Exodus, page 85
“Okay,” she said in relief. “But, again, why tell me?” There was one very big reason she could think of, and it frightened her.
“You know why,” he smiled fondly. “No one else is so close to the queen as you.”
“Oh, daddy.”
“You only share what you want to, and it will only be with me. But if Helena-Thyra is going rogue, we need to know as soon as it happens. You would be able to tell me.”
“How can Helena-Thyra go rogue? She is our Queen. Challenging the queen is going rogue.”
“Zuberi-Dulcina was also a queen of the Crown Dominion,” he said sadly. “And remember what happened to her? Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“But I don’t remember, do I?”
“You are lucky to have been spawned in this age. Her evolution project was a nightmare. She would have ruined all of us, physically and mentally. Then once we were no longer us, she would launch her madness across the entire Centauri Cluster. Her destruction, the elimination of her entire family down to the last infant, was the Crown Dominion’s finest hour. We did not flinch from our task. Because of what we did that day, we have enjoyed uninterrupted stability and prosperity for seven thousand years. My darling daughter, I cannot see that accomplishment disintegrate because we took no notice of a new threat emerging. Our duty to our society is greater than our duty to the queen. Especially this one.”
Clavissa laughed softly at the inevitability. Of course her father would know how deep her mistrust of Helena-Thyra went. Even though she saved my life. There was always something wrong about her. “The only thing I would even consider informing you is if she does something completely crazy. I would never betray the fleet—or our people, or…”
“I would have made the wrong choice if you did betray us. This is all strategic, Clavissa. It is just information to base decisions on.”
“A Grand Game inside a Grand Game.”
“Precisely.”
“Well, okay. But, I mean, even if I agreed to this, how would I be able to tell you anything? I’m going to be on board the Dracaenae; there is no place in the Crown Dominion more secure.”
His lips quirked. “Well, actually…”
“Oh, Asteria’s arse,” Clavissa grunted. “What have you and Gahiji-Calder cooked up?”
“It is nothing; a standard toy for an archon’s operative. I will gift you a simple routine that will allow you to send the occasional message without anyone being able to detect it.”
So that’s what I am now, an archon’s agent?
* * *
—
A day later, as she rode a capsule up to the navy dock on Wynid’s georing, Clavissa still had her doubts about spying on Helena-Thyra for her father. She’d spent the whole trip up the tower convinced that Helena-Thyra would take one look at her and have Major Siskala-Ingrid fling her straight out of the airlock. So great was her guilt it must surely be obvious to anyone. But they made it to the Dracaenae without anyone looking askance at her. Clavissa thanked Helena’s own gifting for that, allowing her to appear relaxed despite the apprehension.
Once they were on board, she sent her father her first message. According to his gifting, the little file of chaos-encrypted neurodata would piggyback on the navy’s own intelligence signals, which only a twinned monitor routine could pick up and decrypt.
Sweet Asteria, Gahiji-Calder has his own filters in all our security communications?
The test message was when the gift’s greater potential became apparent. What was going to be a few words—“Daddy, I’m in the dreadnaught and everything is fine. Let me know if you get this.”—turned out to be much more. What she actually found was that it could package up an entire memory—what she saw and heard, along with her opinion of the scene.
So the first treacherous file was of her in the Dracaenae’s command chamber, showing Helena-Thyra talking to Admiral Serrilda-Kroja, with her father Bekket and the court datamaster Stethos-Thierry in attendance. As she looked round the big chamber, she caught sight of Oujanya sitting with the other tactical analysts. Clavissa raised her arm in a halfhearted greeting, which the ex-princess acknowledged with a semi-embarrassed grimace.
Ten minutes later her father replied with, “Nice view, you’re doing fine.” The sight that accompanied it was the view from his study out across the mansion’s grounds. It was snowing heavily.
The message acted like a mild sedative, calming her. Alarms didn’t go off among the row of intelligence officers; Siskala-Ingrid didn’t shoot her dead.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she sent back.
But she carried on, buoyed by the illicit thrill of her mission. She found she was perceiving events in a wholly different fashion, pushing everything through the prism of her mother’s original politics gifting. She categorized the queen’s behavior, noting that Helena-Thyra only ever used her neural connection to converse with Bekket. Everyone else she simply talked to. She also connected to the dreadnaught’s network on frequent occasions, something Helena-Chione never did.
“Is that relevant?” she queried her father.
“I don’t think so,” came the reply, twinned with the emotion of a chuckle. “But keep watching.”
* * *
—
It took three weeks of one-gee acceleration to reach the ingress Gate. Thyra returned to the command compartment as the fleet adjusted its formation, ready to fly between stars. As well as the admiral and her senior staff, the tactical analysts and battle coordination team took their places in the chamber’s hemispherical combat-acceleration couches. Support hoses wormed out of the edges of the cradles and plugged themselves into their cymech appendages, until they looked like a rank of glossy gray and scarlet mummies in the process of resurrection.
Out of the corner of her eye, Thyra watched First Lieutenant Oujanya claim her couch in the middle of the tactical section. The ex-princess had proved a middling cadet at the academy, not that any of the trainers rebuked her; one of Helena’s daughters was always going to pass through and enjoy a good career.
