The Final Key: Part Two of Triad (18 page)

he was almost certain she was mistaking evidence of the phorine for a medicine he hadn't taken in several years. Perhaps the chemicals were related. But surely phorine wasn't so rare that they couldn't recognize its properties. Although he had never heard of it before, he wasn't a doctor. Regardless, he kept his use a secret.

Eldrin descended the stairs with four Jagernauts. Dehya waited at the bottom, a welcome sight, smiling, fragile in the midst of her Abaj warriors. Machine men. Had his own brother not been a Jagernaut, Eldrin would have wondered if they were human. But all that augmentation hadn't saved Althor.

He recognized the lights flickering on the gaundets of his bodyguards; they were communicating with Dehya's guards. If a Jagernaut focused his thoughts in a certain manner, bio-electrodes fired his neurons and let him "think" to his node. It sent his messages along threads in his body to his wrist sockets, which linked to his gaundets. They transmitted the data to the gaundets of the Abaj Jagernauts, which relayed it to the Abaj's brain by the reverse process. For people close together, it essentially gave them technology-produced telepathy.

Eldrin and Dehya also had internal systems that monitored their surroundings. If either of them needed help, transmitters within their bodies notified their bodyguards and the nearest ISC receiver. Systems within the port were undoubtedly watching them as well, and within the yacht. Eldrin chafed at the surveillance, but it was actually easier to deal with the machines than with the Jagernauts. He could ignore machines. The Jagernauts made it impossible to forget he and Dehya were guarded everywhere, even in their own home, and would be for the rest of their lives.

Eldrin relaxed his mental barriers and concentrated on Dehya. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, he knew two things: she was upset and he was about to be angry. Em-paths didn't always pick up exact moods or interpret what they sensed correctly, but it was obvious something bothered his wife.

Her silky tonic and trousers were rippling in the breezes.

After so many days apart, he wanted to embrace her. But he held back, aware of their audience. In public they rarely showed affection. It wasn't necessary. They didn't even need a formal greeting. They had been in a mental link since he disembarked from the yacht. "I'm all right," he said. &l The wind blew hair across her face. "Kurj isn't." Kurj? "What happened?"

She spoke bluntly. "Someone tried to assassinate him. And you. They almost succeeded." "Good gods. Is Kurj all right?"

She spoke in a subdued voice. "He might not make it." :" His stomach clenched. Not Kurj, too. Although nothing changed in the bluish sunlight, the day seemed to dim, as if clouds had covered the sun. The behavior of the people on the yacht suddenly made sense. "My doctor knew. That's why she hovered over me so much." Eldrin scowled at the Jagernaut captain by his side. "You knew, too." The captain spoke awkwardly. "Yes, Your Majesty." "Gods forbid anyone should tell me," Eldrin said. "Why didn't they?" Dehya asked the captain. "Orders from Imperator Majda," he said. "It was on a need-to-know basis only."

"Well, of course," Eldrin said. "Why would I need to know? It's only my life." He led a fractured existence, guarded as if he were more valuable than the rarest transition metals, yet treated as if he couldn't be trusted to know about threats to his own life. And he was perceived as more "civilized" than his father. If it was this bad for him, it was no wonder his father hated spending time among the Sko-lians.

Dehya laid her hand on his arm. "It's not their fault." He pushed off her hand. "ISC thinks I'm your goddamned pet"

"Dryni," she murmured.

He shook his head. "Let's go home."

"All right."

They walked across the tarmac, and he strove to ignore the guards surrounding them. The faintest shimmer in the air was

the only indication that a sensor shroud protected them out here.

After several moments, when Eldrin's anger had calmed, he asked, "Why was Kurj affected more than me?"

"He drank several mugs of the kava." A shudder went through her slender body. "He was almost dead when the medics found him."

The words felt like a punch. "Help should have arrived immediately."

