Revolution's Shore

by Kate Elliott

  “I don’t know. La Belle Dame might, but she’s gone now, and you’ll never catch her.” She saw the flash of annoyance flicker across his face before he controlled it, and she knew it had been the wrong thing to say.

  “Then that leaves comrade Hawk, does it not?” he replied calmly. “Convenient that he who was so well before visiting this La Belle Dame is now obviously suffering some illness. How did you escape from my people at Nevermore, Lily Ransome?”

  She had forgotten how much he knew of her—again, she had let distance and time allow her to underestimate him. It seemed to her now that she was walking down a long, but finite, corridor in which all the doors were being shut one by one before her.

  “I happened to be traveling,” she said slowly, “with a man who is now dead.”

  “And the three representatives from the League? One of whom was, though I shouldn’t have to remind you, our comrade Hawk.”

  “Hawk came with us. The other two—I don’t know. Perhaps they went back to League space.”

  “Presupposing that the route that the ghost ship called the Forlorn Hope once haunted has now been rediscovered.”

  Lily cupped one hand over her eyes, rubbing the ridges of her eyebrows. “I don’t know. I suppose it must have been—”

  “If La Belle Dame and this other ship are now running the roads in Reft space, I suppose it must have been, too,” he answered for her, perhaps a little sarcastic, now.

  Lily lowered her hand and regarded Jehane with the cool carelessness of utter fatigue. “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “I’m not a navigator, but I think—I suspect—that a road that long lost, or so difficult to run that it was left and forgotten, is not so easily opened again. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Comrade, you do me an injustice,” he replied in his most persuasive voice. “This is not an interrogation. But the safety of the Reft—if the safety of the Reft is at risk, then there is no investigation I will not pursue to ensure peace and the restoration of a true and responsive government.”

  “Blessings worked well for you. Did you know it would?”

  He cocked his head to one side, a gesture both endearing and modest. “I had faith. Now I had better leave you to your well-deserved rest. Events press on, comrade. I will not talk to you again until Arcadia is ours.” As he finished speaking, he stood up and walked to the door.

  “Comrade.” She, too, stood up. “Why are we being held in quarantine?”

  He smiled gently. “As long as the risk remains.” And left the room.

  She reached the door just as it sighed closed behind him. It was locked, of course; a means to ensure quarantine from the inside. She laid a hand on it, felt the unyielding metal cool her palms as she leaned against it as the hope that the pressure of her hand might open it cooled as well with each passing second. He had trapped her as neatly here as he had manipulated her into risking herself and her friends in the liberation of the Harsh 30s mine. That he no longer trusted her seemed obvious; the question now that she had to consider was whether he had ever trusted her, and whether her belief in Robbie Malcolm had caused her to be blinded to his suspicions. But she could not reconcile Pero’s belief in Alexander Jehane with her own misgivings about him, and knowing Robbie as she did, could still only conclude that Robbie knew of him something she did not, and had still to learn.

  “I will be patient, Robbie,” she murmured to herself, and stepped back from the door.

  “Did you want something?” asked Duri, coming from the other room.

  “No,” said Lily hastily. “Nothing.”

  Duri smiled warmly and perhaps apologetically as she walked past Lily to the quarantine lock. The door opened to produce an exchange of partners: Bach’s high, exuberant trill as he was restored—at Jehane’s pleasure, Lily reminded herself bitterly—to his mistress. Duri gave a slight, self-conscious wave and vanished as the door slipped to.

  Which left her still trapped, Lily thought as she turned. To face the door that led into the second room. And she realized that yet another door in that long, finite corridor had closed, shutting her in. Because Kyosti had trapped her just as neatly. And in his case she had not even been, however naively, a willing accomplice.

  She sank onto the couch, preferring, for the moment, to let Bach sing her to sleep than to deal with the consequences of that realization.

  But waking unknown hours later, nothing had changed. And after all, when in doubt, she had always chosen action as her first resort.

