“Uhhh, you’ve done this sort of thing before, right?” Dwight eyed the chair with growing apprehension.
“Of course not,” Theil replied cheerfully. “Darfoeh is the only world in the Republic allowed to handle CPU implants and, even there, it’s restricted to one isolated facility in a floating city.”
“Now wait a minute.” Dwight’s hands came up on their own, clearly agreeing with his reluctance. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with being an experimental patient.”
“Experimental?” Theil frowned at Qut. “Where is the CPU installed?”
A roll of the eyes. “In his sinuses.”
“Hah!” He gave Dwight a gentle shove into the chair. “Don’t worry; I’m just hooking up to existing ports and attaching the new assembly so it won’t bounce around and make you want to sneeze. Ten minutes – tops.” He activated the restraint field. “And I can absolutely guarantee that no harm will come to me!”
It was more like six minutes.
When the restraint field lifted, Dwight surged out of the chair like a cheetah being released by a game warden. He felt a wave of dizziness and stumbled into Theil’s desk.
“All right, let’s get you back to the lab.” Emily grabbed an arm and ushered him out into the foggy pedway before Theil thought to ask what the bus had been connected to.
They were halfway there when everything got fuzzy again. He pushed his way through the crowd to sit on a low wall that enclosed a street-side café.
Emily sat next to him, putting a hand on his back. “What are you feeling?”
“Everything just starts to get fuzzy somehow.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I don’t actually see fuzziness, but it feels like I do.”
“I think it’s working,” Rosh said as he crouched in front of him. “Can you turn off the input from the discriminator until we get back to the lab? It might make walking a lot easier.”
Dwight concentrated, bringing up the control menu. It took a few false trails before he found the input list. Navigating a computer was difficult enough, but this one was manufactured by the Midgaard and he still wasn’t fully familiar with the layout. He found the bus/discriminator combination and deactivated the signals coming from them.
He instantly felt better.
The moment they got back to the shop, Qut closed the front end with a grey, segmented shutter while Rosh helped Dwight into a chair. He pulled three chairs to face him and turned to clear a space on the workbench. When he came over to his seat, a small object was sitting on the bench.
“There’s a simple transmitter on the bench,” he nodded over his shoulder. “All it does is emit a steady clicking sound, three clicks followed by a few seconds of silence, then three more and so on.”
Dwight still had his regular receiver on. “I can hear it.”
Qut dropped into his chair, leaning his elbows on his knees. “Deactivate the standard receiver and turn the discriminator back on. You’ll need to direct the feed from the discriminator into your CPUs signal processor.”
“So, if I’m picking up the signal from your transmitter, it’ll get processed as a standard signal?’
“Exactly.”
It took a few minutes to create the link, but he felt he was getting better at using the retinal menus. He suddenly tensed.
“Whoa! I’m getting a solid bank of sound.” He tilted his head slightly. “I’m getting literally millions of signals coming in from that transmitter, all at slightly different time offsets.”
Rosh jumped out of his chair with a delighted screech. “That’s exactly what you should be seeing!” He danced a clumsy jig around the chair and gave Qut a friendly thump on the back. “It’s working!”
“Now we need to pick one of those signals and follow the path back to the transmitter,” Qut advised. “Just pick any one signal.”
Dwight concentrated, but there were just too many signals to ignore. Maybe I should be using the CPU to filter out the ones I’m not trying to trace. He selected one signal and had the system mask the rest.
With the other paths ignored, he concentrated on the one signal. He could actually perceive the path, knitted together by countless tiny tunnels through the foamy ocean of space-time.
He shifted his position on the seat and the path shifted as well. He was sure of it. Can I make the path shift consciously? He imagined a curve around Qut and the path followed. I should be able to move the end as well, he thought.
The three clicks disappeared, leaving only silence. He caught snippets of sound as he moved the end. “I’m moving the end of the pathway,” he explained. “I’m only getting quick little snippets of transmissions.”
“You can control where the path goes?” Rosh asked, eyes wide. “That’s amazing!”
“Well, it seems remarkably intuitive so far,” Dwight muttered absently. “I thought I’d hear a ton of chatter.”
“The aperture at the end is a micro wormhole,” Qut explained. “You pretty much need to be pointed straight at the target to pick up the signal.”
“Hey, maybe we can talk to Earth with this?” Dwight tried to figure out what direction his home world was and lost the path entirely. He shut down the feed before it had a chance to sneak up on him and start the fuzziness again.
“Signals from your system wouldn’t have reached us yet,” Qut frowned. “At least not through normal space. Not sure how you’d find a path to follow.”
“Let’s try the Midway first,” Emily suggested. “You could try picking up the beacon and initiate a hail using your voice-link.”
Dwight grinned. “It it works, we may be boarding a shuttle within the hour.”
“Sir,” a nervous young communications officer stood at the open hatch to Towers’ quarters at the back of the bridge. “We have a call for you from Dr. Young.”
Towers couldn’t help but smile. Some of the youngsters in the fleet were just naturally frightened around senior officers. “From the surface?”
