In the end the woman coloured and looked away, fiddling with her scarf again. “Well, I… it’s not my normal thing but… I guess I’m flattered.”
Solace grinned despite herself. “Offer’s there.”
“I guess it is just women, for you people?” Kris went on slowly, in what Solace felt was an encouragingly intrigued manner.
“At home. When you get sent out, you experiment…” And without meaning to, she glanced across the bar at Idris. When she looked back, Kris was staring at her, wide-eyed.
“Idris? Seriously?” she said.
For a moment Solace thought she was jealous or horrified, but the woman’s expression had resolved into something like mischievous glee. Solace found herself entirely wrong-footed, because she’d meant to keep that firmly under wraps. Apparently one drink was all it took to unshell her. She was saved from having to give further details when a large man pushed his way to the bar. He sat so close to Kris that he almost shoved her off her stool.
The lawyer opened her mouth to reproach him, but he looked bleakly at the pair of them and said, “The Oumaru.”
Solace’s fighting reflexes kicked in instantly. Angels of Punching You in the Face, and she was ready to make good on the name. The man was beefier than Colonials normally got, even broader than Magdan’s Voyenni soldiers. His hair and beard were cropped to a stubble and his knuckly face was blotched with blue and purple discolorations. There was something very wrong with him too. His clothing was slit from the neck to the small of his back, because some creature was implanted there. It was a thing between a lobster and a bee, armoured in parts, bristly with jagged hairs. Several limbs were dug deep into the man’s body, the flesh around them warped and lumpy. Its handful of stalked eyes flicked about, scanning the crowd. Solace had no idea what it was, except nasty. Very nasty.
Kris very carefully set down her plastic beaker, “Oumaru. Should that mean something?” she said.
The newcomer regarded them without humour. “You brought her back from deep void.” His Colvul was accented strangely. “My employer has an interest in her. Tell me where she is, please.”
“Nope,” Kris said.
“Not our fleas, not our circus,” Solace added. Which, from their expressions, wasn’t a saying that had travelled outside the Parthenon.
The man—the symbiont, Solace decided—smiled thinly. She wondered whether the joining of flesh also meant a joining of minds. “Do not make a game of this,” he continued. “My employer is desirous that his staff have access to the ship. This can be a pleasant matter of contractual recompense or it can lead to matters less pleasant.”
“Take this up with our factor. I’m just crew,” Kris said carelessly.
“The Hanni says you are already under contract. I did explain that this was problematic to my employer, but the little crab would not be moved. To avoid the unpleasantness I come to the crew. Show me the ship now, please.” He put his big hands on the bar and Kris instantly moved several steps away. Danger hung about him like he sweated it.
“You don’t want to kick off any unpleasantness with me,” Solace told him evenly.
He merely grinned. “You’re the Patho they told me about. Good for you. You’re not the only ones who fight. To the ship now, please.”
Solace stood, calm and battle-ready now actual face-punching was imminent. When violence erupted from two tables away, it caught all three of them entirely by surprise.
She aimed a fist at the symbiont out of sheer reflex, and he’d gone for her in the same moment. She twisted aside as her blow glanced off a cheekbone hard as steel. A moment later, someone in red robes was thrown into the pair of them. Symbiont hit the bar with his elbow, cracking the counter and yelping in surprisingly high-pitched pain. Solace herself went with the momentum and put the bar between them. She ended up half covered by robes, shouldering aside the dazed cultist-turned-missile. When she put her head above the parapet, the whole room had erupted into fighting and Symbiont was gone. For a moment she thought Kris had been carried off as well, but the lawyer was also crouched behind the dubious cover of the cracked bar.
“What is this?” Solace demanded, feeling as though their own fight should have taken precedence over this random farrago. Even as she spoke, Kris shouted, “Idris!” and was off into the melee, drawing a narrow-bladed knife from her sleeve. Solace vaulted the bar and was right behind her.
