Planetary Parlay

by Cameron Cooper

  —27—

  The next two days I found torturous. Everyone else quickly picked up on Jai’s jubilant mood, but I couldn’t.

  The next negotiation session we attended, the one that Jai insisted I be there for, I learned why he was so pleased about the awful confrontation I’d had with the Terrans in their Residence.

  Just walking into that meeting told me everything I needed to know. We filed into the hall and just as it had been for the last two meetings, we found the Terrans already waiting for us, that big fucking statue standing over them.

  And nearly every single one of them stared at us with the same covetous expressions the three Assembly officials had worn. Their gazes ran over us. Greed and hot, sick envy gleamed in their eyes.

  The session began with a return to the agenda. We were still on the first point, of course—getting our Carinad people back.

  Constantine, though, diverged from the agenda almost immediately after announcing that was where we were on the list of points to be discussed. He ran his gaze down the table of diplomats. “Would you indulge us and allow us a question that may seem irrelevant, but may help us push forward in these negotiations?”

  Jai answered frankly. “If the question has any hope of moving things forward, then we welcome it.”

  Constantine cracked his knuckles. I don’t think he was aware that he was revealing his nervousness. “We have not failed to notice that each of you has a small, new scar on the back of your neck, which is very nearly healed. Would you mind…if it is not too personal a question…could you explain if that scar has anything to do with your cloning and regeneration therapies?”

  Jai hesitated, then spoke with an air of candor. “The scars are where devices are implanted that…” He shook his head. “The technology is very advanced and well beyond my understanding, but in simple terms, it allows us to back up our personalities and consciousness.”

  A mutter and collective indrawn breath sounded behind Constantine. Isuma’s face developed a tic, a little muscle at the corner of her eye jumping.

  “That…backup can then be inserted into a replacement body, correct?” Constantine replied. “You lose nothing?”

  “I am not the person to answer that, as I have not been through it myself.” He turned in his chair. “Eliot, would you mind?”

  Eliot Byrne got to his feet. “Nah, it’s fine,” he said, his tone casual. “Whadya want to know?”

  Rayhel leaned forward eagerly. “You are a clone of yourself, too?”

  “I died three months ago,” Byrne said. “Thanks to your motherfucking motherships.”

  I bit my cheeks to stop myself from braying laughter at the shock on the Terran’s faces. How would they react to Byrne’s pithy fact? Would they be offended? They had been overly sensitive about everything, so far.

  But Constantine said, “You remember dying? And waking?”

  The excitement in his tone was illuminating. Now I could see what Jai was doing. The Terrans wanted longer lives. They wanted what we had and they did not. They would put up with direct insults and probably a lot more, in order to get it.

  Finally, we had leverage.

  *

  But my joy was short-lived, for my job of protecting our party continued on unchanged and I had serious problems to deal with. Finding Colton was my primary task, but Lyth handed me another one shortly after the third negotiation meeting began. He leaned over my chair. “I need to speak to you,” was all he said.

  He took me back to the suite without another word. Mace was the only one in the room, but Lyth set up a privacy bubble around us, anyway. “Try to reach Lyssa.”

  Lyssa?

  The peculiar deadness in my ear told me the connection was successfully severed. I shook my head. “Gone.”

  Lyth nodded. “The Terrans have been trying to hack into our pads and computers—especially at night, when they think we won’t notice. They’re clumsy attempts, but they’re deliberate.”

  I tapped my hip and realized I was compensating for not having a shriver to rest my hand upon and made myself stop. “And have their attempts increased in the last few hours?”

  Lyth smiled grimly. “They’ve more than doubled.”

  “They’re trying to find any information about regenerative therapies and cloning. They’re trying to run around Jai.”

  “That was my thought, too,” Lyth said. “But they’re attempting to connect wirelessly, which might have worked even fifty years ago, but now we use sealed directional communications, they can’t find a way in.”

