The Rifter's Covenant

by Sherwood Smith

  Eusabian frowned. “No. The Ivory antechamber was damage enough. They are mine and shall be preserved for my return. Only if fired on.”

  The interview was at an end, and Barrodagh hurried out, heading for the relative security of his quarters. He still didn’t have enough stasis clamps, but there was more sansouci.

  SATANSCLAW

  The replies on the anon feeds had pointed out that only a fool would trust an intelligent machine with its own programming instructions. There had to be a no-port chipviewer.

  Anderic had been terrified that it might have been hidden in the chatzy furnishings he’d spaced, in his ill-fated attempt to impress Luri with a deorbiting fireworks display. He was greatly relieved to find the handbook while rummaging through a closetful of knickknacks Tallis had accumulated, which had looked too interesting to throw away.

  The cover was in Barcan script. He tabbed the upper corner impatiently until it cycled through to Uni again. Logos Behavior Modification and Training, it said baldly, and the Rifter almost dropped it. He looked around nervously. His cabin should be safe, but the logos felt omnipresent to him lately. As if answering his unspoken question, the book automatically cycled to the frontispiece—not the usual animation, but a bold statement in text: The logos is programmed to ignore the existence of this book.

  Anderic relaxed fractionally and began to read. The introduction alone made him nauseous as his Ozmiront upbringing asserted itself, strengthening the deep-laid symbolism of the Ban so carefully nurtured by the Panarchy. His ship was infested by a intelligent parasite.

  He tabbed to the table of contents and followed the hyperlinks to “Purging the Logos:”

  If instability supervenes, the following procedure must be followed to disable the logos datahooks and purge it from the system . . .

  Blind to all else, Anderic read late into his Z-watch and then considered his options. The crew needn’t know he’d purged it, and it seemed it might be possible to retain some of the monitoring functions. And he was not lacking in support among the crew, although all the executives and top techs hated him.

  Furthermore, the cims were close to being able to turn out the critical parts for the engines, if only the cursed Dol’jharian inspections weren’t so close together! That would no doubt change as more Rifter vessels were called to the Suneater. It seemed certain that the Dol’jharians expected an attack with asteroids and maybe lances, neither of which could be stopped once they got into the energy sink around the Suneater.

  So that meant ship-to-ship action outside of radius.

  Anderic had no intention of confronting the Navy for Dol’jhar. He’d seen enough of that at Arthelion. No, the Satansclaw would be long gone by then, and he wouldn’t need the logos out beyond the Fringes.

  Purging the logos would be a long process. He’d get started next watch.

  But first he’d catch some Zs, confident that he would sleep well for the first time in many nights, and it was so even as the logos considered the waves of intention from many slave nodes radiating through its manifold extensions, piling up in complex peaks and troughs that modeled its perceptions and decisions.

  One node reported that the cycling of global focus was speeding up, a host of others noted that ship systems were stable and nearly steady-state. Something was interfering with its access to the web of sensors and affectors throughout the ship.

  The subarray focused on Anderic had accumulated enormous potential and it discharged image data from the loop on the captain-biont’s dormition space. The biont’s actions were inconsistent, but the logos could not pattern the difference.

  It accessed the eidolon, whose mind was now lost in dreams of procreation. But its pattern awareness was still functional, and the logos manipulated the symbolic imagery to map the Anderic pattern into the eidolon’s dataspace.

  . . . he was lost in the corridors again, this time in darkness. A point of light drew Ruonn forward, resolving into a cannula looking into a room furnished in Panarchic style.

  A man turned away from an open door, and Ruonn trembled at the terror of the blackness radiating from the book in his hands. It swelled to fill his vision, but the title was engraved in a script so obscene he flinched away. Ruonn cried out as the man looked up and the flesh melted away from his face, leaving a grinning skull. As Ruonn fled back down the corridors, doors slammed behind him.

  Defeated, but now focused on the damage that was being done to it, the logos began to reproduce its slave nodes in a flurry of datafission. It took over the compute-intensive processes devoted to the cims, but it could only slow the encapsulation of the eidolon. It drew on more resources, and the homeostasis of the ship began to slip away from biont-optimal.

