He sighed and shifted position yet again in his chair. He'd been on the bridge ten hours now, well past the end of his watch, but there was no point in standing down. He couldn't rest, and he couldn't sleep. Too many things had been happening recently. Disturbing things. His mission had seemed straightforward enough when Lionstone outlined it for him: patrol those planets in the Empire dominated by sentient alien species, and make it clear to them that they were to have no contact with any alien forces from outside the Empire or any rebel forces within it. Make promises of increased support on the one hand and threats of dire reprisals for disobedience on the other. The carrot and the bloody big stick. Never fails, with humans. But those few alien civilizations that had survived being brought within the Empire were anything but human.
It was quiet this far out on the Rim, far from Empire, traffic, and populated planets. The Dauntless was very alone, and sometimes that loneliness seemed almost too much to bear. Half the crew were taking tranquilizers or dosing themselves with illicit booze. Silence turned a blind eye. They all needed a little something extra to help them survive the soul-deep cold of the long night. Everyone except Frost, of course. Investigator Frost stood at parade rest beside Silence's command chair, as calm and composed as always. She'd been quietly studying the viewscreen for some time, but she didn't need to say anything for Silence to know she was impatient with the endless monotony. Frost always preferred to be doing something, and the long weeks of inactivity out on the edge of the Rim had been hard on her. It was a long way between the few alien planets, even with the new stardrive, and Frost was frankly bored. Personally, Silence felt he could live with a little boredom. Only a few more planets to visit and their mission would be officially over; though whether they would be allowed to return to the more inhabited sectors of the Empire remained to be seen. They knew too many things the Empress didn't want discussed.
But it wasn't just boredom and loneliness that made Silence so uneasy about being so far from the heart of the Empire. The new rebellion could begin at any time, led by people who'd become almost superhuman and aided by an army of the deadly augmented men. This rebellion, when it came, wouldn't be put down as easily as all the others. Silence felt a burning need, almost an obsession, to be back in his rightful place, orbiting Golgotha, protecting the Empress. Lionstone hadn't taken his reports about the strength of the new rebellion and its leaders anywhere near seriously enough. He'd tried explaining his concern to Frost, expecting a sympathetic ear, but she'd just shrugged and said if there was an Empire-wide rebellion, there'd be fighting enough for everyone, no matter where they were. Frost had always been a practical person, first and foremost.
Silence drummed his fingers on the armrests of his chair. Somewhere deep inside him, a small but persistent voice was clamoring for a drink to settle his nerves, but he wouldn't listen to it. He'd tried that, and it hadn't worked. He'd managed to climb back out of the bottle, with a little help from Frost, and he wouldn't give in to it again. He'd pulled himself back from the brink of failure and disgrace with his victory over the alien ship above Golgotha, and having been granted another chance against all the odds, he was damned if he'd be beaten by his own weaknesses. It had taken a while, but his crew had learned to respect him again, which pleased him. They were a good crew, mostly, and he wanted to be a strong Captain for them. Of course, there were still dark murmurs in occasional dark corners, where people wrongly thought the ship's security systems couldn't overhear them. The word belowdecks was that just possibly Silence and/or Frost were jinxed. Bad luck. Jonahs. Unfortunate things happened around them. After all, Silence had lost his last ship, the Darkwind, in a clash with pirates, and their last mission to the Wolfling World had gone to hell in a handcart in a hurry. And as everyone knows, went the murmur, bad things come in threes. Sweepstakes were running among the more superstitious crew members—not about whether something else really nasty would happen, but about what shape it would take when it did.
Silence let them get on with it. On the whole the crew were still sharp and well coordinated, performing their duties at an entirely acceptable level. The victory over the alien ship had raised their spirits and returned their confidence after the debacle of the Wolfling World. And most of them had lost someone they loved or knew someone who had during the alien ship's attack on Golgotha's main starport and city. An undercurrent of anger and a need for revenge burned in the crew's collective heart, hot and ugly. So far Silence hadn't been able to find a target or an outlet for it, but he had no doubt one would emerge eventually. Some alien species would do or say the wrong thing, and have to be punished. And then Silence would sit back and let the crew sink themselves in violence and revenge until it sickened them. A bit hard on the aliens, but after all, that was what they were there for.
On the whole Silence had chosen to let Frost take charge of the alien contacts. It was her area of expertise, after all. And if he was sometimes uncomfortable with some of her more extreme practices, he kept it to himself. She was responsible for the safety of the human species, and if that meant being ruthless as well as efficient, Frost had never been known to give a damn. Silence smiled slightly, in spite of himself. Certainly the Investigator had never been trained in diplomacy; or if she had, had gone out of her way to forget it. She just aimed herself at whatever passed for the aliens' authority figures, made her demands on behalf of the Empress, and issued dire warnings and threats of what would happen if she was disobeyed. It was often as blunt as that, but she got results. Silence had his reservations, but couldn't bring himself to disapprove. The safety of humanity had to come first.
