The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  “Nothing. There have been no words between us. Between her and Eloatri, either, I should add.”

  “Then how do you know she’ll go there and not to Rifthaven? Or to her other base? Telos, Father, only a fool would go straight into danger like that! The Dol’jharians have got to be prepared against just what you suggest. Either a fool or some kind of crazy visionary.”

  “These are questions Brandon will want to put to us when he finds out. He will be angry, and I suspect he will see what Eloatri has done, what I have done, as betrayal. I feel it is right to be there to face it.”

  Osri shook his head. “I’ll come, but I must take leave to tell you that this has been very badly managed. You ought to have made certain in some way that those Rifters would have to go. Why, there’s nothing stopping them from joining the other side and coming back to lead the attack!”

  Sebastian said on an exhaled breath, “Nothing but faith.”

  o0o

  Vannis waited at the Kamera for hours, until the security teams had come through letting everyone know that things were quiet again.

  Then she rose, stopped once along the way to make certain hair and gown were in order, and went to seek Brandon.

  He had arrived ahead of her at the Enclave. Novosti hung about in the background, questioning everyone who neared the place. Vannis gave her name to the Marine guard and waited, heart pounding, until the woman passed her in.

  She got no farther than the study. A group of high rankers, half military, half civilian, waited to be heard. Vahn was busy running security, and of course the silent Rifter Jaim was gone, so Vannis employed herself at the monneplat, ordering up a large quantity of coffee and a variety of fresh food. Once she heard sharp exclamations and glanced at the console screen.

  Against the dark of space a woman’s body hunched in the fetal position of micro-gee, thin, elegantly dressed, turning end-over-end amidst a swirl of what looked like flowers. Vannis glimpsed the face and averted her gaze, shuddering.

  Some watched in fascinated revulsion, a few with the compressed mouths and lifted chins of schadenfreude. Everyone else turned back to their talk.

  There was no sign of regret, much less grief, at Hesthar’s death, Vannis noticed as she laid plates on the big silver serving tray in a pleasing arrangement. What a terrible judgment: to die, and have no one at all regret it. Then she gritted her teeth and forced herself to look again. She had to remember that, as she gained power. And remember Ilara, who was mourned by worlds.

  Brandon was busy dispatching people one by one, most of them with orders. When at last enough space cleared around him, Vannis brought the heavy silver tray and set it down on the table.

  Brandon thanked her in a distracted voice. He poured out coffee for himself, but kept talking while she watched his hands, and his tired eyes, and the cup growing slowly cold.

  And she watched as more and more frequently his gaze went abstract. Then he would blink, or frown and shake his head.

  He’s putting it together, she thought, sending a silent message to Captain Vi’ya. If you are going, it had better be now.

  At last there was only Sebastian Omilov, his son, and Fierin Kendrian. Omilov claimed his attention, saying something about the riots.

  “What I cannot figure out is how the chatzing data got into the newsfeeds in the first place,” Brandon said at last, leaning back on the couch with the cup of cold coffee cradled in his fingers.

  “The novosti didn’t dig it up themselves?” Osri asked.

  “Or the vocat turn it over?” Fierin put in. “He did say we could only use it to get Jes freed, but not to convict the others.”

  “I asked him that a couple of hours ago. He said only an idiot would do that and not foresee the riots.”

  “Which means an idiot did do it,” Omilov said, shaking his head.

  “Or someone who was willing to risk touching off a riot to gain some other end,” Brandon finished. “Well, I will find out what—and who. And then—”

  “And then what?” Vannis spoke at last.

  The blue eyes looked up at her without seeing her. She watched Brandon recognize her, and then wonder why she was there, and then recollect himself.

  “And then what?” she prompted.

  Everyone fell silent, staring at her.

  “And then it would depend on the reason,” Brandon said gently. His gaze had gone wary and watchful.

  “If someone were asked for a distraction, any kind of distraction, by someone else who wanted justice at any price?”

  “Justice?”

  “Or freedom,” she said.

