Free By Other Means by Evan Currie Page B

do what you can.”
    “Of course,” The Sin Fae smiled very slightly, “One thing worth noting…”
    “Oh?” The Ambassador looked over, interested.
    “They sent a Sentinel, supposedly to protect their Ambassador.”
    Quarr’a snorted, “Sentinels are useless for personal protection.”
    “Precisely. We know why
we
have assigned Sentinels to the Station, and one to your guard,” Sienel smiled slowly, “the question I must answer now is, why have they?”
    “Do it. I need those answers, Sienel.”

Chapter Seven
    The station was impressive, Sorilla had to admit. She’d lived most of the last year or so on the Tether counterweight station over Hayden, and the Alliance station blew it away in damn near every regard. Orbital tethers had some open spaces, usually where the cargo holds of the ship were before it was turned into a tether station, but she felt that she was walking
outside
ever since stepping onto the Alliance facility.
    She wasn’t sure if it was as big as it seemed, or if there was a little sleight of hand style trickery going on, but her implants indicated that it was likely a combination of the two. That meant a technical sophistication beyond Earth technology, which wasn’t a surprise, but also a certain appreciation for aesthetics that was rare in SOLCOM because most private hulls were repurposed military designs.
    They’d shuttled across in a SOLCOM tug, a space only craft intended for moving between larger ships and stations, and had been greeted with all the expected pomp and circumstance upon arrival. Sorilla had been cataloging everything, driving her implants hard enough that the processor was actually warming up slightly.
    That hadn’t happened since her new suite had been implanted.
    There was so much to take in that she’d hijacked the feeds from the other officers as well, using their processors’ unused cycles to run it all through. It wasn’t something she was technically supposed to be able to do, and when she got back to SOLCOM space she would have to submit a bug report to close the loophole in the system, but for now she needed all the help she could get.
    The first thing that she noticed was that most of the alien species that made up the Alliance, at least those being presented for the human visitors, were what she’d classify as humanoid. Two legs, two arms, hands of varying types, opposable thumbs or something equivalent.
    As an armchair sociologist and anthropologist, Sorilla wondered what that said about evolution. It was possible, she supposed, that species likely to be recognized by humans as ‘intelligent’ were highly likely to be tool users, and the humanoid form was uniquely suited to developing and using tools.
    It might also be, and this was something she considered at least marginally more likely, that the Alliance was putting forward a comforting face on their society.
    See? Look at us, we’re not so different, are we?
    In either case, it simplified her current task, which was accumulating intelligence on Alliance species and their body language. She needed to assemble a whole new software library for her implants if she wanted to be effective while operating in Alliance space.
    Her spectroscopic scanners were also working overtime, analysing everything from the atmosphere provided in the station to the rather toxic bad breath some of the alien species produced.
    It was going to be a long day of work, and that was just where it started.
    *****
    “Madame Ambassador, it is an honor to have you on my station.”
    “The honor,” Miram said, smiling pleasantly as she greeted the tall, blue skinned, alien, “is, of course, all mine.”
    Parithalians were spindly looking people, the product of a far lighter than Earth gravity environment. The species had the distinction of being the only species in Alliance space, or SOLCOM space for what that was worth, to have mastered heavier than air flight before discovering fire. There was a whole sordid story behind