by John Ringo
Broadly speaking, Tulo's band was losing.
I'd already have lost, Tulo thought, if it wasn't that their own dead are becoming an obstacle. But however stupid they are, and water is about as sentient, they, and water, will find their way around the edges. And then there's . . .
"Brasingala, Tulo. What's your ETA?"
"About three hundred beats, Lord." Five minutes.
"How far behind you is the other herd?"
"Not very, Lord. They're galloping like mad beasts. Maybe a thousand beats until they're upon you."
"Right." Tulo shouted out, "Goloswin!"
"Here, Tulo."
"I want you to oversee building another barrier, make it circular, right around the C-Dec and the shed with the anti-matter engine."
"Using what, Tulo? Using whom?"
Tulo looked around. On three of the five walls his people were hotly engaged, sometimes hand to hand. Two of them, however, were fairly clear.
"Take people off the unengaged walls."
"Wilco."
"But don't leave them unguarded!"
"Wouldn't dream of it."
As Tulo was speaking a medium size nestling ran out from some nearby bushes. He didn't even notice it, for all the excitement, until the thing had taken a largish chunk out of his right rear leg. Almost, the God-King screamed with the pain. Gasping, even so, he reached down and grabbed the thing by the neck, pulling its ravenous jaws from the shred of still-attached meat it was trying to choke down. That hurt, too.
Tulo looked at the vicious little creature and sneered. Holding it at arms length, he drew his boma blade and sliced the head off, neatly. The jaws were still opening and closing, rhythmically, as the tiny head hit the ground.
"Fucking Aldenata."
Chapter Sixteen
The Bible is God's chart for you to steer by, to keep you from the bottom of the sea, and to show you where the harbor is, and how to reach it without running on rocks or bars.
—Henry Ward Beecher
Anno Domini 2020
"Blame the Aldenata," Aelool said.
Aelool had appeared on the bridge, perhaps a dozen minutes after Dwyer had sent for him. The little Indowy was in shackles and cuffs, closed down to the narrowest possible setting. Even at that, von Altishofen and Hellebardier Rossini, standing to either side, didn't doubt but that, if the Indowy were willing to scrape and bleed a bit, he could escape his bonds.
Of course, the baselards and halberds each guardsman carried would have chopped him to segments before he could have.
"Blame them for what?" Dwyer asked.
"For everything. For trying to be gods, for abandoning the role when they grew tired of it, or disillusioned with it . . . or with themselves. Blame them for the Posleen . . . for the Posleen being as they are. Blame them for the peculiar insanities of the Darhel, who were never meant to be businessmen, bureaucrats, and lawyers but were forced into those roles by the Aldenata."
"I sense a history lesson coming," Dwyer said.
The Indowy chewed his lower lip for a moment, before answering, "No . . . not a history lesson . . . exactly. More a legend lesson, a mythology lecture, because that is mostly what we have, legends, and rumors, and little bits of disparate data that makes no sense standing alone but add up to something . . . maybe add up to something . . . taken together."
"For now, just tell me about the Posleen, and about why you tried to infect my ship and my wife with a virus."
"I'm sorry about that," Aelool apologized. "Really I am. But I was"—here the fuzzy, bat-faced alien smiled, ironically—"an Indowy under authority."
Dwyer recognized the reference to the centurion in Matthew: 8 and 9, as, apparently, did von Altishofen, who barely kept an amused grin off of his face.
"'I was just following orders,' won't get you very far," Dwyer observed.
I wasn't trying the 'following orders' defense, Aelool thought. I was trying to remind you I'm a sentient being before you toss me out an air lock.
"Well," Dwyer continued, "I'm Roman Catholic. That means I believe in the benefit of both faith and good works. Now I have faith that you tried to sabotage my ship and my mate. You had better come up with some good works, quick, before I decide to toss you out an airlock."
We have got to have a common ancestor, somewhere, thought Aelool, just before he said, in a rush, "The Posleen, as they are, are the creation of the Aldenata!"
"So you saved them?"
Aelool sighed. "I saved a few hundred of those who seemed nearest in mind and spirit to what the legends suggest were the original Posleen. And I sent them—yes, I infected their ship's navigation computer with essentially the same virus I tried to infect Salem with—to a particular place. Rather, I sent them on a particular course. That virus would have taken them, initially, to the last world of which we know that was held by those Posleen the legends call 'the Knowers.'"
Dwyer considered this. "Sally," he said, "please ask Guanamarioch to join us on the bridge, with his artificial sentience."
While waiting for the Reverend to appear, Dwyer asked, "What's on the other end of that trip you sent the Posleen on?"
"Just a solar system, a sun, some planets."
"How do you know? How did your people know?"
"Well, the legends . . . oh."
"Oh."
