The Proctor looked older than the other Xidan I’d seen, her roach of hair gone gray, the lines in her face graven deep, like some ancient tree. She was no less tall or broad-shouldered than Korduvai, though I’d seen in the videos that most Xidan females were several centimeters shorter than the average male.

  I’d expected Korduvai to bow or genuflect to her like the priests in the prayer videos, but instead he faced her, arms spread, head turned up to the ceiling like a luchador entering the ring.

  “Lady Tandee,” he said, “I present to you Colonel Marcus Hachette of the Commonwealth, a warrior of Earth, the ancient home of the Seekers.”

  Tandee stepped out from behind the ring of displays, their light leaving her like the favor of God had fallen off of her. Another stepped into her place immediately, a female as well, though much younger. The younger one’s eyes flickered from screen to screen, and now and again she would speak into the microphone hanging from a cord around her neck.

  The heir apparent, perhaps? I didn’t know, and Lady Tandee didn’t seem disposed to enlighten me. She stared at us in silence, and I began to wonder if we’d breached some local custom and we were supposed to speak first.

  “I am told you destroyed many of the ships of the Qara,” Tandee said, finally. I thought it might be rhetorical, but she paused long enough that I figured she expected an answer.

  “We had no choice, Lady,” Hachette told her. “The Qara asked us if we were the Seekers, and when we told them we weren’t they opened fire without warning.”

  “I apologize on behalf of my people,” Tandee said, unexpectedly, inclining her head toward Hachette. “The Khitan from Qara Khitai are not only heretics but short-sighted fools. They would destroy the first sign we have had since the Seekers left that things are changing.” She eyed Korduvai. “Have preparations been made?”

  “The dining table is set, Lady,” he replied, spread his hands.

  “Come, sit with me,” she invited us. “Eat of our food, drink of our drink. You shall tell me of your journey to this place, and I will share with you the story of the Khitan… and of the Purpose.”

  “It would be our pleasure,” Hachette replied smoothly. I hoped none of the Xidan could read the scowl of distaste I couldn’t hold back.

  Vicky was already laughing in my ear.

  “Lucky you,” she teased. “You get to sample the local cuisine.”

  “I hope they don’t eat bugs,” I whispered fervently, following Tandee and her retinue out of the throne room. “I bet they eat bugs.”

  17

  They did not, as it turned out, eat bugs. They were heavily into seafood, which made sense given that this was a port city, but the local equivalent of Alaskan king crabs didn’t qualify as bugs in my book. It was all I could do to restrain myself from reaching for thirds after weeks of shipboard food. Lan-Min-Gen nibbled at the vegetable and fruit dishes, refusing, as all Tahni did, to eat meat or fish.

  And while we ate, we listened. Tandee, like most politicians, loved to talk, but I didn’t mind, since she was confirming what we’d guessed about the Khitan.

  “The Khitan were created by the Seekers four thousand years ago,” she said, once she’d eaten enough to be polite, “and told we had to fight for our place among the humans and Tahni who already held sway on Qara. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands, yet we were only a thousand at the start, fashioned from the best of both of them.”

  “They told you this?” Lan-Min-Gen asked, speaking up for the first time since this whole thing had begun. “They told you that you were to enslave the others?”

  “Of course. The Seekers held nothing back from us.” Tandee cocked her head at him with an odd expression I thought might have been similar to one a human might use with a slow child. “We were their last hope.”

  The Proctor fished in a pouch at her waist and pulled out a figurine, what could have passed for a child’s toy if I hadn’t seen the full-sized version of the thing far too close up. It was arachnoid, insectoid, arthropodal, and centaur-like all wrapped in the same terrifying package, and it could have passed for a beast if it weren’t for the beam weapon mounted on its shoulder.

