Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Space Opera
PART TWO:
GALINE FOUR
INTERLUDE
At the bottom of the pit, two suns now burned. He found it hard to sleep, their light was so bright. With tiredness came lack of focus and inability to concentrate. The latter especially was dangerous when the Cruel One’s servant was in the room.
Sensation crackled through nerve-endings left vestigial by his species for good reason. It wasn’t exactly pain; more a driving ache. His body strove to respond—from the tips of all five of his limbs to deep, primal points in his brain— but his being was elsewhere. He was dreaming awake. He was watching the two suns burn.
One hung far away, turning in odd spirals among several dozen much fainter lights. This Shining One was not diminished for being afar; if anything, its magnificence attained a proper perspective in the distance. It was an uncanny thing: made, yet not-made; Human, yet un-Human.
or I swear General Darkan will seed your planet with dusters designed to tear carbon bonds apart! We’ll reduce your so-called Grand Design into a puddle of slime!>
The words formed involuntarily at the mention of the Cruel One. His body was learning new tricks of survival quite beyond the care of his conscious mind.
: THEY
: DANCE
: THEY
: MOVE
: FURTHER
?>
He could not answer the question. Again, the meaninglessness of spatial references confounded him. Movement was enough, surely. Why this endless concern about
location
?
Something—an electrode, a chemical, a laser—touched a point deep within him, a point they had not touched before. This time, it truly hurt.
He writhed. Visions assailed him. Not true eye-sight but mind-visions: of the Shadow Place on Hek’m, his accommodation since birth; of the minds of his attendants, and the minds of his family; of the web of minds unfolding around him, Olmahoi and others, all tangled in a knot of near-infinite complexity; of the simple AI drones who had smashed unseen through this web and snatched him from his people; of the Cruel One who had brought him
here,
wherever
here
was, where the knot was barely a tangle in a handful of threads, where two minds as bright as only a handful of others he had ever been permitted to see struck him like noontime sunlight streaking down a very deep pit...
He strove. Past the Cruel One’s servant—with his complex web of lies and suspicions and delicate manipulations—and the others who served him. Outward... Not to the distant ones, barely visible against the one who accompanied them. Nearer. He had studied these minds before, and recently too—relieved to have found someone new to look at. They too were dwarfed by the one they traveled with, of whose brilliance they had only the barest inkling, yet he found them intriguing.
Two crippled, yet strong; both possessing extraordinary stories, yet not unprecedented.
Another, piercing like a knife. This one he avoided. Her mind burned differently from those of the Shining Ones, although she too had a made quality. She was an abomination.
The fourth and last was ... an enigma. Under other circumstances he would have studied this one exclusively. There were secrets here, secrets that might prove in the end to be unfathomable but would, he was quite sure, be worth the attempt.
Pain.
He concentrated.
: CLOSER
: CONTACT
: MADE
: YES
He sensed the satisfaction of the Cruel One’s servant arising from his immediate misunderstanding, and hastened to explain.
: SAME
: BUT
: DIFFERENT
He pondered this. It was something he’d not considered before. The Shining Ones had a
purpose
? He had thought they just
were,
like most intelligent beings he encountered.
Despite having had his life mapped out for him almost from the moment of conception, he did not believe in destiny. There was no guiding hand ruling the cosmos; he understood this better than most people.
There was only one way he could answer the question.
: SAME
Yet it was not enough. He could sense an impossible truth lurking in the bright points that marked the beings his captors sought. But how to express it? And what to do about it, even if he could?
: IRIKEII
: IRIKEII
: IRIKEII
Words always failed him in the end. No matter how much the Cruel One’s servant ranted and raved, he would never be able to explain any better.
: IRIKEH
: TOO
3
AVS-44
‘955.01.20 EN
1110
“Welcome, Morgan.” The transmission came from the singleship via standard COE communications channels: encrypted and on a tightbeam, but otherwise unremarkable. “I knew we were expecting someone from COE, but had no idea it would be you!”
“Not now, Myer.” Roche looked up at the face in a corner of the scutter’s main observation tank and was pricked again by its unexpected familiarity. “We’re docking in five minutes, and I need to concentrate.”
Mavalhin smiled the smile she remembered so well. “Okay,” he said, “but remember, I’m right behind you, so don’t cock anything up, all right?”
Roche didn’t bother to reply. She knew him—or, more accurately, had once known him—well enough to realize that such comments were symptoms of his own insecurity. Whenever he’d needled her in the past, it had been because he felt threatened by her and needed to bring her down a peg or two. Nothing, it seemed, had changed.
Beside her at the helm of the scutter, Haid killed the audio link between the two crafts.
“The station has indicated that we are to dock at their main facility,” he said. “So far, everything seems aboveboard.”
Roche looked at the navigation display. The mini-station hung like a vast, gray stone in the dark-body halo the natives of Palasian System had called Autoville. Like most mini-stations, it had a spherical external framework almost a kilometer across upon which hung such hardware as thrusters, shield generators, docking bays, and communication dishes; on the inside huddled the modules required for unsuited habitation, packed piecemeal together and connected to the shell by a semi-rigid lattice. Much of the shell’s interior was empty, apart from what appeared to be a small scout-ship docked in an internal gantry; as a result, the mini-station seemed incomplete. But Roche could tell just by looking at it that it had seen many years of service. Its one identifying feature:—a black
R
painted on the end opposite the main engines—had faded from long exposure to space dust.
