“Why would they do that?” Bianca called. “Why slaughter a caprid when you can get milk and wool from it for years? We’re just livestock for the Barony now!”

  “Better to be alive than dead, Bianca Xing,” the burgher snapped. “What did you want me to do? Tell them no? I hear the burgher of Reachway did that, and they cut off his head and put it on top of their flagpole!”

  The crowd had no reply to that. The burgher contained herself. “I’ll… I’ll send word if there’s any more news. For now, just… go on as you have. And hope this all blows over.” She slumped and went backstage, instead of walking out down the aisle and shaking hands and slapping backs like she did at Halemeetings.

  “So,” Bianca’s mother said, “that’s that, then. You’d better get that mech back to old Torvald and fill him in on how things are, I reckon. I’ll see you at the house after.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  She put a hand on her daughter’s knee. “Be careful, Bianca. I know I always say that, but this time, really, be careful. There are strangers out there.”

  •••

  “Reclaimed?” Torvald shook his head. They were sitting in his bunker, him in the chair, Bianca sprawled on her back on the hard bunk. “No, this world of ours was a colony all right, but it belonged to the Federation of Sol, not the Barony of Letnev. The Federation, that’s where most of the humans are, or at least were, back in the old days. Just look around – we’re humans, not Letnev. Sure, we look similar, blue skin and odd proportions aside, but they’re aliens. Who are they trying to fool?”

  “Everybody,” Bianca said. “They’re trying to fool everybody. I can’t believe I saw an alien for the first time and it wasn’t even amazing. It was just awful. Why couldn’t this Federation have come here? I bet they would have offered me a ticket to the stars.”

  Torvald went hmm. “As I recall, the Barony and the Federation didn’t get along too well. When things fell apart, they did some of the fiercest fighting just amongst themselves. Maybe the Barony beat the Federation, and think that gives them some rightful claim to this place? Not that they need a claim, really, if they’ve got ships and guns.” He sighed.

  “I don’t understand.” Bianca stared at the ceiling. She couldn’t see the sky, but she knew right where her triangle of stars was. “I thought there was an empire, one big community, back then. Why would they fight each other?”

  “An emperor is a king of kings, and an empire is a bunch of nations all stuck together under a single ruler. That doesn’t mean they all like being together. You like some of your neighbors more than others, don’t you? Same thing. Just on a bigger scale. Some of those nations joined the empire because they wanted to share in the power, or they wanted to be protected, but some of them were forced to join, or threatened into joining. Any system that big and complicated and full of tensions is bound to fall apart eventually, and when it falls, it makes a mess.” He swiveled back and forth in his chair. “But knowing a little bit of history doesn’t change the price of wool, does it? I’m the only person on the whole planet, maybe, with evidence that Darit wasn’t really a Barony colony world, and even if I told the world, it wouldn’t make a difference. The Barony would just mark me as a troublemaker, and that wouldn’t be good for me.”

  “Ships and guns,” Bianca said. “I can’t believe we got invaded by aliens. That we got conquered. And that the invasion is so boring and stupid! I’ve read stories about this sort of thing, but it’s not like there’s a resistance I can join or anything.”

  “We’d be flies resisting the swatter, I’m afraid,” Torvald said. “You’re sitting in the most technologically advanced place on all of Darit, maybe, and I wouldn’t be a match for even one of their shuttles.”

  “Maybe there’s some sort of super-weapon, buried out in the forest? Something to let us fight back?”

  “Maybe,” Torvald said. “This was an important place, once. I guess that’s why the Barony is here – there’s still precious metal in those mines, just too deep for us to reach with our technology. If you find some super-weapon, though, keep it to yourself, or you’ll get a lot of people killed. We don’t have any tactical genius generals around here. We don’t even have any soldiers. In a situation like this… we mostly just have to hope the boot on our neck doesn’t get too heavy.”

  “I don’t want to be a coward, Torvald.”

