk, then came back with a cut crystal glass and two fingers of smoky brown liquid swirling in it.
“To your health,” Tanaka said, then took a sip.
“So,” Milan said, and sat with the unconscious grunt of an old man with a lot of bad joints. “What do you think that lightspeed shit means?”
“Not a clue, sir. I’m a shooter, not an egghead.”
“This is why I’ve always liked you,” he said, then sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers. The silence was different this time, and she wasn’t certain what it meant. “So just between the two of us—one old sailor to another—is there anything you want to tell me?”
She felt the adrenaline hit her bloodstream. She didn’t let it show. She was too practiced at deception for that. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He tilted his head and sighed. “I don’t either. I find this whole thing pretty fucking mysterious. And I’m not as good at swallowing my curiosity as I was when we were young.”
“Still genuinely unclear what we’re talking about. Was someone supposed to tell me why you wanted me here?”
“It wasn’t me that wanted you. Trejo made the request, and he had me do a little paperwork on your behalf.” He pulled out a physical folder of red paper with a silver string to close it, and handed it to her. It seemed so out of place, it was like being handed a stone tablet. She drank the rest of her bourbon off in one shot before she took it. It was lighter than she expected, and the string came undone easily. Inside was a single sheet of three-layer security parchment, the document verification circuits crisp as lace. Her picture was on it and her biometric profile, her name and rank and identification record numbers. And a short passage granting her Omega status from the Laconian Intelligence Directorate at the personal request of the High Consul’s Office.
If it had been a severed head, she wouldn’t have been more surprised.
“Is this…” she began.
“Not a joke. Admiral Trejo has instructed that you be given the keys to the kingdom. Override authority on any mission. Access to any information, regardless of security classification. Immunity from censure or prosecution for the duration of your deployment. Pretty sweet. You really telling me you don’t know what it’s about?”
“I assume there’s a mission?”
“Probably, but I’m not cleared to know what it is. You just keep your seat. I can show myself out.”
When Admiral Milan closed the door behind him, the office system threw a comm message on the wall screen. After a moment, Admiral Trejo appeared. She’d known him for as long as she’d known anyone living. His eyes were still the same uncanny green, but now there were dark bags under them. His hair was thinning and his skin had an unhealthy waxy shine. He looked haunted.
“Colonel Tanaka,” he said. “I’m reaching out to you with a critical mission for the empire. At present, I am taking a break from a hard burn from Sol system, and if this could wait until I arrived on Laconia, I’d brief you in person. It can’t, so this will have to do.”
She stared into her bourbon glass. It was empty, and the bottle sat just a meter away, but suddenly she didn’t want it anymore. She felt her attention sharpening.
“I’m sure that you, like everyone else in the empire, are wondering what exactly the high consul has been doing in seclusion. How he has been spearheading the fight against the forces that are threatening us from within the gates. I know there’s been some speculation that he was somehow injured or incapacitated. So, candidly, I need you to know that when I left for Sol system, the high consul was a drooling, brain-damaged moron who couldn’t feed himself or wipe his own ass. He has been that way since the attack that destroyed the Typhoon and Medina Station.”
Tanaka took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth.
“Dr. Cortázar had altered the high consul’s biology considerably by using modified protomolecule technologies. It left the high consul in possession of certain… abilities that were not fully documented or explored before Dr. Cortázar’s death. And in fact, Duarte killed him. Waved his hand and splattered that crazy fucker across half a room. I’ve never seen anything like it. Right now, the only people who know this are you, me, Dr. Okoye of the Science Directorate, and Teresa Duarte, who ran away with the underground’s assault forces after they cleaned our clock. So, pretty much the whole fucking enemy.
“Given that for background, you’ll understand how confused I was when the high consul appeared to me eighty… eighty-five hours ago in my office in Sol system. He didn’t register on the sensors. He didn’t interact with any physical object or leave any evidence of his presence that could be verified by an outside observer. But he was here. And before you get too happy with the Anton-Trejo’s-having-a-psychotic-break theory, there is some external evidence. Just not here in Sol.
“Shortly after I experienced what I experienced, Duarte disappeared from the State Building. Not popped-out-of-reality disappeared. He put on his pants and a fresh shirt, had a cup of tea and a polite conversation with his valet, then walked off the grounds. Every planetary sensor we have has been sweeping the landscape since then. No one has seen him.
“We’ve got over a thousand colony systems that are wondering if there’s anything left of the government. We have extradimensional enemies experimenting to find ways to snuff us out wholesale. And I am convinced that the answer to both of those issues is Winston Duarte, or whatever the fuck he’s turned into. I’ve known you for a long time, and I trust you. Your mission is to find him and bring him back. You’ve heard of carte blanche, but I promise you have never seen a check this blank. I don’t care what you spend—not in money, equipment, or lives—as long as you bring Winston Duarte back from wherever he’s gone. If he doesn’t want to come, convince him nicely if you can, but this only ends with him in our custody.
“Good hunting, Colonel.”
The message ended. Tanaka leaned back on the sofa, stretching her arms to her sides like a bird unfurling its wings. Her mind was already ticking away. The strangeness of it, the shocking revelations, the threat it posed. All of those were in her. She could feel them. But there was also the calm of a job that needed doing and the pleasure, deeper than she would have guessed, at the power she had just been given.
The door opened quietly, and Admiral Milan came back in.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
Tanaka laughed. “Not even close.”
Chapter Three: Naomi
They waited until the Black Kite was far enough from the ring gate that an intercept burn would have been difficult if not impossible. Then they waited a little more so that they wouldn’t seem suspicious for starting their transit burn at the first possible moment. And then Naomi couldn’t stand waiting anymore.
Three hours after that, the Laconian frigate hit them with a tightbeam demanding in official language and harsh tones of voice who they were and where they thought they were going.
“This is the Vincent Soo, independent freighter on contract with Atmosphäre Shared Liability Corporation out of Earth. We are carrying ore samples for quality control testing. Our public contracts and permissions are attached. Message repeats.”
The voice was built from samples of ten different men, slip-mixed by the Roci’s system so that even if the Laconians realized the message was false, they wouldn’t be able to track the voice patterns back to anyone. The Vincent Soo was a real ship with a similar drive signature and silhouette to their present modified version of the Roci, though it didn’t work outside Sol system. The contracts the message included would come back as real unless someone started digging into them. It was as plausible a mask as Naomi could fashion.