A super-symbiont. Great.
Kris had never expected to end up here, not the young Keristina Soolin Almier who’d won a scholarship to the law schools of Scintilla. She’d been brought up within the Harmaster asteroid belt, home to colossal resource-stripping factories. Her parents had been members in good standing with the Iron Co-ops, whose collective bargaining and strict union lines had turned poverty and hard graft into relative comfort and affluence by the time Kris was born. Harmaster ex-pats were turning up all over the Colonies by then, bringing their work ethics and Iron Coin bursaries with them. That had been enough to get her onto Scintilla. A lucrative white-collar future had beckoned.
Scintilla was . . . difficult, though. The planet was old-money rich, like Magda. It had the old families to go with it, those left to their own devices since before Earth fell. It was a cold world, with cities carved into the sides of snow-swept mountains. The older students stalked the sparse, high halls of its best law college in black furs. Their junior assistants wore monkish robes and were forbidden to talk in the corridors. And then there was the duelling. It was constrained by all manner of legal restrictions, but students were expected to argue their way out of any repercussions if caught carrying the knife – that was part of the training. And if you didn’t carry the knife, you weren’t anyone. You could buy the knives legally, train openly, and everyone obsessed over the careers of the top fighters. Even the tutors. They harangued their classes on the evils of the atavistic and reprehensible practice, yet their eyes twinkled in encouragement even as they lectured. And it was hardly ever fatal these days.
Kris had picked up the knife because it was plain she’d never walk in the right circles unless she did. She held on to it because she found she loved it. Not the spilled blood – especially if it was hers – but everything else. It was a stupid aristocratic piece of bravado yet she turned out to be very good at it. Up to and including the point where she found her knife painted with the life’s blood of a very promising young boy of very good family.
It hadn’t been the legalities that got her, of course. She’d argued her way out of those in a way that would have made her tutors proud. But the family, they wouldn’t forget. Vendetta was a serious business amongst the legal dynasties of Scintilla. Life gave her two choices then. Get off-planet or spend her days fending off challenges and assassins. She often wondered if she’d made the right choice. Especially now, shipless and penniless.
‘We know this individual.’ Her benefactor, after a morning’s enquiries, was a Hiver. This one resembled a metre-tall bird cage with six evenly spaced legs and not even the pretence of a head. They were an asset leased to the station dock crew and Kris suspected they didn’t socialize with their human peers much. ‘We hear he killed your companions.’
‘Two crew down and our ship gone,’ she confirmed. ‘And we’ve no idea who they were.’
‘The absence of knowledge is a wound that will not heal.’ This Hiver’s designation was Yuri, just another random label plucked from a list somewhere. ‘Of course I am not permitted to provide you with confidential station records, under the terms of my contract.’ Their voice vibrated reedily from the cage of their body. She could see a host of little insects within, whose constant communion produced the conscious entity that called itself Yuri.
‘Well, look,’ Kris told them. They were in an abandoned cargo bay, next to a tangle of wiring that the Hiver was desultorily repairing. ‘I can probably work up a good legal argument for why we’re entitled to this information, then spend all day getting it past the kybernet and station admin,’ she said. ‘Or I could find the shady outfit I damn well know exists somewhere on board, and have them hack the system. But I’d rather take the Largesse my factor has made available and transfer it to you. You can’t tell me you don’t have your own account separate from your leash.’
Yuri managed a creditable chuckle. ‘We won’t do it for the money,’ they said. ‘Although we will take the money, just to clarify. However, we will do it for your loss. We have looked you up on the Tally. Your Asset spoke highly of you.’
Kris went still, parsing that. Yes, Hivers kept a record of who did right by them and who did not. She hadn’t ever thought of Medvig doing that. But that was because, to her, Medvig had been people.
‘Your Tothiat goes by the name of Mesmon. He shipped in aboard the Sark. The Sark itself departed peaceably after your ship was taken. Not connected by security with the theft. Mesmon seems a spacer freelancer. But, to one who has worked here under leash for many years, patterns become clear. He is a sworn man with the Broken Harvest Society.’