  “You aren’t, Bianca. You’re brave, and you’re a romantic, and I want you to stay alive so you can keep being both.”

  “The world has changed, though. Doesn’t that mean we have to change too?”

  He looked at the ceiling for a long moment, then sighed. “Probably so, Bianca. Whether we want to or not.”

  •••

  Nothing did change, though, apart from that flag on the Halemeeting hall. Occasionally a ship flew overhead, but none landed, and no more alien visitors came to the village. There was a lot of shouting at the next few Halemeetings, but after six weeks without any contact from the Barony of Letnev, people mostly settled back into their old patterns, and hoped they’d been forgotten by the new masters. Bianca’s hope and excitement at seeing the first ship go by had turned to fear and then, to her great annoyance, back into boredom.

  Until the day a Barony ship landed at her parents’ farm.

  Chapter 4

  Heuvelt Angriff – former treasure hunter, lapsed gentleperson adventurer, current reluctant criminal – was trying to get drunk, but he wasn’t having much luck. He shook a fistful of coins at the bartender, a sorrowful-looking Winnaran. He squinted. Maybe the bartender wasn’t sorrowful. Maybe Heuvelt was just projecting again. “Look, these coins are from the Xxlan system, and according to the treaty the Hylar government has with the Xxcha Kingdom, that means they’re also legal tender on Jol-Nar and any associated colony worlds, and since Elekayne is a Hylar colony world, that means you have to–”

  “No cash,” the Winnaran bartender repeated, then pointed to a sign behind her that presumably said “No cash” in whatever language it appeared in. The bartender glanced around the bar, which was deserted at this time of day, and apparently decided to take pity on Heuvelt, because she placed a small glass on the bar before him.

  Heuvelt tossed the contents back eagerly, expecting the burn of liquor, but it was just water. He sighed. “Thank you.”

  The bartender leaned forward and said, “I think the cash prohibition is stupid too, but we had a gene-plague last year. One of the ways it got spread around was through infected surfaces, and everyone is still being careful about unnecessary contact. Don’t you have a credit account? Doesn’t have to be with the Universities of Jol-Nar. We’re hooked into all the major data systems, and we even have decent exchange rates for Letnev or Naalu currency.”

  “I am having… difficulty accessing my accounts.” Heuvelt stared at the luminous, worthless discs in his hand. Xxcha money was pretty, but you couldn’t eat beauty. “I was the victim of identity theft. I returned from a deep space exploration several months ago and promptly found myself arrested and accused of various horrible crimes. Only the fact that I don’t resemble the perpetrator who used my name kept me from being thrown into a prison camp.”

  The Winnaran wiped the bar with a rag. “That’s a real sad story.”

  Heuvelt nodded enthusiastically. “It is. Thank you for appreciating that. If you find yourself moved by sympathy, you could–”

  “The real bad guy didn’t have that big scar down his face, I take it?”

  Heuvelt winced. He’d been reckoned a handsome man – almost too handsome, some of his lovers had told him: how could you trust a man with those teeth and that hairline and a chin like that all at the same time? But his former best friend and former first mate, Dob Ell, had left him with a long knife scar that started just under his right eye and took a wandering path down his cheek and over his jawline toward his neck. He was lucky to have both eyes in his head and all his blood inside him. “He didn’t, no. One of the Hylar prosecutors said all humans look alike and I’d scarred my face as a disguise, but there was DNA evidence to exonerate me, fortunately.”

  “You could get that scar fixed,” the bartender said. “I know a Hylar surgeon who does top-notch reconstructive work. Though, now that I think of it, yeah, all her humans do kind of come out looking the same.”

