“But,” Jace said airily, as though he hadn’t noticed Gau’s anger, “we don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to. Right now, I’m much more interested in how you knew about that warehouse.”
The smile that pulled at Gau’s mouth was too fleeting for a Terran to catch. Under different circumstances, Mose might have missed it too, but all his attention had been locked onto the terse exchange. Mose was sure that tiny smile was the only real part of this interrogation. The rest of it was an act, just Gau buying time. But for what?
A hard knot twisted in Mose’s belly. He began to release more telepresence bots into the area in and around the Embassy building and readied them for translation. Something was going to break, and soon.
“You want to talk about my past?” Gau snapped—neatly sidestepping the question about the warehouse, Jace noticed. “Za’s administration chose me because I had no past. So it didn’t matter to them if I had a future, as long as they won their precious war.” His slitted pupils narrowed even farther, to white slivers. “I’ve seen your newsfeeds from that time; they made me out as some master strategist, collaborating with Za to take Olios 3. In reality I was Za’s tool.” Gau’s voice lowered to an almost inaudible hiss. “You don’t collaborate with your tools. You use them until they break.”
“But something else broke first,” Jace guessed. “Fate’s Shears.” He was rewarded by a humorless smile from Gau.
“Perceptive. Fate’s Shears was a gamechanger, as you Terrans say. A master stroke of nanowarfare. I knew from the moment I discovered her plans that it would be Shanazkowitz’s legacy.”
The bot status lights on Mose’s console had all turned blue, but he ignored them. Disbelief had frozen him in his seat. Gau had confessed, and Mose had the recording. He resisted the urge to play back the last few minutes to make sure the recording had caught everything.
The interrogator Jace seemed just as stunned. “You knew about Fate’s Shears and you didn’t warn Za? Why?”
“Za was already losing the war. If it wasn’t Fate’s Shears it would have been something else. I saw a chance to take a different path, so I took it.”
Jace digested this for a silent moment. “That,” he said at last, “is the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”
Malice flashed in Gau’s dark eyes. “Don’t be so righteous. It was your species that released the nanovirus in the first place. My games have always been about self-preservation because that is all there is. My life. Nothing else.”
A sick numbness spread through Mose’s stomach. He understood, in those few words, how easy it had been for Gau to write them all off: the millions of Osk dead in Za, the fugitives scattered across worlds. None of them had mattered, none of them were real to Gau. Will he even remember my name, Mose wondered, when he sees me?
Jace leaned forward on his elbows. “Why did you kill her?”
“Shanazkowitz?” It was inflected as a question, but Gau didn’t sound surprised. “She was my target, and I never miss my targets.”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“Well,” Gau rolled his head languidly on his neck. “There was a more practical reason.”
“The Project: Safeguard bill.”
“’Project . . . hmpf.” He gave Jace a smirk. “Shanazkowitz was always true to her military roots, despite her later posturing. It must have concerned her greatly that the reserve supply of a nanovirus with the capacity to murder a city was being stored right here in Neo-Chicago.” A kilometer above the room, Mose shot upright.
He knew what Gau was planning.
Mose’s fingers drew intricate patterns in the air as he switched half his sensory equipment to a bot placed on the exterior of the Embassy building. He left the audio feed open to the bot inside the interrogation chamber to continue eavesdropping on the session. With his ears still inside the room, Mose picked up the rest of the conversation even as his eyes adjusted to the position of the second bot, gripping the spun diamond wall about ten meters from the ground. The image relay was still fuzzy and indistinct. The conversation came through clearly on the first bot, though with a tinniness that overlaid the sounds with a sense of unreality.
“In fact,” Gau continued, “containing Fate’s Shears concerned Shanazkowitz so much she decided there was only one storage site secure enough.”
Mose’s bot had reached its final position. With a flick of the fingers on his left hand, he sharpened the visuals and drew in a harsh breath.
