Anger impelled him to move faster. One could not obey a fallen leader, but he might find a way to send aid for the sake of childhood alliance. And if not, the Ultschen way still permitted him to take pleasure in snuffing all those who had brought Tau Srivashti to this end. Nothing could stop him, for Nothing was strong.
He’d begun planning his attacks when he became aware of a tick-tick-tick-tick sound behind him.
Felton whirled about. In the minimal lighting of the service tunnel two dogs’ eyes glowed eerily green in visual echo to their red and green-streaked collars as they trotted toward him side by side.
Just dogs. He had seen their traces in some of the obscure byways he’d used on his lethal errands, but this was the first time he’d actually encountered them. When they saw his gaze on them, they began to run, their hind legs reaching forward well past their front paws, their powerful haunches accelerating them faster than a human being could run. He barely had time to reset himself into the proper Ulanshu stance for quadrupedal predators when they were on him.
As one circled to one side, the other leaped for him, jaws gaping. Felton aimed a sweeping kick but the animal twisted, hit his leg with its front paws, and used that leverage to twist again and sink its teeth into his arm. Forty kilos of muscle and bone jerked him violently around as its teeth closed on his arm with crushing force. Agonizing pain shot white lightning behind his eyes as bone snapped, but he overrode it with an internal chord of the numathanat and reached for the dog’s eyes.
It let go as the other one seized his leg from behind in a crushing grip. Felton kicked viciously back with his other leg, but the dog twitched aside and worried at his leg with a savage jerk before letting go and falling back. Blood spurted.
Trying to ignore the ruin of his forearm, and the weakness of his leg, Felton drew in breath and crouched, waiting for the dogs to leap at him again, but they didn’t. Instead, they positioned themselves out of reach on either side of him, as if to force him to divide his attention.
Not out of reach, he thought, summoning a chord comprising the most painful of his poisons on a dense and easily projected breath. He swung his head from side to side, breathing out an agonizing and very satisfying pair of deaths.
Both dogs shook their heads and sneezed several times as they backed away two or three steps, claws ticking on the deck, their fur lifted along their backs, tails down. They were impossibly still very much alive. Only then did he remember the tall Rifter Ulanshu master’s forehead ribbon.
Surely, whatever those collars were, they could not proof the animals against every chord of the numathanat. Felton snuffed in breath again to try another poison—then sneezed violently himself.
He heard another ticking behind him, intricately triplicate this time. He whirled and saw three of those damned Kelly beasts. Felton tried to edge around them, keeping his good arm toward them, then struck out as the trinity closed around him, headstalks strong as cables, bodies like bolsters that shrugged off his blow, threir fluttering ribbons oddly sticky. He inhaled deeply and spat the broadest spectrum, most dangerous poisons he had at the trinity—surely something would drop threm.
Nothing. Time slowed as he fell to the floor, his muscles slack. He fought for breath against near-total paralysis. The Kelly with the garish boswell on its neck said in an incongruously sweet voice, “To nullity you gave your life, and to nullity you return.” A bit of ribbon fell from its pelt onto his lips. “With your breath you killed, by your breath you die.”
Felton inhaled rackingly as the paralysis released his diaphragm, then screamed. The numathant chords began to unravel within him, years of immune programming falling away. Pain beyond anything he had ever known ignored along nerves and tendon, bone and muscle.
o0o
Far above anti-spinward, Tau Srivashti fought against his own pain, and the fury of helplessness as the rabble departed, leaving him alone scarce meters from safety. If it weren’t for his arm, he could take his tunic off and flap it to propel himself back to the deck. But an attempt to pull it off over his shattered bones caused a surge of nausea to choke him—a messy way to die in micro-gee.
He wanted very much to save himself, to see Hesthar’s shock when he returned and shot her, and Felton’s when he had him flayed. How dare that no-family trash turn on him! And why?
Must be that snake cult twaddle, he thought, drawing his knees up against his chest with his good arm. With less surface area, it would take the rotational wind of the highdwelling longer to accelerate him to local spin gravity. He’d always believed that if he ignored the Ultschen nonsense, Felton would eventually forget it; he had made it very clear that spending energy in any religion, even his entropy-worshiping snakes and poisons, was the road to conformity, not power.
The deck fell away upward, ever so slowly, as Srivashti drifted toward one of the massive alloy struts that supported the diffusers. Rungs! A maintenance hatch, closer, closer.
A surge of hope flared, enabling his gibbering hindbrain—falling, falling, falling—to momentarily overpower reason in a frantic lunge so painful that he passed out.
When consciousness returned, the strut had fallen away above him. No succor there. Then Srivashti caught sight of the boswell on his shattered arm and cursed himself twice over.
First for overlooking the obvious in his pain and rage: he could summon someone from the shuttle to rescue him by aircar.
Second, after trying and failing to summon help—the frantic messages from the shattered nerves in his damaged arm made neural induction impossible—for his reliance on high fashion’s elegant boswell with no clumsy audio. The Tetrad Centrum Douloi always had servants to record things.
Getting the boswell onto his good arm would be agonizing. Srivashti looked around. He had just passed through the huge gap that separated two of the vast refractory diffuser tubes; below, the inner surface of Ares spread out, arching up on either side, new construction standing out like livid scars. He noted with satisfaction how fast the landscape appeared to be spinning around him; the rotational wind still hadn’t taken effective hold of him.
Well and good, he thought. That meant it would take longer to fall. At least it was afternoon, the focus of the diffusers at the other end of the oneill; had it been morning, he would have been consumed like a moth in a flame.
Laboriously, gasping with pain, he transferred the boswell to his good wrist. When he finished, his vision bright-speckled on the edge of graying out from hyperventilation, he was still at least four kilometers up, still merely drifting. There was still time.
He subvocalized a query. The shuttle responded promptly. (Yes, prabhu Srivashti?)
Srivashti formed the words but a shrill squeal erupted from the boswell and it flashed brilliant red. They’d imposed Nescience on him! He fumbled to get it off before the neural feedback destroyed his auditory nerves, then angrily flung it from him; the effort grayed-out his mind once more.
When he fought his way back to consciousness, the surface was closer, the rotational wind inexorably accelerating him toward a standard gee. He fought despair with a surge of rage, twisting his head back to look up through the diffuser gap at the spin axis, now more than a kilometer above him. It was then he saw a glint of light speeding toward him between the massive structures.
The nuller.
The old man drew even so they could see each other’s face. The wind from the bubble fanned Srivashti with a warm, spice-scented breeze.
His geeplane could bear extra weight with no effort, Srivashti thought. But why did he wait? For begging and pleading? To bring up their shared blood, as supplicant to benefactor?
He turned away his head. Let the old fool name his price first.
“Do you remember your grandparents?”
Srivashti was tempted to pretend not to hear the rusty, ancient voice. But there was no senility in it, nor in the alert eyes, despite the wrinkles and the absurd name he called himself nowadays.
“To an extent.” Srivashti forced ou
t the words. His broken arm sent fires of protest through him, and he winced, renewing his vow to make that Dol’jharian deviant suffer long and long. “I do remember how angry he was after the Accession party on Karelais for Gelasaar. Angry that you refused to acknowledge the Family anymore. She didn’t say anything.”
“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,” Nyb
erg 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.
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