Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “I think you recognize my Raptorid,” She recognized the voice now, too, though she wouldn’t give the Boyarin the satisfaction of showing it. “And you are the attorney. I remember you. We were having such a pleasant exchange before your warrior-dyke broke in. You have the honour of speaking to the Boyarin Piter Tchever Uskaro. I, on the other hand, am unfortunate enough to be addressing a crew of wanted criminals.”

  He doesn’t half like the sound of his own voice, Kris thought.

  “Now, I’m going to suggest that you divert course and come dock with me, Mesdam attorney. Bring your Int client too. Otherwise your carrion bird is going to take a long dive down the gravity well.”

  “I’m not entering any manner of negotiations until we’ve spoken to our crew on the Vulture,” Kris said. “If you think the ship is leverage enough, think again.”

  There was a pause, then Uskaro broadcast on an open channel, “Vulture, you may speak.”

  They received a frenzied babble of scritching and scraping through the comms, together with a great dump of text and images. That certainly looked like Kittering’s handiwork. Olli sorted through it quickly, decoding a long complaint to find the hidden details Kit had secreted within the message. It was an old Hanni game.

  “Two guys with him. Hauled him over and locked weapons on him before he could do anything. He’s not exactly a pilot, poor bastard. Still alive, though.”

  “So what do we do?” Kris asked. “I don’t see Solace fighting her way over to the Raptorid and ending the lot of them. Idris?”

  She looked back to see the Intermediary sitting with his back to the hull, looking ill. “Anyone we can hail?” he croaked.

  “No friends hereabouts,” Olli said.

  “We could fight. I’m full on ammunition now,” Solace said quietly. “We suit up in case we’re hit. I shoot their hull full of holes, take out some key systems.”

  “That’s how you’d do it in the Parthenon, is it?” Kris asked her frankly.

  “In the Parthenon I’d have at least three others with the same kit and training as me. And then, yes, we’d go in and do exactly that, with full confidence. Right now, with just me, maybe not ideal. But the man wants to enslave Idris and he’s hardly going to let the rest of us go, given the trouble we’ve caused him. You have other ideas?”

  “Yes,” Kris insisted. “There’s always other options… Let’s give talking a chance. The Boyarin likes to talk. And if they take Idris intact and we leave this alive too, we can spring him some time. We work out a rendezvous, Idris can take whatever damn ship they put him on there, and we’ll have pirates waiting. We know some pirates.” She faced up to Solace’s raised eyebrow. “Well, we do. Alive is better, is all I’m saying. Give me a chance to talk to them.”

  “We talk, we’ve lost our best chance of fighting it out,” Solace said, but in a tone that said she was knuckling under.

  “Raptorid, we are coming in,” Olli reported in venomous tones.

  “Of course you are,” Uskaro said, vastly pleased with himself. “I will hand you over to one of my people, while I take care of the bigger picture.”

  “Small people for small matters. Right.” The specialist’s face looked like thunder.

  “Idris?” Kris asked. He looked at her without much expression.

  “Pick a system,” Solace encouraged him. “I’ll have a team there on standby for as long as it takes. The moment they give you free access to a ship’s controls…”

  “And then I’m yours, rather than theirs,” he murmured.

  Solace looked away. Kris searched for anger, frustration, even guilt on her face. She found none of it. Instead there was an unexpected misery.

  “By that point… I don’t think I could ask my people to go to those lengths, including attacking a Colonial ship, to then come away with nothing. But isn’t the Parthenon better? Better us than the Magdans, surely?”

  “We’ll go get him,” Olli said bluntly. “Us… we might use pirates, crooks, whatever. But we wouldn’t be starting a fucking war.”

  “Solace, old comrade-in-arms,” Trine put in, “I am less than enthused by these developments.”

  “As for you—!” Olli started, but then Kris barked out, “Hold! Who’s this?” She’d been keeping an eye on the pilot’s board—and the Joan had some eager early warning systems.

  “What now?” Olli turned her attention to the piloting feed and caught up. “Someone else is out there. Some other ship.”

  “Friends, I don’t suppose?” Trine asked hopefully.

