So! Update at last! Since it's been years since I last updated, I thought any remaining readers I might have would appreciate a review of what's happened so far.
Hands Clean: The Story So Far
It opens with Trance telling a story about one of the many alternate paths Beka Valentine (and the rest of the universe) could have taken.
Story begins with the Maru in hock. The Than keeping the Maru asks Beka to run an errand for his employer, an organized crime lord, in exchange for her ship. In many of the possible futures, Beka refused and stole the ship back, but in this one, she decides to make the deal. She gets her ship back as promised and met with the crime lord, a woman named Darjella. The two women get along well, and soon after, Beka found herself taking another job from Darjella.
It was soon revealed that Darjella ss thinking of retiring from her position and of appointing Beka her successor. Darjella appoints Beka her first bodyguard, an orphaned Nietzschean named Tyr Anasazi. He thwarted the first assassination attempt against her, orchestrated by Jaguar Arch Duke Charlemagne Bolivar, and they started becoming friends. Bolivar's Pride and Darjella's operations under Beka clash as they compete for business and resources. Eventually Beka and Tyr decide to hire a larger security retinue, including the recurring character Skarynet.
They also decide to playact a romantic relationship, for the purposes of luring Beka's enemies into trying to move against her, thinking her stupid and foolish for entering into a relationship with her Nietzschean bodyguard. During this time, they're getting the first rumblings of rumors that Bolivar is to wed an important Sabra figure, Elsbett Mossadim.
Tyr and Beka have their first kiss as Tyr is describing the efforts of a Nightsider to retrieve a High Guard ship stuck in a black hole. Their plan is to let him pull the ship out and then take it from him. When the Andromeda fires on the salvage ship led by Gerentex's crew, Beka quickly boards her, erases the AI, and meets up with two of Gerentex's crew still on the Andromeda, Trance Gemini and Seamus Harper. During the confusion of boarding, Tyr killed the High Guard captain still alive on the ship. Trance is very melancholy about the turn of events. Beka offers the two a place in her crew aboard this new ship, and they accept.
The Trance who is telling us this story interrupts for a bit, to say that Beka had to make herself hard to endure all the moral dubious assignments they had, especially when Flash was involved. She wished she could have met Beka before Beka met Tyr.
They re-name Andromeda "The Shining Path." Tyr and Beka discuss the increasing rumblings of her security retinue, annoyed with their feigned relationship and what they see as their weakness. It was supposed to have that effect on their enemies, not these people. Tyr also has news that the Jaguar and Sabra Prides have agreed on a wedding between Bolivar and Mossadim. They worry that the combined strength of these Prides could give Bolivar the resources he needs to get past Beka's security and finally get rid of her
Storyteller Trance interrupts again with an ominous sidenote about how deadly important Tyr and Beka's exchange about stopping Bolivar's wedding turned out to be.
Beka spreads a rumor that Elsbett is secretly training to destroy the Jaguar Pride, which just happens to be true, beginning with Darjella. She and Trance have a discussion about their worries; contrary to Trance's expectations (and hopes?), Beka does not want to quit her job and go back to her old days of salvage with a small, loyal crew. Instead, she confides the whole story of the feigned relatinship to Trance, her worry that she might actually be falling for him, but most seriously, her fear that he's going to seize the opportunity of her security team's growing unhappiness with their situation to mutiny and take control of the Path, to further this own agenda – which will not include Beka being alive.
Soon after this conversation, Tyr announces that the Sabra-Jaguar wedding as been called off, after Beka's rumors spread far and wide and Bolivar found a pocket nuclear device about Mossadim's things. She's less worried about her team rising against her but still worried about Tyr when she gets a private message from Bolivar proposing a truce between them. Tyr and Beka agree that it's dangerous for her to agree, but they go anyway to hear what he has to say. They have a charged moment wherein Tyr tells her if that if he indeed betrays her, it would leave a scar on his heart. It's not quite romantic, but it's not quite... not.
