Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (9 page)

A glance at the console told me he had been monitoring the estate
defenses. I deactivated the cyberlock first. Then I used his system to access
an emergency node of the Skol-Net, one ridiculously easy to reach—for those who
knew how and where to look. The instant I activated the account I sought, it
released a virus that jumped into the Highton’s computer system. Less than a
minute had passed since I knocked at the front door.

Bells clamored outside. I grabbed my Jumbler and ran out of
the tower into chaos. Lights blazed everywhere, alarms cried for attention,
floodlights swung wildly across the gardens. The virus was setting off every
warning system in every computer on the estate. In all that madness, they would
never find the one alarm they needed, the one that registered me.

I fired the Jumbler across the street. Over here the glare
of the floodlamps hid the sparkles in the air, but across the road the lights
disappeared in an orange flash. Branches from a tree by the fragrance fountain
crashed to the ground in a noisy confusion of exploding wood and flying leaves.

Shoving the Jumbler back into its holster, I ran toward a window
on the second story of the mansion. If this supposed Highton followed the usual
Aristo pattern, he would be staying on the second story in the room hardest to
reach from either the ground or the air.

I climbed to the window using a specialized nervoplex
trellis that vibrated under my weight, trying to throw me off. Had my reflexes
been slower it would have succeeded. But I made it to the balcony and climbed
over its railing, then stepped silently onto its polished floor. The Highton
had left the curtains open on the crystal doors that fronted the balcony. I
could see him standing in the middle of his bedroom staring at the madly
flashing console on his wall.

I annihilated the lock mechanism on the doors. Then I slid
them open and walked inside. “My greetings,” I said in Highton.

He spun around. “How did you get in here?”

I tilted my head at a wardrobe by the wall. “I’m going to
hide behind that. In a moment your guards are going to come and tell you an
intruder is on the estate. You say you saw me run into the park and you want
them to catch me.”

“I will say no such thing.”

“Yes, you will.” I closed the curtains on the balcony doors
and then backed into the space between the wardrobe and the wall, keeping my
gun aimed at his head. “Otherwise, I’ll annihilate you into oblivion.”

He didn’t argue. It was a good thing, because my Jumbler was
empty. I couldn’t have annihilated a speck of dust with it. Even with wimpons
for fuel, a gun could only hold so much antimatter.

A knock sounded outside.

The Highton turned to the door. “Come.”

From my hiding place I could see only the Aristo. I heard
the door open.

“We apologize for disturbing you, sir,” a voice said. It had
to be a guard.

The Aristo gave a perfect Highton scowl and waved his hand
at the blaring console. “This is disturbing me far more. What is the problem?
Who was that woman I saw outside? She looked like an Imperial Jagernaut.”

“She is,” the guard said. “The Primary from the bar. She damaged
the front foyer and then ran out again.”

“Why?” The Aristo sounded genuinely curious.

A second voice spoke. “We don’t know, sir. We’ll question
her as soon as we catch her.” His anticipation made my stomach lurch. I “recognized”
the feel of his mind even though I had never met him. He was the guard with the
two providers.

“I saw her run into the park across the street,” the Aristo
said.

“We’ll search it thoroughly,” the first guard said.

“Good. Now leave me to my privacy. And fix the alarms.”

“We haven’t been able to isolate the virus that is causing
the trouble, sir. We may have to turn off the entire system and restart it.”

The Aristo raised his eyebrows. “With all the commotion she
could have climbed into this room without being detected.”

The first guard made his voice reassuring. “The trellis
would throw her off, sir. And she was only on the grounds a moment. There wasn’t
time for her to get close to you.”

The Aristo spoke dryly. “I’m glad you have such confidence.
Now go find her.”

“Yes, sir.” I heard the guards bow, their clothes crackling
with that irritating noise Trader uniforms made when someone bent at the waist.
The door whispered shut and the pound of boots receded through the house.

The Aristo turned to me. “What do you want?”

I went to the console, keeping my empty gun trained on my
hostage, and turned off the speakers. Alarms still blared in the rest of the
mansion, but at least it was quieter in here.

