September 2024 – Cheeseburger Diplomacy
Mutafawiq Officer Yara Haddad had sat at very many tables in her life. Dining tables of Bourak ebony, hand-carved Abadeh patterns embellished with gold leaf; simple, durable polysteel chow tables, undersides laden with chewing gum and graffiti; bullet-riddled crates, upturned surface still damp from the Interventor who’d died beside it; two wooden planks hung from a stone wall by chains, supporting only a water bowl and the Quran. But of them, none were quite like the one she sat at now.
Across the flimsy fast food dining room table, a Shasvastii sucked the ketchup off his fingers.
Rocket Burger. HuEOS 289. Civilian sector. Jingly, inoffensive muzak repeated ad-nauseum on the datasphere. The substation air was stale, recycled, carrying the taste of grease from the kitchen beyond the counter. Bright red lines ran wild along silvery, aluminum-lined walls, guiding arriving diners to empty seats. Simple, friendly LAI aspects in the shape of 20th-century satellites and moon landers floated overhead, eagerly descending from ‘orbit’ to take and deliver orders.
The clientèle today was mostly the collegiate type, or grease-stained asteroid miners. Geologists and Diggers. Both in town for a conference. The two groups mixed like oil and water. Some had donned the bulky spacewalk uniforms of the astronauts of old, faces obscured by mirrored glass—patrons who’d allowed the restaurant’s datasphere to dress them in a unique patina, not unlike digital makeup in any other circumstance.
Yara wore a different kind of disguise: the trappings of a Barid. To show her face openly would be to invite scrutiny, and today, in this place, scrutiny was what she least desired.
An end to the slurping drew Yara’s attention back to the Shasvastii—a Mentor, if her intelligence was to be believed—but his meal was hardly finished. Picking a fat American home fry from its extra large pile, the Shasvastii swirled it in his ketchup cup until crimson swallowed the gold. Four mandibles gripped it into his mouth, and he chewed it with audible aplomb.
“Oh, my,” the Mentor groaned. “My, oh, my. You need to try this.”
The seven-foot tall Morat woman seated beside him, laced with bulging muscle barely contained by her scant armor, curled her jagged lip. “No.”
“No?” The Mentor cast a suspicious eye to the grease-spotted paper bag in her lap. “Four orders worth of ‘no,’ then?”
“For my lovelies,” she explained. “An Oznat only eats what they kill.”
“And a Hungry should only be in name alone,” the Mentor mused. He paused. “So, my dear, say if you stabbed the potato before they fried it—”
She scoffed. “Silly hypotheses and semantics do not sway me.”
“It’s starch,” the Mentor said. “Calories. Pure calories, to help further chisel that abdomen of yours.”
“Meat has calories.”
“But does it have sugar?”
The Oznat’s brows tightened, nose flaring in what had to be disgust. “It’s got sugar?”
“Of course it does. Humans love sugar. Put in everything. They process it into their water, into their bread. They harden it, soften it, spin it into floss, ferment their beer with it, preserve fruit with it, dose it into their tomato paste—anything and everything you can think of, a human has tried adding sugar. Even if it makes a healthy food deadly, in the long-term. It’s remarkable.”
The Oznat turned her glare toward Yara. “You’re disgusting.”
“He’s the one sucking on his fingers at the table.”
Beside her sat an ally—not quite a friend, but a dependable man. Zvi Abdel Raziq. Judging by the expression carved into his handsome face, he had as much trouble believing his senses as she did. “I thought this was supposed to be a serious meeting.”
The Mentor raised a finger. Before he could answer, an antiquated rocket descended from above with a tray on its back laden with all manner of disgusting American treats: Onion rings, chicken-fried steak, a vanilla milkshake. After the food disembarked, a quick gesture dismissed the spacecraft. After playing a tinny voice clip of Neil Armstrong, it buoyed back to the ceiling.
Plucking the cherry off the milkshake, the Mentor said, “It is.”
