by K. Eason
Tobin nodded. She might have been telling him that B-town winters were cold. He waited for an explanation. No, a reason. Because he trusted she had one. So she told him about Corso. Waited, while he accessed his turing to check the name. His eyes reflected the flickering march of data on the screen. “Corso Risar. Former sergeant in the Second Fleet, Second Division. Resigned his commission after most of his company died holding the line at Windscar.” Subtle emphasis on most. Tobin knew her prior service record, too.
“Yes sir. After Windscar, there wasn’t enough of the company left, so they offered us reassignment or retirement. Corso was . . . not handling it well. He chose retirement.”
Truth was, Corso’d been tired of fighting. Tired of losing, which is how he’d seen the whole surge: the Confederation throwing its military at Brood, void and dirtside, winning sometimes but mostly just holding a line, while the Aedis made surgical strikes and did things, having the alchemy and the arithmancy and the equipment the regulars just didn’t.
“I should’ve asked permission before talking to him, sir, and I’m sorry for that. But I didn’t want to wait on Tzcansi.”
“And you think Corso can find her?”
“Yes sir. We need to know what she knows. Whatever’s happening here, Brood’s only part of it. Corrupted riev are not something PKs are equipped to deal with. Maybe vakari troops, but no one’s going to ask the Protectorate for help, and Five Tribes would ask why. This is the conversation I didn’t want to have over comms, sir. I think we need help, but—from the Windscar garrison, maybe. Not Seawall.”
“All right, Lieutenant. You’re forgiven.”
Iari let her breath out. “Yes sir. There’s more. I, ah, promised the riev compensation in trade for their cooperation. Their usual fee. But then Char said they and Brisk Array wanted to become templars, and asked if I would bring their petition to you. That could be because they’re trying to secure permanent employment, so they can afford repairs—so that we repair them. But that seems like pretty convoluted reasoning for riev.”
Tobin’s sharp look settled and sank into her. Prickled under her skin like barbed hooks. “Does that mean you think they’re sincere in their request?”
“I do. The charter says a templar is called to serve the Aedis, but what that means depends on the supplicant. People join for all kinds of reasons. Fight Brood, serve the Elements. Serve the Confederation. Protect people. Steady salary, fancy armor.” Iari shrugged, spacer-style, a gesture she’d learned from Tobin. “We don’t ask anyone else for a motive.”
Tobin leaned back. Steepled his fingers and tapped his chin with the foremost pair. “Riev have no legal status in the Confederation, or in the Synod.”
“No sir. But they aren’t classified as mecha, either. And Char uses a personal pronoun. Char is I. That makes them . . . a person.”
Tobin blinked. “Does Brisk Array also use a personal pronoun?”
“Not that I’ve heard, but Char didn’t either, until Sawtooth almost killed us both. I think they slipped up.”
“You think Char was . . . concealing their preferences?”
Iari twitched an eyebrow, the corner of her mouth, in lieu of a more painful shrug. “I think so.”
“I’ll talk to Mother Quellis.”
“Thank you, sir.” Iari squirmed on the chair. “There’s something else. Char said Pinjat was trying to restore ‘Oversight.’ They made it sound like an official thing. Gaer thinks it’s some kind of network. Riev-to-riev. The way they were controlled during the war. Quantum, he said. Immune to vakari attempts at hacking. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. Gaer pulled a chip out of one of the riev.” Iari tipped her chin sideways, vaguely in the direction of the door. “He’s waiting in the hall, sir. You should probably hear this from him.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“No sir.”
“Oh. Well.” Tobin sighed. “Better go get him.”
* * *
—
“Wait out here,” Iari had told him, and so Gaer did: skipped that hostile bench and remained standing in the hallway outside Tobin’s office, at first at a polite distance from the door and then, when it became clear no one was watching, a scant handspan from its surface.
Before Tanis and B-town, Gaer had been in exactly one Aedian compound. That one, on Tr’Lak, far from the Weep, shared a planet with the Confederate Parliament and the Aedian Synod, and so it had been far less rustic. The doors there had been a sleek, polished chrome and steel, with an inlaid Aedian crest in the center. Tobin’s door was hinged and wooden and unmarked and very good at absorbing sound.
