“So you won,” Attavio VI said to his daughter, in the Memory Room. “The great houses are in disarray because so many of them signed on for treason. The church is fully under your control. The military is purging itself of its rogue elements. And you have declared martial law.”
“I have not declared martial law,” Cardenia said. “I told parliament it has six months to create a plan to prepare the Interdependency for the collapse of the Flow. If they can’t do it, then I will take it out of their hands. In six months another twenty Flow streams will have collapsed. It only gets worse from here.”
“You said your friend Lord Marce thinks you can use the evanescent streams to buy the systems more time.”
“Lord Marce can be optimistic in his thinking. I don’t get to be. I have to assume the worst-case scenario. And the worst-case scenario is the Interdependency is unprepared because parliament can’t figure itself out, and the one planet we have that can support life on its surface is blockaded by yet another Nohamapetan.”
“It’s still only the one ship sent to End,” Attavio VI said.
“It was a big ship, Dad,” Cardenia said. The Prophecies of Rachela featured a complement of ten thousand marines and more than enough firepower to blast anything it didn’t like coming out of a Flow shoal into metal shavings.
“But still only one.”
Cardenia shook her head. “Not anymore. A few smaller naval ships made a break to the Flow shoal when Admiral Emblad was arrested. They knew if they stayed they’d be arrested too. Four ships in all. Ghreni Nohamapetan just got reinforcements on End. And who knows? Now Nadashe may be there too.” Nadashe, who had bounced from the You Can Blame It All on Me before she could be captured, with a hundred million marks in a data vault. The only thing she’d left behind was a note that said Fuck you, Deran Wu. Apparently Nadashe had been surprised by Deran announcing she was still alive.
Deran, who was going to get out of all of this because he’d walked into the Ministry of Information with a data crypt filled with details on the conspiracy and asked for a deal, which the ministry gave him before Cardenia knew about it. She’d been annoyed because she didn’t need Deran’s information; everything he had she’d found with Jiyi. She’d have rather he be stuffed into the same jail cell as his cousin, because she knew he’d participated in contracting the ship that destroyed the Oliveer Bransid and nearly killed Marce. But she supposed it was better that she did not just magically appear with the data. Jiyi’s collection methods weren’t precisely legal. Deran’s evidence would hold up in court.
Anyway, Deran was a hero now, with a story that he’d been participating to collect information to unmask the wider conspiracy against the emperox. It was a bullshit story, but it was a bullshit story that was going to propel him into the senior directorship chair at the House of Wu. Deran was going to be in the office Jasin used to sit in. Which was apparently all that Deran ever really wanted.
At least you know where he is, Cardenia’s brain said to her. Nadashe, on the other hand, was still out there. She had no access to House of Nohamapetan funds—after the Countess Nohamapetan had completely lost it and admitted to assassinating Rennered, Cardenia had ordered every Nohamapetan account frozen and audited—but she could still do a lot of damage with a hundred million marks.
I hope you went to End, Cardenia thought. Then you’d be out of my hair for a while.
“I think I lost you,” Attavio VI said, to Cardenia.
“I was just thinking about problems, sorry.”
“I don’t mind waiting,” Attavio VI said.
“You don’t mind anything at all,” Cardenia pointed out, and then smiled. “Still, I very much like talking to you. I wish we had talked more like this when you were still alive. But this is still good.”
“Thank you,” Attavio VI said. “To the extent I can like anything, I like it too.”
Cardenia emerged from the Memory Room and found Marce reading a message off his tablet.
“I was just talking about you,” Cardenia said, coming up to him.
“To your imaginary friends, I see.”
“They’re not imaginary. They’re just not real.”
“Very subtle distinction.”
“I suppose it is.”
“What were you saying?”
“That you can afford to be optimistic about Flow dynamics and I can’t.”
“I don’t know that I’m optimistic about the Flow,” Marce said. “I can say I’m excited about it. We know so much more now than we did even a couple of months ago. I can tell you what I’m speculating about right now, if you want.”
“Please,” Cardenia said, fondly. She enjoyed watching Marce geek out.
“I have a pretty good feeling that the collapse of the Flow streams today is at least partially influenced by the Rupture,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘influenced’?”
“I mean I think it did something to the stability of the Flow streams in local space. Rattled them. Shook them. I think the Rupture caused something like a pressure wave to course through the Flow, and we’re seeing destabilization as a result.”
“A pressure wave.”
“Well, not exactly a pressure wave,” Marce said. “It’s something else entirely, in fact. But I can’t really explain it in human languages. ‘Pressure wave’ is the closest I’m getting using words. If you could speak math I might be able to explain it to you.”
“Hatide Roynold spoke math to you.”
Marce nodded. “She did. Really well.”
“I’m sorry she’s gone.”
“So am I. Anyway, this is all wild speculation on my part, because fundamentally I don’t know how the Rupture worked. I can see the effect on the data Chenevert gave me from the time, but I don’t know the process. I’m trying to work backward from the effect, but that’s not really a great way to do things. Did you ever ask Jiyi if there was any record of the math behind the Rupture? Or what they made to make it happen?”
“There weren’t any records,” Cardenia lied.
“Well, that’s inconvenient,” Marce said, forging on. “But it makes the point that all along we’ve been thinking there’s nothing we could be doing that would affect the Flow. But maybe we can after all. We know we found a way to close it off.”
“Is there a way to open it up?”
“A Flow stream?”
“Yes.”
Marce shook his head. “Closing off a Flow stream is easy, relatively speaking. You just have to snap it off at the Flow shoal.”
“‘Just.’”
“I did say ‘relatively,’” Marce pointed out. “Opening a Flow shoal is a lot harder because it requires accessing and moving through the Flow medium. It’s like this: Closing off a Flow stream is like closing a door. Opening a Flow stream is like tunneling through a mountain.”
“I like it when you use human languages,” Cardenia said.
“They’re my second-favorite type of languages.”
Cardenia pointed at the tablet. “Is this stuff about Flow streams what you’re looking at here?”
“No, it’s something else entirely, from Sergeant Sherrill, who you met.”
“I remember.”
“She says that the retired fiver to Dalasýsla is on its way,” he said, holding up his tablet to show the message. “Stuffed with food and seeds and hydroponics and technology and art and entertainment that’s not eight hundred years old. It’s amazing how quickly a fiver can get filled when the emperox tells someone to get something done.”
“You said they needed it.”
“They definitely did,” he said, setting down his tablet. “You should have seen their ship.”
“I told you I wished I had been able to come.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. It means you’re still here.”
Cardenia smiled at that. “Did you learn anything from the Dalasýslans that will help us?”
“I learned that survival is possible for longer than anyone would ever expect, when you have no other choice but to survive,” Marce said. “I’m not sure that’s a great lesson, but it’s a lesson. But it only works for very small numbers of people. If we want to save millions, we need to think larger than that. And the only way we can do that realistically is to bring people to End.”
“That will require sneaking past a large ship in rebellion,” Cardenia said. “If you can find a way around that that doesn’t involve just throwing ships at the Flow shoal until they run out of ammunition, I’ll make you Duke of End.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Are you telling me how to do my job, Lord Marce?” Cardenia joked.
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“You better be. Also, come up with a way to sneak into End.”
“Well, here’s the thing about that,” Marce said. He picked up his tablet and opened a document. “I think I may have found something.”