But she was brought up short by someone calling, “Ingray! Ingray Aughskold!”
Damn. She knew that voice. She put a smile on her face, though she feared it wasn’t a convincing one. She was tired, and she’d been wearing the same clothes for just short of a month, though they were as clean as the ship’s laundry facilities allowed. She’d done her best to put her hair up with the few pins she had left, but her best wasn’t very good and she very obviously had no luggage beyond her shoulder bag. And while this person was nominally her friend, Ingray knew he was much more sympathetic to Danach. “Oro,” she said, “what a surprise.”
“I haven’t seen you in months!” exclaimed Oro happily. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, traveling.” She didn’t look around for Garal. “Glad to be home.”
“Where are you coming from?”
She considered lying, but there would be no point, really. “Tyr Siilas.” And braced for questions about what she’d been doing there.
But instead Oro asked, “So did you see the Geck?”
Ingray blinked. Tried to look as though the question hadn’t startled her. “How could I have? They arrived just hours before my ship left, actually.” A little surprised at how easily the lie that wasn’t technically a lie had come into her mouth.
“Well”—he leaned closer—“if you aren’t going down the elevator right away, maybe you can see them when they get here.”
“What?” There was no concealing her surprise at that. “I thought they were going on to Ildrad. That’s what the news said at Tyr Siilas.”
“They changed their mind for some reason. They’ll be coming out of the Tyr Siilas gate sometime tomorrow, and it won’t hit the newsfeeds for a few hours yet. Nobody’s sure why they decided to change their itinerary, though there are lots of theories. System Safety is putting together a plan for handling the change in traffic and making sure nothing untoward happens, and once they have that in place they’ll announce. I had it from my nuncle. In fact, I’m running an errand for em right now. If you want, I can get you in on the greeting party.” He glanced briefly at Ingray’s rumpled jacket and skirt, her hair half falling out of its chignon. “It’ll probably be very late tomorrow, or even the next day. I have no idea if you’ll see any actual Geck, but it’s worth the chance.”
She smiled again, hoping it looked vaguely sincere. “It’s awfully nice of you to offer, but I’ve been away so long and I’m eager to be home. Catch up next time you’re onworld? You can tell me all about the Geck.”
“Sure, sure.” And after a few platitudes he was gone, off into the crowd.
Ingray looked around again for Garal. Didn’t see em. Closed her eyes and took a breath. Garal couldn’t have gone far. Or if e had, well, there was nothing she could do about that. She opened her eyes again.
Garal stood beside her. “You’re going to have to show me how you did that,” she said. E gave a small quirk of eir mouth, the closest Ingray had seen to an actual smile, but e didn’t reply. Ingray said, “We need to warn Captain Uisine. The Geck are coming here.” She knew the captain intended to stay longer in Hwae System than he’d previously planned, so that he could be sure to avoid the Geck ship.
“I heard,” said Garal. “I’ve already sent the message.” Eir face was as blandly expressionless as ever. “He says thanks.”
“Why would they come here? Don’t they have to be at the Conclave?”
“From what I can tell,” said Garal, “it’s going to take years for everyone to get to that conclave, and probably a few more years before the first meeting even happens. The question of who’s representing humans there is still unsettled. Radchaai involvement in this business has left a lot of people with a very bad feeling. Depend on it, there are going to be arguments all through human-inhabited space about who should and shouldn’t be at that conclave. We’ll be lucky if there are no actual wars over it.” And then, in response to Ingray’s open astonishment, e said, “There wasn’t much to do for three weeks. I caught up on the news.”
Well. That made sense. “It’s not our problem, I guess. Let’s go to the elevator shuttle lobby and find someplace to sit down.” It was getting to be late at night, on the schedule Ingray and Garal had kept for weeks.
By the time they reached the lobby and found seats, Ingray had lost all but two of her remaining hairpins and was glad to sit down again. She was sorely tempted just to lie down on the bench. She thought that even in the noise and chaos of the lobby she’d be able to get at least a little bit of sleep.
The lobby was crowded with travelers from every part of Hwae, and even some from outsystem—mostly tourists from Omkem, who were fascinated enough by the ruin glass on the planet that they traveled through two gates to visit, even though relations between Hwae and the Omkem Federacy had been tense ever since the Omkem/Byeit gate had gone down, and Hwae had become their only route to Byeit, which they badly wanted back. But most of the people here were Hwaean. A few aisles of benches away from Ingray and Garal sat two dozen Hwaean adolescents in identical blue shirts and lungis, carrying identical small shoulder bags. Or they mostly sat. Some stood in clusters, talking or giggling. A fair number sat looking at handhelds, another few staring off into space. Looking at a news or entertainment feed, maybe, though the uniforms looked like these children were from a public crèche and very possibly might not be able to afford the implants yet. If ever. Maybe they were enthralled by the shifting historical images cast on the walls of the lobby—right now it was the Archprolocutor of the Assemblies of Hwae presenting the final payment for construction of the Tyr/Hwae gate to the collected Tyr Executory. In the picture the archprolocutor presented the payment in a gilded and inlaid box, though of course no physical currency had changed hands on the occasion, or any other in the centuries-long course of the debt. Behind the archprolocutor stood the prolocutors of the four Assemblies of Hwae, ready to unroll the length of linen they held and reveal the Rejection of Further Obligations and officially declare themselves the government of an independent Hwae. Then again, maybe the children were just tired and bored. At the end of one bench, two of them slept, huddled together.