by Barry Kirwan
The pain returned as soon as the show stopped. “Well? What’s it to me? Or you, even?”
The Hohash vibrated, oscillating slowly to the left and right.
“Are you going to show me or not?”
A single image formed: a noble ship sculpted from a dream, bold contours of ivory, gold and emerald. It dissolved.
“So, good guys and bad guys. Want me to choose? Don’t you know me yet?”
It approached her side on. Its leading edge nudged her right elbow. Fuck, you’re shitting me! Despite reservations, she curled her fingers around the outside rail-like edge, and gripped hard, clamping her jaw down. She took a breath.
Her scream cut off just after the tchum sound of her shoulder snapping back into place. The pain miraculously ceased.
“Thanks,” she gasped. “But just so we know where we stand, I have more in common with the first guy you showed me.”
The Hohash sped to the bridge. She trailed after it, kicking aside the remnants of her shattered flamethrower. Upon arrival, she felt goose-bumps signalling a jump initiating. She had just enough time to notice two pieces of information from the displays. The first was their destination – though she had no idea how the Hohash had set it. They were going straight to Micah’s location, using a complex multi-jump process that wasn’t in the Q’Roth handbook. What Level are you, anyway? The second was the ownership registration of a docked vessel the Hohash had highlighted: Esmeralda Alessia Carthagena.
A smile etched across her face. “Micah and Sister Esma. Must be my lucky day.”
* * *
The Ranger Ukrull made a clicking sound with his jaw, entering the hyper-transit sequence. He’d seen the deposition already: he would be a key witness. His superiors weren’t too happy about that; Rangers were meant to be impartial, in the background, unseen.
However, now that he had finally gotten what he’d wanted, to properly evaluate this race once and for all – he was reluctant to leave Ourshiwann’s orbit. Initial promising signs of recovery for humanity had stalled, sliding backwards into typical Level Three despotic tendencies, and would inevitably lead to a cycle of civil wars, depletion of planetary resources, followed by extinction through a process of attrition. Grid Society levels of intelligence weren’t about individuals – there were always statistical aberrations, geniuses even, in any species – there had to be collective intelligence too. If the species was locked into self-destructive and recidivist behaviour, then Grid society might order it culled – pruned – to protect the larger society from too many weeds. But some indicators, small-scale parameters at present, could turn the tide. If asked to give the assessment right now, he would say that there were the beginnings of Level Four tendencies and thinking. Humanity, as it called itself, was on the cusp of ascendance, but it could go either way. He growled and flicked a claw at the console. His ship vanished.
As he hummed through Transpace, he realised another source of his reluctance to go back. The Hohash. He hadn’t reported finding them yet, and there would be a Tla Beth presiding over the court. That was going to take a little explaining. As he warped through the multi-transit sequence, he detected another vessel inbound, also on a hyper-transit approach, which required Tla Beth authorisation, as it stretched and occasionally tore sub-space fabric. His ship was cloaked of course, but he could scan the other vessel: Ossyrian. He was about to stop scanning, since they held little interest for him, when he detected human life-signs. He corrected himself – one of the life signs was no longer human, but a hybrid. He sat up when he saw the level indicated. His jaw approximated a grin, and he whacked the Bartran with his claw, making it yelp and exude more pus than usual. Ukrull kicked back in his chair, grunting and snorting with pleasure. His tail curled and twitched. Interesting, very interesting.
PART THREE
THE TRIAL
Chapter 24
Event Horizon
Micah stood mesmerized by the blue-green globe as it rolled in slow motion around the funnel suspended in space beneath them. It was an illusion, a macro-hologram of some sort, but looked incredibly real. The outer rim of the inverted, thundercloud-grey cone appeared hard, ceramic; he almost expected to hear a grinding noise as the replica of Earth toiled its way around the circumference. Towards its centre, the funnel descended like a gaseous whirlpool into darkness, a faint fire-light glow reaching up from its core. He didn’t need to be Level 4 to grasp the implication.
