“We will draw it out, and then they will all smell the stench of its corruption.” One by one, the eyes of the enclave followed his direction, and came to rest on a white spire glinting against the sky.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It wasn’t often that Shomoro visited the menagerie section of the water gardens. Usually the exhibits of animals collected from across the galaxy depressed her, inasmuch as they’d probably rather be roaming much larger territories on their homeworlds than penned up in enclosures, however beautifully sculpted, for the amusement of Teluk’s citizens.
But she’d started the day depressed anyway. A report had been delivered to her that morning from Teluk orbital security: A small, low-albedo one-person craft had penetrated Teluk’s atmosphere and made groundfall in Anmerresh last night. Sensor and surveillance analyses confirmed it was of Terran make.
Appended to that report had been a note: Fish is in the net.
They had Mose wrapped up, just as she’d intended. But the part coming up was beyond her control, because she’d entrusted it to someone she’d thought she could trust absolutely.
With these gloomy thoughts swirling in her head, she’d sought out the gardens’ menagerie, feeding her bad mood by watching native reptilian vaoush stalk around their too-small pens. As she moved to the next exhibit, in the corner of her eye she caught the contingent of her bodyguard moving with her. The three Baskar would look like ordinary zoo-goers to the untrained eye, and they tried to keep enough distance not to crowd her, perhaps underestimating the degree to which her training made that impossible. They were a pressure at her back whenever she ventured beyond her apartments.
The next large animal exhibit contained Oskaran-native vulis. Trammeled in high rock walls below a railing, the habitat mimicked a grassy floodplain. A creek ran through its center, surrounded by long benchmarks of the thick clayey soil vulis
liked to burrow in. The one animal Shomoro could see wasn’t in its burrow. Unimpressed by the relatively less intense light of a Teluk midafternoon, the vulis was stalking from one end of its enclosure to the other, its wedge-shaped head swinging from side to side. The powerful torso was shaped like an inverted triangle, the muscular shoulder girdle and pile-driver front limbs evolved to launch the vulis like a coiled spring from ambush, slamming into prey and stunning it before the jaw bit down in the killing bite.
She read restlessness in each swing of those massive shoulders. The bored stress of the caged animal. She thought of Attarrish: Was this what his days were like, between missions? All that training and intelligence, left to languish until the Project needed to unleash their killer?
We were supposed to offer him something better than life in a cage.
A reshuffling of her bodyguard in Shomoro’s peripheral vision made her glance behind her. She caught Daikar’s scent at the same time as she recognized his face. She turned her own away, studying the vulis as if she found it fascinating and not sad.
“You shouldn’t be above ground,” he said to her back.
His single-minded focus coaxed a dry laugh from her. “Still trying to save me from myself?”
He didn’t answer right away. His shape moved beside her, and he leaned on the railing, not too close. “Pri came to see me after she landed. She . . . told me some things.”
She kept her gaze on the enclosure. “About Mose?”
“About you.”
She looked at him, saying nothing. Daikar dragged a hand through his mane. “She brought up the first night she came aboard the Seril. ”
“What about it?”
He seemed to have trouble meeting her eyes. “I had no idea what you’d told her. Only that you needed me to go before you could. Pri said you told her your story that night. The full story.”
She blinked, momentarily at a loss. Then an unexpected embarrassment made her turn her snout aside—embarrassment that he should find out that she’d trusted a non-Osk with her deepest secret before she’d trusted him.
Then her chest tightened with anger—at him for invoking that guilt, at herself for indulging it. “I was protecting myself,” she said, more loudly than she meant to. One of her bodyguards rolled a languid eye toward them and she lowered her voice. “I didn’t want Pri to find out on her own and tell you.”
“We were unknown quantities. You didn’t trust us enough. Even me.” His words would have sounded like accusations, but for his mild tone. “I understand. We weren’t much more than strangers to you then.”
