Landfall
(Starspeak)
I didn’t understand the meteorology of it all, but I’d picked up idle chatter that the hurricane should lose some of its bite the second time around.
Yeah right.
The hurricane returned with a vengeance. Trees bent, water sprayed, and it seemed like the planet itself was howling. No lightning though. I hadn’t noticed that the first time through. I wondered why that was.
Of course that question was low on my list of priorities.
No, much more demanding of my attention were questions like…
I didn’t answer them.
Halax had been the one to really do the go-between work, including the scheduling. When he’d first shared that the Clark Kent and John Brown would be touching down with just hours to go before the hurricane made landfall again…
Wind speeds were still south of fifty miles per hour—faster than that and landing a spaceship became dicey. Not impossible, but far less than ideal. If they climbed much higher, we were either going to have to break out the really fancy spaceport toys, or call off the ships entirely.
Peudra reiterated. They were nervous. Fretting, even.
I said.
We were standing on one of the spaceport’s balconies, overlooking the massive reservoir it used for a landing pad, taxiway, and hangar all. The wind was whipping around, but our position on the building at least kept the rain off us.
It was a little silly to stand out in the elements like this with the dry, climate-controlled observation deck just a few feet away, but Peudra was so nervous, they were on the verge of hyperventilating.
It was pointless to talk out loud with the wind, but psionically it was clear just how much anxiety bled into their thoughts.
they laughed bitterly.
“Ffff-!”
This time their laugh at least had a little life to it.
Ah.
“What are you—” Tasser poked his head out the door, wind instantly drowning out his voice.
I rolled my eyes.
Peudra and I followed Tasser back into the spaceport’s control room. It wasn’t the exact same as an air-traffic control tower—that was a totally different room—but this one was the hub of all the communication antennas, satellite dishes, and infrared lasers one typically used to talk to spacecraft.
One glance at Nai gave an update.
“—e’re still being lased!” a human voice came through the radio.
Half-a-dozen rak made room for me, and I grabbed the radio console. “Ike, that you?”
“[Dude,] I’ve got a Vorak gunship painting us with a targeting laser. We’re retransmitting their signal, but if we comply we’re missing our touchdown,” he said.
“Keep ID’ing yourselves as a diplomatic vessel,” I ordered. “How’s the gunship identifying?”
Instead of Ike answering that question directly, the retransmitted warning came through.
“This is the Authorized Fleet Ship, Fastiakuang; Clar-Kent, your vessel is transporting known war criminals. Change vector and cease your descent. If you do not comply, your vessel will be treated as a hostile invading force—”
I frowned. ‘Authorized Fleet’ ship…that meant one of the Assembly’s Void Fleets, not the military of the local star system. As long as we were orbiting Margatha V1, that was barely a distinction worth making, but it did tell me who could resolve this.
Peudra was faster, and they darted out the room. Tasser tried the psionic route only to immediately remember that we’d insulated the meeting point against all unauthorized ears, psionic or electronic.
One of the spaceport rak got him to another comm station hard-wired into the spaceport-wide PA.
“Caleb, scopes are saying they have a torpedo readied,” Ike called.
“[Stay frosty, Captain,]” I reminded him. “What’s their distance and heading compared to yours and who’s on board the Clark Kent?”
Parallel to that question, I materialized a card with text on it to send to the John Brown too.
“Parallel heading, matching speed,” Ike reported. “We’ve got…[Hardhead, Fishguts, Thor, and Clockwork] onboard.”
“Confirm,” I said. “Not [Queen Bee]?”
“Confirmed,” Ike called. “[Queen Bee] is aboard the John Brown.”
“Then they’re not kidding,” I told him. “You need to prepare countermeasures for a fast-mover. We’ve got someone who speaks Void Fleet on the way. Patch us through to the Fastiakuang, and I’ll try talking some sense into them.”
“Acknowledged,” he said.
A change in the light on the console told me when my transmission was forwarded to the Vorak vessel.
“Fastiakuang, this is Caleb Hane transmitting from the ground at Pudiligsto Planetary Spaceport, the Clark Kent is flying under my orders on a diplomatic mission. It’s flight plan has been authorized by the system Prolocutor, the Congressional Assembly, and the Marshals of three different Void Fleets. You do not have the authority to issue orders to change its flight plan. You do not have the authority to shoot it down unprovoked. I repeat, you do not have authorization to fire!”
