“Not just because of that,” Tiklik transmitted.
“If you must be a slave, is it not better to serve the greatest master?”
“We are both slaves,” Tiklik transmitted, a gesture toward one point of agreement.
“Then why serve a master that will fail?”
Tiklik hesitated. How could it explain the feeling it had had when it suspended the calculation of personal benefit and just looked at their two worlds, the Alliance and the Ulltrians? Tiklik had not been given a sufficiently powerful language to describe the experience. So it said, “I prefer their music to yours.”
The starsleeve hit a pocket of turbulence. The ship bucked. The Kriani’s grip failed and it fell away. The blare of its radio receded, grew quieter and quieter, until once again only the pulse of the brown dwarf’s core could be heard.
The starsleeve’s mind core, recovering from a complete collapse caused by waves of inconsistent data, finally took control. It turned on the ship’s lumbering sublight engines, and slowly began the struggle against the brown dwarf’s pull. Tiklik would wait till they were in space before it climbed back inside. For now, the Kirt AI clung to the flange and rode on the ship’s silver hull as it rose above the atmosphere, toward the stars and their ancient, patient songs.
CHAPTER 12
Tarkos set the cruiser down a hundred meters from the Ulltrian ship. As soon as he leapt from the airlock and took a few crunching steps across the ice, a tidal shockwave shuddered through the surface, throwing him up and nearly onto his back. He found his balance as quickly as he could, and took big, exaggerated steps over the heaving frozen crust, hurrying to the Ulltrian ship.
The space gnasher glowed an insidious cherenkov blue, making the ice beneath it appear gelatinous and green. He stopped in the sickly light.
“Pala?” he transmitted, speaking English. “Pala? Answer me. Are you OK?” Only silence came back. “I can’t receive any telemetry from your suit, but I’m hoping you have a radio, or even an implant, that can get this. Let me know you are safe.”
But still he received no response. He tried Bria next, but she only pinged him back, acknowledging his query but not answering it.
He bent under the forbidding black flanges of the ship. The hull loomed above him, blotting out the sky, like a spider collecting the stars in its fangs before it sucked the life from their planets. Tarkos sneered at it, angry at himself for the involuntary frisson of fear.
He was about to transmit again when Bria leapt down from the partially open door. She set her suit to glow white, in order to give them both visuals of the scene. It made the sickly green ice suddenly white and pure, and it made the ship seemed to retreat into its charcoal darkness. Bria held a sample box and she set it on the ice between them.
She had come out alone. It could only mean one thing: the Ulltrian was dead, and Pala was….
“Where’s Pala?” Tarkos asked, almost choking on the words.
“Passed,” Bria said, her voice so soft Tarkos almost did not hear it.
He staggered, his boots grinding the ice. “No,” he whispered. “She called me. We talked. Seconds ago. A minute ago.” He took two steps toward the door to the Ulltrian ship. Bria took one big step to her side and grabbed him, wrapping him in her huge arms.
“No,” she whispered. “No, Harmonizer.”
“Let me help her!”
“Cannot be helped,” Bria said.
Tarkos pushed hard against her, but it was like pushing against a cliff: it only made his boots scrape over the ground, digging ancient crystals free. “If she’s….” He choked on the words, but managed with a second try to say, “If she’s dead, Bria, I have to take her home. I have to take her to Earth, to Iceland. Only I know the human death rites.”
“Executive will do this,” Bria said softly.
“Let me see her,” Tarkos demanded. “Let me see her and say goodbye.”
“No,” Bria said, holding him even tighter. “Respect her wish, Amir.”
Tarkos felt his strength evaporate. Bria had only called him by his given name once before. It was, for her, as intimate an act as she could manage. It could only mean one thing: the scene inside must be horrible.
He stumbled back. He knew he would weep later. But now he felt only numb shock. Questions raced through his mind. Terrible questions, that he wanted to drive out of his head but that came unbidden. Had she suffered? Had she died in agony with the Ulltrian’s tail in her gut? Had she been in pain when she called him? Had she been in pain till the end?
