The Rifter's Covenant (57 page)

“We want to pass
peaceably,” Srivashti said to the crowd. “Anyone who cooperates will be well
rewarded. I have the wherewithal to reward or to destroy. Which will it be?”

His husky voice was
compelling, and the people—most of them Polloi, and obviously followers—looked
at one another as if waiting for someone to lead.

More people
arrived, including the nuller’s bubble, which hovered just beyond the railing.
Hesthar thought about the 4.5-kilometer drop to the inner surface of the
oneill—spinning at more than 700 kilometers per hour with respect to the
axis—and her insides clenched. She yanked her boswell up.
(Arret! Get someone up here now!)

(Get to the lift,)
came the reply.
(Meet us in 315. Things are quiet here.)

(Of course 315 is quiet,)
Hesthar fumed.
(That’s Douloi territory. I need aid now.)

(We can’t—the Navy has started securing
lifts and pods. If you can escape, come to us here. We will take care of you.)

Hesthar signed to Felton,
I need the lift.
She smiled sourly,
wishing she had a jac despite the Ultschen code. It would feel so good to burn
them all into oblivion. But she did not speak; she was content to let Srivashti
stay in the front line until he or Felton could gain the lift.

Srivashti began to
edge toward the lift, a step at a time, as Felton slid silently to the console
and manipulated the controls. An orange light flashed, and Hesthar’s nerves flared
painfully. A coded lift? But then Felton tapped without hesitation, and the
light greened.

The doors slid open.
The crowd muttered angrily, then gasped.

For the lift was
not empty. From it stepped Montrose and the
Telvarna
crew.

Montrose lifted his
voice so that everyone could hear, all the way back to the edge of the
concourse. “Tau Srivashti, you are forsworn. It is time for you to answer to
your—”

Srivashti struck
fast.

The only thing that
saved Montrose was that Jaim was faster. He yanked Montrose aside, so that Srivashti’s
killing throat strike glanced harmlessly off Montrose’s cheekbone.

Jaim whirled to
advance on Felton, a green ribbon tied across his forehead. Felton breathed
out, the controlled breath of the numathanat—but his poison had no effect on
Jaim.

Vi’ya confronted Srivashti.

“A Dol’jharian,
aren’t you?” he murmured. “I’ve often wondered what one of you is like to play
with.”

She snapped out
four strikes—a feint, one deflected blow, and two hits—and bones crunched. Srivashti
lay on the deck, gasping through a bruised throat, one arm shattered.

“Felton!” he
gasped.

But Felton lifted
his hands, palms out.

Hesthar bit back a
scream of corrosive laughter. Felton was Ultschen: they only follow leaders,
and a leader does not fall. Hesthar slid behind them toward the lift, a step at
a time. As Srivashti watched, stunned by the deliberate betrayal of his
bodyguard, Felton made a sign that could have been regret, or even a signal to
wait, stepped into the lift, and the doors closed.

He was gone.

Alone, Srivashti
sneered up at Vi’ya.

She ignored him.
“He’s yours, Montrose.”

Montrose spoke in a
voice of passionate hatred. “You twisted or murdered everything on Timberwell
that was good, and I swore long ago that I would deliver justice with my own
hands.”

Srivashti looked
up, his lips skinned back from his teeth. “Takes a lot of courage . . . to sic
your Dol’jharian beast on me first . . . doesn’t it?” His voice was almost
unrecognizable. “So . . . strike now, fool . . . if you dare.”

Montrose shook his
head, a terrible smile distorting his face.

Last step. Hesthar reached
the lift and touched the controls, careful to hit the keys in the exact pattern
Felton had used.

Montrose said, “I
can’t hit a man who is down.” He stepped forward, and as the crowd watched, he
bent and lifted Srivashti from the side with the shattered arm, making it
impossible for Srivashti to stop him. Srivashti struggled weakly. “But I can
throw him,” Montrose said, and pitched Srivashti over the edge of the railing.

The crowd roared
with approval as Srivashti writhed, trying to arrest his slow drift away from
the landing. It would take a long time for him to reach the surface. But spin
gravity, increasing with every meter he descended, would pull him down in the
end.

