IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Jorgen’s admiral to agree to a meeting. FM and her strange slug kept me company in the infirmary while we waited for Jorgen to send word that they were ready for us.
“What are you doing with the taynix anyway?” I asked her.
“Bonding,” FM said. “I shouldn’t say too much, but it’s a new program the pilots are trying out.”
The pilots were bonding with creatures that could hyperjump. After one of their own had infiltrated the Superiority in my place, trying to find the secret to hyperdrives.
The humans, as it turned out, had found it.
“You can use them to hyperjump,” I guessed. “Even if you aren’t cytonic?”
FM winced. “I really don’t have the clearance to tell you that.”
“You didn’t tell me,” I said. “Your slugs revealed it.”
“Yeah, we really do need to figure out how to get them to only do that on command. It gets really confusing when they want to buddy up every time we mention their names.”
I stared at the taynix, which was tucked back in FM’s sling, nuzzling the crook of her elbow. If those things were the key to Superiority hyperdrives, I would need to take at least one with me if I had to flee.
A radio attached to FM’s belt made a beeping noise, and then Jorgen’s voice spoke. “We’re ready,” he said. “FM, can you bring Alanik to the command room?”
“We’re on our way,” FM said, and she smiled at me in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring.
FM led me through the stark metal hallways. My body felt lighter, my steps bouncier than expected—the gravitational pull of Detritus had to be slightly less than ReDawn.
Everything on this platform was so flat, the ceilings so low, not like the buildings at home—which would wind up the branches of the trees, filled with ramps and stairs on the inside and the outside. On some of the wide lower branches, where flat horizontal ground was easier to come by, a building might have a wide first story, but then it would soar upward, making use of the space above it, or spiral around the branches with lower floors built on the bottom side of the branches.
Who wanted to live in a building that was so… squashed? I felt like the ceiling was pressing down on me, closing me in.
Before we reached their command room, we passed beneath a large skylight through which I could see the other platforms that traveled above. They looked a lot like Wandering Leaf, though there were so many more of them.
“Was this an outpost during the last human war?” I asked. “Is that how you became trapped here?”
“No,” FM said. “The technology here is a lot older. Our people were travelers with a small fleet of ships. We crashed here and were imprisoned by the Superiority after the war ended.”
I wondered if there were more humans hiding in pockets across the universe. The people here had been resourceful enough to survive.
As we walked, I caught glimpses of an electric blue barrier stretching across the sky between the platforms above. “What is that?” I asked.
“Our planetary shield,” FM said. “It protects us from the Superiority gunships. Jorgen told me we apparently have a cytonic inhibitor? I guess that must have activated around the same time we put the shield up. We still don’t really understand how all these systems work.”
If I had more information about that, I could have used it as currency, but most of this technology was foreign to me as well. Jorgen had the key to the inhibitor in his mind, but he hadn’t known it existed. I wondered if being born here attuned him to it somehow. That would also explain why the slugs could use their abilities as well.
FM led me to a room with a slightly higher domed ceiling. Several humans with a variety of skin tones, all in shades of beige and brown, sat around a large table. I wondered if those tones revealed their places of origin like with us, or if they were indicative of something else.
The woman I’d fled from—Jeshua Weight, FM had called her—glared at me. The meanings of facial expressions varied from species to species, and Finis had made me memorize many of them before I left for Starsight. But I was pretty sure that glare meant the same thing in every humanoid culture.
At the far end of the table sat the only other non-human in the room, a dione with blue skin. This would be Minister Cuna.
“Alanik of the UrDail,” they said. “Welcome.” They, like everyone in the room, had a translator pin perched on their shoulder. I hadn’t had this many in my ship, so Cuna must have brought a large number as well. Jorgen offered one to me, and I pinned it on.
