Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  Hiro pushed the visor back up once more, and leaned close. “Lis,” he said, and Lisbeth met his stare through the armoured display. “Whatever happens, stay close to me and do what I say. Not Timoshene, not Liala, just me. Understand?”

  Lisbeth stared back at him, unconvinced. Flipped her visor down to double-check coms, and make sure they were off, and no one else could hear. Flipped the visor back up again. “I know Lien Wang brought you instruction from your old bosses at Federal Intelligence,” she said sombrely. “I’m not stupid, Hiro. I can read the signs.”

  There was a hard edge to Hiro’s smile, examining her face for further clues. “And what do those signs tell you?”

  “That Federal Intelligence don’t want House Harmony to rise too far too fast. That’s the main reason you came with me — to keep an eye on Gesul.”

  Hiro nearly laughed. “Lis, I’m one guy. I don’t know how many dumb spy movies you’ve seen, but one person doesn’t stand much chance of influencing the rise of House Harmony.”

  “That’s funny, because I’ve found myself in that position quite a lot.” There was no humour in her voice at all. “It’s inevitable given Phoenix’s centrality in everything, and now you’ve attached yourself to me.” Hiro’s smile faded. “Hiro, swear you won’t do anything stupid.”

  Hiro’s eyes flicked up the passage. “Would you set Timoshene on me?

  “Who do you think helped me to figure this out?” The smile faded completely. He hadn’t seen that coming. “You underestimate them, Hiro. You think because they seem inflexible that they’re stupid. Timoshene’s had doubts about your loyalties since the beginning. Parren do loyalty and treachery analysis like drysines do math. Don’t try to pull one over on them — humans are outclassed, they’ll always see it coming.”

  “If they’re so convinced my bosses have told me to back Fortitude, why did Gesul insist I come along?”

  “Because you have drysine communication tech that only you know how to operate, and only Liala knows how to counter.” Lisbeth glanced toward the bright glare of laser blasts. “And guess who’s really leading this mission? Besides, Gesul has this odd instinct to let things play out and see how they’re resolved. Call it the wheel of fate. Perhaps he has hopes for you.” She meant it as a warning, and moved to flip her visor down.

  Hiro caught her armoured hand. “Lis, Fortitude has been the rock of parren stability for centuries. Harmony has struggled for twenty five thousand years with being the house that sold their soul to the machines in exchange for power…”

  “Right, a narrative that was false to begin with, and is currently being exposed.”

  “And this is incredibly dangerous, Lis.” His eyes were intense. “This is a groundswell. Potentially a revolution in parren thought and politics. Those are lethal with parren because they’re not entirely in control of their own minds…”

  “What nonsense!”

  “They’re not, Lis, only you’ve become too attached to see it. Exactly what are you serving, here? Gesul? House Harmony? You’re human, Lis! This thing that Gesul’s on, this trajectory, this could be incredibly destabilising for all parren space, and the last thing humanity needs now is more instability in the Spiral.”

  “We’re talking about hundreds of years, Hiro,” Lisbeth retorted. “When houses rise and assume power over all parren, we’re talking about a process over centuries. Right now we’re only talking about an alliance between Harmony and Fortitude…”

  “An alliance that Fortitude apparently doesn’t want, given they’re about to ambush Gesul at the alliance ceremony.”

  “Right, and you know what will most likely cause a civil war? Removing or killing the head of House Harmony on a pretext of ‘newly-discovered’ historical data… most of Harmony won’t fall for it, they’ll be furious and then it’ll be on! I won’t let it happen, and if you’re serving what you say you are, you won’t either.” She knocked his hand away, and slammed her visor shut. “You want my advice? Don’t overestimate your own abilities, keep your head down and stay out of my way.”

  She jumped from the access tunnel edge to the roof of the parked vehicle, and promptly ruined the dramatic effect by forgetting all her training and compensating for what would surely be a whole lot of weight pulling her forward when she landed… and nearly lost balance backward instead, the suit reading her unnecessary motion and amplifying it, as all armour suits did. She stepped back, arms windmilling for real this time, then quickly jumped again as her balance came back. She landed hard, and went down on a hand and knee.

  “Dammit.” She got up, heart pounding, as Hiro nonchalantly jumped down to her side and offered her a hand up that she ignored.

  “Must be those superior Debogande genes,” Hiro deadpanned, turning to walk to where Timoshene, Ruei and Tarman waited, watching Dse-Pa work. Lisbeth thought to check her rifle as she went, testing the rear clip with a hand on the rifle butt… the light on her visor told her it was secure, just as well as she couldn’t turn her head in the helmet to see that far. As for actually using the rifle, Hiro had given her some brief instruction, mostly on how not to get herself killed.

  “Liala says her network patches have not been noticed,” Timoshene informed the humans between bursts of the laser. “The infiltration will be unnoticed.”

  Unsurprisingly for House Fortitude’s capital city, Shonedene was a mass of high security networks, nearly impossible for anyone possessing similar technology to penetrate. Liala, of course, swung that equation highly in House Harmony’s favour, but Liala also reported many blindspots where entire chunks of vital mainframes had been removed from the network entirely. Those changes appeared to have been made recently. If so, it meant that House Fortitude, knowing they could not keep a drysine queen out of their systems entirely, had instead decided to proof part of their network by making it inaccessible to anyone.

