Broken Worlds_Civil War

by Jasper T. Scott

  In theory, the nanites would do nothing to harm the Cygnian herself, but that was the point of this test—to make sure. Not that Tanik particularly cared if the virus accidentally killed its hosts, but he had to maintain the appearance of caring, and he needed to know for his own sake if the virus could be dangerous to him in the event that he became exposed.

  “There they go. Look—” Gatticus pointed to the holoscreen in front of them. It was relaying a live video feed from the prisoner’s cell. The air shimmered faintly beside the gill-like respiratory canals in the sides of the Cygnian’s neck, indicating the presence of the tiny machines.

  Two of the Cygnian’s four eyes cracked open as the nanites effectively flew up its nose. The alien’s mouth popped open, and it sneezed thunderously. A shimmering wave of nanites blew back out into the room, but they promptly turned around and zipped back in. The prisoner didn’t appear to notice.

  “How long before the virus takes effect?” Yuri asked.

  “A few hours at least, a day or two at most. It’s a question of how many Sprites there are versus how many nanites, and whether or not the virus can successfully spread its instructions to existing populations of nanites in the host’s blood.”

  “So why did I come down here?” Yuri demanded irritably. “Let me know once you’ve got some real results to show.” He turned and walked out of the brig’s security station, shaking his head and muttering to himself. It wasn’t even a minute later that some real results began to present themselves.

  “Something’s happening—look!” Cassandra whispered sharply.

  Tanik peered more closely at the holoscreen. The Cygnian’s eyes were wide and darting around the cell, as if she were suddenly afraid for her life. She leapt to her feet and began pacing frantically around her cell, growling and hissing unintelligibly.

  “What’s she doing?” Trista wondered.

  In the next instant, the alien stopped at the door and began trying to claw her way out. “That’s never going to work,” Trista said. “We de-clawed her.” Next the prisoner tried gnawing on the door handle with ragged black gums. “We also removed her teeth,” Trista added.

  Cassandra gave her a horrified look. “That’s barbaric.”

  “We had no choice,” Trista replied. “Cygnians can claw or chew through six-inches of solid alloy plating like it’s paper. We would never have been able to hold her here safely otherwise.”

  “What’s she doing now?” Buddy interrupted.

  The prisoner was slumped against the door, pawing it feebly with one claw-less hand.

  “She doesn’t look too good,” Cassandra pointed out.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Tanik mused. He fixed Gatticus with a frown. “I thought you said you had perfected the virus?”

  “I did.”

  “Then what’s going on in there? She looks like she’s dying. It won’t do us any good to solve the problem of the Revenants if we kill everyone in the process.”

  “Let’s not make any assumptions yet,” Gatticus replied.

  Trista’s eyes darted around the security station. “What if that virus gets out and infects us? Is her cell airtight?”

  “Don’t worry,” Gatticus said. “It’s not infectious.”

  “We just saw it infect that Cygnian!” Trista replied.

  “I set it to infect one host, no more,” Gatticus replied. “And as an added safety measure I can deactivate the nanites remotely if I need to.”

  “You’d better do that before it kills her,” Cassandra said.

  “Not yet,” Tanik said. “Gatticus is right. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet. We need to know the full extent of the side effects if we’re going to fix whatever is wrong with our virus.”

  “What if those side effects kill her?” Cassandra demanded.

  “We’ll do our best not to let it get that far,” Tanik replied. “After all, we may need her for subsequent tests.”

  Cassandra’s eyes narrowed swiftly at that. “You don’t care about the Cygnians, either. You’re just like my dad.”

  Tanik arched an eyebrow at her. “Do you want to save your father or not?” That seemed to suck the air out of her lungs, and whatever retort she might have offered went with it. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked away. “That’s what I thought,” Tanik said. “Gatticus, keep an eye on the prisoner’s life signs.”

  “Of course.”

  “And try not to let the virus kill her,” Tanik added. “I’ll be in my quarters if anyone needs me. Let me know if there are any changes in her condition.”

  “You will be the first to know,” Gatticus replied.

  “Good.” Tanik turned and walked out of the security station. The doors slid shut behind him with a muffled thump. He blew out an impatient sigh and shook his head. He hoped this wasn’t a significant setback. They didn’t have a lot of time left before the inauguration, and if Gatticus couldn’t get his virus working soon, Tanik would have to think of some other way to stop Darius.

  Perhaps he could try stealing and smuggling a ZPF bomb to the inauguration. He wouldn’t even have to get it down to the surface. He just had to get someone to deliver it close to the planet and then set it off.

  But Darius would likely be expecting such an obvious attack. Worse yet, he’d almost certainly have a vision or a dream about it. The problem with plotting against Revenants, especially powerful ones, was that subtlety and trickery were the only way to get around their sixth sense of predicting the future.

  Even Tanik’s plan to distribute Gatticus’s nano-virus would have to be layered with multiple levels of decoys in order to succeed, and that was assuming Gatticus could get the virus to work.

  Tanik scowled. He should have paid more attention to his visions of Darius sitting on a throne ruling over a New Union. So far that future didn’t look like it was going to be easy to change.

