Carnelians (37 page)

“Do they know the girl is your kin?” Tikal asked.

“We don’t think so.” Roca pushed her hand through her hair and sent it rippling around her body like a gold waterfall. “I’ve found no indication they have any clue about the girl’s identity. Their main concern has been the man who brought her in and a youth who came with them. The boy is a provider belonging to Admiral Muze and the man is a Razer who claimed he wanted to defect. Apparently the Razer was actually a spy planted by ESComm. No one seems interested in the girl. She’s what they call a slum rat, a child who grew up in poverty.”

“Hidden in plain sight,” Dehya murmured.

“So how did Lensmark know?” Tikal asked.

“We’re aren’t sure she knew anything for certain,” Dehya said. “However, according to the DNA analysis, this girl has gold skin, gold eyes, and gold hair. Lensmark would have seen that.”

Tikal glanced at Roca and Kelric, and they looked back at him like the male and female aspects of a golden being, radiant in the Orbiter sunlight.

“So let me see if I have this straight,” Tikal said. “Someone in the emperor’s circle with a probable link to Lord Axil Tarex may have kidnapped Prince Del-Kurj by infiltrating Allied Space Command and possibly using Del’s neural patterns, secretly scanned by Tarex and given to ESComm. The Traders also have Imperator Skolia’s neural scans, which implies they could do similar to him. In addition, they have scans and DNA records of the late Prince Althor, and they also have his illegitimate daughter, who just may be a Ruby psion, which they will probably realize if they do any searches on her DNA profile.”

“That about sums it up,” Dehya said.

“Any other disasters you want to tell me about?” Tikal said dourly. “Maybe the universe is going to blow up?”

Kelric smiled slightly. “It stopped doing that.”

Dehya knew Kelric’s dry humor helped him deal with crises, but most people didn’t even realize when he was joking. Tikal just shot him an exasperated look.

She wished she could talk to them about Jaibriol. But just her and Kelric knowing was too risky. Suppose one of them were captured? They had protections in their minds, traps that activated under the duress of interrogation and erased their knowledge by destroying neural pathways. Better to have amnesia than unwillingly betray their family, people, empire. But no traps protected their knowledge about Jaibriol. To create such traps, they would have to tell the surgeon what to protect, which they could never do. She and Kelric had to find a way to do it themselves, even if it meant doing brain surgery on each other.

Right now, her mech-enhanced brain was shifting into an accelerated mode, pushing her limits. She was tired. She had lived too long, one hundred and seventy years. Her brain had too much in it. She wanted to turn off her mind, like a node put to sleep, but she couldn’t rest, not yet.

Tikal was speaking and one channel of her mind registered his words. “Dehya, ESComm doesn’t have your neural scans,” he said. “I can see how they might have used Del’s and Kelric’s to attack them in Kyle space, but how did they get to you?”

“I’m not sure,” Dehya said. She was missing something Del had tried to tell her. She went to another bench, a curve of white marble on fluted supports, and sat down cross-legged, comfortable in her white jumpsuit. Closing her eyes, she rested her hands in her lap.

Access memory, Dream, Prince Del-Kurj,
she thought.

Light, her spinal node, answered.
Accessed.

Distantly, she heard Tikal talking to Roca and Kelric. “What is she doing? Meditating?”

“Just thinking,” Roca said. “She does it that way sometimes.”

“I’ve known her for decades,” Tikal said. “Never seen her do that before.”

Kelric’s voice was a distant rumble. “She does it more and more lately.”

Their voices faded as Dehya increased her concentration. Del’s words replayed in her mind, misty, vague: . . .
not Tarex . . . his ship? . . . Allied . . . Tarex could fake . . . all fake . . . 

Dehya sent a thought to Light.
Del thinks he’s on an Allied ship.

Possibly,
Light answered.
Or he could mean Tarex wants him to think that.

If Tarex wanted to mislead him, he wouldn’t let his vessel smell like a Trader ship.

Unless Tarex wants Del to think someone from Glory kidnapped him.

Oh, it could be a million things
.
Tarex this, Glory that. What did Del mean, “All fake”?

I don’t know.

Dehya pulled up files in her mind, some stored as biological memories, others stored in her spinal nodes. She labeled each file with a Quis die. Then she manipulated the dice, playing Quis with them, and in doing so, ran multiple analyses in her mind on the dream about Del.

