by Steve White
"Older and tougher. Also crazier. Everybody in the asteroids is by now." For an instant his eyes saw far beyond old Sarnath to the asteroid belt where the Free Raehaniv fleet continued to disrupt the flow of raw materials and harass the Korvaasha.
Tarlann seated himself and stared at the tabletop. "You know, I've often daydreamed about joining you out there."
Tharuv looked at him sharply. "Don't talk nonsense, Tarlann! What you're doing here—what you're in a unique position to do—is far more important than playing space pirates! We couldn't function without you as our planetside contact . . . ."
"Yes, yes, I know. But have you ever thought of how bloodless that all is, Tharuv?" His eyes held a look that would have shocked anyone who had known him in the prewar era that seemed to be receeding beyond memory, leaving people wondering if they had merely dreamed such a world. "I have to sit around, playing the fool and watching them ruin Raehan, and I've never once been able to do anything direct—I've never been able to strike back at them!"
Tarlann stopped abruptly. He couldn't even voice his real source of frustration: the utter lack of news from his father, as the years had passed and they had learned of the Korvaasha's discovery of the fourth displacement point and subsequent exploration of the Lirauva Chain. So he hadn't even been able to bury his hopes—they lingered on, undead.
But he knew that he was only fantasizing about seeking oblivion in space combat. If nothing else, there was his family to consider. And this Tharuv also knew.
"Well," the Free Raehaniv officer finally said, "here's something you can do to help us strike back at them: get Luraen hle'Nizhom offworld for us!"
Tarlann looked up sharply at the name of the eminent gravitic engineer. "You're in contact with him?"
Tharuv nodded, which meant the same thing to the Raehaniv that it did to most Terrans. "He wants to join us. We can arrange the contact with your people. If you can provide him with a new identity and get him into space, we'll take it from there."
"Of course," Tarlann nodded. "I was just in Norellarn, greasing the people we need so that the company's passenger manifests for the orbital tower aren't looked at too closely. I'll . . ."
An ear-bruising explosion shook the building, followed by a chaos of screams and shouts. Their eyes locked for an instant, before Tarlann spoke with a steadiness which pleased and surprised him.
"Come on; Dormael has an emergency exit in the hallway."
Without a word, Tharuv rose to his feet and they moved toward the door—just before it was flung open and Dormael staggered in, clutching a bleeding abdomen. Tharuv ran to him, weapon already out—a laser pistol, characteristic arm of a spaceman, for whom its lack of recoil more than made up for its susceptibility to the defensive aerosols that nobody wanted to fill a closed-cycle artificial environment with anyway. The taverner had just collapsed in his arms when the Implementers appeared in the doorway, orange coveralls largely hidden by the combat dress they wore.
Tharuv dropped Dormael and got off one shot, stopped by the reflective material that made up one layer of his target's combat dress. The Implementer staggered backwards from the kinetic energy transfer, but two others' railgun carbines opened up on full automatic with a horrible crackling sound as the steel needles went supersonic. Rows of tiny holes appeared in Tharuv's back, and the wall behind him was sprayed with blood. The little hypervelocity flechettes didn't knock a man over backwards; Tharuv just stood still for a fraction of a second, then blood gushed from his mouth and he collapsed. Tarlann, not even in shock yet, managed to raise his hands, palms outward.
The Implementers crowded into the room, two of them grasping Tarlann by both arms while a third searched him. An assault leader swaggered in, idly swinging a truncheon. He surveyed the room supercilliously, finally running his eyes over Tarlann's expensive clothes. He started to turn away . . . and then, without any warning, raised his truncheon and brought it down on Tarlann's right kneecap with all his strength.
Beyond a certain level, pain overloads the nervous system's capacity to perceive it as pain. Tarlann, passing this point as he collapsed, heard as if from a great distance his own screams and the assault leader's rasping voice.
"Kill the others but bring this rich piece of shit along. The Director wants to question him."
