They’d played with humans a few times before – small merchant vessels that as far as anyone outside Xanadu knew had vanished without a trace – and they’d learned quite a bit from them before using them up. They’d already started on a few select victims they’d picked up during the welcoming party. Former ambassador Llewellyn had been one of the lucky few who died during the first day.
Suffering was all the Celebration of Special Uniqueness had left. That, and an eternity trapped with their peers in this palace turned prison. The best way to lessen one’s misery was to spread it among others, and the Tah-Leen had made an art form out of it.
“Cowboys and Indians,” one of its personas suggested. “We can ride to battle as heroic braves and introduce the Marines to the tortures the noble Native Americans inflicted on the monsters who dared steal their ancestral lands.” A bit of mock-outrage and self-righteousness always added some spice to their games. His personas had spent some time listing the Lampreys’ many sins in between rounds of physical torture; humans were even more vulnerable to that sort of psychological torment.
“That might be nice,” said another one, a human female version, and everyone else knew the words meant she thought it was a subpar proposal and that what she was about to offer would be much better. “Although I would like to have them fight among themselves instead. Divide the Marines into two teams and have them battle each other to the death. Threatening the civilians would probably be inducement enough. A few demonstrations, like what we did to their traitor, might be required, but that would be amusing in itself.”
“Dear selves, if I may change the subject for a moment, I need to bring something to your attention,” another one said. He – he was regrettably stuck on a single gender, across every form he picked – was something of a stick-in-the-mud. “I’ve been monitoring the activities of the Scholar and the Seeker. It is clear that they are using human pawns against each other, rather than for the amusement of the Especially Unique.”
“We are all aware,” the Prime Hierophant said, a note of warning in its voice as it took over the Grinning Budai and made him its own. Unlike the rest of its personas, the Prime had no gender and few set characteristics. It had perfected the development of fluid identities beyond what its peers or even its lesser manifestations could achieve. It could be everything and everyone, changing at the slightest whim. On occasion, it wondered why such power hadn’t resulted in anything resembling happiness. It was never satisfied with what it was, never content and complete. At this point, its only source of solace was the exercise of power over others, including other versions of itself.
All its individual expressions feared the Prime, for it alone could create and dismiss them. The discards only lived on as shared memories, never to experience freedom again. It was as close to death as any Tah-Leen had faced since the Fall had stranded ninety-three warp-intolerant survivors in Xanadu. Having forgone procreation millennia before, those eternally-unhappy few were all the Tah-Leen that would ever live. And for seventy-nine thousand years, they had dwelt in the Habitat and played their games.
The Prime considered the situation. This particular event had been more exciting than most, in no small part because of the quarrel between the Scholar and the Seeker, but it would all be over soon, except for the extended torture session at the end. After that, the struggle to make each day even slightly different from the previous one would start anew.
“I do not see a problem,” it finally said. That should have been the end of the discussion.
“I think you are overlooking a few things,” the annoyingly pragmatic persona pressed on. “For one, these renegades are giving their pawns more access to our secrets than is prudent or safe. They are endangering the entire Celebration.”
“Some barely-sapient primitives cannot pose a threat,” the Prime said.
“Perhaps. But consider this, Greatest of All Selves: I believe the Scholar and the Seeker plot to do more than reduce each other’s status. I think at least one of them is seeking to commit murder. To slay a Prime, not just a few extensions.”
They killed each other for sport all the time, but the Primes were held sacrosanct. To fully destroy one of them would be a crime beyond their most depraved urges. Even the Monitor, the worst of them all, had been spared that fate. The Diversity must be preserved; there were only ninety-three True Individuals in a galaxy filled with meaningless hordes of lesser beings, and diminishing that number diminished them all.
