Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Things had been very different when she’d first come to this plane. She had never felt alone or misunderstood. Her masters in the old Unity had gifted her with an AI companion that, unimaginatively, she’d named Companion. It had ridden her thoughts, given her direction.

  But Companion had died during the chaos and madness that had led to Ways and Means’ exile here. Even if it had been around, it would have failed to suit her needs for some time now. Ways and Means knew that. That was why it had never given her another.

  At least Companion would have listened to her.

  She should not have accepted this assignment. She was not suited for it. She did not want to watch these people, their wars, their misery. Usually she was able to clamp down that feeling, but not always. She was not suited, in general, to live alone.

  Dahn didn’t count as company. He returned to his seat. Already, he had gone immobile, statuesque. Companion’s presence would have been patronizing, intolerable now, sure. But, without it, her mind boiled.

  Their cramped quarters didn’t help. They should have had larger. At the start of this assignment, Ways and Means had declared that it was severely curtailing the construction it allowed on this world’s surface. When Meloku had first visited this world, she’d come as a spy, embedded with a team of anthropologists. They’d lived in a compact but fully featured multiroom field base.

  Not any more. No more legions of construction drones. Building a fully featured field base would have made light and noise for days. They’d gotten away with it last time because they’d built out in the middle of a rural nothing, but now Ways and Means was sending more of its agents everywhere, and closer to cities. The rules had changed. Even though Meloku and Dahn’s home was lodged in the Alps north of Italy, far from people, those rules applied to them, too.

  So she was stuck with a single-room quarters with a bitter statue for a roommate, more a hideout than a home. Projecting images on the walls, augmenting their unreality with her demiorganics, only helped to a point.

  Living with another person might have made things better, but Dahn was not that person. He’d lived in his demiorganic body for centuries. He did not remember what it was like to be human.

  She rested her head in her palm again. The battle, if it could be called that, hadn’t waited for her to catch up.

  The wall of infantry reached the road. The monastery itself was likely to remain inviolate. After the last few decades’ turmoil across Italy, it and many like it built high walls, with space inside for grazing. The monastery had been rebuilt to shelter the people of the countryside.

  A cloud of infrared blobs huddled inside: people. Not as many as there should have been. Three days ago, knowing that the Company of the Star was coming, Meloku had visited and planted eavesdroppers. Their cameras gave her a closer view of a mostly empty yard, supplies stockpiled for many more people than had actually reached them.

  Condottieri like the Company of the Star rarely attacked fortifications. Their mobile nature kept them from dragging along a siege train. The Company of the Star could have cracked the monastery’s walls, gotten inside, even without artillery. Scaling the walls and fighting wouldn’t have been worth it, though. Condottieri carefully balanced the costs and profits of every decision they made. This monastery wasn’t worth the trouble.

  A forced march to catch straggling refugees, on the other hand, would pay off a dozen times the cost. But the company had adroitly negated the fortifications by arriving long before anyone had expected them to. The refugees had been taking their time, moving slow, until the moment the cavalry had crossed their horizon.

  Fortifications or not, the riders almost got the monastery all the same. The men at the gates spotted the danger just in time, slammed the portcullis just as the advance cavalry reached it. Any later and they would have had a dozen stradiots inside. The stradiots were feared Albanian light cavalry; they didn’t have as much use for hostages as most condottieri. Their contracts typically rated their pay per head.

  The rest of the cavalry had rolled the refugees into four tight masses. The riders circled, herding them. Then they closed.

  At this scale, Meloku could not track the fate of individuals. She did not care to zoom in. She hoped none of the refugees were stupid enough to resist, but she’d been surprised in the past.

  A second formation of loose infantry, pioneers, had wheeled around the monastery’s walls, through the just-plowed fields. Another group secured the scattered houses of the monastery’s lay community. Any plunder would be divvied up, and the rest burned.

  All of the Company of the Star’s plans revolved around what could be seized and what could be ransomed. The rest was chaff – to be destroyed as a means of spreading starvation and terror.

  A deep well of anger burned in the bottom of Meloku’s throat. She glanced at Dahn.

  Dahn was loyal to Ways and Means. Not all of Ways and Means’s crew were. They had wanted to land on this world, plant settlements, colonize their neighbors. It still sounded like a good idea to Meloku. But some crew believed it more fervently than she did. Dahn was one of those who would follow Ways and Means anywhere.

  Ways and Means had once been able to count on the absolute fidelity of every individual aboard. The fact that it couldn’t now said a great deal about how far it had fallen.

  Dahn was as still as ever. No doubt he was aware that she was watching. He chose to ignore her.

  Meloku was not suited for this kind of work. She never had been. Before their exile, she had only ever play-acted as an anthropologist. That was when she’d had the company of a team of real anthropologists. They’d been led by Dr Habidah Shen, a scientist of pious self-righteousness and capital-P Principles. Meloku had not had so many principles – or, rather, hers had been oriented along a different axis. Meloku’s real assignment had been to infiltrate this world’s power structures, evaluate their pliability, their suitability for colonization.

  Now here she was, trying at the real thing, with no training other than Ways and Means’ library and her own experience. She had only taken this assignment because Ways and Means had asked. It was more than her patron. She could not have refused it.

