Lucifer's Nebula

by Phipps, C. T.

  I closed my eyes and thought about my very awkward relationship with both Clarice and Isla. I was involved with both and they were involved with each other. Which would have struck most men as a dream come true if not for the fact they routinely teamed up on me and I was haunted by the digital ghost of my late wife. Honestly, it was quite exhausting on all quarters. “I don’t think it’s ethical for a doctor to treat the brain of the man she’s sleeping with.”

  “Tough,” Clarice said, showing her usual unwillingness to listen to reason. At least mine. “Isla’s the only medical doctor we have that isn’t completely incompetent. You almost blew up a bunch of escape pods back there and turned us into mass murderers.”

  “We’re already—” I stopped in mid-sentence. “I’m already a mass murderer.”

  I’d done a lot of terrible things in the Commonwealth-Archduchy War. You didn’t get a name like the Butcher of Kolthas by playing nice during the war. I’d targeted industrial zones, targets where there was high collateral damage, and joined with groups that targeted civilian officials. All of it had proven pointless or actually made the world worse, but I didn’t pretend I was a good man. War made murderers out of all men and it made mass murderers of those who survived until its end. It didn’t help the side I’d fought for was a routine violator of the rules and articles of war—such as they were in space.

  “Yeah, well, stop being one now,” Clarice said, “or I’ll stop you.”

  I used my cyber-comm to communicate with Judith. “Tell me, did she move to take aim at me when I was flying at the Ravager?”

  “Yes, Judith replied. I think she was prepared to shoot you down to save their lives.”

  “That’s really stupid.”

  “Yes,” Judith said. “Especially since you’re her closest friend. A person she loves.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Should I be?”

  I shook that thought away and contemplated the fact Clarice was a moral enough person to try to kill me to protect me from myself. The fact I couldn’t make sense of it enough to say she was wrong or right told me there was perhaps something to her belief that I needed my head examined. “I’ll consult with Dr. Hernandez. Maybe you should be captain.”

  “No,” Clarice said. “You’re the best person we have for the job.”

  “Then God help us all,” I said, shutting off our link.

  Alone in the darkness of my cockpit, I took a moment to clear my head. I was detoxing from my latest failed attempt to stop drinking. There were pills you could take to cleanse yourself but the Melampus’s medical supplies were running low due to corners we’d had to cut. It was hard enough running an independent hauling business when you’d offended all of the major galactic powers in human space but doubly so when training to maintain a ship that had been modified by Earth to be just close to a warship. We also needed those modifications as circumstances had just proven.

  A small glowing blue woman, translucent, and wearing a dress made of shifting numbers appeared in the right corner of my vision. It was Judith’s avatar, the Melampus’s avatar now, looking at me. It was image planted in my mind through our cybernetic connection, but no less real. My wife had been a beautiful woman with red hair and pale skin, but she was long dead. Judith the Cognition A.I. was a mere copy of her personality.

  But did that make her less the person I loved? It was difficult to say because in some ways she was every bit the person I remembered. In other ways, she was completely different. Her mind could sort through millions of gigaplexbytes per second but had her personality hardwired into her programming so they never overwhelmed her humanity. Judith couldn’t change, though, nor was she was she able to respond the way she did before. We were worlds apart without a starship and yet always able to see one another. Which I suppose made her a moon in my orbit or vice versa. After all, I had changed.

  For the worse.

  “Would you have really blown up those escape pods?” Judith asked, no longer speaking in my mind but generating her voice through the ship’s comm system into my earpiece.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “In that moment, I wanted to kill them all. However, I probably would have stopped in horror once I realized what I was doing.”

  “The old Cassius wouldn’t have done that.”

  “The old Cassius didn’t have his homeworld blown up or the responsibility of a ship with children and families on it.”

  “Or people he loved,” Judith said, defending it. “Rules of war are strange things. If you’d killed everyone on the ship by blowing up its reactor, you would have done nothing wrong. It’s only after they’ve surrendered and ceased to be a threat that killing them became criminal. You know, despite the fact they tried to kill you and we’re not the authorities.”

