Page 41

We kept moving toward the north gallery. Beyond my people, down the ceremonial hall, I could still see the tall shut doors of the throne room.

I looked at them for the length of one breath.

Behind those doors the Sovereign had taught me what command was for. Behind those doors he’d bled out on marble they washed before the morning session. For six years the Conclave had governed from the room where they killed him. They hung sunbursts down his walls and called the building theirs.

And he had planned for even this.

Sixty-one percent of his archive was still below us. Correspondence, prototypes, evidence we would never recover if I said yes. I’d left the vault promising a return if the building survived us. It wouldn’t. The priority tranche was secure in the transfer case: enough to break the Conclave, enough to fund what came after.

If I declined, the door stayed open behind us. The Conclave could walk in and take what we had left: the evidence against them, the prototypes, the currency to keep fighting. To save it for ourselves, I would have to turn my people back toward the vault. I had already refused that price. I wouldn’t leave them a stronghold full of his work.

For one moment I thought of him standing in this gallery six years ago. The keys had come home. His people had carried them. Aarvyd was dead at the east door. I could give the order.

“Do it,” I said.

“Confirmed,” Varrick said, and then, quietly, off the command channel, just to me: “For what it’s worth. I ran his code for the transfer rig, the vault systems, all of it. Sixty years old and I couldn’t have written it better today. I’d have liked to have met him.”

From Varrick, that was as close to a eulogy as I was likely to hear.

“You did meet him,” I said. “You’ve been working with him all afternoon.”

Somewhere below us, the decommission sequence began.

The lockdown tone died mid-pulse. An older, deeper alarm replaced it as the sealed doors unlocked along the level. Eighteen minutes. Down every corridor the garrison stopped being a garrison; men who had been fighting to hold doors heard the evacuation order and obeyed. The last two hundred meters to the bay cleared ahead of us.

A garrison squad broke past us at a dead run, weapons slung, one of them shouting floor counts to the others. Not one of them so much as looked at the ten armed intruders they’d spent the afternoon dying to stop.

At a junction, a young trooper hauled a limping clerk’s arm over his shoulders. Some of you were never the enemy either, I thought. Get out. All of you, get out.

“He’s evacuating his own enemies,” Lika said, at my shoulder, watching them run. “Six years dead and he’s better than all of them.”

“He was better than everyone,” I said. “It was his worst habit.”

The Penumbra filled the open landing bay, ramp down, engines hot. We came up the ramp with the cases and the wounded while Tamsin counted our window. At the top of the ramp, braced across it like a customs official, stood two hundred kilos of war boar.

Turnip surveyed the returning column, located Anhara, and made a sound like a landslide being pleased.

“He was backup,” Anhara said, to my look, entirely unrepentant, hauling Kallum past the beast by the hand. “I told him to guard the ramp. He guarded the ramp.”

“He ate my copilot seat,” Talon said over the net.

“He guarded it very thoroughly.”

“Anhara.” Kallum, mild, which from Kallum is a full interrogation.

“You’d have said no.”

“I’d have said no.”

“And then we’d have had no backup,” she concluded, and hauled him aboard. The boar fell in behind them. The pig had apparently been part of the plan.

Flinx arrived at Carys’s shoulder, took in the boar occupying the high ground of the ramp, and lodged a formal complaint that lasted the entire boarding process.

Bronwen came up last, moving slowly, because she was carrying, by my count, four prototype cases, two garrison rifles, a ceremonial banner pole, and something in a sealed box she’d definitely been told to leave.

“Sealed cases only,” Zarek reminded her, taking two of them anyway.

“These are sealed. I sealed them.”