Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  The frozen shock that had gripped her that afternoon had not completely gone, but it was dissipating as the reality took hold. The danger had been real before today; the only difference was that now, Shomoro knew of it. And known dangers were infinitely better than unknown dangers. She’d lived the price of not knowing, had its consequences carved into her flesh.

  Never again.

  “Tell me what I can do to protect myself,” she said.

  Whalg-General’s yellow eyes widened. “Do? Not much on your own, I’m afraid. We have months before Attarrish’s arrival; Intelligence is tracking him, and you’ll be privy to their findings, but ultimately this is a matter for Planetary Security to handle.”

  Yurll glanced at him, then back to Shomoro. “Rest assured, we’re taking this seriously. Until the threat’s been dealt with, the Council has authorized your relocation to the vault, if you wish it. You’ll have a dedicated security detail if you need to go to the surface.”

  “What about our defensive research?” Shomoro asked.

  Yurll shook her head, her crest swaying. “Experiments can be delayed. It’s not worth losing you.”

  So that was what they offered. Shomoro could hide in the vault under Anmerresh’s crust, behind layers of security measures and personnel, and let others fight her battles for her. And it was her battle—hers and Daikar’s. They were the ones who’d first uncovered Mose Attarrish’s existence, in the clues offered by the damaged armor of a slain seph . Without that lead, the High Council wouldn’t have known of this threat at all.

  She stood. “I can’t accept that, Councilor.”

  Yurll cocked her head. “You don’t want this protection?”

  “No, I will accept the security detail. Maybe even relocation to the vault. But I can’t just do nothing and wait for Planetary Security to apprehend Attarrish.”

  “What are you proposing?” Whalg-General asked.

  Shomoro breathed deep. “We capture him.” She caught the sharp disapproval in Daikar’s scent as he crossed his arms over his chest. She ignored it and jabbed her snout at the Drevl Char. “Go ahead, Pri.”

  Pri stepped forward. «Shomoro and I have been working on an outside project these past few months.» She paused. Shomoro sensed the nervousness behind it; they were about to make a sizeable request of the High Council, and Pri had not had favorable experiences with bureaucracy in the past.

  But Pri rallied. «We do not begrudge the cost of the sanctuary the Council has provided. Improving Teluk’s defenses against the Expansion is work Shomoro and I value highly. But it isn’t the reason for our alliance.» She used a tendril to indicate Shomoro, Daikar, and herself.

  Whalg-General looked bemused, but Yurll nodded her crested head. “I was there when you spoke at the capitol chambers in Opella.” She looked at Shomoro. “I know how important it is to you—to all of you—to get justice for Za’s destruction. We’ve lent what help we could to further that goal.”

  “And I appreciate it.” Shomoro took her seat. “But there are only three of us. Even with the Council’s help, there are limits to what such a small team can accomplish. And our efforts to recruit more Za survivors have been . . . unproductive.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down as she cast back over the memories. After her and Daikar’s attempt to contact Vorl Yureshenka had ended in disaster, Shomoro had switched tactics. She’d sent out automated fast couriers to seed the datanets of worlds beyond the Front with an invitation to join her on Teluk. Her hope had been that any seph clever enough would find and decrypt the messages.

  The answer had been a decade and a half of silence. There were any number of possible reasons: she hadn’t been convincing enough; the nets had scrubbed the messages before they could be discovered; or perhaps the traumatized refugees of Oskaran’s biggest defeat had viewed the messages with understandable suspicion.

  Or, the Project had traced and killed the sephs before they could reach Teluk, and in trying to expand her team, Shomoro had led it right to her.

  She bit down on that thought. She’d made choices with the best information available to her at the time. All she could do now was the same thing.

  Whalg-General’s nostrils dilated in intrigue. “Are you suggesting we recruit this assassin?”

  Shomoro whipped her gaze toward him. “Mose Attarrish isn’t an assassin, Whalg-General. He’s a seph .” Her tone came out sharper than she’d meant it to. She softened it, but kept his gaze. “A seph who lived through the fall of Za, just like the two of us.” She glanced over at Daikar, trying to catch his gaze, but he was stonily examining the curved wall of the chamber. “A seph who, from what Pri told me, likely has as much reason as we do to pay back the Expansion for its crimes.”

