by Alex Oliver
Maybe he was imagining this too - the fact that the caress felt like the touch of stinging nettles, or that a numbness spread from it, up into his flattened, pomaded hair, lacquering his skin into the same immobility.
"What are you doing?" he tried to say, but his mouth gave out half way through, hung open, drool pooling in its corners and threatening to spill. Panicking, he tried to raise his gun, aim for Nori's calf, where a slug in the big muscle would disable but not permanently harm him. But now he couldn't feel his fingers either, couldn't bend his elbow, couldn't move at all as the boy closed a firm grip around the weapon and eased it out of his hand.
What was happening? Even when he was most scared, Mboge had not really believed anything supernatural could be going on. The Lord did not permit witchcraft to be used against His anointed, and Felix had done nothing recently so terrible it could part him from the compassion of the Lord.
Maybe keeping Cygnus 5's governor and his staff in the hold as prisoners had been wicked enough to open him to this? But the hold was pressurized and heated. Mboge had filled it with blankets and made sure the food and water dispensers were stocked. Which was more than the governor had done for his own charges. Felix was taking them to Snow City so they could go home to their families. That could not warrant punishment.
The paralysis spread to his chest, his lungs. He had to concentrate hard to force himself to breathe, in, out, in again. What was happening? He didn't really believe in witchcraft, except in moments of weakness, but this possession was the very thing he had feared most from the adze. Was Nori a vampire? Was Felix about to have his organs removed and feasted upon, or was he going to be kept like this, like the living dead, an unwilling servant to this petty criminal until he eventually sickened and died?
He wanted to ask. To beg the man to do anything to him rather than that. But he couldn't move his mouth to make words as Nori smiled again and brushed him again with that stinging touch over his forehead and down the other cheek.
~
Damn. Nakano Nori considered his options as his quick-acting nanobots replicated and spread through Mboge's system, paralyzing him. Fun though it was to watch the wide eyed look of terror on the man's face as he froze in place, this was not what Nori had planned for.
He had unlocked the ship's safe at ship-noon the previous day-shift and scooped its precious cargo of carved green data-stones and merely decorative rubies into his rucksack. That must have been when he forgot himself and made enough noise for this moron to hear him. He could kick himself. They were in docking approach at this very moment, Froward's thick nav computer slipping them into one of the approach streams that followed Snow City like comet tails.
Nori'd seen the automated chatter between Froward and the SC traffic control AIs, interpreted the AI's fluid mathematical logic streams and gathered that they pitied Froward for being lobotomized, made so dependent on her crew that she could hardly function without them.
Nori could sympathize with that. The Kingdom believed in doing everything with as little non-human aid as possible - that included thinking. Presumably they thought their own ability to use their brains might atrophy if they had computers to do too much of it for them. What that led to was people like Felix Mboge, whom he had heard muttering some kind of incantation under his breath as he walked - completely unprotected - into Nori's hands. Human brains might be fast, creative, but they were full of superstition and random flesh-generated junk. They needed a rational platform beneath them the way the human foot needed the ground.
Nori sighed and hitched his bag of treasures more comfortably over his shoulder. His plan had been to lay low here in the infirmary until Froward worked her way uptail into the docks. He would have hopped across, out of the docking tube into the station, gone to the nearest buyer of curiosities, sold the loot for fortunes beyond his imagination, and then...
The details were hazy. He'd have bought himself a new suit, and a good meal, and a space ship of his own. Some kind of yacht perhaps, light and fast and clever. Then he would find somewhere where he could repair the ruin that had been made of his mind.
Nori should have been coming out of the bank by the time Mboge got his human cargo organized enough to leave the ship. If he'd been really lucky, the ex-governor would have had Mboge frogmarched to the local justiciar, and Froward would have been left empty for the taking...
He sighed again, contemplating the picture of himself at large in the universe with this ship as his own, and the cost of a yacht to be spent on other things. A villa on one of those paradise planets, maybe? Or a comet of his own. He could definitely see himself with his own lair dug deep in the icy core of a wandering planetoid. State of the art pinholenet, virtual presence technology for when he was lonely, and his own wetware-net on his own planet, where no one could ever tear him apart again.
Was it really so much to ask?
"What am I going to do with you, then?" Nori asked out loud, really to himself, though there was a flicker in Mboge's eyes that said he was trying to answer.
For a Kingdom dupe, the man was nice to look at. Perhaps if Nori had not been chemically castrated in infancy - as all the members of his gestalt had, freeing them of much useless distraction, he might have physically attracted to the man. Certainly Mboge filled out the black trousers and the stretchy black shirt of his uniform nicely, and he looked better for having ditched that blood red jacket with its creepy patches. The picture of some kind of winged cow with a circle around its horns embroidered on the thigh pockets of his fatigues was weird enough, a six pointed star on the other. Fucking savage.
