Tyche's Crown

by Richard Parry

  “There’s only a handful of us,” said Chad.

  “Eh,” said Nate. “A hundred and fifty isn’t a handful.”

  “Against an entire alien race, it’s a rounding error.”

  “It’s an important rounding error,” said Grace. “Because we can learn to fight. Beat them. Lead humans to victory. I know it’s different to order people to their deaths from the comfort of your executive lounge.” That might not have been fair — not all of them were assholes. A great many of them were here because they didn’t tow the party line of the Intelligencer leadership. They didn’t want to rule humans as mind-controlling overlords. Neither did they want to be hunted to extinction by their previous comrades who led the Republic. “So, I’ll teach you how to fight.” She nodded at Nate. “And he’s going to help.”

  “I am?” said Nate, brow furrowed.

  “Yes,” said Grace, wanting to reach out and smooth his confusion away, but now wasn’t the time. “And after that—”

  “You’ll sail off,” said the woman’s voice, “leaving us to the dying.”

  Ah. That one. Grace managed to single the woman out. Blonde hair. Angular face, strong, used to giving orders, not taking them. Certainly not used to the possibility of dying that came with taking orders. Grace walked towards her, pushing through the rest of them. “You think I’m walking away?”

  “You’ve got the ship,” said the woman, giving her hair a toss. “You’re going to leave us.”

  “Yes,” said Grace.

  “What?” said the woman.

  “Because,” said Grace, “we’re going to find them.”

  “You’re what?” said Chad.

  Grace looked at Chad over her shoulder, then turned back to the blonde woman. “We’re going to find them,” said Grace. “In our ship. Then we’ll call for your help, and you must be ready.”

  There was quiet. Total quiet.

  “You’re going to go out there after them,” said Chad. “You. The one they’ve been so interested in.”

  “Yes,” said Grace. “I don’t think I want to wait for them to come to me. And it’ll take some of the heat off of you. While you get ready.”

  The blonde woman watched her. Scrutinizing her, like she was a bug. Grace could imagine what was going through her mind. You’re not even a real esper or why should we do what you say or maybe they’ve already got to you. None of it mattered, because Grace was going. She and Nate had already talked about it. Step one. Build the Resistance up. Step two. Find the bugs. Step three. Fangs out.

  Still no one spoke, which was unusual. This crowd could have been talking mind-to-mind, but Grace didn’t think so. There was none of the usual noise she’d picked up, the metal whispering as people talked just outside her mental hearing. It was just another way she was different. Broken. Damaged.

  Nate’s hand was on her arm, jerking her out of that little internal death spiral. She could smell him, the scent heady, familiar. Like the joy of being in sunlight outside. A reminder of how he made her feel when they were alone in his cabin. Someone who had her back. Together.

  “So,” said Nate, his voice bright. “Who wants to get shot first?”

  • • •

  Grace stood in front of the Intelligencers, Nate and Chad behind her. Nate had a taser out, one he’d borrowed from Kohl. Or maybe Hope had made it for him. Not that it mattered. It would shoot its payload at Chad, and Chad would either dodge the shot or he wouldn’t. And that was all a part of the lesson. The crowd of Intelligencers was like many other crowds, noses keen from the smell of promised blood that hung in the air. They were eager to see what would happen. The great Nathan Chevell, captain of the starship that had led the Resistance to victory. Not just against the Ezeroc, but against the might of the Republic.

  What they missed was that it was with not against the might of the Republic. A hard thing for Nate, who’d worn the Emperor’s Black back before the war. Nate, who’d fought against the corrupt Intelligencers, and lost. Who hated espers. Yet he had to work with them, and with the Republic they’d made, to fight insects that wanted to use humans as calories to power their ships. A more jaundiced, younger Grace would have given even odds that Nate would sell out his own species just to see the Intelligencers burn.

