Schism: Part One of Triad (3 page)

Tahota seemed bemused by me commotion. Was she a romantic interest for Althor? Surely not. On Lyshriol, a woman of her appearance would be about five octets in age. Given how Skolians could delay getting older, though, she could be any age. Regardless, she was much too mature in years for Althor. Besides, she was obviously inappropriate. A female warrior? No. It was too much. Althor epitomized the military ideal: strong, intelligent, powerful, imposing— and male.

He did wish Althor would marry, though. Two octets plus five more years in age and still his son had no woman. Roca seemed to think this was normal; indeed, she claimed he hadn’t reached the “age of majority” among her people.

Absurd. Althor was well beyond the age when a man started a family.

They all settled around the hearth while a maid lit the fire. She peeked at Althor, her lovely face glowing. He smiled at her, but his response was polite only, nothing more. Eldrinson sighed. Maybe me boy had a girlfriend somewhere else.

Althor glanced at him sharply. Eldrinson supposed he wasn’t shielding his mind as well as he might. Well, he had no objection to his son knowing his father wished he would settle down and make grandchildren.

Everyone was talking at once. Vyrl, Del, and Keltic pumped Althor for news about anything offworld, from technology to sports. Roca asked about his classes at DMA. Eldrinson sat back, content to listen. It gratified him to have them garnered like this, all so healthy and full of life. His family.

Except they weren’t all here. Chaniece, Del’s fraternal twin, was visiting another village, which could explain why Del was even less settled than usual today. Aniece had fallen asleep upstairs, worn-out from growing; lately his youngest daughter was moody and irritable, a contrast to her usual amiable nature. After seeing so many of his children through adolescence, Eldrinson recognized the signs. She was less a child every day. Denric was probably off somewhere reading and didn’t yet realize Althor had come to visit. How the boy could spend so much time with holobooks, Eldrinson didn’t know. It pleased him, though, that Denric read so well.

What he didn’t understand was why neither Soz nor Shannon had come to greet Althor. They had both seen him arrive.

They should be here.

Soz stood on a balcony of the third story in the house, her arms folded on the bluestone wall mat came to mid-torso. She gazed out at the plains. Wind played with her hair, throwing curls around her face. Unlike other girls in Dalvador, who wore their hair long, she kept hers at shoulder length. It was black most of the way down, then shaded into wine-red and turned gold at the tips, bleached by the sun. Her mother called it “sunrise hair.”

A rustle came behind her. With a start, she turned to see an imposing woman in the doorway of the balcony, a military officer in a dark blue tunic and trousers. The gold studs on the woman’s shoulders and the insignia on her chest indicated she was a colonel in the Imperial Fleet Why a high-ranking naval officer would show up with Althor, Soz had no clue. The J-Force and Imperial Fleet were completely different branches of Imperial Space Command.

The woman nodded formally. “My honor at your presence, Your Highness.” She used Iotic, an ancient language spoken now only by the antiquated Skolian noble Houses and the Ruby Dynasty.

Soz winced. She so rarely heard her Skolian titles here, she tended to forget she had them. “My greetings, Colonel.” The Iotic came naturally to her. She spoke Trillian more often, the language of Dalvador and Rillia, but she shifted easily between the two.

“May I join you?” the colonel asked.

“Yes. Certainly.” Excitement jumped in Soz. She wanted to ask a million questions. How does it feel tofty a starship? But her bluntness could annoy people, and she didn’t want to ruin this opportunity to hear about ISC.

The colonel came over to stand wim Soz. Her gauntlets glittered, alive and active, monitoring the surroundings. She was a good head taller than Soz and had a lean build with well-defined muscles under her uniform. Soz had always considered herself fit, but she could blow away on the wind compared to this woman.

Subdued, Soz turned back to the view. The house was on die edge of the village. The plains made her think of a silvery ocean with an iridescent sheen on its waves. The suns were low in the sky, behind the house, and long shadows stretched out over the land. Clouds of shimmer-flies drifted across the countryside.

“It is an uncommonly lovely world,” the colonel said.

“It’s all right.” Soz actually thought it rather boring, except when the rare storms swept across die land.

The woman motioned at the sky. “I’ve never seen blue clouds.”

“It’s from an impurity. Like food dye.” Soz smiled. “It’s most concentrated in the water, but it’s everywhere.”