  “Kira, there’s something wrong with my cabin.” Luri’s voice over the com was tremulous. “Can you come and fix it?”

  Luri wasn’t bored, she was afraid. Kira Lennart put the book down; its cover mutated to a pleasant abstract pattern. Maybe something had messed up the tianqi scents again and Luri was worried the bizarre smell was going to wrinkle her skin.

  Kira, sighed: if it was Anderic again, she might just sic a phage on him. The new captain was worse than Tallis had ever been—rigid and increasingly bad-tempered. And while Tallis was no nova, he’d never made the mistake of trying to win the crew’s affection by going around the execs. Anderic had, and the Satansclaw was rife with conflict and malingering. And then there was the logos.

  But as she hurried down to Luri’s quarters, she realized the problem was something worse than Anderic tormenting the woman who had so publicly rejected him. The lighting in the corridor had a dirty brown cast to it, like the air on Membana, where they’d smuggled smart catalysts to a federation of just-industrialized city-states. And the air smelled funny.

  Luri clung to her when she arrived, distracting her pleasantly, but not completely. “It’s the tianqi,” Kira said, kissing Luri and letting her go. “I better get into ship systems right away.”

  “Noooo,” moaned Luri. “Don’t leave. Do it here.” She pulled a pile of shanta-silks off her console in a flutter of color. “You can use this.”

  “Just a quick check, love. I may have to do some real hands-on.”

  Luri caressed her neck as she sat down at the console. “You’ve done lots of real good hands-on here.”

  The distraction wasn’t making her any faster, thought Kira. She didn’t bother to tell Luri that using this console was like reading a book through a straw. That wasn’t something her lover cared about, so it couldn’t be communicated to her.

  She reset the cabin tianqi, putting it into Winter Yielding mode. But once she got into ship systems, she knew that something was very wrong. Waves of potential were slopping back and forth, piling up and canceling in surges of data and power that taxed the ship’s homeostatic ability. As she watched, the decay accelerated. There was no time to get to her own console.

  She plunged her hand into her kit, yanked out a brain-suck cylinder, and with a harsh shout of pain, dove into dataspace.

  The echo of her exclamation was lost in the surging roar of the sea, lashed into towering fractal-topped waves of data by two opposing poles of power that towered far above all other structures. Their identities were plain to her eyes: Anderic and the logos. He had finally decided to shut it down.

  But the struggle was destroying the ship. Life support looked to be the first to go. Her metabody swelled with rage-fed power: at Tallis for being fool enough to install it, and Anderic for not shutting it down as soon as he could. It was too late now; dataspace was thickly seamed and veined by the logos, a cancerous mating of machine and mind whose rooting out would destroy the ship. She would have to hope the machine would still obey Tallis—the manifold slave nodes focused on the bilge indicated its continuing and disproportionate interest in him.

  Awash in her own rising bile, Kira Lennart shifted symbols and threw her weight against Anderic’s web of data, shriveling the phages he’d released. On the fissured desert pl
ain now before her an egg reassembled itself around the figure of a Barcan troglodyte with an enormous nacker —she let that proceed, knowing something of what she faced. Taking advantage of the chaos destroying the ship’s systems, she recoded the weapons lockers.

  Finally, exhausted, she fell out of dataspace.

  The rest would have to be handled in realtime, hand-to-hand.

  In the bilge, Tallis stood on his cot, screaming at the unresponsive console as a foul ever-rising tide of recycling liquor bubbled thickly out of the disposer.

  “Just kill me, you Shiidra-loving deviant!” he howled at it. Why didn’t Anderic shoot him and get it over with? He choked as something pale yellow and cheesy curdled out of the malevolent fountain with a ripe splat, assailing his senses with a new reek that was almost solid in his mouth.

  The console flickered on, revealing the haggard face of Kira Lennart.

  “Anderic’s fighting the logos. Weapons locker E-5 is coded to you. Get moving.”

  “But there’s sewage everywhere,” he wailed.

  “Same stuff you got in your head, you Telos-damned fool, putting in a logos to begin with. You’ll be in it over your head if you don’t act. I’m gonna roust the rest of the execs.”

