The Rifter's Covenant (58 page)

“Did he tell you
why?’

“I do not recall
the details. Something about a promise, but it amounted to a political
disagreement.”

“Political
disagreement. Ho!”

The wind’s press on
Srivashti’s body increased, inexorably accelerating him. The landscape below,
much closer, moved under him even more slowly.

“Let us discourse,”
the old man said, “on power.”

“As you will,” Srivashti
said, gesturing with as much irony as he could muster. “But your point had
better be succinct.”

“That is the
essence of your first mistake,” was the reply, with a dry laugh like the wind
through desert rocks. “There are no quick roads to power. Not real power. None
that last.”

Srivashti glanced
down and felt, despite all his control, his heartbeat pound counterpoint to his
pulse. “I refer to my own time,” he said.

“There is enough, O
vingt-son mine. There is eternity. Do you remember the Polarities?”

Deeply offended,
Srivashti wanted to remind the old fool that their family had been ancient when
the Arkads were mere upstarts. What was that doggerel to anyone with a good
mind? But he restrained his retort. “I fear my memory is faulty under present
circumstances.”

“Hau! Then listen:
‘A faith unfulfilled is loyalty’s pyre, for power can only compel, not inspire.’”
The nuller moved closer.

“Many burned in the
pyres of Timberwell, but you merely presided over the issue of many years of
unfulfilled faith.”

The nuller gazed
upward contemplatively. Srivashti sensed the landscape beneath him as an almost
physical pressure.

“Can you name your
second mistake?” said Tate Kaga after too long a time.

If that was what the
old fool wanted, maybe it is time to compromise
,
Srivashti thought with grim humor. He had learned the efficacy of
retreat on Timberwell.

“As you wish,” he
said. “My second mistake was in underestimating the Polloi. I was raised to
believe their purpose is to serve, and it is ours to be served, so that we may
serve in the larger realm.”

“Honor me,” the old
man said, “with the truth. And without condescension.”

“Very well,” Srivashti
said, infusing all his irony in the deference he made with his one good hand.
Air whipped coldly between his fingers. “I relied on compulsion, and not
inspiration. Is that what you want to hear?” The wind of his fall was making his
eyes water. “Where is the virtue you wish me to embrace? Why did you throw over
your Douloi life and take on this Prophetae guise—to be free of obligation?”

“I have never
thrown it away,” the old man retorted. “And is not this conversation
quintessentially Douloi? Is not the situation?”

“Then why do you
hide behind that foolish name?”

A smile wrinkled
Tate Kaga’s face. “‘Makes the Wind’—is it so foolish a name now? Your choices,
not mine, made the wind you now feel.” He cackled. “And making wind smells better
than the Srivashti name has for over a century.”

There was no time
left to fence, or court, or mask. “Yes, yes! I admit I was wrong, in everything
I have done. Is that what you want?” He shouted out the last.

“It is your third
mistake,” came the inexorable voice. “You will not learn the lesson of the
wind. You do not want enlightenment.”

The inner surface
of the oneill had resolved into individual trees, tiny below him but rushing up
far too fast. Death was seconds away. “I am your blood, you are mine. Mercy,” Srivashti
cried.

“Child of my
children in long descent, justice is all I have,” came the nuller’s voice as
the gee-bubble fell away upward. Incongruously Srivashti heard birdsong as the
forest rushed up at him. “The mercy of Another awaits you.”

And, like the
fingers of a god, tree branches snatched him from the sky and flayed soul from
body, spinning him into darkness.

o0o

(Team four, report.)

(All lift banks secured,)
came the reply.

Margot Ng launched
herself from a platform, caught a cable, and shot down toward the next platform
at right angles to the first.

As she moved
through the air, she scanned the jumble of hastily built entertainment emporia
and game areas. Everywhere she looked order was slowly being restored. A group
of youths busily cleaned the area in front of a row of shops that apparently
they had smashed up for the fun of it while the rioting had distracted the
authorities, a row of hard-eyed shop keepers watching over them.

The next platform
took Ng to a transtube nexus where techs were repairing the consoles. The young
ensign overseeing the labor saluted. “This one works, sir,” he said.

