“Dol’jharian,” Derith said, making avoidance gestures. “Worse than Douloi. Try the drivetech. He didn’t go with them when the Telvarna left.”
“At the Enclave.”
Derith grimaced. The Arkadic Enclave was off-limits.
Nik went on, “If the cook-surgeon gives me the slip and goes straight to the Enclave, we won’t be able to reach him, either. And we can’t get at the navy lieutenant in the Cap.”
“So that leaves the youth with the Kelly connection, and the DC-tech. You’d better be right there when the Telvarna comes in. Good luck,” she said wryly, and left.
Ixvan drank more caf to keep awake, and took off.
Near the end of his shift, their luck seemed to turn against them yet again. One of the noderunners surfaced with the news that the Telvarna had arrived a day ago! It looked like a repeat of the ship’s departure, when the military had not announced it and refused all comment after it was discovered.
Nik moved to his console. The only one he might be able to get at would be the female DC tech, who had reported to work at Engineering.
Then Nik cursed: 99 was already on the way; Chomsky’s passcoding through to Engineering had been what the noderunner saw.
That same unknown source must have tipped 99 off, too. Then he smiled. Marim—the DC-tech’s name—was about to go off shift, and she was a nullrat. If she followed her old habits from before the Gehenna mission, she’d head straight for Spinner’s. And Chomsky hated free-fall.
Stealing a scoop was one of the best parts of being novosti, he thought happily as he squeezed onto a pod. And he’d have the lower orbit with Marim, Chomsky being a Downsider, who used Downsider means to track the Douloi and the influential Polloi who had managed to make their way to Ares. Chomsky didn’t have the right touch for the vast number of support people—the crews aboard the refugee ships, or ordinary folks on ships that were commandeered by more influential people for the skip to Ares. And usually those people really liked novosti.
His stomach fluttered as the transtube slowed and stopped at the Spinner nexus, up at the axis, but muscle memory came back, and he felt more confident as he pulled himself into the establishment under the enormous glowing sign.
SPINNER’S ESSENFRESS AND GAMBLING HELL
Nik chuckled. Spin-axis dives were the same everywhere. The grim conditions of Ares and the military presence hadn’t managed to dampen nullrats’ appetites for raucous fun. Even respectable citizens of either Highweller or Downsider origins seemed to let go in free-fall.
Those who can handle it, he thought as he caught sight of Chomsky. The tall, willowy redhead had donned stickysoles, marking her as a dedicated mudfoot—not that her awkward posture didn’t broadcast Downsider.
And he could see the yellow-haired DC-tech’s opinion of Downsiders in her lifted shoulder and curled lip.
Marim looked just like the stillpic he’d accessed, but it hadn’t conveyed her animation. Nik pulled his way closer, flinching as a rowdy group of men dove past him, slapping at cables to change their course. He wasn’t that good in free-fall.
Marim jerked back, making an obscene gesture at Chomsky. The novosti followed her, posture insistent until the little DC-tech lunged expertly, grabbed Chomsky’s ankle, and flipped her into a spin. The novosti’s face greened as she spun away, helped onward by nudges and less gentle course correction administered by the jeering patrons.
He pulled himself to Marim’s perch, opening the ajna lens in his forehead to record.
Marim saw it, her light blue eyes narrowed and her mouth thinned. She was older than he’d guessed from the picture. “You news-blits like bein’ beat up or something?”
He scrabbled to hook a perch with his feet and pulled himself down, holding up his hands. “Hey, I don’t like her spew about Rifters any more than you do. I think it’s aimed at your friend Lokri, and through him, at the Panarch. That’s what I want to talk about.”
Marim relaxed minutely, but her eyes were still wary. “Yeah, maybe.” Then she grinned, which made her seem young again. “You’re Nik Cormoran, aren’t you? Your stuff’s not bad.”
He smiled back at her, liking her instantly. He hated predictable people as much as he hated predictable events and interviews, even when he knew they’d bring plenty of points. “Have some time? I’ll buy you something to drink, and you talk.”
“About Lokri?” The blue eyes narrowed warily, though the dimpled smile did not diminish.
