Planetary Parlay

by Cameron Cooper

  But we had things to do.

  “Sauli, see the drop ship is detached and we’re closed up!” I called behind me as I headed for the bridge.

  Everyone poured into the middle of the ship with its downsized staterooms with deep, happy sighs and exclamations. Eliot Byrne got down on his knees and kissed the floor—a great, exaggerated kiss that prompted a little laughter.

  I turned and ran for the bridge. So did my regular crew. I pattered onto the bridge in my gleaming slippers, and over to the captain’s shell. We were already underway and picking up speed.

  “Where is it, do you think?” I asked Lyssa. Her avatar stood right beside my shell, as usual.

  “They were behind the red planet, but they’ve been heading toward us since…” Lyssa looked at me. “Three point two minutes after Colonel Van Veen died,” she finished.

  I nodded, my throat tightening and my heart picking up speed. “Someone goosed them.”

  “It could only have been Isuma Florina, that soon afterward,” Kristiana said, on my other side. She and Peter Kole stood together, both dirty, sweaty and their evening gowns ripped and stained. Neither looked like they gave a fig, either. They were staring at the windscreens.

  “Up there,” I heard Juliyana say, from the back of the bridge. I glanced over my shoulder.

  She still had Rayhel at the point of her shriver. Slate walked alongside her, making heavy going of the ramp, which wasn’t made for metal feet.

  Rayhel moved onto the bridge, looking around with blatant curiosity.

  Peter and Kristiana exchanged looks.

  Kristiana turned to Rayhel. “You are going to call off the motherships bearing down on us, as you promised.”

  Rayhel scratched his chin. “I did, didn’t I?” I saw a flicker of that smile of his, full of laughter, but it didn’t quite form. He was as sweaty and dirty as the rest of us, his pretty, glittering jacket no longer quite so bright. It made him seem more human.

  Kristiana crossed her arms. “If you do not contact Isuma in the next two minutes and tell her to back off, I will tell her that your family tried to embarrass hers tonight.”

  I stared at Kristiana. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Not at all. But Peter Kole watched Rayhel with narrowed eyes.

  Yoan climbed up onto the bridge and moved behind his engineering dashboard, after sweeping the bridge and absorbing the tensions. Behind him came Dalton and Mace. My usual crew were reporting for duty. After the week we’d had, it was a delight to see them back at their old posts.

  But there was something going on here I was still catching up on.

  Rayhel raised his hand and even though I’d never seen the gesture before, I intuitively understand what the little wave meant. Peace. Stop. Enough. “I said I could help. I didn’t say I would be able to persuade Isuma in any way. She’s very angry right now.”

  Kristiana’s smile was brittle. “You’ve been having sex with her for years, Rayhel. Use that influence…or did you leave so little impression upon her that even that relationship won’t move her?”

  I admit my jaw sagged. The Florins had embarrassed Rayhel’s family seventy years ago—so badly he wore a jewel embedded in his wrist as a reminder of the blood debt…and he was sleeping with the head of that family?

  Rayhel’s eyes narrowed as Slate finished the translation. “Gloves off,” he muttered. “Very well. How do I hail her?”

  “The last I saw her, she was running for the door at the back of the Assembly Hall,” I said. “She could be anywhere down there.”

  Rayhel shook his head. “She keeps a four-man shuttle behind the Residence. She’ll be on her flagship by now.”

  “What frequency?” Lyssa asked him.

  He told her.

  She pointed to the corner of my dash. “Speak toward the pickup. Your message will be sent on that frequency.”

  “Ships in visual range,” Lyssa added.

  I looked at the windows. Yes, I could see the pinprick points of white light heading toward us. “We can’t go under or over them, Lyssa?”

  “They spread out in a net, completely covering the vector we need for the jump. I could elude them but not forever. We need them to clear out of the way so we can jump.”

  I nudged Rayhel. “You’re up.”

  He leaned toward the dashboard. Just in case he tried something cute while he was this close to me, I rested my stunner against his ribs. He glanced at me, his brow lifting, then returned his attention to the pickup on the dashboard.

