The Rifter's Covenant (40 page)

The thought
steadied him, until the door opened and the bodyguard entered, followed by the
tall, yellow-eyed Archon whom Ivard had first seen at the Ascha Gardens, moving
with controlled grace that unsettled Ivard. Satiny granite weighted his back;
he hastily unfocused his perceptions.

“Please sit down.”

Ivard did so
hastily. Srivashti had spoken to him in a mode that Brandon had never used to
him: barbed steel under the surface politesse, from a podium holding the man
high and Ivard low. He sensed the mute bodyguard taking up a position behind
him.

“You were shipmate
to Jesimar vlith-Kendrian.”

“Um, yes.”

The Archon raised
an eyebrow, and Ivard sensed an alteration in Felton’s emanations. “Sir,” he
added. “Um, uh, Your Grace?” That was what you called an Archon, right?

But he missed the
next question as the impact of what he had just experienced hit him. Reading
scents had been one thing, but now he was hearing Felton like a tempath. Did
Vi’ya do it like that? No, she could hear at a distance, as she had on
Arthelion when they rescued the gnostor. He couldn’t.

“Sorry, Your
Grace?”

He sensed disdain
from the Archon, who clearly thought Ivard very stupid. The man was otherwise
opaque to him, while Felton’s aura quivered with meaning.
“The nicks all live trapped in their heads, tangled in words,”
Greywing had said, not long before she died, under the Palace. But Felton
couldn’t speak. He wasn’t hindered that way.

“You have visited
him in Detention,” Tau Srivashti said slowly. “Has he spoken of his sister?”

“No.” Lokri had,
but only after Ivard brought up the subject of her disappearance.

Ivard sensed
intention from Felton, but then the sensation slipped away.

“Well, I guess he
wondered why she hadn’t ever come to see her,” he heard himself say. The
blueness spouted from his unconscious like myriad fountains coalescing at their
peak into a shape fraught with danger.

“She has
disappeared,” said Tau Srivashti, “and I am concerned for her safety. Anything
you remember could be helpful, and possibly save her life.”

A drug! Ivard
sensed the minutely articulated tingle of a foreign molecule pervading his body
from his alveoli.

“I, um, don’t, um,
remember m-much,” Ivard stammered, trying to dive down to where he could grasp
the molecule’s shape. The Kelly Archon was there, burned spice and velvet
enwrapping his mind and guiding him.

“Too much,” Tau
Srivashti said to the mute presence behind Ivard, “and all we get is incoherence.
Where is the point in that?”

Safe inside the
citadel of his mind, Ivard knew his guess for truth. The Archon thought him
stupid. And he was safer that way.

Ivard let his head
droop and his mouth open, then abandoned his outer body so he could plunged
inward, toward the feral glitter. He wrenched at it. The blueness stayed him,
caressing the bumpy, involuted surface of the molecule. He felt the shape in a
dizzying complex of sensations, matched it with a catalyst drawn from the
chemical furnace of his liver, and watched as the glitters began to shatter,
faster and faster.

Ivard’s head
cleared. “I’m real tired,” he said very slowly, careful to match his earlier
tone. “I’ve been pulling long shifts at the menagerie.”

Srivashti leaned
forward to peer into his face. “Perhaps you are hungry. You will think better
if you eat something.”

“I’m sorry,” said
Ivard, tasting a spurt of fear. He wouldn’t eat anything in this place for the
Emerald Throne itself. “My gut’s gonna . . . I don’t feel so good.”

The Archon
dismissed his protest with a faint, impatient gesture, then paused as Ivard
went on even slower.

“One of the lumbae
is sick. I was helping with it. It has cinnelli, and one of the keepers told me
it sometimes vectors through humans.”

Tau Srivashti drew
back, his nose wrinkling with disgust. “Tell me about Jesimar. Lokri, as you
call him. Did he talk about his family?”

Ivard blurred his
words. “No . . . Rifters never talk about where they came from . . . We didn’t
even know which planet he came from until the nicks nabbed us.”

Srivashti stood up.
“Give him something for his time, Felton.”

He walked out. But
Ivard didn’t relax until the bodyguard released him into a transtube terminal
and the pod had pulled away. More than ever, he needed to talk to Tate Kaga.