The ball resembled Earth as it had been – trawled from one of Zack’s memories, no doubt – not the post-nuclear orange dustbowl which Micah remembered most clearly. Staring at it, he felt hollow, with an attendant nausea. All that remained of his world was a pale echo of humanity’s home. He gazed upon the treasure they had squandered. It was too easy to blame everything on the Alicians. They were a contributory factor, but humanity’s inherent weaknesses had facilitated its own downfall.
He tugged his eyes away from paradise lost, and tracked across to the far side of the vista, to a graphite ball scarred with glowing scarlet rivers. Pinpricks of blood-coloured light stabbed out from the planetary simulacrum. He imagined a sea urchin whose spines had been ripped off, oozing its life force into naked space. Far above that ball, on a platform higher than the one for him, Sandy and Ramires, stood two Q’Roth warriors. They looked more powerful than the ones he’d seen before, their lower legs splayed, and their mid and upper legs folded together in an Escher-like snake pattern. They were completely immobile, but he had the sense they were somehow spitting on the humans who had slain their ambassador. To his far right, on a small disk, Zack’s Transpar stood as if to attention – like Zack never had – emphasising that this was no longer Zack, just an alien replica. Micah’s friend, and mentor, was gone.
He noted that the three parties – humans, Q’Roth, and Transpar, were at three cardinal points of the compass. He looked to the logical fourth point, but there was just empty blackness, no walls in any direction, only darkness framing his opponents, the Transpar, and the swirling funnel.
“Is the judge late?” Sandy inquired.
Micah shrugged without turning to face her. “I don’t know, Sandy, nor does my resident, in case that’s who you’re really asking.” It came out ruder than he’d intended.
“Okay, then tell me something you do know!” Her voice ramped up a notch in sharpness. “What is the attraction between you and Alician women, Micah?”
“Sandy,” Ramires said, trying to placate her. Ramires looked more brittle than usual, a warrior longing for battle, rather than languishing in legal proceedings. He kept glaring across the funnel to his enemy, forearms and thighs taut as razor wire.
Micah turned around to face Sandy. He hated it when she was like this. But he knew she wouldn’t stop till blood had been drawn.
“No,” she said, “I really want to know. First Louise, then Hannah. What is it with you and the betrayers of humanity, Micah?”
“Wait a second,” Ramires said. “Louise?”
Micah didn’t flinch.
“Sure,” Sandy said, hands on hips, “I had a ringside seat.”
“You didn’t have to watch,” he said quietly. “And I didn’t know she was –”
The parry-and-strike was swift. “But Hannah, you knew she was Alician, party to genocide on Earth, let alone Rashid’s ship. Didn’t stop you, did it?”
He saw more hurt than anger in her eyes. He wanted to say that Hannah had tricked him, but it would sound pathetic, and she’d never believe him. Distant images flooded back to him, viewed through the night-time balustrade in his childhood home, when his parents thought he was asleep, peering through the wooden rails as they rowed over his father’s latest indiscretion. Micah had watched it play out a dozen times, maybe more: the accusations, the denials, the confessions, the pain his mother endured, written all over her face, and his father’s coolness, the knowledge – no, the confidence – that she would never leave him, so he could do what he wanted. And the two words that would always end the scene... Micah had sworn
a hundred times as a boy that he would never be like that, would never utter those two words if the situation arose. But nothing else came to mind. They slipped out. “I’m sorry.” He unfolded his arms, so that they hung loose.
Her nostrils flared, and her chest heaved, but Ramires laid a hand on her forearm to still her. “Look,” he said, nodding to the far side.
Micah reluctantly broke off from Sandy to see. The two balls were still circling in the same direction, the Q’Roth home planet having moved a few degrees around the circumference as far as he could judge. Then he saw what Ramires had noticed. He backed off a pace. Between the two Q’Roth warriors, three times their height, stood a giant Q’Roth, its trapezoidal head red with black slits, the reverse of the warriors’ coloration. Its bloated, purple ribbed belly curved down to the floor supported by two ramrod straight, sturdy legs. Its four other legs looked puny by comparison, protruding from its mid-section like useless appendages. It glared at Micah and the others, excreting pure hate. Beneath its loins, half the size of the warriors, Sister Esma appeared in a burgundy cloak.
