A cold, cutting wind sweeps across a land of snow and ice. People stand together, looking the same in thick cloaks and furred caps, rallying around a large man.

The People:

Usser!

We are hungry.

We are cold.

We have no homes and war with our neighbors still rages!

Usser:

My brothers and sisters,

All looks grim.

But now is our finest hour.

We are hungry but we will have bread.

We will make it with our cold and pained hands.

We are cold but we will build fires.

Even though we are tired.

We have no homes but we will build them from wood and stone.

We did not ask for war, but we will have peace.

The People:

Usser!

How can you ask us to do these things?

We are too hungry now,

We are too cold now,

We have no homes now,

And the enemy is at the gates.

Usser:

We must do these things.

We have no food and no one will feed us.

We are cold and no one will warm us.

We have no homes and no one will build them.

Except us.

But we do not toil alone.

We toil together.

And with every step I shall be walking with you.

From now until my dying breath.

The people cheer. The work is hard, and many die of hunger, of cold, of war that they did not want.

But they conquered the hunger with the grain they grew.

They conquered the cold through building homes for all.

They conquered war through peace and solidarity.

Where none would give it to them, they took peace, land, and bread for themselves.

----------------------------------------

Brooks yawned deeply as he entered his quarters.

He had just returned from the formal event, which had dragged on for another three hours as many there had gotten increasingly drunk.

He’d felt obliged to stay at least as long as Klezul Hoshe. Qlerning manners made that quite clear. Once the playwright had left, the guests had continued to celebrate, and probably would go on long into the night.

It had been his chance to escape, though, and during his trip back had written a report on all he’d seen and heard.

Once he’d come back aboard, Jaya had volunteered to continue the watch, for which he’d been grateful. Her report had indicated that nothing much had occurred, save for a few attempted Glorian drone fly-bys.

“They were quite sedate for the time you were in transit. I believe they did not want to risk their fly-bys being seen as an attempted attack on your shuttle,” she had told him, to both of their amusement. No matter how much the Glorians thought themselves better at war, in practice they knew they had to respect the fighting prowess of Union ships.

Changing out of his dress suit, he picked a comfortable outfit for sleeping that was an acceptable suit in case of decompression. It didn’t matter that his cabin was deep in the ship and the Craton was in safe harbor. Some habits were immortal.

Perusing his messages, he saw an update from Urle, but it was marked as non-urgent. He gave it a glance but resolved to answer tomorrow, but as he was about to close out for the night he got a notification of an incoming call, marked as high-level and important.

It was Trevod Waites-Kosson.

Biting back a curse, he turned on just audio.

“Ah, Brooks, excellent,” Trevod said. “Just the man I need, I did not want to speak to a flunky.”

“What do you want?” Brooks asked, letting just a hint of his testiness slip in. He was not at the man’s beck and call.

“I hear you were at the party tonight? I didn’t want to take too much attention off Hoshe, so I did not go myself. Of course, I can’t say his works interest me much. Though you caused some stir, I hear, with that old archeologist, hm?”

“If this is a social call then I will have to be going,” Brooks replied flatly.

His cheek did ache slightly where Nadian had punched him, but he’d treated it on the way back so there’d be no bruise.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“No, not really. But I admit I was entertained by what I heard.”

“All right, well good night, Waites-Kosson.”

“Ah, ah! I do have something worth talking about. You’ll be getting the official orders in a few hours, but you’re going to need to be turning over those three criminals you’re sheltering tomorrow.”

Brooks mind raced. Criminals . . . ?

“You mean the women asking for asylum? Do you understand what that request means? You can’t have them.”

“Oh, Captain,” Trevod said, his voice mocking. “I knew you would say this, but who are they seeking asylum from? Their employer they claimed was out to get them is dead now – at the hands of one of your officers. And in their escape – which violated their contracts, I might add – they killed two people.”

“Who are they accused of killing?” Brooks asked carefully.

“Baro Jett and Earl Thompson, two others working for their deceased employer. They were found with their throats slit in the establishment where they had worked.”

The whorehouse, Brooks knew. Where they’d been tricked and forced to stay with Baro Jett and Earl Thompson being the muscle that kept them in line.

