—They want a five-year contract with Caraqui, Aiah sends. They say they can’t go back to the Timocracy after violating their Code.
—Five years? I suppose we shall still need mercenaries after that time.
—They suggest, as an alternative, that they could be made a part of the regular army establishment. But they want their unit to stay together for five years.
There is a moment’s hesitation. Through the plasm link, Aiah can sense the movement of Constantine’s thought.
—Yes, he sends. I can give them that. They are a good unit.
The Treasury was spending tens of billions on this war.
Aiah knows that Constantine is not likely to quibble over payments and guarantees to the people who could actually bring an end to the fighting.
—And there is something else that / want, Minister.
—Ye-es? Constantine’s answer is wary.
—I want the same arrangement for Karlo’s Brigade, if Ceison wants it. If we are going to reward one unit for changing sides, we should also reward the unit that stays loyal.
—Many units have stayed loyal besides Karlo’s Brigade. Do we make them all such promises?
—Very well. I will modify my request. Let Karlo’s Brigade have the same contract as Geymard’s men.
There was a powerful silence. Geymard’s Cheloki had been with Constantine since the beginning. They were his bodyguard, his spearhead, the steel foundation of his military power.
When Constantine’s reply comes, she can sense amusement beneath the concession.
—Five years does not seem so bad, when things are taken all together.
—Thank you, Minister.
Aiah might as well turn humble, she figures. She has pushed her luck as far as it will go.
Constantine’s reply is swift.
—Is there any good news? he sends.
Laughter bubbles from Aiah’s throat.
—I have saved you money. The Escaliers are likely to accept a smaller signing bonus than we planned.
—Thank you, my child. Though the Treasury will not be pleased with the five-year contracts.
—Ending the war will save them money, and they will thank you.
Aiah can almost see Constantine’s rueful smile.
—The Treasury never thanks me, he sends.
—Galagas and Holson will be back tomorrow, 08:00. Once they are presented with the terms, we can work out the details of exactly how they are to slip out of their agreement.
Traced in the air before Aiah’s eyes comes the reply, lines of gold flame that form the Sign of Karlo.
—Blessings upon you, Miss Aiah.—Thank you, Minister.
Constantine’s presence fades, and Aiah is alone, listening only to the faint slap of water against the hull of Lamarath’s barge. She returns to her quarters. Lamarath and Dr. Romus are gone, and Statius and Cornelius, on guard and in any case unsettled by the strangeness of the half-world, are no company.
Aiah paces back and forth, fretting. She would like to rest, but she knows the Adrenaline Monster would snatch her from sleep if she closed her eyes.
“See if Craftig is outside,” she finally tells Cornelius. “We might as well play some checkers.”
“ELECTIONS WILL CONTINUE AS SCHEDULED,” INSISTS GOVERNMENT SPOKESMAN
The next day Holson and Galagas are forty minutes late. “Sorry,” Holson says after their arrival. “We couldn’t get away—” He looks uncharacteristically vague. “A meeting, with members of the Provisional command.”
Aiah wonders if Holson is rash enough to be involved in a bidding war with the Provisionals—but no, she thinks, that would be suicidal. It’s bad enough they’re contemplating treachery against one side; treachery against both would be fatal. She tells the officers that the War Ministry has given official approval to their agreement.
“Now all that is required,” Holson says, “is to honorably extract us from our commitments to the Provisionals.”
“Do you have a copy of the agreement? We do not.”
According to the agreement, Landro’s Escaliers are irrevocably committed to continue with the Provisionals for another three days, after which, if there is mutual agreement, the contract may be extended. If no agreement is reached, the Escaliers will continue in service for another ten days, time enough for them to be evacuated back to the Timocracy and replaced in the line by another unit.
“How are the Provisionals on the warranties clause?” Aiah asks. “They’ve paid you on time?” “Yes.”
Aiah skims the contract. “Have they arranged for sufficient supply, food, fuel, medical support, and—ah—other classes of logistical support as specified in Attached Agreement C?”
