by John Appel
Vega shook her head. “Miguna’s rebellion died the moment they went after the Iwan Goleslaw, and the surviving rebel ships jumped out of the system. We’ll have the remaining organized resistance cleaned up within a few days, though unrest will likely continue for some time. Hence the need for the reforms we discussed a moment ago.”
She thought things over for a moment. “I’d prefer we not drop the charges against Mizwar and his accomplices,” she said. “But we could suspend them. Banish him and his accomplices from Ileri space forever, and if they ever do show back up, we throw them into detention immediately, no chance of release.” She held up a finger. “Reparations to the victims of his illegal actions, or to their families, must be part of any deal.” She thought some more. What about the big picture? Think like a governor, not a constable. “And no Saljuan military presence in Ileri space without our express advance permission. If they insist on observers to ensure we’re cleaning up, have them come from the Triumvirate, or one of the non-aligned worlds.”
Vega nodded. “I think we’re on the same page here,” she said. “I hadn’t considered reparations for the victims. I suppose that’s something you’re more used to. It’s a worthy addition. But you’re not opposed to a deal?”
“I don’t like it at all,” Toiwa admitted, “but I don’t think we have a choice.”
“Nor do I.” Vega glanced aside at some private window. “That’s all the time I can spare at the moment, I’m afraid. My staff will send a draft of the agreement for your review. I expect your full and frank appraisal.”
“Thank you, Prime Minister.” Vega’s image winked out, and Toiwa summoned Valverdes. “What’s next?”
Meiko
Commonwealth Consulate, Ileri Station,
South Ring
“This certainly isn’t the course of events I expected,” Kumar said to Meiko as they settled into a pair of deep, comfortable chairs. This meeting room was furnished more like a parlor than the more starkly functional one in which they’d first spoken just a few days and a lifetime ago. This chair would be perfect for curling up and reading in, or taking a nap, or cuddling a puppy, Meiko thought. Neosilk hangings in shades of brown and ochre and burnt orange covered the walls. A bot wheeled in bearing frosted tumblers of chilled pineapple juice and placed them on the low table between the chairs, which were set at the angle one saw in photo-op images.
A much more cordial reception than my first.
Kumar pulled a flask from her jacket, unscrewed the cap, and poured a generous dollop of something clear into her own glass. Kumar waved the flask over Meiko’s glass. “Want a hit? And no, this is not a test.”
“What’s in it?” Meiko asked, trying to sniff discreetly.
“Vodka. Something the locals do decently.”
Meiko considered the offer for a second, then shook her head. “Not right now. I’ve got a meeting with Dr. Ngila after this, and I have a hard enough time keeping up with her even when I’m not impaired.”
Kumar nodded, capped her flask and returned it to her jacket. “I promised myself a drink when this was over,” she said, raising her glass. “Not that it’s truly over, but nailing that Saljuan bastard and preventing a station-wide nanoware infection seem like milestones worth marking.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Meiko said with a slight smile, and lifted her own glass. They clinked and sipped. The juice was just this side of ice-cold, almost enough to hurt her teeth, sweet but not overly so.
Kumar settled back into her chair and looked at Meiko with the slightly out-of-focus gaze that indicated a private AR window hovered between them. “Do you realize how incredibly lucky you’ve been? How many rules and protocols you’ve breached? That if you hadn’t delivered the results you have, that your ass would be bounced out of the service so fast you’d beat a driveframe back home?”
Not entirely out of the woods, then. Meiko sipped as she considered her answer and settled on the simplest version of the truth. “I didn’t have anything to lose. Even without my career on the line, failure became less and less an option as things unfolded.” She shrugged, surprised at how relaxed she felt. “My covert days are done, I see that. So, saving that part of my career? It didn’t matter.” She set down her glass and slouched deeper into the chair. “Accomplishing the mission became the only thing that mattered, and the rest could go hang. And then, when the situation escalated, things just needed doing. So I did them.”
