by Natalie Grey
But this was her oldest and deepest fear, and when she spoke of it, she sounded like the child she had been when her parents were taken from her—helpless and afraid.
“Tafa, do you want to leave?” Barnabas kept his voice gentle. “There are many, many safe places we can get you to; places that aren’t associated with us. Koel would never find you, and you could start a good life—”
“That’s not what I’m saying!” She wiped the tears welling in her eyes. She seemed furious at her own emotion. “I’m saying you aren’t invincible. I don’t want you to get hurt.” She looked at Shinigami and Barnabas. “I don’t want you to die…or worse. Shinigami, tell him the odds. You have to have some calculation for this. You’ve seen Koel’s fleet, so you know you can’t win this.”
Shinigami said nothing.
Barnabas felt a heavy weight settle in his chest. “Shinigami?”
“It’s not important,” Shinigami replied finally.
The words were like a blow. Barnabas looked at her. “It is important. What are the odds? Do we have any chance of winning this?”
“Of course, we have a chance,” she declared too quickly. “There’s always a chance.”
There was a silence.
“I don’t have to tell you the odds,” Shinigami continued finally. “You know them.”
Barnabas stood up and paced to the window. “And I’m dragging all of you into this, too. If there was a chance of success—a real one, Shinigami—I could justify it, but without one… You’ll have to go.”
“Who has to go?” Gar looked around the room, taking in Shinigami’s silence and Tafa’s tears. It wasn’t entirely surprising that he came to the wrong conclusion. “Why should Tafa have to leave?”
“You all have to leave,” Barnabas said not looking around.
“All of us?” Shinigami demanded.
“Yes.” Barnabas looked her avatar in the eyes. “We’ll leave the AI core with Bethany Anne, and one of the EIs can pilot it.”
“Bringing your odds of succeeding to pretty much zero! Speaking of which, what would even be your plan in that case?” She sounded furious now.
“Pretty much the same as it is now,” Barnabas retorted, his voice hard. “Try to find a way to lure Koel someplace secluded and do my best to assassinate him. Without him, the Yennai Corporation should fall apart. They’d be easier for someone else to pick off. Tabitha, maybe.”
Shinigami said nothing for a long moment, but when she spoke her voice was ugly. Baba Yaga echoed in her words.
“You’ll die.”
“That was always going to happen sometime.” Barnabas smiled tightly.
To his surprise, the rest of the crew stared back at him, their expressions ranging between sadness and absolute fury.
“What?” He felt himself growing angry as well. “What do you want from me? I am doing the best I can to make sure none of you suffer for this vendetta I’ve apparently created. I will do what I can to end it, and the rest of you can—”
“What?” Shinigami spat. “Live the rest of our lives knowing we abandoned you when you needed us most?”
Barnabas stopped short.
“Did it ever occur to you, genius,” Shinigami’s voice was clipped, hardly human anymore now that she was so angry, “that maybe our biggest concern isn’t whether we survive, it’s what happens to our friend?”
For a moment, Barnabas could not speak. He turned back to the window and crossed his arms over his chest, swallowing as he looked out at the black. To his surprise, he was blinking a bit more than normal. There must be something in the air.
“That’s what’s bothering you all?” He was unable to face them.
“Yes.” The three of them spoke in unison.
“I don’t get it.” Gar shook his head. “You could free that mining camp in your sleep, and you still had a backup. You probably could have done the whole thing at the base yourself, too. And now, when you might actually need us—”
“When you might be in real danger, you mean.” Barnabas swung around to look at him. “Gar, you’ve only been in a few fights. This is an entire fleet. Shinigami, you have years left. Centuries. Tafa, you’ve only just gotten the freedom to live. Why are all of you so eager to rush into danger?”
“Why are you?” Gar countered.
“Because it’s the right thing to do!” Barnabas felt his hands clench. “This bastard wants to rule the universe and make it his playground. He has no excuse. He has no morals. He doesn’t even pretend to value life or goodness or even the people he loves. All of it is just fuel for his ambition. There’s no limit to the number of people he could hurt. I have to try to stop him; honor demands no less. And since he wants to kill me in particular…”
They looked at one another.
“We’re not leaving,” Shinigami asserted. “And you’d better fucking apologize for thinking we would.”
Barnabas stared at them, his mouth opening and closing a few times.
“We have fish that do that on Luvendan,” Gar commented.
Tafa gave a snort of laughter.
Before Barnabas could make any retort, there was the sound of an incoming call. He sighed as he opened it, then frowned at the screen.
“Jeltor?”
“I am not Jeltor.” The Jotun sounded deeply aggrieved. “For one thing, Jeltor is a male.”
Barnabas bit his lip to keep from asking how in the world he was supposed to know he wasn’t looking at a male Jotun. As far as he could tell, this one was identical to Jeltor in every way.
However, several centuries of life had given him the skills to politely bullshit his way out of most social situations.
“My apologies,” he offered smoothly. “We saw only the location. I’m sure the picture will clear up shortly. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking, and how may I help you?”
“Hmph.” She sounded mollified. “I am Commander Jeqwar of the Jotun Navy, and I have an offer for you.”
