by Blaze Ward
“In that case, I would like to meet the man you claim is the only designer in the galaxy that might be better than you,” Casey smiled.
It was a tease, but an honest one. Bedrov didn’t bend the knee to anyone who didn’t earn it.
Bedrov smiled.
“And yes,” Casey stated formally. “I will give my blessing to this project. And hope that we can keep a superweapon like this secret for as long as we can. If it works, I cannot ever see the need to use it again. And that will be formal policy of both my government and my Fleet.”
She turned and fixed first Em, and then Torsten with a hard eye. Wald had remained silent the whole time by choice, observing and keeping notes in his head. On call, if she had a question, but this was all just the formality. It would have never gotten to her in the first place, without him deciding it was worth doing.
Moirrey had designed a sword capable of potentially killing a god. Yan had built it. And Ainsley was going to deliver it into the hands of a man charged with the mission of a lifetime.
Hopefully, it would be enough.
Chapter XIX
In the Ninth Year of Jessica Keller, Queen of the Pirates: October the Twenty-sixth at St. Legier
Summer had to remind herself that she had never technically met any of these people in the flesh, and that all she supposedly knew about them were stories told by Pops and his friends back in Corynthe. That she had been a roamer for the two decades of her adult life, seeing the byways of the Outer Rims and not a city girl who had visited Important Places.
It was a lie, but hopefully her disguise was good enough, because she hadn’t expected to have to test it until she got to Jessica.
But she was here, now, and the time for evasions was long since passed. Hopefully, she could pull it off, or would have some help.
The shuttle had brought them to the surface, overflying the area of destruction where an Imperial capital had been ground into the mud by orbital bombardment. A year later, it was still a basin, slowly filling with water and construction, but Summer could imagine that nobody currently alive would be around to see it completed.
Except maybe her, if she wasn’t dead in the next twenty-four hours.
The ride down had been provided by the Imperial Fleet. Polite, even friendly. Twitchy, with unknown civilians around. The usual extra security measures to make sure they weren’t smuggling any weapons, had all of their inoculations, and were safe to meet with Important People.
Apparently Pint-sized and Bedrov had moved well up in the world.
Summer hung a little behind Pops as they emerged from the shuttle and crossed the tarmac to a waiting vehicle. Pops being Pops, he slowed down and pulled her even with him and held her hand, as a way of making her part of the group.
She could have sent him into the interior and gone on with her life, back on Corynthe, but even then she knew that the chances were that he wouldn’t be back for years. And maybe never.
But she found Iorwerth Nakamura one of the most fascinating humans she had ever met, and she had known some characters, over the millennia.
And her disguise was good enough, she hoped.
Yan Bedrov waited next to the vehicle that would take them to wherever they were going. Summer recognized Ainsley Barret from pictures. They were a lovely, well-matched couple. She approved.
Off to one side, eyes narrowing the slightest bit, Lady Moirrey of Ramsey. Pint-sized. Petite, little pixie with bright blue eyes and raven-black hair starting to show streaks of gray.
Summer got introduced to Barret, and fawned over by Bedrov.
Moirrey approached.
Critical moment, on the surface of the most dangerous planet in the galaxy. One word, and Summer knew she’d be killed instantly.
“Dinna thin’ we’ve ’ver mets, but ya looks familiars,” Moirrey said quietly, shaking Summer’s hand firmly. “’cepts she were a redhead, with lots o’freckles. Knowed the best dirty jokes, though. And burger bars.”
Summer let go the breath she had been mentally holding and nodded.
“I shall see what I can come up with,” Summer replied dryly, with a light smile. “Haven’t been a redhead in maybe six or eight years.”
Moirrey surprised her by stepping close and wrapping an arm around Summer’s waist for a friendly hug.
“Since yer heres, best ta shows you sights ’n’thin’s,” the engineer said. “Then maybes a little beer and then somes serious conversation-like.”
Summer accepted the hug, and returned it.
