She held Alicia's gaze, and Alicia heard the "and from me" as clearly as if her friend had spoken the words aloud.
"It's time you faced up to him," Tannis continued after a moment. "Whatever your reason, he knows you didn't 'fail' him somehow by resigning, but you're never going to feel comfortable about it till you talk to him in person. Call it absolution."
"I don't need 'absolution'!" Alicia snapped, jade eyes flashing with sudden fire, and Tannis grinned crookedly.
"Then why the sudden heat? Come on, Sarge." She hooked an arm through Alicia's. "I'm surprised he's let your debrief wait this long, so you may as well get it over with."
"You can be a real pain in the ass, Tannis."
"True, too true. Now march, Sarge."
"Can't I even clean up first?"
"Uncle Arthur knows what sweat smells like. March!"
Alicia sighed, but the steel showed under Tannis' humor, and she was right. Alicia couldn't keep pretending Keita wasn't here, however much she dreaded reliving that decision. Yet there was a reason she'd cut every contact with the Cadre-even with Tannis-and if the pain had scarred over, it was still there. Reestablishing the ties she'd cut might rip those scars away … and under them, she knew, the wound was bleeding still.
There was a limit to how much pain she could endure, even with Tisiphone standing between her and it and -
A heat which was rapidly becoming familiar tingled in her right arm, radiating from its contact with Tannis' left elbow, and she felt her friend's thoughts. Amusement. Pride in the way she was bouncing back from her wounds. Carefully hidden worry over the upcoming interview. A burning curiosity as to the reasons for her dread over meeting Keita and concern over their possible consequences, and under it a deeper, more persistent worry about Alicia's stability-and what to do about her if she was, in fact, unstable.
Stop that!
Why? She is your physician, and we need this information.
Not from Tannis-not this way. She's also my friend.
A mental grumble answered, but the information flow died, and she was grateful. Stealing Tannis' thoughts was a violation of her privacy and trust-almost a form of rape, even if she never felt a thing-and Alicia hated it.
Not that it hadn't been useful, she conceded. The first time Tannis had hugged her, Tisiphone had plucked a disturbing suspicion from the major's mind. Alicia's monologues had gotten just a bit too enthusiastic, and Tannis knew her too well.
Forewarned, Alicia had tapered off and allowed her manufactured dialogues to run down as if she were tiring of the game. Tannis had written them off as a sarcastic response to the people who mistrusted her sanity, and thereafter Alicia had restricted herself to occasional verbal responses to actual comments from Tisiphone. That worked much better, for they were spontaneous, fragmentary, and enigmatic yet consistent-clearly not something manufactured out of whole cloth for the sole benefit of eavesdroppers-and their genuineness had turned Tannis' thoughts in the desired direction.
Alicia hated deceiving her friend, but she was having those conversations. It was always possible she truly was mad-a possibility she would almost prefer, at times-and if she wasn't, she certainly wasn't responsible for Tannis' misinterpretations of them.
She squared her shoulders, tucked the ends of the towel into the neck of her sweat shirt, and walked down the hallway at her friend's side.
Tisiphone watched through her host's eyes as they marched along the corridor. The past few weeks had been the oddest of her long life, a strange combination of impatient waiting and discovery, and she wasn't certain she had enjoyed them.
She and Alicia had learned much about her own current abilities. She could still pluck thoughts from mortal minds, but only when her host brought those other mortals into physical contact. She could still hasten physical healing, as well, yet what had once been "miracles" were routine to the medical arts man had attained. There was little she could do to speed what the physicians were already accomplishing, and so she had restricted herself to holding pain and discomfort within useful limits and insuring her host's sleep without medication or one of the peculiar somatic units. Tisiphone hated the somatic units. They might sweep Alicia into slumber through her receptors, but sleep was a stranger to Tisiphone. For her, the somatic units' soothing waves were a droning, scarcely endurable static.
She and Alicia had also determined to their satisfaction that she still could blur mortals' senses, even without physical contact. Their technology, unfortunately, was something else again, and that experiment had almost ended in disaster. The nurse had known the bed was empty, but her medical scanners had insisted it was occupied, and she'd been briefed like all the medical staff on Alicia's inexplicable history. Not surprisingly, the young woman had panicked and turned to run, and only the testing of another ability had saved the situation. Tisiphone could no longer beguile and control mortal minds, but she could fog and befuddle them. Actually taking memories from them might have become impossible, but she had blurred the recollection into a sort of fanciful daydream, and that had been just as good-this time.
