Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  But that wasn’t entirely fair. In supporting her, Daikar had acted of his own free will. As had Shomoro in getting him ejected for it.

  Chagrin communicated itself in the Rul’s long silence. “My friend is paying,” she said at last.

  “And what friend is that?” he asked.

  “Someone I think can help both of us.” She cut the comm before he could ask more.

  The pier-side bar was a curved shell of aquamarine glass and translucent ceramic housing several smaller, bubble-like rooms that bumped up against each other in a configuration meant to seem organic. Water Dancer met Daikar at the door and led him through several sets of arches, which he made careful note of, to a secluded alcove at the back.

  Waiting for them on one side of the alcove’s round table was the smooth, impassive cone of an environment palanquin. Water Dancer squeezed around the side of the table next to it and beckoned to him with a tendril.

  There were no benches lining the alcove, though Daikar saw a button on the side that would extrude some. He chose to remain standing, edging just inside the alcove across from the palanquin. He’d have preferred to be in Water Dancer’s spot, where he could keep an eye on the room and the archway leading beyond, but a peripheral view would have to do.

  “What will you have?” the palanquin’s speakers asked. The voice was a translator’s, flat and uninformative.

  “Who are you?” Daikar asked.

  A flicker of bile yellow tinged with orange passed over Water Dancer’s pods. He thought it might be embarrassment, though he didn’t have the facility for reading Rul lightspeech that Shomoro did from working with her.

  “This is Councilor Basalt,” Water Dancer said. “Our representative in . . . in the matter that caused that difficulty with your position in Intelligence.”

  It felt as though a magnet dragged his gaze from the Rul to the palanquin’s hull again. Its gray opaque surface hadn’t changed. There could be anyone, of any species, behind its blank façade.

  As though reading his thought, the palanquin’s carapace cleared to transparency, revealing the grayish mottled stalk and seaflower head of a Veert.

  Daikar dipped his torso in a shrug. “How do I know you’re Basalt? You could be any Veert.”

  His answer was a dry chuckle over the palanquin’s speakers. “I commend your suspicion. Highly appropriate for one in your position—that is, former position.”

  Daikar didn’t let his surprise show on his face. His PagePendant beeped.

  “Perhaps this will assure you of my identity,” the Veert said.

  Daikar opened the file the Veert had sent. A shimmering holo-photo version of the High Council’s seal was projected into the air just above his pendant. To his Intelligence-trained eye, it looked legitimate.

  He jabbed his snout, accepting the proof. “Water Dancer said you could help us. Help us how?”

  A flutter of Basalt’s tendrils took in the two of them. “I believe my fellow councilors were over hasty in authorizing your removal from your positions.”

  Daikar glanced at Water Dancer. “Did Shomoro have you terminated, too?”

  “No,” Water Dancer said. Her pods flashed with crimson anger even one as lightspeech-illiterate as he could read. “She did that directly. I was escorted from the lab on her orders.”

  He grimaced in sympathy.

  “Whalg-General and Yurll seem to have forgotten we are a cooperative governing body,” Basalt said, managing to convey dryness even through the palanquin’s speakers. “Lacharoksa’s been acting under their authority, but I am Anmerresh’s governor. In my own territory, my authority supersedes theirs in local district matters.” They gave a languid twirl of tentacles—a shrug of their own? “In other words, I can reinstate you, Daikar Shurinezz.”

  He felt lightheaded, as though a crushing weight had lifted, but still—“At what price?”

  “Only that you give the right order to Stone’s team when the time comes. I’ll see the Attarrish case given back to you.”

  “The councilor has already granted me access to the vault detention facility’s labs,” Water Dancer chimed in, pods coruscating with excitement. “They’re smaller than Shomoro’s, but very well-equipped. And off the official books—I won’t have to wade through clumps of tedious regulations just to get on with my experiments.”

  “I’ll see you get all the funding you need,” Basalt nodded their head at her. “Once this threat is dealt with.”

  “Has the Council voted to reinstate me?” Daikar asked. He was unsure he wanted to hear the answer, but he had to know—how legitimate was this offer?

