Heat (108 page)

“Respectfully, I must refuse.”

“You can’t possibly keep her!”

“I can.”

And from there, the argument had been slowly building—a barrage of mingled disbelief and exasperation from the Magistrate, countered by Tagen’s brief and extremely polite replies—until this explosion and now, this stunned silence.

“You…” Magistrate Inarr’s eyes lost their rings of white as she composed herself. She seated herself with ominous deliberation, her hands still in fists on the table. “You had best go carefully,
sek’ta
Pahnee. You are risking a great career over a human you had no business bringing home in the first place.”

“Her name is Daria Cleavon,” Tagen replied, still without allowing temper to enter his voice or his face. “And were it not for her aid, make no mistake, Kanetus E’Var would not be in custody now.”

Commander Cura reached out and thumbed at the media panel sunk in the center of the table and an image of Daria suddenly sprang into life in mid-air, flickering as it lazily revolved. She was still wearing her medic-whites; it must have been taken during her quarantine. Every seven seconds, she turned and her mouth moved silently, shaping N’Glish words, ‘Do I just stand here?’ before facing front again.

The Magistrate broke the silence first, snarling as she threw herself roughly back in her chair. “Gods,” she grumbled.

“Pretty little thing,” Cura remarked. His eyes cut to Tagen, cool and deeply assessing.

Tagen stared back, his own narrowing.

“She is, isn’t she?” Admiral Sta’al leaned forward, takking her claws on the tabletop as she studied Daria’s imagine. She was smiling slightly. “Clever, too. I made it a point to have a look at her while she was still contained. We spoke half the day.”

Tagen shifted in his chair. Daria had said nothing of this.

“She struck me as frightened,” Sta’al continued. “Very frightened. But well-mannered, for all that. Friendly. Quite disarming in her own way.”

“What—” the Magistrate began tightly.

“Do you know,” Sta’al interrupted, not taking her eyes from the image of Daria, “she had virtually drained her financial resources in the pursuit of the prisoner? Imagine that, if you will. An alien invades your home, takes you prisoner, conscripts you to be his pilot and guide in the search of a dangerous criminal and further requires that you spend every last
crona
to your credit.” The Admiral leaned back at last, folding her arms across her chest and looking thoughtful for a short time. “I wouldn’t do that,” she remarked. “Not without a gun to my head and perhaps not even then.”

Silence.

Magistrate Inarr flexed her claws again, glaring at Tagen. Finally, she said, “I am struggling to understand why you would deliberately endanger your mission by approaching a human in the first place. What egregious lack of—”

“The humans have groundcars,” Tagen said mildly, and only Admiral Sta’al did not recoil at once. “They have broadcast media. They have sky cars. They have orbiting weapons arrays. They have sent probes to other worlds in their system. Please believe me when I say they are fifty years or less from encountering our Gate with a manned transport of their own. That is the Earth you sent me to.”

He had their full attention now.

“Kanetus E’Var knew this Earth. He landed, he took possession of a human and a groundcar and he was gone. I was on foot. I was made to believe that I would meet primitives with hand-held blades. I met this.” He took E’Var’s gun from his jacket and thumped it hard on the table. “So if there was an egregious lack of anything, with respect, Magistrate, it was with preparative intelligence. Yes, I invaded Daria Cleavon’s home. She, in turn, instructed me in N’Glish and used every resource at her disposal to locate my prisoner, an act that cost her everything she owned.”

“That…is regrettable,” the Magistrate began with a sidelong glance at Sta’al. “And I’m sure her actions are laudable—”

“I am not here to be placated,” Tagen said flatly. “I am not here to ask allowance. I am here to state without apology what I have done and what more I mean to do. I robbed Daria Cleavon of her home. I robbed her of any hope of resuming her life. And so I brought her here and here, I have told her that she will be free to make herself a new one.”

“It is against the law!” Inarr bit every word off a little louder than the one before and finished by clapping her hands in her judiciously-short hair and snarling at the ceiling. “Use your head, you fool male! What hope have we of maintaining order when our own officers are allowed to keep slaves?”

“She is not a slave.”

“The appearance of impropriety is every bit as important as impropriety itself,” Commander Cura answered. He kept his voice low and his posture relaxed, but his eyes never lost that penetrating stare. “The message you are sending is that the officers of the Fleet are above the law they enforce.”

