Ruler of Naught (80 page)

Eloatri stood outside the lock holding a small valise, a
patient-faced clerk by her side with a larger valise in one hand and clutching
a glowglobe-topped staff with the other. “Captain,” she said, smiling,
“permission to come aboard?”

Vi’ya pulled her hands away from her console. “What is the
problem?”

“It’s not a problem,” Eloatri said. “It’s a joining of
paths: mine and yours converge at Ares for a time. It would be simpler if I
could share your vessel.”

Vi’ya’s hand hovered over her console as she glanced Jaim’s
way.

“I wouldn’t want to make her angry,” he said.

“No,” Vi’ya agreed. She tabbed the key. “Lock opening.” Then
she added sardonically, “Jaim will be right there to conduct you through the
ship.”

Jaim slaved the com console to hers with a swipe of his
hand.

“Put her with the others,” Vi’ya said. “I don’t want her on
the bridge. Arkad, you go with them.”

Brandon hesitated, then said, “No.”

Jaim’s eyes lifted.
I was right
. He walked out.

o0o

Vi’ya closed the hatches, then started the flight sequence.
On the screen the grassy knoll fell away, backlit by the Telvarna’s radiants,
then forest land raced below, rapidly vanishing in the darkness.

She did not look up from her work, but she was aware of the
Arkad moving from the hatch to the nav console. Even without sound and sight,
she could track him by the energy of his distinctive emotional spectrum. It
took effort to block him out under the best of circumstances; she felt tendrils
of vertigo around the edges of her senses, a little like inadequate
window-fittings against the sear of Dol’jhar’s sun.

She looked past him at the screen. The stars brightened as
the ship accelerated, a subsonic whispering under the hull. The Arkad sat,
motionless, as she located Nukiel’s battle cruiser and locked in a course.

Then he spoke. “There are fewer women than men on Dol’jhar?”

It was a strange sort of opening salvo, causing her to
glance at him. The pose, the vocal intonations, were so familiar; she turned
her gaze back to her console.

“Perhaps not at birth, but more of them are exposed,” she
said.

“Defects? Or just low birth weight?”

“Weakness.” She hazarded return fire.

It forced a laugh out of Brandon, and she felt his focus
sharpen, narrow-beam, laser-bright. An answering echo reached her from the
Eya’a in their cabin:
one-who-gives-fire-stone, is there danger for Vi’ya?

No danger.
She shaped the words in her mind, but her
inner thoughts, too fast for them to scan, amended:
no tangible danger
.

Out loud she said, “It’s true enough on the mainland, though
in some of the island Matriarchies, things differ.” She crossed her arms. “It’s
a harsh planet. Early in our history the females—burdened by their own weight
during pregnancy—were often crippled by joint disease at a young age.”

She glanced up again. The Markham pose was still there, but
this was not a lanky blond man with a twisted grin. Instead the head tipped to
one side was defined in bone, the skin marred by healing bruises, the eyes wide
and blue, the dark hair curling, uncut these long weeks, on his neck. She could
feel him listening intently, and she looked away.

“If this is a discussion of syntonics,” she said, “we’ve
adapted.”

Brandon laughed again. A subtle alteration, no more than a
ripple, flickered through his emotional spectrum, but still behind it waited a
vast, dark pool. She did not want to define what lay below it.

“Do you always disarm before you destroy?” he countered.

“You sought this interview.”

“‘Offense is the best defense,’” he said. And then, at last,
a direct hit: “Why have you avoided me these past weeks?”

She realized belatedly that his initial indirection had been
a gesture, not an attack. He knew how little Dol’jharians liked to give form to
the intangibles by utterance. She said, “My priorities did not involve lengthy
interviews with Panarchists.”

“To avoid me,” he went on pleasantly, “you left your crew to
eat alone, train alone, and finally to lick their wounds alone.” He waved a
hand back toward the rec room. The movement caught the edge of her vision: the
long fingers, the flash of the signet.

He knows us
. She acknowledged the sense of threat she
felt in his perception of Dol’jharian psychology.

