The Rifter's Covenant (45 page)

“Manderian?” Her
voice sounded hoarse.

Had that poke been
a psi contact? She was too tired to be angry.

“I came,” he said,
“at Eloatri’s request, to check on your well-being and to ask if there is
anything we can do for you or the Eya’a.”

“I am fine,” she
said. “For the Eya’a there is nothing. Short of sending them off to the
Suneater. I’d suggest ridding it of Eusabian first, however.”

Manderian smiled.
“We will leave that in the Navy’s capable hands.”

She found she could
not stand any longer and dropped abruptly into a chair. Perforce she had to
invite the man to sit.

“Several days ago
Ivard came to see me.” Manderian leaned forward, his black eyes steady. “Have
you also had dreams of Anaris achreash’Eusabian?”

She had expected
anything but that. Too late, she experienced the complication of threat and
interest that the name engendered in her, and saw it impact Manderian.

She would have
hidden it if she could, but that was no longer possible. “I have,” she said. “I
attributed it to my own background and to the emotional residue of our recent
journey to Gehenna.”

He inclined his
head, almost a bow. “I am less interested in the dreams’ possible meaning,” he
said calmly, “than in the function of dreams in telepathy. Have the Eya’a
reported to you a similar pattern, or do they dream?”

“I can’t hear their
thoughts when they hibernate,” she said. “It’s hard enough to bring them out of
it. Images do not come, only words, as they do not know him. They certainly
have not given him a label.”

Manderian accepted
this, then said, “And the Kelly?”

“Ivard ought to
have told you that.”

“Ivard has
difficulty articulating some concepts,” Manderian said. “I thought you might
have an observation to offer.”

“No.”

“Very well,” he
responded. “Thank you. I will leave you to your rest.”

As soon as he was
out the door, she glanced at her chrono again. Between the brain-suck session
and its inevitable results, she had lost the entire day and most of the
evening. Since the day of Ivard’s and her synesthetic experiences she had taken
brain-suck three times. Each session had afforded new data, but the physical
cost was increasingly debilitating.

With heavy tread
she retreated to her room and stood there staring down at her console, trying
to marshal her thoughts. Every nerve and muscle in her body clamored for sleep,
but her mind, still reactive from the experiences triggered by the drug’s
synesthesia, ricocheted from one image to another—echoed by ghost snatches of
music, taste, scent.

Her promise to
Lokri. Her findings in cyberspace. Ivard’s new level of experience and what it
meant. The dreams with Anaris, armed with steel, standing on a battleground
beside a river of blood.

She was too tired
to make sense of any of it, and so she moved toward her bed, relief loosening
her muscles.

It was then that
her boswell tingled in a familiar pattern, and Brandon’s voice said into her
skull:
(Vi’ya? A thousand hours of
clashing wills, and two interminable dinners have left me thirsty for rational
discourse. I found a sim room—would you like to take a walk through the Palace
garden?)

She closed her
eyes, feeling the weight of her own exhaustion, and, stronger, the tide of
time. For two days and nights she had not seen him or heard him, nor had there
been a message.

Soon enough, memory
will be all I have, she thought.

(I will come,)
she said.

o0o

“. . . and
she admitted to similar dreams, but attributed the appearances of Anaris to
their shared heritage, and emotional residue of the Gehenna mission,” Manderian
finished.

The High Phanist
stood at her window, watching the rainstorm over the lake. One hand she held
flat before her, the thumb of the other rubbing absently over the burn scar of
the Digrammiton on her palm.

At length she
dropped her hands and turned to face Manderian. Decision marked the wise,
kindly face. “My path is clear,” she said. “But it will not be easy.”

Anaris walked
carefully down the narrow, tube-like corridor, the unused breather on his belt
bumping against his hip. The thick, warm air smelled acrid, the only sounds were
his own breathing and the muffled thud of his boots on the weird material of
the floor.

His legs ached
slightly from the strain of placing one foot precisely in front of the other;
this far from the permanently occupied area the floor had relaxed into its
normal curve. Even with the cims the latest ship had brought running full-time,
there weren’t enough stasis clamps to control as many corridors as Lysanter
wanted. Not and supply all the computer arrays he wanted, too.

