Etude to War (Earth Song Cycle Book 4)

by Mark Wandrey

  * * *

  “I don’t want you to go there.” Her daughter’s voice sounded like she was in Minu’s small office in Steven’s Pass instead of thousands of kilometers away in space.

  “Lilith, it’s the logical thing to do.”

  “They might have spotted me. If they did, they would expect you to show up.”

  “The Tog saved our people. Of all the myriad crazy species in the galaxy, they are the only one that I know is on our side.”

  “Then why have they hidden the starships from you?”

  “They’ve probably hidden a lot from us. The damn Concordia is nothing but secrets.”

  “More like lies.”

  “So, work on shedding some light on those lies.”

  “I am. Pip is coming up tomorrow to help me.”

  “I thought he was on leave with his son?” Minu asked.

  “He said he is tired of the child and wants to come see me.”

  Minu sighed and decided on a side trip. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not worrying.”

  Minu smiled. The glimmers of humanity were becoming more common as the years went by. “Tell you what, if you don’t hear from my little FTL crystal walkie-talkie within twenty-three hours, you zip to Herdhome and pull my bacon out of the fire.” She tapped the crystal implanted behind her ear for emphasis.

  “Very well. Twenty-three hours.”

  Minu made a mental note not to forget, no matter what. She had no idea what her daughter would do if she turned up missing. Would the young girl lay siege to Herdhome? And if she did, would the number who died bother her?

  * * *

  An hour later, she was standing outside a nondescript apartment on the east side of Tranquility. She’d only been there a couple of times in the last six years, for a lot of reasons. She took a deep breath and rang the announcement bell. A second later, Pip opened the door. He looked annoyed.

  “You are the last person I expected just now.” A young voice screamed defiance inside.

  “I can see why. May I come in?”

  “I warn you, it’s not pretty.” Minu shrugged and slid by him.

  The flat was no more than seventy-five square meters, and modest by almost any definition of the word. It was appointed as he’d rented it. Two small couches, an old, tattered easy chair, a four-seat dinette by the window on the far side of the room, and a brace of cheesy pictures completed the ensemble. A four-year-old boy was sitting on one of the dinette’s chairs, various bits and pieces of food strewn about the area. He was drinking milk and spitting it on the table.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Minu lied. She walked over to the little boy and knelt. “Don’t you like the food?” The boy took a mouthful of milk. “Now don’t—”

  SPLURT! Right in her face.

  “You’ve seen worse, huh?”

  “Maybe it’s been a while.” She plucked a towel from the table and wiped her face.

  Pip shook his head and shrugged. “Leonard, please finish your lunch.”

  “I hate macaroni.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you liked it. I told you to eat it.”

  “NO!”

  Minu got up and went into the little kitchen, wiping the last of the milk from her face. Once there she went through the fridge and cabinets before returning to the table. Pip watched as she sat opposite the little boy. Leonard looked a lot like his father, thin with a narrow face, black hair, and green eyes. Leo, as he liked to be called, watched her intently as she sat down, pulling the remnants of his milk closer for a possible follow-up shot. “I bet you like strawberries, don’t you?”

  “Poppa won’t let me have any more.”

  “Well, I’m not poppa,” she told him with a conspiratorial smile. The boy beamed and smiled back. Pip gave her a less than pleased look.

  “I told him he’d had too much fruit already today.”

  “Sometimes with a child, you have to take the wins when you can.” She filled a bowl with fruit, cheese slices, and crackers then slid it across the table. Leo glanced at it suspiciously, instantly noticing the pair of strawberry slices sitting on top. Without further hesitation he abandoned the milk, scooped up the bowl, and went to town.

  “But,” Pip said.

  Minu stood up, put a finger to her lips to silence him, then led him toward the living room area. Once out of earshot, she continued. “That bowl only has one strawberry sliced up.” He looked back over his shoulder to see his son digging through the bowl. Occasionally, he would put aside a chip or a piece of cheese, but often they magically ended up in his mouth, along with the odd slice of strawberry.

  Pip nodded his head in appreciation. “You always were good at unconventional tactics.”

  “Mother’s instinct.”

  “I guess I can buy that. You didn’t come here to help me feed my troublesome child.” Pip led her to the little notch in the wall. It was intended as a place to put entertainment electronics, but Pip used it as his office. The desk was wedged in and piled high with tablets and data chips.

  “Lilith spotted another starship yesterday.”

  Now that she had his complete attention, she fully described the events.

  “I was wondering why she wanted me to come up and help her.”

  “And you were more than willing to ditch your kid.”

  He looked back at Leo who was finishing his snack and looked a great deal more satisfied. The fact that Minu had handled the situation so easily frustrated Pip, and it showed on his face. “I’m not cut out to be a parent.”

  “Then why did you become one?”

  “Cynthia wanted it so badly.”

  “Want doesn’t equate to need.”

  Pip shrugged. “Who knew I’d be a worse parent than I was a husband.”

  “Cynthia said you were a little over the top…sexually.”

  Pip turned away and looked at his pile of computers. “I can’t help myself.”

  “You could try.”

  “I do. She was my wife. She was supposed to do whatever I wanted, right?”

