“Yes,” lied Commander Markose, bending toward the Vox seated next to him as it translated her words. Straightening, he folded his hands on the table and nodded as he took in the assemblage.
The Osians were a diverse group. Some appeared basically human, like the COM, some were heavily modified, both with cybernetics and genetic alterations. All of the Osirans had the same silvered eyes as the COM. Markose recalled something in the historical data about the elevated UV output of the Osiris star being dangerous with prolonged exposure, and supposed these modifications were related somehow.
Those reflective irises flashed angrily from the COM as she spoke, nostrils flared. “Commodore, on behalf of the Aggregation and the United Conglomerates of Osiris, I hereby charge you with crimes against humanity, including but not limited to mass murder, unprovoked assault against a neutral territory, reckless and wanton endangerment of civilians, and attempted genocide. Should you ever stand trial for these crimes, I can assure you that conviction is certain and the punishment will be as severe as we can make it.”
Markose was unperturbed. “Understood.” Later, watching the playback, Harriman would nod in satisfaction at the Commander’s aplomb. Physically, he appeared to be the same twenty-year-old clone he had been each previous time Unending had made one of him, but Harriman had edited the training of this version. There were no memories carried over from one clone to the next, obviously, so every batch of commanders had to be trained into their roles. Harriman had added some personal touches to the Markose regimen. The broad-shouldered, olive-skinned young man had been through an intensive and rigorous education on the current, scattered state of humanity, the lack of driving vision or leadership. He had been fed a steady diet of Harriman’s own vision, of how close they were to the objective. The fire of zealotry had been ignited in him. Harriman had, in essence, turned this Markose into a version of himself, twisting the commander’s native personality to see how close he could get. The crèche AI had warned that Markose would likely become dangerously unstable before he turned thirty, but Harriman knew that if he lived that long, it was only because the mission had failed.
Now, at the meeting, Markose continued, “If we are through with posturing, I suggest we get to business.”
The COM’s face darkened, and there were angry rumblings along the table, but she sat forward. “Do you mean to formally declare, then, that you do not represent the Domain of Sol or any of their subsidiary governments?”
A dismissive wave. “Our mission concerns the future of Sol and humanity, not its past. The regime that we originated from and the one that holds power now are of no consequence to us. It is the one that we will build when we accomplish our mission that matters.”
Hours before, the COM’s mouth turned down in distaste. “So, you’re nothing but another renegade. And a delusional one at that. Are you saying that your invasion here is not an act of war, then, but merely one of...what, piracy?”
Markose shrugged. “Call it what you wish; your labels are irrelevant to us. We are here for one thing; either you can provide it or you can’t. If you can’t, then further discussion is also irrelevant.”
One of the other dignitaries slapped the table, his broad, mahogany complexion highlighted by coppery, circuit-like traceries lining the skin of his face and arms. “You arrogant bastard! You’ve murdered millions of people here, millions! And you dare to think that you can sit here and negotiate your way out of it?”
Markose sneered. “We are not ‘negotiating.’ We are deciding whether or not you survive.”
The man pushed up from the table, seemingly ready to engage in bodily combat. “Do not condescend to me! If you could back up your words, you wouldn’t be here now!”
“I may not be able to conquer you, but I can certainly do far greater damage to you than you can to me. If you did not realize this, you would not be here. Now, enough wasting of my time, do we deal or do I destroy the remainder of your civilization?”
The COM glared sidelong at the angry man and he slowly pulled himself back down. Wireless messages were apparently being exchanged among the delegates as they twitched or gestured at each other. A conclusion was quickly reached, and two guards entered with a thin and elderly woman supported between them.
Markose nodded. “Tzipi Djmondi, greetings.”
“Professor Djmondi.” the woman corrected. “And you have no right to what we’ve accomplished. Nor do you,” she snarled, turning toward the COM, “have any right to use it, or me, as a bargaining chip!”
“We didn’t ask you or your colleagues to come here, and I have every right to protect our people in any way necessary,” the COM answered stiffly. Apparently Djmondi had not come forward willingly. Harriman was surprised at how much older she looked than the images he had seen of her, despite knowing that she had lived out almost five decades of real time in the systems he had chased her across. In relative years, she would be nearly ninety.
“What exactly have you accomplished?” Markose interrupted eagerly. “Does it work?”
Djmondi gave him a scowl. “It works.”
Markose sat back, eyes elsewhere for a moment, and Harriman, no matter how many times he rewatched the scene, felt his heart pound in his chest at the statement, felt the yearning ache for what was just out of his reach. It works!
The woman shrugged offhandedly. “In a manner of speaking, anyway. They were still working on anything more complex than a simple binary signal, but transmissions between dedicated receivers were repeatable and confirmed.”
There was a fire in Markose’s eyes. “You actually did it. You actually achieved FTL communications.”
“Faster than light signaling,” Djmondi corrected sternly, but then relented. “But, yes, it’s only a matter of time until full communication is possible.”
“But, the causality issue, how did...”
