“But none of them write it down,” Cruzie grinned.
Oslo’s squeezed my shoulder, hard. “The drone is mildly annoyed,” I said. “And more than a little surprised.”
Cruzie tapped on a screen. The inside of one of the pyramids appeared. It was a storehouse of some sort, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of the gourds I’d seen earlier that the Vesian had been transporting.
“Nonverbal creatures use scent. Just like ants on the mother planet. The Vesians use scents to mark territories their queens manage. And one of the things I started to wonder about, were these storage areas. What were they for? So I broke in, and I started breaking the gourds.”
Beck stiffened. “He’s not happy with this line of thought,” I murmured.
“Thought so,” Oslo said back, and nodded at Cruzie, who kept going.
“And whenever I broke a gourd, I found them empty. Not full of liquid, as Beck told us was likely. We originally thought they were for storage. An adaptive behavior. Or a sign of intelligence. Hard to say. Until I broke them all.”
“They could have been empty, waiting to be sealed,” Beck said tonelessly.
I sighed. “I’m sorry, Beck. I have to do this. He’s telling the truth, Oslo. But misdirecting.”
“I know he is,” Cruzie said. “Because the Vesians swarmed the location with fresh gourds. There were chemical scents, traces laid down in the gourds before they were sealed. The Vesians examined the broken gourds, then filled the new ones with scents. I started examining the chemical traces, and found that each gourd replaced had the same chemical sequences sprayed on and stored as the ones I broke.”
Beck’s muscles tensed. Any human could see the stress now. I didn’t need to say anything.
“They were like monks, copying manuscripts. Right, Beck?” Cruzie asked.
“Yes,” Beck said.
“And the chemical markers, it’s a language, right?” Kepler asked. I could feel the tension in her voice. It wasn’t just disappointment building, but rage.
“It is.” Beck stood up slowly.
“It took me days to realize it,” Cruzie said. “And that, after the weeks I’ve been out here. The Compact spotted it right away, didn’t it?”
Beck looked over at me, then back at Cruzie. “Yes. The Compact knows.”
“Then what the hell is it planning to do?” Kepler moved in front of Beck, lips drawn back in a snarl.
“I’m just a drone,” Beck said. “I don’t know. But I can give you an answer in an hour.”
For a second, everyone stood frozen. Oslo, brimming with hurt rage, staring at Beck. Kepler, moving from anger toward some sort of decision. Cruzie looked… triumphant. Oblivious to the real breaking developments in the air.
And I observed.
Like any good Friend.
Then a loud ‘whooop whooop’ startled us all out of our poses.
“What’s that?” Cruzie asked, looking around.
“The Gheda are here,” Oslo, Kepler, and Beck said at the same time.
“Call the vote,” Oslo snapped.
Cruzie swallowed. I saw micro beads of sweat on the side of her neck. “Right now?”
“Gheda are inbound,” Kepler said, her artificial eyes dark. I imagined she had them patched into the computers, looking at information from the station’s sensors. “They’ll be decelerating and matching orbit in hours. There’s no time for debate, Cruzie.”
“What we’re about to do is something that requires debate. They’re intelligent. We’re proposing ripping that away over the next day with Kepler’s tailored virus. They’ll end up with a viral lobotomy, just smart enough we can claim their artifacts come from natural hive mind behavior. But we’ll have stolen their culture. Their minds. Their history.” Cruzie shook her head. “I know we said they’re going to lose most of that when the Gheda arrive. But if we do this, we’re worse than Gheda.”
“Fucking hell, Cruzie!” Oslo snapped. “You’re changing your mind now?”
“Oslo!” Cruzie held up her hands as if trying to ward off the angry words.
“You saw our mother planet,” Oslo said. “The slums. The starvation. Gheda combat patrols. They owned everyone. If you didn’t provide value, you were nothing. You fought the Sahara campaign, you attacked Abbuj station. How the fuck can you turn your back to all that?”
“I didn’t turn my back, I wanted a different path,” Cruzie said. “That’s why we’re here. With the money on the patents, we could change things… but what are we changing here if we’re not all that better than the Gheda?”
“It’s us or the fucking ants,” Kepler said, voice suddenly level. “It’s really that simple. Where are your allegiances?”
I bit my lip when I heard that.
“Cruzie…” I started to say.
She held a hand up and walked over to the console, her thumb held out. “It takes a unanimous vote to unleash the virus. This was why I insisted.”
“You’re right,” Kepler said. I flinched. I could hear the hatred in her voice. She nodded at Oslo.
He raised his walking stick. The tiny grains inside rattled around, and then a jagged finger of energy leapt out and struck Cruzie in the small of her back.
Cruzie jerked around, arms flopping as she danced, then dropped to the ground. Oslo pressed the stick to her head and fired it again. Blood gushed from Cruzie’s eye sockets as something inside her skull went ‘pop.’
A wisp of smoke curled from her open mouth.
Oslo and Kepler put thumbs to the screens. “We have a unanimous vote now.”
But a red warning sign flashed back at them. Beck relaxed slightly, a tiny curl of a smile briefly appearing.
Oslo raised his walking stick and pointed it at Beck. “Our communications are blocked.”
“Yes,” Beck said. “The Compact is voting against preemptive genocide.”
For a split second, I saw the decision to kill Beck flit across Kepler’s face. “If you kill him,” I spoke up, “the Compact will spend resources hunting you two down. You can’t enjoy your riches if you’re dead.”
Kepler nodded. “You’re right.” But she looked at me, a question on her face.
I shrugged. “If you’re all dead, I don’t have points on the package.”
“Trigger them manually,” Oslo said. “We’ll bring the drone. We won’t leave him up here to cause more trouble. Bring him, or her, or whatever the Friend calls itself as well. Your contract, Alex, is now to watch Beck.”
We burned our way through the green atmosphere of Ve, the lander bucking and groaning, skin cracking as it weathered the heat of our reentry fireball.
From the tiny cramped cockpit I watched us part the clouds and spiral slowly down out of the sky as the wings unfurled from slots in the tear-drop sized vehicle’s side. They started beating a complicated figure-eight motion.
Oslo aimed his walking stick at us when the lander touched down. “Put on your helmet, get out. Both of you.”
We did so.
Heavy chlorine-rich mists swirled around, disturbed by our landing. Large puffball flowers spurted acid whenever touched by a piece of stray stirred-up debris, and the black, plastic leaves all around us bobbed gently in a low breeze.
Oslo and Kepler pulled a large pack out of the lander’s cargo area. Long pieces of tubing. They set to building a freestanding antenna, piece by piece. I watched Beck. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his posture.
He was about to run. Which made no sense. Run where? On this world?
Within a few minutes Oslo and Kepler had snapped together a thirty-foot tall tower. I swallowed, and remained silent. It was a choice, a deliberate path. I broke my contract.
Oslo snapped a clip to the top of the tower, then unrolled a length of cable. He and Kepler used it to pull the super light structure up.