He felt a flicker of unease when he recognized the grimace on Gleb’s face.
“You’re probably not going to like this, lord. I went there, hoping to uncover your father’s clever scheme in all its glory but what I found was alarmingly simple.
“There’s no scalpel behind the sledge-hammer. It’s all sledge-hammer. He’s just riding the threat of exposure until someone dares to stand up to him and then the whole thing comes out. The entire HQE will learn that Meleke has been running a non-extinct slave-trade.”
“But that’s going to lead to chaos!” Mishak exploded. “He’ll... fornication!” he said quietly.
“Exactly, lord.” Gleb said into the sudden silence. “He wants to carve his own kingdom out of the HQE. What better way to do that than during a time of massive economic and political upheaval?”
“How sure are we about Humans being extinct, Lord?” Eth asked. “Scylla tells me the Chironians only allocated her to your assassination. The other Humans were destined for something called the Irth project. Why would they need Humans for that?”
“That data I took from your brother’s ship wasn’t very hard to get, now that I think of it,” Gleb warned. “Could he have been waiting for someone like me to come along?”
“I doubt he has the subtlety for that,” Mishak said distantly, “but I could see Father putting him up to it. He’s probably laughing down his tunic right now, anticipating the scandal it would make if the assumed heirs to the imperial throne were revealed as having contraband wardu!”
“How the hells do we counter that?” Eth asked. “I mean, short of freeing all the Humans on Kish…” He stopped, watching the glint in his lord’s eyes. “Lord, that would bankrupt you! The fees to buy out the entire genome from Meleke…”
Mishak looked to his wife. “There’s no other option, is there?”
She tilted her head back slightly. Her curiosity was piqued but then it suddenly resolved into certainty. “I know what you’re thinking! If we’re going to do it, then we’d better do it right now, before events can take this rare opportunity from us.”
He nodded. “Computer, prepare to initiate a recording, medium framing on myself and the princess.”
A holographic border appeared to show what the system would record. Mishak didn’t bother to adjust it. “Initiate.”
The border turned green.
“Fellow citizens,” he began, “I am Mishak, son of Sandrak and an elector in the Holy Quailu Empire. I hereby announce intent to transition my world of Kish from a wardu economy to a mushkenu economy. I ask all the inhabitants of Kish to remain calm and to continue reporting to your current work assignments, for the time being, in order to avoid undue disruption. In time, you will be able to transfer to new opportunities as you desire, but I must ask you for your patience.
“I extend my congratulations to all the former wardu of Kish! I’m sure you will join me in thanking the Meleke Corporation for so generously waiving the buy-out fee!”
With a gesture, he stopped the recording. “How did I do?” he asked, enjoying the looks on his Humans’ faces. He could feel a completely undiluted reaction from Eth – the first he’d noticed in a very long time.
Eth huffed out a half breath, half laugh. “That’s great news, lord, but do you think this business about the fee will work?”
“They have to wonder what we know,” Mishak reasoned. “Why should my father be the only one to use this indiscriminate threat?” He sat back, relaxed. “No, they don’t dare call me on this without risking everything.”
“I just came here for a debriefing,” Gleb said, “and I end up having a fancy ceremony, getting to watch my species win their freedom…” He drained his cup and then waved it in a vague gesture. “I gotta drop by more often!”
“I’ve let my father run on long enough,” Mishak said as if Gleb hadn’t spoken. “He’s been arranging his deniable conflicts, chipping away at the empire and at our own credibility. It’s time to force the issue. He needs to fight or tuck-tail.”
“You’re not thinking of attacking your father?” Tashmitum demanded, horrified.
“That would be…” Eth looked to the side, clearly searching for a diplomatic word to convey his misgivings. “Hells, lord, it would be gods-damned idiotic!”
Tashmitum nodded emphatically.