Nik squashed the urge to pursue that wariness. With a tilt-nose, he might go aggressive—provoking people who thought they were better than you usually prompted them to say more than they meant to. His instinct was to like Marim—and he suspected she’d talk plenty if he was gentle about it.
“If you want, but I think people would like to hear about having the Panarch as crew of your ship,” he said. “At least last time I checked, that wasn’t part of their training.”
Marim laughed, a delicious sound. She was small and well rounded in all the right places and she wore her clothes tight. He grinned back. Oh yes, he liked her a lot.
“Sanctus Hicura! I thought all you nicks were busy pretendin’ he never did that Riftskip, like he’d peed in the soup at a party.”
Nik choked on a laugh. “What say we grab a booth in the back where it’s quieter.”
She agreed, and when they’d settled themselves and he’d ordered, he said, “Now, start right from the beginning. When did you first see him?”
She described in vivid detail how she’d been watching the fight over Charvann from a distance, then caught a small blip on her screen—a tiny courier chased by a destroyer. The drinks arrived, but he hardly noticed. Her story was giving him a heart-accelerating sense of what it must have been like to skip in and out with a partially disabled ship, then use a double ablative to propel them toward a small moon . . . using two hundred klicks of bumpy ice to bring themselves to a stop.
“They were mighty purple afterward,” Marim said with a lascivious grin. “At least, the Arkad was. Purple, blue, green, and yellow. Didn’t see old Schoolboy—that’s what we called the younger Omilov. We had two of ’em after we raided the Mandala, him and his papa.”
“Raided the Mandala,” Nik said, using his most admiring tone. “I heard gossip about that. What happened? How’d you come to do that? I thought the then-Krysarch had just left there?”
“Nope. He’d just left Charvann. He was with those Omilovs, you see. Got the silver thing they all squawked about so much. That needle-nacker Eusabian’s got it now, though it doesn’t seem to work, or they would’ve blasted us by now, right?”
“The Heart of Kronos?” Nik prompted, ever mindful of his audience.
Marim waved a hand impatiently. “That’s it.” She shrugged, and gave her drinking bubble a shake. “Anyway, soon’s the Arkad finds out Markham was dead, he wants to go home, so we take him. He promised us a ransom, you see, so why not? But when we skip in, we find the chatzing Fist of Dol’jhar in low orbit!”
“Bad sign,” Nik said encouragingly.
“Very bad. It chases us, but we dip into atmosphere . . .”
What followed was a story of knife-edge close escapes, heroism, and ingenuity. If even half of this is true, the L’Ranja Whoopee alone will make us a planet-sized fortune, he gloated privately. As Marim described that maneuver, memory flickered—hadn’t there been a couple of obscure references to something like that on the milnet? But those military chatzers habitually keep their yaps tight on the best stuff. He resolved to get his best realizers to work on an animation for that sequence, and for the Dis landing.
“. . . so we made it to Rifthaven, and some of us cashed in some o’ the loot. Captain refitted the ship, until we got into a fight over that Shiidra-loving silver thing. Great fight—tore up that blunge-suck of a Snurkel’s shop, then we escaped, just barely, only to walk straight into the tractor of that cruiser Mbwa Kali.”
Marim paused, looking down at the drink in her hands. The next part o
f their journey had been the stop at Desrien. But she hated to even think about that hellish place. She shrugged sharply. “Rest is us arriving here.”
“So the Panarch has permitted you to keep the art objects you looted from the Palace Minor?”
“Said it’s better than letting the Dol’jharians shoot ’em up,” she said. “But he did tell Ivard he’s gonna buy ’em all back. Or what he can, anyway.”
“Some of them got lost, then?”
“Broken. And he gave one away—of course, I guess he could always take it back again.”
“To whom did he give it, or don’t you know?”
“Sure. To our captain, Vi’ya. Called the Stone of Prometheus. Puts like a holo all over you. Nacky!”
The Stone of Prometheus, given to a Rifter? “So he gave one of these priceless gifts to your captain?” Nik repeated, careful to keep his tone casual.
Marim shrugged again. “Sure. What’s that mean to a nick? He’s got a palace full of ‘em.”
