by David Weber
"Looking a little worn to me, Captain," he continued brightly, and cranked the treadmill's speed control up a bit. "Care for another five or six klicks? How about another five percent of grade just to make it interesting?"
Alicia moaned and collapsed over the handrails. The still-moving treadmill carried her feet from under her, and she twitched with a horridly realistic death rattle and belly-flopped onto the belt. It deposited her on the floor with a thump, and she oozed out flat.
Lieutenant de Riebeck grinned, and someone applauded from the training room door. Alicia rolled over and sat up, raking sweat-sodden hair from her forehead, and saw Tannis Cateau clapping vigorously.
"I give that a nine-point-five for dramatic effect and, oh, a three-point-two for coordination." Alicia shook a fist, and Tannis chuckled. "I see Pablo is being his usual sadistic self."
"We strive to please, Major, Ma'am," de Riebeck smirked. Alicia laughed, and Tannis reached down to pull her to her feet.
"You know, I never thought I'd admit it, but this is one part of the Cadre I've missed," she panted, massaging her rebuilt thigh with both hands. The repaired muscles ached, but it was the good ache of exercise, and she straightened with a sigh. Despite her reactivation, she refused to cut her hair, which had escaped its clasp once more. She gathered it back up and refastened it, then scrubbed her face with a towel.
"I think I'm going to live after all, Pablo."
"Aw, shucks. Well, there's always tomorrow."
"An inspiring thought." Alicia hung the towel around her neck and turned back to Tannis. "May I assume you arrived for some reason other than to rescue me from Lieutenant de Sade?"
"Indeed I have. Uncle Arthur wants to see you."
"Oh." The humor flowed out of Alicia's voice, and her forefingers moved in slow circles, wrapping the towel-ends about them. Her success in so far avoiding Keita made her feel a bit guilty, but she really didn't want to see him. Not now, and perhaps never. He was going to bring back too many painful memories . . . and Cadre rumor credited him with telepathy, among other arcane powers. He'd always made her feel as if her skull were made of glass, at any rate.
"Sorry, Sarge, but he insists. And I think it's a good idea myself."
"Why?" Alicia demanded bluntly, and Tannis shrugged.
"Look, you never told me why you quit the Cadre." There was a trace of remembered hurt in her eyes, but her voice was level. "One thing I do know, though, is that whatever your reason, it wasn't just to avoid Uncle Arthur, and you've been hiding from him long enough."
She held Alicia's gaze, and Alicia heard the "and from me" as clearly as if her friend had spoken the words aloud.
"It's time you faced up to him," Tannis continued after a moment. "Whatever your reason, he knows you didn't 'fail' him somehow by resigning, but you're never going to feel comfortable about it till you talk to him in person. Call it absolution."
"I don't need 'absolution'!" Alicia snapped, jade eyes flashing with sudden fire, and Tannis grinned crookedly.
"Then why the sudden heat? Come on, Sarge." She hooked an arm through Alicia's. "I'm surprised he's let your debrief wait this long, so you may as well get it over with."
"You can be a real pain in the ass, Tannis."
"True, too true. Now march, Sarge."
"Can't I even clean up first?"
"Uncle Arthur knows what sweat smells like. March!"
Alicia sighed, but the steel showed under Tannis' humor, and she was right. Alicia couldn't keep pretending Keita wasn't here, however much she dreaded reliving that decision. Yet there was a reason she'd cut every contact with the Cadre—even with Tannis—and if the pain had scarred over, it was still there. Reestablishing the ties she'd cut might rip those scars away . . . and under them, she knew, the wound was bleeding still.
There was a limit to how much pain she could endure, even with Tisiphone standing between her and it and —
A heat which was rapidly becoming familiar tingled in her right arm, radiating from its contact with Tannis' left elbow, and she felt her friend's thoughts. Amusement. Pride in the way she was bouncing back from her wounds. Carefully hidden worry over the upcoming interview. A burning curiosity as to the reasons for her dread over meeting Keita and concern over their possible consequences, and under it a deeper, more persistent worry about Alicia's stability—and what to do about her if she was, in fact, unstable.
