“Why are you in Paris?” Aramis demanded. “What’s wrong?”
The other woman rolled her eyes. “I’m here to sit on a royal friend of ours so he doesn’t go raging across the galaxy on an unsanctioned killing frenzy.”
Oh. That made sense. Chev would have had time to fly to Lunar Palais from the Daughters of Peace once she heard the news about Buck – royal exile or no royal exile, of course she would not leave Prince Alek to deal with the news on his own.
Chevreuse was a good friend to have in bad times. “This line is secure,” she said now in that brisk, no-nonsense way of hers. “At least, if it’s not then no line ever can be. Are you on your way to Valour?”
Aramis didn’t ask how Chevreuse knew that. Her ex-girlfriend had spent her whole career as a wickedly efficient information hub. “Special team,” Aramis replied, assuming Chev knew the particulars. She was asking to let Aramis knew that she knew. “Collecting a package.”
“That could be trickier than you think,” Chevreuse frowned. “Can you do me a favour?”
“Always,” Aramis said automatically, then hesitated. “As long as it’s not treasonous.”
Chevreuse gave her an exhausted look. “As if I’d ask you commit treason before breakfast, darling.”
“Shoot.”
“Do your people know how Buck died?”
Aramis stared at Chevreuse through the screen. She was all bright white bobbed hair and business suit – very professional. “No. Information’s been sketchy, and it’s not supposed to be relevant to our mission.” Collect Milord, take him back to the Bastion. That was it. That was all they were supposed to do.
Chevreuse leaned in, her bright blue eyes troubled. “Aramis, honey, I can’t emphasise enough how relevant this information is to your mission.”
“So tell me.”
“Marshal Felton paid a call on Buck, forty minutes before the staff at Villiers House reported her murder.”
Aramis blinked at her. “Marshal Felton. Jan Felton?” She had never met a stuffier, more rule-abiding person in her life. “That can’t be right.”
“There were witnesses who corroborated the security records, but all evidence concerning Felton’s presence in the house was deleted within six hours of the time of death.” Chevreuse choked a little over the word ‘death’ and Aramis wanted to reach through the view screen and hug her.
“What can I do? We’re not going to have much leeway on the planet if you want us to expand the investigation…”
“No need,” Chevreuse said, getting more of a hold on herself. “That’s not the favour I require. There’s one witness who can’t be bought, can’t be silenced, and I know exactly where he’s hiding now because I sent him there. I need you and your crew to find him, keep him safe. I need you to promise me this one, Aramis, because without that promise I can’t stop the Prince Consort from trying to do it himself.”
Aramis nodded briskly. “Send me the coordinates, Chev. If your witness is who I think he is, I know a Musketeer who is going to be very pleased to hear it.”
Conrad Su must have escaped Villiers House after Buck was killed. No wonder Chev and the Prince were so desperate to secure him. They had already lost one friend this week.
“Good,” said Chevreuse with a grin. “I have a soft spot for your D’Artagnan, since she sent me the best bloody personal assistant I’ve ever had. Kitty is a marvel.”
“How’s the baby?” Aramis asked, to keep Chevreuse on the line a little longer. It was a million years since they had last talked.
Chev actually looked startled – it was rare that Aramis was able to ruffle her. “How did you know about that?”
“Is it a secret? I thought Montbazon would be shouting it to the sky – he’s always wanted an heir, hasn’t he?”
Aramis didn’t know Chevreuse’s husband all that well – one New Aristocrat high-up government official was much the same as another. Chev had kept them as separate as possible, when she and Aramis were dating. Whatever she and Montbazon shared, it had always sounded like a pragmatic, contractual relationship rather than anything romantic.
“He was happy to acknowledge our daughter,” Chevreuse said, surprisingly flustered. That was rare. “He’s not the biological father, though.”
Aramis smirked, leaning her chin on her hands. “Rrreally? Tell me more.”
Chevreuse narrowed her eyes. “Oh look,” she said. “Signal’s breaking up.”
