“That’s not how it was!” Tessan screamed, throwing his hands out in an unconscious defensive gesture.
“No,” shouted Estra at the same moment as she rushed toward Kalan’s back.
Estra came to a stop with Kalan’s blaster pointed straight at her forehead. Tessan was pressed hard against the door in a vain attempt to put a little more room between himself and Kalan’s sword. It had taken all of Kalan’s restraint not to kill them both. Those old reflexes that the fight on Hasen 5 had awoken were on full burn. Oddly, the moment of rage he’d felt had vanished. All that was left inside Kalan was the cool indifference he always felt right before some necessary act of violence. He’d never been sure if that cool indifference was the end goal of the Great Temple’s training or simply a useful byproduct of it. It had never occurred to him to ask anyone else about it. At the time, he’d simply assumed all the other students felt the same way.
It was only after he’d been away for a time and saw the hate and anger that fueled so much of the violence other people carried out that he wondered if he was different. Like so many other questions, he’d lost the opportunity to ask them. Even if he encountered a Warder Under the Night, a situation he considered unlikely, he doubted any would speak to him beyond a few polite pleasantries. It wasn’t forbidden, precisely. He was simply another off-worlder, now. He had no business with them. As an off-worlder, though, they would not speak of their training or their methods with him. It didn’t matter that he already knew. It didn’t matter that they would know that he knew. He wasn’t one of them. He might evoke a bit of pity from them, but never enough that they would answer his questions. He found himself briefly wishing that he had chased down that agent. Maybe that man and the knowledge he couldn’t possess could have answered some questions for him.
Even as all of that passed through Kalan’s mind, Estra and Tessan stood motionless. Their eyes fixed on this terrible figure that both had underestimated in profound ways. Each had fallen prey to the idea of his youth. Tessan had assumed it meant Kalan had never completed his training. That false notion had left him believing that while likely still dangerous, the young man would prove more malleable than a full Warder might be. Estra had assumed that his lack of experience would make him emotionally softer than some of the older Warders she had seen at work. His overall air of politeness had reinforced that idea in the back of her head. He was always so very polite to everyone. She’d heard the stories about him, of course, but assumed they were exaggerations and rumors. The man before them bore no resemblance to that young man they’d invited over to share meals with them.
Kalan’s speed and precision with that sword had disabused Tessan of the idea that Kalan’s training had been cut short. Only a fully trained Warder could have accomplished that move and done it without so much as a blink in their self-control. Kalan’s expression had stripped both Tessan and Estra of any idea that Kalan was a youth. That polite, almost diffident, demeanor was as thoroughly gone as if it had been a holographic projection that he’d switched off. To their eyes, his face was as remote as an icy crag and offered about as much empathy. Of all the things that reinforced to them that they’d made terrible miscalculations about him, it was the eerie stillness of the man. He stood there, on the brink of executing them both by all appearances, yet his body was still. There was no tremor in his hands. The weapons didn’t waver. He just stood there, poised like some awful figure out of myth prepared to levy divine retribution.
Tessan took a chance and said, “I needed to send it with someone who had a real chance of getting it there. Someone who had a real chance of coming out the other side of it if some agent of the Zeren Authority showed up. If not you, then who? What other captain, what courier, could I have entrusted that task to?”
Kalan didn’t move when he answered. “The person you sent the crystal to was dead when I arrived. Two agents were there. That’s not the point. You sent me without the information I needed. For all you knew, I was walking into a trap. What if I’d taken Fresia with me on the delivery? Or Petronan? What if there’d been a battle cruiser waiting in orbit for us? As it stands, there is a target on my ship, or there will be soon enough. You all but signed my death warrant when you gave me that crystal. As I see it, killing you and giving the crystal to whatever Zeren Authority agent shows up next is my best chance of protecting my ship and crew. Am I wrong?”
There was a pregnant pause before Estra spoke. “You’re not wrong. That likely is the best shot you have of protecting your ship and crew.”
“At least you’re honest about it,” said Kalan.
“It doesn’t make it the right choice, though,” Estra added.
Kalan flicked his eyes in Estra’s direction for a second. “Oh?”
“Our contact back in the Zeren Authority isn’t the kind of person who panics. If they passed that information along to us, it was because they believed something or someone had gone too far. There is a plan, or weapon, or strategy that they couldn’t live with seeing used. Something so terrible, their conscience couldn’t bear even the idea. That’s what you’d be giving back. Can you live with that?”
Kalan hesitated before he answered. Could he live with that? Then again, he didn’t know for sure that’s what the crystal actually contained. It might be that or maybe their contact just got greedy. They might have decided that selling off some classified information might finance their new life in some out-of-the-way place. Kalan didn’t know and that hole in his knowledge gave him pause.
“You can learn to live with anything if you have to,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “You’re just guessing about what’s on the crystal, and there’s no way to prove it. Not before someone shows up looking for it. It’d take my ship a month to manage that decryption. Even if I were inclined to wait, I’m not putting my people in that kind of danger for that long.”
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“I know where we can decrypt it,” said Tessan very quickly. “It won’t take a month. A few days travel in the wormhole is all.”
“No,” said Kalan.
“Kalan,” said Estra. “Please. I’m begging you. Don’t kill him. We mishandled this, badly. We were supposed to be your friends. Instead, we treated you like an asset. I understand why you’re angry. You have every right to be. That doesn’t mean we’re wrong about what’s on that crystal. It’s important. I know it.”
“Why are you so sure about this contact back in the Zeren Authority? They might just be making some money.”
“They aren’t,” said Tessan.