  “Then why is he working for a Terran paramilitary organization?” Water Dancer asked.

  “The Terrans must have some kind of hold over him,” Shomoro said. “If we capture rather than kill him, we’ll have a chance to learn what that is.”

  “The same is true if Planetary Security apprehends him,” Water Dancer retorted. “There’s no reason for you or any of us to be directly involved.”

  There is if I want to learn what’s making him do this, she thought.

  She was still trying to shape this personal reason into something strategically convincing when Water Dancer spoke again.

  “With respect, Councilors, there are experiments that can’t be delayed,” Water Dancer said. “We’re at a delicate point in our nanobaffle trials. This situation threatens to be hugely disruptive to Shomoro’s schedule at the moment we most need her expertise.”

  And to think this afternoon the Rul had been critiquing her caution. Yet Shomoro believed Water Dancer was sincere.

  Without Shomoro’s research, Teluk’s nanodefense program would not exist.

  “Security and Intelligence have the resources to handle Attarrish,” Water Dancer finished firmly. “Let them.”

  Whalg-General scratched the violet wattles under his throat with a claw. His yellow eyes found Daikar’s. “You’ve been, ah, awfully quiet, Daikar. You’re a member of this alliance, too—what do you think of this plan?”

  For a beat, Daikar didn’t look at the rest of them. When he finally spoke, his voice was subdued. “Mose was my friend,” he said. “Fifteen years ago. I don’t know how he’s changed since, but he must have, to—to do what he’s done.” He breathed deep, and his voice steadied. “I can’t endorse this plan. It’s too risky.

  We don’t know if Mose will be receptive, and we’ll lose the element of surprise the moment he knows we know about him.”

  «That may be so,» Pri sent, «but there are other kinds of surprise besides the ambush kind.»

  Daikar lifted his snout, signaling her to go on.

  «If our information about Mose Attarrish is correct, he will be isolated, his access to information carefully controlled.» Her independently mobile side eyes panned the room, alighting on each of them. «My contacting him will disrupt that careful system, and that’s before he even sees the contents of the package I will deliver. At the least, it will throw him off-balance, distract him when he needs to be completely focused on his mission.»

  “And at best, it will render him sympathetic to our cause.” Shomoro jabbed. She looked at Daikar. “It’s always been the plan to make contact with him, now that we know where to find him.”

  “On our own timeline!” Daikar swatted a hand through the air—not in negation, but emphasis. “On a neutral world, where we could abort if things turned sour. Not on Teluk itself, with the Project’s target fixed on you.”

  “That wasn’t our reality a few months ago. Now it is.” The words felt leaden, but Shomoro forced them out. Known dangers were better than unknown.

  Whalg-General looked between the four of them. “I don’t relish the prospect of condemning a Teluk citizen. And despite everything, Attarrish is one of our own. If you believe you can recruit him to our side, you have my permission to try.”

 
“Let’s put it to a vote,” Shomoro said. She looked between the two members of her alliance, and pointedly away from Water Dancer. This wasn’t the Rul’s fight. “Those in favor of contacting Mose Attarrish.” A brief moment, less than a second, passed before she raised her arm. Pri lifted a tendril almost simultaneously.

  “Those opposed,” she said. Daikar didn’t raise a hand, but his silence spoke his answer.

  The route from Shomoro’s apartments to the water gardens of Anmerresh provided good exercise. Anmerresh was built on engineered terraces which gradually smoothed out into its estuarial bay. The gardens were located on the city’s terraced upper slopes just below the ancient volcanic caldera. It was only a couple of terraces away from her apartments in terms of absolute distance, but the city planners had laid out the streets in a circuitous, upward-sloping spiral that lengthened the journey on foot by at least fifteen minutes. Though the slope wasn’t steep by any standards—it had to accommodate environment palanquins, after all—the persistent climb always left her flushed and breathing heavily.