  “The Skrela had chased them from their home, devastated worlds,” she went on, setting the figurine on the table in front of her. “Undone everything the Seekers had tried to accomplish and still hounded them even out here, where they dreamed they might be safe. They used everything they had, all the technology, yet still the Skrela came. When the Seekers decided to hunt them down, find the source and cut it off, they knew their own efforts would still fall short. That’s why they brought humans and Tahni with them. And that’s why they created us.” She regarded Lan-Min-Gen coolly. “Oh, they didn’t just tell us to conquer Qara, you understand. They gave the same message to the humans and the Tahni they’d transplanted there. And they gave them a huge advantage in numbers. The humans numbered two hundred thousand, the Tahni half that. And we were a tenth of their numbers, but by the end of the first one hundred years, we had taken over the largest continent and exiled the others to the edge of the world. At the end of the first thousand years, they had nowhere to run to and we took the survivors as slaves. I am curious… whom do your peoples keep as slaves? Each other?”

  “We have none,” Hachette told her.

  “We need none,” Lan-Min-Gen said stiffly. “The Tahni do not trust lesser races to do their work for them.”

  Hachette gave him a dirty look.

  “And we humans use automation to handle the things that would otherwise be done by slaves, servants, or low-paid labor.”

  I tried not to scoff at that. Maybe on Earth and the Core worlds, but there was still plenty of low-wage labor in the Periphery, and outright slavery was fairly common in the Pirate Worlds. But now wasn’t the time for brutal honesty.

  Tandee didn’t seem convinced and was about to move on, but I thought of another question, one more pertinent to the conversation.

  “Did the Seekers give the humans and Tahni the same level of technology as you Khitan?” At her silent stare, I clarified. “We watched some of the transmissions from Qara Khitai on our way here. The Khitan on Qara Khitai seem to believe the Seekers left you with the secrets of space travel, high-tech weapons, computers… basically everything you have right now. Are they mistaken? And if they aren’t, did the humans and the Tahni you conquered have all that stuff too?”

  “We were the favored of the Seekers,” was her simple answer, as revealing for what it left unsaid as for what it did say.

  “The game was rigged.” I nearly started at Top’s voice. I knew she’d be listening from on board ship, just like the rest of the command crew, but it wasn’t like her to interrupt during a high-level discussion. That was more Hachette’s style. “The Seekers wanted their new pets to win.”

  I tried to keep my face neutral, though I certainly agreed with her.

  “We keep looking for good guys out here,” Vicky put in, “but we’re only finding bad guys and worse guys.”

  Hachette cleared his throat, a discreet signal for the peanut gallery to shut up.

  “We were gifted the secrets of the atom by the Seekers,” Tandee went on, perhaps a bit defensively, “but they did not build our spaceships, and neither did they mine our ores nor fight our battles. The humans had gunpowder, rifles, cannons, and their sailing ships ruled the seas, while the Tahni built steam-powered trains across the continents and massed an army larger than the humans even though their numbers were fewer. Defeating them took a heroic effort and brought our people to the brink of extinction.”

  “That’s why you needed the survivors as slaves,” I presumed. “You didn’t have enough of a population left to grow crops or build an industrial base after taking so many casualties. I didn’t notice any here when we came in though.”

  “When we were forced to flee to this world,” Tandee said, the words spat out as if they were shellfish gone bad, “the Qara did not fire on our ships as we left the planet… but they killed any of the slaves we attempted to bring with us. They rightly assumed we would be unable to match their production without the service of our slaves. It has taken us two hundred years to reach the point where we can fight them again.”

  “You’re never going to be able to match their production with less than half their population,” Hachette told her. “And without that, you won’t take back Qara from them. Why are you still at war? What are you hoping to gain?”

  I’d totally forgotten about the food. Servants were shuffling in and out, getting rid of platters gone cold and replacing them with fresher ones. All Xidan because, as she’d just said, there were no slaves here, and all female. Likely breeding females, kept from the life of a warrior to produce offspring, working at either menial jobs or administrative ones, anything to free the males up to fight. I grabbed a breaded shrimp and popped it in my mouth, hoping I’d be able to pop a stomach tab back on the ship in time to stop any local bacteria or fungus from sending me on a rush to the bathroom.