  Basalt straightened their stalk. “The Council”—a burst of static roughened the word—“debates the merits of placing a known assassin into minimum security where he can come into contact with his target. Mose Attarrish is a dangerous criminal and an Expansion agent, if our sources—your colleagues—are to be believed. We should do everything in our power to contain him.”

  Basalt was talking around the answer. “So there hasn’t been a vote,” Daikar said. He felt the weight settling again, and lifted his head against it to look steadily at Basalt. “How many councilors agree with you?”

  “Nearly enough,” the Veerten said shortly. “I have yet to convince Councilor Grass Weaver of the merits of my argument. He has not declared for either side. Until he does, we are deadlocked on the issue.”

  Daikar let out a lung-emptying breath at the news things were that close.

  “However, if we can present Attarrish’s detention as an accomplished fact, I believe that will win Grass Weaver to our side.” The Veerten councilor made a loose bunch with their tentacles, uncannily like a fist clenching. “It’s always easier to vote for the winning strategy.”

  It was all strategy with the Council, Daikar reflected.

  Games they played with others’ lives to further their own ends, collective or otherwise. But often those ends were in service to the safety and security of Teluk. He could accept being used as a game piece to that end, and Water Dancer too. He could accept being made into a constant, a control in the Council’s experiment. The alternative, as Water Dancer had so eloquently demonstrated, was chaos, and chaos got people killed. People he loved—even if he no longer knew what he was to them.

  “Then,” Daikar breathed, “let’s talk strategy.”

  Shomoro watched Pri’s shuttle dock with Teluk’s orbital array from the arrival concourse’s observation deck. The slim arrow shape of the intrasystem shuttle floated toward the coupling on the white puffs of jets, mating to the station with a vibration seen but not felt underneath the rhythm of foot and vehicle traffic inside the orbital station.

  Across from the observation deck was a gently curving row of spaceport gates, from which spilled a din of voices in spoken languages and a coruscation of lightspeech as passengers debarked from an arriving flight. Shomoro turned her back to it, hugged herself briefly, and fixed on a mask of professional cool as she walked past the public debarkation area to the reserved lounges at the far end. The guard at the door accepted her badge and buzzed her through the opaque glass doors.

  The VIP lounge was small but comfortable, with padded species-generic seating and vertical windows that gazed down on the watery half-disc of Teluk. It was also empty; the private flight schedule was arranged so guests didn’t have to share the room if they desired privacy.

  Pri had wanted to deliver her report on Mose Attarrish to their alliance in private. She would be expecting to be met by Shomoro and Daikar. Shomoro clicked her teeth hard, swallowing back a bolus of anger. She wasn’t looking forward to that part of the debrief.

  The door to the airlock corridor whispered open, and Pri entered. She stopped, seeing Shomoro alone, and Shomoro caught a prickle of unshielded puzzlement from her.

  “It’s just me,” Shomoro said. “I’ll explain. But before that, I’m so glad you made it back.” She caught Pri’s shoulders in a light embrace, which the Drevl Char returned.

 
«Where is Daikar?»

  Shomoro thinned her lips. “Daikar won’t be joining us.” Pri pulled back enough to look at Shomoro with her front-facing eyes. Deciphering Drevl Char expressions was something of an art since their features were arranged so differently than hers, but usually it wasn’t necessary for beings who communicated their emotions directly. Right now, both Pri’s thoughts and her silent attention conveyed expectation and the beginnings of worry.

  “He’s all right,” Shomoro said quickly. “It’s nothing like that.”

  A flutter of relief, swiftly succeeded by confusion. «You’re angry at him. What happened?»

  Shomoro guided Pri over to a couch before answering. The Drevl Char might not sit, but Shomoro wanted something under her, supporting her, before she relived the events.

  Settled on a couch, she glanced out one of the lounge’s vertical windows. A sliver of the station’s complicated ring-and-spoke architecture was visible, and beyond it was hard black space dotted with the braking jets of incoming ships. Mose Attarrish’s craft was out there somewhere, perhaps even now speeding toward Teluk, cloaked from their sensors, or so the Project believed.

