by TS Hottle
"Entering wormhole now," said Friese.
Normally, if a wormhole didn't render a person space sick, one noticed nothing. A ship would open through a wide aperture in space with plenty of room on all sides. Even when ships projected their own wormholes, the deck did not vibrate. It would be the same as if it stood still.
The deck bucked and swayed beneath her feet, like a poorly maintained maglev or a wheeled train. Suicide grabbed the edge of a nearby console pod to steady herself. "Something wrong?"
"We're prying open a collapsed wormhole," said Bellona, "with a terminus above the galactic plane. This will not go smoothly."
"It might even collapse," said Friese. "So, make sure you're serious when you want to do this."
For once, Suicide felt ill inside a wormhole.
Friese focused on the helm. "Coming up on terminus in five… four… three… two… one…"
The main viewer switched to a real-time, real-color display of the bow. The stars had a cloudy quality to them, as though a thin mist somehow dimmed them. Only when the disk of the Milky Way passed across the display did Suicide realize the stars were actually distant galaxies.
"Looks like we lost attitude coming out of the terminus," said Friese. "Let me get a fix on Thule, and I'll get us righted."
The starts shifted once more, and a blue-and-white sphere, partially hidden by darkness, drifted into view. The oceans had a tinge of indigo, an effect, Suicide once heard, of Thule's orange sun. The sight of a world similar to her own unsettled her as it stood out from a starless background. It was like seeing a Gelt for the first time. They looked so similar to humans that the two species often gave each other a sense of unease. Seeing a near replica of Tian in strange sunlight isolated from the rest of the galaxy had the same effect.
"Halmont," Bellona called out, "send a hail to Thule traffic control. Let them know this is an emergency."
The woman at communications began working her console. After almost a minute, she said, "No response, Captain. We're getting a connection, but traffic control is not…"
Another crew member stood in the tactical pod. "Incoming!"
One of her fellow tactical crew chimed in. "Kinetic device, looks like rail-gun launched, bearing 213 mark 43."
"Move us two thousand meters nadir." Bellona moved into the command pod and motioned for Suicide to join her. "All hands, brace, brace, brace. Incoming kinetic device."
The alarm klaxons jolted.
Suicide's palm tattoo tingled. "Commander," came Boolay's voice. "Why are we going into battle?"
Suicide quickly pulled her hand to her face. "Not now, Boolay. We're under fire."
Thule shifted slightly on the viewscreen as Friese "dropped" the ship keelward.
"CNC, Flight," came a rare male voice over the speakers. "Cap, do we need to scramble fighters? I thought we were going to Thule."
"Stand by, Flight." Bellona called back. "Halmont, give me a hot mic."
"You're on, Captain," said Halmont.
"This is Captain Macha Bellona of the MS Bova," she said. "We are on an emergency mission for the Metisian Republic. Lieutenant Commander Cui Yun is accompanying Jayne Best. She is in need of medical attention available only on your world."
"Projectile not changing course," one of the tactical crew called out.
"Thule Control," Bellona said, "this is Bova. We need your help." She stood waiting for a response. The CNC went silent as no further kinetics appeared, but no one responded either. "Thule…"
"Bova," said a male voice that sounded annoyed, "may we speak to Jayne Best?"
The projectile disappeared from scopes with a brilliant flash on the viewscreen.
Bellona turned to Suicide and gave her a curt nod.
"Control," said Suicide, "this is Commander Cui Yun. My mission is on behalf of the Amargosan Provisional Government. Madam Best is in stasis. An organization called Juno attempted to harvest her bone marrow. She is…"
"Commander Cui." The voice now sounded more excited. "Please accompany Madam Best to the surface. Once the Bova has achieved a parking orbit, we will send you coordinates. Come alone with Madam Best's stasis chamber. Bring only an attending physician if that's necessary, but no one else. Control out."
The silence in the CNC seemed more palpable now. Even Suicide found herself staring at the misty orb of Thule, unable to speak.
"Well," JT said finally, "welcome to Thule."
"Why did they fire on us?" asked Dr. Bradley as Suicide navigated entry into Thule's atmosphere. "I thought they were friendly."
