Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  Lixbed's workstation was in the corner of the room, an ergonomic reclining seat surrounded by a holographic haptic-feedback display. She ignored it, moving instead to a small, round table surrounded by padded chairs and falling into one on the side nearest her workstation. Deke chose a seat across from her while Cal seated himself with his back towards the wall and the two armed guards in sight. With the mirrored glasses he couldn't be sure, but he thought they were staring at him and the frowns on their much-alike faces were probably professional disapproval of their boss' decision to allow two armed men into the office.

  "As much as I'd like to think you stopped by just to visit your old friend," Lixbed said, patting Deke's arm across the table, "I know you too well to believe that." She chuckled, eyebrow raising. "Unless you just wanted to ask for a discount," she added playfully, nodding towards the door that led to the pleasure doll rental front.

  "I need your help, Lixbed," Deke admitted, laying a hand on top of hers. "It's not something I would usually involve other people in, but things are a bit desperate and I'm running short of options."

  "I'd heard a rumor," the woman said, catching Deke's eye with a steady gaze. "It was wild, and it came from the Sung Brothers and I only believe about half of what those psychos say anyway, but..." She trailed off, a corner of her mouth quirking. "They said you were stooging for the feds."

  "I'm not an informer, Lixbed," Deke told her. "I am a fed."

  The guards' carbines rose again, but Lixbed waved them down, not looking away from Deke's eyes.

  "I'm back in the military: Department of Security and Intelligence," he told her honestly. He grinned disarmingly. "I'm not in the fucking Patrol, Lixbed," he assured her. "Trust me when I tell you that no one in the DSI gives a shit about you, your business or anything the families do to each other in the Pirate Worlds either. We're only concerned about military threats."

  "And I suppose you're in the DSI too, Mr. Mitchell?" the woman asked Cal, glancing over at him for a moment.

  "Sort of," Cal said with a shrug. "I'm kind of temporarily back in for the duration of the emergency."

  "Can I assume this has something to do with what's been going on with the Tahni?" Lixbed asked, sitting back in her chair and crossing her legs. The sari fell away from a nicely-turned calf. Cal noticed that she wasn't wearing shoes. It seemed odd for a second until he thought that maybe it made sense if you lived in an asteroid hab.

  "It does," Cal answered. "We think someone is trying to re-start the war between the Commonwealth and the Tahni." He turned his palms up demonstratively. "We'd like to stop that from happening."

  "What does that have to do with me, or with this place?" Lixbed asked frankly, her voice and expression cooler and much less friendly than they had been. Cal had the sense that she could be a very formidable enemy if she chose to be.

  "There's a Tahni who worked for a minor player out of Canaan," Deke explained. "The guy was a street surgeon named Cutter; and this Tahni, Kah-Rint, ran acquisitions for him in the Worlds. We understand he did a lot of his business out here at Kanesh."

  "Kah-Rint is the one doing the leg work for whoever wants to start this war," Cal elaborated. "We think he's supplying weapons and coordinating the Tahni insurgents. We need to track him down in order to put a lid on this situation before it's gone past the point of no return."

  Lixbed Mastropolo regarded the both of them with hooded eyes, her expression coldly skeptical. After a moment that dragged on in uncomfortable silence, she finally spoke. "If it were anyone else but you, Deke," she said with a deadly earnest in her voice, "I'd have you killed and dump the bodies out the lock." The edge of her mouth quirked upward almost unwillingly. "Do you know why I don't?"

  Deke's answering smile was that of a shark, or a hunting wolf. "Because good help is hard to find," he guessed, eyeing her guards with a sort of hungry eagerness Cal hadn't seen in his eyes ever before. He chuckled softly. "And you don't know the half of it, darlin'. Believe it or not, I am not the most dangerous man in this room."

