by Natalie Grey
She cursed herself for not having killed Uleq the moment he stepped foot in the base, then stopped. All her deductions only applied if her father was telling the truth.
He looked amused as he watched her, and she grew angry. He had always done this: tested her, smirked at her while she tried to find the right answer.
“We have more pressing matters,” Ilia said, sidestepping the entire issue. “Uleq has made an enemy of a human ship. It is now coming to find us.”
“You know this how?” He looked at her coldly. “No one should know where this base is…unless you have neglected some critical piece of security.”
“I have not.” Ilia kept her voice strong. She had nothing to be ashamed of. “Uleq engaged the humans several times, first against their Queen, and more recently against this ship, piloted by…one of their generals.” As far as she could make out, that was what Barnabas was. “During these engagements, this human ship discovered two of our bases with impressive speed. I find it prudent to assume that they will also find this one.”
“So you have called the fleet back.” He considered this as he resumed pacing.
“Yes.” What did he want her to say? She wanted to scream.
“I will be very displeased if this threat is not neutralized, Ilia.”
“I am doing what I can to undo Uleq’s damage.”
He gave her a sharp look. “Do not pass blame, Ilia. Not if you hope to lead this Corporation someday.”
But it wasn’t my fault! Ilia bit the inside of her cheek to hold the words back. Her father would never listen to them, only think less of her if she pleaded her innocence. She looked down at her hands and closed her eyes in fear when he stopped behind her.
“Ilia. Look at me.”
She forced herself to obey him, even though every instinct said to run. She raised her chin and turned to meet his eyes. He was smiling, to her shock.
“You have never hesitated to do what had to be done,” he said. “From when you very small, I knew you were determined. You showed strength time and again.”
Ilia said nothing. To relax now could be fatal. Her father’s mood could change in an instant.
“I admit I was surprised to hear that Uleq was still alive,” her father said. “But not displeased.”
Fool, FOOL. Ilia raged at herself. She should have killed her brother. Anything other than having her father be glad to see him.
“It speaks well of you that you do not deal too coldly with your family,” her father said. He gave a distant sort of smile. “Not because our family should be above justice, Ilia. That is not what I mean.”
She frowned.
“No, it is because those who follow us…are weak. They are lenient with their own families. If we were to do what must be done without any hesitation, it would unnerve them. When your uncle had to die, I made sure to have a trial. I had the evidence shown and appeared to be making a decision. I had known he was guilty from the first day, and that he must die. But the others who commanded the fleet required all the pageantries of that trial. I am glad that, young as you were, you absorbed that lesson.”
Ilia managed to smile. That wasn’t what she remembered from that day, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell him that. She nodded at him.
“And I admit…” He sighed. “I will be glad to see Uleq one more time before he has to die. He is my son, after all.”
Under the long sleeves of her robe, Ilia clasped her hands together until they hurt. She should be glad that her father agreed with her about Uleq’s death, but instead, all she could find in her heart was sadness.
All her life, Ilia had wanted to win. She had wanted to be the favorite child.
Now she was about to get what she wanted, but this was what she’d win—a father whose show of love was a last hug before execution.
It was probably best that she was going to have her father killed, she thought.
But that didn’t alleviate the hollow feeling in her chest.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I have something for our next chess match,” Barnabas told Shinigami. He directed one of his pawns into place.
She arched one black eyebrow. “A special new form of cheating because you can’t win otherwise?”
“Demonstrably fallacious, Shinigami, and you know it. And no. It is...” He reached into a bag by his chair and pulled something out. “This.”
“What. The hell. Is that?”
“A chessboard,” Barnabas explained innocently.
“It’s...”
“A manual chess board.” He reached into the bag again and pulled out a carved stone piece. “Made specially from the stone on High Tortuga. I commissioned it before we left the first time and was able to pick it up when we were there a couple of weeks ago. Don’t you like it? It’s a gift.”
“I am a holograph,” Shinigami said icily. “I cannot pick up chess pieces.”
“I’ll move them for you.” Barnabas smiled. He was doing his best to look innocent, but there was a faint gleam in his eye. “And you know what’s best about this chessboard?”
“What?” Shinigami ground out.
“Since there’s no way to hack it, there’s no way to cheat!”
“That’s a lie. There’s sleight of hand and camera manipulation. You just mean it’s something I can’t cheat with, you bastard.”
Barnabas was laughing now. “I would never use this to gain a dishonorable advantage over you.”
“Oh, no? You wouldn’t? You’re clearly not Barnabas, then. Who are you? What have you done with him, you son of a bitch?”
Barnabas grinned as he slid a piece into place. “All right, I might have stumbled across some of your latest cheating programs and decided to stave that off a little.”
“There is no way you could have ‘stumbled across’ them. How the hell did you find those?”
“So you do have them. You admit that.”
“Son of a—” Shinigami scowled and transformed her avatar into Baba Yaga. “Listen up, ingrate!”
