Starsight

“I need you to promise,” Winzik said, pulling a datapad from the bag at his side—Cuna had used a male pronoun to refer to him. “No, vow! My my, it must be forceful. You will not attempt hyperjumps near Starsight. You must follow the regulations on cytonics—no mental attacks, or even prods, upon the minds of people here. No attempts to circumvent the shields preventing cytonic jumps in the region. Absolutely no mindblades, though I doubt you are practiced enough for that.”

“And if I disagree?” I said.

“You’ll be ejected,” Brade said. “Immediately.” She narrowed her eyes at me.

“Brade,” Winzik said. “No need to be so forceful! Emissary, surely you can see the need for us to be careful in this matter. Simply give me your word, and we shall take that as enough! Cuna is vouching for you, after all.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll follow your rules.” Though hopefully I would be back to Detritus with a stolen hyperdrive before too long.

“See, Cuna?” Winzik said, marking something on his datapad. “All you needed to do was bring a proper official with you! Now it’s all done right. My, my.”

Winzik retreated, his human guard trailing along behind him. I watched them go with a frown, confused at the strange interaction.

“I am sorry for that,” Cuna said. “Particularly the human. The Department of Protective Services apparently felt the need to send you an explicit message.” Cuna hesitated. “Though perhaps this is for the best. It would be good for you to have an ally here, among so many strange and new experiences, wouldn’t you say?”

Cuna smiled again, sending a shiver down my spine.

“Anyway,” Cuna said. “I have assigned you requisition privileges so you can stock this location for your needs. Consider it to be an embassy of sorts—a sanctuary for your kind on Starsight, once we successfully build a new future together. If you wish to communicate with me, send a message to the Department of Species Integration, and I will see to it you receive a quick response.”

With that, they excused themself and walked down onto the street, where the crowd had gone back to its ever-flowing stream.

Feeling worn out, I sat down on the steps to the building and watched the people pass. An endless array of creatures, with seemingly infinite variety.

“M-Bot?” I asked.

“Here,” he said in my ear.

“Could you make any sense of all that?”

“I feel like we stumbled into a contest of power,” M-Bot said, “and they’re using you as a piece in their game. That Winzik is an important official, as important as Cuna. It seems remarkable that either of them would come in person to deal with such a seemingly insignificant race’s visit.”

“Yeah,” I said, then looked up from the crowds of people toward the black sky. Somewhere out there was Detritus, square in the sights of Superiority battleships.

“Come pick me up,” M-Bot suggested. “I’ll feel safer away from this public launchpad. There should be some kind of wire or connection at the building that will let me access the station’s public datanet. We can begin looking for information there.”

12

“My scan is complete,” M-Bot said. “I have deactivated the surveillance devices I found inside the building, and I’m pretty sure I found them all.”

“How many were there?” I asked as I poked around the top floor of the embassy building myself, turning on lights and looking through cabinets as I did.

“Two per room,” M-Bot said. “One obvious one hooked up to the network. They would likely feign surprise if you complained that you’d found it, claiming it was just part of the automation of the embassy. Then each room had a second on a separate line, hidden carefully near a power outlet.”

“They’ll find it suspicious that we disconnected those.”

“They might find it surprising that we found them, but in my experience—which is, granted, full of holes and half memories—this is the sort of thing that we’re supposed to politely ignore they did, while they’ll politely ignore our interference in their plans.”

I grunted, entering what was obviously a kitchen. Many of the drawers and things were labeled. Turned out I could hold my translator pin toward text, and it would read out for me what the words said. One faucet was labeled water, another was labeled ammonia, and a third saline. It seemed this place was set up to accommodate a variety of different species.

M-Bot had been right about the private launchpad on the embassy’s roof. Once I’d landed him, I’d plugged him into the datanet, and I’d started looking over the building from the top down. I had left Doomslug in the cockpit for now.

“I’m taking a general imprint of the datanet,” M-Bot continued, “which will hopefully let us mask which information we’re searching for, in case they’re monitoring our requests. There’s a surprising amount on here. The Superiority seems very free with information—though huge holes do exist. There is nothing about cytonics, and there are government warnings shutting down any discussion of hyperdrive technology.”