Being senior in the field meant that, for this mission, all the Ori-Inu reported to her. The authorization meant she and the other Ori-Inu could scan all they wanted to anyone considered a significant person in the investigation, as long as they could justify it after the fact.
"War Chief, I want daily progress reports from you. L'owuro is to be the center point for the investigation. When the Ori-Inu arrive, find accommodations for them—either on your ship or commandeered space on the surface. The Ori-Inu are authorized to use Orisha priority."
"Understood."
"Yes, sir."
"War Chief Tobi, I want my Ori-Inu back. And I want to know why a gas that alters telepathy levels is being manufactured without my knowledge. If these wants are not satisfied, I will hold you personally responsible. You do not wish to disappoint me."
Once Isembi's visage faded from the holoviewer, Tobi glared at Folami. "Mind telling me when you were planning on sharing the information about the gas with me?"
"I only just found out before you summoned me here."
"I don't appreciate being sideswiped like that, Ori-Inu."
Feigning confusion, Folami asked, "What difference does it make? You were going to find out anyhow—this way I only had to explain it once."
Tobi started to speak, but Folami really didn't feel like being on the receiving end of his abuse any longer.
"It's going to take them some time to get themselves together on the surface, and I'd rather not interrupt the cleanup efforts after the mess we made. Besides, I want to give Orisha Hembadoon a chance to wake up so we don't repeat any of his work—and the other Ori-Inu won't be here until tomorrow. So I won't need any of your people until tomorrow at the earliest."
With that, Folami turned and left Tobi's presence.
Even as she departed, she was surprised at her own haughtiness. She was acting perfectly within her rights as an Ori-Inu. Not only didn't she report to Tobi, but he was pretty much her chauffeur when he wasn't being combat support. Still, she'd never been so dismissive of a cavalry commander before.
I have got to find out what that gas was.
Folami was still exhausted from the fight against the Eso, so she headed straight to her own cabin.
Turning the corner, she felt a familiar set of thoughts, and then saw the face that went with them. Unlike the other personnel on board, this one didn't go out of his way to avoid her. Instead, the smiling face and near-bald head of Adejola met her head-on.
"Folami! How are you? Feeling better after your workout with the Eso?"
Chuckling, Folami said, "More than a workout, but yeah, I'm fine. I was just going to study my eyelids for a while."
She could feel his disappointment in that, which confused her. "That's too bad," he said, words mirroring thoughts.
"Why?"
"Well, I was all set to invite you to join me for dinner."
Folami's confusion only deepened. "Why would you want to do that?"
Adejola laughed. "Why wouldn't I? You're a beautiful woman, an interesting conversationalist, and I want to get to know you better. Inviting you to dinner seems to me like the obvious next step."
"I'm Ori-Inu," she said slowly.
"Yeah, so?"
Folami blinked. Intellectually, she knew that people who were interested in each other dined together. But nobody had ever been interested in her enough to ask—or if they were, they were too intimidated to ask. Generally, when she shared her meals with anyone, it was either other Ori-Inu or a cavalry company she was attached to that had limited mess facilities. A one-on-one dinner was simply out of her range of experiences.
That she remembered, anyhow. Though whatever new memories that gas on Oshun had squeezed forward didn't seem to include anything like this.
A term did suddenly leap into her brain: date. Adejola was asking her out on a date.
"Look," Adejola said, "every time I go out with a woman, there's always a certain—well, frustration with her inability to get what I'm thinking. I figure with you, that won't be an issue."
At that, Folami barked out a laugh. "I don't know if I should mix business with pleasure."
That got Adejola to laugh, and she realized that he had done so in her presence twice. It was exceedingly rare to find a flatbrain who laughed with her.
Another thought came to her, and that was the one that convinced her to say yes: If Tobi found out, he'd be furious.
"All right," Folami said. "Shall we proceed to the mess hall, Cavalry Chief?"
"I was hoping for something more private. Maybe your quarters—this way you're on safe ground."
