by Steve White
“But with us, the evidence is pointing to a more sweeping and profound downward spiral, just as our upward course was uninterrupted. For centuries before the Dispersate, we had known no war. The synergies of thought and belief and common interest that united our world were not arduous achievements; they were natural consequences of our increasingly inclusive and broadly attuned narmata. In retrospect, it would have been strange if our need for national distinctions had not withered and eventually fell away, the way your butterfly rises up and leaves behind its cocoon. For us, dissolving the boundaries between states was not a battle, nor an abandonment: it was the shedding of a redundant feature.”
As presented by the vocoder, Amunherh’peshef’s voice became lower, darker. “We never had a reason to contemplate that there might be an equal but inverse course of devolution, if our unitary culture suffered a debilitating crisis or sustained threat. But now we see that there is an inverse phenomenon. Just as there was little obstruction to our achievement of greater unity and peace while our society was intact and growing, the surety of our planet’s impending death triggered a reciprocal decline toward those primitive traits that recall the dispute and discord of our early societies. I fear that began happening from the moment we learned of Sekahmant’s imminent self-destruction and our need to flee Ardu however we might—and in so doing, break away from the environment and rhythms that had nurtured and maintained our best traits and social accomplishments.” His tendrils fluttered in what even Miriam could read as a gesture of shame and despair. “As we rose, so did we fall.”
Before she could arrest the impulse, she reached out and touched the Arduan’s smooth, sloping gold-yellow shoulder. The texture was akin to that of a muscular seal: strange, but not at all unpleasant. Amunherh’peshef flinched—whether from surprise or revulsion, she could not tell—but she also didn’t care, at least not for the duration of this one moment, this one statement she felt had to be made. “Your race has stumbled, but has not fallen. You and your Dispersate are proof of that, and your people shall rise to their former heights once again. I am sure of it.”
Amunherh’peshef’s three eyes blinked sharply, and though his skin seemed eager to twitch away from the alien contact, he remained where he was. “Your faith in us restores my own. If it is even evident to an alie—to a human, then perhaps we foresee a truth when we embrace the same vision, rather than a forlorn hope for a self-image that we cannot bear to surrender.”
The moment was past: Miriam removed her hand. “We of the Rim Federation are the better for having you here among us, no matter how unfortunate the consequences of our first meeting were.” She looked out her windows toward the distant dome of Government House. “Or how unfortunate the current circumstances seem to be.” Miriam checked her delicately wrought antique watch—an anachronistic affectation, but a beautiful grace note that she felt added just the right panache to her appearance—and moved quickly to her computer. “It’s just about time for the show to start, I think.” She turned on the communications application, searched for an incoming link—the live feed from Government House—and was surprised to see no pending comm channel flags blinking. There was no incoming feed awaiting her consent to establish a two-way link.
“Miriam,” Hildy said softly, “I believe our visitors are already here. Look out the window.”
Miriam glanced up; dark, slightly bulbous delta shapes were circling down out of the clouds: Kaituni transports. Between and around them, flitting like so many anxious hornets, were their transatmospheric fighter escorts.
Miriam frowned, pressed the virtual button that would recall Darrell Schweitzer at his personal comm number. There was no response—and then, the carrier tone dropped out abruptly. The line had gone completely dead.
Miriam felt a pulse of dread, and her earlier reservations returned: All the government in one place? She tried various comm links to reach her colleagues in any one of a dozen different offices, scattered throughout the city—and discovered that none of them were in service.
Miriam resisted the urge to look out the window. “Hildy,” she said, keeping her tone of voice casual, even a bit cheery.
Hildy had proven to be an eager, skilled, and very perceptive aide in matters pertaining to liaison work with the Arduans. Luckily, she hadn’t been with Miriam long enough for her perceptivity to become so refined that she could discern that the older woman’s current calm was pure theater. “Yes, Miriam?” was all she said.
