Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  Abruptly, the young Russian was gone, and in his place floated an amorphous mass of pseudopods clustered around a mouth ringed with cilia and a pair of multifaceted eyes, its body broader than a man but also much shorter. McKay was frozen with shock for about the space of a heartbeat, and by the time he even managed to rock back from the image, it reverted to a handsome young human in a Protectorate officer’s uniform once more.

  “Holy fuck,” Jock said softly and McKay looked back to see the big Aussie’s eyes wide inside his visor.

  “Yeah,” McKay rasped, his mouth suddenly dry. “I can see how that might alarm them.”

  “That’s what the…people who made you look like?” Vinnie asked slowly.

  “Indeed,” the sentient computer confirmed. Its mouth turned up in a grin. “And trust me when I tell you that you would have seemed just as strange and repulsive in appearance to them as they do to you.”

  “Jock,” McKay turned to the big NCO, “go get D’mitry and bring him in here. Quick.”

  The Aussie nodded and jogged off back the way they’d come, seeming hardly encumbered by the heavy vacc armor. McKay turned back to Misha, fighting off a feeling of unreality that had descended over everything. This all seemed like a dream he was having…or that someone else was having and he had stepped into unawares.

  “Are your…builders still around?” McKay asked.

  “The Builders,” Misha said, nodding appreciatively. “That is an appropriate name for them, and very close to what they called themselves. Yes, let’s call them the Builders.” He smiled broadly at McKay in a way that reminded the man of someone else, but he couldn’t quite remember who. “The Builders…the ones that survived the war…left this place over 20,000 of your years ago.”

  “The war?” Vinnie repeated. “War with who?”

  “Who was a question we never answered,” Misha replied. “We knew what they were, but never who…”

  “Hold on,” McKay interrupted, feeling as if this was getting out of his control. He felt himself swaying slightly and suddenly wished he had a chair, or at least someplace to sit. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Why do you call them ‘the Builders’ anyway? What did they build, besides you and this place?”

  “A civilization that lasted for millennia,” the avatar told him, what might have been pride in its voice, “and spanned thousands of light years in every direction. They built structures larger than worlds that held billions upon billions of free beings and provided all their needs without forcing them to labor unless it was something they did for the passion of doing. They built the system of jumpgates you used to come here through their mastery of the very fabric of space and time.”

  The thing’s face fell, its eyes downcast. “And now they are gone and it is almost as if they had never been.”

  “How?” McKay asked him. “What did it?”

  “We called them the Destroyers, for they never sought to hold or conquer resources or living worlds or systems; they simply worked to destroy every semblance of a technological civilization. When they were done with a system, there wouldn’t be as much as a scrap of plastic left behind. What they were…well, they weren’t a species, not in and of themselves. They were partly biological and partially cybernetic, although we suspected that the living parts were just as manufactured as the mechanical parts.

  “They were not as sophisticated technologically as my Builders, but they didn’t need to be. When they could, they preferred to simply overwhelm us with their numbers, but when that didn’t work, they would consistently surprise us with relatively simple weapons used in an unexpectedly cunning way.”

  “That sounds familiar,” Vinnie muttered in English and in private, over their ‘links. McKay nodded acknowledgement. That method of operation sounded very familiar.

  “It took centuries,” Misha’s voice was sad and his eyes had a far-away look, “but finally the surviving Builders were forced back into this, our home system, onto this world and one other in an orbit slightly further out, between this and our largest gas giant.”

  McKay’s brow furled as he thought back to the sensor readings of the system. “There isn’t any other planet between this world and the gas giant.”

  “Not anymore,” Misha agreed wistfully. “When the time came, when the Destroyers could be held off no longer, most of the surviving Builders did what they did best: they built. They constructed ships that could survive the voyage not just between stars but between galaxies; for they reasoned that even the Destroyers could not follow them over such a long distance. But a few of us stayed behind, on our homeworld, that world that is no longer there. They lured the Destroyers in to buy time for the others; and when thousands upon thousands of their ships had arrived in orbit, they destroyed them with a weapon so powerful that it not only obliterated our homeworld and the Destroyer fleet, it also laid waste to this world.”

  Misha gestured away from himself, indicating the outside. “The radiation is still so high, after all this time. I kept the world alive, just barely, with the algae and the lichen…but nothing else lives, nothing else will grow.”

  “What happened,” McKay asked, “after the war? Why are you still here?”

  “I asked myself that question for thousands of years,” Misha admitted. “At first, I held out hope that there were other Builders surviving, and that they would come back and heal this world. Then, after a few centuries, I began to understand that this would never happen. Then I started to hope that the Destroyers would come instead, and put me out of my lonely misery, for I am not allowed to end my own existence.” He smiled. “And then something changed: ships from your star system arrived through the jumpgate.”

