“You have been questioned by the Council of the Alliance, and you have answered them with silence.”
Bria stared, her huge bulk drifting slightly in the soft air currents of the room. Finally she blinked, an informal sign of assent among the Sussurat.
“The Council has long doubted you, Sussurat. You fall into this star system after bitter battle in the Ulltrian system, but you return with dangerous artifacts. And the Kirt made-mind Tiklik’al’Takas, that betrayed you to the Ulltrians, was given liberty of your ship and systems. To the cautious Councilors, you seem indifferent to our dangers.”
Bria said nothing while the Neelee watched her with huge, hungry eyes. Preeajitala waited a long time, her nose twitching slightly with impatience at Bria’s silence.
“I do not share their doubts,” Preeajitala said. “Your character is as predictable as an orbit. Your every urgent act as Harmonizer has turned round a single purpose: to serve the Alliance. You are loyal to the Alliance mission: to spread life through the universe and to balance the world shares of the many lifetrees.”
Bria blinked.
“So,” Preeajitala said, “There are two alternatives.” She held up one hand. “You were altered by the Ulltrians, made into their tool, drawn into their orbit.” She held up the other hand. “You have killed the OnUnAn ambassadors because you believed it would serve the Alliance.”
Preeajitala tapped her hooves together, as if to demand Bria’s attention. “Even the Ulltrians, with their hateful methods to bend the path of a mind, would find it difficult to move you. And if such a thing were possible, how could it be hidden from the guileful human Harmonizer, Tarkos?” She dropped one hand. “Reason embraces the other answer: you destroyed an embassy ship, a terrible violence against the codes and conduct of our civilization, because you believed it necessary to protect the Alliance.”
Still Bria stared. Preeajitala waited. A minute passed. Preeajitala pulled her lips back, showing her flat teeth. A Neelee sign of anger. Bria respected the Neelee but she thought the gesture ridiculous. The big flat teeth were meant to grind nuts and grasses.
“Tarkos?” Bria asked. “Where is?”
“The Executive put him in an external holding cell. They feared the human helped destroy the OnUnAn ship. And they fear that the human, young organism of a young clade—lacking a time-tested heritage, the birth-given drives of the civilized species, bodily wisdom to meet such chaos and confusions—they fear the human will be… erratic.”
“Erratic,” Bria growled, deep and slow—a thoughtful sound. “Now all will be erratic. War begins.”
Preeajitala flicked her ears.
“Tiklik?” Bria asked.
“Strange that a Sussurat would care for an artificial intelligence. That made mind is held in a separate cell, where its kind are isolated. The Neelee have long distrusted manufactured autonomies, since the time of the Machine War.”
Bria blinked. This was well understood. The Alliance members had stopped manufacturing independent AIs centuries before. The AIs that ran Alliance ships were without independent desires or will. Tiklik’al’Takas was an antique, an ancient being, created in and by another era.
“I come to offer a choice, Commander Briathursiasaliantiormethesess of the Harmonizers. The Council has called on a Sussurat neurophysiologist to pry your voice from your brain. You will not hold your secrets, under probes of another Sussurat. There is one way to avoid this humiliation: tell me why you destroyed the OnUnAn embassy ship.”
Now Bria showed her teeth. The prospect of a neural probe made her go cold and still, a predator facing certain danger. She would not allow anything, any sentient, into her mind.
Preeajitala waited a long while, her huge eyes not blinking. Finally, she snorted briefly. “Well, Commander. The feircest punishment the Council could mete on you is to make you useless. This they well know. For that reason, you will remain in this cell. It will be extruded, like Tarkos’s cell, and you will wait, useless in the long and urgent hours while Savannah Runner prepares for combat. Then the Sussurat interrogator will arrive and claim you, and wrench all the secrets from your bared brain.”
Bria looked up at the towering heights of Savannah Runner but said nothing.
