Conquest

“Did you hear about those two boys, the ones they captured?”

  “I did.”

  “They’re going to kill them, Althea.”

  “Are they now?”

  “Yes! They’re going to hang them, and my father is going to let it happen, just so that Gradus and the Diplomats will look bad. We have to stop it.”

  “I don’t know anything about such matters, Syl, and I wouldn’t be making assumptions about your father. Now get yourself dressed. He wants to have breakfast with you.”

  •••

  Lord Andrus looked weary when Syl arrived in the dining room; his usually youthful eyes were glazed, the flesh beneath them swollen with tiredness and distress. He must have been up all night, thought Syl. Even as she inwardly raged at him for what she believed he was planning to do—or indeed not planning to do in the case of the boys—she felt distress at his condition. The table was laid with fruit and cheese, and scrambled eggs with ham and peppers in a metal bowl kept warm by a burner. Syl kissed her father on the forehead, put a few token pieces of fruit on a plate, and sat down. She had no real desire to eat. Thoughts of Paul and Steven filled her head, and the knowledge of what was going to happen to them tomorrow made her want to throw up. Choking food down hardly seemed an option.

  Her father touched her arm.

  “I wanted to say that I’m sorry, Syl. Your birthday was not as I might have wished it to be. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  Her birthday? She’d completely forgotten about it in the tumult of the previous day. Had yesterday really just been a single day? It seemed to her that she had lived a year of her life in the previous twenty-four hours.

  “Oh, please! That hardly matters. Are you okay, Father? You look . . . ill.”

  “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” he replied.

  “Henry the Fourth, Part Two,” said Syl, almost automatically. She shared her father’s fascination with many aspects of this planet’s culture. It was strange, she thought, but she probably knew more about its art and its history than many humans. She would have known even more if she’d been able to upload the information directly, but limiters were routinely embedded in the Chips of young Illyri after it was found that direct uploading of information at a young age stunted mental development.

  The Chip sat on the surface of the brain, near the cerebral cortex. It was basically a neural interface that enabled Illyri thoughts to be detected and read as electrical patterns. It then converted these patterns into orders that could be transmitted to control systems, including flight systems on ships, and weapons from missiles to pulsers. Chips were also useful for helping older Illyri to learn new languages and skills. In addition, as Illyri aged, the implants released “baths” of electrons that boosted memory and increased alertness. They could be used to treat a variety of neurological ailments, including epilepsy, and to aid those with paralysis by allowing them to control prosthetic limbs. Through implants, learning could be replaced by uploading, providing instant knowledge of a language, or a subject.

  But the Illyri recognized that the brain continued to develop its wiring to the frontal lobe, and to the tracts responsible for complex cognitive tasks like attention and inhibition, until long past adolescence. It was important that this development occurred organically, and was not interfered with artificially. For similar reasons, they believed that it was important that the young learn, not simply upload. As her father liked to point out, it was easy to upload. Real understanding was harder. Uploading was instant and shallow; learning took time, but with it came depth. So it was that, perhaps for the first time, Syl really understood the meaning of Shakespeare’s words.

  “Well done,” said Andrus. “All these years of training and governorship and diplomacy, and still Gradus has outmaneuvered me.”

  “Don’t let those boys die, Father.”

  “I have little choice.”

  “Can’t you delay the execution? You could demand confirmation of the order from the president. It’s such a huge step, such a terrible act—”

  “I sent the request to Gradus this morning, and it was denied. Even if I were to try to go behind his back, it would require sending a message through the wormhole. Assuming it got through, it would then have to be transmitted to Illyr through the relays, and Gradus controls them.”

  He pushed some eggs around his plate, but Syl could see that they had already gone cold. Her father was not in the mood for eating either.

  “Syl, the Empire is changing,” he said. “It may be that my place is no longer here on this world.”

  Syl held her breath. She hardly dared to speak, but she had to ask the question.

