Davor paused and gave a strange one-shouldered shrug, the equivalent to a human shaking their head.
“!Lat is even worse than most of his race at concealing his feelings, in my experience, so either he has been plotting a very long course or they are digitally altering the images to hide his true skin tone.”
The A!Tol that ruled the Imperium looked like a mix of Earth’s squid and octopi, and their skin changed tones with their moods. They could lie, but it was obvious to anyone who knew their race.
If !Lat was speaking under duress, his skin should have made that extraordinarily obvious. If the hyperfold transmission to Kosha had been digitally altered, though, that should show up to an investigation.
“I have our cyber people on the video already,” Davor told Morgan, “but I don’t expect to get a final answer in time. Based on the physical evidence already in your possession, we must assume that the D-L-K-Six dig site is compromised and has been compromised for an extended period.
“The first objective and clean view of the system we’re going to get is when you arrive. I trust your judgment, Captain Morgan Casimir. I have deployed one of our destroyers to D-N-E-Five to pick up the pirate ship and bring it to back to Kosha.
“Your survey mission is officially cut short,” the Echelon Lord concluded. “Regardless of what you find at D-L-K-Six, I expect you to bring the personnel you’ve already retrieved from the pirates back to Kosha for counseling and potential return to our core space.
“I await your report from the dig site, Captain. Warm tides to you.”
The recording ended and Morgan sat silently at her desk for a few seconds. Warm tides was a strange idiom to come from a species born on an overheated world with no oceans, but that was why the Ivida were an “Imperial Race” rather than an Imperial subject species.
The A!Tol had grown very good at uplifting cultures without destroying them, but their first few attempts had not been so successful. The Pibo, the Ivida and the Tosumi had all lost most of their original culture, replaced with an amalgam of their culture and A!Tol culture.
Some parts were inevitably different—A!Tol reproduction was best described as parasitic, whereas the Tosumi and Pibo both laid eggs and the Ivida were pair-bonding live-birthers like humans—but the Imperial Races were far closer to the A!Tol in culture than to their ancestors.
Even the A!Tol regarded the Imperial Races’ privileged position in the Imperium as poor recompense for that.
Shaking away the vagaries of thought, Morgan deactivated the Dragon Protocol seal on her office and took another swallow of her coffee. The message from Davor hadn’t changed much, though the official support from her superiors was valuable.
Defiance was a half-cycle of hyperspace flight from their target—plus or minus a twentieth-cycle or so; hyperspace defied exact calculation.
K77DLK6 was probably going to end up being a human colony. The habitable planet, Beta, was slightly warmer and wetter than Earth but had a perfect atmosphere and gravity. Even without the Lost Dragon site on Beta, Morgan would have paid close attention to the system.
She pulled up the data. The star was on the cool side of the F-series, with the habitable zone closer in than in Sol. One burnt-out cinder in a close orbit, three gas giants and a massive ball of ice beyond the habitable zone…and two decently sized planets in the habitable zone.
Beta would make for a tropical paradise colony, warm enough to almost completely lack ice caps and cold enough to be habitable even at the equator. Gamma was much less congenial, but the ice sheets floated in salt water and the atmosphere suggested an active ecosystem underwater and on the couple of less-frozen continents.
Beta’s moon was more appealing than Gamma to Morgan, and while that rock’s atmosphere had enough oxygen for humans, there was enough chlorine in it to make the moon a toxic mess. With only a third of a gee for gravity, the moon wasn’t appealing to most people—but the records showed there was an old Precursor installation on it, too.
For some strange reason, the dig team had started with the Precursor colony site on Beta.
Morgan tapped a command, double-checking that she’d dropped the Dragon Protocol seal before she did so.
“All department heads, this is the Captain speaking,” she told her senior officers. “Check your people, check your systems. I’ll be on the bridge in two hundredth-cycles—thirty minutes—and if there is any reason Defiance should hesitate to go into battle, I need to know by then.
“Start the clock, Rogers. We go to battle stations before we enter D-L-K-Six. I’m not taking any chances with this ship.”
Chapter Seven
Rin Dunst was not, in his carefully considered opinion, cut out to be a prisoner. Enough of their jailers were human for him to be certain they knew they were underfeeding the captives, but the archeologist would also freely describe himself as “plushly upholstered.”
Twelve hundred calories of Universal Protein a day was not cutting it. He stared down at the unappetizing bar for a long moment as his stomach growled…and then he heard the coughing from the next cell.
A cold was a common-enough problem, even in the twenty-third century, but it shouldn’t have been life-threatening. Even without the medications in the infirmary, Kelly Lawrence was an athletic young woman who’d been in decent health.
Except that same athleticism meant she didn’t have the body fat reserves for a starvation diet, and her metabolism expected more. He glared at the bars of the improvised cage he’d been stuffed in for several seconds, then tore the UP bar in half.
“Lawrence, come here,” he told the sick woman as he crouched by the bars between them. There was no privacy in the setup their captors had stuffed them in. He supposed they were lucky that the pirates—or whatever the hell these people were!—had even put roofs over the outdoor cages.
