Havaer recorded it all, thanked Sathiel profusely, and made his retreat. The Caffenado had been very good, he agreed. Hard not to develop a taste for it. Out of the cultist’s presence, even he found himself a little shaken. Not a madman, Sathiel, but a persuasive one. It would be profoundly unfortunate should he turn out to be right. Like most Colonials, Havaer had no wish to be ruled by alien overlords. But better than dying.
After that, it was time to find the Vulture God’s disinherited crew. When he set out, he’d assumed the whole Architect business was a hoax and the Vulture crew was at the heart of it. Now, with two of them dead and their ship taken, he wasn’t sure what to think.
Havaer’s contacts eventually tracked them to a maintenance bay by the freight docks. It was a cavernous space with the stripped shells of two shuttles hanging overhead like whale carcasses. A Hannilambra Envoy-class craft sat below these on uneven legs, as half a dozen crablike aliens and eight station engineers tried to scavenge sufficient parts to fix her gravitic drive. At the back of the bay, sitting on dented crates, were three of the Vulture God’s survivors.
The broad man was their captain, Rostand. The Hannilambra was the factor. And the skinny youngster was their pilot, Telemmier, the Int. It set Havaer’s teeth on edge to think of such a valuable asset rusting at the fringes of Colonial space, rather than serving Hugh.
Rostand glowered up at him as he arrived. “Are you Pilchern?”
From the man’s expression, this Pilchern was going to have a bad day when he did turn up. For a moment Havaer considered saying yes and just winging it, but there were too many unknowns. “Captain Rostand, I’d like a moment of your time.”
“You and every other fucker,” Rostand growled. He was well on the way to drunkenness, Havaer decided: red eyes and a reddening face. Though there was likely grief involved, for his lost crew.
“I’m not rag,” Havaer replied, which he hoped was still spacer slang for newsmongers. He’d decided to ditch his mediotype persona, as the crew hadn’t given any interviews so far. He pulled out his Hugh Intervention Board ID, the real one, and triggered its authenticator with his thumb. The little square of plastic confirmed his biometrics and bona fides.
Rostand stared belligerently at it, then shrugged. “You’re out of your jurisdiction. Or haven’t you been keeping up with current affairs around here?” Spacers were notoriously prickly about Hugh interference, mostly because they were usually doing something illegal.
Havaer hooked over an empty box and sat down, smiling. “Captain, I’ve no official power here, no backup, just a man investigating. You can imagine what.”
“Word gets to Mordant House quickly these days,” said Telemmier, not looking at Havaer. He’d pulled into himself when the ID came out, and Havaer could understand that. Under other circumstances, the man would be the focus of any Mordant operation here.
“We heard you brought something in,” Havaer said frankly. “Then I arrive to find it’s been taken from you.”
“Along with a lot else,” Rostand spat. “What do you want from us, Menheer Spook? Confirmation that we found what they say we found? Yes. Verification that any proof disappeared with my damn ship? Yes again. So there we have it. That’s all there is, see right?”
“You’re Colonial citizens, you two.” Havaer looked to Rostand and the Int, ignoring the Hanni for now.
“Doesn’t mean we do what you say,” rejoined the truculent Rostand. “’Specially not here.”
“I’m just hoping you have some loyalty to the Council of Human Interests, being human,” Havaer went on patiently. “I’m not trying to be Nativist, just concerned. If what you found really…”
Telemmier broke in. “It did happen. And it was recent. I expect you’ve seen the Oumaru’s departure logs. Something pulled her off course into the deep void and did… that to her.”
Havaer tried to meet the man’s gaze, but the Int’s eyes just kept sliding away as though fixed on a distant horizon. Standard for Intermediaries, though. You couldn’t see what they saw without developing the “abyssal gaze.” “Menheer Telemmier, would you be willing to—”
“No.”
“I haven’t—”
“No, I will not come and answer your questions about what I might have sensed or not sensed, felt or not felt… in unspace or real space or in the reaches of my imagination,” Telemmier told him flatly. “I don’t do government work anymore. I’ve served. I’ve earned the right to be left alone.”
Havaer hadn’t quite believed the file on Idris Telemmier. Crossed wires, surely; couldn’t be the same man. Not enough years on the face for a start. Must be some escapee from a leash contract, so technically still the property of the state… Except Havaer could look into those too-young features and see the extra decades lurking beneath the surface like a rot.
“I can promise you—”
“I’m not going back,” Telemmier said and Havaer prepared to push the matter. He only caught the iron behind the words in retrospect, as Telemmier burst out again, “I’m not going back!” He stood so suddenly that he kicked over his crate, fists balled abruptly. The Int was the least imposing physical specimen Havaer had ever seen, a true child of the Polyaspora, but the air about him seemed to flex, and one of the gutted shuttles above creaked warningly. A coincidence, it had to be just coincidence. But Telemmier was one of the oldest Ints out there, junior only to Saint Xavienne herself. Who knew what they might become, in time?
