by K. Eason
“Alleged plan,” Kahess muttered.
“—to acquire something from Protectorate space, the route for which would pass through Samtalet. We assumed a weapon. It was convenient to honor a request from our Merchants League allies to ferry you out here, and to play along with their clearly fictive embassy excuse, because it put us in the area. But now here you are, Vizier, telling me you intend to acquire Confederation personnel, who I infer may possess information useful to both our governments, or perhaps even be the thing the Tadeshi meant to acquire. I believe you understand that the more details we possess, the better our chances of success.”
It was unfortunate, Rupert thought, that he was woefully short on detail. “I am seeking the Princess Rory Thorne,” he said, because it was true. “She has been operating in this system as a, ah. Salvager. We received word that she was in danger, though the specifics of her situation were not relayed to us.”
Adept Kesk raised an eyebrow, but did not challenge his choice of descriptors for Rory, nor remark that his prose was unusually objective. Perhaps that was expected of spies and intelligence operatives.
Grytt was going to—laugh, perhaps, that he had come to this. Or say, better you than me. Or, most likely, swear herself blue that she had let him leave her sight in the first place.
“And this princess.” Captain Kahess tried out the title, working her mouth around the unfamiliar syllables. “They know about this weapon?”
“That would be something to ask her,” said Rupert. “If we succeed in the extraction, I am certain the Confederation will agree to an information exchange.”
Kahess’s eyebrows shot up. “Extraction? Are you telling me she is on one of those ships?”
“She may be,” Rupert said, with a serenity he did not feel, and which he was certain his aura did not reflect. “Though the hostilities of the Tadeshi suggest they do not yet have possession of her. And it is of paramount importance that the Tadeshi do not acquire her.”
We should note that the Vizier was in no way certain of Rory’s whereabouts, and that he still maintained some hope that Rory was on SAM-1 and nowhere near the murdered ship or the battle. But the fairy’s pair of portentous warnings, coupled with Rory’s predilection for finding the center of politically fraught situations, made him fear that she was somewhere on one of those ships. Rupert had also judged that the alwar concerns about sophisticated battle-hexes, potential super-weapons, and Tadeshi aggression concerned the Confederation, and saw an opportunity to acquire intelligence that might ameliorate any penalties Dame Maggie might otherwise bring down on his head when she caught up with him.
In other words, Rupert was operating on a hunch, or as Grytt would say, from the gut.
We leave the reader to consider what it is that guts typically process.
Before Kesk could reply, an interruption by the holographic display showed the dreadnought disgorging another barrage. These streaks, however, were marked orange, and flashing, and appeared to be very small ships.
“Breaching pods,” Kahess said flatly. “The Tadeshi are going to board that Protectorate ship. If your princess is on it, Vizier, she’s in trouble.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The ship bucked a second time. Thorsdottir threw an arm out, planting a palm on the bulkhead, and grabbed for Jaed with the other hand. She had intended to brace him but instead, he caught her. His knees were flexed, his hips centered neatly under his shoulders.
Thorsdottir felt a gawping stare break over her face.
Jaed twisted up the corner of his mouth like a wet rag. “Drills.” His voice tilted into a singsong recitation of someone official-sounding: “What to do in case of grav-hex failure and/or hostile action against Urse.” He dropped back into his normal tone. “Did a lot of these when Thorne was trying to kill us. Not that your warships ever got to Urse.”
“We did drills, too. Only it was you who were trying to kill us. And we were mostly drilling on Thorne against bombardment from space or a palace invasion, so gravity was not an issue—ah!” This time the deckplate rattled, as if it were contemplating unbolting itself from itself. If there were arithmancers involved, that might be a possibility.
Jaed rode out the upheaval with an unblinking grace, all his attention fixed on her face. “Bombardment from space is barbaric. That would destroy a biosphere. We would never—” Jaed’s gaze dropped to her hardsuit pouch, in which Rose’s clipping resided, and his face flamed and blanched. “Never mind. We would destroy a biosphere.”
