The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

the throat, his fingers digging into the soft flesh beneath the golden full mask and its red speaker.

A gold mask. A Knight of the Royal Sept Valencia. He released the Knight and it straightened, showing no sign that he had almost throttled it in his sleep.

His sleep. He’d fallen asleep.

He looked down at the empty sheets beside him and sucked in a breath. The Knight took a step back as he swung his legs onto the floor.

‘Where is my wife?’ he ground out, his voice harsh with sleep and fear.

‘Grandmaster Valencia awaits you in the Audience Room.’

‘Where is my wife?’

The Knight crossed its arms over bare breasts, the only outward reaction to his inexcusable rudeness.

‘Grandmaster Valencia awaits you,’ the Knight repeated. The rainbow colours of the three-dimensional dodecahedron crest of Sept Valencia covered most of its forearm.

His blood was ice in his veins as he swiftly pulled on his boots. There was no sign Eva had ever been there. Her shoes were gone, the trays of food had been removed and only one mask remained on the table. His heart stuttered when he laid eyes on it, his lungs refusing to draw air. Then he took a breath and let the old calm, the old watchfulness, settle around him.

For the first time in years, he was the Grandmaster Didecus Avnette Valentino Lucochin, and Sept Valencia and the entire Greatwood was going to be very sorry they’d brought him back.

He left the mask behind and strode from the room, his mind several moves ahead as the Knight trailed him. He ran down the gentle ramp to the lower floors, toward the public areas at the front of the manse. His boots were muffled on the polished stone floors, so he made sure to push open the doors to the Audience Room hard enough to make them slam against the walls.

As he strode to the centre of the chamber and faced the throne, he saw the sedan chair on one side of the dais – the last piece of the puzzle.

Two rows of golden-headed Knights lining the path to the throne turned their faces in his direction, hands ready at the belts on their waists. He ignored them, stalking between them to the unmasked figure waiting for him in a pile of red translucent silks. Valencia’s Queen stood next to the throne in red trousers, black-gloved hands clasped behind his back and Valencia’s crest shining in the centre of his chest.

He should have known not to use the room they’d selected. He’d been unforgivably careless, and Eva had paid for it.

He stopped with one foot on the incline that led up the dais as he met the cold gaze of the Grandmaster Valencia. ‘You gassed us,’ he said.

The Valencia didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes.’

‘This was never just about me, was it?’

‘On the contrary. It has everything to do with you. And your wife.’

He narrowed his eyes at the only person in the Greatwood who didn’t wear a mask, the better for everyone to know exactly who they were.

His first wife stared back at him, her dreadlocks so thick and long they fell past her waist, her dark eyes like obsidian.

‘She had nothing to do with this.’

‘She is a solution,’ the man beside the Valencia said.

He let his eyes drift over the Grandmaster’s Queen, once a White Knight of Valencia, bitterness filling his mouth. ‘To what problem? She has never set foot on Valencia.’

The Grandmaster fluttered a hand and the Knights came to attention then trooped out, closing the doors behind them. It galled him that she knew he would take no action. Not while he had no idea where they held his wife.

‘Her people will come for her if you harm a hair on her head,’ he warned.

‘We’ve taken precautions,’ the Valencia said. ‘For now, she’s alive and well. Your solution will decide if she stays that way.’

‘I was exiled,’ he said. ‘You no longer command me.’

The Grandmaster Valencia leaned forward, her brown skin flawless and supple in the morning light streaming through the floor to ceiling windows behind him. ‘You will solve our problem, or the Consortium will receive the solution they contracted for.’

He was careful not to let her see the dread that filled him. The Valencia propped her chin in the palm of her hand, studying him.

‘The Consortium?’

‘Yes.’ She let her gaze slide past him, as though bored. ‘They lost a ship a solar year ago. There was a catastrophic malfunction before it disappeared, but the Consortium didn’t find any debris at the ship’s last known location. Their inability to confirm the fate of the ship meant insurance on the ship and cargo could be withheld for years, so the Consortium turned to the best problem solvers in the known Systems for help in finding it.’

‘And have you done so?’

She leaned back and tapped her fingers against the arms of the throne. ‘No. And we never will, given it was destroyed by a Kairi Havoc-class solo-ship. Your wife’s, to be precise.’

He folded his arms across his chest. ‘You came to this conclusion how?’

‘My Grandmasters examined all data from the ship. The transmissions and location coordinates had been altered by a rare Trojan, one that amends the AI code of any analyst, erasing all data not in support of a false conclusion. The Kairi call it Cleanslate and developed it during the Nicene War. No machine could pinpoint it, but Grandmasters are not code.

‘We refocused our search from a missing ship to reports of engagements involving Kairi ships, then cross-referenced them with the time of the Consortium ship’s disappearance. There weren’t many – those that attack the Protectorate soon learn why the Sibling Army is feared in all the known galaxies.

‘One report was of a raid by an unknown attacker on an Outpost planet with few defences. The description of the ship that repelled the attack matched that of a Kairi solo-ship. The description of the destroyed ship matched that of a slaver. And your implant’s ping occurred on the same planet,