The Rifter's Covenant (21 page)

“Weak, weak,” Nik
said, shaking his head. “The old Panarch himself forgave Brandon his
Riftskip—if it was a Riftskip. That’s ancient news! Torigan’s an idiot.”

“What if they did
something Brandon might regret . . .”

“But Panarch’s up
now. We rizz him, and we’re blunge.”

“Everyone’ll DL
it,” Derith said with a grin.

“Yeah, then rizz
us
. Not worth it. Besides, data-slant’s
not Torigan’s style. He’ll use it, sure, but I don’t think he could either plan
it or do it. No, somebody else is behind these hints, and I’m going to find out
who, and how they are using us, before I follow any more of its leads.”

Derith shrugged.
“Well, it’s your call. Trial’s still yours. I’ve got my hands full with the
Accession.” She shook her head wonderingly. “You wouldn’t think those bloodless
old gnostors in Archetype and Ritual’d be the type to duel, but they’re
fighting over symbols and rituals like they were matters of life and death.”

Nik raised an
eyebrow at her.

Derith snorted.
“Yeah, I know. Strange thing for a novosti to say, right? But we do it for
points—
that’d
be worth fighting
over.”

Nik pursed his lips
as he watched Derith pack up her things. She was a hell of a good novosti,
which was why he’d agreed to share fifty-fifty. But she was a little too
focused at times. Why did she think the Panarch had lifted martial law, if not
to free the novosti to disperse and popularize the symbols those “bloodless old
gnostors” so carefully discovered and crafted? Maybe he should’ve taken the
Accession story.

Too late for that.
And from his hasty research on Tovr Ixvan before he’d confronted the man, he
knew that trouble followed the vocat wherever he went. He’d made the fortune of
more than one novosti: in Ivory Sud, Ixvan had been the subject of a Level 2
story more than once—10 to 100 points, with a billion viewers to a point. And
his expose on the Reef had been good. Very good.

As for the trial,
maybe the other Rifters from the mysterious
Telvarna
would be a workable angle to try for inside data, once the ship
returned
.
He’d better find out when and
where it would be expected, or he’d arrive to find Chomsky already there.

“
Telvarna
.” While he still had Derith’s
attention, he thought out loud. “The old gnostor Omilov won’t talk to us, we
know that. Neither will the captain.”

“Dol’jharian,”
Derith said, making avoidance gestures. “Worse than Douloi. Try the drivetech.
He didn’t go with them when the
Telvarna
left.”

“At the Enclave.”

Derith grimaced.
The Arkadic Enclave was off-limits.

Nik went on, “If
the cook-surgeon gives me the slip and goes straight to the Enclave, we won’t
be able to reach him, either. And we can’t get at the navy lieutenant in the
Cap.”

“So that leaves the
youth with the Kelly connection, and the DC-tech. You’d better be right there
when the
Telvarna
comes in. Good
luck,” she said wryly, and left.

Ixvan drank more
caf to keep awake, and took off.

Near the end of his
shift, their luck seemed to turn against them yet again. One of the noderunners
surfaced with the news that the
Telvarna
had arrived a day ago! It looked like a repeat of the ship’s departure, when
the military had not announced it and refused all comment after it was
discovered.

Nik moved to his
console. The only one he might be able to get at would be the female DC tech,
who had reported to work at Engineering.

Then Nik cursed: 99
was already on the way; Chomsky’s passcoding through to Engineering had been
what the noderunner saw.

That same unknown
source must have tipped 99 off, too. Then he smiled. Marim—the DC-tech’s
name—was about to go off shift, and she was a nullrat. If she followed her old
habits from before the Gehenna mission, she’d head straight for Spinner’s. And
Chomsky hated free-fall.

Stealing a scoop
was one of the best parts of being novosti, he thought happily as he squeezed
onto a pod. And he’d have the lower orbit with Marim, Chomsky being a Downsider,
who used Downsider means to track the Douloi and the influential Polloi who had
managed to make their way to Ares. Chomsky didn’t have the right touch for the
vast number of support people—the crews aboard the refugee ships, or ordinary
folks on ships that were commandeered by more influential people for the skip
to Ares. And usually those people really liked novosti.

His stomach
fluttered as the transtube slowed and stopped at the Spinner nexus, up at the
axis, but muscle memory came back, and he felt more confident as he pulled
himself into the establishment under the enormous glowing sign.

