Nara’s polar estate was a kingdom of silence. In the unpopulated south, her unleashed empathy could extend for kilometers, searching for human emotions like a vine seeking water. It sometimes seemed that she could enter the cool, slow thoughts of the plants in the house’s many gardens. Away from the capital’s throngs, she felt transported back to the empty expanses of Vasthold.

But when Lieutenant-Commander Zai began his tale, her empathy pulled itself back from the wastelands and came to a focus on this quiet, intense man, and on the old pain deep inside him.

“The Dhantu punitive expedition was requested by a local governor,” Zai said, his eyes on a distant snowmelt waterfall. It tumbled onto the surface of the great glacier that approached the house from the east, the collision of temperatures raising a misty veil across the slowly setting sun.

“The governor was a sympathizer, it was later discovered,” he said. “She came from a very good family, from among the first allies of the Emperor on Dhantu. But she had harbored traitorous thoughts since childhood. She wrote about it before her execution, bragging that she had achieved the office of Governor Prefectural on the power of hatred alone. A household nanny had raised her from birth to despise the Emperor and the Occupation.”

“The hand that rocks the cradle,” Oxham observed.

Laurent nodded.

“We have no servants on Vada.”

“Nor on Vasthold, Laurent.”

He smiled at her, perhaps recognizing that the spartan ways of his gray planet were not too different from the austere meritocracy of the Secularists. Though polar opposites politically, neither of them were Utopians. Both monks and atheists trod on bare floors.

Nara realized that Laurent had used the word occupation to describe what was officially known as the “Ongoing Liberation of Dhantu.” Of course, he had seen firsthand the excesses of direct Imperial rule, and its effect on the Dhantu heart. He was beyond euphemisms.

Zai swallowed, and Nara felt a chill in him, a shudder through the phantom limbs.

“The governor directed us to a secret meeting place of the resistance, where she said a high-level parley among its factions would take place. We sent a contingent of marines, hoping to capture a handful of resistance leaders.”

“But it was a trap,” she remembered.

The lieutenant-commander nodded. “The walls of the canyon had been carefully prepared, natural iron deposits configured to baffle our intelligence small craft, to hide the ambush. When the resistance fighters appeared in force, it was as if they had materialized from thin air.”

She began to recall the details of the Dhantu incident, which had consumed the media for months, especially on anti-Occupation Vasthold.

“You weren’t actually with the landing force, were you, Laurent?”