"Friendly worlds don't collapse the only means of reaching them across interstellar distances." Outside, a yellow glow had formed over the nose of the Goldeneye. She wished Bradley were a pilot or JT or Boolay had been allowed to accompany her. The Zaran ship did not handle well for the solo pilot. "The Thulians want us to deal only with their diaspora and to leave the homeworld alone."
"But why?" asked Bradley. "I'm Thulian, and I don't understand."
"Then go back and look at Jayne Best when we land. Things like that upset them. Hell, it upsets me, and I'm just a retired pilot living along a rural lake on a still-devastated farming colony."
Bradley gave her a strange chuckle. "You're more than that, Commander Cui. Captain Bellona doesn't take to newcomers on her ship the way she has you. She even treats your protégé as her own."
"Captain Bellona and I have a history." Suicide felt the G forces build as she nosed the ship into a steeper dive. "The Polygamy Wars formed a lot of bonds that cannot easily be broken."
"Any bonds you've broken over the years?"
She sensed the doctor was not so much interested in her history as distracting himself from the fireball now engulfing the ship. "Ask Lucius Kray."
"Who?"
Had Kray met someone who did not know who he was, even by reputation alone, it would have infuriated the late warlord. It made Suicide's face stretch with a grin even her stoic nature could not suppress. "Doctor, I think we're going to get along just fine."
A doctor named Capaldi met them at Thule's Capital Terminal, a sprawling spaceport now mostly quiet. Once, it had serviced the entire Compact and a few systems beyond, as the Yaphit Pass had provided the only safe passage to the system. With the Pass collapsed, the terminal sat empty yet still maintained.
Capaldi stood at just under two meters with thinning sandy blonde hair. Without rejuvenation, Suicide would have placed him in his late thirties. She already knew the man to be well over four hundred, old enough to have seen the dawn of the Interstellar Era as an adult, or at least a teenager.
He met Suicide's gaze. "Commander, thank you." To Bradley, he said, "How bad?"
"I'm not sure how she's alive," said Bradley. "Is it something in how we perform your treatment?"
Capaldi examined the stasis chamber with Jayne Best asleep inside it. "The treatment we have perfected gives humans incredible regenerative powers." He frowned. "But draining bone marrow from a person would hamper that." To Suicide, he said, "Who put her in stasis?"
Orderlies rushed out from a nearby hangar and took hold of the stasis chamber. Capaldi and Bradley fell in step behind them. Suicide followed.
"She was in bad shape on Farigha," she said as they worked up to a trot. "She regained consciousness when we rescued her from Walton."
Capaldi stopped, causing Bradley to almost stumble. "Walton? I was on Walton the day the government collapsed. Who took her there?"
Suicide felt her jaw tighten, along with a knot in her gut. "The Grand Dimaj of the Marilynist Temple. Tried to tell me he did it for her own safety."
They resumed their trot into the hangar.
"If it were up to me, that man would get a bad rejuve treatment on his next run." Capaldi's tone had gone cold. "One of the failed attempts from a couple of centuries ago."
"What happened with those?" asked Suicide.
"Some of the worst cases melted into slime, Commander," said Bradley. "Or they morphed into one big cancer tumor
."
Suicide shivered.
The summons came to Suicide while she waited at the clinic for word on Jayne Best. She would not be going to Founders' House, the seat of government on Thule, nor to any military installation. Instead, the driverless car took her to a cottage outside the capital perched on a cliff overlooking the indigo waters of the Easter Ocean.
She left the clinic at noon. Even with the sun high in the sky and brilliantly shining, the color made it seem like perpetual twilight. The average age on Thule was two hundred twenty-four, with the bulk of settlers born on Earth. She wondered how they got used to the strange sunlight. She had grown up under a yellow sun, the sun that shown above Aphrodite, the same type that shown on Earth, Mars, and Amargosa.
The house sat at the end of a long dirt road. The car deposited her outside a neat little cottage someone once called a Cape Cod. The instructions told her to head around to the back. There, she found a woman crouched in a garden, a trowel in her hand. She wore a loose blouse and a peasant skirt with thick gloves covered in soil. Standing, she revealed a face that had not changed since her late twenties, but a posture that somehow carried the weight of centuries. She moved with the energy of one on the cusp of thirty but with the deliberate grace of the elderly.
