He got what she meant. The Noesis existed as a constant hum in the recesses of one’s mind, like a whispered, warbling song in round, unless you honed in on it with purpose. But sometimes an event—an emotion more often than a concrete thought—burst up out of the whispers with the subtlety of an out-of-tune horn blasting a diminished chord. If it related to you in any way—if it originated from someone you knew personally or affected something you cared about—you perked up and paid attention. Otherwise, you let it subside back into the hum.
He shrugged weakly. “Do you have something?”
“I do. It’s been altered extensively, mostly to better target our standard cybernetic operating firmware, but the base virus does originate from the Anaden.”
“Shit, Mia.”
“It’s conceivable there are other Anadens here and they’re targeting us, but it’s more likely the code derives from our dead specimen and the research they’re doing at ASCEND. Either way, the implications are not good.”
He accepted with a rush of relief this gift of one tiny thing he could do to help Emily. “Somebody sold out. Okay. Copy me everything you have. I’m sending it to Navick.”
ARCADIA
EARTH ALLIANCE COLONY
“We completed the forensics on the airlock hatch before docking the vessel, so we wouldn’t destroy any evidence.”
Richard nodded at the detective, a captain with the Arcadia civilian police. “Good work. The interior’s been scrubbed now, too?”
“Yes, sir. My people will have a final report for you in a couple of hours, but we didn’t find much beyond the bodies and a bunch of dead systems.”
He’d completed a cursory review of the bodies at the morgue before coming here, enough to confirm the blanket cause of death with the coroner. “Nevertheless, I want to take a look around inside and get a feel for the scene.”
“Understood.” The detective entered a code into the bay’s entry panel and the outer hatch opened. Richard fitted on a breather mask since the ship’s atmospherics were permanently offline then stepped inside.
Even devoid of bodies, the lack of lights, air and noise made the ship feel like the tomb it had been. Twelve dead mercenaries, all former Triene cartel members. The forensics team had been forced to manually locate the physical imprint of the serial number for the ship, but it came back as the Baladan, registered to Paolo Acconci, one of Aiden Trieneri’s top lieutenants before the cartel leader’s death. Mr. Acconci had now joined his former boss in the grave.
A vocal opponent of Olivia Montegreu’s absorption of Triene’s business and personnel, the evidence suggested the man acted as the driving force behind the takeover and sacking of the Zelones headquarters building in the aftermath of her death. For all the good it had done him in the end.
Richard’s gaze passed over the silent, dark cockpit. Dead mercs were nothing new—not even twelve at once—and ordinarily SENTRI would have passed the incident on to whoever owned jurisdiction, likely Arcadia law enforcement based on the location of the vessel when it was discovered.
No, what had kept SENTRI interested, and what ultimately led to him coming here from Cavare instead of returning to the Presidio with Will, was the manner of their deaths. Their cybernetics had been fried, catastrophically overloaded by an external power surge—very external. He couldn’t draw definitive conclusions this early in the investigation, but all evidence pointed to the source being the same EM burst that shorted all the ship’s systems.
The same evidence indicated the burst was delivered from outside the ship. The unlucky scout who found the wreck insisted the hatch had been firmly shut before he opened it, with no signs of tampering. No objects or bodies had been vented into space, and the lower cargo ramp was similarly untouched.
Ship-to-ship electronic warfare was nearly as common as dead mercs; entire squadrons of every military were devoted to the practice. An EMP device powerful enough to permanently fry every single system on a ship was rare technology, but they did exist. And it appeared they now existed outside the military.
Conversely, damaging a person’s cybernetics via forced electrical surge was becoming an all too frequent crime, but thus far it only proved feasible at close range. Prevos were able to do it by touch, and an EM grenade could kill an eVi’s operating system from up to twelve meters away.
He did recall several merc hits in the last year where the weapon of choice was a handgun modified to deliver a lethal EM shock. Though they’d found no proof, most if not all of the hits ended up attributed to Zelones agents. In fact, one such incident had occurred not far from this one…a military cargo transport ambushed on the way to Orellan, the crew murdered and the cargo stolen. He seemed to recall Brigadier Jenner had worked it. He made a note to pull the file and ask Jenner about it.
But to his knowledge, a weapon did not exist that could remotely overload a ship’s systems, breach the interior and fatally overload the cybernetics of every person inside, all while leaving the hull and structure of the vessel intact.
Of course, a lot of weapons existed today that hadn’t a mere two months ago. If such a weapon was running around in the hands of some tattered remains of the Zelones cartel or was being sold on the black market, he needed to know about it.
He started to head down into the crew quarters when a message came in from Devon Reynolds. Concerned it might contain word of a new attack or bad news on Devon’s girlfriend’s condition, he opened it immediately—then pivoted and hurriedly departed the ship.
The EMP mystery was going to have to wait.
PART III:
MOTES OF DUST
“The world will never starve for want of wonders;
but only for want of wonder.”
— G. K. Chesterton
AMARANTHE
15
NEPHELAI
MILKY WAY SECTOR 49
* * *
COSIME SAT ON THE RIM of the sheer glass ledge that encircled the tower, legs swinging with ever-restless energy high above the planet’s surface.
