“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Brant said. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Lilly said nothing. She looked troubled. Then she frowned, looking down at her console. “Wow…that’s weird.”
“What?” Catherine asked.
Bedivere straightened up, looking ahead. “Private codes. Yours, Cat. They’re old ones. Older than me.”
Catherine turned back to the console. “A message for me?”
“It’s masked. There’s all sorts of security around it,” Bedivere said. “I can’t see who the sender is at all. Not even a direction.”
“Do you want to accept the message?” Lilly asked.
Catherine looked at the codes, old memories stirring. “I think I know who is sending,” she said, “but it’s impossible. He’s dead.”
“So was I,” Bedivere pointed out. “Take the message.”
“Everyone, move out from behind me. There’s no need for him to see you.”
Brant shrugged. “I’m already on the wanted list. Lilly, too. Besides, I’m comfortable here.”
Catherine hid her smile and accepted the connection. The heads-up display flickered in front of her as the connection was made. Then the display solidified and steadied.
The man looking at her had dark hair, white flesh and dark eyes. His beard was neatly trimmed, outlining a chin that thrust out aggressively. His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. His gaze flickered as he took in everyone ranged behind her.
“Do you remember me, Catherine?” he asked.
She nodded. “You called yourself Caris when we knew each other. I thought you had died in that explosion.” She remembered the ear-splitting noise, the way the ground shook and the building had disintegrated around them. How he had pulled her against him to protect her.
Caris nodded. “That mule did die,” he said, “and it was expedient to let everyone think that Caris Aklini really did die in the assassination attempt. When I do move out of the Ivory City, I always use a different identity to misdirect assassins.” He paused, pressing his lips together as if he was weighing up options. “No one outside the city knows what Kare Sarkisian really looks like except, now, for you.”
Brant made a choking sound and Lilly gasped.
“The Magnate of the Federation,” Bedivere said. “Cat, he’ll be trying to trace your position. Shut it off.”
Sarkisian held up his hand. “I’m not tracing. This is as secure a conduit as I could build. I’ve become somewhat skilled at covert communications over the years, so I’m confident that no one will be able to break into the channel. Not even the best of my Federation agents.”
Catherine let out her breath slowly, so he wouldn’t see how shaken she was. “What do you want, Kare?”
His gaze flickered to her left. Toward Bedivere. “Is this the one they call Bedivere?”
“If your intelligence corps is as good as they say, then you already know he is,” Catherine said.
Kare nodded. He leaned forward, as if he was leaning toward her. “Is it true, Katie? Is he really what they tell me he is?”
She kept her face immobile, struggling to hide her shock and to find an answer…any answer.
A monitor blipped on her console, blinking red, catching her gaze.
Lie. Deny it. The script was from Bedivere.
But she had hesitated too long. Kare sat back, shaking his head. “I didn’t believe them. I didn’t want to believe them. But the more I think about it, the more I come to understand that this is just like you. You always did do exactly what you wanted and everyone else be damned.”
Catherine swallowed. “That’s not what this is.” Her voice was hoarse.
Kare sighed. “It was a shock to me to find out that the Katie I knew on Hakim was the great Catherine Shahrazad but that, too, makes sense the longer I consider it.” He gave a forced smile.
Bedivere got to his feet and moved so that he was standing next to her chair, facing the display. “Now that you know, what do you intend to do with that knowledge?”
“I will not speak with a proscribed machine.” Kare looked directly at Catherine. “You must understand, Catherine, until now I have been protecting you. Slowing down the flow of information, giving misdirections and conflicting orders. You may have thought yourself incredibly lucky to have evaded the most incompetent troops that have been sent your way, but this…” Again, his gaze flickered toward Bedivere. “You have to understand,” he repeated. “I can’t stop what is to come. Not now. I will not stop it. This…thing—it is a threat to our very existence and it must be destroyed.”
“His name is Bedivere and he has as much right to live as you or I,” Catherine said as steadily as she could, but her heart was slamming against her chest, making it difficult to think.
Kare lifted his hand, palm out. Denial? Refusal, Catherine realized. “I have no intention of debating the Ammonite scriptures, or the teachings of Glave. I am not a scholar, but I don’t need to be. That thing is a danger to us all. There is but one chance you have left to reverse this, Catherine.”
“He’s going to make a deal,” Brant said softly, his tone derisive.
“It’s not a deal,” Kare said sharply. “I do not make deals. I’m making a single offer and I do it only because of our shared past.”
“I don’t think I’m interested in any sort of deal you could offer me,” Catherine said and reached out to hit the button to disconnect the display.
“Kill the machine,” he said urgently. “Kill it now and I can ensure that the Federation does not bother you anymore. You can have your privacy and your life back again.”
Catherine shook her head. “Life is life, Kare.”
“Do you truly understand how bad it will become if you do not do this? You have been running for over a year, barely one step ahead, pursued by the weakest resources I could muster. But you will force me to unleash everything in my control and pursue you to the ends of known space and beyond, if necessary.”
“Glave above!” Lilly whispered.
