Shin did not look impressed at the suggestion.
“Try not to alarm him beyond a certain level,” Ibrahim told her after the morning’s combat drills, as she showered in the women’s open stalls. “I approve of the warnings, FedInt need to know where we stand, and strong disagreements are less dangerous than meek misunderstandings. But let’s not overdo it.”
“Did I overdo it here?” Sandy asked, head under the water jets as she formulated silently, other women talking in neighbouring stalls.
“No,” Ibrahim admitted. “But I sense the potential, given that your children are involved. And his child.”
“I think he exaggerated that as an excuse to come at me hard before asking his real questions about Cai.”
“Exactly,” said Ibrahim. “You moved automatically to a defensive position regarding your children, as every good parent does. Thus my concern.”
“I understand.” Another GI paused at her stall but guessed she was uplinked and refrained from whatever she’d been going to ask. “He thinks FSA HQ are loading ourselves up with new GIs to build up our military capabilities for whatever shape the Federation looks like after Ranaprasana’s committee work is finished.”
“And he’d be right,” said Ibrahim. Lucky there was no chance anyone was hacked into this call, Sandy thought.
“He thinks we’re in danger of becoming the new autocratic power.”
“It is a danger. If I were removed, or you were. But the situation has left us little choice, and that’s Chief Shin’s fault as much as ours.”
It was still unclear just how much of a role FedInt had played in Operation Shield, but it was unthinkable they hadn’t been heavily involved. Shin being Shin, he’d covered his tracks very neatly, and word was the ongoing investigations from FSA, CSA, or Ranaprasana himself weren’t finding anything conclusive. Shin, and much of the Federation-wide intelligence network he ran, didn’t want to be run by a central organisation on Callay dominated by former-League combat GIs, and run by a Director who didn’t worship at the altar of established doctrine. And Shin believed, no doubt, that Ibrahim would pursue Sandy’s own interest in GI-emancipation, perhaps simply to gain more manpower.
Federation had fought a war to protect the human race from unconstrained synthetic biology. Sandy had tried explaining to various people away from Callay, where attitudes changed more slowly, that GIs in the FSA did not signal that the League had actually won the war. On the contrary, no one was more concerned about how synthetic technology had been misused in the League, than GIs who had defected out of disgust at their personal experiences. And now, League was paying for its misuse of the technology in the most frightening way imaginable.
But what if GI production stopped completely? Certainly it remained illegal in the Federation and would remain so for indefinite years to come. A certain percentage of those GIs commissioned in the League would continue to trickle into the Federation, and that would keep the numbers here rising, though manageable. To date, Federation GIs were limited exclusively to Callay, though it was theoretically legal for them to move elsewhere—they simply chose not to for fear of less-adjusted attitudes elsewhere in the Federation. Amongst these Federation GIs, a sense of community was growing, a sense of “us.” It was not at all chauvinistic, and Sandy was determined it would not become so, but certainly not all were happy at the prospect of an indefinite ban on making GIs.
Did any GI want to see the “species,” such as they were, die out completely? They dodged the issue neatly in the Federation, condemning League for mistreating GIs but relying on them too for new members of the community. What if she and the others were growing old, many years from now, with all League production shut down, and no young GIs anywhere? Could she sit still and let her people fade into oblivion? Even if it was, by some metrics, the best outcome for the human race as a whole?
Captain Reichardt appeared and leaned on the tiled wall alongside her stall. Sandy raised an eyebrow at him and continued to rinse her hair. He wore full uniform as always—FOG, they called it, for Fleet-On-the-Ground. FOG protocol said that among high-ranking non-Fleet, he was required to identify himself at all times. In strategic terms, a warship overhead changed everything.
“Hi, Arron,” said Sandy through the steam of many showers. “Wanna come in?”
“Hi,” he said. “No thank you.” And produced a memory stick in a plastic cover. Placed it on top of the soap dispenser; no doubt it was waterproof. He indicated to it, then used his hand to mime conversation. Indicated himself, then mimed his throat being cut. Sandy nodded. Not a word, then. And the showers were smart, especially the female showers, sensitivities being what they were toward visual monitors here. But audio was always possible. “Just came to say thanks for the Scarlotti. It was fantastic.”