  He was too tired to mask. She had seated herself directly across from him, so she saw the progression of emotions he did not, or could not, hide as he pieced it together. And she saw him realize the truth at last, and saw anger and a heart-stopping loss.

  He sat up, putting the cup down so fast in slopped over. “Your experiment,” he rapped out to Omilov. Vannis had never heard him speak so sharply before—ever. She saw in the gnostor’s face that he’d never been the target of such from Brandon, but was somehow prepared for it.

  “The polymental unity is bombarded with psychic static on the habitat,” Omilov said, his voice heavy. “They are going out beyond radius to test the true strength of their link to the Heart of Kronos, and thus the Suneater.”

  “Beyond radius. You mean they are there? On the Telvarna?”

  The gnostor looked at his boswell. “They are about eight minutes from the test point,” he replied, slowly. “Yes.”

  Brandon flexed his wrist to activate his boswell, but he spoke out loud. “Send an order to the escort ship: I want the Telvarna to return immediately. No, I’ll wait until you have your acknowledgment.”

  He sat back, his eyes staring sightless at no one in the room. “Eight minutes,” he muttered. “That’s radius.” His command would reach the escort very near the time the Telvarna left the region where its fiveskip didn’t work. They would know the outcome in sixteen minutes.

  Then he turned those terrible, grief-stricken eyes Vannis’s way. This was not a man who had been dallying in the easy fashion of most Douloi. The way he had dallied with Vannis herself. She held her breath, beginning to comprehend how very grave a mistake she’d made.

  o0o

  Aboard the escort frigate Emris, the navigation officer said, “Ares plus eight light-minutes, sir,” reported Navigation. “Approaching test point.”

  It was time to back off, then, thought Captain Sheila Tassinuen. Gnostor Omilov had been most specific. They are very sensitive to the emanations of human minds, which is why I want to perform this experiment. You are to stand off at least 500,000 kilometers.

  Strange escort duty, tracking a bunch of Rifters, a pair of brain-burning aliens, a Kelly trinity, and even a cat. But a light-second and a half or so wasn’t a problem for the sensors. Where would they go? They had no fiveskip.

  Tassinuen laid her hand to her console to tab the com for her order when Communications signaled an urgent message from Ares. “Captain, you better see this.”

  The screen windowed up the worried face of Rear-Admiral Anton Faseult. Sheila blinked. Something was very wrong.

  “His Majesty has directed the return of the Telvarna immediately. Terminate the experiment, and do not let them pass radius. We believe they may have a functioning fiveskip.”

  “Navigation!” she snapped.

  ‘We’re already past radius, sir,” the ensign replied. “Telvarna, too.”

  ‘Skip to one thousand klicks, now!” The fiveskip blipped as she continued. “Communications, hail the ship.”

  The screen windowed up the handsome face of the Rifter comtech, just today acquitted of murder.

  “Captain Tassinuen,” he drawled, smiling rakishly. “What a pleasure.” She heard suppressed excitement in his voice.

  She tried a finesse. “There are some problems with the experimental setup. Gnostor Omilov wants you back on Ares for recalibration of the instrument
s.”

  Kendrian’s smile broadened into a soft laugh. “I’m sure we’ll do just fine,” he said, and blanked the screen.

  And a rose of reddish light bloomed against the stars where the Telvarna had been.

  o0o

  The next several hours felt like eternity, but at last Brandon got rid of them. By this time it took concentration to force muscles to cooperate: smile, nod, speak, bow.

  The Omilovs and Fierin Kendrian were the first to take their leave.

  Somewhere, sometime, Brandon would remember this and find it humorous, how obviously uncomfortable Osri was, almost shifting from foot to foot. He sent a revealingly reproachful glance at his father, then was the first out the door—making it plain how little he approved of what had been done, and how glad he was to go.

  Sebastian Omilov was more difficult. “I will be available to talk,” he said, bowing, his hands spread in plangent remorse. “Anytime, when you wish. But you must remember: they were not forced to leave. Whatever they do, it is their choice. Their mission.”

  Brandon made random polite noises, no longer considering his words; Omilov saw that the young Panarch only wanted him gone, and left, head bowed.

