Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  «Not in words. I wouldn’t trust words, not the way I trust the emotions under them. I could sense his discontent and his shame. And his hope I was telling the truth about our ability to help him.»

  “So he’s unhappy.” Daikar shrugged. “So he’s ashamed. It wasn’t enough to stop him doing the Project’s bidding before, why should it now?”

  «Because we’re offering him a choice.»

  “He’s had choices.” Daikar crossed his arms over his cloak and set his stance. “And I’ve made mine.” He snorted. “The chance to recruit a traitor against the safety of someone I care about? It wasn’t hard.”

  Her answer was instant. «If you care about her, you should realize what this will do to her.» Pri’s thought tone was so serious, so final, that he found his anger fading under it. A wary uncertainty took its place.

  “You really think she’s so proud that she can’t accept our protection from a clear threat?”

  Pri’s voiceless laugh was wry. «This isn’t about pride for Shomoro. No, quite the opposite.» She moved to one of the couches and patted it. He obeyed her cue and lowered his belly onto the couch.

  Pri drew a deep breath, making her rebreather whine. «I have something to tell you about the night we met. It may take a while.»

  The night she left Skraal in the company of the two Osk had been like emerging from an egg case into a second life, or perhaps a third: for if her first life had been spent below the orange skies of Charel, the life she’d led in the tunnels under the ruined surface had certainly not been the same one. After two hundred and more years in exile, first on her own world and then someone else’s, Pri had no idea what to expect when she took Shomoro’s offer. Indeed, she had long ceased expecting anything; long years of guilt and apathy had made her empty except for one thin thread of hope.

  She’d climbed that thread into the small cabin of the Osk courier Seril, having said goodbye only a few hours before to the enclave she’d spent her second life with. Shomoro had met her at the hatch, shown her the modified berth and rebreather stock, what parameters to input into the nutrition console to produce food she could eat, and introduced Pri to Daikar. She was distant throughout it all, her mind tense and tinged with a worry Pri had attributed to their impending launch and all the tasks associated with preparing for an interstellar journey. Then Shomoro sent Daikar away, and Pri realized this was something else.

  “I remember that,” Daikar interjected. “She asked me to run a diagnostic on the navigation program. I’d already checked it that day.” He rubbed the skin along his scar. “I knew it was a pretext, but not for what.”

  «She sent you away because she wasn’t ready for you to hear this.» Pri remembered, as vividly as though it had been fifteen minutes and not fifteen years ago, what Shomoro had said once the two of them were alone: I don’t want you to know what I’m about to tell you, but I have no choice. You would find out eventually. I’d rather it be on my terms.

  Then Shomoro had sat cross-legged before Pri, her head bowed and eyes averted as though she were confessing something, and told Pri the reason for the hunger Pri had glimpsed burning coldly inside her. The memories layered behind Shomoro’s words, as she spoke of her confinement and torture at the White Arrows’ hands, were almost too hot for Pri to touch, like dipping her antennae into scalding water.

  Shomoro had held nothing back. When she’d finished her recitation, the Osk outstretched one forearm, then the other, and invited—almost ordered—Pri to probe the sheaths with a tendril and discover the emptiness there.

  Daikar had listened quietly, his pupils reduced to narrow white slits as he focused all his attention on her story. Now his pupils dilated and he leapt off the couch as if it had stung him.

  “She trusted you enough to tell you about that? You’d just met!”

  He made the statement into an accusation, one Pri recognized wasn’t meant for her. She heard the question underneath: Why did she trust you with it, and not me?

  «It wasn’t about trust.»

  “Then what in the suns was it about?”

  «She was ashamed, Daikar.» Pri spread her arms in exasperation. «Yes, she told me what happened. She also told me what it meant.» At his blank look, Pri elaborated. «That she can never return home. That she would be Bladeless among her people. Your people.»

