The V'Dan (26 page)

(
Don’t quit my day job?
) Li’eth asked Jackie, following her out of the cockpit cabin.

(
He means your attempt at humor wouldn’t be good enough to make a living in the evenings, doing stand-up comedy.
) She sent him a series of mental images to explain it, too.

(
Ah. Well, I
cannot
quit my day job. No one is released from the Imperial military during wartime until the enemy is defeated and the war is declared ended,
) he remind her.

“Ah-ah!”
Lieutenant Buraq squeezed ahead of Jackie, lightly slapping the other woman’s hands away from the portside airlock controls. “You do
not
leave this ship until a Marine has determined it is
safe
, Ambassador.”

Li’eth cupped Jackie’s shoulders as the woman carefully checked the readouts for the exterior air. That took only half a minute, but she also checked a visual sweep of the wing area with the monitor, another half minute. Finally, she opened the airlock cautiously . . . and straightened once she was satisfied, stepping to the side.

“You may now safely disembark, Ambassador, Highness.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Jackie didn’t protest too much at the safety precautions. On their own world, most safety precautions were built into their infrastructure. Here . . . it all had to be manually checked until they could build their own embassy enclave, with their own materials, their own plans, and their own labor.

Outside, the steps had already been unfolded from the shuttle’s underbelly. Captain al-Fulan awaited her at the bottom, his uniform crisp, his hand lifted to his brow. “Ten-
hut
!”

His five Marines snapped to Attention, lifting their hands to their temples as well. They stood just beyond the ramp on either side, clad in their Dress Browns like their captain, waiting for Jackie to descend. She did so. As soon as she reached the bottom, she lifted her hand in a brief return salute, fingers straight, hand and forearm angled just so. That permitted them to lower their arms. She turned to al-Fulan as soon as his arm was at his side once again.

“How are things looking, Captain?”
she asked in Mandarin, aware of the V’Dan guards just a few meters away.

“As clean as we can manage, given we don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for,”
he replied in kind.
“The facilities are quite large, mostly self-contained, and most of the plumbing is brand-new. The sp . . . the K’Katta,”
al-Fulan amended politely,
“were the previous inhabitants, so apparently a few things had to be changed. They are polite beings, and were willing to minimize chances of unexpected daily contact by moving to the other building.”

“Yes, that was very polite of the K’Katta,” Jackie admitted in V’Dan. She still felt unnerved by the very idea of sentient giant spiderlike beings . . . but she would deal with it. “I trust you forwarded our thanks.”

“To the two that I have seen in our pretour of the facilities over the last several hours,” he agreed. “Apparently, the life-support systems in the two buildings are just different enough that it would be easier to house us here alongside the Solaricans and Tlassians, rather than the southern embassy building, and easier to house the K’Katta with the Gatsugi and the Choya.

“This also allows us to expand into a few extra, unused chambers, whereas we’d be short a few rooms in the other building if we ever wanted to expand the embassy’s headcount.” Sweeping his hand toward the patiently waiting guards, the captain changed the subject. “May I introduce you to the Imperial Palace Guard? They are also known as the Elite Guard, and are somewhat analogous to our Marines.”

Nodding, Jackie moved with him, letting Li’eth trail after her.

“Grand High Ambassador, this is Grand Captain Nes Tes’rin. Grand Captain, our Ambassador and head of Terran military operations in Alliance space, Jacaranda MacKenzie. Her military rank in our tongue is
colonel
, which, if I understand the equivalency of our ranking systems right, means she is essentially your peer,” al-Fulan introduced them. “But only in military terms, during military maneuvers.”

The grand captain lifted his fist to his chest, thumping it over his heart in formal salute. A quick study of customs, Jackie managed a credible return salute. “Grand Captain.”

“Grand High Ambassador,” he replied briefly.

She eyed the neatly uniformed man. His outfit carried a lot more gold braiding and frogging than expected. With olive-golden skin, dark brown eyes, black hair neatly pulled into a queue that allowed his curls to form a single, thick ringlet, his cyan-blue marks were an odd contrast to his red-and-gold uniform. Still, he managed to look formal and somewhat formidable, and that had her respect. “I am told your people will be providing an extra security perimeter outside our embassy?”