  Most of Ways and Means’ agents were like Dahn. With effort, they could make themselves appear human. But they could not feel like a human, in both meanings of the word. One of the consequences of moving to a body like his was that all of his senses came at a remove. They were abstract, data. Ways and Means needed someone who was still human, who could step outside and blend in. Someone who might perceive and understand the world the way that the locals saw it. So it had asked Meloku to help study these people.

  But she also needed emotional distance. She couldn’t let herself feel sympathy, and she especially couldn’t feel hate. Habidah hadn’t managed to keep her distance, and it had ruined her.

  In over thirty years of trying, Meloku had grown into some parts of this role, but had never managed the emotional distance. At best, she could fake it. As much as she tried to hide behind projections, abstractions, data, she couldn’t manage it. She couldn’t be like Dahn.

  Hate and disgust were her constant companions.

  When she’d last visited the monastery, her shuttle had taken her in at night. Its stealth fields gathered darkness around it, stifled the thunder of its engines. She’d landed within two hundred meters of the walls, and no one had seen her. She’d darted down the boarding ramp.

  She knew the Company of the Star was coming. The company had even been here once before, eight years ago. Other condottieri had raided in the interim. The locals had heard, too. They thought they knew how to act.

  Meloku had worn local costume, just in case she was spotted. She never was. Retinal infrared allowed her to avoid the watchers at the gates. She stole about the earthen slopes below the cloister’s walls, burrowing fingernail-sized eavesdroppers in the dirt and the wadding.

  She hadn’t meant to develop feeling for the place. She h
ad seen the people sleeping in their homes, the wheel-carved roads. She could not help but notice the care with which the monks maintained their vegetable gardens. She’d spotted the home of a lay family, painstakingly rebuilt after a fire. It sat astride the charred remnant of their last home’s foundations. Likely that one had been burnt by condottieri, too.

  She could not make any of it abstract.

  Today, her eavesdroppers gave her from-the-ground views of the fields and houses as the company’s arsonists turned them to black husks. They showed her the masses huddled inside the walls, weeping for relatives outside. The smoke of their ruined livelihoods choked their sky. Outside, the condottieri sat just out of crossbow range. They shouted, banged their helmets together, anything to make noise. It was mockery. The mercenaries did not need to besiege the monastery when they knew they had already won.

  The anger in her chest grew hotter. With the right tools and with clearance from her higher power, she could stop this. By herself, if she had to.

  But she was constrained to just watch.

  A creek ran along a farm road some distance from the gates. By afternoon, the condottieri had dammed the creek, and dug and filled a deep and muddy pool. It was just visible to the men on the walls. The mercenaries set to work assembling a sturdy wooden frame over the water.

  Several black iron cages sat at the shore. Men hooked the tops of each cage to chains, then the chains to pulleys on the frame. It was clear what would happen when they finished: the cages were to swing out over water. They could be lowered into the water, slowly, if the mercenaries desired.

  She could have stopped this.

  Maybe Meloku was not so different from Habidah Shen. Habidah had cared too much for these people. She had saved one of them from nonsense like this. It had wrecked her.

  Habidah and her team had come to this plane to study how these people coped with a black, virulent plague and its vast mortality. Meloku had studied it with them. She had not forgotten the pealing funeral bells, the leathery corpses, the quarantined houses of the dead. She’d been able to focus on her other objectives. Habidah hadn’t. She had resigned, fled her problems. She was still working on this world, but unaffiliated. She studied for her own sake, selfishly. She would not have anything to do with Ways and Means.

  Whereas Habidah’s problems had stemmed from her empathy for these people, all Meloku had was her anger. It was all she’d had for a long time. She could not stifle it.

  This was all so fucking stupid. A hideous, unnecessary waste. The biggest thing she had wanted, since the minute she had come to this plane, was to change this.

  She took in a long breath, let it out slowly.

  It was not that Ways and Means refused to interfere. It had done plenty of that, most notably by ending the plague. The plague bacillus that had torched this region of the globe was gone. It would never recur again.

  Every three years, Ways and Means cruised across the sky. Its regular appearances in the sky had shaken the religious epicenters of this plane.

  The Company of the Star had taken their name from it. Before the company had just been named after its captain, a Russian adventurer. Temur Antonov.

  The Company of the Star was unique among mercenary societies in that it was also the epicenter of a religious movement. It was headlined by a woman soldier. She claimed she spoke with a long-dead warrior, an exemplar figure called Saint Renatus. She had founded a cult for soldiers.

  Meloku had not yet researched the cult to her satisfaction. She was only one person. Its story was everywhere, though. Even condottieri that had never fought beside the Company of the Star still venerated Saint Renatus. The cult was more dry brush thrown onto the inferno of Italy.

  Fiametta of Treviso had started her career with the company as a captive, and then a slave. It was better than most women in her position could have done. Fiametta of Treviso was probably what on other planes would be called schizophrenic. Here, she made sense of the voices she heard as best as she was able. She had turned them to her advantage. She made others believe them too.

  Now she used all the authority and power she’d won to inflict the same misery on others.