Kumar chuckled. “Assassin caught, Saljuan covert-action cell exposed and destroyed, and this pocket of Unity’s Children exposed? Mission accomplished indeed. Helping stop a planetary rebellion and stopping a plague were just bonus actions, then?”
What the... Meiko jerked upright. “What do you mean, ‘This pocket of Unity’s Children exposed’? What the hell are Unity’s Children?”
Kumar’s expression turned wry. “Something you’re cleared for now,” she said, and threw Meiko a data packet.
Meiko’s djinn caught it and she popped it open—or started to. A familiar bright and boldly lettered form, a Commonwealth security classification file wrapper, filled the window. She pressed her right thumbprint to her djinn’s reader and murmured “I acknowledge,” and the wrapper gave way, revealing a smaller-than-expected cache of documents.
She looked over at Kumar, who offered a resigned smile. “Read the abstract. I’ll wait,” she said, so Meiko did. It took, according to her djinn, seven minutes and twenty-four seconds. And as each second ticked by, she felt more and more disoriented.
She reached the end and held her glass out to Kumar. “If the offer is still open, I’d like to take you up on it.”
Wordlessly, Kumar pulled out her flask and poured a generous portion into Meiko’s half-empty tumbler. Meiko thanked her and slugged back half of it.
The vodka burned pleasantly on its way down her throat. The sensation helped focus her mind, brought her back to here and now. “The infection left Earth with us after all.”
“So the evidence tells us,” Kumar said with a nod. “There were rumors and suspicions even back in the earliest days of Exile, of course. Some think that there was an outbreak on Sumatra back in PE 61 and that’s why they nuked themselves, to keep it from spreading. That’s never been proved definitively, though.”
So much for being beyond surprise. “People knew that far back?” she said. Her head swam. For someone who has lived with lies for so long, why does this one hit so hard?
Kumar shook her head. “Some suspected it for decades, but the first confirmed case of infection was only uncovered fifty years ago. Unity’s Children, by the way, is what that first group called themselves. We just adopted the term.” She paused to take a drink. “It’s possible the Saljuans encountered some earlier. It would explain a lot about the resurgence of their zero-tolerance policies towards innovative nanotech around a hundred years ago, and their aggressive expansion effort ever since.”
“I’d thought getting stuck on a world they named Snow was enough to fuel their ‘never again’ stance, personally,” Meiko said. She considered downing the rest of her drink but held off. “Why read me in now?” she asked.
Kumar waved her glass at Meiko. “Because you’re involved,” she said. “The prisoner you took on your last mission is almost certainly from a UC cell here on Ileri. He was after the conversion bombs Fenghuang carried, though we still don’t know why. That was the biggest UC operation we knew of, until they launched this rebellion.” She waved her glass in a circle. “Which you are also involved with. They’re getting bolder, coming out of the shadows. Which means we need more operatives on this beat.” She pointed at Meiko again. “You broke the rules but doing so was the right call with the stakes what they were, even if you didn’t know just how high. Now you do.”
Meiko sat back, stunned, trying to take it all in. She was still tired in her bones; she’d pushed herself to the very edge of her envelope. Not as good as I once was, or able to go on like I used to. She was sixty-two years old and had been a
way from home for nearly three standard years and two major missions and now this.
Finally, she asked the question which had hung between them since they first sat down. “What happens now?”
“First, we help the Ileris get their house in order, so we can bring them into the Commonwealth,” Kumar said. “So that when the next Saljuan warship shows up packing conversion bombs, which I don’t doubt is going to happen, those asses won’t be quite as ready to threaten to turn a planet of seventy million people, one of the most habitable worlds in the Cluster, into a ball of glowing glass. That means we need to help the Ileris root out the UC here.”
