Zur-Kohlbyr touched a key on the wall and the door to the waiting room slid shut. He leveled a wide grin toward Zur-Iyal. “I knew I could count on you, Cousin.”
“Forgive me, Cousin Director.” Iyal took her hands off the table and folded her arms across her chest. “But this sudden reacknowledgment of our family connection has got me a little confused.” She shifted her expression to a glower and her tenses to across-table casual, which was one step from insubordinate. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
Zur-Kohlbyr’s smile was indulgent. “Iyal, these are serious events here. We have the chance to take the lead with them and shape Kethran’s future as a power in the Quarter Galaxy.”
Uh-oh. A gleam shone softly in the Director’s eye. He was smelling power and he had a keen instinct for it. It was a genetic tendency reinforced by the First Family environment. His branch had been particularly successful at applying it for a hundred years.
“The Vitae want our Aria.” He settled back and lifted his drink. “They want her more than I’ve ever seen them want anything since that business with passing the anti-contraband measures. Now, why?” He sipped his gold liquid. “Would you like a drink?”
“No, thank you.” I don’t think my stomach could handle it right now.
He swirled the liquid in the glass meditatively. “She must be unique in some significant way.” He smiled at Iyal again. “If we knew how, we, you and I, Cousin, could give Kethran what the rest of the Quarter Galaxy would sell their lives to have, a step up on the Vitae.”
“Well, it’s not like we haven’t been trying to work on it, Zur-Kohlbyr,” Iyal reminded him.
“We’ve been trying within very strict boundaries.” He swallowed the last of his drink. “I suggest that the importance of speed in this matter removes those boundaries.”
Iyal felt the blood drain out of her cheeks. “What do you want me to do, Cousin Director? Take a sapient woman apart to see how she ticks?”
“Zur-Iyal.” Zur-Kohlbyr rested his hands flat on the table. “We need this. Things are building quickly in the Quarter Galaxy. The Unifiers are becoming a real force, and we don’t know how power will go to their collective heads. The Shessel are beginning to colonize and spread in their own right and we don’t know what they will do either. The Vitae are pulling back to this little world they’ve found, perhaps permanently, perhaps not. Without some leverage, Kethran, this world our parents built from a dead rock, is doomed to be tossed around the political storm like a feather in a stampede.”
Iyal said nothing.
“Cousin, I know you have limited your considerable talent for intrigue and manipulation to the occasional interaction with contraband runners. Since it was proper to your postmarriage status and beneficial to the labs, I’ve never said anything about it. Now I’m asking you to remember your birth family and your place in the soul-politic and do not make me force you to hand this artifact over to me after I’ve seen to your arrest.
“Where is Aria Stone now?”
Iyal gripped her wrist until the edges of the portrait bracelet dug into her palm. She saw Aria in the lab, reading. She saw her, narrow-eyed and plainly frightened, as she arrived by Perivar’s side. She heard her own voice talking to Perivar: And I’m not crazy about the idea you’d think I’d get her in here and put her in a processor…
And she heard Basq promising to leave as soon as they had Aria, and she saw Kethran forced to crawl back to the Parent World because they couldn’t manage on their own. And she heard Cousin Director’s threat again and she knew, she knew, that he meant it. And she saw Aria in the lab.
Iyal stood up. “Aria Stone is on field assignment, Cousin Director. I’ll have her recalled immediately. You’ll have to give me eleven hours, though.”
He nodded. “I think I can give you just that, Iyal. Remember, we need her alive, but I’m sure we can explain away any other…aspects…of her physical condition.” His smile grew conspiratorial. “I knew, I knew, you would hold true on this.”
“We will also have to talk further, Cousin Director,” she said with what she hoped was a knowing leer.
She let him walk her to the door and salute her as she left.
Back out in the corridor, she used her torque to call Allenden.
“Where is she?” she asked under her breath as she skirted two interns who were deep in their own discussions.
“Sweeping the attic, actually,” came Allenden’s reply, “Iyal, what…”
“I’ll tell you later. Just sit still for now, all right?”
“All right, Iyal, all right.” There was a peeved note in his voice. Iyal swallowed. She couldn’t risk getting Allenden angry right now. There was too much she might need him for later.
“Allenden,” she said. “We need to move with extreme caution on this. It could shape up into a family war if we don’t.”
She could tell by the length of the pause that she had gotten to him.
“I’m waiting on the news, Iyal,” he said, and shut the connection down.
In no mood to wait for the service lift, Iyal ran up three flights of stairs.
The attic was actually a lab that had been shut down three years ago when the Vitae had finished implementing their plans for controlling the genetic engineering industry on Kethran. The loss of business had forced Amaiar Gardens to cut its staff. The unused lab had never been officially converted into storage, but unused equipment, broken furniture, and anything else that anybody wanted to get out of the way turned up there. Every now and again some intern in trouble with his supervisor would be sent up there to clean it out and organize it.
Inside, Aria was lugging a polymer crate full of anonymous cables from its spot in the middle of the floor. Iyal stood in the threshold and watched her for a moment. Aria wore the plain moss green shirt and trousers that most of the interns favored when doing heavy jobs, but she still kept her spill of dark hair wrapped under her black turban. The thick tool belt around her waist had a cattle prod dangling next to the bumpy leather pouch she always carried, because even though they weren’t supposed to, the newer handlers had taken to quietly getting Aria out into the pens to help deal with balkier specimens. She had, as near as Iyal could understand, been some kind of animal handler back on her homeworld. She never complained about the extra work. She never even asked why she was being tapped. She just waded in and did whatever she was told to with an eagerness to please that bordered on groveling sometimes. For the past couple of weeks, Iyal had been wondering what all that ingratiation was covering up.
Now she was still wondering.
Aria stacked the crate on top of a container of silicate blocks and turned around. She saw Iyal in the doorway and flinched.
“Zur-Iyal,” she said as she recovered. “Sorry. Was…I was startled.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Iyal stepped all the way into the room and let the door slide shut behind her. “I need to talk to you, Aria.”
“All right,” said Aria, without hesitation, like she always did. Sometimes, Iyal had the feeling she could tell the woman to go jump off a cliff, and Arla’d still say “all right.”
Sometimes. Other times, out of the corner of her eye, Iyal caught Aria studying her with her innocent, brown eyes turned to black slits like she was memorizing Iyal’s motions, and calculating…calculating what?
Iyal shot the bolt on the manual lock. “Aria Stone, you’ve got two minutes to explain why I shouldn’t hand you over to the Vitae Ambassador who was here looking for you.”
Aria blanched until she was nearly as white as a Vitae herself, but her voice remained steady.