“I went to meet Vorl Yureshenka as we agreed. Spent two hours in the square when he didn’t show. I was coming back to the ship when I saw the crowd.” Daikar broke off to stomp to the small kitchen beside her. He snatched down a lever, and something hot and pungent gushed into the small cup in the kitchen’s wall recess. She smelled metallic hot water and a faint vegetable scent so like spiceleaf that it made her heart turn over in longing.
“Skraal-Teklan’s security had cordoned off an alley. Near our rendezvous point.” He cradled the cup in both palms, then took a long draught—long enough to have drained the liquid inside, it seemed. But Daikar held onto the cup, looking blankly at the wall as he spoke.
“I tried to push to the front of the crowd to see what was going on. That was when one of the civil officers arrested me. I spent the next three hours acquitting myself of Vorl’s murder.”
She shot up from the counter. “He was murdered?” Daikar kept staring at the wall, silent, until she finally whirled to his other side and tore the empty cup from his hands. He sprang back from the counter as though stung, the scar over his right eye twisting as he worked to control his expression. But at least he looked at her.
That’s better. “Why did they arrest you?” she asked, inwardly proud of the levelness in her voice.
“Take a look for yourself.” He stiffly turned his back on her. Pacing back to the pile of steel, he swept one arm toward it. “Vorl’s armor should give you the answer. The Baskar sunspawn who arrested me rendered it into my possession after I told them I knew him. At that point, they’d determined I couldn’t have done it. Their genetic evidence didn’t match, otherwise I’d still be sitting in a cell in the Security Admin building.”
But they’d thought to test Daikar on a genetic level to acquit him. Did that mean . . .
She stepped over that thought, up to the humble pile of plate armor that was the only thing left of the seph who would have been her second ally. Crouching down, she carefully laid out the individual pieces in a neat circle on the thin carpet. There were articulated back and stomach plates, a chest guard, vambraces, and greaves. Shomoro fingered the stomach plate. A narrow, jagged hole marred its surface. One of the articulated back plates bore a corresponding wound.
“He was stabbed to death.” She didn’t bother to make it a question. He crouched down beside her and wordlessly turned the armor plates over. A chemical miasma rushed into her nostrils, so unpleasant that Shomoro had to stop herself from snapping them shut. Blood was the strongest scent, rusty and bitter around the punctures. She saw that all the armor pieces had been backed with soft velvet, comfortable if not adequately protective. I wonder how much comfort that provided Vorl as he lay dying came her next thought, fast and vicious. And the one after that . . .
“Skraal-Teklan’s security took you because they suspected an Osk committed the crime.” She closed her eyes even as she spoke, trying to sort out the morass of jumbled scents. The velvet lining on the back and stomach plates was soaked black with ichor; it would be difficult to peel that hot smell away from the subtler ones underneath.
“That’s right.” Daikar sounded distant. A moment later she heard the click of ceramic as he placed his cup in the kitchenette’s sink. She wasn’t really listening to him anyway; she had bent to the damaged armor and was making passes over it, hands spread to either side as she inhaled the tiny molecules of scent. There would be no conjectures until she determined what the olfactory evidence had to say.
At first, the blood cast its chord over everything; even an ordinary Osk’s sense of smell might not have been sensitive enough to detect the notes underneath, but hers was a different matter. Gradually, she caught the sharp, coppery scent of a young male Osk—Vorl had inhabited the armor long enough to layer his unique essence onto the lining. Two intertwined chemical signatures sprang out next, jagged and dissonant against the male musk. Shomoro recognized the eerie notes out of long personal familiarity as much as anything.
Rage had inhabited this armor alongside Vorl Yureshenka . . . and perhaps fear, at the very end? It was becoming clear to her that their murder victim had not been taken by surprise. The scents pointed to a struggle, culminating in Vorl’s death. A fight that Vorl instigated even, discovering too late that he was overmatched?
A disturbing possibility. The list of opponents that could outmatch a seph in a straightforward bladefight, even a forcibly retired one in subpar armor, was short in her estimation. She would hazard a guess it was a list composed only of other sephs.
She caught it then: the faintest scent, like the fading reverberation of a stringed instrument. It was so like Vorl’s underlying musk she almost dismissed it. A musk, certainly, and male as well . . . but where Vorl’s carried the raw tang of a young Osk on the brink of full maturation, this second was broader, fuller—lambent lead where Vorl’s scent was still coppery with youth. This second scent was that of a male in his prime.
“What have you got?” Daikar crouched close, his blunter scent threatening to settle over her. She shut her nostrils before it could overpower the faint trace she had gathered from the armor. Even so she caught the edge of it, ragged with worry.
She rocked back on her heels. “How many sephs would you say you knew in Za?”
Still in his crouch, Daikar shrugged. “Most of them. I managed the training session roster for a while. Why?”
Shomoro reached into her cloak and removed a small stoppered vial from her belt. From the corner of her eye, she saw him watching her intently as she used one fingernail to peel a scab of blood from the armor’s velvet backing, very close to the primary puncture mark, and brush it into the vial. Only then did she meet his gaze.
