Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  Vernsky swallowed that thought, as he’d trained himself to do. If he was the only person on Mose’s side, then so be it.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  The remainder of the bleary morning had passed before Vernsky caught Jan alone in his office. He rapped lightly on the door frame and took the seat Jan waved him to gingerly. Best not get too comfortable before he said the uncomfortable thing he’d come for.

  “What can I do for you, Alex?” Jan asked once the office door had swished closed.

  Vernsky filled his lungs, steadying himself. “It’s what we can do for Mose that I came to talk to you about.”

  Jan raised his brows, inviting Vernsky to continue.

  “To be frank, sir, you’ve given me an impossible task. There’s no way I can prepare Mose for the mission in the state he’s in.”

  “I thought the psychotherapeutic nanite boosters were helping,” Jan said. “Your last psych report didn’t show a drop in their effectiveness.”

  “They aren’t a magic bullet,” Vernsky said. “The treatments can stabilize Mose’s mood, they can slow the downward spiral, but they can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. Not under these conditions.”

  Jan’s eyes hooded. “Don’t tell me you’re resigning, now.”

  Vernsky put up his hands, conciliatory. “Nothing like that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’ll repeat what I said at the meeting. Why now?”

  Jan pursed his lips. “I told you, we have a tight window of opportunity—”

  Vernsky shook his head. “I meant, why go after this seph? I thought you were focused on pursuing our leads on Gau.”

  Leather creaked as Jan leaned back in his chair, frowning.

  “I’ve been a bad director if I’ve led you to believe I’m using the Project as some kind of engine of revenge.”

  Vernsky shrugged. “I understand you have a personal stake in finding Gau, that’s all.”

  Jan swept a hand over the desk, as though sweeping this point aside. “My stake in this is to prevent the kind of violence that took my mother from ever happening again. As Gau demonstrated four months ago, Za’s fugitive sephs are potential accretion points for that violence. Including the one we’ve just identified.”

  Vernsky rubbed his fingers into his palm under the table, dispelling tension. “That aside, we need to give Mose something. Some little piece of privacy, something that’s his own.

  He’s a rat in a glass box right now, and he knows it.” Vernsky had watched that process of take take take long enough to speak on it with confidence; he only wished it hadn’t taken getting to this crisis point for him to speak up. “We need to create space for him, even if it’s only psychological. Otherwise I guarantee we’ll be bringing his body back from Teluk.” Or nothing.

  Jan squeezed his eyes shut, his lips moving briefly in what might have been internal debate, prayer, or cursing. Finally he said, “I agree. What did you have in mind?”

  “We stop monitoring his search history.” Vernsky licked his lips as Jan nodded. No pushback so far. His second suggestion, though . . . “And turn off the surveillance feeds in his room.”

  Jan’s mouth opened in protest, though no sound came out. After a pause, he said, “Those monitors are there for Mose’s safety. If he has a medical or behavioral emergency, we have to know.”

  Vernsky let behavioral emergency pass without comment. It was a nice way of saying suicide attempt without using the words. “With respect, we don’t need the feeds. Mose’s internal telemetry gives us continuous data about his physiological state, and it has alarms to notify a human tech if his vital signs deviate from expected parameters.”

  Jan steepled his fingers. His gaze over their tops was vague, but sharpened as it settled on Vernsky. “And if he’s about to self-harm? Can they detect that, too?”

  “I can . . . program them to,” Vernsky said, the thought coalescing as he spoke. Yes, he could compile telemetry data from Mose’s medical history and past incidents into an algorithm given a few hours. Unfortunately, they had more than sufficient data to program the monitors to recognize that pattern.

  Jan opened his hand in a gesture that was half invitation, half command. “Get on it, then.”

  Vernsky thanked him and made his exit before Jan could change his mind.

  Wythe was waiting for Vernsky in the hallway outside Jan’s office. The Operations manager nodded to him and said, “A word, please.”

  He let Wythe lead him to the deserted employee lounge.