No lights were visible on the shell or in the interior. Whoever it belonged to, they were taking the job of hiding seriously.
“Bring us in slowly,” Roche said. She would have liked to pilot the scutter herself, but preferred to give Haid the opportunity of flying with his new prosthetics. The bay they were aiming for was outlined in green, courtesy of the navigation AI. “Are we still clear, Box?”
She waited a second for the AI’s reply. The
Ana Vereine
—along with Cane and Maii—was waiting camouflaged as a COE raider a safe distance away, resulting in a slight communication lag.
“I detect no suspicious emissions,” said the Box eventually. “Apart from the singleships and a handful of drones, there are no other vessels in this vicinity. The station is communicating with several distant sites by tightbeam, but I have been unable to overhear their conversations.”
“So far so good.” Roche watched the mini-station grow steadily larger in the display. “Still, I’d be happier if they’d tell us who they are.”
“They probably feel the same way about us,” said Haid. “Our ID tells them nothing, and you’ve avoided mentioning why we’re here. Trust works both ways, Morgan.”
Roche nodded. “I know. But who makes the first move?”
“I guess they already have, by inviting us here.” Haid adjusted the scutter’s trajectory with a quick burn on the thrusters. “I’m not saying we should let down our guard entirely, but we have to give a little in order to get what we want.”
“That doesn’t sound like your normal line, Ameidio.”
He smiled. “Just trying to see it from their perspective.”
She supposed she should do the same, although it was hard to remain impassive following the shock of seeing Myer Mavalhin again. Any fear she had felt over the occupant of the singleship had vanished the moment she saw his face, in 2-D monochrome and highly compressed from the tightbeam transmission aimed squarely at the probe they had sent to follow the
Ana Vereine’s
path. Those dark eyes set deep in a broad, clean-shaven face; the black hair with its graying swaths about the temples... There was no mistaking him.
No mistaking, either, the warning he had sent:
“If you’re heading to Aro Spaceport, then change course
now,
while you still can. A hostile agent unlike anyone you’ve come across before has been contained within this system, and we’re unsure of his whereabouts. I urge you to turn and leave immediately.”
She had already seen enough for the advice to carry real weight. Only the smallest hint of hope had kept her from seriously considering the option of leaving.
“If for any reason you are unable to escape the system,” he had continued, “or if you’re in need of repairs, then follow me to the coordinates 63 plus 4 degrees, 2 point 6 PAU. But maintain radio silence. We don’t want to risk exposing ourselves with unnecessary communications.”
We,
he had said, as casually as only he could under such circumstances.
We.
There was someone else alive in Palasian System.
The yellow landing lights of the station’s main docking facility winked invitingly to life as the scutter broached a minimum distance. No doubt the light was coherent and aimed directly at them to reduce the risk of anyone’s overseeing. There would still be scattering off the scutter’s hull, but Roche suspected the risk of anyone’s detecting
that
was small. Precautions were sensible only to a certain degree; beyond that, they were symptomatic of paranoia.
Which is why, she guessed, she had taken Mavalhin at his word. He was not an unknown quantity, like everything else in the system; she couldn’t entirely trust him, based on past experience, but at least she knew that he was only mundane and could deal with him if necessary.
Myer Mavalhin...
“You said you studied with this guy,” said Haid, breaking into her thoughts.
“Huh? Oh, yeah...” Roche felt again that sudden rush of unreality as the fact that he was
here,
in Palasian System, struck home. “At COE Military Cottage.”
“How well did you know him?’
“Well enough.” She shrugged, and hoped the flush spreading across her face wasn’t visible. “We took the same classes and were often buddied on smaller projects. We were regarded as a sort of team.”
And it had been a very good team, she remembered. For a while. Maybe a year. Then it had been unbearable, prolonged by the fact that the College tutors had still expected them to continue working together. If not for Mavalhin’s eventual expulsion from the College, she might well have left herself, just to get away from him. It had been that bad.
But here she was—part of her almost glad to see him again, after all this time, while another part of her still yearned to stick him in a blast tube and press Purge.
Roche had already discussed some of the facts with the others on the
Ana Vereine,
although she hadn’t felt comfortable delving too deeply into her past. Even when the station had been located at exactly the place Myer had indicated—measured from Jagabis’s location and plane of ecliptic: 63 degrees closer to them, 4 degrees above, and just over two and half times as far away from the sun—she had avoided talking to Mavalhin directly, for fear of exposing scar tissue she would rather have kept hidden. She had simply ordered the
Ana Vereine
to rendezvous with the station and sent a brief text reply indicating to him that she would be willing to talk terms.