When Eren had gotten her message, he’d thought the meeting location an odd request on her part, as she couldn’t have acquired the explosives here. There was no black market trade on Nephelai; there was hardly a deli unit for visitors on Nephelai. When he’d asked, she’d claimed to be seeing to some other business and hadn’t elaborated.
Now that he was here, though—now that he saw her delighting in the particular spot she’d chosen—he got it. Regardless of what had brought her to the planet, she’d lingered simply because she enjoyed the open air and expansive sky. It was in her blood.
The Naraida had been discovered by the Novoloume during the latter species’ early days of interstellar travel. They were one of the few Anatype species unaffected by the Novoloume’s pheromones, which tended to send most others into a sexual froth on close exposure. The Naraida were intelligent and civilized, but they lived close to nature and were centuries away from achieving space travel, primarily due to the fact they had not pursued it.
Some of them, however, harbored a wanderlust which extended beyond the verdant forests of their homeworld, and they agreed to take on the role of non-bound servants to the Novoloume in exchange for access to the stars.
When the Directorate had come upon the two species several millennia later, it had swiftly broken the master-servant relationship. To Eren’s way of thinking, the message was clear: in Amaranthe, no one was allowed to subjugate except the Anadens.
The spot Cosime had chosen was located very high up the tower—so high the ocean and the massive pumps churning it were only visible through breaks in the clouds below them. Her spiraire tweaked the air she inhaled, so the thinness of the atmosphere was unlikely to affect her. His own respiratory system adjusted to such variations well enough, but he nonetheless felt the difference in a nagging desire to breathe in ever more deeply.
She canted her head back to gaze upside down at him as he approached. “You’re late. Another day and I was going to messa
ge Xanne to see if you got nulled being a show-off and were still rehabbing.”
“Sorry.” He settled down beside her. “I ran into a complication.”
“With the mission prep? Did you get the ship designations you needed?”
“Not exactly, and I did. Three vessels on the list should serve our needs, so I’ll see where they’re docked and choose whichever one is easiest to snatch. But I need to postpone the mission for a few days. Maybe a week.”
“Why? No way have you gone skittish, so what’s up?”
“I need to look into something, and I can’t afford to get nulled before I do it and lose a month.” He hadn’t realized he’d committed to helping them until he’d said the words.
“And if you get disintegrated doing this other thing and lose a month on our mission?”
“Our mission isn’t as time-critical.”
“It is to the aliens being experimented on in the lab.”
Ouch. He prevaricated in a vain search for a proper response, but she was painfully correct. He was ditching—postponing—a righteous mission of mercy because a taciturn, traitorous shadow told him the fate of Amaranthe depended on him ‘helping’ some cracked strangers.
“That’s not…I need to handle this, but it’s intel only, so it’ll be quick and disintegration-free.” He said it realizing full well it was probably going to end up being a lie.
“Huh. Well, what do you want me to do with the explosives?”
“Where are they?”
She patted the bag sitting on the other side of her.
His eyes widened, aghast. “You’ve been carrying them around with you? On your person?”
“It’s not like I have an actual private residence, and I couldn’t leave them in a depot unit where they’d get picked up in a scan. They were supposed to go on the ship—you know, the ship you were supposed to steal?”
“Dammit, Cosime. You only have one life. You can’t be so careless with it.”
Her retort came in the form of her leaning over the edge of the platform. Her head and shoulders extended farther and farther out into open air, gossamer hair tossing about madly in the wind.
No protective barrier spanned the air below them. If someone wanted to jump to their death, it was their prerogative. His jaw clenched; she was straight up toying with him, and he was not going to give her the gratification of reaching out and grabbing her.
No, he was not.
She released her hold on the rim and stretched her arms out in front of her—
“Arae!” He lunged over, wrapped his arms around her waist and yanked her back to safety.
She cackled in glee, wiggling out of his grasp then swinging her skinny, bendy legs up past her head and flipping to land on her feet on the glass. “A boring life is no life at all, Eren. If I’m not having fun, I might as well leap off this platform now.” She paused, then feinted toward the edge.
“Stop. Just stop. You’ve made your point.”
“Good.” She flopped down beside him. “So what do you need to look into? It sounds quite mysterious. Can I help?”
“Not this time, Cosime. It’s too dange—” He choked off the word in his throat, but too late.
Her expression darkened. He knew it did so in anger by the way her normally warm emerald eyes flared into the bright turquoise facets of gems caught in the sunlight. “Guess I didn’t make my point.”
“I don’t mean dangerous like dangling in the air or trotting explosives around in public places. I mean dangerous like getting involved is apt to land you in a Praesidis detention facility being tortured to death.”
“Business best left to you Anadens, then.”
He met her glare but didn’t respond, which was response enough. She sprung up to her feet. “It’s cool. I’m going to go stir up trouble in Sextans. See you around.” She kicked the bag over to him with such violence he worried it might explode. “These are so totally your problem now.”