The perfectly clear subspace signal that had transmitted her footage all the way from Lunar Palais dissolved into a burst of grey static.
“That was fun,” Aramis said to Bazin, who gave her one of his patented judgy android expressions. “Can we set up a secure line between us and the Buttercup? I want to chat to Captain D’Artagnan about boys.”
55
Snow and Star Nuns, But Mostly Snow
THEN:
Conrad gave Buck her space, as much as possible. Villiers House was her home, and he was conscious of the fact that he was an uninvited guest.
Also, they weren’t friends.
They had got along fine last Joyeux, when she was the Ambassador of Valour, palling around with Prince Alek and taking Chev’s place to help the Emerald Knights complete their final season. They had played fleur-de-lis together with Chev and Alek, and Conrad would always consider Buck to be a valued teammate. But that wasn’t the same as friends.
Buck had been acting strange since Conrad arrived. It was as if she were at least three people.
1) She was a tired, stressed New Aristocrat who made political plans and looked over paperwork constantly, taking calls from supporters and colleagues who had Opinions about Valour continuing to stay neutral in the war against the Sun-kissed.
2) She was a manic jock who would grab Conrad at the oddest times and haul him into her pool or her Zero-G tank to compete, whether they were racing through the water or sparring with poles.
3) She was a ghost, a pale shade of herself who muttered into her hair, darted away at any sign of company, and did not eat or drink nearly enough.
Buck was cracking up, and while there were plenty of staff and sycophantic “friends” hanging around Villiers House to address her every need, Conrad seemed to be the only person who noticed what a state she was in.
Chev should be here. Chev could deal with anything. Conrad was used to looking after one impulsive but mostly compliant Prince Consort, not this messy mishmash of What The Hell Is Going On Inside Buck’s Skull?
It was the extra security, he told himself. That was enough to make anyone jumpy.
It was almost a relief when the Planetary Marshal arrived, offering a discreet code at the door to prove her identity. “The First Minister wishes me to revise the Duchess’s security arrangements,” she said in a clipped voice.
Conrad wondered if Marshal Felton even knew who he was. Dana had mentioned her as a potential ally in one of her recent texts, but did anyone official know why he was here in this house?
“I’ll fetch her,” Conrad said, making sure that Gus and Loni – two of Buck’s oldest and longest-serving personal guards – escorted the Marshal into the Room of Eggs.
It probably had some schmancy posh person name like a Receiving Salon or a Guesting Suite or whatever, but it was the blue room off the main lobby full of tiny jewelled eggs on stands that freaked Conrad the fuck out. It was also where Buck liked to meet official guests.
Conrad hated that he even knew that. He wanted to go home. Paris was a yawning ache in his heart, and there was too much pollen on this planet. Pollen and oxygen and grass. Why did they need so much grass?
He found Buck upstairs in one of her listless moods. She was wrapped in a dressing gown that was heavy on the starchy gold brocade. “Marshal Felton is here,” Conrad reported.
Buck threw off the dressing gown, unconcerned that she was naked underneath, and walked to her enormous wardrobe, selecting a blue doublet embroidered with pearls. “Felton’s been involved in Milord’s detention,” s
he said, which Conrad already knew. “I suppose she has news for me?”
“Something about security checks,” said Conrad, keeping his eyes aside while Buck dressed. He was used to being treated as furniture by people like her. Alek was the only New Aristocrat who had ever treated him like a person and even then – Alek had his moments of forgetting that Conrad wasn’t a personified extension of his own needs. “Do you want me to join you?”
“No,” sighed Buck, now dressed. She hadn’t put a brush or a sonic wand to her tangled red-bronze hair in days, and it looked it. “Meet me at the pool afterwards. We can swim laps to clear my head.”
“Works for me.”
Conrad was not a fan of this planet and its oddly disconcerting gravity, but he could get behind swimming in water every day of the week. It was almost as good as being in the tank – which he also got to do every day.
There were worse prisons than the Duchess of Buckingham’s personal estate. That asteroid tower, for instance. He shouldn’t complain.
