Birthright: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  Now Tyya couldn't hold back the curse that exploded past his lips. "The damned worthless bastard!" he added in English for emphasis.

  "More than you know," the human woman agreed with him. "Kah-Rint is a liar and a traitor. He used to be a Tahni military officer: Colonel K'tann-len-Renn-Tan of your Marines, who led the occupation of one of our colonies, a world we call Demeter. He betrayed his own force to our agents in exchange for promises of a high position in the post-war government."

  Now the blood drained from Tyya's extremities and he knew that if there had been gravity, he might have collapsed. Things fell into place in his thoughts, and things that had once made no sense now seemed to be all too clear.

  "Commander," G'san spoke up, his expression concerned, "do you know this name? Is what she says true?"

  It took a moment before he could work up the moisture in his mouth to reply. "I know of Colonel K'tann-len-Renn-Tan," he confirmed.

  "He returned to Tahn-Skyyiah after the war," Kara went on, "but somehow--we don't know how, exactly--- it became known what he was and what he'd done, and he was barely able to make it off the planet with his life, and then only with the aid of human troops. He blamed us for this, but he also blamed you, his people. So he came up with a plot that would punish us all for his pain."

  "I know how he was exposed, Major McIntire," Tyya told her, his voice a rasp, his vision barely focused. “General T'Sonn-Yon-Kara-Tin, my father, was informed of what he had done and spread the word to other former military officers in the command staff. He said he was told by one of your intelligence officers who didn't believe traitors should be put in charge of the government, that they couldn't be trusted to keep their word. His name was Murdock."

  "Son of a bitch!" He heard the exclamation over the speakers, muted as if someone further back had said it, and it was not in Kara McIntire's voice.

  "He wanted me in command," Tyya realized, shame and rage and guilt flaring inside him, "so that when I failed, my name---our family name---would be as reviled as his, as revenge against my father."

  "He didn't want you to fail," Kara corrected him. "He wanted you to succeed, because he knew that the only possible outcome would be war between our peoples, and the only possible outcome from that would be your complete and utter destruction."

  "Your people would do such a thing?" G'san asked. Tyya fought back an urge to silence him. What difference did it make now?

  "Let to their own devices? I don't know for sure," Kara admitted. "But Kah-Rint had access to..." She hesitated. "Let's just say he had inside help from some people in our military, who owed him a favor. These people helped shape our military response to your attacks. He was leaving nothing to chance. We were able to capture him because he was personally arranging for an uprising by your people on Anansi---by hiring human mercenaries to assassinate the Matriarch there."

  Someone on the bridge made a sound of outrage at the idea of harming a Matriarch. Tyya agreed with the sentiment, though he was too numb to feel it so strongly at the moment.

  "How can I trust that you're telling me the truth?" he asked her.

  "I can upload the records I was sent from his interrogation," Kara told him. "You can see them yourself. But those can be faked," she admitted. "In the end, D'sinn-Tyya-Khin-Lun, you have to search your conscience and decide for yourself." She paused, and although Tyya was no expert on human behavior, he judged it was a pause to formulate her next words carefully.

  "I will tell you this much," she said. "You won't take back this ship. I am a DSI cadre agent." Tyya made a face of disgust at the words. He knew what those were, and knew how hard they were to kill. "The woman with me, the woman who was there at your house, Commander Holly Morai, is what you called during the war the Tahn-Skii’ana---I know your father would have known about them and I'm betting you do, too."

  Tyya had heard about them from his father. They were rumors, legends, cautionary tales told to young recruits...

  "With us is one of the ship's Security officers. We can patch into the ship's internal air supply via the radiation suits stored here in Engineering, so you won't be able to cut off our air without cutting off your own. And you won't be able to storm Engineering because, unlike you, we have someone who knows the ins and outs of this ship very well, and we know how to guard against it. We will destroy this ship with us on board before we let you take it back."

  Tyya thought there was some bluster in the statement. There were only three of them, and given enough time, he was sure they could think of a way to take them out. But yes, they could destroy the ship from Engineering, if they were willing.

