by K. Eason
“So we get charming.” Grytt bared her teeth. It was not a charming expression.
Rupert regarded her with mingled affection and dismay. “Indeed.”
Thorsdottir sucked in a breath. “Or we give them what we promised: Rose. Which is now me.”
“We don’t tell them that.” Jaed waved a finger, no-no-no, and earned another startled blink from Rupert. “We promised them information on the weapon, so we give them that. The documents, the dead clipping. We don’t tell them about what’s happened with Thorsdottir and Rose because why should we.”
Thorsdottir frowned. “Because the documentation and a dead plant might not be enough to win them over, or to cement an alliance that, you’re right, we really need.”
Rupert gazed down at the canister in his hand. He turned it over slowly, thoughtfully. “And yet, one ought not tip one’s hand too early, and give too much away. If what we offer is not sufficient, then we will revise our strategy. Until then, I believe Jaed’s plan is sound. Are there any objections?”
There was a round of silence. Then Zhang said, “No. None,” in a faint voice.
Thorsdottir glared damn that you’re right at Jaed and shook her head.
Grytt simply glared: first at Zhang (who flinched), then at Thorsdottir (who did not), then at Rupert. “And what are we asking for, exactly? For Favored Daughter to open fire on a dreadnought? For the loan of a shuttle so we can go over and board that Protectorate ship and look for Rory?”
“For what we can get,” said Rupert shortly. “Beginning with an alliance that lasts longer than this crisis. Thorsdottir, I know that you are not obligated to do so, but I’m asking: please follow my lead in negotiations. Let me do the talking.”
Thorsdottir held up her hands in a gesture of surrender and acquiescence. “Right. Sure.”
“Jaed.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Good,” Thorsdottir said, savage and sotto. “You’ve already said enough.”
“Rory,” said Grytt, a little loudly, “will either be fine, or she won’t, and likely not because of anything we say in this ship right now. Fighting each other doesn’t help. Let’s get to work.”
Jaed stayed in his seat as Grytt stood, and then Rupert. He ducked his chin as they filed past. He took a breath and held it as Thorsdottir rose and filed after them. She stopped beside him for an agonizing heartbeat. Then, without speaking, she followed.
Then it was just Jaed and Zhang left in the cabin. She moved around, tidying, replacing Thorsdottir’s shattered armor in its locker, out of sight.
She paused beside him. He felt her stare on the top of his head and pretended deep fascination with the seam on the side of his hardsuit. She would move on soon. Zhang didn’t make conversation, either encouraging or otherwise. She kept herself to herself, mostly, which was fine because she was a little scary.
Jaed continued to stare at his suit. Zhang continued to stare at the top of his head. Then, to their mutual surprise, she said, “All right. What’s the problem?”
“No problem. Someone needs to stay and watch the ship. I volunteer.”
“No.” She spun the word out. “Well. Maybe. But I don’t think it’s politic to do so. We’re supposed to be making an alliance. Besides, it’s your strategy. Come see how it plays out.”
“Rupert doesn’t need me to negotiate.”
“Rupert doesn’t need any of us to negotiate. That isn’t the point.” Her brow creased. “Is it Thorsdottir? She’s only mad because she knows you’re right, and because she’d make the same decision in your place, and she’s frustrated with both of those things. She gets mad at me, too, sometimes, for the same reasons.”
“But am I right? Because if I’m not . . .”
“Then someone might die. And someone might die if you are right. That’s why command is a terrible thing and I’m happy just being the pilot.”
“Now I understand why Rory wanted to stop being princess.”
“Tell her that, when she’s back.” Zhang offered Jaed a small, sympathetic smile. “Now get up and let’s go, before Grytt comes back here to fetch us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rory followed Koto-rek around to the engine’s far side. The vakar stopped in front of a blank bulkhead and took a deep breath. The pigment on her cheeks purpled.
Of course she offered no explanation for either sigh or purpling. Rory, tired of enforced ignorance, and still unwilling to attempt an aura-reading on a scarily superior arithmancer, opened her mouth to make inquires.
