by Kate Elliott
“No, Lily,” he agreed. “But then, you rarely did.” He looked past her, and she quickly introduced Jenny and Yehoshua. The Sar, not much to her surprise, recognized Yehoshua’s House affiliation, and greeted him rather more warmly than he did the imposing mercenary. But his real surprise came when Bach emerged from the compartment.
“Why I remember that piece of—equipment!” he began. “Not even Shiro could get it to work.” He turned a suspicious eye on his youngest child. “Perhaps we all did underestimate you, Lilyaka,” he finished, with a comprehensive glance at her composure and her uniform. Then, reading her discomfort, he turned to Yehoshua and discussed mining and ore with him as they walked the half a kilometer to Ransome House itself.
Various representatives from Unruli’s House concerns had already arrived, but the Sar took his three guests to a small suite to let them clean up before he led them to the formal dining hall. This was not the room in which the Ransome House clan had their family meals; Lily had in fact seen this hall rarely, never being of sufficient age or importance to merit inclusion in any formal functions.
But now her own mother greeted her formally as she came into the room. Held her hand a moment long, looking at her with that prim disapproval that was the expression Lily best remembered of her, and said in a low voice, “You are looking well, Lily. I see that your stubborn wildness has found a suitable channel at last.”
Lily was too astonished to do more than reply limply, “You’re looking well yourself, Mother.”
It was true enough. The intervening time had left no apparent mark on the Saress. She wore the same tightly coiled hairstyle, precise to each strand, and the smooth ebony of her skin concealed her age far better than the paler brownness of her husband’s complexion.
At her father’s urging, Lily passed on to meet the other guests: wealthy men and women, elected counselors and university instructors, other House functionaries. She was grateful when they sat down to dinner, and she could escape from enforced conversations that had no meaning into the safety of eating.
In such company, Jenny too remained quiet. When the talk turned to Jehane, and the rebellion, Lily found herself at a loss to convince these passive observers in the kind of reasoned, uncontroversial dinner talk that was their social forte. To her immense relief, Yehoshua’s years in Filistia House, before he had joined Jehane, had accustomed him to such niceties and evasions. He quickly became the spokesman while Lily, sitting next to the Sar, could relax and watch him field questions and gently rebuke the prejudiced and ignorant.
“He’s a good man, this Yehoshua,” said her father softly under the cover of the conversation. “I know of Filistia House—mostly asteroid mining, of course, but still a large and well-run operation out in the Salah-eh-Din belt. Any kind of alliance, or a bond, with that House would certainly be valuable to us.”
It took her a minute to catch his insinuation. Her first reaction was horror. “That’s out of the question,” she began hotly, thinking of Hawk, and then diverted her agitation into a quick change of subject. “During times like these, I mean. But I’d never heard of Filistia House until I met Yehoshua.” Once voiced, the thought made her regard the Sar with sudden, and keen, interest. “You must collect a great deal of information on the mining and House operations across the Reft.”
“To be successful, one must stay informed.” He returned her regard evenly, giving no clue as to what he thought of her brief and impassioned outburst on the subject of bond alliances. “Yes, it’s true that I collect a lot of information. Though you’ve never shown any interest in such things before, Lilyaka.”
She did not answer immediately: she was thinking of Bach, whom she had left back in the suite, idle but for whatever activities such a robot might choose on his own initiative. Already she was planning how to get that information out of Ransome House’s computer net and into Bach, to transport back on the Forlorn Hope to Jehane’s people. Perhaps Jehane already had access to such files, but whatever twists put on the collation by the Sar’s active and penetrating mind might reveal some valuable grain of a detail otherwise lost. Lily smiled, taking in her father’s bemused expression. “No, I hadn’t shown much interest before, had I?”
“Is this the influence of Jehane that I see?”
“No.” She felt the old pain—muted now, true, but still hard beneath the surface. “Perhaps a little, but it was mostly Master Heredes’s influence. But he’s dead,” she added quickly, wanting to forestall further questions.
“I’m sorry,” he answered gravely. “Then he was indeed in danger that day.”