  “Could they manage it, given enough time?”

  “Given enough time, anything is possible,” Lyth said. “Do I think they’ll manage it today? No.”

  “Three days? A week?”

  Lyth shook his head. “Not unless they learn very fast.”

  “Changing their minds doesn’t seem to be a Terran trait,” I murmured, thinking hard. “Here’s what you do,” I told him. “You hack their computers. We already know how to communicate with them and how they work, but now I want you to steal a translator and hijack it to access their networks.”

  “How subtle do you want me to be?”

  “I want you to holler when you’re in there,” I replied.

  “You want them to know we’re good at this.” Lyth smiled. “I can do that.”

  “And while you’re in there, I want you to look for anything that will tell us where Marlee Colton is.”

  “You really think they took her?”

  “This morning, Constantine called her my computer. They don’t think of her as a real person, Lyth. And they’re trying everything they can to hack into our data.”

  “And to them, Colton is just another entry point,” Lyth concluded.

  *

  I wasn’t the only one ducking the negotiations and finding better things to do. Mace hid out in the common area, a similar oversized pad like Yoan used on his knees, and Lyssa on the screen on the arm of his chair, both of them chatting as he worked.

  He waved me over to his chair. “Something you might want to know, Danny.”

  I sat on the chair next to his. “Let it be good news,” I said fervently. “Hi, Lyssa.”

  “It’s interesting news at least,” Mace replied. “Juliyana asked me what I knew about the myth of Leokadia, so I dug into it.”

  “In the universal archive? You’re brave.” The archive was so large and rambling, that it took advanced skills to be able to navigate the warrens and dead ends and find anything useful. Historians and archivists had been working on trying to sort through the data for generations, everyone adding scraps of indexing, or their own interpretation of historical records, which just piled on the chaos.

  “It wasn’t too hard, with Lyssa’s help,” Mace admitted. “I think I’ve tracked down the real Leokadia, though.”

  “Is it Uqup Pedrottle?” I asked curiously.

  Mace shook his head. “I found a ship’s registration. The Leokadia.” He paused. “A ship, not a planet.”

  “And the Terrans have a myth about a ship called the Hope of the Leokadia,” I murmured.

  “That’s what I remembered.” Mace paused. “You and Lyth were in a bubble, looking earnest this morning.”

  I lifted my hand sharply. “Wait! Lyssa, sorry about this…” I moved over to the kitchen crates and turned on the room-sized privacy bubble that Lyth had installed there and came back. The screen on Mace’s armchair showed white noise. I sat back down once more. “They’re listening to everything, Mace, and I know what you were about to ask. Yeah, Lyth is hacking their networks.”

  “Is he in, yet?” Mace asked. “Because I want to piggyback in and look at their archives.”

  “They destroy records that they don’t want to be reminded about,” I warned him.

  “And maybe they’ve only been doing that for a couple hundred years,” Mace pointed out. “Long term, things change a lot. Their data might be as hopelessly confusing as our archive, which means a bit of smart digging w
ill give us answers.”

  I thought about it. “Talk to Lyth,” I told Mace. “Make sure you’re in a bubble when you do,” I added.

  Mace got to his feet.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To talk to Lyth.”

  “No, sit a moment more,” I told him. Now that the bubble was in place, I was grabbing the moment. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Uh-oh.” He sat. “Yes, captain?”

  “No, no captain. No colonel. This is just me, Danny. And maybe a bit of Dalton into the mix.”

  “What has my father been saying?” Mace asked, sounding amused.

  “Not much. Just enough.” I hesitated and at the last second, went for the indirect approach. “You work all the time, Mace.”

  “So do you. You make me feel like a slug, sometimes, Danny.”

  “Do I? It’s not intentional. I just have a lot to juggle, most days.”

  “And you don’t drop anything.”

  “But you don’t seem to have any fun, Mace. You don’t…enjoy yourself.”

