Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (11 page)

“Well, perhaps I can mention her name to the Guild Master.”

For a moment there was silence. Then the guard’s uniform
crackled again and again, multiple bows this time. “Thank you, sir. Your
greatness. Your exalted highness.” The words tumbled out over one another. “Thank
you.”

“Yes?” Jaibriol didn’t sound pleasant anymore.

The guard took a breath. “Lord Jaibriol, before we activate
the cyberlock I must oversee the repairs to the security system. That will take
me two hours. At least.” He paused. “Possibly four hours. Will you need me
before then?”

I almost snorted. Although the virus I had unleashed was
effective, I doubted it would take even an hour to clean out the system.

Jaibriol’s voice relaxed. “No, I won’t be needing you. Take
care of the computers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you find the Primary?”

“No, sir. She went into the park and destroyed some trees
and power lines. Then she disappeared.”

“Who is the guard I just saw down in the garden under my balcony?”

“Rak.”

Jaibriol stiffened as if he had been struck. I caught a
vivid image from him of the guard with the providers. Unease stabbed me,
a
fear of Rak that he never really understood
—

Block!
I thought. The fear receded, but the psicon
kept flashing.

“Send Rak to the control center,” Jaibriol said. “I want his
report on the Primary recorded immediately.”

“Yes, sir.” The guard’s uniform crackled again.

After Jaibriol closed the door, he came back over to me. “Sauscony—”

It was unsettling to hear a Highton speak my name with such
longing. “Yes?”

“Stay with me.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

For a moment he stood watching me. Then he touched my cheek.
“Goodbye.”

I swallowed. “Goodbye.”

I went back to the balcony doors and checked outside. Rak
was walking across the lawn below, headed for the house. The gardens were dark;
either my mad virus had overloaded the system or someone had turned off the
power to shut down the wildly sweeping floodlights. I glimpsed two more guards
moving through the trees that bordered another garden. But with the lights out
here in Jaibriol’s bedroom and in the gardens below, both the balcony and the
trellis were dark.

It took me only seconds to slip outside and climb down the
trellis. I crept along the wall of the mansion, hiding in the shadows. When my
way was clear, I ran across the street into the darkened park.

It was after midnight when I got back to the inn. An Allied
police officer was waiting in the lobby by the front desk. As soon as I
entered, she came over and spoke to me.
“Navarhos
Valdoria?”

I looked at her blankly, too tired to struggle with my
translation programs.

After a moment she said,
“Espanol?”

“Un poco,” I said.

“Ist Deutsch besser?”
When I just kept looking at
her, she said, “How about English?”

“Yes,” I said, not because my English was any better than my
Spanish, but because I didn’t want to stand in the lobby all night.

“Are you Primary Valdoria?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m afraid I have to arrest you, ma’am.”

“Can’t.” That wasn’t actually true, though I hoped it would
put her off. She had to know that under Skolian law no Jagernaut could be
arrested; the Allieds had made a huge fuss about it during their treaty
negotiations with us. No
one is above the law.
They liked that phrase.
But it was their phrase, not ours. If a Jagernaut broke Skolian laws, the civil
authorities could do no more than register a complaint with Imperial Space
Command. That didn’t mean we got off; ISC held us to a code of honor meant to
ensure we broke laws only if it was necessary to protect the Imperialate. But
it was a military matter, not one for civilian police.

Of course, that was Skolian law. Right now I was in Allied
territory.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the officer said. “But section 436,
section G, paragraph 16 of Allied-Imperial Treaty MilCap allows for the arrest
and deportation of any Imperial Jagernaut found guilty of violating Allied—”

“All right,” I growled. Then I squinted at her. “You
handlock me?”

“No, I don’t believe that will be necessary.” She read me my
rights; anything I said could and would be used against me and so on. The night
clerk at the front desk watched the whole scene avidly. The story would
probably be all over the city tomorrow. Imperial Primary wrecks Highton’s
mansion. I just hoped they didn’t make one of their confounded amok-Jagernaut
movies out of it.

The police officer took me to the station in her flycar. The
screen that separated the front compartment from the back crackled every now
and then, like an electrical discharge. The exit buttons in the back had been
removed, leaving the inside of the car a smooth spherical cavity with a single
seat where I sat. The officer had strapped a restraining web across my body,
apologizing about “regulations” as she fastened me into its constricting
embrace.

I felt like an idiot. I wondered what she would do if I told
her I was a Rhon heir. It would certainly get me out of this mess. But then I
would have to endure being lambasted by my half brother for using my title to
circumvent an Imperial-Allied treaty.

The police at the station were exceedingly courteous while
they booked me for breaking and entering, assault, damaging property, and
violating a computer. It was weird. True, I was a Primary, but even so I had
just walked all over their laws. Yet they almost seemed to approve of my
actions.