“Yes. But it was Central that killed him.”
He pondered the bitterness of her voice for a few moments in silence, while farther down the table Yehoshua kept the guests busy with his passionate, but not unreasonable, defense of Jehane. “Some months after you left, the Caennas were arrested—all but the father—by the government on charges of harboring seditious material and tampering with port logs and trade regulations and tax collection. I could discover that they were sent to Harsh, but nothing more.”
“I know. Old Grandmam Caenna died there. And Swann, the daughter, was killed in a raid. Finch is with me now. His mother, not surprisingly, is on Jehane’s staff on his flagship.”
“Everyone has suffered, Lilyaka. Your cousin Hiro died the day you disappeared.”
“Hiro?” The name caught in her throat, and she felt with vivid clarity the trailing strand of the ghost’s tendril across her hand, back on the flat grounds of Apron Port.
“He blamed himself for your precipitate departure. He followed you, much against my wishes, in another surface truck. He was not as lucky as you.”
She did not reply, stared at her plate for a long while as, half-heard, Yehoshua discussed the meaning of Jehane’s name and assured the guests that Jehane was not a Ridani, in disguise or otherwise, nor yet a fool who did not understand the problems inherent in dealing with the Ridani population sprawled across every grimy corner and rundown corridor of Reft space.
A long ripple of repercussions spread out from her impulsive choice to follow Master Heredes, and yet she was herself just one link in a larger chain that led back across unimaginable distances to its hazy beginnings in a war fought through regions of space that her people—the citizens of the Reft—had long since been exiled from and ignorant of. And yet the Forlorn Hope itself might hold some key that could unlock the route that could lead them across the uncharted and confusing wastes that had stranded such a population here in the first place.
“Do you think Jehane will win?” asked the Sar, breaking into her musing.
She saw that this of all questions was the one that truly concerned him, planning for the future of his House. However much he might care for her—and she understood now that he did—his was a conserving soul, and his overriding goal was one of preservation, to which all other affections must come second.
“I think it likely,” she said carefully, “given that he is what he is. If Central rallies enough to break him, still I think he’ll have come so close to succeeding that things will change in any case. One way, or the other.”
He nodded. Already she could see in the way his attention retreated from her that she had lost him to the calculations necessary to keep Ransome House protected from the upcoming storm.
Dinner adjourned soon after. Lily excused herself from the more casual after-dinner salon, where, surprisingly, Jenny found herself more comfortable than Yehoshua, having experienced at close hand the informal formalities of senatorial society on Arcadia.
A few words to Bach in the silence of the suite, and he was set busy with the House computer, digging up facts. Lily retraced her steps of that day two years since to the old warehouse, recalling the procedures with breathing plug and helmet, the codes on the doors, the cold stillness of the lock that gave suddenly onto the rough wilderness of Unruli.
She felt the same exhilaration, battling those winds as she made her way across the familiar r
oute to the Academy. Old habits came back to her: listening for the snap of rock, the heightened wail of a changing gust of wind, the sudden shift of color in the roiling clouds that might presage new turbulence.
But coming over the rise to the narrow, sunken plateau that housed Master Heredes’s Academy, she saw that it had changed utterly. It was nothing but bones, now. A few wind generators still clacked repetitiously, but most had long since shattered, or else flapped aimlessly in the gale. She went as far as the elevator shaft that led down.
Sand silted the door, half-concealing it. After extensive digging she got enough purchase on the door to shove it open. Sand poured down into darkness.
Cool, stale air wafted up from the deep shaft to commingle with the violent whip of wind around her. No command, no combination of keys, lifted the grounded elevator from its grave. Empty and abandoned, the Academy lay in ruins in the harsh landscape of Unruli.
Thoughtful, but not despondent, she returned to Ransome House. Soon after, she gathered her companions and they left.
“So,” said Jenny when they were back on the shuttle and lifting for the clear veil of space beyond Unruli’s storms, “we’ve accomplished our revenge and succumbed to our nobler impulses of familial solidarity. Now what?”
