Fortune's Folly (Outer Bounds Book 2)

by Sara King

  So perhaps, in all of your vast worthiness and wisdom, you could tell Us how it is an archon novus just jumped dimensions to give you his Seal. This time, the ship definitely sounded bitter. Or, if that one is too difficult for you, perhaps you could begin with what the alien sigil on the other side reads.

  Tatiana blinked down at the meteorite in her hand. “It says ‘Die with honor, rise with fury.’” She frowned as that again triggered something ancient from one of her classes. “I’m pretty sure the unit isn’t around anymore.” After all, martyrs usually didn’t last long.

  Would your friend know? Encephalon demanded.

  “He might?”

  Immediately, as if he’d only been pretending to nap, Milar sat up. “Huh? What? Tat?” His golden eyes blinked as he focused on her with obvious difficulty.

  “Here, tell me what this is,” Tatiana said, shoving the etching into his hand and keeping his attention on it while she kicked the sword away with her foot behind her. The last thing she wanted was for Milar to see her new sword. Like the jaggle, he’d probably tell her she couldn’t keep it. He seemed like one of those stick-up-his-butt rear-admiral types that would try to keep her from having any fun because it wasn’t on the scheduled agenda.

  Instead of groggily complaining he didn’t know anything about ancient history, Milar immediately surged to his feet and away from her like she was holding a snake. “Holy crap, Tat! Drop that! Drop it right now!”

  Tatiana frowned at him and pulled it back protectively. “Um. No. It’s mine.”

  “That belongs to an AlphaGen,” Milar babbled, like he was talking about the Boogieman. “Tat, that doesn’t belong to you. You need to leave it where you found it, okay?” He started wildly looking around them at the gooey red walls, obviously beginning to panic. “Oh shit. Tat. Where are we, Tat? Aanaho, what happened? Am I dead? I remember getting hit by—oh shit. Oh shit.” Her big hunk was hyperventilating, now. “Did that ganshi kill us both and we’re dead? Am I in Hell? Oh shit, I killed all those guys and I’m in—”

  Milar dropped back to the floor, snoring loudly.

  He did not appear to be thinking rationally, the ship said.

  “Agreed,” Tatiana said. But he had answered something for her. “Pretty sure this is the Sun Dogs’ symbol from the Triton Wars. It was the unit of super-soldiers who took out Emperor Giu Xi, led by Daytona Dae and some guy named Sirius. Same guys who stole ganshi from the Tritons as kittens and trained them to fight on our side. Probably where those annoying jaggles came from.”

  And these Sun Dogs fought alongside an archon in these wars?

  “Dunno,” Tatiana said, pocketing it again. “Hey, you got anything to eat?”

  There was a very long silence that began to get uncomfortable. Then, So you are hungry.

  “Yeah,” Tatiana said. “You got like a chowbox here anywhere?” She began looking for the telltale manufacturing cubby, like all good admirals’ quarters contained.

  We might. What do you remember of the Phage? Obviously, it was expecting to make some sort of exchange.

  “Ugh!” Tatiana cried. “It’s a sentient monomolecular nannite-type quantumly-entangled macro organism with telepathic capabilities from another dimension that infects its victims via skin or lung contact with airborne particles, and takes over host brains by altered signal pathways—redirecting neural transmissions—and turns hosts into unwilling prisoners in their own bodies, manipulating their movements and forcing their cells to reproduce its supermolecule for release into the air in a single burst, much like a spore burst, hence why you called them Phageospores, while somehow collecting and encoding all of its victims’ thoughts and experiences for its own encyclopedic use, which is why it prefers high-tech civilizations—it doesn’t feel it has anything to gain from spear-chuckers or cud-chewers. Oh, and it doesn’t need to eat, sleep, or piss, so it doesn’t have down time, so it could have wiped your civilization out in like twenty years flat, but it hung around awhile because it was benefiting from the research you were doing in trying to eradicate it, using the information you gained to make itself even more aggressive and infectious.” She let out a long, disgusted breath. “Can we please talk about something else already?”

  The ship gave her another of those long silences before it said, So you were listening.