They took holoshots of me, and my fingerprints and retinal
patterns, along with a tissue sample for chromosome analysis. Then they put me
in a room where five other people waited, all women with dark hair who wore
close-fitting leather outfits that resembled my uniform. A policewoman lined us
up facing a glass wall that showed our reflections. When I put my hands in my
pockets and scowled, the other five women in the line copied me. The whole
thing was surreal.

I couldn’t see through the glass, but I was ready to bet
that whoever stood on the other side could see us. I tried to relax and let my mind
probe beyond the wall. I felt several people, but only vaguely; none were
psions.

Then I hit the cavity.

It was Jaibriol’s guard, the one with the providers. The
hole in his mind was less threatening than a true Aristo’s, but he still made
me feel like bugs were crawling on my skin. And he was
angry.

I withdrew like a shyback deer fleeing a hunter. As I ran, I
sent the guard a vivid mental picture of another woman in the line. But I was
pretty sure it was too late, that he had already identified me.

They took me to see the police chief next, a portly man with
close-cropped hair that stuck straight up from his head. It was cut into a flat
plane on the top, making him look like a bristly scrub brush. He spoke to me in
a language I didn’t know. It sounded like the first one used by the police
officer who arrested me. When I shook my head, an officer behind him leaned
down and spoke in a low voice.

The chief nodded. “You speak English?” he asked me.

“Some,” I said.

“How did you know where Lord Kyr was staying?”

Lord Kyr? “The Highton?”

“The man whose house you shot up.”

The spinal node gave me several translations for “shot up,”
including English slang for emptied numerous rounds of ammunition into. The
police chief must have meant what I did to the mansion. “Lord Kyr’s” mansion.
So Jaibriol was traveling under a false name. Well, he would have been crazy to
announce he was the Emperor’s heir.

“Provider me tell where,” I said. “I his mind get.” No, that
sounded awful. My English was even more mangled tonight than usual. I accessed
the translator and repeated what it told me to say. “I got the location from
the mind of his guard’s provider.”

“I see.” That seemed to be the answer the chief expected. Apparently
the Allieds accepted telepathy more than they admitted in public. But why had
he anticipated my answer? He had no way to know the guard had providers unless
the guard told him, and I couldn’t imagine a Trader discussing his servers with
the Allied police.

“What did she say to you?” the chief asked.

“The provider?” I asked.

“Yes.”

She? I checked with the
translator and it verified what I thought:
she
referred to a female. But
the first provider I had reached had been a boy. And I had spoken to neither
him nor the girl. Was the chief asking misleading questions on purpose? Where
did he get his information? The guard had no way to know I contacted his
provider. Even if Jaibriol had spoken with the police himself, which I doubted,
he didn’t know I had been in contact with the providers either. I wasn’t sure
if even the providers knew it.

But I felt no deception from the chief, only that he wanted
to verify facts. So I said, “I never speak to provider. I touch mind of boy.
Girl next.”

He nodded. “That’s what they told us.”

They? He had
spoken
to them? How? “They okay?”

“The girl is better off than the boy,” he said. “She could
leave the hospital now if she wanted. But she doesn’t want to be separated from
her brother.” He paused. “They would like to see you. I think they want to
thank you.”

No wonder the Aristo’s guard had been angry. If his
providers were in a Delos hospital, they were in neutral territory and couldn’t
be forced to return to him. But why did they want to thank me? I hadn’t brought
them to the hospital.

Then I realized that in the chaos I had created at the
mansion—with the guards searching for me and their security systems going
wild—the providers could have escaped.

“Yes,” I said. “I see them.”

The hospital was a ten-minute walk from the station. The nervoplex
streets slumbered now, quiet under our feet, with no hover traffic. Even the
light from the streetlamps was muted. The large moon had passed the high point
of its arc in the sky and was headed down toward the horizon again, its disk
shedding pale orange light over the sleeping city.

As we walked I glanced at the chief. “The providers—they
from Tams?”

“Not originally. Both of their parents were servers brought
to Tams a few years ago as part of an Aristo’s household.”

“So these providers, they are born servers?”

“It’s all they’ve ever known.” The chief grimaced. “Christ,
they can barely talk. Apparently even when they had the chance, they almost
didn’t make a run for it.” He regarded me. “It took a lot of courage for them
to do what they did.”

Translate ‘Make a run for it,’ I thought.

In present context, it means attempt to escape, my spinal
node answered.

No wonder the chief said they had courage. That was an understatement.
To even think of escaping, they had to break years of conditioning. “You help
them?” I asked.

