The Prodigal Sun

by Sean Williams

  This last part saddened Roche. Hundreds of people had been sacrificed to provide a means for her escape from the Midnight—none of whom would ever receive official recognition. According to Armada records, their deaths would have come about as the result of an unfortunate accident in Sciacca’s World’s Soul, just another slip-up of navigation in a region already notorious for mishaps. Regardless of her differences with Proctor Klose, she did not believe that this was a fitting epitaph for him or his crew.

  “That seems pretty thorough,” she said eventually. “Although I’m surprised they agreed to it all—and I’m not sure I like the idea of working for them again, no matter how tangentially.”

  “It seems logical,” replied the Box patiently. “You yourself suggested it. If we discover that Cane and his kind represent a genuine threat to Human life in the Commonwealth, then it affects more than just us. No matter how you might resent the Armada and its treatment of you, Morgan, you still have a duty to warn them.” The Box paused for a moment, then added, “Of course, although we haven’t stated as much in the contract, we will also warn the Dato Bloc and the Non-Aligned Realms. That would be the judicious thing to do.”

  Roche reached an intersection and stopped in her tracks, unsure where to head next. “What’s all this business about judiciousness and being fair to Humanity? I thought you were looking out for yourself. Only putting up with us as long as you had to.” As long as I’m alive, she added silently to herself.

  The Box didn’t answer for a minute or two, and she wondered whether it had even heard. Then: “To a certain extent, that is true.”

  She pounced on this admission immediately. “So you do have a hidden agenda?”

  “This may sound strange, Morgan, but the best answer I can give to that question is ‘Perhaps.’“ The Box’s voice sounded faintly puzzled—the first time she had ever heard it sound that way. “While I have access to the command core of COE Intelligence HQ, I can see the events around me with much greater clarity and across a much larger distance than before. Accordingly, my estimates of past and future trends are more accurate, but also more difficult to contain in mere words.”

  Roche absently scratched at the place where the bracelet had once hung around her wrist. She failed to see how this was relevant to its stubborn obedience, and its fascination for Cane. “Spell it out for me, Box. I’m only a Human, remember?”

  “That’s nothing to apologize for, Morgan. Basically, comprehension is a function of intellect, and intellect depends upon structure. My basic components provide me with a blueprint for higher thought that I have not previously been able to exercise. Now, I possess more processing power than I ever did, and I see that there is still room for me to grow. I can’t explain this sufficiently well for you to understand, except to say that I feel... humbled. I know that when the time comes for us to leave HQ behind, I will be reduced to more finite dimensions, and will therefore lose sight of the distant horizons I currently enjoy. No longer a nascent god hunting for equals, I will become once again a mere mortal seeking meaning from apparent chaos.”

  “I think I’m starting to follow you,” said Roche, not sure she really was. “When you give the command core back, you’ll be left with only the valise and whatever comes with the Ana Vereine.” She shook her head. “But why does that mean you can’t tell me whether you have a hidden agenda or not?”

  “Because it is just that: ‘hidden.’ Even the part of me communicating with you now is such a small shadow of my present self—a tiny echo from the edges of infinity, if you like—that it cannot comprehend the ramifications of what the larger, complete ‘I’ sees. They would be even further beyond you. The only other mind that I am presently aware of with sufficient power is on the planet of my creation—that of the High Human who made me.”

  “The Crescend?” she said.

  “Exactly. I am a smaller part of that being—whose one and only weakness is an inability to participate.”

  “Which is why you’re here,” Roche guessed. “You needed HQ all along—”

  “Yes. To examine fresh data, and to decide where to go next. All indicators at present point toward following the Sol trail to the Palasian System. From there, however, directions are unclear.”

  “But what if the rest of us choose not to go even as far as that?”

  “Curiosity is a powerful force, Morgan. Never underestimate it. I certainly didn’t, when gambling on its effect to make you rescue Adoni Cane from the Midnight.”

  That name again. Roche wondered once more at the cost of her survival, and who would be asked to pay—if not now, then in the future.

  “I don’t know, Box,” she said. “You may have me under your thumb, but don’t be so confident about the others.”

  “Why not? I’m sure you will convince them. The ship is yours, after all.”

  “In name only. That doesn’t make me the commanding officer. Haid, for instance, would do a much better—”

  “No. Not Haid. He is too easily distracted, too unreliable.”

  “Cane, then.” Roche frowned, feeling hemmed in. “What makes you think I even want the job?”

  Again, the Box was silent. When it spoke a few moments later, its voice was less insistent than before, almost distant.

  “Section gold-one,” it said. “It’s on the map. Go there, and you will find what you are looking for.”

  “I’m not looking for anything.”

  “You lie even to yourself,” said the Box flatly. “This is something I have difficulty understanding in mundane Humans. You must understand your own limitations before you can ever hope to Transcend them.”

  A chill went down Roche’s spine when she realized what she was talking to at that moment: not the tiny fragment of the Box that had been allocated to keep her informed and to deal with her questions, but the greater “I” itself: the part of the Crescend that the Box had become.

