Page 32 of Redstone
Berengaria smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “With the territory of the presidency or the territory of being my father’s child? We all come by our self-absorption honestly. Our father always loved himself better than anyone else in his life. In some of us, that engendered a desire to excel, in order to draw more of his attention. In Raymond, it brought about a loathing so deep that it became the greatest single motivating factor of his life.
“My father was a military hero; Raymond shunned the military and went into the political sphere as soon as possible. My father had many wives; Raymond was determined that no one was worth the distraction from himself, and that he had no need of anyone else to share his life with. After all, no one could possibly measure up.
“That lasted until he met Haven.”
Garrett racked his brain for a moment. “Your father’s last wife.”
“And my brother’s only paramour, brief as their liaison was.”
Garrett frowned. “How did that come about?”
“Have you ever seen a picture of Haven?” Berengaria reached out to the table between them and shuffled the computerized top back and forth until she’d brought up the image she was searching for.
The girl was … well, exquisite. She reminded Garrett a little of his own mother, possessed of a beauty so exceptional as to render her almost alien. People could shape themselves into almost anything these days, but every so often, someone came along who still blew people’s minds. Haven was one of those people.
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Mmm, yes.” Berengaria lifted her fingertips, and the picture faded away. “Her parents were low-level aristocrats on Firenze who spent all they had getting her to Olympus to make a good match. Haven wasn’t much of a student, but she had aspirations, insofar as they went. She and Raymond met at a dinner hosted by her planet’s ambassador, and he decided he wanted her. Haven was amenable.”
“They sound like a very odd match.”
“They were quite compatible in their mercenary natures,” Berengaria said. “She gave him the attention he wished for, and he had the one person who had ever intrigued him on his arm. For Raymond, it was everything he’d ever wanted.
“And then she met my father.” Berengaria sighed. “I loved my father when I was a child, but as I grew, I could see just how poorly he had done by his families. He was far from a perfect man, and this was exactly the sort of incident he could have avoided but actively chose to pursue instead. He had Raymond’s good looks and far more vivacity, and he seduced her away from my brother in the space of a single evening. They married two weeks later.”
Garrett winced. “Ouch.”
“Ouch, indeed,” Berengaria agreed. “It broke Raymond’s mind; not his heart, because I’m almost sure that he wasn’t in love with her. But he couldn’t conceptualize how anyone could throw him over after he had deigned to notice them. He was a god, and there could be no others, and yet the devil had swooped in and plucked his acolyte right out from under him. He couldn’t allow such a trespass to stand.”
Now they were getting into the meat of things. “You think he killed your father, then?”
Berengaria sniffed derisively. “Iknowhe was behind that attack. The same way I know he’s responsible for killing almost all the rest of us, the same way I know that no evidence of that can be found. The only concrete evidence of Raymond’s wrongdoing rests in Kyle, which is why he’ll fight to the death to keep Kyle from undergoing close psychic probing or to be trace searched for genetic manipulation.”
Garrett frowned. “What do you mean?”
Berengaria’s chuckle was so sharp it should have cut him. “No one was supposed to survive the attack that killed my father. They were traveling in the nearest thing to an empty zone that exists in Alliance space. I was more paranoid than Raymond had suspected at that point, though, and I’d affixed a tracker of my own to my father’s ship. When it stopped broadcasting, I extrapolated their last position and roused rescuers. Kyle was the only one left. Our other siblings …” She looked away. “Their escape pods were too close to the blast and had been damaged. They froze to death. My father, Haven, and the crew were lost instantly, of course.
“I petitioned the courts for custody of Kyle and won. I knew it wouldn’t last. Raymond would try to finish his work. I was prepared to fight him for it, but then … myaccidentoccurred.”
Garrett watched her smooth her hands over each other. “Some sort of malfunction in your Regen tank?”
She nodded. “You’re very insightful, Mr. Helms. Yes. There was a very targeted malfunction in my personal tank’s software, which caused cellular and DNA damage instead of repairing it. By the time I was removed, I had aged almost a century, and one of my aides had permanently disappeared.” She held her hands up and looked at them critically. “Such damage takes time to repair if you want to protect your mind. I’ve been at it for twelve years now, and I’m perhaps halfway back to normal.
“I thought Raymond would kill Kyle, but I was wrong. I had spies of my own at the time, and before the most loyal of them was found and killed, she told me what Raymond had done. His obsession with Haven had never died, despite his killing her. With Kyle, Raymond saw a chance to both have a piece of Haven and to expunge the last of our father from his life.
“He had his personal doctor endeavor to replace the parts of Kyle’s genome that came from Foster with Raymond’s own, to make Kyle into the child he had never had and never trulywantedbefore he was denied the opportunity.”
Garrett knew his mouth had fallen open, but he couldn’t quite get it to shut. “He … that sort of manipulation is …”
“Illegal? Imperfect? Dangerous? Yes. And when it didn’t give him the worshipful child he had expected to get, it was too late to quietly dispose of Kyle; he was in the public’s eye by then. So, Raymond sent Kyle away and told me that if I attempted any contact with him, I would regret it. I believed him.” She shrugged. “I created this place to heal within, and to shut out the rest of the universe, including my younger brother. There’s only so far you can extend yourself before the thread of your will snaps. I reached that time when I found myself in a body I no longer recognized.”
“And this genetic manipulation could be proven?” Garrett pressed.
“Absolutely. It stems to a time that Kyle has no memory of, and that would be enough of a red flag to a behavioral psychic or psychologist that the necessary tests could be done. Raymond won’t be easy to overcome, however.” She tilted her head slightly as she looked at Garrett, and he saw the weariness in her eyes, the hopelessness that still pervaded her. “Be careful he doesn’t draw you out too far, Mr. Helms. You have vulnerabilities that would be far too easy to take advantage of.”
Cody. Jonah. The girls.“He can’t come at me without consequences.”
“For some people, ‘consequence’ is just a word,” Berengaria said.
