“Oh, my dear Mr. Conner,” she said, “I believe we’ve got that covered. We are quite able to protect ourselves.”
“Really?” I asked, knowing this was where Deke would press the matter and hoping I could do a better job of it. “Because we were on Hausos, and we didn’t see any combat spacecraft or even defensive turrets on your cargo ships. I know there are fewer people now and you might think that means there’re fewer threats as well, but the ones that still exist, like the surviving Pirate World cartels, will be looking for things like refined ore, not to mention the facilities to produce it. You’re tucked away nice and safe here, isolated and concealed, but your ships are going all around this sector, and that makes them vulnerable.”
Deke glanced at me sidelong with a tug at the corner of his mouth, a look that I knew meant I was just about to say that.
“We don’t need your protection,” Pol-Kai stated flatly. “If that’s all you have to offer, you should run back to your masters and tell them that you failed. If we decide to allow you to leave.” He eyed Marakit meaningfully. “If you asked my opinion, we would be better served disposing of their bodies in the thermal pools.”
“You think you’re up to it, piggy?” Deke murmured, offering the Tahni a scornful glare. “Because you don’t look that fucking tough to me.”
Pol-Kai pushed away from the table, the legs of his chair scraping against the tile floor, a snarl on his face as he reached for Deke. I hadn’t seen Vagabond move, but suddenly he stood in the Tahni’s way, a hand pressed against the alien’s chest, the other cocked back to deliver a death blow. The Tahni froze, biting off an exclamation, looking between Vagabond and Marakit. She hadn’t moved, didn’t look up, just stared at what was left of her drink.
“Pol-Kai,” she said, “I do not recall either asking for your advice or giving you leave to act on behalf of the Confluence in this matter. I value what you and your people have contributed to the cause, but you’ve all agreed that I am your leader. Or do you wish to discuss that matter at greater length right now?”
I had a sneaking suspicion that discussion would be short and violent and would end with Vagabond’s fist punching through Pol-Kai’s skull. The Tahni must have had that same thought because he dropped back into his chair, hands on the table.
“My apologies, Marakit. I am yours to command.”
Vagabond stepped back, not sitting again, just watching, and Marakit went on as if there’d been no interruption.
“I will be frank with you gentlemen, I have no love for the Commonwealth, whether in its original form or this attenuated one. When I knew it, the Commonwealth government was ever an extension of the greed and lust for power of the Corporate Council Executive.”
“Not a single one of them lived through the Psi War,” Deke told her. He hadn’t moved either during the confrontation, yet still he retained the aura of a coiled spring, extreme violence at rest. “We’re just trying to get by.”
“Lifeboat politics,” I supplied, remembering the term Top had used. “It might not last, but we could still accomplish a lot while it does.” I turned over the next few words carefully before I spoke them. “And we’ve had… warnings that there may be other threats out there. Ones we haven’t encountered yet.”
Something shifted behind Marakit’s biological eye and she stood, the motion as graceful and naturalistic as a dancer despite her bionics.
“Perhaps,” she said, “we would be better served with a demonstration. Vagabond, prepare the lander for takeoff. And pass the word to Illyana…” again, that unnerving, metal smile, “… that we’re going to have a little target practice.”
[ 16 ]
“I know you pay no attention to my advice,” Pol-Kai grumbled, “but I believe this is a mistake. We should not be sharing sensitive information with the enemy.”
“We’re not the enemy, Chuckles,” Deke said, not looking back over his shoulder at the Tahni.
Marakit had sat us both up front, just behind the pilot’s station and beside her, which left Pol-Kai and Vagabond sitting behind us, a situation I wasn’t that comfortable with. Not that Vagabond would kill us without Marakit’s say-so, or at least that was the impression I got of the cyborg, but Pol-Kai was a loose cannon. And a Tahni. I’d gotten to know the Tahni pretty well these last few years, fought beside them and against them, and while they were more complex and nuanced than I’d experienced during the war, they were also most certainly not human and didn’t share human sensibilities or thought processes. Maybe they were trustworthy to each other, but not so much toward humans.
