Reclamation (Book One of the Art of War Trilogy), page 24
He listed the President’s demands – or attempted to. He barely made it past the first before Xavanis launched to his feet. For a moment Yano saw the provar reach for his caldar, though the executor luckily thought better of it.
‘Insult!’ he roared, voice deep and dissonant. Everyone in the audience chamber started. The holos around the room all switched from Yano to Xavanis.
‘Imperial Executor tan’Vex Gochrayne-an Xavanis, of the Provar Ascendancy,’ the zhahassi announcer said over the speaker system.
Xavanis had already launched into a tirade in FP, too quickly for anyone to understand except those provar present. It became quickly evident, however, that it was not directed at Yano. It was directed at Siun.
‘Executor,’ the mediator attempted. Then Yano felt Siun rise to his feet. He turned to see the observer’s face darkening, and where before he had seen a passive, almost weak aspect to the Xhevegan, now there was a terrible wrath, a deep, engrained loathing for Folhourt and the Ascendancy which stormed across his features.
‘Xhevega cressin’as lachma hai!’ Siun bellowed in response to Xavanis’s insults. Other members of the table were standing now, unsure of what to do. The Grand Chamber did have ZEN marksmen scurried away in alcoves, though they had not been used in Yano’s lifetime. Yano guessed they were drawing a bead on Xavanis and the Ascendancy legation, since they were the only bipeds in the room who were armed, ceremonially or otherwise. It would not look good if they started stabbing foreign dignitaries left and right.
Xavanis snarled and thumped his chest. It made a hollow sound. ‘Why here?’ he made a jabbing motion towards Siun. ‘Xhevega dast’a ghan!’
‘Xhevega’ and ‘traitor’ were the two words Yano took from the outburst. The mediator was loudly calling for calm, though he was not being listened to. If they carried on like this, the entire summit would be a waste of time.
< We need to get rid of Siun > he sent to Codey.
< Not yet. See what you can do > Codey messaged back.
‘Executor,’ Yano said, loud enough to be heard over the exchange. ‘Please, hear our position. The Ascendancy has killed UN citizens. All we ask–’
Xavanis snarled, and most of the rest of the Ascendancy legation snarled with him.
‘Think we care? Vhyrmin people are nala!’ He spat more pinkish phlegm onto the floor. That caused some more consternation among the assembled representatives. A thrum of muttered conversation filled the air, though it did not escalate to remonstration. None of the other Tier-Three species had achieved their civilisational status by picking a fight with the Ascendancy.
‘Will the Ascendancy executor please remain calm,’ the mediator tried again, his gravelly old voice this time much more loudly amplified by the speakers. ‘Your behaviour is not in keeping with the spirit of this summit.’
Xavanis waved the mediator off, snarling again. ‘Vhyrmin klashi – fleet, aggressive, insult Ascendancy Imphraexes, hostile, death deserved! Vhyrmin groundmen, fire on Imphraexes, deaths of vheygari, therefore deaths of vhyrmin groundmen, deserved! Now vhyrmin mobilise fleet! Claim vheygari hostile!’ Xavanis was holding both hands out wide now. His entire delivery had been a dissonant tri-modular basso, resonating throughout the entire Grand Chamber without the need of amplification. ‘Insult! Constant insult, vhyrmin insulting, weak! Ashgurn-valta, Xhevega-valta! Zecad is not blind, vhyrmin, we know your plans, plans for allies friends! No apologies, no currency from vheygari, vhyrmin apologise to us and give us ashgurn, ashgurn folly started this, ashgurn attack crusade fleet, I do not view them here? Exchange, man!’
Before Yano could reply, Siun stuck his oar in again, initiating another shouting match between the two provar. After a minute of futile interjections, Yano sat down, waiting for them to finish.