“Well,” a deep breath, “the signal seems to originate here, on the Midway, but the system shows no record of us making a call to ourselves.” He opened his mouth, then frowned as he shut it again. He made another attempt. “Sir, it’s almost as if the signal has no origin. It’s just here, being picked up by our systems.”
“All right, put it through to my neural link.” What’s so important that he can’t wait till he’s back aboard?
Clearing the Slate
En Route to Oaxes
Eiboekna kept her face impassive, but her eyes showed her lack of decision. She set the mug on the coffee table. “An interesting drink,” she allowed. “Bitter, but not unpleasantly so, and sweet as well. It might find a market, here in the Republic.”
“This isn’t the Republic anymore,” Harry corrected her with a polite smile on his face. “We entered Alliance territory three hours ago.”
She sighed, conceding the point with a slight incline of her head. “Wherever we are, I’ve found what I was sent to find, gods help me.”
“You were sent to find us, but why?” Harry watched the wisps of vapor drifting out of his mug. Towers had given him a supply of the beans brought by the Pandora. It almost made up for what the Navy had done to him more than a decade ago.
“I was sent to broker a peace between you and the Dactari.”
“That simple, huh?” Harry looked up at her with amusement. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. We’re just starting to make serious progress against the Republic. I can’t imagine Towers and Caul would be eager to suddenly stop beating the enemy and make peace – not when there are so many worlds out there that might want to join our cause.”
His expression hardened. “I don’t imagine you’ll convince the Dactari, either. They have the crazy idea lodged in their collective mindset that we should be their subjects. Only way to change a Dactari’s mind is to put a bullet through it.”
“Why do you hate them so much?”
Harry took a drink, taking time to think about th
e question. “When I was captured at Oaxes, they interrogated me by putting me into one of their training pods. They forced me to watch dozens of families being executed from the perspective of the parents. I was forced to live the last moments of the planet’s resistance leaders because the emotional turmoil of the experience let them slip into my mind and steal my own memories.” He shuddered. “I’ve seen them at their worst.”
“That was centuries ago.” Eiboekna reached out for her coffee. “The Dactari who live today shouldn’t be held responsible for the crimes of ancestors many generations in the past.”
Harry leaned back, staring at the myriad of conduits and pipes that adorned the ceiling of every warship. Crimes, he mused. An officer is guilty of a crime if he carries out an unlawful order. But what constitutes a lawful order here? “An interesting point,” he remarked. “Were they really considered crimes under Imperial law?” He looked over at her. “Were the soldiers ever prosecuted for those killings, or were their actions approved of by your own family?”
Eiboekna held his gaze silently, her lips drawn tight.
“Perhaps one of your ancestors watched a recording of the mutilation of those children and expressed his admiration of the troops involved.” Harry could see the turmoil behind her eyes, and he felt a sudden guilt. He decided to ease up.
He had left captivity with a deep hatred of the Dactari, having been through a gut wrenching experience at their hands. He had a new facet to consider now. The Dactari may have carried out the killings, but it was the Bolshari emperor who had demanded their obedience.
Now his hate for the enemy was less clear. The Bolshari involvement muddied the waters and he found he had no desire to start over with a new hatred. The Bolshari were still a step removed from his first-hand memories, and he had a feeling that vilifying either species was nothing more than a simple expedient to avoid learning the real lesson.
Humans are capable of the same barbarity. He had seen that reflected in Eiboekna’s eyes when he’d killed thousands of enemies aboard the crippled troop ship.
“Even if we put the past aside, I would still have ample reason to keep fighting.” He set down his empty mug. “They did bring mass drivers to my home world three years ago.”
She looked as though she had been slapped. The presence of mass drivers signaled a clear intention to destroy Earth if they failed to conquer it.
Harry smiled grimly. “I see I’ve managed to shake your view of this conflict.” He nodded to himself. “Perhaps we can change the Dactari mindset as well?”
Revolutionary Ideals
Alliance Territory
Reis walked onto the bridge from his cabin. It was time to explain his scheme, and it was a good one. This region might seem unremarkable at first glance, but it was a key transit point linking the three Alliance-held worlds. They would take a page from their enemy’s book and use old ships to create singularities. They would knock ships out of distortion and either board them or destroy them.
If the space between the Alliance worlds became unsafe for commercial traffic, then the new Alliance planets would quickly turn from assets to liabilities. The enemy would find themselves trying to pacify three angry populations, rather than just one.
Properly executed, his strategy would turn the recent enemy victories into strategic defeats. With their forces divided between three increasingly-hostile worlds, their abilities would be strained to the limits. Their morale would plummet and they would have three starving worlds to deal with.
Though he had come onto the bridge to address the fleet, he stood there in silence. Something felt very different. He had been fighting since his early childhood, first in the slums of his home prefecture, and later in the military. He had developed a sense for danger and the bridge hummed with it.
Nobody would meet his eye, preferring, instead, to look to the second officer.
The worst thing he could do would be to act like a leader on the verge of a mutiny. Just as he could sense the dangerous mood on the bridge, so could they sense hesitation or weakness from him.
“We have an opportunity to turn the enemy’s gains against them,” he announced brusquely.
