Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (30 page)

Kurj was watching me.
What’s wrong?

Careful. Dangerous ground. I was thinking about my last meeting
with a Highton.

Tarque.

I didn’t answer and he didn’t probe. It was the way we
always interacted on the subject of Tarque. I phrased my next question
carefully.
Why so much secrecy? Capturing the Highton Heir is a triumph.
Making it public will cripple Trader morale and send ours flying.

I don’t trust this good fortune, Kurj thought. It may be a
trap. Until we know more I intend to take no risks.

Purpose indeed. What had Jaibriol been doing, hurtling
through space alone, with no protection? Was he crazy? There was no way anyone
outside the Skol-Net could have found him. Even with the Net, we were lucky to
have caught him. At the speed he had been going, he could have traveled for
years and only an instant would have gone by for the rest of us. Fast enough,
and he could have lived his entire life and died before anyone even knew he had
disappeared.

Then it hit me. That was exactly what Jaibriol had intended.
He had been committing suicide. Except it hadn’t worked. The Skol-Net had
caught him like a shimmerfly in a mesh.

On the outer levels of my mind, I let a question surface:
What
have you found out from Qox so far?

Nothing. Kurj’s frustration simmered. He responds as if he
has a biomech web in his body programmed to help him resist interrogation. But
we’ve found no trace of any web. His only implant is the cyberlock in his
brain.

They were so close to the truth.
What are you going to
do?

Find an interrogator who can disrupt his conditioning.

Did he realize yet what that meant? Jaibriol’s mind had been
conditioned so that under duress it blocked the neural processes that let him
communicate his emotions and thoughts to others. In extreme cases—like interrogation—the
effect would become so widespread he couldn’t communicate by any means, even
speech. I knew that conditioning because I had it too. My biomech web let me
control it; I could program it to enhance or suppress any mental training, psi
or otherwise. But I doubted Jaibriol had any control over the process. He
couldn’t
answer his interrogators even if he wanted to.

Breaking that conditioning was no different than breaching
any other defense; it required a battering ram stronger than the defense, in
this case a psibernaut with a stronger mind. Kurj could do it, but his blunt
power would smash Jaibriol’s mind like a battering ram that leveled the
fortress instead of breaking the gate. My brother Althor had more subtlety, but
I doubted it was enough. My aunt was the one with the finesse, more than
enough. But she didn’t have the strength. Although my father probably had both
the strength and the finesse, he had none of the specialized military knowledge
needed to perform the interrogation. None of us had it except Kurj, my brother
Althor, and my aunt.

And me.

I made myself stay calm. Why did you call me back here?

Kurj watched me with his shielded gaze.
I’ve assigned you
to Qox’s case.

You have other interrogators far more experienced.

None of them can break him. None of them. Think about what
that means.

He has a strong mind.

Too strong.

I sat still, afraid even to breathe for fear it would give
me away.

He is a psion, Kurj thought.

He can’t be. He’s Highton.

Nevertheless. He is a psion. One stronger than our best
minds.

I don’t see how that’s possible.

Nor I. Kurj frowned. But I’ve also worked on him, Soz. Even
I can’t break him.

You can break any mind.

The only way would be to use so much force that I would reduce
him to a vegetable.

I didn’t know what was more disturbing, knowing Kurj was on
the verge of the truth, or feeling his grim satisfaction when he contemplated
Jaibriol as a screaming lump of flesh. It was the first time in my life I had
felt the brunt of Kurj’s hatred and I hoped like hell I never felt it directed
at me.

I’m not sure what you think I can do, I thought.

I want you to break him. Get into his mind. Tell me what’s
there. Kurj stood up. Meet me in the morning at the palace at 0600. Make it
look as if you came for a personal visit.

I wanted to cry out that I wouldn’t do it. But all I did was
stand up.
Yes, sir.

After Kurj left, I dropped back into my chair and put my
head in my hands. Then I lifted it again, wondering if my apartment was
monitored. I didn’t dare show signs of the turmoil going on in my mind.

