Context (102 page)

She
shrank back as a Zajinet passed. It might have been muttering threats:

<<... ephemeral segment...>>

<<... most linear shard ...>>

<<... blind and
dark-burrowing ...>>

<<... begone...>>

Then, as she moved back onto the
metal pavement, Anita and Oron slipped out of sight. But they no longer
mattered, now that the disk was resonating with the target signature.

Very close now.

Following the trace, Ro slipped
inside a grey moving structure, something like a Roman villa formed of lead,
and at its centre two partially uncloaked Zajinets—fiery tracery blazing as
their stone-like exteriors came apart, then coalesced once more—hovered, with
the air between them beginning to burn.

Like awed children, Anita and
Oron sat off to one side, watching.

‘No, you can’t—’

Anita’s voice, but Ro was already
moving.

For you, Luís.

Were they mating?

Air crackling now, as she moved
closer. The Zajinets glowed, and there was a current of some sort in the air.

‘Not now! They’re re-forming.’
Anita was on her feet, hands outstretched as though to push back Ro.

‘It’s a new being!’ Oron was
struggling to get up. ‘You don’t know—’

A rebirth? A metamorphosis? Many
beings change radically, make transitions from one life-stage to another...

Should that remove the guilt?

Closer.

Then the external forms came
apart, and she was in a blizzard of whirling stones, every one flying with
deadly momentum, and she squinted against the blazing inner forms as she moved,
blending and avoiding, working by instinct—
irimi:
seeking the hurricane’s
centre, the eye of the storm—and then she was in the midst of blazing
waveforms, spiking and burning and glowing with reinforced energies.

Patterns.

Needing to make sense of...

She recognized the second Zajinet
now. It was the renegade’s accuser, the one which had gone up against it in the
trial. But why—?

There.
The pattern flicked into view, a
visual paradox resolved—
now—
then she took her chance and struck.

Light flowed like liquid flames.

For Luís.

Her hands burned and she cried
out, dropping the copper shaft, but a blackness was already rippling across the
Zajinet’s blue/red fire.

Done it.

Then they were two distinct forms
again, stones snapping back into protective body-form, and they dropped to the
floor and remained still, two elephantine sculpture-piles built of charred
pebbles and boulders.

‘Oh, Ro. What have you done?’

<>

~ * ~

56

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422—

Four
more tendays he spent in a coma, floating in an autodoc’s womb, flooded with
nutrients and tranquillizers, muscles contracting against viscous fluid—stimulated
involuntarily—in an effort to rebuild them.

Slowly, slowly, mind and body
knitted together.

Healed...

In the early days of his waking
convalescence, therapists and counsellors tried to work with the deeper wounds,
until he raged at them and they were made—under Corduven’s direct orders, Tom
later learned—to leave him in uneasy peace.

Whatever Tom was becoming, or had
become—he knew the darkness in his own spirit—it was nourished on hatred. And
he wanted nothing more than to be a weapon, directed by Corduven to wherever it
would do most damage to the hated Enemy’s cause.

But it would be nearly year’s end
before they sent him out again.

The
day after his final debriefing, he had dinner with Sylvana. The conversation
was of intelligence matters: she was part of Corduven’s strategy team, most of
whom considered Tom’s mission a striking success, despite the human cost.

He wondered how Velsivith’s widow
was coping.

Sylvana seemed easy in Tom’s
company. But at the meal’s end, when he leaned forward to chastely kiss her
cheek in farewell, she flinched.

That told him everything he
needed to know about their relationship.

‘Take care, my Lady.’

He watched her walk away, along a
rose-pink marble gallery, followed by a small retinue of servitors clad in
ivory and black. They were colours he himself had worn for too many years.

At
the new, relocated Academy, he trained decryption teams, helped design
idiom-level eavesdropping AIs (Turing-capable and therefore illegal, but this
was wartime), brainstormed organizational cell structures and messaging paths
for penetration agents sent in to liaise with partisan resistance fighters.

And he trained hard, waiting for
the day they would send him back into the field.

But his debriefing had been very
thorough, and not all of it had been conducted while he was conscious. There
were forces at work on his behalf, which he was not aware of until the night a
clap sounded from outside his modest quarters, and when he waved open the
membrane-door it was Adam Gervicort, his former servitor now in military
uniform, who was standing in the corridor outside.

‘Adam? What are you doing here?
It’s good to—’

But Adam sketched a bow, then
quickly handed over a crystal.

‘It’s from High Command, sir.
Tom. From Brigadier-General d’Ovraison himself.’

Tom had scarcely seen Corduven
since his return.

‘Wants to see me now, does he?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Looking back at his
crystal-strewn desk: ‘Well, I could—’

‘I was told to say, it concerns a
certain security chief. She’s been located, alive and well.’

Elva!

The world whirled all around him,
and he had to grab at the doorjamb for support.

Elva’s alive, and they’ve found
her.

~ * ~

43

BETA
DRACONIS III AD 2143