< This is farcical > he sent to Codey. < They want the kaygryn, and they think we’re protecting them. Until they get them, this is only going to get worse. Where the hell is the kaygryn team anyway? >
< I have no idea > Codey admitted. < They have skarls in the building, just not in here. I don’t know what kind of diplomatic authority they are operating under either >
‘Executor,’ Yano said, standing up again. ‘It is not our desire to provoke you. We are seeking to defuse the situation, not inflame it. However, you must understand that an apology on behalf of the Ascendancy demonstrates good faith and a willingness to engage. You have killed many hundreds of humans, unprovoked. We do not want to end up in a situation where our hand is forced.’
‘Not sorry for deaths of vhyrmin. Never! Vhyrmin…’ the provar searched for the words. ‘Interfere with Ascendancy and Zecad. Will go ill for you if you ally with ashgurn and Xhevega dast’a!’
Before Yano could do anything, and much to further consternation among the rest of the representatives, Siun was on his feet again, and he and Xavanis launched into another shouting match. The argument continued for at least five minutes until the mediator sounded the harmonic that had called the initial session to order. To the surprise of all present, both the Ascendancy executor and Siun stopped.
‘It is time for the first caucus, I think,’ he rasped, allowing a note of frustration to creep into his voice. Yano noticed that all the live-feed holos around the room were going crazy, flashing with breaking news banners about the latest folly on Gonvarion. At least it made for good media – it made for appalling diplomacy.
‘Special Envoy Yano, please meet me in my chambers,’ the mediator continued in clipped tones. ‘Everyone else, let’s have an hour to cool off. Meet back here at eleven o’clock.’
The Ascendancy legation, seething, immediately stalked out the room, angrily pushing past serving ZENs, minor diplomats and reporters. The rest of the room fell to talking among themselves. Yano watched them leave, then turned back to Siun.
‘You’re supposed to be observing,’ he hissed, finding it difficult to keep the anger from his voice. He hadn’t interrupted the Xhevegan during the heated exchange for fear of damaging his pride, but now the spotlight was off them he had half a mind to punch him in the face. ‘That was not observing.’
‘I am sorry–’ Siun began, but Yano waved him quiet.
‘Special Envoy Codey will brief you. I need to go.’
He stood with a swirl of his cloak and strode out of the Grand Chamber and into the mediator’s chambers, accessed through a small archway behind the raised chair where the mediator had been sitting. The old zhahassi was waiting for him inside. He looked up, then looked back to the holo built into the desk in front of him.
‘Close the door,’ he said in excellent Terran, and Yano obliged him. The room was well appointed with beautiful wooden furniture and smelled faintly of fresh Vhalyssian wildflowers. A small window was open behind the mediator’s desk, letting in a warm, pleasant breeze.
‘What are you hoping to take from this?’ he asked. In any other situation his frankness would have been appealing, but the lack of tact from the provar that morning had already wearied Yano.
‘To be honest with you, sir… I don’t know.’ He shrugged. His pride had been carefully massaged when he had been given the assignment. Now it seemed as though the summit was already spiralling out of control. ‘I am acting on the orders I receive and my diplomatic mandate,’ he said after a while. It sounded so lame.
The zhahassi nodded, his deeply wrinkled face creasing into that disarming smile which all the aliens seemed to possess. ‘A word to the wise,’ he said, ‘to borrow one of your expressions. Aim low. I have presided over many summits. The provar deign to appear at a very small number and fewer still yield useful results. They see themselves above negotiation. They do not care for your dead civilians, and you will not change their mind on the matter. You will sooner receive an apology from a rock.’
The mediator reclined, his long fingers pulling a lhyrin stick from the uppermost drawer of his bureaux. He lit it and the smell was sickly sweet. It was a narcotic, though with humans at least, not a particularly powerful one.”
‘I know that your President wishes to appear strong. We have all watched his address. I wish we could all be as belligerent with the Ascendancy – Kashgar knows they need it.’ Kashgar was the ancient zhahassi god of war. Yano had seen paintings of it in the Linden-Holmes Gallery on Vargonroth, depicted as an ebony-black demon a hundred kilometres tall. However, he knew the mediator was not a religious man. Much like ‘Christ’, the word Kashgar existed only proverbially or as a generally mild profanity, its religious etymology largely forgotten.
