Val Vega, page 24
That all makes sense, but Pash-Ti doesn’t know about the sample from beneath Tumasra. Maybe the energy surge happened because the Hosh-Unam Front was experimenting with the new interstellar technology they used in the attack on Tumasra, and maybe they did get that from Johnny. But I can’t tell Pash-Ti that—there’s still a chance they could be the traitor too. “But does even Johnny have the capacity to create a swarm of that scale and power so fast? He can’t create exotic matter or quantum threading and all that stuff by himself, right? Wouldn’t they have needed all that?”
Pash-Ti’s eyestalks extend, apparently surprised at how much I’ve learned. “Indeed. Which may be the secret Umberto uncovered. Perhaps some source or faction within the Etoscans or Levinti secretly assisted Johnny and the Hosh-Unam Front in procuring the technology required for the swarm, in order to pave the way for war. That may be the secret Umberto uncovered—and that Johnny killed him for.”
That was our other theory. And after today’s horrible attack, it seems more likely. “So what are you saying we should do?”
“Johnny is dangerous,” Pash-Ti says. “I saw your weapon, the one you used against the Hosh-Unam swarm. You must use it to disable Johnny. Then we can contain him, and, if necessary, use invasive software to search his memory banks for the answer.”
“Invasive software? That sounds like torture.” I stand up, my muscles straining. “Your whole case is conjecture, and we can’t attack Johnny just because you’re suspicious. We’ve got to find another way. Gather the others. I want to go see Listener.”
“I told you, Madame Ambassador, they simply will not answer my calls.”
“Then let’s show up at their doorstep.”
It’s midday, so the streets are quiet as we drive to the Etoscan embassy. The nocturnal Hoshans are home asleep—or trying to sleep. I wonder if, like me, they’re having trouble sleeping after the trauma of the attack. Do they share their dreams too? All around us, in those flat stone homes, are Hoshans dreaming a collective nightmare of swarms and flames?
A massive flock of birds flies across the grey sky above—but then I realize they have no wings. “Are those bots?”
Johnny—now back in his human form—looks up through the car’s windowpane. “Yeah, the Etoscan swarm isn’t just at the border anymore. They’re deploying them everywhere.” A soccer-ball-sized bot is hovering over every Hoshan home. I shudder at the realization that we’re inside a war zone now.
Pash-Ti, Johnny, Timoteo, and I all step out of the vehicle as we arrive at the Etoscan embassy. The Hoshans at the gate don’t lead us to the grand misty chamber where I met the Etoscan ambassadors last time. They lead us to a small room with five Hoshan-style chairs and two Etoscan stools. Timoteo, Johnny, and I sit on Hoshan chairs, and Pash-Ti takes their place on the larger stool, saying, “This is futile, Madame Ambassador.”
Ten minutes later, a small Etoscan enters the room. His headpiece is unadorned, and his thick reddish hide is rough with age. “Salutations. I am Greeter. How might I assist you?”
“We need to speak to the Etoscan ambassadors,” I say.
Greeter’s trunk trembles slightly as he speaks. “I’m afraid the ambassadors are indisposed for the foreseeable future. It’s a busy time, with much to do to protect Northern Hosh after these terrible attacks.”
“That’s why we need to see them,” I say. “We can’t let the attack stop the peace talks.”
“Come on,” Timoteo says, “Listener, or the new Speaker, can spare a moment to see us.”
“Even if they could, they’re not here at the embassy. They’re busy elsewhere making ready the swarms,” Greeter says, turning away from us. “And you should know that Listener has taken a new name this season. His proper name is Commander of War.”
Chapter 21
I close the door behind Johnny after he walks into our room at the guesthouse. He leans against the door, his eyes darting between Timoteo and me. “So what’s up?”
There’s a moment of tense silence. I’m not ready to use “invasive software” like Pash-Ti said, but that attack was … devastating. There’s no way the Hosh-Unam Front got that tech without help. And Johnny’s the one most easily able to offer it.
“Why did you have a map of Hosh-Unam Front bases in your office?” I say.
