by K. Eason
The sub-commander did not answer, or rather, had no chance to do so. At the sound of Rory’s voice, the man lunged at the porthole. His fists made almost no sound as they struck the not-really-glass. Rory winced as his skin split with the force of it.
“I hear you,” he shouted. “Nnedi? Is that you?”
“Ss.” Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik’s jaw-plates expanded. “What is a Nnedi? He repeats the word.”
Rory moved down the porthole until she could match her hands against his. “It’s a who, not a what.—I’m not Nnedi. I’m sorry. I am human, though. Can you tell me your name?”
The hope on Nash’s face withered, then hardened. “Who are you? Are you working with them? With the veeks?”
However long the association between Tadeshi and Protectorate, it had been of sufficient duration to allow the development of prejudicial racial slurs. Rory sighed. “Sub-Commander, can you let him see us?”
Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik did something that involved long talons clicking on the panel.
There was no visible change from Rory’s vantage, except in the sergeant’s demeanor. His undamaged eye rounded until the whole of its dark iris was surrounded by white. His gaze flicked from her to the sub-commander and back again, landing on Rory with such force that she took a step back.
“Rory Thorne. Rory fucking Thorne.” He backed away from the glass. His hatred was palpable, unreasonable, impersonal, and increasing with every step he retreated. His hand patted, blind and instinctual, over his chest and hips, looking for a weapon.
Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik’s stare prickled the side of Rory’s face. “He appears to recognize you.”
The Tadeshi’s gaze flicked to the vakar. Fear twisted his features, though what came out of his mouth was rage and words which, though Rory had heard before, she was not accustomed to hearing directed at her. It was clear that Sergeant Nash held her personally responsible for the rebellion (which was not entirely unfair), and that he assumed her presence here meant the Confederation had “allied with the veeks and against true humanity.” He also had physiologically impossible impressions of her parentage.
Rory watched, trying not to flinch. The sub-commander watched as well, while their chromatophores brightened from charcoal to a rusty maroon. Then the vakar hissed and said something in their own language. The door in the other room opened, and a pair of suited, visored Protectorate soldiers entered and subdued Nash with a brutal and unarmed efficiency.
Rory watched because she thought someone ought to. Despite his misplaced malice, the Tadeshi soldier was human, though that would not have mattered to him, had she been within reach. But still, she did not like the odds in that cell. Nash might have shot at Protectorate troops, might have killed them, but that was war, and he did not deserve to be beaten unconscious.
But perhaps he did, by some Protectorate metric, some notion of justice to which she was not privy. She knew nothing about her captors except that their skill in arithmancy exceeded anything human, and that they appreciated art on their ship bulkheads, and what they called themselves, and that they would beat unarmed prisoners.
Which she was. And Thorsdottir. And Jaed.
Rory watched as they dragged the Tadeshi out of the cell. Nash left long, wet smears on the ridged deckplate.
“Where are you taking him?”
Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik’s long nostrils flared and clamped and flared again. “That should not be your concern, Rory Thorne.”
It was not exactly an untruth; but the fairy gift was uneasy with it, and prickled Rory’s scalp.
“Is the Protectorate at war with the Free Worlds of Tadesh? Is that why you destroyed G. Stein?”
The vakar peered at Rory through half-lidded eyes, and of course, did not answer.
Rory lifted her chin. Her heart was attempting to escape her chest, either by beating its way out, or by crawling up her throat. It was only the two of them back here in this room, no weapons except arithmancy and what physiology provided. Fight back now, and perhaps she would end up like Nash, or dead.
Or worse, because there was a worse: she could get Thorsdottir and Jaed hurt. She could leave the sub-commander with the impression that all humanity was like the Tadeshi, to be classified as enemy. She had to do better.
“Will you do that to my companions, Sub-Commander?”
“They are not soldiers, you said.”
Truth. Oh, truth. But not much of an answer.
“Will you do that to me?”
Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik tilted their head, gathering Rory into the scope of their stare like a hunting bird eyeing a sparrow and debating the worth of a strike. So much work for such small gain. “That is within your control. Answer my questions. You appear to be an enemy of the Tadeshi. Does that make you our enemy, as well?”
“I hope not.”
The sub-commander made that clicking sound in their throat, the one Rory understood to be laughter. “What does that sheepfucking bitch on Lanscot mean?”
“He means Dame Maggie. She’s the leader of the Confederation of Liberated Worlds, which seeks independence from the Tadeshi, and which is currently engaged in armed conflict to secure that independence. Lanscot is the capital planet.”
Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik’s voice remained even, quiet. “Go on.”
“The Free Worlds of Tadesh was a collection of worlds, many colonies, united under a central government. It is one of several such entities in our—in human—space. Anyway, the Lanscottar believed the Tadeshi rule was unjust. When normal political channels of appeal and reform failed, they resorted to armed rebellion.”
Unblinking black eyes. Flattened jaw plates. “And your role in this rebellion?”
“Accidental. I didn’t know it was happening until it did. But other circumstances made it appear as if I was in collusion, or perhaps even responsible. Clearly that is what the prisoner believed.”
“What circumstances?”
“That answer is complicated,” Rory began, and stopped, unsure how to go on. The account of Vernor Moss’s attempted coup seemed very small and distant, petty, even though it had begun with assassinations, even though it had thrown the Thorne Consortium into war with the Free Worlds, even though it had involved marriages of alliance for herself and her mother. Even though it had led to her being here, hiding (after all, let us call it what it is) on the edge of the Verge.
Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik’s pigments rinsed from merely red to blood and fire. “Then be brief, but thorough.”
So Rory hung her stare on the red smears in Nash’s holding cell and told the sub-commander what they wanted to know.
“. . . and then I came here, to Samtalet.” Rory swallowed a mouthful of sand. The vakari atmosphere was more arid, and more acrid, than she was accustomed to. And she had been talking for some time. The smears on Nash’s cell had darkened almost dry.
The sub-commander said nothing for a minute (Rory counted) while their facial pigmentation faded back to neutral grey. “Thank you for explaining,” they said finally. “It is a useful perspective, when one has only heard the Tadeshi version thus far.”
Rory inclined her head. She did not trust her voice quite yet.
“Princess.” Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik tried the word out. The architecture of vakari tongue and teeth made the terminal s especially sibilant. “You are a person of consequence. You—are a commander. A leader. One who makes decisions for others. One who starts wars with those decisions.” They regarded Rory with new, sharpened interest.
“As I said: I renounced the title.”
“Truly?” The vakar grinned at Rory, that baring of etched, dyed teeth that seemed to carry more import than a reflex of the lips.
“I don’t understand what you’re doing. What that means.”
Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik put the smile
away as one clips a ’slinger to one’s suit when it is not in use.
“Those marks say to another vakar who I am. My name. My tribe. My rank. My mothers. If I wished to renounce them, I would have to polish my teeth plain or tear them out of my head. My mothers might do it themselves, for the insult.”
So they did have a notion of male and female, and a plurality of mothers. Rory made note, one of a growing mental list, to discuss with Messer Rupert on her next quantum-hex call (if she lived that long; don’t think too much about that). It really should be him here, meeting a new species. Being the first—well, not the first, the Tadeshi had already made an impression—being a competing sample of what humanity might offer as an example of itself.
“That shocks you,” said the sub-commander, misinterpreting Rory’s silence.
“It seems extreme.” Samur had not been pleased with Rory’s decision, and Rory had not exactly put herself within arm’s reach, either, since announcing it. She’d left communication with the Thorne Consortium to Messer Rupert. But even so, Rory could not imagine her mother’s disappointment transmuting into violence. “Are you a mother, Sub-Commander? Could you do that to your own children—tear out their teeth?”
“I am, and I could. How else does one make such a renunciation permanent? Because if one does not intend permanency, there is no point in the gesture at all.”