  She remembered how Shomoro’s voice had gone soft and cracked as she explained the term. Executions were rare in the Osk system of law, irreversible sentences even rarer. An accordance of Bladeless status carried a sentence of death that could not be commuted. Such sentences were reserved for Osk judged to have committed crimes so heinous that they upset the very balance on which the Osk covenant of peace was founded.

  The blades of the condemned were removed prior to their execution. Bladeless were considered too dangerous to have them.

  “That’s rot,” Daikar hissed. “She hasn’t committed a crime. If she’s still blaming herself for what the White Arrows tortured out of her—”

  «She was then.» He fell silent, and Pri went on. «She told me the full truth only because she didn’t see a way to hide it from me. And because I was an alien. I wouldn’t, couldn’t, understand it the way you can.» She moved closer and brushed his shoulder with a tendril. «When she told it to you, it was because you’d earned her trust. It’s that same trust you’re about to throw away.»

  Daikar jerked away from her touch. He stalked to the neural hub and leaned against an outward jutting shelf, looking at his hands. “But I don’t understand. What does this have to do with Mose?”

  «Let’s see what we know about Mose.» Pri counted on her tendrils. «We know he’s a prisoner of the Terrans. We know they’ve been using him against your people. And we know that on Oskaran he would be considered a traitor. Correctly or not,» she added to forestall his protests. «Now who does that sound like?»

  He turned abruptly. “You can’t compare Shomoro to Mose.”

  «I’m not. I’m saying she already has.» Pri approached until there was less than a body length between them. «And what you have to understand, Daikar Shurinezz, is that for her this isn’t about recruiting an ally. It’s about redeeming a part of herself. That’s what she loses if you go through with this. That’s what you’re taking away.»

  He stayed behind in the Seril’s cabin after Pri spoke her piece. She didn’t ask if he needed the space; she didn’t need to. Once she was gone, Daikar circumnavigated the oval cabin in a daze, seeing it not as it was—berths empty, neural hub dark save for the standby light indicating the ship’s interior membrane was hooked into the dock’s nutrient feed—but as it had been the night Pri came aboard: conduits and blood vessels alike humming with chemical energy, seemingly as eager as they were to leave for Teluk space.

  But that was not what he was remembering. It was what had happened once the launch was done and they were on their way to Teluk. It was what had happened between him and Shomoro, which he hadn’t understood until now.

  Daikar waits until the status lights seeping through his closed eyelids have turned from red to blue before opening his eyes. Blue lights indicate a successful orbital insertion. He’s done a few of them, but he can never bring himself to watch the transition from atmosphere to orbit. It’s bad enough he has to listen to the courier’s inner fleshy membrane squeezing and stretching all along the boundary of its outer hull, to the tink and pop of metal as its temperature undergoes rapid fluctuations of heat and cold.

  The cockpit is designed to be piloted by a single Osk lying on their stomach. Its ceiling is so low it brushes his mane as Daikar wriggles backward out of it. His bare feet touch the chilly floor, sending a stab of cold through his legs. Wincing, he adjusts his robe and goes to find Shomoro and Pri.

  Shomoro is standing with her back to him in what he thinks of as the living area: a carpeted patch of deck, with three couches and a low table bolted to it. He sees she’s examining a piece of paper. He clears his throat and she turns.

  “Where�
�s Pri?” he asks slowly. Shomoro asked him to leave less than an hour ago; he isn’t sure if he’s welcome to return yet.

  “Already berthed.” She sets the paper on the table. It’s the sketch of a vulis she’s been working on. Since he last looked she’s added the head, its mouth open in a mating roar.

  “Shomoro, if I did something to anger you—”

  “It’s nothing like that.” She crosses the living area in a couple of strides, stopping less than half a body length from him.

  “Then what is it?” he says. This close he can smell her base-line scent, more pungent than normal. “You can talk to me.”

  “I don’t want to talk.” She strokes the back of one hand across his right cheek, brushing his mane back and sending a tingle through the scar under his eye. Speechless with surprise, he watches as she draws the robe from her shoulders.

  The cloth falls in a puddle at her feet. He stares, conscious of being rude but unable to look away.

