The Rifter's Covenant (34 page)

To entertain him,
Marim drew the narration out as long as she could. She told him, adding highly
irreverent invective, about the journey the
Telvarna
made in the Navy cruiser
Grozniy
to
the Gehenna system, then about being launched off to the Rift before the
cruiser returned to Ares.

“. . . by
the time we got there, Firehead was eyein’ one of those Marines, and the Eya’a
were gettin’ rizzy. It was a real laugh. Except I missed you an’ Jaim. No one
to laugh with. Anyway, after a couple killer long shifts, that crazy old
chatzer Omilov got a fix on something. Looked just like a faint red star, with
a weird spectrum and no x-rays.”

“Weird spectrum?”
Lokri repeated, looking interested.

“That’s what Omilov
said. It was a black hole binary—with a fractal spectrum of dimension
one-point-seven.”

A faint line
appeared in Lokri’s forehead, and he shook his head slowly. Marim stopped,
watching him curiously, but he only waved a hand for her to go on.

“He said in that
niffy way o’ his, ‘No known process could cause such a spectral signature. It
means we’ve found the Suneater.’ So we pulled a TDVSA, and though we nearly
fried the engines skippin’ in and out like that, we got ourselves a real clear
picture. Real pretty. Gas spinnin’ out into a disc bisecting a red star,
sucking the guts out of it, but no polar jets. Omilov figured that’s the
Suneater’s eatin’ the polar jets.” She laughed, remembering what followed. “And
the Suneater itself was the weirdest chatzing thing: big snarl of tubes ’n
what-all, as much as we could make out.”

“You couldn’t get
in for a closer look?”

Marim shook her
head. “Navy orders.” She wrinkled her nose. “Tell you the truth, I’m just as
glad.” She laughed. “Weird enough lookin’—and then there’s the cheerful thought
of those chatzing Dol’jharians lyin’ in wait there, probably with a
cruiser-load of those torture machines they love so much. Catch me goin’ within
a light-year of that place again? Not for all the sunbursts in Rifthaven!”

o0o

Montrose stepped
into the Enclave’s kitchen and looked around. Most of the workers stopped what
they were doing, except for the other chef, who quite properly kept stirring
his sauce.

The apprentices
looked up at Montrose with expressions ranging from apprehensive to curious.

“Excellent,
excellent,” he said, walking slowly between the prep tables. ‘Those onions
could be chopped a degree finer. You’ll want the gorusch to be smooth as cream.
Are those the freshest fenuik-herb you could find? They look rather wilted.
Wilted means a bitter aftertaste. Try one.” He did not stop to see whether the
young man with the pungent collection of herbs followed his order. Of course he
would. “Have the wines been brought up for the dinner? I shall act as sommelier
for this one,” he added before he went out the door. “The former Aerenarch-Consort
is known for her particularity.”

He went out,
thinking grimly, And I want to keep an eye on her
.

It took four pods
for one to show up with enough space for a large man. Montrose used the
transport time to shift his thoughts from culinary concerns to those of the
clinic.

Between the two
jobs he kept very busy, much more than he’d been accustomed to during what he
now looked back on fondly as the sybaritic life of a Rifter. True, there were
those occasions of extreme danger, usually coupled with periods of tremendous
effort and little sleep, but for the most part he had been free to indulge his
penchant for fine food, fine music, and expensive sex-partners.

The first two he
still had, the last he didn’t, but he was too busy to miss them. Dividing his
time between the Enclave and a clinic in the Polloi area, he was at the center
of Ares’s activity.

Which enabled him
to make his own plans.

The transtube
stopped directly opposite the clinic. A babel of noise drowned Montrose as he
walked in. Night and day, the place was filled with people clamoring for care.
The receptionist smiled at him, saying, “You’ve two appointments, one new, one
follow-up. And then there’s that.” He pointed at the crowded waiting area.

“Thank you, genz
Kelnar,” Montrose said, making his way to the examining room he usually used.
How did the man remain so cheerful and unstressed?

Before he called in
his first patient, he windowed up the log for the twenty hours since his shift
the day before, and scanned the names and complaints listed there.

