NOVEL NEXT 5.2 Liason
Liason
(Starspeak)
Peudra was a goddess.
There was a long list of Vorak I didn’t like.
Tox. Tispas. Itun was probably in jail somewhere. But at least Vather was dead. Stalker and Courser might be nursing grudges against me for killing Trapper and Sendin Marfek—which was such crap. I hadn’t even killed her, but everyone blamed me for it anyway.
And those were just the old ones.
We’d been pretty busy in the two years since tangling with Kemon, but not quite busy enough to avoid making some new enemies. Capsody Maysh, Unte, Koon-au-Kolay…even limiting it to just Vorak, the list of people who probably wanted to kill me was getting uncomfortably long.
It was a comparatively short list of Vorak I tolerated well enough to like—even fewer of whom might like me back. Umtane Fromil. Mirsus Bandee was surprisingly transparent once you saw through their disguise. Maybe Banmei Sturgin on a good day.
But Peudra Cuvay? They topped the list.
The abductee conundrum simmering for the past two years really only mattered to a handful of groups. In our stint in the Casti home system, only the largest nations on Nakrumum had even heard us out. The colonial governors on the planet’s moon oversaw much smaller polities and had been downright desperate to pawn us and our problems off on local Coalition offices or established superpowers on the planet below. Those took an interest in us humans because they had the resources to handle us as well as the position to actually get something out of it in return. But no one smaller than them was really going to want to get tangled with us. Even a country of ‘merely’ tens of millions would struggle to justify the costs of supporting humans, even tangentially. Especially since, by the numbers, there were only a few dozen humans in each system. Moving us anywhere was hard enough. Getting us all in one place? On a permanent basis?
No, we were just too much trouble.
Which was silly considering just how much we had to offer. Psionic distribution, maintenance, and lessons made the Flotilla a ton of money. With how many ships we had, we moved a lot of cargo too.
But the most lucrative of our activities was R&D, by far.
Shinshay and Ben had spent the last two years more or less repeating the same loop: make a prototype device, go to the nearest relevant university or manufacturer, learn more about computer design, programming, and micromanufacturing, come back to the Flotilla. Rinse and repeat.
By now? They’d both put in ungodly amounts of work into the Jack and the Siegfried. Shinshay had the technical knowledge and electrical engineering expertise. Back on Earth Ben only had a passing familiarity with software and computer architecture, but between those two and the human-conventions’ opportunity to pool knowledge, our ships had the best computer systems in the known universe.
Even just their first prototype was cost-effective enough to blow all but the best alien computers out of the water, and we’d sold decade long manufacturing licenses to more than sixty colonies.
We’d had a dozen tech manufacturers cut us checks just to be put on a list to be informed when we had another prototype. Not even to get one. Just when we had something.
And that wasn’t even the most lucrative thing we could sell, if we really needed to.
But some things, it was best to keep to ourselves.
Cash was the one thing the Flotilla had in surplus. Twice in the last couple months, Dustin had quietly messaged me for help covering Nora’s bills. I took maybe a bit too much pleasure in that.
Smaller governments just couldn’t help us, both because they were too weak, and we didn’t really need aid in the form they were most likely to give. So that left the inter planetary superpowers to interact with us, and there were really only two of those.
It would have been grand for me and the Flotilla to keep to Coalition space while Nora worked the Assembly’s systems, but then I’d gone and stolen a small flagship, and Nora had proved adept at organizing people and, well, organizations. We were both helping abductees, but each with different accommodations.
She was making human safe havens. Destinations.
My group on the other hand? We weren’t so stationary.
Not every group of humans we contacted still had an A-ship to carry them, but most did. That left a growing network of human-operated ships.
A fleet.
Fleets made alien militaries nervous. Hell, fleets made anyone nervous. Even transport unions that got big enough made people sweat. Warships weren’t common, but even a spaceship without weapons could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
And our not-so-little Flotilla wanted to go everywhere, anywhere abductees might need our help, anywhere there might be clues about our abductors, anywhere that might even hint at a way back to Earth.
‘Anywhere’ included Vorak space. Most Vorak didn’t like me. The number of times I’d heard the word ‘Ajengita’ whispered in hushed tones when I walked through doors was going to my head. But too many communiques with Vorak colonial governments had been DOA just because they were coming from people who worked with me.
So how was a Flotilla to help the likes of Aaron or Willy? Stuck in all corners of Vorak space with no support?
Peudra-freaking-Cuvay was how.