  That brought Lixbed's brows up and she looked at Cal once more, recalculating what she'd thought she'd seen in him. "Well, there's that," Lixbed admitted. She shrugged slightly. "But there's also the fact that I owe you my life, Deacon." The expression hardened again, the sentimental humor leaving it. "But after today, we are square. Do you understand?'

  "Completely."

  She took a deep breath and clasped her hands in front of her on the table. "Kah-Rint has a standing arrangement with the Sung Brothers. I put it together for him almost ten years ago now. He pays them an annual retainer to reserve space on any of their ships headed for Tahn-Skyyiah or any of the Tahni colonies."

  "Who would we talk to about this arrangement?" Deke asked her.

  "Ken Liu," she replied. "He's got an office behind the Event Horizon, one level up." She fixed him with a hard stare. "But you did not hear it from me."

  "Of course not," Deke allowed smoothly. He pushed himself up from the table and Cal followed suit, eyes flickering to the guards again. "Thanks for your help, darlin'. Next time, I hope we can meet up under better circumstances."

  "No next times, Deke," she said flatly, not rising from her chair. She rested her chin on a fist and looked away from him. "Don't come back here again."

  Cal didn't say anything until the blinking "Pleasure Doll Rental" sign was far behind them and they were in the street again, heading back for the lifts.

  "You know this guy Liu?" Cal asked Deke quietly as he pushed the palm plate to summon a car.

  "Know of him," Deke said with a nod. His eyes were clouded and Cal thought his friend's mind was still somewhere back there with Lixbed.

  "So how do we do this then?"

  "Same as usual," Deke said, stepping into the lift car as the doors slid aside. "The hard way."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kara stepped out of the well-armored groundcar carefully, eyes darting around in a watchfulness that bordered on paranoia given the two dozen battlesuited Marines arrayed around her. It was mid-day and the primary turned every surface of every light-colored building into a spotlight spearing into her eyes, turned the darker street paving into an oven, and she could see the shimmering of heat mirages in the distance. A hot wind buffeted her and nearly took her breath away.

  Aside from her vehicle and the Marine patrol, not another living being was in sight. The streets were deserted, the shutters closed over the windows of the buildings. Nothing stirred but dust and debris carried in gusts by the stifling wind. Here and there, she could see the scars of the street battles, burned out now and no longer even smoldering.

  "God, this place sucks," Holly muttered, sliding out of the door behind her.

  Kara fought back a laugh, knowing the Fleet officer wouldn't appreciate it.

  "I wish we could just leave it to them," Kara agreed. "But somehow, I don't think that would be the end of it."

  "They wanted to nuke it," she shot back tightly, hand clenching the pistol grip of her carbine. "Maybe we should let them."

  "Maybe," Kara admitted, catching the other woman's eye and holding it for a moment. "But we don't get to make that call; and we're both still in the Commonwealth military, last I checked, so we follow orders."

  Holly's glare didn't diminish and Kara sighed, turning away from her. The woman was theoretically under her command, temporarily, but they were both the same rank and she was one hundred percent certain that Holly Morai could kick her ass; she didn't press the point.

  "That's it over there," she said instead, pointing with her left hand at a structure across the street. It had a gated courtyard that doubled as a display lot, empty right now as they all were, with a workshop past the awning and a house around the back. It was the same bright stucco as every other building on the block, with an orange-tinted tile roof, and it seemed untouched by the unrest of the last few days.

  "You really think this old geezer is an insurgent leader?" Holly asked skeptically, following her towards the g
ate, four of the Marines falling in behind them, their footsteps concussions on the pavement that echoed up and down the block.

  "He's next on the list," Kara replied with finality, tired of arguing with her.

  The door into the workshop was shut. Kara followed Tahni manners and kicked at a specially made sounding board down near the bottom of the frame, then waited for a moment, grateful for the shade of the awning.

  "Footsteps," Holly murmured, glancing at the door.

