Chapter Eleven

Cardenas (Findlay IV), Findlay System, Eriuman Republic.

After Khalil’s unremarked departure, the divide between Bellona and the rest of the family grew deeper. Bellona stopped talking to anyone, unless directly spoken to. She spent more time in her suite, reading histories and military treatises.

After five days of remaining locked in her suite, refusing all family communications and having food brought to her rooms, Sang suggested to Bellona that the inadequate combat skills they had developed would be refined by rigorous training. Bellona took a day longer to agree.

The first training session in the usual garden clearing—as all Bellona’s training had been—left Sang trembling, their biological systems overtaxed and bruised. The next day, their muscles were uncooperative and aching despite painful massage to disperse the lactic acid.

That was also the day Bellona ordered Sang to her suite and gave them a list of research topics.

“Khalil Ready?” Sang said, repeating the last item.

Bellona’s gaze was steady, despite the bloom of color in her cheeks. “Profile, history, psychoanalysis.”

“You know why he did it,” Sang pointed out. “Research won’t provide a clearer answer. He had nothing to lose by giving you the truth.”

“He wasn’t who I thought he was. I want to find out just how wrong my assumptions were. I want to know if I can trust my own judgment. Just do it, Sang.”

Sang complied.

While Sang completed the research projects, they moved through the house, taking care of Bellona’s need for food, sleep and exercise, bringing back small pieces of news about the family while steadfastly refusing to provide the family with news about Bellona, as she had ordered. “Let them find out for themselves. If they’re genuinely interested in my welfare, they will come, although I am not expecting anyone to appear at that door, Sang.”

Sang was not surprised when her prediction proved accurate. They wondered if Reynard felt any regret when he realized how awry his stratagem had gone, that his efforts to remove Khalil had not sent Bellona into his arms for comfort, as any other daughter might have, from where he could nudge her in the direction of a more suitable partner.

Her psychological distance from the family, while still in close physical proximity, made Bellona’s temper chancy. The combat training stepped up from three times a week to daily and Sang emerged from nearly every session with new aches, along with a respect for Bellona’s strength and agility. Sang also appreciated that they were serving as an effective vent for Bellona’s frustrations and submitted willingly to the pummeling.

When Sang suggested Bellona find accommodations somewhere in the city, away from the family homebase, she curtly refused. “I have things to do here, still.”

Sang didn’t repeat the suggestion. They were aware that in the night hours when the house was still and dark, Bellona would prowl through the rooms, looking for answers. The house AI and archivist reported to Sang each morning, believing it was helping Sang serve Bellona, per Max’s orders, which was perfectly true.

Bellona spent hours in the kitchens. For most of those hours she lingered in the big store rooms, especially the cool rooms where preserves were made and kept. It was a policy in all the senior clans to keep their family homebases in a constant state of readiness for war and siege. Their cities could be destroyed. If rumors were true that the Karassians were building city-killers, that could wipe out a city-sized area in one blast from orbit, then those cities could be swept from the map in a few minutes. However, the homebases were always situated in the most defensible positions and could be rendered bomb-proof with a few short commands. Behind those indestructible walls, a family could live for years, if they made the correct preparations.

Sang had at first assumed that Bellona did not want to leave the comfort and hidden protection of the homebase. However, the Cardenas family store rooms were factory-sized buried rooms, where the produce from the gardens and farms and the largesse of subject families was kept and assiduously cycled. This was where Bellona crept for a short while each night.

Puzzled, Sang had ordered the house AI to take footage, which Sang had watched the next morning, their puzzlement evaporating.

Bellona was sniffing the supplies, looking for the spice, herb or compound that had tickled her lost memory. She wanted the pure source, to produce another recall. Because the olfactory sense was easily overwhelmed, she could only investigate a little at a time.

If she moved to another house in the city, she would not have access to the storerooms, unsupervised in the dead of night, as she did now.

Sang debated with themselves on whether the behavior was serving Bellona, or if they should intervene. No easy answer came to them, despite the same middle-of-the-night hours spent wrestling with the dilemma on journal pages.

Instead, Sang stepped up their own efforts to produce results for Bellona. They reported on progress each evening. They did not mention to Bellona that they were spending more time researching Khalil Ready’s life, while ignoring most of the military profiles she had requested.

“He told me of his town being evacuated when he was a child,” Bellona said. “There cannot be too many agrarian settlements concentrated within the equatorial zone, or that were grouped there before they could afford weather generators. That was anywhere from twenty to forty years ago, Sang. There has to be a record of it. Even the free states keep records.”

“For themselves, yes, but cooperative exchange of information is sluggish in the free states,” Sang pointed out. “We cannot find a confirmed record for the birth of a child called Khalil Ready anywhere for the last sixty years. We could search further back…” Sang shrugged. Khalil Ready had youthful features and even the most gifted medical team could not make a seventy-year-old look young.

“Try any source, even the most illogical. And scour the records on Atticus again. An eleven-year-old boy cannot simply disappear, not even out there.”

“A grown woman and highly visible member of the senior clans of Erium disappeared from civilized space, ten years ago,” Sang pointed out.

Bellona scowled. “I just want one confirming fact, Sang. You understand why, don’t you?”

“You want to know he was not lying, the last day he was here.”

“Thank you, Sang.”

Sang left her to return to the task of unearthing the life of a minor in the free states, where “freedom” included the right to go unrecorded, undocumented and untrammeled by civic demands and responsibilities.

