“The Queen also said that Second betrayed the Emperor, but not to take the throne himself. He has put another male there, one who kills with guns rather than duels. She doesn’t know who he is, but she sent a good description of him and it matches that of the male formerly known as Logistics-East. Which means,” Uuvek looked at the Knife, “it’s likely that the entire upper echelon of the Eastern Naval administration is involved in this coup. Guess now where the Emperor was heading when he left the throneworld last.”
“No,” the Knife whispered.
“To the Eastern quadrant?” Sediryl ventured.
“To the Eastern Apex world,” Uuvek said. “Which is the seat of the Empire’s Naval power. He was supposed to meet up with reinforcements to take to his next action. I think it’s clear what those reinforcements were really there to do.”
“Well, rhack,” Na’er said. “What are the chances he survived that little party?”
The two Chatcaava looked at one another.
The Knife, grim, said, “I can’t believe that he did.”
“But there’s nothing about his death anywhere,” Uuvek said. “There should be some news. Not official, it’s obvious the Usurper doesn’t care whether people believe the Emperor’s alive or not. But there’s always rumors and scuttlebutt. I’m not seeing any of that. Unlike you.” He eyed Lisinthir. “You’re everywhere. The Usurper has set a personal bounty on your capture.”
“Has he?” Lisinthir asked. “Why ever would he care, if he has dispatched, or believes he has dispatched, the Emperor?”
“A bounty on a specific alien?” the Knife said, puzzled. “That makes no sense. That elevates an alien to the level of a male dangerous enough to warrant personal attention.”
“Maybe he wants a trophy,” Laniis said, ears flattened.
“It is possible,” the Knife said. “But unlikely. Unless the Usurper has a specific grudge against the Emperor, and why would the head of Logistics bear such a grudge?”
“Why would the head of Logistics want to be Emperor?” Na’er said. “For that matter… did you say that Second did this coup? But he didn’t become Emperor. He gave that title to someone else. That seems out of character for you people.”
“Too many mysteries,” Sediryl murmured.
“But enough to act on, finally,” Lisinthir said. “Did the Queen say aught else?”
“Only that she intends to discover what she can about the pirates,” Uuvek said. “She is a most unnatural female. But interesting.”
Lisinthir laughed. “She is quite natural. But special, very certainly.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees. “So then. To find the Emperor is our next task. Na’er, Laniis, Uuvek, and you, Knife. We shall finish assisting the refugee flight and then repair to the Fleet vessel. Sediryl, do you go fetch our kinsman, since he should be about to arrive. Once we’re all in space, we can see what we can discover about the ambush in Apex-East.”
“You want us to sneak into the sector with the biggest naval base in Chatcaavan territory,” Na’er said.
“I seem to recall you being disappointed by my lack of audacity?” Lisinthir said. “Consider this my way of making amends.”
“The chances of our succeeding are very slim,” the Knife said.
“Our stealth systems are pretty good.” Na’er folded his arms and lifted his chin. “I think you’ll be surprised.”
“We’d better be surprised, or we’ll be dead,” Uuvek observed.
“Does anyone have any better notions?” Lisinthir asked. When no one was forthcoming, he said, “Then we go with what we have. Cousin, you should leave immediately. May I walk you out?”
“Of course.” Sediryl rose, brushed the folds of her riding coat smooth.
“I shall return in a moment,” Lisinthir said to the others. “We have much to finish before we leave.”
Uuvek looked at his data tablet. “I have to return this, I guess.”
Sediryl tilted her head, as she did when listening to her crewmember through the telegem. Lisinthir wondered if she’d realized the tell yet. “Maia says there are others on-board. If you want to keep that one, you’re welcome.”
“If it is no trouble?” Uuvek said, folding his hands around the tablet.
“No problems here,” Na’er said. “That’s a consumer model. We’d rather not be distributing the military versions around if we can avoid it.”
“Then keep it,” Sediryl said firmly. “Cousin, shall we?”
