He’d gotten halfway through his second glass listening to all that. “Ok, that’s all well and fine then. But what I’m not seeing here are expeditionary probes 41 through 45 set for their alternate missions.”
Mei sighed, never a sign she was about to tell him anything he wanted to hear. “Those probes are on the delayed launch list, and… and they’re being utilized in the sweep. I want every probe on it. Once we locate the object, you can go ahead and launch all our assets directly into the star for all I care.”
Aru swallowed his annoyance, along with more liquor. They’d spent over two months being outfitted for this mission at Carousel 7, a major Fleet base. They had ordered the ship outfitted with multiple heatsinks, reinforced solar shielding, and a variety of other parts to protect them from this fatal environment, making The Kinetic Dream the most expensively outfitted craft in the entire Fleet. It had been a tall order, and it had been filled with without question, or at least without open question. It made it obvious they were attempting a solar expedition, so it would make sense to return with valuable data for the science community, such as what could be discovered by launching probes directly into a sunspot and following them until the signal stopped. Since most ships had neither the capability to enter a star nor crews that were willing to do so, this was indeed a rare opportunity to gather inner star data for the solar dynamics crowd to ooh and aww and ponder and debate over. More importantly it would justify the costly outfitting and give him a reputation boost to boot, while returning without such data would just raise more questions regarding their motives for this expedition.
“The solar depth probes were outfitted above and beyond the probes you requested, expressly for this purpose,” he snapped at her.
“Well, that was then. We’re going to have double the signal loss with all this surface activity, and to compensate I’m allocating all assets to the primary mission.”
This was very typical of her, too typical, and a personality trait that irritated him to no end. Aru was a man who was bred and raised to follow through on his word, but Cearuleins, like Mei, had no qualms about making false promises if it achieved their ends. This put him at a constant disadvantage because it meant that while he was held to his every syllable, both by others and himself, she maintained a free pass to flout her commitments -because, well, that was just who she was. He glared at her so derisively and so conspicuously that she could not ignore him.
“Look,” she sighed, “our coronal transit entry and exit data from the Kinetic will be more than enough to justify the mission. Bringing a vessel this size through the corona, manned no less, is a historic first. And solar dynamics? I mean, come on Aru. Nobody but a handful of nerds cares about that. Stars shine. That's all we need to know about them. They've been charting solar cycles and flares to predict space weather since time immemorial. Their enigmatic inner workings don't matter to anything that concerns man or machine. Planets are our domains. Stars... well stars are just not our business, never have been and never will be.”
“Ironic you should say that in the midst of meddling in star-business.”
“Yes, well you know me, love. I thrive on hypocrisy. The bottom line here is that there’s really nothing you can do it about it. Or did you forget that I’m currently in command?”
How could he? She basked in it on such rare occasion as he granted it to her. Her mission he reminded himself. The intoxication was beginning to take hold, the positive sense of well-being, the tongue ready at the gate to be loosed. It would all culminate in his usual rants about the parasites of House Psyron, or if not them their neighboring houses of The South, and if not them all the ills of the Calidonian houses north of the rift. When hemispheric rivalries fell dry, he always had leftover bigotry to speak against their twin world, Aq Thalassa, or he could choose to unite his entire dual-planetary system against the Carouselian space-dwellers, or pit his human race against the machine world.
Red versus blue? Who had the time or inclination for that? Besides, Mei's patronizingly sympathetic ear at these times turned sour whenever it came to spewing epithets at the Cearuleians, and her mouth became a fountain of vitriol in return.
She and her world were every bit as bipolar as he and his. Tropica internal politics came first, along with a barrage of clichéd criticisms of Mnemtechian rule, followed by the Arathian nations as a whole and their century long conflict with the ever decaying Anarchies, their lawlessness and vice at the heart of the subcontinent. Then there were all the usual rants about human versus machine world, but how at least on Occitania, the humans still held the upper hand. As if that were true! And then all of that was still only half her world. Discussions of the Pangea were even more inherently schizophrenic with the utopian East and the wicked Far West. Magic and religion... so much religion: -isms of every shape and form that the mind of man could conjure up. And then there was the red satellite Oberion, the Occitanian moon.
It was an oft remarked upon irony that Calidonians spent all their days on a red world under red sun while their nights were ruled by the huge blue disc of Aq Thalassa and the bright Blue Star, Cearuli Azur -while Occitanians lived beneath a blue sun with a red moon and a red star ruling their night. So whether one was born red or blue, they spent their nights beneath the mantle of the other.
But he would save all that fun for later.
“Kinny, music. Modern Eclectic Court Symphony,” he ordered, realizing he must already be quite inebriated, since in no lesser state would he slip into Mei's habit of personifying the ship's system.
“Belay that order!” shouted Mei with mock urgency. She then laid out her conditions to Aru. “You could just well do this in your den, you know -anywhere else on the entire ship for that matter. So if you insist on doing it near me, the ship's acting command authority, while I am working, you'll have to do it to a musical fare that doesn't grate on my brain like a thousand whirring wire brushes.”