I understood why Kurj thought Jaibriol’s presence was a
trick; it was the only way Ur Qox could gain direct access to Kurj. My brother
wouldn’t have taken the same personal interest if we had caught anyone less
than the Highton Heir. It was a horrible thought, that Ur Qox would send his
own son to be tortured in the hope Jaibriol could assassinate Kurj. Yet if
anyone appeared capable of that, it was the Trader Emperor.

But I was sure Qox hadn’t done it. Jaibriol was too valuable
to him, and not only because of his Rhon genes. I was convinced that in his own
way, Qox loved his son. I had no facts to back that opinion, only my intuition.
But regardless of the flimsy evidence, I believed it. Ur Qox would never send
his son on an assassination mission. The only person Jaibriol had meant to kill
was himself.

I got up and walked around the couch. Although the wall behind
it looked opaque, it was actually a double-paned window. When I touched a panel
on a nearby table, the window’s polarization changed to let me see through the
glass. Today I lightened it just enough to show the buildings below. Fliers glided
through the air, their sleek lines the only curves in a city of corners and
edges. Beyond the suburbs, red desert rolled out to the horizon.

Where had Kurj put Jaibriol? In a vault under the city? An installation
buried in the desert? Some remote base elsewhere on the planet? I had no idea.
But he would be guarded by the layer after layer of security. What was I going
to do? Even if I did find him, I couldn’t send him back to Ur Qox and Kryx
Quaelen.

I could do what Kurj wanted, but make it easy on Jaibriol. I
could “discover” the Highton Heir was insane, or had the mind of a child, that
his father had repudiated him and his only choice was suicide. If my brother
believed Jaibriol had no useful knowledge to give us, that he wasn’t even
capable of understanding why he was being tortured, Kurj would most likely let
him die. The advantage of publicly executing the Highton Heir would outweigh
any satisfaction Kurj might gain from keeping him alive to punish him.

Except I didn’t want Jaibriol to die. I wanted him to live.
In freedom. With me.

I pressed my hands against the glass. The only way Jaibriol
and I could live together was in exile. How could I even contemplate it? It was
true what Tager had said, that I had never asked for the responsibilities of my
heritage. But I wanted the title of Imperator so much I could taste it. Turning
my back on that much power—well, Rex was right, I was no saint. Who in their
right mind would walk away from the chance to command an empire?

Jaibriol, that was who.

Maybe he was a better person than I. Or wiser. Or weaker. I
didn’t know. For some reason Tager had the notion I was something more than
what I saw when I looked at myself, more than a bitter warrior with a heart
sheathed in so much ice she had nothing left to give anyone. He treated me as
if I had a value above and beyond my heritage. He even made me believe that
maybe, just maybe, he was right.

But I still heard my mother’s voice, soft and hurting, as
she spoke about Kurj:
He changed. Bit by bit, day by day, year by year,
decade by decade. Until finally I lost him.
How long until she lost me as
well?

No.
No.
I didn’t have to end up that way. I could
have Tager brought here, to Diesha—no, that was Kurj’s style. I would invite
Tager. If he didn’t want to leave Foreshires, I would go to a heartbender here.
But I hoped Tager would come. I knew him now, trusted him as much as I would
ever trust a heartbender.

And there was Rex. With enough time, enough effort, perhaps
we could pick up those ends we had left dangling after Delos. With Rex by my
side and Tager to keep me sane, maybe, just maybe, it would be all right.

What my parents had done, creating a Rhon community—that was
a fluke, a dream that couldn’t be repeated. Jaibriol and I could never give it
to each other. I couldn’t go into exile with him.

Even so. I could still free him. The problem of where he
would go still remained, though. He couldn’t ask the Allieds for sanctuary. No
one would have the Highton Heir. No one would believe he was as much a victim
of the Aristos as the rest of us.

Unless.

