A Treason of Truths Page 10

  If it’d been a true quarantine, this port would have been closed. As it was, a silver-dusted mouse squeaked at her as she used the fork in her pocket to pry off the vent. She peered into the child-size opening.

  It’d been easier when Lyre was child-size. She still bore scars on her knees from the days she’d spent scrabbling around these ducts, discovering hidey holes and getting cussed at by silver-eyed hummingbirds. She wondered if her stash of sparkly stones was still behind the scullery vents. She’d left them there, thinking she’d be back. Then hoping she wouldn’t be back. Then longing to be back. Then swearing she’d never be back.

  Lyre was back. The tunnel was a tight fit, and the dark gulped her up with a greedy sigh.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lyre was ten when her life changed. When she grew too big to fit into her hiding places and got caught out in the light. The Vault didn’t waste talent, but unlike the Syn, the libertarian leanings of their founding scientists meant that all work on the Vault was volunteer. Lyre was hesitant at first, but once she realized that training for work in the Vault intelligence services meant she got to hide and snoop and be smarter than everyone for a living, she was on board.

  She was good at it, and she appreciated the Vault’s philosophy. Fealty was only to reason. Everyone worked out their own reasons for things. So much had been lost in the Crisis, the Cloud Vault’s founders had decided the most clear and imperative goal had to be the preservation and advancement of knowledge. The Vault couldn’t waste time on training should and should nots, not when the world was at stake. Children were encouraged to logic things out, and if flaws couldn’t be found in their logic, then they must be correct. Lyre liked being correct. It was comfy. She was always correct.

  The upside was incredible loyalty among Vault residents. Loyalty in the Syn was based on fear and limited resources, loyalty in the Empire was based on family and a sense of duty, but loyalty in the Vault came from reasoned logic. The Vault knew the rest of the world had it wrong. Countries embroiled in this petty dispute, these paranoid corruptions, that greedy scheme. They’d send everyone to extinction if given half the chance. The Vault was determined no one would have that chance. A neutral floating city, literally above it all. Lyre came to believe her work was part of the real progress; saving people from themselves. Through intelligence and science and cleverness. Lyre never had a particular interest for science, but cleverness? That she could do.

  Still, she was just a scuttle rat on the Vault, where cleverness was a dime a dozen. After training she’d been told she was going to stay with her “aunties” in the Quillian Empire. Work a middle-class diner in the royal city, keep her ears open for rumors about the populace’s general sentiment for the old emperor. The emperor was popular enough, but his son was considered an unreliable wild card to the Vault.

  So Lyre hid away her few belongings and headed to a foreign city called Chrysanthine, where life changed again.

  She’d hid them here. Somewhere around here. Lyre recognized the twist of conjoined pipe by its odd purple screws and slowed her progress. She should hurry, find the real origin of this attack that would propel Sabine away from disaster, but she couldn’t help stopping to look. Recon would be what she’d tell someone else. Not herself. Lyre knew better than to believe her own lies.

  Near the lichen pools, the air was colder here. The flotilla was heated from the core, the ancient star engines chained together and kept running by force of will. The lichen had been designed as a kind of heat sink. It grew in pillowy beds, clinging to hot pipes and feeding off the excess heat.

  They were effective. Enough to turn the air frosty. And they made the nook Lyre wriggled into slippery. When she cursed, her breath came out in visible puffs.

  But there it was. The lichen had been disinterested in a tiny, plastic-sheeted bundle, stuffed in the elbow of a beetle hive. Lyre knew the beetles would leave it alone, and more importantly they’d scare off the ferry ants. The ants were the biggest problem—scavenger haulers designed to seek out and carry any unnecessary materials back to the recycler. They didn’t infest sanctioned areas, of course, but Lyre had lived her life unsanctioned.

