Alicia glared at him, hands taloned in her lap under the table edge, and horror boiled behind her eyes. Captain Alwyn and Lieutenant Strassman dead in the drop. Lieutenant Masolle dead two minutes after grounding. First Sergeant Yussuf and her people buying the breakout from the LZ with their lives. And then the nightmare cross-country journey in their powered armor, while people—friends—were picked off, blown apart, incinerated in gouts of plasma or shattered by tungsten penetrators from auto cannon and heavy machine-guns. Two-man atmospheric stingers screaming down to strafe and rocket their bleeding ranks, and the wounded they had no choice but to abandon. And then the break-in to the hostages. Private Oselli throwing himself in front of a plasma cannon to shield the captives. Tannis screaming a warning over the com and shooting three terrorists off her back while point-blank small arms battered her own armor and she took two white-hot tungsten penetrators meant for Alicia. The terror and blood and smoke and stink as somehow they held they held they held until the recovery shuttles came down like the hands of God to pluck them out of Hell while she and the medic ripped at Tannis’s armor and restarted her heart twice. . . .
It was impossible. They couldn’t have done it—no one could have done it—but they had. They’d done it because they were the best. Because they were the Cadre, the chosen samurai of the Empire. Because it was their duty. Because they were, by God, too stupid to know they couldn’t . . . and because they were all that stood between two hundred civilians and death.
“The plan failed,” Keita’s quiet voice cut through the surreal flashes of hideous memory, “because of you people, but we didn’t know how the intelligence had gone so horribly wrong. We looked—I assure you we looked— but we never found the answers. And then, two years later, on Louvain, Captain DeVries captured a dying Rishathan War Mother. Her medics did their best for the Rish, but she was too far gone. And because she was dying and Alley had spared her war daughters’ lives, she repaid her honor debt.”
More memories wracked Alicia, and Tisiphone rushed to harvest their rage, gathering it up and storing its fiery strength. Alicia remembered the dying Rish. She remembered the beautiful golden eyes blazing in that hideous face as the matriarch discovered she was that DeVries and bestowed the priceless, poisonous gift in the name of honor.
“There was no proof, no record, only the word of a dying Rish, but Alley knew it was true. And because she had no proof, she returned to the command ship, found Colonel Wadislaw Watts, the mission’s assistant intelligence chief, and challenged him with what she’d learned. He panicked and tried to run, confirming his guilt, and she shattered his skull, his ribs, and both legs with her bare hands before they could pull her off him.”
The room was very quiet, and Alicia heard her own harsh breathing while echoes of savagery burned in her nerves. Only her hate had spared Watts’s life. Only her need to make him feel it, to return just a taste of what her people had suffered. If only she’d kept control of herself! One clean blow—just one!—would have left the medics nothing to save.
“And that,” Keita said sadly, “was when the cover-up began. Baron Yuroba was Minister of War at the time. He decided no breath of disgrace could be permitted to mar our success at Louvain, and Minister of Justice Canaris agreed for reasons of his own. The reason for Alley’s attack was hushed up, and she was given her choice: resign or face trial for assaulting a superior officer. No scandal. No messy media circus and gory court martial to befoul the honor we’d won at Louvain or provoke a fresh ‘incident’ with the Rishatha. Watts was retired, stripped of his pension, and turned over to Justice, who—in return for his secret testimony and assistance in breaking the Rishathan espionage net which had run him—amnestied him for his crimes.”
Tears trickled down Gateau’s face, and her eyes were sick.
“That’s why Alley won’t talk to ‘spooks,’ Tannis. Not even to me. She doesn’t trust us.”
“I trust you, sir,” Alicia said very quietly. “I know how you fought it—and I know I only got off as lightly as I did because of you.”
“That’s crap, Alley,” Sir Arthur replied. “They wouldn’t have dared push it in the end—not when they’d have had to explain why they were breaking one of the three living holders of the Banner of Terra.
“Maybe. But it doesn’t change anything, sir. I would have forgiven them anything but letting Watts live—letting him keep his honor by purging the record. My people deserved better than that.”
“They did, and I couldn’t give it to them. We live in an imperfect universe, and all we can do is the best we can. But that’s the real reason they sent me clear out here in person. Countess Miller’s read the sealed records. She knows how you feel and why, but she’s been instructed by His Majesty himself to discover how you managed to survive and evaded all of our sensors. I am directed to inform you that this matter has been given Crown priority, that I speak with the Emperor’s own voice, as your personal liege. No doubt the intent is to duplicate the capability in other personnel, but there is also an element of fear. The unknown has that effect even today, and they’re determined to get to the bottom of it. I would . . . greatly prefer to be able to tell them myself, Alley.”
His eyes were almost pleading, and she looked away. He still wanted to shield her. Wanted to protect her from those less wary of her wounds or what their questions might cost her. But what could she do? If she told him the absolute, literal truth, he’d never believe her.
the voice in her mind was soft,
she replied bitterly.
Tisiphone suggested.
