Bitter Angels (42 page)

She squeezed her eyes shut. It would serve him right if she just vanished. If he’d talked to her—if he’d tried to find a way while they were free for that moment in the peeled core—she could have told him…she could have told him so much.

Another thought came to her, tugging her mind from Amerand to the four columns of patient IDs. All the IDs that did not belong to Bianca Fayette.

She moved back to her desk. She was lighter than a feather. Lighter than air. All her new knowledge had dissolved her from the inside out, and only her ghost remained.

She found the list of human subjects. She made her connections and got her admission data. She sorted for sex, she sorted for age, she sorted for arrival time. She sorted for world of origin. The results gave her all the women from Oblivion. There were a dozen. She flicked through them.

Barai Rhu Amos was the fifth. Amerand’s mother, whom he had been searching for through the diaspora worlds, hoping against hope that she was still alive somewhere, had been taken to Hospital.

She died after delivering the tenth fetal experiment implanted in her.

Emiliya looked at her closed door. They could be out there right now, waiting for her to make her decision. Or they could be on the other end of the line, waiting for her next message.

Waiting to see, for instance, whether that message went to the Grand Sentinel, or Amerand.

Waiting to see if they would have to kill her.

She lifted her hands and laid them on the keys. She flicked through the records a few more times, making notations, marking the most important, double-checking the codes and keying them to the proper personnel records. Just in case anyone needed to refer to this data again. Organization was important. They always stressed that in the academy. Emiliya had organized and cross-filed her own reports for years. She was very good at it.

If anyone came looking, she wanted to be sure they found the correct information.

Emiliya checked over her work and made sure it was properly stored. She stood and crossed her room. She sat on the edge of her bed. Random thoughts filled her—blurts and strings of memory. Hope burned and choked and sputtered out, because it wasn’t real. She wasn’t Amerand, and she had no Terese Drajeske to make her believe.

She lay down and drew up the covers. She fumbled inside her jacket pocket and brought out one of the scalpels she was authorized to carry because of her medical specialty. She was efficient. She knew just what to do and what order to do it in.

By the time the sensor on the floor registered blood and alerted the emergency team that had the authorization to override the door lock, Emiliya had almost bled out. It was decided not to try for revival as they could do more with the parts.

“I am sorry, Emiliya,” he whispered, running his fingers down the edge of the black square.

“Sentinel?” The warm voice rose from the back of his mind.

Torian steepled his fingers. The office faded around him, and forms took shape in front of his mind’s eye. He now stood in the middle of the Clerks’ hive in the new governing palace.

Hagen Kane bowed to him.

“You should know Terese Drajeske is sending an out-system transmission.”

“Yes, but this is not the approved hour.”

“We are.”

“It will be done.”

The Master Clerk bowed again and Torian moved his fingertips apart. Regretfully, he turned his back on his desk. He had thought they would have a few days yet.

Torian left his private office. Beyond his doors, in the central palace, the celebrations were in full cry. Eight hundred members of the Blood Family filled the great room and spread out into the side chambers. The servants moved through the glittering crowd as smoothly as trained dancers, offering food and drink, which also overflowed the tables set by the door of each chamber.

Everyone was in their finest: gold and silver, and genuine Old Earth gems—not the native analogs—shone like fragments of rainbow on gowns and robes. Security was much in evidence too, in its most formal uniform, accompanied by gilded but highly functional swords and daggers, as well as stark black projectile weapons.

It was just warm enough. The air was filled with perfumes designed to heighten sense and sensation. It was loud and glittering now, and would grow increasingly raucous as the night went on. Dancers—clothed and nude—whirled and kicked, glided and soared on stages of various sizes. Elsewhere there were illusionists, light-painters, and musicians. Fully interactive games played out on the screens, and people cheered at fencing matches, aerial battles, even a poetry competition.

Torian craned his neck, searching for a figure in black and white.

It did not take him long to pick Bloom out from the crowd. The Master of Dazzle stood in the middle of a crowd of young cousins, saying something that had them all laughing out loud. Bloom glanced toward him, and Torian nodded. In answer, Bloom bowed to his little audience and moved gracefully aside to stand next to Torian.

Bloom surveyed the gathering like a master engineer, judging its level, brightness, and flow. “Three days, perhaps four, if that becomes necessary.”

“I do not think it will.” Torian paused. “The offer still stands, Bloom. You have earned a place with us.”

Bloom faced Torian. He bowed, and Torian sensed that for once the gesture was sincere. “I do thank you, Grand Sentinel, but no. I shall watch my final great illusion play out, then I shall…fade away.” He smiled at Torian’s blank expression. “And once again, you do not understand me.”

“I admit I do not.”

“That is because, Sentinel, you have never been taught the absolute necessity of a well-timed exit.”

“That’s not what I’m doing now?”

“You know it isn’t. Still, I wish you luck in your new venture. Your time will not be dull.”

Torian offered his hand, and Bloom took it with a grip that was much more firm than the Grand Sentinel expected. “I will miss you.”