  He gratefully accepted when Wythe asked if he wanted coffee, then sat down with the Operations manager at one of the small tables scattered around.

  The crema on the surface of Vernsky’s coffee was still dissipating when Wythe got to the point. “I understand why you’re concerned for Mose’s well-being. But don’t let your professional compassion make you forget what he is.”

  “He’s not human, is that it?” Lack of sleep and the drift of the meeting had made Vernsky grumpy. “Not one of us.”

  “He’s our prisoner.”

  Vernsky had no retort to that. He covered his uncertainty with a gulp of coffee.

  “And he’s not your friend,” Wythe continued. “He’ll never be your friend. No matter what kind of breakthrough you think you’ve made.”

  The walls of his coffee cup crinkled as Vernsky squeezed it.

  He heard the liquid inside slosh and stopped. “Is that why you called this little coffee break? To give me advice?”

  “That, and the file number of a session I think you should take a look at,” Wythe said. “When you have a moment, look up Session 403-89. Perhaps it will supplement what I’ve said.”

  He picked up his cup and left.

  Vernsky minimized the testing window containing his revised medical telemetry program and slumped back in his chair, rubbing his temples. He glanced at his watch and winced. The local time was obscenely late. He peeked around his monitor to the door of his private office, which he always kept ajar.

  Though his office was well-lit, the larger workspace visible through the gap was dark save for bars of crimson night-lights lining the aisles between desks. Vernsky thought it made the furniture appear drenched in blood. The color had been selected for its soothing effect on the Project’s few Veerten employees, but to any human worker the overall effect was creepy as hell.

  Tonight, the florid lighting seemed to be intensifying Vernsky’s tension headache. He reached for the tube of vaporized painkiller on his desk and took a perfunctory snort. Almost immediately, the painful throb in his head lessened, a sadistic musician switching from kettle drums to snare.

  Roving his now-empty desktop screen, Vernsky found his cursor hovering over the session archive icon. Wythe’s cryptic reference to Session 403-89 had been niggling at the back of his mind all day, underneath the skin of his concentration as he’d worked on the algorithm. Vernsky shrugged in his chair. It seemed a long shot, but maybe Wythe had been trying to help him, in his way. Vernsky opened up the database and queried the session number.

  The file popped up. Vernsky looked at the metadata to gain context for what he was about to watch. He was surprised to see it was an older session—so old it had been conducted by the first physician to treat Mose. Vernsky was the third. The timestamp listed a date just over a year since the Project’s inception. With a start, he realized he knew the date from Mose’s case history. This session had taken place just after the Vorl Yureshenka mission.

  His stomach did a flip-flop. Mose rarely talked voluntarily about any of his missions, but from the few times he’d opened up, Vernsky knew this one had been especially traumatic for him. It had been the first time Mose had killed someone he’d known from Za.

  Vernsky’s finger hovered over the cursor, hesitant to press Play on the video. He’d always tried to respect Mose’s privacy within the limits imposed by his role in the Project; he’d never gone digging around in Mose’s old session files without good reason. Vernsk
y knew how he’d feel if someone replayed his most painful moments without his knowledge out of nothing more than curiosity.

  But this time he had good reason. Mose was suffering here and now, and if a fourteen-year-old recording could help . . .

  Vernsky hit Play. The scene was composed identically to Vernsky’s own sessions: Mose sat against a blank wall at a metal table, his lower body hidden from view by its edge. But this time it wasn’t Vernsky’s voice speaking from outside the frame.

  “Tell me what happened.” The new—old—doctor’s voice was bass, gentle. “You said it wasn’t Gau Shesharrim this time either.”

  Staring at the table, Mose spoke in a near whisper. “He was my friend.” His head jerked up as though it was connected to a string, his long lips pulling back from gritted teeth in an expression Vernsky instantly recognized as extreme distress.

  “Vorl Yureshenka?” It was inflected as a question, though there was no one else Mose could mean.