  It was another few seconds before the door creaked open and a young adult Tahni stared out at them, his expression sullen and resentful. From the research she had done, he was dressed in a manner befitting a man who had yet to father a child and still lived as the eldest son and heir of his father's household. There was a way that he held his head, a subtle flinch of his facial muscles that her headcomp translation program told her was distaste and discomfort and she thought it was probably because he recognized them as females.

  Deal with it, you ugly fuck, she thought, but tried to keep her face and tone neutral.

  "I seek General T'Sonn-Yon-Kara-Tin," Kara said, her vocal cords straining at the harsh, alien tones. "He lives here, yes?"

  "My father is in the back," the younger Tahni acknowledged, "but he has not been a general for a long time." He made the equivalent of a shrug. "Come with me."

  Kara waved at the Marine escort to wait, then she and Holly followed the Tahni male back through the workshop. There was a low-pitched background hum as fans circulated the air inside, providing a small relief from the oppressive humidity as they moved inside the structure. It was well-equipped for a small, single-family shop, she thought, with what passed for modern metal-shaping and fabrication equipment on Tahn-Skyyiah, but there didn't seem to be much finished product or works in progress around and it looked to her to have the air of recent disuse.

  They moved past the work tables weighted down with equipment and partially empty storage bins of powdered metal and through a small doorway into the home behind it. It was cooler the further back into the house they went, thanks to an energy-efficient evaporative cooling system used in Tahni buildings for centuries, but it still felt barely tolerable to her.

  The room on the other side of the door looked like some sort of shrine and she knew that it was a memorial to dead ancestors. Things that might have been sculptures or idols or some such thing squatted with cryptic, twisted lines in a semi-circle around a pot or large bowl of some sort with something like incense smoldering inside it. The shrine took up most of the small anteroom, bordered by a thick, rough mat meant to clean dirt from the workshop off shoes before entering the home. The younger man did just that, then stepped through into the larger living area and glared at Kara.

  She chuckled softly and scraped the soles of her boots on the mat before following him. The living area was a large, nearly bare, open space with a single piece of furniture: a curving sort of low couch that wrapped around half the room and encircled a patch of brightness filtering in through the polarized skylight. Hunched over on that couch, almost part of the piece of furniture himself in a brown-tinted robe that nearly matched its color, was General T'Sonn-Yon-Kara-Tin. She recognized him despite the lines time had etched so deeply in his cheeks and on his high forehead, despite the lifelessness of his shaded eyes that was so unlike the images she had of him during the war.

  "General?" she said tentatively, still standing near the entrance to the room.

  The man didn't respond, didn't look up. She took a step closer, felt Holly moving off to her side to keep both Tahni under observation. "General T'Sonn?" she said again.

  There was a flicker of those dead eyes, a seeing yet not quite seeing, and he spoke in a hissing, raspy tone, tired beyond his age. "What do you want, human?"

  "We're investigating anyone who might have been involved in the assault on our base at the spaceport," Kara told him straightforward. "You were a military leader during the war, so your name came up."

  "War is a game for the young," he responded after a long moment, still not looking at her.

  "The young are the game pieces," she corrected him, using a Tahni saying she remembered from her DSI training many years ago, "but the elders arrange the board."

  His eyes strayed towards hers by a degree, for just a space of a heartbeat, before they sagged again to their perpetual stare into nothing and he fell into silence.

  "My father," the younger man spoke up, "is...still troubled by the events of the war."

  Kara looked carefully at him. He wasn't especially imposing for a Tahni, and didn't affect wearing his braid in the warrior fashion. His clothes were plain and ordinary, neither ragged nor expensive, and he had the look that could disappear into a crowd.

  "You're..." She searched the files she'd accessed in her headcomp. "... D'sinn-Tyya-Khin-Lun?"

  "I'm Tyya-Khin," he confirmed, gesturing assent readily.

  Kara's eyes fought to narrow and she kept her gaze purposefully even. Maybe this guy didn't recognize human facial expressions...but then again, maybe he did.

  "You work here with your father?"