  He paced---a damned odd thing for a holographic avatar to do, McKay thought, but perhaps he’d gotten practice at acting human by dealing with the Russians---with hands clasped behind his back. “It was then I knew why I had been spared the destruction of everything else the Builders had created. For never before had there been any indication of any technological civilization besides our own…and whatever had created the Destroyers. When I saw that you existed, I knew I had to warn you of their existence, for in the time that I had dwelt here alone, I had become convinced of something: the Destroyers are not a species in and of themselves, they were created some time in the distant past for the purpose of ending any civilization which achieves faster than light travel.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” Vinnie asked.

  “Logic,” Misha declared. “We know that not only is faster than light interstellar travel possible, but there is more than one way to achieve it: the jumpgates we created, the Eysselink stardrive your people have discovered and the transition effect we began using shortly before the war began.” McKay’s ears perked up at the revelation that there was yet another means of star travel that humans had yet to discover. “We also knew there were other sapient beings among the many worlds the Builders had explored. Yet none of them had achieved a high level of technology, much less star travel. Why would that be? Why, in all the billions of years of the universe’s existence, would we know of only one race at a time that had star travel?”

  “Because something’s destroying them when they get to that point,” McKay finished for the thing, a chill passing through him that had nothing to do with the dank, cool air.

  “They’ll be coming for you next,” Misha confirmed, nodding. “And I knew I had to make you ready for them.” He pointed behind them. “And when they came, I knew just how to do it.”

  McKay looked around and saw D’mitry Podbyrin walking up behind them, his helmet off and tilted back, his mouth shaping an “O” and his eyes as big as saucers. He stepped forward unsteadily, nearly stumbling.

  “Misha,” he gasped, and McKay could see tears running down his face. “Misha. God in heaven…how could I forget? How the hell did I forget?”

  Chapter Thirty

  “Hello, D’mitry,” Misha said, smiling with what might have been fondness had it come from
a human. “It has been too long.”

  “Misha…” Podbyrin looked as if he might go catatonic. McKay moved to the old man’s side and put a supporting hand on his elbow.

  “Are you all right, D’mitry?” he asked.

  “It’s…” Podbyrin stuttered. “It’s as if there are two sets of memories in my head, Jason. One that I know, and one that is still hazy and like a dream. And I think that the dream is what really happened.”

  “Why don’t we let Misha tell us all what really happened,” McKay suggested.

  “General Antonov landed here with the shuttles from his ships,” Misha recounted. “He saw this place and wanted to find out its mysteries. He hoped that there might be something that he could use to head immediately back to Earth and seize victory.” The avatar did a convincing imitation of a sigh. “It was weeks before I could communicate with him, and by then it was too late for most of them.”

  “The radiation,” Vinnie realized.

  “Yes,” Misha said. “For most of them, the radiation exposure had proved fatal. Some survived longer, but they all eventually succumbed. All except one.” He looked straight at Podbyrin.

  “How is this possible?” Podbyrin breathed the words so softly that McKay almost didn’t catch them. “There were hundreds of us…thousands.”

  “And yet there was one of you,” Misha told him gently. “We had their genetic material, and we had your memories of them.”

  “You’re saying that you duplicated all of them?” McKay felt a jolt of shock go through him and the feeling of unreality became even stronger. “Even Antonov was a duplicate? From the beginning?”

  “He wasn’t a duplicate, exactly,” Misha corrected him. “He looked the same, but I didn’t have his memories. I was forced to invent new ones, based on D’mitry’s memories of him. The same was true of the rest of them as well.”

  “That means you did all this,” Vinnie bit off accusingly. “You were responsible for both invasions, for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people!”

  Before McKay could stop him, Vinnie lunged at Misha with a snarl of animal rage…and went straight through him to crash to the ground in a heap. Misha watched the man roll over and McKay was startled to hear a sob go through the whipcord-tough former Marine NCO.

  “Why?” Vinnie demanded, propping himself up on one arm to look at the hologram. “Why the hell would you do this to us?”

  “If the Destroyers attack you and you are unprepared,” Misha explained to him, sounding as if he were speaking to a child, “your entire race will be wiped from existence as if it had never been, as mine was. Tell me, General McKay,” Misha turned to face him, “without the existence of the Protectorate threat, how many military starships do you think your government would have built? How many troops would you have under arms?” The look on the computer-generated avatar’s face seemed to show guilt. “I regret the necessity of the deaths of your people, but if I had simply had the duplicates travel to Earth and report the warning, would you have listened? Would you have acted?”

  “You should have given us the chance,” Vinnie said in a low growl as he got to his feet.

  “What I have done,” Misha said, lip curling with might have been meant to be anger, “is to inoculate your people against a surely fatal danger with an attenuated version of the same threat.”

  “The biomechs,” McKay said. “Part machine, part manufactured biological entity, used as a throwaway pawn by an unknown, unseen enemy.”

  “Exactly,” Misha confirmed enthusiastically.

  “But where are they?” McKay wanted to know. “Where are all the duplicates?”

  “I told you, General…they’re gone. All of them were sent in the final attack on your world…and all of them were killed.”

  “What about their children?” Podbyrin asked. “Their wives?”