  She pried the bag free and the plastic cracked as she peeled it back. It didn’t contain much. A few baubles, a couple filched chit sticks, a cracked skin holo that she’d lifted off a drunk perv on the docks. It was dusty and cracked, and seemed glaringly childish to have held on to. She tried to summon a memory of what the holo had even been, but her desire had long ago been overwritten by slender hands, gold eyes, skin sweet and dark as burnt sugar. That memory, she held to fast.

  Chrysanthine had been in a manic mode that day, The city always turned out in its brightest colors for Ancelmas, but that day there had been a layer of gold dust in the air: the Frost Gala. Every House in the Imperial Senate would converge on the Ameranthine Court for the event, which meant every bored noble would have money to spend in Chrysanthine. Everyone knew a noble’s favorite pastime was spending money. After politics and scandal, that is.

  It was up to the trade guild to make the most of it, and Lyre’s aunts were up to the challenge. Aunt Paure had been up most nights the previous week, planning a special menu for the diner and wringing every last chit out of deals with equally zealous food vendors. Paure had always been the hunger of their little false family, the ambition behind the diner. Just because it was a front, Paure said, didn’t mean it couldn’t be a successful one.

  Young and impatient, Lyre was charged with helping Auntie Nori prepare the front of the house. It was too grandiose a term for what Lyre quickly identified as normal grudge work: scrubbing the plastisteel tables and chairs until the shine promised a better meal than what the diner had to offer. She was bored out of her gourd, so when an insistent rap sounded at the door, it was only partially her spy training that made her jump at the chance to answer it.

  A stern-looking noble swept in, and a cloud of gray hair and noblesse oblige contaminated the diner air. The benevolent rich of the Empire were prone to these festival day displays. Generously visiting the working class and, more importantly, shaking hands and winning the gossip game. Gossip was Lyre’s job, but it was his children who caught Lyre’s attention.

  The boy she saw first. It was hard not to. Even a year younger than Lyre, he was all gangly arms and legs. A promise of altus height and Lyre wrote him off as military fodder in an instant. The polite look he gave her was too earnest to be interesting. Lyre was always on the lookout for interesting, which was probably why she noticed the shadow clinging to the noble’s other side.

  Sabine at fifteen was a sprout of spring crocus blossom. Straight and tender and yet unexposed to the elements. The eldest daughter, she was expected to accompany her father on these outings, but the way she clung to his shadow caught Lyre’s eye. And then, when Sabine met her gaze with a brittle little glitter of challenge, Lyre was hooked.

  Aunties were engaging the old man in small talk, an unspoken game where both sides thought they were extracting information from the other. Aunt Nori was playing him like a fiddle. The report back to the Vault this week would be good. Lyre put down her rag and composed her best smile. It wasn’t a conscious decision to aim it at the girl. More a magnetic pull. Lyre didn’t know enough then to read the red flag in that.

  “So, Barnacle Girl. You and the puppy boy got a name?”

  And the rest had been gold and heartache.

  The scuttle hub dropped out of darkness. Light pooled through the beetle holes in the grate. Lyre stopped long enough to verify the room was empty before dropping down from the ceiling.

  Trays of dirt beds were stacked everywhere, and the air held the quiet hum of dragonflies flitting to and fro, monitoring seedling growth. A sprout room. The Vault had a dozen such rooms scattered across the flotilla, feeding the ever-present need for more and more organic materials and nano-infused structures. Luckily, the dragonflies only had orders to
monitor the plants, and paid her no attention as she dusted off her knees and slipped out the door.

  The hallway contained a low swirl of traffic. Scientists half-buried in their data slates as they moved from one lab to another. No one seemed to notice Lyre, though she wished for slightly bigger crowds to lose herself in properly. She took a moment to orient herself before heading for where she thought Khait’s office would be.

  The more direct route would be to go to Intelligence. She could get answers, either from the massive database or from Mother herself, but Lyre didn’t want to risk it. Her presence here on the flotilla was a delicate position. A former spy. A traitor. A diplomatic guest. A quarantine patient. Lyre’s legal status balanced on a razor edge and she wasn’t stupid enough to press it until she had to.