The shuttle was the same one we’d taken down from the freighter, but the mothership was nowhere to be seen, not in orbit around the moon and not on the shuttle’s sensors anywhere this side of the gas giant. What the sensors did show were the mining and processing facilities in the planet’s atmosphere. They were just animated avatars on the screen, too far away and too tiny against the Jupiter-sized world to show up on the optical cameras, but I’d seen enough of the setups to recognize it. Standard industrial model, churned out in the thousands by the Corporate Council all the way back to the beginning of the Commonwealth. Shipped in pieces and assembled by automated construction drones if you were rich enough to be able to afford them. By roughneck miners if you weren’t.
“You didn’t build the mining facilities yourself,” I said, interrupting the pointless bickering between Deke and the Tahni. “I assume they were abandoned during the Psi War.”
“Yes,” Marakit confirmed, her voice thoughtful. “It happened more than I would have believed likely. After all, with the Transformation Virus running through the colonies like wildfire, the safest thing to do would be for a mining crew to remain here, if not in the orbital facility then down on… the moon.” She’d stopped herself before she could reveal the actual name of the place. “But humans are a strange species. In a crisis, they seek the comfort of other people. I have no way of knowing, but the likeliest scenario is that the men and women who worked this place returned to the inner colonies and died along the billions of others.”
“How did you and your Confluence find it?” I wondered.
“Oh, the story is long and complicated,” she demurred. “Suffice it to say that among our original converts was a man who worked at the atmosphere mine here. And unlike our late, lamented friends, he was smart enough to not only remain isolated here but to find others he knew were free of the infection to join him.”
“You mean the Tahni,” Deke said, finally turning slightly in his chair to reward Pol-Kai with a backward glance. “They weren’t susceptible to the infection.”
“We were the first here,” Pol-Kai acknowledged, though he refused to look at Deke when he said it. “We were the ones who invited Marikit to this place. Though now, it is as if it were the opposite, as if we were the newcomers and our words are not welcome.”
I wasn’t sure how a cyborg with no biological vocal cords managed an exasperated sigh, yet somehow Marakit did.
“Pol-Kai, you are still a valued advisor,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with your advice on every issue. No one is right one hundred percent of the time. You are as prone to blind spots as any other sentient being, and this is one of them.”
“As if you were any more trusting of the human government than I,” he shot back. “Do you really believe they’ve changed just because there are fewer of them?”
“Didn’t your people change once the Emperor was killed?” I asked him. “Didn’t the very character of your society shift when everything you’d built your worldview on for thousands of years collapsed?” I motioned between Deke and myself. “Do you think it’s different for us?”
“Humans are deceitful,” he insisted, straining against his safety harness as if he’d like to lunge across the cockpit toward me. “They are without honor, without respect. They take what they want and never question if it was theirs to begin with.”
“I am still human, Pol-Kai,” Marakit reminded him. She tapped her hard, matt-black torso. “Beneath this.”
Pol-Kai fell silent, but inside those black, shark’s eyes, I thought I saw agreement. And maybe hatred. Marakit turned her attention away from the Tahni, pointing out toward the equator of the gas giant.
“What we’re here to observe is a hundred thousand kilometers that way. What remains of a Tahni destroyer. They Transitioned into this system during the war, after a battle, but the life support failed and all aboard asphyxiated. We found her when we first arrived and stripped off anything useful, but the hull itself was too badly damaged and we left her in orbit, figuring she was a fitting memorial to the futility of that conflict.”
There. The wreckage tumbled across the pale violet of the gas giant’s atmosphere, close enough now for the cameras to pick her up. I recognized the lines of the craft, the wedge shape all too familiar from nightmares of them hunting down my troop transport.
“And now we have no more need of a memorial?” Pol-Kai asked, and for an alien whose first language was definitely not English, he sure managed to convey bitterness effectively.
“Do you really think,” Marakit asked, “that anyone gives a damn about the war now? With everything that’s happened?”
Pol-Kai grunted noncommittally, but at least he shut up.
“You’re using the old destroyer hull as a tow target,” Deke said. “But a tow target for what?”
“Illyana,” Marakit said, and at first I thought the name was the answer to Deke’s question, but when she continued I realized it was part of a transmission, “your target is in a high equatorial orbit, Right Ascension 157.5 degrees. Launch… a dozen interceptors.”