The head of security stood outside the Governor's office - Hoc Rem, as he recalled. As Brooks approached, the man let him in without a word, holding the door but making no move to follow him.
Brooks looked the man up and down out of curiosity. He was heavier set than most people he'd seen so far in the system, and as subtle as it was, it was an important detail. After many generations away from Earth, it was common for colonial humans to take on slightly different characteristics to better suit their conditions.
The man caught his look and gave him a warning glare.
Neither man said anything, but their looks conveyed more than words could have.
He would be a man to keep an eye on, he thought.
Stepping past the man, Brooks entered the office.
Nec Tede's seat of governance was notably less beautiful than what Brooks had seen on New Begonia. It attempted some semblance of dignity, with its vaulted ceiling and arches carved and buffed to a mirror-like finish.
But the trophies, proclamations, monitors, and storage cubbies that lined every surface robbed it of any grandeur that it might have had. The lack of gravity meant none of it was ever out of reach, and the room seemed to serve as an archive for the colony as well as the Governor's office.
"Your head of security does not seem to be from here," Brooks commented to Nec Tede as he came in. "May I ask where he's from?"
"You think so, huh? Well, he's local, and there's no man I trust more," the Governor replied, eyeing him. "Now pop a sit. It'll hold ya down." The Governor gestured to a chair bolted onto the floor paneling.
Brooks saw that it was lined with touch fasteners, and decided against it, instead just holding onto the back to push himself to the floor in a standing position.
"You say that the CR has killed a person?"
"CR?" the Governor asked.
"We call them Cerebral Readers - they seem to have a kind of sixth sense for things that others cannot sense."
"That, and they can kill people by lookin' at 'em," the Governor added grimly. "She did in the last sheriff, ya see. He came to question her about another death, but she wasn't gonna listen. Just looked at him - and like that he had an aneurysm. Ugly kinda death."
"And you're certain it wasn't a natural death?" Brooks asked. "I've never heard of a CR being able to cause harm."
Tede did his rather disturbing grin again. "Captain," he said. "Are you implying that I would lie about this?"
"I don't know why you would," Brooks replied. "But I have been sent to find out about this person."
Tede stuck himself to his chair with a crackling sound from the touch fasteners. "Well, we can come back to that Captain. I have some other things you should hear about first."
Brooks knew that the man was going to haggle with him for the CR. She wasn't a human to him, or a criminal, he reckoned. She was a bargaining chip. "Go ahead," he said, keeping his voice neutral.
"This colony here - we face a lot of troubles. Kicked out, not once, but twice from what was rightfully ours. We all had a proper legal claim to this system, Captain. Isn't a single soul here or on the homeworld that would disagree. Yet here we are."
Legally, the man had a point, Brooks knew. A colony was equally the property of all who set out to settle it. But there was the matter of what the democratic majority of that colony chose to do - and what a minority chose to do.
If they had left the rest of the colony to found this place, then they couldn't now be making claims on the parts they had left behind.
"I sympathize, Governor, but I'm not sure why you're telling me," Brooks said flatly.
The Governor continued his push. "There are things we both want, Captain. How'd you like to bring another system back into the SU, huh? I'm sure it'd be a shiny pin on your cap. And you'd get what you want - your CR. She may be a criminal here, but bonds can be paid in other ways."
"With membership in the SU?" Brooks asked.
"That's just the first part. And trust me, you'll be covered in glory. Saving the last vestige of good people in a system overrun by religious fanatics? You guys don't care for this religious shit anymore - it'll be an easy sell for ya.
"But what I need are colonists. It's not like I want you to come in and start blasting the other colonies. I just want to make us the biggest, best colony. It's why we even picked this god-forsaken rock, Captain. It's big - big enough to be the start of a nice-sized space port. Your entry point into this system. When we control the trade coming through here, we can . . . get the other colonies to change their ways. Help them to move forward."
His face turned to an ugly smile. "But I have to have the bodies. We're not even 30,000 people - not even enough to be a viable population."
