“Olli!” Kris reproached her. “She’s, what, a spy? An agent?”
“An agent.” Solace confirmed. “So when I say I need the use of a ship, I have a ship. Which, here, means you have a ship. If you want it. Now Idris can get to Tarekuma ahead of the Vulture—so you can get your ship back.”
There was a long silence in response to that. It was Rollo who put all their feelings into words. “And why would you do such a thing, Honoured Executor?”
Solace licked her lips. She looked a decade younger than the captain, shorter, slighter of build. Idris had to remind himself that she was even older than he was and could likely kill the lot of them with her bare hands.
“Because it’s in the interests of my government that I learn everything I can about the Oumaru. Getting to Tarekuma—and fast—is the first step in doing that.” She swallowed. “And because I think you’re good people.”
Olli made a disgusted noise.
“Forgive me for saying this, my friend,” Rollo said, with that polite distance he put between his crew and others, “but that does not sound very Partheni to me.”
Solace’s brow furrowed. “What’s the Parthenon, Captain?” She seemed to have reluctantly accepted that distance. “How did we come about, do you know?”
“A bunch of clever women decided that they would go grow a whole load of other women in test tubes, because they hated men?” Olli said, going from a standing start to staggeringly undiplomatic in record time. “Wasn’t that it?”
Rollo shot her a look, but Solace held up a hand.
“That’s how the Nativists tell it. Maybe that’s how they tell it all over the Colonies.” She shrugged. “The Parthenon was founded because of good people. Parsefer and her fellows looked at the way Earth had gone and saw inequality, exploitation, divisions, hatred and ignorance. They wanted to start again and do better. And if you’re boosting your population through vat-parthenogenesis, it’s easier just to work with the female line.” Idris reckoned that was both a simplified and sanitized explanation, but perhaps it was what Solace believed.
Olli scowled but Rollo glared at her.
“One last thing before we clasp arms on any deal, my friend. Why did you pretend to join my crew?”
For a fraction of a second Idris caught real hurt on Solace’s face, before she covered it with her usual martial impassivity.
“I did join your crew, Captain. I worked my passage. But you’re right, I had another motive too.” She glanced at Idris, probably wondering if he was going to spill the beans. He wouldn’t, he decided.
She pressed on anyway, laying it all bare. “I was sent to make an offer to your pilot, on behalf of the Parthenon. An offer I still intend to make, when I can get him to take his fingers out of his ears for long enough. No doubt he’ll say no, and that will be my duty done. Now the Oumaru is out there too, and that changes things. I am using my discretion right now, doing what I think is best while I wait for orders to reach me. But I also want you to get your ship back, because that is fair and just. Hence this.” A flip of the hand towards the Dark Joan. “Take it or leave it, Captain. I’m going anyway. I won’t say I don’t care either way, but it’s your choice.”
Rollo looked at his crew. Kittering was displaying “44%” which suggested he was ambivalent in the extreme and Olli was looking outright angry. Kris was nodding, though, and Idris found himself agreeing. Left with the casting vote, Rollo let out a deep breath.
“Then, my friend, we would be delighted to get our asses over to Tarekuma as fast as Idris can plot the course there. Assuming our asses will even fit in that pint pot thing of yours.”
Idris felt a rush of excitement. It would be grand to steal a march on the hijackers. But he was mostly thinking that he’d never, in all his days, flown a ship as elegant as the Dark Joan.
PART 3
TAREKUMA
11.
Idris
Monitor Joy, the Partheni’s stern diplomat, looked as though she might be Solace’s aunt, though she had likely been born at least a decade afterwards. And the close-mouthed Partheni technician, who came to perform some last-minute modifications to the Dark Joan, might have been the Executor’s younger sister. Her expression showed a marked difference, though; she didn’t approve of a pack of ruffians commandeering their ship. Still, she was plainly in awe of Solace and worked for two hours to get everything flight-ready.
