Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

“Yes, but don’t bolt it.” She signalled one of the four attendant footmen to bring her own tea and toast.

Edward was feeding Benedict slim slices of bread along with his boiled egg. “Is the news still all Laton?” he asked over Emmeline’s head.

“Yes,” Kirsten said.

He pulled a sympathetic face, and dangled another bread soldier in front of a cheerful Benedict.

They had been married forty years. A good marriage by any reasonable standards, let alone an institution as odd as a royal marriage. Edward was old money, titled as well, and an ex-navy officer who had served with some distinction. He was also geneered, which was a big plus; the court liked matches with the same range of life expectancy—it made things tidy. They hadn’t quite been pushed into it by the family, but the pressure had been there for someone like him. All the senior Saldanas displayed for public consumption the Christian monogamy ideal. Divorce was, of course, out of the question. Alastair was head of Kulu’s Church, Defender of the Faith throughout the Kingdom. Royalty didn’t break the commandments, not publicly.

However, she and Edward enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect, and trust, and even considerable fondness. Maybe love had been there too at the start of it, forty years ago. But what they had now was enough to carry them through the next century together without bitterness and regret. Which was an achievement in itself. When she thought of her brother Claude’s marriage . . .

“Mummy’s thinking again,” Emmeline a

Kirsten gri

“What?” Emmeline squealed.

“Depends what you’ve done wrong.”

“Nothing! Ask Na

“She pinched Rosy Oldamere’s swimming towel yesterday,” Zandra said. Emmeline burst into giggles. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

“It was so fu

“Her skin was turning blue,” Emmeline said proudly.

“Who’s Laton?” Zandra asked.

“A bad man,” Edward said.

“Is he on Ombey?”

“No,” Kirsten said. “Now eat your rice chips.”

Her neural nanonics gave a silent chime, which warned her from the start it was going to be bad news; her equerry would never allow a datavised message through unless it was serious, not at breakfast. She accessed the Defence and Security Council datapackage.

“Trouble,” she said resentfully.

Edward glanced over as she rose.

“I’ll help get them ready for day club,” he said.

“Thanks.” He was a good man.

She walked through the private apartments and emerged into the wide marbled corridor which led to the cabinet offices, drawing startled looks and hurried bows from staff who were in early. She was still dressed in her turquoise and grey rising robe.

The official reception room was a decagonal chamber with a vaulting roof that dripped chandeliers. A horizontal sheet of sunlight was pouring in through a ring of azure windows halfway up the walls. Pillars were inlaid with gold and platinum under a lofriction gloss which kept the metal permanently agleam. Holoprints of impossibly violent stellar events alternated with oil paintings around the walls. There were no modern dreamphase or mood-effusion works; the Saldanas always favoured antiquity for the intimation of timeless dignity it gave.

Three people were waiting for her in the middle of the black tushkwood tile floor. Sylvester Geray was at their head; her equerry, a thirty-six-year-old captain wearing his Royal Kulu Navy dress uniform. Hopelessly formal, she always thought, but he hadn’t put a foot wrong since he took up the post three months after her coronation.

The other two, both wearing civilian suits, were a less welcome sight. Roche Skark, the director of the ESA office on Ombey, smiled politely at his princess and inclined his head. Despite geneering, he was a rotund man, in his eighties, and twenty centimetres shorter than Kirsten. He had held his post for thirteen years, dealing with threats and perceived threats throughout the sector with pragmatism and a judicious application of abstruse pressure on the people who counted. Foreign governments might grumble endlessly about the ESA and its influence and meddling in local internal politics, but there was never any solid proof of involvement. Roche Skark didn’t make the kind of elementary mistakes which could lead to the diplomatic embarrassment of his sovereign.

Ja

Quite where the boundaries of the respective agencies’ operational fields were drawn tended to become a little blurred at times, especially in the asteroid settlements or the activities of foreign embassy perso

“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Sylvester Geray said. “The matter was deemed urgent.”

“Naturally,” Kirsten said. She datavised a code at one set of high double doors, and gestured for them to follow. “Let’s get on with it.”

The doors opened into her private office. It was a tastefully furnished room in white and powder blue, though lacking in the ostentation of the formal State Office next door where she received diplomats and politicians. French windows looked out into a tiny walled garden where fountains played in a couple of small ornamental ponds. Glass-fronted cabinets and bookshelves stood around the walls, heavy with exquisite gifts from visitors and institutions who enjoyed her patronage. A malachite bust of Alastair II sat on a pedestal in an alcove behind her desk (Allie looking over her shoulder, as always). A classic Saldana face, broadly handsome, with a gravity the sculptor had captured perfectly. She remembered her brother practising that sombre poise in the mirror when he was a teenager.

The doors swung shut and Kirsten datavised a codelock at them. The processor in her desk confirmed the study was now physically and electronically secure.

“The datapackage said there has been a new development in the Ekwan case,” she said as she sat in her high-backed chair behind the desk.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ja

Kirsten waved a hand for them to sit. “I didn’t think it would be good news.”

“I’d like to bring in Admiral Farquar,” Sylvester Geray said.

“Of course.” Kirsten datavised the processor for a security level one sensenviron conference and closed her eyes.

The illusion was of a curving featureless white chamber with a central oval table; Kirsten sat at the head, with Roche Skark and Pascoe Farquar on one side, and Ja