  Shomoro supposed she could have taken a cable car to the meeting; the Council’s security precautions didn’t forbid her using transit. But she didn’t relish the prospect of boarding a public car with a Baskar security detail scanning the crowd while trying to look inconspicuous. The walk gave her bodyguards the freedom to trail a little farther behind her, mix into the general pedestrian traffic of Baskar and Rul, Arashal and Veert. Today was a rest day, so she was in no particular hurry to get anywhere. And she liked the scenery: It made Shomoro suspect that the circuitous route was not a result of carelessness on the city planners’ part.

  It was sometimes said that Teluk was a world obsessed with its own history. Indeed, it was a rare public place that did not have a monument or two on display. The spiral leading up to the water gardens of Anmerresh was no different. With each turn, between the facades of apartments and shops, wall space had been given over to curving sandstone and ceramic bas-reliefs, each of them about half as tall again as Shomoro and three or four body lengths long. Though the style differed for every mural—everything from photorealism to graphic stylization—each one depicted an event from the Teluk-Terran War thirty-five years before.

  Most of the scenes were of space battles between Coalition ships and the exploratory Terran fleet that had dropped into the system after the Expansion’s initial diplomatic overtures had been rebuffed. Both fleets had been hasty, patchwork assemblies of ships: The Coalition’s was a desperate amalgam of craft from half a dozen species, not all of them combat craft.

  Shomoro saw industrial freighters and supply ships, even garbage scows, mixed among the defense force cruisers and frigates on the Teluk side.

  The Expansion’s loadout had been more unified, but hardly better. It had been able to spare only some light cruisers and two heavy freighters from the Rreluush-Tren conflict raging a few systems away. Then again, the Expansion hadn’t known it would be entering a second war in Teluk’s system. It had budgeted troops and matériel for maybe a few orbital skirmishes, confident of its chances to snatch a moon or two as temporary requisitions from which it could manufacture weapons and mechs for the real war.

  The spiraling street made another turn, and on her left she passed one of the larger murals, Memorial to the Glorious Dead of Banesh-114. Layers of colored sandstone portrayed, in forced perspective, an asteroid plunging from low Teluk orbit.

  The setting sun glinted off the halo of red friction-heat glowing around the space rock. In an upper corner, Terran and Coalition ships fought and exploded in grainy bursts against the black, but the curve of Teluk filled the rest of the frame.

  The artist had chosen to depict the seas and landmasses as they appeared from space, without borders or labels, save for one dot on the coastline near the asteroid’s impact site. This marked the city of Dobre, the name written beside it in Rul glyphs. The mural had been done by a Rul artist, Shomoro recalled. The impact site itself was marked by a series of concentric circles that rippled out to cover the city.

  Banesh-114 had been a mining asteroid rich in metals, towed to a low orbit for harvesting. The Coalition had kept it out of Terran hands at the cost of the asteroid’s orbital stability. Thirty thousand citizens, including at least five thousand Rul, had died in the tsunami at Dobre.

  She turned onto the high-walled street that branched off toward the water gardens. The sound of lapping water and a heady pollen on the breeze announced the park just before the narrow path opened up onto a series of manicured terraces.

  Shallow clear ponds overflowing into chains of miniature waterfalls were arranged along the paths. Little culs de sac provided spaces where visitors given to contemplation could stop and rest. Benches and gazebos sheltered under spreading trees, some imported, some the native arboriform marsh plants of Teluk.

  Anmerresh’s horticulturalists had striven to include compatible flora from the home biomes of every sentient species on this multispecies world. Sometimes, when nothing else assuaged her homesickness, Shomoro had spent long hours in the Oskaran section of the gardens. She would sketch the lam’chra trees with their bone-white, translucent leaves, or smell the ripening seedpods of the kam’chra blossoms in their lead-up to bursting and scattering on the wind. They hadn’t been able to grow successfully anywhere else on Teluk, as far as she knew.

  Her feet turned toward that section out of habit, and Shomoro changed direction, walking around the gardens’ circumference until, in the little plaza the Rul had suggested as a meeting place, she found Water Dancer.

