“Not that long,” Dejah said, with absolute certainty. “Not for what I’ve been seeing.”
Now she was leaving the realm of things I didn’t want to answer, and entering the realm of things I wasn’t sure I could answer. How much could my personality have shifted since I’d welcomed the AIsource into my head? Since they’d admitted a link between their rogue intelligences, the ones I called the Unseen Demons, and the madness that had overtaken my human and Bocaian families? Since I’d defected? Dejah had noticed that some of my wounds had healed, but could she tell that new ones had formed?
I hesitated for so long that she must have felt she’d gone too far, because she placed a protective hand on my wrist. “You don’t have to explain it if you don’t want to. I know you have other people you can share things with. I’m just saying. I’ve noticed, and I’m impressed.”
I didn’t speak again until after I reached for my collar and removed a small silver disk most people would have taken for ornamentation. It was in fact a favorite tool in my arsenal, a hiss screen of Tchi manufacture, invaluable for keeping private conversations private. The soft white noise it projected wouldn’t disturb me, Dejah, Paakth-Doy, or Skye, but would render our words indistinct to Mendez, who was still cycling between image angles of the Stanley at rest, searching for active proof that its crew intended to use the carriage as something more than a parking space. Once the hiss kicked in, I lowered my voice and asked Dejah, “All right. As long as we’re sharing confidences, have the Bettelhines provided you with any idea why you’re here?”
If she felt disappointed that I’d reacted to her personal overture with a swift return to business, she didn’t show it. If anything, she seemed amused. “No, Counselor. I don’t think Philip knows, and the few times I managed to get the question out, Jason and Jelaine kept saying it was up to their father to say.”
“That’s what I got from them as well.”
She pursed her lips. “I’m not surprised.”
“Why?”
“Well, this does seem to center on you, me, and the Khaajiir, doesn’t it?”
That was the impression I’d been forming. “If you didn’t know why Hans wanted to see you, what did they say to get you here?”
She moved closer, making certain that she was within the screen’s most effective range, before lowering her voice still further. “You need to know this. Philip wasn’t kidding at dinner, when he said we’d been enemies.”
“What caused that? A business dispute?”
“Not at all. We’ve never been in competition, or even clients of one another. You could say we work opposite sides of the street, in that I engineer worlds and build custom ecosystems, making places for people to live, whereas they just develop bigger and better ways for people to blow each other up. If anything, they help my business by creating a need for my services whenever their clients damage inhabited worlds beyond repair. But that’s a sick, mercenary way of looking at it. The truth is, I’ve stepped in enough of their messes and seen enough of the suffering they’ve caused to despise everything they stand for. So from time to time, whenever the opportunity presented itself, I’ve used my considerable influence to…discourage the need for their services. I’ve done it so many times over the years that they’ve responded with open hostilities, sometimes bordering on violence.”
“Any assassination attempts?” I asked.
“Seven. One came close to killing my poor husband, Karl, but he survived thanks to the special providence that always protects innocents and fools.”
Skye’s voice was colder than any I’d ever heard from the Porrinyards, either together or as individuals. “I notice you have no problem badmouthing him behind his back.”
Dejah winced. “I do, don’t I?”
Paakth-Doy said, “Forgive me, but that would be the third time in my hearing tonight.”
Dejah looked down at the deck and then at me before finding words. “You’re right. Karl deserves more.”
“Then why,” Skye demanded, “do you speak about him the way you do?”
“I have to. I love the man, I wouldn’t share my life with anybody else, but I’m just forced by the high stakes I play for to be candid about his strengths and weaknesses. And the sad truth, despite his kindness and his generosity and everything else I adore about him, is that Karl is a limited creature intellectually, a fool in the classical sense. He’s the sort of person who stumbles over things and causes disasters even when he’s trying to make things better. It’s that which contributed to the criminal career that ended the very day we met. I left him home this trip, even though Hans Bettelhine’s invitation pledged safe passage for both of us, because his best intentions and the Bettelhine Corporation’s worst intentions are just too explosive a combination even for a meeting our hosts made to sound like an overture of peace.”
Skye was still determined to make the irrelevant Karl an issue for some reason. “You’re still making him sound more like a pet than a husband.”
“He’s a husband,” Dejah assured her, “but in matters of business, he cannot be a partner. There’s a difference.”
Skye was about to protest again, when I held up a hand and said, “Enough,” cutting off further exploration of this tangent. To Dejah I said, “Even if they protested their good intentions, I would have expected you to insist on meeting Hans on neutral ground. Just in case his invitation was a setup for assassination attempt number eight.”
She sighed. “Maybe a year or two ago, I would have. And as it is, I required months of entreaties before deciding to accept their offer. But I’ve been compiling intelligence that gives me reasons for special concern.”
“Such as?”
“It has to do with the way the Bettelhine succession works. Traditionally, every member of the Inner Family has always assumed leadership of some of their enterprises, the various research and development divisions being considered especially large plums. The stakes are greater than you can imagine. There is no way that Jason, with his checkered past and those years in absentia when he could have been under the control of Juje alone knows what unsavory parties, would ever have been trusted as being free of outside influence. Under normal circumstances, his relatives would certainly welcome him back as a beloved brother and son, but never again as somebody with a future in any part of the corporation that really mattered. They’d have to be insane to risk it. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Then explain why Philip, a Bettelhine traditionalist whose business model is best summarized as more of the same, who should be first in line for command on the entire corporation, has been forced out of at least four major subdivisions in the last two years, with more and more of his responsibilities being handed over to this partnership of Jason and Jelaine. Explain why Hans Bettelhine has been spending an increasing percentage of his work hours in the company of Jason and Jelaine—as well as, it seems, this wild card Bocaian. Explain why, at a point in its history when its fortunes are as secure as they’ve ever been, the corporation has not expanded, as you would expect, but rather consolidated its resources, a process that has included terminating longstanding commitments to the production of war materials for at least a dozen raging brushfires on Confederate worlds. Explain why they’ve been shifting their investments to the reconstruction of crumbling infrastructure or worlds laid waste by their policies. Explain why this family, which has forged a munitions empire, seems to be laying the groundwork for a total abandonment of its prior business model. Explain to me what they’re retooling for. And then explain why, on top of that, they would now offer a olive branch to me, a woman they’ve tried to kill seven times.”