  “You don’t suppose correct. We’ve got no fucking friends round here,” Olli told them. “They’re hailing the Raptorid—oh, bless your skittering little feet, Kit. He’s still hacked into their deck, even though they’re looking over his shoulder. He’s sending us the traffic. Listen up.”

  “Raptorid,” came a thin, slightly nasal accent. Kris reckoned it came from somewhere central and settled in the Colonies. “This is Mordant’s Hammer requesting an address with the respected Boyarin Uskaro of Fief Yachellow.”

  Idris jolted to his feet hard enough to crack his head on the curved side of the hull. “That’s got to be a very poor joke,” he got out.

  “Isn’t Mordant…” Kris started uncertainly.

  “They’re saying they’re the secret police,” he said, and when that didn’t seem to make much sense even to himself, he added, “The blatant secret police. When Mordant House throws its weight around, they show it in the names of their ships.”

  Over the comms came the sound of the operator, sounding cagey. “Mordant’s Hammer this is Raptorid. The noble Boyarin would ask for your credentials and to what he owes the pleasure of your presence?”

  “Nativist bastard’s a little leery when the actual authorities turn up,” Olli muttered. “I guess the whole of Hugh doesn’t quite belong to them yet, then.”

  “There’s some kind of ID coming through. Looks… genuine? Idris?”

  “I’m no expert. If you think it’s sound, probably it’s sound. Mordant House. Damn me.” He looked sick with the thought. “They’re here for me.”

  “You somehow failed to mention that the Hugh spook squad were after you, ever,” Kris noted, guessing that at least half of this was his normal paranoia.

  Sure enough, he hesitated. “Well…”

  “I mean, it’s not like we haven’t gotten mixed up in a whole world of other pain recently,” she pointed out calmly. “Maybe it’s not all about you.”

  “Raptorid, this is Agent Havaer Mundy of the Intervention Board. I claim eminent domain of the vessel you are detaining and all of its crew. I appreciate your assistance in holding them, but kindly repatriate any you might have taken aboard and decouple. Your cooperation is noted—and Mordant House always remembers.” The words came over without much inflection, all business and no threat, until you read between them. Oh he’s got our man Uskaro’s number all right.

  “Hailing us now,” Olli said, and that same calm voice came to them.

  “Partheni packet runner Dark Joan, it is my sincere belief that you are not carrying diplomatic personnel or restricted data that places you outside jurisdiction. Therefore I am requesting that you follow your original course and dock with the Vulture God, which I am taking under my control. Please do not deviate from that course.”

  Kris brought up an image of the Hammer, which was cruising in at some speed. It was a blunt-nosed vessel with a heavy head and a bulky torus body. As close as you could get to being a light fighting ship without painting her up in navy colours. Kris could even see two banks of heavy accelerators ready to shred any ship that didn’t fall into line.

  “How are the Joan’s shields. Could we survive that?” she asked, indicating the weaponry.

  “For a short period of time,” Solace confirmed. “But we’re massively outclassed here—and the Vulture can’t handle that kind of firepower at all.”

  “The Raptorid’s backing off,” Olli noted. “They don’t fancy it either, and they’r
e tougher than we are.”

  “They don’t want to be on the Mordant shit list. And neither do we,” Kris said hollowly.

  “We already are. Look at the fucker they sent after us!”

  “Think about what we’ve been involved in recently. You think Hugh didn’t sit up and take notice the moment word came that we’d hauled an Architect-touched ship into Lung-Crow?” Kris demanded. “This doesn’t have to be our trouble. We just need to be frank and honest and not assume they’re going to screw us.”

  “They are going to screw us,” Olli insisted. “But I don’t see what we can do other than bend over. Kit’s out there and he’s not even a Colonial citizen. He’s utterly fucked if we just hightail it away.”

  A glance was exchanged: Olli to Idris, Idris to Solace, Solace to Kris. Trine’s holographic face just gurned through a series of frustrated expressions, looking at all of them at once.

  “Hammer, this is the Dark Joan. We’re coming in,” Kris confirmed. Better than being at the mercy of the Magdans. Maybe. Possibly.

  20.