Ng nodded her
thanks and swung herself inside.

A few minutes later
she walked into the command center, now crowded with uniformed figures. Faseult
met her at the door. “Spin axis secured,” she said.

Fasuelt nodded, his
face haggard with tiredness, but his eyes alert. “Coffee on the sideboard,
Admiral,” he said.

As Ng moved across
the room she spotted one civilian among the uniforms. Stepping closer, she
recognized the Panarch.

“Please sit,” he
was saying to Koestler, who stood stiffly before him, one arm loose at his
side. “If you don’t, I’ll have to practice one of my famous sweep techniques on
you.” He made a martial movement toward the admiral’s ankles, and the listeners
laughed as Koestler lowered himself into a chair.

Beyond a slight
smile Koestler’s face betrayed nothing, but Ng said, coming forward, “That
hurts just to watch.”

As the group
acknowledged her, she added, “Al-Gessinav turned up yet?”

“No word,” Nyberg
said. “She and Srivashti’s bodyguard seem to have vanished.” He grimaced. “A
team just now verified Srivashti’s death. Wasn’t much left of him.”

As Faseult joined
the group, Brandon looked up at him. “Kendrian?”

Faseult said, “I
made him a priority the first time you asked. He’s with his crewmates again,
and they’re all safe. Omilov has them logged for some experiment; they’re right
on the timetable.”

A slight frown
appeared between Brandon’s brows, but it disappeared as he repeated, “Omilov,
you say?”

“He’s fine. Safely
at the Cloisters. No problem there. The Rifters reported in to him when they
were supposed to.”

General
conversation broke out, and Ng watched Brandon assess its tone and utter a
couple of jokes that caused general laughter. With the tension palpably lower,
he turned serious, praising them for their quick planning and fast muster. He
did not make the mistake of expressing overt concern over Koestler’s wounds,
but signaled one of the stewards to help when Koestler rose to leave.

“He couldn’t be
more unlike Semion,” newly-promoted Meliarch Artorus Vahn had said to Ng a
short time before the trial. “What I mistook for strength in Semion was a
deadly, even treacherous inflexibility: the fortress was a retreat from his
father, the iron discipline a weapon against disagreement, and what he did to
his brothers to control them—all in the name of education—was the worst
betrayal of all.”

Had Koestler come
to see any of that?

Margot Ng couldn’t
say for sure, but instinct indicated that something had changed as three paces
away, Brandon flexed his wrist and queried Artorus Vahn about the spin axis,
where Gessinav had last been seen.

A few seconds
later, Vahn replied.
(Lochiel’s spin axis
patrols report things are quiet. Faseult just ordered the last Marines out.)

Brandon
acknowledged, and forced his attention to the conversation flowing around him.
His entire body ached, crowned by a hammer inside his skull, but he could
ignore that; the crisis was almost resolved. Rest could come after.

“The Suneater data sold
by one of us to Dol’jhar,” Nyberg mused. “She must have had some idea how he
was likely to use it, as Dol’jhar is not known for its universities established
for xenostudies. Or did he promise her a place in his new order?”

“That’s one of the
questions we will put to her when she is located,” Faseult promised, glancing
up from his boswell. He smiled faintly. “The Nescience Worm is just about
through her defenses. That ought to help flush her from whatever hole she’s
retreated to.”

They divided into
several conversations—xenostudies—Dol’jhar—Infonetics—as Faseult monitored the
situation, and Brandon tried to listen to the talkers, acknowledging when a
comment was directed his way. They all deferred to him, even Koestler. The
stiff-backed warrior’s respect seemed genuine now; Brandon was not quite
certain what had caused the alteration as yet. He was relieved that it had
happened.

The crisis was
really very near to resolution—he could see it in Faseult’s manner—yet instinct
made him restless. Something was left undone, or overlooked. Something
important. But he found it increasingly difficult to force his mind to focus.

It did not help
that, as often happened when he had gone too long without sleep, his
subconscious kept sending up emotion-charged images: the curve of warm brown
flesh against his side, cool night-black silken hair fanned across his chest . .
.

He blinked,
wrenching his thoughts back to the present.

