“They wouldn’t leave,” said Dalgleish.
“And why are you not running?” asked Shannon.
“Because I was brought up human,” he said. “By good and decent humans I loved. If I run, billions of humans on Cedar could die from Aksenna’s spite. And maybe in the Commonwealth, too. If I give myself up to the Sonta now, maybe, just maybe, they won’t tear the atmosphere from this planet and let a star-eater blot out your sun.”
Forty-Eight
WHEN HER PRIVATE ear-com buzzed for the third time in thirty seconds, Alys weighed her choices. Stand guard over Moro and Valier, or deal with another urgent situation? Even Cama wasn’t sure what was happening, given the jolts of panic spreading through the embassy staff.
Valier caught Alys’s worried glare and nodded slightly, Cama echoing his silent “go” in the ambassador’s mind.
Alys pivoted on one booted heel and went to find out why there were suddenly too many frightened Camalians in the lobby.
“YOU CAN PREVENT the Sonta from doing whatever they want to Cedar?” said Shannon. Her professional mask was in place, but worry began to knot her stomach. “Maybe we don’t have to fear them. They saved Manchester a few hours ago.”
Dalgleish shook his head. “I have no idea what they want or what I can do. I hope being kin might stand f-for s-s-something.” His voice faltered.
Valier Antonin cried out.
One of Dalgleish’s hands went to his throat as if clawing for air. The other flailed outward. His black eyes stared beyond Shannon’s shoulder for a moment. Then he dropped to the white stone paving, slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.
Shannon motioned to her crew to keep recording.
VALIER KNELT BESIDE Dalgleish, followed a moment later by Dr. Hegen.
“Moro!” Valier leaned in, touching his forehead to the unconscious man’s. “Cama! What’s wrong?”
“Pulse and breathing are steady,” said Hegen, passing a medical scanner over Dalgleish’s chest. “Nothing wrong with him. He’s just out.” The man looked over at Valier. “Too much stress, maybe? He nearly died last night. Can we get him inside?”
“No, we can’t,” said Ambassador Antonin’s icy, precise voice. The tall woman stalked out of the embassy entrance, trailed by a group of her assistants frantically muttering on their own coms. “We need to evacuate everyone inside a four-mile radius. And then, we need to keep going out of the fallout range. Hegen, call Kino Hospital and get a Camalian-safe ambulance here. Kino’s evacuating too, but at least their medics can deal with a secondary breakthrough crash while we’re heading for our ship.”
“Sero Dalgleish didn’t want to run.” Shannon defended the comatose man.
“Aunt Alys, this isn’t a crash,” Valier said in a lost tone. “Cama can’t find anything wrong with him.”
“Cama can figure it out later,” snapped the ambassador. “If Terra Prima wants to play stupid games with an angry star-eater, I’m willing to let them have at each other. Just not with me and mine in the middle!”
“I knew about the Camalian evacuation. What else happened?” Shannon asked.
The ambassador gave her a withering glare. “Some Terra Prima hotheads planted an old nuclear device underneath the embassy this morning. The police bomb squads say it’s so decrepit it’s a wonder the thing hasn’t gone off yet. They can’t move it because it’s rigged to blow at the slightest jostle. If it can be disarmed, they’ll have to do it down there. They have the terrorists in custody, and they think the blast range might be limited to one or two miles from this epicenter. But it’ll be a dirty explosion if it goes. It could poison most of north-central Saba, including the university.”
“How did the police find out about the bomb?” Shannon asked.
“Lyton Sardis called it in,” said the ambassador, shaking her head. “He made a citizen’s arrest of one of the backers, a man named Dennis Vance. And our friend Moore’s in custody too.”
Shannon made certain her recorders caught that!
In the midst of letting her own vehicles be commandeered, Deljou Shannon watched the still center of the chaos, where Valier Antonin knelt in vigil beside the motionless figure of his husband.
Forty-Nine
“DR. HEGEN?” CALLED one of the ambassador’s aides. “I see the ambulance.”
Hegen looked up, waved the large floating craft closer. The drive and lawns were covered with vehicles loading people and gear in orderly ranks, but they shifted to allow passage to the ambulance. Astonishing what silent, master-linked communication could accomplish. The Camalians were worried but efficient. Their calm helped anchor the humans around them.
