Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five) Read online

  So newly-phased parren were supposed to choose denominations based on which interpretation of Harmony-phase psychology most appealed to them personally, Lisbeth thought. But instead, as with humans, they ended up siding with the most charismatic leader and not taking much note of what his teachings or policies were. Gesul was the beneficiary of that now, which supposed good sense on the part of his followers, because Lisbeth knew Gesul well enough to like and admire him greatly. But previously Aristan had been the recipient of that parren cult of personality, and the power that his megalomania had nearly managed to acquire was frightening to contemplate.

  Parren populism could be alarming. The surges and tides of parren popular opinion, driven by a psychological phase-change embedded and irreversible in their biology, could favour good people or bad, and drive all parren en masse either toward the heights of sanity and prosperity, or straight over a cliff. Parren artists had been writing plays about it for millennia, these cyclical highs and lows, this simultaneous enlightenment and insanity. Lisbeth had once thought those plays somewhat melodramatic, but now that she’d seen it at a closer range than even most parren playwrights got to experience, she thought that if anything they’d been underplaying the random fragility of it all.

  Something small, winged and insect-like buzzed before her face, and Lisbeth unzipped the pouch on the front of her pressure suit. The little machine landed and climbed inside, theoretically unable to escape once contained, but Lisbeth doubted that and others of Styx’s claims about the bugs’ harmlessness. Perhaps some of the watching parren guards noticed — it did not matter, all parren knew of Phoenix’s association with drysine technology, and all of these parren knew about the bugs. Hiding them would not fool anyone, and parren respected displays of power and authority. But too much power and authority, in the wrong company, could get you recognised as a threat and killed. It was the endless tightrope walk of life amid parren authorities, and it seemed to Lisbeth that lately the rope was growing thinner, and the crosswinds stronger.

  Timoshene joined them at the designated airlock — he and his assigned guards now in the advanced and sleek armour of parren marines, with a visor display that would create wrap-around panoramics inside his helmet, and advanced targeting for the rifle and other weapons. Lisbeth was pleased for the protection, but it did not make her feel as secure as her time amongst Phoenix’s marines had. Parren armour was good, but Phoenix marines considered them toys, and speculated as to how many hits that rifle would need to even penetrate human armour.

  Outside the airlock, Defiance’s grey steel mechanical innards surrounded, some of it the straight forward structural right angles that Lisbeth’s engineer-trained brain made simple sense of, and some of it organic and baffling like the entrails of an alien creature. Incefahd-installed floodlights lit this portion of passage — a winding tube that snaked away like an animal’s burrow. It had been a mass transit system once, beneath the towers that soared overhead, but all trace of train or carriage was now long gone. Instead there sat a familiar parren design of ground car, with fat wheels on independent suspension about a central chassis. Some larger cars were pressurised, but this one was not, used for short trips beneath the towers.

  Lisbeth climbed the ladder easily and pulled herself in, Semaya and the guards distributing themselves evenly about the remaining seats, and several propped on the rear with rifles ready. “No, let me drive,” Lisbeth admonished Timoshene as he attempted once more to take the driver’s seat. “How are you supposed to protect me from attack if you’re busy driving? There’s only two possible directions, forward and back, and besides, I’m a qualified shuttle co-pilot and you’re not.”

  She could not see Timoshene’s expression through the reflective glare of floodlight on visor, but he relented to take the middle of the seat row behind. Lisbeth settled in, pleased to have something more to do than be hauled from one location to another like a bag of vegetables. In parren company, that wasn’t always easy.

  After making sure all were prepared, Lisbeth powered up the engine and sent them forward. She hadn’t mentioned to Timoshene that ‘shuttle co-pilot’ didn’t actually involve much flying, and was mostly about operating systems that the pilot was too busy to manage personally. But this big electric rig was about as simple as vehicles got — a hand throttle, a steering wheel that was mostly redundant in a giant tube, and a few indicators showing speed, power levels and powerplant health.