Kare shook his head slowly, regretfully. “It cannot be allowed to live, Katie. I will go through you, I will squash you flat if I must, in order to find it and kill it.”
Catherine drew in a shaky breath. “Do your worst, Kare.” She slapped the disconnect and the display fragmented and dissolved.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Everyone stop shouting for a moment!” Catherine screamed.
The room fell silent. Lilly, Brant and Bedivere all looked at her.
“This argument is going nowhere,” Catherine said. “You’re scared. I understand that. But Brant, think logically about this. Even if you leave the ship now, if we were to drop you and Lilly on Barros and jump out of the system as fast as possible, it won’t protect you.”
“You’ll be hunted just the same,” Bedivere added softly.
Brant gripped his hands together tightly. “I didn’t sign on for this.”
“You knew who I was when you hired on,” Catherine reminded him. “You knew I was wanted by the Federation and the College and even the Staffers. You knew that. Nothing has changed.”
Brant pointed at Bedivere, his hand shaking. “Everything has changed! They don’t want you anymore. They want him. They will kill all of us just to get to him.”
Bedivere nodded. “You’re right,” he said softly. “But do you think leaving the ship and hiding out on a ball somewhere is going to change that? The Federation and Kare Sarkisian don’t just want to kill me. They will want to wipe out any trace that I ever existed. That includes everyone who knows about me.”
Lilly gripped Brant’s knee, her fingers digging in. “That’s not fair,” she said. “They don’t even know Bedivere.”
Catherine gave Brant a small, sour smile. “Does this overwhelming force the Federation is massing remind you of anything?”
He looked at her sharply. “What?”
“Your Enforcers do pretty much the same thing, don’t they?” Bedivere asked. “Mow down opposition
with sheer numbers and power, sterilize the area and move on?”
Brant subsided, his whole body sinking back into the chair. He gripped Lilly’s hand. “You’re right,” he said, his voice trembling. “This is exactly the same. They’re doing everything I objected to about the enforcement squads.”
“And we will probably have to face them, too,” Catherine said.
Brant sighed.
Lilly lifted her chin. “Bedivere saved my life. I have to try and save his. I just don’t know how.”
“Neither do I,” Catherine told. “Not yet, anyway.” She stood up. “Chocolate is definitely in order.”
* * * * *
Bedivere parked the ship in ultra-high orbit around Barros, which put them just outside the sentry envelope, but required constant readjustments to restore the position.
“We won’t go unnoticed for long, but we’ll have a few uninterrupted hours to figure things out,” he explained as they settled around the table in the common room to eat and talk.
The meal had been eaten in absorbed silence, until Brant blew out his breath. “The more I think about it, the angrier I get. They didn’t even stop to confirm their information. They’re just going to come after us with all guns blazing and I still don’t understand why. AIs need to be harnessed so they don’t reach sentience…this has been a basic tenant of modern life for millennia. No one wants another Birgir Stoyan to happen and have a fear-crazed computer kill every human under its control. I even understand why the thought gives people nightmares. We depend upon computers so much that we’re basically at their mercy. While we’ve got them chained and controlled, that’s just fine. But a sentient computer is different. That’s a computer who thinks for himself, who can make independent decisions and act upon them. But Bedivere isn’t fear-crazed—”
“Oh, I’m afraid,” Bedivere said. “I’m just hiding it so Cat thinks I’m wonderful.”
“—but he might just be flat-out crazy,” Brant added smoothly. “He hasn’t killed us. He’s done more to save my ass than any human I know, present company excluded. But they don’t care about that, do they? They’re just going to kill him anyway.”
“That’s right,” Catherine confirmed.
Brant stared down at his empty plate, troubled. “There’s no appealing to them,” he said. “There’s no court that will hear us out. They will kill Bedivere. Then they’ll kill the rest of us just to cover it up.”
“Bedivere?” Lilly asked, sounding concerned. “Look at him,” she said softly.
He was sitting motionless in his chair, his gaze on the table before him. He wasn’t blinking.
Brant rubbed his mouth. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” Catherine said. “I’ve seen this before. Something we said triggered him into a train of thought. Well, it’s not even thought. It’s a logic sequence. He’s examining every possibility and outcome, every variation and alternative.”
“Examining?” Lilly whispered.
“Mathematically,” Catherine said. “Algorithms and patterns. He’ll rouse in a minute or so and tell us something he’s worked out that we would never have thought of ourselves.”
Brant blew out a breath. “And what if he is triggered by an idea while he’s piloting a jump or something critical like that?”
Catherine shook her head. “He wouldn’t pursue the thought. He would put it aside for later, because it is the less important element at that moment. Bedivere knows his priorities.”
“I’ve seen people do this at the College,” Lilly said. “The thinkers, the ones involved in pure research. They’d sink down into their thoughts and be lost, sometimes for a day or more, chasing after some obscure idea and analyzing it.”
“It’s almost the same thing,” Catherine said. “Except to draw a human out of that deep thought, you just have to wave your hand in front of their eyes. I could pull him out by speaking his name very loudly, but I won’t. He’s figuring something out.” She leaned over his chair. “But I’ll claim his chocolate.”