“That is correct. Anything that takes place within your suites’ walls will be yours to handle, unless there is structural
damage, or your people or your emergency system call for our aid,” he confirmed. “The moment you step outside those spaces, however, you are under
our
jurisdiction. Our rules will be obeyed.”

“That was already understood, Grand Captain. Every member of my staff knows they must behave. However, we are not familiar with V’Dan laws, beyond those built on compassion, courtesy, and common sense,” she warned him mildly. “We may accidentally transgress.”

“We are aware of that, meioas,” the Elite officer stated. “Our job is as much to facilitate, explain, and smooth over such things as it is to guard your safety, above and beyond maintaining the safety of the Imperial Tier and the Winter Palace. Speaking of which,” Tes’rin stated, turning to bow to Li’eth, “welcome home, Your Highness. We were glad to hear you had survived your . . . incarceration by the enemy.”

“Thank you, Grand Captain,” Li’eth stated. “We should continue to the tour of the embassy facilities. The Terrans are not afraid of hard work, and they have a lot of equipment to move into the suites; they will be eager to get moving. Shall we lead the way?”

“Of course. If you are ready, Grand High Ambassador?” Tes’rin asked. Jackie nodded.

“First Platoon B Gamma, remain here and secure the shuttle,” al-Fulan ordered, pointing at his handful of troops. “B Beta, Corporal Gammoor, remain on hand to escort each group. Hangar personnel, please line up your trolleys and cargo sleds where Corporal Gammoor directs.”

Gammoor, a gentleman from the same province of Cameroon as Ayinda if Jackie remembered right, broke formation to approach a set of workers maneuvering a hose toward the Terran ship. “Meioa, that hose had better contain
drinking
water. You
will
be drinking it before a single drop touches the tanks of our ships as a demonstration that it
is
water. If you are not completely confident that it contains drinkable water, take it back now . . .”

“Gently,”
the captain murmured in Arabic, more to himself than to anyone on hand.

“Nice to know everything’s in good hands,”
Jackie quipped in the same tongue, moving with him to follow the Elite Guards.
Two remained, she noticed, but they stayed back a little ways, clearly not there to interfere with the others on the
Embassy 1
disembarking. Lieutenant Colvers, seeing that the corporal was taking care of identifying the hose’s contents, remained near the tail of the oversized ship.
“That’s a good threat.”

“Gammoor thought of it when we first landed, and smelled the petrochemicals growing stronger. All of our troops have been adapting quite flexibly, but then we picked the best we could get,”
al-Fulan agreed. A whining rumble from the lift, which had ascended, warned them that the next Terran ship was coming into view.

“Might want to tell him not to actually make anyone drink biodiesel fuel,”
Jackie suggested. There were hints of such chemicals in the air, but they were relatively faint compared to the smells encountered in the quarantine docking bay on the
Dusk Army
. Then again, this place looked like it had been freshly scrubbed, smelling faintly of detergent-style compounds.
“As effective as it is as a threat, we are merely guests here.”

“It’ll happen only if they insist they have the right hose and bring it within a meter of the ship. They almost pulled the wrong hose to ours,”
al-Fulan warned her.
“Threatening them seems to be the only way to get them to take our orders seriously.”

“Don’t overuse the authority.”

“Of course not, but petrochemicals in the tanks
would
destroy the engines. My job is to protect you and the others,”
al-Fulan warned her, brown eyes stern with his devotion to that duty.
“That includes securing our ships against any possible tampering and destruction, in case we need to leave at a moment’s notice.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

(
I take it that is yet another of the languages you speak?
) Li’eth asked her when their conversation fell quiet.

(
Yes, we’re going over potential protocol versus security concerns,
) Jackie reassured him. (
He voiced them in his native tongue, so to show courtesy, I replied in it.
)

(
How do you keep all those hundreds of languages straight?
) he asked her.

