They announced beforehand that everyone was to put away their loose items and strap themselves into the nearest chair, which meant whether or not ‘Casta’s connection to the Stream became interrupted was moot; she had to put away the laptop and lock down her eyeball optical anyway.
This should have been an announcement that came much sooner. They’d been exiting Dib’s gravity well for some time, and were now technically at the edge of lower orbit, which should have meant that they were weightless. They weren’t, because the shuttle was using null-grav tech to counteract the weight loss.
Makk’s stomach should have notified him of this, but it didn’t because the null-gravity wasn’t being used to counteract gravity here. It was creating gravity. And that was fine. It felt just like standing on the surface, and he was well-accustomed to that.
Then the engines kicked in and whatever relief Makk felt at not feeling queasy due to the null-grav tech was wiped out by a concern that he’d throw up because of the sudden and drastic acceleration.
That only lasted about ten seconds before they reached the speed they wanted, which was great. Makk was still recovering from a couple of broken ribs, and there was nothing like sudden acceleration to remind him of that.
They touched down on the Lys landing dock a few minutes later.
Two security officers were waiting on the landing for them, along with a third person—presumably Exty Demara. They all stepped aside while Dintae Lornt, Oual, and Itazaer-Ga-Serabom Yattlewin-X disembarked, with Oual stopping to hug Exty on the way by.
“Makk Stidgeon?” one of the guards asked. She was wearing a fitted uniform with some pretty upscale light armor. Both the guards were about twice as attractive as any security guard he’d ever met. He wondered if that was a condition of employment and if so, if it was the only condition, or if competence and discretion were also important.
“That’s me,” he said.
“Elicasta Sangristy?” the other guard asked. Makk was about 50% sure he’d seen the man in a Stream ad for cologne.
“Yes,” ‘Casta said. She was looking past both of them, at Exty, who wasn’t making eye contact.
Makk held out his badge to make it clear that he wasn’t only Makk Stidgeon, he was Detective Makk Stidgeon.
The first guard looked him over.
“No firearms allowed on Lys,” she said.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “Because I’m on Lys, and I’m wearing a firearm.”
“Not here you aren’t.”
“Yes, here. Police officers carry guns. It’s kind of our thing.”
“It’s fine, Derra,” Exty said.
“And you’ll have to turn that off,” the second guard said to Elicasta.
“Makk,” she said under her breath.
“Guys, the conditions of our visit were clearly established before we boarded the Tether,” he said. “Nobody said anything about coming unarmed, or about deactivating Streamer gear and believe it or not, both of those things are for our protection. If Mr. Kev would like to renegotiate the terms, we’ll just turn around and take this shuttle back down again. I don’t mind, and neither does Ms. Sangristy.”
“I kind of mind,” Elicasta muttered.
“No, it’s okay,” Exty said. “I’m a big fan, ‘Casta. Keep it running blue. I’m afraid we’ve got no live pickup here, but you can packet-Stream. Lag’s a few hours. Derra, Aeif, let’s just get to the estate. Our guest is anxious to put this behind him.”
Makk didn’t know what to expect on his first visit to Lys, but what he got definitely wasn’t it.
They ended up in an odd-looking people-mover with massive wheels and a thick dome chassis made of some kind of transparent metal alloy. It made no practical sense unless one was expecting to be attacked from space, which he gathered was an actual possibility.
The assault would have to come from that direction, and not from the surface of the planet, because the Lys estates were built on the starward side.
Space debris, he thought.
They drove down a main street that was covered by a protective shield, so that if they stopped and got out of the car prior to reaching their destination, they’d be standing in atmosphere.
Makk thought if a meteorite punctured that shield, the station would have bigger problems than wondering if the occupants of one of the cars survived.
They couldn’t see inside any of the estates. Somehow, this didn’t matter at all to Elicasta. She was reading the signposts as they went by, calling out family names as if reciting a holy litany. When she came across a particularly exciting one, she’d squeeze his hand tightly.