Gaer gave up on dignity and pressed the side of his head against the gap between door and frame. The wood smelled faintly of oil and dust; the stone wall, of more dust with a tang of damp. Voices hummed on the other side, distinguishable mostly by tone and level. He heard his own name a few times. Heard Tobin’s voice lift and sharpen, followed by a flood of Iari again, lower and rapid. He imagined her leaning forward and her hands, with those sad and useless little keratin talons (nails, they were called, though an actual nail was much more useful and formidable), gesturing like she did whenever she felt strongly about something.
Then came a small valley of silence, during which Gaer’s guts knotted and chilled. Tobin might be sitting and thinking, or he might be typing an order for Gaer’s detention. Gaer cast a glance down the hall, toward the stairs that led down to the main hall and the templar barracks. If an arrest came, it would be from that way. And if templars did come, well. Iari wouldn’t do anything. She couldn’t. Argue, yes, but actively interfere? Gaer didn’t think she would.
He didn’t like how that knowledge curdled in his belly. Didn’t like the hard bang of his heart in his chest, either. Tobin was sensible. Iari trusted him. And so Gaer just had to trust her and her instincts and, by extension, Tobin, too.
He almost missed the footsteps on the other side of the door, right there, setat. He recoiled as the latch clicked and the door swung open.
Iari stood there. Noted his proximity to the door, likely noted the kaleidoscope of his pigments—no, definitely noticed. She quirked a brow at him.
“Ambassador,” Tobin called. “Do come in. The lieutenant says you’ve got something to tell me.”
Gaer tugged his jacket a little bit straighter. Then he pinned his best neutral expression in place and went in. Offered a polite bow to Tobin, and then offered his tablet.
Tobin didn’t reach for it. “What is this?”
“My notes on the chip removed from the compromised riev, Sawtooth.” He offered the tablet again. “Knight-Marshal. You’ll be interested.”
Tobin took the tablet like he expected it to bite him.
“Sit down, please.”
Gaer did, in one of those chairs, all bumps and canyons in all the wrong places. There were jokes to be made about torture and diplomatic immunity and oh, no, this was not the time.
Gaer had gotten quite skilled at reading soft-skin expressions—such mobile faces, almost as revealing as auras—but the Knight-Marshal’s lips and brows remained level, immobile, unhelpful. His aura was probably a stunning display, but he had some kind of hex running that rendered his aura a uniform and patently false bird’s-egg blue.
Gaer realized, with some belated embarrassment, that he’d never imagined the Knight-Marshal would employ a concealment hex in his office. But he’d never tried reading the Knight-Marshal here before, either, because he’d never been invited this far into the templar administrative wing. All his meetings with Tobin had taken place in the public parts of the Aedis. Reception. Mess halls. Courtyards. And yes, that one little assignation on the battlements.
Gaer was glad of his own facial rigidity, because if he had brows and lips that would pucker and droop, his would be doing so. And he was glad of Iari’s presence. She sat beside him, her chair a little cl
oser to Tobin’s desk, watching the Knight-Marshal read Gaer’s report. No sign of impatience, no fidgeting. She might as well have been a part of the wretched chair.
A less charitable, less informed person might’ve attributed her stoicism to her tenju heritage, and the downright bigoted would say that stoicism came from a basic lack of intellect. The tenju were the shock-troops of the Confederation, without whom, it was widely accepted, the fragile alliance wouldn’t have survived its first decade. Certainly it had been tenju infantry that had gone toe-to-talon with vakari marines most often. Oh, the Confederates didn’t segregate their units, not officially, of course not. But it hadn’t been alwar units making landfall on Driss, in the last days of the Expansion war.
