“Haider, you prick.” Ramona laughed.
“He must think we were born yesterday.”
“You can’t blame him for trying.”
She waved at the display, and the files melted into a still image.
A conference room with a large mother-of-pearl table assembled from carved barnacles common to the North Arctic Ocean. Three men on the left. Haider, Damien, and Derra Lee on the right.
The three visitors wore similar dark doublets and coordinating trousers, semiformal clothes that could have come from the rack in any New Delphi shop. Standard fare for midlevel businessmen and kinsmen retainers. Three names glowed above their heads: Ronaldo Marner, Weston Lugfort, Varden Plant. All three had conservative short haircuts of exactly the same length. All three sat straight, the lines of their bodies not rigid but far from relaxed.
“Military,” Matias said.
“Agreed. And new to the planet. I bet everything they’re wearing was purchased on the same day in the same shop.”
The recording resumed.
“As I already told you, we decline your generous offer,” Haider said. His expression was flat, his stare hard and hostile. A different man from the one they’d met this morning.
Varden Plant, the oldest of the three men, spoke. “It would be in your best interest to reconsider.”
Matias focused on him. Tall, fit, pale skin, brown hair, brown eyes. A masculine face. Deceptively middle aged. The galaxy offered a plethora of enhancements and rejuvenation modifications. He could be in his fifties or his eighties. He could be over a hundred, but almost certainly older than forty, because he looked at the Davenports with slight contempt and the impatience of someone irritated by perceived youth and stupidity. Both Haider and Damien were in their early thirties.
Damien Davenport leaned forward. Taller than Haider by several centimeters, he was lean, with long limbs and short black hair, his skin a reddish ocher. Where Haider was speed and explosive strength, Damien projected resolve and staying power.
“We are not interested,” Damien said, his voice smooth, almost lazy. “There is no need to argue. We won’t be swayed. You have your answer.”
“Failure is a harsh teacher,” Varden said. “You stand on its precipice, and the galaxy is watching. Take our offer and save yourselves before your enemies rip you apart.”
“Oddly grandiose,” Ramona said.
And familiar. There was something achingly recognizable about the tone, the words, and the look in Varden’s eyes, as if he weren’t speaking with human beings but with insects suitable only to be crushed under his boot.
Haider gave an exaggerated sigh. “You’ve offered three times, and we refused you three times. This meeting is over.”
Varden rose, and the two others jumped to their feet, pushing their chairs back. The visitor raised his chin and gave the Davenports a look of undisguised scorn. “I will remember this. In the future, don’t blame me for being impolite.”
Alarm bit at Matias with red-hot teeth. The world went white for a blink, as repressed memories flooded in.
The recording stopped.
“Not much to go on,” Ramona murmured and saw his face. “What?”
“Give me the access code,” he told her.
The code to the vid screen flashed in his implant. He connected to his private database, pulled the right file, and tossed it on the screen. The conference room melted, coalescing into rows of soldiers standing still in high-tech silver armor, shoulders straight, spines rigid, helmets held in the left hand. Same height. Same long braid stretching across a nearly bald scalp from forehead to the neck. Same expression: locked teeth, lowered eyebrows, unblinking stares, faces stamped with the need to dominate.
“Who are they?” Ramona murmured.
“The Vandals,” he said. The word tasted foul in his mouth. “Star Fall Republic Pacification Brigade.”
“The Vandals?” Ramona frowned. “Is that what they call themselves or what others call them?”
“Both.”
Kurt’s face flashed before Matias, the startled expression on the older man’s face branded in his memory, because he didn’t want to remember the next moment, when his crew leader’s corvette bloomed into a small star on his screen.
He tossed the map of the star sector onto the display, a large sphere punctuated by bright sparks of individual stars. As humanity had expanded across the galaxy, it had done so in bursts. A single habitable planet wasn’t enough to warrant establishing an outpost unless the settlers had serious separatist tendencies and could finance their own expedition. Instead, humanity looked for a cluster of star systems with habitable planets in relative proximity to each other. They would identify an anchor world, the place of initial settlement, build the warp gates, and funnel supplies to that world, from which humanity would spread in a starburst to all other planets within reach, forming a sector.
The sectors varied in size. Theirs was one of the larger ones, with Tayna, the anchor world, in the center and twenty-seven inhabited star systems situated at random distances from it. Even with warp gates, it took months to travel from one edge of the sector to another. Most planets traded with their immediate neighbors and with the anchor world, but the longer the distance, the less they knew about the other populations. Only the spacers—merchant marines, convoy guards, and migrant worker crews like asteroid miners—understood the whole picture.