Confront

“No. They did not,” Laranta said quietly.

“…How long have you known?” I asked.

Laranta was not stupid. She gave a harsh click with her tongue and scowled.

“From the diraksi start,” she said tiredly. “The first time we spoke, I told you as much.”

“That is not what you said…” I started.

“Yes. It was,” she said plainly. “You even seemed better prepared to accept this the first time.”

“The first time I talked through it, the Red Sails had only tried to kill me once,” I retorted. “I could still lie to myself and say that this was all one misunderstanding. Marshal Tispas hadn’t doubled down and kept coming for me!”

“And now you have to confront that you are wrong for the second time: that the Red Sails were not malicious when they found you.”

I glared at her. Words failed me, because I couldn’t believe the ones I was hearing.

“You’re too smart not to see it,” Laranta said. “They went too far out of their way to respond to your ship’s distress call. It changed their defensive perimeter, made them vulnerable.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I growled. “There was planning, a lot of it! Even a child would think to devise some…some…”

‘Plausible deniability’ was the phrase I couldn’t quite translate properly. And right now, I didn’t want to just tack on the English.

“Cover,” Laranta suggested.

“Yes,” I settled. “Which they would need, if they wanted to appear uninvolved.”

“But that goes to my point,” Laranta said, ever patient even as I spoke faster and louder. “They didn’t need to appear uninvolved. If they were involved, then no one ever needed to find out.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone kept a secret badly,” I said.

“Caleb, either their plan to ‘stumble across’ you went off flawlessly, or the real abductor’s plan fell to pieces. It can’t be both, and there’s only evidence for the latter.”

“You don’t think it’s suspicious that even after something has supposedly gone wrong, and we can’t find any evidence for it? There’s a cover-up happening! Even Marshal Tispas’ own rak are turning on him.”

“I’m not saying the Red Sails don’t have many things to answer for,” she said. “But the more we dig, the more reasons I find to think that abducting you isn’t one of them.”

“They tried to kill me! Multiple times now!”

“Caleb, think about where you’re standing right now,” Laranta nodded toward Nora’s bed. “The Vorak didn’t shoot her. If we didn’t have you to listen to, and one of us saw humans working with Vorak? We might have tried to kill those humans too.”

“Yeah, and you would have been wrong if you had!”

“So, when this Human wakes up,” she said, “would you tell her the Coalition is her enemy? We did shoot her.”

“It was a mistake,” I said. “I would know better than you. I was there.”

“So is what the Vorak did to you,” she pointed out. “They acted impulsively on incomplete information.”

“And that has consequences,” I seethed. “How can you ask me to just forget?”

“I’m not—” she started.

“What are you saying then?” I shouted. “Why would you, out of anybody, defend them? You’re the Admiral waging a war on them. They’re invaders around this star. They’re your enemies too!”

I was out of breath, ready to collapse into my chair.

The look on her face was…wrought. Psionically, I hadn’t been paying attention, but now I felt something unexpected: a discernable feeling.

Normally, I couldn’t tell what people were feeling. I could only sense a change in mood, not to or from anything specific.

But in this conversation, the psionic sensation compared with her expression and demeanor: Laranta was unmistakably resolute .

“Yes they are,” she whispered, “but they are not your enemies. Not really. And in the absence of anyone else able to see that, it is my responsibility to remind you.”

There was nothing I could say to that. How long ago had she asked me ‘why did you risk yourself?’

I hadn’t used the same word, but the meaning was the same.

“I feel…responsible,” she said. I realized she was looking at Nora. “It was my mission, my soldiers that took you off Korbanok. The Vorak hunted you because you were aided by Coalition soldiers. This new Human is proof that things might have gone differently.”

“She was sneaking away to try and contact someone important enough to help her,” I said. “I doubt Marshal Tispas is treating them any better than me.”

The Admiral didn’t look convinced though.

“What if I’d waited?” she asked. “Even a day…how long would it have taken the Sails to find those other ships? Had Tasser turned you away, you might have been only a few days away from being reunited with other humans.”

I was a little surprised she knew Tasser’s name. But as soon as I heard her, I knew I shouldn’t have been. She’d probably been receiving reports from him since day one.

How much of this did she share with Tasser?

He could be furious with himself for exactly the same reasons.

“I broke out,” I said. “The Red Sails gave me plenty of reason to, all on their own. That’s on them, not you and especially not Tasser or Nai.”

“It’s not your responsibility to cover for our errors,” Laranta said. “In fact, you don’t seem to be very receptive to the idea that you aren’t responsible for us.”

