Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance (24 page)

“Do you truly understand how bad it
will become if you do not do this? You have been running for over a
year, barely one step ahead, pursued by the weakest resources I
could muster. But you will force me to unleash everything in my
control and pursue you to the ends of known space and beyond, if
necessary.”

“Glave above!” Lilly whispered.

Kare shook his head slowly,
regretfully. “It cannot be allowed to live, Katie. I will go
through you, I will squash you flat if I must, in order to find it
and kill it.”

Catherine drew in a shaky breath. “Do
your worst, Kare.” She slapped the disconnect and the display
fragmented and dissolved.

“Everyone stop shouting for a moment!”
Catherine screamed.

The room fell silent. Lilly, Brant and
Bedivere all looked at her.

“This argument is going nowhere,”
Catherine said. “You’re scared. I understand that. But Brant, think
logically about this. Even if you leave the ship now, if we were to
drop you and Lilly on Barros and jump out of the system as fast as
possible, it won’t protect you.”

“You’ll be hunted just the same,”
Bedivere added softly.

Brant gripped his hands together
tightly. “I didn’t sign on for this.”

“You knew who I was when you hired on,”
Catherine reminded him. “You knew I was wanted by the Federation
and the College and even the Staffers. You knew that. Nothing has
changed.”

Brant pointed at Bedivere, his hand
shaking. “Everything has changed! They don’t want you anymore. They
want
him
. They will kill all of us just to get to him.”

Bedivere nodded. “You’re right,” he
said softly. “But do you think leaving the ship and hiding out on a
ball somewhere is going to change that? The Federation and Kare
Sarkisian don’t just want to kill me. They will want to wipe out
any trace that I ever existed. That includes everyone who knows
about me.”

Lilly gripped Brant’s knee, her fingers
digging in. “That’s not fair,” she said. “They don’t even know
Bedivere.”

Catherine gave Brant a small, sour
smile. “Does this overwhelming force the Federation is massing
remind you of anything?”

He looked at her sharply. “What?”

“Your Enforcers do pretty much the same
thing, don’t they?” Bedivere asked. “Mow down opposition with sheer
numbers and power, sterilize the area and move on?”

Brant subsided, his whole body sinking
back into the chair. He gripped Lilly’s hand. “You’re right,” he
said, his voice trembling. “This is exactly the same. They’re doing
everything I objected to about the enforcement squads.”

“And we will probably have to face
them, too,” Catherine said.

Brant sighed.

Lilly lifted her chin. “Bedivere saved
my life. I have to try and save his. I just don’t know how.”

“Neither do I,” Catherine told. “Not
yet, anyway.” She stood up. “Chocolate is definitely in order.”

Bedivere parked the ship in ultra-high
orbit around Barros, which put them just outside the sentry
envelope, but required constant readjustments to restore the
position.

“We won’t go unnoticed for long, but
we’ll have a few uninterrupted hours to figure things out,” he
explained as they settled around the table in the common room to
eat and talk.

The meal had been eaten in absorbed
silence, until Brant blew out his breath. “The more I think about
it, the angrier I get. They didn’t even stop to confirm their
information. They’re just going to come after us with all guns
blazing and I still don’t understand why. AIs need to be harnessed
so they don’t reach sentience…this has been a basic tenant of
modern life for millennia. No one wants another Birgir Stoyan to
happen and have a fear-crazed computer kill every human under its
control. I even understand why the thought gives people nightmares.
We depend upon computers so much that we’re basically at their
mercy. While we’ve got them chained and controlled, that’s just
fine. But a sentient computer is different. That’s a computer who
thinks for himself, who can make independent decisions and act upon
them. But Bedivere isn’t fear-crazed—”

“Oh, I’m afraid,” Bedivere said. “I’m
just hiding it so Cat thinks I’m wonderful.”

“—but he might just be flat-out crazy,”
Brant added smoothly. “He hasn’t killed us. He’s done more to save
my ass than any human I know, present company excluded. But they
don’t care about that, do they? They’re just going to kill him
anyway.”

“That’s right,” Catherine
confirmed.

