Confluence

by S. K. Dunstall

  “Redmond.” Sattur Dow started.

  His reaction triggered a response in Vega—and maybe in Michelle, too—for line one jangled. Strong enough and loud enough for Helmo, eating a late meal in the mess, to pull up a screen of the bridge and watch what was happening there while he ate. He was looking in the wrong place. He should have been looking in Vega’s office.

  “Apparently her parents planned for her to be a diplomat. Instead, she joined the fleet.”

  * * *

  THE first thing Vega did after she clicked off was call Ean. “Lambert, were you listening?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Names were mentioned. I’ll assume that’s a yes. I want to know everyone that man calls, and I don’t want him to know we’re checking him.”

  How did you explain that to the lines? “I’m not sure I—”

  Vega might have been reading his mind. “You won’t be the only one looking. I want the stuff others are unlikely to catch.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” Ean clicked off. So he was a spy now. And Vega was getting very used to the tools at her disposal. Which weren’t even her tools, they were Michelle’s.

  Still, Vega had given him something.

  Michelle and her people lied by telling the truth, most of the time, and Vega had told Sattur Dow that Radko was somewhere her language skills were required. Therefore, she was on one of the six Redmond worlds.

  How could he use that to find out more?

  * * *

  TODAY, Jordan Rossi accompanied Ean to training. Fergus was there, too, along with Hernandez.

  “This ship smells like it’s been through a sewer,” Rossi said.

  Captain Gruen bristled. “Are you insulting my ship, Linesman?”

  “The people on it are polluting your lines.”

  “Exactly. I have tried telling Linesman Lambert that. He doesn’t listen.”

  “You’re not a line, sweetheart. He doesn’t hear you.”

  “She is a captain,” Ean said. He heard her all right, and Rossi knew that, so it was just another pointless point-scoring exercise.

  “They’ll come around,” Fergus said.

  Maybe. The antagonism crackling through the lines wasn’t helping, for the lines considered Ean as one of their own. His biggest worry right now was that the trainees would make enemies of the fleet lines before they did come around.

  Even now, the lines were promising, “We’ll protect you.”

  “Thank you.” For you couldn’t turn their protection away.

  At least Rossi’s brooding presence kept most of the trainees awed and cowed today.

  Everyone except Arnold Peters.

  “Why is Lambert training us, when Linesman Rossi is here?” Peters demanded.

  Rossi, who was close to the Xanto quartet at the time, listening to Nadia Kentish, narrowed his eyes. “Are you talking to me, or about me?”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “You think, I, Jordan Rossi, should waste my time on a level-six linesman like you.”

  A chorus of something defensive washed through the lines. No linesman liked the implication he or she was inferior.

  “If you think you’re so good,” Nadia Kentish said, “why are you here?”

  Rossi turned his narrowed gaze on her. “I am here because some bastard sold my line contract, and my new contract owner demands I come.”

  Ean seized the silence that followed. “You are all here because you’ve been ordered to come. It’s part of your job.” He watched them think about that, heard the song of the lines change. “If you’d rather be elsewhere, let me know, and I will arrange to have you returned to your fleet.”

  “That is a joke,” Peters said.

  “What, that I can’t have you returned to your fleet?”

  “You know, and we know, that you can’t back out of a top secret project like this unless you’re kicked out.”

  “So put up with it, then, or you will be kicked out.” Maybe even for their own safety, for the lines were starting to pick up on Ean’s exasperation. “Now. We have training.”

  It wasn’t the best training session. The only thing of interest that came out of it was that Jordan Rossi spent a lot of time listening to Nadia Kentish.

  “She’s not Jordan’s type,” Fergus said, later. “He likes his women curvy.”

  Nadia Kentish had no curves at all.

  Ean laughed and felt in control for the first time since the start of the session. “Fergus, there’s only one thing a linesman really cares about.” Especially at line training. “It’s not her body he’s interested in. I will bet you she’s a high-level line.”

  * * *

  SALE had been out on the Confluence all day. “How was training?” she asked at dinner.

  “Okay.”

  “Only okay?” Sale made a face at what was on her plate. “Who is cooking, these days?”

  “Ru Li and Hana,” Bhaksir said. “I think they do it badly deliberately, hoping we’ll get someone in.”

  “We can suffer bad food for a while,” Sale said. “It’s just until we get rid of the tourists. Only okay, Ean?”

  Maybe she’d already heard how bad it had been.

  “They’re still antagonistic. A couple of them, especially.”

  “Your old cartel mate being one of them?”

  Peters wouldn’t like being called a cartel mate. Why single him out, particularly?

  “If he gets to be a real problem, let me know. You can get him kicked off the project.”

  What he’d really like is for Peters to accept the new way of communicating with the lines and to come on board. Ean would just have to work out some strategies for doing it.

  And as for strategies. “If you wanted to find out who on your ship called anyone in Redmond, Sale, how would you do it?”

  “Redmond.” Sale pushed her bowl away and stretched her legs out. Radko used to do that, too. Ean missed her suddenly, so much it hurt. “Am I doing it, or you?” Sale asked.

