Even after years of working for her, there were times when Liolesa caught Maia off guard.
All right, there were lots of times. This one was just another mark on that particular scorecard. “You want me to buy you a ship? For you, personally?”
“As separate and apart from the ones I’ve requested you purchase for general use, yes, and thank you for that, you’re doing well.” The Queen was still reading the document on her desk—on paper, so something to do with the court. Maia was too polite to look without invitation. “The Visionary is in drydock, and I could use a spare. Besides, if you wish to pick up your Chatcaavan without inciting an unfortunate incident, you will do well to use a private vessel. It would be ill-advised for him to travel through the Alliance unescorted in these times.”
“I… had been worrying about that, but I figured I could call in a favor.”
One of Liolesa’s white brows arched, but she didn’t lift her head from what was occupying her. “Ah so?”
That was the other thing about working for Liolesa. Keeping things concealed from her was hard; worse, keeping things concealed from her made their lives less interesting. Maia had watched the Eldritch Queen-now-Empress do astonishing things with the resources available to her; it made the D-per want to drop everything in her lap to see if she ended up ruling the universe. Wouldn’t that be something. “I have friends in Fleet, from when I worked there. And we just did a lot for them, helping truncate the war. The first war. They’re mindful of that. If I pinged them with a request for a Special Forces or First Voice ship to ferry your latest employee here, they’d respond.”
“Something to keep in mind.” Liolesa unscrewed the cap on her ink bottle and dipped a pen in it. “Nevertheless, you need not call in your vowels when we can sew up both our needs with the one thread. I need more than one personal vessel, particularly since Sediryl will want one of her own, and you need to discharge your errand. Find me something appropriate.”
Maia had used one thread of her attention to look up the unfamiliar word; trust the Eldritch to use some obscure term for an I.O.U. Vowels? Where had that even come fr—right. Naturally. “You’re sure you want me to… buy it outright? I could always do all the shopping and present you with a few options—”
“Ah, but that would require my involvement in the decision! I would prefer to have it handled, and even were you not an excellent judge of these matters, you could become so in a matter of moments.” Liolesa set the first page aside and signed the second. “I trust you, alet. Find me something appropriate.”
Virtual people who were courteously not manifesting in their employer’s room to preserve what little power was being generated in the palace did not have to fight their throats tightening. “What’s my budget?”
“Oh, what I paid for the Visionary. Maybe half again, if you find something superlative.”
“Is that all?” Maia replied, amused, because it was better to be amused than appalled when dealing with her employer.
“Unless you can think of something else?” Liolesa tapped her nib on the blotter to clear the excess ink and returned to writing. Her tone was a bit too demure—that was her impish streak coming out. “Have I not settled enough responsibility on your shoulders today? I could consider a few more tasks worthy of your intellect and resources….”
“God in the stream!” Maia laughed. “No, my lady. Trust me, this is enough.”
“Very good. When you’ve made the purchase, send me the details and then take the ship out. I trust you need no crew.”
“Not for this, no. Though technically I shouldn’t be operating a ship alone…”
“Fortunately you won’t be alone once you take on your passenger! So do so expeditiously. And do try not to be caught at your gallivant. It would be tiresome to have to discuss with the authorities the privileges your Eldritch citizenship confers on you, over and beyond the ones the Alliance is willing to extend.”
“I… beg your pardon?” Maia stammered.
Unperturbed—and serious now—Liolesa said, “Look it up. And good hunting, Maia.”
Which was a definite dismissal from her employer, and a woman she respected. Maia withdrew from the room and did, in fact go hunting. It had never occurred to her that the Empress had drawn up explicit documents about citizenship in her nation, because… what Eldritch had ever needed one? And how many non-Eldritch had ever had the opportunity to immigrate? But Liolesa had, and the documents were rigorous and just and… if she’d had eyes…
But she didn’t. She was just conceptualizing that she was sitting somewhere, staring at her name amid the individuals tagged in the Alliance database as having dual citizenship… one of the only to have that status because they’d been granted Eldritch, rather than the other way around. Just like she was imagining that her eyes were watering. Virtual eyes couldn’t water. They could feel the impulse, as some impossibly complex string of dependencies linked to the self-writing libraries that allowed her to generate feelings. But unless she manifested, she couldn’t be crying.
Well. Nothing for a spate of emotion like retail therapy. Maia gathered herself and started researching.
It was strange, making the run to Selnor alone. Stranger still to dock at Fleet’s orbital base without making excuses for herself. Samson, who even for a D-per had his hands full lately, gave her a sardonic look when she tucked the Peacemaker into the slip. |Should I ask?|
|No, and I’d prefer you not say anything either. Please?|
He sighed. |Fortunately for all of us I have more than enough to do without tattling on you. Is this dragon waiting for you?| A shot of Uuvek, sensibly studying a data tablet in a small cabin rather than exploring the station. This was the safest possible place for the Chatcaava in the Alliance; Fleet had fought alongside the Emperor’s ships to protect Selnor, and the humans in their number had experience with warring sects within the same nation, enough to be blasé about making the distinctions between Chatcaava attacking them and Chatcaava aiding them. The civilians were having far more problems accepting the possibility of neutral dragons, even knowing that allied ones had saved them.
