The Rifter's Covenant Read online

  Manderian moved to Ivard’s console and located a stored image of the Suneater, then studied it on the viewscreen: mysterious, sinister, yet somehow beautiful.

  The Eya’a moved their heads sharply, tipping them back at a humanly impossible angle, then both chittered on a high, nearly painful note.

  Manderian sensed disappointment. They raised hands, sketching swift semiotics that Manderian did not recognize, then they darted off the bridge with eerie swiftness, their twiggy toes scritching on the scuffed deck.

  Manderian closed down the console again, wondering if the new semiotics were ones they had developed with the Kelly. Whatever they said, it seemed they still did not recognize the difference between a real-time link and a stored representation: they wanted to go back to the Suneater.

  He frowned around the bridge. The Eya’a were so strange, and humans knew so little of them. Unlike the Kelly’s, their technology was nothing recognizable by humans, apparently more art than anything else. So they knew about artificial representations at least in one form. What exactly were they doing here, so far from their world?

  Manderian left. The ship was not large, and he rounded a corner to discover the Eya’a with the Kelly, their fingers blurring semiotics at a speed they never used with humans. As one of the two ubiquitous Marine guards watched, the Kelly honked out a counterpoint to the keening voices, and Manderian felt the air change—he sniffed a strange scent like cinnamon and burned cork.

  The door to the dispensary opened. Sebastian Omilov stood there, his heavy brows in a line of perplexity as he watched the interaction.

  Abruptly the Eya’a stopped the keening and sped into Vi’ya’s cabin. The Kelly fluted on a note that seemed mournful to Manderian’s ears, then the Intermittor said, “They say their world-mind wishes them to go to the Suneater.”

  There was no answer to be made to that—and the Kelly did not wait for one. They withdrew into their cabin, and Omilov sighed.

  “So much for sleep,” he said wryly. “My mind is too full of questions as it is.”

  “Shall we take advantage of the new Panarch’s beneficence and avail ourselves of coffee?” Manderian asked.

  Omilov made one of those absent gestures of graceful courtesy that seemed inborn to the Douloi. Wondering what else it might signify, Manderian led the way to the rec room, which they found empty. He was fairly certain that Omilov knew him for a tempath. As he tapped up the coffee on the console, he wondered if Omilov had been granting, in his oblique way, permission to listen not just to words but to the feelings behind them.

  Silently he carried the cups to the pair of easy chairs that Omilov had chosen.

  For a time neither spoke. After a few sips of the aromatic brew, Omilov said in a voice of abstraction, “Whenever I think about the Eya’a I question all our definitions of intelligence.”

  Manderian inclined his head in assent. “No written language, no political awareness, speech only used occasionally, no recognizable technology outside of those woven hangings.”

  “Yet those are made in such a way that would require many complicated technical steps for us to duplicate,” Omilov finished. “And they seem to be developing a language with the Kelly. Ivard apparently understands it.”

  “Vi’ya as well.” As yet Manderian did not sense any strong emotion from the gnostor, and he did not comprehend all the stylized subtleties of Douloi usage, but he was patient.

  Omilov glanced up, one of his beetling brows curved in irony. “Vi’ya as well,” he said.

  Manderian tasted the coffee. No bitterness, a blend of several beans—some of which had been grown precisely the same way for over a thousand years—and precisely the right temperature. If pressed, he could name the chemical makeup of the coffee and the reaction of the human body to the brew. Yet there was still an almost mystical sense of well-being that few things imparted merely by smell, taste, and warmth. Coffee was one. “Now that you have located the Suneater, does your job end?” he asked. “Or more correctly, do the authorities perceive your job at an end?”

  Omilov smiled. “There you have my dilemma. Now that it is located I must hand over the coordinates to Nyberg, and the Navy will waste no time in carrying the war to Eusabian.” He paused, adding mildly, “Not that I have a quarrel with the necessity.”