“You might want to be careful with that,” Barnabas cautioned. “The last person who helped me got hauled up on treason charges.”
“I’m aware of that,” she retorted. Her voice was tart. “We’re offering anyway.”
“Who’s ‘we?’”
“The Jotun Navy.” She bobbed slightly in her tank, and he thought he detected some smugness. It was always nice to make an offer that caused people’s jaws to drop.
“The…entire navy? Are you allowed to do that?” Barnabas asked blankly.
“Who fucking cares?” The answer was sharp. “They sold us up the river. We’re going to do what’s right, and damn whoever tries to stop us.”
Barnabas smiled. “Well, then. I’m very glad to have you on board, Admiral. I’ll admit…” He looked at the rest of them and nodded to each, “that we could really use some backup on this one.”
8
“This is as good a system as any,” Barnabas announced a few hours later. He frowned at one of the displays. “It’s out of the way of…everything. No shipping lanes, no private interests, and no colonies that anyone knows of.”
“Judging by the state of that planet, I’d certainly hope no one lives there.” Commander Jeqwar sounded amused.
It was easy to see what she meant. The planet was so inhospitable and in such an out-of-the-way system that it was only known as 1027.478B. The atmosphere had somehow managed to trap heat while blocking absolutely none of the deadly radiation from the system’s star, which was unstable and spat large plumes of gas at random intervals.
No one in their right mind would go there, which made it a perfect place for Barnabas’ showdown with Koel.
The only question was how to lure him there? Barnabas and the Jotun naval officers had been planning for several hours now, and no one seemed to have any ideas. Koel was unlikely to let them dictate the terms of the battle.
“I’m going to shift processing for a bit,” Shinigami told Barnabas. He looked up at her and frowned distractedly, so she made the statement a
bit more human. “I’m going to step out for a few. Call if you need me.”
“Oh. Right.” He nodded in a way that told her he hadn’t really heard anything she’d said. He was still thinking about Koel.
That suited her just fine. She had plenty to do. She had her avatar walk over to the doors, used the ship’s internal controls to open them, and headed into the hallway.
If she were honest with herself, Shinigami had to admit that she enjoyed having an avatar. She didn’t need to walk from place to place if she didn’t want to, but she liked the process of learning to walk without anyone looking at her oddly. Human movement had almost endless subtleties.
She counted it as a victory every time one of the other crew members passed her in a hallway and nodded distractedly, seeing her as simply another crewmate. The other day Gar had even turned his shoulder so he wouldn’t bump into her.
Gradually, the crew had become used to her presence in her almost-physical form, and she liked it. She played around with the clothes she had seen Bethany Anne wear, styled her hair however she felt like it—she didn’t have to worry about gravity or humidity, after all—and tried different looks, expressions, and mannerisms from holorecordings of people she knew.
She was getting good at it.
She stuck her head around the door to Tafa’s room, maintaining her projection in the corridor. “Got a second? I could use an artist’s eye.”
“Sure, just a moment.” Tafa put down her paint brushes with relief and began cleaning them.
Tafa’s painting hadn’t gone well lately. When Barnabas had first brought her on board she’d painted from stress, and after that, she had painted memories and any little thing that popped into her head. Dozens of canvases leaned against the walls.
The problem was, now that Tafa had all the time in the universe to paint and could make her name as a famous artist…
The thought of picking up a paintbrush terrified her.
She made herself do it, of course, but she couldn’t tell if the things she painted were any good. She had never dared sell her work, knowing that anything that made her famous would probably make Mustafee furious.
What if she wasn’t good enough?
She washed her hands and followed Shinigami to the ridiculously clean conference room that had become known as Shinigami’s office. This space showed the limitations of Shinigami’s form more clearly than anything else. While any species gradually accumulated clutter, things they had carried into the room and forgotten, like cold cups of coffee to notepads or sweatshirts, Shinigami was incapable of doing so.
She didn’t really need an office, of course, but with the ship only fractionally occupied, everyone had as much room as they wanted to spread out.
In the office, Shinigami gestured to the only chair. “Please, sit.”
Tafa sat, looking curious.
“I’m working on a project.” Shinigami gestured to the screens on the side walls and they lit up, showing information in a way that would be easy for Tafa to read with her side-set eyes.
The Yofu gave Shinigami a grateful smile. “Thanks. Most people don’t remember that part. You get used to looking at things on front screens, but it’s a relief to be able to see things properly.”
Shinigami smiled.
“What is all this, anyway?” Tafa asked.
Shinigami didn’t answer. She worked on one of Barnabas’ poses, leaning against the back wall with her arms crossed over her chest and one foot tucked behind the other, and she watched as Tafa read.
When Tafa was finished and looking at Shinigami again, the AI pushed her avatar off the wall—she was still working on that mannerism—and gestured at the screens.
“Of the things you saw there, what didn’t seem to fit?”
This was her pet project, her only secret from Barnabas, and it was absolutely essential that it should be perfect.
In fact, though Shinigami didn’t tell Tafa this, it was a matter of life and death.
