A Matter of Oaths (19 page)

“It isn’t that easy,” Rafe told Jualla ruefully. “I’m an Oath-breaker.
I was identity-wiped ten years ago. Anything that happened before that…” He
spread his upturned palms in a gesture of hopelessness.

The admission took Rallya by surprise, but only for a
moment, not long enough to make her miss Elanis’s hiss of dismay. Emperors, if
she had needed proof of Rafe’s tactical skill, this was it. Even if he did not
know that the rumour had already reached Aramas zone, he must know that it
would eventually. Prevarication now would harm him when the truth did come out,
whereas his frank, unsolicited, admission would take the sting out of many of
the criticisms that
Bhattya
’s
web-room might make. Witness the looks of shock, not outrage, on the faces of
his audience.

“Why?” Jualla was the first to find her voice, albeit one an
octave higher than normal.

“I presume, for being unwilling to swear allegiance to the
Old Emperor.” Rafe looked at her without flinching. “I can only guess, of
course.”

“Of course,” Jualla echoed uneasily. “And you really can’t
remember about…” She gestured at the gravity stress chart.

“I can’t remember how I learned about them,” Rafe corrected
her, moving the discussion further away from the realm of ethics into the realm
of facts. “I might be able to remember what I learned, but it’s difficult. I
can’t guarantee it.”

“You’re not going to let it go like that, are you?” Elanis
demanded. “He’s an Oath-breaker. He’s admitted it. Don’t you care?”

Rallya looked at the aristo with interest. He had been
dismayed when Rafe revealed the truth, but now he was trying to make matters
worse. Why?

“Rafe has never tried to hide his past,” she pointed out. “It
was the first thing he told the Three when we began courting him. Whatever he
did or refused to do ten years ago, he paid for it according to the Guild’s
law. Are you saying that the law is wrong?”

“I’m saying that no decent webber wants to share a web-room
with him,” Elanis said defiantly.

Rallya swept an interrogative look around the web-room. “Anybody
agree with that?” she asked them.

“As you said, he’s paid for what he did,” Jualla said
uncertainly. “We don’t have the right to punish him further. Even if we
disagree with the law, we have to accept its results while it is the law…”

From Jualla, that was generous, Rallya thought with
satisfaction. It must be uncomfortable for her, torn between a belief in the
Unification of the Empires that made Oath-breaking uniquely difficult to
forgive, her envy of Rafe for getting the promotion she had hoped for, and her
legalistic passion for fairness. It was the last of the three that was speaking
and, if Rallya judged right, it would continue to determine Jualla’s reaction,
making her a strong supporter of Rafe where she might have been an opponent if
he had handled things differently. There were other members of the web-room who
might side with Elanis, but Jualla was a key convert.

“Is there anybody who agrees with Elanis’s definition of
decent?” Rallya asked.

“I’d like to know why Rafe didn’t tell us earlier,” Irinya
said.

“He’s ashamed of it,” Elanis sneered. “Who wouldn’t be?”

“You, probably,” Rallya retorted. “Except I doubt that you’d
ever be in Rafe’s position. You’d rather swear a false Oath.”

“I resent that!”

“Go ahead, resent it,” Rallya said cheerfully. “Threaten me
the way you threatened Joshim when he entered a formal warning in your record,
if you like.” She grinned ferally. “I’m not surprised nobody agrees with your
definition of decent.” Turning to Irinya, she asked, “Did you tell your
web-mates every detail of your history as soon as you joined
Bhattya
?”

“No, ma’am, but…”

“Do you agree with Jualla about the law and Rafe?”

“Yes, ma’am, but…”

“Stop browbeating her,” Rafe interrupted sharply. “Irinya,
part of the reason that I didn’t tell you sooner was that my past didn’t affect
my work until now. But there was another reason too. I was scared of how you’d
react. I’d been looking for a berth for over half a year before I joined
Bhattya
. I know how people can react
when they find out.” He smiled sadly. “I’ll admit, I was hoping I wouldn’t have
to tell you. I didn’t, on my last ship. It was never necessary. And, I suppose,
I am ashamed of being an Oath-breaker, even if I don’t remember why…”

“I suppose we can’t really blame you for any of that,”
Irinya conceded.

