Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  “Secure our own place first?” his people guessed, watching him out of Sky's puzzled eyes.

  “Make sure everyone gets saved!” He couldn't believe he was starting to share values with those God-botherers, but some things were above profit, surely?

  “It's all right.” Sky smiled. “We'll make sure everyone has access. We’ll just make the cheaper versions less long-lasting, so they have to be renewed every five years. That's much better than a complete cure anyway. Patent holders can keep milking that indefinitely.”

  Maybe he should have gone to Bryant, Nori thought, impatient suddenly to cut the call before the disappointment soured all of his memories of emotional support. “Let’s save the human race first before we squeeze it for cash. I presume if you invent this antigen, you get to keep the patent?”

  “Of course.”

  “So I've done you a favor. You slip me the formula for the good stuff in return, so I can at least protect the people here. Please? They're like my new creche and I don't think I could process without them.”

  Her face relaxed abruptly into something fully human, like for once it was just her, not them. “I don't want to have to mourn you again, Lightbulb. It's a deal.”

  When she cut the call, he felt more severed than ever. What was it she'd said? Like fabric with all its edges raw, trying not to fray until there was nothing left. He thought of Recursion, in whatever tiny room they might be housing her. They wouldn't have given her access to the pinholenet if they thought it would trigger her, so she was still inaccessible. Stuck somewhere all alone. Nori couldn't, though--right now he couldn't spend another moment trapped in his own singular head. He found himself crouching by the operating table, clutching his hair with his left hand and with his right trying to jam his own finger in the port at the back of his neck.

  His eyes, meanwhile, landed on a rat's nest of tangled wire beneath the table and told him to pay attention. This was something he wanted. When he pulled it to him and teased out the strands, it was a sensor net, of the kind that glued onto a person's head and enabled an observer to monitor their brain activity.

  That was enough to give Nori an idea – he hadn't been called Lightbulb for nothing – and he spent an hour scouring the workshop for the other parts he would need. Something with lots of processing power, to convert the sensor data into an information flow. One of the pried-up green bricks would do that, once he had written the basic programming to convert the input to code and back. Wires and couplers, so he could jack himself into the brick and the sensor net into the other side. It was a patch job, rough and ugly, but he took it to Felix's door like a bunch of flowers.

  Felix opened the door in boxers that somehow still gave an impression of having been ironed. He was a nice shape, Nori thought, surprised to find that after seeing Sky from the outside, he cared about such things. Felix also looked like he combed his eyebrows, which was ridiculous and endearing, and made Nori feel better already.

  “I thought you were coming to sleep,” Felix exclaimed. “What's that?”

  “I know I said I only wanted to sleep,” Nori blinked his eyes to keep them from stinging. “But…” This seemed more personal than asking to have sex, and now he was here, he was afraid Felix would say no. “Can I be inside your mind?”

  “Would I be inside yours too?” Felix eyed the wires and seemed to be suppressing a desire to back away. What if he said no? Nori tried not to grimace, but he wasn't fast enough with his occupied hands to stop one of the welling tears from beading up and overspilling.

  Why was he reacting like this? He'd lost his creche months ago. They'd decided it would be most cost effective to allow the Kingdom invaders to pin the blame for their few illegal deals on Recursion, Racetrack and himself because they were the ones most easily lived without. They were most dispensable. He'd been over it. He'd been going to build a massive computer just for him, just for him on his own. To fucking spite them. To show them he didn't need anyone else, but…

  “Yes,” he soaked the tear away on his shoulder. “I don't think the sensors are good enough so we could follow each other's thoughts. But feelings, images, maybe dreams. We could share those.”

  Felix held the sensor net in both hands like a cluster of stars, his own eyes wet for some reason. “This is...” he tried, trailing off. “This is a very special thing you're asking. I'm honored. Will you put it on me? I don't know what to do.”

  It was confirmed again; the guy was perfect. Nori laughed away the remainder of his tears and concentrated on positioning the sensor net correctly on Felix's head. Felix's tightly curled hair had begun to regrow, but wasn't yet long enough to get in the way. When Nori was all set up, Felix lay down gingerly on his mattress and watched Nori set down the brick in the crook of his shoulder.

  “You should feel--” Nori tugged off his space-station trousers, his jacket and shirt, and lay down facing Felix. Now he was here, he felt frightened. But the fear was that of going into a sacred place; he was afraid of damaging it, of disturbing something beautiful.

  “Hollow,” Felix said, watching Nori's face, even as he frowned at the feeling inside his own head. “I feel there's more room inside me than there was before.”

  “Yes.” Nori wriggled closer, pressed to Felix belly to belly, already feeling the relief of those chemical connections being secured. “That's where I'm going to be.”

  He reached over and plugged himself in.

  It was nothing like the creche. The texture of the shared space was smoother, less metallic. The taste in his mouth was like water. A very distant echo of something took notice, but Nori didn't care, because he could feel Felix's astonishment, and then his own pleasure, picked up by Felix and examined with delight and echoed back, amplified.

