Chimera's Star, page 26
“Thanks to us, humanity is almost ready. Now we need to make sure they get enough information to be entirely ready.”
She chuckled, reaching out to pull his leg into her lap and force him to sit more thoroughly.
“We have achieved that much,” she conceded. “Today’s fleet is not the one they would have fought twenty years ago.” She started rubbing his leg, half a massage and half an invitation for something more.
“Do you think we’re pushing too far?” he asked.
“I think that the moment we stop pushing, too many people on this ship are going to start asking questions we don’t want to answer,” O’Shea admitted. “So long as we can tell them that there is an enemy in the Nine and Primes and we are leading them in that direction, Nemesis will follow you.
“If we start trying to tell them we were wrong somewhere along the way?” She shook her head. “It won’t be pretty, Kay.”
“I don’t think we were wrong,” he said. But her prodding made him stop and examine the statement. Was he certain? Or was he… well, looking for a reason to justify everything he’d done?
Did it matter?
“It doesn’t matter,” O’Shea told him, and he wondered if she’d somehow read his mind. “It doesn’t matter if we were wrong, Kay. If you and I and the rest of the leaders want to survive, we have to keep going. We have to find something to prove to our people that we were right.”
She chuckled as her fingers drifted far enough to make him shiver.
“And I agree with you, to be clear: everything about Chimera and Garuda stinks. There were too many secrets there. The questions raised there can only be answered in the Nine. I’m with you to the end.”
“For the answers?” he murmured, reaching down to take her hand, pulling them closer together.
“Answers. Promises. Other things,” she replied. “I don’t plan on surrendering and letting Mars shoot me, to be clear. I recognize that you might regard that as duty fulfilled, but I plan on living.”
She kissed him, sharply. Fiercely. Desperately.
“I’d rather prefer you lived too,” she admitted.
32
“I see that magic, for all of its great power, can not convince bureaucracy to accelerate to meet even their own needs.”
Roslyn looked up from her desk to see Beck standing in the door of her day office. The door was open, allowing his unheard approach, though most people would have announced themselves or been announced by the Marines.
The Executive Officer of any starship was a law unto themselves, of course.
“You were expecting something different?” she asked, gesturing for him to come in.
“It took us most of a day just to make orbit after everyone had agreed to stop shooting at each other,” Beck pointed out as he took a seat. He made a questioning gesture toward the carafe of coffee on the corner of her desk.
She nodded her permission and took a sip of her own coffee. The beverage was edging toward too cool to drink, but it was still okay. Mostly.
“Three days since we made orbit, and we’ve had one meeting with Admiral Wang, and Uesugi has been able to run their little trick,” he continued. “We know where Rose went, skipper. Shouldn’t we be after her?”
“There’s an argument,” Roslyn agreed. “And it’s possible that if we set off now, we might find them before they move on. Except… well, it appears that Mr. Riley is more paranoid than you might think.”
One tapped command closed her office door. Another threw the imagery she’d spent the last few hours glaring at up onto the main wallscreen.
Beck studied the imagery of the antimatter explosion with scant favor.
“Delayed-detonation warhead to cover their tracks?” he asked after a few seconds. “Picked up through the Star Mirror?”
“Leavitt and Uesugi confirmed it two hours ago,” she agreed. “Uesugi says they can probably track through it, but it will take them longer. A lot longer.”
“Forgive me, sir, but wouldn’t that mean we should get going faster?” Beck asked.
Roslyn sighed, wiping away the explosion with a touch on the desk controls. She looked past her XO to the light sculptures on the shelf behind him. They weren’t the ones she’d acquired aboard her first command, Voice of the Forgotten, but that was actually fine by her.
All of them were from the same artist, a young woman who had been in the Tau Ceti Landing City Juvenile Detention Center alongside Roslyn. The other ex-delinquent had done decently by herself, but Roslyn was perfectly happy to spend her entire office-decorating budget with an old friend each time.
Navy service paid both better and more reliably than being an independent sculptor, after all.
“Chasing a thing is rarely the right way to catch it,” she finally told Beck. “Look at the light sculptures. You could follow the light, couldn’t you? Find the emitter. Find all of the lasers, work out how the piece was created.
“But could you duplicate it? Even with all of the technical knowledge of how it’s built?”
Beck shifted the chair, his coffee in hand as he turned to study the pieces. He was silent for half a minute, then chuckled.
“I can see how the visual is created,” he said slowly. “I can’t see how that piece on the end, for example, both shows me a fox and makes me feel generally calmer. I might be able to duplicate it—the technical knowledge, as you say—but I’m not convinced I could repeat that effect.
“And I know I couldn’t make a different version of it—and I see three foxes, a badger and what I think is an RMN destroyer on that shelf alone.”
“It is a destroyer,” Roslyn confirmed. “Alexis and I were teenagers together, long ago. I bought art from her for Voice of the Forgotten’s Captain’s office, but that didn’t survive Voice’s loss.”
Voice hadn’t been destroyed in action, but she’d been battered into a useless wreck the Navy had scrapped rather than repair. The Captain’s office had been lost in the process, vaporized in its entirety by a First Legion battle laser.