A lopsided smile pushed at her lips, and it was all Shomoro could do to keep her face stern. Strangers. That was almost funny, considering what had happened between them that night once Pri had been secured in her berth.
“But now isn’t then,” Daikar said. “Teluk isn’t Skraal. And you didn’t place your trust in me because you thought you had no choice.”
“What are you trying to say?” she asked.
His hand moved along the railing until it almost touched hers. She thought about moving away but didn’t. She would hear out whatever this was.
“I’m not good at this,” he said. “I can’t see Mose beyond the threat he poses to you. But Pri helped me understand that you might be able to see him differently.”
She drew in a quick breath. “Are you saying you’ve changed your mind about helping Water Dancer’s faction imprison him?” His widening eyes were all the confirmation she needed that her guess had been right. This had become a struggle between Council factions, with the two of them each side’s favored pawn.
“I don’t know,” Daikar said quickly. “If we— I— don’t give him this chance, I’ll lose you. If I do, he might kill you.”
“Or you, to get to me,” she said slowly. “Or Pri, or any number of Council aides and guards. It’s possible.” In the enclosure below, the vulis started back toward them on its patrol. “The same possibility exists if we lock him away in a vault black site. He’s a seph; the prison hasn’t been built that could contain him with certainty. The only difference in the second scenario is that if he escapes and kills us, we’ll deserve it.”
His scent went spiky with shock and he looked at her with wide eyes. “Deserve it?”
“I’m helping Teluk accelerate the course of its nanotechnology because I believe in the principles its society upholds and how its leaders use their power.” She did smile this time, a bit sadly. “It’s not Oskaran, but some days it’s close enough.
Mose isn’t a threat only to me, he’s a threat to Teluk’s sovereignty—an Expansion spy. How the Council handles him will set a precedent. It will determine what kind of society Teluk becomes.” And what kind of people we become.
She turned to face him and took his hands in hers. “The Expansion’s government locks people away without trials. So do the White Arrows. Do you want to help Teluk become more like them?”
“Of course not,” he said.
“Then you know what you have to do.”
He opened his mouth, but what came out was almost soundless. She asked him to repeat it.
“I can’t.” His snout was turned aside, his lean, wiry shoulders hunched. He seemed to radiate misery.
Shomoro thought about what he’d just said: I can’t see Mose beyond the threat he poses. Couldn’t, because as long as Mose remained a faceless, amorphous threat . . . then Daikar didn’t have to relearn who Mose was. Didn’t have to grieve him, if that person was indeed dead. Didn’t have to deal with the aftermath.
She knew a few things about aftermath, and grief. But this, Shomoro realized, was the first time in a long while she’d had to deal with grief and fear that weren’t her own. The first time in she couldn’t remember how long when her emotions did not feel like the strongest in the room.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What?” Daikar sounded baffled.
“You were right back there,” she said. “I ignored your feelings and expected you to go along with the plan, even when you made it clear you disagreed. I should have heard you out
.”
He gaped for a moment, blinking. “Does this mean you’ve changed your mind?”
She sighed and set her shoulders. “No. But I’m not going to try to stop you. I know I can’t.” His grip started to relax as though he was going to let go of her hands, but she tightened her hold. “But Daikar, I don’t think you can avoid confronting Mose. It’s going to happen one way or another.” She held his gaze. “But with my way, you don’t have to confront him alone.”
He started to say something, but it was lost in the buzz from his PagePendant. Daikar snatched it up and answered.
The robotic voice of a translator replied. “Stone has made contact. The team is in place for the intercept.”
For a moment he stood frozen, acrid apprehension swirling in his scent. Then he said, “On my way.”
Daikar broke away from her and hurried down the broad steps to the path between exhibits. Shomoro barely resisted calling after him, but she knew that nothing else she said would convince him more than she hoped she already had. Instead, she turned down a different way out of the menagerie, toward the vault. All she could do now was get in place, and wait, and hope.