“Can you see it in the air?” The colonel sounded intrigued.

“Sometimes. It comes from the glitter that plants use to reproduce.” It seemed mundane to Soz. “The dye isn’t dangerous, just an irritant, but it can cause problems. We have nanomeds in our bodies to break it down. They’re passed from mother to child.”

“It’s amazing,” the colonel mused. “Humans can adapt to so many variations in their environment.”

Soz glanced at her hands, with their four fingers and thumb, so different from most everyone else on Lyshriol. “In people, too.”

The officer smiled at her. “I should introduce myself. I’m Starjack Tahota, from HQ City on Diesha.”

“My greetings, Colonel Tahota.” Soz offered her arm and Tahota grasped her elbow while Soz grasped hers. After they separated, Tahota said, “Your father was looking for you earlier.”

Just thinking about him made Soz tense. She couldn’t talk to Althor about leaving if Father was present. She said only, “I was waiting until I could have Althor to myself.”

“He expected you might.”

“He did?” That sounded perceptive for Althor. “Amazing.”

Tahota laughed. “Brothers can be insightful, too.”

Soz regarded her doubtfully. “Why does he have a starfighter? He doesn’t have his commission yet.”

“He’s learning to work with its EI brain.”

“Why are you with him? Aren’t you Fleet?”

“That’s right.” Tahota was watching her closely. “He isn’t cleared to take a fighter out on his own.”

“Shouldn’t his instructor be a J-Force pilot?”

Tahota studied her with that unsettling intensity. “J-Force works with all branches of ISC.”

Although Soz knew DMA drew its instructors from all four branches of the military, she wouldn’t have expected an officer with such a high rank to accompany a cadet on a training exercise. Nor would she have thought they would let him come all the way to Lyshriol. “He’s lucky to have a colonel to train with.”

“I also had another reason for coming here,” Tahota said.

Soz felt a nervous tickle in her throat. “What is that?”

“I coordinate admissions for the ISC academies.”

Soz froze. Admissions. Including the Dieshan Military Academy? She had already taken the preliminary exams, but it would be another year before she could submit an application, and that assumed she passed the prelims. It wasn’t a given: she couldn’t even openly train or study for the tests here, and she had no referent to judge her abilities.

That was her least problem, though. She had taken the exams in secret, without telling her parents, but she couldn’t apply without their permission.

Soz could handle her mother; Roca would resist the way she had with Althor, dismayed at the thought of her children in combat, but she wouldn’t stop mem if they felt they had to go. However, Soz had absolutely no doubt her father would forbid her to apply. It would start a quarrel between me two of them that would make their others pale in comparison.

“I oversee the various academies,” Tahota was saying. “My job is what we call ‘behind the desk.’”

“I see.” Soz didn’t, though. She tried to pick up clues from the colonel’s mind, but Tahota knew how to guard her thoughts well.

“I’m here to discuss your application to DMA,” Tahota said.

Soz squinted at her. “I haven’t made one yet.”

“But you were planning to, I assume.”

“If I pass the prelims.” Soz grimaced. “And if my father doesn’t hit the sky.”

“Yes, your brother said there might be problems. A student your age cannot enroll without parental permission.” Then Tahota added, “Except in certain cases.”

Soz had never heard of such. “What kind of cases?”

:~ “That depends on the discretion of the admissions committee.”

“That must be some discretion,” Soz said, “if they send a Fleet colonel all the way to a backwater planet as the instructor for a boy who hasn’t finished his own studies and to talk to a girl who hasn’t qualified yet to apply.”

To her surprise, Tahota laughed. “Your brother was right.”

“About what?”

“You don’t tiptoe with words.”

Apparently sometimes Althor did know her as well as he had claimed when they were younger. “It’s true,” she admitted.

Tahota pressed a stud on her gauntlet. A chip snapped out of it, elongated into a thin rod, unrolled into a sheet of holofilm, and stiffened. Soz wanted to ask how it worked, but she held back. This didn’t seem the time to indulge the insatiable curiosity that people told her could be truly maddening. …

“Here.” Tahota handed her the holosheet. ‘Take a look.”

Wary, Soz scanned the sheet. Glyphs floated above it, along with charts and symbols. She recognized the J-Force symbol, me silhouette of a Jag in flight.

