“I fear I am too old; I cannot nip this insurrection in the bud,” he sighed. “But I might—if you so desire—be able to infiltrate the seditious organization in the hope of turning aside a potentially catastrophic blow aimed your way, should such a blow come. I trust that the would-be rebels will not move against you, but that trust does not extend to the plan’s architects because, frankly, I do not know enough about them.”
“Tremblay and Guo,” McKnight mused.
“That is the assumption from which I have been operating,” he nodded.
“How do I know you’re not playing both sides?”
He chuckled, “You would indeed have made a fine Hold Mistress, Commander. Of course I am playing both sides—how else is a man to assure his continued survival but by cloaking himself in the friendship of those more powerful than himself? Your question should not be regarding my duplicity—the query should instead pertain to my predictability as it relates to your own plans.”
She quirked a brow, “You’re saying I should trust you?”
“Trust is a…complex word,” he said hesitantly. “We have several clearer words in our native tongue which convey concepts like ‘predictability,’ ‘mutual need,’ ‘love,’ and, of course, ‘friendship’—the last of which is a requisite of any high-functioning society, unlike its predecessors on that short list. So, no, I would not suggest you should ‘trust’ me. I would suggest it to be in your best interests to correctly assess my predictability—and I hope that I might even earn an opportunity to establish some mutual claim of friendship between us. Thus,” he splayed his hands, “my supplication at this juncture.”
“Supplication? Is that what you call this?” she asked measuredly. “You haven’t approached me once—not once—since we left the Spineward Sectors. You waited, biding your time, until you had something to leverage before coming to me.”
He cocked his head fractionally in seemingly genuine confusion, “Is that not the proper conduct of an aspiring mate? Of what possible value is one who cannot demonstrate his worth in a meaningful fashion to the object of his affections?”
“Ignoring the admittedly pathetic attempt to sweep me off my feet,” McKnight forcibly rolled her eyes, “I’m still left with the question: why wait until now to contribute?”
“If you will recall,” he said measuredly, “I was instrumental in identifying and neutralizing the impostors aboard the Rainbow. I have also spent considerable effort to mentor Nikomedes—who I consider one of my few true friends in all of creation—along with a select group of other Tracto-ans. Those efforts are what enabled me to uncover the insidious plot likely headed by Mr.’s Tremblay and Guo.”
“Quid pro quo arrangements don’t seem like genuine friendship to me,” McKnight chided.
“Words can mean different things to different people.”
“So what are you offering me?” she asked, pushing aside the preamble—along with the wholly unexpected sexual advance which he had cleverly wrapped into the body of their conversation.
“My services,” he replied simply. “Aside from stopping this insurrection in its tracks, I doubt there are any real limitations on my ability to interact with or modify it in some way you find desirable.”
McKnight narrowed her eyes thoughtfully as she drummed the fingers of her right hand—which was still positioned near the holdout blaster—on the desk. Eventually, she arrived at what she thought was the ideal response to his offer, “You’ve clearly got more experience dealing with insurrectionists than I do—what do you suggest?”
His lips parted in a warm, yet predatory smile, “Perhaps I was wrong to say you would have made a fine Hold Mistress—one of their ilk would never stoop to asking the advice of a man in matters of intrigue.” He produced a small piece of paper from concealment and slid it across the desk, “This is my suggestion, Commander. I hope it meets with your approval.”
She maintained eye contact with him while gathering the scrap of paper—using her left hand—and after she had plucked it from the desk she belatedly scanned its contents. She found herself nodding along with his proposal halfway through the reading of it, and by the end she was even smiling in spite of herself. “This will have to take place in complete secrecy,” she eventually demurred, “and without support—overt or otherwise—from this office or anyone under my command.”
“Of course,” Nazoraios nodded agreeably, “which leaves us the issue of reciprocity.”
“Excuse me?”
“I am indeed an old man,” he said in muted annoyance—which was clearly directed at himself and not at her, “but I think you will find me capable of performing in any position you might see fit to…what is the word your people use…” he furrowed his brow before finding the proper word, “ah yes: in any position you might see fit to deploy me.”
“That’s a dangerous tongue you’ve got, old man,” she quipped, finding herself more than a little intrigued at his persistence.
“It has served me well—and I trust it will continue to do so.”
She mulled it over before nodding, “This meets with my approval. As for ‘reciprocity,’ I’m not about to agree to anything just yet. But…” she allowed with a dramatic pause, “I will say that any man who could do what you suggest yourself capable of doing in this plan,” she waved the scrap of paper, “would have earned himself my complete and undivided attention—for a short while, at the very least.”
“Then it is settled,” he smiled, standing from the chair. “For all our sakes, Commander, I sincerely hope my assistance is unnecessary.”
“As do I,” she said with a playful note as the hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
Nazoraios bowed deeply—too deeply for McKnight’s comfort—and turned on his heel to leave the room.
After he had gone, she exhaled loudly. “Not even in your thirties and you’re already flirting with the golden age crowd,” she muttered to herself, “just how clichéd can you get, Mel?”
“This is odd,” Guo said with uncharacteristic tension, causing Tremblay to drop his own task and give his associate his full attention.