  Tandee took a drink of water from her crystal bowl, and I thought she must be stalling, not wanting to admit the truth. Which made me even more curious as to what the truth actually was.

  “This is something that was not stated in the Purpose,” she said, her voice quiet as if she didn’t want the servants to hear. “It is not heresy, but it did not come directly from the word of the Seekers, so there is much debate, but the rulers here and on Qara Khitai believe it. That the ones who will be chosen to fight the Skrela are not simply those who emerged victorious in the struggle with the humans and Tahni, but those who are able to travel to the stars, to meet the Seekers as equals.” Her dark, recessed eyes scanned across all three of us. “Such as you.”

  “Oh, shit,” I murmured, sitting up straight as the realization hit me. “The corvette. It’s intact.”

  “They can’t possibly reverse-engineer the Transition Drive,” Hachette declared, then glanced aside at Lan-Min-Gen, looking much less confident than his words. “Can they?”

  “Commander Vel-Tanex and his crew will do their duty and wipe their computer systems,” the Tahni replied, “but there is no mechanism to cause the Transition Drive to self-destruct. If they can get the ship into space, they will be able to activate the drive.” He gave the Tahni equivalent of a shrug. “Whether they can figure out how to use it is another matter.”

  “Does it matter?” I asked. Hachette looked at me sharply, as if I’d asked a stupid question, but I pressed on. “Even if they get it to work, it’s one, small ship. They can get maybe five or six people to another star system and back… if they’re lucky.” I nodded to Tandee. “I understand there’s an element of religious significance to that for you, but the Qara can’t duplicate the drive. They can’t manufacture a new drive coil without taking the ship apart and using the only one they have to blindly experiment with it. Right?” I asked Hachette, hands spread.

  I wasn’t any sort of Engineering tech or physicist, but I knew that much.

  “You’re being short-sighted, Cam,” Top said, voice grim. “Tell him, Marcus.”

  Hachette’s eyes were cast downward, staring at some terrible future only he could see.

  “You’re a Marine, Cam,” he said softly, “so you may not have thought of this, but why do you suppose this war is still going on two hundred years after it started?”

  “Sheer, stubborn bloody-mindedness?” I guessed, shaking my head. What was he looking for?

  “Lady Tandee,” Hachette said, “how have you been able to prevent the Qara from simply dropping an asteroid on top of your population centers here? Or vice versa.”

  “That would be nearly impossible,” the Proctor declared. “We have long-range observatories that would spot any such activity and we would launch an immediate attack the second we spotted them.”

  “And what if they can just do a micro-Transition across the whole damned system,” Hachette asked, eyes boring into me, “and set a dozen asteroids heading straight for this planet?”

  My imagination rebelled at the notion.

  “There’s no way they’ll be able to figure out the drive well enough to do accurate micro-Transitions. It took us like fifteen years after we invented the drive before anyone even thought that was possible.”

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “But if it happens, it would be our fault.” Hachette sighed, hands clasped in front of him. “We have to destroy the corvette.” He glanced up at Lan-Min-Gen. “And rescue the crew while we’re there, of course.”

  “Of course,” the Tahni rumbled in English, and I had the sense that he’d developed an almost human feel for sarcasm.

  “If you mean to attack the Qara and get your lost vessel back,” Tandee said, her dark eyes alight with something wild and feral, “then we will help. This war is ours and we will not let… others fight our battle for us.”

  And by others, I just knew she meant lesser species, no matter the fact that we had her people outclassed by a hundred years when it came to technology. I wanted to tell Hachette not to agree to it, but I didn’t want to show my hand right in front of her and count on Dwight to be wise enough not to translate what I’d said.

  Thankfully, he wasn’t a moron. I knew that, despite the disagreements we’d had, but sometimes I still had too much of an NCO attitude, the feeling that everything was going to go to hell unless I was personally supervising it.