“You avoided me at the risk of losing your crew,” he
finished. “You would have lost them, had Rifthaven gone differently. I’ve been
trying to figure out why you were willing to let that happen.” He got up and
walked slowly about the bridge. “And the only answer that makes sense is that
you wanted me to think that you’d betrayed Markham, and arranged his death.”

He was prodding at the tangential target that she’d offered
him. A plaintive interpolation from the Eya’a distracted her: she caught
reference to one-who-gives-fire-stone and one-in-mask, which was their old
identification for Markham.

“Of course it could have been a purely philanthropic
gesture,” the agreeable voice went on. “Giving me something to do all those
hours we spent in skip. And probably afforded you some entertainment, laughing
from afar at my attempts to break into your system.”

“It was entertaining,” she agreed.

He looked up, an arrested expression in his blue eyes. The
attempt to deflect failed: this one did not emulate Markham, he was Markham’s
model. Within the inner citadel, pain gripped her being. The time to deal with
the implications would come. It was not now.

“I can’t reconcile it,” he said, no longer hiding behind the
mask of politeness. “Mates. Not merely lovers:
mates
. Why did you not
tell me?”

She could breathe again. He did not, after all, see the real
issue. The shield had worked. She was safe. It was now possible to observe him,
to endure the backwash of emotion—though just barely. From their hidden
perspective, the Eya’a sent:
one- who-gives-fire-stone contemplates “trust”
in sorrow.

Trust: another of the intangibles.
What fools my
ancestors were, to teach us that emotions were weakness, that everything could
be conquered through force.

“Who was he to you?” the Arkad went on, coming at last to
face her.

She let the silence build, though she could feel the cost. Soon—minutes—he
would disappear forever into
Mbwa Kali
, which would carry him to Ares
and the silk-and-glitter prison of High Douloi ceremonial. Those who were
clever enough, or powerful enough, to have escaped Eusabian’s clutches would be
waiting on Ares to subsume him by whatever means. It was not, after all, her
war.

But here, and now, she was alone with him, and she still had
to decide what to say—whose integrity to protect.

A throb in her temple presaged the forfeit this interview
would take from her, but that would be later. She said, “Why did you let him
go?”

“Because I could not save him,” Brandon answered, his eyes
wide with pain.

“He warned you what Semion was.”

“I didn’t believe it—no,” he amended quickly, “not the
extent of it. How could I? All my life people shielded me from unpleasantness,
from any hint that life on the Mandala was not gracious, perfect, the order
that the universe strove for. The first break was when my mother died—“

The steady throb stabbed into her jaw; she was clenching her
teeth.

“Life was a game.” His voice was quick and soft, but the
tide of memory-fueled emotion beat at her. “Semion was no more to me than a
grim figure of authority, someone to play off. I had no real ambition—” He
faltered, and the tide stilled. He looked across the bridge at Vi’ya. “Is that
it? His ambition?”

He’s fast. I keep forgetting it.
Once again she
waited, cursing inwardly at her inability to sustain this kind of duel. But
once again there was reprieve.

“I had no ambition,” Brandon went on. “He must have thought
I was incapable of serious commitment. For I see now that though we talked
about everything we did, we never talked about the future.” He smiled, full of
self-mockery. “Did he think it would bore me?”

The effort it took to withstand the battering of emotion
made her mind begin to haze. But release came at last. The comm flashed. She
hit it with a fist, and a moment later acknowledged the docking order from
Nukiel’s comtech.

Brandon turned to the screen, his entire body radiating
regret.

She felt the approach of the rest of her crew and the
others, and heard the rise and fall of voices.

And she could not, after all, leave him believing a lie.

“He trusted you,” she said. “He always trusted you.”

He looked up, the blue gaze intense. He
is
fast, she
thought through the increasing red haze, but now events were faster. If at last
he saw what it meant, it would be afterward, when they would no longer see one
another: the repercussion, if any, would not be hers to deal with. The docking
tractor seized the ship and there was nothing more for her to do. She
deactivated the console and placed her hands on it.

