Confluence

CHAPTER TEN: EAN LAMBERT

Admiral Orsaya was delighted to be officially placed in charge of security for linesmen. She came out personally to reassure Ean he was in safe hands.

“I know that.” Ean was on Confluence Station. The lines would look after him.

A pleased hum echoed through the station lines. “We’ll look after you well.”

“Thank you. I know you will.”

Sale was less happy. “We’re perfectly capable of looking after you. This business with Radko had better not take long.”

Vega had called Sale as Ean had arrived back on Confluence Station, told her about Orsaya, then asked her to come in to the Lancastrian Princess after she finished work that day. Ean eavesdropped unashamedly on the call. Sale had just clicked off when Ean and Bhaksir rejoined them. Bhaksir had shrugged, and Sale had looked at her comms but hadn’t asked anything else.

“You’re coming out to the Confluence with us today, Ean.” Sale looked at Orsaya, who’d smiled, and said nothing.

It had been a long night. Ean tried to doze while Sale and Bhaksir talked quietly off to one side, and everyone else pretended things were fine.

“No idea,” Bhaksir said. “But everyone on board the Lancastrian Princess is on edge. Vega nearly bit my head off when I asked. It doesn’t help that it’s happened at the same time as this business with the Worlds of the Lesser Gods. That’s all anyone’s talking about on ship.”

“I imagine not.” Sale glanced over at Ean. He thought she was going to come and talk to him after that, so he looked away.

The Confluence welcomed them. It was the only thing that seemed happy today.

“We’ll have crew for you soon,” Ean said.

“Crew is good. Lonely.”

Ean knew that as well as the ships did. “I know. We’re doing what we can.” He was trying hard not to promise something he couldn’t deliver, but if the New Alliance didn’t make up its mind soon, he was going to assign linesmen himself.

“We choose, too.”

He hoped he hadn’t committed to choosing linesmen without the council’s agreement. “I’m going for a walk,” he told Sale. He needed to distract himself and the ship.

Bhaksir looked at Ru Li and Hana.

“On it,” Ru Li said, and the two of them trailed after Ean.

“You realize,” Ru Li said to Hana, “Bhaksir never made Radko take anyone with her. That means she thinks we’re half the person Radko is.”

“You are half the person Radko is,” Ean said.

“Oh, that’s mean, Ean. Especially when I know you really mean it.”

He had meant it. Ean bit his lip. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” Don’t compound your mistakes, Radko would say. Or would that be Sale? He took a deep breath. “You know what I mean.”

Luckily for him, they did.

He stopped at one of the large crew rooms. On board the Confluence, there were always things to do. Except he couldn’t think straight today.

Protection. That would be a good start. Ean and the ships had to be able to protect their people. Like he had before, with Radko, throwing the enemy across the room but a controlled throwing.

“I’m going to practice with line eight,” he told the ship.

“Practice?”

What had the aliens done when they wanted to practice? Or were the lines so natural to them they didn’t need to? He searched for another word to explain. “Work with,” he said finally. “Ru Li, Hana, you need to stay behind me.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working with line eight.”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Hana said, as they both moved in behind him. “Isn’t line eight the one that throws people around?”

“That’s why I have to learn to use it.”

How did you work with something you couldn’t see, you could only hear? You listened to them. And you tried to explain what you were doing because though you heard music, the general consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t just music, it was your thoughts that conveyed the message.

“I want to build a field to protect us.”

It built a field all right. Ean recognized the tune. The protective green field that surrounded the ship and when anything came within 9.7 kilometers of it, spread out, annihilating anything within two hundred kilometers.

“No. Not that one.”

On the bridge, Sale grabbed her comms. “Ean. Whatever you did, don’t. Turn it off.”

Sale wasn’t a linesman, but she was a good ship person. Especially on the Confluence, which she and her team knew better than anyone else alive, except Ean.

The green field died. Cut off instantly.

“It’s off.” Ean waited for his heart to stop racing. Thank goodness Abram insisted no vehicle ever went within two hundred kilometers of any of the alien ships without permission.

“What did he do?” Hana asked Ru Li.

Ru Li gave an elaborate, exaggerated shrug.

How did Ean explain to the ship what he wanted? Then, last time he had used eight that way, it had been on the Gruen, which was a different ship in a different fleet. Maybe only human ships did it. Maybe it was their equivalent of the green shield. Maybe it was the only thing they could do, for they didn’t have the equipment to produce the other.

