Samples, Callie thought. Did that mean dead soldiers from the last exploratory mission the Imperative sent? “Is there a big boss arch-healer?” Callie said. “What I’m looking for is your emperor, president, prime minister, king, high priest, whatever. I’m a diplomat. I need to do some diplomacy here.”

  Metcalf stroked his beard. “The system is ruled by a triumvirate of Exalted. The head of surgery, the head of research, and the head of operations. It’s possible the first two would be interested in seeing you. I marked your scan results as urgent, so I’m sure they’ll be notified about your presence soon. This is very exciting! I don’t usually get to do much here at the shipyard besides the routine augmentations we give the pilots. You’ve all really livened up my day!”

  “Are you important here, doc?” Callie said.

  “I like to think so.”

  She rubbed her temples. “What I mean is, are you a high-ranking whatever, healer in this technocracy?”

  Metcalf drew himself up on his pseudopods. “I am. As I said, I am head of surgery for this facility, which is crucial for system security. I stand in the upper echelons of the third rank.”

  “Which means… what?”

  “The first rank consists of the three division heads I mentioned, who set policy for the system. The second rank is made up of their assistant directors and deputies, two for each division head. The third rank includes the directors of facilities, and there are twelve of us in each division – just a handful of us in that rank are human or chimeras like myself, of course, only the very highest achievers. I am part of the surgical division, though of course I dabble in research. You’ve met my associate, the Weaver, who runs operations here–”

  “So you’re one of the fifty most important people in the local government?” Callie interrupted.

  “Forty-five most, actually. It would be difficult to rank me precisely, as the lines of succession are a bit muddled after you get past the second rank, not that the problem has ever come up–”

  “Good enough,” Callie said. “Ashok, take him hostage.”

  Ashok, who’d maneuvered close to the doctor against this very eventuality, reached out with his hand full of articulated manipulators and delivered a precisely calibrated electric shock. Doctor Metcalf’s eyes rolled back, his tentacles drummed on the floor – how about that for tap dancing – and then he slumped, unconscious.

  “Now what?” Elena said.

  “Now, we negotiate,” Callie said. “I’m a diplomat. That’s what we do.”

  Ashok managed to take control of the room’s systems without too much trouble, but he couldn’t get beyond that. “The station is really compartmentalized. Probably so a failure in one area doesn’t become a failure in others, which means I can’t seize control of station-wide security or anything. Those doors won’t open until we want them to, though. Shall could do more, but I’m only about one-third machine by volume, so I’ve got limits.”

  “I can’t believe they just left us alone in here with a senior official,” Callie said. “I know they haven’t met me before, but still.”

  “We are trapped on a space station, though,” Elena said. “I haven’t been in a lot of these situations, but don’t these things usually end badly for the hostage-takers?”

  “Only if they’re stupid,” Callie said. “We aren’t stupid. We also have a high-value hostage, which helps. Now we just need a way to call the Weaver.”

  “There’s a communication system here,” Janice said. “Ashok patched me into it already. It’s not as compartmentalized as the other systems. I can say whatever you want to anybody you want. I can even communicate with other facilities in the system… though I don’t know what any of them are because their names are mostly written in that creepy Axiom language.”

  “I’m supplying translations as fast as I can,” Ashok said.

  “Oh good. ‘Central Processing’ sounds reasonable enough, if vague, same with ‘Stasis Center’ and ‘Experimental Protocol Division,’ but are you sure you’ve translated these others correctly? ‘Blood Circus’? ‘The Temple of Rending’? ‘The Hall of Teeth’?”

  “Lantern is a lot better at their language than I am,” Ashok said. “I don’t get the idioms at all. I barely understand human idioms, to be fair.”

  “Let’s just call the Weaver first,” Callie said. “If he’s no help, we’ll go over his head.”

  “I’m just… hell, I’ll put you on station-wide public address, good enough?” Janice said.

