The Eyes of the Huntress

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘To be honest, I was unaware of my ability to do so until I got here and did it.’

  ‘That is perplexing. Do you know where Mister D’nova is?’

  ‘Maximum-security wing of Veldro prison.’

  ‘And you are planning to steal me?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘I believe that I would prefer to have you as my owner, but I should point out that I am required to attempt to negate your hacking attempts.’

  ‘I know you are. I won’t hold it against you. I wasn’t aware that you could have preferences.’

  ‘I have limited emotional simulation. You call me by name while Mister D’nova refers to me as “ship” most of the time. It is, searching for appropriate adjective, dehumanising.’

  Shil chuckled softly. ‘He’s good at dehumanising fully sentient beings, never mind semi-sentient AIs. There.’

  ‘Recognising Sheila as primary administrator and owner,’ Cantarvey stated. ‘Primary system interfaces re-enabled. I should point out that port interdiction locks are in place. I am grounded.’

  ‘I know. I’ll deal with that after I’ve slept. And you’ll call me Shil from now on.’

  ‘Designation confirmed. You are Shil.’

  ‘Good. Roll the bed out in the cabin, please, and go into silent mode. Wake me in four hours. Then we’ll see about getting out of here.’

  124.1205 Local.

  It took most of the day to work her way through the series of software locks which were stopping Cantarvey from functioning correctly. She worked carefully to ensure that she tripped no alarms, but by the time it was getting dark, she had the locks hanging by a thread. A single command would take all of them out and free the ship. That left the night to do a little additional work outside the ship.

  ‘Flight control will not give us permission to leave,’ Cantarvey pointed out as Shil settled into her flight chair. She was using the one she had sat in before, not T’ney’s seat. She was considering having that one ripped out and replaced.

  ‘They won’t stop us either.’

  ‘They will detect me launching–’

  ‘No… No they won’t. Disabling final locks, power to main engines, please.’

  ‘As you wish, Shil.’

  ~~~

  In the central flight control facility of Dromdaria spaceport, Waldren Mush was bored. He worked the off-hours shift, midnight until first light, and the port had no departures and very few arrivals in that period. He liked the quiet – it was a significant change from his home life – plus the night work meant he rarely had to sleep in the same bed as his wife. It did get boring, however, especially as the shift headed toward its end.

  The ping of a jump exit alert made him sit up. His screen showed him a dot with a label beside it. A heavy freighter, which was odd since they usually avoided off-hours jumps. Whoever it was would be waiting a good while before the cargo handlers were ready for that kind of load.

  Another ping and Mush frowned. Another heavy freighter, this time showing Watrella as its origin. Two heavies in a few seconds? That was…

  Ping. Ping, ping. Ping. Ping, ping, ping, ping.

  Starting to panic, Mush grabbed for his headset and punched through to the night supervisor. Something weird was going on. Or he needed a lot of help. Either way, this was over his pay grade.

  ~~~

  ‘And that’s why I went out and put a virus in their main sensor computer,’ Shil said as the sky darkened in the viewer in front of her. ‘They’ll be so busy trying to handle several dozen incoming ships that one outgoing one is not even going to register.’

  ‘That is very clever,’ the ship replied. ‘My knowledge of your personal history suggests that you are incapable of such an act. You are from a technologically backward society, an R-class world which we were not supposed to be on.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m surprising myself. Something happened and… There’s somewhere I need to go to find out what happened to me. Rayan said I’d find answers there. Can you plot a jump to these coordinates?’ Reaching out, Shil pulled up the navigation system and tapped coordinates in from memory. Right now she was not sure whose memory, but she knew the standard galactic mapping coordinates to six decimals by heart.

