Naomi didn’t say anything. The Kig-Yar conversation was probably more interesting anyway. Occasional English words popped out of the jumble of alien language: fool, delusional, waste, doomed. Whatever the context, it seemed to really piss off one of them. He slapped both hands down hard on the table to lean over it with his quills raised and beak wide open like an angry starling. The other Kig-Yar half-rose and leaned over the table too, complete with quill display and hissing, and for a moment Vaz waited for feathers to start flying. If they hadn’t all been carrying sidearms, it might have looked funny. Then one lowered his quills and pulled back a little. Everyone sat down and went on chattering.
A guy at a nearby table glanced in Naomi’s direction. He was mid-forties, with buzz-cut brown hair and the build of someone used to hard physical labor. “Good thing that buzzards don’t get drunk,” he said.
Vaz found himself suddenly annoyed that the guy had started talking to Naomi. He hadn’t realized he was so protective and jealous. Shit, she was a buddy, not his girlfriend; where the hell had that come from?
“What’s their problem?” Vaz asked.
“Just politics.” The man waved it all away with a dismissive hand. “They’re arguing about some female of theirs who wants to unite them with a central navy again now that the Covenant’s gone. Von or something. It’s too much like hard work for most of them. They prefer piracy. Less paperwork.”
That was rich coming from a citizen of a rebel world. But Venezia did seem to be organized and orderly, regardless of what some of its residents did for a living. A couple of the Kig-Yar glanced their way. Vaz kept looking at the guy with the buzz-cut in case he started a fight by accident. He’d done that once too often.
“I hear Kig-Yar government is afraid of its masses,” Vaz said. “Which is the way it should be.”
The guy laughed and drained his glass. “They don’t seem to have a functioning government at all. It’s a kind of piracy cooperative. What do they want? More stuff. That’s about the size of it.”
Vaz lowered his voice. “I’ve never mixed with them socially. Last time I saw one was through my rifle optics.”
“I don’t think they’ll take it personally if your credit’s good.” The guy seemed to be addressing his answers to Naomi. Vaz couldn’t work out if it was because she reminded him of Staffan or if he was planning to hit on her. Vaz braced to step in. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t handle that well. “So, you two are new in town, yeah? I’m guessing ex-UNSC, and not the Pay Corps, either.”
Word got around faster than expected. “We had creative differences,” Vaz said. “You know how it is.”
The man stood up and put a small flex card on their table, a slip of bright orange plastic. “You’ll be at a premium, then. The militia here always needs recruits. Professionals, I mean. That card’s good for a couple of drinks at any bar in town, so when you get bored, show up at the barracks and ask for Nairn.”
“That’s you, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Naomi suddenly decided to speak. “Are you expecting trouble?”
“Well, the colonies haven’t forgotten Earth,” Nairn said. “And I’m pretty sure Earth hasn’t forgotten the colonies. Now the Covenant’s imploded, it won’t be long before they remember they had to put Trebuchet on the back burner.”
Vaz watched him go. TREBUCHET was the code name for the last counterinsurgency operation against the colonies, before Vaz was even born. So they’ve got very long memories here. Or he was one of us once. It could well have been both, of course.
He turned the flex card over and studied it. “I didn’t even know they still made these.” He mimed a flexing action. “They break along the stress lines. Snap one off and spend it.”
“In an uncertain world, analog beats digital every time,” Naomi said. “Venezia’s banking system’s never going to be screwed by a power outage.”
“This thing might be enhanced.” Vaz had to consider that it might be a tracking device. “Maybe I should leave it here.”
Because that’s what we’d do. Because we’ve tagged every piece of hardware we’ve supplied to ‘Telcam so we can follow it. Neither of us have any idea now if a piece of plastic is a threat or just a free drink.
Look at the world we’ve created for ourselves.
But they’d made the first contact with the militia, and all they’d had to do was walk into the right bar in a small community. Either that, or they know what we really are. They’d find out soon enough. The mezze arrived, a plate of interesting things that might or might not have had a passing acquaintance with Greece, although some of them looked more like dim sum and sushi. Vaz was pretty sure the glistening white lumps were cheese, and the dark green parcels were stuffed vine or cabbage leaves of some kind. The meatballs and small kebab-type things—he’d try one when the beer had stiffened his resolve a little. He decided to pass on the miniature bowls of what he could only think of as a road crash involving baby octopus. Naomi peered at them.
