by P. K. Lentz
Now, in Sallat’s view, it had. And so a rogue Fleet captain and his crew waited not-so-patiently to engage in the first battle in human history to be fought between two Drive-equipped vessels.
The wait lasted nearly two ship-days, two days in which Sallat knew that other worlds were becoming the first, unfortunate prey of Freedom’s Reign. At last Whisper’s web of spysats intercepted an incoming comm transmission signed ISS Colossus of Argil. Whisper jumped, landing within several thousand kilometers of the invader, and fired four missiles. Overkill perhaps, but the enemy must not be left functional after the first volley.
The brilliant intensity of annihilation left the outcome in no doubt: target destroyed. Sallat wasted no time ordering Whisper’s subsequent leap out-system. He didn’t stop to consider the hundreds of lives he’d just snuffed out, or even the billions he’d just saved--billions that included not only the inhabitants of Uriel Prime but also all those of the subsequent worlds on Colossus’ deadly agenda.
More honestly, Sallat had not saved them at all; he’d merely earned them a reprieve. Whatever. It was unimportant right now. When this madness ended, if it did, then perhaps then one might have time to reflect and mourn. Right now, though, all participants in this inhuman game--the Fleet crew whose very atoms Sallat had just erased; the people of Uriel, who remained ignorant of a catastrophe narrowly averted; and the trillions of others who stood to die on other worlds--were mere numbers in an equation. The equation must be kept in balance.
***
Eighteen hours after her resurrection, Lisset was looking considerably less deceased. Her flesh, if still a bit on the pale side, appeared healthy. She wore ill-fitting clothes borrowed from among Serenity’s belongings.
Kearn and Zerouali sat with the girl in Lady’s guest quarters. Zerouali tactfully posed the same question she had asked almost a day ago.
“Please, tell us who you are.”
Lisset’s mouth twisted in a dismissive scowl. “I’m losing,” she said.
The fact that Lisset could now form words more readily, it seemed, was no guarantee she would make sense. Kearn had already decided to let Zerouali do the talking. She was the one with all the theories, and--Kearn didn’t kid himself on this point --her mind was undoubtedly sharper than his.
“Losing what?” Zerouali asked patiently.
Lisset let too much time pass between question and answer, as if half her attention were elsewhere. Her head flopped back onto the couch. Her body went limp.
“What happened?” Kearn whispered.
“Wait. She’ll be back.”
Zerouali was right. Some three minutes later, Lisset sprang back to life and regarded her observers as if no lapse had occurred. Yet she made no effort to answer the last question posed. Perhaps she had missed it.
“What are you losing, Lisset?” Zerouali repeated.
The girl’s bright eyes shone remorsefully from a face that looked suddenly ancient. “This envoy is strongest yet,” she said. “Has beaten me a thousand times. Will destroy me soon, unless I surrender.”
The cryptic pronouncements made little sense to Kearn. But an unfazed Zerouali continued to address the girl as if she expected a decent answer.
“Who will destroy you, Lisset?”
Several beats passed in which the young girl seemed she might again collapse. But she didn’t. She muttered distractedly, “Six hundred, six hundred.” Then she shook her head, exhaustion apparent on her undead features. “Can’t sustain. Must focus.”
Her head and limbs fell limp.
“Shit!” Zerouali said, an uncharacteristic outburst.
“I don’t suppose you understood that?” Kearn asked her.
“There wasn’t much to understand.”
“What does ‘six hundred’ mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what’s your guess?”
“About what?”
“Any of it! I’m lost. A girl whose corpse I spaced three hundred years ago just told me she’s under some kind of attack. I can’t begin to know what to think about that, so please tell me!”
Zerouali’s lip curled in a thoughtful frown. “I’m at as much of a loss as you are. But I will admit I don’t like how it sounds.”
“You think there’s reason to worry?”
“You said it yourself, Captain. A girl we know to be deceased regrew her body from a vial of DNA. I don’t pretend to know what Lisset is, but I don’t think we want to meet anything that she thinks can destroy her.”
The woman’s words brought Kearn to a reluctant but instinctive realization. “Another fugitive,” he lamented. “I’ve got another damn fugitive aboard, haven’t I?”
Zerouali hesitated. There was uncertainty in her eyes. “Actually,” she began at length, “I suspect she might be a danger to more than just your ship. Whatever battle it is she claims to fight might have stakes beyond our comprehension.”
“Stakes? What stakes?” Kearn asked, frustrated. “And what battle? She’s sitting on a couch in my guest quarters.”
“Not any battle we can see. Maybe not even one we’re capable of perceiving.”
Kearn sighed. “Doctor, with all due respect to your scientific credentials, which I’m sure are golden, I think you’re taking too much license. You want proof for your ideas, so you’re finding it. There has to be some more realistic explanation.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know, something we’re overlooking! Deception is my first guess. Insanity a close second.” This last, muttered addition was more expression of Kearn’s frustration than any real contribution.