  Liala reported that she could likely access many of those parts anyway, seeing paths that organic minds could barely conceive of, but Gesul, Timoshene and other advisors had become anxious at the prospect that Liala’s hacking could be if not prevented, then perhaps discovered. Such an act could be construed as aggression, and Liala had instead been instructed to do no more than hide this infiltration team’s progress.

  The building where House Harmony’s leadership contingent were currently lodged had no direct sewer connection or other method of access to where Gesul’s secret maps told of access to the forgotten underground portion of the city. But it did have access to the river. That access was heavily guarded by sensors, but Liala assured them all that however carefully watched, those sensors were now telling nothing of what unfolded in the lower portions of the building’s foundations.

  Dse Pa’s laser made a final burst, then a loud crack! as Liala caught a piece of severed floorplate with big forward legs, braced for leverage, then slid it aside with impressive power. Dse Pa peered into the hole in the steel plating, the rim still glowing hot. “Adequate,” he pronounced aloud for the organics’ benefit, then proceeded to climb inside, like a large spider lowering itself carefully into a hot bath. Modular underside thruster pods made that movement awkward, an extra load that weighed the drone down, to say nothing of his shoulder-mounted cannon with their enclosed ammunition feeds.

  Dse Pa dropped, then a splash from below. “The water is shallow,” he said on coms. “We shall proceed.”

  “There is a Fortitude security drone hovering over this bit of river front,” Liala said by vocals. “The river water visibility should hide us, but one cannot be certain. I will attempt to divert it.”

  “Don’t assume they haven’t thought of that,” Hiro told her, as Ruei and Tarmen followed Dse Pa into the hole. “Parren are real clever with infiltration traps, they’re not above trying to lure in a drysine drone.”

  “Yes, thank you Hiro,” said Liala, with unmistakable sarcasm. “I will try not to disappoint you.”

  Gesul stood at the head of his command formation upon the ceremonial ground
s a hundred metres above the city of Shonedene. Ahead of him, the two great rivers became one, flowing away to the Dalla Falls, a cascade of rainbow spray across the city towers. Citizens of Shonedene lined the banks in their tens of thousands, and above them all spanned the round-sided bulk of the airship, its sides gleaming with wide-screen displays.

  Gesul thought of all the many things that had needed to occur to place him here, at this moment, in the capital of all parren peoples. Barely half-a-year ago he’d been arguing with Aristan over the future direction of the Domesh, refusing to accept the then-Domesh leader’s path of conflict and domination. That had been a pinnacle of its own, the culmination of a great climb he’d been ascending all his life. Had he risen no further, he would have declared himself content, so long as he made some notable impact on Aristan’s plans, and mitigated their deadly consequences.

  Then Phoenix had happened, crashing into Domesh and then House Harmony affairs like a comet flung from some unstable far-flung system, bringing down Aristan and somehow catapulting his stubborn deputy into first Domesh leadership, then leadership of all House Harmony, riding the momentum that Aristan had undeniably in part created.

  It was a strange sensation to stand here, and see this view, the House Harmony entourage spread out behind and about him like Augenai arriving at the gates of Polem in the great tales. The great gears of House Fortitude were plotting against him, and their trap was about to be sprung. Whether he, or any of his group, would live to see the end of this day, he did not know. But instead of fear, he felt only contemplation.

  Mostly he thought of his family home on Tupele, where he’d helped his father to fix the harvester for the grain crop, and played with his sisters on the small stream that wandered about the turek’s nest that the children had been forbidden to disturb. His family had all been House Creative, the farming life chosen by his parents mainly for its leisurely anachronisms — the old harvester, the cloak-figures to scare the birds from the grain, the beautiful view of the Darvan Hills in the evening. The life had not made any of them rich, but it had been the perfect foundation for a life of contemplation.

  The idyl had lasted until age thirteen, when his mother had phased to House Acquisitive — a trauma his father had never entirely recovered from. Humans, he’d learned from Lisbeth Debogande, occasionally killed themselves at moments of great personal distress. Parren facing such stresses would simply phase… perhaps it was an evolutionary reflex, a fracturing, that was not so much a destruction as a salvation, that saved parren from the humans’ self-inflicted death. Certainly it had felt much the same as a death in the family, and Gesul’s mother had left as much to preserve her own newly-phased sanity as to search for a fulfilment of that new identity.

  She’d begun a new family on a new world with a new husband, as all parren marriages were annulled upon a phase-change unless specifically requested otherwise — a desperately romantic gambit that only occasionally worked, between spouses of differing phase. And so Gesul and his two elder sisters had spent their later childhood with their father in the shadow of the woman who was no longer there. Toele norei, the playwright Kafta had called it — ‘the shadow person’, the light breath of wind caused by the simultaneous presence and absence of a person who had never died nor entirely departed, just faded into melancholy abstraction.