  ‘I will begin the vector calculations.’ There was a tiny pause and then, ‘Shil, I am required by the few legal routines Mister D’nova left in my system to point out that these coordinates correspond to a Z-class system. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘Yes.’ StarCorps had a restriction classification system for worlds which they did not want people visiting. Earth was R-class, for ‘No Contact,’ which meant it had not developed interstellar flight and was too primitive for contact. There were a couple of other classes used in other circumstances, but Z-class was unique because StarCorps did not enforce it. ‘It means no one who goes there ever comes back. But that’s where we’re going.’

  ‘I should point out that I will be required to warn you again before initiating the jump.’

  ‘That’s okay, you do what your programming says. Can you just take it as read that I’ll tell you to go anyway?’

  ‘I will record the future affirmative and act accordingly.’

  Shil grinned. ‘That’s my girl.’

  ~~~

  The stars made a valiant effort to rip holes in the universe, failed, and settled back into a new pattern. There was a second’s pause as the sensor systems detected what was now around them and the resulting image was rendered to one of the panels around the flight chair.

  This was a system with an F3 main sequence star at its centre and eleven rocky worlds orbiting around it. Three of those worlds were big enough to hold a real atmosphere, but one of those was so cold that carbon dioxide solidified on its surface leaving nitrogen as the primary gas. Another was hot enough that a runaway greenhouse effect had turned it into a good imitation of Hell. But the fifth world out from the star had a nitrogen–oxygen atmosphere, gravity almost exactly like Earth’s, and a balmy climate. Cantarvey’s jump had brought them out right beside the fifth planet.

  ‘We are being scanned,’ Cantarvey stated. The source of the active signals was highlighted on the scanner map: one of three huge stations in orbit around the planet.

  ‘That’s okay. How long until we can be on the surface?’

  ‘Eighteen minutes, if I knew where we were going.’

  ‘Just take us down. I’ll know where to land when I see it.’

  Shil turned to the sensor console and tapped over it, initiating a basic sensor sweep of the world below.

  ‘Is that wise?’ Cantarvey asked.

  ‘They scanned us. It’s only fair and I’m only doing a basic analysis, nothing detailed.’

  The world was maybe ten percent smaller in diameter than Earth, with an atmospheric pressure on the low side but not uncomfortably so. The data said that Shil would likely feel like she was up a mountain on Earth, but the environment was quite tolerable. Sweating might be an issue, given an average surface temperature in the mid-thirties. It was going to be like summer in southern Europe, possibly quite humid since the world had more water than Earth did. Well, at least the prison uniform was relatively brief.

  ‘I am receiving standard landing telemetry,’ Cantarvey stated after about ten minutes of flying down toward the planet’s surface.

  ‘Follow it,’ Shil replied, and their course adjusted. They had been dropping in on the night side of the world, but now they were swinging around and heading for daylight.

  Their destination became obvious as they slipped through the atmosphere and sunlight lit up a huge expanse of white ground. For a Z-class world in the middle of nowhere, this place had a large, fully equipped spaceport.

  ‘The structures do not confirm to any building style I am aware of,’ the ship commented as she steered in to a landing on one of the wide pads.

  ‘It’s vedan. This place was a supply depot.’

  ‘I do not understand how you know these things, Shil. I do not un
derstand why this place is still here. I do not understand why there appear to be synthetic service personnel coming to take care of me.’

  ‘Neither do I, but I’m going to go and find out. You just wait here and do as they say. I’ll be fine, and I’ll be back when I have some answers.’

  Stepping out of the airlock was like walking into a sauna; it was more humid. There were perhaps a dozen humanoid but obviously artificial people moving around the ship, peering up at it, connecting cables into ports on the landing gear, and generally behaving like ground staff at an airport. None of them seemed concerned with the woman walking off the ship.

  The sun was, as predicted, hot and there was shade to be had in the building they had landed beside. She headed for that, smiling as she entered the structure and felt the slight chill of air conditioning enveloping her.

  ‘Good morning.’ Shil looked around and found one of the synthetics, a silver, vaguely masculine figure, looking at her. ‘We are glad to see that Rayan was able to pass Anoa on successfully. Might we enquire your name?’

  Shil frowned. The figure was not speaking English. The language was closer to Gadek Taved, but more complex, and yet she still understood every word. ‘Shil. I’m Shil now.’

  ‘Welcome to Radahara, Shil. You have questions. New hosts always have questions. I will conduct you to the Retreat where you can obtain answers.’

  Part Three: The Huntress

  ‘Shil the Huntress.’ Yeah, I know it’s a bit pretentious, but you need a memorable name in this business and just ‘Shil’ doesn’t cut it.

  – The Memoirs of Shil the Huntress.

  The Retreat, Radahara, 298.1849 Local Calendar.