Nik chuckled.
Spin-axis dives were the same everywhere. The grim conditions of Ares and the
military presence hadn’t managed to dampen nullrats’ appetites for raucous fun.
Even respectable citizens of either Highweller or Downsider origins seemed to
let go in free-fall.

Those who can
handle it
,
he thought as he caught sight
of Chomsky. The tall, willowy redhead had donned stickysoles, marking her as a
dedicated mudfoot—not that her awkward posture didn’t broadcast Downsider.

And he could see
the yellow-haired DC-tech’s opinion of Downsiders in her lifted shoulder and
curled lip.

Marim looked just
like the stillpic he’d accessed, but it hadn’t conveyed her animation. Nik
pulled his way closer, flinching as a rowdy group of men dove past him,
slapping at cables to change their course. He wasn’t that good in free-fall.

Marim jerked back,
making an obscene gesture at Chomsky. The novosti followed her, posture
insistent until the little DC-tech lunged expertly, grabbed Chomsky’s ankle,
and flipped her into a spin. The novosti’s face greened as she spun away,
helped onward by nudges and less gentle course correction administered by the
jeering patrons.

He pulled himself
to Marim’s perch, opening the ajna lens in his forehead to record.

Marim saw it, her
light blue eyes narrowed and her mouth thinned. She was older than he’d guessed
from the picture. “You news-blits like bein’ beat up or something?”

He scrabbled to
hook a perch with his feet and pulled himself down, holding up his hands. “Hey,
I don’t like her spew about Rifters any more than you do. I think it’s aimed at
your friend Lokri, and through him, at the Panarch. That’s what I want to talk
about.”

Marim relaxed
minutely, but her eyes were still wary. “Yeah, maybe.” Then she grinned, which
made her seem young again. “You’re Nik Cormoran, aren’t you? Your stuff’s not
bad.”

He smiled back at
her, liking her instantly. He hated predictable people as much as he hated
predictable events and interviews, even when he knew they’d bring plenty of
points. “Have some time? I’ll buy you something to drink, and you talk.”

“About Lokri?” The
blue eyes narrowed warily, though the dimpled smile did not diminish.

Nik squashed the
urge to pursue that wariness. With a tilt-nose, he might go
aggressive—provoking people who thought they were better than you usually
prompted them to say more than they meant to. His instinct was to like
Marim—and he suspected she’d talk plenty if he was gentle about it.

“If you want, but I
think people would like to hear about having the Panarch as crew of your ship,”
he said. “At least last time I checked, that wasn’t part of their training.”

Marim laughed, a
delicious sound. She was small and well rounded in all the right places and she
wore her clothes tight. He grinned back. Oh yes, he liked her a lot.

“Sanctus Hicura! I
thought all you nicks were busy pretendin’ he never did that Riftskip, like
he’d peed in the soup at a party.”

Nik choked on a
laugh. “What say we grab a booth in the back where it’s quieter.”

She agreed, and
when they’d settled themselves and he’d ordered, he said, “Now, start right
from the beginning. When did you first see him?”

She described in
vivid detail how she’d been watching the fight over Charvann from a distance,
then caught a small blip on her screen—a tiny courier chased by a destroyer.
The drinks arrived, but he hardly noticed. Her story was giving him a
heart-accelerating sense of what it must have been like to skip in and out with
a partially disabled ship, then use a double ablative to propel them toward a
small moon . . . using two hundred klicks of bumpy ice to bring
themselves to a stop.

“They were mighty
purple afterward,” Marim said with a lascivious grin. “At least, the Arkad was.
Purple, blue, green, and yellow. Didn’t see old Schoolboy—that’s what we called
the younger Omilov. We had two of ’em after we raided the Mandala, him and his
papa.”

“Raided the
Mandala,” Nik said, using his most admiring tone. “I heard gossip about that.
What happened? How’d you come to do that? I thought the then-Krysarch had just
left there?”

“Nope. He’d just
left Charvann. He was with those Omilovs, you see. Got the silver thing they
all squawked about so much. That needle-nacker Eusabian’s got it now, though it
doesn’t seem to work, or they would’ve blasted us by now, right?”

“The Heart of
Kronos?” Nik prompted, ever mindful of his audience.