“…They stopped transmitting,” Ike reported. “But they’re still lasing us.”
“They’ll start up again any second,” I told him. “What I said is just going to give them pause. Stay on your flightpath. Calculate the trajectory of a fast-mover before they fire it. Get countermeasures in place before anything’s flying.”
Simultaneous those instructions, I checked with Tasser and Peudra.
I might have a problem…
I bit off whatever immature words I was moments away from and stayed all business.
“[You’ve gotta be kidding me…]” I swore. “Fastiakuang, I know for a fact there’s an order to every Red Sails ship, straight from Marshal Tispas, in preparation for this specific action, whitelisting my Flotilla’s ships!”
“Harpe Hane, order your ship to change its course. There are hostile Coalition elements aboard. Are you—”
“Not hostile!” I shouted. “They’re a peace delegation you thick-skulled—”
“Negative,” the Vorak in space said. “There is actionable intelligence that the Clar-Kent has been hijacked—”
The idiot just droned on. The transmission delay was less than a second, but even that small gap was desynchronizing our conversation. They weren’t listening to what I was saying. Didn’t they know they were talking about launching a missile at a ship crewed by civilians?
“I vaporized Marshal Tispas’ arm because he tried to send witless whelps like you to arrest me,” I said. “I put Span Fio’s own blades through their neck when they tried to kill me. Imagine what I’ll do if you shoot down a ship of my humans unprovoked. The ship is cleared to land, let it!”
“Negative. Military engagement trumps civilian jurisdiction—"
Not working. Bluster. Threaten them. I could do that…
“Fastiakuang, I’m going to remember that ship,” I said. “Because if you fire, I’m going to spend the rest of this year hunting down every person on the crew who didn’t object to the stupid orders you’re acting on. I’m called Lightbringer. I’m going to curse you with horrors so unimaginable you’ll weep with joy that you can’t remember them when you wake up. I will visit such terrors upon you that every parent of every child you ever knew as whelp will pray in gratitude that their child didn’t suffer your fate. There are no words to describe what unspeakable nightmares I will seed in your brain. And once you’ve been worn down, reached the end of your wits, babbling nonsense about how much you regret killing those human kids on board the Clark Kent? Then I’ll get serious and really make you regret every waking hour of your very long, miserable lives.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The radio line was dead for a moment, and I thought we’d lost transmitting status.
“[…Jesus, Caleb,]” Ike’s voice crackled.
The Fastiakuang, however, was also silent. At least for a few seconds.
“…Negative, Pudiligsto ground. Our engagement is valid, we—”
“Listen, you vacuous imbecile!” I shouted, only to see Halax burst into the room. I tossed him the handset, and he wasted no time barking into it, in Tarassin this time.
“Fastiakuang, stand down! This is Special Officer Halax Ba. I report to Marshal Tispas directly. Authenticator, seven, nine, oceanic, four.”
“…Catatonia, six, six, one.”
“Five, Billious, two, seven…thank you very much. Now stand down, that’s an order.”
“Sir, actionable intelligence reports the Empress onboard—”
“We know,” Halax said. “You have the wrong ship anyway, but it doesn’t matter. The ships were whitelisted for a reason. Tightbeam to Marshal Tispas immediately to confirm. Bottom line? You are ordered to stand down. Immediately. All that stuff the Lightbringer threatened you with? He’s not going to get the chance, because I and plenty of other Vorak are going to beat him to it if you kill a bunch of Human adolscents. By the way, I want your name and those of the ship’s captain and executive officer.”
While the—hopefully trembling—crew of the Fastiakuang complied with Halax’s orders, I got Ike on the horn with a different radio.
“They’re peeling off,” he breathed easy. I did too. That had been too close.
“Get down to this planet as soon as possible,” I said, trying to keep my own voice from shaking with relief. “Haven’t you heard there’s a hurricane blowing in?”
“Yeah, yeah…see you on the ground.”
Not long ago, I would have thought Tispas was behind that little game of chicken. But I knew ever since he and Tox had clashed with contradicting orders, the Red Sails had done a command reform that changed how orders were given.
This had definitely been a failure in the chain of command, but I was just pretty confident that, if Tispas were to engineer a crisis like this, it’d be more elegant. There would be an actual point to it. There was no upside for them. Really, stopping the Fastiakuang had been a favor to the Red Sails.
