Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (8 page)

Even the nervoplex streets were beautiful: silver and smooth
when still, as they were now when no hover traffic was out; shimmering and
rippling like liquid when I walked on them. But I still didn’t like the stuff.
It made me feel vulnerable.

I entered one of the parks and followed a path that wound
through low hills. I was already growing tired. The thinner atmosphere made me
feel as if I had been jogging on a high mountain. I stopped in a field of downy
clover plants, my chest heaving as I gulped in air. Flowers nestled in the
clover—and when the wind blew the flowers
sang.

I knelt down and peered at the blossoms. Each one was a cluster
of pale purple tubes that whistled when the wind blew across them, the notes
varying with the size and shape of the tubes. It all blended together to create
a soft piping music that floated through the night. It reminded me of the songs
my brother Kelric used to play on a flute-reed he had cherished when he was a
small boy. Actually, “small” was the wrong word; Kelric had grown into a giant
of a man who could hold the entire flute in the palm of his hand. But so often
I remembered him as a seven-year-old, from that day during the storm when we
had taken refuge in the spine-cave.

I swallowed. I wasn’t going to find the Aristo by getting
maudlin about my childhood, or wandering through fields, or stalking around the
streets like a burglar. I left the field and headed down the path again. As I
walked, I schooled my mind into a meditative state. The scenery made it easy to
relax, easy to let my sphere of thoughts expand. Without a psiphon to amplify
my mind I couldn’t do much, but if a strong enough psion were close enough by,
I might detect glimmers ...

Pain!

His face hung above me, his eyes like rusty flakes from an incinerator.
Then the iron, its end glowing red from heat—I looked away—

My body jerked as my skin seared, the smell of its burning
mixed with the stench of scorched nervoplex. I heard screams, a youth’s ragged
voice begging, begging—my voice? I struggled to shut out the pain. Instead 1
imagined myself back home on Tams, a young man sitting in the Ivory Garden,
relaxing, comfortable, happy—NO. My arms jerked above my head, trying to come
down and push away the iron. But the harder I fought, the tighter the nervoplex
bonds pulled around my wrists. He was coming at me again, and I fell into the
hole of his mind, fell, fell—

Something hard slammed into my body. I lay on my stomach,
the dull point of a rock pressing into my cheek. My arm lay next to my face,
the gold band on my jacket sleeve reflecting the faint light from a distant
lamp.

The path. I was lying on a path in the park. I sat up,
willing my body to stop shaking. Yes, I was in the park. Here. And I was Soz.
Soz. Not the youth
there,
bound and screaming. But where was there? And
whose Aristo face had I seen hanging above me? My mind kept showing me Tarque,
but it couldn’t be him.

I drew in a deep breath. I had found the Aristo—or at least
one of his providers.

Recall,
I thought.

Memory file degraded, my spinal node thought.

That was no surprise. The human brain couldn’t make perfect
records of memories even with the aid of processors as advanced as my spinal
node, which had been upgraded only a few months ago. But a reasonably good
record had to remain for an event as intense as the one I had just experienced.

Play what you have, I thought. But put a filter on it.

Replay activated.

I saw the Aristo’s face hanging over me again, felt the iron
branding
my
skin. But the filter gave the memory a diffuse quality, its
intensity muted so that I could bear it.

Freeze,
I thought.

The memory stopped, freezing with the Aristo’s face. He wasn’t
Tarque but he wasn’t the false Highton from the bar either. It was one of his
guards, the tall one whose Aristo blood had shown in his eyes and his hair. Was
he the child of an Aristo and a server? I guessed he was at least half Aristo,
probably more, but in any case enough to make him want a provider.

Release,
I thought. The
memory
faded.

I closed my eyes, trying to reach the provider again. He was
my clue to the Aristo’s mansion. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t force myself
back into his mind.

Finally I climbed to my feet and started down the path. Gradually,
as I walked through the park, my pulse slowed and my breathing calmed. I called
up a status menu and it told me my adrenaline levels had almost returned to
normal.

