about its role.”
“So I’m just that weird,” Cardenia said.
“I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yes.”
Cardenia smiled at this, and then addressed Jiyi. “I would like you to take Tomas Chenevert up on his invitation to chat,” she said. “He’s already informed me that he can create a ‘sandbox’ area within his servers where the two of you can meet. You won’t otherwise be able to access his servers, and he won’t be able to access yours. It will be neutral ground. Make the arrangements and have your meeting as soon as possible.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Jiyi said, and disappeared.
“To what end?” Rachela asked.
“Marce already shares information with Chenevert,” Cardenia said. “And Chenevert has been getting up to speed on Flow physics. If I’m satisfied he can be trusted, I can share data about the Rupture with Marce on the condition that the only person he shares it with is Chenevert. He’s an artificial person, and he’s spent the last three hundred years being sequestered. It wouldn’t be cruel to keep him cut off from everyone else. He already is.”
Cardenia spent a few more moments in the Memory Room before rounding out her session. Marce was waiting for her when she came out.
“I have things I need to tell you,” she said. “Important things.”
“They can wait,” Marce said. His face was drawn and upset.
Cardenia frowned. “What is it?”
“Something’s happened,” he said. “To Kiva Lagos.”
Chapter 14
Things were looking up for Nadashe Nohamapetan.
To begin, she’d taken out some trash, in the form of Drusin Wolfe and Kiva Lagos.
But also—and at the moment this was the thing she was luxuriating in—she had a new address. She had been sprung from the dank, fetid confines of the Our Love Couldn’t Go On and was now residing on the White Spats and Lots of Dollars. It, like the Our Love, was an in-system trader craft; unlike the Our Love, the White Spats didn’t require antibiotics just to look at the thing.
The White Spats had been a lease, and now that the lease was up it had been returned to the House of Wu, to be reconditioned before being leased once more. As it was between leases, it was off the roster of ships tracked for commercial use. Proster Wu had flagged it for temporary personal duty, a prerogative of senior House of Wu executives for off-lease ships, and berthed it at the Wu family personal dock complex, where no imperial inspector or assessor would ever trouble it. Unless it moved out of dock, it was effectively invisible.
Nadashe was delighted. The White Spats was clean and modern, and the previous leaseholder had configured it to hold passengers as well as cargo, so her living quarters were no longer clad in groaning, discolored metal and occasional spots of mold. Proster Wu had populated the ship with a skeleton crew of technicians and domestics, all gleaned from the Countess Nohamapetan’s still-in-system fiver, which had been confiscated when she was arrested for treason and murder. Nadashe accepted their fealty as acting head of her house, and then in true Nohamapetan fashion proceeded to forget they existed unless she wanted something specific from them.
Living even temporarily on the sufferance of the Wu family did have its downsides, however, as Nadashe was reminded when her suite was invaded by Proster Wu, who entered without preamble or indeed so much as a knock.
“You murdered Drusin Wolfe,” he said.
“Not I,” Nadashe said, mildly. She was sitting idly on a chaise longue, flipping through her tablet. “I was here the entire time. I have witnesses.”
“You cannot go about murdering your allies. That’s how they stop being your allies. You need all of your allies. We need them.”
Nadashe set her tablet down. “Well, Proster. There are two ways of explaining what happened to our dear friend Drusin Wolfe. The first is that I did not have him murdered. As it happens, when this is looked into by the various law enforcement sorts who will invariably look into these things, mail will be discovered that reveals Drusin Wolfe had lured Kiva Lagos to that park in order to have her assassinated—the two of them had recent contentious business dealings, after all. Bring her out into the park; have a wandering hit man pop her in the head; we’re done.”
“Except for the fact that Wolfe is dead.”
Nadashe shrugged. “A bump. A jostle. This is what you get for hiring cut-rate assassins.”
“And you expect anyone in the world to believe that.”
“I expect law enforcement to believe it, yes,”