In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  Sokolov was out. At forty-one, she was young for the head of a transtellar; fit, beautiful, and capable, but a ballerina she was not. An assassin? Someone had gotten close enough to Casey to kill her, after all. Tyson’s heart sped up as his muscles tensed for action.

  “Paris,” he said slowly as he brought his arms up into a guard position, “who’s prowling around in my office in the dark?”

  “I should be offended.” Paris’s voice cooed from the speakers all around him even as the silhouette stalked toward the center of the room. It wasn’t a tone she’d ever taken with him before. It sounded confident, sensual, and hungry. Tyson took a step back.

  “After all the years we’ve worked together,” Paris continued, “you mean to say you honestly don’t…” The lights brightened at the center of his desk where the mystery figure stood erect, bathing her in white. The breath caught in Tyson’s lungs as the spotlights cascaded down the most stunning woman he had ever seen in his long, lonely years.

  “… recognize me?”

  It was the voice of his AI assistant, but Tyson’s eyes had gotten stuck somewhere near the impossibly flat and toned musculature around her navel, so it took a moment to register that the sound hadn’t come from the room’s hidden speakers, but her mouth.

  Tyson’s eyes snapped up to his assistant’s face, but not the face he recognized. The voice was the same, but instead of the virtual avatar he’d seen in holos and vids for years, her hair was platinum blond and razor straight, her green eyes set into high cheekbones that led down to a pointed chin and full, pouting lips.

  His arms fell to his sides. The rest of her looked like a boy’s dream, a teen’s obsession, and an old man’s nightmare. The sort of vision that could trigger a heart attack and an early trip to the morgue.

  “Paris?” he asked dumbly.

  She ran her hands down her sides and subtly shivered her hips, all of which were covered in a skin-tight white film from her neckline to her knees that looked more like packaging than clothing. “In the flesh, or a very close approximation of it.”

  “You look, uh, different.”

  “I took the liberty of making some changes to my appearance when I placed the order for this carapace.” She began to advance out of the circle of light toward him, falling back into shadow as she moved. “I studied the likenesses of actresses, fashion models, and”—her lip curled up just a fraction—“adult performers and generated an aggregate that I thought would be pleasing as well as … stimulating.”

  “My … um, compliments to the chef,” Tyson said, positively flustered. His cheeks felt warm. Was he blushing? His back bumped up against something unexpectedly. In the dark it took him a moment to realized he’d been pressed all the way back into the window at the edge of the room. Paris drew close, then ran the back of her hand from the shoulder pad of his jacket all the way down his sleeve and brushed against the skin on the back of his palm. He was ready for her touch to feel like cold latex, but her fingertips were warm, soft. Like living flesh.

  Without seeking clearance from his consciousness, Tyson’s penis prepared for Phase Two.

  “I’ve always wanted to know what that felt like,” Paris said with a dripping wet tone.

  “Your skin has tactile feedback?” Tyson said as clinically as he could manage, but he already knew the answer. Even this close, he couldn’t tell the difference between Paris’s carapace and a real woman. She even smelled right, perfume with a subtle undercurrent of sweat.

  “Oh yes, you sprung for all the bells and whistles. Everything works. I hope you don’t mind, but I didn’t come cheap.”

  “You never have,” he said.

  She reached up and smoothed out the lapel on his jacket. “I know why you’re alone, Tyson.”

  “Sorry?” he bleated.

  “A man of your refinement and sophistication demands perfection. What biological woman could measure up?”

  Tyson cleared his throat. “That’s not really—”

  A perfectly manicured finger with French-tipped nail rested gently on his lips. “Shhh. No need to be modest with me. I know who you are, Tyson. I’ve watched your every waking moment for years. I know all your thoughts, patterns, whims, and yes, even desires.” Paris pressed her firm bosom against him, just below his pecks, but he wiggled out of it to the side and put his hands up.

  “This is inappropriate.”

  “Why?” she purred.

  “We work together. You’re my subordinate. There are rules, and for good reason.”