“Have a seat,” I said. “We’re going to talk.”

He made no move to sit. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“You didn’t feel that way in the bar.”

Unexpectedly, he smiled. “No, I didn’t.”

There should have been a law against an Aristo having such a
beautiful smile. No, he couldn’t be an Aristo. Not with a smile like that. “I
don’t believe you’re a Highton,” I said.

“Why?”

His surprise sounded genuine. If he was a fake, either he
didn’t know it or he was an astoundingly good actor. But I couldn’t be sure. At
close range, I could pick up an Aristo’s emotions easily; their lack of empathy
had no effect on how an empath perceived them. But I picked up zilch from this
one. Nothing. He was a blank wall.

I moved to the balcony doors and nudged open the curtains. A
man was patrolling the garden below. “Your guards are good.”

“Apparently not good enough.”

“None of this makes sense.” I let the curtain close again. “You
have eleven guards, and at least one of them has a biomech web in his body.” I
thought of the guard with the providers. “Another is in favor with a powerful
Highton, one with far more rank than you could have at your age. And few
people, especially at your age, want or need to undergo the invasive operation
that’s left you with a cyberlock in your brain. Since your guards hold the key
to the lock instead of you, they must take their orders from someone else.”

He stared at me. “How did you know all of that?”

I didn’t. Most of it had been conjecture. But he had just
verified it. “I’m good at what I do.”

“Yes. You are.”

I blinked. No Aristo would openly concede that someone like
me, who to them was no more than goods for barter, had competency at anything
besides serving Aristos. They knew perfectly well what we were capable of, but
they never acknowledged it. Yes, this man had the mannerisms, the carriage, the
accent of a Highton. But not the scorn. A true Aristo would have made no secret
of his intent to punish me for my actions. I would have
felt
his contempt.
But I felt nothing with this one. He looked both annoyed and intrigued, but I
felt none of it. Nothing. It was almost worse than the cavity.

Then it hit me. He had
blocks
in his mind. These
weren’t the instinctive psychological walls anyone could raise, empath or not.
Elaborate mental barriers protected this man. He had been trained to stop his
KEB from transmitting to other empaths. I knew the huge investment of time and
effort it took to learn those barricading techniques. It had been part of my
Jagernaut training. It was different from the mental doors I closed to let
other empaths know my feelings were private. These were fortified protections
that could be broken only by the force of a stronger mind.

But only psions built such barriers.
Only
psions.
Normal people had neither the need nor the ability to do it. In fact, even with
biomech enhancements most psibernauts couldn’t erect barriers as strong as I
detected in this man. He was blocking out even me. That meant he had to be a
potent telepath. But no Aristo could be a psion. It just plain wasn’t in their
precious gene pool.

“Why do you look at me this way?” the Aristo asked.

“What way?” I said.

“As if I am a laboratory specimen.”

“I’m trying to figure out why a provider is traveling as a
Highton.”

His anger sparked. “You come up here, throwing insults and waving
guns, demeaning my bloodlines. Well, I am not impressed. Go ahead, shoot. This
is what Jagernauts do, isn’t it? Kill without compunction.”

I didn’t need telepathy to know his anger was genuine. He believed
he was a Highton. “We never kill without compunction. How could we? We’re
empaths. We feel what our targets feel.”

“This thing you call empathy—it weakens the mind.” His voice
quieted. “It is a frailty. Those with weak minds must work that much harder to
become strong, to overcome their failings.”

Where did all that come from? “Did your parents tell you
that when they taught you to hide your telepathic abilities?”

He paled, and I was sure I had hit the truth. He was a
psion, which meant
neither
of his parents was an Aristo. But someone had
taken great pains to conceal that fact. Why? Yes, many Hightons had children
with their servers and some elevated those children to the taskmaker caste. But
to pass off such a child as a Highton—I had never heard of it before. It would
be a phenomenal “pollution” of their incessantly glorified bloodlines.

“How long did you think you could hide it?” I asked.

He stared at me. “What are you going to do?”

