A Prison Unsought Read online

  He probably thinks the same about me, came the prompt answer, with a too-brief flutter of humor. Then the humor was gone as they both saluted.

  He gestured for her to fall in step beside him, and flashed her a sharp glance of inquiry as she considered how best to word her news.

  There was no ‘best’ here. Only the relative mercy of simplicity. “There’s something you’d better see right away.” She disclosed the chip on her palm, and watched his expression change from impatience—the unexpressed why couldn’t you just relay it to my office?—to the smooth mask that acknowledged the dire implication of whatever it was she saw fit to bring, in person, on a chip that she didn’t trust to network crypto.

  Nyberg abandoned his inspection tour in an abrupt change of direction. They threaded through the crowded corridor at a brisk pace, as everyone gave way and saluted.

  Nyberg began what for him was small talk. “Captain Ng is out there herself supervising the repairs. Is there a reason that I ought to know?”

  “Nothing more, I believe, than the urgent wish to be battle-ready yesterday. Her crew seems to like her visiting, but she doesn’t hover. I glimpsed her babysitting comms when I started my watch,” Willsones said.

  ‘Comms’ in this instance had to mean the top secret room in the Communications level, housing that Urian hyperwave Ng had fought a bloody battle to capture.

  Nyberg knew that Captain Ng often visited it, to observe first-hand what the Dol’jharians and their Rifter forces were broadcasting to one another. The hyperrelay broadcast was apparently instantaneous—something hitherto nobody had thought possible, accounting for the speed with which the Dol’jharian onslaught had brought down the strategic centers of the Panarchy.

  Teams of cryptographers labored non-stop to decode the Dol’jharian communications, while being horrified and sometimes entertained by the Rifters’ less strategically significant but wild broadcasts en clair; scuttlebutt, officially unnoticed, whispered of a highly prized vid involving a man, two women, a pot of melted chocolate, and a floating eyeball in zero gee—with an obviously-added chorus of panting, groaning, and a commentary furnished by some Rifter with a excellent command of Dol’jharian invective.

  Nyberg wrested his focus back to Willsones. “. . . and before I turned in, I saw Ng among the captains bearing Mandros Nukiel off to be roast-and-toasted after his court martial. I am beginning to think the woman never sleeps.”

  Nyberg grimaced at the reminder of that court martial. Life had become strange enough without the weird, really, the sinister influence of Desrien. “Nobody sleeps anymore.”

  Willsones’s white brows hitched upward. “None of us can outrun the truth,” she murmured as they stepped into a lift. An accusation? No. As the doors closed she uttered a truism—“Ares is a battle station. It was never intended to house the refugees from countless worlds”—that made it clear her ‘truth’ encompassed them all.

  The doors slid open, and neither spoke as they entered his office, which was a hum of ordered activity. With a practiced ear Nyberg assessed the voices, and observed the angles of head, shoulder, hand as the staff saluted. No incipient panic. Nyberg saw the impulse to catch him for some urgent matter, but he shook his head and closed himself and Willsones in the inner office, something he did rarely, meaning interrupt only if the station is exploding.

  “Speaking of comms,” Willsones said, aware that prolonging the inevitable was weak. “Specifically the Urian hyperwave. When we met outside the chamber, Captain Ng told me she believes those little white psi-killers are sensitive to Urian objects.”

  “The Eya’a,” Nyberg said.

  Willsones grimaced. “Forgive me. I understand that they have been granted ambassadorial status as sophonts, but their reputation . . .” She made a gesture of warding.

  “As yet they haven’t used their psi powers to boil any of our brains,” Nyberg observed with a brief smile. “Anyway, Phinboul in Xeno suspects that that there is some psychic connection between the Eya’a and Urian artifacts, but there is no mutual vocabulary even with the Rifter captain translating. And of course we dare not pursue it. She must not discover that we captured the Urian hyperwave. And we cannot interrogate the Eya’a separately from her.”

  Willsones crossed her arms, her expression fierce. “But you can separate this Rifter captain from them. If you haven’t done that and interrogated her, why not?”

