Marque of Caine

by Charles E Gannon

  “I…I can’t.”

  Elena’s nod was still that of a somnambulist. “Few can. Only malign beings, or those who once walked into the beyond from this world: rebels and iconoclasts, dream-striders and question-askers. In every epoch, the keepers and makers of history have been happy to let them pass through the shimmer and be gone. But common folk are often saddened to see them go. Some spirits return out of longing, rather than iniquity. Are you one such, seeking to return to the world in which you were born?”

  Still trying to track Elena’s swerve into almost Shakespearean idiom, Riordan was unsure how to respond. An incorrect reply could brand Caine as a duplicitous, and therefore malign, spirit. So, the simple truth and a bit of redirection. “Elena, I know nothing about the world you are in. I only know we miss you, here in the world where I met and loved you, and where we have a son. Where Connor is waiting for you.”

  Elena stood slowly, walked in a shuffle toward what looked like a pool of glittering water, except it stood upright, defying gravity. “They were right,” she murmured as she started to circle it. “It was an ill omen that I looked back when I walked out of the shimmer.” She paused. “You are a familiar spirit. Your words find purchase in my heart. All the more reason I must say, enough. Begone.”

  “Elena, please; it’s me, Caine. I’m real.”

  She raised her arms as if they were immensely heavy, the folds of her snow-bright nightgown expanding like wings. “This is the robe of the Watcher. I am no addled widow in white weeds, unable to remember a husband though his voice calls from beyond the shimmer. You deceive. No spirit that loved me in life would ask that I join it in death.”

  Riordan fought to find a reply. “Wouldn’t one who truly loves you also travel long and far to remind you of your earlier”—No! Too risky!—“your other life? A life unfinished, and with so many left grieving behind you?”

  Elena shook her head slowly. Her black tresses hardly moved. “You urge me to enter a world of dreams. To walk through that watery door into your realm. But if I do, it shall not fail to consume me, just as it does the others who hazard it.”

  Riordan shook his head. “No. That door is not how you will reach me.” Or is it?

  “Then you speak riddles. There is no other portal that links this world to those beyond the scope of mortal understanding. You are trying to trick me, spirit. But I forgive you: it is in your nature.”

  “No, Elena. I am not asking you to step through that door. I just want to talk to you, to—”

  “To tempt me with tales of our life in some imaginary otherwhen? To use my dreams against me? No, to listen further can only seduce me to my death.” She resumed her circuit of the vertical pool.

  “But Connor will—!”

  “No.” Elena stopped again “Too much pain.” She did not move; the salt statue that had been Lot’s wife could not have been more still. When she spoke again, she did so without turning, her voice so soft that Riordan had to strain to hear it. “I am of this world, you of some other. I release you, spirit, of whatever troth or duty may bind you to me.”

  As she resumed her slow circuit of the room, Elena looked over her shoulder at Caine. “Spirit, if this other world exists, and if you are truly some extension of my loved one, then bear this message to him and to our child: should they ever teeter upon the brink of oblivion, seek me.”

  “Seek you? How? Elena, no—”

  “I could wish, so easily, that you were not a ghost, not a…” Her voice trailed off, thickening as her eyelids drooped and her smile faded. Gray mists crowded in around her, shrinking the window into Elena’s world as she began another slow orbit of the vertical pool of water.

  “No!” Caine shouted as the slate-colored nothingness of Limbo surrounded him…and he started up from where he was lying: the couch he had first laid down upon in Kutkh’s subterranean domain, now surrounded by instruments and medical machinery. He tore off the leads and osmotic pads attached to various parts of his body, glad that none of them were IVs. Not that it would have stopped him.

  Caine leaped up from the couch…and fell awkwardly on the floor. Robots wheeled in to both help him up and restrain him. The room spun, his limbs felt weak. Then he saw them and realized why.

  He had lost a startling amount of weight. His hair fell into his eyes, almost blinding him. “Kutkh, Kutkh!” He hated even having to call for her, to say nothing of the edge of desperation he labored to keep out of his voice. But pride had to wait upon what really mattered: saving Elena from Ur Virtua, finding a way to get her stabilized and homeward bound. “Kutkh!”

