The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(20)
Fundapellonan shrugged. “As you will. You should know we intend to ask for your removal anyway.”
“Good luck with that.”
“We don’t need luck, Lady Kiva. We have your incompetence.”
“The fuck you say.”
“You must be aware that there’s been a substantial increase in the amount of sabotage of Nohamapetan property and merchandise.”
“I’ve heard.”
“Then you’re equally aware this challenges the house’s ability to fulfill its business relationships. That damages the house’s reputation.”
“I don’t know,” Kiva said. “I won’t argue there’s been a spike in sabotage, but it seems to me the most prominent bit of sabo tage was when Nadashe turned a brand-new Nohamapetan ship into fucking scrap metal. As long as we’re talking about what damages a house’s reputation, maybe that should be put on the pile as well.”
Fundapellonan frowned at this. “Perhaps the emperox will see things differently.”
“I doubt it.” Kiva pointed to the signet document. “One of those will get you in to see Grayland, but I don’t think the emperox is going to forget your house rose up against her.”
“Not the house. One of its members.”
“Good luck making that argument.”
“I won’t be making that argument. The Countess Nohamapetan will be.”
Kiva blinked at this. “She’s coming here?”
“Of course,” Fundapellonan said, and smiled. “Lady Kiva, as you astutely note, the reputation of the House of Nohamapetan has taken a few hits recently. This is not something the appearance of a humble lawyer will fix. It’s not something a thousand lawyers will fix. The only way to fix this is to bring the countess from Terhathum to speak to the emperox directly. I’m here to take care of some—sorry—relatively minor preliminaries, like speaking to you. The countess will handle the heavy lifting.”
“And when is she arriving?”
Fundapellonan glanced at her wrist, which held a timepiece, which annoyed Kiva as being an overly dramatic act. “If the ship she was planning to be on held its schedule, roughly three days from now.” She looked back up. “Which gives you that much time to change your mind. But not that much time, Lady Kiva. Not that much time at all.”
Chapter
5
“So, how much time, precisely?”
Marce Claremont managed to keep his face composed—he was learning how to do that much, at least—but on the inside, where it mattered, he was smacking his face with his hand and dragging that hand down across his cheeks. His life for the past month had been answering, time and time and time and time again, the same question, in its infinite but mundane variations, for people who didn’t want to be convinced by the answer and who didn’t have the math to understand why it was going to be true no matter how much they wanted the answer to be different.
But this was Marce’s job now: Special Assistant for Science Policy to Emperox Grayland II, tasked with communicating the issues surrounding the imminent collapse of the Flow to Very Important People. These included but were not limited to imperial ministers, members of parliament, the heads of noble houses and their entourages, bishops and archbishops of the Interdependent Church and any other churches, scientists, journalists, high-ranking celebrities, “thought leaders,” noted public intellectuals and the occasional talk show host.
All day, every day, for the last month.
All day, every day, for the foreseeable future.
At this very moment, Marce had brought his now road-tried-and-tested presentation to the Imperial Society of Exogeology, which had convened for its biennial convention on Hub, biennial because it was difficult for members from across the Interdependency to haul their respective butts across Flow streams that took weeks and sometimes months to get them to where they were going, and at Hub because, simply, all Flow streams led to Hub.
(For now, some portion on Marce’s brain volunteered. Marce shoved that part of his brain back down into its hole.)
One might think that of all groups that Marce would address on the topic of the collapse of the Flow streams, it would be scientists who would be the easiest to convince. After all, what Marce had was data, three decades of data, researched and codified and presented in a format that nearly every scientist would understand. Charts and graphs and columns and footnotes and of course a digital file laden with all the raw information his father, the Count Claremont, had collected over thirty years.
But as it turned out the scientists were uniformly the worst audiences. Marce could understand Flow physicists being balky or dismissive: This was their field, after all, and now some minor lord and even more minor professor from an obscure university at the ass end of space was presenting them information, from his dad, informing all of them that everything they thought they understood about the Flow was entirely wrong. That was a real kick to the nether regions, intellectually speaking. Honestly Marce would have been surprised if Flow scientists had done anything other than attack, at least until they had time to sit with the data and recognize the terrifying truth of it.
But it wasn’t just the Flow physicists. Every group of scientists, in every discipline, had given him static about the data he and his father had collected and interpreted. Marce had been genuinely flummoxed by it until he thought back on his days in academia and what the chair of his department had once told him, about colleagues who were bound and determined to relate every new finding to their own area of expertise and that area only. “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” his chair had said.