17
Place, unknown
Time, unknown
There was light.
There had never been light before, and now there was. Red. Yes, that was the name; that was the color. The name gave the color meaning. Red light, tinged with orange. And darker lines of red, almost shadows, wandering across the areas of lightest orange. Lines branching like trees, like rivulets of a stream flowing.
Flowing was the clue she needed.
Those are blood vessels. I’m looking at my eyelids.
She thought about that for a while. Looking at red eyelids meant there was light beyond them. For her to see the veins in her eyelids meant either the light was very bright, or her pupils were fully dilated. Opening her eyes was going to hurt.
Was whatever she might see worth that pain? Or were red eyelids enough for now?
She considered the question.
Amur, Oriente
Oriente Protectorate
9 November 3137
Rikkard knew Lady Julietta was awake.
There were changes on the monitor screens; numbers rising, waves becoming more frequent and more pronounced. Nothing that triggered the alarms. Yet. But soon the medical technicians in the room would notice the increasing activity and would respond in whatever way their protocols required.
He felt the eyes of one of the Oriente doctors on him. Turning his head, he was not surprised to meet the gaze of the short woman, the leader of the surgical team that had done all it could before the Spirit Cat healers had arrived. The Oriente physician had a dark complexion, much darker than any in the Nova Cat genotypes the Spirit Cats had brought to Marik, and spoke with a lilting accent Rikkard found pleasant. More important, she worked with the dedicated passion of a true healer. Within the limits of spheroid medical technology, Lady Julietta owed her survival to the efforts of this woman.
Rikkard nodded, acknowledging his debt.
The Oriente physician returned the nod. Then, not yet noticing the changes in the numbers—as the Spirit Cat medicos also had not—she resumed her study of the portable sensor array.
For his part, Rikkard sat on the wheeled stool he had appropriated with his back against one of the few unoccupied spaces along the wall. Hands flat on his knees, he watched the energy gather around Lady Julietta as she pulled herself toward full consciousness.
* * *
Dr. Salina M’Bai traced the lines of the medical array with her eyes. There was no way she could ever replicate the device, but if she figured out how it was looking for whatever it saw, it could save years of research in developing scanners of this caliber.
Not that technology was her long suit. She was a neurosurgeon by primary training, but over the years she had become a specialist in reconstruction of torn and damaged bodies. Organs, bones, muscles—she could do it all. There was no mystery why she had been the one called when Julietta Marik had been cut down by an assassin’s knife.
Salina—and her team, specialists assembled from a dozen sources—had stabilized Lady Julietta; had kept her alive. Thank God that first security guard on the scene had thought to immobilize her neck. But for all their expertise…
Salina had also been the one to tell Duchess Jessica that nothing else could be done. Lady Julietta could be kept alive indefinitely but, Salina had truthfully said, her recovery was in the hands of a higher power. At the time she had not imagined that the higher power would be the Clans. Do not be blasphemous. The Clans are the tool of the higher power.
Salina had advocated keeping Lady Julietta alive. True, there was plenty of evidence that the neural activity they could detect was only the random firings of a network damaged beyond all hope of repair, but Salina had thought she discerned patterns. Intellectually she knew there were no patterns to conscious thought—every brain was wired uniquely—but to her mind those patterns indicated Julietta was still there; still an identity worth saving.
But until the Clan physicians and their unimagined machines had arrived, Salina had no idea how Julietta could be saved.
I still don’t. But if I can figure out just one of these scanners—
The panel she was looking at suddenly flashed green and a rhythmic beeping filled the recovery room. It took Salina a startled half second to realize what was happening. She beat the Clan medics to Julietta’s bedside by two strides.
Julietta coughed and spat, a dry rasping sound, as she tried to dislodge the drain tube taped to her mouth.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Lady Julietta,” Salina said, beating the nurse at pulling an irrigation line and vacuum hose from their pulleys. “Let me get some water in there, wash your mouth out a bit. Relax, relax, you’re not choking. That tube’s supposed to be there. We’ll get it out in a moment. Let me help.”
Murmuring comforts, Salina directed a gentle stream of water around the interior of Julietta’s mouth, the suction hose pulling the liquid back out again before it trickled down her throat. One didn’t risk the esophagus remembering what to do when the patient hadn’t swallowed of her own volition for more than twelve weeks.
Lady Julietta had stopped struggling with Salina’s first words. She watched wide-eyed as the doctor worked, evidently trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
Most trauma victims did not remember the event, Salina knew. The insult to their system short-circuited the brain before the memory could be filed. It was most likely that from Julietta’s perspective she had fallen asleep normally on the night of August fifteenth, then suddenly jerked awake in a strange place with people she had never seen before shoving tubes in her mouth.
Keeping her voice gentle, Salina recounted the missing events. Ninety percent of what she said would be forgotten, or at least stored without processing. The important part was that someone was there, talking to Julietta, comforting her and caring for her. That would register. That would do the most good.
