Chapter 17

Chapter 17

The foam was setting. I peeled a strip off my glove and flicked it onto the deck, where it landed on the grey composite plating and stuck. Hazel's foam. It never dried right.

I looked around. The bridge was an imperial military command deck, or had been an hour ago. Consoles ran along three walls in a horseshoe, each one a black slab of angled touch-glass glowing with navigation overlays and crew-status lights. The floor was grooved for magnetic boot grip. The air smelled of ozone, scorched insulation from the junctions Nerissa had punched out of the corridor behind me, and someone's perfume.

The captain's chair sat on a raised pedestal in the center of the room, bolted into a deck that had not been designed for it. Lumi had upholstered the chair in red velvet and draped a tasseled runner across the headrest. I did not want to look at it.

The ship belonged to Lumi. Lumi had stolen the ship from her mother. The bounty crew had now intercepted stolen imperial property while retrieving stolen imperial property. I was fairly sure this violated several subsections of imperial legal code, and I was fairly sure that nobody in the room was going to bring it up.

The gravity was off by a little. Ours at home has a spring to it; this ship's generators were set heavier. Walking felt like wading.

I adjusted without thinking about it. Somewhere in the city below, Juniper was running the morning drill I was supposed to be supervising, and two new recruits were about to learn what it felt like to take a hit through a half-formed transformation. I would apologize to Juniper later, probably with pastries. Pastries work on Juniper about nine times out of ten.

I did not yet know whether there would be a later. There was a contract on the ambassador side of the paperwork that I had read once and chosen not to reread.

I scanned the bridge.

Nerissa took up most of it. Three meters of lizard, skull scraping the overhead conduits. She was built to run things down and bite them in half: long in the back legs, thick through the haunch and tail, chest deep enough to hide another person inside it. Her scales were a dull mossy green, and her teeth showed even with her mouth closed. A harness of dark webbing crossed her chest, hung with tools, a sidearm, and what I was increasingly sure was a thermos. She wore no uniform.

Her tail was draped across the base of the captain's pedestal. She had found the only stretch of floor long enough to hold it.

I am one meter seventy. I came up roughly to her hip.

Tegrin stood by the door with his weight on his heels. Canid, long-muzzled, two meters thirty, built lean. Digitigrade, standing on what looked like toes, and I already knew from the hallway fight that any guess I made about his reach would be wrong. Vest of dark webbing, restraints, sidearm. His tail was still. On Tegrin, a still tail meant full attention.

Samanta was on the ceiling.

Elemantian. I had not known Elemantian was a species until ninety minutes ago. A flattened oval, maybe a meter and a half across, edged in a rippling fringe, two pairs of long thin limbs splayed against the overhead plating. Whatever kept her stuck up there involved a combination of muscle and electromagnetism, and the hair on the back of my neck lifted every time I walked under her. Her eyes were on top, and they tracked me.

She was about the size of a dining table. Dining tables do not usually rest on ceilings.

Lumi was holding the family sword. She was holding it wrong. Nyanine, early twenties, cream fur striped black along the spine and down the tail. Her white silk travelling dress had been expensive six hours ago and was now smudged where she had leaned against a console slick with spilled coolant. The sword was almost as tall as she was. She held it one-handed at an angle that was going to throw her shoulder out. Her knuckles were white around the grip.

Luna had both hands wrapped around Lumi's free arm. Also Nyanine, shorter, rounder in the face, black-furred with white socks on all four limbs. The maid's outfit did not suit a bridge. Her tail was lashing in little arcs against the back of her calves.

Mot stood against the back wall. Grey fur, silver at the temples, military posture slumped at the shoulders. She had been told an hour ago that her career was over. Her eyes were on the deck plating. Ex-steward. She knew what ex meant.

Victoria stood to my left in her Corps uniform, white and green, the sword sheathed across her back. A hundred and eighty-five centimetres of compact muscle. She does not fidget. Rose stood on my right in the pink-and-white she refused to update, rod held loose in her left hand, the little gold star at the end turning between her fingers. Rose does that when she is nervous. She also does it when she is not.

I straightened the front of my dress and put Ambassador Ornik on. The dress was pale blue, knee-length, hem splashed with setting foam. I had worn it to brunch.

***

"So," Nerissa said. Her voice came from low in her chest, rumbled out past the visible teeth. "A proposition."

"A proposition." I offered her my foreign-dignitary smile. "The three of us represent an organized defense force on the planet below. My colleagues here have been closing incursions and eliminating outworlders for longer than the current imperial administration has been aware this world existed."