  Through the open superstructure as they left she saw more vehicles rolling in, similarly loaded with passengers and armoured guards. “Rousha Denomination,” said Semaya on coms, whose job it was to know such things. “A lot of them. Here to discuss the data-core, no doubt.”

  Semaya was now the head of Lisbeth’s personal staff, by Lisbeth’s own appointment. ‘Chief of Staff’, she’d explained the human term to the parren woman — the person who managed the affairs of the office and all the people in it. Semaya was far too cool and graceful to show any great emotion at the appointment, but Lisbeth could tell she’d been pleased. Back at the office, whose personnel were split between the gravitational habitat and the Domesh Tower alongside the one occupied by Phoenix, she had also (as nearly as she could translate their parren names and functions) a Chief of Communications, a Chief of Assessment (whose job it was to advise her on the political state-of-play between denominations), a Chief Scientist (who Semaya had warned was actually a plant from a big Incefahd research institution, there to learn as much as possible about Styx and Phoenix both), and a full seven Denominational Liaisons who were tasked with keeping in personal contact with people from each denominational head office, who often knew things unannounced in the official releases. Happily, all of them answered to Semaya, who in turn answered to Lisbeth. Plus of course there was Timoshene and his twelve-strong security team, tasked with protecting them all from attack, and Lisbeth in particular.

  “I’m more concerned about Alired myself,” said Lisbeth, as the big tires bumped on the lower skeleton ribs of the tunnel. “And the extent to which Alired is coordinating all this House Harmony activity against Gesul.”

  It was the commonest speculation, and one did not need to be an expert in parren politics to see it happening. If the Jusica’s count of followers put Gesul ahead of Rehnar, then Gesul and the Domesh Denomination would assume control of House Harmony. The leaders of the other Harmony denominations, Rehnar’s Incefahd Denomination most prominently, preferred that it did not happen.

  House Fortitude, the greatest of the five parren houses, and currently the outright rulers of all parren space, also preferred that it did not happen. Harmony ruled by Incefahd was manageable, but Harmony ruled by Domesh was a destabilising concern that Fortitude had long sought to prevent — first with Aristan leading the Domesh, and now with Gesul. And so House Fortitude had sent an ambassador to Defiance, to organise and instruct on the wishes of House Fortitude and the Supreme Leader of all the parren. That ambassador’s name was Alired. Lisbeth had met her on several occasions, and liked her less on each.

  The trip back to the Domesh Tower took barely ten minutes, a slow crawl through the framework tunnel that was nonetheless faster than the alternatives. Along the way they passed many engineers and technicians, examining various ancient systems, some still functioning, some long since decayed. The anti-aging technologies on Defiance had not saved everything, and while some sections of the enormous alien city appeared almost pristine, others were a mouldering shell.

  At the tower’s basement access Lisbeth drove them out through the gap Domesh engineers had cut in the tube, then parked the car in its long-term bay. Its passengers dismounted as a tech came with a big cord from its generator to recharge it, and Lisbeth noticed some Phoenix marines nearby, talking with parren marines. She would have stopped to chat, but such informalities were unknown to parren on official business, so she settled for a wave. The marines waved back — a group of four, Second Section, Third Squad, Bravo Platoon, her Augmented Reality visor informed her, o
r Bravo 2-3 in marine-speak. She didn’t know those guys, and hadn’t been on Phoenix long enough to get to know more than a handful very well. But those she did know continued to regard her like family, however little she saw them these days.

  On the other side of the airlock, before the lockers of suit-transition, Hiro Uno was waiting for her. With him was a human man Lisbeth didn’t recognise — middle height and strongly built, he had the look of a military man save that he wore a plain spacer jumpsuit and his hair was several grades too long for even the relaxed grooming standards of a Fleet carrier crew one year away from external inspection. So he wasn’t Phoenix, then. It didn’t leave many options.

  Timoshene stepped before them immediately, helmet off and staring down at both men with menace. “Timoshene, don’t be silly,” Lisbeth told him. “You know Hiro, he’s worked for my family for many years.”

