Confluence Read online

  “Do it, Coop. This is important.”

  The producer took out his comms. “You’d better have a point to all this.”

  “Trust me. You’ll be sorry if you don’t hear this. What’s the lag?”

  “To Lancia? Anything up to an hour.”

  Ships couldn’t communicate between sectors in real time. Or they hadn’t been able to before today. Other ships would record the message, then relay it after they jumped. A regular message ship jumped between the Lancian sector and the Haladean sector nowadays, but it only jumped every hour. In less-traveled sectors, the messages could take days, or even weeks.

  The producer called up the Galactic News office on Lancia.

  “This is Bob Cooper. Can I talk to Harper Fuji?”

  The answer was immediate. “Coop. Haven’t heard from you in months. So they let your ship tag along with the royal yacht, did they?”

  “I told you.” Christian slapped his comms triumphantly into the palm of his other hand. “We’re in real time.”

  Cooper looked at his comms. “Where are you, Harper?”

  “Where? Baoshan, of course. Covering the party tonight. If you’re down on planet, let’s meet for drinks.”

  Baoshan was the capital city of Lancia.

  Cooper looked at his comms as if it were about to bite him.

  “Ean.” Bhaksir waved a hand close to his face, then stepped back quickly as he focused on her. “Admiral Galenos is talking to you.”

  “Sorry.” He forced himself to concentrate on his comms. “Abram?”

  “Can you turn instantaneous communication off for the media ships?”

  The media ships were part of the Eleven’s fleet. “No.”

  Bhaksir leaned over and said into Ean’s comms, “Begging your pardon, Admiral, but we’re also receiving and broadcasting real time on Confluence Station. We’ve already discovered we can get broadcasts from Lancia here.”

  Abram blew out his breath. “Right. In that case, we might postpone these experiments for half an hour while I prepare a press release. I’ll call you when we’re done, Ean.”

  He signed off.

  When Ean turned away, Jordan Rossi was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, amusement leaking through his lines.

  “Lambert strikes again.” He waited expectantly, then looked around as he was ignored. “What? No defense? Where’s Radko?”

  “On leave,” Ean said, and tried to make it neutral, but Bhaksir said, at the same time, “Mind your own business, Rossi,” and Ean heard the interest quicken in Rossi’s lines.

  * * *

  ABRAM’S press release was a brief, recorded vid pushed out to all media outlets.

  “The New Alliance confirms that initial tests of the new intersector-communications device have been successful. You might experience small pockets of extended communication over the next few days as we continue these experiments. If you require further information, please contact Spacer Grieve at the Department of Alien Affairs.”

  As press releases went, it was almost a nonevent. Definitely not worth half an hour’s delay in testing. Although . . . they had put Grieve onto answering any questions, and Grieve wasn’t someone you wasted on simple inquiries. Ean would have liked to talk it over with Radko, but Radko wasn’t here.

  When Sale and her team arrived back from the Confluence that evening, they sat down to a shared meal. Rossi joined them, and Ean got the feeling he was glad of the company.

  Group Leader Sale was Bhaksir’s boss. Bhaksir’s whole team—Radko was part of Bhaksir’s team—were assigned to mind Ean, while Sale, and Sale’s other team, led by Team Leader Craik, spent most of its time working on the Confluence, the other eleven ship. They knew more about the ship now than Ean did.

  “We found the hospital today,” Sale said. “At least, it’s similar to the area on the Eleven that Captain Kari Wang thinks is the hospital. Except that it’s ten times the size.”

  The Confluence was four times the size of the Eleven. It had a fleet of 128 ships in tow and was the size of a small city.

  Craik slid in beside Sale. “Not that we planned on going into that section at all. We were supposed to finish mapping sector three first. This is two floors down and a quarter of the ship across.”

  “So how did you find it, then?” Ean asked. These were trained soldiers. If they were supposed to map sector three, that’s what they would do.

  “We got a wild-card day.”

