It was building again, feeding off the guilt.
Trapper slammed the end of his staff into the floor, using it to hoist himself to his feet. Wilco noticed immediately that he was not rising to stretch his legs. Wilco planted his back foot, shifting into a defensive position without thinking.
Noticing the change in them both, Akari tensed the muscles in her legs, unsure as of yet what she would do, run or intervene.
“We have a problem?” Wilco said.
“Certainly do,” Trapper said. “I can’t manage it anymore. Not mine and yours.”
“The hell are you on about?”
“The guilt,” Trapper said. “About Kurda.”
“Then I suggest you meditate or have a drink or something. Why are you telling me?”
“Because they’re the same. So damn potent that it’s all I feel. Yours flows off you like a salty wind off the sea. Floods my senses. I can’t shut it out. It mixes with mine, and I’m drowning in it.”
Wilco seemed uncomfortable suddenly, like he just realized he was naked and everyone was staring at him. “And we plan to fight about it?”
“At the center of yours, a molten core of self-loathing.” Trapper tightened his grip around his staff. “You blame yourself. You hate yourself. It’s flooding into me right now, the hate and rage. I hate you as much as you hate yourself and I don’t have any of that pesky sense of self-preservation.”
Wilco nodded like he suddenly understood. “So, you want to kill me? Because I want to kill myself?” He laughed. “If you feel a little harder, I think you’ll realize I like myself too much to do that.”
“Bravado,” Trapper said. “So easily seen through. You want to hurt. I want to hurt you.” He squeezed harder on his staff, like he was trying to hold it still.
Wilco rose from his defensive position and stiffened, realizing now why Trapper had been avoiding him. He reached for his face, the habit of adjusting his mask still prevalent. He felt scarred flesh instead and a surge of sickness rose in his gut. He looked to his bag, sitting at his feet, and wished he could remove his mask from within and place it on his face, slide behind the wonderful barrier. Instead, he imagined it. He felt the weight of it against his cheeks. He heard the hum of his breathing.
“If you can’t manage others’ feelings of guilt and loathing, then the heart of a war is the wrong place for you,” Wilco said. “Perhaps you should remove yourself from this mission.”
Trapper’s knuckles turned from red to white and back again. “Perhaps you should come to terms with yourself.”
“Myself and I are quite fine, thank you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve spent enough of my life in rooms with people who want me dead. I’ll be moving on.” Wilco thought he heard a sigh of relief as he left the room.
His mind raced. He tried to consciously slow his body, keep it from matching pace. He felt naked still, even with his pretend mask. He had been exposed. He wanted to strip the hull and fashion himself a suit of armor. Instead, he dropped onto the first empty bunk he could find and fell asleep.
“Approaching the rendezvous,” the robotic voice said over the comm.
Wilco woke without a start. He was not in a deep enough sleep to warrant alarm, rather drifting just below the surface of consciousness. It had been a long time since he fell deep enough to dream. He feared the possibility of losing himself to the thing inside him, the Void. Tirseer and Dr. Elias weren’t exactly transparent about what they did to him. He didn’t know if he was like Sigurd or Ayala. Or like all those that Ayala added to her ranks during the battle at Central. He still felt like himself, mostly. Believed himself to still be himself. He felt the Void inside him, occasionally tugging for control, like a smell that spurned some long-buried memory. But he didn’t want to risk letting the Void take control.
The clang of his cybernetic foot hitting the floor shattered Wilco’s vision of himself, reminding him that he wasn’t wholly himself anymore. He still forgot in moments of half-consciousness that large portions of his body had been incinerated and replaced with machines. The phantom pain didn’t bother him anymore, but the unexpected jolt that he felt when he rested his hand on his thigh, expecting to find warm flesh and finding cold metal instead, was still jarring.
He placed his mask on his face before walking across the path of the mirror hanging on the wall. He strapped his black blade Malevolence on his back, his short blade on his hip. Akari was waiting for him in the hall.
