by William King
“Federal Stormtroopers,” he said as his gaze landed on me. “And one with a low number and plain shoulder patch. We don’t see many of your kind around here.”
It sounded as if he might be making a joke, as if he were aware of the stereotypes we held of his people. A dangerous man, I thought, bright and with a sense of humor. “You did not exactly roll out the welcome wagon.”
“You would hardly expect that. May I ask if that is your only number?”
“Yes.”
“First Fifty. I suppose we should be honored.” The Colonel suppressed a snort of laughter. Beecher did not miss that. He looked at her mildly. He clearly wanted her to say more. The Colonel had played too much poker for that. Her face was a relaxed mask. Beecher’s smile widened.
“I saw what you did to the Aryan fanatics,” he said. “It was impressive for a man with only one bullet. Was that the purpose? To impress and intimidate us poor primitives.”
“I aim to please.”
“Yourself, I think.” A roar of engines overhead announced the arrival of another faction. A pair of gunships came down. Their colors marked them as Radical Orthodox. Their logos were in Cyrillic. The words read Weapons of God in Pan Slavic.
The men who climbed down were just as heavily armed as the Legion’s. They looked a good deal angrier, which was understandable considering this was their territory.
“This is an outrage,” said a large blonde-haired man whose cheekbones were almost as sharp as the bayonets of his soldiers. He wore the long robes and flat hat that were the insignia of an Orthodox church leader. He had the silver-handled blasters of one too. “In clear violation of our boundary agreements.”
“Are you talking to us or to the representatives of the Federal Government, Father Chernenko?” Beecher asked. His tone was mild. He looked not in the slightest intimidated even though the newcomer was twice his body mass and a lot more violent looking.
“Both,” said the newcomer.
“Now, Father,” said the Colonel. “You know we are here because of Brood presence. The Federal Government authorizes direct intervention anywhere within its territory under those circumstances. It’s part of the Armageddon Protocol.”
Chernenko glared at her and then at Beecher. His big hands bunched into fists like wrecking balls. I moved slightly to draw his gaze away from the Colonel. It worked. He looked at me and he did not flinch. Good for you, I thought.
“And what are you doing here?” he demanded of Beecher. He obviously wasn’t getting too much satisfaction from his staring contest with the burning skull hologram over my helmet.
“We moved to repel the Feds should they attempt to cross our borders.”
“These habitats are hardly within your territories.”
“The Feds laid down a carpet of smoke and gas. It was hard to tell.” To Beecher’s credit, he managed to say that with a straight face and not the slightest note of irony.
One of our own shuttles circled into land. “The last of our delegations,” the Colonel said by way of explanation. “The leadership of the Aryan Jihad.”
The shuttle door opened and Doctor Olson strolled down the stairs. A protocol drone orbited her. Beecher and Chernenko nodded by way of greeting. They clearly knew who she was. If anything, Chernenko looked a little more relaxed. He moistened his lips slightly. Beecher noticed this and his lips curled up a little at the edges, whether from amusement or contempt I could not tell.
“Where is Ulrich?” Beecher asked. “Steiner? Cryptman?”
“Gone,” Doctor Olson said. “Dead or assimilated.”
“You know this for certain?” Chernenko asked.
“Seen it with my own eyes.”
“You arrived in a Fed shuttle,” said Otis. “You could be working for them.”
“I just came from a Federal Medical facility. I have been treated against Assimilator subversion and I was supervising the treatment of my own people. You would be well advised to do the same for yours. The Feds have the latest medical technology. Far better than anything we have here.”
Beecher nodded. Chernenko took a deep breath. The rest of their men glared at each other.
“She’s lying,” said Otis. “She’s with them.”
“Certainly there have been rumors,” said Beecher. He tilted his head, in a way that made him look like a predatory bird contemplating a gobbet of meat torn from its prey. He looked first at her and then at me.
“I don’t believe there are any Assimilators on Faith,” said Chernenko. “It’s all a trick, a ploy by Fed Gov to justify their invasion.”
“We have holos and vids,” said the Colonel.
“Those can be simulated,” Chernenko said.
“How about asking your own people?” I said. “They were here when Raximander attacked. Where were you if you did not see them?”
“I am sure Father Chernenko was in his secure command bunker,” said Beecher. “He rarely leaves it these days. We should all be honored.”
“It keeps me safe from your assassins,” said Chernenko.
“So why are you here now?” Beecher asked.
It was a good question. Chernenko did not answer it. He did not have to. We could all see the damage to the sector. He might blame it on us, but it was convincing evidence that his bunker was not all that safe.
“I came to hear what the AItheists have to say, the same as you,” Chernenko said eventually.
“And we’re glad you’re here,” said the Colonel, falling into the role of peacekeeper as if she had been born to it. “Let us begin.”
Half an hour later we had shown them everything. It was less impressive than you would imagine. Dead corpse warriors don’t look too much different from corpses. There’s a surprise, I know. Rax’s larger bio-forms had decomposed into puddles of alien gloop. There were still the fast-decomposing remains of some of the biggest ones, but those could easily be dismissed as mere rotting meat by witnesses as fanatical as our guests.