Ambassador Antonin, once she’d established Moro was unlikely to die just yet, was evacuating the rest of the embassy.
Hegen spared a prayer of sympathy for the squad a hundred feet below, knowing they were on a suicide mission to be vaporized, or poisoned.
“Wait,” said Val, grabbing the doctor’s arm. “They don’t have a Kino logo on the side or front.”
“Would you, if called to carry a Camalian?” asked Hegen, remembering last night’s train.
“They need to identify themselves before I let them touch him.” Moro’s young man dragged a small black case from the bulky belt detracting from his wedding robes. Valier’s deft brown fingers tapped a code. He aimed the device at the ambulance.
The readout satisfied him. “All clear, Dr. Hegen.”
An older female medic scrambled out of the big ambulance, fastening the shield draped in front of her Kino cap. Two taller, younger male medics, already shielded, followed with a floating stretcher. “Is there something bigger we should know about?” asked the female lead medic, looking around the embassy grounds.
“A bomb threat,” said Val. “We can’t return to Kino. We’re supposed to go straight to the Camalian ships on standby at Tagorska. We’ll need you to keep this man stable. I’m riding with him.” It was neither a plea nor a suggestion, Hegen noted with some approval. The little lion had steel in him.
“I can ride too,” Hegen offered.
The lead medic shook her head while lowering the stretcher to ground level. “I’m afraid not, Sero. We’ve little room beyond the life-support bubbles mandated for Camalians. As it is, we’ll be crowded. Are you insured against Cama’s Touch? Have you posted a last will and testament and legal quitclaim for your heirs?”
“I have no heirs and no bequests. I’ve been around Camalians all last night and this morning. I’ve had a sleeping six-year-old boy drool on me.” Hegen waved at Moro. “I worked on him while he crashed the first time.”
“It’s all right, Dr. Hegen,” said Val, helping one of the men ease Moro onto the stretcher. “Follow us to Tagorska.”
The medics loaded Moro into the ambulance with more care and respect than Hegen had seen in most human-Camalian interactions. Hegen watched one of the men offer a gloved hand to Val. With an almost courtly gesture, the Kino medic helped the Camalian prince into the back of the ambulance. The brown doors shut. The ambulance lifted away on powerful, smooth repulsion engines, on a straight path east.
Shannon found him again.
“You’re still here?” Hegen asked, looking at the grim-faced technicians behind her. “And your crew?”
“Where can we run?” she asked. “We just gave away our vehicles. An old nuke is under us. The Sonta will be above us. The city’s going to be in chaos soon, if it isn’t already. The government just blocked our transmissions, but they can’t stop everyone with a com-recorder. Channel 98 wants us here. I almost hate you, Dr. Hegen, for crossing my path last night.”
“Thanks for the lie, missy.” Hegen laughed. “You and yours would hate to be anywhere but ground zero, no?”
“Damn you, you’re right,” she sighed, shivering a little in the chill autumn morning and then paused, looking beyond him to the eastern artery, rapidly clearing of vehicles. “How odd,” she said.
“What?” Hegen turned and yelped, “Oh hell!”
The big, plain Kino ambulance rocked to a halt twenty feet from them, its strained old repulsors barely keeping it two feet off the ground. A young medic in Kino brown, white, and turquoise hopped out, his face shield negligently flapping free. He looked around, puzzled. “Where’s your party crasher, Sero and Sera?”
ALYS ANTONIN PAUSED amid the near panic of evacuation, listening silently. Every Camalian at the embassy grounds or en route to Tagorska went blank-eyed for a moment.
Hearing Cama whisper, “Where are they?”
Hearing Cama scream, “I can’t find them!”
“GOD WAS WITH us, Lyton,” said Terise Volker as she neatly zipped the unconscious Antonin prince into an isolation bubble shaped like a plastic-domed sleeping bag. “Well done, drugging him so quickly. If we are careful, he could provide us with some interesting research opportunities. It’s said the Camalian Royals have abilities the others don’t.”
