She squinted at him. "Are you comparing me to a tomjolt?"
"Let"s just say I"m glad I"m your love and not your enemy."
Softly she said, "I will always love you. If anyone ever tried to hurt you or the children, I would surely tear them to shreds."
Caged in an exoskeleton of controls, Althor Valdoria, the Imperial Heir, sat at his console. Today he worked in his web chamber, a bare room with nothing but the console and his control chair.
Onyx. Althor doubted he would ever know what had spurred his brother, two years ago, to put him in charge of the situation at Onyx Sector. Usually Kurj kept control of sensitive areas. Whatever the reason, he had loosened his iron grip that day. Fascinated with the puzzle Kurj handed him, Althor had studied every report detailing the encroachment of Trader pirates into the region of Onyx Platform, a major ISC base. Over the last two years he had gained increasing authority in that sector, until now he directed ISC activities there.
Onyx Platform was in Onyx Sector, a crucial territory where Eube, Skolia, and the Allied Worlds intersected in a diffuse region claimed by all three powers. Although Trader pirates raided the ISC outposts there, they no longer hara.s.sed Allied holdings. The ISC Public Affairs Office claimed credit for protecting the Allieds, but Althor had no illusions. ESComm no longer sent pirates into Allied s.p.a.ce because Emperor Qox wanted a treaty with the Allieds.
What bothered Althor today, however, had little to do with raids. The puzzle he had tracked for over a year was no more than a simple glitch in one inconsequential datum. It concerned a discrepancy he had found for one price listed in a s.h.i.+pment of construction supplies to an Onyx s.p.a.ce station. The invoice in ISC Records differed by one centilla, one Imperial cent, from that listed by Onyx Records.
Althor would never have noticed if he hadn"t been searching the invoices for another reason, to figure out how his aunt, Dehya Selei, paid her agents among the dust merchants who trawled Onyx Sector. A one-cent difference in a million-dollar s.h.i.+pment? He almost ignored the error.
But the discrepancy tugged at him. He searched it out, to verify it was nothing. What he found puzzled him. Sending the invoice from Onyx to the Orbiter involved no human input. No one to enter the number. Nor did he find any trace of a rip or other problem in the web that could have corrupted the data. It seemed absurd to grow concerned over one cent, but it bothered him that no reason existed for the disagreement.
For a year he tracked it through the web, searching for one cent among daily billions. He found the memory location used to store the invoice. As he followed its history, the search took him farther and farther from Onyx. Today he finally confirmed the source of the discrepancy. Nearly four years ago in HeadQuarters City, the heart of ISC, someone had erased a file. Of course, millions of files were erased at HQ every day. But whoever deleted this one had first hidden it in a private account accessible only to a select handful of people.
Also, an expert erased that file. The only reason anything came up at all was because the hacker had worked from a civilian node. They had eradicated all trace of the work-except for one bit of data removable only from a computer within an ISC control center.
One bit of data.
The hacker apparently even knew about that one inviolable bit. They couldn"t reset its value, from one to zero, so they camouflaged it. A tiny problem came up: the hidden bit caused a bit in an adjoining memory location to change from zero to one. The new bit immediately reset to zero, but in the process it changed another bit from zero to one. So the glitch propagated for over a year, after which it disappeared. Somewhere along the line, it altered the value of an invoice by one cent.
Release exoskeleton, Althor thought.
Released. The exoskeleton around his body opened and the psiphon p.r.o.ngs clicked out of the sockets in his spine and neck.
Lost in thought, Althor left the chamber and walked through his office, then through the outer offices where his a.s.sistants worked, and out into the corridors that networked the hull. He took the magrail to his apartment in City, where he had chosen to live, instead of in Valley.
City drifted around him as he strode through its plazas and along its boulevards. The sailpath he summoned took him to a blue building with onion towers and s.h.i.+mmering spires. When it set him down on a third-story ledge, a doorway shaped like the keyhole for a giant skeleton key opened in the wall. After Althor went through it, the doorway disappeared, leaving a smooth surface glowing with blue light, like a piece of Sky.