Salina glanced around at the others in the room. The nurse, pan in hand for catching vomit and looking resentful that a mere surgeon had usurped her position; the Clan medics, two reading screens and one standing by with a handheld scanner of some sort; the Clan big shot, the warrior-type with the spooky eyes who had been camping in the recovery room for the last three days, sitting and doing nothing.
“You,” she ordered the idle warrior. “Go tell Duchess Jessica that her daughter is awake.”
Without a word the man rose and left.
* * *
“They can’t take her.”
“Your Grace, I understand your feelings—”
“How could you possibly?”
“I’m a mother.”
Jessica’s first instinct was to snap off the surgeon’s head. How did being a mother compare to the responsibility of ruling the Protectorate? But before she opened her mouth she realized the other woman was right. She might protest that the possibility of Julietta being held hostage was her gravest concern, but what truly made her blood run cold was the thought of her daughter helpless among the Clan.
“You’re right, of course,” she said with effort. “Forgive me.”
“Think nothing of it, Your Grace.”
The physician’s accent rounded the words, turning “your” to “yore” and broadening the other vowels. Jessica always felt the urge to tell the woman to hurry up and reach the end of her sentence.
“The Clan doctors have skills and technology we do not,” the doctor was saying. “And Lady Julietta is far from being completely healed. She requires weeks, if not months, of observation and therapy. There is a possibility another round of operations may be necessary.”
“Surely you can do the observation,” Jessica said. “I know you must have skilled physical therapists. If she needs further surgery, we can call them back.”
“Your Grace, without their advanced technology we cannot observe accurately. And without accurate and informed observation, we cannot provide the most effective therapy. We may even do harm.” The doctor spread her hands. “The best hope for Lady Julietta’s
recovery lies in her continuing care by the Clan physicians.”
“You mean letting them take her to Marik.”
The doctor didn’t answer, giving Jessica time to work her way through the necessity herself. Her daughter was alive, she was conscious—wasn’t that enough? But Julietta condemned to a life on her back, diapered and connected to tubes, would never thank her for keeping her safe from the Spirit Cats. For not giving her a chance to be whole again.
For a moment Jessica was back in the recovery room, looking down at the shriveled form of her daughter. Her daughter with the oddly luminous eyes—eyes she had never seen before—looking back at her across a great gulf.
What happened to you when you were trapped alone inside your mind? she asked. What—
She did not say “madness.”
A small part of Jessica—a part of her that was small—tried to think how she could turn this situation to her advantage. She crushed the mercenary instinct. This was her daughter. She deserved to be healed.
Besides, said the calculating voice, she’s no use to you in this condition.
Jessica slashed the air with a short chop, batting the cold voice away. This was her daughter. Nothing else mattered.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said aloud, hoping the formal tone masked the fact that she still could not remember the woman’s blasted name from one moment to the next. “You are right, of course. Please see to whatever preparations are necessary for my daughter’s journey.”
18
Marik Palace
Zanzibar, Tamarind
Duchy of Tamarind-Abbey
10 November 3137
Christopher took up position behind the first rank of counselors. He wasn’t exactly in disguise, but his conservative cap, following the fashion favored by the upper class, was tilted to shade his eyes. His frock coat and leggings were equally universal upper-class civilian conservative. He looked every inch a local scion who had legitimate, if peripheral, business in the central chambers of the Tamarind-Abbey court.
Which in a sense I am.
The room, ornate by any standards, was draped in purple with just enough touches of contrasting and complementary colors to keep the effect from being overwhelming. Make that manageably overwhelming. Designed by Ortho the Cold at the height of his grandiose excess, the room had nothing scaled to the proportions of a mere mortal.
The arched ceiling seemed high enough for local weather; windows three stories high seemed proportional. There were nearly a hundred people in earshot of the ornate throne, and half again that many in alcoves along the wall opposite the windows: communication consoles that linked the throne room to every ministry of the Duchy. For all its ostentation, the audience chamber was a working hub of government.
Duke Fontaine had left the Lyran archon’s ambassador to cool her heels for hours before granting her audience. An old-school ploy to remind the visitor who was in power. Judging from the duke’s attitude, Christopher suspected the forced wait had worn him as much as Trillian Steiner.
Fontaine made no effort to appear at ease on his throne. Christopher knew it was the man’s energy rather than the chair’s reputed lack of comfort that twisted his body almost sideways in the seat. The duke’s hands gripped the arms as though he were about to rip them from their mounts as he glared at the main door, waiting to see Trillian Steiner and hear whatever she’d come to say.
Grand Vizier Sha Renkin stood by the throne. But while his duke focused on the approach of the Lyran envoy, he scanned the room, making sure all was in order for the coming confrontation. Christopher winked when the ice-gray eyes met his, going for some personal contact, but the basilisk gaze passed over Christopher without a flicker.
At last the tall double doors to the audience chamber swung inward on silent hinges. An imposing man entered, wearing the weapons-concealing dress-uniform robes of Duke Fontaine’s personal guard, then stood aside. The guard’s bald head and apparent age registered before Christopher made the identification: Roland Billings, Fontaine’s chief of SAFE. But even knowing, he found it hard to connect this obvious warrior with the nondescript man who had hovered at the duke’s elbow.
