Absence of Blade

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  Attarish let out a long hiss. Unmistakable scorn. “Obviously, since you’ve taken the step of bringing me here.”

  “Given the accuracy of the first estimation,” Jan said with a thin smile, “there is an even stronger probability it was the work of Gau Shesharrim.”

  His blades were out before Mose could stop them, scraping the hard material of his cocoon with a squeal. His lips drew back, exposing his teeth in an instinctive display of disdain. A harsh pounding reverberated through his head, turning his vision red at the edges; Mose looked around for its source dizzily before he realized it was his own heartbeat. Clenching his fists, he forced his blades to retract. Closed his eyes until the rage stopped surging through him, hot breaths rasping his throat.

  The new director raised his eyebrows. “I thought you might find that interesting.”

  “You know?” Mose asked faintly. “You know about his betrayal?” Tremors still shot down his limbs; though it was nowhere close to protocol, he longed for the man to open the capsule chamber. He wanted to move, to pace the floor after spending so long folded into a metal egg, to slash at the walls with his blades.

  The man tented his shoulders in a Terran shrug. “When she was still head of the Project, the general mentioned you had a theory. You said Shesharrim had prior knowledge of the Fate’s Shears attack.”

  His voice squeezed into a hiss. “It was no theory. Shesharrim told me everything. He had nothing to worry about by then. I was dying, from your virus.” The memory brought an ache to the muscles in his chest. “One of millions.”

  The man called Jan had the tact to avert his gaze. Looking at the floor, he said, “And she believed you? M—Diane?”

  Mose bobbed his head in the Terran affirmative. “If there was one accordance between us, it’s that over the years she came to accept what she’d done,” he said. “And who helped her to do it.”

  Jan studied the Osk for another minute or so before deciding the effort was useless. There was no way for him to divine lies from truth on a face so different from his own. If Osk had tells—other than the scents xenologists made so much of—then Jan didn’t know them. He doubted any human did.

  And at that moment, he was in the most glorious state of not caring. It didn’t matter why Attarish hated their target; all that mattered was he did. It meant Jan would be working with a hunter amenable to his mission, rather than one pulling on his chains at every step and resenting Jan as a taskmaster. As it was, he could channel the Osk’s hatred. He’d channeled his own productively so far.

  “You mentioned Aival Civil Security,” said Attarish. “Is the Project working with them on this case?”

  “‘Working with’ is a strong term,” Jan hedged. “Let’s say the local authorities have agreed to share pertinent data with us. That’s as far as the relationship goes.” He took a steadying breath. “If there’s a possibility that keeping them informed might alert Shesharrim that we’re on his trail, then the operational goals of this Project are to take priority.”

  Attarish gave a short, cynical laugh. “Terrans keeping secrets from Terrans. Now that’s something new.” He dropped his gaze, seemed to think. “If you’ve brought me in, that means you must be close to figuring out Shesharrim’s next move.”

  Perceptive. Jan nodded. “We have theories. The number one priority in the next few weeks will be sorting the leads we have, seeing if we can’t narrow down the possibilities. But I don’t have to look at the hard data to know this was a play.” He gripped the edge of the desk until its angles cut into his palms. “I don’t know what his game is, but I refuse to believe this was an isolated attack. It’s leading up to something more. And I intend to stop him before it gets there.”

  With a gesture, Jan brought the lights up on the room. The ambient lighting was dull gray, but he saw the Osk wince all the same, his white pupils shrinking to slits. “We’ve arranged a temporary command center in this building where you can review the evidence at your leisure. After you’ve had a chance to recover more fully.”

  “How kind,” the Osk muttered. “Then . . . why all this first?” He indicated the room with a circular motion of his head.

  Jan grunted neutrally. “I wanted to meet you. Before we start—working together.”

  Attarish’s gaze rose to the ceiling, then settled back down to Jan and stayed there. Jan fought the urge to look away as those bone shards bored into him.

  “Shanazkowitz,” the Osk said at last. A pause. “If my understanding of Terran naming conventions is correct, that would make her your . . . mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Attarish nodded—no, not a nod this time, but the quick jabbing motion of the snout Jan had seen in so many videos, like a blade darting forward. He looked at Jan. “Good. Then we both have a reason to hate him.”

  He didn’t bother to ask who the Osk meant.

  Weeks extended into months. The bombing began to lose some of its potency: papered over by the days, by other news, until time itself began to close the wound the event had opened in people’s hearts.

  Most profoundly affected by the passage of time was the bill advocating the immediate destruction of all reserve supplies of Fate’s Shears. Without Shanazkowitz spear-heading the movement, the bill languished on the senate floor, passed from committee to committee until by unspoken consensus it was quietly filed away. After half a year, the bill and its status had passed out of the minds of all except the most rabid protectionists.

  So it was no surprise that no connection was ever forged between the bombing and the even more inexplicable incident which occurred approximately seven months afterward.

  The sun cast a bright yellow glow on the coppery domes of the warehouses lining Neo-Chicago’s prosperous waterfront, edging their contours with a golden light. In the heat of the day, the silence of the air seemed to expand until it filled the entire harbor with stillness. Then merchants and laborers alike glanced up from their work, prickling with premonition.

