Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) Read online

  The hotel was barabo, like the station, like the entire solar system. But for the last week the hotel had become human, the rented property of the legendary UFS Phoenix, one of the most powerful warships in all known space. Lisbeth walked now through the lobby bar, filled with off-duty marines and spacers talking, drinking and eating, but none entirely relaxed and all with weapons close. Barabo staff served them, and were greeted with smiles and chit-chat — all of Phoenix were on instruction to be nice to the locals. The humanoid, furry barabo would grin with those big, toothy mouths just made for grinning, and chatter back with the aid of translator speakers.

  In the main hall beyond the lobby, military crates and unoccupied armour suits lined the walls, waiting for trouble. Here on this lower level were meeting rooms, dining halls and convention spaces, all filled with more gear, or with Phoenix crew in recreation or work. Lisbeth sidestepped traffic, heavily armed marines, spacer crew in animated discussion of some technical problem, bemused barabo staff going about hotel business and hoping the humans didn’t completely trash their nice facility with all this gear and weaponry. In the week so far, it hadn’t happened, and Phoenix was paying twice the usual rate for a full house.

  The big open room beside the enclosed gymnasium had also been taken over, gym mats taken from Phoenix’s own holds and laid to make an exercise space. Marines now yelled, shouted and heaved in combat drill, or rolled around on the mats seeking a killing leverage. And a few spacers too, Lisbeth noted as she wove between them, game to risk unarmed combat training with some of humanity’s most deadly warriors.

  Lisbeth spied Major Thakur over by a wall, with the other two of her Debogande security crew, and walked to them. The Major was sweaty in her workout T-shirt and pants, as was Hiro, sitting cross-legged on the mats. Jokono knelt alongside in his good suit, as befitted a former station security chief and current Debogande household security chief. Though back on Homeworld, they’d probably found someone else to replace him in that role.

  “Have you two been sparring?” Lisbeth asked, squatting down beside Hiro and the Major. “Who won?”

  “It’s training,” said the Major. “The object is not winning, but learning.” She had that effortless way of making Lisbeth feel about two foot tall, her playful comments crashing into a steel wall of dry good sense. “Can we help you?”

  Lisbeth realised that she was interrupting. “Oh. Well yes… Romki’s annoyed, and…”

  “Romki’s always annoyed,” Thakur said calmly. She had muscles in those bare brown arms that some of Lisbeth’s girlfriends would have sniffed made her look like a man. But even short-haired and sweaty, Trace Thakur looked like no man to Lisbeth, and doubtless cared even less what some skinny civilian girl thought of it. “He’s made you his errand girl?”

  Lisbeth blinked. “Well no, it’s just that I was on my way to work out with Carla and Vijay before I head back to Phoenix for shuttle sims with Lieutenant Hausler, and I called in on Romki in his Engineering bay and he says you won’t allow him any marine guard so he can go and call on his contacts here…”

  “I don’t trust his contacts here,” said Hiro.

  Lisbeth looked at him questioningly. Hiro’s handsome, narrow eyes gave little expression back. “Really? Stan would never do anything to harm Phoenix, he’s our friend.”

  “Stan Romki has more shady contacts than I do,” said Hiro. “I don’t want him kicking any nests to see what crawls out.” Hiro had been a Federal Intelligence spy. The operative kind, who went out in the field and gathered Intel, not the kind that sat behind a desk and analysed. Sometimes he did it very aggressively.

  Lisbeth looked questioningly at the Major. Thakur nodded. “It’s my call Lisbeth. Off Phoenix, I’m in charge. I don’t want Romki wandering the station, not even under guard.”

  “There’s tavalai on this station, Lisbeth,” Jokono added, in that wise, fatherly manner he had. Lisbeth guessed that with the possible exception of Doc Suelo, Jokono might be the oldest person on Phoenix. “And sard too. Romki has a lot of friends among the tavalai. And if he really has discovered this huge plot involving our wonderful allies the alo, then he’s probably safer staying on Phoenix.”

