Maybe that was all that mattered.
Two of the nearby restaurants had sidewalk tables. She wanted to avoid those. She didn’t want to sit with her back to the street. The closest restaurant looked like a café. She let out a small sigh of relief and headed toward the door.
Someone grabbed her arm. The grip was so tight that she gasped in pain.
“Keep walking forward,” a man said in her ear. “Act calm.”
She sent a help message through her links, but the message was instantly blocked. She opened her mouth to scream when another hand grasped her other arm.
“Try anything,” the second man said, “and we will kill you.”
She took a shuddery breath, then closed her mouth. “What do you want?” she asked.
“You to stay quiet,” the first man said.
They propelled her forward. Her feet tripped against each other, unable to keep the pace. The men lifted her slightly, carrying her between them.
No one around them seemed to notice that she wasn’t walking.
“Please,” she said softly, “I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me what this is about.”
“The Disty,” the second man said. “They don’t want you to disappear.”
Twenty-two
Gavin Trouvelot folded his hands inside his robe. He stood inside the Disty-Human Chamber, designed to accommodate both species and, of course, accommodating neither. Seven Disty sat on the tabletop, their bare feet pressed together, their hands resting on their knees.
For the moment, all seven ignored Trouvelot. Apparently they weren’t ready for him yet.
The chamber was in the middle of the Liaison Building, which stood in that no-man’s-land between the Disty and Human sections of Sahara Dome. The Liaison Building served dual government functions: it became host for all the Disty-Human meetings needed to run a two-tiered governmental system, and it also provided the courtrooms needed for infractions between cultures.
The chamber was on the top floor, with a view of the Disty section on one side of the room and the Human section on the other. Tables lined the walls. Chairs filled the spaces between the tables.
Trouvelot was a third-level minister, deemed just senior enough to meet with the leaders of the Disty Death Squad, but not too senior. No need to taint one of the main human liaisons by contact with the Death Squad.
He hadn’t wanted this meeting at all. He had fought it, even though he had been the next minister up for a private meeting with the Disty. But Death Squad interactions sometimes led to demotions or banishment, and he couldn’t afford either of those.
All of his life, he had wanted to work with the Disty. He had been modified so that he was shorter than the average human, with slightly longer limbs. He couldn’t gain as much weight as some short humans did, either, and his skull had been enlarged just a little.
In essence, he was as Disty as a human could get without exactly duplicating their physiology. To do that would insult them. So far, no Disty had even noticed his modifications.
He wore a robe for this meeting with the Death Squad just so that he wouldn’t inadvertently touch anything he shouldn’t. Even though he had spent his life in Sahara Dome and all of his education studying the Disty, he still wasn’t versed in some of the more esoteric customs. In fact, he had avoided most of the death rituals simply because they were so tricky.
Now he wished he hadn’t.
Seven Disty led the Death Squad. They sat in a semicircle on the table which was the longest in length, shortest in height. This group wore all black, with tiny reflective insignia on the fabric. The insignia was a silver flame, the symbol of the Death Squad.
Trouvelot wasn’t sure if he had seen these Disty before. Individual Disty were difficult to distinguish: their skin was the same dusky-tan color and they had no real hair to speak of. Their eyes filled the large sockets, and were uniformly dark.
The differences came in the length of their feet (long feet were considered a sign of beauty—which was why the Disty found shoes barbaric); the shape of their heads—some narrow and others rounder at the chin area; and the degree of depth in the cavity that formed their ears. Sex differences were impossible to determine without intimate contact. Humans had settled this issue by referring to all Disty as it. Age also emphasized a few features: the eyes tended to bulge the older a Disty got, and the mouth shrank in on itself.
Judging by the appearance of these seven, most of them were as young as Trouvelot was.
The center Disty, obviously the head of the group and the only one who would speak, finally deigned to notice Trouvelot. It studied him for a moment, then gestured at the empty space before it. It was clearly offering Trouvelot a place on the table.
Already, a ploy. He hated these games. He wasn’t sure how to play this. If he sat at the table, he had already conceded power to the Disty. If he remained standing, he might be perceived as rude.
He bent his head slightly. This case was a tough one, this meeting one of the most delicate ever held. He would do well to acquiesce to the Disty instead of antagonize them.
He shuffled forward, keeping his head down, his bare feet catching on the nubby carpet. When he reached the table, he turned his back to the Disty according to custom. He placed his hands on the top, and pretended to elevate himself with his arms.
Actually, the table was short enough that he could have slid onto the top. To do so, however, would make the Disty feel inferior, something he wasn’t willing to do.
When he settled on the tabletop, he spun around and pressed his bare feet together. Then he pulled up his robe just enough to uncover his feet and his legs.
One of the Disty pursed its lips, a sign of distaste. Even with all of the modifications, Trouvelot’s feet were too short, and the arches made it impossible to press the feet completely flat. His skin was too thick and multicolored. His anklebones were too prominent, and his knees had too many joints.
