Troubled Waters
Down three stairs and into the captain's cabin went Chamoun, surreptitiously fingering a flashlight at his belt. He'd given one to Cassie when he'd asked her to marry him. Merovingen didn't have enough tech to power up a radio. That was what the Kalugins wanted from Nev Hettek: knowledge. Tech was black magic here, where the Revenantists were sure that the vengeance of the sharrh was going to find them out if they so much as put in a wireless.
The flashlight lit, Chamoun slid between the narrow bed and the cabin's chairs to light an oil lamp. He wasn't using his own electrics, not with the generators down while the Detfish was docked. It didn't do to draw attention to yourself, not here.
Mike Chamoun had found that out during one of his conversion lessons, when Ito Boregy had given him a drug-induced glimpse of Michael Chamoun's purported previous life. The result of that memory (true or false, it didn't matter) of Chamoun's former life as a member of the Merovin Space Defense Force, had made Ito Boregy Chamoun's mortal enemy. And made Cas-sie Boregy an explorer on the astral plane.
Every night that Cassie could get the drugs and wheedle Michael into helping, she'd been going into trances and trying to remember a life of her own beyond the sky—some wisp of reality that belonged to Merovin's history before the sharrh had come and destroyed everything. It was illegal. By Revenantist standards, it was probably immoral. And if her father or Ito found out, Michael Chamoun was going to be Cassie's ex-husband, quicker than you could say "trip to the Justiciar's dungeons."
How he was going to explain about the previous-lives stuff to Magruder, Chamoun still couldn't fathom. His fingers found the oil lamp. Flashlight in his teeth by its stalk, he struck a match and lit the lamp.
Then he turned and there, on his bed, sprawled on one elbow, was Magruder, watching him casually—if you didn't worry about the pistol he held.
"It's me," Chamoun said unnecessarily, his hands spreading of their own accord.
Magruder said, "So I see," in his husky voice and swung upright in a motion that ended with the pistol going back to its home next to his spine. "What's up? I've got a diplomatic reception—" he bared his teeth, "—in an hour and a half."
Chance was around Chamoun's size, but rangy— stringy, almost. He always looked uncomfortable in his Merovingian velvet, and tonight was no exception. In that sharp, weathered face with its broad, forehead and flaring jaws was all the fielded power of the Sword of God. Sometimes, when Chamoun had been away from Magruder for a while, he forgot that checked lethality and started thinking of Magruder as an ally, a benefactor, a friend.
Tonight, one look at the man from Nev Hettek who was here as Minister of Trade and Tariffs, as His Excellency the Ambassador, telegraphed a clear message to Chamoun: caution.
Magruder brushed graying hair impatiently off his forehead when Chamoun didn't answer. "Come on, Mike. Sit down and tell me what the blazing trouble is. Didn't you hear me? I'm on a tight schedule."
"Sir . . ." Chamoun started to reply in Nev Hetteker fashion and stopped, correcting himself in answer to Chance's scowl. "Ser," he amended as he took a seat on the map table opposite Magruder; he needed to speak perfect Merovingian dialect, now, to prove to Chance he had his wits about him. "I've got . . . problems."
"So I gathered. Lay it out, boy."
"It's . . . well, Cassie first, si—Chance. She's been trying to do regressions ever since Ito drugged me into telling him I was a space-based soldier in—"
"Not this again." Magruder leaned back on the bed, balancing on his elbows. "Next you'll be telling me those fireworks we set over the harbor have got you convinced the sharrh have come again, like the rest of these crazies."
"You gotta know this stuff, Chance. You told me, once—whatever I thought was important." Once in a previous life, Chamoun had been someone named Mickey, who'd died fighting the sharrh. He knew he had; there was no way to convince anyone who hadn't been through it that he had, though. "Whatever you think of the regressions, just try to understand that if her father finds out Cassie's eating deathangel every night, Retribution's going to break loose in the household."
"You're her husband. Forbid her."
"Chance, you don't understand. You can't forbid Cassie . . . Anyway, I'm going to go see Rita, maybe she can help me."