  They’d all been arguing with Romki, Lisbeth knew. Phoenix’s commanders were trying to stop a human civil war from breaking out, between the Spacers in their stations and habitats, and the Worlders on their planets. Phoenix’s old commander, Captain Pantillo, had seen that war coming and tried to head it off by running for office on a pro-Worlder platform. Fleet had killed him rather than see it happen, and tried to pin the murder on Lisbeth’s brother, Lieutenant Commander Erik Debogande, to shut him and the powerful Debogande family up, and dissuade them from further Worlder sympathies.

  But Major Thakur had broken Erik out of custody and sent Phoenix running in search of answers… a search that had brought them to Stanislav Romki and his terrible secrets about alien allies that Fleet did not want widely known. Erik and the Major were now adamant that they had to continue the struggle, to prevent a human division that would surely mean doom, in a galaxy filled with aggressive species looking to exploit the weakness of others. That was Phoenix’s mission now — to use Captain Pantillo’s old contacts and leverage to gather those representatives from Worlder and Spacer factions who disapproved of Fleet’s leadership on the issue, out here where people could say what they thought without Fleet constantly looking over their shoulder.

  Romki, of course, thought they were all idiots. The true threat to humanity, he insisted, came not from internal human divisions, but from external threats. One threat was the alo — one of humanity’s great allies in the Triumvirate for which the just-passed hundred and sixty one year war was named. Romki insisted that the alo were in alliance with an old forgotten remnant of the AI machine-race that had once dominated the galaxy, twenty five thousand years ago. And now he spent most of his days cosseted away in one of Phoenix’s engineering bays, examining the remains of an AI queen that the Major herself had killed just three months before.

  “Romki says you’re putting Phoenix in danger by not letting him get out and meet his contacts,” Lisbeth tried again. If anything could make the Major listen, it was concerns for Phoenix’s security. “He says he knows people who might be able to tell us things that could help.”

  “That could help him,” Hiro replied. “He wants us chasing alien shadows across the galaxy. He’ll do anything to steer us that way.”

  “And what do you think?” the Major asked Lisbeth, with that calm, dark-eyed gaze. “You’ve been spending the most time with him lately, studying the dead hacksaw queen.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say the most…”

  “Do you think we’re wasting our time with peace talks?”

  Lisbeth was slightly astonished that the Major was asking her. Then she realised — Erik wasn’t the only heir to the Debogande empire on the ship. And she had absorbed a lot of that big-picture talk, at home amongst the overlap of family, friends and business folks who discussed this kind of thing endlessly. Human politics, human wars and human futures, writ large across the stars. The last ten years, in fact, she’d heard far more of that kind of talk than Erik had.

  “I don’t think it’s ever a waste of time to try,” Lisbeth said carefully. “It’s just that we’re a long way from home out here, a long way from any human space really. And Phoenix is a warship. There’s a lot of talent on Phoenix, but not much experience at diplomacy.” She said it a little nervously, but she needn’t have worried — the Major never took these things personally.

  “It’ll take a famous Fleet name to make peace,” Thakur said firmly. “Fleet Command may not listen to us, but plenty of Fleet captains will. We’ve got their sympathy now, given how Command screwed us over, and Worlders will talk to us because we’re the only ones with big influence in Fleet who are prepared to listen. The Captain died to give us this opportunity, and I’m not about to waste his sacrifice because Romki finds aliens more interesting than humans.”


  * * *

  Barabo had a thing for wooden furniture. Erik ran a hand on the slick, polished surface of the meeting room table, admiring the patterned grain in red-hued wood. Unusual on a space station, given the costs of transport, even from a lush, populated world like Vieno next door.

  “Good quality synth,” he suggested.

  “No, I’m pretty sure that’s real,” said Lieutenant Kaspowitz, knocking on the table top. “I’ve seen enough synthetic tables in my time.”

  “Must have cost a fortune.” Erik looked at the leafy green plants along the walls, and sniffed the air — it smelled vaguely floral, the barabo put something in the air filters to make it that way. “But then I guess it fits, barabo aren’t big on economic common sense.”

  He gazed out the windows at the geo-feature — a huge, deep cavern that split through the Tuki Station rim down to a floor far below. Halfway down, the sheer drop was broken by a luxury hotel pool deck, furry barabo swimming or sprawled on recliners. An impermanent-looking roof spanned the floor below that, a transparent awning made to look like jungle vines, but instead alight with advertising. Beneath that, a sea of barabo and other species at market, tiny figures when viewed from this height.