  "What do you propose then?" he asked her, half to buy time to think, and half because he was genuinely curious. "If you wish us to surrender to face your human idea of 'justice,' be aware that all of us would rather die with you than spend the rest of our lives locked away in one of your internment centers."

  There were a few glances at that, but only a few. None of them had come on this mission expecting to survive.

  "I figured as much," the Earth-woman said. "But you've killed a lot of humans, Tyya."

  "More than you've killed of us?"

  "I'll offer you this," Kara told him. "If you lay down your arms and allow me to send out a distress call, I'll drop your troops off at the nearest colony with a Tahni community. No charges, no record, nothing. It'll be up to them to make their way; but if I find out they've tried to start any violence---and I will find out---I'll come back and hunt down every single one of them."

  "And me?" he wondered.

  "You come back with me to Tahn-Skyyiah," she said. "There, it'll be up to my superior what he decides to do with you."

  "I'll need to speak with my troops," he told her.

  "I'll be waiting."

  Tyya-Khin looked around the bridge at the faces looking at him. There was disbelief, horror, disappointment and...perhaps hope?

  "G'san," he ordered quietly, "call everyone to the bridge."

  Some things had to be done face to face.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Deke Conner gritted his teeth and forced himself not to drum his fingers on the console; it irritated the hell out of him when other people did it. But he dearly wanted to, just like he wanted to curse and stamp his feet and punch the bulkhead. None of that would make the countdown to Transition go any faster, or improve their odds of finding anything in this system.

  "Could be worse," Cal said from the copilot's acceleration couch, somehow reading his mood exactly.

  "How, exactly?" he asked with strained patience.

  "At least the Transition lines only run between the gravitational wells of stars," Cal elaborated. "If they drop out, it has to be in a star system. If we had to search every kilometer of interstellar space between Earth and Tahn-Skyyiah, this would be impossible."

  Deke hissed out a breath and clenched his jaw to keep from screaming. Cal was right and he needed to calm down. "Prep for Transition in ten," he told everyone. "Zero gravity in ten."

  It was an old habit, and not really necessary---Rachel and Pete were strapped into their acceleration couches already. Still, it was better than screaming.

  "Where the Hell are we this time?" Pete muttered. The younger man sounded bored and Deke didn't blame him: they'd been cooped up in the little ship for over a week now.

  "Fuck if I know," Deke said with a shrug before checking his headcomp. "Some brown dwarf on the ass end of nowhere with more numbers than letters in its name."

  There was a shift in perception, and a lurch in his stomach as gravity disappeared and the viewscreen lit up with stars. "Running gravimetic scans," he said half under his breath. There was only a certain distance from the star a ship could emerge from T-space, but it was still a huge volume of space to scan and it took over an hour to complete.

  "If you guys want to go grab some sleep or whatever, now's the time," Deke began, working at the fastenings of his restraints.

  Then he froze in mid-motion at the chime fr
om the ship's automatic frequency scanning, the indication it had detected a transmission. Cal was on it before Deke could drag his brain back to the moment.

  "It's a distress call," he reported, and then his broad, Canaanite face split in a grin almost too big for it to contain. "It's from the Thaddeus Moore." He looked at Deke, smile growing broader. "We've found them!"

  * * *

  Deke let a long, satisfied breath out into the hollow of Kara McIntire's shoulder, feeling his body shudder slightly at the emotional and physical release.

  "I missed you, too," she giggled into his ear, arms and legs clinging to him, their sweat mingling across their conjoined skin and soaking into the sheets of the cabin's bunk. She felt his fingers touching the still-healing scar low on her left abdomen where the laser had penetrated her armor.

  "I love you," he said to her, in a voice so serious it made her tilt her face over to meet his gaze. His were darkly earnest, his normally playful face frighteningly sincere in the dim glow of the chemical ghostlights that lined the deck. "You know, I've never said that to any other woman my whole life."

