Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (17 page)

No wonder the Emperor had never divorced his wife. She knew
her “son” was another woman’s child. She probably thought Qox had taken a
Highton mistress. Had he secluded his wife for months and then showed up with
the baby? If she denied Jaibriol, it would have put the Highton Heir under a
scrutiny Qox must have wanted to avoid at any cost. I was surprised he hadn’t
murdered the Empress as well. Was Taas right, that Ur Qox actually loved his
wife? Or did he just doubt he could get away with killing her? She had to have
her own people, her own political machine, probably with influence approaching
his. So he made a devil’s bargain with her: keep her silence and she kept her
title.

There had been a time when I tried to convince myself that
among the Aristos, the women were their gentle side. They disdained the
military, which meant we rarely had contact with them. So a mystique surrounded
them. But my three weeks on Tarque’s estate had cured me of my notions. The
Aristos had no gentle side. The women were as cruel as the men. Nothing, not
size, shape, sex, or anything else made one whit of difference.

Kurj was watching me. “The Delos authorities sent us a
report about your activities in the Highton’s mansion.” He considered me. “Your
methods weren’t exactly subtle.”

“Am I to be reprimanded, sir?”

“No.”

That was no surprise. Kurj had never had much use for subtlety.

“I’ve arranged for the Zabo squad to receive commendations,”
Kurj said. “We will broadcast the ceremony on all of the news holos.”

So. Make us heroes. In Kurj’s view of the universe, it made
sense. It gave the ISC a better image. I felt about as heroic as a slug.

Unbidden, Kurj’s thought entered my mind. Every time you fly
a mission, you risk your lives. You know that. Your squad knows that. He
paused. Blackstone knows that.

Yes, sir.
I kept the rest of my thoughts hidden. What
else could I say? Knowing that Rex was aware of the dangers we faced didn’t
make what had happened any easier.

“Soz.” His voice gentled. “You deserve the commendations.”

A light glowed on one of the three bands that circled Kurj’s
left wrist. He had the bands on both wrists, metal strips implanted directly
into his skin. When he touched the light, a man’s voice came into the room. “A
medwoman is here to see you, sir. Her codes cleared security.”

“Send her in,” Kurj said.

The cyberlock field dimmed, leaving an opening across the
room. A hole appeared in the wall there and enlarged into a floor to ceiling
oval. Two Jagernauts stepped through the opening. I recognized both of them;
they were two of Kurj’s four bodyguards.

Then a woman appeared, a girl really. She walked inside, her
face flushed as she stared at the floor. She was a beauty, with a silky mane of
gold hair that fell to her waist in ripples. Curls floated around her face, a
breathtakingly beautiful face, soft and sweet, golden. She looked like a
delicate, younger version of my mother, so much so that my breath caught. But
she didn’t have my mother’s vibrant quality, that glowing self-confidence that
drew people like pale moths seeking the warm light of a lamp brightening the
night. This girl looked far more fragile.

Kurj nodded to his guards. “You may go.”

After the Jagernauts left, the wall closed up and the
cyberlock field rippled back over it, trapping the girl with us. Fear closed
around me like glass enclosing an insect. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe—

Block,
I thought. The fear receded, and my muscles
relaxed. But the girl stayed riveted in place, staring at the floor. She wasn’t
even able to acknowledge Kurj, an omission that made her a criminal, punishable
by prison. For that matter, Kurj could have given her any sentence he wanted,
including execution. No one was going to argue with him. But I had a feeling
that wasn’t what he had in mind for her at all.

He regarded the girl. “Come here.”

At first she didn’t move. Then she took a breath and walked
forward, still staring at the ground. She stopped in front of him and knelt,
first on one knee, and when he didn’t give her permission to rise, on both
knees. Her shoulders trembled, making the lace neckline of her white dress slip
forward so that her breasts were visible to anyone whose eyes were above the
level of her shoulders.

For a while Kurj stood looking down at her. Finally he said,
“You are the girl I saw tending children in the nursery?”

“Yes, s-sir.”

“What is your name?”

“Charissa Deirdre.”

“You have a message for me?”