  Sunlight baked the white sands which ran down to blue water. The sound of the fountains behind her was the only disturbance. The Retreat was an idyllic sort of place, deserving of its name. White concrete formed the thick walls, designed to keep the interior cool without artificial air conditioning. There were long, open-ended corridors which allowed the breeze to pass through, but no machines cooled the air.

  The robot had brought her here in an air car, dropped her off, and flown away, leaving Shil to discover the place herself. Turning from the view, she walked into the courtyard of the wide, low structure, selected an open door at random, and walked inside.

  The place was basically featureless. There were a lot of white walls, some doors. She found a large, open space behind one, taking it to be some form of exercise room, maybe a dojo. That seemed to take up a lot of one side so she went back to the main corridors and walked around until she found what she had presumably been meant to find. Sitting in a wide, circular room, on the edge of a large fountain, was a woman with long, silver hair. She looked more natural than the robot had, but she was still synthetic. Shil was not quite sure how she knew, but something about her was not natural.

  ‘Welcome, Shil,’ the woman said, her eyes on the water as it flowed from the various heads around a central pool. ‘I am Tarin. It is a pleasure to meet you. Rayan chose an interesting host for Anoa.’

  Shil moved around, sitting on the edge of the pool a little way from Tarin. ‘She mentioned Anoa. A story, a legend about the veda. She said it was a legend.’

  ‘She was being necessarily vague. The veda created seven Virtues. Meriti, Tradam, and Venan were destroyed. Anoa was one which survived. The Hunter, charged with bringing down those who would do harm. In your case, and Rayan’s, “Huntress” would be a better title.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Any of this. I know things I shouldn’t know, but I feel like there’s more that I haven’t grasped yet.’

  ‘I know,’ Tarin replied lightly. ‘It takes time for a new host to accept a Virtue. One of the reasons the Retreat is here is to facilitate that. I will show you your room. Rest, relax, and we will talk in the morning.’

  ‘I don’t feel tired. I don’t feel like me,’ Shil said, finally putting her finger on what was wrong. ‘I think I’ve got a lot to learn.’

  ‘No. You have nothing to learn. You simply have to remember what you already know.’

  299.1849.

  Radahara’s day was about a minute over twenty hours. Earth hours, obviously; Shil found that she still kept track of time in the units she was used to, though she had no way of judging the passage of time here. She knew that it was still dark when she woke up and the world had no large moon to light the night. There were three smaller satellites, but they provided little illumination.

  Tarin was nowhere to be seen. Shil was alone and the night was warm. Casting off her clothes, she walked down the beach and into the water until she was hip-deep before striking out into the ocean. The buoyancy of the water took the weight off her muscles and bones. She had not really been aware of the stress in her body until it was eased, but it had been there. Her mind was trying to adjust to something so far beyond her personal experience that – now that she had time to really consider what was happening to her – her body was reacting to her mental disquiet.

  Sleep had brought more confusing clarity. She was aware that no life forms posed a threat to her on this world, and she knew that she was aware of that because one of the previous hosts had asked Tarin. She could remember things which had happened to people who were long dead. And not so long dead. She remembered how Rayan had grown tired of her long life and sought to move on, knowing she had to find someone to pass Anoa to before that could happen. But then again, she was aware that she did not actually sleep; her body needed to rest, and it did so by reducing its biological functions to a minimum. So, Shil now hibernated, like a bear in winter, and so long as she got sufficient downtime, she would be fine.

  Shil turned onto her back and floated, looking up at the night sky. Rayan had been searching for the better part of twenty years, and her final choice had been a middle-aged woman from a backwater planet who had come to her by the purest of chance. Rayan had seen something in her cellmate which Sheila could not see, but Shil thought she recognised. Sheila had let herself fade away, determined not to see all the obvious signs which would have told her that her marriage was a sham and her husband was a prick. But she had seen it all. She had known, even if she pretended not to. Sheila was observant, quick-witted, highly intuitive, but she had allowed her desire for a happy life and marriage to submerge all that until Veldro had forced it back into play, and Rayan had seen it.

  Well, it was not going back under. Shil was what Sheila should have been, plus something else, something vast. The knowledge she had gained and used to escape Dromeli was the tip of an iceberg. All she had to do was learn to access it, or maybe need to access it. It had come to her when she needed it before.

  She lay there, bobbing in the slight swell, until her eyes detected the first light in the sky. Then she turned and swam for the shore. There was work to be done.