“What?” Wilco said.
Akari shrugged.
A rush of impatience washed over Wilco. “You aren’t waiting out here for no reason. Tell me now, or never insinuate anything at me again with your silence and presence and general irritation.”
Akari stared, unblinking and still.
“Sorry,” Wilco said with a sigh. “I’m tired.” He walked in line with Akari toward the war room. “I thought being off the Mjolnir would be a pleasant change of pace. Turns out I was completely wrong and would much rather be sitting alone in my bunk than racing off to head a diplomatic mission.”
“You aren’t heading this mission.”
“Because that was my point.”
“You’re upset because of Trapper.”
Wilco ran his hand through his hair, a substitute for pinching the bridge of his nose when wearing his mask. “Well, he is an infuriating and self-righteous man. I would have to be a monk myself not to be angry with him.”
“Not with him,” Akari corrected. “Because of him. Because he spoke what you’ve been trying to deny.”
Wilco groaned. “The two of you should just merge into one person so I can cut my time dealing with vague nonsense in half.”
“You blame yourself for Kurda’s death.”
Wilco stopped like he’d walked into a wall. He stared ahead, feeling Akari’s gaze on the side of his head. “She was a warrior. She lived and died like a warrior.”
“She was your friend. She fought for you.”
Wilco felt the carefully-layered shielding being peeled away from his mind. After having only just begun to rebuild it, he was in no mood to feel so exposed. “She fought for herself. As I do myself.” He left it at that and moved on.
Bigby, Mao, and Trapper were already waiting for them in the war room. Bigby bounced on his heels. “Ten minutes until we land. Time for one last briefing.”
Mao cleared his throat, gently reminding Bigby that he was mission leader. Bigby smirked like a child having been caught sneaking snacks from the pantry.
“The rendezvous is a rogue moon,” Mao said. “It was the site of a joint Navy/Byers Clan research operation a decade ago. A reminder that we used to be on the same side. There is a dome near the northern pole with a landing platform. We will be meeting the Byers representative there.”
“Any idea who they’re sending?” Bigby asked.
“They haven’t said. Just that it’s a high-level member of the organization. One of Cantor’s sons, maybe.”
“One of the living ones, I assume,” Wilco said. “I don’t negotiate with dead people.” The reference to Jaxwell Byers—the eldest son, murdered by Parallax, the spark that began the war—sent a chill through the room.
Mao clenched his teeth. “Do not mention Jaxwell Byers again.”
Wilco raised his hands.
Mao continued. “We will meet. We will exchange pleasantries. The Byers Clan is a dynasty, essentially a monarchy. They thrive on formality and have bloated egos. You would all do well to get it in your head that we are meeting with foreign dignitaries rather than businessmen.”
Wilco nodded as if it made a difference to him. He would regard them all with equal disdain.
“Bigby and I will be the only ones to speak,” Mao added. He looked at Wilco. “If you make an observation that you think can aid our negotiation in any way, you will tug on my sleeve and whisper it in my ear.”
“Shall I do the same if I need to use the potty?”
Mao closed the short distance between him and Wilco in a bli
nk. Wilco had forgotten how tall Mao was, how imposing he could be. “Nothing about this situation is to be taken lightly. If I feel like your presence is in any way threatening our negotiation, I will have Bigby escort you back to the ship and immediately throw you in the brig. Then, upon my return and our exit from this moon, I will dump you out the airlock.”
Wilco saluted. He did not doubt Mao’s sincerity. “Aye-aye.”
The dome glowed with a luminescent blue, like the shimmering surface of a lit pool at night. As they approached, a voice came over the comm. “Please transmit your invitation code.” The automated systems of the Glinthawk responded. “Code received,” the voice said.
“We hired a neutral third party to broker this meeting,” Bigby said. “A firm with no affiliation other than money.”
The thought did not sit well with Wilco. That sort of affiliation was more dangerous than one of loyalty or duty. Those who pledged themselves to money could be bought, their allegiances could shift in an instant. They were unpredictable.
