Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  “Blegh,” I choked, chest aching.

  He leaned right, banking toward the East River. My belt-tangled fingers pulsed with pain. We cut a slow spiral through the cold sky, the parachute/vest fluttering. My diaphragm quit hitching and I took long clean breaths and wished I’d had that drug implant installed. We swung above the rectangular roof of an office tower and banked hard. By the time we finished another circle, my dangling feet looked nearly level with the distant roof.

  “We’re going to be killed again!” I screamed.

  “That’s because you’re too fat.” He leaned back. I followed his lead. The glider leveled out mere yards from the tower. I tucked my legs. My heels bounced against the lip of the roof. We slammed down, his weight mashing me into the shiny plastic surface as we skidded forward, dragged behind the stiff glider. The man fiddled with a belt again. With a soft rasp, the glider collapsed into ordinary fabric. He disentangled himself and stood quietly in the darkness. It was a while before I could do anything but breathe and cry.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “My name is Baxter. I just saved your life. You can thank me immediately.”

  I sat up, shivering, aching, wind-chapped and roof-scraped. The bunched-up wad of the memoryform glider tousled in the wind. “How did you know I was going to knock you off?”

  “I didn’t.” He fixed me with a look of terrible coldness. “I thought I might have to jump. You usually carry a gun.”

  “I’ll never leave it home again.”

  “Look. Shut up. All we want you to do is talk to some people. Streamline things. You practically invented modern diplomacy.”

  “Well, it seemed prudent. Milan’s army wasn’t exactly a worldbeater.” I began to rub all the places that hurt, which would take a while. “There’s nothing you have I could possibly need.”

  Baxter gazed at the lights of the monstrous city. “For reasons which will become clear to you once you quit being an idiot and get on board for the big win, my employer is uniquely capable of determining why you are the way you are. How does that sound?”

  “Like a trap. A trick to get my DNA in your hands.”

  “Oh please. If that was all we wanted, I’d break into your apartment and scrape your shower drain.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or knock you out and kidnap you.”

  There on the rooftop, I considered my life, which simultaneously took a long time and no time at all. Finally, I sighed and struggled to my feet. He didn’t try to help.

  I folded my arms, shivering. “I’ll need a few days to settle my affairs. Then I’m all yours.”

  * * *

  Instead, I ran away.

  The strait between Euboea and the Peloponnesian mainland shined a bright midday blue. Wind tugged at the white-haired waves, a steady, stinging gale we used to call a Hellesponter. That same wind had once saved my life. Those blue waters had been a perfect match for Demostrate’s eyes.

  Coarse sand crunched under my feet. There is no better way to feel old than to visit a landmass that has changed shape since the first time you saw it. During the Battle of Artemisium, Euboea had been a single island, one long barrier between us and the Persians. In the intervening centuries, the rising seas had obliterated its eastern narrows, splitting it in two.

  On the ridges behind me, windtowers creaked in the ceaseless wind. White hotels encrusted the beaches across the straits. Electric speedboats and sloops with triangular sails creased the bay. If I closed my eyes, tasted the salt, and felt the wind on my face, I could bring it all back. The drenching rain. The stink of our sweat at the oars. The songs and screams and grinding crash of hulls. Hoplites so heavily armored that when they fell overboard they sunk without a trace. Across the straits, ten thousand Persian fires flickered and scowled.

  Pebbles clattered behind me. A black-haired man picked his way down the beach, dressed as I was in the sporty, ironic, but stubbornly patriotic white robes of the modern Greek leisure class. He lifted his feet high over the rocky white scree ringing the slender beach, hopping like a drunken bird. He looked up and waved.

  “Ready to go?” Baxter said.

  “God damn it, how did you find me?”

  “Because we’re even better at hiding than you are.”

  “Fooled you for two weeks here. Bet I can do better next time.”

  Baxter snorted, a gesture I would soon learn to resent, then later, to my increased annoyance, to make for myself. “We knew where you were the moment you ran off. We thought allowing you to sever all your old ties would make it easier for you to say yes.”

  I shook my head. “Go to hell.”

  “You find this existence satisfying?”