“Are you familiar with the remote surveillance facility we use to monitor events here and in the Arduan embassy?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I need you to go there at once. Use the tunnels. Oh, and given all of today’s overdramatic nonsense, you might as well seal them behind you. Use protocol one: it’s the easiest.” And also the most absolute. “I need someone to keep an eye on what’s going on in this building and the Arduan embassy.”
“But Madam Consul, what about the facility’s routine security staff? Surely they will be watching the—”
“The surveillance facility’s regular staff have just been reassigned to overwatch the security of Government House from a remote site, Hildy,” Miriam lied. A lie which Hildy would discover as soon as she opened the door to the surveillance control room and found the customary team there. But with the tunnels sealed using protocol one, it meant that she would also be safe and unreachable from any conventional surface entry in the city. She’d have a long trek out of that bolthole, but it also meant that she would be able to report what she saw in the monitors of the surveillance center—whatever that turned out to be.
Hildy was frowning as she gathered up her folders, her palmtop computer, and began moving for the tunnel entrance which was concealed in a reading alcove at the back of the study adjacent to Miriam’s office. “Madam Consul,” she said quietly, using Miriam’s formal title for the first time since the late Yoshi Watanabe had introduced them, “I’m not sure I should be—”
“Hildy, my dear, you’ve picked a very awkward time to be voicing reservations about my requests. Trust me; I need your eyes in the surveillance room—and I need them there now. We can discuss your present concerns when this silliness is resolved—but not before.” Miriam smiled. “Now, scoot.”
Hildy’s mouth smiled in response, but her brow retained the frown. “Yes, Madam Consul.” She walked into the adjoining study with an uncharacteristically measured gait.
Miriam stared out the window at the descending Kaituni ships—including several types she’d never seen in any intelligence briefings—until she heard a dull clump in the study: the tunnel entrance had not only been closed, but was now hermetically sealed behind the full course of stone that had slid into place behind it. To anything less than a deep densitometer scan, the wall of the alcove was now as solid and thick as all the others.
Amunherh’peshef’s voice emerged from the vocoder. “A question, Madam Consul.”
“I’ll try to provide an answer worthy of it, Senior Councilor.”
“Your dismissal of Ms. Silverman. Most peculiar. She might have been quite useful to us—to me—in relaying any nuances of Amunsit’s interactions with your government. The vocoder is—a crude medium of translation, at best.”
Miriam nodded. “Yes, Senior Councilor. I’m aware of that. Keenly, painfully aware of that. But I had other considerations.”
“And they were—what?”
Shadows flitted across her window like haunts, just before Miriam saw the two sleek delta aircraft which had cast them appear from behind the roof of the neighboring Health and Medical Bureau Building. The vehicles began to stoop, like accelerating hawks, down toward Government House’s dome.
“Those, Senior Councilor. Those are my considerations.”
She knew the safety protocols: during the Fringe Revolution, she had drilled along with everyone else, living in fear of possible rebel bombardment. But this day, she was slow to follow the reflexes she felt pushing her down beneath the lower edge of
the window frame. It was not age which slowed her, but a split-second, and wholly unprecedented, state of mind: morbid curiosity. That she should have lived so long, and done so much, to have been standing here to see this—
Missiles and plasma bolts shot from the transatmospheric Kaituni fighters toward Government House and the capitol complex surrounding it, but they were not the largest hammers being wielded against the seat of Xanadu’s government. Their launch must have also confirmed and fixed general targeting coordinates for batteries on orbiting ships. A moment after the smaller weapons of the fighters peppered the capitol complex with gouts of orange flame and grey-brown dust, a brace of HVMs—high-velocity missiles that traveled at almost five percent the speed of light—shot downward in a blazing white ring that bracketed the cupola atop the dome of Government House.
The entire building complex disappeared in the flash, and amidst the cyclonic outrush of the blast wave, beams from orbiting ships played pack and forth within the furious holocaust.
“Madam Consul!” Amunherh’peshef’s vocoder screamed.