Kalan fixed Tessan with a look that made the big man flinch. “Tell me why.”
“Because it’s our daughter,” said Estra.
“Estra!” Tessan shouted. “What in the hells are you thinking?”
The look of undiluted horror on Tessan’s face did more to convince Kalan that Estra was telling the truth than her own words had. Kalan weighed his options. It was possible that the two of them were still lying, but the strength of the encryption on that crystal gave him pause. You don’t encrypt something that strongly without a damned compelling reason. Their certainty that the information wasn’t simply some secret, but the blueprint for some atrocity waiting to happen also gave him pause. He had to know. Otherwise, he’d spend the rest of his life wondering if he’d held the key to stopping it every time the Zeren Authority committed some heinous act of aggression. He didn’t just want to know. He needed to know for sure.
“You should thank your wife, Tessan. She just saved your life,” said Kalan.
He holstered his blaster and sheathed the sword. Then, Kalan punched Tessan. He pulled the punch just enough so that he wouldn’t shatter the man’s jaw. He took some satisfaction in the knowledge that the jaw would ache for days. He expected that chewing food wouldn’t be any kind of joy either. The blow was still hard enough that Tessan went down hard. Estra rushed over to her husband and shot Kalan a dirty look.
“Was that really necessary?” She demanded.
“Yes. It was,” answered Kalan. “Tessan, if you ever put my ship or crew in danger again with your lies, there won’t be a second reprieve. I will simply end you.”
Tessan looked up at Kalan and nodded. “I believe you.”
“Good. Now, tell me about this place we’re going. Be specific. Where is it? What is it? What are we going to find when we get there? I don’t want any surprises.”
Estra helped Tessan stand up. The man rubbed at his jaw and gave his head a shake as if he were trying to clear away a mental fog. He gave Kalan an incredulous look.
“You’re stronger than you look, Kalan. I can’t remember the last time I got hit that hard.”
“I won’t pull my punches next time.”
“Ha, ha, very,” Tessan trailed off as he realized Kalan wasn’t joking. “Gods above.”
Tessan and Estra exchanged an opaque look before they went over and sat down on their couch. Kalan followed them but didn’t sit. He crossed his armed and stared down at the two.
“Will you sit?” Estra asked.
“No,” said Kalan. “Out with it.”
Estra sighed. “That’s it, then. You won’t forgive us?”
Kalan gave the question more thought than he probably would have for almost anyone else. They had done him a number of good turns over the years. There was still some gratitude inside him for that. Forgiveness, though?
“You lied to me. You used me. I might have forgiven that, eventually. But you let me take my crew and ship into danger unawares. No, I will not forgive you for that.”
Estra looked pained, but she nodded. Tessan just looked guilty. Kalan waited them out. Tessan started speaking without ever managing to meet Kalan’s gaze.
“The Zeren Authority runs a number of covert installations. They conduct the kind of research at those installations that governments always deny. Human experimentation, banned weapons, that sort of thing. Sometimes, they abandon those installations. If they think someone is close to discovering the location, it’s a fairly orderly withdrawal. Every once in a while, though, an experiment goes bad or some kind of natural disaster happens that forces a hasty withdrawal. There’s a facility that they abandoned in a hurry a couple of years ago. It should have the decryption key we need for that crystal.”
“Why did they abandon the facility?” Kalan asked.
“An experiment triggered a geomagnetic reversal on the planet,” said Tessan.
Kalan frowned. “A full geomagnetic reversal?”
“Complete reversal. Happened instantly. It caused havoc with their computer systems. Threw the climate and weather into utter chaos. Radiation levels spiked across the globe. Everyone fled for their lives. It won’t be a fun trip.”
Kalan weighed the possibility. “Even assuming we can reach the surface and access this facility, you said yourself that the reversal damaged their computer systems. On top of that, how are we supposed to use those systems even if we can get them turned on? Won’t we need access codes? I don’t have them. Do you?”
“We can provide you with what you need to get around those security measures,” said Estra.
“There is also the small problem of taking that crystal in Zeren Authority territory.”
Tessan shook his head in the negative. “The facility isn’t in Zeren-controlled space.”
“What?” Kalan asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does if you think about it. If you were to just go looking for some covert Zeren facility, where would you look? You’d look inside Zeren territory. You might go looking in the hinterlands, obscure asteroid belts or moons, but you’d look inside their borders. So, they put those facilities outside their territory. They contract third parties to build the facilities using proxies. They set them up to look like corporate labs, or minor colonies, or anything except what they actually are, and nobody looks twice.”
“Clever,” admitted Kalan. “How sure are you about the encryption key being there?”
“As sure as I can be. It’s the only place I can think of that you’d have even a decent chance of getting into without having half the Zeren Navy on your trail.”
“Fair enough. Pack a bag.”
Tessan finally met Kalan’s eyes. “What?”
“You didn’t really think I was just going to take your word for it, did you? We’ll go to this facility of yours, but you’re coming with me, Tessan. You can deal with the security on the computer systems. You can think of it as penance if you like. You can also think of it as me keeping you in easy reach, just in case this whole thing is just another lie you’re telling me.”
Tessan started to say something, belligerence writ large on his face, but Estra touched his arm. She shook her head at him, and the man deflated.
“I suppose I deserved that,” muttered Tessan.
“We’ll both go,” said Estra. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow. My crew has earned a few hours of peace before I spring this on them.”
With that, Kalan turned and strode toward the door. Estra called out after him.
“Kalan. We’re not your enemies.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “I guess we’ll find out.”