Varken Rise (6 page)

* * * * *

“How much did you hear?” Catherine asked Bedivere as soon as they reached the security of their bedroom.

“Enough,” he said. “You don’t have to explain anything, Cat. Not to me.”

Surprised, she studied him. “I don’t think you heard anything at all,” she said slowly. “I think you saw me standing close to Kemp. That is why you’re looking at me that way.”

Bedivere gave a dry laugh. “Are you saying I’m jealous?”

“Jealousy is a waste of gastric juices,” she said tiredly. “That doesn’t mean that if the right circumstances arise, you won’t feel it.” Bitterly, she added, “Doubt can hit you from the most unexpected angles.”

“Then what were you talking about?” Bedivere raised a brow. “Me? Or Jovanka?”

Catherine hesitated.

Bedivere saw her pause and scowled. “When have you ever not been able to talk to me about anything?”

“You’ve been under huge stress the last few days and this, it’s…. She drew in another breath and girded herself. “You’re right, if we can’t talk about anything we want, then this stops working.” She briefly outlined everything Kemp had said. She held nothing back. “I hate that he made me doubt myself,” she said fiercely. “I hate that he’s made me question anything about you.”

Bedivere took her head in his hands and kissed her. “Kemp is right. There is room for doubt there. That is, if you only work with the information that he has. You’re forgetting something, though. Jovanka couldn’t have been as old as he thinks she was. There were things she did not know. Words. Human interaction. It was all new to her. If what Kemp is saying is true and she had been working with the Cartel to hide her from the rest of the core worlds, then things such as manners and words would have been known to her.”

Catherine realized she was biting her lip and made herself stop. “What if she really was delusional?”

Bedivere looked at her steadily. “If she was, then we may have to face the possibility that dementia is the fate of all Varkan. Including me.”

Catherine gave a soft moan. Her eyes were stinging. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not? If it is a possibility, then we should be braced for that.” He gave her a small smile. “I am not prepared to acknowledge the possibility until we look into the details. I think we should make the trip to Soward. Then we bribe, cheat and steal any information we can, from anywhere we can, that will answer your doubts.”

Something shifted inside her and Catherine felt a great sadness. “He has discolored things between us. I hate him for that.”

“Don’t mistake the messenger for the message,” Bedivere reminded her. “Besides, it’s about time we had an argument.”

“We argue all the time!”

“About trivialities, yes. This is different.”

“You
want
us to be troubled?”

“I would much rather see nothing but love in your face. Entropy is insidious, though. Nothing stays the same forever. If we are not moving forward, then we’re regressing. If we weather this, then we will have moved forward. We’ll be stronger. For that reason I welcome it. If the trouble comes from outside us, then that’s something I can fight. I can do something about that.”

Her yawn caught her by surprise.

“Tomorrow,” he added.

* * * * *

Bedivere’s thrashing woke her. Catherine sat up. “Lights.”

The house AI bought the lights up to a level that was just enough to see the bed. Dark shadows hovered all around it.

Bedivere’s eyes were closed, the pupils underneath moving rapidly. He tossed his head on the pillow, which was sweat stained. His body glistened as he writhed.

Catherine grabbed his shoulder and shook furiously. “Bedivere!”

He moaned. The sound was that of a man in torment. She shook again, harder.

This time, she roused him. He woke with a jolt that shook the bed. He breathed heavily and his gaze found her.

“I think you were actually having a nightmare,” she said. “You said you didn’t dream.”

He licked his lips and swallowed and laid his arm over his head to shield his eyes from the light. “I don’t dream,” he said. His voice was croaky. “At least, I didn’t until now.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

His breathing slowed. “It was horrible….” He spoke in a near whisper. Then he said no more.

Catherine laid her hand over his. “Was it about me?” That seemed a likely possibility.

Bedivere’s gaze moved back to her face again. “And Kemp.” He looked away again.

“That jealousy thing is a bitch, isn’t it?” She kept her voice light. There was no need to add to his horror. The nightmare would’ve delivered its own punishment.

Bedivere sat up and pushed his legs over the edge of the bed. “I think I’m going to go and read. Or watch a tank show. Something.”

