The Kinsmen Universe

by Ilona Andrews

  The lean psycher's eyes widened, puzzled.

  "She isn't screaming." Castilla blinked, feigning surprise. "Do you restrain your drone often, Ven? Perhaps she likes it?"

  Venturo moved. The force of his mind shot out like a blow of an enormous club. The older man went flying across the lobby, his heavy body knocking the golden chairs into the air. Venturo spun, too fast, and then Castilla was locked in the cage of his arms, her back to his chest, his hand holding a red monomolecule blade a millimeter away from her jugular.

  "Attacking a civilian is a new low for you," he said, his voice calm, almost conversational. "Shall I tell your parents about it?"

  She trembled, rage shivering in the curl of her upper lip. "Kill him!"

  The older man slowly picked himself up off the floor. His nose, mouth, and eyes bled. The lean psycher stared at Ven.

  "Kill him!"

  "They can't, dear," Ven told her, his lips a few centimeters from her ear. "You can't fight me with your mind. We've tried that, remember? If your cousins attack me, they'll have to spend time breaking through my outer shield. My blade will end your life in half a second. And then I'll kill both of them, and if I don't, your father will."

  Castilla growled, a purely animal sound suffused with helpless fury.

  "So sweet and refined," Ven said. "As always, a true blossom of the Provinces."

  "Fuck you!"

  "Perhaps later, if I decide to go slumming." Ven nodded at the lean psycher. "Pelori, let her go. Now."

  The hold on Claire's mind vanished. Her heels touched the ground. "Thank you," she said to Ven. "Shall I alert the authorities?"

  "There is no need. We're finished here." Ven let go of Castilla and the woman shoved away from him.

  "You'll regret this," she snarled.

  "I had to touch you - I'm regretting it already."

  Castilla spun and walked out of the lobby. The older man followed. The lean psycher lingered, looking her over, and walked away.

  "Are you alright?" Ven asked, his mind probing hers gently, searching for damage.

  "I'm fine." She forced calm to flow through her outer thoughts. "Shall we go up?"

  "No. I've changed my mind." He leaned closer and murmured, "We won't get to Sangori now. He's had too much time to prepare." He raised his voice. "Will you join me for dinner instead?"

  "Of course."

  "Excellent."

  They walked out. The moment they boarded Venturo's sleek silver aerial, the force of his mind flowed over hers, like a shield. "Will you let me scan your mind for injuries?"

  "I would rather not."

  "Why?"

  "We're not that close," she told him. "I like to keep my thoughts private. I ask you to respect this boundary."

  "Very well." Ven punched the code into the aerial's console, pulling his mind back. "Where would you like to eat?"

  Claire considered it. She could tell him to take her home. In all likelihood, he simply wanted to observe her to see if her mind unraveled. But he was right here, next to her, and he was offering her an evening of his undivided attention. It wasn't in her power to turn it down.

  I'm so pathetic.

  If she was going to do this, she would make the best of it.

  "Somewhere private," she said. "I think I've had enough excitement for today."

  The aerial's engine hummed as they rose into the air. "I know just the place," he said.

  Claire had no idea that the top floors of the Guardian Building housed a garden. In this part of the structure the outer exoskeleton of plasti-steel beams sloped, forming the upper curve of the flower bud, and the space between the diagrid and the inner core of the building was only about twenty-five meters. Those twenty-five meters were occupied by a tiled deck. Ornamental shrubs and flowers formed green barriers, slicing the deck into small private sections. Ven brought her to the larger of these sections.

  Three comfortable wicker chairs with burgundy-red cushions waited in the center of the deck, each with its own side table, arranged around a large metal brazier. Past the chairs, the solar panels of the sloping diagrid had turned transparent, reacting to encroaching darkness. The sky spread before her, vast, endless, tinted with purple and blue, the stars distant points of light. Little white flowers bloomed in the flower beds, filling the air with a refined perfume reminiscent of peaches.

  Venturo took an ornate bin from behind one of the chairs, dumped a small heap of uniform black stones out of it into the brazier and added wood chips.

  "What's this?"

