To the Victor

by R Coots

  Kizen opened his mouth, but Oona cut him off. “Hadra’s Net?” She was looking from Syrus to her husband, so she didn’t see Kizen start to rise, one hand on a knife hilt. Quinn did, though, and he dropped a hand to his own belt. Syrus shifted in place, more because he wished he could get the feel of itching bugs out from under his skin than to help his second or his captain. Nobody had gotten to full-blown rage yet, but the irritation and disgust were as annoying as all get out.

  “We have come across mention of it in Imperial records,” Quinn said without looking away from Kizen. “It was never much studied, but we can have the Chief Comm-Tech look into what was copied over before the original servers were destroyed. Unless . . .”

  All three of them swiveled to look at Syrus.

  He growled.

  A nasty smile grew on Kizen’s face. “Well, Imperial. Seems you’re good for something after all.”

  Syrus hooked the stool over with a foot and sat, fingers still in his belt and ankles crossed. He fucking hated being their walking ’pedia on the Navlad Empire. If the damned Fleet didn’t flatten every data center it got near, they might have a better idea of what they were dealing with. Fuckers.

  “Well they couldn’t build a fucking wall in space,” he said. “So they built a trap. Enemy comes through a certain gate, sets off an alarm. All the vamalkuog get their battlegroups together to come thrash whoever it was didn’t knock before they came in the door.” Syrus shrugged. “That’s the theory anyway.”

  “And in practice?” Kizen sounded like he wished they could run across the Net right now, just so he could try some thrashing of his own.

  “Actually tends to work. See, the planets inside the Net? Those are the ones they want to keep.”

  The three of them sat and mulled that over for a minute or so. Syrus let them. As far as he knew, he really was their best source of information on the Empire and its tactics. Which was probably another reason Quinn had kept him alive that first day. Nothing Syrus told them would have been news if they’d been thinking very far ahead in this little trip across the Galaxy. But they hadn’t been, and he was.

  Kizen, on the other hand . . . Well, there was a reason Syrus still had his hands so close to the hilts of his knives.

  “What does it take to make one of those sai bend to their master’s will?” Quinn asked.

  Well fuck. Syrus decided he deserved that little surprise. Tell a Fleet man that psychics would be doing everything they could to stop him, and of course he was going to look at ways to use that for himself. They did it with everything else they found, why not this too?

  “It takes getting ahold of a baby that’s tested positive for the gene and using another sai to condition them so they’ll do what you want,” Syrus said.

  Quinn settled back on his heels and looked at Oona. She looked back.

  Oh, that was fucking perfect. The bastard was actually considering it.

  “Conditioning,” Oona asked. “What is that?”

  Syrus tried to figure out a way to word it so they’d understand just how much work it would take and how impossible it was for them to manage. Finally, he shrugged. “Brainwashing. Make her think and do what you want her to, without realizing it’s not her will guiding her.”

  Quinn frowned. “No men? No way to use them in this?”

  “Not the way you want. As a rule, men don’t have sai. And the ones that do are usually Cracks. Nothing they can do that your com-techs and malware don’t do already.

  “You want to start making sai do what you want, you need to start saving baby girls and keep them off the Breeder ships until you find out which ones have the gift. Let them hit puberty and see who starts talking to walls.”

  “What if we cannot condition them?” Oona asked.

  Kizen growled under his breath, his frustration ratcheting up a notch.

  Syrus threw up another shield and ignored him. He was too busy trying to remember if Barbicans would work as time travel devices as well as transport. Rewinding to the day he’d decided to grab the two women out of cryo would be a really good idea right about now. Leave ’em there, keep on moving. The Fleet would still have the Net somewhere ahead of them, but at least nobody would be asking questions that made him come this close to revealing himself. Now he had to fly along the edge of the gravity well and try not to tell them so much that they’d realize why he knew all this.

