Gradually, we work our way further into the industrial zone, away from the busier areas of the city where collateral damage would be a concern. Once, we are challenged by an officious Morok female who only yields to Wrik’s Confed credentials.
We reach a factory area devoid of foot traffic. A building stands to our left. The structure is heavier than the usual internal construction of the city, which is normally mere compartmentalization. This must be heavy industry location where there was a concern over noise or other environmental factors. I wave Wrik toward the locked entrance. A forlorn looking sign says, “Sumitomo Dye and Press.”
“Looks closed,” he says. “Ah, a bankruptcy notice. Yeah, they’ve closed up and gone out of business.”
“Then this will be an ideal place to deal with our pursuer.” The lock is a simple mechanical one with no electronic components. I simply pull it apart carefully in case I wish to reassemble it later, then I push open the light door. We step into the darkened interior. A few emergency lights provide a wan illumination. In the distance, an office light glows, doubtless forgotten by the departing staff.
Wrik has drawn his laser, forgoing the stunner that had proved useless in his previous encounter with a Ribisan in an environmental suit. This concerns me. I do not want Wrik involved in the coming combat but he often resists my sensible suggestions as to his safety, preferring to “hold up his end.” He is motivated by loyalty, but also by a constant need to persuade himself that he has courage. I must appreciate the former while being well and truly annoyed by the latter.
I spot a control room on the second floor balcony overlooking a line of heavy equipment. “Wrik, take up position there. Prepare to give covering fire if I call for but only then. We must be wary. I think he is alone but I might not be able to detect unarmored humans with him.”
He hefts the laser. “Got it.”
Wrik moves off quickly using an LED built into his collar to help him navigate the clutter and cables on the floor. I watch him go with IR and a half-dozen other sensors. It relieves me that he is removed from the ambush site and will not fire unless I call for it, which I will not do. It is as much protection as I can arrange for him.
I turn back to the door and remove the new jacket that Wrik bought me to preserve the delicate thing. Our enemy has almost literally dogged our steps, following directly behind us. Logically, he will continue to act that way, come to the door, detect the forced lock and follow us in. I will allow him a dozen steps to assure that he is alone and too far from the entrance to dash back into public view. Unless he has a heavy weapon, I will opt for close combat and cyber-attack on his systems to disable his suit and weapons. I must preserve the enemy for interrogation.
I pause, interrogation of an enemy combatant? Beyond a cursory questioning of some Guilders, for whom I have no regard, I have not done this disagreeable task for over 50,000 years. Beyond the fact that those interrogations occurred, I have no memory of the experiences, having deleted them. I only know that they were sanguinary and ended in the deaths of the captives. Creators did not take Infester prisoners save for weapons research. Infestors only took captives to make slaves of them, either mindless automata or tortured souls whose lives ran out soon.
I sigh internally. I had promised Wrik that I would never delete a memory he was part of and I interpret that broadly. I have deleted none since that time. Whatever I do today, I must live with for as long as I operate.
Minutes drag on as I wait for our stalker. I begin to wonder if he has abandoned the chase. Perhaps put off by the same officious Morok we encountered? Maybe his mission was to merely trail us?
A laser flashes followed by a shout. Wrik.
Our enemy has not continued his pattern but has flanked us to attack from the rear. Where I placed Wrik. I have miscalculated. Again.
I accelerate to full combat speed and arm all weapons and cyber systems. I must save Wrik.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I climbed dusty stairs to the second story. A few rodents and bugs skittered away from my approach. The place was cleaner than an abandoned building on a planet, but wherever beings had gone into space, rodents and bugs had found a way to follow. Tir-a-Mar was no exception. My feet raised puffs of dust as I stepped off the stairs into the control space for the factory floor. I moved to look out over the area facing the door we’d come in though. Raising the laser, I tapped on the IR sight and spotted Maauro, she glowed at about the same temperature as a human to make her feel human to the touch. As if sensing the use of the IR, Maauro quickly faded out of the sight as she damped her heat signature.
She probably isn’t even aware of it a conscious level, I thought, the Creators built her well. I tapped the IR off and stared over the barrel, after a few seconds I could pick up the hint of her yellow hair bow. She stood utterly still, in a way no biological organism could, amidst the machinery near the doorway.
I looked about, pondering the situation. Maauro clearly assumed our enemy would continue following our trail directly into the factory, following the pattern it exhibited up to now. Normally I’d never second-guess her as to tactics, but she occasionally showed a lack of imagination in these situations, a reliance on machine logic. Our opponent wasn’t a machine. He was biological and while I had little in common with a hydrogen-breather, I bet he was scared. His side had already lost one operative dogging us. Maauro occasionally underestimated the effect of physical fear. She waded into combats. I realized that made sense, considering the Infestors used warrior-drones who had no more sense of self-preservation than an ant.
