I will find all the available information. Avoiding the Noesis will make the work more difficult, but I welcome the challenge. May I ask why, though? He seemed quite nice. Did you not think he seemed nice?
Oh, he seemed quite nice indeed. What he is is trouble.
22
* * *
AKESO
Alex let the steaming hot water cascade through her hair and down her back. It had been a whirlwind couple of days of bouncing between her mother’s office and the Special Projects labs at Concord HQ, the Connova Interstellar testing facility, and various locales in the Asterion Dominion. The defeat of the Rasu at Namino had given them a chance to regroup and get the upper hand on the conflict, and everyone recognized they couldn’t let it go to waste.
But now she was home, with a few free hours to catch her breath. She celebrated by luxuriating in the shower for an extra five minutes before toweling off, throwing on sweatpants and an old t-shirt, and setting off to find Caleb.
Doing so wasn’t difficult, especially with the sonorous beat of his heart pointing the way. She found him several hundred meters south of the house, sitting cross-legged by the creek, his palms open at his knees and his eyes closed.
She crept across the meadow, which had finally dried out, and eased down to the ground beside him. Once there, she took the opportunity to study him unobserved. The worry lines that had creased deep into his skin around his eyes and mouth after the ordeal on Namino had all but vanished. His jaw was relaxed, as was his posture. His heartbeat resonated in her chest, steady, calm and slow, almost as if he were in a trance. He looked…peaceful, but not soft. Resolute, but for the first time in quite a while, not burdened. She’d daresay this new phase of his relationship with Akeso was working out rather well so far.
A corner of his mouth curled up, though his eyes remained closed. “Hi, baby.”
“Hi, priyazn. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“Your presence is never a disturbance.” His left hand reached out to cradle the stem of a tiny flower sprouting up through the blades of grass between them. As she watched, the bud opened and bloomed into rich magenta petals with white tips. He deftly snapped the flower off at the root, then opened his eyes and offered her the flower now resting on his palm. “Akeso says this is for you.”
“Well, thank Akeso for me.” She accepted the flower and tucked it behind her ear.
He stared at her for a few seconds, then burst out laughing.
“What?”
“You’re not exactly a ‘flower in your hair’ kind of woman.”
“I’m really, really not.” She rolled her eyes and removed the flower from her ear, but kept it cupped gently in her hand. “What’s today’s conversation topic?”
“The nature of evil.”
Her brow furrowed in consternation. “I hope the flower wasn’t a central figure in the discussion.”
“Nah.” His focus fell to the grass, and after another second, the snipped stem grew a new bud. “Akeso is having some difficulty grasping the million shades of gray on the morality spectrum, and how people can slip—or be pushed—down the spectrum toward darkness. We’re working on expanding our mutual understanding, but it’s a challenging topic.”
“You’ve always seemed to have a solid handle on it.” She watched as the bud unfurled; this time, the petals were teal tipped with cornflower. “Mia’s fine this morning, by the way. She was eating cookies, which is sort of making me hungry.”
“It so happens that Graham Delavasi sent us a cooler of fresh fish last night. I’ll grill some up.” He stood and offered her a hand. “How was your trip to Mirai? Did you learn as much as you hoped to?”
She fell in beside him as they walked toward the house. “I now know as much as Nika does about these Ourankeli aliens, but that isn’t much.” She paused. “Nisi would know more.”
“I hear he’s officially going by Corradeo Praesidis once again.”
“Whatever. Do you want to reach out to him?”
Caleb shook his head. “No. He has his hands full wrangling a bunch of spoiled, recalcitrant elassons into line, and he doesn’t need a reminder of why the job is proving to be harder than it might have been.”
How many times had they covered this ground? A thousand on the low end. “I seriously doubt he blames you for the loss of his diati, much less the loss of it by the rest of the Praesidis. The blame lies squarely on the head of his dearly departed son, Renato. Besides, Nika said he acted genuinely happy to learn you were alive.”
Caleb’s expression brightened noticeably. “I’m glad. But…no, I don’t want to open that can of worms. Not yet.”
“Richard says Eren’s working with him now.”
“What? Now this is good news. A righteous cause will give Eren a reason to stick around in the land of the living.”
“Hopefully so. Still don’t want to pay them a visit?”
“Because of Eren?” They reached the porch, and he stopped to lean against a pillar. “I do want to see Eren. But it’s enough to know he’s alive and engaged in an endeavor that’s important to him. Corradeo will take care of him.”
“Assuming Eren allows anyone to.”
His gaze cut over to the creek. “I know I’ve been running from a lot of difficult truths for a while now. I’m working hard to get on top of them. Give me a little more time on this one?”
“However long you need. I’ll stop being a pest about it.” She smiled. “In the absence of talking to the source, we’ll wing it with the Ourankeli. It certainly won’t be the first time we’ve flown in blind, right?”
“It is our stock in trade.”
“And I’m okay with that. I think the Siyane will be impervious to whatever is causing the widespread erosion in the Ourankeli stellar system, but while I was at HQ, I fitted it with a new, supercharged EM shield just in case. I also acquired some new personal shields from Devon. They should protect our environment suits from anything space or aliens can throw at us.”
