by Rick Partlow
"The humans are reacting," the Tahni who called himself Kah-Rint argued decisively, "but they are still reeling from the loss of their headquarters. We need to keep them reacting and not acting."
"I still wonder how those responsible managed to destroy the station," Tyya said, not without suspicion, as he moved to a closed crate full of metal shavings and sat down on it. The basement smelled of metal and wood and dust. "I can see how someone might be able to hijack the supply capsule...but to smuggle a weapon of that size on board would require resources that are difficult to rationalize."
"Those I represent command impressive resources," Kah-Rint assured him.
"Then why do they not attack the humans themselves?" the priest wanted to know.
"Because, Esteemed R'jin-ya-Tarl-Kan, though they too count the Commonwealth government as an enemy, they have their own aims and their own agenda." Kah-Rint tossed his head in negation. "They are the enemy of our enemy, yet I would not call them our friend."
"Then why should we trust them?" the female asked.
"I do not say that we trust them, Y'aa-an-Roh," Kah-Rint corrected her, his face pleasant yet somehow frighteningly cunning as well. "I say that we use them. I do not care what profit they seek by overthrowing their masters, I care only what confusion they can sow for our good."
"This counsel seems wise to me," Priest Tarl-Kan said, signifying agreement. "What would you have me tell those who still follow the Path in our city?"
"We must tell our youth to rise up and strike at the Commonwealth oppressors," Kah-Rint declared forcefully. "We need to distract their armored soldiers and then hit them at their bases while they are occupied."
"Many of our young men and women will die in such attacks," Y'aa-an-Roh said, hands pressed together in a gesture of deep concern. "And what will be the result? Merely more of the human troops sent to our home, more destruction visited upon our cities."
"There will be death," Kah-Rint acknowledged. "But not in vain. There is more that I can't share with you yet. If you are arrested, what you don't know will not hurt the cause. But I swear to you by the blood of my ancestors that this will not end with the Tahni people again in bondage."
"Who will be our commander?" the priest asked. "You?"
"I am needed elsewhere," Kah-Rint said. He looked to Tyya. "You will lead us, D'sinn-Tyya-Khin-Lun."
"I have never seen war," Tyya protested, coming to his feet. "I am not a leader."
"Could the son of General T'Sonn-Yon-Kara-Tin not be a warrior?" Kah-Rint asked quietly but shrewdly. "Could he help but be a leader?"
"My father," Tyya spoke hesitantly, embarrassed, "is not the man he was during the war."
"Which is why we have spoken to you, not him," the female said and he saw a glint in her eyes that actually made him take a step toward her before he halted himself through an effort of will.
"Is the Matriarch with us?" Tyya asked her, looking away to make his brain begin working again.
"Pending my judgment of this meeting," Y'aa told him. "And I mean to recommend she support you."
Tyya closed his eyes and drew in a breath.
"Very well, then," he said, trying to sound stronger than he felt. "Once again we go to war with the humans."
"This time to the death," Kah-Rint added.
Tyya saw the pleased expression in the man's eyes and for some reason, it sent a chill through him.
Whose death?
Interlude:
Inside the Northwest Passage Corridor
N'lyn-Trint-yar regarded the projection of the isolated star system that had been his home for months now, watching the two habitable moons and one terrestrial planet traverse the silent geometry of their orbits. He idly wondered if he was actually seeing it with his eyes or whether the sentient computer system that ran things here was feeding it directly into his brain.
If you're curious, the AI answered over his neurolink, the feed is...
That's all right, Trint interrupted. I don't really need to know.
What he did know was that he was still inside the same sphere-shaped structure he'd entered months ago. There was really no need to leave when he could see everything in the star system with a thought.
He focused on one of the terraformed moons of the system's largest gas giant and the image zoomed at dizzying speed from an orbital view that had showed the colorful bands in the planet's atmosphere to a close-up of the moon. Thick, white clouds parted beneath the automated microdrones that surveilled the moon constantly; and the blues, greens and browns of the world below came into focus. Narrowing his gaze sank him deeper into the atmosphere until he was standing on a plain outside a forest, near a lake. Wooden huts---more like cabins, really---sprang up around him and he could see humans moving between them in the light of the rising primary. Even in daylight, the gas giant hung in the sky, a faded grey and yellow presence like a god watching them from the heavens.
And maybe that's how they think of it, he reflected. They certainly looked primitive enough to hold such beliefs. Their clothes were rough and hand-sewn from wool and hide and fur, their weapons mostly wood and bone with just the bit of metal that Donald Yu had managed to teach them to work in his years among them. Concentrating on the Earth-man, he could see him, bearded and rugged as any of the others after decades stranded on a world so far from his home, yet peopled by humans just like him.
They had been settled there by the Resscharr, the race that humans had come to know as the Predecessors. Trint hadn't followed the whole scientific explanation, but he gathered that the Predecessors had evolved on Earth long before humans and then left the planet after some sort of cataclysm, but remained involved in tweaking the development of the human race. To the Tahni, the Predecessors had done much more than tweak; they had raised them to sentience quickly. Perhaps too quickly, he realized now. He noted that, although the Predecessors had taken samples of humanity and Earth life from various ages to keep alive here in this corridor system to the Northwest Passage, they hadn't brought along any Tahni...
