by K. Eason
Expansion sounded like a nice way of saying war.
Rupert cleared his throat delicately. “Do you or your people know if the Protectorate intend to colonize, or to, ah, exterminate?”
The tenju leaned forward so he could better see around Grytt. He raked his gaze over Rupert. “What kind of a question is that?”
“I’m Grytt,” said Grytt, and stuck out her mecha hand. She didn’t know what tenju thought about handshakes. She might be offending him, but better he take offense at her than pursue his annoyance with Rupert. “This is my friend, the Vizier of the Confederation of Liberated Worlds.”
The tenju looked at Grytt’s hand. Then he took it in his own. She could feel, in a distant, impersonal way, that he was squeezing very, very hard. She applied pressure in return, sufficient enough to make him scowl and extricate his hand with some haste.
He regarded her with new respect.
“Hworgesh,” he said. “Special attaché to Captain Ilsa. She’s in command of the Bane out there.”
“Bane to anything in particular?” asked Grytt.
“Anything that crosses us.” Hworgesh grinned. He shot Rupert a look, accompanied by a single raised brow. “What’s a vizier do?”
“A vizier is meant to ask questions. The answers help me effect diplomatic policy.”
“Diplomat. Right.” Hworgesh’s tone suggested a rather unfavorable opinion of the profession.
Grytt bristled on Rupert’s behalf. “What’s a special attaché? Sounds kind of like a diplomat.”
“It’s not. It’s—more like a representative of the captain. A proxy.” Hworgesh pressed his lips together. “What’s your title, then?”
“I’m just Grytt.”
Hworgesh’s eyes narrowed. Clearly he thought that answer insufficient. Grytt gazed back, impassive.
Rupert stirred, a deliberate restlessness that bespoke an unvoiced query and great self-control. He might as well have poked her.
“These vakari,” she said. “Are we likely to meet any?”
“Might.” Hworgesh flung a worried look at the hologram display. “Hard to say. They’ve been breaking through all over, that side of the Verge. They’re cutting right through the k’bal.”
“Are they responding to some kind of pressure?” Rupert leaned even farther forward, until he was bent nearly double in an effort to see around Grytt. Probably reading the tenju’s aura. She sat back, pretending nonchalance. “Or is this an Expansion of aggression?” He pronounced the capital E.
“Well now, that’s the question everyone’s asking.” Hworgesh looked like he wanted to spit, then thought better of it. “Veeks’ve always been bad neighbors. Always fighting on the borders. But something’s riled ’em up. Maybe something internal. Maybe some new trouble. You know anything?”
“I’m sure we don’t,” said Rupert. Grytt could hear the disarming smile.
“Huh. That’s odd, because the order came down to come get you two from.” He made a gyroscopic gesture at the overhead. “On high. Some political favors called in—go escort these people to Samtalet.”
“Ah.” Grytt could hear Rupert’s smile slip. “Was it a favor, perhaps, from an entity in the Merchants League?”
“So you do know something.” Hworgesh looked grimly pleased. “Or at least, someone.”
Samur. Had to be. Grytt did not look at Rupert, who had no doubt come to the same realization. “We got our orders,” she said, to keep Hworgesh’s attention focused on her. “You know how that goes. You don’t ask why, you just . . . do it.”
“Mm.” Hworgesh eyed her knowingly. “Well, there’s nothing in Samtalet except a mining colony. Too close by half to the Verge and the veeks. If someone wants you out there, maybe you should ask the reasons.”
Rupert found his voice, only a little frayed on the edges. “Thank you, Special Attaché Hworgesh, for being so forthcoming.”
“Just Hworgesh. Titles are for alwar, mostly.”
And judging from his expression, alwar ranked only a little bit above vakari in his estimation. Grytt wondered if that was a species-wide opinion, or strictly Hworgesh’s. She felt the first tweakings of a headache. There were too many variables in this first-contact business. She should switch seats with Rupert and leave all the chatter to him, except Rupert had settled back in his chair again. Perhaps he’d fed his curiosity for the moment. Ha. Not likely. More probable, he was just making a list of new questions to fire off like a ’slinger on fast-fire. Or he was brooding about Samur again. Either way, she didn’t want to—
“Ah,” Rupert said. Only that, but the tone made Grytt whip around as if he’d shouted a profane expletive.