  Havaer

  “Havaer Mundy?” asked Keristina Soolin Almier. “Wait, like the Ragman? The ‘Travelled Opinions’ guy?”

  Havaer stared at her. It wasn’t often someone managed to wrong-foot him at the very start of an interview, but here he was. And that was the drawback of having a public ID under the same tagline as his spook work, certainly, but it was rare his two worlds clashed when he wasn’t personally bringing them together.

  “I moonlight,” he said. “You can assume I’m wearing my other hat here.”

  “Oh, right.” The woman still seemed entirely at ease, chatty, eager to help. “I like your stuff.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Havaer said automatically, shaking off a touch of the surreal. It was just the two of them and the recording rig, here in the heart of the Mordant’s Hammer. The interrogation room was intentionally spare, just metal frame furniture and bare walls adorned with only a little tracery of machinery. Enough to suggest the room might have other purposes than hosting a friendly chat. Almier didn’t seem to have noticed.

  “Mesdam Almier, you can imagine what I’m here to discuss. I’d hoped to talk to Captain Rostand, but I understand…”

  “Broken Harvest killed him.”

  “Yes. While you were retaking your ship from them. Some might say that was a little out of the league of a salvage crew.”

  “Some didn’t know Rollo,” she told him with a hard smile. “Also, some might not have had a Partheni ship and soldier to hand.”

  Havaer had the irrational impulse to school her in how to behave under interrogation. Play down the Parthenon involvement, or at least make me work for it. And she was a lawyer, wasn’t she? Accredited out of Scintilla, of all places. A very odd start, when you ended up working the spacer circuit. And he’d read her file, read all of their files—where they existed. Almier had more detail in hers than the rest, coming from a settled background rather than being born to the spacer life. A nasty business for her there, at the end. Expensive blood she’d ended up shedding, even if it was all legal under Scintilla’s ridiculous duelling codes.

  “What happened to the Oumaru?”

  “We stowed it. In the deep void. I mean, you could talk Idris into taking you there? Or we could nip back in the Vulture, and bring the whole thing back to you…?”

  “We have our own Intermediary navigator,” he said. So don’t think you can just vanish. He was trying hard to be the bad guy interrogator, the looming shadow of Mordant House, but she seemed blithely unaware of it. He’d been minded to go in heavy-handed—with accusations of them selling out Hugh to the Parthenon, all of that. But it was hard to put the screws on when she was being so damned cooperative. Easier right now just to keep a regular police hat on and let her talk, see what spilled out on the table.

  “So why were this Broken Harvest mob involved?” Something he had a personal stake in finding out, given the unpleasant interview he’d just managed to survive.

  “Said the Oumaru was their ship, or was carrying their cargo.” She shrugged. “Or—maybe, I mean, just the wreck itself has a price, right? Who wouldn’t want the chance to go over an Architect’s leavings? That’s why we picked up Delegate Trine, after all. We wanted to know just what we had, now we had it.”

  “Recoup your losses?”

  Her mildly reproving look actually made him feel bad about the words. “Our losses are three dead friends, Menheer Mundy. But we still have to make a living, and if we could sell the thing, to you, to the Parthenon, to some Hanni consortium? I mean, Architects are everyone’s problem, right? Even the Hegemony would be interested. Probably that’s where Aklu the Hook’s buyers are.”

  He let himself blink at her without any sign of recognition. “Who?”

  “Oh, well.” She flexed her fingers enthusiastically. “Agent, let me tell you about the Broken Harvest’s top dog, because that is really worth an opinion piece…”

  *

  He had tried to interrogate the Hanni, whose Colonial trade permits transliterated his name as Kr’k’ctahrr—although his human colleagues referred to him as Kit or Kittering. Havaer suspected strongly that the alien was leaning heavily on the species communications barrier to frustrate any kind of questioning. And although Mordant kept a few Hanni on the payroll, he hadn’t had time to requisition any. So: one useless suspect.