“Let me see,” the Prime ordered. The stubbornly male extension opened his mind, allowing the Hierophant to access not only his memories but his entire thought processes. The upstart’s theory had some merit, but the way this expression of itself had evolved was… undesirable. Individuality could only be carried so far, and by refusing to accept the fluidity of gender and the importance of the games, this one had proved himself to be unworthy. The body collapsed like a suddenly unstrung puppet as his memories were fully absorbed into the Prime. His personality was simply erased from the Core, ceasing to exist altogether.
“That was unpleasant,” it said when it was done digesting the mental meal. Everyone else agreed heartily. “He had a point, mind you. Three of you will abandon the games and proceed to investigate the matter. The rest of us will…”
The lights went out. The sudden darkness lasted for a fraction of a second, but that was long enough to send a thrill of terror through the Hierophant in all its manifestations.
The lights never flickered at the Habitat. No major systems had failed for even an instant for untold millennia. True, maintenance had grown lax, and much of the volume of their great palace had been abandoned to make sure the rest continued to function normally. Even by the most pessimistic estimates, however, the Tah-Leen could expect to live in the style they were accustomed to for no less than another hundred thousand years. Invaders, saboteurs and spies had all failed to disturb the peaceful harmony of the True Individuals. Until now.
The Hierophant saw the shock and near-panic it felt reflected in the expressions of all its personas. Its first move, when it managed to overcome its paralysis, was to contact the Monitor, only to discover that the guardian and keeper of the entire Habitat for Unique Diversity was dead.
Two of its extensions fainted outright at the news. The rest were nearly as traumatized. It was as if Oblivion itself had finally come, an uninvited guest in the midst of all their celebrations, here to finish what the Fall had begun.
The Monitor’s death was not immediately catastrophic. All systems in the habitat were automated, of course, and essentially ran themselves. The Monitor’s chief function was to handle any eventualities that mindless machines couldn’t deal with, and to ensure the security of the whole. With it gone, however, Xanadu was hideously vulnerable to malicious interference and the ravages of entropy.
The time for games was over. The Hierophant sent out a mental command to activate the Executioner devices scattered throughout the station. Their killing signals would destroy all the noxious Americans in the Habitat and in the civilian vessel docked to it; the destroyers would be dealt with later. It felt wasteful to kill them so swiftly, but the damn apes must be stopped before they caused any further damage.
Nothing happened. It tried again, to no avail. Something was blocking him. Or someone. Humans were loose in the Conduit!
That cold realization was swiftly followed by a second murder. A fully actualized Tah-Leen this time. The dead individual and all its extensions were gone, its uniqueness extinguished. Whoever had done the deed had struck at the Prime Core that contained its very essence. Each Core was jealously guarded and protected. Destroying them was impossible, and yet it had happened.
Only ninety-one Tah-Leen remained.
What plague had the humans brought to Xanadu?
* * *
It was a bit like playing Whack-A-Mole.
Lisbeth Zhang had never seen the old version of the game, the one played with actual mallets and wood and plastic boards, but
electronic versions had been available since long before she was born. The principle was the same, of course. Smack the elusive moles whenever they popped up.
Finding and killing the Snowflakes had been just as frustrating.
The Mind-Killer was a tricky beast. Lisbeth had handled dozens of weapon systems during her two careers in the armed forces, from the ubiquitous Infantry Weapon she’d wielded as an acne-ridden teenager during Basic to the 20-inch grav cannon that ran the entire length of the War Eagle warp fighter. But this was the first death-dealing piece of equipment that relied on freaking intuition. Or darkest sorcery; one term was as good as the other. She was sitting in the cockpit of the Corpse-Ship, and using her supernatural senses to search the habitat for any signs of the ninety-two Tah-Leen living there. Finding the Monitor had been much easier, mostly because its location was public knowledge. The others’ brain-jars were hidden from all sensor systems and their defenses were strong enough to withstand anti-ship weaponry. She could only find them by mentally sifting through the billions of cubic kilometers in the station, until a tell-tale tingle told her she’d found a Snowflake.
