by Webb, Nick
Faith? “Took the words right out of my mouth, sir. But, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll leave matters of faith to your graces, and concern myself with saving our people’s civilization, rather than their souls.”
What exactly was the old man getting at? He seemed to think it important, given the time constraints they were all under. Worthlin presented the lily to Nhean, who accepted it, tentatively. “You have my vote, Brother Tang, on one condition. When the immediate threat at Mars and the inner solar system is dealt with, send a force to safeguard our people at Neptune. I’m sure Mr. Ricketts would agree—not that it would earn you his vote.”
“But Neptune simply isn’t in the crosshairs of the Telestines, Mr.—”
“I’m aware. I’m granting you latitude in your interpretation of when the threat is dealt with, just as I grant myself latitude in interpreting the origin of the word Telestine.”
Nhean considered, and, given the alternative, nodded his agreement. “Done.”
“And my second condition—you didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” he added with a wink. “Is that you trust, even when the target of trust is … the other. I have it on good authority that not all Telestines are evil. They don’t all seek our destruction. If we as a people are to survive, we will need all the allies we can get, and in this case, I think the enemy of our enemy is, at the very least, someone we should trust.”
Was he talking about Ka’sagra? Or the other aid groups?
Nhean smiled again, a tight pain spreading from his jaw and down the back of his neck. “I’ll take that under advisement.” Dammit, dealing in information wasn’t about trust. It was about secrecy, source validation, blackmail, arm-twisting, ego-stroking, backroom-dealing, cigar smoking, subtle-threatening, actual threatening, and data scraping. Trust had nothing to do with it. “I promise. Where I can, I will trust those in whom trust is deserving.”
A diplomatic answer if he ever heard one. Luckily, Worthlin seemed to agree. “Good luck, Brother Tang. You have my vote of confidence.” He turned to the Dalai Lama, who had seemed to tune out the conversation, focusing instead on the flock of songbirds perched in a tree nearby. “Oliver? You changing your vote?”
Nhean could have sworn the Dalai Lama looked smug. “Not a chance, Parley. But I knew you would. I’m just here to keep the rest of the Circle happy. Or rather, not up in arms.”
Pope Celestine looked relieved, and put an arm around Nhean’s shoulder, leading him out of the garden. “Come, my child. You’ve been harangued long enough. Mr. Schroeder wanted a word before you left.” He turned to bid farewell to Worthlin. “Thank you, Parley. For the linguistics lesson, and for your support.”
And for your trust, Nhean almost added, before stopping himself. He wasn’t sure that what the other man had shown was trust, but rather opportunism, since Nhean had come to Venus with the expectation to never have to send the fleet all the way out to Neptune where it wouldn’t be needed, and here he was promising to do just that.
How many more empty promises would he have to make before this was all over?
Chapter Forty-One
Earth
North America
Northwest of Denver
The girl hunched back against Pike, shrinking away from the picture on the screen: her own body, lying on a metal table next to another girl who looked startlingly like her, if a bit younger. Her lips parted and she mouthed something. A name? A prayer?
A rush of anger startled Pike. He had never been one to want children. He’d never wanted to bring a child into this world, into the mess of the stations, and in any case, he’d only fallen in love once. Cargo haulers, as a rule, rarely married and even more rarely had children. They were a solitary bunch. Children had been part of a life that he wanted no part of.
Now, he began to understand the scattered anecdotes he’d heard. Snatches of voices rose in his mind: like walking around with your heart outside your body … you’d kill gladly if anyone ever hurt your child … you want to protect them more than anything, and you can’t….
He struggled not to let his hands clench around the girl’s arms. He wanted to yank her away from the wall, away from this place, and take her back into the sunshine. He wanted to give her a ship and let her fly away from all of this. He wanted her—he almost gave a bark of laughter—to have a normal life. What that would even mean, he wasn’t sure, but he wanted it all the same. He wanted her far away from here.