Bedivere drew in a breath, stirred and looked around. He blinked. “The college.”
“What about it?” Catherine asked.
He looked down at the table. “Who stole my chocolate?”
“The college,” she coaxed him.
He nodded. “Every time we jump somewhere, the Federation turn up…or they did until Lilly found the locator. But we’ve assumed that the locator was implanted by the College, before Lilly was sent to infiltrate the ship. But if the data the locator is sending is going to the College, how does the Federation know where we are?”
Lilly pressed her hand against her belly. Brant pried it away, picked it up and held it.
“There’s two ways that could happen,” Bedivere said. “The first is that the data isn’t going to the College at all. It’s going straight to the Federation.”
“But that’s not possible,” Lilly said. “I didn’t leave Van Andel until I was shipped to Darwin terminal to apply for the job. There wasn’t any way the Federation could get to me to…to implant it.”
“There’s several ways it might have happened,” Catherine said gently.
“You traveled to Darwin on a Federation ship?” Brant asked.
Lilly swallowed and nodded.
“Sleepy gas at night when you were sleeping. Accelerated healing of the incision. You would have gone to bed and woken up the next morning and been none the wiser,” Catherine said.
“The other possibility is that the College planted the locator, then reaped the data and passed it on to the Federation,” Bedivere said.
Lilly shook her head. “No, that’s even more outrageous than the Federation doing this to me. That means the College and the Federation are working together and that’s…it’s just ridiculous.”
“Except Sarkisian said ‘Is he really what they tell me he is?’”
“He was talking about his people!”
“He also said ‘I didn’t believe them. I didn’t want to believe them.’.” Bedivere gave Lilly a sympathetic smile. “If it was his own staff he was talking about, he would have reamed them out, instead of hopping on to a secure channel to play let’s remember with Catherine. But if it was the College that had told him, then what he said and what he did makes sense. They’re working together, Lilly.”
Lilly’s face was pale. “But why?”
Bedivere shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Whatever it is, there’ll be money at the bottom of it,” Catherine said softly. “The Federation is a for-profit entity.”
“But the College isn’t,” Lilly said.
“No one has ever been able to establish where they get all their funds from,” Bedivere said. “Public records show some of the money they would need to operate, but it’s possible the Federation has been funding them, maybe for a long time. If you’re controlling the lifeblood of an organization, you’re controlling the organization.” He gave a small shrug.
Lilly’s face was bewildered. “They’ve been lying. To everyone.”
“And we still don’t know why,” Brant said.
“As the College has been controlling the Ammonites for as long as they’ve existed, neither of you has a home to run to,” Bedivere said.
Brant scowled. “That’s not where home is, anymore,” he said shortly and his hand tightened around Lilly’s.
Catherine knew then that Brant had decided to stay.
Lilly sat forward, sudden excitement making her face light up. “Tell the universe,” she said.
“Lilly?” Brant said, sounding puzzled and concerned.
She gripped his hand even harder. “Of course,” she breathed. She laughed and looked at Catherine. “You’ve spent your whole long life sneaking around, trying to hide who you are because it causes riots and worse. You’ve both been hiding the truth about Bedivere for a hundred years—”
“Ninety-nine,” Bedivere said flatly.
“Because one year is going to make you that much less of a
liar,” Brant replied.
Lilly waved them away. “We don’t know why the College and the Federation are working together. Because they’re hiding it. Everything that is coming at us is because people are hiding the truth and wiping out anything that might uncover it. So let’s uncover it.”
Catherine shook her head. “I still don’t know what you mean.”
“She means,” Bedivere said calmly, “that we should tell the universe about me.”
Horror spilled through her. “You’re joking,” Catherine breathed.
Lilly shook her head. “No. I’m absolutely not joking. We sat here and said it ourselves. Brant did and I agree with him. If everyone could see that Bedivere isn’t the monster the Federation will tell them he is, if they could hear his story, then they might not sit still for the Federation just blowing him out of the sky without a fair hearing.”
“The court of public opinion,” Bedivere said. “Probably the one place where I could speak and be heard.”
Brant pulled a terminal over in front of him and punched up data. “There’s three media satellites around Barros.”
“I could have told you that,” Bedivere said, sounding amused.
“Very well, then, my walking datacore…where is the biggest concentration of media outlets in the Federation?”
Bedivere shrugged. “Cathain.”
“Cathain?” The name exploded from Catherine as her horror swirled higher. “The seat of the Federation Board, the very center of the Federation? Do you know how secure that place is?”
“That’s where all the media are,” Lilly said. “There’s satellites and feeds and culling services.”
“Six Board reporting feeds,” Bedivere said flatly in the tone that told Catherine he was reciting from pure data. Reading aloud. “Four entertainment channels. Three hundred and thirty-nine community news centers, all with independent feeds.”
Brant crossed his arms. “It does make a crazy kind of sense.”
Bedivere looked at her. “Just like hiring Brant was insanely brilliant,” he reminded her.
Catherine had to breathe deeply to disperse the near-panic the idea induced.
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