After a moment, Dehya opened her eyes and regarded the others. “It’s all fake.”

Tikal’s face paled. “Dehya, what the hell are you doing?”

“Doing?” She looked around, but she saw nothing unusual, except a mist blurring the park.

“That’s been happening lately,” Roca said uneasily.

“What happens?” Dehya asked.

“Your voice,” Roca said. “You sound ghostly. Otherworldly.”

“The plains of blue,” she murmured. She had learned the phrase from Roca’s son Shannon, the only other one of them who could access the Kyle without technology. Except maybe Del could do it, too. Of all Roca’s sons, he was the most like Shannon.

Kelric spoke gently. “Dehya, you need to tell us what you mean. Focus.”

The models running in her mind were distracting.
Light, move the calculations about Del into the background.

Done,
Light answered.

Her workspace quieted, freeing her to concentrate on the others. She said, “I think we can’t figure out how someone tampered with our minds because this so-called tampering was fake.”

“Both you and Imperator Skolia nearly died,” Tikal said. “I’d hardly call that fake.”

“I don’t mean in that sense.” She switched her thoughts into a linear mode. Presenting them that way to people seemed more successful, especially when she added extra details floating in her mind, those she usually absorbed without directly thinking about them. It made her feel annoyingly verbose, but it seemed to work. Given what was at stake, it seemed better to be just annoying rather than both annoying and confusing.

“I’m still analyzing,” she said. “But this is what I think so far. What happened to Del only appears connected to the attacks on Kelric and me. If Tarex has Del’s neural scans, ESComm must have them, too. Also, if ESComm has agents in the Allied military, General Barthol Iquar would be the Joint Commander with the most interest in their actions, since the Eubian army is more involved in covert operations than their fleet. And he lives on Glory.” She paused. “Then we have these Minutemen. Are they a Trader group in disguise? It’s a logical name to use if they’re claiming to be Allied citizens. It resonates with the history of the country where Del lives. They say they want people to hear ‘Carnelians Finale,’ which has been a major impediment to public acceptance of the peace process. Well, Barthol Iquar is almost certainly a staunch foe of the peace process. However, he signed the treaty—gods only know how Jaibriol Qox pulled that one off—and it would be treason for him to undermine it. So he sets up this fake Allied group to do his dirty work. He uses Del’s neural scans to create a Kyle pathway that links Del to the release of ‘Carnelians Finale,’ because not only does that shift blame away from ESComm, but it also appears as if a Skolian prince is the one committing treason. However—”

“Dehya, wait!” Roca held up her hands. “Slow down. We need time.”

“Sorry.” Dehya waited, feeling foolish. Apparently she still wasn’t communicating well. She needed to work on that.

Kelric smiled at her. “We’re recording what you’re saying on our nodes, then replaying the recording. Just give us a few seconds.”

“Ah.” She sat with her hands in her lap and ran mental analyses of her Del dream.

After a moment, Kelric gave Roca a questioning look. When she nodded, he glanced at Tikal, who also nodded. So Kelric spoke to Dehya. “All right. Go on.”

She put her calculations into the background and returned to linear mode. “Barthol Iquar is a Highton. So a high probability exists that he isn’t a psion.”

“A ‘high probability?’ ” Roca asked. “I’ll say. It’s impossible.”

“Why would you suggest otherwise?” Tikal asked Dehya.

“Because Aristos are human,” Dehya said. “Regardless of their claims about their eternally annoying exaltation. Do you really believe no Aristo has ever passed off an illegitimate child as an Aristo? We may think they’re incapable of love, but any human can love, no matter how weak they believe it makes them. Five generations of Aristos exist now, long enough for some Kyle DNA to have worked its way into their gene pool.”

“Highton empaths?” Tikal squinted at her. “It’s a contradiction of terms.”

“I can’t see how they would survive,” Roca said.

“It would be a nightmare,” Dehya said. How Jaibriol managed, she couldn’t imagine. It was a testament to his strength of will that he hadn’t committed suicide. “I think it’s safe to assume General Iquar can’t manipulate Kyle space himself. He might use providers, but their work would be clumsy. They don’t have training, and Eube has no infrastructure to access Kyle space. But if General Iquar could steal access to ours, it wouldn’t be impossible for him to use a provider to manipulate the web.”