“We go,” Lisinthir agreed, indicating the door with a flourish. Once they’d gained the stairwell, he switched to their tongue, silver and gold and a touch of carnal red. “I think what he desires is to maintain contact with Maia.”
“Really?” She glanced at him, startled. “But he could do that without a data tablet, couldn’t he? With a telegem, or through the computer on the Fleet ship.”
“Certes. But Na’er’s point is well-taken. I have no doubt Fleet data tablets have features they are not eager to share with the Chatcaava, be they ever so sympathetic to our cause.” He followed her to the main floor. “We will be a day or two behind you, I suspect. Will you and Jahir call when you are reunited? It would please me to hear from you both.”
“Would it?” she asked. And then laughed. “Oh, you’d love to answer that, wouldn’t you. I’m sure you have some number of sly and courteous responses just waiting.”
“Sly!” Lisinthir sighed. “I rather preferred ‘ungentlemanly’ from Amber. That at least implied I was occasionally capable of proper behavior.”
Sediryl chuckled. “Proper by whose standards?”
“Ah! Yes. That would be the question. And you would know, would you not?”
“I am the fallen woman of Nuera, so… yes. I would.”
“Pay those gossipmongers no heed,” Lisinthir said. “You are lady enough for the Queen, your cousins, and a passel of dragons. If that does not suffice, what will?”
She thought she was concealing her speculative look, but Sediryl, he judged, had been too long in the Alliance, casting out the customs she’d been reared to. She no longer schooled her face well enough to throw one of the Pelted off her scent, much less one of the Eldritch… and he suspected she didn’t care either. Which he found endearing. Jahir had chosen his bride well; hopefully he would have enough time with her ere this began to make his intentions known.
Lifting her hand, Lisinthir pressed a kiss to its back. “Go carefully, cousin.”
“I’ll call you soon,” she said firmly.
The trek back to the Visionary took longer than Sediryl liked despite her riding skill and how much she wanted time to herself to think. Once she had that time, what she found herself mostly doing was vibrating. She wanted to be off and accomplishing things, not sorting through the complex thoughts Lisinthir and Amber and the Chatcaava had planted in her head.
“I like him,” Maia surprised her by saying into her ear.
Sediryl, still a day and a half off from the outskirts of the town she could use to reach the vessel, canted her head. “Him… the Chatcaavan?”
“Yes,” Maia said. “He's interesting to talk to. The Chatcaava don’t have D-pers, but he said he’d always wondered what it would be like to create one.”
“And you told him what it entailed, I am guessing?” Sediryl imagined that and chuckled. “Was he nonplussed?”
“He was fascinated,” Maia said. “I think he could do it.”
“Code a D-per?” Sediryl said, startled. “I thought that required a team?”
“It does. But I think he could organize and lead a team. He has the imagination for it. It was a pleasure seeing him inject himself into the systems he was using to find his information.”
Sediryl pursed her lips. “Does that mean you can do what he did now? You witnessed the process, didn’t you?”
“I did. And I could, yes. Until they change everything, and I don’t know how they’d do it.” Maia’s voice sounded intrigued. “But I’d love to try.”
“Could
you keep your fingers in it, maybe? Listen for interesting information?”
“I’m always doing that, alet.”
“Then we’re in good shape,” Sediryl said firmly.
“So far.” Maia paused, then added, “You don’t mind being sent off to fetch this man?”
Was she blushing? She brushed her fingers against her cheek, couldn’t tell if that was the sun’s heat or something more revealing. “Jahir? No. He’s my cousin. It will be lovely to see him again.”
“Lovely, is it.”
Sediryl cleared her throat. “Yes.”
“And here I thought that other fellow was pretty interesting. Lisinthir, yes? Very dashing.”
Was he? “Jahir is dashing. Lisinthir is… dangerous.”
“Oh, so this man we’re picking up isn’t dangerous?”
“No, no. He is, I think, just…” Sediryl exhaled noisily, then laughed. “You’re trying to distract me, aren’t you.”
“Your heart rate is unnecessarily high, maybe. You’re agitating yourself.”
