Here We Stand, page 18
Sorry about Paul, it read. He’s harmless really. Remember not to rinse it or it won’t cook up like arborio.
Ingram shook the bag like a maraca before opening it. It was rice, polished to perfection. Now she could cook the only dish she could do well. This was a win. She’d entertain Marc to dinner as she’d promised, and diplomatic relations with the crop boffins were still intact. She took her victories where she could these days.
Jeff reported back to her just before lunch. “Ma’am, Fred says they all feel fine and he doesn’t recall ever being given supplements back in Deku. I wouldn’t argue with a teerik’s memory.”
“Perhaps it’s age-related after all.”
“True. But he’s said they’re all happy to provide feather and blood samples to help the research. Even Turisu. I’ll get Haine and Mendoza on it.”
“Excellent. Thanks, Chief.”
Well, that was something. They’d solve the puzzle because they always did. She went downstairs to the canteen to get lunch, noting who was around and pausing to ask how things were going, and was on her way out with a sandwich and a container of milk when she ran into Marc coming the other way.
“Any news on Tev?” she asked.
“Not yet. Tell me more about teeriks. I got the note. Sounds like we’d better make the most of them while they’re still standing.”
“And I thought I was the heartless utilitarian.” Ingram nodded in the direction of the external doors. “Want to share a sandwich?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
They went outside and sat on the low wall in front of the flagpoles. Ingram handed him one half of her ham and pickle on supermarket white.
“I told Paul Cotton that if they want to explore off-camp, we can’t give them escorts and they’re on their own,” she said. “I hope they don’t get overconfident about their firearms skills.”
“Or too bolshy.”
“But I got some rice out of the visit. Risotto’s on.”
“See, you’ve still got that knack of blagging stuff off people. What is it you matelots call it?”
“Baron strangling.”
“A worthy art. So what are we going to do about the teeriks?”
“I know I’m a granite-hearted harpy, Marc, but I’m looking at the worst case scenario of a post-teerik Opis.”
Marc peeled the sandwich apart to check the filling. Everyone seemed to do that now, confirming it was the real thing even if it was dehydrated, frozen, or vac-packed, and not the first locally-manufactured substance to appear in their meals.
“We either learn to copy what they can do, aided by Sol, or we plan for reverting to pre-teerik levels of technology,” Marc said, apparently satisfied that the ham was genuine. “It’s just as well we’ve had lots of experience of going backwards on Earth.”
“I always wondered why none of their clients could copy their work.”
“I think the teerik advantage is continuous innovation. They’re always ahead in the arms race. But even if I knew how to make a violin, I couldn’t build a Stradivarius. Knock-offs are usually different if all you’re doing is copying. And then there’s how fast they can calculate the really big numbers.”
“Solomon can do that.” Ingram thought about it. “But what we need is a teerik-brained AI. The mystery substance thing will work out, I’m sure. Then all we have to do is worry about them going extinct here.”
“If they’re short of a vitamin or something, it might explain why they’re getting so argumentative,” Marc said. “Lack of vitamin D does that to humans. Makes them stroppy. Lots of deficiencies show up as behavioural shit.”
“You’re quite encyclopaedic, aren’t you?”
“I was trained to live off the land if I had to exfil the hard way,” Marc said. “So I need to know stuff.”
“It’s fascinating.”
“Okay, instead of gating my way into the Kugad parliament to plant IEDs, then, I’ll swing by the Deku branch of Superdrug and pick up a bottle of multivitamins. Do we even know what fit and well should look like in a teerik?”
“Fred thinks they’re all fine.”
“Did the medics have any more ideas on why Rikayl wasn’t the full quid?”
“Not that they mentioned to me. Maybe they will when they sequence the genome.”
“They’ve still got to work out what all the genes do, though,” Marc said. “Which is the complicated bit that takes years.”
“Have you been reading up on this?”
“I chat with the boffins when we have a tea break on the range. I also drink with Todd Mangel. He’s explaining string theory to me a pint at a time.”
“I’m in awe.”
“So you should be.”
“Well, whatever this declining substance does, we’ve got our teeriks for a few more useful decades,” Ingram said. “Unless the Jattans show up first.”
“Or the Kugin. They normally show up together, remember.”
“When do you think the opposition’s going to notice Gan-Pamas is missing? It’s one thing to lose a warship that isn’t really yours anyway, but when you lose the chap who said he’d find it for you as well, you’re bound to think the worst and start blaming people.”
“What, you mean they’ll think someone got to him, or that the enemy assassinated him?”
“It’s too much to hope that they just blame their enemies.”
“Or their man on the inside,” Marc said. “Because they’re bound to have a few. They probably don’t even know we exist because Gan-Pamas didn’t call it in. But we still don’t know why he showed up here in the first place. And that’s the bit that bothers me.”
It was the question that kept getting buried in the snowstorm of recent events. Everyone, Fred included, said nothing was emitting a telltale signal. Perhaps it was just something as simple as Jattans expanding their search for places to seize, and it was Nomad’s bad luck to be in a previously undesirable neighbourhood.
Twice, Ingram thought. Twice.
If it happened again, she’d know that luck — good or bad — had nothing to do with it.