  “Okay,” she said cautiously, wary of making deals with something so far beyond her comprehension. “But if I don’t find anything—”

  “You will,” returned the Box. “And with it you will find the answer to your dilemma.”

  “What dilemma?”

  Roche waited for a moment, expecting the AI to elaborate. Did it mean the dilemma of Adoni Cane, or of the Crescend’s long-term intentions? Answers to either would have been a step forward, but she would rather hear them outright than play the Box’s games to get them.

  When it was clear, however, that the Box had nothing further to add, she called up the ship’s map from the databanks and overlaid it across her vision.

  Section gold-one lay midway between the officers’ decks and the warren, little more than four rooms tucked out of sight near the main life support vats. The map provided no information about what the rooms contained, and Roche had previously assumed that they were simply storerooms or maintenance closets.

  Shrugging, she turned back the way she had come, heading through the maze of corridors for section gold-one. Whatever the rooms contained was irrelevant as far she could see, no matter what the Box said. Hidden weapons, secret cargo, arcane defenses—any or all, had they existed, would have been used before now by the original crew to wrest the ship from the COE invaders.

  Still, it was nice to hear the Box sounding more or less like its old self again. Pondering its sudden, if temporary, evolution while she walked, she eventually decided that there wasn’t much she could do about it. If its plans and goals were truly incomprehensible, then the best she could do, was hope that they acted in tandem with her own, as they had so far. Maybe when they left Intelligence HQ behind, the Box would return to its normal behavior—pompous, but potentially manageable.

  Almost before she knew it, she reached the airlock leading to the section designated gold-one. A security keypad requested a palmprint, but the door opened before she could provide one. The Box again, she assumed, making life easy for her.

  The first room was indeed a maintenance closet, although one rarely u
sed. Tools and equipment were neatly stored in cupboards and boxes, showing little of the disorder usually associated with frequent use. The second room was empty apart from four chairs and another holographic generator in the center of the floor. The third contained monitoring equipment and a massive, complicated control desk. Glancing at the latter briefly,

  Roche noted displays common to life-support systems, along with a few to monitor dataflows.

  Life support and information... For the first time, she wondered whether the Box had known what it was talking about, after all.

  An airlock and a single pane of opaque glass separated the final room from the control chamber. At the touch of a switch, the glass cleared, revealing a roughly tubular tank, three meters long and one across, surrounded by arcane equipment.

  Opening the airlock, she went inside for a closer look.

  The air was cold in the fourth room, kept that way by refrigeration units along one wall. The tank also had an opaque panel that could be set to become transparent. Stepping over ropelike pulse-fiber cables, she did just that, then peered inside.

  At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. The tank was full of a murky, pinkish fluid: definitely the second life support system she had noted from the ship’s schematics. A spinal cord hung suspended in the fluid along the axis of the tank—almost taillike—connected to the interior surface by thousands of thin, nervelike fibers. What might once have been a brain remained at one end of the spine, although it was grotesquely twisted and flattened to allow more fibers access to its inner features. Major organs, some of them severely atrophied, clustered at the bottom of the tank, a web of pulsing veins leading directly to the life support system. She could see no recognizable heart or lungs, just what might have been a segment of bowel and a clump of glandular tissue. Certainly no exterior organs, like eyes, hands, or skin.

  Apart from the pulsing of the veins, the being in the tank—possibly Human, once—displayed no signs of life whatsoever.

  Then, as she leaned closer to study the interface between the cables and the tank, a voice spoke:

  “Hello, Commander.”

  Startled, she stood upright and turned around. The voice had sounded as though it had been coming from over her left shoulder, but the room was empty except for her. She checked the control room, but that too was unoccupied.

  More slowly this time, she turned back to face the tank.

  “Yes, Commander.” The voice was male arid pleasant, quite at odds with the physical appearance of its source. “I wondered how long it would take you to find me.”

  Roche moved around the coffinlike tank, her hand running along its cold exterior in awe. “Are you in there by choice?” she said. “Or are you a prisoner?”

  The owner of the voice chuckled. “I never really thought of myself as a prisoner until recently,” he said. “But yes, that’s what I was.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I have more freedom than you can possibly imagine.”

  “Who are you?” she said, staring at the contents of the tank with some revulsion.

  “My name is Uri Kajic.” He paused, noting her distaste. “Perhaps you would prefer to continue this conversation in the antechamber?”

  Roche nodded and backed away, careful not to bump into the delicate equipment around her. When she reached the antechamber, its holographic generator flickered into life and cast a life-sized image of a man into the center of the room.

  The man smiled openly. He appeared a little older than Roche, with a wide, cheerful face and thick, black hair. His skin was light brown, and his eyes were round.

  “This is how I imagine myself,” said Kajic. “What lies in the coffin is the truth of my existence.” The hologram shrugged, and Roche noticed nothing clumsy in the action. Its movements were perfectly natural. “But we all like to keep up appearances.”

