Apparitions

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Lida Vi was possibly the safest woman in the entire asteroid. She was surrounded by her sister, her father, and Jareth - all of them accomplished swordsmen. On top of that, these criminals actually seemed to respect her swollen stomach; one, a huge Thallonian with the crest of the noble house tattooed on his forehead, had even talked his way past her honor guard and given her a blessing against root rot.

As there hadn't been any Thallonian government for an appreciable length of time, she had to assume that he was out of practice and meant to give her the blessing for a safe, uneventful pregnancy.

Lida, Delea, Lukaya, and Jareth crowded into the infirmary. There were eighty-two victims of the virus still in stasis or wrapstuff. Kado was still sleeping beside them, apparently peaceful, with Shanin standing over her.

"Well! When I said I wanted to see my family, this is not what I had in mind!"

Katya looked grim. "Those ones died, too. This virus is pretty effectively magic-resistant, and I'd like to know where the--"

"The you-know-who got anyone who's that skilled in magic," Katya finished smoothly.

There was music playing. Kado didn't recognize the song. She was in the arms of some man with an odd skin color - like Caden's - and she felt unbearably guilty. What kind of deviant gets that much pain out of dancing? Ah - she saw why. There was his wife, sitting at the other end of the room.

This hallucination had to be funneling her own memories into itself. Shanin was there, and Lukaya, along with Seleyn. The thought turned her stomach. How long am I going to have to put up with this twisted game? She shoved her dancing partner away and walked out of the room, not knowing whether the actions were scripted or not, whether she had just become able to act upon her own free will.

"Rachael?" It was the fake Katya. She seemed weak, in more ways than one. Not only was she not trying to deck Kado the mate-stealer, but there was an odd sheen to her skin, a strange scent to her...

Kado kept walking. She was on an Athmari cruiser not all that dissimilar from the ones outside the dreaming world. Finally, she ran into Caden, damn his soul to the icy core of Third Moon.

A lock of long, black hair fell in front of Tarlen's face. He brushed it away unthinkingly. Having quickly learned as much about biochemistry as Omi could teach him, and with a thorough knowledge of theoretical mathematics, he was still at a loss as to how to alter the bizarre new chemical grouping in order to remove it from the victims' neuroreceptors.

"Well, maybe if we rotated it across the fourth-dimension axis and brought it around here...no, then it would still bump into the watermark. We have to cut that thing off, leave a nub here; then I can rotate the other part through."

"You can't just 'cut it off;' you'll be left with an ion that will attract other ions and polarize the whole thing. And chemicals form bonds at certain angles. You can't stick them together at any angle you want." Omi walked over to the display. "We have to find a chemical that will dissolve the bond there and replace the altered ion. Then we might have a chance."

Tarlen returned dejectedly to his mother's ship. "I couldn't do that much to help; there are some really complex rules involved here."

"We still haven't managed to rally the troops," Shanin said. "Major Christopher is behind us, and a few of the merchants, but everyone else has taken a wait-and-see attitude. Lida's gone to appeal to the High Council but I doubt that'll get us anywhere. Tien Kessel still controls a huge voting bloc and the only way to get around it would be to rip Clan Marigren apart now and ask permission later."

The curious watermark, which Omi had not been able to identify, was in the form of two stylized swords tied together by a knot. The entire display, shrunken to molecular form and limited by the rules of chemical bonding, was quite abstract but still recognizable to any Athmari as Clan Marigren's insignia.

"Damn it," Seleyn growled. "When I'm finished, there won't be any pink and green in the Council Chambers at all, and I don't care what Tien says or does about it!"

"You're the only one to make it this far." Caden held up a hand in a corrective gesture. "That is, as far as I know. I didn't expect this to happen so quickly, but apparently your kind is evolving rather quickly."

"The point is, you are here. I only have the memories of each of your ancestors up to the point at which your next ancestor was born, but so far as I know, none of them has ever come to this time and place." Caden gestured again, inviting her to follow him. "That's one of the drawbacks in having a culture skilled in science rather than magic."

"No." He grinned. "Telepathy and telekinesis. 'Paths and Kinetics, eventually, when our society begins to degenerate. Your 'Mindless Ones' came very late in this particular timespace continuum and we had enough time to let our Empire rot without any outside help."

"It's about to get worse." Sure enough, once they arrived at...at whatever it was he wanted her to see, all she could see about the room was that the readouts there were beyond anything she'd ever seen. Furthermore, they were marked in a strange dialect and some of the characters were completely unrecognizable as Athmari text.

"The bleed from your own memories?" Kado looked startled. "Don't be so surprised; I already told you that I have some of your ancestors' memories." And from there it was only a short logical jump to the fact that he knew what she was seeing and thinking.

"I don't want to play your stupid game. You're dead and this isn't getting me anywhere."