“Stop saying we. You’re not Tadeshi anymore.” Thorsdottir bent her own knees, sank her weight as if she were preparing for an opponent’s rush and attack. That helped. She took her hand off the bulkhead and tested her balance. Definitely better.
Until, at least, she looked up and Jaed’s scowl threatened to knock her over again. “Of course I am. What else would I be?”
“Whatever you like.” Thorsdottir took a tentative step toward the cell door. “This ship’s taking fire.”
“Yes. And we’re locked in a cell. There’s not much we can do about it.”
That annoyed Thorsdottir precisely because it was true. She had been confined before with Rory on Urse, and she had not much enjoyed the experience. “Be ready anyway. Someone’s going to come through that door eventu—”
The teslas went out completely. The dark was absolute, solid, like a hard-edged blanket, slapping the breath from her lungs.
The hardsuit’s headlamps activated at once, punching into the black. Something about the vakari bulkheads absorbed the glare, gave it back satiny and unblinding.
Jaed was already at the door. He had his hand (back in its glove) pressed where the access panel should have been, had there been one on the inside of the cell, and his head tilted inside his helmet in a listening attitude. His eyes were closed, his brows knotted in concentration.
Thorsdottir stayed quiet. Rory looked where she hexed, and was impervious to noise and other distractions. Jaed seemed to need to listen. Could one hear the equations—? Thorsdottir shook her head. She couldn’t. What she could hear was alarms, which seemed to pick an intolerable pitch no matter what species they served, howling somewhere on the deck. Perhaps the power loss had not been ship-wide. Clearly it had not affected the alarms, only the teslas. Perhaps—
The door exhaled sharply and sagged in its track. It was not entirely open, but it was wide enough that Jaed—whose eyes opened with considerably more speed and snap than the door—could jam his fingers into the crack. “Hurry, help me.”
Thorsdottir pushed Jaed aside and wedged her very much human limb, in its hardsuit case, through the gap. Then her shoulder, and her hip. Grytt, Thorsdottir thought, would’ve ripped the door open like paper. It was almost enough to make her wish for her own mecha enhancements, if not the manner of the acquisition.
She remembered the vakari guard armed with that cylindrical weapon. With luck, that guard was distracted. Without luck, well. Better the guard hit her than Jaed, though why Thorsdottir was so certain of that, she could not have articulated.
That certainty was soon tested. Thorsdottir’s hardsuit flashed a warning—motion detected—and then something cylindrical cracked down against the arm and shoulder that she’d pushed through the gap in the door. For a moment she thought an incredulous that’s it? as the cylinder skidded down her hardsuit. The vakari were idiots, arming a guard with only a truncheon.
But then two things happened to readjust Thorsdottir’s perception. The first was her HUD’s sudden panic, BREACH flashing in all squared-off capital letters. The second was the eruption of blue lightning where the vakar’s weapon touched her, clearly something like electricity but also hotter, more liquid, that flowed up to her elbow and down to her glove. Then the lightning found the breach-site, which Thorsdottir herself could not quite see (the lightning was too bright, and the HUD was flashing, and the crack in her suit was very small), exc
ept by the flash where the weapon’s discharge bled into it.
Then the pain hit, a phrase which was as inadequate to the experience as saying, “it’s difficult to breathe underwater.”
Thorsdottir’s vision tunneled. Her breath puffed against the visor’s interior, bringing fog with it. She found herself on her knees on the deck, outside of the cell. Her throat hurt. Her vision was wet on the edges, sweat or tears that cleared when she blinked. Sound came from a very great distance. Her arm—she could not feel her arm. That might be worse, although given her last memory of it, she would not complain.
Something (someone, that was a hardsuit) slammed into her shoulder and then toppled over her. She tried to get out of the way and, at the same time, see what was happening. The main teslas in the room were still out, which left little islands of headlamps and a roiling sea of dark. Blue lightning arced from some short distance away (the HUD could’ve told her, but her vision was in rebellion, and refused to focus), and Thorsdottir flinched. The guard was still out there with that weapon.
That begged asking why it was over there, and not zapping her here—
Jaed materialized in front of her, face bleached by his headlamp and still looking whiter than normal. His visor was up, she saw, which was stupid, there was a vakar with a lightning-stick out there. His lips flapped and writhed, but she heard nothing coming through them. She stared at him, uncomprehending.
