I opened my mouth to argue… and then promptly closed it again. As much as I might like to deny it, he was right.
“I’ll stay,” Soka announced, not entirely a surprise. “I’d feel better knowing I was here, front and centre, to make sure they’re looked after as well as possible. The slave industry is a terrible thing, and anything I can do to help them lead a successful life is worth doing.” I’d known Soka cared about her job, but perhaps I’d underestimated just how invested in it she was.
“Is that okay with you?” I asked Henderson.
He shrugged. “It’s as good as we’re going to get, for the time being. And like we’ve already said, if all goes well, then they won’t bond to us anyway, and all these careful preparations won’t be needed in the end. But better safe than sorry, right?”
“Right,” I agreed. “Kade? Anything you can think of that we might have missed?”
“No. I think you’ve got a very reasonable plan there.”
“All right. Everybody else, let’s get out of here,” I said, turning to shepherd the rest of the staff out of the room. “We’ll clear a path between here and conference room three, and I’ll round up a team to help us move eight mattresses. Aside from that, we’ll just stay out of your way until you’re ready.”
“Actually, it might be worth watching on the security cameras,” Henderson said, before I could leave. “You and Kade have a better idea of what their reactions would mean than anyone else. Security can deal with the logistics,” he added, nodding to a tall Denzogal woman whom I recognised as being part of the security staff. “I need you paying attention and ready to intervene if anything goes wrong.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, feeling my heart rate kick up a notch. I was seriously hoping this all turned out to be spectacularly anti-climactic. But until we got through it, it was impossible to know. “Best of luck, sir. Call me if you need anything.”
At the exit of the docking bay, I turned left and headed for the security wing at a jog, Kade right behind me. I swiped my security pass to open the door into the camera room. There were a dozen soldiers inside, monitoring various parts of the base, as well as incoming communications from the wormhole, and I headed for a desk on the far side of the room. “Excuse me, sir?” I said to the man at the desk, with four different screens open in front of him. “You know the crate they brought in with the dimari in it? They’re about to open it. Any chance you could let me view it, and give me ongoing coverage while they move the dimari to conference room three?”
“I was wondering when they were going to get around to that,” the man said, with a grin. His name was Toros, and he had a reputation for both brilliance and lunacy. He leaned over and pulled a second chair up beside his own. “Take a seat. That’s gotto be the most interesting thing that’s happened around here for a whole month.”
I sat down, while Kade nabbed a chair from the next desk over and squeezed in behind us. Early on in our relationship, I’d been concerned about the way he always took the ‘second class’ position in anything we were doing; offering to stand while I sat, or sitting behind me, instead of beside me. It had taken a couple of weeks for me to realise that that was simply the way dimari were trained, and that he didn’t see himself as any less because of it. But even so, it had taken a fair bit longer for me to learn to be comfortable with the behaviour. Even now, I was acutely aware of it, though I knew better than to say anything.
“Let’s have a look,” Toros said. “Docking bay cameras… conference room… hallways…” He muttered to himself as he scrolled through a number of different cameras. The base wasn’t enormous, but even so, he had to have a bloody good memory to know exactly which cameras were needed to trace the path the dimari would be taking.
“Here we go,” he said, a minute or two later, and a clear picture of the docking bay appeared on the screen. Toros fiddled with the controls, zooming in on the crate and the three people in front of it.
I quickly pulled up Henderson’s contact on my comm.Good to go, I informed him, and on the screen, I could see him glance down at his own comm, strapped to his wrist, and then waited as he typed in a reply.
Security is still clearing the halls. Give it another minute or two.
I waited impatiently, trying not to tap my foot. On a couple of the other screens, I could see security staff moving people away from the access route. Fuck, I hoped we didn’t get this wrong.
Finally, another message came through.Base is secure. Proceeding with crate.I leaned in towards the screen as Iwatched Henderson step forward. Would all the dimari come out at once? Or one at a time? Would they wait to be called? Even if the first one did bond with Henderson, we might still get lucky and get a pause before the rest of them piled out of the crate as well.
Behind me, I heard Kade clear his throat. “Perhaps you would feel better if you continued to breathe, sir,” he said, with just a hint of amusement in his voice, and it was only then that I realised I was holding my breath.
“Fuck. Sorry,” I muttered, even though apologising for it didn’t entirely make sense. “I’m fine.”
On the screen, Henderson was turning the handle on the door to the crate, with the doctor and Soka crowded in behind him. Was that just curiosity? Or strategy? If they were all bunched together, it would be less likely that the dimari would fixate on any one of them to the exclusion of the others.
The door swung slowly open, and by sheer luck, the angle of the camera let me see inside the crate even before Henderson could. But on the downside, the interior was so dark compared to the sun-drenched docking bay that it was hard to make out anything meaningful.
I waited, my hands gripping the arms of the chair like a lifeline. Seconds ticked by and… nothing happened. On the screen, Henderson glanced at his two companions, then took a hesitant step towards the crate. Presumably, he said something, or called out to the dimari, because a couple of seconds later, a figure appeared in the doorway. The dimari looked stiff, almost robotic, and while I had very limited experience with seeing how dimari reacted when they first came out of their crates, this looked nothing like the immediate joy and anticipation I remembered when I’d first met Kade.
A few seconds ticked by, then another figure appeared behind the first. Henderson stepped back, beckoning the dimariforward, and I made the assumption from his actions that the dimari hadn’t bonded to anyone. Soka stepped forward next, waving for the next dimari to come out. They filed out neatly, then arranged themselves shoulder to shoulder in a line. They were all dressed in the same grey uniform, their scales all varying shades of blue, from a deep, ocean blue, like Kade, to a pale sky blue… except no, the last one to emerge from the crate wasn’t blue. He was… black. Jet black. Midnight black. Vangravians were able to change the colour of their scales to a certain extent, and I’d seen Kade change his colouring to pure black a handful of times. And each time, it had been entirely unnerving, appearing more like a wraith than a person. The dimari at the end of the row was no less unsettling now, albeit that I was only seeing him through a screen. Henderson, too, seemed rather taken aback… and then the dimari stepped into line with the rest of them, and it was immediately clear that he was a good head taller than all the others. He wasn’t quite as tall as Henderson, but I would have estimated him to be about seven feet tall. I immediately had to wonder what the hell he’d been trained to do.
“Why is he presenting himself as jet black?” I asked Kade, who was watching the screen just as intently as me.
Kade tilted his head. “It would seem an odd choice for a first meeting with his master,” he agreed. “I couldn’t say more without knowing what his training specialty was.”
“You said that dimari in stasis weren’t terribly aware of what was going on around them. Or, at least, that they weren’t making in-depth decisions. But choosing a colour would mean… well, it requires a deliberate intention, doesn’t it?”
“True,” Kade said, his tone thoughtful. “Unless his intended master specifically requested that he be a particular colour on arrival. My first guess would be that he’s a combat specialist, and perhaps he was being delivered into an active combatzone? In that case, being black might offer him protection as camouflage.”
“That sort of thing would be in his operations manual, wouldn’t it?”
“Most likely, yes.”