Still, emotions were running far too high to take unnecessary risks, and there were civilian contractors on Fleet’s turf. All it would take was one disgruntled person to generate an international incident.
|Yes, he’s mine. The Eldritch Empress gave him an employment contract, so I’m here to pick him up.|
Samson made a noise Maia would have been hard-pressed to explain to a flesh-and-blood person. Oh, she could have described it: it was a modem handshake, plucked out of Terra’s archives and faithfully reproduced. But describing it didn’t make the connotations any clearer, especially when different handshakes came out at different times. Was it derisive? Amused? The virtual equivalent of clearing your thoughts? |Very busy, your boss.|
|Aren’t we all, lately?|
|Touché. I’ll send him to the dock. And… keep in better touch, will you? I get the feeling we’re going to need it.|
|Me too,| Maia said. |And I will.| She smiled. |At least now I’ve got a proper network link-up from home base.|
|Finally. Don’t know how you managed to survive the dark ages over there.|
|Lots and lots of backups. Thanks, Samson.|
Borrowing the base’s sensors, she could see Uuvek already on his way, bag slung crossways from shoulder to hip—how did that work with the wings? Did they clip it on? Ah, yes, she spotted one near his waist. She withdrew her attention to file her flight plan home and because… she was nervous. She could admit that. What would he think of the Eldritch system? He’d been in the Chatcaavan Navy most of his life, seen worlds far more industrialized than Escutcheon. Would it strike him as backwards? Would she be embarrassed?
Would Sediryl tease her about this line of thought if she knew about it? Maia snorted and adjusted the lights to a compromise between Alliance norm and Chatcaavan, so when he stepped through the airlock it was to something comfortable. And as he’d started learning Universal since meeting the Queen Ransomed, and preferred to practice even if the results were messy and speckled with lapses into Chatcaavan, she greeted him that way. “Hello, alet.”
The Chatcaavan patted the bulkhead absently. “Maia. New ship?”
“Yes! She’s called the Peacemaker. I… didn’t name her, the Empress did. She’s naming all her personal ships after Eldritch Queens—so the Visionary was to honor Jerisa and this one is about Maraesa—and… I have no idea what she’s going to do if she needs a third one because she’s run out of queens.” She was babbling. She should stop babbling. “Anyway, she asked me to buy it for her, since the Visionary is sitting in a repair slip.”
“Very nice. Newer model than the last?”
Maia watched him walk fore and lit the path to guide him to the bridge. “Oh, I had to. I’ve gotten really good at finding good prices on slightly used hardware, but at some point you need to make a statement. You know?”
“Like buying a new warship and naming it ‘Peacemaker’?” Uuvek smirked. “She has a sense of humor, the Eldritch ruler.”
“Oh God yes. You have no idea. You’ll find out. Buckle in, let’s get out of here before something goes wrong.”
“Is that likely?” Uuvek unclipped the strap and dropped his duffel bag in the co-pilot’s chair.
“It’s more likely lately than it would have been in the past, for a lot of reasons, so there’s no use tempting fate.” Maia maintained her communication with the flesh-and-blood people talking her—slowly by her standards—through the Peacemaker’s departure and reached to Samson to tender her farewells. He acknowledged, reminded her that she’d been too much of a shut-in lately, and wished her well. “Better to play it safe. For now anyway.”
Uuvek watched the controls as Maia manipulated them. “I’m surprised people like you don’t handle all ship movement.”
“Even given what we’re capable of there’s not enough of us. There are over half a million ships in Fleet, and only twenty-six D-pers. Besides, there are rules.”
“Rules,” Uuvek said. And smiled. “So, some things really aren’t that different between dragon and alien.”
Maia hesitated. “Well. No. Did you expect otherwise?”
“No. But it is interesting to have a theory validated. I hadn’t had the opportunity previously.”
“You’re about to have plenty,” Maia said, and sent the Peacemaker soaring toward the system limit, where she would be cleared to Well home… and for once, directly. Strange, to no longer observe the Veil, and to abandon the corkscrewing spaghetti string routes that had obfuscated the exact location of the Eldritch system for so long. It disoriented her and she’d only been Liolesa’s employee for about a decade, depending on which calendar you used. She could only imagine what it was like for the Queen’s Tams, who’d been running Eldritch errands for generations. “Last chance to turn back! All right, actually, I can bring you back at any point if you decide to change your mind…”
Uuvek snorted. “I won’t.”
“Then relax. And tell me how you’ve been spending the time since we parted ways.” Watching him pull out his tablet, she finished, “Un…lesssss there’s something you’d rather do more?”