"I'd meet you in town," she said without preamble, "but as I told DeMarco, I'm retired. Maybe if we reopen the Pass, I'll start a new career." She stood, took off the gloves, and offered a hand. "Commander Cui, I'm Suri Mongano, one of the founders of Thule."
"The Founder." Suicide realized it was like meeting Fu Xi, one of the legendary first emperors of China. Or King Arthur. Or at least Neil Armstrong.
"Please," she said. "I get more credit than I deserve just because I managed to live almost five hundred years." She threw the gloves aside. "And for hitching a ride with Maurice Dazar when he found the Yaphit Pass. You garden, Cui? Yun? What do you like to be called?"
She felt her face flush. "Most people call me Suicide."
"Oh. You're her. That explains how Jayne got extracted from that cesspool." Suri gestured to the cottage. "I wanted to personally thank you for bringing her to us. That was very brave of you."
"My protégé deserves some of the credit." Suicide felt like a schoolgirl trying to explain something to an absent-minded teacher. "And Lady Yamato from Bonaparte."
Suri gave a non-committal grunt. "Lady Yamato. Distinguished herself in the Amargosan liberation. And your protégé. He's Maurice's…" She counted on her fingers. "Well, he's Maurice's descendant. He lives here, you know. The founder of Dasarius Interstellar. Probably wise to leave the boy on the Bova. Maurice is still upset young Mr. Austin walked away from his birthright. Tea?"
Suicide nodded but said little.
"He's aware of you, Maurice is." Suri put a kettle on an old-style gas stove. "Knows you took Austin under your wing, protected him during the war, turned him into a warrior. He almost went back before we collapsed the Pass."
Suicide stared at the methane stove, a relic. She wondered if it was even safe to have an appliance that burned explosive gas inside a home. Then again, her shack had some rather primitive implements. She burned wood in the colder months but used little power otherwise. "Is that what this is about?"
Suri turned away from the stove. "Oh, no. After all you've been through, I would not inflict Maurice on you. You're here because you brought Jayne Best back to us. Do you understand why she is so important?"
"I know she is one of the first to receive the amortality treatment the Orags use."
Suri laughed. "Far from it. There are three humans over the age of five hundred. Three. One of them is old enough to have lived through the first SARS pandemics, and as an adult. But he is not the first to receive the Orag treatment. He became amortal around the time I was born, but the means of his transformation were radically different." She moved to a cupboard and took out two mugs. One, to Suicide's surprise, had an earlier logo of the Compact Navy on it. "The other received the Orag treatment, and it nearly killed him. They took him to Gohem just before the Earth-Mars War. He returned an angry, paranoid man. You may have met him and not realized it."
Suicide wondered whom she meant.
"He and I underwent the treatment three centuries ago. We met just after the World Wars ended when we both volunteered to be test subjects for the first Homo sapiens trials of rejuvenation treatments." She looked Suicide over. "You haven't rejuved in ten years. Yet I'll bet people don't notice."
"I get that a lot," said Suicide.
"Anyway, I think you'd be a good candidate to become one of us."
"One of whom?"
"Thulian."
"With all due respect, ma'am, I don't want to live on a planet cut off from the rest of the galaxy."
Suri smiled. "We're everywhere, Suicide. You know this. Jayne Best runs the Clinic we set up on Amargosa for this very purpose. And you're fighting my old friend's attempts to stop what we're doing."
"Which is?"
"Make humans amortal. First, we increase our numbers through treatment and through breeding. Then we mate with the rest of humanity. It's a lot easier for us to bring the present generations along if we are their children. Jayne is both a leader in this, and she is breeding stock. She even made her husband one of us."
"How?"
"Some of Jayne Best, at her own insistence, is part of her husband. Mind you, he was suffering from a severe case of radiation poisoning from the blast that killed his first wife. Jayne saw it as her responsibility to save Douglas and to help him do his work."
"Which is?"
