by Mark Wandrey
The one on his right looked up slightly and locked eyes on something. Using his 360-degree radar, Jim looked behind him and saw Splunk high up in the overhead supports of the bar. She had her nasty-looking little rifle braced on the support and was looking purposely at the three NapSha. The one who’d spotted her got the others’ attention, and they all followed the first one’s gaze.
Jim let his hand drift ever so slowly toward his gun belt. He linked the GP-90 with his pinplants and took a calming breath. Your move.
Less than a second later, the aliens moved aside just enough to let Jim through, and he quickly did just that. “You have caution, Human,” the leader said.
“You as well,” Jim replied. He watched them on his radar vision as he moved away. Two of them watched him, the third watched Splunk. A short time later, they joined back up and left the bar. With that drama out of the way, Jim felt his pulse begin to slow and glanced back up. Splunk was gone; there was no sign of her. He grinned and continued onward.
The corner was in almost complete darkness. With his radar vision he could see it was occupied by several sitting locations. One was a pod full of wet cushions, home to a clutch of creatures resembling caterpillars covered in robot arms. He didn’t pick up any language, so he had no clue what race they might be. Another was just a metal post sticking out of the floor covered in random electronic parts. He wondered if it was junk left behind by a patron when part of the pile turned and looked at him. A “hand” raised up and a finger made a beckoning gesture.
Jim set his translator routine to broadcast in Altok and spoke. “Are you Sl’k?”
“It is me,” the parts pile replied, also in Altok.
“Will you speak with me?”
“Depends on what you want.”
“I’m here to see the Daikichi.”
“You are not a disciple. Why would you seek the Daikichi?’
“Are only the disciples allowed to quest for knowledge?”
“You cannot have knowledge without the wisdom to learn,” Sl’k said.
“Help me gain this wisdom, then,” Jim asked. He’d heard a lot about the Disciples of the Singularity; they’d led him to the Empire of Machines in his research. More religious nutjobs.
“Have you tasted of the purity which is machine?”
Jim brushed his hair back to show the sensor clipped to his pinplant. “I have.”
“That is but the gentlest brush of lips from a tentative lover,” Sl’k said. It spread its hands, two mismatched robotic limbs of obviously differing manufacture. “You gain wisdom from the ever deeper embrace of machineness!” Jim waited. “In ancient times gone by, the first Shinshoku found this place. He was searching for something, but none remember what that was now. Deep, deep, deep, he went into the ancient tunnels here until he found Maetel.”
“What is Maetel?” Jim said.
“It is the machineness,” Sl’k explained. “It is why we are here. Kikai.”
Another Japanese word, Jim thought. Kikai meant machine, Daikichi meant a sort of Oracle, and Shinshoku was the leader of a Shinto religious order. The Japanese had been some of the first to leave Earth and explore the Galactic Union. The Maria Maru spent years making trips out and back, trading, exploring, and seeing many places for the first time. It was the reason so many places and things had Japanese names. Had Maria Maru been to Kikai? One day, the ship failed to return so nobody would ever know for sure.
The translation matrix all translators used was dependent on assigning relevant terms based on who had first encountered it, which meant the first Humans to come to Kikai had been Japanese. Who they were was uncertain.
“The Shinshoku was intrigued by what he found. He didn’t understand it, but he desperately wanted to. Only, to do so, he had to be more like it. So, slowly over the course of his life, he became more like it. Bit by bit, piece by piece, he embraced the machineness.
“He left from time to time, to bring back the necessities of his studies. On those visits, he found others, and they wished to learn about machineness, too. In the fullness of time, they grew to be legion.” It gestured around him, indicating the multitudes who lived in the habitat. “They transformed the place of pure machineness into a halfway house where we could survive while we waited to join the Singularity.”
“How long have you waited for the Singularity?” Jim asked.
“Long…so very, very long. Sometimes, the wait is all that remains.”
