The Octagonal Raven

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Except that my fingers had barely brushed the wall stones. I still recalled the shock from when they had gone through the supraholo image. “Whatever … it certainly was a shock.” I paused. “Now what happens?”

  He smiled shyly. “I don’t know everything, sir. The super, he just said that they needed a report from you, and they’d send it with everything to the local FU Claims Authority. This is the first one of these I’ve done. He said to tell you that you’d get a copy, and that probably your compensation would be based on what your personal medical doesn’t cover and your annual earnings for the past two years.”

  “I see.” I shook my head. “I’m glad someone is on this. I’m certainly in no shape to handle it.”

  “Thank you, ser.” He snapped off the VR recorder and slipped it back into the small case attached to his belt. “I’m sorry to bother you, ser.”

  “I’m not doing much else, officer, and I appreciate your coming by.” I did, if not exactly for the reasons he might have thought.

  After he left the room, I wanted to shiver. There was no record, even in the skytors banks, of the two men and the glider-van. All the records showed was my reaching for the top of the wall, as if to yank out a stone, and then the entire wall just cascading down around and on top of me. And the “sinkhole” explained even more. I’d have bet that someone had used nanitic excavators to remove that dirt.

  Had I just been imagining the men and the child? I shook my head. The girl’s image had been projected VR, and at the right angle, wouldn’t have been picked up by a satellite scanner, even with high resolution. But I hadn’t been imagining the men. That, I was sure about, and that bothered me. A great deal. It was theoretically possible to project an image — had the two men projected an image that just showed their section of the road as empty? That kind of equipment, while not horribly expensive, showed both resources and all too much forethought for me to be a casual or incidental target, as did most of what had happened to me recently.

  First, a woman who didn’t exist tried to kill me. Then, a device planted in a way that no one could detect tried again, and finally, two men who didn’t even show up in the FS skytors monitor banks dropped a wall on me, and there was no record of anything except the wall falling. The town of Helnya was very sorry and would probably compensate me.

  All that meant that someone had known where I was going, and possibly why. They’d either tapped my system or the jeweler’s. Probably the latter would have been easier, but that meant they knew who I was looking for. Any way I looked at it, the possibilities were unappealing.

  And then Mertyn had sent a message suggesting that people who might have been friends were my most likely enemies, and those I’d considered possible enemies were friends.

  And I still didn’t know who or why.

  * * *

  Chapter 25

  Fledgling: Yunvil, 425 N.E.

  * * *

  Wearing a uniform as dress for dinner wasn’t forbidden, merely in bad taste. So, when I arrived home on pre-departure leave, I wore my uniform down to dinner — the silversheen and black dress version, and the double bars of a full lieutenant and the silver wings with the star and ship.

  As always, I was the first one to arrive in the upper hallway, and I nodded to the star-surfing young woman, murmuring, “We do have a few things in common, young lady.”

  I had seen, of course, that the star clusters and the darkness looked nothing like the way that Meraal had sculpted them, but that only gave me yet another rational reason to prefer the traditional Hui-Lui painting of the woman and the open sunlit gate.

  “Daryn!”

  I turned to see Gerrat coming from the front of the upper level, accompanied by two attractive women, one black-haired, one red-haired, the first redhead I’d seen in years.

  “Daryn … this is Rhedya.” Gerrat nodded to the dark-haired woman.

  “Enchanted to meet you.” I bowed my head to the beauty who was about to become Gerrat’s spouse.

  In his tailored deep blue singlesuit, Gerrat offered his winning smile before turning to the younger woman to his left. “And this is Emelle. My younger brother Daryn. He’s just finished deep space pilot training and is on leave before his first assignment.”

  “I see you younger folk have already beaten us.” My father’s voice filled the corridor, and his eyes went to my FS uniform. His lips formed a pleasant smile, the smile reserved for the times when he was less than perfectly pleased with me. I’d grown up learning that smile. “You look most official, Daryn.”

  “I’m certain I do, sir.” I bowed, knowing that refusing to explain, and merely agreeing with him, would be far more useful.

  “He looks good in it, dear,” added my mother slipping up beside Father. “And he’s certainly earned it … and the wings. So he ought to be able to show them off.” She smiled brightly. There had been just the faintest emphasis on the words “show them off.”

  “You are most effective, Mother.” I grinned.

  “Thank you, dear. One learns.” At least there was a smile in her eyes.

  “Shall we?” asked Father, although it wasn’t a question.

  We all followed him into the dining room and seated ourselves, with Emelle to my left, next to Father on our side, across from Rhedya.

  The spring greens and alerca melon strips on the plates set before us were crisp, perfect, but, then, even salads had to be perfect.

  The young redhead offered me a warm smile. “How was the training? People say it’s difficult.”

  “Very difficult,” Father answered for me, “even with all Daryn’s background and advantages.”

  “Very hard,” I said with a smile. “Long … and I’m glad to be done.”

  Emelle nodded.

