My Outcast State (The Maauro Chronicles Book 1)

by Edward McKeown

  “Then we must become less predictable.”

  “Yes, because I am coming with you.”

  “Excellent. I will reverse all the deposits and cargo back to the ship and purchase other supplies now that you will be aboard.”

  “We will be flying straight into a trap,” Jaelle said.

  “Yes but we will neither be blind nor helpless. The Collector wants me, but I believe now it may be less for myself and more for my intel on Infestors. That will give us bargaining leverage.

  “Make no mistake, Jaelle. Infestors will be as inimical to present galactic life as they were to the Creators. They are empathic, capable of experiencing sensations of other lifeforms but incapable of seeing them as independent lifeforms worthy of respect. They cannot speak mind to mind, but they can influence and control the actions of others. I suspect that helmet she was wearing was a form of protection similar to what live Creator troops wore. It can block most of Infestor influence at least for a period.”

  “Great. Sociopathic aliens from the depths of time.”

  “The Collector is a rare and subtle opponent. I will enjoy destroying her. Make preparations, Jaelle. We will be voyaging far and fast.”

  ***

  I didn’t remember much of the next few days. There were needles and drugs and interrogations. I would come out of it sometimes, screaming and crying, but there were always more needles. Guild didn’t bother with torture. They had science, which was much more effective. Between sleep deprivation and other interrogation techniques, there was probably little I didn’t tell them, despite my occasional efforts when I was marginally aware of myself.

  I finally came to in a small cabin on a thin, hard bunk. I sat for hours waiting for my mind to clear and my body to become my own once more. I felt violated and ashamed, and worse, I couldn’t remember what I might have given away. Despair overwhelmed me, perhaps for days; time had little meaning in my cell. Food came through a slot and there was a shower I used too often, as if it could somehow rinse my soul clean.

  I knew I was still on a ship not only from the design of my cell-cabin, but from commands I heard, some in standard, some in what I assumed was Guild, over speakers. The sound of shipboard routine permeated my prison.

  After a while I started to exercise, trying to get the tone back in my muscles. I ate, slept, and then listened as the ship prepared for jump. The stomach-turning sensations and bizarre colors and smells told me that this was a long jump. I didn’t know what time it was when the doors to my cabin slid open. The huge man who’d captured me stood there. “Ah, awake, good. I do not need to toss your ass out of bed.”

  He pointed at me. “You, come with me.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I should be upset that I didn’t merit more guards. On the other hand, looking at Tattoo’s arms, which were nearly the size of my legs, I guessed he was more than enough to deal with me. The ape-like man was shorter, but he may have massed nearly twice as much. I’d never seen a more simian-looking creature. His arms hung almost to his knees and he rolled as he walked.

  “Come, come,” he said in his peculiar accent. “We do not keep Madam waiting on her ship.” We walked up a gangway and through several decks and levels before coming into a carpeted and lush section.

  Tattoo ushered me into a sumptuously decorated room that I would never have suspected of being on a starship. Plush carpets dotted the floor. The bulkheads were covered with works of art and fine fabrics. Statutes and other objets d’ art filled shelves and stands. I could see cunningly made tie-downs and protections behind each object. The collection traveled with the collector. Despite the eclectic nature of the collection, there was a harmonious whole to it. A connoisseur operated here.

  The room had so overwhelmed the senses that for a moment I missed the occupant, a tiny human woman sitting very at ease in an overstuffed chair. At her nod, Tattoo walked me toward her, and then stood behind her chair.

  The woman was dressed in an elegant silver and blue suit and sensible, expensive shoes. She sipped a cup of tea and looked up at me with clear gray eyes. It was hard to judge her age. Her face was smooth, with delicate features under a conservative short haircut. Her hair was silver. Not merely the silver of age, rather, it seemed metallic strands ran through it.