Suffice to say, over the years she’d moved heaven and earth in Vorak circles on our behalf. The exact number was fuzzy, but my tentative estimate was that her work had enabled us to save more than a hundred human lives over the past two years.
That built a lot of goodwill.
So, when two months ago, they’d made the very bold request to make Kraknor the Flotilla’s next destination, we hadn’t laughed them out of the room.
They’d made a convincing case, but we hadn’t flown to the Vorak homeworld just yet.
“More than worthwhile…” Tasser said. “Those were their exact words. ‘In excess of how we might benefit from other destinations’, more specifically.”
“Well Willy and Aaron’s crew certainly needed the visit,” I nodded. “But you’re right. So far, at least, I’m not seeing that ‘excess’ benefit.”
Tasser and I chewed our meals while we stared at the screen in the Jack’s mess hall-turned-lounge.
I glanced at Tasser sheepishly.
“
<[Dumbass,]> Jordan accused.
I quickly linked my handbook to the screen so it could act as a remote and toggled the mute.
“—esting, testing, when someone can hear me say something please or I’m going shoot someone…testing, testing please oh won’t someone—”
“Shinshay,” I said, cutting them off. “We hear you now.”
“You really muted it?” they asked.
“It’s not anymore,” I grumbled.
“That means the first cables were good,” they muttered. “So…these ports should…”
The flickering screen cleared and a crystal-clear image of the Siegfried’s briefing room appeared, with a who’s who of the Flotilla’s critical personnel. On the their end, Serral was the big cheese, accompanied by Shinshay, Jordan, Ike, Ben, Aarti, Jean, Weith, Vez, and—very surprising to see—Dirdten, Serral’s old aide from Demon’s Pit.
I hadn’t seen him since leaving the planet. But the Flotilla was a big club, and at least a dozen skilled aliens were absent—presumably busy running the ship itself. Even if I hadn’t gotten along with him back then, I trusted Serral’s choice in personnel.
Down here on the Jack I was joined by Nai, Tasser, Nerin, Sid, Madeline, Johnny, Donnie, finally Fenno. Deg was the only longtime crewmember not present because he was currently supervising the handful of younger abductees the Jack had aboard right now.
“There!” Shinshay crowed.
“We see you,” Serral said.
“Was all this strictly necessary?” Fenno asked. “Briefings are quicker when they’re psionic.”
“Shinshay and Ben are putting more computer upgrades through the gauntlet,” Serral explained. The two tech-heads in question too busy fussing with the machinery to answer the question themselves.
Video conferences with this much of the Flotilla’s critical crew were uncommon, so it irked me to see the two of them not paying much attention to our assembled crowd, but we were on the third computer overhaul now, each one better than the last. The two of them were entitled to being absorbed in their work.
Fenno looked like she might grumble, but I knew flying with Shinshay had made her grow rather fond of them. I suppose I was the same way. I’d originally thought of Shinshay as a stalker, but now they were one of the most dependable and skilled people I knew. They were an odd flavor that grew on you with time.
“How was everything on the ground?” Serral asked us. “I heard from the governors that everything was resolved, but are there any other details?”
“Nothing for this meeting,” I said, “but I’ll shoot you a more comprehensive write-up before I sleep.”
“Well if the video is working, shall we begin?” Dirdten asked. I didn’t hear anything in his tone. Maybe he’d gotten over his dislike of me in the last two years.
“Not yet,” Tasser said. “We’re still waiting on Peudra.”
“I thought they were there already,” Serral frowned.
“We asked her to grab someone from the Ramstein lot,” Donnie said. “Better to have one of them here, in the loop, than just hearing from us afterward.”
<[She’s an old school Vorak,]> I reminded Donnie. <[Careful about calling her ‘her’ to her face. She might chew your ear off for being too familiar.]>
<[Yeah, yeah.]>
“Fair enough,” Serral said, “but the other Hashtin crews are still going to get their information after the fact.”
Hashtin was a gas giant just like Paris in C2, and Jupiter back home. But the Vorak had first colonized its rocks more than two hundred years ago, so by now it was a flourishing network of moons and asteroids.
The local group of abductees had been informally dubbed the ‘Ramstein’ crew when Jordan clocked that many of them had been abducted from Germany. Most systems we’d trawled through had one pod of A-ships consisting of four ships each, but the Ramstein crew had eight ships, and they’d been pretty smart until Aaron and Marika’s mishaps.
