Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (7 page)

“Nivy doesn’t speak,” he explained.

Abigail looked as if she’d been slapped. “She’s a mute?”

“She doesn’t speak,” he repeated, voice tighter than before.

And then Abigail’s dam broke. In a huff, she threw down her fan, actually showing teeth as she growled, “How
dare
you, Liem Cage Sheppard! How dare you bring this upon your father and me! I would never have expected this of you! Marching her in here in those rags, presuming to call her your fiancé, just moments after I’ve arrived! When I speak with Thaddy—”

It was enough to make anyone want to plug their ears with local vibration dampeners. Reece glanced over his shoulder at Gideon and Hayden and nodded for them to follow him out of the parlor, carefully creeping around the wailing Abigail, whose tantrum had evolved to include foot-stomping.

Just before he passed from the parlor into the dining hall, Reece looked back. Nivy’s blue eyes, calm and steady, were on him.

V
I

Do You Prefer Water, or Engine Grease?

Reece tilted his head and let the sunlight soak through the backs of his eyelids, washing out the black. He tried to make sense of a number of things and wished not for the first time he had Hayden’s mind. Hayden could compartmentalize, put order to his thoughts and connect the lines between them. Reece felt like his thoughts were a bunch of blocks, rattling around untethered in his cargo
bay of a skull.

The crash of the capsule, the theft of its cargo, Eldritch’s murder of his workers, and now Liem and Nivy.

The hovering dock under Reece’s legs shuddered as Gideon thundered down its length, tucked in his feet, and leaped into Emathia’s pond. Hayden made a tsking sound and used his sleeve to wipe droplets from the screens of his journal. Gid was the only one who cared to swim this late into the solar cycle. In fact, Hayden couldn’t swim at all.

“But the thing of it is,” Hayden continued, “if that capsule
was
from Honora, why wasn’t its cargo just sent by ship?”

Reece thought for a moment, dangling his legs over the edge of the dock. “I don’t know. Maybe whoever sent it didn’t have one.” Reaching out, he grabbed the dock’s vertical adjustment crank and tweaked it a few degrees till his feet brushed the startlingly cold water.

Gideon stroked over to them and wildly shook out his black hair, spraying Hayden’s journal all over again. “Mighta done it so the cargo would fly under the radar.” When his friends stared at him blankly, he hoisted himself onto the dock, dripping wet and shirtless. “Capsules are too small to be picked up by any’a that fancy equipment at the AC. If they ain’t carryin’ weapons or magnetizers or any foreign bells and whistles, they glide right over sensors. Chances are, those ginghoos in your flight tower really did think it was just another meteorite.”

“But Eldritch definitely knew differently. He must’ve had the judges fail me to distract me from looking into the readings I picked up on my console.”  The blocks were settling into place one at a time. “Only I did it anyways.”

“Hold on!” Hayden exclaimed, glaring up into the sunlight and at Gideon. “How do you know…wait, on second thought, don’t tell me. Then I won’t be guilty by association when you and Mordecai get found with a load of—of smuggled tobacco, for example.”

Gideon grinned, did an about face, and dove off the dock again with a boisterous whoop.

Reece was still stuck on the fact that Eldritch had known all along. Known, and failed the Palatine Second to cover up his own lousy tracks. That cargo must be bleeding valuable. Had he been expecting it? Was that the whole reason he had come to Reece’s test, to watch for it from the flight tower? Maybe—

“Son of a toffer!” Reece shouted. “Hayden!”

Jumping, Hayden stared aghast at Reece. “Good gracious, what?”

“I just remembered…
Liem
was in the flight tower with Eldritch!”

Hayden continued to stare. “You don’t think he knows something?”

“He might.” Troubled, Reece shook his head. He’d never really liked Liem, but he hated to think of him knotted up in this tangled conspiracy. “He always was the celebrity pupil. Followed Eldritch around like a lost puppy at The Owl, remember? The capsule, the cargo…even my dropped gun…he could know about all of it.”

