by Rhonda Mason
She was beginning to suspect that. “Well, there is a beam weapon,” Zimmerman corrected himself, “or at least, there was, but it was nowhere near as powerful as they claimed.”
“The reality of the weapon is much more complicated than that. Even at the height of the Nanotech Wars with Ilmena, none of us wanted a holocaust. The idea of destroying an entire planet, making it unlivable for millennia, killing billions of people and making refugees of a civilization, wasn’t something even our military dictatorship could stomach. Honestly, I’m surprised the populace ever bought into the propaganda, with that being the outcome the government was selling them.”
“Why would the government need to lie about the type of superweapon it had designed?” she asked. “Ordoch was rabid to end the Nanotech Wars by then: people would have cheered the military on.”
He smiled grimly. “You forget, I was there. Believe me when I tell you this technology would never have been approved. The military developed a nanovirus designed for one purpose: to attack and destroy a person’s cartaid arch. The superweapon is the carrier of enough copies of the virus to infect everyone living on Ilmena and destroy their ability to use psi powers.”
Kayla felt horrified. The imagined PD would have inflicted damage on a scale so massive she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around it. But this, this she could imagine. She had lived through losing her own psi powers. It was worse than losing one’s sight or hearing. Psi powers weren’t a single sense; they infused everything a Wyrd did, every part of who they were.
To imagine an entire planet maimed, crippled in that way…
“Without psi powers,” she said, “they wouldn’t be able to use their shields, their telekinetic weapons.”
“Their communications systems would break down,” Zimmerman continued, “they’d be much more susceptible to mind control and mind reading. There are more traditional forms of warfare, of course, but they didn’t have any in place at the time.”
And why would they? Everyone had psi powers: it was a way of life. It would be like building war machines for the blind, just in case everyone stopped being able to see.
“It was ingenious. We would have taken control of the planet within days,” Zimmerman said.
“That’s why this ship is so full of soldiers, because it’s an invasion, not the crew necessary to man a ship. So what happened?” Kayla asked. “A biotech weapon didn’t cause a tear in time and space that swallowed an entire ship and one Ilmenan science station on an asteroid.”
Zimmerman’s gaze turned hard. “Captain Janus happened. That science station? It was a top secret military research center Ilmena had recently built, sparsely populated, so classified that no one there knew what anyone else was working on. It was the perfect test site for the virus.
“Once we were in range, we prepared the virus for launch. Everything was good, orange lights across the board. The virus samples were stable and viable, the aerosolization sequence had been tested a million times. We released the payload at the asteroid, and when we did…” Zimmerman made a motion with both hands like a bomb going off between his palms. “I think your history, written by the military, by the way, claims that we were destroyed as we valiantly attempted a test-firing of the PD?”
Kayla nodded.
“Clearly that’s not what happened,” Zimmerman said. “Tanet still doesn’t know for sure what happened.
“What we do know,” he continued, “from reading the ship’s datalogs before they were destroyed, is that someone accessed the beam weapon’s complink and set it to charge. They overrode the buffer capacity safety settings and looped the command, causing the buffer to be overloaded with excess energy. The whole thing imploded. That it happened so soon after we fired the virus delivery system makes me think it was meant to stop the test from ever happening.
“Beyond that, I’m not sure, but that’s where the energy that flung us through time and space came from. There was no test firing of a magical PD beam.”
Kayla waved her hand to keep him moving. This might be a fascinating historical discovery for a later date, but she needed to help her people now, if she even could. She zeroed in on the only thing that mattered: “How do you stop the virus? Once it has run its course, I mean. You wouldn’t send Ordochians down to the surface while the virus was still active.”
He opened his mouth to speak but she interrupted him. “And don’t you dare tell me the soldiers were inoculated against it, and that Ordoch is screwed because it’s too late to use a vaccine.”
“There is a way to shut it down. Or at least, there was.” He paused, looking sad.
