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  “I couldn’t reach Baron Mitsugawa, and I thought you would like an update on the investigation. I didn’t trust the local web to be secure enough,” Nero said.

  “He’s departed for his home on Taiumikai with his father’s body. I suspect he’s in transit and won’t be reachable until he arrives.”

  Cylus knew that ships in transit were cut off from the outside galaxy until they reached their destinations since piercing an Einstein-Rosen bridge was impossible.

  Praetor Graves’ steely eyes glanced past him.

  “Let’s go out to the balcony,” he said.

  “I’m curious about what he has to say,” Sophi interjected. Her voice caused every muscle in Cylus’ body to stiffen.

  “Heiress Olivaar is not on my list of approved persons for this information,” Nero said.

  Cylus wondered briefly how Nero knew who Pasqualina was until he remembered that Abyssians had “on-board” AI’s capable of looking up such information on the spot.

  “Perhaps you’ll want to see my art collection?” Cylus turned to meet his cousin’s green eyes. To her credit, she maintained the mask of her smile without a twitch.

  “Perhaps she’ll want to stay,” Sophi said.

  He shifted his gaze. His mouth dropped open.

  “It’s alright, I can go for a walk. This is family business,” Pasqualina said.

  “Stay.” Sophi’s voice was iron.

  What do you think you’re doing? Cylus messaged her through his implants.

  “Let her hear what Praetor Graves has to say. Then, we’ll watch what information leaks to her father. We’ll know how far we can trust her then.” Sophi’s words scrolled up Cylus’ vision.

  He could hardly believe them. We can’t trust her, she’s my uncle’s progeny!

  “Silence, Cylus, and listen to what Praetor Graves has to say. Do not challenge me on this.”

  Sophi’s rebuke stung deep, and Cylus felt his resistance melt away as quickly as it had risen.

  “Heiress Olivaar is cleared to hear what you have to say,” he almost choked on the words.

  Nero’s brows narrowed. “As you wish, Baron. Agent Khepria and I have uncovered some key information regarding the murder of Baron Mitsugawa Yoji, as well as in the matter of your family’s death.”

  Cylus found himself a step closer to the Abyssian without knowing how he got there. “My family?”

  “It looks like the two cases are linked, but I won’t be sure until we chase down this lead.” Nero glanced at Pasqualina a second time. “I’ll send you an update via secure channel once we know more. Agent Khepria and I are going to need to leave Kosfanter shortly. Technically, since you were close to the victim, I am still responsible for your safety here. However, this lead must be followed up on while it is still hot. Do you require me to request another Abyssian be assigned to your safety?”

  “That’s alright, Ben has combat routines and he can serve as my personal bodyguard here. The lead is more important,” he said.

  “Cylus, we still don’t know who—” Sophi started.

  “Ben will suffice!” His voice cracked when he said it. Nothing was more important than finding his family’s killer, not even Sophi.

  Silence hung in the air for a moment.

  “As you wish, Baron Keltan.” Sophi’s voice was cold. He knew he would pay for his remark later, but didn’t care.

  “There’s another thing, a VoQuana Maskhim named Sinuthros invoked the treaty to join my investigation. As he is—” Nero glanced at Pasqualina again. “As I am no longer pursuing the lead that would have involved him, I will not be notifying him of our departure. If you get a request from the VoQuana Embassy, I would advise ignoring it for as long as possible.”

  “Done. Just find my family’s killer. Confirm my suspicions, or give me someone new to hate, but do it,” Cylus said. His heart was racing. After so long, he would know for sure if Zalor had killed them. After so long, he would be able to act. Saliva filled his mouth faster than he could swallow it down.

  “It will take us nearly twenty-four day—” Nero paused, listening to some inner voice. “Sorry, sixty-four days to reach our destination. Please let Baron Mitsugawa know of our progress when he arrives at his.”

  “I will,” Cylus said.

  “Praetor Graves, where are you headed?” Sophi asked.

  Nero shook his head. “It’s best I not say, for now.”

  Cylus heard Sophi’s intake of breath.