  “Isuma Florina.” He spoke quickly and Slate murmured behind me. “This is Rayhel Melissa, aboard the Carinad ship. I am their prisoner. You need to clear your barricade out of the way and let them go.”

  “Repeat it,” I said, when static played on the overhead speakers. “And tell her we’ll kill you if she doesn’t get out of our way in five minutes.”

  He didn’t laugh at me. He didn’t even smile. His gaze flickered over my face, measuring my sincerity. Then he nodded and bent back to the dashboard and repeated the message, along with the threat I had given him.

  Static. Silence.

  Peter gave a hiss. “That token effort isn’t going to work,” she declared. “Isuma probably eats her lovers for breakfast.” She looked at Kristiana. “Big guns.”

  Rayhel, I noticed, was sweating again, even though it was cool and dry on the bridge. He couldn’t understand us, and although Slate was giving him translations of everything we said, Rayhel seemed to understand the intent, rather than the words themselves. His gaze measured, flickering from one to the other of us as we spoke.

  “I told you she wouldn’t be swayed by appeals to her emotional side,” Rayhel said. “That target doesn’t exist.”

  “Then you’ll have to find another way to change her mind,” Kristiana said. She was quite a bit shorter than Rayhel, but right then, the difference in their heights was barely noticeable.

  Rayhel gave a laugh devoid of amusement. “And how am I to do that? I told you my influence over her was minimal at best. All I intended to do was let her fleet captains know I was aboard.”

  He was lying. I was standing less than a meter away from him and I saw the flicker in his eyes.

  “You figure you’re so important, the mere deputy Director of the Assembly, that they’d stop from blowing us out of the sky?” I asked him.

  He glanced at me. “Better to risk that, than to return to Earth.” And that was truth.

  Kristiana shook her head. “If you won’t convince her, then why should we not toss you from the ship? Let you die sucking vacuum?” She paused. “It’s what we do to murderers.”

  Rayhel’s jaw worked. “I’ve never killed anyone in my life!” he protested.

  Kristiana took a step toward him. “Liar. It was your Drigu who killed Van Veen. You taught him to appeal to Constantine, to make it look like Jai’s assassination was arranged by the Constantina, so that Isuma would kill him. You started the civil war down there. And you killed Jai Van Veen even if you didn’t wield the knife.”

  I have burned bridges, tonight.

  I spun to face him, clenching the stunner. If I’d still been holding the knife I would have used it. Rage gripped me for thirty long seconds.

  Rayhel backed away from us, his hands raised. “You people live forever! What difference did it make to you?”

  Vara stalked past me, heading for Rayhel, her lips pulled back, her bloody teeth and snout on display. She growled, the sound low and loud.

  Rayhel swallowed. “When you get back home, you’ll have him back!”

  I made myself breathe, until the urge to do murder myself had fully passed. “You have a lot to learn about Carinads, Rayhel Melissa. I am going to presume that sheer ignorance makes you think that we can stand by and watch one of our own murdered without flinching. But my tolerance will last for exactly five minutes. If you haven’t got the blockade dismantled by then, I will personally shove you out the airlock.” I paused. “Please fuck this up so I can.”


  Rayhel measured me. His jaw worked. Then he gave a short nod. “There is a way,” he said shortly. He gestured to the pickup. “May I?”

  I stepped out of the way. I didn’t want to be that close to him.

  He moved over to the pickup and glanced at Lyssa. “Use a different frequency, this time.” He gave her the numbers, down to five decimal places and stepped over to the pickup. He glanced around the bridge.

  Because I had moved away from the shell, I was turned to face the back of the bridge. Nearly everyone had made their way to the bridge and stood along the wall. Marlow was absent, of course. Everyone was dirty and grim faced. They all watched Rayhel with unforgiving hatred in their eyes.

  He swallowed and bent to the pickup. “Isuma, my sweet. I know you’re listening. Now it’s just you and me. You should have listened to me the first time. Then we could have avoided this unpleasantness.”

  He paused.

  The static crackled for a moment. Then Isuma Florina’s voice issued from the speakers. “Clear this channel, Melissan. We have nothing to discuss.”

