‘Of course.’ She nodded at him, as though I’d just introduced an item of furniture. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’
‘And you are?’ I asked, convinced now that she was as practised a dissembler as I was.
‘Au’lys Devrae, Facilitator of External Relations.’
‘Tau personal name, Imperial family one,’ I said. ‘Interesting combination.’
‘Quite common where I come from,’ she assured me, with a smile most men would have taken for genuine. ‘A blend of both, to remind us of the Greater Good.’
‘And where would that be?’ I asked, trying not to sound as though I meant to earmark it for virus bombing. Clearly her home world was well past due for liberating, although whether a population where heresy had taken such firm root could ever be guided back to the light of the Emperor seemed a moot point to me.
‘Ka’ley’ath,’ she said, before apprehending the name meant nothing to me. ‘Our ancestors called it Downholm[28],’ she added helpfully.
‘Still doesn’t ring any bells,’ I admitted. While we’d been talking, we’d progressed deep into the heart of the station, finding the same patchwork of tau and Imperial systems wherever we went, which I suppose applied to Au’lys too.
‘It’s a big empire,’ she said, failing to take offence, and provoking the first genuine smile from me; but I suppose most of its denizens must have been ignorant of just how small and insignificant the tau holdings were compared to the scale of the Imperium, or they would never have dared to challenge us in the first place[29]. ‘Just through here.’ She gestured to a doorway, no different to my eyes than any of the others we’d passed, apart from some inscription in the blocky, rounded sigils of the tau alphabet.
‘You’re not joining us for the briefing?’ I asked, and the woman shook her head.
‘I’m no warrior,’ she told me, with a hint of amusement. ‘I happened to be on my way up here, so I offered to escort you.’
‘For the Greater Good,’ I said dryly, but she only nodded, either missing the sarcasm or choosing to ignore it.
‘In a small way,’ she agreed. ‘But I was also curious to meet some of our kindred from beyond the empire. There are stories, of course, but you never really know how true they are.’
‘Then I hope we lived up to your expectations,’ I said, doing my best to hide my amusement.
‘You certainly did,’ she assured me, although for some reason she seemed to be looking at Jurgen as she spoke, then she ambled away down the corridor without so much as a backward glance.
‘Heretic,’ Jurgen muttered, the minute she was out of earshot, fingering the butt of his lasgun as though tempted to use it.
‘Quite,’ I agreed, envying him his uncomplicated response to things. The encounter had disconcerted me more than a little, and I still couldn’t shake the conviction that that had been precisely the point. I took a deep breath, adjusting my face, and approached the door Au’lys had indicated. ‘Come on. Let’s find out what all this is about.’
Au’lys had called the room a conference suite, but it was like none I’d ever been in before. There were aspects of it I recognised, of course, like the softly glowing hololith display suspended in the air, but the image inside it was crystal sharp, instead of wavering like the ones I was used to, and the edges formed a perfect sphere, instead of hazing away in a diffuse blob. It took me a moment to pick out the projection unit from among the other mechanica ranged about the room, as there was no sign of the tangle of power cables and optical links I would have expected, nor of any tech-priests ministering to it. The hololiths I was used to needed constant adjustment, anointing, and the occasional devotional kick to remain focused. It also didn’t help that everything looked the same: flat, glossy surfaces mounted at an angle in rounded lecterns, with glowing runes appearing and disappearing on them pretty much at random.
The biggest surprise was the absence of a table, which would have formed the focal point of any Imperial conference chamber. Instead, it seemed, we were expected to perch on round, padded seats, which were scattered around the carpet like fungus erupting from a lawn. About a dozen of these were occupied, by roughly equal numbers of humans and tau, with about half as many again left vacant. All the humans I could see, sitting or standing around the periphery,