CHAPTER ELEVEN | YUKETIS BETA

  82 hours until Contact, 29 days until Convergence

  ‘One anthropic interpretation of quantum mechanics is that the universe, through its supreme order, exists only because we observe it as such. Is it arrogance, then, to assume that it was designed to produce us? That we’re here for a reason? That, somewhere, deep within the code, our lives might be of great consequence to somebody?’

  – from ‘Humanity Before Convergence’ by Laithan Shah

  Yuketis Beta’s human postmaster, their neural link a pulsing spider’s web of wires trailing from the back of their skull, peered down at the tiny, furred alien gumming up the line. ‘Seven hundred and sixty-one petabytes comes to’—they blinked, feigning the math—'two hundred credits.’

  The four-foot alien, a blend of dik-dik antelope and sifaka lemur, flicked her tail in irritation. ‘That barely covers the trigger-fuel it took me to get here.’

  The postmaster shrugged. ‘By all means, take it up with accounting. I’m sure they’ll get back to you within the next cycle or so.’

  Snorting through her ventilative, bellows-like snout, the diminutive alien clambered up to snatch the debit discs within her double-thumbed forepaws, her cupped, leaf-like ears pinning back as she snipped the words, ‘Grey-bait.’

  ‘Tree-rat,’ the postmaster fired back.

  Flattening her tufted crest of pale-brown fur upon her forehead, the bipedal deer-monkey pogo-hopped past the awaiting column of snickering freight jockeys. Sure, the courier gig was just a tried-and-tested ruse to get groundside, but for two hundred measly KAAP credits, this particular ass-end of the Kessian Assembly had just earned itself a permanent slot on her no-byte list.

  The freight jockeys were still chuckling at the sight of a Tiyk when, instead of heading back to her ship, the alien ducked into the shade of a nearby cargo scaffold.

  Maijah Doon: covert, infiltrator, self-proclaimed data-jacker. She’d roosted in more than a few trees over the cycles, but this one paid better than most—if you didn’t mind the risks. For her real trade wasn’t couriering bytes, but answering questions—treacherous questions—and her current chase was a doozy: Why was Vahril Kantus, Honoured KAAP Delegate and Chief Minister for the Galactic Advancement of Science and Technology, currently sneaking about the galaxy?

  Thanks to a clever bit of trajectory tracing, she had tracked him all the way from the Assembly’s core world of Auph Kessia. And as for why the minister had suddenly chartered a voyage to this backwater colony—well... that’s what she was here to find out.

  Poking her wrist pad with declawed fingers as the spaceport continued to thrum—grav-mandibled loaders clattering by with an irregular, insectile clicking; docking clamped spacecraft exhaling the burnt-wire stench of ionised trigger-fuel—Maijah surmised two things: first, Vahril Kantus had arrived approximately two hours earlier; and second, he wasn’t in any hurry to leave, requesting a temporary residence in one of the colony’s luxury habitats. That was enough to give Maijah pause. A Kessian Grey wouldn’t have stayed on this moltwaste of a planet for no good reason.

  She snapped her wrist pad shut and slipped into phase two: rumour-sifting. A few stray whispers could sprout a forest of intel—and Maijah had just the ears for it.

  If pressed, she would’ve been the first to admit that choosing the life of a covert might not have been the wisest of decisions. Unlike other sentient species within the KAAP, rising to the peak of their planetary food chains through carnivorous savagery and predatorial cunning, her primordial ancestors had advanced not as hunters, but as prey, evolved only to slake the hunger of others.

  But subsistence had its own gifts.

  Prized for its flexible holdfasts, nutrient-rich stems and saprotrophic bladders, it was said that the Tiyk of Kwaikos instead owed much of their modern sentience to a most extraordinary plant: laktee’nigh, star kelp. Located in sinkholes dotting the coastal lowlands of her tropical homeworld, they were a brain-boosting source of fat and protein, allowing her herbivorous ancestors to rise beyond their lowly beginnings.

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  Maijah had barely been older than a calfling when she first saw the kelp groves for herself. The bioluminescent glow of a million star-like pods seemed to mirror the constellations above as she and those of her khesset lowered a fallen kinsman into the waters of their ancestral sink.

  ‘Blessed star kelp,’ she had intoned, tearing into one of the phosphorescent capsules with chisel-like teeth, suckling at the sacred blue-glow within. ‘Permit me to see Creation with knowing eyes.’

  Maijah dropped to knuckle-walk through the busyness of the spaceport, ducking and weaving between towers of machinery and sauntering legs. Had it not been for laktee’nigh, perhaps she and those of her species would’ve remained trembling quarry forever. Nevertheless, Honoured Delegate Noot Zilehli, Chief Minister for the Department of Culture and Posterity, had requested her personally, and she wasn’t about to repay the Grey’s trust by returning empty-handed.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ the minister had said, impossibly tall and bone-thin, her enormous eyes fixed on the starship Astraea as it was readied for launch. ‘He’s up to something.’