“Spit it out.”
“We use the controllers—and the children.”
Kayla caught her breath. The three teenagers in cryosleep, all three past the point of surviving reanimation.
He nodded. “You saw them in the cryochamber. They’re the ones who were supposed to interface with the nanovirus using a master-code version of the virus. You see, the virus has psionic receptors.” He seemed to be struggling with the words to describe it all. “It doesn’t have a consciousness or anything, but it can receive and react to certain basic commands, given to it by the master-code virus, what we call the queen bug.”
Kayla tried to follow what was being said, but it was hard when all she could hear was that the three children with the solution were the three children dead in cryopods.
“So,” she said, working it over, “the queen bug has a consciousness?”
“From what I understand—and you have to remember, I’m the first officer, a military man, not a man of hard science—it has something approaching a consciousness. It’s a biomechanical interface, part complink, part nanovirus. It attaches to the host’s cartaid arch and links its awareness of the individual nanovirus cells with the host’s awareness. The host can then pass a command to the nanovirus to deactivate it.”
Zimmerman shrugged. “I’m sorry, that’s about what I know of it. Fengrathen can tell you more, she’s the lead science officer on board.”
“Why children? Why not have an adult interface with the virus?” And who the void would attach a biomechanical nanovirus thing to a child’s brain, even in a time of war?
“Their connection to their cartaid arch is not completely solidified, so there’s room for the queen bug to attach. Also, their brains are more flexible than an adult’s. They can grow and evolve with the queen bug, hopefully surviving the experience.”
Kayla held up a hand. “I’m sorry, what? Hopefully survive? You mean these kids only had a chance of surviving the procedure, even before five hundred years of faulty cryosleep?”
Her heart started pounding in her chest: not because the hope of a cure was dead, but because, in the face of it all, one possibility presented itself to her. One horrifying, unacceptable possibility.
::I’ll do it.:: Corinth’s voice. He must have come with the rest of the people to hear what Zimmerman would say and she hadn’t even realized it. She’d been too focused on Zimmerman to realize where her younger il’haar was.
Corinth pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He drew himself up to his full height—when had he gotten past her ribcage?—and squared to face them both. He was serious but unafraid. ::Do you have more copies of the queen bug on board? If so, I volunteer to interface with one.::
“Corinth—” her voice was a whisper. “You can’t.” She was shaking her head, but she didn’t know against what. Against him, or against the truth that if Corinth didn’t try, they had no one else?
He tilted his head. ::Why not, Kay? Because I’m not strong enough?::
She realized then she’d already lost. Any answer here other than her utmost faith in him would hurt him deeper than even the loss of his twin had.
“He doesn’t have to be a strong psionic,” Zimmerman said. “This section of the Yari acts as an amplifier, allowing the queen bug’s signal to reach planet-wide, more than any psionic could do on their own, no matter how strong.”
�
��He is strong.” Kayla couldn’t look away from Corinth. His bright blue eyes, so like Vayne’s. “You’re one of the strongest people I know, Corinth,” she said quietly. And it was true. “All you’ve been through, all you’ve lost. Your struggles in the last five years…”
She looked at him, really looked at him, and saw beyond the child he’d always been. She saw the young adult he was, and the man he could become. He’d not only survived, he’d thrived in this last year.
“I know you’re capable of this,” she said gently. “I know how much you want to help, but I—” She what? Didn’t want him to? Couldn’t bear to lose him? Could she be that selfish, with their world in the balance?
Corinth lifted his chin. ::I’m not a child anymore, Kayla, and you don’t get to make this decision for me.::
He turned to face Zimmerman completely. ::When do we start?::
“Wait,” Kayla said, and held up her hand when Corinth started to argue. “I’m not going to stop you, but I have to ask—will the queen bug destroy his arch the same way the nanovirus does: will he lose his psi powers?” And if he did, would he ever speak again?