Morrighon, at
Anaris’s instructions, was doing all he could to encourage the Urian
specialist’s appetite for expansion and data. Barrodagh still couldn’t get
enough clamps for his quarters. Anaris grinned to himself, then mentally dismissed
Barrodagh. He was here for a purpose, alone for good reason. Only Morrighon
knew of his tests.

Anaris halted and
pulled a handful of shredded packing foam out of a pocket. He threw it into the
air, and summoned his will. A ripple ran through the white drift slowly falling
to the floor, but that was all. His temples throbbed sharply, then subsided.

His nerves
prickling with unease, he remembered the sudden, shocking expulsion of the
guard from the tunnel in the Chamber of Kronos. It was true, then. The strength
of his t’kinetic ability varied inversely with distance from the center of the
Suneater. And Lysanter had found that the dreams of the inhabitants did, too. A
pulse of regret that Lysanter could not know about this latest revelation; it
would mean instant death the moment the Avatar found out.

He started back,
but at the juncture of three corridors he hesitated. The leftmost one would
take him back to his quarters most directly, but passing near the Chamber, the
middle one by a more roundabout way. The rightmost was uncharted and no one
knew where it went.

Anaris forced his
steps to the left. He would not let his discomfort rule him.

He was five
junctions from the Chamber when the station rumbled, the sound a low groan.
Meshes of light flickered through the walls; the lamps the techs had rigged at
intervals flickered. A wave of sensory distortion lobbed him toward the floor
in what felt like in low gee. An intense pressure scrambled sight, sound,
smell, all his senses, even internal ones like proprioception, into a
malevolent, hallucinatory pudding.

Then it stopped,
and the screaming started.

At first he did not
recognize the distant sound. Singing? A siren? But then his mind resolved it: a
man in extremis. The flesh over Anaris’s back crawled as he got to his feet. He
had never heard a human being make a sound like that. Not even his sister,
after her will broke under the flaying knives of Evodh, had shrieked like that.
The victim, whoever he was, continued to scream while inhaling, producing a
throat-tearing sound.

Then it ceased. He
waited.

A few minutes later
two gray-clad ordinaries pushed a gurney-float through the junction near where
Anaris stood. Walking alongside it, the Urian specialist Lysanter chorded frantically
on his compad. Anaris stepped out and stopped them. A short distance back,
Barrodagh halted, too, his gaze ferreting back and forth mistrustfully.

Lysanter stumbled
to a stop, looked up with distracted impatience, then his face changed
instantly to seriousness. “It’s Li Pung, lord,” he volunteered. Anaris saw a
slight tightening of Barrodagh’s mouth, but Lysanter didn’t notice. “I think he
was caught in some sort of feedback loop. The cephalic sensors went off scale.”
The scientist’s expression lightened. “But we got a response from the station.
It’s minor, but it appears to be a permanent change. We’re still correlating
the reports from various sections.”

Minor? What would
it be like if a tempath fully succeeded? Anaris was fortunate to have been alone.
He would have to be sure to be locked in his quarters when the next tempath,
due to arrive shortly, made her attempt in the Chamber. Fear clenched his belly.
His Dol’jharian heritage rejected fear, prompting him to seek something to
blame, to kill; his Panarchist upbringing accepted it as an appropriate
hyporational response, a foundation for action.

He looked down at
the tempath, whose body was tightly wrapped in a sheet, only his head free. Li
Pung’s eyes stared upward, distended, his face ridged into a horrible
expression that suggested either extreme fear or insane joy, like a mask for
some ancient ritual. He did not blink when Anaris snapped his fingers in front
of his eyes. The man’s body was still except for the flutter of pulse in his
throat, and his shallow breathing. Anaris sensed a fierce tension.

“He looks like he
is afraid to move,” Anaris said.

Lysanter blinked,
and tapped some more at his pad. “We’ll try some muscle stimulation, lord.
Correlate it with various affects. And when the next tempath arrives, perhaps
she can probe him.”