Miriam dropped, suddenly terrified and panting, a moment before the windows all along that wall of her office blew inward, the air momentarily filled with a glittering sleet of ostensibly blast-proof glassteel. The pieces chewed into her desk, shredded the woodwork and shelves lining the far wall, riddled her computer, sent a tattoo of shards through the back of her empty chair. Then the air seemed to rush back out a bit, then huff back inward, and she had the brief, surreal impression that she was living in a giant, respirating lung.
But then, the expansion-backdraft pressure cycle equalized and the room was still.
Only for a moment. As Amunherh’peshef rose unsteadily to his feet—several superficial torso wounds leaking his species’ dark maroon blood—sounds of gunfire erupted both overhead and below.
Miriam looked to the Arduan Consul, who clutched his vocoder, which said: “Troop landers, on the roof—and in the street. They must know that this is where—”
“Yes. They know we”—or at least I—“will be here.” Miriam had a brief recollection of Hildy’s face, glad that least one thing had been saved from the inferno of this day, and started violently when a firefight broke out abruptly on the other side of the doors to her office.
She heard automatic weapons of several types. She heard a deep hissing boom—a human plasma gun—drowned out by the rushing roar of Arduan rocket launchers. Explosions rocked the room, knocked over the bookshelves on the far wall, blew holes in the wall, through which she could see flames, smoke, arms and legs and falling silhouettes. And could hear more weapons, and screams throughout. Screams that grew more shrill—
The redoubtable Miriam Ortega dropped behind the ruins of her desk, trembling, hands over her ears and felt, for the first time, like an old woman. Not a gracefully aging woman, but old and weak and very vulnerable in the middle of weapons that were all capable of turning her into just so much ground meat and bones in a fraction of a second.
And, although she had been married, had children, loved and lived a rich life—all because Ian Trevayne’s mortal wounds and medical cold sleep had taken him from her—it was nonetheless his face, his gentle smile, that she now saw. And clung to, in the impregnable realm of memories that were far away from this intolerable present.
But the present cacophony of death found a way to echo even in that inner sanctum of recollections: Ian had been—first, foremost, and always—a soldier, a man whose profession was war. So, this had been his world: navigating this horrible chaos of sights and sounds, each of which were, in fact, a split second warning of approaching death, jumbled in with a dozen other equally dire but different threats. Ian, I always imagined I knew what you had experienced, knew the horrors of the duty you found respite from when you returned and came back into my arms, but this—
The deafening reports ended abruptly. Two voices continued screaming—until two additional machine gun stutters ended them, as well. When Miriam heard the now-savaged doors creak open on their mauled hinges, she could not resist the impulse to stand, regardless of the danger. She was not going to meet enemies while crouched and trembling like a snared rabbit behind her desk. Besides, it’s not as if they’re going to overlook me.
The group of Kaituni entering were visibly different from the Arduans that Miriam had come to know and respect. Even their warriors and security personnel effected a profoundly different appearance. This group were wreathed in body armor that seemed to shift and contract as if it were comprised of interleaved laminate sheathes made of slick, thin rubber: the suits whispered like voices from the grave as the Kaituni troopers entered the room. Their weapons—unlike the multipurpose paramilitary models still carried by the First Dispersate—were large bore, cassette-fed battle rifles of some kind, each with a different underslung heavy weapons system, the types of which eluded Miriam’s limited knowledge of such hardware.
But more arresting still were the sweeps of color that adorned each of the suits; all similar, but with variations that probably denoted differences in role, rank, or both. And at the center of this flying wedge of guards was a medium-sized golden-variety Kaitun whose movements immediately reminded Miriam of a Siamese cat she had once owned—or who had owner her. That matter had neither been very clear, nor ever resolved. And that sinuous cat’s disdain-tinged autonomy was somehow reflected in this Kaitun’s movement as well: this was a creature that tolerated no master and admitted to few, if any, peers.