“Q’Roth queen, and Alician queen bitch,” Sandy said. “We must be on the Galactic A-list.”
He glanced at Sandy. Humour – even the sardonic wit variety – was a good sign, and he needed all of them to be on the same side. He detected a fine inverted triangular film hanging behind the Queen’s frame, and decided the Queen had wings, which wasn’t good news. Doubtless she would have liked to fly across and finish them off herself. He planted his legs firm, and stared right back. He felt Sandy’s hand on his shoulder.
“Apology accepted, Micah,” she said quietly. “But you fuck another Alician and I’ll kill you myself, understood?”
He nodded. “Sounds reasonable.”
A new disk arrived close to Zack’s Transpar, carrying an upright lizard, slick brown all over except for glimmering black thorns running from its crown to the tip of its tail. Its forelegs folded onto the ground so that it looked relaxed, bored even. Its smouldering yellow eyes stared forwards, though Micah had the impression it took in everything around it.
“Ukrull, the Ranger.”
Micah and the others spun around to see a lime-green Finchikta hovering behind them. Micah tried to focus internally, but nothing happened.
“Your resident has been disabled for the duration of the trial. I will translate the proceedings for you.” Its head bobbed like an albatross, though he guessed this creature was vastly more intelligent. He could barely make out the thin line where its upper third eye remained closed. When it spoke, its beak barely opened, but its two sharp orange eyes blazed. The Finchikta’s hundreds of green vermicelli-like legs did not quite reach the ground, hanging like a curtain over its nether region.
“Counsel for the defence?” Ramires asked.
“In this court, there are only truth, causes, context, and consequences,” it replied.
Micah wanted something clarified. “The funnel – what’s the significance, if the representation of our world disappears into it?”
The Finchikta bobbed slowly. “A good question. In your world you represent justice by a set of scales, which can tip either way. But that implies justice can be wrong, that verdicts can be revoked, since scales can be tipped back again. Grid justice, as you may understand it, does not entertain reversals. Once either your globe, or the Q’Roth’s, dip beneath the event horizon of the funnel, the case is lost permanently. There is no appeal. Execution of sentence cannot be stopped.”
Micah stared out at the swirling vista, suddenly concerned that maybe this wasn’t just an image. “But still, it’s only symbolic, right?” He hoped that whatever happened here, today, that Blake and the others on Ourshiwann might still have a chance to escape or at least defend themselves.
The Finchikta bobbed again, deeper, which Micah interpreted to mean he’d asked another ‘intelligent’ question. “It is mostly symbolic.”
He didn’t like the sound of that.
“Where’s the judge?” Sandy interjected.
“Arriving,” the Finchikta said, orientating its beak upwards.
They spotted something descending from way above. At first Micah couldn’t make out what was inside or riding the waves of rainbow-light, but as it got closer, he could pick out the details. Around thirty vertical rings circumscribed the main body, waves of fluorescent light surging through them. Inside the rings was a rounded hourglass shape which barely moved, except that the dark colours in the lower half sometimes squirted up into the lighter upper half of the hourglass, exchanging and sending lighter colours down through its narrow ‘waist’. It made Micah think of some night-time sea creatures he’d once seen, but his analytical mind dredged up a deeper analogy, that of the yin-yang symbol. He realised why, as he noticed a white patch in the lower, dark area, and a black one in the upper, lighter half. He recalled what his Zen master had said once about the symbol: “Most people only see black and white; they forget about the white dot in the sea of black, the black dot in the white portion. In nature there can no more be pure good than pure evil; in the heart of evil there is a speck of good, and vice versa. Nature abhors ultimate states.” Micah found the image fitting for a Galactic judge.
“At least it’s human size,” Sandy said. She placed herself between Micah and Ramires and put a hand around the waist of each. “Whatever happens, gentlemen, it’s been … interesting.”
An overwhelming impulse overtook Micah, to reach out to Sandy in some way, without offending her or Ramires. He leaned forward to her left cheek and deposited a soft kiss there. She didn’t pull back. Ramires shifted from one foot to another but said nothing.
