Do your job, man. No place for a soft heart in Mordant House. But he’d always fought against becoming the sort of man who reached for extreme measures as a matter of course. Which means maybe I’m not the right man for the job anymore.
The soft touch first, he told himself. Time later for the rest. If it’s necessary. He had done it before, when he had to. He had never liked it. It was the crumbling cliff-edge of decency he clung to.
‘Menheer Telemmier . . .’ he tried again.
‘The Presence has shifted.’
Havaer went cold. ‘You mean . . . the thing in unspace. The thing people feel, that isn’t really there?’
Idris just stared at him. ‘Is it not, though?’
‘What,’ Havaer said hoarsely, ‘do you even mean, “shifted”？’
‘I don’t have the words for it. Your own Int, what does she say?’
How does he know our Int is female? No disguising his surprise and suddenly it was Telemmier with the level and knowing stare, and Havaer was shifting uneasily. ‘She hasn’t said anything.’
‘You haven’t asked her. But she’s on a leash, one of the new class out of the Liaison Board, right? When the Board took over from the old Int Program they went for quantity. She hasn’t been doing it as long as me. I’ve been in and out of unspace fifty years, Menheer Mundy. Something’s changed. Maybe they are back. Maybe they’re practising on the small things before they take on a planet again, Maybe they’re rusty.’
*
Havaer let them go back to the Vulture, because they demanded it and he was getting enough cooperation to make the open-handed approach worthwhile. And he wouldn’t call any of this crew traitors or criminals, exactly. Spacers didn’t like to feel they lived in a universe that could tell them what to do, and he could work with that. Worst came to worst, he could pledge some of the budget because it was amazing how quickly most spacers could be bought, once they felt they were making a deal rather than knuckling under.
He composed his report, letting the spacers stew. The Hammer was still clamped to the Vulture, because he wasn’t done with them and their secrets. Most likely they were hiding a little light smuggling, customs evasion or something similar – and he would drop some heavy hints that he didn’t care an iota of Largesse about that sort of thing. But if it was something else, maybe Almier would talk the rest into coming clean. Or if it really was funny business with the Parthenon, Timo might give up the goods on that front?
But what if it’s Hegemony stuff? If that was the case, then he had a problem on his hands. Hegemony, Parthenon and an Intermediary all in the same small boat. With a rumoured Architect out there too. That wasn’t the sort of mix Mordant House was going to like.
He rubbed at his forehead, hoping sincerely that nothing of the sort was going on. After all, spacers constituted a good thirty per cent of the human population, and they were traditionally sanguine about doing business with anyone they chose – though Nativist sentiments were starting to change that.
Not my job. Just a servant. Focus on the greater good. He felt that familiar, baseline unhappiness of someone who would be judged entirely according to moral decisions made by others.
Then his comm implant went off and Captain Khefi, who’d been sangfroid itself when facing down the Boyarin, was shouting at him. Havaer activated his ready room’s viewscreen and saw an Essiel ship bearing down on them.
‘How long have you been keeping that to yourself?’ Havaer demanded, and Khefi assured him that, no, the newcomer had come out of unspace practically on top of them.
‘Hail them, full colours, standard codes for Hegemony vessels,’ Havaer directed, on his way to the bridge already. His implant would keep him in the loop but he had a need to be there, in the same place physically as his crew. ‘Signal the Samphire for backup.’ Although the antiquated navy picket ship wasn’t going to be much help if this turned into a shooting war.
Standard codes for Hegemony vessels. Because there wasn’t any mistaking the ship design, and what the hell did it mean, to meet an Essiel ship so far from anywhere they’d claimed as their own? Except Jericho housed extensive Originator ruins, and Hegemony cultists had been whining about gaining access since forever. Dealing with that hot potato was absolutely not Havaer’s job, but maybe he’d become a new first line of defence.
The vessel had come out of unspace in a slow tumble, a thing like a twisted silver rose. Hegemony ships tended to adopt multi-petalled forms, yet this one looked different, less geometric than usual. There were fewer straight lines – every frond and flange shaped to follow a rippling curve. It was as though a transformative wave had frozen as it rippled through the ship’s substance. It made Havaer’s eyes ache to look at it.