  Lieutenant Crozier spoke to one of her marines on coms, waiting by the door in light armour — ‘light’, of course, being relative only to the powered armour suits that could devastate entire station districts. They didn’t wear those around barabo civilians if they could help it. Erik stood by the end of the table, placed his own helmet on the surface and waited, Kaspowitz beside him.

  From the outside, Master Sergeant Wong opened the door to the meeting room, and a human man in a business suit entered. Wong nodded at his Lieutenant to indicate he was unarmed. Erik smiled and walked to the new arrival, but their guest beat him to it.

  “Lieutenant Commander Debogande!” their guest exclaimed with delight, and strode to clasp his hand in a crushing grip. “Randal J Connor, Major General retired, Ninth Army mobile infantry. An honour and a pleasure!”

  “Likewise Mr Connor,” said Erik, extricating his hand to indicate Kaspowitz. “This is Lieutenant Kaspowitz, first-shift Navigation Officer. And Lieutenant Jasmine Crozier, commander of Delta Platoon.”

  More handshakes, and a barabo staffer in the loose but formal robes of a professional assistant entered with tea and snacks. Erik indicated that they sit, and Connor chose a chair up the table end with a view of both the big windows overlooking the geo-feature, and the room doorway. Erik and Kaspowitz sat opposite, content that with Crozier here and First Squad on guard outside, they didn’t need to watch their backs.

  “So what’s the food like?” Erik asked as Kaspowitz poured tea. That felt slightly odd, as Kaspowitz was nearly twice Erik’s age. But then, being in command was slightly odd. Having fallen into the role three months ago, Erik had concluded that there was nothing natural about it, and he should stop waiting for it to feel normal or he’d be waiting forever.

  “Their tea’s nice,” Connor admitted, taking some nuts from an accompanying bowl and chewing. “Bit of an aphrodisiac. If that’s a problem.” He glanced at Crozier by the door, and winked. Randal J Connor looked every bit the retired army officer — broad-shouldered, square-jawed, strongly spoken and devil-may-care. Probably well over a hundred, he still looked in the prime of life, and behaved accordingly.

  “How about the nuts?” Kaspowitz wondered, setting down the teapot and taking a few.

  “Nuts?” Connor grinned, still chewing. “They’re beetle-shell. Dried, fried and spiced.” To his credit, Kaspowitz ate them anyway. “Bit of an acquired taste.”

  “Bit,” Kaspowitz admitted. “How long have you been on Tuki Station?”

  “Oh… going on five years now. The barabo, you know, they’re fascinated by humans. So I run a nice little consultancy, telling them everything they want to know about humanity, introducing them to contacts, setting up long-term trade plans for when the day comes, that sort of thing. Tavalai used to be the big cheese around here, but now they’ve lost their war with us and they don’t really have the firepower left to keep the peace out here in neutral space.”

  “You mean they’re terrified the sard are going to take over as the big power here,” said Kaspowitz.

  “That too,” Connor admitted. “Sard are one of the tavalai’s most important allies, but with the tavalai surrendering, sard are getting antsy. With sard, you know, that’s not a good thing.”

  “You hear anything bad?” Erik asked.

  “With the sard?” asked Connor. “Hell, always. Nasty pieces of work, all six hundred billion of ’em, or whatever it’s up to now. You know, you’ve fought ‘em.”

  Erik nodded. “We have. The talk is that the sard didn’t want to accept the surrender. The tavalai insisted.”

  “Yeah, look,” and Connor leaned an elbow on the table, talking with big gestures from broad hands, “you gotta understand, sard don’t like anyone but sard. Tavalai they cut some slack, because tavalai discovered ‘em, got ‘em into space, put a leash on ‘em.” He munched some more beetle shell. “Tavalai have known how to control them for a few thousand years, and they did all the tavalai’s dirty work for them — they’re brilliant at maths but stink at technology, if that makes any sense, so most of their tech is tavalai, and they listen to the tavalai because the tavalai are alpha-dog and sard respect alpha-dogs.”

  “But now the tavalai have lost the Triumvirate War and half their old territory,” Kaspowitz finished.

