Humans

by A. G. Claymore

  Gleb led the way through the opening, which sealed as soon as Siri and Mel had cleared it. They were alone in a cargo hold – not surprising, considering they weren’t expected.

  Siri turned to Gleb. “So… now what?”

  “We make the rounds,” Gleb told her as though it was the most natural thing to do. “The provosts guarding the ship will be a little surprised at our presence but we’re only Humans. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that someone might have sent us over here as sanitation laborers without bothering to tell them.”

  “So…” Mel frowned.

  “Yeah, Mel. We’re gonna take our cleaning gear and find out who’s being held on this ship while we pretend to be cleaning. It might have escaped your notice, but my clever plan is to steal this frigate.

  “There are currently only…” He made a show of looking around himself. “…three conspirators. Maybe we could pull it off, but I’m no engineer and the two of you are comms techs, so I think we might want to find out if there are any valuable recruits on this ship before we stir the nibblers’ nest.”

  “But why can’t you just do your… mind-thing?” Siri asked.

  “Too many witnesses. The ship is full of prisoners and I don’t want them telling the rest of the HQE about a bunch of inexplicably dead provosts.” He turned so he could face them both.

  “Look, what I did on Memnon’s ship represents a real danger, a danger to our species. If the Quailu find out I can kill them with a thought, they’re likely to wipe us all out.”

  There was also the small matter of Gleb only being a part-time resident in his own skull…

  “How long can you keep a secret like that?” Siri asked him dubiously. “Are we the only ones that know about it?”

  “There are others who know,” he answered cryptically, “and it’s bound to come out sooner or later, but we prefer later. The longer we can keep this quiet, the harder it gets for them to get rid of us.

  “For now, I need you both to get your heads into the right space. You’re lowly Humans, glad, at least, that you’re free-born but you’re still subject to abuse. Siri, you’re glad to be here, even as a cleaner, because it gets you away from some bastard like Davu and Mel’s glad for the same reason because he likes you.”

  Siri supressed a smile at this. Perhaps he can read people, after all. While they had been waiting for Gleb’s return, they’d studied the programming manuals, as he’d suggested.

  But they’d also done other things…

  The door opened and a provost petty officer stepped in with his pistol raised. He aimed it at the Humans.

  Gleb raised his hands. “Cleaning detail,” he said, his voice wavering slightly.

  “Cleaning detail? Three comms techs?”

  “We’re… also a punishment detail,” Gleb admitted, the wavering tone betraying his embarrassment, perhaps helping him to project the right emotions to the provost.

  It must have worked because the Quailu snorted in amusement. “Fine, get to work but stay out of our way!” He holstered his weapon and left the hold.

  Gleb called up a basic ship’s menu. “First, let’s see what they have listed in the prisoner manifest.”

  Siri, a comms specialist by trade, knew enough to understand that Gleb was changing the interface. “What exactly are you doing?”

  “Well, I’m sure you know I can’t just open up anything, except the most basic menus, without sounding an alarm on the bridge.” He opened an upload window and held his wrist interface port up to it. “So I’m adding in an access portal designed by an old friend. It should let us go anywhere we want in the system without drawing attention.”

  He pulled his wrist back from the screen and closed the upload interface window. The entire holo flickered once, updating with a wide variety of new options. He brought up a list of prisoners. “At least half the Harpy’s original crew has been either killed or transferred off but most of the engineering staff are still here.

  “I was counting on that,” he admitted. “You can’t run a prison ship with just a handful of provosts. If a reactor went critical, they wouldn’t know which wrench to hit it with. I’d bet we’ll find half the staff down in the engine room right now, just running routine maintenance.”

  “You can pull up personnel locations on this class of frigate,” Siri told him. “The Lady Bau must have just had this one grown before Sandrak seized it.”

  Gleb looked at her. “They teach you that as a comms tech?”