Unless I vouched for him. If the authorities on Delos didn’t
keel over from the shock, it ought to work. But first I had to get Jaibriol to
Delos, in secret, without implicating myself.

I pushed up my sleeves. I had a lot of work to do.

It stood in the middle of a casecrete plaza, the building we
called, simply, the Hub. It was deceptively plain, just a two-story structure
with white casecrete walls. Muted lamps lit the area even this late at night,
their light reflecting off the surfaces of the plaza and the building.

The only entrance was a featureless door. When I pressed my
fingers into its lock, a scanner read my fingerprints and the door opened,
revealing a cubicle that looked like an airlock. Except instead of air, this
lock kept in secrets.

As soon as I stepped inside, the outer door closed. The
walls glowed with just enough light to let me see a psiphon resting in a cradle
on the wall by the inner door. I plugged the prong into my wrist and waited
while the computer node connected to it scanned my brain.

The inner door slid open.

A corridor with glass walls stretched out before me. There
were four offices on either side, each with one person sitting inside. Telops.
They wore full psiphon exoskeletons, structures even more extensive than the
ones on our Jags. These covered their wearers from hip to chin, plugging
psiphons in at the wrists, spine, and neck. Some of the telops also wore
helmets that covered their eyes, or their entire heads. Telops didn’t need to
move. Just think. Most of them sat completely still, though a man on my right
was slowly rocking his head back and forth with his eyes closed. Farther down
the hall a woman was leaning back in her exoskeleton watching a cluster of
holos rotate in the air above her head.

Security menu, I thought. Personnel, Security telops,
Hub, current.

The face of a woman with gray hair and lean features formed
in my mind. Stats appeared under her image: name, age, security clearances,
other pertinent data from her ISC file.

Simultaneous displays. I thought.

The woman’s image shrunk until it filled only an eighth of
my mindscape. Seven more images appeared, all of them telops who monitored
security for the Hub. As I walked down the hall, my spinal node matched the images
with the men and women in the offices, giving me stats on each of them. I
stored the data in a memory file. Although I had learned to deal with the “double
exposure” created when my mindscape produced images at the same time that my
eyes were viewing a scene, it was still disorienting to see the telops inside
my mind while I was looking straight at them.

The hall ended in another security airlock. I entered as
before. This time when I plugged in the psiphon inside the cubicle, a metallic
thought came into my mind.

Name?

Sauscony Valdoria, Primary.

Purpose?

I kept my mind as smooth as the surface of a lake on a
windless day.
To recode T12.

The inner door slid open.

I walked out into a circular lobby with white walls and a
blue carpet. Blue chairs sat against the walls like molded beanbags. In the
center of the room a white metal staircase spiraled up to the ceiling.

The carpet muffled my footsteps as I walked to the stairs.
Even when I started climbing, going around and around, the sound of my boot
heels on the metal sounded subdued. A blank wall faced me at the top, with only
a psiphon in its cradle there breaking the flat expanse. I took out the psiphon
and plugged in its prong.

A new voice entered my mind, cool and impersonal. I have no
record of your assignment to work on computer node T12.

Override and open.
I stood relaxed, using
preprogrammed routines in my biomech web to keep my muscles from tensing. The
lobby below, the white walls, the stairs—I knew what those blank surfaces hid.
Monitors were checking everything from my breathing rate to my brain waves. Any
questionable reaction would sound the alarm.

An alarm might sound even if I didn’t alert the monitors.
This door opened only to users on the access list Kurj gave it. Sometimes I was
on the list, sometimes not. My spinal node calculated a 76 percent probability
that he had me on it right now, in case I needed to come here during my
preparations for Jaibriol’s interrogation. But I couldn’t be sure.

So I waited.

The wall opened like a high-speed camera shutter, revealing
a tunnel over a meter long. I ducked my head to enter, then straightened up and
walked through to the end. I stepped out into another room with white walls and
blue carpet. Behind me, the wall snapped closed again, leaving a featureless
surface.