It was also a fact not lost on Gaer, or SPERE command—or anyone else who spent any time studying the Confederation—that alwar made up the bulk of seats in the Confederate Parliament. In the Synod, it was humans who held most of the titles. Tenju had a higher percentage membership in the templars, but even there, their total numbers did not constitute a majority. And that might be coincidence; tenju spacers were organized around clans and battle-fleets. Tenju seedworlds showed a trend toward tribal organization and limited industrialization, which seemed to suggest a cultural disinterest in large-scale empire-building. No tenju seedworld had ever developed void-travel on its own. Certainly this little rock, Tanis, had been just figuring out explosive powder when the first alwar dropped into its gravity well.
Humans, now, like the Knight-Marshal—clever mammals. Flexible genetics, able to breed successfully with alwar or tenju. They had, as a species, spent less time in the void, and so they were at some disadvantage with void-travel trade routes. The tenju spacer-clans had been the humans’ natural allies (being somewhat natural pirates) against the pre-established alwar web of galactic trade.
It was a fact much bemoaned in Protectorate history that, had the Protectorate kept to its borders another century or so, the tenju-human alliance might’ve taken care of the alwar altogether, the tenju clans allying with the human leagues and consortiums, acting as a counter to the old alwar Harek Empire, eventually outspending it, overwhelming it, either financially or militarily. Had that happened, there would have been no alwar left of any socio-political-economic consequence to join the Confederation to oppose the Expansion. Without the alwar, the Confederation, lacking formidable alchemy and arithmancy of its own, would have been too weak to oppose Protectorate forces.
The Five Tribes was more agnostic in its judgment; without the Expansion, there would be no Five Tribes, no reason to rebel, no chance that their heresy would succeed. But there wouldn’t be a Weep, either, if the Protectorate hadn’t felt cornered and desperate.
It was the sort of historical irony that kept academics on all sides occupied.
What Gaer knew was that had Knight-Marshal Tobin been alwar, not human, Gaer would be politely confined to his quarters already, and the contents of his tablet would be triple-encrypted and already quantum-hexed to the Knight-General on Tr’Lak. Of course, had Iari been alwar, he wouldn’t have gone with her into B-town at all, whatever favors or access to libraries and data the Knight-Marshal had offered. Chase down riev with an alw. As if.
Which meant—in that alternate plane of the multiverse—proof of a massive security breach to riev by an unfamiliar, hostile arithmancy and a localized Brood incursion would have remained undiscovered until it was possibly too late to do any good.
So. There was a lesson there, about xenophobia. Maybe he’d include that in his report, too, assuming he ever got round to sending it to Commander Karaesh’t in the Seawall embassy.
Assuming Tobin didn’t do all the things Iari swore he wouldn’t.
What Tobin was doing now was rereading, for the third time or the thirtieth, the contents of the tablet. Gaer leaned back in the chair, and then forward again when some knobby protuberance jabbed into his spinal ridge.
Iari flicked a glance at him, and the smallest half-hitch of a sympathetic smile.
And when he looked back, Tobin was staring at him. The Knight-Marshal’s face had sunk all the way back to neutral. Some soft-skins got very still when they were most angry. Iari, for one. Gaer thought Tobin might be one of those, too.
“I’m not completely sure I understand every technical detail,” Tobin said, and his voice confirmed Gaer’s suspicion. Cool, quiet, briskly contained, and furious. “But what I’m seeing here is that you’ve discovered that riev have in fact been compromised, with what you allege is contamination akin to Brood, but using a vector, what did you say, not unlike Aedian implants, and that we have a person, or persons, in Lowtown who possess this skill, using it for purposes as yet undetermined. Is that right?”
Gaer wished his chair was the chair closer to the window, in case he needed a quick escape. One jump to the desk and he’d be there. Simple mechanical latches. Then he let the fantasy go, and his regrets that he’d come here at all, and made eyelock with Tobin. “Correct. But Char—and I imagine Brisk Array, too, if someone asked him—says that the installation of such a device requires cooperation on the part of the riev. The implication being—the riev asked for this chip, but whether they knew they were getting this or not, we don’t know. It’s unclear whether the contamination is a feature of this chip or a side effect.”