  “It’s alright, Sophi. Happy hunting, Nero. Get back to us when you can,” he said quickly.

  Nero gave a quick nod, and departed with his partner.

  “You should have made him tell us,” Sophi said bitterly when Ben shut the door.

  “It doesn’t matter where they are going. All that matters is what they find,” Cylus said.

  A look passed between Sophi and Pasqualina, but he didn’t care. After so many years, soon he would know. Before the year was out, he might actually be able to put his family’s souls to rest.

  He left the room with a smile on his face.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ikuzlu City, Kosfanter

  41:1:5 CST (J2400:3065)

  Cygni leaned against the belly of one of the nymphs around the bottom ring of the three tier fountain. At her feet, Baron Mitsugawa Yoji’s broken body stared up into eternity. His blood dyed the water dark purple in the eerie blue light. Several meters away the crowd of Intel-Sys workers stood gawking at the fallen baron. She already ran their faces through the Spur Herald’s database. Two of them were reporters, like herself, violating the media law as she had by being on the scene without police permission—but it wasn’t their faces that drew her gaze.

  Created from her own biological memory of the night it happened by the computer woven into her brain’s meningies, the simulation rendered the Abyssian Praetor’s scarred visage in perfect detail. She hadn’t seen either him or his Relaen companion well from her position in the crowd that night, but that wasn’t a problem for her enhancement software.

  She moved from her place at the fountain through the time-frozen memory to stand before the big man. She stared into his hard, gray eyes.

  “Nero Graves,” she whispered. “Why did you respond to a baron’s call when no other Praetor would? It has to be more than that tenuous connection between you, Baron Mitsugawa, and the planet Savorcha. What were you doing at the Gaian Biodome after this?” She shook her head. What few records she could find on Praetor Graves’ showed him involved in the Savorchan conflict ten years ago. That conflict was precipitated by Baron Mitsugawa Yoji’s support for the planet’s defection from the Orgnan Empire. Simply having both the Praetor and the deceased baron involved with the same decade-old action wasn’t enough to justify why Graves had come to this scene in response to a personal request, Praetors just didn’t do that, though it did at least provide a potential link to finding the reason why.

  She turned, looking at the robed figure standing among the barons, apart from the crowd. “And why are you smiling?”

  The questions plagued her for days after the meeting with Boadicea at their favorite cafe. She got to work tracking down the leads as soon as she got home. Boa had let her know that Graves paid her mother, High Priestess of the Kosfanteri Gaian Biodome, a visit recently. A Praetor visiting a Gaian biodome was unheard of in the history of the Confederation. Even more interesting than that, Nero Graves was the strangest Praetor Cygni had ever heard of.

  Although Daedalus’ records were classified state secrets, reports of the Praetor’s exploits were not. She found references to all of the known Praetors going back to at least the J-date 2350:367—except for Nero Graves. References to him did not begin until J-date 2350:18017—nearly fifty years after the first of the Abyssians appeared. That was strange, but it didn’t get her any closer to knowing what was going on when Baron Mitsugawa threw himself out of the window.

  Most of the other news feeds scooped the Spur Herald thanks to her arrest for violation of
the media access law at the crime scene. They reported the official cause of death as suicide. Cygni’s editor was furious with her, but she knew she was onto something that the other news feeds missed. Not only was there the odd group of barons with the Praetor at the scene, but what Boadicea said at the cafe confirmed it.

  Boa had warned her against digging too deeply—warned her that there was something deeper at work and to stay away—but Cygni was determined to find what it was regardless of the danger. That’s what she did for a living. That was who she was, and she figured Boa knew that so the warning was more of a spur towards action than an actual “stop” message.

  She gestured with a hand, and her cerebral computer generated a window before it. Data from her Cyberweb search programs appeared within.

  The Praetor’s ship, the CSS Akanda, departed Kosfanter four days ago. There was no FTL ship listed as its destination, but Praetor flight plans weren’t accessible to any but the highest ranking space-traffic control officers. That was all right by Cygni, she would check the ships that left the system once enough time passed for the Akanda to reach the exit zone. The FTL ships leaving the zone after that time frame would give her an idea of the candidates for the Akanda’s destination. Then she would use that list to figure out more of what was going on. Meanwhile, there were other things to occupy her time.

