There is also a difference between the other Triumvirs and me. I mean more than my invisibility as the fourth Triumvir. I mean that, after hours, when I refuse Su-Hyeon’s offer of a cot in the side office, the Censor’s guards escort me home to Vivien’s flat on the Palatine, with its view down over sloping streets where others can’t see what I see. They see the obvious: windows black and lifeless, shopping streets empty or filled with too-large homogenous crowds, the signs that multiply above the doorways: mitsubishi only or no u-sets or no Vs. But I see more. I see Servicer ‘volunteers’ out ‘fixing’ a ‘kiosk’ on a strategic corner. I see another waiting by the empty bakery downstairs to report that I’m home safe. I see Achilles’s orders moving. And if we Myrmidons are moving, a subtler force is moving too. Because when the guards walk me in, and turn down my offer of tea before they head back, I plead ‘the cat’ if there’s an animal smell, or if something knocked over a cup left on the kitchen counter. It scared me half to death the first night, when that creeping feeling that you aren’t alone in an empty room grew to the realization that there really was the warmth and stuffiness of breath behind me. I was guesstimating the steps between me and the kitchen knives when a shadow congealed into the soft face of a black lion, and the wall beside me glistened with the blink-fast outline of a sun.
“Huxley Mojave,” I pronounced, and naming dispelled the boogeyman effect. “We both failed the same mission, didn’t we?” I whispered, wondering if lions’ faces always seemed so sad. “You were guarding Mycroft too.”
I barely caught their “Yes.” The front of the coat fell open, exposing a face, vizor, black hair, a scraped and bandaged chin, and an arm in a sling, the same type of cheery blue field-station bandage that Carlyle Foster-Kraye had carried home from the tsunami front. We all tried.
“Where will you go now?” I asked. “Do you need help getting to other Utopians?”
“No. Now I’m warding you.” Their hand slid out of their nowhere and placed in mine the soft and battered hat. Mycroft’s smell. Memory attacked, the flash-frozen image of the crowd, the Forum skies alive with bright wings racing off to aid Atlantis, and the fallen hat slumped over the last dusty footprints which could ever prove that such a creature walked this Earth. Was I next of kin, then, in Utopia’s estimation? Fittest to receive this remnant, as close as we would ever have to a corpse? Perhaps I was. Before my sobs could overcome me, Huxley’s hand returned and pressed something into my other palm. I looked. One could call it a gun, if one can call the arrow-slim and deadly peregrine a bird. “I won’t teach you the science,” Huxley began, “but I will teach you to defend yourself.”
CHAPTER FOUR
♥
The Uniform Question
Written September 24, 2454
Events of yesterday
Romanova, etc.
“WE HAVE FOUR HOURS TO SAVE SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.”
Su-Hyeon’s voice was not my usual alarm clock, but my tracker monitor confirmed I’d slept enough to graduate from ‘unsafe’ back to ‘overtired,’ so I fumbled for my boots before remembering I’d slept in them. “Is there time to explain the danger?” I asked. Sydney was no surprise, high on our Worry List as one of Earth’s most Hive-mixed megacities, but when Su-Hyeon came to me with emergencies, half the time it was something straightforward, and half the time it was x ≥ 3√(population/income) ÷ 0.545n, where n ≡ condo prices in €/m2, and it sounded like we didn’t have a half hour for math.
“Unless certain demands are met, a Mitsubishi fleet of at least a hundred and seventeen ships will invade Sydney in four hours eleven minutes.”
That was clear enough. I wriggled aside so Su-Hyeon could join me on our new favorite catnap spot: an inexplicable sofa we had discovered on a landing halfway down the fire stairs behind Papa’s office. “What demands?”
Su-Hyeon presented a plate of beans and fruit salad. “I’ve got your action list prepped, but the Triumvirate’s negotiating now. You should eat and listen to the end before you make your calls. I’ll add you listening only. Ready?”
I carved out a spot for my plate on the mountain of fresh-in-wrapper DNA kits which loomed around the sofa, occasionally plopping a crinkly vanguard in our laps. “Ready,” I said.
First sight made me grip the cushions hard. Before my lenses fired up, I’d braced myself for a glaring bright meeting room, for hard words, even for smoke and blood, but not for the bitter, old blast of prey-fear and antipathy which I wish had not been trained into me by our Visitor’s sinister angel: Dominic Seneschal. I know they’re a world away, can’t touch me, can’t even see me on audio-only, but I came to Madame’s first, not just as Vivien’s heir but as Mycroft’s, and the new puppy required breaking in. I have been tricked across the threshold into that cell which Mycroft, Carlyle, and so many others christened with their vomit. Vivien’s protection saved me from the worst, but even now with Su-Hyeon here and beans and sofa all surrounding me, the sight of Dominic was not welcome.
My lenses showed full morning in Tōgenkyō, whose white sun made the Pacific and glassy lotus-petal skyscrapers painful through the office’s picture windows. Except for Greenpeace Director Jyothi Bandyopadhyay, who joined by screen, the Mitsubishi Interim Directors were all together, crisp and grave around their oval table, and most of them in military dress. This was my first close glimpse of the uniforms satellites had already spotted on the decks of the spreading fleet. The jackets were works of art—our opulent age has improved war that way at least—as fine as the finest Mitsubishi suit, some deep night blue with elaborate linear designs of flowing water, others night-green with knife-fine maple branches, which I think must code army and navy. Stripes of rank (which I must learn to interpret) glittered on shoulders, cuffs, and chest in gold as well as Mitsubishi white and scarlet. Like normal Mitsubishi suits, the collar cuts had variants for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sub-factions, but Greenpeace Director Jyothi Bandyopadhyay was out of uniform, and Dominic too. Or rather Dominic, lurking in the central seat, was still in their black eighteenth-century costume which is, I suppose, a uniform of service to the Prince.
“. . . if we extend the time allowed for implementation,” Charlemagne Guildbreaker was saying as the audio kicked in. Their calm voice and fluffy beard in a side screen was as cheering as Su-Hyeon’s warmth beside me. “Distribution will be a challenge with the cars down. Home-manufacture materials are precious—most cities are already rationing them—and if the Imperial Guard is anything to go by, a lot of these uniforms will have components that can’t be produced at home anyway. This will be a much less daunting proposition for the leaders you want us to win over if we can tell them they have, say, thirty days to figure out how to design and distribute thousands of uniforms, time enough for those who don’t have uniforms already to design them, and for those who do to develop alternatives to hard-to-manufacture parts.”
“Thirty days!”
“I would have said two months if you’d suggested this before the war began, and that was with the cars.”