  “It’s quite an accomplishment even to be selected,” my father said. “They select the very best, and the attrition is between seventy and eighty percent.”

  “I’m glad to be here.” I smiled politely, and waited for Emelle to take a spoonful of the alerca melon before I followed her example.

  “What do you do now?” she asked.

  “I have two months home leave. After that, I’m posted to the DeGaul.”

  Emelle frowned, and I could sense that she was accessing the net to see what there was on the ship or anything related. She had to have an implanted link, and I wondered at that. I hadn’t gotten one that sophisticated until the FS had given me one as part of the mods for the last stage of pilot training, and I tried not to use it in company, perhaps because my parents had suggested that doing so was impolite.

  I took another bite of the melon and smiled at Rhedya, knowing that we’d be exchanging smiles for a long time. Her smile was vaguely sympathetic, but there was a cool mind shielded behind the trained smile.

  “He was a pre-Collapse leader, wasn’t he? The one they named the ship after?” asked Emelle.

  “I didn’t look it up,” I replied. “I probably will before I report. What else did you find out?”

  “Gaul was the name of a part of East Euro in ancient times, and a Roman politician once wrote a book about how he conquered it.” Emelle offered the smallest of shrugs.

  “Nothing new there,” commented Gerrat. “Every piece of the globe has been conquered at least a handful of times.”

  “And the conquerors promptly forgot that they stole it from someone else so that they could claim some sort of moral right to the land when someone else tried to take it away from them,” I suggested.

  “But … of course.” Gerrat beamed his utterly charming smile. “And you are going to become one of those conquerors in a few weeks, I dare say.”

  I hadn’t thought about Federal Service in quite those terms. While FS ships carried nothing that was expressly a weapon, the magscoop fields were shields, and the ship certainly had capabilities for wreaking destruction on hostile objects. But the only thing that had seemed to menace humanity since the collapse had been humanity itself — and one or two rogue asteroids that h
ad been redirected.

  “That’s rather unlikely,” I pointed out mildly. “You have to have some form of intelligent life to be a conqueror, and we certainly haven’t found that — a few planets with primitive ecologies that we can colonize, a few others that might once have held life … and not a single sign of another intelligent species.”

  “They’re out there … somewhere. With trillions upon trillions of stars …” Gerrat grinned. “I’d just rather not waste a finite life traveling and searching the infinite.”

  Even Emelle winced.

  “I can see that. I’d rather not waste my life figuring out yet another way to get people to pay me to provide gossip and information most people already know or don’t need and never will.”

  Mother’s glance — first at me, and then at Gerrat — was almost a match for a laser in intensity.

  I grinned. “But difference is what makes life interesting, isn’t it?”

  “How did you find the melon, Daryn?” asked Mother sweetly. “Interesting?”

  “Very tasty.” I turned to Emelle. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “It was quite good.” Her voice was almost as syrupy as Mother’s.

  Two months might be a very long time, I decided.

  * * *

  Chapter 26

  Raven: Kewood, 459 N.E.

  * * *

  In the end, it took Kharl and the medcenter nearly another two months to put me back together enough so that I was ready to leave under my own strength — or rather under my own newly-regrown legs. The last month or so, I’d been able to do some work, and I’d actually finished up two edart pieces, including the one on Holst and the Warsha Symphony, but I was ready to get back to my own place and start working up to full capacity.

  I’d tried to reach Mertyn, but he was either still hiking through some wilderness or not answering his gatekeeper — probably the former, since I’d left messages and gotten no response. It seemed odd, but he’d been known to spend months out of touch, and there wasn’t too much I could do immediately, anyway.

  As I was packing my gear for the short trip back to Vallura, waiting for Kharl to appear and give me his final words or whatever before I left, I was still thinking, wondering why I’d remembered some incidents more clearly than others while I’d been half-dreaming, half-remembering in the medcradle. There were so many incidents that I had passed over. Because my subconscious said they weren’t that important? Or not related to why someone was trying to murder me?

  As I reached for one of the small pen scanners, the belt net gatekeeper chimed. I tabbed it, looking up as the small image appeared right beside the medcenter bed I hoped I wouldn’t be needing again, or at least not for a very long time. The VR image was that of a man not quite two meters tall, with short black hair, deep blue eyes, and a winning smile.

  Myrto, the head compositor, and Compositor Director of OneCys, glanced at me. “Daryn. I see you’re finally out of confinement.”

  “Almost.”

  “That’s good.” Myrto cleared his throat. “There’s something we need to discuss.”

  “You should have everything you need for the last project.”

  “I do, and it was good work. You always do good work, Daryn.” He flashed another professionally warm smile. “You’re one of the very best.”

  Even if I didn’t know why, I could sense what was coming, but I decided to make Myrto work for it. “You and OneCys have gotten my best work.”

  “We’ve certainly had no problem with the quality of your work, Daryn,” Myrto offered.

  I refused to bite. “You shouldn’t. You’d be hard-pressed to find better.”