  But that wasn’t what he was like. She wanted to kick herself, to shake herself, to scream, because there wasn’t time for this. No time for love, for her and Nate. Not now. Not with what was coming. She addressed the group. “Here’s what’ll happen,” she said. “Nate’s sword is … special. It was a gift. As long as he holds it, no one can see into his mind. Or control it.”

  “A princely gift,” said the blonde woman. “Also, bullshit.”

  “How do you figure that?” said Grace.

  “No object can do that,” she said. “Our power is over minds, and the tech hasn’t been invented yet that will—” There was a zzzzzcrack and the woman gave a tight scream. She shook like she was taking on fifty thousand volts — which she was, the taser’s launched payload embedded in her shoulder — then toppled like a felled tree.

  Grace turned to Nate. “What the hell,” she said. She saw he had his flesh hand on his sword’s hilt, the taser extended from his metal one.

  He lowered the taser. “Huh,” he said, looking at the weapon. “I figured on it being a more effective demonstration this way.” He slipped another cartridge into the taser. “Who wants some of this?”

  “I’ll take it,” said Chad. “This time, hand off the sword.”

  Nate shrugged, let go of his sword, and readied the taser. He did a fast-draw — quick, like a cobra; if Grace hadn’t been looking for it, she would have missed the raise-and-fire of the weapon. Chad sidestepped, like he was just out for a stroll.

  Grace turned back to the Intelligencers. “We’re working on getting more of these swords made,” she said. “Once we have them, the Ezeroc won’t be able to get in your minds. Other Intelligencers won’t be able to either. Any questions?”

  The blonde woman was getting to her feet, looking terrible. Grace wanted to smile, pushed the feeling down, and waited. “You’ve only got one of those swords?” said the blonde woman.

  “For now,” said Nate, from behind them. “But we’re not training you for now. We’re training you for the future. Because fighting humans is one thing. But fighting the Ezeroc? They give nothing away. You’ll be just like me.”

  “Hardly,” said Chad. “Half as handsome and twice as slow.”

  Grace smiled. “Get your practice weapons,” she said. “It’s time to get to work.”

  • • •

  Nate held a practice sword between them, a simple piece of wood that would do nothing but bruise. He held it in his right hand, flesh and blood around the hilt like he was gripping a lifeline. “I hate this,” he said.

  Grace circled him, slow and steady. Her feet barely left the surface of the practice mat. “You’ll thank me for it.”

  “It’s unfair,” he said. “You can read my mind.”

  “It’s not about fair,” she said, lashing out with her own weapon. He tried to get his sword up, gaining a partial success — Grace’s blow was diverted a little, but he still wore some of it on the side of his head. She wanted to wince, but kept a clamp on it. This wasn’t about her not hurting her lover. This was about her lover not dying when she wasn’t there. “It’s about you learning to use that hand to hold a sword.” Nate was left-handed, and he’d always held a sword on that side, at least until the fire had left him with metal on the stump of his arm. Even before that, he’d not been — by his own admission — the universe’s best swordsman. Gunslinger, sure. Swordsman, no.

  He swung at her, an ugly motion with no finesse in it. She tilted her body out of the way, the wood humming past her with light years of space to spare. She sighed. “Chad?”

  Chad came jogging over. “Sup.”

  “Chad, I need you to beat Nate. I mean, leave him bloody.”

  “Hey,” said Nate.

 
“Because he’s pulling his swings with me, and that’s not okay.”

  “It’s a little okay,” said Nate, “isn’t it?”

  “It’d be my pleasure,” said Chad.

  Grace hid her smile as she walked away, leaving them to it. She’d make Nate a swordsman again if it was the last thing she did. He’d probably be ready before her new sword was, anyway.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HOPE WAS IN Engineering. It smelled of grease, smoke, ozone, and home. She was listening to the fabricator, the machine humming away as it printed what felt like the hundredth sword blade. The Tyche was mostly powered down, the reactor running low — a shiny new reactor, courtesy of the Torrington. The Torrington’s Engineers had offered Hope a reactor fit for a ship of the Tyche’s size, and she’d stared at them and said, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight. And because they’d looked confused, she’d said, the Tyche thinks she has a big heart, so give her one. While the Ravana’s reactor was burned out and gone, the new one was fancy new Republic tech. Oversize for a ship like the Tyche. And that was just fine.