“Yes, welcome,” said a man in a white uniform. I remembered him vaguely now—he’d accompanied Jeshua the first time we spoke. “I am Admiral Cobb, and this is Minister Cuna.” Admiral Cobb had hair growing from the space below his nose—a big white bush of it. That had to be impractical when his nostrils cleared. Or maybe the bush existed to collect the contents. That was a disgusting thought.
I wasn’t supposed to judge other cultures’ practices—Finis said we had to be open-minded about the customs of other species if we wanted them to be open-minded about ours. I understood that in theory, but it didn’t make it easy.
Admiral Cobb went around the room, introducing Jeshua Weight and several people who seemed to be her attendants, though I didn’t understand the significance of their titles or manage to remember their names. Finis would have been disappointed. A good spy, she’d said, always paid attention to detail.
Unfortunately, I was distracted by Snuggles, who slipped off Jorgen’s shoulders and onto the table, meandering over to Cobb.
“Is it necessary for those things to be here?” asked a man to Jeshua’s right.
“Yes,” Cobb said. “The pilots have been instructed to carry their taynix with them at all times.”
“Could we at least get rid of that one?” the man asked, pointing at the red and black slug. “We all heard what it did.”
“Boomslug isn’t going to hurt anyone,” Jorgen said. “I’m working with him.”
“Perhaps the pilots could step outside then,” the man said. “Since this isn’t the place to discuss the taynix program.” He looked meaningfully at Jeshua. While I didn’t know enough about human expressions to deduce the full meaning, I could guess.
“I know that the taynix are hyperdrives,” I said.
Everyone in the room looked at me in alarm, including FM and Jorgen, though I wasn’t going to reveal that they’d given it away. “We UrDail are not as ignorant as the Superiority assumes.”
“Your species shows great promise,” Cuna said. “That’s why you were selected from among the lesser species to try out for our military exercise.”
I tried not to bristle at the term ‘lesser species.’ This wasn’t the time to split twigs.
“That military exercise showed up on our doorstep and tried to kill us,” Jeshua said. “So let’s not make it sound like such an honor to be invited.”
Ah, so the Superiority was gathering a military force to destroy the humans. That made sense. Perhaps it was a good thing then, that I’d avoided recruitment at Starsight. Now I knew the secret I’d meant to glean there, and I hadn’t made an enemy out of the humans.
Jeshua continued to glare at me.
Most of the humans anyway.
“Let’s get to the point,” Jeshua said. “Why have you returned, Alanik? What do you want?”
Cuna leaned back and their eyes widened—a dione gesture of discomfort, I thought. FM stepped back against the door where she still stood, while Jorgen tried unsuccessfully to get Snuggles to return to him.
I would have written Jeshua’s direct question off as human aggression, but it seemed not all the humans accepted it as normal.
Interesting.
“I returned because I think we can help each other,” I said. “The Superiority is also the enemy of my people.”
“The Superiority is not the enemy,” Cuna said quickly. “Winzik, the current leader of the Superiority military, has taken a hard line against the humans, but the Superiority itself is not a monolith. It is a sprawling amalgamation of diverse peoples and perspectives, none of which can be summarized with a single creed or—”
“Yes, as you’ve said,” Admiral Cobb cut in. “But whatever you want to call it, its military is trying to exterminate us. And that makes us enemies.”
“I think the more immediate question,” Jeshua said, “is what the UrDail have to offer us.”
I stood up straighter. Like FM, I had not been given a seat at the table. I didn’t know anything about human customs. Finis would want me to reserve judgment, to allow that perhaps in the human culture being left to stand was a gesture of respect.
But it obviously wasn’t. Any idiot could see that.
“I can teach your cytonics,” I said. “My skills are more developed, because I’ve had knowledge and training that your cytonics lack. If we were allies, we would share information with you. We have knowledge and experience with the Superiority that you don’t have here in isolation.”
I shot a look at Minister Cuna, who certainly had far more experience with the Superiority than I had, but they didn’t argue with me.