Tafa considered Shinigami’s question carefully. She looked at all the information and images displayed, and finally, she pointed to three pictures.
“Those.”
Shinigami nodded. “Any of the facts? The writing?”
Tafa frowned. “I really don’t know enough about—”
“You have an eye for the whole,” Shinigami interrupted. “You can see things other people can’t. Some pieces of this, like the photos, might not fit. Does anything stick out to you?”
Tafa hesitated. She was less sure this time, but she highlighted several facts.
Shinigami heaved a sigh and chewed her lip, another mannerism she had picked up from Barnabas. Tafa had, unerringly, picked several lies in the presentation. And what Tafa noticed, someone else might notice on a subliminal level.
Shinigami couldn’t have that.
“Thank you. I’ll call you back to look at it again when I’ve made some revisions.”
“What is this for?” Tafa looked confused. “Shouldn’t Barnabas be helping you with this?”
“Barnabas…told me to take care of it.” Shinigami evaded the question with a sense of unease. Barnabas didn’t know exactly what she was doing.
She was sure he would approve, though.
She walked with Tafa back to the studio, then appeared in the conference room. From the frustrated expression on Barnabas’ face, little progress had been made.
But something had occurred to her as she walked.
“What if we dropped hints and scattered bits of information that sort of suggested there was a human colony being built in this sector?”
Everyone turned to look at her. Barnabas’ eyebrows lifted, and the Jotuns… Well, Shinigami couldn’t actually tell which direction the Jotuns looked, but they seemed to be paying attention.
“We could do that,” Barnabas drawled slowly. “Something like High Tortuga. Protected, and very secretive.”
“Like you said earlier,” Shinigami pointed out, “we can’t just leak some memo about where you’ll be. He’ll know that’s a trap. But then it occurred to me—we know he’s paid highly for information in the past. Putting things together and making plans is how he likes to work. If he thinks he’s discovered something we don’t want him to know…”
Which was pretty much the outline of her pet project as well. She shoved the thought away and smiled at Barnabas, hoping she didn’t look guilty.
He wasn’t really paying attention, though.
“What information would we need to plant?” he murmured. “Sightings of our ships. Buying materials? No, we always use our own materials.”
“He’s very sensitive to any distortions in trade,” Commander Jeqwar noted. “It wouldn’t have to be anything like buying materials. You could simply start to seed information—just rumors, whispers, nothing directly traceable—that shipping routes in a certain area were being disturbed. Say the ships had been offered money to change routes, for instance, and for not talking about it. No one would confirm it when he went digging, which would fit.”
“And he’d go looking for things in that area,” Shinigami continued. She grinned. “And what if we did the old trick of making a planet seem like something it wasn’t…but with another layer?”
Barnabas frowned at her. “Explain.”
“When someone wants a planet for themselves they try to change all the data, right? So when people look it up, they think it’s a piece-of-crap planet they’d never want to go to?” Not that she’d know anything about doing that.
“Yes.” His eyes drifted toward the Jotun officers on the screen, as if trying to see what they thought of this.
It was impossible to tell, however, given their jellyfish not-faces.
She might as well keep going.
“So we do that twice over,” Shinigami explained. “First we change the data on some random planet that he’s had no interest in before. Now it looks like a lovely, habitable planet—or at least, open to terraforming or enclosed colonies or something. Then we
write over the data just a little more sloppily, making it seem like we tried to hide the fact that we can use it.”
“Ah,” Barnabas murmured. He was smiling now. “I do like that.”
“It’s clever,” one of the officers agreed. “But what if he sees through it?”
“He might see through anything,” Barnabas countered. “Our best shot is indeed to give him the illusion that he’s seen through our attempts to hide information. That he’s figured out something we wanted to keep hidden.”
“At the same time, you should send him a direct challenge,” Shinigami told Barnabas. “Throw down the gauntlet, tell him to meet you somewhere. Somewhere far, far from where the action is supposedly happening. You can’t just drop off the radar after your challenge or he’ll know something’s up, so you pretend like you’re playing it straight and then give him this secret target.”
“We should…” Barnabas sighed. “We should pretend that there are a large number of civilians on that hidden colony. That will make him think he can get us by the balls.”
“I’m sorry,” Commander Jeqwar piped up after a moment. “I don’t think that last sentence translated properly.”
Shinigami snorted, and Barnabas flushed.
“I, er…I apologize. It’s a way of saying that he’ll think that’s a place to hit us where we’re weak.”
“Huh.” Commander Jeqwar put that down for further study. “Is this our plan, then?”
“I think so. You’ll need to cover your tracks about where the Jotun fleet is,” Barnabas told her. “We’ll tell you when we’ve selected a place, and you can even reinforce the data we’re planting in your systems.”
“Why?”
Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged a look.
“Because Koel is almost certainly in your government databases,” Shinigami told her bluntly. “That will be one of the things he bribed people to get access to.”
“Oh, gods.” Jeqwar let loose with a stream of words that didn’t translate but didn’t really need to. “We’ll do what we have to do, including finding out who gave him that access.” Her tone made it very clear what was going to happen to those people.