“That’s…you don’t know that.”

“That’s why I said he
could
. But I bet he does. It would explain why he was so jumpy to see me.”

“There’s no proof, Reece.” Hayden folded his legs beneath him and pressed his face into his hands, like he did when he was tired. “No factual evidence.”

Reece looked at his wet rag of a friend. “Why are you defending him? He doesn’t exactly delight in your existence.”

“Because you can’t blame someone for something out of mere gut instinct…it isn’t right. Besides, you’re naturally inclined to blame things on Liem. You always have been.”

“True, but that’s only because he’s such a sisquick.”

“Reece?” a voice crackled over the interestate com speaker built into one of the four posts of the hovering dock. A small red button lit up beside it with a bleep.

Liem.

Hayden scrambled to hold Reece back, but Reece dodged him easily, punching the red button beside the speaker hard enough to hurt his knuckles.

“Fancy that! We were just talking about you, Liem, and Eldritch, too.”

The speaker was silent for a moment, and then Liem’s voice came again, a little edgier, “Can we meet? In private?”

Reece gave Hayden an “I told you so” look. As he reached to push the button again and tell Liem to go lie down on an airstrip, Hayden caught his wrist and held it at bay.

“Reece. Meet with him, but please don’t bully him. A whole ship of people are dead. You might be able to find out why. Remember that.”

Dropping his arm, Reece blew out a hard breath and closed his eyes. The blocks were tumbling in his head; he needed order, focus. A captain picked the farthest point on the horizon and watched it as he steered the ship. To see everything, rather than just the stars underfoot.

He pushed the button. “Meet me in the west library tower.”

“You’ll come alone?”

“I’ll leave my Pan behind, if that’s what you mean.”

The round library tower was narrow, lined with books accessible only by the vertical translocator running up and down its middle. Liem was waiting on the translocator platform with his dinner jacket folded over his elbow. He frowned impatiently as Reece took his time joining him on the platform and closing the gold carriage door behind him. At the push of a bright blue button on the panel inside the door, the translocator started grinding its way upward, hissing and occasionally spitting steam. Reece had always loved the tower. It was as close to the sky he could get without being in a ship.

“I never liked the tower,” Liem said, hanging his jacket over the carriage rail. “I never came here.”

Reece stared at the books sliding by just inches beyond the edges of the platform. “Why?”

Gesturing idly, Liem said, “They’re all fiction.”

It was time to gamble. “No. Why did Eldritch fail me?”

Liem’s eyes searched Reece’s face, and Reece noticed again how dark they were, almost black. “Eldritch didn’t fail you. The judges failed you because of your lack of professionalism in dealing with the meteorite and the failure of your Nyad’s systems.”

“Right. The meteorite. You really think that’s what it was?”

“What else would it be?”

“You were in the flight tower, you tell me.” After a pause, Reece ventured, only half-joking, “An alien escape pod?”

Liem’s eyes shot open wide, then narrowed dangerously. “Don’t say things like that.”

“We’re in a bleeding tower! Who’s going to hear?” Leaning his back against the carriage railing, Reece looped his arms over his chest. This must be really good. Liem was acting as skittish as Uncle Uriah on a bad day. “Liem…you know it’s not a meteorite, don’t you? Oh, quit acting like a ninny, no one’s listening.”

“You never can be too careful,” Liem whispered hoarsely as he thoughtlessly plucked at the silver cufflinks on his folded jacket.

The translocator shuddered to a stop at the top of the tower, where one solitary window looked out over the grounds. There was the pond, a wide grey rug on a floor of green, and there were Gideon and Hayden, two miniscule dots standing on its dock. The domed ceiling of the tower was painted with a depiction of the Streams that roped around the planet Honora and her neighbors, here portrayed as glittery oil slicks in space.

Liem slid a finger under his collar and pulled it away from his neck as it expanded with the deep breath he pulled in. It must have calmed him to some degree, because he was composed enough to sound almost like his usual uppity self again when he said, “What makes you think it isn’t a meteorite?”