“Alexis made the piece of Voice of the Forgotten as a gift and would not take a penny from me for it,” Roslyn concluded. “I’m sure the cost was lost in her margin on what I did pay for, but I was still touched.”
Beck chuckled, eyeing the destroyer.
“It’s supposed to make me fierce and energized, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Like any art, the effect depends on the viewer, but that’s the intent.”
“I’m still not sure I follow your point with Rose, though,” he admitted.
“We can follow her,” Roslyn said. “We can duplicate everything she does—and, in the main, we can move faster than she does and probably catch up. But I don’t know if we can catch up before she reaches what’s left of the Reezh Ida.”
“But if we know the goal, we can beat her there?” Beck asked.
“Exactly. Unfortunately, the longer I wait for them to decide to tell me what I want to know, the more it looks like we should have gone with the slow and ugly tracking method.” She sighed. “But there is more in play than just catching Rose, too. That’s the main mission, but they did a lot of damage here in Chimera.
“Every hour we are here and quiet and friendly buys a small but measurable amount of trust with the Dual Republics. I am hoping that trust will get us the information we need to chase Rose and bring Riley to bay.
“But earning that trust is a worthy endeavor in itself.”
“And if the effort costs us Rose?”
“It won’t.” She smiled sadly. “Uesugi and I are going to sit down and confirm numbers in an hour or so, but we still have time to track her. We will go after her before we run out that clock.
“I just… have the feeling that there are more secrets here than the ones we’ve asked about, and the more of them we know, the better off we’ll be when we go after Riley. Nemesis is operating on assumptions and fanaticism.
“We will operate on truth and fact.”
“What happens if we don’t intercept Rose in time?” Beck asked softly.
“Best-case scenario, they do a perfect stealth scouting of the Nine and learn everything they want to know about the reezh,” Roslyn said. “They bring that back, we thank them prettily for their intelligence and then arrest them all for their crimes.”
Beck looked… uncomfortable at the thought, but it was the best result.
“From everything I have seen and read, I suspect they have no idea how to fully operate the stealth systems of their ship,” he pointed out. “And we know very little of what the Nine will have for defenses and security.
“What does the worst case look like?”
“Kent Riley and Rose awaken a sleeping giant and fill it with a terrible hunger.”
Baars was replacing the coffee carafe when the coms staff told Roslyn she had a live transmission from Chimera.
Hoping for good news, Roslyn waved her steward out of the view of the pickup and accepted Wang’s call.
“Mage-Captain Chambers.”
“Admiral Wang. How may I assist?”
Wang chuckled.
“Said so helpfully, as if you hadn’t spent the last three days yelling at a wall for my politicians to make up their minds,” he said.
“Politicians are politicians, Admiral,” Roslyn replied. “And your people are in a strange situation, one aggravated by a man that I can say wasn’t one of us but wore our uniform and commanded one of our ships.”
She shrugged.
“The situation is not simple. There are limits on how long I can wait, but your people have the right to make up their own minds.”
“Would I be correct, Mage-Captain, in assuming that you’ve spent some time in the company of Damien Montgomery beyond our conversation the other day?” Wang asked.
“I entered the RMN Academy on his direct personal recommendation, sir, so yes, you can say that,” Roslyn told him. “I hope that’s a good thing.”
“Maybe. You just sounded rather disturbingly familiar,” Wang said drily. “Regardless, I hope your patience will stretch a few more hours. I have been asked to invite you and a senior officer of your choice—feel free to bring Commander Beck again—back aboard Chimera for dinner this evening.
“Eighteen hundred Twin Sphinx time.”
“And dinner will answer my questions?” Roslyn asked, her tone equally desert-like.
“I am merely providing the dining room and cook,” the Admiral told her. “Your hosts, Mage-Captain Chambers, will be the Dyad Ministers of the Dual Republics of Chimera. The leaders of my new government are inviting you to dinner on my ship.”
“I see,” she allowed. She supposed she couldn’t blame the locals for not wanting to let anyone else in the uniform of an RMN Mage-Captain down to the surface after what Riley had done. “I would lean toward accepting your invitation anyway, Admiral, but I appreciate the context.”
“Good. I dislike having control of even small parts of my ships taken away from me, Captain Chambers, and all I have been informed about the guest list beyond the obvious is that the Ministers are bringing guests.”
That… struck her as a security risk, though she supposed heads of state could get away with giving those instructions to mere military commanders in chief.
If it was important.
“You and your Ministers have piqued my curiosity,” she admitted. “Is eighteen hundred the time of the meal or when I should have myself and Commander Beck delivered?”
“The latter, Mage-Captain. I look forward to having you aboard Chimera again—and, I hope, to making certain that you and I remain on the same side in any future… difficulties.”
33
While Roslyn had seen multiple reezh on video feeds and even seen a handful in person the first time she’d been aboard Chimera, Dyad Minister Izhaj Ojak was the first reezh she’d actually met.
Ojak was slightly taller than she was, with strange double-jointed limbs that swung into angles utterly impossible for a human. His head resembled a guitar pick to her, with a broad armored frill at the top narrowing down to his shoulders. A pair of horns guarded the Minister’s large upper eyes, with a smaller lower pair shielded by a seemingly armored brow ridge.
