Night Song (The Guild Wars Book 9)

by Mark Wandrey

  Were they singing, or arguing? Sonya’s translator gave no help at this distance, and she had no idea how to read Lumar body language for cues to their mood.

  Chelsey walked at ease, so Sonya decided no one was going to attack them, at least not yet.

  “Silent Night Zuul, not fighting Zuul,” Ulan said to no one in particular, or perhaps the general crowd, making a spreading gesture with an upper and lower hand on each side. “And Silent Night Human, wanting talking to Iban.”

  Sonya gave up on small breaths and took several deep ones, hoping over-exposure would do what restriction had not. The smell in here registered differently than from the hall—the burnt tinge flattened, though every instinct told her it should have intensified in such a crowd. She flipped her ears attentively forward and moved forward with her siblings, taking in the room with her wide peripheral vision.

  There were more than fifty Lumar, all of similar build—large—and sound—loud. Most were eating at variously sized tables, some clustered around Tri-Vs displaying Lumar in hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand combat, and others watching what looked something like, but entirely not, rugby. Iban sat at a long, semi-curved table with five other Lumar, though his ongoing conversation involved his compatriots throughout the room.

  At Ulan’s words, some of the shouting lulled, and Iban chewed meditatively as they approached.

  “Silent Night partners in contract.” Iban gestured to a plate of foodstuff. “Joining for meal?”

  “That’s very nice, Iban, thank you.” Chelsey made a small negative gesture behind her back, which Sonya understood to mean Lumar food would be no good for them. Or Humans, at any rate. “We just want to join you to talk about the contract. Is that all right?”

  “Join. Eating better, contracts fine.” Iban moved his shoulders in what might have equaled a shrug, and a Lumar from across the room, perhaps a hair smaller than the others, jumped up and tossed some stools toward Iban’s table, each of which was caught by someone different and placed around the table.

  “You’ve been on this contract for a long time?” Shadow picked out a spot at the table and sat. Other than having a tail, the general build of the Zuul and Lumar weren’t all that dissimilar. He managed to fold himself into the seat without too much difficulty, and his siblings and Chelsey followed.

  “Yes.”

  Shadow tilted his head and glanced at Sonya. She pointed her nose toward Chelsey, and Shadow gave the barest nod of acknowledgment.

  “Chelsey, you were saying the Lumar have been excellent partners while Silent Night has been here. How long has that been now?”

  “Feels like forever, doesn’t it? But we’ve only been here six months; the Lumar have been here for years, at least. Right, Iban? You’ve done some modifying of the shelter structures to be perfect for your company.”

  Sonya’s ears flickered in surprise. The Lumar had done modifications? She hadn’t heard they were handy with technology. They could handle basic maintenance of their own weapons and gear, but often hired other races as armorers for more detailed work. But then, she hadn’t heard half the things about her own kind that she’d learned since actually meeting some, so GalNet and vids were hardly comprehensive.

  “Modifications done much time ago.” Iban nodded, reaching for more food. “Lumar have been here since mines. Big Strong Fist here since before everyone.” He chewed, giving them all a good view of the mastication process, then slashed out a hand. “Not before Aku. Or Engineering. Everybody else.”

  “Do you work with the Aku?” Shadow reached for the closest platter of meat-resembling food, then caught himself and placed his hand flat on the table instead.

  “No. Not very. You ask Aku questions? Aku know.”

  “Aku know…what?” Sonya asked, her left ear twitching.

  “Know. Aku know. Ask them.”

  “The Aku are meant to be quite smart, if very shy,” Chelsey said. “They handle every bit of the mineral refining on the planet, as far as we can tell. The Zuparti don’t like for them to be interrupted.” Chelsey made a slight movement, leaning her leg against Sonya’s. The corporal had more experience communicating with the Lumar, and was either commiserating, or warning. Either way, Sonya checked her growing impatience.

  “Work important.” Iban tapped an empty hand on the table before refilling it. “Aku do the work. And Aku know.”

  “Can you introduce us to one of them, Iban? Someone it wouldn’t interrupt the work too much to talk to? We don’t want to upset the Zuparti.”