“I have been attempting to find resources on our host system’s language and have found nothing. Is it a military secret?”
God in the stream, what a question. “It was, yes. Now… I’m not sure how that’s going to work, what with the system being more open to foreign trade. So no, there’s no official documentation on the Eldritch language.”
He canted his head. “But?”
“But… I know it.”
“Good. Then I’ll tell you how I’ve been spending my time, and you can start teaching.”
“It’s… not the kind of language you learn overnight—”
In Universal—pointedly, and with a surprisingly good accent—Uuvek said, “I am very good at organizing information for maximum efficiency. That includes language acquisition. Besides, I am motivated.” He tapped the tablet with a clawtip. “Send it here. While I talk.”
“All right. But when your head starts hurting…”
Unperturbed, Uuvek said, “I’ll bang it against a wall until I remember that there are more insurmountable problems."
Maia snickered. “All right. Then… start with what happened after you went back with the Emperor.”
“This is it.”
Uuvek watched the glittering vista spread as they skated toward their orbital assignment. Sitting beside him in one of her more sensible manifested forms, a lilac-coated Seersa, Maia tried not to bite her lip. Unlike an embodied person, she could see every fractional change in his expression through the ship’s internal sensors, and she couldn’t help spying. Would he find it… pedestrian? Disappointing? Backwards?
“I thought there would be less infrastructure given your description.” Uuvek leaned forward and tapped the new station, enlarging it with the claw-swipe motion that Maia had incorporated into the UI to accommodate his habits. “This is a lot more progress than I was expecting. Impressive.”
Impressive! He was impressed? He was impressed! Maia’s ears glowed, literally, and she didn’t mind who noticed. “Isn’t it? That platform was a ship until very recently… the conversion should have taken a third again as long but it’s already a functional station. And they’re doing a superlative job of it—nothing rushed. They’re just working overtime because they care. It’s…” She paused, flicking glitter off her ears. “It’s honestly one of the best things I’ve ever been involved in.”
He nodded, using the quicker Pelted head-bob. It looked better on him than on the Chatcaava who had more slender necks. Maia thought, anyway. “So do we go to this station?”
Maia had sent a request the moment they’d crossed the system limit. “The Empress is… well, an Empress. The earliest we can see her is tomorrow, and that’s probably only because she had a cancellation. They want us to park in orbit while we wait.” She waved a hand at the station. “That’s still a work in progress, so they like to have ships that don’t need a berth to keep clear.”
“Sensible. Any preparation required for this meeting?”
“No,” Maia said. “She’ll use it to evaluate you, give us some marching orders, and then we’ll be done.”
Uuvek was already skimming the database… and frowning. “There is almost nothing about this planet. Even particulars like its gravity rating.”
“Oh… yes, no.” She could sound more flustered. Could she? She could. But he was impressed! That meant he might not regret his decision to stay. “For most of its existence, the Eldritch empire has survived by keeping all its details secret. Location, population, world… all of that. Just gone. Their treaty with the Alliance required the latter to scrub any mention of them from their networks; they wrote a special censor for it. It’s effective, for people with flesh-and-blood minds.”
Uuvek glanced up. “It didn’t work on you?”
“We can read information too fast. The censor can sweep things up instantly by embodied standards, but we can see it anyway.” Her tail twitched, the chime faintly dissonant. “Most of us did internal censor sweeps though, and purged the data the moment we got it. You’re… about to ask why—” Because he’d swiveled his head to eye her. “But none of us knew what that censor program would attempt to do if it figured out that some of the sanctioned information was in us. If it would try to overwrite part of us, and what that would look like. Better to do our own housecleaning.”
“Sensible. Unlike the strategy of protecting a world by trying to deny its existence to an entire settled galaxy.” Uuvek narrowed his eyes at the planet hanging beneath them. “But… it worked.”
“For a long time, yeah.”
“Very unlikely.”
“I know.” Maia considered, added, “Liolesa knew too. From the moment her predecessor decided on the Veil, she knew it was as flimsy as the name. She’s been planning most of her life for what would happen when it got torn.”
“Prescient of her.” He tapped a claw on the back of his data tablet. “I suppose hiding this world would have been easier, given that all this infrastructure is new. Fewer emissions.”
“And until recently there were no real power sources on the ground, either,” Maia said. “People passing through wouldn’t have noticed anything. I don’t know how they got here, even. They must have come on a ship, but no one who knows is talking and…” She shrugged. “I don’t pry. Not with Liolesa. She’s got her reasons for things.”
“But?” He glanced at her. “You do know something.”
“There are some satellites in orbit here that are made of very old materials. With some very old maker’s marks. Like ‘Earth in its early spaceflight days’ old. But… that’s not really knowing things. They’ll tell you themselves—the ones who aren’t embarrassed or ashamed of it, anyway—that they were human once. So…” She spread her hands. “What do I know, in the end, except something that might make me jump to conclusions?”