  “Be still, human,” the Dornaani snapped as she drifted into the room in a chair kept aloft by a quad of rotors.

  “Elena…didn’t know me. She won’t…”

  “I am aware of the general outcome of your visit with her, human. It is unfortunate. But what may I do? You wished access and it was granted.”

  “Take me to her.”

  “You cannot wake her safely.”

  “I accept that.” For now. “But I need to see her.”

  “How touching.”

  “Not to hold her hand,” he half-lied, “I want to see her condition. With my own eyes.”

  “I did not know you were qualified as a physician.”

  Riordan wobbled to his feet, alarmed by the changes in his sense of balance. He had moved differently in Virtua, had become accustomed to far more muscle mass, a slightly higher center of gravity. “I can read enough Dornaani to examine the readouts, maybe see if she can still be revived. Or restored by regeneration therapies or organ cloning.”

  Kutkh cycled her inner eyelids slowly. “Very well.”

  “Then let’s get going.”

  Kutkh pointed a finger to either side. “We have not yet completed our business, human. You agreed to provide me with a copy of your consciousness. We must do that immediately. By the time the process is concluded, you will begin experiencing the after-effects of your long immersion.”

  “I’m experiencing them now.”

  “You have been in Virtua for one hundred and twenty days; the exhaustion will become much worse. I will provide stimulants to maintain you during the trip to your mate’s virtuality support pod. But I make no promises regarding the sequelae.”

  “All right. Just hurry.”

  “I will be swift.” Kutkh gestured toward the ceiling. A hole appeared in it and a silver-streaked globe descended toward him.

  “How long does it take to copy my consciousness?”

  “An hour, possibly less.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  The node mistress’s lamprey-sucker mouth twisted. “Not usually.”

  * * *

  Kutkh’s spearhead-shaped aircar traversed half the continent in less than an hour. Riordan climbed down, striding toward the dome in which a small fraction of Leltlosu-shai’s Ur Virtua participants were housed.

  A large iris valve opened in its side. Caine pushed past the security robots that swerved away at a wave from Kutkh. “Where is she?”

  “According to the contract made on her behalf, she is in cell 9-1845.” Kutkh pointed toward the other end of the soaring dome. “Back there.”

  “Back there” turned out to be another cathedrallike rotunda, built out from the first. As they rode the lift to its ninth tier, Riordan stared around. Every surface was lined with inward-facing hexagonal hatches of cryocell storage tubes. It was like rising up through the center of a hollow beehive-mausoleum.

  The lift stopped. Caine jumped out, glanced at the ninth tier’s directory, located the section that held cell 1845, ran, and started counting. Bile came up in his mouth. He spit it out and kept running past the green lights of active cells.

  1843, 1844, 1845—and a red light.

  Riordan clutched himself, mute with confusion, terror rising up behind it. “What does it…it…?”

  Kutkh murmured, “Very odd,” and tapped a control panel alongside the hexagonal hatch. It sighed open. The virtuality support
pod slid out.

  It was empty.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  JULY 2124

  LELTLOSU-SHAI and DEEP SPACE, BD+75 403A

  Riordan staggered, caught himself on the rim of the pod, the world corkscrewing around him. “Where…where the hell is she? How is this possible? What’s going on?”

  “Evidently, your mate’s body is gone.”

  Thanks for stating the obvious, asshole. “But she was embedded through this node. Don’t you—?”

  “Human, I am a node keeper. That is all. I am not responsible for biohousing the users or other participants. That is a separate activity, performed, as you see, in a separate facility.”

  “But she’s still in the simulation.”

  “Human, this is simply where she was initially embedded into Ur Virtua. She could have been moved quite easily, particularly once she was medically stabilized.”

  “Wait. You said that she had to stay in Virtua to survive. That without it—”

  “That is not what I said. I said her survival would be threatened if she became aware of the simulation, because then she will reject immersion in it. But it is possible that she was transported to another node while in a temporary state of more complete cryostasis.”

