“I am fine,” Kelric said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I sent her a message that she had to come right away.” Dehya sounded exhausted. She hadn’t even pulled back her hair; it fell in a lustrous but tangled black sweep over her arms and down her back to her waist. “I wanted to talk with you two first before we told anyone else.”
Roca joined them. “Is it Del?” Her voice caught. “Please don’t tell me it’s bad news.”
“It’s not Del,” Kelric said. “I’ve no idea what this is about.”
“I received a coded message from ISC on my personal account,” Dehya said. “Highest security level. It came from Trader space.”
He stared at her. “Why the blazes would ISC send you private messages from the Eubians?”
Dehya paced away from him, into the living room. As he turned to watch her, she stopped and faced them. “It’s because of a hidden monitor I set up on the interstellar meshes. It caught a message. A Skolian embassy on the world Muze’s Helios sent a blood test offworld, asking to have the results analyzed.”
“Why send it offworld?” Roca asked. “Analyzing blood tests is trivial.”
“It was for a Eubian taskmaker.”
“Why ask us to look at it?” Kelric said. “Who sent it?”
“A Jagernaut Secondary called Lyra Lensmark.”
“I know Lensmark,” he said. “She’s a good officer. Calm, tough, rational.” Lyra also had more diplomatic skills than most Jagernauts. That was why he had assigned her to an embassy in such a sensitive location.
“She was being careful,” Dehya said. “I think.”
“You think?” Roca asked.
“The taskmaker asked for asylum,” Dehya said. “She’s a psion. But I don’t think that’s why Lensmark sent the blood tests offworld.”
It was starting to make sense to Kelric. “Lensmark was smart to seek a Skolian facility. I wouldn’t trust ESComm to respect the Paris Accord if they found out she was harboring a psion.”
“I think that’s exactly how it was meant to look,” Dehya said, her voice strained, like leaves blowing over a distant plain.
“Appears?” Roca said. “Dehya, what are you trying to tell us? Whatever is going on in your mind, either I can’t follow it or else you’re blocking me.”
“I’m sorry.” Dehya took a breath. “I’ve been in the web so deep, I’m having trouble pulling out.”
“You’re not connected to the web,” Roca said.
“I know.” Dehya’s voice sounded distant. “But part of me is there.”
Unlike the rest of his family, Kelric had seen Dehya like this before, when she had been working long hours in the mesh and was struggling to come out. He had discovered that direct, literal questions helped her focus.
“What did Lensmark write on the request?” he asked.
“Not much,” Dehya said. “The girl isn’t a provider, but Lensmark is sure she’s a psion.”
“So what’s the problem?” Roca asked.
Dehya looked from Kelric to Roca, her face as delicate as porcelain. “The girl has gold skin. Gold eyes. Gold hair. She’s tall. Very tall. And strong. Much too strong for a provider.”
Kelric felt as if she had punched him in the stomach. He didn’t want to hear this. It had to be coincidence.
The blood drained from Roca’s face. “A lot of providers have gold coloring.”
“That isn’t what set off my monitors.” Dehya’s voice drifted eerily. She shook her head as if to reset her mind. “My zeta monitor is hidden throughout the meshes. Its main portion sleeps most of the time. It wakes only if its outermost shell detects certain genetic markers.”
Kelric’s pulse ratcheted up. “Ruby genes? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“I’ve analyzed the tests over and over,” Dehya said. “They give the same results every time. It’s probably why the girl’s mother got pregnant; Ruby genetics play havoc with birth control methods.” Turning to Roca, she took a deep breath. “Somehow, seventeen years ago, your son Althor fathered a daughter with a Eubian woman.”
“No.” Roca’s voice cracked. “That’s impossible.”
“The tests give a 99.7% probability that he’s her father.”
“How could Althor have a Trader family?” Kelric said. “Even if he did somehow manage it, he’d never leave them with the Eubians.”
“Unless he didn’t know,” Dehya said.
“You’re saying I have a grandchild who is a Trader?” Roca asked.
