Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  Engel found the record he was looking for in a few seconds.

  He had the date memorized. The file’s alphanumeric catalog label appeared in white text against a black background on the screen, followed by the date and time.

  By his sharp intake of breath, Mizrah recognized the file, though it was from before his promotion to director of the Arrows. Engel acknowledged him with a nod and hit Play .

  The recording was audio only. It had been preserved just as it was broadcast twenty-five years ago, hacked into the newsfeeds and local nets of Diego Two while the bombed remains of the Church’s parade float were still being scraped off the street.

  Casualty reports had still been coming in. As it would turn out, the only people hurt or killed by the blast had been the Church officials riding the float. The IED had been precisely shaped, detonated from a clear sightline when the float passed over it. A surgical blast, clean as a laser-scalpel.

  After all, the Djandjer-Pralsh’s war was with the Church. They’d been very clear about that.

  Cadence and tone analyses after the fact had identified the speaker in the recording as Lorsk Edrasshii. Yet the altered voice that spoke could not have belonged to one person. It was a mellifluous, hissing, grating amalgam of alien voices, as though the whole of non-Terran Diego Two were speaking at once.

  “Citizens of Diego Two: It is at a time of fear and uncertainty that we address you. On an eve of celebration, an attack has been mounted on your Universal Church. I speak as one of those responsible for this attack.

  “I assume I have your attention.”

  There was a pause over the video, the suggestion of a held breath.

  “Know that when I say ‘citizens’ I address the Terran residents of Diego Two only. There are many sentients who would gladly wear the name ‘citizen,’ but your government has denied it to them. For the honor they do you in coming here, offering their skills and their labor, your government has consigned non-Terrans to slums. You have made them lie, and eat carrion, and slowly tear each other apart to survive. You have watched their children starve.

  “Yet we do not hold you at fault, citizens. We believe the root of our injustice can be traced directly to the pernicious influence of the Universal Church. In the sermons they choose to make public, the Church says that all sentients are part of the same universal soul. They say we are all siblings, children of the same creation. But we have heard the tracts the Church has fed you in private. It has convinced your government—has convinced all of you—that you must keep us chained for the safety of Terrankind. That couldn’t be more false.

  “Our demand is simple: the government of Diego Two must renounce all ties with and reject all influence from the Universal Church. We chose to strike on the anniversary of the ceasefire on Rreluush-Tren to illustrate a point. You have enjoyed five years of peace, citizens, since Terrankind fought a war based on misunderstanding. You stand on the cusp of another such war. Whether or not we become your enemy is your decision. If you renounce the Church, we will pass peaceably through your gates and embrace you as siblings.

  “This is your wisest course, citizens. If you rally around the vehicle of our oppression, we cannot guarantee your safety.

  Those who side with corruption deserve none.

  “We await your response, citizens of Diego Two. Until you look upon us as equals, you will not know our true face. But I will provide a name for your newscasts.

  “You can call us the Siblings in Exile.”

  A heavy, expectant quiet reigned as the recording stopped.

  Engel let it spin out, gathering his thoughts. “The assailants have been hiding behind the faces of different nonhuman species, just as the Djandjer-Pralsh did in their broadcasts. Perhaps in doing so, they’ve been telling us who they are. And that means we also know what they want.” He made a fist on the console. “To exterminate the Universal Church.”

  “If it is them,” Mizrah said in a low voice, “then something else is driving them. Before it was public spectacle, stuff with a lot of casualties. That Djandjer-Pralsh would have claimed responsibility before now, even if they didn’t reveal their identity.”

  “Revenge.” Gomambwe said, quietly, though in the hushed room his voice carried. He glanced at the rest of them and cleared his throat. “It’s the simplest motive. It would explain why the targets have all been White Arrow bases, why they’ve left the rest of the Church alone. We’re too big and connected for them to come after us again—it’d be suicide—so they hurt us where we can still feel it.”