“I’m hoping you can answer something for me. When I scented Vorl’s armor just now, I am almost certain I smelled two Osk. The younger scent must be Yureshenka, but the other is unknown to me.”
Regaining his feet, Daikar ran one hand over his ragged mane in a quick, tense gesture. “I can’t believe you can smell much of anything under that blood.”
“I could barely tell that much.” Not entirely true, but she didn’t think this was the right time to bring up her capabilities. “But my ship could tell us a lot more. I want to use its chemical analyzer to separate out that second scent for us, and then I want your opinion on it. I think it was a seph who did this.” Shomoro stood at last, tucking the precious vial into her belt pouch. “I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell us which one.”
Back at the ship, the analysis seemed to take forever. Daikar knew it couldn’t require more than a few minutes for the ship’s glands to separate out each constituent in the sample, decant it into its separate ampule—but the nervous tension twisting his gut amplified the wait. When Shomoro padded over to where he perched on the couch with the ampule in her hand, he almost didn’t take it.
“Breathe in slowly,” she said as he wrapped his fingers around the mystery sample. “I want you to be absolutely sure.”
“I know how to take a scent,” he snapped. Daikar regretted the tautness of his voice at once, though she did not react except to move a little away from him. He brought the ampule to his nostrils.
Shomoro saw him go rigid with the first inhalation; a second later, his own scent went salty with distress, disbelief. She stood perfectly still and silent so as not to disrupt his concentration, resting one hand against the neural hub. With dilated nostrils, he took another whiff—almost a gasp—then set the ampule down on the curve of the couch with exaggerated care, as though he were handling a bomb. For at least a minute he simply stared into space. She took a step toward him.
“Daikar?”
“I know him.” His voice was softer and more hesitant than she’d ever heard it. “Vorl’s murderer. I knew him during the war.”
“I—” I’m sorry, she wanted to say. Sorry for the both of them that this had happened. The ground beneath their feet had just grown a l
ittle more uncertain. “I see. So who is it?” she said, hating, with a surprising strength, the hardness in her own voice.
He told her a name, but it meant nothing to her. Shomoro repeated it anyway, to fix it in her memory. “Mose Attarish. No, I don’t think I ever met him.”
He hunched forward on the edge of the couch and gave a heavy sigh. “You’d remember if you had. He had this bright red mane . . .” He tugged at a few strands of his own straggly one. “Attarish was a good seph. Or so I thought.”
An awkward silence pervaded the space between them. What, Shomoro wondered, had she brought down on them with her attempts to reach out to the other fugitive sephs?
Daikar propelled himself off the couch in a smooth bound. He paced several times in the small living area, his gaze alighting on the bulk of the hub, the smooth shapes of berths, the sketches stuck on the walls. Looking at everything and nothing. As he caught sight of the tiny ampule on the couch arm, he snatched up the filthy thing in sudden fury and hurled it against the ship wall.
If the vial had been glass it would have shattered satisfyingly. But it was plastic and simply bounced off, rolled under a couch somewhere. He realized abruptly that Shomoro had been watching his whole performance. Standing rigid in the center of the room and watching as he lost control. With a long breath, he clamped down on his fury and gave her an almost steady look.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
With small, careful steps, she walked past him and bent to retrieve the ampule from under the couch. “We can tell the authorities what we know. After that, we have to leave Skraal. I think that much is clear.” As she passed him to deposit the ampule in the ship’s sample compartment, he caught the acrid edge of her distress and knew she’d been more disturbed than she let on by his deduction.
She turned back to him. “The other sephs will just have to make their own way to Teluk. Find us there.”
“No more messages?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed, and she drew one hand very slowly through the air. “No more messages. Someone’s listening in.”
Another local week passed before they were truly ready to leave Skraal. As it turned out, Daikar had one last piece of business to take care of.
In the warm dark silence of the ship as it floated out to the waiting ’stream gate, Shomoro made a last circuit of the main cabin, reassuring herself that every routine and subroutine was running as it should. The ship had been under acceleration away from Skraal for days, and rendezvous with the gate was only a few hours away. The journey to Teluk would take months as they hopped from gate to gate. Soon, Shomoro would have to curl up in her own berth and let the darkness take her.
But not yet. Now she trailed her fingers over the neural hub’s readouts, the measurements of the ship’s respiration and chemical balance, making sure everything was within normal levels. Now she paused above the convex face of the closest berth, the mist inside masking its occupant from view. Hesitant, Shomoro touched the smooth bubble; was their passenger asleep yet?
Then she felt the slight contact brush against her mind, shy and full of tentative warmth—and, Shomoro thought, the beginnings of forgiveness. She hoped she wasn’t imagining that part. Moving on, she passed the berth where Daikar lay ensconced; his chest was already rising and falling gently, his face relaxed and open in sleep.
Shomoro let her fingers trail over the lid that encased him, then stopped where the warm cavity of her own berth awaited her. Lowered herself into its softness and closed her eyes, as she heard the pneumatic whirr of the bubble closing her in for the journey.
15
Feeble sunlight shone through a ceiling of gray-white clouds, limning the steel and glass buildings of Neo-Chicago in a fragile crystalline light. The pale runners of sun fleeted over a tall building fronted by faux-marble ceramic columns, over the open podium set up on its broad steps, seeming for a moment to halo the face of the speaker.