  Vannis waited to the last. “Would you like me to stay?” she offered finally, when they reached the door.

  “No,” he said. “Thank you for the offer.”

  She pressed her lips into a thin line, then said unsteadily, “It seems ironic how we profess to understand all the ranges of human experience, and how we have refined them to such a degree that everything we do, from sex to eating, is an art. But it’s not really true, is it? There is no etiquette, no learned wisdom for real love, is there?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was so low she barely heard him.

  “We’re children again,” she said, hiding her crumpled mouth and tear-smeared face with her hands. “And the lessons are in another language, and the pains are all new.”

  “Tomorrow.” He shut his eyes, opened them, and sighed. “Later—tomorrow.”

  She accepted his dismissal and walked out, her head bowed to hide her own grief. Brandon asked Roget to detail a Marine to see her across the lake to her villa, then he turned away, gaze raking the empty room.

  He was alone.

  Exhaustion pressed against his skull, making vision blurry and thought nearly impossible. Only emotion, sprung free of the last of his control, ran untrammeled.

  “Jaim,” he said as he paced down the hall to his room. “Why did you do it?”

  He could not believe that there was not some kind of communication, however arcane. Or was it, after all, so simple: that Jaim, torn between two allegiances, chose the first?

  He shook his head. There was emotion—and there was sentiment. Jaim had made it clear by word and by deed that his allegiance was to both, and that both together made a whole greater than the sum of the two parts.

  It was Vi’ya who couldn’t see it, he thought as he entered his quiet, orderly room. No sign of the passion of the night before; that all seemed far distant—from another lifetime. Jaim had straightened it up with his own hands, in the tense hours before the trial. She wants me, but not the Panarch. She doesn’t see that they are the same man.

  He keyed up his console, and searched fruitlessly among the ever-present morass of mail drops for Jaim’s ID.

  He did see a report from the escort ship. He punched it up and watched the frigate’s captain contact the Telvarna. He heard Lokri’s familiar drawl acknowledging; he recognized excitement in his voice. Freedom. Wasn’t that what Vannis said?

  The Telvarna was visible one moment and then there was only the red skip rose.

  He shut down the console with a swipe of his hand and turned away—and it was then that he saw what he had been seeking.

  No electronic communication, no arcane hints or codes. Just a folded sheet of paper, lying on the bedside table. He sat down, picked it up, and unfolded it.

  The Suneater is her gift to you. Mine will be to bring her back.

  —Jaim

  SIX

  SUNEATER

  Norio was terrified. The swelling form of the Suneater in his viewscreen relay on the Dol’jharian corvette revealed it to be the same material as the Urian engines, with their sinister aura of constrained emotions. And same material as It, too. He could not bear to think of the monstrosity that had leeched Hreem away from him.

  The tempath’s hands scrambled through his travelcache while he muttered thanks to a deity abandoned long ago that he had brought his full pharmacopoeia with him. Shakily he swallowed the Negus extract, compounded with several other powerful drugs to banish the dreams it would cause.

  By the time they reached the station, the cottoning of his tempathy by the extract reduced its expected emanations to a moth-like beat. It fluttered against his mind as the artifact’s strange motile ship bay engulfed the little ship.

  “There will come a day when you will pray to be null . . .” Norio clenched his teeth against the memory. The crew of the corvette had left him strictly alone; he groped his way to the lock as the ship settled to rest. The outer hatch opened to a gray-clad soldier discharging the ship with a long wand. The sharp snap made him jump, a movement he was sure did not escape the gaze of Barrodagh, waiting for him below. The thin whine of a mind-blur tugged at his back teeth, but the extract held it outside his direct consciousness as well.

  The big Tarkans flanking Barrodagh would not look at him. Even through the haze he could feel their fear, informed with a sense of the uncanny that tingled at him. By comparison, the Bori’s mind was flat; Norio guessed that he was dependent on sansouci.

  With drug-blanketed, mild surprise, Norio recognized that even with the Negus holding the distraction of the mind-blur away, he still had some sensitivity.

