Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (31 page)

The ribbon whisked off the scroll and the parchment unrolled
with the crackle of old paper, filling my field of view with a list of
available files. It was written in my aunt’s script, a font with well-formed
letters and just enough flourish to please the eye. Then the font changed into
the amber text I preferred.

Damn. EM16 might just as well have turned on a speaker blaring
my presence to the next person who opened the file.
Undo font change,
I
thought.

The list re-formed with my aunt’s font.

Psicon,
I thought.

The display winked out, leaving me in the grid. The island
psicon waited in the lower corner of the mindscape, a green dot glowing on it
to indicate it was still active.

I pulled out of the Net. Brilliant strands of light streamed
past me, layer after layer, sparkling, glimmering, changing hue and color and
texture. Even the smells varied: metallic, sharp, sweet, acrid.

Finally I reached the outer layer I wanted. A cluster of
master psicons waited here, each representing a specific function of the
programs that ran under the grid environment. I concentrated on the doctor
holding a surgical laser ...

My mind went black: no images, words, sounds, smells,
tastes, textures. Specify memory location, EM16 thought.

‘Delos’ psicon, most recent font change, I thought.

A string of numbers and letters appeared, white in the black
space. Specify change.

Replace the third A with 0.

The A changed into the digit 0, erasing all record of the
fact that EM16 had changed the font when I opened the Delos file.

Changes complete. Delete Record.
I followed the
Delete command with the password EM16 required to execute it.

The Net reappeared. In the process of returning me to it,
EM16 deleted all record that I had doctored its memory. My aunt had installed
the Delete Record option as a precaution, so that she could interact with EM16
and leave no trace of her activities. I knew about it because she had me use it
when I reprogrammed EMl6’s security systems last year.

I descended back down to the trade psicons. When I opened
the Delos psicon, I heard waves breaking against an invisible shore. A cool
wind blew against my cheeks as the scroll unrolled again. I remained “silent,”
simply reading the files listed on the scroll. But the Net knew I was there;
the list rolled upward at exactly the right rate to let me see new data when I
was ready for it.

The files looked exactly like what they purported to be, a record
of trade negotiations with Delos. I opened
A.Secretary-S
and found a
VR-gram from the Allied Trade Secretary trying to convince our Trade Secretary
to reestablish the treaties. I closed the file and continued to scroll through
the list. What should I look for? Opening every file would take too long. Kurj
rarely spent more than a few hours sleeping and I had to be out of EM16 by the
time he awoke.

A file caught my attention.
Artemis.
The name came
from Allied mythology. Artemis was a goddess born on the island Delos with her
brother Apollo. It was a perfectly reasonable name to find here; these were,
after all, files about the planet Delos.

But Artemis had a special meaning for Kurj, one only I knew.
Earth’s mythology had always fascinated him, particularly the Greek tales:
Iliad
and
Odyssey. Hercules, Medea, Agamemnon. Oedipus.
During one of his
visits to see my mother when I was a child, he had seen me riding in the woods
around my father’s house, a fourteen-year-old girl practicing with a bow and
arrow. He told me later he never forgot that image, the wild, bare-legged girl
shooting at trees. He called me Artemis then, after the goddess of the hunt.

Open Artemis, I thought.

The scroll vanished, replaced by a holoscript of my arrest
on Delos. Pah. This was the last thing I wanted to look at.
Close,
I
thought.

Closed, EM16 answered.

I continued going over the files. But nothing looked out of
place. Finally I thought,
Close Delos.

Close—

No! Wait.
What was a file about my arrest doing with
the records of our trade negotiations? Yes, all right, if a highly placed
Imperial officer alienated the Delos government, it could damage any talks we
were conducting with them. But the behavior—or misbehavior—of military officers
was Kurj’s concern. And he was unremittingly literal with his file
organization. He would have put the file on my arrest in the same place where
he put all of his other files about arrests of highly placed officers who could
damage negotiations with the Allieds.

