A Prison Unsought (3 page)

The screen lit. Dread pooled in the pit of Nyberg’s stomach.
He immediately recognized the awe-inspiring Throne Room in the Mandala, center
of the Panarchy’s government for ten centuries.

Only, seated in the astonishing tree-like throne was not the
short, slim figure of Gelasaar hai-Arkad, Panarch for most of Nyberg’s life.
Instead, a tall, massively built man defiled it with his presence: Eusabian of
Dol’jhar.

Then it got worse.

The only sound as they watched the atrocity was one short
intake of breath from Willsones. He himself made no sound because his breath
strangled in his throat.

When it ended, Willsones said, “I can go over the redaction
analysis with you,” her age-roughened voice husky with emotion. “That will take
longer.”

Nyberg stared out the wall-sized dyplast port behind his
desk, taking little comfort from the sweeping view it gave him of the top of
the Cap, the military portion of the starbase. The massive plain of metal,
scattered with refit pits, glinted crimson in the light of the red giant whose
gravitational field protected the station from skipmissile attack. In the
foreground the aft portion of the
Grozniy
loomed. In spite of all that constant activity, from this angle it still looked
much as it had when he had arrived.
It
will not be battle-ready yesterday, or even tomorrow
.

No doubt Eusabian would bend the slaughter from the Battle
of Arthelion to his purposes as well, Nyberg thought sourly, with another
propaganda vid as false as the one he’d just seen.
But not as bloody.

“Murphy’s own timing,” he said when
he was sure of his voice. It was the cold horror of the two boxes held up for
the Panarch’s inspection that had shaken him most.

But he didn’t have the luxury of time to indulge his horror.
Willsones was smart, unnervingly prescient at times, yet she had chosen
Communications in spite of the fact that the top rank attainable was what she
held presently: vice-admiral. As long as he’d known her—nearly fifty years—the
only ambition she had steadily expressed was her wish to stay as far from power
politics as she could get.

But now they were hip-deep in politics, the tide of muck
rising fast.

As Nyberg considered how to broach the subject, Willsones
was thinking along a parallel track, though her focus was individuals rather
than masses. In specific the young man whose head had been intended for a third
box, Brandon, youngest of Gelasaar’s sons. The last time she’d seen him, he’d
been a mischievous boy, staring out at the world from his mother’s gray-blue
eyes.

Now, bearing a reputation as a sot and a wastrel, he was
immured in the Arkadic Enclave in the oneill portion of Ares. The vid’s false
proclamation of his death was perhaps the least of its lies, but it would lend
more force to the unanswered questions about Brandon vlith-Arkad’s escape ahead
of the Enkainion atrocity, which had spared him his brothers’ fates.

She pressed her hands to her face, struggling to dismiss the
mental image of that obscene vid. “Frankly, given the priority the Dol’jharians
put on broadcasting it, I’m surprised a copy hasn’t arrived before now. While
we can sit on the contents of the ship’s cryptobanks as long as we please,
there are refugees besides Harkatsus at the staging point with more preference
than poor Licrosse can handle. He’s not going to want to hold them any longer
without specific orders.”

“I can’t say I’m not tempted to
suppress it,” Nyberg replied slowly. He knew he would have to release the vid
eventually, but the timing was terrible.

Willsones said, “Is it not today that the Douloi are holding
their reception for the Aerenarch?”

“Burgess Pavilion, 1800,” Nyberg
corroborated; this was the occasion that would see Brandon vlith-Arkad leaving
the seclusion of deep mourning, a polite fiction that both he and the Navy had
colluded, unspoken, in propagating.

Willsones pursed her lips. “The timing really doesn’t
matter, does it? Even without the vid’s confirmation of the rumors about
Semion’s and Galen’s deaths, you can’t keep Brandon vlith-Arkad sequestered if
he wants to enter public discourse.”

“No,” Nyberg said. He untabbed his
collar. “But the sight of those bloody blades is going to work as a metaphor to
the meanest intelligence.”

“Yes,” she said precisely. “The
Dol’jharian rape of Arthelion has wrecked the careful machinery of our
governance as effectively as the Dol’jharian executioners’ blades dealt with
the Panarch’s high counselors in the throne room.”