Uuvek set the tablet down. “You trust this female’s judgment.”
“I do, yes. She’s…” How to describe Liolesa? To someone who hadn’t seen her the way Maia had, that first day they’d met? “She’s very good at the long view.”
Uuvek canted his head. “Rare. For anyone.”
“I know.” She paused. “Is it all right if I say ‘especially for people in bodies?’”
He snorted. “It’s true. Why would it be offensive? Though I am curious if that’s a function of the bodies, or of their longevity.”
“That would mean… your people will have a chance to find out, wouldn’t it?” Maia said. “Did I understand that right? That you can modify yourselves permanently?”
This time Uuvek’s nod was draconic; he was distracted. “We will have another data set to use for comparison. If the Chatcaava don’t destroy themselves navigating the repercussions of those changes.”
“Do you think they will?” She frowned. “Is that why you wanted to leave?”
“I told you why I wanted to leave,” Uuvek said. “That hasn’t changed. The fact that I won’t be at ground zero for the social upheaval is a bonus.” He rose, shook out the stunted wings. “I will rest now. What time is our appointment?”
Maia checked. “Just after dawn, by the capital’s clock. So you have about eleven hours.”
The Chatcaavan’s eyes narrowed again. Thoughtful this time, rather than skeptical. “The clock offset is… how long?”
“Are you asking right now?” Maia replied, wryly. “It shifts throughout the year. But I’ll adjust the onboard clock to local time, if you want to be awake when the planet is. Otherwise, I can keep it set to Alliance Mean.”
Uuvek considered as he walked to the cabin he’d been using. “Find a compromise. We should be awake when most people are, but I like quiet. If I’m awake when the planet’s not, and that coincides with a window where the rest of the galaxy is also awake, that would be useful.”
“Got it. Good night, alet.”
“Good night, Maia.”
She didn’t watch him sleep. At least, not consciously; she remained aware of his vitals through the ship’s sensors. That didn’t count, did it? Flesh-and-blood couples would be aware of that data without snooping. Even friends might fall asleep in the same room and listen to one another’s breathing, the rustle of the mattress as a body shifted on it. And it’s not as if she was focusing on it. How could she, with so much to do? Because—delightfully—there was, finally. Maia manifested herself on the hull of the ship, sitting on it and wiggling her purple toes before sweeping the solar system with her senses. She was simultaneously connected to all the facilities in-system, most of which had changed or were obviously in flux. The Fleet people left behind as attachés had teamed with the Queen’s Tams to start building and deploying a perimeter defense system: lots of recon drones floating around heliopause now, and probably more to come. There was what would become a base on the farthest planet, but was still only a few temporary construction domes; the one on the moon was being rebuilt and was already larger, and Maia enjoyed running her virtual fingers over it and sensing all the lights and heat and activity.
Someone had gotten a manufacturing platform pushed out to the asteroid belt, and while there was only one automated ore collector that was still more than they’d had before.
Of course, orbit now had the station, still unnamed, and all the various satellites. The ships of the new Eldritch navy were on maneuvers below the ecliptic and beyond the farthest planet, but they were furious spots of light and sound to Maia… like the chain of repeater buoys leading back to the Alliance.
There had been times—maybe more often than she’d wanted to admit—that Maia had doubted Liolesa would manage to bring her world into the modern age. The odds had been so high against it. And yet… here she was, surrounded in this, and… it was magic. There was no other explanation for it. She knew many of the embodied expected D-pers to be less mystical, as if the ability to instantly calculate anything should somehow lead people to believe they knew everything. If anything, that ability made her and her peers aware of the limitations of their knowledge. Everyone’s knowledge.
It was a source of endless wonder to Maia. That she should be alive, and that she could stare out into the endlessness of space, and have such long reach and yet not know everything. She could jump the repeaters to a thousand thousand remote sensor platforms, dashing past on satellites or orbiting on ships or strobing off forts or singing on buoys, and use those to see every star between her position now and the edge of known space, and still she couldn’t see the universe as God did. It tickled her, in fact, that the maker of all things could be in the stream, where she and her friends lived, and so far outside it that they couldn’t reach the end of it. Just like it struck her as amazing that she might have finally come into a One of her own. That’s what they called the flesh-and-blood people who could interact with a D-per on a level that didn’t have a logical explanation. Like how Uuvek seemed to know what she was feeling when she knew, to the millisecond and exact frequency, that she wasn’t delaying her responses or varying her vocal pitch. There were more of The Ones than any D-per had expected; all of them were precious, and most of them tended to have that relationship with a specific D-per.
Maia was pretty sure she was the first person to have an alien One, though.
She still wondered about his motivations for leaving. Maybe the One relationship worked both ways, but she didn’t think he was divulging everything. That was his right, of course; D-pers were fanatical about privacy, and she wasn’t going to pry. But she did wonder.
