Eleya waited until the door closed behind her before continuing down to the end of the conference table, standing on the other side of the holo projector and inspecting the design on display. She picked a loose hair off her deep blue jacket, geometric designs woven in with sliver and gold, before looking over at her niece. The Empress raised an eyebrow at Carbon, lips pressed tight and already annoyed. “I do not know what that is. You are aware that technology was never the focus of my studies.”
“This is the newest version of our translator module, two days old.” Carbon practically hissed in Tsla as she tapped at the datapad in her hand, digging into the data stores to find a comparison. The projector went dark for a moment before an image of a much less complex design lit it up. She pointed at it, not that familiar with it, but the chip sitting in the middle was incredibly common. There were probably ten of them in this very room. “Our original module. According to the logs, unchanged since an update to the microphone over a decade ago.”
Eleya did not look particularly impressed, shaking her head with a little shrug. “As I just said, I have never pursued technology. If a new processor design was issued and works well, I’ll be sure to congratulate the team that worked on it. If it does not, it appears that we still have the ability to produce the old unit?”
“It is not our design. Not evolutionary, not revolutionary...” Carbon’s voice lowered, accusatory, as she flipped back to the first chip. Eleya’s behavior had always been difficult to follow, although her drive, her goals, never changed. It was clearly intentional. Carbon’s fingertip slid across the tablet in her hand, highlighting a segment of repeated squares, an explanation of what it was spilling out onto the holodisplay in Tsla. “Multiple rewritable, pipelined language decoding channels. For decades ours have used software running on a single multipurpose processor, capable of translating one audio stream at a time. But we have just now jumped to dedicated hardware with four concurrent streams? There have been modifications, but the core of it is decidedly Human in origin. Look at the power regulation.”
“That is curious.” Eleya seemed to be bored by this already. She gave Alex, still sitting in his chair, a quick look with no small amount of scorn in it. No doubt attempting to spur him into controlling his wife. Finding no reaction besides confusion from her beloved, the Empress set her gaze upon Carbon once more. “Though I admit, I do not see what that has to do with why we are here.”
“It has nothing to do with why we are here, but now is a good time to discuss it. You said you wanted us to have better access to Human technology. Did you not?” Carbon leaned against the table, glaring across it at the Empress. Of all the secrets she’d kept, this one had felt the worst even when she’d merely tolerated the presence of Humans.
She clicked her tongue and shook her head in disapproval. “Yes, and that was years ago... Long before all that has befallen our kind, and long before we undertook any ventures with the Humans.”
“I am thinking of a much more recent statement.” She stood up and crossed her arms over her chest, pad still clutched in one hand. Eleya had never meant for any of this to make to her before she left to work with the Kshlav’o, apparently. “I believe your exact words were ‘we will get back twice what we give, in one way or another.’ Were they not? Taken right from the scripture.”
For a moment, Eleya’s composure broke. It was subtle, her lip curled and her eyes shined with anger. A heartbeat later it had passed, her cool demeanor only betrayed by a twitch of her arms and clipped words. “I never said such a thing. Whoever told you that was fabricating it.”
Carbon set her jaw, lips curled down in contempt. The fucking audacity. So it would be lies stacked on lies? Fine. Perhaps a little more evidence is in order. “I have not been told, Empress, I have been shown.”
She replied with a sharp laugh, a hand set on the table as she leaned towards her niece. “By who?”
“The first time was an Admiral. I did not think much of it, you have a difficult job. A few little lies here and there to smooth things over until results can be shown are understandable. Not my favorite method of gaining compliance, but these are hard times.“ She paused, a tiny sad laugh filling the otherwise silent room. “You looked so smug. It really sold the performance.”
“Which. Admiral.” Eleya had been backed into a corner with the knowledge that Carbon had seen the statement in a link, the disdain for this crystal clear on her face as she shifted to simply demanding to know who had spilled this privileged information.
“Which Admirals.” Carbon smiled faintly, azure eyes cold in the overhead lights. “They weren’t the only ones. Four people all thought I was part of your plan to steal Human technology... I still do not know if it was just a lie you told over and over again, but they all thought I was part of it. I am starting to think they were right, but not about the role I was to play.”
Eleya looked like she had bitten into something particularly unpleasant. “While this has been a delightful talk, I still do not see your point. We both knew that handing over our drives would advance Human waverider technology by decades. There is nothing wrong with wanting equitable trade.”