The habits of Tetrad Centrum Douloi usage urged him to turn
from such distasteful bluntness. But turn as he would, he would still face the
same mental mirror, reflecting the truth: Ares was now the
de facto
capital of the Panarchy.

Willsones went on inexorably. “With no constituted
government, the influx of Douloi refugees from the war is going to transform
Ares from a smoothly regulated starbase into an aristocratic madhouse.”

And no one could stop it. Nyberg’s temples began to throb,
and he tapped the tianqi to a pelagic spring evening mode, the lighting subtly
adjusting to the new scents in the air flow.

“Have you ever visited Charybdis?”
asked Willsones. The subdued lighting struck silver highlights from her white
hair as she tapped her compad. “Their Equinoctial is a whisper at first, like
that maelstrom of intrigue and venom building up around the Arkad boy.”

“He’s hardly a boy.” Nyberg’s tone
betrayed rising impatience, and he made a quick, apologetic gesture.

“No,” she replied, and because they
were alone, and he had drawn her into this conversation, she must honor them
both with the blunt truths so rare and risky among Douloi. “A boy could grow
out of a regency. Has he issued any commands?”

“Not yet.”

She heard hesitation in his reply. “But?”

“The Faseult seal ring that he’s wearing.
He won’t talk about it—an obligation of the Phoenix House, he said during the
debriefing.” Nyberg shook his head. “Anton is already completely overloaded,
and there’s worse to come as more refugees arrive. He doesn’t need this
complication.”

She’d missed that detail. Anton Faseult,
now heir to the Charvann Archonate after his brother’s brutal murder on
Charvann by Eusabian’s Rifter allies, was head of Security for the entire
station, military and civilian.

“You think the Aerenarch intends to use
the ring as leverage?”

“What better time than tonight?”

Nyberg could see his question hit home.
Willsones nodded slowly.

“Either he’s as subtle as his
father—and his reputation does not bear that out—or he’s hiding,” she said. “Or
sulking. Or senseless in some orgy. It doesn’t really matter. What does is my
fear that he’s a dissolute cipher who will need to have a privy council imposed
on him, and there are already those on this station who should never grasp the
reins of power.”

A yellow ophidian gaze flickered through Nyberg’s memory:
Tau Srivashti, once Archon of Timberwell. “I don’t suppose . . .”
He gestured at her compad.

“For a time,” she said, “we could
probably phage the vid if it’s released, but it’s going to leak, probably
sooner than we would like, and then we incur howls about suppression. We can’t
purge memories or immobilize tongues.” She glanced down at her compad, and gave
a soft grunt. “As I thought. Archetype and Ritual strongly recommends releasing
it immediately, and Volkov at Moral Sabotage just now sent me a comm that they
concur. You know what they say about rumor.”

A weapon with no
handle and no defense.
Deadly to public order and perhaps the most powerful
weapon of Douloi politics.

Nyberg gave his head a shake, then thumbed his eyes, as if
that could remove the images he was certain had been burned into his retinas.
“I don’t know what to do.” The words were wrung out of him.

“This isn’t the Battleblimp I know,”
Willsones said, trying for a semblance of humor.

“This isn’t the Ares I know,” he
retorted. “It’s not even the Thousand Suns I knew. I sat in on Nukiel’s court
martial yesterday, listening not to orderly testimony from technical experts
and military witnesses, but to the High Phanist of Desrien. And it was her
testimony—full of unprovable . . .” His hands groped in the air.
“Preposterous mystical rhetoric . . .” He faltered, unable to
express his loathing, unable to admit it hid an even deeper fear.

“I know. I was there,” Willsones
said calmly, her cool tone more effective than the tianqi. “But it’s hard to
argue with the Gabrieline Protocol, whether or not you believe any of Desrien’s
mystical claims. And I find I can’t argue against the fact that Mandros Nukiel,
who is one of the most honest, and least outwardly religious men of my
professional acquaintance, risked his entire career in order to heed a vision.”

Nyberg let his breath out. “Did you see her hand?”

“Whose hand?” Willsones’ brow
cleared. “Ah, the burn of the Digrammaton on High Phanist Eloatri’s palm. I
didn’t. There are many who insist she put it there herself, except that doesn’t
account for the Digrammaton’s presence here, or its radioactivity.” Her upper
lip betrayed her discomfort as she added, “It’s unlikely to be a forgery, given
what happened to the Second Anti-Phanist when he wore a counterfeit.”