Sensing he’d get no more on that from Marim, and resolving to follow up on it, Nik shifted to the immediate. “It must have been hard for your fellow crew member, Jesimar Kendrian, to have lived through those dangerous times, just to find himself in even more danger here.”
“Sgatchi!” Marim exclaimed. “Of course!”
“I understand that he hid his background not just from the Panarch and Gnostor Omilov and his son the lieutenant, but from the rest of his crewmates as well?”
Marim tilted her head, smiling crookedly. “You gotta understand for us Rifters a nick background ain’t necessarily anything to yap about. He coulda hid it just the same if there’d been no murder biznai.”
“But I don’t understand why, after sharing all those adventures with the Panarch—and even saving his life—genz Kendrian did not throw himself on the Panarch’s mercy when he found out who he was. Or has he?”
“Brandon hasn’t seen him since we left Rifthaven,” Marim said, draining her drink. “Heyo, I’m gettin’ hoarse. You want more blab, how about another time? I got somewhere to be.” She leaned across the table and caressed Nik’s cheek. “Unless you want to turn off that thing and come along. You’re kinda nacky yourself!”
Nik laughed, aware of a twinge of embarrassment underlying his strong attraction to the forthright little tech. “Maybe another time? You’re logged off duty, but I’m not.”
Marim laughed as she rose. Nik watched her launch herself toward an exit, and closed off the recording. As he rode the transtube back, he thought over the interview.
Subjects tended to fall into two rough categories: the ones who were awed by the prospect of brief fame, and the ones who treated novosti as moral lepers. He was patient with the first, often resorting to an arsenal of disarming tricks to get a natural response. The second group he often provoked, knowing that they pretty much all DL’d the news he presented—and then they spoke their opinions of it. Marim was the rare third, someone who didn’t care what anyone thought. He wanted to see more of her.
Later. Right now, although he had not got himself a step nearer to the mystery of Jesimar Kendrian, he had a hot story anyway, one 99 hadn’t got a sniff of. If by tomorrow people on the transtubes weren’t talking about the L’Ranja Whoopee and what Rifters thought of the Douloi, even a member of the dynasty that ruled the Thousand Suns, then he ought to resign as a novosti and start mining asteroids.
He wasn’t going to buy any mining tools yet.
o0o
Ixvan levered his lanky height out of the publink booth and joined the line for the transtube, considering what he’d learned about Montrose. As he’d suspected after the novosti interview, the man was associated with the Panarch, apparently as his cook and physician, possibly as a confidant—but most surprising, he was a Rifter, of Douloi background.
Like his crewmate Kendrian.
The pod appeared, disgorging a sweaty flood of humanity. The vocat managed to wedge himself on board; there were no seats free. As it accelerated away from the nexus, Ixvan pondered the most surprising fact his long session of datadiving had turned up. Despite the paucity of hard data on Montrose in the local Net, expected of someone close to the Panarch, a location query had been answered at the shallowest level: full public access. That was puzzling.
Did he enjoy being besieged by place-seekers? Or did they ignore him because he was a Rifter? That would fit with the novosti drift that Ixvan’s fine-tuned knowledge of the feeds had detected. Rifters were being demonized, and it looked like Kendrian was becoming the focus. He wondered who was behind that. They were clever, whoever they were. The Panarch, if he was truly trying to help Kendrian, was helpless against an attack on that level. For it was an attack on him as well.
Ixvan shook his head. He’d gone as far as he could on a public console. He needed a good long session at a private console he could trust, and maybe the help of a midlevel noderunner, before he’d be able to make sense of the political currents on Ares. It would be a difficult case, if he was indeed to be Kendrian’s vocat at the trial, a possibility he now believed almost a certainty.
The pod decelerated, and halted with a faint grinding sound, evidence of accelerated wear and lagging maintenance. As he pushed his way off against the flood of incoming passengers, Ixvan hesitated. This couldn’t be the right stop.