Their experiments had combined dismay and excitement in almost equal measure, yet neither Tisiphone's own sense of discovery and rediscovery nor Alicia's amazement at what she still could accomplish had been sufficient to banish her boredom. She was a being of fire and passion, the hunger and destruction of her triumvirate of selves. Alecto had been the methodical one, the inescapable stalker patient as the stones themselves, and Megaira had been the thinker who analyzed and pondered with a mind of ice and steel. Tisiphone was the weapon, unleashed only when her targets had been clearly identified, her objectives precisely defined. Now she could not even know who her targets were, much less where to find them, and she felt … lost. Ignorance added to her sense of frustration, for if she had no doubt of her ultimate success, she was unused to delays and puzzles. It had turned her surly and snappish with her host (not, she admitted privately, an unusual state for such as she) until a fresh revelation diverted them both.
Tisiphone had discovered computers. More to the point, she had encountered the processors built into Alicia's augmentation, and had she been the sort of being who possessed eyes, they would have opened wide in surprise.
The data storage of Alicia's processors was little more than a few dozen terrabytes, for bio-implants simply couldn't rival the memories of full-sized units, yet they were the first computers Tisiphone had ever met, and she'd been amazed by how easy they were to access. It had taken no effort at all, for virtually all human computers were designed and programmed for neural linkage. The same technique which slipped into a mortal's thoughts through his nerves and brain worked just as well with them, and the vistas that opened were dazzling.
It was almost like finding the ghost of one of her sister selves. A weak and pallid revenant, without the rich awareness which had textured that forever-lost link, yet one which expanded her own abilities many-fold. Tisiphone had only the vaguest grasp of what Alicia called "programming" or "machine language," but those concepts were immaterial to her. A being crafted to interface with human minds had no use or need for such things; anything structured to link with those same minds became an extension of them and so an instinctive part of herself.
She had scared Alicia half to death, and felt uncharacteristically penitent for it afterward, the first time she activated her host's main processor and walked her body across the room without consulting her. Their security codes meant nothing to Tisiphone, and she unlocked them effortlessly, exploring the labyrinthine marvels of logic trees and data flows with sheer delight. Their molycirc wonders had become a vast, marvelous toy, and she flowed through them like the wind, recognizing the way in which she might use them, in an emergency, as both capacitor and amplifier. They restored something she had lost, restored a bit of what she once had been, and she'd sensed Alicia's amusement as she chattered away about her finds.
Yet it was past time for them to be about their mission, and she wondered if Alicia's meeting with Sir Arthur Keita would bring the moment closer or send it receding even further into the future.
Alicia's spine stiffened against her will as she stepped into the sparsely appointed conference room. A small, spruce man in the crimson tunic and blue trousers of the Ministry of Justice's uniformed branches stood looking out a window. He didn't turn as she and Tannis entered, and she was just as happy. Her eyes were on the square, powerful man seated at the table.
He still refused to wear his own ribbons, she noted. Well, no one was likely to pester him about proper uniform. She came to attention before him, saluted, and stood staring six centimeters over his head.
"Captain Alicia DeVries, reporting as ordered, Sir!" she barked, and Sir Arthur studied her calmly for several seconds.
"Cut the kay-det crap, Alley," he rumbled then, in the gravel-crusher voice she remembered so well, and her lips quirked involuntarily. Her eyes met his. He smiled. It was a small smile, but a real one, easing a bit-a bit-of the tightness in her chest.
"Yes, Uncle Arthur," she said.
The shoulders of the man looking out the window twitched. He turned just a tad quickly, and her lips quirked again at his reaction to her lese majeste. So he hadn't known how the troops referred to Keita, had he?
"That's better." Keita pointed at a chair. "Sit."
She obeyed without comment, clasping her hands loosely in her lap, and returned his searching gaze. He hadn't changed much over the past five years. He never did.
"It's good to see you again," he resumed after a moment. "I wish it could be under different circumstances, but-" A raised hand tipped, as if pouring something from a cupped palm. She nodded, but her eyes burned with sudden memory. Not of Mathison's World, but of another time, after Shallingsport, when only nine of them had come back, and Tannis had still hovered between life and death.