She made out her name near the top of the sheet. The glyphs were in Skolian Flag, which she spoke but rarely used, so it took a while to decipher the rest. She wasn’t certain, but it looked like the graphs referred to her preliminary exams.

“Are these my scores?” Soz asked.

“That is correct.”

Soz tried to speak with nonchalance, though her heart was racing. “Looks like I did well.” t:j. Tahota made an incredulous noise. “Looks like?”

Soz indicated a chart above the sheet. “Well, this doesn’t make sense. It says I did better than one hundred percent of the people who took the test. That isn’t possible.”

“Why not?”

Soz frowned. The colonel had to be testing her; she couldn’t be that dense.

“Because the-percentage specifies how many people you did better than out of every hundred.

Obviously I couldn’t do better than one hundred out of one hundred. That would mean I did better than myself.”

“The numbers are rounded off.” Tahota flicked a holicon, or holographic icon, that floated above the sheet The numbers changed to show more digits after the decimal place. The 100 percent changed to 99.99999 percent Soz whistled. “Good gods. If I didn’t know better, I would say this means I had the top score out of ten million.”

Tahota answered quietly. “That is exactly what it means.”

Soz stared at the holos and a roaring began in her ears. She looked up at the colonel. “I take it this means I qualify to apply.”

Tahota gave a startled laugh. “More man that I’ve been in my position for three years and I’ve never seen scores like yours. They’re brilliant across the board, as well as in the dossiers ISC and the Assembly have on you.”

Soz stiffened. “ISC and the Assembly keep records on me?”

“On every member of your family. Surely you knew that.”

“Because we’re the royal family?”

“That’s right.”

Soz knew it made sense, however much she disliked it. Technically, the Ruby Dynasty no longer ruled in this age of elected government; they hadn’t for centuries. But they controlled the star-spanning meshes that tied Skolia together into an interstellar empire, and that gave her family a great deal of power. Of course the Assembly kept dossiers. But even that couldn’t dim her mood now. Inside, she was singing. One out of ten million? Surely her father couldn’t tell her no after this. Althor was an honors cadet, but he didn’t burn with the fire that consumed her. How could her father beam with such pride for Althor and begrudge her the same dream?

Tahota was watching her face. “When someone ranks as highly as you’ve done, their admission is automatic.”

“You mean/’mm?”

“I’m authorized to bring you back when Althor and I return to Diesha.”

Soz’s thoughts whirled. Everything she wanted was within her grasp, but it was happening too fast “My father will never say yes.”

“We don’t normally accept a student without parental consent.” Tahota had that careful quality to her voice again. “However, these are extenuating circumstances. DMA will admit you without their permission if you decide to go mat route. We would prefer you had their blessing, but it won’t be required.”

“Good gods, why?” Soz waved the sheet at Tahota. “Just forthisr “Yes.” Tahota’s gaze never wavered. “How familiar are you with the work of your brother, Imperator Skolia?”

That caught Soz off guard. She found it hard to think of Skolia’s mighty Imperator as her brother. Half brother, actually. Kurj was her mother’s son from a previous marriage. A Jagemaut in his youth, he had risen in the J-Force until he reached its highest rank, Jagernaut Primary. From mere he ascended to command of the entire J-Force.

Then he became Imperator.

Kurj commanded ISC. All of it He was in charge of all four branches, the entire armed forces of Skolia. Soz knew the rumors, mat people called him a military dictator, that with the loyalty of ISC, he had more power even than die Assembly. Althor resembled him, but Kurj was more metallic, and even larger than Althor, his physique so massive that he had trouble visiting a heavy gravity world. It was why he rarely came to Lyshriol. Or so he claimed.

Unlike most people, Soz had never feared Kurj. She liked his taciturn style, besides which, he appreciated her interest in me military. She never let him know how she felt, though. She remained on constant guard with him—for Kurj hated her father.

Eldrinson Althor Valdoria, a folksinger from a primitive culture, was seventeen years younger than his stepson. Good genetics, modern medicine, and cell-repair nanomeds gave Roca an apparent age in her twenties, but she had a good half century on her husband. As far as Soz could tell, though, Kurj would have considered his stepfather the scum of the universe regardless of their ages. She didn’t understand why. For all that her father exasperated and annoyed her, he was also one of the finest people she knew. She loved him deeply and she had never doubted he felt the same about his children, no matter how much he struggled to understand them.