  Heuvelt bowed his head, hoping to make the scar less noticeable. “I tried. I wasted some of the proceeds from selling my old ship on a plastic surgeon. I looked like my old self… for a day. Then the scar came back. It seems I was cut by an Yssaril shame-blade. Have you ever heard of those?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  Heuvelt slumped lower on his stool. “Some of the Yssaril tribes use them back on their homeworld, during their feuds. Sometimes it isn’t enough to kill an enemy, you see. You want them to carry the mark of their defeat with them for the rest of their lives instead. So they take the sap from some horrible swamp plant and boil it and mix it with the venom from some reptile and coat a blade with it, and any wounds given with that blade create a scar that has memory. I don’t know how it works. Something about the toxins on the blade promoting collagen degradation. The surgeon said I should be grateful. Without his intervention, the wound would have just kept opening up on its own, never quite healing, for the rest of my life. This bright meandering line across my face is the best medical science can do for me.”

  The Winnaran chuckled. “I’m sure some people will find it appealing, though they’ll wonder why you don’t get it fixed, and assume you want to look dangerous. Wearing a scar is, in its own way, a weird kind of vanity, don’t you think?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. So now I’m scarred and vain. I used to just be vain.”

  “And broke, apparently. If you were cleared of wrongdoing, why didn’t you get access to your accounts back?”

  “An excellent question,” he said. “It turns out, once your accounts are frozen, they take a long time to get unfrozen again.” There had been precious little in the accounts anyway, since Heuvelt’s parents had cut him off for “being an incorrigible wastrel” and stopped replenishing his funds. “As a further complication, I was wanted by both the Universities of Jor-Nal and the Barony of Letnev. Their different alliances and reciprocal business arrangements, taken together, encompass most of the systems where a human is likely to visit or do business. I’m having trouble establishing new accounts – there’s a flag on my name, apparently. I’m told a fancy Hacan lawyer could sort it all out for me, if I could afford one, but I can’t.”

  The Winnaran looked to the left, and looked to the right, and confirmed once again that the bar was empty, except for a human sleeping with his head on a table in the back. “Give me the coins. I’ll buy your drinks on my account.”

  Heuvelt was moved by the kindness, even though he suspected the bartender drank for free, and would simply pocket the coins as profit, but as long as the end result was booze inside him, he was happy. “Thank you.”

  “We have a range of alcoholic beverages safe for human consumption. What are you drinking?”

  “Do you have anything that started out life as corn?”

  “That’s one of those plants humans like, isn’t it? I thought they made syrup out of it.”

  “You can make lots of things out of it. Including sweet, brown liquor.”

  “I have sweet brown liquor,” the Winnaran said. “Well. Brown-ish. I think it’s made of algae. That’s the best I can do.”

  “I’m sure it will suffice.”

  The Winnaran poured him a small glass of something too dark and syrupy to be mistaken for bourbon, but it was brown-ish. Heuvelt took a sip and winced; it was sweet, too, repulsively so, with a distinct hint of cinnamon. It tasted like something that should be poured over pancakes. “This is alcohol?”

  “It’s fifty-five percent alcohol, according to the label on the bottle.”

  A hundred and ten proof, then. That cheered him up. “Thank you. Maybe something… less sweet for my next round.”

  The bartender nodded and wandered off down the bar, busily attending to nothing much, probably just tired of his company. Heuvelt was getting used to that. When had he become a bore? Probably when his stories stopped being about recent adventures and became about old grievances instead. “Rotten thieves,” he muttered into his glass. “Ruined my life.” That was a comforting idea, though it wasn’t true. Having his identity stolen hadn’t made his old friend and family retainer Dob Ell attack him with a knife. His fortunes had been circling a black hole even before his accounts were frozen, after the ruinous expense of his failed deep-space exploration. He’d had visions of discovering new rich worlds, ancient alien artifacts, perhaps a previously unknown species of alien, and returning a hero. Instead he’d found radiation, rocks, and betrayal, and he’d returned the next best thing to a pauper.

