by Jenn Lyons
recommend you do. With your skin color, it would be easy enough to pass yourself off as adopted out of a QZ—happens all the time. Mayan, maybe Cartel. You spent time there, speak the right languages. You’ve got a lot of options.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“So lie.”
I ground my teeth and looked away. “Did you invite me here to lecture me on how to pretend to be a Wilder? Why did you invite me here?”
“You’re touchy tonight. You’d think I wasn’t your oldest friend in the whole world.” He tossed something to me, a small box no wider than my hand on each side, covered in bright paper.
“What’s this?”
“A box. You store things in it. A genius like you and you don’t know that?”
I just barely didn’t throw the box at his head. Instead I tried to smile. Halfway, it transformed into a scowl. It was hopeless. It would always be hopeless. I didn’t even have to guess; I knew.
“You didn’t have to do this.”
“Are you going to open it or stare at it until it gains sentience?”
I slowly unwrapped the box. Inside were a dozen shiny metallic disks, nestled in crinkled plastic, each with its own paper jacket and tight fitting clear jewelry case. I chewed on my lip as I pulled the compact disks out of their cases. It was old technology, pre-alien technology: human, and human alone.
“I know how you like music. I couldn’t read the labels, so I picked out ones with nice pictures.”
I spread them out. Some of them would be garbage, but even those had their uses. He’d picked a few classical pieces with names that I recognized: Mendelssohn, Mozart, Toscanini. My hand froze over one cover. Angels on a black background, seated, their white robes dirty at the edges, playing cards, smoking. The memory of a chuckle escaped the back of my throat.
Paul leaned back and smiled, sly and pleased. “I couldn’t resist the pun. Thought of you right away.”
I slowly read the words. My grasp of English was passable, but only barely. My old striketeam, the Fallen Angels, had spoken Quechua, with Esperanto and Klingon thrown in for flavoring. Most of the local wild tribes spoke Spanish, French, Portuguese or pidgin mixtures of the above. “Black. Sab-bath.” I shrugged. “Funeral music?”
“Hopefully not.”
A smile thought about crossing my face, but decided to quit while it was ahead. A waiter came and set down sizzling trays of food in front of us—delicate Sarcodinay crystalvines with sweet sharva sauce, steamed lindkelps with their own pearls and the five-spice casserole miqessics, designed to be eaten in order, one bite at a time, for a proper build of flavor. An unidentifiable odor permeated all the dishes that defied description in any Terran language so remained simply ‘Sarcodinay’: at once savory as ground curry spices, earthy as truffle, sweet as vanilla and yet nothing like any of those smells. A part of me, and not a small part, wanted to hate Sarcodinay food as I hated everything else about them. I wanted their cuisine to be unpalatable and foul, but it was a sad demonstration of the unfairness of the universe that even bad Sarcodinay cuisine was a culinary orgasm.
Paul’s sharp eyes appraised me. “I’m worried about you, Mallory. Really worried.”
“Ah. And here I didn’t think you’d get to the point before I was a grandmother.”
He visibly ground his teeth. “You can push it too far, Mal—even with me. Jockey puts up with your tantrums because you always came through on the job and because that sort of behavior was directed at the Sarcodinay, but we aren’t fighting the Sarcodinay anymore.”
“Do me a favor when you have a chance and go look up the phrase ‘Cold War.’ I promise you, Jockey will have plenty for me to do. Besides, Jockey puts up with me because of Kyle Tallman.”
He waved that idea away with a contemptuous flick of fingers. “Gratitude only means so much. You’re old dynamite with a short fuse. Have you ever been to psych?”
I looked away.
“Well?”
I gulped down a glass of juice like it was something stronger. “What a question. You know perfectly well.”
“Maybe you should go in for counseling.”
I stared at him. “Are you insane?”
“It might do you good.”
“Is this some novel definition of ‘good’ of which I have been previously unaware? The definition of good where I end up in a small padded cell or heaven help me, stuck in a lab somewhere? Have you forgotten just why the Sarcodinay labeled me with a Black Flag in the first place?”
He sighed. “I haven’t forgotten. But you do need help, and I think I know how.” He leaned back against the velvet couch. “I think you need a fresh start.”
