Adversary: Starways, #3

By Alexis Glynn Latner

Nia Courant is an interstellar lawyer at Avend University in the space-station city Wendis. Gyle Martan is a university official. Both outsiders here, they are engaged to be married. They'd rather work on their troubled relationship than be caught up in an attack on Wendis by the interstellar empire called the Faxen Union.

 

But they aren't hapless civilians. Nia can wage a war of legal words. Martan was an anti-terror agent for the Faxen Union before he defected to Wendis. He's ready, willing, and terrifyingly able to defend the city.  But first he has to learn the truth about his past and face his worst adversary: himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avendis Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781942686248

Book preview

1

NIGHTFALL

The sunball reached the end of the spar at the heart of the world with a reddening flare. Clouds filigreed by the spinwinds filtered the light and made a pink-tinted twilight spill through the air. Wendis was a small, strange, involuted world, situated inside a huge spinning cylinder, illuminated by a luminous ball that every day slid from one end of the cylinder to the other. Yet Martan was glad to be here. For the first time in years, he had a place in the universe that he could call home.

He had work here too. To be exact, he was the proctor at Avend University. Walking along a fauxgravel-surfaced path on the hilly end of the campus, he smiled to himself at the wild irony of being what he was—and having a job that amounted to making a few thousand students stay inside the university’s rules and stay out of forbidden places.

Occasionally he broke up an undergraduate scheme that involved contraband or dangerous or illegal devices. That was the most interesting part of the job, but still came nowhere near challenging his abilities. In recommending his appointment as proctor almost a year ago, the city council of Wendis had shown an extraordinary sense of irony. And the university had gained an extraordinary protector, though the school in general was unaware of that. Only the top two university lawyers and their legal assistant knew the whole truth.

The students did know that for some weeks their proctor had been away across the stars in the company of Nia Courant, the university’s specialist in interstellar law. Because he and she had become engaged just before they left Wendis, rumor had them honeymooning on the golden beaches of the planet Goya. They had in fact been there briefly, but only on the way back from more distant and dangerous places.

It wasn’t known that he’d returned. After arriving at his office early this morning he’d made sure not to be seen around campus. So tonight he fully expected to catch one or more students breaking rules. A catch like that would be good for his reputation. Depending on how major the broken rules were, it would be good for the university’s reputation too. He felt glad to be back at work.

Around the next turn of the meandering path, he encountered a small white dog trotting the other way. He recognized the dog. It belonged to Academic Provost Gellatly, and it was a canine breed unique to Wendis—a Wendisan chivvier. Martan looked down at the little dog. The dog looked up at him with bright, knowing eyes.

I’m making my evening rounds, same as you, Martan said.

The dog gave a quick wag of its tail and went on its way. It seemed to think it was his equal, a fellow watchdog with sharp teeth, sensitive ears, and a keen nose. That wasn’t far from the truth, which was fine with Martan.

There. Two smirking students hurried along the path. The taller one gingerly carried a large, lightly loaded bag. The smaller one, in the lead, carried a small box with equal care. They hardly noticed Martan. With his dark hair, brown skin, and nondescript coat, he had unremarkable looks. When they were about to pass him, he asked, Planning something against school rules?

They looked at him then. The slighter boy energetically shook his head. His taller, ganglier follower actually paled.

Fine. He walked on. His hyperacute hearing soon caught frantic whispers behind him. What do we do?

We go back.

"What about this?"

We’ll hide it in the steam tunnel!

Once the students were out of his sight, they scrambled down the hill, taking a short-cut across the springy grass between loops of the path. From the direction of their footfalls, he could guess which steam tunnel cover they meant to pry up in order to hide whatever it was.

He’d ask the maintenance team on duty this evening to investigate. It would be interesting to know just what the students’ prize was. If it was contraband, he’d identify the perpetrators and bring charges against them. He hadn’t electronically queried their ID’s—or needed to; because he had perfect facial recognition, he’d memorized both young faces.

