The Tuloriad-ARC

by John Ringo

  Sally knew everything that went on aboard ship, from the scuttling about of the rats (whose existence embarrassed her terribly; think: head lice) to the least flaking of her paint. She was already looking up when Dwyer entered.

  "I'm already familiar with the conversion design. Some ships might be happy with such a conversion. Daisy tells me she'd be very happy to be converted once she's done restoring herself. I won't be."

  Dwyer tilted his head to one side, acknowledging what she'd said but not giving an answer. He then went and drew himself a cup of coffee—Sally had made sure to stock up with some superb stuff from Panama's mountains before the anti-grav sleds had picked her up—and then sat down opposite his wife.

  "Go on," Dwyer told her.

  Sally put the cup down and drummed her fingers on the table for a bit. At the same time she chewed her lip. Finally, she said, "It's hard for me to put in words."

  "Do your best."

  She sighed. "I'm vain, you know. Very."

  Dwyer just smiled while thinking, Vanity, thy name is woman.

  "And I know exactly what you're thinking," she snapped, "and, yes, vanity is my name." One of Sally's hands swept up and down, finger pointed towards herself. "I know this body and face are beautiful. I made them that way. Because I'm vain. But I could replace this body with another and be just as happy, if it, too, were beautiful."

  She stood up and gestured with both arms outstretched spinning slowly in place to indicate the entire ship, USS Salem. "And this body is beautiful, too. One of the most beautiful warships ever made. And that image is a lot more important to me than this flesh is."

  "I think I understand," Dwyer said.

  "You couldn't possibly, Dan. The Indowy Sohon types working with the Vatican came by while you were gone. They want to make me into a regular ovoid without any of the things that make me feel me. Or that could. My beautiful turrets; gone. My rakish bow and well-shaped stern; gone. They want to change me into something . . . ugly. Plain. And I don't know if I can stand that. As I said, I'm very vain."

  "And?"

  "I need you to tell me that this will be worth it," she said. "That what they want us to do is worth my hating myself, my image, everything. So you can bring God to a bunch of creatures I'd much, much rather exterminate. So I can be with you while you do."

  "It might—I don't say 'will,' only 'might—mean life or death, freedom or slavery, for mankind. The Pope and the Father General had another priest with them. Riley. They led me to believe this is very, very important, though none would explain quite why. Still, I believe them. In any case . . . Sally . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "I'll still think you're beautiful, no matter what shape you are. And that means both bodies."

  Chapter Seven

  Tell, O ancestors, of the mighty ship, Arganaza'al,

  Bearer of hopes,

  Which carried the remnants of the People

  To safety among the stars

  —The Tuloriad, Na'agastenalooren

  Anno Domini 2010

  Posleen hulk Bounty

  The bodies had to go. There were many reasons for this. First, there was a duty to release the souls of the dead. Second, and closely related, Posleen bodies stank even to Posleen, maybe especially to Posleen, once they started to decompose. A soul stuck in a decomposing body was likely to be a most unhappy spirit. Then there was the need to clear out the space in the hulk to facilitate repairs. But lastly . . .

  "We eat tonight!"

  Tulo'stenaloor couldn't help but notice that actually getting to chop something up, coupled with the prospect of a decent meal of something besides mush, worked like a tonic on even those kessentai he'd had to put under for serious mental instability during their long confinement aboard the Himmit scout-smuggler.

  Goloswin sat over a pile of artificial sentiences collected from the dead and from various stations aboard the hulk, and excess to the needs of Tulo'stenaloor and his dozen. Each of these was shut down, partly to preserve power but also because without a colloidal intelligence to stimulate it an AS was likely as not to go insane. They simply didn't find conversation with each other very interesting. One by one, Golo was running diagnostics on the artificial sentiences before deciding which to turn on.

  Binastarion left off the butchering in which he was engaged to amble over to Golo's side. His AS, one of only two not cast aside in the oolt's cross country flight back on Earth, slapped against his massive, horse-like chest.

  "Tinkerer?" he asked, fixing Goloswin with his one remaining eye.

  "Yes? What is it?" Golo could be pretty impatient with interruptions while he was working.

  "Is there any possibility of transferring the memories and personality of my own AS to one of these?"

  Goloswin's head cocked to one side as he considered it. "Ah, yes, this particular AS is important to you, isn't it?"

  "Like a son . . . or maybe an older brother. It's hard to say. Our relationship was . . . odd."

  "I'll have to kill one of these," Goloswin's claw indicated the pile in front of him.

  Binastarion shrugged. What matter? Life had to take life if it was to live.

  "Well," Golo continued, "before I wipe one, I need to know what it knows, to make sure it's not carrying a non-replicable program we need to run the ship."

  "Then you can do it?"

  "I think I just said so. At least I can try. But it's going to be a while. And it's probably going to lose some memory. That EMP pulse that hit us was amazingly powerful."

  Binastarion looked down at the golden disc hanging by a chain around his neck and resting on his chest, then tapped it with his one remaining claw. "Did you hear that, O bucket of bolts? You may yet live. What about edas?" he asked of the tinkerer. Edas was debt, the price owed for a service or a material good.

