So Vile a Sin (36 page)

Roz leant in the doorway, looking at him.

‘You might be asked to choose sides, Roz. Very soon,’ he told her. ‘Do you want my advice?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘Don’t.’

She was about to reply when Chris said. ‘Oooooh.
That
sucked.
’

Leabie was waiting for them in the docking bay. She was dressed in a simple black pants suit, the house’s blue and red log glittering on her shoulder.

The Doctor popped out of the
Model Citizen
like a cork out of a champagne bottle. ‘Lady Forrester!’ he said. ‘I have urgent news.

I need to borrow another ship. Something that can defend itself this time. Chris can pilot it.’

Leabie looked past him. ‘Roslyn,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’

‘Now’s the time to strike,’ said Leabie. 'Walid’s away from the palace and no one knows where the hell he is.’

‘Jesus,’ said Roz. She sat the opposite end of a long meeting table, in a room full of historical portraits. The lights were low.

‘How long have you been planning this?’

‘Forever,’ said Leabie. ‘Forever.’ She stared at Roz down the table. The message DataStream she carried with her pipped every few seconds. ‘Don’t tell me that you disapprove, because that’s not going to stop anything.’

‘Hell, no,’ said Roz. ‘Walid’s a conspirator and probably a loon. The bastards he’s got working for him killed Mantsebo and Somezi trying to get to you. All I want to know is how many people you’re willing to kill to become Empress.’

‘As many as it takes, darling,’ said Leabie. ‘This isn’t like choosing a new carpet. It isn’t the sort of project you go into with one eye open. It’s taken ten years to create a fleet and an army that’s up to the task.’

272

Roz nodded to herself. She got up, wandering down the table, and poured herself a glass of water.

‘The plan was designed to keep casualties to a minimum,’ said her sister. ‘We don’t have the Emperor’s resources. What we have is strategy and surprise. A lot of surprise. The Landsknechte have been caught with their pants down twice. First at Purgatory, next on Mars.’

‘Mars?’ Roz sat on the table, a few chairs away from Leabie, drinking the water and wishing for some serious alcohol. ‘What’s happening on Mars?’

‘It hasn’t hit the newsfeeds yet. But they deployed something like a quarter of their troops to suppress the rioting on Earth.’

‘Riots you started,’ said Roz.

‘As I said. Strategy and surprise.’

‘Shit.’ Roz found a very evil grin wandering across her face.

‘You old bitch.’

‘Fancy a little treason, little sister?’

Roz sat in the seat next to her sister, watching the urgent messages flashing on her DataStream.

‘One thing I have to know first,’ she said. ‘How do I know the new boss isn’t going to be just the same as the old boss?’

Leabie looked at her.

‘How do I know you’re not going to be another Empress?’ said Roz. ‘Or another Walid? How do I know you’re going to be better?’

‘That’s easy,’ said Leabie. ‘Because you’ll be there.’

Roz folded her arms. ‘You’ve been making a lot of people a lot of promises, Leabie. You’ve professed a lot of beliefs I know you don’t have. The Ogrons and the Earth Reptiles, and the resistance, they’re all expecting you to make their world better.

They’re dying because you’ve promised to make it worth their while.’

Leabie said nothing. ‘You see,’ said Roz, ‘it’s going to be my job to make sure you keep your word, whether you believe in the causes or not. Fair’s fair.’

Leabie smiled ruefully. ‘You never used to let me get away with anything.’

273

Roz took a good, hard look at her sister. ‘True,’ she said at last.

‘You said there was something you wanted me to do.’

The Doctor paced. It made Chris feel exhausted to watch him.

‘You’re certain you’re up to this flight?’ said the Doctor, glancing at him as he paced the ready room. ‘Just say the word, and I’ll fly the thing myself as soon as it’s ready.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Chris. He was watching EmpireGold. ‘Can you believe this, they’re fighting in Achebe Gorge. There hasn’t been fighting on Mars for centuries. Not since the Ice Warriors.’

The Doctor walked back and forth, back and forth. His clothes were crumpled again, his brown velvet waistcoat unbuttoned. He flipped out his pocket watch, looked at it, flipped it back.

‘There’s not much information,’ said Chris. ‘I might try one of the other newsfeeds. Either nothing’s getting out or they’re censoring it.’

