The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(92)

“And will they?” Ranatunga asked.

“It’s happened before,” Marce said. “Most obviously we lost the Flow stream to Earth, our ancestral home, more than a millennium ago. Another stream collapse, involving the Dalasysla system, happened a couple hundred years later. However, since then, the Flow streams have been remarkably stable, a fact which has allowed the Interdependency to thrive and prosper.”

Korbijn shook the report, which she was not bothering to flip through at the moment; others on the committee had also set them down; Nadashe Nohamapetan had put hers down to make some notation on her tablet. “Does this paper suggest the Flow streams are collapsing?”

“No,” Marce said. “The paper actually proposed that the streams are likely to undergo a radical shift, rearranging themselves over the course of a very few years. Most of the Flow streams that we have now will go away, but they’ll be replaced by emerging ones that will allow trade in the Interdependency to continue—but with End the nexus of the new Flow stream network, not Hub.”

“Is that accurate?” Korbijn asked.

“That’s what Roynold wanted to know, which is why she sent the draft to my father, who had written an earlier paper along the same lines, the findings of which he discussed with Attavio VI, with whom he shared a friendship. It was by Attavio’s request that he stopped publicly researching the topic, but the early paper was still out there. Roynold supposed that he was the only person who would take her seriously on the topic.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing; he was researching privately for the emperox. The only person I think he ever shared the draft with was me, because I was working with him on his research. And publicly, at least, Hatide Roynold stopped researching on this topic. Her doctorate addresses another vector of research entirely. But the imperial guards have just spoken to her overnight. It turns out that like my father, Roynold had a private patron who allowed her to continue her research on the topic of the Flow streams shifting. Nadashe Nohamapetan.”

All eyes turned to Nadashe, who smiled. “I knew this was coming,” she said, and addressed Korbijn directly. “Hatide is a friend of mine from university. She came to me in financial straits and wouldn’t take charity. So I funded her research on this topic instead. I gave her a stipend to finish this and her other work, and she gave quarterly updates. Which I never read because that was never the point.”

“I’m sorry, Lady Nohamapetan, but there is reason to believe otherwise,” Marce said.

Nadashe turned to Marce and would have glared a hole in his chest if she could. “And what reason is that, Mr. Claremont?”

“It’s Lord Claremont, Lady Nadashe,” Marce said. “And because your brother suggested otherwise.”

“To whom?”

“To us,” said Emperox Grayland II, from the doorway. Everyone stood, except for Marce, who was already standing. He smiled at Grayland’s sudden appearance. They had not planned it when they had spoken earlier, but he could tell she had been agitated when he came to her and disclosed what Kiva Lagos had told him, along with his own personal information. When the emperox told him the things she knew, everything, appallingly, fell together. After she had made calls to follow up on loose ends, the two of them planned this presentation, which Marce was to deliver.

But she also made him wear a microphone so she could hear the entire exchange, which is why she had a response to Nadashe Nohamapetan when she was too far away to possibly have heard what she was saying as she walked through the door. Marce had to admit it made for a nice psychological effect.

Grayland walked slowly to the table and waved at everyone to sit. Archbishop Korbijn moved to sit elsewhere besides the head of the table, but Grayland signaled she should stay where she was. She reached Marce and leaned on him instead.

“Your brother, Lady Nadashe, revealed to us that your family knew about Dr. Roynold’s work,” Grayland said. “He told us that just before he died, torn apart by that shuttle that crashed into your new tenner. We didn’t know what he meant at the time. But then we had a conversation with Lord Claremont here, and he knew what your brother was talking about, because he’d seen her early work. He knew what it said, and he also knew it was wrong.”

“It is wrong,” Marce agreed. “The math was sloppy. I haven’t seen her latest work yet, but if she’s still suggesting a Flow shift, then she never corrected her initial errors.”

“But you wouldn’t know that,” Grayland continued, to Nadashe. “So you and your family worked from the assumption that End would become the new center of the Interdependency. You worked so that when it happened, you, and not the House of Wu, would be the ones to control Flow access. You promoted rebellion on End, sent your brother Ghreni there to administer it, developed an agricultural virus to exacerbate it, and blamed it on the House of Lagos to cover your tracks and to get back at an enemy house.”

“Here at Hub you pushed for military aid to End’s duke and then used pirates to take those weapons for your family, pushing the duke to more desperate action,” Marce said. “And you kept the pressure on for more military intervention by planning and executing terrorist attacks here and in the rest of the Interdependency.”

“That’s a lie,” Nadashe said.

“We have Che Isolt in Guard custody, Lady Nohamapetan,” Grayland said. “Your man at customs and immigration. He gave you up almost immediately. He told us how he identified and acted as a go-between between you and immigrants from End. How you would either use them or frame them for the terrorist events. He even told us about the attempt yesterday. How he gave an unwitting immigrant a transmitter that hacked into the shuttle through a maintenance program and sent it into your own ship. Do you know why he gave you up so easily?”