The Eve of War Page 2

  “How much you appreciate me?”

  “How much I hate entry,” Awen said.

  “Only every time we fly. But you could stand to mention the other a little more often.”

  Awen pursed her lips and gave him a nod. “Noted.” She stowed the sealed bag, sat back, and took a deep breath.

  The light civilian cruiser was in calm air again, and Awen was grateful. The passenger cabin was smaller than she liked, which made her motion sickness all the worse. She preferred the larger starships since they had better dampeners. Still, the compartment’s glossy-white walls and ceiling and comfortable chairs were in pristine condition, which she credited to the Luma’s fastidious standards.

  Matteo stared out the starboard window, and Awen followed his gaze to the vast expanse of sand below. It reached to the curved horizon, light yellow contrasting with the deep blue of the sky. She’d waited her entire adult life to come to this system, which wasn’t that long, considering she was only twenty-four years common. Still, Jujari culture had been her major at the academy—or was it an obsession?—and she’d become more knowledgeable in the history and affairs of the hyena-like species than any Luma before her.

  Far below, the capital city of Oosafar rose like a gleaming white obelisk in the late-afternoon light. It stood in stark contrast to the rust-colored dunes and low-slung mountains that surrounded it. While elegant, the city’s presence also felt defiant, as if the buildings stood as a bulwark against the seductive power of the Republic. Awen’s spirit couldn’t help feeling a strange kinship with the Jujari, though their cultures were light-years apart—physically and metaphorically. Still, she admired their ability to resist countless attempts to bring them into the Republic. Awen was drawn to their insistence that joining the Republic would compromise their heritage and that they would rather fend for themselves than eat lavishly from the Republic’s table.

  That said, she knew that the Jujari people suffered at the hands of their leaders. They were a violent species, prone to devouring their own as quickly as any unwelcome visitors—or even welcome visitors, for that matter.

  “Feels like we’re coming in pretty fast,” Matteo noted.

  Awen leaned over his seat arm. She absentmindedly clutched the Luma medallion around her neck—a flame carved inside a golden oblong disk at the end of a leather cord—and squeezed it between her fingers. “New pilot, maybe?”

  “Nah. I just think no one wants to spend more time in this system than they have to.”

  Awen let go of the medallion. “Attitudes like that have delayed meetings like this for centuries. You do understand that, right?”

  “Sure, sure, and the universe is all black and white, and everything can be solved if we talk it through. I get it. I get it.”

  Awen backed away from his seat and crossed her arms. “You know, Matteo, sometimes I wonder why you even joined the Luma.”

  He feigned a pain in his chest by clutching his heart. “That hurts, Awen.”

  “I’m just saying, if we keep going into these situations looking for a confrontation, then that’s all we’re ever going to find.”

  “Then you don’t think it’s the least bit strange that suddenly, after hundreds of years, the Jujari want peace talks? Come on.”

  Awen took in and let out a deep breath. “I admit it’s unusual, yes. However, if we don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, then who will?”

  Matteo shrugged.

  “Precisely,” she said, poking his arm. “This is our job. We can’t expect to find a blaster fight across every peace talk.”

  “What if that’s all these outliers want us to find?”

  Awen turned away from him, mumbling that he was a dumb buckethead.

  Matteo pulled his attention from the window and looked at her. “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. You know you want to say it.”

  Awen shot him a wicked glance and raised her chin ever so slightly. Her words were slow and dripping with sarcasm. “I said that you sound just like an ignorant Repub buckethead, and I have a blaster for you in my overnight kit.”

  Matteo laughed and rubbed his hands together. “I knew you’d come around to my way of seeing things.” He looked out the window again and pointed to something. “Hey, look at that.”

  “What?”

  “You have excellent timing,” Matteo said. Awen followed his finger to see a handful of troopers lining the perimeter of the approaching landing pad. “There’s my fire team now. Hand me my blaster.”