“I don’t care!” I shouted. “I don’t care if they’re only after me for being with you all. You helped me, they hurt me! That’s the end of it.”

“Caleb, you aren’t hearing me,” Laranta said, voice icy, “That is not the end of it. It’s not even the beginning! The first thing we did with you was exactly what they did! Nai and Tasser locked you in a box for your own safety.”

Was she talking about the improvised greenhouse quarantine?

“The difference being, Tasser sat down a few inches away from the glass and slaved away for hours trying to make sure I understood what was happening. The Vorak pinned me to a wall and slid steel into me.”

“And I am telling you, Caleb,” Laranta sighed, “that if you had landed in our laps? Under the same circumstances, I can’t guarantee that the Coalition wouldn’t have wound up doing something similar. It’s my job to make it so unambiguously clear, the circumstances motivating their mistake, that the Coalition can’t be considered responsible if…”

“…If I go trying to tear them down brick by brick?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

She was covering her ass. Or, more precisely, everyone under her command.

That stung. But could I really fault her? Her very point was that all sense of normalcy had vanished. I knew why. I was the first First Contact in eighty years. Even the trained specialists hadn’t been that prepared.

At least she was honest.

“I get it,” I said. “I got stepped on by something maybe too big to realize any better. And you’re responsible for making sure I don’t throw myself at it trying to get even.”

Laranta grimaced, but slowly nodded.

Not only had I been stepped on by an army; I’d popped up right in the middle of their war. And in a crisis…mistakes happened. Harm was sometimes inevitable. Sometimes the best you could do was damage control.

Throw the human in a quarantine and sort out the details later.

…

I hated it.

With every fiber of my body, I wanted to spit it right back in the Admiral’s face.

Crisis was not an excuse.

There was no excuse.

I had to clench my jaw, steadying my breathing so I didn’t scream.

Laranta was, in her infuriatingly big-picture way, also looking out for me. Trying to keep me from getting further overwhelmed.

I likely disagreed about why, but it was true that I couldn’t afford to make the Vorak more of an enemy. Not while Nora’s group was still in their clutches.

“I’m not asking you to ignore what the Red Sails did to you,” Laranta said. “And I’m especially not asking you to ignore what they still might. But…yes. It is intensely in your interests to find a way to…to accept negotiating with them.”

Yeah, she’s right about that. Nora’s steady breathing was too familiar a sound for me to dispute. I wasn’t the only one out here.

“…You should have had Nai do this. It would have stung less coming from her,” I said, forcing my voice back to a reasonable volume.

“I don’t disagree,” she said. “But I was closest, the timing fell this way, and ancestors I’ve yoked that child with enough work already.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Laranta talk about Nai almost like a parent.

“...You know her personally,” I said. “Her sister too. I missed it the first time, but you mentioned Nerin the first time we spoke.”

“I was friends with their mother,” Laranta explained. “I was a junior officer in one of the void fleets that delivered aid after the Razing. Cal and I met organizing food distribution, and she introduced me to her two girls.”

“‘Was’?” I asked.

“Still am,” Laranta said. “It’s just…been a long time. She’s still administrating one of the orbital platforms around Ordeliege, and I wound up an Admiral.”

Ordeliege—it was the moon that orbited Nai’s homeworld, and its colonies represented the largest remaining piece of Farnata civilization.

I might have lived with Nai and Nerin for a month, but I still didn’t know that much about their family.

“I hate not knowing enough,” I said, latching on to yet another thing I didn’t know. The admission felt odd to say. I knew, logically, this should have made me self-conscious. Laranta and I weren’t exactly close. We’d talked a few times, mostly briefly. I probably hadn’t even spent twelve cumulative hours in her presence.

But it didn’t feel difficult at all.

“For every single minute since I got snatched,” I said, “I haven’t gotten to know what I need to. I’ve made some small progress here, learned a few things there, but I just don’t know enough. And everything I keep running into adds to that. I wish I’d known enough to save my friend, I wish I knew how to get home, I even wish I’d tried to get to know Nai sooner. And now, right when it seems like I finally might get to know something important, it turns out these stupid rak don’t know anything more than I do.”

Laranta’s face pinched in the corners, making a wry smile.

“I sympathize,” she said. “I send far more lives than Nai’s into battle on probabilities and conjecture. In command school, it was reassuring to know that your opponent’s leadership didn’t get to be certain either.”

“I can’t say I see the similarities,” I said.

