Atl-Verazlan Compound, Veraz
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.2.24 Interstellar
Koni dropped to her knees and threw up repeatedly into a topiary. Janus winced and tried to keep her hair out of it until she batted him away and threw up again.
“Do you want carbon pills?” Janus asked. “They would help.”
“It would be undignified,” Koni said.
Janus laughed at her.
Koni wiped her mouth and glared at him. “I drank five cups of spite.”
“Yes, you did. Your aunt wanted you to drink six, but that might have killed you.”
“I am the toughest captain that ever sailed these rivers. No one has drunk five cups before.”
“It’s really more a weight thing, and have you considered maybe that’s because no one is quite so good at pissing people off?” Koni stared at him, and Janus realized he’d done the thing where someone said something true without meaning to. He hadn’t drunk like Koni had, but his dinner companion had pushed at least two “real” drinks on him. “Would you call tonight a success?” he asked, trying to deflect the wrong conversation at the wrong time.
“Say what you have to say, Janus,” Koni said.
Janus sat down on a stone bench.
Fury looked at him, then at Koni.
“Come on, girl,” Janus said, and the jungle dragon padded over to sit by his feet. Janus ran his hand along his chin and said, “Things have been better.”
“They have,” Koni agreed.
“They weren’t always that way. You didn’t join this team because you wanted to.”
“I did,” she said, scooting to sit on the stones lining the garden path. “Look, Janus, I’ll be lucky if I remember half of what happened after that third cup. Just speak.”
“You almost started a war,” Janus said.
He hadn’t thought about it in a while. It was something that was so fundamentally un-Irkallan, something shocking, and yet to the sun-siders, a good war was just another part of the cycle—and an important part of how the young men and women from poor families could advance themselves.
“I know you aren’t a coward, Invarian,” Koni said after some time.
“Thanks,” Janus said sarcastically.
“I mean it. So, I can’t imagine you’re so scared of dying that a war frightens you.”
“It does, actually. It scares the crap out of me, Koni,” Janus told her, leaning his elbows on his thighs. “Did you not hear about the life I came from?”
There was a beginning of recognition in Koni’s eyes, or maybe that was just Janus’s wishful thinking because she jabbed her finger into her palm and said, “Those men were thieves.”
“You tricked them into stealing!”
“I didn’t have to try hard!” Koni said. “I just offered them someone else’s hard work, and they took it.”
“You were leading them out, Koni! You bypassed the negotiations and the safeguards, and you created the opportunity for others to do evil!”
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Koni got the stubborn look she usually got on her face, and she opened her mouth to rebut him, but then she didn’t.
“And it’s not even about the thieves,” Janus continued. “Screw the thieves. Those samples they thought they were stealing represented several years of Cofan’s research and months of mine. If it had happened on my homeworld, we would have put them out of the airlock.”
“So, what’s the problem?” Koni said, and there was genuine curiosity in her voice, along with a healthy dose of confusion and annoyance.
Janus was struggling to explain it. It seemed so obvious to him that you weren’t supposed to be a mass murderer, and yet he could also see the shape of Koni’s thought process. She’d created an opportunity for the coldsiders, and they’d taken it, but she took no responsibility for almost killing them. Or maybe she did. Maybe she took credit for it. He understood that the Verazlan acted as frontier judges sometimes, enforcing the law where the law didn’t hold on its own. Maybe she saw the defective crops the same way, that if the coldsiders decided to use the stolen seeds instead of returning them, they would be bringing calamity upon themselves.
Hadn’t Janus’s own people been quick to blame the residents of a dome for its collapse?
“It’s the network effect,” Koni slurred.
Janus looked up at her. “Excuse me?”
Koni yawned and looked up at the sky through the palm fronds. “It’s the network effect, Janus. I wouldn’t have believed it until I saw you and your team, but you’re not champions fixing things on your own. You’re making small changes, and those changes inspire people. It’s what the judges were supposed to be.”
Janus couldn’t believe it. And it was obvious, once he saw it, only he hadn’t thought of it that way because, deep down, he didn’t believe that anyone would really follow in his example—or at least the team’s. It called everything he’d thought about in the past year into question. The Motragi didn’t allow me to join their research teams because they wanted an outsider’s perspective, he realized. They wanted me to join them so I would become like them, and they would become like me. “That’s how we fix places like Hayyam,” he said out loud. “We don’t solve the problems. We raise up people who do.”
Koni slumped forward, propped up by her knees, and snored.
“Void, take me,” Janus said with a sigh. “I’m going to have to carry her.”
He was about to activate his wrist comm to see if Mick or Lira could help, but Mick came running out into the courtyard, searching, and ran toward them as soon as he spotted them. “Boss, we’ve got a problem.”
“What is it?” Janus said, standing up.
“Comms are being jammed, and the security net is down. I think the compound is under attack.”
***
Estafio Tlali-Acamatl, leader of one of the action groups for the dockworker’s union, was no stranger to violence. The high nobles of Veraz prided themselves on Clan Verazlan’s history and the city’s magnificence, but no matter how lofty their ancestry, someone had to clean the offal out of the gutters. Sometimes, that meant literal effluent, and Estafio’s crews went out with power washers to clean the streets. Sometimes, it meant keeping the lower classes in line, and Estafio’s crews went out with other tools, all for the glory of Veraz.
The nobles liked to turn a blind eye in both circumstances.
There was a balance to things, of course. House Tlali-Acamatl had faced resistance from some members of the lesser nobility when they’d officially launched the union; when they’d taken over the security of all the riverside warehouses; when they’d moved into trash collection, mortuary affairs, and civic building maintenance. These were jobs nobody wanted, but some of the more prescient and connected nobles had been alarmed or, perhaps, just affronted at the idea of the lowborn family’s successes.
They’d underestimated Estafio’s family’s willingness to get their hands stained with noble blood.
This was different, though. This wasn’t just any noble family. This was the Atl-Verazlans, who not only had the numbers to fight back but also controlled a significant amount of the shipping that went up and down the Iztacatl River. The joining of their two families had given the powers of Veraz pause, uniting the wealth and influence of the upper city with the muscle and means of the docks, and that was part of the problem.
Feuds within families, outside of duels, were forbidden.
“We’re in position, Honored Elder,” he told his Aunt Citalmina over the comm. “They’ll spot the jamming soon, but we can still—”
“We can still what, Estafio? Call this off? Our family’s blood has been shed.”
Estafio ground his teeth. Of course, he’d been saddened by Copecki’s death. His cousin might have been as soft as his father, but he’d been a bridge between the families, uniting the high and the low. While Brago’s rights as clan patriarch were a matter of vigorous debate, should he return, a grandparent could legally challenge their heirs if they disobeyed, even to the death, and that was the situation he also found himself trapped in. He disagreed with Citalmina’s actions, but he had no doubt voicing such disagreement would only lead to his demotion and possible punishment.
“There will be consequences for this, Honored Elder,” he said. He might only have been a lesser member of Tlali-Acamatl, but he wasn’t a coward.
Citalmina’s image glared at him through the comm. “Your concern is noted, Estafio, but you’re wrong. The guests from the other families are gone, and there can be no consequences if there are no witnesses. Do you understand?”
Estafio understood.
He closed the channel and ordered his teams to attack.