  “On the contrary,” Rayhel said swiftly. “First, the simple question. Will you disband the blockade?”

  “And let them go? After what they did? You should find a way to ditch that ship, Rayhel, because in three minutes, when the blockade has surrounded them on five sides, I am going to open fire and destroy them. They should not have got that far, but they won’t get any further.”

  Even Rayhel paused, his brow lifting in surprise, at her declaration.

  Peter gasped. “She never intended to let us off the surface,” she murmured to Kristiana. “It was all a show. That’s why she didn’t care how much we learned about Terrans. She knew the information would never reach the Carinad worlds.”

  Isuma’s happy and warm welcome. The friendly face only she had shown us. Constantine had resented us, but so had she. It was the will of the people that had got us there…and all three of the Assembly officials had used us to further their own agendas.

  There had never been any intention of finding a peaceful compromise with us.

  I wound my finger in a circle at Rayhel. His face had grown pale, as he put together Isuma’s true intentions, too. He nodded and said into the pickup; “Isuma, darling, you might want to reconsider opening fire. If you don’t order the fleet to disperse in the next two minutes, I will broadcast to all the worlds the fact that you are not Isuma Florina. That you aren’t even Asgar, but a mere Ami and a murderer with a resemblance to the real Isuma Florina, whose life you took when she was nineteen.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment.

  Had the real Isuma Florina been the woman he had loved and lost?

  Static.

  “There is no possible way you can know that. Or prove it,” Isuma replied, but I could hear the doubt in her voice, even via this peculiar and inefficient form of communications the Terrans used.

  “Are you willing to risk it?” Rayhel shot back.

  “If I destroy the Carinad ship, then you are gone, too,” Isuma pointed out coldly.

  “But not the records that will be released upon my death,” Rayhel replied. “You think I don’t know you? I slept with you for years. I know how your mind works. I knew I was taking my life in my own hands every time we laid together. So I took precautions, and that is one of them. There are full records. Documented proof. DNA samples…ah, yes, my sweet, fake Isuma…I took hair strands from your pillows and I had a lock of Isuma’s hair, too. Those DNA comparisons will defeat you.”

  I really think Rayhel had forgotten we were there, listening to every word carefully translated by Slate. His face worked, showing a range of emotions—hate, sorrow, anger…

  “So, be a sweetheart and move the ships out of the way,” Rayhel finished, his tone filled with acid. “Then you’ll never see me again.”

  “You’re joining them? You?”

  “I’m their prisoner,” Rayhel replied heavily. “And I really think they might kill me once this is over. If they don’t, I suspect a solitary cell awaits me somewhere over there.”

  “I’ll try to feel sorry for you,” Isuma replied, her tone cold and indifferent.

  The static cut out.

  “Blockade is breaking up,” Lyssa announced.

  I turned to look for myself. The ships were drifting apart, and those on the edges were pulling away.

  “Lyssa, as soon as our trajectory through them is clear, go!” I shouted. “Everyone, to your bunks! Juliyana, see Rayhel is locked in somewhere!” I threw myself against the inertia shell, as everyone streamed down the ramp, moving fast. The bridge cleared of people.

  Rayhel resisted Juliyana’s directions to get moving and looked at me. “I’m sorry. About Van Veen. I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand, but I can see that I have somehow wronged you—”

  “Someone shut him up!” I shouted, turning my attention to the readouts on my dashboard.

  A heavy thump, a sigh and a thud sounded.

  I jerked my head up.

  Slate stood over Rayhel’s inert body, his useless arm raised. Rayhel was still breathing, but he would have a headache at the very least, after this.

  Juliyana pressed her lips together for a second. “Wow. Took him with one blow. I’m impressed.”

  I looked at Slate, astonished.

  “That was what you meant, wasn’t it?” He twisted a little, then added, “Captain.”

  —33—

  While we went through the stomach curdling heavy gee pre-jump, Lyth sprinkled micro beacons across Terran space. They were self-locating, their final destinations programmed back on Wynchester.