  "Charcoal."

  "Fossil fuels? Really?" How quaint.

  "It's a provincial tradition." He drenched the coals in some fluid and lit it with a flick of a spark stick. The coals ignited. A wave of heat washed over Claire. She smelled smoke. It wasn't an unpleasant scent.

  To their right, the glass doors opened and a smiling man came forward, followed by a computerized trolley.

  "Ah. Here comes our food. Thank you, Ertez."

  "You're welcome. Enjoy."

  The man departed. The top of the trolley opened like a flower, revealing half a dozen larger dishes, each supporting long skewers threaded with vegetables and meat.

  "Pick one."

  She puzzled over the choices and chose a skewer at random. "This one."

  Ven lowered the skewer into the openings cut in the rim of the brazier, picked out his own skewer, and placed it next to hers. Flames licked the meat.

  "Do you feel lightheaded at all?" he asked casually, plucking a bottle painted with an icy lace of frost from the trolley. "Any strange vision problems, like tiny glowing threads flying about?"

  He was trying to check if she'd suffered any mind lesions. Claire smiled. "I'm fine."

  Ven opened the bottle and poured shimmering pink liquid into two glasses. "I'm sorry. I should have never put you into that position."

  Ven would have never attacked a civilian. In his mind, that sort of action was filed under It's Just Not Done. His mind-shields were down - probably so he could scan her mind at the first sign of trouble - and his emotions leaked out. He was intensely worried about her well-being.

  Claire smiled.

  "Am I funny?"

  "No."

  "Then why are you smiling?"

  "I find your customs - Dahlia customs - antiquated. Charming, but antiquated."

  "We're a very violent society," he said, turning the skewers. "We have to have customs and ceremonies, otherwise we'd constantly offend each other and soon none of us would be left. Some things are not done. Attacking a civilian is one of them."

  "Were you worried?" She sipped the pink drink. It was sweet, tart, and refreshing, with a trace of alcohol. She realized it must be wine.

  "Yes," Ven said. "I was worried. I didn't want you to be hurt because I was caught off-guard."

  "I wasn't worried," she told him.

  "I noticed. You handled the whole situation with the poise of a seasoned kinsman." He laughed. "A violent psycher paralyzes your mind, and when he lets you go, you calmly ask if you should alert the authorities. You kill me, Claire."

  Kill. A dangerous word. "I considered screaming in blind panic, but I didn't want to break your concentration."

  "Was that a joke?"

  "Possibly."

  He raised his glass. "Congratulations."

  "Thank you." She grinned and drank her wine.

  Ven frowned. "I don't know what Castilla has on Sangori, but I called a friend of mine in the Provinces, Celino Carvanna. The man is a financial shark, so if something is going on with Sangori, I will soon know about it."

  Ven took a plate from the trolley, used a fork to slide the meat and vegetables off the skewer onto it, and passed it to her. Claire took a bite. The meat tasted smoky and tender and completely delicious.

  "This is great."

  "There is something about food cooked over the open flame," he said. "I don't know if it's a racial memory from the time we huddled around the fire in animal skins, but there are few thi
ngs as flavorful."

  He raised his glass. She raised hers and he clinked it against hers. "Do you like the wine?"

  "I love it. This is my first taste."

  "No wine on Uley?" he asked.

  "No. Occasionally we would be issued grain alcohol, but no wine." She bit the meat and chewed, savoring the taste. "Do you and Castilla have some sort of prior history?"

  Ven sighed. "Yes. Yes, we do. My father was an off-worlder. He came to Rada with nothing except the clothes on his back, but he was a very powerful psycher and my mother's family took him in. He became a client. It's the next step up from a retainer. When you're a client, you are almost family. My father fell in love with my mother and she fell in love with him. They married. He took the Escana name, because our family had status and name recognition, while his surname meant nothing. They were both older at the time, so it was a surprise when I came along."

  "Were they happy you were born?"

  He nodded. "Yes. I had a happy childhood. The money was tight, but tight by kinsmen standards. We had a nice house. During summers, we'd go to the coast to swim in the ocean. It was beautiful. Endless water, brilliant blue as far as you can see and under the surface fish in every color. The mountains thrust right out of the water, and I'd sit on the rocks and watch the shark dolphins play..."