After several minutes I tried reaching out with my mind.
This time I searched warily, prepared—there! I jerked back from the provider’s
mind, but not so completely that I lost the link, just enough so that I didn’t
submerge into his thoughts again.

Then, gritting my teeth, I probed at the rusty-eyed guard. Under
normal circumstances I couldn’t have reached him from so far away. But his link
to the provider was a bridge. I hung on to the edges of his brain activity like
a swimmer hanging onto a strut, fighting a whirlpool. A scream from the
provider cut through
my
consciousness, and the guard groaned like a
lover in the grip of an orgasm.

I was dimly aware of the park around me, of a tree where I
had stopped, leaning against its trunk. How could I make the guard stop? I
couldn’t change his brain chemistry. But I had to
do something.

Boring. I hurled the thought with as much strength as I
could marshal. Boring! This provider has become immensely, tiresomely,
excruciatingly BORING.

Lethargy settled over the guard, dulling his interest and
also my link with him. I was losing the image. The echoes of pain from the
provider stopped, and his relief flared with so much intensity that I saw not
only the guard again, but the room around him as well. There was another
provider there, a girl lying bound to a divan by a bodyweb.

As the intensity of the first provider’s responses quieted,
fading into exhaustion, my link with him weakened.
Where?
I thought in
the Eubian language.
Where are you?

But he was passing out; soon I wouldn’t feel him at all. The
guard had left the room—wait, the second provider, the girl—the guard must have
freed her before he left. She was running to the boy, the intensity of her
concern yanking me back into the link.

I jumped to her mind.
Where are you? WHERE?

She was untying the boy now, crying, cradling him in her
arms. As he collapsed against her, my link with them weakened. Before it faded
altogether I picked up the faint image of a mansion, one shaped like a huge
galleon. I had no idea if either provider tried to send the image; it felt more
like an overflow from the girl’s agitated thoughts. But whatever the reason, I
had a hint now from her blurred memory of the house.

After searching for an hour, I still hadn’t found it.
Finally I decided to go back to the hotel. I could continue this tomorrow. If I
remembered correctly, I was near a street that could take me out of the hills.
I walked around a graceful fountain that spouted fragrances instead of water
and came out into a lawn of rose-bells. Beyond the lawn, a road glistened in
the silvery light from the street lamps.

On the other side of the street was the estate I sought.

The house seemed to float in its gardens, surrounded by
bushes sculpted to resemble swells of water, even to the detail of the white
flowers on their tips that evoked sea foam. The masts glowed with streaks of
phosphorescence, and their furled sails looked, at this distance, like sheets of
gold. The disks on them chimed together, their pitches blending into a song
that sounded like water and wind.

A faint light rippled in the air around the house and the
grounds, a hint of rainbow colors like an aurora borealis. I knew those colors;
I had often seen them around members of the Triad—my aunt, my half brother, and
my father. By order
of
the Assembly, when any member of the Triad went
out in public, the rainbows went with them. Those colors were the only outward
sign of a cyberlock, a brain implant that could be turned on or off by an
external key. When activated, the lock produced a field tuned to its owner’s
brain waves. I had one, though I rarely used it. Anyone or anything entering
the field produced by the cyberlock would set it off: low-keyed fields sounded
an alarm, mid-keyed fields repulsed intruders, high-keyed fields killed them.

Was this lock tuned to the Highton? That would mean he had
undergone surgery to have it implanted in his brain, a grueling process few
people cared to undertake. That so young an Aristo should be so thoroughly
protected was as disturbing as everything else about him.

Birds were flying through the rainbows, so the field had to
be low-keyed right now, a warning system to catch intruders. But it would still
permeate everything around the house, leaving no hole
to
sneak through.

Toggle Combat mode, I thought.

Toggled, the spinal node answered.

