Timni can tell it’s coming, from several places back in the queue. If it wasn’t already too late, she’d quit the line of waiting bodies, turn around, and go back the way she came; but slinking away from checkpoints isn’t likely to make one less singled-out by the authorities.
Sure enough, when it’s her turn at the turnstile, the local carabinieri squints at her documents under the ceaseless local rain, face reduced to a swatch of eye-bearing skin between a pulled-down peaked cap and a turned-up collar, and points to the door of cabin at their back. The words mumbled behind the collar are civil, tone polite; but this means nothing from a uniform with a gun, and the leading-her-away means everything.
Perhaps it’s just that her disposition these days is paler and jumpier and more anxious than ever before. Perhaps she looks guilty, or suspicious, or extortable, or strung out on narcotics. All four, probably.
She follows meekly into the cabin, where there is a tiny square table and two chairs. On the wall behind one, slightly above head height, is a glaring surveillance eye, Imperial seal-shaped, lest any questioned unfortunate forget their smallness and think for a second they are merely faced with a lone and parochial police officer: The Empire sees.
Timni sits in the chair which the eye looks down on, and the carabinieri sits opposite, outnumbering her on their side of the table with a single warm body and the entire disapproving psychic mass of Imperial apparatus. The police officer methodically unsnaps their high-necked hydrophobic poncho, revealing their mouth and a glimpse of pale neck; fumbles a pack of local smokes from a breast pocket. Offers one across the table.
Timni acquiesces to this obvious psychological ploy, and takes it, leaning forward for the carabinieri to light the tip, wobbling as it is with the tremble of her lips.
“Cold?” the police officer says sympathetically. “The wind off the coast came up quick this evening—”
“Please don’t,” Timni says queasily. “Just say what it is I’m to be charged with, or that I’m about to be dragged into a quiet sidestreet filled with truncheons for being a foreigner, or that I can save myself some trouble with just a little cash, or — a little of something else.” She takes a deep drag. She quit, some years earlier; it feels terrible. It feels wonderful. “It’s always the same, these places.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Captain,” the carabinieri says quietly, and touches the table with quick fingertips. Holographic light drizzles down from the ceiling, heaping up into sticky, staticky models, subtly defocused and colour-haloed by grime-filmed projectors. “Perhaps you could tell me something about this gun-henry.”
And this is how it ends: with a quiet fart of coincident provincial competence. Timni looks at the fuzzy honey-coloured voxel images of the rightful head of the Empire in her shoreside vagabond regalia, and shudders. “What do you want to know,” she says hopelessly.
“A name?”
“She never gave one,” Timni says truthfully.
The carabinieri’s eyes dart, no doubt snagging retinal data items and dragging them around, shuffling them together, discarding obsolete hypotheses. “When did she first approach you?”
Timni takes another shuddering drag. “Vana,” she lies; sickening, curdled loyalty sitting leaden in her stomach. “She came aboard at Vana. Any ship would have done, I suppose.”
The police officer leans forward a little, eyes gleaming. “You didn’t take her aboard voluntarily?”
Timni dimly perceives that she’s stumbled into the tangled evidence web of some theorist who’s been following the Empress’ exploits, someone with hypotheses about Timni herself and her role in all this. She laughs, a little wildly.
“What kind of fool do I look?” she croaks, hand shaking too much to put the smoke back in her mouth.
“She threatened you?”
“Amateurs threaten,” Timni says. Her mouth tastes bitter; she licks her lips. “People well-accustomed to it need never say anything that a criminal report would recognise.”
“Captain,” the carabinieri says, with holy solemnity and eyes alight, “I can rescue you from this. All you need do is tell me everything.”
Timni laughs, a cracked and desperate thing, before she can think; and then, hands cradling her head, framing her face, thinks. Shakes her head.
“If I stay silent, what,” she says; “I am under arrest? I go in a cell for ever? Well, if I speak, she will murder me. So put me in a cell.”
“I can protect you,” the police officer says, with a terrible earnestness.
“Not from her,” Timni says, and laughs again. She closes her eyes; which is why she doesn’t see quite what happens, only hears the sudden terrible noise when the Empress tears off the shack’s door with her own hands. The carabinieri leaps up, but the Empress, with awful swiftness, hammers them mightily out of the air with a fist, blank-faced with fury.
The Empress levels a gun at the officer, where they sprawl on the cabin’s floor. Behind her, Timni becomes fitfully aware of sparks, of silence, the smells of weapon discharge and blood on the damp wind.
“None touch her,” the Empress says like the ice and darkness of space, and shoots the carabinieri in the chest. She hooks a brutally firm arm around Timni and hauls her to her feet, and Timni stumbles along in her grip, vacant and terrified.
“Are you injured?” the Empress demands eventually, as they pass through the clammy breath of a row of climate-control units, in an alley behind dumpling shops and laundromats and fishmongers, normal things for decent people, which Timni now has to skulk behind out of sight.
“You didn’t have to shoot them,” Timni says vaguely. “They were on the floor.”
The Empress clucks her tongue as if Timni is very stupid. “They won’t die,” she says brusquely. “More valuable, still speaking,” and Timni catches up, in a rush, with what’s happened.
Sole survivors of violent rampage are the stuff of reputation, and Timni has been cast as damsel, as conquest, as an objectified — humanising —vulnerability of The Rebel Vigilante, to be snatched at and revenged over. None touch—! — a playhouse line, for impressing children and the dim. A claim over a lover, to enhance the romance and sympathy of a wandering gun-henry of regime-toppling ambition.
“I am propaganda,” Timni whispers; the last of her clung-to hopes of getting out any kind of unscathed dying, abrupt and bitter. Her knees give way, but it scarcely matters; indeed, the Empress may not actually notice, effortlessly handling her limp weight all the rest of the way to the ship.
