“The matriarch-chosen is correct,” he said. “I have sometimes used my skills for what must, no doubt, seem small or self-centered motives. That’s what it is to represent a Colony on the Council. Each of us trying to get as much as we can for our separate interests, while simultaneously attempting to convince the rest that it’s also in their separate interest. Councilwoman Jazlin is the matriarch-chosen. She doesn’t have a Colony to represent. In a way, she represents the conscience of the Overlord. Or at least the Overlord’s house. She has the luxury of not constantly having to put her Colony’s interests first.”
Now Nyfid got a bit more aggressive.
“But that’s not what we’re here to talk about, Heir Taga. Everything I just told you, a moment ago, is true, and unless you have taken leave of your sanity, you know this means doom for you and every other soul in your command. If you won’t come aboard Flamediver for your own best interests, do it for theirs. They deserve this of you, as much as your brother’s officers and men would deserve it from him. He has come here, risking himself, in the hope you won’t have to be destroyed. Are you going to let him—let your whole command—down?”
Now, everyone on the bridge was focused exclusively on Councilman Nyfid. In the back of his mind, he felt the memory of his father nod approvingly and raise a mystic glass. In a single turn, Nyfid had flipped the Heir’s disparagement of Nyfid’s character into a direct question of the Heir’s. He chanced a look at Heir Griboth—who gazed at his sister’s holographic visage with moisture in the corners of his eyes—and hoped that Griboth’s presence would help reinforce Nyfid’s words.
Heir Taga seemed to have stopped short. Her lips were parted as if to speak, but she couldn’t come up with the words. Her eyes blinked several more times, then suddenly, the orange light of the bridge flipped to deep crimson. An electronic chirping began.
One of the Flamediver’s threat assessment officers said loudly, “Sir, we’ve got multiple launch signatures.”
“Missiles or spacecraft?” the captain spat back.
“Uhhhh…spacecraft, sir. It’s fighters. Perhaps as many as four dozen.”
“Why, Taga?!” Heir Griboth shouted at his sister, his fists clawing the railing surrounding the holographic tank.
“Don’t resist,” her image said. “Please. You won’t understand if I can’t show you.”
“Show me what??” her brother cried.
But then her image blinked out of existence.
“Wait, get her back! Get her back!” the Heir hollered.
“Signal dropped at the source, sir,” said the communications officer.
“Have those fighters fired on us yet?” the captain demanded.
“No sir,” said the threat officer. “They’re closing, but weapons appear to be in ready status only.”
“God and Goddess of the holy star,” Councilwoman Jazlin breathed and sagged over the railing, barely keeping herself upright.
“What do we do?” the captain asked, looking from Griboth’s face to Nyfid’s, then to the Councilwoman, and finally back to the Heir.
“If we fight, we die,” Griboth said. “If Taga has deployed her fighters, that’s her very last warning.”
“And if we die, she dies,” Nyfid said, matter-of-factly.
Odd. The threat of impending death didn’t trigger much of an emotional response. His only fear had been of losing the verbal battle. Disgrace—during competition of the spirit—disturbed him more than the idea of physically ending. He’d given his best to persuade Heir Taga of her folly. She hadn’t been able to respond with words, but instead had dispatched her men to “solve” the debate for her. Which was, in the end, a very potentially permanent kind of solution. But in his heart, Nyfid felt a tiny spark of triumph. If he could reach her like that—at least once—then he might reach her again if given another chance.
“Issue our unconditional surrender,” Councilman Nyfid said firmly.
“Sir? Madam Councilwoman?” the captain asked, quickly looking from Griboth, to Jazlin, and back again. Seeking their consensus.
“Yes, yes,” Jazlin said, still hunched over the railing.
“Do it,” Griboth said, nodding emphatically.
The communications officer was already speaking coolly into his headset, when the captain spun on a heel and signaled the order.
