On a Red Station, Drifting by de Bodard Aliette

Author:de Bodard, Aliette
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Nine Dragon Rivers
Published: 2013-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

Book 3: The Embroidered Guard

In the hours that followed the banquet, Linh became even more of a pariah than usual. The family provided for her, and her access privileges to the higher levels of the trance weren’t cut off, but everything was given with tight lips, and her usual accesses into the Honoured Ancestress’ and Quyen’s chambers denied. Not that Linh had ever cared much about it, but she hadn’t expected the whole situation to leave her...wrung out, empty, as if there’d been nothing left within her once she’d poured her bile.

Nothing but grief, and the emptiness where Giap had once been; the bitter knowledge that all her prayers, all her entreaties to her ancestors would not bring him back, would not fill the hollow in her heart. The ancestors on her implants, too, were silent, though she could feel First Ancestor Thanh Thuy’s disapproval like a slap on the hand. No doubt she was keeping all the others silent until Linh realised the gravity of what she’d done.

It had been clumsily done. But Linh wouldn’t go back on it, or on how she felt about Prosper.

The only one she felt sorry for was Huu Hieu. She’d gone several times to his quarters, mustering an apology that rang false even to her. But the guardians at the doors of his chambers made it all too clear this access, too, was denied to her. Accordingly, she was down to using the trance, looking into the guts of the system, wondering if there was a weakness she could exploit to send him a personal message that bitch Quyen wouldn’t read.

And what was in the guts was...frightening. Everything was haphazardly cobbled up, seeming to answer little more than random impulses within the core. Linh was no Grand Master of Design Harmony, no Mover of Bots, but still, even she could see that it was all wrong and getting worse by the moment. Quyen was losing her grip on the station. Linh watched, amused, as Bao and a posse of servants tore the Abode of Brush Saplings apart, looking for the missing implants, while the teacher, Lê Anh Tu, watched them, mockingly.

In the end they had to leave. Linh had no doubt Bao would report his failure to Quyen.

Good. Let the bitch know chaos, too. Let her know loss.

But even those words seemed to ring hollow in her mind, faded against the memory of the entire hall turning to her in the wake of her poem.

She was still looking into the system—like a spaceship pilot fascinated by deep spaces a moment before the ship’s protection failed them and they were torn apart—when a visitor was announced.

It was Bao and he looked...different; the ethereal cast to his face subtly wrong, like ill-applied makeup, or a corrupted mask.

He didn’t bother with even so much as a greeting. “I can’t find my younger brother.”

Linh laughed, not bothering to disguise the bitterness in that laugh. “And you think I’d know where he is?”

“You’re a magistrate.” Bao’s tone was flat, reasonable, a monk’s, a priest’s.

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