“He is somewhat less effective away from his own domain,” Srivashti agreed, signaling his willingness to sacrifice Torigan if necessary, and Hesthar relaxed fractionally. But she needed more.
Srivashti stood up and moved to replenish her glass. “He does have his strengths, one of which is tenacity,” he said.
The remark brought a stain of red along Hesthar’s thin cheeks. She glanced at him, a look so full of loathing she looked away quickly again, back at her drink, and as Srivashti waited, she flickered another glance, snake-like, at Felton.
Srivashti caught that quick, covert glance and hid his disgust. Had they been playing with their religious foolishness again? Hesthar really seemed to think it would give her power, and for all her vaunted far-sightedness did not appear to perceive that he permitted Felton to indulge it only to monitor her.
When she spoke again, it was to alter the subject. “Stulafi’s team is probably adequate, but I believe that the more aid we give him, the better the outcome for us all.”
“The novosti?” Srivashti said. “It’s you who is feeding 99 all the Rifter data, is it not?”
“A public service,” Hesthar said with her thin, smug smile. “Their ratings are high—higher than 25’s, with their contrarian attitude. Who does that Cormoran fool think they will get as patron?”
“They don’t need one. Contrariness gets them good ratings,” Srivashti said.
Felton bowed and slid noiselessly from the room. When he returned with Torigan, Hesthar was talking of Privy Council politics.
They’d been there for some time, Torigan thought as he entered to the sound of her voice. Irritation surged at his conviction that they’d been talking about him. “What have you decided?” he said, hoping to sting them with his irony as he sat down.
“Merely that the air in the station is lamentable these days and that Hesthar prefers to drink Vilarian Cloud to the Negus.”
“It’d be madness to drink Negus,” Torigan said with a snort. “Unless you have the time to spend a night gibbering about flowers growing out of hats and other nonsense. I certainly don’t.”
“True: you’re a very busy man,” Srivashti said, bowing. “Will you honor us with a report?”
When Srivashti went formal like that, it was a sure sign he was annoyed. Probably at Hesthar; Torigan smiled privately at the thought. She kept looking around at the chatzing yacht like she could hardly wait to start redecorating it. “I feel that the trial will be a triumph,” he said. “Hesthar warned me that someone was digging deep in the Net—” He bowed in her direction. Better throw a compliment the ugly snake’s way—she had a damn long reach these days.
Hesthar inclined her head, like a logos-loving kyriarch.
“And I’ve put together the best prosecution team ever seen in that Kamera. I’ve got the judges covered, all the data from the murder site, everything in the Net on Ixvan’s tactics, plus a sizable datafile on Kendrian’s activities as a Rifter, and Chomsky is foaming at the mouth to get her hands on those. She’s still angry about that chatzing Whoopee story 25 put out.”
“You know that Ixvan is running the defense solo,” Srivashti said.
Torigan laughed. “Well, the Rifter can’t afford anything better, can he? And if the Panarch buys him a team like mine, it’s as much as admitting complicity in his guilt, and he knows it. He’s looking the other way, and Ixvan solo is as much as an admission that we’ve won before it starts.”
“I do hope you are right,” Srivashti said.
“I have to be,” Torigan said, sitting back. “There’s nothing for them to find that I don’t let them have, and all of it is damning. It’ll be a very good day for us. A very good day.”
Hesthar raised her glass to them both and drank it off.
o0o
When Jaim answered the Panarch’s summons, he found Brandon seated before a comscreen showing the wizened face of Tate Kaga.
“I shall expect you, then, young Arkad,” the old nuller said, and the screen blanked to a pleasant abstract pattern.
Brandon swiveled his chair around and stood up. “You’ve never been to Tate Kaga’s palace, have you?”
Jaim shook his head. He still didn’t understand the nuller’s place on Ares, or in the larger field of Panarchic politics. All he knew was that Tate Kaga was very likely the oldest human being in the Thousand Suns, and he took an inordinate interest in Brandon Arkad.
“I’m going to have a talk with him,” Brandon said. “Do you come with me, or shall I vanish and make this visit solo?”