She stayed on the hull, watching the stars and listening to message traffic, answering requests and helping out where she could. And she listened to him breathe, regular as the thrum of a Well drive.
“You didn’t say she was coming here for this interview,” Uuvek commented, watching Maia flutter around the table.
“I didn’t know!”
“Then… she didn’t tell you until very recently?” Uuvek held out a hand to bar her from trying to rearrange the cups again.
“Ten minutes ago?”
He chuckled, and that surprised Maia into looking at him.
“I like it,” the Chatcaavan said. “It reminds me of the Emperor, who also does unexpected things. It keeps people sharp.”
“But I didn’t buy a tea service!” Maia said, understanding now how some of her embodied friends might wail their dismay. She sat on her inclination to do so, but she was shedding dark glitter in simulated distress.
“Didn’t you buy her this ship?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s a good ship.” Uuvek tapped the deck with one booted heel. “You’ve kept it clean. Neat. It looks good. Why do you need a specific set of cups when you’ve brought a better gift?”
“Because all her ships should have tea services!”
“So? Let her provide one.”
Maia stopped short because… maybe she could have procured one from the Eldritch capital? There had to be a merchant who did porcelain, even in such a low-technology culture, because ancient humans made porcelain long before the automation achieved by factories. Or maybe grubbing with clay was beneath most Eldritch? Where had all the dinnerware on Escutcheon come from?
A chime sounded through the ship—the warning that the Pad was connecting to another, authorized Pad—and Maia squeaked. “I’ll bring her!”
“I’ll come too.”
“But,” Maia began, because she could stay to argue with him while splitting an instance to manifest in the Pad room, “it would be more decorous—”
“She’s my employer now. It would be appropriate to greet her.”
Maybe he was right. She didn’t stop him as he strode down the passageway, because she was busy hovering over the Pad connection because this would be the absolute worst time for the Pads to find some way to malfunction and trap someone in some disconnected wormhole forever. But no, Liolesa stepped over it, and as usual she made her anachronistic clothes feel like a timeless fashion statement rather than an indication that she didn’t belong in a modern world.
Her eyes, Maia noted, were sparkling. Naturally, the Empress was enjoying her jaunt away from the palace. Maia wondered if she’d even informed anyone she’d left. “Maia-alet. How good to see you back. No problems, I would assume?”
Maia offered the Seersa curtsey of pressed palms and bob, setting her fur to scintillate in silver over the purple and lilac because, after all, she was a royal retainer. “None at all, Lady. Here’s Uuvek, of whom we’ve spoken.”
Uuvek, having just stepped into the room, made his own bow, wings tilted as far forward as their stunted vanes allowed. “Do I call you ‘Lady’, the way Maia does?” he said, in very presentable Universal.
Interested, Liolesa said, “That will do, yes.”
“Shall I show you to tea?” Maia asked, nervous.
“That does sound pleasant. But first, I think… a tour of this vessel you’ve bought me. Which unless I’m mistaken is rather grander than the last I sent you off in.”
“Well... I thought it would be handy? To have something a little larger? In case you have to travel with… you know… entourage?”
Liolesa laughed. “Oh, Maia. As if I will take you to task for it. Enough, and show me this marvelous toy.”
Maia was cognizant of how little free time a queen had, much less an empress—literally so, because she had access to Liolesa’s schedule, and could check to the minute how much time had been set aside for this jaunt: forty-five minutes. It was tempting to rush the tour, but… if Liolesa wanted to curtail it, she’d say so. Maia exhaled, her fur darkening as a sign of the calm she’d decided to embrace, and swept her hand toward the hatch. “This way, Lady.”
A proper tour would have taken hours. The Peacemaker was ‘grander’ than the Visionary, which had been designed as a single-person ship. Maia had found this one hiding in the inventory of a contractor who converted mothballed Fleet vessels into private yachts, and the moment she had she’d pounced on it. Armed yachts weren’t unusual in the Alliance, though it was considered more of a status symbol than something to be taken seriously. But those vessels were built to civilian standards and then outfitted with weapons after the fact. They didn’t have a warship’s hull, shielding, engines; they didn’t have the redundancy and overbuilding the typical Fleet ship accepted as necessary and acceptable.
For now, with the Alliance still reeling from the shock of the attacks, that contractor had more inventory than he had places to dock them; he had, in fact, been considering selling it all off at cost and going into some more lucrative business, which meant Maia had been able to pluck up her first choice for far cheaper than she’d hoped. She’d told him—before closing the deal—to stick it out a few more months; she fully expected the Pelted to shake off their numbness, but the fear would linger, and drive them to take security more seriously.
So she’d brought home a ship that could support fifty crew, without compunction over the price or the grandness of it. She could fly it on her own, after all, and while it would have been handy to have crew she’d also picked up a complement of robotic assistants she could deploy if necessary. But she hadn’t really thought about how it would seem to anyone else until she’d started leading Liolesa through it.