  “Daikar and I aren’t on speaking terms right now.” She grasped one hand with the other until the bones grated against each other.

  In a voice that was at least steady if a little too flat, Shomoro told Pri all that had happened since she left. She related the conversation in which Daikar had told of Water Dancer’s plan and his involvement with a detached calm her other self would have admired; it was only when Shomoro got to Daikar’s response to her retaliation that her voice quavered.

  She’d had Operative Jureshsillim keep tabs on him since that evening. He hadn’t left Anmerresh as she’d feared. But neither, according to Jureshsillim, did he seem to be doing anything here: He wasn’t looking for a new position or agitating for his old one back. The dread had creeped up on Shomoro that the reason Daikar was keeping a low profile was because he’d found a way past her countermeasures.

  “I thought having him and Water Dancer removed from their positions would derail their plans,” she finished, “but I’m afraid I’ve only driven them underground.”

  She caught her breath as a wave of surprise and outrage made her vision glaze. It dimmed enough for Shomoro to separate out the emotions as Pri’s, smacking into her for the split second before the Drevl Char shielded them, leaving her only with her own sizeable anger and sense of betrayal.

  «How can Daikar do this?» Pri’s antennae switched back and forth with a faint but audible snap.

  “He and Water Dancer have support on the Council. One of them must be helping.”

  Pri cut the air with a tendril, a habit she’d picked up from either Shomoro or Daikar. «That isn’t what I meant. How can he do this to you? Knowing what you went through?»

  Shomoro was quiet, mulling over what Pri had just said. She thought back over the stew of emotions she’d swum through like sucking mud the past few weeks, unable to identify their source. “Thank you, Pri. I hadn’t made that connection before. I doubt Daikar has.” She worried a fingernail with her teeth. “I believe him when he says he’s doing it to protect me,” she said at last. “But I can’t forgive him if Water Dancer’s plan succeeds.”

  A tendril wrapped around her arm, squeezing with gentle pressure. «It hasn’t yet. It sounds as though Daikar is the crucial link in their operation. Without him directing Stone, it all falls apart.»

  She shrugged, but covered Pri’s tendril with her hand, keeping it there. “His decision seemed firm to me.”

  «We’ll see about that.» Pri’s side eyes narrowed. «Let him try and hide his doubts from me.»

  That coaxed a laugh from Shomoro, if a bleak one. “The immovable object versus the irresistible force. That should be interesting.” Feeling a bit better with someone on her side again, Shomoro turned to the objective at hand. “So, tell me about Mose Attarrish. You said you made contact; what did you learn?”

  Pri related the encounter in Greenwich Hub’s entertainment district, including both the content of her exchange with Attarrish, in eidetic detail, and also the emotional underpinnings of the encounter. It was no wonder, Shomoro thought as she listened, that the Expansion was so invested in affording privileges and lifetime pensions to the Drevl Char inside the Front: Any disaffected enough to turn on the Expansion would make the perfect spies and sleeper agents. Too bad for them they’d missed a few.

  Once Pri finished, Shomoro rose and went to the window, looking out on nothing as she composed her thoughts and tried to tamp down her excitement. “So Attarrish is a prisoner.”

  «So it would seem. His eagerness—need, really—to know more about our offer does not indicate one content in their situation. And the encounter I witnessed after I hid did not suggest he and the Terrans were on equal terms.»

  “Could you tell anything about them? The Terrans he was with?”

  «I sensed genuine concern from the male of the two. He may be responsible for Mose’s well-being, a handler or a doctor, perhaps.» Pri wriggled her tendrils in the equivalent of a shrug, to show it was all conjecture. «The female treated Mose as dangerous. She was the one who threatened him. And I sensed only hostility in Mose toward her.»

  “A guard,” Shomoro guessed. She ran a hand absently through her mane as she thought. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  Pri shook her teardrop-shaped head. «You know as much as I do now.»