  Manderian had endured a childhood of nightmares featuring the torturous “arts” of his mother’s pesz mas’hadni. Omilov had experienced this side of Dol’jharian vengeance, imprisoned in what had once been the citadel of his liege and trusted friend.

  “What will be the theme of your report to Brandon, our new Panarch, then?”

  As if shadowed by memory, Omilov rubbed his cheek, then sighed. “Necessity,” he repeated, and glanced up. “My job now is not my own. I believe my authority comes from future generations. Eusabian will tamper with that Urian construct, I know that. There is nothing we can do to prevent it.”

  Manderian acknowledged with a gesture.

  “Still, I will exert every nerve, every influence I can muster, to extract a promise from our own people not to destroy it. As far as we know it is the only Urian construct still functioning. And though Eusabian brought out of it the power relay that makes his skipmissiles so deadly, I cannot believe the artifacts within it have only to do with warfare, the hyperwave being a case in point. This will be the theme of my report to Brandon: we must preserve the Suneater for study.” He hit his flat palm on the tabletop beside him. “It is more than duty, it is a sacred trust.”

  He wanted Manderian as an ally, or he would not have said even that much.

  Manderian comprehended, and set his coffee down. “Our goals may be contiguous. In accordance with her own vision, Eloatri has asked me to follow the polymental unity established by the Eya’a, the Kelly, and Vi’ya and Ivard.”

  Vision. Omilov winced. He’d been a vigorous skeptic until taken yet again by the Dreamtime previous to their departure from Ares. He still did not know what to believe, except to take visions seriously, at least in this matter.

  Manderian went on, “If any of the others understand what the Eya’a seek there, no one has spoken.”

  “Certainly not to me,” Omilov said, not even trying to hide his regret.

  Manderian hesitated, searching for words. “This polymental unity’s syntonics constitute one question. The other is their interactions with others.”

  Omilov placed his fingertips together, resting his chin on the forefingers. “What is your concern?”

  “Vi’ya watched the entire battle with the Samedi and the death of the Panarch Gelasaar through his son’s eyes. That argues a relationship of intimacy, and of a significant mutual trust.”

  Omilov drew in a deep breath, as though he’d sustained a blow. “Brandon told you that that? Surely Vi’ya didn’t.”

  “Neither of them has said a word. I know it through external evidence. When we entered the viewing room, Brandon vlith-Arkad—that is, the new Panarch—acknowledged Vi’ya like this.” Manderian mimicked Brandon’s subtle movement. “There was no way he could have known otherwise. He did not wear a boswell, and he stood behind the captain’s pod, away from all others.”

  “Next to me,” Omilov murmured. “Yet I was certainly not aware of this. So . . .” Omilov stared straight ahead as he worked through the implications. “So.” He met Manderian’s gaze. “Your question for me is . . .” He spread his hands. “Not what their relationship will mean in political terms or in terms of the war. For that you will go to others. You want to know what it means in personal terms.”

  “I can understand Dol’jharians, but I cannot comprehend the mysteries of Douloi interactions,” Manderian admitted.

  “In Douloi terms, their relationship means nothing,” Omilov said. “It may already be mere memory. Which makes the questions of politics—and war—simple. Supposing they do continue an intimate relationship, I would be very surprised if either of them ever acknowledges even a hint of it in public. What does not officially exist cannot be
used by others.”

  Manderian sipped at his coffee again, recalling his dream—and the vision Eloatri had related to him. “Yet they are bound together by some bond we have not yet perceived. They, and another as yet unknown.”

  Omilov smiled. “If the bond is an interest in the Suneater, let us hope that the High Phanist’s mysterious last figure is in a position of some influence. I fear I am going to need it.”

  THREE

  ARES

  Sedry Thetris left the crowded transtube and descended the stairs from the adit to a grassy path uphill from Lake Illyahin, noting the deepening groove of bare dirt too many feet had worn in it. She sucked in a lungful of fresh air, shrugging off the claustrophobic feeling of having been crammed into such a small space with so many people. Even though the tianqi had been set high enough to both hear and feel, the air inside the pod had smelled thick.