That brought Folami up short. There was no shortage of cavalry on this vessel of both sexes whose dream was to be inside Folami's quarters, and not to share a meal. But if Adejola had such a desire, he kept it tamped down fairly well.
And he was right, it was her own territory, so she could set the rules.
Plus, she was an Ori-Inu, and he was just a pilot. If he tried anything untoward, she'd be able to kill him without even trying very hard.
The dinner that Folami and Adejola shared was not the best—it was still prepared by the same chef who made all the mediocre meals on L'owuro—but it was still the finest Folami had had in a long time.
Adejola spent a lot of time talking about himself. "Believe it or not, I never wanted to be a pilot. Every other spacehopper I've ever met has been completely locked into that, that they just had to be a pilot, like it's a drug."
"But not you?" Folami asked.
Shaking his head, Adejola said, "Nope. I mean, I was always good at it. Me and some friends back home on Ife, we took flying lessons one year for fun. See, I grew up with four other friends, and one of them, Egba, was kind of the pack leader, y'know? She was one of the types who always wanted to fly. The other four of us kinda got sucked up into it with her."
"So you all took lessons?" Folami asked after sipping the awful wine that was all Tobi had allowed in the cargo hold. The war chief said that decision was based on the notion that the cavalry were less likely to show up on duty drunk if the only option was bad wine. In practice, the notion hadn't worked out so well. A cavalry who was determined to drink would take whatever was available. Knowing Tobi, Folami assumed that he figured if cavalry were going to get drunk, they were going to suffer for it by drinking vinegar.
"Yeah, and I was the only one who took to it. Poor Egba was a terrible pilot. No aptitude for it, and she had depth-perception issues."
Folami frowned. "She had a depth-perception problem and she wanted to fly?"
"We didn't know she had it, or we would've stopped her."
"How could she not know she had it?" Folami knew that there were those on the colony worlds who did not have access to even the most basic medical care, but that was rare on Ife itself, particularly with someone who could afford piloting lessons.
Adejola chuckled. "I said we didn't know, not that she didn't know."
Folami shook her head. "I will never understand that."
"Understand what?"
After sipping her wine, and almost choking it down, she replied. "Dangerous self-delusion. It's one thing to strive for something that's difficult, but to ignore something your body's incapable of… I just don't understand it."
"Well, as a telepath, you're a lot more aware of what your body can and can't do. Egba, she'd never needed depth-perception before. Not really."
"So she failed?"
"Never even made it that far—they wouldn't let her into the simulator once they scanned her. She got completely crazy over it and wanted to just turn around and leave. But the rest of us had already paid our fee, so we went on with the lessons." He sipped some wine also, then winced before continuing. "At the end of it all, she wasn't speaking to any of us because we 'betrayed' her, and I got a rating of fifteen."
While Folami had no idea what that rating meant, she could tell from the manner in which Adejola said it and from the pride in his thoughts that his fifteen rating was akin to her being a t
enth-level telepath. "So you pursued it?"
"Honestly, I was seventeen, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and suddenly I found something I was good at. Plus, my other friends, even though they went through with what they paid for, eventually took Egba's side. They all thought I betrayed their trust by signing up for a formal piloting school."
"That's madness!"
Adejola shrugged. "Way I see it, if they were willing to end the friendship over that—if Egba's being happy was more important than my being happy—then it wasn't a friendship worth salvaging."
"So you joined the cavalry?"
"Not exactly—I did private jobs, at first. But this was back before the war, and a lot of my clients were Oyo. Once Yemoja blew up, work was harder to come by, so I let myself be recruited by the Cavalry."
Folami smiled. "I can imagine." But something nagged at the back of her mind. When he'd referred to Yemoja blowing up, Folami had felt her heart skip a beat. It made no sense—unless, perhaps, she'd been to Yemoja before its destruction?
The conversation went on from there, and by the time they got to dessert—a near-tasteless cocoa cake—Folami asked the question that had been on her mind since Adejola had first talked to her on the flight deck.