“That may be, sir,” the second officer interrupted, “but we must first set our own world to rights.”
“You dare to speak out of turn, Sub-Flota?” He forced an edge of menace into his tone. He had to sound like an officer who had millennia of harsh discipline on his side. Any crew contemplating mutiny also had to consider the specter of quinqaugination.
The most brutal sentence for any unit in Republic service, quinqaugination broke the entire crew down into pairs. One man in each pair was then given a vine wood cudgel. If he failed to beat his partner to death within five minutes, the next five pairs would be slaughtered outright. A crewman might wish to spare his comrade, but few ever did so at the expense of ten others, or five – considering the fact that half of them would have died anyway.
One full unit of basic induction training was dedicated entirely to the process. The official purpose masqueraded as a kindness – showing the recruits how to give their condemned partner a quick clean death. The real purpose was simply to shock them, forcing them to keep the threat in the back of their minds.
“I speak out of turn, Flota, because I must,” the second replied sadly. “Our leaders have betrayed the ideals of the Republic. They have covered us all in a web of deceit. We cannot conduct a proper defense of our people when we have no idea of the true situation.”
The flota had to admit he had a point, but this was hardly the right way to have this conversation. “We may not know the entire picture, Sub-Flota, but we do know that we can be of great use to our people right here.” He waved a hand out the bridge windows.
His second officer shook his head obstinately. “First, we must set our own house in order.” He looked around the bridge, seeing encouragement there. “We’re taking the fleet to Dactar. They can’t stop us all and they can’t prevent us from broadcasting to the entire planet.”
“Broadcasting?” the flota blurted. “What in eighteen hells are you planning to do?”
“We will expose the incompetence of the ruling council and the Triumvirs,” the second replied, a gleam in his eyes. “We will force them to face the consequences of their actions!” He reached out a hand, palm up. “Will you lead us in this historic calling?”
“I will not,” Reis replied calmly. As far as he was concerned, the military had no business meddling in politics. It set a dangerous precedent, representing a risk at least as great as the lies and incompetence that had pushed the second over the brink.
“Then we will have to confine you to your quarters until we’ve rescued the Republic from itself.” The second waved to the guards at the portside hatch and they approached to take the flota into custody.
Never make a zealot into a priest, Reis thought, seeing the fervor of his bridge crew, nor a patriot into a commissar. He had allowed his second to poison the crew and at least half of them would die for it.
Hardball
Presh, Oaxes
Harry stood in front of Haldita’s ornate throne. Colonel Adams was beside him, looking as though he might like to kill something – Haldita perhaps. The satrap looked at both men with an air of supreme confidence.
Harry hadn’t been back in Presh for an hour before Adams sought him out at a greasy spoon near their new headquarters. They had expected games from Haldita over the tax revenue, but this went beyond their wildest imagination.
“Colonel Adams tells me we have an issue with the taxes?” Harry began politely.
“Yes,” Haldita nodded. “During the fight against the Dactari, our people were forced to cause much damage to our infrastructure.” He waved a steward forward, taking a cup of tea from the tray. He offered none to his visitors, preferring instead to keep them standing before him as petitioners. “Many pedestrian bridges were destroyed so that we could trap the enemy and wipe them out, landing sites were obstructed…”
“Please come to the point,” Harry interrupted politely but firmly.
An incline of the head, an amused, indulgent smile. “Very well. We must repair our cities before we can afford to hand over a major portion of our revenue.” He held up a hand to forestall the outburst that showed itself in Adams’ features. “Of course, we will make every effort to provide funds in the interim.” A negligent wave of the hand. “On a case-by-case basis.”
Is this just his opening position for a negotiation or is he truly expecting me to come groveling every time we need money? Either way, it set a dangerous precedent. Such an arrangement ensured that Harry and his forces would be under the satrap’s thumb. If he controlled their money, he controlled them. They would have been better off staying in Weiran orbit. He fought to suppress a smile as the thought presented him with his solution.
They would be better off leaving – at least as far as Haldita would know.
“That will not do,” Harry replied calmly. “We cannot leave ourselves subject to whim.” He waited just long enough for Haldita to open his mouth before he continued. “Colonel Adams,” he said, keeping his gaze on the satrap. “Begin recovering your troops from the surface. I want all Alliance personnel back aboard by the start of second watch.”
The order was ludicrous. Tens of thousands of Marines were already scattered around several cities, having been ferried by every shuttle in the task force before the departure for Chula 565. Most of them were out on foot patrol or off on leave. It would take days to get them all back.
To his credit, Adams kept any sign of surprise from his face. “Yes, sir. I’ll have to warn the mess hall on the Salamis that they’ll have a lot of extra customers for dinner.”
Word had already begun to spread about how Alliance soldiers were actually paying for their meals. They were already receiving a wary welcome as liberators, but their reputation as good customers was spreading like wildfire. It was unheard of on the fringe worlds. Just an hour ago, Harry had overheard the owner of a dingy little lunch-bar telling his customers that the Alliance troops were more than welcome in his establishment.
The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) Page 24