  The Rul was up and moving toward her on ambulatory pods, saving Shomoro the embarrassment of trying to pick Water Dancer out from the few other Rul taking the air. Water Dancer had distinctive purple dappling on her green carapace, which thickened to solid purple around her manipulatory tendrils, but it wasn’t always possible to see the markings from a distance. And Shomoro hadn’t been around enough Rul to tell them apart by scent; they all had the same musty, slightly vegetal smell to her.

  Multicolored dapples of lightspeech coruscated across Water Dancer’s carapace. “Did you have a pleasant rest day?” her translator provided a moment later.

  Shomoro jabbed. “It’s a good day for the water gardens. Thank you for suggesting it.”

  Water Dancer hooked a pod in a beckoning gesture. “Let us walk.”

  They fell in side by side on the path. Shomoro checked her impulse to look back and see if her security detail was following. She’d gotten better at not looking back.

  They came to a part of the path with no other pedestrians, and Water Dancer’s pace slowed. She adjusted the volume down on her translator box. “If I ask you a question, will you promise not to get angry?”

  Shomoro raised an eyebrow. “That depends what it is.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  She stopped on the path. Water Dancer hadn’t turned to look at her—with a Rul’s radial symmetry, Water Dancer was, in a way, looking at her all the time, from eyespots in a dozen different places—but all the same, something of the stillness that had come over her conveyed anticipation, and a little worry. “Yes. We may have our research . . . disagreements, but yes. I do trust you.”

  “Then why did you override me in front of the Council?”

  Something bitter that might have been anger had invaded Water Dancer’s neutral scent, and it was making the hairs on the back of Shomoro’s own neck rise. “This—” doesn’t concern you, she almost said, but that was unfair. “This was something my alliance has been expecting, in some form, for a while. I listened to your concerns, but ultimately it was up to the three of us to decide on.”

  “And this is what you decided on? Three guards armed with nonlethal weapons?” She cracked a tendril toward the trio of Baskar trying to look like they weren’t following, and the lead one stiffened. “You really think they’ll be enough to stop Attarrish if he’s determined?”

  “Planetary Security will stop Attarrish,” Shomoro snapped. />
  Water Dancer recoiled slightly at her tone, and she lowered her voice. “The security detail is just to assuage the Council’s fears.”

  Pedestrians were starting to filter onto their secluded path. Shomoro stalked to a nearby bridge arching over one of the larger ponds that seemed to offer more privacy, trusting Water Dancer would follow. She stopped in the middle of the arch, leaned her elbows on the wooden railing, and stared down into the pond’s murky green water.

  Rul were not graceful, except when they chose to be fast. Water Dancer did not so much run after Shomoro as twirl, her bush-like body spinning up the slope of the bridge on its ambulatory pods like a small green planet. She gripped Shomoro’s arm with the tendrils of one pod. “If you have such confidence in Planetary Security,” she said, “why not let them do their job unimpeded? Why send one of our best programmers into hostile territory to risk her life contacting an assassin?”

  A seph, not an assassin, her mind corrected wearily. Or not only. She bit off the retort. Water Dancer wouldn’t understand.

  She only saw the threat, not the opportunity. Not the chance for—what?

  “Because I have to know more,” she said at last. “I could let the Council kill or detain Attarrish. But then I would lose my chance to learn more about who sent him. Why. What other tricks they have in store in case he fails. This is data, Water Dancer, data I need to collect. It’s worth taking a calculated risk.” She scritched a nail under a strip of paint that was coming loose from the railing. “Besides . . . there’s my suspicion Attarrish isn’t doing this by choice.”

  “Does that suspicion rest on any evidence? Or is it because you can’t imagine any Osk aiding the Terrans after what they did at Za?”

  Shomoro squeezed the railing. “A bit of both,” she admitted.

  The light-flashes that preceded Water Dancer’s translated speech were muted, somber blues and greens. “I understand that feeling. But there’s something I want you to think about. The scale isn’t the same, but five thousand Rul died in the inundation at Dobre. And yet there are still Rul working for the Expansion, as government or military contractors. Or are the Osk not capable of that kind of cognitive dissonance?”