  Meloku’s eavesdroppers showed her the first batch of captives being led to the company’s cages. Six of the ten were women. One was a boy. They would have been chosen because each of them was important, in some way, to those inside the monastery. Relatives. Spouses. Children.

  The soldiers grabbed the chains, hoisted the cages. The cages swung over the water in a shaky parabola. The artificial pond was just deep enough to immerse them from top to bottom. The cages swung there, precarious. Men on the monastery’s walls watched.

  Meloku cut the view.

  She drummed her fingers along her desk. The Company of the Star was a problem. She should been paying far more attention before now. She glared at the satellite image of those fifty-two treasure carts. That should have been smaller. How much else had she missed, looking away? All she knew of the company and its cult was abstract, no more real to her than Dahn’s senses.

  The Cult of Saint Renatus had been declared heretical. The church recognized a Saint Renatus, an entirely different one a thousand years older. But the church’s authority had waned since its disastrous first response to the false comet. Never preach apocalypse, Meloku thought, unless you were sure you or your successors weren’t going to be around when it failed to happen.

  The Cult of Saint Renatus was only one of a number of dissident movements that had sprung up in the face of the church’s weakness. It had been more successful than most, second only to the riotous Flagellants of Germany. It slotted neatly into folk Christianity. All it asked was for believers to venerate just one more saint.

  She had plenty of data, all abstract, compiled from agents pursuing monastic libraries and clerical letters. What seemed odd to her now that she was examining their files, though, was that someone with a scholarly education had plainly helped shape it. Saint Renatus, both the figure and his precepts, called back to Mithraism, a religion a thousand years gone from Italy. Mithraism was not widely known here any more, and yet the parallels could not have been an accident.

  Like Mithraism, the Cult of Saint Renatus was most popular among soldiers. Mithraism had been born among soldiers of the Roman Empire, shared among their camps for centuries before the jealous Christian God had outshone it. Also like Mithraism, the cult placed soldiers in a privileged, holy, position. Soldiers who venerated Saint Renatus treated themselves as a kind of priesthood. Saint Renatus was not at all popular in the countryside or the cities.

  Mithras had emerged from a rock. Saint Renatus came from the earth: he had been born in a cave, heralded by miracles. He’d become a soldier the moment he stepped outside. He had been reborn in his first battle. He had worked miracles throughout his life and, like Mithras, slain a bull the size of a galley.

  The cult had cobbled together more contemporary influences, too. Saint Renatus had been martyred on Crusade in the Holy Lands. He had fought on for two days after being decapitated, carrying his head in the crook of his arm.

  Fiametta of Treviso cast herself as a warrior-prophetess in the mold of Jeanne d’Arc of France. They were both women from humble backgrounds, made soldiers. Meloku doubted a peasant slave would have been able to cobble so many influences together.

  She should have been paying more attention. That had not been her only mistake. She could not stop thinking of the treasure train. She did not usually make such enormous mistakes.

  The train strayed close enough to her eavesdroppers for them to pulse scan. The covered carts concealed gold and silver, but also other metallic signatures: brass and iron in the shapes of bells, weapons, farming tools. The scans found shadows of large shapes: tables and cabinets, piles of wool and linen.

  That didn’t match what she remembered, either. Not only were there more wagons than there should have been, but they held more than she remembered. The company must have had twi
ce, if not three times, as much treasure as she’d estimated. If she’d known the Company of the Star had so much buying power, so much war booty, she would have turned her attention to them long before now.

  She glanced to her other projections. There was so much happening. Cages swinging over water. Dark smoke over black wheat fields. Riders departing the monastery to negotiate for the hostages’ lives.

  For her own peace of mind, she killed those images too.

  She turned her attention to satellite records, reviewing the past few months’ logs, trying to figure out how she might have given her such a mistaken impression about the Company of the Star’s size. She found no clues. Her satellites had tracked the growth and movement of the company and its treasure train faithfully. At no point while she’d been watching had the train had fewer than forty-five carriages.

  On a whim, she double-checked those records against her neural demiorganics’ memories. Her demiorganics did not store a complete backup of her own memory, but kept images and other data for later reference.

  According to them, last week at this time, she’d been looking at a treasure train of twenty-six wagons.

  She wouldn’t have trusted the memory if it hadn’t come from her demiorganics. But there the image was, complete and date-tagged.

  Carefully, she asked the base’s NAI to review its satellite records from the same date. The image that returned contained forty-eight carriages. The company had a thousand more men than her demiorganics insisted she remembered.

  Coolly, she closed her connection to the base NAI.

  Last week at this time, she’d been in this same seat, reviewing data from the same satellites. The images were each too specific to be glitches. Her equipment hadn’t failed her.

  There was something here someone didn’t want her to notice. Something of interest to anyone at least powerful enough to do this.

  Her list of suspects was already short. The hideaway’s NAI, its neutered artificial intelligence, kept those records. It wasn’t a full-fledged AI, but it was not without defenses. It would have taken a lot of work to alter NAI’s records without triggering an alarm. Even more to attack her demiorganics. She was an agent of the amalgamate Ways and Means; her security programs were top notch.