“Dharmic mix, Kinny, traditional,” he conceded. This was Mei's favorite inspirational genre -and supposedly her religion. As Aru saw it and from what he knew of that doctrine, she was an appallingly bad adherent in pretty much every aspect of it. Although he would never admit it to her, the music had rubbed off him more than a little over the years. Many a nights’ rest were spent as those rich melodies and mantras played in his chamber, and seeped into his dreams. Now, they filled the hall of the main bridge.
Aru brought the Kinetic up on holograph. He loved to look at his ship. It was truly a technological masterpiece. Five spokes formed from the hub and extended out to an inner ring, in which he and Mei resided. It was not a tubular centrifugal ring as one saw on more primitive craft, but one that tapered out to to a flattened edge, increasing their gravitational surface area. The inner ring turned perpetually at just the right rate to maintain 1G, give or take. It also contained the permanent circuit that maintained their force fields, and powered everything besides the engines. The shield ring overlaid the main ring, wrapping around it completely, but magnetically levitated so that they never touched. The outer ring’s rotation could be synched with the inner ring, or spun faster or slower. This feature was helpful in confusing enemies, who were unable to determine which section of the ship to target. The shield ring also contained thruster arrays on each panel that worked in unison with each other to drive the ship, making the Kinetic Dream the most maneuverable mid-size warship of her class. Both plasma beam jets and more robust anti-matter fuel engines drove the ship. There was no central drive, each panel held its own thruster array, so no single strike on the ship could wipe out their thrust capacity.
The shield ring ports were now opening. Aru knew what that signified and System quickly confirmed it.
“Commander,” said System, “We are approaching launch altitude. The first probe sequence is primed and ready for launch.”
“Commence on schedule,” confirmed Mei.
Within moments the first probe launched from the outer shield panel aligned with their forward vector,
then the second panel came in to position to launch the next, and so on. Aru sipped his brandy and watched as one by one a large fortune's worth of hardware was expelled into the electric haze.
Considering the area this sweep was covering, he made a practical prediction. “We're not seeing half of those again, are we?”
Mei shrugged. “I'm optimistic we'll recover 80%, those that don't get fried or lost that is.”
“You do understand that hardware costs more than several lifetimes’ worth of your salary?”
“Yeah, well, I need a raise then, don't I?”
Aru scoffed. Li Meiyang's clan didn't have anything nearly on par with the immense wealth afforded to the son of a Calidonian Ruling House, but they did possess a measurable estate in the Arathian nation of Tropica.
“You could always moonlight for enemy intelligence to supplement your modest officers income.” A joke, but not a joke. He usually would have known better than to say it. She took it in stride though. This mission had shattered her façade completely with him, in what had always been an open secret between them. Surely High Command had their suspicions as well, and why shouldn't they? How could they vet an officer candidate and expect loyalty to the Empire of Logos from a blue-born Arathian of Pangean lineage? It perplexed everyone, even her. He wondered how she would react if she only knew that it had been he and Mnemtech that had charted this course for her. How astonished she would be! But he would never get drunk enough to let that secret slip. Hopefully.
“Our rewards for this will be great,” she informed him.
Aru had agreed to this mission solely for her and no other reason. “I don't need anything from The Occitanian world government; not The Service, not the Arathian council, not one thing from any of those bastards.”
“They will bestow their favor on your House. That's something you can't turn your back on. Between Mnemtech's favor and theirs, Psyron will be in a position to become the ruling house of all Calidon.”
Mnemtech had been kind to his family since their meeting, restoring all their lands and granting them every favor and leniency imaginable, but Aru hadn't been a part of all that. He'd been here on The Kinetic Dream doing what he dreamed of doing since he was a boy, captaining a starship, and he cared little whatever politics his conniving family was getting up to.
“You'd be wise,” Mei continued, “to return the Calidon when this is finished and claim your rightful place as head of your House.”
“I've always preferred to avoid cockroaches, even those in fancy dress.”
“Aru!” Mei exclaimed, “This is your own family.”
“Yes, and no honor among them. Born to privilege and making no more of it that the pursuit of their childish wonts. Not a single man of any worth among them. If I returned to my house, they would conspire against me with all their puny might.”
“And you would crush them under your feet, love! You are the one with the famous exploits, a highly distinguished officer of great and bold military successes. You are the one bathed in glory! You wouldn't have to lower yourself to intrigues and conspiracies. You could simply take it -as your birthright.”
How could he tell her? Tell her that all he did, he did for her. This ship was their refuge, their island. How could he tell her that this was all he wanted, to travel the stars with her? She would reject it outright. She would tell him to grow up and face his destiny. And she would do that because she didn't see their love the same way he did; she saw it as something transient.
“I want all the intelligence gleaned from this sphere, should we find it. All of it.”
“We'll find it,” she said resolutely, “and, yes, that's the least they could do to compensate you for retrieving it. Just be prepared for days of debriefs and oaths because whatever this thing is, it's a game-changer.”
