Paradise Drift

  “Harper,” Beka snapped, torn between the urge to slap him and to laugh. “Focus.”

  “I was just sayin’,” Harper muttered. “Looking as we pass by—what harm in that?”

  Cyn, ignoring this banter, said, “Here’s a group going up the steps to that portico adjoining the theater.” She pointed at a pack of men moving with determined step.

  Portico, Beka thought. More of the mudfoot architecture. It looked to her like the entryway to a vast hall. But at least the shadows seemed relatively cool, reflecting the silvery gray marble shades.

  They followed behind the group of men, peering ahead. Their crowd stopped. Harper pointed up the broad tiled steps toward another man just emerging from an arched doorway, an older fellow with whitish hair.

  He was speaking, and somehow they heard his voice. “Yes, though I feel ill, I still must address the Senate—”

  “What did I tell you?” Harper groused. “Speeches. Rather have the babes.”

  “—for I am high priest, and as such, must discuss the legitimacy of Antony’s behavior in interfering.”

  “O great Caesar,” a man in purple moaned, running up the steps and flinging himself down at Caesar’s feet. “Forgive my brother—bring him back to Rome!”

  Caesar was still talking to the two men behind him. “Dolabella must succeed me as consul when I leave Rome—”

  The groveling man gripped at Caesar’s toga, twitching and even yanking it.

  “Now, see that? Why do they wear these things?” Harper asked.

  His voice was nearly drowned in a sudden roar from the men in the group surrounding the three.

  “Uh-oh,” Cyn muttered. “What—”

  “Lynch mob,” Beka snapped. “Back up.”

  She was the first to spot the men pulling from their voluminous togas long, sharp knives. The crowd rushed forward—Harper, Beka, and Cyn tried to fade back, to discover an avid crowd pressing up behind, and preventing their retreat.

  The roars changed to yells and a scream; they turned to see the front men in the crowd begin stabbing at Caesar, but as he lunged, trying to free himself, the man at his feet threw his arms around Caesar’s knees and held on. As the men behind Caesar tried to escape, the crowd of men surged about, everyone stabbing wildly until dark blood splotches began showing up on more togas than the falling Caesar’s.

  “You too, my son?” he croaked in a failing voice.

  At the very same moment Beka remembered they could leave—they had safe words! And she rapped out, “Et tu, Curly?”

  A door opened in the wall next to them, utterly unnoticed by the screaming, roaring mob behind them.

  All three ducked flailing knives and pounded through the door, Harper tripping over his toga so that Cyn and Beka had to grab his arms, as behind them a riot broke out.

  The door shut on the noise abruptly.

  They stood in a group, stunned, breathing hard, their heartbeats rapid.

  “It was that way in the vid, too,” Cyn said faintly.

  “No. More. History,” Beka snarled.

  Harper flung up his hands, or tried to, but the toga nearly choked him. Then the bots dissolved the Roman clothing, and he grabbed his chit, fingering rapidly.

  Then he looked up. “Here. No history. It says here we can detour through Casino Pedasso.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Cyn. “Just the time to indulge your gambling habits.”

  Rommie’s voice interrupted. “A good idea. It’s real time, and will take you a good bit farther toward our docking bay.”

  This time it was Beka who activated the door, and they strolled through, hit at once by the exciting sounds of games, the changing lights in glowing, eye-catching colors, and the cool, steady air currents that carried extra oxygen. Beka gulped air—good, scrubbed air that had nothing to do with a cursed planet—and wiped her hot face on her sleeve.

  “Ahhh,” Harper exclaimed.

  “Oh, what now,” Beka muttered.

  Cyn rolled her eyes. Harper, rubbing his hands, moved toward fractal towers of silver and gold coins twisting into agonized shapes, like dragons contending, coiling about each other in increasingly complex patterns as the gamblers below twisted what looked like knotty ropes in their hands, videogamelike controllers.

  “Oh please,” he muttered. “I can see it. Pattern is easy enough for a baby to get. Thirty seconds. I promise.”

  “What will you bet? Your clothes?” Beka retorted.

