Rupert reflected on the wisdom of saying, Isn’t everyone? and discarded the idea. They had almost, almost, achieved something like their old rapport, and he did not want to jeopardize that with ill-timed sarcasm. He cast a glance toward the yard through the still-open door. Grytt was talking to Ivar, two upright islands in a small sea of woolly backs and muttered bleats. The two-and-a-bit years on Lanscot had been good to Ivar, as they had been good for Grytt and for Rupert himself.
That was not what Samur wanted, or needed, to hear. Rupert leaned close to the hex-dish and lowered his voice. “He is a bit feral, sometimes, but he does not suffer from delusions, visions, or dementia. The fairy’s visit was real. He described her in detail too perfect to be invented.”
Samur’s eyebrows floated toward her hairline. “So what did she want? This fairy.”
“She had a message for me and for Grytt, which she could not deliver, Ivar says, because we would ask too many questions and her time was limited.” Rupert steepled his fingers. “Do you know about this Protectorate and these vakari?”
Samur’s lips pursed. “I do, though I have not encountered them personally. The political entity calls itself the Protectorate. The people call themselves vakari. Apparently they are quite advanced arithmancers with some strange cultural practices. We had heard about them through some of our other xeno allies—the k’bal have nothing good to say—but I believe the first actual contact was between a Johnson-Thrymbe long-hauler and a vakari military scout, near one of the J-T mining outposts. There were no shots fired, although things were tense until the translation hexes got communications sorted out.”
A year since the Protectorate had been common knowledge in the Consortium and the Merchants League! Civil wars did have a tendency to refocus national attention, but he would have expected some sort of reporting on the Confederation’s networks, or at least chatter on the public forums, on which he kept a lurking, curious eye. Even with the Confederation of Liberated Worlds’ careful curation of its media, something should have gotten through.
Unless, as he suspected, the doings of people—human and otherwise—on the other side of a civil war were just not as relevant to the Confederation’s network executives as whether or not the Tadeshi royalists would disrupt a convoy or attempt to retake a station. Let people think too widely, they might forget the immediate threats.
“The fairy told Ivar that the Protectorate are, in fact, Expanding.” He was careful to pronounce the capital letter, the same way Ivar had said it. “But that in so doing they are invading the k’bal territories and winning. And that . . .”
Samur waited with admirable patience for Rupert to finish. When he didn’t, when it was obvious that he had either misplaced the words or decided to forego them (and truthfully, he had not yet decided which), she snapped, “Rupert. And what?”
“We will be next. Human space. The Merchants League, Thorne Consortium, the Confederation, all the unaffiliated worlds. There is already armed conflict between the Protectorate and the Tadeshi royalists. The fairy says we need to prepare. You don’t seem surprised, Regent-Consort.”
“I’m not. I’m surprised you are. A political entity which thrives on expansion and does not mind using violence to achieve those ends is not likely to simply stop because they’ve reached a new boundary. You know how invasions work. We fought the war with Free Worlds of Tadesh, didn’t we, to stop them from doing the same thing to us?”
“We started that war.” There were layers to the collective pronoun. We, the Consortium. We, the duo of Rupert and Samur.
“Pre-emptively. We needed the momentum. You know they would have invaded us, if we hadn’t.”
He did know. He had been instrumental in the decisions leading up to war’s declaration. “Does that mean there are plans to pre-emptively attack the Protectorate? I ask, Regent-Consort, because the fairy predicted that we will lose a war with the Protectorate, should it come to that.”
“We—the Thorne Consortium and the Merchants League—won’t be alone in a conflict. There are already alliances in place. The other xeno interests I mentioned.”
Rupert reflected just how much he despised agentless, objective prose. Alliances meant negotiations, and sides, and effort. They did not just happen intransitively. “Yes. The fairy mentioned them, too. Piecemeal agreements between the Merchants League families and,” and here he drew breath, and recited the alien words exactly as Ivar had said them, “some of the tenju spacer clans and the alwar Harek Empire, which apparently consists of both planets and stations, though there are stray seedworlds of tenju and alwar and clans who are still operating independently.” He felt like an actor speaking lines in a foreign language.
Samur blinked. “You are well-informed. Or shall I say, this fairy is.”
Rupert strangled a laugh. He did not feel well-informed. Quite the opposite. He felt as if his head had been firmly buried in the garden, somewhere between the cabbage-sprouts and the compost heap. “The fairy says no alliance will save us. And by us, I mean all of us. The Confederation of Liberated Worlds, the Thorne Consortium, the Merchants League, and whatever organizational units these new xeno friends of yours have amongst themselves. She says, even if we unite, the Protectorate will rip the multiverse apart before they let themselves lose a war.”
Samur shook her head, a sharp, brief gesture. “That’s silly. First, multiverses don’t rip like cheap cloth. Second, there is no we. And third, the Confederation of Liberated Worlds is in the middle of human space. I think you’re quite safe there, on your little rainy sheep-planet of a capital, at least from the Protectorate. The royalists should be your concern, Rupert. They’re far closer to your borders.”
Like all terrestrial planets, Lanscot possessed a diversified climate based on latitude and seasonal orientation to the sun. That most of the planet’s landmass was concentrated in the middle third of the higher latitudes was a matter of chance, as was Lanscot’s location on the edge of Tadeshi space closest to Merchants League territory (which is to say: where the Tadeshi were very unlikely to attack from, having no bases there), or its primary agricultural contribution to trade. Samur’s problem with Lanscot was entirely that Rupert had chosen to live there over returning to Thorne.
However factual, none of that was relevant. What was, however: “Yes. About that. The fairy says that the Tadeshi have made new friends among some of what I imagine are supposed to be your allies, although she only said xenos. The Tadeshi royalists have acquired a weapon which will prompt the Protectorate into that full-scale warfare which destroys the multiverse as we know it.”
Samur frowned. The fern darkened to an ominous, boiling maroon. “Which allies? What kind of weapon?”
“The fairy was not specific.” Actually, the fairy had recited poetry, which Rupert was loath to repeat. So instead he summarized, perhaps too succinctly, “Something which will offend the Protectorate on a moral level.” No, that was not the right word. “A spiritual level. And, ah. Something about the eternal identity of roses, however they are named.”