She had to do something. She had to get herself—and the person in this suspension pod—onto that ship. She had no other option, no other available course, beyond staying on this station, broke and starving, for the rest of her life.
She was not going to cry. “Look,” she said, “I need to explain.” Captain Uisine had already put the worst possible construction on the situation. It wasn’t going to look any better once the suspension pod was opened. She looked behind her, through the entrance to the bay, but no one was passing in the corridor beyond. Looked back at Captain Uisine. Sighed again. “I paid to have this person brought out of Compassionate Removal.” No glimmer of recognition on Captain Uisine’s face. She’d used the name most Bantia speakers would have used, on Hwae; maybe he didn’t recognize that. She tried to think what the word might be in Yiir, which she had been using here, had used in all her brief dealings with Captain Uisine so far. She didn’t think there was one—here on Tyr Siilas nearly every crime was punishable by a fine. All the language lessons and news items she’d run across discussed crime and its consequences in those terms. She called up a dictionary, tried searching through it, without success. “You know, when someone breaks a law, and either they’ve done it over and over again and you know they’re just going to keep doing it, or what they did was so terrible they’re not going to get another chance to do it again. So they get sent to Compassionate Removal.”
“You’re talking about a prison,” said Captain Uisine.
In the corner of Ingray’s vision, her dictionary confirmed and defined the word. “No, it’s not a prison! We don’t have prisons. It’s a place. Where they can be away from regular people. They can do whatever they want, go wherever they like, you know, so long as they stay there. And they have to stay there. Once you go in you don’t come out. You’re legally dead. It’s just, it would be wrong to kill them.”
“So you paid everything you had—which to judge from the clothes you’re wearing, and your manner, was quite a lot—to have your friend broken out of a high-security prison with a name that sounds like a euphemism for killing vermin. What did e do?”
“E’s not my friend! I’ve never even met em. Well, I was at an event e was at once. A couple of times. But we never met in person.”
“What did e do?” Captain Uisine asked again.
“This is Pahlad Budrakim.” Winced, after she said it. Had she really done this? But there hadn’t been any other choice.
After an endless moment, Captain Uisine said, “Am I supposed to recognize the name?”
“You don’t?” asked Ingray, surprised. “Not at all?”
“Not at all.”
“Pahlad’s father, Ethiat Budrakim, is Prolocutor of the Third Assembly, on Hwae.” No reaction from Captain Uisine. “A prolocutor is …”
“Yes,” put in Captain Uisine, evenly. “A prolocutor presides over an Assembly, and represents that Assembly to the Overassembly. I’ve been to Hwae Station quite a few times, and I pay attention to station news. I know who Prolocutor Dicat is, e’s Prolocutor of the First Assembly. Eir name is on all sorts of regulations I have to follow when I’m docked there. But I don’t know anything about the Third Assembly.”
That made sense. Hwae Station and the several Hwaean outstations—and the intersystem gates, for that matter—were all under the authority of the First Assembly. It made sense that Captain Uisine would pay attention to First Assembly affairs and not to the Assemblies based on Hwae itself. Ingray blinked. Took a breath. “Well, Prolocutor Budrakim has held his seat for decades. There was an election just a few years ago. It was very dramatic. He almost lost. Which is how … Pahlad is … well, was one of his foster-children. Ethiat Budrakim is part Garseddai.”
“Him and a billion other people who think it’s tragic and romantic to be Garseddai.” Captain Uisine’s voice was disdainful. “It’s only the most notorious out of a long list of Radchaai atrocities. The only system to resist invasion so effectively that the Radchaai destroyed every last one of them for it and left the entire system burned and lifeless. People like your Prolocutor Budrakim can claim ancestors who are either especially valorous or especially deserving of sympathy, whichever suits them better at the moment. Lucky for them there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. Let me guess; he’s descended from an Elector who managed to secretly flee the system before the Radchaai burned everything.”
“But he is!” insisted Ingray. “He has proof. He’s got part of a panel from inside the shuttle his ancestor fled in, and a shirt with blood on it. And a lot of other things, jewelry and a half dozen of those little pentagonal tokens stamped with flowers that I think were from some kind of game. Or, he used to have those things. They were stolen. You really didn’t hear about this?”
“I really didn’t.” Captain Uisine sounded half sarcastic, as though the idea that he might have heard about something that had consumed the attention of everyone Ingray had known, and pretty much every major news service in Hwae System, struck him as ridiculous.
“It was an inside job. Pahlad had grown up in Ethiat Budrakim’s household, and e had been given a post overseeing the lareum where the Garseddai vestiges were kept.” There had been a lot of comment about how, while it was of course generous of prominent citizens to raise foster-children from less advantaged circumstances, or even the public crèches, it had been foolish of Ethiat Budrakim to trust Pahlad so implicitly. No one was as close or loyal as your own acknowledged heirs, everyone knew that. Thinking of it still made Ingray, herself a foster-child out of a public crèche, cringe unhappily. “Nobody could have done it except Pahlad.”
“And for this e is cast permanently into an inescapable prison, what did you call it, Compassionate Removal? And declared dead?” He took his hand off the crate. Put it back, when the crate shifted again, even though Ingray still held her end.
“E had betrayed eir parent! It was a huge scandal. And e showed no signs of remorse at what e had done. The whole thing had been very elaborate and cold-blooded. E managed to make copies of the things and put them in the lareum in place of the real ones, and there was Prolocutor Budrakim showing people around, you know, thinking they were the real ones, and no one knowing they were fake the whole time. And his foster-child Pahlad standing right there nearly every time, just as cool as anything, as though nothing was wrong.” And after all, it wasn’t as though e was being executed. “The copies were nearly perfect.”
Captain Uisine thought about that a moment. “And your interest in this?”
“They never found the originals,” Ingray said. “Pahlad wouldn’t say what had happened to them. E insisted e had stolen nothing, and done nothing wrong. But of course e must have done it, no one else could have. So e must know where they are.”
“Ah.” Captain Uisine seemed to relax, and leaned back against the airlock frame, folded his arms. “You think this Pahlad Budrakim can lead you to the originals, which you can then, what, sell? Hold hostage? Restore heroically to their proper place?”
Any of them would serve Ingray’s purpose, really. But what she wanted more than anything was to be able to bring them to Netano. “My mother is a district representative in the Third Assembly. She wants to be Third Prolocutor—she tried, last election, but in the end the votes tipped Budrakim’s way.” And Netano had never been friendly with Ethiat Budrakim, an enmity that couldn’t be explained by differences of faction. After all, plenty of other Assembly representatives managed to get along quite amicably whatever their differing positions on tariffs or fishing limits. “Right now I’m one of three …” Not three. Vaor had gone last year. Gone because e’d wanted to, e’d insisted, not because Netano had sent em away, but e had wept the whole time e’d packed, wept walking out the door, and e hadn’t answered any of Ingray’s messages since. “Two foster-children in my mother’s household. One of us will get to be Netano eventually.”