“That is unfortunate,” Tagen replied. “Because the message I should be sending is that an alliance must be found between our races before we meet again. Daria has agreed to act as translator and liaison to the preserves. With her help, the humans we’ve recovered may become a true colony. Self-sufficient. A resource of outstanding potential. Think. There are a quarter million of them and, at this moment in time, they are not happy with us.”

Cura leaned back and looked thoughtful. Admiral Sta’al looked at her hand on the table, her lips curved in a half-smile.

“Law, all law, prohibits the keeping of humans.” Magistrate Inarr stood and paced the room, fighting for calm and projecting only her blatant impatience and fury. “If this one is as intelligent and influential as you claim, let her work her will from the preserves.”

“Very well.” Tagen unfolded his hands, removed his jacket and his gunbelt and laid them on the table before three pairs of disbelieving eyes (Admiral Sta’al’s small smile broadened). “I resign my commission. I will go to the preserves with her. I gave my word that I would not abandon her and I mean not to.”

The Magistrate cast her eyes skyward, palms upturned in mute supplication for just an instant before slamming them down again on the table. “Very dramatic,
sek’ta
Pahnee, now sit down and be serious.”

“I am not, as my record surely shows, prone to frivolity.”

Commander Cura leaned forward. “Think what you do, Pahnee,” he urged, frowning. “The preserves are hostile toward Jotan and we will not protect you.”

“I will take my chances, but I will not break my word to the human who risked and ruined her life to aid me.”

“For the gods’ sakes!” Inarr groaned. “You don’t owe that animal a thing!”

A following silence gave those words weight and ugliness until even the Magistrate looked uncomfortable.

“You make me ashamed of my race,” Tagen said at last.

“How dare you speak to me—”

“This is not about you. I am not asking. I am telling. Daria Cleavon stays with me, one way or another. And that is all. If—and believe me,
only
if—she is allowed her freedom will she offer her services as mediator to other humans. And if she is sent to the preserves, I will go with her and you will get nothing.”

*

“Well, I’m glad it went so well,” Daria said, stirring at the sauce that simmered in the cooker. “I guess it’s okay now to say I was worried.”

“Mm.”

“I’m guessing you talked about everything…” Daria glanced around at him, her brows now pinched with that look of hopeful concern. “Has anyone seen Raven?”

*

“There’s been no report whatever of this second human who escaped from the docking bay on your arrival.” Commander Cura studied his personal media-card a moment longer, his lip curling to expose the tip of one fang, and then tossed the tablet on the table with a clatter. “You’d think a human running loose in the Fleet’s own dock would draw
someone’s
eye.”

“You’d think,” Admiral Sta’al murmured.

“I think of it as a panicked flight rather than an escape,” Tagen remarked.

“Semantics.” Magistrate Inarr was pacing again.

“Hardly.” Tagen kept his voice calm, but there was a simmering heat in his chest working its way up through his body to his mouth. “Escape implies a wrongdoing on her part. She fled at the thought of being imprisoned in a preserve.”

“Then she should have stayed on Earth.”

“Where she would have been killed for E’Var’s crimes,” Tagen countered.

“I’m sure the humans know best how to manage their people,” the Magistrate said dismissively. “She would have nothing to fear if she hadn’t—”

“If she had not what?” Despite every shred of his will, anger found his words at last. “He abducted her. He raped her repeatedly while in Heat. He butchered over a hundred of her kind right before her eyes. He beat her. He branded her. He mutilated her. And you wonder that she did not fight him?”

The others in the room were silent and even Inarr seemed taken aback, although the High Magistrate was still the first to respond.

“Surely,” she said, staring at him in shock, “Surely you do not suggest we prosecute these events as
crimes
?”

He had intended no such thing actually, but the unabashed astonishment it signified infuriated him past the bound of self-control.

“And what do you intend to prosecute him for?” he demanded. “Evasion of law? Unauthorized use of a Gate? Theft of Fleet property?”

“Easy,” murmured Commander Cura.