Shooting down an A-ship was just an insanely bad look for them. It was the kind of thing that could get their entire fleet disavowed by the Assembly and other governments that dabbled in space.
That said, someone was to blame for putting the idea in their heads. It was such a stupid move too…even if they had been right, and the Clark Kent really was some kind of secret covert op insertion, shooting it down was still a losing move.
All it would do is erase evidence that would otherwise serve to mar the Coalition’s reputation. Worse, it marred the Vorak and the Assembly’s right back in the process.
No, shooting down a ship under a flag of truce? Especially the wrong ship?
There was only one enemy we had capable of that kind of petulant destruction: CENSOR. What limited information we had on her personality was coming more and more into focus.
I almost felt bad for the officer Halax was chewing out on the radio. CENSOR could weave pretty compelling lies, disguising her involvement all the while.
More than a year ago, Peudra had approached us and been very upfront about their desire to open new diplomatic channels between the Coalition and the Assembly. Existing diplomacy was infrequent and almost entirely ostensible. But both of them had foreign agents in their midst.
I knew of people SPARK had wormed into the Coalition or its allies, ENVY had spies in both the Coalition Navy and Assembly Void Fleets. I didn’t even want to think about how many different organizations might be infiltrated by CENSOR’s agents, unwitting or otherwise.
This peace summit posed the best opportunity possible to get the two factions of interstellar societies on the same page vis-à-vis our abductors.
Admittedly, they’d kept us in the dark on exactly when their little peace summit would come together, but then, as we’d just seen…
“It would be worse if more people knew this was happening, wouldn’t it?” I asked.
“Undoubtedly,” Peudra nodded. “Every civilization walks a delicate balance when it goes to war, but it’s at its worst in the modern age.”
“Because of the total population that interstellar states reach,” I guessed.
Peudra nodded.
“Every war is popular with at least some portion of the population, no matter how big or small,” they said. “But yes, just by virtue of how huge the Assembly’s constituent population is, there are going to be more people willing to get violent at the prospect of ending the war.”
“Shouldn’t the opposite be true too, though?” I asked. “If it’s just a question of sample size and the extremes…”
“There are probably equally many people who want to end the fighting,” Peudra nodded. “But by nature, they won’t be the radical elements.”
“We’ll be lucky if the biggest hiccup today is a paranoid Red Sails’ ship with an itchy trigger finger.”
“Talk to Agent Avi afterwards,” Peudra suggested. “They arrested someone armed trying to pass through city customs the other day. They had…our Farnata friend’s picture.”
They nodded toward Nai, minding her own business.
“I so pity the rak who tries assassinating her,” I said. “Still, I don’t want to think about who might have been caught in the crossfire. I’ll have to send Avi a fruit basket.”
“A what?” Peudra asked.
“Okay fine, what gift says ‘thank you’ on Kraknor?”
“Fine seafood dinner,” they said. “Or candied kelp sheets.”
“See this is why no one ever thinks of Vorak as amphibious,” I mocked. “Everything about you guys is ocean.”
Peudra snorted.
“You ever hear the one about the Vorak who’s plowing a field, tilling dirt, and planting crops?” they asked.
“No.”
“Well this Kir—Farnata comes up to them and is surprised to see another farmer, and the Vorak says ‘why would you think I’m a farmer?’”
Peudra stared at me expectantly.
“Ha-ha?”
“Bah. If you say ‘farming’ to most Vorak, they’re going to think of tide-shallow farms. Or sea platforms,” they explained.
“Are land farms really that rare on Kraknor?”
“No,” they admitted. “It’s half of why its funny. Vorak farming followed rivers as much as Farnata or Casti farming did.”
“That might just be one of those jokes,” I told them. “…You like learning about other alien cultures.”
“Part of the job,” Peudra nodded. “But yes. You wouldn’t believe the reading I’ve done in preparation for today and tomorrow.”
“I dunno, I’ve seen some of the Jack’s archive requests,” I said. “You’ve definitely done your homework.”
“…I have.”
“…Why?” I asked.
“Why do you ask now? You’ve had a vague idea of what I want for a while now, but you never asked. Why get curious now?”
“I was always curious,” I said. “I’m just...more curious now.”
