It was lighter outside than when we’d arrived, about as light as I imagined it got on this moon, the glow of the gas giant combining with the distant primary star to provide the closest thing this hemisphere would have to broad daylight. It answered my question of whether the moon ever even saw the sun. It did, for a few hours at a time.
I wasn’t sure if it was that sunlight or the steam pouring off the hot springs, but the narrow valley, carved from glaciers through the rolling hills before different glaciers had closed in on it again, was almost comfortably warm. Warm enough that I unzipped my jacket as I walked point for our little group through the collection of drying huts. And the fields of grain.
“Crops,” Deke murmured, shaking his head. “I never thought you’d be able to grow crops here outside of a heated hydroponics farm.”
“Much of it is grown that way,” Marakit admitted. “But as we’ve expanded our homesteads, we discovered valleys like this where the springs kept them warm enough but the fumaroles didn’t put out enough poisonous gasses to kill the plants. Stop here,” she told Deke, motioning at one of the huts.
He let her loose and Marakit hopped gingerly over to the door. She pulled a length of metal pipe from inside and sighed with relief as she leaned into it, using the pipe as a cane.
“I think I can manage without your help now, Mr. Conner.”
“Major,” he corrected her, “since we’re so close and personal now. But you can call me Deke.”
“This way, Deke.”
The cyborg moved with remarkable speed and agility for someone walking with a pipe for a cane, outpacing us through the rows of genetically engineered wheat. I was very ready to let her take point, given that she was the one who trusted whoever these people were. She could be our human mine detector while Deke and I watched the possible ambush spots with our carbines ready.
“Why doesn’t everyone live out here?” I asked her, scanning back and forth on my side of the path. “Looks a lot more pleasant than that rat warren under the ground.”
“It’s exposed,” she threw over her shoulder, not slowing her pace. “There’s radiation out here. Not as bad in sheltered valleys like this, but enough that our human friends, the ones who used to be in the Cult, would not risk it. As for the Evolutionists, well…” her machine grin raised the hackles on the back of my neck. “One place is as good as another.”
I frowned, following that logic chain.
“Hold on. If the Cultists won’t live out here and Evolutionists don’t care, then who the hell are we out here to meet?”
“Marakit.” The voice was deep, sonorous, with the odd timbre of a voice box never meant to speak English. “We haven’t been able to communicate with the others for almost an hour. What’s going on?”
The muzzle of my carbine snapped upward and the tall, broad-shouldered figure froze. He was a Tahni. Older, middle-aged for one of them, with lines etched into his face by time and gray streaking the warrior’s cue at his throat. He’d stopped moving forward, hands at his side, but his calm demeanor told me this wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him.
“Stop,” Marakit said, raising a hand as she stepped between the Tahni and us. “He’s not an enemy. This is my friend… from a long ways back, all the way to Hudson Bay. Colonel Cameron Alvarez, Major Deke Conner, meet Kan-Zin Tel.”
“You’re with the new Commonwealth government, I assume?” Kan-Zin Tel asked as I lowered my gun… though not all the way. “Fleet Intelligence, I assume?”
“You’re pretty well-informed for a Tahni refugee on an isolated moon in the middle of nowhere,” Deke observed. His gun barrel had dipped as well, but I doubted he would have needed a weapon since he was one.
“Oh, trust me, gentlemen,” he said, “this isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with military intelligence.” Tahni didn’t naturally smile, but this Kan-Zin Tel made his best attempt. “In fact, I believe we used to work for the same boss.” He waved us forward. “Come with me. This conversation will undoubtedly take a while, and my family was just sitting down for lunch.”
[ 19 ]
“I feel like I’ve fallen straight down the rabbit hole,” I admitted, holding a spoonful of stew just below my chin, almost forgotten with the surreal feeling of the situation.
“Yes, things are a little different up here,” Matlin-Sen admitted, setting a cup of water in front of me on the table.