  “They’re deserters,” I said, setting my autopilot to dock with the Melampus. “I could tell by their tactics. A group of soldiers for the Commonwealth or Crius that decided to duck from the war.”

  “I think they’re part of the local colonial militia,” Judith said, surprising me. “Piracy is a side activity most of the border planets militaries engage in. They’re probably a local militia trained by the Crius, Commonwealth, or both, and making use of second- or third-hand equipment.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

  “Everyone is just trying to survive out here,” Judith said. There was something about her demeanor, though, which told me she was saying it more out of the fact I expected her to than real sympathy, though. Judith had grown increasingly cold over the past few months, as if the efforts to be human were starting to overwhelm her.

  “If living on the border has made them savages then that just means we’ve wandered too far from civilization,” I said, honestly having grown sick of this area. Resources were so scarce and the rule of law so weak it was unleashing my worst instincts—which hadn’t been that far from the surface to begin with.

  Judith paused in her speech. She looked like a work of art when she stood still—like a Venetia crystal statue or a piece of Arthaeus holo-illusion art. “I can see how much this is all tormenting you but may I make your day just a little bit worse?”

  Her way of asking almost made me laugh. Almost. “Oh please. Lord knows I haven’t had enough bad news today nor have a funeral to prep. How bad is it?”

  “Bad.”

  I closed my eyes. “Tell me.”

  “I think the Ravager, actually the Liberty by the way, was sent by our employer. I don’t think we’re going to get paid for this job.”

  Chapter Two

  The revelation we were probably screwed even if we turned our cargo over to the Dragon, the Spiral’s biggest crime boss, reminded me just how we’d gotten involved in this stupid scheme in the first place. Specifically, I’d gotten us involved in it. I couldn’t say I wasn’t warned against it either.

  I was the one who had decided we should get into interstellar smuggling, become part of a major crime syndicate, and carry cargo for an alien who didn’t even have a proper name. It hadn’t been one of my better ideas and made me think about how I’d gotten us involved. Even better, how seemingly everyone on the ship had seen what a terrible idea this all was before I’d agreed to it. I chose to mentally relive the memory, a feature of my cybernetics, from about a week earlier. After all, I had nothing else better to do until autopilot brought me back to the ship.

  “This is a stupid scheme,” Isla Hernandez said, standing beside me as we walked to the rendezvous at Krawl’s Tavern.

  Isla Hernandez was a beautiful white-haired woman with golden skin and a mixture of Odin and Tezcatlipocan features. She wasn’t descended from the humans of either planet, though, because she was a bioroid. A free bioroid who, if discovered, could have been enslaved or destroyed by anyone who was so inclined.

  Humanity hated artificial intelligence since they’d led to the Great Collapse, and even if there were galaxies of difference between a gynoid like her versus a Cognition A.I. like Judith, both inhe
rited a measure of humanity’s loathing. The fact humans still made bioroids by the millions as slaves was just one of those little hypocrisies we dealt with. Either way, she was human to me. More so than Judith lately—a fact I was uncomfortable with.

  Today, Isla was dressed in a gray hooded cloak over a ship’s doctor’s white flight suit. It was dusty and faded, like much of the attire on the Melampus, but signaled her as a healer on the Ring. We’d already been distracted twice from getting to our meeting in order to treat a stabbing and a Kolahn ape-like boy who was suffering oxygen poisoning. I wasn’t exactly unsympathetic but if we missed our meeting then fifteen hundred crew members on the Melampus would suffer instead.

  All around us were hundreds of humans, aliens, transhumans, and uplifts gathered in the oxygen-breathing Type-C environment of the Ring. The Ring was a structure created by a long-ascended race and one of the few gathering places for multiple species in the border planets. There were places were vast fortunes could be made trading alien technology to humanity or raw materials in reverse. That took a lot of time and connections, though, that I was still trying to work out since I’d taken over as captain.

