“Him and a billion other people who think it’s tragic and romantic to be Garseddai.” Captain Uisine’s voice was disdainful. “It’s only the most notorious out of a long list of Radchaai atrocities. The only system to resist invasion so effectively that the Radchaai destroyed every last one of them for it and left the entire system burned and lifeless. People like your Prolocutor Budrakim can claim ancestors who are either especially valorous or especially deserving of sympathy, whichever suits them better at the moment. Lucky for them there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. Let me guess, he’s descended from an Elector who managed to secretly flee the system before the Radchaai burned everything.”
“But he is!” insisted Ingray. “He has proof. He’s got part of a panel from inside the shuttle his ancestor fled in, and a shirt with blood on it. And a lot of other things, jewelry and a half dozen of those little pentagonal tokens stamped with flowers that I think were from some kind of game. Or, he used to have those things. They were stolen. You really didn’t hear about this?”
“I really didn’t.” Captain Uisine sounded half sarcastic, as though the idea that he might have heard about something that had consumed the attention of everyone Ingray had known, and pretty much every major news service in Hwae System, struck him as ridiculous.
“It was an inside job. Pahlad had grown up in Ethiat Budrakim’s household, and e had been given a post overseeing the lareum where the Garseddai vestiges were kept.” There had been a lot of comment about how, while it was of course generous of prominent citizens to raise foster-children from less advantaged circumstances, or even the public crèches, it had been foolish of Ethiat Budrakim to trust Pahlad so implicitly. No one was as close or loyal as your own acknowledged heirs, everyone knew that. Thinking of it still made Ingray, herself a foster-child out of a public crèche, cringe unhappily. “Nobody could have done it except Pahlad.”
“And for this e is cast permanently into an inescapable prison, what did you call it, Compassionate Removal? And declared dead?” He took his hand off the crate. Put it back, when the crate shifted again, even though Ingray still held her end.
“E had betrayed eir parent! It was a huge scandal. And e showed no signs of remorse at what e had done. The whole thing had been very elaborate and cold-blooded. E managed to make copies of the things and put them in the lareum in place of the real ones, and there was Prolocutor Budrakim showing people around, you know, thinking they were the real ones, and no one knowing they were fake the whole time. And his foster-child Pahlad standing right there nearly every time, just as cool as anything, as though nothing was wrong.” And after all, it wasn’t as though e was being executed. “The copies were nearly perfect.”
Captain Uisine thought about that a moment. “And your interest in this?”
“They never found the originals,” Ingray said. “Pahlad wouldn’t say what had happened to them. E insisted e had stolen nothing, and done nothing wrong. But of course e must have done it, no one else could have. So e must know where they are.”
“Ah.” Captain Uisine seemed to relax and leaned back against the airlock frame, folded his arms. “You think this Pahlad Budrakim can lead you to the originals, which you can then, what, sell? Hold hostage? Restore heroically to their proper place?”
Any of them would serve Ingray’s purpose, really. But what she wanted more than anything was to be able to bring them to Netano. “My mother is a District Representative in the Third Assembly. She wants to be Third Prolocutor—she tried, last election, but in the end the votes tipped Budrakim’s way.” And Netano had never been friendly with Ethiat Budrakim, an enmity that couldn’t be explained by differences of faction. After all, plenty of other Assembly representatives managed to get along quite amicably whatever their differing positions on tariffs or fishing limits. “Right now I’m one of three…” Not three. Vaor had gone last year. Gone because e’d wanted to, e’d insisted, not because Netano had sent em away, but e had wept the whole time e’d packed, wept walking out the door, and e hadn’t answered any of Ingray’s messages since. “Two foster children in my mother’s household. One of us will get to be Netano eventually.”
“And this is how you intend to distinguish yourself in your mother’s eyes,” Captain Uisine guessed.
“I didn’t expect Pahlad to come all packaged up like this!” She couldn’t resist the impulse any more—she grabbed a handful of soft silk skirt. “I went to, you know, the usual sort of broker here, and made an offer, to whoever could discreetly bring Pahlad Budrakim out of Compassionate Removal.” Honestly, she hadn’t really expected that anyone would take that offer up. The plan had been desperate from the start.
“Slavery and human trafficking are among the very few things that aren’t legal here,” Captain Uisine observed. “Technically, anyway. Of course they would deliver this person to you all packaged up. It gives them deniability. And I must say, excellency, the fact that that didn’t occur to you, or that you weren’t at least prepared for the possibility, suggests to me that you’re not best suited to follow in the footsteps of your apparently political mother.” Ingray frowned. She was not going to cry. Captain Uisine continued speaking. “I mean no offense. We all have our particular talents. What happens if you aren’t selected to be your mother’s heir?”