The professor turned her head away in contempt. “Causality! That kind of stupid, overly anthropic thinking... Misunderstanding the true nature of time is exactly why no one’s been able to solve this before! We’ve known for quite awhile that space has extra dimensions rolled up within it. Well, time does, too. Once you understand that and what it truly means, a lot of things change.”
Harriman was almost screaming at his screen, but Markose had caught the same inference in Djmondi’s statements. “You said ‘were.’”
Djmondi seemed lost for a moment, then cursed quietly to herself for the slip. “It’s been almost a year since I saw the others.” She paused significantly, a cold and spiteful grin spreading. “They left.”
It was a physical blow to Harriman, and he slammed his fist painfully into his console. His rage over the wasted time and effort rose like a white-hot wave. TacOps was already drawing up optimal intercept trajectories to take them to each of the disabled starships for search and recovery, but Harriman knew. Intuitively, he already knew: the one that got away.
Markose did a remarkable job of maintaining his composure. “And the research? The prototypes and working models?”
“Destroyed. We knew you were coming, and we knew why. And we knew these idiots would use our work to save themselves if we hadn’t. I’d have gone, too, if I wasn’t too weak to go through hibernation again.”
The COM sat forward, silver eyes narrowed. “Your own people have called for your head, Harriman, you know that, don’t you? They have declared you a renegade and promised aid in rebuilding if we stop you or return you to them. The mission you were part of failed long ago. The fleets were pulled back and independence is being reissued back to the few systems they managed to conquer. It’s time to face facts: you’ve failed.”
Markose spoke rigidly. Harriman knew what was in his mind. “An alliance with Sol? How far away are they? How many light years? The people and organizations that made those offers are already as dead and gone as those that sent me. You are hampered by the very thing we seek t
o overcome. Without the technology that we chase, you are left to make deals with history, just like the rest of humanity. Unless we succeed, humanity is what has failed.”
Djmondi turned away in disgust, and the COM folded her hands on the table before her. “You are not the one to decide that, Harriman. There is nothing for you out here. Surrender now and you have my word that you will be returned to your people. I’ll let them be your judge. I guarantee they will be less harsh than we will.”
Markose scowled contemptuously. “They are not my people.”
In one swift movement, he placed his left forearm against the edge of the table and struck hard with his right fist. The detonator switch was small, tucked between the ulna and radius, and he had to break the bones to activate it. He managed it on the first try.
On board his S-Jet, Harriman turned from the blank screen and glanced at the tactical display, which showed the expanding cloud of debris where the habitat had been. The light of the explosion was three hours old when it reached him, his craft already accelerating out of the ecliptic to meet the Unending as it swung out of the system.
The bomb Markose had carried in his abdomen had been a small one, only designed to take out the dignitaries in the room with him. His S-Jet, however, and all of those that had escorted him to the Asten, had been loaded with nukes, triggered to detonate when his signal was lost. The tactical display showed a wave of explosions blossoming across the system, every last asset they had diving into its target and suiciding in blazes of nuclear and kinetic glory. It wouldn’t end the Osiran civilization, as he had ended the other colonies he had visited, but it would set them back severely. It would stop them from coming after him.
Coldly, he turned away from Osiris, the system and its dramas just one more thing he could now discard, and stared ahead to the tiny drive flare of the escaping ship.
***
They were still in interstellar space when he awoke, the scientists’ ship having boosted away from any known human settlement and straight into the void. It had stopped accelerating after twenty-four years and had been drifting ever since. Whether this was by design or due to running out of fuel was impossible to tell. Unending, cognizant of its own limited fuel supply, had boosted for twenty-five years and then simply waited for the incremental difference in velocity to drain away the distance between them.
Harriman’s screens showed nothing; the other vessel was still several hundred thousand kilometers ahead and the telescopes could not pick out the dark, silent shape against the black of infinity. Only radar and infrared showed that there was something there, and a quiet tick of neutrinos hinting at the fusion power plant still lumbering at its core.
TacOps was quiet: it had nothing to work with. There were a handful of drones and the components for seeder factories aboard, but nothing to seed with them. It reluctantly scrapped a set of empty fuel tanks and their meteorite shields, using the materials to fashion a stripped-down version of an S-Jet. Harriman cut short its protests and boarded with a contingent of crab-like constructor drones as his escort. This was it; one way or the other his mission would end here, and he would see it through personally.
The crossing was uneventful. No lasers leapt out to burn them, no missiles roared in to intercept, only quiet hours as they crept closer. Harriman’s only indication that they were close came when the S-Jet’s maneuvering thrusters fired to flip it over and begin braking thrust to match speeds. Frustrated with waiting, he went to the unmanned flight deck and looked out the only physical viewport on the ship. He was surprised by the sudden vertigo that washed over him as he looked out at the vast, dim shape of the approaching craft, some trick of perception and weightlessness suddenly shifting the infinity of space into ‘down,’ a floor impossibly far below the two ships.