Instead of keeping all eight ships in one place, they’d divided six of them across four different moons orbiting Hashtin and had the remaining two form a small cargo and shipping company. They’d carved out a decent little niche in the community, but stable as their situation had been until recently, they could still benefit from a relationship with the Flotilla.
And that was what we were here to do: help out the Ramstein crew.
Unfortunately, them spreading out made our job slightly harder. It was good for them! Being in smaller groups made it easier for local food production to accommodate them. It also kept them a bit quainter in the eyes of the locals. Two dozen humans moving into the neighborhood was easier to write off as a novelty than ninety-six.
But even with all their work to fit in, there were assholes in every corner of the cosmos, ready to start something.
Public image problems like that were Peudra’s bread and butter.
I hadn’t pressed them about their background, but I’d gleaned a vague understanding she had a history in the Vorak news media. But she also had some deep ties to at least four Vorak void fleets, so I wasn’t making any assumptions at this rate.
It didn’t take too long, but eventually we got a ping from the Jack’s outer hatch.
The nice thing about half Ben and Shinshay’s upgrades were that they included psionic-interfacing components. So we could access a lot of the ship’s systems with just our brains. Nai—already passing the time on her handbook—tapped into the ship’s fancy exterior cameras, and psionically routed the feed to another of the lounge feeds.
Peudra stood patiently with Willy and another girl in tow.
“
Warped by the fisheye lens, Peudra hid a scowl and tapped on the camera orb.
Peudra said.
Nai tapped a button on her handbook and the door hissed open.
“Okay, everyone’s all here,” I said. “Peudra, I don’t think we have any new faces—maybe Dirdten?”
“I met Senior Dirdten aboard the Siegfried before arriving,” they nodded.
“[Cool]. Siegfried crew, this is Willy and—Christina right?”
“Or Christy. Either’s fine,” she nodded.
“Well I know Willy is de facto in charge of the two ships here on Vaco. You helping him out?”
Christina hesitated, and Peudra spoke instead. “Well—"
“Christina is here at my request,” they said. “After talking with the colony governor and confirming my information, I have a proposal to offer, and Christina has testimony relevant to my proposal.”
“…yeah. That.”
“Okay. Well, Christina, Willy, welcome to the Jack and our Flotilla. The impressive looking Casti on the screen is our esteemed leader, Serralinitus. That’s Jordan, Vez, I think I saw Jao earlier, but I don’t know. Anyone up there really dying for an introduction?”
“[We’ve all got shit to do, Caleb,]” Ben chirped from offscreen.
“[Nothing wrong with trying to be a little polite,]” I replied easily.
He was a little right though.
“Willy, the first order of business is for you then,” I said. “The Siegfried’s got five more A-ships with it right now. We do a lot of splitting up, and we’re trying to put your group in more direct contact with the other abductees on Hashtin’s moons. Ike—that guy there—is going to bring some of our alien experts down here tomorrow to make some modifications to your A-ships and hand out some handy psionics.”
“You’re telling me, not asking,” he noted.
“Trust me, these are things you want,” I said. “Ike can go over all the details with you after this. If you really want to turn down anything? Sure. Fine. But I promise you I’m talking about quality-of-life upgrades and psionic goodies.”
“Would an example be too big of an ask?” he said, still doubtful.
“An Earth music library,” Nai said.
That finally shifted him. Willy’s eyebrows shot up.
“Plus a ton of other stuff,” I said.
“Really?”
“Made good on my last promise didn’t I?”
Willy did concede a nod.
“Then…Peudra. A proposal?”
“Yes,” they said, standing.
“You should be warned,” Tasser said. “Our expectations are sky high after your last description. ‘More than worthwhile’ were your specific words.”
“I have a bet on whether or not you deliver,” Nai smiled.
Needling Peudra was something of a pastime because of how obviously it rankled their prim demeanor, but it was a well-practiced game by now.
They were used to it.
“Believe me,” they said, smiling warmly, “I’m even more confident now than yesterday. Caleb. I said I’d ensure the governor would deliver?”
“You did,” I nodded.
“The colony governor confirmed some of the information I wheedled out of my friends in the Trailblazers: there are humans on Kraknor too.”
“Good to know,” I said. “But also not wholly surprising.”
“Perhaps not,” Peudra agreed. “But I still believe I have details of particular interest to you specifically, Caleb. The humans I’ve tracked to Kraknor are not alive. They’re corpses. Particular ones.”