  The tiniest trickle of juice fed the machines around Hope. Life support was powered down, the ship slumbering for the most part. Just the fabricator. That, and Hope’s console, where she was reading more about the Ezeroc. There were a few files she’d scraped together. She had her holo up, and was flipping between two things: the first was a report on the Ezeroc compiled by the Republic facility on Absalom Delta. The second? A picture of Rei-Rei. Those beautiful eyes. The curve of her face. Gone now. And so that’s where Hope sat, torn between the picture of her dead wife and a report about the insects that would kill them all. If I don’t get an edge on these roaches, they’ll kill the rest of my family too. Sure, sure: it wasn’t like Hope owned the problem. She was just better suited to solving it. El was good at flying ships, and Kohl was good at lifting heavy things and sometimes saving Hope from certain death. Nate was good at being a person whom she could trust to look after her, and sometimes at being a captain, too. And Grace was good at being a friend, that person she felt she could talk to if there was anything worth talking about.

  Flip. Reiko’s face. Flip. The report.

  The fabricator chimed, and Hope’s eyes left the report for a second to look at it. She turned back to the console. Flip. Reiko looked out at her. Flip. The report with answers, probably. She sighed, ran a dirty hand through dirtier pink hair, and got out of her acceleration couch. The fabricator’s door opened, and the smell of hot metal came to her. There: Grace’s sword. Or, if there was any justice, it would be this time. She picked up the metal, already cool enough to touch. She’d told the fab to bead metal on metal, a nanometer at a time, each layer hot as it was laid, but the overall blade cool by the time she got her hands on it. The metal gleamed in the low light of Engineering, just the console’s holo working to lift the mood. And that report? Not a mood-lifter.

  Hope swung the flat of the blade against the side of a drive cowl. It clanged, harsh and loud. Didn’t break. Good.

  The problem here was Grace was used to using a nice curved edge. She’d had an ancient sword she’d broken while slicing open Ezeroc, so Hope had made her another. The second version, no longer ancient, Grace had also broken after fighting Republic troops using nano-edged weapons. That was a thing Hope hadn’t planned for, and she’d felt so stupid when Grace had shown her the sheared stump of metal that used to be a sword. Stupid, because Hope Baedeker was the best damn Guild Engineer there’d ever been, Shingle or no, and good Engineers knew to plan for how things were used. You didn’t build a drive that couldn’t give a lot of joules when under heavy thrust, because that was the only time you’d need a lot of joules. Likewise, you didn’t make a sword that couldn’t stand a little blade-on-blade action with modern weapons.

  So, this was v3.0. She’d got the idea from the Republic swords Grace had tangled with. This weapon had a straight edge — not Grace’s style — that was sharpened to a molecule’s width at the finest point. Perfect for slicing apart pretty much anything. Difficult to know quite how it’d end up if you fought another sword just like it though. Would they cut each other? Would they shatter? Hope didn’t know, because she only had the sample Grace had brought her, and besides Grace didn’t want her to break her one remaining good blade. But here in Engineering, she had what she needed: a little time to work, a little space to think, and a project worthy of her time. If she got it right, Grace wouldn’t die — or at least, Grace wouldn’t die because Hope had screwed up.

  This third edition was built layer on layer. The edge was very sharp. Not a monoblade, not like the Republic weapon, but near enough. No one would argue about how sharp it was. But Hope had built the blade so it was strong all the way through. She’d learned a lot about sword making in the past three days. Back before fabs, they’d folded metal. Like anyone has time for that. But it had given her the idea of layers. What was old was new again.

