Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Those are Aristan’s people, yes?” Lisbeth asked her escorts as they approached. “Is he moving another motion?”

  “Against Gesul,” Timoshene said grimly. “Tobenrah has granted Gesul’s forces protection under the powers of the Kunadim. Aristan is challenging the legality of that protection.”

  “What happens if he wins?”

  “Gesul will be forced to either flee, or submit to sudra.”

  Lisbeth blinked. ‘Sudra’ was essentially to throw oneself at the feet of a superior, and hope for mercy. In the case of Gesul, with Aristan, it didn’t seem likely. “What happens to Gesul’s followers if that happens?”

  “Either another will rise to take Gesul’s place, or many will fold into Aristan’s camp. Either way, should it happen, Gesul’s time is likely finished.” And as his loyal servants, Timoshene and Semaya’s time too, Lisbeth suspected. And likely her own, as well.

  Lisbeth noticed many of the dark-robed Domesh watching her as she passed, sombre stares within hoods and veils. Aristan would brook no argument, it was clear. Under him, the Domesh would be all one thing, or nothing at all. Those eyes upon her held no particular malevolence, yet somehow Lisbeth found that the most frightening thing of all. The Domesh did not seek to stop Gesul asking questions from any particular hatred or ideological conviction that a human might understand. They sought to restore order for its own sake, and the simple continuities it created. Gesul was a tall blade of grass on a well-mowed field. That he may have been the best blade of grass did not matter to these parren one bit.

  “Seems an enormous waste of time given Aristan’s trying to join with the local government and will just attack us anyway,” Lisbeth muttered. “Say, what’s happened to the Council of Truthtellers? Are they down yet?”

  Tobenrah’s Council of Truthtellers had tried to broadcast to the system their tale of the deepynine attack in Brehn System. There had been vision from Phoenix, of Mylor Station, and the deepynine ships that had done it. But the Elsium Administration had been jamming those transmissions, so the Council had taken a heavily guarded shuttle down to the planet, where broadcasts would be much harder to jam without shutting down the entire planetary network.

  “Yes, they came down a short while ago,” Semaya admitted, glasses on and keeping a close watch on all sorts of encrypted data that Tobenrah’s higher advisors were feeding to her. “But now there is jamming here too. Planetary coms are being disrupted, but there seems to be no way to gain a clear transmission.”

  It was a problem unimagined by humans. On Homeworld, even under Fleet’s strict secrecy laws, there would always be some underground daredevil prepared to break the law, spread classified data, then cover his tracks. On parren worlds, there were none. Defiance was only conducted by leaders, not followers.

  Suddenly Lisbeth realised. “Semaya, I have a friend, up on Phoenix, who could probably help you to get a clear transmission.”

  Semaya glanced at her as they walked. “A friend?” With cool parren skepticism, and perhaps a little alarm. Lisbeth was certain she understood.

  “A friend, yes.”

  “I am uncertain that Tobenrah will like assistance from this friend.”

  “Well you can tell Tobenrah that if he wants to tell the population about the deepynine threat, he may not have another choice.”

  They passed more hurrying officials, and others locked in serious conversation, clustered in small groups, watched by armed guards. There were even armoured marines in here as well. Lisbeth wasn’t certain of the logic to that — surely if fighting so heavy that it required heavy armour broke out inside the capitol palace, the battle was already lost? But then, there was the parren penchant for internal betrayals and treacheries to consider.

  “So if Tobenrah can’t use coms,” Lisbeth pressed, “how is he talking to the government building?” Tobenrah had declared Kunadim control over the planet and system, and thus this entire sector of space, including Brehn System. It had been necessary, he’d declared, given the local government’s refusal to cooperate. A whole team of Kunadim administrators, with their security, had headed up to the Parliament in the last half-hour, she’d discovered as soon as she’d left PH-1 on the Parliament steps.

