Guilt in Innocece Read online

  "The report I read," Isembi was saying, "said that you found a new telepath in the hinterlands of Oya."

  Snorting, Hembadoon said, "'Hinterlands' is the polite word for it, yes. These were hill people, living deep in the valleys of the Jukun Mountains. The most recent technology they possessed was a century old, and most had no idea of how to use it. Oh, and they are fiercely protective of their own, so the notion of a stranger in white robes taking one of them away from home sat very poorly with them."

  "But you managed."

  "Barely—I almost died." Hembadoon smiled. "Sorry to disappoint you."

  "And lose such a valuable resource? Don't be ridiculous. You see, Hembadoon, of all the Hegemony's many government assets, by far the most vital are the Ori-Inu. The threats we face are so great, that our best line of defense are these telepaths. That makes a good Orisha of great value." The Oba leaned forward. "You, Hembadoon, are a very good Orisha." Then he leaned back and sighed. "Would that the same could be said of your colleagues. The fact is, the skill set required to perform your task is difficult to find in a single person. You are one of the few."

  Raising his glass in acknowledgment of this rare compliment, Hembadoon decided not to actually drink anymore of the Esu concoction.

  Isembi stood up and moved toward the firepit, his back to the Orisha. "It is because of your unique skills that I require you for your next mission. I wish you to go to Oshun." He turned around to face him once again, and Hembadoon saw that Isembi looked almost angry. Emotions rarely made it to the Oba's face, so he was obviously quite displeased indeed. "Another Ori-Inu has disappeared."

  Hembadoon blinked. "An Ori-Inu has disappeared?" Then he shook his head. "Wait—another Ori-Inu has disappeared? How many?"

  "This is the sixth, and we're fairly certain they've been taken. Their neural implants have been either blocked or removed and destroyed."

  Angrily, Hembadoon stood up. "Why was I never informed of this?"

  Unmoved by his anger, Isembi shrugged. "The information was classified."

  "Nothing involving the Ori-Inu should be classified from any Orisha—least of all from me!"

  Now Isembi fixed Hembadoon with a cold, hard glare. "I am Oba, Hembadoon. I decide what should or should not be. Not you."

  "Who has gone missing?"

  "The latest is Abeje. The others include Akanke, Baderinwa, Ige, Olufunke, and Taiwo."

  Hembadoon shook his head. He had found and trained half of those, including Abeje. In fact, she was his third-best student.

  Second-best if you only counted the ones who made it through to the end.

  "If it was so important that this be kept from me before, why are you telling me now?"

  Reaching into one of the pockets in his robes, Isembi took out a reader and tossed it onto the desk. "These are the reports of the disappearances, including investigations made by other Ori-Inu. Only the last one isn't there—from Abeje. She was on a mission to assassinate an Oyo spy when the signal from her implant went out."

  "On Oshun?"

  Isembi nodded. "Though she doesn't recall this, of course, Abeje is from Oshun. We were hoping that might have aided in the search for this spy, but that approach obviously was flawed. I am now assigning this to you. For the duration of this mission, Hembadoon, your clearance has been raised to seventh level."

  That got Hembadoon to raise an eyebrow. Orisha normally only had fifth-level clearance.

  Isembi continued. "Among other things, this means that you may download the contents of that reader to your robe's computer."

  Nodding, Hembadoon sat down at the desk and subvocalized instructions to the computer woven into the fabric of his white robe to do that very thing.

  Walking back to the desk, Isembi set down his glass, and then rested his palms on the surface, leaning in toward Hembadoon, close enough that the Orisha could smell the mediocre gin on the Oba's breath. "You leave first thing in the morning. Understand, Orisha, I want my Ori-Inu back very much. Go find them."

  That got Hembadoon's attention. Just as Hembadoon refused to refer to Isembi by his title, the Oba never referred to Hembadoon as "Orisha," as was proper.

  That he did so now bespoke the urgency of the situation. Dryly, he said, "Yes, sir," then gulped down the rest of his gin. The burn was a bit less this time—though it was as likely as not that the first sip anaesthetized his mouth—and almost approached the possibility of having a taste. Hembadoon let out a noise that sounded vaguely like the moan of an animal caught in a trap, and moved to the exit.

