by Alec Saracen
She’d studied Yustrid’s theories of clear-eyed self-analysis, but there was no answering that one.
At last, Zhai's voice returned. “You're right,” he said. “We should meet. Here are my terms. You come to the embassy, alone and unarmed – as far as Liberators can be unarmed. My staff are convinced you've got, I don’t know, nuclear toes or something. They’ll be present. There will be guns trained on you at all times. Do you accept?”
It was no worse than Grey Hawk had expected. She'd already stored her weapons in a camouflaged bag on the rooftop in anticipation of that condition. Even unarmed and at gunpoint, she could probably kill everyone in the embassy if she had to.
‘Probably’. It was a treacherous word.
“I accept,” she said.
Two minutes later, she stood at the front door. A gleaming brass plaque on the wall read EMBASSY OF THE COALITION FOR THE DEFENCE OF HUMANKIND. There were still plaster shavings on the floor from when it had been screwed in.
Before she could find a bell or knock, the door swung inwards. True to Zhai's word, there were three guns in her face. She smiled at the Coalition security androids behind the sights. They didn't smile back.
Between two androids stood hulking a slab of meat with an incongruous human face. He was looking at her like she might explode without warning – which she could, in fairness. She knew that Liberators had acquired legendary status among soldiers and special operatives throughout the galaxy, but it was one thing to know it and another to be treated like the Red One in human form.
He gestured with his head for her to come inside. She did, which allowed two more guns to be pointed at her. More androids. Actual security personnel was clearly at a premium.
The embassy was clearly unfinished. The décor was chaotic but functional. There was nothing decorative in the large room she emerged into bar the undersized carpet. Everything else had an obvious purpose, a hodgepodge of desks, chairs, sofas, and tables placed for convenience, not aesthetics.
Floor-length windows shimmered with a faint distortion that Grey Hawk immediately recognised as the result of thick layers of bulletproofing sheets. Security was clearly a concern. It hadn't escaped her notice that the furniture nearest the front door had been carefully organised by someone to provide cover for any potential defenders in a firefight.
Ambassador Zhai stood in the middle of the room, dressed in a three-piece navy suit. He was extremely fat, which when combined with his diminutive height should have made him look ridiculous, as spherical as a V-ship. Instead, it somehow gave him an air of gravitas. His silver hair, swept back into a ponytail, and his neatly trimmed beard helped, but to Grey Hawk it seemed that Zhai was saved by his eyes, which gazed sternly from a face padded yet not bloated by his obesity. It was a carefully crafted image, and an effective one.
She recognised two other people in the room. One, the tall, slender man peering owlishly over Zhai's shoulder, was Harod Nouridh-Salter. The other, a solidly built woman with a pistol drawn – but, refreshingly, not yet aimed at Grey Hawk – was the bodyguard who had saved Zhai's life yesterday. As Grey Hawk surveyed the room, their eyes met briefly, and Grey Hawk was struck by the undisguised, fiercely protective glare the bodyguard gave her. Despite her dark skin, her eyes were bright blue.
She was one to watch, not least because her pre-emptive flying tackle on Zhai implied formidable V-sight. Nouridh-Salter's presence was a surprise. Grey Hawk hadn't expected more than one high-level Coalition politico. At least it meant that she had a spare if something unpleasant happened to Zhai.
A handful of others dotted the room: a pale, lanky young man peering anxiously out from under a curly fringe, a brown-skinned man who was enormous in every dimension, a white woman on the couch wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a distracted frown. Aside from the mountainous military man who'd greeted her, that was it. Grey Hawk glanced through them all, recording their faces just in case they turned out to be relevant, but by their number and the state of the embassy, she judged that they were a skeleton support staff rather than significant players in their own right. It was Zhai she had to worry about.
“I always wondered how long it would be before Liberation took an interest in my life,” Zhai said. “I have to say, I expected it to be, well, the wrong kind of interest, let's say. Though Roshi Comet would have me believe that it was you behind yesterday's – excitement.”
“And do you believe him?” Grey Hawk said.
