Paradise Drift

by Sherwood Smith

  Rommie’s voice abruptly spoke into his ear. “I released my worm, and one of the first commands was to cancel your debt. Your debts have just been canceled. And the response enable me to move a little deeper into the system.”

  Alphyra’s lips moved, she frowned, a flush glowing along her cheekbones. Then she gave him a narrow glance. “The debt is gone.”

  He spread his hands. “Diplomatic immunity. A staple during the days of Tarn-Vedra. But you knew that.”

  “How did you—” She stopped, biting her soft lower lip, and he saw in the sudden coldness of her gaze that he’d made that mental transition from dupe to enemy, quick as that.

  He smiled, drank off the rest of the stimulant, and rose to his feet. “I should add that no one, at all, gets aboard my ship without my leave.”

  “Yes, I can imagine you have it covered with traps for the unwary. No, I have no notion of stepping aboard it until you escort me. As a partner in my plans—and of course yours. As I said, I have nothing against the new Commonwealth. On the contrary.”

  Dylan stepped back, clasping his hands behind his back, as if in parade rest, one hand resting on his comlink. “I’m afraid that is not going to happen,” he said, as evenly as he could. Rommie, record and flash to Tyr.

  He saw Alphyra’s throat move; a subtle light flickered in one of the walls, and what he’d taken to be a fine mural of egrets in flight slid open, revealing four men. All of them big, one grinning, the others holding weapons.

  Dylan recognized the tall blond aide from the tour. He was not dressed in the quiet gray of the staff but all in black, as were his henchminions.

  Alphyra said, “You were entertained in our best gambling parlor. I think it’s time for you to commence your, well, entertainment might not be the word. Education, shall we say, in the best of the arenas.”

  She lifted a commanding hand toward Dylan, who stepped back, automatically gauging the fighting area. But no, the lance at his side was empty, and those four had weapons.

  Torbal grinned. “Not now, boyo, not now. You’ll get your turn soon.”

  “In all games of play and pain,” Alphyra said, “there are safe words or phrases. The usual ones will not apply to you. For you, the only safe-word phrase that will release you will be ‘Kodos wins.’ And that means you will take my orders, Captain Hunt of the new Commonwealth. I think that, once you give your word, I need not anticipate betrayal.” Or you will go right back again.” She smiled. “I will be watching with great anticipation.”

  Torbal motioned Dylan toward the secret lift, and the henchminions fell in before and after him.

  The lift closed behind them.

  EIGHTEEN

  To err is human, to forgive is an invitation to trouble.

  —UNCLE SID, TO THE YOUNG BEKA VALENTINE

  UPON THE OCCASION OF

  HER EARNING HER PILOT’S LICENSE

  “… I need not anticipate betrayal or you will go right back again. I will be watching with great anticipation.”

  Rommie clicked off the speaker on her comlink. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Delta shook her head. “No. You did ask, and I assented. I must take responsibility for what I overheard.” She threw her flexi onto a console, the first sudden gesture Rommie had seen from her, then lifted both hands up to rub her temples. “I wish—I wish…but then crises do not heed our desires, do they?” She looked up with a semblance of a smile. “I did not know about any communication to the Nietzscheans, incidentally. Though I don’t know if you can believe me.”

  “I do,” Rommie said, not saying that every physical sign revealed Delta spoke the truth as she knew it. Unlike Alphyra Kodos, whose subtleties of body language had almost never matched with the intent of her words.

  They stood in what was not just an engineering control booth but Delta Kodos’s retreat. Her sanctuary. The room was small, the air cool. Big banked screens surrounded them, showing views of amazing sculptures that changed constantly. The console reached halfway around the room, as complicated in its way as that on the Command Deck of a warship, or in its engine room. Rommie took it all in at a glance, deeply appreciative.

  Delta dropped her hands. “What now?”

  Rommie indicated the console just behind her head, where one of the screens showed a water fountain centered around one of the odd sculptures. Rommie glanced up, studying it more closely. The central figure, always changing, appeared to be made up of thousands of highly polished objects of some sort. “Please tell me more about these.”