He watched as the cutting began. Chips and metal struts, all sorts of machinery inserted delicately beneath the skin.
Un-bruised skin. Her body in the last frame had been dead—and damaged. This body looked untouched. He realized this and looked at her sharply—she’d made the same connection.
“You don’t have to watch it,” Pike told her again.
I do, her dark eyes said.
And so they watched. They watched the jolt that ran through her, and the sudden flare of life on the machines behind her. They watched her sit up, groggy, and stumble into the waiting arms of a Telestine researcher. She was given a physical, tracking movement, answering questions.
“You could talk then,” Pike murmured.
She didn’t respond. Perhaps she did not even notice him speaking. Her eyes were locked on the screen, and Pike had the unsettling realization that she might not remember this at all.
The other girl came awake in a rush, with a yell. She clawed the Telestines with her hands and tried to run, and Pike found himself wanting her to win and break free, even though he knew how this was going to end. Tel’rabim wasn’t one to tolerate disobedience, after all. He looked away while the Telestine scientists surrounded the small figure on the screen. When he looked back, a limp body was being wheeled away on a cart.
The girl looked down at the floor—both in the video and now, in Pike’s arms. Pike held her closer, shaking.
The clips became a blur after that. Some weren’t bad—at least a dozen were of her learning to use the white cubes they called computers—but Pike turned away and pressed his hands over his eyes for some of them. In some, she gave orders. In others, she took them and performed tasks with a perfect calm that reminded Pike of the estates on Venus, everything polite and well-mannered, Parees in his elegant clothing, bowing and murmuring. He watched the girl talk, walk, hack technology that was clearly from the Telestine military. He watched her meet Tel’rabim. At some point, she seemed to stop talking, though he could find no indication of why—no seminal experiment, no big moment of change. It had been gradual.
And then the videos were done, and her hands moved, gathering the videos together, typing in what looked like an encryption.
“What are you doing? Are you sending them somewhere?” Pike asked her. A pit developed in his stomach. “Nhean?”
She nodded.
“I don’t trust him.”
She gave a small smile that said she knew.
“I mean it, think about this for a moment before—”
“Pike?” Nhean’s voice was sudden and sharp, bursting across his comm unit.
“Damn, how fast does that thing send?” Pike looked at her and switched on the unit. “What is it?”
“Parees said you were headed for Earth. Did you make it?”
Pike considered how to answer that. “Yes.”
“Do you have a lock on that ship? Because it’s not where it’s supposed to be. As far as I can tell from my tap into the Telestine’s traffic control system, it just crossed into Pacific airspace, and it has diplomatic clearance. They’ll question it, but odds are they aren’t going to stop it before it’s too late. The closest target is a Telestine mega-city. New Tokyo.”
The drone had more than one bomb. The shock of the realization stopped Pike cold.
“Pike!” Nhean’s voice cut through Pike’s stunned silence. “Pike! You must stop him.”
“How do we—”
“You know how,” was all Nhean said.
The line cut out, and Pike and the girl stared
at one another for a moment, frozen. Then:
“Run,” Pike said, and he took off through the hallways, yelling for Rychenkov. The girl snatched a piece of machinery off the floor and ran after him.
Chapter Forty-Two
Mars
Carina Station
VFS Santa Maria
Walker was running. Fast. Her trip on the Koh Rong following Sargent’s disclosure had seemed to last forever, and once she’d made it back to the fleet at Carina Station, she’d jumped right in, commanding the Santa Maria as if she’d never been away, ordering repairs, reviewing tactical vids from the Ceres battle, and trying to wrap her head around the juggernaut that was the logistical organization of the flood of new recruit’s Essa’s efforts had brought in. Things were already moving quickly when Nhean had sent her an urgent link to a private channel.
She’d tapped into the channel expecting a conversation, and was greeted by chaos.
