Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Space Opera
“I hope so.” She sat in the pilot’s seat and instructed the AI to play the message.
“Morgan,” said the Box, its voice brisk. “This message will reach you exactly three hours following our last communication. In that time, the
Ana Vereine
will have disengaged from Galine Four and headed in-system. We are currently leading a flotilla of seven pursuit vessels along a powered approach that will take us past Jagabis, through the Mattar Belt and close to Cartha’s Planet. At perihelion, in twelve hours, we will adopt a neutral camouflage and power at maximum thrust to a different orbit. If you wish to choose a rendezvous point, please indicate so in your reply, before the delay becomes too great.”
“We left a furious mess behind,” the recorded voice of Kajic broke in. “There are singleships buzzing around everywhere, looking for any trace of you. The Box self-destructed a drone, hoping they’d mistake the wreckage for
Daybreak,
but I don’t think they were fooled. It looks like they’re getting ready to move elsewhere, just in case you come back in a hurry.”
“I recommend strongly that you do not do that,” said the Box. “
Daybreak
is unarmed and poorly defended; any attempt to breach their security will surely fail. Better to wait until we join you and use the combined resources of the two ships.”
Roche nodded to herself; there was nothing she could do for Maii in a clapped-out courier.
As though reading Roche’s mind, the Box went on: “You might be interested to know that Cane and Maii are unharmed. I was able to install a leak via Disisto’s implants while I was connected to the secondary security shell of Galine Four, and through this leak, I have been monitoring their condition.”
Roche smiled.
Thanks, Box,
she thought to herself. Disisto appeared to be telling the truth on that score.
“They are currently being held in separate cells in the station’s outer levels,” the Box went on, “and are closely guarded. Preparations are being made to move them to the Hub, but where exactly I do not know at this stage. Chances are, however, that it will be to a zone I will not be able to penetrate, even with my improved access.
“Lastly, a drone was launched from Galine Four within fifteen minutes of our departure. I was able to track it as far as the orbit of Gatamin, at which point it was accelerating rapidly for the edge of the system. If you have not already interrogated Disisto on this matter, you should do so immediately. Any information he can provide, willingly or otherwise, will be to our benefit.”
Roche felt a brief flicker of self-satisfaction—Disisto had mentioned that they hadn’t sent any drones out of the system—but quelled it. Although it was good to have preempted the Box in one instance, to dwell on it was obsessive.
“That is all for now, Morgan,” it continued. “The drone following you is maintaining a fixed position with respect to
Daybreak
and will relay to me any message you send in return. It will be necessary for you to reply soon, though, for the delay between our communications will increase rapidly over the next twelve hours. Once we have a rendezvous point established, we can begin planning how best to use it to our advantage.
“Also, I will require you to perform a diagnostic check of
Daybreak’
s slow-jump drive. The result of that analysis will affect any plans we make. I will await your reply before taking further action.”
The message ended abruptly, catching Roche off guard for a moment.
After a while she said: “What do you think, Ameidio?”
Haid shook his head. “We haven’t got a lot of options, have we? It’s unlikely they’d even stumble upon us out here, so the sensible thing would be to stay put.”
“I agree.” Roche slipped into the pilot’s crash-couch and called up the communications systems. The tightbeam had come from a point in space not far behind them; she directed the systems to send her reply in that direction, once she had recorded it.
“But staying put is exactly what they’ll be expecting us to do,” she continued. “It’s too obvious, too predictable. And it wastes an opportunity to do something useful. Instead of heading straight back to rescue Maii and Cane, we’d be better off looking for answers.”
“Where from?”
“Kukumat and Murukan.” She called up a map of the outer system. “Twice, now, we’ve received signals from near the double-jovian; Rufo can’t or won’t explain them, and that makes me suspicious. It’s also the only obvious hiding place in the system we haven’t investigated. None of the drones we sent there ever reported back.”
“You think there might be survivors?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’d rather keep my options open until we arrive. Which should be”—she scanned a navigation chart and performed rough mental calculations—”about fourteen hours, if we go by Hintubet along the way. And if we do, that’ll keep our transmission times to the Box at a minimum.”
Haid nodded. “It also increases the chances of the pursuit ships seeing us.”
“Marginally. They’ll be tracking the
Ana Vereine,
not looking for us. By the time the Box loses them, we’ll be gone.”
