Sarah Zettel - Reclamation

But that reasoning had its drawbacks. It meant the most determined and intelligent dissidents kept their activities far away from the parks. Jahidh’s thoughts had never appeared there. Basq had watched for them.

He didn’t let the Imperialist text or his thoughts break his stride. At this moment, he could not be seen to care about anything but setting to work.

Caril let Basq open their door, as etiquette dictated. The portal slid aside to reveal a hive of activity. All four of Basq’s contracted Intership Ambassadors were seated at their stations. The stations themselves were cubical areas marked by pillars of communication fibers sheathed in optical matter. Holosheets or prerecorded requests could be hung from the pillars so that the machines could tap the datastores on other ships for routine retrieval and sort operations. The ISAs themselves handled the calls where complexity or courtesy required personal contact. Their voices rilled the air as they advised, coordinated, recalled, or referenced contacts regarding Basq’s new status and potential requirements. His three apprentices, all of them shaved and robed in red, bustled between the stations, carrying drinks or extra holosheets or relaying questions between the ISAs.

Basq felt his chest swell with pride. He had dismissed his Beholden before he donned his white robe to go meet with his Contractors. Caril must have recalled them all the second the contracts for his new assignment arrived. She had meant more than he had expected when she said, “I will have our quarters ready.”

“Jene,” Basq called above the voices. The supervisor of the team put his station into stasis with two keystrokes and presented himself in front of Basq, a little too quickly. Jene was a student Contractor and the purple bands on his robe were cut with black diamonds. One of the honors conferred on Basq with his promotion was Jene. Under Basq’s guidance, Jene was learning to coordinate and supervise a team of Beholden. “Have the team suspend their activities and stand ready for new assignments. Compile a report of the status of our current resources and contracts.”

“Yes, Ambassador.” Jene’s gaze slid over Basq’s shoulder to Winema.

“Do you see something I don’t, Supervisor?” Basq inquired.

“No, Ambassador,” Jene brought his attention back where it belonged. “The report will be prepared and logged in fifteen minutes.”

“That will be sufficient.” When Jene completed his schooling, he would automatically become Basq’s superior, but if he was unable to handle the tasks his station required both in terms of complexity and etiquette, he’d have nothing to thank Basq for.

Basq fixed his gaze on his work alcove and headed straight for it. His apprentices stepped around him without a word. Praise and greetings to his Beholden would be handed out once Jene’s report had shown him what they had earned.

Let it be seen I run my team properly. No one in this atmosphere will be led to inappropriate ideas or manners. Let it be seen that if Jahidh had not been removed from our care, he would have never even thought of defecting.

Pointless fear, Basq scolded himself. Why can I not let it go? If anyone had any thought that his actions reflected on me, on us, I would not have been assigned to the committee.

Without needing to be asked, Caril retrieved two extra chairs from the main room. Winema did not sit down immediately. While Basq pressed the contract holosheets into the fiber-filled walls, Winema opened her bag. She took out two cubical system taps and typed in their activation codes. Caril stepped around her to raise the privacy walls. Grey-white optical matter spread out from the walls, building on itself until it fenced in the entire work area.

Winema affixed the first tap to the arm of Basq’s terminal chair. When her hand released it, the red warning light blinked on. If the tap were moved or if its dataflow was disturbed without the proper signals being given, Winema would see a warning on her camera set. So would all the other active Witnesses. She hung the second tap between the contracts.

Visible taps on his terminal, of course, were no guarantee that Winema had not ordered invisible ones to be placed on his Beholden’s terminals. It was well within the bounds of her contract to order the entire area to be placed under a continuous data scan.

Winema took her seat next to Caril, and Basq settled himself in the terminal chair. He swung the keypads into place. Although he had meant what he had said to Caril when he greeted her, part of him knew that home for him was really in front of his terminal. This was where he had made the discoveries about Eric Born that led directly to the location of the Home Ground.

Basq’s terminal was not the standard type, like the ones his students and Beholden used. Those were designed with processing layers of generalized organic chains between the silicates. The means for making organic/inorganic chips was another of the private technologies. The integration of organics ensured that no outside machine could tap into the Vitae private network because it would be unable to decode the chemical signals that diffused them. The organics in Basq’s terminal took the technology a step further. They had been designed from maps of his cerebral cortex and cloned from his own cell structure. Basq’s terminal could be used to assemble information in a way that matched the way Basq thought. It was, in many ways, his learning and skill directly enhanced by the speed and precision of a machine.

Basq settled his hands into position on the slip-keys that covered his control pads. There were those who used vocal interfaces, giving orders to their terminals and receiving answers as if they were dealing with apprentices or Beholden. Basq had never liked that. He liked to shuffle and manipulate tangible results. It gave him a better feel for his work.

It only took a moment to slip the keys into new positions so that the board was reconfigured to lock the posted contracts into the main dataflow. Now, the sheets could be read through the network by anyone who needed to verify Basq’s authority, but their contents could not be changed without a direct signal from either Avir or Kelat.

The next thing to be done was to call up Jene’s report of the current resources and status of the terminals in the main room. Basq slid his keys into the proper positions. The main display space showed him a tidy series of graphs indicating available storage space as well as a chart of the channels that had been opened or reserved.

As it stood, he could instantly contact the persons of Ivale or Uary, or read through the information in their datastores. He also had an open line to the main datastore of the Hundredth Core and one of the ISAs, Paral, wasn’t it? Basq squinted at the ID code under the chart; Paral had thought to draw up contracts for time on the lines between the Grand Errand and each of the ships in the encampment, just in case they were required. Basq made a mental note to give the ISA his warmest personal greeting.

All the resources he might need were available and all of them ready for his orders. Basq felt a bit dizzy. He was used to juggling budgets and time and angling for the attention of various Subcontractors and supervisors. Those concerns were wiped away. Now he advised the Reclamation Assembly and the information he required to serve them would be delivered whenever he asked for it.

Basq poised his hands over the keys and considered his assignment. An analysis of the level of danger that the human-derived artifacts presented to the Reclamation efforts. How to even begin to answer such a question? Then he remembered his secondary assignment. Assess the level of danger represented by the missing artifacts. It was dangerous to theorize from a sample of one, but if specifics known about Eric Born could be supplemented by the generalities known about the human-derived artifacts populating the Home Ground, then some useful conclusions might be drawn. The new revelations regarding Eric Born’s abilities added an extra dimension to the calculations. If Born could manipulate physical objects more massive than streams of photons or quanta, then he might…He might…Basq felt his heart contract.