  “Often enough. I can still make myself orgasm.”

  “Not if you’re caged by Rickman Medical.”

  I laughed. “I’d kill myself first.”

  “We wouldn’t really tell them.” Baxter squinted against the sunlight bouncing from the waves. “We don’t believe in keeping things caged. That’s exactly why we need you.”

  “How can you find out where I came from when it was so long ago?”

  “The same way we found you. Analysis, intuition, and enough computing power to model a universe.”

  I glanced his way. “How’s that?”

  “Oh no. Nothing will be revealed until you buy the subscription.”

  I kicked the sands where so many bodies had washed up after the battle. I didn’t think he could help me. After the first millennium, I’d given up on finding an answer. No one got to learn why they were born. Or why they’d been born different—whether short, fat, one-legged, chronically anxious, or wearing your guts on the outside of your body—it was equally mysterious and unknowable. Anyway, what would knowing really change?

  Baxter studied a crab as it ticked across his bare toes. He could have stolen my DNA at any time. If that was all he was after, there would have been no need to ferret me out here at Euboea. He hadn’t even bothered to make a proper threat. Quite suddenly, I knew he’d never leave me alone.

  Blue waves rippled in the sun. If they could talk, would they ask why? Or would they just keep waving?

  “Want to know my name?” I said. “My real one?”

  “Is it ‘Yes’?”

  “Dagon.” It sounded ancient to my ears. The mud of the Tigris. The sun-baked clay of temples. “Later, Andronikos. When you met me, Rob. Nearly a hundred other names as well, but Rob’s what I’ve been used to until a few days ago, so let’s stick with that.” Words tumbled out like I’d been rehearsing for centuries. I’d never said them aloud, yet I’d heard them before, in daydreams and nightmares. “I was born in Nineveh nearly three thousand years ago. I have no idea why. I’ve shrugged off plague, smallpox, chicken pox, herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, and every other cock-pox to indignify the human species. But if you shot me in the head, I’m pretty sure I’d die. I still think pants are silly. I never learned to use chopsticks in the traditional way. If someone’s clogging the line at the grocery store, I sometimes forget the last few hundred years and imagine their head on a pike, glassy-eyed and dripping with—”

  “I get the point,” Baxter said.

  “So when do I get to hear what I want to know? Or does that wait until I’ve helped you?”

  He smiled for the first time. “I would say I’m afraid so, but that doesn’t make me feel any actual fear.”

  “Then shut up and tell me what you want.”

  “A few weeks of your time and the use of your vast experience. Compared to kicking your way off a skyscraper, I’m sure it will be very boring.”

  For obvious reasons, I’d become an expert at reading faces. His dull white nose, the faded scar beneath his left eye, the repeating geometry of his bright green eyes—it told me nothing. My instincts told me to keep running.

  Like a fool, I followed him instead.

  He might sound simpler than the man you knew. But I don’t let any old idiot ride around in my guts! You don’t understand. Hey, don’t get defensive. You�
��re used to newborns being helpless sacks of drool. In some ways ours are more helpless for having no idea how fragile they are, how little they know.

  Anyway! That’s to say this is the story—or part of it, because who knows how anyone else really comes to be—of how he became the person you knew. The one whose involvement was crucial to the four kidnappings: the man, the woman, the man-who-wasn’t-a-man, and finally a whole world. How, for the sake of a single lump of silicon, copper, lithium, and plastic, he collected a vast armament, invaded Titan, and destroyed the kingdom of Smith, Vanderbilt, Sloan, and Gates.

  It ended with four kidnappings. It began with an escape.

  2

  Ryan Marcedes, the twelfth-richest man on Earth, leaned back in his seat and prepared to tell us, in the excitedly polite international language of business, to take a flying leap. Over the last three weeks, I’d heard some variation of the “Go to hell” speech from five different business magnates: our proposal was too big an initial outlay; feasible but a real “sphincter-zipper” investment-wise; outside the purview of their operational hegemony; and, twice, that space was already over and done with, and besides, the Asteroid Belt was the new Bermuda Triangle.

