DUALITY: The World of Lies (7 page)

“Look,” she sighed, “our coronal
transit entry and exit data from the Kinetic will be more than
enough to justify the mission. Bringing a vessel this size through
the corona, manned no less, is a historic first. And solar
dynamics? I mean, come on Aru. Nobody but a handful of nerds cares
about that. Stars 
shine
. That's all we need to know
about them. They've been charting solar cycles and flares to
predict space weather since time immemorial. Their enigmatic inner
workings don't matter to anything that concerns man or machine.
Planets are our domains. Stars... well stars are just not our
business, never have been and never will be.”

“Ironic you should say that in the midst of
meddling in star-business.”

“Yes, well you know me, love. I thrive on
hypocrisy. The bottom line here is that there’s really nothing you
can do it about it. Or did you forget that I’m currently in
command?”

How could he? She basked in it on
such rare occasion as he 
granted
 it to
her. 
Her mission
 he reminded himself. The intoxication was beginning to
take hold, the positive sense of well-being, the tongue ready at
the gate to be loosed. It would all culminate in his usual rants
about the parasites of House Psyron, or if not them their
neighboring houses of The South, and if not them all the ills of
the Calidonian houses north of the rift. When hemispheric rivalries
fell dry, he always had leftover bigotry to speak against their
twin world, Aq Thalassa, or he could choose to unite his entire
dual-planetary system against the Carouselian space-dwellers, or
pit his human race against the machine world.

Red versus blue? Who had the time or
inclination for that? Besides, Mei's patronizingly sympathetic ear
at these times turned sour whenever it came to spewing epithets at
the Cearuleians, and her mouth became a fountain of vitriol in
return.

She and her world were every bit as bipolar as
he and his. Tropica internal politics came first, along with a
barrage of clichéd criticisms of Mnemtechian rule, followed by the
Arathian nations as a whole and their century long conflict with
the ever decaying Anarchies, their lawlessness and vice at the
heart of the subcontinent. Then there were all the usual rants
about human versus machine world, but how at least on Occitania,
the humans still held the upper hand. As if that were
true! And then all of that was still only half her world.
Discussions of the Pangea were even more inherently schizophrenic
with the utopian East and the wicked Far West. Magic and
religion... so much religion: -isms of every shape and form that
the mind of man could conjure up. And then there was the red
satellite Oberion, the Occitanian moon.

It was an oft remarked upon irony that
Calidonians spent all their days on a red world under red sun while
their nights were ruled by the huge blue disc of Aq Thalassa and
the bright Blue Star, Cearuli Azur -while Occitanians lived beneath
a blue sun with a red moon and a red star ruling their night. So
whether one was born red or blue, they spent their nights beneath
the mantle of the other.

But he would save all that fun for
later.

“Kinny, music. Modern Eclectic Court
Symphony,” he ordered, realizing he must already be quite
inebriated, since in no lesser state would he slip into Mei's habit
of personifying the ship's system.

“Belay that order!” shouted Mei with mock
urgency. She then laid out her conditions to Aru. “You could just
well do this in your den, you know -anywhere else on the entire
ship for that matter. So if you insist on doing it near me, the
ship's acting command authority, while I am working, you'll have to
do it to a musical fare that doesn't grate on my brain like a
thousand whirring wire brushes.”

“Dharmic mix, Kinny, traditional,” he
conceded. This was Mei's favorite inspirational genre -and
supposedly her religion. As Aru saw it and from what he knew of
that doctrine, she was an appallingly bad adherent in pretty much
every aspect of it. Although he would never admit it to her, the
music had rubbed off him more than a little over the years. Many a
nights’ rest were spent as those rich melodies and mantras played
in his chamber, and seeped into his dreams. Now, they filled the
hall of the main bridge.

Aru brought the Kinetic up on holograph. He
loved to look at his ship. It was truly a technological
masterpiece. Five spokes formed from the hub and extended out to an
inner ring, in which he and Mei resided. It was not a tubular
centrifugal ring as one saw on more primitive craft, but one that
tapered out to to a flattened edge, increasing their gravitational
surface area. The inner ring turned perpetually at just the right
rate to maintain 1G, give or take. It also contained the permanent
circuit that maintained their force fields, and powered everything
besides the engines. The shield ring overlaid the main ring,
wrapping around it completely, but magnetically levitated so that
they never touched. The outer ring’s rotation could be synched with
the inner ring, or spun faster or slower. This feature was helpful
in confusing enemies, who were unable to determine which section of
the ship to target. The shield ring also contained thruster arrays
on each panel that worked in unison with each other to drive the
ship, making the Kinetic Dream the most maneuverable mid-size
warship of her class. Both plasma beam jets and more robust
anti-matter fuel engines drove the ship. There was no central
drive, each panel held its own thruster array, so no single strike
on the ship could wipe out their thrust capacity.

The shield ring ports were now opening. Aru
knew what that signified and System quickly confirmed
it.

“Commander,” said System, “We are approaching
launch altitude. The first probe sequence is primed and ready for
launch.”

“Commence on schedule,” confirmed
Mei.

Within moments the first probe launched from
the outer shield panel aligned with their forward vector, then the
second panel came in to position to launch the next, and so on. Aru
sipped his brandy and watched as one by one a large fortune's worth
of hardware was expelled into the electric haze.

Considering the area this sweep was covering,
he made a practical prediction. “We're not seeing half of those
again, are we?”

Mei shrugged. “I'm optimistic we'll recover
80%, those that don't get fried or lost that is.”

“You do understand that hardware costs more
than several lifetimes’ worth of your salary?”

