‘Listen,’ Solace told them. ‘I want you all to come with me, right now. I want to show you something.’ She stood, and after a moment Rollo did too, and then Kris. Olli and Kit were already on their various feet. Solace looked at Idris, not a challenge so much as an entreaty. He shrugged, feeling tired and vaguely anxious about whatever the woman had in mind. Whatever it is, I’m not going to like it.
Solace took them towards the dock levels, a ring of small private jetties. The great and the good kept their launches and yachts here. Idris bleakly enjoyed the mortified looks they received from liveried technicians and flunkies, seeing this motley mob of spacers slouching through their pristine corridors.
And then they were at a door with two Partheni myrmidons outside, in full armour and armed with accelerators. The crew shrank back as one, fearing ambush, Kittering practically disappearing behind Rollo’s legs. Solace just nodded to the soldiers and the women stepped smartly aside with a mutual ‘Myrmidon Executor.’
Olli swore faintly, as the door slid open. ‘What treasonous shit have we gotten ourselves into?’
‘No idea,’ Idris lied. He was half expecting to be grabbed and bagged right here, and the rest of them shot.
There was just one ship in the bay. It was a segmented teardrop, half the size of the Vulture God and entirely lacking in the thrown-together look that was practically Colonial aesthetic. Its surface was silvery, and some of the jutting nodules that flanked its nose were probably weapons.
There was a column of Parsef characters on the side, along with its company badges. Kittering’s screens helpfully translated its name as the Dark Joan.
‘What’s this, my child?’ Rollo asked cautiously.
‘Captain Rostand, I have a proposal.’
‘Crew to captain, or Partheni to a poor Colonial?’ His moustache bristled but his eyes kept sliding back to the Dark Joan.
‘I went to the embassy,’ she told them all, and abruptly there was a distance between Solace and the rest of them, a gap of status as much as physical space. ‘This is one of our packet transport ships. I’ve requisitioned it.’
They stared at her, or at least their stares were split between her and the shining perfection of the ship. ‘You mean,’ Kris said slowly, ‘you said, “I want this ship” and they just . . . let you have it.’
‘Borrow it,’ Solace agreed. Her hands were wringing at each other. Idris wondered if she realized. Maybe Partheni didn’t get nervous around each other, so she’d not had his practice in hiding it.
Rollo was suddenly very sober. ‘My daughter,’ he said flatly. ‘The guards called you “Executor”。 What are you?’
‘Executors are trained to go outside the Parthenon sphere and . . . do what must be done.’
‘You’re an assassin,’ Olli said flatly.
‘Olli!’ Kris reproached her. ‘She’s, what, a spy? An agent?’
‘An agent.’ Solace confirmed. ‘So when I say I need the use of a ship, I have a ship. Which, here, means you have a ship. If you want it. Now Idris can get to Tarekuma ahead of the Vulture – so you can get your ship back.’
There was a long silence in response to that. It was Rollo who put all their feelings into words. ‘And why would you do such a thing, Honoured Executor?’
Solace licked her lips. She looked a decade younger than the captain, shorter, slighter of build. Idris had to remind himself that she was even older than he was and could likely kill the lot of them with her bare hands.
‘Because it’s in the interests of my government that I learn everything I can about the Oumaru. Getting to Tarekuma – and fast – is the first step in doing that.’ She swallowed. ‘And because I think you’re good people.’
Olli made a disgusted noise.
‘Forgive me for saying this, my friend,’ Rollo said, with that polite distance he put between his crew and others, ‘but that does not sound very Partheni to me.’
Solace’s brow furrowed. ‘What’s the Parthenon, Captain?’ She seemed to have reluctantly accepted that distance. ‘How did we come about, do you know?’
‘A bunch of clever women decided that they would go grow a whole load of other women in test tubes, because they hated men?’ Olli said, going from a standing start to staggeringly undiplomatic in record time. ‘Wasn’t that it?’
Rollo shot her a look, but Solace held up a hand.
‘That’s how the Nativists tell it. Maybe that’s how they tell it all over the Colonies.’ She shrugged. ‘The Parthenon was founded because of good people. Parsefer and her fellows looked at the way Earth had gone and saw inequality, exploitation, divisions, hatred and ignorance. They wanted to start again and do better. And if you’re boosting your population through vat-parthenogenesis, it’s easier just to work with the female line.’ Idris reckoned that was both a simplified and sanitized explanation, but perhaps it was what Solace believed.