  “How delightfully Rusk of you.”

  His head spun around, a flash of anger on his face. Throwing his heritage back at him was a low blow, but Minu let it stand. “You Plateau girls are more liberated than we’re used to, I guess.”

  “You were a perfect gentleman at one time, Pip.”

  “That was a long time and one plastic dart in the past, I guess.”

  Minu looked at him for a long moment, and he held her gaze without blinking. Eventually, she nodded. “We’ve all changed. It’s just sad that in this case a child and a woman’s broken heart are involved.”

  “Collateral damage. I’ve learned my lesson. There are plenty of girls who’ll do what I want for credits, and I won’t have to worry about another wife or child again.”

  “Damn it, Pip.” Again, he shrugged. “Okay, whatever. So, when you go up to work with Lilith you’ll know what’s going on.”

  A nod.

  “Any luck with the Weavers?”

  “Not to speak of. Of course, I could have a breakthrough tomorrow or a century from now,” he said.

  “Let’s hope it’s the former. One more thing, Pip.”

  “Sure.”

  “Touch my daughter, and I’ll kill you.”

  Pip searched her face for a smile and found none. “I’d never do that.”

  “As long as we understand each other?” He nodded his head. “Good.”

  Minu spent an hour talking with Pip about her trip to Herdhome. When Leo finished the bowl of food, he climbed down from the chair and trundled over to a footlocker near the window. He removed some toys, cars and trucks mostly, and began to quietly play. He was methodical in his play, carefully controlling every movement of his toys and their interactions. Minu saw another similarity between her friend and his child. “Does he ever say anything about the plate in your head?”

  “He likes to knock on it like a door when I put him to bed.”
/>   “That’s cute,” she said.

  “Yeah, except it makes me a little dizzy.”

  “Why don’t you cover it up with prosthetic flesh?”

  “It’s part of who I am.” Minu nodded. Her right hand still only had four fingers. It was part of who she was.

  “Who knows how many species have starships? It really changes the dynamics of politics in the Concordia.”

  “Only from our perspective,” Pip reminded her. “Jacob came to me last year to talk about a mission to Enigma to get more of those ships.”

  “That would be foolhardy at best, insane at worst.”

  “Exactly what I told him. Even though I wasn’t conscious for the first part of the mission, I knew the system carried a heavy T’Chillen presence. The only reason things have been so quiet is because the snakes blamed the Rasa for pilfering one of their toys.”

  “A fact I am not proud of.”

  “The Rasa don’t blame us. I’ve talked to Var’at enough to know. They, the Rasa, have always played the Concordian game hot and hard. He said they’d almost been obliterated a dozen times in their history. It’s the price you pay for wanting power in the Concordia. There are only so many seats at the top.”

  “And lots of room at the bottom.”

  A short time later he showed her to the door. “Be careful, Minu. The Tog might seem to be our benevolent protectors, but they’re still a higher-order species of the Concordia. Think about what the Rasa went through trying to get there.”

  “It looks like the Tog have been there all along.” Minu already knew the Tog were not guilt-free. Remembering that her mother and father were forced to marry was never far from her thoughts.

  As Pip opened the door, they found Cynthia standing there, her hand frozen in midair, reaching for the bell.

  “Hi,” Minu said.

  “Hello, been a while.” Minu nodded and looked uncomfortable. “I was coming to get Leo. Pip said he had to work on a project.”

  “Something is going on,” Minu told her, “but I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry.”

  Cynthia had grown up in the five years they were gone on their rescue mission, and she’d continued to mature in the six years since their return. She was now a twenty-eight-year-old woman, and she’d left her young, soft body behind.

  She still had traces of the acne that had haunted her, and she still had short mousy hair, but she was a good-looking woman with a well-shaped full figure. She wore the fashionable, loose-cut jumpsuit civilian designers had modeled after the Chosen uniform and accessorized it with a colorful sash around her waist and a ribbon in her hair.

  She noted that Minu wore her jet-black uniform and nodded. “I understand. I was married to a Chosen, if only for a short time.” She didn’t try to hide the bitterness in her voice, but it didn’t drip like it used to. Minu brought back Pip as she’d asked, but he wasn’t the same shy, retiring kid she’d expected. Minu was at the wedding when things seemed to be going so well. And she saw him after the divorce only a year later.

  “I’d better go. Take care.”

  “Good bye, Minu.”

  As she went down the short flight of stairs toward her parked car, Minu could hear Leo yelling. “Momma! The pretty lady gave me strawberries!”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 5

  Julast 17th, 533 AE

  Human Liaison Office, Capital City, Herdhome, Tog Leasehold

  It had been three weeks since she’d last set foot in the little office on Herdhome, and nothing had moved from where she’d left it. Outside the window, in the distance, was one of the seemingly endless plains of swaying, grassy marshes only dimly visible under the bluish anemic sunlight.

  Herdhome had almost no axial tilt, so the growing season never ended. Armed with the information from Lilith, she understood a little better that this wasn’t just a perfectly suited leasehold for the Tog, it was where they’d evolved. It was their home world.

