Revolution's Shore (11 page)

“You know I be,” Paisley declared in a ringing voice, as if daring anyone else at the table to state their intentions with as much loyalty or boldness.

Lily smiled at her, looked next at Rainbow, a little questioning.

“I said before,” said the Ridani woman. “And be I meant it then, too.”

“Pinto?” Lily asked, pausing at the frown on his face. For the first time she realized clearly that the inherent natural beauty of his face, and of Paisley's as well, was cleverly and subtly enhanced by the patterns chosen for them at whatever early age such choices were made in the labyrinth of Ridani culture.

“You know I've got no choice,” he muttered. “You possess my kinnas. What else am I supposed to do?”

At the sound of his voice, Finch looked up, first at him, then at Lily. “Swann and I both agree,” he began slowly, “that we and Mom would be best off with you, Lily. We'd just get lost in Jehane's forces, and probably separated as well. But you aren't really going to mix—”

“Don't want to dirty your hands with us filthy tattoos, do you?” asked Pinto, with a sneer. “Well, maybe you never considered that we don't like mixing with
your kind
any better—”

“You can't talk to me like—”

“I can talk to
you
anyway I damn well please. You don't deserve—”

“Sit down!”

Since both men were sitting, the words had the desired effect of startling them into a brief silence. Brief enough: “Now listen. Keep your prejudices to yourself. And that goes for both of you. And all of you.” Lily swept a quick glance around the table. “Unlike Jehane, I don't have any resources backing me up except my people and Bach. So you will show politeness and respect for each other. Or I will ask you to leave. Is that understood?”

“Min Heredes.” Unexpectedly, it was Rainbow who spoke, tentative but with growing firmness. “Be it you know about ya one, or be it you don't.” She looked at the Mule. “We all knew, in ya thirties, 'bout what it be, and some had their say as it were ya perverted—” She paused, and by the set of her mouth Lily could tell that in her own way she was attempting to be compassionate. “—ya monster. Some said it be buying ya one Ridani girl's favors for ya unnatural fashions.”

The Mule began, with stately contempt, to rise. Paisley stared at Rainbow with astonished disgust.

“No, no, min,” hastened Rainbow. “Be it you misunderstand me. If all know, then there's none to whisper.”

“I will thank you,” replied the Mule with fluid disdain, “to stay out of my affairs.”

Lily saw Finch and Swann, and even Jenny and Pinto, staring at the Mule with dawning enlightenment, mingled with some revulsion and, in Lia's case, pity.

“Damn my eyes,” breathed Jenny. “I thought it was just one of those wild space tales, like the old ghost ship.”

“And now everyone knows.” Lily tapped her hands impatiently on the table. “Which settles the question.”

“Sure, and that be ya lowest run, sneaky way to tell folk—” began Paisley hotly, glaring at Rainbow.

“Paisley.”

Paisley frowned, looking mulish, and clenched her hands in her lap.

“Any other surprises? Or confessions?” asked Lily sardonically. “Thank the Void. Now maybe I can eat before I go to meet Jehane.”

“What about the crazy—” began Pinto with his usual caustic undertone. Responding instantly, Finch jumped to his feet with a gasp, just as Pinto said, “doctor,” in a surprised voice at the sight of Finch losing all his color as he stared at the mess door in terror.

Lily whirled. Across twenty meters, she saw Kyosti halt in the door, his whole being fixing like a programmed seeker onto the paralyzed Finch. Some faint word escaped Finch's lips. He was so mesmerized by the sight of Hawk that he could not even move to flee, or to beg for help.

“Pinto, cover him,” snapped Lily, already moving. “Jenny, with me.”

Finch flung aside chairs as he threw himself away toward the far wall, but to Lily, the sound of their clatter and fall faded into a dull counterpoint as her concentration narrowed onto her target. She knew, incontrovertibly, that Kyosti must not, could not, reach Finch, that whatever she had thought about Kyosti's rash words about inevitability and killing, she had erred in believing them rash. She felt more than saw Jenny circle out to close in on his other side. Kyosti's attention had riveted with such utter focus on Finch that he seemed oblivious to the two women converging on him.