  Baron Cylus Keltan and Heiress Sophiathena Cronus changed political affiliations while Cygni was in a CSA holding cell following her arrest at Intel-Sys Tower. The shock was palpable across the Kosfanteri political scene. She could only imagine how it must feel to receive the news on the Cronus’ home world of Stolchem. The defection was still being reported from every imaginable angle by every media source she could think of. Most predicted it was the end of Cronus power in the Barony, but she had to wonder about that. She couldn’t believe that Baron Keltan, after his family had been in opposition to the Revenants for so long, would simply give in because Baron Mitsugawa Yoji was dead. Heir Mitsugawa Ichiro was known as his best friend, almost a brother, and was now the Baron Mitsugawa. She had no doubt that their resistance against Baron Revenant would continue. There was no reason why the new Baron Mitsugawa wouldn’t carry on his father’s fight.

  It occurred to her that she knew where most of the people present on the night of the so-called suicide were now, except for Baron Mitsugawa Ichiro. Her tracking programs hadn’t picked up activity on him in the Cyberweb since J2400:3061—two days ago.

  With a wave of her hand, she banished the window and told her cerebral computer to drop her awareness back into her body.

  She blinked, her vision swimming with the dizziness she always had when her brain started listening to her own biological senses again. She was seated in her recliner facing the broad, picture window in her living room. Thousands of apartment lights twinkled like stars through the polyglass, spilling a soft illumination across the piles of clothes littering her carpet and hanging from the shelves on either side of the room like moss from cave walls. The meter-wide donut of her holographic entertainment module stuck up from the mess like a silver rock among frozen waves of cloth. Reflected in its surface, the residential towers of the Solan Ghetto bent around its curves and vanished into its crevices like a dream.

  She sat up, shifting her weight in the soft cushions of her aluminum-frame couch. The surface of the holographic projector bloated her forehead and narrowed her chin so that her reflection looked like some kind of VoQuana-Solan hybrid.

  “Ugh,” she muttered, shaking her head.

  Her apartment smelled like curry. The scent stung her sinuses and caused her eyes to water. The neighbors must be trying to cook a historical dish again. She wished they would just give it up. The last time they tried this the building’s fire suppression system had ruined half of her furniture.

  “Shkur?” She said in a loud voice and listened for a response. All she heard was the muffled conversations of her neighbors through the walls. It was just as well her Nyangari boyfriend wasn’t here. The curry smell would have him ravenous. He loved the taste of ethnic-Solan food despite the digestive distress it caused him afterward. The thought of the time he tried hamburgers brought a smile to her face and she found herself wishing he had come home while she was working in the Cyberweb. They hadn’t had much time together since the night of the older Baron Mitsugawa’s death, and a girl like her had needs.

  Sighing, she willed her command prompt into her field of vision and set an active tracer program to track down Baron Mitsugawa’s whereabouts. With that running, she got up and crossed the five strides that separated her living room and the narrow, L-shaped nook of her kitchen. The evening news feed from the Spur Herald opened up in the top-left part of her vision when she entered the space between the barren counter tops. Her mind’s ear heard her jackass coworker, Brett Cannon, droning on about the Broghite War while she opened her refrigerator and started looking for dinner inspiration. Tonight she was determined to avoid her usual pattern of ordering in. Aside from rent, restaurant food was her biggest expense as she was usually too busy—or if she was honest with herself——too lazy to cook most nights. The effect of her lack of motivation showed in her present selection of stored foodstuffs. There was barely enough within the temperature-controlled box to piece together a bowl of ramen.