But then, suddenly, there was a hatch in the bulkhead. Or rather, Rory could see one: a spiral hatch with the standard vakari panel, high enough that a human of standard height would have to reach up to it, and set with buttons just a little too small for human fingertips to comfortably manage.
Rory touched the hatch. It was cold, metal, real. “Hologram?” she guessed.
“Hex,” said Koto-rek. “Although the principle is the same. It is a matter of bending light. Surely you are familiar with the hexes for that.”
“Of course, yes, but how do you make the effect permanent? Because the only way I can see would be rewriting reality, and that’s—” Rory stopped short of saying not possible, because clearly, it was. The evidence was in front of her, and in the smug angle of Koto-rek’s jaw-plates. That, Rory decided, was definitely a vakari smirk.
“That is true arithmancy,” said Koto-rek, confirming her smugness with her tone. “Not just playing at it.”
That is the end of us, Rory thought, and wondered where that thought had come from, and why she was so certain of its truth.
Koto-rek stabbed a sequence into the keypad with a talon-tip. The hatch irised open onto a cramped, circular room, stuffed with chairs and standing station-terminals. It had no central turing column, but there was a cylinder rising out of the deck to what would be waist-high for a standing vakar. The cylinder’s end had been hollowed into a bowl, and in that hollow floated a hologram representation of the system, centering on Sissten and including the dreadnought. Two more vessels hovered on the fringe of the display, unengaged by either Tadeshi or Protectorate, and themselves not engaging. Almost every station in the room was already occupied and their occupants remained busy with their current tasks. Only one vakar reacted to their arrival. They wore an armored hardsuit with the same pattern on chest and shoulder as Koto-rek’s. Another sub-commander, then. They approached Koto-rek, casting narrow-eyed looks at Rory, and the two vakari exchanged words in their own language. There were gestures, head-jabs mostly, at the holo-projection, combined with frequent repetition of the words alw and alwar.
Rory, alternating between relief and puzzlement that she was not the subject of more hostile stares, stepped fully onto the auxiliary bridge, and tried not to flinch as the hatch hissed shut behind her. She edged a bit past Koto-rek to acquire a clearer view of the projection. Her movement afforded a better vantage on several of the bridge stations, as well. The technology was unfamiliar, as was—obviously—the language of the operators; but there seemed to be more stations than should be strictly necessary for a ship’s operations. That station there, with its flashing alerts, appeared to be some sort of damage assessment, and there were two operators, both intent on their tasks, which involved headsets and narrow, flat screens the surface of which Rory could not see. One of operators, wearing a pair of goggles, also held a pair of levers, one for each hand, each with multiple buttons. It looked like they were playing a game with a virtual interface; but when the vakar leaned hard right, muttering, and then vented their breath through flared jaw-plates, Rory realized they were watching something else move in their goggles, and guiding it. A mecha, perhaps, or some kind of drone.
She edged a bit closer to the central console. That station there looked like comms, maybe; that one might be weapons, or some inoperative system, with a screen red and crowded with griev
ances. As for the display on the central console itself . . . Rory leaned forward and squinted at the peripheral ships. She did not recognize the shapes of their rendering, which was both unsurprising and irritating. Jaed might have known, or Zhang. Thinking of them made her chest hurt. She did not see any evidence of Vagabond. Perhaps it was too small to render. Perhaps Zhang had escaped to SAM-1. Perhaps, Rory thought, she should learn the potential speeds of her own ship. Surely off the range of this scope. Surely. Or else they were part of that glittering dust that must be debris and that did not bear thinking.
A shadow passed across the nacreous glow of the various screens on Rory’s left and stopped beside her shoulder.
“Rory Thorne,” said Koto-rek. “This is Acting-Captain Zaraer i’vakat’i Brakez. Acting-Captain, the Princess Rory Thorne of the Confederation of Liberated Worlds.”