  What to say? Iira would have told Quinn and Oona what he’d found on the women, but did she know what the markings meant? Or why they’d lit up?

  “If you can’t condition them, you need to find a sai with something to lose and squeeze her until she breaks.”

  At the edge of his vision, Kizen shifted. An expression Syrus couldn’t read flickered across the man’s face. Syrus ignored it. He was too busy slamming the lid back on the hole that housed his memories. He wouldn’t open up that particular demon pit. He couldn’t. Not if he wanted to stay sane. Besides, it looked like Oona had more questions. Syrus figured he could guess what came next.

  “And no, you can’t crown them if you want to use them. Especially not if you get a kid. Not if you want to be able to tell who’s got the gifts and who doesn’t.” Syrus shook his head when Oona opened her mouth. “Otherwise how will you know if the plan’s working?” Woman’s head must still be scrambled if she missed something that obvious.

  Kizen snorted and crossed his arms. “Why not just grab anyone with more than an inch of those markings on them?”

  Syrus bit back a growl. “It’s not the size of the maruste on the back that matters as much as which glyphs are in it. Especially when it’s in full bloom.”

  All three gave him identical flat looks. Right. Translator screwing up again. Why was it always the little words that gave it problems?

  He backed up in his head and tried to think. “Turned on. Exactly like a switch. A bare back doesn’t mean no history. It could just mean they didn’t get the basic programming activated in the first place. The people in the backwaters we’ve been taking are far enough from the Core, they don’t usually give two shits about activating the nanites in the first place. Most never update them either. This far out, only the nobility cares.”

  Telling them how much it hurt wasn’t worth it. The children of normal families never remembered it; they were too young when they were brought to the monks. And for people who were old enough to remember? The skin on his back itched.

  He kept going. “Best thing to do is catch the girls and their families, stuff them in shielded cells, and give them some of the washouts from training to play with. See who does what.”

  Like start trying to pull their ears off their heads, or gouge their own eyes out? asked a part of him he’d thought he’d buried ages ago. Or killing everyone in reach to keep their emotions from infecting you?

  Shut the fuck up, he told the voice. These bastards will figure it out sooner or later. What happens to kids who can’t run fast enough is none of my business.

  The voice obeyed. Just in time, too. He was starting to growl, deep in his chest. Explaining why wasn’t something he felt like doing at the moment.

  “Look,” he said as he straightened and resettled his belt. “You want to make plans to catch sai, fine. We can do that later. Right now we’ve got the Campaign of this system to sort out and the reserves to pull up. Anything else can wait until we’re not short staffed.”

  Oona opened her mouth again, but Quinn touched her shoulder and she shut up. Kizen curled his lip, and Syrus braced himself as the energy coming off him buzzed from frustration to anger to something Syrus could only think of as jealousy, then right back around again. He waited, feeling the other two close themselves down further and further as the silence stretched out.

  Finally, the other warlord dipped his chin. He didn’t lower his eyes. “All honor Syrus, Warlord Turan. You have your people well in hand. My troops will be proud to lead the charge. And to take care of your captive women when you set fit to release them to our care.” />
  With that parting shot, the man left just as quickly as he’d arrived, although much more quietly.

  “I will have to schedule a meeting with his second,” Quinn murmured when the door at the far end of the infirmary slid shut.

  Syrus shot a look at his second. “Why? Because he threw a tantrum when he came in?”

  “What he said about the Fleet being out of touch with the home planets is true enough, in a way. The Branches are relatively autonomous, as you know. Certain customs have shifted from branch to branch.”

  “Such as a woman’s place in the Fleet?” Syrus asked. He had wondered about it, but since the division of labor seemed to work, he’d left it alone. Now, though . . .

  “Indeed.” Quinn scooped his slate up from the bedside table and took his seat again. “But one of the duties of a second is to keep our ties to the Root strong. It’s the Root that sets the patterns of our lives. Even yours, milord.” His lips pulled in a thin smile. “It’s part of why there are so few real Challengers for my post, milord. Nobody really wants the job of cultural custodian.

