A Prison Unsought (23 page)

But Nyberg, a sardonic smile leavening the lines graven on
his face by a near-overwhelming burden, already had a feed from the console on
his screen. “It seems that our enemies are striking a blow for order.”

Ng watched as Barrodagh’s face reappeared, a reddish bruise
marking the side of his high forehead. Barrodagh had changed to a formal tunic
that showed nothing of his recent experiences; behind him the
Fist of Dol’jha
r’s blazon loomed
authoritatively on the wall.

“A message to all fleet units,” he
said. “The initial attack has succeeded. You are to desist from destroying
civilian vessels and to confine your efforts to patrol and occupation as
specified in General Orders.” He cut the connection.

“Tidy,” Ng commented. “No threats,
no reasons.”

“That’s actually quite a significant
change,” Nyberg said. “Moral Sabotage has tracked the change in the tone
of his announcements. He’s more aware than most that the DataNet is already
unraveling, and he needs it as badly as we do; analysis shows that only a tiny
percentage of his fleet is armed with Urian tech. As for threats, why bother?
That tiny fraction knows what he can do if they defy him, and the rest don’t
matter.”

Ng nodded. Unless a mutinous ship decided to risk the Plasma
Wager, bringing the spin reactors up from full shutdown would give Barrodagh more
than enough time to send a loyal ship to blast them.

She shrugged the thought away. “I don’t suppose it matters
how tersely he speaks, as long as he keeps speaking.”

“Exactly.” In her superior’s reply, she heard satisfaction,
but, as always, she couldn’t tell whether it was with her or the situation.

They saluted. Before she turned away she caught the briefest
smile from his usually shuttered face. It was barely there, gone in a
heartbeat, but she departed feeling better than she had for some time.

Jaim kept his promise, when he next had free time.

Whatever the Kelly had done, Ivard had not only been cured
of the effects of the ribbon, he had improved almost beyond recognition. Although
he still bore a green ring around his arm apparently no more dangerous than
body art, gone were the pinkish-red eyes, constantly irritated by allergens,
gone the sickly pale skin marred by melanin blotches too small to protect him.
Gone even was the youthful awkwardness.

Yet the Kelly kept Ivard in their quarters for a time, and
so Jaim went there to give Ivard his first lessons.

Ivard sprang up with an energy he’d never exhibited before. “Are
you ready?” he asked. “I am!”

Jaim knew something was missing. When he looked around
again, he discovered what it was. “Did you lock up Gray and Trev?”

Ivard shut his eyes, his nose twitching slightly. Then he
opened his eyes again. “They’re outside.” He made a vague wave. “Playing with
some other dogs. They know their way around.”

Jaim accepted that; the dogs were really Brandon’s
responsibility.

“Here’s your basic stance,” Jaim
said, and settled into it, ready to launch into the explanation of foot placement,
trunk, breathing, alignment of arms and head, but Ivard mimicked him with an
apparent effortlessness that froze the words in Jaim’s mouth.

“First move.”

Within the first ten minutes, the cautious program Jaim had
so carefully thought out was abandoned, and he took Ivard through the
first-level kinesics.

At the end, Ivard scarcely seemed winded, and when Jaim
returned a couple days after, Ivard proudly demonstrated them all correctly. So
Jaim took him through the second-level kinesics.

Jaim couldn’t get away until after a protracted shift for
their third session. By then, Ivard was back at the detention quarters in the
Cap. When Jaim arrived he found his shipmates’ quarters empty, and passed
through the anteroom into the faux garden. There he found Lucifur, the big
white Faustian cliff cat that Vi’ya had rescued on one of their runs years ago,
prowling restlessly.

Ice-blue eyes glowed at Jaim, reflecting the muted lighting
that indicated a late hour. The big wedge-shaped head butted Jaim’s thigh, and
when he reached to scratch between the battered, notched ears, Luce’s low,
ratcheting purr rumbled.

The cat stilled to alertness, and with a graceful bound,
disappeared over a low, ivy-covered wall.

Jaim turned around as Vi’ya tabbed the door shut. “Ivard’s
away, but he will return shortly,” she said.

Jaim shrugged, relieved. He was tired. “Tomorrow, then.”

Vi’ya nodded. “As you will.”

