“I’m anticipating that this interview is going to consist mostly of belligerent silence, Myrmidon.” He’d half expected her to deny the rank; claim she was renegade, freelance, some other fiction. She just let it go by, though. “But, look… you’ll understand that your mere presence has put your fellows in even more trouble. My superiors see a possible Architect presence, and then they see the Parthenon in its shadow. You don’t need me to tell you that relations between Hugh and the Parthenon are in a particularly fragile state right now. Half my friends in the Colonial reserves were on stand-by for active duty—even before your friends pulled their stunt at Lung-Crow. Your government is making a lot of demands on Hugh right now, Myrmidon. And we both know there are plenty in mine who are reaching for their guns too.”
No denial that the Parthenon was still her government. No protestations of having gone rogue. She was trying to be impassive, but he’d seen the twitch when he talked about the others being in deeper shit just because she was around.
“I’m no Nativist,” he told her. “I don’t automatically assume anything the Parthenon does is inimical to human interests. Because we’re all human, right?”
The tiniest nod, small enough that maybe she didn’t realize she’d made it. And the Parthenon had its own Nativist equivalents, its hardliners, and so maybe Solace wasn’t one of them. Always preferable to deal with non-fanatics.
“This is where you give me at least the cover story of why you linked up with these reprobates.”
She smiled, so unexpectedly that he was slightly taken aback. “That’s a good word for them.”
“And the cover story? Only I was expecting you to go long on how the Parthenon was our front line against the Architects. Always had been. And that’s how you ended up involved?”
A blink. “The information about the Architect came out later. As you’re probably aware. And I won’t deny my government’s interested in it now. Of course we are. Who wouldn’t be? It’s a problem for all of us.” She took a deep breath. “I’m Myrmidon Executor Solace, Heaven’s Sword Sorority, Basilisk Company.” And, after a beat, “Angels of Punching You in the Face.”
“Huh.” He assimilated that. “Quite a salad of competences going on there. Basilisk is a mass loom gunner, isn’t it?”
She looked surprised that he knew, nodded shortly.
“From soldier to spy is quite a jump.”
“I’m not a spy. I’m just tasked with working outside our territory. That’s all Executor means.”
“But you didn’t bring your mass loom…”
“Aren’t you glad?” Hugh hadn’t managed to replicate the Partheni’s huge gravitic weapons, and that still smarted.
“So why are you here, if not to prep for the next Architect invasion?” And he was too confident now; he’d let something slip, because:
“You know that already. You’ve talked to Olli and she’s told you.”
Havaer smiled, not quite sure what had given it away. “Well, you’ve got me there. And?”
“And Idris is a free man. It’s his choice.” Real feeling now, in her voice. “My people would rather I twisted his arm: guilted him, forced him, kidnapped him, even. And I haven’t. It wouldn’t be right. But you’ve no right to stand in his way, if he decides to work for us. He’s free to make that choice.”
“He’s a military asset,” Havaer told her automatically and, having been frank, decided that frankness was the way to go. “I can seek authority to detain him to keep him out of the hands of a foreign power, one we may well be at war with in the near future. That is literally something I can do as an agent of Hugh and Mordant House. In the same way that your own heads of staff would slam the door the moment one of your weapons techs decided that a luxury apartment on the Berlenhof Archipelago sounded like a cushy retirement option. Est-ce compris?”
She nodded sharply, hating him but understanding him. Maybe she hated herself a little too. Because the pair of them knew damn well that her next order might be to cut loose from the Vulture’s crew and take Idris with her. Whether he wanted it or not.
*
Havaer took a break then: grabbed some kaffe, ordered his notes. Between Kris and Olli, at least, he had a good idea of what had gone on with the Oumaru and the Architects. And nobody had reported any planets missing recently, so maybe the Oumaru was a one-off event. Except his racing heart didn’t believe that.