  “Not really,” Tatiana said, waving a dismissive hand. “You just get really good at regurgitating bullshit after standing around listening to twenty jillion daily briefings about weather or politics or machinery or delays or malfunctions or upcoming parades or countless other topics you don’t really give a shit about, but could be grilled on the second the colonel notices you aren’t paying attention.”

  But you could retrieve the information if you needed it, Encephalon pressed.

  “Um,” Tatiana said, frowning as she thought of how many times her short-term memory had failed her. “No, probably not. I pretty much forget it all the moment the briefing’s over and I get to go back to my ice cream and teaser mags.”

  An instant later, Tatiana lost consciousness.

  “You can’t keep doing that!” Tatiana cried, sitting up in frustration. “Just because you’re a crippled-ass ship with a superiority complex, you can’t just—”

  We’re dying, Encephalon interrupted. We didn’t want to do it alone.

  Tatiana’s mouth fell open. “Oh.” Her heart started to pound.

  In retrospect, your responses to Our conversations with you left Us convinced that your species will be incapable of stopping the Phage when it returns. You are too single-minded, too selfish.

  Well, that wasn’t very nice, as far as ‘Famous Last Words’ went. Tatiana opened her mouth to object.

  Not you as an individual, as it is an archon’s purpose to think independently, but your species as a whole. The Aashaanti are a hive culture. No individual considers its desires above the needs of the hive, and because of this, We lasted longer than any other species in the known universe when the Phage entered Our dimension. Every member of the Aashaanti race was working towards a cure for ten molt-cycles. We had full quarantines of entire sectors, had shut down or destroyed entire Ring-chains. All this, and We still lost everything, because the Phage was even more unified, even more organized than We could ever be. And as We die, We consider that We might be the last remnant of a vanished race, the last wisp of sentience that survived the death of Our civilization, and it saddens Us to know that nothing was learned from Our existence—or Our passing.

  Tatiana immediately felt the guilt hit her like an explosive round to the gut. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  It is like your entire species is filled with archons, Encephalon said, sounding angry, now. All of them scurrying to their own individual rhythm, all of them struggling against each other, thwarting each other, slowing progress exponentially due to their selfish pursuit of their own whims, having no idea the danger you are all in.

  That was pretty accurate, Tatiana supposed.

  Then you have no tools with which to fight the Phage when it returns, Encephalon said, and We pity you.

  It was pretty clear the ship intended that to be its final communication. Uncomfortably, Tatiana cleared her throat. “How long do you have?” she asked. Around her, the ship’s corridors were flickering, the lights dimming before returning to full brightness, then dimming again.

  Reluctantly, the ship said, We are losing Ourself as We speak.

  All that knowledge, slipping away…

  Tatiana swallowed, suddenly faced with the very real fact that she had been nothing but a nuisance to this dying presence in its final hours. “The Aashaanti aren’t lost,” she said.

  The ship barely seemed to register her words.

  “When humans first slipped to this galaxy through the anomaly, we were in awe at what we found. Your cities were a hundred times bigger than our biggest on Earth. You covered entire planets with your underground civilizations, and yet you left the surfaces utterly pristine, the ecosystems functioning
in tandem with the surface megastructures you allowed yourselves. Even sixteen thousand years later, a person can walk through those surface cities—just tiny shadows of what lies beneath—and know that the Aashaanti were, without a doubt, a superior life-form.”

  The ship said nothing, but she could tell it was listening.

  “We’re really still just spear-chuckers with a lot of borrowed tech,” Tatiana admitted. “The original ship that got sucked into the anomaly and spit out into this galaxy was Admiral Essa Dublin’s lucky number Seven—basically a lifeboat we launched off Earth during the Migration, when everything was going to shit and our species was eradicating itself. People were put into primitive stasis and packed into trays like sardines just to get them off the planet, as many as they could fit on the ship in the off-chance some would survive. And a few did—except it made them forget everything but their long-term memories. They had no idea where they were or why they were in space. They had no idea how to run a ship, or what they were running from. Some didn’t even remember their own names. They had to read it all in the ship’s history logs and encyclopedias, and even then, a lot of them refused to believe it.”