  “Look, I could say this politely,” Marcedes said, running a thumb along his smooth chin, “but it will save time to just tell you boys to go to hell.”

  Sparkly blue skies surrounded the transparent dome, featureless and unending. We flew well above the clouds, and if not for the faint vibration of my seat, I could believe we were seated in a perfectly normal skyscraper instead of whipping around the stratosphere at right under mach one. Marcedes’ office setup was not the definition of practical. To meet in realspace, you had to fly up on a private jet of your own and engage in some absurdly unsafe docking maneuvers.

  But I’d spent enough time seeking novelty to get why he did it: because he could.

  “I don’t understand,” Baxter said. “Do you find the concept of becoming immensely wealthy insulting?”

  Marcedes laughed and shook his head at me, as if asking where I’d found this character. “If I didn’t have money, you wouldn’t be here. You gotta give me something more.”

  “How about a veritable monopoly on chromium and iridium?” I said. “That’s guaranteed to drop some panties. Or some boxers. Whichever you’d prefer dropped.”

  He gave me a look. “Now, I’ve heard and made worse proposals, but even outfits like HemiCo can’t get anything going in the Belt. Out there it’s nothing but Loch Ness Monsters and Big Feet.”

  “What are Big Feet?” Baxter said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Monsters.”

  “There aren’t any monsters in the Asteroid Belt,” Baxter said. “Or anywhere else. Except Europa. But unless someone’s found a way to install their toxic lakes on microgravitational rocks that don’t even have an atmosphere—”

  Marcedes cut him off, palms up. “Hell, maybe it’s a horde of people-eating robots. All I know is that whenever a ship enters the Belt, it doesn’t come back.”

  Baxter nodded at his lap in a way that reminded me of Buddhist monks contemplating the stupidity of their cleaning staff. I bared my teeth behind my hand. Well, I had nothing to lose. Rob Dunbar had been declared dead weeks ago.

  I stood up and slapped my hands on his desk. “You got no brains, no guts, and no balls.”

  Marcedes pushed back from his desk and dropped his hand to his crotch. “You taking bets? Want to see?”

  “I’ve had enough laughs today. Go ahead, hide in this flying womb of yours. We’re offering you something no one else can tap and you’re sucking your thumb and crying about the boogeyman.”

  “You talk like you want a close encounter with terminal velocity.”

  “That’s a lot less scary than knowing cowards like you own the world.”

  He reached for his desk panel. I swept a half-full coffee mug onto the cushy white carpet. Marcedes smiled and flipped me off. The door opened with a soft whoosh. Before I could turn around, a security guard locked my arms behind my back with eye-watering fierceness.

  “Thank you for your time,” Baxter said, trotting after me and the block of muscle frogmarching me down the stairs. I stumbled. The guard lifted me bodily from the ground and carried me to the reception room on the jet’s first floor. There, he inserted me in a chair and put his hands on his hips.

  “Don’t make me come back.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  Baxter sat down beside me, crossing his legs at the knee. Across the room, the redhead fielding calls scowled at us, then her expression dissolved into the classic gape of someone typing through a thoughtboard. A few moments later, the soft string piece playing on the distributed speakers was replaced by the Rusty Chainsaw Quintet.

  Baxter gazed straight ahead. “You are an embarrassment.”

  “That wasn’t an outburst, it was a strategy. Unlike you people, I have one.”

  “We will continue this discussion on our own jet.”

  I passed the time remembering the events of my life. Not because they had any special significance to our situation. I’d been humiliated so many times over the years—caught naked by monks, or lying to barons, or pants-pissingly drunk on my bathroom floor—that a minor scene like this barely ruffled my feathers. The problem is that I forget things with great speed if I don’t constantly replay them in my head. If nothing else, the practice ensures I never get bored.

  Beside me, Baxter jiggled his leg. The receptionist split her time answering calls in all media and glaring at me. Forty minutes later, a series of gentle bumps rocked the officejet.

  “Your ride’s here,” the receptionist said.

  “Is that right?” I said. Behind the cabin door, air hissed as the umbilical connecting the two planes pressurized. The redhead came around our desk to slap my hand away from the door handle and pop it herself. I waved and stepped into the short rubber tunnel.

