A Prison Unsought (28 page)

Immediately thereafter, the Aerenarch had approached her,
completely outside normal channels, with a request that she tutor him secretly
in what he, like everyone else, unofficially now called the “L-5” Tenno, as
though they were the pinnacle of the tactical game Phalanx, in which the Tenno
were forbidden below the Level 4 version played only at the Academy.

She had assented after checking with Captain Ng, and had
seen his tactical naiveté steadily diminish as they worked together.

Watching Omilov carefully, letting the L-6 sort and
translate the shifts of voice, the little tells of posture whose perception came
so naturally to everyone else, she concluded that he, too, had once felt the
same. He seemed to think a little like she did, so she valued his opinion. All
his L-6 signals revealed reluctant admiration for a man who’d been portrayed as
a dedicated voluptuary without a shred of responsibility. No such person could
have piloted a ship with such skill. More than skill—panache.

Really unsettling was the link to the Lusor affair of ten
years past. If what Omilov was saying was true, Aerenarch Semion had
cold-bloodedly destroyed the L’Ranja Family just to keep his own brother firmly
under control. Which raised the question: if Brandon were truly such a sot and
a scapegrace, why had Semion gone to such lengths?

Osri reached for another glass of water, his throat parched.
The last questions from the assembled officers circled around Brandon’s arrival
at Charvann, no one quite coming out and asking what had brought him from his
own Enkainion. Though Osri still had no idea what had happened—and said so—he
was not at all certain anymore that he wanted to know. What could the truth do
but cause more chaos?

The others eventually
sensed his reticence, if not his ambivalence, for slowly they broke off into
little conversations, gradually returning to their own tables. Ng sat silently sipping
her coffee and listening.

Did she set me up?
Osri
thought.

Of course, it was unlikely that Ng had only one purpose in
mind; though born a Polloi, she could not have risen as high as she had without
subtlety to equal and exceed that of most Douloi. Osri sensed that she was
garnering as much information from the reactions and questions of the younger
officers as from his story, but there was more. He could see it, he just
couldn’t tell what it was.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve some
business to attend to,” Ng said finally, gesturing to Osri. “Lieutenant, I need
to talk to your father about something. Would you accompany me to the project
room and introduce me?”

As the two left, Warrigal turned to Nilotis, whose L-6
patterns indicated the most openness to a question. “What do you think that’s
about? Can’t be Navy; don’t need an introduction for that.”

He shrugged. “No telling.” He glanced around, then lowered
his voice. “But I hear that some of the cruiser-weight Douloi civilians are hot
on her radiants for something.”

“Battle of Arthelion,” Lieutenant
Tang spoke up, black eyes wide, reflecting the lurid lights from the holos.
“They may be civilians, but they aren’t stupid. They’ll want to know what we
fought for.”

“Officially it was to save the
Panarch,” Nilotis said. “Most of them know little enough of strategy to swallow
that.”

“Or seem to,” Ul-Derak said.

They all knew that several highly placed Douloi had tried to
exercise their influence to attend Nyberg’s briefing. They’d been
excluded, but from hints Ng had dropped, one or two of them had since been
exerting every effort to find out what the Navy was hiding.

Ul-Derak turned to Tang. “Some of
them were allies of the late Aerenarch, weren’t they?”

Nilotis tapped his fingers lightly on the table in a soft,
rhythmic pattern. “Spheres of influence, I think. And all Downsiders.” He
lifted his fingers to gesture apologetically. “Deference to present company.”

No one followed up on that: the tension between Downsiders
and Highdwellers was a constant of Panarchic politics, but the L-6 showed Warrigal
that everyone at their table, even the Downsiders, agreed that Semion had
exploited it beyond the bounds of propriety. But no one had dared say anything
until this war broke Semion’s tightening grip on the Navy.

“Lusor raised his son as a
Highdweller,” Tang commented, fingers flicking toward space.

“High Politics, in more ways than
one,” Nilotis agreed. The others groaned at the pun. “However, that—thank
Telos—is probably behind us. I shouldn’t say this, but with Semion gone, the
politics won’t be as bad, and promotions will probably be more fairly
distributed.”

