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The Tabisee secured the air bike in a container, then pulled me inside the space with them and closed it up.
We shifted.
Humans don't use teleportation much; the tech is expensive and requires a huge investment in infrastructure. But even with my head in a sack, I recognized the twitch in my gut when I stepped through a fold in space. It was a flicker, meaning the shift was brief. We were still planetside, in the same general area. The air remained bone-cold and dead.
We walked on a surface that muffled our footsteps, then passed through a door into an enclosed space and I felt the stomach-churning drop of an elevator. We followed a short hallway to a small room, where they left me sitting on a hard chair at a table. During the whole time, my escort stayed silent.
They also forgot to remove the hood and cuffs.
I was angry and confused. The Tabisee were supposed to be Earth Alliance's closest allies. They claimed to have nearly as many diplomatic problems with the Endar as we did—yet they were apparently giving them direct access to their ships!
And why were they treating me as if I was some lowlife slinker?
Despite all the tension, the burst of activity in planetary gravity after my time in a medical recovery tube was taking its toll. I drifted off into exhausted sleep until the hood was whisked away.
My escorts moved past me to take up positions behind my chair, while a third, new Tabi paused just inside the doorway. He wore the requisite black leather that seemed to universally scream security. Three thin, blue enameled rings piercing the lower lobe of his right ear identified him as a captain in the Tabisee Planetary Force.
Right now those ears were turned out and flat, pressing back as close to his head as they could fit.
Not happy.
"Human." The High Jerak had radiated less hostility than this Tabisee captain as he walked over to lean on the table. I didn't bother to look down when I heard metal click on metal. Who was going to tell the man in charge his claw caps were illegal? Instead, I glanced at the nametag on his chest. It was in Tabisee, but my software told me this was indeed Mathet.
Unhappy Captain Mathet Waa Silvec.
"Why are you here?"
"Can I have some water?" I croaked. Some forms of self-preservation took precedence over others.
His eyes flicked past me and a bottle of clear fluid thumped on the table beside me. He watched silently while I struggled to open the container with my tightly lashed wrists. When I finally wrangled the cap off, I chugged half the water. It was as warm as spit, but it kick-started my brain.
I set the bottle down and held up my cuffed hands. "The last I heard, our people were allies." I felt a sudden twinge of wariness: on the frontier "allies" sometimes only counted for as long as someone was useful and whether the current location was isolated enough to dump a body without detection.
"Allies?" His hand lashed out. The bottle bounced off the wall, spraying water from the gashes where his claws caps ripped it.
Okay, that got my attention. I carefully took my arms off the tabletop and put them in my lap.
"The EA can't go through the process like everyone else? You people always have to get ahead of things—try to get some advantage!" He leaned forward again, putting his hands in the place where my elbows had previously rested. "Well, the EA has miscalculated this time. We will not put our empire at risk because you are impatient."
"Whoa." Things were getting way out of hand when people started talking at the level of empires. "The EA's got nothing to do with me being here," I said. "And I didn't ask your people to yank me out of the air, or to cuff and drag me here. I was doing fine on my own."
"You were wandering in a secured Endar warehouse." I recognized the ear position from Saura as he settled into a chair across from me. It said 'Vivi, can you really be that stupid?'
Endar warehouse? Okay. Maybe I was not doing as well as I thought. But his people had been there, too. Which, if that was true, gave me another reason to distrust these Tabi. The EA sure as hell didn't let other species wander around our secured warehouses.
Between Endar access to Tabisee ships, Tabisee access to Endar warehouses, and my cuffed wrists, my best action was to break off this contact fast. Unfortunately, sitting at a table in cuffs and surrounded by bad attitude limited my options.
"I assure you, any trespass was unintentional. If you point me toward a door, no one will ever know our paths crossed. There are things I need to attend to."
He stared at me as if some strange creature had crawled up from the primordial muck into the chair across from him. "Who are you?"
At last, a question, under Whooex conventions of a hostile situation, I could answer. "Vivi Zant, captain of the Thief's Hand, deepspace commercial cargo freighter light class, port of registry Mandra—-"
"A commercial ship captain without wetware," he said flatly. Apparently, somewhere along the way someone had scanned my left arm and noticed my lack of critical tech. "Does the Earth Alliance think we are stupid?"
I was having a hard time with the missing wetware, too. "If the EA sent me I would have wetware. But, no; a Ritto-ssa ship pulled me out of a deepspace accident and brought me here. The Xix kindly put my body through rejuv to recover my left arm. They didn't restore my wetware."
Yeah, I sounded bitter. It didn't matter. I could sit and argue with Captain Mathet Waa Silvec or move on to other things I needed to do. "You've got my permission to do a retinal scan if you want to confirm my identity."
He nodded, and the male guard stepped up to brace my head while the female passed a scanner over my eye. They held their positions as the information transferred from the scanner to the peripheral feed in the corner of their captain's eyes.
I was not worried about the bounce telling him I was ex-military and that I had some heavy-duty hardware inside my head. I was concerned with it linking my idents with their wayward little astrogator.
My shipskins worked efficiently to pull the sweat off my body as I waited.