* * *
They had given him something to dull the sickening pain, and he was able to appreciate—if that was the word—the headquarters from which Gromorgh, Director of Implementation, oversaw the subjugation of Raehan.
Whole city blocks had been demolished to make room for the fortresslike structure, so typical of Korvaash construction (you could not call it "architecture") in its massive, crude, utilitarian hideousness. The inside, he decided, was even worse. No attempt had been made to ameliorate any noise, stench, inconvenience, filth, or ugliness in a structure whose perpetrators had stopped at minimum functionality.
The Korvaasha, he thought through his haze of drug-masked pain, must have been civilized once. Surely civilization was a precondition to the development of high technology. Which led him to the depressing conclusion that technology could survive the death of the civilization that had created it. Or—even more depressing—perhaps this was what civilization looked like in its Korvaash manifestation.
He had little but these dreary thoughts to occupy him as he waited in a cold, dimly lit chamber—brutally massive, grimy, with bunches of power cables hanging fron the overhead against unfinished walls—with three Implementers (the assault leader and two underlings) who shuffled their feet and darted furtive glances around the home of their owners. The Implementers' attitude was not doglike; they were as incapable of loyalty as they were of any other decent impulse. They felt nothing for their Korvaash masters but fear.
Suddenly, the huge door slid open with a grinding crash, and two Korvaash guards stalked in.
It was difficult to make sense of the Korvaasha at first glance—alienness posed a barrier to coherent impressions. It was hard to say why; the overall design—bilaterally symmetric two-armed biped, averaging a third again the height of a man—wasn't fundamentally weird. Of course, part of that height was accounted for by a long thick neck, and the blocky torso itself was broad even in proportion. And the skin was thick, tough and wrinkled, in shades of gray, with no apparent hair. But it was an indescribable wrongness about every angle and proportion, and about the mechanics of movement, that gave humans the flesh-crawling sensation that the Korvaasha did not belong in the universe . . . that, and the head. The head was the worst.
Four slits on each side of the neck performed the functions of respiration and speech. The head itself—armored with serrated ridges of bone under skin that was unpleasantly thin on top—held a wide gash of a mouth that served only for the ingesting of food (a process that no normal human, and few abnormal ones, could watch without nausea), pulsating tympanums that served for ears on the sides, and the single eye that, while perhaps not overtly repellant, was the most deeply disturbing feature of all. It was a darkly glowing amber, with a faceting pattern that allowed for depth perception. A human was ill-advised to gaze into it for long.
But what was most instantly noticeable about the guards was not their alien physiology but the extent to which that physiology had been replaced by machinery. The Raehaniv had made a fine art of lifelike bionic replacements; the Korvaasha had never bothered. Artificial arms with built-in weapons, sense-enhancing implants, and the rest were attached obscenely to the flesh that had been chopped away to make room for them. But at least these two were only ordinary warriors, not the totally cyborgian elite of whom little that was natural remained other than the brain.
The two enhanced Korvaasha took up positions on either side of the door, and Gromorgh himself entered. The stench of fear exuded by the Implementers grew truly disgusting.
The Director of Implementation was short for a Korvaasha, and lacked any visible enhancements. But he wore around his neck the pendant that produced realtime Raehaniv transla
tion of the wearer's speech, in frequencies humans could hear rather than the inaudibly low Korvaash speech. (The Raehaniv had once thought the aliens communicated by telepathy, especially given the distance the subsonic speech carried.) Likewise, a device attached by suction to the head beside the ear-membrane enabled him to understand human speech. It was a kind of technology that had been successfully discouraged on Raehan, on the grounds that it would remove all incentive for linguistic unity.
At a gesture from the assault leader, his two subordinates grabbed Tarlann by the arms, hauled him up from the floor and slammed him to his feet. No drugs could suppress the pain that shot from his knee through his entire being; only nausea prevented him from fainting.
The assault leader stepped forward, demonstrating that it is possible to crawl in an erect posture. "Director, we have brought our fellow inferior being Tarlann hle'Morna as you commanded. He is . . ."