The halls inside also glowed blue, a translucent luminance that extended deep into the walls. At the end of one hall he came to another large horseshoe arch shaped like a keyhole. Purple and silver mosaics bordered the blue door within it. He brushed his finger across a scroll of leaves and the door chimed.
"Come in, Althor," the door said. It s.h.i.+mmered and vanished.
He walked into an airy room with wicker furniture. The door had barely re-formed behind him when an adolescent girl with violet eyes and a wild head of bronze curls stalked through the horseshoe arch of an inner doorway. She stopped when she saw Althor, glared at him, and stalked out again.
Althor blinked. "Eristia?" He started after the girl.
An older woman came through the inner doorway. Tall and willowy, with blue eyes and red hair streaked with silver, Syreen looked every bit the actress she had once been, before she retired to pursue a career in linguistics.
"Althor." She took his hands. "It"s good to see you."
He lifted her hands and kissed her knuckles. "What"s wrong with Eristia?"
Syreen made an exasperated noise. "She"s been like that all afternoon. Maybe you can talk to her."
An irate voice came from the room beyond. "I don"t feel like talking."
Syreen frowned. "Eristia, come here and greet your father."
The girl appeared in the archway. "Ultra, Daddy." Then she disappeared back into the inner room.
Althor glanced at Syreen. "Ultra?"
Her mouth quirked up. "As near as I can tell, it has positive connotations."
He smiled, then went into the inner room and found his daughter glaring at a holo-painting on the wall. "Why are you angry?" he asked.
She continued to glare.
He tried again. "Are you mad at me?"
"At you?" She turned to him. "No, of course not."
"You"re angry at someone."
"Yes."
Althor waited. When it became clear no more information was forthcoming, he said, "At your mother."
"She never lets me do anything." Eristia crossed her arms. "Nothing. Everyone else has fun. Everyone else razzles. But me? No, not me."
It was beginning to make sense. "You want to do something and your mother said "no"."
"She"s the most unreasonable person alive."
Althor grinned. "Alive anywhere?"
"Don"t make fun of me."
"What won"t she let you do?"
She spread her arms to accent her words. "It was going to be the razzlest. Ultraviolet. Out the galactic arm."
He rubbed his chin. "Does that have a translation into normal language?"
"Oh, Daddy."
He looked for help at Syreen, who had come into the doorway.
"She wants to go on a trip with some other children from Academy," Syreen said. "To Blazers Starland."
"Blazers?" Althor frowned at his daughter. "Isn"t that the entertainment complex on Sylvia"s Moon?"
"Everyone ultra is going," Eristia said. "It will be the firestorm of the year." Her pretty face suffused with hope. "Tell Hoshma it"s all right, Daddy. Say I can jopper. Please?"
"Jopper-that means go on a trip, doesn"t it?"
"Of course." She regarded him with the sympathy of the enlightened for those less savvy about the universe. "Everyone razzle will be there."
"Everyone?" He liked this less and less. "Just who is everyone? The girls from your school?"
"Girls?" Syreen snorted. "Don"t be naive, Althor. Half these "razzle" personages are boys. None, it seems, are chaperones."
Althor stared at his daughter. "You want me to let a thirteen-year-old girl go to an entertainment complex on a world as wild as Sylvia"s Moon, with boys and without chaperones? Absolutely not."
Her frustration rolled out in a wave from her mind. "But why not?"
"It"s not safe."
"Yes, it is," she a.s.sured him.
"Erista, I"m sorry, but the answer is no."
Her face crumpled in anguish. She swung around to include Syreen. "You"re horrible people!" With that, she stalked out of the room.
When they were alone, Althor squinted at Syreen. "Do you think she really means that?"
"Althor, no." Syreen came over to him. "She"s just disappointed."
"I can"t fathom why people would let their children go on a trip like that."
"I checked with the other parents. Most of them said "no" too." Her smile crinkled the lines around her eyes. "When Eristia discovers how many of the others had to stay home, they"ll have a great time commiserating about their heartless parents."
"I suppose." It didn"t make him feel any better about being a source of the commiseration.
"Would you like to stay for dinner?"
He shook his head. "I have plans."
"Oh. Yes. Of course." She paused. "How is Coop?"
"He"s fine."
After an awkward silence, she said, "Say good-bye to Eristia before you leave."