“Fresh start? What sort of fresh start?” I curled my fingers in my lap and wondered how many alarms would go off if I lit a cigarette in here.
“A week after the peace treaty is signed, the League Council is going to vote on privatization of hyperdrive manufacturing. The Janus Drive is going public, or rather, private.”
I blinked at him. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”
“Very few will—at least not in time to put in a bid.”
“How nice to know corruption is alive and well in the Solar Independence League.” I frowned. “I thought Nicholas Rhodes had a lock on the Janus Drives? What about the manufacturing plant on Prometheus?”
Paul grinned, his handsome face turned predatory. “Someone suggested that’s a waste of his talents. The Janus Drive operation is a matter of logistics at this point. So the plan is to turn over manufacturing to a private party, keep the plant on Prometheus for military research and development, and let Nick go back to doing what he does best: theory.”
I snorted. “What did Nicholas say about that?”
“They could hear his howls of rage all the way over on Paradise,” Paul said. “Whoever wins this award is going to be the source, the only public source, for Janus drives. They’re going to have more credits or yen or whatever the League decides to use for money than they’ll know what to do with. They will be rich enough to afford their own research labs.” He threw me a significant look.
“Paul, I have a job.”
“For how much longer?”
“They’re not going to discharge me because I was rough on a skald at a party.”
“No? Maybe not. But you know what will happen? You’ll be transferred to Ministry of Justice, working under some square-necked administrator who was trying to kill you a month ago while a Colonial who doesn’t have a quarter your experience is shipped in to give you both orders. And it won’t be a war anymore, so results won’t be as important as procedures. They won’t care about your experience or your skills or that you may be the finest mind the Sarcodinay ever let slip through their shiny brass fingers. All they’ll care about is that you’re wound up tighter than a violin string, and much easier to snap.”
“So you want me to walk away and come work for you?”
“Work with me,” he corrected. “We’ll be partners. You, me—Vanessa’s in too.”
“She is, is she? Vanessa didn’t say anything about this.”
“I asked her not to. It’ll be the old gang again. We already have a location scouted out. You can breathe the air and walk around outside without a fireproof suit. There’s no way the Council would reject our proposal, not with you on board. Think of the research you’d be able to do if you had real funding and didn’t have to spend all your time scrounging the QZs for scrap!”
“The Council isn’t going to hand over something like this to the first cute face that winks at them. If they’re ditching the manufacturing it’s because they’re tired of trying to figure out which League world is paying the bills.” I stopped as a detail clicked. “Who is paying the bills?”
His expression turned cautious. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“I’m sure you do. We’re both IO, and I don’t make enough to afford dinners at restaurants like the Farthest Shore, let alone fronting the cost of a hyperdrive company. They’re keeping
the drive yards at Prometheus for military work. That means you have to build from scratch. That’s not cheap, even if you procure advanced orders. You’d have to have front money. Who’s your backer?”
He chewed on his lip. “He’s a bit of a silent partner. His name’s Alexander.”
“Why?”
“Why is he named Alexander? His parents probably thought it was a nice name—”
“Why is he a silent partner? What’s he hiding?”
“Oh that.”
“Yes! That. What’s his background?”
“Alexander works in medical research. Pharmaceuticals and nanotech. That’s where his money comes from. He doesn’t know anything about hyperspace physics and he couldn’t care less, but he knows an opportunity to make money when he sees one.”
“I still haven’t heard an explanation for why he’s a silent partner.”
“The League is willing to ignore his involvement as long as he keeps a low profile, but he’s too involved with the Sarcodinay to do so openly.” Paul added (rather unnecessarily, in my opinion): “He’s a skald.”
“You’re not just saying that to be insulting? He’s really a skald?”
“Technically no, but he’s very good at pretending. So good I doubt most of the League Council would believe that his sympathies aren’t with the Sarcodinay. If people find out he’s involved in this, it will become political. He’d like to avoid that.” Something in Paul’s manner was guarded, closed. He didn’t want to talk about Alexander.
I sucked on a piece of kalmara fruit. “You should try to convince