Ruler of Naught (15 page)

Norio held the creature out for the crowd’s inspection. “The
medusoid of Empalla IV.” He smiled. “So named for its unique ability to turn
human flesh to something close to stone.”

Hreem looked down at the nullball paddles he was holding.
He’d planned a terrifying humiliation for Naigluf, followed by the public
spectacle of his withdrawal sickness, which he might even have survived. Past
that, Hreem hadn’t cared—Naigluf would be a reminder of the cost of crossing
Hreem whether he lived or died.

But Norio apparently wanted more. Hreem shrugged.
Tough
luck for Naigy.

Norio placed the creature carefully back in the box, held it
up against the hatch, and tripped the mechanism. A swarm of the black arachnids
burst out into the playing area, buzzing and fluttering wildly as they tried
to adapt to the unfamiliar lack of gravity. Some tried to cling to the netting
that enclosed them, but it was too fine and offered no purchase to their legs.

At a curt motion from Hreem the two men holding Naigluf
dragged him over to the large hatch and thrust him through. As the hatch
puckered closed, Hreem walked over and pushed two small nullball paddles
through at Naigluf.

“Here’s your weapons, Naigy. Give ‘em hell.”

The other Rifters roared with laughter as the skinny Rifter
flailed wildly with the paddles, looking like one of the silly speculations
about human-powered flight from the pre-tech age of Lost Earth. The hollow
popping of the vortexers began echoing through the gym, their blasts of air
setting Naigluf spinning.

Hreem glanced at Norio. The tempath was definitely trembling
now under the impact of the crowd’s emotions, his eyes dilated. Then the Rifter
captain felt the summons of his boswell, a priority-one from Dyasil. Alarm
flared: was Telvarna back already? Couldn’t be. He abandoned his own vortexer,
which was immediately grabbed by another Rifter, and got out of his seat.
(Yeah?)

Dyasil’s voice whispered urgently:
(Message from
Arthelion. We’re go for Malachronte.)

The yelling of the crowd and Naigluf’s frenzied screams
withdrew to background noise as the blood mounted in Hreem’s head. Malachronte!
The image of himself on the bridge of the
Maccabeus
possessed him once
again with an indescribable sense of well-being.

But this changed everything regarding Dis. He couldn’t
explain a decision to delay: if Barrodagh found out that the ship with the
Aerenarch and Omilov might be headed back to Charvann, he’d assign its
interception to Hreem and send someone else to Malachronte.

Well, he could head for Malachronte by way of Dis, and use
the same two-ship plan to make sure of the
Sunflame
, if it was there.
He’d leave Lignis there to wait for Vi’ya—no, he’d have to explain why
Hellrose
was posted fifty light minutes away from Charvann, unable to relay whatever
new information came up about Omilov and the whatsit Eusabian was after.
We’ll
leave a telltale.
After all, once he had the battlecruiser, he wouldn’t
have to worry about any of his many enemies, let alone some Dol’jharian bitch
in a Columbiad.

(Cap’n?)
came Dyasil’s voice.

(Get the crew on back on board. Tell Lignis to get his
crew back too, and stand by for orders.)
He flexed his boswell off.

One last thing to figure out: how to finesse this so Lignis
didn’t connect
Telvarna
with the Arthelion raid.
Better make sure he
just blasts them into plasma.
Too bad about the rewards.

Hreem felt Norio’s trembling hands upon his shoulders.
“Ahhh,” he said, wordless. “Ahhh, Jala.” The tempath’s eyes had rolled up into
their sockets—only the whites were visible.

Norio was off in his weird world of pain-boosted bliss. He
wouldn’t be able to walk in this state, so Hreem hauled his resistless arm over
his shoulder and got them both moving toward the exit. The trembling of Norio’s
body followed exactly the waves of sound from the crowd of excited Rifters,
punctuated by sudden jerks that matched the shrieks of agony from the slowly
dissolving Naigluf.

As they reached the exit, Hreem looked back. Naigluf was
still screaming, but only twitching ineffectually, for both his arms and most
of one leg had disintegrated as the bites of the medusoids turned them brittle,
and black pools of fester were spreading across his torso as the creatures fed
in arachnoid frenzy. The Highdwellers—those who hadn’t been dragged off by
Rifters for personal sport—huddled in abject terror, some watching in horrified
fascination, others tightly curled on the deck, their eyes squinched closed and
fingers in their ears.