The Partheni packet transport was indeed short on space. There were six suspension beds in a central stack within the ring of the gravitic drive, and the pilot’s seat was hard back against them. There was nowhere to be except the actual beds. Hold space was almost entirely filled by some new gear of Solace’s and Olli’s Scorpion frame. The packet transport was intended to lug data, after all, not goods. Idris wondered if Mordant House knew the things could be fitted out as emergency squad transport at a pinch.
“Reminds you of wartime?” Solace asked, at his elbow. “Berlenhof?”
“I think we had more space in wartime.”
“You did. You were never in the racks. Picture something like this,” she tapped the cluster of pods, “but for a hundred people at a time. Civilians had luxury accommodation.”
“I never knew. Although I’d have been too busy being scared out of my mind to appreciate it.” He tried to look at her properly and still couldn’t, not quite. “Thank you, by the way,” he mumbled.
“Hm?”
“For helping. For the ship. Getting us to… The others probably won’t say it.”
“I’ve heard all the things they say about my people across the Colonies, Idris. Probably they think I’m a monster who’ll come and kill their menfolk and make regular humanity a footnote in our triumphal histories, right? Or else we’re sex-starved sirens who just need to meet a good man to forswear all our Amazon ways.”
“You’ve seen some mediotypes,” he observed.
“Executor training means exposure to some weird stuff. I’d rather have stayed a simple myrmidon.”
Idris cocked an eye at her, squinting sidelong. Something about her was still too much like staring into the sun, and he was worried that it was because he liked her. “Why’d you go for it, then?” And, in the blank pause that question evinced, he realized, “You didn’t, did you? They just told you. Why? Not just for me?”
She shrugged. “Probably not just for you. The Aspirat does some pretty twisty thinking sometimes. I think it was because I’d been through the war, so I’d met people from outside the Parthenon.” She was closed-up, abruptly, hugging her own arms. “Seems kind of mad that being a soldier made me right for something completely different.”
“Myrmidon Executor.” The technician came out of the Dark Joan. “Prêt à combattre.” She cast what Idris could only characterize as a scandalized look towards Rollo and the crew.
Solace nodded, which turned out to be a dismissal because the younger woman left the bay immediately, ceding the field.
“It’s time.” Myrmidon Executor Solace turned to the crew. “Everyone on board and in the…” She stopped herself and visibly reconsidered her approach. “Captain Rostand. Your ship is ready.”
Rollo’s truculent expression softened by a hair. “Thank you, my good benefactor.” He put his nose through the hatch, clucked at the cramped conditions. “Get yourselves to bed, my children. Not much else for it.”
They filed aboard, and Kris stopped to put a strengthening hand on Idris’s arm. He found a smile for her, from somewhere, and watched her pull herself up into the Joan’s confines.
“You and her?” Solace asked him. Idris felt his expression turn wary again, but there didn’t seem any hidden rocks to the question. Seeing his look, she waved away an answer. “Just thinking you’d be lucky. Definitely outranks you, that one.” Her grin was natural, far too young for her—the way she’d smile with her Partheni comrades perhaps. Then she’d taken his elbow and boosted him up. He took the aid automatically, without flinching, but once in the pilot’s seat a moment l
ater, he wondered What just happened? Solace was already behind him, getting into one of the top pods. Then she paused and leaned over:
“You remember how it all…?” Sudden chagrin showed on her face. “Do you need me to take you through…”
“I recognize most of this from the Pythoness.” The Partheni console had a dozen small screens, each devoted to separate metrics, and he looked them over one by one. Two were military enough that he felt he didn’t need to worry about them.
“You didn’t fly the Pythoness.”
“Who do you think got her back to Heaven’s Sword at Berlenhof?” He felt his hands shake a little with the thought.
Solace must have seen it. “You’re good, Idris?”
He was silent, staring at the controls. They were a clear evolution from those he remembered from the war, but he could do this. Eventually he said, in a small voice, “I’ll be fine.”