  "You risk much, Hembadoon," Isembi said as the door slid aside at the Orisha's approach.

  Hembadoon stopped short. "I'm not risking a damn thing. You can't afford to kill me. Nobody has found as many Ori-Inu as I, nobody has trained as many as I. And I know what you have carefully kept from the history texts. Everyone assumes that the Cavalry destroyed Yemoja and won the war. But it was the Ori-Inu—my Ori-Inu—who did the true work of bringing the Oyo down. You owe me your throne, mighty Oba, and that debt continues to accrue with every passing day. The day you kill me is three days before you lose the throne you worked so hard to acquire, little as I relish the prospect. We keep each other nicely in our respective places." Hembadoon grinned. "I have nothing to lose, so I might as well enjoy it."

  With that, he departed for his mission.

  As an Orisha, Hembadoon was assigned a small, one-person craft—though a passenger could cram in behind the flight chair in a pinch—that he'd named the Ebun. The ship had a magnificent sound system and a huge library of music, at his insistence. If he had to travel all by himself for days on end, he at least wanted something to listen to.

  For the trip to Oshun, which was three days from Ife at Ebun's top speed, he found himself gravitating toward Yetinde spirituals. Hembadoon was a devout agnostic, and believed in pretty much no gods or demiurges or creators or anything like that, but damn the religious types from Yetinde could put a tune together. One group in particular, which called itself Sunshine on Days of Rain, had amazing harmonies that sounded particularly compelling in the state-of-the-art system he had in Ebun, and the power of their talking drums vibrated in the base of his spine.

  It also helped Hembadoon deal with his space sickness. While his robes dealt with the actual nausea by delivering medication directly into his bloodstream, his anxiety regarding the possibility of getting sick required music as a coping mechanism.

  One thing that wouldn't ameliorate his space sickness—but would at least distract him—was the first interview he had to conduct in his investigation. Often, when Ori-Inu went into the field, they went with a cavalry unit as backup and support. For her trip to Oshun, Abeje was supported by Sankarani Company.

  Hembadoon had little patience for the cavalry, mostly because they had been resistant to the notion of Ori-Inu being attached to their units. Never mind the fact that the presence of an Ori-Inu increased the likelihood of the unit making it through their engagement with minimal casualties.

  He supposed that they resented being responsible for someone not part of their chain of command, but Hembadoon had always been more interested in results than process.

  When he put the call through to Sankarani, he used the priority frequency for Orisha, which required that the commanding officer answer it. Anyone else responding to that frequency was a court-martial offense, both for the CO who didn't reply to it and for the poor fool who did.

  So it was the ever-scowling mahogany-skinned face of War Chief Titilayo that looked back at him from the holographic projector on his console.

  "Orisha Hembadoon. You're still alive."

  "War Chief Titilayo. I could say the same."

  She smiled. "Psychopaths do well in Oba Isembi's cavalry, hadn't you heard?"

  Hembadoon snorted. "You're not a psychopath. Psychopaths don't know they're psychopaths. You're a high-functioning sociopath."

  "And you're not a psychiatrist, so how would you know?"

  He waved a hand. "Fine, you
're a psychopath."

  "What does an Orisha need with this particular psychopath?"

  "I need to ask you about your mission to Oshun."

  The smile dropped. "We were to escort the Ori-Inu to the planet," Titilayo said tightly, "and provide support as needed."

  Easy enough for Hembadoon to read between the lines: Titilayo didn't know the specifics of Abeje's mission. That wasn't a surprise, as Isembi preferred to get rid of spies as quietly as possible without the public even knowing they existed.

  Of course, that also meant that the Oyo spy was probably still on Oshun somewhere.

  "Did she ever ask for that support?"

  "No. And then she went missing. Our last tag on her was in a refinery in Kaduna Township. After that, nothing. We did a full-target search, but she wasn't anywhere on Oshun. So we reported in and got reassigned. Honestly, I thought we were done with that."