Disisto had followed the exchange in silence up to that point. “What signals?” he asked. “I was told there was no one near the old base.”
Roche turned to face him. “If that’s what Rufo told you, then that makes me even more interested in having a look myself.”
“I agree,” said Haid. “It worries me what we might be heading into, but yes: I’m also curious to know what Rufo is up to. If he’s lying to his own security staff, then something serious must be going on.”
Before Disisto could respond, Roche turned back to the communications systems and began to record a reply for the Box. She had already checked the maintenance systems of the courier and determined that the slow-jump drive was dead; that was why the clone warrior had ditched it: after attempting to leave the Gauntlet and failing, destroying the drive in the process, he had had no use for the courier. It had become a liability, in fact, due to its inevitable association with him. He had abandoned it and gone elsewhere. Now she was hoping to find him in it; the irony was not lost on her.
But it did confirm one thing: he was in the system with them. Anyone who said otherwise was either wrong or lying.
She keyed their new course into the navigation systems. As the courier’s thrusters began a long, steady burn, she settled back into the crash-couch and let g-forces erase the worry from her mind. For now, there was nothing else she could do.
PART THREE:
MOK
INTERLUDE
The enigma dissolved into the background, obscured by the intensity and close proximity of the light.
He strained desperately to follow her; the Cruel One’s servant would be annoyed if he let her slip away. But he had no choice. He could either see her or he couldn’t, and within moments she had completely disappeared. He let her go with a feeling of apprehension mixed with something not unlike relief. He had enough to do as it was.
Bathed in the light of the Shining One, he examined his options.
One: he could do everything the Cruel One asked of him, where possible.
Two: he could do only those things that he felt comfortable doing and feign ignorance or lack of understanding with the others—although the Cruel One’s servant had an uncanny knack of recognizing his deceptions, and previous attempts had led to torture, both physical and mental.
Three: he could do nothing at all and endure the consequences.
Following the enigma was, already, one request with which he could not comply. Studying the Shining One was something he was happy to do, if he was able to. But neutralizing the abomination... Wasn’t he already doing that just by being here? What more could be asked of him?
He wanted nothing to do with the awful child and her piercing, painful mind. His people would have killed her had they known she existed—or at the very least extracted a terrible price from the Surin Agora for allowing her to exist. That in part was what the grayboots were for: to prevent such things from coming into being, to stamp them out when they did, and to keep all knowledge of their existence secret lest others try to replicate past experiments.
But he didn’t have the means to kill her, and he knew from the Cruel One’s servant’s mind that she was safe here in that respect. Her frail body was considered a threat by no one. It was her powers alone he was supposed to quash, as if that were possible. He was being asked to stop a wasp from stinging without damaging the stinger
or
the wasp. And the fact that this particular wasp was not even a natural creature only made the task that much more preposterous.
He could already feel her stirring, despite an intensive regimen of epsense-inhibitors. Xarodine worked on most Castes—including those possessing epsense naturally, like his own—but its efficacy decreased with extended use. The initial doses given to the girl would have worn off hours ago and been topped up several times since; her powers would be returning soon. They could keep her unconscious—perhaps—but nothing would stop her from dreaming. And even asleep she could be dangerous. Should she erupt, he might not be able to contain her, let alone neutralize her. Those nearby or linked to her in other ways would be in peril.
He briefly imagined what would happen to the Cruel One’s servant under such circumstances, but he dismissed the fantasy. That was why the servant had servants of his own. They stood between harm and the hearth; they bore the brunt of any such perils.
He said:
: SAFE
: SLEEPING
And that would have to do. The girl was probably harmless for a few hours yet. Eventually he would have to decide what to do with her, but for now...
The Shining One.
Its glow, he now realized, was a defensive measure designed to fool anyone encountering it into believing it to be evidence of profound epsense ability. As a camouflage it worked well; few people would penetrate its structure or decipher the giddying motion at its core. It was complex and amazing enough; why imagine that there would be more?
But there was. Behind the façade lay a much more interesting possibility, the same one he had suspected before but could not explain to the Cruel One’s servant. Behind the shine and scatter lay a speck of unfathomable black. The speck haunted him; he could hardly drag his attention away from it. Part of him was afraid it would not be there when he looked—afraid the blaze would cover it again, this time forever. He and the Shining One had something in common, it seemed.
