BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 12: Ninety-Nine Point Nine Nine Nine

analyzer had finished scrolling before Ward got in front of it.

Kestrel stood over it with his back to the room. It was a machine the size of a fist and it did not need a man standing over it, and Ward had to come round his shoulder to get any look at the screen at all; by the time he was close enough to read, his breath was on the clear lid.

He read the number. Then he read it again, digit by digit, the way he read anything that was going into a file.

Ninety-nine point nine nine nine.

He looked at the lid, still lit from underneath. He looked at his own hands, which had held a needle steady against a moving arm twenty minutes earlier and were shaking now, and he put them behind his back. He did not look at either man's face. There was nothing he needed there.

"Ninety-nine point nine nine nine," he said.

"That's what it says," Kestrel said.

"That's what it says." Ward heard his own voice climb half a tone and did not care for it. "Admiral, I've run these for a living for a long time. I have never seen one come out anywhere near this."

From the head of the table, Silas said, "Put it in a sentence, Doctor."

Ward told him, in the words he would have used on paper. He hated the phrase. He had written a page about that phrase once, in a journal hardly anyone read, and two letters since, and neither of the letters had been answered.

"The literature calls it a match made in heaven."

The analyzer's fan turned over once and settled. Nobody said anything.

He had run this assay for years, for people who wanted a reason to marry and for people who wanted a reason not to, and the numbers were usually a disappointment to somebody. Rarely to both of them at once.

His transfer application was in a drawer in the capital with nobody's name on it, and nobody was ever going to decide about it now. He would be in this house until this was finished. He wanted something out of it that could be written down and signed, with a ceremony attached, and he was not going to say today, or possibly ever, what that was.

Under the digits, in soft gold script, the manufacturer had printed a short line of encouragement, on the theory that good news ought to be decorated. Ward had never read it. He had it memorized.

The write-up would be read by people who had never run a machine in their lives and who would have opinions about the last digit, and it would have his name at the top of it.

He began to pack, slowly, one piece at a time, both eyes on his hands.

---

"Impossible," Kestrel said.

"Impossible," Silas said, half a beat behind him. In this house that was losing.

They looked at each other. He had spent a career reading faces across tables, and there was nothing on Kestrel's that he could use; from the look of it, the same held in the other direction. If either of them had been any younger, one of them would have had to leave the room.

Kestrel had come downstairs that morning without touching his hair. It was no problem at all for anyone looking at him. It was about to be a serious problem for anyone listening.

"It's the data," Ward said, from the side of them, in a smaller voice than he had used a minute ago. "It's a measurement. I didn't put it there."

"I'll say it once, for the doctor," Kestrel said. "I would die first."

"Then here's mine." Silas turned his arm over on the table so the bruise showed above the cuff. "Even if every Alpha in the Federation dropped dead tomorrow, I still wouldn't want him."

Kestrel tipped his head, trying it. "Every Alpha in the Federation. You've had that one a while."

"It works."

"Then try mine. It's better." He put both hands on the table and leaned his weight onto them. "If we were the last two people left alive—"

"We're not."

"We're not. But if we were." He straightened up and looked at the analyzer, then at Silas. "I still wouldn't want you."

"And while we're being told things by machines, here's the arrangement, so nobody gets excited." He tipped his chin at the little screen. "When this is over, I go. That number doesn't change it."

"It doesn't," Silas said.

"Good. Then we agree."

Between one refusal and the next, Ward had begun putting his equipment away — one piece at a time, with the unhurried care of a man who had decided to leave and had not decided how fast. Silas pushed his sleeve down over the bruise and stood. The number was going to need a record, and it would be better if he was the one who made the first one.

He was on the stairs when it happened, in this order: the case snapping shut; a pause; something said low that he did not catch; the front door; gravel; an engine, with very little room between any of them.

Silas went up to the study.

The message was waiting on the terminal. No subject line, no greeting. The crest sat at the top of it — a white bird with a green branch in its beak, inside a red ring — and the name at the bottom was her own.

