Errun seemed finally to wake up to the veiled accusation Prin had just levelled at him. He erupted with indignation, swiftly followed by his followers and shortly by the rest of the Traditionalist party. In moments, the chamber was as noisy as Filhyn had ever heard it, even when it was packed.
Prin might have permitted himself a smile then, Filhyn thought, if this had been no more than a debate in a debating chamber. He did not, could not, she realised, because he was perfectly serious and completely terrified of exactly what he had just revealed.
He turned to look at her. She smiled as best she could through her tears, mouthed “Well done,” at him and nodded for him to sit down.
He nodded to the Speaker, then sat.
Not that the worthy senator in the Speaker’s chair was actually in it, or taking any notice; he was on his feet roaring and waving both trunks, trying to restore order. Filhyn recognised the chamber letting off steam after having been forced to listen to something they hadn’t wanted to hear coming from somebody who was not one of their own. Not to mention somebody who had just reminded them that there were higher and greater talking shops than this one.
“That’s put the pride amidst the herd,” Kemracht muttered from behind her. Meanwhile the Speaker was rising furiously on his hind legs and clapping his front feet together. That wild breach of protocol hadn’t happened for years.
The news services carried everything — ah, the joys of a slow news day during the slack season. They showed the Speaker trampling etiquette and rearing to his feet like a disputing skivvy, they showed Errun turning shades of rage that Filhyn had not thought him capable of; and most of all they showed Prin: calm, flawless but sincere. And his words, those ghastly, searing, near-unimaginable details!
And herself. With her, mostly the news teams focused on her crying.
Her tears — not her oratory, sincerity, political skill or her principles — had made her properly famous.
Fourteen
Veppers’ aircraft hurtled across his estate at only a little over tree-top height. Veppers himself sat at the rear, shooting at things.
Leading from the grounds immediately around the torus-shaped mansion house of Espersium were seven trackways of trees; lines of dense woodland only forty or fifty metres wide but so long that they stretched — unbroken save for where they crossed major rivers — all the way to the estate’s perimeter; a distance of almost ninety kilometres in the case of the longest and most used trackway, which was the one leading towards Ubruater, the capital city of the capital planet of the whole Sichultian Enablement.
The trackways were there, famously, for one reason only: to provide sport for Veppers. Simply jumping into a flier and being bounced across to the capital on a parabolic trajectory had always seemed like something of a waste to him, for all that it was the fastest and most efficient way of getting to Ubruater. When he had the time — and he could generally make the time — he would take the slower, low-level route, having his pilots take one of his aircraft tearing over the tops of the trees, only ten metres or so above the tallest branches.
The idea was to use the flier as a beater, utilising its screaming engines and battering slipstream to disturb the wildlife in general and, in particular, to bring birds panicking up out of the foliage below. Veppers’ aircraft were all shaped like giant arrowheads with a broad flat rear containing a recessed, wind-shielded balcony where anything up to ten people could sit, firing laser rifles out through the ultraclear glass into the bustling riot of sucked-up leaves and small twigs at the startled, squawking birds.
Veppers sat with Jasken, Lehktevi — another of his Harem-girls — and Crederre, the daughter of Sapultride and his first wife, who had stayed on at the estate after her father and the girl’s step-mother, Jeussere, had left after the weekend party that had included a couple of miniature sea battles. Veppers had taken particular care to make sure that his ships did not lose the second sea battle, the day after Xingre’s unsettling visit; the bets involved in the ship battles were always small, but that was not the point. For Veppers, winning was the point.
They were on the longest trackway, the one which led to Ubruater. The aircraft’s engines roared distantly as it followed the trackway trees into a slight hollow then powered upwards again. Veppers’ stomach lurched as they bottomed out and then zoomed again. A particularly large and fine spevaline rose wheeling out of the blizzard of dark leaves and somersaulting twigs behind, still sporting its mating season plumage. Veppers cradled the tripodded laser rifle, let the opticals grab the image of the bird and identify it as the largest moving entity in the viewfinder. The gun’s servos whined, lining it up, shaking it with what felt like a series of tiny spasms to allow for the aircraft’s movements. Veppers fired the instant the aiming grid flashed. A single shot passed straight through the great bird in a small explosion of feathers. The spevaline crumpled about itself like a man wrapping a cloak about him. It fell tumbling back into the forest.
“Oh, good shot, sir!” Lehktevi said, having to raise her voice only a little to make herself heard over the howling of the engines. The balcony was shielded from the slipstream by the bowed surface of ultraclear glass. The glass could be retracted to allow other weapons besides the laser rifles to be used against the birds and other animals, but that made the balcony a quite furiously noisy place to be, at any reasonable speed; you needed ear defenders, and the swirling slipstream caused total havoc to any hairstyle worth the name.
“Thank you,” Veppers said, smiling briefly at the achingly beautiful Lehktevi. He looked at the girl on his other side. “Crederre,” he said, nodding at the laser on its tripod in front of her. “Won’t you try a shot?”
The girl shook her head. “No, Joiler, I can’t. I feel sorry for the birds. I can’t shoot them.”
Crederre was young; still becoming a woman, really. Entirely legal, though. She was not bad-looking, though her wan, pale, blonde look was quite eclipsed by the dark magnificence of Lehktevi.
He’d watched the girl swim in the underground pool at the house just that morning.
The main indoor pool under the house took up some of the space where the rows and banks of computer servers had once stood, when the house had been even more the centre of the Veppers family power than it was now, and games and programs throughout the ever-expanding Sichultian Enablement had been controlled from there.
That amount of raw, bulky computational power was no longer necessary — you could build processing substrate into walls, hulls, carpets, chassis, ceiling tiles, monocoques; almost anything nowadays — so all that space under the mansion had come free, to be filled with storage, underground garages full of exotic machinery and a giant pool ornately decorated with waterfalls, giant naturally grown crystals the size of trees, perfume pools, bubble bays and water slides. Crederre’s slim, pale body had moved over the night black of the jet tiles on the pool’s floor, sinuous and quick.
He’d watched her, and known that she’d known he was watching her. Well, he watched all women he found attractive like that, and he’d thought no more about it.
Still, the girl might be a prize worth pursuing. He was aware that he hadn’t bedded — or even attempted to bed — anyone new since the unpleasantness which had resulted in that little scribbled-on slut biting the tip of his nose off. Too self-conscious, he supposed. He stroked the golden shield covering his nose.