  Scars cover her gray-black skin, half-healed—or not healed, but as if something is in the process of wiping them away. The bones are visible in her chest and stomach, the sharp angles of ribs and pelvis pressing outward from flesh that looks too tight to comfortably contain them.

  The last of his doubts about what she endured curl up and vanish, like ash disintegrating in the wind. “Is this what you showed Pri, too?” he finds himself asking anyway. “To convince her of your story?”

  “I’m not trying to convince you of anything.” Her lips twitch in what might be a smile. “Well, maybe one thing.” Keeping her gaze on him, she brings two fingers to the hollow of her throat, pulsing the gland nestled there.

  A wave of attractant pheromones sweeps over him, filling his nostrils with the scent of oskven musk, sweet and woody and spicy. Daikar feels himself responding . . . but there’s something underneath it too, hard and bitter, a stress scent that has nothing to do with arousal.

  He steps back, out of the corona of her scent. “No.”

  Shomoro stills her hand but doesn’t move it. “No?”

  He has only an outsider’s impression of her mental state, based on the distress he can smell on her below the pheromonal rush. But it’s enough. “Whatever happened between you and Pri, it upset you. You aren’t in a good frame of mind.”

  Now she does move her hand, but only to wrap both hands around his shoulders. “I still want this.”

  “I believe that.” He gently removes her hands from his shoulders. “But I don’t. Not like this.”

  “I . . .” She blinks several times, as though dazed by a bright light. “I see.” Her expression closes and she turns away from him to dress. “Notify me when we’ve reached the Teluk gate. Until then, I want to be alone.”

  And for the second time in one night, she sends him away.

  In the living area of the empty Seril, Daikar drew his own hand over his cheek, where she’d touched him fifteen years ago.

  She must have wanted to tell him the same thing she’d told Pri, but the shame and the trauma had been too great. Shomoro hadn’t been ready to divulge her greatest secret a second time.

  Yet she must have wanted to reaffirm their alliance, their friendship, for herself. She’d still come to him for comfort, had still trusted him with a part of herself. It must have been a compromise: one kind of intimacy offered in place of the kind she wasn’t yet able to give.

  He’d rejected it that first time, startled and unsettled. He didn’t regret that decision, but it felt different now; he understood what had driven her to extend that thin thread of trust.

  Daikar rose and left the Seril. It was time—past time—to talk to Shomoro.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mose’s eyes cracked open like lids on a pair of ancient jars. His capsule had changed around him, the liquid gel draining away while he slept, transforming from coffin to true conveyance. A flexible cradle supported his head, tipping it slightly up. A transparent pane had opened in the smooth metal wall before him. The light bouncing into the tiny craft came from a yellow sun reflecting off the broad limb of a planet. If all had gone as planned, that planet must be Teluk.

  The next part of the mission awaited him. Upon his arrival, Mose had to input a unique code into his craft’s computer.

  The program sequence it triggered was bipartite: The first set of functions would instruct the capsule to descend to whatever spot Intelligence had deemed suitably secure. The second set would fire away an encrypted message in an RD burst to his handlers on Greenwich Hub, to alert them that he had arrived.

  It was also the signal to start organizing the mop-up mission. The weeks he would be on-planet planning and executing his mission were weeks in which Project Intelligence would assemble its battery of drones for the cleanup and data-gathering portion of the mission. When the orchestrators judged the mission to be near its predictable end, the cleanup team would arrive. Neither Diane nor Jan Shanazkowitz had ever said explicitly that they expected Mose to make his kill before the secondary team got there. However, Mose had always assumed that expectation was there, unstated.

  Yet this was Teluk: the place of his hatching and childhood, of his education and formation. The idea of tarnishing its memory with an act of coerced murder hurt in a way that his other kills, wrenching as they’d been, couldn’t touch.

  He clenched a fist on the capsule’s armrest, curling his grip around the memory of Pri’s words. They’d been few, vague, spoken hurriedly before she had to disappear. But they were more than he’d had before. If they were true, he’d never have to do what the Project had sent him here for, not now or ever again.