(
It’s only eighty or so, and practice. Lots and lots of practice. It helps that many of them are related to each other, though that can cause occasional bouts of confusion, too.
)

They were approaching a column larger than the rest, which was saying a lot; Jackie had seen houses back on Earth that were smaller than most of these support struts. This one had what looked like a bank of lifts attached, but all of them were apparently built to withstand quite a lot of weight. Even the stone-and-steel trusses overhead were interlocking arches, and every single arch and column shaft had repeating bits of equipment attached to it.

Li’eth caught her looking up and sent an explanation. (
Those are inertia dampeners in case of an earthquake, explosion, or other sort of stress or strain on the structure. Earthquakes are very rare here, but there have been two in the last nine thousand years.
)

(
And the explosions?
) Jackie asked, eyeing the Elite Guards flanking what looked like doors to an elevator shaft and a stairwell.

(
There have been a few more of those, but none in recent centuries,
) he admitted.

The scarlet-cream-and-gold-clad soldiers saluted their captain superior at their approach. One of them turned to summon the elevator. A shout echoed across the bay, the sound almost lost in the whining rumble of the next, normal-sized
Embassy
ship activating its thruster field so that, too, could glide sideways into a parking zone. Hearing it, Jackie peered back the way they had come. Someone was leaning out the airlock door, and a few moments later, one of the brown-clad Humans on the ground came running their way.

It was Corporal Gammoor. His white teeth gleamed in his face, displayed in a grin. Eager for good news, if curious, Jackie broke off from the others and trotted that way. That meant al-Fulan had to detour and follow her though Li’eth remained behind.

“Corporal, report?” she called out, raising her voice over the thrumming of the drifting, lowering
Embassy 2
.

“They’ve successfully transited Kepler 444, clear sailing all the way!” The engines of the
Embassy 2
shut off, leaving his last few words to echo among the nearest arches overhead. He slowed, since now they were within understanding range of each other. “Commander Graves says he just got the news that they’ve successfully scanned,
refueled
, and jumped past
the Kepler 444 System. Two, three more good breaks like that, and we can start inserting new depots and shorten the jump-chain to V’Dan! At this rate, we can trim four, maybe even five days off the trip!”

“That
is
good news!” Jackie called back, grinning. “Go tell the commander to pass along some high praise to the ships mapping out the new route!”

“Yes, sir! Right away, sir!” He grinned and flicked her a salute as he did so, already turning to jog his way back to the ship.

Turning herself, Jackie hurried back to the others. Grand Captain Tes’rin eyed her approach, curiosity on his tan-and-cyan face. “May I ask what that was about, Grand High Ambassador?”

“As soon as we confirmed via the hyperrelays that
this
system was the one we were looking for, to return our V’Dan guests,” Jackie explained, “we immediately started setting up modular supply depots and caches along the route that initially got us to your system. That route, determined by consulting a combination of our star charts and the memories of Leftenant Superior Ba’oul Des-n’yi, who was the pilot on board Captain Ma’an-uq’en’s ship, originally aimed us toward what turned out to be Gatsugi space.

“From there, he was able to give us much more concise directions, but it still took some guesswork to get from system to system,” she continued. Entering the lift—the personnel-sized lift, not the one for the great ships, which was already ascending again—she gestured up and over with her hand. “The path described by that route is vaguely a right-angle turn, like the two legs of a triangle. As soon as we knew that, Admiral Nayak took five ships off the task of setting up resupply points and instead put them on exploring the hypotenuse of the triangle.

“
That
means that—with luck and after a few months of putting the depots in place—any Terrans going home in the future won’t have to spend fourteen days in space taking the long route. Kepler 444,” she said, using the Terranglo words for the system, “lies just past the two-thirds point. It’s what we call a cool red star, over 11 million years old, with several planets hugging it closely. Some of the systems we’ve encountered like
that so far have had large debris fields, making it a bit scary to transit them for the first time. Apparently, this one isn’t all that scary, which is great, but the
really
good news is that they found a source of water in the system suitable for refueling.”