A hole appeared in the shield and continued to grow. By the time the Glinthawk arrived, the hole was more than big enough for the ship to pass through. The dome was big enough to encapsulate a research station and a landing platform and little else. The ship touched down on the platform. Half a dozen armed men greeted them, a man in a crisp business suit standing at the head of them.
“Greetings,” the man said to Mao as he and the others descended the boarding ramp. “I am Mr. Grey, your broker.”
Mao regarded the man with suspicion. “Have the Byers representatives arrived?”
“You are the first,” Mr. Grey said. “Though we’ve received notification that they will be arriving shortly. In the meantime, I can get you settled in the meeting room.” He waved to the armed men, all wearing black tactical gear with the same logo on the shoulder. They moved toward Mao and the others.
“Weapons are not permitted inside the complex,” Mr. Grey said, answering their unasked questions.
“What about theirs?” Wilco said of the armed men’s blasters.
“My operatives are here to ensure the integrity of this meeting. They will be the only ones carrying weapons, and they are intended to keep the peace.”
“Peace at the barrel of a blaster,” Wilco mused.
Mao shot him a murderous look. He then turned back to Mr. Grey. Mao unholstered his sidearm and handed it to the nearest operative. The others did the same. Wilco was the last. He pulled his sword from the sheath on his back and watched the operatives’ eye go wide at the sight of the black blade. He relished the unease in the air, the uncertainty as each flick of his wrist was studied with the eyes of a prison guard. Finally, he stuck the blade in the ground.
“Lead the way, please,” Mao said.
They followed in a silent procession through the complex. The records on the old research station said the joint operation was an attempt at creating new terraforming technologies that could be used remotely. The goal was to essentially build a rocket that could be fired from lightyears away at a moon or asteroid or hostile planet. The rocket would hit like a missile and years later, depending on the size of the target, it would be habitable for humans. It was ultimately a failure. Terraforming still required hundreds of techs and years of work on hostile ground. That was why the process had largely been abandoned and humans hadn’t pushed the boundaries of the Deep Black any further.
It was clear this station had been abandoned for years, though it was well-preserved. The dome was probably down until Mr. Grey and his firm raised it again to prepare for the parley, so there was no oxygen to rust the structure. But the place felt dead, like a ghost town. The emptiness was palpable and startling.
The operatives surrounded the Navy entourage like an armed escort—two on point, one on each side, and two at the rear—but they did not make Wilco feel safer or more peaceful. They passed by the main complex, a two-story square building with a rounded roof, and made for a smaller structure around the back. This building was only one story and had only one entrance, a garage-type of door that raised and lowered with the push of a button.
“You can wait inside,” Mr. Grey said. “The others will arrive shortly. Two of my men will remain outside.” He smiled the kind of smile an executive flashes as he tells you he’s shutting your plant down, but “reminds” you of all the new opportunities you’ll have.
The inside of the building was much as Wilco expected. A storage facility. The back wall was lined with crates stacked to the ceiling. Judging by the fresh scratches in the floor, Mr. Grey’s people recently shoved everything back there to make room for the meeting.
Mao pressed his thumbs into his temples and let out a low groan. Trapper twitched his shoulders, a habit when he was uneasy. Bigby tempered his exuberant energy. Akari was as still as ever.
“So I’m not the only one who thinks this is a bad idea?” Wilco said.
Only Akari looked at him. Even through her steely expression he could see that she agreed. Mao pressed his thumbs harder into his temples.
“Look, I’m the first to admit that I’m deceptive and generally untrustworthy,” Wilco said as he paced the room, inspecting it with the eye of a potential buyer. “And that is exactly the reason the good Admiral Mara Jeska sent me along on this mission of utmost diplomatic importance—to root out deceptiveness and detect those who are generally untrustworthy. And I can tell you this, dear comrades, that Mr. Grey is untrustworthy.”