Her tail shifted. A slow redistribution of weight along its length. I filed the motion under listening, not agreeing.

"You have ships, contracts, and the Empire's logistics," I said. "We have the ground. We know where the tears open, how they move, and what comes through them. A partnership serves everyone. You keep your bounty margins. We keep our world. The outworlders stop existing."

"How many." Her pupils were vertical slits and did not move when she talked.

"How many what?"

"How many outworlders have you killed this year."

I gave her the exact number, unrounded. The exact number was the whole point.

Her eye-ridges lifted half a centimetre. She turned her head toward Victoria. She did it slowly, and she wanted Victoria to notice.

I kept talking before the silence could do any work for her.

"The methodology is mine to discuss only after terms. I mention the figure because it revises your mental model of what an incursion world looks like. We are not a civilian population hiding from something we do not understand. We are the defense. We are, in point of fact, what the Empire hires people like you to avoid having to send a fleet for."

"Sophomore over there said he was only a sophomore." Tegrin jerked his head toward the corridor, where the Nyanine in imperial cadet armor was presumably still sitting against a bulkhead and crying.

"He is not one of ours."

"Mm."

"Imperial Naval cadets traveling with the princess. Cute uniforms, nice posture, could not close a tear to save their pensions. Our forces train in the field, against the actual enemy. I would not put that sophomore against a class-two outworlder for a prize of my own weight in Emperial scrip, and I am not a small woman."

Nerissa laughed, a single short surprised syllable, and covered it by scratching the underside of her jaw with a claw tip.

I counted it as the first.

"All right," she said. "You have my attention. How are you killing them?"

"Happily discussed, once terms are agreed." I made a small gesture, palm-up and open. Diplomatic shorthand for surely you see where I am going. I had never been formally trained in the gesture, because nobody on my world had ever been formally trained in any of this. That was half of why I was the one standing here.

"Cat," Samanta said from the ceiling. Her voice was a dry close-miked rasp that seemed to come from the whole flat plane of her body. "Is trying to stay in the bag."

"The bag is a place where cats traditionally thrive, I am told."

Nerissa's mouth opened on what I was almost sure was a smile. Reptile faces are hard to read and hers has a lot of teeth, so I gave it even odds.

"Terms," she said.

***

"Terms are these." Nerissa leaned her bulk against the edge of the forward helm console, and it creaked under her with the slow protest of equipment that was going to need replacement before end of standard week. "Standard Empire contractor rates, per confirmed outworlder kill, on verification by imperial scan. Your people work for my crew. My crew takes the contracts, manages the logistics, books the flight time. Clean transactional. No partnership, no planetary claim, no sovereignty paperwork. You do what you are already doing, except now you get paid a figure you cannot presently imagine."

She named the rate.

I did the math and did not let it show on my face.

Nine years of full Corps funding. Twelve if we cut the ceremonial uniforms. The rec center could have its ward replaced. Juniper could retire the drill yard that had been one incident away from collapse since before I tested in. Three new Girls through the bonding rites a year instead of one. The roof. We could finally do something about the roof.

It was a very good deal and it was the worst offer in the room.

Victoria's hand, resting on her sword hilt, stopped moving. When Victoria is angry at a person and not an incursion, she goes perfectly still. She had gone perfectly still.

"A procedural question," I said. "Verification by imperial scan. This world has no imperial scan infrastructure. Walk me through the mechanism."

"We install a relay. Standard kit."

"And the cost of the relay."

"Deducted from first year's earnings. Standard kit."

"Of course."

I turned the problem over while I pretended to consider the answer. Contractor rates meant Nerissa kept the margin. It meant the Empire now had a documented bounty channel to my planet. It meant in ten years there would be three bounty crews working the tears, none of them ours, and at least one of them worse than Nerissa. It meant the Girls would be paid to fight, and that sounded like dignity when it was actually a leash. It meant sovereignty was off the table forever, because you do not later negotiate as a peer with a government that has been writing you checks.

It also meant Victoria would walk off this bridge and find a way back to the planet alone. Victoria would rather die in a tear than take money to be owned. She is annoyingly consistent about the things she would rather die for.

"Are you going to help us," Rose said, "or are you just going to pay us to die for you faster?"

I had not planned for Rose to speak. She had not run it by me. Rose has a small voice she uses when she is about to cry or about to be absolutely right, and this time she was right. The sentence landed in the middle of the bridge with the weight of a dropped brick.

I made myself a note. Rose was getting a pastry too.

