The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency) Read online

  “That leaves the drone surveillance that comes with the transport itself,” Tinda Louentintu said. The countess’s chief of staff, as usual, was doing the heavy conversational lifting for the two of them. “They send a constant secure video feed back to the correctional facility.”

  “Yes they do,” Assan agreed. “And that feed is both jammable and fakable. You just need the encryption keys for the individual drones, which I happen to have because the supervisor of the drones likes money more than she likes security.”

  “And then there is the satellite surveillance,” Louentintu said.

  Assan smiled. “That was a harder nut to crack. For that, I needed someone who could give us access to the satellite itself. Which means access to the military. The good news is, between Jasin and Deran Wu, the countess in her wisdom has chosen Jasin for her favored Wu cousin. In return Jasin has agreed to help, as part of his thanks for the countess’s favor.”

  “You’re going to hide a snatch-and-grab from a military satellite,” Louentintu said. “Because when it doesn’t show up on the satellite feed, that’s not going to look at all suspicious.”

  “It is going to show up on the feed, of course,” Assan said. “We’re not going to hide the transport exploding. But we are going to fake the explosion, and make it look like the transport is running slower than it is, so by the time anyone looks at the satellite feed, we’ll be long gone. And we run the same simulation to the drones and the security cameras. No one will know to look for us because no one will see that we were there. They will only see what we want them to see. And what we want them to see will be a tragic freak explosion of the transport.”

  “They’ll notice if Nadashe is missing.”

  “I’ve accounted for that.”

  “How?”

  Assan looked directly at the countess, rather than at her chief of staff. “You might prefer not knowing the details of that.”

  “How long will this take?” Louentintu asked.

  “With the right people, less than four minutes on-site. Obviously more time on either side, but those moments are going to be away from prying eyes.”

  “And you’re confident you can manage this.”

  “With your help and Jasin Wu’s, yes.”

  “What do you need from us?”

  “Your assent, and money.”

  “How much money?” the countess asked.

  “Countess, this will need to be done quickly, and it will need to be done well. Doing it cheaply is not part of the equation.”

  Assan got his assent, he got his access through his own and Jasin Wu’s connections, and he got his money, in amounts that allowed impossible things to happen so quickly and smoothly that it was almost magical. Assan was no stranger to vast sums of wealth, of course. He was the director of his family’s holdings in the Hub system. More wealth moved through his office on a daily basis than some entire human civilizations had had in their entire existence. But there was a vast difference between the daily and mundane exercise of commerce, and the expenditure of frankly ridiculous piles of cash in the service of malfeasance.

  That Assan was doing this while being a director of his house and a member of the executive committee was just icing on the cake as far as he was concerned. The ancient phrase “getting away with murder” had come to mind more than once. He was getting away with murder. And jailbreaking. And at least seven other felonies.

  It was delicious, and Assan had never felt more alive in his life.

  It was a given to Assan that he would be on-site for the extraction. It was a high-risk, high-reward mission, or so he told the countess. He felt honor-bound to make sure that it was executed within the razor-thin tolerances of time and competence that the entire endeavor required. He’d already spoken to the leader of the mercenary team that would be executing the mission, and she’d agreed that he would need to be present, and to oversee the final few minutes of the extraction, and the execution of the finishing touch that Assan had brought to the party.

  Louentintu had been correct, of course. If Nadashe’s body was missing from the transport then no one would believe it was a freak accident. Everyone knew the Nohamapetans had money, and power, and the belief that rules were more like guidelines and optional at best even then. Everyone from the Hubfall police department up to the Imperial Ministry of Investigation would stick their noses in if Nadashe’s body went missing.

  So Assan discreetly let it be known, through agents untraceable to him, what he was looking for: a woman, Nadashe’s height, weight and coloration. Assan made it known he was not looking for a murder. That was splashy and would draw the wrong sort of attention. But if a woman just happened to show up dead, well. Assan would be happy to know about it.

  It didn’t take very long at all. The medical examiner who collected the reward assured Assan’s agent that the woman wasn’t a murder, but a slip in a tub, which, sure, why not. The woman was single, a drifter with no real friends and no immediate family. There was no one to miss her, including the medical examiner’s office files, from which she was conveniently scrubbed.

  The woman, whoever she was, ceased to exist outside of the utility for which Assan had planned for her. She was delivered to the extraction mission without a head or fingerprints. Her circulatory system had been flushed and her blood replaced by an oxygen-optional, DNA-destroying accelerant, which was kept inside her body by the use of wax caps at the neck and fingertips.

  She was beautiful, and she would go up like a firework. There would be a body of the same size and weight as Nadashe’s, but if everything worked to plan, it would be almost all ash. Even if it didn’t, what was left would be almost impossible to identify as anyone, much less Nadashe Nohamapetan.

  In his space suit, Assan watched as his mercenaries put the woman’s body into the remains of the transport, along with the bodies of the guards. The whole truck would then be flash-incinerated again, in exactly the manner that it would burn if the battery pack went up because of internal structural issues. The battery pack didn’t need oxygen to burn, which was convenient on an airless world. It was its own fuel, and, to be sure, the battery pack would be made to go up. It would just have a little help to make the bodies burn more completely.