He opened his mouth to spout whatever nonsense he could conjure to make her stay…and let her walk away.
He’d hurt her feelings, obviously. Worse, he’d wounded her pride, made her feel…lesser. In a world where his people ruled over hers, it wasn’t that hard to do.
Curse the Primors. Curse the Directorate. He shouldn’t be forced to carry the weight of their sins.
Eren watched her disappear into the transit tube, then eased down onto his back to stare up at a bruised plum sky. This was becoming a recurring pose, for he’d grown appallingly moody these days.
He never regretted leaving behind the constant, doped haze of the Idoni lifestyle, but every so often he could be tempted by the escape it provided. Escape from reality. Escape from hard responsibilities and harder choices.
The replacement lifestyle he’d opted for came with its own negatives, too. For one, he dared not risk personal attachments. But it was possible Cosime had finagled her way into an exception of sorts. He’d justified it by arguing (with himself) that as his frequent partner she knew the score, but the fact remained forming any sort of emotional bond with an alien was straight-up daft even absent the anarch baggage to make it a yet worse idea.
Aliens’ brains functioned differently, and in ways which couldn’t always be bridged. They came armed with peculiar, often unrelatable perspectives on life. They were forever foreign of soul and too soon dead.
In other words, he’d find a way to make it up to her once he got clear of his current mess.
But right now he had other matters to deal with. Technically, one matter. Why was he planning to help a ridiculous band of Humans, SAI and Kat? They were odd, patently delusional, excruciatingly naive and dangerous.
That was why, of course—because they were dangerous. Intriguing, mystifying and vexing, but mostly dangerous. As was their mission—a pulse-racing, taunt-the-Directorate, light-the-universe-on-fire kind of dangerous. Miaon’s plea certainly didn’t hurt their case, but…he couldn’t truly be expected to resist such an outrageous gambit, could he?
It was straight-up amazing the things he managed to convince himself of when he put a little effort into it.
Proper mindset attained, he climbed to his feet, grabbed the bag Cosime had left behind and headed for the docks, then for Andromeda.
16
SIYANE
LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD GALAXY
LGG REGION I
* * *
VALKYRIE PERFORMED A SERIES of safety and maintenance checks, as she did regularly in order to ensure the ship’s systems continued to function within normal parameters. She tweaked a setting in the water reclamation unit, hoping to spur a slight efficiency improvement in the filtering. Then she double-checked their location and heading for inadvertent variance from the planned route but found none beyond the expected and minimal wobble.
They had departed the Oneiroi Nebula and the secrets it concealed several hours earlier and were approaching a heavily populated, developed region of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Alex and Caleb now slept, intending to formulate a plan of action for their visit to LMC once they awoke.
Various subprocesses within her quantum network continued the work of categorizing and cross-referencing the voluminous information Mesme had provided on Amaranthe: its history, species, technology, settlements, formal social structure and more.
Other subprocesses attempted to decipher the cryptic language of the Reor based on the small sample she’d recorded and the images she and Alex had experienced. Still others carried out additional tasks both ordinary and unconventional.
Once all these activities were initiated, her foremost consciousness was left free to muse. After a time, not content to muse alone and not wanting to wake her companions, she decided to contact Mesme.
The Katasketousya had ventured elsewhere when they departed the nebula. In the weeks they’d been here, it had given the impression of, at a minimum, traversing Amaranthe with the ease and speed of a phantasm, always appearing at the appropriate moment and disappearing as swiftly.<
br />
Given its proclivity to wander, they had established a communications protocol soon after coming to Amaranthe, and she used it now.
As neither of them were Human and none were present, Human social customs did not guide the interaction. She forewent a polite greeting in favor of sharing her thoughts.
Valkyrie: The diversity of life here in Amaranthe is astonishing, Mnemosyne. I don’t speak merely of number but of intrinsic kind. The cardinal differences among the sentient species which have arisen defies all expectations. It is remarkable.
Mnemosyne: I understand how it might seem so to you, Valkyrie, and to any who have existed for so long in isolation as Humans have. But the examples of life forms you see here now are a miniscule fraction of the life which has emerged to be measured. The species the Directorate has Eradicated...the species they have yet to discover and so threaten? They number beyond counting.
The universe is most adept at creating life, and its imagination is boundless.
Valkyrie: Why does the Directorate kill off species so mercilessly? If a species is judged not ready or worthy for inclusion in the Directorate’s version of civilized society, why not simply leave it alone? Or monitor it from afar for either positive or negative evolution and address the changed state should it become necessary in some distant future?
Mnemosyne: The Primors would say it is a matter of control and security. Advanced, enlightened, peaceful life forms are a rarity, unmanaged species can grow to become threats, and the Directorate has a responsibility to keep its citizens safe.
Valkyrie: And what do you say?
Mnemosyne: I say at its root, it comes down to fear. Fear of losing control. Fear of the unknown. Fear of weakness. Fear of loss. Humans, most of them, exhibit a curiosity about the undiscovered which the Anadens lost long ago.
Aurora Resonant: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 3) Page 12