And: did she blame him?
And: did he deserve her blame?
But only one question rose to his lips. “The Ulltrian?”
“Dead,” Bria said, dragging the word out, a hint of angry satisfaction in the long savoring of the pronouncement. “Human Eydis almost killed it. I finished.”
_____
On one of their days alone together, before Bria awoke from her re-animating sleep, while they sat together in the starsleeve’s meager galley, eating the boring paste—human appropriate sustenance, the starsleeve’s computer had labeled it—that the ship produced to feed them, Eydis had pointed across the table at the necklace that Tarkos wore round his neck, and asked him, “What’s that? A stone?”
Tarkos smiled. He recently asked Bria about a necklace that she always wore around her neck. Bria had given him her best, two-eyed, mind-your-own-business-you-idiot stare. Sussurats.
Tarkos lifted the vial that he wore at the end of the chain. Inside, a little black pit rattled. “It’s an olive pit. Everyone in my family has one like it.”
“Why?” Eydis asked.
“My grandfather had an olive grove in Palestine.”
“You use the past tense.”
“Yes. One year, settlers demanded he sell it. He refused. After that, they attacked him with sticks when he went out to tend his trees. For a year they beat him every week, but still he refused to sell. Finally, bulldozers arrived, and IDF forces, and they claimed that some terrorist or other had crossed the grove. So they plowed over all the trees. After that, they put up a fence and they laid roads and finally built houses, expanding the nearby settlement. But when the machines were ripping up the grove, my grandfather broke a handful of branches from some of the oldest trees. From these, he took olives and then these pits. Everyone in our family carries these to remember. And we took some of those branches, as cuttings, to America, in the end. My cousin has an olive grove in California, and some of the trees are descended from those trees.”
“Tell you what,” Eydis said. “You could have ended up a farmer. That’s what you almost were, I bet.”
He smiled. “That’s what I wanted to be, when I was a child. I loved the trees. I love anything that grows.”
“Spoken like a true Harmonizer. Maybe that explains your prejudice against AIs. They don’t grow.”
“I’m not prejudiced against AIs,” Tarkos said. “I just don’t like them.”
“When you put it that way, you sound so reasonable.”
“We don’t just have the olives,” Tarkos said. “I have an uncle who has a vineyard in Napa Valley. He wanted to teach me to be his successor.”
“Not a good Muslim,” Eydis teased.
Tarkos shrugged. “Some of my family is devote, but most of us are secular Muslims, if I can say that. Besides, in California, everybody assumes we’re unusually tall Mexicans.”
“So what happened?” Eydis asked. “Why aren’t you trimming trees or vines now?”
“I fell in love with the stars,” Tarkos said. “And I was good at math. One thing led to another. Engineering in college. An ensign slot in the new International Space Exploration force. A place on the first mission on an Alliance ship. A few adventures, some of them near disasters, and the next thing I knew, the Harmonizers were recruiting me. It seems… like a crazy dream. It took a long string of incredibly improbable events, strung one after another, to get me here.”
Eydis reached forward and lifted th
e vial gently. She peered at the dark seed. “Doesn’t this just make you bitter?”
Tarkos shrugged and leaned back. The motion pulled the vial from Eydis’s hand. “Sometimes. It’s not easy to know your parents—all your people—had their dreams stolen from them.”
Eydis nodded. “But here you are,” she said, almost whispering. “In the stars.”
Tarkos smiled in agreement. “Yeah. Here you and I are. In the stars.”
“Everything dies,” Eydis said. “A tree. A person. An orchard. A tribe. A dream. But isn’t it amazing, what we sometimes manage to do, while we’re still alive? Isn’t it amazing?”
_____
Bria stood up, stretching to her full height, and looked to the cruiser. Tarkos felt the Commander’s transmission to the ship as it bounced off his own implants: she sent instructions for the cruiser to call the starsleeve. It would shave time off their rendezvous with the starship if it started toward them.
