"Yishna," he looked her up and down, "come in." He gestured her over to his divan, then sat down beside her, peering at her intently, the spoked wheels of his irises seeming almost on the point of revolving. "You know why you're here?"
"I think so," she managed, though she felt his question contained several perilous levels of meaning.
"Can you explain?"
Stay at the surface. Don't go any deeper…it's dark down there. Why was she here in his office now, not why did she exist.
"I just can't seem to…" Yishna could not go on. The nightmares had started after she interfered with the emergency protocols, and from then on she had felt her condition steadily worsening, until, over the last year it seemed all she could manage was to drag herself to a convenient research unit. But, once there, she had discovered nothing new, and often found herself just staring at the screens for hours. She knew that no psychologist could have helped. How could she explain to them her fear that the territory of her mind had been invaded? How could she now tell Gneiss? Or did he already know?
"You need a break. When was the last time you left Main?"
Entirely unexpected. She looked at him in puzzlement. Leave Corisanthe Main?
Gneiss leaned back. "I have recommended you for a position outside the station. You'll still be working for me, but must report directly to the Oversight Committee. We need somebody of your…potential, in at the ground level."
What was he talking about?
He continued flatly, "We don't know when this individual is going to arrive but we definitely need an established Combine representative in this matter."
"Representative?"
"We need a representative in place when this Polity Consul Assessor arrives."
"Oh." She recollected hearing something about that, but could not summon any emotional response. Gazing down at her grubby clothing and the dirt under her fingernails, she said, "I'm a mess." The words seemed to cause a moment of disconnection, a lessening of the intensity between them. The moment became almost humanised.
"Do you think I don't understand?" Gneiss stood, paced over to his workstation and picked up a console. "It gets to some people. Dalepan said you were sensitive to it."
"To what?"
He gestured about him with the console he held. "All of it: bleed-over, the oppressive claustrophobic atmosphere, the downright strangeness…Stand up now."
Yishna got up, realising with some disgust that she had not washed her hair for longer than she cared to think about.
"Yishna Strone, you will be the Orbital Combine representative designated to meet the Consul Assessor when he arrives. Get yourself cleaned up and your belongings packed. You leave on the next shuttle heading over to Corisanthe II, and from there you will take the next landing craft groundside, where you will be taken to meet Chairman Abel Duras."
"But why?" Yishna could not understand why he had chosen her. Surely he, as well as many others, must consider her a burnout.
"I have every confidence in you, and I know the power of your mind. It goes away, you know, once you are back in the real world." He seemed almost wistful, his strange eyes gazing beyond Yishna to some other place or state of being.
He was right. Aboard the shuttle, as it headed for Corisanthe II, Yishna felt as if she was pulling out into sunlight from underneath some bleak shadow. And in her mind suddenly flashed an image of Gneiss, black and toad-like, with Corisanthe Main clutching him like a fist.
9
The War properly ended when Fleet employed its gravity disruptors against the remaining Brumallian warships and their orbital support industry. The near-genocide committed thereafter from orbit and through the deployment of ground troops underlined that ending of conflict in so sordid a fashion as to begin a major shift in Sudorian public opinion. There are only so many broadcasts about Brumallians being conquered that any civilised human being can cheer. We grew uneasy at seeing images of yet more quofarl being incinerated in tunnels or disc-gunned into bloody fragments in forests. Seeing ordinary Brumallians trapped on shores or river-banks, and then shelled into non-existence, increased that unease. "They won't surrender," we were assured. "We have no choice," said those GDS troops and Fleet marines, their expressions haunted. We grew sick of seeing piles of worm-riddled corpses being pushed by bulldozers into pits. We grew increasingly suspicious of Fleet's censorship of certain broadcasts. But, even then, many of us had grown desensitised to the images, and the real turn in public opinion was instigated by a simple audio recording that was smuggled out. There are few of us, as a result, who have not heard the terrible sound that ensued after phosphor bombs were dropped into an underground Brumallian town with a population of ten thousand. It was a sound often reproduced in the protest songs that followed; that concerted shrieking rose like a symphony of Hell recorded from the Pit.
— Uskaron
McCrooger
The quofarl first surrounded us, then closed in. Two grabbed Rhodane, thrust her down on the floor and pinned her there. As two grabbed me, I allowed them to shove me to the floor, and as I went down I felt something rip across the back of my hand, probably the edge of a quofarl carapace. They searched us, thoroughly, then grudgingly hauled us back to our feet.
"What's going on?" Rhodane finally demanded.
The quofarl responded only with an irritated clicking of their mandibles, and aimed their weapons more deliberately. Now Rhodane began to look really worried as she observed other Brumallians spreading out through the surrounding area. It was not just quofarl arriving, but others laden with equipment. Abruptly lights set into the walls came on, and the hum of power permeated the air. Some of the biomechanisms around the bases of the ships began showing signs of movement, the pumps accelerated, and light and heat began to emit from the ships themselves.
"Are you picking up anything from the Consensus?" I asked.
"Something is definitely going on," she said.
"No shit?"
She held up her hand, listening intently to the chatter of the other Brumallians here. I guessed she was also trying to interpret the chemical messages in the air.
"Perhaps you should never have brought me down here?" I suggested.
"It's not that. Something about Fleet…and an evacuation. I think the Speakers—"
The quofarl abruptly parted.
"Come—"
"— with—"
"— us," they said, and a couple of the hand gestures I read indicated: Move now, urgency, danger, outsiders, protect citizens. The butt of a weapon smacked into my back and I started to turn in anger, but Rhodane grabbed my arm and began towing me after the two quofarl who led off. "Keep moving, don't question their orders, don't disobey—and don't do anything stupid."
"Danger?"
"They are confused and scared, so will kill us at the slightest provocation. There's a threat to—"
"Silence," ordered the quofarl, and that's what they got.
They did not take us out the way we had come in, but into a tunnel to one side, then at its end through two sets of heavily armoured doors and out into the open air. The ground lay hard underfoot—mud frozen solid and blistered with shell-ice—and snakes of aubergine cloud occluded the starry firmament. To my right I observed more quofarl shoving ahead of them another figure in an envirosuit like Rhodane's. I also noticed that one of them carried a similar figure slung over his shoulder. So it was not just us, and I guessed this was some instinctive or preplanned reaction to threat.