by Spoor,Ryk E
With a smile, Ariane dropped to the deck and did a pushup-bow; she saw that DuQuesne and Wu Kung followed suit. “Many thanks, Orphan,” she said as she rose.
“Captain, there is no need—”
“Of course there is,” DuQuesne cut him off. “Sure, we started this partly as a favor for you, but the way things turned out? You had every chance to cut out on us, and sure as I’m standing here you had damn good reason to do it—and you decided you were on our side, after all. You’ve proven the Liberated are just as much our allies as the Analytic, maybe more, because the Analytic sure weren’t risking half their members for us. So it’s for sure that we owe you at least a few real bows.”
Orphan was silent a moment, and then he, too, dropped and delivered a pushup-bow. “Then to you I return the honor; I have learned secrets and seen wonders that no other has ever seen, and you do not know all the honors you have done me.” His voice held no trace of his usual irony—though it returned in the next moment. “Now, go; I fear we tremble on the brink of being maudlin.”
The Docks were a welcome, familiar sight after their long time in Halintratha and the devastating passage at arms over their home Sphere. “Home again, I guess,” she said.
“And people are noticing,” Wu Kung said from ahead of her. “I’ve seen two comm-balls summoned already. If we do not move quickly, our friends will get the news from someone else!”
But it didn’t take long to get inside and find one of the floating taxi-platforms to whisk them to the Embassy of Humanity. As Ariane stepped through the door, she called out, “Laila! Carl! We’re back!”
The comm-ball materialized even as she spoke, flickered red momentarily before going green. “Captain! My God, Captain, we must meet immediately!” Laila Canning’s voice was uncharacteristically worried, her usual analytically-calm manner entirely absent.
“Conference Room One, Laila. I only want you and Carl right now.”
“Of course, Captain,” came Carl’s voice. “But there’s something you—”
“If you mean the Molothos assault, yes, I know, and that’s part of what I’m here about.”
A pause, and Laila emerged from the central elevator with a raised eyebrow and some of her accustomed equanimity reappearing. “Indeed? This should be interesting.”
“That’ll be one word for it,” agreed DuQuesne, as they entered the conference room. Carl popped in the doorway, slightly out of breath; he’d obviously run from wherever he was. “How the hell could you—”
“Sit down and we’ll tell you. First, so we don’t keep you in suspense—we’ve won. The Molothos have been beaten, it’s over.”
The two stared at her in such total shock she found herself giggling. “I’m sorry, but …your eyes.”
“I …admit, I have no idea what to say.” Laila said after a moment. “I had so completely accepted the fact that we were going to lose…”
“Oh, you would have lost,” Wu Kung said, “if we hadn’t shown up right at the end! Oh, it was a glorious battle, but the Molothos had ships enough to darken the sky!”
“Slow down, Wu. Let ’em absorb it.”
“When you say ‘it’s over,’” Laila began again, “do you mean the battle, or the war?”
“Both,” Ariane said. “We’ll get into details later, but for now, the important thing is that we got a surrender out of Dajzail himself. Yes, he was leading the assault. Probably a major stroke of good luck for us there.”
It struck her then. Stroke of good luck. In a sense, if Vindatri and Orphan were right, it wasn’t a random event; the Arena had made sure that the Leader of the Molothos chose to lead the assault. That’s …creepy as hell.
“So,” Carl said, looking at her with a suddenly-growing smile, “you got what you were looking for, huh?”
“In spades, as Marc might say. Yes.”
“Can we announce this victory?” Laila asked. “We have a lot of people waiting to hear what happened.”
Ariane hesitated. “I want to keep it quiet for a little while; there’s some, well, diplomatic aspects to this. But we do need to notify people back home; the Outer Gateway’s buried under debris and so no one inside knows that it’s safe to let the Straits open. Last they knew, the Molothos were strafing the surface.” She glanced over to DuQuesne. “Marc, can you carry a message to our Sphere? Just jog over to Transition, drop it off, and come back?”
“Sure thing. What’s the message?”
