by Alec Saracen
“That was the argument I made,” he said finally. “It was heard, considered, and overruled by a large majority. Can't say fairer than that. The prevailing mood was that the Coalition has forced our hand by invading the FPA. We're putting Liberators on the ground on every world we can. The need for numbers was judged to be more pressing than the need for you and your fellow Grade Eights to be eased into things. I think it was the wrong decision, but it's no longer up for debate. Don't you worry, you won't be denied your chance for field deployment.”
Grey Hawk fought back a flash of anger at his lack of faith in her. “You were younger than me when you first went into the field,” she said, calling up Black Horse's limited public file in a corner of her vision. “I'm twenty-one. You were twenty. And I've been in training for five years, but you only had two and a half. And–”
“And?” Black Horse said mildly. Grey Hawk bit her tongue. She'd been this close to saying 'and I'm better than you were'.
To Black Horse.
She mentally kicked herself. It was true, she was better than him, but she shouldn't even have considered saying it.
“And I'm needed right now,” she said instead.
“All of that's true,” Black Horse said. She couldn't shake the feeling that he'd heard the things she'd left unsaid. “I know exactly how you feel, kid, I've been there myself. Believe me when I say that I was not ready, and neither are you.”
Someone hurried past behind them, and Black Horse waited until they were out of earshot before continuing.
“I've read some of your essays,” he said. “You have a keen political mind. A little dogmatic, sure, but the world has a way of softening those edges. Your thesis last year was particularly good. Steps Towards Sunlit Meadows: A Synthesis of Traditional Yustridite Thought and the Carte-Serovicite Perspective on Yustrid's Third Primary Principle, yes?”
He was reading that from her file, Grey Hawk knew, but the thought that the four-hundred-page behemoth she'd slaved over for two months had been read by Black Horse himself filled her with equal amounts of pride and horror.
“That's right,” she said, in tones even she could tell were slightly strangled.
“I can't say I fully agree with your conclusions,” Black Horse said, “but I don't have to. I have to say, I lean towards Yustrid. Carte-Serovic was a great thinker, of course,” he said quickly, as if Grey Hawk would jump to the ridiculous conclusion that anyone in Liberation thought otherwise, “though too … absolutist, let's say, for my tastes. Yustrid's great insight was that compatibility of purity and compromise. We sit here, enjoying our liberated society, all while our shared wealth is sustained by selling Plenty's food, Raccal's rekenon, and Borivicek's heavy metals to the same governments that Liberation exists to oppose. How can we justify our generosity to ourselves when billions live under the yoke? How can we stomach selling vital resources to our ideological enemies?”
“'The true revolutionary must participate in the hated system to overthrow it,'” Grey Hawk quoted.
“'But she must not allow her ideals to be corrupted,'” Black Horse finished. He was quoting from a different translation, Grey Hawk noticed. “Thorny one, isn't it? Yustrid herself knew it was a difficult line to walk. Impossible, some would say. We can only do our best. It's a messy world we live in. There's no way to stay clean.”
“We can try,” Grey Hawk said.
“Carte-Serovic was an academic,” Black Horse replied. “He never took up arms for Liberation. He was brilliant all the same, unmatched as a theorist – but he was just that: a theorist, not a practitioner. They must have shown you Yustrid's rifle in the War Museum when you were at school, right?” Grey Hawk nodded, remembering the ordinariness of it. Apart from Yustrid's initials carved roughly into the stock, nothing distinguished it from any other assault rifle of the period. That had disappointed her at thirteen, but now it seemed inspiring. “Carte-Serovic was probably a better thinker than Yustrid,” Black Horse continued. “A better writer, definitely. But all his talk about purity, about ideals above all else, about the dangers of the Third Primary Principle, he never fought on the front lines for Liberation. If he had, he would have seen the brilliance – the necessity – of Yustrid's way. I've seen it.” He looked at her with a strange sadness in his eyes. “And you will too. You'll have to make compromises of your own. Sometimes, it'll seem like you're losing sight of why you're there.”
“I will never lose my way,” Grey Hawk said, unable to hide the defiance. “Never.”