  Seeing his emotions from Felix's point of view made sudden sense of them – he could process them at this remove. Betrayed – he'd felt betrayed all those months ago when his creche decided he was disposable. Anger and rejection were what had pushed him to want to be alone. He tried being disgusted at the stupidity of his own reaction, the sheer waste of time he had spent on trying to feel that none of it mattered, that he was fine with all of it. But Felix was horrified for him, and tender, and guilty that he had ever thought Nori was just a money-grubbing selfish little criminal at all, when he was so much more. He was so much better than that.

  “Ah!” Nori gulped, rolling further into Felix's body, burying his head under Felix's chin and letting himself sob, because he could feel the flow of Felix's concern and his reaching out to try to understand. He could feel the moment Felix understood that Nori's overwhelming reaction to having Felix in his head was relief – massive, staggering relief after he had been alone so long. He was buoyed in the flood of Felix's shy delight, his willingness to give Nori exactly what he needed.

  “Fucking stars,” Nori wept, already trying to get closer, trying to push at the connection to give more than this basic, broad brush stuff, but still so… so… “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “You're not bad, and you're not alone,” Felix murmured, knowing now that this was exactly what Nori needed to hear. “I'm here. It's going to be all right.”

  They dreamed together of grasslands that Nori had never visited and maths that Felix could not follow. Sometime during the night, Nori's sleeping mind calibrated itself more finely, allowing him to dimly sense the input from Felix's body: How warm and relaxed it felt, the smooth pleasure of the intake and exhale of each breath. The pressure of his own body against it, and that sense of connection tied tight on this side too. He was drowsing in their small and intimate creche, wordless as his earliest memories, when another idea burst in him like a grenade.

  Heart pounding and metal in his veins, he bolted up, jerking two of the sensors from Felix's hair, but Felix, sharing his panic, was already awake and peeling the others off. “What is it?” Felix asked, reaching for his handgun.

  As if that would help.

  “Shit!” Nori spat, scrambling into his trousers, not
bothering with a top. He wrenched out his own wire and bolted for the door.

  “What?” Felix was beside him, armed, looking for something to shoot.

  “I gave them the recipe for the pontoth,” Nori explained, the floor of the cavern glassy under his bare feet as he ran towards his lab. “My people. My creche. They work fast. That's the point of them – lots of processing power to get things done quickly.”

  “That's… good?” Felix ventured, doubtfully.

  “No it isn't! Because they were going to create pontoth to test their antigen. And they don't know ours is being artificially held back. They don't know it responds to a central intelligence, which theirs may not be linked to.” He wanted to shake Felix, but instead skidded to a halt in front of his set up, and flicked the screen on.

  There was a message, time-stamped two hours ago. Was that a good sign? He couldn't bring himself to open it.

  “So they don't know what they're facing. They don't know how fast this stuff can eat everything. If they got even one thing wrong with the antigen, and it doesn't work, they’re going to be destroyed the way the invaders were destroyed - in seconds! And how likely are they to have got everything right on their very first test run? Even they're not that good…” His hand paused, shaking, over the unopened message. “I-- I can't look.”

  Felix's arm slipped around his waist. It didn't help as much as it had done yesterday.

  With the other hand, Felix clicked the message open.

  A view of something black, boiling. Someone screamed in the background and then the visuals went blank. A long, wailing screech of garbage and static, and the message cut out.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Felix is in over his head

  Felix snapped the screen off and turned to watch Nori's reaction. His own heart had stuttered in his chest as he watched--as he heard the panic and despair in that final scream. But he was trained to fight, and part of that training allowed him to switch off his human empathy when it became a problem.

  Besides, though the exact details of Nori's devastated emotions last night had been hazy to him, he'd followed enough to know that these people had hurt Nori in a way that was so deep he was only just beginning to deal with it. And while that didn't mean that Felix should be glad that they were dead, it didn't give him a huge amount of regret over it either.

  Nori, however, was standing in front of the blank screen as though he had been struck by a freeze ray, with only a faint tremble of his fingertips giving away that he wasn't a particularly well-made statue. His expression was blank, his eyes were wide and dry but somehow inhuman. He was offline, Felix thought. Like a computer from which the operating system had been deleted.

  That was what those people had thought of him – that he was a processing node that could be excised without significant loss. And it was, now he had touched Nori's emotions and knew them, also what Nori thought of himself.

  But from Felix's point of view, in his possibly faulty reading, those people had been Nori's family, and you didn't stop loving your family even when they were jerks. Nor did finding out that they were jerks make it easier when they were killed in front of your eyes.

  No. He couldn't bear this anymore. He walked forward and put himself between the computer screen and Nori's unblinking eyes. “Nori. We're going to walk back to my room now. Please turn around and face the door.”

  Nori's face creased into the tiniest of frowns, but he did as he was asked, silently. When Felix put his arm back around Nori's waist, he could feel the shock in him, making him rigid as a dead man. But Nori's lips had begun to move, as though he was trying to talk. Not to Felix, though. The phrases were numbers. Long strings of numbers, codes.

  They were not alien, the people of the Source worlds, though some Kingdom propaganda claimed they had made themselves so. Some said they had cast out their souls and done such violence to the Image of God they held in them that they no longer had to be treated as fellow humans. It looked plausible enough when you saw things like the child Bryant had been trying to change into a water-breathing mer-person. It looked plausible when you thought of children wired together into wetware computers and chemically castrated so they wouldn't ever outgrow their usefulness.

