by Tim Pratt
“Some will return here. They will crew my ships, and go on expeditions to take over Axiom facilities. Others will be soldiers, seeking out rebellious elements – there will always be holdouts, rugged individualists and narcissists, and they’ll need to be hunted down and destroyed, or brought into compliance. Once I have the full power of the empire in my hands, I can start to make some meaningful changes.” Sebastien shrugged. “It’s an ambitious project, I know, but a worthy one. You can be a god with me, Elena. It would be lonely, to have the only free mind in the universe, and I’ve always liked you.”
“I think the implant in your brain has changed you, Sebastien.”
He nodded. “It has. Isn’t it wonderful? I wish you could share my clarity of vision.”
She looked at the fleet being built beyond the window. “How long until your ships are ready?”
“Oh, two-thirds of them are finished already. I’m just waiting to launch them all at once. A coordinated arrival, I think, so no one has time to prepare defenses. My ships will open wormholes around every planet, asteroid, station, or satellite with a human population, and take over.”
“Just humans? No Liars?”
“Ah. The servitors. No. They’re vermin, Elena. The empire only needed them because they’d grown so weak and decadent. They’ll be exterminated. According to the deep archives, one of their sects was ordered to continue serving the Axiom in secret, and they might try to stop us from seizing the empire’s facilities. Apparently there’s a sort of cult devoted to protecting Axiom secrets, safeguarding sensitive installations from interference, and exterminating any sentient races that might discover the existence of the Axiom. The Axiom are fragile, for gods, and depend on secrecy to protect them in their vulnerable state.”
Elena frowned. “A cult… working to protect the Axiom? Not to protect the universe from the Axiom?”
“Ah, yes, you see? ‘Join our cult, and protect our oppressors!’ That wouldn’t be a very convincing sales pitch for the young vermin, would it? Only a few key servitors in the cult are supposed to know the true purpose of their organization. Most of the rank-and-file are meant to believe they’re protecting the universe from the Axiom’s return – don’t disturb them, and maybe they’ll never wake up. In reality, the cult is ensuring the safe return of the Axiom, once their projects come to fruition.”
Elena shuddered. Poor Lantern. “But why would any of the Liars want to help their old masters?”
“Oh, they’ve been promised power when the Axiom returns, their own systems to govern, things like that. It’s all unimportant now. I’m going to erase the empire’s whole plan.”
“I’m not sure destroying one master race by becoming a master race is a good idea, Sebastien.”
“A master race? No, no. Just a few select masters.” He still had his arm around Elena, and he gave her a squeeze. “You can’t study society without realizing how stupid individuals are. I joined the goldilocks mission hoping I’d have the opportunity to plan a society from the beginning, to set initial conditions for ideal outcomes, but even so, I knew there would be flaws, outliers, malicious idiots, well-meaning idiots, all the termites that gnaw at the structure of any worthy enterprise. But now, I can eliminate all that disorder, and make sure everyone pulls together, in the right direction. I never understood this, until a few days ago, but most life in the universe… it’s just biomass, isn’t it? No more important than a swarm of plankton or a field of mold. It’s just a resource to be exploited.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” Elena said.
“You will, soon enough. Just let me modify one of my neural implants – all the ones I have on hand would turn you into a mindless obedient tool, and you deserve better than that. Don’t worry. Right now, you’re just blind to the possibilities, but I’ll open your eyes.”
Elena tried to run, but there were machines hidden in the walls, under Sebastien’s control, and they stopped her.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The access hatch in the wall irised open, and Callie spun, weapons at the ready.
A small, dark-skinned human with serious (and glowing) eyes and a lot of metallic hardware clamped onto their head looked through the opening. “I have come to rescue you. I would appreciate being rescued in return.” A pause. “Are you coming?”
Callie glanced at Ashok, who shrugged. “Out there is better than in here.”
Callie went out first to make sure it wasn’t an ambush – not that anyone needed to ambush them when they were trapped in a warehouse anyway, but she was feeling exceptionally paranoid. The tunnel beyond was only occupied by their bio-drone and the newcomer, but there was breathable atmosphere out there now, according to her suit diagnostics. Callie beckoned, and Lantern and Ashok followed.
