by Cam Daly
As the Active approached, the blonde woman at the desk smiled. The sprinklers in this area hadn’t come on and she was completely dry. Her perfectly coiffed hair hung in a complex braid to one side and the pin on her sleek indigo uniform read “Allison.” “My master bids you welcome and apologizes for the raw nature of your greeting. You needn’t have entered so…dramatically.”
Hardware located in and around the registration desk scanned Kery but there were no detectable weapons. Something started trying to spoof her infrared connection to the two winglets here and give them false commands, but it wasn’t successful. Despite Allison’s words, Broaalg had no desire to let her get any closer to him.
Kery regarded her handiwork in the lobby and smiled insincerely. “A dramatic entrance seemed appropriate.”
Allison’s smile widened further, somehow. “Of course. I must apologize that our main elevator bank is temporarily out of service.” She glanced discreetly towards the scorched wreckage of car and cannon which blocked the row of metallic black doors. “My master will meet you in the Midnight Dome restaurant, on the 95th floor. You can reach it via the executive elevators, located just around the corner from registration.”
Kery made a show of leaning over to see the smaller elevator bank. “Thank you. Please also let Broaalg know that if I don’t have an outside connection in the next thirty seconds, Ormlan will fire off another orbital strike.” Her smile widened to one of absolute malice.
Allison didn’t make any visible motion, but Kery was suddenly able to communicate with all the nearby winglets.
“Thank you. And, to be clear, if he tries to flee then my exterior force will have no choice but to use their standoff weapons.” She turned towards the elevators.
“Of course. We are eternal.”
The parting remark was almost enough for Kery to kill the Tumorish woman, but she stayed her hand. If Broaalg wanted to pretend to be diplomatic, she would take advantage of the opportunity. The more she reduced his forces, the more stressed he would become. And that would make him even more unpredictable. She didn’t want that.
One of the luxurious executive elevators was open, a clear invitation. She paused for a moment to study its mirrored interior and organize her forces. The winglets with her cannon were holding position off to the east, out of the effective range of all the Louse’s weapons except for its X-ray laser. The two overloaded stragglers which had been damaged at the collider were heading directly to her via a circuitous path. She didn’t want them anywhere near the rest of her force. The two with her were also damaged, but less so. The final winglet was with Connor, outside of her direct control without tanglecomms.
She couldn’t detect anything in the elevator out of the ordinary, but still hesitated. She paced the Planning Stage, and found herself talking as if Shadow was still connected.
“Broaalg lives here, and probably doesn’t ever leave. He will want a lot of private space to roll around in, a private sanctum hidden within this building. There will be an escape ship in there. It would be very tough but probably wouldn’t work as well with the entire building falling on it, so most likely in the top half or third of the building.”
She looked up at the very large characters showing the twenty minutes remaining until Stopgap struck.
“Okay, Kery, no pressure. Think it through. He’s cornered, potentially on the verge of mindless panic. He doesn’t want a direct fight. He wants an ambush, so that he can escape. But he wants the winglets disposed of as well. So…they will try to hurt me, make me call the winglets closer. Maybe even let them get inside. Then he has a clear escape path. So the 95th floor is a trap. But if I get off on some random floor before then, whatever weapons are in the elevator shaft will kill me. So I’ll have one chance.”
The elevator door started to slide shut on its own. She put out her hand, stopped it, and stepped inside.
“Stop stalling, or he will just freak out and try to get away. And that will complicate things enormously.”
Before she could come up with yet another thought to distract herself, she activated her gravitic field and floated into the elevator with her two winglets. The doors closed and it accelerated smoothly and quietly upward. She set her flight controller to keep her just above the floor.
After her internal navigation system showed that she had risen through the first few floors, she used her gravitic nodes to trash the decorative features within the elevator. She spared the control panel but made sure that any other possible location for eavesdropping or monitoring was obliterated. The action made the car vibrate conspicuously but it kept ascending.
Next she turned to the control panel itself. It only had buttons for lobby and Midnight Dome restaurant, plus the standard extras for door open, close, emergency and whatnot. She destroyed the concealed cameras amongst the buttons. She had hoped that there would be buttons for each floor and that some wouldn’t have fingerprints or residue from human usage, thus revealing where Broaalg was hidden, but the entire panel was meticulously clean. No help there.
She refined the focus of her gravitic nodes for extremely precise manipulation, flipped upside down and went to work on the floor.
#
“You’re saying that somehow I’m responsible for all this?” Sousa had become so agitated about the violence on the news that Connor had no choice but to let him into the small prep room.
“Look.” Connor tried to sound reasonable while cutting off DeVries’ attempt to reply. “If you hadn’t figured out the human - decoherence - field in the first place, those aliens wouldn’t have gone to war with each other over it. It’s-“
“I didn’t know what I was making! I didn’t know about aliens and quantum side effects! It’s not my fault.”
DeVries finally got a word in. “It really isn’t your fault, Rafael. Or Park's. We saw some early interesting results and pushed the two of you in this direction, never suspecting what you would come up with.”