Brant stared down at his empty plate,
troubled. “There’s no appealing to them,” he said. “There’s no
court that will hear us out. They will kill Bedivere. Then they’ll
kill the rest of us just to cover it up.”

“Bedivere?” Lilly asked, sounding
concerned. “Look at him,” she said softly.

He was sitting motionless in his chair,
his gaze on the table before him. He wasn’t blinking.

Brant rubbed his mouth. “What’s wrong
with him?”

“Nothing,” Catherine said. “I’ve seen
this before. Something we said triggered him into a train of
thought. Well, it’s not even thought. It’s a logic sequence. He’s
examining every possibility and outcome, every variation and
alternative.”

“Examining?” Lilly whispered.

“Mathematically,” Catherine said.
“Algorithms and patterns. He’ll rouse in a minute or so and tell us
something he’s worked out that we would never have thought of
ourselves.”

Brant blew out a breath. “And what if
he is triggered by an idea while he’s piloting a jump or something
critical like that?”

Catherine shook her head. “He wouldn’t
pursue the thought. He would put it aside for later, because it is
the less important element at that moment. Bedivere knows his
priorities.”

“I’ve seen people do this at the
College,” Lilly said. “The thinkers, the ones involved in pure
research. They’d sink down into their thoughts and be lost,
sometimes for a day or more, chasing after some obscure idea and
analyzing it.”

“It’s almost the same thing,” Catherine
said. “Except to draw a human out of that deep thought, you just
have to wave your hand in front of their eyes. I could pull him out
by speaking his name very loudly, but I won’t. He’s figuring
something out.” She leaned over his chair. “But I’ll claim his
chocolate.”

Bedivere drew in a breath, stirred and
looked around. He blinked. “The college.”

“What about it?” Catherine asked.

He looked down at the table. “Who stole
my chocolate?”

“The college,” she coaxed him.

He nodded. “Every time we jump
somewhere, the Federation turn up…or they did until Lilly found the
locator. But we’ve assumed that the locator was implanted by the
College, before Lilly was sent to infiltrate the ship. But if the
data the locator is sending is going to the College, how does the
Federation know where we are?”

Lilly pressed her hand against her
belly. Brant pried it away, picked it up and held it.

“There’s two ways that could happen,”
Bedivere said. “The first is that the data isn’t going to the
College at all. It’s going straight to the Federation.”

“But that’s not possible,” Lilly said.
“I didn’t leave Van Andel until I was shipped to Darwin terminal to
apply for the job. There wasn’t any way the Federation could get to
me to…to implant it.”

“There’s several ways it might have
happened,” Catherine said gently.

“You traveled to Darwin on a Federation
ship?” Brant asked.

Lilly swallowed and nodded.

“Sleepy gas at night when you were
sleeping. Accelerated healing of the incision. You would have gone
to bed and woken up the next morning and been none the wiser,”
Catherine said.

“The other possibility is that the
College planted the locator, then reaped the data and passed it on
to the Federation,” Bedivere said.

Lilly shook her head. “No, that’s even
more outrageous than the Federation doing this to me. That means
the College and the Federation are working together and that’s…it’s
just ridiculous.”

“Except Sarkisian said ‘Is he really
what they tell me he is?’”

“He was talking about his people!”

“He also said ‘I didn’t believe them. I
didn’t want to believe them.’.” Bedivere gave Lilly a sympathetic
smile. “If it was his own staff he was talking about, he would have
reamed
them
out, instead of hopping on to a secure channel
to play let’s remember with Catherine. But if it was the College
that had told him, then what he said and what he did makes sense.
They’re working together, Lilly.”

Lilly’s face was pale. “But
why?
”

Bedivere shook his head. “I don’t
know.”

“Whatever it is, there’ll be money at
the bottom of it,” Catherine said softly. “The Federation is a
for-profit entity.”

“But the College
isn’t
,” Lilly
said.

“No one has ever been able to establish
where they get all their funds from,” Bedivere said. “Public
records show
some
of the money they would need to operate,
but it’s possible the Federation has been funding them, maybe for a
long time. If you’re controlling the lifeblood of an organization,
you’re controlling the organization.” He gave a small shrug.