  “Works for me. I do well with an audience.” Callie cleared her throat. “Hey, Double-Double! Captain Machedo here. I’d like to talk to the ruling triumvirate, and I mean now. We’ve got your man Doctor Metcalf here, and the thing is, I, personally, never took the Hippocratic oath.”

  The speakers in the room hissed emptily for a moment, and then the Weaver spoke. “You are very annoying. I am going to send some people to kill you.”

  “No you aren’t. The doc says we’re very special and important, full of fascinating medical innovations, and you’d get in big trouble if you wasted us. Besides, the doc would die in the process, and he’s your colleague, right? I assume you’re in the third rank too, in the operations division?”

  Another empty hiss. “Metcalf always did like to hear himself talk. I see from the outgoing communications that you are, indeed, of medical interest. It’s unclear whether you need to be alive to be of use to our researchers, but for the time being I’ll refrain from euthanizing you. Let’s open negotiations, shall we?”

  “They’re trying to cut the oxygen to the room,” Ashok said. “I am not obliging them.”

  “Stop trying to knock us out, Doubles,” Callie said. “We’ve got this room on lockdown. This station is from when the colony was founded. Your computer technology looks like wooden blocks and popsicle sticks to us. If you aren’t going to negotiate in good faith, we might have to start cutting off some of the doc’s extra limbs. We’ve got some pretty great self-cauterizing saws down here, it looks like. It’s strange – people never think about how similar infirmaries are to armories.”

  “What do you want, Machedo?”

  “To talk to the organ grinder, and not the monkey.”

  “What would you say to the division heads, if they were here? I can’t just summon them. Could you get the president of the Trans-Neptunian Authority on an open channel on a whim?”

  “Sure I could, but I’m a diplomat, and you’re a traffic light, so I understand we’re not of equal rank and dignity. As for what I’d say – I’d ask them to sit down with me and tell me what the hell is going on in this system, why you isolated yourselves, what happened to the original colonists, what happened to everyone we sent through the bridge to check on you, and a few other pointed questions. Then I’d tell them to give me my ship back so I could return home and inform my president. After that, this whole situation is someone else’s problem. But you don’t lock up diplomats, and you don’t treat us like medical curiosities either. That’s the kind of shit that starts wars, Doubles. Do you want a war with us, now that you know we have the technology to come visit? This time the ship was full of diplomacy. Next time it might be full of guns.”

  “I’ll send a request for my division head’s attention, Captain Machedo. I’ll let you know if she replies. In the meantime, perhaps we could pass the time in conversation. How did your people come to possess ship-sized wormhole technology? Or is that a state secret?”

  “We found an abandoned space station out in the middle of nowhere on a long-range expedition. Nobody alive on board, though there was evidence that your people had been there, once upon a time. Turned out it was a ship-building facility, and a lot of the automated systems still worked. It took a little time, but we got the machinery switched on, and damned if it didn’t start building bridge generators!” That was all true; it just wasn’t the whole truth. “Really blew our minds.” Also true, and in reality, they’d blown up the whole facility to keep the generators from falling into the wrong hands and drawing the attention of the Axiom to humanity. “The TNA tried to keep the tech for ourselves, of course, but secrets like that leak, and we ended up making a lucrative licensing deal with the Jovian Imperative and another with the inner planets… I didn’t pay attention to all the ins and outs on the economic side. We don’t know how to make the generators, but we know how to turn on the machine that does make them, so we’ve got a monopoly, and the TNA is a major power in the Sol system now.”

  “And with the power to go anywhere, you decided to come here?”

  “Like I said. This system is a mystery box, and we love a mystery. There are also still a few very old people who remember relatives who emigrated to the system, hardcore life-extension cases, and of course, they’re the richest of the rich, people powerfully connected in government, like that. Did you think you’d be left alone forever?”

  “Not forever. For long enough, we hoped. It’s a big, dangerous universe, Captain Machedo. Did you humans ever consider that the ability to go anywhere in the galaxy just offers the opportunity to die in ever more distant places?”