  "Since the end of the war," he said, and she double-checked his age, surprised. He was a few years older than he looked; not old enough to have fought in the war, but definitely old enough to remember it.

  Three other brothers, all older, Kara read off the file in her head. All dead in the war.

  "Does your father get many visitors?" Holly asked, unexpectedly. Kara glanced over at her, trying to keep surprise off her face. The other woman had a vaguely irritated expression and Kara guessed she probably was just bored and wanted to move the whole business along.

  "No," Tyya answered. "Every few months one of his old officers will stop by and check on his health. Other than that, it is only me."

  And no way to check that, Kara mused. All the satellite surveillance data had been on the garrison station, and hadn't been considered important enough to back up offsite. Since then, anyone who might have something to hide would have been careful about moving around outside.

  "I noticed you didn't have much inventory up in your shop," Kara told the Tahni, "or any projects being worked on."

  "The unrest is bad for business," Tyya told her, dark eyes inscrutable even to the auto-analysis of her headcomp's translation program. "Many in this area are behind on their taxes and tenant fees. Most people don't want to leave their houses at all."

  "We'd like for things to get back to normal," Kara assured him. Jesus Christ, would we... "But to do that, we need the help of people like you. If you can tell us anything that might help us track down the people behind the terrorist attacks, it could do a lot to make things better for you and your neighbors."

  "Wouldn't you people leaving us alone be the best thing for my neighbors?" Tyya asked with a blunt directness that might have seemed rude to some humans but wasn't unusual for Tahni. Her headcomp assured her his stance and body language was neutral---almost carefully neutral, as if he were trying not to instigate any confrontation. And yet he hadn't asked them to sit, so he wasn't accepting them as guests, which was something of a deliberate insult for his people.

  "Perhaps," she admitted, trying her best to match his tone. "But that isn't my decision to make." She cocked her head in a way the translation program told her was a move to emphasize honest exchange. "The quickest way to get humans off your world is for there to be peace. None of us wish to be here, risking our lives and killing your people. The war was a long time ago, and we seek no revenge. Do you?"

  The Tahni made a motion with his shoulders that signaled reluctant agreement. "Revenge kills the seeker as well as the sought," he quoted a proverb. "Yet these events have a life of their own now. If I were to tell you the names of the leaders of the attacks and you killed them or imprisoned them, do you really think the violence would end?"

  "Then how would you end it?" Holly Morai wanted to know, her voice wrapping awkwardly around the Tahni consonants. Her eyes were narrowed and thoughtful.
"If you were in our position, how would you end all this, Tyya-Khin?"

  The Tahni looked at her, silent, seemingly unsure how to answer that.

  "If it were me..." his father said unexpectedly from his seat on the couch, still not meeting their eyes. He trailed off and Kara thought perhaps his mind had wandered off again, but then he raised his head and looked straight at her, his dark eyes a bit manic and feverish. "If it were me," he repeated, "I'd kill all of us. Every last one."

  Then his head went back down and his mind seemed to slip away again.

  Kara stared at him for a second, feeling a shiver go through her despite the heat. Then she shook her head and turned back to Tyya. "Thanks for your time. We'll leave you to your business."

  Holly stared at her curiously but said nothing until they were out of the building and blinking in the harsh light of the primary as they rejoined the Marines outside. Kara slid into the air conditioned comfort of the armored vehicle and waited till Holly was inside and the doors shut before hitting a button on her 'link.

  "This is Major McIntire," she said. "I need a micro-drone surveillance package on the residents of this address." She sent a link with their location and received an immediate confirmation.

  "You think the son is involved?" Holly asked, shaking her head. "Then why didn't you bring him in?"

  "He's not just involved," Kara told her with grim certainty, staring at the biphase carbide armor of the vehicle like she could see through it. "I think he's their leader."

  * * *

  "I like this place," Rachel said, sipping carefully at her drink. It coursed down her throat like liquid fire yet somehow settled in her stomach as cold and smooth as ice.