Carbon’s ears lifted as he asked that, and her eyebrows followed suit. “Yes, that is very much a ‘mood killer’ as you say.” She sounded a little upset about that, but there was a trace of curiosity in her voice as well. No doubt wondering where this particular question had come from, what exactly the Empress and her husband had been discussing.
Alex had, in fact, called it. Not a big surprise when talking about death, let alone the death of a family member. “I just... We talked about some stuff that involves her behavior. It’s up to her to make good on her word, but I need to know if she was blowing smoke up- lying to get me to come around. She seemed earnest about it, but I’m completely sure she could manipulate people in her sleep.”
“Perhaps she could.” She exhaled and sat up, crawling towards the head of the bed and flopping over onto her back with a puff of the scented powder. Carbon rested her head on his shoulder, antennae swept off to the side. All of her fur sparkled in the dim light now, Neya putting the time Alex had spent wandering the ship to interesting use. “Twenty six years ago. It was about five weeks before winter’s nadir. We actually came back to Sol not long after the anniversary.”
The sparkle effect was visually interesting, and the part of Alex’s brain that ran his more base desires berated him for bringing all this up when there’s novelty attached to someone he was interested in. Too late now. “The exact dates weren’t given, but that lines up so far.” The years that had passed lined up with his understanding of when Eleya ‘terrified’ Carbon as a child, at least.
“A bit after five in the morning, the Imperials were taking an armored limousine to a meeting at the Senate. The usual three vehicle line, armored military vehicles fore and aft.” She sliced the air with her hand as she described these things, slowly and methodically laying it out in a more technical sense and sounding thoroughly detached from it. “The Keslon attack began after the first river crossing, hitting and disabling the lead APC with multiple antitank missiles from ground positions to avoid the point defense systems, and blowing the bridge with a charge that had been concealed in the riverbed while the rear APC was still on it. Another two missiles were used to disable the limousine, killing the driver and security agent in the front compartment.”
Five AM sounded weird until he recalled they split the day into two base-ten halves, each hour being closer to 90 minutes than the 60 he was used to. Being able to take a hit from an antitank missile and not have everybody onboard die sounded pretty impressive, but that wasn’t really his field. “That’s uh... heavily armored.”
“It was an older model with a single-stage plain-explosive warhead, modified to arm on launch. Powerful, yes, but it was being used on fully modernized vehicles. Their shielding was enough to stop a single blow, but the follow-up shots were to bare armor. The lead APC took two more hits, for instance, but the crew inside only suffered one loss though all were concussed.”
“I’m going to be honest with you, this is way more detailed than I expected.” He had been prepared for a real overhead view of the thing, not casualty reports.
“It is taught in tactics classes.” Ok, that explained why she was so familiar with it. “Given that we are near the head of the military now, you would do well to review the curriculum of those classes.”
“I mean, probably.” That was going on the bottom of the list of things he was going to do.
“You should.” She reached over and patted his leg. “One of the three missiles intended for the Imperial limousine failed to arm, likely due to the modifications. After the shield had been dropped, both missiles struck the vehicle but only one detonated. A potential failure that had been anticipated, as a small kill team was stationed nearby and deployed when it became clear the passenger compartment had not been hit.”
“The Keslon Shen was a cult, though, right? That’s kind of outside the scope of what I think cults are capable of.” What the hell had they been up to?
“They had been a cult, yes. Centered around a mystic who claimed to commune with the land itself and built a small compound in the foothills of the Kalamusa range, far away from civilization. An occasional nuisance to the local government for decades. Nothing that had indicated actual sedition, aside from claiming the mountains were the true rulers of Schoen... Never any indication of regicidal intent, though.” Carbon sounded like she was recounting documents about the incident, more than anything. It made sense, as a child she likely wouldn’t have been involved much in the investigation.
“At some point they picked up military personnel?” Alex really didn’t actually know much about cults, but having people from the military would likely change the vibe of the place.
“It appears that a military splinter group picked them up, actually. They had a self-contained, effectively off-grid settlement that avoided contact with local authorities, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of forest and access to a massive cave network. They wanted a quiet place to develop their plots, and snared the cult to use theirs.”
“So the cult wasn’t involved?”
“No, they joined in readily. They had been convinced that killing the Imperials would collapse the government and return Schoen to the rule of the mountains. They willingly assisted this terrorist cell for years, even carried this out under their own name.” No small amount of spite in her voice now, her gestures becoming more pointed. “Several of them trained and came along for the assassination, as well.”
“Oh, well... Suppose that is on them.” Not much to say about that.