  The control panel had unfolded from the wall, eager for its coded instructions. Mose let it wait while he gazed at his planet.

  Four-fifths of Teluk’s surface was covered with oceans. Most of the land took the form of small archipelagos blooming with verdant foliage. The single land mass large enough to be called a continent was swampy, the parts not drained off to be urbanized crisscrossed with rivers and fresh inland seas. Mose recognized the coast of the An Sea from this angle, peeking over the limb of the planet. Sunlight reflected off it in a hard line, smaller glimmers tracing the rivers that fed into its estuary. Beautiful as it was, the glare from the surface made Mose wish his craft’s window came with a better polarizing function. Though he could guess their positions from the outline of the coast, Teluk’s cities’ glass-and-steel gleam was invisible under all this brightness.

  That hadn’t stopped Teluk’s leaders from seeding orbit with surveillance satellites, probing constantly into the emptiness in case it should become less so. The Project craft was shielded, but the effectiveness of its encryption would degrade over time as the satellites’ decryption programs perforated their way in.

  Ignoring this in the past had gotten Mose into unpleasant situations. Much as he wanted to, he could not linger above the atmosphere.

  With a glance at the keyboard, Mose tapped out the single-use code. He leaned back, stretched out his arms on the rests at each side of his cradle, and prepared to make planetfall in a capsule ship barely longer than his own body. He felt the familiar tightening of the cradle around his body and limbs, transforming from chair to crash couch.

  Fluid once more began to fill his capsule. This time the translucent cushioning jelly was turned grayish by clouds of nanites suspended in the solution. He shut his nostrils as the liquid closed over his head, a reflex both pointless and unnecessary; the nanites didn’t need to be inhaled to make their way into his body, and soon he wouldn’t need to breathe anyway.

  The free-floating clouds of the nanite swarm coalesced, darkening into solidity like crystals growing in a solution. The black, infinitely flexible nanocarbon tendrils were impregnated with a mesenchyme of hardware that would interface with Mose’s anatomy in ways that made his stomach clench. They would also allow him to survive gravitational stresses that would otherwise turn his flesh to jelly.

  The usual shivers coursed up and down his spine as th
e tentacles flowed over his skin, bifurcating into smaller and smaller branches to penetrate via his pores into the intercellular spaces of his body. They would take on the gravitational and torsional stresses for the descent, and Mose would become a living jewel—as he had dozens of times before. The ship he’d sacrificed in his fight against Gau had a similar system, though Mose had always opted to be sedated prior to impregnation.

  These newer, more streamlined capsules did not include that option. No matter how many provisions Terrans made for their own squeamishness, when it came to that of other sentients they seemed ignorant. Or indifferent.

  Mose’s gorge rose as his throat was packed with slick tubules. His vision misted over with a fine black lattice, as if he’d pressed his face against a wire screen. Sounds and scents grew muted as the black carbon serpents shut out the tiny world of his capsule. The only sense left to Mose in all its intensity was touch; he could feel every last tendril slide over and then inside him.

  Then the tubules crystallized and Mose was gripped by a giant fist. The capsule tilted out of equilibrium and hurtled toward the seas of Teluk with the velocity of a meteor.

  A meteor was what the citizens of Anmerresh thought they saw streaking across the evening sky as they stepped out to take the air. Most would never be disabused of that notion.

  The confidence of Teluk’s citizenry in their planetary defense system was absolute. They’d borne the full brunt of the Expansion’s imperialist aims, and the Terran fleet had broken against them like waves on a breakwater. There was nothing the Expansion could throw at them that they could not repel on their own turf. Not one of the witnesses to Mose’s descent suspected that one of their own had returned to them as both prisoner and spy.

  Up close, the meteor would have looked very different. The capsule had metamorphosed from a slim lozenge into a light-absorbent sphere, spinning as it fell through the clouds. It aimed close to the day-night divide above the saltwater sea of An, slipping into evening to mask its final descent into Anmerresh.