He'd known the uselessness of words then, too.
"I know I promised we'd never reactivate you," he continued, "but it wasn't my decision." She nodded again. She'd known that, for if Sir Arthur Keita seldom gave his word, that was only because he never broke it.
"However," he went on, "we're both here now, and I've postponed this debrief as long as I could. The relief force pulls out for Soissons day after tomorrow; I'll have to make my report-and my recommendations-to Governor Treadwell and Countess Miller when we arrive, and I won't do that without speaking personally to you first. Fair?"
"Fair." Alicia's contralto was deeper than usual, but her eyes were steady, and it was his turn to nod.
"I've already viewed your statement to Colonel McIlheny, so I've got a pretty fair notion of what happened in the fire fight. It's what happened after it that bothers me. Are you prepared to tell me more about it now?"
The deep voice was unusually gentle, and Alicia felt an almost unbearable temptation to tell him everything. Every single impossible word. If anyone in the galaxy would have believed her it was Uncle Arthur. Unfortunately, no one could believe her, not even him, and they weren't alone. Her eyes flipped to the Justice man, and an eyebrow arched.
"Inspector Ferhat Ben Belkassem, Intelligence Branch," Keita said. "You may speak freely in front of him."
"In front of a spook?" Alicia's eyes snapped back to Keita's face, suddenly hard, and the temptation to openness faded.
"In case you've forgotten, I'm something of a spook," he replied quietly.
"No, Sir, I haven't forgotten. And, Sir, I respectfully decline to be debriefed by Intelligence personnel." It came out clipped and even colder than she'd intended, and Ben Belkassem's eyebrows rose in surprise.
Keita sighed, but he didn't retreat. His eyes bored into her across the table, and there was no yield in his voice.
"That isn't an option, Alley. You're going to have to talk to me."
"Sir, I decline."
"Oh, come on, Alley! You've already spoken to McIlheny!"
"I have, Sir, when under the impression that he remained a combat branch officer. And-" her voice turned even colder "-Colonel McIlheny is neither Cadre nor a representative of the Ministry of Justice. As such, he may in fact be an honorable man."
She felt Tannis flinch behind her, but her friend held her tongue, and Ben Belkassem stepped back half a pace. It wasn't a retreat; he was simply giving her room, declaring his neutrality in whatever lay between her and Keita.
The brigadier leaned back and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"You can't decline, Alley. This isn't like last time." She sat stonily silent, and his face hardened. "Allow me to correct myself. In one respect, this is exactly like last time: you can damned well end up in the stockade waiting to face a court if you push it."
"Sir, I respectful- "
"Hold it." He interrupted her in mid-word, before she could dig in any more deeply, then shook his head. "You always were a stubborn woman, Alley. But this isn't a case of a captain breaking a colonel around the edges-" Ben Belkassem's eyes widened fractionally at that, and Alicia felt Tannis' sudden stiffness at her back "-and I don't have the latitude to allow you to refuse to talk to me." He raised a palm as her eyes flared hot. "You had a right to every damned thing you did after Louvain. I said so then, and I say so now, but this isn't then, and the questions aren't coming just from me. Countess Miller has personally charged me with uncovering the truth."
His eyes drilled into hers, and she sat back in her chair. He meant it. If it had been only him, he might have let her off, let her walk away from the past and all its anguish yet again. But he had his orders, and orders were something he took very seriously, indeed.
"Excuse me, Sir Arthur." Ben Belkassem raised one placating hand as he spoke. "If my presence is the problem, I will willingly withdraw."
"No, Inspector, you won't." Keita's voice was frosty. "You are part of this operation, and I will value your input. Alley?"
"Sir, I can't. It-I promised the company, Sir." Her own sudden hoarseness surprised her, and a tear glistened. She felt Tisiphone's surprise at the surge of raw, wounded emotion, then relaxed minutely as the Fury slipped another pane of that mysterious glass between her and the anguish. She drew a deep breath, meeting Keita's eyes pleadingly but with determination. "You know why … and you understand about promises, Sir."
