Carnelians (7 page)

Corbal spoke to Sakaar. “In this day and age, even a puppet can act of its own volition.”

“Puppets don’t make choices,” Calope Muze said. “Someone else pulls the strings.” An elegant woman with silvery hair, she served as High Judge, the judiciary among Jaibriol’s advisors. As his cousin, she was second in line to the Carnelian Throne after Corbal.

Azile Xir spoke dryly. “Puppets and strings should remain inanimate objects.” He was Corbal’s son and also the Minister of Intelligence. Jaibriol’s top spy man. Although Azile was twenty years older than Jaibriol, he was the youngest person here after the emperor.

Corbal snorted. “In my experience, inanimate objects don’t exercise their vocal cords, especially with so much energy.”

Azile smiled slightly. “Your use of the word energy is kind.”

A low laugh went around the table while the other Ministers looked suitably pained at the thought of Del’s “energy.” Jaibriol doubted any of them would have been caught dead listening to holo-rock if a Ruby prince hadn’t been involved.

“Actually,” Jaibriol said, “I like his music.”

Silence descended while everyone stared at him. They didn’t seem insulted by his direct speech, just confused. Except Tarquine, with her deadpan expression. Only Jaibriol knew her well enough to realize she was struggling not to laugh. Everyone else assumed he was making some abstrusely clever insult about Del combined with a pithy political reference, all done in such a convoluted manner that none of them could figure out what the hell he meant. Jaibriol just sat looking royal and enigmatic.

Calope inclined her head. “An appropriate expression of appreciation, Your Highness.”

The others nodded as if Jaibriol had said something brilliant. It would have been funny if the situation hadn’t been so serious. He had first heard Del sing ten years ago, when Jaibriol had been a teenager, and he had liked the music right off. He even liked “Carnelians Finale,” or he would have if it hadn’t been about him.

Glancing down the table, he saw Barthol watching him with a narrowed gaze. Not good. Well, so, time to put Barthol on the spot.

Jaibriol said, “I’m curious how our military offices view this business of Earth and her supposed songbird.”

“Birds don’t exist on Glory,” Barthol said in a bored voice. “So I can’t imagine why any office would bother with them.”

“Unless the songbird is neither from Earth nor Glory,” Calop said. “But instead Skolian. It wouldn’t be valid for Earthers to think of him as their own or for Eube to consider him such.”

“Who knows if Earthers even think,” Barthol said. “Let alone if any of it is valid.”

It irritated Jaibriol that his top army commander couldn’t give a more useful comment on the situation than his scorn for Earth. “We need more than questions about intelligence,” Jaibriol said. He wanted the general’s assessment of a situation that he suspected Barthol might have deliberately created in secret.

“Indeed,” Barthol said indolently. “Your Highness is most esteemed to remark on its lack.”

Enough of this,
Jaibriol thought. He needed to find out what Barthol was up to, not listen to insults about someone’s supposed lack of intelligence, which could refer to him, to Azile Xir, or to who the hell knew what. He eased down his mental shields. The pressure from the gathered Aristos increased until he wanted to jump up, stride around the room, anything to alleviate the painful sense of falling into blackness. But he caught a sense of Barthol’s surface thoughts. So that was the general’s game: stir up anger by insinuating the Allied Worlds released the song as a back-handed slap against Eube. Barthol was deflecting attention from himself.

Pain sparked in Jaibriol’s temples and he withdrew, raising his mental barriers.

Corbal was speaking. “Perhaps the people of Earth are hiding secrets about their borrowed songbird and his music. They would resist hunts by offworlders to uncover such secrets.”

Tarquine waved her hand, dismissing his comment. “The only thing Earthers hide when the glorious lions come out to hunt is their own meek selves. If their history is any indication, they would rather pretend the lions don’t exist than risk keeping dangerous secrets from us.”

Corbal answered with an edge. “The lion is native to Earth, Your Highness. Not Glory.”

She regarded him with her exquisitely aloof Highton gaze. “All beasts come from the same place, Corbal dear, if you go back far enough in our ancestry.” With a voice like whiskey, she added, “Some of us are just more deadly than others.”

