Chapter Eleven
Spin One
Murphy nodded to the guard who’d followed him into Interview One. The soldier moved so that his back was against the door.
A thin man was sitting cuffed at the table: Yukannak. His head had been shaved and his left eye and jaw were bound with tightly cinched bandages. Almost half his right ear was missing, the ragged rim indifferently stitched. Murphy had a momentary flashback to the first time he saw Frankenstein as a kid.
He stepped forward, placed himself in front of the table’s center. Yukannak did not look up. “You know our term ‘bullshit,’ don’t you?”
Yukannak opened his mouth slowly, carefully before answering. “I heard your men say it all the time. When we were in Downport.” He sounded as though he was talking around a mouthful of marbles.
Murphy nodded, pulled the thick folder from under his arm and tossed it on the table: the complete transcripts of Yukannak’s many interviews. “Well, that’s what this is: bullshit. All of it.”
“I understand your anger because I seem to have betrayed—”
“Don’t even start with that,” Murphy laughed, waving away the Kulsian’s words. “There’s no question that you were looking for any opportunity to sabotage the mission and serve up the team on a platter to your Overlords. But that’s not why you’re here.”
Yukannak glanced up, a hint of interest in his eyes.
Murphy tapped the thick sheaf of papers. “This is why you’re here. To correct all the lies you’ve told us from the start.”
“Colonel Murphy, on the off chance that there were some inaccuracies, you surely understand that I would not have—”
“Not have lied? Not have occasionally seeded in misinformation? The subtle kind that we wouldn’t detect or you could claim was a superficial distinction, but would be quite noticeable to a native Kulsian? Which, when added together—all the small errors in slang, idioms, history—would send a very clear message: ‘I am misleading the enemy as much as I can.’”
Murphy shrugged. “Oh, I get why you did it. You were thinking ahead toward your ‘liberation.’ You’d be able to point to that misinformation in the hope that the Overlords back home would forgive you for cooperating with us at all. Maybe they’d even buy the story that, in order to undermine our efforts, you had to appear to be genuinely cooperating with us. Which was the smart play, because if things had gone otherwise—if we came out on top—you could spin it around and plead that what might seem like lies were just inaccuracies that never impacted our operations.”
“Which they never did,” Yukannak murmured.
Murphy shook his head. “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that. Although right now, I suspect you believe that’s the only card you have left to play. Problem is, it’s become worthless. Maybe you’ve lost track of time, but the surveyors have been on R’Bak for quite a while. Which means there are now a lot of other people there who are just like you: skilled, knowledgeable, tasked with getting shipments ready for the Harvesters. But unlike you, some of them are genuinely helping us.”
Yukannak shifted his jaw slightly. “And you still have your own people on the planet, with so many surveyors abroad? You are very brave indeed.”
Murphy smiled. “That’s prudent, calling our actions ‘brave’ instead of what you really mean: ‘foolhardy.’ But it makes no difference to me, particularly since we don’t need to be on R’Bak to work with our friends there. And no, we’re not so ‘brave’ that we use radio—which you Kulsians would find within days.”
“If that,” Yukannak muttered.
Murphy didn’t bother reacting to the Kulsian’s proud but futile emendation. “So here’s what you need to think about right now, Yukannak. We know you’ve lied to us all along. Hell, we expected that, and I don’t even blame you; we’re the enemy, after all. But before you went dirtside to help our team in Downport, you accepted my parole. And you didn’t just break it, you shattered it. Betrayed my men. Damn near killed some of them. Kept lying while you did.” Murphy leaned back. “And yet, here you are.”
Yukannak stared at the transcripts. “So,” he sighed, “you have found genuinely disaffected persons among the surveyors. One or more from the southern hemisphere, no doubt. And they will indicate where I have lied.”
Fortunately, Murphy had prepared for the interview by presuming that the Kulsian would deduce why his enemies believed he’d amend his earlier statements honestly. “You can hypothesize to your black heart’s content, Yukannak. Doesn’t matter to me. All I care about are these.” Murphy pushed the transcripts at him. “Get started.”
Yukannak stared at the stack of papers and frowned. “If you do indeed have someone who can tell you where I have . . . been less than fully forthcoming, why do you need me to do it?”
Murphy smiled. “Oh, I wouldn’t waste time trying to trick you, Yukannak. You’re the expert liar, here, not me. But if you don’t believe there are Kulsians helping us, there’s an easy way you can prove it to yourself.”