Rory turned. Acting-Captain Zaraer was the same relative size as Koto-rek, but the head-spikes jutting off the back of their skull were thicker, and longer, and sharper on the tips, and their jaw-plates had an extra notch on the rear edge. Sexual dimorphism, she guessed. (Not entirely correctly; for although Zaraer was a male, she had not yet observed a vakari f-prime, and was still assuming a dual-sex species.) Something about him made Rory’s skin prickle and her heart trip in her chest. He looked at her as though he would as soon push her into that impossible engine in the next room, or out an aetherlock. Or—her mind swerved toward what she had seen on G. Stein’s feeds—simply rip her apart.
Rory inclined her head. It was the gesture between, if not equals, at least one individual unafraid of the other. As an afterthought, she wove together a little rudimentary hex to camouflage her aura. That, too, was reflex, unconsidered for wisdom or strategy.
Zaraer’s eyes, like Koto-rek’s, were a fathomless black, edge to edge. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and smooth and oddly accented, the sharp edges of syllables sliding against each other like tectonic plates. “Why are the
abominations
alwar asking for you?”
“What?” It was not the most articulate of utterances, but it had the virtue of honesty. The immediate follow-up questions should be, what is an alwar, but Zaraer did not look like the sort of person inclined to answer questions, only ask them, and to expect prompt answers. The only one Rory had for him was, “I don’t know.”
Zaraer’s jaw-plates flared in what Rory had learned to recognize as vakari displeasure. “You don’t know why there is a Harek Imperial destroyer, accompanied by a setatir tenju knarr, asking after your health and well-being? I find that difficult to believe, Princess Rory Thorne of the Confederation of Liberated Worlds.”
The particular arrangement of consonants in Rory’s title lent themselves to hissing, which Zaraer did to great and menacing effect. Rory noted, with the part of her brain that had not yet begun panicking, that he had not bared his teeth at her yet. Perhaps that was significant. It was probably an insult of some kind.
Her heart beat so hard that sparks glittered on the edge of her vision. She willed her voice steady and firm. “You may believe what you like, Acting-Captain, but I am telling the truth.” She paused, both to breathe, and to congratulate herself on the achieving a firm, fearless tone. “I don’t know who these Imperial alwar are, nor the tenju. I’ve never heard of either people before today.”
“Sss.” The acting-captain thrust his face close to hers. The unpanicked portion of Rory’s brain marked that his chromatophores gave nothing away, despite his obvious agitation. A hex, perhaps, or superior physical control. Zhang and Messer Rupert could keep their expressions bland; Jaed and Thorsdottir were forever blushing or blanching. If Zaraer was more of a Rupert, that was no comfort at all.
“And yet they know who you are. They are offering to aid us against the Tadeshi in exchange for your safe passage off this ship. Why would that be?”
“As I have said, Acting-Captain, I don’t know.”
It was then Rory felt something prod at her hex, like a hand patting blindly under a piece of furniture in pursuit of some lost trinket. She jerked as if the touch had been physical, fingers made of ice thrust down the back of her neck. Did turings feel this way when they were hexed? If they did, she repented every hack she’d ever conducted.
Still, her little deflective hex held. If it were a physical artifact, it would be creaking, spidered with cracks, but it did not break.
Koto-rek, who had thus far maintained both silence and a distance, drawn to the edge of this confrontation, made a move to intervene, both verbally and, with one hand lifted, physically.
Zaraer stopped her with a look. This time Rory saw teeth. His etching was red; the effect, in the dimness of the auxiliary bridge, was of a mouthful of blood.
To Rory’s dismay, Koto-rek recoiled, her own teeth concealed.
“Lower your hex, Princess,” said Zaraer. “Or I will take it down.”
Truth.
It might seem that, when confronted by an angry vakar on the bridge of his own besieged vessel, wisdom should dictate capitulation: that Rory should drop the hex and permit the observation of her aura. And indeed, there is a pithy maxim, touted as wisdom, floating about which states that if one has nothing to hide, one should not mind an examination by authority, the logic being that there is never wisdom in defiance, only in submission.
