"How did you know I specialise in Enjarian history?" Lyn asked, sharper now.
"All questions answered, once you've given me your answer. Your ship will be flight-ready within days. Use the time to see something of our culture while you wait: we're a few days out from the Festival of the Lost Night. It's worth the visit."
The crew rose to be shown out, all except the cyborg, who stayed rooted in his chair.
"Link. Coming?" Frank asked from the doorway.
"I'll be along," Link said, waving him off.
For a long, silent stretch after the others left, Link simply looked at the young man seated across from him, into eyes that were fierce and bright and, underneath all of it, unnervingly still, the way the centre of a storm is the only quiet place in the whole system.
"Master. Is that you," Link said, finally, his voice catching somewhere in the vocal synthesizer that did most of his talking for him now.
"Who's asking."
"The one who did the evil to you. The one who never earned the mercy you gave him."
"I told you a long time ago you were forgiven for that."
Link came apart. He crossed the room and folded himself around Taisen in an embrace that had nothing careful about it at all, sobbing in the ragged, half-mechanical way his voice box rendered grief, while Taisen simply let it happen without pulling away.
"How. How did this happen." Link's words came out broken, stacked on top of each other. "I thought you were gone. Truly gone, this time. Those human bastards, after everything you gave them. We should make them pay for what they."
"I have other plans for that," Taisen said, quiet. "For now, I need your crew brought around to my offer. Can you do that for me?"
"Anything. Anything at all, my master."
Once Link had gone, a scatter of hooded figures materialised out of the shadowed edges of the chamber where they'd been standing the entire time, unseen.
"I appreciate your restraint back there," Taisen said.
"My Nagvashi. You commanded us not to strike unless killer intent showed itself first," one of them said. "We are your servants. We obey."
Ness came to him again that same night, alone, and bowed low before taking the seat he gestured toward.
"I leave for Earth soon, with the humans," he said. "I have work for you before I go."
"I am at your service, my Nagvashi."
"This cannot be said in front of Matriarch Simika. She would not approve."
"We are tools for you to use as you see fit. Her approval was never required."
"Regardless. When I return from Earth, I intend to bring back what's needed to raise the Raider fleet again. I need preparations made. My people ready to move the moment I ask."
Ness's smile spread slow and satisfied, the smile of a woman being handed exactly what she'd wanted without having had to ask for it herself.
"They will be ready, my Nagvashi," she said. "The universe will remember, all over again, exactly why the Sahir of Kharsat were once a name spoken with fear."
"Reactor status."
"Check."
"Hydraulics."
"Check."
"Navigation."
"Check."
"Oxygen."
"Normal."
"Instruments."
"Check."
"Pants."
"Soiled."
"Dicks."
"Wanked."
"Well, that concludes our preflight checks," Frank announced. "Co-pilot Link, raise the landing gear and prepare for departure."
"Captain, the engine's purring like a Danovian cat. Better readings than we had before the Krell attack ever touched us," Link said.
"We really should get shot at more often," Frank said, grinning.
#*** The following contains copyrighted material from "A memoir of my travels throughout the galaxy," written by Lord Wayne and published by the Emure Publishing Company of London ***#
"The stories told of the Sahir of Kharsat have aged into something closer to myth than history by now, though they remain fascinating for it.
The Kharsat system holds seven worlds; Kharsat itself is the fourth, mostly wet and swampy according to the oldest surveys on record, though nothing living I've spoken to has seen it that way with their own eyes. Its people are said to be dark of skin and pale of hair, mystics of some description, though what exactly they practise depends entirely on who you ask and how much they'd had to drink before answering. Some claim the Sahir can hide their presence entirely, or move faster than a blaster round. I consider anyone repeating that claim a fool, right up until I met one of them myself, at which point I revised my opinion considerably, and I'd advise the reader to do the same rather than take my word for it either way.
What can be said with more confidence: the Sahir organise themselves by clan, each led by a woman called a Matriarch, with the full council of Matriarchs governing everything from warfare to agriculture between them. They keep strange customs by outsider standards: among them, harvesting water from the bodies of their own dead, which I suspect owes less to ritual than to the simple, grim mathematics of a desert that doesn't give water back easily to anyone, living or otherwise.
Before faster-than-light travel made the galaxy smaller, the Sahir were something closer to a plague on intergalactic shipping lanes: vast raiding fleets of small, impossibly fast vessels that could swallow a merchant convoy or a military escort with equal ease, using stealth technology no survivor could ever quite describe afterward, beyond the fact that no one saw them coming until it no longer mattered. How the matter was finally resolved remains unclear even now, though rumour holds that a quiet, unrecorded understanding was reached among certain galactic powers, one that sent ships to visit real ruin on the Sahir homeworld itself. No one has heard from them since. Not for a hundred years, at least, not until, if the rumours reaching me even now are worth anything at all, quite recently."
Colonel Lyn kept a careful eye on their new passenger, the ruler of a world she'd never once heard mentioned in any Academy briefing, and gestured Alita toward the cockpit with a subtle tilt of her head, a silent order to go work the man for information while Lyn went to check on the ship herself.