“It shouldn’t. Not in a child.” Zimmerman hesitated, then said, “There’s one last thing you should know. I suspected it right away, but I had Fengrathen run tests to confirm it. The nanovirus we created? It’s the basis for the one the imperials call the TNV.”
* * *
VANKIR CITY, ORDOCH
It would have been impossible to leave the city if they hadn’t had a flyer. As they traveled over Vankir from the palace, Malkor looked down to see utter chaos in the streets. His and Rigger’s trip from the prison earlier looked like a military march compared to this.
The shuttle was quiet all the way back to the rebel base. A subdued Vega sat between Trinan and Vid. Vayne, with the Influencer on his lap, lay with his head back against the seat, eyes closed, but Malkor doubted he slept. Mai had his eyes on Vega, alert for trouble, and another Wyrd drove. With nothing else to do, Malkor returned to watching the world go insane outside.
Canisters continued to drift down, carried gently by paper parachutes. No doubt they’d been transmitted through the atmosphere via rocket and then let loose as the rocket disgorged its payload. Even if the army had an effective anti-air missile system in place, there wasn’t enough ordnance on the planet to take out every one of the canisters before they landed. And with an aerosol delivery system, who knew if shooting them out of the sky would even be an effective defense?
It was hard to wait until they reached the base for answers, but every frequency was jammed full, so wait they did.
The flyer touched down as close as possible to the abandoned manufacturing facility, and they all sprinted from the plane to the cover of the building. Canisters littered the ground here, too, though, and the air had a metallic bite to it when Malkor breathed in. For once he was thankful to get underground. They stripped out of everything they were wearing and left it in a pile, along with the rest of their gear. Rebels in hazmat gear hosed them down, but there was a feeling of “too little, too late.”
Vayne unpacked the Influencer and left the case with the rest of the contaminated things as they entered another room and got dressed. It was only then that they were allowed any deeper into the base. They were shown immediately to the situation room—the one room in the base that was full of high-tech electronic equipment—and greeted by Wetham and his lieutenants.
“Success,” Malkor said without preamble. Vayne hoisted the thing he’d carried with him since leaving Vega’s office, and Malkor got his first look at the dreaded Influencer. Truly, it resembled nothing so much as an ancient typewriter, from the days before complinks, and fitted neatly tucked under his arm. He deposited it in front of Wetham like the head of a slain beast, then crossed the room to stand as far away from it as he could.
They’d already deposited Vega with her jailers before joining the senior leaders of the rebellion in the situation room.
“So?” Malkor asked, looking at the myriad vidscreens and trying to make some sense out of the insanity he saw. “What is it?” His skin felt itchy. Was it his imagination?
“Well, the good news first, I suppose,” Wetham said. People were calling in reports, tracking data, passing paper around, and doing the million and one things you might expect to be happening in the middle of a war. He was like an island of calm in the midst of it, never seeming uncertain or unequal to the task, just steady and perennial.
“We heard from the Yari. The jump was successful, the ship is in orbit around Ordoch.”
“Did they end up firing the PD?”
Wetham nodded. “They did. At the planet. What you undoubtedly walked through on your way here is the result of Captain Janus betraying us. Apparently she and several of her remaining crew members are deep-cover Ilmenan operatives, though born Ordochians. Captain Janus executed a five-hundred-year-old directive to destroy the Ordochian people by firing the Yari’s superweapon at the planet itself.”
Which made absolutely no sense, but Malkor set that aside for the moment. “What was the empire’s response?”
“A brief, and I mean very brief, skirmish broke out between the imperial ships and the Yari. When the imperials fired on the Yari for what they saw as an attack against their forces on the ground, they hit several of the rooks that had disentangled themselves from the ship.” Wetham gave Malkor a somber look. “We did hope to avoid mass casualties, and I regret to inform you that the rooks tore apart one of the battleships before we could stop them.”
At this point, concern over enemy casualties was so far down his list of worries that he filed that under “to think about in my free time.”