  “Wild-card day?” Bhaksir asked. Ean was glad she was as mystified as he was.

  Sale said, “People get bored doing the same thing day after day. So we decided to do a random exploration.”

  “She decided,” came unbidden into Ean’s mind, the thought tinged with satisfaction. “Showing, showing.” The Confluence.

  “What made you choose that particular corridor, Sale? Out of all of them?”

  She shrugged.

  “We showed.”

  “Nice work,” Ean said, but he didn’t push Sale. She could deny it as much as she liked, but he’d ask again later, when there were fewer people around. Had the ship just shown a nonlinesman where to go? If so, how had the lines known she wanted the hospital?

  Sale scowled. “We’ve already got what feels like a hundred scientists and medical experts wanting access to it.” She scowled again. “I don’t know how they find out so fast. This is supposed to be a top secret mission. Thank the lines Galenos insists we leave as much as we can on the Confluence untouched, that any experiments we do come from the Eleven. Kari Wang can deal with the requests.”

  Selma Kari Wang, the captain of the other eleven-line ship, didn’t suffer fools. When Sale had a ship of her own—and Ean was sure that one day she would, for she would make a good ship captain—she would be a lot like Kari Wang.

  “Do you want me to—” Not that he was sure what he could do, short of asking Abram to say something, and Sale would be horrified if he did that.

  “Thanks, Ean, but no. I’m just sounding off. Admiral Galenos keeps them off our back.” She scooped up grains and beans from her plate, paused. “Speaking of experiments, after the press release, we all took half an hour to call up family.”

  Bhaksir had let her team do the same.

  “It was instantaneous. Like they were right next door. And clear as clear. If I didn’t know, and you’d just told me we were in another sector, I wouldn’t have believed you.” Sale spooned the beans into her mouth and choked. “What is this stuff?”

  The kitchen staff on the Lancastrian Princess cooked for royalty and her guests. Even Ean had to admit that Ru Li and Hana, who’d been on mess duty, were not in their class.

  “Borrow one of the chefs from Lady Lyan’s ship.” Rossi glanced Ean’s way. “After all, we do have a level-twelve linesman on board.”

  Ru Li filled Rossi’s wineglass. “Another glass of this will make the food taste better.”

  They had Lancian wine. An entire pallet of it. Ean had seen it delivered. He’d wondered at the time how much wine Helmo thought he and Rossi would drink. Ean looked at his own glass, shook his head when Ru Li offered to refill it for him.

  Sale leaned back. “So, how do we think this instantaneous communication works?”

  “I would have thought it obvious,” Rossi said. “Lines do communicate instantly within a sector, after all. If line seven links the lines through the void, then there is effectively no void for those ships.”

  “So what makes a sector, then?” Sale asked. “And how can linked ships communicate through them?”

  Back when humans had first left Earth, they had divided space into radial sections, 360 of them, one degree each, radiating out from a nominated central position on Old Earth. But after they’d discovered the lines, the old measurements had been replaced by sectors, which was an area of space in which line ships had instant communication. />
  The sectors were constant, but different sizes. There was no known mathematical theorem that could calculate why each sector was the size it was. The smallest was the Grent Anomaly, less than a light-year in area. One of the largest was the Lancian sector, which was how—back when the New Alliance had been the Alliance—Lancia had gained so much power.

  Rossi said, “Sweetheart, if we knew how linked ships communicated through sectors, human ships would have been doing it years ago.” He paused. “One might surmise that the fleet model—multiple ships common to a line eleven, with the sevens keeping individual ships linked—was the default model for alien ship movement.”

  Say what you might about Jordan Rossi, he was a linesman at heart, and he was serious about line business.

  Some of that respect must have leaked through the lines, for Rossi lost track of what he was saying momentarily and looked at Ean strangely, before continuing, “Especially given the way the Eleven is so ready to integrate any and every full set of lines it can. One might say that the only line that doesn’t provide added value to standard ship travel is line twelve.”

