by P. K. Lentz
From her look, Zerouali seemed to expect some kind of reaction, but Kearn’s mind was too overloaded to offer one. He stared blankly until she went on.
“It could only mean that whoever or whatever created Prophet and the Drive cores possessed an intimate knowledge of ancient human culture. But not only that: consider also that after thousands of years of steady development, human science reached a plateau without ever making the slightest progress toward faster-than-light travel. Independently of the Prophet discovery, it still hasn’t. That, along with the suspect EM patterns, might lead one to conclude that the cores were...well, not real science.”
Once more Zerouali seemed to expect something from Kearn, but she gave up and resumed.
“Material analysis of Prophet indicated an age measured in millennia,” she said. “But when translight probes were dispatched to measure change over time in its emissions, they got a very big surprise. More than fifty light years away, there was no trace of it. Nothing at all. It just wasn’t there. Meaning, by the time Halo discovered it, Prophet had only been in existence for fifty years.”
The gleam in Zerouali’s dark eyes persisted well after she stopped speaking. Yet again she gave Kearn space in which to reply, but to his mild embarrassment he once more had nothing with which to fill it. He did wonder how any of what she was saying tied into the centuries-dead young woman a few feet away on the washroom floor. But he sensed that wasn’t the right question just yet.
Zerouali loosed a gentle sigh, more sympathetic than exasperated. “You don’t have to draw any conclusion from this,” she said. “No one really has. In fact, it’s exactly the lack of explanation that worries the Interim. If you consider the implications, it should be pretty clear why they’re desperate to keep it all a secret.”
Taking this as a challenge, Kearn finally shook off his daze and made a solid effort to respond, even if only not to seem like a complete dullard.
“A gift from the gods,” he said in a moment of surprising clarity.
Zerouali seemed pleased with the contribution. “Exactly. Gods are one of those things the Interim works hard to suppress. But if everything I just told you were to become public, they could never control the fallout. Prophet was sent by God, they’d say. There have always been harmless fringe cults devoted to the thing, but with evidence like this, suddenly God is back in the mainstream. The outbreak of religion would shake the Commonwealth, maybe even topple it.
“While I’m at it, I may as well mention another of the Interim’s dirty secrets, one that isn’t actually much of a secret to anyone who cares to notice. Their grand experiment is already a failure. The Commonwealth worlds are far from stable. They’re plagued by crises, upheaval and failed revolutions just like the rest. The statistics are classified, of course, but I’d be surprised if Social Engineering spent less than half its time operating on member worlds.
“But that’s something else entirely. On an even more basic level, Prophet’s secrets undermine the Interim’s very legitimacy. Even if you replace God with ‘godlike aliens,’ Prophet and its contents could only have been intended as a gift to humanity. All of it. In which case, the Interim monopoly is a crime against humanity.”
Zerouali’s final statement forced a scowl out of Kearn. “It’s a crime no matter how you look at it,” he said. “But you’re right. What you know would change everything. So why didn’t you transmit it to every corner of the Commonwealth?”
Zerouali sank into her soft chair. Her excited glow subsided. “As bad an idea as the Interim was and is, its collapse now would do more harm than good. Too many worlds depend on it, and not just within the Commonwealth. They have their hands everywhere. I can’t be responsible for the kind of chaos that might result from its downfall.”
“You prefer to be responsible for the chaos that comes from its existence? You saw what happened to Merada. You told me you’ve seen it before.”
Her eyes flashed with anger, which quickly calmed. “You didn’t save just one core, did you, Captain?” she said, almost accusingly. “You’re smarter than that. You saved two or five or a dozen. Why didn’t you use them to take down the Interim? Or give the cores, or sell them, to someone who would?”
Kearn gave her only a noncommittal frown. Zerouali didn’t look as if she expected a real answer anyway. She’d only meant to make a point, and it was one Kearn didn’t want to challenge for the simple reason that she was right.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know,” Zerouali came back evenly. “I think the two of us have one thing in common, Captain. We want only to live our lives on our own terms, without complication, without interference. That’s why I ran. Not to be a crusader or a revolutionary. And that’s why you’re the first person I’ve told any of this.”
