And the group roared with laughter, Marim right along with them as they moved to the adit and surrendered their ID patches, which permitted them to move freely within the security zones that compartmentalized the engineering section. After a few more zingers back and forth, she promised to see them the next night, and took her leave.
As she squeezed onto the transtube, she scolded herself for sloppiness, but by the time she and a numberless crowd of others were decanted at D-Five, she had made several resolves and was in a sunny humor again. After all, there was nothing stupider than being mad at oneself—the only real ally you could always count on in life.
She found Vi’ya sitting with the Eya’a. The two white-furred beings craned their necks at a weird angle, and both raised twiggy hands to sketch a sign.
Marim sketched the same sign back, grinning uneasily at them until the huge blue-faceted eyes had looked away again.
“Sgatchi!” she exclaimed, eyeing Vi’ya. “Are they always going to do that now?”
Vi’ya’s black eyes studied Marim. “Do what?”
Marim waved her hands. “The signing.”
“They seem to find it reassuring.”
“Well, I don’t.” Marim dug in her pocket and tossed down a wad of scrip. “I don’t like having them talkin’ at me—even sign. It was easier to be around them when they walked by like I didn’t exist.”
“But they have always seen you. And heard you,” Vi’ya added in a dry voice. “They are bewildered and terrified by humans being so many individual motes, moving about randomly. It comforts them to get the same sign back from each individual.”
“So that’s why they do the ‘We see you’ one fifty times a day?”
Vi’ya’s smile was brief as she turned the scrip over. “What’s this?”
“Winnings,” Marim said proudly. “If you convert it—and don’t let me know where it is—then maybe we’ll have something to use when we do bust free o’ this blungehole.”
Vi’ya dropped the scrip onto the table again and leaned back in her chair. “You cheated,” she said.
“Chatz! You been rummaging in my mind?”
Vi’ya’s dark, slanted brows creased with impatience. “Don’t need to. Don’t want to,” she added ironically. “Obvious from the way you threw that down. Also obvious you got caught at it.”
“Well, how else will we nabble us some AU?”
“I’d rather not draw any unwanted attention,” Vi’ya said.
Marim sighed, flinging herself into a chair. “Why is it you don’t ask the Arkad to help us out? They just handed him the whole chatzing station!”
“No.”
Marim slapped her hands on the side of the chair. “You’re being a piss-brained stiff-rump, Vi’ya! What’s the good o’ knowing the biggest nick if we don’t get anything out of him? Heck, he hasn’t even asked to see if we’re still alive, and he owes us. Big.”
“He owes us nothing.” Vi’ya’s dark-fringed black eyes narrowed to lambent slits.
Marim got to her feet, laughing recklessly. “We saved his life!”
“If we ask for favors we draw attention to ourselves. This would be counterproductive. Even dangerous, with the novosti slant against Rifters.”
Marim heard the implied rebuke plainly. “Hey, Nik’s all right. Everybody’s talking about the Whoopee.”
“Until the next atrocity is reported and they forget. In the meantime, the Panarch can do nothing overt about Lokri’s situation, because the insistence on the trial in the first place is little more than a political weapon aimed at him. And we are part of that.”
Marim made a noise of disgust. “So I won’t talk to Nik anymore. Chatz! I’m goin’ to see Lokri.” She began to flounce out, then whirled back, her face a comical grimace. “Can I actually talk to him? Are they listening to everything we say?” A brief flare of humor at the idea of piling on insults against the nicks, and then involving a lot of sex talk, faded when Vi’ya shook her head.
“It is one of their rules. You will not be able to touch him, but your conversation will remain private.”
Marim fumed the short distance to Detention One, where the capital criminals were housed. She noted everything she could about the security measures, wondering privately how in Haruban’s Hell Vi’ya was going to break Lokri out. The place was tighter than Rifthaven during a lockdown.
As soon as she saw Lokri, she felt a flash of guilt. His handsome face was bone-thin and weary, his rakish smile rather perfunctory. He moved with his habitual languid insouciance, but his body was thin. He obviously ate very little anymore.
“You’ve been busy?” he asked, laying his palm against the dyplast window between them.