  But Nori was not inhuman, and though he looked right now like a slaved outlet looking for its server, he was in fact a bereaved young man, unable to face his loss. So Felix ignored the creepy number-whispering and guided Nori's apparently unoccupied body back to bed. He got Nori prone, lying on his back, arms limp beside him, eyes closed and the eyelids twitching, and then reached for his comm, calling Jenkins at the launcher, who had one of the most powerful distance comms rigs.

  “What can I do for you?” Jenkins asked, sounding comfortable and in command as always, as though he had made it his life's mission to have ended up exactly where he was.

  “I think there's been an accident with the pontoth on Nakano Nori's home world. Can you look up what organization he was with before he came here and find out what exactly has happened.”

  “Nori can't do that himself? He is maybe better with computers than me.”

  On the bed, Nori was still muttering data, staring up at the vines above as though they were a neural pathway he was trying to navigate.

  “He thinks they're all dead. He's too upset. And you're better at this than I am.”

  A pause, and then Jenkins' voice came back slower, rich with sympathy, though the words were harsh. “Well, it doesn't take much skill. It's all over the news. InfiniTech Research facilities imploded a little over two hours ago. The planet is highly developed, and crowded. The destruction has already spread over ten percent of the land mass, accelerating as it goes. They've been evacuating as many people as they can, but winds have been blowing the pontoth up to the edge of the atmosphere, and from there it's been jumping to their orbital satellites.”

  Felix reminded himself again that there was only one person here for whom he could do any good. All the rest of it was out of his hands.

  Jenkins breathed out in a long slow sigh of incredulity or horror. “Because it's spread to the satellites? That means there must be some of it in orbit. And that means the Source worlds are issuing warnings to evacuating ships that they will not be allowed in their systems. They are mobilizing defenses to shoot the evacuees down the moment they re-enter real space.

  “They're calling it the first genocide of the war. Of course they're blaming us.”

  “It's my fault.”

  Felix had never felt gladder to hear a voice in his life. It almost made up for the horror. But he took the horror and folded it up tight and put it in an area of his mind labeled ‘Later.’ He turned to Nori and pulled his suddenly clawing hands away from his face. Nori was digging his fingernails in along his hairline, as if he could peel his face off. “It's my fault,” Nori said again, obviously progressed from thinking nothing at all to thinking this one thing, this one worst thing, over and over.

  “It's my fault, I killed them.”

  “I don't see how,” Jenkins commented over the comm. Nori shook his head and continued trying to wrench his wrists from Felix's grip, so he could go back to punishing himself.

  “Nori asked his people to come up with an antidote to the pontoth,” Felix explained. “He gave them the recipe, or the chemical composition--whatever--so they could do that. But they thought it would be a good idea to build their own, and their antidote obviously failed.”

  “I should have told them not to! I should have told them it was a bad idea. But it wasn't my function. I come up with ideas. Racetrack shoots them down. Racetrack – he puts the brakes on. That's why he's called-- And they killed him. Or he killed himself. I don't know. I don't-- ”

  “Listen,” Felix got both Nori’s wrists in one hand and pressed them down to rest on his chest, trying to tamp down the great gusts of sobs. “You gave them all the information they needed to know what that stuff could do. If they were as clever as you think, they should have been able to read it from the
analysis you sent. They built it themselves – could they do that and not know it's capabilities? They couldn't. They were overconfident. That's not your fault. I know you loved them, but it's still not your fault.”

  “I'm going to tell the captain,” Jenkins' voice said, from the comm on the bed next to Nori's knee. “The one place those ships might be safe to come is here, if Bryant can get control over this new pontoth. He should be able to tell whether he can do that, while they're still in orbit. We might be able to save some of them.”

  Not the ones who mattered to Nori, Felix thought, registering the surrender as Nori stopped fighting the grip on his wrist. But at least ones that Nori doesn't have to feel guilty about. “Thank you,” he said, glad to put off reporting to Aurora for a little while longer, because he still couldn't leave Nori like this, even if he had gone from trying to claw his own skin to a more desolate quiet weeping. “We'll see if there's anything we can do and report back when we can.”

  Nori rolled towards him and curled himself in a tight crescent around Felix's sitting form. “I can't do anything. It's too late. They're already gone. So many people! And I--”

  Felix put a hand in Nori's fine hair, his fingertips almost buzzing with the feel of electricity under the skin. Felix was not a bad lieutenant. He was good at order, at tidying things. He liked a neat schedule and the opportunity for a fair fight. But that was not going to save the human race.

  He also understood teamwork and leadership. If he could not do the job, it was his responsibility to enable the person who could.

  Bracing himself for the oncoming mental unpleasantness, Felix unfolded the sensor net that lay on the floor and pressed it to the places on his head that were still a little sore from having it unceremoniously ripped off this morning. When he had got it settled, he put the alien computer in his lap, picked up the wire that connected to Nori and tried to insert it in the socket in the back of his neck.