“And if I choose to make use of it?”
“What you do with that knowledge is your decision and your own responsibility. I’ve carried it for a fair share of my life, and during that time I’ve asked myself a thousand times what was right, to speak up or keep silent. I suspect my dilemma, and my decision, were much the same as yours.”
With a nod Kearn accepted her observation. Then he changed the subject. “I’m surprised they didn’t shut down the Prophet site and kill everyone who knew.”
Zerouali smiled ruefully. “Maybe now they wish they had. I was very high up, though. Close to the top. When I retired in another fifty years or so, they would have secreted me away somewhere, carefully supervised but lacking no comfort.”
“You didn’t want to live out your life with your feet in some stream.”
She shrugged. “I might do just that. But I’ll choose the stream.”
To Kearn, this point required no explanation. Something else did. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.
Zerouali smiled anew. Kearn guessed that this might be the first time in many years that she had so yielded control of a conversation, allowing herself to be led. It was certainly the first time she’d done so since coming aboard Lady.
“I could tell you it’s because of Lisset,” Zerouali said. “But you’d know that for a lie since I’d already agreed to talk before we found her.”
She paused and looked away. Her smile melted. When she met Kearn’s gaze again, she was once more impenetrable. Or maybe not quite. There was a trace of fear in those dark eyes.
“You saved my life,” she said simply. “I know I haven’t really thanked you until now, but believe me I do realize it. And I appreciate it.”
From their somewhat awkward delivery, it seemed to Kearn that these words had not come easily to Zerouali. He could certainly relate to that.
“It’s nothing,” Kearn said dismissively. “I couldn’t have done otherwise. In fact, sometimes it seems like all the major choices in my life aren’t choices at all.”
Zerouali nodded. Her moment of weakness had passed, if weakness it had been.
“Anyway,” Kearn resumed. “You think Lisset is--what, an alien? A god?”
“I hope we can ask her ourselves. I’m anxious to meet her.”
Kearn glanced over at the washroom, where only a pallid ankle was visible through the open door. A touch of the corpse’s foul odor yet lingered in the chamber’s vigorously scrubbed air, but the two living persons present had long since adjusted to the smell.
“This is insanity,” Kearn said.
“Surreal, perhaps.”
“Call it what you want. It makes no sense.”
“I’m sure it makes perfect sense.” Zerouali sank heavily into her chair, settling in for a long wait. “Or, rather, it would if we saw the whole picture.”
“Is that likely to happen anytime soon?”
Zerouali inclined her head at Lisset’s corpse. “I think that depends on her.”
“So you’re really waiting for her to get up and talk?”
A simple nod. A few moments passed in silence. Kearn stood and walked to the washroom for another look.
; “She looks pretty well dead,” he said dubiously.
“Give it time,” Zerouali countered from her chair.
Kearn turned away from the nude corpse to pace the living area. A sudden restlessness gripped him. “We don’t have to just sit and watch her, do we?” he asked.
“Not if you have something better to do.”
Kearn halted by the woman’s chair. “How about dinner?”
Zerouali failed to look up or even break her expressionless stare at the wall. “I’ll get something later,” she said plainly. “Thank you.”
“Aren’t you hungry? Everyone is after hibe.”
An unnatural pause preceded Zerouali’s distant and formal, “Not really, thanks.”
Kearn shrugged off the defeat. He could see the woman’s guard was back up. She was her old self again.
“Well, comm me if you change your mind.”
With quick words of parting, Kearn left her alone. He accepted her rejection and managed not to take it personally. It fit in with what he’d already observed, that familiarity scared her. A spacer of all people could respect the defenses one built of necessity over a life spent constantly on the move.
Back in his own quarters Kearn hunted for a means to kill some time. He absently searched Lady’s datastores for the Earth musicians Zerouali had mentioned, but found only a phonetic match with some insect. Well, she’d said the references were obscure.
