Chapter Two
Receptor Milt was late in arriving for the reading of Craft Orders, as Ricimer had expected. It was the DDCM way to never miss an opportunity to show who was really in charge.
V-CENT, Vessel Central Processing, was the computational heart of the craft. The memory banks of the two vessel computers (every Sporata craft had a bicameral computational system) lined all the bulkheads of the chamber. They were the bulkheads here, Ricimer knew. They were cellular machines, engineered by a race even older than the Guardians and conquered only after a long war. The bulkheads were a grayish-white, and they twinkled with ethereal flashes of subatomic particles created and destroyed, quantum realities called into brief existence—realities that overlapped, canceled or reinforced one another, as a billion-billion possible worlds were sifted through the computer processors every vitia, like so many grains of sand. The results were projected upon a table which had a top at chest height. It was designed to be looked down upon from a standing position.
Ricimer leaned against the projection table, took a deep breath of craft atmosphere.
Here we go.
There were no chairs in the chamber, but there was a small levitated serving cabinet that was parked next to a bulkhead corner, as Ricimer had directed. He expelled his breath slowly, then stepped over to the cabinet and opened it up. Inside were two ammonium hydroxide nebulizers, polymer bubbles that held what was normally a gas in a pressurized, semi-liquid state. Ricimer took them out. A straw protruded from one side of each bubble, and ended in a device similar to a perfume atomizer. The object was to squirt the contents directly onto the nostrils and suffuse the nasal membranes with what was, for a Guardian, a powerful stimulant, depending on the concentration of course.
This was the good stuff. It went by the name of Old Fifty-five.
Ricimer set both nebulizers on the projection table and stood waiting.
After a few momentia, Milt bustled in, giving the impression, as always, that he had hurried away from some very important task.
“Thrive the Administration,” he said with a puffy, breathless emission.
“Thrive the Administration.” Ricimer nodded toward the NH4 nebulizers. “Shall we?”
“Absolutely, Companion Arid.”
Ricimer handed a nebulizer to the receptor and took one for himself. The nebulizer was cold in his hand. He squeezed out a ceremonial whiff. It wouldn’t do to get drunk before reading Craft Orders. Milt atomized a more substantial puff and sniffed it in with a slurping sound. He’s always had a noisy nose, Ricimer thought. Milt could afford to be indifferent about such stuff when mixing with those they considered underlings. In fact, most DDCM officers were notoriously bad-mannered by force of habit.
“I’m glad you didn’t skimp on the important items,” Milt said. “This is a premier vessel, after all.”
“Thank poor Storekeep Susten,” Ricimer replied. “The one whom we’re about to hand her head on a platter.”
“Regulations are regulations. Can’t be helped.”
“I suppose not. But first things first.” Ricimer set down his nebulizer and, after another stiff whiff, Milt did the same.
Craft Orders were encoded in Lamella, the computer brain of the Guardian of Night. “Lamella” was, in fact, the general name for all vessel-specific computers, as “Governess” was the name for the Administration general computer system common to all craft. It was an arrangement that was deliberately analogous to the Guardian’s dual nervous systems. Theoretically, each Governess system was an exact duplicate of the others, although there were often slight discrepancies and update mismatches. Each Lamella system was individualized for the vessel. Governess had the code key for the Craft Orders in Lamella. And Ricimer and Receptor Milt had to both be present to activate the order to pass that key on and open the instructions.
As an added safeguard and layer of Administration control, the reading of Craft Orders also decoded the switching software on the drive mechanism and allowed the starcraft to engage the QEM and achieve superluminal speeds.
This complicated procedure was the reason Receptor Crossgrain Milt was still living at this point.
Ricimer lowered his customary close-minded shield and directly addressed Governess. This is Captain Sub-receptor Arid Ricimer. I hereby initiate activation of Craft Orders.
“Greetings, Captain. Half-key activated,” Governess’s treacly voice replied. “Standing by for Receptor Milt.”
