A Matter of Oaths

by Helen S. Wright

  Rallya looked at the aristo with interest. He had been dismayed when Rafe revealed the truth, but now he was trying to make matters worse. Why?

  “Rafe has never tried to hide his past,” she pointed out. “It was the first thing he told the Three when we began courting him. Whatever he did or refused to do ten years ago, he paid for it according to the Guild’s law. Are you saying that the law is wrong?”

  “I’m saying that no decent webber wants to share a web-room with him,” Elanis said defiantly.

  Rallya swept an interrogative look around the web-room. “Anybody agree with that?” she asked them.

  “As you said, he’s paid for what he did,” Jualla said uncertainly. “We don’t have the right to punish him further. Even if we disagree with the law, we have to accept its results while it is the law…”

  From Jualla, that was generous, Rallya thought with satisfaction. It must be uncomfortable for her, torn between a belief in the Unification of the Empires that made Oath-breaking uniquely difficult to forgive, her envy of Rafe for getting the promotion she had hoped for, and her legalistic passion for fairness. It was the last of the three that was speaking and, if Rallya judged right, it would continue to determine Jualla’s reaction, making her a strong supporter of Rafe where she might have been an opponent if he had handled things differently. There were other members of the web-room who might side with Elanis, but Jualla was a key convert.

  “Is there anybody who agrees with Elanis’s definition of decent?” Rallya asked.

  “I’d like to know why Rafe didn’t tell us earlier,” Irinya said.

  “He’s ashamed of it,” Elanis sneered. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “You, probably,” Rallya retorted. “Except I doubt that you’d ever be in Rafe’s position. You’d rather swear a false Oath.”

  “I resent that!”

  “Go ahead, resent it,” Rallya said cheerfully. “Threaten me the way you threatened Joshim when he entered a formal warning in your record, if you like.” She grinned ferally. “I’m not surprised nobody agrees with your definition of decent.” Turning to Irinya, she asked, “Did you tell your web-mates every detail of your history as soon as you joined Bhattya?”

  “No, ma’am, but…”

  “Do you agree with Jualla about the law and Rafe?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but…”

  “Stop browbeating her,” Rafe interrupted sharply. “Irinya, part of the reason that I didn’t tell you sooner was that my past didn’t affect my work until now. But there was another reason too. I was scared of how you’d react. I’d been looking for a berth for over half a year before I joined Bhattya. I know how people can react when they find out.” He smiled sadly. “I’ll admit, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. I didn’t, on my last ship. It was never necessary. And, I suppose, I am ashamed of being an Oath-breaker, even if I don’t remember why…”

  “I suppose we can’t really blame you for any of that,” Irinya conceded.

  “Most people would,” Rafe remarked.

  “You can’t intend to go on sharing a web-room with him,” Elanis protested.

  “If you can’t stand it, you leave,” Jualla told the aristo curtly.

  “There may be people who aren’t here who agree with Elanis,” Rafe reminded her quietly. “They have a right to be heard.” He was playing his hand perfectly.

  “I’ll ask them,” Jualla promised, nodding judiciously. “If they want to talk to you about it…”

  “Of course,” Rafe agreed readily. “But please, after I’ve had some sleep.”

  “I should think so,” Rallya put in. “It’s over an hour since I ordered you to bed.” If Rafe wanted to make a timely withdrawal after that display of cunning, he deserved her support. She could hardly have done better herself.

  She left the web-room herself shortly after Rafe, knowing that Jualla and the others present needed no further persuasion, in spite of Elanis’s intriguing efforts to turn the tide. If those directing him wanted to keep Rafe under observation, he would hardly be doing his best to separate the two of them. He could not be intending to follow Rafe to yet another ship; that would arouse too many suspicions. Nor could there be another watcher ready to take over Elanis’s role. If there were, the risk of using Elanis again would not have been taken. Besides, the conspirators would not want Rafe’s significance known to any except a select few. Not that Elanis could be described as select, she thought with grim amusement.