The others made little murmurs or motions of agreement,
except Warrigal, who, impelled by the urgency of the L-6, shook her head in
negation. “No.”

The rest of the officers at the table looked at her,
arrested by her tone of voice. She took her time to look at them, assembling the
L-6 tells. Yes, the signs were there: they were all Douloi, but her Family was
oldest, and even if she’d stepped out of the succession, that carried weight,
even in the Navy, especially in a non-command situation such as this.

“No,” she repeated, struggling to
express herself precisely. “Quite the contrary. I don’t mean about promotions,”
she added hurriedly as the L-6 flared again. “That’s undoubtedly true. At least
I hope so. But as for politics, it’s only going to get worse.”

Remembering the cadences and movements of a novosti she’d
watched not long before, she waved her hand around, encompassing Ares with the
motion. “This station is all that’s left of the Panarchy’s government, all
that’s left for the play of cunning and calculation that has sufficed to rule
the Thousand Suns for a thousand years. All squeezed into a few hundred cubic
kilometers.”

Again she remembered the blue-eyed Aerenarch at his console
in the briefing. “All focused on the last Arkad.”

“But his father’s still alive,”
Tang protested.

“Right.” Nilotis tapped the table again—this time in the
rhythm of the Arkadic fanfare. “Alive, but a captive. While his son is equally
a captive—and we Douloi are even less merciful than Dol’jharians when it comes
to High Politics. Just ask the L’Ranjas.”

He pushed himself away from the table, rising with a wince.
“And with that thought, genz, I bid you farewell.”

“When I told you your son raided
Arthelion, I neglected to mention that he rescued a prisoner from the Palace,”
Anaris said. “A Praerogate.”

Gelasaar raised his eyebrows.

“My father’s
pesz mas’hadni
extracted the codes from a woman in your council.”

Pain narrowed the Panarch’s eyelids.

“That institution does not make
sense to me,” Anaris continued, toying with his dirazh’u. “Do you truly impose
no limits on their power?”

“None but those enjoined by their
oath and their moral sense.”

“I cannot believe that.”

Gelasaar smiled faintly. “Do you suppose the Bori in your service
always tell the truth?”

“No. Of course not.”

“No more do the infinitely deeper
layers of bureaucracy that run the Thousand Suns. I could not be everywhere,
nor could I rely on those below me to transmit the truth. Thus, the
Praerogates, my surrogates.”

“But without limits?”

“I did not say there were no
limits, only that I imposed none. A Praerogate cannot act in a vacuum. There
must be an egregious wrong to set right, a fulcrum for the lever of their
power. And they only get one chance.”

Anaris shook his head. “One has power, one acts.”

“True power lies in choosing when,
and where, to act. Lacking a proper target, the greatest blow yields only
wind.”

The pod slowed to a halt. When the transtube hatch hissed
open, Eloatri found herself in another world.

As expected, her boswell’s connection to the net blanked,
and she turned to one of the waiting wall consoles to find directions. There’d
been no occasion for her to come to the Cap before; she was startled at its size
and complexity. She tapped in her destination and thumbed the console where
indicated, then walked on, directed by a will o’ the wisp dancing ahead,
visible only to her.

As she made her way down the metal and dyplast corridors
with their cool, faintly scented air, she thought that her father, a career
Navy man, would have felt right at home among these touches of elegance that
were the hallmark of Douloi design, even in such a utilitarian setting,
especially the smooth, almost organic transition from the pragmatic form of
conduits and cables to flowing ornament. In its own way, it was almost
soothing, a reminder that, after all, this was but another expression of the
human mind, as valid in its way as the beauty of the cloister gardens of New
Glastonbury, on Desrien.

The corridors grew more crowded as she approached the
laboratories housing the Jupiter Project. Several times she passed through
security cordons; each time the brief flicker of a retinal scan and the
bone-deep tingle of a security sweep underlined the importance of the captured
hyperwave.