“Umm …Tell them ‘we have suffered heavy casualties, but the Molothos forces have been driven off and will not return. Open the Straits and help clean up the Upper Sphere, and especially deploy and assign Nodwick to be a transport for Molothos survivors back to Nexus Arena. This information may be transmitted to the home system, but do not allow anyone through Transition until I give the all clear; the political situation is still very delicate.’ How’s that?”
“Good enough. It’ll relieve the immediate concern. I’m guessing you’re waiting on the lists of the lost and the honors?”
“And on Nodwick, yes.”
“I’m off. Just wait about ten minutes, I’ll be back by then.”
“We’ll wait, Marc; I won’t spoil the fun for you.”
Laila raised an eyebrow as Marc departed. “Fun?”
“Telling this story?” Wu said with a grin. “Oh, fun will definitely be involved!”
Ariane busied herself with getting some snacks sent in; this was going to be a long debriefing, but she wasn’t going to put it off. Laila and Carl had been Leaders of the Faction, and she knew what a burden that had been.
True to his word, DuQuesne was back in nine minutes, thirteen seconds, and not apparently breathing hard. Showoff Hyperion, she thought.
You think loosely and muddily, youth, came DuQuesne’s mind-voice, filled with humor as he imitated Mentor. Had I intended to show off, I’d have done it in five minutes.
Okay, touché. You’re right. She looked up. “Now that we’re all here …Embassy, full security on this room. No intrusions.” The doors locked themselves. DuQuesne, she saw, also gave the room a quick once-over. He isn’t trusting that no one’s bugged our rooms. Good.
“Now …before we tell our story, I do have one question. How the hell did we end up with the Analytic sending a fleet to our aid?”
Laila laughed. “So it seems we will have a few stories to tell you. But that one …that should be for Simon to tell.”
“Then I guess we’ll wait on that for now. You want to know what happened on our trip, and about what we learned.” She gestured at her cup and whispered “zofron”; instantly frost formed, spreading across the shiny ceramic surface and crackling softly into the liquid within. At their stares, she smiled. “That,” she said, “is a hint.”
Leaning back, she began.
Chapter 53
“All right, Simon,” Ariane said, “Time for you to tell us the big secret as to how and why you managed to pull a battlefleet out of nowhere to save our Sphere.”
DuQuesne saw Simon give a deprecating wave of his hand. “Oh, it was hardly all my doing. More yours, really, if we trace it back.” He straightened. “The short of it is—you recall, of course, the condition that you wrung out of Amas-Garao after your unexpected victory?”
“Hard for me to forget, given what I went through.”
“Well, the key is that you—with commendable foresight—made sure to include our ‘direct and close allies’ in that protection.
“That certainly makes a fine potential benefit for becoming one of our close allies,” DuQuesne said, “but that’s quite a jump to get someone to throw hundreds of their ships and thousands of lives into the fray on our side. There must’ve been something more than the abstract protection involved.”
“Quite right, Marc. You will also recall how Relgof and I managed to uncover proof that, indeed, the powers of Shadeweaver and Faith extend beyond the Arena?” DuQuesne nodded, saw Ariane do the same, and saw Simon’s smile take on an edge. “So you may imagine t
hat I was rather taken aback to discover that Doctor Relgof had no recollection of that fact, nor even of the research we did to uncover it.”
“Sweet spirits of niter,” DuQuesne heard himself murmur. “Of course. The Shadeweavers wipe out that evidence. Maybe the Faith do, too, but I’ll bet they just count on the Shadeweavers to do it; either side’s evidence would be enough to blow the secret, so the Shadeweavers get stuck with the dirty work. Somehow they guessed Relgof knew, or sensed it from him, and made sure to wipe that data. Couldn’t do it to you because you’re part of Humanity.”
“That was an immediate motive,” Ariane said, picking up the thread. “The Analytic runs on knowledge—and on having secrets others don’t. The idea that someone else was deciding what secrets they could have, what knowledge they could keep—that must have made them frothing mad!”