Black Horse chuckled. “I like your spirit. I hope you prove me wrong, I truly do. I'd like nothing better. But please believe me when I say that you are not prepared for field ops. If you go in thinking you're invincible and infallible, well, you're going to learn pretty damn quick that you're neither. Your ideals will be challenged. Your willpower will be tested. The way seems clear to you now, but I promise you, it's so, so easy to lose sight of it.”
Grey Hawk said nothing. It was obvious that Black Horse had made his mind up, and it was up to her to prove him wrong. Half a dozen objections and accusations that Black Horse was projecting his own failings onto her rose up and died in her throat, each one just barely choked back. She was sure it was good advice, in a way, but it felt so condescending, so patronising.
Yes, some Liberators lost their way. It was inevitable. Black Shark, the only other surviving Grade One, had left Liberation long ago. Dozens more had abandoned the cause over the years. Some came back for their original bodies – though that was never an option for Grades One and Two. The worst of them turned against Liberation. The existence of specialist Liberators tasked with hunting their renegade comrades was an open secret.
But she knew that wouldn't happen to her. She had lived on Plenty all her life, born in a reproduction facility and raised by communal caregivers, dreaming of doing her part for the cause. She had volunteered for the Liberator program on her first day of eligibility. She had studied obsessively for the tests which determined suitability, never letting her eyes waver from the goal.
They had accepted her. They had sliced away her body of flesh and blood and replaced it with the most advanced cybernetics in the galaxy, and now at last they were letting her put them to good use. She wouldn't fail. She couldn't fail. And no matter what he said, no matter who he was, Black Horse wouldn't convince her otherwise.
“All right,” Black Horse said eventually, and headed off down the skybridge. “Can't say I didn't try.”
They took an elevator up to the 204th floor on the other side and walked down a wide, deserted corridor. Ever since the first data runner had brought word of the Coalition-Alliance war to Plenty, Val Yustrid had seemed very empty. A global referendum had passed overwhelmingly the day after the news broke, suggesting working for an extra hour per day and volunteering for extra duties in the name of the cause. It wasn't binding, of course. Referendums on Liberation very rarely were – but that didn't stop people from following them.
“In here,” Black Horse said, indicating a nondescript door halfway down the corridor. They stepped through into a light, airy office.
Three Liberators – Grey Hawk could tell immediately from the uncloaked energy signatures radiating out from their bodies, visible as faint electromagnetic coronas – were there already.
One, a Qienchuan woman with her hair in a short bob, stood at the floor-length window, dressed in a smartsuit configured into a jacket and skirt. The other two were both dark-skinned men, one much darker than the other. The lighter one was shaven-headed, and the darker man had coloured his short hair ash-blond. They occupied two curved green chairs, both wearing smartsuits. The lighter man's was configured to look like jeans and a muted orange shirt, while the darker man's was a garish green-and-white chequered shirt and pale yellow shorts. All three of them turned to look at Grey Hawk as she followed Black Horse into the room. Instantly, she felt that she wasn't entirely welcome.
“I'll make the introductions,” Black Horse said, clapping his hands together
cheerfully. He pointed to the man with the idiosyncratic dress sense. “Blue Wasp.” Then to the other man: “Blue Bull.” Finally, to the woman: “Red Wolf.” He turned to Grey Hawk and smiled. “And this is Grey Hawk.”
“Hi,” Grey Hawk said, after a pause that was slightly too long.
“Grey?” Red Wolf said. She looked at Grey Hawk with piercing eyes. “You're a Grade Eight?”
“That's right,” Grey Hawk said cautiously. Red Wolf was a Grade Six, of course, which gave her seniority and probably first-among-equals status. Blue Wasp and Blue Bull were Grade Sevens.
Red Wolf looked at Black Horse and shook her head. “This is a bad idea,” she said.
Grey Hawk's heart sank. The Grade Six had looked at her like she was rotten fruit.
“There's no point worrying about that now,” Black Horse said smoothly. “You are, of course, able to refuse the suggested deployment, if your concerns are that grave.”
“No,” Red Wolf said instantly.
“Well, then!” Black Horse said, and clapped his hands again. He used joviality as a cudgel. “Shall we begin?”
