"Colonel Lyn. Science corps." He didn't rise. "Your report makes for interesting reading. I agreed to this meeting out of curiosity more than obligation."
"Their leader believes you're a good man."
"He doesn't know anything about me."
"And yet he believes it anyway."
Usyk allowed himself the smallest of scoffs. "What do you actually want, Colonel."
"Access to Enjarian relics. High-level clearance only. And an ear that will actually listen when I say there's a threat coming that this entire fleet is not prepared for."
"The Senate does not hand out artifacts from a dead civilization on a hunch," Usyk said. "Do you have a body? Wreckage? Anything Star Fleet Command can put under a microscope?"
"No."
"Then I have nothing to give you. I have no influence left to spend, Colonel: not since my star pupil earned this whole fleet a war-crimes tribunal and a very short memory for anyone who trained him. I am an Admiral in name and in nothing else. I'm sorry to have wasted your afternoon."
"You still speak of him fondly," Lyn said, before she could stop herself. "After everything."
Something crossed Usyk's face that hadn't been there a moment before, brief and old and entirely private. "I taught that boy everything he knew about war, Colonel, and none of what he knew about mercy. Some mornings I still can't decide which of those two facts I regret more." He waved a hand, and the moment closed back over as quickly as it had opened. "That isn't useful to you. Go home."
Lyn saluted, said nothing further, and left before her voice could betray exactly how much that particular door closing had cost her.
"They're not paying," Jorun said, the moment she stepped back into the map room, reading the answer off her face before she'd said a word.
"No."
"Then we're all out of options and I've wasted a very good ship on charity," Jorun said, already turning for the bridge. "I know a place where the drinks are watered down and the company's worse. Come on, cyborg, dark-skinned tactician. I've got a proposal of my own, one that doesn't need a single admiral's signature to work."
The underworld swallowed them the moment the speeder dropped below the last of the gleaming towers: the air changing first, thick with something chemical that clung to the back of Taisen's throat, then the light, dimming from the clean white of Upper Earth into a sodium-orange haze that never seemed to reach all the way to the ground. Faces of every colour and configuration moved past them without once making eye contact, each of them absorbed in the particular, private urgency of people who had learned that curiosity down here got you robbed at best. Water ran black in the gutters. Somewhere above, through gaps between the stacked, patched-together levels, Taisen caught fragments of Upper Earth's clean skyline glittering, close enough to see and impossibly far to reach, like a second moon that had decided to stop pretending it cared what happened underneath it.
"This," Jorun said, catching the direction of his stare, "is the part of the tour nobody puts in the brochure. Upper Earth likes to imagine it doesn't exist. Easier that way for everyone with the money to live above it."
"You could've left the blade on the ship," Jorun said, eyeing the sheath on Taisen's back. "It's conspicuous."
"I'd rather be conspicuous than unarmed."
"Your choice to make. Just don't bleed on my contact's floor, he charges extra for the cleanup."
The tavern was low-ceilinged, dim, and smelled of a dozen species' idea of a good time layered on top of each other until none of them were distinguishable. A droid guided them to a booth near the back, half-shielded from the room by a partition gone sticky with age.
"So," Jorun said, once they were seated and a round of something the colour of motor oil had been set down untouched in front of each of them. "The twelve admirals wouldn't help you. I'm not surprised. They're too busy protecting their own careers to spend political capital on a threat they can't see with their own eyes yet."
"I understand that now," Taisen said.
"What if I offered you a way around them entirely," Jorun said, no flourish in it, no performance: simply laying the terms on the table the way he'd lay out a ledger. "The underworld is full of businesses that can't get the UN to protect them, because protecting them would mean admitting the UN allows this place to exist in the first place. Every one of them needs security they can't legally buy. I need manpower I don't currently have, now that most of mine is dead on Boettia. You have an entire homeworld full of people who fight the way you fight. Put the two together, and inside a year you're not selling protection, you're selling influence, because the businesses that pay you have friends in the Senate, and friends in the Senate remember who kept their factories standing."
"And what's your cut."
"A third. I found the gap in the market. You bring the muscle. Seems fair to me."
Taisen turned the glass in front of him without drinking from it, weighing the offer the way he weighed every offer: not for what it promised, but for what it would cost him to keep clean. "I won't build power for my people out of extortion," he said, finally. "Not while there's still a legitimate door standing open, even a half-shut one. I have a plan that doesn't require me to become the thing I'd be protecting people from."
"Suit yourself," Jorun said, entirely without rancour, already reaching for his own glass. "I made the offer once. I don't make it twice: waste of breath on a man who's already decided."
"I haven't forgotten what I owe you for Boettia," Taisen said. "When this is settled, I'll make sure of it personally."
"See that you do," Jorun said. "I've been promised things by better-dressed men than you, too."