  Iban wriggled each arm in what amounted to a large shrug. “Work for Engineering, not Zuparti. Ulan take you to Niss. Ulan eat?”

  Ulan, who had peeled off from them to join a smaller table heaped with platters of food, leaned back. “Eat.”

  “Yes. Ulan eat, then take you to Niss.” Iban nodded, waggled his fingers, and sprayed them with crumbs. Another hand shoved still more food into his big mouth.

  The four siblings exchanged awkward looks. Sonya wasn’t sure what to do. As usual, it was Shadow who made the move into the unexpected, gesturing at the platter of meat.

  Ulan cast a glance at him and grunted before pushing a plate over. All four of them had been smelling the food, which wasn’t the source of the burnt, rancid smell—thank goodness. Despite Chelsey’s warning, Shadow leaned closer, took a deeper sniff, grunted in satisfaction, and grabbed a piece of the pale flesh before chomping into it. Within seconds, all four of them were tucking in. Chelsey made a small noise of protest, but Sonya had long learned human and Zuul digestive systems had…different bounds of acceptance.

  Sonya thought the meat had a slightly fishy taste, something she was familiar with from growing up in Australia. She’d always been grateful she was in Brisbane instead of, say, the United States, which had largely made meat illegal outside of startowns. Australians had always had a logical view of meat. It tasted good. She even enjoyed Cane Toad Casserole, something their mother had created when she’d found out they were immune to the animal’s poison.

  “Not bad,” Rex growled around a massive mouthful of the meat.

  “Pretty good tucker,” Drake agreed. They all chuckled, since their XO shared a name in common with the slang for food, something Captain Tucker was less than amused by.

  “Better than witchetty grubs,” Shadow agreed.

  Sonya’s jaw dropped down in a laugh. “Thought you liked the bloody bush tucker you bragged about when you were all woop woop.”

  “You can live on it,” Shadow said between bites, effecting a thick, Human-sounding Aussie accent. “But it tastes like shit.”

  “Shut up, Dundee!” the other three all intoned, and the siblings shared a laugh as the Lumar observed them with detached curiosity.

  The laughter tapered off, and all four quietly ate. As usual, it was Shadow who spoke for their consciences. “I miss Ripley.”

  “We all do,” Sonya agreed. Rex, Drake, and Chelsey bobbed their heads somberly.

  “One of you Zuul go beyond?” Ulan asked.

  Sonya didn’t know what he meant, but Shadow seemed to catch on.

  “She’s not dead,” he said. “Got hurt bad on the dropship, shot by a laser. They said she’s going to be okay.”

  “She’ll make it,” Chelsey said, nodding. She’d been watching the siblings have a piss up and grinning. Then her comms unit chirped, and she pulled it off her uniform. “I gotta run, doggos. You guys have fun with the Lumar, I’ll catch up later.”

  In a second she was up and gone, and Sonya hoped they could find their way back to Silent Night’s area.

  * * *

  Alan had been listening to the Zuparti go on for what seemed like hours. He glanced at his slate sitting on the table and realized he had been sitting there for hours. Bloody hell. He let her drone on for another minute, then couldn’t take it any longer.

  “Guildmaster Ifka, may I say something?”

  The Zuparti stopped and looked at him, so deep in her dissertation she seemed to have forgotten Alan an
d Jill were even there. “Okay,” she said. A confused weasel was an interesting thing to see.

  “My Second Company Commander, Jill Anderle, whom you already know, gave me a full briefing on the sitrep as soon as we landed. She also made it clear that you impressed upon her the necessity of signing a contract with the Engineering Guild, despite my merc company not being interested in working for you.”

  “Essentially correct,” Ifka replied in her scratchy little voice. A trio of her Zuparti assistants nodded in agreement.

  Toadies, Alan thought. “I fail to see why I should consider my newly-arrived forces part of this contract. I only have two squads, and one is apparently a prisoner of the forces opposing your claims here.”

  “The contract automatically extends to your new forces,” Ifka said.

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “Then you can leave,” she said. “Your ship should reach the next solar system with a stargate in about 95 years.”

  “Mother fucker,” Alan growled.

