The bump of an airpocket… definitely she was flying. An atmospheric flight, as anything heading to orbit would have flattened her with heavy-Gs by now. She wondered vaguely who, and why, and where she’d end up. And if she’d ever live to see Erik or her other family again, or even to see another day. Perhaps, she thought. Or perhaps not. It felt odd, to be so unbothered, while still so lucid. Odd, and greatly relieving. She was tired of being scared.
8
Two of Makimakala’s shuttles gave PH-4 a close escort back up to Phoenix. There followed a brief, hard burn to put Phoenix back on intercept orbit over Doma Strana in another ninety minutes, Erik having decided that continual high-G push-orbits, as such manoeuvres were known, might eventually aggravate a tavalai ship into shooting at them. Another ninety minutes until PH-4 could make a return descent, this time with Ensign Jokono and some Engineering techs who could assist with basic forensics. All while Lisbeth was… wherever she was.
Trace escorted Erik to Medbay personally, through the zero-G hub to the crew cylinder, then down to main deck, while Private Krishnan found some spare armour in Assembly and prepared to head straight back down to his platoon in Doma Strana on PH-4. Erik’s painkillers were wearing off as he walked gingerly down Main-A corridor, his arm around Trace’s shoulders for balance as his head spun, and passing spacers gave him looks of mixed relief, concern and sympathy. Everyone had heard about Lisbeth. Many probably now wondered at the wisdom of having had Lisbeth on the ship in the first place, given the emotional vulnerabilities it created for their Captain, and thus for them all. Well dammit, it hadn’t been his idea to have her on board. He felt sick, and hoped he wouldn’t throw up in front of everyone.
‘Doc’ Suelo saw him immediately, in a medbay unusually free of patients for this, Phoenix’s most recent voyage. Suelo helped Trace get his jacket and shirt off, and set about a mobile ultra-sound scan of his shoulder.
“Close the curtains,” Erik ordered hoarsely, and Trace did that, enfolding them in a little privacy. And then it was a struggle to keep the tears at bay, and his breathing calm. Suelo worked without comment, and Trace sat with him and held his good hand, as she’d sat with so many of her marines before in this medbay, saying nothing, just letting them know that they weren’t alone. Suelo would say nothing to others, Erik knew. And despite their hardass reputations, marines were less judgemental of emotional pain than most. They knew it better than most, and upon seeing it in others, knew ‘there but for the grace of god go I’.
“Erik, they took her,” Trace said firmly. “Understand what that means. Killing her would have been easy, but they chose the much harder option and took her. That means they want her alive. Having her alive gives them leverage, over you. I think we’ll be hearing from whoever has her shortly. And then we’ll see what we can do about it, culminating with us putting a bunch of bullets in a bunch of heads. Got it?”
She sounded upset herself, Erik thought. Lisbeth had been her bunkmate for the past four months. Trace hadn’t had a bunkmate for a long time, commanding officers typically bunking solo. Everyone had gotten the impression she’d been enjoying it.
Erik nodded. “Yeah. I just need a moment. Go take your AR glasses to Styx and Romki, I’ll be down real soon.”
Trace nodded, got up and left with a kiss on his forehead. She did that with her wounded marines too, Erik knew, both male and female. There was nothing more to it than that. But it surprised him how good it felt.
Jokono was still uncomfortable in the Phoenix spacer blues. For most of his life, his uniform had been a civilian suit, its weight and folds as familiar to him as his own skin. But now in the Doma Strana, the uniform saved a lot of trouble, as tavalai military and civilians alike understood that those colours meant Phoenix, and authority with the humans who mattered.
“No identification,” said a Makimakala crewman via his belt translator, set for English. The tavalai crouched by the bodies of two dead parren, lightly armoured and lightly armed. Makimakala karasai had killed these two, at the cost of one of their own. One parren’s head was missing. Or not missing, but rather redistributed about the corridor walls and floor. The other had a hole in his chest big enough to put a fist through. Human marines weren’t the only ones to pack very big guns. “Standard light armour, parren design, made for stealth, yes?”