  “Are you talking about returning to Illyr?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “What took place yesterday is just the first of many such acts we can anticipate. This is not just about my own loss of power, or the deaths of two boys. It is about the corruption of an entire race. There is something rotten at the heart of the Illyri Empire, and there has been for a long, long time. It will have to be tackled at its source. That lies on Illyr, and in the Marque, but not here.”

  Syl was torn. She longed to see Illyr, wanted to experience it for herself, but she knew too that her father loved Earth. Perhaps she, too, cared for it more than she’d thought.

  “You will abandon Earth to the Diplomats?”

  “If I have no other choice. We have done some great wrongs on this world, Syl, but the Diplomats will do worse. If I can stop them, I will, but sometimes a general must lose a battle to win a war. If I have to sacrifice Earth to prevent this poison from seeping deeper into the Empire, then I will.”

  “When will you decide?”

  “Soon, Syl, soon.”

  “And . . .” The words caught in her throat.

  “Yes, Syl?”

  “And I’ll be going with you, won’t I? You won’t . . . leave me, will you?”

  Her father hugged her to him. He rarely gave such demonstrations of affection, so she treasured them all the more.

  “Yes, Syl, you will be going with me, although there may come a time when you do not thank me for it.”

  Balen knocked and entered. The governor’s presence was required in his office. Despite the new order, the routine business of ruling continued. Her father kissed her on the forehead and left.

  Syl took her plate and went to sit in an antique chair in the living room. It was her favorite: the heavy brocade fabric was worn smooth in places and the seat was broad and circular, originally crafted to envelop the wide-hooped skirts of Georgian ladies. But she was taller than any human lady of old, so she folded her coltish limbs under her and rested her head back, staring up at the large painting that dominated the wall. It was a masterpiece known as The Rape of Europa, painted centuries before by the celebrated human artist Titian. It had been a gift from the human leaders to Lord Andrus when he became governor of Europe and set up his offices in Edinburgh.

  “They believed that I wouldn’t understand the irony,” he once said, but he had been enchanted by the painting regardless, and it had immediately assumed pride of place in the lounge. The Rape of Europa—or simply Europa, as it was often called—featured fat cherubs who seemed to be attacking a flailing woman on the back of a massive bull, while nymphs standing at the far side of a lake looked on helplessly, and sea monsters gleamed in the depths. The bull’s beady eyes stared straight at the viewer, its tail almost quivering with excitement. When she was much younger, Syl had been frightened by the vibrant spectacle, by the trio of cherubs assaulting poor Europa.

  “But they’re not attacking,” her father had explained to her. “They’re trying to help Europa. She’s just scared, and she doesn’t understand.”

  Syl thought of Gradus as she looked at the scene anew. Curiously, he reminded her of the cherubs, soft and pale and implacable, with his eerily smooth skin, and his tantrums and his
dangerous toys. The elite of the Diplomatic Corps were just like him. The events of the past twenty-four hours had cast the painting in a fresh light. Perhaps Europa was right to be frightened. Perhaps the whole of Earth should be frightened by the rule of the Diplomats.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  S

  yl might have dozed off, or maybe she was just lost in the painting, but gradually she became aware of a presence nearby. She turned to find Meia watching her.

  “Don’t you ever, like, knock?” she said coldly.

  “Why? Were you doing something that you shouldn’t have been doing? How unlike you that would be.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Really?”

  Meia sounded surprised. The expression on her face didn’t suggest to Syl that she was joking. Sometimes she was hard to understand.

  “Very funny. If you’re looking for my father, I don’t know where he is.”

  “Actually, I was looking for you.”

  Meia summoned a screen, and a short piece of video began to play. The camera was angled steeply upward, and the heads of only two of the three people on the screen were visible, because one of them was standing and the camera couldn’t fit her into the frame. The figure on the right was Syl. The other was Syrene. They sat across from each other, while a third figure stood between them, dressed in robes that were red yet almost transparent, as though a ghost had entered the room. Syl could see a translucent hand touching her temple, then the image flickered and was gone.