Mishak chuckled. “I have no intention of violating the patrilineal statutes. I believe we can draw him into attacking us but I want to deal with my upstart brother first. He’s stupid enough to be biddable and, what’s more, stupid enough not to realize it.
“I learned the rules, growing up at court, but I learned how to bend them from my father.”
He turned the full intensity of his personality on Eth. “There’s something I need done and your Humans are the perfect instrument for the job!”
Eth opened his eyes. He was safely back in his quarters aboard the Mouse. The meeting with Mishak had gone well enough…
“You know, I think I trusted him more when I wasn’t dead…” Abdu’s voice muttered in Eth’s head.
His shoulders drooped. He kicked a chair into alignment with his position and dropped into it. He grabbed a mug on a nearby table, draining the cold remnants of the coffee he’d been drinking when he’d been summoned to the Dibbarra.
That business about the Nergalihm would keep things on an even keel for a while but the whole thing seemed hollow and not just because they were pretending to be the servants of the underlord.
I had to tell him, he insisted to himself. We can’t keep our abilities secret forever and the longer we held off revealing it, the worse it would have been.
If they were going to be a part of the empire, they had to be honest with its future emperor. He frowned at the featureless void outside his window.
If…
Where do we belong? He knew he’d made a good case for telling all to Mishak but it wasn’t the real reason, was it? Why did he care what Mishak thought of him?
If Eth was searching for family, he wasn’t going to find it in his former owner and current lord.
He wasn’t going to find it anywhere, was he…
For once, Abdu’s voice remained silent.
He hurled the mug at the aft bulkhead.
Top-up
The Dibbarra, Fleet RV #233
“Shiiiiit!” Gleb drew out the imprecation, emptying his lungs to prevent rupture. He squeezed his eyes shut, both to avoid the disturbing sight and to prevent them boiling dry in the zero-pressure environment he’d suddenly found himself in.
His helmet flowed into place but he kept his eyes closed for a few more seconds, waiting for the tissue swelling to go down. His eyelids felt like they’d doubled in thickness but they were slowly coming back to normal and he finally opened them to find himself floating in front of the Mouse.
He worked his jaw to get some saliva flowing back into his paper-dry mouth.
Eth’s cruiser looked large from this distance. He opened a channel. “Mouse ready room,” he requested, waiting for the light layer of ambient noise to appear. “Scylla, this is Gleb. I missed.”
“Where are you?” she asked him.
“Floating in front of the Mouse. I tried but I just couldn’t see the bridge of the Scorpion.”
“The bridge?” Scylla’s voice had no edge to it but it still managed to convey disapproval. “What did I just finish telling you?”
“See the bridge?”
“And how were you supposed to do that? If your eyes were on the Mouse, how were you supposed to see anything on the Scorpion? Did you completely ignore that part?”
“Find someone on the Scorpion and use their eyes,” Gleb answered sheepishly. “I kinda got a little too excited after shifting myself around the ready room. Got used to using my own eyes.”
“Well, shut your own eyes and find someone on the Scorpion.”
Gleb did as he was told, closing his still-tender eyelids, and reached out to the Scorpion but he couldn’t find anyone.
“Are you reaching back for a common origin?” she asked him as if she were watching from inside his mind.
If she was doing that, Gleb could hardly blame her. I wasn’t like he was going to win any student-of-the-year awards today.
“Don’t just reach out,” she continued, saving him the need to admit he was doing it wrong again. “Reach back. Follow the path back up to a higher dimension, find our projections into the space within the Scorpion.”
Gleb blew out a slow, controlled breath and concentrated. He’d made use of that dimension to move his body – with less than stellar results. He just needed to accept that he, that all of his species, existed there, that life was more than the three-dimensional bodies he was accustomed to seeing.
He could feel his own presence there… He shook his head fractionally, not realizing he was doing it. That wasn’t quite right was it? That presence wasn’t just his. It was more than just himself. He felt it more like a… shared mind… a homecoming. It stretched away, fading in the distance, but he sensed closer knots of it, surrounding him.
