Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (19 page)

 “It was when the two of you came back from Tams Station,”
he said. “After you had been Kryx Tarque’s provider.”

I stiffened. Kurj and I had never talked about what happened
on Tams. He knew every detail of it from my reports. But I had never spoken
about it to him. I didn’t intend to start now.

“You think I want revenge,” I said.

“Don’t you?”

“Well, why not?”

“Revenge lust clouds the mind.”

“My mind is fine.”

“Blackstone said the same thing.”

“This isn’t the same.”

“No, it isn’t.” Kurj turned to face me. “I need you
functioning. In sound body. In sound mind.”

“You’re looking for problems that don’t exist.”

Kurj didn’t answer. He didn’t even move. He just watched me
with his metal face.

Warning, my spinal node thought. External probe conducting
invasive pattern search.

Let him look.
I thought. It was true that no other
telepath had Kurj’s raw power. But it was like his physical strength; blunt and
heavy. He had none of the delicacy needed to uncover what I had hidden from
him.

He stood for a long time, unmoving. Finally he spoke. “Very
well. I’ll leave the combat option open. But right now I need you at JMI. I
need a good trainer there.”

“Yes, sir.” I knew better than to press him further. But
behind my walls and barriers, hidden within the fortress of ice that surrounded
my emotions, I thought,
I’m coming back. Too much is unfinished.

Returning to the planet Forshires Hold was like coming home.
Almost.

I had first been stationed here only a few years after
receiving my commission. The barracks where I stayed then were part of a
cramped building out in the countryside near Jacob’s Military Institute, about
twenty kilometers from the city Eos. Now my “rooms” were in the affluent
section, in a venerable old building with luxury apartments.

I would rather have stayed in the barracks out by JMI.

My assignment was to design a training program that would
get the JMI cadets into better physical shape. Two out of every eight days I
worked with them, and the rest of the time their instructors carried out my
program. It was a good program. It would whip any cadet into top shape. But
once I finished working it out, I didn’t have a thing to do.

So for six out of every eight days I sat in my penthouse and
brooded. I knew what Kurj was up to. He wanted me to recover from whatever
stress he imagined was interfering with my ability to function. I was a vital
cog in his war machine, a cog he had decided needed refitting. So he gave me
preposterous orders, stuck me in a beautiful city on a beautiful planet and
assumed nature would take care of the rest.

He was wrong. Nature did nothing. I sat in my apartment and
stared at the paneled walls until I was ready to explode. I had been a fool to
consider leaving combat. I couldn’t retire. It left a person too much time to
think.

Kurj was right about one thing, though. The JMI program did
need an overhaul. I reworked the cadets’ entire schedule, everything from what
they ate for breakfast to how many kilometers they ran to when they climbed scaffoldings.
Only 14 percent of them could meet the physical requirements of the program
when I first tested them.

Char Iaki, the Commandant at JMI, finally took me aside one
afternoon, into his office. He nodded toward the window. Outside, in the
slanting light of Forshires’ gilded sun, cadets were walking across the quad,
heading to classes, the library, the simulation rooms.

“They need more time for their class work,” Iaki said. “They’re
too exhausted at the end of the day to move, let alone study.”

“We had to meet stricter requirements at DMA,” I said. It
was true that the Dieshan Military Academy, which trained Jagernauts, usually
lost half of its entering class by the time graduation came. But with reason. “These
men and women have to be our best. If they can’t make it, we had better find
out now instead of when lives depend on their ability to operate under
pressure.”

Iaki spoke quietly. “Training them and breaking them are two
different things.”

So now I sat in my apartment and wondered if I were going
overboard. Why did we bother training cadets at all? The Traders were
inexorable. They would break us no matter how hard we fought them. What was the
use of it? We were all going to die, or worse, be eaten up by the Aristo war
machine.

Cut it out, I told myself. I picked up a holobook I had
dropped on the sofa last night. The title glowed in rosy letters:
idioms from afar.
It was my hobby,
learning figures of speech from other languages. My brother Kelric and I had
done it all the time when we were young, always searching out clever turns of
phrase.
Sauscony esta construyendo castillos en el aire.
Sauscony is
building castles in the air. Here was a good one from English: shot to high
heaven.