The pharaoh closed her eyes, and for an instant her body looked translucent.
“Dehya, come back,” Kelric said.
She opened her eyes. Her gaze was so distant, he wondered if she would phase out of real space. How long had she been submerged in the Kyle trying to verify the truth of this claim?
“The girl has all the Ruby genes,” Dehya said. “All of them. Every one.” Her eyes were huge, like green pools. “She is a Ruby. An heir in the direct line of succession to the Triad.”
“No.” Kelric didn’t want this to be true. He didn’t want to discover that a member of his family, one he had never even met, was trapped with the Traders. If ESComm realized they had a Ruby psion, they wouldn’t give a flying drill about peace, not even with Jaibriol at the helm. They could make a Kyle web, break the Skolian monopoly on faster-than-light communications, and conquer the Imperialate.
“It’s no mistake,” Dehya said. “You can’t fake that genetic signature. It’s too complex.”
Roca crossed her arms and scowled at Dehya. “You’re forgetting something, aren’t you?”
Dehya tilted her head. “What?”
“Althor didn’t like women.”
“He liked women fine,” Dehya said.
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Roca said. “Why do you think he was in a three-way marriage with Vaz and that boy Coop? He only married Vaz because the Assembly wanted him to have a wife. It was Coop he wanted.”
“He has another daughter,” Dehya pointed out. “Eristia and her mother Syreen lived here for years, and Syreen still does. Althor may not have married Syreen, but he loved them both.”
“Yes, well, why do you think he didn’t marry Syreen?” Roca demanded.
“He went both ways,” Dehya said. “You know that, Roca.”
“That’s only because the Assembly was always pressuring him to get married, make babies, all that diddle-carp. He was trying to make everyone else happy and making himself miserable.” She lowered her arms, suddenly looking very tired. “He just wanted his own life.”
Kelric had never understood why the universe had seemed determined to fuss over his brother’s sexual preferences. It wasn’t anyone’s business but Althor’s. But the Assembly had been unceasingly annoyed that one of their invaluable Ruby Heirs didn’t want to make Ruby babies.
Regardless, though, Althor made up his own mind. “He married Vaz because he liked her,” Kelric said. “If he had an affair with this woman before that, then he cared for her, too.” He thought of his brother’s military records. “He did some covert work among the Eubians fifteen to twenty years ago.” Althor had died eleven years ago, in the Radiance War, so what Dehya described wasn’t impossible. “ISC regulations wouldn’t allow him to bring back a Trader citizen, and if someone had broken his cover, he would have acted to deflect attention from his lover. So yes, he would have had to leave. But if he had known he had a daughter, he would never have left her or the mother behind.”
“All right,” Roca said. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this girl is a genuine Ruby Heir. Then we must get her out of Trader space. The mother, too, if we can.”
“It won’t work,” Dehya said miserably.
“Why not?” Kelric asked. “You said the girl was at the embassy.”
“I’ve been investigating,” Dehya said. “ESComm broke in and took her, along with a provider who wanted asylum and a Razer who had asked to defect.”
“Hell and damnation!” Kelric wanted
to punch the wall. “A Razer wanted to defect? And we lost him, too?”
“Yes.” Dehya lifted her hands, then dropped them. “The provider, a boy, belonged to Admiral Erix Muze.”
“If they broke into the embassy,” Roca said coldly, “they violated the Paris Accord.”
“They pulverized it,” Dehya said. “Roca, we could use your expertise as Foreign Affairs Councilor on that, to make sure none of the embassy staff are harmed or taken into custody.”
“Count on it,” Roca said. “What about the Eubians?”
“The provider, Althor’s daughter, and the Razer were all sent to Admiral Muze,” Dehya said. “He found out about them because someone recognized his provider from footage of a street brawl between the girl and two of Muze’s illegitimate grandchildren. Apparently Althor’s daughter was protecting the boy.”
“That’s impossible,” Kelric said. “A low-level slave would never fight high-level taskmakers. They’re bred and conditioned from birth to obey.”
