The Thirteenth Man (25 page)

On Turnlee, Charlie had had one of Nano's crewmen deliver a simple message to her asking her to meet him at this time and these coordinates, and other than signing it
Edwin Chevard, Free Aagerbanni Resistance
, it gave no other details. “I thought we should talk, Your Grace.”

“Don't you fear that I'll take you captive and turn you over to Goutain?”

“A mutual friend told me I could trust you if you gave me the word of House de Vena. The same friend told me you might be interested in . . . comparing notes on the present Aagerbanni situation.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And this mutual friend?”

He smiled. “Would prefer to remain anonymous, at least for the time being. But he did tell me that my enemies are also yours.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then said, “Yes. Perhaps we should meet in person. May I entertain you on board my ship?” She didn't want to leave the safety of her own ship.

“You would have me subject to your overwhelming force? And what assurance do I have from you regarding my ship, my person, and that of my ­people?”

“To be clear, you had no such assurances when you came out here, and you're already outgunned by my ships. And yet you came anyway, showing that you have a semblance of trust in my response.” She regarded him carefully for several seconds, then said, “But I understand your reticence. So I will say this: Mr. Chevard, as long as you come unarmed, and take no hostile action, you and your retinue will be treated with the utmost respect while you are my guest. You'll be scanned, but only to ensure that you're not armed. You'll not be otherwise interrogated or held against your will. You'll be allowed to depart at any time you so choose, and given a five-­light-­year head start to prevent pursuit. On this, you have my personal word, and that of House de Vena.”

He smiled at the plump little woman. “I look forward to our meeting.”

“S
he's disappeared,” Dieter shouted. “Completely disappeared. She and that Carristan woman.”

“Calm down,” Nadama said tiredly. He was in no mood to deal with his son's hysteria. He poured himself a stiff drink, then poured one for Dieter as well. “Here,” he said, handing it to him. “Drink that. It'll calm you.”

“I don't want to calm down.” He tossed the drink down in a gulp. “How dare she defy me this way?”

“I take it you had an argument?”

“Yes,” Dieter said, lowering his eyes like a chastened child.

Dieter had a hot temper combined with a vicious streak that could create problems. “Did you strike her?”

Dieter raised his eyes and looked Nadama in the face. “No.”

He was probably telling the truth, but certainly not all of it. “Good, but be very careful. Keep that temper of yours in check until after you're married. Then you can do what you please with her, as long as you don't kill her.”

“But she's gone.”

“Not for long. Where can she go? Perhaps to some distant relative. We'll just quietly make it known that anyone who harbors her will suffer considerably. And after a few tendays we'll hear from whoever it is. We'll give them a little reward and reel her back in.”

At moments like this Dieter took on an almost inhuman appearance. “I'm going to kill that Carristan woman, though.”

 

CHAPTER 24

OVERLORD

O
n his way back to Starfall Charlie stopped briefly at Andyne-­Borregga. The transformation that had occurred during his absence was amazing. Roger and Momma Toofat had opened up a large promenade with restaurants, bars, and shops. At present, the shops provided mostly functional supplies and a few luxuries for spacers, the restaurants tended toward simple fare, and the bars provided mostly booze, gambling, and girls. Momma Toofat assured him that, as time progressed and more commerce showed up, all the establishments would attend to more than just the needs of transient spacers. As it was, with warships from the Free Aagerbanni Resistance making extensive use of the new shipyards, and with ships from Istanna, Finalsa, Toellan, Terranzalbo, Allison's Cluster, and the Scorpo Systems all taking advantage of Andyne-­Borregga's free port status for gunrunning and other smuggling efforts, Roger told him the station might soon be operating at a profit. Charlie didn't want to damp Roger's enthusiasm so he didn't tell him that wasn't good enough. Even a slight negative operating margin was draining his finances rapidly.

Charlie also learned that ships from the independent states were surreptitiously supporting the Free Aagerbanni Resistance, frequently in direct confrontations. The more they hindered the consolidation of Aagerbanne, the longer it would take Lucius and Goutain to look for their next target. The resistance was slowly heating up into a real shooting war. Certainly more headaches for Lucius and Goutain, but Charlie feared that it was heating up too fast.

He didn't stay on Andyne-­Borregga for long—­in fact he only had time to sit briefly with Arthur—­but left and hurried quickly back to Luna. He needed to be there when Del showed up.

“Where are we?” Charlie heard Carristan say angrily in the reception area outside his office. “This isn't Aagerbanne. Where have you taken us?”

“Just a brief stop,” Nano said. “Come. Please.”

Carristan had approached Nano under the pretense that Del was nothing more than the noblewoman's servant.