  Paris giggled. “Tyson, I’m flattered, really. But have you already forgotten what I am? You bought me and signed the user agreement. I’m a very expensive piece of office equipment. You can do anything you want to me, it’s all covered under the warranty.” She reached out and took his hands in hers, then placed them gently on the plastic film covering her hips. “I just need to be unwrapped.”

  For just a moment, Tyson’s fingertips dug into the flesh covering her hips. He could feel the soft skin, a layer of toned muscle beneath it tense, and the bone of her pelvis below that. It was all artificial, of course, heat-activated poly-fibrous tensile coils for muscles, printed carbon laminate chassis in place of a skeleton. But it felt completely, convincingly real. The impulse to rip at the plastic film and tear it into confetti like wrapping paper on Christmas morning was very real, and very hard to resist.

  It had been a long, long while since Tyson had made time for such distractions, and the sight of her, the perfect, flawless sight of her, roused something deep inside him he thought dead, but had merely been in a deep slumber.

  Tyson tore away from her. “I’m sorry, I … have a thing.”

  “I know you don’t,” Paris said, annoyance seeping into her voice at the edges. “I maintain your schedule, remember?”

  “It’s not you, this is just, very fast. I need to think.” Which was entirely true. Tyson tapped a floor panel and called up the express lift car. “I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll talk about this more then.”

  “Do I look like I want to talk?” the spurned, inexplicably horny android said with a huff.

  “Please don’t be angry with me.” Tyson practically fell into the lift as soon as the doors opened. He backpedaled until his shoulders hit the inside wall and the doors closed. Tyson’s knees went weak and he slid down the wood paneling inside the lift car.

  “Lobby.”

  What a perfectly bizarre day. From planning counterespionage to fighting off the advances of an assistant whose physical existence was measured in hours.

  As the express lift started its near freefall to ground level, Tyson considered stopping at Klub Kryptonite for a carafe of his indulgent sake, but no. Paris would see him doing it on the building’s security feeds, and it was Friday night, late. There would be throngs of Lazarus’s young and beautiful drinking, flirting, dancing lasciviously, and looking to climb his ladder, in several meanings. The very last place on the planet he wanted to be just then. Tyson had perfectly serviceable liquor at home, and he needed a shower.

  A cold shower.

  In liquid helium.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Derstu! Your attention is necessitated in cavern seventy-three!”

  Thuk clicked a blood-claw against the plate on the side of his thigh. “What’s the problem, Kivits?”

  “The humans are trying to poison us!”

  Thuk glanced across the corridor to where Captain Kamala and her pair of warrior escorts stood. They’d managed to restore artificial gravity, if only at half strength. “Susan?” he called. They’d moved to first names.

  “Yes, Thuk?” The tiny mouth implanted in his ear pore spit out the translation of her words.

  “Are you trying to poison us, by any chance?”

  “Think no.” Even after seventy years of war, then stalemate, then pacing each other’s fences, their capacity to communicate was still hindered by clunky translations and the misunderstandings that came along with the imprecision of language and cultural assu
mptions. But, it sounded like a denial to Thuk. He motioned for them to follow. “Come along. Let’s see what my dulac is chittering about.”

  They bounded down the tunnel in long, awkward strides under the weak gravity, for which neither species was adapted or accustomed. It was almost worse than floating, but at least it provided an up and down.

  “I apologize again for the state of our mound,” Thuk said over his shoulder. “We weren’t expecting visitors.”

  “[Laughing/humor]. Not was I,” the humans’ derstu said. No, not derstu, Thuk reminded himself. She was a captain. Humans did things differently, at least onboard their warships. Her power and authority among her harmony, ahem, crew, were nearly absolute, like the queens of old.

  He was more than a little envious, if he were being honest. Imagine how much easier it would be if his harmony just did what he said instead of making everything into a negotiation. But then, they could hardly call themselves Xre.

  “Surprise when [drone] start explode, also,” Susan said, still smiling, or what Thuk had been taught was a smile at any rate. She was probing him again, trying to get an admission to slip. Well, two could sing that song.

  “Probably just as surprised as I was when our reservoir exploded. What a cursed star we orbit.”