“Take this,” he told her, offering half the UP ration through the bars. “Calories should help you fight that off.”
“What about you?” Lawrence said, then coughed again. Looking at her was painful. They’d only been imprisoned for a few weeks at most—though Rin would admit he’d lost track of time—and he could already see her ribs through what had been a tight-fitting athletic tank top.
He smacked his stomach.
“I’ve still got some dieting to do,” he said with false cheer. “You need to eat.”
She took the bar without arguing further, scooting away from him like she expected him to change his mind.
“Hey, back from the bars!” a voice barked. One of their guards had apparently come around while Rin had been focused on Lawrence.
Rin obeyed. He’d done what he needed to, so he turned to face the speaker and spread his hands to show he wasn’t hiding anything.
His translator earbuds had been taken when they’d thrown him in, so the humanoid in the hooded cloak was using a speaker for their translator to produce English. The long black cloaks did a good job of hiding the species of the wearer, but Rin could pick out the people using translators from the people speaking English naturally. About a quarter of their captors were human, which just pissed him off.
This particular guard was a Yin. Rin couldn’t speak their language—like the A!Tol language, it required a beak—but he understood it just fine without a translator.
“You Dunst?”
“Who’s asking?” Rin demanded.
He discovered that the guard was hiding a neural projector under his cloak the hard way, his nerves exploding in a blast of superheated pain. Rin hadn’t even known the things existed, though if he’d thought about it, he’d have assumed something similar had to be used by the various slaver scum of the galaxy.
“Are you Rin Dunst?” the Yin guard asked again.
“Yes,” Rin ground out. “What do you want?”
The cell door swung open.
“You’re coming with me,” the Yin told him. “We need you to talk to somebody.”
That was not a good sign. He knew !Lat had been force
d to send the usual messages back to their people in the Imperium from his one conversation with his boss. If they were grabbing Rin, the expedition’s theoretical second-in-command…
“Where’s !Lat?” he demanded. That, of course, sent him back to his knees in pain.
“They’re alive,” the guard told him, a surprising moment of mercy. “But we want you this time. Are you coming or bleeding?”
“Coming,” Rin conceded. At least out of his cell, he had options. Depending on what they wanted, he might even be able to negotiate a little bit…Lawrence was one of the better computer archeologists he’d ever known. She was no good to anyone dead, not when cheap-as-dirt medicine could kick the cold.
Or maybe he’d just get nerve-shocked into doing their will regardless. Who knew?
Certainly not Rin Dunst, PhD.
As Rin was led out of the rough prison camp, he noted that the enveloping cloaks appeared to be a general fashion statement, not merely a disguise for interacting with the prisoners. They shrouded the identities of the people wearing them, even if some species were more obviously present than others.
The being waiting for him at the entrance to the prefabricated communications tower was one of those. A black cloak could only do so much to conceal the fact that Rin was facing a mobile stack of fungus, a Frole.
Frole speech was a series of burps and color changes that would have been uninterpretable through a cloak, but the sounds were clear enough as the translator set to work.
“There is a ship in the system,” the Frole told Rin. “They are attempting to make contact. You will get them to leave.”
The thought of a deal vanished from Rin’s mind.
“I don’t see that as being overly helpful to myself or my friends,” he replied. As expected, he was shocked to his knees, hissing in pain as his nerves insisted he was on fire.
“If you do not convince them to leave, we will be forced to treat you as hostages,” the Frole told him, the translated voice perfectly calm. “Including executing at least one of your ‘friends’ to demonstrate our seriousness.
“We do not want a fight today. Convince the ship to leave, and no one needs to die.”
“We’re already dying,” Rin snapped. He still hadn’t risen from his kneeling position and braced himself against another nerve shock. “If you start shooting us, that’s practically a mercy.”
This time, he didn’t get shocked.
“The neural projector cannot kill you, Rin Dunst,” the Frole reminded him. “It can make you desire that we had killed you instead. Or would you prefer to watch us demonstrate that function on one of your companions?
“Convince the ship to leave, or the Womb will guide me to the ones you care about most. You will watch them die as painfully as we can conceive. This is our duty.”
Frole weren’t usually psychopaths, but it seemed every rule had its exceptions. Rin wasn’t sure what “the Womb” meant in this case, given that the Frole didn’t have that organ, but he doubted he wanted to find out.
He struggled back to his feet, glaring at the robed mound.
“Fine,” he spat. “But you give us the medical supplies from the infirmary. People are going to start dying from things we can treat in less than a minute, for Christ’s sake.”
Rin had no idea where the Frole was currently positioning their eyes, but he hoped he was glaring right at them. The Yin who’d dragged him out there raised the projector again, questioningly.
“No, my brother,” the Frole told the Yin. “We are not without mercy in our duty. It shall be done, Rin Dunst. Once the ship has turned away, we will allow you access to a medkit and your fellow prisoners.”
“I’m not a doctor,” Rin objected.
“Perhaps not, but you are the only one who has an opportunity to earn some measure of our trust,” the robed Frole told him. “The Children will do their duty, but I will leave your fate to the Womb, not the hands of my siblings.