  She cleaned up a little, because it helped clear her mind, plugged Bach into the terminal that graced the front room, and ventured into the second.

  “Kyosti.” She paused in the arch that separated the two rooms.

  The second room, in which Kyosti lay, was dim. Unlike the outer room, which looked directly out on the pristine counters of Medical, this tiny chamber had opaque walls, the only concession to privacy. The corner lighting had been muted until it was more a suggestion than a glow. The only real light came from the screen levered out over Kyosti’s recumbent form. She knew he was not asleep because now and then he would lift his right hand and tap a few keys, coding some message or instruction.

  Alien. He was—not human, or not fully human. Yet he looked human to her, lying there, not like some fantastic and dreadful creature that haunted the highroad on its inexorable path of vengeance. The idea of making love to that alien male who had lunged for the man on La Belle’s bridge, had ripped his throat out—had scented the air when he entered, like an animal.

  Like Kyosti did. The gesture, familiar then, was familiar because she had seen it before, not because of some deeply rooted memory from her ancient predecessors. And the thought of loving a je’jiri male appalled her.

  Except that, even knowing what she did, he simply looked like Kyosti to her. As if she had known him too long to see him as anyone—anything—else. She felt bewildered by her contradictory emotions, and still, above else, furious that he had trapped her so completely. Without ever telling her why he had done it.

  “Have you slept at all?” she asked harshly, finding that her anger confused itself with a concern for his well-being. She sat on the edge of the couch, resting her hand in his hair.

  His breathing altered slightly in reaction to her proximity, but now she could read what his response really was: he was taking in her scent. He did not need to look at her to make contact. She recognized finally that touch and smell and taste had always been the most vivid senses for him. She shifted her body just enough that his arm and chest settled into contact with her leg where she sat sideways beside him.

  “Kyosti,” she began again after it became clear that he was not going to answer her—or at least not in words. “You knew all along what would happen if you slept with me.”

  This time she waited him out Information scrolled past on the screen until he lifted a hand to press pause.

  “Yes.”

  “You knew, and you did it anyway.”

  “Yes,” he repeated.

  “Without asking, if I had had other lovers. Without explaining anything to me, about the circumstances of such a—partnership. You forced me into a—a contract whose terms I was ignorant of. Whose terms I didn’t even know existed!”

  “Yes.” He did not move.

  All her breath came out in an angry rush. “No wonder Master Heredes was so furious! When I think—” She had to pause for a moment to let the full implications of just what it was that he had done to her sink in.

  “Would you have slept with me, had you known?” he asked quietly.

  “No! Of course not.”

  “Well.” He flipped off the “pause” button and let the information begin to scroll across the screen again. “There you are.”

  She reached past him and flipped the terminal off completely. “Just give me your attention for one damn second,” she snapped. “It may be perfectly easy for you to dismiss this with a blithe ‘there you are,’ but it’s a far different question for me. I’d
like to know just how you thought you had any right to subject me to your kind of—partnership.”

  He winced, reacting to the caustic tone of her voice on the word partnership, but he did not reply immediately. His fingers brushed the controls of the terminal, but he did not turn it on.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “I had no right,” he said softly. “The truth is—” He faltered.

  “The truth is?”

  For the first time, he looked up at her. In the luminescent glow of the corner lights, his skin seemed as pale as hers, but it was a human pallor. “You aren’t going to like this.”

  She laughed, a truncated noise that was more pain than humor. “You’ve said that to me before, but this time—Sit up, damn it. How can I talk to you when you lie there like an invalid?”

  He sat up obediently, the thin blanket that covered him rustling down around him with a whisper of sound.

  “This time, you’ll tell me.”

  He lifted one hand to brush the curve of her throat. “I was running,” he continued at last in a low voice. “Running from what the League did to me—locking me away. I was afraid they were trying to drive me”—he hesitated—“insane. By the time they allowed me to recant, I would have said anything to get out of that prison. When I saw you and Master Heredes …” He trailed off.