  “The senior directors are worried about the timing. They think that could be a problem.”

  “A problem? I was late once, when I was in the medcenter, and that doesn’t happen to anyone very often.”

  “But you were close with two other projects, and that’s three times this year.” Myrto shrugged apologetically. “It’s not my decision. I can’t give you anything that’s time-sensitive.”

  In short, he couldn’t give me anything, because I’d never gotten anything from OneCys that hadn’t been time-critical. If it weren’t, someone in his organization would have been tasked with it.

  “Who made this decision? Can you tell me that?”

  “I made it.”

  “Myrto … please don’t lie to me. If you had a problem, you would have let me know before this. So … someone ordered you to drop me. Who … and why?”

  “I’m sorry, Daryn. But that’s the way it is. I didn’t tell you earlier, because I wanted to make sure you were in good shape.” Myrto offered a last smile before his image vanished.

  After almost ten years of perfect methodizing for OneCys, I’d been dropped. For no real reason, and by a very nervous compositor director who didn’t want me to know why or who had ordered it. And like the attempts on my life, I still didn’t know the reason why, except I was getting the feeling that they were connected. I just wished I knew what everyone thought I did that made me so dangerous.

  The thing was that no one else seemed to know anything. There was no record, even in the skytors’ monitoring banks, of the two men and the glider-van or of anyone installing a laseflash on the wall beyond my house. Even Gerrat and Father couldn’t find out anything, and with them I knew they were telling the truth — and that might have been the most disturbing bit of all.

  All I could do was think and keep packing, and I had finished checking the two small bags that held the remote relay equipment that had let me work from the medcenter when Kharl walked in.

  “Already hard at work,” Kharl said as he stepped into my room.

  “I’ve been hard at work for weeks, mentally, anyway. I’ll need to get back into shape physically.”

  “Do it gradually,” my cousin the doctor suggested. “Solid exercise, but don’t overdo it, and listen to your systemic nanites.” He paused, then added, “You don’t want to undo a miracle.”

  My eyebrows lifted.

  “By all rights, you shouldn’t have lived,” Kharl said slowly.

  “With a modern medcenter?”

  “Oh … once we had you here, that wasn’t the question. It might have taken a lot longer, but we could have put you back together.”

  “The accident was set up to make sure I was crushed and died on the spot?”

  “I’d have to say so … now.” Kharl nodded.

  “Why didn’t I? And why do you think so?”

  “Apparently, those strange nanites have other functions. I couldn’t get rid of all of them, and they must have multiplied in your system. You had a very high concentration. They protected your brain … mostly … I’m not quite sure how.”

  “You left them … this time?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t successful in getting rid of them last time, and your system is adjusted to them, and they saved you. I’m not about to damage something that works and cause you more harm in the process. We’ll want to watch them, though. And you should let me know if your internal systemics show anything strange.”

  “So I’m a lab animal now?” My voice was dry.

  “You’re a very live lab animal,” he pointed out equally dryly.

  We both laughed.

  “Why did you change your mind?”

  “The same reason you did,” he pointed out. “Once might be an allergenic reaction … but two more times isn’t coincidence or allergies or accidents.”

  What he said was true, but I had the feeling there was more. “What else?”

  “I’ve told you all that I know.”

  Again, that was mostly true, but he wasn’t about to say more, and I’d have felt strange really pushing my only really close friend who’d saved my life twice.

  “I want to see you in a week, immediately if you feel the slightest bit strange or out of sorts,” Kharl said.

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise. After all this, I’d be stup
id not to,” I admitted.

  “You would.” He smiled again. “Have to see to a few others. Take care, Daryn, and don’t climb any more old rock walls.”

  “I’ll promise that, too.”

  He was gone, and I bent down to finish packing the two small bags. It would be good to get home, although I was beginning to get worried about having to roust up more business from other clients.

  * * *

  Chapter 27

  Fledgling: Supra-Ecliptic Space, Sol System, 426 N.E.

  * * *

  Past conditioning and physical strength notwithstanding, my lungs and chest were beginning to ache as I lay pushed into the form-fitting bridge couch by the DeGaul’s three gees of constant acceleration. The cream gray of the overhead blurred if I tried to look at it directly, and most of the time I kept my eyes closed, using the direct links to monitor the ship’s systems and all the scanners.

  The DeGaul was angling out of the solar system, angling because getting away from the dust envelope was harder leaving Earth than with any of the colony systems. Our home system was one of the few where the orbital ecliptic plane was nearly at right angles to the galactic plane. So, it wasn’t that leaving the system’s ecliptic wasn’t any harder, but getting out of the system ecliptic and to where the Gates were placed was, and that meant a longer acceleration.

  Then the whole business of Gates was another matter. The theory had been around for a long time, back in the days of the Noram Commonacracy, although they didn’t call it that. There had been two problems — generating and focusing enough power to create the wormhole and making sure the exit was where it was supposed to be. In the end, both were resolved by the scientific equivalent of the larger blunt object wielded with greater force.