He gave her a rueful smile. "I"ll try."
He found his daughter lying on her back on a divan in the sunroom, staring at the skylight above her head. When he entered, she scowled and focused harder on the gla.s.s.
"I will see you tomorrow," Althor said.
Her disappointment suffused his mind. "I know," she said. "I"ll still be here. Everyone galactic will be on Sylvia"s."
He came over and sat next to her. "Did you really think we would let you go on that trip, Podkin?"
"Don"t call me that baby name."
"All right." He wondered when she had stopped liking the nickname. She continued to stare at the skylight, so he tilted his head to look. All he saw was an unremarkable patch of Sky.
"Not much up there," he commented.
She sighed. "Oh, Daddy. You"re so infrared."
He turned back to her. "Infrared?"
"Don"t feel bad," she consoled. "Parents are supposed to be that way." She sat up and hugged him around the neck. "Come for dinner tomorrow, all right?"
He hugged her back, relieved she didn"t find her taciturn father so horrible after all. "Of course." Softly he said, "Your mother and I love you, Pod-Eristia."
"Me too," she said. "You, I mean."
After he left Syreen"s apartment, he walked to his own. He didn"t know what to make of Eristia"s taste for the fast life of her rich friends. Having grown up on a rural world, he never even knew that kind of life existed until he went offworld at eighteen, to attend military school. At thirteen, he had spent his free time hiking in the countryside around Dalvador, the village where his family lived. His friends were all local boys. Their idea of getting into trouble was sneaking into a tavern to drink watered-down ale.
A voice spoke, sounding like Cobalt, the node that ran his apartment. "Althor, are you coming home?"
He stopped. "Cobalt?"
"The door registered your presence and interpreted your body language as an intent to come home," Cobalt said. "But you kept going."
Althor looked around. He had indeed walked past the turn to his apartment. He retraced his steps to a corridor where the walls glowed in ever-deeper layers of blue. The keyhole arch at the end stood twice his height, with stained gla.s.s in its upper curve and a mosaic border of cool geometric designs. The building"s beauty was one reason acquiring an apartment here was impossible without connections. Althor had gotten Syreen one when she discovered her unexpected pregnancy after what had been, for both of them, a fling of a few days. They tried to make a go of their relations.h.i.+p, only to discover they did far better as friends than as lovers. But he was glad she had stayed all these years, making him part of Eristia"s life.
The door s.h.i.+mmered open and he entered. His apartment had a different feel than Syreen"s home. Where she chose wicker, he chose gla.s.s and chrome; where she used curves, he used angles. The floor-to-ceiling holopanels on the walls displayed whatever he felt like looking at. Right now, they showed his childhood home, the village of Dalvador. Blue-capped mountains made a backdrop for a town of whitewashed houses with purple or blue turreted roofs. Plains of silvery gra.s.s rippled in a breeze.
The horseshoe arch across the room had no door. Beyond it, suns.h.i.+ne poured through many windows into the sunroom where Althor often went to relax. As he entered the sun-drenched chamber, a young man came through another archway across the room, a willowy youth, twenty-four years old, about five-ten, with red curls and blue eyes. He could have been Syreen"s brother.
The youth froze. Then he remembered himself and said, "My greeting, Prince Althor."
Althor smiled. "Coop, my name is Althor. You don"t have to use a t.i.tle."
Coop managed a more relaxed smile. "Althor."
"How is your painting?"
"I finished the landscape this afternoon."
Althor nodded, pleased. Coop"s art had caught his notice when he had wandered into an outdoor exhibit while walking home from the War Room. The work had struck him as close to genius. After learning how much time Coop wasted doing ISC holobanners to support himself, Althor became his patron. He set Coop up in a luxury apartment with a huge studio and gave him a sensible credit line to cover expenses. At least Althor considered it sensible. For some reason Coop thought it extravagant. Tonight he had invited Coop to dinner, to begin introducing him to Orbiter society.
Althor went into the circular alcove that served as a kitchen and bent over the counter, checking its console for messages. "My family should be here soon."
"Cobalt set up dinner." Agitation crackled in Coop"s voice.
Althor turned to see him standing in the archway of the alcove. "What"s wrong?"