Jak and the Marines strode to positions that placed Vida and her guests in the middle of a triangle. By then she could hear the footsteps, too, and in a sudden swirl of black their makers strode around the corner.
‘Priests!’ TeeKay said. ‘Ugh.’
‘Shut up!’ Dan hissed.
Apparently some of the local clergy had been taking Sister Romero out to dinner in some plainer establishment farther down in the Mercado. In a companionable crowd, priests, factors, and a couple of monks were walking along, talking to one another and nodding seriously over points of theology while Sister Romero merely listened. She was the only one who noticed Vida and her guards standing at the side of the corridor. As she passed, she raised one hand in a frozen wave and smiled when Vida waved back. ‘My factor gave me your message, Sister,’ Vida called out. ‘I’ll be glad to help.’
Romero laid a cautious finger to her lips and glanced at the other church officials with her. Fortunately they were paying no attention; the rules of the Lifegiver order held no strictures against alcohol consumed in moderation, and moderation was a flexible term. Tee-Kay waited until they’d disappeared into the lift booths.
‘Do you know the Papal Itinerant?’ TeeKay said.
‘A little bit, yeah. I like her.’
‘Like her?’ TeeKay rolled her eyes. ‘She scares me shitless. Though she scares my father, too, which makes her heroic in my baby blue eyes.’
‘What?’ Dan said. ‘What’s he worried about?’
‘The Stinkers, of course. He thinks the Pope wants to free the Stinkers, and then he’d have to pay his servants, and you know how cheap he is.’
‘Oh come on!’ Dan snapped. ‘No-one would do that. They’re just animals.’
Both of them glanced at Vida, as if for support.
‘What are you guys thinking?’ Vida said. ‘That the Pope lets me in on his secrets? You’d better go to your party. I’m awfully tired.’
When Vida returned to her suite, she checked the delivery status of the message Jak had left for Wan. It still hung in his queue, unread.
* * *
On the big vidscreen in the gather of Karlo’s suite, stars shone inside the three apparent dimensions of a virtual cube. Among them, grossly out of scale, blinked small red points, each marking the disposition of one squadron of the Fleet, while thread-thin gold lines designated the microshunts near them. In a deep armchair of silver brocade, Karlo sat in front of the screen with his feet on a glass coffee-table and a transmit wand in one hand. Occasionally be would target a squadron, magnify its red point into a status readout, then minimize it again. The men and women who commanded these units had fought through the entire war; after Kephalon’s death, they had pledged to Karlo the loyalty that they once had given to their home planet. No matter how badly he wanted a new commission for Pero, Karlo refused to demote a single one of them.
Reassigning a ship or two from each command to form a new unit seemed possible, if Karlo could find the reasons that would convince his chiefs of staff. He hadn’t kept the loyalty of this orphaned Fleet by making arbitrary decisions, after all. When he turned a ring on the wand, the scale changed, and the Fleet disappeared. A view of the entire Pinch glittered within the virtual box of stars, or rather, a schematic of the Pinch. Real distance between two points meant nothing; what counted were the micro-shunts. Two planets lying at either end of a shunt could be tens of thousands of light years apart yet still hang close together in the navigable sky, while a pair off the shunt system, though separated by a mere five hundred, were for all practical purposes lost to one another.
Here in the Pinch the shunts formed an almost symmetrical pattern, rather like an abstract diagram of a skewed crystal. Old navigation maps of the Rim survived, and there the shunts stretched out in what the human eye saw as a random scatter, although mathematicians postulated that chaotic equations underlay their placement. The Pinch, however, divided itself neady. Ri, the main Lep world, lay on a corner facet of the crystal with Palace almost diametrically opposite. Souk stood in the middle at a nexus of six different shunts. The other habitable worlds hung at regular intervals at other nexi. The pattern broke down at the edges, where shunts led to empty space. One of these false trails had once ended in the macroshunt and the Rim.
In a corner of the vidscreen a red alarm blinked.
‘Display,’ Karlo said.
In the centre of the stars an iris opened, forming a round window controlled by the security camera, which had caught Vanna and Dukayn walking in the front door of the suite. In her grey business suit, Vanna looked sweaty and exhausted. In between her tattoos her skin seemed dead-pale.
‘Alarm off.’
The Pinch schematic returned. Karlo laid down the transmit wand and rose just as the pair entered.
‘I’m sorry I’m so late, darling,’ Vanna said. ‘I had to stick around for the victory party. My staff worked itself to the bone for this vote, and I wanted to thank them all.’
‘Of course. Come sit down. Have you eaten?’