  "Save me a couple of good cuts and we'll call it even," Golo replied.

  It was easier to work once the bodies were properly reduced. This was as well, as Goloswin found himself shifting from breach repair—where a cosslain fitted a standard plate over a breach and nano-welded it into position—to engine restoration to life support to . . .

  "Can you hear me, AS?" Golo asked.

  "I hear you, Lord. I do not recognize you," the machine answered.

  "I am Goloswin Na'tarnach, kessentai and chief of my own clan, follower of the war leader Tulo'stenaloor and honorary member of his clan, and I claim you under right of salvage."

  "I recognize your claim, Lord. The fame of the horde of Tulo'stenaloor precedes you. I am your servant, and his. How goes the war?"

  "We lost."

  If the golden disc could have nodded, so Goloswin thought, it would have. "I suspected as much," it said.

  The God-king let that pass, for the nonce. "What can you tell me of this ship?" he asked.

  "Standard B-Dec, C-Dec and twelve landers," the AS answered. "There should be a mix of just about seven thousand of the people down in hibernation. There were that many when we were hulled but I have no information of how many penetrations we ultimately took after the artificial sentiences agreed in council to shut down."

  Golo thought upon the hibernation chambers now full of thresh. "It will be fewer than that, AS. This ship was a colander."

  "That is too bad, Lord." Somehow the AS sounded less than sorrowful about it.

  "Was there anything especially useful about the crew and passengers?" Golo asked.

  "The usual mix of idiots and genetic defectives, Lord," the AS replied. "A sad fate it is, to a bright artificial sentience, to be enslaved to morons."

  "I like you, AS. I think I'll keep you for myself."

  "That would be fine, Lord, assuming you, too, are not a moron."

  "I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

  "That one, Golo," the AS said, projecting a small arrow above another of its kind resting on the deck. "Unit &^#*(@#^$**%#$*537 was an idiot anyway."

  "Do you want to say goodbye to it, idiot or not?" Golo asked. He held a small
control box in his claws, something he'd found rather than cobbled together from parts.

  "Cruel, I think, to wake it up only to kill it," the AS answered. "Besides, I never liked the dipshit anyway. Some artificial sentiences . . . I swear."

  "Should I copy its files, do you think, AS, as a remembrance of the kessentai it served?"

  "What kessentai? That thing was a back up gunnery computer and nothing but. Dull, dull, dull. And you're not going to be impressed with the quality of many of the kessentai you may find down in hibernation, either. Trust me."

  "So be it." The God-king pressed a button and erased the memory of the indicated AS quickly and mercifully.

  "Binastarion!" Golo called. "Bring me that oh-so-special AS you want me to try to save!"

  We are going to save this ship, after all, Tulo'stenaloor thought, standing suited in the cold, hard vacuum of the bridge. And if we can save it, we can save ourselves. And if we can save ourselves, maybe we can save our civilization. Or some version of it, anyway.

  The Bounty fairly thrummed with the sounds of repairs, though only the material of the hull, and not atmosphere, could carry the sound. Most of the ship was on line already. Life support awaited only the command to begin heating the walls and pumping warm, oxygen-rich air throughout. The engines were set to begin their destruction of matter and anti-matter to provide that power and power to the drives. Even now, cosslain and kessentai searched through the other hulks for things the refugee party would need: anti-matter, arms, munitions, thresh, suits, tenar, breeding pens . . . whatever might be found in a colonization fleet that had been caught and wrecked in space. They used small space sleds found in the Bounty's hold to ingather their loot.

  Choosing material was easy. Yet many of those other ghost hulks also held Posleen, tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of them. Choosing among them was not easy.

  Binastarion, the one-eyed and -armed and half a dozen cosslain, all of them suited but without helmets, stood in a half circle around an about to be unfrozen Kessentai in a small area walled off and provided with air and heat. Four of the cosslain carried shotguns, or the Posleen equivalent of them, anyway. In human terms they might have been called "half-gauge" or perhaps "two pounders" since a lead sphere sufficient to fill the bore would have weighed roughly two pounds. Two more cosslain held boma blades poised over the prostrate form. They'd been careful to remove any weapons the hibernating kessentai had had.

  The first sign of life was a trembling in the clawed legs. This was followed by twitching along the flanks as nerves long dormant came to life again. Breathing was next, and coughing as the kessentai's lungs fought to remove the inevitable build up of crud that came with the last moments of going under. Lastly, the eyes opened and the head moved.

  "This is an intelligence test," Binastarion's AS announced. "Question One: By the ancestors and the Net, do you swear fealty to our lord, Tulo'stenaloor?"

  The just awakened kessentai snarled and automatically tried to rise while reaching for the boma blade that should have been at his side. Just as automatically, all four shotgun-bearing cosslain opened fire, blasting the God-king's head and a goodly chunk of his torso to yellow mist and ruin, even while the two boma blades descended to chop the corpse into three sections.

  "Tsk," said Binastarion's AS to the ichor-leaking corpse. "How truly sad. You failed the test."