  “Five seconds,” said Meia. “That’s all the bug got before whatever power was being used to prevent us from monitoring events in that room shorted its systems, and it died.”

  Syl let the image play again and again, trying to repair the holes in her memory. It helped. There was still a lot that was unclear, but at least she now knew a little more of what had happened.

  “That was Syrene,” she said. “But that was also Syrene sitting on the chair across from me.”

  “A mental projection of some kind,” said Meia. “A part of Syrene released to roam free, while the rest of her sits and grins.”

  “I didn’t know the Sisterhood could do that.”

  “Neither did I. It seems they’ve been learning all kinds of new tricks in the Marque: mental projection, the manipulation of presidents and consuls, the rule of an empire from its shadows. Perhaps I should see if the Sisterhood will have me after all. There’s much I could glean from them.”

  “You don’t mean that,” said Syl.

  “Don’t I, now? Well, have it your way.”

  “She burned me,” said Syl, pointing to the marks on her temples.

  “So she did. I wonder what she was looking for in that marvelous, mysterious head of yours. Whatever it was, I suspect she didn’t find it, because she was looking in the wrong place—or, rather, the wrong head.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do, Syl. I want you to bring your little friend Ani to my quarters in an hour. If you don’t, I’ll tell your father what you both got up to yesterday.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “I would,” said Meia, and her tone left Syl in no doubt. “Oh, it wouldn’t give me pleasure—well, not much—but I would. So: an hour, then? And don’t be late. I hate to be kept waiting, and who knows what I might do if my patience is tested. . . .”

  •••

  Syl and Ani arrived early. It seemed like the sensible thing to do, under the circumstances. Ani had been most reluctant to join Syl in Meia’s quarters. Any meeting with Meia could only mean trouble, at least until Syl explained the consequences for them both if they did not do as she had ordered. Ani had been on the receiving end of her father’s rage often enough to know that it wasn’t just the two humans who would be in danger of hanging if he found out that his daughter had been wandering outside the castle walls without permission.

  Meia was waiting for them, and opened the door before they had a chance to knock.

  “Almost as good as one of your tricks, isn’t it, Ani?” she said as she closed the door behind them. “Mind you, I was forced to listen for you, but you’d just have known.”

  Ani said nothing, which was unusual—even painful—for her.

  Meia’s rooms were bigger and more elegant than Syl had expected, a confirmation of just how valuable she was to Lord Andrus. The neat living area was furnished with two chairs and a sofa, and a video screen. There were prints and paintings on the wall, some of them quite valuable, Syl thought. They showed good taste. Two walls were lined entirely with books, both Illyri and human. Meia, like Andrus, liked physical books. A half-open doorway led into the bedroom. It was exceptionally tidy. In fact, it looked like a room that had never been truly occupied. Despite its adornments, it suggested functionality.

  “Sit down,” Meia instructed, pointing to the sofa, and Syl and Ani complied. Meia took one of the chairs. She produced a deck of cards from her pocket, and spread them on the small coffee table between her and her guests. Syl hadn’t seen anything like them before. Instead of suits—like human cards—or symbolic animals, as the Illyri used, there were only five symbols: a circle, a cross, a trio of waves, a square, and a star.

  “These are sometimes called Zener cards on Earth,” said Meia. “They’re used to test for psychic ability. Of course, most of it is nonsense, and a certain degree of success can be put down to chance. You’re both going to take this test, and you’re going to do it to the best of your abilities, because if you try to trick me”—she stared at Ani, but not at Syl—“then I’ll be having interesting conversations with Lord Andrus and General Danis. Am I clear?”

  Syl and Ani nodded.

  “Right. Let’s begin.”

  •••

  It was simple: Meia showed them the back of a card, and they had to guess which symbol was on the other side. They began with fifty cards, and eventually increased to one hundred over the course of five tests. At the end, Meia calculated their accuracy.