Nhean was yelling into the comm unit, and Pike was yelling back. She let the words flow over her. She tried to keep her mind free of anything, unfocused, no expectations, nothing but the truth. Only in this state could she respond tactically. One had to see the battlefield, not the shadow of it that one feared or the shining version one hoped for. Satisfaction, fear, surety—these only clouded the picture.
It occurred to her to wonder now about the drone strike on Io. Tel’rabim had made sure that humanity knew how close they were to annihilation, but what of the Telestines? Had they seen carefully curated snippets of the human news reports and heard only that it was a human who had done this? Had the bombing served to reinforce Tel’rabim’s lies that humans could not be trusted, that they were so illogical as to bomb one another in protest over the occupation of Earth? The thought was fleeting. Surely they weren’t stupid enough to believe that. Nhean could find out.
Now, they had the imminent bombing of Tokyo to worry about—a Telestine mega-city. Much better propaganda for Tel’rabim. Twice—no—likely triple the population of Telestine Denver.
Delaney greeted them on the bridge with a crisp salute. Relief ran off him in waves, and when Walker saw his company, she understood why: Morgan and Essa, both seeming to take up more space than any one human should, both watching the satellite projections from Earth like hawks. Essa gave Walker a sardonic smile, and Morgan’s lip curled in dislike.
Essa wasted no time. “It appears our enemies are not waiting anymore, Admiral.”
She did not bother to respond. The crew on the bridge was loyal to her. It did her no good to tangle words with Essa. Instead, she looked to Delaney. “Tell me.”
“The ship entered orbit near Europe, as it was expected to, and held its course for approximately thirty minutes—including its entry into the atmosphere—before deviating. Whether that was done with some specific knowledge of their Earth-side defenses, we aren’t sure. We know it deviated from its projected course and made for Denver, where we assumed it was lost in that bombing.” Delaney shook his head. “Again, it’s hard to know if its trajectory tells us anything about how they find rogue ships.”
She wanted to shake him. Those facts would be useful later—not now, especially not with Morgan and Essa watching their every move, ready to pounce and say they’d simply sat back and allowed the Telestines to do what they wanted. “And our crew?”
“They crashed.” He shook his head. “Well—they landed hard in the mountains. There’s no mention on the Telestine channels of an engagement, as far as we can tell, so it was either debris in orbit that got them, or the drone knew they were being pursued.”
“Probably the latter. Tel’rabim’s methodical to a fault.” She paced around the chart, studying the readout of Earth with a frown. “The blue is them? What are they doing?”
“They said that in the shuttle, there was no chance of intercepting the Telestine craft in time. They’re breaking up out of the atmosphere and coming back down directly over Tokyo.”
Walker nodded. Despair was threatening. The responses Nhean was getting were few and far between, and between the delay on the video feed and the delay on the comm unit, she was helpless, watching an engagement that was already close to complete. She laid her palms flat on the desk as she considered her options.
“I want the reserve communications officers called in. Scan every frequency, check with every outpost, do a sweep of all our satellites in the asteroid belt. I want to know if there is a Telestine fleet inbound anywhere. The rest of you, stand down from battle stations.”
“What?” Essa looked furious.
“Either Pike will intercept this bomber, or he won’t,” Walker told him simply. “Likely, he won’t. This attack was designed as a provocation. It was designed as anti-human propaganda. It is an excuse, and it is one Tel’rabim hardly needs at this point. If we thwart this, he will come up with something else, and quickly. We can’t possibly stop all of those. Our goal now should be to head off whatever Tel’rabim planned to come after this.”
“Ma’am?” It was Min, the lieutenant Delaney had recommended. “Showing pursuit of the craft by feathers.”
“Make sure they’re aware.” Walker swallowed. “Tell Pike that it’s more important to get out alive than take this ship down.”
“Not Pike’s ship, ma’am.” Min shook his head. “The drone ship.”