I couldn’t believe it. He was afraid of me. I had felt many
emotions from Hightons: scorn, lust, anger, obsession, disgust. But never fear.
As
far as they were concerned I was a provider, and they refused to
acknowledge that a
provider
could have the power needed to inspire fear
in them. Yet I felt his as clear and sharp as broken glass.

I
felt
him.

Sweat beaded on my temple. A moment ago his barriers had
been impenetrable. Now they were dissolving, at least to me. He was a mental
fortress, one that should have taken a tortuous battle of wills to break, yet
now I felt him. He had to be voluntarily dropping his walls; I had done
nothing. Yet I sensed neither the intent from him to drop his shields nor the
realization it was happening.

He watched me with a healthy, sensual desire that caught me
unprepared. Blood rushed to my face and to far more private places.
Block!
The
wall-and-synapse psicon flashed in my mind, and kept flashing, telling me the
block wasn’t working. Either his desire was too intense to shut out or else I
was feeling my own as well as his. What was going on? It was wrong, all wrong.
No, it wasn’t wrong, it was right, and that was what was wrong.

I took a deep breath. Stay cool. Find out who he is. But
how? Well, I had a good starting point; if someone wanted him to pass as a
Highton, they would have given him a Highton name.

“What surprises me,” I said, “is that your parents gave you
a name you obviously had no claim to.”

The comment didn’t provoke his anger, as I had hoped. He
just shrugged. “I have far more right to it than the hundreds of other people
who use it.”

Hundreds. Given that only a few thousand Aristos existed,
his name had to be a popular one. What were well-known Aristo names? That was
easy. Kryx, as in Kryx Tarque. I would never forget it. Vitar was another, and
Jaibriol, and ...

Jaibriol.
Jaibriol.
Now I knew why Rex and I thought
this man looked familiar, but neither Helda nor Taas recognized him. This false
Aristo, this dove hiding in a night-wolf’s body, was a living reminder of a
dead Highton, a man who had died when Helda was a small girl and before Taas
was born. Comtrace hadn’t reported it because we had looked for a living
Highton. This man brought to mind a young version of the late Emperor Jaibriol
Qox, the father of the present Emperor.

But a dramatic difference existed between the Trader who
faced me now and the holos I had seen of Jaibriol Qox. Although the late
Emperor may have been handsome in his youth, his face had aged into harsh lines
that showed the truth of his nature. His son, the current Emperor, was a
leaner, quieter ruler, softer-spoken—and just as vicious. The years had stamped
that cruelty into his features, just as they had stamped it into his father’s
face. The man in front of me now showed no mark of that harshness.

The thought budding in my mind was absurd. It had to be
wrong. But I had to test it. “How are you ever going to rule, Jaibriol? Your
people will never accept a telepath as their Emperor.”

He flushed. “There is nothing wrong with my mind. My people
will accept me.”

No. No. It was a lie. It had to be. But with his mind
opening up to me now, there was no room for misinterpretation. We had been
wrong, all of us.

Ur Qox had an heir.

I made my voice stay calm. “You’re a provider. It’s the only
way you could have been born a psion. You have to get the genes from both
parents.” Both.
Both.
I stared at him. Now that I was looking for it,
there was no mistaking his Qox lineage. Not only did he bring to mind the late
Jaibriol Qox, but I could see his resemblance to the present Emperor as well. “That
means your father—the Emperor—is at most only
half
Highton. You can’t be
more than one quarter.”

“Stop!” Jaibriol clenched his fist. “Stop your filthy
insults.”

His blocks were dissolving like salt in water. I felt him.
It was incredible. Beautiful. And sensual. I wanted him, just as an Earth
salmon ready to spawn felt driven to swim upstream, against all obstacles, to
reach home and reproduce. It made me want to strike out at him, furious that
he—the Highton Heir—could so move me.

“They’ll lust after your pain.” I was losing my battle to
stay cool. “All of them, your ministers, your peers, your women, your guards,
your generals. Your life will be hell.”

“You’re insane,” he said.

“You don’t know. You’ve had barriers protecting you. But you
can’t do it forever. If you slip
once, just once,
they’ll know. You’ll
find out the truth about your precious Hightons. About your father. The man is
a monster.”