Besides, experience cooperating with the Superiority wasn’t the same as experience resisting.
Jeshua hesitated. They did need help with cytonics, and they knew it.
Admiral Cobb cleared his throat. “What exactly do you want in return?” he asked me. “An alliance between our governments?”
That wasn’t something I could officially offer, not with things the way they were. “An alliance between the humans of Detritus and the Independence faction of ReDawn,” I said. I might not have that authority either, but Rinakin did, and he’d sent me. “I need help to defend my people and to inspire others to fight. Once we’ve secured our military base, we could formalize the alliance, build a plan to resist together. Your people and mine resisted together in the last war—”
“And we lost,” Jeshua said. “That’s how we ended up in this fix to begin with.”
I didn’t like the implication that the UrDail were at fault for that.
“We were allies for generations, not only in the last human war. And now my people are in trouble,” I said. Unity tried to suppress the history, but I’d read the books Rinakin had on the subject. “A rival faction is rounding up those who want to maintain independence from the Superiority, and they’re going to use us as leverage. If we first work together to rescue my allies, we can then build a coalition to fight back against the Superiority together.”
“So you’re asking for help,” Jeshua said. “Not offering help to us.”
“I think Alanik is saying that an alliance between your peoples would be mutually beneficial,” Cuna said. “And I concur. The UrDail are still somewhat aggressive, but if that aggression can be properly channeled—”
That was enough. “We aren’t aggressive,” I said. “We are defending ourselves, same as you are. And together we have more resources—”
“We are using all our resources to help ourselves,” Jeshua said.
“It seems like a good offer,” Cobb cut in. “If we share knowledge and resources, we’ll all be better positioned to fight back.”
“Maybe,” Jeshua said. “But if we align ourselves with rebels, we might lose the opportunity to bargain with the Superiority. They are the ones with the real power.”
FM and Jorgen both looked at me. The last time they’d talked about bargaining with the Superiority, I’d reacted poorly. That clearly had been the wrong tactic. Finis said a good spy was levelheaded, measuring her reactions.
“If you bargain with them,” I said, “you will always find that your wood returns to you rotten.”
“Regardless,” Jeshua said, mostly to Cobb, “We can’t send our starships away. We need them to defend Detritus.”
“The shield is defending us now,” Cobb said. “This might be the best time to send some of our ships away, to strike out instead of hunkering down here and waiting for the Superiority to devise a new way to come at us.”
“This isn’t our decision,” Jeshua snapped. “An interplanetary alliance should be voted on by the National Assembly.”
“That depends,” Cobb said. “If it’s a military operation, then the DDF should make the call.”
I didn’t know enough about human politics to know who was correct, but I did know enough about politics in general to guess that everyone would interpret the law in the way that best suited themselves.
I reached out to Jorgen’s mind, hoping he wouldn’t react visibly. Do you agree with them? I asked him.
Jorgen stared at his unruly taynix, who was lying on the table just out of his reach, fluting softly.
I don’t know, Jorgen said. It isn’t my call.
I know it isn’t your call, I responded. I’m asking what you think.
We don’t have a policy for this. There’s no precedent.
That wasn’t an opinion either. Were these humans not even allowed to think for themselves? How had they managed to outlaw that?
“Perhaps you could offer Alanik some quarters while you discuss it,” Cuna said.
“Yes,” Jeshua said. “I think that’s an excellent idea.”
I didn’t. “My people are in danger,” I said. “I don’t know how long they have before they’re turned over to the Superiority.”
Aside from FM and Jorgen, only Cobb looked sympathetic. The rest merely stared at me like my problems were none of their concern.
Still, my only choices were to wait them out or return home empty-handed, with nowhere to run and no way to help my brother, or Rinakin, or the rest of the resistance.
“But I would appreciate that,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
If they took too long, I’d have to come up with another plan. I couldn’t leave my people in Unity’s hands for long.
But I couldn’t save any of my people on my own.
