A Prison Unsought (13 page)

Jaim said, “So you did talk like high-end nicks during your
days on Timberwell. Say one thing and mean another.”

Montrose laughed as they got into the transtube. The big man
glanced around the empty compartment, then sat down in the middle of a bench,
arms like tree branches spread along the bench backs and powerful legs
stretched out before him as he said, “You have to remember there are nearly as
many kinds of nicks as there are Rifters. We were a Service Family—several
generations of service. But though I was raised and educated as Douloi, I was
not what the elite flatter themselves by terming the
Tetrad Centrum Douloi
. Our rank was too modest to attract the
notice of Tau hai-Srivashti.”

Jaim thought through the implications behind Montrose’s
words. “If you jump him while we’re here—”

Montrose snorted. “Jump.” His grizzled face twisted in
scorn. “Just because I never learned the Tetrad Centrum Douloi’s sneaking,
double-dealing way of talk doesn’t mean I do not know how to wait for the right
moment.”

Montrose glanced out the window. For him the conversation
had ended.

Jaim followed his gaze. The transtube was about halfway to
the north spin axis and the access to the Cap, where the
Telvarna
’s crew was housed. Below them a distance-softened
patchwork of greenery and water stretched into hazy distance below hook-shaped
clouds, curving up on either side to become a verdigris sky until lost from
sight behind the sun-bright diffuser below the spin axis overhead. The
brilliant filament of a stream, threaded with the shimmering pearls of a chain
of ponds, winked at them from anti-spinwise.

Montrose didn’t see any of it. In spite of his words, memory
was bitter. But he’d spoken the truth.
I
do know how to wait.

The transtube halted and the doors slid open to permit
passengers to enter. Montrose pulled his arms and legs in, but made no move
otherwise, thoroughly enjoying how the nicks took one look at his bristling
beard and bushy eyebrows, and moved into another compartment.

Montrose chuckled deep in his barrel chest as the doors
shut, and they were once again alone. “Rifter trash, that’s what they’re
thinking. I think I’ll make myself a purple shirt.”

Jaim ignored that. “Nobody has stopped us.”

Montrose rubbed his jaw. “We both know how much power
Brandon has.”

“Effectively none.”

“And yet,” Montrose said. “And yet.
When we were on the
Telvarna
, he was
doing his best to recruit us into going after his father on a suicidal rescue
mission. But since we’ve come here, the game has changed, and so have the
rules. He’s no longer our prisoner. We’re his.”

“Prisoner—” Jaim repeated.

“You don’t like the term? Then let
me ask you. We will not even consider poor Lokri, who seems to have gotten
himself tangled up in a murder charge. But you know we cannot leave this
station. They don’t seem to be close enough to listen to us, but we must be
under surveillance by Roget’s team.”

“Vi’ya and the Eya’a walked right
through that ballroom last night,” Jaim said, recollecting the sharp angle to
Brandon’s face as the three unlikely figures cut their swath straight through
the whirling Douloi. “So she’s not completely locked up, at least.”

“And she was followed, right?”
Montrose laughed. “As I’m sure she knew. But it was apparently the only way for
her to get the word to us. Wonder what she wants! Feels like the old days. . . .”
Montrose laughed reminiscently.

A soft tone sounded in Jaim’s ear. Brandon’s code. Jaim
touched his boswell.

(Duties almost
executed. Want to sleep, or join me in a visit?)

Jaim rubbed his eyes as the transtube stopped.
(Montrose is with me. What kind of visit?)

(Strictly unofficial.
I’m ditching Vahn after the official tour. Meet me in half an hour? Bring
Montrose if he wants to come.)

Jaim tabbed the accept again and followed Montrose out of
the transtube. They paused to look out once more over the interior of the
oneill from their lofty vantage at the north spin axis. Up here the air was
cool, thin, and refreshing. They entered the Cap access.

Jaim looked around, surprised to discover the same smooth,
clean style that Markham had introduced when the
Telvarna
was refitted.

Their boswells’ connections to the net degraded on Naval
territory, going to heavily-filtered feeds and guidance only. They oriented
themselves and proceeded quickly, garnering brief incurious glances from
others, mostly Naval flunkies from the coveralls and uniforms, as they
traversed the access-ways and corridors.