For flaming sake. The last thing Jaibriol needed right now was another fight between Corbal and Tarquine. “General Iquar,” he said to Barthol. “Your knowledge pleases us. Continue.”

A muscle just barely twitched under Barthol’s eye; if Jaibriol hadn’t looked for such a sign, he would have missed it. He knew what it meant. The general didn’t like being asked to support his implications that the Allieds released the song to insult Eube. Tough. Jaibriol had no intention of sitting back while Barthol started rumors that would damage Eube’s already shaky relations with the Allied Worlds of Earth.

His headache was growing worse.

The interstellar mesh wasn’t one system. It wasn’t a million. Not a trillion.

No one knew how many meshes networked human space; every human being alive operated hundreds, thousands, even millions. The webs permeated cultures, they saturated people, cities, atmospheres. When meshes could be as small as atomic particles or as long as light years, when they infiltrated every aspect of life, even becoming part of human evolution, it was impossible to keep any place touched by humanity free of them. Individual nodes linked into community meshes, which linked into planetary meshes, which formed super meshes within a star system. Those systems communicated with the Skolian psiberweb through the Kyle web, linking across interstellar space. To gain access to the Kyle, the Allieds petitioned or paid for it and the Eubians stole it, until all of human space was connected across the star-flung reaches of three empires into an ever-evolving entity simply called The Mesh.

As with any form of life, The Mesh could become infected. It developed codes to protect itself. Antibodies. They worked with varying effectiveness, countering contagions it picked up from human civilization or discovered mutated within itself. Usually, an infestation in one network had little effect on another unless they were closely related. It was almost unheard of for an infection to spread throughout settled space, across three empires. A rare, rare phenomenon.

When it happened, people called it a mind-plague.

In the year 2288, only months after the historic signing of the first peace treaty between the Skolian and Eubian empires, a mind-plague exploded across the interstellar meshes.

It was called “Carnelians Finale.”

VI: Red

VI
Red

Aliana didn’t know which amazed her more, that the guy attacked her or that he believed he could actually do her damage.

She was walking along the lakefront, taking a break from training with Tide. Pebbles and mech-debris littered the shore, either glinting with metallic components or cloudy from composites. Water lapped sluggishly against the rubble, leaving smears of oil that caught prismatic rainbows from the watery sunlight.

A blow hit her from behind, square in the back. She stumbled a step and spun around. A dark-haired youth in a dingy red jumpsuit was raising a club to hit her again. He was almost her height, with a slender frame. She didn’t have time to see details of his weapon, other than that it ended in a metal ball the size of her fist. Her hand shot out, and she caught the club as he tried to bring it down. With an easy twist, she ripped it out of his hand.

“Hey!” he shouted, wincing as he pulled his arm against his body.

“What are you doing?” Aliana asked, more amazed than mad.

“Give me that.” He pointed to a metal clasp on the collar of her shirt. “Or I kill you.”

“Really?” She regarded him curiously. “I’m terrified.”

“Do it!” he said menacingly. Or tried. His voice shook.

“Why?” she inquired. “That clasp is worth zilch.”

He clenched his fist, raising it as he stepped toward her.

Aliana caught his fist and pushed him away. “I could do this all day, hon.”

He glared at her. “You not Aristo over me.”

“Hey, asshole, you’re the one that hit me.”

He pointed to her clasp. “Need that.”

“Whatever for? It’s a piece of junk.”

“Sell. For food.”

Aliana looked him over. He wasn’t just “slender,” he was skeletal. “You don’t have any credits, is that it? No way to eat?”

“I fine.” He tensed as if to fight, then squinted at her and apparently changed his mind. “Hungry,” he added.

“Well listen, mesh-mole, I’m gonna help you. I don’t know why, but what the hell.” She jerked her head toward the street beyond the rocky beach, about fifty meters away. “Come on. I know a place near here. With food.”

“No go with you.” He backed farther away. “You hit.”

She stiffened, angry. She wasn’t like Caul. “Suit yourself.” She dropped the club and strode toward the street. Over her shoulder, she said, “You can come, run away, or grab your little club and try bashing me again.”

Footsteps sounded behind her. “Not little,” he said.