  Riordan thought he might vomit as he realized the next question he had to ask. “Could she be dead?”

  “No. A consciousness can continue in Virtua even if the body requires complete life support, but the brain must still function. I suspect this was the primary reason her overseers embedded her in Ur Virtua. It was insurance, to keep her mind active even if the rest of her body continued to decline.”

  Exhausted, swaying on his feet, forgetting how malevolent Kutkh could be, Riordan mumbled, “So what do I do now? Where do I go?”

  “Records housed in this facility will indicate who took your mate’s body and their intended destination.” Kutkh stared into the distance for a moment. “The transfer records have now been relayed to your ship. We are finished. You must leave.”

  Riordan nodded. Or tried to. He discovered that once his head dropped forward, he could not lift it easily. When he tried, the world spun.

  He reached out to steady himself against the rim of the hexagonal hatch.

  “You look ill, human. The stimulants are wearing off sooner than I expected. Can you move? Do you require assistance?”

  “I do not,” Riordan responded defiantly.

  Even as the floor rushed up at him, bringing abrupt blackness.

  * * *

  “Caine Riordan, I understand that you are fatigued, but please, attempt to focus.”

  Caine blinked, realized his eyes had already been open but couldn’t remember what, if anything, they’d been seeing. At the moment, they showed him an unfamiliar ceiling. He raised up on his elbows.

  Hsontlosh was uncomfortably close, blocking his view. “Has the nausea passed, Mr. Riordan?”

  “Must have. Can’t remember experiencing it or anything else…”

  Elena!

  Caine jerked upright. His head swam; he fell back.

  “Please, Mr. Riordan, move slowly. We had to increase the stimulant dose to inadvisable levels. But before you can commence your actual recovery, we must report what has occurred in your absence and set our course.”

  “More stimulant? I don’t remember—”

  “After the shock of discovering that Elena Corcoran was not on Leltlosu-shai, and the node keeper’s stimulant wore off, you slipped into a semiconscious state. The new dose we administered will not last long. This time, sit up slowly.”

  Riordan felt simultaneously exhausted and jumpy. He was shivering even though he wasn’t cold. “Okay. Update me.”

  “Dios mio,” said a familiar voice. “Hear that? He’s giving orders already.”

  Riordan frowned, searched his memories for that distinctive accent. “D-Dora?”

  “Who else?” Pandora Veriden replied with a twist of trademark sass. She smiled crookedly as Hsontlosh backed away from Riordan and revealed the rest of his surroundings.

  He was in a Dornaani sick bay. And it was lined with smiling faces he hadn’t seen in four years. Bannor. Peter. Duncan. Dora. Newton Baruch. Miles O’Garran. Even Yaargraukh. And, most surprising of all, Ayana Tagawa. Eku stood off to one side, very much by himself, looking…furtive?

  Riordan’s body quaked involuntarily. He couldn’t be sure if it was from the drug, surprise, relief, or joy. But alongside those feelings rose a less pleasant sensation. “What the hell are you doing here? You can’t just travel—”

  “Correction, Boss,” Miles O’Garran almost sneered. “Since we’re here, we obviously can.”

  “Little Guy, I am glad to see you, every one of you. So glad that I won’t even try to explain it. But what about the Lost Soldiers, the Cold Guard, the rest of the crew?”

  “Still hiding, still safe,” answered Bannor with a lazy smile. “Alnduul is trying to work out a deal for them.”

  “Alnduul? Making a deal on behalf of hundreds of renegade humans?”

  Newton murmured, “It is a brave new world indeed, Commodore.”

  Riordan shook his head, wondered if he was still in a semiconscious state and if it might include bouts of delirium. “Ms. Ayana, while I am glad to see that you made it off Earth—”

  “Explanations should wait until time permits, Commodore. For now, you must heed Hsontlosh’s warning.”

  Riordan nodded, turned his attention to the face that was much higher than, and radically different from, any other. “Yaargraukh, I am guessing that matters back on your homeworld have not improved.”