  Brinkley barked an ugly laugh. “It was suicide then, too.”

  He twisted his torso to face Engel. “Let me take a squad into Tarbreak, sir. If it is them, I guarantee I can have those snakes flushed out and dead within forty-eight hours.”

  Engel felt the corners of his lips turning up, just slightly. “I thought you might make such an offer. But those tactics are exactly the wrong approach, I’m afraid.”

  Uncertainty entered Brinkley’s pale blue eyes. “Sir?”

  Folding his hands behind his back, Engel began to pace, studying the gray walls. From the moment the idea occurred to him that the Djandjer-Pralsh were the culprits, Engel felt certain of its truth. It fit the evidence, and even better, it provided a more than adequate motive. If it were only a matter of convincing himself and the officers at his disposal of the Djandjer-Pralsh’s guilt, he would not hesitate to throw the Church’s full weight behind exterminating them all this time.

  But there was the small problem that the Djandjer-Pralsh were not supposed to still be in Diego Two. And what was more, the Church was not supposed to have been involved in their removal.

  “You joined after the civil crisis, correct?” Engel asked Brinkley.

  Brinkley nodded. “After I was discharged from Nheris Colony. After we won.”

  “Quite,” Engel said. “So you wouldn’t remember the knife’s edge we were balanced on in the aftermath of the crisis.”

  Brinkley shook his head.

  “The Church had everyone’s sympathy,” Engel said. “How could we not, after Dania? But we also had our marching orders. The Core Worlds Government sanctioned us to deal with the terrorists quickly and quietly. CoG would see order restored in Diego Two, and in exchange they would provide the public with resolution.”

  Heads were nodding around the table. Everyone in the room knew the story, even if they hadn’t been there. The official report that had gone out after the strike on Chii Ril was that Osk terrorists operating out of the enclave had been engaged in a firefight by Diego Two civil security forces. Around a dozen terrorists had been killed, and the survivors and civilians subsequently detained at the Terran Embassy. Officially, the civilians were later deported to the nearest Osk territory, the newly established Za colony.

  Engel splayed his hands on the table and leaned forward, making sure he met the eyes of all three men in the room. “We can’t risk this becoming public, is that clear? Anything that could stir up public inquiry into the crisis again, anything that could lead to a renewed investigation, could tear down everything we’ve built.”

  He waited until each of them nodded understanding. The last thing they needed was some CoG special envoy pawing through their files. Not when they were so close—when he’d visited the fleet six months ago, his engineers had been putting the craft through the final stress tests. They would be ready to operate as designed within the year.

  “So a hardline approach is out.” Mizrah toyed with one of his rolled shirtsleeves, pulling it down, then up again. “What are our other options?”

  Gomambwe rose and joined Engel at the table’s head. “I have an idea.” He spread his arms for Engel to cede the floor, and Engel returned to his seat.

  “We have a place to start looking now. That’s more than we had before.” With some digital alchemy Engel didn’t quite follow, Gomambwe located and brought up another file. It was a map of Diego Two, zoomed in on Tarbreak. Gomambwe swept a hand over the blocky shapes
of tenements, and they lit up red where his fingers passed.

  “These housing blocks haven’t been in use since shortly after the civil crisis.” He tapped one of the buildings and a white dot marked it. “This block used to be Chii Ril. It’s supposed to be empty now, along with the others.”

  “‘Supposed to be?’” Mizrah asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Gomambwe shrugged. “Squatters probably come and go. Not everyone wants to live in the shack city. The security drones pretty much ignore the occasional heat signature coming from the apartment blocks.”

  “Aren’t those buildings all condemned?” Brinkley asked.

  “Technically. But the bones are solid.” A small smile passed over Gomambwe’s face as he knocked on the sturdy table in emphasis.

  Engel realized what Gomambwe was about to propose.

  “Who owns the tenements now?”

  Gomambwe brought up the metadata. “Private developer. Looks like they bought them off the city when no one else wanted them. They’ve been sitting on them for years.”