  “Because,” Nyberg exhaled the word on a sigh, “the Aerenarch requested that the Rifters who brought the Eya’a, as the actual rescuers of himself and both Lieutenant Omilov and his father, be granted preferred status within the confines of D-5.”

  Willsones knuckled her temples. She had, without consulting Lt. Osri Omilov, given the order to distract the novosti by identifying him as the rescuer of the Aerenarch. Since the news feeds, constrained by martial law, were prevented from interviewing the Rifters, they’d gleefully pounced on the story, and the entire station had been full of talk about the miraculous escape from Charvann by the Aerenarch and his boyhood friend.

  In actuality, neither the Aerenarch nor young Osri, a navigation instructor on leave visiting his father when Rifters attacked Charvann, would have made it out of the system were it not for the Rifters now imprisoned in Detention Level 5.

  Osri was invited everywhere, by captains as well as Osri’s own peers, and everywhere bludgeoned with questions. Willsones had heard plenty about the L’Ranja Whoopie and other escapades that sounded like something out of a really imaginative wiredream—but not from him. Osri was, if possible, even more laconic than his father Sebastian, a retired Gnostor of Xenoarchaelogy, and not given to hyperbole.

  “I hope at least you are keeping those—the Eya’a far, far from Communications,” she said.

  “My first order after I read the Xeno report.” Nyberg eyed her, then leaned a fist on his desk. “Damana. You pulled me off-course with a must-see, then sidetracked me with the Eya’a. I take it whatever is coming is bad. Shall we get it over with?” He tapped his console.

  “I wanted you to see it alone, Trungpa. And sit down. This is going to hurt.”

  Chill flashed through his nerves as they moved to chairs at the side table, and she tabbed the console. “I haven’t watched it all yet. We found it in the cryptobanks aboard the Sola Astarte, arrived with the latest wave of refugees yesterday. The fact that it was hidden makes it certain that someone hoped to use it for political effect. Licrosse is holding a Kestian Harkatsus, his passengers, and his crew at the staging point, pending your orders.”

  The screen lit. Dread pooled in the pit of Nyberg’s stomach. He immediately recognized the awe-inspiring Throne Room in the Mandala, center of the Panarchy’s government for ten centuries.

  Only, seated in the astonishing tree-like throne was not the short, slim figure of Gelasaar hai-Arkad, Panarch for most of Nyberg’s life. Instead, a tall, massively built man defiled it with his presence: Eusabian of Dol’jhar.

  Then it got worse.

  The only sound as they watched the atrocity was one short intake of breath from Willsones. He himself made no sound because his breath strangled in his throat.

  When it ended, Willsones said, “I can go over the redaction analysis with you,” her age-roughened voice husky with emotion. “That will take longer.”

  Nyberg stared out the wall-sized dyplast port behind his desk, taking little comfort from the sweeping view it gave him of the top of the Cap, the military portion of the starbase. The massive plain of metal, scattered with refit pits, glinted crimson in the light of the red giant whose gravitational field protected the station from skipmissile attack. In the foreground the aft portion of the Grozniy loomed. In spite of all that constant activity, from this angle it still looked much as it had when he had arrived. It will not be battle-ready yesterday, or even tomorrow.

  No doubt Eusabian would bend the slaughter from the Battle of Arthelion to his purposes as well, Nyberg thought sourly, with another propaganda vid as false as the one he’d
just seen. But not as bloody.

  “Murphy’s own timing,” he said when he was sure of his voice. It was the cold horror of the two boxes held up for the Panarch’s inspection that had shaken him most.

  But he didn’t have the luxury of time to indulge his horror. Willsones was smart, unnervingly prescient at times, yet she had chosen Communications in spite of the fact that the top rank attainable was what she held presently: vice-admiral. As long as he’d known her—nearly fifty years—the only ambition she had steadily expressed was her wish to stay as far from power politics as she could get.

  But now they were hip-deep in politics, the tide of muck rising fast.

