A Prison Unsought (27 page)

“Did she teach you how to shield
the effects of these encounters?”

“Perhaps in time. I wish we could
test her,” he said. “But it would be a mistake now to try. For the moment, I
can tell you this: I am reasonably certain that she is very strong for a
tempath—stronger, indeed, than I ever was, and in fact her talents border on
telepathy.”

“Then?”

Manderian nodded. “She does not seem to require proximity to
communicate with the Eya’a, as I do.”

Eloatri sorted the immediate implications. “Then she, too,
knows about the captured hyperwave?”

“I am certain of it.”

“Well.” Eloatri rubbed absently at
the burn scar on her palm, then dropped her hand. “For now, tell no one of this.
I will pursue it in my own fashion. You must see if you can win her trust.”

Manderian took this for his dismissal and withdrew to
recover, and to meditate.

Eloatri stayed where she was, meditating on what she had
heard. The military, she knew, were bound under strict oaths of secrecy, but
she was not so bound. What bound her was just as strict, if not more so, but
equally difficult to articulate.

Yet trust obliged her to act. First, she must speak to
Omilov, whom she had seldom seen since Nyberg had given him space to set up the
Jupiter Project. He, too, was a Hinge of sorts, a critical one in the destiny
of Brandon vlith-Arkad. This would be a good opportunity to probe the extent of
his awareness, under the cover of an official visit.

o0o

Augmented priority,
future imperfect, threat level two, deferred linkage to . . .

The hyper-Tenno glyphs flickered out, and Osri cursed
mentally as the tenuous web of understanding he’d laboriously discerned
vanished with them. He’d had no reason to go beyond the Academy basics in
tactical semiotics—the addition of the new non-relativistic symbolism slowed
him to near-imbecility. It was fortunate that as his father’s liaison to the
Navy for the Jupiter Project, he wouldn’t be called upon to interpret them in
real-time.

The young sub-lieutenant in the chair next to him sat there
relaxed, her blunt, dark features in repose as she watched Captain Ng resume
her stance in the front of the seminar room. The Tenno were obviously no strain
for her. Not surprising, since Nefalani nyr-Warrigal had invented them after
Grozniy’s
first encounter with the
non-relativistic Urian weaponry and communications with which Eusabian had
equipped the lead units of his Rifter fleet.

In the front of the room, Ng addressed the assembled
officers. “That will be all for today. The simulators are set up for you;
you’ll need to eat, sleep, and breathe these new Tenno to master them in
whatever little time Dol’jhar leaves us. Dismissed.”

Osri stood up to follow Warrigal out, but to his surprise
Captain Ng approached them both, accompanied by a very tall, thin lieutenant
commander. His nametag read “Nilotis;” his attenuated frame, ebony skin,
golden-red hair, and green eyes identified him as a member of one of the bomas
of Nyangathanka. He walked with the care of a man newly out of the chirurgeons’
hands—as indeed he was.

“Lieutenant Omilov,” said Ng, with
a nod at Warrigal. “What do you think of Lieutenant Warrigal’s hyper-Tenno?”

Honesty had once been Osri’s moral high ground. Now it was
merely the truth; his short experience with Warrigal had convinced him that she
was even more socially awkward, and direct, than he. “They give me a headache,
sir. I’m a navigator, not a tactician—I’m glad I don’t have to deal with them
in real-time.”

As usual, Warrigal reacted with a somewhat perfunctory smile,
and that after a fractional beat. Osri imagined her adding his words to her
internal accounting, attended by no more emotion than one would expect for
ranks of numbers, then responding as calculated.

Ng’s expression made it clear that she heard that reaction
frequently. Osri felt somewhat better.

Then she surprised him again. “Will you join us for lunch? I
believe you have a couple of hours before your next class.” Her phrasing made
it not quite an order.

“Of course.” He was only a student
for the Tenno seminars; his next class in fivespace navigation he could teach
in his sleep.

Ng led the way to the nearest
officers’ mess, followed by a comet tail of junior officers. She moved like a
dancer; Osri remembered the unknown young woman who’d seduced him after they’d
liberated Granny Chang’s habitat from the jackers, and suppressed the memory
forcibly. This was Margot O’Reilly Ng, hero of Acheront and Arthelion, a Polloi
who’d blasted her way to the top of the captains’ list by sheer ability—aided
by the quiet patronage of the Nesselryns.