  “At least you, milord,” the sarcasm practically dripped from the word, “do not attempt to remake us in the image you wish.” Oona sniffed and stuck her nose in the air.

  “Yeah. Think of how much we’d get done if I tried that.” Syrus snorted and picked up his slate. “Let’s get this deployment shit figured out before someone from engineering starts a mutiny.”

  > Chapter Eleven

  Jossa

  “They call the common folk rabbits; did you know that? Copulating like the Galaxy is about to end. It makes you wonder, then, who decided that a rabbit should be the symbol of the concubines.”

  -Chataf Kuchru lis Chuis isk Fuerrus, in conversation with Jossa

  When she woke for the second time, she was still disoriented, but not quite as badly as before. For one thing, she recognized that she was lying on a mattress of some sort, and that the lighting above her was more typical of a ship than a palace. For another, her body was draped with a thin blanket, the fabric of which felt nothing like she remembered. Nothing this coarse would ever have been allowed in the vicinity of the fuerrus.

  The fear faded a little with that knowledge. What followed was almost enough to throw her right back into the grief.

  “’Bout time you woke up.”

  The voice was harsh, grating on the ears and on the soul. In it she could hear the stark truth of her current reality. The owner of that voice didn’t care if she lived or died. She was a thing. An object that just happened to look like a human being.

  She cringed. How long had it been since someone had talked to her like that?

  Too long. Not long enough.

  The voice said something else. Something in a liquid language full of vowels and too many syllables. Another voice, female, answered him back. What? None of that fit with what she’d expected.

  “What?” she said, before she could think about it.

  A pause. More liquid gabble. And then the man’s voice again. “Well, at least we don’t have to figure out what language you speak. One less problem in my fucked up day.”

  She lifted her hands to rub at her eyes and realized her head was pounding. And heavy. Why was her head heavy? It felt like she’d been drinking Sender’s distilled lozo wine again. What in the name of the Ancestors?

  Her fingers touched cool metal—rounded, smooth, and molded to her skull. Yanking her head up, she overbalanced and clutched at the edges of her mattress. No wonder she was off balance! No wonder it felt as if her head was stuffed with padding! No wonder the world was dim! They’d put a crown on her!

  “You took out a quarter of our fighting force,” the harsh voice said. If anything, he sounded even less happy than before. “Would have been more if most of the troops hadn’t been out on the base. Congratulations, you’re a weapon of mass destruction.”

  If he was trying to shock her with the news, he was many, many years too late. She’d been raised on that knowledge.

  Instead of answering, she set herself to learning the boundaries of the crown. They were complete. Nothing from the outer world could make it in. She would not be able affect anyone without touch. Maybe not even then.

  How was she going to cope until Del woke up? What if she never woke up? What if the crown blocked the bond? She’d never worn one while bonded. She’d never needed one after Del found her. She was alone now, locked inside herself.

  She looked over at Delfi and realized that it might not be such a bad thing to have the crown blocking her sai. Yes, it was difficult, but more difficult than trying to survive in new environs without Delfi to anchor her in sanity? She hid a shudder before it manifested further than an ominous quake in her stomach. Focus. Focus on the here and now, and not the possibilities. Not the past. Here and now are what can kill you, and everything that happened before is immutable.

  More liquid gabble from the woman. Both the strangers were being very careful to stand where she couldn’t see them. Did they think she needed line of sight to use her sai? Did they not trust in the contraption they’d all but welded to her skull? She could feel the tendrils and hair-thin wires feeding in under her skin. Its roots in her brain.

  It blocked her sai at the source.

  The man replied in the same language, and now that she was no longer swimming through half-consciousness, she could tell he was softening his voice a bit for the unknown woman. His lover? She might not have her talents working at range, but she’d been raised with a crown grafted to her nervous system. She had learned to read emotions in words even without the abilities of a Feel. She just had to remember how to compensate for the forced lack of Feeling.