He had rough gray skin with an almost pebbled texture, but his smile was close enough to human to reassure Roslyn as the reezh politician bowed to her.
“We appreciate your patience,” Ojak told her. “Minister Hsieh, for one, was far less tolerant of our discussions than you were.”
“I am an outsider,” Roslyn said, glancing over at the towering Asian woman. While Roslyn tried not to be vain about her appearance, she knew she was a very attractive woman.
But Hsieh Ai Ling made her feel dowdy and dull in her plain black-and-gold uniform. Expertly done near-black makeup drew attention to the Minister’s blue-black hair and deep, soulful eyes.
Eyes that Roslyn, at least, realized were spending noticeably longer on Emerson Wang than on anyone else. It might have been her generally over-tuned hormones—the solitude and celibacy required of a starship captain were physically painful for Roslyn at times—but it seemed the Dyad Minister appreciated their Chief Naval Officer for more than his ships.
“I am not an outsider, so discovering the depths of the secrets my counterpart was concealing was a rather unpleasant surprise,” Hsieh observed. “I knew there were some things that the reezh hadn’t been transparent about, but this has been a week of rude awakenings for all of us.”
“The decisions around what was hidden and from whom were never mine,” Ojak noted, his English precise despite his voice sounding like he was gargling gravel. “In truth, even I was unaware of much of what has been dragged into the light by Riley’s attack.”
“Forgive me, Ministers, but I believe I am missing much of this conversation,” Roslyn told them. “I suspect that a briefing is planned? If so, then I don’t believe any recriminations are necessary.
“If the weight of history here is anything like what hangs over Mars, I doubt the decision to share it was easy. It has taken what it has taken—let us move forward.”
“Well spoken, Mage-Captain,” Wang agreed. “If we have decided to give Captain Chambers what she needs, that is enough. I hope.
“Shall we go find our meal?”
The dinner guests were sparser than Roslyn had expected. She had brought Beck, as instructed. Wang had brought Commodore Falkenrath, Chimera’s commander. Roslyn assumed that Cam and Ty, the ship’s Prometheans, were eavesdropping.
But that was it for the military part of the dinner. Four visible and two invisible members of the party. The civilian side was only five—the two Dyad Ministers, a human and a reezh that both radiated historian—and a third reezh whose gray skin had faded to the shades of white marble.
Unless Roslyn was misreading the signs, that reezh was ancient.
All of them were brought into a small formal dining room in what Roslyn figured were the diplomatic sections of the ship. Like most capital ships, RIN carriers were designed to show the flag and carry out all kinds of secondary duties—such as formal state dinners.
The decorations had clearly been swapped out since Chimera had been a Republic of Faith and Reason warship. The table was standard military-issue beneath its delicate white tablecloth, and whatever the original decorations had been, they’d been replaced with a large seal of the Dual Republics on each wall, flanked by heavy blue curtains that helped conceal the stewards’ entrance.
“Introductions are in order,” Hsieh announced as the doors closed behind the stewards. “I assume Mage-Captain Chambers knows of myself and Minister Ojak, but the Dyad Curators and our… other guest are less well known.”
“Myself and Commander Matthias Beck are known to you in turn,” Roslyn agreed. “The Curators?”
“Much of the Dual Republics is anchored on the system of the Dyad,” Minister Ojak told her. He and the other two reezh had seats that resembled more stools with a supporting pole than chairs to Roslyn’s eyes, with the Minister between the two older reezh.
“Where the Republics act as one, it serves us well that one of each species is involved in the decision. There are an Eastern and a Western Dyad Minister to serve as heads of state.” The reezh half of that Dyad gestured to the two historians.
“There are an Eastern and a Western Dyad Curator to manage the Joint Museum, the central archive and historical education facility of our entire world,” Ojak concluded. “Eastern Dyad Curator Drusa Sciarra manages the part of the Museum that covers human history. Western Dyad Curator Oj manages the reezh portion of the Museum.”
“A portion that apparently includes secret archives inside the radiation dome the Museum was built on,” Hsieh said, her tone acidic.
“Forgive me, Minister,” Sciarra said quietly, the old woman sounding tired. “I and the Eastern Dyad Curators before me have always been aware of the archives in the containment dome of the Last Ship.
“While I was never fully privy to their contents, I agreed—as did my predecessors—that the reezh were entitled to decide what of their history was shared with us.”
The Dyad Minister sighed and nodded, glancing over at Chambers as if to apologize with her eyes.
“This is fair, I suppose, until that history comes back to bite us all in sensitive places,” Hsieh pointed out.
“And that is why I am here,” the last reezh, the one with skin faded to white marble, said in the softest voice Roslyn had heard from a reezh yet. Even in the recordings and video she’d reviewed, reezh tended to sound like they had a throatful of gravel.
The old reezh still sounded distorted, but much of the sharpness seemed to have been ground away.
“The Dyad Curators, of course, are known to all the Chimeran members of this party,” the stranger continued. “I… am not.”
