A Prison Unsought

by Sherwood Smith

  Once again he inclined his head. “There will be changes one day.” The soft-spoken words carried all the resonance of foreknowledge. “For now time speeds, and we have much to do. You must know that I attempted to establish communication with the Eya’a, at the request of the High Phanist. I believe I succeeded, though the attempt nearly killed me.”

  And from their distant vantage, they sent the thought: This one makes hand-before-the-face words for Eya’a, for the ones-among-many. We celebrate new word-nexi.

  “Nivi’ya,” she murmured.

  “‘Another who hears.’ Does this mean they accept me as a kind of pet? Their reactions are difficult to interpret.” He paused, smiling, as if offering behind the joke a chance for her to elucidate on Eya’a psychology, but she remained silent. Then he went on, “Based on that encounter, I am attempting to devise a sign-language to enable them to communicate necessities to the humans around them as they move about the station.”

  He did not ask her why she had not attempted anything of the sort herself, nor did he query the depth of their communication level. She sensed that just as she had, he concealed things from her. She could hardly complain. “I shall do my best,” she said.

  “Good.” He switched to Uni. “Let me explain my initial thoughts, and if you will corroborate or correct, I believe we may have a measure of success.”

  o0o

  Eloatri finished her meditation, took three cleansing breaths, then unfolded her legs with the ease of decades of habit. She rose to her feet.

  She sensed her secretary, Tuan, still deep in meditation. The pervasive atmosphere of tension throughout Ares had affected them all.

  Before her walk in the garden she decided to steel herself to duty and check her drops. She tabbed the control on her boswell that had shut off the neuraimai triage dumps, and sorted rapidly through the IDs and headers of the messages.

  She paused at an invitation to a party, at the Ascha Gardens, from Tate Kaga. What was the old nuller up to now? The image of the Digrammaton burned into her palm tingled.

  Prophetae, shaman, trickster—he was utterly unpredictable. He’d been a longtime friend to Tomiko. When Eloatri first met him at the reception celebrating the arrival of the Aerenarch, he’d looked at her in silence, then said only, “He chose well.”

  Eloatri decided that this was one function she wouldn’t miss for anything. In spite of the disorienting effects of the Gardens’ layout. She tabbed her acceptance, then forwarded the other messages to Tuan to deal with, and escaped into the garden.

  There she stood for a time listening to the waterfall and the sweet tang of hidden wind chimes, until her boswell chimed: Manderian had returned.

  Eloatri crossed the tiled courtyard to the reception chamber to welcome the huge Dol’jharian gnostor from Synchronistic Perceptions and Practice.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “We have much to discuss,” Manderian replied.

  At her gesture of invitation, he followed her to the garden.

  All the way back from Detention Five he had had to resort to cleansing breathing. His nerves felt unsheathed to the breeze carrying wafts of coolness from the waterfall, and the busy chitter of unseen creatures. He found these gentle evidences of life soothing, and finally he could speak.

  “I attempted to communicate with the Eya’a,” Manderian began, “as you requested.”

  “And?” she prompted gently, disturbed by the narrowing of pain in his eyes.

  “Forgive me, Numen. It was . . . almost overwhelming. I was only the second human with whom they have exchanged . . . concepts.” He shook his head. “It is difficult to describe. They do not, even now, fully understand that each of us is a monad. I believe that this is the result of their first peaceful contact being with the Kelly, whose psychic interconnectedness is comprehensible to their own hive mentality.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Nothing, and too much.”

  He fell silent again, staring at the ground, his hands pressed palm-to-palm between his knees. Presently he looked up again. “So I heeded your advice and visited the one they call Vi’ya. With her cooperation, I have devised some very simple gestural semiotics for them to use with other humans—you will have found an explanation among your drops.”

  Eloatri nodded.

  “But for the most part, their communication was a maelstrom of images and emotions with only the most tenuous connection to anything I could understand. I wonder, almost fear, what the years of association with them have done—are doing—to Vi’ya.”

  “You think she is in danger?”

