Kingdom of Cages(176)

“We’ve lost, Beleraja.” Shontio spoke the words to his bloody hand and leaned his back against the wall.

Beleraja found she had to swallow again before she could speak. Twenty-five hundred desperate, brave people, and they weren’t enough. The invasion would only work if they could put up secure settlements all across Pandora. Secure, defended settlements. It would only work if they had more people than they needed so that lives could be lost and the invasion could still succeed.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, using his clean hand to wipe at his face. “Make a last stand, I suppose. Shut down the space cable, barricade ourselves in. Send out distress signals. And, finally, lose, and get my mind taken away from me. If I don’t have the nerve to kill myself, that is.” He pushed himself away from the wall and crossed the bay to the emergency station with its suit locker, fire suppressant canisters, and first-aid kit.

“Shontio…”

“Your family can take you out of here.” Shontio opened the kit and took out a bandage. “I’m going to ask you to take as many of the refugees as you can persuade to go—”

“Shontio!” She slammed her own hand flat against the wall. Startled, Shontio jerked his head up. “You cannot give up.”

“And where is help going to come from, Bele?” Shontio returned his attention to pressing the spongy bandage against his wounds so it would seal to his skin. “We’ve got no leverage.” He flexed his hand, watching the way the bandage stretched and relaxed. “There’s nothing left but air and noise.”

Beleraja leaned all her weight on her hand where it was pressed against the wall and forced herself to think. Nothing left but air and noise was how her head felt. Air and noise, no signal left, no transmission, all for nothing, how did you make something out of nothing?

Slowly, Beleraja lifted her head. It wasn’t true they had nothing. No, they had at least two things Pandora did not. They had all her skill at bluffing and lying, honed so carefully over these long years trapped in this hole in the sky. They had the results of all those messages where the Pandorans and the Council of Cities thought they were talking to each other when they were really talking to Beleraja and giving her fresh material to use in her disinformation campaign so she could hide the invasion and consolidation just a little bit longer. They had all those lies, and they had the satellites.

“Shontio. Can you take hold of the satellite network without Pandora noticing? Now?”

Shontio lowered his bandaged hand. “Bele, what are you thinking?” She lifted her own hand away from the wall, able again to stand without help. “Can you do it?”

Shontio watched her out of the corner of his eye. “Probably.”

“Then we may still be able to win this.”

“It’s not possible, Bele.”

“Then let me put it to you this way.” Beleraja faced him fully. “You said you were planning one last, grand stand?” To her own amazement, she felt herself smile. “Well, now so am I.”


The space cable car had a screen set in the floor of the main compartment so you could sit on the padded bench and look down between your feet to watch Pandora rising up to greet you.

Teal had done little else since she’d left Athena Station. Her guards were a pair of superiors, a man and a woman who had not bothered to tell her their names. She’d taken to thinking of them as Shoulder Woman and Gray-Eyed Man. They had locked all the doors leading out to the subsidiary compartments and she had to ask to be allowed to use the bathroom. One of them was pretty much always on the game rig, while the other one was using the sight-only screens so they could keep at least part of their attention on her.

She’d tried to use the one extra game rig they’d left on for her, but she couldn’t relax into any of the scenarios. She felt their eyes on her all the time. She felt Pandora getting closer and closer. Pandora and the hothouse.

They had passed through the clouds, and now she could see Pandora spreading out underneath her—green, blue, and brown. Mountains made wrinkles of earth in the extreme upper right-hand corner. A cluster of lakes shaped like blurred footprints lay in the lower left.

It was beautiful. She had to admit that. The world was beautiful. How had it allowed the hothousers to live in the middle of all that beauty? Worlds killed their settlers all the time. That was what the whole Diversity Crisis was about, wasn’t it? So why hadn’t Pandora killed the hothousers?

Why haven’t I killed myself?

She glanced nervously up at her guards, as if she thought they might have heard that thought. But Shoulder Woman was in the game rig, waving her hands and talking at something, her voice muffled by the mask-microphone, and Gray-Eyed Man had all his attention riveted on the columns of numbers scrolling up the screen.