“You don’t trust anyone,” Mao said. “How can your evaluation on the subject hold any value?”
“True,” Wilco agreed. “I trust none other than myself. But I recognize ill intent and cunning machinations. I understand the mind of those cut of the same cloth as I. Paid treaty brokers are a slippery lot in general, but this Mr. Grey is one slimy eel.” Wilco pointed to the back wall, laden with crates. “Did anyone notice that there is a door behind all those boxes? The only other point of egress from this building has been blocked, creating a very convenient kill box. Convenient for them, not us, obviously. Armed guards outside as we are left here, unarmed and helpless.”
“You think Mr. Grey means us harm?” Mao said. “He’s received half his payment from each party. He gets the rest only after the meeting. He stands to gain nothing from killing us.”
“Nothing that we can see,” Wilco said.
Before he could say anything further, the door rose. Joining Mr. Grey and his operatives were five representatives of the Byers Clan. They all wore matching uniforms—black pants and jackets with red accents on the shoulders and collar. Their black boots were shined and without scuffs. Not a wrinkle in any article of clothing. They looked more military-like than Mao and his people.
It became easier upon seeing them to treat them more as representatives of a foreign kingdom rather than a business entity. They seemed to regard themselves as such. Especially the woman leading the delegation. She had long, brown hair that would have hung to the middle of her back if it wasn’t woven into a neat braid that hung over her shoulder and traced the ridge of her collar bone. Her eyes were a similar brown as her hair, chestnut, and calculating and decisive. She clasped her hands behind her back, accentuating the empty scabbard that hung on her hip. It was a startling thing to see paired with the uniform. The Navy didn’t carry blades. Wilco had grown to acquaint them with pirates.
“The other party has arrived,” Mr. Grey said. “Now, we can begin.” He led the Byers delegation inside.
Scanning each of them, Wilco concluded that none carried weapons. He also noted that the woman was the only one with the scabbard. Maybe the blade was a sign of her stature.
Mr. Grey pulled a metal cylinder from his pocket. It seemed like nothing of note at first, until he pressed the button on top. Each end glowed with a faint pink light. He released the object, but it did not fall. Instead, it hovered and emanated a warmth and hum, like that of a small engine. Within seconds, the pink light flowed from each end and formed a solid light construct—a t
able. It sat between the two delegations, with enough room for one from each party.
Wilco had seen such a device before. He’d witnessed a few brokered deals, spying on them as a deckhand when he served under various captains. Half of those deals ended in bloodshed. Wilco was not ignorant, though, and knew the difference in caliber between these negotiating parties and those of the past. And he knew the difference in stakes. Whereas the parties previous were haggling over turf rights, the parties present were eagerly seeking peace as a means of mutual survival. Or so the story went.
That was why he was here.
Mao and the woman took their seats at the table. Mr. Grey stood between them. The four operatives positioned themselves around the room while two remained stationed outside. Wilco stood along the periphery of the gathering, trying to sink as much into the background as he could.
“First,” Mr. Grey said, “comes the statement of purpose, why this parley was called. As the initiating party, Captain Mao, you will open the proceedings.”
Mao laid out the rationale for the parley very logically. He spoke as if making a presentation to a committee of his peers, people who were prone to agree with his reasoning before he even spoke. The woman only clenched her jaw. Wilco got the sense that her eyes, had they not been locked on Mao like a targeting reticule, would have rolled into the back of her head from boredom and exasperation.
“I’m sorry,” Wilco said, interrupting and taking his life in his hands. “But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out one glaring flaw in these proceedings.”
“You were remiss the moment you opened your mouth,” Mao hissed.
Bigby, taking a silent command from Mao, reached for Wilco’s arm. Wilco politely shrugged him off and stepped closer to the table, his eyes on the woman.
“Proper introductions were not made,” Wilco said. “My name, as I am but a humble hand servant to the good captain, is of no import. But you, you deserve to be known as more than the leader of this delegation. You have weight, a name that means something.”
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 69