The Dark Joan slipped from Lung-Crow Orbital like the dreams of a fish, as the saying went. It was swift and subtle, its departure cloaked by whatever standing arrangement the Parthenon had with the kybernet. Idris checked the sleep pods’ vitals and threw the gravitic drive into a low activity cycle, extending its shadow into unspace to plot out the conditions. From there, he could calculate their departure from real space.
He glanced back at the neat rack of suspension pods behind him. Four occupied, two empty, plus the incompatible aesthetics of Kit’s garish red globe sticking out like a sore thumb. Then he had committed them, and the Dark Joan fell into the liminal void beyond the real.
It hadn’t been like this on the Pythoness. He’d been surrounded by motion: running women performing desperate triage on the vessel’s abused systems. There’d been blaring alarms and rapid orders-and-confirmations in Parsef—all as the vessel unleashed its weapons against the unthinkably vast face of the Architect. The pilot’s chair had been sunk partway into the floor there too, because even a Parthenon warship held space at a premium. The body of the original Partheni pilot, and a good dozen other casualties, had been hauled away with grim efficiency. Idris had dropped into the vacant seat as though this was some bizarre dream. His elbows had been tucked in, his shoulders hunched forwards to avoid the women’s booted feet. He’d been glad that he was smaller even than the average Colonial starveling. All around him the injured vessel lurched and bucked, its brachator drive clutching at the gravitic substructure of real space for purchase. And beyond their hull the colossal, invisible hand of the Architect was reaching—deforming space as it tried to remake its enemy.
The Dark Joan was not the Pythoness, of course, but her controls and the cramped pilot’s seat recalled the old wartime vessel to him; the appalling chaos of their flight from the Architect, after the ship was crippled and half her crew killed. And then he was in unspace, strapped down tight and utterly alone with all those bad memories. The remembered Architect to one side, and to the other, patiently biding its time, the Presence had been waiting for him.
It was going to be a long trip through the deep void.
Kris
“You look rough.” Kris was understating the case, but dealing with Idris in this kind of state was always hard. Honestly, he looked like he’d been disinterred, standing in the close-walled orbital dock outside the Dark Joan with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders bowed. His skin looked pallid and clammy as he used his slate as a mirror, propped against the curve of the Partheni ship’s hull. He was lasering away a shadow of stubble, which would be back within a few hours.
“Where have you brought us, my boy?” Rollo stretched and rolled his shoulders. Olli was having the Scorpion lift her into its cradle.
“Some kind of Partheni channel opened up, when we quit unspace,” Idris mumbled. “Set a beacon for us to dock here. I mean, Tarekuma’s not the safest place to just hang about in orbit.”
“This is our safehouse.” Solace had unpacked new armour and was adjusting the fit of individual sections, using an interface on her slate. The gear was devoid of company badges this time. She had a new accelerator weapon, too; Tarekuma had no interest whatsoever in restricting the arms its visitors carried. “There’s no embassy here, but there are groups we just about trust to do business with us.”
“Even the great Parthenon gets its fingers dirty, eh?” Olli remarked. Kris shot her a look. Back when Solace had first showed, everyone had been prickly with her, but Olli seemed determined to carry on the feud, even though they were relying on Solace bending the rules for their benefit. Kris wasn’t sure why, but something about Solace had got under the woman’s skin.
The Partheni just shrugged. “From here, it’s your play.”
“On our own now, is it?” Rollo chewed at his moustache. “Well, you’ve done right by us, my friend. We owe you—”
“No,” Solace broke in. “You don’t understand. I will continue to back you. I just don’t know what should come next. I don’t know how this place works.”
“Leave that to me,” Kris broke in. “Me and Kit, anyway. Ready to spend some credits?”
The Hannilambra threw up some obscene human images from his library, showing exactly what he thought of that. But he displayed their Largesse account anyway. “All spending kept to a minimum!” came the translation, after some fiddling of his arms. “Do not negatively impact my retirement fund!” Which sounded funny but really was a matter of life and death to the Hanni.