  His eldest sister Fora had phased to House Fortitude shortly after entering advanced studies, a development that had required a shift of university to an engineering college, and a career in space — an administrator on various facilities, lately with adult children of her own. His less-elder sister had phased later in life to House Acquisitive like her mother, with whom Gesul understood she’d become reacquainted and reconciled. Those two worked in business now, professions the details of which Gesul found of no interest whatsoever. But he’d remained in contact with Fora, on and off. She would be most amazed to see him here today, gazing down the path of two rivers that became one, with all the people of Fortitude’s great capital watching on.

  Their father remained House Creative, stubbornly refusing to re-phase in that way that the psychologists insisted was impossible, but the playwrights had always known better. Still he lived in the same house they’d all grown up in, working on his wood carvings, lately taking students from the nearby college, and from his most recent message having sold a stately set of chairs to a new family who’d just moved in to the neighbouring property. Gesul thought that if he survived this current predicament, he would send his father a new message, telling him about today… and more importantly, about how well the little hand-carved footstool his father had sent now found harmony with decorative arrangement in his quarters.

  A thrumming powerplant and metallic clatter brought his attention to the left. Dse-Ran, Liala’s second drone, fully armed for ceremonial rather than defensive reasons… though either would serve as well here today.

  “Gesul-sa,” said the synthetic voice in his earpiece. “Liala wishes to speak with you.”

  “Always and immediately, Dse-Ran,” he formulated in silent reply. A click, then…

  “Gesul, this is Liala. We are in the river, and proceeding toward the entry point. The current is strong, but not insurmountable.”

  “Good news, Liala. All proceeds as expected here.” He’d had many conversations with Liala since her birth. Far more than he’d had with Styx, in fact. Liala was to be the drysine commander of parren-aligned forces, while Styx could never commit herself to something so limited. Styx was possessed of a cunning as old and dark as the void. In Liala, Gesul sensed the potential for something… closer. But it puzzled him that she would contact him now. She could see this ceremony proceeding via her uplinks. It was broadcast across the city and around this world and beyond. She knew how it went, and that constant updates were a luxury that a man in as much control of his mental state as Gesul would not likely need.

  “Gesul-sa,” she said now. “How does one deal with fear?”

  Gesul was pleased for the veil across his face below the robe hood, so that the many cameras across the city would not see him smile. “Liala, are you afraid?”

  “I am uncertain. I know many things, but none of them is a substitute for experience. Even in drysines, with our stored memories passed from mind to mind, it is not the same as direct personal experience.”

  “You feel an anxiety for your personal safety,” said Gesul. “This anxiety becomes intense enough that you fear it may interfere with your duties.”

  “Yes,” said Liala. “I am intelligent. It does not stop bullets. I am very young in this galaxy, and I enjoy it immensely. I would like to see much more.”

  “I too, young one. I cannot offer you much. Parren meditations are a melding of mind and body such as synthetics do not have, and I suspect your mind works far too fast for you to consciously control and focus into such a state. I can only suggest that you think on who you are. From self-knowledge comes resolve. Who are you, and what is your purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” came the reply. “I am too young to know.”

  “Then that is your purpose today. Big things are hard. Small things are simpler. Today, you will learn who you are. Once you know, you will find your resolve, and your bravery. Fear is not defeated by tricks, young queen. The power to defeat fear must be sought and earned.”

  18

  Vrona Ma escorted Phoenix and Makimakala to another unremarkable red dwarf system, where course was set directly for a remote rock point-five AU from a pair of gas giants in close solar orbit. ‘Vrona Ma’ was corbi for ‘The Traveller’, and all of the Resistance vessels appeared to have done some enormous distances between port calls. Exactly where those port calls might be located, or what for the Resistance might pass for a ‘port’, no one had any clue. But the reeh did not occupy this band of space close to the Croma Wall, and regular croma incursions, and passing Resistance traffic, sought out any sensors they might place to monitor through-traffic, giving the Resistance a clear-enough run on most jumps
. When they ran into trouble, Vrona Ma seemed to have significant jump engines for such an outwardly unimpressive ship, and Phoenix’s relevant crew had been surprised at what of her performance they could observe.

  Behind the remote rock in the new system emerged another ship of a different but similar class — small, fast and with minimal armaments. It seemed logical to Erik that these would be the ships the Resistance used to roam their territory — ships designed merely to watch, not to fight, and which could lead reeh pursuit a dance away from primary corbi systems. Ships needing to contact each other would head to pre-determined coordinates where they knew someone would be hiding. System-wide broadcast would never be used, as no one ever knew who else might be hiding in-system, listening in the dark.

  With contact made, Vrona Ma continued on, her alien guests in tow, as the new ship she’d contacted accelerated out along the path they’d come in — presumably to take Vrona Ma’s place in case anyone else came calling. A third jump brought them to an unnamed point of dark mass, the kind of place that had proven humanity’s salvation so many times in the war against the krim — of negligible luminosity in dark space, very hard to spot unless you knew exactly where it was, but large enough to bend space and pull trans-light ships from hyperspace.

  There they found another three ships — one light vessel like Vrona Ma, another mid-sized cruiser with the appearance of an actual warship, and the third an enormous hauler, five times the internal volume of even Phoenix.