The Rifter's Covenant (51 page)

“I will go,” Jaim
answered.        

Brandon was silent
on the way to the spin axis, leaving Jaim to his own thoughts. Jaim had learned
that Tate Kaga had united Vi’ya and Brandon on the night of the cabal’s
attempted coup—almost as though the old man thought that link as important as,
or more so, than Brandon’s political standing. Jaim didn’t know that he
disagreed. But he had been with Brandon for months now, seen him against almost
every conceivable background, from Rifthaven to the drawing rooms of Ares. How
had Tate Kaga, who had talked to Brandon perhaps one half-hour total, and who
had met Vi’ya only once, arrived at the same conclusion?

Their arrival cut
short his thoughts. Jaim looked around in wonder as a gee-flat carried them
swiftly from the transtube nexus into a congerie of bubbles hovering amongst
the huge structural members of the spin axis that evidently formed the nuller’s
home. Far below, seen between the diffusers, the bright thread of a stream
glinted from the surface of Ares; nearby, Jaim saw the scars of construction,
brown wounds in the verdancy of the oneill.

When the gee-flat
stopped, a bright cloud of tiny birds, their wings extended only when changing
direction, swirled around their heads. Brandon pointed toward the largest
bubble and pushed off, propelling himself toward it by slapping at the cables
arrayed like a spider’s web all around them. Jaim followed.

The room Brandon
led them to was disorienting, and Jaim’s initial reaction was dislike. A large
platform of some mossy plant spangled with little yellow flowers extended like
a wall across from the entry; small spheres were poised, stationary, at random
intervals throughout the space. Music whispered in the air, too faint to grasp
consciously.

Odd polygonal
viewscreens were affixed to all the interior surfaces, displaying slowly
changing human faces. Jaim couldn’t be sure, but some of them seemed familiar—a
few echoed Brandon’s bone structure. The faces were aging, from childhood to
maturity. Some were then replaced by new faces, while others reversed time’s
arrow, regressing to youth again.

“Ho! The Arkad and his
Rifter shadow.”

Jaim blinked. He’d
not heard Tate Kaga approach—the old man just popped up from behind the wall of
moss. He had no gee-bubble. The nuller pulled himself down onto the moss and
motioned to them. “Join me.”

The moss was
prickly on Jaim’s palms; it evidently had minute hooks in it, for it grabbed
his clothing and held him lightly. He seated himself at an angle to the other
two, leaving Tate Kaga and Brandon facing each other.

They sat in silence
for a long time. Jaim knew nuller courtesy: Tate Kaga’s orienting the meeting
to a common surface was a concession to gravity-bound expectations.

Finally Brandon
spoke. “When I was young, I built a ghost in the Palace computer, to torment
someone. It never appeared directly to him, but only in the periphery of his
vision.”

Tate Kaga smiled
but said nothing.

“Here on Ares, I
seem to be haunted in similar fashion, but not by a ghost. We met the night of
the cabal’s attempted coup; Vi’ya saw you in the DataNet; Tovr Ixvan reported
an interesting encounter. I rarely see you face-to-face, but you are always there
on the edges of my vision.”

“Do you feel it as
a gadfly’s sting, then?” The nuller’s chuckle was like the fall of pebbles into
a dry gully.

“I had no cause to,
until I saw the chip of the Enkainion that the laergist Ranor brought to Ares.
Before he was killed he gave it to Fierin, who gave it to Vannis, and thence to
me.”

Tate Kaga nodded,
expressionless. Jaim sat very still, the implications of the Panarch’s bald
statement detonating in his mind. He had seen the chip, had seen the
unidentified nuller punch through a window as the nuclear device irradiated the
Hall of Ivory. But like everyone else, he had assumed that that nuller, whoever
it was, had died like everyone else present that day.

But if it had been
Tate Kaga at the Enkainion, then he had known all along about Srivashti,
Y’Talob, and al-Gessinav—and had said nothing. Even as they had plotted to
remove Brandon from the succession. Even now, as Ares careened toward disaster.
And misprision of treason was itself treason.

The nuller did not
answer the Panarch’s unspoken accusation. Instead, he waved one stick-thin arm
at the walls around them, with the faces slowly evolving on the viewscreens.
“Do you like my meditation room?”