The newcomer looked at Lantern for a long time. “You are a member of the race the builders of this station forced into servitude. I have never met a living alien before. My name is Uzoma.”
“You may call me Lantern.”
“I will take you all to a safe place. Well. Safer. I am impressed that you learned to control the bio-drone. Show me how?”
Uzoma climbed into the drone. Ashok looked a question at Callie. She shooed him in, and got on board herself.
Ashok showed her how the lights worked to direct the drone. “So where are we going?” he said.
Uzoma said, “Continue in the direction you are facing. Take the third left, and then the second right.”
Lantern consulted the infosphere. “There is no second right. The tunnel dead-ends after the first one.”
“This is good,” Uzoma said. “I think you will soon be impressed by me.”
Ashok flashed his lights, and Uzoma made a low ahhhh sound as the bio-drone lumbered forward. “I see. Good.” Uzoma turned to Callie. “I was on the Anjou. I assume Elena made it back to Earth, and sought assistance?”
“She did, more or less. Elena told us about you.” Callie looked Uzoma over. Brain-spider on the back of the head, check, weird eyes, check, but they seemed entirely calm and rational and in control of themselves. Then again, so had Sebastien, until he suddenly hadn’t. “Elena warned us you’d been compromised.”
“You refer to the neural manipulator? It briefly took control of my gross motor functions, turning me into a tool of the station. I acted without my own volition. But these devices are not designed for human anatomy. Not originally, at least. I gather Sebastien has made modifications, and his new models will be more effective on humans.”
Callie didn’t even want to think about what that meant. Not yet. “Sebastien thinks he’s unaffected, too, but the neural manipulator did something to him.”
“It did worse things than you know. Sebastien has become a megalomaniac. He believes the aliens who built this place were gods – the implant whispers such things to him. But instead of being frightened, he was invigorated. Sebastien wishes to take their power, and become a god himself.”
“Great. That kind of thing never goes badly. So why aren’t you in the grips of megalomania?”
Uzoma shrugged. “I suffered from seizures as a child. I have a deep brain stimulation electrode implanted in my brain, to control them. I believe the neural manipulator interacted poorly with the DBS system, perhaps perceiving it as an existing implant. The manipulator seems to have shut itself down, but some damage was done – I am now vulnerable to seizures again. I would appreciate medical attention. I cannot remove the manipulator without the risk of damaging my brain, but as far as I can tell, its impact on my mental state is negligible.”
Callie nodded. Sebastien had seemed off to her from the beginning, and she’d put it down to subconscious jealousy instead of trusting her instincts. Uzoma seemed strange, but didn’t trigger that same discomfort, so she decided to trust for the moment. You could fret over things forever, or you could do something, and she was forever and always from the tribe of the doers. “I’ll assume you’re on our side until I have reason to believe otherwise, then.”
&nbs
p; “I am glad. You must have a ship, and I would like to leave this place on it. Does your transport have weapons? Powerful ones?”
“It does.”
Uzoma pulled aside a panel in the wall and revealed a roughly hexagonal screen, wired into some exposed cables. “I have tapped into the control room, though I cannot meddle too much, or Sebastien will notice, and shut me out. I can, however, open a hangar door. Your ship can pick us up, and then fire through the open door, and perhaps do enough damage to kill Sebastien, or cripple his ability to continue his work. We should go now.”
“As soon as we save Elena.”
“Ah.” Uzoma nodded, once. “That will be more difficult. Sebastien may already have compromised her. If we do not stop him…” Uzoma shook their head.
“What’s he trying to do? I offered him a ride home, and he wasn’t interested. Is he building his own ship with a wormhole generator or something?”
“Not one ship. A fleet of them. Each ship full of neural manipulators. He intends to enslave the galaxy. He sees himself as the heir to the aliens who built this place.”
Callie closed her eyes for a moment. Thought about millions of brain-spiders flooding across the stations and moons and asteroids and planets of humanity, a silver wave of erasure. She opened her eyes again. “Let’s stop him from doing that, yes.”
Lantern bustled toward the panel, holding the sphere. “May I?”
