by J D Huffman
William vaguely remembered having done that before, and took up one of the consoles on the other side of the command deck, near the rear corner. It was rote, dull work, but the ship wouldn’t come off the ground if it wasn’t done. Secondary life support? Check. Backup thrusters? Ready. Astrometric navigation? Functioning. He ticked off the list, which essentially involved tapping a button to initiate the next step in the sequence, wait for it to finish, then do the same for the next. He understood the need for a person to physically do this: if anything was wrong, someone would be immediately aware of it. More than that, it was a matter of accountability. An automated system might throw around a message that could be easily ignored. A system that required manual intervention, however, meant someone had to physically observe the process, and so there would be someone to blame if it failed to be done, or was done improperly, not that William knew how this could be done “improperly.” As far as he could tell, each system succeeded or failed, and failures didn’t let one proceed to the next step. As he neared the bottom of the list, a “cargo management check” did not signal a success, but a warning. He was able to continue the process, but he had to investigate the warning. The message it produced was simple: “Significant quantities of unsecured cargo detected in main bay. Secure cargo or serious damage to ship and/or cargo may result.”
He felt like laughing at the ship’s assessment. The “cargo” it referred to, of course, was the hundreds of humans crammed into the main cargo bay. He wondered if this particular check was disabled on slave transports. The Totality probably don’t “secure” all the slaves before taking off, do they?
With the checks complete, they were soon off the ground and rocketing through the lower atmosphere of what they would have, up to now, called “Arkady’s Planet.” Now that Arkady was either dead or no longer on it—they couldn’t be sure which—William found himself at a loss for how to refer to it. Given its status as the secret exile of the splinter Totality, it had no official name in the Totality charts. Fred checked that at least three times to be sure. There was a numeric identifier for it, as there was for every astronomical body in the Totality database, but no useful information was attached to it in the case of this planet.
William used the ship’s scanners to look for any survivors on the planet’s surface as they flew above it. He didn’t want to bother Fred’s piloting by asking for permission, so he said nothing. Unfortunately, scans showed nothing in or around the clearing, and readings from beneath the forest canopy were completely unreliable. It could be telling me there’s one or a thousand people down there and I can’t make any sense of it. Still, he didn’t give up until they ascended to orbit, at which point the scanners weren’t sensitive enough to detect anything so specific as individual humans crawling along the surface. According to the scanners, a fleet of Totality ships hovered a bit beyond their line-of-sight, some of them moving into orbit and others descending to the surface. In space, such things were much easier to detect at a significant distance, and William knew that by detecting them, their cargo ship was also not invisible. He watched their movements, waiting to see if any broke away to give chase. Fred guided the ship farther away from the planet, away from its star, past a few clouds of gas and dust, and still none of them bothered to pursue. William was thankful, but also perplexed. The why of it nagged at him. Why would they let us go? Do they consider us that insignificant? Fred’s right. They could have come for Arkady at any time. They had us, right there. Why would they let us go? Have they really examined us as a threat and determined that we just aren’t worth worrying about? William found the prospect insulting. He tried to consider it an opportunity. We’ll show them who’s insignificant. But it does no good to get ahead of myself. Who’s going to help us now? I wouldn’t expect Arkady’s people—Elena’s people now?—to help us fight the Totality. Arkady was quite firm that they’re all pacifists and abhor violence. Cylence destroyed their home, but is that enough to make them vengeful? How deep does their ethos go? Questions to which he’d have to find the answers, later.
He barely noticed Janus stepping out of Sasha’s office, appearing dazed and disoriented. Janus stepped onto the command deck and stopped a bit short of William. “What’s going on? Where is everyone?”
“I think you should go rest in your quarters,” William urged. “Duna told me you held off a bunch of Totality. You did a good job. Just go rest,” he repeated.
Janus scoffed and looked to Fred instead. “Fred?”
From William’s vantage point, Fred appeared busy plotting their course and monitoring for Totality ships. He was almost afraid to ask where they were going. Fred refused to argue with William. “You should do as he says. Go rest.”
Dejected, Janus did as he was told. That surprised William, who expected Janus to be more argumentative. He must really be traumatized. I hate to be short with him but I don’t have time to play therapist right now. There are hundreds of people down in that cargo bay that we need to figure out what to do with. “What are we going to do with all those people?” he asked, going straight to the core of the issue.
“Find them a new home?” Fred suggested. “Ask them to fight with us? Use them to bargain with the Totality?”
“I hope that last idea wasn’t serious,” William scolded. “I’m not exactly in love with these people but they don’t deserve to be turned over to Cylence. I can only imagine what he’d do with them now.”
“Likely less than he would do with us.”
“I’m not so sure about that right now. You saw what happened back there. They just let us go. It’s not possible that they didn’t see us. We were right there, plain to see. You can’t mask the exhaust trail of a ship like this. We might as well have been blaring sirens and shooting off fireworks on our way out of the atmosphere.”
