Halsey’s substitute for Naomi hadn’t fooled him, either. This was a man who saw what he saw, not what he expected to see. Vaz suspected he didn’t fall for card tricks.
“I don’t work for any gang.”
“What did you do with Fel?”
“I don’t even know Fel. I haven’t touched him. I don’t even know where he lives.”
“Well, you’re definitely a marine—or some kind of military professional. But that’s all I’m sure about.”
“Yeah. I told you the truth.”
“Why did you come here?”
“So the UNSC couldn’t find me.”
“How long have you been in?”
“Eight years, in all.” Vaz would have stuck to name, rank, and number if he hadn’t still been trying to look like a real deserter with nothing to hide—not from Venezia, at least. “Nearly nine.”
“How’d you get the scar?”
“Hand to hand with a hinge-head.”
“Nairn’s going to have to try a lot harder, then.”
“Depends what you want to hear.”
Staffan fished in his pockets and took out Vaz’s radio, wallet, and a few odds and ends. There was an art to assembling the right “pocket litter,” the bits that everyone collected without thinking and that provided a lot of information about identity. The carefully chosen contents of Vaz’s pockets were the obviously forged plastic ID chip, colonial credit bills, a suitably dated PX receipt from Diego Garcia, and his Warthog key. Nairn wandered around the room, arms folded, looking down at the floor. Staffan held up his radio.
“You don’t store many codes. None, in fact. Completely purged.”
Vaz shrugged as best he could. He really needed to pee. “It’s UNSC property. If I get caught, I don’t want my buddies traced, do I?”
“Is your name really Vaz Desny?”
Think like a deserter. “Who’d desert and use their real name?”
“You realize,” Staffan said, “that if I was testing you to see if you were any goddamn use to us as an operative, you’d have failed by now? Didn’t the Corps ever teach you to keep your mouth shut? I think they did. So you’re playing a game with me, and I don’t appreciate it.”
Vaz was waiting for the next punch from Nairn. Staffan probably didn’t have anything concrete, but he didn’t need it. Suspicion was enough here. In his position, Vaz would have done the same.
“Why did you try to hack into the ship?” Staffan leaned a little closer. “This is my problem, you see. You show up with some impressive skills just when we need them. I invite you to check over my ship, and the next thing I know is that someone tries to hack in and my supplier’s kidnapped. Probably dead. If this was a big city on Earth, I’d buy statistical chances. But this is a small town in a wilderness on a ball of rock at the ass-end of the galaxy. Are you with me so far?”
“Why do we need Fel if you’ve already taken us to the ship? Why do we need to hack in when we could have done it from inside the ship?”
“Or … I’m wondering if you didn’t desert. That you’re still on the UNSC payroll. Checking us out.”
“You think the UNSC would send in two grunts when they could simply show up with a small fleet and trash New Tyne?”
“True. They nuked Far Isle just to stop a few rebels, after all. No squeamishness about collateral damage there.” Staffan looked up at the light fitting for a few moments. “Anyway, maybe there’s more than two of you. It’s hard to seal the borders on a planet like this, but we’re pretty good at what we do. There’s quite a few people here who remember how you guys operated in the old days.”
Staffan just looked at him as if he could absorb information from Vaz’s brain simply by staring. Then he stood up and jerked his head at Nairn. Vaz thought he was calling him to heel, but Nairn moved in as Staffan opened the door.
“I’m going to find Gareth. Talk to Vaz. Ask him about the woman.” Staffan glanced back at Vaz. “I might just hand you over to the Kig-Yar and tell them you took Fel. I bet you know more about what Kig-Yar do to prisoners than I do.”
Nairn shut the door. The worst guys weren’t the ones who looked like psychos, but professionals who just did it out of necessity.
“Nothing personal, Vaz,” he said.
He pushed the chair over and Vaz crashed onto his side. That hurt like hell, too. He hit his head on the concrete. Then he got a kick in the face. At least Nairn hadn’t gone straight for a knife or bolt cutters or anything. But the next kick was right on the shin, and that was off the scale. He shrieked.