A mental grumble answered, but the information flow died, and she was grateful. Stealing Tannis' thoughts was a violation of her privacy and trust—almost a form of rape, even if she never felt a thing—and Alicia hated it.
Not that it hadn't been useful, she conceded. The first time Tannis had hugged her, Tisiphone had plucked a disturbing suspicion from the major's mind. Alicia's monologues had gotten just a bit too enthusiastic, and Tannis knew her too well.
Forewarned, Alicia had tapered off and allowed her manufactured dialogues to run down as if she were tiring of the game. Tannis had written them off as a sarcastic response to the people who mistrusted her sanity, and thereafter Alicia had restricted herself to occasional verbal responses to actual comments from Tisiphone. That worked much better, for they were spontaneous, fragmentary, and enigmatic yet consistent—clearly not something manufactured out of whole cloth for the sole benefit of eavesdroppers—and their genuineness had turned Tannis' thoughts in the desired direction.
Alicia hated deceiving her friend, but she was having those conversations. It was always possible she truly was mad—a possibility she would almost prefer, at times—and if she wasn't, she certainly wasn't responsible for Tannis' misinterpretations of them.
She squared her shoulders, tucked the ends of the towel into the neck of her sweat shirt, and walked down the hallway at her friend's side.
Tisiphone watched through her host's eyes as they marched along the corridor. The past few weeks had been the oddest of her long life, a strange combination of impatient waiting and discovery, and she wasn't certain she had enjoyed them.
She and Alicia had learned much about her own current abilities. She could still pluck thoughts from mortal minds, but only when her host brought those other mortals into physical contact. She could still hasten physical healing, as well, yet what had once been "miracles" were routine to the medical arts man had attained. There was little she could do to speed what the physicians were already accomplishing, and so she had restricted herself to holding pain and discomfort within useful limits and insuring her host's sleep without medication or one of the peculiar somatic units. Tisiphone hated the somatic units. They might sweep Alicia into slumber through her receptors, but sleep was a stranger to Tisiphone. For her, the somatic units' soothing waves were a droning, scarcely endurable static.
She and Alicia had also determined to their satisfaction that she still could blur mortals' senses, even without physical contact. Their technology, unfortunately, was something else again, and that experiment had almost ended in disaster. The nurse had known the bed was empty, but her medical scanners had insisted it was occupied, and she'd been briefed like all the medical staff on Alicia's inexplicable history. Not surprisingly, the young woman had panicked and turned to run, and only the testing of another ability had saved the situation. Tisiphone could no longer beguile and control mortal minds, but she could fog and befuddle them. Actually taking memories from them might have become impossible, but she had blurred the recollection into a sort of fanciful daydream, and that had been just as good—this time.
Their experiments had combined dismay and excitement in almost equal measure, yet neither Tisiphone's own sense of discovery and rediscovery nor Alicia's amazement at what she still could accomplish had been sufficient to banish her boredom. She was a being of fire and passion, the hunger and destruction of her triumvirate of selves. Alecto had been the methodical one, th
e inescapable stalker patient as the stones themselves, and Megaira had been the thinker who analyzed and pondered with a mind of ice and steel. Tisiphone was the weapon, unleashed only when her targets had been clearly identified, her objectives precisely defined. Now she could not even know who her targets were, much less where to find them, and she felt . . . lost. Ignorance added to her sense of frustration, for if she had no doubt of her ultimate success, she was unused to delays and puzzles. It had turned her surly and snappish with her host (not, she admitted privately, an unusual state for such as she) until a fresh revelation diverted them both.
Tisiphone had discovered computers. More to the point, she had encountered the processors built into Alicia's augmentation, and had she been the sort of being who possessed eyes, they would have opened wide in surprise.