  The eyes were the warning, the winter gray of a killing frost. They let you know the tilt of lip was not a true smile. Something about her told me she was from an early colony where genetic drift had diverged from old humanity. I thought she was far older than she looked.

  “Ah, Marcel,” she said to the hulk escorting me. “I see you have brought our new friend? I hope he has not been too much trouble.”

  “No, Madame Ferlan,” he said with a grin.

  “Good.” She raised an elegant, flowered cup to her lips and sipped. “I always find myself chilled aboard ships. I know the temperature is the same as at home, but my old bones know that on the other side of this metal skin, death is waiting, icy cold and inexorable, one finger beckoning.”

  I thought about the books and videos I’d seen with the hero trading wisecracks and defiance with the villain. I wasn’t tempted. I said nothing.

  Ferlan gestured at the leather chair opposite her. “Sit.”

  I dropped into the chair. She almost winced at my abuse of part of her collection. Marcel moved to stand behind me.

  “Would you care for tea?”

  I nodded. God knew what might be in it, but she didn’t need my cooperation to get drugs into me. She poured tea from a silver service into some exquisite cups.

  “Cream and sugar?” she asked, for all the world like a grandmother.

  “Just sugar, please.”

  “Ah, manners. So unusual in the young these days. You must have been raised properly. Where would that have been?”

  “No place in particular,” I said.

  Ferlan’s gray eyes flashed. “No matter. The present and the distant past are what concern me.”

  “I don’t know how I can help you.”

  “You have a friend that can help me.

  “To do what?”

  She sipped her tea. “I will tell you a story. A hundred years ago, a Guild vessel of a particularly outrageous scoundrel was looking for a place to hide after an over-audacious raid. He fled into an unoccupied area of space, finding a brown-dwarf star with a system of small, rocky planets: nothing of any interest there, no reason for any Patrol or Confed vessel to pull in there. He expected to find nothing but frozen, dark rocks. He found something else. His vessel encountered a gravity gradient, almost a bubble in space-time. At the bottom of it, he encountered the Artifact.”

  This time I sipped the tea. “Artifact?” I said, keeping my face a blank.

  “An immense ship, or perhaps a space station, or maybe something else, he did not find out. Being a daring Guildsman, he tried to land, only to provoke a deadly reaction from what he thought was a lifeless derelict. Daring only goes so far. He fled, almost melting his engine to escape.

  “When his repair crews went out to work on the damage, they found a rider. A small, ball-shaped probe had attached itself to their ship. At first, they feared it was a mine. When it didn’t explode, he had his engineers bring it aboard, hoping to prise its secrets out. They imagined it was some form of probe.”

  “Did he?”

  “After a fashion,” Ferlan replied. “He returned to his home base with his one treasure. It seemed at first to be merely a curiosity, a fragment of some unknown species surfacing from the well of history. Yet it was more. The machinery was still functioning in some way we could not understand. It affected our gallant captain, who was fond of keeping it in his room. He began to act in a peculiar fashion. Almost as if he was under some compulsion. He tried to gather supplies, fuels, and radioactives, then tried to commandeer a Guild ship by himself. He went mad when captured. His ravings indicated that the probe had
taken over his mind, commanding him to gather supplies and intelligence, and return to the Artifact.

  “The Guild sent a larger, better-armed expedition back to the brown dwarf. But the Artifact was not where they had encountered it before. The vessel searched but could find no sign of the gravity gradient. They abandoned the search after a month.”

  I looked at her as I finished my tea. “A fascinating tale, but that was a century ago. What does it have to do with us now?”

  “So glad you asked. Come with me, young man. Come with me.”

  Marcel stepped forward and offered his arm as she put down the teacup and rose with his assistance. The almost ape-like enforcer seemed incongruous next to her elfin delicacy.

  I stood and followed out the back of her audience hall. We went down a long corridor until we came to a guarded hatchway. The two guards noted her approach, but said nothing. Ferlan placed her hand against a biometric sensor and the hatch slid open. We entered a large, cool room. Light bounced off the blue-painted walls, giving a corpse-like look to the scurrying techs.