* * *
Office of the Government of Jatt in exile, Clerics’ Quarter, Rouvele, southern Viilor, Esmos: one full season since last contact with Gan-Pamas Iril, Controller of Procurement.
A glorious coral sunset illuminated the cobbled courtyard below the office window and marked another day that Nar P12 had still not been found.
But that was probably a good sign. The enemy hadn’t recovered the ship. Nir-Tenbiku Dals, Rightful Mediator of Jatt, Primary in Exile, would have known if they had. His intelligence network had never let him down. He’d spent a working lifetime cultivating the patriots and malcontents in the naval ministry and the civil service, and the government-in-waiting had now been graciously accommodated by the Esmos Convocation in Viilor for twenty years. He was willing to bide his time to remove the illegitimate regime in Jevez, but not forever. It was a task he couldn’t hand down to his children in the same way his father had bequeathed it to him. The Jatt Protectorate had to end in his lifetime.
He also needed to see it completed before he was too old to personally supervise the purge of all Kugin influence from the nation — from the entire world — and declare it to be the state of Jatt again, free of foreign dependency.
Protectorate. Imagine voluntarily renaming your nation to tell everyone you were happy to be the snivelling pet of barbarians. The Common Welfare Party that usurped his grandfather’s office as the true heir of Jevezsyl might as well have burned the standard and called the country Kugad’s Whore. He understood them for wanting to be rich, but the only point of wealth was to do something with it, and they had done nothing visible for the public good.
They’d simply sold the nation to the expansionist Kugin. The noble state prefixes to their family names were an insult to Jattans. When he returned and placed the illegitimate government under arrest, he would replace Gan, and Nir, and all their other honorific pre-names with Hebudi to remind the citizens that these traitors rolled over and licked the Kugin’s hands like domesticated animals. They’d begged for annexation. That subjugation was a permanent stain on every Jattan’s honour.
We are not a colony. We are not a state under Kugad’s rule. We are Jatt, and we will seize our independence again.
Nir-Tenbiku stood at the window to enjoy the gentler light of early evening. It was generous of Esmos to give the exiled government asylum here, untouchable in the centre of the priestly enclave, but the climate was uncomfortably dry for a marbidar and the sun was too bright for his eyes. Mornings and early evenings were tolerable, though. Perhaps he’d go for a walk in the grounds tonight to enjoy the cooler air and the acoustic imagery of the gardens without the interruption of anyone else moving around and spoiling the fine echoed detail in his mind. His open daybook reminded him that the clerics would be singing tonight from the first star to the sunrise to mark the start of the season of redemption, so that would be a pleasant diversion as well, at least until he needed to sleep. Then he’d have to shut out the sound as best he could.
The shadows from the gates stretched further across the cobbles and then disappeared as the sun dipped below the roofline. Nir-Tenbiku sat down at his desk and caught up with the intercepted messages collated by his agents, but he lost his concentration and found himself worrying about Gan-Pamas Iril again.
It wasn’t the first time that Gan-Pamas had disappeared for extended periods in radio silence, and Nir-Tenbiku accepted that arming an invasion force required discretion and secrecy. Kugin agents were everywhere. But this was still a long time to hear no word at all.
He got up and waved a chart open. At this scale, he could see both Velet and Dal Mantir in their respective star systems, and if he expanded it, the three-dimensional image took in Bhinu as well. Intelligence had told him that the teerik rebellion — the communes constructing ten vessels in Kugin yards — had agreed a rendezvous point around thirty light years from Velet. But only one had left Velet space, the prototype Nar P12, and the teeriks who’d hijacked it hadn’t waited at the rendezvous point, probably realising by then that they were on their own. Gan-Pamas had said that Lirrel thought he knew where they might have gone after that — there were limited options unless they were prepared to search for even more distant and uncharted worlds — and that it might take some time to hunt them down.
Nir-Tenbiku had hoped the commune refitting the Fourth Fleet flagship would escape and hand the vessel to him, because that was the biggest prize, but he’d be satisfied with the stealth vessel. It was small but it had other value: apart from its unique technology and its ability to insert special forces, it was commissioned by the Jattan Protectorate’s intelligence service. It was destined to be used to suppress unrest on Jattan colony worlds and even attack other nations on Dal Mantir deemed to be harbouring security threats. To fly that ship over Jevez in full view of the population and turn it on those who planned to use it on their fellow citizens would send a clear message that the Protectorate and especially its secret police had lost control.
And if Jatt rebelled, the most powerful and obedient servant of the Kugin for three generations, then other Kugin protectorates would be emboldened to overthrow their masters too.
There was the matter of how the Kugin government would react to a coup in one of its dependencies, but as they were greedy barbarians who had no pride, all they would care about was keeping the minerals and rare metals flowing from Jatt’s mines. If they tried to invade the country and seize any facilities, they’d face opposition every step of the way and the mines and quarries they relied upon would be destroyed.
Nir-Tenbiku was confident he could rally the population. He already had half the navy waiting on his word.
“So where are you, Iril?” he murmured to himself. He tried to be objective and forget Gan-Pamas was his friend so that he could judge the urgency of the situation properly. “Are you still searching, or did those parasites catch you?”