  Mose went on as if the doctor hadn’t spoken. “He was my friend, and I betrayed and murdered him.” There was almost no inflection in his voice, but Vernsky noted from long practice the signs of remorse and self-loathing in the set of Mose’s mouth, the way his snout pulled to one side, as though he couldn’t face what he’d done head-on. His next words still came as a shock:

  “I’m not doing this anymore.”

  Fake leather creaked as the doctor straightened in his seat; his hands came into view as he leaned his palms on the table.

  “Be realistic, Mose. I know this is difficult for you—”

  “No, you don’t!” Mose snapped. “No one knows what this is like for me.”

  The doctor’s hands flinched on the table, but he didn’t draw back. “Fair enough. But I want to make sure you understand what could happen if you refuse to comply with the Project’s requirements.”

  “Oh, I understand,” Mose said in an almost normal voice. “I understand completely.” Then he lunged across the table and seized the doctor’s wrists.

  With a strangled yell, the doctor tried to jerk out of the Osk’s grasp, but Mose tightened his grip. Vernsky watched, stunned, as Mose forced the doctor’s right forearm to rotate until its delicate tracery of veins was exposed. The blade extended from the sheath along the Osk’s own forearm, its honed enamel edge a centimeter away from slicing open the poor man’s vein. All Mose had to do was push down with that arm—

  A door slammed open offscreen, and the room flooded with security personnel. “Tranq him, now!” one of them shouted, and a moment later a dart embedded itself in Mose’s neck.

  His hold on the doctor’s wrists faltered enough for the man to wrench them free. The Osk’s eyes went glassy, then closed as he slumped to the table.

  The vid ended. Vernsky’s hands shook a little as he opened the attached addendum. It was brief: a personnel change note to the effect that Mose’s physician had resigned shortly afterward in fear for his safety. Vernsky scanned it, then closed out the file and logged out of the workstation. The computer screen dimmed and went black. Vernsky was standing to shrug on his coat and collect his buzzing thoughts when he heard the padding of footsteps on carpeting and looked up.

  Mose Attarrish stood in the doorway to his office.

  Vernsky had backed up two steps before he caught himself. “Jesus. You startled me.”

  Mose said nothing, studying him in silence. Backlit by the gory red night lighting, his lithe, centauroid body resembled a sculpture fashioned in black oil. Though like most Osk, Mose was shorter than human average—his elongated head probably reached no higher than Vernsky’s shoulder—Vernsky knew the body under that dark cloak was packed with muscle, the fibers better integrated than human muscles, providing more strength for their mass. White pupils like slivers of bone met Vernsky’s gaze, beneath a shock of red mane that reminded him unsettlingly of a spray of blood.

  Vernsky swallowed uncomfortably. He switched to O’o Nezz and tried again. “You’re up late.”

  The Osk’s laser-bore stare drifted away from Vernsky and over the minutiae of his tidy office. “I don’t sleep much,” he muttered. “But apparently, neither do you.”

  Vernsky licked his lips. “You knew I’d be here, at the office.” He spoke slowly; an unfamiliar wariness had come over him, the session he’d just watched fresh in his mind. Vernsky had always known Mose was capable of violence—shit, the entire point of the Project rested on that—but this was the first time he’d considered that that violence might be directed at him. The desk was still between him and Mose; in a motion he hoped Mose didn’t catch, Vernsky groped under its edge until his fingers found the emergency call button.

  “Yes,” Mose said. “I . . . these last months . . . I’ve been feeling bad.” The Osk tapped his chest twice, indicating the feeling was internal, a soul-state. He often used sign gestures when spoken language failed to convey the scope of his meaning. “That’s why I found you,” Mose said. “I think there are . . . some things I need to say.” He sounded faintly amazed at this admission.

  Vernsky moved his hand off the button. “Well, what—”

  “And I need to get out of here,” Mose continued, as if Vernsky had said nothing. “Is there someplace we could go?”