  Mace didn’t try to brush me off. He gripped the edge of the pad. “There’s time yet, for that. Thanks to Lyth and Arnold Laxman, we all have so much more time now. And…” He actually blushed, the white skin almost matching his red hair. “And thanks to you, I actually get that time. I wouldn’t have, if you and Dalton hadn’t hauled me out of that mothership. So I feel like I can’t waste it, now.” He glanced at me, to see if I got it.

  I nodded. “But because you do have all that time, you can afford to pace yourself. The work will still be there when you get back to it, even it’s a month later.” I paused. “Just don’t relax right now, huh? I need everyone frosty until we get the hell out of here.”

  I got to my feet.

  Mace looked up at me. He was still flushed. “Thanks, Danny.”

  I knew he wasn’t talking about just now, but three years ago, when we found him on the Terran mothership.

  “You’re family, Mace. I work so hard because of you guys, because I refuse to let any of you down.”

  The red crept down his neck. He nodded, his gaze on the board.

  I grinned and left him to recover.

  *

  News about our longevity therapies and cloning spread across the Terran worlds at better than light speed. We learned exactly how fast because by the end of day three’s negotiations, the Terran domestic broadcasts were showing protests on a dozen different worlds, all of them demanding that we give the Terrans our secrets to immortality. Jai had to carefully explain on day four that we were not immortal, that we were as vulnerable as Terrans to disease and accidents. We just had a means to recover from both if we went about it the right way.

  But that didn’t make any difference to the ordinary Terrans out among the stars. It wasn’t just protests. There were debates and speeches and polls. Articles written. Interviews given. All of them with the same theme. They wanted to live forever, or even just a good damn while longer than they did and now they knew that possibility existed, they were going to harangue the Assembly into getting it for them from those nasty Carinads who refused to share.

  And Jai was dangling the technology and the possibility of sharing it, all for the price of giving us everything we wanted—namely, give us our people back, then fuck off forever. Screw trade agreements. We’d had enough of them. I could see that weariness in the diplomats’ faces each evening, after another formal dinner full of verbal backstabbing and one-up-manship.

  I don’t think the Terrans at the table were particularly happy, either. They were under enormous pressure from the rest of the Assembly and the officials of every Terran world to achieve the impossible; acquire the secrets of immortality and give absolutely nothing away in exchange. All three of them seemed to grow older by the hour as they fielded messages and notes and whispered conversations from assistants, who were likely delivering more demands from Terran authority figures.

  Early on day four, after the diplomats and those of our party who cared to watch the circus carry on had left for the Assembly hall, Mace and Lyth pulled me into a privacy bubble and Mace put his big pad on the crate between us.

  I balanced the plate of breakfast rolls on my knees and listened.

  “We found the Hope of Leokadia in the Terran records,” Mace said. I could see the excitement in his eyes. “It was as buried as you thought it would be, but it’s there. I don’t think the Terrans have accessed it in centuries. Millenia. They just presume it’s a myth and move on.”

  I nodded, encouraging him, and took a bite of my late breakfast.

  “The Hope of the Leokadia was the last generation ship to leave Terra,” Mace said. “There’s been a dozen calendar and year count adjustments since it left, but near as I can estimate, this was nearly seven thousand years ago.”

  Wow.

  My astonishment must have shown on my face, because Mace nodded. “It was a last-ditch effort to save mankind, because Earth was collapsing and settlements on the other planets in this system had failed.”

  “Save the planet from what? The environment?” It was a good guess, given how sensitive they were about any impact upon the world, now.

  “The environment, and the political and economic fall out because of it,” Mace said. “Wars, riots, even genocide.”

  “So they put a few thousand humans in a generation ship, and sent it on its way.” I considered that. “Quixotic of them.”

  Mace leaned forward, his fingertips on the pad. “The ship’s departure log says it was heading for the Carinad section, Danny.”