  “Perhaps. I cannot judge. The woman and the sophonts are an authentic Primal Contact, a nexus in the collision of two noospheres. They never had so protracted a contact with the Kelly; that was just long enough to establish a possible peaceful coexistence. Vi’ya’s and their extended association is the classic Meeting of the Archetypes being researched by the Joint Conference of the Colleges of Xenology and Archetype and Ritual.”

  He saw her confusion at his terminology. “I have heard you speak of a ‘Hinge of Time.’ That is much the same idea. The psychic energies of human and Eya’a are blending, with an echo of the Kelly, not only from long ago, but brought to present association via the youth Ivard.”

  That was confirmation of the impressions she received when the Kelly physician-trinity had retrieved their Archon’s genome from Ivard’s flesh.

  “And one more thing,” Manderian said, “one image that repeated: a small silver sphere, with an impression of great power.”

  Eloatri nodded, unsurprised, but the Dol’jharian’s next words stunned her. “The Eya’a seem to believe that it, or perhaps more likely, some component of it, is here, on Ares. They are trying to reach it.”

  She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Then they know about the captured hyperwave.”

  “I believe so. I do not know what they want with it.”

  She took a deep breath. The Dreamtime had bidden her follow these people, a spiritual quest that was drawing her ever deeper into the politics of Ares and the prosecution of a desperate war. Nyberg and Omilov would have to be told.

  For now she put the thought aside. She still had her own concerns, and, in the balance of Telos, the fate of one sentient being weighed as heavily as that of an entire polity.

  “Please tell me more about your meeting with Vi’ya.”

  “Well enough,” he said. “She does not trust us, as you warned. She has little enough reason to do so, yet she did help me with the semiotics.”

  “Did she teach you how to shield the effects of these encounters?”

  “Perhaps in time. I wish we could test her,” he said. “But it would be a mistake now to try. For the moment, I can tell you this: I am reasonably certain that she is very strong for a tempath—stronger, indeed, than I ever was, and in fact her talents border on telepathy.”

  “Then?”

  Manderian nodded. “She does not seem to require proximity to communicate with the Eya’a, as I do.”

  Eloatri sorted the immediate implications. “Then she, too, knows about the captured hyperwave?”

  “I am certain of it.”

  “Well.” Eloatri rubbed absently at the burn scar on her palm, then dropped her hand. “For now, tell no one of this. I will pursue it in my own fashion. You must see if you can win her trust.”

  Manderian took this for his dismissal and withdrew to recover, and to meditate.

  Eloatri stayed where she was, meditating on what she had heard. The military, she knew, were bound under strict oaths of secrecy, but she was not so bound. What bound her was just as strict, if not more so, but equally difficult to articulate.

  Yet trust obliged her to act. First, she must speak to Omilov, whom she had seldom seen since Nyberg had given him space to set up the Jupiter Project. He, too, was a Hinge of sorts, a critical one in the destiny of Brandon vlith-Arkad. This would be a good opportunity to probe the extent of his awareness, unde
r the cover of an official visit.

  o0o

  Augmented priority, future imperfect, threat level two, deferred linkage to . . .

  The hyper-Tenno glyphs flickered out, and Osri cursed mentally as the tenuous web of understanding he’d laboriously discerned vanished with them. He’d had no reason to go beyond the Academy basics in tactical semiotics—the addition of the new non-relativistic symbolism slowed him to near-imbecility. It was fortunate that as his father’s liaison to the Navy for the Jupiter Project, he wouldn’t be called upon to interpret them in real-time.

  The young sub-lieutenant in the chair next to him sat there relaxed, her blunt, dark features in repose as she watched Captain Ng resume her stance in the front of the seminar room. The Tenno were obviously no strain for her. Not surprising, since Nefalani nyr-Warrigal had invented them after Grozniy’s first encounter with the non-relativistic Urian weaponry and communications with which Eusabian had equipped the lead units of his Rifter fleet.

  In the front of the room, Ng addressed the assembled officers. “That will be all for today. The simulators are set up for you; you’ll need to eat, sleep, and breathe these new Tenno to master them in whatever little time Dol’jhar leaves us. Dismissed.”

