Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (2 page)

A
lone on the
bed of her hotel room, Trace Thakur sat cross-legged and meditated. The bed was too soft. It was a joke among her marines, that she refused even small luxuries in favour of things that were tougher, harder, more unpleasant. But in this case it was true — the bed was too soft, and her posture suffered. She couldn’t sit on the floor because her full armour suit currently occupied much of it by the door, while her huge Koshaim-20 rifle took up the rest beside her bed.

With much of Phoenix Company crashing about in the hallways, the hotel quarters were the only place quiet enough to meditate in. Usually when she meditated, she focused only on her breathing, making it slower and deeper until all time and space seemed to drift with the gentle rhythm of her heart. When she was younger, that focus had come naturally. In the last few years, however, that peace had been harder and harder to find.

When inward focus abandoned her, she typically thought of clouds. In her quarters at the Kulina Academy on Sugauli, she’d watched them rolling in across the ragged black mountains, building into great, thundering storms. But thinking of Sugauli only made her think of Aran, and how she’d stared out of the dirty windows of the coroner’s office at age seven, having just seen his body, and wondering why the clouds looked so unchanged. Didn’t they know that her brother was dead? Didn’t they care? Her whole universe had changed, yet the clouds rolled on regardless. Like it didn’t matter. Like nothing did.

Aran had been an apprentice miner in Sugauli’s many pits and shafts, having left home and school early, like so many Sugauli youngsters. The money was good, far better than a more advanced education might earn, but the safety conditions weren’t as great. A loader he’d been operating had malfunctioned in an earth tremor, and run off the side of a huge, deep pit. For perhaps twenty seconds, the coroner’s report confirmed, the loader had hung upon the edge of that pit, dangling, while Aran had struggled with the unfamiliar safety harness and shouted for help. Men had been near enough to help, but had not. They’d been scared. And sure enough, the loader had fallen, and taken Aran down with it.

Trace had hated those men. She hated their weakness. Like she hated her own father’s weakness, in being the violent, drunken oaf who’d driven Aran away at such a young age. And like she’d hated her mother, for caring more about her dreary social life, gambling and drinking than she did about her own children. There had seemed to be so little virtue in the world. People put their selfish needs first, and disasters followed. From then, she’d dreamed only of becoming Kulina. The Kulina were at war with the tavalai, but the true war that Trace had wished to wage was the one within her own heart.

On
Phoenix
she’d found comradeship and love — not the petty, selfish love of a girl with a boy, but the love of people who needed each other so profoundly, for simple survival, that their individual identities began to fuse into a single, greater whole. That love was the greatest happiness she’d ever known, and so she distrusted it. Love and happiness were selfish things. Selfishness had killed Aran. Since becoming Kulina, she’d devoted herself to scouring all selfishness from her soul. The Kulina did not simply want to make one person better — they wanted to make the whole universe better. Selfishness made bad karma, and bad karma would eventually destroy everything good in the world. Thus you could love and be happy, yet actually make everything worse, if you loved and were happy in a selfish way. Her father had been happy when dominating others. Her mother, when gambling with noxious friends. Tavalai soldiers were happy when killing humans. ‘Happiness’ in itself was no object worth seeking. Selflessness was all.

And so she sat here, alone in the dark, and tried to purge the human attachment from her soul. The more attached she became, the more harm she would do the very people whom she loved. Lately, purging that attachment had become very hard indeed. Some people, individually and together, she simply loved too much. And it terrified her, that she might live long enough to see her own failings hurt those very people she’d most like to save.

A heroic death was always the most she’d expected and wanted from the war. She’d come very close on numerous occasions. But that happy fate had not been granted, and so she was stuck here, worrying over the consequences of her own selfish failure to die, as so many other Kulina had had the fortunate good sense to do.

Her uplink coms clicked.
“Hello Major,”
came Hiro Uno’s voice.
“You promised me a sparring session. Is now a good time?”

Trace took a deep breath, and unfolded herself from the bed. “Of course Hiro. I’ll be right down.”

T
he marines
on guard in the hotel lobby did not bother checking Lisbeth’s ID — these days everyone knew her on sight. She dressed in spacer blues and harness with Fleet insignia on the shoulders and a
UFS Phoenix
cap pulled tight over her frizzy brown hair, and while she did not exactly feel like one of the crew, she looked the part in every way except for the lack of rank, and unorthodox haircut. Vijay and Carla walked with her, looking like marines in just the same way — except that they weren’t. Ex-marines, but now Debogande bodyguards, protecting their charge with the light armour and weapons that
Phoenix
’s officers had allowed them for the task.

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.”

B
arabo 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.