“You're throwing Grade Eights in the field already?” Blue Bull said, in a rapid High Summer accent. “They're still children.”
Grey Hawk bristled.
“Grey Hawk has–” Black Horse began.
“I can speak for myself,” Grey Hawk snapped. Black Horse's mouth stayed open for a moment, then promptly closed. His eyes invited her to say her piece. She glared at Blue Bull. “Listen, asshole,” she almost said, but managed to keep that part internal. “I passed the same tests you did, and with higher scores across the board. I have been training for this for years. You don't get to decide when I'm ready. I do. And I'm ready.”
Nobody said anything, and Grey Hawk was attacked by a sudden fear that she'd completely alienated herself from her future squadmates already. The silence was broken by laughter.
“What's the matter with you?” Blue Bull said irritably. Blue Wasp was doubled over, drumming his palms on his knees in glee.
“That's exactly what you said!” Blue Wasp gasped. “Remember? When we were first attached to Green Dragon? You said you'd smashed all his sim records! And he gave you this look, you know how he used to, like–” Blue Wasp pulled an exaggerated, grotesque frown, and laughed again. “I swear, if you still pissed, you'd have wet your pants right there.”
“Fuck off,” Blue Bull said, but he was clearly suppressing a smile.
Blue Wasp turned to Grey Hawk, grinning. He had a very broad face with wide-spaced features, which made Grey Hawk feel like she was seeing him through an invisible fisheye lens. “Good to have you on board, kid. You Grade Eights as good as they say?”
Grey Hawk smiled back, relieved at his friendliness. “We're not bad.”
“They say you lot can survive damn near anything,” Red Wolf said, crossing over from the window. She looked at Grey Hawk appraisingly, as if she was seeing only the machinery and not the rest of her. “Good. You'll need that.” She glanced at Black Horse. “How many Grade Eights are being deployed?”
“I don't have that information,” Black Horse said.
“And you wouldn't tell us if you did,” Red Wolf said, rolling her eyes. “I know.”
Black Horse nodded. He seemed to be a very difficult man to offend. “I can tell you this: only those Liberators judged to be ready are offered field assignments.”
“Judged by whom?”
“And that I can't tell you. Do you want to hear the assignment?”
Red Wolf threw up her hands in frustration. “Fine. Tell us, then. But this is a bad idea.”
Grey Hawk dug artificial nails into artificial palms and said nothing. She had a feeling that what she wanted to say to Red Wolf wouldn't help matters. If the Grade Six thought she would be a liability, she had another thing coming.
“All right,” Black Horse said, looking from face to face. The office – his office, Grey Hawk realised – was sparse and clean, with no visible personal effects but a small carving of dark wood on the desk, obviously handmade. It was, of course, a horse. She wondered if it was a gift, or something he'd whittled himself. “You all know how this works.”
Blue Bull jerked his head at Grey Hawk. “She doesn't.”
“I do,” Grey Hawk said sharply. And he knew she did, the asshole.
“She does know,” Black Horse said. “Regardless. This is an official offer. By remaining in this room, you enter a contract with Liberation, and you will be sent into the field. Anyone want to leave?”
His eyes settled on Grey Hawk's, and she gazed back defiantly. Nobody moved an inch.
“I thought not,” Black Horse said. “Congratulations. You're going to Tor.”
4
Zhai remembered one three-day sleepless stretch as an undergraduate at Alleker which had yielded the entire final (and only) draft of his 25,000-word thesis. He'd slept for thirty hours afterwards, but staying awake for days on end had always seemed eminently possible. Now, at 0550, after three hours of patchy sleep, he couldn't believe he'd even lasted half that long.
Sipping coffee strong enough to degrade steel, he blearily watched the autoloaders beyond the docking bay window stack their crates of equipment into the ship's hold. They reminded him of some mechanical block-arranging puzzle. Their ship, nestled like a gigantic ball bearing in its docking cradle in the hangar below, was surprisingly large, fully forty metres across. The journey to Tor would take them more than a week in such an ungainly ship, and that was assuming the crew rotated to keep them running 'overnight' rather than dropping back into realspace to sleep.