“I will go,” Jaim answered.
Brandon was silent on the way to the spin axis, leaving Jaim to his own thoughts. Jaim had learned that Tate Kaga had united Vi’ya and Brandon on the night of the cabal’s attempted coup—almost as though the old man thought that link as important as, or more so, than Brandon’s political standing. Jaim didn’t know that he disagreed. But he had been with Brandon for months now, seen him against almost every conceivable background, from Rifthaven to the drawing rooms of Ares. How had Tate Kaga, who had talked to Brandon perhaps one half-hour total, and who had met Vi’ya only once, arrived at the same conclusion?
Their arrival cut short his thoughts. Jaim looked around in wonder as a gee-flat carried them swiftly from the transtube nexus into a congerie of bubbles hovering amongst the huge structural members of the spin axis that evidently formed the nuller’s home. Far below, seen between the diffusers, the bright thread of a stream glinted from the surface of Ares; nearby, Jaim saw the scars of construction, brown wounds in the verdancy of the oneill.
When the gee-flat stopped, a bright cloud of tiny birds, their wings extended only when changing direction, swirled around their heads. Brandon pointed toward the largest bubble and pushed off, propelling himself toward it by slapping at the cables arrayed like a spider’s web all around them. Jaim followed.
The room Brandon led them to was disorienting, and Jaim’s initial reaction was dislike. A large platform of some mossy plant spangled with little yellow flowers extended like a wall across from the entry; small spheres were poised, stationary, at random intervals throughout the space. Music whispered in the air, too faint to grasp consciously.
Odd polygonal viewscreens were affixed to all the interior surfaces, displaying slowly changing human faces. Jaim couldn’t be sure, but some of them seemed familiar—a few echoed Brandon’s bone structure. The faces were aging, from childhood to maturity. Some were then replaced by new faces, while others reversed time’s arrow, regressing to youth again.
“Ho! The Arkad and his Rifter shadow.”
Jaim blinked. He’d not heard Tate Kaga approach—the old man just popped up from behind the wall of moss. He had no gee-bubble. The nuller pulled himself down onto the moss and motioned to them. “Join me.”
The moss was prickly on Jaim’s palms; it evidently had minute hooks in it, for it grabbed his clothing and held him lightly. He seated himself at an angle to the other two, leaving Tate Kaga and Brandon facing each other.
They sat in silence for a long time. Jaim knew nuller courtesy: Tate Kaga’s orienting the meeting to a common surface was a concession to gravity-bound expectations.
Finally Brandon spoke. “When I was young, I built a ghost in the Palace computer, to torment someone. It never appeared directly to him, but only in the periphery of his vision.”
Tate Kaga smiled but said nothing.
“Here on Ares, I seem to be haunted in similar fashion, but not by a ghost. We met the night of the cabal’s attempted coup; Vi’ya saw you in the DataNet; Tovr Ixvan reported an interesting encounter. I rarely see you face-to-face, but you are always there on the edges of my vision.”
“Do you feel it as a gadfly’s sting, then?” The nuller’s chuckle was like the fall of pebbles into a dry gully.
“I had no cause to, until I saw the chip of the Enkainion that the laergist Ranor brought to Ares. Before he was killed he gave it to Fierin, who gave it to Vannis, and thence to me.”
But if it had been Tate Kaga at the Enkainion, then he had known all along about Srivashti, Y’Talob, and al-Gessinav—and had said nothing. Even as they had plotted to remove Brandon from the succession. Even now, as Ares careened toward disaster. And misprision of treason was itself treason.
The nuller did not answer the Panarch’s unspoken accusation. Instead, he waved one stick-thin arm at the walls around them, with the faces slowly evolving on the viewscreens. “Do you like my meditation room?”
Brandon looked around. Jaim watched his focus shift; the faces seemed to all be looking at the Panarch, and he at them.
“I knew them all,” Tate Kaga said. “Some built monuments, in stone or metal or human minds. Others left no trace, save fading echoes in the DataNet.” He pushed off from the platform, slowly rising into the air. “They all died, swept away like dust in the wind. I could not change that.”
