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Elys came awake with Taia’s enormous glove fingers gently fastened on her upper arm, holding her steady while her body lurched away from the wall she’d been leaning on. That horrid noise that kept waking her up was still echoing...
No, Taia hadn’t been in that cell. This was Vatirah’s ship. Taia’s CRU napped in their armor all around her.
“Elys?” Taia kept her hold on Elys’s arm like she worried Elys might fall over, which was a reasonable concern. “Did you have a bad dream?”
Elys covered a yawn with her free arm while memories of their escape from Krebs’s ship coalesced in her brain. Vatirah was nowhere in evidence, for which Elys was grateful, and she felt a little less like she was about to melt into the floor than she had when she came onboard. “What’d I miss?”
“You’re coming home to Alyansa with us.” Taia smiled, although she still looked worried. “Vatirah accepted the money and the CRU’s ready to protect you if she tries to back out on our arrangement. You’re going home.”
The last thing Elys remembered was Taia offering Vatirah an absurd amount of money for Elys’s freedom. Still, the Republic would pay, however slowly it chose to do so. Alyansa lacked that reputation.
Elys shivered. There was still time for Vatirah to sell all the Alyansans out. The ones here, and the ones back on Mayari, if they couldn’t interpret the information Krebs had given them.
“Do you have access to the ship’s course?” Elys asked.
“The commanders do.”
So if Vatirah was taking them somewhere else, the CRU would know. Unless Vatirah gave the unit commander a made-up course, the way she’d created that trail for the for the Republic ship to follow.
Elys tapped the unit commander’s arm. “Could you share the current course with me, please?” Not that she knew what the course should look like.
“Sure thing,” the commander said. Elys accepted an invitation to the CRU’s shared conversation, where the commander dropped the course a moment later.
Just like that. As easily as the mediators had risked their lives to rescue Elys from a miserable situation in Republic space, twice. “Thank you,” Elys said to the unit commander, and then more loudly, “Thank you, everyone.” The mediators who were awake offered nods and of-courses. To Taia, Elys added, “How exactly did you end up in the same place as Vatirah, anyway?”
“She was tracking you — she won’t say how, and we have all asked multiple times because Off-World Affairs wants to know — and we were following Krebs’s ship. We contacted her once we came in range, explained your situation, and asked for her help. She had a much better plan for getting on and off the Orefield than we did, and her ship would look less threatening to the Republic crew than ours, so we joined her here.”
“You just... Talked her into cooperating.”
“It’s my job.” Taia proudly emphasized her grasp of Republic terminology. “It helped that we stopped her from unknowingly breaking into an unmarked Republic military vessel, which she wouldn’t have gotten paid for. That seems to be something she cares very much about.”
“Yeah, that could’ve been bad.” Elys shuddered at how much worse it might’ve been if SHRIKE hadn’t taken control of the Republic weapons on Krebs’s ship.
“But we’re stuck here for a while,” Taia said apologetically. “The Off-world Affairs ship is still hours away. Vatirah said there’s a bathroom through that hallway and in the door on the left, if you need it.”
Elys found it, locked the door behind her, and used her pickup to turn all the lights off. The complete darkness felt like a comforting barrier between Elys and the days of bright light in her cell.
She felt her way through relieving herself and throwing up. This sanitizer flashed blue and green status lights, unlike the one in the cell. For some reason, it dispensed a lime scent to prove it was working.
That scent, as much as Taia and the armored mediators clattering around outside the door and the ship’s slight vibration beneath her feet, made this moment feel real. A sob caught her by surprise and shook her. She wasn’t in the Republic’s custody anymore.
And she’d die before Krebs got a chance to arrest her again. Even if he had held back essential information that the Alyansans needed to teach the city and the citizens how to defend themselves, Off-world Affairs had other people they could send for it. Elys’s job was done.
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In addition to the list of entertainers Krebs had targeted to change Alyansans’ behavior quickly and drastically, the documents he’d surrendered were filled with other information Alyansa could use. Some of it was encrypted, and Elys had sent that to Nautilus with an invitation to at least determine what kind of encryption had been used. The city could get that far on its own, but Nautilus was capable of enjoying the process.
