She left him there and hastened back down the halls. Pain stabbed in her left knee and right shoulder, her pulse fluttered, she snatched after air. Mats vas-tu, ma vieitte. “—when the journey’s over,” she thought, ‘there’ll be time enough to sleep.”
Haugen awaited her. “I have Selenarch Brandir ready for you,” he announced as if it were an accomplishment.
Dagny mastered her wheezing. “I assumed he wouldn’t stray far from a secure phone,” she said drily. “Okay, I need to speak with him in private. That means private. The communications room, right? Meanwhile see if you can get Anson Guthrie of Fireball on a similar line and ask him to stand by for me likewise.”
She didn’t pause to note how the governor general of Luna took to being commanded around by an old female wreck, but continued on her way.
With no personnel present, the communications room seemed doubly big and empty. Screens stood in blind rows, air hissed from the grilles, a fallen piece of paper rattled underfoot like a dead leaf. One holo-cylinder glowed live. Dagny sat down before it and pushed the Attention key.
The head and shoulders of Brandir appeared. Behind him the image held a piece of a mural wall. The art was half naturalistic, wholly enigmatic to her. Her son’s face was lean, sharp, hollowed and honed by time. It was not quite real that once those lips had milked her breasts while she crooned a nonsense song over the tiny bundle.
Yet: “Lady Mother,” he greeted formally. “In what may I serve your desire?”
She turned her voice frosty. “You know full well.”
“Nay. With deference, lady Mother, I tell you not toplead. You remember how I have refused calls from that Council of yours. Decision lies no longer with words.”
“But you took this call because it was from the governor’s headquarters, and you’re hearing me out because obviously I’m there too and you’d God damn well better find out why. Okay, listen.”
In a few short sentences, Dagny described her past several hours. His countenance stayed immobile. Flittingly she recalled an eagle she saw once in a zoo when she was a child. Such were the eyes that looked into hers.
“I’m not about to pass judgment,” she finished. “You murdered a decent man whom I sometimes worked together with and sometimes fought but always liked; and you did it by means of a boy who’ll never quite get the corruption out of his soul; but we haven’t time for trivia like that, do we? What’s beyond argument is that you’re desperate.”
Then Brandir smiled. “On the contrary, lady Mother, Luna is poised to seize what is rightly Luna’s.”
“Don’t shovel me that shit.” He was the least bit taken aback at hearing that from her, she saw. “If you and your gang were really confident, you wouldn’t have wanted to change any factor in the equation. You’re an intelligent son of a bitch, if I do say so myself, and you’ve had a long experience in the unforgiving history you helped bring about. You know how easily human arrangements go to chaos. This assassination was as wild and precarious an operation as I’ve ever heard of. It’s got to have been done in a mood of ‘What have we to lose?’
“Wahl reacted faster and more firmly than you counted on. He was about to hit you with everything he had, if you didn’t back down, and you knew how slim your chances were. So try killing him in a way that didn’t seem like murder. Haugen’s not formidable, he’d dither and temporize while Wahl’s military preparations went to pieces and your faction had time to build up strength as you meant to do in the first place. Then, come the showdown, you’d have your full house, and you could hope the Federation would fold.”
“I sorrow that you, of all folk, demark the cause of liberation evil,” Brandir said quietly.
“Son of mine, son of mine, don’t insult me with slogans.” Don’t strike at my- heart. “You know how I’ve worked for what I believe the Moon deserves. Today that is not my business. Frankly, I think in this case ‘liberation’ is a catchword for the aggrandizement of a clique among the Selenarchs. But that is neither here nor there, nor is the question of whether a Selenarchy is maybe what Luna needs. What I want is to prevent people getting killed.”