  Ifka looked down at her translator, hanging around her furred neck, and cocked her head in confusion. Alan would have laughed if he wasn’t so pissed off. Jill leaned forward and spoke.

  “Maybe if you could offer us a specific departure window?”

  “How am I to provide this with an active assault underway? The Zuul are bad enough, but the Pushtal are much worse! They nearly breached our defenses a week before you arrived.”

  “Five of my newly arrived troopers are Zuul,” Alan said. “Maybe it would give us an opportunity—”

  “What?” Ifka yipped. “You have Zuul with you?”

  “Yes,” Alan said evenly. “Five of them. They are my children.”

  Ifka spoke a word which didn’t translate, then she looked even more confused than when he’d cursed. “Children? Zuul? But you are—”

  “Human, yes, obviously. We saved them on a contract. I couldn’t find out who to send them to when we got back to Earth, so my wife and I raised them as our own children. If you have a problem with that or say one bloody word about locking them up, you’re going to have a much bigger problem than a few Pushtal to deal with.”

  He stared at the Zuparti with deadly intent. Jill looked from him to Ifka and swallowed. He could tell she’d been as diplomatic as she could, especially considering the situation she’d found herself in, and he couldn’t argue with her decision. However, he was here now, with most of his family. They might have been born Zuul, but they were his children, and he loved them just the same. One had almost died bringing them to the relative safety of the base. He’d be damned to hell if he’d let anyone touch his kids.

  He considered the possible outcome if the Zuparti challenged him. The first option was, the weasel bastard would sic her Lumar on Silent Night, and it would turn into a great round cockup. The second option was, she’d try to sic the Lumar on Silent Night, and the Lumar would refuse to follow orders. Luckily Ifka took option three.

  “Fine,” she said. “Will your pet Zuul fight?”

  Alan suppressed the snarl of outrage he felt coming. Maybe he’d been around the kids too much. “My children are registered mercs with Silent Night Mercenary Company; they’ll follow orders.”

  “Good,” Ifka said, and turned back to the Tri-V. “Since you are informed of the situation, I’ll outline my plan to get the filthy Vergola and their Cartography Guild off my planet.” The Tri-V showed a tactical battle map of the region where the mines were located.

  Alan immediately noticed there were many more icons for mines identical to the one they were located at, except a different color. He asked about them.

  “Those are played out mines,” Ifka said, annoyed at the interruption.

  “So the Astatine-222 plays out quickly?” he persisted.

  Ifka turned to shoot him a sidelong look. “Our mining methods for Astatine are proprietary,” she said.

  “Was it proprietary to those you took this planet from?” Alan asked. He smiled, because he’d quickly caught onto something.

  “We’ve had this holding for longer than your pathetic race has possessed the power of written language.”

  “Perhaps, but someone had it before you. Those corridors weren’t designed for Zuparti.” Jill glanced at him, blinked, then grinned. He shot her a wink, and she suppressed a laugh.

  “Who had it before is of no consequence.”

  “It’s of more consequence than you think,” Alan said. “I’ve only been here hours, but I can tell you’re having trouble with the mine. Lots of it.”

  “What makes you think that?” The question was asked by one of Ifka’s assistants. Elsewhere nearby, a pair of elSha techs had stopped their work and were watching the exchange.

  “This planet is the only source ever found for Astatine-222, you’ve said?” Ifka gave a tiny nod. “Your display shows the dates of those mines,” Alan said, and gestured at the Tri-V. “It looks like you’re sinking a new mine every five to ten years. There’s no way this rate of new mines could exist on this world for even 20,000 years, the time between now and the First Republic. More than 2,000 mines in just that time? If this mine is an average example, the planet would be nothing but holes.”

  “You Humans think you know everything,” Ifka said, almost quivering with rage. “But you know nothing of the efforts others do to provide you, and the rest of the galaxy, with simple luxuries like space travel.”

  “Luxury?” Jill asked incredulously. “I’ve read what happened after the Great War when most space travel ground to a halt. How many trillions died when the luxury of space travel stopped?”