“Well, the sign did warn us,” she said. “I’ll try the meatballs.”
Vaz watched her chewing. “Too risky.”
“Pork. I think. What, too scared? And you a Helljumper.”
“Diarrhea. Sealed drop pod. They don’t mix.”
“You think? Try living in your armor.”
They burst out laughing but it only lasted a few seconds. Then Naomi’s face froze, and for a moment Vaz thought she might burst into tears. But she didn’t. She just composed herself and retreated behind her Spartan indifference.
“Should we be worried about a Kig-Yar nationalist?” she asked.
“Like the man said, they enjoy pillage, but paperwork’s too much of a pain in the ass.”
Vaz would pass the intel on to Osman on the next radio check. He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. They finished the mezze, spent the flex card on a couple of beers to take out, and wandered down the street, just looking around in the way that any innocent deserters who were new in town would. Vaz activated the recorder on his jacket to capture a few faces that passed, just for BB to run through facial recognition.
But he didn’t lose sight of the fact that the most sophisticated intelligence operation in human history had still managed to miss Staffan Sentzke for the usual banal reason: human nature. In a way, it reassured him. Humans could still screw systems. They weren’t slaves to any machine.
Naomi went silent again. Somehow it added to the authenticity of their cover, two people who knew each other so well that they hardly had anything new to discuss. When she finally spoke, it made him jump.
“If I’m leaving,” she said suddenly, “then there’s something I need to do.”
“Sure.”
She went from quiet to almost inaudible. “Let’s take a look at the chart. How close can we get to Mount Longdon Road?”
It took Vaz a moment for the penny to drop. “You want to go look at your dad’s house?”
“Observe.”
Vaz nearly asked her if she thought that was a good idea. But what harm could it do? If she thought she could take it, if it helped her come to terms with what had been done to her, then he’d go along with it.
“Okay.”
Vaz turned around and they walked back to the Warthog. He did a discreet check for explosive devices and bugs with the handheld scanner he used to track tagged weapons before heading south out of town. There was a park. Vaz thought that was the weirdest thing—a park with picnic tables and sports fields on a planet that was the number-one destination for the galaxy’s terrorists. But they had kids and families like anyone else. Except us. He realized Mal was right: he really did watch too many apocalyptic GlobeWar movies. Humans were pretty domestic, even angry humans that wanted to blow other humans up.
He ran the 3-D projection of Venezia on his datapad while they sat in the Hog and watched a bunch of kids playing field hockey. Surreal didn’t quite cover it.
The mapping sweep that Port Stanley’s sensors had compiled fr
om orbit showed one conurbation—New Tyne—with a few scattered settlements in a ten to fifteen kilometer radius, a mix of factories, farms, and all the other processes that needed to stay outside the city limits. Most of Venezia was an uninhabited wilderness. Vaz zoomed in on the network of roads that ran out of New Tyne into the countryside. So if that was the south, then Mount Longdon Road had to be this one, and that was the old quarry. He zoomed and tilted the projection to check the line of sight from vantage points near the house.
It was the kind of surveillance that BB could have carried out by dropping a tiny surveillance drone to hold position a few hundred meters above the house. But Naomi obviously needed to see this for herself.
“There,” Naomi said. She pointed to a hillside covered in bushes that looked like gorse. “We could lay up there, assuming they don’t have any surveillance sats of their own that we’ve missed, or if we pull back to here and use a scope, we won’t necessarily look suspicious if we’re spotted.”
She was going to do it anyway. He knew it. All he could say was “Okay.”
It was definitely Mount Longdon Road. In that oddly bureaucratic, respectable way that Venezia had, there was a proper road sign of the kind that Vaz would have found in Sydney or St. Petersburg. The nearest place to park the Warthog meant a walk of a couple of hundred meters. It was a nice afternoon, so he took the two bottles of beer to help them pass themselves off as a couple just killing time while they worked out what they were going to do now they were on the run.