What was harder to ignore was the testimony of witnesses from the Orthodox’s own people, and their soldiers. They were quite clearly terrified and they had quite clearly witnessed something that disturbed them. Beecher was surprisingly gentle as he questioned them, and, if they noticed he was garbed in the colors of their old enemies, none of them seemed to notice. That might have been because they were too busy staring at me. I suppose I could have switched off the burning skull but I kind of liked the effect.
At the end, Beecher said, “It seems like there was definitely something here, something alien.” He looked at me as if I were a good example of what he was thinking about.
“What do you expect me to do about it?” Chernenko asked.
“Your usual—nothing sensible,” said Beecher. “You’ll blame it on the Feds and the loss of your people’s lives will be everybody else’s fault but your own.”
“I did not come here to be insulted,” said Chernenko.
“I could do it over Grid if you prefer,” I said. The Colonel glared at me. I got a wintery smile from Beecher for that one. Doctor Olson looked appalled.
“Are you just going to stand there and make jokes while our people are infected by this alien horror?” She managed to get all of the revulsion a good Aryan would feel about that into her voice. I suspect she was not acting.
“What do you propose?” Beecher asked. He was looking directly at the Colonel now.
“We need to begin distributing medical aid to your people. Anyone showing signs of being assimilated needs to be isolated. We can quarantine them if needed.”
“You want to take them away and put them into camps,” said Chernenko. “And disarm them too. Why not just imprint the number of the beast on their foreheads while you are it too?”
The Colonel’s glare told me I had better not answer that one.
“We can set up camps in your own territories if you like,” said the Colonel.
“Give you advance bases, you mean. A foothold from which you can continue your invasion.”
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I had to bite my tongue. He was making it too easy.
“You could always do nothing,” said the Colonel, a note of exasperation appearing in her voice. “You could leave your people to be absorbed by the Brood and your world to be overrun by alien monsters. Then we’ll definitely have to nuke you. From your point of view, that would have the great advantage of leaving nothing for the Fed Gov to take over.”
She sounded serious and she sounded mean. It gave them pause for thought.
“We’ll need to consider what you have to say,” Beecher said at last.
“Don’t consider too long,” said the Colonel. And with that the peace conference was over.
Chapter Eighteen
“Would you really nuke Faith from orbit?” Doctor Olson asked as we climbed back into the shuttle and headed back to the spaceport.
I said, “We won’t have much choice if Raximander overruns the planet.”
“Which there is a very good chance of him doing within the next forty-eight hours if things go on as they are,” said the Colonel. “It’s geometric progression once the infections start. One to two to four to eight and so on to infinity.”
“Diseases don’t spread like that,” said Doctor Olson. “A certain proportion of the population is always immune. There is die-back once the maximum number of hosts are infected. The surviving population develops resistance, even immunity.”
“You’re talking about good old fashioned non-sentient, non-self-evolving diseases,” said Medico Mark, warming to his specialist subject. “Brood infection mutates as it encounters resistance. And the victims don’t necessarily die unless we nuke them. They can continue on their merry way spreading the disease as they go.”
“We all might be vectors right now,” Doctor Olson said.
“Indeed we might,” said Medico Mark. “Except for the fact that our bloodstreams are filled with medical nanites every bit as vicious as Raximander’s.”
“He’ll learn how to counter those if what you are saying is true.”
“And they’ll learn how to counter him. Ours have the advantage. They don’t need to learn how to infect his organisms or counter anything. They just need to kill and kill and kill.”
“Sounds like they could become a terror all by themselves,” said Doctor Olson, who clearly did not want to see any bright side to this. It was understandable. From her point of view. She looked over at me. “You’ve fought Raximander before, what do you think our chances are?”
Ragequit laughed. “He survived. He always does.”
“So did Raximander apparently,” said Doctor Olson.
“Yeah,” said Ragequit, “How’d he do that?”
“He’s just a sub-system of the Overmind,” said Medico Mark. “As long as it survives, he survives.”
“So why does he claim he’s self-willed?” asked Doctor Olson.
“He claims it,” said Mark. “We’ve no idea whether it’s true. He could just be playing mind games. The Brood love to do that.”
Doctor Olson’s luminous blue eyes focused on me once more. “You think we’re all going to die?”
“Not if I can help it,” I said. “The Brood are not invincible. They can be stopped. We’ve done it on a hundred worlds. We can do it again.”
“How many of those worlds did you exterminate? How many did you turn into just another corpse world?”
“Now that’s the question, isn’t it?” said Ragequit.
“No more than half,” said the Colonel.
“So you’re saying Faith has a fifty/fifty chance.”
“If the people cooperate. We’re already running an isolation zone around Sternheim. A microbe will have difficulty getting in or out.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve sterilized the earth in a circle fifty clicks around the city. Power drones have moved forcefields into position. We’ve got rings of interceptors ready to pick off anything that moves. Bio-detectors will spot any spore clouds. We’re filling the circle with hunter-killer nanites. This pocket is contained.”