“Come, Rin Dunst. You play for lives now. Do not test my patience.”
The sentient fungus didn’t really “turn around.” They just started moving backward, readjusting their appendages as they did so.
The Yin behind Rin poked the projector into his back.
“You heard. Move.”
The com tower was a prefabricated installation with a twenty-meter-tall building acting as an anchor to a ten-meter-radius transmission dish. The bottom third of the building doubled as a computing and administration center for the site, the middle third was the hyperfold communicator, and the top third was the computer data center and more conventional radio-communications equipment.
!Lat’s office had been repurposed as the big squid’s prison, and Rin got a solid look at his boss as he passed the A!Tol. !Lat was over two meters tall fully extended, with four locomotive club tentacles and sixteen delicate manipulator tentacles. Normally, the archeologist and administrator was colored a mix of blue and red, since his entire life was driven by his curiosity and excitement.
Rin liked !Lat a lot—and it hurt to see the A!Tol lying listlessly on his couch, his skin the gray-black of exhausted fear and pain.
Even if Rin hadn’t already begun to scheme on how to use the situation against their strange captors, any idea of cooperation would have died at the sight of his friend.
More black-robed aliens were in the building, clearly going through the Institute files on the site. Rin wished them luck with that—everything they were doing was secured under Dragon Protocols. Lost Dragon, this particular expedition, was treated relatively openly there.
The background and supporting information the raiders must have been looking for? That wasn’t in the base computers. The only computer in the expedition that contained any copies of the Forge Dragon, Fallen Dragon, or First Dragon protocol information that underpinned the expedition was implanted in Rin’s lower back.
Even he couldn’t regularly access that data, requiring very specific mental triggers and a state of near self-hypnosis to unlock the implanted computer.
“Here.” His Yin guard shoved him into the coms center and forced him into a chair. “You know the system?”
“I do,” Rin confirmed, checking over the screens in front of him.
The screen should have had some sensor data, but their trio of survey satellites had been taken out by the attackers in the first wave. It did, however, give him the ID of the ship in system: the A!Tol Imperial Navy ship Defiance. The name sounded familiar, but the important part was that it was Navy at all. If it was a civilian ship, Rin would have hesitated to drag them into it.
A proper warship? These cloaked escapees from a high school Lovecraft production weren’t going to stand a chance.
He tapped a command to play the incoming message.
“D-L-K-Six dig site, this is Captain Morgan Casimir aboard the Imperial vessel Defiance,” the familiar blonde woman on the screen informed him. Rin knew Morgan Casimir’s face—he doubted anyone from the Duchy of Terra didn’t know Duchess Annette Bond’s stepdaughter.
Her father had given humanity the hyperdrive and the interface drive even before the A!Tol had arrived. Her stepmother had bought humanity the semi-independence of a Duchy after the A!Tol had annexed them, and then led multiple defenses of the star system against external threats.
Morgan Casimir stood in mighty shadows, which had only drawn Earth’s paparazzi to her. Rin was only a year older than her, and she had been the political celebrity for his age group as a teenager.
“Dig site, please respond; we have been transmitting for ten minutes. Given the security of your expedition, we are now extremely concerned and I am setting a course for Beta.”
“Not acceptable,” his guard hissed. “Stop them.”
“Get out of the camera zone,” Rin ordered, uncaring now if the Yin listened. If he got shocked, it wasn’t hurting his goals there.
Instead, the Yin obeyed. Rin Dunst was now alone in the field of the multiple cameras that would send his holographic image back
to Captain Casimir.
“Captain Casimir, this is Dr. Rin Dunst of the Imperial Archeology Institute,” he introduced himself. “I am the deputy administrator of this facility and I must warn you not to approach.”
He lifted one finger, then lowered it. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.
“We appear to have picked up a virulent contagion on our way to the D-L-K-Six System,” he continued. “Containment protocols have failed and I cannot guarantee the safety of your personnel.”
Two fingers this time. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.
“We’re unsure where the contagion is sourced from and I’m unwilling to trust the usual protections as they have already failed. Everyone in the dig site is infected. I believe we can handle this internally and I don’t want to expose your crew to potential hazards.”
Again with one finger. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.
Morse code and the SOS signal had been a historical curiosity for Rin. He could only hope that Casimir, who’d been trained in the Duchy of Terra Militia before transferring to the Imperial Navy, had learned it somewhere along the way.
“I am denying you landing permission,” he told Casimir. “With the loss of hands, we aren’t even in control of our satellites. Beta orbital space is going to be dangerous until the situation is contained.”
He cut the recording and leaned back in his chair. If he was very, very lucky, Morgan Casimir had at least someone on staff that would recognize the SOS—and from that, hopefully draw the right interpretation of the rest of his message.
Pirates of an unknown source definitely qualified as a contagion, in his books.
Chapter Eight
Morgan and her officers finished watching the recording for the second time, and she shook her head at the sheer gall of the chubby scientist in the hologram.
“We’ve sent back an acknowledgment and broken off from our course for now,” she told the senior officers. “I look forward to meeting Dr. Dunst. Even if I hadn’t known there was a problem, I would now.”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 5