  An object sat on a large table at the center of the room, secured with clamps and behind a glassite well. It was a meter wide, made of a dull gray metal, studded with panels and what looked like black plastic.

  I looked at her in astonishment.

  She smiled. “Yes. I purchased it about twenty years ago. I was wiser than our unfortunate captain. I have never laid my hands on it. It’s been studied and carefully secured. It has led me on a merry chase. Clearly it is from a species of immense technological knowledge. I was fascinated with it. I studied every marking on it, the style of its making, even the structure of its exotic alloys. I found occasional relics in my searches that told me it was compatible with materials from over 50,000 years ago. Yet it is not so ancient, it could have been made recently. It is a great mystery.”

  I stared at the thing, moved by her rapt storytelling. I walked forward then stopped, looking back at her. She nodded.

  I started forward again.

  Light arced from the probe, slamming into the plaststeel cover nearest me. People screamed and threw themselves to the deck as fragments, spalled off the plaststeel hull, flew across the room. One cut my arm, snapping me out of the frozen fear. I flung myself backward in a roll. As I came up, I saw Marcel disappearing back through the hatch, Ferlan tucked under one massive arm. I pushed past the guards, who dashed in, weapons leveled.

  I flung myself into the corridor, fetching up hard against the wall opposite. Behind me, the hatch slid shut. I stood shaking with reaction, staring at the Collector and Marcel, who had a large-bore pistol leveled at me. After a few seconds, she put her hand on Marcel’s massive arm and pushed it down. “Check inside.”

  The huge man gave me a volcanic glare, then slapped the entry plate. The doors slid open and a wisp of acrid smoke came out. He rapped out commands in some language other than standard and answers came back.

  “All is quiet,” he said. “No one is hurt. The probe shows no sign of life. Shall I call off the guards?”

  “Yes, but keep them in the room.”

  “The plaststeel barrier is badly damaged.”

  “Summon a repair crew,” she said absently, staring at me.

  I shrugged. “I did nothing.”

  “No,” she said. “Interesting. Only once in a hundred years before today has that probe done anything. Yet you walk in the room and it immediately tries to kill you.”

  “It recognized him as an enemy,” Marcel rumbled

  “Not him,” she mused, “but something that has touched him. “I think that your friend Maauro has marked you in some way, perhaps a biochemical trace or some mental imprint, but this confirms my suspicions. Maauro is from one side of an ancient war; this probe is from the other side.”

  “You said it had done something before,” I managed.

  “Yes, the first year I purchased it. One morning we came in to find a dozen small similar-looking balls around it. They turned out to be smaller versions of the probe. They were apparently designed to build themselves into larger, mobile bodies with which to explore new environments. One variant made small submarines, another produced a flying machine, and still another produced a form of centipede-like scout.”

  “Yeah, I saw that one.”

  “We thought it would be useful to salt these miniature probes on those Confederate worlds that had good hyperspace routes out of Kandalor. I thought that if Maauro landed on a world where one was present, it would find her.”

  “She found it first.”

  “Clever girl.”

  “So you decided that you’d simply give the little beggars just what they wanted?” I said.

  She looked at me curiously. “Yes, I provided them with the raw material and sent them on to the destinations I wished.”

  “You wished,” I repeated dryly. “You really think that it was your wish that got carried out? Its probes are dispersed on Confederate worlds, with the equipment they need, searching for the one remaining enemy they have.”

  Ferlan stopped, looked confused, then, “Nonsense. The probe served my purpose. After all I wanted to add…well to make the acquaintance of your Maauro, even to ask her to join my little expedition.”

  “Expedition to what?” Either she would not, or could not see that the probe might be influencing her.

  “Come with me,” she commanded. “There is another test. Marcel, call ahead and tell Dr. Flinss we are coming and to be sure everything is secure.”