  What was more, something stinky was going on. And if anyone stood to benefit from it, it was their hosts—though Lyre still couldn’t quite see how. Surely a disastrous summit would look bad for them. But it was a place to start.

  Khait’s office was simple enough to locate in the warren of well-labeled labs. The retinal scanner at the door was impossible to fool. That is, unless you knew the precise place to lever and rip the cover panel off. Four seconds of prodding at a silver matrix sent the door swishing open on silent channels.

  Khait’s office matched the man: stacks of knowledge, no dust, no nonsense. A neat stack of petri dishes was the only decor on his desk. Lyre gave them a wide berth—who knew what nano monsters were trapped in them—and settled in his chair. The tabletop detected her movement and a translucent ghost of a data stream fogged the air in front of her.

  Of course, the Vault wasn’t foolish enough to tie data to a particular terminal. Everything was stored in the networked archives and bio-locked with the best authentication tech that money could buy. But money couldn’t stop people from being lazy, and that was why Lyre had gone to the trouble of breaking into Khait’s actual office. People got in a rush, or were absentminded—especially scientists, in Lyre’s experience—and started to cut corners. Like leaving a soft copy of their access credentials on their personal data-stream terminal.

  Tsk. It was like leaving your keys in the door, really.

  It was a matter of a few graceful twitches of her fingers to dig into the reports she wanted. One of the most recent files had been the medical screening, of course. Huh. Lyre’s alarm rose as she naturally jumped to Sabine’s results. Khait had not been lying about the state of infection or the nature of the nanobots.

  But Khait knew these bio-sigs. Sylvere had mentioned the nano agents looked “familiar” but that had been an understatement. These were Vault-bred bugs. Relatively new, if the mutation strains could be believed. A suspicion tickled at Lyre’s brain and she chased it down a rabbit hole of consecutive files.

  She’d just found what she was looking for when a sigh of air at the door brought her alert. It was the sound of the locks engaging again. Considering the transmitter for the lock was still in her pocket, that was a worrying development. Lyre started the data copying to one of her spare chit cards, then eased around the desk on silent feet.

  The door was a frosted pane of glass, able to become more or less opaque at a touch, but Lyre was pretending to not be here. She stopped short of the door, sliding herself into shadow. The figure on the other side took no such precautions. It was obvious enough from the broad shoulders and blocky lab coat that it was one of the scientists.

  The office was still. Too spartan to entertain a ticking clock or something as frivolous as music. The only passage of time was Lyre’s silent measured breaths. The shape on the other side of the door appeared to grow impatient first.

  “Scarab, I know it’s you,” Khait said, confirming Lyre’s suspicions. He sounded tired. “Quarantine is a matter of public safety, you know.”

  Lyre weighed her options. She had the information she needed, and though the door wasn’t the only way out of this office, it would make little difference if Khait had already alerted security. Besides, it seemed she’d caught him alone and in a chatty mood. She eased closer to the door. “And if this were a real quarantine, I mighta seen my way to cooperate.”

  “I’m not going to ask how you got past the guards.”

  “Strikes me you should be more concerned about how I got in here. If this is how Mother runs her ship now, you can tell her I think she’s getting sloppy.” Lyre stuck her hand in her pocket and added, “Though locking me in was a neat trick.”

  “I didn’t reach my position by being an idiot. I wanted to talk without risking the possibility of getting my neck snapped.”

  Talk. That was an interesting turn of events. Lyre occupied herself with duplicating data—if things went sour she wanted a chance to smuggle something out of here—while she rearranged her assumptions about Khait. She took a gamble and put her trump card on the table. “This thing was Vault bred.”

  Khait didn’t ask for clarification. He knew she was talking about the nano virus. Each second of silence tabulated his guilt.

  “It was,” he said.