They meet Charlemagne in a very fancy establishment – I must admit, part of the fun of writing this has been describing a good number of very fancy establishments – wherein he taunts Tyr and is mercilessly charming toward Beka. He also sees through their romantic facade and speculates that a lot of people would like to know that they're not actually an item. He proposes that she leave her facade with Tyr for a relationship with him, which would serve to make them both look like fools (and much less threatening to their enemies) while they quietly expanded their spheres of influence. And he would, ahem, treat her right. She refuses his proposal but suggests that they build a business relationship, to which he agrees.
Tyr and Trance have a conversation as Tyr attempts to teach her self-defense, where Trance begs him not to let Beka leave. One of security team hears part of the exchange and reports it to Beka. When she explodes at him for trying to turn here against her crew, they have words and she kicks him off the Path. Darjella comes about for a mysterious meeting with Tyr. Harper thinks the conversation was about Charlemagne, and he and Trance agree that he's bad news.
During a work-out that would turn out to be their last, Tyr and Beka have a spirited debate about Charlemagne, and the sparring match gets a little rough. He's very upset about the prospect of Charlemagne and Beka entering into any kind of understanding, knowing just how much she has to gain, but he understands that there's no stopping the inevitable. Beka realizes just in time that he's about to carry out the threat that's hung between them for so long now, and she manages to force him into the Path's brig. She sends a message to Charlemagne, but before he can arrive to help her, Tyr manages to convince two of the other security team to join his side. He takes her prisoner and then tranquilizes her. She wakes up to find that Charlemagne's made his way on board, and their overwhelming numbers convince Tyr to leave the Path.
Charlemagne's coterie settles in, and Harper and Trance finally decide they can't take life aboard the Path any longer. The Jaguar Matriarch, Ishtar Nikei, insists on meeting Beka, and offers the services of two of her soldiers to accompany Beka back to the Path as a Chief Engineer and Chief Medic. Beka refuses and speculates that perhaps the Jaguar Alpha, a man Bolivar is not shy about despising, tried to foist them off on her. Bolivar brings her back to the Path, where she has a messge waiting for Darjella; Beka is to embark upon a fact-finding mission between a small Nietzschean pride, the Volsung, and the human government of Castalia, after an alleged accident claimed the lives of thousands of Volsung.
During a languid conversation about their new crew, Charlemagne renews his offer of romance to Beka, who refuses again. She very much enjoys their friendship and wishes he would stop trying to make it something more; she leaves more determined than ever to find him a wife.
She meets with Dominique Mayae, her Nietzschean contact in the investigation at Castalia. Immediately upon Dominique's abrupt dismissal of Charlemagne, she knows that Dominique is the perfect candidate to wed Charlemagne. He tells her that, if she were to propose such a scheme to Dominique, she would assume that they were lovers, and once again he tries – and fails – to seduce Beka as they talk about the case Dominique presented to Beka.
Upon meeting with a representative of the Castalian government, Beka is presented with a near infallible case: the only strange part is the assassination of the man president at the time three days before he was to hand over power to the current president. The murder was blamed on a diplomat who escaped before he could be jailed, and Beka makes contact with him to discuss the case. Dominique sneaks up on her as she's leaving, and as Beka flies her back to her home, she presents her proposal for marriage between Dominique and Charlemagne. As he predicted, Dominique assumes that Beka is his "consort" and she does not argue. Beka learns that rumor has it that she killed Tyr when she took on Charlemagne, and Dominique merely asks that Beka not do the same to Charlemagne when she tires of him – and she assures her that she would not deprive Beka of her lover if she did agree to the proposal. Dominique finally declares that she would be honored to call Charlemagne her husband and Beka her sister, which takes Beka aback.
Oddly enough, the prospect of Dominique marrying Charlemagne leads Beka to contemplate pursuing the suggestion that Charlemagne keeps posing to her, and she surprises him no less than her by asking him a proper date. He suggests another ridiculously extravagant place, and they have an enjoyable time, but Beka is troubled on the ride home by both her intentions and the consequences of pursuing anything. The date ends with a chaste kiss.
The next day she visits with the diplomat accused of murdering Castalian President Lee, Lord Asoradn. The visit convinces her that there was an elaborate cover-up to hide not only the truth about Lee's assassination but about the accident that killed thousands of Volsung Nietzscheans. She has security footage showing the music discrepancy, that the current president did not have his entrance music played shortly after President Lee's assassination.
