The Killing of Worlds (30 page)

Rana Harter narrowed her eyes. The Other prompted her to agree, but she found herself resisting. She remembered the avian precision of Herd’s movements, the sure violet of her eyes, the alien pathways of her mind.

“We shall see, Mother.”

The dead woman nodded, unperturbed.

“You will discover your old life slipping away, Rana. And ultimately, you will be glad to be free of it.”

The honored mother held out a hand, and Rana grasped it. Trevim helped her rise into a seated position, and the bed re-formed to support her back. Her muscles felt different, strangely supple and free of tension, but a bit weak. Rana looked around the room. The walls were a deep, rich color, full of shapes and suggestive motions, immanent with potential, covered with old and pure ideas.

She realized that this eloquent surface was painted with the color she had once called black. It was more than a color now.

The two of them were silent for a time that could have been a minute or an hour, or longer. Then the honored mother spoke again.

“Rana Harter, let me ask you some questions.”

“Certainly, Mother.”

The adept pressed her palms together.

“In your time with the Rixwoman, did you ever see signs of… another presence?”

“You mean Alexander.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Alexander?”

“The compound mind, Mother. It chose a name from the history of Earth Prime. The founder of a great empire.”

“Ah, yes. He died young, I believe.”

Rana shrugged, a gesture of millimeters among the dead. Trevim looked pleased, as if she were already making unexpected progress.

“The Apparatus has reason to suspect that this entity possessed certain critical information.”

Rana looked up at the black ceiling. “Alexander is information. All the data on Legis.”

The honored mother shook her head. “Not all. There are some things hidden away, crucial secrets. But there is evidence that the compound mind went to great lengths to uncover them. And to transmit them from Legis.”

“Why don’t you ask it?”

The adept frowned. “Have you … spoken with this abomination?”

Rana sighed, her mind returning to the halcyon days of her captivity, learning the Rix language and working under Alexander’s guidance on necessary changes to the entanglement facility. Rana remembered the embrace of the compound mind, the security of knowing that practically every object on the planet was imbued with her lover’s protector.

“Spoken is the wrong word, Mother. But let me use the infostructure, and perhaps I can find an answer for you.”

The adept shook her head. “Alexander no longer exists.”

For a second, Rana felt one of the vanquished emotions of the living. Shock coursed through her, a sudden fire. The Other calmed it.

“How?”

“We don’t know. It seems to have fled. Or perhaps it simply ceased to exist.”

Rana closed her eyes, calling on her brainbug. She thought of the work she had done, when Alexander had helped her through the intricacies of the translight communication facility. The floating synesthesia icons of their researches appeared in memory, their meanings inflected by what Trevim had just reported.

Here in the arid place inside her dead woman’s eyes, Rana’s brainbug was different. It moved with new surety, open and confident where once it had been furtive. She could guide her ability now, instead of having to turn her mind away to give it freedom.

In a few minutes, she saw the answer.

“Alexander sent itself away.”

The honored mother swallowed.

“Did it know?” As she said these words, pain seemed to cross her face. Odd to see pain in a dead woman.

“Did it know what?”

Trevim’s features contorted again. “The Emperor’s Secret,” she gasped.

Rana narrowed her eyes.

“Are you well, Honored Mother?”

Adept Trevim wiped her brow, the gray skin of which shone with a milky-looking sweat.

“It is forbidden to speak of it,” she managed, “to one uninitiated.”

Rana Harter looked down at her bedclothes. Her mind moved lightly across the weeks she’d spent in the shadow of Alexander. The brainbug searched for clues to what the adept might be talking about. But there was no purchase for the question; the evidence was insufficient.

“Mother, I know nothing about this.”

Trevim sighed, making the crude facial movements that showed a living person’s relief. Then she nodded. “I hoped you would not.”

Trevim stood silent for a few minutes, regaining her composure by staring at the engaging blackness of the walls.

“You will go on a journey now, Rana.”

“Where?”

“To meet the Emperor. He would speak to you of this.”

“Home?”

“Yes. A great honor.”

Rana frowned. The trip would take ten years Absolute. “But where is Herd?” she asked.