Daikar descended the curving street from the water gardens as quickly as he could manage without running and drawing attention from passersby. Without taking his eyes from the street, he extracted his PagePendant from his cloak and told it whom to message.
Whalg-General answered a second later, half annoyed, half curious. “Daikar? You shouldn’t have access to this line.” Not since he’d been removed from Teluk Intelligence.
“Councilor Basalt reinstated me under your muzzle,” Daikar said without preamble. “They want me to divert Mose into indefinite detainment.”
He heard the intake of breath as Whalg-General began to reply, and rode over it. “Basalt’s side has all the votes it needs for that to be a legitimate order. Except one.”
The moment spun out. Daikar was grateful for the time it gave him to regain his breath. “What are you suggesting, Daikar?”
He reached the last intersection between him and Command and stopped, looking from across the canal at the non-descript gray office front. He brought the pendant close to his mouth and whispered. “Grass Weaver is the key. Basalt thought he could be swayed if presented with our success. Get Grass Weaver on our side.”
Would Whalg-General hear it, the implications of that our? Would he understand what it meant?
So it seemed. “Go,” Whalg-General said. “Leave all else to me.”
Emerging from the dim flooded tunnels under Anmerresh was like surfacing from a dream. Mose had been propelling his craft up the kilometers of surface access tubes without any discernible increase in brightness when the walls around him opened up. Mose glanced around: the access tube had given way onto a deep pool lit turquoise by Teluk’s sun, itself a pearly blotch wavering through the storeys of water above him. Sleek, coppery oblongs jetted through the water around him, Veerten palanquins, headed for the city or out to sea by alternate tunnels.
The bottom of the pool was tiled in cream, with darker strips on the floor and walls marking traffic lanes and surface exit ramps. Mose followed a chevron pattern that led to a surface ramp, resisting the impulse to hold his breath for the last few meters before the palanquin broke the surface. Above the water, Mose saw that he’d emerged at the edge of an artificial lagoon large enough to be called a pond, perfectly circular and about seventy meters across. The sizeable pool sat at the center of an even larger bowl of creamy stone, molded into an amphitheater of intricate tiered ramps leading down to the water.
He maneuvered onto the shallow, tiled slope of artificial beach between the water’s edge and the first of the circling ramps leading upward. Beyond the rim of the structure rose the spires and arches of buildings in the city proper. The lagoon and its amphitheater were sunk below street level, like a crater gouged by a passing meteorite.
The lagoon was a hive of activity. Everywhere, palanquins were popping out of the water, sinking sedately into the depths, or wheeling along the ramps of the great bowl like self-animated board game pieces. Most were coppery Veerten models, though a few colorful enameled Baskar conveyances wheeled past as he gained his bearings—enough to make Mose confident his own craft wouldn’t stand out.
In fact, if he decided now, he could slip the rendezvous entirely. Ditch the palanquin somewhere in the upper districts he knew, and with it the Veert’s leash, and find Shomoro without the protection they’d promised. If she truly meant to help him, he shouldn’t need it. And if she didn’t—if this was all some elaborate ruse to make him vulnerable—than any equipment they gave him wouldn’t be enough, when in his mind he’d conceded victory to her already.
Yet there was more than the palanquin tying him to the Veert, Mose reflected sourly. There was that other, invisible leash, the one the Project had embedded in his cells. He didn’t know how quickly or even whether the Veert would be able to report it if he went off-mission . . . but he couldn’t risk it. Not now. With that thought, Mose began to wheel his palanquin along the strand. A stationary one would be too obvious in this busy terminal. Sand and Shell had said his contact would be able to find him via the tracker on his vehicle. He would stay here until they made contact. He set a leisurely pace, neither too slow nor too fast, passing the time by reviewing the tasks he still had to complete. Retrieving a set of body armor would be top priority; fortunately, he had that part of the plan laid out.
A few minutes after he started his circuit of the amphitheater, the palanquin’s console popped up with a new message waiting. Mose opened it. Level 3, Ramp 7.