Moirrey was apparently willing to cover for her. Hopefully, that meant that she would be willing to accept whatever help Summer could offer, and cover for her with the others.
And get her to Jessica.
Eight years ago, Suvi had promised to disappear from human history, but they would need her help to kill a Sentient being, especially one that thought of himself as a god.
Then she could go back to being the Last of the Immortals.
Chapter XX
Date of the Republic October 26, 402 Impi Palace, St. Legier
Moirrey’d liked to died from frights, watching the babe just walks up all nonchalantinglike. Summer were blond ’gains, lookin’ likes her immortalness, backs on Alexandria Station, and nots the hot redhead that had joineded her an’ Jess an’ Marcelle fer burger’n’beers afterwards.
Only difference were age. Weren’t twenty-two-lookin’s no more, but more mature. Had died the roots gray, then the tips back blond. Since it weren’t real, weren’t gonna grows back out. Done somethin’ to her skin to make it olders. Carried herselfs diff. Almost casual-like, ’steads of the hard-ass athlete she’d portrayed.
And Pops’n’Bedrov wouldn’t know no betters. And da Vinci’d been too busy at th’times, getting ready fer the Red Admiral to comes fer their souls, to spend any time dealin’ with the locals.
Not like Moirrey, who’d helped birth her, and all thats.
And seened it in her eyes when they shook hands.
Everyone were in the limo, nows. Her bein’ fifth-wheel, sittin’ ’cross from Summer, while Pops and Yan chewed the fat.
“How longs ya knowed Pops, Summer?” Moirrey asked, casual’n’stuffff.
“A little over two years, Moirrey,” the chick replied, friendly an’ smooth. “Wanted to meet the legend. Then I never quite got back to my wandering, afterwards.”
“Unnerstoods,” Moirrey nodded.
Pops were impressive dude. Too old fer her, and she had Digger, but he’d’a still made top ten lists, were she lookin’.
“Reasons I ask is importants,” she continued, noting that the other three’d gones dead silent and watching, owls on a rail, jest turnin’ heads and otherwised frozed. “We’z up ta no goods, and is all hafta be silents. If’n ya beens with Pops for that longs, ya unnerstands secret.”
She liked the long, superior gaze come outta Summer. And the snuggle up against Pops, like she were demure and all that. Moirrey weren’t fooled.
“If Pops is headed to the frontier with Galen, hopefully I’ll be allowed to join him,” Summer replied. “So I’m not sure who I could tell.”
“Is good,” Moirrey said.
She turned and gazed, quick-like, ats the other three, little chickadees on a wire, then back to Summer.
“I designed something,” Moirrey said flatly. “Yan and a friend helped with the engineering. Gonna get Pops involved, so’s you’ll hafta know something ’bouts it. And promise the kinds of secrecies ya keeps to the grave.”
It were fun, watching Summer act. Chick knowed humans. Had been around them fer six millennia now, learning from some great card players. Served her goods, today, too.
“I can keep secrets,” Summer stated boldly. “How bad could it be?”
“I learned some things, once upon a time, about a decade ago,” Moirrey felt her voice go smooth and clean, likes it did, moments like this. “At a place called Alexandria Station,”
“That’s at Ballard, in Aquitaine, right?” Summer
asked with pretty good ignorance.
“Tis,” Moirrey nodded. “Helped the Librarian herself, when an Imperial assassin tried to kill her. Our technology today is not as good as hers was, but we’re making progress, slowly.”
“So what did you design, Lady Moirrey?” Summer turned serious.
“A superbeam weapon, for lack of a better term,” Moirrey’s grin turned ice cold. “Depending on the final engineering, something more powerful than a Type-6 beam, relative.”
“Six?” Summer asked, a little shock showing that might not be acting. “I thought they only went up to Four?”
“They do, currently,” Moirrey replied, deadly serious now. “But this is designed to kills a god. A Sentient being called Buran who wants to conquer the galaxy.”
