The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  The thought steadied him, until the door opened and the bodyguard entered, followed by the tall, yellow-eyed Archon whom Ivard had first seen at the Ascha Gardens, moving with controlled grace that unsettled Ivard. Satiny granite weighted his back; he hastily unfocused his perceptions.

  “Please sit down.”

  Ivard did so hastily. Srivashti had spoken to him in a mode that Brandon had never used to him: barbed steel under the surface politesse, from a podium holding the man high and Ivard low. He sensed the mute bodyguard taking up a position behind him.

  “You were shipmate to Jesimar vlith-Kendrian.”

  “Um, yes.”

  The Archon raised an eyebrow, and Ivard sensed an alteration in Felton’s emanations. “Sir,” he added. “Um, uh, Your Grace?” That was what you called an Archon, right?

  But he missed the next question as the impact of what he had just experienced hit him. Reading scents had been one thing, but now he was hearing Felton like a tempath. Did Vi’ya do it like that? No, she could hear at a distance, as she had on Arthelion when they rescued the gnostor. He couldn’t.

  “Sorry, Your Grace?”

  He sensed disdain from the Archon, who clearly thought Ivard very stupid. The man was otherwise opaque to him, while Felton’s aura quivered with meaning. “The nicks all live trapped in their heads, tangled in words,” Greywing had said, not long before she died, under the Palace. But Felton couldn’t speak. He wasn’t hindered that way.

  “You have visited him in Detention,” Tau Srivashti said slowly. “Has he spoken of his sister?”

  “No.” Lokri had, but only after Ivard brought up the subject of her disappearance.

  Ivard sensed intention from Felton, but then the sensation slipped away.

  “Well, I guess he wondered why she hadn’t ever come to see her,” he heard himself say. The blueness spouted from his unconscious like myriad fountains coalescing at their peak into a shape fraught with danger.

  “She has disappeared,” said Tau Srivashti, “and I am concerned for her safety. Anything you remember could be helpful, and possibly save her life.”

  A drug! Ivard sensed the minutely articulated tingle of a foreign molecule pervading his body from his alveoli.

  “I, um, don’t, um, remember m-much,” Ivard stammered, trying to dive down to where he could grasp the molecule’s shape. The Kelly Archon was there, burned spice and velvet enwrapping his mind and guiding him.

  “Too much,” Tau Srivashti said to the mute presence behind Ivard, “and all we get is incoherence. Where is the point in that?”

  Safe inside the citadel of his mind, Ivard knew his guess for truth. The Archon thought him stupid. And he was safer that way.

  Ivard let his head droop and his mouth open, then abandoned his outer body so he could plunged inward, toward the feral glitter. He wrenched at it. The blueness stayed him, caressing the bumpy, involuted surface of the molecule. He felt the shape in a dizzying complex of sensations, matched it with a catalyst drawn from the chemical furnace of his liver, and watched as the glitters began to shatter, faster and faster.

  Ivard’s head cleared. “I’m real tired,” he said very slowly, careful to match his earlier tone. “I’ve been pulling long shifts at the menagerie.”

  Srivashti leaned forward to peer into his face. “Perhaps you are hungry. You will think better if you eat something.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ivard, tasting a spurt of fear. He wouldn’t eat anything in this place for the Emerald Throne itself. “My gut’s gonna . . . I don’t feel so good.”

  The Archon dismissed his protest with a faint, impatient gesture, then paused as Ivard went on even slower.

  “One of the lumbae is sick. I was helping with it. It has cinnelli, and one of the keepers told me it sometimes vectors through humans.”

  Tau Srivashti drew back, his nose wrinkling with disgust. “Tell me about Jesimar. Lokri, as you call him. Did he talk about his family?”

  Ivard blurred his words. “No . . . Rifters never talk about where they came from . . . We didn’t even know which planet he came from until the nicks nabbed us.”

  Srivashti stood up. “Give him something for his time, Felton.”

  He walked out. But Ivard didn’t relax until the bodyguard released him into a transtube terminal and the pod had pulled away. More than ever, he needed to talk to Tate Kaga.

