“Calisse de chrisse—”
“As you say, Casey. Drink your Scotch before it gets cold.”
It's not cold at all. It burns. I limit myself to one slow, shallow sip before I answer. “What does this mean for Min-xue?”
She's already finished her drink. “He'll command the Huang Di when she goes out.”
“Did Wu have proof, Connie?”
She shrugged, one shoulder only. “He would have shared it if he did, I'm sure. Now ask what we're going to do about Xiong.”
The gleam in her eyes tells it all. “We'll make a deal with him. We're going to split that planet with him, aren't we?”
“Well,” she says, folding her hands around each other, “he does already have ships under way. And he's proven tractable… of late.”
“Where's Wu now?”
“‘Awaiting trial.'” Her fingers describe quotes in the air.
“Christ.” All right. The man's a mass-murderer. But I kind of liked him, in a quiet sort of way. Dick, you listening? Is there anything we can do for Captain Wu?
I feel him hesitate, feel him think. And then feel him decide to answer with the kind of sick joke anybody else would find reprehensible, but which serves as a sort of comfort to me. “I'm sorry, Jen. I can't let you do that.”
Don't be an asshole, Dick. Bitch-ass computer. “Christ.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep meaning it, too.” I want coffee more than I want whiskey. Fortunately, there's a carafe of that, too. “You know Xiong set you up, Constance. He meant to use you to get rid of Shijie, and Shijie to get rid of you. And the order to attack Toronto didn't originate with anybody's minister of war.”
“You have a nasty, suspicious mind, Casey.”
“Anything for détente, Constance?”
“Anything for peace,” she says, and looks me dead in the eye. Her eyes look weird for a minute, and then I realize they're light brown, sherry-colored. She's not wearing those artificial green contacts. It makes her look softer.
I almost believe she means it.
The coffee's good, dark, redolent. The surface is clotted with broken rainbows. I raise it to my mouth, pause, breathing in the steam. Just the smell of it is energy. “Pity justice wasn't served, though — although there's an irony I don't like in it coming from Captain Wu's hand.”
“Justice might have complicated negotiations. No cream?” Dryly. She arranges a cup to her own liking. If I were polite, I suppose I would have asked.
“What's this going to mean for your plans for world domination?”
“World cooperation. That other was the PanChinese.”
“Hegemony is as hegemony does—”
“Ooo,” she says, and drinks half a cup of scalding fluid in one swallow. “She knows big words for a dropout.”
“Bitch.” I can't get any heat into it, though. “Some of us read more than mash letters from our contributors.”
“Touché.” She grins like she means it, swills the rest of the coffee, and pours herself more. I'd hate to be the guy whose job it is to keep that carafe full. “It's not going to happen. It's too big a goal, and there's too damned much us and them. At least the Russians are cheerful — although they'd rather we gave the Huang Di to them, I think.”
“I can't blame them. The Russians are cheerful about the PanChinese?”
“Officially, they're cheerful about the PanChinese withdrawal from the same stretch of Siberia they've been fighting the Russians over since the dawn of recorded history, and the UN's decision to send observers in, and the fact that we're soaking PanChina for enough reparations that they'll barely be able to afford an army for the next twenty years. Although why anybody would want a few thousand miles of permafrost is too complex a question for me.” She stops, tilts her head to one side, looks me in the eye, and shrugs, her hands knotting on her coffee mug. I've seen that look before, and I know what she's gonna say before she says it. “I think I'm done, Jen.”
“Done?”
It even looks like an honest smile, this time. “Yeah. I think I'm going to call an election and let the voters throw me out. I bet the Conservatives and the Home party can swing a coalition, and I'm ready to pack my socks and undies and go home to Calgary. I'm just too proud to say I quit.”
You know, I don't really want to kick her in the teeth, for once. But on the other hand, she so very obviously needs it. “Oh, for Christ's sake, Connie. Get off the pity wagon already, would you? The seat's full enough with me up here.”
Riel blinks at me. The bruises under her eyes are dark enough for Min-xue to dip his brush in and write poetry. I stop midrant and try again, softer. “You're ready to walk away from your dream on the eve of success, you realize.”
“I considered it more saving enough face so it didn't look like I was slinking home with my tail clamped over my groin.”
The image is too much. I'm laughing hard enough that I have to set my coffee cup down. I expect any minute now a concerned Mountie is going to bust down the door. “Mary Mother of God, woman. The expansionist Chinese government has wiped itself out, the EU, the commonwealth, and PanMalaysia are going to sign your cogovernance agreement so they have a crack at the Montreal and her sisters, and the Latin American states aren't far behind. You've got your treaty organization. And we walked out of the whole damn thing with our hands clean—”
She looks down at hers, holds one out palm-up. “Our hands aren't even remotely clean. Just because the blood doesn't show doesn't mean it's gone.”
Yeah. Well, you know what I mean. “They look clean. And that's all the world cares about. And we need you. Because if it's not you, it's people like Shijie. And Hardy. And Fred.”
I turn my back on her, which is more effort than I like. Dammit. Much as I'd like to feed her her own superior smile sometimes, I still want the woman to like me. And I want her to like herself enough to keep doing what we need her for. Because, God knows, I haven't got it in me to try.
I make it three steps toward the door before she raps out my name. “Casey!”
“What?”
“I'm going to have a plaque made for the front door of this place, you know that? ‘The men who love war are mostly the ones who have never been in it.'”
“Send a wreath to Minister Shijie's funeral, won't you? From the both of us?”
She catches my gaze when I would have turned away. “I'm sending Fred. And you. Lay the damned wreath yourself.”
It stops me short. I haven't been to see Fred in the hospital. I had no intention of going. “Valens is on his feet? Did he take the nanosurgeons?”
“He's on his feet,” she says, with a smile that narrows her eyes. “But he refused the Benefactor tech. Categorically.”
“Huh.”
She doesn't say anything, just gives me a second to chew on my lip and think. I snort. “He always was kind of a pussy. Always willing to stand back and let somebody else step up.”
“Not like you.”
“No.” It hurts to say it. It hurts to think it. “I'd rather it was me, all things considered.”
“Jenny,” she says, and she puts her coffee cup down, and she comes across the rug, and she tilts her head back to look at me. “You ever think about a career in politics?”