“You see? You understand.”
“But…me?” Van said again.
“You’re best for the job, and someone has to do it. Besides, it’s what Gramps wanted.”
“I wasn’t looking…”
“I know.” Nynca paused. “I’m not angry at you. I’m not angry at him. But I’m angry that things have to be the way they are.”
That Van understood.
He just sat in the console chair, looking at nothing, long after Nynca had left.
In time, there was a tap on the door. Van sensed Eri beyond. “Come on in, Eri.”
The diminutive tech stood there. “I wanted to tell you, ser…”
“I’ll need a new tech?” Van asked gently.
She nodded. “I have done this long enough.”
Van also understood that.
After Eri left, he began to pack a duffel, almost in a daze, knowing that was a luxury that he could not long indulge.
How could Trystin…all those millions? He frowned, shaking his head. On the other hand, how could he not…?
Were there any answers? Real answers?
JUDGE
Chapter 74
Van eased the Joyau back out-system, checking the systems. Once more, he realized that he had no torps left, not a one, and there were at least two more cruisers headed out after him and the Salya.
Van studied the monitors, then pulsed, Interrogative status?
Had to improvise here…everything’s go. Countdown beginning at sixty…fifty-nine, fifty-eight…
The numbers marched down slowly, and Van struggled to recall…something…there was something wrong about those numbers, something he should know. He glanced around the cockpit, familiar and yet unfamiliar…trying to remember…
…thirty-six, thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three, thirty-two…
The transmission from the Elsin broke off, and the Elsin had vanished.
And Van knew, his eyes frozen as the shipnet called up in his mind the energies flaring off the sun Jerush…and the wave fronts that would scour the planet of Orum clean of all life, and freeze the jumpships in place, unable to leave the system…
Could he jump the Joyau? After what would happen, could he?
He wanted to think, to come up with another answer. But it was already too late, and the black-white timelessness of jump washed over him.
Van sat up, soaked in sweat, breathing heavily.
Slowly, he swung his feet over the side of the luxurious bed in the top-floor apartment, and sat there for a time, trying to slow his heart and his breathing.
The same nightmare, seemingly every night.
But Van hadn’t known…just as he hadn’t known about the Fergus…or the Collyns.
“Should you have known? Shouldn’t you have guessed?” he murmured to himself. But a nova device?
After several moments, he stood, then walked from the bedroom out into the sitting room, moving to the wide south window. Most of the city of Cambria looked dark, even in the damp winter, because the lights were designed to shine out and down, and not upward in a way to be visible from the sixth floor of the IIS building.
Ethics? How could Trystin have talked so much about ethics? Yet Dad Cicero had warned Van about men who trumpeted their ethics. Yet until the end, Trystin had acted for what Van might have called the greater good. It was better to destroy Revenant raiders than to allow them to terrorize systems that could not defend themselves. It was better to help businesses and small multis in ways so that they could compete and hold off, if not surmount, the subsidized and state-supported competition from Revenant institutions.
But…did that inevitably lead to…something like the Jerush flare?
Trystin had said that the technology was Farhkan. Did that mean…could they have somehow programmed the older man to destroy the Revenant home system? Trystin hadn’t seemed programmed, not in the way that the clones in Scandya had been.
Van paced away from the window, still damp with sweat, then turned back.
Could he honestly continue to manage IIS? Could he not? What would happen to all the independent systems…or to the fringe planets even in the Argenti or Hyndji loop…if someone, something like IIS, didn’t offer another alternative?
Or was that mere self-justification?
Van took a deep breath.
He hadn’t done any of the things that plagued him in nightmares. Was he having the nightmares because he hadn’t acted after he had learned? But what could he have done besides what he had? Walking away—from the RSF, from IIS—that didn’t make things better. It was a meaningless symbolic act, as if to say that Van wasn’t responsible. Was the guilt in what he felt because he hadn’t seen and should have—and should have acted?
Just as he hadn’t seen, or hadn’t wanted to see, what had been happening in the Republic until it had been too late?
Van slowly looked from side to side and back again, his eyes facing the window, but not really seeing the city or the darkness beyond.
Chapter 75
In the late morning of fiveday, Van sat at the conference table in the ISS Cambrian office, in the position where Trystin had once seated himself. Van still didn’t feel like the managing director of IIS, even after more than a week in Cambria, but everyone looked to him as that, probably because Nynca had made it absolutely clear that Van was indeed the managing director. Van had checked the records, and Trystin had only made the changes in the leadership contingency plan for IIS a month before his death—and he’d never told Van.
Van wondered if they all would have looked to him had they known of the nightmares and doubts that plagued him. Then he could see from the lines and the darkness behind Nynca’s eyes that at least some of those demons tormented her as well. And Eri had simply left IIS, claiming her stipend.
“I’ve read your report,” Van began, looking at Laren, the dark-haired woman in charge of research in Cambria. “It’s good.” It was good, even if Van didn’t like the facts it contained. The Jerush system was uninhabitable, and would be for years, if not centuries, even with remedial planoforming. Uninhabitable…such a clean word to use after the death of over five