His face creased with exasperation. Then he struck the side of her helmet, hard enough that her head bounced off the interior. She should have felt irritation, certainly, but also some discomfort.
She felt neither, and harbored a dim certainty that that, too, was a bad sign.
Jaed pushed his face up against her visor. His mouth moved.
OPEN THE VISOR
She did, when she remembered how. It labored open, taking the HUD and its warnings with it. Cool air rushed in and brought the sounds of the room with it. Scuffling, the ragged snarls of breath dragged hard and fast through teeth, the meaty thumps of bodies bouncing into each other and into harder surfaces. Thorsdottir smelled ozone and burning meat—oh. Oh. That smell was her, wasn’t it? Her stomach clenched as someone, not a human voice, screamed.
Jaed’s gaze flicked that way. He had both hands on the side of her helmet. “The other prisoner’s fighting the guard. They got out of their cell on their own. Come on. Let’s go. Get up.”
Jaed had not asked if she was all right. That must mean either he knew the answer already, or the answer did not matter.
Rose, she thought. What had that arcing-sparking weapon done to them?
“Come on.” Jaed was pulling at her; she could see his gloved hands gripping her upper arms. She glanced down at the breach-site in her suit, just a flicker, and then looked away. Her hardsuit was blackened, smoking a little from the crack on her forearm.
Just as well she could not feel her hand right now, she decided firmly, and rocked off her knees, onto her heels, and lurched to her feet. Jaed participated far more in that process than pleased her; her balance was suspect, her hardsuit sluggish, and the sudden change in altitude resurrected the roaring in her ears and reduced her vision to Jaed’s twin blue moon eyes and the flat, grimly scared line of his lips. Her stomach clenched again, this time around empty acid. Bile burned the back of her throat.
“Come on, come on,” he said in jagged, airless bursts, as he propelled her across the deck. The battling xenos had fetched up near the central console. The vakar appeared to be losing. Their weapon trailed sparks and lightning and Thorsdottir found herself staring at it, waiting for it to strike the other prisoner, waiting for that flash of contact. But then from the dark came a crack, of the sort that sounded both organic and final.
The shuffling, snarling, heaving sounds of conflict stopped. The weapon-stick fell, end over end, and clanged against the deck, and then rolled a short way.
Heavy, ragged breath came from a stationary location in the dark.
The ship heaved suddenly and the emergency teslas came on. The vakari, too, must consider red to be the color of alarm; the room turned bloody, dim, adding to Thorsdottir’s blurry-eyed nausea.
“Come on.” Jaed tugged at her. He was not looking at the center console with the resolve of someone who has decided that not looking at a thing is the same as that thing not being there. Thorsdottir had found that to be universally untrue, and so she did look.
The vakari guard was definitely dead, crumpled against the main console, head bent and neck twisted. Now Thorsdottir knew what was under those triangular panels on its uniform. Spikes studded the backs of their arms, wrist to elbow, and presumably also between the double knee joints, and the hard convexities of their hips (though the latter two fin-like portions of their uniform remained intact). The jaw-plate was evidently detachable. Probably a natural vulnerability. The color of vakari blood was impossible to guess under the influence of throbbing red teslas, but there was a great deal of it in a spreading pool, and an accompanying metallic odor.
The door was in front of them. Whether it would open automatically, or at all, was another matter. Thorsdottir was not at all sure she could help, if it came to another attempt to force it.
But that might not matter.
The other xeno had gotten up and come around the far side of the central console, and now stood between them and the door. He (assuming humanoid secondary sexual physiology, which Thorsdottir did, unconsciously and in this case correctly) stood a little shorter than Jaed, and broader. His hardsuit, helmetless, was of an unfamiliar design that seemed more concerned with visible armored plating and with intricate painted designs, some of which had been damaged. There were scorch-marks on the torso and upper chest.
Someone’s suit was proof against vakari lightning-sticks.