There were heavy purple bags under Zhai's eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept in a long time. “No,” he said, after a moment. “I saw the footage. You were chasing that drone down. I don't know why, but you were.”
Grey Hawk decided that honesty was the best policy. She didn't trust herself to lie well enough to fool Zhai, who had a lifetime's experience of seeing through them – and telling them – if his file was anything to go by. “You know why we're here.”
“Oh, certainly,” Zhai said, smiling thinly. “You liberate. The clue's in the name. Whatever you're doing, it's in the name of your little galactic revolution. Do we have a date for that yet, by the way? It's been just around the corner for eighty years.”
His tone wasn't as cruel as it could have been, though Grey Hawk still felt a hot pang of anger lance up from stomach to throat. She suppressed it. It was getting easier to do that.
“We'll let you know,” she said instead.
Zhai snorted. “Twins. You know, I always thought that they surgically extracted the sense of humour when they turned people into Liberators.”
Grey Hawk smiled back. “New model. Lots of upgrades.” Emboldened by the surprisingly civil conversation, she took a risk. “My name is Grey Hawk.”
The bodyguard nudged Zhai with a shoulder. “Grey means eighth generation. The latest.”
Zhai nodded. “And what does Hawk mean?”
“It's a kind of bird.”
The ambassador glanced over his shoulder, exasperated. His bodyguard was deadpan.
“I'm going to reach into my pocket,” Grey Hawk said, “and take out the computer core.” She looked back at the bevy of armed androids. There were seven guns trained on her now. “Which,” she went on, “I now realise looks kind of like a grenade.”
“Go ahead,” Zhai said. “Don't shoot her, captain, or you're next.”
“As you say, Ambassador.”
Deliberately slowing her movements to normal human speed, Grey Hawk withdrew the core and, testing a theory, threw it quite hard at the bodyguard. She plucked it out of the air with one hand without blinking, then tossed it on to the woman in the hooded sweatshirt. Her eyes never once left Grey Hawk.
“It's been remotely wiped,” Grey Hawk said, as the core's new owner placed it on the table and called up a ream of complex interfaces on her watch. “There's no actual data left, just a few scrambled strings and some foundational code. But if you look at the way it was wiped, you can identify similarities with other cores from similar drones. We have thousands of them on file. This matches one.” She paused a moment, less for effect than to work out what she was going to say after she dropped her bombshell. “It's Coalition-made.”
The room absorbed the news in silence. Grey Hawk imagined the furious calculations going on inside their heads. They would accuse her of lying, of a flagrant attempt to sow discord, and then they would analyse the core for themselves and see that she was telling the truth–
“I fucking told you so,” Nouridh-Salter said.
Zhai shrugged. “You did.”
“No doubt now. It's Peck.”
“Agreed.”
Grey Hawk glanced from one to the other, baffled. The news that Zhai had been targeted by his own government's drone had barely affected the mood.
“Ambassador,” she said cautiously, to make sure that there had been no understanding, “there is very strong evidence that the attempt on your life was carried out by Coalition agents.”
Zhai nodded. “I know. You've confirmed our suspicions in that regard.”
>
You already knew? Grey Hawk very nearly asked, but she managed to swallow the question at the last second.
“Yeah, this is ours,” the woman scanning the core said. “Coalition hardware, no doubt about it.”
The ambassador was watching her with an inscrutable expression. Grey Hawk felt like she was being slotted into some vast clockwork machine inside his mind, repurposed as just one of millions of tiny components. He just had to decide where she fitted in his system.
The feeling repulsed her. She was a Liberator. Liberators didn't fit into people's systems. They broke them.
“Grey Hawk,” Zhai said, after a lengthy pause, “I wonder if you'd like to join me in my office to talk privately.” Nouridh-Salter and the bodyguard both began to protest, and Zhai held up a hand for silence. “My deputy and my bodyguard will join us.”
“Ambassador, I have to–” the captain began, and Zhai's patience visibly snapped.