And Nesselryn is
cousin to Zhigel.
Was this invitation political in nature? Osri hid his surge
of disgust. That was a silly question—everything on Ares was political. At
least the connection was on his father’s side. Inwardly he winced at the
thought of his mother descending on Captain Ng, demanding preference for him
“for the Family.”

Walking next to Lt. Omilov, Warrigal reshuffled what she now
called her “L-6 Tenno,” that secret tactical semiotic system that was her
lifeline to the emotions and social interactions she could not intuit. She’d
invented it to track the expressions, postures, and movements of others so that
she could interpret them enough to know how to respond.

Osri Omilov’s disgust had been relatively easy to detect.
She had learned during their tutoring sessions that he shared her dislike of
politics, although certainly not for the same reason: the atypical neurology
that made her socially blind and therefore incompetent to participate in either
Warrigal Family or Court politics.

The other officers were more difficult, and as they reached
the open door to the mess the emotions of everyone in the group peaked and
scrambled all her calculations.

As they reached the door to the mess, Ng slowed so abruptly
that Osri almost ran into her. Tension radiated from the rest, except for
Nilotis, who laughed softly as they all surveyed the full-depth holo wrapped
around the bulkheads inside the commissary: a dizzying depiction of space, with
a pitted asteroid in the foreground. Nearby a battered battlecruiser with the
Sun and Phoenix emblazoned on it was frozen in the act of launching a sortie of
lances at a point of light gleaming against the stars. Behind the lances a
frigate veered past the asteroid, its radiants flaring, fluorescing gases
spewing from a deep gash in its bow.

Warrigal saw from her internal tenno that Lieutenant Omilov
didn’t understand the image. She forced herself to touch him hesitantly; that
in itself was difficult, and the L-6 implied that he felt much about social
touch as she did. “Acheront,” she whispered. “That’s the
Flammarion
, Captain Litvak-Liu, sortieing against the
Blood of Dol
.”

Then the frigate was the
Tirane
,
thought Osri, captained by the young ensign Margot Ng, the only officer left
alive on the bridge after the ship had been ripped by the edge of a ruptor bolt
from the Dol’jharian flagship. She’d shepherded the lances to the crippled
battlecruiser, fending off its missiles while betting that its ruptors wouldn’t
come back on-line too soon.

She’d won her bet, a promotion, and the Karelian Star—the
youngest officer ever so decorated.

Ng laughed and turned to Nilotis and Warrigal. “I wondered
what you were up to.”

“Broadside O’Reilly,” the tall
lieutenant commander said as they found a table. “Scourge of Dol’jhar.”

Ng’s smile turned
grim. “It wasn’t as easy, the second time.”

Ng lives in uniform.
Osri’s interest in the captain sharpened. He was inclined that way himself.

A slight change in posture drew his attention back to Nilotis,
whose lack of overt reaction revealed his Douloi origin, but Osri saw in him a discomfort
indicating awareness of personal trespass. Warrigal, as always, reacted a bit
late, her eyes twitching minutely to and fro, as if in waking REM sleep.
Surely she doesn’t use a visual neural feed
from her boswell.
Almost no one could avoid flinching when something popped
up in their visual field that wasn’t in consensual reality, so boswells had
been audio-only for centuries, and any special vidtech versions tended to be
crude by comparison.

Then the captain touched Nilotis’ arm. “Forgive me, Mdeino.
There’s no call for you to share my ghosts. You, too, Nefalani. Here, sit with
me.”

Her use of their given names was an indirect apology, which
put the conversation on a more comfortable basis—not personal, maybe, but
informal. She guided them to sit on either side of her and motioned Osri to sit
across from them. Osri’s shoulders tightened; he felt the covert and
not-so-covert gazes from the other officers in the room.

Ng indicated the holo. “It was a wild ride, and you’ve done
a great job reconstructing it.” She laughed. “At least it looks like you have.
I sure didn’t see it that way!” She gestured to Osri. “But, from what I’ve
heard, it can’t have been as wild as your flight from Charvann. You really outran
a Rifter destroyer using atmospheric braking and an ablative to bring a courier
in with insufficient delta-V?”