And that's the story so far...
Chapter 20
Beka awoke with a stiff neck, barely able to look straight ahead. She groaned and tumbled off the ledge, cursing loudly. "Coffee," she muttered. "Need coffee. Diplomacy requires caffeine." Vision still blurry, she stumbled to the desk, still mirror-smooth despite the many months she had used it primarily as a stand for her favorite coffee maker. It was dreadfully low-tech, but it had sentimental value.
She threw water and coffee into the pot, then made her unsteady way to the bathroom. A few minutes later, she emerged shivering, face wet, to the smell of brewing coffee. "Good as a shower," she murmured as she poured a cup and sipped it. For three minutes, she allowed herself to sit and stare blankly around her quarters, and then she jumped up and jerked open the wardrobe. It was one of the few hinged doors on the ship, and Beka had discovered that jerking it open and slamming it closed worked wonderfully to relieve stress.
The universe grew a little brighter and regained its normal pace, no longer dragging, as the coffee hit Beka's system. When the computer console on the desk emitted a shrill beep, she almost jumped out of her skin. It was a message from Lord Asoradn, a name she had to think about for a minute. The diplomat accused of assassinating the former Castalian president had just sent her a real-time communiqué, which he must have sent as soon as he received her proposal in order to have reached her so quickly. He had agreed to see her at his earlier convenience, providing she came alone and unarmed. Well, alone she could do.
---
Late that night, she returned to the Path, jittery with coffee and exhaustion and excitement, and made a bee-line straight for Charlemagne's door. She chimed the door incessantly until he answered, wrapped in a robe with his blond hair almost disheveled. He smiled, though, too courteous to berate her for obviously awakening him.
"To what do I owe the pleasure…" he glanced off to one side, "this morning?"
"Sorry," she replied breathlessly, "couldn't wait. I think the President… the Castalian president… I think he killed his predecessor. I don't know why or how, but I'm almost positive. We have to talk about this before I lose this caffeine high and all brain function."
Even as she spoke, Charlemagne raised the lights and disappeared for a moment into his bedroom, emerging before she finished her sentence in the silky trousers and tunic she thought of as his lounging clothes. In his hands he held two steaming cups made of thick-cut glass, wafting into the room a welcome, familiar aroma.
"I'd hate for you to lose brain function when you're on the verge of proving a major conspiracy," he said by way of explanation. "Unless I'm somehow involved." He furrowed his brow. "Castalians murdering Volsung Nietzscheans and assassinating their own president… no, that's not familiar."
Beka grinned as she took a cup for herself. She closed her eyes for a moment to enjoy the heady fragrance. "Good," she answered after a silent, savory moment. "I don't think your wife-to-be would approve."
Clutching the cup in one hand, she dug into the pocket of her jacket with the other and withdrew a tiny cube. "I don't know if your tech is compatible with this; this kinda thing was popular before grandpa Valentine was doing the lindy hop, or whatever the hell old spacers did. If not, the Maru can read it, and don't you dare comment on that."
His eyes were round. "I wouldn't dream of it."
He found a port that did not quite fit the thing but through computer magic could read the data inscribed on it and translate it into something the audiovisual center could read and project for their elucidation. Beka was bouncing in her seat while the thing whirred. After the few minutes the computer needed to think, a shot of President Lee entering a room appeared on the screen, accompanied by a strange warbling melody. He walked into the room and the scene abruptly ended.
She looked at Charlemagne and back at the screen. "What…" she began, but her question was cut off by another scene that flashed on the screen. Same action, different room. The weird music played while he entered the room, and then the visual feed went black. Four more scenes went by like this, and then she recognized the room where he'd been killed. Nothing unusual there; the music played like normal, and in went the President. She told Charlemagne the significance of the room, and he nodded without commenting.
Just as she'd thought, the next scene showed the current president. He entered a room, and the scene cut out, as it always did.