  “Syl,” she said, “you scored an average of eighteen per one hundred over the course of the tests.”

  “What does that mean?” said Syl.

  “It means that if you decide to bet on a sunny day tomorrow, it will probably rain. You seem to have no psychic ability whatsoever. In fact, you may even be a little below average.”

  “Loser,” said Ani.

  “We haven’t heard your score yet, smarty,” said Syl, although she already had her suspicions.

  “Ani,” said Meia, “you scored an average of ninety-five percent. It would probably have been higher if Syl hadn’t distracted you by sneezing a couple of times.”

  “Sorry,” said Syl.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Ani. “Below-average specimens probably just sneeze more than the rest of us.”

  Meia walked to her drinks cabinet and brought out three glasses and a bottle of fresh lemonade.

  “A celebratory drink,” she said.

  “Of lemonade?” said Ani, who had been caught drinking illicit alcohol so often by her father that he had largely given up trying to stop her from doing it. “Wow. Push the boat out, why don’t you?”

  Meia ignored her and poured the lemonade, handing each of the girls a glass.

  “I propose a toast,” she said. “To what, if I’m right, may be the most gifted psychic this world has ever seen. To Ani!”

  They clicked their glasses and drank. The lemonade was good: not too tart, not too sweet. Meia didn’t even sip hers before setting it aside.

  “Now, Ani,” she said, “why don’t you tell us what else you can do?”

  •••

  The list was long. Even Syl was surprised. Ani couldn’t quite read minds, not yet, but she could pick up on emotions, and she was strong on spotting those who were lying.

  But there was one particular skill that
reminded Syl of what Syrene had done to her: she could cloud minds. Not for long, but for long enough. She demonstrated it on Syl, forcing her to concede that the lemonade was, in fact, whisky, and might be making her a little drunk. It irritated Syl considerably, not only because she didn’t wish to be part of some mind experiment, but because she found herself feeling jealous of Ani’s gifts, and more than a little hurt that she had not shared the extent of them with her closest friend.

  And then she had a thought.

  “Ani, did you use this thing—this power—to hide who we really were from the human boys on the Royal Mile?”

  Ani shrugged, looking embarrassed.

  “I guess. I tried to, anyhow.”

  “There are Illyri who would do almost anything to have you on their side,” said Meia. “You have a great, great gift. Syrene must have sensed it when you were spying on her, but she couldn’t pinpoint the source. She thought it might be Syl at first, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps you can screen yourself somehow. I don’t know.”

  “I’m not going to get into trouble, am I?” asked Ani.

  “You’re not going to get into any trouble at all,” said Meia, “not if you refrain from demonstrating your skills too obviously, and not if you do what I ask.”

  “But we already did!” protested Syl. “We came here. We did your tests. We’ve kept our side of the bargain.”

  “Bargain?” said Meia. “I don’t recall making any bargain. I simply threatened you, and that threat still stands.”

  Syl swore with frustration. Ani fell back against the sofa.

  “What do you want us to do now, then?” asked Ani.

  “What I want,” said Meia, “is for you to help two prisoners escape.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  L

  ater, when it had all gone wrong, Syl would wonder if she might have done things differently had she known what would befall them. But that was the benefit of hindsight: looking back, everything was clearer, and every false step, every poor decision, seemed so obvious that it was impossible to believe that they had ever been taken at all. Still, Meia’s scheme, however flawed, was the only one that had been offered to her, and the only plan there was. Of course she had to act; of course she had to try to save Paul and Steven, because they had saved her. And perhaps, just perhaps, they’d been captured because of her and Ani, because they had taken the time to help two panicked girls on the Royal Mile. Not taking action to prevent a wrong, when one could, seemed to Syl almost as bad as the terrible fate to which Gradus had sentenced the boys come the morning. Their bodies would swing, and she would bear witness.