Rather than lean forward, Murphy leaned back. “Just leave one error in place. Please, do that. I’d like it; I really would. Because you see, I’m authorized to speak with you but not to . . . well, ‘discipline’ you.” He leaned back. “The SpinDogs insisted they be left in charge of that, as well as your care.”
Yukannak wasn’t able to keep his Adam’s apple from cycling rapidly.
“It’s up to you. Although it might prove helpful if you cooperated.”
“Helpful in what way?”
“I understand you’ve complained that your injuries did not receive adequate treatment. So just leave one lie in place. I’m sure the SpinDog medtechs will show their appreciation by ‘examining’ your injuries. In minute detail.
“And you don’t have to make a hasty decision. Take as long as you like. But if you want your SpinDog warders to give you something to eat, and if you want the temperature in your cell to remain above five degrees Celsius, and if you want more than half a liter of water per day, then you’ll want to start correcting these transcripts.”
* * *
Mara and Naliryiz nodded at Murphy as he closed the door to Interview One behind him.
“He’s already started,” the healer said.
Lee smiled and shook her head. “I’ve got to hand it to you, that was some pretty nice work, Colonel.”
Murphy shrugged and sat. “Helps when you hold all the cards.” And a subject who knows there are a bunch of SpinDogs just itching to “clean his wounds” with a bit of exploratory knife-work.
“Still, looks like we won’t have long to wait,” Mara added, watching Yukannak flipping through the pages. “Where did he lie, according to Lanunaz?”
Murphy leaned back, waited until he controlled a tremor starting in his leg: in recent weeks, doing so had not only become more difficult, but took longer. “There weren’t a lot of blatant falsehoods. Mostly lies of omission.”
“About what?” Naliryiz slid into the chair next to him, letting her weight push it much closer than was common between professional peers.
Murphy did his best to ignore her proximity. “Yukannak said that the lack of Harvester activity in the southern hemisphere and the northern part of the Greens was due to disinterest. There’s some truth in that, but there’s another factor: they’re more difficult to control.
“Because they’re both less affected by the Searing, they retain most of their vegetation and almost all of their water sources. That leads to more stable communities and political structures, which means it’s harder for the Kulsians to apply their favorite strategy: bribe and back the most cooperative satraps. That’s how they take over regions: divide and conquer. And because both areas also remain reasonably well-forested, the coursers and surveyors take heavier casualties when they move around there.”
Mara nodded. “When I was teaching helo pilots at the northern edge of the Greens, you could always see canopy somewhere nearby. A small force willing to cross that region in stages could do so just by moving from one point of concealment to the next. Is it the same down south?”
Murphy tilted his head in partial confirmation. “Not as much cover, but a lot more arable land and bigger cities, largely because the Harvesters never have made durable inroads there. The nation—or maybe confederation—of Peregryn has been able to maintain a united front against most incursions, and whatever toeholds the Kulsians make never survive from one Searing to the next.”
Mara frowned. “Why?”
“Weather,” Naliryiz answered before Murphy could. “During the Searing, trans-equatorial travel is extremely hazardous. Jrar’s approach injects an immense amount of energy into R’Bak’s oceans and jet streams. The resulting storms and floods are frequent and often catastrophic. In-atmo flight is not much safer. So any landings the Kulsians make in that area cannot be supported by air or sea links, only direct planetfalls from space.”
Murphy nodded. “And even when the weather improves, there still isn’t much travel over the equator. Not just because the temperatures and weather are still awful, but because there isn’t a lot of motivation for merchants from either north and south to take the risks. The north’s trade is dominated by the satraps and the goods they covet: Kulsian technology and pharmaflora. The south is more inwardly focused, occupied with providing enough food and goods for its much greater population.”
Mara folded her arms. “Okay, but how are Yukannak’s misrepresentations about this any more than . . . well, little white lies?”
Murphy smiled. “Because he used those little white lies to conceal a much bigger one. Specifically, why are the Kulsians more focused on R’Bak’s northern hemisphere when the south is generally wealthier?”
Mara nodded. “So, his important lies were what he concealed about Kulsis.”
“Exactly. And it was easy to hide because there are a lot of misleading similarities between R’Bak and Kulsis. Although R’Bak’s is much worse during the Searing, both have punishingly hot equatorial belts that are dangerous to cross. Kulsis’s political and cultural environment is far more organized and secure, but beneath the surface, it’s every bit as tangled and diffuse as the satrapies and tribes in this system. They, too, maintain distinctions and prejudices that seem arbitrary or ridiculous to an outsider.