“Not from where I’m sitting.”
A shrug. “My companion and I could turn off the ridiculous outfit we’re broadcasting to the restaurant. Things would get very serious then, yes?”
Yara frowned. While the Combined Army had taken—stolen, more accurately—a seat at the table in the Oberhaus, their presence in the wider Human Sphere wasn’t quite at a ‘new normal’ level of ubiquitousness yet. A Shasvastii in a family restaurant would cause quite the stir, and the Hassassins needed nothing less than attention. “Let’s not be hasty.”
Whatever passed for a Shasvastii smile graced the Mentor’s sullen, slug-gray features. “Then we won’t.” He held out his right hand—the only hand he used, now that Yara thought of it. “Onion ring?”
“Please, just tell us why you called us.”
“Of course,” the Mentor said, and insisted: “Onion ring.”
She didn’t take it. “You’re the ones who contacted us. Contacted Haqqislam. Why?”
“Contacted the Hassassins,” the Mentor corrected, tossing the proffered ring aside. “Important information, a quick discussion. We’re all friends, now—may as well have a friendly chat now and again, face to face. But, to my credit, I never thought we’d be meeting Yara Haddad and a Hassassin Áyyār.”
Years of training kept her inner disarray from betraying her surprise. “Who?”
“At least,” the Mentor continued, “not over a milkshake. A battlefield, maybe. Or somewhere darker. Disused missile silo on Luna. A Black Labs research facility, buried in some godforsaken swamp. Nipponese ghetto on Shentang.”
“Paradiso jungle,” the Oznat added. “At midnight.”
The Mentor dismissed her half-heartedly. “But, nevermind that. We’re meeting now. It’s a good moment—no dance of death, no cat and mouse. I like this more. There’s honesty to it, something I’ve sorely lacked on our long campaign into your galaxy.”
Zvi crossed his arms, projecting curious ambivalence. “An Áyyār. As in, a vagrant?”
“I think not, sayidi.”
He scoffed. “Not my name, and you’re using that wrong.”
“Sure,” the Mentor said. “And what I have to say hinges on our honesty, now. If I’m speaking to a Ghulam and a Barid, I may as well cry for help into a shoe. No. I require a better ear. A cooperative one. One with a honed set of skills.”
Psychosomatic weight graced Yara for an instant then, pulling at her throat. Something in the tremble of the Mentor’s voice, the choice of location, his knowledge of their identities, his accompaniment—it reeked of insincerity. The only conclusion was that they were being played with. They’d been connected in the datasphere, allowed to see their ‘true’ forms, but what if that too was a layer of deception?
The Combined Army had been their enemies not long ago. While Haqqislam had always taken the high road, their people had injured each other with ferocity equal to the other great powers of the Sphere. A test, perhaps? Or worse, a trap?
All she could do to test it was to step into it. If she’d been alone, perhaps she would have. However, with Zvi by her side, equally Cube-less, it lent caution she would’ve waived otherwise.
Yara cleared her throat. “We’re not who you think we are.”
“I think you’re both in a position to save lives if you controlled your fear and trusted me. So, I suppose, the choice is yours alone.”
“We can take a message for them,” Zvi offered. “See if they’ll get back to you.”
“Wonder if a Hassassin would die to keep cover,” the Oznat said. Her bulky frame slipped to the edge of her seat. “Bet you break character once I break her nose.”
Zvi shifted his weight to one side ever-so subtly. The resulting increase in draw speed might be enough for at least one of them to empty their Viral Pistol into the Morat before she’d cleared the table. “That’s not very nice, lady.”
“Never said I was nice,” the Oznat growled.
The Mentor blanched. “Heavens, Narantsetseng. There are children.”
“They don’t have to watch.”
Yara couldn’t contain her laughter. “I cannot believe this. Accusing us, threatening us. I’ve tried three times to pinch myself awake. Perhaps, instead, we should be leaving.”
“Lives are at stake,” the Mentor said.
