Lexi was mildly surprised when she considered the number of movers and shakers of the Accord she already knew in the fifteen months she had been threading space with Ron and Geena. Jackson Meeham, one of the ruling board members of Cardin’s Paradise, was at the reception as were no fewer than three of the ruling moguls from Naragene Nine. It wasn’t so long ago she and the rest of Aeolus Investigations were the guests of honor at parties held in those peoples’ mansions. Adding the leaders of Ackalon and Grammin, she personally knew and was on a first-name basis with heads of five of the twelve major civilizations of the Accord. That kind of floored her.
Early in the evening, Ron got Lexi’s attention and said, “I see someone I want you to meet.” They made their way through the crowd toward an attractive blonde woman. She turned as Ron said, “Sori?”
The woman replied, “Ron?” With an degree of enthusiasm Lexi found interesting, Sori stepped toward him and reached up to give him a hug, being careful of both their drinks.
As she stepped back, Ron said, “Lexi, this is Sori, the woman Jis met with at the Talmon embassy. Sori, this is Lexi, head of my investigative team and my girlfriend. I assume you must be here with the Talmon delegation.”
Sori smiled at both of them. “So you’re Lexi Stevens, the girlfriend Jis warned me about. A pleasure to meet you. I’ve already been hearing things about you. If you didn’t already know, brace yourselves. You guys are one of tonight’s hot topics of discussion. And you, Ron, pretending to be a bodyguard. You had me fooled. You look like a bodyguard. I’m glad that situation worked out as well as it did.” She paused, noticing the brief change in facial expressions on both of them. She had training in reading faces. They were both angry about something. She knew not everyone had lived after the hostage rescue. “No, I’m not exactly here with the Talmon delegation. Jis and I hit it off over dinner the day I met you guys. I’m the new ambassador here.”
Lexi said, “Congratulations. May I ask what you mean? Jis warned you about me?”
Sori smiled at her. “I’m afraid I may have been guilty of fantasizing about running off somewhere with your gorgeous boyfriend. Jis cued me in there was no chance of that.” Her smile broadened. “I’m sure you understand.”
Lexi laughed as she glanced sideways at Ron. “Yes, I do.”
Sori said, “I expected you would. Follow me and I’ll introduce you to our President.” Six Accord worlds.
***
To the team’s considerable surprise, as they mingled with the other guests, they quickly learned that almost all of the representatives of the Accord knew of them, even those they had never met. Despite the long hyper-transit times, there seemed to be an active rumor mill or information network among the upper echelons of the Accord. When they later brought it up with Jadkim, his simple one-word reply explained it all. “Spies.”
The three E’Krets were not the only hostages they extracted from Hepca. Eleven other captives related to high-ranking citizens on nearly half of the worlds of the Accord were returned to their families. The team was relentlessly questioned, in a polite manner of course, about that mission. The walking exoskeleton they built around Urania was considered by most to be a brilliant strategy for getting around the widespread Accord restriction against arming non-military starships. All of the hostages witnessed Urania stalking around outside the compound, blasting any remaining weapon bunkers with beam weapons mounted on the exo and clearly not on the ship.
Of course, they all assumed that the forty-foot-high metallic spider that stalked into the pirates’ mining camp with energy cannon blasting and later demolished the bunkers around the chalet was remotely controlled by Lexi, Ron or Geena. No one guessed that Urania was sentient. Truly sentient computers just didn’t exist and everyone knew it.
Lexi found herself wondering if it might be time to change that misconception. If there were other sentient computers out there, they were probably as lonely as Urania had been. The chief of palace security on Grammin learned of her sentience. It was unavoidable once Lexi found herself working against the clock to defuse a bomb planted by terrorists in the underwater city’s power plant, forcing her to confer directly with Urania. Urania’s responses came over the power plant’s speaker system, rather than Lexi’s comm-gear so Lexi didn’t need to repeat everything to the Grammin security chief.
Subsequently, the rescue of Grammin’s Queen Abree and Prince Danu also exposed her sentience to them. The Grammin knighted both Lexi and Geena in a public ceremony after they dealt with the terrorist attack. The fact the queen quietly and privately bestowed knighthood on Urania made it clear they understood the situation.
Among the guests here for the coronation were both political and military leaders. The latter were curious about the rumors going around about the potency of the beam weapons the team employed. Those questions received evasive answers. As far as those people knew, handheld ray-guns were technically impossible. Lexi upscaled that technology for the weapons mounted on the exoskeleton. The fact was, nothing the Accord possessed came close to the destructive power of the Zappers Lexi invented.
The questions concerning what they had been up to since the Hepca mission received a startling answer. The team couldn’t mention the Grammin, who desired to remain unknown to the Accord. Because of that, they couldn’t mention being hired to recover Grammin’s Barossa Channel, an ancient artifact responsible for the development and support of the Grammins’ telepathic abilities. Other than omitting those details, they gave a straight answer to those who asked. “Killing pirates.”