“We prefer our own language,” this Disty said in perfect English. English was the language of the Alliance, and technically should have been used in all meetings between alien species.
But Trouvelot was willing to concede a lot, just to be heard.
“I will do my best,” he said in Disty, imitating the flat affect they used when speaking to each other. “I might have to use English words to convey some of my meanings. Please do not take this as an offense. Please consider it ignorance on my part, since I am not usually the one who deals with death matters in my culture.”
“Then why are you here?” the Disty asked. “Why isn’t the person who deals with death consulting with us?”
“She has been banned from contact with the Disty,” Trouvelot said. “She is considered contaminated because of the skeleton found in Sector Fifteen.”
The Disty divided their section of Sahara Dome into numbered sectors.
At Trouvelot’s explanation, all seven of the Disty let out a quiet “Oooo.” He had gained a point by understanding that his lack of knowledge would offend them.
“Begin,” the Disty in charge said. Miraculously, they had agreed to see him without knowing the exact reason why.
Now, however, the difficult part began.
“At your request, our people have been excavating the contaminated area,” Trouvelot said. “The work has created a problem.”
His heart was pounding: the very idea of telling the Disty about this terrified him. But the Council thought it best, and they thought it best to start with a liaison and the Death Squad, instead of a city diplomat talking to the Disty Ruling Class.
The Council believed that the more ignorance they showed, the lighter the Disty response might be.
“First,” Trouvelot said, sounding more confident than he felt, “I must tell you that I have not been to Sector Fifteen for a long time, long before the skeleton was discovered. In fact, I have not been in the Disty section of the Dome for quite a while. The Liaison Building is the closest I have come to your home section in three human
months.”
He had to establish before the conversation got too intense that he was not contaminated.
“We understand and accept your lack of contamination,” the Disty said. “It was a condition of our meeting.”
So the higher-ups hadn’t bothered to tell him that. Lovely. A misstep, but a recoverable one.
Trouvelot pressed his knuckles against his chin and bowed his head slightly, a sign of respect.
“I am happy,” he said, “to have met an important condition of the meeting.”
They nodded in return.
Now the moment of truth. His mouth went dry. “In fulfilling the Disty request to make certain the area around the Sector Fifteen site held no more surprises, my people have spent the last few weeks digging.”
“We are aware that you have been following the terms of our agreements,” the Disty said. “The sooner you can certify the area free of trouble, the sooner we can begin decontamination procedures. Several thousand of our people are currently homeless. Most have moved in with relatives, but the conditions are crowded, and there is much unhappiness.”
Trouvelot swallowed hard. His knuckles felt sharp against his chin. “I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. We have discovered something horrible in that site, something so awful our language has no words for it.”
All seven Disty closed their fists. That gesture could be interpreted as a sign of displeasure, a sign of warning, or a sign of imminent departure. Trouvelot, usually so good at reading the Disty around him, couldn’t figure out what the unison gestures meant.
That made him even more nervous.
“We have found more bodies,” he said. “They are human and we believe them to be much older than the initial skeleton. They have been in the sand for many more years. They are not skeletons, which is, I don’t know if anyone told you, an aberration for our people on Mars. We do not know how these new bodies died, nor do we know how long, exactly, they have been in place.”
One of the Disty slid off the table. The Disty caught its foot on the table’s edge and nearly slid off. Another Disty grabbed the first one’s arm and held it in place.
The leader didn’t move. “How many dead?”
“That’s our dilemma.” And the beginning of Trouvelot’s tap dance. “We are unwilling to risk new lives to work on the site, so we are only allowing the already contaminated from the skeleton discovery there. The work is slow. We have no numbers for you, and no studies. We have nothing in our records that indicate this is a death location, and we have no mention of many deaths occurring in one place in our histories.”
He hoped he had dodged the question well enough.
The Disty looked at each other. One of them raised a hand, a request for private counsel, but the leader shook its head.
“How many dead?” the leader repeated.
Apparently, Trouvelot hadn’t dodged the question at all.
“We don’t know,” Trouvelot said.
“How many have you uncovered so far?” the leader asked.
“We have uncovered nine,” Trouvelot said.
All of the Disty gasped, except the leader. Its dark eyes hadn’t moved from Trouvelot’s.
“‘Uncovered,’” it repeated. “That is a strange term. How many bodies are at the site?”
“We don’t know,” Trouvelot said for the second time.
“You suspect an amount, however,” the leader said, “and that amount is greater than nine, simply from your attitude. How much greater?”
After much debate, the Council had told Trouvelot to answer that question accurately if the question was asked. The key, the councilors had told him, was to ensure the Disty never asked the question.
He had lost that negotiating point in the first fifteen minutes. Maybe he wasn’t as good as he thought he was.