He knew maybe a third of the names, and couldn’t shake the sensation that they were driving down the main drag in a large warehouse.
“Hey, how do you feel?” Elicasta asked.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re in null-grav here. Is it bothering you?”
“No. It’s holding me down instead of up,” he said. “This just feels like regular Dib gravity.”
They reached the Demara estate and turned in, crossing out of the tunnel that linked up all of the other estates and into…a place where it was currently the middle of the day.
“Well that’s interesting,” Makk said.
“It’s an artificial sky,” Exty said. The car had three rows of seating; she was alone in the second row, with Derra and Aeif up front, while he and Elicasta had the back.
“I imagined it had to be,” he said. “And not that you were wealthy enough to own private suns.”
“Close to the same thing, isn’t it?” ‘Casta said. “I hear you have your own river.”
“Yup. We’re coming up on the bridge over it now. It just goes in a big loop so it’s not a real river.”
Makk considered asking what would constitute a “real” river on a space station, but decided not to.
“There’s a lagoon out back, too,” Exty added. “And a couple of bounce courts over there, past the stables. It used to be a mini zero-ball stadium, but nobody in the family plays anymore. Too bad, I kind of liked the irony, you know?”
“Did the zero-ball field use null-grav tech to counter the null-grav tech of the station?” Makk asked. “Or did you just turn it off locally?”
“The gravity field is all-or-none, so it was the first thing,” she said. “I know, right? Sorta messed up. I wish we could turn it off locally. I’m probably the only one who thinks like this, but I’m kinda interested in a nostalgic Lys. Like, the way it was when Archeo first set all this up. I’ve got a blueprint of what the mansion looked like in perpetual zero-g. Next time we update maybe I can convince uncle Tomy to try it.”
They got across the river, and then the full spectacle of the mansion came into view.
“Is that all real?” Elicasta asked, craning her head for a better shot of the place.
“Yeah, but it’s not as big as it looks. This iteration of the place is a little overcompensating, if you ask me.”
“How many people live here?” Makk asked.
“Depends on your definition.”
“Is there more than one definition?”
“I’ve got fifteen family members living up here full-time and another thirty-two who visit on the regular. I think two or three are here right now, it’s hard to keep track. Plus there’s the whole guest wing. Only a couple of people there, but that could change any minute. Those are all the people we talk about, but look at the size of the place, right? I think our staff headcount is up to sixty.”
“Nita’s sake,” Elicasta muttered. “That’s over a hundred people, and there are two hundred and sixteen other estates. Are you saying there are over twenty-thousand people living on Lys?”
“I can’t talk about the other properties,” Exty said, “but this is the biggest of them. It’s written into the bylaws, actually. Archeo’s last expression of ego. None of the other estates can have a single structure more than eighty percent the size of the Demara estate. We’re at the point now wh
ere if anyone wants to expand, they have to ask us to add a wing first. We didn’t even pay for our last two expansions. Grandpa Archeo was a wily old man.”
They drove past the front of the mansion and around the side, to a staircase that may have been composed of actual ivory leading to a set of doors that may have been plated with actual gold.
Standing at the top of the stairs beside a door being held open by a house servant was Ba-Ugna Kev. Muscular, tall, and nearly bald, Kev was a difficult person to mistake for someone else. He was staring at a hand-held device, the screen’s data reflecting on his glasses. He didn’t look up until the car came to a complete stop.
The guards opened the doors to the car, and Makk got his first whiff of real Lys-grade atmosphere. It smelled like flowers.
Kev looked him up and down wordlessly, and did the same to Elicasta. Then he nodded and walked inside.
“Are we…supposed to follow?” Elicasta asked.
“I dunno, maybe he’s going in to get his bags,” Makk said. “I assume he packed already.”
Exty came up next to them.