“No, you wouldn’t,” she agreed. “You did not sign up for any of this.”

“I’ll go ahead and cry another river about it,” I said. “I’ll get over this. It’s not the first time I’ve had to remind myself where I stand.”

“Cry a…?” Laranta repeated, unsure.

“Cry,” I told her. “Like tears. It’s…overstatement. Exaggeration.”

“It sounds like a Farnata idiom,” she said.

“It might be,” I said. “I’d have to ask Nai.”

“Are you getting along with her?” Laranta asked.

“Yes,” I said plainly. “With her probably better than anyone else as long as Tasser is stuck on Archo.”

I saw a flicker cross Laranta’s face. If it hadn’t been tandem with a flicker on my psionic senses.

“You’re not fond of Tasser,” I guessed.

“…No,” she admitted.

“Why?” I asked. “He’s even better friends with Nai than I am.” For the first time, it seemed like I’d asked her a question she wasn’t prepared for.

“…Or is that exactly why?”

“How much do you know about his background?” she asked.

“Enough,” I said vaguely.

“Then I’ll tell you what most Casti won’t: he’s never getting promoted past—"

“He’s never getting promoted past Rahi,” I interrupted her. “I already knew that.”

“...Because he already knows that,” the Admiral realized.

“Did you think he didn’t?”

“I think I don’t think of him that often,” she said. “Nai is the only reason I know of him at all.”

“You just said he’s never getting promoted again,” I said. “That’s not professional, it’s personal. What’s your [beef] with him?”

“His rank is professional,” Laranta said, “He’s not getting promoted because, whether he likes it or not, he’s not suited for higher command.”

“He can lead a unit but not a company?” I said.

“…In essence,” she said.

“Why do you care?” I asked.

“Because he has a diagnosed psychological condition,” Laranta said evenly, “and I have to trust the judgement of the officers under me.”

“Except Serralinitus is one of those officers, and he was the first person to promote Tasser since he was commissioned,” I said. “He’s fought and won against more Adepts than most of your actual Adepts have. I’d wager he’s more valuable than any two of them put together.”

I leaned forward in my chair to remind her, “I know every rumor around this star says otherwise, but Tasser was the one to actually kill Sendin Marfek.”

“Informally, that’s what actually earned him his promotion,” Laranta conceded.

“So [what gives]?”

“So…it’s not his fault,” Laranta said. “As far as cases go, his is probably inconsequential. But when Casti hear that he’s prone to outbursts or violence, his own soldiers might not be so eager to follow him.”

“I can speak firsthand that he’s more patient than the average Casti, so is it just the fact that there’s a record of him getting put in one of those ‘special schools’? Is it really just…[stigma]? The label?”

“How much of Casti history do you know?” she asked, instead of answering. “Specifically before we first contacted the Kiraeni.”

“Not too much.”

“Well, the thing to know about Casti is that we only truly mastered our homeworld in the last four-hundred years or so. Before that, at any given point, we as a species were under threat.”

“Extinction?” I asked.

Laranta didn’t quite nod. “Almost,” she said. “We didn’t become the dominant species until we developed firearms. Before then, even well-established cities lived under threat of being overrun by predators or wildlife.”

“Nakrumum kinda sounds like a terrible place to be,” I said. Nothing about the planet had impressed me so far.

“My point is that Casti are, and in too many senses remain, prey. For a thousand years before we developed paper, our most viable survival strategy was to split into groups, knowing that one group would die so the others might escape. It’s in our genes to trust the group, to die for the flock. And so when we finally build up for ourselves a proper civilization, someone like Tasser, who’s constantly ready to stand his ground, even alone…”

“Society is ready to leave him behind to fight and die,” I gathered.

“…Yes,” she said.

The look on her face made me falter. She was good at hiding her expressions, but I had ways to notice she couldn’t help. She was ashamed.

I was being pretty harsh.

“Wow,” I said. “It must have been quite the shock to start finding other civilizations. Vorak, Farnata, and now me: every alien you’ve run into is some kind of predator. I wonder how Tasser doesn’t wear this smug, self-satisfied grin everywhere. He’s not mentally ill, he’s just ahead of the [plot.]”

“I don’t—” she started.

“It was snide. Sorry,” I said. “I’m…needling you because I’m angry and helpless.”

“…Nobody’s perfect.”

Hah. Was she talking about me or her people?