My aunt must have made this copy of it. I could see why she
would want a notation of the incident here. But the complete record? Whatever
for?

Open Artemis, I thought.

The holoscript activated, re-creating the police station on
Delos so vividly in my mind that I felt as if I were there. Again.

I went through the entire mortifying file. Every last detail
was there, even the fact that Zabo, the computer on my ship, had intercepted
the satellite transmission about my arrest while the Delos police were sending
it to Imperial Space Command. But that was it. The file was exactly what it
claimed; a report of my unplanned visit with the Allied police on Delos.

Something kept tugging at my mind, though. A small point ...
Taas? Yes, now I remembered. When Zabo had dumped that satellite transmission
into my mindscape, the data had spilled over to the computer on Taas’s ship.
What had happened? Taas tried to get rid of the transmission, but—what? He used
the wrong commands. That was it. He tried every command he could think of to
get rid of the spillover and none of them worked.

I checked my spinal node. It still had the list of commands
Taas had given me:
Stop, Cancel, Break, Quit, Exit, Bye, System, Chop,
Stomp, Flush, Dump, and Curse.
And I had told him—what? To use the Erase
command. Yes, now I remembered. Erase had finally done the trick.

I frowned. This file should have included a report of the
spillover. But it wasn’t here. I went through the entire record again, detail
by detail, with the same result. No mention of the spillover existed anywhere.
I had come looking for information and instead found a lack of it.

The data couldn’t have disappeared by accident. All four
fighters in my squad recorded it and I found it hard to believe that the
identical omission would crop up in all four of our reports. But I couldn’t
imagine Kurj deleting it either. In his view of the universe such an omission
would be sloppiness, which he avoided to the point of obsession.

It had to be my aunt. But why would she delete such trivial
information? She was too smart to have done it by accident. She was just too
damned smart period. Trying to follow her mental processes always made me feel
like I had the brain of a slug.

I closed the Artemis file and searched through the other
Delos records, looking for anything related to Taas. Nothing came up even
marginally promising. I was running out of time and I knew no more than when I
had started. Taas. Artemis. Delos. Satellite. Spillover. What was I looking
for?

The
psicon.
After Taas had used the Erase command to
get rid of the spillover, he sent me an image of his Erase psicon, a scantily
dressed woman with a big bosom whose scraps of clothing disappeared when she
painted them. She
disappeared
whenever she
appeared.
Of course!
That was it. What better way to hide data than to make it self-vanishing, so
that the act of calling it up erased it. It was exactly the kind of solution
that would appeal to my aunt.

Now I knew where she had hidden Jaibriol’s files. It wasn’t
in EM16. She had left Kurj a pointer here as a precaution, in case he came
looking for the files. It was an effective pointer too; only someone who knew
those facts were missing would know the pointer existed. But the information I
wanted was on the key to the cyberlock in her brain.

Anyone could have a cyberlock put in their brain. You didn’t
need to be a psion. That was why we called it “cyber” instead of “psiber.”
Every member of my family who had gone through the operations to have a biomech
web implanted had also had a cyberlock put in. The Assembly insisted on it.
That was why I had recognized the rainbows around Jaibriol’s mansion on Delos.
Its shimmering veil of colors warned that the cyberlock was active.

None of us liked them. The field disrupted brain function
and could cause damage if used too often. The key to mine was on a psiberchip,
a card with neural tracings created from my own brain cells. For most people
such a chip was useless. No one could activate it unless they were a psion. But
when I linked to it through psiberspace, it became a functioning part of my
brain. If another psion tried to link to it, the chip would know it wasn’t me
the same way I would know if an intruder began thinking in my mind.

My aunt had designed the psiberchips because implanting keys
in our brains was too risky. A head injury could damage the key or its lock, or
both. Separating the two decreased the chance that the system would malfunction
when we needed it most. Although that also made it easier for someone to steal
the key, using psiberchips solved that problem. A chip recognized its owner’s
brain—so it could be set to erase itself if a foreign mind tried to access it.

