“And I need you guys to be able to pipe an audio comm channel into the room so that we can all hear it,” Brazel said. “It’s a subcomm right now. I’m not wearing any speakers.”
Overmorrow nodded at Glow-of-Twilight, who left the room in a hurry.
“My wife has an employee who has some knowledge of the Benevolence,” Brazel said, speaking a bit more quickly than usual. “That rock we stole this on? It’s spilled into open war since we pulled off the heist. Almost planet-wide. The only parts not seeing active conflict are so geographically isolated that they probably don’t really care that the rest of Khkk is even there. And the Benevolence are moving in to put down the revolution and restore order. Khkk is in ogrespace. Any of you have any idea what the Benevolence are trying to do ‘restoring order’ in ogrespace?”
The ogres were the only species who had managed to entirely resist Benevolence influence, although gnomespace was mostly free of them as well. The Benevolence had been leaving the ogres alone for generations, focusing their influence on keeping a firm grip on human-and elvenspace and on conquering–or, as they put it, “pacifying”–the dwarves. There was a reason the Malevolence was so dominated by dwarven interests.
“It can’t possibly be good,” Smashes-the-Stars said.
“No, it can’t, and you got us involved,” Brazel said. “We aren’t very happy about that.”
“It could still be a coincidence,” Smashes-the-Stars said.
“It’s not,” Brazel answered. “They’re going to find out we stole that thing sooner or later. The war might be a coincidence. Maybe. I rather doubt it, and I’m doubting it more the longer we talk about it. They’re using the war as an excuse to pacify the place and get a toehold in ogrespace, and that statue has something to do with it.”
Glow-of-Twilight reentered the room with a portable comm speaker. She placed it on the table and Brazel connected it to the subcomm in his ear.
“Go ahead, Irtuus-bon,” he said.
“Look very carefully at the very top of the sphere,” the troll said over the comm. “Look and see if there is a depression or perhaps a very small crack. It would be something barely large enough to get a fingernail into, if that.”
“There’s little lines traced all over it,” said Brazel, who had climbed onto the table to get a closer look at the statue. “A few of them meet right at the top. I wouldn’t call it a crack, but…”
“See if you can push something into the convergence,” Irtuus-bon said. “Surely the halfogre has a knife with him.”
Grond shrugged. “I’m empty, believe it or not. First time, I swear.”
Overmorrow looked at Asper. Xe protested at the look for a moment, then removed one of the blades from xir forearm and handed it to Brazel.
“This ought to be good enough,” he said. “Am I trying to split the thing open?”
“You will find that you cannot scratch it,” Irtuus-bon said. “And if I am wrong, it does not matter if you do. Simply press the tip of the blade into the place where the lines intersect.”
Brazel followed instructions, realizing as he did that he could hear the buzzing sound again. Asper had apparently removed the statue from stasis at some point. He carefully inserted the point of Asper’s knife into the statue and applied gentle pressure.
The buzz suddenly got much louder. A seam shot out from either side of the point of his knife, and the statue split in half. Brazel took a step or two back as dozens–hundreds, perhaps–of smaller spheres of varying sizes, apparently made of the same metal as the larger one, fell out of the inside of the statue. As he watched, the statue sealed itself back up again.
The new spheres, moving on their own, rearranged themselves around the circumference of the larger sphere. The largest spheres touched the original one, with successively smaller ones attaching themselves to each of the larger spheres until the overall effect resembled tentacles. Thirteen of them, he counted.
He took another step back as he recognized the shape the statue had formed itself into.
“Ah, I was right,” said Irtuus-bon, as the hologram updated itself on his end of the conversation. “I rather wish … that I had not been.”
Fourteen
Kri was looking forward to getting to sleep. He had been serving the lady Majesty-of-Nature for close to twenty-one hours before she noticed he was starting to fall asleep on his feet and had ordered him to go to his rest and send her a replacement. He only hoped that there was room in one of the beds in the common room he shared with the rest of the males. There were eight of them and only three beds, one of which had a broken leg and could be difficult to sleep in. Someday one of them would remember to ask for the supplies to repair it. He never remembered until he was already on his way home, and the one time he had remembered while he was working for Smashes-the-Stars, the lady had been in in a terrible mood and not to be disturbed.
On the plus side, it was daylight. Bright daylight, well past noon. Most of his brethren should be at work. They had to be, didn’t they?
He thumbed a button on a monitor at his ankle to signal that he had been released. Someone else would be summoned to the lady’s side within minutes, possibly freeing up a spot in the very beds he was heading toward. If not, well, he’d slept curled up in a corner on the floor plenty of times before. It wasn’t that bad.
Luckily, only two of his brethren were present when he got home. Unluckily, both Bna and Ler were asleep, and they’d taken the two good beds. Kri sighed and lay down in the bad bed, trying to position himself toward the three good legs so the bed didn’t wobble too much. He would eat when he woke up, which hopefully would not be for several hours. He was supposed to have at least six before the monitor began buzzing and summoned him back to work again.
Less than an hour later, he was awakened. And it wasn’t the monitor. It was a thunderous explosion somewhere outside. His conditioning kicked in before his common sense. He’d checked his monitor before getting out of bed every day since it had been put on, and he glanced at it almost unconsciously.