If it wasn’t contraband, they’d still be poorer for however much time and money they’d put into whatever it was, and the story of their misadventure would spread across campus and prevent future trouble. He liked solving problems that way, using guile instead of raw force. The name he used now was Gyle Night Martan, and Gyle was pronounced guile. Having Night as a middle name helped him pass unremarkably for a native of Goya.

Martan, though, was the name that felt like who he really was. Nia Courant called him Martan, which got his attention like nothing and no one else. After he did proctor’s rounds, and she got out of a meeting expected to run late, they planned to spend the rest of the night together. She was okay with what he was, very much so. In her clear voice, she’d call him Martan and tell him what she wanted him to do to please her, and he would. Looking forward to that, he whistled an old tune, remembered from his childhood in a vanished village on a distant world where his name had been Mikal-Martin.

From uphill, he heard a sharp growl. He halted. Had the chivvier met a sewer snake?

It growled again. It wasn’t an excitable dog. He jumped over the low hedge beside the path and angled toward where the growl came from, a grove of linden trees.

With its white fur tinted pink by the intense pink twilight, the chivvier stood beside something man-shaped lying on the ground. Maybe the man-shape was a drunken intruder on the university grounds. But the chivvier wasn’t growling at the drunk. It glared at a thicket of rhododendrons under the trees. The trees were winter-bare. The rhododendrons, evergreen, had enough foliage for someone to hide behind them.

Martan stalked closer, alert. Then two things registered on his senses at the same time. He heard someone run out of the thicket, skidding into the ravine over the shoulder of the hill. And he smelled blood. It wasn’t congealed blood. It was warm and welling.

Muttering a curse, he ran to the prone figure while stabbing a stud on his ID cuff to signal the university’s emergency medics.

The man was face-down with arms and legs askew as though he’d fallen like a rag doll. He wasn’t holding a weapon. Whatever injury had spilled his blood hadn’t been self-inflicted. The nape of Martan’s neck prickled with unease. He glanced at the chivvier. It was still stiff-legged and alert. It would warn him if the assailant returned.

He took a longer look at the fallen man. Blood pooled under the man’s throat. The side of the man’s face was distorted by a rictus of terror. His fingers were rigid, spasmed in the act of clawing at the ground.

This was like something Martan had seen before. It was too much like that. Incredulous, he touched the man’s temples with his fingertips. Concentrating on faint electrical signals detected by the enhanced nerves in his fingers, he read the dying mind. It was ruined, dimming, but the shape of the ruin was unmistakable.

As Martan felt the brain die, and knew why, anger exploded in his chest.

The emergency medics sprang out of their little vehicle before it rolled to a stop. They were medical students, full of enthusiasm for emergency medicine.

Martan blocked them. The patient is dead. It was murder. The police will soon be here. He could hear the police hovercraft approaching.

Scared, the young medics backpedaled away from the dead man.

The murderer fled the scene, Martan added.

The hovercraft landed vertically. A compact woman in a dark uniform stepped out. Martan told her what he’d told the medics. At a gesture from her, the hovercraft pilot jumped out with a weapon in his hand. Wendisan police did not brandish weapons except in extreme situations. But this was exactly that.

It was getting dark. The policewoman expertly swept a flashlight beam across the dead man, the bloody grass, and the bristling chivvier. She knew what she was doing. She was Sagitta Charry, the Wendisan chief of police. Do you recognize the victim?

Martan shook his head. The rictus would have made any face almost unrecognizable. Expensively tailored clothing made it unlikely that he was a student or professor. Paler skin than most Wendisans still left a few hundred citizens, not to mention visitors.

Charry queried the victim’s ID cuff. Her eyes widened at the automated response. Asking if the medics had a postmortem scanner and knew how to use it—they did—she told them to begin that. Finally she raised an eyebrow at Martan. With a jerk of his chin, he suggested they retreat a few paces where they wouldn’t be overheard.

Bad, said Charry. But why signal me?