The vitae on Montrose had indicated he had recently taken over the running of a clinic. Despite his supposition about the disadvantages of the physician’s Rifter background, Ixvan had nonetheless expected an elegant establishment for the highest Douloi, trading on the physician’s connection to the Panarch. But no one would put such a clinic in what had to have been a subterranean service corridor before the influx of refugees, the walls scarred with slogans, the air faintly reeking of human waste under the stench of disinfectant.
He pushed past the poorly dressed men and women lounging on the benches outside the clinic and opened the door. The noise and smell hit him like a blow, throwing him mentally back to the Reef. Only the presence of an armed guard among the ragged crowd, a man his own age with the look of a retired Marine, suggested otherwise. His assumptions about Montrose collapsed abruptly, making him ashamed of his prejudice until he remembered that Montrose had yanked him out of the Reef, business unfinished.
Ixvan announced himself to the receptionist, a round-bodied man with a smooth, unlined face and a look of peace that the chaos around him seemed unable to shake. The man cocked his head, inward-focused briefly, then smiled up at him. “Please go through the door and wait in the second room on the right. He will be with you in a moment.”
The guard swung the door open for him; he heard it click locked behind him as he walked the short distance to the examination room. Its interior was stark, containing only a data console, an elevated platform, a single, tall chair, and a small bureau with a disposer next to it. A metal tray with some glittering medical instruments on it sat on the bureau. Ixvan looked away, preferring instead the single picture that broke the pink sameness of the scuffed dyplast walls: a holo of a bucolic landscape, feathery trees under a green sky full of towering clouds.
The door opened. Despite the stillvid in the net, he was shaken by the man’s appearance. Although he topped Montrose by at least a fifth-meter, the other man was far bulkier, and surprisingly ugly. But the eyes that scanned him were intelligent, the mouth made for humor, even compassion.
“Thank you for coming so promptly, Gnostor Ixvan.” Montrose indicated the chair. “Please, sit. It will probably be more comfortable for both of us.” The smile seemed genuine as he perched himself on the examination table, and Ixvan’s sense of dissonance increased. ‘Coming so promptly?’ It sounded like twisted Douloi mockery, but that didn’t seem possible.
The big Rifter peered at him more closely. “Are you all right? Should we make this a dual-purpose visit?”
“No. It’s just that I can’t square this with what you did to me.” The vocat gestured to indicate the clinic.
“Did to y
ou?” Montrose seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Pulling me out of the Reef, giving me no choice. You must understand pro bono—why did you do it?”
The doctor just looked at him silently for a long beat. “Tell me exactly what happened,” he said finally, tapping his boswell and holding his wrist out momentarily. “You won’t object?”
Ixvan shook his head and launched into his tale. As he spoke, the doctor’s face gradually settled into a stern anger that sent a thrill through the vocat. It transformed the harsh planes of his face into the very image of justice. Ixvan’s fingers twitched for an imager; his hobby was portraiture.
“Are you proposing to retain me as Kendrian’s vocat?” Ixvan asked when he had finished and the doctor sat ruminating over what he’d heard. Montrose roused himself at the question and tapped his boswell off. Considering whom he no doubt represented here, that was commendable caution. The Panarch’s name would be spoken by neither of them.
“Yes.”
“Then, in light of the backing I assume you have, I expect justice for the Reef and for the criminals who run it. That includes a free flow of data.”
Montrose’s gaze flicked to the holo. He smiled grimly, an expression with an edge of old pain to it. “Perhaps you know that I was of Timberwell. I, too, have a passion for justice. It shall be as you demand.”
Ixvan heard multiple levels in his words. Timberwell. Srivashti. His quick datascan had given the bare outline of the political maneuvering that had preceded the Panarch’s assumption of power. The former Archon of Timberwell was near the center of that maelstrom.
Ixvan inclined his head in thanks. “Then I expect I should be about it.” He toed his travelcache on the floor next to his chair. “I assume you’ve made discreet arrangements for me.”
“You’ll be in the Cap,” the doctor said apologetically. “Putting you in the oneill at this late stage would be too blatant.” He grimaced. “Telos, how I hate this Douloi twistiness.”
Ixvan cocked an eyebrow at him. He was starting to like Montrose a great deal. “Douloi twistiness?”
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