“Ahh! You have one of their infospheres. You will have greater access than I do. Sebastien has kept such devices from me. You could even search the deep archives with that. Sebastien has spent hours poring over them. I have caught the occasional glimpse, but I have trouble reading the records. Sebastien’s implant whispers translations to him, but mine does not.” Uzoma inclined their head toward the sphere. “What are you planning to do?”
“Whatever I can.” Lantern held the sphere up to the screen, and it glowed bright blue, and began to spin.
Callie said, “We have to neutralize Sebastien and save Elena. That’s straightforward enough. As for blowing this place up – we can just get out of here, and let Sebastien’s dead-man’s switch activate and take the station out.”
“I overheard Sebastien telling you that.” Uzoma shook their head. “There is no self-destruct system, no dead-man’s switch. The station has no central power source that can be caused to explode. He was merely trying to keep you from incapacitating him.”
“And you call me a liar,” Lantern muttered.
Callie put a hand on one of Lantern’s tentacles. “Not you. Not anymore. You’re a truth-teller.”
Lantern patted her hand, but absently, focused intently on the spinning sphere.
“A whole fleet of ships, full of wormhole generators. Huh.” Ashok clucked his tongue, somewhere under all that metal, and began to pace back and forth, a sure sign of deep and twisty thoughts. “We probably shouldn’t leave those lying around unattended.”
“Not ideally,” Callie said, “but maybe no one else will ever find this place again. Space is big.”
“Sure, but it would nag at me, knowing they were out there, waiting to wreak havoc. But maybe… Cap, do you need me, for the Elena-saving portion of our program?”
Callie was already formulating a plan, with herself at its center, so she said, “I don’t think so.”
“Good. I want to talk some stuff over with Lantern.”
Callie flapped her hand at him in dismissal and turned back to Uzoma. “Is there another way into the control room?”
“I doubt Sebastien is there anymore. I suspect he has taken Elena to the overseer’s platform, to show her the progress on his fleet. He dragged me there often, until he realized I did not share his wish to become a god.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a god either. Seems like a lot of responsibility. The part of being a god where you get to mete out justice is good, but I can do that in my mortal form pretty well already. Can you get me to this platform?”
Uzoma nodded. “Yes. You should hurry. Sebastien was always fond of Elena, and has spoken of her often, regretting his decision to send her away, so perhaps she is unharmed. But he does not cope well with disagreement, and he may try to… change her, to make her compliant.”
“I just need a clear line of fire,” Callie said. Shooting a sort-of-romantic-rival in the head might ruin her budding relationship with Elena, but it was better than the alternative. Having Elena hate her would be a small price to pay if it kept Elena free and alive.
* * *
Elena struggled against the machines, one on either side of her. They were shining metal icosidodecahedrons, skeletal spheres composed of numerous triangles, with pulsing blue globes floating in their centers. The machines expanded and contracted as they moved, and some of their triangles opened outward and unfolded into multi-jointed arms. The arms were ductile, too: two of them had wrapped around her wrists like rope or wire, and she was trapped in place, standing on her feet with her arms pulled down and outward at her sides.
Sebastien stood with his back to her, looking out the viewport at the sparks and flashes of the machines building his fleet. “I wish you hadn’t tried to run, Elena. I thought I could make you understand.”
Elena considered. Was there a pathway out of this? Perhaps, if she walked carefully. “Why assume my understanding is faulty? Maybe you just didn’t explain it properly.”
Sebastien turned, gave her a long look, and chuckled. For a moment, it was like seeing the old Sebastien again, calm and amused and charming. “That’s fair. This must be disorienting and frightening for you. You lack my perspective. That’s why the implant will help–”
“Sebastien, listen. I never had the chance to tell you how I felt. About you.” She looked at the floor, no longer struggling against her bondage. “I was too shy, too nervous, and I was afraid it would be unprofessional. During training, every time I looked at you, I lost my breath. When you talked, I admired your brilliance and eloquence, but I also just looked at your lips, and wondered what it would be like to kiss them. I came back to this station, at great risk and great cost, to save you. So please understand, all this, everything you’re telling me, about becoming a god – it’s hard for me.” She made a little gasp, like she was on the edge of crying. “How could I ever be worthy of you, if you’re going to remake the universe? How could I ever be good enough to kiss a god?”