‘But it is provocative, perhaps deliberately so,’ the mediator continued. ‘If it were my place to counsel him, I would tell him for one to call off the Fleet.’
‘Would you tell him to abandon the kaygryn to their fate?’ Yano asked. It was not a question he had envisaged asking, since, if he was honest, he did not care one jot about the kaygryn.
The mediator laughed. ‘Therein lies the problem.’ He took a long drag of the lhyrin stick. ‘People will die either way. If the UN stops now, some kaygryn will die. If the UN and Ascendancy go to war, the whole galaxy will burn.’
Yano inhaled deeply. ‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ he said after a short while.
‘You should,’ the mediator said, ‘and watch out for Representatives Zvell and Fhalco. They are troublemakers in the Commonwealth.’ He peered at Yano through narrowed eyes. ‘If I were you, I would not trust them.’
Yano simply nodded. It was advice they would ignore, of course, and given that that was the case, there was no sense in arguing.
‘Thank you for your time, sir,’ he said. He pressed himself up out of the chair and quietly exited the room.
*
‘What was that about?’ Codey asked as he entered their caucus room, a small chamber on the fourteenth floor.
‘He wanted to sit there and offer me pointless advice like a geriatric fool,’ Yano said, wrinkling his nose. ‘We need to speak to McKone. This hard line is counterproductive, and having him here…’ he gestured to Siun. ‘…is only making things worse.’
‘Let’s be civil, Yano,’ Codey said. ‘Xhevega is an ally of the UN.’
‘No it damn well isn’t!’ Yano snapped, then laughed out of sheer frustration. ‘Not officially it’s not. And if it is, I sure didn’t get the memo. This morning was an embarrassment, Bal, a total fucking embarrassment. I preach reconciliation and mutual respect and within two minutes I’m making, no, bugger that, attempting to make a list of demands to xenos that hate us, and what do we get out of it?’
‘Yano–’
‘A violent argument that sees all of our demands rejected and the whole Grand Chamber emptied within the hour!’
His hands were shaking. Codey’s face was infuriatingly impassive.
‘Yano–’
He was cut off by the door opening. Velsze stepped inside, his face slightly flushed.
‘I have spoken with the provar executors, insofar as they are amenable to discussion. I have been asked to bring you the following message. We’ve done some work on it to ensure it’s comprehensible. It’s a useful summary of their position, though I’m afraid its content is rather negative.’
‘Just read it,’ Yano said, seizing an apple from a fruit bowl in front of him. Siun was conspicuously silent, sitting uncomfortably in the corner.
‘The Ascendancy rejects all your demands. It makes no apology for the deaths of UN citizens. It will not reimburse you for any damage caused by its forces. The Impraxes will remain in orbit around Uvolon, and will be reinforced. The commander will face no censure for his actions. While the provar will permit the evacuation of humans from Anternis, the safety of those humans will not be guaranteed. Any hostile activity will be met with force. Any alliance with the Xhevega Enclaves and/or the kaygryn will result in a declaration of war. The UN is to hand over any and all kaygryn responsible for the attack on the crusade fleet and to cease harbouring kaygryn war criminals.’
The caucus room was completely silent. Velsze folded the holo away. ‘That’s the end of it. Oh, also there is a charity dinner tonight at the Summer Palace. Your attendance is expected.’
The caucus room remained completely silent.
‘Was there–’
‘Thank you, Ambassador,’ Codey said. Velsze bowed and left.
Yano replaced the uneaten apple in the bowl and balled his hands into fists.
‘Fuck,’ he announced to the silent room and left.
MISSION CREEP
‘It is much easier to blame a race for what they did, rather than to try and understand why they did it.’
Quorl Marshal Exvonsa’s war crimes testimony, following the Insurrection on Merisgard
Lyra didn’t recall falling asleep. She didn’t even recall being particularly tired, though as she slowly surfaced into consciousness, she felt groggy and exhausted. She reached out instinctively with both hands, feeling her way around the bed, but found nothing save the thin sheets. She lay still then, concentrating, slowing her slightly panicked breathing. Gradually, she heard the rhythmic boom of the waves and realised then that she must still be in her computer-generated mansion. It was more comforting than she’d have readily admitted.