“Regardless of the present state of the threats to their person – which we feel are still valid – they are also requesting economic asylum.”

“Gohhi does not recognize that claim, Captain,” Trevod snapped back. “Just because your people think-“

“They are on my ship, and they are not leaving,” Brooks said.

“We do not have a death penalty – so they can have their fair trial here, and protection from whatever imagined threats they can come up with. This won’t hold up, Brooks. They committed their crimes on Gohhi – and that is truly the crux of the matter.”

Brooks’s heart was pounding now. The man was turning these women into unwilling bartering chips, it was obvious.

“I’ve already spoken to some of the other major families, Captain. We’re prepared to push on this – it’s a case that matters. There’s a lot of concern that this might catch on and we’d have a flood of unhappy employees trying to murder their way out and then claim refuge on visiting Sapient Union ships. This Daze fellow was an independent entrepreneur, but we all have investments in the sex entertainment field. We stand to lose a lot of product.”

“You piece of shit,” Brooks snapped, his temper finally breaking. He’d spent too much time around these selfish, vile people and this was finally the last straw. “These are people, not products!”

“You don’t need to get so annoyed, Captain. I’m doing you a favor here, letting you know about this ahead of time. I am but the messenger, the official documentation will be brought by the lawyers later.”

Brooks had fought down his anger, but he counted it as a blessing that the man was not actually present. The temptation to take rash action might be too strong . . .

“Well, anyway, Captain, I hope to hear back from you soon, I’m sure that between the two of us we can come to some sort of deal that-“

Brooks terminated the call.

It seemed that sleep was going to have to wait.

----------------------------------------

“Hello, Tred. May I come in?” Zachariah Urle asked.

Tred stared, dumbfounded, into the mostly-mechanical face of the Executive Commander.

“Of course you’realwayswelcomeExecutiveCommanderUrle!” he finally said in a rush, stepping back and opening the door fully.

Urle glanced at the door – most people never really made use of the fact that they could open just partially, but Tred was in the habit of never fully opening his door until he had to.

Continuing to stare at Urle, Tred wasn’t sure what to say.

The Executive Commander was a friendly man, and Tred felt more comfortable around him than any of the other command staff. But only in comparison; the man still intimidated him.

“I imagine you’re here to see what I’ve been working on for the Ambassador,” Tred stammered out.

“Yes, that’s right,” Urle said, but he said it in a way that put Tred at ease. “I hear you worked pretty hard to learn drone modding to make it.”

“Yes,” Tred admitted. “I didn’t want to mess anything up and hurt her . . . I mean, in theory it should all be perfectly safe, it’s just feeding in data to existing ports, but . . . you know.”

Urle didn’t seem to find anything wrong with Tred’s stammering sentence, just nodding. “Is this it?”

“Uh, yes, that’s my prototype. If you think it’s good enough, then-“

“It’s very good,” Urle said, approaching the device and kneeling.

It was not a traditional floating drone, but had four sets of treads on independent struts, allowing it to move smoothly along even rugged surfaces and steps.

The body was really just a long, verticle tube, though with some embellishments he’d added that seemed right.

Urle looked at him quizzically gesturing to the small wings he’d carefully cut and ground from a sheet of pearlescent steel.

“Er,” Tred muttered, flushing red in the face. “She’s – Ambassador Jophiel, that is – species are called Star Angels, so I thought . . . an angel should have wings.”

Urle nodded, accepting the answer without question, and then looked at the head. It consisted of two sets of eye-like sensors on a spherical head that was mostly unadorned, save for some careful gold patterning he’d put on.

He’d lacked the real skill for it, but he’d picked out the pattern and let a drone apply it. He liked how it had come out.

“This looks very nice,” Urle said. “I can see a few micro-cracks in the casing, but they shouldn’t cause any problem. I’ll run further scans, but I can’t see that this could in any way harm the Ambassador.”

“Oh, thank you sir! Send me your notes on the cracks, though, I’ll repair them all!”

Urle glanced at him again, and Tred automatically prepared a defense – to say that the Ambassador should have the best, since she was the first Ambassador of her kind!

