The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(42)

“You have been,” the countess assured him. “But I don’t think we’ll be needing your services any longer, Lord Teran.”

Assan was about to ask what she meant by that, but then was distracted by a knife sliding into his right kidney and slicing right. The air in Assan’s suit immediately started bleeding away into the vacuum, along with his actual blood. Assan turned, knife still in, to see his mission commander holding another knife. This one went into his stomach and was likewise slid across to the right. Assan’s suit started spilling oxygen prodigiously into his helmet to compensate for the loss elsewhere, which meant Assan could still hear the countess speaking to him.

“You were acting as the middleman between me and the Wu cousins,” she was saying. “And I was wondering why I needed a middleman at all. So I met with them both. Turns out you’ve been playing both for a fool, and they didn’t like that. We came to an alternate arrangement we were all happy with. We also decided that this little escape plan of yours would look better if it looked like it failed, and you went up with it when it did. We’ve already framed Nadashe’s lawyer as your accomplice. It’s very detailed. We’ve had to tweak your video plans. It shows something different now.”

Assan fell stiffly to the ground.

“Well, I imagine you’re almost all out of oxygen now, Lord Teran, so this is where we say goodbye. Thank you for being useful. There’s just one last thing left for you to do.”

There was a thin rustle, and Assan felt himself being lifted, carried, and thrown, into the transport.

The last thing he saw was the headless women he’d been so proud of. In the cold, her fingers had contracted up toward her palm. It occurred to Assan that it looked like she was flipping him off.

He would have laughed at that, but he burned instead.





Chapter

10

“What do you mean Nadashe Nohamapetan is dead?” Grayland II asked Hibert Limbar, head of the Imperial Guard. She set down her morning tea, for which she had budgeted exactly five minutes of time in one of her private gardens before she was hustled off to her next meeting.

“There was an escape attempt made this morning,” Limbar said. “From the security feeds it looks like it went horrendously wrong. Everyone was killed including the person trying to break out Lady Nadashe. And, ma’am, the person trying to do it appears to have been Lord Teran Assan.”

“What?”

“There wasn’t much to go on—the transport’s batteries ruptured and incinerated nearly everything inside—but the evidence we have is pretty conclusive. Lord Teran had been in contact with Lady Nadashe’s personal lawyer fairly extensively recently. I’ve got people liaising with the Hubfall police, the Corrections Ministry and the Ministry of Investigation on this. We’ll pick up Nadashe’s lawyer and see if he wants to try to extract himself from this mess.”

Grayland nodded at this. “Has someone informed the Countess Nohamapetan?”

“I understand the MoI has taken the task of informing her and getting a statement from her on themselves, and I am willing to let them have that honor.” Limbar’s tone very subtly made the point that it would not actually be an honor at all, but rather a real trash fire of an event, and Grayland couldn’t argue the point.

“I should send a note of condolence to her,” Grayland said. Limbar made a small, odd sound at this. Grayland caught it. “No?”

“Lady Nadashe was accused of attempting to assassinate you, ma’am,” Limbar said. “Sending a condolence note might appear disingenuous. The Countess Nohamapetan is known to perceive insult where none was given, and to hold grudges. Perhaps a public statement acknowledging the deaths of the lady and Lord Teran, plus a regret that justice was not served in this case.”

“You’re right, that’s better,” Grayland said. “Thank you.”

“There’s another small matter to be aware of, ma’am. Rumors have already begun that you had a hand in this event. That Teran wasn’t acting on his own, for his own reasons, but that you had hired him to act as an assassin on your behalf, because there is growing evidence that the attempt on your life was spearheaded by Amit Nohamapetan, not Nadashe.”

“That’s ridiculous. Particularly the part about Amit planning the assassination attempt.”

“There are news reports that suggest he had dealings with some less-than-reputable characters over money issues,” Limbar said. “Among other things.”

“I was with Amit literally seconds before he died,” Grayland said. “I’m not a mind reader, but I can assure you the look he had just before he was murdered was not one of someone who had a master plan to kill me or destroy his own ship.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

Grayland narrowed her eyes ever so slightly at this response. “You don’t believe there is anything to those reports, do you?”

“What I believe is someone has been making a concerted effort to introduce as much doubt into Lady Nadashe’s culpability for your attempted assassination as they can. Before this, I would have chalked this up to the lady’s defense team doing everything they could to open up an alternate theory of the case, to try to gin up reasonable doubt. But this latest bit makes me concerned that there is something else going on.”