He filtered out the
usual plethora of contusions, hematomas, simple fractures, concussions, and
similar complaints: the stress of overcrowding was provoking fights with
increasing frequency.

Left was a mix of
traumas, too many of them not accidents. He winced at the report, its affect
not diminished by the bald medical terminology, of a man who’d had an eye
sucked out of his head during a tussle.

Eight deaths, as well.
A cold sensation gripped the back of his neck at one of the one-line autopsy
summaries: near-total disseminated intravascular coagulation. Death is Coming;
the phrase popped up from his first year of medical education long ago. Poison
again. He jumped to the test results and sighed in relief: some idiot had
somehow smuggled a Ndel ghost snake—so named for its near transparency—onto
Ares, and her bunkies got curious.

Good enough. Then
he turned to the long-running
neuraimai
search he had running, granted him by a place-seeker trying to exploit his
connection to the new Panarch, through the logs of virtually every clinic on
Ares. That filtered out just about everything, and as usual he thought he saw a
pattern, too subtle to make out, in other poisonings and even odder deaths and
injuries, none so benign in political terms
.

He wasn’t good
enough on a computer to pin it down.

Sighing, he tabbed
the console to summon his first patient.

The med history
that scrolled up was brief. Female; Navy career officer; atherosclerosis. Now
she was complaining of severe angina.

Three years younger
than I
,
he thought as the door hissed
open and a short, stockily-built woman walked in. Why didn’t she go to the
military medicos? The condition had been diagnosed some time ago. She could
have had atherolysis at any time, unlike Sebastian Omilov, whose spastic angina
had had a different cause.

He saw at once that
she was experiencing the angina right now, and it was serious: pale face,
pain-narrowed eyes, clenched jaw, compressed breathing.

As she walked in,
one of her hands moved its way up to her shoulder and massaged there.

Glancing at the
name again, he said, “Commander Thetris? We’ll start right away. This is
serious.”

His mind was
already moving ahead to treatment, so at first her words didn’t register. He
looked at her, his hand poised above the tray of instruments.

“I said,” her
thready voice intensified slightly, “it can wait. Please hear me out.”

“I’m damned if I’ll
sit here and watch you die. What can be so important?”

“It is more
important than my life,” she said, her pain-hazed eyes steady.

“Look,” he said
abruptly, “let me at least relieve the pain. Then you can talk, after which we
do something about this.” He touched her left shoulder.

Her brow creased
with faint lines above steady blue-gray eyes.

She was quiet while
he sprayjected her, including a powerful arterial specific as well as an
analgesic; six breaths later, a tinge of color entered her cheeks.

“Now,” he said,
“talk. And make it fast, because if I see any more signs of distress in you, I
start treatment.”

To his surprise she
withdrew a seeker from a pocket in her plain, serviceable coveralls. She moved
it around the room, and when she was satisfied there were no narks, she sat
down, breathing deeply.

“I saw the Tovr
Ixvan story. Thought of going to him. But when I ran a search,” she said, “your
name popped up. He came to you. Now Kendrian has one of the top vocats in the
Thousand Suns, and the all-powerful Licrosse was yanked off the Reef. Your
position at the Enclave is more than it appears. More important, you are a
Rifter, which indicates to me there is a chance you might hear me out before
calling the authorities. And most important, you are from Timberwell, which
means you might want to see justice done.”

A fierce pang of
anger and pleasure twisted Montrose’s insides. “Go on.”

“You will have to
understand at the outset that I am a traitor,” she said, her gaze still steady,
but her trembling voice revealing the emotional cost of her words. “I have lied
and schemed, but I am not lying now.” She paused for a deep breath. “I worked
for a democratic revolution in Cloud Shelani, Phoenix Nord. I stayed in contact
after my promotion, when I was shifted to Arthelion. We wanted a voice in the
government, not more aristocrats squandering money on their vices.

“I found out too
late that my promotion, and thence the orders that I interfered with and
relayed, had been influenced by those who did not have a better government in
mind. They were in league with Dol’jhar,” she said, her voice so flat that
Montrose felt her cold pool of misery and self-judged guilt in his own gut.