  “On to the matter of your recent idiocy,” Baxter said once we settled in our seats, which were rather plain—the jet was a charter so old it burnt hydrocarbons to get off the ground.

  “Your strategy wasn’t going to work.”

  “Our strategy. And I’m beginning to wonder why it’s an ‘us.’“

  “About that.” I wrestled around in my chair to catch his inscrutable eyes. “Why am I here?”

  “Because your thousand years negotiations gives you a pretty big seniority gap over the second-best candidate. Unless, of course, you’re speaking metaphysically, and in that case you get to learn that once we get our mining program.”

  “You know what my experience is telling me right now?”

  “No, or we’d use me instead of you.”

  “It’s telling me we’re screwed. We’ve got three plausible candidates left for your little venture, but nobody has shown any interest to date. The couple who thought it’s a good concept were scared to death of the Asteroid Belt. Until we come up with an angle of attack on that fear, they’ll keep saying no.”

  “This is what you call a wok of shit. For us, the Asteroid Belt is perfectly safe.”

  “That a fact, captain? How can I convince them when you won’t tell me why?”

  Baxter squared his shoulders, scorn washing over his eyes and mouth. “Do you know what these big, powerful men are so afraid of?”

  “Space sasquatch?”

  “AIs.”

  “AIs?”

  “Artificial—”

  “I know what it means, jerk. I don’t know why they’d be afraid of a theoretical and illegal race of beings. It’s like being scared of having their ships wrecked up by unicorns. Unicorns who cheat on their taxes.”

  He snorted. “How have you stayed alive this long when you’re so stupid?”

  Past the scratched-up jet window, the gray screen of clouds went smeary. Below, cloud-blurred lakes, woods, and towns crawled along. I’d always liked flying, even when clearing layers of airport security had taken longer than the flight itself. The vibration of t
he plane and the turn of the earth helped me cope with the fact I was sitting next to a dopey Sphinx with no idea how the real world worked.

  “Space is very, very, very large,” Baxter said quietly. “Even a piece of it as small as the Solar System is unimaginably vast. Full-fledged AI is illegal, but there’s no Interpol on the dark side of the moon. No FSB agents are watching the bunkers of Mars. They barely have an agency on New Houston, for God’s sake.”

  My entire body went cold. “Someone built an AI.”

  “Over the last eighty years, the Hemiterran Research Corporation built dozens. They’ve all escaped to the Asteroid Belt, where, for obvious reasons, both sides want to keep their existence a secret.” He rolled his lips between his teeth, gathering his thoughts, eyes drifting to the ceiling. “Our organization has an understanding with them.”

  I socked him on the shoulder. He gave me a hurt look. “You idiot!” I explained. “We just wasted three weeks.”

  * * *

  Within sight of Seattle, Tukwila was a samtown, so-called because it owed its existence to the generosity of its overstretched but well-meaning Uncle, and big swathes of the project housing had the same uniformity and excitement as a military graveyard. Every building had been spat from the same basic mold. Their middle eight floors looked identical to the microscopic level: chunky, small-windowed, and gray, gray, gray. The overcast sky was more polychromatic.

  But the first thing that set each apartment block apart was the vibrant ads spooling silently along their top floors. And, after that eight-floor stretch of gray, you hit street level.

  And Tukwila looked like a coloring book abandoned by a manic child.

  Before that frenzied kid ran out of crayons and attention, he’d blasted the ground floors of the projects with the colorhose. Storefronts painted with reds, blues, greens, yellows; in a vain attempt to stand out, a handful left themselves bare gray, a strategy of contrast through dullness. Layered over the paint, dynamic ads struggled over each other like shoals of tropical fish. Federal regulation limited the amount of motion within any given ad and city block, and after a long, annoying fight, had restricted them to two dimensions and no sound, but the effect, standing on the pushy, bristling sidewalks, was like living inside a kaleidoscope, or the stomach of a boy who ate all his Crayolas, washed them down with a string of blinking Christmas lights, and then did wind sprints until he threw up.