“
“No,” he said, “I think this works in our favor. Don’t do anything, just follow. Unless things go badly, of course.”
The five figures drifted next to him and stopped. Like Sl’k, it was impossible to tell what they had been before. But while Sl’k was indistinguishable from any random pile of machinery, these had an almost alarming resemblance to CASPers. Horribly misshapen ones, but still mechanical war machines. They all had pieces of their former selves. Pieces. An eye here, an ear there, one had a single hand which was a massive purple paw.
“You called them?” Jim asked Sl’k.
“These are Sky Knights.” Jim had to listen twice; his pinplants choked on it for a second and tried calling them celestial samurai, or something like that. Once it was clear the name was Sky Knight, he remembered the person on the radio saying the Sky Knights were the only ones with fuel. “You are under arrest, Human.”
“For what?”
One of the Knights grabbed him and started pulling him out of the bar; the other four fell in with them. He didn’t fight.
* * *
The cameras serving as a head on Sl’k followed his departure. It remembered the last time it had seen a Human. The only time. The Human had come looking for the secrets of Singularity, too, and it had dealt with the Human the same way.
When the Human was gone, Sl’k wanted to return to its thoughts on machineness, but it was interrupted by another visitor. It pulled its thoughts away from machineness to look at the visitor, and the entire pile of parts which made up Sl’k’s being jumped in surprise. Its brain took full account of the visitor, recognition fired, and it turned to shock.
“No,” Sl’k said.
“Yes,” the visitor said, looking at Sl’k with huge eyes. A tiny hand held out a data chip. A manipulator reached out, took the chip, and examined it closely. It was nondescript, but of the old type. The rare and valuable type. “You will find what you seek on that chip.”
Sl’k stared at the chip for a long time, then finally looked up to the visitor only to find it gone. Sl’k’s manipulator shook slightly as it inserted the chip into a data port. A second later, Sl’k exploded like a bomb.
* * *
Jim was sure he could have gotten himself out of the situation, even without Splunk’s help. The so-called Sky Knights only appeared formidable. He suspected they were anything but. In regard to the Knights, though, he was doing what Hargrave had been encouraging him to do. Trust your instincts, son. They are a merc’s best weapon in almost every situation. So, when the Knights appeared, his instincts told him to just let them take him. If they’d wanted him dead, they would have come in shooting.
The legends around Kikai were as varied as the ones who told them. Jim first came across them while reading a Human research paper on Raknars he’d initially missed. He hadn’t found it earlier because the paper had been written almost a century prior—not long after first contact.
It turned out a few of the scientists who’d left on the expedition with Dr. Adelaide Black to explore the galaxy had returned. Never more than a few, and never at the same time. The storied Dr. Black herself was never heard from again, but the wealth of data brought back by those who’d made it home proved to be the backbone for hundreds of books and papers. One of those had a section on Raknars. Jim hadn’t found
it initially because the paper called them “mecha.” Of course, he’d since expanded his search parameters.
The paper was largely wrong about the Raknars. The writer considered them a failed experiment in war machines, abandoned eons ago. The reality couldn’t be further from Jim’s conclusions, of course. The Dusman built tens of thousands of Raknars; their remains were scattered on untold battlefields across the galaxy. His pair were just two of them.
Buried in the paper was a side note, another conclusion, based on the researcher’s work, that he believed the Raknars may have originated at an enigmatic city-state known as the Machine Empire. They’d designed the Raknars for the Dusman, or that’s what the author believed. Another reference included the system Kikai, though it also said nobody had gone there because it was too dangerous.
As Jim was “escorted” deep into the habitat, he went back through his files to look at the researcher’s name. Samuel Wodden. It was disappointing; Jim had hoped he was Japanese.
When he focused again on his surroundings, Jim was surprised to see he was no longer in the artificial construct of the habitat. Now he was being maneuvered through caves cut in the living rock of the asteroid. His general feeling of anxiety was now laced with excitement as he realized he might be the first Human to ever see this place. He hoped Splunk was following him, or he might be the last.