“Yes, s-sir.” Her voice was soft.

“What is it?”

“Your guard—the Jagernaut—the biggest one. He told me
that—that you gave orders. That—I was to inform y-you when—” She took a breath.
“When the—the broadcast you wanted to watch was ready to b-begin.”

“And is it?” Kurj asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Broadcast? What was Kurj doing? If he had wanted to watch
some news program, all he had to do was set my room console to activate when
the broadcast was about to start. What purpose was there in ordering a girl who
worked in the nursery to come tell him? No, I knew why. Some men asked women
who interested them to dinner. Kurj had other methods.

“Get up,” Kurj said.

The girl stood up, her eyes still cast downward. She was
young enough to be his great-granddaughter, or even his
great-great-granddaughter; although he looked a fit and muscled forty, in truth
he was ninety years old. He towered over her by more than half of a meter, so
that the top of her head barely reached the center of his massive chest.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked up with her large eyes, beautiful eyes, brown
flecked with gold. Bright spots of color showed on her cheeks. Kurj cupped his
left hand under her chin, stroking her cheek with his thumb. His hand was so
large that his fingers covered her right ear lobe and his thumb, on the back
swing of its stroke, covered her left lobe. With his other hand he touched a
button on one of the metal bands implanted in his wrist.

“Yes, sir?” His guard’s voice came out of the com in the
band.

“The girl is ready to leave,” Kurj said.

The cyberlock opened again and the two Jagernauts came back
inside the room. Kurj ignored them, still looking at Charissa. She stared at
him like a shyback gazelle mesmerized by a hunter’s light.

Kurj bent his head and kissed her, a long kiss, taking his
time with it. Then he straightened up and glanced at the Jagernauts. “Have her
taken to the palace.”

“Yes, sir,” the larger guard said.

Charissa went with them quietly, looking at neither as they
took her from the room. When she was gone, I sat on the bed with my fists
clenched under the blanket.

Kurj turned back to me. After a moment he said, “You disapprove?”

“You’re an empath,” I said. “You must have felt how frightened
she was.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps.”

Perhaps?
How could he have stood there, submerged in
her terror, and not react to it?

And who the hell was I to judge him? I had killed a
terrified pilot who was barely more than a child, purposely blocking off my
emotional responses so I could destroy his ship.

“If you hadn’t killed him,” Kurj said, “he would have killed
you.”

I thought of the Aristos. “So we become what we fight.”

“We survive.”

My voice snapped out before I could stop it. “And survival
means raping whoever catches your fancy?”

Kurj’s jaw stiffened. “You overstep yourself.”

That one.
Tarque’s image seared my mind. He had made
me kneel in front of him and praise him with every noxious title he could think
of, promising me a respite from the pain if I did what he wanted.

Kurj exhaled. He walked over to the window and pulled aside
the curtains, letting painfully bright sunlight cut into the room. He stood in
the swath of light, glittering gold, his hands clasped behind his back while he
stared out at the sharp edges of the casecrete and chrome grounds around the
ISC hospital.

Then he said, “You compare me to a Highton?”

I just shook my head. I couldn’t talk to him about Tarque.

He turned around, his body a silhouette in the glassy
sunlight. “Did it ever occur to you that I need companionship?”

I stared at him. I didn’t know which surprised me more, his
admission of loneliness or his method of alleviating it. What kind of companion
would Charissa make if she was so traumatized she could barely breathe when she
was in the same room with him?

“You want me to court her,” Kurj said. “To ‘woo’ her. To
make her want to come to me.” He spoke harshly. “I bow to no one. Not Ur Qox,
not the President of the Allieds, and least of all not Charissa Deirdre.”

Is that how you see love? I thought. As a loss of control?
Or are you punishing her for looking like the one woman you most want in your
bed, the one you can’t have? But I didn’t let those thoughts out where he could
find them. It might be true that I spoke more openly to Kurj than almost anyone
else alive. Even so, the limits on what I could freely say—or freely think—in
his presence were far too stringent to let pass certain truths.

After all the years I had known him, Kurj remained an enigma
to me. He was a brilliant war leader, one who inspired a fierce loyalty from
his officers. I had yet to resolve that in my mind with his darker side.