Nerissa's eyes went to Victoria a second time. I let her look. Whatever she saw changed the set of her shoulders; the plates across her upper back shifted, resettling lower.

I turned toward the viewport.

The viewport ran the full curve of the forward bulkhead, four meters across. Past the blinking navigational glyphs, our world hung in black. No one from our world had ever seen our world from outside it. The night side was half-lit. I could make out the coastal grid of the capital as a pale-gold fretwork against the dark, and beyond that the small constellation of lights that was the district I had grown up in. I looked for one second. Maybe two.

"You are not even nobility." Lumi's voice came from behind me, half a tone higher than it had been five minutes earlier. "You cannot negotiate on behalf of an entire world. This is absurd. I am the rightful..."

"Princess." Nerissa did not turn.

"...rightful governor of..."

"Princess. If you speak again before I say you can speak, I will put you in the carrier myself, and the carrier will not be a comfortable one."

Lumi's mouth closed on a small clean click of teeth. Luna's grip on her arm tightened until the cream fur paled visibly around her fingers. Mot, against the back wall, did not look up. I clocked all three.

"I will need a moment with my colleagues," I said to Nerissa.

"Take it."

***

We walked to the far end of the bridge, past the aft sensor station and up against the rear bulkhead, under a ventilation grille humming at a pitch slightly below speech. Samanta, six meters above us, pretended to be fascinated by a rivet. I kept my voice at conversational volume. Samanta was going to hear me regardless, and pretending otherwise would have been rude.

"We take it," Rose said. "Ornik. Nine years of funding. Ten. We take it and we rebuild the east ward and we fix Hazel's drill yard and we put Girls through the rites, and we survive. We just survive, for once, without running out of money in March."

"I know."

"I am not saying it right, I know, I am just..."

"Rose. I know."

Victoria had not spoken. She was looking at the deck, at a scuffmark shaped like a boot that was not hers. Her hand still rested on her sword hilt. The tendons in the back of her hand stood out clearly.

"Victoria," I said.

"I am listening."

"If we took this. What does the sword think."

She considered the question with the seriousness she brings to every question. I love that about her. I also find it exhausting before noon and sometimes at dinner.

"The sword does not think in those terms," she said, finally.

"I know. That is why I am asking."

She looked up. Her hand on the hilt shifted, the knuckles whitening and then easing, the tension traveling in a single visible line from wrist to shoulder.

"It thinks we should not take money from people who cannot find us on a map," she said.

"Thank you."

Rose made a soft sound. She does that when she is shelving a feeling for later. I put a hand on her shoulder, briefly, the same touch I use on a new recruit before sending her into a tear for the first time.

"We are not taking the deal," I said. "We are taking a different one. I need you both to let me do this and not speak. Especially you, Rose. You did beautifully thirty seconds ago and I need you not to do it again for the next ten minutes."

Rose nodded. The star on her rod was still turning between her fingers.

Victoria let her hand come off the sword. Her whole posture dropped half a centimetre.

I walked back.

***

"We decline," I said.

Nerissa gave me no visible reaction, and that was a reaction. Behind her, Tegrin's ears came forward. Samanta, on the ceiling, stayed exactly where she was. I chose to read it as her version of leaning in.

"We decline the contractor terms. I would like to offer a different arrangement. In exchange for sharing our incursion-closing methodology with the Empire, through you as the channel, we will accept four conditions, and we will commit to them in writing, under whatever witnessing protocol your empire finds binding."

"Go on."

"One. Sovereign recognition of the Magical Girl Corps as the legitimate defense authority of our world. Not a governorship. Not a protectorate. Sovereignty. We govern ourselves, we negotiate our own subsequent treaties, and the Empire treats our borders the way it treats the borders of any other independent sophont power."

"That is a big one."

"It is the cheap one, actually. The Empress has not met us. She has met Lumi. By this time tomorrow she will be in a mood to grant concessions she would not otherwise grant, and I am asking you to be the one who writes them into the record before she sleeps it off."

Nerissa's tail shifted again.

"Two. No Empire citizens are removed from our world by your crew or any subsequent crew without explicit consent of the Magical Girl Corps. Bounty targets, fugitives, persons of interest, and any other category your legal system may later invent. The three runaways on this bridge are exempt. You may take Princess Lumi and her entourage with my blessing. Future cases go through me."

"Mot stays?"

"Mot is banished. That is between Mot and the Empress. We are not asking you to leave her here. Frankly we would rather you did not."

Mot exhaled. The grey fur at her throat ruffled once and settled. She still did not look up.