No. That couldn’t be it. Both times, the ship had been protecting individual people.

“I was on the Gruen, and someone fired at Radko. And we—I—knew he was going to kill her. So line eight made a protective field on the ship and stopped the other man’s weapon.”

He still hadn’t made himself understood to line eight by the time they left to go home.

Abram waited for him on Confluence Station.

“Wouldn’t it be smarter for us to go to the Lancastrian Princess?” Ean asked, as they settled in with tea in Ean’s quarters. Michelle liked it when Abram came back to her ship, and so did the crew. “Sattur Dow isn’t there yet, and we’d know long before he arrived that he was coming.”

Abram made a face that could have been a grimace. “Both Michelle and Vega feel it is better for me to spend less time on the Lancastrian Princess for the moment.”

That was like kicking Michelle herself off the ship. It was Abram’s home as much as it was hers. Or it had been. “Sometimes, I don’t like change much.”

“Change is inevitable,” Abram said. “You go with the changes as they come, try to control them.”

Abram and Michelle were both masters at controlling change and making it suit them.

“Do you ever regret becoming an admiral? Do you ever think that if you had to do it again you’d say no, and stay in your old job?”

He didn’t have to hear Abram’s reply to know the answer—the lines told him the truth.

Abram sidestepped the question anyway. “Have you met the other Lancastrian admirals, Ean? I can’t think of one I’d like to see in Alien Affairs. Lancia’s reputation is not undeserved. We have been too long in power. When we want something, we go out and get it, without thought to the consequences.”

“But you think of the consequences.”

“I think of the future, Ean. That is all.” There was a strong sound of Michelle in the lines now. “I want Lancia to have a future.”

He wanted it for Michelle.

“Emperor Yu is right to accuse me of controlling access to Haladea III. I do. Because I believe that is best for Lancia’s future. I might be wrong. There are plenty of people who believe what they are doing is right, when it isn’t.”

“You are not wrong. And keeping you off the Lancastrian Princess is crazy.”

“Michelle has her reasons. And I trust Michelle implicitly. If she thinks there’s a problem, there’s a problem.”

What sort of problem would Michelle be worried about? It was Yu who had accused Abram of working against him, not Sattur Dow. Was Michelle expecting Dow to act as proxy for Yu? Or was there something more?

“What does Lancia do to traitors, Abram?”

Abram grimaced. “Treason has to be proven first.”

That didn’t answer the question. Ean waited.

“But that’s not what I came here to talk about.”

Of course it wasn’t. Did Abram ever pay social visits?

Abram blew out his breath. “We’re going to sing another ship into the Eleven fleet.”

“Into?” Ean asked, just to be sure. They asked him to sing the ships out, which he couldn’t. Not in.

“We are looking for the aliens.”

Abram believed that if they didn’t find the aliens, the aliens would find them one day. It was better, in Abram’s opinion, that humans were the ones who did the finding. It gave them more control. Furthermore, Abram believed that Kari Wang’s jump into alien space would have triggered an alert, somewhere. Ean had told the ship to go somewhere safe. Safe for an eleven ship was likely to be close to its alien home, in a sector with other alien line ships.

The aliens would have picked up the line signal. Especially if they were looking for it, for no one, not even aliens, would lose an Eleven-class ship and not be searching for it. Aliens would arrive one day, following the Eleven’s trail.

Humans didn’t know how old the war was that the alien ships had fled from, or how close. All they knew was that the Confluence fleet had accumulated a lot of damage, and anything that could do damage like that would annihilate human ships. Abram’s job in the Department of Alien Affairs wasn’t just to learn how to use the fleet ships to their advantage, it was also to determine what threat—if any—the aliens were to humans.

Ean had heard other plans, too, at those interminable dinner parties the councilors loved so much. Plans for trading, plans for expansion. Plans for war.

“We want to start with the place you sent the Eleven to.”

Where, according to Abram’s theory, they would almost certainly meet aliens.

The Eleven had been under attack. A new weapon invented by Redmond, where four cloaked ships surrounded another ship they were attacking and sent a wave through that sliced the ship they were attacking into pieces. They had surrounded the Eleven, and Ean had told the Eleven to go “somewhere safe” until the field dispersed.