  She almost said, "You see the bionet as the ocean, don't you, Ven?" but caught herself. Claire Shannon, the secretary, wouldn't know that.

  "My parents loved it so much, they live there now. I always wanted to live on the coast." Ven smiled.

  "So why don't you?"

  "There are very few businesses on the coast. The ocean storms six months out of the year, so little shipping is done by water. The ports are mostly for tourists. Besides, most of the family is here. Our business interests are here. My father and mother have little concern for Guardian. Neither one of them is really the business type. They have the ability, but not the ambition required to grow a business."

  Ven shrugged, leaning back. His face seemed almost melancholic, and then he shook it off.

  "Anyway, back to Castilla. As I grew up, the family realized that I was their most valuable asset. I'm a stronger psycher than my father, but we had very few resources to make use of my talents. De Solis is an old family. A lot of money, a lot of connections, and decades in the bionet business. So, my parents approached the de Solis with a marriage proposal. De Solis would get a powerful psycher and Escana's financial issues would be resolved through the alliance."

  He seemed unperturbed by the idea of his family selling him. "How did you feel about it?"

  Ven drank his wine. "Imagine that you're eighteen years old. On this world eighteen means you are a man, expected to support yourself and your family. You're the golden child; your family expects you to lift them out of misery and solve all their financial problems, and you have no idea how to do that. You have a lot of anxiety about it. Then your father comes to you and says, 'You don't have to go to college and you don't have to worry about finding a job. All you have to do is marry this beautiful girl, make her happy, and work for her family business. They'll train you, they'll teach you to develop your talents, and one day you'll inherit the whole enterprise. You'll never have to worry about a thing.'"

  "Sounds great," she said.

  "I was all about it," Ven said. "Ask any eighteen-year-old boy and he will tell you he'd jump on the chance. And Castilla was gorgeous. She had breasts the size of grapefruits."

  Claire blinked.

  "I'm trying to give you my eighteen-year-old perspective."

  "So her breasts were a large factor in your calculations?"

  "Yes. Sex with a beautiful girl on a regular basis, I wasn't going to pass that up." Ven shook his head with a self-mocking expression.

  She laughed.

  Ven refilled their glasses.

  "What happened?" Claire asked.

  "It turns out that I knew about the negotiations, but nobody bothered to tell Castilla. She was sixteen at the time and she was a kinsmen princess: expensive clothes, pricy jewelry, endless parties... Anything daddy's money could buy, she bought. She set the scene. She had a crowd of flunkies following her around, egging her on." Ven stirred the coals with a metal poker and set a few more skewers over the fire. "Somehow the rumors of the possible engagement leaked and one of the tabloids cornered her. She was at a party at the time, surrounded by her hangers-on. They asked her what she thought about the engagement."

  He fell silent.

  "What did she say?"

  "She said, 'Well, of course every beggar boy wants to marry a princess, but princesses don't dream of marrying into panhandler families.'"

  Even with her minimal knowledge of Rada, Claire knew the insult to the Escana family was monumental.

  "The tabloid had her on vid, and they ran with it. Her father tried to quash it, but it was too late. The engagement was impossible after that. Castilla's parents were furious with her."

  "Because of the insult to you?"

  "That, but mostly because her conduct was vulgar. It made her seem stupid and spoiled and it was unbecoming of her family name. Kinsmen mothers would play the vid for their children as a demonstration of how not to behave in public. De Solis had been above reproach and now they were deeply shamed. Her father told her, 'You think you're a princess? Let's see how you will do without my money.' Everything stopped, all her parties, all her shopping sprees, all of it went away. Her crowd dumped her. She worked for the family company and was given just enough money to live on. To this day her spending is tightly controlled. She hates me. You saw her today, she was practically frothing at the mouth."

  "You hate her, too."