What better place for my aunt to hide the information about
Jaibriol than on her psiberchips? If anyone tried to steal the data, the chip
would erase itself. It was an ingenious warning system too, since if her chips
erased, it would trigger an alarm in her spinal node.

But if I couldn’t access the information, neither could
Kurj. So what was the purpose of leaving him a pointer that pointed to a place
he couldn’t go?

Wait. Maybe the data weren’t on her chips. Maybe she put it
on
his.
But how? They were as thoroughly protected as hers, and would
erase if she tried to access them.

The Skol-Net. Of course. Boosted by the Triad psilink, she
and Kurj could meld their minds even more completely than Jaibriol and I had
done on Delos. With their minds intertwined as one, she could have accessed his
chips. I doubted he could do the reverse; it required too much delicacy. Only
my aunt had the necessary knowledge, finesse, and Triad access. She had
probably managed it without Kurj even noticing.

But that did me no good either. I couldn’t join the Triad
psilink. The huge flux of power it generated increased exponentially with each
Rhon psion in it. Two minds posed no danger. Three worked only if the minds
weren’t too alike. Add a fourth and it would overload the Skol-Net in one
giant, star-spanning short circuit.

I understood why Kurj feared Althor and me. If either of us
ever tried to follow in his footsteps, forcing our way into the Triad link with
no warning or preparation, we would kill not only him but everyone else in it
as well.

So now what?

An unsettling thought came to me. What about my chips? Kurj
had access to them. He claimed it was for my protection, but I knew better. He
wanted control over my cyberlock. It was another in his precautions meant to
minimize the chance that one of his heirs would turn on him. So my psiberchips
also included neural tracings cultured from his brain cells to ensure that my
keys wouldn’t erase if he accessed them.

Suppose I linked to one of my chips and merged with the
piece of his brain on it? Would that meld be enough to fool one of his chips
into thinking I was him? I doubted he would notice my meddling unless he
happened to access the chip at the same time. And he had no reason to do that
while he was sleeping.

But the risk of being detected wasn’t what disturbed me most
about the idea. What if I couldn’t dissociate from his mind when I finished my
work? The prospect of being imprisoned in Kurj’s rigidly controlled paradigm of
existence scared the hell out of me.

I needed to get away from here, to think this through.

I closed the Delos files and deleted all record that I had
worked in EM16. After setting the Hub’s monitors so they wouldn’t record my
departure from the building, I withdrew from the Net. Then I stood in the dark,
waiting for the psiphon cage to release me.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Sweat beaded on my temple. No, I couldn’t show fear. That, more
than anything I had done on the Net, would give me away.

The psiphon collars snapped away from my body. The tube that
had surrounded me slid back into the ground, letting cool air waft across my
bare skin.

I took a breath. Then I put my clothes back on and left.

The psiberchip lay in my hand, a simple square the size of
my palm. I sat in front of the console in my bedroom and stared at the chip.
Taking it out of the safe here had been easy. But that was as far as I could
make myself go.

Alive. This card was alive. Nano-meds tended the neural tracings
on it, keeping them primed to link to my brain. I had ten chips, two in my
father’s house, three on Forshires, four at Headquarters, and this one here in
my quarters.

The console waited. All I had to do was insert the card. My
spinal node calculated a 94 percent probability that I could merge my mind with
the piece of Kurj’s brain on it—a piece that, ironically, he wanted there for
his own protection. Whether or not that would allow me to access his chips was
another story, but I wasn’t going to find out until I tried.

If. If I could force myself to do it. I stared at the card
in my hand. One minute passed. Three. Five. The few precious hours of time I
had to work with while Kurj was sleeping were leaking away.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen.

I took a deep breath. Then I slid the card into its slot on
the console and logged into my personal account, the one I used for private
rather than military matters. I reached the Net’s outer shell first, the
electronic network anyone could use. From there I entered psiberspace.