At the first access lock, the guard eyed them curiously.
MilSecNet had delivered need-to-know data about them when they oriented at the
main hatch, and a battery of scans had confirmed their identity. In spite
of—maybe because of—the scuttlebutt he’d heard, the guard found Jaim
disappointing, Ulanshu master or no, but the monstrously ugly cook, physician,
and sybarite, Montrose, looked like a typical wiredream Rifter.

The guard waved them through.

At the D-5 access lock, the next guard pointedly shut off
the sound and, secure behind thick dyplast, conferred at length with a
superior. After sour looks from both, the sound remained off but the outer lock
hatch opened.

As it rumble-clanged shut behind them—a completely unnecessary
sound that went straight to the hindbrain—Montrose commented grimly, “That one
looked like he had dinner last night with Vlad Tepes.”

Jaim had no idea what he was talking about. He figured the
two sour-faced guards, no doubt listening over their consoles, probably did.

The inner lock finally opened, and they went in.

“You have always told me,” Anaris
said, “that you valued truth.”

“So I do,” Gelasaar replied.

“Then why did no one ever speak
about Tared vlith-L’Ranja, Archon of Lusor in the ten years after that
scandal?”

“Perhaps for the same reason you
did not ask at the time?”

Anaris grinned. “I can safely say that their reasons and
mine would not be the same. At the time, I was sequestered by the tutors and
guards you set about me. And while I heard rumors when I attended social
gatherings, the Archon of Lusor was not known to me, except as one of the many
names of your court of advisors. It wasn’t until recently, when I was reading
through the records Barrodagh exhumed when searching for likely subjects to
suborn, that I connected that particular scandal with Brandon’s being expelled
from the Academy on Semion’s orders.”

“They were connected, yes.”

“And as nothing seemed likelier
than that Brandon would cheat and rely on his name to get him out of trouble,
no, I did not ask you about that at the time, either. But there are some who,
Barrodagh discovered, felt that Semion distorted events to his own purpose yet
again. So in effect, you had two sons lying.”

“There are layers to truth,” the
Panarch began.

“Sophistry,” Anaris remarked.

The Panarch’s eyes narrowed in humor. “Let me rephrase.
There are layers to perception.”

“Either Semion lied, or Brandon and
Lusor’s son did; I suspect the latter, as Lusor committed suicide. That would
seem to be an indictment of Brandon’s co-conspirator.”

The Panarch’s eyes half-closed as he slipped into reverie.
Anaris waited in silence, the dirazh’u quiescent in his hands.

At last Gelasaar looked up. “I see two questions here. One
concerns my sons, but the greater question concerns the Archon of Lusor’s
suicide, and how my council and advisers responded. First of all, you must
realize that I did not view Tared L’Ranja’s suicide as an admission of guilt.
Quite the opposite. For that I blame myself, not him. Or my sons.”

“Explain?”

“Events moved too swiftly. By the
time I found the matter at the top of crowded list of priorities, Tared L’Ranja
had taken himself beyond justice or compromise. There was no chance to
interview him; the pain of his loss kept those who knew him silent out of
respect for his achievements.”

“So no one criticized the necessity?”

“With Tared dead and his son
vanished, Lusor resolved its affairs internally. I could not investigate, and
my advisers knew it. Discussion thereafter was . . . oblique.”

“They have not been so oblique
since?”

“No,” said the Panarch. “We have
the leisure—one might call it the luxury—to be direct.”

“Ah,” Anaris said, “one would
expect the opposite. When you were in power, since you say you valued truth
from those around you, directness would be deemed a virtue.”

The Panarch inclined his head. “When I was in power, time
and the weight—measured in consequences—of one’s words combined in exponential
pressure. To function at all under those circumstances, one learns the language
of compromise.”

Two Marines escorted Montrose and Jaim to their shipmates’
cell; one took their boswells and instructed them in a clipped voice to request
escort out through the intercom when finished, then both departed. The door
slid open.

The living space assigned to the
Telvarna
’s crew was functional, even spacious to those used to
living on shipboard: a main room, fitted with a console (heavily filtered, Jaim
guessed), and access to a tiny garden beyond, artfully designed to suggest
outdoors. Small sleeping rooms opened off the main salon, each with a private,
if tiny,
bain
.

