“Then I think you and I had better not step out anywhere there’s a direct line of sight between us and a tall roof. But no matter what, we’ve just thrown a spanner into their plans and schedule. It’s going to be interesting to see what they do in the next few days.” Huma settled herself at Pretar’s desk. “This friend of yours. The Flow physicist.”

“Marce Claremont,” Kiva said.

“You still have tolerable relations with him?”

“You could say that.” Kiva thought back to a recent fuck session and smiled at it.

“I want to meet him. I know you believe him, but I need to believe him too. If I believe him I need to know how much time we have before everything really turns to shit. Then we need to find out exactly how the Nohamapetans benefit from it—and how it fucks the rest of us. I want to know before everyone else does.”

Kiva shook her head. “He’s meeting with the emperox today,” she said. “I don’t think she’s going to keep it to herself.”

“It’s not whether she tells everyone,” Huma said. “It’s whether they believe her.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Oh, my daughter,” Huma said, and smiled. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how little that actually means.”

Chapter 15

Marce Claremont didn’t realize how much of a country bumpkin he was until he arrived at Hub.

It was one thing to know intellectually that Hub, which included the namesake planet of Hub, its immense imperial station, the equally immense autonomous habitat of Xi’an, and dozens of other associated habitats, was the most populated and advanced human nation in the Interdependency. It was another thing for Marce to disembark from the Yes, Sir at Hub’s imperial station, several times the size of End’s station, and to take in the bustle and rush of so many humans arriving and departing and doing their business—and knowing that the planet below held even more people in even more crowded habitats, pressed together in underground domes or technologically advanced kilometers-long spinning cylinders, living their lives oblivious to, or simply unconcerned about, how close they were to the hard vacuum or cold rock or searing radiation that could kill them in minutes.

These people are nuts, Marce thought, and grinned to himself. It was breathtaking the situations that humans put themselves into, and still managed to thrive. In the Interdependency, with its religious and social ethos of interconnectedness combined with a guild-centered, monopolistic economy, they’d created possibly the most ridiculously complex method of ensuring the survival of the species they could have devised. Bolting on a formal caste system of nobles intertwined with a merchant class, and common workers underneath, complicated proceedings even further.