Sandy smiled, dunking her face in the water stream. “Sure. They’re the best secret in the Goyal Valley. They don’t have too many vines so they don’t want to mass produce. But I haven’t found a better red for that price on Callay.”
“Ndaja and a few of the grunts are down that way touring,” said Reichardt. “I’ll tell them to check it out.” Sandy couldn’t quite imagine Lieutenant Ndaja of the Mekong’s marine complement touring wineries on her shore leave . . . but then, she of all people should know better than to prejudge. “And I’ll wire them a procurement order from Fleet allowances to bring back an extra box or two.”
“Ah, officer surplus wine supplies,” Sandy reminisced. “I made good use of it, League-side. I was the black market’s top customer.” Whatever his innocent intentions, Reichardt’s gaze was straying. She turned. “Do my back?”
He grinned. “No . . . no, I think I’ll um . . .” He jerked a thumb back toward the exit. “I’ll just go.”
“If you must,” she sighed and resumed washing herself. Reichardt turned and made way for Amirah, wearing that friendly grin as she passed and nothing else.
“Hi, Captain,” she said, padding to her locker as she towelled her hair. Just because she was lately on an administrative track didn’t mean she neglected her combat exercises.
“Dear Lord,” said Reichardt as he walked to the exit, speaking loudly enough for most nearby to hear. “Thank you for female GIs.”
A 42 series named Lata paused at Sandy’s stall, observing Reichardt’s departure with disapproval. “You let him go,” she observed. “Why?”
“Steady girlfriend,” Sandy explained.
“Straights!” Lata exclaimed, walking on with an exasperated shrug.
When she got home, the kids had already made and eaten dinner and were now doing homework together at the kitchen table—all under Danya’s supervision. Other parents sometimes asked her what they could do to induce similar behaviour from their kids. Send them to Droze for five years to be terrified and starved, she’d replied. If they survive, they’ll come back so mutually dependent and desperate for normalcy that even cooking and homework would seem a joy.
“Wow, guys,” she said as she ate her fish with vegetables on the table amidst their homework. “This is delicious.”
“Svetlana made it,” said Danya, looking up from his physics problems. His hair was a mess after swimming at the Canas School pool, his arms bare and tanned. He’d grown ten centimeters since he’d come to Callay, and though he’d never be more than average sized, he would still be taller than her in another year or two. In four or five years, she’d probably barely make his shoulder. It still amazed her, teenagers and their growth spurts. Teenagers and everything, in fact. Her lack of familiarity made even the things most parents complained about seem interesting.
“Nice job, Svet.”
“It was Danya’s recipe,” Svetlana said with a shrug, stylus paused between math sums. “He bought everything on his run this morning, I just followed the recipe.”
“I made the sauce!” Kiril insisted. He was halfway through a page of meticulous handwriting, which Tanushan schools still insisted on. People like Ari thought it a stupid anachronism, of co
urse. “The sauce is the best bit!”
“It is the best bit, Kiril,” said Sandy. “You’re right.” His brother and sister smiled and did not protest. “I hear you guys talked to Shin Yu the other day.”
“You mean Yu Shin,” said Kiril.
“She’s Chinese, Kiri,” said Svetlana. “Surname comes first.” Suddenly concentrating very hard on her tablet.
“Who told you?” asked Danya. Carefully.
“Her dad.” She looked at him, waiting for the explanation she was not sure would come.
“Are you angry?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Sandy with mild amusement. “Should I be?”
Danya looked a little relieved that she was at least not immediately angry. Not that her anger with them was ever real, just occasionally projected for effect. “Kids sometimes say more than adults,” he explained. “I wanted to see if she let anything slip, about her dad and FedInt.”
Sandy bit another mouthful. “And?”
“Not really. She doesn’t talk much.”