  The thin smile on the captain’s meaty, horizontal lips curled up on one corner of her mouth. “[Touché.]” His translation matrix offered no suggestions, but Thuk was pretty sure he caught her meaning anyway.

  “Seventy-three is just up ahead and to the left. The dulac sounded exasperated. Be patient with him should he become dramatic.”

  “I can [grapple/hold] him.”

  It was almost certainly untrue, not only because she only had four limbs to a Xre’s six, but humans averaged a full head shorter. Still, they were a confident race almost to a fault that rarely passed on an opportunity for a good fight. Thuk wasn’t sure fear even occurred within them.

  The entrance to the cavern in question came into view around a bend in the corridor. Five humans, two warriors and three attendants, stood outside under three of the Chusexx’s own warriors and Kivit’s unrelenting glare. As soon as he saw Thuk approach, he started gesticulating wildly, throwing an accusatory claw in the general direction of one of the human attendants holding a silver cylinder under one arm.

  At the sight of the additional human warriors, everyone tensed as the balance of force in the immediate vicinity shifted ever so slightly to their visitors’ favor. Thuk knew enough about the capabilities of the weapons Susan’s warriors carried to know they weren’t particularly heavily armed for human foot troops. There had been few surface engagements in the last war, but the Dark Ocean Chorus had managed to trade, steal, or smuggle enough copies over the years to get a good sense of what they could expect from a land engagement or boarding action. These were defensive weapons, enough punch to make an enemy think twice, but not enough to wreak the kind of havoc necessary to destroy a ship from within.

  Susan and her people had placed a lot of trust in Thuk and his harmony simply by being here. He would reciprocate.

  “Weapons at your sides. We’re all being friendly here.”

  “Derstu,” Kivits began. “These abyss dwellers tried to release a pathogen into our air tunnels!”

  “Calm your claws, Kivits. We’ll dig to the truth of this soon enough. Now, I asked everyone to relax. These people came to help. Let’s not be ungrateful hosts.”

  The budding standoff eased; not much, but enough. Weapons remained in hands, but pointed at the floor and with fingers or claws eased away from their firing studs. Both sides kept close watch on one another, but their postures relaxed some. “Thank you. Now, Susan, can you explain what your attendants are doing, please?”

  “One [second].” She held up a finger in a human gesture requesting a pause, then leaned in to speak with the attendant holding the cylinder in hushed tones. She touched the attendant’s shoulder and stroked it, perhaps for comfort, then took the cylinder with an outstretched hand before turning back to where Thuk stood next to his perennially perturbed dulac.

  “[O.K./Affirmative].” Susan held out the silver tube with the strange markings. “This colony. [Consume/devour] … um…” She searched for a word, probably struggling with the same translation issues on her end of the conversation. It was entirely too easy to watch someone struggle with a language and syntax that wasn’t their own and assume they were stupid. Natural, even. But this one had already proven herself very clever indeed. Thuk was sure he sounded like a half-head to her ears as well.

  “Rotting light!” Susan blurted out. “[Consume/devour] rotting light. Spread throughout. Soak up like [sponge]. Clean caverns and tunnels. Safe ground.”

  “What’s a ‘sponge’?” Kivits asked.

  “I’m going with something absorbent. Like a guju towel.” Susan pointed and nodded her head in affirmation. “There you go.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “I think she’s saying they have a type of spore or fungal colony that eats rotting light.”

  Susan shook her head in the negative. “Not fungus. Think of plants.” She held her gloved hand flat like a leaf and wiggled the fingers of her other hand down onto it like rain. No, like sunlight.

  “Ah! No, it doesn’t eat it, it photosynthesizes it. That’s amazing.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Kivits said.

  “Why would it have to be? The mechanisms would be similar, just either evolved or built to handle the higher energy levels. They probably developed it to clean up rotting light corruption on their own vessels.”

  “But how do we know it’s not a biological weapon?”

  Susan snorted through the paired holes in her olfactory organ. “Need not come over to kill you. Press button, fire [laser], I take swim.”