  Delegate Trine turned out to be another dead-end. Not even a member of the Vulture crew, but an academic with a list of Colonial qualifications as long as a human arm. The problem was the “delegate” in front of their name. Hiver Assets would have been fair game, under the reciprocal agreements between Hugh and the Hiver Assembly. Delegates were a different matter—a rank awarded sparingly by the Hivers, and only conferred upon individuals of particular significance and knowledge. Hugh had agreed not to prod one without going through slow official channels. This in return for the Hivers respecting Hugh’s own diplomats and, not to put too fine a point on it, their spies. It turned out that the Dark Joan really had been transporting someone with diplomatic immunity, but their credentials had been Hiver Assembly rather than Parthenon.

  Olian “Olli” Timo was another matter. They’d got her out of the Castigar engineering frame by a careful mix of reason and veiled threat, although it hadn’t done much to take the fight out of her. She turned up in a six-legged walker instead. Havaer’s crew had done their best to scan it for hidden weapons, but the thing was a mess of clashing parts and incompatible tech, and spacers were so damn ingenious with their jury-rigging… For all they knew, the whole thing could have been a bomb or a home-made accelerator cannon.

  “Well?” she demanded. “What, then?” Her finger stumps flexed and the feet of the walker scraped on the metal floor like fingernails on a board.

  I will have some carpet put down when we hit dock, Havaer vowed, hiding the way the sound wormed into his head. “Mesdam Timo, you know why we’re here…”

  “I’m saying nothing.”

  “You’re a Colonial citizen, Mesdam. You resent your government taking an interest, when it looks like the war’s back on?” Meeting her bluntness with bluntness was probably the best tactic.

  “Not my government. You know spacers get no say in what goes on in Berlenhof.”

  “Tell me about the Oumaru.”

  “I’m telling you nothing. Not one word. On advice of my lawyer.”

  “Mesdam Timo,” Havaer said calmly, “I have just had a perfectly pleasant and informative conversation with your lawyer.”

  “Then you don’t need me, do you.”

  “Let’s change topic then. Tell me about the Broken Harvest.”

  “Those fuckers,” she said, forgetting instantly that she wasn’t telling him anything. She proceeded to describe the cartel, their Essiel leader, their Tothiat enforcers and a great deal more without any real prompting from him. I suppose it was this “Mesmon” who was taking part in the anatomy lesson, when I was there.
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  “So, fine. You don’t like them,” he concluded for her. “I’ve had my own run-in with them—as it happens—while on your trail. This Mesmon, who killed your captain…”

  “We did for him, the bastard.”

  “You didn’t.” And he saw her face go still and then clench like a fist. He told her what he’d seen, the way that The Unspeakable Aklu punished failure in its more durable servants. She didn’t like Mesmon being alive, but he could see she didn’t mind him being alive and flayed—and she appreciated both the warning and the mental image of the Tothiat’s torture.

  “So, tell me about the Parthenon.”

  “Those eugenicist fuckers?” she snapped. “Oh, that’s what’s got your panties twisted, is it? That figures.” She hunkered forwards in her walker with a twitch of her limb stumps. “Let me tell you exactly what I think of those turds…”

  *

  Which led him onto what he reckoned was going to be the toughest interview.

  They had not persuaded the Partheni to take off her armour. She wasn’t quite under arrest, although Havaer had broad powers when it came to foreign operatives in Colonial Space. Her ID was good on the surface too, but stank of espionage the moment he turned a spook’s practised gaze on it. He had three marines in with him, also armoured and all with accelerators. If anything kicked off, they would end up riddling the Hammer’s hull with holes, and also anyone who got in their way. Havaer’s pessimistic assessment of anything kicking off included himself being used as a human shield, and he was, as a rule, averse to death by friendly fire. It’s never that friendly, let’s face it.

  At least she’d agreed to leave her own gun on the Vulture.

  Sitting down, he opened with, “Well now, Myrmidon. You’re a long way from home.”

  She nodded, watching him. Everyone told you how impossible Partheni were to read, but it wasn’t true. The warrior angels were humans too, perhaps their biggest secret. They really weren’t machines or perfectly bioengineered superwomen, although both Nativists and the Parthenon had unintentionally colluded to hide these facts. Right now this one, Solace, was tense, a little antagonistic. But he could tell she was worried, too. Worried for herself? Concerned about Partheni interests? He didn’t think so.