  Engel could picture the story: an ambitious developer buying property for a song off a city government eager to divest itself of a bad history. Only, the developer must have realized no one who could pay wanted to live in Diego Two’s mistake.

  “We can’t do anything that would attract public scrutiny,” Gomambwe said. “But if we buy the buildings through a shell company, that’s a private transaction. They become our property.”

  And the Church could do whatever it wanted on its own property—including find out who was already living there.

  Engel looked at Gomambwe. “Buy the block. Every building. I want to see the deeds in our holdings by tomorrow.”

  Gomambwe suppressed a yawn, and Engel remembered he had been up most of the night. There were dark circles under his eyes. But he nodded.

  Engel turned to face Brinkley and Mizrah. “I want you to have your people make inquiries. Discreetly. Contacts in the shadow markets, black ops, mercenaries, whoever they know. Anyone who might have heard rumors about where the Djandjer-Pralsh might be hiding. I want them sewn up.”

  Mizrah gave a hard nod, while Brinkley stood and saluted.

  “And once we have them cornered, sir? Somewhere nice and out of the public eye?”

  Engel felt a wolfish smile pull at his face. “Then, Brinkley, you have my permission—no, you have my blessing—to kill them down to the last snake.”

  INTERLUDE

  Arrowhead

  A sigh of relief escaped Engel as the door to his private apartments in the Arrow whooshed closed behind him. In his mind, he knew he’d been careful: He’d descended to Diego Two via shuttle, leaving his recognizable winged flagship in orbit; he hadn’t announced his visit to the Aival branch save for Gomambwe and his immediate aides; he’d dressed anonymously, in a plain suit rather than his robe of office.

  Yet he’d felt unbearably exposed in the aircar ride over to the Arrow, as though someone had stripped him naked and painted a giant red “X” on his back. Knowing the name of their enemy made him feel less secure, not more. He wondered if Dania had ever felt this way. If she had, she’d never shown it, not even in their private correspondence.

  A second thought followed that one: Dania would hate this.

  All this sneaking around in the shadows. She would want to confront the Djandjer-Pralsh head-on, before the whole city.

  A pang of mingled regret and admiration made his chest feel heavy. Engel groped toward the easy chair in the living room, already a vague shape in Diego Two’s short-lived dusk.

  Some kind soul had left Engel’s lightpad on the side table. He opened it, intending to check for news from Gomambwe regarding the purchase of the buildings. Instead, he found himself navigating to a familiar folder.

  He was in the habit of saving communications from his senior staff. One never knew when important information was buried in a message someone had sent months or even years ago. With Dania, their letters had often gone beyond the business of managing the Church; by the end, it had become a long-distance friendship. It was another reason he was glad he’d saved them.

  Every staff member had their own folder. It was easy to find the last letter Dania had sent him.

  Engel opened it and began to read.

  Dania Huascaro signs the letter on her lightpad screen, her latest report on the results of her ongoing engagement tour.

  She’s about to send it off to Robert when the idea strikes her to add a postscript: My last address is tonight at 5 P.M. D2 time—don’t miss it!

  She sends it off and closes her lightpad, then presses against the cabin wall with its slit of window eagerly. Diego Two unfurls below the cruiser in a golden late afternoon haze through the passenger cabin’s narrow window of spun diamond. If she kneels on one of the cabin’s crash couches and cranes her head, she can just make out the crush of bodies in the street below. Hundreds at first, and now thousands, follow her cruiser in a river of humanity flowing toward the citadel at D2’s center.

  They cruise at an altitude of perhaps one hundred fifty meters, close enough to the ground for her to make out individual people in the crowd below. Too close for George Hammond, her head of security, who almost seemed to relish reeling off the litany of street bombings and vehicular sabotages that have befallen other ministers in the last year. If Hammond had his way, their cruising altitude would be a good ten thousand meters, at a safe remove from any possible attack.