Once more Bloom bowed, the grand, sweeping gesture that Torian expected from him. Then the Master of Dazzle turned away and slid easily into the currents of the party he had created. Torian felt a small shiver run inexplicably up the back of his neck as he watched Bloom depart.

Torian continued to make his own way through the crowds, pausing frequently to exchange greetings and compliments, even with the third- and fourth-degree family members. He skirted past the children, who were, of course,
finding their own amusements around and between the adults and in general ignoring the ones created for them. A melancholy stained his mood, the closest he had come to regret down the long years of planning for this moment.

At the far end of the Grand Hall Mai Erasmus held court from her high-backed chair, cradling her daughter Indun in her arms. The other infants lay in specially designed bassinets that allowed them freedom to wriggle and coo—and also monitored every one of their vital signs.

Torian laid his hand on Mai’s shoulder. She glanced up from the baby. He leaned over and poked his finger into Indun’s pudgy fist. Indun grasped it and immediately tried to yank it into her mouth.

“She’s hungry again.” Mai sighed. “I’m beginning to think I won’t be able to keep up.”

“You’ll do fine,” murmured Torian. “And you’ll have help. It’s time to go, Mai.”

She met his gaze and nodded once. She stood, gathering her shining skirts with her free hand. Her well-trained waiting maids lined up instantly behind her. Indun, she declared, was getting fussy. Mai glided through the party, explaining that the noise and the heat were “just too much.” Indun obligingly set up a loud wail and everyone smiled to see what a dedicated mother
Saeo
Mai Erasmus was proving to be. Torian caught Estev’s eye with a nod and a tiny flickering movement of his fingers. Estev bowed and smiled and said he’d better make certain his wife and daughter did not want anything, and he followed Mai out.

Torian resumed his slow circuit of the rooms: exchanging greetings, asking after health and business, hearing
concerns and making promises that shortly “everything will be taken care of.”

“The plan is in order,” he assured everyone who asked. “The first wave will be leaving soon. Enjoy the festivities until you are called.”

They all knew of the triumphs on Hospital, of the heritable immortality and the living network that would ensure the permanence of the Erasmus System and the Blood Family.

What most of them did not know was that immortality would be given only to certain, selected members of the Blood, and that these were the only ones who would be taken into hiding until such time as any fallout from their dealings with the Pax Solaris had cleared.

Those who remained behind did not, of course, know he had planned for their ending as carefully as he planned for the others’ continuation. Bloom’s party would keep them amused and distracted for the few hours remaining to them.

That he’d lied to the majority of the family did not trouble Torian much. He had been lying to Felice and Jasper’s children for centuries.

Eventually, he reached the main doors. He passed through them into the relatively empty corridors. All around him, the motif of the family tree was repeated: in etched glass, in beaten bronze, in inlaid marbles and delicate paints. Torian drew a deep breath and walked purposefully down the avenues that would take him to the port yard.

Behind him, the celebrations continued.

It was highly illegal to take water off Fortress without permission. It was a death sentence to be out in a ship on a course or at a time that had not been thoroughly approved and reapproved by Flight Control. But it simply never seemed to have occurred to anybody that someone might remove water from a world that was struggling to keep itself hydrated.

As a result, one major part of Papa Dare’s operation was perfectly legal. He bought up water at the markets with the considerable credit and scrip he had at his disposal, and he either turned it around for resale or hoarded it in very heavily secured warehouses.

That, supposedly, was what was going on today. As a result, Vijay—along with Meek and the other four strongarms Meek had rounded up for this job—was able to walk into the port yard without any hassle from the few listless secops. Vijay wouldn’t have thought much of it, except for Meek’s half-drunken revelations: The cargoes weren’t going to the normal ports on Market. Oh no, these were being stuffed into Habitat 3, until the thing had become a damn floating
ocean
. The
patri
was coming down hard on everyone, then that fuckless fool Kapa vanished, taking an entire registered ship with him, which meant the whole run was in danger of being postponed. The permissions had been
set for nearly a month, and Papa Dare did
not
like to have to rearrange his schedule. There were dozens of people in the fragmented, shifting morass that oversaw Dazzle’s port, and all of them had to be kept properly bribed, flattered, and fed. It took intense dedication to forge a chain that worked even once. Having to rearrange it would cause serious, and maybe permanent, delays.

Papa Dare evidently felt that time was an issue. Which made Vijay wonder what they were really loading into the ship today. You could stash all kinds of lethal items in a watertight container. If you filled a habitat with poison or disease, then dropped that habitat through a jump gate and into an inhabited system…

Papa Dare paid extra so his cargo was at least nominally secured behind one of the yard’s few walls. Vijay hung back as Meek presented the promissory and manifest to the hardeyed Clerk, one of a half dozen or so prowling the port’s interior. Vijay was the most visibly scarred, and the tallest of the strongarms. No point in presenting himself for closer inspection.

But the Clerk wasn’t interested in any of them yet. She ran her fingertips over the manifest as if checking for holes in the sheeting and handed it back to Meek with a nod.