“The trade was letting us use their research and ship to find new planets!” Carbon burst out, slamming the datapad down on the table and sending it skittering across the room. She seethed at the piece of shit standing across from her. She had thought, for quite a long time, that Eleya was actually looking out for their people. It was stupid, to think that the Empress would do anything but use her. “New homes for our people! Places where they could live, and be whole, and begin to put these horrors behind them! Not to sneak about, stabbing people in the back to get what you want.”
Her eyebrow went up again, looking between Carbon and Alex. A malign smile crossed her face, a heavy dose of malice in her voice. “Ah, I see. This is about your toy, is it?”
The silence between them was cold and crisp as Carbon’s face contorted in rage, her teeth bared with wild look in her eye as everyone else in the room tried to make sense of this exchange between the two most powerful people in the Empire. The Colonel actually took a step away from Eleya, silver-gray eyes evaluating her in a new light. Alex sat up and reached out, trying to get her attention.
Carbon didn’t see any of that, the universe collapsed down into a finite point of hate immediately across the room. She stepped back and grabbed the chair next to her, and hurled it over the conference table.
She lept up onto the table right behind it, the lightweight chair making contact with its intended target - Eleya’s guard. Protocol dictated that the Captain of the guard would stand to her right, so that’s where the chair was aimed. The assault caught him by surprise, staggering back into a loosely defensive posture as the cloaking field was disrupted and brought him clearly into view for a moment. Carbon took one step to cross the conference table, the next snapped out at the Captain’s flickering form, catching him squarely in the throat.
No hard armor there, only the thinnest amount of impact gel - it would be a shock to the system. Far from fatal, but he was about to wish that it had been.
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Her boot came to rest on the deep V shaped bevor on the chest piece, extra protection so blast or spall didn’t shred your muzzle, and now a handy foothold. She shoved off the table with her back foot, sending the Captain tumbling, her inertia moving his center of gravity far beyond what the lightly boosted suit could reasonably expect to hold up. He slammed into the ground with a deeply muffled groan, hands raised to protect his throat.
Not his weapon.
Before anyone really knew what was happening, before Alex could even get out of his chair to try and stop this, Carbon had retrieved the Captain’s sword and snapped the blade out, the monofilament wires cutting a glittering arc in the cold lights of the conference room and filling it with a quiet hum. The other guard had a stun baton out already, the charged stick playing havoc with the cloaking field. A lunge forward and a flick of the impossibly sharp edge hacked a chunk of the baton off, rendering it inert. Carbon pivoted and shifted direction, all but slamming Eleya up against the wall with her forearm, the tip of the wire sword held her throat. Carbon’s lips curled back, eyes burning with hate. “Perhaps you would like to rethink your words, dearest aunt.”
A healthy amount of fear filled out Eleya’s eyes now, wide with shock. She gazed into the violent response she had finally provoked and her mouth twitched towards a smirk before she began to laugh. She was amused by this, the fear on her face replaced with... pride? The smirk that had almost formed quickly developed into an enthusiastic grin. “You really are your mother’s daughter.”
This did not make Carbon ease up at all, sword trembling from the adrenaline running through her veins. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Your father does not have the fortitude to do that.” She waved her other guard away with a curt little hand motion, the ghostly vision wavering as it stepped back. “And your mother did. Tashen and your father had to pull her off of me once... But she had not trained to fight, and certainly not trained to fight cloaked opponents. Is that what they are teaching to Lan these days?”
Hate still boiled in her. It was Eleya’s existence that had pushed her to learn to fight, the Royal Guard specifically. The knowledge that someday she’d end up as a pawn, traded against her will as a payment... Even as a child, she had known that the Guard would be the ones enforcing it. Training to be a Lan put her in close proximity to the military - and they loved having an apprentice who was interested in their domain. All she had to do was ask and she was getting personal lessons from the same people who trained the Guard. Carbon knew that Eleya’s inquiry about her skill was just an attempt at deflection. Her reply came out as little more than a growl. “Why did my mother attack you?”
“I am sure you remember.” She sighed and lowered her voice, though her eyes never wavered. “I am sorry. It was cruel, I should not have said it. It has caused you so much pain that I had never considered when I did it.”
Carbon relaxed, somewhat. She had never expected Eleya to recognize that she had done wrong by her. Ever. Not even if one of them were dying. It took nearly thirty years, and a sword held to her throat, but her aunt even apologized. Carbon didn’t sense a bit of resentment in her words, it didn’t feel like she was trying to dodge responsibility for her actions. She didn’t release Eleya yet, but she lowered the tip of the sword from Eleya’s neck and let it drop... though it was still held ready at her abdomen. “And your desire to take from the Humans?”