* * *
The brig of the Skybright was the first jail cell Councilman Nyfid could ever remember occupying. He’d seen unruly presenters-at-court hauled off by Council beefeaters but had never been the one being hauled before. It had not been a particularly pleasant experience, getting escorted under arms from the airlock of the Flamediver into the adjoining airlock of the Skybright’s launch, then pushed from the launch into the innards of the Skybright, herself. Along the way, Nyfid had seen Uldarran crew and faces which should have been friendly. But they watched with a cold indifference—the source of which Nyfid absolutely could not fathom. As if all those people had become completely estranged from their country in the phantom course of a single, unaccountable mission. Brainwashed? Shocked out of all reason by an event no Council member could imagine or dare dream of? Something else again?
And now, Nyfid sat in Skybright’s prison, along with Flamediver’s captain, Councilwoman Jazlin, and even Heir Griboth, of all people.
The fact that not even her brother merited special treatment seemed a particularly dour sign.
They waited ninety minutes, not daring to speculate between them what could be happening, or what might have gone wrong. The security cameras placed behind thick reinforced glass—with microphones to boot—were no doubt transmitting everything they said and did to Heir Taga’s bridge personnel. From this point forward, there could be no asides. No debate of strategy. Nyfid had what he had in his own heart and his own head, and he hoped his reflexes and timing would be enough to somehow score them all another hearing.
When the guards opened the cell, Heir Taga strode in, flanked by four of her officers. All of them wore sidearms in holsters. That was a bit of unnecessary theater, Nyfid wanted to think, but at the same time, these people had killed their own. There was nothing to say that Taga or one of her men wouldn’t pull out one of those pistols and discharge a bullet into the head of every prisoner, on the merest whim from their commander.
Out of the corner of his eye, Nyfid watched Councilwoman Jazlin. The woman’s countenance had brightened instinctively at the sight of Taga—in the flesh—then fallen immediately, when the reality of their predicament reasserted itself. She now bore an expression of profound sorrow, mixed with something that seemed like tenderness. Almost as if she were attending a funeral.
Heir Griboth, on the other hand, had recovered himself during their transit. He stared coolly at his sister—peer to peer, on more than one level—and occasionally eyed her officers with the attitude of a man who could give them orders. And mean it.
Flamediver’s captain merely kept his legs crossed and his hands in his lap. He was almost detached, as if waiting for matters larger than himself to be resolved—one way or the other—by people far above his pay grade.
“My dear, I can’t—” Councilwoman Jazlin started but was stopped cold.
“I told you that you should not have come,” Heir Taga said sternly. “It doesn’t matter how much I loved you. It doesn’t matter how much I loved the Overlord. It doesn’t even matter how much I still love Uldarra.”
“That’s been demonstrated amply,” Heir Griboth said, just a bit too sarcastically for Nyfid’s taste. He admired the choice of words, but the tone was too presumptive. Even for someone who was Taga’s equal. Griboth’s men weren’t the ones armed and able to deal damage.
She looked at her brother. They locked eyes for several intense, silent seconds.
“You believe me to be a murderer,” she said.
“Until you provide us with overwhelming proof that you’re not,” her brother replied, “I don’t have any choice, Taga.”
“People have died,” Councilwoman Jazl
in said with an aching sadness in her words. “And not just other soldiers. Families, Taga. The last attack cost the lives of mothers and children. It was an atrocity, my dear. And it made absolutely no sense. Not when evidence of your direct participation surfaced—yet again. I have been trying, all this time, to believe there would be some logic to all of it. That some explanation might be possible. But now, sitting in your jail, with your men and their weapons shining brightly on their belts…I don’t know what happened to the Taga I bade farewell to when she left for Salvage System. Does that Taga even exist anymore?”
“Yes and no,” the Heir replied.
“What does that mean?” Griboth barked. “You were never a player of cute games, sister. It never suited you. So, either have your men pull the triggers, and let’s be done with this, or tell us exactly why you’re not a treasonous killer of innocent people!”
Again, Nyfid admired the choice of words, but Griboth was fronting bravado that might short-circuit the tenuous playing field on which they presently stood.