“I should remind you that vacuum is soundless,” Fred smirked. “In any case, they have elected not to pursue us, and I am content not to question the ‘wisdom’ of Totality who choose to spare our lives.”
“Hey, it’s not like I’m sitting here wishing they’d blown us up!”
“Once we run out of food or water, you might consider such a prospect merciful,” Fred opined.
Chapter 31
Prototypes
Sasha couldn’t recall much of what happened immediately after being brought aboard Cylence’s ship. In fact, it took her several moments once she awakened again to realize where, exactly, she was. She found herself in a small, square room, with a dim red light seeping in from the ceiling, enough to barely make out her surroundings but not much else. She discerned a seam on the wall farthest from her and determined that to be the door, but it had no obvious mechanism from her side. She knew a prison cell when she saw one.
She’d been lying on her side, body sore and slow to respond, and she realized she was no longer wet and shivering. Running her hands along her clothing, it became clear that she’d been changed out of her soaked, torn clothes and put into something more familiar: one of the dull, thin, gray garments that hung loosely off of all Totality slaves, because the comfort of their slaves was the last thing the Totality thought about. She felt sick to her stomach at the idea of Totality stripping her unconscious body, leering at her, staring in judgment, then roughly yanking these pathetic excuses for clothing over her skin. She wondered if Cylence had given the order personally. He wants to remind me who’s in charge. That’s all it is. If he wanted to kill me, he would have. Then, her mind started to wander to various possible fates. Surely, Cylence didn’t want to keep her around for something more pleasant than death. I rebelled against him. Killed his kind. He must have something much worse in mind for me, she concluded anxiously. But she was on a ship destined to put her in the company of ever more Totality, with no weapons, no allies, and no means of escape. Any thought of getting away would have to wait, at least until she arrived at her eventual destination.
She tried to conceive of what
Cylence might consider fitting punishment. Just making me a slave again? Is that too easy? Or would he expect that to crush me on its own?
She was jarred into a sitting position with the sudden clanging and rattling of her door. It swung outward and someone strode in. Light filled her cell from the hallway, and then the cell’s own lights activated, blinding her such that she held an arm over her face and could only make out a silhouette. She soon recognized Cylence, with his chubby face and disconcerting smile. Curiously, he wore a casual robe, which didn’t strike her as especially intimidating. The ends of the sleeves flared around his wrists, leaving openings large enough to fly a cargo ship through. Contrasting stripes of blue, green, red, and yellow ran the length of the garment. She guessed that the flamboyant colors were some kind of boast, and such casual wear in her presence was a taunt. As he approached, she slid back against the wall, staring up at him.
He knelt in front of her, still grinning that strange grin. “Good afternoon, Sasha.”
She wasn’t even prepared to believe he was being honest about the time of day. She remained as silent as the undisturbed stones at the bottom of the mines on Actis.
“Conversations are more stimulating when at least two parties engage,” he sighed. “But, if you have no wish to talk, I cannot compel you.” He casually checked his fingernails, as if expecting to find debris under them from a long day of manual labor. What would you even know about that? came her angry thoughts.
“We’re on our way back to the Dominix Totality Centrality, or ‘the Dominix,’ as I’ve always preferred. Do you think it’s too elaborate a name?” he asked, and she knew he was only pretending to care about her opinion. “I thought of it quite early, when we first found this place. The Fortress, that is. Did you know we didn’t build it? We came across it during the Exodus, after the forces of Earth gathered to push us out, and drove us all the way to the Great Tunnel. We’d only scouted that before, but we were cornered and short on options, so through we went, with our sad little fleet. A few more years of wandering and we came to the Fortress—the vast sphere. At the center, as you have probably realized, is that massive complex I call the Dominix. Arkady thought my name for it was too much of a muchness, as he put it. He is an artless fool, in my view.”
He kept rambling like that for some time, with Sasha drifting in and out, uncertain if he would ever impart strategically valuable information, or simply babble for the duration of their journey. She made a mental joke to herself that maybe this was his preferred method of torture: blathering at his captives until they beg him to shut up, only he never would.
She decided to interrupt his memoir with a pointed question. “Did you kill everyone else?”
He stopped mid-sentence and looked at her again, his face showing something she took for amusement. “No. There should have been very few casualties among the Delphi.”
“The what?” That was definitely a new term.
“Oh, I suppose Arkady stopped using that name? Shame. I told you he was artless. He must have gone soft in his old age, too. His people called themselves the Delphi, after Arkady’s obsessive study of some dead Earth culture. He said that because our kind could not reproduce as humans do—so he believed at the time—it would instead require a group of Totality to serve as the ‘womb of thought’ for our future.”
“But they can reproduce like the rest of us,” Sasha noted flatly.
“Yes, so we learned! Not a practice I have broadly approved of, mind you. It is harshly punished everywhere else among the Totality. Only Arkady and his freaks have been permitted their perversions, away from the sight of decent folk.” His tone suggested that he wasn’t altogether serious, and Sasha didn’t know if this was his way of toying with her, or if it was meant to serve a real purpose in their communication.