“He’s just like that,” she said. “Has this thing about not wasting words on being polite. Pretty sure he’s expecting you to follow him in.”
“I thought we’d be leaving right away,” Makk said.
She shrugged. “He’s paying for the trip. It leaves when he says it leaves.”
They weren’t going to be taking the Tether back down. The shuttle took six hours to reach the top of the Tether, and six hours to go back down again, but that wasn’t where the delay was. Lys was only close enough to the top of the Tether for about thirty minutes every day; taking it back down meant being on board the shuttle during that window, which wouldn’t be open for another nineteen hours.
Because of this, a hired shuttle that would take Kev, Makk, and Elicasta back to the surface. Makk assumed that this private shuttle still had to respect the basic facts of the situation, i.e., that Inimata was only underneath them for a limited period. Clearly, given nobody was in a hurry, he was mistaken.
Another possibility was that Kev had no interest in actually surrendering.
He looked at Elicasta, who appeared as uncertain about going up the steps as he was.
“How’s your big trip to Lys going so far?” he asked.
“I was expecting more debauchery. You?”
“This seems about right.”
“Go on in,” Exty said. “It’s not like an ambush or anything.”
Makk immediately concluded it was an ambush.
“Are you coming?” Elicasta asked.
“No, but I’ll swing by when it’s time to go,” Exty said, “Don’t let Ba-Ugna fool you, he’s actually a sweetheart.”
They went up the stairs—reluctantly, with Makk’s hand on the butt of his gun—and crossed the threshold into a velvet-appointed hallway leading to a wood-paneled study. The furniture in the study looked like it had been there for a while, but there was an entire wall of computer screens that were clearly a more-recent addition.
An oak table split the room in two. It was covered with the pieces of various apparatuses.
Ba-Ugna Kev was sitting in a chair behind the table. He bore the expression of a man who expected the meeting to have started ten minutes ago.
“I’m going to have to ask you to turn that off before we proceed,” he said. He was speaking to Elicasta. “And remove it. Let’s not revisit past mistakes.”
He said it with almost no inflexion in his voice, despite which it sounded like a threat. Elicasta took a half step behind Makk.
“You’re not in a position to make that kind of request,” Makk said. “I’m here to bring you down. If you didn’t want a Veeser in the room for that, you shouldn’t have asked for one.”
Kev sighed. “All right. It will be the demonstration, then.” He picked up a metal lattice from the table. “I don’t know what brand of gear you’re working with, Ms. Sangristy, but I expect it looks something like this?”
She examined what was in his hand.
“Sure,” she said.
“Very well.”
He flicked on the lattice in his hands. The light on one side turned white. “It’s an UnVeeser set, but obviously the same technology,” he said. “Please pay attention.”
He reached across the table for another device: a long metal wand with a piece on the end that looked like a flyswatter. He pointed it at the headgear on the table, from about a mader away. After a few seconds, the light on the gear flickered and went out. Then there was a BANG and a puff of smoke came out of the metal box in the back of the gear.
“I’ve just cooked the hard drive,” he said. “It’s now utterly and completely useless. Irrecoverably. I’ve tested this from a range of ten maders, which is about how far apart we’re standing right now.”
“What…what would that do to someone’s head?” Elicasta asked.
“Not sure. The real damage is to the drive, but it does react poorly in death, doesn’t it? That little pop is why you’ve never seen one of these before. I haven’t been able to adjust it to do what I want without a potentially lethal side-effect, but it does function.”
He put the wand back down on the table and waited. Makk felt like he’d just been caught doing something wrong by one of the Sisters.
“Is this why I’m here?” she said. “So you could threaten me?”
“Not at all. I only introduced the threat after you declined my much more polite appeal. I’ve many things to say to both of you, but I’m not saying any of it for posterity. I also can’t explain why that’s the case in advance of the telling. You’ll have to trust me. Once we’re done, as promised, the three of us will return to the surface. This isn’t a trick.”
