Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4)

by G. S. Jennsen

  None of the other Advisors accompanied her this time, because they had more important work to do than watch a frustrating, often maddening interchange that couldn’t decide if it was an interrogation or a negotiation. All the combat dynes remained on guard, however, as did two of Lance’s officers, and her interaction with the Rasu would of course be recorded.

  A chilly, drafty silence nonetheless permeated the prison. The ventilation system forced fresh air inside at a brisk flow in order to suppress the constant ionization of the air the barrier caused. She’d planned ahead and wore a black velvet turtleneck and gray wool pants, but they didn’t prevent her from shuddering when she sat down.

  Jerry imitated an oil slick spilt across the rear half of the cage. Lying there without shape or definition, it seemed impossible that when combined with a scant few of its brethren the alien was capable of destroying species and worlds. That this oil slick was capable of willfully inflicting horrific pain and torture on living, thinking individuals.

  Yes, she was angry at Jerry. At the Rasu as a whole, but though she’d used negotiation tricks to make Jerry feel special and unique, right now when she considered the prisoner, she saw Parc’s torturers. She saw Rasu.

  “Jerry, wake up.”

  The oil slick shrunk in diameter as it grew in height, pulling itself inward into semi-solidity. It slipped and slithered until it had taken on its preferred form, that of a forever coiling serpent, and approached the front of the cage. “Asterion. It has taken you a lengthy time to educate yourself on the unique characteristics of kyoseil, if you have managed to do so at all.”

  “I’ve been occupied with a variety of important duties. I apologize if you felt neglected in the interim, but I’m here now. I want to talk about control, Jerry. Control, free will and the unreconcilable dichotomy between them.”

  MIRAI ONE PAVILION

  Nika hurried into the conference room at the Pavilion to find Dashiel talking to a man who looked like he’d climbed straight out of a wilderness nature vid. A neat but full beard spilled onto his chest, and long soot-gray hair draped behind his shoulders. A rough-hewn plaid shirt paired with beige canvas pants and beat-up work boots completed the presentation.

  Dashiel met her at the door, squeezing her hands in greeting before gesturing to his guest. “Nika, this is Magnus Forchelle.”

  “Aye, we know each other. It’s been a while.”

  Dashiel cringed. “Sorry, I didn’t get an opportunity to mention….”

  She gave Forchelle her best diplomat smile. “I know we do. Unfortunately, I recently lost the majority of my historical memories in an attack. But I’ve been reading up on you, your work and our history together. Hopefully we can make do.”

  “Makes no real difference to me. If anything, I’m envious. I’ve wanted to forget my own past many times.”

  She shifted toward Dashiel enough to arch a private eyebrow at him, and got a pained shrug in answer. The message came through well enough: yes, Forchelle was a quirky character.

  She returned her attention to the man. “Yes, well, thank you for agreeing to help us.”

  “I’m still not certain it’ll be ‘help’ I’m giving in the end, but Mr. Ridani here convinced me it’ll be all our end if I don’t try, so into the breach I go.”

  They gathered at one of the two tables in the room, and Dashiel clasped his hands atop the surface. “As I mentioned in my message, Mr. Forchelle is aware of both the supradimensional and interlinked features of kyoseil. Rather than mangle the explanation, Mr. Forchelle, if you don’t mind?”

  The man stroked his beard thoughtfully—because what would you do with such a beard as his if not stroke it? “You’re referring to ‘supradimensionality’ and ‘interlinking’ as separate concepts, but when you’re talking about kyoseil they are one and the same. When you observe a chunk of kyoseil, you’re seeing an instance of its periodic extrusion into what we call the three physical dimensions. But it exists just as fully in the deep dimensions of the universe.

  “Now, in shaping kyoseil to our own needs, to our own creation, we’ve changed it. The bonding that occurs between strands of kyoseil and our neural networks of necessity weakens its bond with other manifestations of its kind—strands which are bonded to another life, or not bonded at all. But it doesn’t sever those links entirely.”

