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Irit spoke softly. She didn’t meet Anax’s eyes. “Yorrik said all this could still be an accident. The birth of a new life form. But you don’t think so, do you?”
Anax Therion looked down at the volus. “Irit Non, I will tell you what the hanar who raised me told me. One misfortune may be chance; two might be divine punishment. Three is a plan.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “The virus and the system malfunctions leave us somewhere between divine punishment and a plan. Do you really think we will be spared a third?”
“Ah. No. But then, I am a committed pessimist.”
“I knew we would find common ground somewhere, Non,” Anax said with a soft smile, half concealed by her unfinished helmet.
A long silence. Irit was clearly famous for good reason. Even now, under stress that would break a Spectre’s sense of professionalism, the volus had added flourishes and touches of style without even seeming to be conscious of doing it. “It wasn’t us,” she whispered. “I’m not angry at you for suspecting so. It’s natural to think of the ones in the suits, the ones with an immunity to Yoqtan from childhood, the ones who even know what Yoqtan is. But it wasn’t the volus.”
“You can’t know that. There are three thousand of you on board.”
The volus wheezed heavily and sat back on a box of eye-lenses. “Look,” she gulped through her air filter, “I know my people, just like you know yours. When you rise to the top of a society, you have an excellent vantage point on the people in it. Would you grant me that?”
“Certainly,” Therion said. She wouldn’t, not really. In her experience, a seat at the top of a society afforded a view of nothing more than the top of that society. But the best way to get someone to keep talking was to agree with them, and that transcended species. Everyone wanted people to agree with them. It was, perhaps, all anyone wanted.
Irit leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees, her large belly hanging between them. She did look up then.
“This just isn’t our style, Anax. First of all, we have no quarrel with the Rakhana-clan. Or Kahje-clan, except that preachers are always extremely annoying, when they preach anything other than your own religion. In fact, we have a certain sympathy for you. The client relationship between turians and volus is not so different than the one between hanar and drell. Secondly… let me put it this way. If the volus were to strike out at the drell, we would much prefer to simply buy out their Compact with the hanar and take their place. To have a client species of our own would greatly increase our standing in the new galaxy. Forgive me for putting it bluntly, but if we wanted to get rid of you, we would far rather absorb you into the volus culture and benefit as the hanar have done for so long, or finesse the Fleet-clan or the Khar’shan-clan into declaring war on you. We long ago did away with waging war ourselves, of course. Wasteful. But we are very interested in other people’s wars. There is more money in war than anything save entertainment. We would never deny our munitions manufacturers such an opportunity. But this? There is no profit in a simple death, only expense. In disposing of bodies, in extra work to make up the lack of laborers, in concealing our involvement so as to avoid retaliation. No, a volus might shoot you directly in the face for money, but at least it will be direct. Biological weapons are messy. Unpredictable. We volus dislike unpredictability, in both markets and life.” Irit made a disgusted sound. “My father would say that is our great weakness as a people.”
Irit Non stood up with a grunt and rummaged through her stock for more piecework. She strode around behind Therion and began the final lacing of the torso section.
Target acquired. When in doubt, it’s always daddy issues. Therion trod carefully. “Your father?”
Non yanked on a structural panel with unnecessary brutality. Therion gasped. She let herself gasp. It was what the suit designer wanted. To express a small domination over her. It cost Anax nothing to let her have it.
“My father says a lot of things. In fact, you could say that all the fat old bastard does is say things. Professionally. My father is an invasive fungus in volus form. We do not get along. And yet…” Non fastened the other half of Therion’s faceplate into place. “And yet I am here. The miserable gasbag pissed off so many people so many times that the Vol Protectorate forced him into exile. Do you know how many writs of exile the Protectorate has issued in the history of civilization? Three, and two were for my father.”
“Your father is Gaffno Yap? The terrorist?” She knew of Yap, of course. It was hardly possible not to. He was a regular feature in political satires across half the galaxy, a cartoonish villain among the volus, a violent criminal among the courts, a tragic figure among others. But this she had not known. A volus’s second name was not a surname; it indicated no genetic relationship, as they disliked the implication of families owning their offspring. Between this and the identical suits, it was very hard to piece together the shape of relationships between individual volus. She remembered Irit hissing furiously at Yap on the security vids.
“Never proven!” snapped Non. “As if my father would lift a finger to do his own work. He is radical, yes. He is an agitator, yes. He is an anarcho-communist who preaches the abolition of currency and personal property to the volus, for fuck’s sake, yes. But he had nothing to do with those bombings. He just… inspires people. It’s not his fault those people invariably run off holding hands and skipping through the flowers to blow up banks and treasuries and any place where there might be a lot of money or influence or money and influence all together in one spot.”