Johnny chuckles, almost with relief. “Is that what this is about? Umberto asked me to make that for him. He was getting super paranoid, so he asked me to make it paper instead of digital.”
I grip my phone inside the pocket of my jeans, ready to press the neutralize button if I have to. “Then you led me right into their trap. You knew one of their bases was right beneath the Southern capital.”
“Well, yeah, obvi,” Johnny says. “I guessed the spy we were chasing was Hosh-Unam Front. But I figured I could take them. I didn’t know they had a frigging positronic pulse.”
Timoteo looks up at Johnny from his seat in the corner. “But you can defend against a positronic pulse. That’s not hard for a Synthetic warlord.”
Johnny throws both hands in the air. “If I know it’s coming! If I know vaguely what frequency it might be, so I can modulate my shield for it. But the Hosh-Unam Front have never had access to that kind of tech before. I just wasn’t ready for it.”
“So you’re not the one who’s been helping the Hosh-Unam Front get these more advanced weapons?” I say.
“No!” Johnny says. “I hate the Hosh-Unam Front! I hate violence! You’re totally right that someone got them a major power upgrade, but I swear it wasn’t me. And even if I wanted to, I couldn’t arm them with a whole swarm like that all by myself. Only someone high up in one of the Great Powers could do that. Did you notice Listener—Commander of War—wasn’t at the talks? That he survived the attack as a result? He must be the one who’s been arming the Hosh-Unam Front.”
“Hmm,” Timoteo says, scanning the inside of his glasses. “Listener’s official communiqué says he was praying on the talks and had a vision that he shouldn’t go. Does that sort of thing really fly with Etoscans? I guess it does, because some other Etoscan leaders praised his piety. And Listener getting his name changed to Commander of War was sort of like a promotion.”
“Exactly,” Johnny says. “Commander gave the Hosh-Unam Front the weapons to attack his own Citadel, taking out all his enemies in one blow—and now he wants control of all of Hosh.”
Timoteo and I exchange glances. Johnny’s corroborating all our theories—except the part about his own involvement. And if Johnny were really threatened by these accusations, he could probably take Timoteo and me both out before I pressed the trigger on my phone.
“Timoteo and I have some things to figure out,” I say. “You can go.”
“Guess I’m dismissed,” Johnny says, walking out the door. “I’m here if you need anything.”
Timoteo gets up and paces. “I didn’t think it made sense before, because I thought supplying the Hosh-Unam Front with weapons wasn’t really an issue of interstellar law. But now that I’ve seen how terrible this attack was … maybe that is what they were hiding.”
Finally, a theory that makes sense. “If Umberto found out that Commander was conspiring with the Hosh-Unam Front, even against Speaker and other Etoscans—that seems like the kind of secret Commander would kill him for. But if not Johnny, then I guess Wasala was his agent. That’s hard to imagine too.”
“I know,” Timoteo says. “But something’s missing. It’s still the Levinti who have the strategic advantage in a war on Hosh. Why would Commander manipulate things like this just to start a war he’s likely to lose?”
“It could be the Levinti who armed the Front,” I say. “Which would make Pash-Ti the most likely agent. Maybe that’s why they’re trying to deflect our suspicions to Johnny.”
Timoteo lifts his glasses, rubbing a finger and thumb on his eyes. “Maybe, though that doesn’t explain the weird sample, or Listener being the only one to conveniently avoid the massacre.”
The massacre. My entire body trembles. Over a dozen Etoscans, Levinti, and Hoshans died, right in front of me. Speaker is dead. Kantroponar is dead. They were hard to negotiate with, but they seemed like good people—good sentients—and now they’re gone. Just like tío Umberto.
A sob wrenches out of me, my body convulsing so hard it shakes the round Hoshan chair I’m sitting on.
“Please don’t lose it, Val,” Timoteo says, tearing up too. “I’m about to lose it, so I can’t have you lose it. How could tío Umberto do this to us? How could he leave us alone like this? Didn’t he tell you anything else? Didn’t he leave you a fricking clue?”
