Olsirkos frowned. “As you order, it shall be, Fearsome Srin, but…”
“Yes?”
“Why such emphasis upon Extirpated Houses and Families?”
“Because that was the root of all these crimes. Have you examined the background of the communications officer you ultimately assigned to Red Lurker?”
“I am ashamed to say that I completed the interrogation mere minutes before arriving at the Sensorium.”
Probably true. “Here is what you will find: her name is Nezdeh, a former Srina of House Perekmeres. She was behind much, if not all, of the planning and collusion and bribery that we have now uncovered. You will also find, if you research deeply enough, that many of the Undreaming who were awakened to round out the crew of the Lurker were not who they were purported to be. They were more renegades from House Perekmeres.”
Olsirkos shook his head. “But to what end would they fashion such a strange plot? If they seize Red Lurker, where may they go? Without us, they will remain stranded in system V 1581.”
“Will they? They are too adept at overcoming obstacles for me to rely upon that assumption. They have suborned human agents among the civilian auxiliaries of the Aboriginal fleet. They were able to infiltrate cryocelled Terran collaborators into a diplomatic mission with only twenty-four hours notice. So I am unwilling to make any presumptions regarding what capabilities they do and do not have. We may only be sure of this: as renegades, they will take every possible precaution to remain undetected. And also, having no House left to support them, they must have sponsors among either the Autarchs, the Hegemons of the Great Houses, or both.”
“Yes, Fearsome Srin”—and Olsirkos did genuinely seem to be awestruck at Shethkador’s calm, confident unfolding of the conspiracy—“but I still do not understand how the architect of this plot could be located in V 1581 and yet be influencing events that were taking place here.”
“That mystery is not solved by a single answer, but rather two. The first part is that the Slaasriithi invitation to the Aboriginals was not wholly unforeseeable. Therefore, it is possible, if unlikely, that the duelist you just interrogated was left with a complex flowchart of contingency orders to execute, as dictated by subsequent occurrences. This alone could have produced the chain of events we have uncovered. But I suspect there is a second, more likely, answer to how these renegades managed to influence events in another star system.
“Only hours after Monolith left V 1581, another preaccelerated Arat Kur prize hull—Mimic—shifted into that system from Sigma Draconis, probably carrying a warning of our sudden appearance there. It seems likely that the ex-Srina Perekmeres — or her sponsors — had agents aboard Mimic, who reported the Slaasriithi’s diplomatic overtures to the Aboriginals. The ex-Srina then contacted the new second communications officer.”
“So she is Awakened?”
“Almost certainly.”
“But what are these traitors hoping to accomplish?”
“That we cannot know until we track them down. But they clearly intend to compromise the Aboriginal legation to the Slaasriithi homeworld.”
“So our travel to V 1581 to retrieve Red Lurker is but a stalking horse to conceal our investigation into the connections between this plot and rogue elements of the former House Perekmeres.”
“Exactly.”
They had returned to Shethkador’s spin quarters. “Dominant Srin,” Olsirkos breathed, “you have been inconceivably kind to show me the workings of your mind, that I may be inspired and educated by them.”
Shethkador resisted the urge to rub his eyes. “Yes, of course. Now, commence preacceleration for shift to V 1581. I had expected to depart this wretched region of space as soon as I was repatriated. Now I must investigate a pack of meddlesome renegades who should have been culled with the rest of their scrofulous breed.”
“At least, being renegades, they are desperate and possess little real power. After all, how much damage could they do?”
Shethkador fixed Olsirkos with a brutal stare, compelling his irises to contract into pinpricks of contempt and dismissal. “Since they have nothing to lose, what won’t they do?”
PART THREE. September 2120
Chapter Twenty-Eight. IN VARIOUS ORBITS BD +02 4076 TWO (“DISPARITY”)
“They call the planet ‘Disparity’?” Tygg stared at Riordan, who had conveyed the information. “What the hell kind of name is that? What’s it mean?”
“Wish I knew,” Riordan confessed, “but I don’t. Got the name from Yiithrii’ah’aash just a few minutes before we started shuffling gear around for tomorrow’s landing.”
Keith Macmillan, hearing the exchange as he went to get another load from the cargo mod, grunted. “I guess we’re going to be staying here a little longer than on Adumbratus.”
“Why do you say that?” Melissa Sleeman asked over her shoulder. She was helping — well, more like directing — Tygg as he relocated her test gear to the corvette.
“Because they’re having us pack for a bloody camping trip, and landing us in two boats,” Macmillan answered as he disappeared around the bend.
Which Caine knew to be only part of the reason for tomorrow’s two-vehicle planetfall. After Adumbratus, the Slaasriithi had sheepishly admitted to overestimating the avionics automation of the TOCIO shuttle and had been alarmed when neither their shift carrier nor Adumbratus’ ground station had been able to achieve a solid lascom lock to relay telemetry and meteorological data to it during the unexpectedly rough descent. This time, the Slaasriithi had urged a “buddy-system” landing. The concept was to let the far more robust and cutting-edge Wolfe-class corvette, the UCS Puller, lead the way down, relaying both its own sensor readings and any transmitted data to the shuttle following on its heels.
Few of the legation noticed the change: they were eager to begin the visit, particularly since getting their first look at Disparity yesterday. Easing into near orbit, they had watched as, due to the rotation of their habitation module, the green and blue planet slid swiftly in from the top of their view ports and dropped just as swiftly out again every forty-eight seconds. Unlike the outré appearance of Adumbratus, the second planet of BD +02 4076 conformed to the image invoked by the term “green world.”
It was indeed the greenest planet Riordan had ever seen. Only fifty-four percent water-covered, Disparity’s seas followed the equatorial belt, dividing the planet into pole-centered landmasses. There were a few land bridges joining the two ragged collections of top and bottom continents and one seasonally-migrating ice cap. But those land bridges were apparently eroding: coastal archipelagos flanked the remaining spines of once-wide isthmuses.
Disparity’s other unusual feature was the bright blue of its seas, which were much shallower than Earth’s oceans and were reportedly well-populated by analogs of cyan-colored algae and plankton.
But even those colors were faint when compared to the vast verdant swathes extending away from the water on both the north and south continents. Whether light grasslands or dark forests, the rich, saturated hues indicated that the vegetation was not interspersed with many badlands or scrub-plains. With the exception of a few dramatic mountain ranges and small wind-shadow deserts that clung to their upland skirts here and there, the green of Disparity’s landmasses did not suffer interruption or preemption until it grudgingly mixed in with the tans and browns that rimmed the seasonal icecap.