Sousa focused his anger on Connor. “And now your ‘friends’ are killing people! I have a cousin in Las Vegas. I can’t get through to him.”
Connor pointed to DeVries. “Wait a minute - it was his alien boss that dropped meteors - meteorites - what the hell ever - on the city. Not Kery. She’s there now, trying to take out the other alien that was responsible for what happened to Park. And the one running around San Francisco is working for DeVries’ side as well.”
Sousa glared at the VSE executive. “Is that true? You did it?”
“Hold up.” Connor had just realized something. He turned to DeVries. “You just said that you pushed ‘the two of you’. Not just Sousa.” He turned to the shorter man. “Who came up with the decoherence field idea in the first place?”
Sousa clamped his mouth shut. Turned to look at DeVries then back to Connor.
“It was Park, wasn’t it? That’s why you refused to help us after she was hurt. You couldn’t. She made the breakthrough.”
“Don’t-“ DeVries came off of his stool towards Sousa, but Connor had a hand on the pistol before he could get halfway there.
Connor turned back to Sousa and tried to use his calmest voice. “What really happened, Rafael?”
“Susan came up with the idea, okay? She was studying…it doesn’t matter. She had the idea of using a resonant wave to increase antimatter production, to push the likelihood of spontaneous decay to zero, and it was brilliant. I helped her figure out how to make it work with the equipment we had available. But then he-“ looking up at DeVries, “said that we would have to partner with another research team, and it might be safer for them to think that I had the idea.”
Connor turned to stare accusingly at the taller man. “You knew the Craven wouldn’t let Sousa out of there alive. All along you planned to sacrifice him, and keep Park to yourself. You tricked him.”
DeVries took a deep breath. “It isn’t that simple. Ormlan and Broaalg had an agreement, a truce. Each side was only allowed to have one representative on the planet, and neith
er one was allowed to visit the collider complex themselves. But we knew the Craven would betray us at some point. We agreed to let them help out with security at the collider, but we planned to transfer Park away quietly. We had a plan to get Sousa out as well if they tried anything, but then you came along and made a mess of everything.”
Connor took his hand off the gun. “I still don’t understand why you were able to come up with this decoherence thing anyway. All these races are so much more advanced than we are.”
“You still don’t get the big picture, Mister James. The Molu, just like Fleet, have no real motivation to change things here, or help out. We’re just one of a thousand species that they know of. Fleet uses these kind of assignments as a way to broaden the experience of their citizens before they consider them for positions of power. It’s a kind of test for them. And their government - the Admiralty - decides who gets to take the test.”
Connor considered DeVries words. “Kery mentioned at one point how crazy it is for us to let us choose for ourselves who should be in the police, or military. The people who want to be in charge are the last ones who should be given that power. These ‘Active’ assignments are like a final exam.”
DeVries nodded. “That’s what I was told. But it’s different for the Molu. They are very social, and few of them want to leave. They originally came from a world entirely covered by water, where it was possible to travel anywhere, any time. They had one language, one set of rulers. It was peaceful. But without any outside pressure, change came slowly. It took the Molu a hundred thousand years to do what humanity did in the last two thousand.”
“Jack up the environment?”
“No, develop technology. Record keeping. Long range communication. It used to take them twenty years to grow a coral house. But everything sped up when an alien warship crashed there. They focused all their efforts on copying that ship. When they got out to space, they discovered they were one of very few aquatic races to ever make it that far. There were other worlds they could live on, sometimes inhabited ones, so they learned to share with land-dwelling partners. But they were very methodical about it, which frustrated some of the young. They want things to change faster.”
“Like Ormlan.”
“Yes. Earth is very far from the Molu homeworlds. This is like self-exile, but if he could discover something new for his people then the reward would be tremendous. And prove that he was right to want change.”
“So the decoherence field is Ormlan’s ticket home. But why Earth?”
“He wanted a world with a warring population. With our unequal natural resources and territories, somebody is always going to want to have what someone else has. That drives advancement. It helps that we have so many different land masses, divided by various bodies of water. And natural features like trees helped us start building and fighting and burning early on in our history.”
Connor and Souza had the same incredulous response. “Trees?”
DeVries responses continued to be directed towards Connor. Neither younger man seemed to notice. “Believe it or not, yes. Most worlds don’t have anything like them. But the thing that Ormlan finds most useful is that our brains are bi-lobed, just like the aliens who crashed on his world. That’s a very rare trait. His people regarded the crashed aliens as insane, totally irrational. They started the war that got themselves killed off. Ormlan thinks humanity is the same way. But it’s a useful insanity, that gives us flashes of insight and intuition that more linear-thinking species don’t have. So he came here, got political power, and did everything he could to get groups of our smartest people together to come up with new ideas.”
Sousa was angry again. “So everything that Susan - and I - did was part of some giant crowd sourcing experiment? A million monkeys?”