She tried to bring him back to her original question. “You let everyone else go?”
“’Let’ is a strong word,” he evaded. “It’s more useful for me to know where your little insurgency goes and what they do, rather than kill them outright.”
So, they escaped. That must mean at least some of Arkady’s people escaped with them. Or he’s lying. How can I be sure? “If you just wanted to follow us, why capture me?”
Cylence glanced up, scratching his chin, an exaggerated expression of his own ponderance. “Hmm. Why would I want the leader of a slave uprising? It’s difficult to imagine.”
“Right,” she sighed, any hope that he didn’t know who she was finally dashed.
“Well, don’t fret just yet. It will be a long time before I publicly execute you. I must savor this victory for all it’s worth, you know. It’s not every day I manage to take someone so daring and dangerous back to the Dominix as a trophy to my own magnificence.”
This guy’s in love with himself, she thought with annoyance. “Whatever it is you want, I’m not going to help you.”
“People always say that, but you’d be surprised how rarely they follow through,” he contemplated aloud, still behaving as though he wasn’t speaking directly to her, but to some invisible audience. “This is why I won’t say exactly what it is I want. Or, I could tell you what I want, but it would be a lie to deceive you into giving me what I actually want. All I need do is avoid telling you the one thing—or two things, or three things, or however many—that I want, and you will inevitably stumble across one of them and I will be very pleased with myself.”
“Having me here doesn’t please you enough?” she goaded.
That comment caught him off-guard. She saw it in his eyes. He was thinking over not just what she said, but how she said it. Good. Go ahead and think I’m trying to seduce you. Think whatever you want. I’ll open your throat the second I get my hands on something sharp.
“I know enough about you to distrust you,” he said. “That is, apart from the obvious. Naturally, I couldn’t trust a slave who got the idea in her head that she could violently agitate against us. But beyond that, there is malice in your heart and hatred in your soul. These are spiritual poisons, and they lead you down the darkest of paths,” he warned. “I should know. I only barely returned from that journey myself.”
“I don’t need to hear your fucking redemption story,” she spat. Once again, she was at a loss as to his motives. He really must be amusing himself. There’s no way to beat him at this game. Anything I say, he’ll turn into a joke, or a riddle, or use it to jump into a bizarre personal anecdote. He’s trying to exhaust me so I’ll let down my guard and tell him whatever it is he wants to know. She grew silent again.
“It’s no matter if you don’t want to talk to me, Sasha. I am perfectly capable of entertaining myself,” he promised. Reaching into a pocket, he withdrew a small rectangular device with a series of buttons and dials on it. It looked crude to Sasha, not quite as slick as most Totality control panels and interfaces. She tried to hide her sense of intrigue, but her face betrayed her. “You’re curious, aren’t you? You don’t have to ask. I can tell you exactly what it does. To be honest, this is only a remote control, as I’m not comfortable showing you the device itself just yet. Back on Arkady’s world, you received word from your ship that it had been overrun by Totality, yes?”
She said nothing.
“It’s fine, it’s fine. We were listening, you know. We heard everything.” He tapped the side of the remote with his index finger, looking smug. “It’s a prototype. You may not know this, but we cannot simply pop into any body we want, anywhere, at any time. It is a random process, one which is not well-understood even among our top scientists. What they have been able to determine—quite recently, as a matter of fact—is that the main impediment to controlling our comings and goings is a dimensional barrier. What’s on the other side of the barrier remains, admittedly, something of a mystery to us. What we do know is that ‘we’—whatever part of ourselves exists beyond this universe—originate there. This device, which is a prototype at the mom
ent, allows me to weaken that barrier temporarily in a large but still localized area. Using it on your ship seemed like an intriguing field test, an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. I’m happy to report that it was a stunning success. Based on communications from your ship, it was quite a massacre. I pity the poor Totality who emerged into new bodies, confused and angry, but they did their duty well. I’m sure they will soon inhabit new bodies, in any event. So, thank you for your cooperation.”
The explanation helped put her at ease if only because she finally had one. She now knew that what happened on their ship wasn’t chance, but deliberate—and an experiment, at that. So, this can’t happen everywhere or at any time, only where he has that device. I know what I’ll be destroying the first chance I get.
“I can see how busily you’re thinking,” he smiled crookedly. “Yes, it would be wonderful if you could smash my lovely machine to bits, wouldn’t it? But that wouldn’t help you. This is a prototype, but a fully-documented one. I could have another produced in a week, and in that time I suspect my engineers will have improved it by at least twenty percent, in either range or power—perhaps both! It is the march of progress, Sasha. And you seem like a clever woman, clever enough to know the endgame here.”
She didn’t think she had to be all that smart to figure out where this experimentation was going. Bigger, more powerful, more effective. Maybe he thinks he can destroy this “barrier” entirely, and then there will be nothing stopping the Totality, anywhere. Something else occurred to her, as well: Is that how Angel’s body was taken? An earlier “experiment”? But we shouldn’t have been anywhere near this ship or that device at the time. That can’t be the explanation, can it?