  As Nyberg considered how to broach the subject, Willsones was thinking along a parallel track, though her focus was individuals rather than masses. In specific the young man whose head had been intended for a third box, Brandon, youngest of Gelasaar’s sons. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been a mischievous boy, staring out at the world from his mother’s gray-blue eyes.

  Now, bearing a reputation as a sot and a wastrel, he was immured in the Arkadic Enclave in the oneill portion of Ares. The vid’s false proclamation of his death was perhaps the least of its lies, but it would lend more force to the unanswered questions about Brandon vlith-Arkad’s escape ahead of the Enkainion atrocity, which had spared him his brothers’ fates.

  She pressed her hands to her face, struggling to dismiss the mental image of that obscene vid. “Frankly, given the priority the Dol’jharians put on broadcasting it, I’m surprised a copy hasn’t arrived before now. While we can sit on the contents of the ship’s cryptobanks as long as we please, there are refugees besides Harkatsus at the staging point with more preference than poor Licrosse can handle. He’s not going to want to hold them any longer without specific orders.”

  “I can’t say I’m not tempted to suppress it,” Nyberg replied slowly. He knew he would have to release the vid eventually, but the timing was terrible.

  Willsones said, “Is it not today that the Douloi are holding their reception for the Aerenarch?”

  “Burgess Pavilion, 1800,” Nyberg corroborated; this was the occasion that would see Brandon vlith-Arkad leaving the seclusion of deep mourning, a polite fiction that both he and the Navy had colluded, unspoken, in propagating.

  Willsones pursed her lips. “The timing really doesn’t matter, does it? Even without the vid’s confirmation of the rumors about Semion’s and Galen’s deaths, you can’t keep Brandon vlith-Arkad sequestered if he wants to enter public discourse.”

  “No,” Nyberg said. He untabbed his collar. “But the sight of those bloody blades is going to work as a metaphor to the meanest intelligence.”

  “Yes,” she said precisely. “The Dol’jharian rape of Arthelion has wrecked the careful machinery of our governance as effectively as the Dol’jharian executioners’ blades dealt with the Panarch’s high counselors in the throne room.”

  The habits of Tetrad Centrum Douloi usage urged him to turn from such distasteful bluntness. But turn as he would, he would still face the same mental mirror, reflecting the truth: Ares was now the de facto capital of the Panarchy.

  Willsones went on inexorably. “With no constituted government, the influx of Douloi refugees from the war is going to transform Ares from a smoothly regulated starbase into an aristocratic madhouse.”

  And no one could stop it. Nyberg’s temples began to throb, and he tapped the tianqi to a pelagic spring evening mode, the lighting subtly adjusting to the new scents in the air flow.

  “Have you ever visited Charybdis?” asked Willsones. The subdued lighting struck silver highlights from her white hair as she tapped her compad. “Their Equinoctial is a whisper at first, like that maelstrom of intrigue and venom building up around the Arkad boy.”

  “He’s hardly a boy.” Nyberg’s tone betrayed rising impatience, and he made a quick, apologetic gesture.

  “No,” she replied, and because they were alone, and he had drawn her into this conversation, she must honor them both with the blunt truths so rare and risky among Douloi. “A boy could grow out of a regency. Has he issued any commands?”

  “Not yet.”

  She heard hesitation in his reply. “But?”

  “The Faseult seal ring that he’s wearing. He won’t talk about it—an obligation of the Phoenix House, he said during the debriefing.” Nyberg shook his head. “Anton is already completely overloaded, and there’s worse to come as more refugees arrive. He doesn’t need this complication.”

  She’d missed that detail. Anton Faseult, now heir to the Charvann Archonate after his brother’s brutal murder on Charvann by Eusabian’s Rifter allies, was head of Security for the entire station, military and civilian.

  “You think the Aerenarch intends to use the ring as leverage?”

  “What better time than tonight?”

  Nyberg could see his question hit home. Willsones nodded slowly.

  “Either he’s as subtle as his father—and his reputation does not bear that out—or he’s hiding,” she said. “Or sulking. Or senseless in some orgy. It doesn’t really matter. What does is my fear that he’s a dissolute cipher who will need to have a privy council imposed on him, and there are already those on this station who should never grasp the reins of power.”

