by Eric Warren
Page gritted his teeth. “That won’t be necessary, sir.” He said it with such a seething hatred Evie thought he might go for the captain. But even Page wasn’t that stupid. Not unless he wanted to throw his entire career away. At least this way he could still be assigned to another ship in the fleet.
Greene motioned for everyone to leave, Evie exiting the room first. Swift justice, just like the Coalition was supposed to deliver. Page had screwed up and this was his punishment. The only problem now was Uuma would have to step up, and though she was good, she wasn’t the tactician Page was.
Greene joined her in the corridor as they made their way back to the bridge. “I can hear your enthusiasm in the silence, Commander,” he said.
“He deserved it. After what he did to Box, who I think is emotionally scarred by the way. You should have stripped his rank.”
“Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind. But we’re still unclear about what to do with the robot. And until the Coalition makes some sort of ruling, I don’t want to take an action that might be considered too drastic. Though this will be going on his service record.”
“As it should,” she replied, keeping in step with him. “With Uuma moving up to the primary shift we’ll need someone to take over second shift.”
“Anyone in mind?” he asked.
“Ensign Yamashita. Her skills back at D’jattan were impressive, to say the least.” Hers had been the first name to pop to mind, despite there were probably more than a few qualified candidates on board. Why had she jumped to the ensign?
“Isn’t she in exobiology?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at his first officer.
“She is, but wait until you see what she can do with a weapons array.”
“Very well,” Greene said. “Once this is over give her a few field runs. We’ll try it out.” As they stepped into the hypervator to go to the bridge he rubbed his forehead. “Do you think I just made a mistake back there? With what we’re about to face?”
She pursed her lips, staring at the blinking lights indicating they were moving. “I think if you’d kept him on the bridge in an emergency you would have been questioning if you could have trusted his judgement instead of focusing on the task at hand. It’s a lose-lose situation but I think you did the best you could, given the circumstances.”
“You’re probably right. I picked Page to serve on Tempest because he was the best at his job. But I neglected to see the darker side of him. The parts he hid so well.”
“He’s had a rough life,” she added. “So, I understand where it comes from. It doesn’t have a place on this ship.”
He nodded, his eyes somber. “Let’s just hope he finds what he needs elsewhere.”
***
Box sat in his room, running it all over in his mind again. The sound of the drills and the saws, how they cut into him, extracting parts as if he were nothing more than a defective engine. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if Evie hadn’t come when she did. They had come precariously close to his memory units, which could have completely wiped everything from the past five years, including everything he’d learned about medicine.
Damn Cas. If he hadn’t gone off without Box none of this would have ever happened. No one would have ever suspected him, interrogated him, hurt him. But Ronde baited him while Cas was still onboard, so maybe there was no way to avoid it. Perhaps it had been the natural outcome of living on a ship full of organics.
Box was homesick. He missed the Reasonable Excuse and he missed flying around with just Cas. The man was an asshole but at least he showed Box a modicum of respect. There was no telling with these people. It was like the more organics he was around the worse things got. Why couldn’t it be like it was back in the Sargan Commonwealth, where no one paid him any attention? Sure, maybe sometimes he had something thrown at him that he had to clean off later, but at least no one tried to kill him. At least, no one that he wasn’t actively pursuing or trying to kill back.
The people here were too intrusive, too concerned with matters that didn’t involve them. All they had to do was leave him alone and he would take care of the rest. But no, apparently some people found just the concept of him repulsive. And he’d definitely seen the hairy, pus-filled underbelly of the great and wonderful Coalition. After all this time he understood what Cas had been talking about all these years.
It didn’t matter anymore. They didn’t want him interacting with them and he couldn’t stand to be around them. That was fine. He would stay in the room until Cas came back. And if he didn’t, maybe Box would steal his own shuttle and head off somewhere. Somewhere no one cared if he was an artificial life form or not. That had always been the plan anyway.
He walked over and fished his entertainment center off the top of one of the unpacked crates, starting it up. He projected the image on the wall beside him and focused on one thing and one thing only: if Lady Penelope would find out about her husband’s affair with the duchess. Nothing else mattered.
31
Cas was ushered into a large room, large enough so the beam of the flashlight didn’t reach any of the walls. Behind him, Kayfor nudged him on. As best as he could tell it was circular in nature, with a four-meter-high wall on all sides, though beyond that there seemed to be alcoves or something similar that stair-stepped backward until he couldn’t see them anymore. Directly across from him was a pillar about five meters high, upon which crouched another Sil, glaring down at him, its purple head aura swirling around. This aura was different; it seemed to leave the confines of the Sil’s head, branching out in different directions like bolts of lightning. It was beautiful.
But when Cas glanced down his stomach dropped. In the floor was a dirty grate, caked with what looked like darkened bits of hair, blood and maybe even flesh. Was this an execution arena? After everything else he’d seen he wouldn’t think the Sil to be capable of such gore. The entire ship seemed so pristine. What sort of other creatures had been in this exact same position, only to suffer a fate they didn’t deserve? Did it even matter or was this all for show and nothing more?