"No music," Beka observed. It returned in the next scene, and then the cube was spent. She sat back on Charlemagne's plush lounge and pondered the cube. "Lord Asnoradn or someone realized what was going on, hacked into the palace's security feeds and trawled a lot of data, and compiled all this. And then sat on it until this morning."
Charlemagne somehow scooted closer without actually appearing to move. "Oh, pardon me," he said, grinning, when their shoulders bumped. He stretched out his arm and laid it across the back of the lounge.
Beka snorted. "Very smooth." She repressed a giggle and shook her head. "Can we get back to business?"
"A conspiracy to cover up the genocide of my people, yes of course. Pressing matters at hand." He glanced at the screen and turned himself a little to face her more fully. "As you noted so keenly, someone broke through Castalian security…"
"A monumental task," Beka murmured, rolling her eyes.
"Yes, well, as sophisticated as their firewall is bound to be, I'm sure even the Castalians notice when someone copies extensively from their security feeds. No doubt the very clever president has made himself aware of this breach, knows precisely what this means, and has locked up very tightly, if not outright destroyed, any more damning information – especially to the audacious party who found this in the first place."
They sat in silence. "Well," Beka observed, "I can't blame him. I would've done the same. If I were in a bad mood, I might've swapped a page from Darjella's Rolodex and sent someone after the audacious party."
She paused. "Do you know what a Rolodex is? Is it like a book? Are there actually pages involved?"
---
The next day, Beka arrived at her scheduled meeting with reluctant Castalian archivists jittery with sleep deprivation coupled with excess coffee on the ride over. The music was the key, she was sure, the music and Lee's assassination. What any of it had to do with the alleged accident she could not begin to say, but her instincts told her that if she could find the right piece of evidence, a house of cards would come tumbling down and she's have the truth.
Who would have thought that she'd ever become so interested in setting the deaths of a bunch of Nietzscheans to rights? It was doubtless the result of making friends – and rarely, but still too often, more – with so damned many of them. Back in the days of running salvage, days she barely remember anymore, she could not have cared less, although back then, no one would have dreamed of hiring her to find out.
"I need all of President Lee's papers," she insisted to the archivists, "and all the memorial footage." She didn't think she'd find her answers there, but it was a good place to start.
They complained that it could take weeks to assemble everything she was requesting, if she even had the proper security clearance to view it all. She sighed. Maybe she really had been around Nietzscheans too long; these annoying little people were making the exoneration of their beloved leader – as they were sure would be the result of her investigation – unnecessarily difficult. Hadn't anyone ever introduced them to the concept of enlightened self-interest?
She took a deep breath. "Do you or do you not believe that the Volsung deaths were accidental?"
They did, fervently.
"And do you or do you not want me out of your precious archives as soon as possible?"
Their shuffling feet, averted glances, and incomprehensible muttering affirmed that they did.
"Then for the love of all things true and beautiful in this universe, get me those damned papers!" she shouted, punctuating the order with a slap of her hand against the nearest obliging surface.
One of them actually jumped and skittered away; the other two looked at her reproachfully and shuffled away, bubbling. The jumper was one of the air breathers, she noticed, and the other two were fitted with those water tanks the aquatic Castalians had to wear up here on the surface. The breather was the most junior among them, she was sure. She thought about that as the archivists disappeared into the stacks.
To give herself the appearance of productivity, Beka called up on the few seconds of security tape she had already managed to acquire: the footage of the closed room where Lee had been assassinated, in one of the temporary structures constructed for the celebration of Chandos transferring the presidential mantle from Lee's water tank to his own. She rubbed her temples against a headache she could feel building behind her eyes.
Lee and Asoradn entered the room together, apparently alone and deep in conversation. Seconds passed. Asoradn ran out again, pale and sweating. He grabbed the nearest guard and practically threw him into the room where Lee lay dead, before careening out of the camera's view. Beka squinted, but she could not make out what Asoradn said; there was no sound on the tape.
When the breather returned, his arms full of folders and flexis, Beka asked about the sound on the security tapes.
"I don't know how it could have happened," he moaned, noticing the screen Beka had been watching. "We took such careful measures. We positioned these cameras everywhere, and they were supposed to be the latest and best technology. Only the president had the authority to de-activate one, and the camera in that room was de-activated nearly half an hour before that filthy murderer killed Lee."