Lyton removed his shield and cap. He sat between the two comatose men. “You are not touching Valier Antonin, Terise,” he said, resting his hands on the clear plastic shielding of each bubble.
Both bubbles were double-layered all around, the vacuum between inner and outer layers filled with specific charged particles. Shimmering pale-blue light flickered, intermittently veiling the captives.
“Well, I can’t collar him like we did Moro,” she said, taking another look at Lyton’s face. “Are you insane? No. Do not even consider—”
“He’s exquisite,” murmured Lyton, watching the icy glow reveal and conceal the prince’s bronze features. “Antonins don’t marry lightly. He’s permanently fixated upon Moro Dalgleish. Don’t you understand, Terise? He’s the perfect bargaining chip.”
“Lyton! Are you forgetting? Terra Prima or the Camalians?”
“Think outside your antiquated religious bias for once. Moro’s body is Camalian now. And Sonta. If we are to activate our Sonta key, we’ll need to use Valier as Moro’s inducement to good behavior.”
“Then don’t be a hypocrite, Lyton,” Terise snapped. “As soon as you’re wearing Moro’s body, you want to fuck the pretty Antonin. Is that it? Shall we break him the way we broke Moro?”
“Oh no, Terise.” Sardis’s hand stroked spiral patterns on the plastic cocoon imprisoning Valier Antonin. “You mistake my intent. Valier has fixated on Moro. Therefore, Valier will be mine sooner or later. Willingly. Think of what might happen for Terra Prima and the League if we can turn the Camalians and the Sonta against each other.”
Terise sat back, staring not at him but at the future. Her smile matched Lyton’s. “God’s work and God’s rewards, Lyton. You’re still with us!”
One seat ahead, away from the medical cabin, Zarin Basrali controlled her shudder. She hid her bracelet behind her unrolled reader scroll. She plotted out routes not to Tagorska, where the ambulance’s uplink said it was going, but to a fast ship concealed much closer to the south.
And as the false uplink went out on electronic channels already strained from panicked citywide communications, she activated Bill’s bracelet in a precise and ancient pattern. Three repetitions, then she shut it off again and did not think about the two drugged and helpless men behind her.
Fifty
“THEN FIND THEM, Alys!” Liatana shouted back over the communications array, the echoes of her worry and terror reverberating across the more private link she shared with Alys, via Cama. “You lost them!”
Alys gritted her teeth and forgave her wife. “I’m trying. Call Maitland. Your Shield needs to be home with you. You have to get pregnant again and fast. I don’t care how you do it, get drunk and bed him or grow something in a tank.”
“Alys, how could you?”
“Lia, you need an heir at all times.”
“I have one! Valier. He’s not dead, just vanished.” The lovely, slightly plump woman on-screen suddenly looked as wild and waiflike as she had at nineteen. “Find them both, my Knife,” she commanded, and the screen went black.
Cama was nearly useless at the moment. Alys was treated to the dire reason why the Commonwealth had a genetically engineered imperial family in the first place. She felt Lia’s strong mind clamp down on the panicking, furious elemental’s incipient chaos, preventing emotional collapse from spreading into the more sensitive members of the Camalian public.
Lia couldn’t hold on.
Cama thought clearly, “I will kill all of them. No humans left. Not one.”
A core of savage darkness began to eat away within Cama’s warm golden core. Alys was no Royal, with a brain engineered to hold so many linkages steady. She could feel the entire Commonwealth poised on a spasm of hate and fury. She felt the weight of weapons on her harness, and the proximity of the hated, feared humans…
And then, stillness rippled out from a center that wasn’t Cama or the empress. Somewhere far away, a presence distinctly Camalian and yet distinctly odd. But no less steady. No words came, but scornful, disgusted emotion sang back along the link, powerful as a slap.
Cama paused, shocked in the instant before she gave the order to kill.
The unknown mind gave Liatana the moment she needed.
Alys felt it all.
Even terrified of the Aksenna Sonta and afraid for her son’s life, Liatana forced herself to become the center of Cama’s maelstrom, a calm spreading outward across vast distances, touching wherever a Camalian mind reeled from Cama’s anger.
Alys felt the storm ease as Lia diverted the fear and fury into her own mind.
