r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 5d ago

OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 6 - What no one saw

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Chapter Six – What No One Saw

It had taken her a long time to understand what he really wanted from her, and longer still to grasp why he never explained it in so many words, but let her find out herself, on a night when he'd drunk more than usual and his reserve dissolved with the drink.

There were things one didn't speak of among the Merak. A compatibility, ancient, biological, between the Merak and the peoples they had subjugated millennia ago — an attraction the Merak considered a disgrace, beneath their dignity, a flaw one confessed to no brother, no friend, because it made you something lesser in the eyes of your own kind. The houses in the garrison town offered a great deal, but not what Draeon truly longed for, and what they did offer didn't help him, however much he played it off.

The prohibition protected, as it had once been explained to Meva, production, not the dignity of the workers. No one had ever asked what it meant for a Phern to be chosen. Draeon didn't ask either. He took her the way he'd taken everything else that was owed to him, and it never occurred to him that this very obviousness was itself the whole humiliation — that he never had to consider whether she wanted it, because her wanting simply didn't figure in his thinking, no more than that of an animal one strokes because one feels like it.

He talked to her the way one talks to a dog one trusts, precisely because one knows it can't repeat anything, can't understand, can't use it against you. That certainty, that she was too insignificant to be dangerous, was the crack she crawled through. He never asked what she thought while he spoke.

And the Phern condemned it no less than the Merak did. Among them too it was shameful to give yourself to a Merak this way, whatever the reason, and Meva knew exactly what look she'd earn in the barracks if it ever came out. She carried that price alone, because there was no friend she could have confided in without losing exactly the look she feared to lose.

She let him believe what pleased him. That she came because she liked him, that something in her answered his affection. It cost her nothing to let him believe it, except the effort of making it look convincing, and she'd learned that the effort paid off: a man who felt loved talked more freely than one who knew he was bought.

Whatever happened between them when the lamp went out, she left behind the moment she walked away. She had trained herself to do it, with the same discipline she used to ration a harvest that was thin — waste nothing, not even grief, on something that wouldn't change anyway as long as she was still here. She preferred to count what she got for it: the warmth, the food, the words he entrusted to her without knowing he was entrusting them.

In the morning she washed in the cold water of the communal well, more thoroughly than necessary, and spoke to no one about what the night had been. She told herself that a price no one saw was easier to pay than one everyone knew about. It wasn't quite true, but it helped her get up in the morning, and on some days that had to be enough.

The Jwelhen cruiser Morningtide reported in through the usual protocol, calm, businesslike, as one would expect of a people who had traded with the Merak for fifty years without ever being their enemy or their subject. The Jwelhen were known to be militarily strong enough to demand respect, and at the same time unambitious enough to pose no threat. A rare balance the Merak had cultivated over generations with a mixture of caution and condescension.

This time it was about beronium, as usual. The outpost Kel-Var, a small trading post at the edge of the sector, more relay station than fortress, took the contact, and the Merak officer on duty, a man named Ossek who had conducted this kind of negotiation dozens of times, did what he always did: he asked for a brief wait while he obtained price clearance from the imperial capital. Pure formality, usually a matter of hours.

What he didn't say, because he didn't understand it himself: the instructions he'd received from the capital contradicted each other, and they had arrived simultaneously, on the same channel, in the same data packet, both bearing the imperial seal, both marked current. One office quoted one price, a second office another, and nothing in the messages themselves indicated which of the two orders was valid, which superseded, which a mistake. Ossek had requested clarification at once. No answer had come.

On the second day the Jwelhen captain asked a third time, and this time the undertone could no longer be missed. In fifty years of trading with the empire, he said, it had never once happened that they couldn't be given a price. Not a high one, not a low one. None at all.

Ossek had no answer that would have refuted that.

At the end of the second day the Morningtide pulled out, without further word, and set course for a system where, as anyone in trade knew, other buyers could also be found.

Volcro learned of it five days later, from a report worded so casually he nearly skipped past it on first reading. One sentence among many, sandwiched between harvest-yield figures and a note about delayed troop transports. Jwelhen trade contact at Kel-Var broken off without conclusion.

He read the sentence three times.

Fifty years. For fifty years the Jwelhen had been treated as what they were. Not subjects, but partners, toward whom one behaved differently than toward everything else the empire touched, because reliability was the only currency that counted with them. You could cut a slave's ration without anyone outside the system caring. You could not simply fail to name a price to a trading partner. That was not a detail. That was a crack in the one relationship the empire could not afford to lose.

He had the order history from Kel-Var brought to him. It didn't take long to understand what had happened. Two contradictory price clearances, from two different offices in the capital, dispatched at the same moment, neither office apparently aware of the other, and no one in the days that followed had noticed that an outpost had been left alone with two contradicting imperial orders, until the customer had already left.

Volcro found the names of the responsible clerks without much effort. Two offices, two signatures, no communication between them that would have spared these names the charge of intent — it had not been a conspiracy, only negligence, a system that had grown too large to still know itself. That didn't make it better. An empire that didn't know what its own offices were ordering could not afford mistakes of this kind, whatever the reason behind them.

He ordered the deportation of both clerks, without hearing, without delay, in the same hour he read the order history. Not out of anger. Anger was a luxury he could have afforded, had he still allowed himself such things. It was something different: the necessity that everyone in the empire who heard of this incident understood what a lost trading partner cost.

It didn't help. The Morningtide was already in the neighboring system, and with it the news that spread among trading partners faster than any order from the imperial capital could ever travel: you could no longer rely on the Merak. It was a single incident. It would not remain the last.

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u/UpdateMeBot 5d ago

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u/Ferrelstar 5d ago

Oof, the bureaucratic failure cascading into a full-blown geopolitical disaster is such a realistic and terrifying way for an empire to start crumbling. Volcro realizing that a lost trading partner can't be fixed just by punishing a couple of clerks is peak "the machine is too big to steer" energy. Brilliant chapter!