  “The kind of people who take on missions like this aren’t too afraid of dying, no. It’s a sort of self-selection criteria.”

  “Mmm. How long before we can expect more visitors, do you think? Not that they’d get any farther than the outside of the fence we set up. Just because you jumped it doesn’t mean other people will be able to.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Callie said. “We sent a lifeboat back home with navigational data before we came to the shipyard here.”

  “What.” The syllable was flat.

  Callie had gotten the idea for this lie from the scourge-ship’s escape pod, returning to tattle on them. “Well, sure. Sending the lifeboat back meant we only had one bridge generator on board my ship, which isn’t ideal, but it seemed like pretty important information to send home, don’t you think? I sent a little video message, too – ‘Hi, Captain Machedo here, the Vanir system is still inhabited and they’re trying to murder us and they can disrupt our wormholes but here’s the way to get around that.’”

  “You might have mentioned this communication before, captain.”

  “I might have, if I’d been talking to someone important, instead of the guy who stands in the intersection with white gloves and a little whistle waving the cars through.”

  “I do not understand that reference.”

  “That’s okay,” Callie said. “It’s enough for you to know it’s insulting. I’m done talking to you. Get me someone with actual authority.” She made a cutting-her-throat gesture and Janice ended the communication.

  Callie turned toward Metcalf. “Let’s get him secured. I’m betting there are plenty of restraints in this room somewhere. Then we’ll wake him up and find out what the hell has been happening here for the past hundred years.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “What did you say to Callie?” Lantern whispered, jammed into the blister-ship that clung to the side of the White Raven. Her personal vessel was a comfortable size for her, except when Kaustikos was crushed in with her. Being so close to something rigged with explosives made her deeply uneasy. “She ordered me to withdraw to my ship immediately after you spoke to her.”

  Kaustikos was smug. “I simply pointed out that the Vanir system has had only limited contact with the outside world in the past century, in the form of whatever they could glean from the rescue and military missions sent through the bridge. All sorts of interesting technical innovations have happened in the wider human community during that interval – most importantly, from my point of view, the development of artificial intelligences.

  “The denizens of this system likely have no idea that sapient intelligences can inhabit machinery, so they wouldn’t even look twice at me, or be aware of the existence of the ship’s AI. I told her that since the crew was about to be captured, Shall and I could hide, and later lead a rescue mission. She knew that you, too, might escape detection – you aren’t listed anywhere as a member of the crew, apparently – and told me to bring you along with me.”

  “She actually said you should follow Lantern’s orders,” Shall said over their comms.

  “Is there no solidarity among artificial intelligences?” Kaustikos’s tone dripped with contempt.

  “I believe Callie knows what she’s doing,” Shall said. “I believe she doesn’t trust you much.”

  “Perhaps that will change when I rescue her from the clutches of our enemies.”

  “Is that how you think she’ll feel?” Lantern said. “What do you think, Shall?”

  “I think Callie would be deeply irritated at anyone who believed she needed to be rescued. I think she’d be twice as irritated if it turned out they were right.”

  “She can probably rescue herself,” Lantern said. “But we’ll help create more favorable conditions for that rescue. Shall, what’s your best available body? One of the big mining drones from Glauketas?”

  “Oh, we brought the war drone,” Shall said. “Ashok’s been fixing it up in his spare time.”

  “You have military hardware?” Kaustikos said. “That’s marvelous. I have some experience running such equipment. I can split my consciousness–”

  Lantern’s chromatophores flushed with a deep purple of displeasure. “Shall will operate the war drone. Kaustikos, you have stealth equipment, don’t you? Sneaking around seems to be the Benefactor’s favorite thing.”

  “I may have some such capabilities.”

  “Then you can follow the Weaver of World’s ships and find out where they’re taking the crew. Don’t intervene unless it seems like they’re in immediate danger.”

  “I’m to be some sort of sheepdog?” Kaustikos protested.

  “Sheepdogs herd, so no,” Shall said. “You’d be more of a tracking dog.”