“Do you know whether the affected riev shared some sort of communication?”
“No. We know that Brood appear to communicate with each other without equipment. Pheromones, some sort of deep-aether entanglement, telepathy, magic—there are a great many hypotheses. I hypothesize that this chip is meant to employ a similar mechanism to what Brood use to connect the riev. I hypothesize that the altar we found might be some sort of transmitter or central point. But to be sure, I would need to examine it in some detail.”
“Yes. The altar. I note your report makes a detailed mention of it, but draws no conclusions as to its origins or purpose, except to say that the script on it appears to be k’bal. Is that because you really don’t know, or . . . ?”
“Or am I trying to retain some information for my superiors that you don’t get to read first? I really don’t know. Even if I had not come to you with this data, Knight-Marshal, I would be here asking to examine that altar. K’bal artifacts are rare. What one is doing here, on a tenju seedworld, I can’t even guess. I suppose it was smuggled from offworld. We did find it in a ganglord’s warehouse.”
“And I suppose SPERE wants to find out why it’s here, and who brought it.”
“Of course they will. So does the Aedis. Obviously, sir, because here we are in your office having this conversation.”
Iari moved, on Gaer’s periphery, an audible squeak as the chair scraped the stone tile. Take that as a kick in the ankle, long-distance.
“They will, future tense.” Tobin spun the tablet on the desk and pushed it back to Gaer with a fingertip. “You haven’t sent this to your superiors yet.”
It wasn’t a question. Gaer cocked his head. “I haven’t.”
“Why not?”
Gaer leaned forward slowly, hands open, empty, hopefully non-threatening. “My assignment here is, among other things, to observe the fissure, to report Brood activity, and to report signs of a new surge. If there is a new surge, then I am authorized to assist the Aedis at my discretion. I have a lot of latitude, as a SPERE agent, in how I fulfill that assignment.”
Tobin’s lips broke their stiff line, drawing together in an expression Gaer knew meant thoughtful. “Including when you file this report.”
“Yes.” He felt Iari’s stare scorching the side of his face. Please, oh dark lords, she didn’t call him liar right here, and throw the word treason around the Knight-Marshal’s office. Because he was committing that, to some reckoning (his political enemies’, certainly), but also not, dependent largely on how circumstances resolved. “If I am to be of any use to my superiors, I need your confidence t
o operate. I don’t get that confidence if I send SPERE command proof that someone has breached riev security. That sort of information will delight some, and disturb others, and generally sow chaos as people scrabble about trying to figure out how best to use it. I think that would distract us from bigger problems.”
“Such as?”
“Why there are Brood in B-town. How they got here. Why they aren’t killing everyone they encounter. And the potential for breaching and corrupting Aedian hexwork. If you go down, the next surge will be the last one for all of us.”
“Could you replicate the arithmancy on the chip?”
“Me personally?” Gaer flared his plates. The room’s aether tasted like stone and wood-oil and the constant presence of mammals. Most vakari couldn’t distinguish human from tenju from alwar. Soft-skin was soft-skin.
No. It’s not that they couldn’t distinguish. It’s that they didn’t bother to try.
“Perhaps, with time and access to documents the Aedis won’t thank you for giving me.”
“Only perhaps?”
“I’m unfamiliar with Aedian techniques. It’s not strictly arithmancy, as we understand it.” Careful, careful use of pronouns. Differentiation without judgment. “You are more inclined to, ah, diluting the purity of the equations with galvanics and alchemy. And the nanomecha, of course. They replicate and, if I understand correctly, self-repair.”
Tobin’s gaze flicked to Gaer’s optic. His mouth flexed into a smile that could’ve been gently amused if his eyes hadn’t been anything but. “What about repairing riev armor? Jorvik is going to need some help with Char.”
Gaer glanced at Iari. Found her looking back, a smile curdling around her capped tusk. The light coming out of the courtyard made that scar on her face seem especially livid. Iari was the sort to run face-first into trouble. And since he was intending to go with her into that trouble, well, best he helped where he could.