“The other two battleships surrendered to Natali immediately and were spared. We expect to receive a surrender from the imperial army forces on the ground momentarily. Though that’s really just a formality at this point.”
Wetham was quiet then, pensive, and Malkor sensed they had come to the end of the good news. He hadn’t expected to find the commander of the rebellion in a somber mood upon news of a victory—but then, today was not your average day.
Finally, Wetham took a deep breath, settled something within himself, and spoke. “The end result of Ida’s actions, unfortunately, is that Ordoch has been infected with a nanovirus originally designed to destroy psi powers in Wyrds. And while only the main continent has been hit so far, it’s only a matter of time before the prevailing winds spread it across the entire globe.”
Wetham’s particular phrasing caught Malkor’s attention. “You said, ‘originally designed.’ What is it capable of now?” He had a million and one questions beyond that, but this seemed to be the one that truly mattered in this moment. “What else does it do?”
“Apparently our five-hundred-year-old virus was the blueprint for the empire’s TNV. It might be fitting, actually,” Wetham said. “Our refusal to help you five years ago will now prove to be our downfall.”
24
THE YARI
It was a strange procession that filed its way down through the unpowered sections of the ship, covered as everyone was in spacesuits. Kayla and Corinth led the way, followed closely by Zimmerman, who floated one of the Lorius’s stasis pods beside him, and last came Noar.
Kayla felt most keenly the absence of their other loved ones: Trinan, Vid, and the other members of the octet, Toble, Vayne, Tia’tan, and especially Malkor. All people who cared for Corinth, all people who would be here supporting them if they could. Natali was split by her desire to be with her family for such a personal moment, and her need to be with her people for such a crucial one. Privately, she thought Ordoch could have waited one more day for its en’shaar, but maybe she and Natali were not as alike as she’d always thought.
They had to leave the lift on the bottom level of the habitable section, as the narrow spindle section jutting out from the center of that part of the ship wasn’t in line with any lift tracks. Noar sped them down the zero-gravity hall with his
mind, getting them to the hatch access for the PD housing in record time. It had an airlock, which boded well for Zimmerman’s insistence that the housing was on its own power and atmosphere entirely.
Kayla knew that every second counted now for the people infected with the nanovirus, but once Corinth bonded with the “queen bug,” he would never be the same again—if he lived. She hesitated at the airlock.
::There’s no time, Kay:: Corinth said, reaching for the mechanism. He was eager to do this, eager to prove his worth to himself, to their family. He rushed ahead without fear, so sure of the outcome. In his mind, the hardest part—convincing Kayla to finally let him be an adult—was behind him. He probably saw nothing but smooth sailing ahead.
She saw what she always saw: the pitfalls, the snares. The overwhelming odds and the terrible stakes.
She forced herself to smile just a little. “I’m coming.”
They entered the airlock, cycled it, and stepped through into the most powerful weapon system the galaxy had ever seen.
It looked a lot like a locker room.
In fact, it looked just like a locker room. The ship was finished here, and instead of the molychromium bones, the floor was covered in an industrial gray rubber mat, easily washable and probably fungal resistant. There were benches to sit on while donning or doffing gear, storage lockers of various sizes, a pressure chute for laundry, showers, a bathroom… It was so eerily normal that Kayla wasn’t certain they’d come to the right place.
Several vending machines were attached to the wall side by side, dispensing things like protective eyewear, sterilized clean suits, and shoe covers. It felt like the anteroom for a super-secret laboratory.
“Disappointed?” Zimmerman asked.
“A little. I was expecting something straight out of a sci-fi vid.” At least it had lights and gravity and atmosphere. She opened her face shield and breathed the stale air.
The circular room wasn’t large at all. In the center was a ring of protective railing guarding a hole in the floor several meters wide. A ladder descended into the hole on one side, leaving the rest of the space for a lift platform.
