“It exists in the Rasu,” Dashiel snapped, and instantly regretted it. Seeing Nika earlier had rattled him more than he wanted to admit. Fractured his composure then and his concentration now. Also, his manners. “Forgive me. Obviously, you know it exists in the Rasu.”
Galesh’s company, Tsuyo Materials, specialized in crafting the strongest, most resilient and, when required, most flexible materials in the Dominion. The company’s products girded the Ridani Enterprises headquarters building, held together most d-gates in operation today and formed the hulls of a third of commercial starships. The man knew his materials, which was why Dashiel had invited him to the office this morning.
“I do. After watching every Rasu transformation we’ve recorded at 1/1000th speed and experimenting with over five hundred material combinations using eighty-two different catalysts, I’m forced to conclude that the Rasu can manipulate themselves at the subatomic level. It’s likely they exercise control over not only their own protons and electrons, but their own fundamental particles.”
Nika was wearing her old clothes now, and the stark juxtaposition of old and new added a layer of complexity to the storm of conflicting thoughts tearing him to pieces one bloody slash at a time. His intention this morning had been to throw himself into work until he no longer had the bandwidth to linger on the storm. It was going swimmingly so far.
“That would mean they can transform into nearly anything in the universe.”
Galesh grimaced. “Theoretically, yes, but I have to believe some limitations constrain them. They seem to strongly favor inorganic compounds to organic ones, which could suggest a preference for, or greater skill at, metallic bonding over covalent.”
“Let’s hope something constrains them. If they can truly shift at the subatomic level, where do you think their intelligence resides?”
“You are now firmly outside my area of expertise.”
Dashiel conceded the point with a tilt of his head. “I’m outside mine as well. It’s just difficult to conceive of a single atom of Rasu being sentient.”
“Perhaps, like all other intelligent life we know anything about, their intelligence lies in the complexity and nature of their neural interconnections. Perhaps they become struck by temporary dumbness while they transform!”
He laughed, which felt good for half a second. “Finally, a weakness we can exploit. We can hope, anyway. All right. Thank you for stopping by and, if I can beg an indulgence, keep working the problem?”
“I wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise. This is all of our problem now. I’m sorry I don’t have better answers yet.” Galesh extended his hand, and Dashiel shook it.
“We’ll talk again soon.”
MIRAI ONE PAVILION
It had been almost a day since Dashiel had eaten anything, so he finally gave in and went to the Pavilion cafeteria. He found it crowded even early in the evening; it was possible he wasn’t the only person randomly forgetting to eat.
After grabbing a sandwich and roasted potatoes, he spotted Adlai at a small table in the corner and headed over. “May I?”
“Of course, but you look like crap. What happened?”
He sat and took a quick bite of his sandwich. “You don’t want me to recount the gory details, and frankly, I don’t want to either. You look positively chipper by comparison, though.”
Adlai’s cheeks reddened. “I feel horribly guilty, daring to be happy amidst all this terror and angst and imminent death. But I can’t help it. I’m happy.”
“Perrin?”
Adlai nodded, and a smile spread across his face. “At least it’s the same…” he paused to study Dashiel more critically “…unless it’s not the same for you. You and Nika had a fight, didn’t you? She was uncommonly sober and brooding when she briefed us on her plan to visit the Sogain and—”
Dashiel’s heart stopped beating, and only his OS’ core programming restarted it. “On her what?”
“She didn’t tell you? How bad of a fight was it?”
“Bad enough. She’s planning to seek out the Sogain?”
“Not planning any longer. I think she left this morning. I’m sorry, I thought she told you.”
“Gods, did no one try to talk her out of it? What about the Sogain’s warning?”
“Everyone tried to talk her out of it. She insisted she understood the warning, because one of her ancestors was on the survey ship to first encounter them. Did you know that?”
Dashiel pinched the bridge of his nose. Not an ancestor…but this was how the lies were told and the secrets kept, wasn’t it? “No. I didn’t.”
“She believes the Sogain were the ones who warned her about the Rasu three years ago. If so, it means they have a lot more information on the Rasu than we do. Maybe they’ll be willing to share it.”
“And if they aren’t? If they atomize her and the Wayfarer?”
“I’m sure she updated a psyche and memory backup before she left.”
“Did she? Where?”
“She told us she’d taken care of it. I didn’t ask where she’d stored it. Again, I assumed….”
A shadow crept across the table, and Dashiel spun around to see Maris standing behind him. “What the fuck does ‘she’d taken care of it’ mean?”
“I don’t know, either.”
Dashiel snorted in disgust.
Maris sighed. “I’m telling you the truth. But she said she had, so I trust she has.”
“Must be nice to trust so freely.” He pivoted to his friend at the table. “Adlai, I bet Maris is here because she has something important she needs to tell you.”
She fidgeted, betraying a rare lack of poise. “No, I merely wanted to—”
He grabbed his half-eaten plate of food and stood to point a finger in her face. “I will not be your coconspirator. Either you tell him, or I will.”