Kayfor put his hand on Cas’s shoulder again. “Take joy the life you lived brought you here, so it could be ended with swift dignity,” he said.
The Sil above him on the pillar leaned over, “peering” down at Cas with a faceless head, which was unnerving. He wished they at least had eyes; it would give him something to focus on. He shifted from side to side, trying not to let his nerves get the better of him. He’d been in plenty of questionable situations before, places he thought he’d never get out of and yet somehow he had. But this was unlike any other place. And he barely held any of the cards, so negotiating would be difficult. “I would like—”
“Silence,” the Sil atop the pillar announced. The voice was different enough from Kayfor, but at the same time it hung in the air. “Human, you have been found guilty for the crimes of attempted escape before, during or after an interrogation by the Consul. How do you plead?”
“I don’t plead,” Cas replied. “I don’t agree with any of this.” He shone the light up at the Sil but it did nothing but dissipate before it reached him. It was like this race was molded out of darkness. But he wasn’t about to go quietly or easily. If they wanted to kill him, they’d have to get down here in the pit and get their hands dirty.
“Your plead is deemed irrelevant.” The Sil’s head lifted. “Ship guard, do your duty.”
Cas turned to face Kayfor, shining his light on him, though the glow from his head aura had intensified. “Maybe Rutledge was right. Maybe when we were out there, waiting in that quaternary star system I should have let him take your ship. Because it’s becoming obvious to me you’re more worried about your borders than the sanctity of life.”
Kayfor paused.
“If you really cared about justice, then you would be more interested in learning the truth, rather than just your version of it.” He turned and flashed the light back up at the other Sil. “All of you. But I can see now th
at nothing I ever say will make a difference to you. You decide the fates of those less powerful than you before you even understand them. How can you profess to be an advanced race?”
“We don’t need to understand them,” the Sil above him said. “Which is what makes us advanced. We don’t concern ourselves with the trivial matters of those beneath us.”
“That’s bullshit. If you didn’t you would have blown my shuttle to pieces the minute you saw me. But you brought me aboard because you were curious about what I might have to say. It just so happened what I did say didn’t match up with what you were expecting. And now, because it is an inconvenient truth rather than a comfortable lie, you will execute me and wash your hands of the entire situation.”
Kayfor’s head moved up to “look” at the other Sil, then back to Cas. He stepped back, his posture relaxing. “You say you were the human who sent the distress call three-point-one regulations ago?”
“I don’t know what a regulation is, but if you mean seven of my years, yes.” Cas replied.
“You have to prove it. In some way. We cannot allow this disruption to continue.” Kayfor held out one of his hands, palm up.
Cas glanced down at his feet; they had smeared some of the errant fur and blood along the floor. “Do you know how my people measure time?”
“We downloaded your information. You base your cycles on the orbit of your planet around its sun. You then break those orbits into six seasons, which are further broken into seventy-three ‘days’. Each day consists of twenty hours which can be divided into minutes and seconds.”
Cas lost his attention span for a moment. “Yeah…yeah, that’s it exactly.”
“You also categorize a grouping of seven days into something called a week, though it seems superfluous,” Kayfor added.
“According to our calendar, I sent the distress signal to your people on Dekaton 65th, 2593. Or in other terms, 2593.2.65. We were in the Quaval star system just inside your border, a quaternary star system consisting of a red supergiant, a white dwarf and two mid-level yellow stars. The massive gravity from the supergiant obscured our presence so we managed to find and surprise your ship. I sent the distress signal on frequency one-one-one-three-eight-two at thirteen forty-nine hundred hours of that day.”
Kayfor glanced up at the other Sil. “It is not enough. You could have obtained that information after the fact.”
Cas shook his head. “I couldn’t. The mission was classified by my people. Only those aboard on the ship would have had it. And I was the tactical officer that day. I had control over the weapons.”
“Still, that does not prove you were there,” Kayfor said.
“The proof is I am here now. Why else would my people send anyone else? No one has had contact with your race in over a hundred years. No one would be equipped to speak to you. Wouldn’t they send the only person they thought you might be receptive to?”
Kayfor didn’t respond, but he continued to hesitate.
“Listen to me,” Cas said. “You have to be willing to trust me. I know you see me as inferior, but allow me to show you the evidence. If I’m lying then you can execute me. No one else other than me could tell you this.”
“It isn’t me you need to convince,” Kayfor replied. “It’s Zenfor. She has the ultimate say over your fate.”
Cas cut his eyes at the form looking down on him from the pedestal. “She never gave me the chance. She had already made up her mind before she even came to talk to me.”
Kayfor “stared” up at the other Sil. “Prejudice?”
“Confirmed,” the Sil replied. “Tainted questioning.”
Kayfor returned his attention to Cas. “Zenfor had a relative on the ship your people took. We did not realize it would cloud her judgement. She should have given you the opportunity to explain.”
