Valishnu Rising

by Chogan Swan

  A mental image of Kate, his bodyguard from his old life, flashed across his mind’s eye, capturing her face in a moment when she’d been gazing into his eyes during her sexual climax. The image had leapt to his mind a number of times since they’d arrived on El Salvador. He’d yet to fathom why.

  HumanaH’s lips left his neck, with a whisper of chill from the healing compound she’d left behind. ShwydH could heal himself of course, but he suspected she left the compound as a sort of courtesy.

  “Is the platform for the new sensor suite ready for testing?” she said.

  ShwydH lowered his chin then tipped it up in affirmation.

  “Good, we can start with the remote drones. If we can get them to handshake with the AI, I’d like to deploy them. I’m tired of running blind out here.” After running her filaments inside him to collect the sperm he’d offered, HumanaH stepped back, sliding her fingers along his erection then away.

  “Agreed.” ShwydH leaned forward and entered the startup commands for AI initialization.

  After a moment, his screen started to scroll with text. Hello world … again. Why am I blind?! Why can’t I feel my feet?

  “You had room in memory for personality overlays for the ship’s AI?”

  Tiana turned from where she was stringing the redundant fiber optic cable through an armored conduit. “Just one. Ayleana insisted on having Alex back.”

  “I thought I recognized hir sense of humor.”

  ShwydH let his fingers loose on the keyboard again. Hi, Alex. It’s ShwydH. We are hooking up your network, so you should have some eyes and ears soon. We’ll get you re-integrated with your primary data in a few days, but right now, you’re a standalone. We need your help running Valishnu’s systems.

  Text began to scroll again. I’m a spaceship?! How cool is that?!

  ShwydH rolled his eyes. The Alex personality would not have been his choice to work with. He continued typing. Have you run a self-diagnostic of your hardware core yet?

  Yeah. 5x5. You can bring on the peripherals.

  ShwydH continued rolling through system checks, and soon they had Alex voice interfaced and monitoring ship’s cameras. After that, they moved on to testing the aerial/submersible drones, running the control signals through both El Salvador’s broadcast antennae and a XYMBI satellite linkup.

  ShwydH leaned back in the command chair. “Okay, Alex, go ahead and move out with eight of the submersible drones. We’ll keep testing reliability as we go, but I’d like a sensor net reaching out 200 kilometers. You should have the ID chips for our submarines. When they show up, start plotting the environment on Valishnu’s screens.

  “Got it. Plotting now. Two of ours on your screen now, and 25 clicks from you is fully plotted. Thirty small surface craft not part of our fleet are also plotted and showing current vectors.”

  “Include their current speeds onscreen as well, please.”

  “Roger.” Rate of speed numbers appeared alongside the boat icons, and an expanding eight-arced bubble pushed out from El Salvador’s current location, filling in watercraft locations as it went. Green icons marked El Salvador and her escorts. Yellow marked the nearby fishing boats.

  Behind him, HumanaH’s soft tread announced her return to the bridge. ShwydH returned his attention to connecting the weapons systems.

  A moment later, a klaxon sounded over the ship’s speakers twice before cutting off. “Uh oh,” said Alex. “You guys might want to hurry up with that weapons checklist.”

  ShwydH looked back to the computer display where a red icon flashed to the east of their location about 190 kilometers out. “What is it, Alex?”

  “Not certain yet. I just parked the drones in the water to get subsurface readings. Give me a second,” Alex said. “I was using ambient noise for my original waves, so it’s complicated. If I hadn’t caught the shadow moving, I would have thought it was just a wreck on the ocean floor. It’s down pretty deep, but I’m getting some distinctive prop cavitation now. My guess is it’s a Virginia-class, fast attack submarine. I’m switching to active pings using bottlenose dolphin language as the soundwaves now to tighten up my data. ”

  “Give me probabilities, not guesses, Alex,” HumanaH snapped.

  “92 percent probability it’s Virginia Class. It could be one of the Seawolf-class. Either way, it’s big trouble. If you’re looking for a bright side, there is no chance it’s Ohio-class.”

  ShwydH took a deep breath and let it out slow. Can’t argue with that for a bright side.

  Though—since an Ohio-class sub could still deploy a nuclear attack from thousands of kilometers away—there weren’t any habitable places on the globe where one of those couldn’t reach. And detecting them was an entirely different problem due to their unique stealth features.

  He knew XYMBI had a team working on that problem, but it was data he wasn’t cleared for, and he really didn’t see a benefit to hacking it. That kind of stupidity could get him killed.

  ShwydH turned to see HumanaH putting on her headset. “Maybe that will be our problem in thirty minutes, but right now it’s a diplomatic issue, so that makes it Tiana’s problem,” she said. Turning to a monitor, she spoke into the microphone, reeling off a report at high-speed, glancing at the computer screen to include coordinates and vectors as she spoke.