“What do you think?” asked Lily absently. Hooked by her screen to Bach’s memory, she paged through the wealth of information stolen from Ransome House’s computer net. “We track down Jehane.”
“Oh, Jehane,” said Jenny, sounding a little disappointed. “I thought, with that boat falling so providently into our hands, that we might set up as a bootlegger. I think we could be pretty successful.”
Lily looked up from her screen. “I don’t think the next couple of years are going to be very fruitful for bootleggers. If—when—Jehane succeeds, he knows too well how useful they can be in clandestine operations against the government. And if Central wins”—she hesitated, casting a glance at Yehoshua—“they’ll want their own revenge against the people who aided and abetted the rebellion.”
“And in any case,” said Yehoshua easily, but with a surprising touch of sarcasm, “we’re all Jehanists, aren’t we?”
“‘Jehane will come,’” said Lily slowly. “‘He will bring justice. But, comrades, it is up to us to prepare the ground on which he will stand.’”
But she thought of Robert Malcolm as she said it, not of Jehane.
19 Gregori Meets His Father
THE FORLORN HOPE SLUNK along the littlest used interstices of the Reft’s vector net for two months before a chance encounter with a terrified merchanter gave them the Boukephalos’s last known location. They had taken out two military cutters with their guns and had scared off any number of less aggressive vessels with the faded, looping distress beacon that was the last vestige of the Forlorn Hope’s previous crew.
A long two months, but fruitful for Pinto and the Mule, Finch and Nguyen and Blue, and even Paisley when Blue cooperated with her; with Yehoshua acting as an ad hoc first, they began to grow comfortable with the ship’s systems, so that their lack of qualified people on many of the posts was a problem they learned to work around, even as their ability to respond to the ship became more complex.
On returning from Unruli, Lily had told Hawk that he was no longer welcome in her cabin, and that she would prefer he stay confined to Medical. He did not press her for an explanation, just disappeared into Medical’s lab. Only Rainbow saw him with any frequency, which suited the rest of the crew, although Lily suspected that both Paisley and Gregori spent time in the lab with him. Now and then he requested through formal channels the assistance of Bach. She always agreed, although she did not inquire into his doings. Aliasing brought him meals from the kitchen, and Jenny, mercifully, asked no questions.
Rumor led them past Salah-eh-Din by circuitous routes to Timbuktu. Good hard facts directed them back toward that sector of space that Jehane had come out of in the first place.
They found the Boukephalos at Tollgate. After a tense hour during which Lily finally managed to convince a massed fleet of twenty ships that she was with them, not against them, she received a sudden order to report on board the Boukephalos in person in two hours. She sent Pinto and Jenny and Finch to prepare the shuttle, left Bach in her cabin with the usual instructions to be cautious, and went to docking to discover Hawk already strapped into one of the last row of seats.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, annoyed to find that her hands shook and her breathing quickened at the sight of him.
He smiled, mocking. “It occurs to me,” he replied softly, “that it is time that I met Alexander Jehane. I am curious to see what kind of man he is.”
“I would have thought you’d have plenty of opportunity to do that by watching the vids of his speeches.”
He had cut his hair short. It gave him an almost normal look, as if he were just any other person, except that his hair was now entirely blue: all the blond ends had gone. His expression was still mocking, and he glanced, briefly, toward Jenny at the front. “Ah, but it is the one point on which comrade Seria and I agree: being both uninterested in messiahs, neither of us have bothered to follow the exploits of our glorious leader except through what we hear from others, or inadvertently over the comm.”
“Then what’s your interest now?” She found herself getting more annoyed because he seemed so distant from her. Had he no reaction at all? No explanations or even a plea for forgiveness? He had never even sought her out in the past two months—
The mocking look on his face changed abruptly, as if he could read her thoughts, to one of amused complicity. She blushed: there had been dreams, and stranger, more erotic ones still when she had slept through windows, until at last, this past week, she had scheduled her sleep to periods when they did not traverse the highroad itself.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed in an undertone. “Not during a window—” She stopped, infuriated by the look on his face. She could not tell if he was laughing at her for her fantasies, so revealing, or if he was pleased with himself for having found so underhanded a way to circumvent her decision to reject him.