“She’s a really good student,” Svetlana piped up. “She’s top of her classes in nearly everything. And she keeps to herself and has almost no friends.”
“Thing is,” said Sandy, “her dad says she felt threatened.” Undeterred by Svetlana’s attempts at distraction. “And tried to get me to reprimand you.”
“She’s lying!” Svetlana protested.
“We didn’t threaten her,” said Danya very seriously. “Not even close.”
“I know,” Sandy said mildly. “I told her dad I didn’t believe you would. And I think he was probably exaggerating, just so he had some leverage on me.”
“He’s an asshole,” Svetlana complained. “It’s no wonder she looks unhappy all the time, with a father like that.”
“I don’t know that he is a bad father,” Sandy replied. “I’ve heard other people say he’s great with his daughter. But being the only child of a man like Shin is hard. They’ve travelled around a lot, and he has a lot of personal security concerns. She hasn’t been able to make many friends, I think, because they keep moving, and she’s been told not to talk to people about so many things. Like you.”
“That’s what Danya said,” Svetlana admitted reluctantly.
“The difference between her and you is that she’s all alone, while you have each other. And while I’m sure she’s had the usual security training for the child of such a high-level man as her father, she hasn’t actually lived it, like you guys have. She’s been told there’s threats everywhere, and she’s probably been told I’m one of them, and therefore you guys are too. And probably that makes her scared. Especially when two of you talk to her together.”
Danya made a wry face. “Yeah. It’s just that when I talk to people, girls especially, they usually react better if Svetlana’s there.”
“Sure,” Sandy agreed. A lot of people found their relationship very sweet, having rarely seen brothers and sisters so close at this age. “But there’s two of you, and she was outnumbered.”
“So you think I should have gone alone?”
“I think you probably shouldn’t have gone at all.” With a good-natured look. Danya smirked. Adult-sensible or not, he was still a teenage boy on some things. She may as well have told him not to surf on the really big waves. “But if you must, why not let Svetlana do it?”
“Alone?” Another smirk.
“Hey!” said Svetlana.
“Probably talk about shoes,” said Danya. Svetlana slapped his arm.
“She might have done better talking about shoes,” said Sandy. “Then, a few days later, she could talk about hairstyles. And a few days later, boy bands. Then, two weeks later, ‘how’s your father?’ You see?”
Svetlana grinned triumphantly at Danya. Danya looked thoughtful. “You’re such an ignoramus, Danya,” said his sister. “You know so much about everything except people.”
It was unfair, but not without some truth. Danya viewed everything as a technical problem to solve. With people less serious than himself, as children usually were, he didn’t always relate.
“Sandy,” said Kiril, “how many people live in China?” Sandy smiled. While Kiril, meanwhile, lived in Kiril-land, a bright and happy place filled with interesting facts that had nothing to do with the topic at hand.
After dinner, Sandy helped them with homework. Danya’s grades were okay but predictably depended on whether his teacher engaged him or not. The technicalities of maths and languages did little to excite him, but applying them toward actual results, like in Applied Design, had gotten him good marks, and renewed enthusiasm for the skills that went into it. At history he was best of all, the more brutal and bloodthirsty, the better. People and politics made sense to him, and few of the horrors in history books surprised him.
Svetlana struggled, having missed most of those early years of education Danya had at least received. They’d used some basic education tape on Droze, but it was very limited, and often she got frustrated with how far she was behind. Sandy helped her now with some basic maths, sipping coffee while pointing her way through some algebra on Svetlana’s slate, converting sums into simple diagrams with her uplinks that demonstrated the problem in some different way. Sometimes she substituted funny comic-art animals for numbers, eliminating them as subtraction demanded by an equally comic boot up the backside, making Svetlana giggle—she’d discovered the best way to curb the frustration was to break up the learning with laughter. It sobered her to recall how once, when she was very young in the League, she’d been dismissive of straights and their relative lack of maths and other basic mental skills. Less intelligent, less important, she’d thought. How wrong she’d been.