Aru was still drawing mostly blanks in his conjecture. A data orb perhaps? Data the emperor wanted stored, but keep hidden as far from him and others as possible? That seemed like the most plausible explanation. Or was it a secret weapon? Logos had made his last decree 70 years ago, and it had been in the form of an ominous threat to the entire solar system. The Ultimatum of Logos promised to unleash a destruction upon the Taiji of unprecedented scope should the Cearuleins not concede to some form of The Land Grant. The deadline for the culmination of this ultimatum was set for these very years. Logos' predictions of long ago were all coming to be. The carouselers, though not yet starving to death, were becoming ever more malnourished and discontented. It was the root cause of the 66er rebellion he’d built his career on quelling, and there were surely more uprisings just around the corner. There was just not enough biomass to go around, and the only solution was to tear down the wall of Agrigar and open the eastern side of the Occitanian Pangea to agriculture. It could be argued up and down and sideways, and it always was, but the cold fact remained that so long as the Occitanians kept that land sequestered, a red famine was inevitable. Just thinking about it almost made him speak of it, but that debate with Mei never ended well. It was the most sensitive political topic of their time, and things were due to come to a head. Logos' declaration had been over half a century ago, and he'd not uttered a single word since then, thus most among the common people no longer believed it to be of any concern. There were even rumors that Logos had died, and The Stones were now ruled over by a machine ghost. Aru, and the governing bodies, knew better of that. The taciturn emperor was very active behind the scenes, and hidden from the human realms. As his proxy, Mnemtech had been left to rule over them. But the Emperor’s grand and covert projects about PoleStar North and its orbiting body Ponix were of the utmost concern to the governing bodies of both stars and to the collective paranoia of conspiracy theorists everywhere.
The drink was making him ornery, and he felt like getting provocative on a more personal level with Mei rather than taxing his brain with highminded political matters.
“And your reward for all this, Little Miss Li? Perhaps you are demanding to be crowned Queen of Occitania?”
Mei laughed out loud. “You must've daydreamed as much of your way through Political Science as you did in Solar Dynamics. We don't have royalty in a democracy, dear.”
“Oh, I beg to differ. That scheming charlatan Indulu, descendant of Mandu, rules your world unopposed decade upon decade upon decade. Anyone in the ruling class of either star can tell you, it's all about resource allocation and very little else, no matter how much you might dress it up or convince the masses they possess some form of ‘freedom.’”
The liquor was clearly taking hold over him. This was crossing a line with Mei. She spoke very little of Indulu, but he could see in her eyes that whenever Indulu appeared on broadcast that she was cast entirely under his spell.
Mei rolled her eyes and lowered a bright blue halo over her head to indicate her false indifference to the matter.
“You're drunk, you borg fool,” she told him.
Aru didn't need a halo. He had a cyberbionic implant linking his mind directly to System. In true blue fashion Mei had refused one upon her recruitment in the Fleet, defying what was universally demanded of all officers. They had accepted her anyway. Whenever Aru tried to extol the virtues of permanent mindlink technology, she responded that not being handicapped (mentally) she didn't require one. Then invariably she chided him, calling him “borg” and the like. By definition though, Aru was not a cyborg. A cyborg was a being who could not function normally without a continually active biolink connection between his organic brain and its artificial components, since both were required to project its mindscape. Aru could deactivate his implant indefinitely and carry on normally, but in terms of convenience it just couldn’t be beat. Having a telepathic link to the machine world allowed him to issue commands and bring up data displays faster without any need for verbal or tactile input.
And drunk? Please. He was just starting to feel good, and he was not about have her, all of people, start criticizing him over it.
“Yeah, right. I'm dru
nk. I'm the one with the substance abuse problem. Me.”
With some awkward blend of perturbed and patient, Mei flicked her head to discharge her halo, which gracefully withdrew into the dark chamber ceiling and vanished.
“You know...” she started, “you know, I get that you're taking a little mental vacation right now. I even think you deserve it. And yes, I'm probably ten times worse than you in that regard. But what I can't stand is listening to you dismiss everything that's good for you. Whatever you think of Indulu's politics, gaining Occitanian world government favor, the favor of the Arathian Council and The Service, will be a boon to your house! Rubelian High Command turned their favor upon your house a decade ago, and look how it has risen! You have the highest governing organs of both stars shining their grace upon you, yet you scoff! I can't understand it, Aru. I can't understand you. It seems like you just want fly around in your spaceship to avoid embracing all that destiny lays at your feet. You've never even put yourself in for a promotion. With your glorious record, you could be a commodore working his way into the admiralty by now. It's all set out before you for the taking. Why don't you...”
“Because he mocks me!” Aru blurted out thoughtlessly, realizing immediately what an ill-considered statement it was. Mnemtech, Mnemtech gave him everything: his command, his ship, even Mei! He owed all he had to Mnemtech, and he hated him for it.
Mei reacted with stunned curiosity. “Who mocks you?”
He didn't ask for more, because he truly was being mocked with every gift. But Mei musn't know this. His loose lips needed to lie to cover this slip, and lie well and lie fast.
“God!” he spat with all the cynical drunken passion he could muster.
“You mean the God you don't believe in?” she asked.
“And how exactly do you know that?”
DUALITY: The World of Lies Page 5