  “There is a laser communication facility on the roof,” Semaya explained, pointing upward. “And the Parliament is on a hill, so there is a clear line of sight. But the Parliament are refusing to hand over any communications codes for local networks, and the Parliament itself is now being jammed.”

  What a mess, Lisbeth thought as they entered the central atrium, beneath a dome even higher than the last, bright beams of sunlight spearing from small windows overhead. She placed the AR glasses on her face as they climbed the wide stairway toward the upper administrative levels, where higher parren office was always located… and immediately there came a familiar voice in her glasses-linked ear-uplink.

  “Hello Lisbeth,” said Styx. “It is better that you don’t enquire how this communication is taking place, the relays through civilian networks are quite complex, and involve quite a lot of illegality that could place Phoenix in difficulty with her hosts, I am sure. There is also approximately a three second delay as a result of all those relays, so I will get straight to the question. The enemies of Tobenrah are jamming his communications, both at your current location, and in the Parliament. Do you judge it wise to unjam them?”

  Lisbeth took a deep breath, ignoring Semaya breaking into conversation with someone else, querying an urgent matter. Phoenix was asking her. She doubted it was purely Styx’s idea — Styx was very reluctant to intervene in the affairs of organics, and would only make a major intervention like this with the approval of Phoenix bridge crew. With Erik on the planet, that would mean second-shift ran the bridge — Lieutenant Commander Draper as acting-captain, and Lieutenant Angela Lassa on Coms.

  “I think I should ask Tobenrah first,” Lisbeth replied, getting a look from Timoshene as they climbed the stairs. She indicated that she was on coms. “I think he will have some discomfort with these methods, but he may not have a choice. And I think you’d better ask the Captain himself… unjamming transmissions may have the effect of escalating political tensions, perhaps even accelerating any military action by the local government and Aristan against Tobenrah.” And she waited, as she mounted the next flight to the second level, for Styx to hear, and then reply.

  Seven seconds later, she did. “Lisbeth, Commander Draper has authorised me to inform you that Phoenix can disable many of Aristan’s and the local government’s vessels without firing a shot. Aristan has doubtless informed them what happened to his own ships at Cephilae, but that will not help them, as neither he nor they have any technological means of defending themselves. In this proximity to a civilian planetary communications system, even less so, given their additional connections and thus vulnerabilities.”

  It began to dawn on Lisbeth precisely what Styx was saying. Planetary communications networks were all interconnected, obviously. Those networks were mind-bogglingly complicated, and possessed so many barriers against hacking to make the prospect of more than denting them unlikely, for the most sophisticated known technologies in the Spiral. And Styx could carve through all of those barriers like a hot knife through butter. Could probably even take control of the entire network, and make it dance to her tune. Advanced as the parren no doubt considered their tech, to Styx it was a pile of obsolete junk. Defeating their security would be like Lisbeth solving problems in a children’s puzzlebook.

  “I will pass on this offer to Tobenrah also,” she replied. “Thank you Phoenix, is there anything else?” She was careful not to say Styx’s name out loud. She’d spoken the name to Gesul, and while Gesul did not seem like one to gossip, it was possible others had heard the name by now, or would simply guess.

  “That is all, Lisbeth. I am just a communications icon away if you need me.”

  “Your ‘friend’ on Phoenix?” Semaya asked, as they cleared the top steps, and headed along a
less-populated hall. Very little got past Semaya, Lisbeth was noticing.

  “Yes,” said Lisbeth. “With a message for Tobenrah. I must speak with him.”

  When they’d passed a final layer of security and administrative assistants into Tobenrah’s chamber, Lisbeth found that the floor before Tobenrah was already occupied. Tobenrah sat slightly higher, on a raised wooden platform and cushions, while parren in various colours and styles of tunic and robe knelt before him, and discussed in respectful Porgesh too fast and overlapping for Lisbeth’s translator to follow. Semaya made her way past the watching observers, advisors and guards that lined the walls, before finally indicating a clear space for Lisbeth to stand in, with Semaya and Timoshene on either side.

