“I’ve wondered,” Lorsk said quietly, “ever since your return, why you took so long.”
Did you really? Gau didn’t voice the thought, but schooled his expression to an expectant blandness.
“Of course, most of that time we thought you were dead.”
Lorsk’s voice went low. “We mourned you, along with the rest of the ten million, for a long time.”
As if you care in the slightest about me beyond what I can do for the cause. The thought came wrapped in a cold hatred that no longer burned in his chest and made it hard to breathe, as it had years ago. Gau had experienced it often enough, had lived in it long enough, that it sometimes felt like all that kept him breathing.
“But now I understand,” Lorsk went on, oblivious. “We’ll see to it the sacrifices you made to get this data were not in vain.” The object of Gau’s hatred smiled, showing off long, sharp teeth.
Dimly, Gau perceived that he’d gone totally still and scentless in what must have seemed attentive silence. With a fluidity born of practice, he unfroze himself and mirrored Lorsk’s smile.
“Do you think we can do this?” At her question, Gau glanced away from the crack of darkening sky visible through the tarp stretched over his apartment’s ruined balcony. It faced east toward the docks, and he’d been savoring the scrap of sea air that made its way to their slum. Most of the day had been consumed in dissecting the contents of Gau’s data sliver, discussing the implications of the new intelligence, and drafting the beginnings of a plan of action. His eyes had been sore from staring at screens by the time the conference concluded.
“Having second thoughts?” he asked.
“Not exactly.” Ariveth uncoiled from a low pile of musty blankets in the main room. She gripped the railing beside him and looked out at the decaying face of Tarbreak. “The Djandjer-Pralsh will take this opportunity, and we should. But this will be different from before, Gau. Lorsk won’t be satisfied with harassing the White Arrows, not after what they did. I think he means to destroy them utterly. That gives me pause.”
“They deserve it. Look at me and tell me you don’t agree.”
With sudden violence she swung her body away from the balcony, gripping it one-handed, and gave him a penetrating look. “I lost my mother. I was twelve, little more than a hatchling. Of course I agree.”
Gau made a commiserating mew, keeping his expression neutral as he waited out her flash of anger. It would not be good to upset Ariveth. She had been his in with the Djandjer-Pralsh four months ago: the first of them to see through his battered, exhausted exterior to the young warrior who had left them almost two decades before.
Ariveth’s scent was salty with agitation, but little by little it softened toward its usual blend of wet sand mixed with pungent wood. “It’s just that the Djandjer-Pralsh have been in hiding for a very long time. We’ve gotten good at it—good enough to know that part of our success rests on Terran indifference to our existence. This campaign you propose is going to make us a threat again.”
Gau considered this for the space of a measured breath. He turned up his palm, and a pale line sliced the darkness as he flexed the blade free of its sheath. He flicked his arm, and the concealing tarp fell away as the ropes holding it taut parted.
Above them rode a dome of black sky dusted with stars.
Ariveth started. “Why did you do that? If we are discovered—”
“You think the Terran authorities still monitor this building? If they did, we’d already be dead. You said it yourself, they don’t care.”
Her shoulders relaxed, slowly. “Yes.”
“You’ll have to let go some of that caution, Ariveth, if you want to do more than survive. This”—he waved at the black vault above them—“was to illustrate a point. Somewhere in the universe there is one who taught me about deception. He taught me that in that game, you present a certain face to your opponent: sometimes for minutes, sometimes years; long enough that they think they have your measure. They think they know you.
“Then—when all the pieces are in place—you turn on them. Your opponent cannot counter it, because they discover they are fighting someone totally unknown to them, and the person they thought they knew is dead . . . or never existed at all.” Gau injected his words with what he judged the proper amount of bitterness, turning his gaze away as if in shame at falling for such a deception. Let her guess the rest.
“Did you know Mose Attarrish long, during the war?”
“Only a few days. Around the time of my final mission,”
Gau answered. “He made an impression, though. Too bad it was a false one—a wet cloak he’d wrapped himself in, to disguise the stink of betrayal.” For a moment he thought with pleasure of the real Mose and how he would writhe if he could hear them now.
“If the Djandjer-Pralsh ever found him, we would make him answer for his crimes. I would make him answer, one exile to another.” Ariveth loosed one of her own blades and gazed along its length. “How could Attarrish do it? After our loss on Rreluush-Tren? After Chii Ril? How could he go over to them?”
“How?” Gau stepped closer, edging his hand on the railing so that it almost touched hers. “I don’t pretend to understand that. But the why . . . the why is what happened on Rreluush-Tren. What happened to Chii Ril. What, I assume, Attarrish saw about to happen to Za. He felt the flames of Krenkyr gathering, and panicked. Forsook his position as seph, his status as Osk, for the safety he knew could be gotten as an ally of the Terrans. The promise of security is a powerful motive.”
Her bristling mane relaxed toward the nape of her neck, her hands unclenching from the rail. “No one appreciates that more than the Djandjer-Pralsh.” She gazed at the milky limb of stars above them for a long while—thinking of Oskaran, he wondered? Gau knew Ariveth had never been there. Like most of them she was a hatchling of Teluk; she hailed from the large port city Ril, after which their enclave had been named.