  “Yes?” she asked, with more patience now, because she remembered the first time he had told her that she was beautiful.

  “I could tell there was a link between you. A bond of—family. Then he told La Belle that you were his daughter.”

  “I remember,” she replied, but she was thinking of the locked room on La Belle’s ship where they had first made love.

  “Oh, Lily,” he murmured, moving his fingers along the tracery of her jawline. His gaze was agonizingly somber. “I realized that if I slept with you, I would, by linking myself to you, automatically get Heredes’s protection.”

  She hit him.

  “You bastard!” she yelled, jumping up.

  He gasped, clutching his abdomen. “Did you pull that punch?”

  “Of course,” she said scornfully. “Not that you deserved it.” Hot, angry tears, as yet unshed, scorched her eyes.

  He tried to laugh, but all he could manage through the gasping, short breaths occasioned by her blow was a kind of shuddering chuckle. “Lily, my heart.” He leaned forward while she was still surprised by his laughter and pulled her against him. “I love you.”

  “You what?” she asked, standing very still.

  He murmured something into her clothing which she could not understand.

  “I once told Finch,” she muttered, exasperated, “that I was looking for someone unpredictable. I thought you were traumatized by what happened on La Belle’s bridge.”

  He moved his head back to look up at her, and he frowned. “I am,” he said irritably. “It just occurred to me that this entire conversation has probably been taped for the edification of our friend Jehane. I can’t believe I let that slip—”

  “Damn Jehane.” She found herself inordinately pleased by the very humanness of his annoyance at himself, and she used the leverage of her standing to push him down onto the couch. “And anyway,” she added, kissing him on the lips, “I told Bach to interrupt any recording mechanisms.”

  Kyosti smiled and traced the soft angle of her lips with one finger. “Lily,” he began, then shook his head and let her kiss him again.

  Jehane followed Central’s routed fleet to Arcadia. Lily watched their progress on the terminal hooked into the suite, alternating time with Kyosti’s monitoring of the condition of the patients injured in the battle at Blessings. Of the forty-two worst cases, all but four survived, a statistic that led Doctor Prachenduriyang in to visit more frequently and at greater length than she ever had when Lily had been in quarantine alone.

  And when Kyosti, rather than falling ill, quickly recovered, Duri gave up trying to make sense of his blood sample and instead enlisted his aid in coordinating the report on the plague itself. Lily did not venture to intervene in this project, although she recognized immediately that Hawk had no intention of giving the game away—yet.

  The Boukephalos swung into orbit around Arcadia without any resistance: whatever station garrisons had not surrendered had already been taken by force by the advance assault teams. Kyosti spent more time relaying treatments to physicians on the other ships, and convinced Duri to send the worst casualties to the Forlorn Hope, where a specific ward could be set up to treat them.

  And one by one, across Arcadia’s great metropolis, the ward councils of each district repudiated Central’s rule and welcomed Jehane, until the only place left that remained armed, garrisoned, and defiant was Central itself, surrounded by the walls that had always separated it from the people it had governed.

  Jehane came to Medical. Kuan-yin trailed like a hound at his heels.

  “Comrade Heredes,” he said, while Doctor Prachenduriyang dismantled the quarantine and freed Lily and Kyosti from its sheath. “I would like you to accompany me downside.”

  “Of course, comrade.” She whistled to Bach.

  “Comrade Hawk will serve our cause best by transferring back to the clinic on the Forlorn Hope.”

  Kyosti merely nodded his head, not glancing at Lily, without any attempt to argue or be even mildly sarcastic.

  “Well,” said Jehane. Lily wondered if he was surprised at the meekness with which Kyosti received his orders, but he had only paused to glance at his wrist-com. “Let it be so.” He swept out.

  Kuan-yin paused in the doorway to look at Lily, a glare replete with dark warnings. In the hall beyond, comrade Vanov waited.