The monitor was emitting a faint hiss, and the screen, which normally would either be counting down the remaining time in his rest or displaying his next assignment, was filled with gibberish.
Had the work center been bombed? There had been a rebellion among the males on 9013LV a few generations before. The first thing they had done was destroy the work centers, a decision which had made good sense symbolically but did little for them tactically. The rebellion had been suppressed in less than two days. Kri suspected the only reason he even knew about it was because the women found it useful for the men to be aware of how poorly it had gone.
His room had no windows. He considered running outside and decided to head to the roof instead. Oddly, he was alone in the room. Apparently the rest of his brethren were already out on work detail. With eight of them sharing the room, there was usually someone else around.
Kri fled out the door and then up the stairs, forgetting and stumbling over the one with the bad board a few steps above his level. He was panting and out of breath by the time he reached the roof, but it would be worth it for the view. He looked toward the work center to the east. There was a huge plume of black smoke right about where it would be.
There were more plumes of black smoke to the north, and to the south, and to the west. There had been explosions everywhere. He’d only heard the one boom. Had they all gone off at once?
And then Kri looked up.
The sky was filled with black ships. Many of them were oval-shaped, with eight arms off the central oval, some of which were being used to steer and others to pour fire down upon the city. Others were angular, with actual wings instead of the tentacles, and larger. These were the bombers. There was another series of booms and other parts of the city went up in smoke.
This was no rebellion. This was an invasion.
Kri panicked. He had no training, no orders to cope with a situation like this. His ankle monitor was supposed to light up and tell h
im what to do and where to go at any time. In an emergency he was supposed to be summoned and given a job. He’d not been summoned before the bombs struck. He couldn’t be summoned if the work centers were destroyed. The clans, for now at least, had no way to get ahold of him. And no way to track him. He had no idea what he was supposed to do.
Wait.
With a flash of euphoria, Kri realized that he was free–or, at least, freer than he’d been since he was a very small child. Anyone who might stop him would likely be busy with other tasks. If he could just manage to look like he was on an important task he might actually manage to get away from the city. And if he was caught, he could run. Who had time to chase one runaway male dwarf when they were being invaded? Surely no one.
He’d made it halfway down the stairs, in a mad rush to freedom, when Benevolence bombs blew the building into dust.
Fifteen
“I am assuming that someone is about to explain,” Overmorrow said.
“We’ve encountered that thing before,” Brazel said. “Dwarven planet. An iceball–don’t remember the name–”
“00901213,” Grond chimed in.
“Whatever,” Brazel said. “We got asked to come in and pick up a package, then get the package out of dwarfspace. Easy run. We figured it was a male trying to get off-planet.”
There was some rumbling from the two dwarves. Overmorrow shot them a look and it stopped.
“Anyway. Research colony, I think. We got there and everybody was dead–the station was wrecked. The male dwarves were strangled and the females were just dead, in their beds. No marks on any of them except scuff marks and scrapes on their hands. They’d torn the station to bits with their bare hands. And there were these signs–what, Grond, three of them?”
“Two, I think.”
“Two, then. Yeah–one upstairs in the hangar, one downstairs under a pile of dead males. They looked like–that.” He pointed at the statue. The arms were waving freely, like the thing was alive. None of them had tried to touch it yet. “They were painted on the floor. And then–then this thing showed up.”
He paused for a moment, taking a few deep breaths.
“Grond got a better look at it than I did,” he said. “He was carrying me at the time, because the thing had ripped one of the planet’s moons out of orbit and chucked it at the research station like it was a kids’ toy. I couldn’t run fast enough so he just picked me up and split.”
“We heard about that,” Glow-of-Twilight said. “The feeds said it was an asteroid impact. Nothing that could have been done.”
“You’d think the feeds would have noticed a missing moon,” Grond said.
“The moon was a caught asteroid anyway,” Brazel said, waving the concern off. “What, you think they’d have thought Oh, the moon must have fallen out of orbit? More likely the records were wrong. Not like anybody important had ever been there.”
“We made it off-planet,” Brazel continued. “Barely. Another minute or two and we’d have still been down there. And the weirdest thing–Namey couldn’t see the thing that threw the moon at us. When he commed us about it as far as he knew the moon had just stopped orbiting. He had no idea that the thing was even there.”
“And this is a statue of the … creature you saw? It was alive?”
“Yeah,” Brazel said. “We were worried it was going to chase us. If anything alive could get into tunnelspace, that thing would have been able to.”
“I believe I can … shed some light, here,” Irtuus-bon said.
There was a moment of silence around the table.
“Go ahead,” Overmorrow said. “Everyone else may as well know exactly what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
“The Benevolence believe that their magic comes from the gods,” Irtuus-bon said. “They are not … worshipped, as such, they are feared. There are no rituals or prayers or services for this. No sacrifices. But this is Azamoeg. It is the ninth of the Benevolence’s nineteen gods. The Benevolence clans are arranged around the nineteen gods.”
“Their gods are real?” Brazel asked.
