The hairs stood up on the back of Conrad’s neck. “Brasileiro?” he repeated.
“Ancestral language from my homeworld. My wife spoke it, but I always was a miner so I picked up Canonic from the other miners that came through.”
“When was your world settled?”
Arro scratched his head. “I can’t really say,” he admitted. “Don’t know much about history. Just a miner, and my father was a miner, and we never got much schoolin.’’’
“Do you know where your people came from?”
“Ah, that much I know. Another planet, somewhere else in the galaxy. The details—” he shrugged.
“And the Satori?”
“They’ve been around longer than my planet’s been settled. They’re the oldest civilization here, I’ll give ’em that. They took the extra time and figured out how to kill the rest of us. It’s a fight that’s been goin’ on for as long as the Satori have existed. It’s not going to end soon, not in my lifetime, or even yours,” the man said.
Conrad smiled. “Are you sure about that, old man?” he asked.
Arro chortled slightly. “And you’re going to take it down all by yourself, are you?” he said. “I wish you luck, anyway. Have you been a part of the Federation for long?”
Conrad hesitated. “Just joined up,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a lie.
“When you get to my age—if you get to my age—you spend a lot of time thinking about what you did with your life. What really matters. To you, to your family, to the whole blasted universe. You realize you spent your whole life making decisions. Little ones that added up to big ones. And if you chose right, you can look further down the path without fear.” Arro nodded.
Conrad felt a strange peace settle over him at the old man’s words. “I believe you,” he finally said.
Arro grunted and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be a good soldier, son. Something about you tells me you’ll go much further in this fight than I will. And it’s not just because you’re a few years younger than me and a tiny bit skinnier.” Arro patted his portly belly.
He looked at Conrad more closely and his eyebrows climbed. “If you don’t mind me askin’, is that what you are—Satori? At least in part?”
Conrad shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m a stranger here. Where I come from, the Empire doesn’t exist.”
The man looked doubtful. “Well, if you’re here, then the Empire must not be too far off from your worlds.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Conrad said. “To do something about it—before they get to us.”
Arro chuckled softly. “You’re young and idealistic now. Full of piss and fire,” he said. “It’s a good thing. You remind me of me, thirty years ago.” He glanced at the Oro Yurei and the Blackbird, sitting silently across from each other in the bay. “Somethin’ tells me this fight isn’t over yet, for either of us, son.”
Baro II was a gas giant, with swirling red storms traveling over its surface. Conrad could understand why the Federation had chosen it as a gathering point; it was surrounded by more than twenty moons, both large and small. There were countless places to hide.
The trawler deposited the Oro Yurei and the Blackbird at the edge of a massive flagship. The Federation had no presence on a starbase or planetary base. Being always on the move, it was a waste of resources to put down a permanent base anywhere.
Besides, Jira had said darkly, it’s faster and cleaner to set a ship to self-destruct than an entire base.
She had spent most of their journey to Baro memorizing the navcharts and diagrams from the datapiece. By the time they arrived, she’d seen every piece of data they’d stolen from the palace archive.
She waited at the gangplank, clearly eager to disembark. Conrad came up behind her. “Does Argus smell that bad that you’re this desperate to get off my ship?” he asked her.
Jira wrinkled her nose. “Argus smells fine. Nice, even. He grooms himself. If anybody needs a dip in a tub it’s that mechanic of yours. And you too, come to think of it.”
“Me?” Conrad folded his arms. “I smell as good as I look.”
She glanced at him and suppressed a smile. “Exactly.”
“What is it about women in this galaxy?” he complained. “They wouldn’t appreciate a gift from the ‘Lords of the Dark’ if they dropped him in their laps. You, Rose, all of you.”
“Rose?” she asked curiously, her head inclined. “Who’s Rose?”
“An old friend of mine,” Conrad replied, wondering why he felt a jag of guilt saying so.
“I see,” Jira said. At that moment the gangplank lowered and she walked down it briskly. “There’s no time to waste,” she said. “We need to get copies made of the data in this ’piece. And perhaps we can find out where this planet Earth is. We’ll cross-reference the data in your old ship’s memory banks against what we have in our own libraries. No promises, but—”
“Jira?” Conrad lingered behind her.
“Yes?” she turned around. There was already a group of uniformed officers waiting to greet her a few meters away.
“What happens to Arro?”
Her face softened. “It’s up to him,” she said. “We can arrange for him to be returned home to Escaton… or he can stay with us and join the Federation fleet permanently. I’ll make sure his ship gets repaired. We’ll take care of him, Conrad, I promise. The Federation takes care of its own.”
Jira seemed to disappear after that, but she was as good as her word. The medics on board the Federation flagship healed Argus’s wound completely, and checked over Conrad and Baltasar for injuries. It seemed he was free to roam the flagship—named the Verdant—but he stuck close to the bay where they were docked, to keep Arro company. He slept on board the Oro Yurei, more comfortable now on the ship’s hard bunks than anywhere else.