Jaim watched the faces during the ensuing silence. How many lives had Tate Kaga touched? Was there any facet of humanity he had not seen, in a life which spanned almost a third of the Exile?
The nuller’s motion took him up to one of the screens, from which a woman’s face appeared to watch them. Her smooth, youthful skin slowly gathered lines of experience, aging into even greater beauty, her eyes deepening with hard-won wisdom. The nuller extended a finger to touch the screen gently. Age finally conquered beauty, her cheeks sank in, her hair withered to wisps of gray, and she faded away, to be replaced with a child’s face that echoed faintly the lineaments of her features.
Tate Kaga caressed the screen, the motion spinning him slowly about to face them.
“I learned to wait.”
The Panarch stared at his empty hands. “Do that which consists of no action, and order will prevail,” he said finally.
The nuller’s cackling laughter was shocking, holding pain and merriment in equal measure. “Hah! Carved in stone that is, on Lao Tse. You must live it. But there’s more, and worse.”
Brandon waited.
“Do you understand the fiveskip?” the nuller asked.
The Panarch shook his head.
“Yet you let it carry you from star to star.”
“I don’t have time to master it; there’s too much else my position demands I know. Others understand it, and I trust their understanding.”
Tate Kaga smiled, and the weariness in that smile struck Jaim like a blow. The old nuller looked every bit his age.
“Just so. You don’t have time.” Jaim heard the emphasis, and the narrowing of Brandon’s eyes betrayed its impact on him as well.
“I have lived long. Now I make the wind,” Tate Kaga said. “Some stand against it, some ride it, and some are swept away. Do you trust my understanding?”
Brandon unfolded his legs, the motion pushing him into the air. He stilled himself with one of the little spheres, hanging opposite Tate Kaga. Slender and strong, he looked massive next to the frail nuller, but to Jaim’s eyes the balance of power was equal.
“It seems I must,” Brandon said.
Tate Kaga let out his breath in a gusting sigh. “I promised Burgess that I would guard his progeny as my own.” Tate Kaga’s voice slowed, husky with old pain. “To mine I made another promise. Very soon now, I will fulfill them both.”
o0o
This was the second time the Telvarna’s crew had all been called together. Jaim was late, and Montrose with him; they’d both had to provide coverage for their jobs.
They arrived at D-Five to find Marim lying on the couch cradling an injured arm, her face puffed with bruises and lacerations. Lucifur lay under her feet, a huge tan-striped pillow with sapphire eyes.
Montrose moved straight to Marim, ignoring her protests, and checked limbs and eyes, then he sat back on his heels and grinned at her. “Caught cheating, eh, rock-rat?”
Marim started up in protest. One blackened eye remained closed, but the other rounded in honest outrage. “No,” she howled. “This time I wasn’t. Some drunks just wanted to duff a Rifter, and I was it.” She finished in a pitiful voice, then added gloomily, “At least three of ’em look worse than I do.”
Everyone laughed. “Huh!” Marim flounced back, wincing, and Luce lifted his head, sending her a sleepily reproachful look. “Ow,” she added under her breath when some unseen bruise twinged.
Vi’ya leaned over Ivard’s chair, her hands on either side of its back. “Jaim. Montrose. Is there a hardship in being here now?”
Montrose grunted. “There’s a hardship in every moment of existence on this benighted habitat. But things’ll hold without me.”
Jaim shook his head, considering what might underlie the question.
Vi’ya said, “Then let us begin. Marim, Ivard, some of this will be new to you: the evidence against Lokri appears to have been false. There is a good chance he will be vindicated, enough that I have decided to abandon the plans to extricate him by our own means.”
Which was the first I have heard of it, Jaim thought, and knew he had the underlying query now: to whom did his allegiance belong? To Vi’ya or to Brandon? Will she accept that it is twofold?
Montrose whistled. “They would have cut you down like a lazplaz through paper.”
