In the end, though, when the Coffin was closing in, she just said, ‘You jumped straight into salvage, after the war?’
‘Cartography Corps, for a few years, discovering planets.’ He blinked up at her, still not convinced she wouldn’t ambush him. ‘You ever been to Damasite? No, I suppose not. Well that was one of mine. Found it in the void, traced a Throughway back. There’s a colony on it now, onto their second generation.’ He found her hard to look at, mostly because she was – if he was frank with himself – very easy to look at. The woman who’d engineered the Partheni genomes had had exacting standards when it came to appearance.
‘And then?’ she pressed.
‘Then someone from the Liaison Board turned up and made me an offer,’ he told her shortly. ‘It was a very nice offer, on the surface. I’d have lived well on that offer. But I’d heard, by then, how they were treating the next class of Ints – and the hit rate they were getting with conscripts and criminals. I didn’t want to be part of it anymore. I’d done my bit. I ended the war, Solace. Not alone, but I was one of the few.’
‘I’m amazed they let you just walk out.’ And this wasn’t a Partheni criticizing the Colonial authorities. It was an old friend, glad for him. He felt broken edges grinding inside him and stilled those feelings brutally. No, not doing this. She’s just after me for one more goddamn government.
‘So after the Cartography Corps, you’ve been bumming about on ships like this, for all those years?’ Solace asked, and he winced at the implicit criticism.
‘I had a stint in prison. And I was a slave once.’
‘What?’
‘Well, they slapped a leash on me. I fought it, and thankfully it wasn’t anywhere like Magda, where the small print of the law’s tattooed onto some gorilla’s knuckles. But that’s the why of Kris.’
‘You lawyered up?’
‘She has saved me from that kind of shit on eleven separate occasions now.’
‘She sounds good,’ Solace noted. ‘Why’s she slumming it with you?’
‘Ask her.’ Idris shrugged. ‘Not my sunny personality, that’s for sure. And now you’re looking at me funny.’
‘Harbinger Ash,’ Solace said. ‘Idris, he sent for me. He told me where to find you.’ A moment later, she looked as if she wished she hadn’t. It was just her making her offer by another route.
Idris shrugged. ‘Changes nothing.’ Yet he was keeping a lid on so much that something had to give. ‘But I’m glad he did. I always wondered. If I’d see you. I should. I should be grateful that he. I should . . . something. I’m sorry. I am a failed experiment most days, and a bad human being.’
The Coffin pilot’s voice had been buzzing away quietly and now it stopped, because the man had finally caught sight of the Oumaru. Rollo snorted, ‘You assholes get it now – why I’ve dragged you out to this hinterland? I’m not here for my health, see right?’
There was a ragged noise over the comms, someone’s choked breathing, then, ‘Yeah,’ in awed tones. ‘No shit. We’re opening the doors. Just get on inside.’
There wasn’t much call for the vast Coffin transporters: only really used to get large and delicate cargo down planetside. Out in space, you could shunt fragile goods around without a worry, due to the inertial dampening effect a gravitic drive could muster. But the buffeting of atmospheric entry meant it was best to fully enclose anything you wanted to take down to the surface. Of course, cargo wasn’t usually another ship. But the Coffin’s size meant they could transport the Oumaru to the Lung-Crow Orbital without sparking a system-wide panic. Just putting off the inevitable, Idris knew. But that was life, wasn’t it?
He guided the Vulture God, with the Oumaru in tow, into the great open maw of the Coffin. Then the bigger vessel’s internal gravitics locked them in place. After that, there’d be more waiting as the Coffin lugged them in-system to the bustle of Huei-Cavor. Barney stomped off, claiming maintenance duties, and Kittering ended up playing a three-hander with Medvig and Olli instead. Rollo sloped away to get some sleep.
Idris looked up at Solace almost challengingly. ‘So, what about you?’ he asked. ‘Would you like a drink? We can synthesize . . . actually very little that tastes authentic. But you can at least tell me what you’ve been up to, if we’re doing the old friends bit.’
‘I saw a little action, after the war.’ She shrugged. ‘I was on ice, off ice. You hear about the hostage standoff, on Britta Station? That was one of mine.’