  ‘Or worse,’ Maijah added. ‘The something’s already been done.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Noot Zilehli pondered. Beneath the loom of her homeworld’s accompanying gas giant, her skin shimmered like pearly feldspar—not quite silver, not quite lavender, something in between. ‘Did you manage to get your hands on the probe?’

  ‘Probe’s gone,’ Maijah replied. ‘Scrap metal, probably. Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.’

  Noot blinked as she turned, translucent inner membranes sweeping sideways across her dark, reflective eyes, as vast as deep space. ‘You can do that?’ she asked. ‘Track a ship through subspace?’

  ‘It’s technical,’ Maijah shrugged. ‘I won’t bore you with the details.’

  Noot studied the tawny-furred creature looking so tiny upon her bed: her soft belly tapering to a waist coated with creamy, speckled shades. ‘How long do you think you’ll be gone this time?’

  The Tiyk rolled onto her front, coaxing the Grey over with a flick of her tail—the slow, suggestive lick of a tongue. ‘Why?’ she asked, pinning the Kessian down as soon as she was close, stroking and kissing everywhere the apex sentient had taught her to stroke and kiss. ‘You gonna miss me?’

  ‘Yes,’ the minister gasped, her three-fingered hands threading through the tufted hairs of Maijah’s crest, tugging upon oversized ears. Her slender thighs squeezed as she tipped back her head, spindled toes crossing while the little alien caressed her to paradise. ‘Oh, by the Maw! Always!’

  Always...

  Maijah had wanted to melt with her then, remain in her chambers until the eventual heat death of the universe rendered their atoms void. But, as was too often the case, duty called.

  Beneath the faux-light glare of omnipresent glow-tubes, Maijah wandered the off-white utilities and habitat corridors of the Yuketis mining colony, horizontally pupilled eyes scanning the ever-shifting crowds, pivoting ears—aided by a pair of universal translators—listening in on every passing conversation. She rechecked her wrist pad: no untoward traffic from the comms, no registered movements near the luxury habitats. It seemed that Vahril Kantus had cosseted himself up for a wait. That told her more than it didn’t.

  ‘Still can’t believe Voss bitched himself so easily,’ she overheard while nursing a darkly hued concoction in some disreputable corner of the human habitats. ‘And to that fucking lank of a xenos, Kantus, too!’

  Maijah powered up her wrist pad. Voss. She knew that name. A human. Descendant of the core world glamour stocks. Captain of the Monkfish—a de facto legend among smugglers and freight jockeys alike, if only for the luxury of owning her.

  According to the colony’s manifest, he had departed under “clandestine intentions”—and not leisurely, either. He’d scarpered barely an hour after Kantus’s arrival.

  Interesting, Maijah thought. The pretty piece of Grey-bait had obviously been chartered for something—a fetch-quest, a swoop. But specifics? No amount of digging had yet uncovered that.

  So she turned to more... enterprising tactics.

  ‘One move, meat-bag, and you’re—what do you humans call it? Oh, yeah. Barbeque.’

  The human hacker-jacker—a sorry piece of vat-descended meat—raised his hands against the spicy end of her military-grade “quickster-fixster”: plasmic, flash-frying, blacklisted across most of the KAAP. Apparently, he and those of his ilk had been dropping like flies across the colony, their inquisitive snooping leaving nothing but brain matter splattered across every junction box and server room.

  ‘You’re wasting your time, Tiyk. Kantus has locked everything down tighter than a corefold rim.’

  Maijah clicked off the safety, prompting a tapered, sizzling ping. ‘Let’s start with what you do know.’

  ‘Only that digging any deeper will pop me like a zit,’ he replied, the neural link on his left temple glimmering as it continued to feeler through the network—a back-alley probe. ‘He’s littered the system with watchers—the sploding kind.’

  Maijah dialled the charge a touch higher.

  ‘Earth, goddammit!’ the hacker soon yelped. ‘He sent Voss to Earth!’

  Maijah flashed a smooth row of incisors. Great. The one place she couldn’t follow.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Something about a research facility! That’s all any of us know! Going any deeper triggers the—!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Khioni Sigma! Khioni Sigma, all right? Now, slack that fuckin’ fixster before I—’

  Maijah flicked up her wrist pad, the smell of freshly fired plasma biting as she holstered her gun, a bubbled curtain of brain-meat sludge-sliding its way down data-flicker walls.

  Khioni Sigma. Habitability class—“husk”. A five-hundred-plus lens-jump on already dwindling trigger-fuel.

  Sometimes, she wished the blessed star kelp had kept its sentience to its fucking self.

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