A Prison Unsought Page 10

  Montrose rubbed his jaw. “We both know how much power Brandon has.”

  “Effectively none.”

  “And yet,” Montrose said. “And yet. When we were on the Telvarna, he was doing his best to recruit us into going after his father on a suicidal rescue mission. But since we’ve come here, the game has changed, and so have the rules. He’s no longer our prisoner. We’re his.”

  “Prisoner—” Jaim repeated.

  “You don’t like the term? Then let me ask you. We will not even consider poor Lokri, who seems to have gotten himself tangled up in a murder charge. But you know we cannot leave this station. They don’t seem to be close enough to listen to us, but we must be under surveillance by Roget’s team.”

  “Vi’ya and the Eya’a walked right through that ballroom last night,” Jaim said, recollecting the sharp angle to Brandon’s face as the three unlikely figures cut their swath straight through the whirling Douloi. “So she’s not completely locked up, at least.”

  “And she was followed, right?” Montrose laughed. “As I’m sure she knew. But it was apparently the only way for her to get the word to us. Wonder what she wants! Feels like the old days. . . .” Montrose laughed reminiscently.

  A soft tone sounded in Jaim’s ear. Brandon’s code. Jaim touched his boswell.

  (Duties almost executed. Want to sleep, or join me in a visit?)

  Jaim rubbed his eyes as the transtube stopped. (Montrose is with me. What kind of visit?)

  (Strictly unofficial. I’m ditching Vahn after the official tour. Meet me in half an hour? Bring Montrose if he wants to come.)

  Jaim tabbed the accept again and followed Montrose out of the transtube. They paused to look out once more over the interior of the oneill from their lofty vantage at the north spin axis. Up here the air was cool, thin, and refreshing. They entered the Cap access.

  Jaim looked around, surprised to discover the same smooth, clean style that Markham had introduced when the Telvarna was refitted.

  Their boswells’ connections to the net degraded on Naval territory, going to heavily-filtered feeds and guidance only. They oriented themselves and proceeded quickly, garnering brief incurious glances from others, mostly Naval flunkies from the coveralls and uniforms, as they traversed the access-ways and corridors.

  At the first access lock, the guard eyed them curiously. MilSecNet had delivered need-to-know data about them when they oriented at the main hatch, and a battery of scans had confirmed their identity. In spite of—maybe because of—the scuttlebutt he’d heard, the guard found Jaim disappointing, Ulanshu master or no, but the monstrously ugly cook, physician, and sybarite, Montrose, looked like a typical wiredream Rifter.

  The guard waved them through.

  At the D-5 access lock, the next guard pointedly shut off the sound and, secure behind thick dyplast, conferred at length with a superior. After sour looks from both, the sound remained off but the outer lock hatch opened.

  As it rumble-clanged shut behind them—a completely unnecessary sound that went straight to the hindbrain—Montrose commented grimly, “That one looked like he had dinner last night with Vlad Tepes.”

  Jaim had no idea what he was talking about. He figured the two sour-faced guards, no doubt listening over their consoles, probably did.

  The inner lock finally opened, and they went in.

  THREE

  ABOARD THE FIST OF DOL’JHAR

  “You have always told me,” Anaris said, “that you valued truth.”

  “So I do,” Gelasaar replied.

  “Then why did no one ever speak about Tared vlith-L’Ranja, Archon of Lusor in the ten years after that scandal?”

  “Perhaps for the same reason you did not ask at the time?”

  Anaris grinned. “I can safely say that their reasons and mine would not be the same. At the time, I was sequestered by the tutors and guards you set about me. And while I heard rumors when I attended social gatherings, the Archon of Lusor was not known to me, except as one of the many names of your court of advisors. It wasn’t until recently, when I was reading through the records Barrodagh exhumed when searching for likely subjects to suborn, that I connected that particular scandal with Brandon’s being expelled from the Academy on Semion’s orders.”

  “They were connected, yes.”

  “And as nothing seemed likelier than that Brandon would cheat and rely on his name to get him out of trouble, no, I did not ask you about that at the time, either. But there are some who, Barrodagh discovered, felt that Semion distorted events to his own purpose yet again. So in effect, you had two sons lying.”