  SEVEN

  Lochiel followed her cousin Cameron warily to Admiral Nyberg’s office. The last of their debriefings had been over a week ago, leaving her crew free to enjoy what R&R they could while being confined to the Shiavona. To help ease the situation, the nicks had shipped over an astonishing array of supplies, vids, chips, simgames, and even sextech, but the ship was getting a little close.

  Unsettled by Cameron’s unwonted silence as they entered flag country, she mentioned this to Cameron, and his grim expression turned, if possible, even grimmer. “You should see Ares,” was all he said.

  Alarm flared through Lochiel. “Camzie?” Out came the old childhood nickname—the one he’d forbidden her ever to use again when he went off to the Academy as a cadet.

  Cameron paused in the quiet hall outside the Admiral’s office. His lips pressed into a line as he gazed sightlessly through one of the archways. Lochiel turned her head, but all she saw was an office with a bank of consoles, dark for this deck’s Z-watch.

  “Nothing,” he said at last. “To do with you. But this interview? I think it’s important.”

  He turned away before Lochiel could respond, and walked through the last archway, into a large office.

  In the foreground plain but comfortable furniture sat in a circle. Cameron took three steps in and saluted Nyberg, Rear Admiral Damana Willsones, a sprightly old woman, and Rear Admiral Faseult, the tall, exceedingly handsome head of Security. Across the room, Shtoink-Nyuk2-Wu4 stood unusually still, only threir head-stalks moving. The Intermittor inspected the picture of Brandon hai-Arkad on the wall, another bent all three eyes on Admiral Nyberg, and the last considered the view through the huge Port in one bulkhead that overlooked the ship bays in the Cap. Beyond, actinic points of light winked, thickly clustered on the ships undergoing repairs.

  “Sirs,” Cameron said. “Captain MacKenzie of the Shiavona, as requested.” This formal Cameron was scarcely recognizable.

  Something was wrong. Alarm tightened Lochiel’s insides, and she wished she had Messina and Bayrut with her for whatever was about to fall on her head.

  But Admiral Nyberg stood up and bowed gracefully, and even though she had long since left the Douloi world behind, she recognized gratitude in the deference, the bow for a civilian of social importance at a gathering. It didn’t relax her, and her sense of dissonance increased. All these heavyweights, and they were treating her like . . . she didn’t know what.

  “Captain MacKenzie, I regret your sequestration on your ship, especially in light of the service you have rendered His Majesty’s Navy and government.” He held up a small chip. “This is the last external copy on Ares of the bonus chip on the Shiavona and its crew. A phage has already been tailored and released into the DataNet to eliminate your records.” He dropped the chip into the disposal slot in a bureau against the wall. There was a brief flash.

  “Welcome to the Panarchy,” said the admiral.

  Lochiel shook her head. “Thank you, but we’re not giving up the Riftskip.”

  Nyberg gestured. “So we understand. It’s your choice. You’ve a clean record.” He motioned, inviting Lochiel to take a seat around the table as a steward brought food and drink. Lochiel sneaked a look at her cousin; he sat bolt upright, his profile wooden. This was getting too weird.

  As they loaded food onto their plates, Nyberg spoke to Cameron. “Captain, you are an unknown quantity on Ares.” The harsh lines in his face deepened in a wintry smile. “But you have somehow managed to become quite popular.”

  Which meant he, too, knew how Cameron had killed Neyvla-khan—but without the log, maybe he wouldn�
��t have to take official notice? Surprising how fast that news spread—faster even than gossip on Rifthaven.

  Lochiel took in her cousin’s tension, and reflected that maybe it wouldn’t be so easy after all.

  Nyberg indicated them both with a courteous gesture. “Captain MacKenzie, it is likely that many of our number might consider you an ally and express their intentions.” And, to Lochiel, “Captain, you are here because the Elder agrees with our sense that you could be of great help here on Ares among the Polloi elements.”

  Lochiel shifted uncomfortably. “You mean you want me to nark for you. I told you that I wasn’t giving up the Riftskip.”

  The tall, dark security chief set aside his plate and tabbed the little console next to him. She heard her own voice.