  “Both of us.”

  “Me, I’d go to Vega. She’ll be looking for anything like that. She’s got access to all the messages that go out and come in, and she’ll be checking their origin and what they say.”

  “And me?” It would be interesting to have Sale’s view, given she’d worked so closely with lines over the last six months.

  “I’d ask the lines, of course.”

  “How do you recognize something from Redmond? I mean, how do you know it’s not from Lancia, say? Or Aratoga?”

  “Identifying Redmond. Are they talking or not?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, there’s the language. Redmond uptrill at the end of their sentences.” She tried to put an uptrill at the end of her own, failed miserably. “You get the gist.”

  He nodded.

  “Otherwise, you can’t pick them. Not like Lancastrians, who are racially distinct.” Then Sale looked Ean over. “Mostly, anyway.”

  Ean nodded again, not really hearing her. Suppose he asked the ship to listen for words. Or sounds. Would it work?

  Back in his room, he settled down with a primer on the language of Redmond and memorized a hundred basic words. He turned it into a song, to make it easier to remember. When he had it down well enough, he turned to the lines. All ships, on both eleven fleets.

  “Tell me when you hear sounds like these.” He concentrated on getting them right, for with the lines, the sound had to be exact. “Greetings, yes, no, today . . .”

  * * *

  EAN was in the fresher, seriously considering whether he could convince one of the ships to jump to Redmond and back to see if he could identify it as a place, when the Lancastrian Princess said in his mind, “Words,” and suddenly he was looking at a place on ship he’d never been but recognized as part of t
he VIP area that was set aside for visitors. Of whom Vega had said, fervently, she hoped there were no more.

  Jakob’s room, and Jakob was there, speaking into a comms.

  Ean stopped the fresher midcycle.

  Every sentence had an uptrill at the end of it.

  Afterward, he watched Jakob slip the comms into a side pocket of his bag, pick up the bag, and walk down to the shuttle bay. Vega waited there, two guards beside her, along with the woman they had identified as a single-level linesman.

  Jakob indicated to the linesman that she enter the shuttle.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” Vega told Jakob. “I hope she improves soon.”

  “Thank you, Commodore.” Jakob disappeared into the shuttle as well.

  Neither of them mentioned the linesman. Moments later, the shuttle was gone. Vega watched it go.

  Ean called Vega. “Where did Jakob go?”

  “He’s going home. His mother is ill.”

  That was as likely as Sattur Dow’s being a suitable partner for Radko.

  “And the linesman?”

  “He offered to take her. Said he hadn’t known she had failed line certification.”

  “And you believed that?”

  “I believe they didn’t expect us to pick up on it so easily. She’s a virtual prisoner here. What else could he do but send her home?”

  Where she would tell everyone what she’d seen. Single-level linesmen wouldn’t be a secret much longer. If they were now, for why had the Worlds of the Lesser Gods brought a single-level linesman if they didn’t think there was good reason to?

  “Are you listening to Jakob’s cabin?”

  “Naturally.”

  “You should listen to the last fifteen minutes then.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Ean was in the fresher again when Vega called back. He sighed and stopped the fresher. At least this time, it was nearly at the end of the cycle.

  “You might tell me what happened in Jakob’s cabin,” Vega said. “For I can’t see a problem.”

  She couldn’t? Maybe he was wrong about the language. He didn’t know it really. But he had recognized the sound of some words.

  “Not even what he said?”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  “But what about—?” Vega must have heard him talking into his comms. “I want to see the security tape.”

  He thought for a moment she was going to refuse. Instead, she said, “This had better be a secure line.”

  He sang it as secure as he could, then watched, disbelievingly, as Jakob settled onto his bunk with a tired sigh, closed his eyes, then lay there for fifteen minutes before getting up—with another tired sigh—and leaving the room.

  “That wasn’t what I saw.”

  “So I gathered. Security on this ship is badly compromised.” He could feel the rage coming through on line one. It wasn’t directed at him. Vega liked to be in control.

  The ship—and thus Helmo, too—didn’t like it either. And the emotion was building.

  “How do I tell the ship what to watch for?”

  “First we work out how he did it. Then we can work out how to prevent it. Now, I’d like to hear what Jakob said.”

  Maybe Jakob’s people were listening in. But, “No,” from line eight, “Secure.” Ean tried to stop worrying and concentrated on remembering what he could. “He was talking into a comms. Words like . . . ” He gave what he could remember, which wasn’t much. “Then he put his comms in his bag and went down to the shuttle bay. Can you check if his mother really is sick and that he is going home to see her?”

  “No. The Worlds of the Lesser Gods don’t like strangers, and to date, they’ve never been considered a threat.”

  “So you don’t think it’s important?”

  “I’m saying Lancia doesn’t have anyone on the ground there, and even with this alleged marriage coming up, they’re still blocking us sending anyone in. Subtly, of course, but we know we’re being put off.”