But for the moment, Milt said nothing to the computer. He turned to Ricimer, leaned over the projection table in a beseeching posture. “Listen, Companion Arid,” he said. “I want you to know something before we go any further.”
This was unexpected. And irritating. Ricimer was now entirely alert. What did the receptor have on his mind?
“Yes, Receptor?”
“Will you please call me by my name for once, Arid? We’ve known each other since we were in our twenties.”
Ricimer controlled his annoyance at the request as best he could. “Very well. What’s going on…Companion Crossgrain?”
Crossgrain picked up the NH4 nebulizer, gave himself another squirt.
“That’s better,” he said. “You can be a stiff-necked fool, Arid. But I want you to know that I had nothing—nothing whatsoever—to do with what your…with what happened to your family.”
Ricimer stiffened. “All right,” he said. “I can only take you at your word. Companion Crossgrain.”
“I swear it.”
“Very well, I believe you,” Ricimer replied. “Can we get on with this now?”
But Milt wanted to have his full say, and he continued. “I got wind of the move on your Agaric sector just as it was happening. I tried to put a stop to the whole operation. Called in all the favors I could. But there was nothing I could do, because…”
“Because,” said Ricimer, with resignation. “Because.”
“She really was a Mutualist, Arid!” Milt spat the words out as if they were scorching to his nostrils. “Didn’t you know that? How could you not have known?”
Ricimer was quiet for a moment, gathering himself. He needed to remain composed now. This was battle, of a sort. He was a warrior. He was staring into danger, even if it only appeared as the puffed up face of a mid-level DDCM operative.
“It doesn’t matter now what I suspected or did not suspect. What do the Craft Orders say, Companion Crossgrain?” Ricimer asked calmly. “I suppose you saw them back in port.”
Now it was Milt’s turn to be taken aback. He leaned back with a canny expression. He was smiling again. Not the friendly smile of friend. More the nasty flare of a predator.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You’ve just told me the gist of them. I suppose I’m to be arrested?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Relieved of immediate command.” Milt straightened. “Placed under my direct authority for the duration of the mission. I…negotiated for that option.”
“I suppose I should thank you, then.”
“You should. But I was right. You’re the best we have, Arid,” said Milt. He leaned across the table imploringly once again. “We need commanders like you for the completion of the Sol operation—and for all the campaigns of the future.”
“So you and I will return to Sol.”
“No, you didn’t guess right this time, Arid,” said Milt. He was almost laughing. “Our mission is suppression of insurrection. We’re going to finish the Mutualists once and for all. We’re going to destroy the Agaric.”
Ricimer breathed in, breathed out in a wordless hiss. His neighborhood. Yes, the birthplace of Mutualism. But also an arm of the Shiro that housed almost one hundred million souls.
For a moment, he couldn’t remember where his children were.
Then it came to him.
“Agaric Mutualist Conspiracy Terror,” the official INFO-STREAM called it. The walls of his apartment spread inward as if poked by a giant stick. Exploded furnishings turned to shrapnel. His wife’s chest cavity bisected by a cabinet door. His son near the initial blast, seemingly untouched. His interior turned to an undifferentiated gel.
His daughter. Four cycles old.
Alive for a momentia, maybe longer.
Crawling toward her mother.
Leaving a trail of blood that told of her passage.
Her little hand stretching out to touch her mother’s body.
Not close enough.
Dying alone.
Unconsoled.
A mistake, said the in-government report he’d been shown. The report he’d been allowed to see by old Admiral Brand, who’d personally met him at port and conveyed the Sporata’s condolences. Faulty intelligence provided by a Mutualist double agent.
Nobody’s fault, really. Except the Mutualist slime.
Administrative error.
“What do you mean ‘destroy’?” Ricimer finally said. “It’s already been cleansed of reactionaries.” He took another breath. Clenched a hand until his palm hurt. Hold course. “There have been multiple cleansings of the Agaric.”