Clinging to the wall ten meters off the ground, his bot eyes stared into the shattered optical lens of a security drone. The spindly-legged robot had been crushed into the pavement by a titanic force that had splintered its legs and reduced the main body to a pile of conduits, wires, and shattered exterior plating. He angled his bot’s view outward, looking out over the concrete plaza: a second drone lay smashed on the steps, beneath the remains of a third which seemed to have been jaggedly sliced apart: the body, legs, and tendrils, minced into separate sections by what looked like heavy, shearing cuts.
Mose flipped his bot around, looked to the right. A similar scene of mechanical carnage awaited his gaze: more smashed and sliced-up drones, plus a couple of victims whose chassis were pitted with smoking holes, as though a strong acid had been sprayed directly onto the metal. Something, or rather several somethings, had been through there in a hurry.
“Krenkyr’s teeth,” Mose swore. This is my fault. He should have been monitoring the exterior. He breathed deeply; there was still time to correct the oversight. He redirected the bots to do a general scan of each floor of the Embassy and zero in on the loci of densest activity. That was where Gau’s forces would be, whoever they were.
He reopened the channel to the bot in the interrogation room. If anyone knew what was going to happen next, it was Gau. Mose would not let him slip away this time.
Jace had gone still at Gau’s last words, attuned to the danger thickening the air. He slipped a hand into his pocket and retrieved his palm slate, then turned it on below the table where the Osk couldn’t see.
Or tried to turn it on. Jace realized with a plummeting in his stomach that the communication device was dead. The ceiling lights flickered out a moment later.
“Electronics trouble, Jace?” Gau asked. He showed the tips of his teeth in a grin. Jace stood from his chair, sidled to the sliding door on his side of the room, and waved his access card over the scanner.
The door didn’t budge. He stood under the nearest camera bubble and shouted into it as loud as he could: “Security!”
“They can’t hear you. Anyway, I expect they’ll be busy for a while yet.”
He faced the Osk again. “The warehouse was a diversion.” The words felt cold and huge, too big for his tongue. An icy dread dripped into Jace’s stomach.
Gau inclined his head in a tiny bow. “Of course. I knew from the beginning it was Shanazkowitz’s decoy. Fate’s Shears is stored right here, in the Embassy building itself.” He indicated the edifice with a backward nod of his head. “My capture created an opening for my agents to slip through and disarm certain crucial systems. You see, there are people in this building who think it’s time to cut the Expansion down to size, and who believe I know the way to do it. They may work for you, but they believe in me.
“And now, I must join them.” With a slight twist, Gau pulled his wrists free of the silver tendrils, which had become as limp and lifeless as the tentacles of a dead mollusc. He levered himself off the block and approached the other side of the table.
Stumbling away, Jace felt the door against his back. He jammed his fingers into the gap between the door and its frame, his joints creaking with effort as he tried to wrench it open.
“You know, Mr. Jace, it felt good to tell someone else about my plan. It’s been a secret between me and my followers for so long, I was starting to feel it eat away at me from the inside. Do you h
ave any idea what it’s like to be a bearer of such secrets? Whether of your own making . . . or someone else’s . . . it’s a hard line of work.” Gau spoke softly as he advanced, the bone blades beneath his arms sliding into place with a whisper.
The door’s hydraulics were stuck fast. Jace’s knees went soft, and he had to press himself against the wall to keep upright.
“Please,” he begged. “Please wait! You don’t have to do this.” Part of him winced to hear the absurd cliché come out of his mouth, even now. But Gau paused, cocking his head.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he asked.
Jace sucked air. “You’ll be killing innocent people. Families. Surely that means something even to you.”
Gau half turned, staring into the middle distance. Something old and pained flashed across his dark eyes. “I had a family once.”
A single downward slash followed, faster than Jace could track it. He died with Gau’s words ringing in his ears.