Alicia blinked. She actually hadn’t considered this possibility when she decided to maintain her semblance of insanity. She should have realized she would be forced to confront the Cadre and her past directly, but the old wound had been too deep for her to consider all its implications, and she’d never guessed the Emperor himself might insist on probing the matter.
But suppose she told Keita the whole story? He had a built-in lie detector no hardware could match. He’d know she was telling the truth . . . as she believed it, at any rate. What would he do with her then?
What his orders dictated, of course. He’d return her to Soissons for further investigation—and, no doubt, treatment for her insanity. That might even be good, since the sector capital would be a much more practical base from which to begin her own search for the pirates. But because he would know she was far, far over the edge, he’d also do what the book demanded and shut down her augmentation through Tannis’s overrides.
Tisiphone had followed her internal debate.
Alicia looked back up and met Keita’s pain-filled gaze. She couldn’t tell them everything. Even if they didn’t believe in Tisiphone, they might be alarmed enough to take precautions against the Fury’s ability to read thoughts and handle her augmentation. But if she cut off, say, with the day Tannis had arrived, before they’d begun their experiments. . . .
“All right, Uncle Arthur,” she sighed. “You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you exactly where I was and how I got there.”
Chapter Seven
Tisiphone observed as Major Gateau’s left leg scythed viciously for Alicia’s ankles.
She levitated above its arc, and her own foot lashed out. Tannis never saw it coming, but the moves and counters, action and reaction, were part of t
hem both, as automatic as sneezing on dust. She fell away from the attack, robbing it of its power, and slammed a wrist up under Alicia’s ankle. Alicia fell to the mat as Tannis landed on her own shoulder blades and flowed into a backward somersault. She tucked and rolled until her toes touched the mat and dug in—then straightened her knees explosively and catapulted back toward Alicia in a ferocious charge. Alicia had rolled sideways and bounced up herself, but she was still off-center when the major reached her. Arms snaked about one another, hands flashed and parried in a flickering blur, and then Tannis was leaning forward, one leg bent, the other in full extension, while Alicia cartwheeled through the air with a squawk of dismay. She hit the mat with a mighty thud, flat on her belly and tried to roll upright, only to grunt in anguish as a knee drove into her spine, a hand cupped the back of her head, and a forearm of iron pressed into her throat.
“How about it, Sarge?” Tannis panted in a disgustingly pleased tone.
Tisiphone asked interestedly,
Alicia snapped back, and went limp with a groan.
“Uncle,” she said.
“Damn, that feels good.” Gateau’s grin sparkled, and she rose, then leaned forward to help Alicia to her feet.
“For one of us,” Alicia muttered, massaging the small of her back cautiously. She and Tannis wore light protective gear and sparring mittens—no mere precaution but a necessity when drop commandos practiced full-contact— but every bone and sinew ached.
“Out of shape, that’s your problem,” the major jibed. “You used to take me three falls out of five, and now you’re letting a pill-pusher throw you around the salle? Dear me, whatever would Sergeant Delacroix say?”
“Nothing. He’d just take both us uppity bitches round to the advanced class and lay us out cold.”
“Ah, for the good old days!” Tannis sighed, and Alicia chuckled. Learning to do that again hadn’t been easy. The last few weeks had been bad, not shattering but drably depressing, for her senses were dull and dead, deprived of the needle-sharp acuity of her sensory boosters. Those boosters had been a part of her for so long she felt maimed without them.
She knew her friend had shut down her own augmentation to make their sparring even. Not, she admitted, with another groan, that Tannis any longer needed the edge her hardware might have given her. She stood barely one hundred sixty-five centimeters to Alicia’s own one-eighty-three, but her home world boasted a gravity thirty percent greater than Earth’s, and there were no noncombatant drop commandos. Medics were medics first but only first, and Tannis had spent the last five years keeping her edge in workouts just like this one. Alicia hadn’t. In fact, the mind boggled at how any of Mathison’s citizenry would have reacted to an invitation to an all-out bout.
She got herself fully upright and pushed her non-reg bangs out of her eyes, knowing she looked a wreck and wondering where the vid sensors were. All her military rights had been scrupulously observed, and Keita himself, as regs prescribed, had formally notified her (not without an unusual, wooden embarrassment) that she would be kept under observation at all times. She was carried on the sick list, and—technically—she wasn’t a prisoner, which gave her full run of the transport, but they couldn’t take a chance on her vanishing again. And, if she did, they wanted a complete readout with every instrument they had on precisely how she’d managed it.
Which was an excruciatingly polite way of saying they couldn’t let her run around unwatched when they were no longer confident she could count to twenty with her shoes on.
As much as she’d expected—and, yes, worked for it— it hurt, and it had wounded more than her alone. Keita could have let Tannis explain it all to her as her physician if he weren’t such an honorable old stick . . . and if he hadn’t known how distressed Tannis already was over deactivating her augmentation. All of her processors had been shut down, and her pharmacope, and her Alpha and Gamma receptors, as well. He’d made an exception for her Beta receptor, so she could still at least directly access the computers for information and entertainment, and he’d stood beside her in sickbay, offering her his support and acknowledging his personal responsibility for the decision. He’d looked so unhappy she’d wanted to comfort him.