"Silence." Gromorgh's pendant emitted the flat, tinny "speech" that made him seem even more machinelike than his enhanced soldiers. His eye contemplated Tarlann. "Your contacts with the feral inferior beings of the asteroid belt have long been known to us. But your death would result in more disruption and loss of productivity than we wish. Instead, you will remain in your present position, heading the enterprises you inherited when your father died."
Again Tarlann almost fainted, this time from relief. The Korvaasha still believed Varien was dead; all this had nothing to do with the Lirauva Chain, and suicide would not be necessary.
"But," Gromorgh continued, "in the future you will report to us on the plans of the feral inferior beings. Thus you will buy your life . . . and theirs." He gestured with a hand whose four fingers were all mutually opposable, and two more Korvaasha entered the chamber, shoving Tarlann's wife and children in front of them.
Nissali's eyes were glazed with terror, but she clutched her son and daughter convulsively. Iael's fear warred with his early-adolescent boy's pride. But Tiraena, for whom puberty still lay a couple of years in the future, was too young to understand what was happening to her; her uncomprehending fear was still tempered by wide-eyed wonder at the novel surroundings.
"Daddy!" she cried out, great dark eyes widening even more, and tried to run to Tarlann. Nissali, darting a terrified glance at the nearest Korvaash guard, restrained the child with desperate strength and locked eyes with her husband.
"Director," Tarlann stammered, thinking furiously, "the Free Rae . . . the feral inferior beings may not trust me after seeing me emerge from this building. They will assume I am working for you . . . ."
"It will be your task to make them trust you," the mechanical voice cut in. "I see that you need more incentive. You have not yet learned that we are to be taken seriously." He looked down at the woman and the two children. Irresistably, their gazes were drawn to that enormous eye. Tiraena looked upward and actually gave Gromorgh a tremulous little smile.
The Director made an abrupt gesture and one of the guards, moving with the speed of the bionically enhanced, grasped Tiraena's small head in his massive hands. Her scream died aborning as he wrenched her head around almost almost a full circle and her neck snapped. He dropped the small, weakly twitching corpse to the floor and, too quickly to fully register, it was over.
Tarlann, existing in a universe of horror in which time did not exist, heard Nissali's gasping sobs as she tried to form a scream that would not come, and saw Iael's eyes glaze over with shock. But mostly he heard the empty expressionlessness of Gromorgh's voder, addressing the assault leader. "Laerav, you may have the remains. I believe your perversions include a preference for immature females of your species . . . and that you are not averse to the recently deceased."
The assault leader stepped forward, anticipation momentarily overcoming cravenness on his face. Little flecks of spittle appeared at the corners of his mouth.
Tarlann, moving like an automaton, tried to break away and reach toward Laerav. One of the Implementers, grinning, smashed the butt of his weapon into Tarlann's fractured knee. Tarlann crumpled to the floor and vomited, over and over.
When he was finally aware of his surroundings again, that which had been Tiraena was gone, as was Laerav. A part of what Tarlann had been was gone too. He tried to make eye contact with his wife, but there was nothing there to make contact with. Nissali was no longer there; she had taken refuge in a place where her baby was with her and the Korvaasha could not follow.
"I have illustrated," came the voice from Gromorgh's pendant, "what should already be obvious: since the lives of individual members of our own species mean nothing to us, the lives of individual inferior beings mean less than nothing. If you do not cooperate to the full, or if you attempt any treachery, the female and the immature male will be made available to the Implementers before being butchered, and you will watch both processes."
Tarlann looked up into the face that held no more expression than the uninflected mechanical voice. When he spoke, it was with a strange calmness that came of having passed beyond all feeling except a certain curiosity.
"You don't even enjoy it, do you?"
"Your question is without meaning. I simply do whatever is necessary to further the expansion of the Unity. It must incorporate the entire accessible physical universe into itself. This is the only imperative. Nothing else matters."