At a booth across the room were Idris, Rollo and Olli. Solace’s heart sank to see that someone had driven a dagger into their plastic tabletop, because she knew precisely what that bit of theatre meant. The Betrayed. With their “humans for humans” sentiments. Between her and them was a room full of brawling people either trying to get into or out of a fight, all representing a serious obstacle. A core of young Colonial men were going for anyone wearing cult robes or Hegemony regalia.
A cultist stumbled into her, robes flapping, and tried to punch her in the face. She blocked and elbowed him in the jaw with brutal efficiency. He spat blood from his savagely bitten tongue and reeled away. She felt absurdly indignant, because frankly none of this was their fight. However, a man had Idris by the collar, and she remembered that Intermediaries were on the Betrayed’s long list of race traitors. How they’d identified Idris for what he was, she didn’t know, but presumably that was why someone was trying to choke him to death. Rollo slugged the man, who let the Int go and lurched sideways. He hit an electrified prong that Olli had jabbed out from her walker frame and fell, shuddering. Then a bulkier opponent appeared, popped Rollo in the nose and kicked Olli back into the wall.
Solace powered through the fist-happy crowd. Halfway across the room she had a sudden crisis of conscience and looked for Kris, surely at the mercy of the mob. Except Kris was tight at her back, knife held along the line of her arm. Even as Solace glanced in her direction, the lawyer took a cultist’s arm, twisting it viciously to bend the man backwards. She then kicked her victim’s legs out from him, her blade remaining unbloodied. No need to escalate just yet.
A bundle of bodies cannoned into Solace even as they moved forwards: two spacers laying into a cultist. One of them saw her, processed her as an ally, then realized his mistake. He was a particularly ugly customer, his own Nativist sympathies on show with the cross-hilted knife inked onto his forehead. The Parthenon was right at the top of the Betrayed’s hate-list.
She swayed back from his right fist’s wild swing, and then his left came at her with a knuckleduster studded with nails. His friend was right behind with a knife.
Escalation it is, then. Knuckles came for Solace with both fists this time. She caught one, rammed it back into its owner’s face, and then deflected the other so the knuckleduster raked across Blade’s abdomen. Then Blade rammed into her, knocking her over. She rolled out from underneath him, ramming an elbow into his head, but Knuckles got a grip on her knee and drew back his fist full of nails for a pounding.
Kris cut his ear off.
For the briefest moment, mid-brawl, Solace and Knuckles both stared at the ear as it flopped to the floor. Kris had stepped back, knife poised, and the back of her other arm presented to block.
Knuckles rose, roaring, to his full height, Solace forgotten on the ground. He grabbed for Kris and received the myrmidon’s booted foot right in the groin. She reckoned she’d fractured the man’s pelvis. She kicked Blade in the head for good measure as Kris hauled her to her feet.
Over at the table, Barney had appeared and was wrestling fiercely with the man who’d hit Rollo. Solace punched their antagonist in the back of the head and floored him.
“Where’s Idris?” Kris yelled.
“There!” Olli had righted herself and was pointing a truncated arm across the room. Solace spotted a knot of red and purple figures, with Idris’s slender form in the middle.
“Oh for…” It seemed particularly unjust—in the middle of this fight-that-was-not-their-fight—that they’d have to go toe-to-toe with both sides. A moment later Idris was gesturing, app
arently unharmed, and they shouldered their way over. Medvig was sheltering amongst the cultists too, Solace saw, and Kittering had been under the table all along. They had sensibly decided against getting trampled by a roomful of mad humans.
The cultists were armed with shock batons and coshes, more than ready to give any marauding Nativist a run for their money. Around that time station security finally arrived and started cuffing rioters, or at least any rioters without Hegemony colours. Rollo made the call that perhaps they were with the cultists after all.
Soon the bar was quiet again and security were considerately removing the unconscious bodies. Solace stared at the dagger stuck into the crew’s erstwhile tabletop.
“So that’s a thing,” Kris agreed, following her gaze. “The Betrayed. They’ll all get rooted out of here sharpish by the cult, now the Hegemony’s taken over.”