“Correct. So, the kill team used a breaching pick on the passenger compartment - one of the military’s current issue units, at the time. Blew the door off, located the Emperor alive inside and shot him in the head twice. While the cabin was not breached by the missiles, it was thrown into disarray. The Empress was hidden from sight by a large piece of headliner from the ceiling and debris from the seating area directly behind the driver’s compartment.” Carbon exhaled through her teeth, this clearly not her favorite subject to discuss, but resolved to see it through. “At that time, the crew from the front APC deployed and engaged the Keslon kill team. They were split, the one that had entered the Limousine to kill the Emperor stuck inside by suppressive fire as the rest retreated into a shopping center.”
“All right, I think... that pretty much lines up with what I was told. You don’t have to continue.” Frankly he didn’t want to hear any more, either. Well, actually... “One thing, though. Sergeant Zenshen said that Eleya had killed the guy that killed the Emperor. Is that true?”
“Yes. After he was split from his team, he exited the other side of the vehicle into a residential area, using his rifle to provide suppressive fire to cover his movement but also being shot once while doing so. The Empress had regained consciousness at that point and pursued him. He discarded his equipment in an unsuccessful attempt to blend into the populace. She recovered his rifle and shot him again before engaging at close range, where yes, she did kill him with his own knife. It sounds fictitious but there were multiple witnesses and several videos of it.”
“Huh, I’ll be damned.” There was a potential discrepancy he noticed there. Eleya had said she saw Navaren die, but this retelling only had her regain consciousness ‘at some point’ during the attack.
But would you really want to talk about a detail like that when you could just fudge it a little bit so you didn’t have to recount seeing your significant other get shot in the head, twice, and literally no one else would be the wiser?
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Or she didn’t see it, and a few horrible little details fabricated on top could turn it into a very moving lie. But why wouldn’t she capitalize on that more often? He got the impression that nobody liked what the Keslon Shen had done, but she could have utterly annihilated their already bad public image with something like that.
Alex really hated having to have these sorts of conversations with himself, and he’d had most of them in the days since he met Eleya. “Did Eleya ever tell you about the suitors that had been sent to you?”
“The ones my father sent? Only that they were bad and had been chosen out of a sense of desperation.” She shrugged, not sure where that shift in the conversation had come from.
“No, not them. The other ones. The first one” Yes, he was being cagey.
Yes, she saw that immediately. Carbon tipped her head back so she could look at him, upside down, eyes sliding his direction. “What other ones? What first one?”
“It’s... it’s not for me to share.” He sighed. “No, actually, it very much is. But I’m not going to share it, because Eleya needs to do this work herself.”
Carbon blinked once at him and rolled onto her stomach with another puff of dust, chin resting in the crook of his elbow, her eyes intensely focused on him. “Well now you must tell me.”
“It’s not that-” It’s not that he doesn’t want to? Oh, he very much does not want to. He was still sure that Eleya intended to use him as a courier, and he was still sure that would reduce the impact. “This needs to come from her. This is her mess. I’ll help, but she’s got to do the heavy lifting with subjects that are this personal.”
She actually looked a little bit disconcerted by that statement. “What have you been talking about?”
“What everyone was saying at dinner, and your relationship with her.” He wasn’t going to beat around the bush, though.
“What was said about it? About our relationship?” Carbon’s almost clinical tone while discussing the assassination had given way to a strained worry.
“A lot, and a lot of it personal.” He held up a hand, hoping to dissuade her from asking more questions while he figured out a way to explain why he wasn’t just coughing it up. “If she told me that she was sorry for something in your history and then I told you that she was, would you care at all?”
She shook her head. “No. While it is nice to know, I would find that her inability to tell me, to use you as a messenger, it would...”
So his guess that Eleya was likely using him as a conduit for this information was accurate. “Infuriate you?”
“That is a starting point.” She blanched, eyebrows pulled low as she gritted her teeth.
“That’s what I figured. She told me a lot. I think it’s the truth.” Or at least mostly the truth, which felt like the best Eleya could do. “I was not told to tell you, but I think she expects me to play the rube here and just blurt it all out. I don’t think I can tell you because it’ll lose all of the meaning coming from me. Like... the importance of it will be destroyed. The weight it carries.”
“Perhaps. But she has seen you, knows your intent and is becoming familiar with your actions... This is a test, but not of you.” Her face softened as she ruminated, setting a warm hand on his exposed shoulder and idly stroking it. “Not of me, either. I do not think.”