The crewman looked up at an armoured karasai nearby — a middle-rank, Jokono thought. The tavalai equivalent of a sergeant, perhaps. The karasai grunted. “They don’t fight heavy,” he said. “Light force, moves fast. That’s how they kidnap human crew.”
There was a touch of contempt in the karasai’s voice, even through the translator. Jokono ignored it, looking over the corpses in the hope they’d tell him something more. “What do you think they were after?” he asked both tavalai. In the smooth, black hallway, more tavalai and human ship crew were moving. Marines and karasai stood guard, and tavalai civilians watched on with big, anxious eyes.
“Maybe your Captain’s sister was the target,” the big karasai suggested.
“Or your Captain himself,” the crewman added. “They did try to kill him.”
“But continued their attack on Doma Strana even as he was escaping,” said Jokono, stroking his chin. “And I’m not so sure they did kidnap the Captain’s sister.”
Both tavalai frowned at him. Jokono beckoned them to follow, and walked the short distance to the office doorway. Inside, a former temple room converted into modern office space, there were transparent com screens and display partitions. Some were now broken, some desks askew, and large bullet holes in the walls where Phoenix marines had sprayed fire at something they couldn’t see. Jokono walked to where one of Phoenix’s techs had found a dislodged ceiling panel, an interlocking piece of ceiling, now missing and exposing a dark hole within.
He pointed. “That’s an old temple access. We’re not sure if it’s ventilation or designed for some other purpose, possibly a multi-purpose conduit built just in case.”
“More likely a murder hole,” the tavalai crewman said grimly, walking around to peer up at it from a different angle. “Big parren temples are full of intrigue. Murders, assassinations. They build it into the architecture, sometimes.”
Jokono nodded, having read similar, disquieting things. Once upon a time, such things had been just tales to most humans, lost amongst the countless stories from the many species who lived far beyond human space, and had no interest explaining themselves to human ears. But now, all those distant tales were coming to life, very close and personal. “So which parren know this temple best? And could already be in place to surprise our marines, and snatch our personnel?”
The tavalai looked at each other.
“Captain,” came Jokono’s voice from down on the surface, as Erik sat on the bridge and sipped coffee. “Hiro’s quite sure it was Aristan’s people.”
Erik nodded slowly, thinking a thousand thoughts at once. Most of them involved blasting parren heads, and parren ships. Focus, he told himself. You can’t let your emotions fly the ship, Captain Pantillo had said. There’s no place for rage in the captain’s chair.
He took a deep breath. “How is he so sure?”
“Hiro is missing one of his surveillance units.” Erik recalled the little synthetic wasp, buzzing above Hiro’s palm. Styx’s technology. “He’s not receiving a signal from it now, it lacks long range coms and is programmed to be stealthy. But Hiro says it was tracking Lisbeth when she vanished, on his instruction. He says he’d know if it had been destroyed, and it would never just disappear without a trace. He’s certain it stowed away with Lisbeth, possibly in her pocket. The final signal it sent, and the final known location of one of Aristan’s teams, were identical.”
“You mean we have a bug actually on her?” His heart started thumping, with sudden, ferocious hope.
“Hiro thinks so, yes. He’d told it to keep an eye on her specifically.”
Thank god for Hiro, Erik thought. If that bit of foresight ended up saving Lisbet
h’s life… “When will we hear from it, if it has attached itself to her?”
“At the earliest opportunity, he says. But it will wait, it can’t give itself away. Styx will know more.”
“Styx?” Erik asked to the air.
“The tracker has limited communications functions of its own,” Styx said, as calm as ever. “If it needs to talk, it will infiltrate local networks and use them to communicate instead. If it sends a coded signal, I will process it. May I have full access to Phoenix communications sensors in case of encoded incoming signals?”
Erik signalled at Shilu, who was looking at him from Coms. Shilu nodded, and did that. Of course, Styx probably didn’t need permission, but so long as she was being polite, they’d play along.