“Your Rix captor?” The adept’s face seemed to hold distress again. How agitated she was for a dead woman. The Other in Rana rippled with cool displeasure.

“Yes.”

“Don’t think of her, Rana. You must let that unfortunate episode pass into memory. You don’t need such attachments anymore.”

Rana closed her eyes, thinking of the Rixwoman. When she opened them again, the honored mother was gone, leaving Rana alone with the question.

Would her love for Herd really slip away?

She stared at the walls and considered. The afterlife was clean, and pure, and good. The propaganda of the grays was true. Fear was vanquished now, the Old Enemy death had been beaten, and with it pain and need.

But Rana Harter shook her head in quiet disagreement with the honored mother’s words. She knew that she would always miss that other heaven, those weeks with her Rix lover that had changed everything. That time with Herd had been so short. The alien woman had given her happiness, had somehow placed her on the path to immortality.

Most of all, the alien Herd had been beautiful, even more so than this wondrous blackness.

Rana wanted to see her. Desired— no other word was correct—the alien lemongrass of her touch. Where was her lover now?

The Other calmed these thoughts before they grew too anxious. It explained that the still-living were never suitable companions for the dead. The pinks were like spoiled children, petty and tempestuous. They were ugly creatures, squalling brats who vied constantly for attention, for the baubles of wealth and power. They were blind to the subtle beauties of the darkness. The dead rightly kept themselves apart.

You don’t know Herd, Rana Harter thought.

The Other was silent at this, as if it were a bit surprised.

And Rana closed her eyes, slipping back across the red horizon onto the calm, arid plane of death, and soon was smiling, an odd expression for a dead woman.

Katherie Hobbes awoke.

She felt strangely rested. For the first time in weeks, her body wasn’t full of nervous tension. But her sight was blurred, and all that she could comprehend of her surroundings were a few pastel planes, the restful hues of sickbay.

Hobbes tried to move.

Medically restrained, said a machine voice in second hearing.

“Shit,” she said, remembering her knee. She blinked gumminess from her eyes and tried to look down the length of her prone body.

Standing at the foot of her bed was a figure whose stance she recognized even through the haze. Laurent Zai, “They said you’d be coming around.”

“How long, sir?” Her voice was dry and frail.

“Ten hours. Five hypersleep cycles.”

A whole day, Hobbes thought. And she couldn’t remember a single dream. The last time she’d slept more than two straight hours had been before the hostage-taking. It was strange to remember that time could go on while she was asleep. Despite this disorienting news, however, Hobbes’s mind felt clearer than it had in days.

“Who cut out the drive, sir?”

He smiled. “Frick.”

Of course. The first engineer could operate any aspect of the ship from his synesthesia interface. It was lucky he’d been on the bridge, and not knocked unconscious on one of the wildly spinning aft-decks of engineering.

“But you made a valiant try, I see,” Zai added.

He glanced down at her left knee. Hobbes lifted her neck, straining to see her legs, but all she could see was a network of traction bars and a few glistening nano drips traveling down into shrouded flesh.

“Looks pretty ugly, sir.”

“Nothing permanent, Hobbes. The Al doubts you’ll even need a servo-prosthetic. But you’ll be limping until we get back to Legis and get some new ligaments put in you.”

Back to Legis. The engagement was truly over then. No more monstrosities had emerged from Rix space to threaten them. It was hard to believe.

“Just ligaments?” she wondered. It had felt as if the kneecap had been shattered. She must have weighed more than three hundred kilos when she’d fallen.

“Well,” Zai admitted, “ligaments and a hypercarbon kneecap. If you plan on taking any more strolls at five gees, I would recommend you get a pair of those.”

She smiled. Then images returned to her mind from the fiery moments of the blackbody drone attack. Dead bodies on the bridge. Blood in the air.

“How many casualties, sir?”

“All told, eighty-one of us died,” he said. “All three bridge pilots, and Gunner Wilson.”

Eighty-one. A bloodbath. Between her three engagements— hostage rescue, the first pass of the battlecruiser, and the blackbodies—the crew of the frigate was more than a third gone.