Her lips drew into a thin line, exposing tension wrinkles along her perfect ebony skin. “Dashiel, I’m begging you. Don’t do this.”
“What are you two talking about?”
“Ask her. I have work to do.”
And he did have work to do—enough work to fill a hundred lifetimes. But his last thread of tenuous focus had frayed and floated off on the breeze that greeted him when he walked out the front doors of the Pavilion. He meandered to the left and found shade beneath the broad limbs of a snowbell tree.
Nika had run off alone to provoke a confrontation with the Sogain, the only aliens they knew of who were capable of killing them even faster than the Rasu. He’d been the one to suggest the Sogain might be responsible for the Rasu simex. He should be with her, dammit.
But he couldn’t be with her. Couldn’t so much as see her without being consumed by the bitter sting of…not betrayal, but something worse. Of being used. Trifled with. Demeaned.
Except, it didn’t feel like she’d demeaned him. When she’d stared at him this morning, he didn’t see scorn or contempt; he saw sorrow and longing. He saw pain. But should he trust anything he imagined he read in her eyes? Clearly his perception programming was shit, for her to fool him so completely in thousands of encounters of profound intimacy.
An alert arrived from his bank, notifying him of a significant new deposit. He opened the alert to check the details, then sank against the sinewy trunk of the snowbell.
2.1 million credits deposited to the personal account of Dashiel Ridani from the personal account of Nika Kirumase.
The itemization that followed spelled it all out: the 1.4 million for the Wayfarer, the 500,000 for NOIR, the 60,000 for the Taiyok cloaking device, plus an assortment of smaller expenses they’d incurred while traveling together.
At the end, a note:
Thank you for being there for me, for NOIR and for the Asterion people when we needed you most.
His immediate reaction was one of anger. How many times had he told her the money wasn’t a loan? By treating it as a business transaction, she trivialized everything about their recent time together, ensuring those memories now
joined their predecessors, tainted, in a dank sea of doubt.
But the anger swiftly gave way to soul-gutting despair. Why did she have to be so fucking kind? He’d flung the worst manner of vitriol at her, yet she was thanking him for being a decent person.
Gods, was this a goodbye? A settling of debts before closing and locking the door forever? Worse, was it an actual goodbye? Did she not expect to return from her visit to the Sogain? Had she lied about taking care of a psyche backup, and was this her chosen way to ‘sunset’?
No. Whatever wrongs she may have inflicted on him, she would never abandon her people, whether this meant NOIR or every Asterion who lived and breathed, at their hour of greatest need. She’d spent 700,000 years protecting them, and on losing all memory of those aeons, she’d nonetheless promptly taken up the mantle anew.
But the fact remained that she might not be given a choice in the matter.
He crouched beside the tree trunk and dropped his head into his hands. The thought of her not coming back threatened to rip the tattered remains of his psyche apart. Damn him for loving her so much. Damn her for lying to him. Damn her for vanishing and reappearing and making him love her all over again.
If she defied all sane odds and did survive this mission, what the hells was he going to do?
Forget then—what the hells was he going to do now?
He bit the inside of his cheek until he drew blood…then unblocked her message ID and pinged her.
Just tell me you’re all right. Just tell me you’re safe.
Message unable to be delivered to intended recipient.
Godsdammit. He probably deserved that.
With a sigh he pinged Perrin instead.
Hey, have you heard from Nika this evening?
No, and I’m worried sick about her. She should’ve reached the Sogain stellar system by now, and I thought she would have checked in before trying to communicate with them…and of course you’re worried about her, too. You ought to send her a message, Dashiel. She’d really, really like to hear from you.
Not so much. I tried, and it bounced. She’s blocking me.
I highly doubt it. Hold on for a second, I’ll ping her.
A pause.
Um, she’s not blocking you. My ping bounced, too. She’s not receiving. Stars, what if something’s happened to her?
It’s likely some kind of interference field emanating from the Sogain stellar system. They’re paranoid, so they’d implement defensive measures along those lines, right?
I don’t have the foggiest idea what strange, hermited super-advanced aliens would do!
He smiled a little. Fair enough. Do you know where her psyche backup is? She told Adlai and Maris she’d updated her backups before she left, but no one knows anything about where she’s keeping them.
I don’t. I mean I used to, when we were at The Chalet. But even then, she kept additional backups in secret locations. Now? I’ve got no idea.
I’m sure a backup won’t be needed. Contact me when you hear from her, okay? Please?
Absolutely. You do the same.
I will.
The connection ended, leaving him alone with the breeze and the shade and the smooth bark at his back. He closed his eyes as the naked, unvarnished truth smacked him in the head like a tidal wave and settled in so he could drown beneath it: he needed her to come home. Not a copy or an old backup—he needed this Nika, this complex mosaic of the woman she’d once been and the one she’d become, to return safely, real and whole.
He didn’t know what else this meant, or what he planned to do if she did; he only knew he needed her to be here.