“Looking for something?” he asked after a silent interval.
Ariveth slid away from the railing and settled back into her rough settee of blankets. Her answer surprised him.
“Sol. I was looking for the Terrans’ star.” She cast another glance skyward. “Amy taught me how to find it, back when she and the rest of them would visit Chii Ril. But I can’t find their star anymore. You were probably too young to remember those days.”
Gau said nothing, though in fact he did remember. The images were hazy—graffitied over by years scrabbling at the margins of living—but what was there carried a warmth even now. He rubbed the worn rail and recalled when it had a coat of lustrous black paint, the deck under their feet not yet warped by moisture and neglect. His parents had hosted the Terrans’ visits on this balcony, with the awnings thrown up to protect against the stark Aival sun. In the early days the stupid primates had insisted on coming in the middle of the day, before they realized their subjects’ sensitivity.
Gau would watch them from behind the sliding glass door, in the security of the dim living room. The Terran xenologists would sit with his parents for hours, talking in a crude pidgin of Bask and the few words of O’o Nezz that had leaked across to the Terran side during the Teluk and Rreluush-Tren conflicts. One of the Terrans never talked at all, but quietly observed his companions’ efforts, making copious notes on a small lightpad all the while.
And Gau would watch (shrinking farther into the shadows) as his parents allowed the aliens to examine them: the two Osk posed patiently as one of the xenologists captured their images in a small black device; they walked and ran in tight circles as another recorded their movements.
They’d even let the Terrans touch them. An unwanted memory surfaced of a pale Terran hand with too many fingers gripping his mother’s own, she turning her arm over without resistance to expose the sheath. Standing beside her, his father had slid free one of his own blades—slowly, so as not to alarm the primates—and explained in O’o Nezz what it meant to the Osk to be bladed.
The Terran xe
nologists were not alarmed; they were fascinated. They’d asked his parents many questions that day, their half-learned O’o Nezz made clumsier by enthusiasm, and took measurements and pictures of every part of the blade and sheath. Young Gau had slunk away into their foreign apartment, with its straight lines and sharp corners, swamped with unease and puzzlement. Gau knew the aliens had visited other families in Chii Ril—he just didn’t understand what made the Osk so interesting to these Terrans.
Now he knew, oh yes. Twenty years had taught him much.
“I don’t really remember those visits,” Gau said. “What I know I learned later, from you or Jarn.”
“That was a happy time. Peaceful. When I talked to Amy and the others on those visits, I used to think things could be all right between our species. That it was good the Terrans wanted to learn about us.”
“They wanted to learn about Osk, but not because they bore any love for us.” Gau sneered. “The Terrans wanted to know their enemy, all the better to destroy them. Destroy us.”
“You sound like—” She cut herself off abruptly, turning her snout away before he could make out the aborted syllable.
“Who?” he asked in reflex, not sure he wanted to know. His stomach twisted as he wondered if the word, the name she’d swallowed had been Lorsk. He’d adopted a bit of the faction leader’s rhetoric, to be sure, but surely Ariveth knew it was an act.“You sound angry,” she finished.
“I am angry,” he allowed. “At the White Arrows.” True. “Not at the Djandjer-Pralsh” — a lie —“or you.” Never you, Ari.
She turned her snout to face him again. In the star-filled dark her face was a fin of lighter darkness, slit by two white pupils. “You know, when you left for Za part of me was relieved.
Not because you were going to war,” she went on quickly, “but because at least that way you got out. Got away from him.”
Gau didn’t ask whom she meant.
“Ever since you came back, I’ve been wondering why,” she said. “Until tonight, I wasn’t sure it was . . . entirely your choice.”
A frisson of unease crawled up Gau’s spine; the conversation was venturing in a direction entirely too historical for his liking. Time to redirect it. “I’m not doing this for Lorsk,” he said. “I’m doing it for us. All of us.”
Ariveth inclined her head. “And I am with you in this; all the Djandjer-Pralsh are. You should know that. As long as it promises us victory.” She smiled wryly. “We exiles have had quite enough of defeat.”
“Don’t worry.” Gau walked over to her and (with a shyness he realized was not wholly feigned) grasped Ariveth’s hand.
“You have me.”
Chapter Six
Daikar Shurinezz had never given much thought to the distances of space. Hyperstream gates had shrunk the travel time between solar systems from millennia to the days or weeks needed to transit between them. Also, on the thankfully few occasions when he’d had to make that transit himself, he’d spent most of the time unconscious in a hibernation capsule. The last such time had been fourteen years ago, when he’d traveled from Skraal to Teluk with Shomoro and Pri. He’d been quite happy then to set foot on solid ground and never look back on that black vacuum.
But in the days after Pri’s departure for Expansion space, Daikar found himself thinking uncomfortably often about the distances she was crossing. Trillions of hexaleagues of empty space lay between her and Greenwich Hub, quantifiable but not truly graspable by any organic mind. Even once she arrived, none of them knew for sure what dangers she might face, not least from the person they’d sent her to contact. By agreement, Pri would not send an automated fast courier to report back until she was outside the Expansion Front again.