“You know that if you go straight back to sleep, there’s very little chance you’ll have the same dream?”

He looked at her over his shoulder as he thrust his legs into his pants. “Tell me you’ve never returned to a dream a second time. A really vivid dream, that wouldn’t let go.”

She stayed silent.

Bedivere got to his feet and looked at her. “I can still hear you screaming my name.” He touched his temple. “In here. I think I always will, now.”

“If it really was a nightmare,” she said, “then it will fade. I promise.”

“Except I’m not exactly like you, am I?” He said bitterly. “I am the first of my kind and neither of us knows what my future is.” He shifted on his feet, toward the door. “Go back to sleep, Cat. I won’t have you losing sleep because I’m full of doubts.”

“I thought I was the one with the doubts.”

“You’re not the one having nightmares about them.” He shut the door gently behind him.

Catherine suspected that sleep would be a poor companion after that. Yet she woke to sunshine streaming through the high windows and lay blinking, orienting herself. She was the only one in the bed and that brought Bedivere’s nightmare rushing back to her.

The house AI chimed. It was the intercom signal. “Catherine, come quickly!” It was Lilly’s voice and she sounded closer to panic than Catherine had ever heard her before. “Glave save us, Kemp is dead.”

Nicia (Sunita II), Sunita System. FY 10.092

Catherine didn’t remember running through the complex. She only remembered arriving at Kemp’s room, where Brant and Lilly stood in the doorway, watching for her.

“Where is Bedivere?” she asked them.

“He wasn’t with you?” Brant asked.

Catherine shook her head. “He couldn’t sleep.”

She stepped into the room and looked around. Kemp Rodagh lay on the floor, on his back. His eyes were open. He was unmistakably dead, for someone had taken a knife to his flat and fit abdomen and sawed right up the middle of it.

He rested in a pool of his own blood, wearing only the trousers he had arrived in. He was barefoot, as if he had been woken from sleep and had thrust them on for the sake of modesty.

The bed was rumpled and the covers thrown back, supporting the supposition.

Catherine’s gaze return to the gaping wound in his stomach.

“Computer, witness mode,” she called.

“Recording,” the AI said.

Brant moved into the room beside her, while Lilly stayed back at the doorway. “It couldn’t have been any of us. None of us had reason to do this. We barely knew him.”

Catherine’s heart squeezed. “The AI is in witness mode, so no one can tamper with it. Bedivere was tracking Kemp’s movements inside the complex. There’ll be a record of where he went last night. We can pull a copy before the gendarmes arrive.”

“You’re going to call in the police?” Brant asked softly.

“Not just yet. I have questions of my own I want to answer first. We need to move out of this room and seal it.” She stepped around him and went to the door, then looked over her shoulder.

Brant was staring at the body. “No alarms, no alerts. The shields were up. I don’t understand.”

“Brant,” she repeated.

He stirred himself and stepped out of the room.

“Lilly please seal the door.”

Lilly nodded. Her face was very pale.

Catherine headed down the corridor door, moving fast.

“Where are you going?” Lilly asked. She sounded frightened.

“I’m going to get dressed. Follow me if you want.”

Both Brant and Lilly came to her room. She knew they just wanted to stay within her proximity because this had shaken them badly. They were both children of College indoctrination. To them human life was utterly sanctified. The idea of deliberately taking a life in cold blood in this way, for no reason that they could currently understand, distressed them.

Brant had taken more than a few lives at the point of a gun as an Ammonite, when he had been working for what he thought was the greater good—the progress of mankind.

Catherine, however, knew there was a darker side to humanity that all the indoctrination in the world did not remove. While the death of Kemp distressed her, the fact that he had been murdered did not. She was not mentally stumbling, trying to encompass that someone would be capable of such an act. She knew in her bones that any human, given the right motives, would kill.

She dressed quickly. “Computer, locate Bedivere, please.”

“Bedivere is not in the complex,” the computer replied.

Catherine glanced at Brant and Lilly and saw her surprise mirrored on their faces. She looked over at the screen and said, “Show me the top deck, please.”