“The brigade whorehouse,” Galagas clarifies.
In the last months Aiah has become used to the ways of mercenary units, and is not surprised. She looks at Galagas.
“Has logistical support been, ah, sufficient in terms of the contract?”
Aiah wonders if a mercenary contract has ever been broken because prostitutes were not provided in sufficient number.
“Given the exigencies of war,” Holson says, “the government’s support has been adequate.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Aiah says. “I asked if the Provisionals’ logistical support has been sufficient in terms of the contract. Anything ever delivered late? Or delivered to the wrong people? Or the wrong stuff delivered to the wrong people?”
Given what Aiah knows of the military life, she would be amazed if this were not the case.
Holson and Galagas look at each other. Holson fingers his chin and shifts his weight uncomfortably in his chair. “Arrangements have not been perfect,” he says, “but I mislike breaking an agreement on these conditions, all so common in war. It could set an unfortunate precedent—any unit, on any side, would be justified in breaking its contract if this clause were strictly invoked.”
“Well,” Aiah says, turning pages, “we will keep that option in reserve.”
Unfortunately the contract is very straightforward and plainspoken, with few ambiguous clauses worthy of exploitation, and most of these involving situations that do not apply here. Maybe, Aiah thinks, it will have to be the whores after all.
“Can we arrange for the Provisionals to break the contract somehow?” Aiah asks.
They look at her. “In three days?” Holson asks. “How?”
“I keep coming back to the warranties clause,” Aiah says. “Can you arrange for some supplies to go astray? Suppose your food gets delivered to the wrong place…”
They consider this for a few minutes. Ideas are put forward, then rejected as too complex. Aiah scans the contract again.
“The signing bonus!” Aiah says finally. “What if that doesn’t get to you?”
Galagas seems relieved. “Well,” he says, “finally.”
It takes them only a few minutes to work out a plan, Aiah collaborating with the other two as if they had known each other for years, so smoothly that she wonders if there’s something, after all, to this business of the Cunning People having a special gift for duplicity.
Holson, they decide, will drag out negotiations with the Provisionals till practically the last minute. In the meantime, he will establish a new bank account in Garshab in order to receive the money. But the account number to which the Provisionals will be told to wire the signing bonus will be subtly different from the real number, a digit or two off.
When the deadline for payment passes without the bonus, Landro’s Escaliers will be free, legally and (it is hoped) morally, to sign another contract with someone else.
“We should have the contract with you in place beforehand,” Holson says. “That way we can take immediate action—holding a bridgehead, say—in accordance with the wishes of our new commanders.”
Aiah is surprised. “You can sign a contract before the old one has expired?”
“It will be provisional only. Full of thus-and-so’s, stipulating that in the event we are f
ree of any other obligations before a certain date, we will consider ourselves yours to command. And we will give you an account number in Garshab”—he nods, with a significant smile—“a real’ account number, into which your government can place its good-faith deposit, perhaps one-tenth of the signing bonus?”
“I think this might be arranged.” He has anticipated, she notes, her objection to giving them their entire bonus, in case they re-sign with the Provisionals after all and dupe her government of all its dinars.
“We will return early third shift,” Holson says, “and bring the contracts with us. We can’t specify an exact hour—our other commitments are pressing.”
“I will wait, sir. I thank you both.”
Galagas—no longer so stiff and uncomfortable—reaches into a pocket and produces a silver flask. “I wonder, Miss Aiah, if you would join us in some kill-the-baby? It is from Barkazi.”
Aiah smiles. Kill-the-baby is a phrase her grandmother has used. “I would be honored, Colonel.”
Galagas raises the flask. “To success, and Barkazi.”
There is a strange light in his eyes. Aiah wonders at the man’s strange faith in her, in his belief that she is somehow destined to change the shape of things far away. It is beyond a mere credulity, and well into some mystical realm of faith she can’t herself understand.