“If she’s Althor’s daughter,” Roca said, “she’s a far different breed than the usual taskmaker.”
“I couldn’t find much about her,” Dehya said. “She’s never registered on our spy monitors. If Lensmark hadn’t found a way to warn us, we would never have known she existed.”
Kelric felt heavy. He walked away from them, deeper into his living room. He didn’t know how to add this incredible development to everything else that weighed on him.
“Kelric?” Dehya said.
He turned to face her. “You and I need to play Quis.”
“I know,” she said.
“For flaming sake.” Roca glared at them. “Your answer to this mess is to play dice?”
Dehya smiled at her sister. “It helps us plan.”
“First you two nearly die. Then Del. Now this.” Roca’s voice cracked. “It’s too much.”
Kelric came back over to them. “We’ll figure it out.”
“You need to give up this idea of meeting Jaibriol Qox face-to-face,” Roca told him.
“Why?” Kelric asked. “This has nothing to do with that.”
“Well, fine,” his mother said. “You can accept his invitation to have the summit on Glory, and while we’re there, miraculously avoiding their attempts to make us all prisoners, you can rescue this Ruby Heir we had no idea existed, grabbing her out from under the nose of Erix Muze. Hell, Kelric, while you’re at it, you can create a few new galaxies, too.”
He laid his hand on her shoulder. “We will solve this.”
“I hope so,” she said softly. “Because I don’t know how much more of this we can take.”
“We’ll manage,” Kelric said. “We’ll fix it.”
He just wished he knew how.
XX
The Next Move
The Mentation Chamber was tucked into the Orbiter’s hull, close enough to the poles of the rotating sphere that the gravity was significantly lower than Earth standard and the floor slanted sharply. The outer surface of the chamber was dichromesh glass reinforced to withstand the radiant emptiness of space. It curved outward and offered a glorious view of jeweled nebulae in the deep black of the interstellar void. Dehya stood before the window, remembering the words of an ancient poet. His identity had faded in the blur of history, but one line of his works survived: Magnificent sea forever bright, forever cold and forever night.
The click of dice came from behind her, followed by Kelric’s musing voice. “The seeds of the game we sent Jaibriol Qox are all here in the patterns he sent us.”
Dehya turned around. Kelric was seated at a carved table, which stood on a dais that compensated for the tilt of the floor. Quis structures covered the table, reproducing the session Jaibriol Qox had coded into his last message. Kelric was studying them with that incredible gift of his to understand patterns. Dehya liked watching him. It was hard to understand why he terrified people. Couldn’t they see the luminous intellect and affectionate man inside that huge frame? Yes, he was a phenomenal warrior. But she would always remember how she had first known him, as a baby snuggled in a sling on Roca’s hip, a golden cherub gurgling and happy. He had grown into an inimitable man, but she understood the gentler side he hid within.
“It’s like a frozen frame of the game,” he said, intent on the dice, his face bathed in starlight. “We sent him a frame of ours, he played that game, and he sent us this frame.”
Dehya came over and sat across from him. “The problem is figuring out how he produced these patterns. I see the seeds, yes, but modeling how he reached this point in the game is difficult.”
Kelric looked up. “The closer we get to figuring out his moves, the better we can understand his intent.”
She mulled over the patterns evolving in her mind. “You know, we’ve assumed he played solitaire. But I don’t think he did.”
Kelric regarded her uneasily. “That would mean he taught someone else.” He motioned at the structures. “Someone talented enough to help him come up with this work of art.”
“Who do you think?” Dehya asked. “You know the Hightons better than most.” She thought of Tarquine Iquar. It didn’t surprise her that Jaibriol had married the Finance Minister. True, an emperor was expected to choose a beautiful young Highton for his empress, the flower of supposed maidenhood, after which she dedicated her life to fawning on him. That was the antithesis of Tarquine Iquar. But if Jaibriol truly was the son of Kelric’s sister Soz, and he had grown up on a world with no other human beings except his family, then his only model of an adult woman during his formative years was a force of nature who had become one of the most formidable warrior queens in the history of the human race. It was no wonder he chose Tarquine as his wife.