“Most of the rebels aren’t infected, though,” Meiko said. “Less than one in ten. And less than one in three Ileris backed Miguna and the One Worlders. They were just disproportionately strong in the military and police, where the rate of infection was much higher, from what Dr. Ngila and the Ileri scientists are finding.” Somewhere around one in three, in fact, which Meiko found seriously troubling. “Dinata could still call for Interdiction, though.”
“Vega’s cut a deal with Dinata. Quarantine, but not full Interdiction. At least for now.”
The realization hit Meiko then. I’m not going home. Not yet, anyway. “We’re stuck here, aren’t we,” she said, unable to keep the note of bitterness out of her voice.
Kumar knocked back the rest of her drink and locked eyes with Meiko. “Some of us are. But you don’t have to be.”
“What do you mean?”
Kumar waved her hand and called up an image of Amazonas as the bot returned with a fresh serving for Kumar. “Captain Gupta will be heading back very soon to report what’s happened here,” she said. “You could be on Amazonas when it leaves. I need someone cleared on all this to carry a report back. You’re certainly well qualified to do so.”
A spark of hope returned. “I could go home?”
“You’ve earned it,” Kumar said. “But I’d like you to consider staying on.”
“What would I be doing?” Meiko asked warily.
“Short term? You’re ideally positioned to keep an eye on Dr. Ngila’s people and the Ileris, liaise between the boffins and the intelligence services. You’ve got contacts with the criminal underground here. And Toiwa doesn’t hate you.”
“She kicked me off the station,” Meiko interjected.
Kumar waved that away. “That was before you brought back the assassins, and before you heroically helped save her station. She’s a woman who favors results, and she’s demonstrating more flexibility than I anticipated given her past record. Plus, she seems to trust Shariff, whose partner and granddaughter seem to trust you. I think she’ll be fine with you sticking around.”
“I doubt the Saljuans are going to be so forgiving,” Meiko said.
“You might be surprised. I think they have a lot of respect for you. They’re pragmatic, even if they’ve got iron bars up their asses.” Kumar shrugged. “But some of those rebels got away after Andini blew her ship to MC2. We need to be sure they don’t have any footholds left to work with if they come back.”
But I could go home. The ache in her heart, unassuaged for the last year, for longer than that, truly, was physical. She had served her time in the darkness, holding the line for the light, had earned her scars and those first gray hairs.
Surely someone else could help put things back together here, could take her place on the line.
But could they do the job as well as she could? What if Ileri succumbed to Unity’s Children, and she wasn’t here to do her part in stopping it? What kind of future had she been serving to build, these last forty years?
“I don’t suppose they’re going give us hardship pay for this?” she said.
“Now you know why I’m day drinking,” Kumar said. She raised her glass, and Meiko raised her own, and together they drank to the onset of their own exile.
Noo
Thanh Victor Medical Center, Ileri Station,
Forward Ring
Noo woke feeling positively fluffy, which was surprising, since she hadn’t expected to wake up at all.
“You’re back with us,” said a gravelly voice that made her heart skip. Literally, apparently, since one of the monitors squawked alarmingly, prompting a nurse to rush in and paw his way through the monitor fields anxiously.
“I am,” she croaked.
The nurse interrupted his examination to raise a squirt bottle of water to her lips and helped her drink. “Don’t talk too much yet,” he admonished, but he left the water bottle in her hand and skipped out as briskly as he’d come in.
“You gave me a fright, woman,” Daniel said. He sat in a power chair, with a brace cradling his head. But his hands were steady and warm as they wrapped around her free hand.
“So did you, old man,” she said, her voice sounding less like something to frighten children with. She glanced down, noted the unnatural shortness of her legs beneath the blankets. “I didn’t imagine that part, then.”
“We’re a pair, aren’t we?” He patted the arm of his chair. “You’re going to get one of these soon, they tell me. And that they can probably regrow your legs.”
“Well, we can go dancing afterwards,” she said, and he looked away. “Wait, what did I say?”
His eyes found hers. “Dancing seems to be off the table for me,” he said gravely.
