Carnival

“Assuming I beat Claude today.” She glanced guiltily at Julian—who was hunched over the terminal, getting toast crumbs in the interface—and then looked down at her hands, both curled clumsily around her coffee mug, and frowned. When she set the mug down and turned her hands up to examine the palms, the fingers stayed curled, and Vincent could see how the heat had puffed and softened her wounds, which were glossy and slick looking where she’d showered the scabs away.

Michelangelo was full of surprises this morning. He crossed behind Vincent, trailing his fingers across his shoulder, and took the four steps to crouch down next to Lesa’s chair with something like his old grace. And then he reached out gingerly and slid thick fingers around her wrist, drawing her hand out and turning it over so he could brush a kiss across the back. Old Earth chivalry.

“Capable hands,” he said, while Lesa stared down at him with twisted lips and a wrinkled brow. “You’ll manage.”

His fingers flexed on her wrist, and then he replaced her hand in her lap and stood, patting her lightly on the shoulder.

She turned to follow him with her eyes. “And if I lose?”

“If we have to fight, we fight,” Michelangelo said, but Vincent wouldn’t let him get away with that particular lie.

“We go home in disgrace,” he interjected. “Claude takes New Amazonia isolationist, and Dragons defend it. And Ur and New Earth do what they have to.”

“And everybody gets their asses kicked except us,” Lesa said, staring at Julian’s oblivious back. Vincent tried to remember what that kind of focus felt like and couldn’t. Forty years since he might have been like that, but that was forty years of enhanced sensory input and eyes on the back of his head ago, forty years of living or dying by his wits while trying to fill five or ten mutually exclusive assignment objectives simultaneously.

“You could just let her send us home, mission incomplete,” Michelangelo said.

“Dishonoring myself and discrediting my mother, and leaving Claude in an even stronger position than if she shoots me.”

“Besides,” Vincent said, “that’s an acceptable risk for me. Not for you, Angelo. Not after New Earth.”

It hurt, the way Michelangelo’s shoulders rose and fell, the way he dismissed his own life as acceptable losses. He wasn’t expecting to live through this, Vincent realized. He didn’t think their trick with Kii would work. And he wasn’t even bothering to hide it.

He was just telling the truth.

It was the most plaintive admission of defeat Vincent could imagine.

“Claude will want that art,” Lesa said, as if driven to shatter any silence so strained. “And even if Claude doesn’t, Elder Austin will. They’ll have to work something out with the Coalition eventually.”

After the Coalition crushed whatever fragmentary revolution Katherine Lexasdaughter managed to cobble together without New Amazonia and its unrepatriated trade partners. After the…flawed New Amazonian social structure got a kick in the pants that could keep it going strong for another hundred years. There was nothing like a little outside pressure to get people to stick to a stupid philosophical position.

The Coalition was proof enough of that.

“Right,” Lesa said, looking down. “Let’s hope this works, then. Julian?”

He didn’t twitch.

“Julian?” she repeated. “Are you ready?”

The second use of his name penetrated. His head snapped around. “I’ve been ready for hours.”

When she insisted that she wasn’t meeting any more Dragons sitting down, it was Michelangelo who went to help Lesa stand, an arm around her waist to ease the pressure on her feet. Vincent closed down his countermeasures, and resolutely chose not to think about the possible vengeance an angry Dragon could wreak on four humans who meddled with its programming.

“Kii,” Angelo said, “we’d like to speak with you, please.”

The Dragon appeared in its trademark twist of colored light, seated on its haunches with its wings half unfurled. “Greetings…” it began, and then blinked. And blinked again, the entire eyelid, rather than just the nictitating membrane.

“I feel strange,” it said.

It took Vincent half a second to figure out why exactly that simple sentence made Michelangelo curse with such heartfelt relief. By the time he’d worked it out, Angelo was talking. “Forgive us, Kii. We needed to talk to you without the Consent.”

Kii beat wings hard, and Vincent ducked reflexively, but of course they weren’t really there. Not even so much as a draft flipped his braids around, and after a moment he controlled himself and stood upright. “I am…” the Dragon began, and then flipped wings closed and settled down, the delicate fingers on the leading edges of its wings scrabbling lightly at nonexistent stone. Vincent almost imagined he could hear the scritch scritchof immaterial claws. “There is no Consent,” it said, its head subsiding between hunched shoulders. “What have you done?”