  Nika nodded soberly. “Yes, we’ve…discovered this ourselves.”

  Dashiel looked over in surprise. “You have? What happened?”

  MIRAI

  My chest is flayed open, the folds of skin held back by clamps. The cavity revealed glows hot like steel fresh out of a kiln. But I can’t peer inside at my own insides, because my head is locked in place by something hard and unyielding. My eyelids are held open by more unforgiving clamps. My eyes are dry, scratchy, sandpaper scraping over unfinished wood. I haven’t blinked in…I can’t say.

  Time has blended together into an endless series of brief respites between the pain.

  Parc huddled on the floor in the far corner of Ryan’s rented room. His eyes were squeezed shut, in defiance of the memory he couldn’t stop seeing, and his legs were pulled up against his chest. His intact, whole and in no way whatsoever flayed open chest.

  He tried to focus on the silence of this room, his home since reawakening, but his ears rang with the din of his own screams.

  A shadow passes across my limited field of vision as one of the creature machines returns to me. It begins working on me, from behind this time. On my brain, as my skull must be cracked as wide open as my chest.

  Cool air tickles my brain tissue, and my whole body shivers within the restraints. Then a probe descends from above, and I’m screaming again. Silently, with no vibrations to give voice to my agony, for they long ago severed my vocal chords.

  He shivered now, though the room was comfortably warm, and tugged his legs closer against him.

  § sysdir(root) § Ηq(storerec*. Y12,463.115.1120-1314 A7)

  < erase all

  |

  He transfixed on the blinking cursor. It wasn’t fair to leave him—the other him—out there on the other side of the galaxy, alone and afraid. How dare he abandon himself to that torture while he lived free and easy back here? He was such an arrogant jerk!

  From the opposite corner of the room, a powered-down IkeBot passed judgment on him by way of its pitiless, blank gaze.

  I can’t breathe any longer. I don’t want to breathe any longer. Another nanosecond of this pain and I will surely die. Why can’t I die?

  Why wouldn’t the monsters fucking let him die?

  The remembered pain seized hold of Parc anew, and he couldn’t breathe either. He forced his eyes shut again, and in the darkness behind his eyelids he swore he saw the kyoseil strings pouring out from his body to travel across the galaxy. Was he still connected to his other self, somehow, even now?

  He started to reach out for a string, the way he had in the lab—then yanked his hand back. He was too much of a coward to do it, too much of a coward to share in his own pain.

  A sound from his left announced Ryan entering. Twenty-to-one odds that Nika and Perrin had told him to rush home and see to his pathetic, quivering mess of a lover.

  “Parc? Are you here?”

  The lights flicked on. Parc instinctively shrank away from them, burying his face in his arm.

  “Parc!” He felt Ryan’s presence draw near as the man crouched on the floor beside him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look up. “What’s wrong? Are you sick? Do I need to—”

  “No. I just…I just…I can’t….” Fuck, he was hyperventilating again. Talking seemed to trigger it, which wasn’t great.

  “Let me get someone over here—”

  “No!” His hand shot out to blindly grab for Ryan’s arm. “I’m….” He concentrated on opening his eyes and lifting his head. He blinked furiously against the too-bright light until gradually Ryan’s face sharpened into clarity. Good-looking face, if he was honest.

  Gods, he on
the other hand must look a wreck and a half, judging by Ryan’s expression. “I’m not sick. It’s all in my head. I need…” he realized he’d been pulling at his hair with his free hand, and he quickly dropped both hands to the floor “…to be alone for a while, to work through it.”

  Ryan’s brow furrowed up in consternation; after a few seconds he shook his head. “Sorry, but I’m not leaving you alone like this. I wasn’t there for you before, but I will be now, dammit.”

  He stared at Ryan, searching frantically through his scrambled brain for how to respond. He didn’t want a keeper. Thus far the sex had been fantastic, and they’d always gotten along well so they had plenty in common to talk about in between. But now Ryan was making like this thing they were doing was an actual relationship.