Alex exhaled with a long, drawn out grumble of annoyance. “I’m about done with being tested.” It was an interesting thought that Carbon had prompted, though - if not himself or Carbon, was Eleya testing herself? Her own ability to speak about these things, to act like a family without immediately pushing back? She’d avoided them for nearly 30 years, that was a long time to perfect a reflex.
Neya laughed quietly at his reaction, having disappeared into the background of the room as they spoke, even though she had not moved from the chair she sat in to remove his wraps. Present for the conversation, even though she was not a part of it. Alex thought he understood that - if he spoke to Carbon, he spoke to her as well, so now Neya is fully up to date on both sides of what was said.
“Are you? I have bad news about being alive.” She said with a wry smile before her eyes looked towards Neya. “You should, perhaps, work on the prince’s muscles?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He rested his hand on Carbon’s head and petted her a little bit, something that did not escape Neya’s attention based on the lopsided smirk and crinkle of delight in her eyes. As she went to work on the foot that was already sitting there, Alex let out a strangled, shocked sort of gurgle as she pressed her thumbs into a group of muscles that were still angry as hell. “Fuck, that is a deep tissue massage.”
“I am sure the physiological differences are nothing she cannot overcome.” Carbon was sure of that, anyway.
“It seems mostly the same, save for the extra toe and much more pronounced distribution of said toes.” Neya didn’t stop working as she spoke, exploring a group of muscles in the sole of his foot with a little more care. “Tendons are grouped differently, too. There is no vestigial dewclaw, which will make the mid-foot easier to work with.”
“Interesting, th-” He grumbled to himself and returned to the topic they had been discussing. “I told Eleya, repeatedly and in crystal clear terms, that she needs to talk to you about everything we discussed, and she needs to do it soon. I hope that’s acceptable to you.”
“Yes, it is. She has gained some small measure of latitude for what she has said this afternoon, but much is left to be done so it would be best to start before she squanders it all.”
“I didn’t say it quite like that, but I indicated as much. Strike while the iron is hot and all.” That idiom seemed to land perfectly fine. The Tsla’o did like their metalwork, so he’d be surprised if they didn’t have a similar saying. “She did ask me about my use of mediboards, too. If I had been fully healed by it. That was odd, and she didn’t give me any reasons beyond that.”
“She is often inscrutable, but likely wanted first hand evidence of the functionality. It is very new to us, after all.”
“It does not seem like a thing that should be possible.” Neya added, despite the fact she was working over a limb that had been rebuilt from a burnt stump a few months ago. “The idea you get into a bath of goo and a computer wipes away your injuries sounds like a fantasy.”
“Well when you explain it like that, yeah. I would remind you that it still took a full day to replace my heart and lung.” He pointed out, tapping his chest. “Not like you just hop in and suddenly everything is ready to go.”
Neya did stop working for a moment as she looked up from scrutinizing his muscle groups. “The cloned organs they were preparing for you take a week to grow.”
“Well all right, that is a lot faster. Point taken.” He had no idea how long a Human organ regrowth rig would take, and really didn’t want to think about it because he was now acutely aware of his heartbeat. He pivoted to something a little less internal-organ related, switching from petting Carbon to kneading the muscles at the base of her antenna as he did. “What was the deal with the secret meeting after dinner?”
“It was about our return to the artifact. Colonel Lhenan is the official intermediary for the joint operation for exploration of the artifact. We are still in charge of it, but are to conceal our station from the Humans for now.” Carbon sighed with content, her body going slack. “A little harder, please.”
Alex had come to find the demarcation between him and Humans unsettling. He understood what she meant, but he was still Human. As far as he was concerned, at least. “When you say we, who do you mean?”
“You and I, Alex. Royals lead, even if there is deceit.” She didn’t sound particularly happy about this compromise. Guess the first senator that left the meeting wasn’t happy about it, either.
“Interesting. So I’m actually going to do something, huh?” He still didn’t know what the hell his function as a prince was. He was consciously aware of that fact he had that title, sure, but it hadn’t really soaked in yet. All he had to go on was movies, so score one point for wearing obnoxiously fancy clothes at a dinner held by the current ruler. Another for getting the Princess, too.
“That is what Eleya indicated.” She pushed herself up and rearranged the pillows, laying her head on his shoulder with a soft sigh.
“So uh...” He draped an arm over her shoulders. “What might that something be? I’m fully out of the loop here, I have almost no idea what’s going on around me.”
“Normally, I am glad that you ask so many questions. It is endearing, and I love your curiosity.” Carbon laughed and stretched up to kiss his neck, a hand working on the daman wrapped around his torso. “But that is enough for one night. You will be a prince, and you will lead. The finer details of that must wait until tomorrow.”