“But if you were able to figure this out,” protested the news mech, “why hasn’t anyone else? The keepers at the System Lareum, for example?”
“Oh, I guarantee you that some of them know. There’s no way they don’t. But either they refuse to believe it, or they’re keeping quiet. If they say anything they’ll surely lose their jobs, and likely many of their friends and associates. And after all, it’s the words that matter, the fact that the Rejection was sent and accepted and the Assemblies established, and just by being on display in the System Lareum that copy has become important. It’s a real vestige now, even if it’s not the one everyone thinks it is. So why should it matter if it’s really a forgery?”
“Why should it matter?” The news mech’s voice was outraged. “Of course it matters! How can you even say that?”
“Look into it, District Voice,” said Garal. “Treat it like your most serious investigative story. Publish it, and then come ask me why the curators at the System Lareum might keep quiet and tell themselves it doesn’t really matter.”
“I won’t be able to ask you,” observed the District Voice. “You’ll be well away from all of it, off gallivanting with aliens. You don’t have anything to lose here.”
“Nothing that matters more than everyone knowing what Ethiat Budrakim did to me, no.” All this time Garal’s voice had been calm and even, but Ingray thought she heard, for the first time, an undercurrent of anger. “I don’t really care about anything else. But once you start looking at the evidence, once you really look at those Garseddai vestiges, there will be questions about other vestiges, and if you’re afraid to ask those, District Voice, you might as well just stop now.”
“And I’m back to wondering if you really did me a favor asking me along like this,” said the news mech ruefully.
The spider mech spoke up from the floor of the groundcar. “Mech from the District Voice news service, you are very stupid.”
“Be nice, Ambassador,” said Ingray. “Aren’t you a diplomat?”
“And the District Voice has a point,” said Garal. “I’ve put her in a difficult position, while I myself, as she’s just said, have nothing to lose. But I’m telling the truth.”
“Diplomat does not mean nice,” muttered the spider mech. “Diplomat means tell the aliens to leave us alone.”
“Let me give you some names,” said Garal to the news mech, as though the spider mech hadn’t spoken, “and some places to start looking, and you can do whatever you want with them.”
The car that ringed the massive, multistranded elevator cable was huge, with several decks, luxury cabins for those who could afford them, and shops and restaurants. And, of course, kiosks where one could buy a vestige of the trip.
Extra-Hwae Relations had lost the debate over what sort of quarters Garal—and not incidentally the Geck ambassador, traveling with em—was due. Surely an alien diplomat, who was getting her way largely because everyone was afraid to break the treaty she represented, ought to have as comfortable a trip as could be provided. Planetary Safety had pointed out that the ambassador was a mech, the comfort of which wasn’t much of an issue; Garal Ket, Geck citizen or not, was a convicted criminal; and besides, Extra-Hwae Relations wasn’t intending to actually pay for any of it. So they had a tiny private compartment with a single bunk the three humans sat on, with the spider mech crouching on the floor.
They were more than halfway up the elevator before Ingray could muster the courage to confess to Taucris that they had all lied to her, even Ingray, and the Geck did not in fact want custody of Garal Ket. The elevator had passed its midpoint several hours before, and gravity had begun to return—or, Ingray knew it wasn’t exactly gravity, just felt like it, but it was close enough. Enough for them all to sit on what had previously been the underside of the bunk, the spider mech sitting now on what had hours before been the ceiling but was now the floor.
Was there any point in delaying it? They could tell Taucris what was really happening at the last possible moment, when they got off the shuttle from Zenith Platform to Hwae Station. That would be wisest. That would be safest.
Ingray didn’t want to do that to Taucris, didn’t want to see Taucris’s face at that moment. But if she confessed now, what would Taucris do?
Ingray took a breath. Opened her mouth. “Taucris,” she began.
“Oh, shit,” said Taucris, sitting straighter. She stood quickly, or tried to, shoved too hard off the bunk in the slowly increasing gravity and hit the opposite wall. “Oh, shit,” she said again. “We’ve got a problem. I mean, not just us. But we do. Ingray, turn your messages back on. And look at a station news service.”
Ingray did, and her vision was flooded with urgent messages, and even more urgently worded news items. And once she saw what those were about, she couldn’t even bring herself to swear.
A week before Ingray, Garal, and Tic Uisine had come out of the Tyr gate, two freighters had come out of the Enthen gate and docked at Hwae Station. They had declared the sort of cargo large freighters carried—a miscellaneous assortment of things that for whatever reason couldn’t be produced at their destination: arrack, medical supplies, replacement parts for interstellar gates, even tea, not all of it from Radchaai space. They unloaded some but not nearly all of their cargo at Hwae, and while they waited for cargo they were scheduled to take on, their crews did the sort of things that freighter crews did on stations. None of it unusual, none of it alarming. None of it illegal, which in retrospect might have been suspicious in itself.
Enthen was one gate away from Hwae. It was also one gate away from Omkem. The freighters were not, in fact, carrying arrack or gate parts or Radchaai tea. Or not much of those things. They had actually been packed full with Omkem military mechs. And an hour ago those mechs had marched out of their freighters and blasted their way out of the docks.
“What is it?” asked Garal, who had not been reconnected to Hwae’s communications network when e had left Arsamol Planetary Safety.
“Very bad, is what,” whispered the spider mech. “I should have been watching the news from the station, but I wasn’t.”
Taucris was too involved in her own various sources of information to notice how differently the spider mech had just spoken, far more like Tic than like the Geck ambassador. “Shuttle service between Zenith Platform and the station is suspended,” she said. “Everyone on the station has been ordered to seek shelter.”
“What’s happened?” insisted Garal.
“It looks like the Omkem Federacy has happened,” said Ingray. “They’ve managed to get armed mechs onto the station and there’s fighting. I don’t think anyone knows what their goal is, or why they’re doing this.”