  • • •

  The landing was harder than usual. Awen smoothed her maroon-and-black robes as the engines cut off, hoping her stomach would settle down just as fast. But she wasn’t sure what was airsickness and what was adrenaline. She was finally here. She had dreamed of this moment for the last six years and never really thought she would get the chance to visit Oorajee.

  She ordered herself to stay calm and savor the experience. Every sight, every sound. She would take it all in.

  Through the window, Awen heard muted footfalls and loud orders then the whine of hydraulics as the ramp went down. The flight attendant typed on a wall-mounted keypad then descended out of view in a swirl of white mist. That was when Awen smelled it: her first deep breath of the Jujari home world. It was a strange mixture of curry, sour milk, lavender, and burnt fecal matter. She wrinkled her nose but still savored the fact that she was finally here. She’d made it.

  “You’ve been waiting for this for a while,” Matteo said. “Bet it feels surreal.”

  “It does,” Awen replied, unfastening her harness. “Doesn’t smell like I thought it would, though.”

  “Pretty sure no place in the galaxy smells like this.”

  Awen chuckled then stood up. It felt good to stretch. She turned around to see the rest of the entourage unbuckle and gain their feet. Some of the elders took longer than she would have liked, but this wasn’t a day to rush anything. Slow and steady, she reminded herself.

  “Madame Emissary,” said the flight attendant in his deep-blue flight uniform. “They’re ready for you.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. Awen glanced at Matteo and the others then back at the flight attendant. “We’re ready.”

  The man nodded and gestured down the ramp. Awen took the lead and emerged from the shuttle’s shadow into the full force of the sun’s glare, a sensation that felt akin to plopping an ice cube on a hot frying pan. Her skin prickled, and the smells intensified as she got her bearings.

  “It’s even more incredible than I imagined,” Awen whispered to Matteo. She felt overwhelmed by the sight of the linens that hung in hundreds of windows. “The inook shrouds are stunning. Did you know their thread count correlates to the number of generations in each owner’s lineage? Some range into the thousands.”

  “That’s wonderful, Awen. Can we go inside?”

  Just then a gruff voice blasted her name from an exterior speaker. The person talking was the trooper closest to her, whose helmet looked like a bat head with a muzzled lion’s mouth. His armor was black and gray, and he held a large blaster not more than a meter from her head.

  “Emissary dau Lothlinium,” the trooper repeated.

  Awen nodded toward whatever eyes lay behind the glossy black visor.

  “We need to get you inside. This way.”

  Awen gestured for the trooper to lead the way but could not bring herself to actually thank the bulky hulk. The trooper turned and walked across the platform toward the building’s entrance. He escorted her to a tall archway, stepped through the fabric, and held it aside for her to enter. A moment later, Awen was inside a large receiving room lined floor to ceiling with the white linens that made up the walls. Awen’s fellow Luma began to file in while the trooper remained at the entrance.

  “That’s better.” Matteo brushed sand from his robes and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  Awen, too, was immediately grateful for the temperature change. The separation to the outs
ide world was dramatic. She noted just how thick the fabric was. A wide bolt of it streamed down from the center of the room and draped around a bowl of fladaria. She approached the table and felt the heavy fabric between her fingers then looked at the bloodred fruit.

  “What is it?” Matteo continued to dab his forehead with his sleeve and puffed out his cheeks.

  “It’s fruit, and a good sign for us,” she said softly, noting how the room swallowed her words. It felt as though she’d been cut off from the exterior world. “It’s the ceremonial food of welcome.”

  “So, what do they put out when they don’t want you around—bad eggs?”

  “No,” she whispered, “a severed head from that day’s public executions.”

  Matteo instinctively reached a hand to his throat. “Nice species. Say, where are they?”

  “They’re finishing prayers.” Awen had yet to see her first Jujari in the flesh and could hardly wait. “They won’t entertain us beyond this room until they are sure of their god’s will for the meeting.”

  “Heck of a time to figure that out.”