  I lowered the breakfast roll, staring at him. “It was us on the Leokadia…!” I dropped the roll with a plop. “That’s why we have a record of a ship called the Leokadia, too. It was the first place we settled. It was a frigging ship, not a world, but that’s where we came from…”

  Mace laughed. Even Lyth smiled.

  I stared at the big pad, even though it showed nothing. “It’s staggering.”

  “That’s not all,” Mace said quietly.

  “It’s more than enough,” I assured him. “It explains so much. Seven thousand years is more than enough time for genetic drift to explain why Terrans and Carinads are the same, but different. Why the Terrans can be put into cryosleep, but it doesn’t work on us. Why…well, you name the difference between us, and that’s probably the reason at the base of it.”

  “There’s more, Danny,” Lyth said.

  I pulled myself together and nodded. “Go on.” I picked up my abandoned breakfast roll once more.

  “We’ve been roaming through the data,” Mace said. “Especially the archives. The Carinad universal archive has all Terran records from before we left…we thought.”

  I looked from Mace to Lyth and back. “Lyth was always tapping into the archives. You’re saying they’re incomplete? That’s probably not a big surprise, given how old they are. Corruption and memory loss has to have chipped away at it.”

  “It’s not a few records here and there, Danny,” Lyth said. “I did a very rough comparison, and I suspect that the Carinad archive has less than one percent of all Terran knowledge and records that existed from before the departure of the Leokadia.”

  “One percent? That’s all?”

  “We think it’s because of the Leokadia itself. They wouldn’t have had room to take everything with them. They would have had to pick and choose, and what they chose to take with them is what we now have in our archives. They preserved what they had, but they let almost everything else go.”

  “Sort of like what Xaviens do when they transfer to a body,” I murmured.

  “We have to ask the Terrans to give us the archives, Danny,” Mace said. “We’re as entitled to Earth’s history and knowledge as the Muradar.”

  My wariness rose. “I don’t think we want to ask the Terrans for anything right now,” I said slowly. “It gives them back leverage we only just took away from them. It will kill everything Jai and the others are trying to do in t
here.”

  Mace looked crestfallen.

  “So let’s steal it,” I added.

  Lyth grinned.

  “Lyth, does Lyssa have enough capacity to suck up the Terran archives from before the departure of the Leokadia? We put in all that extra storage when you were still running the ship…” Then I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Just what I was about to say,” Lyth said. “We take what we can and consider it good enough. There might be opportunities later, now we’ve figured out how to talk to their computers and how to get into their networks. For now, I’ll grab everything I can.” He paused and put his hand on Mace’s shoulder. “You will grab everything,” he said and got to his feet. “I’ve got to find Marlee.”

  He headed back to the room he shared with Juliyana.

  *

  As soon as I knew the Terrans were listening in on everything we did and said, I installed a room-sized privacy bubble in the room that Dalton and I shared. Each day I would carefully recharge it with a solar charger, out on the edge of the sideless corridor. Tropical sunlight was strong enough to charge all our devices in an hour or two, which was a good thing, because we were still trying to figure out how to convert their power to something we could use. Most of the palace seemed to run on non-powered resources like candles and lamps, which added to the challenge.

  That afternoon, after learning about the Leokadia, I switched on the room bubble and told Dalton. It was lovely watching awareness and excitement dawn in his face.

  “It’s…I don’t know…I feel proud, or something, just knowing where we came from. Stupid, but there it is,” he said.

  “I don’t think it’s stupid. We lost that knowledge and now we have it back. It tells us who we are and that’s not a small thing. I think it’s the one good thing to come out of this mission.”

  Dalton lifted my chin. “Let me help you find her.”

  I shook my head. “Someone who knows how to react if something breaks loose has to be in the room with Jai and the others.”

  “Then let Juliyana help you.”

  “Maybe…but until I know where Marlee is, there’s nothing to help me do.” I muttered, “I just want this over with.”