Lochiel followed
her cousin Cameron warily to Admiral Nyberg’s office. The last of their
debriefings had been over a week ago, leaving her crew free to enjoy what
R&R they could while being confined to the
Shiavona
. To help ease the situation, the nicks had shipped over an
astonishing array of supplies, vids, chips, simgames, and even sextech, but the
ship was getting a little close.

Unsettled by
Cameron’s unwonted silence as they entered flag country, she mentioned this to
Cameron, and his grim expression turned, if possible, even grimmer. “You should
see Ares,” was all he said.

Alarm flared
through Lochiel. “Camzie?” Out came the old childhood nickname—the one he’d
forbidden her ever to use again when he went off to the Academy as a cadet.

Cameron paused in
the quiet hall outside the Admiral’s office. His lips pressed into a line as he
gazed sightlessly through one of the archways. Lochiel turned her head, but all
she saw was an office with a bank of consoles, dark for this deck’s Z-watch.

“Nothing,” he said
at last. “To do with you. But this interview? I think it’s important.”

He turned away
before Lochiel could respond, and walked through the last archway, into a large
office.

In the foreground
plain but comfortable furniture sat in a circle. Cameron took three steps in
and saluted Nyberg, Rear Admiral Damana Willsones, a sprightly old woman, and
Rear Admiral Faseult, the tall, exceedingly handsome head of Security. Across
the room, Shtoink-Nyuk2-Wu4 stood unusually still, only threir head-stalks
moving. The Intermittor inspected the picture of Brandon hai-Arkad on the wall,
another bent all three eyes on Admiral Nyberg, and the last considered the view
through the huge Port in one bulkhead that overlooked the ship bays in the Cap.
Beyond, actinic points of light winked, thickly clustered on the ships
undergoing repairs.

“Sirs,” Cameron
said. “Captain MacKenzie of the
Shiavona
,
as requested.” This formal Cameron was scarcely recognizable.

Something was wrong.
Alarm tightened Lochiel’s insides, and she wished she had Messina and Bayrut
with her for whatever was about to fall on her head.

But Admiral Nyberg
stood up and bowed gracefully, and even though she had long since left the
Douloi world behind, she recognized gratitude in the deference, the bow for a
civilian of social importance at a gathering. It didn’t relax her, and her
sense of dissonance increased. All these heavyweights, and they were treating
her like . . . she didn’t know what.

“Captain MacKenzie,
I regret your sequestration on your ship, especially in light of the service
you have rendered His Majesty’s Navy and government.” He held up a small chip.
“This is the last external copy on Ares of the bonus chip on the
Shiavona
and its crew. A phage has
already been tailored and released into the DataNet to eliminate your records.”
He dropped the chip into the disposal slot in a bureau against the wall. There
was a brief flash.

“Welcome to the
Panarchy,” said the admiral.

Lochiel shook her
head. “Thank you, but we’re not giving up the Riftskip.”

Nyberg gestured.
“So we understand. It’s your choice. You’ve a clean record.” He motioned,
inviting Lochiel to take a seat around the table as a steward brought food and
drink. Lochiel sneaked a look at her cousin; he sat bolt upright, his profile
wooden. This was getting too weird.

As they loaded food
onto their plates, Nyberg spoke to Cameron. “Captain, you are an unknown
quantity on Ares.” The harsh lines in his face deepened in a wintry smile. “But
you have somehow managed to become quite popular.”

Which meant he,
too, knew how Cameron had killed Neyvla-khan—but without the log, maybe he wouldn’t
have to take official notice? Surprising how fast that news spread—faster even
than gossip on Rifthaven.

Lochiel took in her
cousin’s tension, and reflected that maybe it wouldn’t be so easy after all.

Nyberg indicated
them both with a courteous gesture. “Captain MacKenzie, it is likely that many
of our number might consider you an ally and express their intentions.” And, to
Lochiel, “Captain, you are here because the Elder agrees with our sense that
you could be of great help here on Ares among the Polloi elements.”

Lochiel shifted
uncomfortably. “You mean you want me to nark for you. I told you that I wasn’t
giving up the Riftskip.”

The tall, dark
security chief set aside his plate and tabbed the little console next to him.
She heard her own voice.

“. . . we
played fair, and you left room for us. Dol’jhar doesn’t and won’t. If the Lord
of Vengeance wins, there will be no Rift Sodality, for he recognizes no limits
on his power.”

Faseult silenced
the recording with a decisive movement. “Ares is the only remaining center of
resistance to the Lord of Vengeance, and we are losing control.” His deep voice
was resonant with conviction.