“Ingrate? I’m hundreds of years older than you, young whippersnapper, so don’t speak to me like you’re the grandma. Although I must say…” Barnabas grinned wickedly. “You’re not aging very well.” When Shinigami’s face got stormy, he laughed. “I’ll be damned, that works on female AIs, too.”
“If by ‘works,’ you mean, ‘makes them want to put crushed up glass in your food,’ then yes, it works beautifully.” She leaned back in her chair, frowning at him, and suddenly sat bolt upright. “Jeltor. You used Jeltor to get into my programs.”
Barnabas started laughing again. “All’s fair.”
“You let him into an Empire AI?”
“Oh, please, those programs were hidden on a partitioned server with no encryption. You’d been using Gar to store them for weeks. Once I figured that out…I just had to get to them. And since you had Gar keeping the only access module you knew of to get into it, I had to get creative. Jeltor’s suit can modify its hacking tip.”
“Sneaky bastard,” Shinigami grumbled.
“Mm-hmm. Are you going to make a move, or should I just declare myself the winner?”
Her eyes glowed. “Try it, and I’ll teach you a new meaning for the word ‘pain.’”
Barnabas only snickered.
Tafa was painting when Barnabas found her later.
The ship had been headed toward the Votayett system for about a day while Shinigami and Barnabas worked to figure out where the actual Yennai base might be. Gar and Jeltor prepared for the battle, but since Tafa would not be fighting, she had little to do other than paint.
When Barnabas entered the room, he paused on the threshold, and she turned to see him looking at her latest completed painting.
“What are you doing?” she asked finally.
He looked at her. “Shinigami has access to certain pieces of my neural networks, and I’ve asked her to show me your paintings close to the way you might see them. She shows my brain the input of one picture com
ing through one eye, and the other coming through the other eye. It isn’t exact, of course.”
Tafa tilted her head to the side curiously. “Wouldn’t it be? That’s how I see them.”
“Because humans have both eyes pointing forward, they use the variation between the images received to create depth perception,” Barnabas explained. “Even when we see two totally different images, our brains try to make sense of them in a different way than yours does. I’ve tried shifting the images to my peripheral vision…but I admit that just gave me a headache. Regardless, they’re beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Tafa smiled. She looked around and was very aware of the mess she had made in this beautiful white room. “Would you like to come in? It’s terribly messy, but perhaps—”
“You should see the workshops our engineers have,” Barnabas said with a smile. “And, yes, thank you. I came to see how you were doing.”
“Well enough, I guess.” Tafa fluttered her fingers in the Yofu equivalent of a shrug. “There’s not much to do.”
Barnabas said nothing, watching her quietly.
“I mean, I’m painting, but…something’s missing.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t suppose you could sit over there.”
“Why—oh.” Barnabas took his chair and moved it to her side. He still faced her, but now she could see him with one eye. “This takes some getting used to.”
“What’s it like to see only one thing?”
“Much less interesting, I think, than seeing two things.” Barnabas smiled. “Though I suppose I couldn’t say for certain. It sounds like a philosophical question that would be quite impossible to answer.”
“I hate philosophy,” Tafa said with a shudder. “Mustafee always loved it. He’d quote it at people before he had them executed.” Her voice was low and resentful. “He wanted everything he did to be justified, but he was only ever doing it for himself. He enjoyed being cruel.”
“I know,” Barnabas reassured. He remembered, with unpleasant vividness, the taste of Mustafee Boreir’s thoughts. “He was…well, he won’t be missed, I don’t imagine.”
“Only by people who also need to be brought to justice,” Tafa remarked succinctly. She looked at one of her paintings. “I think he’s what’s missing, though. I spent so much time worrying about him that now I don’t know what to do with myself. My parents…had a cause. They really believed in something. I was so concerned with my own survival that I didn’t have anything like that.”
“Perhaps you’ll find one,” Barnabas offered. “But art is its own cause, don’t you think?”
Tafa swung her head so she could see him first with one eye, then the other. She frowned unsure if he was joking.
“I’m quite serious,” Barnabas said. “I told you about the manuscripts.”
He paused and considered.
“One of the things you practice as a monk,” Barnabas said, “is making everything you do a devotion.”
“Devotion?”
“A prayer.” He considered. “More than a prayer—a service to God. Do the Yofu have deities?”
“Not like humans, I don’t think. It would be too complicated to explain. I know what a deity is, though, for other species.”
“Very well, then. Prayer is sometimes seen as a dialogue, a request made to God. Then when people do something extraordinary and devote that act to God, or proclaim that they do it to glorify God, they see that as something different than prayer. But a devotion, in the way a monk would perform it, is to do every task of daily life as a…meditation. To do even the littlest thing as if it is for the glory of all creation. Tending a garden, washing dishes, keeping livestock.” Barnabas nodded to the painting. “Creating art.”
“I do not worship your God,” Tafa observed.
Barnabas smiled. “Neither do I. Not in the way a monk would, at any rate. My understanding of things is somewhat different from theirs.”