  A sound had caught their attention.

  The almost inaudible whine coming from the warehouse district’s northeast corner leapt to a titanic roar and abruptly cut out—replaced by the high-pitched keen of a klaxon as the warehouse’s automated security system realized it had just been broken into. Police cruisers accompanied by automated drones rushed to the scene, their own sirens screaming loud enough to make nearby people cover their ears.

  They arrived at the vandalized warehouse to find a messy, jagged hole blown through the metal wall, its edges still smoking. Huge steel-gray tanks lined the space within, interior gloom turning them into featureless monoliths. The drones were sent in first. Their long, spindly metal limbs clicked on the concrete floor as the spidery robots approached the back of the warehouse, scanning every inch of the interior space for the intruder with their heat-sensitive ‘eyes.’

  A darting movement from the back left corner of the building caused a drone to turn on its precarious legs. The machine fired four rounds at the figure that had just leapt for it. The first two went high—over the assailant’s head—but the last two made up for it, burying heat-sterilized needles deep into its neck. The drone neatly sidestepped the figure as it crashed to the ground; the attacker rose up on four legs for a moment, clawing at the darts in its neck, then slumped to the floor as it succumbed to the tranquilizer. After prodding the inert heap to make sure the sedative had taken effect, the two drones each hooked a robotic arm around the being’s midsection and dragged it into the daylight for inspection by the Terran officers.

  The civil officer paced around the huddled unconscious form the drone had dragged from the warehouse, the part of his face visible under the mirrored visor twisted into a scowl. The lean black form of a plasma rifle rode on his shoulder, its muzzle pointed firmly toward the being at his feet.

  “Okay, the fuck is going on?” he spat. “What the hell is an Osk doing here?”


  The other officer sat half in and half out of the police cruiser, typing data into the precinct’s database. She raised an eyebrow but did not immediately answer.

  “I mean, where’d it come from?” He gestured at the Osk with his rifle.

  “Not from Za, that’s for sure,” the second officer muttered, scanning the readout from the cruiser. She’d taken the alien’s photo and was waiting for the computer to throw up a possible match. “D2, maybe?” she asked her colleague in a brighter tone.

  “Thought that group was deader than the silicon chip industry.”

  She shrugged. “Mostly, but with the war on they weren’t able to account for every last one of them.”

  The first officer grunted. “Still kind of amazing this guy’d show his face in Neo-Chicago, even if he is from Chii—”

  The female officer whistled and waved him into silence. “Shut up for a second. I don’t think this is just any old Osk: the database is giving me a bunch of info on the image I sent through. If it’s accurate, I think we need to take this guy to the Embassy. This is one for Jace to handle.”

  As a frontier world, Aival was nominally independent; it had its own senate and, for the most part, autonomous control over its affairs. Yet it was also part of the larger collective of the Expansion, and as such the Core Worlds Government made certain to retain an outpost of authority from which it could offer Aival a helping hand in any and all matters likely to impact the larger Terran sphere of influence. The drafting of interstellar laws, trade pacts with alien nations, and the regulation and distribution of hyperspace technologies essential to the maintenance of the larger Expansion were all the province of the Terran Embassy.

  So when Chief Interrogator Bryan Jace heard that Civil Security was bringing in a breaking-and-entering suspect for questioning, he was skeptical to say the least.

  “Isn’t that a little low on the crime totem pole for them to send the perp here?” he asked the secretary who had fielded the call to his office. Isn’t it your job to screen my office from calls like these? rode unspoken in Jace’s question.

  The secretary raised a curled fist to his mouth and coughed delicately. “I thought so too, but the civil officer was pretty insistent. Not to mention agitated.”

  “Too much coffee?” Jace quipped. His secretary laughed.

  “Yeah, I was ready to chalk it up to that . . . but then his partner sent through a classified file their photo check turned up. Guess what the perp’s species code is.”

  Jace raised an eyebrow, and the other man told him.

  “The suspect’s an Osk? You’re sure you heard right?”

  “It gets better.”

  Doesn’t it always, Jace thought dryly. “Okay, what?”

  “Apparently, the photo matches one we have on record at the Embassy for known combatants in the Gray Wars.”

  Jace could have sworn there was a mischievous smirk behind the other man’s bland smile. “Don’t keep me hanging, Jack. Who is it?”

  His secretary’s smile widened into the satisfied grin Jace had sensed there all along.

  “Shesharrim. They caught Gau Shesharrim.”

  19

  The Embassy building gleamed in the last rays of Aival’s yellow sun, a glittering silver column that rose to a pinnacle far above Neo-Chicago’s other skyscrapers. Hundreds of meters beyond the striking tower that marked CoG’s center of power on Aival, a slim, graceful ship hovered above the upper layer of golden clouds.

  Its black hull carried a sheen that made the metal appear constantly wet. The body of the ship was an attenuated oval, with a rounded main pod that stretched into razor points at each end. The only evidence of engines was a faint reddish glow under one end of the craft. Two sharp ridges etched each side of its sleek form, catching the dying rays of Aival’s sun.