“Yeah, well, I need a raise then, don't
I?”

Aru scoffed. Li Meiyang's clan didn't have
anything nearly on par with the immense wealth afforded to the son
of a Calidonian Ruling House, but they did possess a measurable
estate in the Arathian nation of Tropica.

“You could always moonlight for enemy
intelligence to supplement your modest officers income.” A joke,
but not a joke. He usually would have known better than to say it.
She took it in stride though. This mission had shattered her façade
completely with him, in what had always been an open secret between
them. Surely High Command had their suspicions as well, and why
shouldn't they? How could they vet an officer candidate and expect
loyalty to the Empire of Logos from a blue-born Arathian of Pangean
lineage? It perplexed everyone, even her. He wondered how she would
react if she only knew that it had been he and Mnemtech that had
charted this course for her. How astonished she would be! But he
would never get drunk enough to let that secret slip.
Hopefully.

“Our rewards for this will be great,” she
informed him.

Aru had agreed to this mission solely for her
and no other reason. “I don't need anything from The Occitanian
world government; not The Service, not the Arathian council, not
one thing from any of those bastards.”

“They will bestow their favor on your House.
That's something you can't turn your back on. Between Mnemtech's
favor and theirs, Psyron will be in a position to become the ruling
house of all Calidon.”

Mnemtech had been kind to his family since
their meeting, restoring all their lands and granting them every
favor and leniency imaginable, but Aru hadn't been a part of all
that. He'd been here on The Kinetic Dream doing what he dreamed of
doing since he was a boy, captaining a starship, and he cared
little whatever politics his conniving family was getting up
to.

“You'd be wise,” Mei continued, “to return the
Calidon when this is finished and claim your rightful place as head
of your House.”

“I've always preferred to avoid cockroaches,
even those in fancy dress.”

“Aru!” Mei exclaimed, “This is your own
family.”

“Yes, and no honor among them. Born to
privilege and making no more of it that the pursuit of their
childish wonts. Not a single man of any worth among them. If I
returned to my house, they would conspire against me with all their
puny might.”

“And you would
crush
them under your feet, love! You
are the one with the famous exploits, a highly distinguished
officer of great and bold military successes. You are the one
bathed in
glory
!
You wouldn't have to lower yourself to intrigues and conspiracies.
You could simply
take
it -as your birthright.”

How could he tell her? Tell her
that all he did, he did for her. This ship was their refuge, their
island. How could he tell her that
this
was all he wanted, to travel the
stars with her? She would reject it outright. She would tell him to
grow up and face his destiny. And she would do that because she
didn't see their love the same way he did; she saw it as something
transient.

“I want all the intelligence gleaned from this
sphere, should we find it. All of it.”

“We'll find it,” she said resolutely, “and,
yes, that's the least they could do to compensate you for
retrieving it. Just be prepared for days of debriefs and oaths
because whatever this thing is, it's a game-changer.”

Aru was still drawing mostly blanks in his
conjecture. A data orb perhaps? Data the emperor wanted stored, but
keep hidden as far from him and others as possible? That seemed
like the most plausible explanation. Or was it a secret weapon?
Logos had made his last decree 70 years ago, and it had been in the
form of an ominous threat to the entire solar system. The Ultimatum
of Logos promised to unleash a destruction upon the Taiji of
unprecedented scope should the Cearuleins not concede to some form
of The Land Grant. The deadline for the culmination of this
ultimatum was set for these very years. Logos' predictions of long
ago were all coming to be. The carouselers, though not yet starving
to death, were becoming ever more malnourished and discontented. It
was the root cause of the 66er rebellion he’d built his career on
quelling, and there were surely more uprisings just around the
corner. There was just not enough biomass to go around, and the
only solution was to tear down the wall of Agrigar and open the
eastern side of the Occitanian Pangea to agriculture. It could be
argued up and down and sideways, and it always was, but the cold
fact remained that so long as the Occitanians kept that land
sequestered, a red famine was inevitable. Just thinking about it
almost made him speak of it, but that debate with Mei never ended
well. It was the most sensitive political topic of their time, and
things were due to come to a head. Logos' declaration had been over
half a century ago, and he'd not uttered a single word since then,
thus most among the common people no longer believed it to be of
any concern. There were even rumors that Logos had died, and The
Stones were now ruled over by a machine ghost. Aru, and the
governing bodies, knew better of that. The taciturn emperor was
very active behind the scenes, and hidden from the human realms. As
his proxy, Mnemtech had been left to rule over them. But the
Emperor’s grand and covert projects about PoleStar North and its
orbiting body Ponix were of the utmost concern to the governing
bodies of both stars and to the collective paranoia of conspiracy
theorists everywhere.

The drink was making him ornery, and he felt
like getting provocative on a more personal level with Mei rather
than taxing his brain with highminded political matters.

“And 
your 
reward for all this, Little
Miss Li? Perhaps you are demanding to be crowned Queen of
Occitania?”

Mei laughed out loud. “You must've
daydreamed as much of your way through Political Science as you did
in Solar Dynamics. We don't have royalty in
a 
democracy
,
dear.”

“Oh, I beg to differ. That scheming charlatan
Indulu, descendant of Mandu, rules your world unopposed decade upon
decade upon decade. Anyone in the ruling class of either star can
tell you, it's all about resource allocation and very little else,
no matter how much you might dress it up or convince the masses
they possess some form of ‘freedom.’”

The liquor was clearly taking hold over him.
This was crossing a line with Mei. She spoke very little of Indulu,
but he could see in her eyes that whenever Indulu appeared on
broadcast that she was cast entirely under his spell.