Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  Gau slipped away from the boarded-up window and rifled through his small pile of possessions in the entryway cubbyhole. His seph armor was wrapped in his cloak; he removed it and donned the cloak, checking the pockets to make sure the packet of pre-paid credit chits was still there. For this excursion, he could leave the armor behind.

  After checking the peephole, Gau left the grungy apartment for the stairwell at the hallway’s far end. In his peripheral vision, he kept track of the doorways on either side of the hall. While most were closed, a few tenants hadn’t bothered.

  Through those cracked-open doorways, he glimpsed Osk huddled alone or in pairs on musty cots or piles of blankets like his own makeshift nest.

  The survivors of the Chii Ril enclave had crept back to this wretched apartment building in ones and twos after twenty-five years of staying away, of waiting for the time when it would be safe to return. As if there were such a thing as safety in the world.

  Passing the closed door closest to the stairwell on his right, he slowed, stopped. His hand hovered over the handle. He should check before he left—make sure its occupant was really asleep. He hadn’t done so before his past excursions, but this one was too important to leave a chance of his truancy being discovered. Especially not by . . .

  With a silent indrawn breath, he eased the door open. Unlocked, of course—none of the apartments locked since the power had been cut, disabling the door’s keycard-operated locks. Gau peered through the aperture at the figure curled in what he hoped was sleep.

  Lorsk Edrasshii, the Djandjer-Pralsh faction’s leader and by default the Chii Ril enclave’s, had secured both a cot and a blanket for himself. Rank had its privileges, Gau thought with a silent snort. The faction leader lay half on his back, half on his side, legs and lower body tangled in the blankets and one fist curled in them, resting on his chest. His red and black brindled mane splayed over a pillow he’d scrounged up.

  The face framed by that mane was slack and open as Gau had never seen it; he doubted anyone in the faction who was still alive had seen it this way. Gone were the worry lines Gau had seen marring his forehead and tightening his jaw, the smile lines that had taken their place when Lorsk was in his leader role encouraging the troops. Absent, too, were the cruel lines that had so often twisted his mouth when he spoke to Gau alone. But of all those, Gau fancied he could still see the hints of that dismissive scowl, etched at the corners of Lorsk’s mouth, waiting to reemerge when the mind that controlled it woke again. Even in sleep, those hidden lines jumped out at Gau, as if to sneer at him, You are nothing. Don’t forget it.

  Without his meaning to, his foot had edged across the threshold. A wild thought speared across his mind: I could do it right now. Slip into Lorsk’s room and slit that long, exposed throat, hold the pillow over Lorsk’s snout to muffle the sound as Lorsk bled out. No one would be awake to stop him.

  He jerked his foot back. Now was not the time.

  Because he didn’t want to merely kill Lorsk.

  He wanted to destroy him.

  Gau closed the door and depressed the bar on the stairwell fire door as quietly as he could. Red lettering in English advised him to keep the door closed at all times to prevent the spread of fire, under a crude pictograph of flames shooting out an open doorway. He scowled, remembering the dream.

  A thin stream of brackish water trickled down the middle of the alley behind the enclave’s tenement. The drier pavement to either side was lined with repurposed storage crates, stained blankets spilling from their openings. Homes for Diego Two’s most impoverished, they made Gau’s crumbling apartment seem as luxurious as any House official’s. Gau closed his nostrils against the familiar odor of rotting fabric and sewage as he slipped down the shadowed alley. If one of the homeless huddled in the box city had looked out at that moment, they might have found it curiously difficult to keep track of the figure, as though its movements through the shadows drew the eye away rather than toward it. But none of them looked; they didn’t want trouble.

  It was almost a relief to be outside, though he had to be even more on the alert now. Diego Two hadn’t been a safe place to be an Osk since he was a child. At least he hadn’t run into any other members of the enclave. So far, he’d been good at timing his reconnaissance of Diego Two, or maybe just lucky. Either way, in the few months since his battle with Mose Attarrish had left him stranded on Aival, he’d explored Diego Two’s new contours a few times without the rest of Chii Ril knowing.