“Perhaps we need to back-trace our steps a bit, eh?” Nyfid said, patting a palm downward in Heir Griboth’s direction. “If I’ve learned anything about the Council in all this time, it’s that nothing ever gets done if people proceed under false presumption of motive. Our mission from the Overlord was to uncover facts and get statements, after all. We deduce the accused’s guilt while, simultaneously, badgering the accused for her defending statement. If I were in her place, I might not trust the intent of the people taking such a contradictory, two-pronged approach. Do I have that about right?”
Nyfid leaned his head in Heir Taga’s direction, mustering a smile he hoped would seem harmless.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said stiffly.
Nyfid then cleared his throat.
“On the other hand, Heir Taga, you have to try to see it from your uncle’s side, too. We’re just his emissaries. He wants to understand you. He would love nothing more than to discover that all of this has been some kind of tragic mistake. He loves you. As much as the Councilwoman sitting here, beside me, loves you—and is looking as if her own child had just been put to the airlock. I can state surely, it won’t take a collapsar’s effort to turn both of them around. Make them respect not only your motives, but you, again, as well. Which is what I think you’d like, right?”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Heir Taga said, slowly taking off her officer’s gloves and folding them neatly in her lap. Like her men, her uniform was pressed and crisp. Discipline was as tight here as it had ever been before the rift. Which meant these people were still taking pride in themselves and what they were doing. Not something Nyfid would expect from people who’d simply grown bloodthirsty or who otherwise were deranged in the way the attacks on Uldarran space had seemed deranged.
“Would you do us the favor of please explaining?” Nyfid asked, being very sure of his politeness.
“There’s not much to explain,” Heir Taga said. “When my uncle’s Council Security men tried to kill me in Salvage System, it became clear we had all been sent away on an entirely different kind of errand than the one originally briefed to us. An errand from which I, specifically, was not supposed to return.”
There was a scoffing sound from both the Flamediver’s captain and Heir Griboth, alike. Nyfid, himself, was startled but kept it from showing openly on his face. If the charges against Taga had once sounded preposterous, a recrimination of equal or greater magnitude had just been leveled. And against the Overlord, himself, no less. Council Security were under the Overlord’s direct control. The tightest screening of any state service. To include serving on the Council, itself. To suggest that Council Security would be involved in the attempted murder of an Heir was an astonishing charge. It had taken hard evidence to convince Nyfid of Taga’s involvement in the raids against the Colonies. It would take hard evidence to convince him Council Security would violate their honor, or their oath of loyalty, as Taga had just said they did.
“H-how?” was all Councilwoman Jazlin croaked, looking physically ill.
“You may not remember, Maza, but when my command left Uldarran space, we had a full fifteen ships. Five weeks after we reached Salvage System, we made contact with a human informant who claimed to have intimate and exclusive knowledge concerning the Bith credit system, as it tied to the functioning of the gates. He promised us we could leverage this back home. We took three ships and rendezvoused in Salvage System’s cometary belt. Far from the gate. Far from anywhere. So that we could get the secret. It was a trap. We lost two of the three ships that day, while I limped back in the third. With exactly one prisoner. Sedated. When we got him back planetside, we took the truth out of him.”
“He told you he was Council Security?” Nyfid asked, his left eyebrow raised halfway up his forehead.
“Of course not. He fought us. We beat him. He fought us harder. I finally sliced his neck open to his spine. And that’s when we found the chip implant, with the attached micro-detonator. I think the detonator fizzled when he tried to set it off, just before I killed him. He had intended to die and take his interrogators with him. The chip was damaged, but repairable. There are people we met in Salvage System. People who can hack anything made by men. I looked at the files, Councilman. I have top clearance, the equal of any of you. I know official copies of Council secret orders when I see them. There was no doubt in my mind. I and every single member of my command were sent into the wilderness of the galaxy to perish.”
