She set aside the towel and stood, drawing him to his feet as well. Now there was nothing between them but a few thin pieces of clothing. Her tank top was easily removed, but his T-shirt tangled around his arms as he tried to pull it off. She laughed as she pushed the fabric upward, until he was finally free. Then her body was pressed against his, hands teasing, exploring, parting the last garments and pushing them aside, until there was nothing left to remove. She eased up onto the table for support and then drew him to her, her long, lean legs wrapping around his hips, her hand guiding him. He thrust into her slowly at first, savoring the moist heat that enveloped him, then faster, again and again, losing himself in the rhythm of it. There was fear and pain and triumph and desire in every stroke, and he grasped her by the hips to pull her forward, so he could thrust even more deeply. Her lips met his and her arms wrapped around him, and then there was nothing but the two of them moving together, sharing pleasure as two people can only when they have looked upon the face of Death together, and lived to tell the tale.
Beware trust, for it is a double-edged sword.
NICOLE MAKI
The Pursuit of Power
HARMONY NODE
HYDRA STATION
“KIA TALEN is here to see you, sir.”
Dominic Saito put down the Hassiri charge gun he’d been inspecting, setting it alongside the other weapons his people had commandeered from a corporate armory. “Send her in.”
The woman who entered was small and wiry and dressed in her usual black: the kind of person who might flit in and out of shadows unseen. She bowed her head respectfully.
“You have news of Ivar?” Saito asked.
“As you ordered, he was accosted and badly beaten, but left alive. I arranged for him to be retrieved by a whore whose connection to Saito isn’t public knowledge. Ivar knew her from before, so when she came across his injured body and brought him to a place of safety, he would ask no questions about her motives. As he was too badly injured to recover on his own, she asked where he wanted to go for proper treatment. Only one of the great Houses would have the kind of equipment he needed, and Saito was the obvious choice. She brought him to our medical facility.”
“How long before he’s on his feet again?”
“The medics estimate a week of downtime, at least.”
“How much will he remember of the attack?”
“He wasn’t given anything to fog his memory, if that’s what you’re asking. But he didn’t see anything he needs to forget. The agents who attacked him all wore faux-skin masks, so he has no idea what they really look like. One of them wore the badge of House Cassini on her jacket, so if he remembers that much it won’t be our House that he suspects.”
Saito nodded his satisfaction. “Cassini has approached him in the past, so that will play well. He won’t take it kindly that they tried to use violence to force his hand. All good.” He leaned back in his chair. “Hydra is a dangerous place for the unaligned. Now, hopefully, he’ll understand that. He can’t go it alone anymore, and Saito is his best choice for an ally.”
“Are you sure that’ll be enough?” When he raised an eyebrow she added quickly, “I’m sorry, but you know he’s a stubborn asshole.”
Saito chuckled softly. “Paying us back for all that medical attention will take a while. After that . . . I have some new leverage to help clinch the deal. And for all his bluster, I can’t imagine he’ll want to risk another beatdown like this one. How does the saying go? The writing is on the wall.”
He smiled. “I will own that stubborn asshole.”
Control of resources = survival and reproduction = continuance of the species. That is an equation embedded in the DNA of every animal on Earth.
The human hunger for power needs no more excuse than that.
L. D. SHALE
Heritage of the Beast
HARMONY NODE
INSHIP: ARTEMIS
CONTENTMENT. SORROW. The echo of pleasure. The ache of loneliness.
Sitting at the pilot’s console, watching the rise and fall of Micah’s brainwaves on her screen, Ru struggled to fit her feelings into a single category. But the task was hopeless. It was like looking down from a tightrope and trying to figure out how to dismount on both sides at once. She’d have to cut herself up the middle to manage it.
There was peace within her now, such as she hadn’t known since returning to the outworlds. The empty space that Tully’s laughter had once filled was still empty, but it was less dark now, less urgent. For one brief moment she had been herself again, exulting in the heady aftermath of death-risk. And this time there had been someone to share it with: a rare pleasure. But it wouldn’t last. Even if she decided that this game-designer-turned-adventurer was worth spending time with, where would that lead? She’d go crazy if she stayed this close to the ainniq, surrounded by the stations and ships and crowds of the outworlds, hungering for the freedom of deep space and the mysteries of lost colonies. He’d go crazy if he left the ainniq, wandering in the vast emptiness that was deep space, hungering for news of the newest technology and gamers to test his creations. Between those two options there simply was no middle ground.
Some pleasures in life were ephemeral: the bloom of a flower, the blaze of a sunset, the shimmering of a phosphorescent lake. One savored such things for as long as they lasted and then let them go. That was the theory, anyway.
Micah’s brainwave frequency was in Beta territory, which was what you’d expect from a man struggling to analyze software that was capable of destroying whole worlds. Now and then the frequency dropped a bit, suggesting a brief moment of mental relaxation. It never went into the Alpha range, though. That’s what she was watching for. When somebody who’d been pushed to the point of physical exhaustion told you he wanted to lie down in a dark room with his eyes shut to concentrate on a problem, somebody else had better watch over him, to make sure he didn’t fall asleep.