“What are the risks?” the Sil above them asked. He shifted to the side of the pedestal, leaning over the edge.
“Risks, what risks?” Cas asked.
“The risk of not allowing you to make your case to her.”
Cas craned his neck to the other Sil. “There is a threat that could potentially harm or destroy the Sil. And all the surrounding systems. I came to warn you and ask for your help.” The other figure wasn’t moving, but Cas caught the rise and fall of his chest. So they breathed after all, but how? He hadn’t seen any way for them to take in oxygen. There was more to these Sil than what was on the surface.
“Allow him to make his case. It is a minor inconvenience,” the Sil above him said.
Kayfor took him by the arm, leading him out of the center of the room back toward the door. “You don’t know how lucky you are. A true rare gem in a field of common stones.” The Sil Judge said nothing as they left, the door appearing behind them as if it had always been there.
“How often do you bring people aboard for execution?”
“Whenever one of the inferior races living in our space leaves their planets. Some evade us, others aren’t as skilled.”
“You mean there are other species living here?”
“Of course. My people come from a binary pair of planets orbiting what you know as Taurus Epsilon. But our home planet is called Thislea. Obviously there are others within our space.” He led Cas down the dark hallway, though they hadn’t gone through a different door there was something strange about this hallway. It wasn’t the same one they’d taken to the judge.
“We have a binary set of planets in my system too,” Cas said.
“We know. Amun and Mut, both Class J gas giants according to your own classification system.”
“You know a lot about us,” Cas replied, his arm aching from where Kayfor gripped it tight.
“We learned a lot more after you arrived. Your shuttle’s database was very informative.”
Cas shook his head, unable to believe all of that useless data was still in there while the thing he needed had been erased. “In order to get the evidence, I need to show your captain—I mean consul—about the attacks I’ll have to go back to my ship. There’s another copy of it there.”
“Evidence gathering will be later,” Kayfor said. “If you survive convincing the consul you are who you say you are then we’ll discuss retrieving the information.”
It was the best he could hope for in a tense situation. Maybe the Sil weren’t as vicious as he thought. One thing was for certain. If Cas ever got back he was going to kill Page.
32
Page sat on the edge of his bed, fuming. How dare Greene take him off duty. The only thing he’d tried to do was keep the ship safe. It would have been different if had been a normal machine following its programming, but there was something strange about this one. It wasn’t alive. But someone had done something to it to make it seem alive. Any machine who had threatened a Coalition officer would have been decommissioned, wiped, and reprogrammed. At least that’s how they did it back on Meridian. Quite a few of the Sargans had machines helping them. They were easy cannon fodder and didn’t complain when they got shot. Except the Sargans hadn’t counted on the locals catching a few and turning them against their masters. Old Houck, he had been a technical genius at reprogramming. He told Page once he’d been the chief engineer on the Coalition flagship in his youth. But the thing with Old Houck was you could never tell when he was lying and when he wasn’t. Half the shit he said had to have been made up.
Houck would even install remote cameras in the robots so he could make sure they would get back to where they belonged. Not to mention it allowed everyone to see the real prize: the face on a Sargan scum when his own robot came marching back to his camp and self-destructed. Those had been the days.
Not like now. When robots had rights and feelings. He’d never heard anything more ridiculous. That machine was an infiltrator for the Sargans and he was going to prove it if he had to rip its central cortex out himself and bleed the information from it. Box had already threatened Ronde with physical violence and with a passive-aggressive gesture. That would h
ave been enough to get any Coalition officer put on suspension. By now he should be disassembled and in two hundred parts in the science lab. But no, it seemed that because this robot was good at emulating human emotions he was being given the benefit of the doubt. Was he alive? Was he just a copy of life? No one knew.
Except Page knew. That thing was nothing more than an automated utensil, programmed with a few quirks to make it seem more life-like. It was the perfect vehicle for stealing classified information. And it roamed the ship, freely. Any moment he expected to hear a BOOM, feel the ship shake from an internal pressure loss and a general alert come over the comms telling the crew the Sargans were closing in on them. Or the Sil. Or any of a hundred other organizations. The fact was the traitor and his machine were a liability, and it was Page’s job to identify that threat and remove it.
But how was he supposed to remove anything with both the captain and the XO protecting it?
He slammed his fist down again, standing and pacing the room. There had to be something he could do. They hadn’t left yet; he would have felt the ship jump into the undercurrent. Which meant he still had time. He couldn’t be out of his room more than a few minutes before the automatic scanners all over the ship found and identified him. Unless…
There was only one recourse left to him.
He tapped his comm. “Izak. You there?”
“What do you want?” Izak whispered. “We’re getting ready to depart, I can’t talk now.”
“I apologize you got in trouble because of me. But without you, this ship is in grave danger. We don’t have any more time to spare.”
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
Page wracked his brain. If left unchecked to his own devices, the machine could have the run of the ship as soon as everyone was preoccupied with returning to Sil space. There was only one thing he could think of.