Possibly not much. Possibly she would just continue in her job, in the family, as she had. But Netano had always said that in anything worth doing, the stakes were all or nothing. Most families on Hwae had sent one or more children out for fosterage, or were fostering children from other households, some in temporary arrangements, some in permanent adoptions. Danach, for instance, was a foster from one of Netano’s supporters. But there were always some children in every district whose parents were unwilling or unable to care for them, and had no one willing or able to foster them, who ended up as wards of the state in one of the district’s public crèches. Ingray, like Pahlad Budrakim, had been one of these. “I don’t really have a chance to be Mama’s heir. I never really did.” But if she left the Aughskold household, or was sent away, she had no other family to turn to. She would be entirely on her own. “Mama likes it when we take initiative, and she likes schemes, but she doesn’t like it when we fail. If I fail badly enough I’ll probably have to leave the household. Worse, I’ll be in debt. I borrowed against my future allowance, to get enough for the payment. So even if I don’t lose my job—which I probably will—I’ll be broke. For years.” For decades. “I know it wasn’t exactly a prudent use of my resources,” she admitted. Willed herself to open her hand, raised it to lay on the crate but instead clasped it with her other hand, a perfectly acceptable pose with no danger of anxiously clutching at things. “If I was going to borrow like that, I ought to have just invested it somewhere safe. Then if Netano sent me away, I’d have at least had enough to keep myself with. I just…” She just couldn’t stand the thought of Danach sneering openly at her. Of losing any chance at all of Netano Aughskold’s regard.
Captain Uisine stared at her over the crate. “I am on the very edge,” he said, finally, “of refunding your passage—both of the berths you’ve paid for—and asking you to leave this bay. I haven’t made up my mind yet. But I’ll tell you one thing, there’s no way you’re bringing that person—Pahlad Budrakim, you said?—aboard my ship still in that suspension pod. And considering you expected to meet em awake and unfrozen, you won’t have any objection to t
hawing em out now, I presume?”
“Will you take us aboard then?”
“I’ll consider taking you aboard then. Pahlad Budrakim can do as e likes.” A moment’s thought. “If e doesn’t want to come aboard, I’ll refund you eir fare.”
It could have been worse, Ingray supposed. It was some sort of chance, anyway. Captain Uisine put his other hand on the crate. “Step back, excellency, you don’t want your foot caught under this.” Ingray stepped back and the crate settled to the floor with a thunk. “Do you know if this person has ever been in suspension before?”
Ingray picked up her jacket and bag and sandals from off the crate lid. “No, why?”
Captain Uisine touched the crate’s latches and carefully slid the lid aside. “E might panic if e doesn’t know what to expect. A little help would be nice.”
Ingray dropped her sandals and bag, pulled her jacket on, and then helped brace the lid as Captain Uisine tilted it and let it slide down to rest against the crate.
Captain Uisine looked for a moment at the smooth, black surface of the pod, then slid open the pod’s control panel. “Everything looks good,” he said, as a giant black spider scuttled out of the airlock, nearly a meter high, a rolled-up blanket clutched in one hairy appendage. Weirdly, disturbingly graceful, it skittered up to Captain Uisine and stopped, turned one of its far too many stalked eyes toward Ingray. No, it wasn’t a spider. It was…something else.
“Um,” said Ingray. “That’s…is that a spider?” She didn’t know why the back of her neck was prickling. She didn’t mind spiders. But this…thing was so unsettling. Its legs were jointed wrong, she realized, and its eyestalks sprouted right out of its blob of a body. There was no waist, no head. And something else was wrong, though she couldn’t quite say what.
“Of course it’s not a spider,” replied Captain Uisine, still frowning at the suspension pod. “You don’t get spiders with half-meter bodies, or two-meter leg spans. Or, you know, not unaugmented ones. But this isn’t a spider.” He looked up. “But it’s kind of like a spider, I’ll grant you that. Do you have a problem with spiders, excellency?” The not-spider’s body trembled gelatinously, stretched to become oblong rather than round, and four extra legs slid out to touch the bay floor. “Does that help?”
Seeing the thing change shape was somehow even more disturbing, but she refused to step back, even though she wanted to. “Not really. And I don’t mind spiders at all. It’s just, this looks so…so organic.” Except in a wrong, squishy, itchy sort of way.
“Well, yes,” said Captain Uisine, standing square and stolid by the open crate. Entirely unbothered by the spidery thing beside him. “A lot of it is. Some people find it unsettling, and apparently you’re one of them, but it’s just a bio-mech. You’ll get used to it after a few days, or if you don’t I’ll keep it out of your way.” He touched the control panel and the smooth surface of the pod broke open with a click and slid aside. For just an instant Ingray saw a person lying naked and motionless, submerged in a pool of blue fluid, unevenly cut hair a tangled mass over half of eir sharp-featured face, thin—thinner than she remembered pictures of Pahlad Budrakim—the long welt of a scar along eir right flank.
Then the smooth, glassy surface of the preserving medium rippled and billowed as the person opened eir eyes and sat convulsively up, choking, one outthrust arm smacking hard into Ingray. Captain Uisine grabbed eir other arm. “It’s all right,” he said, voice still calm and serious. The person continued to choke as blue fluid poured out of eir mouth and nose, sheeted away from eir body back into the pod. “It’s all right. Everything’s fine. You’re all right.”
The last of the fluid drained away from the person’s mouth and nose, and e gave a breathy, shaking moan.
“First time?” asked Captain Uisine, reaching down for the blanket the spider-mech still proffered.