Primary Inversion (6 page)

      
That one. Me. Sauscony Valdoria.

      
I had run. But even a Jagernaut couldn’t outrun six armed soldiers plus an Aristo in a flycar. When they caught me, I faced a decision that haunted my memories:
should I fight?
I wanted to hurt them the way I knew Tarque planned to hurt me. But it would give away my military training. They would know they had someone far more interesting than a Tams citizen. They would investigate until they discovered my identity, not only my military rank but also the civilian title I carried. And then my life would become a nightmare.

      
Unless I waited until the odds were better, I would have no chance of escaping. So I fought like a frightened civilian instead of a Jagernaut. Tarque found it amusing. He took me to his estate in the hills and had me as his prisoner for three weeks. Late into one of those long Tams nights I finally managed to work free of the restraints he had used to tie my wrists to the bed.

      
Then I strangled him.

      
Rex had been trying for that entire three weeks to infiltrate the estate. He found me after I fled the house, when I was running across a field, my mind screaming from aftershocks of the pain. He caught me, held me tight, so tight, as if he feared I would vanish. His voice shook while he told me, again and again, that I would be all right.

      
But I wasn’t all right. Tarque had been the antithesis of an empath, a being with a mental cavity where his capacity for compassion should have been. Sadist and empath, parasite and host: his mind had been the negative of mine. When he concentrated on me, I fell into his emptiness, filling it for him, connecting us in a bond he craved even more than orgasm. He spoke in soft, loving murmurs while I screamed and screamed and screamed…

      
Rex and I left Tams that night. I spent only a few days in the hospital; Tarque hadn’t wanted his provider scarred, so my physical wounds were minor. But my doctors told me to see a heartbender. When I didn’t go, my CO ordered it. So I went and told the heartbender what she wanted to hear; I am, after all, an empath. In her report she said I  would be all right, that I just needed time to heal.

      
As for my true feelings about what happened—if they had haunted me for ten years, that was my business and mine alone.

III

Psibernaut

The thick carpet in the hallway outside Rex’s room muffled my footfalls like a wine-red cloud. Real wood paneled the walls, glossy and red-hued. Next to Rex’s door, an ivory oval showed a palm-sized relief of a man with the tail of a fish. He was rising up in a spume of water, glistening drops of water spraying about his head and a trident held high in his hand. When I touched the pager, the door chimed like bells heard through sea waves lapping on a shore.

      
Rex’s voice came over a hidden speaker. “Come.”

      
I touched the door and it swung open, revealing a room paneled in that same sinfully luxuriant wood. A carpet covered the floor like burgundy velvet. The only light came from a lamp with a rose-glass shade. Rex sat in the middle of the bed, cross-legged on its wine-red cover, his head bent over his work. He was cleaning his Jumbler. Sections of the gun lay around him, black metal gleaming in the dusky light.

      
“Planning to shoot someone?” I asked, closing the door.

      
He glanced up as I crossed the room. “You’re the one who insists we clean them so often.”

      
I smiled amiably. “Clean and jumbled.” It was how I felt after my shower. I sat on the bed next to him. “I set up a guest account on the Inn’s system. We can upload our data on the Traders as soon as Taas and Helda get back from dinner.”

      
Rex nodded, bent over his weapon. He was polishing the ejector that fit into the accelerator dees inside the main body of the gun.

      
“I expected you to be out with that girl from the bar,” I said. “She seemed interested.”

      
He finished the ejector and went to work on the hand grip. “She’s young.”

      
“I thought you liked your women that way.”

      
“I guess I’m tired.”

      
I wondered at his mood. He had seemed subdued since we left the bar. It was odd; I would have thought seeing an Aristo would have wound him up. Something else was bothering him. I nudged his mind but he blocked me, keeping his mental doors closed.

      
“Rex.” I laid my hand on the grip of his gun, stopping his movements. “What’s wrong?”

      
He looked up at me for a moment. And then he said, “I’m going to retire.”

