Free Varken Rise by Tracy Cooper-Posey

and see Bedivere? I haven’t seen him for decades.”
    Catherine sighed. “Then we are still in the dark.” She gave Kemp a stiff smile. “We’ll give you a bed for the night and breakfast, of course, then see you on your way. I do appreciate you dropping everything and rushing here, even if there was nothing you can tell us.”
    Kemp swallowed hastily. “I’m not going anywhere. That is, if you have no objections? I want answers as much as you do.”
    “You don’t think that Bedivere has gone rogue, then?” Brant asked.
    Kemp pushed his plate aside with a heavy thrust. He leaned back and looked at all of them one by one. “You were all on the ship when I was. You know that Bedivere and I were close. I was truly stunned when I found out he was a computer in a human body. If I can be intimate with someone and not be able to see such a fundamental difference, that tells me they are as human as me.”
    He grimaced. “Humans can have psychotic breaks, sure. They just don’t wipe out entire civilizations when they do. Besides, Bedivere was the most sane, stable person I’ve ever met, except for Catherine. Do I think he’s having a nutty and trying to destroy the universe as we know it? Not even for a second.”
    He got to his feet, moving stiffly and slowly. “If you could point me toward that borrowed bed? And please tell me that you have a gym here that is as well-equipped as the one you had on your ship?”
    Kemp became the fourth person in the household and the complex seemed to stir and generate energy with him in it. He had to rehabilitate his body, to bring it to normal strength, so his daily routine included gym work and whatever therapies Catherine could provide him from her home surgery.
    In between, they all followed the limited lines of inquiry they could, trying to find Bedivere.
    “All the hysteria in the news is not helping,” Catherine complained. “Everyone thinks they’ve seen him, in a dozen places at once. They’re all false alarms, yet they will have to be investigated. We don’t have time for this.”
    “Who broke the news, anyway?” Kemp asked.
    “Does it matter?” Catherine replied. “It was inevitable that this would break. It’s too big a story.”
    “I was only thinking that whoever revealed the story first might have had a reason to do so.”
    “A conspiracy?” Brant asked with a smile.
    “I grew up on Soward, the world of intrigue. What can I say?”
    They introduced Kemp to Connell, who returned every few days to report that he had found nothing.
    Catherine watched Kemp deal with Connell the first time, to see if he could treat the Varkan as a human. Kemp did not flinch, nor did he alter the way he was speaking when talking to Connell. Yet his behavior toward Bedivere when he had been there two weeks ago had not been any different from when he had been a passenger on the ship. It seemed that in the intervening years, Kemp had thrown off his own prejudices.
    “Of course it was a shock when I found out about Bedivere,” he told Catherine when she asked him. “It was exactly what I needed to start questioning everything I had known about dangerous computers and their ways. The news that the Federation had suppressed computers because they knew about Interspace and it would destroy their shipping monopoly wasn’t nearly as surprising after that.”
    Two days later, the house AI woke her and told her that Bedivere had destroyed the entire southern continent on Barros.
    * * * * *
    “He used nuclear particle beams from a high altitude,” Brant said, reading from the board in his hands. “From that high up, the blast washed over hundreds of kilometers, which is most of the southern continent.”
    Catherine nodded, absorbing the facts. She was deliberately not thinking or trying to speculate. She shoved the shirt that Lilly handed her into the jump bag, wedging it into a corner. She sealed the bag with a swipe, locking it to her prints.
    “Barros is in the Aibosian