The Tuloriad-ARC

by John Ringo

  "You really ought to give him a chance, though," Boyd said. "Guano's all right. Especially since he gave up snorting VX."

  Chapter Five

  Speak, O Demons, of the peerless armor of the god-like Goloswin,

  He of the clever ways and the subtle mind,

  Who assists now the Great Being in the running of

  The clockwork timing of the universe.

  —The Tuloriad, Na'agastenalooren

  Anno Domini 2010

  Himmit Ship Surreptitious Stalker, Diess System

  It was a surreal scene. The Stalker was nearly wrapped in the battered hulks of a Posleen ghost fleet, the fleet having been towed into a position of stable orbit pending recovery and scrapping. On every side of the cargo compartment, the view screens showed images of battered and cracked hulls. Unlike the wrecks floating around the Earth, these ships neither glowed, nor sparked, nor burned, nor spilled out the dying husks of Posleen crew.

  These wrecks were dead and had been for years. In human terms, this was a boneyard. Nonetheless, it was not an entirely dead boneyard. The anti-matter containment units were still active. Normally this should not have been true; anti-matter was simply too valuable to have been left ungathered. On the other hand, if you're the Darhel, the galaxy's lawyers, beaurocrats, and corporate sharks, and you've cornered the market on anti-matter, and suddenly there's just a vast quantity of anti-matter that threatens to undercut the entire galactic market, then you, too, might decide that a little visited corner of the Federation was just the place to dump that anti-matter for a while until you could figure out how to put it into the system without upsetting that system.

  And the band of Tulo'stenaloor couldn't get at any of it.

  Binastarion sat on his haunches, with his gruel bucket held in one hand. With the other, the kessentai rolled little balls of gruel, using a clawed thumb-cognate to flip the balls several feet into his maw. Binastarion was bored out of his mind; flipping food balls was about as interesting as it got.

  If only I had my artificial sentience to talk to, the Kessenalt mentally sniffed.

  And he had every right to be bored. The Stalker had been stuck in orbit about Diess IV for over a month, as humans measured time and had been en route for two months more. In all that time there had been nothing to do but stare at the screens, eat, flip food balls, and stare at the screens some more. Practice fighting was out; it was too likely to turn into a free for all. Fucking was out; as Tulo'stenaloor said, "Just what we need; a couple of hundred little damned, ravenous nestlings underfoot and no pen to keep them in. You want to wake up with nestlings gnawing on your reproductive members?" Besides, Kessentai didn't really care for screwing each other, as a general rule, feeling the practice was somewhat perverse.

  "You thought of everything, did you, Indowy?" Tulo sneered. "Save us from the big, bad humans. Run their blockade. Take us to safety in the stars.

  "Then forgot all about Posleen suitable space suits, didn't you?"

  "Can't think of everything, Tulo?" Aelool answered, with a shrug. "Besides, your plight had me in something of a rush."

  "Why couldn't you?" Tulo'stenaloor asked, walking off in a huff and completely ignoring Aelool's counter-jab. This left the Indowy and Goloswin, the tinkerer, alone.

  "How were we supposed to get to one of the wrecks to rebuild and restore it," Goloswin asked, "without suits?"

  "The Stalker can extrude a sort of metallic tunnel," the Indowy answered, pointing at a view screen where a stubby, silvery-sheened cylinder protruded into space. "We not sure quite how it's done, but it can be done. And it's perfectly capable of linking itself to a Posleen air lock. Any airlock, actually; this metal has some very odd attributes. Unfortunately, we didn't realize that every ship here would be airless."

  "If I had the material, I'd bloody sew us a few suits," the tinkerer said. "Unfortunately . . ."

  "Unfortunately, we don't. I've sent for a courier to deliver us some, but—"

  "But that's going to be a while," Goloswin said. "Can't the Himmit go?"

  "Golo," Aelool chided, "if you were the sole Kessentai aboard a ship full of Himmit, would you leave your ship?"

  "Since you put it that way," Golo conceded, "I suppose not. Damn! If we could just get one kessentai safely into one of the hulks, I'm sure he could find a suit bay that's more or less unscathed. Just . . ." Goloswin looked again at the view screen showing the metallic cylinder. He cocked his head, inquisitively. "Ask the pilot, would you, Aelool, just how that lump turns into a tunnel?"

  "What the fuck is that?" Tulo asked.

  Goloswin didn't answer immediately, but just stared down a rectangular lump of silvery metal, about the size of a human loaf of bread, or a construction worker's lunchbox, sitting on the deck of the cargo compartment and doing precisely nothing. The tinkerer shook his head and said, "I wish I knew. Here, let me show you."

  Taking out his boma blade, Golo set it carefully edge down atop the lump and pressed down. Nothing happened, a fact that caused Tulo's yellow eyes to widen.

  "Now watch this," Golo said. He turned the blade on its side and pressed. The weapon passed through the lump easily. Then he put the blade away and placed his hand atop the lump. It immediately began to flow around the hand until the tinkerer withdrew it. Even as the hand was withdrawn, the lump tried to extend itself to wrap around it.