But she could feel Maii’s curiosity brushing at the edges of her long-term memory. And Haid knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t telling the whole truth.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “You’re prepared to take this guy at his word when he says he and his buddies want to work with us, but you’ll hardly talk about him, let alone
to
him. Who is it you don’t trust, Morgan?”
“I’m not sure,” she said frankly, half-smiling in the gloom of the scutter. “I don’t know what I’m thinking at the moment, which is why I’d rather not think at all for a while.”
“That’s not very reassuring, Morgan.”
“I know, but... Look, I’m sorry. Let’s just dock, and see what they have to say.”
“Now I know why you left Maii behind. With her here, I’d at least have been able to dig a little deeper.”
She was about to snap back that the reave would never have betrayed her confidence in such a way, but caught his grin in the fluorescent glow from the displays in time to realize he was joking.
“It’d take more than Maii,” she responded evenly, “to make sense of this mess.”
“So it seems,” he said, returning his attention to the navigation display.
* * *
The scutter docked with a slight jerk. Within seconds, environment displays indicated that an external feed needed authorization before the physical link could be completed. Roche advised the scutter’s AI to wait.
“A little rough,” said Haid, leaning back in his seat and flexing his new hand. The matte-gray digits wriggled as fluidly as organic fingers did, defying their appearance.
Roche patted him on the shoulder, and levered herself out of the copilot’s chair. “Nothing a bit of practice won’t fix.”
“I guess.” Haid followed her into the scutter’s empty passenger bay.
She reached into the shoulder bag she had brought with her and produced two Dato side arms, giving one to Haid. The holster of the other energy weapon she clipped to the belt of her black expedition uniform—again, a standard Dato make but not distinguished by insignia. Haid’s weapon hung at his side like an extension of his biomesh.
“Ready?” he said, shifting the side arm into a more comfortable position.
“Not quite.” Roche keyed her implants and linked them to the scutter’s communications systems.
The lag was shorter this time. The
Ana Vereine
had assumed a more immediate position once the scutter had docked.
A small window appeared in one corner of her vision. Haid’s more basic implants were not designed to carry sensory data, but could transmit and receive text messages translated from speech by the scutter’s processors.
FINE, he said. AM I COMING THROUGH OKAY?
Roche nodded.
UNDERSTOOD.
I am confident I will be able to contact you at all times,> said the Box.
Roche nodded again, satisfied that she had covered that particular base as thoroughly as she could. The station would know that they were broadcasting to and from the scutter, but without cracking the Box’s cipher, eavesdroppers would not know what was being said.
That was fine by her. Just because Myer and his friends probably weren’t working for the clone warrior didn’t necessarily make them allies.
Speaking aloud, she continued: “We’ll wait for them to make their move. It shouldn’t be long; they’ll probably want to attach an umbilical to keep us under control. In fact, I’m hoping they will, because that’ll give us easier access to the bay security systems. The Box is more likely to find useful data poking around the datacore than we are on a guided tour.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Haid. “It handled COE HQ easily enough, so—”
A clunk on the hull interrupted him. They both turned to face the airlock. A red light began to flash.
Roche cued her implants for an external transmission. “This is Morgan Roche,” she said. “I’d like to speak to the person in charge of dock security.”
“That would be me,” came the immediate reply. “Gered Disisto at your service. We’re trying to attach an umbilical, but your ship won’t comply. Is something wrong?”
“I will release the airlock when I am satisfied that we’ll not be harmed.”
“Your caution is understandable, Commander,” Disisto said. “And I give you my word that you are in no danger from myself or anyone under my command.”
“Not good enough.” She was tempted to correct the erroneous use of “Commander” but decided to let it go. “I’ll allow the umbilical to be attached, but I’m not leaving this craft until you and one other officer arrive to escort me from it.”
There was a slight pause, then: “I’ll be down in a moment.”
Roche instructed the onboard AI to proceed with the linkup. The sounds of faint movement came through the hull as the umbilical locked tight around the external airlock and equalized pressure. At the same time, fuel and data lines sought their respective sockets and clicked home. The sounds ceased at the same time the airlock display indicated that the umbilical was sealed.
“You there, Disisto?” said Roche.
“I’m here,” said the dock security head not long after. “Outside and waiting.”
First making certain her side arm was within easy reach, Roche stepped back from the airlock and cued it to open.
The outer airlock opened with a hiss and two men stepped inside, one tall and dark-skinned, the other short and fair, both wearing gray uniforms. When the outer door had sealed behind them, the inner opened and they stepped inside, bringing with them a pocket of heavily scented air.
“Disisto?” said Roche, looking to both men.
“That’s me.” The tall, dark-skinned man nodded, extending a hand to Roche, which she took, and shook. His face, like his frame, was lean without being thin, as though he exercised regularly. “Roche, I presume?”
“And this is Ameidio Haid.” Haid bowed slightly.
Disisto indicated the other man. “Torr Synnett.”
Synnett glanced at both of them in turn, but was otherwise impassive.
“I figured you’d want us unarmed,” he said, gesturing at
Haid’s side arm. “So this puts us at something of a disadvantage.” When neither Roche nor Haid made any effort to remove the weapons, Disisto shrugged and said: “Well, now what?”