The lurch as the Lune Station docking control took hold of them was entirely avoidable. Some Colonial controller waving his genitals in their direction as far as Solace was concerned. She felt the shift and sag as Lune’s induced gravity engaged, the same Earth-standard 1G she recognized from the Wu.
‘Remember,’ Tact informed them all, ‘put on a good show. Efficiency, discipline, restraint, est-ce compris? We are the pride of the galaxy, the shield of humanity, the armoured fist, the banner unfurled.’ Her voice was abruptly hard, ringing from the metal walls like a hammer. ‘We start no fights here, but make them believe that we will damn well finish them.’
‘Compris, Mother,’ the escort chorused, standing and forming up.
The Council of Human Interests – ‘Hugh’ – hadn’t sent out a similarly pugnacious party to meet them. There were a handful of clerks in knee-length belted smocks, what passed for well-to-do white-collar garb here. The man at their centre was wearing much the same – save that the extravagant cloth of his over-robe fell all the way to his shiny shoes. To Solace it looked absurdly impractical, but that was the point, she supposed. Here was a man who didn’t need to throw his own punches.
He kissed Tact on either cheek, the way the Partheni did. She clasped his hand – elbow to elbow – in the ‘Colony handshake’。 All deeply symbolic of the divided fragments of humanity clinging together, or some such nonsense.
‘Monitor Superior Tact,’ he greeted her with a bland smile, speaking Parsef smoothly enough. ‘I was expecting some battlefield officer, bloody to the elbows.’
‘Commissioner Poulos. And I trust you’ve had the chance to table the additional motion I sent.’
Solace caught the momentary evasion in his eyes before the man turned from Tact to look over her escort.
‘It’s been too long since I saw the infamous Partheni myrmidons,’ he declared, though Solace reckoned he could happily have gone to his grave without ever seeing them again. He made a show of examining their company badges, stopping at hers because she alone displayed the winged blade and the serpent, rather than the Wu Zhao’s sunburst icon. Myrmidon Executor Solace, Heaven’s Sword Sorority, Basilisk Division. That she was a long way from her assigned ship obviously didn’t escape him.
‘You’ve brought an apprentice, Tact?’ he asked mildly, while Solace squirmed within her armour at his scrutiny. ‘The sword is for the ship, and the snake, that’s artillery division . . . Angels of Infinite Fortitude, they used to call you?’ Old nicknames from when the Partheni were humanity’s shield against the Architects, not the enemy.
‘No, menheer,’ and then, because she couldn’t keep it in, ‘Angels of Punching You in the Face, menheer,’ watching at least an eighth of the poetry in him wither.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well. I suppose we’d better . . .’ And they set off, leaving both entourages to jostle for primacy, a contest that the armoured Partheni won. Solace sensed Tact’s eyes on her, and felt she wasn’t living up to the role of apprentice diplomat as well as she might.
‘We have a full slate of trade agreements to rubber-stamp,’ the Commissioner was saying. ‘As for your other motion . . .’
‘Yes, as for the other?’ Mother Tact enquired. Because she hadn’t come all this way just to talk about shipping tariffs.
‘It’s been tabled,’ was all the man would say.
*
The Partheni escort received hard looks on the way to their temporary quarters. Many Lune staff clearly saw them as a threat, but Parthenon armour was proof against hard looks. It wasn’t proof against boredom, though, while they waited for Tact to wade through trade permits and shipping concessions with a roomful of Hugh diplomats in impractical clothes, forging towards the one issue that was actually important right now.
Tact’s message to Solace, when it finally arrived, came in as a series of brief encoded packets designed to avoid Colonial surveillance.
Their Liaison Board has no interest in sharing Intermediary Program data, Tact confirmed to her. Their Ints remain ‘weapons technology’， not to be shared with foreign powers.
But Intermediaries aren’t designed to be weapons against us . . . and the Architects are gone anyway, Solace shot back.
While our technology exceeds theirs, they’ll do us no favours. The Ints are the one thing they have that we don’t. And those they’re turning out these days are under government control. There’s no way we could get hold of one for study without starting a war. This might just be the Parthenon’s next step, Solace knew. The problem was that not only were the Intermediaries the best weapon against any return incursion of the Architects: as navigators they gave their ships the freedom of the galaxy. A warship with an Int pilot could turn up anywhere, strike and vanish, uncatchable. And the Parthenon had the best warships, but the Colonies had all the Ints.