The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency) by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi [Scalzi, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780765388971
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

11

After a day of hiding and skulking around with mercenaries, which was a thing too tedious to recount or indeed ever to think of again, Nadashe found herself on the You Can Blame It All on Me, her mother’s personal fiver.

Nadashe thought it was an almost unconscionable extravagance that her mother used a fiver to haul herself from star system to star system, but on the other hand her mother didn’t really live anywhere else. The fiver was her home, even when it was parked in orbit over Terhathum. She never went down to Terhathum, or Basantapur, its largest city.

Well, that was the deal, wasn’t it, Nadashe thought to herself. Dad got Terhathum. Mom got the rest of the universe.

Nadashe was tucked quite comfortably into her own private apartment on the Blame. It was the one her mother always kept for her, because it was a whole huge goddamn spaceship, and she could keep an apartment for a couple hundred of her closest friends if she wanted. And in fact she did travel with an entourage of friends and lackeys and what have you. She was a countess, and she was the head of the House of Nohamapetan, and she was a narcissist who needed and wanted attention. All of these things conspired to have her travel with a village in tow. But the villagers were kept on the other side of the ship’s ring from Mother and her quarters. The only living quarters on her side of the ring were the ones for her and her three children.

Two now, Nadashe said to herself, and sighed. She wasn’t ready to have that conversation with her mother.

But she didn’t have to, yet; Mother wasn’t on the Blame. She was down at Hubfall, where she was being told the horrible news that her daughter, the traitor, the murderer, the imperial assassin, had gone up like a firework in a botched escape attempt that killed her, three guards, a driver and the Lord Teran Assan.

The presence of Assan was a spicy bit of news that the media glommed onto and ran with. Everyone loved the idea of Assan, obsessed with the traitorous Nadashe Nohamapetan, planning her escape with her witless lawyer as their go-between. The lawyer who, incidentally, had jumped to his death while his family was at the zoo looking at miniature giraffes and long-haired otters.

Nadashe pursed her lips at that thought. Alas, poor Dorick. He had had no idea what he was getting into, and probably continued to have no idea, up to and including the moment whichever of the countess’s bodyguards it was pushed him out of that window. At least his family would be well cared for, as long as Dorick had told his wife where his stash of money was, and also the authorities didn’t find it.

No one as yet had seemed to suggest that Nadashe might still be alive. The escape scene featured a body for everyone plus one extra, and what was left in all cases was hardly identifiable.

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