“You have to do nothing but follow orders, captain,” he said sharply. “If the Liberator kills me, you have permission to say 'I told you so' to my dead body.” He looked at Grey Hawk. “Or you can, of course, walk away now.”
“No,” Grey Hawk said. She had come this far. “Let's talk.”
The four of them filed into Zhai's office, which was better-appointed than the rest of the embassy. .
The bodyguard was the last through the door, which she closed with a click before taking up a position in the corner, her pistol still drawn. Whenever Grey Hawk caught her eye, a fresh wave of hostility came crashing her way. Zhai sat behind his desk. Nouridh-Salter sat on it, his spindly legs crossed.
Zhai took a good few seconds getting comfortable before his attention returned to her. “I always envied Liberation,” he said. “You're all so damn certain of everything. You know exactly how the world works. You know exactly what the solution to any problem is. You know best for everyone. It must make life so easy for you. Twins, I wish I was the same.”
“You were, once,” Nouridh-Salter murmured.
“And so were you.” Zhai was looking at her, but he wasn't seeing her. “We really did think we had all the answers. Funny, how they all seem to slip through your fingers.” He trailed off, then seemed to snap back to the here and now. His eyes cleared, and he looked up at Grey Hawk. “That's why you start so young, isn't it? Why every Liberator I've ever seen is under thirty? You can still look at the world and see binaries. Us and them, good and evil.” He waved a hand. “Free and enslaved. You can speak the language of Yustrid.”
“Anyone can speak the language of Yustrid,” Grey Hawk said.
“I can't,” Zhai said. “Not any more. All those nice clear distinctions– I don't see them now. It's all blurring into one.”
Disgust and pity welled up in Grey Hawk in equal measure. “And that's something to be proud of?” she said, with more acid in her voice than she'd expected. “Letting the world wear you down until it blinds you?”
“I'm not proud,” Zhai said. He folded his hands on the desk and sighed heavily. “I wasn't lying when I said I envied you, Liberator. That you can call yourself that – 'Liberator' – without doing it ironically or disingenuously... you don't know how valuable that is. You have the chance to live a brief, meaningful life, and to die for your cause without ever losing your certainty that you're doing the right thing. That's a precious, precious blessing. But that's the curse, too, isn't it? You die young and pure, or you grow old and corrupt.” He smiled faintly. “Like me.”
Grey Hawk hesitated. Whatever game Zhai was playing, it was one where she had about half the rulebook in a language she barely understood. The only response she could think of was not to play at all and speak as honestly as possible, but the problem was that Zhai seemed to be doing the same thing. Had that all been a pack of lies, intended to manipulate her, or had it been as truthful as it sounded? And even if it was true, surely it was still part of some agenda. If she refused to play along, was she breaking free from the game or just blundering deeper into it?
Fuck it, she decided. Let him do what he likes. I know what I need.
“If you think I'm a mindless fanatic,” she said, “why am I here? Why am I helping you?”
“She's got you there,” Nouridh-Salter said to Zhai, grinning.
Zhai shook his head. “Read your Yustrid, Harod. The Third Primary Principle.”
“Remind me.”
“You wrote essays on this at Alleker. I let you borrow my notes for the exam!”
“Forty years ago.”
“I suppose you were probably drunk, or high, or asleep in some girl's bed, or any combination of the above,” Zhai said. Grey Hawk had the uncomfortable feeling that she was poking at the still-hot embers of an argument that had smouldered for decades. “Did you know that the original Alleker College on Home used to make its graduates come back every ten years and sit an exam to prove they still deserved their degree?”
“Bullshit.”
“I'm afraid not. You'd have been lost on Home.”
“Well, thank goodness for the Red One. It really did me a solid there.”
Zhai shot him a filthy look. “Yustrid's Third Primary Principle. More or less, it's 'don't be afraid to get your hands dirty, as long as you don't stain them forever'. Make compromises and get things done, or sit on the sidelines and waste your time bickering about ideological purity. Which, I dare say, is why you're here?” he said to Grey Hawk.