“A simple lie told several times is easier to make truth than a dozen interwoven. Think about the people who shared that with you. You do not know them like I do, you have not spent much time in the court. I assure you they were all greedy parasites, ready to carve out their own little corners of the Empire.” Eleya huffed, annoyed to even speak of them. “If we fractured, shattered into fiefdoms, there would be no deals with the Humans. We would turn inward, bleed ourselves dry. No homes, no healing, just a death mark.”
“Do you have proof?” Carbon had eased up further, still holding Eleya firmly against the wall. The murderous intent that had sent her over the table in the first place had all but drained from her.
Eleya tipped her head at Colonel Lhenan. “He dealt with Governer Teraha personally when that fool decided the wait was intolerable. Not a bright one, but he had made some friends.”
Carbon lifted an ear in the Colonel’s direction, never looking away from her aunt.
“It is as she says. He planned to break his entire sector free of the Empire, then turn around and start raiding us.” The Colonel’s words were clear and concise, and he was trustworthy. A friend of the Emperor, may he rest, and a hero for his actions on Zeshela. “It was seen, and stopped.”
This mollified her somewhat, though the sword did not waver. “Fine. A lie to corral the treacherous. And the assassination attempt on Alex?”
“I had nothing to do with the attack on the young prince. If you do not believe me, consider that it was not nearly as well contained as it should have been to merely be convenient. A twitch in the wrong way and that blade would have ended his life. Right after I brought him into the fold? For a translator? That would make me look like an idiot. Besides, not even the rest of his implants are worth what happened to Tashen.” The Empress laughed again, clipped and sarcastic. “I hope you do not actually think that I am that petty, particularly after what we paid for the mediboards.”
Carbon was well aware of the fact that they were almost done adapting the mediboards for Tsla’o, so it wasn’t just for Alex... And it pained her to realize she’d forgotten that Tashen had been beaten into a coma, if only for a day. She retracted the blade and released her aunt with a single nod.
“The doctors had to remove the unit anyway, it was leaking something into him.” She waggled her fingers in Alex’s general direction, straightened her jacket and settled into a seat like she hadn’t just been held at sword point. She turned the chair and looked up at Carbon. “But when your house has spiders, dear niece, you ferment them.”
Carbon was aware of how the court operated, the unspoken language of how Royals acted. Eleya stepping past her - still armed and unrestrained - and carrying on like there had been no altercation was the same as a pardon. She hadn’t been thinking that far into the future when she’d thrown that chair, but... maybe Eleya really did care about her, actually wanted to make things right. The idea that everything that was going on wasn’t just some kind of ruse to hurt her again felt uncomfortable to think about.
“Fine, you have made your point.” She twisted the pommel of the sword, locking the blade deploy system out and tucked it away inside her jacket, threading the thin hilt into her daman like some kind of movie hero. She’d won the fight - yes, she had struck first without warning. He had invisibility, strength boosting power armor, and a real weapon. That should have been an overwhelming advantage. It didn’t matter at this point, the loser's weapon was forfeit. She’d give it back to him eventually, but right now he’d have to deal with that humiliation.
“I have done too much wrong by you, Carbon. I will do what I should have done decades ago.” Eleya reached out and set a hand on her arm, the two looking at each other once more. A lifetime’s worth of regret was clear in her face and she still seemed recalcitrant. “I do not think you will trust it, but you have my word.”
“It lies with you to prove it good.” She slipped from Eleya’s touch and stepped back, not quite ready for that at the moment. Carbon brushed past the wavering form of the guard before returning to Alex’s side, pulling the last chair at that end of the table along behind her.
“So it will be...” Eleya closed her eyes and bowed deeply, head nearly touching the table.
That deep a bow was very rare for an Imperial. Carbon took it in stride, despite her surprise. “I look forward to it.”
Alex leaned in, his voice low and panicked. “What the fuck was that? Are you okay? What. The. Fuck? Is she going to kill you?”
“I believe we just needed to speak truthfully for once. The air has needed clearing for far too long.” Carbon replied just as quietly but much more composed and gave him a faint, warm smile as she patted his arm. She turned back to Eleya as she mulled it over what to say next, foot tapping thoughtfully under the table. “I agree, all of that does not seem like something you would have orchestrated. There were not enough ways for you to turn the situation to your favor.”
“I knew you had been paying attention all these years.” Eleya grinned broadly, obviously delighted by her statement. “Now, do you mind if we turn to the matter at hand?”