Hreem laughed, feeling his pleasure resonate in the
shivering tempath.

Life was good.

o0o

“Engage,” Captain Margot Ng said.

The viewscreen blanked as the fiveskip hurled the
Grozniy
away from Schadenheim.

Ng gently tapped her fingers one by one on the arm of her
pod. Treymontaigne and Schadenheim were unusually close to each other, as
distances went in the Thousand Suns, but the eighteen hours until they arrived
would be long ones.

And it’ll all be over when we get there, most likely.

She looked around the bridge. The new alpha crew had turned
out well, so far. They’d handled the excitement at Wolakota beautifully, and as
far as she could tell, had accepted cheerfully her decision to go to General
Quarters before emergence at Schadenheim, which put the senior crew instead on
the bridge for the anticlimactic emergence.

There’d been no sign of Rifter activity at Schadenheim. She
smiled, remembering the disappointment of the Archon there.
They really are
a bloody-minded bunch.
Eichelly had probably made the right choice, even if
Harimoto did rip him up at Treymontaigne.

But that made her next decision an easy one. The alpha crew
was at the end of their watch. Normal rotation would bring them back up for
emergence at Treymontaigne; they’d have had full tween, rec, and a Z-watch to
recover. It was unlikely they’d have anything to do except watch
Prahbu
Shiva’s
tactical recordings.

She was distracted when Ammant’s shoulders tightened. His
head turned—he really was distractingly beautiful—and he spoke, the bridge
cadence almost hiding his obvious curiosity. “Captain, the discriminators have
turned up a message for you in the downloads from Schadenheim. En clair.”

“Relay it, please,” Ng said.

Words appeared on her console.
This worm-casting turned
up for you in the DataNet at our last call, some more data on your port
wriggles. I’m shortcutting it to you, but I hope it doesn’t help. Six months to
go on our bet, Broadside!
A glyph indicated an encrypted attachment, and it
was signed “Metellus Hayashi.”

Tenderness bubbled up behind her ribs and forced its way out
in a chuckle. She caught heightened attention from the crew and decided to
satisfy at least part of their curiosity, and perhaps help Rom-Sanchez deal a
bit better with his own distraction.

“A friend warning me that he’s about to win a bet we’ve had
for a very long time.” She glanced around. “Any of you know what a port wriggle
is?”

No one did of course, but she caught a quick look passing
between Rom-Sanchez and the irrepressible Wychyrski at the next console. When
she let them catch the direction of her gaze they turned obediently back to
their tasks, but she knew they’d be speculating later.

o0o

Sebastian Omilov looked up with a smile and set his book
aside as his son entered the little dispensary berth. Mild alarm kindled at the
furtive look on Osri’s face. For the first time, Montrose had not accompanied
him.

“Father, I’ve found something I think you ought to know. Look
at this.”

Osri reached to touch a key on the med console. With a few
swift strokes, he windowed up a physician’s cachet
.
For a neurosurgeon,
Omilov saw.

Osri brought up another cachet, from the Apanaush
Gastronomie on Golgol. The name was encrypted on both, but that was not what
caught Omilov’s attention.

“The seal of Timberwell,” he said, surprised. “On both of
them.” He touched the zoom.

Osri grimaced. “Exactly,” he said with distaste.“Now
a Rifter.”

Another symptom of the rot beneath the glory.
Timberwell had expelled its Archon, in spite of the fact that the Srivashti
family was extremely powerful, but after the departure of the government the
insurgents had instituted a reign of terror, earning a Class Two quarantine in
the process. Osri obviously suspected Montrose of republican sympathies, but
Omilov had already sensed that if the man had ever been interested in politics,
it was dead to him now.

“A surgeon and a chef,” Omilov mused, attempting a
deflection, though he knew it was unlikely to succeed. “Montrose is a remarkable
man. I do know he has a collection of opera chips, and he is one of the few
people I have ever met who knows the game chess, though of course we have yet
to play.”