“I have spent thirty-five days in pursuit of this man! Thirty-five days on Earth in the worst of its Heat-season watching E’Var slaughter ten and twenty and thirty humans at a single hunt and you sit here in your clean white robes and ridicule me for calling it a crime?”

It was quite possible that High Magistrate Inarr had never had a male shout at her in her entire life. She didn’t seem to know how to respond. She opened her mouth, closed it, and cautiously sat down. “I don’t deny the savagery of his actions,” she said in her most neutral tones. “But my jurisdiction is restricted to crimes perpetuated in our own corner of the galaxy. However unfair it may seem to you, Earth must police itself.”

“Bureaucrat!” Tagen spat. He made the word a curse. “For five hundred years, Jota has known of the existence of humans in the universe. For five hundred years, the human homeworld has been quarantined and laws affected to prohibit contact. And for that full five hundred years, Jotan criminals have trafficked in human lives! Don’t you
dare
dismiss that suffering with ‘Earth must police itself!’ We are responsible for these outrages and now we are responsible for those abandoned in our corner of the galaxy and how are we proving our responsibility? We gather them up when we stumble on them and drop them on a moon to leave them to their own devices! The human Raven chose to run blindly into an alien world rather than face that fate!”

Magistrate Inarr just stared at him, her lips slightly parted and her eyes showing the whites all around. And, unless Tagen was phenomenally mistaken, she was also exuding the faintest tinge of musk. He glared at her, his chest heaving as he fought to control his breath and his temper, and sat down again.

“That isn’t fair,”
vey
Kosar said after a moment. “We offer services. They refuse them.”

“Why should they trust us?” Tagen asked. “When has any effort, any attempt whatever been made to explain their circumstances or apologize for them? None. We take them from the mines or the breeding farms or the slave ship, we pack them into a transport, and we dispose of them like garbage.”

“Whereas you would have us adopt them all as pets,” Magistrate Inarr interjected. She combed her claws through her hair several times, avoiding his direct stare. “Which is so much more preferable to keeping slaves.”

“What I would have you do,” Tagen said, “is admit a responsibility to the liberty of and justice for the humans who have been abducted by Jotan, who are enslaved by Jotan, and who are slaughtered by Jotan. An honest communication between our races is essential to that goal.”

“Agreed!” Magistrate Inarr turned her palms upward in a gesture of exasperated conciliation. “The defining word being ‘honest’. You can trust no human, none of them! They have all been slaves, they are every one of them duplicitous and vengeful.”

“Which brings us round to Daria Cleavon,” Admiral Sta’al said mildly. She turned and eyed Tagen, takking her claws on the tabletop. “Who has volunteered to come to Jota as ambassador to her captive people, provided she is not herself confined.”

“She has made no such provision,” Tagen said. “I make it for her. Daria trusts fully to your judgment.”

“And you do not?” Inarr countered.

Admiral Sta’al and Commander Cura exchanged a glance, and then both looked Tagen’s way with identical expression of voyeuristic unsurprise, waiting for his answer.

“I know our policies,” Tagen replied carefully. “And I know it is far easier to turn a blind eye to dissent if the revolution is already contained on an isolated moon without any chance of decampment. Turning a blind eye is what we Jotan do best when it comes to humans, after all, and those in the preserves are even easier to ignore. But I would make a point here about policies, Magistrate. Not everyone who disregards them is as blatant a criminal as Kanetus E’Var.”

“Clearly,” she said, giving first the floating image of Daria, and then him an allusive stare.

He chose to overlook that. Instead, “Where is the human Raven?” he asked quietly. He glared around the table, meeting and holding each eye until it dropped from his and ending with Sta’al, who merely gazed back at him. “She vanished. Into the Fleet’s own docking bay, she utterly disappeared. Which can only mean that a
Fleet officer
took her, did
not
report her and is now either holding her for his own purposes or has sold her to a slaver. And do not forget the Vahst which Raven carried with her, and which also has disappeared into the hands of whoever took her. An officer! A
brother
!”

Admiral Sta’al nodded. That and the perfect stillness of the others at the table was his only answer. Tagen resumed his seat. “Clearly, our laws are not as effective as we would like to pretend,” he said. “And since they must change anyway, they may as well change to include humans as beings deserving of our respect. We show Kevrian more civility than humans and we were at war with them in my father’s time!”