  A yellow ophidian gaze flickered through Nyberg’s memory: Tau Srivashti, once Archon of Timberwell. “I don’t suppose . . .” He gestured at her compad.

  “For a time,” she said, “we could probably phage the vid if it’s released, but it’s going to leak, probably sooner than we would like, and then we incur howls about suppression. We can’t purge memories or immobilize tongues.” She glanced down at her compad, and gave a soft grunt. “As I thought. Archetype and Ritual strongly recommends releasing it immediately, and Volkov at Moral Sabotage just now sent me a comm that they concur. You know what they say about rumor.”

  A weapon with no handle and no defense. Deadly to public order and perhaps the most powerful weapon of Douloi politics.

  Nyberg gave his head a shake, then thumbed his eyes, as if that could remove the images he was certain had been burned into his retinas. “I don’t know what to do.” The words were wrung out of him.

  “This isn’t the Battleblimp I know,” Willsones said, trying for a semblance of humor.

  “This isn’t the Ares I know,” he retorted. “It’s not even the Thousand Suns I knew. I sat in on Nukiel’s court martial yesterday, listening not to orderly testimony from technical experts and military witnesses, but to the High Phanist of Desrien. And it was her testimony—full of unprovable . . .” His hands groped in the air. “Preposterous mystical rhetoric . . .” He faltered, unable to express his loathing, unable to admit it hid an even deeper fear.

  “I know. I was there,” Willsones said calmly, her cool tone more effective than the tianqi. “But it’s hard to argue with the Gabrieline Protocol, whether or not you believe any of Desrien’s mystical claims. And I find I can’t argue against the fact that Mandros Nukiel, who is one of the most honest, and least outwardly religious men of my professional acquaintance, risked his entire career in order to heed a vision.”

  Nyberg let his breath out. “Did you see her hand?”

  “Whose hand?” Willsones’ brow cleared. “Ah, the burn of the Digrammaton on High Phanist Eloatri’s palm. I didn’t. There are many who insist she put it there herself, except that doesn’t account for the Digrammaton’s presence here, or its radioactivity.” Her upper lip betrayed her discomfort as she added, “It’s unlikely to be a forgery, given what happened to the Second Anti-Phanist when he wore a counterfeit.”

  “Desrien.” Nyberg made a warding motion. “It’s useless to talk about it. ‘To speak of the Dreamtime is to enter the Dreamtime,’ and right now this nightmare—” He opened his hands. “Is enough for me. Nukiel’s acquittal means we have to accept that woman as High Phanist, but for now let us deal in facts. Beginning with the two inescapable ones that hold me helpless betwee
n them. One, I seem to have become the de facto ruler of the Panarchy, while the de jure ruler is on his way to Gehenna and his only remaining heir sits in the Enclave under suspicion of treason.”

  “Not treason.” Willsones’s recoil was instinctive. “Even if the Aerenarch skipped out on his Enkainion, he broke no law that constitutes treason. What he did was contravene tradition.”

  “At best,” Nyberg said. “At best, he flounced away in a childish gesture to flout his brother. At worst . . . In here we may as well use the words we mean. It would be treachery and treason if he connived at that dirty bomb in the Palace Minor. It would be treachery and cowardice if he found out about it and skipped out without alerting palace security. They might have saved a few,” he finished bitterly.

  “But it is possible he had no part in that, nor foreknowledge.”

  “Then why isn’t he offering to debrief us? Nukiel said he gave him every opportunity during the flight to Desrien and from there to here. Gnostor Omilov, once his tutor, told us during his debriefing that Brandon never talked about it.”

  Willsones pursed her lips again, then said, “If I were in his place—and you know I have dedicated my life to avoiding politics—but were I in his place, and I could not prove anything I said, I would say nothing.”

  Nyberg cursed under his breath. “Bringing us right back to where we started. This much I know.” He dropped his hands onto his knees. “If we expect to hold onto what remains of the Panarchy, then we have to follow the rules. And that means according the Aerenarch all the due deference owed the Arkad name.”