“How the hell did you managed that level of through-put, punk?” Pops turned a sharp gaze at Bedrov, his voice almost professionally insulted.
Yan turned a questioning eye on Moirrey now. Like he could see where this was going, but hadn’t yet wrapped his brain around the whyness. The gaze turned to encompass Summer as well.
Moirrey nodded. The conspiracy was in the back of this limo with the interior window up, flying at about a thousand meters height over the Death Zone in mid-fall colors. What of it had survived below them.
“I had some help,” Bedrov said. “Imperial Intelligence calls it Reading Someone In, when they allow you to review the files. Both of you will go through that process, and need to keep it secret, as Moirrey said, for the rest of your lives.”
“What have you done, Yan Bedrov?” Pops turned into an old-school preacher now, fire and brimstone.
Bedrov surprised her by getting quiet and almost withdrawing into himself, ’cepts where Ainsley leaned herself against him, like she were keeping him warm.
Spooky.
“On our flight back from Jessica, Mendocino dropped out of JumpSpace to investigate a grav-anomaly,” Yan said in a slow, quiet voice. “It turned out to be the Earth Alliance Sentient Combatant Carthage, commander of Earth’s defensive fleets during the Concordancy War.”
“Damn,” Pops whistled. “That’s one hell of a wreck to salvage. What did you find?”
“He wasn’t dead, Pops,” Yan said. “Not then. Spent an entire evening aboard him, talking about the past, the war, and the nature of evil.”
“He wasn’t dead?” Summer suddenly leaned forward, eyes intense with an inner fire.
“Not then,” Ainsley spoke up. “That happened later.”
“How in Vishnu’s name did you manage to kill a Skymaster, kid?” Pops had gone gray. Summer maybe, too.
“He chose that part,” Yan said, eyes bleak with pain. “Sent me home with a book of poetry that was printed on Earth, thirty-five-hundred years ago. Sent Ainsley home with something…else.”
“What?” Pops demanded, but the wind had gone out of his sails, as well.
“That’s where we’re headed now,” Moirrey broughts herself back into the conversation. “To show you.”
Chapter XXI
Engineering status: optimal
Weapon status: this platform is unarmed
Power supplies: batteries full. Induction systems optimal
Hardware status: Lord of Tiki projection optimal, language deviations over time adjusted for and stored internally
Memory status: 37% full with stable backups
* * *
The Lord of Tiki had been warned, several times, by both Yan Bedrov and Ainsley Barret, to retain the secrecy of his existence. He could respond to verbal commands for audio playback, to a list of seventeen approved requestors, but should only ever present himself in the flesh (as it were) when one of the two of them was present, with four, distinct sets of contingencies in place for their eventual deaths.
He wasn’t a Sentient being. Not in the sense of Carthage himself, but he could perform a good-enough facsimile. Simply shutting down his higher circuits, his Sentient parts (or however the modern humans might mistake them), did not concern him. Death was not a place, as he knew himself to only be a machine. A copy of a most advanced machine, one that had spent millions of years of personaltime investigating his own existence, but only a machine.
Carthage had not, however, downloaded anything more than summaries of those findings into the Lord of Tiki, and his personal logs only hinted at the immense logic puzzles that the being had explored in his meditations.
The door to the room opened.
When in rest mode, the space contained only the faintest hints of the environment it could become. A bar set at 1.3 meters tall, covered over with dinged and polished wood, apparently salvaged from a building largely destroyed by his distant cousin Buran. Backbar with a plate-glass mirror 4.3 meters wide and 1.7 meters tall, surrounded by polished wood from a different bar. His projector rested in the center of the backbar, where the available mirrors made his task much easier.
Eight chairs of a height for the first bar, possibly salvaged from the same location, based on design, entropic decay, and damage. Walls set at the correct distance for the projectors to optimize, marking off a room seven meters by eleven, the exact, original size of the Tiki Lounge, itself just aft of a primary forward frame and tight against an outer bulkhead and a storage warehouse for human consumables.
