The Rifter's Covenant (33 page)

Riolo was still
snuffing in the thick air with an ecstatic expression, but he paused to say
breathlessly, “Captain, you can detach it at will.”

Trying with little
success to find a comfortable way to move, Hreem thought grimly just what he’d
do to the little troglodyte if it didn’t.

A female voice
interrupted his thoughts.

“Welcome, Captain,”
she said in a deep voice like boiling mud. “You cannot know it, but this is
honor for you and necessity for me: I cannot command a lesser Mater to this
task.”

At the sound of her
voice, and the sight of her enormity swelling like moonrise from the huge vat—that
was no throne
,
a panicky voice
gibbered at the back of his thoughts—Hreem’s shaky confidence failed him
utterly.

But as he began to
back away, the immense woman said, “You did not understand what the shestek
will do for you, Captain? Let us essay a more promising start.”

Without any warning
a tsunami of pleasure mounted from the heaviness at his groin and washed away
his thoughts, impelling him forward into mindless white light.

Marim spun
around, laughing. One hand fluffed out her tangle of curly, bright blond hair
as she surveyed the four unsmiling co-workers facing her.

“I was lucky, see?
I’ve always been good at L-3, but I don’t always win. Tomorrow I’ll probably
lose again.”

“Gruen says you
cheat.” The speaker, a tall, strong young man, crossed his arms.

“Gruen’s a
sneeze-wit. He’s rasty ’cause I zapped him good.”

“Says he was
watchin’ on another console. Saw you send a worm through, locatin’ everyone
else’s supply dumps.”

Marim flicked a
glance round the four stony faces, then sighed. “Then let’s go right up to
Spinner’s and get them to run back the log on the games. Come on, let’s go
right now. I got somewhere to be, but I’ll wait on it, just to prove it.”

The shortest of
them, a slim young woman with green and black hair, said quietly, “They flush
the logs hour after closing. You didn’t know that?”

Of course I knew
that, nullwit
,
Marim thought as she
mimed disappointment. Though the woman was the shortest, Marim had seen her in
action, and did not make the mistake of assuming her the weakest of the four. She
smiled, despising them: even if they didn’t flush the logs, her worms
destructed at game’s end. If any of these nullwits’d had a whole brain between
them, they’d be inventing their own worms instead of jawing her down.

The third man spoke
up. “Ilda’s right. They do flush the system, so all the evidence vipped last
night. I think you owe us a rematch, Marim.”

“All right,” Marim
said, throwing up her hands. “Glad to. Sanctus Hicura! Go ahead and win your sunbursts
back off me—I usually lose more than I win anyway.”

Which was another
lie, but she saw the threat in the four faces ease slightly, and the second man
clapped her on the shoulder. “You got it. After shift tomorrow?”

“I’ll be there. You
grab a table,” she said to the tallest man, and then she grinned at Ilda, whose
face was still stony. “And you can stand right behind me the whole time.”

Ilda cracked a
small smile at last. “Sure. And not get to play? You just don’t want to lose to
me.”

“I’ve already lost
to you, Ilda. Why you think my underwear has holes in ’em?”

“That’s not from
bein’ old, that’s from bein’ worn out,” the redheaded man cracked.

“Yeah, like you?”
Marim retorted.

And the group
roared with laughter, Marim right along with them as they moved to the adit and
surrendered their ID patches, which permitted them to move freely within the
security zones that compartmentalized the engineering section. After a few more
zingers back and forth, she promised to see them the next night, and took her
leave.

As she squeezed
onto the transtube, she scolded herself for sloppiness, but by the time she and
a numberless crowd of others were decanted at D-Five, she had made several
resolves and was in a sunny humor again. After all, there was nothing stupider
than being mad at oneself—the only real ally you could always count on in life.

She found Vi’ya
sitting with the Eya’a. The two white-furred beings craned their necks at a
weird angle, and both raised twiggy hands to sketch a sign.

Marim sketched the
same sign back, grinning uneasily at them until the huge blue-faceted eyes had
looked away again.

“Sgatchi!” she
exclaimed, eyeing Vi’ya. “Are they always going to do that now?”

Vi’ya’s black eyes
studied Marim. “Do what?”

Marim waved her
hands. “The signing.”

“They seem to find
it reassuring.”