Hesthar smiled and
keyed the doors shut.

The lift accelerated
smoothly downward.

Felton slipped
from service byway to maintenance tunnel, moving invisibly through the
lifelines of the habitat. From the first day of his arrival on Ares, he had
made himself familiar with nearly every adit and exit. The arrival of
al-Gessinav of the Third Circle, who had unlocked the codes for many previously
closed to him, had made it even easier to execute undetected the assassinations
Srivashti had ordered in his attempt to snuff out all who might know of the
Arthelion bomb.

Felton did not
assume he knew all the secret byways, or he would have been able to hunt Fierin
down. But he knew enough of them to go to ground himself and bide his time
until al-Gessinav or another of the Third Circle contacted him.

Anger impelled him
to move faster. One could not obey a fallen leader, but he might find a way to
send aid for the sake of childhood alliance. And if not, the Ultschen way still
permitted him to take pleasure in snuffing all those who had brought Tau Srivashti
to this end. Nothing could stop him, for Nothing was strong.

He’d begun planning
his attacks when he became aware of a tick-tick-tick-tick sound behind him.

Felton whirled
about. In the minimal lighting of the service tunnel two dogs’ eyes glowed
eerily green in visual echo to their red and green-streaked collars as they
trotted toward him side by side.

Just dogs. He had
seen their traces in some of the obscure byways he’d used on his lethal
errands, but this was the first time he’d actually encountered them. When they
saw his gaze on them, they began to run, their hind legs reaching forward well
past their front paws, their powerful haunches accelerating them faster than a
human being could run. He barely had time to reset himself into the proper
Ulanshu stance for quadrupedal predators when they were on him.

As one circled to
one side, the other leaped for him, jaws gaping. Felton aimed a sweeping kick but
the animal twisted, hit his leg with its front paws, and used that leverage to
twist again and sink its teeth into his arm. Forty kilos of muscle and bone jerked
him violently around as its teeth closed on his arm with crushing force. Agonizing
pain shot white lightning behind his eyes as bone snapped, but he overrode it
with an internal chord of the numathanat and reached for the dog’s eyes.

It let go as the
other one seized his leg from behind in a crushing grip. Felton kicked
viciously back with his other leg, but the dog twitched aside and worried at
his leg with a savage jerk before letting go and falling back. Blood spurted.

Trying to ignore
the ruin of his forearm, and the weakness of his leg, Felton drew in breath and
crouched, waiting for the dogs to leap at him again, but they didn’t. Instead,
they positioned themselves out of reach on either side of him, as if to force
him to divide his attention.

Not out of reach,
he thought, summoning a chord comprising the most painful of his poisons on a
dense and easily projected breath. He swung his head from side to side, breathing
out an agonizing and very satisfying pair of deaths.

Both dogs shook
their heads and sneezed several times as they backed away two or three steps,
claws ticking on the deck, their fur lifted along their backs, tails down. They
were impossibly still very much alive. Only then did he remember the tall
Rifter Ulanshu master’s forehead ribbon.

Surely, whatever those
collars were, they could not proof the animals against every chord of the
numathanat. Felton snuffed in breath again to try another poison—then sneezed
violently himself.

He heard another
ticking behind him, intricately triplicate this time. He whirled and saw three
of those damned Kelly beasts. Felton tried to edge around them, keeping his
good arm toward them, then struck out as the trinity closed around him,
headstalks strong as cables, bodies like bolsters that shrugged off his blow, threir
fluttering ribbons oddly sticky. He inhaled deeply and spat the broadest
spectrum, most dangerous poisons he had at the trinity—surely
something
would drop threm.

Nothing. Time
slowed as he fell to the floor, his muscles slack. He fought for breath against
near-total paralysis. The Kelly with the garish boswell on its neck said in an
incongruously sweet voice, “To nullity you gave your life, and to nullity you
return.” A bit of ribbon fell from its pelt onto his lips. “With your breath
you killed, by your breath you die.”

