“I’ve never seen that before,” says Kenrai. “I didn’t plant it, and I wasn’t told anything about it.”
I place the device back on the desk. I didn’t figure that he would know anything, but it was worth trying. Ethan thinks it’s a monitoring device, set to react when conditions are right to cause a chemical change in one of the constituent elements. But what could possibly trigger it?
“All right. I’ve just got a few more questions to ask before you leave for Dolparessa. You seem certain that the agent you dealt with wasn’t working for President Gweseki, even though you didn’t believe her story about a base on the moon. Why is that?”
“It was the way she used her memchip.”
“Could you explain?”
“When we’d get information from the IndWorlds, it would feel totally different from the flow of CenGov information. It’s difficult to explain to somebody who has never had a chip. Those people from the old guard at CenGov…the chips are all controlled centrally. Like the information was coming from a rigid pipeline, not a network of multiple sources. This woman’s chip felt like an IndWorld chip. It was an incongruity, one of the reasons I got very suspicious about the motivations of my contact. Not the stupid propaganda we were being sent from CenGov. That was so obvious as to be laughable.”
The chips…feel different. X’khaim, do you want to comment on that?
I wouldn’t know, he says. I’ve got a CenGov style chip because the IndWorlds don’t have telepathic defense capacity. I haven’t used it to communicate directly with someone, only to listen.
“Obviously, our knowledge of chipping is limited. Do you know much about the difference between the chips in the IndWorlds and the ones used by CenGov?”
He leans forward, resting his elbows on the table, his lips pressed together in a rueful half-grin. “You’re so naïve. That assassination attempt on Cybae – do you know what everybody really thinks about it?”
“The government claims it was a lone fanatic. They haven’t shared any speculations with us.”
“I don’t mean the government. I mean the public.”
“The public knows nothing. The incident was hushed up.”
“Officially. But everyone who was there shared the recorded image of what happened with their friends and family using their memchips. Instantly. Although there was no media coverage of the incident at all, everyone on Cybae knows what happened.”
So what he’s saying is that we have to treat everyone on Cybae as if they’re telepaths. Or inside of a pleroma.
“That’s the real way people get information in the IndWorlds, not through the media. The media is owned by the corporations, and the corporations also control the government.”
“I thought the government controlled the corporations?”
“Naïve. Anyway, the thing that’s so funny is that Prince Patrick – according to the point of view of someone raised in the Domha’vei – clearly acted to allow the government to save face. But to someone born and raised in the IndWorlds, he was demonstrating the extent of his power. The Archon showed up the local police. And they didn’t believe that Her Eminence was actually upset about it, either. They thought that she was making a fuss to make them look bad. She has a reputation for being a diva.”
Well, that reputation isn’t entirely undeserved…but Tara has mellowed a lot in the past two decades.
“They don’t understand what a Cu’enashti is, not really,” Kenrai continues. “While everyone here is amazed at your ability to travel to other star systems, the people in the IndWorlds take it for granted, and think the reason you don’t is that the Matriarch is an isolationist. Her reluctance to assume Terra as a protectorate just proved that to them – after all, who wouldn’t want to conquer Earth? After you demonstrated your power on Terra and in the Arthvean system against the Alliance fleets, everyone is convinced that you could take any system you wanted. They think the reason you don’t is because the Matriarch is afraid for you to leave her side, and that she’s too much of a coward to fight battles outside of her home system.”
He starts laughing. “You should see the look on your face! But they don’t understand. They really don’t. They don’t know what it means to be the daughter of a Skarsian battlequeen, and they don’t know Her Eminence’s reputation fighting the Cybrids in hand-to-hand combat, and their women aren’t genetically modded, so most of them are built like Volparnian women, and they don’t understand n’aashet n’aaverti in the least, and you’re male, and have godlike power. So their reading of the situation is that the Matriarch is a weak woman who has inherited her throne, and you’ve basically got to pay lip service to that, and it limits what you can do. Another irony of the situation is that CenGov is reading it much more realistically. Their technocracy functions much more like your aristocracy, and their genders are equal by law and physically equalized by cybridization.”
“Well, this is…enlightening. I’m afraid that if I tell Tara, she’ll want to go and punch out each one of them individually.”
“I can see that,” says Kenrai, suddenly serious. “If Her Eminence realizes…hell, if any of the old battlequeens realize…we’ll have to go to war just for the sake of honor.”
“No Skarsian woman could stand to be thought of as a coward,” I agree.
These attacks, says Cillian. Maybe they weren’t intended to hurt us badly. Maybe they were intended to push us towards war.
But war with whom? CenGov? It strikes me that if somebody wanted to frame CenGov, putting starslick on their ships was a very stupid oversight. Then again, I already suspected that the starslick was there to lead us back to the double-agents.
I can draw only one definitive conclusion: somebody is fucking with our heads.