“So I have.” Brun leaned it against the couch. “Do you—does anyone—have the slightest idea what was going on, and who did it?”
“The present idea is that Harlis wanted to talk to you in private, he and your cousin Kell. There’s no real evidence, except that Harlis found you at dinner and told you he’d been to the house looking for you and found police there. That didn’t happen. My guess would be that he wasn’t actually planning to kill you, just trying to bully you into doing something he wanted.”
“He wanted to go to Sirialis, he said,” Brun said. “I can’t imagine why.”
“To find out what your mother found?” asked Kate, from an armchair across the room.
“Possibly,” Kevil said. “If he thought it was your mother’s evidence that landed him in trouble.”
“Has anyone located him?” Brun asked.
“No. He didn’t go up on a scheduled shuttle, but you know there are other ways . . . does he own a shuttle?”
“He might’ve taken the family one—”
“Not the one at Appledale; we checked on that. But with the Grand Council meeting coming up, there are Family shuttles of all sizes coming and going. He might have caught a ride with someone. We’re trying to find out. And of course he may not have tried to get offworld at all—he could be on his way back to his own place, or somewhere else—”
“And there are a few more things for the police to do than chase one suspect, I’ll bet,” said Kate.
“Yes.” Kevil sighed. “Brun, we’ve made up the spare bedroom for you and Kate. Stepan’s having his senior security staff check over the town house; he expects you can move back in tomorrow morning. We’re covered, of course.”
“Of course,” Brun murmured. She felt both very tired and very alert.
“Have you told Kate about the meeting today?”
“No,” Brun said. “I wasn’t planning to—”
“Stepan said it wouldn’t hurt, and might take the strain off you, not to be keeping more secrets than you have to.” He turned to Kate. “Stepan’s head of our sept—the Barracloughs—and he asked Brun to become his designated heir.”
Kate frowned. “The sept—I’ve never quite understood. Families I understand . . . is this like a sort of super-family of families?”
“Yes, in a way.”
Kate whistled. “Well—quite a step up, then.”
“You’ll like this,” Brun said. “One thing I had to do was agree not to be rejuved.”
“My . . .”
“Yes. Power versus longevity. Take your pick. And I’m being dropped in at the deep end: he wants me to address the Grand Council formally at the next meeting. So I think I’d better toddle off to bed and get my beauty sleep.”
She woke with a start in the unfamiliar bed, with Kate snoring lightly across the room. She could just make out the green and cream stripes of the wallpaper. What had woken her? She heard voices in the distance, muffled by the closed door, then footsteps coming closer. A tap.
“Yes,” she said softly. Kate’s snore stopped in the middle.
“It’s me,” George said. “Can you come out?”
Brun looked at the time and sighed. She could have used another hour’s sleep, but she was, after all, wide awake. “Coming,” she said.
She wrapped the borrowed robe—one of Kevil’s she thought—around her, and went out to find Kevil waiting for her in his study. “We just heard—Harlis rented a yacht from Allsystems Leasing yesterday. He’s with a mutineer commander, and apparently rented the yacht bare. Probably crewed by Fleet personnel, in other words. They requested and got a fast-transit exit route and went into jump two hours ago.”
“Did they say where they were going?”
“Harlis told Allsystems Burkholdt and Celeste, but the same mutineer had tried to get passage on a civilian ship to Millicent. I think the question at this point is, who’s in command of that yacht?”
“They don’t get up this early on ranches,” Kate said from the doorway. She yawned. “Found Harlis, did they?”
“And lost him,” Kevil said. “Case of the right hand not having told the left what was going on.” He explained what they knew.
Kate frowned. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“What doesn’t?”
“The timing. He was at the restaurant when we were eating dinner—what time was that?”
“I don’t know . . . it wasn’t late . . . 1900 maybe?”
“And the yacht left the Station at 2230. So he must have run for a shuttle and then gone immediately . . .”
“Yes . . . that makes sense.”
“Except that he leased the yacht earlier. He’d have to have been on the Station, then come down to the surface, then gone back up . . . Why? Is that even possible?” Kate looked from face to face.
“With good private shuttles, of course,” Brun said.
“He came down to pick you up,” George said suddenly. “He arranged to hire the ship, he leased the shuttle, and while the ship was being provisioned, he came down to get you.”
“He was going to take her away? Where?” Kate looked at Brun; Brun felt a chill that struck through her like a spear of ice.
“I . . . don’t want to know,” she said, struggling to keep herself from showing the panic she felt. Had she really come so close to another captivity? But her mind went on working. “Sirialis. If he took me to Sirialis, the people there would think it was me. I mean, they’d think it was all right, at first, and then—”
“A hostage.” Kevil said. “Against your sept, certainly against anything the people on Sirialis might do. And—Brun, you have the family codes for the communications and data storage systems on Sirialis, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. Everything but Mother’s private ciphers.”
“Would he know about hers? About your not having them?”
“I don’t know.” Brun felt a wave of panic, and shoved it down.
“Our files on him are at Appledale,” Kate said. “We didn’t bring them into town—didn’t see a reason to. He was detained, we thought.” She sounded annoyed.
“Gentleman’s detention—he wore a scan bracelet,” Kevil said. “His attorneys argued that he wasn’t going to bolt, and he’d posted a huge bond. Anyway, he claimed to have a toothache; apparently his dentist took the bracelet off for him early yesterday morning. Nobody realized he’d slipped away for hours: the dentist claimed he had an emergency ahead of Harlis, and the bracelet returned a signal. The dentist’s now in detention himself; they found the bracelet tucked under the cushion of one of the chairs.”
“Did Harlis go to Appledale?” Brun asked.
“No. We’ve called out there; no intrusion.”
“He has the family codes,” Brun said suddenly.
“What?”
“Harlis. He has the codes. Some of them, anyway, the general ones. I’m sure—unless Mother changed them, when she left, but she would have thought he was in detention. No reason to change them. And nobody’s there.”
“The staff are,” Kevil said. “The others . . .”
“No family,” Brun said. “No one who can change the codes, and lock him out.”
“If that’s where he’s going, with a Fleet warship, just changing the codes wouldn’t help.”
“I’ll bet that’s how they got in, in the first place,” Brun said.
Kevil looked blank, and so did George. “Who got in? When?”
“Lepescu and his . . . hunters. I’ll bet it was Harlis, or my cousin Kell.”
“You could be right. Your father never did figure out why that fellow who was Stationmaster of the Pinecone let him in. If Harlis had pressured him, it makes more sense.”
“But now—we have to stop him getting there. I’ll have to go—”
“Brun—you can’t. You have to be here.”
“But Kevil—we can’t just let him go in there and terrorize people . . .”
“What could you do if you were there?”
“Warn them. Try to help.” But she knew it would be futile; she wasn’t a battle group of Fleet ships, all in herself. No. She had to give that up, and do what she could for the Familias as a whole. She could warn them, that was all.