“What is it?” Tremblay asked, making his way over to Guo’s side.
“The Cultural Ethics Committee just filed the results of a closed session,” Guo replied as he pulled up the intercepted report of the highly-secretive committee’s latest gathering. “By a vote of six to five it grants Cydonia direct stewardship over its cultural heritage museums.”
“We were expecting that vote to pass,” Tremblay said with a frown, failing to see the other man’s point. Lu’s entire mission to this point had been to collect the necessary support for them to liberate the Elder Fragment from Cydonia’s most secret and best-fortified facility.
“We were…” Guo allowed before magnifying a slice of the record which immediately made Tremblay realize why his colleague was ill at east.
“But we weren’t expecting Senator Bellucci to be in attendance…she hasn’t attended one of these meetings in two years,” Tremblay mused darkly. “Run the simulations—“
“They are already underway,” Guo said tersely. “Preliminary results confirm our suspicions.”
Tremblay closed his eyes for a moment as a whole host of post-operation options went up in proverbial smoke right before his mind’s eye. “Fine,” he snapped his eyes open and shook his head, “but this doesn’t change anything from our end. Not yet, anyway.”
“It does not,” Guo affirmed, “however, it does limit our alternatives in terms of our future relationship with House Raubach.”
“I’m not going to be snapped up and collared like a pet by some would-be Empress,” Tremblay reiterated firmly. “I don’t care if that happens to be Bethany or a blasted Triumvir herself—we’ve got our mission, and we can’t let anything move us off our course…no matter how much more difficult this might make things.”
“It is reassuring to hear you say so,” Guo said with evident relief. “However…” he began hesitantly.
“I know,” Tremblay grumbled, “it means we need to accelerate our evacuation protocols.”
Guo nodded grimly as he pulled up a set of constantly-adjusting numbers, “The projections now place the odds at sixty point three percent that House Bellucci will call the Imperial Fleet down on this facility before we complete the primary objective of our current mission phase.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Tremblay said sourly, casting a look around the base’s nerve center and sighing. “Oh well, it can’t be helped now. How are the recruiting efforts going now that the droids hightailed out of here?”
“The droids’ departure was unorthodox, but not entirely unexpected,” Guo said, his former unflappable demeanor reasserting itself, “thankfully we have made significant inroads with a small sub-clique of the Tracto-ans—primarily in the person of Nazoraios, who does his best to assure us that we will have his full support when the time comes.”
“Here’s hoping we won’t need it,” Tremblay said heavily. “If McKnight’s either smarter or stupider than I think she is, things could get awfully ugly around here for her people.”
“I can only repackage this information so many ways, fleshbag,” Waldo said irritably as Tiberius walked the dark, silent tunnels which had formerly housed all of the moon’s droids, “they are gone—all of them.”
“They can’t have left,” Tiberius objected, “their chassis’ alone would generate enough local EM interference for us to have tracked their movement.”
“Such a fleshbag,” Waldo sighed, actually face-palming with his spindly, hand-like appendage slapping against his optical receptors, “but I suppose it is an inherent perspective-based failure of your design: a droid—unlike a fleshbag—is not its chassis, neither is it inextricably linked to its chassis, as your experience reassembling me should have amply demonstrated to even your pitiful gelatinous neural circuitry.”
Tiberius stopped in his tracks, “You’re saying…they smuggled their droid cores out of here?” His jaw clenched tightly as he realized what had happened, “I wonder who gave them that brilliant idea.”
Waldo’s optical receptors flickered, much as a human’s eyelids might blink, and in a tone that was laden with patently false incredulity said, “You think I had something to do with this?”
“Jack into the local data storage units,” Tiberius said after taking a few seconds to enhance his calm. “I want to know exactly what happened to them and where they went. As far as I’m concerned, they could still be down here—and the last thing I need is three thousand armed droids mucking up our plans.”
“Fine,” Waldo sniffed as he floated over to a nearby access panel, “but if I had been somehow involved in the conception of a plan to evacuate my fellow droids, I would have been too clever for any trace of my involvement to be recorded within these data banks.”
A nearby monitor sprang to life, and the image of a humanoid droid appeared on it. “Greetings,” the feminine voice of the droid said, “we are most sorry for our abrupt and unannounced egress, but after consulting with our new friend Waldo we were convinced that his plan was indeed the best available course of action.”
Waldo recoiled as Tiberius’ glare fell upon him. “I…uh…” Waldo stammered before turning and studiously ignoring Tiberius’ wrathful gaze.
“However,” the droid on the monitor continued blithely, “we wish to assure Captain McKnight and her subordinate units that all preparations have been appropriately made in accordance with all issued directives. An automated grav-cart will arrive shortly to convey you to the Key, which is now available for your inspection and perusal. Either Captain McKnight or her backup command unit, Lieutenant Spalding, are allowed within the Key at this time—though you are free to modify the security restrictions to your own specifications once you have gained access to the Key’s control center. We are most grateful for the synergy we have experienced during our limited time together, and look forward to future interactions of a similar nature.”
The monitor went dead and, just as promised, a grav-cart thrummed down the tunnel and came to a stop before them.
