Sarah Zettel - Reclamation

Zur-Iyal ki Maliad looked back at him with gold eyes half-hidden under a ragged curtain of straight black hair. The color of both was new.

“I like the look, Iyal.” Perivar ran his hand through his own hair to comb it back. “Dyes or upgrades?”

“Upgrade on the hair. Stays dry in the rain. The eyes are overlays. UV screens. I’m seeing if I like them or not.”

“Handy when you’re out in the field so much, I guess.” Iyal spent most of her time with the institute’s livestock, and it showed. She was a big, round woman. A casual observer might have mistaken her bulk for fat, but only until she moved. As she leaned across the table and folded her arms, muscles rippled visibly beneath her sun-browned skin.

“What can I do for you, Perivar? Or is this social?” The UV screens did not hide the mischievous glint in her eyes.

Perivar chuckled. “Iyal, Iyal, what would your husband say?”

“‘Is he still any good?’” They shared the long laugh. It was an old joke, but it felt good.

“Actually, I need a favor, Iyal.”

“Oh?”

“I need a gene scan run. Nothing fancy. Just make sure the specimen’s clean and healthy. You know the kind of thing.”

“Oh yes. I do know.” She drew back abruptly and Perivar thought of Kiv doing the same thing, not five minutes ago. “I didn’t think I was doing that ‘kind of thing’ for you anymore.”

“It’s a one-off, Iyal. I’m tying down a loose favor.”

Iyal’s sigh ruffled her new hair across her forehead. “Once, Perivar. That’s all the old times are good for right now. We just got a whole shipment of kids from the Vitae’s university. If I don’t keep myself clean, one of them’s going to be earning my pay.”

“Once.” Perivar laid two ringers over his heart. “The promise goes from here to the gods.”

Iyal just watched him. “The Rhudolant Vitae are making sure everybody comes down real hard on…the competition…these days. I hope you’re still in shape.”

“Wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t. Check your hard mail bin tonight, Iyal. I’ll have the sample in it.”

“Good enough. Take care, Perivar.”

“And you, Iyal.”

She watched him thoughtfully for a minute longer before her hand reached out to her control panel and his screen went blank. Because he didn’t request another line, the display lowered itself until it was flush with the counter again.

So, I lied, he said silently to the space where the display used to be. I wouldn’t be doing this if I was sure Eric would keep his mouth shut about me if I didn’t.

Gods, gods, gods. I’d forgotten about this. Don’t trust anybody. Can’t trust anybody. Everybody’s dangling something over you, unless you’ve got something to dangle over them, and even then it’s who’s got more and what’s worse. Abruptly, he found himself laughing. I’m getting old. And cowardly.

It wasn’t a general warning that Iyal had brought up about the Vitae, although they were the main reason her job was in danger. Thanks to the talent-mongering Vitae, Amaiar Gardens was one of the few independent gene-tailoring houses left on Kethran.

Kethran was an artificial ecology. A hundred thousand details of the environmental balance had to be constantly monitored, maintained, and replenished. A population surge coupled with an unexplained drought had the Senate screaming for help. The Vitae had quietly offered to take over the administration of the ecology for a comparatively reasonable trade and land contract. They’d moved the majority of the government employees into labs and farms they themselves subsidized, and in three years they had made themselves indispensable.

With that kind of power, they could make more than a few demands without the official power base getting upset. They could, for example, ask for rigid enforcement of some of the legal codes.

Never mind that the Vitae were the largest purchasers and purveyors of contraband bodies in the Quarter Galaxy. It was only one of the areas where they had a low tolerance for competition.

Perivar had sometimes wondered what the Vitae were looking for. They had the most sophisticated gene-engineering methods in the Quarter Galaxy, and yet they bought body after body. It was a clumsy, risky, expensive way of acquiring new genetic patterns. Tasa Ad and Kessa, the heads of the runner team Perivar had been part of, had survived by selling their…acquisitions…exclusively to the Vitae, or the Vitae’s clients.

Perivar remembered the cargo hold on the runner’s ship then. Double racks of anesthetized bodies in support capsules. No sound, except for the weird harmony that came from so many support systems droning on together.

What do you think I am? asked Eric’s voice from memory.

I think…I think I didn’t think.

“Perivar?” Kiv’s hail sounded through his translator disk.

“Here.” Perivar straightened up. “Open up. It’s all right.”

The membrane housing slid back. Perivar looked through the threshold to see the slightly wobbly scene of Kiv and his family. All five of the kids were in evidence, swarming up and down the poles, working on the control pads, delving under the map table. Kiv held all his eyes and hands open.

“We need to…” began Kiv.

“Go over the…” Dene scuttled out from under the map table and vanished under the communications counter.

“Shipment of packet 73-1511.” Ere took her place of pride on her parent’s shoulders, hands out and ready to work.

“Now!” added Ka, as she slithered halfway up her parent’s back. Ka hated to be left out.

Perivar nodded, understanding what he saw as a mark of trust. Kiv had nothing precious hidden. Nothing more needed to be said. Perivar leaned over his map table and touched the slave key to synch the two tables together. Ri slid into the capsule and shot across the cables to dangle above him as his map lit up.

The map showed a representation of one-tenth of the Quarter Galaxy from a communicator’s point of view. Suns shone as pinpricks of gold; inhabited stations were green and drone stations were blue. The chaos of the communications networks stretched between them as a series of glowing white line segments. Solid lines showed the beam connections. Dotted lines showed the places only a ship could reach. A red grid overlay the entire arrangement, measuring everything out in hundred-light-year squares.

The network had no organization. It was several million shifting threads, made up of everything from cavernous, public databases, to hard-wired private lines, to rented AIs like Brain.

Perivar accessed packet 73-1511’s shipment plan. The map displayed the work in progress by turning a series of the white lines orange.

Calling what they were organizing a “packet” was a convenient shorthand. 73-1511 was actually a data transfer from a research station to a third stage colony. A library’s worth of specialized manufacturing information needed to be copied across ten thousand light-years’ worth of network. It was a complicated process, especially since “simultaneous transmission” was a meaningless concept across the distances the map represented. Even quantum transfers took time. Without careful planning, the channels, even if they were reserved with solid credit, shifted and blurred. The pathway, and all the information, could be lost in a heartbeat.

That much-disliked fact gave Perivar and Kiv their living. They found clients who needed a specific kind of information, found a source for that information, and then, most importantly, found a way to get the information from the source to the client. Each shipment took hours of planning and sometimes more insurance than their combined accounts could afford.