  Crap, was it? Was that a good thing?

  He chuckled quietly, which was a marked improvement from the screaming. He’d gone a whole ten seconds without thinking about the waking nightmare his other self was trapped in. If Ryan could do more to extend those spans of respite, he was desperate enough to take him up on the offer. “Fine. You can stay.”

  Ryan got comfortable on the floor next to Parc and stretched out his legs. “Perrin told me a little about your experiment. Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  “No, I want to erase it.”

  “So, erase it.”

  “I can’t. I’ll be abandoning my other self to suffer alone.”

  Ryan frowned deeply. “You think your other self would want you suffering along with them? You’re a selfish prick, but you’re not a masochist…or a sadist, I guess. Sorry, this is all kind of confusing. Wouldn’t you instead want you working your ass off to get vengeance?”

  “Huh.” Parc dropped his head against the wall and fixated on the ceiling. A bead of sweat dropped into the corner of his eye, and he wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, unsurprised when it came away soaked.

  The man had a point. Parc played with a few embers of vengeance stirring in his gut, stoking them idly until they rose into the beginnings of a proper righteous fire. Vengeance was definitely a worldview he could get behind.

  A hundred thousand million seconds have passed, but at last the probing ceases. Not for long—it’s never for long. The creature machine always returns.

  I breathe, but only because my body insists upon it. Not for much longer. My will is gone, and my body will mercifully soon follow.

  “Hey, hey.” Ryan’s arm was around his shoulder, and Parc was half slumped into his lap. But not in the good way.

  “I’m all right.” He straightened up and slapped himself on both cheeks. “Okay. I’ll erase the memories. But first I need to put together a detailed report for Nika of everything I saw, heard and felt, along with my recommendation.”

  “What’s your recommendation?”

  “We have got to kill every last one of these motherfuckers.”

  31

  * * *

  MIRAI ONE PAVILION

  Nika peered out the window of the third-floor conference room as evening shadows crept across the lawn. “Do you think Luciene will make his move tonight?”

  Dashiel wrapped his arms around her waist from behind and rested his chin on her shoulder. “I think Luciene will cower in whatever hole Satair has stashed him in. Now, Satair might make a move tonight, or he might wait.”

  “For us to self-destruct?”

  “We’re not going to self-destruct.” He kissed her neck beneath her ear. “We’re going to ingenuity our way out of this crisis. It’s what we do.”

  They had sent Forchelle off to meet with a group of scientists at the Industry Division’s Conceptual Research office, in the hope that they could turn this new—or in Forchelle’s case, very old—knowledge into a concrete tool to use against the Rasu. Ingenuity their way out of this crisis, in other words.

  “We will. Speaking of, I know why the Rasu don’t use quantum entanglement communications.”

  “Did Jerry tell you?”

  “More or less. After some goading on my part, it divulged a great deal about what it means to be a Rasu—enough for me to infer the rest. The key is in the term ‘entanglement.’ Jerry fears the effect on its individuality of physical re-entanglement with the Rasu at the stronghold. The Rasu at the stronghold fear the effect on their individuality of quantum entanglement with distant Rasu. They fear it will force a renewed merger with those they now view as wholly separate entities.”

  He shifted around so he could see her face but kept his arms around her. “Are you certain?”

  “Fairly. They’ve worked themselves into quite the pickle. Every Rasu of any size and complexity desires above all else independence for itself and control for all others. Consequently, every Rasu of any size and complexity suspects that its equals and superiors desire the same.”

  “Damn, they are paranoid monsters.”

  “It’s not paranoia if it’s true.”

  “Heh. Does this mean all those platforms and ships in their stellar system are fighting with each other? If so, we can use this. I’m not sure how, but I expect Palmer will have some ideas.”

  She sighed, but any frustration ebbed away beneath the soothing warmth of his embrace. Since their reconciliation, she was finding great comfort in his touch; it seemed as if he was finding the same in hers, and they both sought it out whenever possible. Even when the world careened madly around them.