Jaim knew she would not offer any more information unless he
asked. “Will he be disappointed if I don’t wait?”

“I’ve run him through the second-level
falls, and some of the easier combinations,” she said. “He has the first-level
kinesics and combinations mastered. But the sparring combinations must wait
upon you. Healed as he may be, I still do not want to risk damaging him.”

Jaim hesitated. Since Markham’s death, he’d become
accustomed to her one- and two-word answers. When she talked this much, she
usually had something on her mind.

So he followed her into the common room. “Where is he? Oh.
Of course—with the Kelly.”

“Actually I believe he is visiting
his nuller friend.”

Vahn had filled Jaim in on Tate Kaga; when asked what
interest the ancient Douloi had in Ivard, the Marine had shrugged.
He’s a nuller and a Prophetae, and he’s over
six hundred years old. Who can tell what interests him, and why?

Vi’ya punched up something to drink, filling the room with
the sharp tang of caf. After a week of real coffee, the synth drink smelled
sharp and unappetizing, but Jaim said nothing.

Two cups appeared in the dumbwaiter. They retrieved them,
and Jaim followed her into the tiny room where she slept. It contained nothing
more than a bed, a wall storage cabinet, and a pull-down console desk.

Without looking to see if he followed or not, she sat down,
her fingers moving with assurance over the keys. It was such a familiar sight
that he started to back away, thinking that he’d misjudged and he was
disturbing the captain at her work, but then he remembered that she was no
longer captain.

She could not be monitoring supplies, or planning a run.
Telvarna
had been impounded somewhere in
a Cap compound, and she had nothing, in fact, to do. He wondered why she even
bothered with the console, so heavily filtered it must be—perhaps the challenge
of bypassing its limitations appealed to her. But that could only be a game.

Her profile was
somber, its planes and curves clear-cut, her blue-black, glossy hair pulled
back in the uncompromising tail Jaim had always seen her wear. In eight years
it had only gotten longer, yet she never wore it loose. She could have: she had
beautiful hair.

She is beautiful, but
it is irrelevant to her, Reth Silverknife had said once. And it was true. Vi’ya
hid the graceful lines of her tall, strong body in a utilitarian flight suit. Before
Markham’s death she had delighted in jewel-toned colors, but wore no actual
jewels or ornaments, though she liked to look at them; it was only possible to
see the generous curve of eyelid and brow, enhanced by the dramatic sweep of
dark lashes, when her attention was otherwhere, for when she looked straight at
you, you noticed only the density of her pupils in an uncompromising gaze that
usually made people uncomfortable.

You can take the
Dol’jharian out of Dol’jhar, but you can’t take Dol’jhar out of the
Dol’jharian,
Lokri had joked.

She worked steadily, her eyes on the keypads.

A terrible conviction gripped him: she was trying to break
into the station system, and failing that, she was about to demand that he use
his position to aid her.

He forced his thoughts away, and she didn’t react. He recognized
grimly that despite their long association he really didn’t know her. Did
anyone? Had anyone?
Once.
In all the
years she and Markham were mates, they had never once touched one another or
displayed any kind of affection in front of others. Yet each had spoken for the
other with an effortlessness that comes of intimate knowledge—and trust.

“You’re here!”

Ivard’s glad cry
caught Jaim by surprise, and old habit spun him around, hands stiff. From
behind came a snort of amusement from Vi’ya.

Was that all? She just
wanted me to wait for Ivard?

“I hoped you’d wait,” Ivard said as
Jaim joined him in the main room. “I was up at the spin axis in Tate Kaga’s
palace. You should see it. Better than any chip! And then I visited the Kelly.
We lost track of time, doing the—” He trilled and honked, making noises Jaim
would have thought impossible from a human throat. Ivard didn’t seem to notice
his change to Kelly-language. “Goes so fast.”

“Let’s get started,” he said.

Ivard nodded and followed them out of Vi’ya’s tiny chamber.
He stood aside and closed his eyes as he concentrated on his breathing. Vi’ya
moved quietly to help Jaim push back the sparse furnishings to the edges of the
room. Then she took up a station at the archway into the garden, the angle of
her head intent.

“Let’s see what you learned from
Vi’ya. Show me the second-level falls,” Jaim said.