The data storage of Alicia's processors was little more than a few dozen terrabytes, for bio-implants simply couldn't rival the memories of full-sized units, yet they were the first computers Tisiphone had ever met, and she'd been amazed by how easy they were to access. It had taken no effort at all, for virtually all human computers were designed and programmed for neural linkage. The same technique which slipped into a mortal's thoughts through his nerves and brain worked just as well with them, and the vistas that opened were dazzling.
It was almost like finding the ghost of one of her sister selves. A weak and pallid revenant, without the rich awareness which had textured that forever-lost link, yet one which expanded her own abilities many-fold. Tisiphone had only the vaguest grasp of what Alicia called "programming" or "machine language," but those concepts were immaterial to her. A being crafted to interface with human minds had no use or need for such things; anything structured to link with those same minds became an extension of them and so an instinctive part of herself.
She had scared Alicia half to death, and felt uncharacteristically penitent for it afterward, the first time she activated her host's main processor and walked her body across the room without consulting her. Their security codes meant nothing to Tisiphone, and she unlocked them effortlessly, exploring the labyrinthine marvels of logic trees and data flows with sheer delight. Their molycirc wonders had become a vast, marvelous toy, and she flowed through them like the wind, recognizing the way in which she might use them, in an emergency, as both capacitor and amplifier. They restored something she had lost, restored a bit of what she once had been, and she'd sensed Alicia's amusement as she chattered away about her finds.
Yet it was past time for them to be about their mission, and she wondered if Alicia's meeting with Sir Arthur Keita would bring the moment closer or send it receding even further into the future.
Alicia's spine stiffened against her will as she stepped into the sparsely appointed conference room. A small, spruce man in the crimson tunic and blue trousers of the Ministry of Justice's uniformed branches stood looking out a window. He didn't turn as she and Tannis entered, and she was just as happy. Her eyes were on the square, powerful man seated at the table.
He still refused to wear his own ribbons, she noted. Well, no one was likely to pester him about proper uniform. She came to attention before him, saluted, and stood staring six centimeters over his head.
"Captain Alicia DeVries, reporting as ordered, Sir!" she barked, and Sir Arthur studied her calmly for several seconds.
"Cut the kay-det crap, Alley," he rumbled then, in the gravel-crusher voice she remembered so well, and her lips quirked involuntarily. Her eyes met his. He smiled. It was a small smile, but a real one, easing a bit—a bit—of the tightness in her chest.
"Yes, Uncle Arthur," she said.
The shoulders of the man looking out the window twitched. He turned just a tad quickly, and her lips quirked again at his reaction to her lese majeste. So he hadn't known how the troops referred to Keita, had he?
"That's better." Keita pointed at a chair. "Sit."
She obeyed without comment, clasping her hands loosely in her lap, and returned his searching gaze. He hadn't changed much over the past five years. He never did.
"It's good to see you again," he resumed after a moment. "I wish it could be under different circumstances, but—" A raised hand tipped, as if pouring something from a cupped palm. She nodded, but her eyes burned with sudden memory. Not of Mathison's World, but of another time, after Shallingsport, when only nine of them had come back, and Tannis had still hovered between life and death.
He'd known the uselessness of words then, too.
"I know I promised we'd never reactivate you," he continued, "but it wasn't my decision." She nodded again. She'd known that, for if Sir Arthur Keita seldom gave his word, that was only because he never broke it.
"However," he went on, "we're both here now, and I've postponed this debrief as long as I could. The relief force pulls out for Soissons day after tomorrow; I'll have to make my report—and my recommendations—to Governor Treadwell and Countess Miller when we arrive, and I won't do that without speaking personally to you first. Fair?"
"Fair." Alicia's contralto was deeper than usual, but her eyes were steady, and it was his turn to nod.
"I've already viewed your statement to Colonel McIlheny, so I've got a pretty fair notion of what happened in the fire fight. It's what happened after it that bothers me. Are you prepared to tell me more about it now?"