“I did not expect your answer,” Preeajitala said, “since you have refused to answer before.” Her ears leaned forward, close to her head and pointed directly at Bria—a gesture of focussed, intimate conversation. Softly, she said, “You are needed, Harmonizer. Do you understand this? You are needed.”
Bria flinched in surprise, but after a moment of consideration, she blinked.
Preeajitala’s skin twitched repeatedly, as if she were being bitten by insects. Bria recognized this Neelee expression: extreme impatience. Bria thought it a vice of herbivores, this inability to wait.
The Special Advisor turned abruptly, without another word. Preeajitala pulled herself out into the hall, springing off the door frame. It closed and locked behind her. After a moment, the view through the walls began to distort, altered by the warping of the wall material. The exterior wall behind Bria bulged outward. The walls to each side stretched and narrowed together, making the door seem to retreat into a hallway. When the distance to the door had doubled, the walls around the door bent forward and touched, then sealed together. The whole chamber formed the shape of a water droplet, and then the narrow end of the cone broke free, and Bria was inside a clear cell that floated beside Savannah Runner.
A slight push of vented gas from Savannah Runner made the cell drift away.
Bria showed her teeth, and then turned her back to the planet and to the vast ship, to face toward deeper space. She watched ships gather and begin to speed toward the outer system, bright points that weaker eyes than hers could have mistaken for sparks, rising toward cold extinction.
While she waited, she extruded her claws, and interleaving her fingers, ran the edge of each claw against its opposite on the other hand, to sharpen their long edges.
CHAPTER 3
When Savannah Runner filled half the view before him, Tarkos flipped and burned the rocket pack at a whole e-gee, slowing till he drifted forward at only a dozen meters a second.
Tarkos never much liked space walks. The inescapable emptiness of space could cause a kind of existential vertigo if he reflected on the vastness that surrounded him. Sometimes he enjoyed that: it gave him a sense of wild freedom and it reminded him that all his problems and worries were very, very small. But sometimes a space walk instilled a primordial fear all the way down his spine, like the feeling you get in the deep ocean when you are treading water and you realize there are miles and miles of black water, and creatures that live in that black water, below your naked feet. So he tried, when outside a ship in his vacuum armor, to focus on his next steps, and not on the infinity of cold emptiness, interrupted only by vastly distant stars.
The huge crystal ship slowly turned before him. Beyond it, the white rings of Neelee-ornor reached around the green world. From this perspective, it seemed Savannah Runner sat on the rings, a white snowflake on an ice road. He opaqued his helmet and chose a magnified view, making the spires of Savannah Runner leap forward in his vision, seemingly close enough to touch. He scanned for his cruiser, assuming that it remained docked with the Neelee flagship. But there were many ships around the Savannah Runner, docked and undocked. That surprised him. He recognized Neelee herd ships, Bright spikeships, and Kirt dreadnaughts. He spotted two other Harmonizer cruisers also, both free floating in the crowded space around the flagship.
Tarkos frowned. The assembly of small, fast ships meant only one thing: they were preparing for an attack, but the attack had not yet come.
His view passed over a Kirt ship, floating near the ventral spikes of the Savannah Runner, but then he quickly looked back at the ship and increased the magnification. The Kirt ship had a horseshoe-crab shape with its probability spines so close to the hull that the ship almost appeared smooth. Tarkos had flown in ships of this design. They
were the most versatile, and common, Kirt design. Earth had bought a small fleet of them, trading biological wealth for the technology. And on the side of this ship, unmistakably, shone a pale blue square with white concentric circles within circles, surrounded by laurels: the UN Earthcorp flag.
Tarkos considered for a long while. Then he turned on the stealth capabilities of his suit, aimed himself at the ship from Earth, and activated the rocket pack.
_____
Tarkos had been a junior pilot on a Kirt ship of the same form, during his first mission off Earth, to a difficult world that the crew had named Purgatorio. So Tarkos knew well the design of ship. He cut the engine of the rocket pack a kilometer away, and used his suit jets to slow his approach. He hit the hull going a meter a second, but the power assist in his armor let him grip a probability flange and hold on.