  The Hkh’Rkh simply inclined his head-neck.

  Riordan returned the nod, leaned back. “Where are we?” he asked the room. “And where is Irzhresht?”

  Uncomfortable looks crisscrossed the space behind Hsontlosh, whose lids lowered slightly. “I am saddened to report that Irzhresht was killed four days ago.”

  “Killed? How?”

  “She was electrocuted.”

  Damn. “Doing what?”

  Hsontlosh’s gills tightened. “Apparently betraying us. She triggered a security countermeasure while seeding coded messages into our communications stream. The routing data indicate that they were to be carried out-system.”

  “And you killed her for that? She could have been sending confidential updates to Alnduul, for all we know.” And which Caine rather expected: Alnduul had clearly intended for his various assistants to keep surreptitious watch upon each other.

  Hsontlosh blinked. “I was not aware she might be involved in authorized back-channel communications.” He seemed ready to glance at Eku, but stopped himself. “At any rate, no one sought her death. It was she who attempted to bypass my own ship’s automated protection systems. Unfortunately, they were still calibrated for loji space, where criminals are rarely dissuaded by anything less than lethal force.”

  “Have you been able to determine who she was sending to?”

  Hsontlosh snapped down the fingers of both hands; they resembled clusters of stilettos. “She was sending messages to a powerful Patron—the term translates literally as ‘Apex’—who dwells upon the First Ring. But we have been unable to break Irzhresht’s code.”

  Riordan’s brow grew cold. “You suspect she meant to sabotage us?”

  “Yes, or simply undermine your mission.” Seeing Caine’s puzzlement, Hsontlosh added, “The mishandling of your mate’s transport and care has been perpetrated solely by loji. This may indicate a concerted effort on their part.”

  “But why?”

  Hsontlosh’s burble was exasperated. “The Rings may assert they are loyal to the Collective, but old resentments still turn with them. To many there, whatever injures Dornaan is as succulent as new-hatched smelt.”

  Ayana’s eyes were very bright. “Then I am at a loss to understand why Alnduul risked entrusting the Commodore’s safety and mission to loji.”

  Eku’s eyes were lowered, his tone clipped. “Necessity.
”

  Hsontlosh’s fingers rolled through the air. “Our continuing search will require that we examine private data compilations, consult cooperatives that specialize in illicit activities, interact with violators of numerous prime statutes, and possibly visit worlds that are interdicted or ‘cordoned’ from contact. Alnduul foresaw this.”

  “And that’s where you come in.”

  Hsontlosh wagged a finger. “My credentials as a ship’s master and pilot are more crucial than my familiarity with the illegal activities of lojis. Indeed, I am not an optimal representative to my own people.”

  Newton lowered his head slightly. “And why is that?”

  Hsontlosh turned to look at the human. “They consider me a traitor.”

  Dora’s tone was incisive. “Are you?”

  “From their point of view, I am collaborating with their traditional adversary and constant oppressor: the Collective.”

  Ayana nodded. “And from your perspective?”

  Hsontlosh’s speech became more constricted. “I am a Dornaani, first and last. The bigotry of both sides belies our claim to be an enlightened species. Few know this better than I. Only because I am regarded with suspicion by both societies am I allowed to operate in them. That is why Alnduul selected me; no matter where the search may lead, I can expedite it. Also, when he learned that he might be prevented from doing so himself, he needed a pilot. Accordingly, he provided me with the necessary authorization and contacts to acquire this shift-capable ship. I returned with it from system HR 4084 A five days ago, just before Irzhresht’s demise.”

  Riordan nodded his approval at the unfamiliar bulkheads. “So exactly whose ship is this, then?”

  Eku spoke before Hsontlosh could. “It has been indefinitely requisitioned under Alnduul’s authority as a Custodian. His request invoked an obscure and archaic provision for furnishing a small starship to ‘diplomats, dignitaries, or important visitors.’ However, shift-craft can only be operated by government personnel or by licensed pilots.” He gestured without looking. “Such as Hsontlosh.”