  Lily turned as soon as Kuan-yin left, but Kyosti was seated at Duri’s main terminal and seemed intent on his work, ignoring her.

  Duri came forward and offered Lily a little bag in which to stow her few possessions.

  “So the quarantine is off again?” Lily asked negligently.

  Duri shrugged, but she looked troubled. She glanced toward the door to Medical, as if she were afraid that one of Jehane’s lieutenants might be listening in. “It does seem a little abrupt,” she began, and then she turned away quickly, as if she had said too much.

  Lily went across to stand beside Kyosti. Although he did not look up, she knew he had followed her every movement around the room. Bach hovered an arm’s length above the terminal.

  “Kyosti,” she began, because this time Jehane’s separation of them seemed to her determined to keep them divided for a period she could not divine the end of.

  He glanced up. Although he smiled, she detected in it a warning to say no more. When she did not, he gave her the briefest of winks and then turned back to his work. With a brief good-bye to Duri, Lily followed the trail of Jehane’s procession down to the shuttle bay. Comrade Vanov, silent, accompanied her.

  To find, to her astonishment, a familiar face waiting in docking.

  “Robbie!” she cried. She flung herself forward and hugged him enthusiastically.

  Remembered the bridge of La Belle Dame, and pushed him away.

  “Robbie.” She realized that she was grinning like an idiot, partly out of the pure joy of seeing him, and partly because he was the perfect solution to her problem: if anything happened to Kyosti, Robbie would see to it that the Hierakis Formula got out. All along, she had known that he would be the most important person to tell. “But how did you come here?” she demanded, flush with knowing that she could in this way put to rest her worries about Jehane.

  He, too, was smiling, but with a gravity that reflected the seriousness of the situation. “I came to escort Jehane to his people. As is my part as his representative on Arcadia.”

  “Oh, Robbie.” Lily chuckled. “You haven’t changed at all. It’s so good to see you.”

  “I knew it was right to send you to Jehane,” he replied, his voice resonant with the depth of his sincerity. “I knew you would prove valuable to his cause.”

  Lily
could not help but frown slightly. “Yes.” She was saved from having to say more by the entrance of Jehane himself. He had perfected the art of pausing at exactly the right moment to draw attention to himself without overtly seeming to seek it.

  Robbie’s face shone with the illumination of the converted as he gazed on Jehane, oblivious to the rest of the group clustered around that man. He took two steps forward and thrust out his hand. “Comrade. I am Pero. I am honored to be the one chosen to escort you to our people.”

  For the barest instant Jehane hesitated, at this rather brash assumption of equality. Kuan-yin advanced quickly to brush aside this impudence, but Jehane moved smoothly forward to circumvent her action, and clasped Robbie’s hand.

  “Comrade Pero,” he said warmly. “The honor is mine. Shall we go?” He motioned for Pero to precede him up the ramp into the shuttle and followed him like any humble acolyte.

  Left behind, standing beside Lily, Kuan-yin scowled.

  25 The Hierakis Formula

  “BUT ROBBIE,” BEGAN LILY for the third time. “I don’t think you quite see.”

  Robbie shook his head with the same conviction that informed all of his actions. “It’s exactly because I do see, Lya, that I see the importance of telling Jehane about this miraculous discovery.”

  Lily sighed, because it was impossible to argue with Robbie when he was in one of his righteous moods. But the sigh also provoked a smile, because she could as easily have been having this conversation one year ago as now, so little had things changed with him.

  She and Robbie stood at the kitchen wall of his tiny apartment, washing dishes. His way of living seemed to have altered not at all, except that this apartment was in Anselm District instead of Zanta, closer to the walls of Central. A nameless benefactor had provided it for him when he had been forced by the closing net of Central Intelligence to move from his last residence some two months previous.

  “I still don’t see,” Lily said in an attempt to change the subject, “why you didn’t attend Jehane’s council this afternoon.”