Chương 88: Macapá

Macapá, Terra Imperium Stellarum August 11, 2848 For once, both the swarm of drones in the air above, and the pack of media personalities and their cameramen which dogged Cassie's heels were part of the plan. Every part of the expedition had been extensively planned, in advance, to provide the sort of footage that made the imperial family look good when it spread across the planetary nets of all twenty-three inhabited systems spread nearly a thousand light years out from Terra.

Mid-August in Macapá was hot; when Cassie first stepped out of the sprawling spaceport which surrounded the elevator, she felt like she was walking into the cloud of hot steam left behind by someone else's shower. Somehow, here at the equator, earth's one sun had managed to rival the oppressive, exhausting temperatures of Vidako's dry season, only with much higher humidity.

The ride in air-conditioned grav-cars had kept her and her companions from wilting on the way over, but the refugee camp itself was nearly devoid of shade. Thirty-five hundred prefabricated, collapsible container homes had been set up on hastily cleared land just outside the city, arranged in carefully planned blocks that left organized streets of packed earth clear for grav-trucks.

At twelve meters long, each of the structures shared roughly the same layout: three bedrooms along the right side, a small, narrow family room on the left, followed by a galley-style kitchen, and a half-bath at the end of the hall. The roofs were covered in solar panels which fed into a shared power grid, which was the only reason each home was able to have air-conditioning, and they were all hooked into buried water and sewer lines hastily extended from the city itself.

The structures had even been connected to the planetary net. It was, to be honest, an impressive feat of organization and planning, carried out by teams of workmen who'd labored in shifts to finish before the first ships from LeShaii space had gated into the system. Cassie was certain that her home world was doing a much better job of housing their share of refugees than most of the dukes would manage.

Whoever had supervised the project had probably, when it was finished, looked over the rows of neat, tidy houses with satisfaction. Now that the refugees had arrived, it was obvious to her that the camp was wholly inadequate. Homes that had been designed for two parents and, perhaps, a few children had become the only source of shelter for entire extended families.

Cassie saw that many of the LeShaii had scrounged tarps, lengths of cloth or plastic from the supply trucks, or whatever else they could find to set up makeshift awnings which extended out from the front of the homes. There, empty crates had become chairs in which elderly men and women congregated, talking in low tones as they watched her pass.

Their shoulders were slumped, as if on a world with much higher gravity - or perhaps, she thought, as if the fear and sorrow that had accompanied their evacuation from Hav'eth had manifested as a physical weight. Long lines of men shuffled toward the parked supply trucks from which food was distributed, dressed in a bizarre mixture of traditional LeShaii robes and donated old pants, shirts, shoes, and hats offered up by the people of Earth, Mars, Luna, and the settled moons, such as Europa.

Their backs were bent, as well. In fact, out of all the LeShaii present at the Macapá Refugee Camp, the only one who seemed unbowed by the Na'xir invasion were C'rise, her father An'cet, and the running packs of half-feral children who tore up and down the dusty streets, kicking balls and shrieking.

"How many at this camp?" Cassie asked, as she looked up and down the packed dirt lanes.

"It was designed for an expected twelve-thousand survivors," Senator An'cet explained. His nacreous scalp-growths were much thicker than those of his daughter, perhaps because it had had decades longer to grow. Where dust hadn't entirely coated the mother-of-pearl-like head crest, it glinted rainbows beneath the beating sun.

"When the evacuation ships arrived, they carried more survivors than expected."

"Which is, on the one hand, a good thing," Cassie thought out loud.

"On the other..."

"Twenty thousand in this camp," C'rise said.

"Almost twice the number these houses were designed to handle.

"We can clear land and ship in more of the pre-fab units," Cassie said.

"It will take time and money, but we can do it."

"With respect, Princess Cascada, that would present difficulties that I'm not certain the imperium has accounted for," An'cet said.

"My daughter has told me that you've spent some few months training with her, to discipline your mind."

"We all did," Cassie confirmed.

"All of the roommates, and a few friends. Once we understood how hard it was for her to have pieces of our dreams running through her head every night." The memory of how, nearly a year ago, she'd demanded to have C'rise moved to a different room surfaced, and it nearly made her flinch in embarrassment. Her friend must have felt it, because C'rise reached out to take Cassie's hand and offer a gentle squeeze.

"Our children are trained in those techniques from the time they're very young," C'rise explained.

"That discipline is part of what lets us live in such close proximity without driving each other mad. But when people are traumatized, that kind of control can slip. Children have nightmares, soldiers find a certain noise triggers flashbacks..."

"And the emotions slip out, don't they?" Cassie shook her head.