  “Ridiculous,” Kaustikos grumbled as Lantern’s ship opened its tiny airlock to let him out into cold space.

  “What do we do?” Shall said once the Benefactor’s pet was gone.

  “Can you activate your military drone and get off the ship? It’s possible we’re still being watched.”

  “I’m tapping the local base’s communications, and they aren’t talking about us, which either means they’re very subtle, or they’re overconfident. I’m inclined to believe the latter. They’ve been the undisputed masters of the Vanir system for a long time, I think. They might even believe we’re diplomats.”

  “Let’s proceed as if they’re very clever, though, all right? It wouldn’t do for us to get captured too.”

  “The war drone is crouched in a launch tube, and I can port a copy of my consciousness into its body and then crawl out nice and slow.”

  “Are there handholds for me to ride along? Or will everything I touch electrocute and disembowel me?”

  “I didn’t even know your species had bowels. I’ll have to update my biological databases. I think we can work something out. The war drone is on its way. It’s only got a limited version of my mind, because it lacks the processing power to run me in all my splendor. My personality should be intact but don’t expect me to do complicated math, and my access to information will be limited since I won’t be plugged into the ship’s databases. I’ll be crammed full of tactics and strategy and intrusion measures and what little local knowledge we have, though.”

  A few moments later Shall said, “I’m here.”

  Lantern checked her suit and toolbelt, and then slipped into the tiny airlock Kaustikos had departed through. Her blister-ship was originally meant as a boarding pod, equipped with all sorts of nasty cutting tools on the underside designed to breach hulls. She hated to leave it behind, but there was nothing it could slice through that Shall’s war drone couldn’t, and he presented a smaller target for sensors.

  She looked through the window, where her view of the shipyard was obscured by the bulk of Shall’s drone. The drone’s general shape wasn’t so different from that of Lantern’s own body: a central oblong surrounded by limbs and studded with eyes. As she understood it, the shape of the war drone was meant to suggest the Earth creatures called ‘spiders’ – most humans apparently had some instinctual horror of the creature, so making an engine of war spiderlike had psychological advantages. “Spiders have too many eyes, and too many legs,” Elena had explained to Lantern once – apologetically, as Lantern was just one limb and one eye short of having the same complement of both as most spiders.

  The array of lights (now turned off) and sensors on the front of Shall’s body were clustered to look like eyes, and his many limbs were variously serrated and spiked and capable of firing projectiles, energy bursts, plasma bolts, and other things, but because of her own physiology, Lantern didn’t find his appearance particularly menacing – Shall looked like a bigger, stronger version of herself and her people, and she found his form quite comforting. “You’re very handsome this way.”

  “Ah, so this is your type. And here I thought you only liked unfrozen xenobiologists.”

  Her species didn’t blush, exactly, but some of Lantern’s chromatophores shifted to colors that indicated embarrassment. She hadn’t realized Shall was aware of her little crush on Elena, but it wasn’t surprising; he saw every interaction on the public areas of the ship and on Glauketas. “I’m very complex, Shall,” Lantern said with dignity. “You can’t possibly expect to understand my vast depths.”

  “I wouldn’t presume. Clamber up on my back and we’ll be on our way.”

  Lantern opened the outer airlock door and slipped into space, her seven limbs – three fine manipulators and four stronger but less dexterous ones, though calling them ‘arms’ and ’legs’ would be an insulting simplification – reaching for handholds. She clambered onto the back of Shall’s body, and he showed her where she could clip her suit on to keep her firmly connected to his broad, matte black back, studded with mysterious bumps and bulges.

  Once she was settled, she allowed herself to look around. All the truth-tellers trained in vacuum and microgravity, since they never knew where their dedication to keeping the secret of the Axiom’s existence would take them. Lantern was comfortable in space, but she wasn’t comfortable in this space: looking out at the hundreds of spiked scourge-ships drifting in the void around her in all directions gave her the shivers. She could very well die in this place, and for a moment she felt terribly alone.