She put her palm up and touched it to the dyplast opposite his, hiding how much she pitied him. Being under threat of death was bad enough, but to be denied any human contact! She shivered, and to cover it, shook her hair back and fluffed it out.
Sorry,” she said. “Been gambling, tryin’ to net us some cash for when we do skip outa this blunge-dump.”
“You really think we will?” Lokri lifted one fine, arched brow.
Marim shook her head. “Vi’ya says we will. Hasn’t broken a promise yet.”
“This one might be broken for her,” he said, pulling his hand away and rubbing his eyes.
“What about this old Ixvan nick Montrose found? Novosti say he’s hot stuff in Ivory Sud.” Another idea occurred. “Who’s paying him?”
“The new Panarch, I’m told,” Lokri said with a wry grimace. Then he sat back. “Ixvan talks well. Dragged me through the muck all over again. Made the usual noises about getting me justice. But I know very well that an ex-Rifter doesn’t count for much, especially with all the atrocity stories, so I don’t expect he’ll really put up much of a fight.”
Marim snorted. “Right. And I don’t suppose a Panarch counts for much, either. You’re as bad as Vi’ya.”
“She’s a realist. So am I.” He drummed his fingers irritably on his side of the table. “Let’s talk of something else. Tell me about the Suneater run.”
“Sure,” Marim said, surprised. “But I thought Vi’ya and Montrose been here since we got back.”
“Vi’ya has been here twice, and Montrose once. And both of them spent their entire visit combing exhaustively through my fourteen-year-old memories, just like Ixvan.”
Marim was tired of hearing the others speculate about the trial, but this caused a faint flash of interest. “They find anything? I almost never see Montrose anymore, and you know how much Vi’ya blabs.”
Lokri shook his head wearily. “Same thing I’ve thought all along, that random acts of violence don’t include destroying, with a thoroughness that can’t be traced, the victims’ databank.”
Marim whistled. “Your family musta been some kinda cruiser-weights.”
“Not at all,” he said, his long mouth curling. “Kendrian is merely a cadet branch to Vakianos—”
“Shipbuilders,” Marim said, muttering. Every Rifter had seen, coveted—or, if very, very lucky, jacked or stolen—a Vakianos yacht.
“And we weren’t connected with that. We had a license through the Concilium Exterioris to run student expeditions. No yachts. Just exploration ships. Equipped with tech that the Navy and real frontier explorers already considered old.”
“They could have stumbled across something brand-new—”
Lokri interrupted impatiently. “And anything they stumbled on would be in the DataNet before they got home. The license mandated a direct coded download through the first available Node in line of skip. That’s the way those things work in reality.”
“But there had to be something in their comp. You didn’t check?”
Lokri flicked his fingers dismissively. “As soon as I got home and found them dead, I ran a check outside the home system—it had been randomized—and discovered that all their credit had been emptied—in my name. That’s how I knew I was being set up.”
“You didn’t
try to find out who?”
“Of course I tried, whenever I could.” He hesitated, then said in a flat voice, “After a particularly drunken evening I told Markham about it, and he tried, once, as well. With the profits from the first Hreem jack, we bought a worm from a noderunner—a ninth-power chthon, in fact.”
Marim whistled. “So that’s what it was! I didn’t know you could dig that deep with a Riftside worm.” She frowned at him. “You spent all your share, and wouldn’t tell me what on,” she said, pretending to be offended.
Lokri didn’t seem to notice. He got up from his chair and paced the tiny room restlessly, sightlessly, and Marim knew she was looking on long habit. “Of course not. Why? We found out only a little more. Mostly that all the students on that trip later turned up dead or missing. And the nicks nearly nailed us. That deep, the DataNet is as bad as the Rift for danger. You have to go hands-on. And to track down whatever evidence might still exist requires a far deeper noderunner than either of us was.”
Someone like Vi’ya, Marim thought, but she didn’t say it—felt too much like raising false hopes. All this talk of evidence and crimes and so on was a total waste of time. The only way they’d get Lokri free was not by legal methods, but by breaking him out. So she changed the subject. “Your sister . . . you still haven’t seen her?”