Rory had no answer for that. The silence returned, in the absence of dialogue.
The sub-commander gazed into the empty cell, unblinking. She—because claiming motherhood suggested that pronoun to Rory (correctly: vakari link gender pronouns to specific roles, and when speaking GalSpek, employ the feminine for mothers)—might have been looking through the aether. Or she might have been considering what she might say next, or do next. Who she might put in that cell next, and what she might do to them.
It was better, sometimes, to derail and distract such chains of thought, even if doing so meant drawing that unfortunate attention onto oneself. Rory cleared her throat. “Why are you here, Sub-Commander? Why did the Protectorate attack G. Stein?”
“Is that how interrogation works for humans? A trade of information? Sss. No. I will answer you. Though,” and her plates flared wide, amused, “it is complicated. Perhaps you would like to confirm my words with a hex? Arithmancer. You are that, too, I
know
think.”
Rory lifted her chin. So her little concealment hex had been noticed. The sand in her mouth had spread all the way to her lungs. “So are you. I think. Though your skills are superior.”
“I am a vakar.” Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik flipped her fingers. If that gesture meant the same thing to vakari, Rory thought she’d been dismissed. No: that her species had been, and all their arithmancy. Which, when she considered the maneuvers she had seen from Sissten, was probably fair. The k’bal were similarly convinced of their own superiority, with more apparent courtesy to their arithmantic inferiors. Also, they had no fingers to flip.
“I think we share a mutual problem, Rory Thorne. The Tadeshi have acquired a weapon which—ss. Which should not have been made at all. Setatir wichu.”
“What was it? Can I ask?”
“You just did, and I cannot tell you because we did not find it. We are unsure of its disposition, only that it is not obviously what it is. The wichu are crafty, and they would have attempted to conceal its nature from us. We emptied the Tadeshi ship’s medical bay and the armory and found nothing. None of the surviving crew admits knowledge. It is unfortunate that the bridge crew was killed in our initial contact; I suspect the weapon’s location was classified, and knowledge of it limited to the command staff. A salvager, however, might have found something we did not.” The vakar grinned, this time without baring her teeth: a spreading of jaw-plates, and narrowing of star-spangled eyes. “Did you find a weapon on board G. Stein, Princess Rory Thorne?”
The correct form of address is Highness or Royal Highness, and I am just Rory. But perhaps she wasn’t. Perhaps she couldn’t be. The sub-commander thought her a person of consequence. That might be more useful than just Rory.
Sweat prickled on her scalp, on her skin, chilling in the ship atmosphere and collecting damply wherever the suit covered her. The truth—that Thorsdottir, not Rory, had found Rose—would suffice to fool an ordinary (human) hex. Whether or not it would stop Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik remained to be tested.
Rory was still thinking of a way to answer when the ship lurched underfoot. Her boots, accustomed to decks both smooth and metal, skidded, despite the automatic mag-lock on her soles. The sub-commander spoke sharply to empty air. Empty air answered in a burst of xeno syllables, in which the collection Koto-rek figured several recognizable times, without the subsequent syllables (and Rory, again correctly, made a leap of understanding, that Koto-rek ia’vakat’ia Tarsik could be shortened to Koto-rek). The ship was shaking, and the vakari were speaking: a mixture of sibilants and sharp clicks and edges. The volume was higher, the cadence more rapid. Koto-rek’s cheeks spiked red, orange, yellow, like a sunset on Thorne.
It had been years since Rory had seen an orange sun, much less a sunset through atmosphere. She wondered what the vakari homeworld’s sunsets looked like. If Koto-rek missed them.
Those were more interesting topics for first contact than did you find a super-weapon. Or at least more informative, in ways that would be conducive to an amiable, long-term association between peoples.
With a final bark-hiss, Koto-rek flowed toward the door like ink spilled from a bottle. So sudden was her movement, so liquid and startling, that Rory lost all breath and leaped in the opposite direction. She overbalanced and pitched into the porthole and scraped one arm and a shoulder, making a terrible noise, leaving no marks. Then her wits caught up with her instincts and she stopped and turned.