For Edwin Chevard, Charlie had selected a large administrative office in an isolated wing of Starfall on Luna. He had activated it and staffed it with only the most trusted servants and guards. Nano and the guards Charlie had assigned to the two women for their journey had made sure that Carristan and Delilah never got an exterior view, merely the inside of a ship, then the inside of a hangar, then the inside of a maze of corridors. And the rooms Charlie had had prepared for them had no exterior views. Charlie thought he could probably trust Del, but he still didn't know if he could trust Carristan. And Roacka and Winston constantly reminded him that any knowledge of his covert activities should remain on a need-­to-­know basis, and that even Del did not
need to know
.

The door opened and Nano ushered the two women into the office. Charlie wore the visual distortion field that produced the Edwin Chevard appearance. When Carristan saw him seated behind the desk, she halted abruptly, and swallowed an angry retort. Behind her Delilah stepped into the room, doing a good job of pretending to be the meek servant.

Charlie stood and stepped around the desk. He felt like a schoolboy about to ask a girl on a date for the first time. “Your Ladyship,” he said to Carristan, the programmable implant distorting his voice.

“Who are you?” Carristan demanded.

Charlie tried to smile warmly, hoping to alleviate some of her fear. “I'm Edwin Chevard.”

“What do you want? Do you intend us harm? My girl here . . .” She waved a hand at Delilah. “ . . . is just a servant. Let her go. I'm sure you have no need of kidnapping a mere servant.”

Charlie looked at Delilah as he spoke. “Oh no, Lady Carristan, we have no need of a servant. However, we do find it advantageous to kidnap Her Royal Highness.” Charlie bowed deeply to Delilah.

Carristan gasped and tried to deny it. To Del's credit, she didn't react in any way, but looked Charlie in the eyes and considered him carefully. She thought the situation over for a few moments, then slowly squared her shoulders. The servant disappeared and the royal princess emerged. “Carristan, my dear, please,” she said. “I think there's no use denying it. Mr. Chevard is clearly well-­informed.”

“We intend you no harm,” Charlie said, looking only at Del. “My ­people will protect you with their lives. You'll be housed, clothed, and fed, and treated as befits your station. Unfortunately, you cannot leave. We support the Free Aagerbanni Resistance here, and the windfall of your captivity is . . . a boon to our efforts, shall we say?”

Del's eyes narrowed, and Charlie wondered if his disguise was as good as he thought. “For the record, Mr. Chevard,” she said, “I did not support my father's ambitions. I did not support his alliance with Syndon, nor the annexation of Aagerbanne.”

“I'm well aware of that, Your Highness. But you must be aware that your support either way is irrelevant. Your presence here as a hostage, however, is quite relevant to our cause.”

Charlie turned to Nano. “Captain Neverlose, please see Her Highness and Lady Carristan to their quarters. And see to it that they're under guard and protected at all times.”

“Will do,” Nano said. He opened the door and held it for the two women.

Delilah turned, walked to the door, paused on the threshold, and turned back, looked suspiciously from Charlie to Nano. To Nano she said, “I think we've met before.”

Nano shook his head. “No, never met.”

She smiled, clearly not convinced. She looked again from him to Charlie, then turned and left the room.

C
harlie woke in the middle of the night needing to piss badly, staggered tiredly into the fresher, and relieved himself. As he returned to bed he paused at the small dressing table on which lay the computer tablet and the ornate dagger. His last visit to the blind corridor haunted almost every waking moment, and many of his sleeping moments too. He'd racked his brains a hundred times trying to understand why it had failed to respond to his presence.

He threw the switch on the computer tablet, watched the internal map of Starfall appear on its small screen. He stared at the display for several seconds, knew for a fact he'd missed something important, but what? He switched the tablet off, crossed the room to his bed, and sat on its edge staring at the tablet. And the dagger; he stared at that too. He wondered why his eyes kept returning to the dagger, just an ornate piece of junk. He'd suspected it was the overlord key, but that had turned out to be wrong. Cesare had told Paul it was important, so Charlie had never let it out of his sight, stuffing it into a pocket each morning, and putting it on the dresser each night before going to bed. He tried to recall the last time he'd gone down there. He remembered getting up, throwing on the robe, and going down to the blind corridor. He'd done nothing different—­except he hadn't taken the dagger. “Shit,” he shouted, jumped to his feet, ran across the room, and swept up the dagger and the comp tablet. He ran out of his room in his underwear, swearing, “Shit, shit, shit!”

Ell sat up on the couch where she'd been sleeping and jumped to her feet, a startled look on her face. She followed him out into the corridor where he dodged cleaning bots that only came out at night. Charging down to the lower floors, he took steps three at a time in a headlong dash. He stopped just outside the blind corridor, and Ell stopped beside him.

“What are you doing, little brother?”

“I'm not sure,” he said.

He held the dagger in his right hand with the comp tablet in his left displaying the interior map of Starfall. He extended his right arm so the dagger passed into the blind corridor, and the corridor suddenly appeared on the map. He pulled the dagger back out of the corridor, and it disappeared. In, out, in, out, he waved the dagger back and forth, watching the corridor appear and disappear on the map. All along it had been the dagger that triggered the appearance of the corridor on the map, not him. With the exception of that one time he'd always had it stuffed in a pocket.