From there he began wading through everything he could find about old Earth, which was not terribly much. The strange and unlikely thought crossed his mind that maybe Lisset had been there. The time and distance involved seemed impossible. But, of course, impossible seemed a relative term of late.
There had long been whispers that Fleet had mounted translight expeditions back to Earth, humankind’s home before the Crossing had taken its seed, and its peculiar brand of madness, to more desirable galactic real estate. But such expeditions, if they’d occurred, remained the stuff of speculation. No findings had been released, at least none that had managed to find their way outside the Commonwealth and into Lady’s datastores. Maybe Zerouali knew more.
As he passed the next few hours sifting through miscellaneous and largely uninteresting data on Earth, Kearn drifted to sleep a few times. His eyes were bleary and his mind almost numb when Zerouali commed.
“Captain,” she said urgently. “Something’s happened.”
The words brought Kearn to life. He extinguished the screen in front of him and began a mad dash for the guest suite.
On arrival there, he was greeted by the sight of a live and naked--but still decidedly corpselike--Lisset hanging awkwardly from Zerouali’s shoulder. He stood dumbly at the entrance, watching the pair stumble toward the couch.
“I could use some help,” Zerouali said. “She’s not very graceful.” As if to prove that point, Lisset slipped from Zerouali’s grasp and plunged face-first to the floor.
Kearn raced over to grab one of the dead girl’s arms and heave her up. He winced with ill-concealed disgust on feeling her cold flesh slide easily over atrophied muscle in his hands.
Together they set the girl on the couch, where she lay unmoving but for the slow rise and fall of tiny breasts atop a starkly defined rib cage. Irrationally, Kearn wiped his hands back and front several times on his shirt after touching her.
“Clothes?” Zerouali panted. Her breathlessness likely came more from excitement than exertion.
“None here, unless you have something?”
“Only what I’m wearing. I’ll get a blanket.” Fetching one, she draped it over Lisset’s semi-animated corpse.
“You think she’ll want a drink?” Kearn wondered aloud, after several dull minutes spent watching the girl breathe. “I know I do. Something hard.”
No sooner had he said this than Zerouali gasped. Kearn looked over to find that Lisset had opened her eyes. It was among the more disturbing sights he’d ever witnessed--those two bright blue irises lodged in that pale, dead face from the past.
The girl lurched up into a seated position, the blanket crumpling into her lap. Her head flopped lifelessly on her chest, then snapped back to perch at an awkward angle.
Blue eyes shifted lazily back and forth between the two gawking onlookers.
“K-K-K-Kearn...” the corpse croaked. The initial sound stuck in her throat and sounded like gagging. After this her eyes, and only her eyes, moved to Zerouali. “Don’...‘member yooou,” she drawled in the spacer tongue.
Kearn could only stare. He managed a quick sidelong glance at Zerouali, who stood similarly transfixed.
Lisset emitted a string of disjointed words. They emerged in bursts from pale lips that scarcely moved. “Wait...hard...gotta...conc’trate.”
Her hand twitched beneath the blanket. Other parts followed until it looked as if her body were being jolted intermittently with electrical current.
This went on for a minute or so before subsiding. Zerouali took a hesitant step forward to reposition the blanket over the girl’s bare chest. Lisset didn’t seem to notice or care, alternating between blank stares at her audience and flicked glances around the room.
Zerouali knelt on the floor, squarely in front of the girl. “What are you?” she asked in slow spacer Galactic. Kearn had forgotten she knew that tongue; they had been conversing in Meradi.
The corners of Lisset’s mouth turned upward in a dumb, babyish grin. “Trouble,” she said. “Looooosing...”
Zerouali took the non sequitur in stride. “Losing what?” she asked.
The girl took her time answering. She seemed distracted.
“So close.”
“What? What’s so close?”
“Slipped in...tiny...expands. Undoes my work. Negates my influence. Clever. Can’t stop it...”