‘What happened?’ she mumbled, trying and failing to open her eyes.
‘Hello,’ said an exuberant voice from somewhere in the room. The incongruity of it made her start, and a second, more concerted effort to open her eyes partially succeeded. She could then just make out a vague, human-shaped blob in the back corner of the room, neatly perched on the edge of an exquisitely upholstered mahogany chair.
‘Who is that?’ she said, the words spilling out of her mouth in a languorous blurt of sound.
‘Doctor Lee’s personality construct,’ Doctor Lee’s personality construct said. ‘Doctor Lee was just running some tests, tests which required you to be unconscious.’
‘What tests?’ she asked, her speech slow and slurred. She glanced at the antique clock hanging on the wall at the end of the bed. If it was accurate, she had been unconscious for nearly eleven hours.
‘Just some medical tests. Nothing to be alarmed about. Good news, though; your new body is nearing the final stages of preparation. Doctor Lee has made it his top priority. I’m pleased to report that its eventual resemblance to your natural body will be quite remarkable.’
Lyra’s brain ached. It was a feeling she was vaguely familiar with, like being mindjacked by one of those maniacal Exigency Corps envoys.
‘My head,’ she said, straining her voice to properly enunciate.
‘Yes, an unfortunate side effect of the testing, I’m afraid. Still, the more we can do and the sooner we can do it, the quicker we can attach you to your new body.’
‘Great,’ she mumbled, a thin seam of drool attaching her mouth to the pillow. Her UNIS conditioning was beginning to kick in, clearing her mind, sloughing away the grogginess like a surgeon debriding a wound. ‘Why did he not inform me?’
‘There was no need,’ the construct said simply.
Lyra snorted. There was no arguing with that.
‘Please inform me next time you are going to knock me out,’ she said, regaining her composure. She propped herself up on one elbow, though her head was still lolling slightly.
The personality construct hesitated. ‘Miss Staerck, I should inform you that due to the ongoing nature of the tests, the unconsciousness may come and go–’
She waved it quiet. ‘Whatever. Thanks. Please leave me alone now.’
‘Of course,’ the construct said without missing a beat, and blinked off.
As soon as it had gone, she rechecked her IHD.
You may be in danger. I will contact you when I can.
The message was exactly where it had been before, unmolested. She read it again, the tiny, million-layer-encrypted, text-only file.
She read it a third time, and her sync-generated heart palpitated for a few brief moments.
Danger. Danger from what? Immediate danger? It did not take much for her suspicions to fall to Doctor Lee, her underlying misgivings quickly exacerbated by her recent and lengthy bout of curiously timed unconsciousness, but she put those thoughts to one side for the present time. She was not familiar with the process of regenerating a body, of course, and the explanation regarding the tests, for all she knew, was sound. Even if Doctor Lee did have designs on her life, evidently there was something which had prevented him from killing her thus far.
She concentrated deeply, utilising her UNIS training to access the fringes of her subconscious. The sophisticated over-encryption bore all the hallmarks of a military source, there was no mistaking that, and there were no other people on Uvolon who had access to electronic warfare equipment. It followed logically that someone within UNAF had implanted the message into her IHD.
She tried to recall any military personnel she had come into contact with in the last year. Commander Vance was one, though their interactions had been sporadic, and in any event, she was sure that the man did not like her – though admittedly she couldn’t envisage that being a reason in itself why he would refuse to save her life. She also knew a few Fleet personnel from the North Star, though the voidbreaker had not docked – nor would dock – at Uvolon for months.
She brought her hands up to her face, pressing on the bridge of her nose with her fingers. The mission station in the mountains had been placed illegally under Galactic Protocol, and therefore the number of people aware of its presence had been kept deliberately low. Karris knew, obviously, and Vance, but beyond them, she simply hadn’t had any contact with anybody save through the module’s VR sync, and in that she was subject to a strict comms protocol – so strict in fact that the sync would be severed a full microsecond before her larynx and lips even began to enunciate any number of buzzwords.