He sat down on the floor in the corridor with his back to a wall and put the tablet aside, then examined the dagger carefully. The overlord key, it had to be, but again he found nothing to indicate it was anything more than a cheap, decorative blade.

Standing over him, Ell asked, “What is it? What's bothering you?”

He looked up at her and said, “The overlord key, I need—­”

He stopped in midsentence as her eyelids fluttered and her mouth opened. In a trancelike state, she stared at nothing for several seconds. When the moment ended, she looked down at him and took a step back. Then she subvocalized into her implants, “Add, get down here right away.”

“What's wrong?” he asked.

She ignored him as she told Add their location. In a matter of seconds a breathless and half-­dressed Add came running down the corridor and stopped beside Ell. She asked the same question Charlie had. “What's wrong?”

Ell looked at Charlie and said, “Say it to her. She has to hear it in your voice for the implant programming to kick in.”

“Say what?”

“What you said to me a moment ago about the key.”

“The overlord key?”

Those words had the same effect on Add as they'd had on Ell: the eyelids fluttering, the trancelike state that lasted for only a moment. When Add regained her composure she looked down at Charlie, held out her hand, and said, “May I have the dagger, little brother?”

Charlie extended the hilt up to her. She took it, looked at it for a moment, then pressed the sharp edge of the blade to the back of her hand and made a small cut there. She handed the blade to Ell, who then cut the back of her hand. Both cuts weren't deep, and began healing rapidly due to the genes engineered into the twins' ancestors.

“DNA lock,” Ell said as she handed the dagger to Charlie.

He noticed two red smears on the blade's edge. It wasn't a terribly large blade, about the length of his middle finger, hilt the same. As he looked at it, the blade and hilt came apart with a click. There was no hidden compartment, no secret documents that would lead him to concealed wealth and power, but the connection between the two was an odd sort of plug-­and-­socket type of arrangement.

C
harlie rushed up to the security center with the twins on his heels. He sat down at the security commander's station and examined it, looking for an interface that would mate with the dagger. He saw nothing visible, so he put the dagger down and ran his hands over the surface of the station.

“I'm looking for a visual distortion field,” he told the twins. “Help me.”

He repeated the process at the other stations. Again nothing. Eventually he and the twins ran their hands over every inch of the security center, every station, console, the floors and walls. They even stood on the consoles and ran their hands over the ceiling. Nothing.

“Computer,” he said. “Define the overlord interface.”

“This system does not recognize the reference to
overlord interface
.”

He needed to try a different approach. “Computer, define all references to overlord.”

“
Overlord
is undefined in this system.”

“Damn!”

Dagger in hand, he headed back down to the blind corridor. With the twins standing in the hallway outside it, he stood facing the featureless wall with the visual distortion field. “Cesare,” he said, “where is it? What are you hiding? What are you trying to tell me?”

Driven by pure desperation, he laid the dagger on the floor since he had no pockets in his underwear, walked up to the wall, and pressed his hands against it about shoulder high. His hands again appeared to sink into the stone up to the wrists. Something had changed, he realized, something subtle. Perhaps the texture of the wall, perhaps it was ever so slightly different than before, though still featureless and blank.

He started at the top and ran his hands from left to right, dropped his hands down one hand span, dragged them along the wall right to left. Methodically, he repeated the process, slowly working his way down the wall, careful to miss nothing. He was more than halfway down, about waist high, when he found it: two indentations that he could feel, that he was certain hadn't been there when he'd done this once before. That had been before he'd inserted the three cyberkeys into their sockets in the security center.

Two indentations. The visual distortion field hid them from view, and he couldn't really determine any fine detail with his fingers so he had to go on instinct. He picked up the two pieces of the dagger and, going by touch, brought the hilt up to one of the indentations, hoping he could insert it in some way, careful not to force it since he couldn't see what he was doing. Again, nothing.

He moved the hilt to the other indentation, felt a mild pull on it like two magnets attracting one another, carefully let the pull guide his hand. Just before it made contact the pull twisted the dagger slightly, and when it touched the indentation it locked there with a solid click. He tested it, tugged on it, and couldn't remove it.

He lifted the dagger's blade, brought it to the other indentation, felt the same pull, the same guiding twist at the last moment, and it too snapped into place with a click. The visual distortion field disappeared, and the hilt and blade now protruded visibly from the otherwise featureless wall. But nothing else happened. He waited, and still nothing. “Damn it, Cesare. What am I supposed to do?”

He stepped back from the wall, tried to twist or turn or pull the hilt and blade, but met with no success. He waited for what seemed an eternity and nothing happened.

He turned to the twins. “Do you know anything about the overlord key?”

Both shook their heads as Ell said, “No. There was just some hidden programming in our implants. When you said
overlord key
, I felt a mild compulsion to cut myself with that blade.”