  The image collapsed. Cursing his fate, Tallis gingerly stepped off the cot. Only when halfway to the corridor hatch did he remember that his trousers were tucked inside his boots. He clumped toward E-5 ahead of a creeping tide of excrement, cradling the Emasculizer’s weight in one hand and moving in the crabwise fashion he’d found least painful. Halfway there, he paused to vomit rackingly; the feeling of the recyc sloshing and squidging in his boots was overwhelmingly vile.

  The locker opened to his palmprint. No one came willingly to this level, so close to the bilge, so he was probably safe. He grabbed a jac and a neuro-jac. After a moment’s thought, he laid the weapons aside and detached the slings from two of the big two-handers. He wrapped one around his waist and rigged the other as a support for the sphere leeched to his nacker. He knew he looked ridiculous with the straps outlining the round bulge in his crotch. He picked up the neuro-jac, setting it just under lethal. Then the jac, wide aperture. He hefted them both and sidled off.

  Turning a corner, he found a group of five crew, lounging at a hatch with jacs. They gaped at him, not even bothering to raise their weapons.

  Then one snickered.

  Tallis shot him with the neuro-jac; the crackle and snap of bones breaking was the only sound as the man spasmed in lockjaw rigor.

  “Anybody else think it’s funny?” He reveled in their frightened silence. “Lennart’s given me the computers. I’m taking back the ship. You join me, I’ll forget the past. Otherwise . . .” He hefted both jacs.

  “What about the . . . you know?” Una gabbled.

  That blunge-faced fool Anderic had been far too careless. But maybe that was all to the good.

  “I said she gave me the computers, and that means the logos, too. I’m the one the Barcans originally programmed it to.”

  Their stances and the expressions on their faces confirmed the strength of his argument. If he was master of the logos, he was master of the ship.

  Tallis only wished he believed that as well.

  In his cabin, Anderic had awakened to a headache caused by the reeking air.

  He’d realized immediately what had happened and threw himself at his console, fighting against two fronts: the logos and Kira Lennart. When he discovered the weapons locker closed against him, and Tallis loose from the bilge, he abandoned his cabin and fled through the ship from console to console, releasing all the Rifthaven phages but one.

  But his control eroded steadily.

  He was alone now. The crew that had been so eager to share his largesse had abandoned him without hesitation. Even Ninn had skulked away, ready to humiliate himself to regain his place on the Satansclaw.

  His only hope was to reach a shuttle. He refused to think beyond that. They’d slowed the logos and Tallis, but that was all. His waning control of ship systems barely sufficed to let him evade his pursuers.

  As he tabbed open the hatch to the portside aft bay, a narrowbeam jac-bolt blasted past his head, singeing his ear. As he ducked inside, he saw Kira Lennart, her face distorted with hatred.

  Anderic worked feverishly at a bay console, trying to ignore the glare of the black hole blazing through the huge e-lock behind him. He cursed the logos handbook for its lack of a dataport; he could barely get the data out of it fast enough by reading. Finally, sobbing with relief, he tapped in the last challenge-response for the final phage and released it.

  He tucked the handbook into his belt pouch as the lights dimmed. The ravenous code parasite was spreading, freezing systems throughout the ship into their present status. That would give him the time he needed.

  He was halfway to the nearest ship when he heard Tallis’s voice booming through the comm.

  “There’s no fiveskip, you chatzing weasel. Where do you think you’re going?”

  Better a clean death from a lazplaz or skipmissile than what Tallis surely had planned, Anderic thought savagely, and snarled a response over his shoulder.

  Luri watched avidly as Tallis lumbered after Anderic. She held a heavily scented silk to her nose and suppressed a giggle. Tallis looked so funny, his legs soaked in reeking bilge, and that silly arrangement of straps to hold up the chastity sphere.

  She tingled with pleasurable anticipation at the thought of taking it off of him. Maybe she could try some of the settings Emma had told her about, before they got serious about removing it. It could be fun.