Hordes of people surrounded the edifice, some armed with video cameras and disc recorders. The crowd was mostly a tasteful mix of suits in muted colors—media and Embassy workers with a few students thrown in. Everyone was clamoring for a good view of the speaker as she wrapped up the speech that had lasted a good portion of the chilly morning.
A reporter near the front of the crowd hoisted his camera high to catch the last words of Senator Shanazkowitz’s address. “The Fate’s Shears nanovirus was fundamental in ending the struggle to expand our neighboring colony on Olios 3, and in bringing an end to the Gray Wars. However, in the fifteen years since the end of the conflict, I’ve had a lot of time to reconsider the morality of its release into Za.
“That’s why I will do everything in my power to pass this bill commissioning the destruction of the Fate’s Shears reserve supply on Aival. Not only is it too vulnerable to hijacking and modification by anti-Expansionists, it is also a blight on our history of galactic Expansion. One which I now wish I’d had no part in.” There was a pregnant silence.
Then the counter on the package beneath the podium reached zero.
Hours later, salvage drones recovered a reporter’s camera, miraculously intact, from the wreckage piled in the enormous hole the blast had carved from the street. This is what it had recorded:
Shanazkowitz’s last words rang clear over the digital feed; the second of silence following them was split by the rumble of an explosion far beneath the pavement, a muffled boom that built to a shattering roar as it clawed its way up to street level.
The cameraman jerked the lens toward the shaking ground. Then the whole view swung sickeningly upward as the black pavement shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. According to estimates, the camera had been hurled more than thirty meters into the air—along with all the luckless people who had been standing within the blast radius.
By sheer chance the camera happened to angle down as it fell, filming for one perfect instant the chaos beneath it. The fire ball that had propelled tons of concrete dozens of meters into the air was still rising, consuming the falling debris in its path as it ascended with the speed of a launching spacecraft. The image dissolved into static as the fireball met the camera on its return trip down.
A few blocks from the site of the explosion, a figure crouched on the roof of a building. Invisible in the darkness, he put away his long-range goggles and smiled slowly. Phase One had gone as smoothly as he’d hoped; he hadn’t lost all of his skills in the fifteen years since the Gray Wars. He motioned to a bulkier figure crouched beside him. As it moved closer he spoke quietly.
“We’re done here. Tell the rest we’re ready for Phase Two.” The second figure grunted in assent before melting into the night. Alone now, Gau straightened out of his crouch to stand precariously on the rooftop’s edge. He looked out over Neo-Chicago, closing his eyes as he felt its power sweep over him. The Terran capital was most impressive—and irrelevant. His moves here were perfunctory, mere mid-game logic. The endgame lay elsewhere, in a city he knew well.
Yet Gau could not suppress a small shiver of satisfaction, the kind that came from knowing he’d made all the right moves so far. The elements of the plan were slotting into place like a tiled puzzle. A game he was playing with himself, but one whose stakes were deadly real. In this game, some people were going to win, and some were going to lose.
As in everything.
And he was going to watch, and laugh.
16
His mother’s death was taking longer than Jan expected. Weeks had passed after the bombing and she seemed to be everywhere, as the event reverberated through the hyperwaves he’d dipped into on his way to Aival. If anything, her presence had intensified after he arrived in Neo-Chicago, her name in the headlines and ’casts of each news cycle as the media eulogized her life and work in sanitized five-minute clips. There was talk of a memorial parade in downtown Neo-Chicago, provided the “necessary security concerns” could be address
ed.
If they truly wanted a memorial to honor her, they should hold it open casket. Broadcast the event on a live feed. Show everyone the reality behind the pretty eulogies and speeches. Of course, there was no one he could say this to without seeming morbid. His mother was the only one who’d have understood what he meant.
Jan supposed he had it easier than some executors: not only had Diane Shanazkowitz maintained a living will, but she—or someone—had also organized the directions for dispensing her assets down to the last credit. He was even surprised (and slightly guilty at being so) to see a large chunk of funds set aside for non-Terran integration projects in Nheris and other younger settlements on Olios 3.
No, the will wasn’t the reason he’d been losing sleep, lying in bed in his hotel suite night after night counting irregularities in the poured nanofoam ceiling. And day after day eating only when he remembered, which was about one meal in three.
He did not cry. Jan would remember that distinctly, later. Even when he wanted to, a kind of wall seemed to rise up between his brain and eyes, blocking the grief he knew was there. Sometimes he thought the grief itself was the wall.
He was running out of the stipend he received as the liaison to Nheris’ administration, though it would remain comfortable for a while yet. Problem was, Jan wasn’t sure he’d be able to return at all. His mother and fifty-two other people were dead, in an attack as gruesome as anything he’d seen on Rreluush-Tren. Spending his days drafting urban zoning laws and intercity trade regulations seemed absurd after that.
What he did most of the time was read. The bills and other documents on the terminal in his mother’s office made up a small part of that reading, but most of it he devoted to the files sent him by those involved with the ongoing investigation into the bombing.
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