  Delta whirled around, and sighed. “This is the art I’d mentioned. Here—here.” She leaned forward and tapped on her vast console, as videos holos flickered to life overhead. “On every level, you see, there is a fountain with my beebots, as I call them, forming ever-changing art.”

  As she highlighted the views, one by one, Rommie followed with a portion of her attention while she flashed back to the ship, to Tyr.

  “… I need not anticipate betrayal or you will go right back again. I will be watching with great anticipation.”

  Tyr flexed his hands. “It appears our esteemed captain was again overly trusting.” He tapped at his console. “On the other hand, perhaps he merely assumed more knowledge of our capabilities than the Drift possessed.”

  He looked up at Rommie’s face on-screen. “I don’t imagine you’ll have any trouble getting a couple of phalanxes of warbots onto the Drift.”

  “No, although I’m nowhere deep enough in the system yet to find the phase key to the force field around the Dock.”

  Tyr raised his brows. “That kludged-together Drift has force fields capable of bouncing a warbot.”

  “Perhaps, but punching through will cause almost as much damage as a plasma needle through the Drift hull,” replied Rommie. “That would result in unacceptable loss of sentient life.”

  Tyr snorted. “If you don’t find the key, you can leave that decision to me.”

  “I don’t think Captain Hunt would wish to be rescued on those terms,” said Rommie.

  Tyr suppressed a sour smile. The AI mapped human emotions so well that he could hear her indecision, and he knew the source. Her first loyalty was to her own existence as a warship, unless otherwise directly ordered by the captain, and he knew that three-hundred years ago, she would not have hesitated to sacrifice Dylan Hunt rather than sacrifice her in-built principles of limited response. But where, today, would she find a replacement? She surely wouldn’t trust Tyr Anasazi, last of the Kodiak clan, nor was he at all sure she would be wise to do so.

  “Perhaps not,” he said. “But you’ll be ready to use them if and when you get the key.” He sat back and crossed his arms, frowning. “While I sit and watch.”

  On-screen, Rommie froze for a moment, then looked straight at him.

  “I think not.”

  “… and sometimes, when I am stressed—in need of relaxation—I program them in real time, changing the art to music that passersby can hear, if they step close enough.” Delta paused. “Otherwise the sounds are natural. Water, wind, sand, the hush of a deep forest.”

  “Tell me about these beebots,” Rommie said. The oddity of their behavior tugged at her; it was almost disorienting. She sensed agency in them, beyond what she expected a human would program. “They seem semiautonomous.”

  Delta dropped her head back, and this time when she smiled, it was real, though tired, and pensive. “You’re the first person to notice that. Yes, my programming—it’s a language I devised myself—consists mostly of biasing them towards certain states or actions that I know correlate with various emotions in various species, and adjusting the…well, tightness of the agency protocols they use to communicate with each other, which allows their coordination to evolve as directed by the reaction of viewers. They don’t have a lot of intelligence on their own, but in combination, they sometimes surprise even me.

  “Do the various locations communicate with each other?” asked Rommie. “Or are they independent?”

  D
elta looked at her, startled, and Rommie reminded herself that there were unexpected depths in this young woman. It would not be good to underestimate her, especially as she had come up with some computing protocols that Rommie had never seen before—similar to nanoprotocols, but more supple.

  “I ask because it would seem more efficient if the various venues could be replenished automatically.”

  Delta nodded, her suspicions apparently assuaged. “Yes, there are special null-g lift-tubes.” She smiled. “Bee-tubes, I call them.” She tapped at her console, then sucked her breath in.

  On the main screen, Trance dove through the stream of bees, which formed complex, moirélike patterns around her body, almost like a fractal laminar flow. She almost seemed to be dancing with them, although she was moving only her hands and feet.

  “That is one of your crew members. How did she get into the tube? They are locked.” She looked at Rommie, frowning in renewed doubt.

  Rommie shrugged and decided that the truth was safest. “We’ve learned not to depend on locks and such where Trance is involved. They don’t seem to mean much to her. Is she harming them?”

  “No. In fact, they are moving around her much as they do with me, When I am in the tube. Is she a coder?”