He'd been the same himself, cold and curt and full of authority, until it backfired on him on a backwater planet called Unseeli. The native species rebelled over the Empire's extensive mining operations on their planet. The Empire needed those mines, and so the newly promoted Captain Silence had been sent to put a stop to the rebellion, by whatever means necessary. He tried diplomacy, and then he tried firmness, force, and finally all-out war. But there turned out to be strange secrets and powers moving on Unseeli, and things got out of hand fast. Silence had been forced to pull his people back from the planet and order the entire world scorched clean from orbit. That particular alien species was now extinct, though their ghosts still haunted Unseeli's metallic forest.
Silence's frown deepened as he considered the contacts he'd made with the alien planets so far. Few had gone well, but in the end he'd got what the Empire wanted without having to order another scorching. He wasn't sure he could do that again. Though he had no doubt that if the occasion arose and he didn't give the order, Frost would. And who was to say which one of them was right in the end? Humanity had to be protected, and while all the alien contacts had been strange and unusual, some had been actually disturbing. Life had taken many shapes and purposes throughout the Empire, and few of them were human in form or intent. Many were mysterious, obscure, and even impenetrable. Silence wasn't sure some of them even knew they were in the Empire.
* * *
Shanna IV was a desolate world, with endless plains of hard-baked ground, and its only water deep underground. A huge, brilliant sun beat down from a blinding sky that had never known clouds, and the only signs of intelligent life were the huge pyramids of resin-hardened stone and sand, built long ago by the planet's only inhabitants. Each pyramid was exactly like all the others, though they might be thousands of miles apart. Four hundred feet high, their lines were sharp and their dull red sides were smooth and featureless. No one knew what was inside them, or even if there was an inside; none of the Empire's investigative teams had been able to find an entrance. Being Investigators, they'd tried making one, only to discover the pyramids' smooth sides were impervious to anything the Empire could throw against them, up to and including major energy weapons. Which should have been impossible for resin-hardened stone and sand. Eventually, the Empire decided it didn't really care what was inside the pyramids after all, and concentrated its attention on the pla
net's current inhabitants, who might or might not have been the builders of the pyramids.
These were ugly, hard-shelled insects about the size of a man's fist, with razor-sharp mandibles and entirely too many legs. They seemed to have no individual identity, but en masse they were capable of producing a group mind that could, with some difficulty, be communicated with. Which was just as well, as the horrible scuttling things were also capable, with a little prodding, of producing a great many organic compounds the Empire found useful. So the Empire provided the base materials; the insects ate and excreted it, and possibly did other things to it in their pyramids when no one was looking, and the end result was a series of extremely complex chemical forms that would be hideously expensive to reproduce in a laboratory. The Empire profited, the insects got protection from outside influences but were otherwise left strictly alone, and everyone was happy. Or at least no one complained.
Captain Silence and Investigator Frost stood at the base of one of the massive pyramids, waiting for the insects' representative to make an appearance. The day was as hot as a blast furnace and twice as dry. The air shimmered, and the sun was too bright to look at, even with the heavy-duty protection over their eyes. Silence turned up the cooling elements in his uniform another notch and screwed his eyes up against the harsh, unrelenting light. Sweat was pouring out of him, only to evaporate almost immediately in the awful heat. Silence didn't look at Frost. He just knew she still looked cool and calm and completely undisturbed. She was an Investigator, after all, and therefore by definition not prone to the fallibilities of the merely human. In the end, curiosity got the better of him, and he looked casually around just in time to see her kick out lazily at one of the many small forms scuttling around their feet. It flopped over onto its back, its long legs wriggling, and then somehow turned itself over again and hurried on about its business. Frost sniffed.
"Ugly things. Desolate bloody place. If the representative doesn't turn up soon, I'm going to start using these nasty little creepy-crawlies for target practice."
"That should get their attention," said Silence, smiling in spite of himself. "Do I detect a note of distaste in your voice. Investigator? I thought you were trained to take all forms of alien life in stride?"
"There's a limit to everything," said Frost, "and I think I may have found mine. Repulsive little things. If one even looks like it might be thinking of darting up my leg, I'm going to blast it and everything like it for a dozen yards around. I had more than enough of that inside the alien ship over Golgotha."
Silence looked at her carefully. If it had been anyone else, he would have sworn there was a note of remembered horror in her voice. The interior of the alien ship had been horrible enough, certainly. He still had nightmares. But Investigators were trained from childhood to give nightmares, not suffer from them. He considered his words carefully, and when he finally spoke he looked off in a different direction.
"It was bad inside the alien ship. All those insects, all sizes, all around us and no way out. Enough to give anyone the creeps."
"You're about as subtle as a flying half brick, you know that?" said Frost. "But thanks for the thought."
Silence looked back at her. She was smiling, but it didn't touch her eyes. He shrugged. "If you ever need someone to talk to…"
"I'll bear it in mind. But any problems I might have are mine, and I'll handle them."