“Why couldn't we just get a smaller ship and not have to get up so bloody early?” Zhai muttered to Harod.
Harod, who seemed to treat sleep as optional, shrugged. He had a box of chopped fruit from some trendy takeaway place on his lap, which he was methodically skewering and eating one piece at a time with a cocktail stick. “Maybe Sekkanen's making sure you're up for the job. Literally.”
Zhai grunted. “Very funny. Twins, I'm not built for this.”
“What are you built for, then? Sitting on your fat ass all day?”
“Something like that.” Zhai finished his coffee and glared at the dregs. “Sam! I need more coffee. Stronger this time.”
“He's not here,” Ceq said. She was lounging across several chairs on the other side of the private boarding lounge. “You sent him to meet Tetaine.”
“Well, why isn't he back yet?” Zhai grumbled. “Fuck.”
Harod smirked. “Silver-tongued rhetor Zhai Gumeigo astounds the audience with his extraordinary eloquence.”
“Fuck you too, Harod. I think I still have the authority to leave you behind.”
“Ah, you'd miss me too much.” Harod speared a whole strawberry and ate it with unnecessary salaciousness. Zhai suppressed a smile. Every now and again, something reminded Zhai of the ebullient young woman Harod had been all those decades ago. “Who would you have to complain to? Sam would just agree with everything you said, Ceq wouldn't give a shit... who else is coming, by the way?”
As if on cue, the door slid open and Sam bustled in like only he could, with Tetaine and Fleischer in tow. Fleischer, her ponytail stuffed under a dark Alleker hooded sweatshirt, looked thoroughly fed up with the world. Tetaine, halfway through a glazed pastry, just looked thoroughly fed.
“And Lho?” Zhai said, turning away from the hangar windows.
Sam paused for a moment to catch his breath. “On her way now. Space elevator had delays for passengers. Next car up.”
“Nice to see you too, boss,” Tetaine said, his Bellesch accent drawing the 'o' of 'boss' out into a drawled 'aw'.
Zhai sighed and turned to him and Fleischer. “Sorry. Thank you for agreeing to come on such short notice. You found out five minutes after I did.”
Tetaine chuckled. “'Agreeing'? The way Sam put it, it was more 'get on the ship or die'.” He was even fatter than Zhai, though far larger in volume – he was the
tallest person in the room, which said a great deal considering the presence of Ceq, Sam, and Harod.
Why was everyone who worked for him a giant? He needed new legs.
Zhai smiled crookedly. “Well, I wanted you all quite badly. We're running a skeleton crew here. I need people who can juggle about eight thousand balls at once.”
Tetaine raised his hands and wiggled his fingers. They looked like bulging, overcooked sausages. “Say no more. Safe hands here.”
“Large hands, at the very least,” Harod said.
Across the room, Fleischer sat down on Ceq's outstretched legs – or at least she would have done if Ceq, her eyes still closed, hadn't whisked them out of the way at the last second, allowing Fleischer access to the sofa. She looked at Zhai across the room, started to say something, and interrupted herself with a yawn.
“If you want the best,” she said after a moment, “give us more notice. I only got the bare essentials fabbed in time.”
Zhai nodded, knowing full well that Fleischer's definition of the 'bare essentials' probably included a ten-metre satellite dish, an SSA-grade sensor array, an army's worth of protective nanosuits, and a couple of helicopters. “We'll have to make do. Get a fabricator on Tor if you need one. How are your little friends?”
Fleischer summoned a pin-sharp holo display from her watch and idly flicked through it. “I got modules for admin, comms, finance, logistics, media, strategy... can't do much without data, though.” Her finger hovered over the finance module, rendered as a glowing sphere overflowing with currency symbols, and she frowned. “You weren't kidding. We really can afford a fabricator. Sure they meant this many zeroes?”
Harod coughed. “There's a reason for that,” he said. “When things went really bad between us and the Alliance thirty years ago, all diplomatic ties were severed. With prejudice. Things thawed out a little, but the embassies never reopened on either side. In fact, they tore ours down on Tor and replaced it with some kind of government building. Which is the Alliance's answer to everything.”