“Excellent.” He reached out and drew her into his arms, kissing her softly. “You go put the flower in a vase. I’ll shower and pack a bag, then cook lunch. After we eat, I’ll be ready to go whenever you are.” His lips brushed across hers again. “It’s time for us to have an old-fashioned adventure.”
23
* * *
MIRAI
Dashiel’s Flat
Close your eyes and open your vision. See the hidden dimension that exists everywhere and nowhere: the gateway to the universe. Visualize where you want to be and let your mind take you there—
Nothing. Nika stretched her arms over her head as the lingering vestiges of a damn restful night of sleep competed with her need to concentrate on solving the sidespace/wormhole puzzle. But whether her eyes were shut or open, all she saw was kyoseil waves. They sure seemed to travel wherever they pleased, but they were not as yet interested in offering her consciousness a ride on their journeys.
She tried mentally nudging them aside, as if parting a curtain, but they continued to ignore her request in favor of their dancing undulations.
Ugh. All this kyoseil flowing through her, powering her very thoughts alongside sophisticated quantum synthetic programming, and she couldn’t find a way to harness it to execute on her intentions? What good was any of it if it refused to do as she asked?
Several good nights of sleep in a row had improved her overall outlook considerably, but on this point she remained annoyingly frustrated. With a resigned sigh, she decided to give up for now, again, and switch to her other puzzle, the Kat code from the Rift Bubble on Namino. It accessed hidden dimensions as well, but the programming that allowed it to do so was accessible to her.
The code appeared at first glance to be infinitely complex. The rift device not only accessed extra dimensions to power itself; it then tore a planet-sized hole in the fabric of space-time, optionally hid everything on the other side of the tear from view, and opened a new hole in that fabric at a distant yet specific location.
&nb
sp; But once you separated out the disparate functions into their own silos, it began to be decipherable. Byzantine, intricate and strikingly beautiful, but decipherable. She’d already delivered a copy of the code to Conceptual Research in the hope they’d be able to build their own Rift Bubbles and possibly even develop new uses for the technology. But Alex had chosen to share this gift with her, personally, and she badly wanted to wrangle it into submission herself.
The instructions forcing the device to rip open space-time were written in the formalistic, structural language of quantum programming, but in practice the operations didn’t behave so differently from Alex’s instructions on accessing sidespace. What if she—?
In the corner of her vision, Dashiel emerged from the lavatory wearing khaki slacks and an unfastened shirt, then rested against the doorframe and regarded her with a playful smile. She didn’t need to turn her full attention toward him to feel the lust in his gaze. She’d kicked off the covers at some point during her ruminations, and the morning sun streaked in through the windows to warm her skin. She stretched again and purred seductively. “See something you like?”
“Do I ever.” He came over and perched on the edge of the bed, leaning down to kiss her, long and slow.
She urged him more fully down on top of her, letting her hands snake beneath the material of his shirt to caress the muscles along his back. “Come back to bed.”
“Hmm….” His lips left hers behind to trail tantalizingly down her neck and across her chest; his tongue darted out to circle her left breast, evoking a moan from deep in her throat. “I would deeply, deeply love to stay right here all day and night…” his lips returned to linger upon hers for a breath “…but I can’t. I’m expected at the DAF Orbital Assembly #3 in forty minutes.”
“Damn.”
“I know.” With a groan he slid off the bed, stood and began fastening his shirt. “Tonight, nothing will distract me from…” he gestured vaguely at her “…this vision you present. In fact, I will have to struggle mightily to think of anything else all day.”
In truth, she was expected at the Initiative not too long from now herself, but she so enjoyed teasing him. “Tonight, darling.”
DAF Orbital Assembly #3
Dashiel stood on the sealed observation deck in low Mirai orbit and watched as an army of space-rated dyne mechs assembled row upon row of military warships. The kyoseil-infused adiamene took on a cornsilk hue in its final form, and the arrangement of ships—fighters, in this instance—resembled a sea of fireflies poised to swarm the planet below.
It had taken a herculean effort on the part of Ridani Enterprises, the Commerce, Military and Administrative Divisions on multiple worlds, and numerous business partners to bring the warship assembly facilities to fruition in record time. But he believed he had finally created a robust, redundant supply and production chain for the DAF fleet.
Component production facilities were duplicated on all four functioning Axis Worlds, and shipyards had been completed above three of the four, with the fourth scheduled to begin production next week. For now, each shipyard specialized in a different type of warship: fighters here above Mirai, frigates, cruisers and carriers at Synra, and specialty and support craft at Kiyora. But every shipyard could be converted to handle the other ships in less than a day, should the need arise.
So long as a single Axis World still stood, the Dominion would have its fleet.
He diverted his thoughts before they began to delve into the troubling possibility that one day no Axis World would stand, because it was not going to happen. Before he got hold of the diversion, his thoughts darted immediately to the delicious sight of Nika’s naked body luxuriating in his bed this morning, and it was with a great deal more reluctance that he put those musings aside as well.