“Well, I don’t.”
Marim dug in her pocket and tossed down a wad of scrip. “I don’t like having
them talkin’ at me—even sign. It was easier to be around them when they walked
by like I didn’t exist.”

“But they have
always seen you. And heard you,” Vi’ya added in a dry voice. “They are
bewildered and terrified by humans being so many individual motes, moving about
randomly. It comforts them to get the same sign back from each individual.”

“So that’s why they
do the ‘We see you’ one fifty times a day?”

Vi’ya’s smile was
brief as she turned the scrip over. “What’s this?”

“Winnings,” Marim
said proudly. “If you convert it—and don’t let me know where it is—then maybe
we’ll have something to use when we do bust free o’ this blungehole.”

Vi’ya dropped the
scrip onto the table again and leaned back in her chair. “You cheated,” she
said.

“Chatz! You been
rummaging in my mind?”

Vi’ya’s dark,
slanted brows creased with impatience. “Don’t need to. Don’t want to,” she
added ironically. “Obvious from the way you threw that down. Also obvious you
got caught at it.”

“Well, how else
will we nabble us some AU?”

“I’d rather not
draw any unwanted attention,” Vi’ya said.

Marim sighed,
flinging herself into a chair. “Why is it you don’t ask the Arkad to help us
out? They just handed him the whole chatzing station!”

“No.”

Marim slapped her
hands on the side of the chair. “You’re being a piss-brained stiff-rump, Vi’ya!
What’s the good o’ knowing the biggest nick if we don’t get anything out of
him? Heck, he hasn’t even asked to see if we’re still alive, and he owes us. Big.”

“He owes us
nothing.” Vi’ya’s dark-fringed black eyes narrowed to lambent slits.

Marim got to her
feet, laughing recklessly. “We saved his life!”

“If we ask for
favors we draw attention to ourselves. This would be counterproductive. Even
dangerous, with the novosti slant against Rifters.”

Marim heard the
implied rebuke plainly. “Hey, Nik’s all right. Everybody’s talking about the
Whoopee.”

“Until the next
atrocity is reported and they forget. In the meantime, the Panarch can do
nothing overt about Lokri’s situation, because the insistence on the trial in
the first place is little more than a political weapon aimed at him. And we are
part of that.”

Marim made a noise
of disgust. “So I won’t talk to Nik anymore. Chatz! I’m goin’ to see Lokri.”
She began to flounce out, then whirled back, her face a comical grimace. “Can I
actually talk to him? Are they listening to everything we say?” A brief flare
of humor at the idea of piling on insults against the nicks, and then involving
a lot of sex talk, faded when Vi’ya shook her head.

“It is one of their
rules. You will not be able to touch him, but your conversation will remain
private.”

Marim fumed the
short distance to Detention One, where the capital criminals were housed. She
noted everything she could about the security measures, wondering privately how
in Haruban’s Hell Vi’ya was going to break Lokri out. The place was tighter
than Rifthaven during a lockdown.

As soon as she saw
Lokri, she felt a flash of guilt. His handsome face was bone-thin and weary,
his rakish smile rather perfunctory. He moved with his habitual languid
insouciance, but his body was thin. He obviously ate very little anymore.

“You’ve been busy?”
he asked, laying his palm against the dyplast window between them.

She put her palm up
and touched it to the dyplast opposite his, hiding how much she pitied him.
Being under threat of death was bad enough, but to be denied any human contact!
She shivered, and to cover it, shook her hair back and fluffed it out.

Sorry,” she said.
“Been gambling, tryin’ to net us some cash for when we do skip outa this
blunge-dump.”

“You really think
we will?” Lokri lifted one fine, arched brow.

Marim shook her
head. “Vi’ya says we will. Hasn’t broken a promise yet.”

“This one might be
broken for her,” he said, pulling his hand away and rubbing his eyes.

“What about this
old Ixvan nick Montrose found? Novosti say he’s hot stuff in Ivory Sud.”
Another idea occurred. “Who’s paying him?”

“The new Panarch,
I’m told,” Lokri said with a wry grimace. Then he sat back. “Ixvan talks well.
Dragged me through the muck all over again. Made the usual noises about getting
me justice. But I know very well that an ex-Rifter doesn’t count for much, especially
with all the atrocity stories, so I don’t expect he’ll really put up much of a
fight.”