  “We might not know everything,” Alan admitted. “However, I know you need us. My guess is, production has been falling, so the supply of Astatine-222 has decreased. Maybe the Cartography Guild isn’t here so much out of greed as because they think you’re squeezing them.”

  Ifka was clearly conflicted. To Alan, it looked like she was trying to decide whether to scream at him or throw something. He watched an interesting internal battle play out on the alien’s face. The Zuparti had long been known as one of the twitchiest races in the galaxy. Paranoid, but with deep pockets. As the commander of a registered Human mercenary company, he was privy to a lot of yearly data concerning types of contracts, where they took place, and even who employed the mercs. On a rolling average, the Zuparti accounted for 10% of all contracts, with that number reaching as high as 25%, but never less than 5%. For all this prowess and money, as a species, they had a terrible collective poker face.

  One of Ifka’s assistants leaned in and whispered in her ear. She was so focused on Alan that when her assistant spoke, she gave an audible squeak and jumped half a meter in the low gravity. Twitchy.

  She reached out to the Tri-V and yanked a data chip from it hard enough to nearly topple the projector off its table. “Here are the details,” she snarled and threw it at him as hard as she could. Alan plucked it from the air with casual ease. It might have been a devastating throw to another Zuparti, but Humans had been throwing rocks at each other for a million years. Young children naturally took to baseball or other games of catch. Baseball was still a popular sport on Earth. Catching things was second nature to the hairless apes. “Be ready at the required time,” she screeched and left.

  “Ever the diplomat,” Jill said, finally letting the laughter out she’d been suppressing for several minutes.

  Alan wasn’t laughing. The situation was a lot more dangerous than he’d originally feared. If he’d learned anything in his lifetime as a merc, it was that if there was anything more dangerous than a poor race with nothing to lose, it was a rich race with everything to lose. Between the Pushtal and the Zuparti in one system…

  “Get the officers and noncoms together,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  * * *

  Shadow found the Lumar fascinating. They were more like koala than intelligent beings. Methodical and single-minded, they went at every task with 100% of their attention. When they ate, they ate.
When they played, they played. And when they fought, they fought.

  He hadn’t seen actual combat in person, yet. However, he’d watched thousands of hours on Silent Night’s Tri-V archives. Battles going back to the company’s founding. Lumar were there many times. Sometimes they were allies; sometimes they were enemies. In each instance, they fought with the same dogged determination and straightforward attitude. They didn’t give up unless ordered to, and they weren’t brutal in victory, like some.

  He was all too aware how many merc races were, by Human standards, considered monsters. Tortantula would slaughter until there was nothing left, feeding on the enemy dead. Besquith killed for the pure fun of it. Aposa were just bloody nuts. They wouldn’t eat the enemy dead, but they were just as brutal as the Tortantula. The Lumar, on the other hand, were almost Human in the way they treated their defeated adversaries.

  Lumar were usually only used for garrison, reinforcements on major contracts, or security. Shadow wondered if it was their rather gentle nature which explained that. Oh, it wasn’t that a Lumar wouldn’t fight. He’d witnessed two squabbles in the cafeteria before leaving. Those four arms and the aliens’ powerful build was a horrendous combination to witness. Yet the fights were over as quickly as they’d begun. They were a strange and fascinating race, to be sure.

  Once the Lumar had satiated their hunger, and Shadow had as well, Ulan and Iban led them from the cafeteria through the same door as they’d entered. The other Lumar were leaving, too, off to do whatever tasks needed doing. They weren’t self-starters, yet Shadow’s understanding was that they performed regular jobs or anything assigned them well. Still, Shadow wondered who was assigning these jobs. Normally on a contract, an officer of another race would oversee the Lumar to be sure they had been directed properly. There were no other merc races in the base that he’d seen or heard mentioned.

  Shadow was about to ask Ulan about this as they were leaving the cafeteria until he spotted another of the females. She was standing in a doorway leading to another section of the Lumar barracks. She had two slates held in her lower arms, and was using her upper arms to do something with them, both at the same time. A millipede-like Jeha had half its body raised up to be closer to eye level with the female, its antenna waving in the air, apparently listening to instructions. At the group’s sudden appearance, the female’s head turned to regard them.