  After telling Mose to wait outside his office, Vernsky made a call—several, in fact. Escorting the ShadowStalker off Project real estate wasn’t disallowed, but there were strict rules about where Mose could go and when. He had to be supervised at all times, by his handler and a backup team for passive surveillance. The location of the excursion had to be vetted ahead of time, cleared of any civilians and even non-Project government personnel. Excursions during the station’s designated night-time were a lot easier to arrange than those in the daytime, and Mose knew that—it was probably why he’d come to Vernsky’s office at one A.M. instead of P.M.

  Once Vernsky had finished setting up the location, the security officer on the call asked, as usual, if he was comfortable escorting the ShadowStalker to the site.

  “Yes,” he said, after a hesitation so small Vernsky could almost convince himself it wasn’t there.

  “We can always send a team to accompany you.”

  Vernsky pictured it. A friendly heart to heart, just him and Mose and fifteen armed guards. Yeah, right. “It’s fine.” He disconnected the call. Dawdling by his desk, he opened the drawer of his medical cabinet and slipped a sedative patch calibrated for Osk physiology into his pocket. Now it was fine.

  Vernsky accompanied Mose down the transparent corridor that led out of the Project’s real estate. Project headquarters occupied a remote section of the orbital habitat Greenwich Hub: the hub was a free-floating structure, floating in a river of debris caught in the gravitational slipstream of the star Polaris. It had been built as two spoked wheels arranged concentrically around a central rotating spindle. The smaller inner wheel contained businesses and residential complexes. The larger outer wheel was mostly leased to specialized interests: recreational areas, laboratories, manufactories, and government projects.

  Mag-lev trains linked the complexes together, traveling along the spokes between wheels in aerated tubes.

  Though it could not be called a city in any Earthly sense, Hub residents—clinging to the English tradition of centuries past—sometimes called their home Greenwich-on-Polaris: a cozy village floating in a river of rock and ice.

  Mose shivered beside him, pulling the ratty black overcoat Vernsky had lent him tighter around himself.

  “Cold?” Vernsky asked, curious. The only answer was the subliminal hum of the motorized track under their feet, pulling them onward to the waiting trains.

  Vernsky took another stab. “Even before I first read your file, I knew you couldn’t be from a hab.”

  The glance he got was slow, but there was a flicker of interest there. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “You’ve got the look of a planet dweller, if you don’t mind me saying. I was born here, but I’ve seen a lot of visitors come from plane
tside. They all shiver. It’s psychosomatic—comes from looking out at all that frozen rock and vacuum and imagining it on this side. The nervousness goes away eventually.”

  The Osk jabbed tersely. Convinced?

  “So, what’s it like? Teluk.”

  “Different.”

  Vernsky waited for more. Surely there would be more.

  “It was a good planet. Natural. Not like here. It stuns me that you Terrans would choose to live on an airless rock, when there are habitable planets all around. Ensconcing yourselves in technology just to survive. Suffocating—except the irony is that without it you would suffocate.” Mose’s tone became more bitter and incisive toward the end. Vernsky noticed him begin to pull at the collar of the coat around his throat and chest.

  “It’s not as extreme as that, Mose,” Vernsky said. “Terrans have been living in different kinds of artificial habitats for most of our history as a species. It’s part of being sentient, inventing things that help you extend beyond your natural limits. Don’t tell me the Osk don’t have similar technologies; you’re space-farers, same as us.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve earned the right to hear how we live,” Mose fired back. “Leave my memories of before alone. They’re one of the few things you Terrans haven’t felt the need to pry into, and I appreciate that small privacy.”

  Vernsky opened his mouth to say he wasn’t prying—but being honest, he guessed he was. Crudely put, the whole point of his job was to pry: to understand how Mose was feeling and what he was thinking, and respond to that as compassionately as the difference in their positions allowed. He winced; when had he started thinking like that?

  “Okay,” he said slowly, “We don’t have to talk about them.”

  He waited, the only sound the whirring of the tube’s ventilation system. Mose didn’t speak until they were almost at the tube’s airlock.