Brandon looked
around. Jaim watched his focus shift; the faces seemed to all be looking at the
Panarch, and he at them.

“I knew them all,”
Tate Kaga said. “Some built monuments, in stone or metal or human minds. Others
left no trace, save fading echoes in the DataNet.” He pushed off from the
platform, slowly rising into the air. “They all died, swept away like dust in
the wind. I could not change that.”

Jaim watched the
faces during the ensuing silence. How many lives had Tate Kaga touched? Was
there any facet of humanity he had not seen, in a life which spanned almost a
third of the Exile?

The nuller’s motion
took him up to one of the screens, from which a woman’s face appeared to watch
them. Her smooth, youthful skin slowly gathered lines of experience, aging into
even greater beauty, her eyes deepening with hard-won wisdom. The nuller extended
a finger to touch the screen gently. Age finally conquered beauty, her cheeks
sank in, her hair withered to wisps of gray, and she faded away, to be replaced
with a child’s face that echoed faintly the lineaments of her features.

Tate Kaga caressed
the screen, the motion spinning him slowly about to face them.

“I learned to
wait.”

The Panarch stared
at his empty hands. “Do that which consists of no action, and order will
prevail,” he said finally.

The nuller’s
cackling laughter was shocking, holding pain and merriment in equal measure.
“Hah! Carved in stone that is, on Lao Tse. You must live it. But there’s more,
and worse.”

Brandon waited.

“Do you understand
the fiveskip?” the nuller asked.

The Panarch shook
his head.

“Yet you let it
carry you from star to star.”

“I don’t have time
to master it; there’s too much else my position demands I know. Others
understand it, and I trust their understanding.”

Tate Kaga smiled,
and the weariness in that smile struck Jaim like a blow. The old nuller looked
every bit his age.

“Just so. You don’t
have time.” Jaim heard the emphasis, and the narrowing of Brandon’s eyes
betrayed its impact on him as well.

“I have lived long.
Now I make the wind,” Tate Kaga said. “Some stand against it, some ride it, and
some are swept away. Do you trust my understanding?”

Brandon unfolded
his legs, the motion pushing him into the air. He stilled himself with one of
the little spheres, hanging opposite Tate Kaga. Slender and strong, he looked
massive next to the frail nuller, but to Jaim’s eyes the balance of power was
equal.

“It seems I must,” Brandon
said.

Tate Kaga let out
his breath in a gusting sigh. “I promised Burgess that I would guard his
progeny as my own.” Tate Kaga’s voice slowed, husky with old pain. “To mine I
made another promise. Very soon now, I will fulfill them both.”

o0o

This was the
second time the
Telvarna
’s crew had
all been called together. Jaim was late, and Montrose with him; they’d both had
to provide coverage for their jobs.

They arrived at
D-Five to find Marim lying on the couch cradling an injured arm, her face
puffed with bruises and lacerations. Lucifur lay under her feet, a huge tan-striped
pillow with sapphire eyes.

Montrose moved
straight to Marim, ignoring her protests, and checked limbs and eyes, then he
sat back on his heels and grinned at her. “Caught cheating, eh, rock-rat?”

Marim started up in
protest. One blackened eye remained closed, but the other rounded in honest
outrage. “No,” she howled. “This time I wasn’t. Some drunks just wanted to duff
a Rifter, and I was it.” She finished in a pitiful voice, then added gloomily,
“At least three of ’em look worse than I do.”

Everyone laughed.
“Huh!” Marim flounced back, wincing, and Luce lifted his head, sending her a
sleepily reproachful look. “Ow,” she added under her breath when some unseen
bruise twinged.

Vi’ya leaned over
Ivard’s chair, her hands on either side of its back. “Jaim. Montrose. Is there
a hardship in being here now?”

Montrose grunted.
“There’s a hardship in every moment of existence on this benighted habitat. But
things’ll hold without me.”

Jaim shook his
head, considering what might underlie the question.

Vi’ya said, “Then
let us begin. Marim, Ivard, some of this will be new to you: the evidence
against Lokri appears to have been false. There is a good chance he will be
vindicated, enough that I have decided to abandon the plans to extricate him by
our own means.”

Which was the first
I have heard of it, Jaim thought, and knew he had the underlying query now: to
whom did his allegiance belong? To Vi’ya or to Brandon? Will she accept that it
is twofold?

