by Natalie Grey
They looked at one another.
“We’re not leaving,” Shinigami asserted. “And you’d better fucking apologize for thinking we would.”
Barnabas stared at them, his mouth opening and closing a few times.
“We have fish that do that on Luvendan,” Gar commented.
Tafa gave a snort of laughter.
Before Barnabas could make any retort, there was the sound of an incoming call. He sighed as he opened it, then frowned at the screen.
“Jeltor?”
“I am not Jeltor.” The Jotun sounded deeply aggrieved. “For one thing, Jeltor is a male.”
Barnabas bit his lip to keep from asking how in the world he was supposed to know he wasn’t looking at a male Jotun. As far as he could tell, this one was identical to Jeltor in every way.
However, several centuries of life had given him the skills to politely bullshit his way out of most social situations.
“My apologies,” he offered smoothly. “We saw only the location. I’m sure the picture will clear up shortly. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking, and how may I help you?”
“Hmph.” She sounded mollified. “I am Commander Jeqwar of the Jotun Navy, and I have an offer for you.”
“You might want to be careful with that,” Barnabas cautioned. “The last person who helped me got hauled up on treason charges.”
“I’m aware of that,” she retorted. Her voice was tart. “We’re offering anyway.”
“Who’s ‘we?’”
“The Jotun Navy.” She bobbed slightly in her tank, and he thought he detected some smugness. It was always nice to make an offer that caused people’s jaws to drop.
“The…entire navy? Are you allowed to do that?” Barnabas asked blankly.
“Who fucking cares?” The answer was sharp. “They sold us up the river. We’re going to do what’s right, and damn whoever tries to stop us.”
Barnabas smiled. “Well, then. I’m very glad to have you on board, Admiral. I’ll admit…” He looked at the rest of them and nodded to each, “that we could really use some backup on this one.”
Chapter Eight
“This is as good a system as any,” Barnabas announced a few hours later. He frowned at one of the displays. “It’s out of the way of…everything. No shipping lanes, no private interests, and no colonies that anyone knows of.”
“Judging by the state of that planet, I’d certainly hope no one lives there.” Commander Jeqwar sounded amused.
It was easy to see what she meant. The planet was so inhospitable and in such an out-of-the-way system that it was only known as 1027.478B. The atmosphere had somehow managed to trap heat while blocking absolutely none of the deadly radiation from the system’s star, which was unstable and spat large plumes of gas at random intervals.
No one in their right mind would go there, which made it a perfect place for Barnabas’ showdown with Koel.
The only question was how to lure him there? Barnabas and the Jotun naval officers had been planning for several hours now, and no one seemed to have any ideas. Koel was unlikely to let them dictate the terms of the battle.
“I’m going to shift processing for a bit,” Shinigami told Barnabas. He looked up at her and frowned distractedly, so she made the statement a bit more human. “I’m going to step out for a few. Call if you need me.”
“Oh. Right.” He nodded in a way that told her he hadn’t really heard anything she’d said. He was still thinking about Koel.
That suited her just fine. She had plenty to do. She had her avatar walk over to the doors, used the ship’s internal controls to open them, and headed into the hallway.
If she were honest with herself, Shinigami had to admit that she enjoyed having an avatar. She didn’t need to walk from place to place if she didn’t want to, but she liked the process of learning to walk without anyone looking at her oddly. Human movement had almost endless subtleties.
She counted it as a victory every time one of the other crew members passed her in a hallway and nodded distractedly, seeing her as simply another crewmate. The other day Gar had even turned his shoulder so he wouldn’t bump into her.
Gradually, the crew had become used to her presence in her almost-physical form, and she liked it. She played around with the clothes she had seen Bethany Anne wear, styled her hair however she felt like it—she didn’t have to worry about gravity or humidity, after all—and tried different looks, expressions, and mannerisms from holorecordings of people she knew.
She was getting good at it.
She stuck her head around the door to Tafa’s room, maintaining her projection in the corridor. “Got a second? I could use an artist’s eye.”
“Sure, just a moment.” Tafa put down her paint brushes with relief and began cleaning them.
Tafa’s painting hadn’t gone well lately. When Barnabas had first brought her on board she’d painted from stress, and after that, she had painted memories and any little thing that popped into her head. Dozens of canvases leaned against the walls.
The problem was, now that Tafa had all the time in the universe to paint and could make her name as a famous artist…
The thought of picking up a paintbrush terrified her.
She made herself do it, of course, but she couldn’t tell if the things she painted were any good. She had never dared sell her work, knowing that anything that made her famous would probably make Mustafee furious.
What if she wasn’t good enough?
She washed her hands and followed Shinigami to the ridiculously clean conference room that had become known as Shinigami’s office. This space showed the limitations of Shinigami’s form more clearly than anything else. While any species gradually accumulated clutter, things they had carried into the room and forgotten, like cold cups of coffee to notepads or sweatshirts, Shinigami was incapable of doing so.
