Ariele nodded again. “We saw them ram two ships—”
“We?” Jerusha asked.
“Silky and I. I was with Silky.” She glanced down, cursing herself silently, but Jerusha did not ask her about it.
“Did you see anyone go into the sea?”
She shook her head. “It was too far away. But they deliberately sank at least one.”
“Capella Goodventure believed someone died,” Gundhalinu said, frowning, but not at her. “Enough to want to kill me in revenge. Something stinks, Jerusha.”
“Smells like a cover-up to me,” she said.
He swore softly; his body jerked with agitation under the blankets. “Start an investigation. See what you can find out, if all the evidence isn’t sunk already.”
“Do you think Vhanu knows about this?” she asked.
He looked up abruptly. “No. Of course not.” He leaned forward, holding himself in place with his arms locked around his knees. “Ariele, you say there were hundreds of mers on the beach … but according to the report I was given, the hunt was relatively poor. How did the mers get away? Did you warn them off?”
She stiffened, uncertain; glanced at Jerusha, who nodded. She told them, carefully, the truth but not the whole truth. “They fired at me too—at my mother’s hovercraft. I had to get away before … before all the mers were off the beach.” Her face burned with remembered frustration and rage.
“And you’re sure that Silky was gone?” Jerusha repeated, coming across the room.
She nodded.
Jerusha rested warm hands on her shoulders. “Thank you, Ari. Silky doesn’t belong to me anymore—any more than you belong to your mother. But the gods help anybody that ever hurt either one of you.” Her hands tightened gently, in a fond gesture that they had not made for many years, and then released her.
Ariele smiled, hesitating, wanting suddenly to say more; to tell her everything. But she only turned away toward the door.
“Anele—” Gundhalinu called.
She turned back, reluctantly, compelled by the fragility of his voice, and not the sudden command.
“Who was there with you?” he asked quietly.
She half frowned. “I told you—” She broke off, seeing the expression on his face. Certainty. He knew she’d been lying to them, as surely as if he had been reading her emotions from some offworlder machine. She looked at Jerusha, and saw the same certainty in her eyes; knew that it was their experience that had betrayed her, and her own inexperience. “I don’t have to tell you,” she said. “I didn’t even have to come here. Your own people are afraid to tell you what I was doing there, because they know I saw what they did.”
“What’s this other person afraid of?” Gundhalinu asked.
“You,” she answered. “The Police. He’s an offworlder. If the Police know he saw, and tried to stop it, he’s afraid they’ll deport him.”
“What was he doing there?”
She tossed her head. “He was with me. He works for my mother, studying the mers.”
“Your mother doesn’t have any offworlders working for her, studying the mers,” Jerusha said.
Ariele felt her frown deepen. “Yes, she does. She has Reede, and he’s brilliant No one knows the mers like—”
Gundhalinu’s face froze. “Reede?” he said. “Reede Kullervo?”
She looked back at him. “Yes.”
“I know him,” Gundhalinu murmured. “He is brilliant. But he doesn’t work for your mother.”
Jerusha was staring at him. “That one?” she said softly.
He nodded. His eyes, still on Ariele, were suddenly dark with understanding “He isn’t what you think he is, Ariele…. But he can trust me. You tell him that He wants to save the mers. We can do it, together. I can protect him, I can help him, if he’ll trust me. Will you tell him that?”
She went on looking at him for a long moment, at the intentness and the desperate weariness in his face. She nodded, at last. “I’ll tell him,” she said.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
“Reede Kullervo!” The voice that called his name seemed to come at him from everywhere at once, out of the shadowed doorways of the midnight-quiet alley. The streets of Carbuncle were never completely dark, but the nights grew shadows in places where none survived by day.
Reede stopped in his tracks, his hand reaching for his gun as shadow-forms detached from the larger darkness of doorways and passageways.
“Son of a bitch—” Niburu muttered in disbelief, reaching for his own weapon as Ananke spun around behind him. Suddenly they were surrounded by half a dozen Blues, in the middle of an alley that had gone from sparsely inhabited to a no-man’s-land in less than a heartbeat.
“Drop the weapons,” the voice said, behind him now, and he saw that the Blues already had their own weapons out, trained on him. They wore the flash shields of their helmets down, making them all into faceless, unidentifiable clones. He let his gun drop, slowly and deliberately stripping himself of weapons, as his men did the same.
“The knife in your boot too,” the voice directed mildly, and he realized they were being scanned. He tossed out the knife, and held his hands high. “What do you want with me?” he said, feeling more disbelief than fear. Vigilantism wasn’t the Blues’ style. “I haven’t done anything.” Gods, he hadn’t had his fix; he needed the water of death. What if they locked him up, how long would he last—? And suddenly he was afraid. He clenched his teeth.
Beside him Niburu was muttering, “Holy hands of Edhu, holy hands of Edhu …” like an incantation. Ananke was as silent as a wall, staring at the shielded faces all around him. Two minutes ago the pair of them had been bitching about waiting at the bar in Starhiker’s for hours, because he didn’t show up on time. He figured he knew where they wished they were right now. He thought about where he’d been. Between a rock and a hard place. “Fuck—” he whispered; repeated it over and over under his breath, like Niburu, like an adhani.
“You’re a stranger far from home, Kullervo,” somebody said. “Another stranger far from home wants to talk to you about old times.”
“No—” he said, starting to turn around. But something brushed the back of his neck like a wet mouth, and then there was only blackness.
He came to again, what seemed to be a moment later, although it probably wasn’t. He sat up slowly, cautiously, on a perfectly ordinary couch in a neat, austerely furnished sitting room. It was not so different from his own, could almost have been his own. He shook what might have been a dream of somebody else’s life out of his head, like a dog shaking off water. He looked down at himself—recognized his own clothing, his tattooed arms … realized that the dream was reality, and felt a kind of hopeless fatalism settle over him.
“Hello, Kullervo-eshkrad,” a familiar voice said.
He jerked around, startled, to find BZ Gundhalinu, Chief Justice of Tiamat, leaning against the doorframe at the entrance to the room. “What are you doing here?” Reede said stupidly.
“I live here,” Gundhalinu said. He wore a pair of hastily pulled-on pants and a loose robe hanging open, baring his chest and an expanse of bandageskin. His hair was rumpled. He looked like a man who had been rousted out of bed; as if he had not been expecting this meeting any more than Reede had himself. But the expression on Gundhalinu’s face said that he had been anticipating it for a long time.
Reede leaned forward, with his hands tightening over his knees. “Where are my men?”
“Niburu and Ananke?” Gundhalinu half smiled, almost as if he remembered them more fondly than he remembered the man who was his guest. “Waiting for you,” he said simply. But his eyes changed as he went on looking at Reede, and for a brief moment his smile was real. “It’s good to see you again,” he murmured, as if the truth surprised him. He looked down suddenly.