Beka blinked, astounded by this sudden burst of information. She tried to process it all. "So, best technology but there's no sound? That plus the de-activated camera – you guys either had some really bad technical luck or really skilled sabotage working against you." Judging by the data cube Asoradn had given her, she doubted that he had the resources to carry out something so elaborate.
He frowned and tapped the controls. "No sound? I'm not sure anyone's ever noticed that before."
Of course not, Beka thought. Asoradn was too easy a target, and his flight served to seal his guilt so nicely for everybody. No one wanted to launch an investigation, no one except the pesky Volsung, and the footage was too distressing to be included in any of the memorial memorabilia.
The breather seemed to forget that he was supposed to resent her presence and set to work muttering at the computer while Beka slipped away to examine the papers he had brought her. The sheer volume of Lee's writing made her head spin, but she was soon able to sort out the interesting papers from the day-to-day minutiae of running a government.
"There!" the breather exclaimed, just as the other two archivists returned. They exchanged a look of surprise and hurried over to the computer as Beka momentarily abandoned the papers.
They all watched the footage, and when the presidential music began playing in the tent, Beka finally began to see one of the connections that had so far eluded her. "It was the mantle. Or whatever you guys call it."
"What are you talking about?" one of the archivists asked.
"Look, for the rest of the day after Lee's assassination, the presidential music did not play when Chandos entered a room. And yet there it is, going off while Lee's holding still. That's not a coincidence."
The Castalians looked at each other with wide eyes. "Even if you're right about the music," the female aquatic ventured in a brittle, defiant voice, "it doesn't mean anything. Maybe President Chandos was... omitting the music out of respect."
Beka snorted. "I have a hard time believing that of someone so eager to don the mantle." She paused. "Did you say that he donated Lee's papers to the library?"
The archivists nodded slowly. "You don't think..." the breather whispered.
"I want you to look up everything Lee every said or wrote about the Volsung. Everything. I-"
The whine of charged guns interrupted Beka as footsteps pounded against the carpeting. "Shit," she muttered.
It was President Chandos and what she assumed passed for the Castalian Black Ops. No wait, those weren't just Castalians.
She cursed again. "I know you," she said flatly to a grizzled human, twice as old as she and bearing a gun almost as large as something Tyr would have carried. She ignored Chandos, who was looking very smugly at her, for the simple reason that he was apparently unarmed.
"I'm amazed you recognize my face," he growled. "I would have thought us kludges were beneath your notice if we weren't Darjella herself. Uber-lover. I know what you're doing here, and I've come to stop it."
She rolled her eyes as it occurred to her the strange alliance that this man in Chandos's company represented. "This is pathetic. You're trying to usurp my role as mediator? No one ever tries to usurp the mediator."
"Hardly an impartial one," Chandos broke in, his unctuous tone very different from his companion's. "You're brokering a marriage between your lover and the Volsung female. Can you deny it?"
"What, deny that gossip travels fast? That would be pointless."
She coughed, and in the motion of covering her mouth, deftly activated the subvocal communicator Harper had discovered and Trance had installed so long ago. Now that had been a strange surgery, but the device had proven its use many times over.
"You're corrupting my people with your Nietzschean-backed lies," Chandos continued. "President Lee was a great man, and you're attempting to turn a technical glitch into some sort of case against his historical legacy – and mine."
Beka tried very hard not to grin. "Technical glitch?" she asked, as nonchalantly as she could with a host of black ops guns trained on her. "What do you mean?"
His lips twisted as he snarled at her. "The tape, Miss Valentine. The music. It means nothing! Yet here you are, wasting my government's money and my employees' time, sending them on a fool's errand and leading them into the sedition you so carefully have constructed."
Moving slowly so that a trigger-happy soldier wouldn't seize an excuse to kill an enemy of the state, Beka turned to the breather who had fixed the tape and asked, in her most innocent voice, "Technical glitch? Is that what it was?"