And they waited. They gambled with fake money with the deck crew. Baltasar was surprisingly skilled, winning a few hundred bits of plastic chip. Ship crews are the same everywhere, Baltasar confided to him. You spend all your time fantasizing about having money and you just end up losing what you’ve got to your crewmates waiting for action.
Baltasar and Argus spent the rest of the hours repairing the Oro Yurei, lovingly patching up her nacelles and running diagnostics on her AI nucleus. Their new deckmates were eager to help in exchange for a look inside an Imperial yacht.
Conrad spent his own time talking with Arro, learning what he could about the universe the man lived in. There was the tantalizing hint he’d dropped on their journey—Brasileiro.
Brazil. South American Confederacy’s been in place for a hundred years, though. That part of the Confederacy hasn’t gone by that name in a long time. Conrad spent hours mulling it over. But there were no other facts that directly linked Arro to Sanctuary.
Ultimately, Conrad learned little more about Arro and his family than the quadrant of the galaxy in which they lived. He’d had a daughter named Neves. She was so bright the Empire had picked her up to serve as one of its colonial administrators, and he hadn’t seen her since she was twelve years old. Arro had gone back into his ship and stayed there for a while after telling Conrad about her.
Conrad was beginning to feel restless and helpless at the same time. It was a bad combination. It made him feel itchy. Like he was going to climb out of his own skin if something didn’t happen soon.
If he wasn’t spending time with Arro, he tried to sleep. He’d lie on his bunk for hours, idly rolling Jira’s earring between his fingers, thinking about Sanctuary, the Empire, and the portals.
Somehow, he knew this was just the quiet before the storm.
One morning, Argus appeared above him, sniffing his face.
He peeled an eye open. “Arg, what a terrible way to be woken up. Have you been eating your own droppings again?”
“Jira is here,” Argus replied. “Have you taken a bath? You smell awful.”
Conrad dropped the earring into his shirt pocket and heaved himself up to see th
e petite woman standing behind Argus. “I won’t be insulted on my own ship anymore,” he declared. “I’ll have you know that I smell—”
“I’ve got answers for you,” Jira said, her expression intense and unsmiling. “Are you ready?”
Chapter 27
Conrad followed Jira through the halls of the Federation flagship, Argus trailing behind him. The Kazhad lingered close, as if guarding him. Jira looked over her shoulder, sensing his unease.
“Don’t worry, kit,” she said. “Nothing’s going to happen to your princeling.”
“Wouldn’t mind if something happened,” said Conrad. “After all this waiting around.”
“Careful what you wish for,” she said, a glint in her eye. “I learned not to say dangerous things like that a long time ago.”
“You been on this ship before?”
“I grew up on this ship, after I joined the Federation,” she said. “The Verdant is Cadero-built, and a hundred years old. The Imperials destroyed most of the Caderan fleet during their invasion but they didn’t get this one.” She ran her hand along the bulkhead. “We were always known for our tech. When the Imperials took over they took away our engineers by the thousands, but even the average Caderan child knows more than most full-grown beings about tech and how to use it. And we don’t forget anything we see. The Caderans who rebelled and joined the Federation repaired the Verdant and fitted hundreds of other ships. It made sense for me to grow up here, among people who spoke my own language.”
That was why she spoke Canonic with an accent, Conrad realized. He looked up, examining the shape and design of the ship from within. There was no doubt it was a well-made vessel, built for a fight.
As they walked, Conrad noticed that the numbers of humans and aliens that passed them were becoming fewer and fewer. They passed through multiple shield doors into what had to be the core of the ship.
“The Verdant is more than a flagship. It’s one of the data stores of the Federation,” Jira explained. “We’re spread out across hundreds of systems and thousands of worlds. If we had a central repository, the Empire could destroy it. But this way, there’s no way they can bring every data store down. Some are purely automated, with no living being attending them. Others are guarded.”
“That means more chances you’ll be discovered, with so many stores,” Argus rumbled.
Jira shrugged. “There’s more levels of encryption than you can imagine,” she said. “Caderan-style encryption, ever since we threw our lot in with the Federation. It’s a system that’s worked for a millennium.”
She paused in front of a massive, heavy door, placing her palm against a panel at its side. It slid open to reveal a dark room, a man standing in its center. Around him was an elaborate rig of machinery, spiraling around him like a cage. Holographic screens hung in the air around the cage like ghosts. The screens displayed images of ships, faces, navcharts, and endless streams of text, which seemed to scroll into infinity.
At first glance, the man was unremarkable. He was middle-aged, with a head of white hair. He wore the simple olive uniform of a Federation officer, which Conrad had become familiar with, but he wore insignia Conrad didn’t recognize. With a start he realized there were needles entering the man’s temples, in the same location where Heik had tried to drill into his own brain on the Secace.
The needles retracted and the cage opened, the holographic screens blinking out of existence. The man stepped through and turned toward them.
“They’re on their way here, you know,” he called out, his eyes glancing at Jira before coming to rest on Conrad. “We haven’t much time.”
“Who?” Conrad asked before Jira could respond.
“The Imperial Fleet,” he replied.
The words were like an icy knife plunging into Conrad’s gut.
“How?” This time it was Jira, her voice tight with tension.