  For a brief instant, Hembadoon toyed with the notion that Titilayo was the one responsible for the disappearance, but that didn't track. Psychopath or sociopath, she had always been loyal to the Hegemony.

  After signing off with the war chief, he put the music back on. It was an a cappella number by Sunshine on Days of Rain, and the power of their harmonies echoed off Ebun's bulkhead.

  The next step was to do a computer dive, to cross reference the various Ori-Inu disappearance reports, searching for any common terms. The search turned up nothing that gave him any encouragement: "mysterious," "confused," "unsure." The words "planet" and "station" appeared fairly often, and specific places turned up a lot, particularly Ife, Benin, Niger (the city that housed the Ori-Inu training facility), and Olokun.

  Of all the results of the search, "Olokun" was the only one that wasn't in any way familiar. Hembadoon frowned. One of the first things he learned in his own training as an Orisha was that the discrepant part of a set was the one that usually was of the most interest.

  The music program moved on to a hard-driving number that always set Hembadoon's pulse pounding in much the same way a good investigation did, and he found himself amused by the serendipity of it starting right when he started to check out "Olokun." Uses of the term in the reports consisted of either a word overheard by witnesses or a reference to an Olokun Station. Hembadoon searched the computer for other uses of the term, but the only hits that generated were mythical ones relating to the founding of the cradle of life on Ife. Ironically, one of the religious hits was to the lyrics for one of the Sunshine on Days of Rain songs he'd been listening to an hour ago.

  So what is Olokun Station? There was no record of any station with that designation—and thanks to his new seventh-level clearance, Hembadoon had access to a whole new range of classified files he wouldn't have been able to get at in the past.

  But there was nothing, aside from a few mentions in these reports and the myths.

  The question continued to nag at Hembadoon until he reached Oshun. The first thing he did was contact the planet's orbital control, which was located in Kaduna Station in high orbit. The Kaduna Mining Corporate all but owned Oshun. The planet's two main cities were Kaduna Township and Kaduna City, and it was difficult to find anything on that world that didn't have the company name in evidence.

  "Kaduna Station, this is Orisha Hembadoon aboard the Ebun." He sent that on the same priority frequency he used to contact Titilayo.

  A friendly female voice replied a few seconds later. "Kaduna Station responding. Welcome to Oshun, Orisha Hembadoon. What can we do for you today?"

  Well, I thought I'd lift my robes and ask you to fellate me in the town square. Somehow, Hembadoon managed to restrain himself from saying that, especially since he suspected that the woman on the other end would do so rather than risk the ire of the Oba's favorite government agency. Instead, he simply said, "I need a landing point in Kaduna Township, preferably close to the refinery."

  "Not a problem, Orisha. We're uploading a landing vector for Ebun right now."

  Almost instantly, that vector showed up on Ebun's heads-up display. "Thank you very kindly, Kaduna Station."

  "If there's anything you need from the people of Oshun, please don't hesitate to ask. If you contact the Municipal Building in Kaduna Township, there's someone there twenty-one hours a day."

  "Good to know. Thanks for your help. Ebun out."

  The refinery was, Hembadoon thought, a testament to the hideousness of industry.

  He supposed it was inevitable. After all, nobody built a refinery with aesthetics in mind. Form didn't just follow function when you were refining ores and minerals and things, it pretty much dogged its every step. Ugly metal passageways connected ugly metal structures to other ugly metal structures, with ports that released heat into the air.

  Proving that the owners weren't entirely without a sense of humor, there was a verdant, beautiful park right next to it. Hembadoon figured it was an attempt to beautify the area, but the park was maybe a quarter the size of the refinery. All its grassy, tree-lined presence served to do was shine a light on just how ass-ugly the refinery was.

  Inside was little better, all metal walls and floors with no decoration. The executives who ran the refinery were in a different location. What few offices there were on-site belonged to lower-management functionaries who were obviously too busy making their quotas to even go so far as to decorate their working space.

  It didn't take long for Hembadoon to find the right person to talk to about Abeje. Nobody knew anything about an Ori-Inu being present at the refinery—so it was obvious that her investigation was a covert one, which tracked with the mission profile—but each person he spoke to mentioned one of the engineers, a man named Kosoko, going completely insane.

