“I keep hearing Thea is being stubborn about its resources.” The Kaanan delicately speared a last piece of fruit from the sweet course. “Naturally, in Iskaner terms, that means your negotiators said maybe when Iskat expected them to say yes. You did get allied province status because you were amicable, after all. Do try the passion fruit, it’s very good,” they added. “The hothouses over here so seldom get it right.”
Kaan liked to stir up trouble. It was how they did politics; Jainan knew this and yet still felt a twinge of disquiet. The stateroom around them was full of Iskaners. “Thea shares its resources generously,” Jainan said. “We’ve been an allied province for decades. We’ve renewed the Resolution treaty several times already. Nothing has changed.”
“Except the factions on Iskat,” the representative said mildly. “Are we dealing with a commercial empire, a parliamentary system, a dictatorship, a military oligarchy? You can’t say, can you, because Iskat throws all of them at us at different times. I wonder how much of a grip the Emperor really has on everything that’s going on. Of course, Thea’s little gripe about your mining resources takes the heat off Kaan, where we really are stubborn. I am grateful.”
There were flippant responses and political responses; Jainan discarded all of them. Instead he watched the representative’s eyes, which weren’t part of their affable expression, and said, “Why did you bring up my treaty?”
“Oh,” the Kaanan said, casually straightening the cuff of their robe, “you’re our test case, if you like. How much do you have to annoy Iskat before you end up as a special territory?”
Treaties changed, for better or worse, but even in the wrangling that led up to the Resolution renewal, no allied or satellite province in the Empire had ever dropped to special territory status. Jainan could feel his heartbeat speed up. It was the kind of absurd, troublemaking thing that Kaani politicians threw out to set hares running. He clenched his hands under the table and said nothing.
In the face of Jainan’s silence, the representative gave him a charming, impersonal smile. They could have been discussing the weather. “My embassy’s conversations with our Iskat counterparts have been … unproductive, this time around.”
“Have you mentioned this to the Thean embassy?” Jainan asked quietly. He couldn’t seem to slow his heart rate. “Do you have any evidence?”
“Evidence? This is politics,” the Kaanan said. “I have talked to your embassy, as a matter of fact. Everyone has rather cut you out of the loop, haven’t they? And this is honestly just gossip.” They rose to their feet in a rustle of bright formal robes. “Speaking of, I must circulate. Lovely talking to you.”
“What was that about?” Kiem murmured in his ear.
All of Jainan’s thoughts fled in a rush of cold alarm. He was supposed to be a goodwill representative. He was not supposed to get involved in politics, and he was especially not supposed to embroil his partner in it. That entire conversation should have been left to the embassy and their Iskat counterparts. He felt his breath shorten. “Nothing of importance.”
“Thea’s an allied province,” Kiem said. He was frowning, as if this reminded him of something. “The Empire shouldn’t just be able to change that.”
Jainan could not think straight. His heart would not slow down. It felt like someone was whispering in his ear. “I couldn’t comment.”
“I suppose not.” Kiem gave him a faint echo of his normal grin. “I was never great at politics. Oh, hey, Vaile,” he added, as someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Haven’t seen you in months. Thought they sent you to Rtul. How’s it going?”
“Swimmingly! But, Kiem, three kinds of cake?”
The ornately dressed Prince Vaile gave Jainan a pretty nod. Jainan almost didn’t see her. There was a presence behind her shoulder. For one moment, Taam stood there, much more real than he’d been even during the wedding night dinner. Jainan’s breath stopped.
This was a remnant-induced hallucination. It wasn’t real. Jainan rubbed a hand swiftly across his eyes, and the image disappeared.
Vaile and Kiem were talking. Jainan rose. “I must go and, and talk to … excuse me.” He bowed to her, keeping a semblance of control over his ragged breathing, and struck out blindly into the crowd in the stateroom.
Enough people were starting to rise and circulate that he didn’t stand out. He saw nobody he recognized. He was too on edge to even pretend to be sociable; faces loomed vividly as he strode through the crowd, and he found himself pushing through a glass door to the gardens outside.
The sudden cold air on his skin was a relief, as was the way the buzzing from the remnants faded out. The geometric hedges of the inner palace garden radiated out from where he stood, snow-covered and monochrome. Jainan picked a direction at random and plunged into the small paths, walking fast, forcing his heart rate to level out. It had been a hallucination. Resolution technology was associated with unpleasant mental phenomena.
He needed something to focus on. A couple of minutes later, he found himself sitting on a stone bench, breathing the astringent scent of Iskat’s winter-blooming flowers as he opened Taam’s flybug logs to go over them again. The noise of the party had faded into the distance. He knew combing through Taam’s crash data was obsessive and pointless, but it was the only thing he could entirely control.
Events and visualizations scrolled through his hands in a river of color. He stared at them, forcing himself to concentrate. He could imagine the flybug jolting in the air, failing to respond to Taam’s increasingly desperate commands, slipping nose-down into a death spiral. The compressor had been giving out maintenance warnings for months. It was all in the data.
The cold stone of the bench pressed into the back of Jainan’s legs. Taam’s perfect, textbook crash data.
Like a free-spinning gear clicking its teeth into alignment, something in Jainan’s mind started to tick. He gestured a command sequence over his wristband. More screens came up, floating in the cold air, requesting data from various research libraries Jainan had once been a member of. He searched for his old university access keys, slowly at first, and then with more impatience. When he found them the screens changed into lists and lists of materials.
He found it in a second-year undergraduate textbook under failure analysis. A textbook example of a gradual compressor malfunction.
He arranged the textbook and Taam’s data side by side. It wasn’t a one-to-one correlation. The component IDs were different. The time stamps on the compressor events also looked different, but when he examined them, they were all offset by exactly the same amount, as if someone had just shifted them forward by the appropriate interval. His skin prickled.
He would expect a compressor failure to take place the same way every time. It was mathematically possible that the similarities were a coincidence.
He stared at the time stamps and tried to shake the persistent feeling that he was going mad.
“Jainan? Count Jainan!”
Jainan’s head snapped up. He had lost track of time. Through the trees, he could see the conservatory had emptied out, leaving only staff clearing away the meal. The figure hurrying out of a walkway in the opposite direction, huddled into a greatcoat against the Iskat cold, was a Thean embassy staffer.