“It has begun,” the Finchikta chirped in a crisp tone, drifting to Micah’s side. Sandy’s hand slipped from his waist, and he faced the Tla Beth, some thirty metres away, its aurora ebbing into a penumbra of rippling pastel shades.
“You will now bear witness to the charges,” the Finchikta said.
Above the funnel, a swirling spiral of myriad stars appeared. Micah immediately recognised it as their galaxy, the Milky Way. A scalpel-sharp white mesh etched its way outwards about a third of the distance from the galaxy’s white hot centre. The pattern was complex, like some kind of blueprint, but there was a design to it. As it stretched out like vines along a number of the spiral arms, Micah realised it was the Grid, the transport system that was the paragon of Galactic infrastructure, enabling its society to function. It reached fully half the galaxy, a criss-crossing net of curving and intersecting conduits: a skeleton framing the stars. A blue dot pulsed on one of the spiral arms remote from any grid lines or nodes.
“Your planet, the one you call Earth. Here is the latest recorded image.”
His jaw fell as an image of a charred, ocean-less, dust-coloured ball loomed large in front of them. He felt as if someone had just punched him in the stomach.
“The atmosphere was purged to reduce the radioactive poisoning. It will recover faster this way. In ten thousand of your years it can be terraformed and replenished with life.”
“Bastards,” Ramires cursed.
The Finchikta peered around Micah to see Ramires. It cocked its head. “I assure you the Q’Roth have followed strict protocol. Atmospheric removal is recommended in case of nuclear fallout, once radiation levels reach a certain point, to prevent planetary rot setting in. The world is then left fallow for a set period, after which time it can be used for resettlement of a displaced race or one requiring more room.”
Sandy whirled around to the Finchikta. “It was our home! Billions of people! Not to mention all the animal life! Who gave them the right?” She pointed to the Q’Roth platform. “You’ll pay for this one day, even if it takes a thousand years!” she shouted in their direction. She added quietly, just for Micah and Ramires’ ears: “They hibernate a long time, that’s when we’ll find them.”
Micah gazed toward the judge. A line of fire unfurled from the Tla Beth like a whiplash, latching onto the head of Zack’s Transpar.
“The judge is interrogating the human version of events.”
While the line connected the two, another dot glittered, very close to Earth. “Eden,” he whispered. The image zoomed in, so they could see this sector of space in more detail. Four blue dots zigzagged from Eden towards another distant ball he knew must be Ourshiwann, still far out on the spiral, and a long way from Grid access. A red dot intercepted one of the blues, and was extinguished. The fireline connecting the Transpar with the Tla Beth dissolved. A new one lashed out to Sister Esma, taking her by surprise. Her haughty stance wavered as her face disappeared inside a fist of fire-light. Her body arced as if she was being electrocuted, her arms and legs stretched out to maximum.
“About fucking time,” Sandy said. “Fry her, please.”
“What’s going on?” Micah asked, glancing at the Finchikta.
“She is being questioned. I have partial access as court official. She sent the one you know as Louise after you, but sabotaged her ship before she left so she could not hope to return to the Alicians. The Alicians made a deal with the Q’Roth a thousand of your years ago to dispose of humanity’s nuclear and nanotechnology, and to bring humanity to Eden. They instigated your third World War. They…” The Finchikta’s beak clamped shut.
“What?” Sandy and Micah said at the same time.
The Finchikta nudged a shoulder feather back into place. “They suppressed Level 4 emergents; co-opting those they found early enough into their order, terminating the rest.”
“This much we suspected.” Ramires said. He glanced at Sister Esma and spat over the side of the abyss. “Though we never knew the full extent.”
Micah gazed at Sister Esma’s taut body. Her face twisted in pain. Good, I hope it rips your mind apart. Abruptly the fireline dissipated, and they watched Sister Esma stagger, nearly collapsing. Her face had paled, and she looked shaken. Neither the Q’Roth warriors, nor their Queen, moved to support her. She gathered herself, and stared defiantly at Micah.