It took her a good three minutes to locate her second victim. Even most annoying, it was nobody of importance. This particular Tah-Leen had been very low on the totem pole, a sycophant who earned its keep by kissing every ass in reach, often literally, since whenever the Tah-Leen weren’t fucking their captives they were busy fucking each other, in every sense of the word. She got all of this through the mind-link she had to build with her quarry in order to engage it. The process was like a setting up a ship-to-ship targeting solution. Once it was done all she had to do was open a microscopic warp aperture and expose the poor bastard to what lay on the other side. The Tah-Leen couldn’t withstand exposure to the Starless Path: the shock was automatically fatal. Killing the Monitor had been rough, but taking out a fully conscious Tah-Leen was much worse. She had the privilege of hearing the terrified psychic screams of her victim as it went insane and died shortly thereafter.
Lisbeth found and destroyed one alien brain-jar after another. The process soon acquired an awful sameness. Her targets first felt surprise at the unexpected contact, followed by terror and useless attempts to resist. They had no defenses against her, however. She might as well be slaughtering penned sheep, unable to escape or fight, forced to watch in horror as their killer approached. Each time, she experienced a little of bit of the lives she snuffed, becoming both confessor and executioner for her victims.
Fifteen down. Even though this wasn’t a fight but a series of executions, each kill took a lot out of her. After her bout of insanity had finally passed, Lisbeth had eaten the last of the food the Scholar had left her, hydrated herself and ran a bio-scan. She was doing better, but she still needed a break every few minutes, a little time to let her body recover from the unfamiliar stresses she was putting it through. She lay back and closed her eyes.
Heather’s voice interrupted her rest less than a minute later.
“The Scholar’s moving towards you! I locked him out but he’s using energy weapons to blast through the airlocks!”
“Holy shitty indeedy,” Lisbeth mumbled. She was feeling a bit crazy again. She’d better whack this mole, or he’d do some whacking of his own.
There Scholar had nineteen active embodiments, including the one in the Pappy Boyington costume, and all of them were headed her way. Not good. The only way to take them all out was to find his brain-jar, but finding it would take time she didn’t have. She zeroed in on the nearest body and used the Mind-Killer on it. Pappy Boyington dropped dead, much to her delight. Problem was, there were eighteen more of him, and killing a single persona did diddly to the rest.
Lisbeth took two more aliens out, and each time she almost took herself out along the way. Killing the Tah-Leen’s extensions was as exhausting as destroying their Cores, and for a lot less bang for the buck. She’d drop long before she got through all of them. The surviving Scholars arrived to the Corpse-Ship’s storage room. Heather had locked the door and they couldn’t bypass her codes, but they didn’t have to. They had graviton pistols, something Lisbeth hadn’t known was even possible to build, given the power requirements. They used them against the armored door and its defensive shields. She had maybe ten seconds before they broke through and turned her into shredded beef.
So far, she’d been able to access only small amounts of energy, just enough to power the Mind-Killer and the sensors that she’d used to find her prey. She tried to draw more power into the ship. It was like trying to lift a shuttle with her bare hands. Lisbeth didn’t have it in her. Maybe if she wasn’t so tired from all the mole-whacking.
No. Not even on my best day, Lisbeth thought. She might have rewired her brain, but she still didn’t have the mental bandwidth for the task. She wasn’t a Fifth Circle Master. After all her hard-work and near-death experiences, she might qualify for the First Circle. Maybe the Second, if she applied herself. Which was a roundabout way of saying she was shit out of luck.
“I might be able to help,” the Pathfinder whispered in her ear.
The dead alien had gone silent since Lisbeth had rewired her brain, and hadn’t responded to her attempts to contact it again. She’d given up after a few tries; time was running out and she figured maybe the poor ghost had finally moved on or whatever. But there it was again. Unless she’d gone completely bonkers and this was a figment of her imagination.
“Help me,” she said. Figment or not, it was all she had.
“One last push.”