  As he sidled along shadowed alleys and cut across side streets deeper into the city, Gau experienced the frisson of apprehension laced with excitement that came from being on his own in hostile territory. And Diego Two was definitely hostile territory, for all that it had been nominally at peace since the civil crisis ended. But this time there was extra tension quickening Gau’s steps, tightening around his spine. This was no mere reconnaissance mission. This was the day he’d decided to put Lorsk’s destruction into motion.

  The lobby of Eugenia Torres’s office in Rush Harbor District was small and almost empty except for a scale model of Diego Two that rose to about Gau’s knee level. It appeared to have been designed to be mounted in a display case, but it squatted on the floor, scavenged, he guessed, from some developer’s mockup or civic revitalization project. The bare linoleum around it needed sweeping; he curled his nostrils shut in disgust at the dust forming hillocks in the corners. Squares of cleaner floor indicated where chairs and tables had once occupied the lobby, while cavities gaped like eye sockets in the ceiling where recessed lighting had been stripped out, the wiring poking out like severed nerves. In the gray light leaking in under the closed blinds, the whole lobby gave the impression of a defunct enterprise that even at its height had never thrived but only kept afloat.

  The front was a ruse, as fake as the tiny model city that constituted the lobby’s only furnishing. It had taken some trawling of the shadow markets to find Torres’s new outpost, but eventually his persistence and invocations of their past association, made to the right people, had paid off. He’d been able to arrange this meeting through a courier paid to forget his face and deliver a message Torres would know could only have come from Gau.

  While he waited, Gau inspected the table-sized model.

  Though the paint was faded and the fake trees and parkland were broken off in places, he had to admit the artist had created a tolerable likeness: the model city spread outward in a series of concentric rings, each ring a separate district. The districts weren’t labeled—Gau guessed the model had been meant to be viewed with augmented reality lenses or optical implants that would overlay labels, and perhaps even virtual vehicles and citizens to create the effect of a thriving metropolis.

  But he didn’t need the overlay to recognize each district.

  In the center of the mandala, the eponymous Central District soared in a forest of towers, the tallest of whose real versions rose thousands of kilometers above the atmosphere to connect with orbital relay stations. The artist hadn’t been able to depict the entirety of the space towers, but the shorter replicas were still recognizable. There was the Aival Transport Authority, a silver parallelogram fronted by an impressive parabolic arch, and near it the brassy rectangle of Diego Two’s civil admin building, surrounded at its base by blocks of parkland enclosed in geodesic domes. The civil admin building would have been the obvious centerpiece of the district, but it was dwarfed, in breadth if not in height, by the enormous spike of ivory metal that stuck up near the center of downtown.

  Gau would have had trouble fitting his hands around the buttressed circumference of the model space tower’s base.

  Though he’d only seen it from a distance, Gau knew the real version’s base was almost two kilometers across. Only a fraction of that was taken up by the actual space elevator, with the rest filled by offices, a visitor’s center, a chapel, and a garrison.

  The tower’s official title was the Aival Branch Headquarters of the Universal Church. Most Diego Two residents c
alled it the Arrow.

  He snorted and let his eye wander down the lower circles of the mandala. As he moved away from the center, the buildings got lower and the inhabitants less affluent. About a third of the way from the outer circumference, the fuzzy red ring of the Thicket separated the parklike district of Florisal from Los Gatos, the next district out. The Thicket was a cross between an unofficial district (though no one lived there) and an ecosystem. A giant fungal organism, Thicket spores had made their way to Diego Two in the crevices of spaceships; by the time municipal authorities had discovered its presence, the Thicket had rooted itself there to stay. Any attempt at eradication had been ruled out after experts granted the Thicket semi-sentient status—at least, that was the official story. Gau suspected the real reason was that the Thicket made for an effective if implicit barrier between the Terran and non-Terran sides of Diego Two.