"Of course no one was planning for that. You're the first race of psychers to ever join the imperium, no one's thinking about it. Just like all the laws we need to catch up with. What would you do back home?"

"The generally accepted wisdom is to spread people out," An'cet said.

"Ideally, traumatized people should be in a place of stability, where they can be supported by their family or friends, and given medical care and counseling. When this many people are packed into one place, however, the compounded trauma can feed off itself. A child's nightmares can influence the dreams of a dozen, two dozen people. There have already been reports of gestalt night-terrors, spreading for blocks in every direction."

"Some of the children have begun to develop a sort of mythology around it," C'rise continued.

"They say that warp-ghosts followed them through the gate, latched onto the ships and came out the other side. They've even given names to some of them." Cassie watched as her friend slipped a tablet out of her pocket, unfolded it, pulled up a picture, and then passed it over. The screen caught the light of the sun just right to glare in her eye, and she had to tilt it before she could actually get a good look at what C'rise was showing her.

The picture was of one of the close, cramped alleys between the mass-fabricated housing units. Someone - the children, presumably - had stacked a pile of stones there to form a sort of altar, which had been decorated with simple sketches of a distorted figure. Something about the shape of it made Cassie think of a woman, though her fingers were elongated into bloody claws, and her eyes were black. There were words, as well, though in the script of the LeShaii, not imperial standard.

Small piles of food had been left as, apparently, offerings.

"What does it say?" Cassie asked. C'rise hesitated for a moment.

"I'm not certain I can give you a good translation, even if I had help from an AI. Some of these words don't seem to have the right sense... It's like a title, or a description, instead of a name. An unseen woman that comes in the dark, and sings into the ears of sleeping children, and that's where the bad dreams come from. The Nightmare Singer, perhaps, or She Whose Song Brings Torment. Some of them just say The Woman with the Bloody Hands." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

These poor children, Lyra commented, inside Cassie's head. They've been through so much. They're terrified - it's no wonder they'd rather blame their fears on a ghost.

"It sounds like we need to get them into smaller settlements," Cassie said.

"I'll talk to my father and see what we can do."

"Thank you," Senator An'cet said, with a slight incline of his head. Jessica Morrow walked over, dressed in her imperial guard uniform, from where she'd been organizing a cordon to keep back both the media and the refugees. Her auburn hair was nowhere long enough to pull back yet, so like Cassie, she wore a hat - though in Jessica's case, it was more of a military-style black beret, rather than something designed to shield her eyes from the sun.

"I think we're set up well enough at this point," Cassie's bodyguard said, once she was within conversational distance.

"We've sorted everyone who wants to see you into a line, and each one will be searched for weapons before they ever get to you."

"I don't think the children need to be patted down," Cassie pointed out.

"It's what you don't think of that'll kill you," Jessica shot back.

"Let's get this over with. The sooner they've got their footage, the sooner I can have you back up on Auctoritas Station, where we can control access." But if Jessica had thought Cassie would rush through meeting the refugees, she was in for a great deal of disappointment. In fact, that was the part of the day that Cassie had most been looking forward to, and the promise of the opportunity was the reason which had finally pushed her over the edge into agreeing to the visit.

She tugged C'rise over by one hand, and the two women sat in chairs that had been provided just for this purpose, arranged with some of the nicer looking container houses as a backdrop, and the hazy line of the space elevator climbing up into the sky far in the distance. It was meeting the children that Cassie liked best, though most of them only spoke halting Imperial Standard.

"She wants to know if it's true you're a princess," C'rise explained, with a smile on her face.

"It is," Cassie told the little LeShaii girl perched in her lap.

"I live up there, at the top of the elevator." She turned and pointed back behind them. Two dozen cameras and just as many drones, all kept back behind a rope set up by the imperial guard to keep a safe distance, filmed the exchange. On C'rise's lap, the girl's brother said something. It was the first noise he'd made, and the skin of his face was covered in burn scars. The only word that Cassie could pick out was 'Na'xir.'

"What's that?" Cassie asked. C'rise frowned.

"He says that he heard we're both mech pilots. He says the Na'xir killed his best friend, and he wants to if you're going to go fight them."

"We are," Cassie promised, though she knew that she'd catch grief from her parents for saying it. Her words would play on billions of tablets and holo-projectors by the time she ate dinner that evening, she was certain.

"We're going to go there and send them right back where they came from, so that you can all go home." 𝝮 It wasn't until after the evening meal that she actually had a chance to speak to her father. After the drive back from the camp and the trip back up the elevator to Auctoritas Station, Cassie had needed to get clean more than anything else.