But Urle only nodded pleasantly again. “I’m sure the Ambassador will be very pleased with your work, Tred. If all goes well, I’d like to recommend you for a Medal of Ingenuity in engineering – I don’t think anyone has actually done something of this caliber for a Star Angel yet, and it deserves recognition.”

Tred found himself flushing again, a rush to his head almost making him dizzy. “Thank you, sir!”

“No need to thank me. If I may ask, though . . . and this is just a personal question, you don’t have to answer. What is the relationship between you and the Ambassador?”

Tred’s mind blanked. “Sir?” he mumbled, jaw dropping slightly.

“That’s okay, don’t worry,” Urle replied pleasantly. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.” He looked to the drone again. “Honestly I was going to offer my expertise if you needed it, but you’ve gone above and beyond with this. Be sure to show this to Cutter and Sulp, I’m sure they’d both be just as impressed.”

Cutter was Tred’s actual superior, but he’d always found the Beetle-Slug inscrutable and demanding. The being never seemed to offer praise, though to be fair he also was never rude. Only pragmatically critical. Tred wasn’t sure he could even imagine the being gushing like Urle was.

“Thank you, sir. I will, sir.”

Urle moved to the door. “If you do think of anything I can do to help, just let me know, all right?”

“I will, Executive Commander. Absolutely!”

“Oh, one last thing. I know this has all been sort of an unofficial commission you’ve taken on, but Ambassador Jophiel has put in the paperwork to ask for you to be her official aide and engineering liaison. It’s not really an administrative role, since she doesn’t do much in that regards . . . mostly honorary. I wanted to bring it up with you, though. You’re free to refuse, of course, she already said she’d understand if you felt it was too much of a burden.”

“No, not at all! I mean, it’s not a burden I’d . . . I’m more than happy to continue to help the Ambassador, or rather to help her now as an aide and engineering liaison . . .” He trailed off.

“Great! You’ll get an official letter soon, before the play. Which,” Urle consulted his clock. “Is just over twenty-four hours from now. Do you know what you’re wearing?”

“Just my normal uniform,” Tred mumbled.

“That’ll be fine, really. All right – carry on, Engineer.”

----------------------------------------

Urle had made it only a few steps from Tred’s work room when the call from Brooks came in.

“Ah, Ian, how was the party?” he asked.

“Nevermind that. We have something more pressing.”

There was no image, but Brooks’s tone made it immediately apparent that this was no social call.

Urle stopped, stepping to the side in the hall. “What is it?” he asked, spooked by the tone. He added some extra layers of encryption to his end of the call and made sure none of his audio was anything but digital.

“I just had a call from Trevod Waites-Kosson. He is demanding that we transfer the women who are requesting amnesty back. I need to you to look into the laws and treaties we have with Gohhi – is there a case here?”

“What’s his reason?” Urle asked. “I mean, the whole point of amnesty is that they’re given refuge from persecution.”

“Murder. The two thugs that they fought to escape from are dead, and now they’re charged with the crime. I know that we can’t let this happen, but I need to know that our case for protecting them is air-tight. He says he’s willing to push this, and he claims to have the backing of the rest of the bourgeois leadership. If they push with their resources, I’m thinking they might be able to cause a lot of trouble.”

“Why would they want to go after these women this hard?”

“It’s not about them. It’s about Jan Holdur.”

It clicked for Urle and he took a deep breath. “So they’ll go all out.”

“That’s right. In a few hours we’ll be getting the demands from the Gohhian lawyers and we’ll have to go over them carefully. We’re going to need to talk to the women again about their story. The parts that didn’t fit, we have to know the truth. Even with their resources, the Lord Executives will have a hard fight, but there might be some detail we don’t know that tips this in their favor.”

“And we can’t let them win,” Urle said.

“Agreed. Get the women separated and talk to them again – I’ll brief Kiseleva and send her down to aid you. I don’t want them to think they’re in trouble or danger, but we do have to impress the importance of knowing the truth.”

“I don’t believe they did anything to deserve being sent back,” Urle said flatly.

Brooks had said nothing to the contrary, but he had to say it.

The Captain replied immediately, his words firm. “I don’t either. But we have to be prepared to fight for them.”