It was the crews of the Human ships.
He focused on the one representing the Scorpion. As he moved his mind that way, the presence began resolving into individual concentrations.
Crewmen.
Some seemed more familiar than others. He chose one that seemed the most welcoming to his mind and tried to come closer. He felt like a ghost trying to inhabit a live body. He felt as though he were mentally occupying the same space as the crewmember but he couldn’t seem to make the connection.
Don’t try to take over, Scylla had told him. Just use their perception. It flows up to where we all connect. He considered trying to reach back into the higher level but realized that, if his body was in one place and his perceptions were largely focused on the figure aboard the Scorpion, some part of him had to already be in that in-between space.
That did it. He suddenly saw the bridge. Oliv was nodding her assent to him and he turned, heading for the aft exit hatch leading to the central companionway. He’d intended to appear on the bridge but he wasn’t willing to give up his connection, not after the difficulty in making this one.
He watched the companionway drift past. Several crewmembers nodded his way and he wondered whose eyes he was looking through. He turned to the left and stopped at the third cabin door. A hand pressed the control panel and the door slid open.
He paid particular attention to the layout of the cabin, not wanting to appear in the middle of a bed or chair. Unfortunately, his host barely glanced at the room before turning to the com panel inside the door to set a wake-up alarm.
The crew-member stepped back, the field of vision rocking oddly from side to side, vaguely focused on a section of the bulkhead separating the cabin from the hallway outside. Gleb didn’t think there would be room for him there and so he waited until his visual host turned toward the far end of the small room, calling up a holo-mirror.
It was Eve, her underarmor suit pushed down to her waist while she examined a shrapnel scar on the left side of her abdomen. Gleb realized there was room for him in the space where her holo-projection stood and he flowed into it.
It must have escaped Scylla’s attention during the briefing or, more likely, Gleb had missed it, but there are some things you don’t quite comprehend while reaching across to another mind.
Gleb had seen Eve examining her scar, but he’d been doing it through her eyes. His perception of what she was doing was heavily influenced by localised biology.
Eve’s biology.
From the moment he opened his eyes in the glare of her holo-reflection, he realized that, though she saw nothing amiss in examining her own healing skin, she would definitely see problems with him suddenly intruding on a private moment.
She twitched in alarm, dropping into a combat stance. It was something his mind told him he should regret having seen though his body was playing devil’s advocate.
Seeing her, now, through his own male brain, he was acutely aware of her sublime curvature. There was also a great deal of delightful motion involved in her adopting a combat stance so rapidly…
He held up his hands. “Look, I know this looks bad…” He shrugged, grimacing. “I mean it doesn’t... That is, you don’t look…”
“Gleb!” she yelled. “What the actual shit?” She brought an arm up across her chest. “Hiding in my cabin? Did you think I’d find this amusing?”
“No!” He waggled his hands desperately, still palms out toward her. “I was training…”
“You need training to be a perv?” She looked around the room as if searching for something to hit him with.
“No… no. I was with Scylla, training to shift my location. I was aiming for the bridge. I had to find eyes on the bridge to plot an entry point. I wound up piggybacking on your perceptions because your mind offered the strongest connection.”
“That’s… kind of nice, I suppose,” she said grudgingly, “but why show up here instead of on the bridge?”
“You started moving almost as soon as I started seeing through your eyes. I had to wait till you got here, so I could find a safe spot with no obstructions.”
“So, you’ve been using my eyes since I left the bridge?” she asked, a dangerous tone making the hairs on the back of Gleb’s neck stir. “You were watching me undress and examine myself?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t realize you were undressing and then when you were looking at the holo-mirror, the only thing on my mind was that the holo was in a good spot to materialise.”
She glared at him. “I’m having a hard time deciding why I’m gonna punch you. For one thing, you’ve been watching me undress; for another, you had no reaction at all to what you saw?”
