Cat and Company (31 page)

“She’s babbling,” Brant breathed.

“Who was he?” Bedivere said.

“Your favorite enemy, Bedivere X. Devlin Woodward is Kare Sarkisian.”

Mehtap Mining Colony, Velorum II, Velorum System. FY 10.187

“Kare Sarkisian!” Connell breathed, shock stealing his voice.

“Shut up, Connell,” Brant said quickly.

“Sarkisian died, out in the Silent Sector,” Bedivere said.

“He did,” Akira confirmed. “Only he didn’t die instantly and there was a medic out there on his ship who had just enough skill to preserve his memories and personality in the ship’s datacore. Then he followed Sarkisian’s last instructions and brought that psyche back to known space and gave it to Nephele, along with Sarkisian’s instructions. It took ten years to reach the next gate and in that time, all trails of Sarkisian led into the Silent Sector and now there was no trace of his return.”

“Wait, why didn’t they use the Last Gate?” Connell demanded. “Why the next gate along?”

Akira didn’t look at him. “Sarkisian destroyed the Last Gate before he died. It’s what killed him, you might say. His ship was caught in the space rip it caused and he was mortally injured.”

“
Sarkisian
destroyed the gate?” Brant said, sounding winded. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Nephele didn’t tell me. I don’t think she knew, either. She only had the instructions Sarkisian had left her and the medic’s ramblings. She killed the medic too quickly, if you ask me, but she didn’t ask. She just followed instructions.” Akira shrugged.

“You knew her well,” Bedivere said. “Well enough for her to trust you to do the transfer and not talk about it.”

“We were lovers,” Akira said flatly. “All that bought me was time, though.”

“Time to run,” Bedivere interpreted. “Sarkisian—Devlin—killed Nephele once he was in his new body.”

“Devlin doesn’t do his own deeds,” Akira said, “or I’d have been dead a long time ago. He keeps his hands very, very clean. The day after I finished the procedure, the lab was destroyed by an angry mob who had been protesting over the College science research and technology capabilities. Everything was destroyed, including the lab’s datacore, which conveniently hadn’t been backed up to the central core.”

“That’s what made you run?”

“Finding Nephele’s body is what made me run.” Akira’s mouth turned down. “The destruction of the lab just confirmed my decision. I was already gone by then.”

“And you’ve been running for nine decades,” Bedivere finished.

Akira laughed at him. It was a strained sound. “So have you, tin man.”

Brant stiffened and glanced at him.

Bedivere frowned. “Me?”

“I told you he stays clean. Clean and distant. Except he couldn’t stay away from
her
. He lasted thirty years, then he moved to Charlton where she was. That’s when he stepped up his program, Varkan. A nudge here, a victory there. Implications and gestures. Sarkisian spent fifteen generations manipulating his Federation council and they were all politicians. You were easy in comparison.”

Bedivere struggled to keep his breathing even, to not show his shock. She was trying to unsettle him, to make him feel inadequate, to win back power for herself. He couldn’t afford to show any vulnerability.

“Wait, you’re saying that he’s been twisting Bedivere around for
ninety years
?” Connell said.

“His greatest achievement,” Akira said, her voice drier than even Brant had ever managed. “He got you to push her at him, to let her go and think it was all your own idea. And so did she.”

Bedivere gave up on hiding his reactions. It was too monstrous. It was overwhelming. Only, Akira wasn’t finished with him yet. “Who do you think dangled all those no-ask contracts in front of you, leading you on a tether down into places like this one? Who do you think got you hooked on Darzi and made sure each contract you were offered was just a little bit more dangerous and high risk than the last one?”

Brant’s hand settled on Bedivere’s shoulder and he nearly jumped in shock. “Lilly has always maintained that someone arranged all your bad luck for you.”

“Why didn’t he just kill me?” he demanded.

“You can’t kill the Varkan,” Akira replied. “Not any more. You can’t kill humans either, not unless you destroy their memories and psyche and find every single mule farm and destroy those, too. He didn’t have to do that, though. He didn’t have to go nearly that far. All he had to do was discredit you, make you look so pathetic and paranoid and delusional that
nothing
you said would be believed, even if you pointed directly at him and called him by his real name. With you crawling around the ass end of the known worlds begging for your next dose, he would be free to get what he wanted.”