  She breathed again, her gaze on a distant leg of the lake that gently curved up into the mist obscuring the far side of the oneill. Here, on the surface where spin-derived acceleration was a standard gee, she could more easily dismiss the sense of heaviness that oppressed her, than at the spin axis outside the entrance to the Cap.

  Up there it felt uncanny. As a highdweller, she knew weight as a function of altitude, and so the psychic weight of Ares’s ever-increasing population contrasted too vividly with the microgravity at the rotational axis of the oneill. Sedry dreamt too often now of the overcrowded habitat bursting open, spewing thousands of bodies into the void; even more so since the death of Sync Osman had hit the newsfeeds.

  Maybe she wanted it to happen, she reflected with a bitter spurt of not-quite-laughter. A traitor twice over, yet uncaught by those she now served, she already regarded herself as under sentence of death. She never permitted herself to think about the future, or at least about her place in it: her plans, work, and life were limited strictly to how many of the enemy she could take with her when she inevitably got caught out.

  And one of them will be you, Tau Srivashti, she vowed, as she turned onto a narrow-stepped gravel path that wound down to the edge of the lake through a grove of flowering chimetrees. All the dangling branches within reach had been plucked clean of flowers.

  As she walked, the image that oppressed her waking and sleeping seized her mind: the eternal ice of the Ninth Circle, where traitors lay frozen for eternity.

  She hadn’t even thirty pieces of silver to fling in Srivashti’s face. She had been lied to—manipulated—and her cause had been just, but there was no escaping the truth. Leveraging her seniority in Naval infonetics at Arthelion, she had inserted false orders for Captain Armenhaut and the Home Detachment at a critical moment, sending them off after a manufactured threat and leaving the capital of the Thousand Suns undefended before the Dol’jharian attack. There was no comfort in the knowledge that, as the Battle of Arthelion much later had revealed, Armenhaut could have done nothing to stop the invasion, and in his ignorance of what he would have faced, might have cost Dol’jhar far less than did his final sacrifice.

  The second betrayal had been here, on Ares. All naval officers had been enjoined under the Articles of War not to speak of the hyperwave that Captain Ng had captured at such terrible cost from the Dol’jharians. Blackmailed by Srivashti, Sedry had reported it in detail to him.

  Srivashti had promised that he had the greater good of the Panarchy at heart and that the chaos to which the former government had been reduced required such unorthodox action. But instead, the Archon had made an unsuccessful grab for power through the luckless Aegios Kestian Harkatsus.

  The Aerenarch Brandon, with the help of the Praerogate Omilov, had triumphed, proving despite detrimental rumor and record that he was a worthy heir. She’d seen then, with awful clarity, that flawed as the Panarchy might be, it could correct itself, which Dol’jharian cruelty and violence could not.

  Sedry had almost turned herself in then, but her spiritual confessor had commanded her a harsher penance: to undo, as much as possible, the damage she had done, before seeking the catharsis of legal confession and just punishment.

  She smiled grimly as she turned up a secluded path to avoid a group of strollers. She knew herself unmemorable, in the unlikelihood anyone traced her footsteps here: a short, plain woman in her middle years, wearing nondescript civilian clothing. Her one gift was manipulation of dataspace: noderunning. She was one of the best in the Navy, and Srivashti did not know how closely Sedry had been monitoring his movements since his political defeat.

  Her goal today was to find out, if she could, the identity of the noderunner whose protections of Srivashti’s DataNet feeds had so far resisted her. The Archon still retained enough influence to hold on to several threads’ worth of dataspace on the couriers that now smuggled information between the Ares Net and the tattered but still functional DataNet that linked the rest of the Thousand Suns.