It was true; if he had known how to wield the club, it could have been dangerous. She didn’t believe he really wanted to hurt her, though. Why she thought that, she couldn’t have said, except that it was easier to pick up his mind than with most people. She had no idea why she was helping him, except that it bothered her to see someone hurting. She knew how that felt.

Aliana kept going, with her would-be attacker following. When they reached the street, he came up beside her, acting as if he didn’t notice she was there. He hadn’t picked up his club, though. Either he trusted her more than he should or else he didn’t know much about weapons.

They walked along the street while armored bug-vans rumbled past, grey and windowless. When they were deeper into the city, an unexpected growl of voices came from a plaza ahead. Uneasy, Aliana stopped at the edge of the open area. Grey and red buildings surrounded it, most with armored plates instead of windows, one-way screens that served as spy portals looking out onto the plaza. A crowd of taskmaker slaves had gathered across the square, watching a giant holo projected on the side of the only building that sported a working screen. She couldn’t hear much from this far away except the driving beat of drums.

“Loud,” her new friend in the red jumpsuit said.

She glanced at him. “You got a name?”

He ignored her, watching the crowd.

“I have to call you something,” she said. “How about Red?”

He continued to pretend he was interested in the crowd.

She motioned at the people. “You want to go see what’s up?”

He flinched. “Aristos come?”

Aliana doubted anyone here had ever even seen an Aristo. “Don’t worry. They never come to this sleazo slum.”

“No Aristos,” he said.

“No Aristos. You got my word on that.”

He glanced at her. “I go with you.”

“Good.” She headed across the plaza with Red at her side.

No one paid them much attention, other than a few disinterested glances. She soon saw why everyone had gathered here. The holo showed a gorgeous man in black leather with red hair. He was singing in some language she’d never heard, his head thrown back, his fists clenched, his powerful voice full of fury.

They stopped at the outskirts of the crowd. “Mad,” Red said at her side.

“Yeah, no shit.” Something bothered Aliana about the singer. He looked familiar, but she knew she’d never seen him before. She would remember a guy who looked that good.

“Provider,” Red said suddenly. “Want to go.”

“What?” She glanced at him. “You think that guy is a provider?”

“His arm.” He pointed at the holo. “Got e-spring burns.” He backed away.

“Hey.” Aliana pulled him back. “He’s somewhere else, not here.” He was right, though, the singer did have welts, cuts, and burns on his arms. It was part of the show, right? Why else would he go on stage like that?

“Red, look, he doesn’t have wrist guards or a collar,” she said. “He’s not a slave. And he sure as blazes isn’t an Aristo, not with that hair.”

“Skolian,” he said, pulling his thin arm out of her grip. “Singing in Iotic.”

Aliana snorted. “Yeah, right. How would you know the language of Skolian royalty?”

“Iotic,” he insisted as the man wailed the climatic line of his song.

“I wonder what he’s saying,” a man nearby said.

Aliana considered Red. “Can you really understand him?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know Iotic. Just recognize it.”

“You used to work in an Aristo’s mansion or something?” It was the only way she could imagine that he might have heard such a high language.

Red wouldn’t look at her. “Or something.”

The music calmed as the man let go of his final note. The viewpoint of the holo moved out to show his audience, a crowd in some big plaza that dwarfed this little square. Aliana didn’t recognize it, but she’d never been anywhere besides this city, Muzepolis, named for its owner, Orzon Muze, the son of Admiral Erix Muze, one of ESComm’s Joint Commanders.

Suddenly the singer shouted in Highton, the language of Aristos.
That
Aliana knew; anyone with any sense learned enough Highton to jump to it if an Aristo ever gave them an order. Besides, languages came easy to Aliana. She could almost
feel
what a speaker was trying to say.

“
This is for you, Jaibriol Qox,
” the man shouted. He sang blasphemous words, soaring on the notes until he reached the end, excoriating the highest of the high, the gods of Eube:

I’ll never kneel beneath your Highton stare

I’m here and I’m real, your living nightmare!

Gasps sounded as people backed away. Others stood with their mouths open, staring at the singer as if it his vocal cords had suddenly turned into laser cannons shooting them.

“We go!” Red spun around and sprinted away, his long legs eating up distance.