Walker frowned. She took two quick steps back to the desk, eyes narrowing as she made out the pursuit. Three full wings of feathers were inbound on the drone ship’s trajectory as it raced for Tokyo.
“A decoy?” Delaney murmured.
“It must be.” She exchanged a quick look with him.
“Will someone please explain what is going on and why we are not disturbed by it?” Essa’s voice was ominous.
Walker prayed for patience and tore her eyes from the drama unfolding on the readout. “Who benefits when this attack is completed?”
Essa frowned.
Walker tried not to sigh. “Tel’rabim faces dissent. The Daughters of Ascension are not only continuing aid work, they’re increasing it. This means they’re getting increasing resources from somewhere, and the only place that makes sense is from other Telestines lending their support. And this is after Tel’rabim promised to kill all humans. They and their backers clearly don’t think he will, or they don’t think it’s right. So he has to tip the balance and push them back toward his side. He’s giving them a push.”
“That much was obvious,” Essa said icily.
Then why did you ask? “Indeed. So now Tel’rabim has to pretend that he didn’t know the attack was coming. He has to mobilize attackers who will just barely fail to take the ship down.”
Essa snorted. “A fine military strategy. Recommending we stand back and let the Telestines make bad press about us—brilliant, Walker. I always knew you had it in you.”
“At its core, it is an excuse.” She spat the words at him. “If we were to cut the ship off, what then? Would he not recover it from the ocean, find the bomb aboard, and say that his feathers shot it down? Taking Telestine Tokyo down will make a bigger impression, I don’t deny it—but forgive me if I’m not expending every effort in an attempt to save Telestine lives. I will expend my effort when Tel’rabim sends his fleet—as he will. As he has already promised to do.”
“And where will you send your fleet then?” Essa asked hatefully. “Which human settlements will you deem worth saving?”
Walker looked up. The bridge had gone silent. Delaney was staring at her, horrified. A faint whirr proclaimed that there was likely video of this being streamed across the fleet.
A strange calm came over her.
“How about this?” She met Essa’s eyes. “I swear here and now that I will do everything in my power to cripple Tel’rabim, defeat the Telestines, and free humanity. That is my goal. I will not be led into battles I cannot win, and I will not send our fleet out in a tangle that puts our ships in each other’s line of fire.” She shot a blazing look at Morgan. “I will give us a chance for the futu
re. And when all of this is over, if I am still alive, you can hold a referendum to see if humanity thinks I did enough. If not, hang me. Deal?”
There was total silence on the bridge. The officers looked away, trying desperately to pretend they weren’t there.
“Deal,” Essa said finally.
Chapter Forty-Three
Venus
Constantine City
Constantine Gardens
Landing level
“Schroeder.” Nhean strolled down the gangway of the transport vessel to clasp his friend’s hand. The oligarch was on his way back to Mercury, where his rolling city was almost certainly turning a tidy profit, now that his company’s stock price had risen in response to Nhean and Walker saving the human settlements there last month. Most of them, anyway.
“Ever the eccentric.” Schroeder, a short man with pale brown hair and dark brown eyes, looked delightfully scandalized. “Don’t you have your own ships anymore?”
Nhean only smiled. He had left the Koh Rong for Walker, as much as it pained him not to have his own well-shielded and agile ship, for fear that his movements were being tracked. He did not want to be noticed coming back to Venus. As the fleet made for Mercury weeks ago, he had remotely wiped every computer in his house and moved the bulk of his money into shell corporations. There was no way for Tel’rabim to recover the information Nhean had collected—a great deal of which centered around the capabilities of the Exile Fleet—but that didn’t change the fact that Tel’rabim knew Nhean was involved.
His home could no longer be considered safe. Herbert Schroeder’s was hardly better, but Nhean had learned to trust the man’s instincts. If Schroeder said he had important information to share, then he did.
Schroeder jerked his head down the crowded hallway and Nhean followed.
“So?” he asked, as soon as they were lost in the crowd.