  So, if Elanis wanted Rafe expelled from Bhattya—and it must have been the aristo who planted the rumour in the convoy at Jalset’s World, Rallya decided in passing—it was because something was intended to happen to Rafe, but not aboard Bhattya. Another murder attempt, made less risky because Rafe had no sympathetic web-mates to press home an investigation, or less risky still because Rafe had been driven out of the Guild completely? But if Elanis was a party to that plan, he must also have known about Avannya’s fate in advance, and it was his controllers who were responsible.

  She was back to the question that she had asked herself fifteen days ago: if they wanted Rafe silenced, why wait ten years? Unless something had changed recently, and Elanis had reported something that made Rafe a greater danger to them. The return of memory, or the first signs of it? And if so, how had Elanis known about it?

  Rallya swore silently. She should have realized before. To be an effective observer, Elanis must have concealed snoops to help him. Where? Rafe’s cabin was a certainty, Joshim’s too, both audiovisual snoops and tracers on their consoles. The web-room and the rest-room would be monitored too. In fact, Elanis had had the opportunities he needed to scatter them throughout the ship, and any spy with the background support that Elanis had would have come equipped with the comp access needed to override any locks that he encountered.

  Rallya shrugged indifferently, acknowledging that she could not make a search without alerting Elanis to her suspicions. So, let him watch and listen. He could not monitor her thoughts and she was not naive enough to trust any of this to a console. Besides, he probably spent all his time watching Rafe and Joshim together and blowing steam out of his ears.

  Gods, she wanted to know why Rafe had been kept alive so long. It was so crazy, it had to be the key to everything else. If he had once been valuable alive, why were they now trying to kill him?

  There was disagreement over him, she realized triumphantly. A party who wanted him dead, who had probably wanted him dead from the beginning, and a party who wanted him alive. If power had shifted between the two groups, or if one group was acting without the other’s knowledge … She smiled contentedly. In a situation like that, there were ample opportunities for them to make mistakes that she could exploit.

  What would they do next? There was no legal way for them to separate Rafe from Bhattya without the consent of her Three. The only options open to them were to kill him while he was off-ship or to destroy Bhattya herself. In their place, which would she choose?

  Simple murder would invite a storm of questions so soon after Sajan’s death when there were people who were aware of the link between them, but nobody would think twice about the loss of a patrolship in an active zone. An attack on Bhattya was the only safe alternative, in spite of the number of people who would have to be involved—they would have to send at least two ships to be sure of success, and it would be an insult if they sent less than three. They could not hope to use another EMP-mine; a patrolship did not follow a predictable course the way that a surveyship did. Or … Rallya caught her breath. They would try sabotage. A hidden explosive, or a modification to the drive, or something more subtle, a trap in the comp to send their navigation fatally wrong.

  She could not bar Elanis from the maintenance areas without making him suspicious, any more than she could bar the station techs from the ship at Aramas. And without knowing how widely Elanis had sown his snoops, she could not deliver a warning to Vidar and Joshim. But the snoops could only report locally without being detected, she realized; a
nything else would register in Bhattya’s comm sensors. And it would be no surprise when Elanis left the ship on Aramas; after all, no decent webber would share a web-room with an Oath-breaker. Once he had gone, Bhattya could be scoured of every snoop, tracer and trap.

  Rallya frowned uneasily. It was a calculated risk, balancing her forty years of familiarity with Bhattya’s comp and Vidar’s intimate knowledge of every system aboard against the resources of the saboteurs. If they found nothing … They would find it, she promised herself, if they had to rebuild the ship around them in the process. She smiled wolfishly. There would be no retreating afterwards, and no more waiting for her enemies to act. Somewhere in Rafe’s memory was what she needed to know to take the war to them. She promised herself she would find that too.

  Conversation at the office of

  Councillor Danriya Lady Carher

  “The failure of the primary plan is unimportant. The agent reports that the second line of attack was activated before he initiated the first, and will be effective within ten days of his departure.”

