Palace by Katharine Kerr, Mark Kreighbaum Page A

the Map.’
    Barra grimaced. ‘I may have limited clearance. The Council’s putting one of Karlo’s officers in command, some Captain Niko, some name like that.’
    ‘What? The guild won’t stand for that!’
    ‘That’s what I told him. We need to lodge a formal protest. If you hadn’t been gone today
    -’
    ‘Yeah, I know, I know. First thing in the morning I’ll take care of this. I don’t understand why the military’s even involved.’
    ‘Well, Nimue is a defence installation. And it was disabled as an act of war. But mostly, it’s the new way of doing things.’ Barra grimaced again. ‘The Peronida way.’
    Hi nodded and looked balefully into his glass.
    ‘This soda’s terrible,’ he remarked, then set the glass on the table. ‘Think you’ll find any new evidence of the L’Var treason?’
    ‘Why would I? I thought you’d found plenty.’
    ‘I delivered it to the courts under formal protest, if you’ll remember.’ Hi hesitated, frowning, glancing Rico’s way. ‘It was a standard record holotape, fuzzy as hell from the disruption but readable, tagged with full routing code coming from the L’Var family compound out in the swamps. There were other bits and pieces of code that looked like a shut-off order and an override, or there could have been one before the pulse bomb went off, I mean. There were images, in various conditions, but some were pretty clear. And there were voice fragments left
    - Kella L’Var’s voice, all right, logging in. The judges ate the tape up. It wasn’t the only evidence, thank God. But it executed Kella L’Var and her two brothers.’
    ‘What was wrong with it?’ Rico said. ‘Something must have been.’
    ‘Smart boy.’ Hi flashed a grin. ‘Nothing was wrong with it. But it wasn’t right, either. For one thing, it was so damn convenient that it would survive. The pulse bomb scrambled packets, blew codes, fused sockets - you name it. But this nice convenient record of the traitor’s act just somehow survived, all chewed up, maybe, but it did.’
    ‘Well, something as important as a shut-down order gets routed right into the safe box,’
    Barra objected. ‘It wasn’t just some list of icon counts.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah, but still.’ Hi leaned back, considering. ‘I kept having the feeling that Nimue was trying to tell me something, the whole time I was jacked in. Call it cyber’s intuition. The AI was practically junked - shut down first, then hit by that pulse wave - but she was trying to reach me. I could just feel it. And she tried the hardest to reach me when I was finding the evidence that killed the L’Vars.’
    Barra frankly stared. Hi grinned at her.
    ‘It Sounds crazy, I know,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Rico? Think your patron’s losing a few databanks with age?’
    ‘No,’ Rico said. ‘I know that kind of feeling.’ Hi raised an eyebrow.
    ‘Yeah? We’ll have to talk about this some more.’ Hi turned to Barra. ‘Huh. I wonder if Karlo’s putting one of his men in charge to make sure that you do find some new evidence. A lot of people grumbled about what happened to the L’Vars. Some of them are still grumbling. Karlo would love to produce more proof, just to lock down the crematorium door one more time.’
    ‘But Uncle Hi?’ Rico said. ‘If it wasn’t the L’Vars, then who was it?’
    ‘Good question, kid, a very good question. I don’t know. There wasn’t one shred of evidence on the Map that pointed to anyone but the L’Vars. That’s why I finally turned the tape over to the courts. And by then the Makeesa had a lot of hard evidence that the L’Vars had been bargaining with the Leps. Witnesses, that kind of thing.’
    ‘Witnesses can be bought,’ Barra said. ‘I wouldn’t trust Vanna Makeesa with a six-bit coin, much less someone’s life.’
    ‘It’s a hard world,’ Hi said, grinning. ‘And Vanna’s one of those sapients who makes it just a little bit harder for us all. She saw her chance to get her claws