“I can expl—“ Waldo began, but Tiberius wasn’t interested.
“Get in,” he snapped, and after they had boarded the cart it sped off down the tunnel, gaining speed at a frightening rate until finally it began to decelerate after several minutes of unchecked acceleration—during which time the surrounding tunnels went by in a blur.
When the cart came to a stop, it was at a seemingly nondescript door that was largely identical to the ones in the human-occupied portion of the base several miles up.
Tiberius swiped his wrist-link across the door’s access panel, and the door slid aside to reveal what looked like a long airlock beyond, with another door—this one of decidedly different construction—at the far end.
The short corridor was well-lit, and Tiberius made his way down it to the second door. He swiped his wrist-link across the panel built into the frame, but was rewarded with a noise that was clearly one of rejection.
“Access denied,” a monotone voice echoed as the first door slid shut behind him, “biometric sample required—please input the appendage of your choice.”
A six inch square panel folded inward below the access panel, and Tiberius ground his teeth in annoyance before placing his hand inside. A series of rapid-fire pricking sensations blossomed across his hand, and a second later there was a congratulatory sound.
“Welcome, Lieutenant Spalding,” the voice intoned as the door slid open, “please wait.”
Tiberius watched in unvarnished fascination as the metal door receded like an iris, revealing a warbling mass of faintly glowing, crystalline material beyond. That material shimmered and shifted, slowly receding as it did so, until the thirty foot long corridor beyond was clear.
He made his way into the now-dark tunnel, activating his wrist-link’s light as he did so. The chamber at the end of the tunnel was so dark that it seemed to swallow the meager light of his wrist-link.
The sharp, whistling sound which Waldo made as they reached the end of the tunnel made Tiberius stop in his tracks. The droid then said—in a decidedly reverent voice, “Oh my…”
“What is it?” Tiberius asked, peering into the impenetrable blackness at the end of the tunnel.
“It is…perfect,” Waldo said after a dramatic delay.
Then the chamber beyond was illuminated by a bank of criss-crossing lights which activated in dramatic sequence, until the entire inner surface of the chamber was illuminated so brightly that Tiberius had to briefly shield his dark-adjusted eyes.
When he lowered his hand from his face, he could not help but echo the whistle which Waldo had made a moment earlier. The chamber was a perfect sphere—that much was obvious—and its inner surface was lined with some sort of silvery reflective material. That material caused the light from the bank of emitters scattered throughout the equatorial plane of the chamber to cover every last millimeter of the spherical, cavernous chamber’s interior.
But it was the sheer size of the chamber which was most noteworthy. Tiberius’ human brain was unable to ascertain its precise dimensions due to the strange reflective qualities of the inner surface. Thankfully his wrist-link’s rangefinder managed to get an approximate diameter after a few sweeps of the colossal chamber.
“Two miles…” Tiberius breathed in surprise.
“One point nine seven,” Waldo corrected before mulishly adding, “but who’s counting?”
“So…” Tiberius said, his voice oddly echoing across the cavern as he spoke, “this is what it takes to kill a god?”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” Tiberius shook his head as he looked along the equatorial plane of the chamber, seeing a narrow catwalk which led to a small, instrument and console-laden platform a hundred feet from the tunnel where he stood. “Let’s take a quick look at the equipment and report back to the Captain—she’s going to want to see this.”
Chapte
r XVI: Echoes of Light
“This is it?” Lu Bu asked after the Chief Archivist of Cydonia had reverently lifted the lid of the box which supposedly held the Elder Fragment which they had come to retrieve. “It looks like a data slate,” she said sourly.
“It is,” the Archivist—a woman named Dench—said with a hint of annoyance.
“This is supposed to be an Elder Fragment?” Yide asked, having taken a break from bridge duties to indulge his curiosity. “I thought it would be…alien.”
“Appearances are often deceiving,” Dench chided. “This data slate was present when the Elder Protocols were initiated on a now-destroyed space station which had become overrun by vengeful droids. It—and, as far as I am aware, it alone—bears a living, accessible record of the Elder Protocols in action.”
“Isn’t that impossible?” Shiyuan asked, his eyes wide as he looked down into the box. “The Elder Protocols are supposed to self-consume on activation—they’re a virtual ‘scorched earth’ mechanism that purges any and all data systems they come in contact with, aren't they?”
“They are indeed that, among other things,” Dench agreed. “The truth is that humanity does not understand the Elder Protocols to any meaningful degree beyond your summation: they appear to be inherently toxic to every known virtual system, and can spread faster than our best detection systems. Of course, there are rumors of them causing all sorts of unsubstantiated effects but that is all they have ever been proven to be: rumors.”
“Wait a minute…” Fisher interjected, “you’re saying that this device—this fifty year old data slate,” he quirked an eyebrow incredulously, “somehow survived contact with the Elder Protocols when our best gear gets chewed up by them in seconds?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Dench allowed. “However, I must stress that this record is almost certainly incomplete—and that accessing it for the purposes of duplicating the information contained therein has proven to be every bit as destructive as exposure to the Elder Protocols themselves would be. I must therefore insist that it remain in my direct custody until such a time as you are prepared to employ it.”
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