Twelve senior officers had stations around the airscreen. The bridge was crowded with them and their planning staffs, and the air was filled with the crackle of argument and conjecture, of growing desperation. The wireframe of the palace was lanced periodically by arcing lines in bold, primary colors. Marine insertions, clandestine ground attacks, and drone penetrations were displayed every few minutes, all manner of the precise and sudden attacks that hostage situations called for. Of course, these assaults were all theoretical models. No one would dare make a move against the hostage-takers until the captain so ordered.

And the captain had been silent.

It was his neck on the line.

Laurent Zai liked it cold on his bridge. His metabolism burned like a furnace under the black wool of his Imperial Navy uniform, a garment designed for discomfort. He also believed that his crew performed better in the cold. Minds didn’t wander at fourteen degrees centigrade, and the side effects were less onerous than hyperoxygenation. The Lynx’s environmental staff had learned long ago that the more tense the situation, the colder the captain liked his bridge.

Zai noted with perverse pleasure that the breath of his officers was just visible in the red battle lights that washed the great circular room. Hands were clenched into tight fists to conserve warmth. A few officers rubbed heat into their fingers one by one, as if counting possible casualties again and again.

In this situation, the usual math of hostage rescues did not apply. Normally against the Rix Cult, fifty percent hostage survival was considered acceptable. On the other hand, the solons, generals, and courtiers held in the palace below were all persons of importance. The death of any of them would make enemies in high places for whoever was held responsible.

Even so, in this context they were expendable.

All that mattered was the fate of a single hostage. The Child Empress Anastasia Vista Khaman, heir to the throne and Lady of the Spinward Reaches. Or, as her own cult of personality called her, the Reason.

Captain Zai looked down into the tangle of schematic and conjecture, trying to find the thread that would unknot this appalling situation. Never before had a member of the Imperial household—much less an heir—been assassinated, captured, or even wounded by enemy action. In fact, for the last sixteen hundred years, none of the immortal clan had ever died.

It was as if the Risen Emperor himself were taken.