I blew out a gust of air and set down the book. Then I got
up and walked to a south-facing window in my living room that looked out at the
countryside. The building where I lived stood at the edge of Jacob’s Shire, a
park of rolling hills covered with cloud-grass that rippled like golden clouds
scudding across the land. It was early evening, a softer evening than on
Diesha, a shorter one than on Delos. The amber sun hung in the southwest above
the horizon.

Of all the places I had lived aside from my childhood home,
I liked Foreshires best. It was the second planet of an orangish star that had
acquired the name Ruth from the explorer who discovered its planetary system.
Prior to ISC occupation, the people here had numbered their twenty-three cities
according to when each was built. Some poetry-minded administrator in Imperial
Space Command had renamed this city Eos, after a dawn goddess he apparently
read about in a study of Allied mythology.

My brother Kurj didn’t have a poetic bone in his body, and
he preferred well-ordered names to poetry any day. But the mythology of Earth
had always fascinated him, especially the works of a tragedian named Seneca. I
had never read the stuff myself, and I doubted even Kurj knew why it enthralled
him. Whatever the reason, he let Eos stand as the name for this city that
before had simply been Ruth-2, #17.

I understood why someone would wax romantic about this
place. The sky alone evoked reams of poetry from its people, the descendants of
an independent group of colonists who had settled here one hundred years ago.
At this latitude, 30 degrees north, the planet’s rings spanned the sky in a
bridge, reaching their highest point directly to the south. Had I been at the
equator, they would have gone straight overhead in a strip so narrow it almost
disappeared. Here the arch curved in a wider band, its thickest point directly
south, the lower edge 41 degrees above the horizon and the upper 45 degrees
above it. Most of the arch was a faint whitish-gold, but as it curved down to
the mountain-rimmed horizon in the east and the west it shaded into a deeper
orange, then pink and finally red.

I wondered what it had been like all those centuries ago
when an asteroid glanced off Forshires’s surface. It couldn’t have been too
catastrophic given that the planet was well on its way to being healed, with
only the rings as evidence of the event.

The plants and animals were still adjusting to the presence
of the rings, though, and to the dust in the air. Friction with the upper
atmosphere and collisions between rocks and still caused chunks of ring
material to fall to the planet. They showed up in the night sky like meteors.
The atmosphere contained dust, chemical impurities, and ash, making a natural
smog that never blew away. The amber sunlight also peaked closer to the red end
of the spectrum than average for suns of human habitable worlds. It all came
together to give Foreshires a rich golden sky instead of the blue more common
on worlds with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres.

But for all its beauty, the sky looked strange to me, not
right, not like home. I didn’t want to look at pretty sky now anyway. I wanted
to see people. Real people. Not robots or machines or Jagernauts. Normal
people.

I bent down and rubbed my calf, working out a cramp. The
gravity here was a little heavier than standard, though no more so than on the
world where I had spent my childhood. But it usually took me a while to get
used to it after I had been on Diesha or in space.

I walked over to a window that looked west, out toward the
city. From here I could see a boulevard far below basking in the gilded evening
light. I couldn’t see much of the street, though; the trees were lush with
foliage, making a green canopy that started a few meters below the level of my
apartment and rolled out to the west and north for kilometers. It was like
being above the clouds, except these were leafy green clouds.

A tower poked above the trees nearby, and others showed farther
in the distance. Although I knew they were the same as the one where I
lived—metal and casecrete—they looked like delicate constructs of rosewood,
ivory, and ebony, with green accents, as if an artist had made them in minute
detail to hang against the gold sky. Each curved in a crescent shape
reminiscent of the rings. The convex side on the tower nearest me faced west,
but others faced in other directions.

I peered down at the boulevard. Wasn’t there
anyone
around?
Here and there, when the wind blew aside the leaves, I glimpsed the pale blue
tiles that paved the street below.

A couple appeared, strolling along the boulevard. They were
dressed in skimpy clothes that brought to mind rose and gray petals waving in
the breeze. It was hard to see clearly from so far up, but it looked like the
woman was laughing. The man started to laugh as well, a big man with dark hair
and what looked like a big laugh. Like Rex.

I turned away from the window. What was wrong with Kurj,
sending me here with nothing to do but think?

Well, I didn’t have to sit like a lump. I could go out. Do
something. But what? The only people I knew on Forshires were military
personnel. I kept getting asked to formal dinners at the Imperial Embassy where
I stood around in my gold dress uniform, with its glittering trousers and tunic
and sash, and a saber hanging at my hip that served no useful purpose other
than to glitter along with everything else. It was awful.

