Chapter Twenty
Do you know what is exciting about the galaxy? The mystery of it, for this vast network of star systems, despite its great antiquity, continually shows us new and unpredictable faces.
—Scienscroll, Commentaries 1:29-30
In the bustling main kitchen of the Palazzo Magnifico, seven chefs in white smocks and gold caps hurried from counter to counter, inspecting the decorations on the mini-cakes, fruit biscuits, and other elegant desserts. The five men and two women moved from section to section like wine tasters, sampling the imaginatively-shaped confections and expectorating into buckets on the floor. It was mid-afternoon, a warm day in the city of Elysoo and even warmer in the kitchen, because of the ovens.
A teenage culinary worker, Dux Hannah. wiped perspiration from his brow with a long white sleeve. He noticed a roachrat poking its long black antennae out of a bucket at the exact moment that a female chef was about to spit food into it.
Startled, the chef sprayed her mouthful all over a tray of decorated cookies. “Double damn!” she exclaimed, and swept a thick arm across the contaminated tray, sending it crashing to the floor. Then she gave chase to the fat, beetle-bodied rodent as it ran across the kitchen.
Looking on, the stocky head chef, Verlan Ladoux, flew into a rage. “Get this kitchen clean!” he shouted. “We feed people, not roachrats!”
Moments later, a team of exterminators appeared with their equipment. Solemnly, they inspected sonic traps under the counters, cleaned dead roachrats out of sealed compartments, and reset the devices.
Dux Hannah and Acey Zelk were members of a Human slave crew. Sixteen-year-old boys, they were first cousins, with no formal education. Acquired on the auction market by Doge del Velli’s chief of staff, they had been enslaved because their people—the Barani tribe of Siriki’s wild back country—had been negligent in paying taxes to the Merchant Prince Alliance. The boys did not look alike at all. Acey had bristly black hair and a wide face, while Dux was taller and thinner, with long blond hair that tended to fall across his eyes.
Owing to his considerable artistic talents, Dux had been ordered to decorate royal cakes and other delicacies, using frosting and sprinkle guns to create swirls, animals, hieroglyphics, and geometric designs. In contrast, Acey had mechanical skills, so he worked with the maintenance staff to keep food-service robots operable.
As the exterminators worked under the counters, slowing the pace of kitchen operations, Chef Ladoux paced about nervously. He was especially agitated today, since food was being prepared for the Doge’s elaborate celebration, which had begun that morning. It was early afternoon now, and the kitchen—one of many servicing the festivities—had been operating at peak efficiency for more than a day. Until this interruption.
Acey and Dux exchanged glances, and nodded at each other. This was the moment the boys had long awaited, for they intended to use the confusion to activate their bold plan.
Acey slipped away first and entered a supply room. After shutting and locking the door he reprogrammed one of the robots. The brassex, semi-sentient machine was large and blocky, with a spacious interior where it carried food that it picked up and delivered—enough space for the two young men to hide, if the shelves were removed.
Still in the kitchen, Dux wrote a frosting message on a large ivory-chocolate cake: “I WOULDN’T EAT THIS IF I WERE YOU.” He then covered the cake with a silver lid and knocked on the door of the supply room, three taps followed by a pause and then two more taps.
Moments later, the robot marched outside and clanked toward the central market of the city. When out of sight of the palazzo, the machine changed course and took the boys instead to a crowded depot. There they caught a shuttle that took them up to an orbital pod station, high above the atmosphere of the planet. They brought money with them—merchant prince liras—stolen from the chefs’ locker room over a period of months.
Presently the boys stood at a broad glax window in a noisy, crowded waiting room, waiting for the next podship to arrive. The pod station was stark and utilitarian, made of unknown, impermeable materials and placed there by unknown methods … as others like it had been established in orbital positions around the galaxy.
Below the pod station, through patchy white clouds, Acey and Dux watched early evening shadows creeping across the surface of Timian One as the sun dropped beneath the horizon.
“When do you think the next podship will arrive?” Acey asked.
Looking up at an electronic sign hanging from the ceiling, Dux answered, “Anytime in the next twelve hours.”
“I’m not talking about what the podcasters say. Those guys are wrong all the time.”
As both teenagers knew, podcasters were expert prognosticators employed by the various galactic races, performing jobs that computers purportedly could not do nearly as well. Working at each pod station, the professionals spent long hours making calculations, figuring podship arrival probabilities based upon past results. The calculations were elaborate, owing to a number of variables and the sometimes unexpected behavior of the podships. The jobs were demanding and required a great deal of education to obtain, including rigid testing procedures. In merchant prince society the positions were considered prestigious for commoners to hold, causing people to compete for entrance into the finest schools.
“Wrong?” Dux said, brushing his long golden hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know about that.”
“Maybe I’ve had bad luck, but I’ve spent days waiting for podships that were supposed to show up and didn’t.” Acey’s chin jutted out stubbornly, as it often did when he debated a point.
“You mean on that cross-space trip you and Grandmamá took?”
“Uh huh, the contest she won.”
“I hear there was a big shakeup in the podcaster ranks a couple of years afterward, so hopefully it’s better now.”
For a long moment, Dux stared at another electronic sign hanging from the ceiling, a display panel that reported information transmitted by “glyphreader” robots from the zero-G docking bays. This one was blank, since there were no podships present at the moment. Had one been docked, the glyphreader would have translated the hieroglyphic destination board on the fuselage and transmitted the results to the various electronic signs around the station. (The alien hieroglyphs were one of the few things that anyone had figured out about the spaceships—a revelation that enabled travelers to know where they were going before boarding one of the vessels.)
When the right opportunity presented itself, Acey and Dux sneaked aboard a podship … without paying any attention to the destination.…
Back on Timian One, in the broad plaza mayore of the capital city, the citizens went into shock as rumors began to circulate about a catastrophic military loss suffered by the merchant princes at far-away Paradij. It seemed impossible for the Mutatis—who had lost most of the battles fought against the Humans—to have scored such a huge victory. People couldn’t believe it. Stunned and fearful, the crowds fell into murmurs. Were Mutati forces on the way here now?
In the throne room of the Palazzo Magnifico, Doge Lorenzo railed at General Sajak, who stood humbly before him in a wrinkled red-and-gold uniform, cap in hand. The furious ruler shouted so loudly that he could be heard all the way out in the corridors and public rooms. It was an embarrassment of epic proportions, the worst military defeat in the history of humanity.