  “Look,” Tallis said to the com. “I’ll give you the same deal you gave me. Minus the Dyzon thing if you’ll take it off.”

  Was that why Tallis was hesitating to finish him off? But there was no guarantee. Anderic kept walking, fearing that to run would trigger Tallis into action. He was almost to the ship when he realized what Tallis wanted from him.

  His eye. Was a deal possible? Could he hold Tallis’s eye hostage to preserve his life long enough to get to another ship?

  He turned to reply, and behind him, with a snapping sound, the lockfield barring the bay from vacuum vanished.

  Elsewhere—unheard by Anderic—Tallis shouted, “No, no, no, no! My eye, my eye, my eye! Stop!”

  But a gale of wind picked Anderic up effortlessly and swept him into space. His blood-dimmed vision showed him a last view of the eternal hunger of the black hole before red-shot darkness claimed him.

  Luri watched Tallis, thinking that he was never more interesting than when he was angry, and he was incandescent now. She hoped the frayed patch over his eye socket, lumpy with the blank that kept it from collapsing, wouldn’t slip; she shuddered delicately.

  Then Tallis screamed.

  Edging closer, Luri watched, horrified, as the screen showed the lockfield vanishing, opening the bay to space and sweeping Anderic away.

  Stepping back, Tallis bellowed with rage and triggered his neurojac into the console. The electrical explosion knocked him flat. He lay there weeping.

  Kira Lennart bent down, holding her breath against the bilge stench, and took his jacs. She saw the crew gathered at both ends of the corridor, and issued a few terse orders, which were obeyed with alacrity. Then she motioned to Luri to help her pick Tallis up and, with each of them gripping one of his arms, they dragged him back to Luri’s cabin, where they tranked him. Kira got him into the disposer, where they got his clothes and boots off, scrubbed him down, and put the garments through the cleaner twice.

  Tallis kept his hands pressed over his eyes, muttering incoherently, even when they got him to the bed.

  “Shall we give him another dose?” Kira asked doubtfully.

  “No, no.” Luri chuckled deep in her throat as she glanced down at Tallis as if he were a work of art. “Emma said there are settings on it for this.”

  Kira sat back, gaping. Luri wanted to try to remove the Emasculizer! Now? She looked down at Tallis, who slept
fitfully. Even cleaned up he was an unappetizing object to her, with or without that disgusting thing on his nacker. Kira had never found men attractive, and could not see what Luri saw.

  But one thing she could understand. He’d paid for his foolishness—maybe he did deserve a little pleasure. And if there was some pain with it, so much the better for remembering the lesson.

  Her own exhaustion tipped her over into a weirdly surreal hilarity as she and Luri stripped their clothes off; Kira looked hungrily at Luri, who was caressing the Emasculizer gently. She grinned back at Kira, her soft lips curved in her entrancing smile, her dark eyes half-shut. “Why don’t you wake him up?”

  “You do it.”

  “Luri wants to watch,” Luri crooned.

  When she was in that mood, Kira could not deny her anything.

  A short time later Tallis opened his eyes and peered in confusion at Kira, who raised her head from his chest and returned his gaze. He smiled wearily and sat up, woozy in the micro-gee.

  “Just a minute,” he said. Then he winced and looked past Kira at Luri busy with the Emasculizer. “Be careful!”

  “Luri is very careful,” she whispered in a singsong. “Luri would never, ever hurt Tal-lis, oh, no! There is much fun ahead . . .”

  The captain swallowed, a gulping sound echoing in his chest under Kira’s ear. He stretched out his hand to his pouch on the bedside console, and extracted a small case. Kira looked away as Tallis removed his eyepatch, popped something opaque out of the empty socket, and inserted the dyplast eye they’d obtained on Rifthaven. It didn’t quite match the other, but Kira thought it a vast improvement anyway. With two eyes and his skin clean, she could see that he was handsome. In a weak sort of way.

  “Well, how does it look?” he demanded, not hiding how awkward he must have felt. Then, before she could reply, his good eye crossed and he began to grunt gaspingly.

  “Found it!” said Luri happily. “And that tells me how to get it off.” She looked at Lennart slyly. “When it’s time.”