"Captain Zant, or whoever you are," the ears had risen a little, but they remained in the danger zone. The guards released me and stepped back. "Why are you here?"
Not for whatever reason he suspected, for sure.
Should I tell him about Saura? No. Not if I had an ounce of hope that I could get someone else to help me. If I told the Tabi and they even believed me, they would recover her back and punish her for her failure to return home, ending our partnership. "I'm looking for someone." And, while I sat here arguing with a supposed ally, the kid was out there somewhere, moving ever further out of my reach.
"Are you insane?"
"No." Odd question. "Why?"
"Your people could have asked us to do a search." He leaned forward, his copper eyes narrowing. "Unless the EA is working behind our back. Which we would consider a serious breach of trust."
"No!" I didn't want to create an incident with our closest ally. "I swear. I woke up here after a station accident!" I softened my tone, to reduce the level of stress in the room. "My internal feeds aren't working. I have no idea where I am."
"You don't know where you are, but you claim to be looking for someone?"
Put that way, it did sound questionable.
He leaned back without breaking his stare and a chill of foreboding crept over me. Of course, there was an array of instruments beyond this room trained on me, trying to interpret every flicker of my responses, down to the cellular level.
"Earth Alliance would never jeopardize their current opportunity by sending someone as incompetent as you to the Moneyworld," he said.
"The what?" My brain did a stumble. Not good. Not good. There were two things forbidden on the Moneyworld: telepaths and Humans. Unless we had gained membership while the Hand carried us to Idwal...?
But, no. The High Jerak said I was an illegal presence, and Mathet had just said 'current opportunity', so the EA had not achieved membership yet.
And here I was...
Shit! "That's not possible." Why in the hell would the Ritto-ssa bring me to the Moneyworld? Anger, born of panic, warmed me. "Is this some elaborate joke? Fool the Human? What? Are you studying my reactions?"
Mathet cut me off with the flick of a finger. "Who knows you are here?"
"The Zeeks," I said. "The Ritto-ssa crew who brought me here. Some Endar—"
I could have bounced a meteorite off his ears they went so rigid. "The Endar are aware you are here?"
"I talked to them—though the word 'talked' hardly applies. They put me on a ship to send me off world. I escaped."
He blinked. "You escaped?"
"Some guy calling himself High Jerak Seok tried to question me, then he ordered two of his people to stick me in a cryo unit on an outbound freighter. I got off."
"You—" His whole posture said he was having trouble with my story. At least he didn't shut me down. "How?
"I pulled the power pack on the auto-attendant before it sealed me in a SAC and dropped down a cargo loading chute as it detached from the ship."
He looked past me at the guards. "Find out what ships left the Endar pad in the past two days."
Endar? Nice try. "I can save you the trouble. The High Jerak called it the Obega."
"Impossible!" Captain Mathet Waa Silvec's irises actually blazed brighter gold, a reaction I had only seen once with Saurubi, when some pirates ambushed us on what we mistakenly thought was an abandoned space junk. Several of them had died seconds later. "If EA intelligence is that poor, we should rethink our alliance with you."
Back to that again. "He said—"
"The Obega is a Tabisee ship!"
"Yeah, I know." Which begged the question: if the Endar and Tabisee had access to each other's ships and warehouses what else did they share? As he said, maybe we should rethink our alliance. "And you picked me up in a Tabisee warehouse."
"We picked you up in an Endar warehouse," he snapped. "Access to storage beneath the spaceport is exclusive to assigned Star Association field areas. It's impossible for you to access an Endar warehouse from a Tabisee ship."
"Your people were there—"
"We were running a stealth operation. Which you compromised."
I hoped he didn't expect me to apologize for that. As for the exclusive access to warehouse thing, I only had his word on it. "This High Jerak told my Zeek attendant he was putting me on the Tabi ship, Obega."
"Check on the status of the Obega," he ordered the guards.
He was making the argument that I had not been on a Tabi ship sound pretty damn convincing.
A Human on an Endar Primacy ship. The thought left me chilled and nauseous. Had I been destined for some Endar lab, for dissection or experimentation if I hadn't escaped down the loading tube?
"It left yesterday, ser," the female reported.
There was a long moment of silence.
"If you came here injured," Mathet was not done with my story yet, "and you don't know where you are, how can you be looking for someone?"
Good question. "There was a Human child on the Ritto-ssa ship. I saw her slip off when they carried me out. She's very young—"
"There is no Human child on this world," he interrupted.
"There was no Human child," I corrected. "There is now. I saw her leave. I need to find her."
"Humans are forbidden on Moneyworld. Do you think the Endar would waste any time blowing it into a major incident if they found one here? They would instantly try to link the Tabi Empire into a conspiracy with the Earth Alliance. In fact, I find it strange they did not use you to do that very thing. But then," cold amusement pulled up a corner of his lip, "it sounds as if they had other plans for you."
Bastard.
I forced myself to focus on the brighter side of the discussion. "If no one has reported seeing her, she's out there."
"Or she is dead."
"No!"
"How long were you at the Xix medical facility?"