  Ean ignored that.

  Rossi looked around. “Where is Radko again?”

  Ean ignored that, too. As did everyone else.

  “Imagine,” Sale said. “Instant communication everywhere in the galaxy. What a shake-up that would be.”

  “Especially for Gate Union,” Rossi said. “If you had instant communication, you could automate the jump process.”

  Gate Union’s main advantage in the war at present was that they controlled the jumps. Would that mean the end of war?

  Except the New Alliance only had two elevens, and Ean, to link the ships together.

  Sale’s and Bhaksir’s comms sounded then, along with that of the senior of Rossi’s two bodyguards.

  “Heart attack.” Bhaksir looked at her comms as if she didn’t believe it. She looked at Rossi, then Ean. “But there’s been no—”

  No strong line-eleven activity, she meant. Ean might not have reacted, but Rossi would, for he was easily overcome when line eleven was strong.

  “I’ll check it out,” Sale said. “Craik, Losan, with me. Ean, watch us in case it’s a setup.”

  They left at a fast walk.

  Ean sang to lines eight and five, and asked them to track Sale through the station. He put it onto the closest screen. “Where’s she going?”

  “Station manager’s office,” Bhaksir said. “Apparently, the station manager has had a heart attack.”

  The station manager was the equivalent of a ship captain. If he’d had a heart attack, wouldn’t the lines have registered something? A little distress, maybe. If Captain Helmo had a heart attack, the lines on the Lancastrian Princess would go crazy. If someone had attacked the station manager—which was why Sale was checking it out—wouldn’t the lines have reacted?

  Ean sang up the station manager’s office on another screen. The room was filled with paramedics, along with an older, tired-looking man who was speaking to one of them, and a distressed younger man.

  “Station staff,” Bhaksir said. “The older man works directly for Patten.”

  Patten was the station manager.

  “The younger one is new. Also works for Patten. Nothing untoward.” Bhaksir called up Sale. “Looks clear so far.”

  Rossi snickered. “Nothing untoward. You people take your job so seriously.”

  Maybe one day, a heart attack could simply be a heart attack instead of paranoia. Until then? Ean watched as Sale, Craik, and Losan entered the already overcrowded office.

  Why hadn’t the lines become distressed?

  TWO

  DOMINIQUE RADKO

  THE RADKO ESTATE looked the same as Radko remembered it. Kilometers of vineyards, deepening now into purple as the leaves darkened for autumn. She hadn’t told Ean that most of the wine he drank on the Lancastrian Princess came from her family winery.

  Golden Lake, named for its color, sat like a massive gem in the heart of the estate. Hectares of trees and gardens set around smaller lakes made a gracious panorama as the car flew in. The morning sun caught the rose quartz and mica in the granite of the stone blocks of the house, making it sparkle and glow.

  It had been afternoon when she’d left Confluence Station. Radko sighed. On top of everything else, it was going to be a long day.

  She received three messages from her mother in the time it took to walk from the parking station to her apartment, and another one as she dropped her kit onto a shelf in the nearly empty wardrobe room. This time, Hua Radko leaned on the signal until her daughter answered.

  “Mother.”

  “You’re late.”

  She wasn’t. She was seventeen minutes earlier than she’d told them she’d be, but there was no point saying that. “When you’re traveling with Michelle, you travel on Michelle’s time.”

  “I suppose you can’t argue that. Although you’d think she’d try to be on time for her own father.”

  “Are we going to hold this whole conversation through the comms?” Radko asked. Her mother was perfectly capable of doing that though her apartment was just down the corridor from Radko’s. “Why don’t I come and talk face-to-face?”

  She dropped her comms back into her pocket and moved swiftly down the corridor to her mother’s claustrophobic quarters. Hua Radko had collected jeweled eggs all her life. The heavy black timber cupboards that were de rigueur for displaying them lined the walls. That, combined with the individual display lights to show off each egg, always made Radko think of a cave alight with phosphorescent growth.