An engineer walked into the ready room. A young man, he couldn’t be twenty. He saw the shots of Mars on the screen. ‘Any news?’ he asked, in a thin voice.

‘Nothing new, really,’ said Chris. ‘Not for the last hour.’

‘I’ve got family there,’ he said. ‘My mum runs a kiosk on the Olympus Mons ski slope.’

‘I’m sure she’s OK,’ said Chris. ‘Right now all the fighting’s around Achebe.’

‘Thanks. Sorry,’ said the young engineer. ‘That wasn’t what I came in to say. Your shuttle’s ready, sir.’

‘Great!’ Chris bounced to his feet. ‘Doctor! Let’s go!’

‘Go and warm her up,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

Roz walked out of the meeting room, feeling light-headed. The Doctor came out of nowhere and grabbed her arm.

‘If you’re a party to this madness, Roz, then the friendship between us is finished.’

‘Not a chance,’ said Roz.

He looked at her, astonished. ‘Do you think I’m joking?’

She grabbed him by the lapels. She’d always wanted to do that.

‘We’ve stared into the abyss together, you and I, Doctor. Jesus, 274

the things that we have seen. And when all those
children
you call your companions have their fits of moral anguish and cover up their eyes because of the things you have to do just remember who it is that stands by you. Who does the necessary even when the necessary costs.’

The Doctor stared at her, silent, his blue eyes piercing right into her skull. She resisted the temptation to shake him, stop him staring.

‘Finished? We’ll never be finished, Doctor, because
you owe
me
. So you can threaten Bernice and Dorothée, you can show your human side for the cameras, but
I know
. That history kills people and sometimes even
you
can’t save them. So you owe me this, for my family, for the children of the angry man and for the ones that died in the slave ships and mines and all the others you couldn’t save at the time.’

‘Millions will die.’

‘Millions are dying already.’

‘Oh,’ said the Doctor. ‘Only now they’ll die for truth and justice.’

‘Well, it’s better than dying for a profit margin.’

‘And what about you?’ said the Doctor softly.

‘Jesus, will you quit it with the stare?’ Roz let go of his lapels.

‘What about me?’

‘If you step back into history, I won’t be able to protect you.’

‘This isn’t history, Doctor,’ said Roz. ‘This is family.’

275

2

Valhalla

When you come home from a long trip away, and everyone wants to know what it was like, you find yourself telling the same stories over and over. After a while, the anecdotes become polished, the rough edges of detail worn away in your memory.

War is like that. Seen in the quiet aftermath, war reduces itself to a series of phrases and photos, place names and images. A man shoots a bound man through the head. Women dancing in the street, showered with confetti. A child screams, running towards the camera. A pile of starved corpses, limbs like firewood.

The Three Days’ War barely lasted long enough to produce its own set of images. There were one or two. A pair of battleships colliding near Phobos, the first spurt of flame from a ruptured plasma engine bursting free into space. An angry face in a rioting crowd in Brazil, scream of rage with no name or cause attached.

Even a Jeopard refugee, haunted, slit-pupil eyes in a weary breadline.

What most people remembered about the Three Days’ War were the place names. Some of them already had battles attached, but after the Three Days’ War, everyone would know which one you meant when you talked about the Battle of Achebe Gorge.

Or about Janus, or Purgatory, or the Valles Marianes, or Valhalla.

276

Mimas, 26 August 2982

Chris wished they could have taken a cutter, but every warship Leabie had was out there, somewhere… Instead they took Leabie’s private shuttle, the
Zero Discipline
, newly installed proton cannon heavy on its back.

They fell towards Mimas, engines off, only the attitude jets puffing out compressed gas to keep them on course. He kept an eye on the monitor, keeping them just over the horizon. Mimas was a dirty lump of ice, a little rock buried under the surface.

Herschel Crater was almost half as wide as the moon itself.

The Doctor was running a simulation on the shuttle’s computer, his hands nervous on the controls. ‘Tethys is tidally locked,’ he said. Chris glanced across to the screen. Its great crater always points in the same direction, thirty degrees above the ecliptic. A signal from there would drift out into space, well clear of the other moons and planets.

‘But Mimas’s crater is locked only two degrees above the ecliptic. Shoot a beam from the centre of Herschel, and it would pass through the entire solar system, slightly more often than once a day.’