  "It's a bit like what our Sohon masters do with nanotech," Aelool offered. "But it doesn't require or respond to Sohon."

  Sohon was the mental discipline by which the Indowy manipulated energy and matter. It was especially useful in manipulating nanites to act upon other matter.

  "How do you know?" Tulo asked.

  "I've a little of the craft," Aelool answered. "Not master level, no, but enough to tell if this lump works via something like Sohon. It doesn't."

  "Is the Himmit captain of any help?" Golo asked.

  "No. His skill set is different. He knows how to use the material for its intended purpose, but not how it works. 'Next promotion,' so Argzal says. And, 'No,' he says, we can't partly disassemble the controls of his ship to make something to manipulate the material."

  "How about the spares?" Goloswin asked. "Doesn't he have some parts I might be able to make use of? And maybe some tools?"

  "I didn't think to ask," Aelool admitted. "Our ships really don't carry spares. It's expected that nothing will go wrong that the ship's engineer can't fix by manipulating bare stock."

  Binastarion had graduated to galloping around the bay, bouncing his food balls off the walls and ceiling before catching them on the fly. Brasingala polished his boma blade without surcease, muttering over it constantly. The Essfour had taken to painting geometric designs on the walls with his grasping members and claws. This would have been no problem but that the only materials available to paint with were waste product and the flow from the food dispenser. Binastarion used the open spaces defined by the Essfour's shapes as aiming points for his solitaire game of "I Hate This Fucking Place."

  The Rememberer played a game something like chess with himself—Goloswin had made the pieces and board in an attempt to stave off madness. This also would not have been bad, if the Rememberer had not switched sides after each move, then lectured and argued with the invisible Posleen on the other side.

  And those were among the ones who were taking their boredom relatively well. Those who had done not so well Tulo had begun sending into hibernation, shortly after Essone decided that Essfour could use with a little trim . . . of the latter's head from his neck. Unfortunately, the more of his followers he put away, the faster and worse the effect of boredom on the others. He'd pretty much reached the tipping point, he decided.

  "Stand over that," Golo ordered, pointing at the lump for the nameless cosslain who had once served as assistant to the Mesergen. "Oh, don't be such a nestling," the tinkerer chided at seeing the cosslain's rolling eyes and trembling limbs. "Just stand above the bloody thing."

  Reluctantly, terrified, the co
sslain put first one foot forward, and then the other. In a total of five steps it was standing over the crude block of silvery metal.

  "Good creature," Golo praised. "Now just hold still."

  As Goloswin began to manipulate a flat rectangular control box he'd thrown together out of spare parts scavenged from the Himmit ship's stores, the cosslain looked down between its front legs. It saw the block of silvery stuff begin to flatten out, spreading across the deck. It thinned out to the thickness of a single molecule and flowed under the cosslain's clawed feet, then thickened. As the cosslain felt itself lifted by that thickening, it rolled its eyes, lifted its muzzle to the ceiling of the cargo compartment, and began to howl, piteously, "Geugh, geugh, geugh, geugh . . ."

  "You're not fooling anyone, you know," Golo chided.

  The material, once it was past the cosslain's feet, began then to ooze up along its legs, and over its torso. It spread its silvery sheen to the tips of the cosslain's claws, and up to the juncture of head and neck. There it stopped, until it had formed a thick lip, as if awaiting something. That something—an irregularly shaped clear helmet to which were attached some small bottles, tubes, and something that looked quite a bit like a rebreather—Golo picked up from the deck and slid over the cosslain's muzzle and cranium. The silvery material immediately flowed to join the clear plastic-like helmet, forming a seal. The cosslain's howling immediately cut off.

  "Now what?" asked Tulo'stenaloor

  "Now we see if it dies," the tinkerer answered, giggling.

  "Interesting that you had the precise parts required by the Posleen," Aelool observed. "A suspicious being, which, of course, I am not, might suspect that you or your people had anticipated they'd ask. But that could never be, could it?"

  Argzal, lying on his quilted couch, subtly shifted both heads to stare at the Indowy. "I'm sure I've no idea what you're talking about," the being said.

  "No . . . no, of course you wouldn't."

  After an hour, the cosslain not only wasn't dead, it had begun to gambol about the cargo compartment, to the delight of Goloswin and the annoyance of everyone else.

  "What is that crap?" Tulo asked.

  "Basically . . . long chain molecules, with peculiar additional protons and electrons, in various isotopes. Basically . . . too . . . material that 'wants' to be or become something, that can only be or become what it is designed, at a subatomic level, to be or become. Though one can play with that . . . intent. It was fascinating stuff to work with. I'm not at all sure I really understand it. Rather, I'm sure that I don't understand it . . . not yet, anyway."

  "Well . . . it seems to work . . ."

  At that time, the cosslain, somewhat unused to the helmet and surrounding material, bumped into Brasingala, who lashed out immediately and mindlessly with his boma blade.

  Which bounced off. Which caused the kessentai guard to strike again. Which strike also bounced off.

  Which caused Goloswin to gape and Tulo'stenaloor to exclaim, "Fuscirto!"—demon shit!—"That stuff's armor!"