I frowned. Human corpses were still something to concern the whole Flotilla. There were only a handful of corpses that I had a special interest in.
No…
I’d left twenty-three deceased abductees behind when I first escaped Korbanok. And just a few weeks later, the Vorak had lost more than half of them in transit. ‘Attacked by unidentified assailants’ was the most detailed report I’d read on the event.
“From Korbanok?” I asked. “The missing ones?”
Peudra nodded.
Tasser and Nai had both been in my brain at one point or another. They’d felt how important this was to me.
“Tread very carefully, Peudra,” Tasser warned. No jokes anymore.
“If you’re getting his hopes up about this…” Nai added, leaving the rest of the warning unsaid.
Peudra nodded solemnly.
“I will clarify now then. I can’t confirm the number. It’s at least two, but it could be as many as seven.,” they said.
“How’d you track them from C2 to here?” I asked.
“The grunts I’ve talked to in the Trailblazers said they had family on the Ogi Coast who ran into a human—normally we’d treat that as unsubstantiated rumor, but something to watch for—but those stories were corroborated by regional news stories that talked about ‘alien corpses’.”
“More than enough to get us interested,” I nodded. “But I’m still waiting on the evidence that says they’re from Korbanok.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk with the colony governors. Everyone administrating a colony on any of Hashtin’s moons moves in the same circles. The local governor acted as a go-between for me and a governor with a family member formerly in the Red Sails. Long story short? They were there, eyes on the corpses, immediately after the attack on the convoy.”
“There’s only way that’s possible,” I pointed out. “They had to be involved.”
“After the fact,” Peudra nodded. “Their unit in the Red Sails was stationed on Archo, but they did some… ‘unofficial’ work on the side. The rak’s basically a kid, so they didn’t pry into who hired them, but the family member in question was part of a squad paid to guard a small operation where some metal containers identical to the A-ship coffins were stored for a few days. Not only that? They saw something they weren’t supposed to when one of the coffins fell open: a pale alien with fingers.”
“The bodies were stolen from the Red Sails and then shipped somewhere,” I surmised.
“And our anonymous little rak saw where they were headed,” Peudra nodded. “Which brings me back to the initial rumors. I talked to people in the Red Sails about this too; ultimately? Those coffins were delivered to four places: Harrogate in C2, C12, F4, and…”
I recognized C12 and F4. We’d recovered six of the lost Korbanok corpses from the Ramik system. Nai had visited F4 on her own last year and brought back three more.
Harrogate was interesting to hear about, but it was back in Shirao—Nora’s backyard. I’d have to point Dustin that direction.
With three other locations that held water, Peudra’s last piece of information was probably reliable too.
“V1,” I guessed. “Kraknor.”
“More specifically, the Ogi Coastal region,” Peudra nodded. “We can’t say exactly how the coffins were divided among destinations, but my contact says the delivery marked for Ogi had at least two coffins.”
“Two coffins doesn’t necessarily mean two corpses,” I pointed out. “On Korbanok, their bodies were removed from the coffins.”
“…I didn’t know that before now,” Peudra admitted. “But I would be astounded to learn there wasn’t at least one corpse from Korbanok on the planet. I’m sure of it.”
“Sure enough to stake a future working relationship with the Flotilla?” Nai asked.
“I am,” Peudra nodded.
Honestly, their word was good enough for me, at least to investigate. But I had a lot of other responsibilities. All abductees, corpses or otherwise were Flotilla business, and a corpse from Korbanok struck an especially deep chord with me.
Daniel’s was one of the few corpses from my A-ship still in the wind.
His body might be just a few days spaceflight away.
Someone was definitely going to Kraknor. But weighing all my Flotilla responsibilities against a body—even Daniel’s? I didn’t need to be the one to go.
Because I trusted the other people that job might fall to.
But more than that…
“What do you get out of this?” I asked Peudra. “You have an angle.”
“I do,” they confirmed. “I will not share details today—this stage is too sensitive. But I can promise you that none of my goals should negatively impact the Flotilla.”
“Should?” Serral said.
“I will not be blithe,” Peudra said. “We’re talking about Flotilla personnel going to the Vorak homeworld. Even if there were no Coalition personnel in the Flotilla’s crew, the local fleets would still be paranoid. The possibility for agreements breaking down does exist, but I assure you that I am committed to protecting the Flotilla from that possibility.”
“Because you value our relationship so much?” I said, dripping with sarcasm.
“Yes,” she said simply.