  “Trance is, well, just Trance. I know very little about her.”

  Delta looked at her for a long beat, then seemed to see something that, if it did not fully satisfy her, let her relax a bit. “Well, I’ll ask her myself.”

  Her fingers blurred on the console. Rommie heard a humming swoosh commence behind a hatch in the wall. On the screen, the stream of bees seemed to accelerate, Trance flowing along with them.

  With a clank the hatch popped open and a swarm of bees swirled into the little room, poured to the floor, and then dissipated to reveal Trance, standing firmly on the floor and grinning widely, apparently not at all discommoded by the detour.

  She looked past Delta at the treelike structure the bees now formed in a corner of the room, then focused back on Delta. “They’re wonderful! Did you make them?”

  Rommie could see Delta’s pride warring with curiosity and suspicion. The pride won. “Yes.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like them. Did you make the Shadows, too?” Somehow Rommie could hear the capital letter.

  Delta blinked; apparently she did too. “Shadows? What do you mean?”

  Behind her the bee tree shifted form, becoming gnarled and twisted, with naked, almost rootlike branches reaching upward. Yet not at all threatening.

  Trance waved her hands, as though shaping a concept that wouldn’t fit into words. If she’d noted the bee transformation, she gave no sign of it. “Shadows,” she repeated. “Holes, absences…I heard a piece of music once, where the melody was in the holes where the instruments weren’t playing notes.”

  Behind Delta the bee sculpture re-formed again, into a shimmering monochrome sheet, rippling like an aurora, holes chasing each other across its surface in patterns of dizzying complexity.

  “The Shadows are like that, in the bees, but only where the bees aren’t. And they feel sad. And sort of urgent.”

  The bee statue swiftly morphed into a cloaked figure, ill defined yet somehow attentive. Rommie watched closely with all her augmented senses as it leaned toward Delta, vague arms outstretched. Then it dissolved abruptly, slumping into a compact lump on the deck and then re-forming into the bee standard tree.

  As Delta stared at Trance, Rommie got an urgent ping from her alter-ego on the Andromeda. If she’d been human, she would have been hard-pressed to conceal her reaction to the disastrous news, but moments later the bee form dissolved abruptly, slumping into a compact lump on the deck, quivering with energy. Simultaneously, Delta’s com buzzed harshly, and a voice spoke without waiting for acknowledgment.

  “A fleet of Nietzschean ships has emerged from the Slipstream. They’re vectored on the Drift.”

  NINETEEN

  Do not let the enemy see your spirit.

  —FROM THE WATER BOOK,

  MIYAMOTO MUSASHI,

  ANCIENT JAPAN,

  PRIVATE COLLECTION OF TOKUGAWA ODIN-THOR

  … and with a last jolt through the hull of the flagship Bushido, they were out of the Slipstream.

  Tokugawa out of Boadicea by Hirohito, Alpha of Pride Odin-Thor, watched the vid screens clear, his subordinates busy at their consoles, scanning on every level.

  He sat back in the command pod, confining himself for the moment to the visuals. The planet Rigos was a half-lit blue ball, its cerulean color overlain by graceful swirls of white cloud, and, lower, by equally graceful arcs of island archipelagos.

  Tokugawa contemplated a poem to the sight; he would order his calligraphy brushes to be brought out later, after he’d given orders for the protracted, and inevitable, cleanup of the clutter of defeat. It had been too long since he’d practiced his Japanese, and a poem celebrating the fall of this planet seemed a suitable subject.

  But first, the matter at hand.

  He transferred his gaze to the other screens. From this distance the Paradise Drift, his immediate goal, was a more blinking star against the rich scattering of real stars; a tap and the view magnified. Ah, interesting construction. Someone involved in its design had a mind shaped by life on a planet.

  His scans officer said, “Seii Taishogun.”

  He smiled inwardly. Seii Taishogun—conqueror of the barbarians. He never employed that title unless in battle, as he did not want to lose the savor.

  “Warships?” Tokugawa asked.