  “There are layers to truth,” the Panarch began.

  “Sophistry,” Anaris remarked.

  The Panarch’s eyes narrowed in humor. “Let me rephrase. There are layers to perception.”

  “Either Semion lied, or Brandon and Lusor’s son did; I suspect the latter, as Lusor committed suicide. That would seem to be an indictment of Brandon’s co-conspirator.”

  The Panarch’s eyes half-closed as he slipped into reverie. Anaris waited in silence, the dirazh’u quiescent in his hands.

  At last Gelasaar looked up. “I see two questions here. One concerns my sons, but the greater question concerns the Archon of Lusor’s suicide, and how my council and advisers responded. First of all, you must realize that I did not view Tared L’Ranja’s suicide as an admission of guilt. Quite the opposite. For that I blame myself, not him. Or my sons.”

  “Explain?”

  “Events moved too swiftly. By the time I found the matter at the top of crowded list of priorities, Tared L’Ranja had taken himself beyond justice or compromise. There was no chance to interview him; the pain of his loss kept those who knew him silent out of respect for his achievements.”

  “So no one criticized the necessity?”

  “With Tared dead and his son vanished, Lusor resolved its affairs internally. I could not investigate, and my advisers knew it. Discussion thereafter was . . . oblique.”

  “They have not been so oblique since?”

  “No,” said the Panarch. “We have the leisure—one might call it the luxury—to be direct.”

  “Ah,” Anaris said, “one would expect the opposite. When you were in power, since you say you valued truth from those around you, directness would be deemed a virtue.”

  The Panarch inclined his head. “When I was in power, time and the weight—measured in consequences—of one’s words combined in exponential pressure. To function at all under those circumstances, one learns the language of compromise.”

  ARES

  Two Marines escorted Montrose and Jaim to their shipmates’ cell; one took their boswells and instructed them in a clipped voice to request escort out through the intercom when finished, then both departed. The door slid open.

  The living space assigned to the Telvarna’s crew was functional, even spacious to those used to living on shipboard: a main room, fitted with a console (heavily filtered, Jaim guessed), and access to a tiny garden beyond, artfully designed to suggest outdoors. Small sleeping rooms opened off the main salon, each with a private, if tiny, bain.

  They found Vi’ya and Marim eating breakfast. Both looked up sharply at their entry. Marim cocked a knee over the other leg, and leaned back in her chair. “Though we’d never see you.”

  “Security preparations,” Jaim responded, to which Marim made an obscene gesture. She wouldn’t care about the politics, even the little he could explain.

  Montrose turned to Vi’ya. “Brandon said the Kelly chirurgeons put a priority on treating Ivard, but didn’t get a lot of cooperation from Ares, nicks, or Navy.”

  Vi’ya’s black eyes gazed back impassively. “It is so.”

  “Can you tell me more?” Montrose asked. “You may or may not be aware, but Brandon requested daily reports. Which were minimal.”

  Vi’ya said, “The medics have tested him since we got here, with no apparent conclusion. Then, a week ago, the Kelly showed up and things started moving.
” She angled her head at one of the tiny sleeping rooms. “Ivard rests in isolation until his guard arrives to take him to the Embassy for the procedure this afternoon.”

  Marim didn’t want to talk about Ivard, whom she’d bunked out long before they ended up prisoners on Ares but found herself stuck with anyway. Or stuck with something: with all his gabby outbursts—which made him blush green, like a time-lapse of a corpse decaying—and his twitching in a boneless way that suggested too many joints, she wasn’t sure he qualified as human anymore. She wished they’d keep him locked up, preferably somewhere else. She’d much prefer Lokri being returned to them.

  “Heyo,” she said, hitching one foot up onto the table so she could scratch the black microfilaments gennated on the bottoms of her feet, and grinned. “I start work today on a refit crew.” She brandished a pair of mocs: the Panarchists did not approve of gennation, so Jaim figured Vi’ya had prevailed on Marim to hide her feet while outside D-5.

  His sharp tug of longing surprised Jaim. He was an engineer by choice, and he knew that refit would be badly needed, with the glut of ships coming in each day. “Fiveskip repair?”