Jenny reached him first, and since they had all been forced to leave their hand-pack weapons on the shuttle—security reasons—she tackled him.

Had she not had the most ruthless hand-to-hand combat training available in the Reft, he would have thrown her off. Damaging her did not seem in his purpose: he continued to stare at Finch, who had trapped himself in a corner and was frozen in terror even as his sister and the three Ridanis massed in front of him, trying to hide him from Hawk's sight.

Jenny tugged Hawk to his knees and was trying to force him down, but even so he struggled up with all her weight on him. Lily simply ran straight into him and wrapped her arms around him and hugged him hard into her chest, as if suffocating him. He paused in his forward momentum, distracted by her presence.

She looked back over her shoulder, gestured wildly with chin and eyes, and Pinto grabbed Finch by the arm and yanked him around the edge of the room and out the door. The others crowded along behind.

Kyosti attempted to rise again, slowed, partly by his restraints and partly by some new information registering in his mind. He sank back onto his knees.

There was a long pause, like a moment of opportunity lost, or of the kind of transfer of information that interrupts a computer's flow.

Everyone in the mess stared at them. The Mule, followed by Lia and Gregori, picked his way past overturned chairs and came up to them just as Kyosti began to shake.

It wasn't even trembling, in fear or anger or relief at danger passed by. As Jenny had said, it was as if he was in the grip of a palsy so debilitating that it took both Lily and Jenny to support him. His face seemed shut down, emotionless, as if he was not there at all, though his eyes remained open. The tremors shook him for at least five minutes, while Lia and the Mule, prompted in her case by compassion and in his by some unknown emotion, attempted to shield the scene from the sight of onlookers. Gregori asked if he was sick, and an officer in Jehanish whites approached to offer to take him to one of the wards.

Lily shook her head and waved him off. At last the tremors subsided, and Kyosti lay limp. He had fainted.

“What time is it, Jenny? Hoy, I have to go. Have Pinto meet me at the shuttle. Tell Finch to lock himself in his room. No, in the room with Bach. And you'd better get Kyosti checked by a doctor.”

“I don't think he'll like that,” said Jenny.

“Damn what he likes,” said Lily fiercely. “I've never seen anything like that in my life. Is that what happened before?”

“Yes, but the first time was worse.”

“I'll carry him,” said the Mule unexpectedly.

“Thank you.” Lily studied the Mule with interest, and calculation, for a moment. “Can you stay by him?”

The Mule nodded and reached to transfer with remarkable gentleness Kyosti's unconscious figure from the grasp of the two women into its own. Like any sta, it was obviously stronger than a human.

“Oh, hells,” muttered Lily, watching Kyosti's limp form as the Mule carried him out. Simple jealousy did not seem to her an adequate explanation for what she had just seen. She straightened out her clothing, straightened herself. “Keep them in line, Jenny. Just for as long as I'm gone.”

Jenny chuckled. “Look at it this way, Lily-hae. At least it'll never be dull.”

The
Boukephalos
proved to be one of Central's own class 4 military cruisers, impressed into Jehane's service by some unknown means.

Lily left Pinto in the shuttle, which was docked in the vast fighter squadron bay, and met a group of ten crisp-stepping soldiers in crackling white uniforms who escorted her through the gleaming corridors of Jehane's flagship to the upper decks. She was forcibly reminded of La Belle and her ship, the
Sans Merci
, although the utilitarian lines of the
Boukephalos
could scarcely measure up to such competition.

They showed her into a large, plain office: a desk and single molded plastine chair in front of a wall screen, facing a single plush chair that looked out of place in the middle of the expanse of marbled floor.

She sat in the plush chair and waited.

Enough time passed that she suspected the wait was meant to impress the extent of their power—
his
power—over her. She did kata in her head, concentrating, and was thus almost surprised by the abrupt slip and sigh of an opening door.

She stood up, not hasty, but in order to meet on the same level.

Jehane entered and paused as the door sighed shut behind him to examine her.