He hurriedly crawled across the hull to one of the emergency airlocks. The Neelee ship seemed above him now, filling the entire sky, its white reflected light pouring down and lighting up the dark hull around him. His stealth armor turned blue as he crossed the blue Earthcorp flag. The dock lay just next to the flag.
The Kirt craft was not a military design. Earth used them for commerce, exploration, and diplomacy. The emergency lock had no crypto-protocols. On a ship like this, on the kind of missions it performed, you assumed that if someone walked out on the hull, they should be there. He interfaced with the door’s computer, and the Galactic design immediately recognized and obeyed his protocols. The outer door opened. The ship’s AI linked with him also. It recognized his Harmonizer identification and offered him a menu of ship controls. He ignored those and crawled inside.
Blood-red light glared in the airlock, blinking urgently. A visual alarm, something that human engineers had added. The door closed behind him, shutting out the pale light reflected off Savannah Runner and the rings of Neelee-ornor. He turned off the stealthing of his vacuum armor, and flipped to face the inner door. As air pumped into the lock, his suit’s microphones activated. The screech of an alarm grew with the density of the air.
The inner door opened. Tarkos pulled himself into a long hall with walls that looked like dark stone. His suit, still cold from the stealthing mode, smoked with condensation. Two women floated a few meters before him, their faces sharp with the shadows of the lights above their heads. One was tall, with very dark skin. From North Africa, Tarkos would guess. The other looked to be from Northern Europe, with blond hair cut short. They held heavy laser rifles, pointed at his feet. Tarkos felt a surge of excitement to be present with several humans at once. For the last several years, he’d met only a few humans during his missions, and these always singly. He sent the command to make his armor split open. He pushed out, drifting toward the women.
“Identify yourself,” the dark woman asked. Tarkos could barely hear because his eardrums had burst in the vacuum of his cell, but his implants had their own microphones, and his translation software fed the voice to his aural cortex.
“I am Harmonizer Amir Tarkos,” he said in English, no doubt shouting because of his deafness. “Take me to your captain.”
_____
“This is a curious way for the Harmonizers to pay us a visit,” Captain Shirazi said. “Unannounced, without a ship.”
They were alone in her office, though Tarkos had no doubts that the other two women with the lasers waited nearby. Moving to the office he heard voices and bustle that made him guess the crew here must number at least a few dozen. The halls were spotless, clean, with almost no obvious modifications. The whole ship had a spare, minimal appearance, as if discipline had mattered more than any possible additions to ship design. But he could smell bread baking, and humans, and something floral. The smells overwhelmed him, and filled him with a longing for human company and for Earth. More strongly, his ability to sample and sequence free DNA—a new sense that the Gallactics had built into all Harmonizers—gave him an overwhelming feeling of homecoming: all the genetic code here was terrestrial. The ship was a tiny pocket of Earth’s biome. And best of all, the air mix felt perfect, as if it breathed for him, after the parched high-oxygen mix he shared with Bria.
But alone with this serious captain, he suppressed the desire to smile, to talk about nothing, to ask about their shared homeworld. Bright light filled her office, and every surface, including her desk, shone clean and empty. No doubt the walls could project data and tactical views. But, taken in without virtual effects, the room seemed like a monastic cell.
The captain had made it instantly clear that she wanted their conversation to be formal and short. She floated behind a desk, slightly bent so that it seemed almost that she sat. An Iranian woman, he guessed, with a very serious demeanor, and thick black hair pulled back into a severe bun. She had not smiled once. She had a way of talking with her lips barely parted. It hid her teeth and made her seem uptight, if not angry.
“This is not an official Harmonizer visit,” he said.
“And you look like you’ve been in a week of fist fights,” she added.
“I was unfortunately exposed to vacuum. That’s why I’m most likely shouting at you. I’m deaf, but for my implants.”
She nodded, as if expecting him to have been in all sorts of unfortunate and inappropriate scrapes. “I’ll have my doctor look at you, if that helps.”