  The planet was once bathed in perpetual gloom from cloud cover and volcanic action. When they’d learned science and climbed from the swamps, the Tog had turned their world into a bountiful paradise. Then they’d joined the Concordia on an equal footing with the other species, not as refugees like the humans they rescued.

  Back in her office, Minu sat in her comfortable seat and put together a list of questions. Planning her strategy was one of the hardest parts of preparing for a meeting. It was something she’d been working on almost every waking moment since she’d decided to come. The plan Jacob had provided was carefully stored in a garbage can back on Bellatrix. Her plan was more intricate and more dangerous. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to think about it anymore.

  “Welcome back, Chosen Alma.”

  Minu looked up to see a Tog standing in the doorway. She’d seen thousands since coming through the Portal Spire an hour ago, but this one was instantly recognizable by its color patterns and the way hse cocked hser head in an almost human expression.

  “Thank you, P’ing, but it is Groves now.” The head tilt became more pronounced. “I have not seen you in my duties here in years. I have since married.”

  “Oh, this is good news. Our Chosen fail to reproduce far too often. It is good that they reproduce.”

  Minu felt her face turning red and coughed. Oh, she’d reproduced alright. “I’m glad you came by, I was hoping to talk to you.”

  “Of course, that is why you are here days ahead of your schedule.” Hse gestured with a single finger at the two stars on her sleeve. “Your new rank ended your assignment here, we were informed by our First, yet you have continued to come back for years and have not requested a replacement.”

  Minu looked into the almond-shaped, black-on-black eyes and tried to figure out what was going on in hser powerful brain. Some words from her father’s journal came back to her. “Never for a minute assume you know what a Tog is thinking!”

  “I am indeed here for a specific reason, but first I’d like to ask you a question.”

  “You have been a powerful servant to the Tog, please ask.”

  Interesting qualifier, she thought. “How old are you?”

  P’ing was silent for a moment, and Minu wondered if she’d violated some cultural taboo. Almost nothing was known of Tog culture, or if they really had one at all. Then hse answered. “I am six hundred, ninety-two years in reference to your world.”

  Minu was stunned. But, the ancient Tog wasn’t done.

  “In this body.”

  “This body? I’m sorry Concordia master, I don’t understand.”

  “There is a basic fact of our species that you have never been told of. There are only two hundred, fifty-five unique, individual Tog. We reproduce through a process known as budding. Two individuals exchange genetic material, which includes chemically coded memory engrams, then one gives birth to the new, young Tog. A very long time ago, as we became fully sapient, and perhaps as part of that process, those parings were more carefully limited to increase and pool memories and abilities. By the time we joined the Concordia, there were only some four hundred individuals left. That number slowly decreased to where it is now.

  “The vast number of Tog you see are versions of these individuals, each with small, unique qualities that will eventually be folded back into the line through selective reproduction. Some lines have many thousands of individuals, some only a few. Often a line is specialized in an area of work or social function such as science, agriculture, or diplomacy.”

  Suddenly, her father’s accounts of P’ing seemingly being in two places at once made sense to Minu. It was not only possible, but likely, that such a thing would happen, if there were multiple copies of that individual running around. “What is your specialty, P’ing? And how many of you are there?”

  “Our specialty has long been diplomacy in dealing with client species such as yours. Also, we are historians and the keepers of the collective records of our species going back to the beginning. There are seven of us right now.”

&
nbsp; Hse’d said some lines were many thousands. Yet P’ing’s was only seven. Lilith said the ancient records which referred to the Tog called them P’ing. “You were there, at the founding of the Concordia, with The Lost.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember, I mean yourself, as an individual? Can you see in your mind those first species who created this galactic empire?”

  “Yes.”

  Minu burned to ask more questions, to push the boundaries of human knowledge back much further, but P’ing had other plans. “Now you have asked more than one other question. Tell me why you have returned.” Minu nodded and took a tablet from its sheath on her belt. P’ing’s head moved down and instantly locked on the machine even before she turned it on. “Where did you get that?”

  “This? It is just a tablet.”

  “No, it is not, and you are very aware of that!”

  Minu was taken aback by the rare display of emotion from the normally stoic Tog. It wasn’t until she looked down at the machine that she realized it was different from the many thousands of others on Bellatrix. This one was from the Kaatan.

  “I forgot,” she said silently and cursed herself for not thinking about it. The machine was noticeably slimmer than a normal tablet and made entirely of the same crystalline material as the bots on the Kaatan. She’d carried one since returning from the rescue mission and often got compliments on it back home. Usually some admirer asked where they could obtain one or where it had come from.

  “We found a number of these machines during a mission on the frontier.” The truth. P’ing came even closer, lowering hser head on its flexible torso, hser front set of legs bending slightly to allow the maneuver.

  “This is a special tablet. We would like one and to know where they were located.”

  Minu gritted her teeth. She was losing control of the situation. “I will pass along the request.”

  “With thanks.” P’ing straightened up, and Minu turned on the tablet. She’d set up the presentation in advance. It started with images of their operation on Romulus, the massive floating settlements and the machines harvesting the algae. “So, this is what you have been doing to generate extra credits? This is admirable!”