I watched the mansion, trying to assess the best approach.
In combat mode my body relied on bioengineered mechanicals that ran along my
skeleton, with living motors that also linked to my fiberoptic web. The only
limit on my reaction speed was the time it took the mechanicals to move my
limbs. And that
was fast,
far faster than any muscle could contract.
Even so, I used the mode sparingly; despite reinforcements to my bones and
joints, the system could still strain my skeleton.

I fought by reflex, automatically accessing the extensive
libraries of fighting maneuvers in my spinal node. It made my reaction times
even faster than if my brain needed to issue commands. Of course, preprogrammed
reactions weren’t always enough for the unexpected. And fast reactions did me
no good here in the park. How was I going to get inside the mansion?

An idea came to me. I smiled. No, I couldn’t do that. I
really couldn’t.

“Well, why not?” I said.

The rose-bell blossoms rang softly as I waded through them.
When I crossed the road, its nervoplex surface shifted under my feet. On the
other side I walked straight through the cyberlock rainbows, straight up the
front path, straight up to the front door.

Then I knocked.

The door opened immediately, revealing two guards armed with
laser carbines. Their confusion hit me like a blast of air: had his lordship
actually been lunatic enough to invite me here? Had I actually been lunatic
enough to accept?

“My greetings,” I said—and whipped up my leg, kicking one
carbine out of its owner’s hands while I sent the other flying with a sweep of
my arm.

Neither guard had a chance to summon help before I knocked
them out. But as I ran into the mansion another eight guards appeared, running
down the stairs in the entrance foyer and coming through archways on both my
right and left. What the hell? Although Hightons always traveled with
bodyguards, the usual complement was four. I had expected only the five I had
seen at the bar.

As I focused on the guards, my mind quit time-sharing and
went on boost, changing my perceptions so that everyone but me seemed to move
in slow motion. The guards reacted as if they were underwater, barely changing
position as I leveled my Jumbler at them.

Weapons link established, my spinal node thought. A grid of
cross hairs “jumped out” to overlay my view of the foyer while stats flashed in
a corner of my mental display:

Fuel: abiton

rest energy: 1.9 eV

charge: 5.95x10-25C

magnet: 0.0001 T

max radius: 0.05 M

I swept the Jumbler beam across the ground in front of the
guards. Only orange sparkles showed as the beam cut through the air, but when
it touched the floor, that polished parquetry surface exploded. Debris flew
everywhere, and rained back down into the trough I was gouging. Dust flew all
around us. I doubted the owners of the mansion would rent to the Aristo again.
His guests were very ill mannered.

The guards skidded to a stop at the trough, their arms
flailing in slow motion to protect their heads from flying debris. But it
wouldn’t slow them down for long, and there were too many for me to knock out
even with my enhanced reflexes. Either I was going to have to take the
irreversibly drastic step of shooting them, or else find another way to reach
the Highton.

I ran out the front door into the garden. A shot from a
laser carbine came so close to my ear that I heard strands of my hair sizzle.
Someone cursed, and shouted something about wanting me able to talk, not
crisped into cinders.

I sprinted for a tower at the south edge of the mansion. It
had to be the security center—Traders rarely varied in their procedures. They
didn’t comprehend innovation, opting instead for sheer strength. Unfortunately
for us, sheer strength went a long way no matter how much imagination its
producers lacked.

I reached the tower in seconds and annihilated its lock.
Another guard was inside, his laser carbine already up and aimed. Even before
my mind registered his presence, my leg was kicking into the air. My boot heel
hit the carbine and it flew out of his hands, its shot going wide so that it
burned into the tower wall on my right.

He hit my Jumbler so fast that I only saw a blur as it spun
out of my hand. I barely managed to block his blows when he came at me. I slid
the thorn-tube out from
my
sleeve, shooting its microthin sliver of
metal at him. He brought up his arm and blocked it with the metal wrist guard
he wore, but that gained me the fraction of a second I needed; while he was
deflecting the drug-filled needle, I got him with a dart. It hit his neck and
he spasmed in midpunch, his raised fist flailing in the air, the tendons in his
neck outlined like cables under his skin. Then he collapsed into a heap on the
floor, breathing but unconscious.