  I was wearing a heavy duster over my red starfighter’s pilot uniform. I had a Disintegrator-7 fusion pistol holstered on my belt in open display as well as my personal shield generator belt buckle next to my old Crius Starfighter Corps proton sword. The sword itself was useless outside of duels but I’d made a name for myself with it by letting my shield soak up some low powered weapons fire then carving the holders up. They called me Cutter. Not the best name to have around here, but not the worst either.

  “If you had any objections, you should have shared them before,” I muttered, not wanting to have this conversation again.

  “I did say so before,” Isla said. “Before, during, and will after if we don’t get ourselves killed.”

  “We haven’t yet.”

  “Which goes to show you God isn’t finished screwing with us yet.”

  “True,” I admitted. Then I lied, saying, “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Are you sure, because from where I’m standing, it looks like you want us to become smugglers,” Isla said. “Which, having actually worked on a smuggling ship, is a lot less glamorous than they make it out to be in the holovids.”

  “We’re not exactly welcome in civilized space,” I said, grimacing. “The result of screwing over the two largest governments in human space.”

  “Stealing the Melampus from the Commonwealth’s intelligence service and killing the Free Systems Alliance’s chief mad scientist was a rather colossal ‘fuck you’ to the two sides in this war, I’ll admit.” Isla paused a second, perhaps remembering their ‘chief mad scientist’ had been my sister—or, at least, a bioroid duplicate of her. The real Zoe had created one before escaping Commonwealth custody and joining the Free Systems Alliance founded by our brother.

  “We also kept them from an Elder Race artifact designed to worsen the war,” I said, still not sure how we’d wound up in the middle of such an epic clusterfuck. “It was all extremely heroic but makes us the most wanted ship in the galaxy.”

  There was also the issue of Judith, something I’d lost crew over despite the majority of the crew thinking she was nothing more than an exceptionally sophisticated interface. A Cognition A.I. was an insurmountable advantage when keeping our enemies at bay, but would also make us galactic pariahs if discovered. Still, Judith was a living monument to my late wife and something I’d preserve no matter the cost—and the cost had been dear so far.

  “Not quite,” Isla said. “Judith wiped our records and changed our transponder. The Melampus is an old Olympian-class heavy hauler. They’re more common than dirt. Besides, if the Watchers really wanted to find us, they would. Neither side can risk Judith tearing them apart or revealing their secrets.”

  “That’s one theory,” I said.

  “What’s the other?” Isla asked, pick-pocketing the credit stick of a rich-looking alien we passed.

  “They just haven’t gotten around to murdering us yet,” I said, thinking about how long the Commonwealth’s memory was. Some of the criminals they’d hunted down and executed included fugitives who’d been on the run for centuries. I had no desire to be grabbed out of my bed, tried, and hung when I was a two-hundred-year-old retiree.

  Isla didn’t respond to that.

  Passing a newsfeed kiosk run by a man who looked like a tiger with two legs and cybernetic arms in a tank top, I took a moment to pay a subscription fee and download the latest information from Sectors One through Twelve.

  In a moment, my mind became full of hundreds of news stories my enhanced brain sorted through relevancy and detail. For the most part, I restricted myself to checking details about the war and economics. I did, admittedly, also download a list of upcoming holovids I wanted to see.

  “Pick me up the latest Galactic Concubine vids,” Isla said.

  “You realize those are porn, right?” I asked.

  “And?” Isla asked, smiling.

  “All right.” I shook my head, soaking in what was happening to the rest of the universe.

  “Any good news?” Isla asked.

  “No,” I said. “The Free Systems Alliance is kicking the crap out of the Commonwealth and adopting a policy of guerre aux châteaux, paix aux chaumières.”

  “Not all of us received your classical education, Cassius.”