Osri paused while the steward took their orders. “I actually
had very little to do with it. The Aerenarch was piloting.” He hesitated, aware
of the absence of the old anger whenever he’d thought back to those terrible
experiences. They seemed remote, as if they had occurred to someone else a
lifetime ago.

His ears burned when he noticed the complete silence.

Ng smiled encouragingly, implicitly opening their circle to
everyone within hearing. Nilotis leaned forward. Warrigal simply sat there.

Osri thought,
Get it
over with.
“My suit’s med circuit oranged me out about halfway through the
flight, anyway.” He tried a smile. “Probably for the best. I don’t know that
the suit cache could have handled it, otherwise, when we made that last skip
just outside of the gas giant’s radius.”

Several people hooted with laughter—even Warrigal gave a
soft chuckle half a beat after everyone else.

And then came the inevitable questions. As the waiters
brought in the food, he looked at his fast-cooling plate, trying to be as
succinct as possible in laying before them the entire story of their flight
from Charvann. But the more he tried to summarize, the more specific the
questions became.

“The L’Ranja what?” Sub-lieutenant
Ul-Derak asked.

“The L’Ranja Whoopee,” Osri
repeated. “They said that Markham and Vi’ya had figured it out several years
before.”

Warrigal’s tenno responded to a rustling of whispers, a
tightening of hands and jaws and eyes at the mention of Markham vlith-L’Ranja.

Tang leaned in with the ease and assurance
of one who had always been popular, always knew what to say and when to say it.
“So they used the ship’s teslas to hold them just off the S’lift cable
while they accelerated to orbit, so the Dol’jharians wouldn’t zap them?”

“Right. Only the Dol’jharians did—I
mean, they tried.”

Ng paused in cutting her meat. “The Node was gone when we
got to Arthelion. There was a lot of speculation about what might have
happened.”

Osri had taken a quick bite. He swallowed painfully when he
saw everyone waiting. “The
Fist
used
its ruptors. We skipped out right then, but when the ruptor hit the hohmann
launch cable, it must have yanked the Node right out of orbit and shredded it
at the same time.”

“Didn’t they know about the emergency disconnect?” someone
asked.

Two or three someone elses began to speculate about that as
Osri gratefully took the chance to eat some of his congealed lunch.

“Really? Just to pick off one
ship?” Nilotis asked, turning to Osri.

Osri set down his fork and sighed. “Hard to tell. Up until
then, it looked like they’d let us go.”

Ul-Derak shook his head. “Hard to believe that even
Dol’jharians’d blow up the Arthelion Node just to zap one ship.”

“Then you must make some time for
study of your enemies,” Ng remarked. “Vengeance is the key to Dol’jharian
thought. This shape of this entire war is a direct result of that action.” She
waved a hand at the wall holos. “But none of us saw the inevitability of it
until it was too late.”

Warrigal noted the tightness in Omilov’s lugubrious face,
and her L-6 categorized it as important. Then she remembered then that part of
the little ship’s actions on Arthelion had been the rescue of his father, the
gnostor, who was being tortured by the Dol’jharians.

But Osri’s thoughts had moved beyond memory.
They want to know what happened at the
Academy with Markham vlith-L’Ranja—and what happened at that Enkainion.
Both
questions had obsessed Osri after leaving Charvann.

He took a last bite, and forced himself to speak once more,
hoping that this would end the questions forever.

He reported the little his father and Brandon had said about
the L’Ranja affair, to which they listened so intently that his was now the
only voice in the room. He hated that sensation—it reminded him of those
horrible dreams, when he first reached the Academy, of finding himself naked
among his classmates in their dress uniforms—but duty forced him through it.

Warrigal listened closely. Throughout Omilov’s halting
report, scrupulously amended with “I understood him to say,” or “I did not
actually witness the whole, but . . .” the last of her
assumptions about the events ten years ago crumbled under the impact of those
diffident words.

It was a process that had begun at the hyperwave briefing when
she saw in the now-Aerenarch an unusual depth of understanding, belying her
assumption that he had to be worse than any of those privileged Tetrad Centrum
youths she had gone through the Academy with: closed ranks, closed minds.