  But if she could discover his runner’s identity, the Spelunkenbuch maintained by Infonetics in the Net might give her enough of a personality profile and style to penetrate his or her blockade and reach the deepest levels. Given what she now knew of the Archon’s twistiness, she had no doubt there was much there to severely damage or even destroy his remaining influence.

  She glimpsed a tall male silhouette, apparently absorbed in tossing food pellets to some ducks. Grace and latent power were evident in the pose, the hands; a few meters closer, and she recognized the exiled Archon of Timberwell’s perfectly barbered silver hair and the chiseled profile.

  Once again, betrayals, but each time I will come that much closer to what I need to destroy you, she promised, as she forced herself to move slowly, her fingers clenched in her pockets.

  Srivashti appeared to be unaware of her until she reached the rock he lounged against, and when he looked up, his pale, almost yellow eyes were acute in their assessment.

  Sedry had never been able to comprehend the almost telepathic awareness of subtle gesture and movement that the Douloi were taught from infancy, but she gambled on the shock of her news overwhelming whatever nervousness he read in her manner.

  “The Panarch is dead,” she said bluntly.

  And knew she’d succeeded. Not that he reacted overtly; a long breath, the widening of his pupils, were all that she saw, but that was very revealing for a Douloi.

  “Tell me more,” he murmured, his voice, husky by nature, made rougher by suppressed emotion.

  “Little to tell,” she said. “Dol’jhar released the data. One of their rituals. Anaris achreash-Eusabian—his heir—just arrived on the Suneater with the news.”

  The Archon gazed blankly at the waddling ducks. Sedry withdrew her hand from her pocket and tossed bits of a dried seedcake. She knew that as soon as Srivashti recovered from his reverie he would dismiss her like one of his servants. She had to prolong the conversation if she could.

  “Nyberg and the Naval command surmise the Aerenarch—now the Panarch—will arrive back in four days.” She knew he could get this information elsewhere, but she wanted to foster the illusion of cooperation. “Are you still planning to aid him in making a government?”

  Srivashti’s gaze remained distant, then his eyelids drooped, shuttering his gaze. “Of course,” he said with a faint smile and one of those unreadable hand gestures they all made. But she didn’t have to read it to know he was lying to her—or twisting the meaning so much it amounted to a lie.

  She sighed with relief, and launched into her prepared speech. Now she was lying herself, and it had to be convincing. “You’ll need help.”

  “Is this an observation or an offer?”

  She pretended not to hear the condescension in his voice. “I’m a good noderunner. One of the best here.” She shrugged as she tossed the rest of her cake to the ducks, who dove after it, quacking furiously. “Thinking of retiring. If I had a good enough berth civilian side.”

  The Archon gave her a mendaciously rueful smile. “If I had known that even two weeks ago, but alas, I have recently received t
he otherwise pleasant news that my staff, inadvertently separated from me by the war, is safe though as yet inaccessible, but I do appreciate the offer, and I give you my word I will remember it.” He backed away a step, his attitude one of dismissal.

  “Fair enough,” Sedry said, and watched him leave, reflecting with a flare of bleak triumph that she had a military feed from both the Reef and the Douloi processing center, so Srivashti would not be able to slip his people past her.

  All she needed was a name.

  As Sedry made her way back to her station in the Cap, Srivashti’s personal shuttle took him back to his citadel—the fabulous yacht on which he lived.

  Deep within the yacht, Fierin vlith-Kendrian sat on a rock with her hands clasped around her knees, her face turned up toward the waterfall. She sat close enough to be bathed by mist, to feel the ruffling of moisture-laden air currents and the occasional sting of cold water. The air smelled of wet loam and crushed blossoms.

  She closed her eyes. Seated thus, she could almost convince herself she was on a real mountainside—on a planet—and not in a metal-and-dyplast ship countless light-years from home.

  She felt Srivashti’s presence, a slight change in the aural spectrum of the room, a sense of warmth as he stood in the proximity of assured control, something no one else on the yacht would ever do. A flicker of alarm kindled inside her. To hide it, and hide it well, was her first task.