“And this is the first deck alone?” Liolesa said when they’d finally reached the bridge.
“It is, yeah.” Maia thought about blushing, sat on the impulse. “I know it seems large…”
“It is large,” Uuvek said behind them. He’d been strolling in their wake, listening to Maia’s patter in interested silence. “But a useful symbol. This would be the ship your warships escort to summits. Your last one, the one you use to sneak out of town.”
Liolesa laughed merrily. “And do you suppose I do such a thing, alet?”
“Yes,” Uuvek said, unconcerned.
“Wait, you do?” Maia asked. “But you hardly know her!”
“A good ruler does not allow their people to chain them,” Uuvek said. “They need to be able to fly.”
Maia stared at him—could stare at him, because the sensors allowed her to pretend she wasn’t. She’d known Uuvek for months now, and had never heard anything like that out of him. He was so… pragmatic. Very focused on systems, and processes; very keen on data and experimentation. The most she’d ever heard him say about poetry involved gently mocking the Knife for his interest in old scriptures.
“I’m afraid I have a kick in my gallop,” Liolesa said with a regret that Maia knew was entirely fake. “Alas. Fortunately I am forced to wear skirts so broad no one notices. But come… I see you’ve set out refreshments. Let us talk.”
“Oh, good,” Uuvek said. “Now you’re going to tell me what you want me to do.”
“Not in the slightest,” Liolesa said. “Now you’re going to tell me what you think you’d like to do, and I will tell you if I’m willing to pay you to do it.”
…and it went surprisingly well, given how nervous Maia had been over what the Empress would think of the Chatcaavan who’d demanded to work for her. Uuvek had begun by explaining what he knew about the Eldritch situation, politically and technologically, and since he and Maia had been discussing it since he’d told her he wanted to come with her, his understanding was accurate and fairly complete. He also described its weaknesses and opportunities in ways Maia was sure the Empress hadn’t heard yet, because Maia herself hadn’t… but then, what Chatcaavan had they imported to make such an assessment?
After he’d finished, Liolesa had started asking questions, and Maia had leaned back to watch them go at it with pleasure, holding the real cup in her hand but simulating the tea so she could appear to drink without having to deal with actual fluid. The D-per was so used to thinking of Uuvek as a data security specialist because of the work he’d been doing during the war that she’d forgotten he came out of the military as a logistics specialist. And if there was one thing a budding society needed, particularly a budding technological one, it was an understanding of logistics.
“Well,” Liolesa had said in conclusion, patting her lips with her napkin, “I think we shall get on well together, quite. Begin at once with those itemized proposals and we’ll proceed from there.”
“Yes, Lady,” Uuvek said.
“Shall I engage housing for you on-planet?”
“Do I need it?” he’d said, frowning.
“He can stay here with me,” Maia said quickly.
“Then let me know if you change your mind. Aletsen, a pleasure. Message me when you deem it prudent.”
And that was that. They’d escorted her to the Pad and she’d vanished over it, and then… they were alone.
“A fascinating female,” Uuvek said, sounding puzzled, and intrigued.
“You’re surprised?” Maia asked, tentative.
“Yes. Only because it’s rare to find an agile mind in anyone’s body. Much less someone from an antiquated society.” Uuvek twitched his head, a flinch she associated with him moving on from a thought. “That was good. I will enjoy working here.”
“There’s certainly enough to do.”
“Yes. I’ll begin now, in fact.” He cast an eye toward her. “Should I have moved into quarters on-planet?”
“What? No. I actually think it’s safer for you up here, honestly. For now, anyway.” Maia wrung her hands. “Also, I like your company.”
“Good. I like yours.” He vanished into the block set aside as a library—a literal one that Maia had started filling with books she’d ordered, because an Eldritch ship should have physical books, and because she’d loved the juxtaposition of the shelves with their antique paperbacks alongside the floor-to-ceiling flexglass windows overlooking the stars.
He would, she knew, become engrossed in his work. Which would give her time to prepare her surprise… the one she hadn’t even realized she wanted to offer, but now knew she had to.
“That looks good,” Maia said later, when Uuvek stretched and shoved the displays aside, dissipating them. “The manufacturing pipeline here is…”
“Grossly underdeveloped?”
“I was going to say ‘nonexistent’ but that would have been an exaggeration.”
Uuvek snorted. “Yes. If not as much of one as anyone should hope.”
“Did you stop for dinner?” Maia said.
“Not specifically. I set a timer to force myself to stop what I’m doing. Do something else for a while. A change in perspective. The mind sits in the body, and a healthy body is required for a healthy mind. I will exercise, and then eat.”
“And then after that, maybe I can help. With the change in perspective.”