Ribisans were long-lived sophisticates. The Nekoans, who knew them best, claimed that their ethical system was self-centered, raising selfishness to a virtue. The more I thought about it, the more I feared we were going about this wrong. If I were trailing Maauro and had any idea what she was, I’d never follow her directly. I’d be looking for any advantage, any margin of safety, rather than risk a direct confrontation with her.
I looked around, my eyes now fully adapted to the dark, remembering what I had seen of the building and the corridor outside. The ceiling of the floating city was high in this industrial area, easily twenty meters up, doubtless to help with cooling and air quality. The buildings were more sturdy that most of the construction inside the city. Unless it was part of a station’s airtight compartmentation, walls needed only be eye and ear proof, but in a factory section with the noise and vibration, more was required. The building had been banked with higher passages on either side. That meant what was the second floor here, might be the first floor to the smaller passage behind the building and facing the next row of structures.
The door at the far end of the control complex looked like an interior door, so I didn’t think it opened to the outside, but there could be a showroom or something beyond it. I rubbed my face for a second in indecision, wondering whether to leave my post or to call mind-to-mind to Maauro.
Hell, I thought, she doesn’t need me up here. She just placed me here to be out of the way. She’d either tell me to stay put because I was wrong, or if she believed it, then she’d have to watch two entrances at the same time. Impossible from where she was. I decided to check it out before bothering her with my theory.
Laser leveled, I crabbed toward the back door, moving as silently as I could.
The door swung open and the Ribisan stepped into the room. Surprise gripped us both, but its grip was tighter on him, I’d been thinking about this. I fired, shouted for Maauro and dove behind a desk. My shot hit dead center, but he was holding his weapon against his chest. The weapon took the brunt of the shot, pieces shattering off it as sparks flew. He staggered, falling against the doorframe as I hit the floor behind the desk.
A blast of icy rage literally froze me, slamming into my brain and numbing me so I couldn’t get off a follow-up shot. For an instant I thought it some device of our enemy, then I recognized the mind radiating the icy fury
, just as my ears heard the sound of ripping metal as she tore through the space separating us. Maauro was coming and so angered that she was overflowing the link into my brain.
I didn’t even see her until she struck the Ribisan, just a green-suited blur with a touch of yellow who plunged into her towering opponent in a flurry of blows. He dropped his useless weapon and tried to grapple with the speeding android.
Maauro hit with all four limbs so rapidly that I could barely see it. She was tearing off actuators, smashing joints. Ribisans were durable high-G dwellers, but this one’s suit was not the equal of the one we fought on Star Central. There was no contest.
“Maauro, we need intel,” I shouted. “Don’t kill it.”
The rage that had almost displaced my conscious thought faded, to be replaced by a sense of sadness and failure. It didn’t take much to realize Maauro was upset that she’d misread the tactical situation and placed me directly in harm’s way.
Sparing the fallen Ribisan only a glance, I walked over and put a hand on her shoulder, then winced from the heat that had built up in her body, but I kept my hand on her. “It’s ok.”
“No,” her voice was flat and mechanical and that was always, very, very bad. “I am defective, Wrik. I keep making tactical mistakes. I am literally made for this and I keep failing, endangering those I would protect. Maybe this is why the Creators are all gone. Maybe they were served by defectives like me.”
I put both hands on her shoulders and turned her to face me. “Nothing and no one is perfect. And you are not defective. Your problem is that nothing scares you. You have to learn to think like a frightened animal, with one life and who can’t turn off pain like you turn off damage. You need to learn about practical benefits of cowardice. Fortunately I’m a good teacher in that regard.”
“Stop it, Wrik. I do not like it when you refer to yourself that way.”
“And I don’t like it when you call yourself defective. So I’ll trade you on that and we’ll both stop it.”
“You out-thought me,” she said, watching the fallen Ribisan. “You realized he would change his pattern as he approached us.”
“I considered the possibility because of my exaggerated sense of self-preservation, which may be almost as good as his. I’d do anything rather than risk coming face to face with you if I had been him. I think sneaky. It’s why I’m still alive.”
“No thanks to me,” she said, but animation was returning to her voice and her face was softening into its usual gentle expression. “I am so sorry, Wrik.”
I smiled at her. “I’m just glad to find that I’m some use to you.”
“I need you very much, Wrik, and not merely to make up for my failures of imagination.”
The Ribisan stirred. Maauro was on him instantly, dragging the environmental suit upright and binding the damaged arms behind its back. She jerked the Ribisan up to standing, slamming its feet onto the deck.
I flinched, that could not have been pleasant inside the environmental suit. Remembering what it had been like when I was crawling over Tir-a-Mar pushing a frozen Maauro in my own damaged suit, I had to fight down an impulse of sympathy
“My friend holding you,” I said, “is quite capable of drilling through your unarmored suit in a variety of ways. A few minutes exposure to our atmosphere would poison you even if the pressure difference didn’t cause your innards to explode.”