  The outermost district was that of the semi-abandoned tenements and crate slums where he’d started his journey. It had some official name, but as with the Church headquarters, that had been quickly discarded in favor of a more descriptive one.

  Gau had known it all his life as Tarbreak, a name inspired by the absolute disrepair of its streets, which were crazed with spiderweb cracks summer and winter both. With a flash of dark humor, Gau imagined what the virtual overlay for Tarbreak might look like: Would the designers have crammed the virtual alleys with crate cities, placed vagrants on the stoops of tenements? Probably not; he doubted such realism would have agreed with their artistic vision for Diego Two. Probably for the same reason, the designers had omitted the scrum of tents and shacks that extended past city limits in an unsanctioned district that was officially even poorer than Tarbreak—though Gau knew better. The unregulated, unpoliced shack city had become the new epicenter of Diego Two’s shadow markets in the years after Tarbreak emptied out.

  This thought drew him back to the meeting to come. Krenkyr knew where or how she’d got it, but it seemed clear what kind of talisman this model city represented for Torres. Gau could read her ambitions there as clearly as though the virtual overlay had written them in meter-high neon letters that proclaimed, I will own this city.

  The intercom next to the inner door buzzed, and an automated recording invited him inside. Pausing at the door, Gau saluted the model with a smile and a thought: Not if I crush it first.

  As he crossed the threshold, a tingle of electricity passed over Gau’s skin as the ring of machinery embedded in the doorway scanned him for weapons and surveillance devices. They found none, other than the natural weapons on his arms, of course. The inner office’s ceiling lights were painfully bright after the dim lobby, but even as he squinted against the increase in illumination, Gau was scenting the room for any surprises.

  He detected two, one on either side of him—the leathery, slightly saline scent of Baskar. With an effort, he kept his muscles relaxed, breathed steadily to smooth out any tension on his part that might look like an attack. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he glimpsed the Baskar in his peripheral vision: two muscular metallic blue bodies lounged in apparent nonchalance on either side of the door. They were so still that one less observant might have mistaken them for potted plants.

  Torres herself rose from behind the cheap wood veneer desk in the center of the room. Despite the office setting, she was dressed for manual labor, or maybe a rough party: jeans, flannel shirt, short zippered jacket of some black material that passed for leather. Her hair was shorter than the last time he’d seen her, ear length on one side and buzzed almost to her scalp on the other—shorter than the most cautious Osk civilian, though Gau knew Terrans didn’t follow the convention of distinguishing combatants and non-combatants by mane length. Anyway, this Terran was no ordinary civilian. She was an information broker, a shadow market privateer, and his last best contact if he didn’t want to live out his days in Diego Two’s slums.

  “Till you actually walked in here, I thought this was a joke,” Torres said. She looked at her device and read aloud part of the message he’d sent. “ ‘Remember the warehouse on the corner of Fifth and Trevelyan.’ ”

  Gau smiled, keeping his lips together. “I thought it might add some legitimacy to my meeting request. Something only the two of us know.”

  “Cute.” Torres leveled the phone at him like a weapon. “Now you’ve conveniently delivered yourself to my office, give me one reason I shouldn’t turn your ass in for the bounty.”

  I’ll give you thirty. Nerves roiled his stomach, but under them was a cold satisfaction as he finally spoke the words that had lived inside him for months, waiting to hatch. “Because I can give you the Djandjer-Pralsh.”

  Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “Bullshit.” Under the dismissal, he heard a whiff of curiosity. Gau seized it like a hunter tracking a scent.

  “You really think I’d walk in here with a bounty on my head, if I didn’t have something better to sell you?” Gau said. “You know me better than that, Torres.”