  Awen rolled her eyes at him then reached for the bowl. She took one of the oblong fruits and bit into it, a small red stream of juice flowing from the corner of her mouth. She knew that “bleeding” when eating was customary among all Jujari tribes, though the fruit was so juicy that she hardly did it on purpose.

  “It’s okay,” she said to the rest of her team as they continued to file in. She motioned toward the bowl. “You’ll like it. It’s sweet.”

  Matteo grabbed one of the fruits and tried it, a smile creeping across his wet red lips. Everyone else took a fruit and ate. As the juice was still streaming down the team’s faces, all sixteen troopers who’d been outside threw open the fabric doorway and entered with a blast of light and heat.

  “Excuse me, what are you doing?” Awen asked. “No military presence is required here.”

  “We have our orders, Emissary dau Lothlinium,” said the trooper who’d addressed her outside. She noted for the first time how dusty his armor was. It was also devoid of any of the traditional military markings she’d seen, save for a small yellow insignia on the shoulder in the shape of a crescent moon cradling a combat knife. He had a pistol in his chest plate as well as several grenades, and he looked utterly ferocious in the dim light.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Awen insisted, planting her feet, though no one could see them through her thick robes. “The Jujari won’t allow this, and quite frankly, neither will I.”

  “Emissary dau Lothlinium, our orders are to escort you to and from your ship for the duration of your stay.”

  “And you’ve done that marvelously,” she conceded with no attempt to hide her condescension. “You may stand down now until we’re done.”

  “Negative.”

  “Excuse me?” Awen was sure her eyebrows had just hit an all-time high.

  “Negative. Our orders are—”

  “Listen, trooper,” she said, her face mere centimeters from his chest plate. “I don’t care what your orders are. You cannot be in here right now, and you certainly will not follow us in there.” She pointed to the far wall, which, she expected, opened to a corridor that led up to the mwadim’s council tent.

  “Our orders,” the trooper continued, “are never to let you leave our sight.”

  “Who has ordered this?”

  “A joint task force chaired by Admiral Isaacson and your own Master So-Elku.”

  Awen could feel the blood rising in her face as she clenched her jaw. So-Elku would never have agreed to such a breach of cultural protocol.

  Then, without warning, all the troopers started to nudge each other as if laughing about something—probably a joke made over their comms. She’d met her share of soldiers to know the type. Their helmets kept the joke unheard by outsiders.

  Fine, she thought. Let’s play.

  “Awen,” Matteo pleaded. “Don’t. Please.”

  She cast him a dark look, one he’d learned not to cross. Awen took a calming breath and closed her eyes. She lifted her chin and began to separate her consciousness from the room, from those around her, and then from her mortal self. There, in the Unity of all things, she reached toward the energy that was already racing away from this place. She could see ripples, long strands of color and undulating shapes, flitting off to take their place in the infinite beyond. But she was faster than they were—not as fast as her masters, but quick enough.

  She caught up to the first ripples, the trailing edges of laughter. Then she reached the next waves, full-bodied chuckles. She could pick out each man’s voice, each nuance. She saw where the laughter began, and then, like a bloodhound on a fresh scent, she zeroed in on the speaker and his careless words. He was making a vulgar conjecture that she would not repeat. But she would toy with him.

  Awen left the Unity of all things and opened her eyes. She was back in the present. “Too bad you’ll never be man enough to find out, Corporal Chico.”

  The trooper winced in his armor and took a step back. Helmets pivoted back and forth as the troopers looked between themselves. Perfect. Awen guessed they’d be more cautious to say anything inappropriate over their “secure” comms from then on.

  “You’ll have to forgive them,” the lead trooper said. “Most have never met a Luma before.”

  “And you have?” Awen asked.

  “Enough to know not to do anything stupid around you.”

  “But following me into the inner sanctum of your Republic’s longest unconquerable adversary doesn’t sound at least a little bit stupid to you?”

  “No, ma’am. That’s just doing our job. Stupid is what the corporal did.”

