by Mark Wandrey
“Anything else I can do?”
“You know you probably killed a thousand or more?”
“Aposo, no major loss.”
The opSha gave a little grunt. “Congrats, you passed the test.”
“What kind of test?”
“The recruitment kind. You want more work like this?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“You can help keep the galaxy from burning itself to pieces.”
Sato snorted and gave him a sideways look. “The galaxy can take care of itself.”
“How about more credits?”
“I don’t know what to do with the ones you just gave me.”
“Okay, how about technology?”
Sato’s eyebrows went up slightly. “What kind of tech?”
“Like you’ve never dreamed of.”
“Does it involve killing more Aposo?”
“You never know.”
“Okay, sure, why not.”
“Welcome to the Science Guild.”
* * *
The robotic doctor finished installing the computers in his brain. They called it Mesh, which was a strange name. It had taken a week of surgeries, all painless, luckily. At least until they started calibrating them—then he went through something he could only call torture. He felt every sensation, from agony to orgasm, all so the tiny implants could map his brain and fully integrate with all of his biological functions.
“You are the first Human to undergo this process,” his handler, Skoowa, explained. “And you are the first Human to be recruited into the Science Guild.”
Sato was proud, to some degree. The work, the study, the conditioning his body was undergoing via nanite treatment, the Meshes, all of it to make him an agent of the Science Guild. It kept him from thinking about his life, and that was fine. Still, he wondered, science secret agents? Wasn’t that kind of odd?
Skoowa was his supervisor, or Jōshi, as he called it. He was going to be a Himitsu, an investigator. At the installation were lots of science researchers, Hajimeru. Giving everything Japanese names was a habit dating back to Sakura Maru. He didn’t think there was any reason to stop.
“Sato,” Skoowa called.
“Yes, Jōshi-san?”
“You’ve got a mission.”
“Excellent.”
* * *
“How did it go?” Skoowa asked.
“Had to destroy their ship to extract.”
“That’s unfortunate. Ready for the next mission?”
* * *
Sato watched the two ships exchange missile fire as his escape pod spun away. A small smile crossed his face. He so rarely got a chance to kick the Aposo in the teeth. It made the job all the more worth doing.
* * *
“They suspected,” Sato said.
“What did you do?” Skoowa asked.
“I deployed an Enigma box. I didn’t know their entire planet’s computer network was dynamically linked.” Sato frowned. He recalled the site of the antimatter explosion from orbit. The planet would be uninhabitable.
“It’s their fault for experimenting with antimatter,” Skoowa said.
“I think I just killed the entire Altok race.”
“There has to be a price for reaching outside their bounds.”
“Genocide?” Sato asked.
Skoowa shrugged. Sato looked away. “Word of your work has reached the Saisho.”
Sato looked back up. That was the name he’d been given for the leader of the Science Guild. The first, the beginning. It made sense to him. Like any other Human word assigned the first time to a translator, it was then used automatically going forward. “Me? I’m only a Himitsu.”
“You are to be a Kahra’ak,” Skoowa said.
“What are they?”
“You will teach those who go too far the limits of technology, and the price for exceeding those limits.”
“Kantoku-sha,” Sato said. “Kahra’ak will be Kantoku-sha.” Kantoku meant warden. Proctor was good, too.
* * *
Sato struggled within the Mesh-induced torture. He knew it wasn’t real, but that didn’t make it feel any less. He had to work the complex mathematical problem, despite feeling like his legs were on fire. He screamed and lost the process.
“I’m trying, Saisho!” he cried as he flayed about for something to grab.
“I-I can’t,” he sobbed. Inconceivable agony lashed his brain. An eternity later, he felt tiny clawed hands moving him, and the cool steel of a stanchion pressed into his hand. Tiny glowing eyes regarded him. “Thank…you,” he gasped.
“You can do this, Human,” the Jōshi said.
He nodded, missing Skoowa yet again. This new Jōshi was Flatar, as many of the proctor trainers were. “I am ready to try again, Saisho!”
“Very well.” He was thrown into the spinning dark abyss once more, and pain lashed at him.