Bedivere’s gut squeezed. His heart, too. “Catherine,” he breathed.

“I hear she’s his executive officer, now.” Akira smiled nastily. “And you…you’re shuttling refugees and sleeping off your crawling heebies when they bite you, which they do every time you see her with him, don’t they?”

“Now I wish she’d just shut up,” Connell muttered. “I feel sick.”

There was a flat, cracking sound, followed by glass tinkling musically and wetly.

Akira grunted and fell back on the pad and lay still.

Bedivere dived to the ground. “
Get down
!”

Brant grabbed at his arm, almost tearing the sleeve of his jacket off. “No! Run! We can’t get pinned down.”

“How can they get through?” Connell cried. “The building is shielded!”

More shots fired, coming close to them and making whining sounds as they ricocheted off the floor.

“Percussion bullets!” Bedivere cried. “Run!”

“The equipment…!” Connell cried, scrambling back to his feet.

“Leave it. Back to the ship. Let’s go!”

* * * * *

They scrambled through a darkness for which there was not even moonlight to help show them the way. The rain had stopped and a cold wind blew across the wet ground and straight through their clothes. They were exhaling hot misty breaths into the night as they ran and dodged, and they were gasping hard because the oxygen was so thin.

Behind them, their pursuers were scrambling as they were. Every now and again, someone fired a shot at them, the old-fashioned bullets cracking through the crisp air and echoing off the bare hills around them. The cold wind was ruining their aim. If they had conventional weapons, like rattlers, the wind wouldn’t have made a difference.

Connell slipped and staggered and Bedivere hauled him back onto his feet.

“Dizzy,” Connell muttered.

“Oxygen deprivation,” Brant said. It took him two breaths to say it. “Think it’s time you did your thing, Bedivere.”

Bedivere handed Connell to Brant, who helped him stand up. He concentrated on reaching out to the
Aliza
and inserting himself into the systems and snapping them out of ready mode and into active status.

“Hurry,” Brant urged him. “I don’t have a single weapon on me.”

He didn’t respond. He was too busy flying the ship.

The sound of the big engines boomed across the hills, rolling like thunder. Even the ground vibrated. The
Aliza
could navigate through atmosphere, but it was an interstellar ship and the power of the engines matched that capability.

The glow of the engines lit up the night.

“They’ll pick us out against that!” Brant shouted, over the sound of the engines.

“If they fire, I’ll see them,” Bedivere muttered.

Connell flinched as a shot whined off the ground next to them. It was exactly what Bedivere had been waiting for. He saw the muzzle flash in the dark and used it as a location beacon and fired the particle beam…a narrow, sharply focused shot.

Seventy meters away, the ground lit up like sunrise, the water evaporating instantly and the dirt burning and fusing itself into instant glass.

Two seconds was enough. He turned it off.

Silence, except for the whistling wind.

“All aboard,” he said and brought the ship over to where they were standing, close enough so that all they had to do was climb up onto the lower step of the gangway.

* * * * *

Bedivere didn’t have to worry about sneaking out of the star system the way he had stolen into it. He blasted off the surface at full power, leaving behind a supersonic boom that would rattle the teeth of anyone nearby, and leapt for the outer atmosphere.

As soon as the atmosphere stopped dragging at the hull, he jumped.

“That’s not Charlton,” Connell said from the navigator’s chair as the star field reformed in front of them.

Bedivere turned his chair away from the dash, so that he could see both of them. Brant stood behind the defense console, checking the monitors and feeds. He looked up as Bedivere swiveled. “You need time to regroup,” he guessed.

Bedivere rubbed at his temples. “It’s a lot to take in and I don’t think we have the luxury of time to analyses it down to the last pixel. I just need to breathe for a minute.”

He really did. There was a knot loosening in his chest that had been sitting coiled into white-knuckled tightness for months. No, years. For the first time in a very long time he felt as though he could take a full breath and not choke on it.