  Barrodagh forced himself to say, “Welcome to the Suneater, genz Danali.” His teeth ached all the way to his skull and down his spine.

  He was sure this must have been Morrighon’s suggestion to Lysanter, that Hreem’s disgusting mindsnake Norio Danali would perform better if given every comfort, including courtesy. “I think that should include an adequate supply of stasis clamps,” Lysanter had said, knowing that Barrodagh would have to comply.

  More bitter by the day was his regret that he had not understood how successfully Morrighon had simulated predictability on his rise through the bureaucracy; if he’d had any inkling of Morrighon’s capability for underhanded treachery he would have had the misshapen abortion mindripped before Anaris ever laid eyes on him.

  Gritting his way through the labored small talk he imagined to be his duty, Barrodagh was relieved at Norio’s laconic replies. He got Norio as hastily as he could to the quarters assigned him, cut off from strategic locations in the Suneater by high-powered mind-blurs. Norio would go where they intended him to, and when.

  Barrodagh fought to suppress the terror evoked by memory of the station’s convulsions while ingesting—absorbing!—the still-living Li Pung. The Avatar himself had commanded that in the future all corpses were to have their heads cut off and thrown into space, with only the bodies recycled into the Suneater, whose increasingly plentiful Ur-fruit were now furnishing part of the diet of the ordinaries and menials. Barrodagh himself wouldn’t touch them.

  Noting that such an eventuality wouldn’t add much to the station’s mass, Barrodagh left the thin, sallow tempath with a mild admonition about the mind-blurs, courteously put, he thought. He returned to his office, to assign an underling to watch the vid of the tempath’s journey on the corvette from the transfer point outside the sinkfield, and highlight actions of interest. Of more immediate interest was the inventory of Norio’s array of drugs, revealed when he boarded the corvette, that Lysanter had ordered. He made a mental note to inquire more deeply after it was complete.

  A short time later he reported the tempath’s arrival to the Avatar.

  “When will he be ready to attempt activation?” Eusabian demanded.

  “Lysa
nter has requested at least forty-eight hours, to allow for a full physical examination and noetic calibration.”

  “Let it be no longer than that.” The Avatar picked up his dirazh’u. “Tell me more about the Arthelion hauntings,” he said.

  Barrodagh was glad of the sansouci now locked to receptors in his brain. Why was the Avatar bringing that up again? “There is nothing of consequence to add, Lord. The Tarkans are reluctant to patrol in the Palace Minor. But we have a similar problem in Hroth D’ocha; in both places they speak of your indwelling presence.” Now the hauntings should sound less like a trespass.

  “And the phantom? Is it the computer?”

  “Ferrasin thinks not. The system is yielding data daily. The techs have penetrated it deeply.” Barrodagh hesitated. He did not want to accuse the Tarkans—Eusbian’s elite guard—of being less than perfect in the execution of their duties. Yet the fact was that they were hampered by Eusabian’s orders about jac-fire in the upper levels of the Palace Major and Minor.

  “No,” he said carefully, “the evidence suggests they report encounters with the Phantom more frequently than they do encounters with the resistance, who are still only a nuisance.” Like those dogs no one could get rid of, or that name that kept cropping up so often: ‘The Mask.’ Barrodagh was certain it was mere superstitious ignorance. It had to be. A pang shot through his trigeminal nerve. “A ghost is much preferable to an enemy who escapes to plot again.”

  Eusabian gave a short nod.

  Barrodagh paused.

  The Avatar had made his priorities clear before leaving Arthelion. Damage to the service corridors was tolerable, but even a scratch on the elegance of the upper levels, where the Arkads had actually lived and moved, might be punished with agony beyond measure unless justified by actual attack. This order enabled the use of clever traps to harry the Tarkans—and of late, to pick them off. Jesserian, now commander of the Arthelion garrison, wanted the orders changed. He was certain that The Mask was no phantom, but flesh and blood. But there was no proof. “Dektasz Jesserian requests permission to shoot on sight in the top levels of the Palace structures, Minor and Major.”