That xeno had taken possession of said lightning-stick, and now held it loosely in his right hand. Five digits, Thorsdottir noted, four fingers and a thumb, in the usual disposition and numeration of joints. She was not a biologist, conventional or xeno, but that similarity seemed significant. Illogically, it disposed her better toward their fellow captive, as did the fact that there were no spiky growths or extra joints, and—
Well. She had been right, thinking there were tusks. They were shortish, perhaps a fingertip upthrust from his lower lip, and predictably sharp. The rest of his features were human-ish, emphasis on the ish. A single protruding nose with two nostrils, a pair of eyes (narrowed, in what Thorsdottir assumed was hostility, suspicion, or pain), a single horizontal mouth with that formidable dental display. The jaw was heavier, slightly undershot, the ears short and located in the normal place, if a bit more pointed at the tip. Skin of a shade between Zhang’s medium-gold and Rory’s warmer brown. The xeno had no facial hair, but he did have hair on his head, roped into thick braids in which bits of metal gleamed.
Hooks, Thorsdottir thought. Those were hooks. Some of the braids had come loose—secured, presumably, to fit under a helmet—and hung down, loose and straight like the tail of an unconcerned cat. If cats kept hooks in their tails. Which they did not. All right, focus. This person had just gotten past a cell door that had taken two strong humans to manage and, unarmed, dispatched an armed vakar.
And now he stood between them and the door, holding the guard’s weapon.
Thorsdottir tried to shove Jaed behind her, clearly a reflex and not a considered action, since in so doing she would be presenting her wounded (perhaps ruined) arm first. The effort failed, mostly because Jaed was attempting to do the same thing, and with greater success. And so they ended up making an absurdly defiant wedge of shoulders and hips. What they would do if it attacked, Thorsdottir didn’t know. Well, that was not true. They would lose, and then very possibly die, if the tusk-bearing xeno decided to disassemble them as he had done to the vakar.
“Shit,” Jaed said, very softly and distinctly.
At the sound of his vo
ice, the xeno’s attention sharpened and shifted.
“Grensk atalat mok.” His voice was surprisingly melodic. Thorsdottir had been expecting something more gravelly.
“Yeah. Don’t understand you. How about you just let us past?” Jaed sounded much more calm than Thorsdottir thought was likely, in this situation.
The xeno snorted. Definitely a snort. His lips spread, baring more of his teeth. That was a grin, Thorsdottir was certain, and not a kind one.
“You need help,” he said, in clear, though accented (and possibly impeded by tusks), GalSpek. “Please tell me you understood that.”
Thorsdottir wished she could close her eyes and perhaps settle the spin in her head. She settled for taking a gulp of blood-flavored air and stating the obvious. “You killed the guard.”
The xeno’s gaze snapped to her. “What, the veek? So? She was your enemy and mine.”
“Doesn’t mean we’re friends, though, does it?” Jaed sounded as if he was speaking through gritted teeth. “I don’t even know what species you are.”
“What I—void and dust, where are you from?” The xeno shook his head. The braids rattled as the hooks bounced across his hardsuit. “Tenju, from the—oh, never mind what clan. Won’t matter to you. Our species are friends, all right? Which tribe are you? Larish? Johnson-Thrymbe? Qing-Kovacs? Nahbib?”
Those names, Thorsdottir recognized. Merchants League corporate families, mostly concerned with making money and moving it around, all spacers, though Qing-Kovacs originated from the same homeworld as the Thornes. Rory had nearly married a Larish boy. If she had, Thorsdottir might’ve known what a tenju was before meeting one in a Protectorate brig. Then again, she wouldn’t be in a Protectorate brig.
“No,” Thorsdottir wanted to sound decisive. She was afraid she sounded one breath from collapse, if Jaed’s alarmed glance was any indicator.
“We’re Confederation of Liberated Worlds.” He had inserted himself fully between Thorsdottir and the tenju now. She recalled long hours spent with him and Zhang in the SAM-1’s recreational facilities, honing his skills from determined but as dangerous as a puppy to might survive in a bar fight (hypothesis untested). He might think that was enough. Or, more likely, he knew that it wasn’t, but he’d make the gesture anyway.