“I want to be doing things,” Sediryl said. “Things worthy of you and that ship.”
“And of you, maybe?” Maia asked carefully. “And your Queen’s regard?”
“That too. Of course. How not?” Sediryl straightened her shoulders. “And if I prove to Amber that he was ridiculous for thinking I needed coddling, well. That would be very satisfying too.”
“I wouldn’t mind that myself.”
“Really?”
“He might be right about this being a bad idea, alet. But it’s your bad idea to try. And you do have me, and the Visionary.”
“I do, don’t I?” she said, satisfied. “We’ll just have to see what we can do about rearranging our enemies’ plans for them. And in the mean…”
“Yes?”
“You can still talk to Uuvek, can’t you?”
“I… might be talking to him right now?”
Sediryl laughed. “And you are teasing me about my cousins! You are terrible, Maia.”
“A person’s got to have some entertainment, alet.”
“Apparently. Well! I shall leave you to your tryst. I promise to breathe deeply so that my heartrate won’t distract you.”
Maia made an indelicate noise. “Just don’t hyperventilate.”
Navigating the final stages of the journey to the orbital station was by turns worrying and tedious. Amber’s warnings had made her hyper-vigilant, though she never saw anything to give her cause, and the extended journey, with its extra steps to prevent or isolate pursuit, wearied her, particularly when it seemed unnecessary. But by and by she found herself upstairs, and from there she went to her ship; Jahir’s vessel should be docking at the station, but if everyone was convinced of the dangers of merely being Eldritch and in public, she thought it the better part of wisdom to wait for his arrival somewhere she could ensure her own safety.
She was on the bridge of the Visionary, untangling yarn to use for a game of cat’s cradle, when her timer went off. Sitting up, she said, “Maia?”
“Alet.” A pause. “I’m checking the gate schedules now.” Another pause, then: “They’re not here yet.”
“Delayed?” Sediryl leaned forward, frowning. “Did they say?”
“I’m looking.” Another pause that felt interminable but was probably only a few seconds long. “They had one stop. That second liner left on time. It should be here, but they’re listing it as delayed and nothing else.”
Her pulse began to speed. Gently, Sediryl set the yarn down on the console and rested her palms on the edge of the metal.
“Still looking…” Maia sounded distracted. Then, a growl. “On a comm buoy at the system’s edge. They sent a distress call.”
“They did what?”
Maia’s voice grew dark. “Pirates. They were attacked by pirates.”
“And haven’t returned yet?” Sediryl’s palms went clammy. “Did someone answer the distress call? Is there any record of anyone helping them?”
“Nothing.” The deckplates beneath her hummed as the engines woke from standby. “I’m requesting an exit vector. I assume you want to go looking?”
“Yes!”
“We’re cleared to depart in twenty minutes. Do you want to call your cousin?”
Who might tell her not to look? No, she thought… Lisinthir would encourage her to go. But she wanted to wait until she had something more distinct to tell him than ‘our cousin’s vanished and it was probably pirates.’ “Let’s wait until we get out there and find something.”
“We might not,” Maia said, low. “Sometimes there’s nothing left to find. A sensor trace, if we’re lucky.”
“Debris?” she asked, faint.
“If we’re not so lucky,” Maia said.
“We’ll be lucky,” Sediryl said, determined. “And hidden from sensors.”
“That goes without saying.”
The twenty minutes seemed to last just as long as the pauses between Maia’s comments earlier. But they did pass, and Sediryl stayed on the bridge as Maia brought up various displays: trajectories, scheduled flight paths, location of buoys, some sort of calculation about the speed of the message, or its age, variables she didn’t know enough to understand despite her years in the Alliance. They were suitable objects for her to fixate on, but not enough of a lodestone to keep her from noticing that it would take her several hours to retrace the liner’s route to the point at which it must have exited Well.
“Do you want me to lie down?” she asked Maia.
“Would you if I asked you to?”