  Golo insisted that he be the one to test the new suit. Tulo had, of course, said, "No. You're too valuable." Golo had then pointed out that he was not as valuable as Tulo and that none of the others had a mental state that could quite be trusted. "Truth, Tulo, I don't really trust myself. But I trust myself more than I do them." Golo pointed with his chin to where the Remember was strangling an empty space. He moved his chin's aim to Binastarion who had lost interest even in his food balls and was instead hugging his AS like a teddybear and rocking while keening. A second shift indicated Brasingala, who had stopped polishing his blade and was, instead, apparently fellating himself.

  "I see your point, Golo."

  Thus Golo found himself traipsing the unpleasantly yielding tunnel between the Surreptitious Stalker and a Posleen hulk bearing the name, Beatific Bearer of Breakfastime Bounty in High Posleen. An alternate translation, in low Posleen, might have been something like, Vengeful Ripper of Skulls and Devourer of Brains. It really depended on whose dictionary was being used; Posleen was an odd language that way.

  How the fuck do they maintain artificial gravity in this? Goloswin wondered, as he closed on the hatch of the Bounty. That hatch was already open to space. Yet another mystery to be solved. I love the Himmit.

  Golo hadn't a clue why the hatchway was open. The ship appeared to have been hulled in space. The hatch in question was not a normal route for egress, less still for emergency evacuation. There were no scorch marks or gouges around it. Another mystery. One I shall probably never solve.

  In fact, human salvage crews had deliberately opened the ships to space on the odd chance that a Posleen might someday emerge from a hibernation chamber set on automatic. If that were to happen, so the humans had decided, best to give that Posleen one final, big surprise.

  He entered through the hatch into a long corridor, one that split up to descend into the bowels of the Bounty but also to ascend up to the ship's bridge. There were bodies there in that corridor, a few, frozen solid with their faces set in some final, untellable agony. Blood, a frightful yellow, formed icicles at their maws, even as their semi-detached lungs had jammed their throats and, for a few of them, forced open their mouths.

  The ship had been there, motionless and without gravity, for a long time; so long, in fact, that even without air resistance the bodies had ceased any obvious motion. They simply floated, frozen, unknowing and uncaring. Goloswin thought that the eyeballs held in place by mere threads of nerves leading to the sockets was the creepiest thing he'd ever seen.

  A hair-thin cable trailed out behind Golo. He and Tulo, plus Essthree and Esstwo, had agreed that it would be most unwise to use radio or anything like it while there was even the remotest possibility of Fleet Strike hanging about or passing by.

  "I'm in, Tulo," Goloswin announced via the cable. "And it's pretty bad. On the plus side, though, we'll be able to eat something besides reconstituted shit for a change."

  "Do you recognize the design?" Tulo asked. "Can you find where the EV suits are?"

  "Yes to the former," Golo answered. "For the latter, that depends on whether there are suits were they're supposed to be. That should be the case; I see none of the crew wearing any."

  Most likely place to find some is up by the bridge, Golo thought, pushing aside a couple of floating bodies, setting them not only to spinning but to bouncing erratically off the walls. Dodging the corpses, he took the upward ramping corridor, turning a few times along his way. He found the spinning bodies, and especially the orbiting eyes, sufficiently unsettling that he did his best to set no more of them into motion. In this he was, for the most part, successful.

  That is to say, he was successful until he reached the EVA suit locker, where he found a ragged pile of Posleen who had apparently fallen to fighting amongst themselves in a last ditch, desperate attempt to get at the means of saving their lives.

  These he had to move out of the way. And if the gravity was non-existent, still the mass of eight or nine of his people—it was hard to be sure, they were so chopped up—was difficult enough to lift and move. Moreover, frozen together in wrestling postures and with their spilled and flash frozen blood acting as mortar, they could not be separated short of chopping. It was all Goloswin could do to lift the pile slightly and to set it spinning up toward the bridge.

  "I've got nine general purpose EVA suits," Golo reported. "Shall I return with them now or continue my explorations?"

  Back on the Stalker, Tulo pondered. It would be nice to have a report of the task ahead, but if something goes wrong over there, and we lose the one suit, we're lost.

  "Come back, Golo. We need the other suits more than the information, at this time." And we'll need you, too, old friend. Though I might not say so to your face.

  "As you command."

  The suits were fine, once Golo had managed to move the bodies and crank open the door. They were just general things, large enough to fit the largest Posleen and simple enough for even a n
ormal to use safely, provided a skilled cosslain or a kessentai dressed them.

  Hmmm. Check them here and waste time—never mind hanging around all those frozen eyeballs—or just load up what I can carry and bring them back?

  The sight of two eyeballs, bouncing off each other on the ends of their strings of nerves before bouncing back to the face of the dead Posleen who had owned them, then returning once again to bounce off each other, was the deciding factor. I think I'll bring these suits home. Do the others good to have something useful to do, anyway.

  The sphincter that sealed the tunnel leading to the Bounty closed without a sound. This, too, Goloswin found unsettling.