She didn’t really need an office, of course, but with the ship only fractionally occupied, everyone had as much room as they wanted to spread out.
In the office, Shinigami gestured to the only chair. “Please, sit.”
Tafa sat, looking curious.
“I’m working on a project.” Shinigami gestured to the screens on the side walls and they lit up, showing information in a way that would be easy for Tafa to read with her side-set eyes.
The Yofu gave Shinigami a grateful smile. “Thanks. Most people don’t remember that part. You get used to looking at things on front screens, but it’s a relief to be able to see things properly.”
Shinigami smiled.
“What is all this, anyway?” Tafa asked.
Shinigami didn’t answer. She worked on one of Barnabas’ poses, leaning against the back wall with her arms crossed over her chest and one foot tucked behind the other, and she watched as Tafa read.
When Tafa was finished and looking at Shinigami again, the AI pushed her avatar off the wall—she was still working on that mannerism—and gestured at the screens.
“Of the things you saw there, what didn’t seem to fit?”
This was her pet project, her only secret from Barnabas, and it was absolutely essential that it should be perfect.
In fact, though Shinigami didn’t tell Tafa this, it was a matter of life and death.
Tafa considered Shinigami’s question carefully. She looked at all the information and images displayed, and finally, she pointed to three pictures.
“Those.”
Shinigami nodded. “Any of the facts? The writing?”
Tafa frowned. “I really don’t know enough about—”
“You have an eye for the whole,” Shinigami interrupted. “You can see things other people can’t. Some pieces of this, like the photos, might not fit. Does anything stick out to you?”
Tafa hesitated. She was less sure this time, but she highlighted several facts.
Shinigami heaved a sigh and chewed her lip, another mannerism she had picked up from Barnabas. Tafa had, unerringly, picked several lies in the presentation.
And what Tafa noticed, someone else might notice on a subliminal level.
Shinigami couldn’t have that.
“Thank you. I’ll call you back to look at it again when I’ve made some revisions.”
“What is this for?” Tafa looked confused. “Shouldn’t Barnabas be helping you with this?”
“Barnabas…told me to take care of it.” Shinigami evaded the question with a sense of unease. Barnabas didn’t know exactly what she was doing.
She was sure he would approve, though.
She walked with Tafa back to the studio, then appeared in the conference room. From the frustrated expression on Barnabas’ face, little progress had been made.
But something had occurred to her as she walked.
“What if we dropped hints and scattered bits of information that sort of suggested there was a human colony being built in this sector?”
Everyone turned to look at her. Barnabas’ eyebrows lifted, and the Jotuns… Well, Shinigami couldn’t actually tell which direction the Jotuns looked, but they seemed to be paying attention.
“We could do that,” Barnabas drawled slowly. “Something like High Tortuga. Protected, and very secretive.”
“Like you said earlier,” Shinigami pointed out, “we can’t just leak some memo about where you’ll be. He’ll know that’s a trap. But then it occurred to me—we know he’s paid highly for information in the past. Putting things together and making plans is how he likes to work. If he thinks he’s discovered something we don’t want him to know…”
Which was pretty much the outline of her pet project as well. She shoved the thought away and smiled at Barnabas, hoping she didn’t look guilty.
He wasn’t really paying attention, though.
“What information would we need to plant?” he murmured. “Sightings of our ships. Buying materials? No, we always use our own materials.”
“He’s very sensitive to any distortions in trade,” Commander Jeqwar noted. “It wouldn’t have to be anything like buying materials. You could simply start to seed information—just rumors, whispers, nothing directly traceable—that shipping routes in a certain area were being disturbed. Say the ships had been offered money to change routes, for instance, and for not talking about it. No one would confirm it when he went digging, which would fit.”
“And he’d go looking for things in that area,” Shinigami continued. She grinned. “And what if we did the old trick of making a planet seem like something it wasn’t…but with another layer?”
Barnabas frowned at her. “Explain.”
“When someone wants a planet for themselves they try to change all the data, right? So when people look it up, they think it’s a piece-of-crap planet they’d never want to go to?” Not that she’d know anything about doing that.
“Yes.” His eyes drifted toward the Jotun officers on the screen, as if trying to see what they thought of this.
It was impossible to tell, however, given their jellyfish not-faces.
She might as well keep going.
“So we do that twice over,” Shinigami explained. “First we change the data on some random planet that he’s had no interest in before. Now it looks like a lovely, habitable planet—or at least, open to terraforming or enclosed colonies or something. Then we write over the data just a little more sloppily, making it seem like we tried to hide the fact that we can use it.”
“Ah,” Barnabas murmured. He was smiling now. “I do like that.”
“It’s clever,” one of the officers agreed. “But what if he sees through it?”
“He might see through anything,” Barnabas countered. “Our best shot is indeed to give him the illusion that he’s seen through our attempts to hide information. That he’s figured out something we wanted to keep hidden.”
