Dead, all dead. But then, not quite all dead (a Sept was no small thing, and reality was rarely quite so neat). Just as-good-as all. Five junior servants, on leave or errands, had survived, as had one of his second cousins and her infant son. That was all. Enough to make it not a clean break, however awful, sufficient so that he would be expected to keep going, provide leadership, be strong… all that easily said clichéd stuff. His mother, absent, might have survived, but she’d been killed too, in another attack — unrelated, it was supposed, just sheer bad luck — on the Cessorian habitat in the Kuiper belt where she’d been on a Retreat for the last half year.
He supposed he ought to be thankful that Jaal was still alive, that she had not been calling at the Winter House at the time of the attack. Instead he had a succession of alarmed, shocked, plaintive and then numb-sounding messages from her, the last few pleading for him to get in touch if he could, if he was alive, if he was somewhere in Nasqueron and could hear this or read this…
He had been listed as missing by the Shrievalty Ocula after the attack on Third Fury. Officially he still was. They hadn’t been sure that he and Colonel Hatherence were still alive until they’d received her relayed signal days later, and subsequently had thought it best to keep his survival a secret for the time being. His interview with the news service in Hauskip had complicated matters — however, this was already being denounced as a fake even without their intervention, and a degree of confusion had ensued. Listed as missing in action, he was still officially alive and so Chief Seer of Sept Bantrabal. That would not change for at least a year.
The situation in Ulubis system was no less desperate and the importance of what they had been asked to do had if anything increased with the latest hostile actions of the Invader\Beyonders. Even as it all came through, even as the signals downloaded into the gascraft’s memory, with all the codes intact, all the routings displayed, he kept thinking, Maybe it’s all a hoax, maybe it’s all just some terrible mistake. Even when he saw the news screenage of the still-smoking crater where the Winter House had been, in the rolling hills of Ualtus Great Valley, he had wanted to believe it wasn’t true; this was faked, all of it was faked.
It had happened more or less at the same time as the bombardment of Third Fury. The tiny flash he had seen on the surface of ’glantine as they fell towards Nasqueron in the escaping drop ship: that had been the impact, that had been the instant of their deaths, that had been the very second in which he became alone. The earlier Shrievalty message, slipping through before the data jam that had kept them ignorant all these days and recording the organisation’s sympathy for his loss had been referring to this catastrophe as well, not just to the loss of life in Third Fury.
The wreckage of the drop ship had been found, in the upper Depths, the body of Master Technician Hervil Apsile within. It was as though nothing was to be left aside, nothing and nobody saved, nothing, almost nothing, left to him. Some servants he hardly knew and a second cousin he was moderately fond of, plus an infant he couldn’t even picture. And Jaal. But would that — could that — ever be the same now? He liked but did not love her, and was fairly sure she felt the same way. It would have been a good match, but after this he would be different, another person altogether, even if he did return from this idiot adventure, even if there was anything to return to, even if the coming war hadn’t destroyed or altered everything. And would her Sept want her to marry into a Sept that no longer existed? Where was the good match, the wise marriage there? Would even she want to, and if she still did, would it not be out of duty, out of sympathy, out of the feeling that their contract must still be honoured, no matter what? What a formula for future blame and bitterness that would be.
It was almost a comfort to realise that Jaal too would probably be lost to him. It was as though he was hanging over some great drop, about to fall, destined to fall, and the greatest pain came from the act of still hanging on, fingers scraping, nails tearing. Let go of this one last thing to cling to, and the fall itself would at least be painless.
He wasn’t going to kill himself. It was grimly good to know he could do it, but he wouldn’t. From a purely practical point of view, he was fairly certain that Hatherence had followed him, using her esuit’s military capabilities to hide herself from his gascraft’s senses. She’d try to stop him. It could get undignified, and she might even succeed. If he really wanted to kill himself, he was sure there were easier ways. Just heading deeper into the war zone and powering hard straight for a Dreadnought should do the job.
And it would be too easy. It would be selfish. It would be the end to this terrible, gnawing feeling of guilt, a line drawn under that, and he didn’t think that he deserved such an easy way out. He felt guilty? So feel guilty. He had meant no harm — quite the opposite — he’d just been wrong. Feeling guilty was stupid. It was understandable, but it was stupid, just beside the point. They were dead and he was alive. His actions might well have led directly to their deaths, but he hadn’t killed them.
What was left? Revenge, maybe. Though who to blame? If it really had been Beyonders, that made his old treachery (or principled, self-sacrificing stand, depending) look foolish somehow. He still despised the Mercatoria, hated the whole vicious, cretinous, vacuously self-important, sentience-hating system, and he’d never had any illusions about the unalloyed niceness of the Beyonders or any other large group, or thought that a struggle against the Mercatoria would be other than prolonged, painful and bloody. He’d always known that his own end might be painful and long-drawn-out — he would do everything he could to make sure it wasn’t, but sometimes there was just nothing you could do. He had also realised that innocents died just as filthily and in equally great numbers in a just war as they did in an unjust one, and had known that war was to be avoided at almost all costs just because it magnified mistakes, exaggerated errors, but still he’d hoped there would somehow be an elegance about his involvement in the struggle against the Mercatoria, a degree of gloriousness, a touch of the heroic.
Instead: muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death — all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictive-ness, just through the ghastly, banal working-out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.
Perhaps he had brought it all down upon them. Never mind advising Slovius to get away from the Autumn House: his delve, his famous delve, the action of meeting Valseir and trading information might have produced all this. It might all be his fault. Taking all he’d been told at face value, it was.
He tried to laugh, but the gillfluid filling his mouth and throat and lungs wouldn’t let him, not properly. “Oh, come on then,” be tried to say into the gassy skies of Nasqueron (it came out as a hopeless mumble), “show me it’s all a sim, prove the Cessona’s right. End run. Game over. Lift me out.”
Still all just a mumble, a gurgling somewhere down in his throat as he half stood, half lay there in his coffin-shaped alcove in the little hovering gascraft, poised within the gas-giant’s atmosphere at a place where a human could expose themselves to the elements and not die too quickly, if they had something to breathe.
Revenge was a poor way out too, he thought through his tears. It was human nature, it was creat nature, it would be in the nature of almost any being capable of feeling angry and injured, but it was nearly as poor a way out as suicide. Self-serving, self-centred, selfish. Yes, if he was set in front of whoever had ordered the lobbing of a nuke at a house complex full of unarmed, unwarned civilians, he’d be tempted to kill them if he could, but it would not bring the dead back.