  “War to the castles, peace to the houses,” I said, remembering my lessons. “I think. It’s been a while since officer school. The FSA is doing their best to do hit and fade attacks on as many military targets as possible, all easy victories, to leave Commonwealth occupied worlds unable to administrate their worlds. They’re not interested in actually taking worlds as trying to inspire revolutions so the Commonwealth is forced to expend resources to retake them until it stretches itself so thin it collapses.”

  “Sounds like a good strategy,” Isla said.

  “It is,” I admitted, not wanting to give any credit to the organization founded by an imposter using my name. That was another benefit of Zoe’s mad science. Supposedly, my mental and physical clone was the FSA’s leader. He’d started off as just a propaganda piece but had seized full control a few months ago. “Good strategy or not, though, it means the war will continue to go on even though the FSA has no ability to win. They can maximize casualties but not defeat the Commonwealth’s size advantage. All they can do is ‘liberate’ worlds only for the Commonwealth to ‘liberate’ them right back.”

  “Maybe their strategy is to get everyone pissed off by the damage,” Isla suggested. “Create more sympathy for the rebellion.”

  “Then it’s working,” I said, grimacing, as the stories of revolts were over seemingly every sector’s newsfeeds. The absolute worst absurdity of it all was the fact that, a few years ago, I would have been right there with me. The Commonwealth had destroyed Crius with meteors from orbit, killed millions of citizens, and I wanted the people responsible to pay.

  The problem was those people weren’t on the battlefield; they were safely in shielded facilities on Albion, immune to even orbital strikes. It meant all this massive uprising was doing was killing more people who had nothing to do with policy in the Commonwealth. It was a war of kings fought by peasants and mourned only by their families as well as God.

  Isla reached over and took my hand. “You don’t have to take responsibility for your family’s screw-ups.”

  I clutched her hand’s smooth softness against my rough hands. “As much as I’d like to believe that, I don’t think that qualifies when your sister downloads your mind into an android body and sets him up as the face of the revolution.”

  “I know something about being made in the image of someone else,” Isla said, reminding me she was still a popular model purchasable at bioroid stores for twenty thousand credits with the adult functions being an extra ten thousand. “Trust me, the imposter running around leading the FSA isn’t you.”

&
nbsp; “No, but he’ll come for us eventually too. Avenging Crius may be occupying his attention now but he won’t stop until I’m dead. He loved Zoe.” I also knew he’d have to kill me, as I represented an existential threat to his narrative. As long as there was a Cassius Mass running around who didn’t think the best solution to the Commonwealth occupying the former archduchy was war—well, that potentially put to lie all of his pretty speeches about fighting and dying for freedom.

  “You loved Zoe too. She just didn’t love you back,” Isla said, understating matters.

  I leaned over and kissed her, taking a moment to be glad I’d found her. Our relationship wasn’t exactly conventional, though. There had been a time I’d considered ending my relationship with her and Clarice both to be with Judith but the latter had no interests in the physical intimacies of a relationship. I could never have given her up completely, though, nor would Isla have done the same. I really didn’t deserve her patience in figuring out we were a family—just a very strange one.

  Isla then pulled away and glared at me with fire in her eyes. “You’ve been drinking.”

  Uh-oh. I wiped my mouth. I’d promised I’d try to work on that. “How can you tell?”

  “Your mouth tastes like reactor fuel,” Isla said, sticking out her tongue.

  “Well, it’s Munin’s home brew, so that may be an ingredient,” I said, speaking of our young chief engineer. “I’ve only been drinking a little. Just high of socially.”

  “Socially where? Drunk planet?” Isla asked, her voice having an edge as sharp as Arawn steel.

  “I’m functional. That’s more than I can say for a lot of Crius veterans.” I wasn’t in the mood to be berated for how I coped with the shit hand God had dealt me.

  Isla looked like she was struggling to decide whether she should be understanding or angry before descending on controlled fury. “We’ve discussed this, Cassius. You’re supposed to stop drinking. Self-medication isn’t how you’re going to recover.”