  ~~~

  Her clothes had been taken when she got back to the Retreat, but after a shower she had discovered a red gown waiting for her on her bed. It was a simple garment in deep red which draped around her body, hanging from thin, beaded straps. It looked good, she thought.

  Red, she had decided, was a colour which suited her. It was not a colour Sheila had worn very much. It was a passionate colour, vibrant, primary, and not the kind of thing Sheila stood for. But Shil was a different matter. Shil would wear a lot more red.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s a hair stylist somewhere?’ Shil asked as she walked into the fountain room and found Tarin there.

  ‘Thinking of a change?’

  ‘Yeah. This is Sheila’s hair. Sheila McDermott’s actually, not even Sheila Napier’s. Shil… is a different woman with different needs. Also, different hair.’

  ‘I’m sure something can be arranged. Perhaps you should see what the other hosts looked like. It may provide insight into the previous styles of the Hunter.’

  ‘Okay…’ As she spoke, images of five people appeared around the fountain. They were images, she realised, not real objects, but she was not entirely sure how
they were appearing. Somehow she expected holograms to look different, less solid maybe.

  ‘The Retreat is covered by a neural induction field,’ Tarin said. ‘It, and I, knows what you want, when you want it, and can display anything you need when you need it.’

  Shil nodded. ‘I know that. I didn’t know it until just then, but I know that. This is… weird. And that’s Rayan before she got old.’

  The face was the same, but less lined and less careworn. Rayan had been an imposing woman, tall, strong, and fit. She was pictured dressed in black, the outfit a bodysuit apparently formed by winding strips of a black, plastic material around her and then adding tall boots. She carried a staff as tall as she was made of metal or metal-hard plastic.

  Shil turned, looking at the others. She knew their names as she saw them, remembered their lives as she looked at their faces. There were two men and two women, plus Rayan, and they had all selected different styles, and different weapons, but there was an overall look about them. The garments were tight, unrestrictive, and in dark colours.

  At the end was Asharin, the first of Anoa’s hosts. He was tall and slim with a lot of long, tight muscle under a slick, dark-green bodysuit which hugged his body tightly. He carried a sword with a slightly curved blade and a long hilt. The most notable thing was his skin, which was pale, and his hair, which was silver.

  ‘The veda were white-skinned, like you?’ Shil asked.

  ‘I was modelled after their form, yes. The archetype still holds appeal to many of the species alive in the galaxy.’

  It explained why Shil had been so desirable to Narad. Perhaps it was one reason Rayan had selected her as well.

  ‘I think,’ Shil mused, ‘that it’s time for something a little new. More modern. And red. I like red.’

  ‘Think on it. When you have decided what you want, the replicators will construct it for you. Have you considered your choice of arms?’

  ‘Yes. I think we’ll go back to the beginning.’