  Chapter 32

  Darius sat on his throne, listening to his Revenant governors arguing amongst themselves. He’d had tables and seats arranged on both sides of the throne room to create a temporary forum for them to air their grievances and report on the state of their star systems. The objective was for him to get an idea of the overall condition of his burgeoning empire without having to meet with each of his governors individually. He planned to share the positive highlights from their reports when he delivered his inauguration speech in three weeks’ time. But so far those highlights were more negative than positive.

  The primary problem seemed to be that he’d appointed just one hundred and ten governors out of almost twenty thousand Revenants. The basis of those appointments had largely been their relative strengths. He’d appointed the most powerful Revenants, thinking that they would be the best-equipped to hold on to power. What he hadn’t accounted for, however, was that the other nineteen thousand would begin plotting to usurp his appointed governors just as soon as he left their star systems. At the moment there were twelve seats empty out of the one hundred and ten, and Darius was hearing rumors that the missing governors hadn’t shown up because they’d been killed by their own enforcers.

  Darius frowned angrily and leaned his chin on his fist as he listened to the surviving governors argue about different solutions.

  “We should disband the enforcers entirely,” Governor Wilks said while smoothing down frizzy strands of blonde hair that had escaped the bun on top of her head. She had the floor at the moment, evidenced by the fact that she alone was standing, but it didn’t seem to matter. The others were all interrupting her at random.

  “That won’t solve anything!” said a Dol Walin governor, waving a flipper-like hand in her direction. His pale lavender skin had flushed dark purple, and his glossy blue eyes were flashing and darting to either side of his snout. “If anything that will only hasten our demise. Either we share power with them equally, or they’ll find some way to take it by force.”

  Murmurs of agreement followed that statement.

  “So instead of one governor per star system, we�
�ll have two hundred?” Governor Wilks demanded. “How do you even share power equally with that many people?”

  “Give everyone their own jurisdictions and the power to vote on decisions that affect their star system,” the Dol Walin said. “If everyone has an equal number of constituents and an equal number of votes, no one will be able to complain.”

  Someone barked a laugh at that. Darius saw that it was one of the ghostly white-eyed Vixxons. “In an ideal situation, that might work, but there will still be plenty of discrepancies. Some jurisdictions will be more affluent or important than others regardless of their number of inhabitants. You can’t divide the empire up into perfectly equal parts, and even if you could, differences would emerge over time, and new power struggles would occur.”

  “At least it should be enough to prevent outright assassinations,” the Dol Walin argued. “And we’ll have sanctions in place to deal with rogue elements. Right now we’re vulnerable because the Empire is in its infancy and the fleet is spread too thin to police all of our worlds.”

  “And what happens when we do have fleets in place?” a human governor with dark skin and a bushy black beard demanded. Darius tried but failed to put a name to the face. “That will only make it easier for a star system to break away! Any one of us could take control of a fleet with non-Revenant crews and make them do whatever we want. A lone enforcer could have such a fleet execute an orbital strike on his governor’s palace! There’s a reason the Augur used the Luminaries to keep us under control. Their influence united us and kept us all from turning on each other.”

  At that, the room burst into chaos, with all of the governors shouting denials and angry retorts. None of them were sorry to see the Luminaries go. They were finally free, and they had no interest in becoming slaves again. Darius’s policy of spreading them out across the galaxy ensured that not even he could control them, and that had been a large part of what had convinced them to go along with his plans to re-unite the galaxy under his rule. The implication that they needed to be controlled by him from some central location was probably more true than false, but it was definitely not a popular idea.

  “Enough,” Darius raised a hand for silence, but no one listened. Standing up from his throne, he added the weight of his mental influence to that suggestion, making it an order they couldn’t refuse.

  Silence fell like a shadow over the echoing throne room, and all eyes turned to Darius. His governors’ expressions were glazed and staring, as if they’d all suddenly forgotten what they were arguing about. Darius relaxed his hold on their minds, giving them back enough of their faculties to listen, but not enough to argue.

  “These petty struggles will end just as soon as the Empire is established because I will identify rogue states and crush them myself. If you are afraid of your enforcers, I suggest you increase your security and figure out who you can trust. Get your houses in order. We have three weeks left until the inauguration. Between now and then I expect you all to come up with a list of positive progress that you’ve seen since entering office. This meeting is adjourned.”

  Chairs pushed out in unison, and the resounding thunder of a hundred pairs of boots hammering marble tiles followed the governors out of the throne room.

  Once the last of them left and the doors slammed behind them with an echoing thud, Darius turned his throne and sat scowling out the windows at Tarsus City, the capital of his empire. He watched as the sun sank and lengthening shadows went inching across the roofs of shorter buildings. The fading sun cast everything in a golden hue, and stars began to prick through the sky between faint wisps of cloud.

  Darius tore his thoughts away from the view and considered the problem at hand. All this vying for power and petty rivalries were symptoms of a deeper problem. The Revenants didn’t want to be subordinate to anyone. Eventually the infighting would reach Darius in the form of an assassination attempt, or an on-going series of them.

  Darius let out a heavy sigh. Now he understood why the Cygnians had appointed androids to rule their Union. Subordinates who could be programmed to obey would give far less trouble.