“What do you mean?” she asked just before everything went dark.
Lisbeth and the ghost became one. The Pathfinder’s consciousness melded with her own, and she no longer was Lisbeth Juliette Zhang of Eureka, North California. She was Atu, born on the edge of a black hole’s event horizon. Atu, whose real name was two-hundred syllables long, at least the parts that human hearing might perceive. Atu’s true name was a reflection of what it had been and done, growing in length as new chapters were added to the story of its life. Several thousand years of alien memories flooded her mind.
Atu had been born in an exoplanetary habitat not unlike the one she was in. The young Pathfinder, bred for zero gravity, had undergone additional procedures to optimize its capabilities: hormones to increase its growth to gargantuan levels; nanotech conversions that infused its skeletal structure with near-indestructible composite materials; subtler bio-engineering that shaped its brain to better perceive and access the Starless Path. As it grew, it was schooled in the philosophy of balance, and upon reaching adolescence was taken into the Path, where it met a Mentor, an angelic entity that became its best friend, confidant and guide.
There was much more, a kaleidoscope of events detailing a life lived for exploration and trade. They included journeys to the further reaches of the known galaxy and encounters with beings that might have been the Elders themselves; an ambitious attempt to reach the Galactic Core that had ended in tragedy; and finally, a great schism that had ended with the Transcendence of most Pathfinders, and a cold exile for the rest. Atu had been among those left behind. Those remnants of its species had been hunted down by other Starfarers. Wounded and near death, a few hundred survivors fled to a remote star and entered a vegetative state, hoping to outlast their tormentors and eventually follow their siblings. Something had gone wrong, however, and Atu and its kind had become living fossils, a mere spark of consciousness trapped within their petrified bodies. Eons later, their resting place had been discovered by the Marauders, at which point Atu’s story ended and the Corpse-Ship’s began.
Lisbeth/Atu felt the door to the chamber break apart just as their combined consciousness opened a link to the Starless path and poured power into the ship. The Scholars rushed in and opened fire, but not before shields had sprung around their target. Beams that had torn apart bulkheads and regular force fields did no damage against the shimmering yellow-pink aura protecting the undead vessel.
They couldn’t h
urt the hybrid entity she’d become, but she could hurt them. A thought was all it took: the energy shield expanded suddenly, producing enough pressure to transform the display room into a hollow sphere a hundred yards wide. The sixteen remaining Scholars became a thin film of organic matter that evenly coated the sphere’s surface. The live Corpse-Ship floated in the center of the sphere until Lisbeth ordered it to descend to the curved floor.
Atu regretted the violence. Lisbeth exulted in it.
“I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree,” she told her new soulmate. She was herself once again, more or less.
A psychic sigh was the only response. She felt the alien’s presence fade away, and hoped that was temporary.
Time to get back to her game of whack-a-mole.
* * *
Suckass had the honor of making first contact with the enemy.
He and the rest of the fireteam were on point, moving through a bunch of corridors that had next to no distinguishing features. You’d think that the aliens who’d built the colorful outer shell would have spent some time prettying up the interior, but you’d be wrong. If it wasn’t for the Skipper feeding them directions every few minutes, they could wander around the innards of this oversized space station for years without finding a way out. Not that they would have lasted years; they had maybe a couple days’ worth of rations, and everyone’s twin power packs were at fifteen percent or less. Most of the tunnels had no atmo in them, either, which meant that as soon as their power and their reserve oxygen was out, it was all over.
They stopped at an intersection. PFC Barton took a peek on the left side; Howard checked the right – and spotted a tango less than thirty feet away heading towards them. This particular Snowflake looked like a crab and a multi-tool had babies together. Six legs around a seven-foot-long carapace that sprouted a couple dozen upper limbs, everything from tentacles to scrubbers to sensor antennas. It could be a robot, cyborg or just a funky-looking alien in a combat or utility suit. Only way to find out was to open it up and take a look at its insides.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 88