The Rifter's Covenant by Sherwood Smith, Dave Trowbridge Read Free Book Online

mysteries of Douloi interactions,”
Manderian admitted.
    “In Douloi terms,
their relationship means nothing,” Omilov said. “It may already be mere memory.
Which makes the questions of politics—and war—simple. Supposing they do
continue an intimate relationship, I would be very surprised if either of them
ever acknowledges even a hint of it in public. What does not officially exist
cannot be used by others.”
    Manderian sipped at
his coffee again, recalling his dream—and the vision Eloatri had related to
him. “Yet they are bound together by some bond we have not yet perceived. They,
and another as yet unknown.”
    Omilov smiled. “If
the bond is an interest in the Suneater, let us hope that the High Phanist’s
mysterious last figure is in a position of some influence. I fear I am going to
need it.”

THREE
ARES
    Sedry Thetris left
the crowded transtube and descended the stairs from the adit to a grassy path
uphill from Lake Illyahin, noting the deepening groove of bare dirt too many
feet had worn in it. She sucked in a lungful of fresh air, shrugging off the
claustrophobic feeling of having been crammed into such a small space with so
many people. Even though the tianqi had been set high enough to both hear and
feel, the air inside the pod had smelled thick.
    She breathed again,
her gaze on a distant leg of the lake that gently curved up into the mist
obscuring the far side of the oneill. Here, on the surface where spin-derived
acceleration was a standard gee, she could more easily dismiss the sense of
heaviness that oppressed her, than at the spin axis outside the entrance to the
Cap.
    Up there it felt
uncanny. As a highdweller, she knew weight as a function of altitude, and so
the psychic weight of Ares’s ever-increasing population contrasted too vividly
with the microgravity at the rotational axis of the oneill. Sedry dreamt too
often now of the overcrowded habitat bursting open, spewing thousands of bodies
into the void; even more so since the death of Sync Osman had hit the
newsfeeds.
    Maybe she wanted it
to happen, she reflected with a bitter spurt of not-quite-laughter. A traitor
twice over, yet uncaught by those she now served, she already regarded herself
as under sentence of death. She never permitted herself to think about the
future, or at least about her place in it: her plans, work, and life were
limited strictly to how many of the enemy she could take with her when she inevitably
got caught out.
    And one of them
will be you, Tau Srivashti , she vowed,
as she turned onto a narrow-stepped gravel path that wound down to the edge of
the lake through a grove of flowering chimetrees. All the dangling branches
within reach had been plucked clean of flowers.
    As she walked, the
image that oppressed her waking and sleeping seized her mind: the eternal ice
of the Ninth Circle, where traitors lay frozen for eternity.
    She hadn’t even
thirty pieces of silver to fling in Srivashti’s face. She had been lied to—manipulated—and
her cause had been just, but there was no escaping the truth. Leveraging her
seniority in Naval infonetics at Arthelion, she had inserted false orders for
Captain Armenhaut and the Home Detachment at a critical moment, sending them
off after a manufactured threat and leaving the capital of the Thousand Suns
undefended before the Dol’jharian attack. There was no comfort in the knowledge
that, as the Battle of Arthelion much later had revealed, Armenhaut could have
done nothing to stop the invasion, and in his ignorance of what he would have
faced, might have cost Dol’jhar far less than did his final sacrifice.
    The second betrayal
had been here, on Ares. All naval officers had been enjoined under the Articles
of War not to speak of the hyperwave that Captain Ng had captured at such
terrible cost from the Dol’jharians. Blackmailed by Srivashti, Sedry had reported
it in detail to him.
    Srivashti had
promised that he had the greater good of the Panarchy at heart and that