This room had no furniture. Nothing but computers. Each
stood in its designated place on the blue carpet, some isolated, some connected
by hardware. The acoustics muted the hum of their operation the same way the
lobby had muted my footsteps.

The computer network dedicated to Imperial Space Command was
distributed throughout military locations within the Imperialate, with built-in
redundancy and multiple back-ups, making it as invulnerable to compromise as
possible. There were ten computers here. EM16 was a cylinder made from black
glassplex that stood near the center of the room. It was two meters high, a
meter wide, and the thickness of a finger. Muted lights glowed inside of it,
some blinking, some shining. There was an opening in one side of the cylinder,
a “doorway” half a meter wide. Stepping through the doorway, I entered a cavity
with a domed roof and a bench running around its inner surface. I took off my
boots, then peeled off my jumpsuit and underwear, leaving my bare skin
vulnerable to the cool air. When I went to stand in the center of the cylinder,
a tube rose up around me, going higher and higher until it locked into the dome
above my head. The silvery walls of the tube were just translucent enough to
let me see my clothes as a shadowed lump on the bench. I couldn’t make out my
boots at all.

A metal framework rose up out of the floor, whirring as it
closed bands around my ankles and snapped psiphons into the sockets there. When
the framework reached my torso, a belt locked around my waist, its psiphon
snicking into the socket at the base of my spine. Bracelets closed my wrists,
inserting their psiphons. The framework rose higher and a collar fastened
around my neck, plugging a psiphon into the base of my brain stem.

I tried to ignore my vivid mental image of being trapped
here, held immobile and naked inside a coffin-size tube. I had to hide my fear.
Anyone with a valid reason for linking into EM16 had no cause to feel
threatened by a cage designed to imprison intruders. The only reason it would
refuse to release me when I finished was if I gave EM16 cause to be suspicious.

The room faded from my awareness. I seeped darkly into EM16,
sliding along the potential hills and valleys of psiberspace like a ghost
drifting over a virtual countryside.

System privileges, EM16 thought.

I exhaled. It had worked. My gamble in coming here had paid
off. Only two ways existed to gain system privileges on the Net. One was to be
a member of the Triad. The other was to enter through the Hub.

I wrapped a security cloak around my mind and maintained a
mental silence on the Net that was the equivalent of standing motionless. Today
I saw it as a grid of translucent fibers flashing with iridescent sparks in
colors ranging through the visible spectrum from red to violet. Psiware
stretched across the grid squares like filmy lace that sparkled each time a
user accessed it. Those sparkles were too faint for most users to detect,
including Kurj. But I saw them clearly.

Tonight I didn’t feel the immense flux of power Kurj
generated in the Net. He had been here earlier, though; his operations had left
a potent signature. But he would be sleeping now, alone with his security
systems and bodyguards in his tower in the city. Mak’s claim that he was
staying at the palace had to be a cover; until Kurj finished with Jaibriol, he
would stay as close as possible to his center of operations.

No, the danger here wasn’t from Kurj. A much subtler signature
permeated the web, one that was always present, including times like now when
it’s owner wasn’t in the system. My aunt—the oldest member of the Triad—was far
more dangerous here than Kurj. Kurj was a giant trawler rumbling through
psiberspace, using the Skol-Net to catch what he wanted. My father was the
ocean that supported it, rocking it in its waves. But it was my aunt who had
woven the Net into the far reaching web of power it was today. She had, in the
delicacy of her operations, what he had in the force of his. Had I not known to
look I would never have realized she had been through here at all.

She had security monitors everywhere. Almost nothing escaped
her attention. The moment EM16 acknowledged me, one of my aunt’s watchers had
caught that information and stored it in a security cache. I actually saw it happen;
the words System Privileges sparkled in a grid square, caught like a moth in
the lace, and then vanished.