“Cards on the table, Ambassador,” Grey Hawk said. “Our analysis of the political situation is that you still represent the interests of the Consolidationist faction, which prefers minimal Coalition expansion. Your mission is to keep Tor independent and drive it away from the Coalition. Am I right?”
“For the purposes of our discussion,” Zhai began, then paused and visibly reconsidered. “Oh, to hell with it. Yes. You're right.”
Nouridh-Salter glanced sideways at his colleague. Grey Hawk sensed that Zhai was not quite himself, and wondered whether or not that was playing to her advantage.
“And this person, Peck, who you mentioned,” she said. “Coalition as well? Developist? Revanchist?”
“Devvie, probably,” Zhai said. “Could be Revvie, I suppose. She's here on Tor with a small team of agents. And yes, she's the one who tried to kill me. I'm here because an old friend cashed in a lot of favours. The First Circle wanted someone to guide Tor into the fold. They got me instead.” An ironic smile crept onto his lips. “Lucky me.”
“Then right now, we're on the same side,” Grey Hawk said. “We also favour Torian independence and a transition to democratic government.”
“And then a slow slide into communism,” Nouridh-Salter said.
Grey Hawk shrugged. “That's the dream, but we'll settle for independence and democracy. Like I said: right now, we're on the same side. We have common enemies and common goals.”
Zhai raised his head, which he'd been resting in his hands. “What exactly are you proposing?”
Grey Hawk smiled, hoping it would come across as justified confidence. “Let's call it a coalition, Ambassador. I want you alive. You want you alive. And right now, you don't have much in the way of security resources.”
“No,” the bodyguard said suddenly. “Boss, this is the worst idea I've ever heard.”
“Your concern is noted, Ceq,” Zhai said.
“I'm serious.” Ceq was making no attempt to hide her agitation. “Listen to me. I can't guarantee your safety with a Liberator around. If she decides she wants you dead, you're going to die. I won't be able to save you.”
“The same applies to you,” Grey Hawk said quietly. “You could kill him if you wanted to.”
“Fuck you, Liberator,” Ceq snarled. “I've earned his trust.”
Grey Hawk bristled. “I walked in here unarmed, alone, with vital information–”
Ceq's grip on her pistol tightened visibly. “And you could still kill us all.”
“Enough!” Zhai said, slapping his palm on the desk. Grey Hawk cho
ked back her retort and stared as blandly as she could at Ceq, who was looking back with undisguised venom in her eyes. “Twins save me from military women! Ceq, I understand your concerns. Grey Hawk, I understand your position. All right?” He glared at each of them in turn. “All right.”
“I wasn't finished,” Grey Hawk said. Zhai closed his eyes and, rubbing his temple with one hand, gestured for her to go on with the other. “I'm not suggesting I join your staff. What I want is to help you stay safe. I can operate in ways that are impossible for anyone officially associated with you. I can act openly against the government, because that's what Liberation does. I can hunt down Peck without taking resources away from your security detail. And yes, I can accompany you physically if requested,” she said, jumping in before Ceq could object. The bodyguard shut her mouth and narrowed her eyes. “What I'm offering, Ambassador, is a free Liberator who can support and further your aims on Tor. If you don't trust me, don't tell me a damn thing. But I'm a Liberator, and that makes me predictable. As long as our goals remain the same – and ours will not change until Tor is an independent democracy – then you know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.”
She'd written the speech ahead of time in note form, and she was reading it off her HUD, hoping it sounded more or less spontaneous. Zhai listened to it with his eyes closed, so still he might have been a lifelike waxwork of himself, finally opening them once she had finished.
“I've got a question for you,” he said. “I may not agree with your principles, but I'm glad you have them. They're precious things. Guard them well. I appreciate that you're bargaining with the Red One at the moment, but you can't let me lead you astray.” He coughed into his hand, twice, and looked up at her with weary eyes. “Everything you say about cooperation, mutual enemies and mutual interests, common goals – I agree. It's rational. It makes sense. But all this time, I've been wondering – what do you honestly think of me, Liberator? What am I to you?”