Across the room the VR equipment activated, speckled
patterns and lines swirling on its floor-to-ceiling screen. Then a holo formed
in front of it, the three-dimensional image of a sleek black puma with red
eyes. Its lips drew into a snarl that showed fangs glistening like wet daggers.
Music swelled out of the wall, the haunting sound of the Trader anthem.

So. Kurj
had
set the console to activate. He was
watching the screen now, his arms crossed, his gaze intent on the emblem of his
enemy. He had already filed Charissa away in his mind and moved on to other
matters.

I couldn’t put her out of my thoughts that easily. I kept
seeing her frightened face, kept feeling her horrible sinking sensation as she
heard Kurj’s words:
Have her taken to the palace.

Block,
I thought. The psicon sputtered in my mind and
fizzled, but that was it. The memory stayed strong. My blocker only removed emotions.
Deleting memories was too dangerous, a process that could inadvertently wipe
out other needed information as well.

In front of the screen, the puma stretched a paw forward,
its claws extending out in a fan of sharpened points as the Trader anthem swelled
in a crescendo.

I spoke in a voice as neutral as I could make it. “Who is
broadcasting this?”

Kurj continued to watch the puma. “We picked it up from the
Trader’s waves.”

“Qox is speaking?”

“Yes.”

We were probably getting the transmission even before many
of the Trader worlds. To transmit off planet, Qox had to record the broadcast
and send it via starship to wherever he wanted it heard. But once we picked it
up, we could shoot it over the Skol-Net instantaneously, to be picked up by
telops, the telepathic operators trained to receive psibernet communications.

The broadcast had to be about Tams. Qox couldn’t hide this
time. Two hundred million witnesses had survived his latest attempt at
genocide. Their words would show the lie of his.

The image of the puma shimmered—and then we were
there,
sitting
in a great circular hall that echoed. Far above our heads, the ceiling curved
in a white dome. High-backed benches made from white stone filled the hall,
each curving around to form a ring. The rings were concentric with the center
of the room, the smallest only a few meters across, the largest curving around
the perimeter of the hall. Red cushions softened the seats and backs of the
benches, plush red cushions the color of blood.

Aristos sat on the benches. Ranks and ranks of Aristos. Hundreds.
Thousands. They sat side by side, like subunits in a machine, all dressed in
black, with glittering black hair and ruby eyes, all seated on blood-red
cushions in a stone white hall.

At the center of the rings, a pillar of crystal reached from
the floor almost to the ceiling. The crystal was so clear it would have been
invisible if it hadn’t been for the distortion made by light refracting through
it. Everything behind it looked displaced and magnified.

The puma crouched in the air behind the pillar. The animal
twisted and swelled in size, its proportions elongating. Its back legs pulled
out straight, its body came upright, its front legs reached out like arms, its
fur receded into hair—and a man stood there, two meters high, three meters,
four. When he finished growing he was five meters tall, his head almost
brushing the ceiling of the hall.

He stood behind the pillar, using it as a podium. He was
lean, gaunt. His Highton features were unmistakable, but nothing else made his
face remarkable. What set him apart was his presence, an air of undisputed
authority that marked him as Ur Qox, Emperor of Eube.

The music stopped. Qox waited a moment, then spoke in the
Highton language. “My people, I come before you tonight with great pride. We
have much to rejoice over. We, the children of Eube, have been chosen. We have
an honor never before known, the honor of living in the greatest civilization
to grace the great, turning wheel of our galaxy.” He paused. “We have worked
hard to build our glory. To shine where darkness once blanketed the stars. We
persevere against even the vilest threats to our accomplishments and
well-being.”

And he went on and on, coming up with ever more grandiose
tributes to his empire. He never even mentioned Tams. Did he actually believe
he could hide it? I wished he would finish the damn speech. Even seeing him
now, so long after he had made the recording, made me feel as if mites were
burrowing into my skin. He, the Hightons, all of the Aristos—just their images
were enough to terrorize us, as if our minds recognized what they could do on a
subliminal level that our conscious thoughts tried to deny.