Clothes really do make the man.
Framed in the doorway was a sleek greyhound of a woman.
Or perhaps Doberman pinscher, Christopher amended as he noted her combat-ready stance. That would make the big blond guy behind her a rottweiler?
Trillian Steiner stood, evidently appraising the room before entering. Christopher recognized the ploy to ensure all eyes were on her. He was careful to keep his own features completely blank as her eyes swept over him.
Finally focusing on Duke Fontaine, she stepped across the threshold and approached the throne with measured strides. Her watchdog kept in close step. Surely he realized his position was symbolic. There was nothing a lone soldier—and the graceful precision of his movements identified him as warrior-trained—could hope to do to defend his mistress when outnumbered an entire planet to one. Still, his stride showed no doubt in either his mission or his ability to carry it out.
Respect, Lyran, Christopher thought in the bodyguard’s direction.
Evidently recognizing the obvious cues worked into the mosaic, Trillian Steiner stopped in the center of the audience area and bowed her head with apparent respect.
“A member of House Steiner here?” Duke Fontaine demanded in apparent surprise. “I would ask why I deserve this honor but after your nation has savaged my Duchy…
“I assume you’ve come to finish your blood-work.”
Surprise almost pulled a laugh from Christopher. His mother would never have started with a preemptive barrage of that caliber; of any caliber. Subtle, Duke Fontaine was not. Or perhaps more subtle than was apparent—going for the shock to see what it knocked loose.
Trillian Steiner was made of stern stuff, he gave her that. Far from flinching at the duke’s booming voice, or snapping back a retort to the accusation, she raised her head as though nothing had interrupted her hollow courtesy.
She fixed her eyes on a point just in front of the duke’s feet, like a lowly supplicant in the days of Ortho the Cold.
“Duke Marik, I have come here at the behest of the archon of the LyranCommonwealth,” she said in a tone that was both respectful and pitched to reach the farthest corner of the audience chamber. Then she slowly raised her eyes to meet Fontaine’s. “It is my hope that you and I may be able to bring an end to these hostilities.”
Be sure all witness your innocent intent, Christopher recognized. Admit no fault and take the high ground. Solid, basic tactics.
Fontaine regarded her for a long moment. Trillian did not waver.
“You people create false pretenses to start a war,” he said, rage in every hard-bitten word. “You invade my nation—a peaceful people—and ensnare us in a bloody conflict entirely of your making. And you now come here and talk of ending these hostilities?”
Christopher changed his mind. Fontaine wasn’t about to yank the arms of his throne from their sockets. He was about to hurl the half-ton chair at Trillian Steiner. A breath, two, and the oldest living Marik brought his rage under control. The tension did not leave his body, but it became controlled; contained.
“Very well, Lady Steiner.” Fontaine’s voice was a sheet of ice over a racing torrent. “Tell your cousin to remove her troops. She started this war, she can stop it right now by withdrawing from my Duchy.”
Good shot, Christopher cheered internally. He glanced around, but everyone was too focused on the confrontation to spare him a nod of shared appreciation. Except Roland and Trillian Steiner’s guard dog. Moving his head in an otherwise still room had earned him a double hit from paired lasers. He smiled his most charming apology and the blank visages returned their attention to the envoy and the duke.
“You were increasing your military presence along the border, Duke Marik,” Trillian said, not conceding a point. Then she spoiled her clean tactics by going historical: “And let us not forget th
at it is the Free Worlds League that has the reputation for crossing that same border and invading our worlds.”
Christopher saw her body English shift as she recognized her misstep. Lunging back to the high ground, Trillian added: “Our actions were aimed at ensuring the sovereignty and protection of our people.”
Fontaine released his death grip on one arm of his throne to wave away her words.
“Trumped-up intelligence,” he snapped. “Outright lies.”
Christopher missed the next few words as he became aware of the Lyran watchdog again. The man was slowly turning his head, no doubt looking out of the corner of his eyes as well. He was scanning the room, evidently taking inventory of who was present. Of course her bodyguard would be her intelligence man. Memorizing faces, making note of which worlds were represented and which were not.
Could the Loki agent—for that is what he was suddenly sure the man was—recognize Christopher? The Oriente Protectorate was too far from the LyranCommonwealth to be a direct threat or reasonable target. But even if the man did not recognize him now, he would no doubt review an image database—compare his memory with records of known Mariks—and spot Christopher. Lord knew the face of Hellion Hughes had been splashed across enough news feeds.
Realizing it was probably futile—after all, the man had looked directly at him a moment before—Christopher shifted his weight slightly. Not quickly, and not much, but enough to eclipse the Lyran with a heavyset judge’s crested hat of office. Flexing his knees while keeping his back straight, he reduced his height by a hand span. Legs conditioned to hours on a snowboard could hold that position for days without a quiver. Christopher doubted the usefulness of his impromptu disguise, but had no choice. He did not want the Lyrans considering the Oriente Protectorate a player—a potential threat worthy of attention—in their current conflict.
To Ride the Chimera Page 9