"I bet." Sarcasm laced Magruder's response. "I told you, kid, I don't care what you do with your spare time. Just don't blow off your marriage."
"I ... Great. Yeah. Fine." Chamoun was sorry he'd asked for this meeting. Magruder was watching him too closely. The Ambassador's reactions weren't their usual, protective sort. Something was really wrong and Michael was making things worse, not better.
"Fine? You think you're doing fine?" Magruder shifted just enough to slide the fishknife from his belt. He started paring his nails with it. "I just finished cleaning up your last mess—with Mondragon and Vega Boregy. I thought, I'll admit, that was why you'd called me—that something had happened vis a vis the second channel. Has it?" Eyes as blank as a dead man's centerpunched him.
"I . . . don't know what Mondragon's up to. Nobody's had me carrying messages to Megary and back, that's all I know."
"That's something, anyhow. Another mess like that one, and I'm sending you back to Nev Hettek—on family business or something; I'll think of an excuse. You're more—"
"Chance!" Michael objected.
"You're more use to me," the Ambassador continued implacably, "as an absent husband than as a dead one. Ito's still after your scalp, and you and your wifey are playing druggie games? Not real welcome news, kid."
When Magruder's diction slipped, his violent side was roused, Chamoun knew. There wasn't a single person or group or natural phenomenon in all of Merovingen, including the canal-spawned diseases of this pest hole, as deadly as Chance Magruder.
Chamoun reminded himself of the night he'd married, when Magruder had pledged to take care of Chamoun: his troubles, his enemies, his body and mind. He clung to that thought now. He had to, or he'd start wondering if Chance had decided he was expendable. If he started wondering that, he might as well go back to Nev Hettek and face the music. If he could get that far. An angry Sword tribunal could brand him a coward, a fool, a failure. But they'wouldn't kill him out of hand—not him or his parents.
Magruder would.
As if reading his mind, Chance said, "You've got your parents to think of, Mike: lots of people depending on you. Go see the Nikolaev woman if you think it'll help. Put your foot down with your wife. And if Mondragon so much as shows up at Boregy House, send for me. Next time he's there, I want to accidentally be there too."
Magruder put away his knife and got up, stooped in the low cabin. His hand went to the small of his back, where his pistol was. "By the way, you're doing a nice job with your census taking. Tatiana thinks the world of you."
The parting shot was like a behavior-modification morsel thrown to a guard dog after a grueling session, Chamoun knew. He watched Magruder until he'd gone. Then he put his head in his hands and stared through spread fingers at the deck. Why couldn't he talk to Chance? How come he couldn't make Magruder understand what was dangerous here, and what wasn't?
Chamoun knew in his heart that Cassie's mind-games were more dangerous than Mondragon's maneuvering, that Ito's enmity could wipe out more than simply Mike Chamoun. Ito was capable of undoing everything the Sword was trying to do here, starting with Michael Chamoun's life.
But then he thought back over what Magruder had said and realized that the Sword cell leader had offered him a way out—a way he might not like, but one that was survivable.
Instead of making him feel better, the realization made Michael Chamoun feel worse. Magruder was implying that Chamoun was in a mess not even Magruder could unmake; that the only solution was to pull Mike Chamoun from the playing field. The final resolution of that lay in the behavior of Michael's wife, Cassie Boregy. And Cassie was acting just like any spoiled child with a new toy, never mind that that toy was mind altering drugs in conjunction with hypnotherapy.
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Suddenly, Chamoun's problems didn't seem like a handy excuse to see Rita Nikolaev and find out if he still loved her. Suddenly the night was darker and the Detfish's cabin smaller, and the winter chill of the Merovingen harbor bit through his clothes to scrape his very bones.
Cassie Boregy was all alone in her blue bedroom and she was very angry. She had everything prepared. She'd been looking forward to tonight. And then Michael had to go out—so he said. Deathangel wouldn't keep forever. It wasn't fair.
It also wasn't fair that Michael had had such a great revelation. He was an unbeliever, really; he was only converting because of her. Yet Uncle Ito had taken Michael under his wing and guided him to a soul-ennobling experience, and now no one would help Cassie do the same.
