The remnants. There was a thick lead case beside Aren, the type Jainan had seen protecting radioactive samples. “You stole the missing remnants?”
“Stole?” Aren said. “I’m offended. Do you know how much money Taam and Fenrik siphoned from the Kingfisher budgets to secure those? We bought the Sefalan ones off the raiders and had to bribe some civilians for the others. You could say we bought them fair and square.” He patted the case. Jainan couldn’t feel anything, but didn’t know if that meant lead worked as a shielding material or not; he felt so wrung-out that he might not have registered it if a full-size link opened up next to him.
“You don’t just want to start a war with Thea,” Jainan said flatly. “You want to start a war with the Resolution. You’re mad.”
“Tell that to General Fenrik,” Aren said, grinning. “You can see his point. First we deal with the vassals, then when Iskat isn’t distracted by all this compromising, we get independence from the Resolution. We only have one link to defend, after all—a natural chokepoint. What’s the use of having an army if you never let them fight?”
“The Galactics will laugh,” Jainan said, with a rising sense of dread that nothing he said was cutting through the madness. “This will help you take Thea, but every weapon in the sector will do nothing against a power that has a million ships. We’re an afterthought to them.”
“Oh, forget the conventional weapons. These”—Aren made an expansive, dismissive gesture at the military hardware stacked around them—“are going to be obsolete once we’ve dealt with the vassals. The remnants let you get into people’s minds. Give us a few months to develop weapons around them, and imagine what we can do with that. We can defend the link as long as we like.”
“These were General Fenrik’s orders?” Jainan asked. The drugs made his tongue thick and dry in his mouth. “To annex Thea and sabotage the Resolution treaty?”
“Fenrik’s an old-school bully,” Aren said reflectively, “but he’s right, you know. Why should we hamstring ourselves when other powers get away with it all the time? The Resolution is a collection of hypocrites. They go after the weak sectors and leave the others to do as they like. Other planets have worked out how to weaponize their remnants, you know. An Orshan commander can take over your mind from across the room. The ruling class of the High Chain are near gods. The Resolution itself uses remnants to train their scouts—how else could they pilot ships through the link? They only enforce the rules on backwaters like us.”
There were footsteps approaching, but Jainan couldn’t turn his head far enough to see who it was. He swallowed and tried to make sense of the weapons he could see. He knew very little about military hardware, but he could recognize combat drones and energy weapons when he saw them. This wasn’t about him, or Kiem, or even Taam. He could see no way of getting this information out to anyone else. Despair pressed on his chest like a clamp. “You think it’s because Iskat is too timid to take what it wants.”
“The Resolution never helped Thea,” Aren said. “I don’t see why you’d want to defend them.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m happier if all the power sits with you and your commanders,” Jainan said hoarsely. “This is a war crime.”
“Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, I agree,” Aren said. “Which makes it gloriously hypocritical that when I started skimming my own percentage off the top, Taam found out and threatened to rat me out to Fenrik. Invading Thea without telling the Emperor is fine, apparently, but Heaven forbid someone tries their hand at personal enrichment.”
So that was why Aren killed Taam, Jainan thought. He felt numb. In the middle of Taam’s grand scheme to bring Thea to heel and start a new, glorious chapter, he’d caught Aren with his hand in the cookie jar and got himself killed for it. Taam had never known when to be subtle.
Aren slid off the crate and to his feet, looking at someone Jainan couldn’t see. “You’re late.”
“Sorry, sir,” a gravelly voice said. A woman in a trooper’s uniform came into Jainan’s field of vision, carefully putting on some antistatic gloves. “Came as soon as I got the order.”
Jainan had thought he was beyond fear, but a thread of it sprang up as she approached. Aren wouldn’t have told him this if he expected Jainan to remain alive to talk about it. He forced himself to keep his eyes on Aren. “What’s the point of this? You can’t expect Internal Security and Fenrik to both blame me. Your evidence is too thin, and my death in custody will look suspicious.”
“I don’t actually want you to die,” Aren said briskly. He brushed off his uniform fastidiously, as if bringing the conversation to a close. “I just need someone to take the fall for Taam’s death and for the money I borrowed. Then Fenrik can get on with annexing Thea, the Resolution treaty will fall apart, and everything will be back on track.”
The trooper was doing something to a machine beside him. Jainan felt a coolness spreading from the patch in his arm and started to breathe faster as he realized it was a sedative. The woman picked up something and turned around; Jainan took a second to recognize it as a medical helmet. It was more complex than the ones he’d seen in hospitals.
He was closer to losing cognitive thought than he’d realized—the new sedative had started to work terrifyingly fast—but he finally put the pieces together with the odd spikes around the bed. “This is the Tau field.” No wonder Aren thought he could get Jainan to take the blame. If he had a genuine trained interrogator, a Tau field could make Jainan believe anything. He would implicate himself.
“Give the man a medal,” Aren said to the world at large, “he’s finally caught up.” Jainan tried to roll off the bed as the woman approached him with the helmet, but the new sedative on top of the incapacitator shot was too much. The guardrail jammed into his shoulder. At least they haven’t taken Kiem, he told himself. The last thing he heard was Aren in the distance, clear as a bell, say, “Now, if you’ll both excuse me. I have to go and drink champagne with the fucking diplomats.”
* * *
The noise was like standing underneath a shuttle burner as it ignited. Jainan floated paralyzed in the sea of hammering sound, convinced every scrap of his consciousness was unravelling piece by piece. He tried to scream. He couldn’t tell if he’d succeeded or not, so he tried again. His throat was raw before he stopped. He shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, he was upright and standing in front of the palace.
The sky overhead was the bright, clear blue of summer. Of course it was summer, he thought uneasily, why would it be anything else? He rubbed his shoulder for warmth; a nervous tic he’d developed over his first Iskat winter.
A flyer was pulling into the driveway. Jainan’s head twitched up for the dozenth time. This time he was rewarded, because when it stopped in front of the palace, the first figure that emerged was Taam’s aide, who held the door and saluted as Taam disembarked.
Jainan pulled a smile onto his face as he went over and found to his relief it was genuine. They had argued before Taam left—Jainan could not seem to stop causing arguments—but Taam gave a characteristic half smile and beckoned him to hurry. When Jainan reached him, Taam slung an arm around him and clapped him on the back, then pushed him away, holding him at arm’s length. “All right, you don’t have to be all over me.”