"Cavalry Chief, why did you ask me on this date?"
Another laugh. Folami decided she liked his laugh. "I'll tell you, but you have to agree to call me Adejola."
She smiled. "Okay, Adejola, why did you ask me—"
"Because I wanted to get to know you. Everyone treats you like a weapon or an object, and I don't think that's fair. I guess I got used to that from when I was working commissions. Nobody paid any attention to me, I was just a part of the machinery."
"And you didn't like that feeling, I take it?"
"No." Adejola leaned forward. "I see you being treated the same way, and I don't like it. You're a person, no more a part of the machinery than I was. I figured you should be treated like one."
Folami popped the last of the awful cake into her mouth, looked at Adejola, and smiled, saying, "Thank you for that, Adejola."
And she meant it. The notion of being treated like other people was as completely outside her range of previous experience as a date was, and she found that she liked both a great deal.
FIVE
Oshun
Abameta was the oldest active Ori-Inu. He took considerable pride in this accomplishment, as being an Ori-Inu wasn't a profession that lent itself to longevity.
But no matter how many missions he went on—and he'd been on so many he'd long since lost count—he always managed to survive.
Now he was pushing forty. While most humans would consider this only a third of the way through their lives, most Ori-Inu didn't even see their thirtieth birthdays.
He wasn't sure what it was he had that the other Ori-Inu didn't. He was a sixth-level—not the most powerful, nor the weakest telepath in the bunch—he was a perfectly good fighter, and had decent aim with his rifle. Other Ori-Inu, with far more skill or higher ratings had died around him.
The call to divert to Oshun had come while he was on his way back to Ife for a new assignment. He'd hired a civilian transport to take him home, so he simply instructed the shipmaster to change course.
Abameta had heard about the infamous Folami, but had assumed it all to be hyperbole and rumor. Certainly, she couldn't have been as beautiful as everyone said she was. In Abameta's experience, most Ori-Inu were like him: craggy, weathered, scarred, and cynical.
As ordered, he reported to L'owuro, heading straight for the vessel's wardroom once the civilian transport dropped him off. The other eleven Ori-Inu were already present, and they were simply awaiting the mission's leader.
After Abameta had been sitting for ten minutes, the doors to the wardroom parted, and a strikingly tall woman entered.
To his shock, Abameta discovered that Folami was just what everyone said she was. Beyond her impressive height, she had a toned, hourglass figure, which was complimented by her standard-issue red-and-black body armor. That, at least, was to be expected, as one didn't last long as an Ori-Inu without being in near-perfect shape. Her hair was cut short, but not all the way to the scalp. Amazingly, despite the fact that she'd been on dozens of missions, several of which she'd been the only survivor of, her face was unblemished.
Something else the rumor mill missed was her intelligent obsidian eyes.
Folami took her seat at the head of the wardroom table and activated a holograph in the table's center. It showed an image of a fiery wreckage of what had once been an industrial complex of some sort.
"This is the mission," Folami said. "A half-dozen of our fellow Ori-Inu have gone missing over the past few months. The latest was Abeje. When Orisha Hembadoon was sent to investigate, this Kaduna Mining Corporate refinery that you see here was destroyed. The Orisha is still unconscious in the L'owuro infirmary. The refinery explosion released an as-yet-unidentified gas into the atmosphere. Oyo rebels have claimed responsibility, and did attack Kaduna Township upon our arrival, which tracks with what we downloaded from the Orisha's robe computer. The Oyo spy that Abeje was tracking was the one who blew the place up.
"Your missions are to patrol the hospitals, the area around the refinery, and Kaduna Station. We have authority to fully scan anyone we consider a significant person in this investigation. Be careful—" Those intense black eyes suddenly felt as if they were boring right into Abameta's head. "—because you will be asked to justify any scans in your after-action reports."
