The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(71)
“How many?”
“As many who can make it here alive, I expect,” Claremont said, and then clapped his hands together. “Now, Lord Ghreni. You’re a murderer and a usurper, and you tried to hurt my son. In a perfect world you’d be dead or rotting in jail for what you’ve been doing for the last few years. Either option would be fine by me. But right now, for better or worse, you’re the Duke of End. I suppose now that you’re duke you’ve magically found a way to end the rebellion, yes?”
Ghreni nodded.
“Which means you were actively involved in the rebellion in some horribly duplicitous way, yes?”
Ghreni gave a full-body shrug to this.
“That’s what I thought. Regardless, now we’re at peace, which we’re going to need for what comes next, and you, alas, are instrumental in keeping it. Which means that getting rid of you at this point would cause even more problems than it would solve. I could try arguing the point—I suppose I could contact Sir Ontain and make a fuss. But now that you know about the Flow stream collapse, you know we have bigger problems on our hands than rebellions and coups. So I’m going to offer you my support.”
“Really.” Ghreni blinked at this. “With all due respect, sir, I think you’re misjudging who needs whose support.”
“I’m not. You have some decisions to make that will decide whether humanity—the part of it here now, and the parts of it to come—survive the collapse. You’re ambitious and you’re greedy and you clearly were part of some larger plan by your house to take control of the Interdependency. Good.”
“Good?”
“That last part, yes. It means your ambition and greed are in service for something more than just yourself. It means that you might be something other than just a grasping sociopath. That you might actually care about the Interdependency, and the people in it, and what happens to them. If you do, or if at the very least you can learn to, then I’m here to help you. If you don’t, you might as well have those marines on the other side of the door shoot me now. At this point, it’s all the same to me. But if you are going to use me, and you should, I have some terms and requests. Some things I need from you, so I can trust that there is more to you than the shallow, self-centered hustler you’ve been up to this point. I need to believe you might actually be able to save the world.”
For the life of him, Ghreni had nothing to say to any of this. It was literally like his tongue and brain—his two advantages—had simply shriveled up and blown away.
Claremont peered at Ghreni closely. “You didn’t think this was how it was going to go, did you? Being duke? Getting everything you planned for?”
Ghreni opened his mouth to respond and croaked. He swallowed, embarrassed, and tried again. “No,” he said.
“Well, surprise, then, Lord Ghreni,” Claremont said. “And now, tell me: What’s it going to be? Are you going to use me, or not?”
PART THREE
Chapter
13
Less than ten minutes after Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby emerged out of the Flow in the Hub system and began its thirty-seven-hour real-space trip to Hub’s imperial station, a bomb went off in the entertainment district of the city of Chadwick, on Hub. The bomb had been placed in a restaurant and went off just after the lunch rush, killing ten people in the restaurant, two people on the street outside. The restaurant itself was gutted.
The response was quick. Automated fire suppression units sprang from their hidey-holes to minimize that threat; the public air systems in that area switched over to particulate filtering mode to keep the air breathable for the immediate environment. The massive doors to that section of Chadwick, so rarely activated, ground closed in order to seal off the spread of any possible conflagration, the damage of which would be horrifying in that enclosed, underground environment. Transport tubes in and out of Chadwick were shut down and physically sealed off. Until local and imperial authorities reopened the tubes, the only way in or out of Chadwick would be overland, in hard vacuum. But even the access tunnels to the surface were closed off and policed.
Not that it mattered. “They’ve looked at the security cameras for the week prior to the bombing, both from the restaurant and on the streets around it,” said Gjiven Lobland, the imperial investigator at the scene, in video piped into the executive committee’s meeting room at the imperial palace, three hours after the bombing. “There’s nothing. No drops, nothing left behind by a customer, no suspicious activity. We’ve identified all the patrons and staff who ate or worked there and we’re working through them, starting with the ones with criminal records. So far, all of them have come up clean.”
“So how did the bomb get in there?” asked Upeksha Ranatunga, representing parliament.
“We’re looking into it. What video we have shows the explosion originating in the back of the restaurant, in the storage areas. We have the forensics people in there now.”
“If it went off in the storage areas then it might be something that was delivered,” Archbishop Korbijn said. “In which case it could have been something that had been sitting there for days, or weeks.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” Lobland agreed. “We’ve got investigators looking through delivery records. We’ll find it.”