Ivard obediently dived forward.

Vi’ya stayed to watch the lesson, though she neither moved
nor spoke until Ivard, frustrated with his inability to immediately master a
tricky combination, called to her for a demonstration.

Expecting her to refuse, Jaim was surprised when she left
her post by the window and took up a stance facing Jaim, a hand’s breadth out
of reach, humor narrowing her slanted eyelids above the pure black eyes.

“Hah!” she breathed, and attacked.

Jaim’s body reacted before his brain did. After a
lightning-fast exchange of light-handed blows, Vi’ya picked Jaim up bodily,
with only a soft grunt of effort, and threw him. Jaim twisted, landing in a
perfect roll-to-crouch, hands ready.

“That was great!” Ivard enthused.
“Do it again!”

They did, and Ivard said, “I want to do that!”

“The air spin is third level. You
have a lot of second-level combos ahead. Back to the forearm block-elbow
strike, now that you’ve seen it from attack and defend.”

Ivard obeyed, but then he launched himself into the air,
flailing as he attempted to mimic Jaim’s fall. So Jaim shrugged, and
demonstrated.

Ivard barely made it.

“You’ll need to practice that,”
Jaim said, hands on hips. “Dive off that chair and master the roll-to-crouch
before you move up to the hip twist.”

Ivard nodded, swiping back the sweat-dark red hair, and did
so, again awkward but successful. He did not seem to notice his own rasping
breath, but Jaim motioned for him to sit down.

“Do a bout,” Ivard
said. “Show me. You’d never let us watch you before.” His voice ended on a
faintly interrogative note, his gaze on Jaim, not Vi’ya.

He got to know her as well, within his own perceptive
limitations,
Jaim thought wryly.

Then he abandoned thought as Vi’ya reached for him. They
feinted and attacked, engaged and retreated. Jaim had always found her
proximity disturbing; it was difficult to remember how young she was. When
Markham had found her, she was scarcely the age of young Ivard. Tall and thin
but never gangling, she’d grown taller over the next year, and she’d already
been immensely strong. Memory-images, no more than echoes, flickered through
his mind. The scent of sweat mixed with a subtle spice; the sight of the long-fingered
hands, their nails closely trimmed; the soft sigh of midnight-black hair
against his cheek or his arm when she spun out of his grip.

A difficult blend of emotions accompanied that memory:
humiliation and excitement, fear and anger. He had laughed most of any of them
at Lokri’s tired old joke because until recently he of all of them knew best
that she was, after all, a Dol’jharian: she had attacked Jaim, with rape the
intent, one terrifying night not long after her arrival on Dis, and he’d ended
up fighting for his life.

His gaze brushed her dark gaze. Was she remembering as well?
Or had it so little meaning to one of her culture she had long since forgotten?
She had never again referred to it, and after she had forced a similar
encounter onto the hapless Lokri not long ago, she had again behaved as though
nothing had happened.

When they finished, Ivard went off to his room, feinting and
jabbing before him at imagined enemies.

Jaim said to Vi’ya, “Back tomorrow, if circumstances
permit.”

She retreated to her room, leaving Jaim to exit.

The guard lifted his hand in a casual salute, which Jaim
returned with a wave. Jaim retraced his steps through the corridors to the
transtube to wait for the next pod. He sniffed the air. It was “morning”; the
lighting had been altered subtly to resemble morning light on one of the
planets that claimed to be most Earth-like.

The transtube arrived, a quiet rumble under his feet. He
found a seat behind a number of people going off to work. The transtube lurched
into motion; Jaim felt the smooth acceleration in his midsection. The pod burst
out of the Cap and began its descent to the surface of the oneill. He watched
the patchwork of greenery grow into detail as they fell, with the raw scars of
newly constructed refugee camps scattered throughout.

Unlike Rifthaven, there was no ugly place on this habitat.
Even the new camps, prefab though they might be, were pleasant to see, albeit
crowded. But the surface space of the oneill was limited, since much of it was
given over to food crops. He could see construction of new quarters going up at
the Cap. Even from a distance they appeared much less pleasant.

He knew from the Marines that some of the civilians had
expressed anger at their displacement; from those sequestered in the Cap for
their work with the captured hyperwave, that anger was feigned.