She was a female Tahni, which wouldn’t have been that surprising… except that she and Kan-Zin Tel lived in the same house. With their children. Two boys, both teenagers, and a girl just a little younger, sitting at a side table and eating their own bowls of gruel. They were quiet and well-behaved, but so was Kan-Zin Tel… and that was fucking impossible.
“I’ve never seen a male Tahni,” Deke admitted, “this close to an adult female without going absolutely apeshit.” Not that the shock kept him from shoveling down the stew. I took a bite myself, realizing abruptly how hungry I was. It wasn’t bad, if you liked beans.
“I have,” I admitted. At Deke’s curious glance, I shrugged. “Not here in the Cluster. It took a whole society built around meditation and introspection, and it took hundreds of years to accomplish.”
Kan-Zin Tel and Matlin-Sen shared a look.
“I wish our people had the wisdom and patience for such a process,” Kan-Zin Tel said, tapping his spoon against the side of his bowl, “but I’m afraid there’s a more prosaic answer. The phan-tar-nok, the rage and violence a Tahni male feels when he goes into the mating cycle, is caused by a gland right here.” Kan-Zin Tel tapped the back right side of his skull just behind his flattened ear. “I had microsurgery that altered the gland’s output… installed a regulator, if you will. Instead of a massive surge of hormones a few random times each month, now I have a constant stream of those same chemicals at a much lower dose.”
“If it’s that simple,” I wondered, “why didn’t the Tahni figure it out a long time ago?”
“It was against our beliefs,” Matlin-Sen replied in a tone that said it should have been obvious. “We were created perfectly by the Ancients. Nothing about us could be altered.”
“Fortunately for me,” Kan-Zin Tel said wryly, “you humans destroyed our belief system just in time.”
“For some of us,” Matlin-Sen interjected. “If what you say of Pol-Kai is true, then I would guess he hasn’t given up on them completely.”
“Marakit,” I said, finally having the time to ask the question that had gnawed at me all through the tunnels, “what about Project Rho… Illyana? Is there any way Pol-Kai can control it without you?”
“I’m afraid so,” Marakit admitted. “There’s an imprinter… a device we discovered along with the Corporate Council research base. It reads the brain patterns of the user and imprints them into the control systems and fail-safes of Illyana. Anyone can take control of her using it. It’s locked down with a security code, but that won’t keep Pol-Kai out forever. Days at most. I’m fairly certain Illyana is what this coup is all in aid of. He believes we should use her to seize control of the entire Cluster.”
“He has been vocal about his insistence that the Psi War and the chaos caused by the Changed was an opportunity sent by the gods,” Kan-Zin Tel agreed. “But to murder our allies and try to kill you…” he made a Tahni gesture of negation. “He’s destroying everything we’ve built.”
“Can you guys pull together any sort of opposition?” I asked, looking between the three of them. “I mean, we have to assume Pol-Kai either killed or locked up all the Evolutionists who were loyal to you, Marakit, but he might not be worried about the Cultists. Can you get hold of any of them? And do you have access to weapons?”
Marakit was already shaking her head before I finished.
“If anything, the Cultists would be more likely to side with Pol-Kai, I think. They’ve always resented the high positions Evolutionists held in the Confluence, even though I’ve tried to make them feel at home here. As for weapons—well, what Pol-Kai and his confederates managed aside, one of the covenants all who come here agree to is that we hold our weapons in common in the armory, and none may draw upon them without authorization.”
“Yes, well…” Kan-Zin Tel made a gesture with hands and shoulders, the equivalent of a shrug. “We did agree to that covenant, true. But some of us are veterans of the last war and have a problem divesting ourselves of any means of defense…”
“Show them, my love,” Matlin-Sen suggested.
Kan-Zin Tel waved at us to get up from the table and I did, though I took my stew bowl with me. The Tahni was getting on in years for someone who hadn’t received anti-aging treatments, but it hadn’t diminished the strength in those massive shoulders. The muscles bunched up under his long-sleeved tunic as he pulled upward at one side of the table. It should have flipped over, but instead it toppled on a hinge concealed beneath the long slat it rested on, and as it fell backward a trapdoor concealed beneath the floorboards of the house’s small kitchen opened up.