  She was about to give up and load her list of local takeout places when the phantasmal chime of an incoming call interrupted Cannon’s grating tone. With a thought she accepted the transmission to her CC. The ghostly form of her editor appeared dressed in a crisp, dark-brown robe with a high-collar buried up to his waist in her false-marble counter top. The three golden-yellow eyes in his powder-blue domed head rotated to face her. The fist-sized orbs regarded her with saucer-like pupils. He stretched out his chin, pulling the dense blue-white cords of his external larynx taut. The strings of flesh connecting his jaw-line with his clavicle buzzed out Ax’xoa’s accented Solan words.

  “Aragón, why haven’t I received an article from you about the Keltan defection?”

  Cygni bit her lip. She forgot that she was supposed to be writing about it.

  “I haven’t worked on it.” Honesty, in this case, was her only option. It wasn’t like she could hide the fact that she hadn’t written or investigated the story.

  All three eyes blinked in succession. “Why not?”

  “I’ve been working on something else, Ax’xoa—it’s related, though.” She hadn’t meant to use his first name, he was a stickler for formality and she was already on thin ice from having bungled the Mitsugawa story.

  “What?” He buzzed. His large, black pupils constricted—a voluntary gesture in Cleebian body language meant to convey extreme displeasure. She didn’t have to guess about what.

  “Sorry, Mister Iai.”

  “Better. Now, tell me about this ‘something else’ that has kept you from your assignment.”

  She took a deep breath. “Barons Keltan, Mitsugawa, Cronus, and her sister and children were all present when Baron Mitsugawa allegedly threw himself out the window—”

  “You don’t believe the coroner’s report?” One of Mister Iai’s lateral eyes shifted around.

  “Not for a minute.” Her insides felt like they were made out of tingles and sparks.

  “Continue.”

  “The CSA took my recordings when I got arrested, but I reconstructed the scene from memory. Heiress Sophiathena Cronus was smiling the whole time. Her step-father was laying broken on the fountain not three-meters from her, and she was smiling. Why?”

  Mister Iai buzzed out a single tone that Cygni had come to know was the Cleebian equivalent of a shrug. Cleebians tended to communicate more vocally than Solans did—as hard as that was to believe considering some of the Solans she knew.

  “I think something was going on in that tower before the so-called suicide; something big. I’m working on it.”

  “You have other assignments, Miss Aragón.”

  “Heiress Sophiathena said something to the Pra
etor who showed up—something that indicated she’d called him in. I did some digging, and it turns out this particular Praetor has an association with the Mitsugawa family—”

  “The Cronus sisters’ mother invented Daedalus, and Heir-Representative Cronus is—was—married to Baron Mitsugawa. Maybe Daedalus simply assigned this Praetor to them?”

  Cygni closed her mouth. She hadn’t thought of that angle.

  “Miss Aragón, if you are unwilling to do the assignments I give you—the assignments I pay you for—then perhaps I should find a new investigator for the Spur Herald’s Solan Affairs Division.”

  “Mister Iai, I promise this is going somewhere.” She suppressed her urge to throw something at him even knowing that the Ax’xoa Iai standing in her kitchen counter was a hallucination generated by her cerebral implant.

  “Is it?”

  “That same Praetor showed up at the Gaian Biodome just a few days later. A source I have there said he was asking questions and got information he shouldn’t have known about.”

  “And?”

  “And? And why was an Abyssian Praetor going to a Gaian Biodome while investigating the death of a baron?”

  “There’s a connection between Mitsugawa and the biodome?”

  “Possibly,” she sensed victory.

  Mister Iai’s pupils widened slightly. “What about Baron Keltan and the rest?”

  “I believe it’s all tied in together, sir.”

  Mister Iai’s right eye turned away from her. She tried to keep focused on his center and left-temporal eyes. The way the Cleebians could individually direct their eyeballs had a tendency to twist her stomach.

  “Baron Keltan and Heiress Olivaar are engaged. They are having their party on the luxury liner, Queen Gaia, in a few days. I have Pawqlan covering the event for the gossip column, but if you really think there’s some strange and possibly scandalous connection between the barons at the death scene and the Gaians, then perhaps I’ll instruct her to look into Baron Keltan while she’s there. Maybe it ties into the defection. None of the other news feeds have picked up on this that we know about—yet.”