“I don’t know if it’s reassuring or depressing that every civilization out here has some glaring flaws to it. The Vorak nuked their own planet to the brink of collapse, Earth is a backwards mess that I can’t even begin to describe, Nakrumum is filled with…”

“Panicky, cowardly animals,” Laranta suggested.

I laughed. “Yeah. I don’t want to know what kind of problems Farnata had before the Razing, even less about after it.”

“I think…” Laranta said slowly, “that we believe it is simple to evaluate a civilization. It’s just ‘one’ thing. Singular. But everyone would admit people are complicated. Civilization is made up of those complicated people.”

“Gendra yo hemi,” I quoted.

“What?” she asked.

“Tasser told me about it. It’s something from one of the Casti philosophy books Tasser had me read,” I said.

“I don’t recognize the language,” Laranta said. “What does it mean?”

I stifled my surprise. Of course she wouldn’t know everything from her homeworld. She might not even be from the Casti homeworld. Even if she was, no one could even come close to knowing it all.

Not even the best professor in France would know every single French philosopher, much less every single one on the planet.

Casti couldn’t be any different.

“It means ‘the tribe does not exist’,” I said. “The author meant that individual characteristics can’t be extrapolated to a whole group, and that tendencies in the group can’t be used to predict an individual either. The tribe doesn’t exist, because only its members exist.”

“…You’re quoting Tasser,” Laranta guessed.

“A month ago, you would have been right,” I said. “But you playing [devil]’s advocate for the Red Sails made me think about it now.”

“It’s never fun is it?” Laranta asked. “Having your self-reliability shaken?”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “Self-improvement gives me life.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant,” she pointed out.

That…was true.

“You realize why I’m having to prod at you like this, right?” she asked.

“Because none of you are qualified to think it through for me,” I said. “First Contact is messy, and while you guys might be responsible for my safety, it gets a lot more complicated when I’m erring toward something self-destructive.”

“Do we tell you how to think: work to correct your biases? Or do we let you keep ignoring facts and fostering resentment for our enemies?” Laranta asked sardonically. “You wouldn’t believe how much simpler my life would have be if you’d accepted the Organic Authority’s offer to quarter you.”

“They’d still pester you all. However it happened, I got involved with you. And besides, even the Organic Authority doesn’t know anything about First Contact,” I said.

“That’s…accurate. Who knows, if you’re still alive, they might call you for the next one.”

That was a chilling thought.

“Caleb, I’m very busy. I don’t have a lot of time outside this,” Laranta said.

“Yeah, I get it,” I told her. “I’m good for now. I can talk more about the Red Sails with Nai. I—”

“No, I meant that I have the time now, not later. If there’s anything else I can do to help, anything else you want to cover, now’s the time.”

“…Walk me through it then,” I asked. “The Red Sails, everything that happened with me. You have the widest view out of anyone in the Coalition, don’t you? So what do you see with them? With me? With Nora?”

“…Alright, well you already know some of the important names. Tispas is Marshal, Tox is his Adjutant—the second.”

“I want to put it to the test more,” I said, “the assumption that the Red Sails didn’t abduct me.”

“Assumption?”

“I’ll concede there’s no evidence that they did abduct me, but evidence the other way is pretty thin too. The only real piece I can see is how far they had to fly to find me. We don’t know anything about how they found Nora’s group.”

“Well then it all comes back to Korbanok,” Laranta said. “You’ve been reading the files. You probably know the specifics even better than I do.”

I nodded, dredging up the psionic files in my mind.

“Tox was the one in charge. But Tispas took over soon after. He’s the one trying to keep a lid on the abductions now. He wasn’t in command of the station when they detected my ship, and not a single one of his logs or files on these drives. He could still be involved,” I said.

“…But he isn’t,” Laranta said. “And I think you can reach why. Force yourself to see more than one possibility.”

“It’s…against his interests,” I said, forcing the words out. “It’s a mess for him even more than you.”

Except…that didn’t prove anything. Tispas didn’t have to be the first person willing to hurt themselves to look innocent.

“But he could still be involved,” I said. “In fact…Nora’s group has three ships of survivors. But I’m the only left from my ship. That’s proof something went very wrong. Tispas’ original plan probably wasn’t to have anyone ever find out we were here.”

“Perhaps,” Laranta said. “But in that case, what was the plan?”

“Sorry?”

“You’re right that someone’s plan went very awry. But suppose for a moment things didn’t go wrong. Where does your ship end up?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“Not Korbanok, I would think,” she said.

“…Because otherwise Tispas wouldn’t have only found Daniel and I,” I realized. “Finding us is what made him look for more. That must be how he found the ships Nora’s group was on.”