“I should have listened to you, Hobbes,” Zai said. “Removing the armor from around the bridge almost cost us the
Lynx
entire.”

“No, sir. It was my mistake. I shouldn’t have gone to six gees. That was too much with the AG already failing.” She shut her eyes, reliving the moment. If only she’d ordered a slower ramp-up to three gees, the AG might have held.

“You couldn’t have foreseen that, Hobbes,” the captain assured her. “The Rix plan was brilliant—mutual destruction. The battle-cruiser released a hundred and twenty-eight drones just before they self-destructed. Full blackbody types. Enough to tear the
Lynx
to pieces. We were saved by Data Master Kax, who stayed alert while the rest of us were celebrating. He spotted them and warned Tyre.”

Hobbes furrowed her brow. Hadn’t Kax been blinded?

“And you too, Hobbes,” Zai continued. “You got us out before the drones could cut us to pieces. Every kilometer between
Lynx
and the blackbodies saved lives. No one died from the acceleration.”

Hobbes felt a moment of relief. At least her rashness hadn’t killed anyone. “But there were a few injuries, I’ll bet, sir.”

“Purely from the acceleration? Only a hundred or so. Your knee’s just about the worst, though. Every other member of my crew has the sense not to stand up in five gravities.”

She smiled wanly at the captain’s teasing. Hobbes’s memory of her mutinous thoughts was hazy. The fierce conflict that had raged within her seemed now like a phantasm, a stress reaction rather than a true failure of will.

“And we’ve captured it,” Zai said.

It took Hobbes’s mind a moment to grasp this. “The object, sir?”

Captain Zai nodded. “We’ve got artificial gravity again, as you may have noticed. We have the thing under tow.”

Her eyebrows rose. Easy gravitons were swamped in the proximity of supermassive objects like planets. But on something like the Rix object, which massed only a hundred billion tons or so, they could get purchase, she supposed.

But the ship would be straining like the devil to make any headway.

“What vector are we making, sir?”

“Practically nothing. But four heavy cargo tugs are under construction on Legis,” he said. “Between them and the
Lynx
, we’ll be able to accelerate the object at almost a full gee.”

Hobbes nodded. The frigate’s powerful drive was her most advanced feature. If it weren’t for the fragility of humans and equipment inside, and the limits of AG when it came to dampening high gravities, the
Lynx
could accelerate like a remote drone. With a few cargo tugs thrown in, and additional darkmatter scoops to provide reaction mass, the frigate could move a small planetoid.

“The object is already making two thousand klicks per second into Imperial space, sir,” Hobbes said, calling a tactical display into the air before her. “We should be able to get it up to point-nine constant in under a year.”

Zai smiled at her enthusiasm. “It’ll take a hell of a lot of reaction mass, Hobbes. You might want to include darkmatter variation in your math.”

“But where are we taking her, sir? Trentor Base?”

“We’re going Home.”

Hobbes’s mouth fell open. All the way Home again. She could see the quiet happiness in Laurent’s eyes. Whoever his secret lover was, she was back on the Imperial capital.

A trip to Home would take ten years Absolute. The war might well be over for the crew of the
Lynx
.

Of course, for many of them, the war was over already. Katherie wondered how many of the honored dead were suitable for reanimation, and how many were gone forever.

She suddenly felt exhausted again, despite her five cycles of hyper-sleep. Her mind couldn’t take in any more information. The simple facts were overwhelming enough. The
Lynx
had survived, accomplished her mission, and captured a war prize that might well change Imperial technology forever. Laurent Zai was still alive, still an elevated hero, and Katherie Hobbes, it seemed, was not a traitor.

Things were better than she would have been expected.

But Hobbes knew the next time she woke, she would have to face the details of the situation: endless components to be repaired; preparations for the long trip home; assistance in the rebuilding of Legis’s infostructure. Learning how to walk again.

And she would have to read the names of the dead. Friends, colleagues, and crewmates. She closed her eyes, deciding not to call up the casualty list yet. That could wait.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Hobbes,” Zai said. “You must be—”

“Tired, sir. But thank you for seeing me.”