“You would not dare,” the Ribisan replied. The artificial voice could not convey fear, but it struggled momentarily in Maauro’s grip until she shook it once, hard.
“We’d dare a lot,” I replied. “If you know anything about us then you know that to be true. If not, you can figure from her grip that you cannot escape. You’re up against enemies who are more than they seem.”
“I am in the hands of the Originator,” the Ribisan replied. “If my death is predicted, it is predicted.”
“Predicting seems to enter into things a lot,” I said, fishing.
The Ribisan jerked.
“A fight/flight reflex,” Maauro said, “similar to your own.”
“And likely for the same reasons. Olivia was right, prediction seems to be a nerve.”
“You will not overturn the will of the Originator of All Things,” the Ribisan shot back.
“Do you mean God?” I asked
There was a brief pause, as translating units conferred, until it was broken by Maauro.
“Yes, he does. I have updated the language protocols, Confed machinery is sometimes so slow, Wrik.”
“Sorry, Sweetie, not everything can be as advanced as you.”
“Why are so many human endearments associated with sucrose? Honey, Sweetie—”
“Later, Maauro, later.”
I looked back at our captive, staring at the grape-like clusters that passed for its face. “We have no desire to frustrate your God. Nor are we aware of how our actions would do so.”
“False information,” it replied.
“If you mean I am lying, you are incorrect. We are here looking for some human personnel who signed up to work on a project in Ribisan space, they never returned, though all our information is that the project failed.”
“Half-truth,” the Ribisan replied. “You have come here on behalf of the Confederacy to steal the last remaining Predictor.”
“Predictor?” I said. “We know that word is bound up in this somehow. But to us it’s just a word. We even know that the biogenetic experiments had something to do with that, but beyond that we are in the dark.”
“You will remain there.”
“Consider this,” Maauro said. “I can use a variety of means of distressing you, up to and including your death. We may, however, be satisfied with basic information that could justify you to us, at least sufficiently so that we do not kill you and yet do your own side no harm.”
I fought a shudder, abruptly reminded that although she looked like an adorable slender girl, Maauro was a fighting machine. While she had never killed for pleasure, she did not hesitate to use violence when she felt it necessary. It had been so long since I’d seen this chilling side of my little friend I had almost forgotten it. Almost.
The Ribisan considered. “Very well. I will explain who we are but I will give you no information harmful to my people regardless of your threats.”
“It may well suffice,” I offered. Interrogation 101, get them talking, it’s always hard to find reasons to stop. “Just tell us who your side is in this and what you want. Why were you stalking us?
“Can it truly be that you do not know?” The Ribisan said, perhaps to itself. “I am a priest of an order of warrior priests. We have both guarded and served those who had the Predictors in thrall.”
“What are the Predictors?”
The Ribisan hesitated. “It is a forbidden to speak of these matters to one not of our species.”
I shrug. “Why? The fact that you are referring to someone or something called a Predictor says much: soothsayers, oracles, prophets, psychics, most religions and cults have such people”
“I do not dispute you.”
“So you were their jailers?” I pushed.
“We kept them safe, available to the good of the species!”
I thought of an old story, where, in a land of sightless people, a sighted man thought he would be God, he’d been tragically wrong.
“What is your involvement with these predictors?” Maauro asked.
“We guard their rest. We take their silica brains to the Hall of Shadows, where they dwell until the final electrical impulses still. From silicon we came and from silicon we return. Thereafter their sacred rest is our watch. Reward for all they suffered in life.”
“What’s changed?” I asked.
“Heretics, Scientists, and others sought to defeat the will of God. They took the last active Predictor. The predicative ab
ility was a gift given from God when it was needed. Now it is taken back by God. The Scientists seek to thwart God by making the ability duplicable, or at least by denying the mind of The Last One, its deserved rest.”
“How?” I asked.
“I have said enough,” it replied.
“Shall I increase his duress?” Maauro asked.
“No!”
Maauro gave me a curious look.
“I will bargain with you,” I said.
“Commerce?” Maauro interjected,
“Yes, commerce.”
“It would be good for you to bargain with Wrik,” she said, visibly tightening her grip on the Ribisan.
I don’t want this for her, I thought. I don’t want her doing such things. In two strides I reached her and placed my hands on her arms. “Release.”
The big green eyes, which always reminded me of gentle seas, gazed at me in puzzlement, but she let go.
“Ribisan, lean against the wall,” I said, my voice harsh with stress. “As you would live, make no fast moves. I won’t stop her a second time.”
“As you say.”
“How long can that suit sustain your life?”
“Without replenishment, 178 hours.”
“Tell me what I want and we will leave you in a sealed compartment. At the end of five days a message will appear in the main control center telling people you’re locked in here. That’s the deal.”
“Why should I trust you, oxygen-breather?”
“Because if you don’t I am going to have to let her kill you and I don’t want that. Even across the gulf between our kinds, you must see that.”
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