“If she or he can do something for my ears, that’d be appreciated.”
“So,” the captain said, tilting her head forward to indicate that the niceties were over. “You have come to tell me what all the panic is about, I suppose.”
Tarkos frowned. “The panic?”
“The military preparations. The alarms. The collection of ships. Bright, Kirt, Velerit, and even—until a few minutes ago—Hurlkor ships, all spreading out in the system.”
Tarkos nodded. “That’s news to me, but I can explain it. The Alliance is at war. Some kind of special attack is intended for Neelee-ornor. But other worlds are threatened. Maybe all other worlds. Several worlds have been attacked already.”
“Earth?”
“As far as I know Earth has not been attacked. That’s not much consolation, because eventually Earth will be attacked.”
“By whom?”
“The Ulltrians.”
The captain narrowed her eyes and stared at him a long time. “Ulltrians. Those mythical monsters that the Alliance fought thousands of years ago?”
“Not so mythical.”
“We were told,” the Captain said, with a tone that made clear ‘we’ meant humanity, “that the Ulltrians were extinct.”
“So it was believed. That turned out to be an overly optimistic assessment.”
“But why would Earth be in danger?”
“Because the Ulltrians know about Earth. I have seen first hand that they are interested in Earth. Listen: the Ulltrians aim to pit every ecosystem against every other. That’s their mission, their… religion, I guess we would call it. They cannot let a world like Earth go, once they know it’s there. They’ll consider it their duty to rain down on us the organisms of a hundred other worlds, to create ecological warfare at every scale of life, in every corner of every ecosystem, so that they can adopt and use what survives the struggle. Everything we know and love would be destroyed, including humanity. So the sooner the Alliance wins this war, the more likely we are to stay out of it.”
“And you came to tell me this? You don’t trust radio or hyper-radio anymore?”
“I came to ask for help.”
“Help? This is a trade mission, Harmonizer. How can we help in war against the Ulltrians? If Alliance historical records are accurate, the Ulltrians nearly destroyed all known ecosystems in the Galaxy, the last time they waged war. A single Ulltrian alone was said to be catastrophically dangerous.”
“I need to talk to someone in Terran Exo-Intelligence.”
The Captain gave an exaggerated sigh. “I repeat: this is a diplomatic and trade mission. There is no one aboard in Terran Exo-Intelligence.”
“Captain Shirazi,” Tarkos said, “worlds are going to die. The old rules are dead. We have to be very practical now. So: I served on a ship like this. I know Terran protocols. Someone—perhaps most of your crew even—is in Terran Exo-Intelligence. Most likely you are in Terran Exo-Intelligence.”
“There is no member of Terran Exo-Intelligence on board,” she repeated.
Tarkos’s patience failed. Although he did not mean to do so, he spoke even more loudly, his hoarse throat grinding out his words in a growl. “Captain, a member of Terran Exo-Intelligence died gathering information that could save the Alliance and that could save Earth. She was a damn fine human and operative, and I will not let her sacrifice be in vain.”
“Who?” the Captain whispered.
Tarkos had not expected the question. “What?”
“Who died? Who was this woman?”
“Pala…” his voice cracked, but he swallowed and managed to whisper, “Pala Eydis.”
The captain turned and looked at the wall for a long while. They floated there in silence. Tarkos’s sorrow rose in his throat, but watching this severe captain turn suddenly thoughtful and look away, he felt certain that the captain felt shock and sorrow also. Tarkos understood everything he needed to know then: this captain had known Eydis. And therefore this captain must be a member of Terran Exo-Intelligence.
“I promised her,” Tarkos said softly, “I promised her that I would deliver her data trove to a member of Terran Exo-Intelligence. I will keep that promise if it kills me. But more important right now is that Pala Eydis determined the Ulltrians had a special attack planned for Neelee-ornor. She sent me one last message that I believe might tell us what that attack will be. I need help going through her data to try to figure out what that plan is.”
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