  Dob Ell had stabbed him the very day her scheduled monthly stipend failed to arrive: as soon as she was off the payroll, the illusion of friendship and the reality of a lifetime of resentment had become manifest. His parents had hired her to watch over him when he was a mere child, and he’d assumed a bond of love had grown between them. He’d called his parents to tell them about the attack, hoping they could take some vengeance on his behalf, but they weren’t talking to him anymore. The second underbutler who took the message had laughed at him and said, “Of course she attacked you. She was paid to guard your body, and I can’t imagine a more thankless or tedious job.”

  And so, scarred and betrayed, he’d been forced to sell his pride and joy, The Lady of Misrule, an exceptionally beautiful long-range cruiser he’d emptied his trust fund to buy as a university graduation gift to himself. (He hadn’t technically graduated from university, but he’d stopped going, which was close enough.) Oh, the times he’d had in that ship, plying the spaceways with Dob Ell and a series of attractive humanoids! He could have lived the life of a dashing adventurer for decades if he hadn’t decided to get so ambitious. “Ambition is poison!” he called to the bartender.

  She ignored him. Perhaps she couldn’t relate. She worked the morning shift in a dingy bar on a Hylar colony world that was mostly desert (and as the Hylar were mainly an aquatic species, that meant it wasn’t a colony world held in high esteem), so it was possible she’d never sipped the poison of ambition, personally.

  He’d gotten a lot of money for the Lady of Misrule, and used the proceeds for living expenses and to purchase a far less beautiful ship, the Show and Tell. It was a fast courier retrofitted with extra cargo space, and Heuvelt had planned to use it to establish a business for himself as a high-end transporter of luxury goods. He’d even hired a crew. Why not? He knew lots of rich people from the Federation of Sol, the Jol-Nar, the Emirates, even the Mentak Coalition and the Yin Brotherhood, because his parents were well connected in those circles. He might as well exploit their good name.

  He hadn’t counted on the difficulties his not-fully-expunged criminal record would cause when it came to getting licensed and insured, though. No one would hire him for legitimate work, so he was forced to take on less savory jobs. The sort that paid in cash, and brought him to planets like this.

  Where the hell was his contact, anyway? His crew – sorry, his partners – Ashont and Clec were waiting for him back on the ship, and while he didn’t think they’d steal the Show and Tell and leave without him, he had trouble trusting anyone fully after his experience with Dob Ell.

  The door swung open, and a Hylar came clomping in on six mechanical legs, its real body a tangle of tentacles floating in a dingy soup of fluid inside a translucent tank. The alien approached the bar and stood beside Heuvelt.

  The bartender started toward them, then thought better of it and withdrew. Oh, good, so the illicit nature of their business was that obvious. What a comfort.

  “You are Mr Scar?” The Hylar’s voice grated out of a metal box on the front of the containment suit.

  Heuvelt sighed. He certainly hadn’t chosen that nom de crim, but some Saar drug dealer had called him that, and it stuck. People didn’t have much trouble identifying him, at least, though it wasn’t like there were a lot of potential criminal contacts in this particular dingy bar at this particular dingy hour. “That’s me. You’re Mr Slosh?”

  The artificial voicebox gave a harsh, uninflected series of ha-ha-ha sounds. “I chose my name when I heard yours.”

  “Most clever,” Heuvelt said. “You have my money?”

  “You have my data-stick?”

  “Right here.” He reached down for the briefcase by his stool and opened it up. There were dozens of data-sticks inside, all different colors, jumbled together. “It’s one of these.”

  “Which one?”

  “Give me the money and I’ll show you.”

  The Hylar grabbed the briefcase instead and tried to run for the door. Annoying, but not unprecedented. None of the data-sticks were the one Mr Slosh’s employers actually wanted, and once they figured that out, they’d have to slink back to Heuvelt and pay a “we’re sorry we tried to screw you over” premium to get the real one–

  “Stop right there!” The sleeping human in the corner leapt up and became very much an awake human, and one armed with a long and complex energy rifle. “Jol-Nar Data Enforcement Agency!”