No lights or signs of activity were visible anywhere on the kilometer-and-a-half-long body of the craft, no obvious signs of damage beyond the normal micro-meteor pockmarks. He watched the engine and reactor sections slide by, followed by row upon row of fuel spheres tucked into their gridwork scaffolding. The ship dramatically necked down into a thin spine that finally vanished into the almost laughably small, drum-like modules of the crew and cargo section. The S-Jet’s robotic pilot chimed a warning for him to strap in as it fired the thrusters for final braking and maneuvering to seat the craft against the larger vessel’s main airlock.
Harriman watched the constructor drones rush in, then followed when he heard no sounds of fighting. He waited for the bots to secure the rooms and storage compartments in this section, their heavy yellow bodies almost filling the narrow space as they crabbed along the walls, waving their thick torch and gripper arms like weapons. There appeared to be three main modules in the habitable section of the ship, each no more than a few dozen meters long, with rooms and workspaces extending radially from the central shaft. Under thrust, ‘back’ would become ‘down’ and so all of the furniture was mounted on what currently looked and felt like the aft bulkhead of each compartment. It made for a surreal experience as Harriman floated through the dark, swinging his helmet lamps around and feeling strangely let down at the lack of resistance.
The last two decks of this module were open rings filled with piping, tanks, and a series of sarcophagus-like slabs arranged around the perimeter, eight slabs per deck. Long sleep canisters, but much smaller and less bulky than the one Harriman used aboard Unending. Most of the canisters were empty and shut down; only four on the upper deck were occupied.
Three of the four were no one Harriman was familiar with, but the status screen on the last named its occupant as Isobel S-B-S: one of the remaining researchers he sought. He cleared the thick layer of frost from the observation window and shone his lights in. The scientist’s face was withered and grey, decades older than the pictures Harriman had on file. The sunken eyes and sallow cheeks gave her the appearance of a corpse. Ice was already spreading back across the window, the crystal feathers reaching like fingers to close up the clearing he had made.
TacOps signaled that the bots had reached the far end of the ship. They reported lights and warmth in the second module, but little else. Harriman went on.
The next section of shaft was dimly lit from wall strips and considerably warmer. Constructor bots hung from opposite sides of the shaft twelve meters up ahead by the next connecting hatch, arms stiffly held before them. Harriman began opening doors, carefully looking around each chamber, pistol at the ready, before moving to the next deck. He was a third of the way up the module when the distinct sound of a zero-gee toilet being flushed rattled through the walls. He braced himself in the shaft and aimed toward the sound as a door slid open and a shadowy figure floated out.
The old man gently closed the door behind him and then started, looking up at the bots hanging above him. After a few moments, he turned cautiously and saw Harriman still pointing his weapon. The man’s face pulled into a deep scowl. His voice was tired and irritable. “Oh, you’re finally here. Took you long enough.” Without another word, he pulled himself slowly across the shaft and into another room, vanishing from sight.
Harriman hung in place for a moment, deflated by the odd anticlimax of the encounter, but then a surge of anger thrust him up the corridor and into the room. He found the man clumsily strapping himself into a seat before a broad bench full of equipment. Harriman swung himself around so that his feet were against the aft wall/floor and the room was right side up.
Most of the things on the bench were mundane, but the object in the middle grabbed his attention like a bolt from Heaven. Made mostly of some perfectly transparent material, it had two conical sections joined together at their bases by a broad sphere. Within the crystalline material, a myriad of strange things glowed and pulsed, seeming to move and shift as he looked at them. In the central sphere sat a coil like an eye, fading languorously through soft red and lavender and back. The old man adjusted something on the bench and the eye seemed to blur—for
a moment it seemed actually bigger than the crystal that encased it—before it settled back into a soft, quiescent pink. He stared at it for a few moments longer, knowing, his expression fierce with longing, before finally turning back to the old man, who sat quietly watching him.
Harriman looked down at the gun that he was still pointing, then lowered it. He removed his helmet and faced the man.
“Yalson Trigood-7.”
“And you are Commodore Harriman, of course. By way of greeting, allow me to say ‘Go to hell.’” In a surprisingly swift motion, Yalson snatched a heavy tool off the bench and swung it at the crystal device, hard.
The crack of Harriman’s pistol was deafening in the small room, and he had to duck as the tool spun wildly from wall to wall before burying itself into the face of a locker opposite the bench. Yalson clutched his hand to his chest, sucking breath through his teeth as little crimson bubbles floated innocently out from the wounded limb. The device was untouched.
Yalson looked up at him from under his brows; rage and hate filled his eyes. His voice was a hoarse, emotion-filled rasp. “You stole our lives away, you bastard!”
“You never had to run. This could have ended a century ago.”
“How? By working for you? You’re a monster!”
Harriman shrugged, unimpressed, nodded at the device. “It works, doesn’t it? You’ve finished it.”
Yalson Trigood-7 sat up in his seat, though he kept his hand clamped tightly to himself, blood beginning to stain his worn coveralls. Defiantly he said, “We didn’t go to sleep; we stayed awake and worked on it all the way from Osiris. We’re getting too old for hibernation, anyway, and we knew you would never give us time to settle anywhere else. Isobel, she...” A flutter of emotions came and went across his face, and then the hardness returned. “Well, we all get tired, after a while, don’t we?”
The Big Bad II Page 30