17
* * *
WAYFARER
Interstellar space
Coming alone had been a mistake. She should have brought Perrin along for a constant stream of enthusiastic conversation. She should have brought Maris along and picked her brain about seven-hundred-thousand-years’ worth of history. But to bring either of them would have endangered their lives, if temporarily, and the Dominion couldn’t afford to lose them for even a day right now.
She should have brought the entire A Song of Sorbonne series for twenty hours of song and dance.
Instead she had only her thoughts, and they made for poor company indeed.
She skirmished with the emerging picture of the woman Nika Kirumase had been as it took shape one journal entry at a time. She agonized over how she could possibly convince Dashiel to trust her again. She ruminated on what her next move would be if this gambit failed. Not for long on the last one, however, because she didn’t have a next move. She mused pointlessly about the motivations of the Rasu.
She found no answers in the noisy echo chambers of her mind.
Expansion for expansion’s sake wasn’t a goal Asterions aspired to, but their ancestors the Anadens had. Nevertheless, though the Anadens were a hard and at times ruthless people, their desire for greater power had not transformed them into monsters. They had treated the alien species they encountered with minimal decency, if not always empathy or respect. The war her people had fought against the Anaden leadership had its roots in ideological differences and fear of the unknown—
—a bell sounded to alert her that she’d reached the far outskirts of the Sogain stellar system. It hadn’t been a terribly long trip, which her weary psyche appreciated. The system lay a mere six hundred thirty-four parsecs from Mirai, but for the last 200,000 years they’d treated the space surrounding it like a black hole and, as ordered, given it a wide berth.
She stood, splashed water on her face and sent a message to the External Relations Advisors to let them know she was set to begin.
Message unable to be delivered to intended recipients.
Huh. The possibility that the Guides had escaped their prisons, mounted a full-scale attack on the Pavilion and rendered everyone inside nonfunctional briefly crossed her mind. But it was far more likely the Sogain maintained an interference field for some distance beyond their stellar system as a defensive measure.
Either way, nothing she could do about it at present.
Unlike when she interacted with the Taiyoks, here no algorithms existed beyond the rudimentary ‘first contact’ protocols to instruct her how to act or what demeanor to project, and those were less than useless since this was second contact. Or possibly third.
No, the only tools at her disposal were her instincts and a healthy dose of desperation.
She approached the stellar system at half maximum impulse speed with all cloaking mechanisms turned off—the space travel equivalent of holding her arms in the air, palms open. Based on the notes from the previous encounter, the Sogain somehow understood Communis and had even communicated in it, so she broadcast a message on a loop signaling her peaceful intentions.
The first expedition had never made it close enough to any of the five planets in the system to determine which one, if any, the Sogain called home. If nothing arrived to stop her, she’d conduct flybys of every one of them—
—the cabin lit up in a thousand swirling points of light. Before she could begin to react, they rushed around her in a torrent and the cabin vanished.
SOGAIN STELLAR SYSTEM
Nika hung suspended in nothingness. In space, perhaps, but the churning lights surrounding her made it impossible to say for certain. If the lights dropped her, it was possible she might fall forever and ever through the depths of the infinite cosmos.
She breathed in—she could breathe. There was air, and the frigid, deadly vacuum of space wasn’t reaching her. So that was something.
She struggled to make out an object beyond the fog generated by the pinpoints of lights agitating around her. A planet? No. Though globe-shaped, there was no soft glow of an atmosphere and no true surface. Instead the object was porous in the gaps between a multitude of rigid lines and sharp angles. Light, though markedly different from what surrounded her, pulsed in intricate rhythms across the object’s breadth.
It was a machine. A constructe
d tool.
She squinted, trying to make out more details. The patterns stacked upon one another into the depths of the machine. The star at the center of the system, which she suddenly realized she floated alarmingly close to, pulsed out solar flares toward the machine in a hypnotic rhythm. A rhythm which was neither random nor chaotic…nor unevenly distributed. While the star and the machine both rotated, the machine remained at a fixed point in space—it didn’t orbit the star—and the flares invariably licked its outer framework.
The Sogain, who she assumed must control the machine, were siphoning off energy from the star, though by no method she’d ever heard of. Given the regular, targeted flares, it almost seemed as if they were controlling the star’s activity, manipulating the solar atmosphere to their own purposes.
She should feel fear in the presence of such unfathomable power, but as she dangled helplessly there, a tiny speck of dust in the cosmos with naught but her supernal cocoon protecting her from its ravages, she felt only awe.
She gulped in impossible air and greeted her captor or captors. “Hello?”
You violate our directive and trespass on our sovereign space once again. Explain your presence or be disposed of.
The voice boomed in her mind, more forceful and intimidating than the one she’d heard after the Rasu simex but possessing the same innate qualities.
“I’ve come to plead for your assistance. My people face a grave threat to their existence—a threat that looms dark over all life in this galaxy. They are called the Rasu, and I believe you know something of them. I believe you gave me information on this species three years ago in an attempt to prepare me for the conflict that is now upon us. I’m most grateful for what you did, but it is not enough. Your information impressed upon me how fearsome the Rasu are and provided crucial details on their nature, but it didn’t show me how we can defend against them.
Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Page 72