“I’m not governing the people of those worlds. I supply them with resources at no cost, asking nothing in return but those who would volunteer.”
“We don’t ask enough,” Pol-Kai snapped. “We live in tunnels like rats, hiding from the radiation and the poison, when we could have our own planets, determine our own future.”
“Must we go through this again?” Marakit asked with a sigh of exasperation. “That is not the way of the Confluence. We are not here to rule others, nor will we steal their homes.”
“Those planets are rightly Tahni. They were ours for centuries before they were yours. We should take back our land.”
“As I recall,” Deke said, “you lost them fair and square.”
“What can be lost by conquest can be regained the same way,” Pol-Kai told him. “And with Illyana behind us, who could stop us?”
“Illyana is not behind us, my friend,” Marakit reminded him softly. “She is behind me.”
Jim, that AI has to be on a control circuit, right? Could you break the encryption? Take control of it?
Of course I could. Even in this tiny space inside your head, I’m more advanced than anything your backwards civilization could develop. But they’d notice. And unless I misread the situation, they’d likely kill you.
“Illyana,” Marakit went on, looking between Pol-Kai and the two of us, “is for defense only, and our possession of her is non-negotiable. I would not give up the only guarantor of our continued existence. If that is your condition for treating with us, then you might as well go back now.”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” Deke said. “Nobody gave me the power to shut down talks, just the power to open them up. Yeah, we do need to go back, but I’d like to take back at least some kind of proposal we can both agree to. Maybe something involving trade or humanitarian aid.”
What he really wanted, I was sure, was to get back and share the location of this place with Kara McIntire and Randall Munroe. Honestly, at this point, I was okay with that.
“Very well,” Marakit said. “I suppose I could come up with something to send back with you. I’ll have the freighter recalled and prepped for another run to Hausos. But I must warn you both… don’t try to find this place again. You don’t wish to have me as an enemy.”
Which was true. But I wasn’t sure if we’d have any choice in the matter.
[ 17 ]
“Isn’t there some easier way down?” I griped, again forced to use Deke as my guide down the stairwell. “Maybe an elevator or something? Or could you at least turn the damned lights on?”
“There’s a freight elevator,” Marakit said, her voice carrying back from the front of our procession. “But that’s for freight, and I doubt you’d find it any more comfortable. As for lights, well… we never bothered to put any in. Those who belong here know the place well enough not to need them.”
Which was the extent of our conversation since we’d touched down again. That worried me. Pol-Kai hadn’t been reticent about sharing his displeasure on the way up, but he hadn’t said a word on the way down, not after Marakit had rubbed his nose in it. Then there was Deke. The man usually didn’t know when to shut up, but he’d clammed up as well. I wished I could talk to him the way I did Jim…
You can, obviously, Jim told me. He’s already shown that he has an implant datalink.
Shit, why didn’t you say something before? I demanded.
If you want me to tell you everything I believe you haven’t had the foresight to think of, I’ll be buzzing in your head almost constantly. I assume you want me to determine if I can contact him?
I took a deep breath and counted to ten, knowing it wouldn’t do any good to get angry with a voice inside my head that I couldn’t get rid of.
Please.
Another ten steps in the darkness before Jim spoke again, and I worried he’d actually heard me counting and gotten pissed off.
You’re connected to his neurolink transmitter. Go ahead.
Talking in my head to an actual person was so much weirder than talking to Jim, and I tripped over my words in a way I never would have if I’d simply been speaking aloud to Deke.
Can you hear me?
I didn’t know you had any implants, Alvarez. I don’t know how the hell a thought from Deke transmitted via microwaves into my head managed to sound just like his voice, but I wasn’t anything close to an expert on the human brain, so I just rolled with it.
Surprise. But what are we gonna do? She’s admitted to having Project Rho, and if we come back here in force, they’re just blast us out of existence. She put a dozen of those things out just to blow up an old destroyer hull, which tells me there have to be a hell of a lot more, and I don’t think even the Ellen Campbell could take on that many of their intercept vehicles.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, he admitted. This is a sneak-in-and-kill-everybody type of campaign.
I paused a step and the Predecessor Cultist guard behind me ran into my back.
“Keep moving,” the too-perfect man grunted. He wasn’t armed, but he was a walking mountain of cloned muscle, so I kept moving.
I’m not comfortable killing all these people, I told Deke. Most of them aren’t guilty of anything except trying to survive.
It don’t matter anyway. If they have a halfway-decent sensor net up, I can’t see us getting close enough to sneak in a ground force. Unless we can set up some kind of trade agreement and smuggle people in on a freighter maybe. He kept going before I could voice my outrage at the idea. And yes, I know that’d be a shitty thing to do, pretending to want to help colonists and then using their charity as a cover to kill them. And no, I wasn’t seriously considering it. I’m just saying, I don’t know what the hell to do. All I know is, with that Illyana thing and her stash of em-drive ships, Marakit is automatically the most powerful force in the Cluster. And we’re fucked.
There was nothing I could say to that. Not that I had any reason to think Marakit was a bad person, but Deke was right. This was power I wouldn’t have trusted myself with, and I sure as hell didn’t trust it to someone I barely knew.
I hadn’t come up with any better ideas by the time we reached the garden, but Deke apparently had.
“Marakit Almario,” he said, not as if he was addressing the woman but more like he was reading her name off of a file.
The cyborg paused at the center, and I noticed that the background forest had changed. No more a boreal woodland, it had transformed into a tropical jungle, complete with the background hoot of monkeys. Deke stopped as well, and when the Cultist who’d been our rear guard tried to push his shoulder to keep him moving, all the motion accomplished was to send the big blond man stumbling back a step.
“Search and Rescue in the war, you said,” Deke went on. “And after the war, you wound up on one of the Trans-Tahni colonies. Hudson Bay. The same one our good friend Pol-Kai here mentioned.”
Marakit stared at him, her biological eye narrowing.