That the signal pod on his ID cuff had an easy-to-find stud specifically to alert Sagitta Charry was very unusual. It had been given to him in case of an almost outlandishly unlikely need. He’d never used it before. It’s even worse than what you see. Moments before he died, I touched his mind. There wasn’t much left. It had been plundered before his throat was cut. He forced the next words out. A hellhound did it.

She had strong nerves. In an even tone of voice, she asked, Where were you?

On the path, thirty meters away. I encountered two students up to no good just before I heard the chivvier growling. I got here in seconds, and the assailant was already gone. A telepathic interrogation takes longer than that, at least five minutes and as much as thirty, because the victim fights it. The students will probably agree to sign statements about seeing me when they did. They recognized me.

You are telling me that there’s another hellhound in Wendis. One which, unlike you, we don’t know about. One that just made a kill.

He gave a curt nod. Anger made his blood pound in his ears. But knowing how an interview like this could go—the ingrained suspiciousness of law enforcement personnel at a crime scene, on any world, even if the suspect was somebody they knew, even a friend—he concealed his anger and steeled himself for doubt. What Charry asked next surprised him anyway. Can you read a scan done moments after murder and archived in the hospital since then?

He disentangled his mind from his anger to think clearly. Possibly. I couldn’t retrieve any facts, not the name of the victim or identity of the assailant, but I might be able to tell whether the brain was assaulted like this one. Do you think this isn’t the first kill?

There’s a cold case I’ve wondered about.

Martan instinctively felt skeptical. A few years ago, the protectors of Wendis had eliminated a hellhound who came here on the trail of an enemy of the Faxen Union. Since then, Wendis was off limits to the hellhounds of Faxe. Which was why, when Martan lost faith in the cause of the Faxen Union, he had defected here.

But the loss of a hellhound on the trail wasn’t something that the Faxen Secret Intelligence Agency would overlook. If they ever had a hellhound with a decent chance of going undetected in Wendis—yes, they’d send him here. Not that Wendis was full of enemies of the Faxen state. But the scope of hellhound missions had expanded from excising enemies of the state to seizing advantages for the state. In terms of lucrative interstellar secrets and linchpins of interstellar trade, Wendis was a target-rich environment.

After Martan had lost his family in his home village—turned into a radioactive scar on the planet Delagua by Disunion terrorists—he’d been recruited to become a hellhound. He’d been physically and psychologically redesigned in the laboratories and training grounds under the surface of the Faxen moon called Varry. It hadn’t been a home—more like a protracted ordeal—but it had been a defining place of origin, sending him out across the stars like an arrow aimed at enemies of Faxe. The last shot of the arrow went astray because it had a conscience. The arrow landed here. Now his home, his work, and his lover were in Wendis.

And another hellhound had intruded and become his mortal enemy.

2

AFTERMATH

Nia Courant wished she could be in her own apartment, awaiting Martan, instead of here. When you had more appealing plans, a meeting of the university’s faculty senate—with exacting attention to every detail whether relevant or not, every opinion magnified by outrage however justified by current events, and an overstuffed agenda even before new business yet to be specified—qualified as one of the lesser circles of hell.

But only recently she’d been in a place that really had been hell for her. . . .

A watchful and autonomous part of her mind found the door to that topic ajar and gently closed it. She was left with a clear but unsubstantiated sense that there were far worse places than the senate chamber. The air felt comfortably warm. The lighting was soft, with a rosy twilight slanting through a tall window. She felt only slightly askew in her chair because of the spingravity, which kept things in place. No, she didn’t mind being here after all.

The vice-chancellor apologized for the chancellor’s absence, at which no one was particularly surprised. The chancellor preferred to conduct meetings electronically. Meeting in person was archaic. But that was how things were done in Wendis.

The speaker of the faculty senate read through the agenda, of which everyone had an electronic or printform copy anyway. Nia scanned hers. For all its detail, it didn’t name the elephant in the room. Only a few weeks ago, the interstellar crossroads station and hotel called Starway, the farthest province of Wendis, had been invaded by a corporate militia of the Faxen Union. The Wendisans and hotel guests defending Starway had surprisingly—the corporate soldiers were certainly surprised—won the little war that followed. Repercussions were still spreading out like shock waves. Wendis was an independent city-state with many diplomatic, commercial, educational, and legal connections to the Faxen Union. The attack on Starway made almost every such connection suspect.

