Read A Prison Unsought for Free Online

the team waiting in an antechamber
to hand stitch the final adjustments.
    Willsones advanced, and then, instead of a formal military
salute, which would precede a military briefing, she offered her hands in the
formal Douloi greeting.
    (So this is not a Naval
visit, but civilian) , came Vahn’s bozzed voice in Jaim’s inner ear. (Different rules.)
    Brandon straightened, his beautiful manners revealing
nothing as he lightly touched fingertips to Willsones’ palms. She glanced from
the Faseult ring to the bland mask of Brandon’s face.
    “Admiral Willsones,” Brandon said.
“My mother introduced us, did she not? Aren’t you related to the Lieutenant
Willsones who ran nav on her yacht?”
    “My daughter.” Willsones watched
the lift of his dark brows in recognition, then the quick contraction of sympathy
as he realized that Lieutenant Willsones had died with the Kyriarch Ilara when
the Dol’jharians had murdered the Trucial Commission twenty years before. That
quick, instinctive sympathy—that was Ilara’s.
    He said, “I’m sorry,” and then, before she had to say
anything, he indicated the Rifter who was eating another sandwich. “This is
Jaim, my bodyguard.”
    What did he mean by introducing the Rifter bodyguard as if
he were a guest? Willsones found her first impression veering back toward
favorites. Either Brandon’s well-publicized excesses had rotted his brain entirely,
or was this an indirect invitation to state her business? He knows his position is anomalous . Even a drunken sot who had been
raised on the Mandala, political center of the Panarchy, would perceive that
much.
    So she stepped outside of Naval and Douloi patterns of
interaction, staying within the context of familial connection as she said,
“You know that the Navy scans the cryptobanks of all incoming ships now, not
just what they discharge as their DataNet obligation. One held a vid that
Admiral Nyberg thought you should see before it is released. I am here to
escort you to a secured briefing room, if you wish to accept the Admiral’s
invitation.”
    “I am at your disposal,” the Aerenarch said. “Lead on.”
    o0o
    Silence gripped the briefing room.
    Commander Sedry Thetris clasped her hands tightly behind
her, careful to keep her sweaty palms away from the wall. At her left and
right, a captain and another commander breathed harshly, their tension
heightening her own.
    Before them a holographic view of the Emerald Throne Room on
Arthelion appeared, familiar to nearly every citizen. But in the huge,
tree-like throne there sat instead of a small, dapper, silver-bearded man a
tall, broadly built one with a grim, hard-boned face, every line of his body
glorying in triumph.
    The unknown Dol’jharian with the ajna swept the view away
from the throne to the long approach leading down from the huge double doors.
Small at first, but instantly recognizable, the Panarch—dressed in prison garb
and wearing a shock collar—was brought forward by a smirking Bori.
    Sedry, who had spent fifty of her sixty years working
actively for revolution, controlled the twitch in her fingers; she longed to
rip that Bori’s lips off his gloating, sniveling face.
    “Kneel,” the Bori said to the
Panarch, and the ajna showed the Panarch kneeling obediently at the left of the
throne.
    “Eusabian is broadcasting this for
a purpose,” Nyberg had said when they first filed in. “I will remind you all
that we cannot be certain that anything we see really happened the way it
appears.”
    The Bori stood forth and addressed a long line of Privy
Councilors and other exalted Panarchists, all prisoners. Sedry expected to feel
triumph at their downfall, but felt nothing. She was still angry that the
imminent revolution, so long needed to rid the Tetrad Centrum Inner Planets of
the rule of debauched aristocrats and get power back into the hands of the
people, the imminent revolution that had superseded her own group’s careful plans,
had turned out to be a blind: