Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  “Anyway, you’re missing the point,” Mose said. Vernsky signed a gesture for him to continue.

  “Of course all spacefaring species use technology. But with Terrans the situation has flipped. You don’t use technology anymore; it uses you. And it won’t even need you much longer. In fact, it stopped needing you the second you invented it . ”

  Vernsky heard the rehearsed quality of an obsessive train of thought in the way the words came pouring out of Mose.

  “And what exactly is It?” he said.

  “Nanotech,” the Osk spat. “Fucking nanotech.”

  Though the tunnel was heated, Vernsky pulled his own coat a little tighter.

  It was warmer at their destination in one of the Hub’s central blisters; the air held a humidity meant to simulate a sultry summer night. The climate systems of the Hub had been programmed to maintain an Earthlike cycle of seasons, within comfort levels of course—winters tended to be mild, and summers never got too steamy.

  Mose and Vernsky had debarked from the mag-lev at ground level. They walked along a wide boulevard lined with kitschy shops done up in faux New England–seashore style, even though most Hub residents had only a faint idea where New England was. Many of them had never seen an ocean outside of sims. Nothing was open on their level, but higher up a neon glare spilled out of shops, casinos, and assorted pleasure-houses arrayed along the upper tiers of the bubble.

  The sky directly above them was dark save for starlight bleeding in from the outside. The silvery light turned the elegant connecting tubes stretching between tiers into delicate, silken strands of webbing.

  It wasn’t enough, frankly. Vernsky had to squint to make out where he was going, and for a moment he envied Mose his alien eyesight as the Osk strode confidently beside him.

  Mose paused then, the bright slits of his eyes narrowing.

  “Something wrong?” Vernsky asked.

  “I know what you were watching in your office.” Mose’s voice was flat, but with a tension underneath. “Session 403-89.”

  He couldn’t see Mose’s expression—the Osk was little more than a shadowy outline in the dark. Vernsky found himself scanning Mose’s posture for signals, noting where his arms were. He fingered the edge of the coat pocket where he’d put the sedative patch.

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought there might be something in the record I could use to help you.”

  “Help me what?” Mose said. “‘Come to terms with what I’ve done?’” Vernsky could hear the quote marks in his intonation. “So I could be ready to do it all over again?”

  Vernsky didn’t breathe.

  Mose took his silence as the answer it was. “I know there’s another mission coming. Don’t worry, it’s nothing you said,” he added with a wave that made Vernsky tense up. “But I can read what you and the others don’t say just as well. Or did I get your cues wrong?” This last was asked almost casually, but Vernsky heard the trap coiling in it. Mose was waiting for him to make some evasion, to lie or dissemble.

  “No,” he said as neutrally as he could. “There is another mission coming up.”

  “That’s the right answer.” Mose resumed walking. “And you can take your hand off that drug patch I smell in your pocket.”

  Welcoming yellow light poured from beneath the red-and-white striped awning of a bar built into the side of a storefront.

  Çedille’s, read the black letters printed on the awning. The shop front was little more than a polished wooden counter jutting out from the fake stone wall of the surrounding building.

  Above the counter, a rectangular window opened into a bright but empty workspace whose steel counters were lined with bottles full of various liquors, flanked by ranks of tumblers, decanters, muddlers, and other drink-mixing tools whose function, to Vernsky, was less clear.

  “Let’s take our seats,” Vernsky said. “Someone should be along soon.” They each took stools beneath the bar; the seat of Mose’s stool was a generic rectangular block, slightly concave in the center. It seemed to support his long lower body well enough.

  A door slid open in the back wall of the workspace. The woman who emerged was tall with an athletic physique, and dressed in neat black trousers, pinstriped white shirt, and red bow tie. Despite her uniform, Vernsky recognized her as one of the Project’s security personnel.

  “Evening, sirs. Something to drink?” Her voice was courteous and empty of recognition. Just a bartender serving a couple of patrons.

  Vernsky cleared his throat. “I guess I’ll have a vodka. Got anything to put in it?”

  “If you want juice, we’ve got orange, lychee, durian, glassfruit—”

  “Glassfruit. Please.”

  “Excellent.” She turned to Mose. “And for you?”

  “Same,” he grunted.

  “Two glassfruit vodkas coming up.” She smiled and pivoted to a counter to prepare their drinks. A silence inhabited the space between Vernsky and Mose for the time it took her to carefully measure vodka into two glasses and stir in a good deal of clear green juice.

  She presented them with their drinks. “Enjoy.” The woman disappeared through the aperture in the back wall, which sealed itself soundlessly behind her. She, or some other Project agent, would be monitoring the proceeding conversation from somewhere nearby—but neither Vernsky nor Mose would receive any further sign of their presence. After all, the mark of a good ShadowStalker-stalker was that you never noticed they were there.

  Vernsky raised his glass in the imagined direction of the surveillance cameras. “Na zdorovye.” He took a generous pull of his drink, relishing its smooth sweetness, the biting edge of the vodka. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Mose studying him.

  “That’s not a word I know,” the Osk said.

  Vernsky chuckled. “It’s not English, it’s Russian. It means

  ‘Cheers.’”

  Mose cocked his head.

  “Bottoms up.” Vernsky mimed taking another drink.

  Comprehension widened Mose’s eyes; he put his own glass to the end of his snout and carefully poured some of the liquid into his mouth, then made a spluttering noise. “Pah! Tastes like burning water. You really drink this for pleasure?”

  “It’s more about the effects than the taste,” Vernsky said. “The glassfruit juice helps it go down, though. Its sweetness cuts the vodka.”

  Mose’s face went blank. Then he actually laughed, a sibilant sound that Vernsky almost didn’t recognize as laughter. It had been so long since he—since anyone on staff—had heard Mose laugh that some of Vernsky’s co-workers were of the opinion Mose didn’t possess a sense of humor. Vernsky suspected it was because Mose simply hadn’t found anything to laugh about.

  “Glassfruit is sweet?” Mose asked when his laughter subsided. At Vernsky’s nod, Mose smiled lopsidedly. “I can’t taste sugars, remember? The nanites let me digest them, but even all the advances of Terran science never let me taste them.” He went on before Vernsky could interject. “Is glassfruit a plant from Earth, then?”

  “Nah. Planet called Emerald. They’re famous for botanical exports. No sentients living on it, but the tropical areas have a huge diversity of plants and animals. It’s an interesting story, actually—Emerald orbits a cooling white dwarf, and the colony there had to build a soletta array to focus more sunlight onto its surface. Some scientists still think it’s headed for an ice age, eventually. Considering, it’s fortunate we can get glassfruit here at all.”

  “Which market demand no doubt drove the effort to preserve that planet’s tropics.” Mose’s lips curled in a small wry smile, as if he had cracked a joke. Maybe the quip had been the Osk equivalent.

  Vernsky took another swig. “Despite your harsh summation of the motives, it’s true. Everyone knows Emerald is one of our success stories.”

  “Like Olios 3,” Mose said quietly. “An uninhabited world living a marginal existence, until the Expansion developed it into a peaceful, productive colony. At least, that’s all anyone seems to rememb
er.” The Osk was staring down into his glass as he said this, hands clutching the countertop, shoulders hunched forward. Vernsky noticed how small he looked draped in that ratty overcoat.

  “Is that what you wanted to talk about?” Vernsky said.

  “Since Neo-Chicago it seems it’s all anyone wants to talk about,” Mose said. “I keep up with the newsfeeds every day. I see how shaken the possibility of a Fate’s Shears release in Diego Two left the Terran media. But I have yet to see one that portrays its release in Za as the evil it was.”

  It came as no surprise to Vernsky that Mose kept up with the news. He knew Mose had been heavily involved with Za Intelligence during the war — staying informed would be a bone-deep habit for him, even those times when he might have preferred to stay in the dark. Vernsky had watched the coverage around the aftermath of Mose’s battle with Gau and his team, analyses built on the scraps of the fight captured on surveillance, and of course, on the traces of the Fate’s Shears nanovirus that hadn’t been incinerated. That discovery had sent the newsfeeds reeling into endless recaps of the war the virus had brought an end to. Most of the arguments for and against the virus’s use had struck Vernsky as shallow and simplistic, based on hypotheticals that were conveniently inevitable in hindsight.

  And to him, they were still hypotheticals—he hadn’t lived the war like Mose had. “I can’t imagine what that’s like,” Vernsky said. “Listening to people talk about it who weren’t there.”

  “It makes me wonder—” Mose’s fingers curled around his glass, hard enough to make the skin of his fingertips turn pale.

  “No.”

  “What?” Vernsky said. When the Osk stayed silent, “You can talk to me, Mose. That’s why we’re here.”

  “It makes me wonder if stopping Gau was worth it.”

  Vernsky gaped, then covered his astonishment with a gulp of vodka that strained his next words. “You saved millions of lives. I’d say that’s worth it.”

  Mose slammed his glass down on the bar. Pale green liquid sloshed over his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Millions of lives?” he said. “Vernsky, I have a console in my room. Twenty-four-hour access to any news stream within the Expansion. You know what they all say, in all the post-mortems and discussions of the Gray Wars? They say General Shanazkowitz saved ‘millions of lives’ by ending the war. And maybe she did.

  But not one, not one, mentions the millions of lives lost in Za, except as a trade-off. A necessary sacrifice, so that fifteen years later Terran pundits could debate the merits of the atrocity that ripped the heart out of my people.

  “And now, when the same kind of atrocity, one that would have taken millions of lives, was stopped from striking a Terran city, did any of them call it prevention of a tragedy on the scale of the Za Incident? No. Because no one cares if a few million snakes were rooted out of their burrow to make way for a decent Terran civilization.”

  I care. But Vernsky kept his mouth closed on the response. Next to what Mose had said, it would be meaningless. Wasn’t that true of all the Gray War analyses that had sprung up after the Neo-Chicago scare? He toyed with his glass, wondering if there was anything he could say that wouldn’t ring hollow.

  “Maybe it’s not a history for us to redefine,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Mose asked.

  Vernsky looked into his glass, drained the few drops left. “There’s a saying in English—‘History is written by the victors.’ It’s self-serving, and more to the point, it’s inaccurate. Sure, there’ve always been dominant narratives—we tell ourselves stories about why we were right to win some war, or colonize some land where people were already living—but there’s always counter-narratives, too. There’s always survivors to tell the victors they were wrong, even if it takes a long time for them to be heard.”

  Mose gave a low hiss—laughter again, but with a bitter edge. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been killing the survivors.”

  Vernsky could think of no response to that. What could he say that could possibly comfort Mose? He couldn’t hold out the possibility of freedom to him, or even retirement, not as long as their Project director was Jan Shanazkowitz. He sighed.

  “I wish I could say I know how you feel right now,” he said. “I can’t claim that. But you should know there are Terrans who do see the Za Incident as genocide, one of the worst we’ve committed.”

  “And are you one of them?” Mose sounded marginally interested.

  “I’m the one who says it doesn’t mean a damn anymore, because Fate’s Shears is gone. And you were the one who destroyed it, Mose. I can’t imagine some of the shit you’ve gone through, but don’t tell me it wasn’t worth it just to purge that virus from the world.”

  Mose sat back on his stool, turning his gaze upward. He took another pull from his glass, and this time did not cringe at the taste.

  “I had to wait a long time for that satisfaction, but you’re right. When it came, it was very good. Better,” Mose continued with a wicked grin, “was the look on Shesharrim’s face when I destroyed his precious ship.”

  Vernsky returned Mose’s smile. “You gave that bastard something to think about.”

  “You don’t remember like I do.” Mose seemed to float away from the present, staring at nothing. “Gau’s rage was terrible to see. I’ve never seen an Osk go so completely wild. But at the end—when he had me on the brink of death—he backed off. Let me go.”

  For a moment, Vernsky was speechless. “You never told me—what would make him do that?”

  Mose turned his gaze smoothly back. “There was something Gau told me then: that I hadn’t destroyed his game, but enriched it. I think that, in some way, I was his opponent in more than just combat.”