  The fab didn’t agree. It kept printing new swords where the layers weren’t cohesive. It was like trying to teach an idiot child. But she’d kept at it, and now? Progress, because the sword hadn’t shattered when she’d struck it.

  Good enough for a test run.

  Hope picked up Grace’s hilt, fitting it to the sword blade. She wasn’t paying good enough attention, and some of her hair fell against the blade’s edge. It sheared with no resistance at all, pink strands falling past her face to the floor of Engineering. Hope took better care after that. Standing tall, she held the sword in what she felt was the right way — two hands on the hilt, blade out. She raised it, swung it down against her practice dummy — a block of metal and ceramicrete that used to be an insulator for a high-power capacitor. The sword hit the edge of the block, and kept on going, straight through and out the other side. Hope overbalanced, the sword hitting the decking, biting into the Tyche’s floor. She paused, shaking a little, because the sword blade had halted close to her foot. She would have felt stupid calling for help while she was bleeding to death.

  But the sword? It worked. Hope would need to find out whether Grace liked the way it felt, but from an Engineer’s perspective, it seemed to do the job. Functional requirements all in the green. Just the non-functionals to go, the user testing phase. She hoped she hadn’t forgotten anything this time.

  Time to get back to the report. She paused, looking at the sword, her eyes moving back towards Grace’s scabbard. Sword, scabbard, sword, scabbard. Hope realized two things then. First, she would need to make a scabbard the sword wouldn’t cut through when it was sheathed. Second, she was very tired, because that was another stupid thing to miss. Hope laid the sword down by the Tyche’s new reactor, and went back to her acceleration couch. She pulled a fresh stim from the pile by the console. Plenty of time for sleep later.

  • • •

  The problem with the science geeks on Absalom Delta was they had been trying to build themselves a weapon. They’d found themselves a nice new alien race that could take human bodies and convert them into fuels or organic building blocks. A ready-made army for use against whatever army you didn’t like very much. The real problem with their geeks — aside from them being sociopaths, as near as Hope could tell — was they had thought they could control the Ezeroc. Like the Ezeroc didn’t have a commanding presence of their own. Like the Ezeroc hadn’t set the whole thing up, seeding greedy humanity with the weapons of its own destruction.

  With a series of reports written from the perspective of we’re going to control everything, it was hard to glean useful intelligence. There were a couple of things Hope managed to get from the reports though.

  Most important was the Ezeroc did, as everyone figured, communicate mind-to-mind. There didn’t seem to be any pesky speed of light issues to contend with, which was a worrying facet that would give someone who cared about military strategy nightmares. Not Hope’s problem.

  Second, and high on the list, was that their Endless tech was different. Ships like the Tyche used an Endless Drive to go t
o various locations, but you use one of those too close to a gravity well you’d fry the system. Oh, you could use it to generate a little vertical lift, maybe take the load off your cargo or your hull, but if you tried to jump? Boom. Dead drive. The Ezeroc didn’t have that problem. But that wasn’t the real gravy in the reports. The high-value sauce was that the Ezeroc had worked out how to make an Endless jump instantaneously. Humans used Guild Bridges to open wormholes for the same purpose, but you needed endpoints to make a tunnel through space. Endless Drives didn’t need endpoints but didn’t move instantly from point A to Point B: if you got an Endless ship to go too fast it screwed with a human’s perspective of linear time. Whole crews would go crazy, and if you pushed it too much, their consciousness would wink out like a reactor in emergency shutdown. Either the Ezeroc didn’t have a similar view of linear time, or their tech was better. Hope made notes in the file: Ezeroc do not experience linear time. It felt kind of right, because it made her so worried. Plan for the worst, right?

  Third, and this was a bit of a problem too, was humans had in fact picked up transmissions out there on the silky edge of human space. Absalom Delta was constructed as a colony world, but the great conceit was it had been chosen because the Republic geeks had heard signals from ‘out that way.’ Hope checked the report again. Yep, Ezeroc spoke mind-to-mind. Also yep, transmissions on the electromagnetic spectrum.