He nodded. “When the boy is released from the hospital, we’ll
send them to Earth. They’ll have a host family there, and counseling to help
them adjust.”

At least some benefit had come out of the mess I had made tonight.
Now the providers had sanctuary, that word the Allieds liked so much. Earth
chose no side in the war between my people and the Traders, granting sanctuary
to anyone who gave cause for needing it. I had always regarded them with
suspicion because of that. Their sanctuary struck me as a convenient means for
Imperial troublemakers to evade the authorities.

Tonight I saw it differently.

The providers were in a private room at the hospital. I recognized
them as soon as the doctors ushered me into the room. They looked like
fraternal twins, both about eighteen years old. The boy lay in the bed and the
girl sat in a chair next to him, showing him a holobook. They jumped as the
door opened, their faces going pale.

I hesitated at the doorway, then walked in. “My greetings.”
I spoke Eubian, the language of the server castes. It was named for Eu’be Qox,
Jaibriol’s great-grandfather and the first Emperor. Eube was also the word the
Traders used for their empire, the Eubian Concord. That name had to be one of
their more specious creations. I doubted any of the planets they conquered felt
much “concord” with their unasked-for masters.

The girl watched me with eyes like pale seashells. Her
brother sat up slowly. He wore pajamas, but I saw the welts on his wrists and
knew there was worse under his clothes. I didn’t want to imagine what his owner
had done to him—and “owner” was the right word despite the Aristos’ attempts to
convince the rest of the universe that their providers were “favored subjects”
rather than slaves.

The youth spoke with diffidence. “Are you the one who came
to the house?”

I nodded. “I’m glad you got out.”

The girl said, “We’re sorry we caused you so much trouble.”

“We really are sorry,” the boy said. “We didn’t mean to be a
problem.”

I couldn’t believe they were apologizing to me. “I’m sorry I
couldn’t have come earlier.” Say eighteen years earlier.

“We won’t cause any more problems,” the girl said.

I swallowed. “You never made any problem.”

The longer I talked with them, the worse I felt. They kept
apologizing. Their minds were open, unprotected; I knew their shame at having
been providers, at having been the cause of so much commotion, at just plain
having been. To say they didn’t like themselves was the understatement of the
century. The marks the guard had left on them went far deeper than welts.

Hadn’t the heartbender I saw ten years ago, after my experience
with Tarque, said something similar to me? I didn’t want to think about that.

After we left the hospital, the police released me. They
could have deported me for breaking their laws, but they showed no inclination
to do it. I had a feeling the one they wanted to deport was the guard who had
pressed the charges.

As I walked back to the inn, I brooded. How was I going to
deal with knowing that the one human alive who could be my Rhon mate
represented everything I most hated? I wondered if Jaibriol’s father saw the
irony of it, that in trying to create the ultimate weapon to destroy my people
he had produced a remarkably decent human being.

Jaibriol’s life, once he openly assumed his position as the
Emperor’s heir, would be hell. He would have to live as a Highton, trapped
among a people who would sicken him. To survive he would have to become, in all
appearances, just like them. If they ever learned the truth, they would turn on
him in a way that would make the life of the two providers I had just met
gentle in comparison. What would happen to Jaibriol when he realized the truth
about his future?

I already knew the answer. I had seen it in my half brother
Kurj, perhaps even in myself. The capacity of the human soul to harden was
boundless.

But I didn’t want to imagine Jaibriol as he would become. I
wanted to remember him as I had known him tonight. Perhaps he would retain
enough of that humanity so that someday he and a Skolian Imperator could meet
at the peace table. He was the only Highton Emperor I could imagine who would
ever genuinely talk peace with us. And that was another reason why I couldn’t
reveal what I had learned about him tonight.

I “knew” Jaibriol because I had melded with him. That was an
experience my half brother Kurj would never share. Even in the immensely
unlikely event that the opportunity presented itself, Kurj would never consent
to it. Without it, he would never accept my conviction that Jaibriol was our
one chance to end this war without losing it. Jaibriol’s father and grandfather
had created him to end the war, that was certain, but not by making peace. If
Kurj ever learned that Ur Qox had sired an heir who could take control of the
Skol-Net, he would never rest until he stood over the Highton Heir’s lifeless body,
preferably after Jaibriol had died a long, agonizing death.

I could barrier my mind to hide what I knew. But it would
make a wall between me and everyone I loved. Rex would know something was
wrong. He would never guess the truth but he would know something had changed.

It was still dark, long past midnight when I once again
walked into the velvet and giltwood lobby at the inn. As I passed the front
desk, the clerk looked up from the holobook she had been dozing over. “Excuse
me, ma’am,” she said in English. She reached under the counter and pulled out
an envelope. “This was delivered for you about an hour ago.”