“The empress,” Dehya said. “Jaibriol taught her Quis.”
Kelric scowled darkly. “Then gods help the human race.”
Dehya couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t look so dire.”
“Quis was developed by the women who rule the Twelve Estates on Coba.” His metallic face showed alarm, which in Kelric’s understated universe could mean he was envisioning a disaster of unmitigated proportions. “It’s how they establish their authority. And Tarquine Iquar could leave any of them in the dust when it comes to political acumen and intrigues. If she realizes the power of Quis, who knows what she could do.”
“You put a lot of trust into Jaibriol Qox when you taught him Quis.”
His thought came to her mind like a tap the door. Dehya?
She eased down her barriers. Our Jagernaut bodyguards are outside this chamber.
I turned on a cyberlock tuned to our brains, he answered. It surrounds this chamber. Even if they were strong enough to catch hints of our thoughts from outside, which they probably aren’t, the field would block them.
Dehya nodded. It was a good idea. The cyberlock affected the neural processes of anyone who crossed the field from either within or without. On its lowest setting, it caused vertigo. On its highest setting, it fatally disrupted neural structure in the brain. The one Kelric had activated affected neither him nor her because they both had a key for it within their brains. Designed from their own neurons, it knew to protect them. The cyberlock affected neural firings, so it would also veil their thoughts from any telepaths outside its field, providing an extra layer of security.
How many people know you taught Jaibriol Qox this dice game? she asked.
Just you.
No one else?
Tarquine Iquar, apparently. He paused. I taught him Quis by opening my mind and dumping the rules for the game into his. We shared thoughts during that time. He has great strength of character. I don’t believe he would betray us.
Maybe not deliberately. That doesn’t mean he won’t. Or that his wife won’t.
He could use it to his advantage, that’s true. So can we. A dangerous glint came into his eyes. And no one plays Quis as well as I do.
Dehya smiled. You shouldn’t be so insecure about your ability.
Ah we
ll. He didn’t look the least bit abashed.
She finally put into words what they both knew but never said. Jaibriol is part of the Triad.
Kelric met her gaze. Yes.
Yes. One simple word. Yes, the leader of our greatest enemies is part of our ruling Triad.
We must meet with him in person, she thought. A face-to-face meeting was the only way they could truly communicate with the third Triad member. By telepathy.
Dehya brushed her fingers along the table. A section slid out to her right, an opalescent screen with colorful holicons floating above it. She flicked her fingers through various menus until she reached her workspace on this Quis session.
“Laplace, attend,” she said.
“Attending,” her EI answered.
“Access all files on Tarquine Iquar,” Dehya said. “Draw from every source you can find, including my accounts, Assembly accounts, anywhere.”
“Include all ISC files,” Kelric said. “You have full access on my authority.”
“Security verified,” Laplace said. “What shall I do with the data?”
“Use it to create a profile for a Quis player,” Dehya said. “Then re-run all my models for the game on this table with Tarquine Iquar as a second player, starting with the initial Quis session and evolving to this one. Give me the result that best matches the session here.”
“Analyzing,” Laplace told her.
Within moments, a holographic Quis game appeared on the mesh screen. Laplace said, “I was able to play a game that evolves to match the one on your table exactly.”
“Gods help us,” Kelric muttered. “He taught her Quis.”
Luminous glyphs appeared on the screen, offering data with the words they represented and also in their dimensionality and the way their colors shaded through blue and rose. Studying them, Dehya said, “That’s odd.”
“What is?” Kelric asked.
“I think the empress left hints about herself in her moves, probably unintentionally.”
Kelric tapped the table and a mesh screen slid out to his right, mirroring the one Dehya had summoned. He spoke to the air. “Show me the moves you predict were made by the players Jaibriol and Tarquine, starting from the first Quis session and ending at the one here.”
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