Montrose whistled.
“They would have cut you down like a lazplaz through paper.”

“Maybe,” Vi’ya
said, smiling slightly. Her black eyes narrowed with cool challenge. “And maybe
not. Have you forgotten how many similar jacks we’ve pulled off?”

Montrose grunted,
shaking his head.

“I will restate:
those plans have been abandoned. Yet there is this. The only part of the plan
we had acted on was the procurement of the parts necessary to restart the
engines. But two weeks ago the regular inspections ceased, accelerating our
work. We are now only an item or two short, and that lack can be eradicated
quickly if we must.”

“Ceased?” Montrose
queried.

“I suspect there
are those who would be glad to see us leave.”

See
you
leave, thought Jaim, remembering
Vannis’s face.

“But now we have an
opportunity before us that I had not looked for.”

Ivard looked up
soberly. Jaim wondered what was going on in the youth’s head.

“Manderian came to
me last night with a request. Gnostor Omilov desires us to perform another
experiment for him, this time from space outside the system and away from the chaos
of psyches here. I suggest we agree, but once we are past radius, we leave.”

“Yes!” Marim
sighed. “Rifthaven and treasure, here I come!”

“Not to Rifthaven,”
Vi’ya said. “Marim, you must consider. Anywhere we show up we are bonus points
for both sides. What I propose to do is to go to the Suneater and activate it.
And take it over.”

Silence met this,
and then came Marim’s high, keening wail: “Why-y-y-y-y-y-y?”

“Because there is
nowhere else for us to go. I believe we are strong enough.” Jaim heard the augmented
plural. She was referring to the Unity, as Eloatri had called them.

But Marim was deaf
to that subtlety. “To our old hideout,” Marim protested. “Or we can even stay
here and sit tight, until their blunge-eating war is finished.”

“And wait for someone
else to start that station?”

Marim threw up her
hands. “If they come after us, then we escape! But
not
to that Sunchatzer. We’ll never get out of that alive.”

“What’s the
choice?” Montrose asked.

“Go or stay. The
Eya’a, of course, are ready to leave now. They hate this place. They are
hibernating for longer and longer periods of time. I spoke to
Portus-Dartinus-Atos before this meeting, and threy are willing to go. Lokri
wants nothing more than to be gone from Ares. Ivard?”

The youth had
paled, but he nodded jerkily. “Count me in. Nothing keeping me here if the
Kelly go. Except for Tate Kaga,” he amended in a low voice.

Montrose frowned.
“One request first. I’ve been treating someone who will soon be at large, and
since we’re short a crew member . . . .”

Vi’ya turned his
way. “Brandon explained about her. I spoke with Thetris a day ago, and she will
resign her commission tonight. Tomorrow she joins our crew, and she’ll run Fire
Control. She knows the tenno Markham added there.”

“Volunteered?” Jaim
asked.

Vi’ya glanced
briefly his way. “Yes.”

“Who’s this?” Marim
asked.

“New crew,” Vi’ya
said. “Ex-Navy. Noderunner.”

Montrose nodded,
obviously pleased, but then his expression changed. “I said I’d stay with you
and I will, but I tell you now, I don’t like this plan. How do we get rid of
the inevitable Marine guards? Get ’em to throw in—or space ’em? And how the
hell do we hide what’s going on in the engine room?”

“There is no need,”
Vi’ya said. “Omilov was quite clear. He wants the seven of us alone—or as near
to alone as is commensurate with the running of the ship. An escort ship will
be sent with us. Several of you working can probably get the skip up and
running during the long slow trip to radius. Then we simply skip out. The
escort ship can do nothing if they have no warning.”

She turned last to
Jaim, brows lifted in question.

“My question can
wait,” he said. Vi’ya did not return an answer, but Jaim saw Luce rise, and in
a sudden, graceful swarming of smooth feline muscles, he jumped to the top of a
nearby chair and lay along it, his tail twitching.

Vi’ya bent over the
chair to listen to something Ivard was saying, his subdued voice completely
drowned by Marim, who had descended into colorful and heartfelt invective.

Montrose laughed,
which started a good-natured argument, just like old times. Ivard, snickering,
joined in.

Vi’ya signed to
Jaim, who silently followed her to her room.

There, she shut the
door and faced him. “Your objection?”

“Have you told
Brandon?”