  “Can’t he be more precise than that?”

  “The trigger selected makes the timing imprecise, but the results are certain.”

  309/5043

  ARAMAS ZONE, OLD EMPIRE

  A tap on the door interrupted the long laughing kiss into which Rafe had snared Joshim as they were dressing. Reluctantly, Rafe rolled aside to let Joshim get up, then sat up and reached for his shirt as Joshim opened the door.

  “Commander’s compliments, sir, and would you join her and the Captain in the sun-side observation gallery,” Fadir said.

  “Now?” Joshim asked in surprise.

  “She said immediately,” Fadir confirmed apologetically.

  “But she didn’t say why,” Joshim remarked resignedly.

  “No, sir, but I did hear some good news that the dock supervisor told her, just before she sent me with the messages for you and the Captain,” Fadir volunteered. “Elanis shipped out late last night, as a passenger on the fast courier to Keltam.”

  “You’ve got big ears,” Joshim teased. “You’re lucky Rallya hasn’t trimmed them for you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fadir said seriously.

  “She’s plotting something,” Joshim said when the apprentice had gone. “Though the gods knows what. She doesn’t usually drag me and Vidar off-ship to sanction her schemes. She doesn’t usually bother to get our sanction,” he added drily.

  “Whatever it is, she’s been plotting it since we found Hadra,” Rafe remarked. “She’s been acting like a woman with a stack of emperors in a game of drag, just waiting for the pot to reach a respectable size before she plays them.”

  “And not one of them was in the box that the other players drew from,” Joshim agreed.

  Rafe laughed and tossed Joshim’s shirt across the room. “You’d better get dressed, or you may not leave here in time to see her slip them onto the table.”

  Joshim obeyed. “Will you take the training sessions if I’m not back in time?” he asked, adding with a wicked grin, “Churi will be pleased.”

  Rafe groaned. “Only Churi could think that being an Oath-breaker was exciting,” he complained, thankful that the rest of the web-room had reacted more levelly to his admission. It was a relief not to have to hide his past from them any longer. He had not known when he confessed how they would react; there had not been time to consider the consequences, only to act on his instinct that it was the right thing to do. He was still warmly surprised by the scale of the acceptance he had received, by their willingness to judge him on what he was rather than on what he had been.

  He frowned, thinking that he should not expect the same tolerance outside Bhattya’s web-room.

  “I’m surprised Elanis didn’t spread the news about me around Aramas station before he left,” he remarked. “It’s not like him to miss a chance to make trouble. Especially since he was more or less forced to leave Bhattya because of me. It would have been an obvious way to get even.”

  “Maybe he tried,” Joshim suggested. “Our news about the raiders has pushed everything else into the background.”

  Rafe passed Joshim his tunic. “Maybe,” he conceded. It was true that Aramas station was humming with speculation and counter-speculation. Everybody had a theory about who was behind the raids or about who was making them and, in the absence of any more facts than the few Bhattya had discovered, everybody’s theory was equally viable and equally enthusiastically proposed. Everybody’s theory except Rafe’s, because Rafe did not have a theory. He knew. He just could not remember what he knew.

  “Stop it,” Joshim said firmly. “You’ll just make yourself sick again.”

  Rafe flopped back to lie on the bed, scowling. “I swear you read my mind,” he accused.

  “No, just your body.” Joshim sat down next to Rafe to put his boots on. “It’s not your fault you can’t remember. And whatever it is, somebody else will know it. The whole Guild—in both Empires—will be looking for the answer. You don’t need to feel guilty because you haven’t got it.”

  “It’s not guilt. It’s frustration.”

  “You’re as bad as Rallya.” Joshim wound one of Rafe’s short curls around his finger and tugged playfully. “She thinks the universe ought to revolve around her.”

