‘Your Grandness,’ Rollo started. ‘He is not under leash. He is a free man. You have no right—’
Uskaro gave him the look of a man who can purchase any right he wishes. ‘The kybernet is processing the matter now, Captain Rostand. I shall return shortly to take possession of my new property. What happens to you depends on your decorum between now and then.’
When he was gone, Rollo sat on the floor and stared at his sandalled feet. ‘Fuck all paymasters,’ he said, less a specific jibe at Uskaro so much as a familiar spacer oath.
Idris was still standing. He couldn’t sit. His skinny body was vibrating with adrenaline which had nowhere to go. I will fight, he decided. I will not go. And he knew they couldn’t force him, not really. They couldn’t make him navigate for them. But they could beat and brutalize him, condition him, drug him. Drive implants into his brain, until his ability to resist their demands had been pared down to nothing. Mostly with the Liaison Board Ints, the Commercial Ints, it wasn’t necessary. They came pre-compliant, resigned to drudgery until the horrors of unspace unhinged them. But when one of them went renegade and fled, well, you heard all sorts . . .
And he wasn’t renegade. He’d never been on a leash. But it wasn’t the first time someone had made the convenient assumption, and this time Kris wasn’t here to sort it out.
‘I won’t go,’ he said, because the thought had bounced back and forth in his head so much it had to escape.
‘We’ll jump them,’ Rollo suggested. ‘On the way to their ship . . .’ As though Rollo would even be getting out of the cell, Idris thought. ‘Or we’ll come after you.’ As though they could, without Idris in the pilot’s chair. ‘We’ll . . . something.’ As though there was anything.
*
Around fifty-five years back, in the heart of the war, the freighter Samark exited unspace to find every wartime pilot’s worst nightmare: an Architect bearing down on them. They were bound for Forthbridge Port, packed to the gills with displaced refugees. Faced with their imminent demise, the crew started packing people into shuttles and escape pods, of which there was an entirely inadequate supply. Meanwhile, the Architect reached out for them, intent on peeling the ship and arranging the hull into a configuration more pleasing to its alien aesthetics.
Yet, even as it began to warp the hull, it stopped. For a long moment the passenger freighter and the colossal alien entity hung there in space, both speeding towards Forthbridge Port. Then it withdrew. For the first time ever, an Architect just went away. What happened on board the Samark became legend. The most popular mediotype showed one of the passengers, a girl of fifteen, running onto the bridge. She was clutching her head, speaking in tongues, blood running from her nose. What was clear to everyone was that Xavienne Torino had somehow made the Architect leave. Her own testimony confirmed she’d forged a link between them, mind to mind.
She had been the first Intermediary, a natural. Over the next decade, humanity’s best scientists would work with Saint Xavienne – as she became known – to try and replicate her abilities. The new corps would get its first outing at the Battle of Berlenhof in 78 After, and would go on to end the war.
But before that, everyone had realized Ints were good for more than just driving away Architects. That same uncanny sense let them tap into the fabric of unspace, to navigate beyond the established Throughways in a way no instrument or device could. Some species could manage something similar: the Castigar and the Hegemony for example. But even with them it was rare, and humanity had abruptly joined that select club. Ints went from being a secret weapon to a trading advantage. So the Liaison Board was born. They took in humanity’s unwanted and they turned out a handful of commercial Intermediaries, through harsh conditioning and unrelenting surgery. All who survived the Program left under leash contracts, making them nothing but property until they’d paid back the colossal cost of their ‘treatment’。 Which meant, to all intents and purposes, never.
Idris was a free man, created before the Board existed, but who would believe him? And almost all the other free wartime Ints were dead. These cheery thoughts occupied him until the Boyarin Piter Tchever Uskaro returned, with his retinue, to ‘take possession’。
‘All is achieved,’ he said cheerfully to the two station guards. One opened the cell so a Voyenni trooper could pull Idris out; the other ensured Rollo stayed inside. Then they hauled him out to the clerks’ office, where the staff did their best not to notice what was going on.