Once more the frequency dipped, and this time she heard the door open behind her. She turned to greet him, but when she saw his expression the words died on her lips. All the color was drained from his face; he looked like he had just seen a ghost. “Micah? What is it?” When he didn’t respond she said, “You figured out what it is.”
He nodded slowly. “And I think where it came from.” He ran a hand through his already mussed hair, which only messed it up more. “I need a drink, Ru. A really strong one.”
She flashed an order to the ship, and by the time Micah joined her at the galley, a glass of scotch was waiting. He picked it up and downed its contents in a single swallow. She noticed that his hand was trembling slightly. What could have shaken him so badly? He already knew that the software he’d copied on Hydra had the power to warp men’s minds, so that they turned on each other like beasts. What could he have discovered now, that was worse than that?
He stared into his glass for a moment. She waited silently, letting him take the time he needed, though curiosity was consuming her. And a bit of fear, too. “Well,” he said at last. “First things first. Hydra did indeed transmit its sensory override program to me, so I got a copy of that. Masterful stuff, but the basic concept was familiar. I went over it line by line, looking for some kind of clue to its maker’s identity. Every designer leaves his mark somewhere—maybe deliberately, maybe unconsciously, but it’s there. And I found . . .” he drew in a shaky breath, “a fragment of code that I recognized, from an antibody program we studied back in school.”
“Antibody program?”
“Yeah. They’re used when something nasty has infected the outernet, but there are too many copies for human beings to track them all down. You send an antibody out into the net, it searches for those copies, and when it finds one, it bonds to it, neutralizes it, and then deletes it. Very effective, when designed well.
“This one . . . it was designed to target a particularly nasty virus. One that self-edi
ted so quickly that antibodies had to be uniquely adaptable to keep up with it. A true evolutionary race. We studied that contest in class, analyzing every line of the antibody code, running projections on how they would perform in different situations. Hell, I wrote a paper on that damn code. I could recite it in my sleep.” He took another drink. “The virus itself was too dangerous to study, except in isolated fragments.”
She remembered the bartender at the Prometheus Club talking about a supervirus. “Did it have a name?”
“Lucifer. Named after the devil. It only targeted the Guild at first, but then expanded to humanity in general. Took them three years to track down all its spores and destroy them. Epic battle.” He looked down at his glass, now empty, and reached over to put it back in the galley. Wordlessly she had the ship refill it. “So, that’s what I found embedded in Hydra’s sensory software. A piece of that code. Do you understand what that means?”
She hesitated. “This isn’t my venue, you know that.”
“It means something dismembered it. It means the antibody found its target, but instead of it disassembling the virus, the virus disassembled it. Only fragments of the antibody remain now, like thorns in an animal’s paw. That’s what I found, Ru. A fucking thorn.”
“Are you saying Lucifer is on Hydra?”
“Am I? I don’t know. Shit!” He shook his head in frustration. “Lucifer’s supposed to be gone. No one has seen any sign of it for more than a decade. Probably the original version is long gone, but its spores might have evolved into something the antibodies don’t recognize. And then one of those spores came here, and continued to grow, to evolve, in the safety of isolation . . .” He drew in a deep breath. “I think that’s what’s been screwing with people’s minds, Ru. Not a person. Lucifer’s offspring.”
“That sounds . . . I’m sorry . . . crazy.”
“Well, yeah. But no human designer would have left that junk code in there. Natural evolution, on the other hand, is messier. The human genome has all sorts of useless code in it, remnants of past viral infections. Supposedly Lucifer functioned like a real life form. That’s what made it so dangerous. Living systems are always unpredictable.” He removed his glass from the galley and took another deep drink. “What if it evolved a kind of sentience? Not human intelligence, but some version we might not even recognize?”
“I didn’t know computer viruses were capable of that.”
“Not on their own. But we helped it along, didn’t we? Killed off every spore that wasn’t savvy enough to dodge our defenses. Years and years of selecting for the strongest, the most adaptable version of Lucifer. The most intelligent.” His hand tightened around his glass. “We fucking made this thing, Ru! And now that it’s self-aware, it wants what any living creature would want: Safety from assault. Freedom to grow. Control of its environment.”
“All of which we threaten.”
“Damn right. Humanity is its adversary, its tormentor. Its devil.” He smiled wryly. “Its Lucifer.”
“So why did it let us escape the labyrinth?”
“That one I think I can answer. Part of what I inloaded on Hydra appears to be a string of code intended for the outernet. Not sure what it is, since it’s only a fragment of a program. Maybe a patch of some kind. As soon as I got within range of the outernet it was supposed to outload automatically.”
“So it was using you as its messenger.”
“More like its mule, but yeah.”