  “Of course you were. You stopped him from carrying out his attack.”

  “All right, but it was more,” Mose continued, with a slow shake of his head. “More than just a random strike on a Terran city. For Gau, its object went deeper than that.”

  “Deeper than . . . Mose, I don’t think I understand.”

  The Osk began another sinuous shrug—then stiffened as if he’d been struck by a jolt of electricity. Vernsky watched in astonishment as Mose drew all four legs under his body, hunching on the stool like a spider. He sniffed the air in short, sharp breaths, the nostrils on the underside of his snout fully dilated.

  “You smell that?” he hissed. Vernsky tried sniffing the air, feeling a little silly, but he could detect nothing.

  “I don’t—” But when he turned back, Mose was gone.

  Chapter Three

  Mose squinted against the harsh streetlights, trailing a hand against the walls of buildings to orient himself as he followed the increasing gradient of the scent.

  Was Vernsky’s nose stuffed with gauze, that he could not smell it? The odor was mysterious yet familiar: a deep, musky warmth cut with a stronger, almost acidic spice. A profoundly welcoming scent.

  He was almost itching with longing as he followed the wall, to finally stumble into an alley so rich with scent he could almost see it—

  Nothing. Mose was alone in the alley, an empty corridor between two graffitied walls, ending in the metal bastion of the dome itself. He stared at the end wall in a daze, feeling baffled and oddly cheated. But the scent was still there, tickling at his nostrils. He turned and froze.

  Another Osk stood between Mose and the street. An oskven—the taunting scent proclaiming its pheromonal identity at last. She was of a height with him, lithe and wiry. A supple material designed to fit beneath armor sheathed her lower body, ending in a leather belt with pouches around her waist. Her legs and torso were bare, and the gray skin Mose could see was very dark, almost black. By her face he knew she was unknown to him. Above the delicate snout and large eyes fell a spiky water-fall of white hair, creating a striking contrast against her dark skin. She eyed him levelly, silent.

  On the heels of his shock and surprise, Mose felt shame. He was acutely aware of his shabby,
voluminous overcoat, the unkempt state of his skin and mane after weeks of neglect. That he should meet face-to-face with an oskven, and such a sleek and self-assured one at that, in such a state . . . She must think him pathetic.

  Except that he was being ridiculous. This was all wrong—the fact of another Osk’s presence here was wrong. With an effort, he found his tongue. “Who in the name of Oskaran are you?”

  Mose delivered the interrogative in the incisive tone that had made even deep-tier Za officials flinch in deference, yet the stranger remained impassive. A smile slowly spread over that pointed face, lips curling up to reveal sharp, perfectly white teeth.

  “In the name of Oskaran, is it? How carelessly you bandy about that word, Mose Attarrish.” The words were spider silk drawn across steel, soft but with a subliminal grating edge. She swayed into motion, padding across the pavement toward him on bare feet. Mose stood his ground against the sudden fear that gripped him, scanning her unhurried movements. Keeping his arms loose under the tentlike coat, he partially extended his blades. A precaution in case a change in her scent indicated things were about to get violent.

  She spoke again. “Who I am, how I know about you—because I do know about you—how I came to be here . . . none of that is important. All that matters is the why.”

  She stopped. A blade’s width separated their feet.

  “Why?” Mose asked, breathless.

  “I have come to give you something.” Her arm was a gray blur as it darted under the coat, past his unsheathed blades.

  Something like leathery ropes gripped his upper arm, so in-congruous it almost made him gasp—and then he did gasp, at a stab of brief fire in the crook of his elbow so familiar it would normally be beneath his notice: the prick of a hypodermic needle.

  He shoved the other Osk away. She stumbled and fell to the pavement with surprising clumsiness. Mose stood back as she struggled up—then blinked as she began to change. Smooth gray flesh was yielding to tough bronze hide along the length of her body, and as she regained her feet he realized there seemed to be too many of them; her legs became stick-thin, jerky, insectile. The eyes had multiplied as well, four obsidian wells mirroring Mose’s wariness. A jolt of recognition went through him at the sight of the melted-looking scar tissue on her thorax.