Grail - Elizabeth Bear [65]
The patron waited patiently while Dorcas poured coffee and passed around almond milk and agave syrup. Then she lifted her salvaged-materials cup, touched it to her lips, inhaled the steam—eyes closed briefly as her colony analyzed the composition—and set it down again.
“It’s safe,” Dorcas said, and tasted her own coffee to demonstrate. When her eyes closed, Dust thought it was in appreciation. The almond milk made little swirls and shimmers of fat on the surface, and small curdled patches, but to his body’s organic nostrils it certainly smelled good.
When she set the coffee down, she smiled. “You wanted to speak to me.”
“I want to take the ship,” the patron said, with the boldness that had always been hers. “I do not know yet if this is feasible, but I do know that the current Captain’s policies will lead us to death and disaster. Those who hold Grail will not share or surrender it without a fight, and we—” She sighed. “We have come too far to be turned away. We will not survive another long passage in the dark.”
Dust watched Dorcas swirl her coffee in the cup, the curling edge of the wavelet she made leaving a ring of froth and wetness behind. “You are forthright,” she said. “I like that.”
The patron smiled and sipped her drink. From her expression, it pleased her better than everything else about the day. “We are talking about the people who contaminated your preserve with symbionts against your will. Who engineered the colonies to begin with, and tortured and murdered innocent life-forms to do so. Cynric Conn and her minions respect no boundary; they adhere to no ethical compass beyond what I want, I shall have.”
“A stiff dick has no conscience,” Dorcas said.
The patron grinned. Humans, Dust thought, were so … erratic.
“Exactly,” the patron said. “And a Conn dick is doubly blind to consequence.”
Dorcas smoothed one hand across her hair. Her lips thinned. She drew in a deep breath and said, “And what are the consequences of your conquest of the world? We’ll descend on Grail and take what we want of her? We’ll abandon negotiation in favor of force?”
Dust saw the flicker of frustration cross the patron’s face, heard the skip of her elevated heart rate. “We’ll survive,” she said, “by whatever means necessary. Cooperation, of course, is to be preferred, as is a nonviolent solution.”
Dorcas smiled. It was not a friendly smile, or even one of complicity. When she set her cup down on the table, it made so little sound against the woven vines that even Dust’s honed ears could scarcely detect it. “I find that reprehensible,” she said.
Dust had not expected his patron to be rocked back in her chair, but amid his bower of leaves he nevertheless—if asked—must have confessed himself gratified that she frowned. Fleetingly, so fleetingly a Mean might have missed it, though Dorcas most assuredly did not.
“You would find me a very bad enemy,” the patron said. “I think it would be wise to reconsider. There are elements among your people that are already in sympathy with me.”
“I said I found it reprehensible,” Dorcas said. “I did not say I would under no circumstances cooperate. I know who you are and I know who you were. I know what you stand reduced from, and I know what you did in Rule and among the Deckers who allied with you last. You are a Conn through and through, Ariane, and rotten with it. But it’s also possible that you are our only hope for survival.”
Dorcas stared calmly at the patron. The patron stared too, seeming taken aback for the first time in Dust’s experience.
There was a sound when the patron set her cup down, and a louder one of scuffed turf and tearing grass when she shoved