“And we’ll be marooned on this dirtball,” Colonel Swartzbaugh said, rubbing his head. “Not my first choice. And how, exactly, do we explain it to the Corps?”
“Lie,” Mike said. “Tell them we were ordered to stand down and await transport. In a year or so it might get sticky. But they’ll be alive.”
There was a knock at the door and Mike looked at it furiously. Rawls had very direct orders not to interfere.
“Get it,” he said, gesturing with his chin to Colonel Ashland.
“Sir, I’m sorry,” Rawls said. “There’s an Indowy out here saying he has to talk to you now. He says that he has information that you need about what you’re talking about. He’s really exercised. He said if I didn’t let him in he was going to quote rip my head off and shit in my neck.”
Mike looked at the NCO blankly for a moment.
“An Indowy said that to you?” Colonel Ashland said, incredulously.
“Yes, sir,” Rawls said, caught between his own incredulity and humor. “An Indowy.”
“Show him in,” Mike said. “Then shut the door.”
The Indowy was, as far as Mike could tell, pretty much identical to any mid-level Indowy worker. Mid-years, about a hundred in other words. Totally indistinguishable from any of a trillion of the prolific species.
“Exalted Lord O’Neal,” the Indowy said, prostrating himself. The term was one the Indowy had bestowed on Mike after his actions on Diess. It translated, as far as Mike could tell, as something like “Duke.” It wasn’t a clan lord but about the same status. It generally got bestowed on particularly good scientists and the Indowy equivalent of lawyers. As far as Mike was aware he was the only human with the rank and also the only warrior. “I am Indowy Tak Ockist Um’Dare. I see you.”
“I see you, Indowy Tak,” Mike said. “Stand and speak.”
“Exalted Lord,” Tak said. “You have made contact with People of the Book.”
“You know about People of the Book,” Mike asked, leaning back. “Why am I not surprised.”
“I did not know, myself, Exalted Lord, until recently,” Tak said, nervously. “Exalted Lord, I am… Exalted Lord, this is a very long story.”
“I’ve already heard one,” Mike said, gesturing to a station chair. “Tell me. Tell me all of it, Tak. Every bit you know.”
“They’re what?” Cally said.
Cally O’Neal was fifty-eight and looked to be about twenty. Officially listed as killed in one of the last battles of the Siege of Earth, for most of those fifty-eight years she had been an agent of the Bane Sidhe, the secret underground among the Indowy and Humans that worked to overthrow the Darhel rule. And for most of that period she’d been primarily an assassin.
In the last decade, though, things had changed in so many ways it seemed as if change would never slow down. First there was the mission where she’d met James Stewart. They’d started off as enemies fighting each other in secret and ended as lovers. Stewart had faked his own death but refused to join the Bane Sidhe. Instead he’d entered the Tongs, the Chinese mafia that had taken over most of the organized crime among humans, and fought his own battles from that vantage. He and Cally had married in secret but of late they’d had to even break off the most cursory contact.
His connections had been of premium value when Cally’s sister, Michelle, had used them along with some stolen nannite codes to take down an entire Darhel clan. Michelle wasn’t Bane Sidhe, either; the Darhel had just crossed the wrong human. Michelle was a Sohon mentat, a wielder of almost magical powers over space, time and matter. But she still was indebted to the Darhel. Or had been until she, Cally and Stewart had managed, through a combination of luck and deviousness, to buy her free and bankrupt her Darhel bankers.
The mission where Cally had met Stewart had caused a sundering in the Bane Sidhe, most of the organization splitting off from the O’Neal faction. But the response to the take-down of the Epetar Clan had included, among other things, a massive crackdown on the Bane Sidhe. The faction that had tossed the O’Neals aside ended up screaming for help.
The O’Neals had pulled their chestnuts out of the fire. But Papa O’Neal, the man who had been a real father to her for most of her life, had been killed by the ACS response team. An ACS response team commanded, by one of those horrible coincidences in life, by her own father.
So Cally was anything but charitable to their “fellows”.
“Back up to the beginning, Terool,” Father O’Reilly said. The monsignor had been a member of the earthly Bane Sidhe since before the return of the Darhel. Bane Sidhe translated roughly as “The Death of Elves.” It had remained hidden within “secret societies” since before the dawn of history. It had remnants of pre-history fable that were passed down, but none of it had ever been clear. He might, finally, get some of it filled in.
“The Darhel coopted human guards long ago,” the Indowy Terool said. He had been one of the leaders of the anti-O’Neal faction in the Bane Sidhe, so revealing the secrets he was about to reveal was like pulling teeth. “They were gathered mostly from Western Europe and the Mediterranean. They were trained on a small continent where the Azores are presently placed. There was a revolt, here and on Akoria, the planet your father just ‘reclaimed’ from the Posleen. Here on earth a Darhel was sacrificed to lintatai to cause a massive earth movement under the continent, effectively sinking it by several hundred feet. Finding the traces of what you humans call ‘Atlantis’ would be very difficult even for us. But they are there.
“Your father’s corps was probing along the spinward axis of the spiral arm. Akoria is on the anti-spinward axis. None of the Darhel found it of moment that the reclamation was in that region. It should have taken years for your father’s corps to reach Akoria and the end of the reclamation program was well on its way to fruition.
“However, word has come back that instead of slowly proceeding across the arm, the corps jumped to the far side. Why is unclear. But they have Akoria, which they refer to as ‘R-1496 Delta,’ on their list. They should have reached there by now. And there is no way that they could miss traces of human habitation.”
“The Posleen took the planet,” Father O’Reilly said. “That will pretty much erase traces of humans.”
“Even at the height of the war there were humans hiding in deep jungle and high mountains,” the Indowy said, patiently. “You are very hard to wipe out completely, just as the Posleen are hard to wipe out completely.”
“Point,” Cally said. “But get back to the corps.”
“The Darhel are unwilling to allow this secret to be revealed,” Terool said. “Very unwilling. Unwilling enough to destroy the entire task force.”
“That would be pretty hard to do,” Cally said.
“Every ship is controlled by the AIDs,” Terool said. “As are the suits. They will simply enter hyper and never exit.”
“That wouldn’t just violate the Compact,” Cally said, furiously. “It would break it beyond belief! Do they want all-out war?”
“There are too many members of the corps to cover this up,” Terool said. “And if people become aware that the Darhel have been manipulating humans for this long there will be… other questions asked.”
“About the colonist ships,” Cally said, bitterly. “About fucking with us during the war. About why China was wiped out.”
“Indeed,” Father O’Reilly said. “But they must know what the response of the Bane Sidhe would be to something like this. There would be no end to the blood.”