It was hard to kick the shit out of someone when they were already doubled up in a sitting position, but Nairn managed to make the most of it. All Vaz could think about was when it was going to stop. Then he concentrated on the pain building in his bladder, which was actually worse. He was going to piss his pants. He found himself debating whether to hang on because it kept his mind diverted enough from the pain of being kicked, or to let go and focus on one set of pain at a time.
In the end, his body made the decision for him. For a moment, a brief moment worth grabbing, it was almost bliss. There was no relief quite like emptying your bladder. So the room was going to smell like a cell from now on. Fine. It felt like a small victory. He hadn’t peed himself out of fear, but from too many beers, so that was okay.
“I’m glad you understand the seriousness of your situation,” Nairn said. He sounded out of breath. “I ought to use you to mop that up, you filthy bastard. So where’s the woman?”
“Ram it up your ass.” Vaz sounded coherent to himself. “Told you. She left. Didn’t like the place.”
“And Mike? Where did Mike go?”
“Christ knows. No frigging idea.”
Nairn sounded as if he’d sighed, as if he regarded this as a tedious job and that he wanted it over with. Vaz found he wasn’t embarrassed to yell his head off. It helped. But once he decided he was going to die, then—instantly—things became simple: he wasn’t going to tell Nairn anything because that would mean that he’d wasted his time dying. He wanted to thwart the bastard. Nairn could go screw himself if he thought he was getting an answer out of him, even today’s date. Vaz focused on beating him. Every time he didn’t tell Nairn anything, he scored a point. The longer it went on, the more he felt he had to hang on to his score. Maybe he’d hit his head harder than he thought. The pain shifted suddenly from real, screaming, unbearable pain to an awareness of damage, still pain but somehow happening on a different level.
That wasn’t a good sign, though. He remembered that much.
No wonder Nairn had opted for kicking him. He didn’t want to damage his hands. Punching someone repeatedly made a mess of your knuckles and hurt the joints. But he wasn’t trying hard, because if he was, he wouldn’t have left Vaz tied to the chair—a crappy position to land a kick, no use at all—and he wasn’t aiming for his head now. He didn’t want Vaz dead, then, not yet.
Why am I thinking all this shit?
Because I can. Look at me. I haven’t told him anything. But it won’t save me if I do.
Where’s Mal?
Vaz could have said anything to get some respite, but then it’d just start again. As long as he kept thinking, thinking, thinking about anything, he kept enough of a barrier between the pain and his mind to stop himself from breaking.
This is okay. Really, it is. No blades, no cattle prods, no plastic bags, nothing weird.
This asshole wouldn’t last five minutes in St. Petersburg.
Really.
Nairn paused to get his breath and squatted to peer at him. Vaz found himself straining to see where the puddle of urine had spread. There was no carpet to absorb it. He hoped the floor was perfectly level and that it wasn’t creeping toward his head.
“Personally, I didn’t think she looked like Staffan at all,” Nairn said. “But Gareth always says stuff like that. Staffan’s probably more pissed off with him than he is with you. You know. The business about his daughter.”
I
t was a card to play, but Vaz had no idea if it was going to save him or kill him. Naomi. In an ideal world, Vaz would reveal that she was alive and well, Staffan would weep with joy, and then he’d renounce his insurgent ways. A happy family reunion would follow. But that was never going to happen. And Vaz’s sole purpose now was to remove that battlecruiser from insurgent hands.
Which I can’t do unless I survive.
His brain was now doing some really weird shit. For a moment, he knew what it was to be BB, with fragments busy everywhere, little mirrored versions of himself each doing different things yet all aware of each other and making sense both individually and as a whole. One piece of Vaz was hanging on to the inevitability of death, because that meant not telling Nairn a damn thing was a final, satisfying, soul-preserving spit in his eye. Another part was saying that it was all very well, but completely pointless, because he had to get out of here to take down Pious Inquisitor. Yet another slice of him was busy being aware of how much damage had been done to his body without registering the pain, another was scared, five years old, and wanted his babushka to make it all better, and another was waiting for the first chance to get loose and gouge Nairn’s eyes out.