Abameta noted several of the other Ori-Inu squirming in their seats. He just smiled. Such authorizations used to be more common, but Isembi had decided recently to at least create the illusion of benevolence by tightening the restrictions on deep scans. Abameta had been on one mission a year ago where a fellow Ori-Inu had scanned a civilian bystander in order to find a particular location. Said bystander found out about it and reported the Ori-Inu in question. That Ori-Inu's name had been absent from the active roster ever since.
Folami finished: "Your specific areas of investigation have been uploaded to your armor computers. Send me daily reports, please, as I'm reporting straight to the Oba on this one."
More murmurs around the table, but Abameta's voice wasn't among them. If it was worth dragging a dozen Ori-Inu to a single planet and if it involved an unknown gas produced by a refinery, it had to be big.
In fact, Abameta was pretty sure that the gas was of far greater import than the missing Ori-Inu. While Oba Isembi made a public fuss about how important each of his special agents was, Abameta had been at this far too long to believe that. They were all interchangeable parts, all lines in the program code of Isembi's master plan.
A dropship took ten of the Ori-Inu to Oshun's surface. Folami remained on board L'owuro to coordinate, while the remaining two went to Kaduna Station to see if anyone knew anything about a ship that had taken the missing Ori-Inu.
The Ori-Inu seated next to Abameta on the dropship was a tall, gangly boy who wouldn't stop talking.
"This is so hyped! This is what it's all about, am I right, huh, am I?"
Abameta scowled at the child. "Being an Ori-Inu is all about doing what you're told."
"Well, yeah, sure it is, but I mean, come on, this—finding a lost Ori-Inu, solving a mystery, scanning folks..."
"You ever scanned anyone, child?" Abameta asked. He tried to keep the pity out of his voice, but didn't succeed very well to his own ears.
"Well, I mean, in training, but... Well, what's the hype, anyhow? I mean, so we read a couple folks more than normal, right?"
Abameta shook his head. "The human mind is a swamp, child. It's dirty and muck-encrusted, filled with all kinds of garbage that you do not see coming, and when you're done, it's damn near impossible to get it off you. And this mission? We have to do it over and over again. Think about everything that a person has seen, heard, experienced. Then you have to sift through all of that to see if there's anything that's actually germa
ne to the mission. And then you have to put it out of your mind—which you cannot do completely—and move on to the next person."
The boy just stared at Abameta for a few seconds.
Then he shook his head. "Maybe for an old man like you, but me? I can handle that with no flaws."
To Abameta's relief, the boy ignored him the rest of the trip down.
Abameta's assignment was one of the hospitals that had taken in those injured by the refinery explosion.
He started with the ones in the burn unit. Most of them were sedated, which meant that there wouldn't be much there to read. Of course, the downside of that was that there was probably a lot that Abameta wouldn't be able to read at all, but it was worth the risk.
He moved silently through the Dada Memorial Hospital. According to the text that accompanied a holograph on display in the hospital lobby, the facility had been named after the doctor who founded it back when Oshun was first colonized.
Out of curiosity, Abameta looked up Doctor Dada on his computer, only to discover that the doctor had died in disgrace, bankrupt and miserable, thanks to a botched operation that left both a woman and her unborn child dead following what should have been a routine repair of a damaged bone.
As he approached the burn unit, Abameta had to chuckle to himself. The real story was always more interesting to him than the legend, which made him wonder where the legends came from, since they were supposed to be the better stories...
The first person he came upon was a maintenance worker.
Ow (What was that?) this (Need more overtime.) hurts. (I hate her.) Ow (Never should've) this (married her.) hurts. (What was that?) Ow (Hope our team wins this week.) this (Stupid woman, annoying me.) hurts. (Never should've) Ow (What was that?) this (married her.) hurts. (Leave me alone, woman!) Ow (Gotta get that money he owes me.) this (Never should've married her.) hurts. (What was that?)
Abameta shuddered. There but for the grace of telepathy, go I, he thought. If he hadn't been a telepath, he probably would've spent his life as a nobody like this sad specimen.
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