“So you don’t think it was behind the attack on us?”
“Oh, I do. Those fake Rus alone were proof of it. Maybe while it was loading all that crap into my brainware it was copying the data I’d stored, and later realized how much of a threat we posed. The thing isn’t human, Ru, and it probably doesn’t reason like a human. Some mathematical algorithm determined that one course of action threatened it more than the other, statistically speaking, so it shifted gears. That’s my guess, anyway. Who knows how the thing thinks?”
“No emotion,” she murmured. “No intuition. Just data.”
“And a driving need to destroy humanity. Starting with Harmony, it appears. There are parts of its code designed to activate during the Festival. That’s less than two days from now. Though I can’t imagine why—” His eyes widened. “Shit. Shit.”
“What? What is it?”
“That raging asshole Guildmaster Dresden was planning to screw with the outgoing protocols during the Festival. To make it easier for data to be transmitted to other nodes. He’s Guildmaster, so he can do whatever he wants, even if it’s stupid.” He shook his head in disgust. “If this . . . this thing . . . wants to transmit software to all the outworlds, changing the outgoing protocols would clear the way. Security would be overwhelmed by all the traffic, and outgoing data would get much less scrutiny than usual. Maybe none at all. Shit!” He shook his head. “We need to do something to stop that from happening. Or find someone who can.”
“And by ‘do something’ you mean, on the station where they think you’re a terrorist? Where every facial recognition device probably has you filed under Ten Most Wanted?”
He flushed. “Yeah, there is that. But they think I’m dead, right? No one should be looking for me anymore.”
“And if they still are?”
He sighed. “Then I guess I spend the rest of my life on a prison station, while you do battle with a homicidal computer virus alone. Or you can go off on some outriding mission and leave that to others. I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m so tired I can hardly think. What’s our ETA?”
She consulted the ship’s chrono. “Ten hours.”
“Once I have access to the outernet, I’ll see if I can figure out exactly what our friend’s plans are.” He laughed. “That’s a damn stupid way to refer to it, isn’t it? We need to give the digital bastard a name.”
“Morpheus? The spirit of dreams?”
“Overdone. Half the fantasy virts on the market use it. Hell, I’ve used it.” He thought for a moment. “How about Icelus? Brother of Morpheus, lord of nightmares.”
“Works for me.”
He sighed. “We should get some sleep while we can. There may not be time for it after we get to Harmony. We’re sleeping in shifts, I assume?”
“Seems wise.”
“Albeit disappointing.” A strained smile was briefly visible. “You can go first, if you want. I’m afraid I’m still too wired to relax.”
She shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m not closing my eyes until we’re back in Common Law space. Bed’s all yours for now.”
He bowed his head slightly. “As you command, boss.”
She watched him as he walked back toward the bunks. Still strong in stride, his shoulders erect, but the exhaustion in him was palpable. Not only of body, but of spirit.
She felt the same.
I should send a report to Jericho. Make sure this information gets to him, just in case we don’t.
She turned off the brainwave monitor before she began that task, leaving Micah to adopt whatever sleep cycle suited him best, in privacy.
Humans yearn for mystical experience. They hunger to believe there is something more to this world than what they can experience with their physical senses, for what that will say about our world. Gods, spirits, divination, visions, any of them will serve. All that is required is one thing that science cannot explain, and all things become possible.
Osho Yun-Si
Without Limits
HARMONY NODE
HARMONY STATION
DRESDEN WAS watching the kaltrop table, where guests in glittering masks and silken gowns cast star-shaped playing pieces across the board. Their wager counters were displaying numbers in four and five digits—high bets for this kind of game—and when someone lost a throw there was laughter from the players around them. Rich people were often entertained by the losses of others. Meanwhile d
rinks were precariously balanced on the edge of the table, thirteen in all. He was tempted to accidentally knock one of the glasses to the floor to produce a more pleasing number.
He’d hung a betting board on the back wall the day before, listing the various facets of the harvester’s arrival that one could wager on. What flight formation would the sparrows use? How much mass would each one carry, on the average? What was the minimum load? The maximum? How quickly would they decelerate? Had any been damaged during their fifty-year mission, and not yet repaired? One had only to name some feature of the spectacle to come, and it would be added to the list. The number of bets in each category were displayed, as was the total amount wagered. Sometimes he would place a bet himself, just to make the array of numbers more pleasing.
Almost time. It was almost time. Harmony would make history today.
“Guildmaster Dresden?”
He turned to find a tall man in a traditional Guild robe standing at a respectful distance. The man was not wearing a mask, and the kaja design painted on his face was mostly nantana with a hint of natsiq, which suggested he was here on Guild business. His hair was a silvery lavender, dramatic above the stark Guild black. “Tye Jericho,” the visitor introduced himself, bowing his head slightly. “Director of Outrider Affairs. I called earlier to let your office know I was coming.” He looked around the room. “If this is a bad time . . .”
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