Lokri’s mouth was grim. “No.”
“You know she’s disappeared?”
Lokri’s head jerked up, his eyes wide and sea-gray. “Disappeared? You mean dead?”
“No, I mean disappeared. At least, there’s been no body. Nicks’re all gossiping about it. That Archon she was bunkin’ with went off like an engine in supercrit for a while, then suddenly he’s forgotten her. At least in public. He’s now runnin’ with the Harkatsus boy, the one whose father got stiffed during that cabal thing everyone was yammerin’ about before we left Gehenna.”
Lokri ranged back and forth, reminding Marim of a beast in a cage. “What can it mean?” he muttered.
“Probably means she got tired of that pissbrain Archon, and is bunkin’ up with someone else. Gossip about him says he’s not one to cross and he’s got a nasty long reach. If so, who’d blame her?”
Lokri paced back and forth twice more, then dropped abruptly onto his bench, lacing tense fingers through his long black hair. “I can’t think,” he muttered into his palms. “Suneater. Tell me about that. You found it. What’s it like?”
To entertain him, Marim drew the narration out as long as she could. She told him, adding highly irreverent invective, about the journey the Telvarna made in the Navy cruiser Grozniy to the Gehenna system, then about being launched off to the Rift before the cruiser returned to Ares.
“. . . by the time we got there, Firehead was eyein’ one of those Marines, and the Eya’a were gettin’ rizzy. It was a real laugh. Except I missed you an’ Jaim. No one to laugh with. Anyway, after a couple killer long shifts, that crazy old chatzer Omilov got a fix on something. Looked just like a faint red star, with a weird spectrum and no x-rays.”
“Weird spectrum?” Lokri repeated, looking interested.
“That’s what Omilov said. It was a black hole binary—with a fractal spectrum of dimension one-point-seven.”
A faint line appeared in Lokri’s forehead, and he shook his head slowly. Marim stopped, watching him curiously, but he only waved a hand for her to go on.
“He said in that niffy way o’ his, ‘No known process could cause such a spectral signature. It means we’ve found the Suneater.’ So we pulled a TDVSA, and though we nearly fried the engines skippin’ in and out like that, we got ourselves a real clear picture. Real pretty. Gas spinnin’ out into a disc bisecting a red star, sucking the guts out of it, but no polar jets. Omilov figured that’s the Suneater’s eatin’ the polar jets.” She laughed, remembering what followed. “And the Suneater itself was the weirdest chatzing thing: big snarl of tubes ’n what-all, as much as we could make out.”
“You couldn’t get in for a closer look?”
Marim shook her head. “Navy orders.” She wrinkled her nose. “Tell you the truth, I’m just as glad.” She laughed. “Weird enough lookin’—and then there’s the cheerful thought of those chatzing Dol’jharians lyin’ in wait there, probably with a cruiser-load of those torture machines they love so much. Catch me goin’ within a light-year of that place again? Not for all the sunbursts in Rifthaven!”
o0o
Montrose stepped into the Enclave’s kitchen and looked around. Most of the workers stopped what they were doing, except for the other chef, who quite properly kept stirring his sauce.
The apprentices looked up at Montrose with expressions ranging from apprehensive to curious.
“Excellent, excellent,” he said, walking slowly between the prep tables. ‘Those onions could be chopped a degree finer. You’ll want the gorusch to be smooth as cream. Are those the freshest fenuik-herb you could find? They look rather wilted. Wilted means a bitter aftertaste. Try one.” He did not stop to see whether the young man with the pungent collection of herbs followed his order. Of course he would. “Have the wines been brought up for the dinner? I shall act as sommelier for this one,” he added before he went out the door. “The former Aerenarch-Consort is known for her particularity.”
He went out, thinking grimly, And I want to keep an eye on her.
It took four pods for one to show up with enough space for a large man. Montrose used the transport time to shift his thoughts from culinary concerns to those of the clinic.
Between the two jobs he kept very busy, much more than he’d been accustomed to during what he now looked back on fondly as the sybaritic life of a Rifter. True, there were those occasions of extreme danger, usually coupled with periods of tremendous effort and little sleep, but for the most part he had been free to indulge his penchant for fine food, fine music, and expensive sex-partners.