Abruptly he frowned and turned his face away from her. “I will thank you,” he said in a low voice, “not to insult me by believing that I would touch you without your consent.”
Instead of replying, Lily spun and went forward to strap in beside Jenny, just behind pilot and comm.
“Let’s go,” she snapped.
Much to Lily’s surprise, she found Kuan-yin waiting with ten white-clad soldiers to escort them at the Boukephalos docking bay. Lily had intended to have Jenny accompany her, but seeing the hard face of Kuan-yin, she felt it might be wise to leave Jenny with the shuttle and go alone with Hawk, who she doubted she could persuade to stay.
“Comrade Jehane wishes to see you alone,” said Kuan-yin harshly, seeing Hawk emerge from the shuttle behind Lily.
Before Lily could reply, Kyosti stepped forward. “Don’t you remember me?” he drawled.
She glared at him, but without a word turned and motioned them forward. As they filed along the white corridors of the Boukephalos, Lily wondered if comrade Kuan-yin had changed at all in the intervening time, or if she had perhaps forgiven Lily for the injury she had dealt Jehane. The belligerent set of Kuan-yin’s shoulders seemed to indicate that she had not.
She left them in the same office that Lily had met Jehane in some nine months ago. Lily sat down in what might well have been the same plush chair, but Kyosti prowled, touching each surface, each texture, in the room, including Jehane’s desk and chair. Lily watched him move, the familiar posture, the smooth grace with which he completed his exploratory circuit of the room. He returned to stand just behind and to one side of her chair.
A door sighed open, and Jehane entered.
He paused as the door slipped shut behind him and simply gazed at them. His brilliance had neither dimmed nor, Lily thought, changed in its essence, and yet she felt he was measuring her in a new way. S
he stood up.
As if her movement was a cue, Kyosti stirred beside her, and spoke.
“‘And he stood in his own Light that surrounds him who is the eye of the Light that gloriously shines on me.’” His voice was so neutral that Lily could not tell whether he was being sardonic or sincere.
Jehane cocked his head to one side, a curiously mortal gesture. “Have we met before?” he asked.
“Not personally, I think,” replied Hawk.
As much as Lily wanted to turn her head to see Kyosti’s expression, she did not think it prudent.
“Ah,” said Jehane, the exclamation encompassing an entire universe of understanding. “Yes. I remember you.” He walked with deliberate steps to his desk and stood behind it, fingertips resting lightly on the plastine grain of its surface as he examined the blue-haired man. Lily could not decide whether he approved of what he saw or not.
“Shall I wait outside?” asked Kyosti in a tone both languid and amused.
Jehane did not reply immediately. He sat down instead and tapped onto the keypad of his desk, until a shifting of the light that radiated up toward his face from the screen imbedded in the desk revealed that he had called up some information. His gaze flicked over it, but whatever it said either did not surprise him or was entirely unrelated to his scrutiny of Kyosti, because his expression did not alter in the slightest.
“Yes,” he said softly, at last. “I think you might.”
Hawk offered him a negligent bow and left by the other door.
Lily remained standing.
“I sense,” said Jehane, “that you have rather a lot to report to me, comrade Heredes. Perhaps you would be more comfortable seated.”
“Thank you, comrade.” Lily sat down.
He acknowledged her thanks with a patrician nod and simply waited, then, for her to begin.
She started with Callioux’s final instructions, with the death of Franklin’s Cairn, with their time on Landfall, and moved from there to the discovery of the Forlorn Hope. As she spoke, his fingers moved lightly over the keypad, so that she wondered what notes he was taking. His gaze remained on her, as narrow and tight a channel as that between two ships in a crowded port who wish their conversation to go unheard by any other comm. The effect was so disconcerting that she faltered once or twice, but always she found her balance again and went on with her story. When she finished, his fingers continued tapping for a time and eventually ceased.