"Three. If the methodology we share leads to bounty contracts on other worlds, our Corps receives a ten percent share of the take, paid to the Corps treasury, for as long as the methodology remains in use."

"Five."

"Eight."

"Seven and I stop laughing."

"Seven."

"Four?"

"Four. You personally return to our world once per standard year for a one-day consultation. No fleet. No entourage. Just you. We will feed you. We will show you what has changed. You will tell us what the galaxy is doing that we need to know."

Nerissa's head tilted.

"That is not a treaty term," she said. "That is a visit."

"It is both."

"Why."

"Because you are going to be the face of the Empire to my world for the rest of my career. I would prefer that face to belong to someone who has eaten in the capital and met the Girls and knows what the east district smells like in spring. I would prefer not to negotiate the next ten treaties with a diplomat who has read a brief about us and thinks 'Magical Girl' is a costume choice."

She looked at me for a long moment. Her pupils stayed unchanged, the vertical slits unblinking.

"You are binding me," she said.

"I am inviting you."

"Same thing. We both know it."

"Yes."

Nerissa laughed again. Tired, this time, not the surprised bark from earlier. I had been angling for this one since her counter-offer.

I counted it as the second.

"I already have a ship full of problems," she said. "A princess in a carrier. A banished ex-steward who is going to be someone's headache for ten years. An electric ray who wants to watch her daughter's shows on the forums before they get spoiled. And now I have a yearly appointment on a planet at the ass end of nowhere, which I am supposedly going to keep because an ambassador in a dress made me laugh twice."

"Three times."

"Was there a third?"

"There will be."

"Cat," she said, "you are toadally pushing your luck."

"You set that up, not me."

"I know I did."

She extended her clawed hand. It was roughly the size of my head. The palm was pebbled grey-green hide, cracked across the lifelines the way old leather cracks. Her claws were extended but curled inward.

I took it.

The claws were warm against my glove. Residual heat from the cutters. I knew, without being able to articulate how, that I was going to remember this handshake for the rest of my career, and that I was going to describe it wrong when I eventually tried. Important handshakes do not feel important at the time.

I did not let go first.

"One more thing," Nerissa said, without releasing my hand. "The Empress meeting. I will vouch for sovereignty. She will want to see one of you in person. Not the ambassador. She will want the fighter. The one with the sword."

I did not turn around. I already knew what Victoria's face was doing.

"I will ask," I said.

"That means yes."

"That means I will ask."

She let my hand go. Her claws clicked once against each other as they retracted.

That was the third laugh I had earned, though she had swallowed it before it reached her throat.

***

We walked off the bridge behind Victoria and Rose. The door hissed on its rails. Samanta came down off the ceiling by a method I did not think gravity normally permitted and held the door for us with one long flat hand. I made a private promise never to play cards with her.

Tegrin was already bent over the forward console, pulling logs. Nerissa had moved on to her next problem before we had cleared the threshold. I took it as the highest compliment she could have paid me.

In the corridor, the blue-white light gave way to warmer amber from the emergency strips. Fifteen meters down, the hole in the bulkhead still showed the lip of hardened hull sealant where Nerissa's team had come through, and the air tasted faintly of molten metal.

Rose let out a breath she had been holding for what sounded like the entire conversation.

"I thought we were going to lose it."

"We were going to lose it."

"How close."

"Close."

Rose absorbed that by pretending she had not. She walked a few steps ahead to give Victoria and me the corridor.

Victoria stopped at the intersection where the corridor split toward the airlock. She turned. She looked at me the same way she looks at the sword when she is getting a read on it. I had never been on the receiving end of that look. I did not enjoy it. I resolved to do whatever was necessary to avoid triggering it again.

She nodded once.

She walked on.

I stood there a moment. Behind me, somewhere on the bridge, Lumi was agreeing to the cat carrier. The agreement had come without fanfare because Mot still was not looking at her, and something in the petulance had gone quiet.

At the airlock viewport, our planet was still there. Half-lit. The capital's grid, the southern farms, the small constellation of the eastern district, dark now because the drill was over and Juniper had sent everyone home.

There was paperwork waiting. There were always going to be new recruits with new bruises. Somewhere in the capital, a courier was being sent to the Empress by end of day, and by tomorrow evening an ambassador from a world the Empire had not known was inhabited eight hours ago would be a sovereign peer. That was a significant amount to have accomplished in a wrinkled brunch dress.

I peeled the last strip of setting foam off my glove and flicked it onto the deck.

I went to find my team.