There were half a dozen notifications waiting for her once she'd dressed, including the latest update from the team working on Lady Ren's refit, promising once again that her mech would be ready to head back to Vidako with her when she left Terra. She played Arc's most recent message - recorded at a silk festival, which seemed to have consumed the entirety of Zurah V's capital city.

He'd swept his tablet around to show off the food stalls, the dancers and jugglers and fire-eaters, and she had to admit that it looked fun. Then, she'd sat down to dinner with her parents and suffered through her mother's current fixation on Orion and Isla Emonstone's engagement. Her older brother's fiancée had, apparently, passed the test with flying colors when she'd visited Auctoritas Station back in May. Cassie did her best to make the appropriate noises when called for and otherwise bided her time.

Bringing up either of the things she wanted to talk about would have been less than productive with her mother in the room, so when Altair Janus Solaris snuck back into his office for one last round of official business before bed, Cassie followed and closed the door behind her. At the soft whir of the electronic lock engaging, her father looked up at her and set down his tablet.

"The trip to the camp is playing well in the media," he said, spinning the screen so that she could see a headline: Warrior-Princess Makes Vow to Save LeShaii.

"I wish you hadn't implied you'd be going to fight personally, however. You've got three years left at the academy, and things may well be over by the time you graduate." Cassie stepped forward, took hold of the chair that faced her father, pulled it out and settled herself into the cushions.

"Arc had something to say about that, when it first started. He told us about a twentieth century head of state who promised the war would be over before the leaves hit the ground that autumn."

"Wilhelm the second," her father said.

"I know the story. In any case, whether the war is finished or not, you will serve where you are assigned to serve, as determined by the admiralty."

"You won't interfere, then?" Cassie prodded.

"If you have complaints, you can go to your Uncle Jack."

"I will," she promised.

"We need to begin breaking that refugee camp up into smaller pieces, integrated into local populations. C'rise and her father were telling me about how PTSD interacts with telepathy when you've got large numbers of traumatized people, and it isn't good."

"I know." Her father nodded.

"Senator An'cet spoke to me about it a week ago, which is one of the reasons I wanted you to go down there and see it yourself. I want you and your friend to talk to a subcommittee about what you saw there before you leave for Vidako." Cassie narrowed her eyes.

"And?"

"And you're going to be taking a full detail of imperial guard with you this time. Jessica Morrow's reports during your first year at the academy make it clear that a single guard isn't sufficient. Especially now that we're at war." Rather than begin by shouting at her father, Cassie let things tumble through her brain for a moment. She could fight it, make things as difficult as possible, and still lose. That was what she would have done the year before. That, and beg Orion to help her.

She could see her father bracing for the explosion. But if there was something he wanted, that was fine, because there was something that she wanted, too.

"I'll make a deal with you," Cassie told the Emperor of the Imperium Stellaris, meeting his eyes with the desk between them.

"I'll take whatever detail you want, and in return, you give me the genetic retroviruses I asked to have for Arc." Altair Solaris's face was still and placid, betraying no emotion, but his gaze was intense. As a little girl, she'd never been able to win a staring contest with him. He reached into the top drawer of his desk, removed a white box with the old bio-hazard warning symbol emblazoned on it, and set it between them on the finely polished surface of California redwood.

A few snaps later, and a gust of frosty air swirled up from the open box. Most of it was filled by foam padding, and in the center lay a glass tube with an electronic cap, upon which a green light slowly blinked.

"Hyper Efficient Brain Flush," her father said.

"If you give it to him as soon as you get there, he should be feeling better by the time they start sending the two of you out on patrols."

"I asked for the Comprehensive G-Force Adaptation," Cassie reminded him.

"You owe him. After the shit that Monica Yarborough pulled with that mine -" Her father shook his head.

"He can't take that during the school year. It isn't like making the modification in the womb - the symptoms are much worse, and the treatment isn't safe without doctors and facilities equipped to monitor his condition. For that, you need to bring him back here next summer, and he needs to stay at Auctoritas Station."

"And it will be ready for him when I do?" Cassie pressed. Her father shut the case with a click and pushed it toward her.

"It will. We have access to his full medical records and genome from Vidako. I hope this will bury any lingering resentment you're feeling about the duel."

"As long as it never happens again." The emperor looked away.

"You know how this family works," he said.

"We make the decisions that are best for the imperium as a whole. Everyone has a duty, and none of us are above making sacrifices. If you want this young man to be part of that, you'd better make certain that he knows exactly what he's signing up for. Otherwise it will break him."

"What's best for the imperium is different from risking his life without even telling us," Cassie shot back.

"Would you have let that mine remain armed if it was me fighting?" She let the silence stretch out for a long moment, which was answer enough.

"I didn't think so." Cassie stood up, snatched the case, and left.