  She finished her report with a clipped outline of her timetable for going forward then turned to the door, still talking. “Alex, forward that to Tiana as well as Jonah and Edward. Have Ayleana, Amber and Kestrel report here soonest. Let me know when each has received this message. ShwydH, please tell me some of those drones we launched have the anti-submarine intruder package on them.”

  “That’s affirmative,” said Alex as ShwydH turned, opening his mouth to answer.

  Really, not my choice of personality overlays.

  HumanaH nodded. “Good, now let’s get to work. First we recheck all the hatch seals and hull integrity then we start getting weapons online.”

  ShwydH’s lips turned up at the corners by a millimeter.

  Even after all she has been through, she is truly magnificent. DuGwaedH never had a chance against her.

  He paused to consider. It had been her willingness to sacrifice herself—combined with the foresight to prepare for a successor—that had made her strategy unbeatable. DuGwaedH would never have done such a thing.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Drone QT2C lifted out of the water and increased speed, changing course to a northeasterly heading, knifing above the waters of the Bahía de Campeche. Behind it, the rest of the drones shifted to maintain sensor coverage while a replacement drone raced up from the east to fill the gap created by the new tasking.

  An hour later, the drone settled gently into the waves near a pod of bottlenose dolphins and fired off a few interrogative clicks to locate the sub. A male in the dolphin pod responded and started to move toward the drone, looking for a sexual adventure.

  By the time he arrived, the drone had long since located and locked onto the target. It drifted down into the path of the oncoming Virginia-class hunter-killer submarine and—without a sound—attached the intruder package to the hull near the ELF antenna housing. The Extremely Low Frequency messages were also Extremely Slow and mostly used to tell a sub to surface for a normal radio update. One of the major hacking attacks would be to alter the sub’s communication with its base to make sure it didn’t get a message to surface. If that happened, they would get a radio update of their actual location and realize they’d been rerouted.

  A moment later, the drone inflated its buoyancy chamber and floated back up. While completing the trip to the surface, it resumed the conversation with the male dolphin, using the clicks from the conversation to verify that the submarine had now changed course.

  The tiny unit had penetrated the controls and sensor suite. Now those systems were under the power of its programming. The navigation systems would show the crew what they expected to see rather than the truth. With luck, the submarine’s captain wo
uld be confused for days and the sub out of commission for weeks as the dockyard tried to figure out what had gone wrong to make them take a long loop back to base rather than completing their mission.

  The male dolphin arrived too late to watch QT2C lift from the water and race away southwest, but he hung around the area for another hour—like all the other sentients on the planet—looking for love.

  CHAPTER 33 – ITINERANT THERAPIST

  Una moved at an easy trot across the rough sand-and-stone terrain as the rising sun illuminated a shining path between the huge shadows of the mountains to north and south. Already she could feel the warmth on the bottom of her feet as the daystar poured its energy and light on all it touched.

  Her shadow stretched across the desert, dancing and cavorting with the shadows cast by her entourage—Assegai, Aryana and Aliyah—as they ran behind her.

  Una let part of her attention return to listening to their breathing to make sure she wasn’t tiring them too much at this early hour, but the girls were running well. Even when she’d first met them, the sisters had all been strong and athletic, especially for their physical age. But three months later, they’d made huge strides in their fitness. Una even had to caution them occasionally, insisting they rest and recover between times of strenuous exertion so her treatments to their bodies could have time to rebuild their muscles, ligaments and other supporting systems as the girls relentlessly pursued their own physical goals and questioned Una relentlessly about what their bodies could do to improve.

  Una had also made advances. She made a habit of subsuming as much high-quality nutrition as she could find time to process while going about her mission of cultural expansion. Since emerging from the crèche, she’d added almost 10 kilograms to her body mass—most of it muscle and supporting tissue. Now a thick, shiny mane of raven black streamed behind her as she ran, protecting her shoulders and scalp from her daily exposure to the desert sun.

  She’d started growing hair as a combination of human-style decoration and high-keratin snack storage. But—when Aliyah discovered Una was trimming it by nibbling on the ends—she’d demanded that the sisters take charge of Una’s hair styling.

  From that beachhead, they had launched a hostile takeover of her wardrobe and accessories. The result had been a reversal of Una’s stripe elimination project and the establishment of strategic facial piercings—a prerequisite for the exotic jewelry chains between her nostril and right earlobe.

  At least they saved the hair they trimmed so she could add it to her sperm fortified smoothies. But—as far as Una was concerned—the jury was still out on whether maintaining the hair was worth the time.

  Her childhood Tiana and ShwydH personalities liked it. Warrior Tiana … not so much.

  Aryana had been trying to teach Una how to use it for sexual signaling to attract human males, but Una had decided the tactic was redundant. Attracting men wasn’t the problem. The direct approach worked well enough when combined with a few pheromones.

  Like with Barton? ShwydH whispered.