  “. . . we played fair, and you left room for us. Dol’jhar doesn’t and won’t. If the Lord of Vengeance wins, there will be no Rift Sodality, for he recognizes no limits on his power.”

  Faseult silenced the recording with a decisive movement. “Ares is the only remaining center of resistance to the Lord of Vengeance, and we are losing control.” His deep voice was resonant with conviction.

  Lochiel clenched her jaw. She saw Cameron stir; he had warned her that they would record the meeting. The nicks recorded everything.

  She had the sense of standing on a dangerous slope, poised to plummet into a chaos of competing loyalties. “Why not just proclaim martial law? Use your power?”

  “The first act of the Panarch when he returned was to revoke martial law. To reimpose it would be an admission of failure, and trigger even greater unrest,” said Willsones.

  “But there are those in the Navy who, we fear, intend just that.” Faseult leaned forward. “Some of the unrest correlates loosely with the arrival of certain ships.”

  Koestler, she thought, and set aside her own plate. The little pastries and the pickled vegetables were delicious, but her appetite had shut down. No one else was eating, either; she suppressed a shiver at the name of Koestler, who long had been a symbol of mercilessness toward Rifters. The nicks must be really desperate to bring in a Rifter to help deal with that particular Navy captain.

  “And as you saw at the Reef, the number of refugee ships arriving has grown beyond our capacity to cope.”

  Lochiel grimaced, remembering the transmissions from inside the huge congeries of ships when the Marines from Cameron’s squadron had stormed on board at the Panarch’s orders. It made the worst parts of Rifthaven look like a Douloi drawing room by comparison.

  “The coordinates for Ares were bound to become known eventually,” Willsones said grimly, “but we suspect Dol’jhar accelerated the propagation of this information through the DataNet just to overload us, since they can’t reach us any other way. Yet.”

  Horrific rumors about the Suneater floated through Lochiel’s mind. To dispel them, she asked, “What happened to Commander Licrosse?” The last she’d see of the officer in charge of the Reef was an image of his arrest by Meliarch ZiTuto.

  “He shot himself,” said Nyberg with satisfaction. “The only decent thing he’d done for the Navy in the past ten years, it turns out.” He pursed his lips, head tilted. “I would have ordered it anyway, had he not; watching the clean-up after Claidheamh Mor’s Marines secured the Reef is the first time I have seen His Majesty express anger, and it will be well if it is the last. I think a little of his grandfather’s severity came down to him.”

  “The Marines will do what they can to deal with the vermin, petty jackers, and the like,” Faseult said, his face marked with fatigue. “Which won’t be enough. We can’t let them all in. Ares has just about reached capacity. On the other hand, everyone with any influence is using it to bring their dependents and clients on board.”

  “Some out of obligation, I hope,” Wilsonnes commented. “But most, I expect, out of calculation.”

  “Precisely.” Faseult drank his coffee, then blinked. “We can and are deporting troublemakers back to the Reef. But that’s a course fraught with danger. Eventually an ochlophore will exploit the resentment that causes—along with the usual orthogonal tensions across the Douloi/Polloi and Highdweller/Downsider axes—to create a major incident.”

  Lochiel shivered. She hated crowds; hated even more those people with the mysterious ability to ignite their collective passions into action.

  “Humans rightly fear their transformation into what they oppose,” Shtoink said, her tone low and mellifluous. The Intermittor bent her head-stalk into a position denoting humor. “It is a disadvantage of your bilateral nature, wethree fear.”

  Nyberg gestured toward the station. “His Majesty has straitly limited our ability to deport people back to the Reef, and the degrees of force we are permitted to apply, for precisely that reason. He will not use the Dol’jharians’ methods to oppose them.” He glanced at the Kelly. “And youthree, Elder. Will you grant our request, for the dispersal of your people as needed throughout Ares, to calm nascent crowd nuclei?”

  Lochiel grimaced inwardly. She’d always thought the smooth running of the Shiavona—until the Dol’jharian attack upset everything—had been a tribute to her skill and that of her lifemates. Now she knew that part of it, perhaps a large part, had been due to the deliberate pheromonal influence of Shtoink-Nyuk2-Wu4, who had chosen her ship as threir refuge: part of the Kelly strategy to safeguard the genome of the Eldest.