He stepped toward her, smiling, and then stopped, almost close enough to touch her. “I think you’re trying to trick me, Elena. To get me to let my guard down.”
“I understand. But you could find out. You could kiss me. You’d be able to tell, if you kissed me, whether or not I was telling the truth.”
Sebastien came even closer, and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. His eyes glowed. She leaned into him, into his touch, his warm strong hand. “It would be nice to kiss you,” he said. “I haven’t stopped being who I was, Elena. I just became… more.”
“Show me the man I knew, the man I dreamed about – show me he’s still here. Prove that to me, and I’ll be able to believe everything else. I’ll be able to trust you.”
He moved even closer, and she turned her face away. She pulled against the unyielding machines that pinned her wrists. “Don’t kiss me while I’m chained up. Please.” She let a smile rise to her lips. “Not on a first date, anyway.”
Sebastien snorted, and seemed amused, but didn’t order the machines to let her go.
“What can I do to you?” she said. “You took my weapons. You’re bigger, and stronger, and the whole station obeys your commands. I’m trying to trust you, Sebastien. You have to trust me a little bit, too. If this is going to work, it needs to go both ways.”
“You’re right. Of course.” He took a step back, glanced left and right, and spoke a word in some guttural language. The machines slithered their coils away from Elena’s wrists, contracted into smaller spheres, and rolled off to wait patiently in the corners.
She went to Sebastien the moment she was f
ree. Elena stood on her tiptoes and kissed him, and it felt as good as she’d always imagined it would. He was passionate without being pushy, strong without being overwhelming, and when his hands went around her waist, up her back, and then traveled down over her hips, she pressed herself against him, and moved her own hands up his back, holding him close. He pulled back after a long moment. “Oh, Elena.”
“Oh, Sebastien.”
Then she punched him in the back of the head.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Callie crept through a smooth tunnel that was barely big enough for her. Maybe the Liars had used it, long ago, or the brain-spiders used it now, to move around the station quickly. That was a horrible thought. She’d had to take off her environment suit and her helmet to fit through this space, and she didn’t like having her head exposed. She still had an earpiece so she could talk to the others, but she couldn’t be sure Sebastien wasn’t monitoring their comms, so she kept quiet.
The going was tight and awkward, but Callie knew how to crawl. She’d had sniper training, and part of that was learning to move silently and stealthily, on elbows and knees and toes, centimeters at a time if necessary. She was moving rather faster than that now, and though she had a lot of worry and anger bubbling away under the surface, she’d compressed those feelings down and put them aside and kept them ready to draw on as a source of energy, but not a source of distraction.
After wriggling through the tunnel, which had the size variance and wandering geometry that seemed typical of the organic Axiom aesthetic, she faced a seemingly impassable dead end. She clucked her tongue, twice, signaling Uzoma, who would use her back-door into the station systems to–
The blank roundish wall in front of her developed segments, a series of triangles arrayed in a circle, and they irised open, but only partway, and slowly. Callie had asked for a spy hole, and a gunport. She didn’t have a sniper rifle. She owned a very good one, but it was tucked away in Shall’s belly, way the hell back on her ship. What she had instead was two sidearms and a wrist-launcher with an array of exotic lethal options, but none of them were particularly reliable at long range. She had one ballistic sidearm and one that fired magnetic pulses of plasma. The latter didn’t need to be very accurate: superheated plasma hitting you even glancingly tended to be disabling. But it wasn’t enough to disable her enemy. If Sebastien could even shout a command, that might spell her doom. He thought Callie was harmlessly locked away. If he realized she was roaming free (and shooting at him, no less), and turned the station’s defensive systems against her, she didn’t think she’d survive long. She had to take him out, clean, quick, a shot to the head. She decided to use the ballistic weapon. On a practice range, she could hit a target pretty accurately at a hundred meters, but in real-world conditions, anything more than twenty-five meters away would be pushing it, and there was no reason to think she’d get more than one shot.