The image on the screen shifted from Kemp’s room to the grassed over deck at the top of the complex, where the landing pads were. Only one zipper sat there.

She pressed her lips together, stopping herself from speaking. There wasn’t enough information yet to even begin to speculate on what was happening. Bedivere’s departure may be completely unrelated to Kemp’s demise.

That didn’t stop her heart from beating harder.

Because the AI was in witness mode, the screen moved back to Kemp’s room. The still body was partially hidden by the bed. The blood was not.

Catherine deliberately moved to a spot in the room where she could not see the screen easily.

“We should call someone,” Brant said. “The gendarmes….”

“We will, just not now.”

“Why not?” Lilly asked, her voice sharp.

“He was murdered, Catherine. Someone deliberately took his life. And now Bedivere is not here….” Brant added.

Catherine met Brant’s gaze. “Do you really think Bedivere killed him?
Bedivere
?”

Brant’s gaze flickered away from her. After a long moment, he said, “It doesn’t seem likely.”

“That means you think it’s possible.” She wondered why she was pressing the point. Did she really want to hear this answer? She already knew what Brant was thinking, because she was asking herself the same questions.

Brant sighed. “Bedivere has been on edge lately with Jo’s death and I know that you and he argued last night. Something about Kemp.” His discomfort was acute. Yet he was making himself say it anyway.

“Arguments don’t generally make people kill someone. It usually takes long-term resentment, or severe trauma for that to happen. Up until yesterday, none of us had seen Kemp since we first met him. Let’s not draw any conclusions until we know much more than we do now. Lilly, we can’t move the body, not until formalities have been completed,” and she glanced at Brant, “and we will get to those formalities, including calling the gendarmes, eventually. For now, we should find Kemp’s personal data cache.”

“You won’t be able to start the regeneration process without a death certificate,” Lilly said.

“I know. I want everything ready to go as soon as that certificate is in hand. I really want to talk to Kemp.”

“If he followed standard procedure,” Brant said, “he will have backed up daily. There’s a good chance he will be missing the last day, maybe two. He certainly will not remember how he died.”

Catherine moved past them and down the corridor to her office. Brant and Lilly followed her. “I know he won’t be able to tell us who killed him. He will be able to tell us why he was here, though. We can start from there.”

“He couldn’t get back to Soward,” Lilly said. “That’s why he was here.”

“Really? Are you sure of that?” Catherine asked. She moved over to the desk and switched everything on.

“You think he had a hidden agenda?” Brant asked.

“I’m trying not to think at all right now,” she said honestly. “Have a seat. Both of you. Computer, display the tracking logs for Kemp Rodagh, starting from his arrival at the complex yesterday.”

The heads-up display streamed lines of text that scrolled up to the edge of the invisible screen.

“No video?” Lilly asked. “No images?”

Catherine shook her head. “Bedivere initiated passive tracking, I suppose because he was wondering why Kemp was here, too. It would’ve been invasive to follow him everywhere with a lens, because he was simply being cautious.” She was scanning the log lines as they scrolled upward, picking out the timestamps. “Halt,” she said.

“That was after dinner,” Lilly said, looking at the log line Catherine had displayed. “He was in the kitchen. With you.”

They both looked at her.

“He bought some empty dishes,” Catherine said.

Brant nodded toward the heads-up. “You were alone with him in the kitchen for ten minutes. How long does it take to recycle dirty dishes?”

“Then Bedivere arrived. Look.” Lilly pointed at the display.

“Then you left, thirty seconds afterward.” Brant looked at her through the heads-up. “I’m not an expert at reading passive logs,” he said. “You do know what that looks like don’t you?”

“I know. It looks as though Bedivere caught us doing something he didn’t like. That’s not what actually happened. Kemp and I were talking about Jovanka…and Bedivere.”

“What were you talking about, specifically?” Brant asked.

“Kemp had information that said that Jovanka was very old, possibly older than Bedivere and that she really had gone rogue. That she was delusional and suffering a persecution complex.”

“That’s what you argued with Bedivere about last night,” Brant said softly.