Solace nodded. The Betrayed were a relatively new faction within internal Colonial politics. They were officially decried by Hugh and yet, mysteriously, they’d never been outlawed. The Parthenon didn’t care for the legitimate Nativist movement either, which was all about returning to one unified human identity. They celebrated old Earth and embraced the rhetoric of humanity’s past glories. The Betrayed went a step further, preaching that humanity would have been the galaxy’s dominant species, if allowed to fight the Architects “properly.” But Intermediaries had made some sort of sham peace, they claimed, part of a grand conspiracy to keep humans down. Needless to say, the Hegemonic cult was right up there in their sights as well, which brought them round to…
“Who are your new friends, my wayward son?” Rollo asked.
Before Idris could speak, a thin greying woman amongst the cultists said, “Captain Rostand, of the Vulture God?”
“A responsibility that seems to bring only trouble these days,” he agreed warily.
She managed a creditable smile. “My hierograve has asked me to invite you to dinner, sir.”
Rollo looked over the ruin of the bar, then back to her. “That so?” he asked, his usual loquaciousness deserting him in the fact of this unexpected development.
“He has a business proposition for you. Perhaps you and he—”
“Oh no, my friend, it’s all of us or nothing at this point. This orbital has a case of the frothing fits on it. So make sure your table has something fit for a Hanni.”
*
“Help me out.” Rollo bent towards Kris as they followed the cultists through the orbital’s quieter passageways. “Why wine and dine us when they run the place now? We’ve got nothing they need, surely?”
“The cult isn’t unified. Right now various cells will be jockeying to see who gets to be the mouthpiece for their masters,” she speculated. “The clams—” She bit off the slur. “The Essiel are very hands-off when it comes to how they rule, so long as they get what they want. Winning divine favour can get underhand and sneaky fast.”
Solace had shuffled closer to Idris. “You all right?”
He looked at her warily. “For now. Except Barney was shooting his mouth off about deep void work to what turned out to be a knot of Betrayed.”
And deep void work meant Ints. “You get that reaction a lot?”
“You’re going to tell me it’d never happen in the Parthenon, right?”
She opened her mouth to say: Well, it wouldn’t. Closed it again. Still not the right time, but what would it take? “Just give me a chance, Idris. Let me spiel and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“‘Give your spiel,’” he corrected, smiling a little. “Your Colvul’s slipping.”
“Also, you’re changing the subject,” she pointed out.
He shrugged. “Probably. I do that.” And then they had arrived, apparently. They’d gone some way into the domestic areas of the orbital, amongst nests of rooms occupied by station staff and permanent residents. These cabins were stacked three or four high and separated every now and then by high atria and claustrophobic light wells. The latter had probably been intended as public squares, so long as your public was happy to gather in groups of no more than a dozen. Here, though, three units had been converted into some kind of eatery, decked out in Hegemonic colours. Plainly this neighbourhood was well ahead of the curve in adapting to the system’s new masters.
There was a large table ready for them, half a dozen richly robed cultists already standing by their chairs. Staff bustled past, setting places. They’d even left spaces for Olli’s walker and Medvig’s frame and put in a high, narrow stool for Kittering. All in all, not a bad show.
“Please,” the lead cultist invited them, and the crew sat cautiously. Solace saw Kris adjust the sit of her knife within her sleeve and Rollo squared his shoulders. Nobody really trusted this development not to go sour at the first opportunity.
Then their benefactor arrived—the hierograve from the way the other cultists reacted—and Solace burst out, “I know you!”
For a moment she couldn’t quite place him. He was balding with a fringe of white hair about the ears and a well-groomed beard. She found herself wanting to stroke it: it was a novelty to Partheni eyes and looked soft and woolly as a blanket. Colonial men tended to misinterpret that kind of thing, though, so she kept her hands to herself. His high-collared robe was eloquent evidence of his cult standing but his eyes had a good-natured twinkle to them—suggesting he was as harmless as everyone’s favourite grandfather. Solace, who had no male relatives of any kind, didn’t trust him an inch, and she reckoned the rest of the Vulture’s crew were just as leery.