  “Oh. Uh, yeah. There is that.”

  They moved on, but again, Harper paused. Before them, a row of giant bulbous cylinders bubbled with blobs of glowing jelly in each, bubbling up from below, some growing by ingesting others, some fragmenting, each column surrounded by four consoles manned by intense gamblers tapping pads with long flexible sticks as though playing drums.

  “Oh, wow!” he said. “I’ve never seen a—”

  “Harper!” said Beka, putting warning growl in her voice.

  She pushed him forward, past a simple roulette wheel that contrasted sharply with the complicated flashing, pulsing, glowing fractals of light all around them. They were moving into a quieter part of the casino.

  Ping! The warning from Beka’s com flooded her with adrenalin. “Rommie!”

  Harper turned away from the game, worry sharp on his face; both Cyn and Beka realized he was hiding pain.

  Well, Cyn knew she was. But she ignored it. “What? What? We really, really need to get to my ship.”

  Beka held out a hand, palm up. “Don’t believe me lacking in sympathy, but you really did not think this through, did you?”

  Cyn opened her mouth, then realized Beka was not listening to her.

  Beka frowned. Rommie’s voice came over the comlink, just audible above the chiming and clanking and ringing around them: “Your pursuer still can’t get a fix on you, but it looks like he may be running a random screen around himself, so he knows you’re within whatever range he’s set for the bots. Use the green door behind the whackabot game.”

  “Behind the whackabot game,” Beka snapped at the other two. “He’s screened himself—knows we’re in his range.”

  They hustled across the casino floor, fighting their way back into the more crowded section. The whackabot game was easy to find: they just followed the sounds of smashing bots: Whang! Cliirrring! Aoogah! Aoogah! They ducked around the intent gamblers, Beka trying to shield as much of the game from Harper’s view as she could.

  Cyn let out a sigh of relief when she spotted a green door in the wall between that and some game called Bats-n-Geeze-o-Rama, apparently a sort of pseudogladiatorial combat, with aged sentients with wild filaments atop their vegetable-shaped heads, and elephant trunks a-swing, smashing wire baskets on wheels into each other as gamblers screamed encouragement at them, guiding snaky tubes that dumped random garbage into the baskets, making them harder to maneuver while increasing their effectiveness as battering rams. Beka hit her chit and they rushed through the green door into another anteroom.

  This time there were only two doors, but no flickering screens above them. Instead, one of them had the picture of a tiger on it, the other of a spoon, both done in an archaic style that made them look like neglected oil paintings.

  “Take the tiger,” said Rommie. They hesitated. “Trust me,” she added, “you don’t want the spoon. No safe words, and a fifty percent probability you’ll need regen of a major limb.”

  “Bleah!” said Cyn.

  “Safe words: ‘I found an elephant in my pajamas,’ ‘the blackberry jam tastes of fish,’ and ‘I am standing here beside myself.’”

  Harper sighed. He turned to Cyn. “Who was it who said, ‘What fresh hell is this?’”

  “I don’t know,” she muttered. “But I was just thinking it.”

  “Come on, let’s move fast,” Beka said. “The docking bay is not going to come to us.”

  They hit the door and plunged through.

  SEVENTEEN

  Despite the elections the Kodos family
thought they were kings. Ambition in their subordinates was vice, but in themselves was virtue.

  —NASRU KANLA,

  FIRST WITNESS BEFORE RIGOS SUPREME JUDICIARY

  KODOS VS. REPUBLIC OF RIGOS, CY 9899

  Danger on the way—

  Dylan had only time for that message from Rommie before the doors opened and Director Vandat stalked in, followed by robed Perseids, all of them clutching flexis and whispering. Behind them strode a phalanx of Than, their polished and decorated carapaces gleaming in the muted lighting. Most of them, he noted, were emerald: warriors.

  Alphyra leaped up and whirled to face them.

  “What is this intrusion?” she demanded, and Dylan wondered if her sister had had time to warn her or if what he was seeing was more of her consummate acting.