“Right, Captain. Relgof argued to their Conclave that the integrity of their knowledge—and of their minds, since obviously the Shadeweavers had affected his—overrode even considerations of ordinary safety. We had shown our general positive qualities to them and the Arena previously, and so Relgof convinced the Conclave that it was in their interest to ally with us. But they also knew that it was likely not enough to just say they were our allies; they would have to prove it, in a fashion that would leave no one in doubt as to whether they were aligned with us.”
Ariane’s smile was like a flash of the sun. “Amazing, Simon. You managed to get them to commit a fleet to our support as a payment for the proof of their allegiance—and thus the protection of Humanity against the Shadeweavers’ mental tampering. So we aren’t indebted to the Analytic—not in the Arena sense, anyway,” she added. “In a moral and personal sense, we certainly are, but as a Faction they consider this their payment for a service only we can provide.”
“Yes, and Doctor Relgof confirmed this to me. I agree that we owe them as friends, naturally.”
DuQuesne looked across the table to Oasis. “No argument there, and I know Ariane’s already working on how we can properly recognize their help. But right now I need to know what it was you were hinting at, Oasis.”
Both his old Hyperion friend and Simon went suddenly grim. “Marc,” Oasis said slowly. “Marc …he’s here.”
“He?” For an instant he didn’t understand …and then he did, in a horrid flash of revelation. “Fairchild is here? Here in the Arena?”
“I saw him. Twice, I think.”
It wasn’t often that his brain tried to ignore truth, but it was sure doing a lot of fancy gymnastics of evasion now. “Oasis …K, look, did you talk to him? How sure are you—”
“Dead sure, Marc,” she said, and the coldness in her voice brought him up short. She’s terrified. And I can’t blame her one little bit. “No, from just what I saw I can’t be sure, but we used Simon’s talent. He couldn’t quite localize Fairchild, but we got enough evidence to be sure he’s here, somewhere, on Nexus Arena.”
Fairchild. Holy Hells of Niffleheim, I’d rather it was almost anyone else, Moriarty, Loki, Monolith even. “How the hell is that possible? He’s an AI, and the Arena doesn’t let them play up here. Even the Minds haven’t figured out how to game that, and they’ve had millennia to work on that problem.”
“It was Wu Kung’s racing challenge results—and your theory, that you rather extensively proved in your own adventures against Vindatri—that explained it,” Simon answered.
“If the Arena was willing to change its limitations rules based on the fact that we Hyperions were raised utterly ignorant of the fact that we were in any world other than the one we saw,” Oasis continued, “then it didn’t seem ridiculous that it would do the same for an AI if the AI cloned or manufactured a living body to match the one it had been created to believe it had.”
“Damnation. Makes sense.”
“Marc, who is this Fairchild? I know the name—he was the one who almost killed Oasis, forced K to rescue her—but even you seem worried, and that worries me,” Ariane said.
DuQuesne took in a deep breath, held it, let it out. “I am worried, Ariane. Who was Fairchild? Well …he was me, I guess you could say. When Bryson and his assistant AIs on Hyperion decided to make me into a good guy, with Seaton my best friend, that kinda left a big hole in the plot, a big hole in the shape of the real Marc C. DuQuesne, a cold-hearted gold-plated bastard with a yen for total world control and a brain like a computer.
“So they took this really pretty dangerous guy from another of Smith’s books, and then loaded him up with my kind of skills plus a big chunk of the villain Gray Roger, and, poof, Doctor Alexander Fairchild, me and Rich’s nemesis for years—decades, actually. Almost got us both killed more than once, damn near brought down the Patrol right when we thought things were starting to go well …believe you me, Fairchild was the biggest of Big Time Operators.”
He saw her shiver. Yeah. She’s the only one here who read the old books, so she’s the only one other than me, Oasis, and Wu that can really get it.
“And he’s here.”
“If Oasis and Simon say so, yeah.”
She nodded slowly. “And now we know who that escaped AI was, the one pulling Esterhauer’s strings, killing off the Hyperions that Maria-Susanna wasn’t after.”
“I’ll bet anything you like on that, yeah. Fits Fairchild’s MO perfectly.”