If nothing else, I have to get Mal out of here. Yeah. Focus on that.
It wasn’t what he’d been trained to do, which was to complete the mission regardless. But what held an army together was the instinct to fight for your buddies. ONI knew where the ship was. They could save Earth by just blowing up the goddamn thing. They didn’t need it in one piece. They didn’t need it as much as they needed Mal.
Mal. Sorry, Admiral. Mal comes first.
“You believe the story. His daughter.”
Nairn frowned. “Speak up.”
Vaz thought he sounded normal. Am I mumbling, then? “His daughter. Naomi. He thinks she was kidnapped by the government. Replaced by a clone.”
“If it gets him through the day to think that, fine by me.”
“You think he’s crazy.”
“Grieving. He’s just grieving.” No, that sounded like crazy to Vaz. And that was what he needed. Now he had a wedge to drive between Staffan and his cronies. It was all he had, and he’d use it. “Did he tell you about the double, then? Because normally, he leaves that bit out.” Nairn’s frown had vanished. He looked completely wide-eyed for a moment, as if a lightbulb had switched on over his head. “He stopped telling people that years ago. Least of all complete strangers. And personally, I’ve never heard him say clone.”
Vaz had the feeling he’d slipped up. Had Staffan mentioned that? Shit, he couldn’t remember.
No, he hadn’t. These people watched detail like that. He used to, once, but he was dazed, in pain, and just a little crazy himself.
And soaked in piss. Not my finest hour.
“I think Staffan needs another chat with you,” Nairn said.
Vaz had just one shot at this. “Mal,” he said. “I want to see Mal. Let me see he’s all right. Let him go, and I’ll talk to Staffan all he wants.”
Vaz watched Nairn’s boots as the man walked out and slammed the door behind him. He wasn’t sure if he’d simply caved in like a coward after a moderate to serious kicking—no ruptured organs as far as he could tell, no excuse for weakness—or if he’d taken a daring gamble and grabbed what few advantages he had left to save his best friend and maybe complete the mission.
He’d find out soon enough.
The pool of pee was spreading away from his face. At least that was something to feel positive about.
INDEPENDENT KIG-YAR SHIP PARAGON, SOMEWHERE OFF VENEZIA
“I don’t want your fee for this, Fel, whatever it is,” Chol said. “Keep it. Use it to hide from your four-jaw friends. But I will have the warship. Where is it?”
Fel fixed her with a defiant yellow eye, head tilted away from her. “What about my chicks? My mate? My customer will kill them.”
“If you don’t tell me,” she said, “then I’ll kill them. Because I know exactly where they are, and ‘Telcam doesn’t seem to know that Venezia even exists.”
She let him think about that. He sat in the middle of the hangar deck, well away from any sharp objects or access to comms. He was missing a few feathers and a little bruised, but that was because he’d struggled when they’d seized him and needed restraining. She preferred to get results by offering a choice. Torture and violence were a hobby for the humans, a substitute for intelligent questions for the short-tempered four-jaws, but a last resort from a Kig-Yar. It often yielded unreliable information.
“What have I ever done to you, cousin?” Fel asked.
“I never said this was personal.”
“You’re the one who preaches a united Kig-Yar to defend our kind against the savages.”
“And I need a ship to begin that process. Where is it?”
“He might have moved it by now.”
“Then tell me the last coordinates you were at.”
“He’ll kill me. He’s very clever. He’s also very patient. He can wait years to put a knife through your back.”
“Tell me his name, then.” In case a rival locates him and uses him to get to the ship. I’m so close now. I can smell it. “Who is he? What does he want a battlecruiser for? The humans now have more of a navy than the Covenant. This is a warlord with scores to settle, by the sound of it. Tell him he’ll achieve a great deal more by small bites from many angles than he ever will by one great act of destruction.”