  There was a tap on his shoulder; his merc commander was signaling him to check his communicator circuit. Assan checked it; he had forgotten to turn it on.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, over the circuit.

  “We’re patching a secure call to your suit,” she said. “It’s the countess.”

  Assan nodded, and when the call came through he turned away from the commander to give himself and the countess a little privacy. “This is Assan,” he said.

  “Lord Teran,” the countess said. “How goes the extraction?”

  “Exactly as planned, and right on time. We’ll be up and out of here in the next two minutes.”

  “That’s a remarkable bit of planning.”

  “Thank you, Countess. I am glad to be of service.”

  “You have been,” the countess assured him. “But I don’t think we’ll be needing your services any longer, Lord Teran.”

  Assan was about to ask what she meant by that, but then was distracted by a knife sliding into his right kidney and slicing right. The air in Assan’s suit immediately started bleeding away into the vacuum, along with his actual blood. Assan turned, knife still in, to see his mission commander holding another knife. This one went into his stomach and was likewise slid across to the right. Assan’s suit started spilling oxygen prodigiously into his helmet to compensate for the loss elsewhere, which meant Assan could still hear the countess speaking to him.

  “You were acting as the middleman between me and the Wu cousins,” she was saying. “And I was wondering why I needed a middleman at all. So I met with them both. Turns out you’ve been playing both for a fool, and they didn’t like that. We came to an alternate arrangement we were all happy with. We also decided that this little escape plan of yours would
look better if it looked like it failed, and you went up with it when it did. We’ve already framed Nadashe’s lawyer as your accomplice. It’s very detailed. We’ve had to tweak your video plans. It shows something different now.”

  Assan fell stiffly to the ground.

  “Well, I imagine you’re almost all out of oxygen now, Lord Teran, so this is where we say goodbye. Thank you for being useful. There’s just one last thing left for you to do.”

  There was a thin rustle, and Assan felt himself being lifted, carried, and thrown, into the transport.

  The last thing he saw was the headless women he’d been so proud of. In the cold, her fingers had contracted up toward her palm. It occurred to Assan that it looked like she was flipping him off.

  He would have laughed at that, but he burned instead.

  Chapter

  10

  “What do you mean Nadashe Nohamapetan is dead?” Grayland II asked Hibert Limbar, head of the Imperial Guard. She set down her morning tea, for which she had budgeted exactly five minutes of time in one of her private gardens before she was hustled off to her next meeting.

  “There was an escape attempt made this morning,” Limbar said. “From the security feeds it looks like it went horrendously wrong. Everyone was killed including the person trying to break out Lady Nadashe. And, ma’am, the person trying to do it appears to have been Lord Teran Assan.”

  “What?”

  “There wasn’t much to go on—the transport’s batteries ruptured and incinerated nearly everything inside—but the evidence we have is pretty conclusive. Lord Teran had been in contact with Lady Nadashe’s personal lawyer fairly extensively recently. I’ve got people liaising with the Hubfall police, the Corrections Ministry and the Ministry of Investigation on this. We’ll pick up Nadashe’s lawyer and see if he wants to try to extract himself from this mess.”

  Grayland nodded at this. “Has someone informed the Countess Nohamapetan?”

  “I understand the MoI has taken the task of informing her and getting a statement from her on themselves, and I am willing to let them have that honor.” Limbar’s tone very subtly made the point that it would not actually be an honor at all, but rather a real trash fire of an event, and Grayland couldn’t argue the point.

  “I should send a note of condolence to her,” Grayland said. Limbar made a small, odd sound at this. Grayland caught it. “No?”

  “Lady Nadashe was accused of attempting to assassinate you, ma’am,” Limbar said. “Sending a condolence note might appear disingenuous. The Countess Nohamapetan is known to perceive insult where none was given, and to hold grudges. Perhaps a public statement acknowledging the deaths of the lady and Lord Teran, plus a regret that justice was not served in this case.”

  “You’re right, that’s better,” Grayland said. “Thank you.”

  “There’s another small matter to be aware of, ma’am. Rumors have already begun that you had a hand in this event. That Teran wasn’t acting on his own, for his own reasons, but that you had hired him to act as an assassin on your behalf, because there is growing evidence that the attempt on your life was spearheaded by Amit Nohamapetan, not Nadashe.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Particularly the part about Amit planning the assassination attempt.”

  “There are news reports that suggest he had dealings with some less-than-reputable characters over money issues,” Limbar said. “Among other things.”

  “I was with Amit literally seconds before he died,” Grayland said. “I’m not a mind reader, but I can assure you the look he had just before he was murdered was not one of someone who had a master plan to kill me or destroy his own ship.”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  Grayland narrowed her eyes ever so slightly at this response. “You don’t believe there is anything to those reports, do you?”

  “What I believe is someone has been making a concerted effort to introduce as much doubt into Lady Nadashe’s culpability for your attempted assassination as they can. Before this, I would have chalked this up to the lady’s defense team doing everything they could to open up an alternate theory of the case, to try to gin up reasonable doubt. But this latest bit makes me concerned that there is something else going on.”