Havaer smiled at him, which was hard but he was practised. “Understood,” he said easily. “I’ll leave you with my details, in case you recall something and want to pass it on. Anything will help. This isn’t about you, it’s about saving lives. Anything…” He trailed off. A woman had joined them. Havaer put a great deal of effort into maintaining his mild, friendly expression.
She was Partheni. He noted the badges on her regulation grey overcoat, the service-and-loss tattoo beneath her eye. But he’d have known her without those signs. Soldiers of the Parthenon all had a certain look to them, literally: beautiful and deadly like highly polished knives.
He nodded cordially to her and stood. “Thank you for your time, Captain.”
The Partheni was standing protectively by Telemmier, regarding Havaer with narrow-eyed belligerence. She didn’t return the nod.
On his way out Havaer was already composing his report in his head. Parthenon involvement, request further instructions.
Idris
Colonial tradition was for grieving to be brief; the living needed to move on. It came from when the dead had outnumbered the living, and there just wasn’t time for protracted mourning. And it wasn’t as though the end of the war had cured death. Spacers died; they died hard and they still died often. They were the lifeblood of the human sphere, from the crews of the huge, dilapidated freighters whose timely arrival with holds of food was the difference between plenty and starvation, all the way down to the packet runners who carried nothing but information and barely stayed out of suspension for longer than it took to download. They died when life support failed; they died crazy in the deep void. They died when decades of careful maintenance ceased to be enough to hold their ageing ships together. They died on both sides of pirate actions, of hereditary conditions, in impromptu brawls in sordid brothels or orbital bars. And their friends moved on, but you couldn’t move on without a ship to move you. Losing a ship was a disaster that you literally could only walk away from.
Kittering had been searching for opportunities for the crew all morning, without success. No vessel would take them on as a group. Rollo was fiercely adamant that he’d take nothing less than a share-holding second, and Idris privately thought that he wouldn’t want to be the captain who took Rollo on as a subordinate.
At some point, Idris knew, the crew would simply part under the stress of the situation, so that they would all drift outwards and probably never meet again. He certainly wasn’t going anywhere without Kris to fight for him. He felt a cold shiver at the thought that s
he might turn to safe work on-planet as an advocate. She’d been running a long time, after all.
Around that point the spook turned up, which didn’t improve anybody’s mood much. And Idris had over-reacted, of course. Too much stress and grief over too short a time. He’d let himself off his own personal leash, and that always left him feeling tired and sick. Probably the man really wasn’t here with ulterior motives but then Solace had arrived. He would worry, later, what conclusions the Mordant House man would draw about Partheni involvement; Hugh attention was never welcome. Yet right then he’d never been so glad to see anyone as he was to have Solace beside him, and the spook had cleared out almost immediately. Solace’s proprietary air should have got on his nerves but, with Kris absent, he clung to the thought that someone was looking out for him. That’s wretched, Idris; just wretched. But he felt rubbed raw, as though every new development was salt on open wounds.
“I thought you’d left, gone back to…” Rollo made a vague gesture, presumably intended to indicate the whole institution of the Parthenon.
“I’ve been seeing what I can do,” Solace told him. “As a member of your crew.”
“And are you? Still?”
She met his bleary-eyed belligerence head on. “Do you still have a crew?”
Rollo dropped his gaze first. “I don’t know, my daughter.”
“If you do, then I’m still on it. Until the next job, when we can negotiate all over again. And… I have something to say, but where are Kris and Olli?”
Rollo glanced at Kittering, whose screens informed them that they were inbound, with word.
Solace nodded. “Then let’s hear what they have for us.”
*
“My ship’s headed for Tarekuma?” Rollo echoed, after Kris had rattled out their news. “That figures, my children.” He sighed, and said again, “Tarekuma. It’s a goddamn armpit.”
“Explain?” Solace asked and Rollo rolled his eyes at her.
“Not having to know about or go to Tarekuma is a profound incentive to back the Parthenon.” He rubbed at his face as though trying to scrub the alcohol out of his skin. “It’s… a shit-hole, is what it is.”
“Back Before,” Kris filled in, “there were plans for a big colony there. It was going to be a grand terraforming venture. Rocky planet, bad chemistry, but they had all the time and money in the world, didn’t they. And what the place did have was location. Seven Throughways meet at Tarekuma. Then the Architects happened, and then the war. Whole lot of refugees ended up in Tarekuma, because it was so easy to reach. What didn’t end up there was money or terraforming kit. People came there from everywhere. Aliens too. Gangs, warlords, cults… They got the vertical cities running, bought atmosphere modifiers, kept out most of the bad wildlife. Even now, Hugh’s got only the loosest grasp over what goes on down there.”
“Way I hear it, that’s how they like it,” Olli put in sourly. “Gives Hugh a place to bend their own laws, gives their spies a place to meet other spies—all sort of shadowy ballsack stuff.”
Kittering chittered, his screens responding to a query Kris had raised. She read off the information:
“There are maybe a hundred major players on Tarekuma and any number of off-world cartels and syndicates who’ve got fingers in the pie. The Broken Harvest are some kind of criminal enterprise from out of the Hegemony,” Kris reported.
“Wouldn’t have thought their perfect paradise-empire would have gangsters,” Idris said mildly.