  “At a safe remove from my parishioners, too,” she’d remonstrated her head of security gently. “The whole point of this tour of the city is to reassure people their Church is still here for them. That we aren’t about to be cowed into hiding by these despicable attacks. Hopping from place to place practically in the ionosphere is hardly going to help that message.”

  George hemmed and hawed, but in the end he bowed to her request and lowered the cruise ceiling to three hundred meters, one fifty as they approached Central District and the base of the Arrow, their final stop on the tour.

  Dania is lucky that Hammond is letting her do this tour in person at all, even if he insists on ferrying her around in this armored relic from the Terran-Urd war. When she first announced her intention to visit each branch of the Church district by district and meet with its ministers and congregation, his expression had been a door slamming shut.

  “Video screens work just as well,” George had said. “ With telepresence, it would be like you were really there.”

  But everyone would know I wasn’t really there, she thinks. A video address would be worse than doing nothing. It would only be proof of their fear.

  Dania Huascaro is not afraid. She lost her fear when she was fifteen—when the scarcity riots swept Los Gatos and Tarbreak, depleting the depots where non-Terran residents received their monthly allotments of staple foods and sending hordes of underfed and overboozed poor into the streets. She’d been a junior member of D2 Civil Security’s volunteer brigade: not police, officially, but more like interns. Along for the ride to see how justice and order were administered in a society where two-thirds of the city’s poorest residents were not human.

  The volunteer brigade had not been meant to get involved with the crackdown. But by the end of the first day she’d been wielding truncheon and tranquilizer pistol with the rest of them, as angry rioters pelted her articulated armor with bottles, rotted fruit, excrement, even chunks of concrete. She has handcuffed angry drunks and subdued writhing, snapping Urd as they tried to bite her; she’s talked a bristling Rul down from a burning fruit stand and pounded vodka with Russians as she explained the merits of expanding the Church into Poldska District. She is fluent in all three of the city’s human languages, with a smattering of Bask and Urdeki besides. She has lived in this city her whole life, and she isn’t about to be chased out of it by a bunch of cowards who attack from the shadows.

  The Siblings in Exile. That they are aliens has been established beyond doubt. Indeed, they stated so proudly in their
initial manifesto, but determining which species are involved has been a trickier question. Dania was not obligated to sit in on Civil Sec and Church Security’s endless hashing-out sessions; as grand minister, she could request that a summary of their meetings be sent to her office as often as she desired.

  But her sojourn in the volunteer brigade has taught her the value of being in the thick of things. It’s too easy to become abstracted from the way things work on the streets, from the real lives people live and the real emotions that drive everything they do. It doesn’t matter what kind of bodies they have or what kind of air they breathe . . . alien or human, people are all the same. In desperate situations, their fear takes over and they become animals clawing to escape. This much she has told George Hammond, in their last terse conversation before she embarked on this tour:

  When you find these ‘Siblings,’ we’ll see that they’ve been scared, desperate animals all along. We must not judge them too harshly for their fear. It’s the hardest thing to overcome on the path toward cosmic truth.

  The Father teaches that all sentient beings live in separation from the original state of grace. This includes humans, though by cosmic accident her own species is closer in form to the ancient Edenic state from which all sentient beings have been expelled. This is why it is the responsibility of the Universal Church to guide other sentients toward the light of truth, to an understanding of what they have lost. To help them accept the conversion they must make.

  Often, the hardest converts to gain are human ones. She’s spent years paying her dues in the smaller parishes, first in her home district of Los Gatos, then a slow spiral up the turns of the mandala. Along the way, Dania has learned plenty about nuancing the Church’s message. Shrouding its truth in softening veils of rhetoric so as not to burn the eyes of the uninitiated. To uncover the truth of the universe all at once would only blind people; in their incomprehension, they would deny it completely. It is not enough anymore for a church to ask for faith. It has to provide proof.