“Shit.” The word was out before her brain caught up to her mouth. “I’m sorry, love. What happened?” She listened carefully as he explained, telling her the story of the doomed assault, and the damage done. “The doctors say I likely won’t ever walk again. The rest, they can fix, though it will be a while.”
She gave him a smile and squeezed his hand. “I seem to have time.”
One of the cutters tasked with orbital debris clean-up located Zheng’s body a few days later, spinning in a long orbit around the planet. Toiwa ordered the cutter to Ileri Station the moment she learned the news and came in person to invite Noo and Daniel to the funeral.
The ceremony was strangely simple in light of the number of VIPs in attendance. In addition to Toiwa and the top brass of the station government and the Constabulary, Major Biya turned up with a military honor guard; the soldiers and police split the pallbearers’ duties. Fathya and Fari stood amidst the massed ranks of the Shariff family and associates, to which Daniel, Noo, and Yinwa attached themselves. The young woman turned out to have had a sizable number of friends, and her family—shuttled up at government expense—numbered nearly two dozen. The Commonwealth Consul attended with a respectable contingent, Meiko in his wake. Even Pericles Loh came, though only Myra accompanied him.
No one seemed to mind that Noo dozed off through the brief rounds of chanting and verse-reading, or the series of remembrances offered by Zheng’s family and friends. She was awake enough to see Meiko start forward as if to share before a short woman next to her, the science attaché according to her social profile, dissuaded her. Fari did come forward, though, to speak on behalf of their short-lived team.
“There was no finer person to have at your side when the night is dark, danger surrounds you, and desperate action is the only path forward.” Fari’s voice was thick with emotion. “I would not be standing here today without Maria’s skill and steadfast courage.” She looked out at the crowd, her eyes glistening, and Noo wept silently herself. “Many of us here today would not. And though I didn’t know her long, I miss her terribly.”
Afterwards, Noo and Daniel lingered in the temple space rather than try to force their power chairs through the crush of people. Loh found them tucked away in the corner furthest from the incense burner. “Might I speak to your mother privately?” he asked Yinwa, who rolled her eyes before slipping out to wait with Fari and Ifedapo. Daniel made as if to leave, but Loh indicated he should stay.
Loh crouched down before them, bringing his eyes to their level, and snapped a privacy field into place. “I wanted to thank you both for what you did for us all,” he said.
Noo shrug
ged while Daniel, who while not a diplomat, was at least more of one than Noo, made appropriately grateful noises.
“It appears the system is going to be quarantined.”
“I watch the news,” she said. She flicked her eyes at Daniel, who watched the Fingers boss with a bemused expression. “What are you getting at, Pericles?”
“I can arrange to get people out of the system, for a little while at least. The Navy has their hands full between helping mop up the last rebels and preventing Kessler syndrome in close orbit. It will be two weeks, three at most, before they can lock down traffic from the outer-system station.”
“Why would I want to leave?” she asked, puzzled.
He reached over and bumped his djinn to hers. “I can think of one reason,” he said, as she opened the file and found a remarkably detailed dossier on Mizwar, including bits of information about his activities beyond Ileri.
She reached over and touched her djinn to Daniel’s. He opened the file and she studied his expression as he perused it. They locked eyes and opened their private channel.
His eyes flicked downward to his legs, and the space where hers ended.
inconspicuous. And neither one of us is exactly in fighting trim.>
She glanced out the doorway.
His mouth drew tight, and his eyes looked up and out into the middle distance as he thought it through.
He gave her a faint smile, and she knew his answer.
“I might be open to a bit of travel,” she said.
Daniel reached over and took her hand. “We would be open to it.”
“And possibly a companion or two,” Noo amended.
Loh nodded slowly. “I thought you might,” he said as he stood up. He shook Noo’s hand, then Daniel’s. “I’ll start making the arrangements. I’ll need to know for how many the day after tomorrow.”