“Most people would,” Rafe remarked.

“You can’t intend to go on sharing a web-room with him,”
Elanis protested.

“If you can’t stand it,
you
leave,” Jualla told the aristo curtly.

“There may be people who aren’t here who agree with Elanis,”
Rafe reminded her quietly. “They have a right to be heard.” He was playing his
hand perfectly.

“I’ll ask them,” Jualla promised, nodding judiciously. “If
they want to talk to you about it…”

“Of course,” Rafe agreed readily. “But please, after I’ve
had some sleep.”

“I should think so,” Rallya put in. “It’s over an hour since
I ordered you to bed.” If Rafe wanted to make a timely withdrawal after that
display of cunning, he deserved her support. She could hardly have done better
herself.

She left the web-room herself shortly after Rafe, knowing
that Jualla and the others present needed no further persuasion, in spite of
Elanis’s intriguing efforts to turn the tide. If those directing him wanted to
keep Rafe under observation, he would hardly be doing his best to separate the
two of them. He could not be intending to follow Rafe to yet another ship; that
would arouse too many suspicions. Nor could there be another watcher ready to
take over Elanis’s role. If there were, the risk of using Elanis again would
not have been taken. Besides, the conspirators would not want Rafe’s
significance known to any except a select few. Not that Elanis could be
described as select, she thought with grim amusement.

So, if Elanis wanted Rafe expelled from
Bhattya
— and it must have been the aristo who planted the rumour
in the convoy at Jalset’s World, Rallya decided in passing — it was because
something was intended to happen to Rafe, but not aboard
Bhattya
. Another murder attempt, made less risky because Rafe had
no sympathetic web-mates to press home an investigation, or less risky still
because Rafe had been driven out of the Guild completely? But if Elanis was a
party to that plan, he must also have known about
Avannya
’s fate in advance, and it was his controllers who were
responsible.

She was back to the question that she had asked herself
fifteen days ago: if they wanted Rafe silenced, why wait ten years? Unless
something had changed recently, and Elanis had reported something that made
Rafe a greater danger to them. The return of memory, or the first signs of it?
And if so, how had Elanis known about it?

Rallya swore silently. She should have realized before. To
be an effective observer, Elanis must have concealed snoops to help him. Where?
Rafe’s cabin was a certainty, Joshim’s too, both audiovisual snoops and tracers
on their consoles. The web-room and the rest-room would be monitored too. In
fact, Elanis had had the opportunities he needed to scatter them throughout the
ship, and any spy with the background support that Elanis had would have come
equipped with the comp access needed to override any locks that he encountered.

Rallya shrugged indifferently, acknowledging that she could
not make a search without alerting Elanis to her suspicions. So, let him watch
and listen. He could not monitor her thoughts and she was not naive enough to
trust any of this to a console. Besides, he probably spent all his time
watching Rafe and Joshim together and blowing steam out of his ears.

Gods, she wanted to know why Rafe had been kept alive so
long. It was so crazy, it had to be the key to everything else. If he had once
been valuable alive, why were they now trying to kill him?

There was disagreement over him, she realized triumphantly.
A party who wanted him dead, who had probably wanted him dead from the beginning,
and a party who wanted him alive. If power had shifted between the two groups,
or if one group was acting without the other’s knowledge… She smiled
contentedly. In a situation like that, there were ample opportunities for them
to make mistakes that she could exploit.

What would they do next? There was no legal way for them to
separate Rafe from
Bhattya
without
the consent of her Three. The only options open to them were to kill him while
he was off-ship or to destroy
Bhattya
herself. In their place, which would she choose?

Simple murder would invite a storm of questions so soon
after Sajan’s death when there were people who were aware of the link between
them, but nobody would think twice about the loss of a patrolship in an active
zone. An attack on
Bhattya
was the
only safe alternative, in spite of the number of people who would have to be
involved — they would have to send at least two ships to be sure of success,
and it would be an insult if they sent less than three. They could not hope to
use another EMP-mine; a patrolship did not follow a predictable course the way
that a surveyship did. Or… Rallya caught her breath. They would try sabotage. A
hidden explosive, or a modification to the drive, or something more subtle, a
trap in the comp to send their navigation fatally wrong.