Crud. Peudra might have been painfully straight-laced, but that came with an earnestness that was hard to argue with.
They were telling us, right to our faces, that they had ulterior motives. But they were being so upfront about it, my gut said to give them another chance to deliver. They hadn’t let us down yet.
“We’re going to want details sooner or later,” I warned.
“It’ll be sooner,” Peudra assured. “My next task was to finalize a visa agreement for whichever Flotilla ship might be going to Kraknor. In my imagined version of events, it would be Caleb and the Jack, but whoever goes, once their itinerary is confirmed, I can properly finish assembling the rest of my preparations.”
“And we get to know what they are once they’re done?”
“Knowing them while they’re still incomplete would put both you and myself in danger. Not much, I believe. But still,” they confirmed.
<…Part of your plan requires having Flotilla personnel on Kraknor, doesn’t it?> I asked them quietly.
They gave the most imperceptible nod.
“Then I guess it’s just a question of who’s going to Kraknor,” I said.
Except multiple expressions around the room went shifty, most of them glancing at me or Serral.
“…Something I don’t know?” I asked.
“Yes,” Serral admitted. “I tried to be subtle about asking around, but everyone I asked had mostly the same thing to say: you’re running yourself ragged. So Caleb; I think you need a vacation.”
He was…not wrong. But really? A vacation?
Despite many—my own people and not—thinking of me as the Flotilla’s leader, I liked to think of myself as the Flotilla’s number two. Serral was the one with real leadership experience, and I was more ‘boots on the ground’ about whatever needed doing.
“I haven’t been doing that much,” I frowned.
“You haven’t come to movie night on the Siegfried since we left Ukro,” Madeline pointed out.
“That was—” Wait. No. That was not three months ago. It couldn’t be. We’d left Ukro seven months ago, spent the next five-and-a-half in F2, split up for a couple weeks before rendezvousing the whole Flotilla in V1 where we’d been for the last month.
Had I really not watched a movie with everyone in all that time?
“Yes,” Nai said, probably reading my mind. “You really did do that.”
“You’ve been working non-stop for close to two years, and while your work has been nothing short of exemplary,” Serral said, “I’m anticipating a moment soon where you finally burn out. And I think I speak for everyone here when I say that we would all like to avoid that before it happens. Not after.”
“So your solution is for me, me of all people, to take a vacation on the Vorak homeworld?”
“Oh, don’t be like that!” Peudra smiled. “It will be fun! The homeworld is all water and islands. I was led to believe humans loved beaches.”
I eyed them suspiciously.
“Serral asked you two about this, didn’t he?”
“Of course,” they said.
Nai and Tasser were failing to contain their snickering too.
“This isn’t that funny,” I pouted.
“Kinda is,” Sid said.
“It’s sweet too though,” Maddie smiled. “There’s a certain charm in our fearless leader being oblivious about how much work he’s put in.”
“Jordan, I can always count on your counsel,” I tried. “They can’t force me to use vacation days, can they?”
“Quit while you’re ahead,” she said. “If you’re that worried about taking some time off, just remember you’re going to be hunting corpses there. That ought to bring your mood down enough.”
“[Not just that!]” someone said.
All eyes turned to the abductee sitting with Willy.
“[Oh. Uh…]” Christina said.
We all had been wondering why Peudra had gone out of their way to include her.
“In my research into the Korbanok abductees, I found conflicting local reports of a living human in the Ogi region too,” Peudra explained. “But I didn’t give them enough credence until Aaron shared something Christina here said.”
“[Well…I…]” she stammered.
“…It’s a complicated situation, but long story short; we had an abductee leave a few weeks after the big psionics wave. She said she was going to Kraknor because they might have better medicine than Hashtin.”
Willy gave her a nudge to elaborate more.
“[Well…] her name’s Ingrid. She didn’t tell anyone else, but when we first got abducted she told me she was dying. It’s been more than two years since we’ve heard from her. But…I’m sure she’s still alive. She rigged up this psionic signal to ping every thirty days or so, and…well, she might have automated it, so maybe this means nothing. But it pinged perfectly normally every month until two months ago. She said she was dying, and I’m just worried about her.”
I turned to Peudra.
“You want to send me on a vacation about two corpses? Finding one, preventing another?”
“Oh, it’s much worse than that,” Peudra said. “You’re still Ajengita, and that makes plenty of Vorak skittish. The agreement is pending but your visas come at a price. If you agree, your trip might also entail making a third corpse too.”