“Captain,” Zerouali said, “apparently you’ve forgotten what she already told us. By her own admission, this being is the creator of Prophet and hence of translight. She manufactured a catastrophe aboard your vessel in order to cause its discovery. Now she’s returned from the grave. With all due respect to your credentials, what more can she do to prove she isn’t human? I would suggest that for lack of any better term, we might as well call her a god. Not in a theological sense, perhaps, but in the sense of a being whose nature and actions are indecipherable to us.”
God. The word gave Kearn a chill. He cast a long glance at Lisset’s inert form on the couch. From the look of her body it seemed she might have died again. Was this a god?
“I don’t know if I’m ready to believe that.”
“Understandable,” Zerouali offered sympathetically. “I only hope that if and when we are given proof, it doesn’t kill us.”
***
Sallat’s success at Uriel was followed by two more unequivocal victories in the span of eight ship-days. Fifty more hours under Drive and conventional propulsion brought Whisper of Death to Hualt.
Formerly home to a civilization of ten billion, Hualt was now a barren, dying world. Sallat regretted the waste of valuable time spent getting here. By now, warnings would have trickled out to Fleet warships in the field, and henceforth Whisper would have to be wary of ambush. Worse still, the executioners’ orders may now become ‘cleanse first, ask questions later.’
Where to go next, then, to catch an unprepared enemy and arrive in time to avert another holocaust? With each passing hour the likelihood of success grew fainter.
Of course, that assessment presumed a continuation of their current strategy. There was yet another, more daring option, a plan in fact conceived by one of Sallat’s aides. They could threaten the Commonwealth itself, deliver an ultimatum: call off Freedom’s Reign or Reissa will be the next world extinguished, to be followed thereafter by another and another of the thirteen. Even if the threats were idle, Fleet would be forced to recall most or all of its forces for homeworld defense. Reissa might be blackmailed into exercising reason, at least for a while.
However, there was quite an ethical leap to be made from preventing genocide to committing or even threatening the same. If it came down to it, Sallat wasn’t sure he could give such an order. Killing Fleet crews to prevent an impending
crime was one thing, terrorizing sixty billion civilians quite another.
Regardless of whether he could bring himself to act on the threat, the ultimatum seemed a wise strategic move. Sallat retired to his office to compose the necessary translight beacon.
Just as he began, his display went haywire. A single entry from the Catalogue of Inhabited Bodies sprang forth unsummoned. He dismissed it. It returned.
By the time Sallat had cleared his screen for the third time, a vague sense of deja vu had become outright flashback. It had been a similar glitch at Merada that alerted him to the bogus neurilace upgrade and ultimately saved Whisper from infection.
This was no glitch, Sallat concluded with a chill. There was intelligence behind this. Was it the work of Ascher’s phantom? Sallat could scarcely guess. If anything, the mystery had only deepened.
Of far more immediate importance was that Whisper now had its next destination.
Ona.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
<
Interim Directorate of Research and Assessment
Ref. No. MR-3351-277
Type: Satellite, Natural, Class 7
System: NG785-9953
Local designation: Ona
Interim registered designation: same
Dominant language: Thaniq (Interim designation: Onari)
Tech Quotient: 3.6
Commonwealth Induction Quotient: 0.6
Revision Date: I.0284
<
A rocky and barely habitable natural satellite, Ona houses a civilization founded by religious outcasts from the system’s major inhabited body, Delchet. From approximately I.-00228, in the face of persecution by Delchet’s emergent world government, adherents of an extremist religious sect began relocating unlawfully to Ona, the incompletely terraformed moon of the system’s gas giant. Less than a century later Delchet was ravaged by sudden and catastrophic magnetic field fluctuations, resulting in massive depopulation. Attempts by survivors over the next several decades to rebuild a viable population on the planet ended in failure.
Ona, now the system’s sole habitable body, rejected refugees from Delchet, often with lethal force. A century later it was Ona, the colony of exiles, which would begin the slow and methodical recolonization of its former homeworld.
Ona’s population of 1.5 billion is governed by a hereditary council of spiritual elders wielding supreme religious and political power. To perpetuate that power, the council employs social engineering on a massive scale. Male children are subject to postnatal gene surgery, advanced even by Commonwealth standards, which extends the recipient’s lifespan to some three hundred years, while females are left to live out a natural span one-third that length. The male-to-female birth rate is carefully controlled in order to maintain a stable ratio. The rationale for such manipulation derives from precepts of the state religion.
Unsurprisingly, the field of genetics continues to progress on Ona, a society in which technology remains otherwise deliberately stagnant. Limited outbound interplanetary space travel is permitted insofar as it advances the goal of recolonizing Delchet. What few vessels arrive from other systems are welcomed only in the hope that they contain useful cargo for trade. Offworlders are not permitted to set foot on the surface, and local women are not permitted to leave except those destined for Delchet. Females are not allowed out-system under any circumstances. It would seem that the architects of Onari society concluded, quite rightly, that large-scale exposure of its citizenry to foreign value systems contradictory to the state religion would undermine the ruling council’s authority and dramatically increase the likelihood of regime collapse.