“Almost certainly,” she said.

“It’s still not proof though.”

“No, but it might as well be,” Laranta said. “We did almost the exact same thing.”

“What?”

“As soon as Ase Serralinitus confirmed your arrival, I had every satellite I could beg for peer into every corner of this star system. I talked to everyone who’d listen. Civil astronomy groups, the Organic Authority, even the criminal networks operating defunct satellites,” she said. “A new First Contact? The first thing everyone would check for is more of you, just to be safe.”

“You didn’t find any ships though,” I said.

“We found too many,” she disagreed.

“What?”

“We didn’t have the chance to actually find any one ship,” Laranta said. “At any given moment there’s a million things floating around this star that look like a ship. You can look everywhere, or you can search near you, that’s the truth of interstellar scouting. The sheer scale of distances turns everything into blurry pixels.”

“So…everyone looks…but only the Red Sails actually finds anyone?”

Laranta slowed to consider that.

“That seems a bit suspect,” I said.

“It does seem to indicate all of the Human-carrying-ships were relatively close together,” Laranta admitted. “Like I said, it could just be the Red Sails were the ones close enough to find you.”

“That trajectory data of the other ships,” I said. “Where could we find it in these files?”

“You couldn’t,” Laranta said. “Those files are only current to the day we pulled them from Vorak computers; the same day you escaped Korbanok. By our current assumptions, the Red Sails didn’t find Nora here until afterwards.”

“But the Red Sails would have that data right?”

“Yes,” Laranta nodded. “If I had to guess, they’re probably using that information to try and figure out which Beacon you entered the star system with.”

“…Which they wouldn’t already know if they weren’t the ones to abduct me,” I followed.

More and more, things were pointing that way.

…No, even that was wishful thinking.

It already pointed that way. It was the leading possibility, no matter how much it boiled my blood.

But that was the problem and Laranta’s point.

It was probably a bad thing, that my blood boiled over them not abducting me.

How could I just let it go though? They’d done a lot more than—

Oh. Right.

“…You’re wrong,” I said.

Laranta gave a very owl-like blink, adding an inquisitive click.

“You said the Red Sails were not malicious when they found me; but they violated First Contact even without me ever meeting the Coalition. They took my blood, samples from me. I don’t even know how much or what more they took, but I have the scars to prove it. Violating medical tests, physical assault. I’ve done the required reading; I know First Contact rules. Regardless of whatever they chased me for afterwards, I hadn’t met any of you when they did that to me. That has to be something .”

“That is something to discuss,” she said. “It’s not exactly the same thing as abducting you, but it’s definitely a heavy violation. But…Caleb, you said it yourself. ‘The tribe doesn’t exist’. It’s possible that those things were done to you against orders, or by someone who wasn’t in charge, it’s not—”

“I’m not talking about justifying a grudge,” I said.

It wasn’t easy to ignore. But if I could make something right by doing so?

I’d stomach it.

“Even if it was some rak going renegade, they did it with Red Sails resources and personnel. Whatever diplomatic, legal crap you can hold over their heads, would my testimony be enough to leverage them into turning over the other abductees?”

“…No,” Laranta admitted. “Almost certainly not. I could put pressure on system Assembly representatives and colony governance, and it would make the Red Sails even more unpopular than they already are, but they would never hand over abductees they haven’t been proven to have in custody.”

“But Nora,” I said. “She’s living proof there are more of us.”

“She’s certainly another human,” Laranta agreed. “But as long as she remains unconscious, what proof do we actually have she hasn’t been with us the whole time?”

“What? She said—she was on Archo,” I protested.

“That evidence certainly exists, but we don’t have it. If I took the truth to every civil leader on Yawhere, Archo, and Harrogate, it would be me and my subordinates’ word against whatever Vorak representatives appeared.”

“Then we still only have me,” I said angrily. “If my testimony can’t help us free the other abductees, what can we get with it?”

“…I’m hesitant to answer that question,” she said, wary and quiet.

“Tell me,” I asked. “I’m not going to throw a tantrum.”

“…We could negotiate for the bodies of the other abductees from your ship, the ones you prove they have. Serralinitus told me you made sure to take identification from their effects.”

My chest tightened.

Daniel.

Just his body, but...but it was something.

“It’s not a sure thing,” Laranta warned. “Negotiations are never guaranteed…”

“But you think it’s possible?”

“…Even likely.”

“Please,” I asked. “Please help me do that.”