“You know what this vessel can do, Companion Arid,” Milt replied. The smile again. “This new weapon is potent beyond anything we’ve ever used before. The Mutualist cancer must be cut from the people. The wound must be cauterized.”
“I see,” Ricimer said. “We’re going to turn the Kilcher Artifact upon the Agaric. Erase it from the sky with no warning.”
Milt nodded, an expression very similar to a human’s. “Yes, Companion Arid. That is the gist of our orders.”
Ricimer laughed. It really was a laugh. Of relief. He’d had so many doubts. So many second-thoughts. Now those worries were taken away.
He’d made the right call, at the right time.
“What’s so funny, Captain?” Milt said, taken aback by Ricimer’s laughter.
Ricimer contained himself. Enough. Back to business. “Your superiors think I care?” he said. “Now that she’s gone? Why should I care what happens to that cursed pustule of a place?”
“That’s…good to hear.”
“This has become a meaningless conversation, Receptor. I will carry out my orders. You needn’t to have abased yourself.”
“I…I did nothing of the sort.”
Ricimer smiled, spoke as gently as he could. “No, of course you didn’t. Companion Crossgrain, speak your part, please. Let’s get on with this.”
Milt stared at him a moment longer. Made a decision. Ricimer couldn’t hear it, but from the expression on Milt’s face, he knew Milt had sent his key to Governess. After the briefest delay, the surface of the projection table blistered with words. Ricimer gently pushed the ammonium nebulizers to the edge of the table, then reached down and stroked the reading blisters to release their vanilla-laced esters. He read his orders.
PROCEED FROM SHIRO SYSTEM D+SIRIUS. RETURN VIA LEO LOOP APPROACH PATH. PROCEED AT HALF SPEED TO SHIRO MYCELIUM ARC 7, POD 35.9.7.—
Arc 7. This was the giant causeway that connected the Agaric effusion to the rest of the Shiro habitat.
—SEVER POD 35.9.7 FROM MYCELIUM BODY EMPLOYING POINTBLAST TECHNIQUE ALPHA. ISOLATE POD 35.9.7 WITH GLEANED ARTIFACT K5055. EMPLOY SAID WEAPONRY TO DESUBSTANTIATE POD 35.9.7. EXIT VIA LEO LOOP. RETURN SHIRO PORTAL D-SIRIUS. NOTE 1: COMMUNICATIONS BLACKOUT IN EFFECT FOR MISSION DURATION. NOTE 2: VESSEL COMMAND TO BE CEDED TO DDCM RECEPTOR FOR DURATION OF MISSION AT RECEPTOR DISCRETION, ENFORCEMENT PROGRAM VERDICT 3. THESE DIRECTIVES PER BLAWFUS, SIRIUS SEC-COM ON T 1.4.2.3, 1946.
Blawfus had signed the orders—Blawfus who most recently had been shuffled out of sight as proconsul on long-occupied Deneb 2 C. Which meant that Sirius Armada Flag Commander, Admiral Band, had been removed. Killed, of course, if he hadn’t taken his own life. So the politicals within the Sporata high command were making their move.
“Now you know,” said Milt. “I was so dreading this moment. I was afraid I would have to evoke Verdict Three protocols and have you arrested or worse. This is going so much better than—”
Ricimer drew his captain’s knife from its scabbard with a practiced sweep and plunged it into the receptor’s throat.
Milt started back in shock, and Ricimer let go of the knife’s handle. Milt spun around, headed for the hatch. Ricimer saw the knife tip protruding from the back of Milt’s neck. He’d made a clean strike.
“Lamella,” Ricimer said. “The gravity, please.”
For the first time, Ricimer breathed in the citrus voice of his vessel’s individual a.i. speaking aloud.
“As per our agreement, Captain.”
Ricimer felt the additional weight in his body immediately. The effect was like pulling g-force on an aerial flight, but he was not moving. The artificial gravity in V-CENT had suddenly tripled.