‘There was a buffet at the party.’ Vanna kicked off her shoes and sank into the sofa. He could see her hands trembling, out of control. ‘I’d like a drink, though.’
With a nod Dukayn went to summon a servant. Karlo sat down next to her and kissed her on the forehead.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘The whole Fleet will be drinking a toast to you for this.’
‘Huh. As long as they’re prepared to return the favour someday.’ Vanna glanced at the vidscreen. ‘Making plans?’
‘Trying to figure out where to put Pero. It’s not doing his temper any good, getting to see what an incompetent fool his younger brother is.’
‘Ah. Dukayn told me that Wan didn’t show up for the vote.’
‘Yeah. The gridjockeys who dropped by for quotes weren’t impressed by his absence, I’ll tell you.’
Vanna leaned back against the pillows of the sofa and shut her eyes. Her hands began clenching and opening again of their own accord. When Karlo caught them between his, they quieted.
‘Maybe Wan’s off with his little Vida.’ Vanna opened her eyes.
‘Maybe so. You know, my love, I don’t understand why you hate that girl so much.’
Vanna pulled her hands free and sat up, turning a little away from him.
‘Well, hell,’ Karlo said. ‘Sorry I said anything.’
Vanna ignored him with a toss of her red and blue hair. While Karlo was still considering what to say, Dukayn returned, leading a saccule who carried an icy glass on a silver tray. Vanna snatched the drink and took a long swallow. Dukayn sent the servant away and sat down on the edge of the armchair.
‘Did you ever find Wan?’ Karlo asked him.
‘Yes and no, Se. I never did find out what he was doing all morning, but he and Leni left Government House just after the sixteens. My informants thought they were going to Pleasure Sect.’
‘Huh,’ Vanna muttered. ‘One whore isn’t enough for him, huh?’
‘Please!’ Karlo snapped.
With a slight smile she considered the ice cubes floating in her drink. Karlo turned to Dukayn.
‘If Wan comes back at any kind of reasonable hour, I want to see him. If not, first thing in the morning.’
‘All right, Se. I’ve got a tracer on him. The minute he or Leni puts a thumb on an access plate for East Tower, I’ll know.’
‘Damn him anyway,’ Karlo went on. ‘I wish to the Eye of God that he’d been born on Kephalon and Pero born here! If Pero had Wan’s goddamn birth papers or if Wan had half of Pero’s brains, we’d be in fine shape. As it is ...’ He let his voice trail away into a growl. Dukayn nodded.
‘They say the Colonizers could transfer one person’s mind into another’s body,’ Vanna put in, still smiling. ‘It’s just a myth, most likely.’
‘Too bad,’ Karlo said. ‘We could just switch them over.’
‘You’re sure it can’t be done?’ Dukayn leaned forward, all seriousness. ‘There’s usually some core of truth in these old myths.’
‘I only wish,’ Karlo said. ‘No, no, it’s only the kind of crank theory that shows up on the late-night vids. You know those shows, a lot of crap about the magical mysteries of our ancient past. Magla narrated one once.’
‘She’s got a beautiful voice for that kind of thing,’ Vanna said. ‘And a perfect delivery.’
It struck Karlo as bizarre that Vanna had never been in the least jealous of his ex-wife but would hold a grudge against a girl she barely knew. There were times when he despaired of ever understanding how Palace people saw life.
* * *
‘So,’ Zir said. ‘The job hunting went well?’
‘Very well,’ Kata said. ‘In a couple of days your hatchmate Elen and I will be working for the D and B Cleaning Service. They hold the main contract for Algol Park. If anyone sees Elen and me walking around the amphitheatre in D and B uniforms, they won’t think twice about it.’
Zir let her crest lift high and hissed for good measure. They were sitting in her repair shop, Zir on a high stool as she bent over the counter, Kata comfortably cross-legged on a floor cushion. For a moment he merely watched her while she removed the delicate mechanism of an output station and laid it on an anti-mag pad. She had beautiful hands, long and slender, glistening with pale green scales and delicate claws, unsheathed at the moment to let her use them as tools for her work.
‘Riva said you have another set of papers for me,’ he said at last.
‘Yes, I certainly do. This one identifies you as a photonics technician. But there’s something I need to tell you.’ She sat back on the stool. ‘It’s stamped for access to the force-field generator. That stamp takes a special kind of vinyl ground. I couldn’t find the current formula on the black market, so I used the mix from last year. As long as no-one runs it under an analysis beam, they won’t be able to tell the difference. But I wanted to warn you.’
‘Thanks. I’ll work out some story to cover it.’