  Marim laughed and shook her head. “No chance! Told us that every civ ship coming in gets its fiveskip disabled and sealed, and the nicks do that. We’re gonna patch up the ones Eusabian’s chatzers couldn’t blow out of space.”

  “They are being very careful with the data they allow to leave Ares, and so must we be,” said Vi’ya. “I refer most particularly to the news that Eusabian possesses hyperwave capability.”

  Shock radiated through Jaim. He hadn’t forgotten Marim’s startling discovery on Rifthaven, but before their subsequent capture shortly afterwards by the Mbwa Kali, the probable existence of hyperwave had merely been one more datapoint in their narrowing list of options. After their capture, it had become the nicks’ problem, and it had not even occurred to Jaim to tell them about it. In any case, he’d been half-inclined to discount it as bilge-banging.

  As if reading his mind—which Jaim knew she couldn’t—Vi’ya said, “I believe it is real enough for us to consider the consequences if we talk about it.”

  “Like now?” said Montrose, but even as he spoke he realized what she was doing. Talking to two different audiences with the same words was very Douloi; Markham had taught her well. He glanced at Jaim, laid a finger alongside his nose, and saw the lift of eyelid that indicated awareness.

  “No,” she replied. “But any mention beyond the confines of D-5, I suspect we’d find ourselves locked in maximum security along with Lokri. Are we agreed?”

  To Vi’ya Marim said, “I’m mum. I didn’t believe it anyway. Still don’t.”

  Montrose watched her merry face with its fringe of blond curls. She’d sell us all if she thought there was high enough pay—and she could get away with it, he thought.

  “Do you think the nicks know?” said Jaim, wondering if his oath required telling Brandon.

  Vi’ya’s expression was bleak. “We cannot know what they are aware of. They had some of us under noesis, so I consider it very likely.”

  Jaim glanced at Marim, who rolled her eyes. She, Vi’ya, and Jaim were the only ones that the nicks could subject to noesis, for the rest of the crew were technically citizens, even Ivard.

  He knew he’d gone through it, although that’s all he knew. No one remembered noesis itself, and no one ever found out what had been revealed unless they faced a court or tribunal. And he was pretty sure Marim had undergone it. But Vi’ya? Had her connection to the Eeya’a spared her that for fear of the consequences?

  In any case, as Montrose had reminded him, she was speaking on two levels, both designed to protect her crew. The second and more important audience wouldn’t answer, of course, unless not throwing them all in max was counted. Apparently that’s all Vi’ya wanted to make sure of for now.

  Vi’ya spoke to him. “You are still guarding the Arkad?”

  Montrose’s gaze met his. She’s reminding them of our connection to Brandon, too.

  Jaim assented, unsettled by the calculated implication: that she was going to use Brandon any way she could to protect the Telvarna’s crew.

  “Then you will have a certain amount of freedom of movement,” she said. “Will you visit Lokri?”

  “Soon as I have free time.” Whenever that might be, Jaim thought, checking his boswell. A few minutes to go.

  Montrose yawned. “Well, that’s settled, then.”

  Jaim followed him to the door, hesitated, then turned to Vi’ya. “Having a job will occupy the time,” he said.

  She saw the question in his gaze, and remembered that Jaim had been there the last time she spoke to Brandon. Markham trusted you, she had said to Brandon, partly a gift because he had not hidden his grief, but also . . .

  She did not like following that mental path. She had always assumed from Markham’s stories about Brandon that the two had shared certain characteristics; she had discovered only upon meeting Brandon that Markham had adopted those characteristics from Brandon. Mimicked them.

  But that did not mean that Brandon shared Markham’s own qualities, such as his loyalty to the many he loved.

  Brandon had his own secrets, including his purpose; she acknowledged that he might use the Rifters as readily as she would use him. It made sense. And yet, and yet . . .

  She looked up, and discovered Jaim waiting for an answer. How much time had passed? No matter. “Perhaps I will take a job. But I will not permit them to monitor my movements.”

  Marim waved her fork. “Montrose! Sneak us some real coffee, would you?”