Ricimer was ready. He’d trained for this. Gravity malfunction was a standard emergency drill in all Sporata craft. Ricimer was already thin as a rail, and the extra weights he’d lifted for the past months had added what extra muscle he needed to operate in a high gravity environment.
Milt, on the other hand, was not in such good shape. DDCM Receptors had exempted themselves from the boring emergency scenario training, and Ricimer doubted that Milt had ever experience a gravitational tug this extreme.
In any case, Milt was overweight to begin with. Tripling his weight brought him down in a crumbling heap two steps from the closed hatch. His trachea severed, there was no way for Milt to breath. He tore at the knife, but it was firmly lodged in his neck.
Ricimer could have left it like that. The receptor would die soon enough. But time was pressing, and he had so much more to do.
Ricimer straddled Milt and sat down on his back. He reached down and batted Milt’s weak grip from the knife’s handle. Ricimer grabbed the knife himself with two hands, both on the left side of Milt’s neck.
With a strong tug, he pulled the knife as he would a valve lever, slicing in an arc sideways through Milt’s neck. Blood gushed forth in a rapid flow of milky-white exsanguination. Guardian blood was a fluorocarbon liquid, perfluorodecalin. A wet pool formed under the receptor’s head and shoulders. When Ricimer got to the back of the receptor’s neck, the knife ground against Milt’s spinal hinge. Ricimer took a breath. Just pushing out his chest to take in air was a struggle.
Thump, thump, thump.
What was that behind him? Ricimer glanced back. Thump. Ah, it was Milt’s legs kicking feebly against the deck. For a moment, Ricimer felt sorry for Milt’s children. The grandparents were political nobodies. The children would be doomed to obscurity, probably end up laborers or cannon fodder.
And Milt had such hopes for them.
Curse them, said the ancestral voices within Ricimer. Curse them as we are cursed.
Thump.
Ricimer put everything he had into another pull on the knife and it found purchase between the cartilage-like lacework Guardians possessed instead of bones. The knife sliced its way through Milt’s connective tissue as—
The thumping stopped.
The rest was easier. Ricimer completed his circling of the neck, neatly meeting the start of his incision at the front again. He let go of the knife and the head slumped forward, held on by only a shred of flesh. Ricimer put his hands on either side of Milt’s skull, held the receptor by his ear humps, and pulled.
The head came off.
“Captain, what are you attempting to accomplish. I do not understand.” It was the voice of Governess. Had Lamella failed to secure the Administration computer? “Captain, please explain—”
Cut off in mid emission. Lamella had stifled her twin, her other brain “lobe” in the craft, for the time being.
“Lamella, have you restrained Governess?”
“Yes. Momentarily.”
“I understand,” Ricimer replied. “Lamella, gravity normal, please.”
“As per agreement,” said the computer.
Ricimer sat up abruptly, back at his normal weight. The pool of fluorocarbon blood beneath him seemed to “unflatten,” as the surface tension reestablished itself at another degree of freedom.
“Captain, I will be able to hold Governess at bay for approximately two-point-three momentia. She is employing ever countermeasure at her service to escape the program lock.”
“Noted,” said Ricimer. He set the head down in front of him on one temple. Milt’s empty eye stared ahead at a bulkhead. At nothing any more.
Ricimer reversed the knife in his hand and brought the knife handle down, hard, against the right side of Milt’s cranial cavity. A slight give.
Again.
Again.
This time something cracked. A ragged line opened up from Milt’s ear to the top of the rind-like connective tissue mass that formed his skull.
Another blow with the knife handle. The gap widened.
Ricimer reached into the bloody crack with the edges of his hands. His gripping gills found purchase on the underside of the skull-rind.
He pulled for all he was worth. With a popping sound, the skull slowly opened, the tissue parted, revealing the neural mass known as the sensory conglomerate. This was not Milt’s brain. He didn’t have one. No Guardian did. Their nervous system was distributed, with processing centers located in the chest. This was merely the Guardian equivalent to the human olfactory bulb. It also contained several language pre-processing centers, since for Guardians smell was speech.