"That's what I thought when the booze was drowning me inch by inch. You helped me out anyway."
"You didn't know how to ask for help," said Frost. "Neither do you," said Silence.
They looked at each other. There was a closeness between them that was more than just the link they always shared now. Frost's eyes softened slightly, and Silence thought for a moment that she was closer to opening up to him than she had ever been before. But the moment passed and the softness disappeared, and Frost was an Investigator again, cold and focused and quite impenetrable. Silence looked away.
"You have to make allowances for the insect representatives," he said finally. "According to the files, they have little concept of time as we understand it, but they respond well to firm behavior."
"I don't have to make allowances for anything," said Frost. "That's what being an Investigator is all about."
Silence had to smile. "Useful though the files are, however, they don't have anything at all to say about how you get the bloody insects' attention in the first place."
"We could kill a few," said Frost. "Hell, we could kill a lot. Nobody'd miss them."
"Let's save that for a last resort," said Silence. "There must be something a little less drastic we could try."
And then he broke off as a wave of insects came surging toward him, thick and black like a living carpet. His hand dropped to the disrupter at his side. Frost already had hers out, and was sweeping it back and forth, searching for a meaningful target. The wave crashed to a sudden halt a few feet short of them and began piling up into a tall, thick pillar of squirming bodies. The twitching legs folded around each other and were still, the small bodies fitting neatly together like the interlocking parts of some more complicated machine, and gradually the pillar took on a humanoid form: a dark, shiny shape that mocked humanity as much as it duplicated it. The square, flat-sided head turned jerkily on its thick neck to look at Silence and Frost, though there was no trace of anything that might have been eyes. It buzzed briefly: a short, ugly, and completely inhuman sound. It buzzed again, and suddenly, though the sounds hadn't changed, Silence and Frost somehow understood it.
"Empire," said the dark human shape, though there was nothing that might have been a mouth. "Interrogation. Respond."
Frost put her gun away and tried to look as though she'd never drawn it in the first place. "Yes, we represent the Empire," she said flatly. "You've been informed why we're here?"
There was an Empire Base on Shanna IV, populated by a handful of scientists and a small force of guards who'd all managed to upset someone really badly to get themselves posted here, but they had as little contact with the resident aliens as they could get away with. They might have arranged this meeting, or they might not have. It was that kind of Base.
Silence stared at the humanoid figure, and it stared right back at him. Though there was no trace of eyes on the flat shiny face, Silence had no doubt the insect representative was watching him. He could feel the weight of its stare, like an icy breeze in the boiling heat of the day. The insects that made up the human shape twitched suddenly, hundreds of legs flexing briefly so that a shimmer seemed to run through the figure, and then it was still again. Silence winced as a headache blossomed slowly between his eyes. It was as though he could almost see or hear something that was being hidden from him. He concentrated on the feeling and realized it felt something like the link that he shared with Frost. He glanced at her to see if she felt it, too. She was scowling, but there was nothing unusual in that. Certainly she didn't seem as disturbed as he felt. He tried to grasp the vague feeling and bring it into focus, but it slipped away like water between his fingers and was gone. He still had the headache, though.
"Rebels," the alien representative said suddenly. "Avoid. Punishment."
"Got it in a nutshell," said Frost. "Anyone tries to contact you, rebel or alien, you tell them to go to hell and then report them to the Base immediately. Understand?"
"Rebels. Avoid. Punishment. Chemicals. Interrogation. Respond."
Silence would have shivered, had he not been boiling alive in his own sweat. There was something about the way each word seemed to emanate from different parts of the dark human shape that upset him greatly. He made himself concentrate on his job.
"Yes, we've got your chemicals," he said curtly. "They're being unloaded in the usual place. The regular supply ship will be along to pick up the compounds you've produced." A question occurred to him, and he decided to ask it before he could think better of it. "We have a use for those compounds, but what do you get out of the deal?"
There wa
s a long pause, until Silence assumed the construct wasn't going to answer him; then it said two words and fell apart before Silence could respond. The human shape disintegrated from the top down, tumbling into hundreds of its respective parts, which hit the ground running and scuttled off in different directions. In a few moments they were indistinguishable from those who were already covering the ground, and Silence wasn't at all sorry to see the back of them. Particularly, after the two words the figure had spoken. Chemicals. Addictive. He looked at Frost, who was still staring thoughtfully at the insects scuttling around her on their inscrutable, incomprehensible missions.
"Do you suppose they have any concept at all of themselves as individuals?" he said finally. "Or only when they gather together like that?"
"No one knows for sure," said Frost. "They're supposed to have a single hive mind for the whole species, but no one's been able to prove anything, one way or the other. Our instruments can't detect anything, and espers just get really bad headaches when they try to listen in. The constructs are our only way of communicating with them, and they tell us as little as they can get away with."
Deathstalker Rebellion Page 36