"I do," Keita didn't wince, though his voice gave the impression he had, "but I have no choice. I was at Shallingsport, and Louvain. And I was there at Sligo Palace. You're right-I do understand why you feel that way. But I have no choice."
"Understand?" Alicia's voice cracked. She swallowed, but she couldn't stop. Despite all Tisiphone could do, an old, old agony drove her. "If you do, then how can you ask this of me? We went in with a company, Sir-a company!-and came out with half a squad!"
"I know."
"Yes, and you know why, too, Sir! You know why that son-of-a-bitch screwed our mission brief to hell, and you know what came of it, and you still want me to talk to a spook?!"
Her eyes were hard, harder than Sir Arthur Kieta had ever seen them, and she half-crouched forward in her chair, hands like talons on its armrests as she glared at him.
"Alley. Alley!" Alicia's augmentation crackled with prep signals as emotion jangled through her, and Tannis' hands massaged her shoulders, trying to relax her tension. "They did their best, Sarge." Tannis' voice was soft. "Intelligence screws up sometimes. It happens, Alley."
"Not like this," Alicia grated. "Not like this time, does it, Uncle Arthur?"
Her eyes were green flint, challenging his, and he inhaled deeply.
"No, Captain. Not like this," he said at last, quietly, and looked over her head at Tannis. "Did Alley ever discuss this with you, Major?"
"No, Sir." Tannis sounded confused, Alicia thought, and no wonder.
"No, of course not," he sighed, and turned his eyes back to Alicia. "Forgive me. You promised you wouldn't, didn't you?"
She stared back, face like marble, and he pursed his lips in thought, then nodded slowly.
"Perhaps it's time someone did, Tannis." He gestured at the chair beside Alicia and waited until the cadrewoman sat. "All right. You heard there was an, um, flap when Alicia resigned?" Tannis nodded. "Did you happen to know the nature of that 'flap'?"
"No, Sir." Tannis looked at Alicia for a moment. "I always wondered. There were all kinds of rumors, of course, but none of them ever made sense to me. There was talk that she'd resigned to avoid a court-martial, but I knew that was bogus. I couldn't imagine Alley doing anything that would draw a court! The whole idea was ridiculous! But I never heard anything else that did make sense, and … she wasn't talking to us anymore." She looked at Alicia again, her eyes glistening. "I don't think anyone in the Cadre ever knew what really happened."
"I'll be damned. I never thought the cover-up would hold."
Keita pinched the bridge of his nose again, shaking his head wearily, then continued in a flat, level voice.
"Alley assaulted a superior officer, Tannis." Tannis' brown eyes widened in disbelief, and he nodded, meeting her eyes, not Alicia's. "That officer was Colonel Wadislaw Watts," he continued, "and she didn't just 'strike' him. She hospitalized him in critical condition. In fact, it was, by her own subsequent admission, her intent to kill him, and she damned nearly did."
Tannis gasped and turned to stare at her friend, but Alicia looked straight ahead, eyes stony, showing her only her profile, while Keita continued in that same flat, steady voice.
"Precisely. You and I know, Tannis, that the Cadre isn't perfect, whatever the Empire as a whole may believe. We make mistakes. Not often, perhaps, but we make them, and when we do, they can have … major consequences. Like Shallingsport."
"Mistakes!" Alicia hissed like a curse, then caught herself and pressed her lips together. Keita didn't even frown. He simply went on speaking to Tannis as if they were the only people in the room.
"Alley's right," he told her. "It wasn't a mistake that killed ninety-seven percent of your company at Shallingsport. It was a crime, because those casualties-" he laid his palms on the tabletop, as if for balance "-were completely avoidable. Captain Watts knew exactly what was waiting for you down there, Tannis. The rest of us didn't, but he did."
Cateau's face was white, twisted with disbelief and anguish, and Keita folded his hands together and frowned down at them.
"He deliberately sent you into that ambush … and he thought he could get away with it, hide it," he said softly. "In fact, he very nearly did."
"But … but why, Sir?"
"For money. And, in Shallingsport's case, out of fear, too, I suppose. The … foreign power actually behind the Shallingsport terrorists had suborned him on his very first deployment out of the Academy. He'd been feeding them information for years before the raid, and he'd been very, very clever. He'd been through several routine security checks and two regular five-year close scrutinies, and we'd never even suspected that they'd turned him. But his employers had kept records of every payment they never made him, and when Shallingsport came up, they informed him that he could either cook his intelligence analysis to guarantee a blood bath that ended in failure, or be exposed by them."