“No!” I shout. “He didn’t leave us with anything! Just a giant mess of a Galaxy!”
Timoteo falls to the floor, taking off his fogged-up glasses and hiding his face in his hands. I have to stay strong, for him and for everyone.
I take a deep breath to steady myself. Why did Umberto leave me alone like this? He knew they were trying to assassinate him, why didn’t he leave me more clues?
Ferus said maybe Umberto had left me a clue, and I’d missed it, that maybe that’s what my vision of him in the mists meant. “You don’t want to miss the train!” If that was a message from my subconscious, it was a pretty useless one.
Then I remember the most random thing. I wipe away my tears and grab my phone from my knapsack. My phone chimes to life. I’m obviously way out of range, but I can still scroll through old messages. The one I’m looking for is way down in my inbox, but there it is, from Umberto Olmeda. It came into my phone a few hours after Umberto died, but the time-stamp of the email is from two days before he died.
Tío Umberto left me a virtual message in a bottle. Of course he found a way to tell me his secret—something so subtle that no one else could guess what it was. How could I have mistaken it for a stupid joke-email forward? But then, how could I have known? I got this email before I even found out about all the secret-ambassador stuff.
I re-read the email, word by word. I think back on everything I’ve learned—and what was in that vial. It’s like a stuck window suddenly being flung open, the sounds of the outdoors rushing in.
“Oh my God,” I whisper aloud. I’m still trembling, but now my trembling is tinged with hope instead of despair.
Timoteo looks up, his eyes red with tears. “What is it? Are you okay?”
I stand up. “I know what’s hidden beneath Tumasra. And I know who killed tío Umberto.”
Chapter 22
Timoteo and I walk through the corridors of the transit station on Hosh-tor, an uninhabited, gaseous planet—the sixth from Hosh’s sun. We’ve never much time here before, just used it as a transfer station on trips back and forth from Earth to Hosh. It’s a massive transit center. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all transparent, exposing the corridors and rooms beyond, a maze of interconnected passageways. Etoscans, Levinti, and at least a dozen other species stampede or fly or swim through the station’s corridors. Everyone is rushing to leave after the Interstellar Council’s order for all non-Hoshans to evacuate the system. Everyone is expecting war to erupt as soon as the treaty expires in just a day and a half.
Checkers guides us through the throng of aliens racing through the station’s Oxygen Section. I take the longest strides my short legs allow, trying not to let the fear all around us infect me. These panicking aliens don’t know what I know. We can stop this war. We have to.
We find Pash-Ti and Johnny standing at the far end of our meeting room in awkward silence. Pash-Ti points a spindly finger at me. “Why have you called this meeting here on Hosh-tor? We must evacuate immediately, as every sensible sentient is doing, before the inevitable war.”
There’ve been so many layers of tension between Pash-Ti and me this past month. Some of it is because they never really thought I was qualified to be ambassador, and some of it’s because they’re so by-the-book and I tend to be more seat-of-my-pants. But a lot of it has been because I didn’t know if I could trust them. It’s a relief to finally be able to confront them directly. I step up to them so that we’re barely a foot apart, my eyes at the level of their elbows. “It’s not inevitable. You may have given up, but we haven’t. And, look, I’m sorry I haven’t been fully up-front with you. I wasn’t sure if we could trust you—either of you. This whole time I’ve been ambassador, it’s been impossible. I’ve tried to work with all three of you while still staying prepared for any one of you to be the traitor. I’ve had to keep secrets from all of you, which I hated doing. But all that’s changed now.”
“Are you saying you figured out who killed Umberto?” Johnny says. “Wait, if you’re here talking to the two of us, does that mean it’s Wasala?”
“We’ll get to that,” I say. “You both should take a seat.”
Pash-Ti’s eyestalks bend down at me, blinking. “Very well.”
“Um, hey, room,” I say to the air, “we need a meeting table and four chairs of appropriate heights for each of us.” We all step away from the center of the room as one large mass and four smaller objects rise up from the floor and shape themselves into a table and chairs.