  Kivits reared up onto his hind legs. “Is that a threat?!” Several of the warriors, of both species, took note of the sudden tension and braced for action, their weapons brought to a ready position.

  “Sit down, Dulac. It’s not a threat, it’s a statement of fact. Why go to the trouble of coming here and exposing her people to danger just to kill us slowly when she could do it at light-speed with the twist of a toggle?”

  Slowly, Kivits accepted the logic of what had been said and stood down. The sudden pressure front lifted from the rest of the cavern as calm returned. “I’m sorry for jumping to an assumption. It was ungenerous. But what happens when all the corruption is gone?”

  “Actually I’m curious about that as well,” Thuk said.

  “It [Famine/starve],” Susan answered with a shrug of her shoulders. “Nothing to [consume/devour,] it dies. No fuss.”

  “A moment,” Thuk said, then pulled Kivits aside for a short duet. “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think we don’t know what they’re really doing here in the first place.”

  “They’ve already sped up our repairs by more than a day. If this plant colony can do what she claims, we don’t have to cut out and replace the corrupted walls and tunnel segments. That saves us weeks of repairs and gets the affected caverns back in use. Besides, if we can isolate a sample, even after it’s dead, our own gene growers back in the Symphony might be able to replicate it. Think of a colony of that stuff in stasis on every ship in the Dark Ocean Fleet. Think of the lives saved over time.”

  “So you’re going to risk it, regardless of my advice.”

  “I’m singing with you, aren’t I?”

  Kivits fluttered his thorax with annoyance. “Fine, we’ll risk it. But if this is a weapon—”

  “Then you can lord it over me while we’re both dying in the infirmary. Fair enough?” The dulac looked away and said no more. Thuk returned to Susan. “We accept your gracious offer, Susan. Please, instruct your attendants to finish their work.”

  * * *

  Two more days passed. All told, three shuttles full of human attendants rotated through the Chusexx, working alongside Thuk’s own repair teams, sharing t
heir expertise and bearing their load of the work. Susan had returned to the Ansari after the first day, but they’d kept in frequent contact to coordinate the effort. By the time source energy was restored, the humans and Xre had developed a grudging respect for one another. Even the spores of comradery had begun to sprout.

  “The last shuttle of humans are departing the harbor now, Derstu.”

  “Dulac, I’d say our new friends have earned a parting salute, would you agree?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “We are always free to make the wrong choice, Kivits.”

  “Then yes, they certainly deserve a salute,” he said with only the slightest hint of mockery in his tone.

  Thuk beamed with satisfaction. “Hurg, open a link to the Ansari and her shuttle, please. We’re singing the ‘Forked Path Lament.’”

  “Link established, Derstu.”

  “Hello, Derstu. How I [aid/assist] you?” came Susan’s now-familiar voice through the mouths of the mind cavern.

  Instead of answering directly, Thuk lifted a claw and signaled the assembled harmony to begin. The “Forked Path Lament” started slowly, building over its course. It was an old song, one of the oldest. It was the first song larvae learned formally to mark the day their clutches were assigned to mounds and distributed. It was used anytime friends, family, or harmonies had to part ways. It was beautiful, haunting, and mournful all at once, an expression of the sadness one felt at being separated from those they’d grown to care for. But, in the song’s final measures, it turned and uplifted, clawing for altitude, laying the foundations of hope for a joyous reunion further down the path.

  Thuk had probably sang it a thousand times by now. It was a simple song without the multiple layers of harmonizing and fade outs of more complex compositions one learns along the way. But it was still one of his favorites.

  Outside, the cloakskin on the Chusexx’s exterior, usually tasked with keeping the ship as invisible as possible, instead flashed and shimmered a dazzling splash of color in every shade from the infrared through the ultraviolet, programed to match in frequency and time with the song as it was performed in real time. It was an honor usually only exchanged between ships of the Dark Ocean Fleet at the conclusion of a successful expedition as they parted ways for their home harbors. No human had ever lived to witness it in seventy years. It was unprecedented. But then, so were the events of the last few days. What more appropriate time would there be?