  His last stop was yet another lower-management functionary: an officious twit of a personnel manager. Hembadoon sat in his office while the short, balding man explained in a squeaky, sing-songy voice from behind his clean metal desk that Kosoko was perfectly normal until a few days ago.

  "It was incredibly strange. One day he was working with the others, and making his usual awful puns, and then suddenly he was babbling like an idiot and banging his head against the wall."

  Hembadoon frowned. "Are you being metaphorical, or—?"

  The manager made a tch noise. "No, he really was hitting his head against the wall. They had to take him to the police station."

  Subvocalizing instructions to his robe computer to provide directions from here to the nearest law-enforcement headquarters, Hembadoon asked, "Was he charged?"

  "No, no, it was just for his protection—and ours, to be honest. I think he was going to kill poor Iyapo. She's the one he shared his office with. I swear he was raving like an Eso on crink."

  Somehow, Hembadoon didn't think a drugged-out Eso would act anything like how Kosoko was behaving, but he didn't care enough to correct the man's misapprehension. He just said, "Thanks for your help."

  As he exited the office, his robe computer provided the location of the Kaduna Police Headquarters. It was just a hundred meters from the refinery, which was an easy walk across the park. As he ambled over, he checked the police records, to find that Kosoko had been taken into custody on the same day that Abeje had disappeared.

  While the refinery was all cold metal and fancy machinery, police HQ was a drab prefabricated structure. The officer at the desk—a polite young woman—escorted him to the cell where Kosoko was being held. She led him down a flight of unevenly spaced stairs that creaked with each step.

  Widening his eyes to try to make things out in the dim light of the basement, Hembadoon saw several holding cells with the standard shockbars keeping the prisoners in their place. Each cell had a refresher, though none of them looked as though they'd been cleaned in years, and there were no windows. Only four cells were occupied. A couple of them made half-hearted cat-calls at the officer, which she ignored.

  Kosoko was a short man, mid-twenties, with kinky red hair kept long on the sides and completely shaved on top—a fairly common style on Oshun
among younger folks. The hair was dirty and greasy, but Hembadoon figured he hadn't been offered much by way of hygiene care since being placed in here. He was seated on the edge of the metal bunk, hugging himself with skinny arms, and rocking back and forth.

  "Out of nowhere just out of nowhere people just appearing like nothing and yelling and screaming and fighting…"

  Hembadoon set his robe computer to scan Kosoko and also record everything he said, then turned to the officer. "He been like this the whole time?"

  She nodded. "When he got here, he was a lot more—well, intense. And active. Some doctors examined him, and one gave him pills to calm him, but no one's been able to get through to him."

  Turning back to the cell, Hembadoon asked, "Kosoko, can you hear me?"

  "Just out of nowhere couldn't believe it just the two of them going to Olokun and then coming out of nowhere…"

  Olokun again. If there was any doubt in Hembadoon's mind that Kosoko's sudden madness was connected to Abeje, it was gone now. "Kosoko, can you tell me about the two people? You said they were going to—"

  "Out of nowhere just showing up like that and fighting and killing and yelling and screaming and who's who and I didn't know what to do with no orders…"

  "What orders, Kosoko?" Hembadoon asked. "Whose orders were you waiting for?"

  "Just completely out of nowhere…"

  "Mogbe," he muttered. Kosoko was an engineer who built equipment for the refinery to use. He had no military record, so it was unlikely that he would think in terms of "orders."

  Unless he's the one Abeje came here to assassinate.

  "Going to kill me going to kill each other going to kill everyone all going to die die die die die…" Kosoko started rocking back and forth more quickly.

  "Kosoko, look at me, please. My name's Hembadoon, I'm an Orisha. I need to know—"

  "Need to know, need to know, we all need to know, need to know when to go ahead, need to know when to go forward, need to know when to get a move on, need to know need to know need to know…"

  The officer looked helplessly at Hembadoon. "See what I mean? Best psychiatrists on Oshun couldn't get through, so you probably aren't going to, either."