“All right.” That was it. Just accepting it. She thought he was content; everything the Alliance had on Chatcaavan body language was suspect, since it had been compiled by the original ambassadors to the Empire, all of whom had been very wrong about what they were seeing. Lord Lauvet Imthereli’s amendments were new, but not as lovingly detailed as those initial impressions garnered from the Pelted who had done their best to interpret the throneworld culture, and failed. They hadn’t even made it clear that they were gathering data on a specific culture, and that others might have different sets of non-verbal phatic expressions. But… her sense of him as contented lingered, and she kept an eye on him as he went through the martial exercises he must have learned in the Navy, and then poked at the genie until it presented him with something that constituted a balanced meal for a Chatcaavan. More protein-and-fat-centric than the typical Pelted meal, but the dragons did eat vegetation. Some holdover from other species they’d assimilated? God in the stream, but the revelations about how their species came about had fascinated Maia.
Over his meal, he handled mail—a message from the Knife, or, Maia guessed she’d have to say, the Knife that was; Uuvek was addressing him now as Liaison. That male was now gallivanting around the border with Laniis Baker and the rest of the Special Forces Hold 22, and Maia was dying to know how that had worked but hadn’t asked Samson yet. Maybe they’d attached Laniis as a separate contractor, on loan from Fleet Regular? And had someone annotated her file in the Assignments database to ensure she always ended up with the Chatcaavan alongside?
What a strange pair those two made. Good, though. Uuvek was right: sometimes radical shifts in perspective made for breakthroughs.
Speaking of which.
“I’m ready,” Uuvek said. “What now?”
“Do you trust me?”
The Chatcaavan cocked his head, staring overhead at the source of her voice. “Obviously.”
“You’ll see why I asked. Head to the shuttle bay.”
He strode down the passageway, unhurried and apparently unconcerned. She wondered how long that would last, or if he wouldn’t show any expression at all when she made her request. She’d already opened the bay door, so when he arrived he stared at the stars and made an interrogative noise. “Nice view.”
He had no idea. Maia manifested herself beside him and handed him a telegem. “Take this and come with me.”
“With you… where?” he said, but followed her all the way to the field. Maia touched it—or more accurately, she made herself to appear to touch it, because it was easier to use holographs for this, rather than solidigraphs. As Uuvek peered at her, she passed out of the field and floated just outside, her hair and tail releasing a stream of glitter in the direction of the solar wind.
Then she held out a hand to him. “Step out.”
Both his brow ridges arched, eyes widening. She waited for him to point out that he couldn’t breathe vacuum, or make some humorous comment, or ask her if she was sure. She was even prepared to ask him—again—if he trusted her.
But he didn’t say anything. He just met her eyes, then looked down at the deck and his booted feet on the safe side of the force field.
And then he stepped through it.
Cautiously, yes. But without hesitation. And with strict attention to his surroundings, so maybe he perceived the shiver of light that rimmed the field that Maia was extruding around his limb to accommodate it. He didn’t have to see the evidence to feel it, though, because the air Maia was keeping around him was the same temperature as the shuttle bay.
When he withdrew the limb, she started to object, but he said, “This will be easier at the edge of the bay, where I can grip the side.” And suited actions to words. At the end of the bay he once again stepped forward, completely this time, bringing both limbs outside… and with a breath, ducked his entire body outside, with only his fingers clinging to the hull. Maia built the bubble around him as fast as possible, and this… this was one of the few things that could strain her resources. But it was worth it, for the shock on his face, and the wonder.
She tapped the side of her face, and he brought the telegem out of a pocket. “You can walk on the hull,” she said, once he’d set it in place. “I can contour the bubble so that it’s heavier toward the ship. It’ll keep you from floating off. Or you could just flap your wings.”
He looked at her.
“The ship can project fields,” she continued. “It’s how a lot of its various propulsion systems work, and of course, the plow that keeps debris from pitting the hull, or worse, when we’re underway. I’m just taking creative liberties with it. She’s nicely overpowered for a yacht, she can handle it.”
Maia didn’t mention the power she’d borrowed from one of the solar collectors, since she’d requested that expenditure and received permission. What she was doing… it had been pioneered by a D-per using a Fleet ship’s resources. A larger one. And if that particular relationship hadn’t ended well, still, now and then D-pers had been known to facilitate a sky walk for one of their Ones… or use it to rescue people.
“And if I lose control?”
“Don’t worry,” Maia said. “I’ll tractor you back in. Most of my cycles right now are working on this. I’m not going to let anything happen.”
He surveyed the vista, craning his head in a slow circle, floating near the hull. Then, carefully, tried his wings.
Maia had made assumptions about those wings. Not calculations—those had been easy enough. She could measure their length, their density, their area, the muscle mass in the wing arms and back, and knew he could fly with them on most worlds the Chatcaava preferred. Not well, maybe, but enough to get by in a society that built all its towers assuming people would be flying up them to reach their ingresses. What she’d been assuming was how it had affected him, to be a less than adroit flier in a culture that valued wings so highly.