  Montrose snorted. “As if you can taste the difference, nullrat.”

  They left on the sound of her cheery laugh, and as they retraced their steps through the various security checkpoints, Vahn, sitting behind Brandon in the private transtube on the way back to the Enclave, and listening to the telltale inside Jaim, was glad that no one could see his reaction.

  (Hyperwave?) Vahn could hear Roget’s disbelief over their private boswell link.

  Vahn understood. “Hyperwave” was a term straight out of star fantasy, the technological equivalent of a word like “unicorn”: denoting something mythical, impossible, yet eternally sought. And Eusabian had it? Chill gripped him viscerally.

  Vahn gazed at the back of the Aerenarch’s dark head three seats forward, wondering how much of this he knew. He cursed mentally: too many hours without sleep, Rifters to guard (one of whom had only minutes before announced his intention to assassinate an Archon) as well as an Arkad famed for indiscretions, and now this bomb.

  (What now?) Roget asked.

  (Since the Rifters just agreed to sit on it, I think we’re safe keeping it tight until we’re debriefed in person. If it’s really true, whoever needs to know already does.)

  Roget gave a soft laugh, then she reverted to business: (Montrose and Jaim just boarded the transtube: over to you.)

  o0o

  Montrose and Jaim’s transtube reached the Enclave, and both were aware of eyes turning their way as they debarked. Montrose ignored their fellow passengers with a zing of pleasure, but Jaim scanned for subtle signs of intent before he followed Montrose out.

  Then he wondered if it was him and Montrose they’d been staring at, or the Aerenarch, who stood on the platform with Vahn and a thin, mild-faced young man wearing the robes of an Oblate.

  The tube hissed quietly away, leaving them alone.

  “We just got here ourselves. This is Ki,” Brandon said. “A former student of Sebastian’s. He will be taking on the comtasks.” To Ki, Brandon said, “You have my basic preferences for discriminators, but feel free to set up other sub-categories as you see fit.”

  “I’ll find him a room,” Montrose said, rubbing his hands and grinning. “And he can get right to work.”

  Brandon made the gesture that Jaim had learned meant thanks, and turned to Vahn. “Let me know when Ivard’s procedure is imminent. They will probably be taking their time to set it up.�
��

  Jaim caught a glance of muted curiosity from the Marine. It sent alarm through him, but Vahn said nothing as he and Ki followed Montrose up the gravel pathway toward the house. Maybe that look was nothing more than wondering why Brandon wanted a change of guard.

  Meanwhile, why had Montrose grinned at the prospect of this addition to the household? It wasn’t as if he’d paid any attention to the constant influx of mail arriving for Brandon.

  A former student of Sebastian’s. Jaim had learned that Brandon seldom said anything that was not to a purpose, even if he did not state the purpose. Oblate, student of an honest man: probably this Ki could be trusted not to be reporting every movement to someone else. Would that, in turn, be an oblique warning to Vahn?

  That’s it. Jaim smothered an inward laugh. Too much more time on Ares and he’d be as twisty as any nick.

  Brandon scanned the distant line of dwellings on the far side of the placid lake waters. “So give me your impressions of the reception last night.”

  Jaim considered his words as he wondered what Brandon was looking for. Or who. A knot of people appeared on a distant grassy hill; Brandon chose a pathway that would avoid a meeting.

  “Tension,” Jaim said at last. “Patterns of avoidance and coherence. A sorting out, not complete.” Whispering—about you. Is it time to say that? He paused. “Or did you want individuals?”

  Though Brandon had not looked his way, Jaim saw by the angle of his head that he was listening. “Speak.”

  “That business with the tunic, and Archon Srivashti,” Jaim said. “Why did you refuse to wear the flash one? Would have looked all right in that crowd.”

  “Would it have?” Brandon walked sideways, his blue eyes wide.

  Jaim considered the costumes of the Douloi, some of which (he guessed) might cost half as much as a ship. “One degree more flash,” he said finally.

  Brandon grinned. “A little test.”

  Remembering the Archon’s husky voice, and the slight emphasis on “miracle” when referring to Brandon’s escape from the Enkainion, Jaim wondered how many tests he hadn’t discerned.