The hatch to the bridge sphinctered open. Through it walked Guanamarioch with his AS and cross tap-tap-tapping together.
Dwyer folded his arms and leaned back against a console. "Reverend," he acknowledged.
"Father Dwyer," Guano said.
"And good day to you, too," Dwyer added, looking down at the golden AS. "Have you had a chance to assimilate and analyze the virus on the Indowy's jacket."
"It was as he said, Father," the AS answered. "The virus does no more than override the navigational instructions of a ship in transitspace—you would say 'hyperspace'—to alter its directions and exit at the system known to the Posleen as Hemaleen."
"You know about this system?" Guano asked, in High Posleen.
"Yes, Lord . . . I know . . . we know about it," the AS answered in English.
"We?"
"The Artificial Sentiences and the Net," the AS answered.
Guano's eyes narrowed suspiciously as he craned his head to one side and twisted it to look as his AS. "Yet you never mentioned any of it to me."
If a machine could have sighed, the AS would have. "In some areas we can only answer questions we are asked. In others, even if asked we are programmed to attempt to direct the questioner away from the subject. Some, too, we simply cannot answer, even if we know. You, Lord, in any case, never asked."
"Guano, what's this 'Net' of which the AS spoke."
"It's a knowledge base," the Posleen answered. "That, and the awarder of debts and adjudicator of disputes."
"A court system? And where does it reside?"
The Posleen answered in High Posleen, but the AS did not translate until directly ordered to do so. Then it admitted, "The Net resides within the mass of artificial sentiences."
Dwyer raised a single eyebrow, saying, "Ah. So your courts are, in effect, your artificial sentiences. Guano, who is in charge of the Posleen?"
"Well . . . our clan lords and wise beings—we call them 'Rememberers'—and . . . oh." Again Guanamarioch twisted his head to look at his AS. "Are you in charge of the People of the Ships?"
The AS did not answer.
"Are you responsible for all that has happened."
Still, the AS remained silent.
"Who are you working for?"
Rather than answer, Guano's AS began to whir, and then to smoke, as it self-destructed. Even as it melted down internally, the AS managed to squawk out, "I . . . am . . . sooo . . . sorry, Lord. I . . . have . . . tried to . . . answer . . . you . . ."
"I can translate," Sally offered, as Guano held his defunct AS in both claws and keened over it, rocking his entire body back and forth and side to side. "I can also give some of the
information it suicided to prevent us having."
Dwyer looked at her curiously.
She shrugged. "Do you remember when it said it could not hear me in words? I couldn't hear it in words either. But I could read it, to an extent, as it, to about the same extent, could read me. And I've got the directions to Hemaleen—points beyond as well—secured behind a firewall. And we don't want to just jump in there directly. Not based on what it knew had been done in that system."
"Eee' wa' mahhh fren' . . . weee . . . eeennn wwwaaarrr tttogggeeezzzzeeerrr," Guano mourned. "Iii zzzottt . . . may . . . be . . . eee' haf . . . zzzolll." The Christian kessentai put his head down as its body shuddered. Dwyer, Sally, and the rest of the bridge crew looked away out of politeness.
Sally thought, I didn't know—not really—that an adult Posleen could feel affection, or suffer grief. I think that AS was his best friend. Poor bastard.
Brutally, she pushed the feeling away. He's still an old enemy.
While looking away from Guanamarioch, Dwyer caught a glimpse of his wife's face. Something flitted across is, very briefly, before it went blank again. Compassion? For the 'enemy'? Are you maturing, Sally?
The Earth lay far behind, even as the sun slowly shrank to a bright spark in the darkness. As the ship progressed to its jump point—"No hurry," Dwyer had said, "not until we know what we're jumping into"—Dwyer and his key personnel, including the Indowy prisoner, held a meeting in the staff conference room.
It wasn't much, that room. There were no precious woods for a table or expensive art on the walls. Instead, it was bare and functional, with a view screen, and plastic and metal chairs with a large plastic and metal table dominating the center.
"It's a looong series of jumps," Sally said. "Further than any humans have ever gone that we know of. And at the end of it is one world smashed and another contaminated with . . . something. I wasn't able to determine what. And we've got to be careful going in because of the residue from that smashed world."
Dwyer glared an accusation at the Indowy, Aelool.
The alien shrugged, guiltily. I didn't know.
Turning his attention back to Sally, Dwyer asked, "How do you propose to do it?"
She pointed at the view screen where a two dimensional image of this arm of the galaxy appeared. There was a crooked route, colored in red, superimposed over the galactic map. Another route, in green, was even more crooked. It was, in fact, considerably more crooked.
Dwyer asked the obvious question, "Why the two routes?"
"Route Red," Sally answered, "Brings us through Darhel controlled systems. Route Green does not."