Elys proposed leaving a copy of everything Krebs gave them on Vatirah’s ship when they left. “Republic citizens should know what their government did,” she explained to Taia’s CRU. “It’d be more believable coming from Vatirah than from us.” The mediators agreed. Elys doubted that the Republic government wanted their people to know anything about what they were doing to Alyansa.
Elys returned her attention to the documents from Krebs, sitting on the floor near Taia with her back to Vatirah’s creepy cage. “If Krebs has been tracking injuries per day and the increase rate over the average, and housing disputes per day, there’s no reason the city can’t track that too. If it’s already tracking those, it needs to start reporting major changes to City Support. It can also incorporate that check into its new warning system for behavioral change trends.”
“Don’t we want to talk people out of following trends like this?” Taia turned her upper body to face Elys, since her armored suit’s seated configuration immobilized the rest of her. “It’s such an avoidable problem!”
“But if the city learns to keep up with them, who do those trends hurt? Just acting on whims isn’t a problem. Krebs organized these trends to cause as much damage as possible without being noticed, and it worked. That’s why I want to make sure he can’t do it again.”
“Won’t the Republic just give Krebs’s project to somebody else? Someone who might do even more damage?”
“Yeah. If they think it’ll work twice.”
“So we stop this from happening again by building an impenetrable defense,” Taia said. “That’s what we CRUs are for. And you’ll be helping the city improve, while the public educators teach Alyansans to think more critically about whose message they’re listening to in their entertainment programs. That should work, right? The next time the Republic tries to confuse the city, we’ll all be ready for them.”
Taia kept talking, but the document Elys had just opened included dates, troop numbers, and specific sections of the Republic military which the government would mobilize to attack Alyansa. It even included a strategy section with positioning, weapons which could and couldn’t damage mediator armor, and timing of attacks. Elys invited Taia to the visualization.
Taia went quiet while she read. “You were right,” she said in a softer voice.
“Yeah. The city can use this to decide how to deploy CRUs, if it comes to this.”
“But... Why?” Taia’s gaze shifted from the digital resources to Elys. “What have we ever done to them?”
“When independent stations refuse their invitations to join them, they take it personally.” Krebs had said something similar, and repeating his words made Elys shudder. She went back to reading, but she didn’t seem to be remembering what she read.
“Elys, I’m sorry, can we stop a minute? You’ve been staring at the same spot on the wall for the past ten minutes.”
“Oh.” That would be why Elys didn’t remember reading much.
“Something seems wrong, since...” Taia took a deeper breath than her others. “What did Krebs do to you?”
Elys would’ve preferred to just pass out and not wake up, but now Taia had asked, and Elys would have to tell her the truth. “Do you know what leovostik omnipirin is?”
Taia frowned. “No. Keep talking, I’ll look it up.”
“Right. Well, Krebs said it’ll kill me.”
“What?” Inside Taia’s helmet, her work face shifted through shock, pain, and then determined focus at a speed Elys envied. “No. He’s wrong. We won’t let it. Tell me everything about it, starting with how he got it into you.”
Elys told her about the water bags, the headaches, the tiredness, and the vomiting even though she didn’t normally get motion sick. Taia added a new document to the shared visualization where she listed Elys’s symptoms. “Someone else can look through all this Republic stuff. City Support should’ve received their copy by now. I’m going to get the city and some doctors to listen to what you just told me, and you’re going to a hospital the minute we’re back in Alyansa. You’ve been to the Port district one. It handles all kinds of off-world conditions every day. And as soon as we’re back on our ship, you’re going to bed.”
“I’m still going to need things to read in bed,” Elys grumbled.
“As long as you’re horizontal, I won’t complain,” Taia said.
Elys leaned against Taia’s massive suit. They wrapped their arms around each other at the same moment, although Taia did so slowly and carefully. “Thank you for letting me do this,” Elys said. “I couldn’t get Krebs to give me any of it without you. You and Alyansa deserve to be left alone if you want to be.”
“You let him think he had complete control of you, all that time,” Taia said. “You should try out for a play or something. You knew I’d take his ship apart to get to you.”