  But it was so hard! Her soul cried out for her sousi. Her heart cried out for her husband. Neither wanted anything to do with the discipline of the mind. Why couldn’t she just curl up and pretend she’d never been taken out of the casket?

  “What year were you put under?”

  She snapped her head up, shocked out of her haze of grief by the man’s words. When she tried to look at him, she nearly toppled over. Someone steadied her with firm hands. Small hands. Very strong hands.

  “Year?” The face of the woman who’d caught her was impassive, her emotions unreadable, even through contact. Her Imperial was so heavily accented it was almost impossible to tell what she’d said. It wasn’t until those hands, so un-ladylike in their strength, squeezed, that the words registered.

  “Thirty-four eighty-five, oh five seventeen,” she breathed, still trying to compute the disparity between the grip on her arm and the graceful lines of the face in front of her. It wasn’t until those strange reddish-brown eyes looked away from her own that she felt able to think again.

  “Just over three hundred years,” the man said, his voice soft again in its thoughtfulness. “As the Empire reckons a standard year.”

  The young woman’s heart stopped. Tried to restart. Stopped again. Air passed into her lungs and did not come back out. Horror and grief and agony, tamped down to coals, flared to life again. The woman in front of her caught her as she wavered, then eased her center of balance back onto the mattress.

  “No,” she whimpered, clutching at the smooth metal encasing her head. “No!” She choked on a sob, gasped for air, and curled in on herself. The position didn’t help her breathing, but at the moment she would have rather suffocated than keep on with life. They’d known the risks. They’d known the plan might not work. But still, she’d hoped. Still she’d dreamed that it would be his face. His laughing, loving face, badly in need of a shave—that would be the one to greet her when she woke up. It hadn’t. He hadn’t. Unless . . .

  “Were—” She swallowed and tried again. “Were there any others?”

  “Just you two,” the man replied. She couldn’t tell what he thought from his tone of voice. She didn’t put much effort into trying. If she’d lost Rui, then Delfi had lost Denz and they were both that much more the worse off for the loss of their anchors to
the real world.

  “Oh Del,” she murmured, straightening so she could lean across the gap and touch her sister’s hand. Her body failed her. If it hadn’t been for the strange woman, she would have gotten a very personal look at the decking. Instead, she stared at her rescuer as the woman gabbled in the other language. The woman ended in a word that sounded like “De-el?” as she gestured with her free hand at the other table.

  That penetrated the haze of loss. “You will call her Delfi. If you call her Del, she will wake to scratch your eyes out. And put fire-sauce in your bedclothes.” Oh, if only it were possible.

  A rasping sound like gravel in gears brought her attention back to the man. She stared, then realized he was laughing. She knew she’d heard a worse sound somewhere, but she couldn’t remember where.

  Unfortunately, the horror of his voice was in no way matched by his appearance. He melted out of a shadowed gap in the wall behind the strange woman. He had warm brown skin, lighter than hers. Fine creases, like those of planetside men who spent a great deal of time outdoors, framed hard brown eyes set under arched eyebrows. One eyebrow had a fine scar through it, old but not entirely faded. A small beard capped his chin. His hair was brown as well, pulled back behind his head and probably tied there somehow. His shirt was nearly the color of his skin. The muscles under it bulged as if they were insulted he’d even bothered to clothe himself.

  If her heart had been at all fickle, she might have been tempted to fling it at his feet. As it was, she was reminded of the games she’d once played with Delfi and Azia, taunting their men by comparing the finer points of the various longshoremen working the docks around them.

  “I said, what’s your name?” There was no humor in his voice now. How many times had he repeated the question?

  “Jossalyn,” she whispered, suddenly reminded of the fact that she was not aboard the Skatasi op Essi and she was most decidedly not surrounded by friends. How long had she been out of the habits of a good concubine?