“Are you kidding me? You—”

“Humor me.” Liem tugged again at the cufflinks. “What makes you think that?”

After giving it a moment’s thought, Reece hesitantly explained. He couldn’t say why—this was Liem, after all. Maybe his want for answers was making him reckless. A captain couldn’t be reckless, not when he had a crew to watch out for.

“You should have left it alone,” Liem said, dabbing his face, which Reece suddenly noticed was as white as a sheet, with a handkerchief. “Eldritch could expel you for a whole number of things, now.”

“He could, but he won’t. Because then he’d have to explain why, and that would direct everyone’s attention back to the crash site.”

“Eldritch doesn’t have to explain anything to anybody. Even Father.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a very powerful man, that’s all.”

“He still answers to Parliament.”

Liem’s pause was deliberate, left open long enough for Reece to know that when he said, “Of course”, he didn’t really mean it.

“The capsule was the strangest part,” Reece said, almost as an afterthought. He watched Liem closely. “It had Aurelia’s crest on it, and it looked like it could have been one of hers. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

Liem frowningly rubbed his chin, immersed in thought.

Reece pried a little more. “I’ve never seen the like before.”

“I have.”

“You have? Where?”

“It’s…not important.”

“Dirt yes it’s important!” Sometimes, it took Gideon-speak to get a point across. Reece slapped his hands together, fist into palm. “Eldritch had a whole crew of men killed to cover up his tracks. He used my failure to distract everyone from the meteorite’s crash. He needs to be bagged! If you have some kind of evidence—”

“I don’t have any evidence,” Liem hastened to say, holding up his hands, which Reece noticed were trembling. Liem noticed too. He lowered them again with a scowl. “I’m strictly uninvolved in this. You shouldn’t have told me anything at all.”

“Why for the love of engine trappings did you even want to meet with me? All you’ve done is give me more holes to fill in.” Pausing, Reece studied his brother, sighed, and shook his head. “I’m going to fill them in, Liem. I just hope for your sake that when I do, you’ve picked the right side. Because I won’t withhold any evidence. Even if it implicates you.”

Liem set his jaw stubbornly. “This is just like you—setting up some idiotic plan to make you the hero and me the villain. It’s not going to change how they see you, you know! Mother and Father will never forget that you chose your second-rate Westerner friends over the future they built for you!”

Reece stepped forward to let brown eyes sear into brown eyes. To Liem’s credit, he didn’t flinch, just stuck his nose up higher in the air. As if putting it up there would keep Reece from knocking it into his skull.

“You have no idea what you’re up against.”

“Then give me an idea,” Reece said through his teeth.

“I have nothing more to say on the matter. Other than that I have laid the groundwork for you. Just look closely at what I’ve said. It’s there.” Reece made an unimpressed face, and Liem added with a disdainful sniff, “You want to know what I asked you to meet me for? Alright. I need a favor.”

Reece blinked and in his surprise, accidentally let his anger go. Liem didn’t need favors, and he would certainly never ask Reece for one if he did. Not on a normal day, anyways.

“It must be a real heliocraft of a favor. You did, after all, just call my friends
second-rate
.”

“I wouldn’t apologize if it wasn’t. So…I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” His look added, “Even if it’s true.”

“Right. So what’s the favor?”

Reclining against the railing, Liem closed his eyes in thought. “As you might guess, I know things, Reece. Things I’m not at liberty to discuss—so don’t bother asking.” Reece shut his mouth with a click. “For the last eight years, I’ve conducted research on a matter of explicit importance to the Honoran people…and, in short, turned out more than I perhaps should have. When I’m found out, you’ll very likely never see me again. I suppose that might make you happy. I know I’ve never particularly enjoyed your company. Surely you feel the same about me.” Reece didn’t need to say yes aloud. “I need you to promise me you’ll take care of Nivy.”