“Hit the comm,” Montrose said, coming in first. “See if
Nukiel will let me chip some of our music.”

“How about the coffee?” Marim put in, appearing messy-haired
and cheery as the
Telvarna
set down in the docking bay, and the engines
spun down into silence.

Chatter rose on all sides. Through it Vi’ya saw Brandon
watching her, but he said nothing, and when one of the Marines addressed him
low-voiced, he responded with an order concerning Jaim that she could not
comprehend.

She no longer had to comprehend. Control had been taken
away, for the last time; they were all someone else’s responsibility.

She waited, sitting in the captain’s pod, until the last of
them had left the bridge, then she stumbled into the disposer and was rackingly
sick.

It was almost a day later that they finished evacuating the
Babur
Khan
, which had been battered into scrap by three Rifter destroyers.
Captain KepSingh transferred his command to a frigate and volunteered to wait
for any remnants of their forces that might still find their way out of the
battle area.

“I think we can even manage a few search-and-rescues,” he
said. “With the tacponder net still running, we should be able to find just
about anybody with a functioning comm.”

Ng nodded wearily. Her duty was clear: the FTL comm had to
get to Ares as soon as possible. A courier was one way, but there were hundreds
of wounded—including Mdeino Nilotis—needing medical care that now could be
found only on Ares. Only the
Grozniy
could get them there.

“Very well, Captain KepSingh. We’ll be on our way, then. You
have everything you need.”

The older man nodded. His face softened. “We’ll keep an
especially sharp watch out for Metellus and his crew.” He smiled. “That
pirate’s got a lot more light-years’ travel in him, I’m sure.”

‘Thank you, Captain.” She paused. There was so much to
say—but not now. She took refuge in ritual. “Light-bearer be with you;
Grozniy
out.”

“And with you, Captain Ng.”

The connection terminated.

“Navigation,” she said, when she could trust her voice.
“Take us to Ares.”

As the fiveskip engaged, she turned the con over to
Commander Krajno, who would release her exhausted primary crew.

She left the bridge. The transtube took her to a hold deep
within the
Grozniy
; the Marine on duty saluted and let her in.

The lights sprang on, revealing the rounded glowing form of
the Urian communicator set on a table. They’d decided not to attempt any use of
it—there were techs better fit for that on Ares.

Margot Ng laid her hand gingerly on the weird device, then
snatched it away. It was warm, body temperature, and felt uncannily like human
flesh. Like muscular human flesh, hard yet yielding.

Like Metellus.

A tear tracked down her cheek, then another. She was alone,
she let them flow, remembering him, the twenty-five years they’d known and
loved one another, snatched in brief, oh so brief moments. Brief, intense,
loving, always knowing each might be the last.

Twenty-five years.
She remembered his teasing about
their bet. It had seemed a long time then. She’d been so sure she’d track down
the port wriggle long before that. A sob caught in her throat. She’d give
anything to have him there to claim the forfeit.

It wasn’t that she thought him dead; she wouldn’t think
that.

It was worse than that: she might never know. Space was
large, and human lives were short.

...and I will pay whatever price demanded...
The
Urian device blurred as the tears came freely, but she didn’t look away.

“You’d better be worth it,” she whispered fiercely.

o0o

As the
Mbwa Kali
sped toward Ares, Captain Nukiel
entertained his two most exalted guests. He had out the best china, and
everything was fresh.

The High Phanist Eloatri and the Aerenarch were the only
ones who seemed at ease. Efriq sat, straight and still, and opposite him the
Numen’s clerk waited with folded hands for the others to finish their coffee.
The young man’s round face was impossible to gauge, but his eyes were never
still.

Nukiel wondered if the magisters would be hashing over this
conversation as closely as he and Efriq would be directly they left, and the
thought made him smile.

Eloatri returned the smile. “Have I exhausted your patience
with my questions?”

“That’s all I know about Ares,” Nukiel said, backtracking
rapidly. “I was only there once, as a very green sub-lieutenant, and that was
only in the Cap—the military sector. I never set foot in civilian country.
Leontois?” He looked up at his first officer.