  “It’s conspiracy mongering.”

  “I agree. But not all conspiracies crop up because someone forgot to adjust their tinfoil hat, ma’am. Sometimes they’re part of a disinformation campaign. And, you will forgive me for saying so, you’ve given some cause recently for people to stoke disinformation campaigns.”

  “You’re talking about my visions.”

  “Yes, among other things. I’m not here to doubt them, ma’am. I am saying they muddy the waters in ways that work against you as much as they work for you. But to be honest I’m less worried about that than the rumors swirling about your upcoming address to the parliament.”

  “Ah,” Grayland said. “The one where I will be declaring martial law across the Interdependency.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Our press people have already knocked down that rumor.”

  Grayland sensed rather than heard Limbar’s reproving sigh at this comment. “Your Majesty, it is certainly true that no one expects you to confirm that you are going to announce martial law, until you actually announce it.”

  “I take your point, Sir Hibert. But the fact remains that martial law is not on my parliament address agenda. I and my messengers have been very clear about this. I don’t know what else can be said about it.”

  “That’s the point of rumors. They’re not based on anything, so nothing is very effective against them. Truth is no defense, and the people fielding these rumors know it.”

  “You believe someone is leveraging all this to work against me.”

  “You are the emperox, ma’am. Someone is always working against you. It’s in the job description.”

  “To what end?”

  “Probably several. I have people working on it. The point of telling you was not to make you worried or paranoid, ma’am. Merely to inform you what is out there, to help you craft your own messaging.”

  “Yes, of course.” Grayland picked up her tea and sipped it. She put it back down and looked up at Limbar. “Do you believe Lady Nadashe is actually dead?”

  “At this point we have no reason to believe otherwise.”

  Grayland smiled. “You have a way of not directly answering the question.”

  “I have no reason to believe otherwise, either,” Limbar said. “I’m also aware the bodies at the site were incinerated to the point where they are almost impossible to identify by forensic means. Everything is ash and denatured bone. And that is very convenient.”

  “How paranoid do I need to be about this, Sir Hibert?”

  “You should not be paranoid of anything, ma’am. The paranoia is my job. Leave it to me. I and my people will discover the truth, whatever it is.”

  “Thank you,” Grayland said. Limbar bowed and excused himself and was immediately replaced by Obelees Atek, who would shuttle her off to her next meeting, and the next, and the next, forever and ever, amen.

  Except this time Atek did not shuttle her off. “Archbishop Korbijn is here and wants to speak to you. I believe this is regarding Teran Assan.”

  “What’s the schedule?”

  “Your next several meetings are meet-and-greets. I can clear them for you.”

  Grayland frowned. “Don’t clear them; just push them back. I have a half hour for lunch scheduled. Put them there.”

  “You need to eat, ma’am.”

  “I can skip an occasional lunch, Obelees. Bring along a protein bar. I can shove it into my face between you taking one group out and another in.”

  Atek smiled at this. “I’ll bring the archbishop right in.” She exited.

  Grayland finished her tea and frowned to herself.

  She was having a bundle of contradictory feelings about the death of Nadashe Nohamapetan. The first, and she had to admit it, was
relief. Nadashe had been an irritant literally since the beginning of her reign.

  And not just Nadashe; the entire Nohamapetan family had been on her, unpleasant and sticky, the whole time. Nadashe with her plotting, Amit with his unappealing stolidness, and now the Countess Nohamapetan with what seemed like inexhaustible anger.

  Grayland recounted her meeting with the countess once more. Grayland couldn’t deny her intent had been to roll over the countess, and she’d done just that. But she’d also extended the proverbial olive branch to the countess by offering clemency to Nadashe and placing her in the closest thing the imperial penal system had to a four-star hotel. Grayland had hoped this smallest offering of goodwill would be appreciated; instead the countess could hardly keep her rage in check. Grayland was aware she had missed a step in there somewhere, but for the life of her she couldn’t understand where she had.

  Nadashe’s death, whatever else it did, cleared all of that away. No more worrying about Nadashe out there plotting; no more of the countess’s fury on her daughter’s behalf.

  Don’t count on that, that annoying part of Grayland’s brain was telling her, and she had to admit that the annoying part of her brain was probably right about that. Limbar had told her that rumors were already spreading about her having Nadashe killed. They were ridiculous, and Limbar was correct that it wouldn’t matter, especially to someone like the Countess Nohamapetan. If the countess could get enraged when Grayland was showing her daughter mercy, she’d probably be a volcano of fury at the thought she had her killed.

  The second feeling Grayland had at the death of Nadashe Nohamapetan was sadness, and that was a fact that confused her and made her a little angry. Nadashe, it was clear, had never thought much of Grayland. Grayland had met her once when she was still Cardenia Wu-Patrick and her brother Rennered was the crown prince. Nadashe, who had been in the early days of dating Rennered, had sized her up, figured out the absolute minimum amount of courtesy she needed to provide the bastard sister of her royal boyfriend, and provided exactly that. Cardenia had not been emotionally sophisticated enough at the time to understand why she felt vaguely hurt and unhappy around Nadashe that day. Even now it was disquieting to her.