  Fair enough, Awen thought. At least this one isn’t a total reprobate. She took a deep breath and turned to Matteo. “How come I wasn’t informed about this?”

  Matteo shrugged.

  Then the most senior Luma, Elder Toochu, approached her. “Awen,” he said in his frail yet confident voice. He took her hand like a doting grandfather. The elder had a liver-spotted baldpate and white wisps of hair over his ears to match. “Master So-Elku trusts you wholly, as do we all. Know this.” He leaned close to her ear. “However, he does not trust the Jujari. Therefore, he perceived that it was in all of our best interests to concede to the Republic’s wish to provide you with a security detail. Surely, no harm can come from their protection.”

  But harm would come. Her mind raced through a hundred history lessons about moments when projected hostility was met with violence and, in the end, death. Worse still, these troopers had to know that they posed little threat to the Jujari. They would be sliced and devoured before a blaster shot even crossed the room. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, she concluded. But it won’t end well.

  “Fine,” Awen said, turning to the trooper. “I permit you to escort us. However, you will keep well apart from us, and for the love of all the mystics, keep those blasters down. We don’t need a war on our hands, and they won’t do you much good anyway.”

  “We’ll keep our weapons in low ready position, Madame Emissary,” the trooper said.

  “A compromise. Also, I need a name or rank or something.”

  “I’m SR-2133, Commanding Officer of Charlie Platoon with the Seventy-Ninth Reconnaissance Battalion, Marine Special Units—”

  Awen interrupted him with a wave of her hand. “I don’t do your numbers and units.”

  The trooper stared at her. Awen couldn’t tell if he was considering how to bite her head off or trying to remember his birth name apart from his indoctrination. His brainwashing.

  “Lieutenant Adonis Olin Magnus.”

  “Lieutenant.” Moving onto her tiptoes to as close to the trooper’s face as she could reach, Awen whispered, “Just so you know, I don’t need an escort.”

  “And just so you know,” Magnus replied, the output volume of his helmet lowered to match hers, “I don’t need to protect you.”

  “Then we have an underst
anding.”

  “It seems we do.”

  Chapter 3

  When the first Jujari emerged from behind the linen wall, Awen thought his voice sounded like the bottom of a Gull-class freighter grinding against a shoal in the Meridian Outskirts. His words seemed to tear a hole in the hull of her soul, and she could sense the troopers bristling at the Jujari.

  The hyena-like warrior stood half a meter taller than the troopers and twice as wide. Though they still preferred to run on all fours, the Jujari had evolved to stand on their hind legs and use their forearms as humanoids did, making them a dramatic though terrifying amalgamation of canine and human characteristics. This one wore a crimson sash across his tawny chest and a wide leather belt around his waist; on it hung a holstered blaster and the ceremonial curved keeltari long sword. The fur on his shoulders was matted down by a thick red fluid. An uneducated observer would assume it was paint, but Awen knew it was blood from the day’s executions.

  Awen realized that this was a blood wolf, a member of the mwadim’s inner pack. She really wanted to interview him, but she had a job to do. That, and the warrior would most likely slaughter her the moment they were alone, no matter how much of the mother tongue she spoke.

  “The mwadim’s elect invites that you search your kyat and then to ingest the sharsh should you merit audience,” the Jujari said. His words barely seemed to escape his maw of bared teeth as his tongue labored to articulate Republic common. Still, Awen was impressed that this warrior had mastered so much of the galactic tongue.

  “Thank you,” Awen said in the beast’s native language, returning the favor and lowering her head to one side in submission.

  The effort clearly surprised him, as evidenced by the way his ears perked up. “One among you speaks mother tongue,” he snarled. “You have been blessed by the Alpha.”

  Awen bowed again but noticed that the warrior refused to acknowledge her with his eyes. Apparently, the sexist assumptions were true, even for guests.

  “Uh, Awen, what does any of that mean?” Matteo whispered. The corner of his mouth twitched. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’d soiled himself.