Connell spun his chair so they were all facing each other across the flight deck. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Why would Sarkisian destroy the Last Gate? Of all the people who might have done it, all the theories over the years, no one has ever suggested it could have been him. He’s a boardroom warrior and everything he did after that was to further his ambitions. Destroying the Last Gate…that doesn’t fit the pattern.”

“It does if you’re thinking very, very long-term,” Bedivere said.

“Everything he’s done since then says he was thinking in centuries, not years,” Brant said, in agreement.

“Then, why?” Connell demanded.

Bedivere looked at Brant. Brant shrugged. “The Periglus, of course.”

Connell stared at him. “They came out of the Silent Sector…”

“We always theorized Sarkisian ran to the Silent Sector when his deal with the Soward Cartel was revealed,” Bedivere said, “and something destroyed Griswold and everything on it, five years before the Gate was lost.”

“Sarkisian has known about the Periglus all along. He learned about them in the Silent Sector,” Connell concluded. “Then he destroyed the gate…to slow them down?”

“And to give himself time,” Brant added.

“Time for what?”

“To set himself up as a champion of the Varkan,” Bedivere said. “He knew the legacy gate system was compromised, that the Periglus stole useful technology they came across. Of course they were going to use the gates. The gates fold space for anyone who uses them. Sarkisian is used to thinking long-term and he could see a time ahead when the Periglus would reach the settled worlds and we would be forced to destroy
all
the gates. Once that happened, the Varkan would be the key to interstellar travel. Anyone with a stake in their success would benefit in a big way.”

Connell was staring at him again.

Brant looked unhappy.

Bedivere shrugged. “He thinks long-term,” he repeated.

“He’s trying to set up another Federation-style monopoly that he holds all the strings to,” Brant said, sounding disgusted.

Bedivere turned back to the dashboard. “Let’s go home.”

“Where he’ll be waiting,” Connell said darkly.

“Good,” Bedivere said. “I’m sick of running.”

Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187

“The next time you go off the grid, you have to tell me!” Lilly railed via the screen as soon as Bedivere settled the
Aliza
on the landing pad. “I’ve been holding things together here by the skin of my teeth! Get back to the suite right
now
!”

“What’s happened?” Brant asked her quickly.

“This conduit is not secure. Use the back tunnels,” she said shortly and cut the connection.

Brant glanced at him. Bedivere connected with the city systems and straightened in his chair. “Oh…Glave save us. He didn’t wait a single minute.” He pushed out of the chair.

“Hell and damnation,” Connell muttered as he got to his feet, too. “They’ll lynch us if we go out in public anywhere.”

“That’s why we have to use the back tunnels. No wonder Lilly is in such a flap,” Bedivere said.

“I’m not wired in, you two! Talk to me!” Brant demanded stridently.

“As we walk,” Bedivere told him, waving him toward the entrance to the flight deck.

“Or run,” Connell said, his voice low.

They stepped off the ship and Bedivere paused to seal it up tight, taking his time over it and activating all the passive and active shields and security. He didn’t trust anyone in Charlton right now.

Then he headed for the docking bay door, moving quickly. Connell and Brant kept up with him. “The meeting on the
Hana
just before we left for Mehtap,” he said.

“We were there,” Brant reminded him.

“Not afterward, when Catherine confronted me and screamed at me to stay away from her.”

Connell sucked in his breath.

“A ruse?” Brant said. “To deflect any suspicions?”

Bedivere nodded.

“You told her,” Brant said flatly, sounding disapproving.

“I warned her, that was all. She put the rest together for herself. The public screaming was a way of distancing herself from me.”

Connell had his head down as he strode. Then he lifted it sharply. “She mentioned the Darzi. Hell on wheels, Bedivere. He’s using it to make you look like a delusional addict. The clip is everywhere.”

“I
am
an addict,” Bedivere said. “But I know I’m not delusional. Not anymore.”

“Why expose you like that? What does he get out of it?” Brant said. “There’s no political mileage. You’re not a political figure and you never have been.”

“It puts Catherine publically in his camp,” Bedivere pointed out. “He’s pulling up the drawbridge.”

“He’s what?” Brant said.

“Even I had to reach for that one,” Connell complained. “He means he’s setting up his defenses for a battle.”