  Marcel spoke into a com on his wristband in Guild.

  Again we walked down corridors, changing levels on broad gangways. The Collector’s vessel was not a regular warship; its interior was far less compartmentalized and cramped and more comfortably appointed. From the traffic in her corridors, I estimated the crew at well over three hundred and marveled at the wealth it would take to run such a vessel privately.

  Before another guarded doorway, the Collector again pressed her palm to a panel and doors slid aside. The room beyond was far larger than the probe room, almost as large as the vehicle deck below. The crew in here wore white labcoats as well.

  I froze when I saw the focus of activity in the room.

  Maauro had shown me images of Infestors, I never imagined I’d see live ones. Three huge plaststeel cages, reinforced with a grid work of thin bars, sat lined up behind each other. The nearest held something like a cross between a spider, a crocodile and a nightmare. Its yellow and black body twitched with explosive energy as it skittered around the enclosure. The skin was fleshy, yet there was an unpleasant chitinous look to it as well. The long head, filled with teeth, seemed too small to house much of a brain.

  “Greetings, Dr. Flinss,” Ferlan said. “How are our patients today?”

  “Patients!” I sputtered.

  Flinss, a gaunt woman with dark-gray hair, severely pulled back, looked at me narrow-eyed, like a mother hearing a critical comment about her children. “They are quite well, Madam Ferlan, agitated a little, as usual, by jump.”

  “Good, I want to see if there is something else that agitates them. Is the deluge trank system operational?”

  Flinss looked at her suspiciously and me with positive dislike. “Yes, but why—”

  Ferlan’s head snapped around and the question died on the doctor’s lips. She ducked her head and walked back to the main control panel.

  “Come, Wrik, let us get a closer look at my resurrections.”

  “I’m good from here.”

  “Now, now, no cowardice,” she chided. “You are quite safe. The walls are far too strong to be breached and these do not have hidden weapons.”

  Rather than be dragged forward by the hulking Marcel, I stepped forward, realizing that the Collector wouldn’t expose herself to any avoidable danger. I walked forward to stand next to the tiny woman only a few feet from the enclosure.<
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  The monsters stalked restlessly around their enclosures, paying us no attention.

  “Interesting. While the probe reacted rather violently to you, the Infestors themselves do not deign to notice you.”

  “Good. Wish I didn’t have to see them either.”

  “You don’t care for our little friends?” Ferlan asked. “Well I cannot say that I care for them much either. But don’t tell Dr. Flinss,” she added in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “How many of these things do you have?” I asked, consciously not being drawn in by her easy manner.

  “Three have survived to this point. We reconstituted them from the DNA of the one that was found by your friend Dusko near the Tar Sea. So these are all clones. Of course, while their DNA is correct, they have not been raised or educated as they once would have been. These seem to be warriors, of a lower order of intelligence. They are little more than savages, just like human children raised in a zoo would be. I have tried to have them educated but their psychology is bizarre and we have not established more than the most basic communication with them. Even that is mostly on a stimulus-response basis.”

  “So Dusko was working for you?”

  “Sometimes. He knew of my interest in ancient things and contacted me when this body was found. Thereafter I sent many expeditions to that section of space and commissioned him to scour your world and near space for additional treasures. One of those expeditions caught you up.”

  “Harfang and Treska were Guild?” I asked.

  “Low-level,” she nodded, “and evidently not too bright given that they recruited a Confed intelligence agent for the search for the Infestor asteroid base.”

  I thought of Candace and for a fleeting second wished the confident Confed agent was with me. “Yes, they got dead and she got the base.”

  “And you got Maauro. You will have to tell me sometime how you kept her hidden from Ms. Deveraux on the trip back. Only I failed to profit from that expedition.”

  “It didn’t work out so well for Dusko, either.”

  “You do not care for your Dua-Denlenn companion.”