Ah, indeed. Lanscot station had disgorged a pair of blips, which, as Grytt watched, began trailing Favored Daughter and Bane. Her stomach coiled in on itself, the sensation entirely independent of how much organic stomach remained.
One of the alwar, sprouting comms from both ears, jerked upright. He turned and said something rapid and unintelligible to the alwar captain.
“Huh,” said Hworgesh, so quietly even Grytt’s mecha ear had to strain. “Something about you, sounds like. Station wants us to turn around and go back.”
Grytt said a word that generally did not make it into the Kreshti-GalSpek dictionaries. “Will we?”
“Not likely. The Empire doesn’t like taking orders from us lesser beings.”
The captain leaned over the comm officer. Then she turned and beckoned at Adept Uo-Zanys Kesk, who, after a pause bordering on insolent, left her post and approached. There was a brief conference. Grytt side-eyed Hworgesh, who was unabashedly leaning his whole self that direction. The tenju swore under his breath. Some expressions and utterances are universal in delivery and intent, even if their specific syllables defy comprehension.
Before Grytt could inquire whether it was the content of the conversation, or its volume, that inspired such ire, the adept broke away from the captain. She came around the bridge crew in a tight, quick circle, her fingers claw-locked on each seat-back in sequence, using them for both balance and pace.
Grytt’s knotted stomach tightened into a singularity of anticipation. Beside her, Rupert drew upright into the stillness of dread.
If the adept noticed their distress, she gave no sign of it. Her voice and face remained inflexibly calm and courteous.
“Please fasten your harnesses,” she said. “We will be tesser-hexing sooner than anticipated.”
Huh. The central display was pretty clear that Favored Daughter was still a long way from the Lanscot system’s gate. Grytt dragged the harness into place anyway, because one does not take chances on voidships, even as she suspected that this was a ploy to immobilize her, should the alwar decide to take custody of their guests on Lanscot’s demands.
She was substantially larger. Perhaps they thought she would offer resistance. They weren’t wrong about that, though she intended to wait until her captors were human, and resistance less likely to cause an intergalactic incident.
“We are quite far from the gate,” Rupert said politely.
Grytt fired a look at his impassive profile. All his Vizier-ness must have rusted away in his two years on the sheep-farm. She’d ruined him. He might look the diplomat, but she could smell the suspicion smoking off him.
Adept Uo-Zanys Kesk laughed. An actual laugh, humor, and not a jagged emotional expulsion.
“We don’t need a gate,” she said, gently condescending. Her smile, unlike her laugh, contained sharp edges: all pride, Grytt thought, and contempt for the species that did. “We only used the one here out of courtesy. The Confederation traffic control systems have not been upgraded for random entry.”
“Without a gate,” said Rupert, matching her tone, “how do you compensate for the Ekandeosol Paradox?” And then, because the adept’s face had blanked at the name, he rattled off a string of letters and
operations.
“Oh!” she said, momentarily misplacing her pride and condescension in favor of a genuine delight. “You’re an arithmancer. I can show you the equations, if you’d like.”
Oh, thought Grytt, less delighted. There are two of them.
Hworgesh grunted and muttered, barely audible. “Oh yes, please.”
“I would appreciate that,” said Rupert.
“After the tesser-hex.” Grytt reached over to fasten Rupert’s harness.
Adept Uo-Zanys Kesk chuckled. “Indeed, Vizier. After the tesser-hex.”
She sat down on Rupert’s other side, advising them that the countdown would soon be visible on the central holo, which indeed, yes, there it was. Presumably those were numeric symbols, anyway. Funny little curls and spikes changing at regular intervals.
Grytt eyed it with some dread. The run-up to a tesser-hex is dull. The actual travel between void-points is not: the conventional manner to which Grytt was accustomed involved a great deal of turbulence and sensory distortion, which some people found exhilarating and which Grytt had reserved for second-worst sensation in the multiverse (the first being “caught in an explosion”).
