“And you, Ambassador?” the shopkeeper asked. “An elegant weapon for an elegant diplomat, to show you speak with more than words?”
The Drifter was certainly well informed, though that wasn’t entirely surprising. Sylvia figured the casino ship’s crew had been briefed on all of the senior officers of Shaka’s crew.
“No, thank you,” she told the Drifter. “My words are more effective than any weapon I could carry.”
“Shame, shame. Well, look if you wish; I am here if you change your thoughts.”
Sylvia was about to thank the Drifter when her internal network chimed.
The Drifter vessel they’d sent to Kozun had returned to the system. They were a day earlier than Sylvia had expected, which was either a very good sign…or a very bad one.
“Vasilev, I need to get back to Shaka,” she told the other woman. “It looks like it might be time to get to work again!”
Sylvia ended up almost alone aboard the shuttle, the spacecraft heading back toward Shaka only carrying her and her GroundDiv security detail.
They’d crossed barely a third of the distance between the two ships when Leitz contacted her from the destroyer.
“Em Todorovich, we have a coms request from the Protector-Commander,” he told her. “I can ask them to wait until you return aboard?”
“They’re going to see it anyway, Felix,” Sylvia replied with a chuckle. “Who are we hiding from? Relay it to the shuttle and I’ll take it in my internals. Shouldn’t add too much time delay.”
“Understood,” her chief of staff said. “We’ll have them connected momentarily.”
It was a bit longer than momentarily before the relay and connection were set up, but it was still only a couple of minutes before a two-dimensional projection of Third-White-Fifth-Gold appeared in front of Sylvia.
Since she was using her internal network, which had obvious issues with having an image of her, they were speaking to an avatar image of her. It wouldn’t make much of a difference, but they would be able to tell.
“Ambassador, it appears my timing is less than optimal,” the Protector-Commander noted.
“Teta,” she agreed. The word meant touch and had the same connotations as touché in English. “But my mission here is important and I understand the courier ship you sent to Kozun has returned.”
“It has,” Third-White-Fifth-Gold replied. “We now have an official response from the Kozun Hierarchy to your request.”
“And?” she prodded.
“They have agreed to the meeting but have conditions and terms that will need to be met,” the Protector-Commander told her. “Some of those conditions involve the resources of Convoy Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe.
“Would it be possible for you to meet with the Council of Ancients once more, Ambassador Todorovich? We believe this would be more readily negotiated in person.”
That was ominous. More than anything, it probably meant that the Drifters were going to try and negotiate gravity-shield technology out of her again.
Swindle was probably too harsh a word, after all.
“I see no inherent issue with that,” she conceded. “But I would like to review the terms the Kozun have requested prior to that meeting.”
“If you wish to redirect your shuttle toward the garden ships, I will make certain a summary is forwarded to you,” the Protector-Commander promised. “I think all will benefit from a speedier resolution to this situation.”
That was a new sense of urgency that Sylvia hadn’t managed to get out of them before. Though…it was also possible that urgency was merely at the realization they could get paid twice now.
It was easy to stereotype the Drifters as greedy, but the scale of the Convoy outside Sylvia’s shuttle told her the truth: repairing and running those ships, feeding and caring for their crews…just keeping the millions of people living aboard the ships of Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe was an immense and expensive task.
The Council was responsible for all of those lives. Every resource they could acquire was one more shield against a cold and horrific death for millions of people.
She could understand where they were coming from…even if she wasn’t going to give them what they truly wanted.
Sylvia Todorovich was also responsible for millions of lives, after all.
Chapter Fifteen
By the time her escorts peeled off at the top of the Council of Ancients’ auditorium, Sylvia had gone over the Kozun’s requests three times and she was truly optimistic for the first time since she’d started on her mission.
The Kozun had specified a location: a blue hypergiant three skips from La-Tar. They were sending one of the Voices of the Kozun, the religious and secular heads of the Hierarchy. They wanted both sides to send three ships—specifying that at least one “Cluster” ship should be UPSF—and they wanted a three-ship neutral detachment. They weren’t even setting any preconditions to the negotiations; everything appeared to be on the table.
Of course, the neutral detachment was going to be a headache. The rumors UPSF intelligence had heard suggested that the Kozun were actively at war with at least two other nations—neither of which the UPA was in contact with yet.
In fact, the only shared contact the UPA and the Hierarchy had was the La-Tar Cluster, and since the negotiation was officially between the Hierarchy and the Cluster, they definitely didn’t count. The only option on the table, of course, was the Drifters.
And that was why Sylvia made her way down the steps to face the robed and masked figure at the center of the auditorium. It was the same Ancient with the blue-whorl-marked silver mask as the last time, and they bowed slightly as she approached.
“Ambassador Todorovich, it seems the Kozun have listed several conditions for your negotiations,” they told her. “We of Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe are prepared to help you meet those conditions, if you so desire.”
“It seems to me that the Convoy will ask for payment for such assistance,” Sylvia pointed out. “And that such payment shouldn’t be borne by merely one side of the negotiation.”
“We could not send three Guardians away from the Convoy without significant compensation, no,” blue-whorls agreed. “This Council could not do so, in fact, without guaranteed compensation.”
“You did not answer my question,” Sylvia pointed out. “Did the Kozun offer you any payment for this service?”
Blue-whorls chuckled and made a conceding gesture with his left hand.
“They did,” he allowed. “Their payment would suffice for half of the rental of three Guardians. We will require payment for the Cluster’s side as well, to guarantee our neutrality.”
If one side was shouldering all of the mercenaries’ bill, after all, the mercenaries weren’t neutral.
Sylvia kept her face calm as she studied the Face Mask of the Councilor, then glanced around the tree-shrouded meeting space. They were right, both in that she didn’t want the Kozun to be paying for their entire bill, and that in sending three Guardians away from the fleet was a major ask.
They probably didn’t need three Guardians. But that was clearly what Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe were going to send, which meant that the Cluster had to pay for it—and Sylvia was speaking for the Cluster there.