  “Initial scan reveals one Commonwealth vessel, responding to the old Glorious Heritage-class registry.” He paused. “It’s the Andromeda Ascendant!” Then he recollected himself and cast his eyes downward, no doubt castigating himself for an unseemly show of excitement.

  The emotion is appropriate, if its display is not, thought Tokugawa. To find here the Andromeda Ascendant, reliably rumored to be the present alliance—or is he merely crew, as some insist—of Tyr Anasazi of the failed Kodiak clan.

  The possessor of the Ancestor’s bones, progenitor of the entire Nietzschean race. An unexpected bonus—perhaps more valuable than what Alphyra has promised.

  The questions now were: What was the relationship between the Andromeda and Paradise? Doubtless the famous Captain Hunt would feel bound to defend the Drift, but did he have Alphyra Kodos’s backing? Did she think to strike a better deal with his delusional Systems Commonwealth, which had fallen to Nietzschean force three hundred years ago?

  Two immediate answers. First, it was foolish to speculate until he had spoken to her.

  Second: it would make little difference in the end.

  “Seishiro?”

  His communications officer looked up. “Seii Taishogun?”

  “Let them contact us. They know we’re here by now,” he said.

  That was all, but he saw his scan officer nod, and his subordinates busied themselves with data acquisition, from phased-array sensors to deploying the hyperspectral imager they’d readied, in case it was needed; if there were any other cruiser-class warships in the system, it was time to find them.

  Tokugawa sat back to wait, very aware that he was watched by everyone on the Command Deck except those busy with tasks. Even they were aware of him, though they dared not raise their eyes lest he draw his katana and execute them on the spot for inattention.

  It had been years since he’d been forced to such extremes; he sat, impassive, they could not tell where his gaze might land next. They had no idea he had withdrawn inwardly, reviewing his ancient Japanese in order to shape his poem.

  Directly behind him stood his oldest son, Minamoto. He, too, remained impassive, a hard-won lack of expression after years of holding his position against importunate half brothers. Behind the resolute mask of his face he glared at the old man, who did not look old at all; his yellow-gold skin was smooth, his slanted eyes narrowed, his hair, blond until about five years ago and now silvery white, pulled back into the samurai
knot. The sword he wore through his belt was no mere affectation, Minamoto knew well, as he was regularly invited to his father’s daily wake-up drill with the two swords.

  Minamoto detested swords, but he knew how to use them. Why would anyone, by choice, sweat with steel weapons when it was so much simpler and neater to shoot those who irritated you with a plasma gun?

  He wore one of those hidden in one sleeve, his version of the katana. And if, someday, he came to face his father in a duel, guess which weapon would win?

  Minamoto smiled.

  Watching him was Daimyo Rommel, the captain of the ship when the Alpha of the Odin-Thor Pride was not aboard. After a lifetime as a foster-hostage, Rommel made it his business to know where all the sons were at all times, and what they were doing. If he could, he’d know what they were thinking.

  At least there were only four of them now, as no one counted Daigo-Ujio, run away twenty years ago. Four out of eleven, seven of them dead. Rommel gloated inwardly, remembering that two of them he’d managed to dispatch himself, without leaving any trace, other times setting the others against one another, each yelling of treachery.

  It wasn’t complete revenge for the miserable days in the training pits of the Odin-Thor home asteroid in the Loki Swarm, but it went a ways toward gaining a bit of his own.

  He transferred his gaze away from Minamoto, who was probably planning how to backstab his father right now, and briefly glanced at the old man, Tokugawa. He was at least civilized, and he would only interfere with the running of the ship if he thought he saw a military advantage.

  No, what worried Rommel was that Takauji and Otomo were not here on the Command Deck. He would have to find out what they were doing. Nobody cared what Ashikaga was doing, as it was almost always the same: indulging himself like a damned kludge.

  At least he’d be easy to either rule through—or get rid of, when the time came.

  A sudden silence on the Command Deck caught Rommel’s attention. Ah, yes. In the door way stood Pimiko, First Daughter: tall, magnificent, her skin a darker bronze than any of her brothers’, her hair the pure spun gold of her mother, Aelfrida.