Elicasta looked at Makk, then back at Ba-Ugna Kev, and then back to Makk again.
“Power down,” she said to her gear.
“Off the head as well,” Kev said.
“I know.”
She pulled the lattice off. There was a tiny light on the base of the drive that blinked out.
“It’s off,” she said.
“Thank you,” Kev said. “Now step up to the table, both of you.”
They did. He picked up a different device—this one looked like a metal spiderweb in the shape of a bowl, with a stick on the end—and pointed it at each of them.
“Is this to see what we had for breakfast?” Makk asked.
“It’s to make sure you have no secondary recording devices. Don’t read too much into it, I do this to everyone. My words have monetary value.”
The device gave three short beeps, which pleased him.
“All right,” he said, gesturing to the part of the room where there were comfortable chairs. “Who would like a drink?”
Chapter Sixteen
The Demara family had a bottle of Dorabonian rye whisky that was a hundred and twenty-five years old, which made it older than Lys itself. For whatever reason, it was decided that now would be when to break out that bottle. Makk’s first impression was that someone was trying to impress him, but the longer he thought about it, the more it made sense that nobody up there realized the age of this whisky made it a rare thing. There was probably a selection of much older bottles in the cabinet.
It was superb, anyway. It was so good it made Makk angry, because it would be the only time he’d ever get to drink it, and because it would ruin Dorabonian rye for him from now on. It also made him envious of the rich for probably the first time ever.
The bottle and the three rocks glasses were spirited into the room by an actual butler, whose name was Jig. He bowed a lot, called them sir and madam, and acted like this was a perfectly normal circumstance.
Oh, are you being taken into custody now? Very good, sir.
Makk protested to the drink initially, but weakly. The problem was after it became clear that Kev really wasn’t about to have them murdered—or if so, not right away—they did have a little time to spare. And it was obvious Ba-Ugna wanted
to talk. If what he had to say ended up being a confession, it didn’t matter whether or not it was recorded. Makk was a police officer; confessing a crime to him was a big deal. They even had a witness. Sure, she was a Veeser and they were living together so she didn’t necessarily make a great witness, but it was better than nobody at all.
If getting Kev to talk meant sharing a one hundred and twenty-five year old bottle of Dorabonian rye, then that was what Makk would have to do.
They took up seats around the small table holding the bottle, and waited for Ba-Ugna Kev to do something other than enjoy the alcohol. It took a few minutes.
“About two years ago, I met a man,” Kev said. “Polite. Scholarly. Very smart. A Septal. He was far from home. As was I, but in my case, it was trivial; I travel all over the world with regularity. It was at a charity event held at the Wrimmad City temple. Southern Botzis. Raising coin for the Botzos for…something. Irrigation, I suppose. Dunners have always evinced a certain kinship with the Botzo people that I never personally felt, because I think of both as being self-destructively stubborn.”
It was well-known that Ba-Ugna Kev had no love for his native country of Dunn, on the continent of Unak. The Dunn portion of the continent was nothing but desert steppes and powerfully humid rainforests. It was said that the only temperate part was halfway between the two extremes, at an intolerably steep thirty-five degree angle. Dunners lived at both ends of that steep angle—atop the steppes and amid the rainforest—and even if it was barely subsistence living for most of them they were strangely proud of it.
A similar observation could be made regarding the native populace of the island of Botzis. The Botzo people lived in the desert portion of the island—the middle—while being surrounded on all sides by the encroachment of transplanted cultures from other parts of Dib.
There was a possibly apocryphal story that the name of the island came from a misinterpretation of the native tongue. To the Botzos, the word “Botzo” meant “I” or “me”, and the word “Botzi” meant “us” or “we”. It was said that when the first modern explorers—sailors from Wivvol—made landfall on Botzis, they asked, “where are we?” The natives misunderstood the question as being “who are you?” to which they said—in their own language—“us?”
The Madness of Kings Page 19