Roca shook her head. “What happened to you and Kelric would take far more than a few inexperienced providers sneaking into Kyle space. The training and web access it requires are far too sophisticated. How would ESComm do it?”

Dehya spoke grimly. “That’s the unpleasant part.”

“The rest of this
isn’t?
” Tikal asked.

She wished she had a better theory to offer. “ESComm would need an agent in ISC or the Assembly, someone high up. Very few people could manage that access to us.” She forced out the names. “Roca, you’re one. Tikal, you would be, but you aren’t a psion, so you’d need to work with someone who is. The others are General Naaj Majda, Admiral Chad Barzun, Admiral Ragnar Bloodmark, General Dayamar Stone, and Primary Brant Tapperhaven.”

They all stared at her. At least, Roca and Tikal stared. Kelric didn’t look surprised.

“You know damn well I didn’t do this,” Tikal said curtly.

“I didn’t say anyone had.” Dehya hated this. “Just that you’re the ones with access. Kelric and I have it, too. I could have acted against him or he could have acted against me.”

“That’s crazy,” Roca said. “Besides, you were both attacked.”

“We’re in the Triad,” Dehya said. “If one of us attacked the other, it would backlash against the attacker. What happens to one of us, happens to both.”

Both of them.

Except the Triad had three people.

“This is just great,” Tikal said dourly. “We all could have committed treason.”

Three people.
Jaibriol’s son had died in his mother’s womb, maybe at the moment Dehya and Kelric experienced the attacks. Was that the connection? It still didn’t fit. She and Kelric had been in the Triad with Kelric’s father when he had died, and although they both knew he had passed, neither of them had suffered a backlash. True, he died peacefully, surrounded by family. But Dehya had also been in the Triad with Kurj, who had been Imperator before Soz and Kelric. He had died violently in battle. She had felt him go, yes, but it hadn’t nearly killed her. The death of an unborn child who was only half Ruby, as heartbreaking as it may have been, wouldn’t nearly kill both her and Kelric.

Had Jaibriol attacked them? She didn’t believe it. They would have recognized such an attack, especially from another Triad member.

Dehya talked slowly, thinking. “Maybe we
did
experience a backlash, both me and Kelric.” She considered them. “From the attack on Del.”

“Del?” Kelric asked. “What do you mean?”

“The second time he supposedly released ‘Carnelians Finale,’ it happened when you and I experienced those Kyle attacks.” Dehya concentrated on him, hiding her thoughts but hoping he realized she meant a lot more than Del. “What if we were just collateral damage?”

Tikal gave her an incredulous look. “You’re saying ESComm went after Prince Del-Kurj and got you and Kelric
by accident?
That’s some collateral damage.”

“If it doesn’t involve betrayals by our top people,” Roca said, “I’ll gladly consider it.”

Kelric was watching Dehya closely. “Go on.”

“What happened to us could have been an unintended side effect of the tampering with Del,” Dehya said. “As members of the Ruby Dynasty, we’re all connected. If Del could reach me through Kyle space while I was asleep, think how much stronger the link would be if I had been in the web.”

Tikal regarded her doubtfully. “It still doesn’t seem likely.”

“It does have a low probability,” Dehya admitted. In fact, it was essentially zero. She and Kelric would sense if Del was attacked, certainly, but it wouldn’t nearly kill them, besides which, he hadn’t been attacked, only manipulated. But a murder attempt that nearly killed the third Triad member—
that
was a different story. What if the Highton Heir had died in violence aimed not at him, but at his father, the emperor? In the Kyle, events were related by similarity, not location. If the same person who tried to kill Jaibriol had also been the one who implicated Del, using untrained telops, he could have unknowingly linked what Jaibriol experienced to the release of “Carnelians Finale.” That release had a huge impact on the summit—which Dehya and Kelric had been working on almost continually for many months. In Kyle space, that would have linked the murder attempt against Jaibriol directly to Kelric and Dehya. It would explain why the attack against Del appeared so clumsy while that against Dehya and Kelric seemed so sophisticated. No one had attacked them; the backlash had nearly killed her and Kelric because they and Jaibriol were in the Triad. The sophistication of the attacks came from their own minds. That they had
both
been in Kyle space when Jaibriol experienced whatever happened had magnified the effect.