If Michael Chamoun, a mere Nev Hetteker, an Ad-ventist tech-lover, could find that in his soul lay a great hero of the war against the sharrh, then what wonderful deeds might lie in Cassie's own forgotten past? There had to be some.
God would not be so mean as to give Michael a past as a space warrior against the sharrh and give her nothing but vague memories of sculleries and babies and wood-chopping and water-carrying. Somewhere in Cassie's soul, the noble heroine she knew must be there was hiding. It just couldn't be that the Nev Hetteker she'd married had been a hero in a previous life, and she a common fishwife.
So she kept searching. She searched with Michael, night after night. She knew it was boring him, but he should have a little consideration. All he had to do was take notes, while it was she who risked her sanity and her health taking the deathangel so regularly, trying to expel her soul from her body and send it through time and space.
And now he was openly more hostile. He'd just said he was going out to Rita's, of course, to hurt her. There was no reason for Michael to deal directly with the Nikolaevs. He was trying to make her think that he'd gone to talk to Rita about Cassie's "addiction" to deathangel.
That was obviously not the case. Michael was only trying to hurt her, to manipulate her, the way her father often did. Men were all alike. Or else Michael wouldn't be treating her just like her father would, if Vega had known what was going on behind closed doors in her bedroom.
She paced the room. She touched her ormolu-festooned furniture. She sat before her dressing table and combed her gold-streaked hair with a silver brush. She looked at herself in the mirror calmly, waiting for the deathangel to take affect. Soon enough, she'd see whether Michael hadn't been somehow holding her back, guiding her mind away from its true goal, toward the mundane revelations that seemed to be all she'd ever gain from the regression process.
As soon as the mirror began to look like a wavy pool of clear water, she began reciting the regression formula. She knew it by heart. She didn't need Michael to tell her that she must find a previous life of interest and value to her present self. She didn't need Michael to tell her to listen only to his voice. She could listen only to her own voice.
She talked to herself in the mirror until she stopped talking. The deathangel in her system made it seem that she was still speaking aloud, but she wasn't. The person before her in the mirror was changing, and the scene that the mirror displayed was beginning to spin.
She wasn't aware that she dropped her hairbrush, or that she gripped the white enameled dressing table with both her hands. She didn't see her own eyes widen, and take on a glassy, unblinking stare. She didn't see anything at all, from that moment onward, that was in the outer world of sight and sound and taste and smell.
She was somewhere else. The person who she was looked into a cracked mirror, and that mirror reflected flames behind her. The ground itself was burning. The city around her was blazing. And she was sitting in a vehicle whose doors she couldn't open.
Outside her, a mob was rocking the car she was in. She knew it was a car, and she knew that the mob was out of control. She also knew that in the front seat of that car her driver lay sprawled, shot to death.. She was trapped alone, helpless.
The mob closed in, until she could see nothing through the mirror but their dark bodies pressed against the car's windows, and faces full of hatred screaming at her—distorted faces full of hatred for the techno-barons who'd brought the retribution of the sharrh down upon them all.
She found herself clasping her stomach. She was pregnant. Didn't they know out there that she was pregnant? She screamed back at the crowd that it wasn't her fault, that she wasn't to blame for the sharrh's coming. But her family owned a controlling interest in the largest of the Merovin conglomerates, and the rioters were not about to listen.
The crazed mob was rocking the car now, back and forth, back and forth. More and more came to join them. Suddenly the car was being pushed forward, and then it canted to one side.
She screamed, "No!" when she realized they were lifting the car. She pounded on the glass, but the faces pressed to it didn't soften. She tried to open first one door, then the other, to no avail. Against the weight of the crowd, they were as good as locked.
Her car was completely off the ground, now. The crowd had lifted it, and was carrying it toward the flames.
As she realized what they were doing, she screamed louder and louder. She screamed that the sharrh's coming wasn't her fault; she screamed that technology hadn't done this to them; she screamed that she would give them all her money and all her possessions, if only they would let her and her unborn child go.
But the mob didn't listen. Women's faces, distorted against the glass, cursed her. Men leered. And closer came the flames.