Miriam waited to see if there was a selnarmic exchange between the central Kaitun (whom she presumed was Amunsit) and Amunherh’peshef. Once you knew Arduans well enough, there were sudden flurries of slight movements—tendril gestures and almost ticlike head motions—that indicated that one of their high speed telempathic exchanges was in progress. But from what Miriam could tell, Amunsit simply stared at Amunherh’peshef, and he stared back. Then the admiral’s eyes turned towards Miriam. “You are the Consular Liaison, Miriam Ortega.”
It was a statement, not a question.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Yes, I am Miriam Ortega.” Miriam kept her tone and volume level as she continued. “And I protest your cold-blooded massacre of the government of both this planet and much of the Rim Federation. Any civilized rules of conflict—”
“Do not apply here,” Amunsit’s vocoder announced. “Rules imply contracts. A person cannot make a contract with an animal, with a zhettek such as yourself, such as your species. Zhetteksh are not capable of higher functions, or the higher understandings necessary to be party to agreements with actual persons. Which this flixxit-brained traitor”—she indicated Amunherh’peshef—“has either forgotten or misrepresented in his exchanges with you. I suspect the former, since I cannot see any reasonable course by which the First Dispersate’s surrender would serve as a means to ultimately lure you griarfeksh into either subjugation or extermination. Rather, he and his followers have actually come to believe the heresy they spout: that you humans are in fact persons.”
“They are,” insisted Amunherh’peshef. “And they have sensitives among them who—”
“Yes, sensitives who were able to infect your weak minds with the infantile rot that a species which has any evidence of telempathic capability—no matter how limited and outré—is somehow a brother race, a species of persons. Idiocy and heresy, both. The griarfeksh and other aliens are not of Illudor: they do not reincarnate, they are bound by no common sharing of narmata, and have no access to shaxzhutok—although in that regard, they may have an advantage over us.”
Amunherh’peshef’s mouth sagged into an almost perfectly round hole. “You reject—you contemn—the visions of past lives, of shaxzhutok?”
“I do not reject them, but I do not consider them a basis for authority. The shaxzhu, and their selnarshaz servitors, have ruled us long enough with their inarticulate babble about past lessons and the archived lives of exemplars. Whom, you will note, were overwhelmingly representatives of their own cas
tes.” Her tendrils threshed restively. “But this is pointless and tiresome, to say nothing of irritating. You”—her left cluster rose up in Amunherh’peshef’s direction and the hooklike claws clacked together for emphasis—“let down the wall of your selnarm and reveal your identity.”
“I shall not let down my selnarm but I shall identify myself. I am Amunherh’peshef, Senior Councilor of the Council of Twenty. And I—”
Amunsit’s golden skin became almost incandescent. “The arch-traitor himself. Well, second after the Eldest Sleeper Ankaht, that is. You figured prominently in Torhok’s reports, before he died.”
For a moment, Amunherh’peshef seemed too stunned to speak. “Torhok’s…reports? But Torhok has been dead almost seven years, and he hadn’t the power of shaxzhutok, certainly not enough to send the iconic invocations of our commonly held tales, of the parables—”
“Prating fool.” The vocoder infused Amunsit’s voice with a rich measure of contempt. “Still trapped in your worship of lives and deeds of the past. Still consulting the long dead for answers to the urgent present. Idiot. Torhok and the rest of the Dispersates needed no complex shaxzhutok. We only needed selnarm itself to signal across the distances, to flash on and off just as all binary codes do.”
Miriam understood. “Morse code.”
“What?” asked Amunsit.
“Morse code was a way of communicating, a code that was simply comprised of long signals, short signals, and extended silences between them.”
Amunsit’s teeth snapped—a gesture and sound that Miriam had never heard from an Arduan before, and found aversive and fearful. Amunherh’peshef flinched as if he had been poked by a hungry cannibal.
Amunsit gestured toward Miriam. “The human sees it. Torhok was the one in the First Diaspora who stumbled across the simplicity of the method which was already in use among the later Diaspora.”
“And by this,” murmured Amunherh’peshef, “you knew when and where the other Dispersates were coming, coordinated the recent deluge of attacks against this part of space.”