"I... I'm not..." He frowned. "It could be, I guess. If you say so, Mr. President. But..." he swallowed and stared at his feet. "Nobody's looked at it till now. How did you know about the problem?"
Out of the corner of her eye, Beka could see the reality of the situation dawn on the other two archivists. The soldiers were too well-trained to react, Beka noticed with surprise and reluctant admiration, and the man she recognized just smiled.
"You're both idiots," Beka said before Chandos could make up another lie to cover his watery ass. "Coming in here, threatening me. Chandos, you gave Lee too little credit. He was a brilliant politician by all accounts, and I'm sure your people could have handled the truth. That was it, wasn't it? Lee was going to announce something when he passed the presidency to you, and you were terrified of what would happen. Hence the soldiers here now." She turned her attention to the grizzled man.
"And you. What, do you think Darjella's going to put you in charge?" She laughed. "Fertrun Nav. You tried to betray me, and then you tried to betray your crewmates, and now you're back to me. You failed the other two times, and you're going to fail this time. You're a pathetic specimen of humanity."
"At least I'm not a blood traitor," he spat. "It's bad enough screwing them, but defending them at the cost of a great man's legacy? It's disgusting. I won't let it happen."
Chandos was the smarter of the two ringleaders. The look on his face when the breather had spoken belied everything he had doubtless planned to say, and now Beka suspected he was calculating how to get out of here with his reputation and political reign intact. He would prefer to kill them all, she was sure, but he must have known that Charlemagne would bring the fury of the Shining Path and her crew upon his world. But Fertrun... he worried Beka. Somewhere along the line, he had lost his mind to virulently anti-Nietzschean bigotry, and now he was practically foaming at the mouth to kill her.
"Chandos," Beka warned, "don't even think about it." He had the temerity to look surprised, but she bulldozed over any protest he might have made. "The order you're thinking of. Don't. My crew aboard the Path has overheard this entire conversation, and if they suddenly hear a lot of shouting and gunfire, your people are going to have a whole lot more than a besmirched president to worry about."
Fertrun spun toward Chandos, face red with fury. "Chandos! We agreed! Do what you like with your kind, but Valentine will not make it out of this room alive!" he shouted. Beka had no strategy for this rabid individual; nothing she could say about reprisal would cow him.
"That man has done you more damage just now than I ever could," she said softly. "If I die, you will be reviled among the few of your people who survive Charlemagne Bolivar's revenge. Think about it. If you value your legacy or the survival of this government Lee worked so hard to build, you cannot let this man live."
With a wordless, insane cry, Fertrun threw himself at Beka and began firing indiscriminately. She hit the deck as she soon as she saw him twitch, and she managed to escape the first barrage with nothing more serious than a burn along her right arm. She hissed at the hot agony of the blast, but her fingers responded to her commands and pulled a table down in front of her as a second barrage erupted. This time, she heard the sounds of different weaponry, and she prayed that Chandos had listened to her.
"Miss Valentine?" Chandos called. His voice had lost all its smoothness, and now it was tired and sad. "It's safe to stand. He's dead." She rose slowly to her feet and was shocked to see the other three archivists, dead just meters away.
She cursed. "Dammit." The breather had been a genuinely decent human being, and even the fish-people had proved okay. She leveled a finger at Chandos. "This is all on you. That man was a lunatic, and you let him in."
He bowed his head. "And I will bear the responsibility. My soldiers and I will see you to your ship, and you shall make your report. When you hear of my world in chaos, I hope you'll remember that you had a hand in it."
Beka stepped quickly around the table and, ignoring the guns aimed at her, slapped Chandos as hard as she could. Her arm ached with the exertion and her palm stung, but it was worth it. "I didn't slaughter the Volsung," she hissed. "I didn't murder a man who was about to reveal the truth. I didn't even kill those archivists. I just let the sunshine in."
"The truth," Chandos said quietly. "If your truth does not involve the chaos those Volsung inflicted on my world for centuries, it will be no truth at all."
"Spare me," she spat through clenched teeth before hurrying out the library. She had a ship to run, territory to defend, and a marriage to plan. The sooner she left these people to their own rotten leaders, the better. At least crime lords were honest about their brand of evil.