  Shomoro jabbed acknowledgment. It was precious little—the gleanings from a few minutes of interaction and spying—but she’d conducted successful missions without much more.

  They had enough information to plan how to approach Mose once—if, she corrected herself— if they captured him.

  “There’s still the problem of Water Dancer,” she said, and grimaced. “And Daikar.”

  Pri looked at her with all four eyes. «You leave Daikar to me.»

  When Daikar got to the small hangar the Council maintained for private craft, Pri was already waiting for him. She stood before the slim Council courier ship that had brought her in; beyond it, the mouth of the hangar looked out over Anmerresh’s ancient caldera. The sun was setting, touching the blue-green foliage of the water gardens with bronze light.

  He embraced Pri carefully, mindful of dislodging the rebreather pack strapped into her spiracles. “I’m surprised they dropped you off here,” he said. “There are other landing pads closer to the vault access points.”

  «I told them to land here.» Pri started walking down the line of parked ships, forcing him to follow.

  That wasn’t an explanation. “I assumed you’d want to meet with Shomoro to debrief as soon as possible.”

  «I’ve already met with Shomoro.» Surprise made him stop.

  Pri didn’t miss a beat; she halted and faced him. «I asked you here because I wanted to talk to you. Alone.»

  He studied her for a long moment before he realized what was missing. Normally, Pri was the most open of the three of them; not sharing emotions was abnormal to her. But now her mind was closed to him. Astonishment made his voice small as he asked, “Where?”

  In answer, Pri turned down another aisle and stopped before a mid-sized Osk courier. The name stenciled in white paint wasn’t visible from this angle, but Daikar knew it almost as well as his own. “The Seril?”

  Pri still said nothing, projected nothing. She only held up her access card to the hatch scanner and waited while the steps folded down from the belly of Shomoro’s ship. Daikar followed her up the hatchway, numb with astonishment. But his mind was already coming up with its own reasons for Pri’s behavior.

  She wanted to talk to him alone, in a place Shomoro wasn’t likely to look for them right away. It could only mean she didn’t want Shomoro to hear this conversation. Had she discovered something on her mission that Shomoro didn’t want to hear, something she only felt comfortable telling him?

  He emerged into the oval cabin bisected by the black,
fleshy column of the neural hub. Low couches and a kitchen area were arranged on one side of the hub, the three travel berths on the other. Pri stood looking down at one of the berths. Her own—he recognized it from the accretions of hardware bolted onto the sides, mods he and Shomoro had added to change the atmospheric composition to accommodate Drevl Char physiology.

  She looked up as he approached. «Do you remember how we met?»

  “What happened on your mission?”

  She waved a tendril in dismissal. «I’ll answer the question. But first, answer mine.»

  He suppressed a frown. “All right, then. We met on Skraal, right before leaving for Teluk.”

  «We met because Shomoro took a chance on two people she didn’t know. Without her, both of us might be still be rotting on Skraal. We’re here because she gave us a chance to prove ourselves allies. Friends.»

  Now Daikar did frown. “Ah. That’s what this is about.”

  A crack appeared in Pri’s shielding, allowing the slightest hint of indignation to emerge. «I thought we were an alliance. If you had second thoughts about the plan, you should have approached one of us before I left. I shouldn’t have to hear about it from Shomoro secondhand, after you decided unilaterally what’s in our best interests.»

  Her indignation strengthened to anger, and it fed his own; he could smell his scent turning acidic. “If anyone’s making unilateral decisions, it’s Shomoro. She’s set on this ridiculous plan to win Mose to our side, even if it costs her life.”

  «It’s not ridiculous.» Pri’s send was suddenly whisper-soft, so soft he wasn’t sure he’d apprehended it correctly.

  “What?”

  «It’s not ridiculous.» Her main eyes fastened on his, liquid with sincerity. «I made contact with Mose. He wants out.» She told him of their brief encounter in Greenwich Hub, the scene with Mose’s handlers or guards that she’d witnessed afterward.

  “He said he wants out?” Daikar said once she’d finished.