Nobody had been in the slightest surprised when she was assigned a prestige bridge crew post in the Dracaenae. Everyone knew Helena always liked to have a high percentage of her spawn in the officer corps. It wasn’t a particularly senior position; she simply coordinated the reports of each squadron’s chief tactical intelligence officer, ready to provide a cohesive threat profile to the admiral. Her somber face showed she took the position seriously.
The shift from economics student to navy hadn’t surprised anyone, so Clavissa had informed Thyra. Most of Helena’s ex-princesses grew to demonstrate their mother’s determination. Though, Clavissa added, career wasn’t the only thing that had changed; Oujanya had become distant, discarding friends to become alone and aloof. Her fellow cadets wondered if her father had gifted her some kind of emotion-inhibiting rider. Such a gift to a newlife was considered bad form, but then in a dominion where Thyra’s new hardline policies were primary, progression was paramount.
Thyra didn’t care what gossip swirled around Oujanya, nor how difficult it made her life, as long as the ephemeral compulsions she’d forced into her subconscious held fast. Her family’s formidable neural weapons hadn’t let her down so far. She put her hand on her own couch’s contact bulb, once again breaking Helena’s habit of refusing to connect with a network. No doubt that piece of gossip had circulated faster than lightspeed. Her perception of the fleet and Gate of Heaven was omnipotent. In the back of her skull were a million whispers of comms channels and telemetry, any one of which she could select for her mind to concentrate on.
She chose the frigate Nerthus, which the admiral’s staff had designated fleet herald. It accelerated to the apex of the massive formation and flew directly into the ingress Gate of Heaven. As always, the circular burst of achromic radiance contracting across the Gate’s conical surface to embrace the ship brought a smile of wonder to her lips. Not even the power of the Dracaenae could rival the god-level energies of an Elohim Gate.
The Nerthus vanished somewhere within the light of Heaven. Its job was to announce the Royal Fleet’s arrival to the Kelowan Navy watch satellites in their sentry orbit around the egress Gate. Nobody wanted a misunderstanding when such a powerful military force was entering a friendly star system, if that’s what you can call Kelowan. And they were arriving a couple of months earlier than arranged, to which she would plead guilty. But we were ready, so here I am. Forgive my enthusiasm, my dear empress.
The rest of the fleet started to follow in superb precision, triggering flare after flare in quick succession. After two-thirds of them had gone through, the Dracaenae accelerated smoothly.
* * *
—
As the fleet finally arrived at the ingress Gate to Kelowan, Clavissa sent a last message. “I’ll see you in about ten years,” she told her father as the frigates in front of the Dracaenae started to fly through the Gate of Heaven. “Sorry I couldn’t find anything interesting—or incriminating. Love you, daddy.”
With that done, she made a last pass round the lounge, checking the princesses and congregants were all secure in their couches. She settled back in her own couch and took a breath, ready for the weird mental distortion of the ZPZ generator framing the huge warship.
There was a familiar tingle from her father’s gift, telling her it had a message. “If I’ve timed this right, you’re about to go through the Gate,” her father said. It was a bright sunny day outside his mansion, with the grounds covered in a half meter of snow that glinted in the sunlight. “I need to tell you, don’t stop sending messages. They’ll take a year to reach me, which admittedly isn’t a lot of use, but don’t worry, a colleague of mine and Gahiji-Calder’s called Neusch is in the Kelowan system to receive them. He can take any action that’s necessary on our behalf. And if you’re in trouble, he can help. I know you can do this, darling, I have faith in you.”
Clavissa had to clamp her jaw shut to stop a deep-felt groan emerging. Take action? I thought this was just the two of us. Oh, daddy, what the hell have you got me into?
* * *
—
The Polkadav was eight days out from Gondiar and about to perform its mid-flight flip, ready to decelerate to Anoosha, when Otylia sat down with her sister in the ship’s so-called lounge. In reality, it was a cramped compartment of worn couches and drink dispensers that now could only produce approximations of the beverages featured on the decades-old menu screen. The air that circulated through the grilles was a concentrate of human scent mingling with the occasional pungent gust of too-hot oil. Despite the very basic nature of the interplanetary ship, Otylia actually found their circumstances strangely relaxing. It was an interlude from a life that was spiraling rapidly downward—a time to take a breath and really think about what to do next.
The sisters clasped hands and connected for complete privacy. Self-perceptuals were profoundly sad, but neither was surprised to recognize the other retained a diamond-clear core of determination.
“Did you access the latest speech that Josias broadcast?” Otylia asked.
“Yes,” Zelinda admitted. “Everyone’s being diplomatic and not mentioning it to you. Especially after his so-called eulogy to mother.”
“I thought I was going to throw up as I listened to that sanctimonious bollocks.”
“Unfortunately, it would seem he really can fool most of the people most of the time. With apologies; I don’t mean you.”
“Irrelevant. I’m the best living proof that he can’t maintain the illusion forever. Eventually people will realize what a self-aggrandizing little turd he is.”
“We don’t have that time.”
