‘Well.’ Rollo ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘What do we even call you? Or do you just have a number?’
Solace, Idris recalled, just before she spoke. There had been rank and company after the name, back then, and she was plainly biting off something similar now. It must be hard to be just ‘Solace’ without all that military armour to protect it. And there was something about that moment when she just said her name, bare and alone. She looked suddenly uncertain, a crack in that Partheni facade. Idris, who sometimes felt he was built entirely out of competing vulnerabilities, valued them in other people.
‘Hoi, Captain,’ came Barney’s voice. ‘Horizon trouble.’
One of the command screens flashed up with the image of a ship just getting underway. It was a conspicuous piece of kit with a forked hull like two forward-curving claws, the ring of its gravitic drive spread like a peacock’s tail. Barney identified it as the Raptorid, Boyarin Uskaro’s craft.
‘Flash bastard,’ Rollo decided. ‘Do we have a road to Huei?’
‘We do,’ Idris confirmed, eyes still on Solace.
‘Then everyone get to your couches for suspension for we’re going under, my family. We have a working spare for our new friend?’
‘Captain, I keep all the spares in working order,’ Barney’s voice said bleakly. ‘Because all the regular couches are on the point of falling over.’
‘Then further discussion will wait,’ Rollo decided. ‘Kris, show the angel where she’s to go. Idris?’
‘Ready.’ He saw a twitch of frustration cross Solace’s face. Had her recruitment spiel lined up for me. It seemed depressingly likely that she was just the friendly face of a deal similar to the Boyarin’s. Everyone wants a piece of me. Well she can at least wait until Huei-Cavor before trying it on.
As he pulled the ship a politic distance from the planet before the unspace jump, he called up a quick lowdown of precisely what was happening on Huei-Cavor that had Rollo so gloomy, just in case that meant more personal trouble for him too.
Ah, yes. It’s being taken over by the clams.
*
Human colonists, in the hopeful days Before, had finally met what they most feared. The Essiel Hegemony was a genuine space empire, complete with conquered species, all dominated by a race of alien overlords. When humanity appreciated what they’d found, they retreated in fear and disarray. Back then, nobody could imagine anything worse than an alien polity with designs on adding humans to their menagerie. Which was exactly what the Hegemony seemed to represent.
Except, as time went on, no warfleet appeared in the skies over Earth or any of its colonies. The Hegemony certainly wanted to talk to humanity, and human xenolinguists’ best guess was that they wanted to discuss humans bowing to their almighty alien power, or else . . . something would happen, some species-wide calamity. But if the Hegemony was threatening humanity, they seemed very laid-back about it. Refusal caused no offence, just a repeat of the offer, demand or ultimatum at a later date.
It didn’t help that the Essiel were very alien aliens, and their conquered under-species weren’t much better. So, although the Essiel met with human diplomats and sent messages, with great pomp and ceremony, nobody was quite sure what they were saying – what threats were being made, what promises offered.
Then the Architects came and suddenly many things about the Hegemony became clear. The doom that the Essiel had been waving at humanity was not a threat, but a warning. The Hegemony was more than familiar with the Architects’ predatory designs and could shield planets from their attentions. All they wanted in return was a world to swear itself to them, heart and soul.
A dozen human colonies joined the Hegemony for this reason, accepting the Essiel as their unquestioned overlords. That rate of defection had slackened since the war ended, of course, but now the Essiel had human underlings to translate for them. Hegemonic diplomats had appeared all over the Colonial Sphere, pushing their inscrutable masters’ agenda. Their rule was peace and love, order and harmony, they said. The Essiel were the benevolent autocrats our ancestors had sought but never found – human nature being too flawed. They were a cult, basically. Nobody was even sure if what they spouted really represented what the Essiel and their Hegemony intended, filtered as it was through layers of mistranslation. The Essiel were, in a very religious sense, ineffable.
Huei-Cavor, the Essiel’s latest ‘conquest’， was busy with ships. So much so that Idris had a momentary flashback to evacuations during the war. Many were getting the hell off-planet with whatever they could carry. Other ships were turning up with diplomats, spies and information-hounds keen to mediotype every development for dispatch on the next packet ship. After a planet-wide vote and years of argument, the population of Huei-Cavor had decided to leave Hugh for the Essiel Hegemony. Huei-Cavor was a big win for the Essiel, a prosperous colony. The Hegemonic cult had been pushing hard for years. Preaching and proselytizing in the open – and likely worse things behind closed doors – to swing public opinion. And Nativists and Hugh loyalists had been fighting every step of the way, only to fall at the last fence. Even now, Idris gathered from the newsfeeds, the ceremonial barge of some Essiel overlord was due. Come to oversee the ritual obeisance of the colony’s government and accept their fealty. And that would be that. Everyone would have to adjust the notional borders of their maps; Huei-Cavor would no longer be a human-governed world.