  “She told me it did.” Rafe pulled Joshim down for a quick kiss, then reluctantly let him go. “You’d better not keep her waiting, or I’ll get the blame.”

  “Mmm. And I know how scared of her you are.”

  Rafe tied his hair up on top of his head and watched Churi slip a headband around his.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.” Churi hesitated, then asked, “Can I try some internal monitoring this time?”

  “The schedule says signal practice.”

  “I know, but the Webmaster said I could try monitoring as well.”

  Rafe gestured towards the doorway to the web. “Come and talk me through the display on the central monitor,” he instructed.

  The youngster described the basics competently enough, and identified the essential monitoring functions without too much prompting.

  “If there’s time at the end, you can try five minutes passive monitoring,” Rafe conceded, adjusting the limits of the web to give Churi a manageable size for his first attempt. “I’ll have a priority override on you and I’ll probably need to use it. It isn’t as easy in practice as it seems in theory. And remember: if I do override you, don’t panic, just disengage normally. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rafe logged his name and Churi’s, and their purpose in the web. “In you go then,” he told the youngster.

  He watched Churi attach his quiescent web-contacts and sink below the surface of the shub, then moved around the circle to the next position. The web-contacts waiting for him were warm, active; as he attached them, he could sense the shadowy web beyond, quiet and empty. Most of Bhattya’s sensors were inoperative in dock; her drive was providing power for life support alone. The web was like a sleeper, waiting to be woken.

  Breathing slowly and steadily, Rafe slipped into the shub. There was the inevitable twinge of otherness as he started breathing shub instead of air. When it had passed, he let go of his body and entered the web, exchanging the kiss of the circulating liquid against his skin and the familiar citric tang on his lips for a deep-felt awareness of himself at the heart of the silent ship.

  He swept a trial signal through the empty circuits, measuring the echoes and checking the limits that he had set, then tested his override to be sure it was working. With that in place, the worst that could happen if Churi mishandled the monitoring was a mild web-burn for them both. Satisfied with his precautions, he activated Churi’s contacts.

  The youngster did not allow his eagerness to try something new to destroy his concentration on the routine of signal practice, Rafe noted with approval. Or else Churi realized that, if his signalling did not meet Rafe’s standards, he would not be allowe
d to try monitoring. And there would be no arguing with Rafe’s decision when it was made; even if he dared to try, Churi did not have the necessary inventiveness with signals. Not yet, Rafe corrected himself, not for another year or so.

  As Churi worked on, Rafe mentally reviewed the possibilities for Bhattya’s next task, seeking to identify the one for which Rallya was manoeuvring into position. There was no real purpose to the attempt; it was just an enjoyable challenge, to be able to predict her thinking. It would be even more fun to show her that he could; he could imagine what her reaction to being predictable would be.

  It was easy enough to guess that she would not willingly accept escort duty again with the convoy gathering for Tarin’s Outpost. And Noromi would not object too strenuously to her absence, Rafe added cynically. Now that Meremir’s Commander had learned how to organize a convoy effectively, he was eager to repeat his success without sharing the credit.

  The obvious choice was a return to the system where they had found Hadra, to retrieve the drones that had been left there and to search for the other lost ships. The covert competition for that duty would be intense, with its opportunities to learn more about the raiders and its high probability of an encounter with them. But Rallya had insisted on replacing Bhattya’s missing drones as soon as they docked at Aramas, suggesting that she did not intend to collect the ones they had left behind. Nor did Rafe believe that she would look so permanently smug if she was planning anything obvious.

  The only other task in the zone which called for a patrolship was the routine patrol of the border with Zfheer space, and that was a ceremonial duty, necessary only because the diplomats had not yet agreed upon the final details of the treaty that would bring the near-human Zfheer into the Old Empire. Rallya would rather agree to convoy duty than undertake a patrol whose highlights would be the rare meetings with their peaceable Zfheer counterparts, Rafe decided with amusement. Unless she knew something about the Zfheer that he had missed in his research…