What that was, though, he still lacked the words to explain.
No one
had the words. Only a natural reave would understand.
Epsense theorists—some of them reaves, most of them not—likened a world empty of thought to a flat plain, in the same way that physicists described empty space-time as a rubber sheet. This plain they called “n-space.” The addition of a thinking being—an “n-body”—added a small spike to the flat landscape. Reaves were spikes surrounded by small mounds that spread across the surface of the plain, joining the spikes together.
On first inspection, the Shining One was a peak so high, its foothills buried all the n-bodies around it.
Races of natural reaves, like the Olmahoi, warped the surface of the plain itself, creating valleys and peaks and, sometimes, holes. He was one such hole; without him at its heart, and others like him before, the Grand Design of his people would have unraveled millennia ago. He depressed n-space, disconnected n-bodies from each other even if there were reaves present, absorbed stray thoughts no matter where they came from. That was why he’d been kidnapped and brought here: to gather data for the Cruel One’s servant. All things eventually found their way into the Olmahoi
irikeii.
A closer look at the Shining One revealed the hole in its core—a hole so deep he could not find its measure. If it had a bottom, he never touched it.
He could sense it, though. And what he sensed both disturbed and fascinated him.
Something old.
Something that should not exist.
Something that seemed, impossibly, to be studying him back.
Yet through the eyes of those examining the Shining One, he saw just another Pristine Human, one of many hundreds of trillions scattered across the galaxy. Why would anyone go to so much trouble to bring such a thing into being and hide it in so ordinary a vessel—not just once, but several times? What could possibly be served by such a deception?
He saw in the minds of those around him—through the all-pervading nimbus of the Shining One—that some thought it a weapon made to wreak vengeance on Pristine Humanity. A weapon that could hide among its intended victims, striking with surprise and efficiency. That made sense, even though the evidence was tenuous at best, and sometimes outright misleading. And in the mind of the Cruel One’s servant he found a nagging doubt that nagged at him in turn. Could it be so simple?
He hoped it was. The only other possibility to occur to him was too horrible to contemplate...
Knowing it was probably futile yet needing to try, he cast his mind outward, as he had done on only a few occasions before, to the very limits of his senses. There, normally, he sensed strange, superior intelligences, watching from their arcane removes as the lower Castes went about their business. The High Humans were like people watching ants; they saw the swarming, the building, the clashes between hives, but few if any ever stopped to notice the lone ant waving its antennae in the hope of catching their attention.
Still, he had communicated with High Humans before. They used means as far above epsense as epsense was above normal speech, and they tended to be reticent. But sometimes unintended data slipped through, as though the sheer bandwidth of the High Humans’ media meant that their speech could not be effectively dammed. Some of it was incomprehensible; most of it was useless, relating to Castes or times far distant; but just one useful piece of data made the effort worthwhile.
He needed their help now. If what he suspected was true, even they could be in danger.
But there was no reply. He sensed nothing lurking at the fringes of the void. There was no one to whom he could turn for advice.
He was suddenly homesick. He missed his people: he missed their minds, their song, the tapestry they wove around him and in which he knew his proper place. Here, he had no one to commune with. Few even knew he existed, and those that did were unable to communicate properly. He was trapped by mundanes in a plot that, under ordinary circumstances, might only tangentially concern him.
He wondered how his people coped without him. Did chaos reign, or had the keepers of the Shadow Place found a way to correct the imbalance? Was the racial mechanism that had brought him forth when his predecessor had died already conceiving his replacement? What would happen if he returned? Could the Grand Design tolerate
two irikeii
?
Perhaps he would have to remain in the void forever, trapped with only a handful of minds to watch until his own was extinguished! Except he knew from those around him that the void was impermanent: it would collapse upon itself within weeks. So perpetual imprisonment was not an option: it was temporary at best.
Then there were the Shining Ones to consider, and the Cruel One. Regardless of whether he was right or wrong about the former, of one thing he
was
certain: the Cruel One and her servant had no intention of letting him live after his mission here was complete.
For a brief, bitter moment he envied the enigma. Whoever she was, whatever she represented, she was freer than he could ever hope to be.
But there was comfort in knowing that he was doomed, he guessed. Once all hope was gone, there was nothing left to fear except fear itself.
And if he could take the abomination with him, all the better....