In one year he seemed to have changed not at all. The office, nondescript, gained sudden life at his entrance, as if its space needed only his presence to illuminate it. His hair still shone like a vein of gold, dazzling and attractive. His eyes, richly green, bored into her as if with his gaze alone he could penetrate to her inmost secrets.

He walked to the desk, lengthening his path by keeping to the wall, saying nothing, but all the while his attention remained clasped to her like an ornament, or a need, something she could merely reach out and, taking, be utterly satisfied with. She resisted the temptation to lose herself in his scrutiny. The sheer weight of his charisma sank onto her, although this time she did not feel the stark fear she had felt the first time she had met him—and she recognized the fear for what it was: he would be easy to lose one's self in.

He sat down, graceful and poised, and lifted a hand. “Please.” His voice was gracious. “Please sit down, Lilyaka Hae Ransome.”

“Heredes,” she said.

“Heredes,” he agreed, munificent.

She sat down.

He had the gift of being able to keep his gaze fixed on her, as if she were the most important person in his existence, and yet remain all the time aware of the room and the flashing play of the intercom and the slow circle of lights on the wall screen behind him, tracing star fields and solar systems like an echo of his vast concerns.

“You wish to join my cause,” he said at last. It was neither a question nor a statement, but rather a reflection of some casual thought, intrigued but undecided.

“Yes. Together with twelve others who have let me speak for them.”

“Twelve.” He mused over this figure. “Most of those who come to believe in my goals join me as common soldiers and earn a more intimate place in our revolution by effort and blood and loyalty.”

“Exactly,” Lily agreed. “But you would be wasting me in the army, in the usual forces.”

“Would I, indeed?” He considered her thoughtfully.

In any other person, man or woman, his features would have been too perfect, a little false, a little stilted. But Alexander Jehane had such force of personality, such radiant personal power, that his beauty seemed almost a secondary consideration, an accidental flaw conferred on him by unsuspecting parents.

“Would I, indeed?” he repeated, no longer a question. “Are you prepared to give me the coordinates of your voyage here from the old worlds—from Terra?”

Lily was startled into a brief laugh at this sally. “You don't really want to confront the Terran League, do you?” she asked. “You can't hope to defeat them in any military fashion, I don't think, and in any case, for what reason would you be rebelling against them?”

“Indeed,” he replied smoothly, “what need for our revolution if we are reunited with our elders who will bring reform and unity to Reft space. You understand my need.”

“Yes, I do,” said Lily, meaning it. “And you're right—” Abruptly she wondered what Kyosti's compatriots, Anjahar and Maria, would think of Central's abuses—what would they, as law-enforcement officials, report back to the League? Had they been faster, perhaps Heredes could have been saved. “The League wouldn't condone Central's government, I don't think. But I don't know the way back, or how long it runs, or how complicated the calculations are. I told you that once before. I can't help you with that.”

“Then what do you propose to help me with?”

“I believe,” said Lily slowly, “that you already know.”

He drew an index finger across the fine grain of the plastine desktop. “I have monitored with great interest the events on Harsh, and the liberation of the thirties dig. I am sure you are aware that I am not militarily as strong as Central—not yet. Central is aware of it, thus they are only now beginning to see the true threat I pose to them. Therefore, I must still rely on surprise and speed and subtlety for my victories, and on the careful mining of what information I can glean, and on the precise use of what forces I command, and on the constant recruitment of the oppressed and discontent who have just and good cause to rally to my aid. Thus—”

He paused, and she waited, expectant, even eager, to hear him finish. Realized abruptly that he had paused just to test the extent of her attention on him.

He smiled. For an instant she caught a glimpse of another Jehane, a man who was not so engrossed in leading a revolution that he could not briefly be amused by the very tactics he used to manipulate people, and share that amusement with her, seeing that she recognized them for what they were. Then that window vanished, collapsed back into the gravity of the task at hand. “Thus I build a special force, trained in the more arcane disciplines: espionage, commando, saboteurs …” He trailed off.

“Terrorist,” she finished. “Yes, I know a bit about such disciplines.”