Brooks stared at him for a long moment. "You're free to apply for membership to the Sapient Union. You always have been. You have to meet the criteria for acceptance, however - and you are free to put out calls for colonists. As long as you disclose all conditions and laws, confirmed by an SU emissary."
The man scowled. "That's it? You're not willing to work with me at all?"
"I just laid out the way in which it will happen, Governor. Now - when can I meet this CR?"
The man continued to scowl, staring at Brooks, and he realized that the man was trying to stare him down.
Brooks mentally tallied his odds. There were only twenty in his party, and this was a colony of nearly 30,000. Yet he did not feel afraid, not in the slightest.
The Governor blinked first. He pressed a button on his desk.
"Rem, tell 'em down in the jail that someone's coming to see the seer."
"Right away, Governor," a voice returned.
For the first time Brooks heard the man's voice. His accent was heavy, and nothing like the Governor's - or anyone they'd encountered thus far in the Begonia system.
Definitely not local, and it explained a lot about why he hadn't talked. For such an insular colony to have an outsider this high in command, especially in security, likely meant he was a mercenary.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
If the Governor needed that, Brooks thought, then his control of the colony might be in question.
Nec Tede's eyes had flickered away, but now they came back. "I'll have someone take you down there."
*******
The tunnels and districts of New Vitriol were narrow and cramped. Each and every section had been laboriously cut into the rock with hand-held equipment, it seemed. In some areas, they hadn't even bothered to cover the stony metal walls, just fusing metal sheets into them or even just buffing the stone itself to be a sort of bulkhead.
There was no gravity, either - at least none appreciable - and they had to use handholds stuck into the walls, floors, and ceilings.
It was interesting, in a way; small stores and proprietors could be over their heads or under their feet. Pirra just wished there was anything interesting in them.
What food stalls she saw seemed to mostly sell different flavors and textures of algae paste, with even pre-packaged survival rations being presented as delicacies.
The prices were all in local work credits, and the prices seemed exorbitant. Something that looked like it might have been a decent meal cost twice as much as good work gloves.
Not that she was wanting to buy anything; even besides how unappetizing the food was, she had a hunch that the shop owners wouldn't want to deal with xenos.
It might have been the glares they kept giving to her and Cenz that told her that.
She was glad that Alexander had opted to stay on the ship. He'd been born on the Phobos colony around Mars, he had little interest in seeing what he called 'a worse version of that'.
She thought he was just worried he'd say something stupid and cause a fight. He wasn't a combative man, except when it came to others reacting poorly to her. As good a feature of him as that was, this was not the time or the place to go looking for a fight.
"This rock is fascinating," Cenz said, leaned over and intently studying the wall. "The composition makes me think it must be an inner-system object that migrated to the Kuiper Belt, rather than something that formed out here naturally."
Pirra was hardly paying attention. Something was making her nervous - it was hard for her to tell if it was just the confined nature of the tunnels, the local sentiment or something else altogether.
She was probably overreacting with the locals. Despite the stares they had gotten, no one had said anything or made a move, and the majority of people just seemed content to ignore them.
Probably they had seen aliens before - certainly they did if any mass-media made it out this way. Dessei produced even more than humanity in that regard. Theatrics were a very popular past-time among them both. And Qlerning dwarfed even Dessei and humans combined in that passion.
She just thought of it in a human term; peacocking. Some beings just really liked attention.
Sometimes she wished she had been born with a more muted feather scheme. Some were mottled brown and white - plain, but at least not standing out as much as her bright greens.
But one couldn't change the colors of their feathers.
"There's a higher concentration of phosphorus-bearing minerals than I would normally expect. That's a good sign!" Cenz continued. "No wonder they picked this rock. Phosphorous is vital to carbon-based life, as I'm sure you know."
She had learned that at some point, but it wasn't the kind of information that popped up in her mind a lot.
"This might account for the high bacterial growth," Cenz continued.