As a case in point, the chancellor was half-Faxen and had spent his early life on Faxe. Apart from his distaste for physical meetings—a typical Faxen attitude—his background had never been at issue in Avend University. Nia wondered if anyone would take advantage of his absence to call for a vote of no confidence. She probably wasn’t the only person thinking about the implications of the Starway attack for the chancellor’s legitimacy.

The elephant in the room invisibly leaned on people, who fidgeted uncomfortably. With an invisible trunk, it knocked over the water glass in front of the dean of the School of Hospitality. Dean Zelig was jittering with impatience for her turn to speak—blandly scheduled in the agenda under Administrative Reports. She would name the elephant if no one else did. Avend University owned and operated the hotel in Starway and used it as a training ground for students in the School of Hospitality. The fight for Starway had put students in peril. Prompt medical care—there was a small hospital in Starway and the doctors had rushed to tend fallen fighters even while the fight raged—had saved three injured students from ending up crippled or dead. Being a conscientious academic dean, Midori Zelig took it very personally.

Nia was scheduled to speak after the dean. The agenda noted that she would explain how recent events were of legal interest.

You could say that the recent events were of legal interest. With equal truth, you could say that a sun was a light in the sky. So it was, but that said nothing about the mechanisms that provided this world light and heat. Calling the Starway attack of legal interest papered over a spectacular crisis in interstellar law. Nia needed to warn the faculty senators where real legal risks lay—without revealing anything that would be compromising if it leaked out. And it almost certainly would. Typically, the faculty senate could make a sieve look watertight.

The intended agenda would finally wind its way around to consideration of several junior faculty for tenured positions at Avend University. Awkward and debatable even under normal circumstances, that process was going to be complicated by one of them being an upper-crust Faxen. His field was mathematics—about as far removed from war and politics as you could imagine—but the Starway attack had changed everything.

The rosy light in the window faded. The room lights gently brightened to compensate. The speaker called for a vote to approve the previous month’s minutes, which now seemed utterly inconsequential. Across the table from Nia, a small bright light flashed on the wrist of the vice-chancellor. An urgent signal had come to his ID cuff. He quickly stepped to the commcube in the back corner of the room.

It was incredibly archaic to have to go to a designated spot from which to communicate. Of course the Wendisan history enthusiasts who put on the annual Ascendance Fair, celebrating how the ancients first ventured from Earth into space, loved it: they decorated commcubes as twentieth-century telephone booths. Everybody else including foreign interstellar citizens just had to live with it.

The faculty senate made a bored stir. This was how the chancellor usually made his presence known at these meetings—by calling the underling he’d sent in his place. Thin red lines of light at the edges of the commcube signaled that the call was privatized. The vice-chancellor could hear and say anything without being overheard. Something of a sensitive nature was at issue, then, which was a bit out of character. The chancellor preferred it when the importance of his thoughts was audible.

The vice-chancellor abruptly ended the call and ran out of the room as though catapulted. The senate speaker’s mouth dropped open. Then Nia’s ID bracelet flashed. She went to the commcube abandoned by the vice-chancellor.

The face of her legal assistant appeared on the screen in the cube. He was in their office with a dark window behind him. His face was grave. We have been contacted by Sagitta Charry. On his evening rounds, Martan happened upon the scene of a crime. You need to know about it without delay. It is going to be complicated for our office.

What kind of crime?

A m-murder. Hiro Hiroshi Low was her friend as well as her trusted legal assistant, and a gentle soul. The word murder did not come easily to his lips.

Nia was more case-hardened. Who got murdered?

Hiro whispered, The chancellor.