“However, there is something that unifies almost all Kulsians in the southern hemisphere: their feeling that the north is inhabited by a bunch of hierarchical and autocratic oppressors. In the north, the opinion runs the opposite direction: that the south is a dumping ground for the disorganized, the desperate, and the inferior.”
Mara raised an eyebrow. “The ‘inferior’?”
Murphy nodded. “That’s the party line among the great powers. The strongest of them, the Syfarthan Combine, controls the rest of the north through a set of pacts, treaties, and marriages.”
“Sounds feudal,” Mara grumbled.
“It does, except it’s even more complicated and convoluted: I couldn’t follow Lanunaz’s explanation of all the class distinctions. Their pecking order is so bizarre and petty that it would be funny, if it wasn’t a matter of life and death. Literally.”
Naliryiz nodded. “Still, it is easy to see why the Kulsians instituted the ‘satrapy’ model on R’Bak. It is the likeness of their own society, writ upon the beings of another world.”
“The lesser beings of another world,” Murphy amended. “Which arises from the same presumptions that lead the Overlords to define the people of the south as inferior.”
Mara crossed her arms. “Look, I know they must have inherited the Ktoran insistence upon dominion, but what’s the rhetoric they use to convince themselves that everyone else is their inferior?”
Murphy shook his head. “The best way to ask that question is in reverse: What makes the people in the north believe they’re superior? That’s the critical piece that Yukannak left out of all his descriptions, because it explains why the Overlords are so laser-focused on harvesting the resources in the north, and particularly the Hamain.” Murphy sighed. “Ironically, we had all the pieces of that puzzle in front of us. Hell, it was all but spelled out in the database Vat put together while he was on R’Bak Island.”
Naliryiz frowned. “What kind of database?”
“A list of the resources and trade goods that the surveyors always look for. Of where previous Harvester missions had concentrated their efforts. Of what their cargo priorities were.” Murphy laughed at himself. “We just thought it was the pharmaflora. Although, to be fair, pharmaflora was the second-highest priority on the Kulsian agenda. But it was a distant second.”
“A distant second to what?” Mara almost shouted.
“To the pods that allow the families of the north to maintain their genetic advantages.”
Mara started. “What are you talking about?”
“According to Yukannak and Lanunaz,” Murphy began, peripherally aware of Naliryiz’s widening eyes, “the way that Breedmistresses determine optimal pairings—the genetic matches with the fewest potential defects and greatest potential advantages—is something they call breedsensing. It’s genetic knowledge that transcends mere observation. It involves, well, sensing the patterns of genetic material and how those can be combined to produce desired outcomes.”
“‘Sensing’?” Mara echoed helplessly. “What the hell does that even mean, Murph?”
“It means they can examine genecodes with a sense beyond the five we know. That sixth sense is the product of a state they call Reification.”
Naliryiz’s eyes were so wide they trembled. “Murphy! You swore not to ask about that word! All the Families present at Primus Dolkar’s execution witnessed your acceptance of that condition!”
He turned toward her. “Guild-mother Shumrir’s exact words were, ‘You are not to ask us about it.’ And I have kept my word; I have never asked any SpinDogs, or even RockHounds, about it.” He gestured toward Yukannak. “But that promise did not include Kulsians. Nor any other path by which I might have come to learn more about the word. Which, in this case, was not entirely intentional.”
“Well,” Lee asked, “so what about me, now that I’ve heard the word? Do I have to pretend I never did?”
Murphy glanced toward Naliryiz. She continued to stare, unblinking, at Murphy: fearful, intrigued, possibly impressed. But also . . . slightly aroused? No: ridiculous.
He turned back toward Mara. “You haven’t promised anyone you won’t ask about Reifications. So if anyone has a problem, they can come to me. But frankly, we couldn’t avoid the topic any longer.”
“Why not?”
“Because the pods the Kulsian breedmistresses use for the most delicate Reifications are the Harvester’s top priority resource on R’Bak. Every Searing. No fail.”
“They’re that valuable?”
Naliryiz’s voice startled Murphy; it was not merely low, but husky. “Reification is a . . . a more expansive state of awareness. It is not limited to breedsensing. So yes: the pods—they are called Catalysites—are very valuable. For those who crave dominion, possibly they are the most valuable objects that exist.”
Mara shook her head. “Okay, fine. But they’ve got a whole planet of their own on which to grow them. Why come here to grab a few more?”
“Because,” Murphy said quietly, “Catalysites do not grow on Kulsis. At all.”