Finally, they arrived at an entrance—a vast, armored doorway which showed obvious signs of repair. Sometime long ago, an incredible force had blasted it loose. The door was at least two meters thick. Whatever had penetrated it was as powerful as a starship-class weapon, and the cuts were frighteningly smooth. Someone had improvised a way of closing it again by welding massive hinges to swing the door, more or less, back into place, and a bolt had been added, not unlike what you would find on a gate back on Earth. Crude, but effective.
His guards took no notice as they passed the door and took Jim still deeper into the asteroid. They eventually floated into a chamber cut in the side of the tunnel, which had a more rough-hewn appearance. Round, with a high ceiling, it was at least 50 meters across. Along the walls of the chamber were ranks of huge, mostly mechanical, beings, which Jim assumed were more Knights, and there was something that looked like the entrance to a manufactory on the back wall. He got the feeling if he was in a video game, this was the equivalent of entering the final level.
The guards continued to flank him as they crossed the chamber. As they approached the far end, he realized it wasn’t a manufactory, but another living being. God, how far have they gone in their cult?
“Wait here,” one of the Knights said when they were a couple of meters away.
For only the second time on Kikai, Jim saw unmodified beings like himself. Only, they weren’t like himself. They were on hands and knees—or whatever their races used for hands and knees—digging at the rock of the back wall around the mechanical parts, worrying at the stone with bare hands, claws, or feelers. The air was filled with the smell of various kinds of blood. He saw with horror a starved looking Oogar digging with a hand half worn away, leaving streaks of blood with each movement. Jim swallowed his bile.
“Do my disciples impress you?” the wall asked in a grumbling voice which shook the room.
“Who are you,” Jim asked, “and what is this place?”
“I am the Daikichi, and this is the chamber of suffering.” He checked his pinplants and saw the Daikichi was speaking in Tortantula. Tortantula? He looked closer. Not only couldn’t he find a sign of even a patch of skin, there was nothing spiderlike about the machine he saw. The Knights all bore some resemblance to a living organism. This…thing carried none of that.
His pinplants continued to reply in whatever language they were addressed in, so he didn’t stop. “Why are they made to suffer like this?” Jim asked in Tortantula.
“Suffer?” the Daikichi asked. “There is no suffering here, only labor. These disciples are taking their first steps toward machineness. The trip toward Singularity requires sacrifice. They must move away from the flesh, which cannot grasp the beauty of machineness. These rocks will take the first piece. If the disciples are found worthy by forgoing the flesh, they may move onward to be judged by Maetel.” A coughing laugh reverberated, and the disciples labored harder. “Maetel will demand more flesh as a talisman to gain a view of Singularity.”
“I have come to speak with you,” Jim said. “I am Jim Cartwright, commander of a great mercenary company. I am a Human.”
“I know your race,” Daikichi said, its gasping breath reverberating. So, some part of it was still biological after all. “You came before, and like now, you only ask of the Empire of Machines, but you do not offer anything in exchange.”
Jim looked at the rock wall with its streaks of blood. Rotten meat hung in places to offer testimony of previous offerings from disciples come and gone.
No fucking way, he thought, but then he decided to go forward. “I’m here to learn about the Raknars.” He didn’t know what the Daikichi expected him to say, but the mostly mechanical being was speechless for a long time.
“Why do you want knowledge of Raknars?”
“Because I have one. I’ve piloted it.”
The entire wall shivered, making the cave quake. Dust slowly fell from the ceiling, and the acolytes crawled back in shock and confusion.
“None pilot a Raknar anymore. How would you do this thing?”
“By becoming one with it,” Jim said, the memory of the joining flooding him with sudden power. “I AM A RAKNAR!” he roared, surprising himself. “Who are you to doubt me? I have ground Canavar under my feet, thundered over enemies by the thousands, and watched them flee from me in terror!”