Oh, no! No wonder he was absent! She disliked Chancellor Moras. But no one deserved to be murdered. Her mind raced. Complicated is right. The chancellor, half-Faxen, could have been targeted because of his ancestry. Gossip and the news media would reach that conclusion in hours, with suspicion falling on any university people who’d proclaimed anti-Faxen sentiments, and that had to be at least a third of them. Diplomatically, no matter what the Faxen Union had done, it looked bad for one of their citizens to be murdered in Wendis. It gave the Union diplomatic traction it didn’t deserve and would misuse.

Nia Inanna, there’s more. The way Hiro said her nickname and first name, a manner of address very significant in Wendis, told her that he had something important to tell her. The rim of the cube turned red.

You could complain about the Wendisan insistence on commcubes, but the city’s communication lines were hardened against eavesdropping. Wendis didn’t have communication signals flying through the air for anybody with an unhealthy interest to tap, nor carelessly audible calls that could be overheard. Every face in the senate chamber was looking her way, but they would hear nothing. What?

Martan thinks the murderer was a hellhound. Not him. Another. One that got away.

Her breath caught in her chest. An anti-terror agent of the Faxen Union assassinated Chancellor Moras? This wasn’t just complicated. It was bad in too many ways to count. Where? Is Martan there?

The linden grove near the meanderway. Yes.

Nia ran out of the Senate chamber after the vice-chancellor. Younger, fitter, and galvanized where he was stunned and stumbling, she caught up with him by the time they reached the linden grove.

City and campus police ringed the crime scene, holding back curious onlookers. The head of the campus police department, Chief Warman, recognized her and let her into the ring.

Martan stood motionless, alert and grim. Provost Gellatly’s little chivvier stood by Martan’s feet somehow conveying the same mood. The dog’s name was Sirius, Nia disconnectedly remembered.

Registering how the vice-chancellor swayed in shock at the sight of the long, plasfilm-covered bundle on the ground, Nia urgently asked Martan, Do you need a lawyer?

I have an alibi. Sagitta accepted it. So probably not.

Nia started to advise him to not say anything more without consulting her, to stay inside the university until further notice, and to do nothing out of the ordinary any time soon.

The advice died in her throat.

From here you could see much of the length of Wendis. The dark shapes of the Wend mountains loomed high, stippled with artificial lighting and campfires, blotched with lightless areas. The Wends held the Zoned Park, with countless boltholes in which a wrongdoer could hide. It also had places where a criminal could find allies or buy them. The murderer had most likely fled into the park to lie low and prepare to strike again. And Martan knew it. He looked up at the Wends with his fists clenched. With another hellhound in Wendis—one that had invaded the university and killed someone—Nia could guess what he was thinking: This means war.

In that mood, he wouldn’t listen to legal reason, not even from her.

If the faculty senate meeting had been tense before, it was a lightyear beyond tense now. When she got back, Nia found that the speaker had stubbornly kept the meeting on track. Dean Zelig had already made her report. Nia didn’t need to hear it. She’d been to Starway not long after the war. She’d seen the makeshift repairs and heard survivors’ stories.

It was time for Nia to address the Senate. But not with what she’d planned to say. She stood up, knowing that her looks—tall and with the silver hair of someone from the terraformed planet Azure—had an attention-getting effect. I have very new and unpleasant information to share with you. The chancellor has been murdered. It was less than an hour ago. It was on campus, outdoors. The perpetrator has not been identified or caught.

There was a moment of shock, then murmurs of incredulity and distress. Then everyone in the room threw questions at her.

She held up her hand. University Legal Counsel Minami Toll is in conference with the Wendisan city council. It would be premature for me to answer questions. The only information authorized for release now is what I just told you.

They pivoted. You’re supposed to tell us about the legal repercussions of what happened at Starway, said one.

You were there, said another—better informed than most but not suspiciously so. She’d anticipated being reminded of that.

I was in the Starway hotel, she said. Asleep.

And then—but the watchful part of her mind quickly closed the door. She shrugged. I slept through it. Our university proctor took some part in the defense, along with many heroic Wendisans who were there as staff, students, academic visitors, or guests.