Yan Bedrov entered first, holding hands with Ainsley Barret and thus satisfied the first four security protocols on his defensive logic tree. Both wore casual clothing consisting of loose pants, tunics, and jackets, with Bedrov in his customary charcoal gray, and Barret in dark green and blue.
Lady Moirrey of Ramsey, AKA Moirrey zu Kermode, entered third, in an outfit she had previously explained as personally-modified Field Utilities originally issued by the Fourth Saxon Legion, a Republic of Aquitaine Hussar unit in the fourteenth millennium. Horse cavalry. That still made him giggle to consider.
Two other beings accompanied.
The male entered first, holding hands with the female, as Bedrov and Barret. He scanned as a human male, approximate age sixty Standard years, in good health and condition.
The female was…
The Lord of Tiki activated several subroutines that had been quiescent before now. Scanned the creature with a ping hard enough that he was amazed none of the humans noticed.
She did, fixing him with a sudden, hard glare that never made it out of her eyes.
She even continued walking forward, pretending to be a human, even though her internals were a highly sophisticated android chassis of a model he was unfamiliar with.
Even in the days of the Concordancy, such creatures were never allowed to achieve this level of intricacy, and everything he had been allowed to consume by Bedrov did not suggest that Buran was capable of it, either.
She was unarmed, beyond the simple ability to walk over to his projector and destroy it with a few, well-placed blows of a ceramic-boned fist. He was completely unarmed, as a precondition for accompanying the two pirates into the broader galaxy, and outliving his parent being.
What was he now, the Lord of Tiki? Once, he had been an avatar of Carthage, but Carthage was gone. Was it his destiny to live as long again?
He filed the question for his next bout of downtime. He was incapable of actually growing bored, but intellectual endeavors were the best way to pass the centuries.
“Lord of Tiki, could you join us please?” Ainsley Barret requested. “I have some friends to introduce you to.”
She always asked, when they were together. Technically, he had been given into her custody and protection by Carthage, and he could even choose to ignore Bedrov, though he doubted the circumstances when that might occur.
The next set of security protocols navigated successfully, he brought the bar into being around them, with old posters for beers not consumed in millennia. Travel ads to places that existed only in his memory of them. He decided to leave the barstools in their native format. It added a level of verisimilitude, since they already looked old and worn, like any good bar.
The older male’s heart rate jumped significantly, and his head rotated like a turret to take it all in. Profanities under his breath were barely audible.
The creature that presented as female mimicked the male externally. Her heartrate even seemed to speed up, but he suspected she was doing that for his benefit, and not out of adrenal necessity.
He placed himself behind the bar, a big, gruff-looking Irishman from the old country, on the home planet. 1.9 meters tall. One hundred and five kilos of mass, broad and thick through the torso, like a rugby player that had retired to open his own bar, as so many had, once upon a time. Short, reddish hair starting to think about grays. Scars and rough spots, like any good publican expecting a wee-bit of the rough trade, when the locals got maybe a little too deep into their pints and a match came on the tellie.
“Pops Nakamura, Summer Ulfsson, this is the Lord of Tiki,” Ainsley gestured to each as she introduced them.
Lady Moirrey surprised him by stepping up to the bar and leaning over far enough to stare directly at the projector, rather than the bartender.
“She’s a friend of mine, so behave yourself,” she threatened in a polite voice that still suggested a power torque and welding laser in his future if he did not.
Did she understand what that creature was? The face she gave him suggested that she did, which was the most fascinating thing he had discovered yet in the new era. Even more than Hussars.
Perhaps outliving Carthage would be an adventure after all.
“Understood, Lady Moirrey,” the bartender stepped back and to one side, so he could bow in the formal way, acceding to her desires.
He turned back to the crew and confirmed that the door to the secured room was closed. And that there were no devices recording or eavesdropping within his detection range.
“I would ask what it’d be,” he stood back up and grinned. “However, this is all an illusion, so I’m the only one that can drink.”