  Osri stood up to follow Warrigal out, but to his surprise Captain Ng approached them both, accompanied by a very tall, thin lieutenant commander. His nametag read “Nilotis;” his attenuated frame, ebony skin, golden-red hair, and green eyes identified him as a member of one of the bomas of Nyangathanka. He walked with the care of a man newly out of the chirurgeons’ hands—as indeed he was.

  “Lieutenant Omilov,” said Ng, with a nod at Warrigal. “What do you think of Lieutenant Warrigal’s hyper-Tenno?”

  Honesty had once been Osri’s moral high ground. Now it was merely the truth; his short experience with Warrigal had convinced him that she was even more socially awkward, and direct, than he. “They give me a headache, sir. I’m a navigator, not a tactician—I’m glad I don’t have to deal with them in real-time.”

  As usual, Warrigal reacted with a somewhat perfunctory smile, and that after a fractional beat. Osri imagined her adding his words to her internal accounting, attended by no more emotion than one would expect for ranks of numbers, then responding as calculated.

  Ng’s expression made it clear that she heard that reaction frequently. Osri felt somewhat better.

  Then she surprised him again. “Will you join us for lunch? I believe you have a couple of hours before your next class.” Her phrasing made it not quite an order.

  “Of course.” He was only a student for the Tenno seminars; his next class in fivespace navigation he could teach in his sleep.

  Ng led the way to the nearest officers’ mess, followed by a comet tail of junior officers. She moved like a dancer; Osri remembered the unknown young woman who’d seduced him after they’d liberated Granny Chang’s habitat from the jackers, and suppressed the memory forcibly. This was Margot O’Reilly Ng, hero of Acheront and Arthelion, a Polloi who’d blasted her way to the top of the captains’ list by sheer ability—aided by the quiet patronage of the Nesselryns.

  And Nesselryn is cousin to Zhigel. Was this invitation political in nature? Osri hid his surge of disgust. That was a silly question—everything on Ares was political. At least the connection was on his father’s side. Inwardly he winced at the thought of his mother descending on Captain Ng, demanding preference for him “for the Family.”

  Walking next to Lt. Omilov, Warrigal reshuffled what she now called her “L-6 Tenno,” that secret tactical semiotic system that was her lifeline to the emotions and social interactions she could not intuit. She’d invented it to track the expressions, postures, and movements of others so that she could interpret them enough to know how to respond.

  Osri Omilov’s disgust had been relatively easy to detect. She had learned during their tutoring sessions that he shared her dislike of politics, although certainly not for the same reason: the atypical neurology that made her socially blind and therefore incompetent to participate in either Warrigal Family or Court politics.

  The other officers were more difficult, and as they reached the open door to the mess the emotions of everyone in the group peaked and scrambled all her calculations.

  As they reached the door to the mess, Ng slowed so abruptly that Osri almost ran into her. Tension radiated from the rest, except for Nilotis, who laughed softly as they all surveyed the full-depth holo wrapped around the bulkheads inside the commissary: a dizzying depiction of space, with a pitted asteroid in the foreground. Nearby a battered battlecruiser with the Sun and Phoenix emblazoned on it was frozen in the act of launching a sortie of lances at a point of light gleaming against the stars. Behind the lances a frigate veered past the asteroid, its radiants flaring, fluorescing gases spewing from a deep gash in its bow.

  Warrigal saw from her internal tenno that Lieutenant Omilov didn’t understand the image. She forced herself to touch him hesitantly; that in itself was difficult, and the L-6 implied that he felt much about social touch as she did. “Acheront,” she whispered. “That’s the Flammarion, Captain Litvak-Liu, sortieing against the Blood of Dol.”

  Then the frigate was the Tirane, thought Osri, captained by the young ensign Margot Ng, the only officer left alive on the bridge after the ship had been ripped by the edge of a ruptor bolt from the Dol’jharian flagship. She’d shepherded the lances to the crippled battlecruiser, fending off its missiles while betting that its ruptors wouldn’t come back on-line too soon.