Of course, he didn’t know Tisiphone had run her own tests since and demonstrated that the “unbreakable” reactivation codes were as effective as so much smoke against her.
“’Nother fall, Sarge?” Gateau inquired lazily. Alicia backed away with a shudder that was only half-feigned, but the glint in those brown eyes was a great relief. She’d worried over Tannis’s reaction to the truth about Shallingsport, yet she’d weathered the news well. And while she might be throwing herself into this sparring just a bit more enthusiastically to hide from it, Tannis’s real motive—and the real reason for Tisiphone’s teasing, though the Fury would never admit it—was to take Alicia’s mind off her problems. Not that knowing made bruises feel any better.
“Between you and Pablo, I’ll be back in sickbay by the time we hit Soissons. Damn it, woman! I’ve only been back in shape for this for a week! Give me a break, will you?”
“Which vertebra?” Tannis purred, then collapsed in most unprofessional giggles at Alicia’s expression. “Sorry,” she gasped. “Sorry, Sarge! It’s just that I’m enjoying being the one kicking your tail for a change!”
“Oh?” Alicia gave her a sidelong, measuring glance, then curled her lip in a vulpine smile. “Why, that’s very wise of you, Major. It’s two more weeks to Soissons, after all.” Bared teeth glinted pearl-white at her friend. “Care for a little side bet on who’s going to be kicking whose tail by the time we get there, ma’am?”
Inspector Ben Belkassem sipped coffee and slid the folder of record chips aside. The ventilators sucked a rope of fragrance away from Sir Arthur’s pipe, and he sniffed appreciatively, but his face was serious.
“She seems so convinced I sometimes find myself believing it,” he said at last, and Keita grunted agreement. “There don’t seem to be any loose ends, either. It’s all internally consistent, however bizarre it sounds.”
“That’s what worries me,” Keita admitted. “She sounds convincing because she believes it—I knew that even before she went under the verifier. There’s absolutely no question in her mind, no doubts, and it’s not like Alicia to accept things unquestioningly. She wouldn’t, unless there really were something ‘speaking to her,’ so either she’s truly broken down into some sort of multiple personality disorder, or else some external force has convinced her of the complete accuracy of everything she’s told us.”
Ben Belkassem straightened in his chair, eyebrows rising. “Are you seriously suggesting that there actually is something else, some sort of entity or puppeteer, living inside her head, Sir Arthur?”
“There’s certainly an entity, even if it’s a product of her own delusions.” Keita busied himself relighting his pipe. “And she certainly believes it’s a foreign one.”
“Granted, but surely it’s far more probable that she’s slipped into some kind of delusionary pattern. My understanding from Major Gateau is that this high degree of internal consistency and absolute self-belief is normal in such cases, and Captain DeVries has certainly been through more than enough to produce a breakdown. I had no idea how traumatic her military service had been, but when you add that to the brutal way her family was massacred and her own wounds . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.
“Um.” Keita got his pipe drawing and squinted through its smoke. “How much do you know about Cadre selection criteria, Inspector?”
“Very little, other than that they’re quite rigorous and demanding.”
“Not surprising, I suppose. Still, you do know the Cadre is the only arm of the military whose strength is limited by Senate statute, correct?”
“Of course. And, with all due respect, it’s not hard to understand why, given that the Cadre answers directly to the Emperor in his own person. Everyone knows you’re a
corps d’elite, but you’re also the Emperor’s personal liegemen, and he has enough power without giving him that big a stick.”
“I won’t disagree with you, Inspector.” Keita chuckled around his pipe stem as Ben Belkassem’s right eyebrow curved politely. “Every emperor since Terrence the First has known the Empire’s stability ultimately depends on the balance of its dynamic tensions. There has to be a centralized authority, but when unchecked power becomes too concentrated in one body or clique you’ve got real trouble. You may survive for a generation or two, but eventually the inheritors of that concentration turn out to be incompetents or self-serving careerists—or both— and the whole system goes into the toilet. A sufficient outside threat may slow the process, but the gradual destruction is inevitable. However, I wasn’t referring to concerns over praetorianism on our part. What I meant to point out is that the Imperial Cadre is limited to forty thousand personnel. But what you may not realize is that no emperor has ever recruited the Cadre up to its full allowable strength.”
“No?” Ben Belkassem watched Keita over the rim of his coffee cup.
“No. Keeping us small keeps us aware of our ‘elite’ status, of course—you know, ‘The Few, the Proud, the Cadre’ sort of thing—and maintains a sort of familial relationship among us, but there are more mundane reasons. Four out of five Cadremen are drop commandos; the rest are basically their support structure, and by the time you allow for augmentation, training, combat armor, and weaponry, you could just about buy a corvette for what a drop commando costs. There are senators who suggest we ought to do just that, too. Unfortunately, you couldn’t use that same corvette to take out a bunch of terrorists without killing their hostages or stage a reconnaissance raid on a Rishathan planetary HQ, though some of the old codgers—“ he used the term “codger” totally unselfconsciously, Ben Belkassem noted wryly, despite his own age “—always seem to have trouble grasping that.