“What possible purpose could that serve?” Heir Griboth asked, now looking more bewildered than defiant.
“More importantly,” Nyfid butted in, “do you still have that chip, and can you show us the orders?”
“Yes,” she said.
Her men—and their weapons, nice and clean—had not budged an inch.
“Even if all of this is true,” Jazlin said, appearing to choose her words very carefully, “that still doesn’t explain the attacks. Why did your own people have to die, because someone on the Council made a mistake?”
“Mistake?!” Heir Taga said, practically shouting the word, as she leapt to her feet and wadded her gloves in one tight fist. “There was absolutely no mistake in any of it, Maza! And you knew! You knew, and you did nothing!”
The Councilwoman slid from her bench onto her knees, her arms outstretched to Taga while tears streamed down Jazlin’s face.
“No, dear, no, it can’t be, I don’t understand. No! I would never, ever have approved or turned a blind eye to any such thing. You’ve got to believe me! Whatever you saw on that chip—whoever that man was—he wasn’t one of mine. And I can’t believe he was one of your uncle’s, either. Those Council Security men and women love and cherish you Heirs like they love and cherish life, itself!”
Nyfid’s mind was turning over at light-speed. Council Security, acting on orders to murder not only an Heir, but to scuttle her entire command as well? The loss of the ships, alone, would be a quite serious blow to the fleet. Perhaps even crippling? There was no strategic sense in it, much less political sense. Fratricide in the fleet was not unheard of, but very, very isolated, and never had anyone ever heard of an Heir being targeted by the Overlord. Not even the old stories from the beginning of the Colonies told of such things.
Which still didn’t explain the retaliation.
“The raids,” Nyfid said. “I have to understand the necessity. You could have come back to us. Presented the evidence. Not even an Overlord—no matter how far above the rule of law he may believe himself to be—can escape the judgment of the Council. No matter if he had help from the Council, itself. You should have spared the lives of those who were not involved. Come directly to one of us. Come directly to someone like me. I could have protected you, your command, the whole lot, while we, in the Council, sorted this out.”
Now it was Heir Taga and her men who made the scoffing sounds.
“Did you go to Mieetal Outpost? See the bodies for yourself?” she asked, wagging a fin
ger in Nyfid’s face.
“No, but the evidence they brought back was conclusive. I saw the death list. The names of the workers and their children.”
“Mieetal Outpost hasn’t been staffed with civilians or any fleet personnel for almost five years!” Taga roared, her finger shaking with rage.
Nyfid was left blinking and confused. Helplessly, he turned to Heir Griboth.
“Is that true?”
“I have no idea,” Heir Griboth said, his brow deeply beetled. “If personnel weren’t being moved around in my command, specifically, it wasn’t on my scope to watch. I heard about the massacre, same as everybody else. I also heard about the evidence. The news was everywhere about Taga’s involvement.”
“But there were bodies recovered from Mieetal,” Nyfid said, turning his attention back to Heir Taga.
“Council Security bodies. Only Council Security bodies. Councilman, whatever you think you know about what happened at Mieetal Outpost, let me tell you plainly: the truth has been edited to paint a specific picture. And that is true of every other precision strike we made. Me—my command—we are faithful and loyal to Uldarra. We carry the banner proudly. We will fight to protect the Colonies from any enemy. Inside or outside!”
The way Taga pronounced the last world made Nyfid’s blood chill in his veins.
“But…I don’t understand why the Overlord would then send the three of us—your brother, the Councilwoman, me—out here to look for you. In an attempt to discover a logical reason for the breakdown in communications. The attacks. All of it.”
“Unless the intent was to get rid of us too,” Heir Griboth said, his brow still beetled. “They reassign me from my own command. To one ship. Sending one ship on any mission is foolish. I should have demanded four more. But one ship. If something happens to one ship, they say, ‘Oh, how unfortunate, Taga has killed them all,’ and no one is any the wiser.”
Nyfid staggered to his feet.
“But why us? What is so threatened by us that they would arrange this?”
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