  “This other is not Phoenix,” Timoshene said bluntly. “There is no passcode access. How did you enter?” This directed at Hiro. Hiro heard on his earpiece translator, but looked at Lisbeth, both amused and wary.

  “Phoenix has the tower next door,” Lisbeth retorted, feeling very much like a pre-school teacher scolding an unruly five-year-old. “Humans come and go from the Domesh Tower all the time, I’m quite happy to meet anyone Hiro has brought to see me.”

  “This human is from the other ship,” Timoshene said stubbornly. “He could be an assassin.”

  “If he’s a friend of Hiro’s, he probably is an assassin,” said Lisbeth. It was a thought she would have kept to herself among humans, but among parren it was more likely to increase respect than diminish it. “But Timoshene, you must understand the consequences for a human of assassinating the daughter of Alice Debogande, and the brother of Erik Debogande. It would be catastrophic for all involved. Besides which, I trust Hiro implicitly, both his loyalty and his judgement.”

  Parren didn’t really do family. They had families, and loved them, but those bonds were always weaker than the bonds of house and the great change of the flux that sent parren scattering to all corners. It was a constant source of misunderstanding between herself and her parren comrades, as they could not quite grasp what Family Debogande was — not a denomination of like-minded ideologues, not a house describing a psychological state of mind, but rather a bloodline of kin that also operated as a great unit of power in human space. Whatever else they were, parren were meritocrats, and their leaders did not ascend to the top purely by accidents of birth or marriage. They’d never really done kings and queens at any point in their social evolution, and regarded all those who ascended in that way as suspect, the same way a Phoenix spacer might judge an officer who’d climbed the ranks on rumours of favouritism from high-placed friends. And sometimes Lisbeth was left with the uncomfortable feeling that they were probably right.

  “His name is Daica,” said Hiro, and Lisbeth was astonished at the momentary disorientation that sudden switch to English caused her brain. “He is a representative of the human government. There are private matters to be discussed, Lisbeth. Regarding your family, and its affairs back home, while you have been gone.”

  “No,” said Timoshene, a blunt obstacle in Hiro’s way. “No private affairs. Lisbeth is an advisor to the ruler of the Domesh Denomination.”

  “A role she will struggle to fulfil if she cannot hear sensitive information from the human government for herself,” Hiro said calmly, after the translator pause that Lisbeth no longer needed. “If she is not privy to sensitive human information, what possible use is she to Gesul?”

  Lisbeth settled in her personal quarters, and waited for the aides to settle food and drink on the small tables before each of her guests. The aides were the lowest rung in her office — four of them, all wide-eyed kids from various worlds in parren space, who fetched the drinks and did the odd tasks that every office required. Lisbeth was uncomfortable with how brusquely they were treated by others in her office, but happily it was never a permanent position, and all high-ranking parren had begun their duties in such posts, Gesul included. They departed, as Hiro watched with a private, impressed smile. His companion, now Lisbeth’s guest, looked out the curved, massively reinforced windows at the airless view of alien cityscape beyond, with all the awe that it deserved. Lisbeth put her AR glasses over her eyes and blinked through a series of security protocols, assuring her that the installed technology in this room was doing its job.

  “We are secure,” she informed the new man. “There’s anti-bugging technology in this room that parren technology cannot penetrate.”

  Daica, Hiro had said the man’s name was. “Who installed that technology?” he asked, still gazing out the window. “Given that this is a parren facility?”

  “I did,” said Hiro. “It’s drysine and it’s ridiculous, like all things drysine. What the local parren don’t realise is that it can probably isolate and recover every data-feed taking place in this tower, communications or otherwise.”

  “And they let you install it?” Daica wondered. “Surely they’d suspect, given how you’ve been messing around with drysine coms tech lately?”

  Hiro shrugged. “Parren be strange.”