  She shook her head. “You told us to learn programming while you were gone.” She pointed at the display in front of his face. “The version number on the firmware has a date, if you know how to pick it out. This ship is only a few months old.”

  She frowned at the look on Gleb’s face. “What?”

  Gleb seemed to shake off whatever had brought the look of concern to his face. “Never mind. It’s just one more reason to get in touch with the old crew, but it’s my worry, not yours.”

  He gestured to the display. “Show me how to bring up personnel locations.”

  She reached out and opened a series of sub-menus. “It’s in the engineering coding,” she explained. “The ship has to track everyone aboard because it sends a suit-close command in the event of a hull breach or if we rig for combat.” She smiled, giving a little shrug. “That was how I thought to look for it in the sample codes we were learning with.”

  “Clever!” Gleb grinned, nodding his approval.

  She felt a surge of pride and she wasn’t sure how to deal with it. She chose to focus on what she was doing. “Here we are, literally, as it turns out.” She pointed at the new holo-image of the ship indicating the three forms that represented the Humans.

  “Well done, future petty officer!” Gleb gave her a light punch on the shoulder.

  She’d only ever known such a gesture as an attack but, given the context, she couldn’t help but feel it was meant in a friendly, congratulatory way. “Engineering looks crowded,” she said.

  “It certainly does,” Gleb agreed. “Twelve engineering crew and six provosts to watch over them. Typical linear provost thinking. They know there’s a risk the engineers might cook up some mischief, so they put a heavy watch on them. Looks like a third of their total manpower is sitting down there staring at pipes.”

  “Waste of time,” Mel said with a grin. “When engineers want to cook up mischief, they do it through holo-interfaces. It would just look like they’re doing regular engineering stuff until it’s too late!” He noticed Gleb’s raised eyebrow. “I wanted to be an engineering tech but they put me in comms.”

  Gleb nodded, a grin spreading across his face. “Ain’t no way a provost is gonna know he’s watching mischief brewing until it’s too late to do anything about it!”

  He closed the holo. “Right! Screw the cleaning routine! We’ll go down to engineering and get them to help seize the ship!”

  Siri put a restraining hand on his shoulder, turning him back. “What makes you think they’ll help us?”

  “Because they serve Lady Bau,” he replied with a tone of unshakable confidence. “The Lady would never forgive them if they failed to assist us, especially when it would have brought this ship back to her.”

  They followed him out into the corridor. Siri couldn’t help but think that there was a lot of missing context behind Gleb’s statement. Bau held a vote in the imperial succession. She was an electress, so why the hells would she care about whether some of her captured crewmen were willing to help a handful of Humans?

  Sure, she could get a ship back in the deal, but that would seem like a long shot to her. How would she even come to hear of this, anyway?

  They walked straight up to the main entrance to engineering and stepped into the space between the inner and outer doors. The doors cycled and they stepped into the vast open space that housed the path drive.

  “You’re that cleaning detail?” a provost lieutenant asked them from a control room door.

  “That’s right
, sir,” Gleb confirmed. “Just a quick clean-up in here before we start on the prisoner cabins.”

  The officer waved them in and went back to his seat.

  Gleb led them straight to a small group of five Quailu engineering crewmen and, as they approached, one of them glanced over and noticed them. Siri had no explanation for their response but she felt the thrill of a deepening mystery.

  The crewman looked surprised, his stance altering slightly to elevate his head. It was an atavistic instinct that had allowed his distant ancestors to search for predators on the savannahs of his home-world. He turned back to the group, whispering urgently, and they all turned to look.

  “Way to act casual, fellas,” Gleb muttered under his breath. He looked around the space. “At least the provosts seem to have realized the futility of staring at the engineering prisoners for the entire shift. Probably all watching vids in the control rooms.”

  He walked up to the group and nodded affably.

  A lieutenant wearing the stripes of a path-drive team-leader waved for his team to be silent. “You’re Humans, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. Name’s Gleb.”