“I don’t pretend to understand it myself,” Kris replied, “but the Essiel have a strange attitude towards outlaws and crime. They hate it and openly fight lawbreakers, and yet it’s also a recognized part of their system somehow. So, yes, the Broken Harvest are some mob out of the Hegemony. But if they’re on Tarekuma, they obviously stray beyond its borders.”
“So why,” Rollo demanded ponderously, “do they want my ship?”
“Maybe we were just unlucky,” said Olli. “Surely they want the Oumaru, not the Vulture? Plenty of people would pay to control that evidence, either hide it or shove it up a flagpole.” Olli eyed Solace. “You fuckers, for instance?”
The Partheni met the accusation without a frown. “Honestly, not our style.”
“Harvest’ll have a sale lined up for the Oumaru, or maybe they’ll auction it. But the Vulture… I mean, it’s a decent ship, but it’s not the prize. Maybe we could even buy it back off them, cut a deal—work for the mob to secure it?”
Idris looked from one to the other, seeing how Olli’s suggestion sat. Not well, but not beyond anyone’s personal morality, was his conclusion. During his years with the Vulture they’d never worked for criminals directly. But you might have only had to go one step down the chain to find dirty money. On the other hand, working for the Broken Harvest meant clasping wrists with Barney and Medvig’s killers—not something to be done lightly.
The same dilemma had probably played out in Rollo’s head, for he said, “We could go there… See if they haven’t already sold or scrapped her. Work passage over to Tarekuma and see how things lie. And if there’s a chance for revenge…” His face went hard at that thought. He could be a vengeful man. Dangerous waters, Idris knew. Am I getting cold feet? Icy cold. But he couldn’t abandon his crewmates.
“Kit,” said Rollo at last. “Hunt down berths Tarekuma-ways, as passengers or crew, whatever it takes.” He looked round at them. “Anyone wants out, then get out, no hard feelings. For I am in a mood to do some truly stupid things.”
Solace coughed slightly. “Idris?”
He looked at her warily, and for a long two seconds she just met his gaze. Then she asked, “How long does it take, to get from here to Tarekuma on the Throughways?”
Kit crabwised over, presenting a reckoner on one arm-screen and highlighting the most useful routes.
“Bear with me,” Idris said, checking the displays. And then: “Can’t get it down to under three days, by any route.”
“And if you were to pilot us from here yourself, off piste?”
“Off…? You mean deep void?” He hadn’t realized the Partheni had their own term. “Somewhere between nineteen and twenty-three ship hours.” Meaning the hours old Earth had used.
Rollo grunted. “You think we can charter something?” He sounded dubious and Kittering was already cautioning about expense.
“Listen,” Solace told them. “I want you all to come with me, right now. I want to show you something.” She stood, and after a moment Rollo did too, and then Kris. Olli and Kit were already on their various feet. Solace looked at Idris, not a challenge so much as an entreaty. He shrugged, feeling tired and vaguely anxious about whatever the woman had in mind. Whatever it is, I’m not going to like it.
Solace took them towards the dock levels, a ring of small private jetties. The great and the good kept their launches and yachts here. Idris bleakly enjoyed the mortified looks they received from liveried technicians and flunkies, seeing this motley mob of spacers slouching through their pristine corridors.
And then they were at a door with two Partheni myrmidons outside, in full armour and armed with accelerators. The crew shrank back as one, fearing ambush, Kittering practically disappearing behind Rollo’s legs. Solace just nodded to the soldiers and the women stepped smartly aside with a mutual “Myrmidon Executor.”
Olli swore faintly, as the door slid open. “What treasonous shit have we gotten ourselves into?”
“No idea,” Idris lied. He was half expecting to be grabbed and bagged right here, and the rest of them shot.
There was just one ship in the bay. It was a segmented teardrop, half the size of the Vulture God and entirely lacking in the thrown-together look that was practically Colonial aesthetic. Its surface was silvery, and some of the jutting nodules that flanked its nose were probably weapons.
There was a column of Parsef characters on the side, along with its company badges. Kittering’s screens helpfully translated its name as the Dark Joan.
“What’s
this, my child?” Rollo asked cautiously.
“Captain Rostand, I have a proposal.”
“Crew to captain, or Partheni to a poor Colonial?” His moustache bristled but his eyes kept sliding back to the Dark Joan.
“I went to the embassy,” she told them all, and abruptly there was a distance between Solace and the rest of them, a gap of status as much as physical space. “This is one of our packet transport ships. I’ve requisitioned it.”
They stared at her, or at least their stares were split between her and the shining perfection of the ship. “You mean,” Kris said slowly, “you said, ‘I want this ship’ and they just… let you have it.”
“Borrow it,” Solace agreed. Her hands were wringing at each other. Idris wondered if she realized. Maybe Partheni didn’t get nervous around each other, so she’d not had his practice in hiding it.
Rollo was suddenly very sober. “My daughter,” he said flatly. “The guards called you ‘Executor.’ What are you?”
“Executors are trained to go outside the Parthenon sphere and… do what must be done.”
“You’re an assassin,” Olli said flatly.
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