I concentrated on the square that had caught the data about
my intrusion. It swelled in size, moving to fill my field of view while the web
streamed past me like a tunnel of pearly rose filaments. When I “stopped” at
the square I saw its captured data lodged in a cell inside of it, under a
pearly film of lace, trapped in that location of memory. I slid into the cell,
taking care to disturb none of the filmy psiware that floated lazily around me
like sealace under water. Then I wiped the memory clean. My passage back out
was so smooth that not one glitter marked my progress.

Next I erased all record of my entrance into the Hub. Then I
brought up my file of the telops and used it to find them in the Net. By
manipulating the grid, I created false memories to make them forget what they
had seen. It was harder to erase memory in telops than in conventional
computers, but I had enough experience to set it up so that unless they
specifically searched for the tampering they wouldn’t detect it. Had my aunt
rigged EM16 to look for my actions, I probably couldn’t have hidden. But she
had no reason to suspect I would do anything as illogical as skulking around in
EM16 with the deliberate intent to violate the security around Jaibriol Qox.

Sauscony?

I froze. My
father?
What was he doing here? The color
of the Net warmed and I had an odd sense that the strands
smiled.
Nothing
on the grid actually moved, but the sense persisted.

My father was the last person I had expected. He was home on
Lyshriol now, his native world. He and my mother were visiting the multitude of
grandchildren they kept reminding me I had yet to contribute to. It had never
occurred to me he would link up to the Net from there. The only way he could do
it was by using the console room, that truly incongruous addition to his
ancient homestead that my mother had had built. It was in a stone-walled
chamber at the top of the north tower. The room, which could only be reached by
a rough-cut spiral staircase, had been used for storing broken farming
implements before my mother’s time.

My father hated those consoles. Although psiberspace itself
fascinated him, he wanted as little to do as possible with the machines that allowed
him to access it. He used them only when he had to, which certainly didn’t
include visits to his grandchildren.

He was definitely here, though. I hadn’t noticed him before
because he was filling psiberspace, surrounding every strand and film and sparkle.
If I hadn’t known better I would have thought he was here on Diesha, jacked
straight in through one of the central nodes that the Triad used to power the
Net.

I hid from him, drawing security routines around my presence
like a deep black cloak. He searched for me, the grid rippling with his efforts
like a net in the ocean rocking up and down with the swells. Gradually his
certainty that he had felt me faded to doubt, then to embarrassment that he
could have made such a mistake. Finally he turned his attention elsewhere.

I moved on, careful now to avoid him while I sought out the
data I had come to find. But it didn’t appear. I found no path, no pipeline, no
hint leading to information about our capture of Jaibriol.

What I finally discovered was an inconsistency. It was one
psicon among hundreds grouped in a section of the grid dedicated to our trade
agreements with the Allieds. Each psicon represented a world. Set innocuously
in with the rest of them was the colorful image of an island on Earth, a place called
Delos.

Well, that was reasonable. We used that symbol to represent
the Allied planet Delos, which had been named after an island on Earth. Except
we had no trade agreement with the planet Delos. I was one of the few people
who knew Kurj had dissolved the treaties because he didn’t like their policy of
offering asylum to Imperialate citizens. He kept his actions a secret to avoid
igniting a controversy should people find out he had acted to block citizens
from seeking sanctuary.

I concentrated on the Delos psicon, and it grew until I
could see every detail of the island, from the gray and brown rocks that jutted
along the shore to the turquoise waters of the Aegean lapping on its beaches.

Open,
I thought.

The island split down the middle and opened like a pair of
doors. The smell of salt and sealace tickled my nose, and the sound of breakers
murmured in the background. A display of psicons showed me what functions I
could use while I worked with the Delos records.

I turned my attention to a small scroll tied with red
ribbon.
List files. Written records only.
It would have been easier to
view the records using an interactive simulation of their contents. But the
more I required the node to do, the more likely I was to draw attention to
myself. Reading files on EM16 was like using swords to fight a war when
battlecruisers were available. But swords were far less conspicuous than
battlecruisers when you were trying to hide.