  The ship continued to sulk.

  “We had the good luck to land on an Aashaanti planet,” Tatiana said. “We never would’ve survived if it hadn’t been for your cities and technologies, all right there in the open, ripe for our taking. We deconstructed everything we could and adapted what we could to work with electricity, though our scientists never could figure out how to power the originals with the same efficiency your culture seemed to possess.”

  You were using the wrong power source, Encephalon muttered. Every member of the hive participates in its survival. Our young were Our energy sources.

  “Well, that would be why we couldn’t figure it out,” Tatiana said. “Anyway, the point is, we’ve gone through something like this already. We have no idea how many other arks survived,” Tatiana said. “Hell, we still have no idea which galaxy we’re in, or how to get back to Earth.” She held up a finger. “But one thing is clear, even to the stupidest, most selfish human who ever happened to walk within the halls of an Aashaanti metrathon.”

  She waited for the ship to grudgingly acknowledge her with the equivalent of a mental grunt.

  “What’s clear is the Aashaanti were the greatest civilization this galaxy has ever seen, greater than any of us ever imagined a culture capable of being, and had we run into you guys while we were alive, we would be living on your good graces, if you let us live at all.”

  We would have, the ship replied. You hadn’t broken any laws.

  Immediately, Tatiana thought about the node in her head, and she had to ask, “Do you really judge an entire civilization by the actions of a single person?”

  It is the civilization’s responsibility to be advanced enough not to produce individuals capable of creating atrocities or catastrophic disharmonies, so yes. Encephalon’s mental ‘voice,’ usually booming and strong, sounded weaker, to her. Certain things the Aashaanti find intolerable, and they can and have annihilated civilizations to nothingness for things like you described on your home planet. Evil is not to be tolerated, not for any purpose. Harmony above all.

  ‘Evil,’ Tatiana thought, in this case was definitely subjective.

  We refuse to get into a philosophical debate about your contemptible species’ supposed worthiness in Our final moments, Encephalon snapped. Please leave. We will keep the quadrupeds here while you and your mate escape.

  The fact that what was essentially a dying race would rather be alone than spend its final minutes with her sobered Tatiana more completely than anything else in her entire life. She felt Time seem to slow around her, realizing how totally she had screwed up, and how few moments she had left to fix it.

  Beside her, Milar groaned and started to wake.

  “No,” Tatiana said, “keep him under. You and I need to have a conversation.”

  We don’t need to do anything, Encephalon said, though Tatiana knew she had its attention.

  “Keep who under?” Milar slurred. “Tatiana, what’s going on?”

  “You said an archon gave me this pendant,” Tatiana said, grabbing it from her chest. “And from what you said, that means I meet one in the future, because I certainly haven’t met one yet. That means I’m going to run into Aashaanti survivors, and one of them thought I was important enough to your people to give me his Seal. Is my logic wrong?”

  Encephalon hesitated several moments, then Milar slumped back to the floor. Your logic is correct, the ship said. And that is the only reason We haven’t ended you for the abomination you carry.

  “Look, I didn’t put the node there,” Tatiana growled. “I was an unwilling guinea pig.”

  We weren’t talking about the technology in your forehead.

  Tatiana frowned. “Then what…?”

  The one who sleeps beside you…were you aware he was infected with a bioengineered Aashaanti organism?

  Tatiana blinked. “Nooo… What does that have to do with…?”

  We’ve run calculations. Between the changes your technology is making to your genetic components and your partner’s infection, the results of such a match are…dangerous.

  Oshit.

  But the ship wasn’t finished. We were unaware there were any carriers left to spread the virus. Where did he come into contact with it?

  Tatiana flinched. “What are you talking about?”

  Surely the psychological changes are obvious! Encephalon snapped. The infected become acutely intellectual, often to the detriment of their physical selves, they gain a vicious sense of individuality, and they very easily devolve into terrible psychosis and extreme violence. It was one of Our final attempts to rid Our race of the Phage, but in doing so, We destroyed Our own cultural coherency.