He drinks and passes the flask to Aiah, who echoes the toast and takes a swig. It is brandy, harsh and fiery and absent of refinement, without doubt the worst stuff she has ever tasted. This baby is dead, she thinks. Eyes streaming, she passes the flask to Holson.
If this is what the homeland tastes like, she thinks, I am not going.
She sees her guests out, and as they say farewell Holson surprises her by embracing her, kissing her on both cheeks.
“I know we will accomplish great things,” he says.
Aiah manages through her surprise to retain her air of confidence. “I have no doubt,” she says, and then accepts Galagas’s somewhat more reserved embrace.
As Aiah watches the two officers make their way across the swaying bridge, she feels a kind of wonder that it has all worked out exactly as Constantine had, weeks ago, anticipated. He has maneuvered all of them, somehow, into this position, and will doubtless get his victory.
But what then? Aiah wonders. Aiah and the Escaliers have been maneuvered into this position, true, but the position is an artificial one. Aiah is not the redeemer of Barkazi—except on video, and in the mind of a deranged hermit back in Jaspeer—and the Escaliers are not an army of liberation. She doesn’t know how she can ever meet these people’s expectations.
We will accomplish great things.
She fears she is going to be a terrible disappointment to everyone who believes in her.
Aiah returns to Lamarath’s office to organize her notes and finds Lamarath there, along with one of his hulking guards. One of the locked metal cabinets has been opened, and Aiah sees inside it a video camera, set to gaze at the room through a spyhole. Lamarath has opened the camera and is removing the video cartridge.
Aiah looks at the camera in shock. “The meetings were recorded?”
Lamarath looks at her over his shoulder. “You didn’t know?” He seems surprised.
“No. I didn’t.” Anger blazes up in her. “I should have been told!” she says. “If they’d found out—”
If they’d found out, Aiah thinks, she’d have been killed.
Lamarath opens a briefcase and drops the cartridge into it. “A dolphin will carry it beneath the front to our friends,” he says. He pats the case. “Insurance,” he adds, “to make sure our mercenary friends won’t betray us.”
And insurance, Aiah knows, in case they’d failed to make an agreement at all. If the negotiations had failed, Constantine could have threatened to release the video to the Provisionals, which Holson and Galagas would have realized meant the end of them.
Displaced anger and fear rattle in the hollow of Aiah’s chest. Constantine, she thinks, is willing to sacrifice her here, if it means a greater chance to win his war.
She feels a tremor in her knees.
One must keep one’s true end in view. His end is victory, and Aiah herself—her life, her happiness—ranks somewhat lower on his scale of priorities.
Aiah walks unsteadily to Lamarath’s chair and lowers herself into it.
“Insurance,” she repeats, and thinks, Who is insuring me?
TIMES CHANGE, BUT OBEDIENCE IS ETERNAL.
A THOUGHT-MESSAGE FROM HIS PERFECTION, THE PROPHET OF AJAS
—I am very pleased with this, Constantine sends. His tone, silky and satisfied, rolls through Aiah’s mind.
—I expect the Escaliers will keep their agreements, Aiah replies. Which means that those recordings made by Lamarath can be destroyed… I would like, in fact, to see them destroyed personally.
Their mental contact is sufficient for Aiah to receive Constantine’s jolt of surprise, along with his reaction, chosen from an array of possible responses. He rejects a lie, first thing of all.
—It was to protect you, he ventures. If they had attempted treachery…
—The recordings could not have been produced until it was too late. You have put me in danger with this.
—Very little. It was all carefully calculated…
Wordless fury rages through Aiah’s mind. She can feel Constantine recoil.
—Apologies, he responds quickly. It was a bad decision, and shall not—
—It will not have the opportunity to happen again. I shall guard my own back in future, and not let you do it.
For a moment she senses thoughts rolling in his mind, their exact nature beyond her reach, imponderable.
—That is wise, he judges.
In answer she just radiates anger at him. Constantine absorbs this, and she senses, strangely, his approval.
—You are growing, Miss Aiah, and that is good.