"Regen for a Human arm takes ninety days." Said aloud, it did sound like a long time for a small child to survive on its own.
"Well, then." He shrugged.
He could be right; she might not have survived. Or she could be out there right now, wandering, cold, hungry, and scared. That was a problem for me. 'Dead' I could accept. I could walk away, sad but intent on finding another way to save Saurubi. 'Might be alive', I could not walk away from. I had lived inside the slave trade. I knew about the lowlifes lurking out there, waiting to prey on the helpless. Besides, I had to talk to her. She knew who had attacked her ship and tried to kill us—who had ripped my partner, my ship, and my way of life away from me.
The water and the information were finally working to engage my brain. I realized I had a bigger problem now than when I walked into this room with a bag over my head. These Tabisee were not my allies. On this world, they couldn't afford to be. By Whooex Union law, I was an illegal presence in the heart of the Whooex economy. These three put their Empire at risk of trade sanctions by even talking to me.
And I was putting the future of EA membership at risk by being here. Everyone knew the Endar had an iron grip on security on the Moneyworld. It was one of the ways they had blocked our admission to its commercial markets for one hundred and sixty years. They held power, and they used it to exert their agenda.
Rumors abounded in the bars on our Outer Rim—how members either went with the Endar way of thinking or suffered the consequences. I'd asked a Ritto once over a drink: With more than twenty species in the Whooex Union, why didn't they join together against the Endar? Had they never heard of safety in numbers?
He had quivered with amusement. "That is what we like about Humans. You stand alone and shout at the universe. You give us hope. The Endar hate you for that same reason. We fear you will lose because of it; the rest of us are unable to cross the line to stand with you."
Unable or unwilling?
So many innocent people would suffer if the Tabi Empire turned me over to the powers controlling security on this world.
There comes a point when you smack up hard against the wall of reality. I'd had plenty of time to consider my personal situation while I wandered the warehouse. Without my wetware, I was a waste of air, a scrub doomed to a life of indentured servitude when I got back to EA space. I could curse the MoMo and the Frairy every day for the rest of my miserable life, but the odds of recovering my tech were stacked against me. It meant the odds were stacked against Saura, too. If I didn't get back to Idwal, she would die. We had not linked the Hand into Idwal's massive power grid. Knowing nothing of their alien system had made it too risky. Now, when the batteries on our ship went dead, the power to the SAC would die. That alone would not have been bad, but the Hand, attached to the station, would pass through the blaze of Idwal's sun with every rotation, raising the ambient temperature inside the ship too high to protect life inside an unpowered SAC.
"I want to talk to someone in your diplomatic service. Someone in charge."
Mathet leaned back and crossed his arms again.
"All right. Let me talk to the Ritto-ssa. I have to find out what happened—" I tried again.
"Impossible."
"Then you talk to them. There's—"
"Are you stupid? We can't talk to the Ritto-ssa about a Human we cannot even know exists! The Endar already accuse Tabisee of collaborating with you because our governments are allies. Now they'll be watching our activities twice as close as before."
"This is important."
"So important the Earth Alliance is willing to jeopardize everything, including the relationship with its closest ally—would risk even destroying its closest ally—for it?"
"No! But it's not—"
He looked as if he wanted to gut me.
I wasn't giving up on finding the kid, but I sure as hell wasn't going to let it kill Saurubi. I couldn't get back to Idwal, but her people could. They might punish her for not returning home after her termination of duty with the EA, but at least she would be alive.
"There's more to this situation." I took a deep breath and plunged into my story, referring to Saurubi only as my partner. I wanted them to realize someone needed rescuing before I told them who it was. I also left out any details on the MoMo and the Frairy. The clown-duo was my problem—to be resolved personally.
"You abandoned your partner. How does this concern the Tabi Empire?"
"I didn't abandon her! She was on an upper level of the facility with our ship when the ring section blew. She made it to a SAC. I know she did! The blast threw the kid and me out into open space, where the Ritto-ssa found us and pulled us out of the dark. But she's still out there and she needs help!"
"Spacers attacked in a disputed area of space where they had no legal right to be." He shrugged again. "It sounds as if it's an issue for the power in charge of that sector."
His callous attitude twisted my insides. "My partner is Tabisee," I said.
"No!" He grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall. The cold metal of his claw tips bit into my flesh. "You blunder into a bad situation and now you want us to clean up your mess! You think you can manipulate us?"
"Ser," the female guard spoke up softly. "You may not want to kill her yet."
I made a choking sound of agreement.
The captain's grip on my throat tightened. "Why, Shoff? Tell me why, and it had better be good."
"There may be some truth in what she says."
Darkness crept into the edges of my vision.
"For reasons of deniability, I cannot forward this to you. You understand," she added.
Ears tilting out in disgust, Mathet flung me back into the chair and went to join his people in staring at the female's feed while I took the time to catch up on my oxygen intake.
Mathet came back and settled into the chair across from me. Everything about him had gone unreadable. "What do you want from us, Human?"
"Just save my partner," I rasped. "Tell me you'll do it and show me a door. I'll be gone and you'll never hear from me again."
"No," he said. "I don't think so."
The bag slammed back over my head.