Though if he never met that bastard “Slate” or “Milord” or whatever he called himself again, it would be too soon.
Outside, Conrad peeled off his own clothes and stood in a pair of bright emerald trunks, poised to dive into the deep end of Buck’s glorious pool.
In the seconds before he hit the water, he heard the low ‘boom’ of an arc-ray discharging, from inside the house.
NOW:
There were worse prisons than the Church of All Convent of Carmelline, in the peaks of the Drift Mountains, but it was hard to imagine one that was colder.
Conrad awoke with a gasp as the deep, piercing sound of the arc-ray shocked him out of the dream, like it always did. He wasn’t even sure if what he had heard was the shot that killed Buck. Perhaps it was a chair hitting a wall, or one of the shots that Gus and Loni got off in those last few moments.
All he remembered now was plunging into the water. When he surfaced for air, the world had been different.
He breathed hard now, separating himself from the dream – the memory. The air hit his lungs, cold and unrelenting.
This prison was more comfortable than Slate’s asteroid tower, but that wasn’t saying much. Every time Conrad awoke in this place, he was wrenched by desperate homesickness all over again – for the cozy artificial atmosphere of Luna Palais and Paris Satellite. Even for the home he had barely shared with his wife, behind her workshop.
Conrad would give anything to be back among his own people, instead of here.
Hiding from an alien maniac in a freezing stone building in a snowy mountain range. A stone building with glass windows. Not temperature-controlled plexi-glass: this was the freezing, breakable kind of glass. It let in draughts.
Also, there were star nuns.
To be fair, the star nuns were pretty great.
Conrad dressed quickly, layering tunics and extra wool sleeves before putting on the heavy hooded scarf that the nuns insisted all men wear within their walls, for modesty.
Breakfast was served in the Sharing Hall, on the far side of the frosted courtyard. Conrad took a deep breath and pulled his hood over his face as he walked over the slippery flagstones, towards the smell of food.
A discreet cough alerted him to the presence of the extremely tiny and elderly Sister Ursa, about to make her own trek across the courtyard. Conrad doubled back and offered her his arm.
“Good boy,” she said, patting his cheek. She allowed him to help her across to the hall. After the of icy air, it almost felt warm inside, though the high glass ceiling (to allow better access to the constellations at night) let in far more cold than Conrad himself would have liked.
Oh, for a space station and plexi-glass. Conrad had never been cold in Paris, or on Lunar Palais. Cold never entered the equation there.
As they approached the tables of food, Sister Ursa released her hold on him and darted towards a prime spot of bench space, within grasping reach of a porridge ladle.
Conrad didn’t have anything like her speed, and ended up jammed between Sisters Volantis and Columba, both of whom were far more interested in breaking down this year’s fleur-de-lis matches than they were in allowing him to eat his breakfast.
Oh, and that was the other thing. The season. League Fleur-de-lis had been well underway for months before the war called for a suspension of games, mostly without the reigning champions the Emerald Knights in the roster.
With Laurel Slaughter replacing Chevreuse after her exile last Joyeux, the Knights had played barely a handful of games this season.
Conrad knew that everything at the other end of the Solar System was more important than a game with poles in a Zero-G tank, but… he mourned his old life, that other life where he was able to prevent Alek from doing stupid things, and Chevreuse was on the ground in Paris to mitigate the Cardinal’s more destructive schemes, and the most adrenalin Conrad felt in any given week was in the tank, where he belonged...
After the asteroid, as he recuperated at Chevreuse’s new digs, they had barely talked about the sport, except for that one night they got drunk together and bitched about every single member of the 0-League who wasn’t them. At Buck’s, Conrad had played and practiced casually, but had managed to keep the vidscreens from displaying any of this season’s most recent games – on a high repeat rotation, without new players and matches to provide fresh feeds.