His pulse jumped and his skin flushed with excitement for the second before he steadied his breathing. Contact achieved. He angled the palanquin smoothly away from the hubbub along the edge of the lagoon and up to Level 3. A Veerten palanquin identical to the others in the amphitheater idled by the seventh ramp leading out into the city proper.
He slowed the palanquin as he approached but didn’t stop. If this was the wrong one, he would coast by without stopping. A few meters from the Veerten palanquin, Mose sent the encrypted key on the data sliver Sand had entrusted to him. If it was the wrong palanquin, it wouldn’t be able to open it and respond.
A new message flashed on his screen, its signature hash matching the one on his own data sliver. The message itself was terse: Hello, Mose Attarrish. You may call me Stone.
Mose halted the vehicle and swiveled to face the newcomer. He deliberated with himself a moment, then switched the console to voice chat. “Well met, Stone.” A test: If the other palanquin continued to use text instead of voice, he would know its driver was hiding something. Mose wasn’t the only one who could hide behind the shell of a palanquin.
“Well met, Mose Attarrish,” answered the flat voice of a translator.
Mose exhaled slowly. “So, I understand you have some intel for me—and possibly some equipment?”
“These conveyances are not as shielded from certain surveillance techniques as they might be,” Stone replied. “I will guide you to a secure location before dispensing these items.”
The Veert’s palanquin turned and wheeled toward one of the climbing ramps.
“Fair enough,” Mose jerked the controls to follow. “But I want to make a detour first—there’s something I must retrieve before much time has passed.” He could hear the mental calculations in Stone’s pause before the Veert replied.
“That is acceptable to me.”
They emerged from the tiled well into a broad plaza Mose remembered as a hangout for wholesale electronics peddlers, a feature which had lent it the informal name Circuit Square. In his mental map of the city, Circuit Square was several kilometers from the sea stack monument where he’d descended to the lair of the rebel Veert. However, like most areas in Anmerresh, it was close to one of the main thoroughfare canals that sliced the city into a grid of vaguely diamond-shaped islands.
Mose followed Stone, absorbing the new landscape and t
enor of the city as they traveled down snaking streets, across comely paved squares and over arched bridges of stone and SimuWood. The sky was gray and bright in the manner of sunny days on Teluk, but there weren’t too many citizens on the streets. Mose guessed it was sometime in the midmorning.
He wheeled his palanquin abreast of Stone’s. “I should retrieve my item before we go much farther.”
“That is acceptable to me,” Stone said.
And Vernsky thinks Osk are creatures of few words. Muting his mic, he muttered, “I could have a more engaging conversation with a clump of seaweed.”
Mose angled his palanquin in front of Stone’s and guided it into a narrow alley between two overhanging tenements. A tributary canal trickled down a groove in the center of the street. It was little more than a drainage ditch, but had enough water for his purposes. Mose swiveled his palanquin, scanning the alley entrances. Stone rolled up close on his wheels, halting their palanquin so that it blocked the end of the alley from which they’d entered.
“I understand you require a certain discretion in this next action,” his guide remarked with what Mose could have sworn was amusement.
“Oh yes.” He opened the palanquin’s door and swung deftly to the pavement. “I think that would be best.”
Holding his garments out of the muck with one hand, Mose crouched beside the drainage ditch. In a motion as quick as he could make it—for he detested this part—Mose slipped a finger into his mouth and pressed it over the point of one tooth until he tasted blood. He held the bleeding finger over the water and watched it drip a smattering of dark red globules into the trough. When it looked like he’d consigned a few good milliliters to the stream, Mose tucked his finger into the armpit of his robe. The nanites swarming throughout Mose’s body had been programmed to seed his tissues with artificial markers. In a few minutes, carried by the current, those markers would reach the capsule craft waiting in standby mode somewhere in Anmerresh’s great canal. The machine would follow the faint concentration of Mose’s blood in the water right to him like a predator sniffing out its prey.
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