by P. K. Lentz
Gareth reassured Mela with a gentle hand on her hair, which she’d braided to make more manageable in zero grav. Spacers of both sexes invariably wore their hair cut very short for that same purpose, but cutting was hardly an option for Mela--not if she meant to keep her exploits secret from her slumbering family. Just as well, since long hair was one thing Gareth particularly appreciated on groundsider women.
“Of course the offer still stands,” he told Mela softly. “I just don’t want you to waste your time being upset.”
Just then Gareth was interrupted by a chime from the comm implant in his ear canal. A synthesized voice named the caller as Lady’s navigator, Rita Aprile.
“I’m sorry, I have to take a comm,” he said quickly to Mela, so as not to seem to be talking aloud to himself when he answered. “I’ll only be a moment.” Turning his back on the girl, Gareth switched from the Meradi tongue he’d been using into spacer Galactic. “What is it, Aprile? I’m a little busy right now.”
“No doubt.”
The dry insinuation in Aprile’s voice arrived undiminished by the distance it had traveled to reach him. Apart from the few seconds of transmission delay, his navigator on the surface of Merada sounded almost as near to him as Mela.
“In two hours I’ll come aboard with the last batch of passengers,” Aprile reported. “All accounted for.”
“And our hibe capsules?”
“Spoke to the workshop this morning. Just more excuses. Said they’ll deliver them directly to Lady.”
“The sooner we lock down, the sooner we can get this bloody Interim inspection over with and shove off.”
“I know. That’s why I offered them a bonus if the units reach Lady before I do. Hate to reward incompetence, but it beats more delays.”
“You’re awful generous with my accounts, Aprile.”
“You’re welcome to handle them yourself, Captain. But then you always seem to find other things to handle, don’t you?”
Gareth laughed discreetly, mindful of Mela’s presence even if she was incapable of comprehending what was said. “If that’s all,” he returned to Aprile, “I have some of those other things to get back to right now.”
Typically, Aprile didn’t laugh. Gareth wondered sometimes why, or if, she even liked him.
“Actually there is one more thing,” Aprile said. “I was given a comm disc addressed to you.”
“Strange,” Gareth commed back. “Anything important?”
“I wouldn’t know. Probably a damn marriage proposal. You want me to access it?”
“No, I’ll check it out when you get back. See you soon.”
A tone signaled abrupt termination of the link, letting Gareth return his full attention to Mela. Though the girl’s eyes were a touch pink from her earlier flirtation with tears, she seemed otherwise to have collected herself.
“Why don’t I take you back to your quarters,” Gareth suggested. “You can relax.”
Mela forced a smile. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay here. You can tell me where all the plants come from. Unless you have something else to do.”
“Of course not. I’d love to.” Clasping Mela’s proffered hand, Gareth pulled her deeper into Lady’s garden.
An hour later he helped the girl recover her shirt, which had become lost in a bank of Delthnian ivy.
***
CHAPTER TWO
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Interim Directorate of Research & Assessment
Ref. No. MK-21110-315
Type: Planet, Class 3
System: CX551-0315
Local designation: Merada
Interim registered designation: Merada
Dominant language: Leshtar (Interim designation: Meradi)
Tech Quotient: 7.1
Commonwealth Induction Quotient: 8.4
Revision date: I.0286
<
Merada is a temperate world of three major continents inhabited by some twelve billion individuals representing a wide cultural and ethnic spectrum. As with most worlds of diverse population, it has a history rife with conflict. However, Meradi civilization can safely be said to have passed through its period of existential danger, its last major geopolitical conflict having concluded some three centuries ago with casualties reducing the global population by one fifth. Most military action since then has taken place within the context of an emergent planetary government purging itself of reactionary elements.
One potential negative indicator can be found in the fact that some thirty percent of Merada’s population adheres to organized religion in the form of an obscure doomsday cult with supposed Earth origins. Since I.0109, Instruction & Guidance has adopted active and passive measures to contain it and discourage its spread.
A more immediate danger has been the significant presence on Merada of militant groups explicitly opposed to the planet’s entry into the Commonwealth. Such groups include at least a dozen distinct factions of both the isolationist and rejectionist varieties. The isolationist elements are the minority but tend to be the most proactive, employing violent means in an effort to sabotage Merada’s chances at induction. The most famous isolationist exploit was the successful bombing of Merada’s only interstellar spaceport in I.0184. The rejectionist factions, largely religious in origin, particularly oppose the Commonwealth’s prohibitions on the spread of superstition. Groups of this second variety tend to be highly subversive and well organized, preferring long term objectives to more immediate and visible ones. Social Engineering Service has been deployed on a small scale in the past to assist Meradi authorities in the suppression of these elements, an endeavor in which the planetary government has proved highly cooperative.
<
Despite some negative indicators, the potential for catastrophic reversal in Merada’s social evolution remains slight. In all likelihood Research & Assessment will recommend Merada for Level 4 Provisional Commonwealth partnership at the next Expansion Conference.
[Detailed entry follows.]