She hoped her audience imagined Martan startled but bravely joining the fray like so many others. In truth, without his superhuman talents the outcome would have been a pyrrhic victory or worse. The thought made her blood run cold. But that was beside the point now. She hardened her voice. Five Wendisan defenders paid with their lives. There was no reason for them to die. Diplomatic evasions aside, and there have already been those from the Faxen government, the attack on Starway violated the neutrality of Wendis. It contradicted at least twenty-three clauses of seventeen interstellar agreements of which the university or its departments, schools and institutes is a signatory or interested party. And it was an unprovoked act of war.

The faculty senate included several citizens of Faxe and several more scholars of Faxen history, economy, or ecology. None of them argued with her. With surprising alacrity for an often-tendentious body, the faculty senate approved a resolution that censured the Faxen Union for the attack on Avend University’s people and property. The resolution deplored it as an assault on an old and respected institution of education, and by extension, an affront to the values of civilization.

Nia couldn’t have agreed more.

She could hardly believe she’d only been back in Wendis for two days. A lot of work had already been waiting for her in her office, and she’d been at it all day. And now this. The more-junior lawyers in the Legal Counsel’s Office had left. They would return very early in the morning. Her boss was still here. Legal Counsel Minami Toll, the university’s top lawyer, was white-haired with age, but as durable as someone half her years, and never left important work unfinished.

Toll finally told her, This is all we need from you now. Go home—or better, go stay with Martan tonight. In his residence, you are well protected by his security devices.

Will I need to be? Nia had so hoped that now that she was back in Wendis, she was finally safe. Last year she’d found herself a target of unknown enemies and ill-intended schemes which escalated and finally sent her and Martan on a dangerous quest across the stars. She had so hoped all that happened while she and Martan were away had finally put a stop to her being in danger here.

High Heaven only knows.

Hiro asked, Minnie Minami, what do you make of this? His use of Toll’s nickname and first name signaled respect, while his sweeping gesture encompassed the murder by hellhound and every uncertainty and stress connected to it.

Toll looked at them—Nia, Hiro, and Friday the AI with its unblinking attention light. She gave a nod, almost to herself, signaling how much she trusted the ears remaining in this office. It seems plausible to me that the Starway attack having failed, a secret agent—a sleeper—in Wendis woke up. No such creature would have gotten in recently, in the weeks since the attack. Security is on highest alert. But it may have found chinks, long before now. My worst fear is that the chink was found in the university.

Hiro clutched his hair in his hands. That was a bad sign. Hiro had excellent instincts for where trouble could come from.

Toll said, It’s been a long day, and the night that has fallen on us may last long. Go home to your good husband, Hiro; and Nia, go to your fiancé.

What about you? Nia asked.

I’m on call with city council and the university’s administration. Important deliberations are going on. For one thing, the vice-chancellor is unqualified to be elevated to the office of chancellor at a time of crisis. The chancellor was not someone who chose assistants made of stern stuff. Unlike myself. With that, Toll withdrew into her private office, possibly not anticipating any sleep tonight.

Hiro held up an untidy pile of leaves. He put it into Nia’s extended hands. It napped in my desk drawer all day.

The hugwort was a plant-animal from a distant and mysterious planet. There were several of its kind in Wendis, and Nia had been given one because she needed to design legal protections for its species. She’d kept and nurtured it because she liked it, and it liked her. It tenderly twined a tendril around Nia’s finger, and she felt its furry root mass purr. She sighed gratefully. As it had been through the last months and perilous travels, the hugwort was good for her nerves.

Picking up his carrycloth, Hiro told her. Minnie Minami looks like a grandmother and thinks like a general. If an acting chancellor is to be named, I hope it’s her.

Nia frowned. She couldn’t take that hot potato of a job and head this office at the same time.

Of course not. That would fall to you, Nia Inanna.

She was in a troubled mood as she walked across the campus to Martan’s apartment in the cool evening. Stars glittered in the spar in the central axis of the cylindrical world, above her. Like the sunball, they weren’t just lights. The stars reflected the environs of Wendis, the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, rich in bright stars, dark nebulas, and