Elys smiled tiredly. “The air would’ve leaked out a lot faster.”
“Don’t joke about that!” Taia squeezed her a little tighter. “That was too close. It’s still too close. We’ll figure this omnipirin thing out, Elys, but you’ve done enough for Alyansa for now, alright? Let us do something for you.”
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Two very uncomfortable days later, Vatirah’s ship reached the Alyansan one. Taia didn’t look alarmed about Vatirah pulling Elys aside while the mediators slowly maneuvered from Vatirah’s ship to the Alyansan one without slamming their armor into the docking umbilical’s walls. Vatirah’s hand closed over Elys’s arm and just about gave her a heart attack.
“Listen close,” Vatirah muttered to Elys. “If you ever fuck up for real...” The umbilical creaked as the mediators traveled through it, obscuring some of Vatirah’s words. “...step off that little rock you’re... I’ll drop you in my cage so fast your head will spin. Got me?”
“Sure.” Elys pulled her arm out of Vatirah’s grip. She was fairly sure Vatirah let her do it.
The umbilical airlock shut behind Elys. It was the only thing that could’ve convinced her Vatirah was letting her go.
The mediators all kept their armor on in the Alyansan ship. As Taia put it, “If Krebs grows some gonads and comes after us with an army, we’ll be ready.”
Elys’s stomach had developed a persistent ache that didn’t feel like any menstrual pain she’d ever had, and she wasn’t bleeding. She didn’t mind staying in the ship’s quarters, in the softest clothes the onboard assembler had material for, to deal with that. Krebs must’ve been telling the truth about the poison.
She kept reading the documents he had given them, huddled in a corner of the already-tiny ship’s galley with Taia in and out of arms’ reach the whole time. There was less new information in there than she’d hoped. What new details she found were no more pleasant than the discoveries she’d already made.
The most infuriating were notes left by people with RIS analyst titles, mocking Alyansa for relying so heavily on the city. “We should try this in Iskamaisanyi, but they’re smarter about what they let their AI do. It won’t work as well there.” As if Alyansa’s hundreds of years of peaceful existence didn’t speak to their intelligence and successfulness on its own.
She read the last of Krebs’s documents when they were about two days out from Alyansa. She forced herself out of bed, breathed through stomach pain like she’d never had before, and staggered a few steps across the room to Taia. Now that she’d taken her helmet off, Taia’s head looked tiny at the top of her armored suit.
“We need to get this information out to everyone,” Elys said.
“What? Sorry, I was talking to the dogs. Bye, babies!” Taia made loud kissing sounds at where, presumably, she saw the visualization of the dogs, then focused on Elys while Elys repeated her observations. “Yes, you’re right. Even if it wouldn’t affect other stations as badly as it’s affected us, the Republic might try something similar on them. They have to be ready. Although, maybe we should wait until we can send the city’s assessment and what it’s doing differently, so they can have the problem and solution at once?”
“Only if the other stations aren’t already under attack,” Elys said. “If they are, they...” She gasped as her stomach twinged with pain. “They need our help now.”
Taia stood from her armored suit’s seated configuration and put her helmet on with a practiced twist. “I’ll recommend that to Off-world Affairs just as soon as I get the medic in here. I’ll be right back.”
The medic examined Elys and determined that whatever was wrong, they weren’t prepared to treat it in the ship’s facilities. They gave Elys something which eliminated the pain and, after a minute, everything else in Elys’s universe.
––––––––
Elys opened her eyes to find Taia leaning over her, with her real face on again. Elys didn’t hurt as much as she did before, but she felt... wrong, still. Under a thin blanket, her abdominal muscles felt too tight against the mattress, like they would’ve hurt if something weren’t stopping them.
“Hey.” Taia looked strangely hopeful. “How are you doing?”
Elys was still exhausted. This might be her last chance to talk to Taia. “I told Krebs I’d...” What had she said? “I’d spy for Alyansa. Leave you, but... I didn’t... I’m sorry.”
Taia smiled sadly. “I don’t think either of us believed you.” So she’d heard more than she’d let on.
Elys wanted to say that she wouldn’t have believed herself either, but her mouth wasn’t forming words right, and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She’d done all she could.