Felton inhaled
rackingly as the paralysis released his diaphragm, then screamed. The numathant
chords began to unravel within him, years of immune programming falling away. Pain
beyond anything he had ever known ignored along nerves and tendon, bone and
muscle.

o0o

Far above
anti-spinward, Tau Srivashti fought against his own pain, and the fury of
helplessness as the rabble departed, leaving him alone scarce meters from
safety. If it weren’t for his arm, he could take his tunic off and flap it to
propel himself back to the deck. But an attempt to pull it off over his
shattered bones caused a surge of nausea to choke him—a messy way to die in micro-gee.

He wanted very much
to save himself, to see Hesthar’s shock when he returned and shot her, and
Felton’s when he had him flayed. How dare that no-family trash turn on him! And
why?

Must be that snake
cult twaddle
,
he thought, drawing his
knees up against his chest with his good arm. With less surface area, it would
take the rotational wind of the highdwelling longer to accelerate him to local
spin gravity. He’d always believed that if he ignored the Ultschen nonsense,
Felton would eventually forget it; he had made it very clear that spending
energy in any religion, even his entropy-worshiping snakes and poisons, was the
road to conformity, not power.

The deck fell away
upward, ever so slowly, as Srivashti drifted toward one of the massive alloy
struts that supported the diffusers. Rungs! A maintenance hatch, closer, closer.

A surge of hope
flared, enabling his gibbering hindbrain—
falling,
falling, falling
—to momentarily overpower reason in a frantic lunge so
painful that he passed out.

When consciousness
returned, the strut had fallen away above him. No succor there. Then Srivashti
caught sight of the boswell on his shattered arm and cursed himself twice over.

First for
overlooking the obvious in his pain and rage: he could summon someone from the
shuttle to rescue him by aircar.

Second, after
trying and failing to summon help—the frantic messages from the shattered
nerves in his damaged arm made neural induction impossible—for his reliance on
high fashion’s elegant boswell with no clumsy audio. The Tetrad Centrum Douloi always
had servants to record things.

Getting the boswell
onto his good arm would be agonizing. Srivashti looked around. He had just
passed through the huge gap that separated two of the vast refractory diffuser
tubes; below, the inner surface of Ares spread out, arching up on either side,
new construction standing out like livid scars. He noted with satisfaction how
fast the landscape appeared to be spinning around him; the rotational wind
still hadn’t taken effective hold of him.

Well and good, he
thought. That meant it would take longer to fall. At least it was afternoon,
the focus of the diffusers at the other end of the oneill; had it been morning,
he would have been consumed like a moth in a flame.

Laboriously,
gasping with pain, he transferred the boswell to his good wrist. When he
finished, his vision bright-speckled on the edge of graying out from
hyperventilation, he was still at least four kilometers up, still merely
drifting. There was still time.

He subvocalized a
query. The shuttle responded promptly.
(Yes,
prabhu Srivashti?)

Srivashti formed
the words but a shrill squeal erupted from the boswell and it flashed brilliant
red. They’d imposed Nescience on him! He fumbled to get it off before the
neural feedback destroyed his auditory nerves, then angrily flung it from him; the
effort grayed-out his mind once more.

When he fought his
way back to consciousness, the surface was closer, the rotational wind
inexorably accelerating him toward a standard gee. He fought despair with a
surge of rage, twisting his head back to look up through the diffuser gap at
the spin axis, now more than a kilometer above him. It was then he saw a glint
of light speeding toward him between the massive structures.

The nuller.

The old man drew
even so they could see each other’s face. The wind from the bubble fanned Srivashti
with a warm, spice-scented breeze.

His geeplane could
bear extra weight with no effort,
Srivashti
thought. But why did he wait? For begging and pleading? To bring up their
shared blood, as supplicant to benefactor?

He turned away his
head. Let the old fool name his price first.

“Do you remember
your grandparents?”

Srivashti was
tempted to pretend not to hear the rusty, ancient voice. But there was no
senility in it, nor in the alert eyes, despite the wrinkles and the absurd name
he called himself nowadays.

“To an extent.” Srivashti
forced out the words. His broken arm sent fires of protest through him, and he
winced, renewing his vow to make that Dol’jharian deviant suffer long and long.
“I do remember how angry he was after the Accession party on Karelais for
Gelasaar. Angry that you refused to acknowledge the Family anymore. She didn’t
say anything.”