  “I’m afraid it isn’t that overt. No Rasu are openly fighting one another…more executing low-key secret subversion campaigns. And if I’m starting to understand a little about how the Rasu function as a species, I think we can treat all the permanent structures in the stellar system—the platforms, the antenna rings and so on—as a single functional Rasu entity.”

  “Damn. The entire stronghold is a single mind? That’s disturbing to contemplate.”

  “It is. And I don’t know if ‘mind’ is the correct word. I doubt their consciousnesses operate anything like ours do. Maybe it’s more accurate to say a single ‘will’—or to use Jerry’s word, a single ‘purpose’—exists at the stronghold.”

  His brow knotted, wrinkling his nose. “That’s not any less disturbing.”

  She kissed the wrinkle away. “Nope. Now, the ships we saw coming and going of necessity become ‘separate’ Rasu for a time. But their tours are kept brief, with frequent return trips home. What happened with Jerry? The Rasu realize it’s a risk when they send out their shards—their temporary offspring—to roam. They’re forced to keep a tight leash on them, lest they develop their own free will the way Jerry did.”

  “This is what they want to correct using kyoseil. This is why they’re experimenting on our people.”

  “Torturing—why they’re torturing our people.” She quickly smiled to soften the rebuke. “But you’re exactly right. If they can devise a way to maintain control over their shards across great distances and for infinite time? It’s their crown jewel. Their ultimate prize.”

  “It also could be the spark that ignites a Rasu civil war—”

  The door slid open, and Parc and Ryan burst in. “Good, we found you.”

  She eased out of Dashiel’s arms. “Parc, you look better. I read your report, and I am so damn sorry I put you through that.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I erased it all. Hope the report helped. So, Ryan and I have been messing around with this kyoseil supradimensional nonsense, and we have an idea.”

  Thank gods. This was more like the Parc she knew. “Okay. Talk to me.”

  He started tromping around the room, while Ryan leaned against the wall by the door and watched Parc with a keen, arguably protective eye. “When I connected with myself, there were these luminescent…strings. Not strings precisely, but it’s the best way to describe them. They flowed in these tendrils between me and the other me, like the rope of an anchor. But they weren’t physical—they weren’t out here in space.” He waved a hand in the air in front of him. “They were in my mind. Or possibly in
another dimension. In fact, almost definitely in another dimension.” He gave himself a sharp nod.

  “I thought you said you erased the memory of connecting to your other self?”

  “Well, not all of it. Just the screaming, mostly. I kept the technicals, obviously.”

  “Obviously. And what have you discovered about these not-strings?”

  “Ah, you catch on fast. I went back and figured out how I was seeing them—again, the technicals of it. And, you guessed it, the kyoseil is communicating with each other—or possibly itself—on an extradimensional plane. Bet you didn’t know we could see them communicating, did you?”

  “I did not.”

  “We can. I tweaked my ocular settings so I can see them whenever I want, without flaying myself open for the world to see.”

  “Parc….”

  He smirked. “Merely a little gallows humor. But guess what I discovered?”

  She shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “They don’t solely connect me to my copy. We’re all emitting these strings. All over the fucking place. And they’re connecting to each other, in this immense, intricate web. Kyoseil is interconnected, and this means so are we.”

  Forchelle had hinted around this concept earlier, but after Parc’s disastrous experiment she’d focused the man on the relationship between kyoseil and their own neural architecture. Which in retrospect, had been a bit myopic on her part.

  Parc took her silence for confusion and kept talking. “Ryan—” he gestured to Ryan, who waved casually “—is also broadcasting a rainbow of supradimensional strings. I was able to see his as soon as I adjusted my ocular receptor settings. One of his led to me, or to one of my strings, which also led to one of his.

  “Now, these strings are fainter and weaker than the ones tied to my other self. And they kind of…dead-end at the other person. Because, the kyoseil is so intricately wound into our neutral structure, into our psyche, into our anima, that our passive security protections block the strings from entry.”