“Ensign Jokono, do you think Aristan helped to set up the ambush on us? Is he in on it, with the State Department and whoever these parren are?”
“Well… to know that for certain would probably take a far longer period of investigation than we have available, Captain,” said Jokono. “But from discussing matters with Lieutenants Zhi and Dale, and now with what Hiro shows me of encrypted network activity within Doma Strana leading up to the attack, I’m actually inclined to believe that Aristan was the target of the attack. Perhaps even more than us.”
To his right, and his front-left, Erik could feel Commander Shahaim and Lieutenant Kaspowitz’s stares boring into him. “So it was one of his many parren enemies? Working with the State Department?”
“It’s only a guess at this point, Captain. But it’s my best guess.”
“State Department has good reason to want Aristan dead,” Kaspowitz added. “He’s destabilising the current parren regime. If they got rid of both him and you, Captain, at the same time, they’d consider that a good day’s work.”
“Using aliens to do their dirty work again,” Shahaim muttered. “Typical tavalai, never get their own hands dirty.”
“So if Aristan did take Lisbeth,” said Erik. “Why?”
“Captain, the smart money’s on leverage. Over you.”
“Leverage for what?”
“I suppose we’ll find out.”
A full rotation, and a flurry of activity between Phoenix and Makimakala later, all the senior crew plus Commander Nalben were crammed into Phoenix’s briefing room, in a circle of chairs about a central holographic space. Plus two more of Makimakala’s senior crew, it was eighteen people in total, in a room designed to hold no more than twelve.
Before all this assembled military authority, it was the civilian, Stan Romki, who held court. “So we’ve seen the recording now,” he told them all, seated in a front row, AR glasses high on his bald head, a slate of notes on his lap. “Styx confirms that it is certainly Drakhil himself, and that it appears to have been recorded in the final months before the fall of the Drysine Empire. The encryption built into the temple is a very high class of very old drysine code. Styx says it’s nearly unbreakable for non-drysines, and would have erased itself if anyone had gained entry by forcible means. We can only guess how many of these hidden places remain elsewhere in the Spiral — the message gives no clue, only to say that there are others, but most will never be found. Given the scale of the space over which they’ve been dispersed, over the scale of time since the end of the Drysine Empire, I think that’s probably true.
“Now in the recording, Drakhil mentions a diary, apparently written by him. Five copies, in five locations, he says. And sure enough, there follows a lot of very old drysine code that even Styx struggles to make sense of. She suspects Drakhil was using encryption patterns that even she has lost — perhaps Drakhil was suspecting that it would be parren who recovered this recording, with drysine assistance, and certainly not humans with drysine assistance. If Styx has a failing, it is that neither she nor her people made a particular study of their parren allies, and so her knowledge of their language, mathematics and codes is incomplete. But one of the five entries did reveal itself to her immediately, as it is based on the Klyran tongue, which she has just recently come to understand. And here I shall pass over to Commander Nalben.”
Everyone looked at the tavalai commander. Odd, Erik thought, that until quite recently, it would have seemed sacrilegious to have a senior quasi-military tavalai on board. Now it was almost normal. Erik had to fight his own utter disinterest in the topic at hand, his brain clamouring instead for news and clues of Lisbeth, and ways of tracking her, and getting her back. But if Aristan’s people had kidnapped her, then the odds were that it was somehow tied up with the data from the small temple he and Trace had found. And it was almost certainly Aristan’s people who had laid that flower by Lisbeth’s bunk in PH-4, with the data chip that had led Trace to the temple in the first place. Unravel this mystery, and perhaps the other, more alarming mystery would become more clear.
“Thank you Mr Romki,” said Nalben, in that thick, throaty tavalai voice. “My experts and I have searched our records on the data given to us by Mr Romki and your… helpful drysine friend.” There were some ironic smiles around the group. “The location of the one diary provided to us was a bit obscure. The name given is Chon Il, which was unknown to us. Yet some long arguments among our experts about the translations between old parren and old tavalai tongues — the details of which I shall spare you — have convinced us beyond doubt that the location revealed to us is the Tonchalda System.”
