Jay remembered the first project he'd ever worked on as an apprentice engineer. The Vitae had been contracted to create a security network for Eispecough, one of the countries of an embattled world called Toth. Basq, proud of Jay's engineering aptitudes, or maybe just seeking the extra status that would come from proving his son was brilliant, had gotten him assigned to the job of designing the module links. He'd worked hard, almost fanatically, and watched the network grow. He remembered his pride, both of place and accomplishment.
Then, there'd been an election in Eispecough and a new government moved in. They canceled the contract and told the Vitae to leave. The Vitae did leave, because that was their way. Work for hire only and when told to go, take the severance payment and go. Jay had kept a surreptitious eye on his work, just to see how it held up. He'd even done a little remote repair work on the code. Basq had known about it and kept it quiet. Contractor Kelat had found out, however, and had Jay removed from Basq's custody, citing that Basq, by over-permissiveness, had allowed his child to become a danger to Vitae public dealings.
Three local months later, there was a civil war in Eispecough and the network was destroyed. The Vitae did nothing. Their work wasn't theirs. Their vision wasn't theirs. They'd abandon it all to chaos, because they would not take responsibility for their vision.
The Imperialists wanted to change that. They saw the change that was happening in the Quarter Galaxy. The Vitae in their fearful isolation had made no friends, established no colonies, and claimed no servants. They survived because many civilizations in the Quarter Galaxy considered them useful, and so they were used. But that could change as colonies and stations grew ripe with their own histories and technologies. There might just come a day when the Vitae went from being respected experts to being beggars, unless they established real power. Unless they began issuing contracts instead of just obeying them.
That, no matter what his father said, was the real work.
Jay weighed the weapon in his hand for a long moment before he laid it carefully in the chest. He couldn't see the angle on any of the shadows from here, but he had the distinct feeling tomorrow was still a long, long way off.
Cor left Jay's room without looking back. Her thoughts crowded around her like a cloud of biting flies and she was so busy trying to shoo them away so she could find some kind of understanding, that she lost track of where she was going. She looked up, blinking at the shadows and squinting at the stonework. The relief carving of the three Crooker trees told her she was almost to the dining hall. Her stomach rumbled. Food would help clear her head and warm her cold hands.
The hall itself was a broad, solid, graceless chamber. The space between the tables and benches was taken up either by stone pillars or by coal fires carefully banked in their own ashes. When she'd first gotten here, Cor had found the acrid heat suffocating. Now she breathed it into her lungs as a source of comfort and reassurance. This far into the house it was never warm. The day's heat was not strong enough to penetrate the stone, but the night's cold never seemed to have that problem.
And it'll do nothing but get worse, she thought. The Dark Seasons are coming.
Averand, her homeworld, could zip around its sun forty times in the time it took the Realm to skulk once around the Eyes of the Servant. She remembered when she first saw the simulation of the Realm's orbit. It circled the binary warily, swinging in almost too close, then backing off almost too far, always riding the bare edge of tolerance as it made its long, slow way around its stars. It was on its way out to the far, cold edge now.
Ceramic pots stood in the ashes at the edge of the fires. Cor snagged a red clay bowl off a table she passed and dipped it into the nearest jar to shovel out a helping of porridge, mushrooms, and overcooked chicken meat. She glanced over the jar, looking hopefully for a flat dish of baking bread, but didn't see any. She sighed at the porridge. It'd keep her from starving, but not do much more than that. Even the Nobility kept barely at a subsistence level in the time when there was more day than night.
She thought about Raking Coals, who brought his sledge in every tenth day and kept asking her what price she set her own hands at with a broad wink and a happy leer. And the Oilbrake sisters, who carried fifty-pound sacks of grain on their backs when their pair of oxen went lame and still whistled at the stable boys who crossed the courtyards. And the Notouch daughters who scrambled this way and that in the courtyard, grabbing up the feathers that came down like snow when the house's Bonded sat on the roof and plucked chickens.
It was a filthy, hard, stupid life, and if the Vitae got hold of them, it would vanish.
And if the Family gets hold of them? Cor dropped onto the bench and stuck her fingers into her bowl, shoving the food into her mouth before it went cold.
She'd been sent down with the team when the Unifiers still thought these people were Family. She'd hunkered down and learned the language and the customs and made friends as fast as she could. She learned to tell jokes and to laugh at them. She learned to pitch in with the work of the Bondless and to defer to the Teachers and the Nobility. She could recite the Words of the Nameless in the Temple on the tenth day and navigate using nothing but the walls around her. She'd deliberately set out to find anything and everything she could admire and respect about the culture. It was her job. She'd trained for it specially for years.
Then the word came down. These weren't Family. These people were artificially created. Nothing like this had ever been found before. New policy would have to be formulated as soon as the extent of the engineering could be understood.
Policy? She scowled at her bowl and her porridge-spattered fingers. Jay's voice had been flat and unquestioning when he delivered the message. As if there could be any policy for this world except getting them some decent food and a way to keep warm and dry through a twenty-year winter. These people who worked and starved and slaved and still sang and loved and told really, really obscene jokes.
Behold the noble savage, she thought grimly. Cor, Cor, Cor. They're dirty and ignorant and so enslaved to their superstition that they don't even know what they're standing on top of. Come out of it, woman. It's a raw deal, of course, but the worst the Family does'll be better than the best the Vitae'll do.
Cor scooped up another mouthful of porridge.
Of course it will.
A sharp ringing in her ear made her jerk and Cor nearly sent her bowl crashing to the floor. After a moment she realized it was her translation disk. She balanced her bowl in her dirty hand and tapped the disk twice.
"Cor, Jay," said Lu's voice. "Get yourself back here and move it like you mean it."
Cor shot up straight and shoved the heel of her hand against the torque. "What is it?" she demanded, forgetting to whisper like they usually did over the e-comm links.
"We hit diamond. I think. I…look, just get back here."
"On our way," came Jay's voice.
Cor sucked the last of the porridge off her fingers and deposited her bowl on the table for the Bonded to find later. She hurried through the halls and across the walks of the High House, shouldering past anyone who didn't get out of the way fast enough, barely pausing to raise her hands to them. Something could have happened down in the smooth shadowy tunnels under the shelter. Maybe something finally switched on or came alive. Something real and comprehensible. That idea shone like a freshly lit lantern.