  That touched off a flurry of surprised exclamations. Siri watched in fascination as they exchanged glances with each other. Some darted quick looks to the catwalk above but there were no provost guards up there. Why is it such a big deal that we’re Human and that he’s Gleb?

  “You were there at the gas platform?” the lieutenant whispered. “You were one of the Humans who saved our lady?”

  Now that’s interesting! Siri thought, the hairs standing up on the back of her neck.

  “It seemed like the right thing to do,” Gleb said, as though rescuing powerful nobles was the sort of thing he might do on a whim.

  The Quailu crewmen chuckled quietly. Their officer stepped in closer. “What are you doing here on the Harpy?”

  “We noticed Sandrak is using her as a prison hulk and thought your lady might want her back,” Gleb replied mildly. “Doubtless, you guys have already cooked up a scheme to do that, but we thought we’d drop in and see if you could use a little help.”

  Another deep rumbling chuckle. “So,” the officer asked, “you’re escaping from something or someone and our ship was convenient?”

  “Also that,” Gleb allowed cheerfully. “So what do you have in the works?”

  The crewmen looked around them again, seeing no guards. “We’re hoping to use the grav-plating to immobilize the guards. Came up with it a couple of weeks ago, but the damned provosts have two guards in the grav-control room ‘round the clock. The old grav-gambit is one of the oldest tricks in the scroll.”

  “Mostly because it’s one of the best tricks in the scroll!” Gleb said. “Don’t worry about the guards. I’ll get your boys in there. What else do we need to get things rolling? Clear a path up to the bridge?”

  “We were planning to conn the ship from here, actually,” the engineer said.

  “Figures, seeing as you’re engineers,” Gleb said, arching an eyebrow.

  “No,” the officer countered. “Conning from engineering is a poor second-best but we have no way of grav-trapping just the provosts. We’d have to search the corridors one section at a time, restoring normal gravity as we went, until we found them all. The fleet would figure out something’s up long before we ever reached the bridge!”

  “What if I told you there was a way to locate them that didn’t end up violating Lady Bau’s software contract?” Gleb asked him. He turned to beckon Siri forward. “My friend, here, can show you how to use the emergency suit-close system to track everyone on board.”

  The Quailu officer leaned in. “Is this true?”

  “Yes, sir.” She nodded, unconsciously wasting the gesture. “The system tracks every suit on board because it has to confirm suit-close in the event of a hull breach. All you need to do is tie it to an output node and you can project the locations on a holo of the ship.”

  “Why does that sound so simple,” the Quailu asked her, “now that you’ve explained it?”

  She didn’t know quite how to respond to that. This was the first time she’d said more than a couple of words at a time to a member of the ruling species and his question threw her, full, as it was, with self-deprecation.

  “It sounds simple,” Gleb said, coming to her rescue, “because it is simple. You’ve just never had much use for it, in the past. If you want to contact someone on the crew, the system just routes your conversation for you. Enemy boarders aren’t tracked in the system because it doesn’t give a pile of turds whether they suffocate…”

  He paused, turning to the two Humans, eyebrows high.

  “Shit!” Mel exclaimed. “If you could set your system to open the helmets of any hostile forces on your ship while you’re rigged for combat…”

  “Or find a way to corrupt the system on an enemy ship to kill off its crew…” Siri added.

  “Now you’re definitely getting outside the contract parameters,” the lieutenant warned. “We can’t get away with something like that.”

  Gleb held up a hand. “Yes, that would absolutely get you blacklisted, but we have no such restrictions, seeing as we’ve already been blacklisted.”

  He gave his two companions an appreciative nod. “I like where your heads are at, and we’ll work on those ideas later but, for now, we concentrate on getting this ship back to its owner.”

  He looked back to the Quailu. “Who’s your grav man?”

  “Ramaat,” the officer gestured to a warrant officer.