Koto-rek was not looking at her. She had a hand splayed across the door controls, and as the door retracted, she placed her body across the opening. The light refracted off her suit, breaking pink, green, blue over the sharpest edges. Now she looked back at Rory, across the narrow width of deckplate.
“Stay here,” she said, and added, almost kindly, “It will be safer than the corridors. I will come back.”
Truth.
And then she was through the door and gone, even before the door had closed again. Rory had a moment to realize she could rush the opening, perhaps wedge it (with what, demanded the rational part of her, an arm? Do you think a hardsuit will suffice against a door determined to close? But there would be safeties, surely, as there were on human vessels—)
Rory got a glimpse of the corridor, of the ambient teslas tilted toward a dimmer red than they would’ve been on a human ship, but still flashing. She heard a brief bite of siren, cut off when the door resealed.
Soundproofing. Convenient, in that she need not hear the ship’s panic. And not, in that she’d never know what was happening out there. That this was an attack was obvious; who it was another matter. She tried the door panel. It ignored her. Of course, Koto-rek had locked it. Rory thought she might get past it—she was good at hacking locks. But now wasn’t the time. Not with the ship rattling like a can full of bones. Running around in the corridor would not help, and it might make things worse if someone mistook her for an enemy and shot her.
Rory wedged herself into the corner and squatted down. There were no benches, no emergency grabholds or fasteners or any way to secure herself. If the ship lost its grav-hex, or its inertial hexes, she had only the maglock in her boots to keep her from bouncing around. It might be best to imitate a ball, which bounced without damage, instead of a spindly shape with fragile, easily snapped-off limbs.
The ship shook. Rory, now ball-shaped, pressed herself gently into the bulkhead. She sealed her visor as an afterthought. She’d been confined before. It was just a matter of patience. She distracted herself by watching the HUD catalog the atmospher
ic composition, temperature, humidity. Hunkered down like this, she could not see into Nash’s cell, could not see the smears of blood. So that was a good thing—
The ship lurched. An alarming vibration came up through the deckplate, as if for a moment all the ship’s molecules tried to storm off in separate directions. A hex, Rory thought; but before she could dip into the aether—before she’d even decided that was a good idea—all the teslas went out, and dropped her into darkness.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Zhang remained as ordered in the rear cabin, prepared for a search and both relieved and mildly appalled that one was not forthcoming. It seemed careless, on the part of the vakari, to neglect to secure Vagabond. But once they had departed, and Zhang was certain that they meant to remain gone, she was also forced to reassess their wisdom. There was power to the ship coming from Sissten, which meant the hatch opened readily enough between vessels. But Vagabond’s turings were down, both primary navigation and the smaller arms-targeting, and with them, the engines. The entire cockpit was a monument to dark teslas and dead screens. Engines weren’t dependent on turings . . . but pilots usually were.
Zhang had learned piloting as part of royal service. Her qualification exam had been taken, and passed, on Royal Shuttle Two, which was meant to take people of importance from one terrestrial location to another, and occasionally to travel up to the orbiting station if a visitor was too important for the beanstalk. An atmo-craft’s ability to get on and off the ground relied more on engines than on turings, and an atmo-pilot’s skills relied on being able to steer a metal box (cylinder, ball, or whatever geometric shape applied to the superstructure) on top of a plasma core engine without running into anything. In void, where there was less to run into, but where speeds were much greater, ships used turings to do the math required for navigation, scanning, and, if it was that sort of vessel, weapons.
Zhang knew where the primary power junctions were. She went back into the rear cabin, pried up the floor panel, and rummaged around in Vagabond’s guts until she found and flipped every switch that she knew governed ship systems, and a couple whose purpose she did not know. The engines, which had been sulking on standby mode since the turings’ demise, muttered and grumbled and began rousing themselves. Zhang allowed herself a small, explosive exhale and a tiny victory gesture.