“Maybe,” Vi’ya said, smiling slightly. Her black eyes narrowed with cool challenge. “And maybe not. Have you forgotten how many similar jacks we’ve pulled off?”
Montrose grunted, shaking his head.
“I will restate: those plans have been abandoned. Yet there is this. The only part of the plan we had acted on was the procurement of the parts necessary to restart the engines. But two weeks ago the regular inspections ceased, accelerating our work. We are now only an item or two short, and that lack can be eradicated quickly if we must.”
“Ceased?” Montrose queried.
“I suspect there are those who would be glad to see us leave.”
See you leave, thought Jaim, remembering Vannis’s face.
“But now we have an opportunity before us that I had not looked for.”
Ivard looked up soberly. Jaim wondered what was going on in the youth’s head.
“Manderian came to me last night with a request. Gnostor Omilov desires us to perform another experiment for him, this time from space outside the system and away from the chaos of psyches here. I suggest we agree, but once we are past radius, we leave.”
“Yes!” Marim sighed. “Rifthaven and treasure, here I come!”
“Not to Rifthaven,” Vi’ya said. “Marim, you must consider. Anywhere we show up we are bonus points for both sides. What I propose to do is to go to the Suneater and activate it. And take it over.”
Silence met this, and then came Marim’s high, keening wail: “Why-y-y-y-y-y-y?”
“Because there is nowhere else for us to go. I believe we are strong enough.” Jaim heard the augmented plural. She was referring to the Unity, as Eloatri had called them.
But Marim was deaf to that subtlety. “To our old hideout,” Marim protested. “Or we can even stay here and sit tight, until their blunge-eating war is finished.”
“And wait for someone else to start that station?”
Marim threw up her hands. “If they come after us, then we escape! But not to that Sunchatzer. We’ll never get out of that alive.”
“What’s the choice?” Montrose asked.
“Go or stay. The Eya’a, of course, are ready to leave now. They hate this place. They are hibernating for longer and longer periods of time. I spoke to Portus-Dartinus-Atos before this meeting, and threy are willing to go. Lokri wants nothing more than to be gone from Ares. Ivard?”
The youth had paled, but he nodded jer
kily. “Count me in. Nothing keeping me here if the Kelly go. Except for Tate Kaga,” he amended in a low voice.
Montrose frowned. “One request first. I’ve been treating someone who will soon be at large, and since we’re short a crew member . . . .”
Vi’ya turned his way. “Brandon explained about her. I spoke with Thetris a day ago, and she will resign her commission tonight. Tomorrow she joins our crew, and she’ll run Fire Control. She knows the tenno Markham added there.”
“Volunteered?” Jaim asked.
Vi’ya glanced briefly his way. “Yes.”
“Who’s this?” Marim asked.
“New crew,” Vi’ya said. “Ex-Navy. Noderunner.”
Montrose nodded, obviously pleased, but then his expression changed. “I said I’d stay with you and I will, but I tell you now, I don’t like this plan. How do we get rid of the inevitable Marine guards? Get ’em to throw in—or space ’em? And how the hell do we hide what’s going on in the engine room?”
“There is no need,” Vi’ya said. “Omilov was quite clear. He wants the seven of us alone—or as near to alone as is commensurate with the running of the ship. An escort ship will be sent with us. Several of you working can probably get the skip up and running during the long slow trip to radius. Then we simply skip out. The escort ship can do nothing if they have no warning.”
She turned last to Jaim, brows lifted in question.
“My question can wait,” he said. Vi’ya did not return an answer, but Jaim saw Luce rise, and in a sudden, graceful swarming of smooth feline muscles, he jumped to the top of a nearby chair and lay along it, his tail twitching.
Vi’ya bent over the chair to listen to something Ivard was saying, his subdued voice completely drowned by Marim, who had descended into colorful and heartfelt invective.
Montrose laughed, which started a good-natured argument, just like old times. Ivard, snickering, joined in.
Vi’ya signed to Jaim, who silently followed her to her room.
There, she shut the door and faced him. “Your objection?”
“Have you told Brandon?”
“No.”
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