      
“
What?
”

      
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.” He exhaled. “Soz, I’ll be forty-seven soon. All the other officers from my class at DMA have retired.” Neither of us said what he left out:
or else died.

      
“You can’t retire.” I tried not to remember he had only been a year behind me at the Dieshan Military Academy. “I need you.”

      
He pushed his hand through his graying hair. “I’m not like you. I can’t put off getting old. Forty-seven isn’t just my age on file; it’s how I feel.” He shook his head. “I’ve had enough. I want to go home, have a family, dig in the garden.”

      
“You can have a family now.” I was talking too fast. “You don’t have to retire. And you can dig holes in the ground wherever you want. I’ll get you a special hole digging commission.” He wasn’t
old.
He wasn’t any older than me. Yes, my genetics gave me a potential lifespan twice the human average. But nowadays most humans lived into their second century. Rex had plenty of time.

      
He smiled, but it was like this strange mood he had tonight, gentle instead of wild. Then he really went over the cliff. He slid his hand around my neck, drew my head to his, and kissed me.

      
“Hey.” My protest came out muffled again his lips. “What are you doing?”

      
He pulled back enough to look at me. “Kissing you.”

      
“What for?”

      
“Well, let me see. Maybe it’s a new way of checking the weather.”

      
“Very funny. Why are you acting so strange?”

      
He spoke quietly. “Soz, I want you to marry me.”

      
He had gone crazy. “You drank too much at the bar.”

      
“I didn’t drink anything. We never got our ale.”

      
“I can’t marry you. It’s against regulations.” Good reasons existed for the ban on fraternization. It compromised the ability of the people involved to carry out their duties. It happened anyway, despite regulations, but it often ended in disaster. If I married Rex, no way could I send him into battle. I would spend the whole time obsessing on the fact that he might get hurt. Or worse.

      
Except he wanted to retire.

      
“I don’t want to retire,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that were true, but for the moment it would do.

      
“I’m not asking you to,” Rex said.

      
So. He wasn’t giving me an out. I tried to untangle my thoughts. Could I see Rex as a husband? He had been my closest friend for fifteen years, my confidant, someone I relied on. He was like a brother. In fact, I was closer to him than to any in my seemingly endless supply of brothers.

      
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happened to these women you have pining for you all over the galaxy?”

      
“You’re evading my question.”

      
“What do you want to marry me for?”

      
He looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or growl. “Because I have a fetish for women with the romantic instincts of a cork.”

      
I couldn’t help but smile. “Then I guess we’re compatible.”

      
“Sauscony, I’m serious about this.”

      
If he was calling me Sauscony, he had to be serious. No one called me Sauscony but my parents. “I would hate it if you left me.”

      
His voice softened. “Why would I do that?”

      
Could I say it? Sixteen years had passed, enough to dull the pain. “My first husband did.”

      
“I didn’t know you had been married more than once.”

      
“Twice.” My second husband had died a few years ago, not long after we had married. I couldn’t think about that now. Maybe never.

      
“Why did he leave?” Rex asked.

      
“It’s a boring story. You don’t want to hear it.”

      
Rex stroked a curl away from my face. “Tell me.”

      
It was a moment before I answered. “He hated what I did for a living. He was afraid I would die. He asked me to quit.”

      
“I thought you couldn’t quit.”

      
I stiffened. “I’m not indentured. I can retire if I want.”

      
“But if you do, don’t you lose your position in the Imperator’s line of succession?”

      
I wanted to say
so what?
I had never asked to be born into the remnant of a dynasty that had ruled a long dead empire. The Ruby Dynasty. The people Tiller had called
Rhon,
with no idea he was talking to one of them. My brother, Kurj, held the title of Imperator. He commanded Imperial Space Command—and they followed him with such intense loyalty that some observers considered him a de facto military dictator.