“Desrien.” Nyberg made a warding
motion. “It’s useless to talk about it. ‘To speak of the Dreamtime is to enter
the Dreamtime,’ and right now this nightmare—” He opened his hands. “Is enough
for me. Nukiel’s acquittal means we have to accept that woman as High Phanist,
but for now let us deal in facts. Beginning with the two inescapable ones that
hold me helpless between them. One, I seem to have become the
de facto
ruler of the Panarchy, while
the
de jure
ruler is on his way to
Gehenna and his only remaining heir sits in the Enclave under suspicion of
treason.”

“Not
treason
.” Willsones’s recoil was instinctive. “Even if the
Aerenarch skipped out on his Enkainion, he broke no law that constitutes
treason. What he did was contravene tradition.”

“At best,” Nyberg said. “At best,
he flounced away in a childish gesture to flout his brother. At worst . . .
In here we may as well use the words we mean. It would be treachery and treason
if he connived at that dirty bomb in the Palace Minor. It would be treachery
and cowardice if he found out about it and skipped out without alerting palace
security. They might have saved a few,” he finished bitterly.

“But it is possible he had no part
in that, nor foreknowledge.”

“Then why isn’t he offering to
debrief us? Nukiel said he gave him every opportunity during the flight to
Desrien and from there to here. Gnostor Omilov, once his tutor, told us during
his debriefing that Brandon never talked about it.”

Willsones pursed her lips again, then said, “If I were in
his place—and you know I have dedicated my life to avoiding politics—but were I
in his place, and I could not prove anything I said, I would say nothing.”

Nyberg cursed under his breath. “Bringing us right back to
where we started. This much I know.” He dropped his hands onto his knees. “If
we expect to hold onto what remains of the Panarchy, then we have to follow the
rules. And that means according the Aerenarch all the due deference owed the
Arkad name.”

“But not the power,” Willsones
said.

Nyberg’s memory flashed to the iconic statue in the gardens
of the Palace Minor, seen only once in person. He flicked his fingers over the
admiral’s stripes on his sleeve. “That’s number two: this uniform makes me
officially powerless.”

Willsones sat back, musing. “I wonder what Eusabian thought
of the Laocoön, if he’s seen it?”

Her statement, unsettlingly parallel to Nyberg’s, demonstrated
once again why rumors of telepathy had dogged her entire career, despite her
null certificate from Synchronistics.

One hand strayed lightly across her blanked compad. “Do they
have snakes on Dol’jhar?”

Nyberg appreciated her attempt at humor—release—a moment to
mentally regroup. Before he left this room he was going to have to make a
decision. They both knew it.

He snorted. “Probably. With fur, no doubt.” The tightness
between his shoulder blades eased a fraction.

“Ours run more to silk and jewels,
don’t they?” She uttered a dry laugh, more like a cough. “This vid will be like
whacking the whole ball of them with a stick. Just don’t give them time to
think.”

Nyberg straightened with decision. “Right. We’ll release the
vid at 1800 hours, or whenever Brandon leaves the Enclave for Burgess Pavilion.
But the senior officers will view it first. And . . . ” He knew
his duty. “Damana, you knew the Kyriarch Ilara, I believe.”

Her eyes narrowed, and the precision
returned to her voice. “Yes. Through my daughter. They were at school
together, before my daughter chose Minerva and the Navy, and Ilara caught
Gelasaar’s eye.”

“I’d like you to invite the Aerenarch
to join us in the Situation Room. This is not an order. Merely a request.”

Willsones inhaled and laid her hands carefully to either
side of her compad, hearing in Nyberg’s voice the unspoken apology for such a
trespass. But she could not deny that she was perfectly placed for such a duty.

Times were too desperate for resentment, and so she did not
ask him why he didn’t do it himself.
What
is it you fear seeing in young Brandon?

With most other officers, Willsones would suspect that
personal fears of career suicide might override anything short of outright
riot. But she’d known Nyberg since the Academy. She’d be surprised if his
concern here was himself.

“I’ll do it.” She let out her
breath. “Ilara was a remarkable young woman. Her death unmoored all of
Gelasaar’s sons, none worse than Semion.” She looked directly at Nyberg. “ I
admit to some curiosity about how much of her inheres in Brandon Arkad.”