“Your pardon,
lord,” Barrodagh interposed impatiently. “The Avatar demanded an immediate
report of the results of this first experiment.”

Anaris stared at
him until his gaze dropped, though he knew Barrodagh had nothing to lose from
insolence. He could expect no mercy if Anaris won the succession duel.

Anaris smiled.
“Then you have very little time to prepare your . . . report.” The pause was
fractional, but he knew Barrodagh heard and understood. Equally he knew that
Barrodagh was lying to Eusabian whenever he dared. Which could only help
Anaris. And Barrodagh was too intelligent not to recognize it.

Anaris released
them with a twitch of his hand, and walked away, reflecting that Barrodagh was
resentful as well. The misdirection of giving Morrighon some of his own stasis
clamps had worked very well, unsettling Barrodagh and simultaneously
frightening Morrighon into greater efforts on his behalf, while ensuring that
he was better rested than his Bori opponent.

Anaris laughed,
ignoring the buzzing echo returned by the twisting corridors, and walked on, as
Barrodagh vented his feelings on the hapless technician.

Lysanter could tell
that Barrodagh was annoyed with him for speaking freely to the heir, but what
could he do? One did not deflect the question of a Dol’jharian lord. And
Barrodagh himself had told him that the Avatar had commanded that information
about the station be freely shared with the heir.

As he walked beside
Barrodagh, whose suspicious gaze never seemed to still, he contemplated Anaris
and Eusabian, and how their differences reflected in their Bori secretaries. The
first evidence of those differences had come as a surprise, a message directly
from Anaris commanding him to have stasis clamps transferred from the heir’s
quarters to Morrighon’s. No such command had ever come from Eusabian, nor could
Lysanter imagine it happening.

Even before that, Morrighon
had been easier to deal with, right from the moment of his arrival on the
station. He actually seemed to appreciate to some extent what Lysanter was
doing, rather than dismissing it as beneath his notice as Barrodah did.

Perhaps this would
be a good opportunity to remind Barrodagh—without directly challenging him—that
there was no reason to withhold information from Anaris.

As soon as they reached
Lysanter’s office, the scientist said, “I’m sorry, serach Barrodagh,” not
sounding sorry at all. “The Avatar hasn’t forbidden me to speak to the heir.”

Barrodagh smoothed
his expression as he eyed Lysanter, wondering what had prompted that. “Of course,
Gnostor. But the Avatar expects to be the first one informed of any results.”

“Just so,” Lysanter
replied. He inclined his head slightly. “And I thank you for supporting my
efforts to go more slowly with the next tempath.”

Barrodagh nodded,
remembering Eusabian’s disappointment and impatience at the news the next
tempath would not arrive for six more days. “It does no good to waste them.” And
keeping the next one alive longer would keep the Avatar interested longer
.
But for now, he had to devise some
other methods of keeping his lord from becoming bored.

“What will you do
now?” he continued, stifling a yawn without showing it. He longed for sleep;
his new quarters were still relatively quiescent.

“We are proceeding
with the attempt to use Li Pung for control via patterning and neural
infiltration, bypassing his mind.” Lysanter frowned, shoulders tensing with
discomfort. “I don’t expect much of it. Ah!” He lifted his head, his expression
clearing. “But here is another interesting possibility. You remember the blood
analogue in the ship bay during the Return?”

Barrodagh’s stomach
spasmed. If it hadn’t been for the heir’s inspired improvisation, he didn’t
know what the Avatar might have done. He managed a fractional nod.

“The Ur-fruit
poisonings have all been via toxins that attacked blood cells in one way or
another. I believe that the station is still trying to adapt to us,
experimenting with a new homeostasis, but may have interpreted the blood as a
waste product because of how it was spilled.”

Barrodagh
suppressed his impatience. He could not afford to alienate the man. “So?”

“We have found a
chamber, below the central one, which seems to be a sort of recycling organ.”

“How is that?” Barrodagh
wished Lysanter wouldn’t use biological terms for the station. Suneater
existence here already felt too much living in something’s viscera.

“The air pressure
in it is lower than the surrounding areas, so that there is constant
circulation toward it. And it, eh, how should I express this? It swallows
things.”