***
Several kilometers from the site of the ambush on his Social Engineering team, Erick Fyat pulled the nondescript land cruiser onto a deserted side road. He and Coleridge had escaped the city limits without apparent pursuit, but they were by no means safe. Repeated transmissions to Whisper of Death had yet to yield a response. The limited instruments at hand in their getaway vehicle suggested deliberate interference--EM screamers or some other form of electronic warfare. Whatever the cause, it was depriving them of direction and backup.
To complicate matters further, five minutes ago Coleridge had begun to weep. Her behavior, steadily declining since her injury in the park, now verged on hysteria. It had been her frantic efforts to exit the vehicle at speed that had prompted Fyat’s brief pause in their flight.
The moment the cruiser halted, Coleridge made another lunge for the door. Fyat grabbed her by the neck and yanked her bodily back into the cabin. Maintaining an iron grip on her, he produced a set of cord restraints from his belt and secured her single remaining arm and one ankle to the seat frame.
When Fyat finished and returned to the driver’s station, the female agent didn’t struggle against the ties but rather just issued a few light sobs. “I won’t go back,” she said mournfully.
Steering the vehicle back onto the road, Fyat answered Coleridge’s treasonous declaration with calm detachment. “I’m required to terminate you if you try to desert.”
With vague disinterest in her red-rimmed eyes, Coleridge nodded. Now that she’d been restrained her panic began to melt into something like resignation, at least insofar as a trained Social Engineer could discern two mental states that were to him little more than distant memories.
Sparing Coleridge just a glance or two in the quiet moments that followed, Fyat focused on the road ahead. Maybe some deeply submerged facet of his old personality compelled him to pity the woman, for at length he decided to offer her some explanation for the turmoil she was c
urrently experiencing.
“The damage upset a flow of chemicals to your brain,” he explained. “The effects are temporary. Once the balance is restored you’ll be good as new.”
“I won’t go back,” Coleridge repeated feebly.
“The same happened to me,” Fyat went on. “Long ago. I realized what I was, what I’d been doing. The same things you are realizing now. I made my decision to continue in the Service. As will you.”
Minutes later, as Fyat quietly drove on, Coleridge began to speak in a distant voice, as if to no one in particular. “I was twenty-two when I enlisted,” she said. Her stiff, burned lips made her voice a low monotone. “Thought I’d spend a decade or two seeing far places, then go home to Verond and use my pay to...I don’t know, start a family or a business or something. But now I’ve done fourteen ops on Verond. I might have killed people who knew me.” She paused and swallowed through her scarred throat before correcting herself. “--who thought they knew me.”
“You’ve done your duty,” Fyat said dismissively. “Whatever lives you took were for a higher cause.”
Coleridge frowned, pain and disgust twisting her half-face. “I’ve killed pregnant women, children, old men, cripples. Most of them only because they happened to be in the way. I could see every one of their faces now if I tried, except they have no faces. They were just colors on a thermal scan. And now they’re not even that. They’re nothing.”
Mouthing again and again her final word, ‘nothing,’ Coleridge lapsed back into trancelike silence. When she spoke again minutes later it was with renewed strength.
“I’m a citizen of the Commonwealth,” she said. “I have rights.”
“You waived them. Your chances of ending up in SES were small, but they did exist. If you weren’t aware, you should have been.”
“How? Civilians have no idea what we do. How could they? We don’t make newsfeeds, even when we operate on the homeworlds.” Coleridge stared forlornly out the window of the moving cruiser. “Home...” she said. “I have no home now. Look at me, I’m half a person and I feel no pain. We aren’t human anymore. We’re monsters.”
Her head sank against the glass.
“I won’t go back,” she pledged anew. “I’ll make sure you have to kill me. It’s what I deserve.”
Fyat didn’t argue. Privately, though, he found himself faced with a dilemma where there should have been none. He faced it not because of anything Coleridge had said--not just that, anyway. Rather it came from the unprecedented degree of freedom afforded by the comm breakdown.
Not since that day decades ago when he’d found himself in Coleridge’s current position had the idea of desertion even crossed Fyat’s mind. Such thoughts were irrelevant without the opportunity to act upon them. But now, with the omnipresent eye of Command temporarily blinded, there was such an opportunity.
For years after his own enlistment Fyat, like every Social Engineer, had been an obedient and amoral killer incapable of questioning orders. Then had come his single, bewildering moment of clarity, the one Coleridge now faced, the moment in which his true self had emerged from years of deep slumber to witness for the first time what it had become.
His own crisis had gone rather differently than Coleridge’s. Naturally, full cognizance had come as something of a shock, like waking from a long and elaborate dream. At first he’d felt betrayed: why hadn’t his superiors trusted him enough to let him serve unimpaired? Deeper reflection, though, brought acceptance. Acceptance that the Interim had done only what was necessary in pursuit of its goal. Acceptance, too, that this goal was a noble one. Every one of the bloody planetside ops in which he’d participated had in some way advanced the cause of peaceful unity for all mankind. And so, even with his independent faculties restored, and even after having been, in a sense, used, he retained the same sense of conviction that had led him to enlist in the first place. Social Engineering was a sometimes violent means to the Interim’s just and glorious end, the blade by which humanity would carve itself a brighter future.