She could not bar Elanis from the maintenance areas without
making him suspicious, any more than she could bar the station techs from the
ship at Aramas. And without knowing how widely Elanis had sown his snoops, she
could not deliver a warning to Vidar and Joshim. But the snoops could only
report locally without being detected, she realized; anything else would
register in
Bhattya
’s comm sensors.
And it would be no surprise when Elanis left the ship on Aramas; after all, no
decent webber would share a web-room with an Oath-breaker. Once he had gone,
Bhattya
could be scoured of every snoop,
tracer and trap.

Rallya frowned uneasily. It was a calculated risk, balancing
her forty years of familiarity with
Bhattya
’s
comp and Vidar’s intimate knowledge of every system aboard against the
resources of the saboteurs. If they found nothing… They would find it, she
promised herself, if they had to rebuild the ship around them in the process.
She smiled wolfishly. There would be no retreating afterwards, and no more
waiting for her enemies to act. Somewhere in Rafe’s memory was what she needed
to know to take the war to them. She promised herself she would find that too.

“The failure of the primary plan is
unimportant. The agent reports that the second line of attack was activated
before he initiated the first, and will be effective within ten days of his
departure.”

“Can’t he be more precise than that?”

“The trigger selected makes the timing imprecise, but the
results are certain.”

A tap on the door interrupted the long laughing kiss into
which Rafe had snared Joshim as they were dressing. Reluctantly, Rafe rolled
aside to let Joshim get up, then sat up and reached for his shirt as Joshim
opened the door.

“Commander’s compliments, sir, and would you join her and
the Captain in the sun-side observation gallery,” Fadir said.

“Now?” Joshim asked in surprise.

“She said immediately,” Fadir confirmed apologetically.

“But she didn’t say why,” Joshim remarked resignedly.

“No, sir, but I did hear some good news that the dock
supervisor told her, just before she sent me with the messages for you and the
Captain,” Fadir volunteered. “Elanis shipped out late last night, as a
passenger on the fast courier to Keltam.”

“You’ve got big ears,” Joshim teased. “You’re lucky Rallya
hasn’t trimmed them for you.”

“Yes, sir,” Fadir said seriously.

“She’s plotting something,” Joshim said when the apprentice
had gone. “Though the gods knows what. She doesn’t usually drag me and Vidar
off-ship to sanction her schemes. She doesn’t usually bother to get our
sanction,” he added drily.

“Whatever it is, she’s been plotting it since we found
Hadra
,” Rafe remarked. “She’s been
acting like a woman with a stack of emperors in a game of drag, just waiting for
the pot to reach a respectable size before she plays them.”

“And not one of them was in the box that the other players
drew from,” Joshim agreed.

Rafe laughed and tossed Joshim’s shirt across the room. “You’d
better get dressed, or you may not leave here in time to see her slip them onto
the table.”

Joshim obeyed. “Will you take the training sessions if I’m
not back in time?” he asked, adding with a wicked grin, “Churi will be pleased.”

Rafe groaned. “Only Churi could think that being an
Oath-breaker was exciting,” he complained, thankful that the rest of the
web-room had reacted more levelly to his admission. It was a relief not to have
to hide his past from them any longer. He had not known when he confessed how
they would react; there had not been time to consider the consequences, only to
act on his instinct that it was the right thing to do. He was still warmly
surprised by the scale of the acceptance he had received, by their willingness
to judge him on what he was rather than on what he had been.

He frowned, thinking that he should not expect the same
tolerance outside
Bhattya
’s web-room.

“I’m surprised Elanis didn’t spread the news about me around
Aramas station before he left,” he remarked. “It’s not like him to miss a
chance to make trouble. Especially since he was more or less forced to leave
Bhattya
because of me. It would have
been an obvious way to get even.”