The alwar version of tesser-hexing was, remarkably, even less pleasant. This time, Grytt felt as though she were stretching, as if her flesh had become a membrane and someone was pulling, pulling, until she was sure she was going to rip, or tear, or come undone. The mecha part of herself, hexed to integrate with human nerves and muscle, reported no sensation, but Grytt became certain that if she moved, even the slightest bit, she would part ways with herself.
The theory behind tesser-hex travel, which Rupert and Rory had discussed with mutual fascination until Grytt had no choice but to retain some understanding of it, was that all matter and energy fused, somehow, in that between-place. There was indeed a possibility of coming undone, but the ships were battle-hexed to maintain internal integrity. What one felt did not reflect the reality of the situation. Grytt, who found that feelings often conflicted with, or at least distorted, material events, had been content to ignore them.
Now, for the forever-moment of the tesser-hex, she was left to wonder just how much difference there was between alwar physiology and human, how wide the gap in arithmantic understanding, and whether human flesh might come unglued in the passage, where alwar (and tenju) flesh would not.
And then, with a snapping sensation, the tesser-hex ended. Grytt closed her flesh eye. The tesla eye, pitiless, reported the bridge intact, no one melted, and a new display on the hologram.
“That,” said Rupert, a bit breathlessly, “was amazing.”
CHAPTER NINE
Very fast, in the vast scale of void, is a relative term. Voidships travel very fast on an absolute scale of velocity, though the degree depends on engine size and power-to-mass ratios and other technical specifications unnecessary to anyone except engineers. A Tadeshi corsair like G. Stein is faster than a Tadeshi military shuttle like Vagabond; both of those move more swiftly than a mirri corracle; a Thorne Consortium warship (built by Merchants League shipyards) is faster still, and a k’bal kite-skiff outpaces them all. The xeno vessel Zhang had identified was moving faster than any of the aforementioned ships.
People running from a cargo bay to a vessel docked at an aetherlock run significantly more slowly on that same absolute scale, and yet, because of the relatively short distances involved, may board a ship, and that ship may shrug itself into the void and achieve several kilometers’ clearance, before very fast makes its arrival.
So it happened with Thorsdottir, Jaed, Rory, and Zhang.
There was no time to remove their hardsuits. Thorsdottir and Rory threw themselves into their respective stations in Vagabond’s tiny cockpit. Jaed, who should have gone into the back cabin and availed himself of a chair and harness there, chose to stay in the cockpit as well, preferring to brace himself between the bulkhead and Rory’s chair and trust to maglocked boots and the hardsuit’s reinforcement for his safety. This was unwise, because although Vagabond’s standard hexwork could counter and compensate for inertial shifts, there was always the chance the ship would execute a maneuver beyond their capability. At that point, Jaed and his hardsuit would become a large, free-floating projectile in a very small space and endanger everyone.
Vagabond’s turing knew it. Vagabond’s turing advised Zhang (and Thorsdottir, by proximity, since she could see Zhang’s screen as well as her own) of the danger, and recommended “locking down the loose cargo immediately.” A part of Zhang wanted to do that: grab Jaed Moss bodily and escort him into the cabin and strap him down, over all protests, because he was violating everything she knew about shipboard safety during combat and, if he would not behave responsibly on his own, he should be made to do so. Another part of her sympathized. Waiting for everyone else to do, or fail to do, their jobs, and being dependent on the outcome, would not have suited her especially well, particularly if she had just gotten herself out of a dangerous situation, as Jaed had.
And the part of her that was too pragmatic to indulge temper or sympathy simply noted that if such a lockdown became necessary—if something happened to the inertials—then there would be bigger worries than Jaed bouncing around the cockpit, and those worries would look more like torpedoes or missiles or whatever dreadful battle-hex a xeno warship could muster.
“Where did that ship come from?” asked Rory. “Was it hiding behind one of the moonlets?” The second of Samtalet’s two resident gas giants, Perkele, had a small constellation of moons and jagged bits of former moons in orbit. It was also the nearest planetary body to G. Stein.
Zhang flashed Thorsdottir an incredulous side-eye. Rory was not given to asking questions when she could ascertain the answer herself. Anyone looking at the navigational screen could see that the xeno ship was, in fact, coming from a direction other than Perkele or its satellites, or the station, or in fact anything except the system’s edge.