‘Good. Riva told me not to worry now that you’re in charge.’
‘Well, you’re pretty impressive yourself. I never would have known about that vinyl mix.’
‘I try to live up to Riva.’
‘Yes, and so should we all. I’m amazed by what she can gain access to. These passes, our fake IDs - it’s incredible how good she is. Palace lost a great cybe when Karlo passed his laws and threw her off the Map.’
‘Really,’ Zir said, nodding.
‘And access codes are nothing to her, either. I’m still marvelling at the way she got me onto this planet. She somehow or other overrode the autogates. Did Elen tell you about that?’
‘He did.’ Zir allowed her crest to rustle. ‘I’d have loved to have seen the faces on the Protectors who figured that one out!’
Kata began to make some pleasantry but paused, struck hard by a sudden thought. Once before some sapient had overridden access codes for an AI, and in the service of the Lep cause at that, only to be thwarted by the unforeseen approach of the Kephalon Fleet.
‘What’s wrong?’ Zir said. ‘You look so strange.’
‘I just had a strange idea. Who shut down Nimue, Zir? Do you know?’
‘What? Of course not. Oh!’ Her jaw dropped sharply. ‘You don’t think it was -’
‘Who else?’
Zir hissed at him. ‘Shush!’ she said. ‘We’d best not talk about that.’
‘Why not?
‘Riva doesn’t like it when we talk about her.’ Zir hesitated briefly. ‘Don’t speculate, Kata. It’s dangerous.’
‘Very well, then. But something just struck me. This repair team that’s going out to Nimue?
What if they find something that leads them to Riva?’
‘I wouldn’t worry.’ Zir raised her crest. ‘I’ll bet you she’s already thought of that. I’ll bet she’s got it all planned out, just how to eliminate them if she has to.’
‘That’s true. If nothing else, she always has me.’
* * *
Wan returned to the tower just after Datechange. Although Vanna had long since gone to bed, Karlo was still studying his Fleet schematic when Dukayn marched Wan into the gather. Dressed in baggy civilian clothes, all rumpled, Wan stood staring at the floor. The scent of alcohol hung around him. Karlo flicked the schematic off and rose, laying the wand down.
‘I was just wondering,’ Karlo said, ‘why you didn’t bother to show up for the vote this morning. Didn’t you get my message?’
‘I didn’t, no.’ Wan looked up, green eyes snapping. ‘I wasn’t in my rooms all day.’
‘Yeah? Where were you?’
‘I didn’t realize I needed to file an itinerary whenever I go out somewhere.’
Karlo hesitated, caught. Wan seemed to be bracing himself, his feet a little apart, his arms crossed over his chest. His face revealed nothing but a distant hatred. At moments like these Karlo almost liked him.
‘No, you don’t,’ Karlo said at last. ‘I should have made it clear earlier that I needed you there.’
Wan neither moved nor spoke, all wariness. Dukayn cleared his throat.
‘I got a commcall a little while ago from Se Vida’s bodyguard.’ Dukayn turned mild eyes Wan’s way. ‘They were worried about you at dinner.’
Wan went white about the mouth.
‘What’s this?’ Karlo snapped.
‘As I understand it,’ Dukayn went on, ‘Se Wan made arrange merits to accompany his fiancee to a dinner party, then never showed up.’
‘Damn that meddling bastard,’ Wan hissed. ‘What business of his was it, calling you like that?’
‘Jak had his reasons,’ Dukayn said. ‘I don’t feel like explaining them to you.’
‘Oh yeah? Maybe I should just get rid of him, then. Get Vida to fire him.’
Dukayn actually laughed. It was the first time that Karlo had heard that particular rusty chuckle in years. Flushing red, Wan took one step forward, froze, and stepped back sharply when Dukayn stopped laughing.
‘Sit down, both of you,’ Karlo snapped.
They followed orders, Wan slouched on the sofa, Dukayn perched on the edge of the armchair. Karlo shoved his hands in his pockets and began to pace back and forth while he talked.
‘Listen, Wan, there’s something you don’t realize about Vida’s bodyguard. He’s blood-bonded himself to her. Do you know what that means?’
‘I’ve heard about it,’ Wan said. ‘So what?’
Dukayn laughed again, a cold mutter under his breath.
‘So what?’ Karlo snarled. ‘Get this through your thick skull. Never try to cause trouble between Vida and her bodyguard. You’ll be marrying Vida, sure, and Jak will tolerate that because Vida’s agreed to it. But he’s going to hate you every goddamn minute that she’s your wife. He’d love an excuse to break your neck first and apologize later.’