They were docked at one of the elevator orbitals that ringed Tarekuma’s equator. The planet’s actual surface was harsh: scoured by radiation, high winds and without enough atmospheric pressure for unprotected humans. Ancient geological tumult had left Tarekuma riven with chasms, some up to five kilometres deep. The air was thicker there and conditions were more conducive to both native and visiting life. A dozen cities across the planet were built into the walls of these rifts, extending deep into the rock for vast vertical distances. Each habitation was home to millions of humans and other species, living like termites in constant close proximity. They were linked over the surface to the various elevator cables where the ground-based factions jealously controlled access to orbit. All real business had to be done planetside, no matter how inconvenient that was for anyone up above. It was just about the only thing every gang leader and petty overlord agreed upon. Orbitals that tried to cheat them were disciplined with extreme prejudice.
What Kris could do from here in orbit was research her quarry. She could also make some initial overtures, and for that she’d need to spend a little of Kit’s “retirement fund.” Nobody here was going to help her out of the goodness of their hearts. Not even Prosecutor Thrennikos, who was practically an old friend. She’d crashed out of Scintilla’s Inns of Court, barely snagging her credentials as she ran out of the door. But Livvo Thrennikos hadn’t even managed to qualify, after they’d caught him stuffing bribes into his pockets with both hands. However, Tarekuma didn’t care about official credentials—only malign ability. The place was a weird sort of meritocracy like that. So it was that her old friend had somehow ended up here, with a hastily conferred practising certificate from a Tarekuman law school that probably hadn’t existed five minutes beforehand. Then Thrennikos had been put to work to magically transform the underhand into the legitimate.
He took her comms call readily enough. She was expecting… she didn’t know what, to be honest. It had been years. Would he have grown bloated and corrupt with over-fine living, or maybe have an eyepatch and a cybernetic hand? As it happened, Prosecutor Livvo Thrennikos looked far better than she expected. His long-chinned, dark face had grown prosperously fleshy without losing its strength, and he was sporting a moustache of remarkable curling richness. His eyes lit up when he saw her, which was reassuring. Maybe he wouldn’t fleece them too much for his services.
“Nalsvyssnir Orbital, no less?” he exclaimed, seeing where she was transmitting from. “What brings you to my humble hemisphere, Kerry?” Because back on Scintilla they’d put the stress on the first syllable of Keristina, so
the name had worn down differently on repeated use.
“Information, introductions…”
“Setting up business here?” He raised an eyebrow and flashed brilliantly white teeth.
“Would it threaten you if I did?” Despite herself, she smiled back at him. He’d always been utterly amoral, and she guessed that hadn’t changed. He’d definitely been more fun than her fellow students… in a variety of interesting ways. Wouldn’t bring the price down, but she found herself wondering if he’d make a nice diversion, once the current problems were sorted out?
“Come work with me,” he said, apparently sincere and without hesitation. Kris found herself genuinely touched.
“Tempting,” she replied. “But my ship’s captain has a Tarekuman issue… and we’re here to sort it out.”
“That covers a lot of ground. Is this the sort of issue that leaves bodies?”
“God, I hope not,” she said honestly enough. No more than we’ve had already. “We need contacts, and we need an introduction. Beyond that we’ll sort ourselves out, no dirt on your doorstep, Liv. Can you help?”
“Let me look at you.” And he did for a while, and she wondered about him. Was he married? With children? How much of a life could you carve out, on a planet splintered into gang territories and ruled by criminal fiefdoms? Probably quite a good one, if you were careful. At last he smiled, a little sadly. “Who are you in the shit with, Kerry?”
“Hopefully, nobody. But we need to talk to Broken Harvest.”
His face went into professionally blank mode as he thought about that. Likely Thrennikos had no direct links with the Harvest, given how many factions had a stake on Tarekuma. But he’d know someone, or someone who knew someone. Or he’d sell Kris and her crew out to them. She was banking a lot on their old association.
“That should be possible.” His professional face was still on, but he was nodding. “They’re Hegemonic, which makes it hard to get to them directly. But I can scare up a minister to make the necessary introductions. That do you?”
Shards of Earth Page 14