The villagers in the human settlement looked to be doing fairly well, and he noted that Yu and his wife were expecting another child. He shifted his focus outward and was quickly soaring through space from one viewpoint to another as he rode a wave of observation drones all the way to the other terraformed moon, the one inhabited by the debased descendants of the Predecessors. Left behind when the rest of the race had abandoned this section of the galaxy and closed off all the Transition Lines behind them tens of thousands of years ago, they had regressed to the point where they could no longer manufacture or even repair the technological devices of their ancestors.
Now, the ones who'd hoarded what weapons and devices that still functioned after all these millennia were the ones who ruled in a society that worshipped the technology almost as much as they revered the ones who'd made it. He peered down at the largest city on the moon, the night on that side of the world lit by the stars and the glowing disc of the gas giant, the streets also lit by crude electric lights with carbon fibers...powered by a reactor that had run unmaintained for almost twenty thousand years. Resscharr guardsmen patrolled the streets, walking with a reverse-kneed gait that seemed unnatural to him. The striations in their long faces deepened in the shadows, their swept-back, feather-like hair glinting in the glare of the streetlights. The two of them carried spears.
The sight of them made him uncomfortable, somehow. Perhaps it was the idea that the beings who had created his race had allowed themselves to sink this low.
They were not the most impressive individuals to begin with, the AI told him, and he thought he could sense the haughty note of superiority in its tone. They were the ones who couldn't bear to leave the place we'd called home for so long. It took only a few generations for them to fall into savagery.
I'd appreciate if you wouldn't access my thoughts when I'm not actually addressing you, Trint scolded the sentient computer system, not for the first time.
Apologies, it respo
nded. It had never given him its name and it seemed pointless to ask for one: there was no one else around. I have begun to sense, after this time spent becoming familiar with your thought patterns, that you are discontent with your living arrangements. Would you prefer to live with the humans, or perhaps the Resscharr? A pause. Or is it simply that you miss your friends?
I do miss them, Trint admitted. But even more, and more oddly, I miss home. Home on Tahn-Skyyiah, though I've not been there for many, many years. To return would have meant death in those days; yet even knowing I could return, if only to die, was somehow a comfort. Now there is no way I will ever see my homeworld again.
It was hard to say how he knew the computer was hesitating. How do you read a pause from a disembodied voice in your head? Yet somehow he did know.
That, the machine finally broke its silence, almost reluctantly, is not strictly true.
Chapter Four
The last time Caleb Mitchell had set foot on Tahn-Skyyiah, he'd landed in a stealth drop pod just ahead of the main invasion force in an effort to take out the control centers for orbital defenses. Stepping off the boarding ramp of Kara McIntire's cutter, he felt decidedly more exposed and insecure than he had fifteen years ago. The spaceport was a few kilometers outside the capital city of Tahn-Khandranda, surrounded by remote sensors and energy fences, and patrolled by stun drones and Fleet Security troops armed with deadlier weapons.
Maintenance techs, supply specialists and transportation crews seemed to be scrambling everywhere, all with a look of near-panic accentuated by the ever-present salt stains from dried sweat. It was mid-afternoon and Tahn-Khandranda was in the midst of its summer; the temperatures hovered around forty degrees Celsius, even with the breeze from the nearby inland sea. The heat only exacerbated the anger and fear in the faces of the men and women around him. Some had friends who'd been aboard the garrison station, but all of them felt the loss.
Had they landed at the port a few weeks ago, there would have been Tahni workers here and there, employed to perform non-military jobs, to service civilian spacecraft. Not today. Not a Tahni face was to be found anywhere inside the security perimeter.
"The place hasn't changed much," Deke said, stepping down the ramp behind him. Cal glanced around and saw Deke staring at the spires of the city in the distance. The tallest buildings were the Justice Center and the Palace of the Governor, twin needles that rose above the rest and had been repurposed from the Imperial Center which had occupied the structures before the invasion.
"Looks different without the temples," Cal opined, shaking his head. There had been three of them: huge spheres that formed a triangle around the Imperial Center, but they were gone now as if they had never been.
"Well, we couldn't very well let them keep worshipping the Emperor we'd just deposed, could we?" Holly asked reasonably. She'd changed out of her Fleet uniform and into civilian clothes, though not without protest. She wore a sidearm now as well, which hadn't taken nearly as much convincing. "Even if they'd wanted to, which most of them didn't."
"They didn't really worship the Emperor," Kara corrected her as she brought up the rear after locking down the ship's systems. "Not the physical, mortal Emperor. It was more like the man---well, the Tahni---was the avatar, or vessel for an eternal, spiritual being." She shrugged. "It's complicated."
"Most things are," Deke muttered.
"We need to check in at the temporary operations base Fleet Intell has set up," Kara told them. She grimaced. "I'm not crazy about announcing our presence, but if we don't get clearance, we'll wind up getting arrested by our own troops."