Mose hissed in disgust as he watched the stroke split Jace from his right shoulder to his left side. From the torrent of bright red blood, he knew the man was dead before he even hit the ground. With a terse exhalation, he brought up the Embassy map. The bots he’d seeded into the building reported a locus of activity in the hangar. A grainy image of the dark hangar, seen through the bot’s eyes, projected itself onto the screen.
A dark, streamlined shape materialized in the foreground; even with the grainy resolution, Mose recognized the outlines of a seph’s cruiser. The Carnivore. Quiet scuffling from beyond the right side of the screen diverted Mose’s attention.
It sounded like speech of varied cadences—some of them quite unusual—interspersed with the unmistakable staccato of a keyboard. The odd rhythm of the keys told him the creature doing the typing was possessed of an anatomy very different from his own. After perhaps a minute, the clicking sounds halted, followed by a triumphant whistle from whoever had been laboring at the keys.
Circular, bright green lights sparked to life in the hangar floor. The running lights extended in two parallel lines from the right of the screen, encircling the Carnivore in sickly light. Mose blew out a long breath, feeling dizzy. Not long now.
Several floors higher up, Gau was more at peace than he’d been in a long time. The plan had swept him along in a wave that permitted almost no time for reflection; to pause had been to doubt, to question his moves—even his right to play at all. But now, hovering at the crest before events crashed into the channel he’d carved for them, he dared to believe he would succeed.
His satisfaction was just starting to tarnish at the edges with impatience—he’d expected his agent several minutes earlier; they had a schedule to keep—when the door to the interrogation room screeched open a few centimeters.
Faint blue sparks flew from the runners at top and bottom as a muscular, scaly green hand with two thick fingers forced its way through from the other side. The Arashal digits curled around the door and wrenched it open all the way with a shriek of protesting metal.
The only light in the outside corridor leaked from the passage’s thin, high windows—a reddish orange, sunset glow. Gau could not see much more around the massive frame of his rescuer. Craning his neck up to meet his follower’s eye, Gau allowed himself a brief, needle-toothed smile.
“Arkk. I’m glad you’ve arrived.”
The Arashal gazed at Gau with his bullet-shaped head turned to one side; the crimson gem of his eye seemed to inspect him from head to foot, like an infrared scanner. He said nothing. Arkk never said anything. Without lowering his gaze, he raised a massive hand to scratch at the worn, scale-less patches of pearly blue skin at the base of his neck, where a collar of servitude had rested a long time ago.
Arkk was by far the most loyal of his followers, but sometimes the Arashal’s devotion verged on the pathological. At those times, as now, he would stare at Gau as though afraid Gau might disappear if he took his eyes off him for a moment. The stare always felt like a gesture of disrespect, though Gau had realized years ago that it wasn’t. Quite the contrary: he’d decided it was the closest the Arashal could come to expressing his trust and admiration in Gau.
Arkk swung his bullet head down and observed the bloody corpse of Gau’s erstwhile interrogator, Bryan Jace, betraying no more emotion than he had while staring at Gau himself. Then he turned back the way he had come and stalked in long strides down the corridor toward the elevator.
Gau strode out of the chamber after Arkk. It did no good to become impatient with him, and his stoic silence was not directed at Gau alone. For all the years Gau had known him, Arkk hadn’t uttered a single coherent syllable either to him or any of his followers.
The elevator doors slid open, and the mismatched pair stepped in. Arkk stood silent as Gau pushed the button for the hangar level, closing his eyes in satisfaction as their car began its descent.
“I trust everything went smoothly?” asked Gau. The sentient Buckyball hovering in front of him looked more like a piece of abstract sculpture than an organism: a geodesic sphere of faceted indigo blue crystal evenly dotted with multiple black eyespots, floating on a cushion of agitated air. Flashes of light flickered deep in the alien’s crystal body as translating equipment moved and clicked deep beneath its translucent outer shell, translating his speech into the luminescent bursts of the Buckyball’s language.
The translator rendered its reply. “There were no complications. The Embassy building is yours.”