Ignoring this apparent nonsense, Zerouali changed tack, leaping straight to what she no doubt considered the most pressing question.
“Are you the creator of Prophet?” she asked.
A curl of Lisset’s dead lip conveyed something like puzzlement. “Prophet...?” she said. “Oh, that... S’pose.”
Encouraged, Zerouali leaned in and planted hands on Lisset’s lap. “What are you?” she demanded. “Why did you give us Prophet?”
Lisset’s dull features twisted in another smile. “I like you,” she slurred.
“I like you, too,” Zerouali returned, as if to a young child. “But we need to know what you are. What are your intentions?”
Lisset must have tried to shake her head then, but instead it only rolled a fraction to the left. “No m-m-matter now... Hopeless.”
“Maybe you should let her rest a little,” Kearn offered.
But Zerouali shushed him angrily without even a backward glance. “You said ‘influence,’” she went on calmly to Lisset. “What influence?”
The girl’s blue eyes drifted belatedly to Kearn, back to her questioner. “He right, need time... Better...soon.”
“We’ll help you all we can,” Zerouali said hurriedly. “But there’s so much we need to know.”
Kearn laid a hand on Zerouali’s shoulder and said, “Let her rest.”
Zerouali turned to whisper urgently at him, “We’ll get more while she’s disoriented!”
“No,” Kearn said firmly. “That’s my friend you’re talking to. Sort of. Maybe. I say we let her rest.”
“This is bigger than both of us, Captain.”
“I agree.” Kearn stared heavily at the recently-dead girl, who appeared to be practicing her motor skills with simple, jerky movements. “That’s exactly why I want to tread lightly.”
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Uriel. Home to fifteen billion souls, it was the first system that Daniel Sallat would betray his masters to defend. Whisper of Death, like nearly every translight warship in the Interim Fleet, had been loaded to capacity with planet-cleansing ordnance and assigned a string of inhabited systems for systematic extermination.
There were five systems o
n Sallat’s itinerary. Five that were safe. For now.
Uriel was not among them. Sallat wasn’t privy to knowledge of when or by what particular voidship Uriel was due to be cleansed, but he did know it to be one of those targeted. And its location relative to more than one Commonwealth world made it fairly likely to be among the first.
Whisper now stood in wait a few million kilometers from Uriel Prime, the system’s only inhabited body. Stealthed spysats were deployed over millions more kilometers, awaiting sign of an incoming Fleet warship. There was no predicting the path by which an attacker might approach the planet. Drive navigation was at best ninety percent accurate, necessitating travel in a series of ever-shorter translations followed by a final approach under conventional propulsion.
When the executioner did arrive, there would be little time to react. Ideally Whisper would destroy or disable the incoming vessel before it was able to fire ordnance at Uriel Prime. Under normal circumstances this would be a nearly impossible feat, but fortunately for Sallat, and for Uriel Prime, Fleet’s own orders gave a defender a fighting chance. The local Instruction & Guidance Commissions at the targeted worlds had been issued notice, albeit short, to evacuate any and all groundside assets. Upon arrival in-system, the executioners were to establish contact with the local Commission and verify evac before proceeding to bombard the planetary surface.
Command deemed such a luxury acceptable because, quite reasonably, they anticipated no resistance. But this critical delay would give Whisper a window in which to strike. Sallat’s plan was to jump Whisper as close as possible to the incoming vessel and fire a volley of stealthed antimatter warheads , weapons normally intended for use on groundside targets but which should equally suffice against another ship. In the vast void of space, where a ship’s hull was the only significant clump of matter for thousands of kilometers, even a near-miss with such arms could be lethal. With a clean hit, the targeted crew would never know what hit them.
Not surprisingly, official Fleet doctrine contained no reference to combat between two translight-capable ships. No doubt such tactics had been conceived at some point in history, but Fleet had decided, quite rightly from a political standpoint, that to make them public amounted to tacit admission that the Interim’s monopoly might fail.