Ona is at present a danger only to itself. Any organized attempt to export its religion by conventional means would be doomed to failure. However, were it to obtain translight in its current state, Ona would pose a threat of the highest order. Thus fundamental revision of Onari civilization must be considered a desirable outcome. To promote future stability, the collapse of the current order is being engineered along evolutionary rather than revolutionary lines. Instruction & Guidance has made gradual and steady progress on this path.
It should be noted that nearly every generation of Onari rulers has faced a social movement aimed at liberating Ona’s female population from ‘gene-slavery.’ Such movements have been entirely ineffectual, enjoying support from only a tiny fraction of the population at large. I&G monitors these cells and provides covert support where deemed expedient, but only as part of the longer-term strategy, not as a viable avenue for change.
<
Ona will certainly not be a candidate for any sort of Commonwealth partnership in the next five centuries. Interim presence for the foreseeable future will remain clandestine.
[Detailed entry follows.]
***
Miryth. Her name and face were fixed in Associate Director Liam Jagr’s head as he left the freshly concluded special session of Instruction & Guidance’s Ona Commission.
In just two of Ona’s days, Miryth would be dead. The special session had convened at Jagr’s own request to determine what, if any, action the Commission might take to prevent her execution. Jagr had argued for urgent intervention on the grounds that someone like her could potentially galvanize the small women’s underground on Ona. Already in her short life Miryth had become known in subversive circles planetwide for spreading forbidden ideas about female education, genetic freedom and social equity. For eight Onari years she had been a shadow, successfully eluding the civil-religious authorities with just the occasional, ever-so-subtle assistance from ‘on high.’ Not gods, but the closest thing to them.
Then, six days ago, Miryth had been captured. A sham trial held in secret yielded a predictable conviction on charges of apostasy and incitement to revolution. To ensure her proper demonization, the Council even managed to falsely implicate her in two assassinations they knew well to have been the work of other, entirely unrelated, forces. Jagr had argued that a successful rescue would humiliate and undermine the Onari establishment and make Miryth a hero of mythical standing. When next she chose to speak, Ona might listen.
His request had been rejected, for it ran counter to the Commission’s plans for Ona. The decision had been made long ago that the eventual reordering of Onari society would begin on the recolonized Delchet. ‘A frontier society in a geographically expansive space is the ideal breeding ground for subversive ideologies,’ they believed. Moreover, any premature emergence of a strong rebel element on Ona itself might backfire, convincing the Elders of a need to tighten their grip. In the worst case they could even abort the recolonization project, as some in power were already advocating. Ideally, in the Commission’s eyes, the Onari administration that eventually took root on Delchet would be arrogant, complacent, and ripe for collapse. In fifty Onari years the Commission would move its own primary base to Delchet, where the ‘real work’ would commence.
Within such a framework, the Commission could not afford to risk valuable assets in an action that might well prove counterproductive. Miryth, they had ruled, ultimately served their purposes better in death than in life. Jagr understood the reasoning but could not quite accept the arrogance with which his Interim consigned a brave woman to a miserable fate.
Monitoring Miryth and her associates had been Jagr’s special, if only semi-official, project for the whole of his four years in this post. Miryth didn’t know it and never would, but she was alive now because of him. He had prevented her capture on at least five occasions, through means ranging from well-placed warnings to outright acts of sabotage against her pursuers. Two of those interventions had been unauthorized, and if discovered would surely cost Jagr his career. Saving Miryth now that she was imprisoned, however, would be impossible without authorized allocation of groundside resources. The mission was too dangerous and too high profile. Miryth’s impending public execution was already the talk of Ona.
Sadly, it seemed that
this brave heretic’s invisible guardian would be powerless to save her this time. That knowledge kept Jagr from focusing on his work. Not that there was terribly much of it to be done, even by an Associate Director, in a backwater posting like Ona where progress was measured in centuries and the ‘real’ work hadn’t even begun.
Perhaps it was the lack of variety, or perhaps the isolation that had led Jagr into the trap into which he’d fallen, of feeling sympathy, even affection, toward one of his assignments. So much had Jagr come to care about Miryth, a woman whom he’d never met and never would, that he had even betrayed the Interim. Sometimes the realization shamed him but the truth was clear: his first loyalty was to her.
And now, as Onari men began to converge from far and wide on the capital city to witness Miryth’s ritual murder, there was but one thing on Jagr’s mind. How he might yet save her.
No viable option presented itself that didn’t require extensive groundside assets, something Jagr could not hope to accomplish without the authorization the Commission had refused.
And so as he waded through the day’s surveillance data, Jagr worked halfheartedly at best. He was taking a break when something of considerable interest came to his attention.
A ship.
Ona averaged only two or three incoming interstellar vessels per year, and dispatched none of its own. As a result, the monitoring of traffic didn’t even warrant an additional post in the Commission. The job was tacked onto Jagr’s own.
Several hours ago, a vessel calling itself Maseilya had contacted Ona’s port authorities looking to trade for fuel. There was nothing inherently noteworthy about that. Visitors to Ona were rare, but not extraordinary. This time, however, Jagr recalled a strange communiqué received some months ago from Fleet Command, a warning of a wanted ship fitted with an illegal translight drive. Had the alert not been so unusual, he might have forgotten it.