* * *
He received his proctor clearance by a code installed within his Mesh. The last step had been the modified nanite treatments that would slow the aging process by several orders of magnitude. He’d thought of it as the Lazarus nanites. They didn’t know how long it would make a Human live. As long as there were enough nanites remaining in his body to counteract the effects of replicative fading within his cells and cure cancer, who knew? It was all to help do the job. Years of combat training and mastering the many tools of the Science Guild proctors were now behind him. It was time to do his job.
* * *
Once he’d established a base of operation back on Earth, he set up several caches. One was, ironically, aboard Sakura Maru. The old family ship was grounded at the edge of the starport. It had suffered catastrophic computer failure and was unrepairable for any reasonable fee. The family hadn’t scrapped it yet. There was talk of preserving the ship. It would do as a stash. His codes still worked, so he locked backup gear in the computer section and took the key.
Later, while running down leads, he established another cache in the United States, near their new starport at Houston. A drop box was sufficient while he developed a credible cover.
Before long, he gained entry as a low-level computer code writer at the California office of Binnig. It wouldn’t take long to do some serious damage to their powered armor program. He considered seeing family, or something. The thought of going off mission set off some of his conditioning, and his Mesh punished him. He continued with the job.
* * *
He finished destroying the storage devices and made sure all the HecSha were dead. There was a record of another researcher, a prisoner. Human. That was interesting. But the Human had been freed some time ago by other Human mercs. He considered the risks that the Human had done any significant part of the research and considered it minimal. The HecSha hadn’t yet tried to sell or share their version of the Lazarus nanites.
This version was crude by comparison. It would require maintenance update shots every 5-10 years to really be effective. In the files he’d stolen, he saw that the original research had been commissioned by an obscure race suffering from a short lifespan. Likely a remnant of Kahraman genetic programming. The Lazarus treatment would have made a major difference to that race, and countless other short-lived ones. His Mesh gave him a jolt. Back to work.
* * *
Backtracking the HecSha’s work to its sources hadn’t been easy. It had led him back to Earth again, proving the benefit of setting up multiple caches. The Saisho had approved of his forward thinking. It had said that was why he’d been trained as a proctor. He would do much good for the Guild.
This mission had taken more than 5 years before he’d finally infiltrated the shadowy organization known as Section 51. It was the first time he’d had to utilize his long inactive real identity. A made-up personality would never have sufficed. Section 51 had apparently sat astride the Earth governments for more than a century. The level o
f technological sophistication was equaled only by his Science Guild. And to think, he’d never known they were there!
Once inside, the scientist formerly lost on Dr. Adelaide Black’s scientific mission of discovery was worked into the Section 51 organization. They were just as secretive as the guild. They liked having a ‘dead’ scientist working for them. He liked it that they didn’t have enough offworld operatives to know what he really was, because his visage would be found in many suspicious incidents of sabotage, espionage, and mayhem.
To facilitate his advancing level of trust and access, he planned to take one of the organization’s operators as a lover. Adrianne McKenzie was a lovely woman. The problem was the pangs of guilt when he went to consummate the act. The ghost of Ichika and their unborn child haunted him. Adrianne recognized the reluctance, understood, and never pressured him. That didn’t make his job any easier.
Finally he got in deep enough to gain access to their whole information network. His orders were to destroy them utterly. He decided it was impossible, and instead compromised their main data storage, sabotaging as much as possible before fleeing. His mission was a success, yet he still felt guilt and some doubt. His Mesh punished him for indecision, and he returned to his duty.
* * *
It was the most important mission he’d ever been given. They’d sent him because, once again, it involved Humans. Far too often, Humans were involved in dangerous research. That was, of course, why he’d been recruited. Sato understood that his people needed to be restrained, just like every other race. But in the depths of his psyche, he felt a little thrill of fear. What would the Saisho do if humanity crossed one too many lines? The memory of the Altok haunted him still. Had it really been an accident?
Penetrating Azure had been easy. The Humans there were friendly, open, inviting. The planet was a paradise compared to many in the galaxy. Warm beaches and water. He’d been sent to investigate what the Humans were doing with the race known as Wrogul. The species had been unknown until recently.
The orders were plain and straightforward. He used his considerable scientific knowledge to get a position as a researcher and stashed an Enigma box in the village against future need. It was only a matter of a week before he got his chance, and he used his slicer to crack open their database and copy everything.
The genetic information he fed into his Mesh to be compared against all known racial genetic profiles in the galaxy. As he was leaving the lab, he jerked and almost fell.