  “Right, warrant, I need you to come up to the grav room with me. Siri will project a holo of the ship with enemy dispositions, centering it in the grav room to distract the guards inside.”

  He turned to her. “Do that just as we reach the door.”

  “Then…” He looked back to the Quailu crewmen. “I get inside, subdue the guards and Ramat will just grav-bomb the whole ship, except for engineering. After that, you can use the holo to restrict the enhanced gravity to the plates that happen to be holding the guards.”

  “Let’s do it!” the Quailu officer said.

  “Off we go, Ramat!” Gleb led him over to a lift platform and they rode up to the catwalk.

  Siri got to work getting the holo ready and she gave Gleb a confirmatory nod when he looked down at them. Now! He mouthed at her and disappeared from view.

  She activated the holo-display inside the gravity-control room.

  She heard the door snap open but nothing seemed to happen for a moment. She heard a faint ‘dammit, not again!’ followed by a cheerful ‘Hey, fellas!’ as Gleb greeted the two guards. ‘Are you aware that, in the event of a combat wound, your lord’s blanket coverage may not pay for such items as restorative physiotherapy or extended convalescence?’

  ‘I… what?” said the first guard.

  ‘Are you actually trying to sell us insurance?” another voice asked.

  She heard the squeak of armored-suit sole-pads on the decking, a soft grunt and the unmistakable sounds of a sidearm scraping its way out of a holster. There was the sound of a blade slicing several times, deep into meat, and there were two heavy thumps followed by a desperate thumping of armored feet on the deck.

  ‘It also won’t cover death by edged weapons,” he advised his victims, though it was too late to change their coverage now.

  Insurance companies were notorious when it came to pre-existing conditions.

  Siri snuck a glance at the engineering officer, who seemed to take the killing of two of his own kind with relative equanimity. It was hard to believe that, only a few days ago, it had been unthinkable that a Human would even look a Quailu in the eye and, yet, here she was helping Gleb kill two of them with the apparent approval of a Quailu officer.

  “Ramat has an open path for us to the bridge,” Gleb said from directly behind her, making her twitch with alarm at his unexpected presence. “I’ll take Mel and Siri and we’ll take care of whoever we find up there.”

&n
bsp; He led the way to the main entrance, stopping for a moment to casually shoot the provost officer in the main control room, where Ramat was unwilling to fiddle with the gravity because there were too many sensitive controls in there.

  “How many Quailu have you killed?” she asked him as they waited for the engineering airlock to cycle.

  “Dunno,” he admitted. “If you count combat, then it’s gotta be in the thousands. At the second battle of Arbella, Meesh and I were both tossing warheads from our scout-ships, kind of like mines but a little more up-close and personal.

  “I know I put a couple of frigates down into the grav-well of that gas giant and probably a cruiser also. We’d set them to home in on the curvature of the pitch-effect from their drives. Take out even one pitch drive when a big ship like that is already dancing on the knife’s edge and you pretty much guarantee them a one-way ticket to the after-pasture.”

  “It’s just…” she frowned, shaking her head as she walked.

  “It’s hard to imagine killing a Quailu?” He was asking, but just barely. “I couldn’t have imagined it, a few months ago, at least not seriously, but now?”

  He came to a stop, turning to face Siri and Mel. “The thing is you’re taught to revere them, to sacrifice your life for even the most worthless of their people.” He looked over her shoulder, not really seeing whatever was there.

  “And then, you see that the ‘master race’ can bleed. You see they can die and then, when they start dying by your own hand…”

  He trailed off and then looked her straight in the eyes and she shuddered at what she saw there.

  “The djinn is out of the lamp,” he said softly, “and there’s no way the Quailu can shove him back in. There’s no way I’d let some salt-licking Quailu security hump tell me what’s what, back on Kish.”

  “But the rules still exist,” she countered.

  “Rules!” he scorned, turning to resume his progress to the bridge. “A lot of rules are gonna have to change or the HQE will tear itself apart in short order!”