“The ’piece you took out of the Imperial archives was the most valuable intel we’ve gotten in decades, my dear,” the man said. “But this one—” he pointed to Conrad—“is even more interesting. And valuable.”
She glanced at Conrad. “I don’t see what he has to do with the Fleet coming here,” she said. “Unless he’s a mole.”
“Hey, I’m no mole,” said Conrad. “You saw how many times they tried to kill me, and everyone on board my ship. A mole’s not much use if he’s blown into a million bits. Who are you, anyway?”
The man grinned. He had the look of a soldier who’d been through more than one battle in his time—old, wizened, and indifferent to the words of a young upstart.
“My name is Ilm,” he said.
“General Ilm,” Jira cut in.
“Jira’s always very defensive of me,” he said, smiling fondly at her. “She grew up here, under my tutelage, at the request of her parents on Cadero. You can blame any fault of hers on me. I suppose I spoiled her too much when she was a girl.”
She crossed her arms, and Ilm patted her shoulder affectionately. “It is to her credit that she was able to bring you here,” he said to Conrad. “And it was my confirming who you are that has alerted the Empire to the location of this refuge here at Baro.”
“Who I am?” Conrad said.
Ilm lifted his hand. Conrad saw that his hand was covered in implants, seemingly built into his flesh. He raised his eyes and saw that the general’s head and neck were covered with implants, too—Ilm’s eyes and temples in particular were covered with a mask of small, gleaming metal implants. A translucent holographic screen appeared a few inches above his palm, hovering in midair.
“We absorbed your ship’s memory banks along with the data that Jira stole from Albion Prime,” he said. “She’d already done the first overlay of the navcharts on top of the data from your old ship’s data. She found a place called Earth—you call it Sanctuary.”
Conrad’s heartbeat was racing as fast as if he were in the heat of battle. “Does the Empire know where Sanctuary—Earth—is?”
“Not yet.” Ilm’s words gave Conrad a flash of relief, but it was short-lived. “But they did once, and they will again.”
“You’re talking in riddles,” Jira said, in a half-annoyed, half-fond tone that indicated this was a common habit of the old man’s.
The screen above Ilm’s hand flickered. It was the first time in a long time Conrad had seen something so familiar: a Protectorate starmap, with familiar planets spinning around a burning white sun.
Sol. Sanctuary. Earth.
A crude, sketchy navchart appeared on top of it, the sun and Earth matching perfectly between the two maps.
“The first map you recognize,” said Ilm. “And the second—that’s the fragment from the datapiece. It’s a match.”
“Is that what you meant when you said they knew where Sanctuary was?” Conrad asked.
Ilm’s augmented eyes looked at the screen as if staring through it to somewhere else. “We accessed the memory banks of your own ship, which you connected to your ship’s AI,” he said. “Much of the data was incomprehensible to us, and your systems are primitive, but beyond your navcharts, we found something… fascinating.”
He squeezed his hand into a fist and then opened his hand again. The holograph changed into a two-dimensional image of a colossal gray ship.
“This ship was in your database,” Ilm said.
“It’s a class nine colony ship,” said Argus, his voice gravelly, as if he was lost in thought. “Common in the early twenty-fifth century, especially for long-haul movements of settlers through outer edge portals. They were originally designed as generation ships, but the portals changed them into densely packed passenger vessels. Judging by the modifications made to the propellant tanks on the side of the ship here—” he moved a claw through the image “—this ship came out of the Pacific Consortium. One of the better-built colony ships from the initial settlement period.”
“That ship’s name was the Satori,” said Ilm, his eyes gleaming.
Conrad stared at the man,
bewildered. “What are you saying? The colony ships left the solar system beginning in the late twenty-fourth century, after our people discovered the portals,” he said. “You’re suggesting…”
Ilm tilted his hand. The ghostly image of the colony ship shifted, the name Satori etched in square, black letters on its flank.
“The data from your memory banks was minimal,” he said. “But we know the ship came from the Pacific Consortium, as your friend here observed. Its captain was from a place called Japan, but most of its crew was registered to a place called England. Its passengers were a mix of the two.”
“Albion,” said Argus, the hair on his scruff rising up. “Albion is an old name for England,” he explained at Conrad’s questioning look.
“The captain’s name was Ishiguro Karsath,” said Ilm.
Conrad faintly remembered a name Baltasar had once spoken of. Attilio Karsath.
There were too many connections for this to be coincidence, he had to admit. But the implications were staggering.
“Jira told me the Satori Empire is two thousand years old,” he said.
“Indeed it is. There are records on hundreds of subject worlds within the Empire that confirm its age. The Satori were a race of conquerors from the beginning, it seems.”
“Then—how?”
“We had hoped you might give us that particular answer. As it stands, it appears this ship—the Satori—may be where the Empire originated. But there is the fact that the Satori Empire is two thousand years old, as you point out.”
Conrad smiled wearily. “Of all the people here, I have the least knowledge of anything,” he said. “Jira could probably tell you in detail all the dumb things I’ve done over the last ten days—”
Sanctuary's Soldier: The Darkspace Saga Book 1 Page 17
