My parents outdid them all. Somehow, I still don't know how, they wangled me a
one-year appointment as aide to Magnell Sutherlan, Convocant from New Ararat to the Supreme Convocation of the UnEthHu. My friends were all kelly green with envy; naturally, I milked it shamelessly for all it was worth.
It didn't take long for the shine to wear off, though. Zurich was crowded and noisy, with a crime rate probably a thousand times that of our whole district back home. The Convocation Complex itself was huge, practically impossible not to get lost in, and populated by some of the most snidely condescending people I'd ever met. And Convocant Sutherlan, far from being a respected, sharp-edged lawmaker the way the newspages always portrayed him, was old, tired, and completely detached from what was going on. Just treading water, really, until this final term was over and he could go home.
It was not exactly an atmosphere that bred enthusiasm. As a result, whenever there was travel to be done—whether secure document delivery, repre-meetings, or personal errands—I was always the first of Sutherlan's aide corps to volunteer.
A fair percentage of those first few months were spent crisscrossing Earth in a
suborbital or hopping between various planets of the UnEthHu in one or another of Sutherlan's official half-wings.
And so it was that, four months into my tenure, I found myself two hundred parsecs from Earth on the Kailth world of Quibsh.
Everyone in the UnEthHu knows where Quibsh is now, of course, but back then even most professional politicians had never heard of the place. No real surprise; Quibsh was a fairly useless border world, with an unimpressive list of resources and an outer crust that was a staggering collection of tectonic instabilities.
The Kailth had put a couple of minor military outposts there to watch over a population of a few million hardy colonists, about half of whom resided in a single city in one of the more fertile valleys. The Kailth and UnEthHu had made contact about ten years previously, but with the Dynad's main attention focused on the ongoing Pindorshi trade disputes, we hadn't given the Kailth much more than passing notice.
The diplomatic corps had installed a one-man consulate in the main Quibsh city, where I was supposed to pick up some research documents Convocant Sutherlan had ordered as a favor to a constituent. The pilotcomp landed the half-wing behind the consulate—it had its own drop beacon—and I presented my ID and request to the consular agent, a wrinkled man named Clave Verst who, like Sutherlan, seemed to be marking time until retirement. He got me the documents, and I was preparing to head back to the half-wing when I took a second look at the request form and noticed a hand-written note asking me to also bring back a case of Kailth mixed cooking brandies. There wasn't a single shell of the stuff to be had in the consulate, the nearest potables dealer was a kilometer away, and Verst made it abundantly clear he wasn't about to waste his own time on such a
frivolous errand. So, armed with a fistful of detailed instructions and a stomachful of queasiness, I headed out alone.
The spider-web maze of streets was surprisingly crowded—I thought more than once that the entire population must have decided to go out walking or driving that afternoon—but I'd bumped shoulders with other species before and it wasn't as bad as I'd been afraid it would be. For a small fraction of the pedestrians I seemed to be a minor curiosity; for the rest, I was something to be ignored completely.
I had just turned what I hoped was the last corner when I spotted Tawni.
She was probably the last thing I would have expected to see out there among all those lizard-skinned, bumblebee-faced Kailth. A human woman, of medium height and slender build, with an exotically cut cascade of black hair that at the moment was obscuring most of her face as she leaned into the open engine compartment of what looked like an ancient Pemberkif Scroller. The vehicle was parked beside the curb, or else had summarily died there. On all sides, completely oblivious to her plight, streams of Kailth shuffled past, breaking around her like a river around a rock.
Protocol probably dictated that I call back to the consulate, report the situation, and then continue on with my errand while Verst handled it. But she was a human, and in trouble, and I was an aide to a UnEthHu Convocant. More importantly, I was nineteen, and what I could see of her looked pretty attractive. Working my way through the traffic, I headed over.
I got through the last rivulet of pedestrians and stepped to her side.
"Having some trouble?" I asked inanely.
She looked up, giving me my first look at a face that more than met my expectations: young and beautiful, in a dark and distinctly exotic way, though at the moment she was almost at the point of tears from the frustration of her situation. A delicate line—scar or tattoo, I couldn't tell which—arched almost invisibly from the bridge of her nose over her right eyebrow, curving around her cheekbone and past the corner of her lip to disappear into the dimple at the point of her chin. From one of the frontier Ridgeline worlds, I guessed, where humanity's races had been mixed in unusual combinations and body ornamentation could get a little bizarre.
And where, I belatedly remembered, Anglish was not always the language of choice. For a second she just gazed up at me, her face not seeming to register my question; and I was trying to figure out a Plan B when my words suddenly seemed to click. "Yes," she said. Her accent was soft and delicate and as exotic as the rest of her. "Can you help me?"
"I can try," I said, peering into the engine compartment. It was a Scroller, all right, though from the looks of it whoever had traded it to her had gotten the better end of the deal. I was just reaching in to check the motivor cables when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the pedestrian stream falter and looked up to see what was going on.
Rounding another corner, heading across the intersection, were a pair of Kailth warriors.
I'd seen pictures of Kailth warriors at the Convocation Complex, vids secretly taken by SkyForce Intelligence at the Chompre and TyTiernian pacifications near the edges of the Kailthaermil Empire. We hadn't tangled with them yet ourselves, but there was a widespread feeling in the Complex back rooms that it was just a
matter of time before we did. The Kailth controlled a lot of territory, with a
fair number of non-Kailth under their control, and that almost always spelled trouble.
Besides which—the more cynical argument went—the Pindorshi situation wouldn't last forever, and wars and conflicts were too politically useful for politicians to stay away from them for long.
Watching the SkyForce reports in the safety of a Zurich screening room, I had hoped those cynics were wrong. Standing there in the middle of a Quibsh street, I desperately hoped they were wrong. On telephoto vids, Kailth warriors were impressive; up close and personal, they were damn near terrifying. Armored up to their headcrests in full combat suits, walking in lockstep, they were straight out of a xenophobic newspage docu-diatribe. Or straight out of hell.
The two warriors spotted me at roughly the same time I spotted them, and in perfect unison they shifted direction toward us. Instinctively, I moved closer to the girl—some chivalric idea about sticking together, I suppose—and I threw her a quick glance to see how she was handling this.
And paused for a longer look. She was gazing at the warriors, but the look on her face wasn't the knee-shaking trepidation I was feeling. She was smiling, the tension lines in her face already starting to smooth out.
It was a look of relief. Maybe even adoration.
"You," one of the Kailth said in passable Anglish. "Human male. What are you doing?"