Marim snorted.
“Right. And I don’t suppose a Panarch counts for much, either. You’re as bad as
Vi’ya.”

“She’s a realist.
So am I.” He drummed his fingers irritably on his side of the table. “Let’s
talk of something else. Tell me about the Suneater run.”

“Sure,” Marim said,
surprised. “But I thought Vi’ya and Montrose been here since we got back.”

“Vi’ya has been
here twice, and Montrose once. And both of them spent their entire visit
combing exhaustively through my fourteen-year-old memories, just like Ixvan.”

Marim was tired of
hearing the others speculate about the trial, but this caused a faint flash of
interest. “They find anything? I almost never see Montrose anymore, and you
know how much Vi’ya blabs.”

Lokri shook his
head wearily. “Same thing I’ve thought all along, that random acts of violence
don’t include destroying, with a thoroughness that can’t be traced, the
victims’ databank.”

Marim whistled.
“Your family musta been some kinda cruiser-weights.”

“Not at all,” he
said, his long mouth curling. “Kendrian is merely a cadet branch to Vakianos—”

“Shipbuilders,”
Marim said, muttering. Every Rifter had seen, coveted—or, if very, very lucky,
jacked or stolen—a Vakianos yacht.

“And we weren’t
connected with that. We had a license through the Concilium Exterioris to run
student expeditions. No yachts. Just exploration ships. Equipped with tech that
the Navy and real frontier explorers already considered old.”

“They could have
stumbled across something brand-new—”

Lokri interrupted
impatiently. “And anything they stumbled on would be in the DataNet before they
got home. The license mandated a direct coded download through the first
available Node in line of skip. That’s the way those things work in reality.”

“But there had to
be something in their comp. You didn’t check?”

Lokri flicked his
fingers dismissively. “As soon as I got home and found them dead, I ran a check
outside the home system—it had been randomized—and discovered that all their
credit had been emptied—in my name. That’s how I knew I was being set up.”

“You didn’t try to
find out who?”

“Of course I tried,
whenever I could.” He hesitated, then said in a flat voice, “After a
particularly drunken evening I told Markham about it, and he tried, once, as
well. With the profits from the first Hreem jack, we bought a worm from a
noderunner—a ninth-power chthon, in fact.”

Marim whistled. “So
that’s what it was! I didn’t know you could dig that deep with a Riftside
worm.” She frowned at him. “You spent all your share, and wouldn’t tell me what
on,” she said, pretending to be offended.

Lokri didn’t seem
to notice. He got up from his chair and paced the tiny room restlessly,
sightlessly, and Marim knew she was looking on long habit. “Of course not. Why?
We found out only a little more. Mostly that all the students on that trip
later turned up dead or missing. And the nicks nearly nailed us. That deep, the
DataNet is as bad as the Rift for danger. You have to go hands-on. And to track
down whatever evidence might still exist requires a far deeper noderunner than
either of us was.”

Someone like Vi’ya,
Marim thought, but she didn’t say it—felt
too much like raising false hopes. All this talk of evidence and crimes and so
on was a total waste of time. The only way they’d get Lokri free was not by
legal methods, but by breaking him out. So she changed the subject. “Your
sister . . . you still haven’t seen her?”

Lokri’s mouth was
grim. “No.”

“You know she’s
disappeared?”

Lokri’s head jerked
up, his eyes wide and sea-gray. “Disappeared? You mean dead?”

“No, I mean
disappeared. At least, there’s been no body. Nicks’re all gossiping about it. That
Archon she was bunkin’ with went off like an engine in supercrit for a while,
then suddenly he’s forgotten her. At least in public. He’s now runnin’ with the
Harkatsus boy, the one whose father got stiffed during that cabal thing
everyone was yammerin’ about before we left Gehenna.”

Lokri ranged back
and forth, reminding Marim of a beast in a cage. “What can it mean?” he
muttered.

“Probably means she
got tired of that pissbrain Archon, and is bunkin’ up with someone else. Gossip
about him says he’s not one to cross and he’s got a nasty long reach. If so,
who’d blame her?”

Lokri paced back
and forth twice more, then dropped abruptly onto his bench, lacing tense
fingers through his long black hair. “I can’t think,” he muttered into his
palms. “Suneater. Tell me about that. You found it. What’s it like?”