"To stop Juno." The kettle whistled behind Suri. She found two tea pouches in a ceramic pot near the stove and placed them in the mugs, then poured the boiling water over them. "Earl Gray. Amazing how it tastes grown in this soil." She handed Suicide the Navy mug and seemed surprised when she drank it black.
"So, Thule exists to stop Juno. Why cut yourself off?"
Suri moved to a table and gestured for Suicide to do the same. "Other way around. I came to Thule three hundred fifty years ago to die. I dutifully rejuved every five years, common now, but once only the privilege of the rich, and before that, those who volunteered for the experiments. The Orags came, curious how a stable wormhole could exist between Etrusca and a planet so far outside the bulk of the galaxy. The gravitational conditions to form it should not have existed. I left only to join their experiment on Sapiens in Antarctica. At that point, I was over a century old and willing to die if it meant furthering their knowledge of longevity. I may look young, Suicide. I certainly feel young physically. But longevity makes one tired in ways you can't imagine yet. I've accepted leadership roles for this world many times, but each time I grow more and more exhausted."
"Again, why me?" Suicide stared at her host. "Why am I here to see you?"
"You led six very young adults during the occupation of Amargosa."
Suicide frowned. "Five. Lady Yamato joined me during the liberation effort."
"Just the same, she is one of them, the so-called Children of Amargosa. Two of them are now part of us, but the others have turned us down." Suri stood. "Lady Yamato stands to become a queen, but I guarantee she will break the mold for that role. Austin has turned his back on his birthright, but the First Citizen of Hanar is extremely fond of him. We suspect they will eventually come together." She smiled. "Madam Lattus does not realize it, but her interrupted academic career may save her own species."
"And the others?"
"Nardino lives with one of only three non-primate intelligences we know of, at least one of three that aren't simply reptilian analogs of primates. Duffy does not realize it yet, but his work at MIT and with the Compact Navy will open up the galaxy to all the species in this corner of the galaxy. And they all follow your lead without question."
Suicide frowned. "JT questions me."
"That's because he's always around you. He's benefitted most from your wisdom." Suri held her in her gaze. "You're close, but not lovers. I can't ev
en see that happening between you two."
Suicide felt her cheeks turn warm. She tried not to laugh. "We're like oil and water. That would most definitely never work."
"No, but the bond between you two is very strong." Suri tilted her head. "He hasn't seen his mother since his accidental move to Amargosa, has he?"
"No. Refuses to go back, despite prodding from me, from the First Citizen, even from his father."
A smile formed on Suri's face. "You're mother and son. He even calls you mother on occasion."
The warmth in Suicide's cheeks grew more intense. "Goes both ways."
"And he went after Jayne Best at your side without question."
JT, she realized, did very little without Suicide's input. He followed her lead, actually, though these days, he challenged her more. "You brought me out here to talk about JT Austin?"
"I brought you out here to recruit you for the work." She stood. "Cui Yun, you belong with us. Not here on Thule, but part of our diaspora. And those six young adults who clung to you just as their childhoods ended, they belong to us, too. Davra Andraste is already one of us. So is Eric Yuwono, if only because he was dying from radiation exposure."
"I have no interest in amortality," said Suicide. "One of the reasons I moved to Amargosa was to let myself die naturally, to age without further rejuvenation."
"Had the Gelt not invaded, rejuvenation, at least the type most people have nowadays, would have reached Amargosa within five years. It was almost a core world at that point, despite Mars's best efforts to keep its breadbasket." She put her hands on Suicide's shoulders. "Humanity is at a crossroads. There are three distinct species of human emerging to replace the Homo sapiens we were born as. Thule exists to bring the first about, amortal humans, still in their bodies, but with a resilience few species can match. There are artificial intelligences that began life as human. For obvious reasons, they've either kept a low profile or created personas to disguise their nature. Even they fear this development could go wrong. And there is now a hybrid of the two: Human consciousness inside a synthetic body. Less common, more dangerous to the occupant of that body, but at least two roam our home stars. And Suicide… Yun… You don't have to become one of us. If it is your wish to fade from the universe, we'll respect that. We'll mourn your loss when the time comes, but we'll honor that. But these six exceptional people have roles to play. Two became part of us so we could save their lives. The others we need you to guide to us. Will you help us?"