It’s what everyone will tell each other. That one fluke doesn’t mean they’re back. They’ll tell that to each other, and nobody will believe the news is true. He was trying to imagine the wave of panic spreading across the Colonies, once elusive rumour became hard evidence in the form of a wrecked Oumaru. Mass evacuations, worlds defecting pell-mell to the Hegemony, apocalyptic cults and survivalist brotherhoods and—yes—the goddamn Nativists would find some way to capitalize on it as well. Betrayed! they’d shout, and get in the way just when Hugh needed unity. To Havaer, as a professional agent, the thought of the paperwork alone filled him with dread.
And he knew the Parthenon wanted their own pet Int, too—not exactly hard to guess, even if Olli and Solace hadn’t independently confirmed it. And right now, if the Architects were back, the Parthenon would be even more determined to get an Int on their side.
Which only left one interview to go.
Idris Telemmier was slumped in his seat. He had the same shadow of stubble Havaer remembered from Lung-Crow, the same inward-looking, flinching manner. Stripped of his friends, he looked as though he was waiting to be beaten with hoses or have wires clipped to his nipples.
“Hell, man,” Havaer said, sitting down across from him. “This doesn’t have to be that sort of conversation.”
“You…” Telemmier stared at him bleakly. “I said all I wanted to say to you on Lung-Crow. I don’t want anything to do with Hugh anymore. I did my bit. Nobody can say I didn’t.”
“Look, Menheer—”
“I stopped the war!” Telemmier burst out suddenly, eyes wide. “I went into the mind of an Architect, me and the others. We stopped the war. We saved everyone. You. Cannot. Imagine—” He clearly had more to say, but his teeth were clamped together now and he couldn’t get the words out. His wrists were pressed to the arms of the chair as though, in his head, he was shackled to it.
“Menheer Telemmier. Idris.” Havaer kept his voice very calm. “This…” he indicated the interview room, “isn’t even about you.”
“Sure it isn’t.” Drawn-wire tension was pulling every part of the man taut.
“You found the wreck of a goddamn Architect attack!” Havaer snapped. “Why is it nobody’s focusing on that, exactly? We could get an Architect over Magda or Lief or even Berlenhof any moment. As we sit here, it may already have happened. Packet trade to Jericho space is pretty damn slow after all. A few billion people maybe just got offed, while I’m goose-chasing after your crew to ask some questions. Help me out here, maybe?”
And that was the right approach, yanking the man out of his self-made misery hole. “It’s not my fault,” Telemmier told him. Aggrieved, but that was better than self-pitying.
“Nobody’s saying it is,” Havaer said. “Look, I’m not even starting on the whole Parthenon thing. Why you have a pet soldier aboard your ship.” Not yet, anyway, though that is definitely on the menu for interview two. “Just tell me what you know about the Oumaru and what happened to it. I’ve got the facts from the others. Give me anything that’ll only have come to you.”
“I mean, why would they?” Idris burst out, the non sequitur taking Havaer’s train of thought and shunting it into a siding. “They attacked one ship. One Hegemony freighter. Since when was that how Architects did things? They take out planets. And even then, only ones we’re actually living on. A thousand rocks out in the void, and none of them gets special treatment. Only places that are someone’s home.”
“The Oumaru had a crew, and they called their ship home,” Havaer suggested.
“But… it’s wrong. It’s not how th
ey work.” Because the war had been all kinds of trauma, for the Ints, but at least they’d thought they knew how the enemy operated. “And yet, and yet, we all saw the Oumaru had been just… Architected. And you’re asking why’s nobody focusing on that fact? Because the Oumaru was too small a disaster and people need something big to make them understand, Menheer Mundy. Everyone’s built new lives for themselves in the last forty years. I watched them do it.” Shaking his head wildly at the foolishness of it. “At first, people were terrified to put down roots. They still had their bags packed and every ship had spare pods to carry refugees. You’re too young. You wouldn’t know. But year by year, when the Architects stayed gone… I saw people begin to realize they could live again. Build, settle, invest, have families. And now if they’re back, all that goes away. We go back to being doomed every day of our lives. So take it from me, nobody’ll focus on this goddamn fact—until some colony somewhere gets an extra moon all of a sudden, and then gets worked over.” His shoulders hunched further. “I don’t want to believe it. I saw the wreck up close and I don’t.”