  She’d won her bet, a promotion, and the Karelian Star—the youngest officer ever so decorated.

  Ng laughed and turned to Nilotis and Warrigal. “I wondered what you were up to.”

  “Broadside O’Reilly,” the tall lieutenant commander said as they found a table. “Scourge of Dol’jhar.”

  Ng’s smile turned grim. “It wasn’t as easy, the second time.”

  Ng lives in uniform. Osri’s interest in the captain sharpened. He was inclined that way himself.

  A slight change in posture drew his attention back to Nilotis, whose lack of overt reaction revealed his Douloi origin, but Osri saw in him a discomfort indicating awareness of personal trespass. Warrigal, as always, reacted a bit late, her eyes twitching minutely to and fro, as if in waking REM sleep. Surely she doesn’t use a visual neural feed from her boswell. Almost no one could avoid flinching when something popped up in their visual field that wasn’t in consensual reality, so boswells had been audio-only for centuries, and any special vidtech versions tended to be crude by comparison.

  Then the captain touched Nilotis’ arm. “Forgive me, Mdeino. There’s no call for you to share my ghosts. You, too, Nefalani. Here, sit with me.”

  Her use of their given names was an indirect apology, which put the conversation on a more comfortable basis—not personal, maybe, but informal. She guided them to sit on either side of her and motioned Osri to sit across from them. Osri’s shoulders tightened; he felt the covert and not-so-covert gazes from the other officers in the room.

  Ng indicated the holo. “It was a wild ride, and you’ve done a great job reconstructing it.” She laughed. “At least it looks like you have. I sure didn’t see it that way!” She gestured to Osri. “But, from what I’ve heard, it can’t have been as wild as your flight from Charvann. You really outran a Rifter destroyer using atmospheric braking and an ablative to bring a courier in with insufficient delta-V?”

  Osri paused while the steward took their orders. “I actually had very little to do with it. The Aerenarch was piloting.” He hesitated, aware of the absence of the old anger whenever he’d thought back to those terrible experiences. They seemed remote, as if they had occurred to someone else a lifetime ago.

  His ears burned when he noticed the complete silence.

  Ng smiled encouragingly, implicitly opening their circle to everyone within hearing. Nilotis leaned forward. Warrigal simply sat there.

  Osri thought, Get it over with. “My suit’s
med circuit oranged me out about halfway through the flight, anyway.” He tried a smile. “Probably for the best. I don’t know that the suit cache could have handled it, otherwise, when we made that last skip just outside of the gas giant’s radius.”

  Several people hooted with laughter—even Warrigal gave a soft chuckle half a beat after everyone else.

  And then came the inevitable questions. As the waiters brought in the food, he looked at his fast-cooling plate, trying to be as succinct as possible in laying before them the entire story of their flight from Charvann. But the more he tried to summarize, the more specific the questions became.

  “The L’Ranja what?” Sub-lieutenant Ul-Derak asked.

  “The L’Ranja Whoopee,” Osri repeated. “They said that Markham and Vi’ya had figured it out several years before.”

  Warrigal’s tenno responded to a rustling of whispers, a tightening of hands and jaws and eyes at the mention of Markham vlith-L’Ranja.

  Tang leaned in with the ease and assurance of one who had always been popular, always knew what to say and when to say it. “So they used the ship’s teslas to hold them just off the S’lift cable while they accelerated to orbit, so the Dol’jharians wouldn’t zap them?”

  “Right. Only the Dol’jharians did—I mean, they tried.”

  Ng paused in cutting her meat. “The Node was gone when we got to Arthelion. There was a lot of speculation about what might have happened.”

  Osri had taken a quick bite. He swallowed painfully when he saw everyone waiting. “The Fist used its ruptors. We skipped out right then, but when the ruptor hit the hohmann launch cable, it must have yanked the Node right out of orbit and shredded it at the same time.”

  “Didn’t they know about the emergency disconnect?” someone asked.