  “Exactly. And the sard, they don’t respect old alpha-dog no more. So sard start pushing and barabo get nervous, start coming to my office and asking me when human Fleet’s going to come and save them.” He glanced around. “You know, I was kinda hoping Major Thakur would be here. Always wanted to meet that gal. Beautiful and deadly, just how I like ‘em.” With another wink at Crozier.

  Erik forced a smile. Behind Connor, Lieutenant Crozier contemplated murder. “The Major’s primary responsibility whenever Phoenix is docked is ship and personnel security. She’s kind of busy.”

  “And she kinda sucks at diplomacy,” Kaspowitz added, sipping his tea. As one of Trace Thakur’s oldest friends, he was sure to know.

  Connor laughed, then gulped some tea. “So,” he said, putting the tea down with a theatrical flourish. “You guys! Anyone else, any other ship gets into a fight with Fleet Command, they’d be running off and hiding in some distant part of the galaxy. But you guys come rolling in here trumpeting your message for all to hear — peace talks!” He shook his head in amazement. “In Kazak System, right?”

  “Joma Station,” Erik agreed.

  “Do they know you’re coming?”

  “They do by now,” said Kaspowitz. “Everyone else does.” He said it with the edge of someone not entirely happy about it.

  Connor heard. “And it’s occurred to you that when you run around Outer Neutral Space trumpeting your intentions and your destination to everyone, then all the folks that want to kill you might show up and try just that?”

  “It has,” Kaspowitz said mildly, with a glance at Erik.

  “Because even UFS Phoenix isn’t indestructible, right?” As though her young commander might not have thought of that.

  “Not indestructible, no,” Erik said calmly. “Just very determined. You’ve heard the word from Fleet, it reaches out even this far I’m sure. Trying to kill Phoenix just became a very unpopular policy.”

  “Yeah sure,” Connor agreed. “Fleet fucked up big-time with what they did to you guys. Oh, and real sorry about your Captain, by the way. Great man, I was real sad to hear that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But still, you guys… how many Fleeties did you kill when they came chasing after you? UFS Starwind, wasn’t it? A hundred and twenty lives?”

  “About that,” Erik agreed. “They were trying to kill a fully loaded Phoenix shuttle at the time, piloted by me. Unprovoked.”

  “Hey,” and Connor held up his hands. �
��No argument here. But still, you guys blew up a Fleet warship, no survivors. Got into numerous shooting matches with non-marine security, the way I hear it… put a warhead through the side of Fleet HQ on Hoffen Station and threatened to blow them all away? Man!” He shook his head with a disbelieving chuckle. “You guys have some serious balls. And they still want to forgive you, so I guess Captain Pantillo really packed some clout, huh?”

  “Fleet Command swore the same oath everyone else did,” Erik said coldly. “To protect and value the lives of their brothers and sisters in arms. And instead, they murder one of their best, and expect the rest to just lie down and take it. We didn’t. It escalated, far beyond what any of us wanted. And now that the dust’s settled, the rest of Fleet has had a chance to think about what happened, and have decided they don’t like it. If Command can murder Pantillo, then who amongst them is safe? Command is scared now, and on the back foot. We have an advantage.”

  Connor considered him, shrewdly. “That you do. Anyhow, you didn’t invite me here just to chat about current events. You want Worlder contacts. I’ve got Worlder contacts. I’m a Worlder myself, born and bred, like most army brats. You Fleeties all go zooming around in space — myself, I’ve lived and fought in the dirt. I mean someone’s got to take those damn worlds once you get us access, don’t they? Army gets the blisters, Fleet gets the glory.”

  Erik nodded slowly. Kaspowitz leaned forward. “Our information is that you know a lot of Worlders,” the Nav Officer said meaningfully.

  Connor nodded. “I did a lot of business after I retired. Lots of old army buddies… plenty of Worlders, you know the army.” Both Fleet officers nodded. They did. “This latest ordinance of Fleet’s… you guys have any idea of the lives it’s going to destroy? Forcing Worlders to abandon all downworld holdings or assets in order to get any kind of Spacer job? Forcing them to choose?” He shook his head in disbelief. “We’re all one species, right? One humanity? Wasn’t that what we were fighting the war for?”