“And so you came here to get confirmation, from this expert you knew from way back?”
“What? Yes.”
The story’s still not right. He had the maddening sense of a missing piece, but they’d all told the same tale so far. If he wanted the hard truth that meant harsh methods—actual arrests, solitary confinement, serious interrogation at a secure Mordant facility. It also meant paperwork, expense and having to justify it to his bosses. Given the stakes, it wouldn’t take much justification, but still…
Do your job, man. No place for a soft heart in Mordant House. But he’d always fought against becoming the sort of man who reached for extreme measures as a matter of course. Which means maybe I’m not the right man for the job anymore.
The soft touch first, he told himself. Time later for the rest. If it’s necessary. He had done it before, when he had to. He had never liked it. It was the crumbling cliff-edge of decency he clung to.
“Menheer Telemmier…” he tried again.
“The Presence has shifted.”
Havaer went cold. “You mean… the thing in unspace. The thing people feel, that isn’t really there?”
Idris just stared at him. “Is it not, though?”
“What,” Havaer said hoarsely, “do you even mean, ‘shifted’?”
“I don’t have the words for it. Your own Int, what does she say?”
How does he know our Int is female? No disguising his surprise and suddenly it was Telemmier with the level and knowing stare, and Havaer was shifting uneasily. “She hasn’t said anything.”
“You haven’t asked her. But she’s on a leash, one of the new class out of the Liaison Board, right? When the Board took over from the old Int Program they went for quantity. She hasn’t been doing it as long as me. I’ve been in and out of unspace fifty years, Menheer Mundy. Something’s changed. Maybe they are back. Maybe they’re practising on the small things before they take on a planet again, Maybe they’re rusty.”
*
Havaer let them go back to the Vulture, because they demanded it and he was getting enough cooperation to make the open-handed approach worthwhile. And he wouldn’t call any of this crew traitors or criminals, exactly. Spacers didn’t like to feel they lived in a universe that could tell them what to do, and he could work with that. Worst came to worst, he could pledge some of the budget because it was amazing how quickly most spacers could be bought, once they felt they were making a deal rather than knuckling under.
He composed his report, letting the spacers stew. The Hammer was still clamped to the Vulture, because he wasn’t done with them and their secrets. Most likely they were hiding a little light smuggling, customs evasion or something similar—and he would drop some heavy hints that he didn’t care an iota of Largesse about that sort of thing. But if it was something else, maybe Almier would talk the rest into coming clean. Or if it really was funny business with the Parthenon, Timo might give up the goods on that front?
But what if it’s Hegemony stuff? If that was the case, then he had a problem on his hands. Hegemony, Parthenon and an Intermediary all in the same small boat. With a rumoured Architect out there too. That wasn’t the sort of mix Mordant House was going to like.
He rubbed at his forehead, hoping sincerely that nothing of the sort was going on. After all, spacers constituted a good thirty per cent of the human population, and they were traditionally sanguine about doing business with anyone they chose—though Nativist sentiments were starting to change that.
Not my job. Just a servant. Focus on the greater good. He felt that familiar, baseline unhappiness of someone who would be judged entirely according to moral decisions made by others.
Then his comm implant went off and Captain Khefi, who’d been sangfroid itself when facing down the Boyarin, was shouting at him. Havaer activated his ready room’s viewscreen and saw an Essiel ship bearing down on them.
“How long have you been keeping that to yourself?” Havaer demanded, and Khefi assured him that, no, the newcomer had come out of unspace practically on top of them.
“Hail them, full colours, standard codes for Hegemony vessels,” Havaer directed, on his way to the bridge already. His implant would keep him in the loop but he had a need to be there, in the same place physically as his crew. “Signal the Samphire for backup.” Although the antiquated navy picket ship wasn’t going to be much help if this turned into a shooting war.
