But then sometimes when no one was observing them, Xan would put his head in Cara’s lap so she could ruffle his hair. It was a moment that primates had been sharing back to the Pleistocene, deeper and more recognizable than mere humanity. Or Cara would crack a joke about something Elvi asked, and then smile almost shyly when Elvi actually laughed. Elvi’s opinion shifted on them. Sometimes she was sure they were puppets of inscrutable alien technologies. Sometimes it seemed obvious that Cortázar had built his case that they weren’t human just so he could keep them in a cage for a few decades and run tests on them. Elvi wasn’t sure if she liked them or if they scared the shit out of her. If they were passing their Turing test, or if she was failing it.
But it was interesting that none of Cortázar’s work on Duarte seemed to have resulted in the high consul’s getting access to the library, and the weird turning-off of consciousness hadn’t broken Cara and Xan the way it had Duarte. There was a clue in there somewhere. She had the dataset. She just needed the right grid to put over it, and the pattern would make sense. She could feel it.
Her hand terminal went off again. This time with a message. Her transport had arrived. She was late for the briefing. She muttered something obscene and started levering herself up to standing. “I have to go.”
“We’ll be here when you get back,” Cara said, and after a pause, Xan laughed. Elvi smiled too. It was silly to treat them like she’d been having lunch with friends and had to go too soon, but there she was. Sometimes she was silly.
She leaned on her cane as she made her way out through the labs to the fresh and open air. Her leg hurt. The regrowth, as simple as it was, was going slowly. Poorly. Fayez’s new foot was already in place, the skin a little paler and softer, the new muscles still prone to cramp if he walked too much. But he’d regrown bones and tendons and nerves, and she was still leaning on a cane.
The difference, she knew, was the stress. Fayez was almost ornamental in her present life. He slept in, ate at the State Building, visited with whoever came through the gardens or read books or watched old entertainment feeds. He recuperated. Elvi was diving through Cortázar’s data when she wasn’t examining Duarte’s condition or trying to keep Teresa from being murdered in the name of curiosity or going over her own data from the Falcon. She was barely sleeping, and when she did, it was just rolling the dice to see what flavor of nightmare was taking its turn.
There would be a point when it was all too much. When the intrusive image of Sagale with a part of his head missing wouldn’t let itself be kicked down the road for her to think about later even one more time. When she’d break. It hadn’t come yet, though, so she didn’t have to deal with it. She was very aware that she was working on what Fayez called fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happening-right-now protocol.
Worse than that, she was coming to a place where she enjoyed the intensity. She had never been under more stress in her life, except maybe once, back on Ilus. Everyone had been going blind, and there were neurotoxin-covered slugs crawling up out of the ground, and alien artifacts coming to life, and people murdering each other over political issues and personal pride. Everything had depended on her talent and the sharpness of her mind. And now it did again. And part of her loved it like it was sugar. Probably not a healthy part.
The driver waiting for her had an umbrella up to shield her from a light, misty rain. He didn’t speak. When she got to the car, she leaned toward him. “Let Trejo know I’m on my way.”
“I already have, Doctor,” the driver said.
Drivers, Elvi thought as they pulled away, were a strange kind of affectation. It would have been easier to have a transport just pick her up and take her without another human involved. Having someone there whose job was to be deferential to her actually slowed things down. An extra layer of processing. Like that pause the children had. She wondered if it was like a stutter. She had to read up on that. Maybe there was something useful in it.
The State Building was wreathed in mist. The car’s heater wasn’t quite enough to push back the cold that radiated from the window. Early winter on Laconia—on this part of Laconia anyway—seemed to involve a lot of chilly days and bitter nights. As soon as the sun went down, all the mist would turn into an all-encompassing layer of ice. The local trees had all retracted their leaves. The imported ones had seen all their chloroplasts die out and were in the process of dropping red and yellow and brown remnants.
Inside, the climate was warm and dry, as controlled as a ship’s, but the light from the windows was muted and gray. It still smelled like rain. A different servant took her jacket and asked if she wanted a snack or a cup of tea delivered to the briefing room. She said yes out of habit. Her attention was already divided between the past—sitting with the children or alien child-corpse puppet things—and the future—her report and analysis of the most recent mass blackout event. There was literally no room in her awareness for the present.
The briefing room was beautiful. Walls of polished rosewood with a subtle gold inlay, and lights set behind frosted glass that left the place shadowless. Trejo and Cortázar and Ilich were already there, seated around a malachite-topped table. Trejo looked as bad as she felt, and Ilich maybe even a little worse. Cortázar was the only one of them who was bearing up well under the stress. She was pretty certain that was because he didn’t care whether any of the rest of them lived or died.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I’m sure you understand.”
“We’ve all been busy,” Trejo said, and either it was a subtle dig or it wasn’t. She couldn’t tell which. “Regardless, we’re all here now. And we have to make a statement about this … latest event. What can the high consul say about it? What do we know? Colonel Ilich? Would you like to begin?”
Ilich cleared his throat. “Well, we experienced another event that appears to have simultaneously affected everyone in the system. And by simultaneous, again, I mean that it appears to have been a single, nonlocal event that happened … everywhere. We have reports that it also occurred in at least two other systems.”
Cortázar raised his hand like a kid in grade school, and Trejo nodded at him.
“What happened in the ring space?” Cortázar asked. “Was it the same as in the systems?”
“We don’t know,” Ilich said. “We didn’t have any of our ships in the ring space at the time. There’s some indication that ships in the ring space may have been … um … eaten, if that’s the term. The same way the Typhoon and Medina were. But I don’t have confirmation. The event doesn’t seem correlated with anything we did, but we only have an active naval presence in about one hundred and twenty systems right now. If something happened outside of those, we might not know.”
“Seriously?” Trejo said.
“I can’t overstate how devastating it’s been to lose Medina Station, sir. Controlling that choke point was the leash we had on the empire. Without it …”
Trejo leaned back in his chair, scowling. He opened his hands to Elvi and Cortázar, giving the floor to them. Cortázar didn’t seem to care, but Elvi found herself sitting forward to speak as if she owed the admiral something.
“If I can try to put this all in a wider context?”