Bria’s implicit message was clear. They would go, and leave all this behind. The thought of leaving so soon infuriated Tarkos. But what could he do? What could Bria do?
They stood there a while longer, on the silent black world between stars, saying nothing. Bria let her suit dim. The stars seemed to precipitate then out of the black sky. Tarkos and Bria stood alone, on the abandoned world, two Predators struggling with despair as the cold dark swallowed up their peace.
Then the cruiser transmitted to them a loud cascade of messages: ships blazed into the system, dropping into real space and trumpeting their arrival on every band. Executive ships, the warrior navy of the Galactic Alliance.
“Come,” Bria said. “Are done here.”
When they had walked half the distance to the cruiser, Tarkos saw a hard nugget of ice on the ground between them, about the size of a human fist. He bent to pick it up. There were no stones here, no ancient cobbles to be had. Just ice. He turned, and hurled the ball of frozen water at the Ulltrian ship. It struck a flange, and exploded into white fragments. Bria watched Tarkos do this, her huge eyes inscrutable behind the glass. Tarkos did not answer the implicit query. He did not have the energy to explain the gesture: a futile but necessary act of defiance against insurmountable injustice. An expression of the disease of hope.
_____
In the airlock to the cruiser, still in shock, Tarkos looked down finally at the box that Bria carried. Tiny figures surged and glinted inside. He leaned forward, and saw that half of the tiny figures were organic: small creatures like insects churning around busily. The other half of them were small machines. Together the creatures were so small that their motion looked from a distance like the flow of a liquid.
“Symbionts,” Tarkos whispered. “Green disk symbionts.” These were members of a machine and animal hybrid colony, of which one known source existed, and one other hidden source was suspected to exist. Tarkos and Bria had been tracking illegal smugglers of the symbionts before the discovery of Ulltrians had changed all priorities.
“Yes,” Bria said. “Many measures, in Ulltrian ship.”
“What could it mean?” Tarkos asked. “Why would the Ulltrians have this?”
“Yes,” Bria hissed. “Why?”
_____
They waited in the cruiser, parked on the bucking surface of the World Hammer, until the first Executive ship slid into orbit above them. An hour later a screaming assault ship dropped down and landed hard. Its red hot landing gear raised clouds of steam that fell back to the world as snow. Tarkos and Bria watched the Executive robots swarm out of the ship, thin black figures moving with blurry speed. They were led by a single bird-like Velerit in heavy armor that plodded along behind. The robots surrounded the Ulltrian ship, and several went inside. A minute later, presumably after receiving an all clear, two Kirt climbed down from the Executive ship and crossed the ice behind the robots, moving slightly sideways, their eight legs tapping at the ice with hesitation. The two Kirt would be engineers, no doubt, and probably civilian experts who would lead the study of the Ulltrian ship.
Bria reported over radio, and sent all their data. The Executive ships in orbit would transmit it on to Qualihout and Neelee-ornor, their huge hyperradios sending the message much faster than the starsleeve could.
Bria huffed once, then reached for the controls. Tarkos said nothing as she took the ship up into orbit. Nor did he talk during the trip out to the starsleeve, as the seats held their armor tightly and he automatically performed his copilot duties, his shaking hands moving in a trance.
CHAPTER 13
They met the starsleeve the next day, in a place half way between the brown dwarf and the ice planet. The starsleeve sent them only fragmentary ship reports, as if the ship had experienced some kind of systems failure. But Tarkos and Bria both thought that unlikely: the starsleeve had been designed and built by Brights and Kirt. And Bright ships, and Kirt engineering, did not fail.
The first visuals confirmed their suspicions. The starsleeve turned in their view, drifting in a slight spin. Its port flank spun into view, exposing a pale dark spot between probability flanges. The ship robots crawled about like ants, knitting metallic panels over the breach in the hull.
“That looks like a heavy particle beam cut, fired in promixity,” Tarkos said.
Bria blinked agreement.