"Yes." Her face was drawn. "The assassin meds replicated like mad. They were all over. They sabotaged machinery. In Kurj's body, they destroyed his biomech. The kava dispenser was hit early, probably because it was next to the first conduits they reached in the auto-kitchen. By the time our people got there, they were in every system."

He stared at her, incredulous. "How could they attack the palace that way? It can't be that vulnerable."

"That's what we thought," Dehya said. "All we know so far is that the more isolated systems weren't affected. The simple ones were the hardest to sabotage. Like the repair bots. Kurj figured that out in time."

They had reached the dichromesh-glass gate into the terminal. Lights flickered on the gaundets of one Abaj, and the polarized door slid open. They entered a spacious room where a woman sat behind an artistically rounded Luminex table. White carpet covered the floor, and holoart on the walls showed graceful streets shaded by droop-willows.

One of the Abaj spoke with the woman at the console. Although technically security had to clear Eldrin's arrival with the port authority, it was only a formality. They were hardly going to deny the pharaoh's consort entrance into the capital of her empire.

Within moments, he and Dehya were walking down a concourse lined with food stations, cafes, and shops—all empty. The Jagernauts surrounded them, but the only other people in the area were security officers from the port. It flustered him that ISC emptied out an entire terminal just for his arrival. That paled, though, next to his dismay over the news about Kurj.

"Thank the saints, the repair bots could help him," Eldrin

said. "Saints" referred to some of the lesser gods in Lyshriol mythology; when he was upset, he tended to revert to idioms from his own language.

Dehya nodded, her face drawn. "The bot was supposed to fix damaged furniture, but it couldn't repair the footboard Kurj had cracked. That flummoxed the signals from its pico-chip. The palace is saturated with links to the Kyle meshes, enough so that even without a direct connection, the bot's signals caused a slight perturbation in a local mesh. It wasn't much; to pick up something that faint, you needed a telop in a Dyad Chair. Kurj was counting on me. We would have—" She took a shaky breath, then tried again, her voice low and strained. "We would have figured it out in time if I had been in the web. But I wasn't."

Eldrin drew her to a halt "It's not your fault." She was shielding her mind, but it didn't work as well with him. He felt the guilt that was eating her hollow. "You can't be in the web all day, every day of your life! It's impossible. You would die."

"I should have been there." Her face was as pale as alabaster. "If not for Roca, we would never have found him in time."

His mother had been on Diesha? "I thought she went to the Orbiter with my father."

"She did." Dehya started walking again, her gait slowed with fatigue. "She used the Dyad Chair there. It showed her Kurj." She lifted her hand, then dropped it. "We know so lit-de about the Chairs. They allow the Dyad to use their functions. Sometimes they do other things, like this. But why? Their intelligence exists in Kyle space, not here. They are too different from us."

"Well, they seem to like you and Kurj." Maybe the Chairs didn't want the Traders in charge of the Kyle meshes, either.

"I don't think they have emotions, at least not the way we do." Dehya smiled wanly. "Maybe we interest them." "Just as long as they don't turn on you." "Why would they?"

"Because you're trespassing in Kyle space." ,Ś The gaundet worn by the captain of Dehya's Abaj buzzed, e rifted bis arm to speak into the comm. Or at least Eldrin

thought he meant to speak. The man's face furrowed and he lowered his arm again, slowly. Static buzzed at the edges of Eldrin's mind.

Dehya was watching the captain. "What is it?"

"I thought I received a page," he said. "But it wasn't."

She regarded him uneasily. "Check it out."

He nodded, and his face took on the inwardly-directed quality of a Jagernaut communicating with his internal node.

A hum came from behind Eldrin. As he turned, a teardrop car floated alongside him. It was open to the air, shaped like its name, and just large enough for two people to sit. Several other cars whirred around them, enough for their bodyguards.

Eldrin smiled, intrigued. "Where did these come from?"

"I called them." Dehya lifted her hand toward the car as if offering an invitation. "Care to ride?"

He bowed to his wife. "My pleasure, lady."