  Tell me what is going on, you fucker. But Lyre knew too well that asking questions wasn’t the best way to get information. It was to convince them you already knew. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t burn the whole summit to the ground over this.”

  “That won’t help us design a counter agent for it. The quarantine is in place to buy more time.”

  “I thought you said it was for public safety.”

  “War is the opposite of safety for everyone in the public,” Khait grumped. “Yes, as far as we can tell the nature of the virus is that it’s not likely to spread between people, but it still could trigger another death in the guests at any moment. The fewer factors we have to account for, the better.”

  “What about where it originated? Who created this thing?”

  “I...” Khait faltered. “I’m looking into it.”

  I’m. Not we’re. Interesting. The copy finished processing. Instead of hiding it, she slid the extra data stick in her pocket. “Where’s Sylvere right now, Khait?”

  This time the silence was definitely damning. She heard a deep sigh come from the other side of the door. “I don’t know. He’s supposed to be following up in the lab but he’s taken to disappearing lately. I’m worried...”

  Khait seemed unwilling to finish that train of thought.

  “Could Sylvere have created this thing?” Lyre asked.

  “No. Never. If...” Khait made a low sound, half-pained. “I’m a very smart man. You’re very smart. We all are—this is the Vault. So please understand, when I say Sylvere’s a genius, I’m not choosing that word lightly. He’s a prodigy, perhaps the brightest mind in nano-botany that I’ve ever seen. He’s clever, and harder working than you’d believe, and cares about things more than he lets on. But he’s...troubled.”

  Lyre’s fingers itched. She was putting pieces together, but it was like being fed by an eyedropper when dying of thirst. She needed to move. But she needed to keep Khait talking. “I hear he came from the Syn not too long ago.”

  “No.” Khait’s immediate response was rough. “He hates the Syn. Reassure your Empress that there’re no favors being played here. We’re running a fair and equal summit.”

  “Yet we got one dead Imperial noble.”

  “I’m working on it,” Khait growled. “Answers take time. I thought a former intelligence agent would understand that.”

  “Still intelligence. I just pick my employers better now,” Lyre said. Data was copied and stowed. She’d gotten everything she could from this location. It was time to figure out what she was looking at here. She squared up to the door. “Question is, has this been all buying enough time for your security backup to arrive?”

  There was a grunt, silence, then a purr of air as locks disengaged. The door slid open, revealing a rumpled and grumpy-looking Khait. In the hallway alone.
Well. Perhaps the day was looking up.

  Khait wasn’t. He’d developed a stubble since she’d seen him last, and his coat looked like he’d slept in it. He rubbed his jaw and drew himself up. “From my perspective, we both want the same thing. I’m a scientist, I’m not made for these silly games of yours so I’ll just say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “We could work together. I’ll pretend I didn’t find you breaking eight international laws in my office and you help me keep this summit on the rails.”

  It felt too late for that. That was what Lyre’s gut was telling her. But she won nothing by telling him that. She smiled, not too big, just enough to contain a possibility. “I do like making friends.”

  “Good.” Khait was gruff, but relief leaked out of his tense expression. “You should probably get the hell out of my office.”

  “Sure. Just one thing.” Lyre paused, fingers playing along the data sticks in her pocket as she calculated the precise measure of her risk. Acceptable, at this point. “Since we’re friends now, you should take a look at this.”

  Khait blinked at the stick that dropped into his palm, but his fingers closed around it instinctively. “What is it?”

  “Stuff I just stole from you—but improved. A bit. Might help speed up the time on those answers we’re looking for. If you don’t understand it, I’m sure Mother can hold your hand.”

  Of course, if Mother turned her attention to Lyre’s presence on the flotilla, this summit could get a lot more complicated.

  “I’ll manage,” Khait said, and gods bless a nerd’s sense of wounded pride. He stepped back to allow Lyre to slip past the door. The hallway was quiet, and Lyre already had a path in mind that would take her back to the solarium with only minor scrabbling through bug shit.