She wanted to know by what authority he had taken the prisoner Adrian Kestrel out of the First Prison without consulting her office. She wanted to know on Friday, in the Tribunal, on the record, with the Cabinet in the room.

She was a hundred and seventy years old this year. She had not asked him for anything in a decade. What she had sent him was not a question. It was a date.

His authority was one clause of the Natal Protection Act, written a long time ago for a problem that had nothing to do with Kestrel, and never used the way he had used it. It was real law. It was also the kind of law a Cabinet could decide, on a show of hands, that it had stopped believing in. He had been expecting the message for four days. Expecting it had been no help at all.

The true reason was not going into that room. Whatever he said on Friday had to be better than the true reason, and he did not have it yet, and it was ten days.

Whether or not Ward had written the number down, he had it, and he had walked it out of the house in a case with a lock on it.

He did not reply. There was no reply that would hold, and the terminal chimed again while he was still sitting there.

"Admiral Juno Osei," the terminal said, and put him up over the desk.

Osei came up standing, in a study with the same desk in it. They had bought those desks the same year, out of the same catalogue, back when neither of them had any money and both of them had plans. He never sat for these calls. The projector drew him from the knees up, and he had come off the frontier the day before and had the flat, patient look of a man who had not slept on the way home.

"Silas. You took Kestrel out of the First Prison."

"Yes."

"Why."

"The President has asked me the same thing. She'll have her answer on Friday."

"That's ten days."

"It is."

Osei took his time with it. He unhooked the band of his watch and set it down on the desk.

"Give me a sentence," he said. "Not for the net. Something I can carry back to my office and read out to people who are going to ask me about you."

"There isn't one yet."

"Then tell me you know it was wrong."

"I know it was mine to do. That's the sentence I have."

Osei let it stand.

"I don't think you've lost your mind," he said. "The net does. There's traffic about you, and a lot of it."

"I know."

"There's a version where you and the pirate are going into the Cabinet together. The word they use is treason."

"The word is cheap."

"It's cheap when nobody's buying. My office hears things before your office does. Somebody in the Cabinet has already picked this up and taken it home to read."

"Then they'll do it where I can see them. On Friday."

"All right." Osei leaned in over the desk, closer than the projection usually allowed, and the question came out flat, because it was not an accusation, it was the last thing he had. "One thing, and I'll leave it. How did you take him in the first place? He's a man who—"

The wormhole was where that question went. It was where it always went.

There was cold in it, and weight, and a month with nothing in the right order — no before, no after, nothing he could lay out in a line and look at. He had never once tried to put the pieces in order. He did not try now.

"Juno."

"All right," Osei said, and let it go, because they had known each other since school and they both knew where the floor was.

"You know I've held you up as my compass since we were in school," he said. "That isn't flattery. You have never once been wrong about anything that mattered, and I would like to keep it that way."

"People are wrong." Silas looked at the desk between them. "Don't make a myth out of me."

"I'll be at the Tribunal on Friday."

"All right."

There was nothing else to say. Osei did not know enough about the last four weeks to finish the sentence he had come to the edge of, and Silas knew the end of it, and that was the whole of it. Silas ended the call.

Afterward, when the call was down, the file came through. It was not a message. It was two things: a Cabinet committee schedule for the next quarter with one meeting circled in ink in a hand that was not Osei's, and a duty roster for the Tribunal's north entrance with one line struck out by hand and nothing written in its place.

Silas read it twice. No name had been written in the margin anywhere on either page. That was the message.

He sent back one word.

Understood.

The envelope lay on the desk, squared to the edge of it: orange crayon, a sun with a face in it, four fat rays, and the letters of the address running uphill toward a line nobody had drawn. He knew the hand.

Boots on the stairs, and no knock. Kestrel came around the back of the chair, put a hand on it, and leaned in over his shoulder to look at the paper.

Silas closed the terminal with his thumb and did not turn around.