“Hey! You gotta understand. I was seeing you through your own perceptions, the way you see your own body. That’s how I goofed. I didn’t perceive how good you look until I showed up here and saw you through my own eyes. Honestly, you don’t give yourself anywhere near enough credit.”
Her expression softened a fraction, giving way to mild surprise but she covered it quickly enough. “Aww!” she cooed. “Of all the creepy things I’ve heard over the years, that’s gotta be the sweetest…” Her eyes suddenly grew wide.
“Wait! You actually transitioned here? That’s incredible! Do you transition back now or what happens?”
“I hit the EBEA,” he gestured to the emergency beacon nodule on his forearm, “and she reaches out to guide me back. They don’t want to over-tax me on the first attempt between ships. Seeing as how I missed the first time, I’m not complaining.”
“You missed?”
He nodded, grinning now. “Appeared in the black, right in front of the Mouse. Still some pain from the tissue swelling.”
She grinned. “Well, that’s the risk you run as a Nergalihm. She dropped her arm, advancing on him. You end up in the wrong place and you have to deal with swelling.” She backed him up to the door.
“I hear the combat EVA suit is a little unforgiving where that kind of thing is concerned,” she said, eyes wide in a mockery of innocence. “Have you ever noticed that?”
Gleb grimaced. “I’m noticing that right now, thanks ever so much.”
“Oh dear,” she mused. “In military terms, I believe we call that being ‘caught out of position’. She had to reach down to press the EBEA icon because Gleb was starting to double up.
She reached back up and pressed the control to open her door, shoving him out into the narrow hallway. “Next time, knock, jackass!” She shut her door.
Gleb settled into a seated position against the far bulkhead, chuckling ruefully. “Definitely deserved that,” he admitted, then frowned up at her door. Next time? Before he could assure himself that she hadn’t meant that as some kind of backhanded invitation, he felt Scylla’s mind reaching out to him.
Oh gods! He could have used a little more time but he closed his eyes and the ready room on the Mouse appeared in his mind almost instantly. He appe
ared in front of her, still sitting on the deck next to one of the chairs.
Scylla took a step closer. “Are you alright?” She stopped at Gleb’s outstretched palm.
“Sure!” he insisted. “No worries. It’s just… y’know, a little tiring, first time and all that. He put a hand on the seat and levered himself up awkwardly, remaining in a seated position the whole time. He brought up his right leg and crossed it over his left knee, leaning forward to rest his right elbow on his knee.
“I’ll just… catch my breath while we get caught up, if that’s ok?”
Scylla stared blankly at him for a moment but that was her normal expression, anyway, so it was hard to tell what she was thinking. Gleb could feel mild amusement coming from her, so he supposed he wasn’t being nearly as subtle as he thought.
“Sure,” she finally agreed. “Whatever’s more comfortable. Let’s keep at it, though. We’ve got a lot of candidates waiting.”
“I have to go again?”
“Relax.” Scylla took a seat. “The second time won’t be nearly so hard.”
She frowned at him. “What?”
Choosing the Battle
Goading the Ox
Hab-Ring, Kurnugia 2
“They’re coming out,” Meesh’s voice crackled in Oliv’s ear. It had that scratchy quality from the narrow-focus speakers in her stowed helmet. The loss in quality was worth the boost to operational security. Meesh could have been screaming and the other noodle-shop patrons around Oliv wouldn’t hear a thing.
She abandoned her bowl and threaded her way through the tables. “I don’t think Lord Kittebar cared for the entertainment,” Meesh opined. The raucous background noise, partially dampened by the processors in their suits, faded as he reached the sidewalk behind their quarry.
Oliv met the Quailu and his entourage just as they were passing a dark alley tunnel. She felt his alarm as he recognized her species and it threatened to set her adrenaline coursing. She willed herself to remain calm as the guards, picking up on their master’s feelings, drew their side-arms.
Humans Page 26