Here at the convent in the fucking mountains, you couldn’t escape it, because little known fact about this particular chapter of nuns? They were really into TeamJoust. They had their own tank, and their own cinquefoil teams (divided by age group – the 60+ “Silver Tyre-Irons” were especially brutal). They had watched every 0-League game, past and present. They talked about fleur-de-lis, constantly.
If sport was a religion, these nuns had their cake and ate it too.
It no longer surprised Conrad that they had taken him in on an anonymous character recommendation from Chevreuse’s office, had given him shelter despite the danger his presence might bring down on their peaceful community.
The nuns of the Convent of Carmelline thought that having a real life professional fleur-de-lis player in their midst was the best thing that had happened to them in years.
“So, what was it like playing against the Dido Demons?” asked Sister Gemini from across the table. She at least leaned over and offered him a ladle of the hot herb porridge, while Sister Columba took pity on him and finally pushed the flagon of coffee in his direction.
Conrad smiled weakly and filled his plate, pushing his hooded scarf back a little (not too far) to make eating more practical. “Oh, man, that game almost killed me…”
Yeah, as long as he didn’t run out of sporting anecdotes, he and the nuns got on fine.
After breakfast, Sister Ursa led them all in a rousing series of songs about star fields and the future of humanity. Sister Magellan was called up to lead a prayer for the United Royal Fleet, and the casualties of war.
Conrad shivered, and not from the chill of the stone-and-glass hall. Dana was out there. His friends among the guards and the Musketeers were out there, most of them.
And then there was Alek. The Prince Consort was supposed to be safe on Lunar Palais playing secret baby daddy, but what were the actual odds that he was going to be safe in a time of war?
As Sister Magellan’s prayer came to a rousing finale, there was a knock on the big double doors at the far end of the Hall of Sharing. The doors that led directly to the mountain path. Conrad tensed, remembering all over again that an alien assassin might have a good reason to hunt him down here.
But when the nuns levered the heavy doors open, it was a woman who collapsed through them, in the torn remains of a flight suit. For one confused moment, Conrad thought it was Dana – the same warm brown tones to her skin, the shaven head, the clenched fists – but this woman was taller, and shaped differently. Her face, messy with blood and plasma burn, was broader than that of Dana.
The sisters came forward to help the wom
an. Some of them gasped as the sleeve of her flight suit came completely away, revealing tangled tattoos all the way up her arm. A fleur-de-lis pattern blended into a star field, familiar because it reflected the tattoos that every Sister of Carmelline wore on her limbs.
Their religious robes were designed to slide back and reveal the sacred patterns to each other, though Conrad had only seen the nuns do it once or twice, for formal ceremonies. It was too damned cold in the mountains to flash wrists and ankles if you didn’t have to.
Also it was too cold to make your way up a snowy staircase on a mountainside in a ripped flight suit and ungloved hands. The poor woman was a wreck.
“She’s one of us,” Sister Magellan said. “Conrad, help us get her to the medibay.”
Well, he was the muscle around here. Him and Sister Volantis, who could bench-press three of him. Volantis was already moving ahead, shoving open doors and clearing the way.
Conrad scooped the burned, half-frozen woman into his arms, and she nestled into him as if seeking comfort. Her fleur-de-lis tattoos ran all the way up her throat, he noticed.
In his head, he composed a text to Dana even as he carried the woman to the medilab to have her wounds seen to. Hey, babe, today I played at being an Actual Knight, with chivalry and everything.
A text he would never send, because after the single message he had got through to Chevreuse when he was on the run, and the location she sent back to him, he had destroyed his comms. Flirting with Dana was going to have to wait until this Milord business was over with, and she came to rescue him.
Dana was worth the wait.
“What is your name, dearie?” Sister Ursa asked as Conrad laid the woman on a bed. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you fixed up in no time.”
The woman’s eyes opened wide, as if startled, and Conrad saw that her eyes were grey, an odd combination with her deep brown skin. “I seek refuge,” she gasped.
“That’s what we’re here for, ducks,” said the elderly nun, patting the woman’s hand.
Musketeer Space Page 51