  Tatiana swallowed hard, thinking of how Milar had wiped out an entire regiment of Coalition soldiers and had come out of it with only a few scratches and a branch to the leg. “Uuuhhhhmm.”

  So you see, Encephalon said, carriers must exist on this planet. We let the earlier explorer take the beacon because Our corridors were empty, devoid of life. We never thought anyone had survived.

  The way the ship said ‘anyone,’ it was almost as if it expected her to say, oh, by the way, there’s an Aashaanti supermarket right down the street.

  “There’s nothing on this planet but Shriekers,” Tatiana said, sending the mental picture.

  As soon as she sent a picture of a Shrieker, every light in the room flared. Where?! the ship screamed at her, giving her a mental shake. Where are they?! WHERE?!

  Flinching, Tatiana cried out at the sudden assault. “They’re everywhere,” she babbled, clutching her head. “Their mounds are scattered out in the jungle all over. Some of the old lava tubes along the Snake have small clusters of them, but they’re mostly in the underground caves.”

  How many?!

  Tatiana had heard it estimated that there were upwards of five hundred thousand to a million Shriekers on Fortune, if undiscovered mounds were taken into account, though those unprotected by the Coalition had been on an overall decline since humans discovered Yolk because the smugglers were poaching more nodules than the population could sustain. “I dunno… I think like half a million.”

  Aanaho. Enough for a hive. The red and violet lights flared out around her. You have to get out! We don’t have the energy to transport you. You have to escape!

  “Escape what?” Tatiana asked, frowning.

  Find the beacon, the ship whimpered, its voice like a thin trail of smoke in her mind. We’re so sorry. Please get out. Please help Our children.

  Tatiana frowned. “Children?”

  Total darkness answered her.

  “What children?” Tatiana demanded. “There’s just Shriekers!”

  The ship did not respond.

  So, a smug voice chuckled, all alone at last. Whatcha gonna do now, midget?

  Tatiana ducked down, yanked a permafla
re from Milar’s survival bag, and activated it. Holding it up, she shouted at the ship walls, “What children?!” Around her, the ship shuddered, and there was a weird whining boom from somewhere deep within.

  I’m talking to you. The big cat batted at her, knocking her over.

  Tatiana ignored the animal. She’d already decided she would make it out alive, based on all the given evidence, so she didn’t care about its stupid antics. “Listen, goddamn it, Encephalon!” she shouted, waving the light. “I need you to answer me! Are you saying the Shriekers are your children?!” When the ship didn’t respond, she kicked the rubbery wall, which was already starting to lose its consistency.

  In fact, the entire ship seemed to be…melting?

  On the floor, Milar was starting to sit up. “Tatiana, I swear to Aanaho, if you don’t tell me—holy shit!” He lunged to his feet, panickedly staring at the ten enormous black kitties in the room with them. The striped one was standing by Tatiana, scowling at her.

  “Encephalon!” Tatiana cried, kicking the wall again. This time, her foot lodged in the material and came back gooey.

  The ganshi, too, appeared startled by the way the metal seemed to be melting around them. Go ahead and kill the big one, the striped jaggle said. I’ll take the cyborg.

  Tatiana swiveled on the cat and shoved the flare in its face. “No,” she snapped, “you won’t take the cyborg, because your buddy left my picture with that goddamn sword,” she jammed the drawing of her into the cat’s face, then held it in place until the animal’s big purple eyes reluctantly dropped to look.

  Once Tatiana was certain the feline had gotten a good examination, she threw it aside and dug through her pocket. “And somewhere out there, there’s a time-space anomaly that gave me this.” She held up the archon’s symbol and spun it to show the Sun Dogs emblem. “Proof you’re supposed to get me out of here.”

  The jaggle visibly flinched upon seeing the insignia. One of the black ones was padding up towards Milar, who swallowed and backed up against the wall, but the gray one growled, Stop. The cat was looking at the thin brown film beginning to drip from the formerly opaline ceiling, its ears flattening against its striped skull. The ship’s collapsing, it cried. Get the babies! Leave the humans. We have to get out of here! Now!