“That was you?” I blurted out. I clearly remembered Henderson’s report on the Nwandu ship being shot down.
“Indeed it was,” Jethrigol replied. “The Alliance then assisted them in repairing their ship, which was when we started putting out serious feelers as to what they were doing here. We have a vested interest in disrupting their activities, no matter who they’re dealing with. But given Lieutenant Hill’s actions a few months ago…” He shrugged. “We decided to take a more personal interest in the matter.”
The judge shook out her feathers, not quite sure what to make of that. “Well, if your claims are true, then we owe you a debt of gratitude. If, however, you’re lying, then you’ve created an enormous problem for us.”
“Wecreated a problem?” Jethrigol asked in surprise. “It was Vendanu herself who brought unauthorised weapons into a peaceful court hearing. And she was the one who bought a dimari from the Eumadians. That much, at least, we have proved. To my knowledge, the Alliance tries to limit their dealings with species who engage with the slave trade. Even if we only ever manage to prove her purchase of Kade, then that by itself should cast significant doubt on any agreement you might have had with them. It’s the Nwandu who will be answering the sticky questions here, not you.”
Over at the side of the room, the Eumadians were muttering to each other. They seemed to reach some sort of agreement, and as one, began packing up their comm screens and putting on their jackets.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Nors asked them loudly, seeing them intending to leave.
Volgoch shrugged. “We are finished here. We’re going home.”
“But we haven’t reached an official verdict on the case,” one of the Solof lawyers objected. “Don’t you want to…”
Volgoch laughed. “Vendanu is dead. There’s no more point continuing any of this.”
“What the heck does she have to do with it?” the lawyer asked.
Volgoch looked at her as if she was stupid. But if she was, then so was I, because I had no more clue what was going on here than she did. “We don’t want Kade back,” he said slowly, as if explaining it to a particularly dull-witted child. “We never did. He’s bonded to Hill. So he’s completely useless to us.”
“Then why did you launch this case and spend so much time and energy trying to get him back?” Nors demanded.
Volgoch rolled his eyes. “Vendanu wanted him back. We offered to give her a different dimari. We have several who have been trained to a level close to Kade’s skills. But she was fixated on him. He was too attractive, apparently.” He said the words with a sneer, as if he found nothing even remotely attractive about Vangravians. “We tried to talk her out of it, but she paid us a very large sum of money to try and get him back.”
Now it was my turn to ask questions. “But if he was bonded to me, why did she want him anyway? He would have been no use to her.”
“You said you could reverse the bonding,” Nors chimed in. “Is that true?”
Volgoch scanned the room, then his shoulders sagged. He set down his comm screens, apparently realising that this was going to take a while. “Not really, no,” he began, but Jethrigol interrupted the conversation.
“Are you aware that it was the Nwandu who supplied the original neurological engineering technology to the Eumadians?” Jethrigol asked the legal team.
“Certainly not,” Nors said. “Or we wouldn’t have been negotiating with them. Is that true?” she asked Volgoch.
“It certainly is,” he replied, seeming unbothered by the idea of giving away trade secrets. “And Vendanu still had access to the original prototypes, along with various upgrades that the Nwandu have made over the years. They’ve made significant advances that allow them to placate their captives and use them for their own purposes. Of course, the downside of forcefully enslaving people with mind control technology is that after six months or so, their brains tend to… melt.”
There was a wave of muttering around the room, including plenty of curses and a few prayers to various deities. Nors spoke up. “So if the Nwandu invented the technology, then how are you so sure that Vendanu couldn’t have undone Kade’s bonding?”
Volgoch was losing interest in the conversation now, his tone reverting back to the cool disinterest of much of this case. “The Nwandu might have developed the technology. But we’re the ones who use it every day. That’s why we use so much positive reinforcement in our training. If you force someone to do something they hate, their brain will eventually destroy itself. We make the dimari love their jobs. We train them to do things they are naturally good at. And when we combine that with the Nwandu’stechnology, they bond irreversibly with their masters, because we convince them that theylovetheir masters. And love is one of those excruciatingly foolish things that makes people do and say all manner of things that make absolutely no sense. But what we’ve found, over and over again, is that you can’t reprogram love. It just… is.”
The expression on Nors’ face wasn’t entirely decipherable, but it looked like she’d tried to eat a mouthful of lemon. “So if you knew she couldn’t reprogram Kade, why would you bother going to all the trouble with this case?”
“She paid us a lot of money,” Volgoch said with a shrug. He eyed the lumpy remains of the Ambassador, still splattered on the floor. “Fortunately, she paid in advance.”
“What would have happened if she’d tried to unbond Kade?” I couldn’t help but ask. Did I even want to know?
“One of two things,” Volgoch said, picking up his equipment again and moving towards the door. He was clearly done with this conversation. “Either absolutely nothing – he would have remained bonded to you and hated every moment he was away from you – or she would have fried his brain and turned him into a very expensive ornament.”
“And it doesn’t bother you at all that your stupid games and greed for money could have destroyed a person’s entire life?”
Volgoch laughed. “Did you miss the bit where she paid us a lot of money?”
“What about this supposed deal to pay a fee for the use of our wormhole?” one of the Eumadians’ lawyers called, sounding a little desperate. Was he just trying to salvage anything he could from this shitshow, or did he genuinely not understand that the entire thing had been a farce?
Volgoch snorted. “Let me explain this to you in purely economic terms. We pay twenty thousand credits for a Vangravian baby. By the time they’re sold, they’ve paid for themselves three times over in manual labour and manufacturing output. We don’t just teach them things. We get them to work at the same time. Even if we just shot them in the head at that point, they would still be turning a profit. But we sell them, and ninety per cent of them reach their intended masters. The handful we lose are a negligible economic cost. Even if they cost as much as Kade did.” He turned a sardonic look Kade’s way, that one comment negating the value of two decades of intense training – and any consideration for Kade’s identity as a person. “Paying money to either maintain a wormhole, or to allow us to use yours, is entirely pointless. It would cost us more that way than just cutting our losses and abandoning the dimari.”
“Everything’s about money for you, isn’t it?” I muttered. But Volgoch heard me anyway.