The Coral continued to walk along, one of the fingers on his hand opening to reveal a suite of sensors. As he began to scrape at the wall, evidently taking a sample, a few heads turned their way.
Pirra flicked on her comm. "Sir, I feel like the locals might be finding your tests a little suspicious. I think it's better not to antagonize them."
"Hm, that's good thinking," he replied, standing upright.
"Looks so sturdy," he said, just loudly enough that the words could carry. "They've done such a good job with this place."
Perhaps he thought that would help placate them, but she wasn't sure if they cared about his view of their architectural skills.
"Let's move on," she suggested, wrapping her wing drapes around herself and heading away.
Cenz said nothing, but followed her, a calm smile on his face screen.
She noted that her tracking signal for the Hurricane blipped out for a moment.
"Cenz, did you see that with the tracker?" she asked.
"Yes," he replied. "That was odd, I'm not sure why it happened. But we have the signal back. Would you like to head back towards the ship?"
"Yeah, I think so," she answered.
As they moved, she saw figures coming out of shadows around them; humans wearing crude cloth masks. Everything about them appeared to be trouble, from their fake loitering to the tools they gripped. They seemed more ready to use them as weapons rather than labor.
"This way," she said to Cenz, taking a turn. The signal for the Hurricane blipped out again, and this time it stayed off.
"Damn it," she hissed.
"I've got it," Cenz said. "It might be getting scattered by something in the asteroid itself."
Pirra saw the tracker return, but it seemed to be suggesting a different path for her. Had the signal changed, or had her system calculated a better path?
She couldn't be sure.
The masked humans had followed them. Her systems could see right through their masks, figure out the shapes beneath, but the faces of individuals she'd never met had no meaning to her - and importantly, faces scanned this way were frequently inadmissible in trials.
One of them had armor on, she saw, that of the station's security. Tape covered his badge and other identifying marks. His rifle was unslung in his hands.
"Cenz, we might have trouble," she noted.
"I saw them. Let's just keep moving and see if we can head back towards the ship."
"Understood."
Cenz took a sharp corner and she followed. The men behind them seemed to hesitate, and she knew they had good reason; she'd let them see her hand on her sidearm as she'd ducked through. This narrow tunnel would be a death zone for them if they forced her to use it.
Glancing down the path and following Cenz, she realized that this route had been a mistake; while defensible from the mouth, it was lined with bore holes large enough for a human to hide in.
She had no idea how deep they went.
"Cenz-" she started.
"I know. Just get through as fast as you can."
Her scanners tried to measure the depth of each hole, and she strayed nearer the shallow ones, but they were hard to get a good read on. The metals in them were scattering her scans.
Passing with her back to one, she saw the man too late. He wasn't wearing a mask and looked different from the others, grungier.
"Hah!" he said in a cracking voice. His hand lunged out, grabbing at her wing shrouds. His hand closed upon a feather and yanked at it.
A stab of sharp pain went through her, but she didn't let it take her attention. The feather came off in his hand, and she lashed out with a boot, smashing the reinforced toe into his cheek.
The man's head snapped back, but he wasn't stopped. The look in his eyes grew more crazed, and she realized that he was under the effect of some sort of drug.
He crouched against the rock and lunged for her.
She likewise kicked off the wall, just barely dodging his flailing arms. Her sidearm came up-
"Don't!" Cenz cried.
She didn't shoot. Instead, she smashed the butt of the pistol against the man's temple.
In the lack of gravity, he went into a sideways tumble, crunching painfully into the wall and bouncing. His eyes still looked crazy, but he was, at the very least, stunned.
His cries had attracted attention - or perhaps the others following them took it as a signal. Silhouettes crowded the end of the tunnel, and someone cried out in anger.
"Get them!"
"Go!" she shouted to Cenz. The Coral clearly had been figuring out an escape path, and he dove down into one of the holes in the wall.
Giving herself a great push, Pirra followed him.