“At the same time, you should send him a direct challenge,” Shinigami told Barnabas. “Throw down the gauntlet, tell him to meet you somewhere. Somewhere far, far from where the action is supposedly happening. You can’t just drop off the radar after your challenge or he’ll know something’s up, so you pretend like you’re playing it straight and then give him this secret target.”
“We should…” Barnabas sighed. “We should pretend that there are a large number of civilians on that hidden colony. That will make him think he can get us by the balls.”
“I’m sorry,” Commander Jeqwar piped up after a moment. “I don’t think that last sentence translated properly.”
Shinigami snorted, and Barnabas flushed.
“I, er…I apologize. It’s a way of saying that he’ll think that’s a place to hit us where we’re weak.”
“Huh.” Commander Jeqwar put that down for further study. “Is this our plan, then?”
“I think so. You’ll need to cover your tracks about where the Jotun fleet is,” Barnabas told her. “We’ll tell you when we’ve selected a place, and you can even reinforce the data we’re planting in your systems.”
“Why?”
Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged a look.
“Because Koel is almost certainly in your government databases,” Shinigami told her bluntly. “That will be one of the things he bribed people to get access to.”
“Oh, gods.” Jeqwar let loose with a stream of words that didn’t translate but didn’t really need to. “We’ll do what we have to do, including finding out who gave him that access.” Her tone made it very clear what was going to happen to those people.
“We’ll be in touch,” Barnabas told her. He signed off and looked at Shinigami. “Where did you get off to?”
“Researching planets.” It wasn’t a lie.
“Any suggestions for your plan, then?”
She dug hastily through her data banks. “Not 1027.478B. That one is pretty well known, and none of the shipping lanes go near it. He might have that as ambient knowledge. I’d suggest Waler’s Star. One of the planets there is just too inhospitable for any colonies to take root. If we make it seem like we have the technology and want to make sure no one tries to take it first…”
“I’ll trust your judgment.” Barnabas nodded decisively. “Let’s get started, then.”
Chapter Nine
On the bridge of the Avaris, Lotar Venn frowned at the screen and punched a few keys. What he saw in the data couldn’t possibly be correct…could it? And it might be nothing, anyway. He had to be very, very sure of what he suspected before he brought anything to the admiral—and to Mr. Yennai.
Lotar gulped. Koel Yennai was a legend. People said that when they made reports to him his face never changed. That it was impossible to know what he thought until you stopped talking and he began to ask questions.
And if you didn’t have answers…
That was a fast track to ruining your entire career. When Lotar had first been brought onboard the Avaris, everyone had hastened to assure him that he shouldn’t worry that he’d be executed for something like that. No, not for something like that.
He’d found that to be the opposite of reassuring.
“What did happen?” he had asked them finally, and they all looked at one another meaningfully. Your career was definitely finished if you wasted Mr. Yennai’s time. You got shuffled off…somewhere; no one knew exactly where. It wasn’t anywhere you wanted to go, though. One or two of them shared stories about bunkmates who’d committed that grave offense and managers and company officers who had failed to do their due diligence.
Anyway, you had to be sure, they said. That was the point. Just be sure, if you were going to bring information to Mr. Yennai, that your research was unassailable and you’d drawn sound conclusions.
Lotar had consequently spent the past six months absolutely terrified of finding anything that would mean he had to present a report. Now that he had, his palms were clammy, and he wondered if he could just pass the report to his managers and let them handle it.
He’d do the research first, though. In his heart, Lotar was an academic. He loved to put together puzzles and draw pictures from
scraps of information. He’d proven adept at all the tests they’d given him when he was interviewed to join the corporation—finding trade opportunities, noting market manipulation, and suggesting avenues for data collection.
Now, this was live data, and he was doing everything in real time, and he was grinning as he punched the keys.
Yes, someone had definitely manipulated data. They had tried to be clever, but he’d caught them. He added images and facts to the report. Which facts had been changed on which date? What other source might there be?
Once or twice he made emphatic points, only to go back and revise them. If he wasn’t sure of something, he withheld it. He took comfort, as he always did, in the data. The patterns were there. Data, unlike people, didn’t lie. The data points were what they were.
By the time he’d finished his report, he was finally feeling relaxed and happy. He flexed his fingers, smiled to himself, and spun in his chair—
To see Koel Yennai watching him.
The bottom dropped out of Lotar’s stomach. He froze, staring at the Torcellan patriarch in absolute terror.
Then Koel smiled. “I watched you build the report,” he admitted. His voice was melodious. No one had ever mentioned that about him. “It’s a good one. You’ve drawn very reasonable conclusions, with a good balance between unfounded speculation, and over-caution. What is your name?”
Lotar managed to close his mouth, but his mind was still a complete blank.
What was his name? He only just managed to avoid looking at the nameplate on his desk.
“Lotar Venn, Mr. Yennai.”
“Lotar Venn.” Koel smiled, which transformed his face. For a moment, Lotar felt like he was the only person in the universe. “I am pleased to have you as one of my employees. Forward that report directly to me.”