“You were a monk, but you did not believe as they did?”
“It is…complicated.” Barnabas took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I am not just a human. I have changed in ways that some would say mean I cannot worship God. I do not believe that, but it also propelled me to look beyond one view of things. To understand further, I think you would need rather more information about human society than you probably want.” He smiled.
Tafa laughed. “I don’t understand Yofu, let alone humans.”
“I think that would be the honest assessment of anyone speaking about their own species,” Barnabas agreed. “Any sentient species is filled with contradictions.”
Tafa pulled her knees up to her chest and smiled at him. She could not remember having a simple conversation with anyone like this in years. She had always been afraid that the people she spoke to were spies from Mustafee, or that he had hidden recording devices somewhere. If she said the wrong thing, she would be punished.
To be able to indulge in a conversation without that fear was a luxury she had never expected. Expectations, after all, led to hope—and she had known since her parents were taken that hope was the most painful thing.
“Tell me about this piece.” Barnabas nodded at the finished painting.
Tafa bit her lip as she stared at it. “When I was very little, my parents took me to see my mother’s home. She was born in the southern hemisphere, very different from the north. Where she was from, it was all blue hills and scrub brush, and when the sun set, it would be gorgeous every night. We stayed in her parents’ house.”
Barnabas looked at the painting. He did not speak, only waited for her to explain further.
“I think it was probably on that trip that she rediscovered her belief of…” Tafa sighed and searched for the word. “Peace? Not having weapons.”
Barnabas nodded.
“For years, I did not think of it at all, though it is one of my happiest memories. My mother—” she pointed to a piece of the blue image, which somehow seemed to pulse with energy despite being only part of an abstract swirl “—came alive when she was there. I remember her smiling all the time. For months after that, things were different. She was filled with purpose, and she and my father fell more in love than they were even at the start, I think.”
“It hurt to remember it,” Barnabas suggested.
“Yes.” She looked at him and tried not to cry. For a moment, she hung her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “If they hadn’t gone back, they wouldn’t have…gotten into that mess. Gotten killed. That’s what I told myself, anyway.”
“You know that’s not necessarily true.”
“Yes.” Tafa clenched her hands, the dual thumbs closing over one another. “And I know it’s not their fault, as much as I wanted it to be.” She looked up to see Barnabas staring at her curiously. “It doesn’t make sense, does it? Mustafee and my aunt wanted to destroy us. They put my parents through things that no one should ever have to suffer. I should have blamed them. But they had all the power in my world, and the more I think about it, the more I wanted it to be my parents’ fault. I wanted to believe that they had done something wrong, rather than the whole universe is messed up and evil people have all the power.”
There was a silent moment.
“Anyway, that’s the painting. That trip. I don’t want to hate my parents anymore for being tortured or being killed. Missing them hurts so much more.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “But it’s the truth. Hating them was…believing a lie. I’m done believing Mustafee’s lies.”
Barnabas reached out to clasp her hand silently, and after a moment of surprise, she closed her fingers around his.
“I know how difficult it is to grieve,” he said. “And how much easier it is to take solace in anger. But you’re right, it’s better, to be honest.”
There was a small crackle in the speakers. “Am I interrupting?” Shinigami asked.
Barnabas looked at Tafa, who sniffled and shook her head. “No.”
“That’s a lovely painting,” Shinigami told her. Her tone was a bit
awkward, as if she were trying to be nice and wasn’t quite sure how to do it.
That made Tafa’s heart feel like it was going to burst for some reason. These people might go around wreaking utter havoc with missiles and guns, but they were some of the nicest people she’d ever met. She wasn’t sure how that made any sense at all, but it was true.
She had friends, for the first time in her life.
“Thank you, Shinigami.”
“Yeah,” Shinigami said, still awkward. “Big B, we have a location lock on the base.”
“I’ll be there in a moment.” Barnabas practically leaped out of his chair. He smiled at Tafa. “I look forward to seeing the rest of your paintings.”
“Sure.” Tafa smiled, picked up her brush and started painting again.
Could art be a worthy purpose in life? She was intrigued to find out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
A day and a half passed on the Overlook, and that was enough time for Crallus to learn to hate the sound of the reactor below. Food was brought—not much of it—and once or twice, the guards peered through the door as if they wondered if they could get away with beating the prisoners.
Crallus would almost have welcomed that, at this point.
When the door slid open again he felt his heart leap, but he didn’t look. Let them try to sneak up on him. They’d kill him if he fought back, but he knew they’d kill him anyway. He’d get in a good fight before they took him down. He’d make them hurt. He’d—
“My son.”
Uleq’s head jerked up, and Crallus looked around sharply as well.
Torcellans, apparently, didn’t age—at least if this one was anything to go by. He looked dangerous and beautiful in the way Crallus imagined the monsters from his bedtime stories did when he was a child. Koel Yennai looked like the sort of monster whose very words would steal your soul. Crallus could see the echo of his features in Uleq’s face now.