Lochiel clenched
her jaw. She saw Cameron stir; he had warned her that they would record the
meeting. The nicks recorded everything.

She had the sense
of standing on a dangerous slope, poised to plummet into a chaos of competing
loyalties. “Why not just proclaim martial law? Use your power?”

“The first act of
the Panarch when he returned was to revoke martial law. To reimpose it would be
an admission of failure, and trigger even greater unrest,” said Willsones.

“But there are
those in the Navy who, we fear, intend just that.” Faseult leaned forward.
“Some of the unrest correlates loosely with the arrival of certain ships.”

Koestler, she
thought, and set aside her own plate. The little pastries and the pickled
vegetables were delicious, but her appetite had shut down. No one else was
eating, either; she suppressed a shiver at the name of Koestler, who long had
been a symbol of mercilessness toward Rifters. The nicks must be really
desperate to bring in a Rifter to help deal with
that
particular Navy captain.

“And as you saw at
the Reef, the number of refugee ships arriving has grown beyond our capacity to
cope.”

Lochiel grimaced,
remembering the transmissions from inside the huge congeries of ships when the
Marines from Cameron’s squadron had stormed on board at the Panarch’s orders.
It made the worst parts of Rifthaven look like a Douloi drawing room by
comparison.

“The coordinates
for Ares were bound to become known eventually,” Willsones said grimly, “but we
suspect Dol’jhar accelerated the propagation of this information through the
DataNet just to overload us, since they can’t reach us any other way. Yet.”

Horrific rumors
about the Suneater floated through Lochiel’s mind. To dispel them, she asked,
“What happened to Commander Licrosse?” The last she’d see of the officer in
charge of the Reef was an image of his arrest by Meliarch ZiTuto.

“He shot himself,”
said Nyberg with satisfaction. “The only decent thing he’d done for the Navy in
the past ten years, it turns out.” He pursed his lips, head tilted. “I would
have ordered it anyway, had he not; watching the clean-up after
Claidheamh Mor
’
s
Marines secured the Reef is the first time I have seen His
Majesty express anger, and it will be well if it is the last. I think a little
of his grandfather’s severity came down to him.”

“The Marines will
do what they can to deal with the vermin, petty jackers, and the like,” Faseult
said, his face marked with fatigue. “Which won’t be enough. We can’t let them
all in. Ares has just about reached capacity. On the other hand, everyone with
any influence is using it to bring their dependents and clients on board.”

“Some out of
obligation, I hope,” Wilsonnes commented. “But most, I expect, out of
calculation.”

“Precisely.”
Faseult drank his coffee, then blinked. “We can and are deporting troublemakers
back to the Reef. But that’s a course fraught with danger. Eventually an
ochlophore will exploit the resentment that causes—along with the usual
orthogonal tensions across the Douloi/Polloi and Highdweller/Downsider axes—to
create a major incident.”

Lochiel shivered.
She hated crowds; hated even more those people with the mysterious ability to
ignite their collective passions into action.

“Humans rightly
fear their transformation into what they oppose,” Shtoink said, her tone low
and mellifluous. The Intermittor bent her head-stalk into a position denoting
humor. “It is a disadvantage of your bilateral nature, wethree fear.”

Nyberg gestured
toward the station. “His Majesty has straitly limited our ability to deport
people back to the Reef, and the degrees of force we are permitted to apply,
for precisely that reason. He will not use the Dol’jharians’ methods to oppose
them.” He glanced at the Kelly. “And youthree, Elder. Will you grant our
request, for the dispersal of your people as needed throughout Ares, to calm
nascent crowd nuclei?”

Lochiel grimaced
inwardly. She’d always thought the smooth running of the
Shiavona
—until the Dol’jharian attack upset everything—had been a
tribute to her skill and that of her lifemates. Now she knew that part of it,
perhaps a large part, had been due to the deliberate pheromonal influence of
Shtoink-Nyuk2-Wu4, who had chosen her ship as threir refuge: part of the Kelly
strategy to safeguard the genome of the Eldest.

She felt the grave
regard of the trinity bent on her. “Wethree have not apologized to you,
Lochiel,” the Intermittor said. So they were muscle-reading her. “We can only
plead that the
Shiavona
was our nest.
Your name is already inscribed in the fane of the Blessed Three as a righteous
human and protector of the Race.”