I squinted at the console in the wall. The computer was a
Pak 20. It could do anything for me. Well, almost anything. I didn’t think
husband-providing was within its capabilities. Or maybe it could even do that.
Virtual reality in the bedroom.

“Pako,” I said. “I want some clothes.”

A light glowed on the console. “Dress or duty uniform?” Pako
asked.

“Not a uniform. Clothes. You know, like normal people wear.”

“What style?”

Style? “I don’t know. Pick something. What a woman here
would wear to go for a walk.”

Pako’s screen came on and a holo appeared in front of it, a
naked image of me standing in the air. I blinked at it, surprised by how young
I looked.

Clothes appeared on the image, a strapless wrap that barely
covered my breasts and buttocks. “Is this acceptable?” Pako asked.

I reddened. “I said clothes. Not scraps.”

The wrap changed to a filmy blue dress that came almost to
my knees. “Is this acceptable?”

It was still less than I usually wore, but compared to what
I had seen—or not seen—on the strollers below, it was conservative. “I guess
so. Send it over.”

It arrived within minutes, delivered by a young man in a
blue uniform who smiled shyly. Shoes came with it, blue slippers with small
silver bells that hung around the edge of the shoe at the ankle. After the
delivery boy left, I put on the dress. The whole flaming thing was lace. What
was the function of that? The neckline was too low, too. And it had no sleeves,
just straps that crossed in the back. I felt naked.

“So what?” I muttered. Then I went out for a walk.

Once outside, though, I had no idea where to go. There weren’t
many buildings in this district, mostly just trees, and plazas with those blue
tiles. Some of the paths had curving patterns made with rose and gold tiles
that swirled through the blue. As I walked, the bells around my ankles chimed
softly. Mercifully, there wasn’t a speck of nervoplex anywhere.

I crossed the boulevard to the park on the other side. For a
while I wandered down a path under the trees. The air quality was good, the
concentration of dust low enough so it didn’t bother me. People strolled by,
nodded, wished me a good evening. Men smiled at me.

Everyone wore those shoes with the bells, so that the park
was full of a sweet, faint music. The bells had to be a new style; I had never
seen them before on Foreshires. But then, I had never taken a walk like this
either. I felt like an intruder. I didn’t belong here. This lovely evening was
for normal people.

Eventually I came to a cafe with a giltwood sign that said
heather’s dream.
I wondered what
Heather dreamed. Curious, I pushed open the door.

A big woman in an apron appeared in front of me, smiling
broadly. She took my arm. “Good. You’re right on time.”

“I am?”

She bustled me over to a crescent shaped table made from unpolished
wood and sat me down on a bench in its concave side. “Here you go.”

A youth who couldn’t have been much more than twenty slid
into the seat next to me. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Pulli.”

As I blinked at him, the woman said, “Do either of you want
a drink?”

“Rootberry juice for me,” Pulli said.

Rootberry
juice? People who drank rootberry juice
took vitamins and ate noxious vegetables that looked like miniature cabbages.
Why had the woman put me here with this Pulli person?

Before I had a chance to escape, more people showed up, and
then more, and even more. They all crowded in around the table, filling up both
its convex and concave sides, ordering drinks and introducing themselves to
each other. Within moments I was surrounded by a herd of rootberry drinkers.
Everyone was talking at once, saying where they lived, what they did for a
living, where they went to school. They were university students and young professionals,
all glowing with health.

A lanky man folded himself in on my left, grinning at me. “So,
Green Eyes, you got a name?”

“It’s not Green Eyes,” I said.

He laughed. “I’m Hilten. Raik Hilten. Everyone calls me
Hilt.”

I nodded, wondering how I was going to extract myself from
Hilt and his healthy friends.

At the far end of the table a woman stood up. “All right,
everyone, let’s get to business. I’m Delia, your excursion leader. We’ll just
go a few kilometers tonight. Next time we’ll do a full day trip, but I wanted
you to meet each other first.” She smiled. “Well, happy hikers, let’s catch the
trail.”

Flaming rockets. I had been trapped by a gang of
rootberry-guzzling happy hikers. As the group squeezed out from the table, I
got ready to make my escape.

Hilt stood up with me and took hold of my arm. “Listen,
Green Eyes. You can have the honor of being my partner tonight.”

“Thanks, but I can’t stay.” Call me Green Eyes again, I
thought, and I’ll dump a pitcher of rootberry juice over your head.