  Its interior was dark except for a single glowing standby light that cast a pulsing crimson flush over the crescent-shaped cockpit. Mose slouched in the pilot’s chair, eyes half closed, watching the red status light of the spy bot he’d sent into the Embassy building. As he waited, he turned the circumstances of General Shanazkowitz’s assassination over in his mind. As Mose reviewed the files, a building conviction had swelled in his chest until he almost couldn’t breathe. All the evidence pointed to Gau. Mose had never been so close to finding him before.

  Only a motive was missing, a gaping hole in the center of the picture. Shanazkowitz’s death had come fifteen years too late to matter. Mose agreed with Jan Shanazkowitz: the assassination couldn’t be Gau’s endgame.

  A quiet beep pulled Mose away from his thoughts. His gaze darted to the console, where the bot’s standby light had turned from red to blue. It was in position, ready to connect to the ship. Mose routed the bot’s visual and audio feeds through his ship’s screen and interior speakers and started to record.

  For a moment Mose was disoriented as the bot’s perspective became his own. The bot had ensconced itself high in a corner of the room: its artificial eyes looked down on an empty interrogator’s chair. A simple upholstered metal block sat across from it, generic enough that almost any species could rest on it without too much difficulty. Between chair and block squatted a round table with ten red circles spaced evenly around half its circumference. His lip twitched with distaste; the setup was one Mose knew well. Then a door slid open in the wall, and every muscle in his body froze.

  The Osk escorted into the interrogation room by spidery drones was smaller than Mose remembered. A prisoner’s jumpsuit altered for his physiology draped his torso and lower body in an orange tent. His gaze had a glassy, fixed quality, and he didn’t resist as the drones led him to the block chair. He was obviously under the influence of a sedative. Mose knew that look. He’d seen it many times in the mirror, or in the background of the semi-lucid waking dreams that haunted his daylight hours. But it was not Mose the security drones were leading to the block; those were not his wrists being affixed to the red circles on the table by silvery tendrils. It was not him taking in the room with that fixed look.

  It was Gau.

  The breath flooded out of Mose in an exhalation that leached the strength from his body. His next breath was a sob. A pressure rose like the tide inside his chest until he felt as if it were caving in on itself, at the same time empty and so full he could barely draw the oxygen that kept him alive. Mose cradled his head in his hands as the shuddering breaths racked him for what felt a long time.

  The sound of a second sliding door made Mose raise his eyes to the screen. The bot’s timer said twenty minutes had passed. He watched Chief Interrogator Bryan Jace enter the room from the right and sit down in the chair with his back to the bot’s camera. Gau’s gaze flicked to the interrogator, then away.

  Jace let the silence stretch a calculated few moments, flipping through files on his lightpad in the meantime. Then he said quietly, “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Gau spoke to the table. “Because I was caught breaking into a warehouse.” His voice came over the telepresence feed with almost zero distortion—slicing into Mose’s ears, into his brain. It still carried the same hard edge Mose remembered from long ago.

  Jace shook his head. He slid the lightpad across the table. “You’re here because of this.”

  Gau glanced at the screen. “My dossier. I see.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “And where is here? Who are you?”

  “You may call me Jace. As for where you are, you don’t need to know that.” Resting his elbows on the table, Jace steepled his fingers. “All you need to know is you’re not leaving any time soon. We traced the explosives you used at the warehouse back to your little nest, by the way.” He examined his fingernails. “I’m curious, do all sephs get personal spacecraft, or was Za just especially grateful to you?”

  A frown crossed Gau’s face, deeper than normal for an Osk expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about
.”

  “So the Osk cruiser currently in our impound hangar isn’t yours?” The interrogator’s voice dripped fake innocence. He splayed his palms on the table. “You’re good; I won’t deny that. But it’s over. You’re in deep shit, Shesharrim.”

  Gau snorted. “I’m terrified,” he said, a sardonic edge in his voice. Not easily intimidated, but then Jace hadn’t thought he would be.

  Shrugging, Jace said, “I don’t expect I scare you much. I know you’ve faced worse odds than this.” He retrieved his lightpad. “In Diego Two, for example.”

  Gau’s shoulders stiffened under the sacklike jumpsuit. “What?”

  That had gotten through to him. Jace resisted the impulse to smile. Instead he made a show of reading the file on his lightpad, though he’d committed the dossier to memory. “The crisis days in Diego Two were a chaotic time, especially for intelligence gathering,” he mused. “Aival Civil Sec never was able to trace all the lines of contact between Za and the Chii Ril insurgency. And when the enclave went underground, well . . .” Jace raised his hands palms-up in a what-can-you-do gesture. “I’m sure it made it easy for you to disguise your connection to them. To pretend you just appeared in Za when you were needed, with no past to your name.” He cocked his head as he studied the Osk. “Though you do seem a bit young to be one of the insurgents.”

  Gau said nothing, but Jace didn’t need him to. The small Osk’s cuffed hands were clenching and unclenching on the table as his eyes tried to burn a hole through Jace. Got him, Jace thought; that would be a productive sore spot for further questioning. But not right away. Push Gau too far and he’d clam up before Jace learned what he wanted to know.