Thus, of his own newly freed will, Fyat had subsequently renewed his dedication to that cause.
Since then he’d seen a thousand missions on a hundred worlds. Too often, though, when Fyat stopped long enough to consider, it began to seem they were the same missions on the same worlds, over and over again without end.
These seeds of doubt had lain dormant in his mind for years, he realized, but only now, outside the harsh glare of Command, did they have the chance to take root.
And they made him wonder. While Coleridge questioned the morality of their work, Fyat questioned its efficacy. However noble the Interim’s goal, could it ever be achieved? Had anything he’d done truly brought its vision closer to reality?
He had an unthinkable decision to make and little time in which to make it. But for the chance concurrence of Coleridge’s dysfunction and the loss of comm, he might have passed the remainder of his service without ever confronting these nagging doubts. But circumstances, it seemed, were conspiring to spur him to treason, even the thought of which was a punishable offense.
Halting the cruiser at the site of his decimated team’s enshrouded flyer, Fyat spoke words to Coleridge that sealed his fate. Upon speaking them he would be forced to summarily liquidate the woman or desert with her.
“After my own imbalance,” Fyat confessed, “I learned to disable the chemical flow. I’ve been myself ever since.”
Restrained in her seat, Coleridge looked over blankly. Her expression showed no hint of understanding.
“I won’t go back,” she said again, her voice a dull whisper.
***
Leaving Mela in her guest quarters, Gareth walked to the hub of Lady’s rotating habitation module and entered the lift to its axial shaft. His body’s weight yielded during the short trip, reaching zero by the time the doors slid open at the cylinder’s axis. En route to the bridge his comm chirped and Aprile’s voice sounded in his ear. The signal was weak and noise-filled, but managed to convey considerable exasperation.
“Gareth!
“Sorry, come again?”
“You haven’t
“You want to fill me in? Is it serious?”
Her response was riddled with static and likely profanities, but Gareth caught the gist of it: “--trying to contact you for an hour--aggressive jamming--pierced the heaviest of it--ETA twenty minutes--visual of the Fleet cruiser in orbit.”
Gareth’s lazy swim toward the bridge became a bit more urgent. “Give me a hint,” he commed back. “What is it?”
“Check the logs
“You’re scaring me, Aprile.”
“Maybe you need a good scare
“Ilias took them aboard a little while ago.”
“Glad something went right. When I’m
A tone signaled termination. Moments later Gareth hurried into Lady’s bridge, an empty hexagonal chamber of dull grey fibresteel, and activated the large main viewscreen.
It took him just a few seconds to call up a visual of the Interim voidship that had entered Meradi orbit five days ago. Whisper of Death, was it? Bloody Interim gave their ships such melodramatic names. If the owner of Lady of Chaos had any right to criticize.
When the visual did come up, Gareth could only stare. A massive field of debris surrounded the cone-shaped Interim vessel. At the heart of that debris stood a yawning black gash in Whisper’s hull.
In all his life Gareth had never seen an interstellar vessel deliberately damaged. But that’s just what this was, he knew it. The fact that it was an Interim warship made the historic first all the more historic. And dangerous.
He called up Lady’s sensor logs from the past hour. No visual record existed of the precise moment at which
Whisper had been damaged, but there was enough stored data to piece together what had happened. The resulting picture made Gareth more eager than ever to leave Merada far behind.
***
Right on schedule, a freshly returned Aprile sailed onto Lady’s bridge. Since Gareth had last seen her groundside she’d shaven back to a fine stubble the sandy hair that he’d convinced her--bribed her, actually--to grow out during their months of leisure on Merada. But if he’d was going to tease her about it, it would have to be later. Right now they both had more pressing concerns.
“What the hell happened?” Aprile asked urgently.
Calling up the relevant sensor data on the main viewer, Gareth filled his navigator in. “The EM interference started with thousands of tiny detonations in Merada’s upper atmosphere. Screamers, apparently, intended to cut off groundside comms. A few seconds later, twenty ships from the spaceport and high orbit engaged their drives simultaneously on a common heading...” Gareth didn’t disguise the note of admiration that touched his voice as he finished. “Straight into Whisper of Death.”
Aprile studied the display momentarily before switching back to a realtime feed of the damaged warship. She zoomed on the gaping black wound in its rear quarter.
“Whisper evaded most of the ships,” Gareth went on. “Whatever Fleet uses for defense screens neutralized most of the rest. But at least one made it through, and with a payload of antimatter by the look of it.”
“Damn,” Aprile said in awe. “Wonder what’s going on groundside. Seemed quiet enough when I left.”
“I’m monitoring what channels I can for details, but so far nothing helpful. Whatever’s going on, Merada isn’t a good place for anyone to be right now, not least us. I’m halfway inclined to just shove off. Screw the inspection. Who knows how long it’ll be now before they grant any clearance.”
“I’d like nothing more,” Aprile concurred. “But if that Interim ship didn’t vaporize us on the spot, they have translight. They’d have years to intercept us and no trouble doing it. Leaving now will just make it seem like we have something to hide.”