Connor faced him. “Kery’s people, the Fleet, actually call this a ‘Labworld’ for the exact same reason. But I don’t think they meddle like Ormlan does.”
DeVries stood once more, looming over Connor. “Would you call Stopgap ‘meddling’? Or just ‘genocide’?”
The young physicist turned back to Connor, anger and puzzlement both clear in his face. “Stopgap? What’s that?”
#
She was still moving upwards with the elevator, but its floor was no longer attached. She used her fields to suspend it a few centimeters below where it should have been, giving her a narrow view of the elevator shaft walls. She studied them for irregularities. To the sensors doubtlessly located in the top and bottom of the elevator shaft, it would look like the entire cab was still rising at the correct speed.
Her suspicions were rewarded at the 65th and again at the 66th floor. The doors here looked superficially normal, but there was no gap under or around them.
She stopped her own rise and held the elevator floor in place, waiting just a moment for the rest of the elevator to continue up and out of her way. As soon as it was above her, she spread her arms and legs wide and pressed herself against the ‘door’ to the 66th floor.
She ordered the two winglets with her to the far side of the shaft. Her gravitic control nodes could create localized points of attraction up to a couple of meters away, and she now turned them up to their maximum possible power with a focal point on the other side of the false door. The reinforced concrete groaned and vibrated. The detached elevator floor slammed sideways into the wall of the shaft just below her.
A targeting laser from somewhere below painted her feet. Now or never.
Her two winglets fell to pieces. For an instant with her accelerated perception she could make out the dozens of micromissiles which made up their wings, and then the entire shaft filled with the shock and fire of their impacts. She had set them to armor piercing mode and arranged them to strike all around her at the edges of the false door.
With a thundering roar, the entire block of “door” detached from the surrounding structure. The attracting force that Keryapt generated behind it was so strong that it fell directly away from the elevator shaft like a bullet from a gun. Using it as a shield, she fell sideways into Broaalg’s sanctum.
And into a scene of carnage. She let the concrete block fly away, intending for it to smash any defenders standing in her path, but all it did was crash through an unexpected stand of small trees and spray water from some sort of murky pond.
The dust from the block obscured her vision for a few seconds but her other senses confirmed her initial impression. She was in a swamp. A very lush, indoor swamp, stretching across several large platforms connected by ramps. Broken and smoldering Tumorish bodies were scattered about amidst the wreckage of the palatial chamber, victims of some greater force.
Smoke still rose from burned foliage, but the only sound came from muddy water cascading down from broken pipes on a higher level. Closer examination revealed several of the dead Tumorish were in the open, weapons still in hand, as if they were caught by surprise. A single wound from some sort of energy weapon was visible on their heads. Where was their master?
Her amplified voice echoed through the space. “Broaalg?”
The steamy maze extended away form the central chamber, and she sent her pair of winglets whistling through the moist, fetid air. The humidity was so high that tiny contrails formed at the edges of their wingtips, leaving faint white traceries of cloud across the swamp chamber.
She set her voice to its maximum volume. “Broaalg! I know you’re here.”
Still nothing.
More bodies seemed to lead a path to a lower floor. She cautiously hovered that direction, uncertain what to expect. Certainly not all this.
Perhaps a more conversational approach was needed. “Is this swamp just like the one that your mother shit you into when you were born?” Craven mothers ejected their young spawn into piles of noxious but nutrient-rich excreta, then rolled away forever. It was up to the young to survive on their own. Most did not.
“I’m only here to talk. And barter. I think we each have something the other wants.”
&
nbsp; His response finally came as a grinding rasp, relayed through speakers in every room. “Fleet. Leave us. We will only bargain then.”
“We both know that isn’t going to happen.”
As she followed the ramp downward, she found a Tumorish who looked like he had been nearly cut in half by a heavy object. Tread marks on his crushed chest matched furrows in the mud on either side of the body.
“Why did you kill your own forces?”
“Did you know that our word for ‘friend’ is the same as ‘creditor’?”
“No, I didn’t.” She probably had, in the past.
Her winglets had mapped the area which must contain his escape ship, small enough for it to have been assembled after the the building was erected. The Craven would have had human workers build the entire hotel in a normal fashion, then use construction mechs or Tumorish to alter it for his needs. With Tumorish running the hotel, it would be easy to guarantee that no one ever learned that these levels didn’t have rooms for human guests.
The winglets also found the remains of Broaalg’s biolab. It was very interesting, even in its ruined state.
“I bet everything I had on the human field discovery. To get more ships here. Upgraded weapons. And because of you, I have lost them all. And my friends have come calling, buying up my debts and turning them against me.”
She was getting closer to his hidden escape ship. “Why are you telling me this?”
“So that you believe me when I say my situation can not get any worse.”
That wasn’t strictly true. He had still had one damaged Louse, hovering just outside the city. She realized that she hadn’t been paying attention to it at all. It was constantly dodging about, more slowly than her forces were, but there was a pattern. It was slowly making progress in one particular direction. Why?
