Reclamation

Basq's mind raced. Eric Born and Stone in the Wall had to be located immediately. If they returned to the Home Ground to alert the other artifacts, they could become the Aunorante Sangh again and the Reclamation would become a war. Basq gathered his raw conclusions together and opened the line to Ambassador Ivale. This could not wait. The terminal would assemble his conclusions into a report and transmit it to Ivale while Basq continued to work.

Basq sighed inwardly. The easy work was done and the obvious conclusions drawn. Now came the test. Could he, from the available information, infer what patterns of resistance, if any, would be displayed by the artifacts remaining on the Home Ground? There was a wealth of carefully collected satellite data available, but the Historical committees had encountered difficulties interpreting it. There was no guarantee that he could successfully integrate Eric Born's observed behavior into that greater, less well understood picture…Basq leaned forward and set to work.

Caril watched Basq hunch over the boards again. He was going to need a muscle relaxant before he slept, or his shoulders would be aching in the morning. She filed the thought away in the part of her memory that kept her household lists. She flicked her gaze toward the Witness. Winema had her camera eye trained on Basq, but her unaugmented eye took in the entire room, including Caril.

Keeping her face impassive, Caril rose and stepped through the privacy barrier. She moved carefully between the Beholden's work stations. Since she did not stop to give any of them instructions, none of them gave her a glance. She looked back at the feverish, ordered activity that she had organized and allowed herself an inner smile. There was not one flaw here, not one thing out of place or left undone. It would run smoothly without her supervision for hours.

Caril left her home and crossed the park. The choreographers ignored her as she passed them, preferring to continue their argument about balance and light and shadow than to politely acknowledge another resident of the deck. The Imperialist treatise still glowed in green on the wall. She didn't read it. She knew quite well what it said.

The corner of the park farthest from her door held a single user terminal. She sat in front of it and ran her hands across the board, shuffling the keypads into the position she wanted. According to public law, these terminals were unmonitored and couldn't be traced, so you could say anything here, place any text or recording you wanted to in them. In truth, Caril knew, they were almost as tightly secured as Basq's terminal was.

There were, however, ways to confuse the system. First she composed a message to the market vendors to order dinner for the Beholden and the family. Her own terminal had been co-opted by Basq's team, so for now all the household work would have to be done from the public lines. Apart from the list, she recorded the other news briefly. Jahidh needed to know what had happened so he could plan his next move.

Then Caril arranged the keys into their new patterns with an ease that came from long practice. She waited a few heartbeats and arranged them again. Her news would flit through every park aboard the Grand Errand, bouncing back and forth for hours in the crowded lines before it finally hit a transmission point where it could be released from the internal lines and start on its real journey.

Let Basq strive for the honor of remaining a servant to the Quarter Galaxy. She would not make that her work. Once she had thought he understood the need for the Vitae to cut themselves loose from the overwhelming caution that had been instilled in them when the Ancestors had begun the flight, but he had been blinded by his promotions and paralyzed by responsibilities until there was almost nothing left of the person she had tied her life to.

Let him glory in his service to a Reclamation Assembly that spoke of standing side by side with civilizations of babies and monsters. She would not hear them. The Rhudolant Vitae were the First Born and the First Blood of all the humans, the head of the Family, not just another member to be tricked and controlled by the Unifiers. Jahidh had found the proof and he would soon bring home the power to make the Assembly recant.

But there was not now much time. The artifacts were lost and even the Assembly was taking that loss seriously.

She leaned back in her chair and, using a key-slip she'd learned from Kelat, Caril sent both transmissions simultaneously.