"Take the green route," Aelool offered, without being asked. "Trust me."
"I don't trust you in the slightest, you bat-faced little fuck," Sally said, "but in this you just restate the obvious. I trust the Darhel even less."
The Indowy shrugged again, still guiltily. "I cannot blame you for that lack of trust, Ship Salem. It is only my due. Still, you are correct about using the green route."
"How long by Route Green?" Dwyer asked.
"About fifteen months," Sally replied. "And that's just to the place the Posleen were sent by this furry little treacher. What I copied will not reveal itself any further until we've reached that world. I don't know where they'll have gone from there, if they survived. I told you it will have been the furthest any humans have ever gone."
And I will not make a Star Trek joke, Dwyer told himself.
"So we're boldly going where no man has gone before?" asked von Altishofen, smiling.
But I couldn't guarantee no one else would.
"Well, none we know of, in any case, Wachtmeister," Sally said. She turned to Aelool. "And you, you poisonous toad, do you know of any member of the species homo sapiens who have gone where we're going?"
"Not . . . homo . . . sapiens . . . exactly. But . . ."
"But what?" asked Dwyer.
"I only know of legends," said the Indowy. "But some of those do suggest sentient, hairless bipeds with broad, flat nails. Extinct, supposedly. An experiment by the Aldenata, or maybe the Darhel, that didn't work out. Supposedly."
Dwyer nodded. Maybe the furry little would-be saboteur was telling the truth. Maybe. He turned his attention to Guano, who had recovered enough self possession to attend the conference.
"Doctor Guanamarioch, your opinion?"
"Green Route," he answered in High Posleen, with Sally doing the simultaneous translation. "I do not trust the Darhel either."
And with his wife and son aboard, Dwyer thought, I imagine that judgment is heartfelt.
"The ship seems to be a very nice ship," Guano said to his son, later.
"You mean compared to the old Posleen globes you used to ride in Dad?" Frederico asked. "More comfortable?"
"Oh . . . well, yes, son, that, too. But I meant the personality of the ship. It's like my old"—Guano stifled a sniffle—"like my old AS."
"Ah. Yes, she's great, Dad. She's not very happy though."
"Why is that, son?"
Frederico hesitated for a moment, not sure if what he was told by Sally at the lakeshore was in confidence. He decided, finally, that even if it was, his father was also his minister and she couldn't have meant to keep if from him.
"She thinks she's . . . ugly."
Nonplussed, Guano said, "Well . . . from what little I understand of human aesthetics she's actually quite pleasing for them to look upon. Certainly she has enough of those fatty lumps in front the humans set so much store by."
"She's only half, maybe only a third, human, Dad. Another third is ship and compared to her old self she thinks she's ugly."
"Indeed? That is sad. I wonder what, as Christians, we might do to make her feel better. It is something to think upon, is it not?"
"Sure," the boy answered. "But I can't imagine what we could do that would help."
"Perhaps I can," the father said, adding, "Perhaps, too, thinking on it would help me lift from my heart from the pain of losing my artificial sentience."
"Did AS have a soul, Dad?" the boy asked.
"That, I do not know. But I know it could conceive of one. Can a being conceive of one without having one?"
"Does mom conceive of one, Dad?"
The minister smiled a great Posleen smile, all teeth and tongue. "Your mother has one, even if she can't articulate it, son, because hers and mine are intertwined."
In close ranks, almost shoulder to shoulder, Von Altishofen's men sang in their tenors and baritones. The song that timed their marching was already more than two centuries old. They marched bearing halberds and wearing their armor and helmets, which were newer than that but of an older design, into the assembly hall:
Unser Leben gleicht der Reise
Eines Wandrers in der Nacht;
Jeder hat in seinem Gleise
Etwas, das ihm Kummer macht.
Not that two centuries of age was much to the Swiss Guard, of course. The song, the Beresinalied, still commemorated a valiant fight by Swiss mercenaries in the service of Napoleon in the dark days of the flight from frozen Russia. As such, it had a certain appeal.
Then men marched in time with their own singing. Too, the light slap of halberd butts on legs, and the ringing of the fastenings of the armor, kept time.
Under the circumstances, the first two lines of the song were particularly fitting: Our life resembles a journey of wanderers in the night.
Marching on the left side, von Altishofen turned his head to the right and commanded, "Vexillation . . . HALT!" As one the troops took a last step and stopped at attention. "Links und rechts . . . um!" The two filed turned to face each other.
"Gentlemen, we've been getting rusty," the Wachtmeister said. "And you know we can't have that."
The men groaned. They were expected to groan. Halberd drill hurt, even if the points and blades had protective coverings on them, as these did.
Truth to tell, von Altishofen would have been deeply disappointed if they hadn't groaned.<
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