  She felt the grave regard of the trinity bent on her. “Wethree have not apologized to you, Lochiel,” the Intermittor said. So they were muscle-reading her. “We can only plead that the Shiavona was our nest. Your name is already inscribed in the fane of the Blessed Three as a righteous human and protector of the Race.”

  The trinity waltzed forward. “Wethree have already proclaimed the suspension of Kelly neutrality. Dol’jhar has made that choice for us. So yes, Admiral, wethree and allthree are at your service.”

  And with that, Lochiel found it slightly easier to admit that she didn’t have any choice, Riftskip or no. “I can do no less,” she said. “I will report this conversation to the rest of the shareholders. If anything changes, I’ll communicate at once.”

  She rose, looking with regret at the pastry with the single bite taken out, and the untouched ones. She hated to waste food, but that Douloi training so long ago was tough to break, and she couldn’t quite make herself swipe her plate into her pocket.

  After brief thanks and farewells, Cameron walked out with her, but he stopped in the hallway again.

  “You don’t want to come aboard and make sure I do a fair presentation?” she asked.

  “I have my own meeting,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.

  Her insides did the flipflop again.

  “It was a hard choice,” he said. “But you heard what Ares is like. You could still have said no.”

  “Could I?” she asked, then winced at the pain in his expression. “I’m sorry, Camzie. I could, and I couldn’t. I’m sure Nyberg plays fair—even Faseult. I just hate being where I am, doing what I have to do.”

  Cameron chuckled. “You always hated being told what to do. Were you surprised when the Riftskip ended up imposing its own imperatives?”

  She nodded. “At first. But they were my imperatives.”

  He looked askance.

  “Well, mostly, anyway.”

  “Same here,” he replied. “So let’s make the best of them we can.”

  “Right. I’ll do my best to be fair, then. If anything changes, you’ll be the first to hear.”

  She turned away, pausing at the outer door as he trod back to the office. She shook her head, and left.

  Cameron returned to Nyberg’s office. The food and coffee had been cleared away, all semblance of a conference gone. More serious than that, he found Captain Ng present. Shtoink-Nyuk2-Wu4 had withdrawn to the extreme end of the room, the trinity tightly clustered, the head-stalks woven together, swaying gently.

  Admiral Nyberg exchanged glances with the others, then said, “Please s
it down, Captain MacKenzie.” Another exchange of glances, and he said, “You have probably wondered why you alone haven’t been pulled in for your debriefing interview.”

  Cameron shifted, unsure what to say; Nyberg raised a hand. “Let me finish, please. You should know before we go any farther that, in spite of the many—very many—problems facing this station, this past week there has been one overarching subject of debate among us.”

  When he hesitated, Captain Ng spoke up. “First I would like to reiterate our admiration for your handling of the Barcan battle. We’ve all gone over the records. By ‘all’ I mean Captain Koestler as well as myself, plus some other officers who have also faced these Urian weapons.”

  Nyberg said, “I would like to commend you for the loyalty of your crew. Every one of them testified to the excellence of your command.”

  “And,” Captain Ng said, “every one testified to the destruction of Neyvla-Khan’s ship by Hreem the Faithless. In spite of the fact that the record appears to have sustained damage, so that the crucial minutes are missing.”

  Faseult said, “Meanwhile, a rumor has gone through every naval ship on the Cap, and even out to those doing perimeter duty beyond the Reef, that we, the Navy, got ours back again against Neyvla-Khan for the atrocity at Minerva.”

  Another pause, then Ng said, “Because the record is missing, we are going to have to find the time to bring every member of your primary crew in for intensive interviews—”

  “I take full responsibility,” Cameron burst out. “My crew was under my orders.”

  Captain Ng ran her small, neat forefinger across her bottom lip as she glanced in the direction of the Kelly Elder, who had remained uncharacteristically quiet during the conversation. And that was all it took: with a sick heart, Cameron remembered his Kelly allies. Of course. They’d seen the entire thing. Maybe even had recorded it, too. Obviously they had tech more sophisticated than that available to the Panarchy.