Most of Boc Seckan’s guests were unaware that, fewer than three months ago, Lexi had been captured by bounty hunters and delivered to a pirate base. The fact that Jis Boc Seckan single-handedly captured the two bounty hunters who remained behind, both armed, after the others hauled off an unconscious Lexi raised many eyebrows.
While the Aeolus team did gloss over most of the details, they made it clear that the base Lexi had been taken to, along with five pirate vessels, were completely destroyed while extracting Lexi. They also mentioned that the kidnap team was now dead to the last man. Most of the off-world guests, despite their spy networks, were not yet aware that Ackalon now permitted non-military ships to be armed and that weaponizing Urania was what they were involved in at the time Lexi was snatched.
Most of the Ackalonians at the reception came from the upper tiers of society and knew that the Rose of Light had been missing for over twenty years; they also knew that Aeolus Investigations were the people who recovered it. That story had been big news a year ago and widely circulated. The gem had been in the possession of an off-world collector living on Earth since around the time Lexi was born. Without that theft, she never would have met Ron, Geena, Urania, or Jis and begun this odyssey that her life had so quickly become.
A lot of the excitement among Ackalon’s off-world guests revolved around rumors of Lexi’s sword fight with two Helgan mercenaries. She found herself wondering how people even knew about that. True, several of the Helgans survived. She left one of the two who wanted to duel her in an Honor Challenge alive on the field. She crippled the man but decided to not to take his life in what was supposed to be a duel to the death. Ron was pretty sure he killed at least one other on their ship. Then too, everything that happened on Earth, including the Helgans’ freakin’ Honor Challenge, was discussed at the small cocktail party held at the Universal Underwriters offices on Cardin’s Paradise to celebrate turning over the Rose to its rightful owners, the Boc Seckans. That put officials on both Cardin’s Paradise and Ackalon in the group of people in the know. Jadkim was right, spies.
Even the four members of the Helgan delegation to the coronation were interested in hearing Lexi’s side of that story. Lexi got the impression these people considered the fight to be on par with Wesley fighting Inigo Montoya at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity in the Princess Bride. In reality, the engagement was nothing even close to that. She hadn’t switched her sword from her left-hand to her right
-hand a single time. She wasn’t that good left-handed. She hadn’t discussed how comfortable face-masks were either. Frankly, the Helgan mercenaries lacked the skills for either role.
Basically, as her team was preparing to leave Earth with the Rose of Light, a team of Helgan bounty hunters arrived and challenged Ron to an honor duel for possession of the Rose. Ron, a man who had never before held a sword. Lexi didn’t hold back on her description of the fight, even with the Helgans present.
“I’m from Earth. At the time, I had been fighting in dueling competitions for over a dozen years,” she explained. “Fencing is considered a sport on my world. We wear padding and count points. As a rule, no one is injured. Regardless, I claimed the honor of fighting the mercs. The Helgans I faced were not very skilled. They only, mistakenly, thought they were. I didn’t realize that until after I killed the first man. Then I was forced to delay concluding the bout with the second fellow due to the small complication that one of my partners was being held against her will on the Helgan ship.”
Her eyes stabbed into the eyes of Helga’s planetary president, as she continued, “We strongly objected to their assumption that kidnapping my partner made her their property. While I fought the two men with the swords, my other partner handled the extraction. In addition to the two men who went down under my blade, we think there may have been fatalities among the Helgan crew as a consequence of their criminal behavior. We satisfied honor and they let us go. Unlike the Helgan ship, my ship was unarmed at the time. I will mention that is no longer true; Urania is now armed. Legally armed, let me add. And believe me, ladies and gentlemen, my guns are bigger than yours. The lesson to be learned from this is don’t touch my people and we’ll let you live.”
She shifted her gaze to the Helgans. There were at least another dozen beings surrounding the group, sipping their drinks while Lexi spoke. Every one of them was hanging on her every word. All four of the Helgan representatives cringed slightly as she said, “We aren’t Helgan. We are not obligated to adhere to Helgan traditions. We will not play that game with your people again. If a similar situation comes up, there will be no survivors.” Ron said we were acquiring a reputation, and he was right. We want it to be widely known that we’re people who are just too dangerous to be messed with. Anything else and we will be looking over our shoulders all of the time. Let the spies have a field day with that.
Toward the end of the evening, Jis stepped in and pulled Lexi out of the crowd. “I hear you’re frightening some of my guests. Good for you. There are two people I would like you to meet. Try not to frighten them, please. Collect Ron and Geena and join me in my office, would you?”
Chapter 5
Help Wanted
“It’s an interesting situation,” Jis mused. “Quite typical of the Accord, of course.” The party was officially over, although there were still any number of stragglers in the ballroom. Security wouldn’t actually escort the hangers-on out until dawn.