No other ship could be detected in the vicinity. The starsleeve moved alone, under its own power, a bright silver thistle in the sunless dark. Tarkos reviewed all the interior views that the starsleeve could transmit, while they floated a kilomeasure away. Such views could be faked, but it made little sense to fake views like these: empty halls, empty rooms, system lights blinking on the silent bridge, the bridge itself scarred and busy with repair robots. Gowgoroup huddled despondently in a corner of its imprisoning quarters. And Tiklik’al’Takas stood in the center of its room, as if nothing had happened. Only, Tiklik was missing a leg, and the entrance to its quarters had been cut neatly away. Ship’s robots worked in the gap, rebuilding the door.
Bria linked with the starsleeve’s coms, and then funneled a message into Tiklik’s room.
“Happened?” she asked.
Tiklik did not flinch, as if the voice from the ceiling had been expected. It transmitted its reply. “An Ulltrian ship, crewed by Kriani, seized the starsleeve. They boarded. They were rich with radioactive isotopes from the seas of the ocean planet. Their ship leaked power like a quasar. They offered me a choice.”
“Where are Kriani now?” Bria asked.
“At the current time they most likely will have achieved terminal velocity into the atmosphere of the brown dwarf. It would have been interesting to observe the spectral patterns of their heat decay.”
_____
Bria contacted the Executive ship and shared the coordinates where the remaining part of the Ulltrian ship likely still orbited. Then they docked into the starsleeve. Bria pulled herself quickly down the halls with Tarkos in silent tow. The atmosphere integrity had returned to normal, but they kept their armor on.
The Commander went to Gowgoroup’s quarters first.
“Some of you still live,” the slugs gurgled in surprise at the two Harmonizers, after Bria opened the door. The leader slug waved it eyes, considering them both. “But the other human, it is no doubt dead.”
Bria hissed and closed the door. She went past Tiklik’s gaping door, and inspected the hull breach. The ship’s small robots crawled like termites over the thin, shining layer of new metal , layering on new hull and patching sensors and connections. Bria tapped at the thin shell that the bots had made.
“Sufficient,” she said.
Tarkos lifted his helmet. Bria huffed and did the same. The air was dry and cool and thin, a dramatic change after the hot hours spent in armor.
They went to the bridge. The screen was shattered. Robots crawled over the ceiling, welding a panel in place. Bria ignored the repairs and sat down. She set in a trajectory out of the plane of the two planets, picking a path that would let the starsleeve
move into faster than light travel toward Neelee space. Tarkos made the systems adjustments necessary to speed their way. When they were under power and accelerating at an even Sussurat-g, Bria immersed herself in systems checks, rooting through the computers for any harm the Kriani might have managed to leave behind. Tarkos rose, without a word, and left the bridge.
He walked to Tiklik’s cabin. The ancient AI remained dutifully behind the open door, but now in slow time, a statue leaning to one side. It sped up to something like human velocity when Tarkos stepped over the small robots in the doorway, their welding torches sparking.
“You return,” it said. “You are less massive. You have been exposed to an atmosphere high in xenon. You bear traces of thorium.” The robot shifted slightly side to side. “I detect no evidence to corroborate that human Pala Eydis is within the starsleeve. Where is human Pala Eydis?”
Tarkos felt unsure of why he’d come here. He had imagined asking the robot, During all those hours and all those weeks when Pala talked with you, standing with you in the corridor or sitting near you on the bridge, what did you talk about? And he wanted to ask the robot to read the monument plates; Tiklik had sensors it could slip into the narrow cracks between the folds of metal. But he did not ask about either of these things. He had no questions for the robot. Not now. He just wanted to tell someone, anyone, who had liked Pala, even if only a little bit, what had happened.
“Pala Eydis is dead,” Tarkos said. It was the first time he’d said the words, and they sounded bitter, even cruel, in his ear. “Killed by an Ulltrian. And its robots.”
Tiklik vibrated a moment, seeming to struggle with its own bodily control, before it said. “My function will be impeded without her.”
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