Naomi wandered down into the gorse. He lost sight of her for a moment or two, but he could still hear her boots swishing through the grass. When he caught up with her, she was sitting on the ground in a gap between some bushes, hugging her knees and looking down the hill at a sprawling two-story house with a lot of land and outbuildings. It was much closer than Vaz expected, and left him feeling a little exposed. He wasn’t sure what to say.
“Is that it?”
Naomi nodded. “If this is making you uncomfortable, just say.”
“No. I’m fine.” He knew how to keep his position hidden. It was no big deal. He settled down, opened the beers, and passed her one. “You’re okay, yeah?”
“I’m not drunk.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“If you’re asking if I’m going to lose it, I’ve already seen Dad once today. Twice won’t kill me.”
But she did call him Dad. Vaz was prepared for anything. There were still thousands, maybe millions of displaced people wandering around the inner colonies, refugees from all the worlds that had been glassed in the war, and sometimes he let himself wonder if his father might be one of them, no possessions or ID, not entered into any database, still trying to get home to his son. He hardly remembered his father now. He’d been four when his dad had left Earth for a few weeks to work on a construction project on Lostwithiel, but the Covenant had shown up, and Oleg Beloi had never returned. How would he react if he saw his father now, out of the blue, back from the dead?
He hoped he’d take it calmly like Naomi, but he doubted it.
They sat watching for a couple of hours. Vaz had to take a leak behind a bush, and later Naomi disappeared for a few minutes as well. If they hung around too long he’d miss the next radio check, but he could signal with his personal comms, a brief blip so BB would know they weren’t in trouble.
Suddenly Naomi stiffened and leaned forward. “Look.”
They were so close to the house and it was so quiet that Vaz felt as if they were sitting on the doorstep. He couldn’t see the front door, but he could hear a vehicle coming. A pickup turned into the front yard and parked halfway up the gravel drive, and a man in his late twenties or early thirties—medium-brown hair, medium build—got out of the driver’s side to open the passenger door. A little girl with long blond hair and blue dungarees climbed out backward as if she was frightened of falling. The guy scooped her up and sat her on his hip, laughing, as Staffan Sentzke appeared on the porch and held out both arms to the kid.
“Grandpa!” she squealed.
Vaz had no idea what effect that had on Naomi, but it floored him completely. He couldn’t look at her. He just watched Staffan with what was obviously the new family he’d built on the wasteland of his old life, and had no idea how to fit that into what he thought he knew about the Sentzkes. Staffan took the little girl and they disappeared into the house, happy and normal.
Maybe Staffan wasn’t bent out of shape about Naomi at all.
Vaz risked turning to look at her, and for a second he thought he saw something. But then her expression went completely blank. It always did when things got bad. Vaz knew that by now.
“Well,” she said. “Looks like I’ve got relatives.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
Mortal Dictata Act: Section 1A/3—Introduction and Overview
1A/3a: A human being shall be defined as a person recognized and accepted by a reasonable layperson as being human on the basis of form, behavior, or external appearance, and no authority shall be permitted to use any element of a genetic profile to exclude a person from that definition.
1A/3b: A human being shall not be restricted, selected, or subjected to discrimination on the basis of their genome or genetic profile, whether altered or unaltered.
1A/3c: A human being shall not be brought into existence with the intent of providing biological material or research data for the use, treatment, or benefit of another.
1A/3d: A human being shall not be subject to any commercial claim, patent, or restriction on the basis of any part of their genome or genetic profile, whether altered or unaltered.
1A/3e: A human being, regardless of any engineering of their genome or introduction of non-human or artificial DNA, shall not cease to be classed as human under any circumstances.
1A/3f: No human being shall be subjected to genetic alteration except with their express and informed consent, or, in the case of a person under 18, with the consent of their legal guardian for the sole purpose of correcting a health defect in that child.
1A/3g: A human being or part thereof may not be owned by any individual or organization.
1A/3h: A human being shall not be cloned.