  "I love you too, Deke," she said, for once not playing the sentiment off, or answering it with a kiss or a caress. "It scares me to say it," she admitted with an honesty so natural that it, too, frightened her, "so I'm sorry for all the times I haven't."

  "I know," he said with a nod, grinning. "I know. That's why I never pressed you on it. I just want you to remember, so you don't go off and get yourself killed. You do have someone out here that cares about you more than anything else now."

  She smiled warmly at him, running her fingers lightly down his cheek. "That's going to take some getting used to."

  "For me too." He closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the pillow. "I knew what you were going to do when we told you about the Thaddeus Moore, and I felt like a total shit."

  "It's my job," she said gently, punching him in the chest. "Yours too, now."

  "Maybe we've done our part," he said quietly. "Maybe it's time we both stopped putting our heads on the chopping block."

  "I've thought about that, too," she said, the words fighting their way out of her, as if she were reluctant to acknowledge them. "I've thought about that a lot, lately. We're going to live a long time, you know? People say they know that, but I don't think it's sunk in with us, not as a species. It'd be a shame to throw all that away before we got to really live it."

  "You wanna' settle down somewhere, have a few kids?" he asked her, cocking an eyebrow.

  "Maybe," she said with a shrug. "Maybe I'm ready for that. But I know what I definitely want to do. I'd like to just spend a little time somewhere I can relax, somewhere I wouldn't have to be always looking over my shoulder."

  "That sounds pretty nice," he said, hand tracing a line down her leg where it rested across his hip. Then he sighed, and from the cock of his head and the away look in his eye she knew it was a message over the neurolink. "We need to hit the 'fresher," he said. "We'll be coming out of T-space in ten minutes."

  "I get it first," she said, disentangling herself from him and hopping out of the bunk. He watched her with a look that told her he still appreciated the view and she smiled as she slid aside the door to the cabin's tiny 'fresher. "Hopefully Savage is still in the Centauri system," she said, stepping into the small cubicle and shutting the door, then pushing the plate for a short cycle.

  "He said he'd stay there till he heard from us," Deke's voice sounded far away on the other side of the transplas as the jets of hot water and soap started to massage her body, stripping away dirt, sweat and dead skin. "I'm still not totally down with leaving Holly and that Velazquez kid back there on the Moore with all those Tahni, even if they are disarmed and locked up."

  "She insisted on it," Kara reminded him, raising her voice to carry and spitting out water. "And she was right: we need to get back to Tahn-Skyyiah with Tyya as soon as possible. Gaia only knows what's been going on there since we left." She sighed as soap was washed off of her body from the omnidirectional spray, then the drying cycle began with jets of warm air replacing the water.

  "I'll feel better when we know Kel's heading there with his freighter to pick them up," Deke said, barely audible above the drying blasts of air.

  She pushed the door aside and emerged into the cooler air of the cabin, finding Deke standing just outside, waiting his turn. She grinned at the sight of him, not wearing a stitch, then leaned in to kiss him before she let him pass.

  "Are you sure it's such a good idea putting all those Tahni insurgents on a ship with Kah-Rint?" she asked him, grabbing her uniform from the closet.

  "Keller Savage is a lot of things, sweetheart," Deke raised his voice to be heard over the water, "some of them not very nice, but stupid isn't one of them. He's had Kah-Rint in a hibernation chamber since we got through interrogating him. Besides, your pet insurgent, that Tyya guy is their leader and he's here on board with us, so hopefully the rest of them won't have anyone to stir them up."

  "I'm glad I don't have to decide what to do with Tyya-Khin," she said, fastening up the front of her uniform jacket. "I mean, he's responsible for a lot of deaths, but he was trying to fight what he saw as unwarranted military occupation---we couldn't know that Kah-Rint was the one who'd bombed the orbital garrison, but the Tahni knew it wasn't them and we still had our troops in their streets."

  "You're getting soft," he told her as he pushed the 'fresher door open in a wash of warm, humid air. There was a smile on his face as he said it, though.