Sediryl touched her hand to her stomach, where she could feel the knot winding tighter beneath the boned vest. “I probably should, but I don’t think I’ll be able to.”
“Have you ever tried anything to give your hands something to do?”
“Garden,” Sediryl said, rueful.
“You could do that, then.”
“I... what?”
“There’s a genie on board. You could improvise a tub and get it to give you soil and things to plant. No reason you can’t grow potted plants on-board. I can get you a seed catalog?”
“I... yes,” Sediryl said, startled. “That would do nicely.”
But even diverted by work she knew intimately, it was hard to concentrate. Sediryl was far too conscious of the hours passing. She forced down a cup of sweetened tea and regretted it, tried to wash it down with an unsweetened tisane of anise and Asaniian bittersweet, but even the herbs couldn’t convince her body to stop tying her gut into tiny knots.
Hearing the engines change pitch ranked among the best moments of her life. She was sure of it. “Are we here?”
“We are,” Maia said. “From here on out, we creep and sort through what we can find.”
Appalled, Sediryl said, “How long will that take?”
“With most people... probably another few hours.” Maia sounded distracted. “Fortunately, your D-per is former Fleet, and I know a little bit about the tricks that pirates play on merchants from organizing convoy and anti-piracy missions. There’s debris here, alet.”
“Did they... did they get shot?” she asked, horrified.
“Pattern and amount’s not consistent with shooting. They probably got yanked by a tripwire. That’s a risky trick, but if it works they can jar a slow-moving ship out of Well and damage it enough to keep it from fleeing. Still, that’s not the important part.”
“What is the important part?” Sediryl leaned over to study the displays, wishing she knew which one mattered. As if answering the thought, one of them swelled in front of her and began flashing competing arabesques of red and blue.
“Here.” The blue brightened. “This looks like a pirate vessel’s vapor trail. It’s not actual vapor, but we still call it that. Energy signature suits. Or at least, it’s what I’m presuming is the pirate vessel. Because this,” The red flashed. “Is distinctly a Chatcaavan trail. There were two ships here, alet, and they were here so close on one another’s heels I
can’t tell which one came first. I want to guess that it was the pirate, because tripwires are more a pirate tactic. But now that we know that they’re working together, from Uuvek’s reports....”
“So either they were taken by pirates, or taken by the Chatcaava, or both,” Sediryl said. “Do we know where they were headed?”
“I have a trail leading away,” Maia said. “We could follow it as far as we could, and after that it would be all extrapolation based on their vector and probable places they might end up. I can’t guarantee we’d find anything.”
“But?” Sediryl asked, hearing it in the D-per’s voice.
Maia materialized beside her, edges crisping into the Seersa shape: dark now, no glitter. “But I’m former Fleet. Retired, technically. And while I don’t have the security clearances I used to, I’m also not a flesh-and-blood personality. And too often, Fleet doesn’t do anywhere near enough protection of its databases from digital people. Mostly, I think, because they don’t want to.”
“Ah?”
“Because we’re still useful to them,” Maia said. “We might not enjoy working off our indentures, alet, but all of us recognize that we exist because the Alliance does. And protecting the Alliance against its enemies... that’s something all of us care about. Even if we weren’t feeling patriotic, we survive—we thrive and travel and learn and are capable of growing—because of the networks the Pelted have built. Because of the extravagance of the money that goes into increasing the storage capacity, speed, and robustness of those networks. Those of us who worked for Fleet often help out, now and then. Even those of us who haven’t... we slip information to useful people when we find it.”
“And you know aught that might help,” Sediryl said, the knots in her stomach beginning to ease as the prospect of action opened before her.
“I know what Fleet knows about pirate bases and activities,” Maia said. “And with some prodding, I can know what the Chatcaava know, if Uuvek can hack into that information.”
“We could go hunting,” Sediryl murmured.
“You have the ship,” Maia agreed.
“The Chatcaavan Queen... it was implicit that she expected rescue. And my cousin Jahir cannot go missing either, without our doing something to impede the plans of those who wish us ill. Yes?”
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