Nori had very little sympathy for people who gave their lives over to some kind of atavistic sky god, as though they'd never crawled out of the primordial slime. His own world had been purely, ruthlessly pragmatic. One provided some kind of useful resource and with that use one bargained for the things one needed. His gestalt had been doing wet networking by the time they were five. His earliest memories were of sitting at long white tables with the other units, wired together, with Arcadia's AIs using their plastic little brains as extra processing power. Thoughts greater than his own had been passing through his mind all his life. It wasn't always great, being a disposable battery, but still he now felt like a single tessera plucked out of a mosaic. Where was the pattern? What was the meaning of him now?
A clunk and the ship shuddered under his feet. Glancing to the left showed lines of code from an SC tug flowing up the infirmary's rigged monitors. Good. So they were going to dock earlier than he'd thought. He could remote pilot Mboge off the ship, open the hold doors and dump the governor on a waiting cargo processor and...
No, he needed to get to the assessor before Mboge was released. Damn it. He looked around. Bandages? No, Mboge might tear them. IV tubing? It would stretch. Ah!
A drawer under the infirmary's operating platform contained padded leather restraining cuffs and a chain that fitted through mounts beneath, threading up in a configuration that would keep a prisoner tied down, spread eagled, cuffed around the wrists and ankles, helpless.
It was sick that they had this. He hadn't forgotten that this was a prison ship - he'd been confined for long enough in its barracks, forced to jog every day around its two g running track. They probably had restraints like these for when they had to force feed prisoners, for when they had to hold them down for torture. Using it on Mboge would be no more than justice - a little payback to the people who had ruined not only Nori’s life, but the lives of every member of his gestalt, all of them now wrenched out of their sockets like dismembered bones.
And yet, now Nori had the chance to look more closely, he didn’t honestly want to hurt the guy. Mboge was very dark skinned, almost the color of space itself, and his bones were bold and elegant. His eyes were a far lighter brown, looking almost like amber by comparison. Not even the fact that he glued his hair down with something slick and sticky, to the point where it looked like a helmet, could take away from his overall beauty. It was the first ti
me a person’s outward appearance had struck Nori as something important - something to preserve and save to memory - and he was intrigued.
Mboge didn't look stupid any more, not with his generous mouth closed and firming into a disapproving line.
Wait! He closed his mouth? Fascination turned into alarm with a sinking shock. I didn't give you permission to move.
The eyes Nori had been admiring blinked. Nori took a step back without thinking, and then closed his own, concentrating on the connection between himself and his bots.
Damn it! He had expected no resistance at all. These people prided themselves on being base stock humans, a blank state for anyone with a suite of bugs to call on but...
Swathes of data came in, reports from each individual bot, amalgamated into an overall feed that was then stripped of 99% of its irrelevances by sophisticated algorithms so that Nori's conscious mind could interpret it. What he saw now was similar to a cat scan of Mboge's body, colored according to density of bots.
Hundreds of them were blinking out even as he watched. The pink blush of his own influence flickered at the brain stem, retreated. Nothing but a faint dusting showed now over the man's face, paralyzing a few unimportant muscles and smoothing a few wrinkles in the process. Nori ran diagnostics, switched on his bots rudimentary scanning ability, and hissed.
Oh fuck, he recognized the pings that came back in silver, a mist at first and then a solidifying wall. Bryant! This bastard had got himself equipped with Bryant's latest batch of defensive nano. That meant...
Mboge's right hand curled into a fist. Shit. Nori retreated to the drug cabinets at the back of the operating room. There must be some kind of anesthetic here, a chemical that would do what his beloved machines had failed at. But no, the shelves had been stripped - all the medicines moved into Bryant's new offices down in the Lice city.
OK, so, no electronics, no chemicals. What was left? Campos had taken all the guns to issue to Cygnus 5's hunters. There was - his hands closed around a long, serrated blade - a bone saw. And he pictured pulling it through Mboge's flesh, arm, or leg, or throat - the tear of skin and splatter of blood. He dropped it. No.
Talking it was, then.
He smiled, "Don't get angry. I'm sorry about the paralysis. I just needed you not to hurt me while I explained a few things. I was afraid you wouldn't listen if you didn't have to."
"I don't have to listen now," Mboge slurred, fine motor control improving even by the end of the sentence.
"Obviously," Nori humored the man's pride, "but I think you should try anyway. You need me. The people here are not like anything you've ever met before. I know the Kingdom has been floating around the outside of the Source worlds, picking off the dreamers and the half-and-halfs and the worlds the Source considers unviable and disposable, but SC is not a bunch of collapsing stock netlife players who've forgotten about the real world. They're going to see you and they're going to know you're Luddite trash. You're the enemy to be fleeced and then killed so your organs can be sold."
"And you're telling me this because...?" Mboge had managed to bend one knee, flex that foot. At this rate of progress, he'd be mobile again before the SC tug settled them in their crater of snow.
"Because I want to help," Nori tried. Another thing about fanatics - they were not great at reading human nature. "I have friends back on Cygnus 5 waiting for this ship to return with food and supplies. I can't let you throw yourself to the sharks of Snow City to be fleeced of all our money. I want to see this colony succeed as much as you do, and while I don't doubt you'll try your best, you need someone who is wise to this culture to help you." He put on his most innocent face, and smiled. "I want to help you."
Mboge laughed. "Right. And that's why you were hiding from me. The whole voyage when we could have talked and planned for this, you pretended you weren't on board at all. Only now I've caught you are you singing a different tune."