They found Vi’ya and Marim eating breakfast. Both looked up
sharply at their entry. Marim cocked a knee over the other leg, and leaned back
in her chair. “Though we’d never see you.”

“Security preparations,” Jaim
responded, to which Marim made an obscene gesture. She wouldn’t care about the
politics, even the little he could explain.

Montrose turned to Vi’ya. “Brandon said the Kelly
chirurgeons put a priority on treating Ivard, but didn’t get a lot of
cooperation from Ares, nicks, or Navy.”

Vi’ya’s black eyes gazed back impassively. “It is so.”

“Can you tell me more?” Montrose
asked. “You may or may not be aware, but Brandon requested daily reports. Which
were minimal.”

Vi’ya said, “The medics have tested him since we got here,
with no apparent conclusion. Then, a week ago, the Kelly showed up and things
started moving.” She angled her head at one of the tiny sleeping rooms. “Ivard
rests in isolation until his guard arrives to take him to the Embassy for the
procedure this afternoon.”

Marim didn’t want to talk about Ivard, whom she’d bunked out
long before they ended up prisoners on Ares but found herself stuck with
anyway. Or stuck with something: with all his gabby outbursts—which made him
blush green, like a time-lapse of a corpse decaying—and his twitching in a
boneless way that suggested too many joints, she wasn’t sure he qualified as
human anymore. She wished they’d keep him locked up, preferably somewhere else.
She’d much prefer Lokri being returned to them.

“Heyo,” she said, hitching one foot
up onto the table so she could scratch the black microfilaments gennated on the
bottoms of her feet, and grinned. “I start work today on a refit crew.” She brandished
a pair of mocs: the Panarchists did not approve of gennation, so Jaim figured
Vi’ya had prevailed on Marim to hide her feet while outside D-5.

His sharp tug of longing surprised Jaim. He was an engineer
by choice, and he knew that refit would be badly needed, with the glut of ships
coming in each day. “Fiveskip repair?”

Marim laughed and shook her head. “No chance! Told us that
every civ ship coming in gets its fiveskip disabled and sealed, and the nicks
do that. We’re gonna patch up the ones Eusabian’s chatzers couldn’t blow out of
space.”

“They are being very careful with
the data they allow to leave Ares, and so must we be,” said Vi’ya. “I refer
most particularly to the news that Eusabian possesses hyperwave capability.”

Shock radiated through Jaim. He hadn’t forgotten Marim’s
startling discovery on Rifthaven, but before their subsequent capture shortly
afterwards by the
Mbwa Kali
, the probable
existence of hyperwave had merely been one more datapoint in their narrowing
list of options. After their capture, it had become the nicks’ problem, and it
had not even occurred to Jaim to tell them about it. In any case, he’d been
half-inclined to discount it as bilge-banging.

As if reading his mind—which Jaim knew she couldn’t—Vi’ya
said, “I believe it is real enough for us to consider the consequences if we
talk about it.”

“Like now?” said Montrose, but even
as he spoke he realized what she was doing. Talking to two different audiences
with the same words was very Douloi; Markham had taught her well. He glanced at
Jaim, laid a finger alongside his nose, and saw the lift of eyelid that
indicated awareness.

“No,” she replied. “But any mention
beyond the confines of D-5, I suspect we’d find ourselves locked in maximum
security along with Lokri. Are we agreed?”

To Vi’ya Marim said, “I’m mum. I didn’t believe it anyway.
Still don’t.”

Montrose watched her merry face with its fringe of blond
curls.
She’d sell us all if she thought
there was high enough pay—and she could get away with it,
he thought.

“Do you think the nicks know?” said
Jaim, wondering if his oath required telling Brandon.

Vi’ya’s expression was bleak. “We cannot know what they are
aware of. They had some of us under noesis, so I consider it very likely.”

Jaim glanced at Marim, who rolled her eyes. She, Vi’ya, and
Jaim were the only ones that the nicks could subject to noesis, for the rest of
the crew were technically citizens, even Ivard.

He knew he’d gone through it, although that’s all he knew.
No one remembered noesis itself, and no one ever found out what had been
revealed unless they faced a court or tribunal. And he was pretty sure Marim
had undergone it. But Vi’ya? Had her connection to the Eeya’a spared her that
for fear of the consequences?