The twelfth fairy had, one might recall, given Rory the courage to take necessary action (or refrain from it). And so, even as one of her gifts advised de-escalating what had become an acute situation, another advised resistance, however futile. Rory agreed with the latter. Yielding now, Rory was certain, would communicate more than her own personal weakness. She was representing humanity other than Tadeshi, and so—
She closed her eyes and slid into the aether and reinforced her hexes. It was ugly, her patchworking: variables stuffed into equations, supplemental proofs, convolutions of logic. Messer Rupert would cringe. Rory fully expected that Zaraer would punch through her defenses in the next offensive.
Then she opened her eyes and said, “I am not a liar, Acting-Captain. I decline your request.”
The reader may hope here that Rory triumphed: that her defiance proved successful, that sheer human obstinacy triumphed over vakari hostility.
Alas, reality did not cooperate. Rory’s hex collapsed under Zaraer’s next assault like a bridge made of damp matchsticks. It hurt, which surprised her. She gasped and recoiled and raised her hand to her face before she remembered she wore a hardsuit and her hand was buried under layers of polyalloy. She sniffed, instead, as blood ran out both nostrils in a fine, tickling thread. At least she could not feel Zaraer reading her aura. But because she knew that was precisely what he was doing, she looked up, and thrust her chin at him, and said loudly, “I don’t know anything about the alwar, or the tenju, or why they would ask for me by name.”
Zaraer spat something in his own language, sibilant and sharp-edged as his jaw-plates. Rory could not understand the words, but she grasped the essence. Zaraer was afraid, and he was angry because of that, and bitter as oversteeped tea that she was, indeed, telling the truth. He turned and crossed to the comm station in two slicing strides and said something to the comms officer, which earned a nod and what Rory supposed was a yes sir. Then he spat something at Koto-rek, who took Rory’s elbow and guided her away from the center of the bridge and into an unoccupied patch of deck near one of the nonfunctional stations.
“What did he say?” Rory asked.
“He’s telling them we’re still looking for you, but that he hopes to acquire you soon.”
“Which means he hasn’t decided whether or not to kill me yet?”
“He wants to know what the alwar want with you, first.”
“I—”
“Don’t know. Yes. He knows that, too. Nevertheless, you are valuable to them, Empire and Confederation, and he needs to know why.” Koto-rek peered into Rory�
��s face. “Is that serious, the bleeding from your . . . nose?”
Rory sniffed, and grimaced at the taste on her tongue. “Nose, yes, and no, it’s not serious.”
“Sss. Why did you not simply lower your hex?”
“He would not have respected me if I had.”
Koto-rek’s gaze broke and skipped sideways. “He does not respect you now.”
“But he knows that I told the truth, even when I might’ve believed myself safe to lie. Perhaps he knows I’m honest. That’s why he’s letting me talk to you, isn’t it? You’re supposed to interrogate me, and I’m supposed to confide in you because you aren’t him.”
“Something like that, yes.” Koto-rek straightened in her chair with a near-breathless hiss, and Rory recalled her injury.
“You need medical attention, Sub-Commander.”
“We are remarkably short of medics on this bridge, Princess Rory Thorne.” Koto-rek cocked her head, that birdlike gesture again, only this time less shall I eat you and more aren’t you fascinating. “The wound
hurts like knives
is unpleasant. It is not life-threatening.”
While Rory did not wish Koto-rek’s imminent demise, she had been hoping for more of a revelation about the injury, some reason she might have to demand Koto-rek’s treatment, some reason to delay this interrogation. She supposed she should be grateful they were confined to an auxiliary bridge, and Koto-rek had no access to jail cells and the guards that would beat someone unconscious.
“If I don’t cooperate,” Rory said, very softly, “will you do to me what you did to that Tadeshi soldier you showed me?”
“No.” Koto-rek’s chromatophores darkened, violet bleeding into deepest crimson. “There was little information he could give us. He is, after all, just a soldier. You, however, are a princess, and someone of some importance. Our methods would be more thorough.”