“What’s he like?” Ariane asked after a pause. “I understand he’s dangerous, but what kind of a person is he?”
DuQuesne paused, trying to figure out how to answer that question.
Oasis spoke first. “Refined is the first word that comes to mind, really. He’s a monster, but he’s an unfailingly polite monster. Dresses in almost completely white suits—a white fedora with a black band, white coat, pants, vest, gloves, shoes, with just a few touches of other colors. Chessmaster, of course—not literally, figuratively. Though I guess he probably is one literally, too. He manipulates people to do what he wants, and back in …well, the world of Hyperion, ‘people’ included species of beings that should have crushed him like a bug.”
Unexpectedly, Wu Kung entered the conversation. “He likes frightening and hurting people. Maria-Susanna …she is broken and she does dangerous and crazy things.” He looked very sad for a moment. “I have …looked up what she has done. She is very scary and I am very sad for her. But she is like …like a volcano, or a storm; she may do something very destructive but she really doesn’t mean to hurt people; she really thinks she’s helping. And sometimes she does. Not like Fairchild.”
“What does he want? What will he be after here?”
“Power,” DuQuesne answered, without even having to think. “He wants control—of as much of everything as he can. Part of it is that he is absolutely certain he knows, better than anyone else, how to run things. And to an extent, he’s right. But that’s really more an excuse than anything else. He likes power for its own sake, and he likes to have the ability to use that power whenever and however he likes.”
“And he’s your equal?”
“At least,” DuQuesne ceded reluctantly. “Like many other villains in stories we’ve all read, the thing that really gave us a chance against him was that there were more of us than there were of him, and we were willing to work together and trust each other. He may work with other people …but he doesn’t trust them, and he intends to dispose of them as soon as they have fulfilled their purposes. He’s damned convincing, though, to anyone who doesn’t know him; he’s gotten people loyal enough to him to lay down their lives for him, even people from other species.”
Laila was looking at them all with an exasperated expression; she was particularly staring at Oasis.
DuQuesne met her gaze. “What is it, Laila?”
“I understand the potential danger, DuQuesne—but unless I have misunderstood things for a considerable time now, this Fairchild does not know he has his powers. Correct?”
That stopped DuQuesne, and he suddenly felt a grin spreading across his face. “No …no, he pr
obably doesn’t.”
“I’m particularly confused by you, Oasis. We had this conversation, and I had thought you were no longer—”
Oasis’ smile was a shadow of its usual sunny self. “Sorry, Laila. Mainly I took it as a reason I could expect to handle him for a little while—long enough for Marc to get back. But even without his powers, I had to think …there’s no chance he wouldn’t have built himself the best body science could buy.”
Laila blinked at that, and DuQuesne picked up the thread, liking the idea not even one little bit. “No, not one chance this side of Hades. And since his ‘real’—as in, what he seemed to have inside of Hyperion—body would be a lot more formidable than anything he could build …well, we’d have to assume he’d get everything he built.”
“Which means that he might kick my ass even with my Hyperion badassery-switch set to ON. Remember, my Hyperion background wasn’t a superhuman psionic Smithian space opera. I ran with James Bond, not people like you.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, K,” he said. “But you’re right, that would make him a lot worse than we were thinking.”
Oasis/K looked up at him bleakly. “And after the last time …Marc, I just have to be honest and say I’m too freaked out by him to be sure I’d do my best. Maybe I need a shrink or something.”
“I don’t think any of us would fault you for that,” Ariane said. “If you need help, well, we can find you some.”
“I have more faith in you than that, Oasis,” DuQuesne assured her. “When it comes down to it, you’ll do your best, and that’ll be one hell of a lot.” She gave a slightly brighter smile and nodded.
“Still,” DuQuesne went on, thinking out loud, “Laila’s right; he almost certainly doesn’t know he’s got access to his Hyperion-world powers. Like the rest of us, he’ll know those were phonies from the word go and he’ll need to run into something really strange to tell him otherwise.”
“So is there a way we can use that?” Ariane asked. “A way we can track him down and catch him before he really gets ahead of us?”