“Suppose I can’t get back to the same place?” Ean didn’t know where the Eleven had gone.

“We’ll work that out when we get to it. We’ve astronomers and astrophysicists working on the images the Eleven brought back, to see if they can identify it.” Abram smiled, a rare expression nowadays. “So far they haven’t, but we’ll get there.”

He blew out his breath again. “I want to send Wendell.”

Wendell would be perfect for a trip like that.

“I hear a but?” Ean wasn’t sure if it was in the lines or the way Abram said the words.

“Many of the New Alliance worlds don’t trust Wendell. Or his crew.”

Wendell and his ship were prisoners of war. Normally, in cases like this, they retained the ship but ransomed the crew back to their world, but Ean had already sung the Wendell into the Eleven’s fleet, and the bond between ship and captain meant they couldn’t send Wendell home.

They couldn’t send the crew home either. They knew too much.

They were now dual citizens of Lancia and Yaolin, but really they were loyal only to their ship and their captain. As for Wendell himself, Ean had heard him say once that given the circumstances, he was loyal to whoever paid his crew and kept his ship supplied and powered.

“He’s part of the Eleven fleet. We’d know everything they did.”

“That doesn’t matter to some people. Whether they believe it or not, they see this as an opportunity to get one of their own ships into the fleet, as a way to open up space for their world.”

Or the mistake that brought an alien war to human space.

Abram blew out his breath again. “They’d be right, too, because whoever gets there first will have an advantage.”

“So who?”

“It hasn’t been decided yet. But it will be a functioning fleet ship. If this war is over before we’ve got someone, it might even be a Gate Union ship.”

“Will the war be over?” No one else talked as if they thought it would be.

Abram shook his head. “And that’s worrying enough in itself. We’ve two groups of aliens fighting each other, maybe more. I’d rather humans were all allied before we come up against them. Instead, if the Redmond–Gate Union split happens—as everyone expects it to—we’ll be three fragmented groups. Not a good position to be in.”

“Redmond is only six worlds. How dangerous are they?”

“Line factories,” Abram reminded him.

Other worlds had factories that grew individual lines, like mass-producing line five for comms use, but now that the factories on Shaolin and Chamberley were gone, only Redmond could produce the full set of lines required to power a ship or a station. They couldn’t afford to destroy Redmond.

Not even if the Worlds of the Lesser Gods gave them a military base close by.

Ean turned his attention back to the thing he could control the most. Another ship for the Eleven fleet.

“What about a Balian ship?” Admiral Katida supported Lancia—although she claimed she didn’t always. Ean suspected it was less Lancia she supported than Michelle and Abram. He was fine with that. It was his definition of supporting Lancia as well.

“Unlikely. We’re more likely to get someone who opposes Lancia. It won’t be Nova Tahiti, for they have a captain on the Eleven. Maybe Yaolin, if they can talk hard enough.”

Admiral Orsaya’s passion was lines and linesmen. At least she’d want to know more about the ships and their lines than she would about finding new planets to explore. Or maybe not. Even Abram would be thinking about exploration for Lancia.

“Whoever we get,” Abram said, “I want them to join in line training although most of them won’t be linesmen.”

Ean nodded.

“Speaking of line training. The events of the last two days have had most worlds scrambling to get people for us. They don’t want to be left without trained linesmen.”

When he said “events,” Ean thought he meant the battle, and the Eleven, but there was a strong sound of Michelle underneath Abram’s words.

The Confluence would be happy. “Good. We need crews for the ships. All of them. And captains.”

“This batch of trainees will be bigger than the first group,” Abram said. “We’ll house them on the Gruen initially. Once it gets too many, we’ll put them on Confluence Station, but that will take some organizing.”

How many could they train at one time? A group session, Ean supposed, plus smaller groups. At least he had Hernandez and Fergus, and maybe Rossi, to help. And some of the earlier trainees.

Abram said, “We are also training paramedics from the different worlds to deal with line-related problems. That’s going to be fun. We’ll send them with the line trainees, but you won’t have to train them. The paramedics who are already trained will do that.”

“Do we have the room?”

“Captain Gruen has already complained about her cargo holds being kept empty for line training, rather than being put to use for storage now she has a full ship. We’ve promised her supplies every three days.”

Ean grinned. Gruen would milk that for everything she had.

“As for the rest. We’ll take it as it comes.”