Standard codes for Hegemony vessels. Because there wasn’t any mistaking the ship design, and what the hell did it mean, to meet an Essiel ship so far from anywhere they’d claimed as their own? Except Jericho housed extensive Originator ruins, and Hegemony cultists had been whining about gaining access since forever. Dealing with that hot potato was absolutely not Havaer’s job, but maybe he’d become a new first line of defence.
The vessel had come out of unspace in a slow tumble, a thing like a twisted silver rose. Hegemony ships tended to adopt multi-petalled forms, yet this one looked different, less geometric than usual. There were fewer straight lines—every frond and flange shaped to follow a rippling curve. It was as though a transformative wave had frozen as it rippled through the ship’s substance. It made Havaer’s eyes ache to look at it.
Talking with the Hegemony was a pain at the best of times, unless they had some of their pet humans aboard to translate. Even then you never quite knew if you were getting the alien masters’ intended meaning. They weren’t hasty, though. They loved their pomp and posturing, as befitted a species that had evolved sitting on its fundament.
“Their guns are hot!” one of Khefi’s people was shouting as Havaer hit the bridge. “They’re not slowing.”
The hell? “Are they responding to hails?” Havaer demanded. The central screen showed a model of objects in near-space buzzing with trajectory lines and a host of numbers. The left screen showed an image of the newcomer, enlarged and cleaned up in all its disturbing glory. The right panel displayed technical data—including the fact that those twisted petals hid a dozen heavy-duty accelerator cannon. All of these were currently spiking the Hegemony ship’s gravitic field.
Is this it? Did we go to war with the Hegemony and this is the first news we’ve had of it?
“Hail incoming, in Colvul,” the comms officer reported, sounding calmer than Havaer felt.
“Let’s hear it.”
Over the comms came a bell-like voice. For some reason it sounded familiar as it declaimed, “Take flight, O villains crouching so to shield the right inheritor of all our wrath. Begone, lest all our fury fall upon you like your namesake.”
“The fuck…?” Khefi muttered, at Havaer’s elbow.
“Ship name is Broken Harvest,” the comms officer confirmed. And Havaer sighed in a weird relief. It was the Essiel from the concrete bunker. Not war then. Not yet, anyway.
“Stall them, something ritual, respectful, basically timewasting,” he directed. “Tell them we’re
taking them seriously and are convening our most important people to prepare a fitting response.”
“What is this, Agent?” Khefi demanded.
“Believe it or not, they’re a crime syndicate.”
“That is one hell of a big ship for gangsters.”
“Don’t I know it. What do we think they can do?” And Havaer could only goggle at the Broken Harvest as it came at them. Was it named after the gang, or did the ship come first? It wasn’t a full-on Hegemony diplomatic barge, but it was still twice the size of the Mordant’s Hammer. Scans showed superior firepower and what looked to be some advanced gravitic shielding. On the other side of Jericho, the old Samphire was getting underway from dock. However, the Hammer could have run rings about the antique warship, and the Harvest could take them both.
“What do they want?” Khefi demanded.
“They want the Vulture,” he said. “Can we run?”
“Not and take the salvage ship with us,” Khefi said. “The Vulture could actually run faster if she carried us. But we’d still both be slower than that thing.”
“Can we sync drives?”
“Not in the time we’ve got.” Because you really didn’t want to hit unspace in two locked ships, where one drive wasn’t perfectly aligned with the other. Havaer had seen the result one time, and it had started a brief panic about the return of the Architects.
“They’re hailing us again,” the comms officer said.
“Hegemony don’t shoot first,” Khefi muttered. “They bluster, and they defend themselves, but they don’t…”
“This one will,” Havaer decided. “It’s renegade… mad maybe.” The Unspeakable Aklu, the Razor and the Hook. And perhaps it wasn’t even madness. Perhaps Essiel society threw up outliers like Aklu to fill a pro-active void that would otherwise remain empty, and was occasionally useful?
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