After homework she apologised and went to her room, with a promise to join them a bit later for a game they’d discovered they liked. In the room, she inserted the memory stick into her personal autistic drive, which established her local construct with no external connectivity whatsoever. It had no memory either, so no intruder or warranted search would find any trace of its use.
The memory stick loaded constructs in Fleet format, heavily encrypted, and Reichardt hadn’t bothered to give her a decoder, knowing she could break it in a few seconds. She established the first construct . . . it was a nav map, from a ship’s cruise recorder. The date had been not merely hidden but scrubbed, so she had no idea what ship it was, or when it had been recorded, or where. A bit of detective work could solve that, she supposed, sipping tea as she watched the recording play on her double desk screen, to save herself from the mental ache of too much uplink vision in one day. She could hear crew talking, and a voice-print match could find the personnel in question, the dates they’d served, and put the pieces together from there. Also, system features were clearly marked, planets, moons, stations, identifying names also scrubbed, but she knew quite a lot of that stuff from her time League-side in the war. Reichardt knew his career was over if anyone knew he’d shared this, names or no names.
This feed looked like a third-watch ship, twenty-four-hour cycles divided into three eight-hour slots. They were inertial, 31 AU from a star, twenty-three degrees nadir on an insystem heading. There was the usual system chatter, quite a lot of sensor data. Sandy guessed from the feeds it might be a Destroyer; the trajectory didn’t suggest the jump engines of a Runner or the stealth of a Ghostie.
Suddenly an entry, a flare of jump energy . . . just 2.3 AU. Loud calls of alarm, scan and nav shouting figures in unison, helm sorting through incoming response trajectories, all-hands flashing red. The incoming vessel was far too close to the star for comfort, on a trajectory taking him across and also insystem . . . and now a second vessel jump-flared in behind, in the almost identical spot the first had arrived.
Only now they both turned, simultaneous flares of jump-energy to shift trajectory as only Talee could, and both disappeared in a flash of power. Leaving stunned Federation bridge crew to analyse the continuing scroll of incoming data, radiation levels, last trajectory, mass
and power projections . . . all impossible, of course, for human ships. Listening to the crew gave her a cold chill up the spine, as seasoned Fleet professionals tried to keep the incredulity from their voices and do their jobs.
The ships had come in on different trajectories and arrived at nearly the same moment. So they couldn’t have coordinated that manoeuvre beforehand. That had been spontaneous. And therefore impossible, because when you ran into someone else’s light-wave you had no idea what they were actually doing at that moment, only what they were doing, several seconds or minutes ago, at the light-wave’s source. But somehow they just knew, turned together in perfect synchronicity, and left on the same heading on the same trajectory. Unless it was a fluke, both ships turning instinctively to a familiar destination, a safety route. But this trajectory took them toward Federation frontier space, she heard nav telling the newly awoken Captain in terse, disbelieving tones. No Talee ships went that way, everyone was quite sure. Which meant they’d probably known a rock out there in the dark that Fleet did not, some point of mass they could arrive at, reorient, and jump out again some other way.
Unless they’d short-jumped it. In unison. With no preparation. That was impossible too, even preplanning short-jumps were fraught; with the star’s fading mass behind them, getting out of hyperspace was hard, and making it stick, harder. Coordinating between two vessels and emerging within the same 100 AU, really hard, even if the Talee were using the tech everyone thought they were.
Sandy looked through two more cruise recordings. Both showed equally amazing things. The pattern, she was beginning to see, was that none of them could be completely explained by technology. All involved Talee ships, always two, appearing to guess each other’s actions. Unless one believed in telepathy, and even that would surely be constrained by the laws of light and the fabric of the universe.
What was Reichardt suggesting with this selection of recordings? Some great mystery that Fleet had been puzzling at for . . . decades? Longer? Were Talee simply that predictable to each other? From everything she knew and had learned, Talee were never regarded as predictable, they were creative thinkers who often applied what seemed to humans risky or daring solutions. But then the magic act always seemed daring to clueless viewers in the audience who did not know how the trick was safely performed.
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