—BASED ON THE UN GENETIC RIGHTS ACT, EXTENDED TO THE COLONIES IN 2165 TO PREVENT ABUSES BY GENE TECH CORPORATIONS CONDUCTING RESEARCH OUTSIDE EARTH’S LEGAL JURISDICTION
NEW TYNE, VENEZIA: ONE WEEK LATER
The word came from Sav Fel just as Staffan was putting the finishing touches to the chandelier for Kerstin’s doll’s house.
His phone bleeped at just the wrong moment. Threading the crystal beads was a fiddly job that he couldn’t put down until he’d bent a loop in the wire to stop the beads from scattering everywhere. He let the phone bleep a few more times, swearing quietly to himself, then pressed it with his free hand. He never left it on voice activation. It was too much of a risk.
“I can take you to the ship now,” Sav Fel said.
Staffan leaned against the edge of the workbench. “With a demonstration?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you planning to do that?”
“A barren planet a long way from anyone’s monitoring systems.”
“Okay, so what are we doing for transport?”
“We meet at the airfield. Once out of Venezia space, a ship will rendezvous with us, we’ll transfer, and transit straight to slipspace. Only a short trip. But I don’t want to be followed.”
“As if I’d have anyone do that.”
“I meant my compatriots. I hear the original owner of the ship has hired a shipmistress to recover it.”
“So you’ve got a religious lunatic and an angry hen on your tail now, have you?”
“Inquisitor is obviously a very desirable ship.”
“If you’re trying to hike the price, I’m immune.”
“Where will you get another warship with a ventral beam?”
“Where will you hide if your rivals realize you’re here?”
Sav Fel went quiet for a moment. He obviously knew a threat when he heard one. “When can we meet?”
“I’m bringing an adviser. It’ll have to be tomorrow or the next day.”
“Very well.”
“I’ll call you back as soon as I fix a time.”
Staffan ended the call and picked up the chandelier again. He was pleased with himself. He’d now managed to light the entire house by weaving fiber-optic cable through the walls and floors, just like the real thing. With a small power pack and a few transparent caps from a control panel, Kerstin would have lights in every room.
The house—three exterior walls but no roof yet—sat on an old wooden table at one end of Staffan’s workshop. He walked around it, scrutinizing it. The wood-burning stove in the kitchen glowed red and orange from two LEPCs, and there was a painted dresser to match the Gustavian-style furniture in the other rooms. The wallpaper was in place, but he still had to source some carpets. Maybe he could find someone to make some tiny rugs for the rooms with floorboards and tiles, too.
It was immensely satisfying work. He liked getting things just right.
Here I am, creating my happy little house. No war, no government, no grief.
He’d known from the moment he started making it that it was more than just a special gift for his granddaughter. He accepted that it was a penance for failing to get one for Naomi, a subconscious motive buried in so shallow a grave that he could see the bones below with little effort. Lately, though, he’d delved a little deeper into his psyche and seen the perfection that couldn’t be spoiled, the miniature world that could shut the door on the harsh reality of adult life. Within this doll’s house, another reality could be built, a safer and happier one.
In an underground store, he kept salted cabbage, dried mutton, and two thousand ex-CMA rifles, not cutting-edge technology but more than capable of punching through light armor and flesh, along with a dozen crates of plasma weapons favored by Kig-Yar. In the quarry, in a cathedral-like hangar formed by the excavation of sandstone for the city of New Tyne, an assortment of Darters, Albatrosses, Phantoms, Banshees, Hornets, Vultures, and other small craft sat under tarpaulins. Some planets had more sheep than humans, but Venezia nearly had more dropships and small fighters than it had inhabitants. The arms cache built up here—some of it Staffan’s, some belonging to other dealers—was enough to mount a coup in a large nation. It was all rather accidental, people had told him when he arrived, just a consequence of various dissident groups ending up here, bringing their equipment with them because they had nowhere else to go, and Venezia had turned that into a revenue-earner. There’d even been UNSC Shortswords on the black market, although acquiring the nukes for them was a tall order, and, as with all the fighters Venezia could lay its collective hands on, they just didn’t have trained fighter pilots to make use of it all. But you could acquire pretty well anything in a thirty-year galactic war. Security would never be watertight. Staffan’s business depended on it.