He closed down the chart display with another wave. He’d opened it every day for years but nothing had changed. It was useful to visualise where his agents were, but it was mostly to remind himself what Jatt had lost and how much the traitors had given away.
He glanced out of the window again and decided it was time for that walk. After locking his office, he made his way down to the courtyard and turned right outside the ornate metal gates. From there he followed the course of the ornamental stream that ran in a curving, marble-lined conduit and sat down by the fountain with its permanent cool mist of water droplets.
How was Jatt going to pay the Esmos Convocation for all this support? The house of Tenbiku could cover the cost of maintaining the Halu-Masset, the government-in-exile, but Esmos had given it sanctuary, and however righteous the Convocation was, it would expect favours in return one day. None of the families funding the restoration of Jatt had fallen into poverty yet, but arming a revolution wasn’t cheap. It was another reason he couldn’t wait indefinitely.
At least the prototype would be free of charge, other than maintenance. A great deal of covert effort had gone into exploiting the teerik rebellion, such as it was, and there’d been no guarantee it would yield a single ship or deprive the Kugin of any engineering capacity, so seizing the most advanced vessel the Kugin were willing to sell to allies and a commune of teeriks would be a good result.
Once the ship was found, the teeriks wouldn’t put up a fight. They weren’t pirates. For all their brilliance, they were cosseted and helpless. They couldn’t live indefinitely in a ship like that, they couldn’t live off the land, and they’d need to set down somewhere they could breathe the air and find water. That narrowed their options.
Nir-Tenbiku sat on the low marble balustrade that surrounded the fountain and dipped his hands in the water. Perhaps the Protectorate navy or the Kugin had already caught up with Gan-Pamas. He’d deny being part of the true government and use that flimsy cover story of being an arms dealer, but nobody would be fooled because he looked and sounded exactly what he was; the well-educated, well-bred, genteel, favourite son of an old family from Gan. He wouldn’t even fool a drunken Kugin.
How much longer do we have?
Are we already too late?
Nir-Tenbiku asked himself that question every day. He had capital ships of his own, but as time dragged on, they weren’t being updated to keep pace with the Protectorate’s fleet. There were loyalist commanders in the Protectorate navy who would join the rebellion when the day came, and perhaps that would be enough. In the end, though, it would come down to ordinary Jattans being willing to take back their country as well.
The priests had started their singing for the night. It was a plaintive sound, unaccompanied by music, and it was soothing even though it had no spiritual meaning for him. He was thinking anything but spiritual thoughts these days. His plans were full of destruction and vengeance, but they’d been with him for so long that they’d acquired a kind of quiet normality, a list of actions that he could open like a book when he sat down at his desk in the morning and leave behind when it was time to have his evening meal. They rarely made him feel angry these days, just impatient to complete the task.
He moved around the fountain to one of the ornately carved pillars that rose out of the balustrade to sit with his back against it. All he could hear was the priests’ song, the patter of water, and the occasional pop as a bud opened on one of the night-blooming vines. But now a noise intruded, growing louder, the sound of someone running on flagstones. He strained to target his echolocation to sense its shape and movement. Then he saw it in his head, a person on two legs, a marbidar like himself who’d surely feel the stream of clicks that Nir-Tenbiku was aiming at him, but the screen of ornamental trees and the colonnade blocked his line of sight and deflected too much of his signal.
Someone was running towards him. Nobody ran here. This was the cloistered part of Rouvele, a quiet place of perpetual contemplation usually populated only by those in holy orders, and the Halu-Masset was here because nobody would dare enter the area, let alone risk Esmos’s retribution by attempting an assassination. But an assassin was the first possibility that came to mind.
Nir-Tenbiku reached inside the drape of his tunic to find his weapon. But then the echo-image resolved into a more familiar shape and his eyes confirmed it was only Bas Ayin, his aide. Bas slowed to a very fast walk as he approached him, trying to recover some dignity, but it was clear from his panting that he was agitated.
“Excellency,” he said. “We’ve intercepted an emergency beacon.” All his arms were twitching. “It’s from the Controller of Procurement. Excellency, I fear he might be dead by now. And he found something shocking.”
Bas held out his personal recorder. Whatever the message said, he’d thought it was too dangerous to risk sending it over a network even on friendly territory. Nir-Tenbiku took the device and touched it to unfold its display.
It was certainly from Gan-Pamas. He’d located the stolen ship, which he only referred to as the object, but he was in trouble.
‘I’m now marooned on a planet at the above coordinates beyond Kugin Gate Four, which appears uninhabited except for a military outpost of a previously unknown civilisation. As I send this, their troops are searching for me. My teerik killed one of their females and was shot dead himself.’
Nir-Tenbiku had to read it twice to take it in. Gan-Pamas was unlikely to make a mistake about a new sentient species in the sector. How could they be unknown? The location was some way outside the Kugin Mastan, but it was still hard to hide a spacefaring civilisation, which these beings had to be if they’d acquired the prototype ship. Nir-Tenbiku read on, skipping over detail about the problems with the teerik and pouncing on the next disturbing word and skimming the bad news.