“No,” said Zhang, after a moment, when it was clear Rory was not actually looking at the nav-screen. “The trajectory’s wrong. They came out of nowhere. One second, nothing on the scans. Then, there they were.”
“Thank you,” Rory said absently. “I’m getting signal fragments. Not like what I heard on G. Stein, not like Rose’s whispers. It sounds like there are two separate origins, which suggests two ships. That’s why I’m not looking at your screen and am asking obvious questions.”
Thorsdottir pitched her voice low, for Zhang’s ears. “Rory thinks the xenos can tesser-hex without a gate.”
Zhang shot her another worried side-eye. “Does that mean there could be more of them coming? Or out there already?”
“I wonder if SAM-1 can see what’s happening.” Jaed sounded grim. “I wonder if it’s even still there, or if these whoever-they-ares already blew them up.”
“I sent them a warning,” Rory said. “I haven’t gotten a response.”
Thorsdottir had a sinking feeling about the station’s well-being. SAM-1, like all stations, had a quantum-hex communication system. They could have already called for help, and received instant confirmation, but that help would still take time to arrive. Ship-to-ship conflicts were harrowing enough. Stations could not run away. She imagined a xeno boarding party on SAM-1 like Rose had shown her on G. Stein, and felt sick.
Then Vagabond’s arms-turing beeped and Thorsdottir felt even sicker: the xeno ship was in Vagabond’s gun-range already, which meant that Vagabond was almost certainly in range of the xeno guns.
“Should we keep running?” Zhang asked. “Or turn around and—?”
“Die by superior battle-hex,” Jaed muttered. “Or superior weapons.”
“Keep running,” said Rory. “I’m trying to hail them. If we can talk, maybe . . .”
Rory did not finish the sentence. Thorsdottir finished it for her, in the confines of her skull. Maybe they won’t attack. Maybe they’ll tell us
who they are. She touched the compartment on her hardsuit in which she’d stored Rose’s clipping, as if for luck, or just to reassure herself Rose was still there.
Though Rory had given no orders about targeting the xeno ship, Thorsdottir busied herself with the arms-turing. The targeting scope could see the xeno ship, but it was having difficulty settling on a lock. Considering the xeno ship’s vector—coming straight at Vagabond—and its sheer size—far larger than G. Stein—that failure seemed hex-related. She started to report as much, in hopes that one (or both) of the arithmancers on board could do something to let Vagabond at least get a shot off in the conflict.
She was forestalled by a metallic squeal that ripped through the cockpit. For an instant she thought they’d been holed, breached, that the sound was Vagabond’s hull ripping open. Then she recognized comm-screech.
“Sorry,” Rory muttered, “sorry, sorry.”
The screech came down to a whine, which then resolved into words.
“Tadeshi vessel. Disarm. Cease forward momentum. Prepare to be boarded.”
For a fistful of moments, Zhang and Thorsdottir and Rory and Jaed sat there, listening to the first words they’d ever heard from a species they’d never met, in a perfectly comprehensible—if oddly accented—GalSpek.
This was not, obviously, first contact for the xenos.
“Well, hello to you, too,” Jaed said, under his breath.
Thorsdottir turned her attention from her arms-turing to Rory, and by proximity to Jaed, who clung to the back of Rory’s chair with both hands, white lipped.
Rory looked more composed, but Thorsdottir was not fooled; there was an edge in her voice Vernor Moss would have recognized.
“Xeno vessel, please identify yourself. This is the free-trader Vagabond. We are on a salvage operation. We are not Tadeshi. Repeat. We are not Tadeshi. Please acknowledge.”
“You assume that’ll matter to them,” said Jaed.
“I’m hoping it will,” Rory snapped.
“Vagabond.” The speaker—male, female, impossible to say; the voice had an odd doubling, as if the transmission had lagged, and an echo as if he, she, it, or they were speaking from inside of a bucket—stumbled over the syllables. “This is Protectorate vessel Sissten. We repeat. Disarm. Cease forward momentum. Prepare for boarding.”