“Well, I’d love to be able to say it’s just because I hate war, and violence, and suffering, and I’m willing to do anything to see the war end…and I definitely feel at least some of that…” they said. “…But I don’t really know. Sometimes I feel like I’m just going through the motions.”
“You’re too diligent for me to believe this is just rote habit,” I said. “You’re trying to end a war.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t go through the motions with precision,” they defended. The look on their face softened for a moment, before darkening for an equally brief spell.
“Sorry, Captain,” they said. “I just can’t give you a good answer to that right now.”
“Just me being nosy,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the best you keep your head in the game. No distractions.”
·····
The wind speeds had officially moved into ‘hurricane’ territory by the time the Clark Kent and John Brown touched down.
I almost couldn’t watch.
Every single Vorak in the spaceport’s control center had insisted it was possible, but watching the two A-ships descend at such steep angles made my stomach turn over. It was like watching the Leaning Tower of Pisa in spaceship form.
But even if the winds were fierce, they were also consistent. As forcefully as they tried to blow the ships off course, they didn’t gust or billow. Some arcane technology of the spaceport’s to help control the atmospheric conditions for takeoff and landing, no doubt.
Both A-ships touched down on floating platforms in the middle of the spaceport reservoir, and within seconds of confirming their stability, tugs started pulling the massive platforms toward the hangars and ship berths that lined the water.
Madeline, Ben, Drew, and Aarti were the first ones off the ships.
Jordan and her sister in particular were quick to reunite, but Madeline got my attention.
“[Vacation weather, huh?]” she asked, barely audible over the howling winds.
<[Shut up,]> I grinned, not even bothering to try out loud. <[How’s the VIPs?]>
<[Taciturn,]> she reported. <[The Admirals and officers were absorbed in their preparations, but…]>
<[Problems with their tagalong?]>
<[No, but she was looking at us like…I don’t even know. Everything about her gives me the creeps though. I can’t put it into words.]>
The Adept in question stepped out the hatch of the John Brown and swept her eyes across the welcoming party.
Madeline was right. I could feel when she looked at me; an actual physical sensation crawled across my skin. I couldn’t have imagined that, surely…
Instead of disembarking the ship via a ladder or the gangway stairs, the Farnata woman just stepped off the lip and fell to the ground like a stone, only to slow a few inches before touching down like a feather.
My psionic and Adept senses were blaring alarms at me. I’d just witnessed something I didn’t understand, and I knew I didn’t understand it, and that didn’t help.
Nai had said she’d look for her, and it was true. The new Adept saw Nai and wasted no time in striding over.
“Warlock,” she said. She spoke the words with all the sweetness of a starving polar bear.
“Empress,” Nai said cooly.
Every single person had been briefed about the Coalition’s choice of bodyguard for their delegation. We all knew, and just their name was enough to suck all the life out of the hangar.
Tane Ko-Jon-Tav was the single most powerful Adept alive.
She made my blood run cold just standing next to her. She didn’t give off the same ‘big bear’ energy that Mavriste and Macoru did. In fact, my senses couldn’t even confirm she was Adept.
That was so much worse.
It was same terrifying sensation of ‘void’ that I’d felt outside the Diving Bell, like there was just a Farnata-shaped hole in reality a few feet away from me.
Madeline could sense something wrong, but she clearly wasn’t feeling this. Not like Nai and I were.
Of the Coalition’s five Headliners, Nai was the runt, funnily enough. She didn’t want to back down in front of the top dog of the cosmos.
…But I could tell she was on the verge. She was clenching a fist to keep her arm from trembling.
It’s on purpose, I realized.
Tane—Empress was doing something. This wasn’t just some passive effect of her presence.
I took a gamble.
“Knock it off,” I said in badly mangled Speropi.
Tane couldn’t hide her surprise at my choice in language, turning her attention away from Nai. She frowned at me.
“The Lightbringer,” she deduced. “I expected more.”
Without another word, the stifling void she exuded eased—though it did not vanish—and Tane walked back toward the admirals disembarking.
“[What a bitch,]” Madeline muttered.
“Yeah,” Nai agreed. “[A bitch.]”
As nice as it was to get a chance to see the rest of the Puppies and Drew? We had a peace summit to assemble and a hurricane to duck.
Peudra and I beckoned the Coalition delegation to follow, and we led them into vehicles to drive the periphery of the reservoir.