The car rocked so now, from the lurch of the crowd as it picked up speed, that she was thrown about on the back seat. She grabbed for the front seat's headrest, holding on.
Then she saw how she would die.
The mob was running with the car toward a great fire, and a smaller bonfire set in the middle of the street. She screeched in horror, and started to scramble over the back seat into the front seat. The windscreen was cracked; perhaps she could punch it through and escape that way.
As she straddled the seat, she remembered her driver, with his brains splattered over the upholstery. Then her knee hit the dead man's chest, and she slipped in his blood.
The car tilted crazily. Then it fell, throwing her against the dashboard. When she scrambled up, holding her head, trying to blink away the dizziness and look through the cracked windscreen, the crowd was no longer around her.
Fire was everywhere. Through it, she thought she could see faces contorted in fury as the mob watched the car burning in the middle of the bonfire.
She was coughing; she was hot; everything around her was hot. She was burning up. The upholstery caught on fire—little puffs of smoke that caught and blazed. The car's doors were too hot to touch, and the door-upholstery was plastic, which gave off choking fumes as it melted.
She was coughing her guts out, and she felt her baby die just before the flames all around the car reached its petrol tanks and she felt nothing more but a single spark of white obliteration that seemed to explode her into a universe of eternally blazing stars.
Nikolaev House was as far west as you could get on Rimmon Isle; it faced New Harbor on the north and Dead Harbor on the south. You could see Ramsey-head and beyond from its docks. The elite mercantilists wanted to keep watch on their customers, one and all.
Michael was out with Rita Nikolaev on her private balcony, a place he'd never thought to be. Not alone with her.
But alone with her he was, and his body and mind were sending him conflicting signals. She was as wondrous as ever he remembered her; she was everything his flesh desired. And Revenantists . . . well, they were freer with their bodies than Adventist women were, or Nev Hetteker women would ever be, since both common sense and morality differed here, An Adventist woman worried about disease and pregnancy; Revenantists didn't. Both were karmic penalties, to be embraced even if they killed you. Everything here was a matter of politics: you negotiated even with God. Did what you pleased, so long as no one found out.
&n
bsp; Yet Rita was a friend of Cassie's—an older friend, a wiser friend, a more experienced friend. And Cassie was in need of a friend whose opinion she respected. Could Chamoun do what his body prompted—reach out and put his arms around Rita Nikolaev's slim waist, pull her against him, take advantage of the privacy she offered and the invitation he was almost certain he saw in her eyes . . . ? Do all that, and then say, "Look, will you help me talk some sense into my wife?"
"Now tell me what it is that's troubling you, Captain Chamoun," said the Nikolaev woman teasingly. Cassie's friends all still called him "captain"; Rita made it a joke they shared. She was older than Cassie by centuries of experience, it seemed, though by not more than a few years. Maybe she knew about all her previous lives. Maybe there was something to this Rev-enantist creed, to make a woman so arch and proud, so calm and competent, so sure of herself though she was no older, no more experienced, than he.
He felt like a bumpkin, a rube, standing there before her, tongue-tied and hesitant.
When he didn't respond, she moved closer, looking up into his eyes with a probing intelligence that had made a slave of his heart the first time he'd seen her, so long ago in Nev Hettek. Those eyes were grave, all humor gone: "It's serious, then? I'm sorry. We're safe here, no matter what we need to discuss." She touched his arm. "Nothing you say to me will go any farther. We're about to become business partners, after all.'
"Huh? Oh, right." Merger details. He'd paid no attention to any of that. Vega Boregy and Magruder and the Nikolaevs were hammering out some kind of shipping agreement. Chance had kept him out of it, or he'd been too busy with the census, or with Cassie. . . . "But that's not it," he blurted. Rita was so damned close to him. The lights from Ramseyhead seemed to reach across New Harbor to halo her beautiful head.
"Then what is it?" She took his hand. Hers was warm and dry. She led him to the balcony's rail and there she sat on the railing, swinging her velvet panted legs as if she had no idea of her effect on him. "Come on, Michael," she smiled encouragingly. "It can't be that bad."