He breaks contact, and leaves her with a reluctant sense of surprise tingling in her bones.
WANTED HANDMAN FOUND DEAD
“CAROUSED TO DEATH” IN NEIGHBORHOOD BAR
Head down, arms folded over the dangling Trigram on her ivory necklace, Aiah paces along the deck, thoroughly in the grip of the Adrenaline Monster. It is third shift, the two officers could arrive at any time, and she is too nervous to wait in Lamarath’s stuffy office. It is dinnertime, and the twisted families are settling in for the sleep shift that will begin at 24:00. Cooking smells join the miasma over the dark half-world, mingled with the odor of sea, garbage, and feces. Video screens light the darkness here and there, blue video light glowing on twisted faces, reflecting off dark water. Judging by the laughter rolling up from barges here and there, most are tuned to the weekly episode of Folks Next Door. Aiah wonders what these people make of the video they watch, the constant display of goods, wealth, and security they have never possessed.
No one, she thinks, will ever make a weekly comedy about life in the half-worlds.
And then something blows up.
Right in the middle of the half-world, fifty paces away, a bright flash followed by a hot wind that presses on Aiah’s face, that blows her hair back and ruffles the lace at her throat and wrists. In the roofed space of the half-world the sound is deafening. Aiah claps her hands over her ears, but this does not shut out the screams and cries for help or the sudden startled pounding of her own stammering heart.
She stands on the iron deck and stares into the darkness, but there is a huge bright bloom on her retinas that dazzles her, keeps her from seeing any of the explosion’s aftereffects. Suddenly there is a firm hand on her elbow, and she jumps.
“Miss, you should take shelter.” Statius’s voice. “It’s probably just an accident, there are all these pressurized hydrogen tanks here and open burners, but we should—”
Another explosion rips through the darkness. The pressure wave punches Aiah in the solar plexus and tears a cry from her throat. Statius wastes no more words; his hands close on her sh
oulders and he half-carries her toward the hatch.
A third explosion, on the other side of the barge from the first two, turns the darkness bright. Actinic light etches the ramshackle structures, the hunched bodies of the twisted people, bent over their meals and only now beginning to react. Aiah can hear metal fragments whistling through the air. There is a terrible stench, the smell of the explosive chemicals themselves. And then Aiah hears sirens, a terrifying wailing that echoes dizzyingly from the concrete and iron that surrounds them, and the sound of a machine gun, thud-thud-thud, and sees tracer rounds flying overhead in a regular stream…
Statius throws her inside the hatch and slams the door shut behind them. Cornelius is there, machine pistol ready in his hand. He licks his lips. “What’s happening?”
Statius answers as he propels Aiah through the neat, whitewashed rooms of Lamarath’s headquarters. “Some kind of attack. Mage throwing mines or shells, I think.”
“Who’s doing it?”
“No idea.”
The oval hatch to Lamarath’s office looms ahead. It is shut. Statius throws himself onto the central wheel and heaves the hatch open as another explosion shifts the deck beneath their feet. Aiah stumbles through the hatchway, pain shooting through her leg as she catches a shin on the lintel.
“Hold the hatch, please,” says an odd, reedy voice. Dr. Romus, the snake-mage, swims over the lintel with powerful, swift pulses of his body—for all the weight of his thick trunk, he is fast—he shoots across the room and lunges up the wall to the hook, the plasm connection, where he usually hangs, and coils himself around it.
“I will protect you as best I can,” he says.
“That’s our job,” Statius says, crossing the room toward Romus. Behind him Cornelius slams the hatch to, spinning the wheel and dogging the hatch closed.
Dr. Romus’s eyes are closed as he concentrates on the plasm world. “I am used to this connection,” he says. “I am used to working with the little plasm available—you’d use it up in a minute or two.”
Statius reaches for the plasm hook, grips it firmly. The barge lurches to a near-explosion. Plaster drifts from the ceiling like pollen. “I deflected that one,” Romus says. “It would have killed us all. Please—let me do my job.”
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