“I know,” Otylia replied. “The general just released a criminal notification edict. There’s a bounty on my head now, and on Laurella’s and Dushan’s—which was a shitty thing to do, but that’s the way the general’s mind works. Nowhere is too low for him to go.”
“I’m only surprised that I didn’t get a bounty.”
Otylia smiled fondly at her. “I don’t think General Avone-Valerio is quite as annoyed by Haian as he is by Josias.”
“No, but it won’t be long before he works out I’m a member of our truly terrible little group of outlaws. He’ll come for all of us.”
“I know. And that’s a big problem. We’re probably safe from the Polkadav crew—”
“—all four of them—”
“—all four of them. Even if they have worked out who they’re carrying, they should be worried they’ll be considered complicit.”
“Good point.”
“But that problem won’t be bothering anyone at Pana-seok. A group of people arriving from Gondiar and seeking a charter outsystem—that’s just easy money.”
“Asteria. So what do we do?”
“I have an idea. And I’m not sure you’ll like it.”
“At this point, I’m open to anything. We have to get our families to safety. Otylia, so you know, if it means you and me giving ourselves up, I’ll do it.”
“Oh, hell no, it’s not that bad. We pay the Polkadav a great deal of money to take us to the one starship that will never turn us in to the general, and will take us as far as we need to go to be safe. It should be here soon, and I’m prepared to wait for however long it takes.”
“What starship?”
“The Diligent.”
“Oh, sweet Goddess. Finn!”
“Yeah. Finn.”
“How could I have forgotten our own brother?” Zelinda’s eyes began to water. “Am I really this awful?”
“Hey, it’s been thirty years. I’ve spent almost every day thinking he’s gone and stupidly got himself killed. But now, I believe in him. Because if you and I can elude a psychopathic Celestial empire that’s out to kill us, even if it’s just for a few days, then Finn can survive anything the Cluster throws at him!”
“But we don’t know where he’s been, so we don’t know which egress Gate he’ll come out of.”
“He’s been to Kingsnest, so he’ll be coming from Oxanotol.”
“You knew that all this time?”
She smiled gently. “He’s my twin, Zelinda.”
“My Goddess: Kingsnest! And Finn. What must that have been like?”
“Yeah.”
Zelinda embraced her sister. “Right! Let’s go bribe the captain. Again!”
* * *
—
Terence had seen the inside of the Dark Paradise club enough times, though always through feeds from various infiltrator drones and informers. He’d never actually physically been inside the building where Stanvar8 conducted most of its business. Until now.
The club occupied the two lowest floors and three basement levels of the Haywood Block on Oldmixon Avenue. As the governor and the general between them had arrested every member of Stanvar8 in Terence’s files, nobody had been in since. To make sure of that, once the last raid was over, a team from the police crime scene department had sealed the club. That consisted of adding an official code to the locks and physically securing the doors and windows. Sensors were placed in every room, and all the surrounding civic surveillance cameras fed their images directly to the local station’s network for real-time analysis should anyone try to gain entry.
Terence’s CI swiftly unpicked the digital protection. He, Jimena, and Vanilda wore othervisors as they went in through the staff entrance on the second floor. Vanilda’s presence had caused the biggest argument. But as she pointed out, if they went without her and got caught and taken into custody by the Knights, it would only be hours before she was captured. Terence couldn’t fault the logic, so it was the three of them who ventured inside.
The first time they went in, they started on the second floor. “We’ll just work our way down,” he said. “Slow and steady.”
Jimena grinned at Vanilda. “So says the forensics expert.”
Vanilda laughed. “So what are we looking for?”
“Old stuff,” he said. “Specifically any data storage modules.”
They started in the manager’s office—a room crammed full of crates and bottles and overflowing bins. Broken andys formed a little clutter pile of their own in one corner. Terence opened the backpack he’d brought, containing a hundred mobile forensic sensor units, resembling cockroaches with long antennae. They wriggled their way out of the case and lined up along the floor. He used his lnc to start their scan sequence, and they moved slowly forward together, probing the floor. The image of what they found was fed directly to the CI, which built a virtual image of everything embedded within livestone—all the cables and pipes running under the surface. It would take them an hour to cover the office’s floor, walls, and ceiling.
Jimena then released a flock of insect drones from her backpack that zipped around searching out chemical signatures.
“Of what sort?” a fascinated Vanilda asked.
“Blood, mainly; although the livestone does slowly absorb it. But they can also spot saliva and hair and flakes of skin. Anything organic, basically—specifically, human traces.” She bent down and used a pair of tweezers to pick up a small scrap of white material from beneath one of the inert andys. “Like this.”
“What’s that?”
“Piece of tooth.”
“Eww.”
“And while the CI analyzes the scan results,” Terence said, “the three of us look for personal items—especially anything that doesn’t make sense to you. The kind of thing that a CI will simply catalogue as a miscellaneous physical item, but humans will pick up on as being out of context.”
“Okay, then.” Vanilda started opening drawers in one of the cabinets.
It took them four days to cover the second floor, examining the rooms one by one. After the office, there were private client rooms that had furniture saturated with traces of human DNA. Small storerooms. A big kitchen, complete with large cold stores still full of chilled food. Staff rooms.