  We had thought that distributing them would take place in a far more leisurely way and a lot closer to their final destinations, but everything we had thought about this trip had been wrong, so at least we were consistent.

  Once the Lythion was in the hole, we had nearly two weeks during which we did our best to keep Rayhel away from Marlow. Marlow didn’t come out of his stateroom very often, and I warned Rayhel that his best option was to stay in his, too.

  But that didn’t mean Rayhel was alone. Nearly everyone on the ship wanted to talk to him, to ask questions or demand explanations. I gave them all access to him, and to Slate, to translate for him.

  It didn’t surprise me that Kristiana and Peter, Arati Georgeson and Gratia Rosalie spent the most time with him, filleting him of every skerrick of information about the power struggles in the Terran Union. Union—there was an oxymoron!

  But Jonas Keskemeti also spent a few hours talking to the man. And Seong, of all people, sat across from Rayhel. I think he found closure in those few hours, which I discovered when he ate dinner with me and Dalton that night.

  “I couldn’t accept how different it was on Terra from what they told us it would be like,” Seong explained to me and Dalton. “But now I’ve seen it for myself and I’m…appalled.”

  I thought Seong had grown up a lot in the last few days. Stress and danger can do that. “What you saw on Terra was a concentrated sample of the very worst of Terran politics,” I told him. “Out on the other Terran worlds, it might very well be like what they told you in training.”

  “I hope so,” Seong said simply. “My mother is out there somewhere.”

  Keskemeti was another one who was changed by what he had seen on Terra and his long, long interview with Rayhel.

  “The man just does not think as we do,” Keskemeti had complained at the dinner table that night.

  “He’s Terran. He was raised to think a different way,” Dalton pointed out.

  “He is more alien than anything I have ever met that I considered non-human,” Keskemeti said. He didn’t sound pleased about it.

  “I think he’s in mourning,” Dalton said later, after Keskemeti was gone. “He has to put together a whole new worldview that makes sense of what he’s learned.”

  Nearly everyone who interviewed Rayhel ended up sitting across from me at the dinner table, telling me and
Dalton and those who sat with us what they had learned and gradually, I pieced together a picture of Earth politics, and all the maneuvers and plot-hatching that had taken place while we were on Terra. The story turned my guts.

  The Constantine, Belfon Constantine, had lied about everything. He had not wanted us there, learning about Terrans. He had argued strenuously that empty, symbolic Earth was the only location which would let us learn the least about Terrans, particularly their military strength.

  It was Belfon Constantine who had stopped us from exploring the wreck of the Success to the Bold. Muradar soldiers from his family had been formed into a temporary squad to picket the road and turn us back.

  He had blocked us in every way. But Belfon had also been in his seventh decade. Terran longevity therapies were adequate enough to give him youthful vigor but he was feeling his mortality. When the Terrans had learned about our ages and our cloning tech, Belfon had done everything he could to acquire that knowledge. He had directed the Terran techs to hack our computers. And he had stepped up the efforts to extract the information from Marlee Colton.

  But he had not abducted her.

  Marlee’s abduction was all Isuma Florina’s idea. Belfon had disapproved, but kept his mouth shut, then actively helped her when he learned about our regeneration therapies.

  Isuma Florina’s initial motive in taking Marlee was to learn more about Carinads, in the mistaken belief that extracting information from her would be as simple as plugging into a computer. She didn’t care that we would instantly suspect the Terrans of abducting her. She didn’t care what we learned about Terrans while we were there.

  She actively encouraged us to explore the planet, and then doctored the footage to show us abusing the wildlife. She wanted to turn public opinion even more against us, because she wanted a war. She set us up to provide a casus belli. The blockade had been a fallback plan…for she had intended to quietly murder us one by one. She had counted on the disappearance or death of each of us winding the survivors up to responding with violence. At which point, she could call in the navy and declare we were hostile.

  Unknown to us, a section of the wall beside every bed in every bedroom in the suite could be removed. The Terrans had merely to lean in and take the sleeper, which is what they did with Marlee. Maybe they injected sleepy gas first.