  Suddenly it fell into place: the holographic generators, the information networks, the missing quarters—

  “You’re the captain of the Ana Vereine,” she said.

  “I was,” corrected Kajic. “And these are my quarters.” He chuckled again. “I must be the only captain in history whose crew didn’t envy his suite.”

  Roche sagged into a seat, her mind reeling. “But this type of technology is incredible,” she said.

  “We’ve had a long time to develop it.” Kajic smiled. “Centuries ago, Ataman Vereine desired an army superior to any other in existence. Science then, however, was insufficiently advanced to modify the Pristine form as Ataman Vereine wished, and the Ataman Theocracy was itself in a poor state. When it joined the Commonwealth, the Military Presidium went underground and channeled its energies into something else: the Andermahr Experiment, specializing in cybernetic interfaces designed to allow mind and machine to merge.”

  “And to become...?” Roche shook her head numbly as words failed her.

  “A synergistic gestalt,” Kajic offered. “The experiment was undoubtedly a qualified success. I am evidence of that.”

  “But how could you have progressed this far without anyone knowing?”

  “COE Intelligence would have suspected, I’m sure, especially had the Dato Bloc not seceded when its researchers began making progress. You may not have heard of the experiment, though, because the Armada wouldn’t have wanted its relative weakness in this area made public knowledge. Or perhaps it simply wanted its own work in the field kept secret.”

  Roche scratched at the stubble on her scalp. Kajic’s final comment made all too much sense. “Whoever perfects the technology first will have an awesome advantage over the other side.”

  “I agree.” Kajic nodded, then smiled again. “Perhaps it is better, in that case, for me to have appeared to have failed so badly. The Presidium may hesitate before committing itself to another such experiment. That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway, when I contemplate my defeat.”

  Roche belatedly remembered that she was not just talking to a fellow officer; but one on her enemy’s side. “It must be a great disappointment,” she said, “to meet me like this.”

  “Not at all,” said Kajic. “I don’t resent your victory, Commander. I don’t even resent you taking over my ship.”

  Kajic’s image shook its head. “On the contrary. I welcome your arrival. When your Box brought us here, to Intelligence HQ, my second in command thought that my inability to lead had brought about our downfall. She tried to kill me, but your AI disconnected my restraint systems as it took over the ship—indirectly saving my life. For that, and for the freedom to think which I now possess, I am nothing but grateful.”

  Roche frowned, remembering how the Box had sent her down to the section. “The Box has contacted you?”

  “Along with the Surin,” said Kajic. “Before the takeover, they warned me not to fight too hard, or I would be caught up in the dissolution of the shipboard systems. I didn’t understand then what they meant, but I can see it now. Since then, I’ve been watching, careful not to interfere, biding my time to see what happens next.”

  “And what does happen next? Will you try to regain control of the ship?”

  Kajic laughed. “Like you, Commander, I was used. I hold no allegiance whatsoever to my former superiors. I am, however, still tied to the ship. I am free only insofar as it is free. Whatever you decide to do with it, I am obliged to go along.”

  Roche grimaced.

  “What?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just hate this idea of everyone depending upon my decision.”

  “Why? It is your decision.” Lines of static flickered across his image, distorting it briefly and reminding Roche of what he actually was. “I’ve been watching the others as closely as I’ve watched you. They’re all supremely talented in their own way—Cane, the perfect soldier; Haid, the grand vizier; Maii, the soothsayer; and the Box, the wizard—but they need something to keep them together. Something more than just a purpose, or a goal—or even an enemy. They need a leader to focus all the
ir energies, otherwise they’ll tear themselves apart within a month.”

  “And you’re saying that I should be that person?”

  “Who else?”

  “What about you?” she said.

  Kajic laughed again. “I don’t for a moment believe that you would take control of an enemy’s ship and then reinstate the previous captain! Besides which, I have no desires for such a position. No one knows this ship better than I do, I’ll grant you, and I will gladly fly and maintain her for you. But that’s all. I’d like to enjoy my freedom for a while.”

  “That still doesn’t mean that I’m the right person.”

  “No,” said Kajic quietly. “It doesn’t. But you are.”

  Roche averted her eyes from Kajic’s intense holographic gaze. “I’m beginning to wonder if I have any choice.”

  “Perfect,” he said with some amusement. “All leaders have less freedom than anyone under their aegis. That’s a natural law.” He stopped suddenly. “You’re smiling. Did I say something funny?”

  “No. It’s nothing, really,” she said. “It’s just that you remind me of my Tactics lecturer from Military College. And there’s something the Box said just before I came here.” You will find what you are looking for. “It probably thinks I’m ignorant, in need of a teacher.”

  “Maybe you are. Maybe we all are.”

  “You’re offering?”

  “Haven’t I already said as much?”

  She nodded. “And I’m grateful, really. It just seems...”

  “Inappropriate? To be taught by someone who, until very recently, was doing his damnedest to take you prisoner?”

  Her smile widened. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “Well, maybe we can teach each other a thing or two. You did win, after all.”