"Then what?" Holly asked her as they walked through the chaos of the spaceport towards the grey buildfoam domes recently erected next to the spaceport's main facilities. "Tahn-Khandranda is a big city, and even with these civvies," she gestured to her own clothes, "I don't see us blending in."
"We've already been over the basics," Kara said, and Caleb could tell she was suppressing a sigh. "Deke and I will be concentrating on the laser launch facility and everyone who had access to it. You two will work the opposite angle, looking into known threats."
"Won't Fleet Intell already have checked them out?" Cal wondered, voicing a question he hadn't thought to bring up during Kara's abbreviated briefing on the flight from Highland.
Kara snorted. "None of those pansies would venture out into the city, not without a full Marine escort. They'll send out insect drones and run computer models and then haul a few people in and question them for a day before letting them go. As if someone capable of planning this," she waved upward demonstratively, "isn't capable of covering their tracks. Whole service has gone to hell these last couple years," she muttered the last sentence under her breath, but Caleb could hear it and he knew the others could as well.
Kara regarded Caleb evenly. "You were a cop for a long time, Captain Mitchell," she said. "Go be one for me."
* * *
"You were a cop for a long time, Captain Mitchell," Holly Morai muttered in mocking impression. "How the hell does Deke put up with that uptight bitch?"
Cal chuckled softly. "You get used to her," he said, eyes scanning back and forth as he watched the street for threats.
"I'd rather not," Holly shot back, her own eyes surveying the other side of the street. Tahn-Khandranda was laid out according to some Tahni logic, and apparently they didn't have any such thing as zoning or neighborhoods in the human sense. There were no commercial districts or residential districts or anything districts. Temples and factories were scattered among family homes, which usually doubled as something else: workshops, storefronts, schools, training centers and other things that Caleb couldn't imagine. It made finding your way around complicated, even with computer and satellite guidance, but Cal was devoting most of his attention to the Tahni adults watching him from their windows and doorways.
All of them were males. He knew from wartime briefings the why of it, the biology of it, but it still struck him as damned creepy. He watched them watching him, staring with resentment or curiosity or sometimes overt hatred in their ridged eyes. He thought he knew Tahni faces well enough now to tell. Their clothes were the most alien thing about them, he thought. Combinations of clothes and colors and patterns and coverings that just didn't seem to make sense to him added up to something that somehow covered torsos and legs, but in ways that twisted his vision. More than the ridged eyes, more than the recessed nose or the flattened ears or the too-long fingers with too many joints, the little things like clothes and the shapes of doors and windows were the most alien things to his eye.
"Why the hell didn't we take a vehicle?" Holly wanted to know. "I feel like the main course walking through the fucking restaurant."
"You never used to be this grumpy, Holly," Cal said, facing her for just a moment so she could see his grin to take the edge off the comment. "They had you sitting at a desk too long?"
She didn't reply for a moment, and he thought perhaps he'd offended her. "Back during the war," she finally said, her voice soft and distant, "I always thought that, once everything was over, I could just step back into the life I'd had before. I tried not to let everything that happened to us change me, because I was holding onto my mom and dad and my sister and our apartment back in Ottawa."
"Things changed," Cal guessed. "Been there, done that."
She chuckled. "Yes, I suppose I'm whining after what happened for you on Canaan. But it wasn't the enemy that had changed my home, it was my family. Mom and dad split up while I was gone, and it wasn't at all what you'd call amicable." Her tone went bleak. "My sister Callie took it hard and wound up retreating into black market ViR."
Cal winced. Callie had been the whole world to Holly back in the day. There had been pictures and videos of the little girl everywhere in Holly's room.
"I'm sorry, Holly," he said earnestly. "I didn't know."
"No reason you should have," she said. He could hear the shrug without looking at her. "It's not as if any of us kept in touch.
Anyway," she went on, the wistfulness hardening quickly into something more pragmatic, "I applied to stay in the Fleet. There wasn't much need for augmented assassins at the time, so I was stuck in Attack Command."
"And how has that gone for you?" Cal asked her, watching carefully the group of four young Tahni males that was approaching them from one of the house/shops across the street.
"It's a living," she allowed, and he could tell by the direction of her words that she was looking the same way he was. "Trouble?"
"We'll see," Cal replied, his voice calm.
He felt via his implant sensors that Holly was splitting off from him, going to the other side of the street to spread out the focus of any possible attack, and he nodded approval to himself. All those years away from the action hadn't made her forget her training, at least.
The four Tahni couldn't have been that far out of adolescence, Cal figured. From the data he'd audited during the war, that meant that they'd only recently been initiated into adult society and allowed to visit the female sectors for the first time for their ritualistic first mating. They were old enough to think themselves adults, but still young, dumb and full of piss and vinegar, as his grandfather used to say. Cal had always suspected grandpa was cleaning the saying up a bit.
"What do you want here, human?" the one in the lead asked him in Tahni. Cal noted they ignored Holly and he fought back irritation. They were used to trying to pretend females weren't there, because to focus on them would unleash a storm of hormones they could barely control.
Fuckers are lucky the Predecessors helped them out, Cal mused. With a biological limitation like that, they never would have achieved a technological civilization otherwise.