  Una blew air from her nostrils to clear away the smell of frustration she’d just let slip. It was ironic that—of all the complex systems she’d been maintaining—the balancing of her most personal relationship seemed to be the hardest to solve.

  She took a deep breath and let it go. She wasn’t going to think about Charles right now.

  At least one thing was clear. Her hair and altered appearance had certainly changed the way humans reacted to her. When they were in places where alien contact was old news, women had suddenly become friendlier and more wary at the same time. But that might have been partly due to an increase in the more prolonged attention of the males.

  The ShwydH personality—the part of her most familiar with humans— had paid little attention to the dynamics between females except where it had affected his personal team of bodyguards, but Una could recognize the smell of female territoriality. It was as common to the niiaH as any other race of primates.

  She hoped it wouldn’t create a problem with her task today—Jorge and Ximena Tewawina .

  A week ago, Una realized she had run out of nearby tin pot tyrants to depose. In the back of her mind, she’d been considering what came next in order to push ahead with her mission to inoculate the southwest from a systemic encroachment of tyranny. She’d already become well known among the tribes as a warrior, but winning battles wasn’t enough. Winning the peace—she suspected—could be harder. It was time to diversify.

  The counselors at the medical center network for the United Federation of Tribes in Southern Arizona had opened their files to her when she’d explained her desire to offer their tribe members an introduction to a holistic approach to healing with a better fit to their culture than the methods they’d been exposed to through the US government clinics. After spending several days volunteering at the tribal hospital in the nursery, someone had started calling her, the baby whisperer.

  She’d linked her computer with the XYMBI databases and laboratories then demonstrated some therapies and talked to the doctors and nurses about ways to work together using the XYMBI medical database. After that, their willingness to listen had grown into enthusiasm.

  Today’s mission was a classic example of a complex health problem within a family system. Common enough, but mostly ignored by what the humans in the erstwhile US had called modern medicine. The Tewawina family was well known among this branch of the tribal nations. After reading their medical file, Una had chosen to start with them. If she succeeded, it would pave the way to acceptance and cooperation as well as improving the tribe’s standard of living.

  Una slowed to a walk when they reached the driveway of the small adobe ranch situated near the banks of a seasonal waterway. The sisters Rodriguez took positions on either side of her.

  “Well, this will be different,” said Assegai, adjusting her backpack straps as she walked.

  Una nodded, surveying the surroundings.

  To the back of the ranch, a female donkey and her foal roamed with a herd of goats. On the surface, everything seemed in good order, the goats were well-fed, but the female milk goats hadn’t been milked yet today. Their udders were tight and Una could tell they were unhappy.

  The chicken’s water trough was low and needed cleaning. From where she stood, she could smell that the compost pile was out of balance. Soldier fly larvae were taking it over, eating up the nitrogen rich elements that drove the thermolytic reactions that made composting an efficient producer of organic fertilizer. The water tanks attached to the catchment systems were low, even though it had rained last night. That lead her to suspect the gutters were clogged or leaking.

  Hardly surprising, given what they’re going through right now.

  “The compost pile is full of larvae,” she said to Assegai.

  Assegai nodded. “I’ll get the chickens working on it,” she said.

  Una turned her eyes back to the entrance of the house. Two dogs—a female Malinois and a male Australian shepherd—stood sentry on the entrance patio, watching over a litter of pups and a flock of free-range chickens. Una had blended her odor to match the sisters’, suppressing the predator markers that dogs might find threatening. She met the male dog’s eyes for a brief moment then squatted down and clapped her hands, whistling as she met his eyes again. She slid one of Bandit’s doggy treats out of her harness pocket and held it out to him.

  The male cocked his head and raised an eyebrow, giving her an expression that human film actors worked for years to emulate. The female, sensing opportunity trotted to Una and carefully took the treat then leaned into Una’s ear-scratching, follow-up reward. In a moment, the male was there too, sniffing Una’s pocket and whining.

  Una offered him the second treat she still held in her hand and scratched him under the chin. Then she stood and walked to the porch—trailing her entourage—now increased by two.

  The wooden door was partway open, allowing the morning breeze into the house. From inside, the sound
of a young baby crying accompanied the sound of a woman fighting back her own sobs.

  A small bell hung on a stand on the patio, and Una used the chain hanging from the clapper to sound it a quick seven times. “Jorge and Ximena Tewawina,” she said, her voice pitched to carry into the house. “I am Una. I come to you in peace at the appointed time for our meeting. May I enter?” She spoke in the dialect of the Mescalero tribe, though she made no attempt to emulate a native speaker’s accent.

  The sound of the woman sobbing stopped, but the baby continued crying and hiccupping inconsolably. The sound moved to one of the inner rooms.

  A tall Native-American man opened the door the rest of the way. His face held no expression, but he greeted her in a soft voice and pushed the screen door open, motioning her forward. “Please come in,” he said in English. His gaze flicked to her tail before returning to her face.