  Tobenrah’s eyes flicked her way, in mid-conversation with the other four parren, before returning to the conversation. Lisbeth leaned to Semaya. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “The four house leaders,” Semaya replied, in a similar whisper. “Fortitude, Acquisitive, Creative and Enquiry.”

  Lisbeth stared at her, then back at the floor. There being five parren houses, each house typically held twenty percent of the population, on average, in any given system. Drezen System, Lisbeth knew, was closer to thirty percent House Harmony. That left the other seventy percent of the population spread between the remaining four houses. Parren from the ruling house almost never mistreated the followers of the other four houses, but neither did they invite them to participate in the higher levels of governance. So what were these four doing here?

  “They’re the yural?” Lisbeth asked, recalling this particular lesson. “The shepherds?” Semaya nodded, having learned that gesture from Lisbeth. If you were a regular parren, on a world like Elsium, and not of the ruling house, you still had someone to follow. Protocol said you must obey your ruler and his administration, even if not of your house, but neither could that ruler expect much more from you than to pay taxes and make orderly conduct. Cooperation from the non-house population in larger ventures, like joining the military, or participating in security matters, was generally out, and non-house rulers would not stretch their authority by demanding it.

  A House Fortitude parren on Elsium had a Fortitude civilian administration to follow, lead by the Fortitude yural. The yural was generally not a political figure or person of ambition, given how completely vulnerable he was to assassination from a planetary ruler who found him threatening. Rather, the yural was usually an uncharismatic bureaucrat appointed by the federal house leadership — each house’s equivalent of the Kunadeen. Lisbeth had discovered that her translator found the Porgesh word ‘yural’ roughly equivalent with the human word ‘shepherd’, as both derived from the guardians of defenseless livestock, in pre-technological times. Parren from the non-ruling house were considered ‘sheep’, to be mustered, grazed, and occasionally shorn or milked. Among parren, it was not the insult it would have seemed to most humans. Yural would never allow their lambs to be slaughtered, and many parren were vegetarian anyhow.

  The yural’s actual job, Lisbeth had thought when explained to her, was something like what the head ambassador would do in an embassy — ensure the rights of his house members, and represent them in any legal matters against the ruling authorities. There were also cultural matters pertaining to each house, involving longstanding, house-specific traditions, that the yural would oversee, and the recording of identifications and phase-changes for the matter of census — a very important thing for each house, considering how the Jusica noted the census changes brought about by phase-shift when considering how and when the rulership of parren houses and denominations would shift from one house to another.

  “What are they doing here?” Lisbeth pressed.

  “If one would listen,” Semaya said with impeccable politeness, “one might discover.”

  Lisbeth tried, but formal parren conversation was far different from the one-on-one variety they usually had with her. Parren did not always address matters directly with each other, for one thing, but rather settled for oblique references or euphemisms that a human, or her AI translator, would miss completely. With an alien guest they were deliberately blunt, to avoid misunderstanding. Here, she listened to as many words as the translator could catch, and tried hard to read between the lines.

  Certainly it was a great breach of protocol for a planetary ruler, to say nothing of the house ruler himself, to convene such a gathering of yural. That it had become politically necessary indicated great weakness on the part of the ruler, and was thus a humiliation. But no one would deny that Tobenrah’s position here was weak.

  Perhaps that was it, Lisbeth thought. Tobenrah couldn’t hide that factional weakness, and so had decided not to try. Instead, he appealed to the greater cause of parren security, in the face of a greater threat. Deepynines, attacking Brehn System, and killing 40,000 parren. He, Tobenrah, was the only one proposing to fight them. The Elsium Administration, and Aristan, were proposing only to gain power for themselves, and nothing more. Perhaps Tobenrah was appealing to them not on the basis of house, as happened in most parren political conversations, but on the basis of parren unity.

  Ironically, it occurred to her, parren unity was precisely what Aristan proposed as well… by trying to make everyone into Domesh, in the imagined image of the late and great Drakhil.