“What if Raximander has already infected areas outside of your sterile zone?”
“We’ll soon find out. He’s not the sort who will keep quiet about it for too long.”
“You hope.”
“Yes,” said the Colonel. “We hope.”
The shuttle began its approach to the spaceport. Our perimeter defenses had already been reinforced. Orbital was putting everything she carried onto the ground. The factory printers were working overtime now. Mining drones were sitting on the moon and scouring it for raw materials. I could see a massive autoforge beginning to take form out on what had been one of the runways. It would not be up to speed before Raximander hit tipping point. I looked at the Colonel.
“How long have we got?” I asked.
She did not need to be told what I meant. “Less than forty-eight hours if we are lucky. Better hope the militias start seeing sense or we’ll be frying their corpses.”
Doctor Olson looked out of the porthole with bleak, horror-filled eyes. Fires burned on the concrete that could grow to consume her world.
I stood on the watchtower. Pulse cannons covered the column of refugees flowing in through the gates. Some of them wore militia colors, many were garbed in the street clothes of the non-aligned factions. I counted one or two in the bright robes of a Shogunate trade clan. The locals gave them a wide berth. It seemed not everybody was as certain that we were worse than Raximander, and it seemed like a fair number of the locals believed our broadcasts about the Brood presence. Small mercies.
Doctor Olson stood beside me, watching the influx. Dave circled around, scanning for threats. “It’s like the end of the world,” she said, at last. “Like the Beast of Revelations has come.”
I wondered why she had climbed up here from the sprawling refugee camp. Surely it couldn’t be because she found my presence reassuring? Then again, I suppose I had been with her when she met Raximander and she had lived through that. Maybe some part of her subconscious mind associated me with survival.
“I felt that way once,” I said. “First time I ever faced a Brood invasion.”
“They kill you?”
She was thinking of our resurrection chips and our clone bodies and all the other things the locals regarded as abominable. In the face of a Brood invasion people often start thinking about such things. For some people it’s religion, for others it’s more scientific mirages of personal immortality.
“I’ve never died. Never been resurrected.”
“Does the possibility frighten you?”
I was tempted to say something with a bit of swagger to it. The words did not come out. “Dead is dead. They grow a clone body and download my memories into it, it’s still not me. I’m gone. There’s just somebody exactly like me in my place.”
“Your friends would not be able to tell the difference.”
I thought about what Carla said about my blockchain recordings. “No. They would not. Would not make any difference to me though. I would still be just as gone.”
“The new you might think different.”
“He’d be welcome to. I would be beyond caring.”
“I’ve heard Shogunate samurai think that the spirit makes the leap from brain to brain. It’s attracted by the similarity to its old form.”
“Nobody’s ever measured any spirits doing any leaping.”
“And that’s all that matters to you, that it can be measured?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“You are materialist as the preachers claim.”
I thought about Lopez. “Some of us.”
“You despise us primitives, don’t you?”
“My wife was a Christopian,” I said.
“Was?”
“She’s dead. Permanently.”
“She chose not to be resurrected.”
“Yeah.” That kind of killed the conversation. A long silence fell.
I watched a family come in, pushi
ng their belongings in shopping carts, eying our sentry golems with suspicion. They looked tired and they looked scared. A kid looked up at me. She was maybe about six and when she saw me looking down at her, she buried her head in her mother’s skirts. I could well remember being that frightened. It was hard to remember a time when I had not been as a kid.
“You think the Brood are immortal?” she said eventually. “I mean, you killed Raximander and he keeps coming back.”
“He’s a distributed intelligence, kind of like our multicore computers. Bits of his mind are stored throughout his bodies.”
“Does that mean when you kill one of his bodies, he loses some of his intelligence or some of his memories.”
“You’d have to ask him. Or maybe Medico Mark. He would witter on about hologramic memory and multiple redundant systems.”
“We’ve studied the Brood so much and yet we know so little about them.”
“We?”
“Humans.”
“I was too busy killing them to do much studying,” I said flatly. “And the Fed Gov has very strict laws about studying Brood biomatter. They’re scared of infection.”
“Rightly so, judging by what we’ve seen. They say the Brood were responsible for the Extinction Event. They killed everything and absorbed it.”
“It would not surprise me.”
“What else could have done it? As far as we know only the Brood survived the Extinction Event. All the other advanced civilizations are gone.”
I could have argued that perhaps the Brood did not count as an advanced civilization, perhaps they were more like a parasite. Instead, I said, “We don’t know that. We haven’t explored even a thousandth of the Galaxy. There could be hundreds of other races out there.”
“What do the Brood want? Why do they do what they do?” She looked up at me as if I could provide her with answers. That was quite a desperate situation to be in.
“Beats me.”
“You’ve had as much to do with the Assimilators as anybody. Hell, Raximander even talks to you. He knows who you are.”