      
“Well, technically,” I told him, “you could say Kurj has no heirs. He’s my mother’s only child by her first husband and he has no children of his own.” No legitimate children, anyway.

      
“I thought he chose you to follow him.”

      
I shifted my weight. “I have seven full brothers and two sisters. He could have chosen any of us. Hell, he could have made my mother his heir.”

      
“Your
mother?
” Rex’s grin turned wicked. “No one would fight, then. They’d all be in love, too busy trying to look at her to think about going off to war.”

      
I scowled at him. “Only a man would say that.”

      
He laughed. “I don’t know about that. Helda might.”

      
In truth, I couldn’t imagine my mother as a war leader. She was a superb diplomat and a lovely ballet dancer, but the military was a foreign language to her.

      
Before I married anyone, I had to sort out how I felt about my heritage. I brought out my thoughts like a game player setting up a board with three pieces: the Imperator, the Assembly Key, and the Web Key. Or, more popularly, the Fist, Mind, and Heart of Skolia. As Imperator, my half-brother Kurj commanded the military. My aunt, the Assembly Key, served as the liaison from the Assembly to the Rhon. My father was the Key to the Web.

      
My mother had married my father because he was a Rhon psion. Kurj hated him, this man who had become his stepfather. If I married Rex, what would it be like for him? I wasn’t sure that was a fair comparison, though. Rex could handle Imperial intrigues. When my parents met, my father had been living on a primitive world. His people descended from a colony established in the Ruby Empire and isolated for thousands of years after its fall. Marriage to my mother had yanked him from that simple, rural culture into the morass of Skolian politics. In Kurj’s unforgiving view of the universe, any children produced by my father were flawed. But unless Kurj ever found a Rhon woman to marry, we were the only suitable candidates for his heir.

      
“Kurj needs an heir who understands Imperial Space Command,” I said.

      
“You.”

      
“He chose three of us. Me, and the two of my brothers who became Jagernauts.”

      
“Why three? Only one of you can be Imperator.”

      
I gritted my teeth. “That’s right.”

      
Rex stared at me. “The one who survives.”

      
My shoulders bunched under my jacket. “Kurj knows I can’t stay on active duty forever. I’ve proven myself for a quarter of a century. But sixteen years ago it was different.”

      
“That was when your husband wanted you to quit?”

      
I nodded. “It would have meant abdicating any claim I had to become Imperator.”

      
Rex made an incredulous noise. “What the hell did your husband expect when he married an Imperial heir?”

      
I stared down at my hands. Somehow I said the words. “I got pregnant. I didn’t know. I was injured in battle and lost the child.” I made myself look at Rex. “Jato—my husband—it tore him apart. He stayed with me until I recovered. Then he left.”

      
“Soz,” Rex murmured. He tried to put his arms around me, but I held back. I’d always wondered if Kurj knew how much Jato and I had wanted a child. That was another item in my mental file of things not to think about.

      
“You ought to know I wouldn’t leave you,” Rex said. “I don’t expect you to retire.”

      
I turned the idea over in my mind like a child with a newly minted coin. Kurj couldn’t keep me in combat forever. With my rank and experience it made more sense to have me behind a desk, planning strategy. If he killed all his heirs, he wasn’t likely to get more of us soon. None of my other siblings were remotely qualified.

      
Rex was a good man; I’d known that since I first met him. He was a potent telepath, probably the strongest I would ever find. I couldn’t spend my life looking for that one in a trillion person whose mind matched my own. The only time I had ever shared my mind with another Rhon psion had been an accident. Once, when my kid brother Kelric had been seven and I sixteen, we went hiking. A storm caught us, pale blue sleet raging from the sky. We took shelter in a spine-cave of the Backbone Mountains. As Kelric and I huddled together for warmth, our minds merged. It lasted only a few hours, the most fulfilling link I had ever made with another human being. It never happened again; that bond was too intimate to share with a brother. But neither of us forgot. After that day, I knew I would search everywhere for a Rhon mate.