“There can’t be too many ex-Timberwell Douloi with those
qualifications,” Osri continued as if Omilov hadn’t spoken. “His accent and
mode of speech identify him as coming from the Ranks of Service. My mother
would know... she would also know if there was some sort of scandal—” Osri
stopped, and shook his head wryly. “But you’re about to tell me how much you
hate gossip, aren’t you?”

Omilov cleared the screen with care, considering several
things he might say. Circumstances had effectively cut him off from Brandon. He
did not want to lose Osri as well.

“I am about to say,” Omilov murmured, “that the ease with
which you found those, and that you were allowed to show them to me, probably
indicates that you were meant to.” Omilov considered how he might tell Osri of
the slowly growing sympathy he was discovering with Montrose, whom he was
beginning to suspect was one of the most cultured men he’d ever met despite his
rough exterior. He suspected that this “discovery” was simply a way for
Montrose to share a bit more information with him without inviting further
questions

“Maybe he wants reinstatement,” Osri said. “As if that would
happen, after helping loot the palace. I think—“

Omilov’s suspicion was confirmed when the big Rifter’s
booming voice interrupted Osri.

“I wondered why Sebastian’s vital signs had spiked.”

Osri’s face paled.

“I’ll not have you worrying my patient into a relapse.
You’ve got free time now, Lieutenant. Use it somewhere else.”

The use of his naval rank obviously flustered Osri—Omilov
suspected it was the first time he’d heard it from any of the Rifters—and he
left with a mumbled apology, mostly directed at his father.

Montrose fussed over Omilov for a few minutes, speaking only
of medical matters, and then left without any further comment.

But he left the console on.

o0o

Osri Omilov opened the hatch to the cabin he shared with
Brandon. As expected, it was empty. The Aerenarch went out of his way to avoid
private encounters with him.

Still shaken by the sudden appearance of Montrose in the
dispensary when he’d though him asleep, Osri cast aimlessly for something to
do. Checking the hatch lock once more, he stooped over the console and
awkwardly pried up the cover of one of the inset lights above it with his nail.
Inside, snugly set, were two objects: one, a bloodstained silk ribbon; the
other was the warm silver shape of the Lost Earth Tetradrachm.

He sank down onto his bunk and examined them both.

The coin he’d learned about on his first visit to Arthelion,
accompanying his father, when he was ten years old. He’d toured the Ivory Hall
as his father explained the artifacts there. The thing was impossibly ancient,
one of a kind.

The date on the piloting ribbon was 955, ten years ago. Osri
knew who had won the medal. He’d stood there at the award ceremony when it was
pinned on Markham vlith-L’Ranja, just months before the swift, terrible events
that saw Markham cashiered and Brandon nyr-Arkad removed from the Academy,
supposedly for the unauthorized use of atmospheric craft in war games over the
southern continent, but everyone knew it was for cheating.

Everyone knew. Osri turned the medal over. If Brandon was to
be believed, that rumor was false. Osri was quick to dismiss his words—of
course Brandon would deny cheating. And the rumor had been passed by some very
high-ranking names. On the other hand, though Brandon was irritating,
irresponsible, utterly lacking in discipline or even a sense of the dignity
that should be part of his duty as an Arkad, Osri had to admit that he had
never been a liar.

But there was no one to ask. No one in the navy would talk
about the incident. Markham had disappeared. His father, the Archon of Lusor,
had committed suicide. Osri’s own father had retired from active service, acting
for the next ten years as if his life in court had never taken place.

Osri had long ago come to terms with these events, believing
them unrelated. He could not believe that the false rumor was a conspiracy
cooked up by none other than the Aerenarch Semion vlith-Arkad, against his own
brother and the L’Ranja heir. It made no sense—it sounded like one of the jokes
in questionable taste that Brandon and his brother Galen had been so fond of.

What galled Osri was his recent discovery that his own
father, the most loyal man Osri had ever known, had considered the Aerenarch
Semion culpable in all these events.

Osri crushed the silk in his hand, recalling Ivard being
carried aboard the
Telvarna
, his arms dangling over Montrose’s massive
shoulder, and the two objects falling from a pocket onto the deck.

Markham might have given the boy the flight ribbon, for
whatever reason; the coin, though, had been looted from the Ivory chamber, an
act of violation that made him furious.