  When finally the meeting was over, there were more announcements, and some bowing, and finally some differently-robed officials moving amongst the visiting party of yural with smoking containers of incense.

  “A cleansing ceremony,” Semaya explained, a murmur at Lisbeth’s side. “To mix the houses, before a Ruler of House Harmony, is to create an impurity.” Lisbeth saw a lot of very solemn faces among Tobenrah’s assembled advisors, and some grim expressions too. No doubt they thought he debased himself with such a meeting.

  “I sometimes get the feeling,” Lisbeth murmured back, “that parren are far more comfortable with a human like me than they are with parren from other houses.”

  Semaya smiled, faintly. “It does not require the cleansing ceremony, no. To mix the houses, to mix the minds of the five phases, is impure in the karan.” That was what parren called the great, collected lore of relationships between the houses. Even today there were great monasteries devoted to its study.

  “So for a leader to mix with aliens is not unclean,” Lisbeth said drily. “But for him to mix with House Fortitude is?”

  Semaya gave her a sideways look. “Humanity was once so divided. It took near-genocide to unite those of you who remained, and make you one. These ways of ours are not truly so strange, it is rather that humans have forgotten who they once were.” And Lisbeth found that she could not think of anything to say to that.

  Then she caught sight of Gesul, moving past Tobenrah’s advisors to kneel beside his ruler on the matting, and murmur, and indicate to Semaya. Tobenrah looked, with that displeased glare of powerful parren, as the yural filed from the room, and kept any hint of an opinion from their faces. Tobenrah gave an order, which two more officials repeated in loud unison, and clapped their hands. To Lisbeth’s surprise, everyone else began to follow the yural from the room.

  Places were presented on the mat before the Harmony lord, and Lisbeth went with Semaya to kneel, heart beating a little faster now, in what was surely not a safe situation. Tobenrah was a powerful man put in a dangerous situation. Such men could see lives ended with a command, and desperate circumstances would make those commands more likely. Once knelt, Lisbeth gazed at the matting just before Tobenrah’s robed knees. Parren did not require a deep bow, considering posture too important. Lisbeth concentrated on hers… a losing battle, as she could never match the grace of a willow like Semaya.

  Gesul took his place at Tobenrah’s left. Lisbeth risked a glance at several advisors who remained, standing against the rear wall. They did not seem pleased.

  “Lisbeth Debogande,” said Tobenrah. “You have returned.” You did not rejoin your brother, he meant. Lisbeth had g
ained the impression that some parren expected her to, at the first opportunity.

  “Tobenrah-sa. I serve Gesul.” Tobenrah stared at her, as though in some offence. Against the wall, advisors shifted, as though unsettled. Lisbeth wondered if she’d said the wrong thing. A glance at Gesul showed only his eyes within hood and veil, calm and blue.

  “Your brother,” said Tobenrah. “What does he say?”

  “Tobenrah-sa, Phoenix will fight with you against all enemies, if her single condition is granted.”

  “What condition?”

  “That House Harmony will join with Phoenix in formal alliance against the deepynines and the alo.”

  One of the advisors did not like that, and spoke out of turn. “Phoenix is a single ship,” Lisbeth’s earpiece translated. “She has no allegiance to humanity, her own people have cast her out. An entire house cannot make allegiance with a single ship.” His voice conveyed scorn, unmistakable even in an alien tongue.

  “This is not an alliance of equals,” Lisbeth explained, trying to keep her breathing calm. Perhaps it was too late, and she’d screwed this up already with awkward phrasing. “Phoenix merely requests that the steps be taken against the deepynines and alo beyond any present action. That House Harmony will not simply deal with this current incursion, and then retreat. This is an ongoing threat, Tobenrah-sa, of the gravest kind. All of the Spiral’s people need to unite to protect themselves from this threat. Phoenix asks merely that you agree, and if so, Phoenix promises to be your strongest ally in this struggle.”