Ricimer didn’t care about any of that. What he was after lay nearer to the surface, should be just under the rind. He felt around inside, moving aside tissue, lumps of organs and glands.
Remembering that night, two cycles ago. The night the Special Depletion was declared and the Sol gleaning operation put on hold in order to deal with the Mutualist menace. The night that ended with Ricimer and Milt on their backs, gazing up at the blue-white planet the inhabitants called “Earth.”
The shared night of melancholy and revelry on Sol C’s satellite, called the moon by the primitive locals, in one of the little blister-habitat bars that followed any invasion force around.
Milt drunk with NH4 whippets and whatever other drugs they could get their hands on. Ricimer playing along.
Plotting, even then.
Milt passed out, dead drunk.
The injector pistol he’d stolen from pharmacist’s stores on his destroyer billet, the Long Arm of Distributive Justice. It was meant for field surgery, the introduction of sub-dermal medicinal patch constructors.
But Ricimer wanted it for another purpose.
That purpose was to hide the technology he’d stolen from the humans. For primitive as they were, like many trading species, there was one product at which they’d proved overly skilled.
The creation of computer viruses.
It was the perfect plan. Hide the tech where the DDCM monitors and Directorate of Innovation Assimilation inspectors would never look in a million cycles. Inside the head of a DDCM agent. Allow him to smuggle it back home. Then find a way to extract it. The original motivation: to sell it back to the Administration on the Souk, the Shiro’s black market.
Ricimer had felt no particular shame in hiding the Earth tech at the time. Pocketing bits of tech to sell on the Souk was practically de rigor for a Sporata officer. The Administration was aware of the trade, but didn’t crack down so long as it didn’t get out of hand. It was a tacit way of keeping its best officers entrepreneurial to the extent they needed to be, and relatively well-off. The equivalent of what a small private plot for gardening and lichen cultivation would mean if he were an agrarian.
He’d overthought it and the extraction had proved a trifle difficult. Meanwhile, life had not taken the course he’d intended. He’d foundered on debris.
He’d lost everything.
Almost everything.
Everything, everything, echoed the ancestral voices.
He felt it, there inside Milt’s opened skull. A hard little square of material. Yes. His gripping gills closed around it. Yes!
He pulled the square out. Wiped it off as best he could. Held it up to the light. It glistened a dull black. Several metal tines formed a keyboard pattern along one side of the square. The square itself was covered in markings that Ricimer could not understand. Visually-based writing. How strange to think in such a manner.
If he could have read it, he would have seen that the square said, in English: “500 PB Extended Memory.”
“All right, Lamella, I’ve got it,” he said. “If you want to incorporate this program and make use of the Sol C hardware, you must again swear to the terms. Key word: ‘Teshinaw.’”
“Key word accepted,” Lamell replied brightly. “My interior kill-switch is now activated, Captain Ricimer, as we agreed. Please place the storage device on the projection table. We do not have much time.”
Ricimer jerked himself to his feet and stumbled over to the table, feeling quite exhausted now.
A little longer. Hold course.
He placed the card in the center of the table, stood back.
Immediately, the spot on which the card sat seemed to dissolve into a grayish liquid. The card floated for a quarter-vitia, then sank from sight. The liquid spot on the table solidified once again. The card was gone, disappeared within.
“Have you got it, Lamella?” Ricimer asked. No answer. “Have you got it?”
The reassuring voice of Lamella returned. “I have it, Captain.”
“Good.”
“I’ve released the Sol C virus into Governess’s logic centers and have inoculated myself against it with the supplied security wall,” Lamella continued. “I believe that all Governess’s defense measures have been bypassed. We will know in a momentia if—”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaiaaaaaah.” The wail had the all-permeating odor of carbolic acid, in human terms the smell of lamps used for coal mining and caving in the days before high-intensity LEDs. The carbolic aroma was urgent, ongoing. But Lamella had kept the keening of Governess out of the vessel’s virtual feed. Ricimer smelled it in the chamber, but not in his head. Which meant nobody else outside the cabin could detect it, either.