The team gathered in the comfortable sitting area of Jis’s private office for the second time today. Her office was a large suite of connected rooms. One section held a beautiful antique conference table with seating for at least twenty-six people. That area was separated from the rest of the space by a floor-to-ceiling smart-glass wall, currently displaying in real-time a sunset over the ocean taking place on the other side of the planet. The sitting area was akin to a large living room, partially separated from the office space itself by a large fireplace that opened onto both sides. The fireplace was centered between one wall of the office and the glass wall of the conference room, with a good eight feet on either side of it. The wall at right angles to the fireplace had a gentle waterfall cascading down the stonework, creating a soft, gurgling white-noise.
“Go ahead and tell us about them, Jis,” Lexi requested.
“Of course.” She smiled. “The Ostrieachians are the youngest and newest member-race in the Accord. They’re also the poorest. They can’t seem to get their house in order to the point where they can make anything of themselves. Don’t misunderstand me, they still have full Accord membership. Honestly, that doesn’t mean that much. They still have independent countries, about thirty-eight of them if I remember correctly. Although that number is subject to change without notice.”
She paused, looking thoughtful. “Frankly, Lexi, other than the fact that they have space-threading technology, their world isn’t that much different than Earth. Their technology is behind everybody else's. Most of us suspect they reverse-engineered a starship that crashed on their planet rather than discovering the technology on their own. Their level of space-threading tech suggests it was a small, private ship.” She frowned. “It would be interesting to know how the rest of us developed starship technology. We all assume we developed it more or less independently, but it was eight thousand years ago. No one knows for sure anymore. I think it’s a bit odd we all seemed to discover it within a couple of centuries of each other.”
Her frown momentarily deepened before she continued, “Ships going down on primitive worlds is a more common event than we’d like to admit. Wealthy fools with more money than is good for them and an itch to explore buy a starship. Without the training to maintain it and crewing it with friends rather than professionals, they eventually head for a Level-One or Level-Two world just for kicks and wind up crashing the ship they shouldn’t have in the first place. Your Earth, Lexi, is probably littered with wrecks. That’s one of the reasons the Accord monitors your world so closely. We suspect your people will be capable of reverse engineering a starship before much longer too.”
Lexi nodded. “We do have many unexplained sitings of flying objects we can’t identify. We also are almost to the point of figuring out how to thread space. We could build ion drives today. The expense is the limiting factor. Based on theoretical work I studied before I left with the Samues, we really aren’t that far from building hyperspace drives from scratch.”
Jis nodded. “You would know. I’m not surprised. Earth, being so close to developing space-threading tech itself, is one of the most interesting planets in Accord space. But, back to Ostrieachia. It doesn’t matter how the Ostrieachians achieved star flight. They met the Accord’s requirement that a member world possesses space-threading technology.” She paused, shrugged, and continued. “Individually, the few of them I’ve met over the years are nice people. Still, the general feeling the rest of us have is that it’s not wise to trust them. Even when they aren’t intentionally being deceitful, they’re woefully inept at delivering on their commitments.”
She paused. “Kalia and Denem are here as ambassadors representing their One World Council and, in theory, their entire planet. The OWC is their planet’s attempt at unifying their diverse governments. On the surface, at least, they’re satisfying the second requirement for Accord member-world status of having a central government. My information is that it is not working, but at least they’re making efforts in that direction. In reality, the primary duty of these two ambassadors is going to be spying on everybody else. Particularly Denem. I can’t bring myself to trust him at all. Their race is harder to get a read on than human races are, but not completely impossible as are Vankovians. Kalia, though relatively young, is a tough woman. I don’t have any feelings about her one way or the other. As I said, they’re hard to get an empathic read on.” She shook her head. “Nor is it possible for anyone to represent that planet in it’s entirety.”
Jis shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible the planet may finally be growing up, faced with a threat that affects them all. Whatever is happening there, it has them scared. These two are using my receptions as an opportunity for face-to-face meetings with the leaders from other worlds in an to attempt to enlist military support from other Accord worlds. They know how we all feel about pirates. It’s a minor breach of protocol, but I can’t really blame them. Every government represented here sent people primarily to meet with those from the other worlds. My ceremony is just an excuse. Do you know about t
he Conclave, Lexi?”
Lexi shook her head. “No, love. There’s still a lot about the Accord I don’t know.”
Jis nodded. “It’s held roughly every thirty years. It’s a big event, hosted by one of the member worlds and attended by representatives of all of us. Father was attending the last one at the time we lost the Rose of Light. Maybe when I go to the next one in a few years I’ll ask you guys to come with me. That way, if I lose the Rose, you can bring it back immediately. We still have it insured through Universal. But I’m hypering way off-topic, aren’t I?”
Her smile was back. “Everyone here, and I’m as guilty as the rest of my guests, are using the receptions and parties as an informal Conclave. Keep in mind that while the Accord worlds keep out of each other’s business that doesn’t mean we aren’t interested in knowing what the others are up to. The opportunities for all of us to get together like this are rare, travel times being what they are.”
Aeolus Investigations Set 2: Too Cool To Lose: The Continuing Evolution of Lexi Stevens Page 3