They all boarded the cars. As Eldrin and Dehya whirred off, the Abaj captain pulled up alongside them in his car. He said, "I've tracked down the page, Your Majesty. It was a spike in the energy output of a system here in the port."

Dehya frowned as their cars sped down the concourse. "Send a report to ISC."

They continued on, headed for Selei City, where a new session of the Assembly would soon open, gathering hundreds of leaders from all over Skolia in one place—including the First Councilor, Skolia's elected leader, and the Ruby Pharaoh, its hereditary sovereign.

Soz sat at the end of a robot arm with a terminus just big enough for her console, which formed a cup, curving under her feet and around her lower body. She had become so used to the psiphon prongs that clicked into her sockets, she barely noticed them. Transparent panels positioned themselves around her and holomaps rotated above them while the iridescent ripples of holograms shifted on their surface like rainbows on an oil slick.

Today Soz was in the main body of the ship rather than on the bridge. From out in space, the cruiser resembled a tubular shell, but that "shell" was hundreds of meters thick,

with many decks where crews lived and worked. Soz tended to think of bays in terms of the observation bubbles where a person could look out at the stars, or else medical bays, which she avoided. This bay was a cramped chamber, spherical in shape, with featureless walls. The robot arm held her in the center. Known as a telop bay, it provided an environment where a telop could more easily detach her attention from spacetime and submerge her mind into Kyle space.

Sigma Pride respond,
Soz thought.

Attending.
The thought came from one of many sub-shells created by the EI brain of the batde cruiser Roca's Pride.

Visor,
Soz thought.

The visor lowered and plunged her into darkness. A display of psicons formed like the icons that floated above mesh screens, except these were in her mind, created when her node accessed her brain. She concentrated on the icon of an old-fashioned horn, the type a town crier might have used to announce news.

Communications,
Soz thought.

The horn grew until it filled her mindscape. Then it blinked out and left her in darkness.

Soz scowled. Well, flat damn. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Return psicon display,
she thought. The icons reappeared as before, except the horn was pulsating red.
Sigma, what is wrong with my link to your communications systems?

Sigma rumbled.
The error appears to be in your spinal node.

Soz directed a thought to her node.
Why cant you link to the comm systems of this ship?

Her node's "voice" was quiet compared to Sigma.
Your wet-codes are incompatible.
You mean my thoughts?

Not thoughts. The commands encoded into the bioelec-trodes in your neurons are incompatible with the commands Sigma expects you to send so that you can communicate with the ship.

Soz didn't like the sound of it.
They have to be compatible. ISC designed Jagernaut biomech specifically for use with ISC systems such as this.

Yes. However, your bioelectrodes have been altered.

Soz went rigid. Altering her bioelectrodes required access to her brain.
Do you know how it happened? Because I sure as blazes don't.

Checking.
After a pause, it thought,
the alteration took place during a communication you had with Diesha several days ago.

You mean when I talked to Jazar?

Yes.

I dont recall anything unusual.

I recorded an energy fluctuation toward the end of the transmission.

Now that Soz thought about it, she did recall Jazar mentioning an energy spike.
A fluctuation that just "happened" to reprogram my bioelectrodes?

The electrodes aren't reprogrammed. Just disrupted.

Why did it happen when I talked to Jazar?

I don't know.

Did it affect any other Jagernauts onboard this cruiser?

*I don't know. You must ask the ship. She redirected her thought.
Sigma, what do you know about ?

Nothing,
the ship answered.
I have no public records of other Jagernauts reporting such an effect.

*What about private records? Soz asked.
Private records are private.

Well, yes.
All right. What is the procedure for dealing with alterations like those in my bioelectrodes?

I have no established procedure.

Interesting. If this was a known problem, medical would have a means of dealing with it, especially since so many systems on the ship required access to the Kyle web.
We need to establish one. I can't do my training if I cant link to your comm systems.

Checking.
Then Sigma thought,
it should be possible for one of my nodes to reprogram your bio-electrodes.

That sounds straightforward.

Yes. Shall I proceed?

Is there any danger to me?