“But I threw myself
into undoing as much damage as I could before the last of us were pulled off
Arthelion. Some may say I was lucky to live,” she finished, and had to swallow
three times before she could force her voice to work.

Montrose found
himself holding his breath. Though he had not met the woman before she’d walked
into this room, he knew without question that she embraced the pain of her
disease as justice meted out.

“I ended up here,”
she said, her voice thready despite his drug. Her gaze remained steady, and
Montrose stepped closer the better to hear. “The Archon Srivashti, formerly of
Timberwell, sent me a message not long after my arrival threatening to reveal
my treachery to Nyberg if I did not supply him with certain evidence. I did so
only because I knew that if he betrayed me he would find someone else, who
might not have my abilities.” She gave Montrose a wintry smile. “My expertise
is in noderunning, not in revolution. I gave him what he wanted, but I was also
able to penetrate his security by using certain facts he let slip. His codes
did not take long to break,” she added with slight disdain. “And I found some
curious references.”

She stopped and
cautiously essayed a deeper breath. “I did not tell you how I found out too
late: that was because of a message sent me by my contact, one Martin Cheruld,
Aegios, Brangornie Node.”

She cocked her
head, awaiting his reaction. The name seemed vaguely familiar.

“The dupe whose
machinations at the Node controlling access to Dol’jhar was instrumental in
setting up the attack. He plotted to put Galen on the throne. Or so he thought.
What I subsequently discovered was his correspondence with Archon Srivashti,
and deeper than that, much deeper in the Rouge Nord octant, the manipulation of
data by Hesthar al-Gessinav.”

Montrose nodded,
not surprised at all.

“The packet headers
on that data led me exponentially deeper, to a communication I believe to have
originated from Barrodagh, Eusabian’s factotum. I cannot, however, decipher
it—but that may change as I gain access to more recent messages still
propagating.”

Montrose shook his
head slowly as he tried to take it all in.

Sedry paused, her
brow furrowed. “How much do you know about the DataNet?”

“Enough to use it
like anyone else,” he replied frankly. He flexed his hands. “But my talents lie
in other directions.”

“Ah, yes. Golgol as
well as medtech. An interesting nexus.” Sedry smiled wanly. “My fondness for
rich foods is what got me to this point, but I have never experienced Golgol
cuisine.”

He noted with
approval that she said “experienced,” not “eaten.”

“Well, the traffic
on the DataNet propagates throughout the Thousand Suns according to an
immensely complicated set of distributed algorithms designed to make sure that
all data lasts some time, and more important data lasts longer. Below a certain
level, the priority is automatically assigned, but the really interesting work
is done in the Anachronic Hubs and their substations in the various sectors.”

“But hasn’t the
DataNet been destroyed?”

She laughed, then
her face whitened and she caught her breath. “It would take an act of Telos to destroy
the DataNet. Every interstellar journey, no matter what the ship, is a part of
it.”

Montrose accepted
that. The
Telvarna
had often carried
data. Infonetics didn’t care about your identity: Vi’ya had commented once that
they really didn’t even care if you delivered it, since the same packets were
no doubt replicated on hundreds of other ships. But he’d never thought about
the implications of that.

“As a matter of
fact.” Sedry paused to draw another deep breath. “Ares is still connected. Via
couriers smuggling data in and out of Nodes not controlled by Dol’jharians.
Barrodagh has ensured that the Rifters leave ship traffic alone now—he needs
the DataNet as much as we do.”

She leaned out, her
hands on her knees, then continued. “Cheruld must have sent a large packet of
data to Ares at the same time he sent it to Arthelion when he discovered he’d
been duped. But he wasn’t at a high enough level to send direct to Ares, and
the data never arrived here. Our only hope is that it is still propagating from
its path to Arthelion and thence to Lao Tse.”

“So what you are
hoping is that eventually the data you need will show up here?”

“It may have
already. But I can’t use brain-suck anymore. The pain is too great.”

Montrose shook his
head, frowning. “You could have killed yourself, stimulating your limbic system
like that. Why didn’t you come sooner?”