  “Superior capabilities are a mark of status among parren,” Lisbeth explained, sipping the steaming tea the aides had left. “Parren compete upwards, not down, and superior abilities are encouraged, not repressed.”

  “They’re elitists,” Hiro translated, dipping a small instrument in his own tea. It gave him a reading on his glasses. Only then did he sip. Daica watched, then did the same.

  “Spies,” Lisbeth said distastefully. And to Daica, “What branch are you?”

  “Federal Intelligence,” said Daica. His face registered cautious surprise at how good the tea was. Lisbeth wondered if he’d been out of human space before in his life. “The same branch as Hiro.” Meaning quite a bit more than just ‘Federal Intelligence’, Lisbeth knew. Most of Federal Intelligence sat in offices and processed data. A small, elite few went out and gathered that data. An even smaller, even more elite group possessed specialised and often lethal skills for the gathering. Hiro was a former member of this group, and Lisbeth suspected that Daica was too.

  “Old friend?” she asked. Daica glanced at Hiro. Hiro just smiled. Lisbeth sighed, knowing she’d never get a detailed answer. Hiro had ‘retired’, but in truth no one ever really retired from that organisation. And Alice Debogande had surely known that, in hiring Hiro, the advantages and connections from his presence went both ways. Surely it had benefited Hiro’s former bosses to have a theoretically ‘ex’ agent within the Debogande household, as it had also benefited Alice to have a conduit to the highest spymasters in human space right in her office. Hiro’s branch of Intelligence was not Fleet, it was civilian, and those two sides didn’t always get along.

  “You’ve got parren servants now,” said Hiro. “To go with the personal bodyguards.”

  “They’re staff,” Lisbeth corrected, wary of her former family security making fun of her. He and Jokono had always worked for Alice, not for Alice’s children, and had not been shy of reminding them. “I have an office. Call it a human liaison office, in Gesul’s administration.”

  And she was surprised that Hiro did not make fun, but smiled proudly. “Amazing,” he said.

  “Amazing,” Daica added with feeling. “There’s been hardly any non-parren who’ve achieved it, let alone humans. Maybe back in the Parren Empire aliens in high administration would have been a thing, but not for thousands of years. And your Porgesh… you learned all that in six months?”

  “It’s been high immersion,” said Lisbeth with great understatement. “And I’ve been taking the memory enhancers, they help.”

  “So,” said Daica, nodding. Like Hiro, Lisbeth thought he seemed quite casual and laid back. It had surprised her at first, meeting Hiro as a younger girl. Hiro had been a significantly powerful person, a top spy, yet he was flippant and good humoured. Only after a while had she come to realise how the flippancy w
orked as a cover for evasiveness, and created an air of general vagueness that allowed him to avoid answering most questions directly. And the thing with casual, laid back people was that you could never really tell what they were thinking, or what mattered to them. People liked Hiro, and were at ease with him, talking eagerly and hoping to impress him… all good things for a spy. And the fact that he was so damn handsome didn’t hurt his chances at getting information from female contacts, either. Human ones, anyway.

  “I came out on Lien Wang,” said Daica. “As you’ve gathered. I’d heard a few things about your situation when I left, but nothing like this.” He gestured around. “You’ve made yourself quite an asset to all human kind, Lisbeth. We’ve not had this degree of influence in parren society ever.”

  It made Lisbeth immediately uncomfortable. “No, look.” She held up her hand. “You’ve misunderstood my position. There’s no such thing as ‘parren society’. It’s not a singular thing, all the houses compete and all the denominations compete within the houses. I have some influence in House Harmony, but no more than that. And if humanity attempts to use me to further human causes, I lose all my status and thus my usefulness to anyone. Parren serve only one master. Divided loyalties are almost entirely unknown to them.”

  “Really?” Daica’s eyebrows raised. “Isn’t there a long tradition of servants turning on masters?”

  “No.” Lisbeth shook her head firmly. “The servant was always serving one master. He was only pretending to serve the other. That’s the difference.”