“They have other responsibilities, more intimate ones,” Bellona pointed out when Sang brought the lack of documentation to her attention. “Survival is a sharper equation. When the local wildlife is eating one’s summer harvest where it stands in the field, one doesn’t stop to file an incident report. One gathers the neighbors and drives the wildlife into the next valley, or one doesn’t eat that winter.”

“Atticus is beyond such basics. It was settled nearly five hundred years ago.”

“Even there, the right to live freely holds sway,” Bellona said. “There are no social cushions, no government sponsored services. The people have the freedom to thrive or die trying, with no support.”

Sang stared at her, startled. Sang was not the only one to dig into the history of the older planets in free space. “Khalil spoke of eating with the homeless. This would corroborate his testimony, would it not?”

Bellona winced.

“We apologize. We were still in witness mode when Khalil spoke of Atticus so his words are recorded as testimony. Although, we noted at the time that Atticus did not match with the story he told us about his childhood.”

“Which is why I’ve decided he must have been evacuated at some stage, or moved for some reason. That reason is what you’re looking for,” Bellona finished.

Sang hesitated.

“What, Sang?”

“When Khalil spoke to me of his childhood, he said he did not want the memories stimulated. He implied they were not all pleasant.”

“All kids have unhappy memories. Just listening to their parents argue can sound like the end of the world if they’re little enough.” Bellona paused, considering. “You think it is more than that, though?”

Sang nodded. “The happy memory he shared…there was family there, somewhere. There had to be, for a child that age would not be so carefree without one. Yet on Atticus, he was alone.”

Bellona considered it. “Maybe you should check the Karassian military annexation databases, Sang.”

“That is not all. When we were on Kachmar, Khalil spoke of a brother.”

“A brother?” Bellona sat up, startled, disturbing the tray of spiced tea. Lately, she had been requesting heavily spiced dishes for all her meals. She put her hand on the pot, steadying it. “Khalil never spoke of a brother. Not once.”

“He only referred to him once, in passing. Benjamin, he called him. The most wanted man in Karassia.”

Bellona looked pleased. “Did you run the enquiry?”

Sang nodded. “The only Benjamin in the free states the Homogeny has shown interest in is a Benjamin Arany, of no known allegiance to any free state. He is a maverick freeship captain who likes to harass both Karassian and Eriuman transports wherever he comes across them.”

“So does every captain with a cargo to protect,” Bellona said, disappointment writing itself on her face. “They prefer to shoot first and get the hell out while the cruisers are trying to turn fast enough to get them in their sights.”

“I believe that is where Max came up with his idea of small, agile fighters,” Sang said. “He spent five years patrolling the borders of Eriuman. Arany, though, is not a typical freeship captain. He has a number of other freeships that look to him for leadership. As he spends his time harassing the Karassian military, they are most keen to…talk to him.”

Bellona frowned. “Do you remember what Khalil said about heroes?”

“We do.”

“What you just said about Arany makes me think of that. I wonder if the Bureau are looking for their hero out in free space?”

“I doubt that is ever something we would be able to find out. The Bureau are necessarily secret about how their algorithms and minds work.”

“Apparently, not even the Bureau understands how they work,” Bellona said. “Except for the interpreters.” She shuddered. “Keep at it, Sang.”

Sang searched, broaching unlikely record sources as Bellona had ordered. When Sang found the answer, they considered the implications for a whole day before presenting their findings to Bellona, who listened gravely.

“The military annexed a freeworld, twenty-six years ago,” Sang told her. “It was agrarian, with no standing army, the arable land all concentrated around the equator and across only one of the six continents that transverse the equator.”

“Why annex it?” Bellona asked, as Sang had anticipated.

“Hydrogen in pure diatomic state suspended in the southern ocean, in concentrations heavy enough to offset the cost of navigating the gravity well. Processors were built and a beanstalk pipeline to the outer atmosphere, all within ten years of conquering the planet.”

Conquering?” Bellona said sharply.

Sang nodded again. “The local farmers banded together and fought off the military landing craft. It was bloody, brutal and short. Afterward, every adult in the colony was rounded up and executed.”

Bellona drew in a long slow breath. “The children…?”

“Put aboard a shuttle, that took them to the nearest free state and dumped them.”

Bellona examined the front, then the back of her hand. “The year?”

Sang told her.

“That fits with Khalil’s facts.” Bellona shook her head. “Lately I have wondered why Erium continues this pointless war, then I hear about something like this and know why. Karassia is a disease, Sang. It will destroy us all if left to thrive.”

“Yes, Bellona.”

“And the name of the planet?”

“Before annexation, it was called Arcadia. Now, its official designation is Revati III.”

“Revati?” Bellona stared at Sang, her eyes large. She grew pale. “Revati is an Eriuman possession.” Her voice was stiff.

“Yes.”

Her chest rose and fell quickly. “That is all,” she said, her tone remote. Weak.

Sang left silently.

* * * * *

For four consecutive days, Bellona cancelled combat training and did not emerge from her rooms, not even to wander the stores at night.

Sang waited and monitored the food that was sent to her suite. Too much of it came back untouched.

They considered the various ways Bellona might react to the facts of Khalil’s childhood and the role of the Eriuman Navy in those events. She had received the confirmation she craved that Khalil had at least been truthful in the end. The truth, though, was not pleasant.

Sang hoped the experience would discourage Bellona from searching for a way to restore her lost memory of leaving Cardenas. The house AI report that she had stayed in her suite for four nights encouraged Sang.

When Bellona threatened her father with a ghostmaker she had smuggled past the house weapons filters, Sang learned they had been completely wrong.

About everything.