“His Wisdom the Bearer Sathiel,” the cultist woman announced, and Solace abruptly recalled seeing the man in the news mediotypes. He’d been talking about Huei-Cavor entering a bold new age, and how his sect had been instrumental in converting the populace to Hegemonism.
“Well this is a grand honour and no mistake,” Rollo said without enthusiasm. The restaurant staff began bringing out food, a mix of bland-but-nutritious Colonial staples and weird-looking dishes from Hegemonic worlds. Kittering received a bowl of something that looked like coarse-grained coloured sand that his mandibles picked at with gusto. Nobody seemed to know what to do with Medvig, but in the end the Hiver just co-opted whatever was going. When they had a pile of assorted foodstuffs in front of them, their insect-form selves swarmed out of their frame and attacked everything omnivorously, breaking it all down into proteins and energy.
Sathiel twinkled at Rollo, who smiled right back. For a moment Solace thought the pair were going to have an avuncle-off right there at the table. Then one of the hierograve’s people bustled forward to remove his high collar and peel back his robe, revealing a thin mauve tunic underneath.
“They look hot, those things,” Rollo said, around a spoon of algae.
“And heavy, but that’s responsibility, isn’t it?” Sathiel smiled, as though faintly embarrassed by all of it. “Captain, we have a mutual problem, you and I, and it’s sitting in Bay 98 right now.”
“You have a problem with my ship, friend?” Rollo asked him mildly.
“You have the problem,” Sathiel said. “Right at this moment, a certain station administrator of our acquaintance is looking into impounding it for her own purposes. She wishes to retain control of a… sensitive cargo you brought back from the deep void.”
“This is perhaps the worst-kept secret I’ve ever encountered in my long career,” Rollo remarked.
“Some of the administrative staff know how our masters may be best-served,” Sathiel said piously. “We therefore heard you have evidence of an Architect attack, a recent one too. You can appreciate this is of prime importance to the galaxy as a whole, and the Hegemony in particular.”
“You mean if you parade our ‘cargo’ about in public, everyone will suddenly want to wear a fancy robe like yours,” Olli said sharply.
The cultists bristled, but Sathiel took no overt offence. “Do you not think, Mesdam Timo, that people deserve the chance to save their worlds from destruction? Or should we wait until a
n Architect appears over Ossa or Faedrich perhaps?”
“Why not just swash your robes at station admin then?” Medvig’s comment was even blunter than customary, perhaps because half of their processing power was devoted to eating.
“I think you’ve already discovered that we’re experiencing some… unrest here,” Sathiel told them. “And our local admins, who were vociferously anti-Hegemony, are now trying to grab power by any means possible. There are also Nativist sympathizers in positions of authority. I would rather be in possession of the Oumaru and then ask permission, to stop anything happening to it.”
“Wait,” Solace broke in. “Do you have someone on your payroll who has a sort of… insect thing plugged into his back?” She exchanged glances with Kris.
“A Tothiat, you mean?” Sathiel asked. “Not in my retinue. It’s a rare adaptation…”
So who was that “Tothiat,” exactly? One more complicating factor.
“What are you proposing, Your Wisdom?” Rollo asked.
“I am suggesting that your people and my people go down to the bay, in defiance of the impounding order. I will ensure that all staff on duty are keen to earn favour with our masters, and thereby clear your way. You can then take your ship out and leave the Oumaru in full view outside the orbital. Everyone will see it and know just what happened,” Sathiel said. “And then we can put all this ridiculous cloak-and-dagger business out of the way and proceed into the future like grown-ups. What do you say?”
Rollo glanced at Kittering, whose arm-screens were running with a screed of Colvul text: contractual terms and rates. Apparently the only variable the factor was concerned about was not doing it for free. Then the captain looked to Kris.
“Factor Leng won’t be happy,” the lawyer opined.
“A matter of less than no consequence to me,” Rollo decided. “Nobody who wants to tie down my ship is a friend. And what about your lot?” A frank stare at Solace.
“Me?”
“Tell me you didn’t skip straight off and tell your people what we had here?” Not angry, but not smiling right now either. “Parthenon’s already taking action to keep this for themselves, maybe? You tell me.”
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