All those assumptions she saw validated, in the caution with which he tried this new environment. No doubt some part of that was the concern that he was visibly unprotected while in vacuum, but she didn’t think that would explain the hesitation in the movements of those extra limbs. He wasn’t used to using his wings. Even the Queen Ransomed, who hadn’t been able to fly for most of her life, had used her pinions more: for gestures, for emphasis, even just idly, the way most embodied people might twitch an arm, or wiggle to work kinks out.
Maintaining that bubble, and keeping the tractor on it so it wouldn’t spin away, was one of the most computationally stringent things Maia had ever done. But it was worth it, to watch the ungainly motions smooth out, until a Chatcaavan who’d been denied the sky in a far more subtle way than a wingless female… was flying, amid the stars.
She sat on the hull, as she’d sat on so many since her creation, and smiled, hugging her knees.
He joined her, finally, soaring back to the ship and banking alongside it. “Safe to touch?” he said of the hull, because naturally he would remember they were in space.
“Go ahead. I’ll put layers between you and it to keep your skin off the hull, and so that we don’t get stress fractures from the temperature differentials. You’ll feel like you’re sitting on it, but you’ll actually be held in place over it.”
“This is extraordinary.” Uuvek touched down alongside her and sat, glancing beneath his leg to see that he was, indeed, not in contact with the surface of the ship. “Why is it not more frequently done?”
“It’s hard,” she said. “For a computer by itself, impossible. It takes someone like me to make all the judgment calls while crunching all the numbers and moving all the energy around, and even for me it’s hard work. I’ve been offline for anything else. But… I wanted you to see this.” She stared outward, all the way outward. “This is where I come to think. I don’t think there’s anything like it. To look at the universe like this.”
“I could have worn a suit,” Uuvek said, smiling.
“But then the suit would have been between you and everything. It’s not the same. You don’t feel… free.”
He glanced at her. “I am surprised you feel that way. Your body is constructed; presumably it has no limitations.”
“Oh, it has limitations, just in the opposite direction,” Maia said. “It’s more about the mechanics of organic bodies, which I can simulate and approximate but not feel. Not the way you do.” She thought about his comment to Liolesa. “We all need to be able to fly. The nature of our chains might be different, when we’re chained, but that longing for the sky… it’s universal.”
She lapsed into silence, which he didn’t break and… that was good. What did they need to talk about when there was so much to experience? To simply sit in one another’s company, and confront the magnitude and the beauty of the universe, with all its mysteries and challenges… to see, directly, with sensors in her case, and eyes in his, the Eldritch planet revolving alongside, and the stars with their unblinking clarity scattered on the vault of the vacuum all around them… words were superfluous. She didn’t want it to end.
But her claim on the spare power was on a timer, and when it had almost run down, Maia sighed. “It’s about time to go back. I don’t want you out here when I don’t have some spares to handle emergencies.”
He nodded, Pelted quick, and stood. She was expecting him to launch off the hull, so when he didn’t she paused, puzzled.
“It’s why I came,” he said. “The real reason.” He craned his head back to stare into a part of the sky that had nothing but stars. “Because the scope for imagination in the Empire was artificially confined. Here… here I thought I could breathe.”
She stared at him, still cupping the bubble that kept him safe, and it felt impossibly precious and heavy against her in that moment. She managed to stammer, “There are still boundaries here. Arbitrary ones, or stupid ones. Or cultural.”
“I know,” Uuvek said. “But there are fewer. And they’ll be different.” He looked out again. “Maybe here, I can grow. We’ll see.” He jumped off the hull and twirled once, slowly before heading for the bay. Maia hastened after him, fighting far too many emotions. Just… too much. An empire’s worth of dragons, suffocating. An empire’s worth of Eldritch, doing the same. And between them, the Pelted… suffering now, but they had led the way for so long. That they might fumble off the path, distracted by grief and vengeance and distrust… all the D-pers had discussed it, and been horrified by the probabilities.
But maybe the nations on either side of them would remind them of the values they cherished, by showing them how much those values mattered, and were needed still.
Uuvek stepped back into the bay. He reached over his shoulder to touch one of his wing arms, his expression pensive. She let him have the moment, occupying herself with closing the bay doors and restoring all the functions she’d backgrounded to manage his excursion.
“Maia. Thank you.”
“Anytime,” she said. “I mean that.”
He dipped his head in a partial bow and headed toward the cabin he’d chosen for himself. She sighed and sagged into the ship, luxuriating in the solidity of it, and the power that allowed her to seat so much of herself in its core rather than spreading herself out. So much to do, but she was surprised to discover that she was looking forward to it. And really, wasn’t that the point of a change in perspective?
Many of her friends were sleeping. Plenty weren’t. Time to get back to work. She pulled her work queue and extended a finger toward Samson, poking him. |Soooo…. Tell me all the latest news. And while you’re at it, give me a line on any people I might steal from you for a new navy.|