"You're saying one of our own people set us up?" Tannis whispered.
"That's exactly what I'm saying," Keita said bluntly, "and only two things kept Watts from succeeding: the courage and determination of your company … and the leadership of Staff Sergeant Alicia DeVries."
Alicia glared at him, hands like claws in her lap under the table edge, and horror boiled behind her eyes as the scars she'd spent five years building were ripped away and she saw it all again. Captain Alwyn and Lieutenant Strassman dead in the drop. Lieutenant Masolle dying even as she ordered the break-out from the LZ. Pamela Yussuf and her people buying that break-out with their lives. And then that endless, nightmare cross-country journey, while people-friends-were picked off, blown apart, incinerated in gouts of plasma or shattered by tungsten penetrators. The wounded they had no choice but to abandon.
And then the break-in to the hostages. Obaseki Osayaba and Astrid Nordbш's icons vanishing from her HUD. Brian Oselli, throwing himself in front of the plasma cannon. Samantha Moyano firing, firing, until the plasma bolt incinerated her. Thomas Kiely breaking the counter attack's back with his own death. Tannis screaming her warning and shooting the terrorists off Alicia's back even as point-blank small arms battered her own armor and she took two white-hot tungsten penetrators. The terror and blood and smoke and stink as somehow they held they held they held until the Marine shuttles came down like the hands of God to pluck them out of Hell while she and Kuromachi Chiyeko ripped at Tannis' armor and the medic restarted her heart twice … .
It was impossible. She knew that now. 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 she'd been, by God, too stupid to know they couldn't … and because they'd been were all that stood between six 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, five years later, on Louvain, Captain DeVries captured a dying Rishathan War Mother. And because she was dying and Alley had spared her line-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 as Alicia remembered the dying Rish. Remembered the beautiful golden eyes blazing in that hideous face as Shernsiya 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, and challenged him with what she'd learned. He panicked and tried to kill her, confirming his guilt, and she shattered his skull, his jaw, both cheekbones, his ribs, his wrist, and his elbow, ruptured his spleen, crushed both testicles, broke three vertebra, seriously damaged the left ventricle of his heart, and punctured his right lung in four places with bone fragments 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 desperate to avoid any sort of scandal, and the reason for Alley's attack was hushed up and she was given her choice: keep her mouth shut forever about the truth, 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 and Shallingsport or provoke a fresh 'incident' with the Rish. Watts turned Crown's evidence, and they handed him 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 Tannis' face, and her eyes were sick.
"And Alley accepted the order to keep silent," Keita said, his voice very quiet. "She accepted the order because it came from the Emperor himself, but she couldn't accept the betrayal. That's why she resigned, the reason she walked away from the Cadre and everything connected to it. And it's why she won't talk to 'spooks,' Tannis. Not even to me. She doesn't trust us."
"I trust you, Uncle Arthur," Alicia said very quietly. "I know how you fought it-and I know you were the one who forced them to accept my resignation instead of pushing through with that damned court-martial threat of Yuroba's. The only one who believed I'd really keep silent."
"That's crap, Alley," Sir Arthur replied. "I told you then-he wouldn't have dared push it in the end."
"Maybe. But it doesn't change anything. 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 how you 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's 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 explain it to 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.
Little One, the voice in her mind was soft, I like this man. He has the taste of honor.
He is honor, she replied bitterly. That's why they gave him this assignment. Because he'll do what his oath to the Emperor demands, however much he may hate himself for it.
What will you tell him?
I don't want to lie to him-I don't even know if I could make myself try, and he'd spot it in a minute if I did.
Then do not, Tisiphone suggested. Tell him what he asks.
Are you out of your mind?! He'll think I'm crazy!
Precisely.
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 Uncle Arthur 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' overrides.
And if he does? Tisiphone had followed her internal debate. We have already determined I can reactivate it any time I choose, and would it not aid our escape if they believe your augmentation is useless?
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 Thirty-Nine
I think you are in trouble, Little One, Tisiphone observed as Tannis Cateau'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 them both, as automatic as sneezing on dust. She fell away from the kick, 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 Tannis 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.