The unknown presence closed itself off from the link, abrupt as a doused lamp.
Emperors broke, sometimes, from too close a contact with their patrona. Alys stomped down any shred of doubt. Lia was tough. And Lia had a Knife and a Shield almost as tough, in their own way. The three of them would manage.
They’d find Valier and Moro and unleash Cama’s Justice on that slime-mold Sardis!
Then they’d find the unknown…Antonin? She needed another look at the founding families’ bloodline charts.
“AMBASSADOR?” DR. HEGEN asked beside Alys. “Your people just put out an all-points watch for your fake ambulance. If the abductors go to Tagorska or any other port, the Cedar-Saba police will—”
“If they were taken by Lyton Sardis, he won’t go to a port,” said Shannon. “He’ll have a small, fast courier ship somewhere near. Not at the Rio Sardis headquarters, I’ll bet.”
“Then we need to find it,” said Hegen, stifling another sneeze.
The ambassador glared wearily at Hegen. “You’ve done enough, Doctor. You could be already on a ship with the Richesons. I know Johani begged you to go.”
“I can’t,” said the medic, shrugging. His farewell to Johani had been quiet and calm, even though Phillipe had held onto Hegen’s leg and sniffled until his mother led him away. Hegen’s last sight of the Richesons matched his first: three small, tired figures, two of them towing large wheeled totes. “Moro’s close to kin for me. I’ve dealt with one Sonta for four years. Maybe this one will listen to me.”
The ambassador turned toward Shannon’s crew. “You’re recording all of this?”
“I’m not broadcasting,” said Shannon. “But since we may get blown up at any minute, why not record it?”
“Wait,” said Hegen. “Ambassador, can your Cama broadcast our words as well? To Camalians outside the blast zone?”
“Yes. After Lia’s talked some sense into her,” said the ambassador. “You have a plan, Doctor?”
“We need information,” said Hegen. “Cama can always ‘find’ her people, right? Over how far of a distance?”
“I cannot say, Doctor.” She had an excellent poker face.
“I’ll bet you can’t. Valier said his father wore locators. But thinking back, when I was on Ventana with your professor, the man didn’t need any tracking devices then. And he got lost all the damned time. His two Camalian graduate students could triangulate his location anywhere on Ventana. Through Cama?”
“So?�
�� asked the ambassador.
“Find out which dig sites of the professor’s interfered with Cama’s locating abilities and why. And why didn’t Cama panic then? No way our boys are off this planet already. Your Cama swears they’re not dead, so they’re being shielded. If we know by what, we may be able to break it or track it.” Hegen trailed off, unsettled by the gleam in the ambassador’s dark-brown eyes.
She stepped forward and brushed her closed mouth against his cheek. “I’m not usually a woman for men, Dr. Adam Hegen,” she said in his ear, “but Ventana seems to have bred some extraordinary ones. Cama really likes you!” Then she turned, shouting orders at her people. She didn’t have to shout at all, Hegen realized. Just her way of coping.
His, up until four years ago, had been another shot of bad whiskey and another low-profile job on the dead-end frontier world he’d called home after Ventana.
“Where would Sardis take them?” asked Shannon. “If he’s looking to use Sero Dalgleish as a key to a Sonta installation no one knows about? Not to any of his planets, I think. This stunt may cost him Rio Sardis itself, so the stakes have to be just as high.”
Hegen whistled sharply, and the ambassador looked back at him. “Sera Antonin,” he called. “Sera Shannon has another parameter for your professor to check. I’m assuming the Camalians have a far broader database of possible Sonta sites than the League. See if you can find anything matching the artifact Moro told us about, as well as possible interference with Cama. Something big enough to make Lyton Sardis risk his company. If we can’t find the boys, we can find their destination.”
The ambassador actually blew him a kiss.
Beside him, Shannon started laughing. “Only Camalians,” she said, dragging at Hegen’s sleeve.
He turned, following the reporter’s pointing hand. The civilians were gone. The Camalians left behind were career embassy staff, facing the dual nightmares of bomb blast and Sonta attack as stoically as their ambassador. But some of them had brought out a folding table onto the sunlit grass. They loaded it with porcelain mugs and tall, steaming pitchers.
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