  So they couldn’t check. Ean clicked off and spent the rest of the night wondering how he could protect the ships from people like Jakob.

  SEVENTEEN

  EAN LAMBERT

  “I THINK YOU should run the training today,” Ean told Hernandez and Fergus. He thought about including Rossi, who was there as well, but that was something to keep in reserve. Right now, having Rossi listening from the sidelines was just as good.

  “Can’t take the pressure?” Rossi asked.

  “No.”

  Sometimes, with a short answer like that, Rossi would go for the jugular. Today, he just sniffed. “Radko’s a long time coming back, isn’t she.”

  And sometimes he simply attacked from a different angle. Then, so could Ean.

  “I’m glad you’re missing her, too, Rossi.”

  Rossi’s eyes narrowed.

  “You must be. You keep talking about her.”

  “It’s nice to see you get in a hit occasionally,” Bhaksir said, approvingly, as Rossi turned away.

  Rossi probably did miss Radko. She was strong enough to stand up to him, and Rossi had to respect that. Maybe he should work with Rossi to get rid of Sattur Dow.

  As if.

  Although if Rossi could be persuaded, it was to his advantage.

  “If you’re making plans”—from Rossi—“you shouldn’t do it in a room full of raw linesmen in the middle of line training.”

  Ean turned his attention back to the lesson, where Peters was complaining that now they had a seven running the training.

  Hernandez, who was a ten, but still wore the seven bars she’d been certified with, bared her teeth. “If you think you can do better, why not come up and do it?”

  Ean made his way to the front.

  “And not just a seven,” Peters said. “Aided by a linesman’s assistant.”

  One of his companions nudged him. Ean heard through the lines the quiet warning Peters’s friend gave him. “Fergus Burns is Jordan Rossi’s assistant.”

  Hernandez seized on the silence that followed. “Line one,” and started greeting the lines.

  Ean moved to stand with one foot raised back against the wall. He couldn’t do it for long. Radko did it for hours. What was Radko doing now? Who was she working with and did she like them as a team?

  Did she ever think about him?

  Peters started arguing again.

  This was something Ean had to control. Even though Sale had hinted, the previous night, that they would take care of it for him if he needed them to.

  “Linesman Peters.” He used Gospetto’s training to increase the sound, and pushed it out through the lines as well. “If you have issues, bring it up with me and your commanding officer outside of the scheduled training sessions. There’s a war on, and the sooner you learn these new techniques, the sooner you will become useful to the New Alliance. Don’t hold everyone else back because you don’t like what you’re doing.”

  The lines on all ships on both fleets joined in, for Ean hadn’t stopped to target the Gruen lines only. It was so strong that all the trainees stepped back. And, of course, all the captains checked to see what was happening.

  “I’m holding us back?” Peters said. “What about what we were promised? We were promised alien ships, but we’re stuck here on a piece of Gate Union junk.”

  The captain of that piece of “junk” was listening in right now. Peters had just made himself an enemy.

  “You’re not going anywhere until you learn correct line technique.”

  “Correct line technique. That’s a joke.”

  Nadia Kentish said, “So we come all this way off our own ships—at great inconvenience to us—and we won’t even get to see the alien ships.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Of course they would introduce them to the sh
ips, and most of them would end up as crew. “But no one, especially not me, will take unwilling linesmen onto a ship that uses lines like the alien ships do.” For their own benefit, rather than the ships’. “I’m not taking you anywhere until you show some appreciation of the lines.”

  “You’re not taking us.” That was Peters again. “Who made you the arbiter of what we can do and can’t do?”

  “The New Alliance council,” Rossi said, before Ean could say anything. “They made Lambert senior linesman. All line matters go through him, particularly anything to do with the Department of Alien Affairs.” He glanced at his comms. “And most of us have better things to do than sit around making power grabs.”

  It quietened them, although Ean wasn’t sure it helped. Wasn’t sure it was meant to. It definitely gave them more to complain about though at least they did it quietly. Except, of course, Ean heard muttered comments through the lines.

  “The Department of Alien Affairs is controlled by Lancia.”

  “Jordan Rossi should be the senior linesman.”

  “They’re using a junior to train us.”

  He made a point of moving over and standing close to each mutterer, to listen to their singing.

  Hernandez continued with the greetings.

  In the middle of the trainees’ chorused reply, one of the Confluence fleet ships joined in. A song of welcome.

  They usually restricted training to the Eleven fleet.

  First, the Confluence itself tried to choose its own crew, now this ship was doing its own thing. Ean checked which one it was. That one, the little scout right on the edge of the fleet. Scout Ship Three.

  Ean changed his song to target that specific ship. The lines answered, happy at the attention. Happy to be getting visitors.

  “Visitors?” Ean heard air being cycled out of the shuttle bay on the scout, then being cycled back in.

  A shuttle had landed.

  “Who?”

  “Lines.” And there were lines. Ean could hear them as they made their way onto the ship. The single-level linesman from the Factor’s trip to the Eleven. Another single. Plus a third with the characteristic sound of a trained, multilevel linesman.