  Venturo stirred the coals again, the light of the fire playing on his face. "It took me eight years to scrape together enough funds to start Guardian. I took every job I could find. I remember two months after Guardian opened, a contract fell through. We couldn't pay the power bill. We got one terminal working, because we had to log in and patrol for our monthly maintenance. We had it running off the aerial's generator. I'd drained it dead. When I think where I could've been if we had married... She set me back about fifteen years."

  Fourteen years ago the Intelligence soldiers had led her away from her mother's apartment.

  "Do you regret it?" Claire asked.

  "No. If I went down that road, I wouldn't be the person I am today. I'm not indebted to anyone. I own my business, I own this building, many people feed their families because I provide them with jobs. I got there on my own. Nobody tells me what to do."

  "Except Lienne."

  Ven grinned. "Except her. She never lets me forget that I have family obligations. The other day she actually sent a pulse through the building looking for me. It's a kind of psycher wake-up call."

  Yes, I know, it gave me a headache. Claire bit her tongue.

  "Besides, I'd have to be married to Castilla." He grimaced.

  Claire sipped her wine, feeling the pleasant heat slide down her throat. "Why aren't you married, Ven?"

  He shrugged. "I work. A lot. Psychers aren't exactly a common kinsman variant and dating non-psychers is difficult." His face slid into a suave expression. "Hello there," he said in a smooth bedroom voice. "My name is Venturo Escana. I can read your mind!"

  Claire laughed.

  "I can tell when you're lying and I can discover all your secrets. I'll know when you fake it in bed, I'll know when you cheat, I'll know when you spend too much. I'll know what you really think about me. Don't you want to marry me?"

  She finished off her glass and squinted at him from above the rim. "Would you read your wife's mind? You don't read our minds at work."

  "Probably not," he said. "But there is always the possibility that I could and that's enough. Your turn to tell me about yourself."

  "It's not that interesting," she said.

  "I'm interested. I'm dying to know how you ended up on that planet."

  She sighed. "Very well. Melko and Brodwyn ar
e actually large mining conglomerates. Both of them owned mining fleets and they strip-mined asteroids for years. It takes a lot of skilled workers to run mining operations on that scale. Mining fleets always attract weird people, individuals who don't fit anywhere else, and the employees of both conglomerates had pretty varied histories.

  "Then Brodwyn scouts discovered Uley, which is basically a mineral treasure trove covered with a thin layer of rock. The scouts came back but somehow Melko found out about the find. The official Brodwyn version is that one of the scouts was captured and Melko tortured the information out of her, but official versions are usually untrustworthy. The Melko fleet was more mobile at the time, so they wrapped up their operation and landed on Uley, on the Eastern Continent. It took Brodwyn almost three years to untangle themselves from their trade agreements and then they landed on the Western Continent."

  "And the arms race began," Ven said.

  She nodded. "The resources were severely limited so both Melko and Brodwyn adopted no-waste policies and encouraged population growth to build their armies. There was only one city on each continent and they looked exactly the same: picture a hive of uniform rectangular buildings about a half-kilometer tall. The buildings were so large, each one was like a village run by a Building Association. You would be born, live, work, and die in the same building sometimes."

  "It sounds bleak."

  "It was. On most worlds when a war breaks out, both sides have access to prior culture, to art, to pre-war luxuries such as gardens, clothes, entertainment. We didn't. Most clothes were standard issue and un-dyed. We had one solid meal a day, usually a meat block and some sort of grain, the rest of the time we had nutrient paste." Claire hesitated, not sure how much to share. "When I was fourteen, I was taken away from my mother."

  "What do you mean, taken away?" He refilled her glass and emptied the rest of the wine into his.

  "It was decided that I should become a part of the military support staff, so some soldiers came and took me away from my mother. I was given new rooms in a Military building and I had to live there. My father had died years ago, and my mother was sick with Meteor Shower Virus. A lot of mining people get it - it looks like black burn marks on your skin. Nobody knows why it flares up, but the outbreaks will spark and die out on their own. MSV is incurable. It attacks the nervous system and it's a very slow killer. The victim becomes weaker and weaker, until they lose the ability to walk and then fade into death. All you can do is make the person comfortable."