  “You uploaded a covert message into the message beacons just before his arrival,” Vandat said, indicating Dylan with a gray hand.

  Dylan thought it better to stand.

  “We have just decoded the protocols. Your intended recipient was a Nietzschean from the Odin-Thor Pride.”

  Dylan frowned, subvocalizing, “Rommie?” Out loud he addressed Alphyra. “Is this true?”

  “Of course it is not true,” Alphyra stated, her usually modulated voice ringing. “My name is used by many people, and so there are hundreds of communications going out every day. Sometimes every hour. It was only a matter of time before it was borrowed without permission, by someone other than my staff….”

  As she went on outlining the shortcomings of the Than security system, over the Andromeda comlink Rommie said, “Yes, it’s true, although I can’t tell you any more about the message just yet. I am with Delta now. I’ve found Trance—that can wait. I just reviewed your conversation with Alphyra. She wants something, all right, but it sounds like she was building toward it by degrees of consent.”

  Dylan thought back over her smiling hints about how the Andromeda could be used for special trade with Rigos, how much she felt the planet was underutilized, its seas extraordinarily beautiful, with their sunken cities from millennia ago, just waiting for exploration—recreation, pleasure planets—and other projects for which only she seemed to have the necessary vision. She never named the other projects, but her intimate tone, her low, husky voice, had more than suggested that these were personal projects, and that his cooperation was a matter of personal alliance.

  Just what level of personal she had in mind had been, he thought, about to be broached, when the doors flashed the override on the lock, and then opened.

  “That is not true.” Blossoms on the Wind’s reedy voice brought Dylan’s attention back to the present. “I shall have a full report shifted to your desk, as it has been to the other directors and their staff. The protocols used in the message are not the interlocked ones we agreed on, which can be decrypted with a majority of director keys. That lack indicates a private, highly covert communication, of the sort we promised never to send without alerting the other directors when we agreed to our contracts. You are answerable for that, and at this moment, only that, before we proceed to specifics about its intendee, and content.”

  Alphyra gripped her elbows, then flung back her head, a magnificent gesture, and Dylan realized that this was an act, everything she’d done was an act, carefully rehearsed.

  Sure enough. “I demand justice,” she intoned, again in that theatrical voice. “Am I going to get it now? I see only one human, and that a visitor: before me are a dozen Than warriors, and half that in Perseids. I demand a full hearing before the Guiding Council—with my own staff present.”

  Vandat exchanged looks with the Than, then said in his customary smooth voice, “Then we shall request you to confine yourself to your quarters here. It seems inappropriate to send you to the detention area, for as you say, there is no official charge, and there is our shared prestige to consider. Captain Hunt.” Vandat shifted his attention, and Dylan nodded. “As you seem to be involved in the question to be resolved, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not, we must request you to remain here. As well, we have sealed off the Andromeda’s dock from the rest of the station. No one else will be allowed to disembark.”

  He smiled diplomatically. “As you’ve already demonstrated a predilection for remaining in Director Kodos’s company unaccompanied, I trust you will not deem our request too arduous, should it prove that you are an innocent party.”

  Dylan spread his hands. “Whatever you say. I just want my negotiations to be resolved in favor of the new Commonwealth, and to depart in peace.”

  “Perhaps those goals are contiguous to our own.” Vandat bowed. “We shall assemble at prime?”

  Prime: noon on the planet below, which had a thirty-hour cycle. Dylan automatically translated that into approximately a watch and a half from now.

  The Than turned in a body and left, their limbs rustling; the Perseids followed, silent, sober, though as soon as the doors began to shut Dylan heard them whispering.

  So did Alphyra. She pulled out her comlink and jabbed it to summon her sister. For once she was kept waiting.

  Had that damned Vandat blocked her private comline? But he’d have to isolate it first, and Torbal had sworn it impossible. He’d been instructed to hire the very best, inside or outside the law. It couldn’t be that.

  Nor was it. Rommie was saying to Dylan over their own link, “Alphyra is trying to get Delta.”

  Alphyra hesitated, then stabbed at her comlink again.