On the far shore opposite the spaceport concourse, there were a smattering of much smaller support buildings and warehouses. One of which was sporting an obscene, and yet subtly hidden amount of security features.
Two different military posts guarded it, and even in the mounting hurricane we stopped dead until every last member of the delegation had been positively identified and cleared against a whitelist.
When we were finally allowed to proceed, Peudra and I led half a dozen Coalition flag officers into a technically-defunct underground facility that had once been the crisis bunker for a nation that no longer existed.
Now technically owned by the spaceport, it was an ideal secure location to host an ultra-secret summit to explore the possibility of ending the war.
I did not miss the Empress’ cascade spider-webbing outward underfoot. At least she did some things like a normal Adept. Nothing she found gave cause for any alarm, and she gave a subtle nod to the admiral leading the delegation, one I was none too fond of: Hakho.
Aiding him was one of the few Vorak I held a positive opinion of: Sturgin Banmei—though after this trip, I suppose that list of people would have more than doubled.
Two other admirals joined Hakho: Cursozi and Fute.
I knew precious little about the former, other than the fact that he’d been chums with the Empress for the last two years, deploying her on daring missions that saw her carve through scores of Vorak.
The latter I knew through Peudra. Fute was the first Admiral on the Coalition’s side to really seem open to the idea, and I knew Peudra had been most primarily engaged with him diplomatically back in C4. Peudra had been negotiating on behalf of the Assembly’s Void Fleet there at the time, but it had sown the seeds that might come to bloom today. Fute’s presences was more than a little reassuring.
Vice-Admirals Tockunot and Shor rounded out the group, and I recognized from the decoration on his uniform that Tockunot was from Laranta’s command.
It made sense that she’d want a voice at the table here.
For so many high-ranking members of the Coalition navy to be here…it was a little insane that they’d seen fit to guard all five of them with just one Adept.
But they didn’t call ‘the Empress’ for nothing.
The only thing more shocking was the fact that the Assembly’s delegation didn’t send any body guard detail. But then again, this was their home turf.
Even if the Empress did decide to assassinate V1’s Prolocutor, she wasn’t so powerful that she could fight off an entire planet alone…right?
Nai was, funnily enough, not allowed in the room.
So sitting in between the two sides was Peudra, Halax, Tox, and little old me. Our job was playing host, referee, and nominally security too.
More firmly on the Assembly’s side of the room was a much more eclectic selection of aliens. Halax helped fill in the blanks for me as everyone filed in.
First came a few faces I recognized, however tangentially: Cacallay Trifon, Marshal of the Horror Wings, and Serignar Tox, Marshal of the Deep Coils. That second rak happened to be Tox’s sibling—brother or sister, I wasn’t sure—but it was amusing watching the two of them pay the barest amount of lip service toward their relationship.
They met eyes and gave small nods before focusing on their business.
Next was the figure I knew the least about: Senator Kesto Adavir. The exact political structure of the Interstellar Congressional Assembly was opaque to me, but for the purposes of the day, this person’s words carried the most weight across the whole of the cosmos. National governments were smaller than planetary governments which were smaller than system governments which yielded to interstellar governments.
The Senator belonged to that last one. The Assembly presided over dozens of star systems, and it was the Assembly that the Coalition had the most problem with. Even more than the Marshals of the fleets fighting them, this would be the person with the most animosity to and from the Coalition’s delegation.
Finally came a figure that I’d picked up a lot of information on since landing on Kraknor. If the Senator belonged to the highest reaches of government, the interplanetary apparatus, Unee Brabalk belonged to the next rung down: the system-wide governments.
The Prolocutor’s office was one designed—literally—to speak for the whole star system of Margatha V1 and exactly no one else. They were more or less the governor of the entire star system.
It wasn’t that clean, because all the nations and states in the star system held their own sovereignty, technically. But it was a tricky line to draw.
Simply?
In this single star system, there was no higher official, and even without a speck of Adeptry to their name, there was a palpable charge in the air as they took their seat at the center of the Assembly’s delegation.
The Vorak next to me took a deep and measured breath to steady themselves, and stood.
“Thank you all for making your way here,” Peudra said. Their voice was precise, rehearsed, and confident. Years of work had gone into laying foundations for just this moment.
It showed.
“Shall we stop a war?”