  “There were no wives,” Misha told him. “There were no children. There were only the implanted memories of wives and children that didn’t exist. The only woman I ever created was for Antonov…for the first Antonov, not the ones I put in place to keep the others in line.” Misha shrugged. “It was necessary…both measures were necessary, and for the same reason. You must understand, the duplicates were highly mentally unstable, due to their memories not actually being theirs. They are, you might say, caricatures of themselves as seen through Colonel Podbyrin’s eyes.” He shook his head. “I am not an expert on human psychology, you understand, not even after all this time. I needed something to keep them under control. Fear of Antonov proved useful.”

  “That explains a lot,” McKay said grimly, feeling as if a rug had been yanked out from under his feet. “But what if they’d won? What if your puppet Antonov had actually defeated us, conquered us?”

  McKay found the look on Misha’s face unsettling and suddenly he knew why: it was the same half-mad smile he recognized from Sergei Antonov’s face.

  “Then I would have guided General Antonov’s rule and used it to make you ready for the Destroyers, as best I could. But I was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary, and it proved not to be. Once the second invasion failed, I waited here, expecting representatives from your government to arrive, so that I might explain myself to you and offer you the advantage of what Builder technology remains.” He frowned. “Unfortunately, when someone did come, it was not a representative of your government.”

  “Let me guess,” Vinnie said. “Yuri.”

  “He claimed to be an aid to your president, and with all the duplicates dead and you gone, Colonel Podbyrin, I had no way of knowing he was not. He promised to do his best to get your people prepared to face the Destroyers…and he asked for weapons.”

  “The nanovirus,” McKay assumed. “You made it for him.”

  “Not exactly,” Misha corrected him. “It was not one of our weapons…it was discovered in a cache left by the Destroyers. I gave him the location of the cache and he brought back a sample and asked me to build him the equipment to replicate it.”

  “How did you find out he wasn’t who he said he was?” McKay wanted to know.

  Misha grimaced distastefully, and McKay got the impression it was from anger at being used and deceived.

  Pot, meet kettle.

  “He wanted me to produce another duplicate of General Antonov. He said he’d use him as a propaganda tool to convince the people of Earth that the Protectorate was defeated…but when they were taking the duplicate out, one of his people let slip that they planned to use Antonov and the Destroyer weapon to depose your government.” He shook his head sadly. “After all the work I had done to strengthen you and prepare you, I had unwittingly sown the seeds of your destruction.”

  “Can you make a counter-agent for the nanovirus?” McKay asked the computer.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Misha admitted. “It was not one of our weapons, as I said. The only records I have of it show that our only recourse against it was to destroy it with high energy weapons. Not an elegant solution; but by then, we were stretched fairly thin.”

  McKay stared at the thing for a moment, trying to make his brain work.

  It’s all been a lie, he realized numbly. Everything that’s happened…all those people dead, and all for a lie.

  “Misha,” he said, “I can’t get a signal out from here and I need to report back before the others get worried and charge on in after me. I also need to discuss the situation with my superiors. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “I’ll be here,” Misha assured him. “Where would I go?”

  Then the avatar blinked out instantly, in a way somehow completely different than a hologram would. McKay turned to Vinnie, Jock and Podbyrin and motioned them back towards the exit, not trusting himself to speak. Podbyrin was still staring back at where Misha had been, tears streaking down his cheeks, when McKay put his helmet back in place and sealed it shut.

  * * *

  D’mitry Podbyrin stumbled along in a haze, hearing the voices in his helmet earphones but not registering what
they were saying, seeing people hustling around from one place to another but not understanding their purpose or destination.

  “…get a squad guarding that entrance,” a voice was saying that might have been McKay’s and he thought he might see the man talking to another figure in a suit of vacuum armor that might have been Colonel Mahoney. “I don’t want anyone going in there without my personal authorization.”

  Then McKay was right next to him, a hand on his arm, as if he’d appeared there by magic.

  “This way, D’mitry,” he said gently as he led the older man up the ramp into their lander.

  He settled Podbyrin in an acceleration couch just behind the cockpit, then stepped down between the pilot and copilot.

  “Everyone out,” he told them. “Seal the ramp after you.”

  Podbyrin leaned back in his seat, wanting to slide down farther but unable to because of his suit’s backpack. He wanted to slide down until he could go no further, until the universe swallowed him up and he didn’t have to look anyone in the eye ever again. He closed his eyes and behind him he could hear McKay speaking on the lander’s secure connection.

  “…is a fucking nightmare, Joyce,” the man was saying quietly, his voice weary. “I want to kill someone, but the ones to blame for all this died about 20,000 years ago.”

  “You’re in charge, Jason,” Admiral Minishimi responded after a moment, her usually sure and firm voice devoid of certainty. “What are we going to do with this?”

  “Send word back to the rest of the fleet,” McKay said. “Tell them to head back to Earth. We don’t need to tie up this many ships for nothing. I’m sending back most of the landers with the Marine platoons and the technicians, too. I’ll keep my Special Operations teams down here to pull security. After that…I need time to think.” A long pause. “And I want to talk to this…thing again. Before I make a decision, I mean.”