The first two he still had, the last he didn’t, but he was too busy to miss them. Dividing his time between the Enclave and a clinic in the Polloi area, he was at the center of Ares’s activity.
Which enabled him to make his own plans.
The transtube stopped directly opposite the clinic. A babel of noise drowned Montrose as he walked in. Night and day, the place was filled with people clamoring for care. The receptionist smiled at him, saying, “You’ve two appointments, one new, one follow-up. And then there’s that.” He pointed at the crowded waiting area.
“Thank you, genz Kelnar,” Montrose said, making his way to the examining room he usually used. How did the man remain so cheerful and unstressed?
Before he called in his first patient, he windowed up the log for the twenty hours since his shift the day before, and scanned the names and complaints listed there.
He filtered out the usual plethora of contusions, hematomas, simple fractures, concussions, and similar complaints: the stress of overcrowding was provoking fights with increasing frequency.
Left was a mix of traumas, too many of them not accidents. He winced at the report, its affect not diminished by the bald medical terminology, of a man who’d had an eye sucked out of his head during a tussle.
Eight deaths, as well. A cold sensation gripped the back of his neck at one of the one-line autopsy summaries: near-total disseminated intravascular coagulation. Death is Coming; the phrase popped up from his first year of medical education long ago. Poison again. He jumped to the test results and sighed in relief: some idiot had somehow smuggled a Ndel ghost snake—so named for its near transparency—onto Ares, and her bunkies got curious.
Good enough. Then he turned to the long-running neuraimai search he had running, granted him by a place-seeker trying to exploit his connection to the new Panarch, through the logs of virtually every clinic on Ares. That filtered out just about everything, and as usual he thought he saw a pattern, too subtle to make out, in other poisonings and even odder deaths and injuries, none so benign in political terms.
He wasn’t good enough on a computer to pin it
down.
Sighing, he tabbed the console to summon his first patient.
The med history that scrolled up was brief. Female; Navy career officer; atherosclerosis. Now she was complaining of severe angina.
Three years younger than I, he thought as the door hissed open and a short, stockily-built woman walked in. Why didn’t she go to the military medicos? The condition had been diagnosed some time ago. She could have had atherolysis at any time, unlike Sebastian Omilov, whose spastic angina had had a different cause.
He saw at once that she was experiencing the angina right now, and it was serious: pale face, pain-narrowed eyes, clenched jaw, compressed breathing.
As she walked in, one of her hands moved its way up to her shoulder and massaged there.
Glancing at the name again, he said, “Commander Thetris? We’ll start right away. This is serious.”
His mind was already moving ahead to treatment, so at first her words didn’t register. He looked at her, his hand poised above the tray of instruments.
“I said,” her thready voice intensified slightly, “it can wait. Please hear me out.”
“I’m damned if I’ll sit here and watch you die. What can be so important?”
“It is more important than my life,” she said, her pain-hazed eyes steady.
“Look,” he said abruptly, “let me at least relieve the pain. Then you can talk, after which we do something about this.” He touched her left shoulder.
Her brow creased with faint lines above steady blue-gray eyes.
She was quiet while he sprayjected her, including a powerful arterial specific as well as an analgesic; six breaths later, a tinge of color entered her cheeks.
“Now,” he said, “talk. And make it fast, because if I see any more signs of distress in you, I start treatment.”
To his surprise she withdrew a seeker from a pocket in her plain, serviceable coveralls. She moved it around the room, and when she was satisfied there were no narks, she sat down, breathing deeply.
“I saw the Tovr Ixvan story. Thought of going to him. But when I ran a search,” she said, “your name popped up. He came to you. Now Kendrian has one of the top vocats in the Thousand Suns, and the all-powerful Licrosse was yanked off the Reef. Your position at the Enclave is more than it appears. More important, you are a Rifter, which indicates to me there is a chance you might hear me out before calling the authorities. And most important, you are from Timberwell, which means you might want to see justice done.”
The Rifter's Covenant Page 25