  "Get your clothes on," she said, tossing his uniform to him, "while you still have gravity."

  * * *

  "You're late," Cal said, not trying to conceal his smile as Deke and Kara floated into the cockpit; they'd transitioned a few minutes ago and left the artificial gravity field behind in another universe.

  "As I recall," Kara said, a cat-that-ate-the-canary look on her face as she pulled herself into an acceleration couch, "I'm your superior officer for the moment, so I can't be late."

  "We already sent the message off to Kel," Caleb Mitchell told them. "We're just waiting on a reply."

  "Where are we?" Tyya-Khin asked. Cal glanced at him, surprised the Tahni had spoken. He hadn't said a word since they left the Thaddeus Moore, just sat in a fold down chair at the back of the ship's cockpit and stared at the bulkhead. He was slim and sharp-edged for a Tahni, but there was something about him that reminded Cal of Trint.

  "The Procyon system," he told the Tahni. "No habitables, but it has three wormhole jumpgates, so it's an Instell ComSat hub." He shrugged. "There's a small maintenance station but no other permanent habitation."

  "How far are we from my home?" Tyya asked, and Cal thought it was a clarification more than a second question. He didn't give a shit what system they were in, he wanted to know how long it was going to take them to get back to Tahn-Skyyiah.

  "Less than ten light years," Cal told him. "A couple, three days' travel along the Transition lines."

  Tyya didn't respond other than a gesture of assent.

  "Looks like we have a response already," Deke said from the pilot's station, reaching over to a flashing holographic display and pulling out a red cube from the haptic feedback controls. The cube expanded to fill the main viewscreen's holographic projection tank with the image of Keller Savage at the command station of his freighter.

  "We got your message," Savage said, “and we'll head out right away to rendezvous with the Thaddeus Moore. Glad Holly and Major McIntire made it through okay." But the look on his face wasn't satisfaction or happiness. "Y'all need to get back to Tahn-Skyyiah right away. It looks like Kah-Rint had one last surprise for us. This is from some raw Fleet Intelligence feeds my guys picked up from a source here in Centauri."

  Savage reached out to touch a control and the view suddenly changed. Now they were at the walls of the Op Center outside Tahn-Khandranda, scanning back and forth in a way that told Cal he was looking through the helmet camera from a Marine batt
lesuit in one of the guard towers. And there, a hundred meters or so outside those walls, outside the fenced perimeter of the military base, were gathered thousands upon thousands of Tahni civilians.

  "From the reports," Savage went on over the video footage, "they haven't done anything violent yet, just basically gathered at the edge of the base and shut down everything going in or out. Some filter in and out of the crowd to bring back food and water, but the numbers are hovering around thirty thousand Tahni---males and females by the way, mostly younger---there every hour of ever day for the last three planetary days." The view switched back to Savage.

  "I gather from my sources that the only reason the military hasn't used crowd control measures against them is that there's absolutely no orbital backup since the Thaddeus Moore left. There's a couple intact assault shuttles, but that's it, and that's not enough to take on most of the young adults of a whole damn city."

  Savage ran a hand through his hair tiredly. "We'll grab Holly and drop off your Tahni for you at the closest colony, but you fellas better get there as quick as you can, because Commonwealth cruisers, plural, are on their way and I don't think they'll be using kid gloves this time. Savage out."

  The holographic display went back to an optical presentation of the star system around them, and all eyes turned to Tyya-Khin.

  "Who would be leading this with you gone?" Kara asked the Tahni.

  He considered it for a moment---or maybe, Cal thought, he was considering whether or not he should answer them at all.

  "It might be the Matriarch," he said, finally. "If the females are out there as well, she must have given her blessing, at least. But..." He trailed off, and his body language was troubled.

  "But what?" Cal prompted.

  "This thing, this uprising," Tyya-Khin went on, "it may be at..." His hands made a helpless gesture. "I don't know your word, a point where something is so far one way it can't go back the other way..."