  She smirked. “So what’s this ‘something better’ you got to sell me? Some rumor the Siblings in Exile’s last few members are still fighting the good fight in Tarbreak? Or have they set up shop in the shack city this time? I get twenty of those crap leads every week.”

  Gau returned the smirk warmthlessly. “I’ve been in contact with them. And I have proof.” He patted his cloak pocket. In his peripheral vision, the two Baskar guards stiffened; one emit-ted a warning growl. He moved his hand away from his pocket and put up both hands where the Baskar could see them. “Your associates should know I’m unarmed.” Torres threw a pointed glance at the blade sheaths embedded in Gau’s forearms. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  She tilted her head in some signal, and the Baskar converged and patted him down with efficient strokes of the manipulatory tendrils around their torsos. One dipped a tendril into his pocket and removed the data sliver there, then announced this discovery to Torres.

  Torres jerked her head toward a door in the wall behind her desk. “Run it.” The Baskar disappeared through the door. Gau tried not to look after it. That wasn’t his only copy of the data: the original footage was stored on a number of pinhole cameras hidden in strategic places in the enclave’s tenement.

  Settling back into the office chair she’d vacated, Torres pressed a control on the surface of her desk. A generic padded block chair rose from the floor across from it. Torres indicated the chair with a sweep of one arm. “Have a seat.” She pressed another control, and a food console swiveled up out of the desk’s surface. “Drink?”

  Gau settled gingerly onto the block chair, waving away the offer of refreshment. He was confident the deal he’d be offering Torres would be more attractive than the one-time payout she’d get from delivering him to the Terran authorities, but there was a difference between confidence and foolhardiness, especially at this early stage of negotiations.

  So Gau sat in silence while Torres sipped something clear and fizzing from a glass and studied him over its rim. The remaining Baskar guard hovered near his flank, totally still but no doubt ready to snap into motion if Gau so much as lifted a finger wrong. He wasn’t the only one in this meeting with trust issues.

  As Gau had expected, Torres was the first one to break the silence. “So where the fuck have you been all these years?”

  He rolled his head to one side, then the other, slowly so the Baskar wouldn’t be alarmed. “There was something called the Gray Wars. You might have heard of them?”

  She made a rude noise. “That was fifteen years ago. I meant since then.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t.” She sipped her water. “Except I’m curious why I hear zip for fifteen years, then the next thing coming down the wire is you almost blowing up half of Neo-Chicago.”

  He blinked in genuine surprise. “How did you hear about that?”

  “The government’s lines of communication are more porous than they’d like to admit. In the shadow markets, we hear things. Part o
f why I wasn’t totally surprised, you showing up now.” Torres ran a finger around the rim of her glass, disrupting the condensation there. “They upped your bounty, by the way.” A pause. “Considerably.”

  Gau didn’t reply, didn’t move, barely breathed. He was newly aware of how precarious this plan was, how much it relied on Torres jumping the way he wanted. But the Terran was fickle—she could as easily decide to go for the easy payment Gau represented, rather than the nebulous promise of something larger later. If he could even convince her . . .

  “Did they,” he managed in a strengthless voice that made him wince internally.

  She licked condensation from her finger. “The smart money’s on turning you in,” she purred. A vulis circling for the kill.

  Was that tilt of her head a signal for the Baskar to move in behind him? With a titanic effort he refrained from turning his head to look.

  “But hey,” Torres said with a shrug, “we have history. Thought I’d at least hear you out before I let Cecil and Lottie shish kebab you.”

  A little of the iron tension within melted, but Gau didn’t relax his guard. He turned the corners of his mouth down. “Cecil and Lottie?”

  “My Baskar associates. I could tell you their real names, if you have a couple of minutes.”

  “No thanks.” Gau kept his frown on; despite her surface breeziness, everything about Torres’s conversational style was a negotiation for status. Her mention of his bounty had been, if not a threat, at least leverage: a reminder that underneath it all, this meeting was a favor to him.