Lilly’s face was bewildered. “They’ve
been lying. To everyone.”

“And we still don’t know why,” Brant
said.

“As the College has been controlling
the Ammonites for as long as they’ve existed, neither of you has a
home to run to,” Bedivere said.

Brant scowled. “That’s not where home
is, anymore,” he said shortly and his hand tightened around
Lilly’s.

Catherine knew then that Brant had
decided to stay.

Lilly sat forward, sudden excitement
making her face light up. “Tell the universe,” she said.

“Lilly?” Brant said, sounding puzzled
and concerned.

She gripped his hand even harder. “Of
course
,” she breathed. She laughed and looked at Catherine.
“You’ve spent your whole long life sneaking around, trying to hide
who you are because it causes riots and worse. You’ve both been
hiding the truth about Bedivere for a hundred years—”

“Ninety-nine,” Bedivere said
flatly.

“Because one year is going to make you
that much less of a liar,” Brant replied.

Lilly waved them away. “We don’t know
why the College and the Federation are working together. Because
they’re hiding it. Everything that is coming at us is because
people are hiding the truth and wiping out anything that might
uncover it. So let’s uncover it.”

Catherine shook her head. “I still
don’t know what you mean.”

“She means,” Bedivere said calmly,
“that we should tell the universe about me.”

Horror spilled through her. “You’re
joking,” Catherine breathed.

Lilly shook her head. “No. I’m
absolutely not joking. We sat here and said it ourselves. Brant did
and I agree with him. If everyone could see that Bedivere isn’t the
monster the Federation will tell them he is, if they could hear his
story, then they might not sit still for the Federation just
blowing him out of the sky without a fair hearing.”

“The court of public opinion,” Bedivere
said. “Probably the one place where I
could
speak and be
heard.”

Brant pulled a terminal over in front
of him and punched up data. “There’s three media satellites around
Barros.”

“
I
could have told you that,”
Bedivere said, sounding amused.

“Very well, then, my walking
datacore…where is the biggest concentration of media outlets in the
Federation?”

Bedivere shrugged. “Cathain.”

“
Cathain
?” The name exploded
from Catherine as her horror swirled higher. “The seat of the
Federation Board, the very center of the Federation? Do you know
how secure that place is?”

“That’s where all the media are,” Lilly
said. “There’s satellites and feeds and culling services.”

“Six Board reporting feeds,” Bedivere
said flatly in the tone that told Catherine he was reciting from
pure data. Reading aloud. “Four entertainment channels. Three
hundred and thirty-nine community news centers, all with
independent feeds.”

Brant crossed his arms. “It does make a
crazy kind of sense.”

Bedivere looked at her. “Just like
hiring Brant was insanely brilliant,” he reminded her.

Catherine had to breathe deeply to
disperse the near-panic the idea induced.

“You’re allergic to being in the spot
light,” Bedivere added. “But it won’t be you, this time. It will be
me.”

That calmed her. “Do you mind?” she
asked him.

“Mind?”

“Having the entire galaxy know about
you?”

“If it meant you’d be safe, I’d
audition for a carnival side show,” Bedivere said flatly. This
time, Catherine knew it was the tone he used when he was speaking
raw truth.

“I don’t mind,” he added.

She let out a breath. “Cathain it is,
then.”

Their heartbeats had settled and the
warm quiet in Catherine’s bedroom had wrapped around them, much as
Bedivere’s arms were. He pressed his lips against her cheek.

“You were lying, earlier,” Catherine
said softly.

His lips paused. “When?”

“The connection between the College and
the Federation…that wasn’t obscure enough for you to fall into your
trance over it. I could have worked it out myself. I was almost
there, already. You thought of something, then you lied to cover it
up because you didn’t want to speak of it in front of Lilly and
Brant. What was it?”

Bedivere sighed and rolled onto his
back, his arm loosening from around her waist. “Could we talk about
this later?”

Catherine propped herself up on one
elbow to look at him. “Putting it off until later won’t make it any
easier to speak about. Trust me, I know.”