  But taking back the power he’d given to the Revenants would just pit them against him. He couldn’t do that without first finding a way to eliminate them as a threat.

  There were ways of doing it, especially now that the inauguration put them all in one place. A well-placed ZPF bomb would take out the entire planet in the blink of an eye. Poof, no more Revenants. But surely they would foresee the threat coming and decide to flee the planet. Furthermore, Cassandra was still here somewhere—unless she’d found a way to leave the planet. He couldn’t risk killing her in the process of eliminating the others. Darius scowled and shook his head. He should have let Tanik kill the Revenants when he’d had the chance. Of course, back then it would have been premature. He’d needed them and their fleet to consolidate his empire. In fact, he probably still needed them to keep local populations in line.

  Darius sighed again. He never imagined that ruling an interstellar empire would be so complicated.

  * * *

  “How long has she been like this?” Tanik asked, nodding to the holoscreen.

  “Since this morning,” Gatticus replied.

  The Cygnian prisoner was sitting down, staring at the door to her cell. She was awake and alert—a significant improvement over the past day, which she’d spent drifting in and out of sleep, refusing to eat or drink.

  “What do her test results show?” Tanik asked.

  “No fever, no signs of respiratory or cardiac distress. The swelling in her brain has subsided. She’s made a complete recovery twenty-nine hours after infection.”

  “And the Sprites?” Tanik asked.

  “The virus appears to have eliminated all of them.”

  “So it worked?”

  Gatticus nodded.

  “And it didn’t kill the host,” Tanik added.

  “No, it didn’t, but it’s important to note that the Cygnians are a much hardier species than most. If the virus put her at death’s door for the past day, there’s no telling how it will affect other species—or for that matter how it will affect Revenants, whose blood concentrations of the Sprites are much higher. We won’t know what to expect until we test it on them.”

  Tanik scowled and shook his head. “There’s no time for that, and even if there were, how do you propose we test all the other species? We can’t abduct a dozen other test subjects, and something tells me we’re going to be short on volunteers from Yuri’s fleet. Besides, we’ll never get the data that we really need, which is how the virus will affect Revenants.”

  “Correct. I just thought you should know the risks involved.”

  “Is there any way to mitigate the side effects?”

  “If we slow the rate at which the Sprites are killed, the effects should be diminished. Slow them enough, and the host might not even notice that they are feeling poorly until their powers begin to fade.”

  “What kind of time frame are we talking about?”

  “For a Revenant? Who knows. For this Cygnian, setting an elimination period of three to five days would likely have eliminated most of her symptoms.”

  “That’s too long,” Tanik replied, shaking his head. “We’re going to have to risk it. We can’t afford to make the elimination period longer, or we’ll risk giving the Revenants enough time to neutralize the virus before it can do its job. The Cygnians might be resilient, but so are the Revenants. It won’t kill them.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Gatticus said.

  “Make sure you create enough of the virus to infect at least twenty thousand people.”

  “Twenty thousand?” Gatticus blinked in shock. “I’ll need several hundred kilograms of nanites for that.”

  “Then you’d better get started. We leave for Tarsus in two days. Can you do it?”

  Gatticus nodded absently. “If Yuri cooperates, I should be able to make it in time.”

  “Good...” Tanik trailed off, nodding
to the Cygnian. “Has she demonstrated any behavioral changes?”

  “Such as?”

  “Reduced aggression, increased tolerance for other species, reduced impulsivity...?”

  “There’s no way to be sure from here,” Gatticus replied.

  “True,” Tanik said. “Let’s go open the door. I’m going to have a chat with our prisoner.”

  “Are you certain you want to do that?”

  “Why not? She’s not contagious, is she?” Tanik asked.

  “No, but she may try to kill you,” Gatticus replied.

  “With no claws and no teeth?” Tanik snorted. “I’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 33

  “What is your name?” Tanik asked.

  A series of growls and hisses followed.

  “I am Queen Rassura. Who are you?”

  “Tanik Gurhain. You are not trying to kill me. Why is that?”

  The Ghoul bared her ragged, toothless black gums at him. “With what teeth?” Then she held up a hand and fluttered six claw-less fingers. “And what claws?”

  Tanik nodded. “Futility wouldn’t stop the Cygnians I know. The Cygnians I know are driven by emotion and instinct, not reason. What makes you so different?”

  “Why should I answer your questions?” Queen Rassura countered. “What do I get out of it?”

  “You could save your people,” Cassandra said, stepping forward quickly. “They’re not all dead. Not yet.”

  Tanik shot a warning look at her. The Cygnian drew herself up onto her hind legs and hissed loudly. “What do you mean we’re not all dead yet?”

  Cassandra cleared her throat, probably about to describe her father’s xenocidal rampage through Cygnian space, but Tanik put an arm in front of her chest, and pushed her back.

  “What she means is that the Cygnians are losing the war, but there might be a way to negotiate peace if your people were more reasonable.”

  “And how do you propose to make us more reasonable?” Queen Rassura asked, while stepping forward and looming over him with all four of her massive arms poised to rip him apart.