"But . . . why?"
"This question, too, is meaningless. When our race attained the Unity we reached the end of all such philosophical problems. The Unity settles the question of means and ends, for it is both means and end. It settles the question of good and evil, for it is neither good nor evil. It simply is. The Unity is the goal toward which all sentient life strives, however unknowingly, for through it sentience will eventually be transcended—in the absence of choice, thought itself will become unnecessary. But its guiding control can only be entrusted to our race, which brought it into existence. Your species, and all other inferior beings, can aspire to no higher destiny than to serve it in subordinate capacities.
"The fundamental fallacy of your values is revealed by the fact that you allow yourselves to be intimidated and dominated by the specimens of your race that are, by the terms of those very values, the lowest: these vermin that we employ." Gromorgh gestured at the Implementers, whose cringes intensified lest they inadvertently display any resentment. "This is why we use them. They will continue to keep your race terrified and submissive, so that it can better serve the Unity under our direction. Thus it will be . . . forever.
"Remove him."
* * *
Arduin stared at the tabletop as he listened to the report, oblivious to the occasional exclamations from the others. Tharuv dead. The entire operation centering on Dormael's establishment exploded. And Tarlann . . . ?
No one could be sure. He had been taken to Gromorgh's headquarters, as had his family. Later, he had emerged—alone. And there were no apparent obstacles to resuming contact with him, which was in itself suspicious.
"Of course," Daeliuv was arguing, "we can take advantage of the fact that we know they're using him. We can pretend we don't know it, and feed them false information through him." Since becoming the Free Raehaniv intelligence chief, the former professor had displayed a surprising aptitude for the more devious aspects of espionage. Maybe it wasn't all that different from academic politics.
"Rhylieu shit!" Yarvann's outburst was characteristic, and not nearly as startling as it would have been in the old days. They had all changed; Yarvann had merely changed a little more than most. He was one of the rare Raehaniv who had actually taken to military life. The wiry little man had been the space fleet's most aggressive combat officer before the fall, and one of the few officers in Arduin's experience who actually managed to look right in the uniforms that had been inflicted on them. In fact, alone among them all, he still wore them—or, at least, his own flamboyant versions, complete with a brace of custom-made laser pistols. In a historical drama, or a space-pirates fantasy, nobody would have believed h
im. But as a combat commander he was still in a class by himself.
"I know Tarlann," he was saying, "and he'll never betray us! What we need to be thinking about now is reprisals! If we don't keep the initiative, the mneisafv-fuckers will think they've shocked us into immobility. It's time to activate our plan for hitting one of the big mining stations here in the asteroids."
Daeliuv ignored all of Yarvann's speech except the first part. "He would not willingly betray us, granted. But . . ."
"You're all forgetting something." Arduin's flat voice came abruptly from the head of the table. "You're forgetting what Tarlann knows."
There was a shocked silence. All of these people knew the truth about Varien—Arduin had had to reveal it, to give them a gleam of hope. And they had forgotten it. It had become easier and easier to forget as the years had passed with no sign of the old man and the allies he had gone to seek. But now they remembered that Tarlann knew it too—which meant that the Korvaasha might now know it.
But their silence also said that it probably didn't matter very much. None of them really expected Varien to ever return, whatever had happened to him and the others at Landaen. They hadn't expected it since the day they had learned of the Korvaash discovery of the Lirauva Chain, for they knew full well what that meant for Varien's schemes. There would be no relieving fleet for them to aid. They fought on simply because, knowing what was happening to their homeworld, they could not do otherwise. They could continue the struggle for a long time, but not forever. Sooner or later, the Korvaasha would wear them down and starve them out. And eventually the Korvaasha would stumble onto the secret of the continuous-displacement drive, whether or not Tarlann had already revealed to them its basic principle.
Arduin was silent, his face like stone. But inwardly he wept—for Raehan, for the Landaeniv (or whatever they called themselves), for all humanity.