Zvi stood. “We’ll tell this Yara and the hobo if we see them, then.”
“Wait, please,” the Mentor said. “Don’t be hasty because my companion is overeager. I beg you to trust us. Many Shasvastii and Morat lives lay in the balance.”
Yara scoffed. “Play your mind games elsewhere.”
The Mentor deflated. His pale eyes cast down to his vibrantly colored plates, and he arranged them on their tray to gather himself before speaking. “One day soon you’ll be wont to doff your masks and pretenses. One day, we’ll be allies, true and true.”
“And on that day, I still won’t be Yara Haddad,” Yara said, and turned away.
Neither alien made a move to stop them.
It wasn’t until they’d hit the street and mingled into the crowd of convention-goers and bloodsport fanatics that Yara dared open a secure channel to Zvi. “I can’t believe they made us.”
Stepping between two pedestrians, Zvi shifted from a Haqqislamite Ghulam into a female Yujingyu courier in vibrant street clothing. Swiftly, the new Zvi pulled up the hood of her jacket and zig-zagged into the crowd. “Me neither, but that’s the SEF for you. Rumor has it Mentors are low-key psychic.”
“Doubt that,” Yara said. “I’ve already shed the dummy network credentials and reset my datasphere. Sending a request to have my presence deleted from security intranet, folding you in with it. Stay off comms until I see you in person again.”
“Will do. Do you need an escort to the bureau?”
“Already called for one. Nadhir’s en route now.”
Zvi laughed under his breath. “They’re so forward. That had to be a trap. Did they think we’d just jump to it? That we’re so boy scout, we’d ignore everything we’d ever learned?”
“Clumsy intimidation. Intelligence gathering. Prelude to an assassination.” She paused her list, weathering a chill. “Glad we didn’t touch the food. A trace of DNA would’ve been all they needed to have two Speculo agents clone into us.”
“Thank you,” Zvi said. “That’s exactly what I needed to go to sleep tonight.”
She drew her hijab closer to her masked face. “Always happy to help.”
A long, deep exhale preceded the shimmering of flesh and splintering of mirrors. Disentangling his limited-use holomask from his chest, Agent Dukash sullenly picked at the greasy human feast spread on the table before him.
“I liked them,” Narantsetseng said. “They thought us stupid. Very arrogant for lowly humans, but overconfidence never fails to entertain. Hopefully I followed your directions well?”
“Well enough,” Dukash answered, closing the comlog channel he’d been using to feed her every line, every subtle move. “I would’ve avoided such overt threats of violence, especially while in close proximity to two individuals armed with viral pistols. But you skimmed the line very skillfully—threatening, but not serious enough to answer with force.”
Narantsetseng smirked. “Just treated them like I treat all the honorable Morats I know. Act the fool so they’ll underestimate you.”
He didn’t dare speculate on how much of that skill came naturally to the musclebound female “Well done, then.”
She paused, paper bag crinkling. The dead cow stench inside wasn’t fading. “So why them? Why not PanO Christian martyrs, or Nomad do-gooder types? Why the Haqqs?”
“Haqqislamites always pride themselves as the ‘heroes’ of the Human Sphere,” Dukash explained. “The one true knights in shining armor do not wear blue in this galaxy—or at least, according to how I see it. The Haqqislamites think they’re the good guys, and the Hassassins even better. I was curious to what end. How suspect could the perceived danger of a cry for help be before these ‘heroes’ err on the side of abandoning course? Not so dangerous, it seems. So they’re prudent. As calculating as we are, to outweigh their golden hearts. If anything, it’s a good data point towards our relations here forthwith.”
“Well,” Narantsetseng said, “when you put it that way….”
Dukash dug in the onion rings until he’d retrieved the largest. “And the morpho-scan our accompaniment took of the two of them will prove useful in the future.”
Narantsetseng chuckled. “That’s cold.”
“These aren’t,” Dukash said, dangling the snack in her face. “Onion ring?”