Fuck. Nori should have put the cuffs on. He should have put the cuffs on anyway while Mboge was paralyzed. Could he at least do the feet? He pulled the chains with a rattle out to their furthest extent. With all the others tight to the table, there was enough play in the final one to get it within a foot of Mboge. But even if he could somehow stretch it another foot and get it around the man's ankle, Mboge would just be able to bend down and unlock it.
As Nori crouched at the end of the chain, trying to figure something out, the readouts in his head blinked from mostly pink to entirely silver as the progression of bot sweeping ramped up unexpectedly. The next thing he knew was a boot coming down square in the center of his back, knocking him forward onto the deck.
"You really are one of the worst criminals I've ever met," said Mboge with an intonation almost of wonder. “How did you ever achieve anything bad enough to earn being sent to Cygnus 5?"
That stung. He wasn't incompetent. He just wasn't used to being entirely, merely human. He missed the minds that had used him as a node, missed feeling infinite and infinitely brilliant. He didn't miss the fact that they thought through him – that he was simply being used by minds greater than his own, for purposes to which he was never made privy – but being clever, he missed that. It wasn't fair that he had to try to do the same thing with only his own brain to lean on.
"Yes," he said, more submissively than he would have preferred. "I know, you've defeated me. That doesn't negate my point. You need me."
The infirmary view screen whited over as the tug gave Froward a little push into one of the docking craters. Magnetic tracks beneath the snowy surface came on line, locking them down. From the center of the hollow a transfer tube rose like an insect mouth to fasten on to the ship's hatch. A distant banging echoed through the corridors as the gravity shifted and unsecured items fell from the floor to the wall.
A freak of the air vents meant they could hear the governor's staff beating on the door of the hold. "Let us out!"
Nori slid sideways onto what had previously been a wall, and Mboge kept him pinned down the whole way. He almost felt sympathy for the man as he lay flat under Mboge's foot and let him wonder what now. How could he deal with all of this at once? Alone? "You can't stand like this all day,” he pointed out, trying not to be as smug as Mboge deserved. “I can help you. I want to help."
Unfortunately Mboge seemed to be as resistant to Nori’s charm as he was to his nano. He hauled Nori up and marched him to the brig, to watch the rest of the docking from inside a cell. Why he hadn't thought of putting Mboge in the cells himself, he didn't know. He banged his forehead gently against one of the steel bars, as if that would open up a port and let outside wisdom flow in, but it didn't. It just gave him a headache behind the eyes.
Everything had been easier when he had more processing power. That was what he was going to spend his money on, when he got it. He was going to buy his own planetoid and install as many servers as he could power, with a wetware interface, and he was going to make himself a proper brain. One that he didn't have to share. One where he was still in control.
But before that, he would have to get out.
If he squeezed himself into the farthest corner of the exercise area, he could see the guards' monitors. One of them showed the hatch opening, ship drones coming in like an invasion of cockroaches. An APiD shaped like a pole on caterpillar tracks followed them in. Mboge gave it a helpless look as though he didn't know what it was, kept his rifle trained on the ex-governor of Cygnus 5, and his staff - four pale men who already looked a great deal better than they had looked when Campos took over.
The APiD's projector flashed, and then Nori was looking at a green-skinned woman in a tattered dress made up of floating lights, her dragonfly-like wings flickering as she hovered just at Mboge's eye level. 'Actual Presence Device' indeed. Was he expected to believe the woman really looked like this, where she lay in her stim tank? If it even was a woman.
The governor recovered first, drawing himself up to his meager height but producing an impressive voice of authority. "I want this
man taken into custody at once. He is a wanted criminal in the territory of the Kingdom of the Book. Then I wish to speak with whoever represents Kingdom authority on this station."
The flying woman rolled further into the ship, her accompanying drones skittering off at top speed down all the corridors. "Snow City Free Port does not acknowledge Kingdom sovereignty nor authority. However, we do have an embassy. You and your companions may proceed to level seven, where you will find your people on median 98. A guidance drone may be hired to take you there, if you have funds."
"My government will answer for any charges I may incur."
"Then may your visit be long and enjoyable."
She appeared to flit out of the way of the docking tube, to gesture him onto the station. The governor shoulder-checked Mboge as he passed, and disappeared into the station. Mboge rubbed the bridge of his nose with the hand that wasn’t cradling his rifle, his alert expression giving way to tiredness, clear even on the monitor.
So Mboge is there, being kept busy. If he's put your rucksack back in the safe, this would be a good time to go get it.
Nori's thoughts blossomed by themselves into the forefront of his mind. But you're behind bars, he answered them. A few months of captivity, of being unhooked, had not been enough to let him grow accustomed to his own thought processes - he still interpreted his own ideas as being command sequences from an upper level processor.
I know you’re behind bars. But you have bots. Adapt them!
Nori had designed his bots as an interpersonal defense system, but perhaps they could be tweaked? Bryant changed the function of his bots on the fly and it irked Nori mightily to watch the man being so effortlessly good at it, when Nori used to think that he was the best.