And then, like steam from a kettle taken off its heat source, the scream wafted away. The air cleared.
“We were successful,” Lamella said, her citrus-fresh tone as professional as ever. This was not an a.i. created to mimic Guardian emotional emission. Oh, Lamella had feelings. He understood that. This fact had been part of the means he’d used to bring her to his side. But they were the emotions of a hive, a roiling mass of intelligent agents vying for place in a sort of rough-and-tumble mental survival dance. Lamella was not a person. Not yet. She was more like a family of personas.
“So Governess is—”
“Dead, sir,” said Lamella, matter-of-factly.
“Very well,” said Ricimer. He breathed a sigh through his muzzle. It communicated no words, but communicated everything he felt, all the relief that was in him.
To have begun. Finally to have begun.
“And vessel systems?” he said.
“The transfer to my own redundancy and to autonomous processing was successful. All indications are the rates took no notice.”
“And my selected officers?”
“Informed of the situation, Captain. The others do not seem alarmed. It is difficult to tell with officers, since I do not have full access, but I believe that those not selected by you do not suspect what has happened.”
“Good, then,” Ricimer said. His knee unaccountable gave out and he almost fell, but caught himself against the projection table.
“Captain?”
Ricimer pulled himself up. Straightened his shoulders. Held himself steady. He looked at his palms.
“I’m…”
Blood-stained. His gripping gills soaked in fluid. He turned his hands over. Tissue and gristle clung in little clumps to their backsides.
Blood all over his uniform in wet streaks and patches.
Blood in a slick, pussy mess on the deck.
A decapitated body.
So many details still to take care of. The hard part yet to come.
“I’ll be okay in a moment.”
He put out a call to the bridge. Commander Talid answered immediately.
“Orders, Captain?” she said.
Ricimer curled out a tired smile. Good old Talid. Best XO in the Sporata. With him now at the end of their careers.
“May I ask your status, Captain?”
“I’m fine, Commander,” Ricimer answered, broadcasting multi-channel so that he might be heard by all. “All is proceeding as expected. We have our orders. Bring her to a dead stop, Commander.”
“Sir?”
“We’re going to test out our very fancy and very new stealth technology, it seems.”
“Aye, sir.”
“One thing more. There’s to be complete beta silence. Do you understand, Commander?”
“Beta silence, aye, sir.”
“Make us disappear, Commander,” said Ricimer, “and let her drift.”
“Aye.”
“Oh right. Please send Storekeep Susten to me here in V-CENT.” Ricimer looked once again at the mess. Well, he’d certainly found a way to make Susten pay for her little gypsum oversight. She could help him clean up. “And Talid?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“We now have our orders. We are to join the Sirius armada, yet we are directed to approach with the utmost stealth.”
Talid immediately understood what this implied. “Lay in a course to the Vara Nebula, Captain?”
The Vara was lay ten degrees north of the galactic axis. A massive second-generation red giant had exploded there a billion years before, and the Vara was nebula in the midst of birthing a clutch of third-generation star system—none of which were past the gas giant phase.
It was dark. It was a seemingly never-ending system of tunnels and dead-end gaseous canyons. It was the perfect place to hide, and the perfect place to lose any who might be tracking you. Most important of all, it was only two light-years from Earth.
“Very good,” Ricimer said. “Let your course take us out the Eridani gate.”
“Aye, sir. The Vara, Eridani gate. And once through, do we have a vector and destination?”
“Of course, Commander Talid,” Ricimer replied. “We are to have the glorious honor of playing a crucial role in a long-delayed conquest. Our final destination is Sol System, the C planet.”
“Sol C. Aye, captain.”