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“No,” I said.
Qilian raised a calming hand. He hadn’t even bothered to have me tied into the seat. “Do you hear that, Muhu
“Can you see that he’s told you everything he knows?” I asked, tossing the binoculars against the floor.
“He’s told us as little as he could get away with,” Qilian replied, placing a hand over the end of the microphone to muffle his words. “We could go through the usual rigmarole of conventional interrogation, but I think this will prove much more effective.”
“We’ll learn far more from him alive than dead.”
He looked at me pityingly. “You think I don’t know that? Of course I’m not going to kill him. But very soon—unless he chooses to talk—he’ll be wishing I did.”
The winch dropped Muhu
“I can hear you,” a voice said over the cable car’s speaker system. “But I have told you everything I intend to. Nothing you can do now will make any difference.”
“We’ll see, won’t we,” Qilian said. To me, confidingly, he said: “By now, he will be in extreme discomfort.
You and I are fine, but we have the benefit of a functioning life-support system. His suit is damaged. At the moment, his primary concern is extreme cold, but that will not remain the case for very much longer.
As he nears the fissure, it is heat that will begin to trouble him.”
“You can tell the woman—Ariunaa—that I am sorry it was necessary to withold information from her,”
Muhu
“There’s no need for me to tell her anything,” Qilian replied. “She’s listening in. Aren’t you, Yellow Dog?”
Somewhat to my surprise, he passed me the microphone. “Talk to him. Reason with your favorite prisoner, if you imagine it will help.”
“Muhu
“I appreciate the concern for my welfare,” he said, with a sincerity that cut me to the bone.
“Lower him to five aids,” Qilian said.
Is it necessary to document all that happened to Muhu
What we learned was: Muhu
Infrastructure, the points of leakage, and learning something of the other empires begi
They knew about us. They had been intercepting our lost message packets for years, and had even found a couple of our ships with living crew. That was how they had learned Mongolian. They also knew about dozens of other empires, including the lemurs.
“They caught me,” Muhu
“They look so harmless,” Qilian answered.
“They are vicious beyond words. They are a hive society, with little sense of self. The beings you found, the dead ones, would have sacrificed themselves to ensure their cargo returned home intact. It did not mean that they did so out of any consideration for my well-being. But there are worse things than the lemurs out there. There are the beings we call the Smiling Ones. You will meet them sooner or later. They have been in space for millions of years, and their technology is only matched by their loathing for the likes of you and me.”
“Tell us about your state,” Qilian probed.
“We call it the Shining Caliphate. It is an empire encompassing seven thousand star systems, comprising twenty thousand settled worlds, half of which are of planet class or at least the size of major moons. A third of those worlds are terraformed or on the way to completion.”
“You are lying. If an empire of that size already existed, we would have seen signs of it.”
“That is because you are not looking in the right place. The Shining Caliphate is here, now, all around you. It occupied much the same volume as your own empire. It even has the same home world. You call it Greater Mongolia. We call it Earth.”
“Lies!”
But I knew Muhu
But perhaps I am crediting him with too much intelligence, too much imagination, and he was simply unable to grasp what Muhu
What he could grasp, however, was an opportunity.
I was with them when we brought Muhu
“This isn’t to hurt you,” Qilian said magnanimously. “It’s to help you.”
The couch was a skeletal white contraption, encumbered with pads and restraints and delicate hinged accessories that would fold over the occupant once they had been secured in place.
“I do not understand,” Muhu
“We have studied your implants and deduced something of their function,” Qilian said. “Not enough to learn everything about them, but enough to let you control one of our ships, instead of the one you were meant to fly.”
“It will not work.”
“No one is pretending it will be easy. But it is in your interests to do what you can to make it succeed.
Help us navigate the Infrastructure—the way you do, finding the weak points and slipping through them—and we will let you return home.”
“I do not believe you.”