Just as quickly, the feeling was gone, leaving Jim shuddering and gasping for breath. What the fuck was that? He looked around, expecting the hulking half-machines of the Knights to be pointing weapons at him or poised to cut him down. Instead he found them kneeling. Even on their knees, they were taller than him, so they bowed whatever they used for heads in order to not look him in the face. Oh nuts, what did I just do?
“The Master has returned,” Daikichi said, its mechanical voice quavering uncertainly. “None believed it possible.”
Jim was about to say he was no master when he felt Splunk land on his shoulder. The “eyes” of the Knights moved between Jim and Splunk. Back and forth, back and forth.
“Do you have knowledge of the Raknars?” Jim asked.
“What does a Master and a Hall’ita need of our sad knowledge?”
Master? Hall’ita? “Some things have been forgotten in the ages,” Jim said, rolling the dice. “I have…returned to find what has been lost.” He thought frantically. “I am rebuilding a Raknar Corps and need knowledge.” Splunk gave his shoulder a gentle, reassuring squeeze, and he felt more confident.
A manipulator emerged from the wall of machinery making up Daikichi. It held a data chip of the same antique design as the ones Splunk had stolen back in the Valley of Loss on K’o. “This is the sum of the data we have on the Raknars,” Daikichi said. “I fear most of it you already know.” One of the Knights took it and brought the chip over to him, and to his surprise, handed it to Splunk. He glanced at her, and the little Fae gave him a wry wink.
What the heck? “Do you have any Raknars?”
“No,” Daikichi replied. “Once, ages ago, there were many. They were taken by the Union. The Peacemakers watch over us now because many would harm us for our secrets of machineness and take our disciples as slaves.”
“Why didn’t you fight them?” Jim asked.
“Fighting is not the way of Maetel.”
Jim looked around and realized he hadn’t given any thought to his exit strategy. “Do you know the way out?” he asked Splunk, sotto voce.
“
“What now?” Daikichi said.
“I’m leaving,” Jim said.
“But, Hall’ita, what of us?”
&nb
sp; Jim was moved. The machine sounded as forlorn as anyone he’d heard in his short life. Even translating from its own language, whatever it might be, through Tortantula, and finally to English, the despair was unmistakable.
Jim turned back. “What of you?”
“You must go to see Maetel,” it said. “You cannot come this far without seeing it! A Master and a Hall’ita; this is a fortuitous moment.”
Jim thought for an instant and almost resumed his departure. Get while the getting’s good, as Hargrave would say. Almost, but not quite. One of his traits had always been a driving curiosity. He wanted to know about as many things as he could. Now he was being offered an audience with the leader of this being’s cult. By the way they described Maetel, they believed it was their god.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess, yeah. I’ll meet Maetel.”
The machine presence of the Daikichi split in half and opened to reveal a passage. “Inside is the Maetel,” it said. Jim slowly walked/glided past, glancing at Daikichi as he went by. The being seemed 100% machine. He wondered what part wasn’t.
As he moved into the chamber, he could feel Splunk’s claws holding onto him through the combat armor. She was completely silent, with no sign of the rifle she’d had back in the bar. The Fae never ceased to amaze him, though lately she’d been showing abilities which shocked as well as amazed.
The space narrowed until it was the same as the tunnels before they’d reached the unusual breached door. It went onward for a short distance until it ended in a miniature version of the cavern where the Daikichi and its disciples lived. The cavern was dimly illuminated by ancient nucleic glow strips. Jim knew they were good for tens of thousands of years of light, and these were nearly dead from age. This place was ancient. In the center of it was a device cut into the living rock of the asteroid.
“What the hell is it?” Jim wondered aloud.
“Computer,
“A computer?” He moved around the device, examining its construction. It was a two-meter tall metallic column with vertical grooves and glassy sections which could be slates. He leaned in closer and could see the grooves were glowing ever so slightly, like the nucleic glow strips. “What’s it doing here?”