The deep voice was unusually gentle, and Alicia felt an almost unbearable temptation to tell him everything. Every single impossible word. If anyone in the galaxy would have believed her it was Uncle Arthur. Unfortunately, no one could believe her, not even him, and they weren't alone. Her eyes flipped to the Justice man, and an eyebrow arched.
"Inspector Ferhat Ben Belkassem, Intelligence Branch," Keita said. "You may speak freely in front of him."
"In front of a spook?" Alicia's eyes snapped back to Keita's face, suddenly hard, and the temptation to openness faded.
"In case you've forgotten, I'm something of a spook," he replied quietly.
"No, Sir, I haven't forgotten. And, Sir, I respectfully decline to be debriefed by Intelligence personnel." It came out clipped and even colder than she'd intended, and Ben Belkassem's eyebrows rose in surprise.
Keita sighed, but he didn't retreat. His eyes bored into her across the table, and there was no yield in his voice.
"That isn't an option, Alley. You're going to have to talk to me."
"Sir, I decline."
"Oh, come on, Alley! You've already spoken to McIlheny!"
"I have, Sir, when under the impression that he remained a combat branch officer. And—" her voice turned even colder "—Colonel McIlheny is neither Cadre nor a representative of the Ministry of Justice. As such, he may in fact be an honorable man."
She felt Tannis flinch behind her, but her friend held her tongue, and Ben Belkassem stepped back half a pace. It wasn't a retreat; he was simply giving her room, declaring his neutrality in whatever lay between her and Keita.
The brigadier leaned back and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"You can't decline, Alley. This isn't like last time." She sat stonily silent, and his face hardened. "Allow me to correct myself. In one respect, this is exactly like last time: you can damned well end up in the stockade waiting to face a court if you push it."
"Sir, I respectful— "
"Hold it." He interrupted her in mid-word, before she could dig in any more deeply, then shook his head. "You always were a stubborn woman, Alley. But this isn't a case of a captain breaking a colonel around the edges—" Ben Belkassem's eyes widened fractionally at that, and Alicia felt Tannis' sudden stiffness at her back "—and I don't have the latitude to allow you to refuse to talk to me." He raised a palm as her eyes flared hot. "You had a right to every damned thing you did after Louvain. I said so then, and I say so now, but this isn't then, and the questions aren't coming just from me. Countess Miller has personally charged me with uncovering the truth."
His eyes drilled into hers, and she sat back in her chair. He meant it. If it had b
een only him, he might have let her off, let her walk away from the past and all its anguish yet again. But he had his orders, and orders were something he took very seriously, indeed.
"Excuse me, Sir Arthur." Ben Belkassem raised one placating hand as he spoke. "If my presence is the problem, I will willingly withdraw."
"No, Inspector, you won't." Keita's voice was frosty. "You are part of this operation, and I will value your input. Alley?"
"Sir, I can't. It—I promised the company, Sir." Her own sudden hoarseness surprised her, and a tear glistened. She felt Tisiphone's surprise at the surge of raw, wounded emotion, then relaxed minutely as the Fury slipped another pane of that mysterious glass between her and the anguish. She drew a deep breath, meeting Keita's eyes pleadingly but with determination. "You know why . . . and you understand about promises, Sir."
"I do," Keita didn't wince, though his voice gave the impression he had, "but I have no choice. I was at Shallingsport, and Louvain. And I was there at Sligo Palace. You're right—I do understand why you feel that way. But I have no choice."
"Understand?" Alicia's voice cracked. She swallowed, but she couldn't stop. Despite all Tisiphone could do, an old, old agony drove her. "If you do, then how can you ask this of me? We went in with a company, Sir—a company!—and came out with half a squad!"
"I know."
"Yes, and you know why, too, Sir! You know why that son-of-a-bitch screwed our mission brief to hell, and you know what came of it, and you still want me to talk to a spook?!"