Marim waved a hand
impatiently. “That’s it.” She shrugged, and gave her drinking bubble a shake.
“Anyway, soon’s the Arkad finds out Markham was dead, he wants to go home, so
we take him. He promised us a ransom, you see, so why not? But when we skip in,
we find the chatzing
Fist of Dol’jhar
in low orbit!”

“Bad sign,” Nik
said encouragingly.

“Very bad. It chases
us, but we dip into atmosphere . . .”

What followed was a
story of knife-edge close escapes, heroism, and ingenuity. If even half of this
is true, the L’Ranja Whoopee alone will make us a planet-sized fortune, he
gloated privately
.
As Marim described
that maneuver, memory flickered—hadn’t there been a couple of obscure
references to something like that on the milnet? But those military chatzers
habitually keep their yaps tight on the best stuff. He resolved to get his best
realizers to work on an animation for that sequence, and for the Dis landing.

“. . . so
we made it to Rifthaven, and some of us cashed in some o’ the loot. Captain
refitted the ship, until we got into a fight over that Shiidra-loving silver
thing. Great fight—tore up that blunge-suck of a Snurkel’s shop, then we
escaped, just barely, only to walk straight into the tractor of that cruiser
Mbwa Kali
.”

Marim paused,
looking down at the drink in her hands. The next part of their journey had been
the stop at Desrien. But she hated to even think about that hellish place. She
shrugged sharply. “Rest is us arriving here.”

“So the Panarch has
permitted you to keep the art objects you looted from the Palace Minor?”

“Said it’s better
than letting the Dol’jharians shoot ’em up,” she said. “But he did tell Ivard
he’s gonna buy ’em all back. Or what he can, anyway.”

“Some of them got
lost, then?”

“Broken. And he
gave one away—of course, I guess he could always take it back again.”

“To whom did he
give it, or don’t you know?”

“Sure. To our
captain, Vi’ya. Called the Stone of Prometheus. Puts like a holo all over you.
Nacky!”

The Stone of
Prometheus, given to a Rifter? “So he gave one of these priceless gifts to your
captain?” Nik repeated, careful to keep his tone casual.

Marim shrugged
again. “Sure. What’s that mean to a nick? He’s got a palace full of ‘em.”

Sensing he’d get no
more on that from Marim, and resolving to follow up on it, Nik shifted to the
immediate. “It must have been hard for your fellow crew member, Jesimar
Kendrian, to have lived through those dangerous times, just to find himself in
even more danger here.”

“Sgatchi!” Marim
exclaimed. “Of course!”

“I understand that
he hid his background not just from the Panarch and Gnostor Omilov and his son
the lieutenant, but from the rest of his crewmates as well?”

Marim tilted her
head, smiling crookedly. “You gotta understand for us Rifters a nick background
ain’t necessarily anything to yap about. He coulda hid it just the same if
there’d been no murder biznai.”

“But I don’t
understand why, after sharing all those adventures with the Panarch—and even
saving his life—genz Kendrian did not throw himself on the Panarch’s mercy when
he found out who he was. Or has he?”

“Brandon hasn’t
seen him since we left Rifthaven,” Marim said, draining her drink. “Heyo, I’m
gettin’ hoarse. You want more blab, how about another time? I got somewhere to
be.” She leaned across the table and caressed Nik’s cheek. “Unless you want to
turn off that thing and come along. You’re kinda nacky yourself!”

Nik laughed, aware
of a twinge of embarrassment underlying his strong attraction to the forthright
little tech. “Maybe another time? You’re logged off duty, but I’m not.”

Marim laughed as
she rose. Nik watched her launch herself toward an exit, and closed off the
recording. As he rode the transtube back, he thought over the interview.

Subjects tended to
fall into two rough categories: the ones who were awed by the prospect of brief
fame, and the ones who treated novosti as moral lepers. He was patient with the
first, often resorting to an arsenal of disarming tricks to get a natural
response. The second group he often provoked, knowing that they pretty much all
DL’d the news he presented—and then they spoke their opinions of it. Marim was
the rare third, someone who didn’t care what anyone thought. He wanted to see
more of her.

Later. Right now, although
he had not got himself a step nearer to the mystery of Jesimar Kendrian, he had
a hot story anyway, one 99 hadn’t got a sniff of. If by tomorrow people on the
transtubes weren’t talking about the L’Ranja Whoopee and what Rifters thought
of the Douloi, even a member of the dynasty that ruled the Thousand Suns, then
he ought to resign as a novosti and start mining asteroids.