“Clearly so,” Irtuus-bon said. “Seven of the nineteen–eight, including the appearance you witnessed–have made recorded appearances across the galaxy during the last two centuries, and those … those are just the appearances I am aware of. The Benevolence have never viewed their gods as remotely metaphorical beings. Gods may not even be the correct word. They are beings of immense power and antiquity, but they are not creators or exemplars. They are merely power, and the source of power.”
“If they don’t leave a lot of witnesses behind, there might have been a lot more appearances than that,” Brazel said. “Namey said the moon would have created an extinction event if 00901213 actually had any indigenous life.”
“A true point,” Irtuus-bon agreed. “Azamoeg himself would not have left many witnesses. He is the Scouring God, the destroyer. He is said to be the simplest to summon. Azamoeg will come if he is properly called regardless of the caller. If he finds the caller unworthy, however, they will not survive the summoning.”
“Asper just cast a spell a couple of days ago,” Grond said, pointing at the elf. “You didn’t know about these Benevolence gods?”
“You carry weapons,” Asper responded. “Do you know how they work?”
“Stab with the pointy end,” Grond answered. Asper rolled xir eyes.
“Belief–or even understanding–are not necessary to use their magic,” Irtuus-bon said. “Much like knowledge of metallurgy or chemistry is not necessary to use a sword or a gun, or physics to use an energy weapon.”
“I still wanna know how xe knows Benevolence magic,” Grond said.
“I taught xir,” Overmorrow said. “The Benevolence are not the only users of magic in the galaxy, even if they would prefer everyone believe them to be. And their gods are not the gods of all of the elves.”
“And how did you learn?” Grond asked.
“Elven memories are long,” Overmorrow answered. “And while the Noble Opposition may have been a creation of the dwarves, even at the beginning there were elves who resisted the Benevolence. These skills were ours before they were theirs.”
Brazel shook his head. This entire conversation was a distraction.
“So we have, what? A cultic object? Did the symbols on the floor at that research station summon Azamoeg? Or was there one of these statues buried in the rubble somewhere and we never found it? Or did the summoner just get off the planet before Azamoeg showed up?” He turned to Overmorrow. “Asper took one look at that thing and wanted all of us off-planet and got xirself onto my ship. Most of what Irtuus-bon just said wasn’t news to you, I think.”
“That is correct,” Overmorrow said. “I had my suspicions that this was, as you put it, a cultic object. As did Asper. The weight and the material are the clues. Benevolence cult statues are always fashioned in this way. The signal is another. It is passive, but the statues form a network. The device can be used for communication over long distances, much like a comm signal, but more specific. The Benevolence knew that this was on Khkk. They sent it there. It very likely was a reward or a sign of trust for the beings they contracted with. And if we leave it here long enough, it will bring them here as well.”
Asper began mumbling again, and the blue glow reappeared around the statue. The tentacles stopped moving.
“Irtuus-bon, Rhundi, you two still listening?” Brazel asked.
“We are,” Irtuus-bon confirmed.
“I think it’s probably about time to let them know about the other stuff, too,” Brazel said.
“We don’t even really have any ‘other stuff’ yet, Brazel,” Rhundi said. “We haven’t cracked it yet. But go ahead.”
“The person who brought us the statue–who we now have multiple reasons to believe is a liar–also passed on some files that he claimed came from the same source that produced the statue. He doesn’t know the contents, but they’re encrypted with Benevolence tech. Irtuus-bon is working on decrypt
ing them now.”
“But you do not know their contents,” Overmorrow said.
“Not yet,” Brazel said.
“I think perhaps we need to interview Haakoro a bit more closely,” Rhundi said.
“Clearly,” Overmorrow said. “And I believe I have another job for the two of you as well.”
“What would that be?” said Brazel. “Go looking for your people on Khkk? Because we kinda started a war the last time we were there. I don’t think I like it there very much.”
“I definitely don’t,” Grond said.
“Not as yet,” Overmorrow responded. “We have a rather more important job in mind. It concerns the proper disposal of the artifact in front of us. We need you to transport it to someone.”
“Why us?”
Overmorrow smiled. “Are you not available for work? We had the idea that you were freelancers. And the job we have in mind for you is entirely legal, which may be a welcome change of pace for you. Furthermore, we have reason to believe that the individual we wish you to transport this to may be more welcoming of your company than that of others.”
“Oh, hell,” Brazel said. “You’re talking about Remember.”
Overmorrow nodded. “Remember.”
The Lady Remember had used them for a job in the past, a job that ended up with an entire populated moon scorched clean of any life and hurled into its planet by Benevolence forces. She had paid them by ensuring Rhundi’s sole ownership of her resort on Arradon, an act that had gone a long way toward Rhundi’s more-or-less legitimacy as an honest businesswoman. She had also said that she would be in touch with them in the future, a promise that she had–as of yet–failed to follow through on.
“We don’t exactly have Remember’s comm address,” Brazel said. “She got in touch with us once and that was it.”
“Remember will be contacting you herself in the next few days,” Overmorrow said. “You will bring her the artifact and that will end your association with us, if that is what you wish.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Brazel said, incredulously.
The Sanctum of the Sphere: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 2 Page 9