World's End

Page 19

He glanced up, frowning slightly at my surreptitious movement. "Inspector, I know you carry some unpleasant memory from your duty on Tiamat. ... I know you still bear the scars." He looked down again, as if even to mention it embarrassed him. "I don't want to know what

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happened to you there, or why you haven't had the scars removed. But I don't want you to think that I hold what you did against you--"

Or what I failed to do. The very fact that he mentioned

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WORLD S END

it at all told me too much. I said nothing. I felt my face flush.

"You've served here on Number Four for nearly five standards, and for most of that time you've kept whatever is troubling you to yourself. Perhaps too much to yourself. ..."

I knew some of the other officers felt that I was aloof and unsociable--and I knew that they were right. But it hadn't mattered, because nothing had seemed to matter much to me since Tiamat. I felt the cold of a long-ago winter seep back into my bones as I stood waiting. I tried

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to remember a face . . . tried not to remember it.

"You've shown admirable self-discipline, until recently.

But after the Wendroe Brethren matter.... It was handled very badly, as I'm sure I don't have to tell you.

The Governor-General complained to me personally about it."

And the Police had to demonstrate the Hegemony's good will. My eyelids quivered with the need to let me stop seeing. But I held his gaze. "I understand, sir. It was my responsibility. My accusations against the Brethren's chamberlain were inexcusable." Even though they were true.

But truth was always the first casualty in our relationship with an onworld government.

Kharemough held the Hegemony together with a fragile net of economic sanctions and self-interested manipulation, because without a hyperlight drive, anything more centralized was impossible. The seven other worlds of the

Hegemony were technically autonomous--Kharemough cultivated their sufferance with hypocritically elaborate care. I knew all of that as well as anyone; I'd learned it on Tiamat. "I should have offered you my resignation immediately. I've had--family difficulties the past few months. My brothers lost . . . are lost in World's End."

I felt the blood rise to my face again, and went on hast

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