“. . . yacht,
in case that henchman of his is found,” Faseult was saying. “From the evidence
piling up, Srivashti was probably behind several of our unsolved murders,
mostly related to the datachip from the Enkainion. And it was this Felton who
must have executed them.”

She came to me.
Brandon had meant to sleep, to be well
rested against what he knew would be a difficult day. Instead—for the first
time—Vi’ya had offered to stay at the Enclave, and they had shared all the
hours until dawn. Mock battle, laughter, passion, tenderness—it was she who
initiated each, gauging his mood and his pleasure as they moved from cusp to
cusp through a wide range of experience.

“. . . rely
on Lochiel and her lieutenants Bayrut and Messina. They’ve been as steady as
Downsider gravity through all this novosti gabble about Rifters,” someone new
was saying: Lieutenant Commander Jalal-Alfad. Faseult’s aide.

“They want to be in
on the Suneater attack,” Ng commented.

“If they still had
access to the high-powered skipmissiles, I’d be tempted to say yes,” Koestler
said from the doorway, where he had paused to listen.

“Cameron speaks highly
of their performance in combat conditions.” That was Nukiel. When had he come
in?

“Oh, Cameron,”
someone said on a sigh. “Did what every single one of us wanted to.”

“And paid the price
for it,” Koestler said.

Brandon swallowed
half his coffee, trying to force his mind to clear. He flexed his wrist to
summon Jaim, then remembered with regret that he had given Jaim leave. He
needed to talk it through.

Was that it?
Something
was wrong.

He reached for the
silver coffeepot, and caught himself as a wide-eyed steward sprang to pour the
liquid for him. Made himself wait, and thanked the young man.

There was nothing
wrong with Jaim wanting to celebrate Lokri’s freedom with the rest of the crew.
And he knew they were safe, because Faseult had just said so: Omilov and another
of his experiments.

The riot . . .

Experiment . . .

What was it Vi’ya
said? “There are no regrets behind us, and the future before us is uncharted
space. Let us gift one another with the now.”

He realized it was
not Jaim he wanted to talk to, it was Vi’ya. Vi’ya—who for the first time had
not only initiated their meeting, but had not insisted on neutral ground, but
had come within what she regarded as his citadel.

Someone was
speaking his name. He looked up into Faseult’s face.

“Your Majesty, they
have found Hesthar al-Gessinav,” he said.

o0o

Chatzing Navy
Shiidra-scat, Hesthar thought viciously. When this was over she would arrange
an accident and vent all their quarters to space.

The thought of Ng
and those others bloating their lives out in vacuum made her smile as she
emerged from her cramped hiding place and slid into the lift the naval unit had
just vacated.

After a long, tense
trip, she was very close. She’d shut down her boswell to prevent a locate from
being run on her, but that had made it impossible to communicate with Arret.
What if the situation had changed?

Only one more stop.
She watched the console, smiling when the doors opened onto the verdant
greenery and peace of Douloi territory.

Where next? The
yacht?
Yes.
She had coveted Srivashti’s
fabulous yacht for years; she’d penetrated its defenses far enough to take it
now. She knew that with its weapons and its tremendous engines she had a good
chance of getting away.

S
he stepped out into the flagged pathway. A quick look: no Navy, no
security spooks.

And there, waiting
with several Douloi, was Arret.

Hesthar frowned
when she saw the group. Most of them were familiar, gowned and brocaded for a
formal affair. They stood in decorous silence.

Of course
,
Hesthar thought as they came forward
and wordlessly surrounded her. They’d hide her from any patrols on their way to
some party or other. Arret’s obedience marked her as abject in Hesthar’s mind.
A good tool—really, better than she had counted on. This boded very well for
the future.

Silently they
ushered her to a transtube nexus. It was Arret herself who programmed it. The
pod lurched, grinding slightly.

Hesthar became
aware of the people standing at either side, much closer than they ought. Were
the seats greasy from overuse? She disliked trespass into her proximate space,
but at least they were Douloi, and not filthy, sweaty Polloi or, worse, those
Rifters. She remembered the woman who had broken Srivashti’s arm so easily, and
the ugly one who then pitched him over the railing.