  “She’s just sent out a deep-level cipher,” reported Rommie. “I can’t decipher it real-time, not until I get deeper into the system. But it didn’t go to Delta.”

  Then Alphyra turned her attention to Dylan, who said, “Why don’t you show me which chamber is mine? If we’re to have a long session at prime, then we ought to get some rest.”

  Alphyra jerked her head, as though flinging his words away. “I need you, and I need your ship,” she stated.

  “For?” he asked.

  “Escape,” she said.

  Dylan dropped onto the couch. Rest, it seemed, was postponed yet again. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t do the next best thing. “Why? Did you really contact the Nietzscheans?” he asked, as he reached down, and tabbed the server for a good stiff drink laced with vitamins and caffeine. “No, let me rephrase that. Were you really foolish enough to contact the Nietzscheans?”

  “The Kodos family once ruled Rigos,” she said, beginning to pace back and forth, the billowing silks of her skirt outlining her splendid legs. “We ruled well. We brought wealth and prestige to the world. But wealth and prestige don’t just foster the arts and civilization, they also inspire greed and power grabbing. Every archipelago wanted precedence over the others, and from there it was a short journey to demanding independence.”

  Dylan said, “Tell me you didn’t actually think the Nietzscheans would use their power to put you back on your ancestors’ throne.”

  Alphyra threw back her head. “You think I’m stupid?”

  “I think having anything whatsoever to do with Nietzscheans is stupid.”

  She laughed. “But then all you have is an antiquated starship. Oh, powerful, I grant you that,” she said, flinging up one hand. “But I have what they really want: the results of generations of genetic study. The Nietzscheans claim to be the end product of human possibility, but there is always room for improvement. Always.”

  Dylan tried to hide his growing disgust. “Delta is one of your genetic experiments, I gather.” The quiet whirr of the server distracted him; a slot opened in the black table, and there stood his hot drink.

  “Oh, yes. The Kodos family has always turned to its own genes for its closest servitors. Delta is a drone, nothing more. Do not mistake: she’s far more intelligent than most of the fools who come here to throw away their money. But she exists to serve Kodos.” She smiled. “Pure self-interest is always the best loyalty binding.”

  Dylan felt a pang of sympathy for the patient “sister,” but he said nothing as he
sipped the stimulant drink. Energy—false, but good enough for now—poured through his veins.

  “No, you will find some of our experiments—the successes and the failures—down in the gaming arenas. And our dear, cleanhanded friend Vandat knows it, too. Do not believe him so high-minded. He wanted what Kodos could bring to this Drift, which was a floating graveyard until I got here. But his vision is so limited. I brought success here, and with some aid, I can bring success to the planet below, which has stagnated in their endless wars between the islands for an independence that one shot from a starship could end.”

  “You want my ship for defense,” Dylan said slowly, sifting her words.

  “I do. Oh, I think the new Commonwealth is an excellent idea. But why not make the new capital here? Rigos is extraordinarily beautiful. You join me, you protect our planet—and the Drift—and I in turn will share the Kodos genetic discoveries. Enough to guarantee the Commonwealth the best and brightest rule humanity is capable of.”

  Dylan gazed at her, repugnance tightening his throat. He drew in a deep breath, said in an easy voice that revealed nothing, “You’re a betting woman. At least you run with gamblers. What will you wager that Drago Museveni made a speech just like yours when he first launched the Nietzscheans on the unsuspecting galaxy?”

  Alphyra lifted her chin, her eyes both steady and angry. “So you refuse to aid me, is that it? Why, do you imagine you stand on some moral pinnacle?”

  Dylan retorted, “You claim to be a student of history, and you even have to ask?”

  “You can refuse me,” she said. “And we can then proceed to deal. Everyone has their price. Even a starship captain who gambles with far more money than he can ever command. Just don’t insult my intelligence with moral platitudes, please.”

  “I wondered when you would be bringing up my diplomatic immunity,” he said conversationally.

  “Diplomatic clearance,” she said, smiling with anticipation. A quick pucker between her brows, and Dylan realized she was listening over her comlink.