He pressed his hands together as tightly as they went, then bowed his head until it touched the tabletop. He hoped he wouldn’t have to hold this position long because it always made him dizzy.
“Maybe a hundred, maybe more.”
The table shook as the Disty jumped from it. He couldn’t look up until they gave him permission, but he saw limbs flashing around him, heard a high-level chatter—a form of the Disty language that was forbidden to all but the most important Disty, a part of the language most Disty never learned. Humans would probably never learn it either.
It didn’t even sound like regular Disty, so he couldn’t pretend to understand it.
At least they were arguing, though. At least they hadn’t fled.
Then he heard the door open. More chatter, and then the door slammed shut.
The back of his neck ached. The only sound he heard in the entire room was the echo of his own breathing, shorter and more rapid than it should have been. His face was flushed with blood.
He swallowed again, painfully against the dryness of his throat.
“Forgive me for speaking out of turn,” he said in Disty, “but I thought I heard the door. I want to confirm that the meeting continues.”
No one responded to his words. He remained in the subservient position, however, hoping that he was not alone.
He held his breath, heard nothing, and then counted silently to one hundred, just like he had been instructed to do in a situation like this. Instructed years ago, by a teacher who had worked on some of the toughest negotiations with the Disty.
You’ll probably never have to use this technique, the instructor had said. The difficult years are over.
Trouvelot raised his head. He was alone in the room. He put his arms down for balance, feeling the dizziness rush through him as the blood left his face.
Alone. He hadn’t even been near the site, and still the Disty had fled the room.
This was bad. It was worse than bad.
It was a disaster.
Twenty-three
Staff applications. Position papers. The minutes of fifteen different meetings in which nothing got done.
DeRicci leaned back in the plush chair behind her desk. She had brought in the chair because she hated all the transparent furniture, but it still didn’t make her feel at home. The desk looked like a pile of computer pads and blinking lights, not like a workspace. And she hated being able to see her knees through the desk’s surface.
Most of the information had come through her new link, the one that was on a secured network, designed only for the security department’s staff. Security memos—hundreds of them—scrolled on a continuous loop at the bottom of her vision. Even with her eyes closed she could see the damn things. Literally.
DeRicci resisted the urge to shut down the link. That had been her solution during her detective days, and back then, it had nearly gotten her fired. Now it was a matter of Moon-based security, and she could only shut off the visual part of the link if she planned to sleep.
She’d been told that some people got so used to this feature that they slept with the information crawling through their optic nerve, keeping one part of the brain active while the body slept.
If she did that, she’d be even crankier than she was now. And she was cranky. She wasn’t designed for this kind of administrative position. She wanted everything done and settled, the duties of the department delineated quickly so that she could get to work.
At the last meeting she’d had with the Moon’s Governing Council, she had asked for a timeline, figuring if she had a deadline for setup, she could get the interior meetings done quicker.
We’ll finish when we agree, the governor-general had said, and with that had ended the whole debate.
As far as DeRicci could tell, they’d all agree when moss grew on the top of the Dome. Until then, she was going to be in charge of a toothless agency, trying to determine its own sense of purpose.
That was how naïve she and Flint were. They had thought she could get something done here. Not even the greatest politician in the universe could get anything done in this situation.
She was stuck, and it was her own damn fault.
DeRicci pressed on all three screens on the desktop. She had devoted one screen to applications, another screen to public comments, and a third to private suggestions. As those screens came on, a fourth rose behind them, its clear surface blinking orange with more than a dozen urgent messages.
Of course, the urgency came from the media, whom she had decided to ignore. The governor-general had questioned that decision at the last meeting—After all, she had said, the people are the ones we’re working for, and the only way they hear about our good deeds is through the media—but DeRicci had ignored that.
She hadn’t done any good deeds yet, and after that terrible piece Ki Bowles had run on her, she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable toward reporters and their accuracy.
Or maybe she was feeling a bit persecuted. Nothing in that report had been wrong—DeRicci had been a screwup in most of her jobs, but not the kind of screwup who cost lives. The kind of screwup who didn’t play nice with others, who did things to the best of her abilities, and often saved lives. The kind who didn’t suffer fools easily. That was the kind of screwup she had been.
DeRicci sent the screen back down and focused on the applications. What she really needed was a good assistant. Someone who kept the media at bay, who could learn how to take DeRicci’s harsh statements and make them into something political.
In short, she needed a miracle worker.
And she wasn’t finding one.
A knock on her door made her growl. But she had learned to ignore her staff here at her own peril.
“It better be important,” she called.
Rudra Popova, DeRicci’s de facto assistant, opened the door and leaned in. Popova had perfectly straight black hair that flowed like water whenever it moved. It went all the way to her waist, and never seemed messy or in the way. Her black eyes snapped with intelligence and a bit of condescension. DeRicci could feel Popova’s thought whenever that woman’s gaze fell on her: I could do this job so much better than this uneducated cop can.
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