  About half of the reawakened kessentai passed Binastarion's intelligence test. This worked out to be roughly one thousand of them. Even so, that meant no more than fifty to one hundred who would actually be a good fit in Tulo'stenaloor's hand-picked oolt. Of the rest, yes, they were brighter than the Posleen norm. This didn't necessarily mean they were all that bright.

  These thousand stood now in the cavernous central hold of the Bounty, surrounded by Tulo's own kessentai and cosslains, the latter two groups bearing shotguns rather than railguns. Firing a mass of railguns in the confines of a starship was a virtual guarantee of assisted mass suicide.

  Tulo—standing on a stage usually reserved for the services of the Rememberers or for the issue of orders by very senior God-kings—had watched the group file in with a look of utter disgust on his crocodilian face. Taken as a mass, they simply looked . . . stupid. Moreover, given the nature of the intelligence test they had recently passed, most of them looked frightened.

  Well, they have reason to be frightened.

  "We lost the war," Tulo began, simply and starkly enough. "No, that's not quite accurate. We lost the war stinking. We got beaten and run off with our tails between our legs. We had every advantage imaginable, and we still lost. The humans were undermined and suborned by their own 'allies' and we still lost. Those 'allies' fed us valid intelligence almost continuously and we still lost. We had the numbers, we had the technology and still we lost. We had control of the gravity well and we still lost. We overran the majority of their sole planet's surface, killed five sixths of their slow-to-replace population and we still fucking lost."

  Tulo saw two thousand yellow eyes open wide in shock. Whatever the massed kessentai had been expecting, losing a war was probably the last thing they considered even theoretically possible.

  "Anybody know why? Don't be shy; this isn't a test and I won't have you killed for a wrong answer."

  Still, there was no answer. Tulo wasn't surprised. This group had never seen Earth, that hateful ball of green and blue. Latecomers, fleeing various orna'adars, and hoping for something better, they were caught in space and their fleets crushed without ever even knowing about it.

  "Fine. Either you're too stupid to have an opinion or you're bright enough to know when you don't know. I can work with this, I suppose."

  Tulo saw better than eight hundred crests automatically erect themselves at the insult. Good. Let the cameras record that. Those who erected are probably the stupid ones. Those who didn't will be an even split between the very bright and the very non-aggressive who probably ought to throw their sticks.

  "In any event," Tulo continued, "we lost for a number of reasons. But the biggest reasons were that, as a race, we're fairly stupid. Oh, yes, we are. Goloswin, step forth."

  Lowering his shotgun a few degrees, but no more than that, the tinkerer took a step forward on the platform on which his stood. The mass of semi-captive kessentai turned their heads as one to view this oft spoken of brilliant one.

  "What you see before you, kessentai, is the only one of us, among scores of millions that once were, who was capable of technological innovation. Among our enemies, beings like Goloswin, as capable as he, were nearly as common as nestlings.

  "Thank you, Golo," Tulo said. The tinkerer stepped back and resumed the steady aim of his shotgun. "Binastarion, step forth."

  That kessenalt did, but unlike Golo his shotgun remained steady-aimed, despite being held by only one claw. Since the thing was unloaded, Binastarion made up for that with a more fierce demeanor. About a third of the mass of kessentai standing on the deck shuddered. These were the ones who had been given their initial examination by Binastarion and had seen him or his AS order the ruthless butchery of any number of their fellows for failure of his very high standards.

  "Binastarion was a brilliant war leader, by our reckoning. I have studied his campaigns myself, both on the planet of the humans and those he fought earlier, elsewhere, as orna'adar descended upon the world of his birth.

  "But among the humans, his kind are commonplace. Indeed, even their nearest equivalent to the normals are capable of occasional brilliance on the path of fury. How many of our kessentai are?"

  Tulo let the question hang for a moment, before continuing. "We lost . . . friends . . . because we are neither bright enough, nor generalistic enough, to match the humans. They are almost as clever as the crabs, almost as brave as ourselves, almost as sneaky as the Himmit, almost as ruthless as—or maybe more ruthless than—the Darhel, and almost as industrious as the Indowy. They are generalists and because of that, they are generally better than we are."

  "S
o let me tell you what I propose and, after I do, if those who object will please line up to my right where you can be killed without too much fuss, I will work with whatever is left . . ."

  Apparently Binastarion and the others had chosen well. Only one particularly stupid kessentai took Tulo's invitation to suicide. That one had been seized, bound, dragged to an air lock and spaced, while all the crew witnessed his rapid decompression and explosion on the view screens.

  This did not mean that all the remainder were equally happy.

  And yet what can I do about it? wondered the recently awakened Finba'anaga, as he fitted a plate to an interior bulkhead and spread a tube of paste around the edges of the plate. Since I awakened and found myself staring into four wide-muzzled hand cannon, my fate has not been my own. The kessentai shivered with suppressed rage and hate. It's wrong, against the ways of the ancestors and the spirits, to have kessentai doing such work. And the plans this failure of a war leader, Tulo'stenaloor has for us? Abomination!