His people continued to refine and improve the delicate process of creating adiaK, and a joint Conceptual Research/DAF ceraff-enhanced team continued to churn out improvements to warship weapons and engines. But Palmer was correct. He couldn’t scrap the fleet and start production over every time he or anyone else had a newer, better idea. So he was rolling improvements into the production process as they tested out, and where there was time and a lack of battles, the older-generation ships were cycled in for retrofitting.
Grant was back on the team now, at least nominally. The two times Dashiel had met with him, his head didn’t appear to be completely in the game. Given how his homeworld had been leveled and his home and business destroyed, he’d forgive the man for a little distraction. Still, none of them could afford to be too distracted, not while they had worlds on fire and Rasu relentlessly probing every defense they’d erected to protect the ones that weren’t.
Of all the nonconventional weaponry they’d determined was able to put a permanent dent in Rasu—antimatter, negative energy and nuclear—negative energy weapons left behind the least collateral damage and created the smallest risk to nearby objects, people and planets. A far from zero risk, but the smallest of the lot.
They’d never had cause to need negative energy weapons before now, but they certainly knew how to construct them, and new facilities on Ebisu and Synra had begun building the weapons earlier this week for addition to the frigate and cruiser loadouts. Their fighters were too small to carry more than two, which to his mind seemed almost like a waste of effort.
But on the way here this morning, he’d authorized the creation of a new Conceptual Research ceraff devoted to the task of developing a rechargeable negative energy mechanism. If their supply of the weapons became effectively unlimited, it stood to change the shape of every battle to come.
Dashiel exhaled and rubbed at his jaw. It wasn’t in his nature to thrive on crafting instruments of mass destruction. He preferred to build things that lasted. Useful, creative things to improve people’s lives, work and the society that nurtured both.
But nothing improved lives so much as not getting killed by Rasu, so he was making his peace with this new phase of his professional career. The times called for a wartime industrialist, so a wartime industrialist he would be.
24
* * *
MIRAI
Omoikane Initiative
“We cannot have multiple copies of a single person running around the streets like they’re in a madhouse carnival. Do you have any idea how much more difficult Justice’s job will be if Plexes become widespread?”
Nika shrugged in Adlai’s general direction. Outside in the hallway, beyond the open door, she kept an eye on Maris and Spencer talking in fervent but hushed tones. Spencer had excused himself from the table to confer with Maris almost ten minutes earlier. “If our society was structured around making Justice’s job easy, a lot of things would be different.”
“That’s a low blow.”
Adlai acted like he was teasing, but she softened her tone anyway. “I didn’t mean it as such.”
“I know you didn’t. I do wonder if this is NOIR talking, though.”
She forced herself to ignore the hallway drama and focus all her attention on Adlai and the others gathered around the table. “Maybe it is. NOIR was created for a reason.”
“Yes, the Guides’ overreaching and, it turned out, treasonous activities. We’ve done away with their excesses.”
“Most of them. Listen, having been a Plex myself twice now, I’m not a fan of the technology. But it does have its uses—”
“And we can write in exceptions to the ban for those uses.”
“But a ban is still a ban, and we try to have as few of those as possible.” Nika sighed. “The idea of Plexes having free rein in our society makes me uncomfortable, too. I’m searching for a middle ground here.”
Selene returned from taking a comm to settle into her seat. “From my perspective, if we implement basic registration requirements so we know who they are, I don’t have a problem with legalizing the technology.”
Adlai shook his head. “People who become Plexes aren’t the type to be amenable to ‘registering’
with the government.”
“True, but—”
Maris tip-toed into the room to lay a hand on Nika’s shoulder. “May I speak to you for a minute? In private?”
Adlai arched an eyebrow but didn’t protest, and Nika stood and followed Maris out into the hallway, passing Spencer on the way as he went back to the table.
Maris closed the door to the meeting room behind them. Her features were unusually pinched, and the hint of worry lines framed her orchid irises.
Nika leaned against the wall a few meters down from the door. “Are you and Spencer fighting?”
“Yes, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. What do you want to talk about, then?”
“I was listening in on the last bit of your discussion regarding the Plexes—”
“Instead of listening to whatever Spencer was rather earnestly trying to say to you?”
“Nika, I am not seeking love-life advice.”
Maybe you should…. But she kept the thought to herself. In her admittedly limited recollection, she’d never seen Maris so snippy, or even upset. “I’m sorry. Please continue.”
“Thank you. It sounds as if you are reluctant to grant Plexes legal rights, which brings me to…I feel I need to remind you of something. Or simply tell you in the first place, since you don’t remember. I was there with you when you chose to stand up for the right of every individual, whether they be Anaden or synthetic, to live a life of their own choosing, and to live it freely. The Nika that ignited the SAI Rebellion would never have advocated for making a new variant of sapient life illegal.”
She sank deeper against the wall and rubbed at her face. “Are you saying I started the SAI Rebellion?”
“Technically, your brother started it by flaunting the new laws and provoking the authorities, but you were the one who stood up, spoke out and rallied everyone to fight. Because you wanted to protect your brother, yes, but also because you believed in the cause—believed in it enough to risk your life without the safety net of regenesis.”
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