The people she passed, mostly Naval personnel in uniform,
eyed her curiously. She looked down at her black soutane with its archaic
neck-to-hem row of buttons.
They’re
probably wondering how long it takes to get it on and off.
She smiled at the
memory of her first experience with the garment, after her sudden elevation to
the cathedra of New Glastonbury. Tuan had hooted with laughter when he realized
she actually undid all the buttons. It had never occurred to her just to undo
the top few and pull it over her head.

The wisp flickered out as the sight of two Marines in battle
armor jerked her back to the present. They stood to either side of the hatch
that gave access to the project facilities. After yet another scan, one tabbed
the hatch open while the other handed her the follow-me that indicated a high-security
destination, and motioned her through.

The green wisp dancing under the dyplast cover of the little
device led her quickly to another, anonymous hatch. She keyed the annunciator;
the gnostor Omilov’s voice came back, betraying impatience. “Just a moment.”

But the hatch slid open immediately, and she stepped
through. Her stomach dropped and her breath froze in her throat: no floor, no
walls, the stars slowly wheeling around her, and standing astride a wisp of
nebula, the figure of a man.

The man reached up,
and a flourish of stars dripped new-minted from his fingers, dancing outward to
take their place among the panoply of glory he was constructing.

“Let there be lights
in the firmaments of the heavens. . . .”
Eloatri shivered with
awe. Then the man reached out and grasped a red star, which flared up brightly
for a moment, then guttered out.

“Aaargh!” he exclaimed in disgust.
Tilting his head back, he spoke to the darkness looming above. “It still isn’t
working right. Give me some light.”

Eloatri choked on a laugh and the man spun around. “What?”

“I’m sorry, Gnostor,” she said
unsteadily as the lights came up and the stars faded. And though the floor had
always been there under her feet, her body sank as if she had leaped down from
several stairs. She shook herself, a whistling laugh escaping her throat. “You
make a singularly inept Creator.”

He blinked in confusion, then smiled. “Ah. Yes, I think I
know what you mean. The seven days of Creation are part of your tradition.”
Actually six,
she thought as he looked
around and then chuckled. “Give me some light, indeed.”

A woman’s head poked out of a rift in the stars above them.
“It’ll be a few minutes, Gnostor. A whole bank of projectors just crashed.
We’re reprogramming.”

“Thank you, Ensign. I can use a
short break.” He turned back to Eloatri. “There’s so much information to winnow
through, trying to find the Suneater, or even some clues to its whereabouts. This
kind of direct perception and manipulation of the stellar topography is
necessary.”

“I’m sure it’s better than a pile
of printouts, or flicking through countless display screens,” said Eloatri.
“And a lot more fun,” she couldn’t resist adding.

“Yes, well, there’s that,” Omilov
admitted. Eloatri sensed embarrassment. “But I’m surprised to see you here. Are
the briefings not keeping you sufficiently up to date?”

“No, they’re fine. But I haven’t seen much of you lately.
Not everything of importance is happening here, you know.”

The Douloi mask smoothed his features into unreadability.
Eloatri almost smiled.
Are you that much
a fool, Sebastian Omilov? Have you forgotten what Desrien is like?
He must
have, to think that she couldn’t read past the shielded politeness of an
aristocrat.

“The project is taking a great deal
of my time,” he replied neutrally, though his hands and shoulders betrayed his
impatience. “And I retired from politics ten years ago.”

“The same time our present
Aerenarch was pulled from his own path and forced on another’s?”

The impatience dissolved
into a somber gaze. “Ten years of seclusion has vouchsafed me little knowledge
of anything outside of xenoarchaeology,” Omilov murmured, making an apologetic
gesture.

The guilty man flees
when no one pursues.
He understood very well her thrust and, for whatever
reason, felt it necessary to deflect.

“Then I can see why you spend so
much time here,” she said in a pacific tone. “It is perhaps the only place on
Ares that is apolitical.” She continued before he could speak; she’d learned what
she needed to know, for now. There was no sense in antagonizing him further. “I
don’t want to keep you from your researches—I do understand how critical they
are. But I have a bit of information that may be useful. I’ve just learned that
Vi’ya and the Eya’a know about the hyperwave.”