  “We have to return to our ship and work up a plan of attack,” he told her. “We would, of course, appreciate any intelligence you might have regarding the Qara intelligence and military apparatus, and where they might be keeping the ship and its pilots.”

  Very diplomatic. A lot better than I would have managed. The question was, would Tandee buy it, or would she see it as the stalling tactic that it most certainly was?

  I couldn’t make out the thoughts behind her rough-hewn face, and if Dwight was able to put a tone or mood to the translation of her words, I wasn’t perceptive enough to pick it out.

  “We will aid you in any way we can. But be very careful in your planning, Colonel Hachette.” Tandee stood, towering over us, even Lan-Min-Gen. “The Qara didn’t defeat us because they were better fighters or more devoted to the purpose. They defeated us because they are utterly without any sense of self-preservation. Every Khitan would rather die than taste defeat, but the Qara would rather die than see an enemy live. They’ll sacrifice anything in order to keep you from destroying that ship. And they’ll kill your people the second they believe you might succeed in freeing them.”

  “Well, it’s obvious why she’s the leader,” Vicky commented privately, and her sarcasm was plain to hear. “She’s just so damned good at motivating people.”

  “One last thing,” Hachette said, his expression neutral. “The reason we came here in the first place was to try to find the Seekers, to track down where they went after they left the other Predecessors at a planet called Decision. It’s obvious they spent considerable time here, thousands of years. But do you know where they went when they left?”

  It’s a damned good thing I wasn’t playing poker with Tandee, because I couldn’t make out a thing from the look she gave Hachette.

  “No, they didn’t share that secret even with us, their chosen heirs. That’s why we are so intent on preparing for their return. None know when it may be, but we are determined to be ready.”

  “Thank you for your time, Lady,” Hachette said, standing, wiping at his chin with one of the wet towels we’d been given. “We need to get back to our ship and try to determine the best course of action. But we will keep in contact with you and let you know what we decide.”

  “Whatever you may decide, Colonel Hachette,” she warned him, “we of Xidan can’t allow the Qara to have that ship. With or without your help… we’re going to attack and destroy it.”

  18

  “Cam was right,” Dunstan insisted dolorously. “We should just leave.” He raised a hand acknowledging Lan-Min-Gen. “All due respect to your pilots, man, but this idea is nuts. If we’re really worried about the ship getting into enemy hands, we should just blow the damned thing up from orbit. I bet we could do it and get out before their missiles got us.”

  I paced, unable to sit still, ignoring the curious glances from Vicky and Top. The intelligence report we’d received from Tandee and her people was scrolling across the main screens, showing the spy satellite imagery of the military headquarters. It was under a fucking mountain. Not like built in a mountain pass, or we’d have to fly through the mountains to get to it. It was under a mountain. A big one, like Denali big. They’d dug into it like ground squirrels, using small nuclear weapons. Maniacs.

  “That isn’t your decision to make, Kyler,” Hachette reminded him gently, sitting at the center of the Ops table, arms crossed, “but your opinion is duly noted and will be considered.”

  I stopped my pacing long enough to eye the colonel sidelong. He almost sounded as if he meant that.

  “What’s with you?” Vicky asked me, grabbing my arm and squeezing as if trying to wake me up from a fugue.

  “This shit,” I told her. I didn’t want to say it, not right out in front of everyone, but it burned in my gut, bile I couldn’t hold down. I waved around us. “All this shit.”

  “Something to say, Alvarez?” Hachette asked, eyeing me sidelong.

  “Sir,” I said, trying to moderate my tone before I wound up screaming at him in front of everyone, “we’re doing this way too much.”

  “This?” He shook his head.

  “This,” I reiterated, motioning at the Ops Center. “Sitting in this fucking compartment and debating what we’re going to do next.”

  “That’s how things work when you’re a senior officer, Captain,” Top scolded me. “This is how decisions are made. You didn’t experience this during the war because you were a platoon leader for most of it, well below the level where this sort of decision-making went on.”

 

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