He activated the room holographics, and the central space within the circle of chairs came to life — a star chart, a blizzard of inhabited systems, linked by the glowing lines of established space lanes. The image zoomed inward, centring upon one system in particular, labelled in tavalai script.
“As you can see, Tonchalda is today a parren system. Like Stoya, it has a history of Tahrae habitation, and today has a large parren population whose settlement origins go back to the early days of the Parren/Drysine Alliance. In those days, Harmony House ruled, and the Tahrae ruled Harmony House. Tonchalda was a regional centre of government, and played an important role in both the Tahrae’s rise in the Drysine Empire, and then in the Parren Empire that followed the end of the Machine Age.
“But Tonchalda was not always a parren system. For a period of several hundred years, Tonchalda was captured by chah’nas forces during the fall of the Parren Empire and the rise of the chah’nas. Chah’nas won the military victory, but naturally, administering the system fell to their trusted bureaucrats, the tavalai.
“The Dobruta maintain extensive records of all such old historical events, given our interest in old hacksaw artefacts. And so we scanned our records for any sign that tavalai forces may have encountered such an artefact as Drakhil’s diary. Sure enough, hidden amongst several centuries of ship traffic, logs and details, we found this little gem — a priority message from a local surveyor in the Vedavan, who were a branch of a very early branch of old Parren Empire-era administration. A tavalai administrative division, with no legislative power of course, as the chah’nas held all that for themselves. But a department of managerial expertise, to handle new conquests in the ongoing wars following the collapse of the Parren Empire.
“I will spare you the technical protocols and their significance for now — I shall have a fully detailed copy of our reasoning available for you after, for your further reading. For now, it is enough to say that this local surveyor found something at Torea, the local Tonchalda temple complex. His priority message is garbled with out-of-date encryption we can no longer penetrate, but it brought an analysis team running from various major institutions.
“This analysis team included a tavalai named Cheliratanga. Now Cheliratanga is a name still familiar to all Dobruta. We learn about her in our tertiary education, because she pioneered a new field of hacksaw encryption and machine language. Her breakthroughs are legendary, and many have speculated how they came about. Now… the first of her technical papers on this subject, as it happens, were published three years after her assignment to the analysis team on Tonchalda. From there, those papers fl
owed in a steady stream.”
“You think she found something?” Erik asked.
“Yes,” said Nalben. Erik thought he sounded a little excited. As though this line of enquiry might be about to shed light on mysteries the Dobruta had puzzled over for thousands of years. “Records show that following a year spent on Tonchalda, she retreated to a research facility at Dovadara and was based there for the majority of the rest of her life, slowly building herself into a legend of tavalai academia. Clearly she found something. Many have speculated what, as the records are classified. Perhaps now we know.”
“But how can you tell if it’s Drakhil’s diary?” Lieutenant Kaspowitz asked. “There are a lot of old objects in the Spiral. She could have found anything.”
“Appropriation orders,” said Nalben, with something approaching triumph. Blank stares from the humans. “Apologies, this will seem needlessly complicated to humans. You have my two assistants to thank for it — Ensign Tov and I believe the equivalent rank is Petty Officer Ben.” He indicated the two other seated tavalai, names abbreviated for human convenience. “Together we have had no sleep the past cycle, as we’ve followed this trail through the tavalai bureaucracy for nearly twenty thousand years.
“Whenever an old, important artefact is moved from one tavalai department to another, an appropriation order must be filed. The process is long and complicated in direct proportion to the importance of the object being appropriated. For one particular object within Cheliratanga’s possessions at the time of her death, there was placed an appropriations order the scale of which I’ve rarely seen.
“It is a twenty-five stamp job,” added Petty Officer Ben from his seat beside Kaspowitz, in much more heavily-accented English than Nalben used. “Most jobs require no more than five stamps. A ten stamp job is a very large and complicated order. Fifteen stamps is nearly unheard of. This one had twenty-five stamps. It is the kind of thing that becomes a bureaucratic legend, only this one appears to have been kept very quiet.”
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 11