“Before or after he slices my head off? Flat-faces talk about eating us, you know. We’re just large food animals to them. Chi-kens. And stuffing. I have had threats of being stuffed. Which involves disemboweling.”
“Fel, you might well be more afraid of your customers, but they’re not here. I am.”
It was bad form to treat a fellow T’vaoan like that in front of common Kig-Yar, but this was about her dominance almost as much as finding Pious Inquisitor. If she could do this to one of her own ethnic group, then she could exact far worse revenge on a wayward crew or anyone who tried to cheat her. But Fel had appearances to keep up as well. This was going to be slow.
And ‘Telcam was getting impatient. He’d send another search party when he could afford one, and then he’d add her to his vengeance list as well. But she had Fel. That was her best treasure map to Inquisitor. The ideal one was a human, but that might have been one step too far even for her.
“Just tell me this,” Fel said. “If I tell you where the ship is, on account of it being no use to me and having been paid, what do I do after that? Do I go home? How will my customer not know I was responsible?”
“Do you care nothing for the security of all Kig-Yar?”
“I care for continuing to breathe, along with all my clan.”
“There’s no better time to do this. We take advantage of the four-jaws squabbling among themselves with their Prophet masters gone. We arm ourselves to make sure they don’t come back and think they can swallow us up again. They were part of the High Council, Fel. You all forget that too soon. They weren’t drudges like us. They made the decisions with the San’Shyuum. They’ll want to make them again one day.”
Fel was still looking at her with one eye. “Lovely manifesto. I don’t disagree with a word of it. But I’m still the one who’ll have to pay for this.” He turned to face her full-on and dipped his head as if he was sharing gossip with her. “Give me a way to let you have this information without looking responsible for it, and you can have the location and the entry codes.”
Did his human customer even know Fel was missing yet? Chol thought that through for two seconds before deciding that the rest of the Kig-Yar community on Venezia would know, and so would whoever Fel was due to meet that evening, and his human customer did business with Kig-Yar. He would get to hear sooner or later. Even if she dusted Fel down and took him home, the deed was done.
“How about half a lie?” she asked. “They work better than complete ones. We say that ‘Telcam managed to track the ship by s
ome devious technological device, because humans will believe any nonsense like that, and sent us to find you while he decided how best to reclaim his ship. You managed to escape. You end up back on Venezia and raise the alarm … once we’ve gone.”
“How did I escape?”
“You bribed one of my crew.”
Fel nodded. “Ah. Good.”
“I expect you to do just that. I hope you have gezk to pay for it. Tokens. More credible as a bribe.”
“Outrageous.”
“Better than dead. Who is this human, anyway? What does he want a battlecruiser for?”
Fel poked around in his vest pockets for tokens. “To glass other humans.”
“I realize that. They’re always at war. I meant specifically.”
“I have no idea, other than that he understands that glassing customers is counterproductive. Anyway, if the humans resume their civil wars, we have a new market.”
Fel handed over the gezk. All in all, Chol felt it was a good outcome, a deal that met the needs of both sides. A one-sided deal forced on someone simply bred resentment and a festering urge for revenge. It was rarely a victory.
“So you’ll return me now?”
“First let’s see that the ship is where you say it is.”
Fel didn’t look troubled at all now. “Very well.”
Chol went back to the bridge and wondered whether to contact her roost to make sure that her mother was taking care of the children. But it was probably safer to keep signals to an essential minimum, just in case ‘Telcam was smarter than she gave him credit for. The ship jumped to slipspace for a very short transit, hardly worth the strain on Paragon’s drives, and then the detailed navigation began. Bakz and Nulm were playing a round of shaks by the doors, ready to step in if Fel needed physical encouragement to behave himself. He seemed very relaxed, though. He obviously expected to find Inquisitor where he’d left her. The human should have thought that through a little better if he knew Fel that well.
So he might have moved the ship, whoever he was. If the ship wasn’t where Fel said it was, then she would become much more insistent.