I take the seat across from Johnny. Timoteo sits down next to me, and Pash-Ti sits last, in the taller stool beside Johnny. I take a deep breath, my confidence shaky. I just have to be direct, unravel the facts one by one.
“I think I know the secret that got Umberto killed,” I say.
“Whoa,” Johnny says.
Pash-Ti lets out a sharp whistle. “How might you have attained such information?”
I take the vial out of my messenger bag and pass it across the table to Pash-Ti. “It started with this.” I explain to them how we actually did find the Outlands and Ferus, how he gave me the sample that Umberto had asked him to get.
Pash-Ti grasps the vial in two thin fingers, moving it up and down, taking note of its odd reverse weight. “This appears to contain exotic matter,” she says, passing it to Johnny.
Johnny holds the vial up to the light. “Yup. Also entangled quantum threads and graphotons.”
Pash-Ti stands up and takes a step back from Johnny. “That composition could be used to develop advanced swarm technology of the type used by the Hosh-Unam Front in their attack on Tumasra. Particularly if they had the assistance of a Synthetic former military command unit.”
“Hold up, Pash-Ti,” Johnny says, palms in the air.
“Think about it,” Timoteo says. “If the Hosh-Unam Front were the culprits, why didn’t Umberto report it? They’ve got no clout with the Interstellar Council.”
Pash-Ti shifts their weight back to their third leg. “True. But if they were conspiring with one of the Great Powers—if he believed the Etoscans intentionally allowed their technology to be stolen by the Hosh-Unam Front—that would have made Umberto more reluctant to report his suspicions until he had proof.”
“We thought that too,” I say. “And Ferus confirmed that both the Etoscans and Levinti have been arming the Hosh-Unam Front, which is probably how they got the technology for that super-advanced swarm. But Ferus says he saw in Umberto’s mind that Umberto was suspicious something the Etoscans were hiding beneath Tumasra, where the storm and the caverns would block both sensors and telepathy.”
Pash-Ti leans over the table, their long torso casting a shadow over my face. “I see no logic in this line of thinking. The Etoscans are undoubtedly hiding a plethora of weapons beneath Tumasra, but nothing about that would violate interstellar law.”
“We also thought that too,” Timoteo says. “But weapons aren’t the only things that matter in war. Which is the clue Val realized from her vision in the Etoscan mists.”
“You claim you’ve solved the mystery of Ambassador Olmeda’s murder based on a hallucinogenic vision?” Pash-Ti says, still leaning.
I wish Timoteo hadn’t mentioned the vision thing. This is hard enough as it is. “The vision isn’t important, it just helped me remember something. A clue Umberto left behind. When I used the mists, I saw Umberto, and he told me not to miss the train. It all just seemed like a trippy vision, but Ferus told me I should pay attention to it, that it might be my unconscious trying to tell me something.”
“Ferus is a former insurgent and wanted criminal,” Pash-Ti says.
“He’s reformed,” Timoteo says. “We think.”
“The vision and Ferus aren’t the point,” I say. “On the night of Umberto’s funeral I found an email from him in my inbox. It was just a stupid joke email, and I hadn’t looked at it closely before. I figured he’d sent it just before he died. But a few hours ago I looked at it again and saw it had been written a few days before he died but wasn’t sent until the day after he died. Which made me think he was trying to send me a message in a way no one else would notice.”
“That would be pretty smart,” Johnny says. “By sending it through a primitive channel like email, the Great Powers and their spies would never detect it.”
I stand up and pace around the table, like moving my legs will help me get the words out. “Right. So this email is just a joke-article. Umberto always used to send me stupid joke articles and memes. But the article was about a train station being built right under a volcano. A Subway station.”
Pash-Ti finally stops leaning, straightens their long spine in surprise. “Are you implying …”
“Yes,” I say. “The Etoscans are building an unauthorized Interstellar Subway Station beneath Tumasra.”
Johnny gapes. “If that was what Umberto figured out—”
“It would definitely freak out the Etoscans,” Timoteo says. “Since the Interstellar Transit Authority is maybe the most powerful body in the interstellar bureaucracy.”