  Her mother hadn’t changed. A tall, elderly woman who held herself as straight as a soldier on parade, Hua must have spent time in the military; for how else could she hold that posture so long? Radko had never asked, for her mother didn’t encourage personal questions. They’d never been close.

  The long entertaining room was crowded with people. That was normal. Hua entertained as much as her sister Jai—the Emperor’s mother—did.

  There were new faces. After years serving under Abram Galenos, checking out potential threats to the Crown Princess of Lancia, Radko recognized many of them.

  Prominent among them was Tiana Chen, a minor functionary in the Emperor’s outer circle. She didn’t have much influence with the Emperor himself, but she had a knack of ferreting out secrets from those who did and using those secrets to control them. She had no reason to associate herself with an out-of-favor branch of the Yu family like the Radkos. Nor did Ethan Saylor, the slender youth sitting beside her, whose family were part of the Emperor’s inner circle.

  Saylor leaned his head close to Chen’s, curled his lip, and said in an undertone meant to be heard. “Look what just walked in.”

  Chen rapped his fingers with her comms and said something too low to hear. Given Chen’s lower standing in court, an action like that should have been social suicide. Instead, Saylor scowled at Radko, as if she were to blame for the reprimand.

  Radko moved around to get close enough to hear them.

  Both of them fell silent.

  Her time in the fleet had made her suspicious of everyone. She had to remember that people behaved strangely without ulterior motives.

  Hua saw her then. “Surely you could have changed out of that dreadful outfit before you came to me.” If her mother had been given to histrionics, she would have put her hand to her forehead in an overt display of the hopelessness of the task.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Radko saw Saylor nod. Chen rapped his fingers again.

  Hua beckoned two of the guests toward her with an imperious snap. “Messire Zheng, Messire Tse. Do what you can.”

  Tse and Zheng circled Radko.

  “At least she has the family looks,” Tse murmured.

  “But her hair,” Zheng said. “What a disaster.”

&nbs
p; Hua beckoned again. “Messire Coles.”

  Pieter Coles had been doing the hair for the Radko family ever since Radko could remember. He’d been the first and only person to cut her hair until she’d left to join the fleet. He’d been simply “Pieter” back then. Messire was an old term, once used for a master of a craft but now mostly fallen out of favor. Maybe it was coming back into fashion, for Ean’s voice coach insisted on the title “Messire” Gospetto, as well.

  It wasn’t hard to tell what the other two were, with their striking outfits and their comms extended to full slate mode. Clothes designers.

  Radko stood patiently while the designers made their sketches. She’d done this often enough as a child to know they would have come in with their designs mostly complete. After all, what designer threw something together in half an hour when it would be worn to an audience with the Emperor of Lancia? This part of the designing was for show.

  “So excited to be a guest of honor at tonight’s party,” Hua said. “And Michelle will be there. I haven’t seen her in . . . oh, I forget how long.”

  Radko could have told her mother that Hua had last seen her grandniece 287 days prior, at a function held the day before Michelle had left to supposedly investigate the confluence. She didn’t. Instead, she stood silent and thought about her own upcoming meeting.

  Emperor Yu had a habit of springing nasty surprises when he called a member of his family in for a royal audience, and Radko’s invitation had come separate from Michelle’s, which meant the Emperor had plans for both of them.

  She didn’t know which was worse. Worrying about what the Emperor wanted or worrying about what might happen to Ean while she wasn’t there to protect him.

  “Dress her to show how important her family is,” Hua said to the designers. “After all, she is the Emperor’s cousin.”

  A cousin the Emperor didn’t remember existed most of the time.

  Radko’s oldest niece, Claudette, drifted over to talk to Chen and Saylor. Claudette was two years older than Radko. Hua hadn’t wanted a second child—after all, Henri was happily married and already producing grandchildren. But Hua’s nephew, Yu, insisted the family bloodline be carried by more than a single child. And who would argue with Yu, then newly ascended to the Lancian throne?