“Good. You may continue with your duties.” The living orb swooped off, accompanied by an audible crackle of ionized particles as its propulsive movement heated the air.
He turned away and joined the main cluster of his followers in the middle of the hangar. They had congregated near where the Carnivore crouched in a ring of running lights. He felt a rush of admiration as he gazed at the ship bathed in the soft, sea-green glow of the ship-pad lights. One of his followers had considerately laid his seph armor beside the pad. Gau shucked off the ridiculous jumpsuit and donned the armored plates.
Gau’s followers were huddled in a circle at the Carnivore’s immediate right, around several dark cylinders about two meters in height and a meter in diameter. A computer console stood behind them; furious typing sounded from its keyboard. Then the typing ceased, succeeded by a whistling hiss of satisfaction. Another ring of pale green lights illuminated the cylinders, revealing their contents: each transparent tank contained a batch of cultured nanomachines, suspended in a soupy, translucent gray sludge. Gau smiled as he set eyes on them.
His team made room as Gau approached the computer console. Pri had pushed the wheeled office chair in front of the console to one side. The Drevl Char did not sit. Instead, she stood on eight muscled, ropy legs which ended in clawed stumps. The legs met in a ring of muscle that separated her thorax from her abdomen, which hung down in a dark comma within the bell formed by her legs. The lump of a rebreather pack clung to her back, ported into the spiracles along her shoulders.
Pri turned from the keyboard, giving Gau a good view of the striated bands of scar tissue crisscrossing her thorax. She scratched absently at the old wounds with a segmented tentacle. At the moment, claw-tipped manipulatory tendrils sprouted from the apertures between segments on two of her four arms, making the jointed appendages look like sea fronds. She hadn’t bothered to retract the tendrils into their protective compartments yet.
For a moment, she studied Gau with dark eyes. Pri had four of them: one on either side of her teardrop-shaped head capsule, and two more set one above the other in her face, above a sharply downward-pointing mouth. Two long antennae waved toward Gau; then the point of her mouth split into four triangular sections, each lined with a sharp chewing ridge in place of teeth, as she smiled at him.
«You have arrived!» Her words percolated into his awareness like the fragment of a dream: soundless O’o Nezz as fluent as his own thoughts, as t
he electromagnetic field generated by her antennae manipulated the linguistic center of his brain. Drevl Char telepathy was always slightly unnerving at first. It felt as though a piece of his own brain was thinking the telepathic alien’s thoughts.
“Just in time, it seems.” Gau stroked a palm down the nearest canister. “Have you programmed the swarm yet?”
Pri inclined her pointed head. «Yes,» she sent, with the clear ring that told him her words were to the group at large. «Fate’s Shears is ready for release.»
“Excellent.” He pointed a long arm at a Rul. “Sand Sweeper, have your team load up the Embassy ships. Then I have an announcement to make.” The Rul named Sand Sweeper conversed with her two teammates briefly, dapples of bioluminescent lightspeech spiraling down the beings’ pod-shaped limbs. The huddle broke up, and the Rul began ferrying the canisters to the waiting Embassy ships.
Satisfied the work was going well, Gau had turned away when Pri spoke again. «Please stay. I could use help with the boot program for your ship.»
He met her by the console. “You wanted to talk to me?” Gau asked, a knowing edge to his tone. Pri’s antennae drooped a little, accompanied by a touch of disappointment in his head.
«I see my excuse was rather transparent.»
“You know more about programming than the rest of us combined. What’s bothering you?”
«The teams will be departing in less than a standard hour.» Pri scratched nervously at her scarred thorax with a tendril. «And you haven’t yet told the others where we’re going.»
“Pri, we talked about this. Our destination is need-to-know information.” A precaution in case any of his team were captured before time. Of course, he’d had to tell Pri where they were going. As a Drevl Char, she could just pull the information from his head; instead, he’d used it to plant a seed of trust between them.
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