He’d decided it was silence that made the distances of space still matter. The Terrans might have hyperwaves, but for everyone else information traveled no faster than the physical craft that carried it. They might wait days or weeks for news of Pri’s success or failure. Or she might disappear forever—killed in hostile territory by the murderer this ridiculous plan was meant to win to their side—and neither Daikar nor Shomoro would ever know the full truth.
He spent the first few days as usual, monitoring his assigned channels within the High Council’s sprawling intelligence network. Shomoro returned to her work as well, though it now took place in the higher security of the shelter vault under Anmerresh. Daikar had never been down there, but from her descriptions he knew the chamber dug into the bedrock under the city was huge, a space meant to provide emergency housing, work spaces, and government facilities for all of Anmerresh’s citizens. Sometimes Daikar wondered if Shomoro was lonely down there, with only Water Dancer and a few of the Rul scientist’s lab assistants for company.
She never mentioned it. Beyond the few desultory pleasantries they might exchange in passing, or over a meal both of them picked at, she volunteered nothing of what she was feeling. But Daikar could read her anxiety in the rigid way she sat or moved, avoiding eye contact that might lead to a longer conversation. Though she hadn’t officially moved from her surfaceside apartments, she spent long hours working in the vault.
He suspected it was a kind of retreat from her own helplessness as they waited for news from Pri. Had he been a scientist, he would have thrown himself into the work alongside her, if only to alleviate that dreaded waiting—but Daikar couldn’t help her that way. However, it had occurred to him there was something else he could do.
About a local week after Pri’s departure, Daikar broke the larger silence their empty words had failed to fill. Sheets of pale gold dawn light sliced through the blinds of his apartment as the two of them ate first meal. Shomoro’s plate seemed mostly full, the food more rearranged on it than eaten. Today though, encouraged by his idea, Daikar had found the appetite to finish his meal. As she moved to rise from the low table, he placed a hand gently on hers.
“Tell Water Dancer you’re not coming in today,” he said.
Shomoro went still, salty surprise in her scent. But for the first time in a week, she looked at and not through him. “What?
But we’re testing the seals’ integrity against one-shot swarms today.”
“For what? The seventh time? I think Water Dancer can manage as team leader for one day.”
As Shomoro contemplated this, she absently picked up a rejected cutlet from her plate and held it without taking a bite, as though reconsidering her appetite. “You have something else in mind, I take it?” Expectation widened her eyes. “Has a fast courier come in from Pri?” But her voice was growing subdued by the end; Shomoro knew as well as he did that any message would take at least a month to reach them.
“No,” he said. “Pri hasn’t sent word yet.” Then, before the threads of anxiety pulling his stomach to his spine could get any tighter, Daikar went on. “Take the day off and spar with me.”
She fumbled the cutlet. Before it could hit the table she’d caught it again, with those lightning-quick reflexes he remembered, although it had been a few months since they’d trained together.
But she was frowning as she said, “I hardly think this is an appropriate time. The Council already has guards escorting me to and from the vault. Deviation from my established routine will strain their resources—”
“Forgive me, but you just made my point,” he said. “The Council may have you under heavy security. Their orbital defense forces may be on high alert. But we’re facing an opponent whose masters have been very good at eluding both ground security and orbital defenses.” His mouth tightened around the next words. “We need to prepare for the possibility that Mose gets through them to you.”
A cobalt flush of fear spread under the skin of Shomoro’s snout, so immediately that Daikar suspected she’d been keeping it under the surface these last days through sheer force of will. “The possibility has occurred to me,” she said. “I trust the High Council to do their utmost to keep me safe, but they’ve never had to defend against infiltration by a seph before, let alone one
assisted by Terran technology. But I don’t see what we can do that they aren’t already doing.”
“Train in preparation,” he said. “As sephs always have.”
Her eyes narrowed at this simple answer, but her scent was warming with interest, losing its anxious acridity.
“When was the last time you developed your style with a sparring partner?” Daikar asked, warming to the prospect himself.“Don’t be disingenuous,” she said. “As if I spar with anyone but you. You know it was a few months ago.” She glanced at her plate, sorting among the cutlets, and popped one in her mouth.
“And except for some refinements, the sverdren style is developed to the best of my current abilities. A few more training sessions won’t markedly improve it.”
Daikar winced at the name Shomoro had given the technique she’d built around the steel blades she used: the “false blade” style. Maybe her blades weren’t biologically a part of her, but when they sparred, he knew the connection between warrior and weapon was as real as anything Daikar had ever felt while wielding his own natural blades.
He set this thought aside and made his voice firm, the tone of a trainer pointing out weaknesses in a pupil’s stance. “Have you had to use it outside of a training session? Trusted your life to it, against an opponent who intends you the most serious harm?”
“Well, no,” she said. “But we’d only be sparring . . .”
“True,” he said, even as a jolt of remembered pain lanced through the scar that scored his right cheek from eye to mouth. The old wound had been hurting more often lately. He quashed the urge to touch it. “But we’d be moving. Doing something. Surely that’s better than sitting here waiting for something to happen.”
Shomoro considered him for a moment, a hard smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “All right. Let me get my blades.”
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