Chris watched the projected red line moving across the surface of the Earth, connecting the icy moon with the distant, living world. ‘You’d only get twenty to thirty minutes’ contact per day,’

said the Doctor. ‘But that would be enough.’

‘So is it leaking?’ said Chris. ‘Like the one on Iphigenia?’

‘No,’ the Doctor said. ‘They’ve found part of the original shielding mechanism. It was never meant to do what they’re doing with it.’

‘They’re making it leak deliberately?’ said Chris. ‘They can make whatever changes they like? But only for thirty minutes at a time?’

‘That’s right,’ said the Doctor. ‘They think I can tell them how to stabilize the corrupt probabilities.’

‘Can you?’

‘Probably,’ said the Doctor.

He sat back in the co-pilot’s seat, staring out at Saturn as they fell towards its innermost moon. Distantly, flashes of light 277

reached them from a pair of warships locked in close combat in the Cassini Division.

‘Take us in as close as you can,’ he said. ‘And then skim over the surface until we reach the lip of the crater.’

‘Aye aye,’ said Chris. Mimas’s pocked surface was looming in the forward screen, blotting out everything else.

‘Is the rescue autopilot set?’

‘Doctor,’ said Chris, ‘that’s the third time you’ve asked that.

It’s a standard safety feature – of course it’s switched on.

‘I know, but it can be disabled for suicide work,’ said the Doctor.

‘Gee,’ said Chris, ‘you’re not thinking of ramming the thing, are you?’

The Doctor picked a bit of imaginary dust off the console.

‘Damaging it is the last thing we want to do.’

‘So what is the plan?’ said Chris.

‘I need to reach the Nexus itself,’ said the Doctor. ‘Or rather, its real-world interface. It won’t be very large. It probably won’t be directly under the centre of the crater, but it will be buried deep.’

‘Close to the centre of the moon?’

‘That’s right.’

They were approaching the five-klick-high rim of Herschel.

‘People have speculated for centuries how a giant snowball could have survived so large an impact,’ said the Doctor softly.

‘So the whole thing is fake?’

‘The whole crater,’ said the Doctor. ‘Possibly the whole moon.’

‘Holy cow,’ said Chris. And then, ‘Christ!’

He fell back in his seat, hands jerking away from the controls.

His heart went into overdrive, his whole body jumping with the force of his pulse.

The Doctor was slumped in the co-pilot’s seat, head lolling to one side. Chris tried to reach out to him, but the pounding in his head got louder and louder until he decided it would be a very good idea to faint.

Kibero

278

Leabie’s war room had been a ballroom two days ago. Now it was packed with computers and people. Everyone wore a comm headset. Huge screens had been hung from the ceiling, covered in messages and 3D schematics. Soft lighting, big shadows on the grey walls.

Leabie stood with her advisers on a balcony that ran around the room. When Roz came in she wasn’t talking: she was just looking out over the room, her hands gripping the railing. Deep in thought. Roz decided not to bother her. Leabie didn’t seem to notice her as she walked through the crowd below.

There was a small communications room off the war room.

Roz waited until the woman inside was done, racing back out with a printout in her hand. She went in and shut the door.

It was very dark in here. There was just a desk, a chair, a laptop. Roz sat down at the computer and started up the comm link.

It was going to take the communications software a few minutes to track down the person she wanted to speak to. In the meantime, she put her feet up on the desk and closed her eyes.

The room had been soundproofed, she realized. You could even imagine that none of it was happening, that the room outside was empty and Leabie was upstairs somewhere chattering with a champagne glass in her hand instead of trying to take over the galaxy.

She wondered what the Doctor was doing. She wondered what the Doctor would do, in her shoes. She opened her eyes.

Whatever was necessary.

The console pinged. Roz looked into it. After a moment, the Acting Pontifex Saecularis appeared on the screen.

He was a skinny pale-skinned guy with big bags under his eyes. ‘Having a bad time, Malinowski?’ she asked.

‘Pontifex Saecularis!’ he said. ‘Yes, I am, as a matter of fact.

How can I help you, ma’am?’

‘I want you to keep the Order out of this. I don’t want the Adjudicators to take sides.’

Malinowski said nothing, but she saw his shoulders sag with relief.