“People like your mother.”
Irit did not take that bait. “I had to grow up with that voice whining in my ear, singing all property is theft, all money is blood money as a lullaby. He thought we should emulate the quarians, and give up the whole notion, not just of capital, but of trade itself. Revolting. To isolate us that way. To take away the lump of sugar that coaxes any species to take the risk o
f interacting with any other. And when I made a success of myself, he took it as a personal insult.”
“Yet you came with him. You left your success behind.”
Irit Non’s shoulders slumped a little. “He is old. He is not well. All his life he has had followers to manage his affairs. Now he is in disgrace. He has no one. They abandoned him once there was no more profit in writing tell-alls about spending a bit of their youths rubbing elbows with the intellectually dangerous. But Gaffno is an optimist to my pessimist. He actually thinks he can convince the volus on board to join him in creating a new society on whatever world the Pathfinders discover for us. I could not… let him be alone when he finally understands that they will not. I am weak, in that way. And that pill will be all the more bitter for him, now that his only other friend is dead.”
“Oh?”
“Kholai, the hanar. You must have heard it on Hephaestus. It was preaching day and night, with a throng of hanar hanging on every word. Kholai was the leader of a cult of some kind, or at least a sect. He and my father had much in common. There’s a group of hanar, fifty or so, who believe that only in Andromeda will they be able to practice their religion freely. The one with Yorrik in medbay is one of them.”
“All hanar practice the same religion. There is no religious conflict on Kahje.”
“Oh, they still worship the Enkindlers. They just think Kholai is their only true prophet. They call it the Enkindled One. They believe that the Enkindlers made a mistake in uplifting primitive life in the Milky Way. That we should not be. Because they erred in directing our evolution, all present organic life is tainted and trends toward chaos and wickedness.” Non sighed, as if she were reciting from a particularly annoying book. “The Enkindlers will one day return to punish the children of the galaxy for their impure way of life, for using their blessings improperly, for polluting themselves by intermixing with the cultures of others. On the ‘Day of Extinguishment’ the Enkindlers will return to destroy all those who have sinned against them and raise up those who have lived an immaculate life into a new paradise. The usual doomsday song. The Illuminated Primacy objected to their missionary work, spreading the idea that the Enkindlers were capable of error. So they hope for a new world where they can wait for the Day of Extinguishment without the temptation of outsiders. Sounds delightful, I know. Kholai is a very persuasive speaker. It has a beautiful voice. Had. There. I think you’re settled. I have a mirror, give me a moment.”
The volus hauled out a mobile dressing-room unit from the rear of her cavernous crate. Therion looked herself over. The suit flowed naturally around the curves of her body as though drell had been wearing habitat suits for centuries. Stripes of white-and-brown titanium mesh divided by flexible structural boning defined her waist and conformed to the shape of Therion’s muscular legs, her arms, even her feet. The large round central processing unit rode on her solar plexus, blinking softly, all systems online. The air-exchange nozzle that gave the volus’s voices that trademark wheeze-and-suck sound covered her mouth and nose, breathing for her, with no effort of her own expended. The gloves transmitted textural information directly into her cerebral cortex and newly augmented visual display. She couldn’t feel things through the fabric, but she could instantly compute them, without the irritating inefficiency of physical contact. The drell hadn’t even known how badly she’d always wanted that until now.
Anax Therion looked… disturbingly good. She had to admit it. The whole effect was utterly alien, extremely formidable, and wholly unsettling, even frightening. It was entirely possible that no one in the history of either galaxy had ever looked the way she looked standing in the hallway of a stranded ghost ship a hundred light years from anywhere.
“I’m not going to sound like you, am I?” Anax said experimentally.
She didn’t, not exactly. Her voice was suddenly very gravelly and rough and breathy, a nightclub singer after a three-day bender voice, but not quite as hard a wheeze as Irit’s. The air exchange didn’t actually have to exchange air for a drell, nor did the pressure panels have to hold her lungs together in an intolerably low-pressure environment.
“Ungrateful,” the volus puffed. “Do you know what this kind of bespoke job would cost you back in the Milky Way? Your firstborn child wouldn’t even cover the down payment. I honestly don’t know why Rakhana-clan don’t suit up like the rest of us. You don’t see us stuffing the hospitals with Kepral’s corpses.” Her snout lifted thoughtfully. “I can feel a new profit vector in my kneecaps. By the gods, I hope we survive this.” Non reached up and gave Anax’s stomach a solid whack below the central processor unit. A dark stain in the shape of her fist spread over the mesh.
