The Complete Warlord Trilogy: An Aeon 14 Collection
Page 45
Katrina glanced down at the case she was carrying, Malorie’s brain and life-support systems nestled inside.
Katrina wondered about ‘some’ broken legs. That, combined with Demy’s description of the things as being creepy, piqued her interest.
Katrina closed the connection and considered her next call. This one would be trickier, but it had to happen.
While most of the Adders referred to her as ‘Lady Katrina’, given her position as the head of the Blackadder canton, the MDF officers preferred to call her ‘warlord’. She was certain they meant it as an insult, but she acted as though it were not.
Even if they spoke the word in derision, given the two options, she preferred it. She held no military rank, and appropriating one would not earn her any love from the MDF. Warlord was about as close to a military rank as she would get.
Katrina replied.
Katrina spoke the lie with such conviction that she almost believed it herself. Granted. It was not entirely untrue. She didn’t start this; Admiral Lara was actively working to take whatever the Blackadders had found—namely Katrina herself—by force, if necessary. That precipitated their small conflict on Farsa, which Jace escalated greatly in his bid to take over everything.
Colonel Odis laughed.
Katrina’s eyes widened at that.
That’s why I picked you, Odis, Katrina thought. You’re predictable that way.
Katrina closed the connection, and then considered the various ways in which taking the Verisimilitude could play out.
A malicious smile crept across Katrina’s face.
THE JUMP
STELLAR DATE: 02.03.8512 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Voyager, Monta Station
REGION: Orbiting Takan, Kashmere System
Troy reviewed the new jump-navigation systems, recalculating their trajectory, triangulating off nearby stars, and confirming with more distant objects.
The dark layer made him nervous. No, not nervous, uncomfortable. It was just so much nothing, barring the clumps of dark matter that clustered around stars. Barely detectable, but spelling instant death for any ship that collided with them.
How did they ever manage to map all these jump points out? The time and expenditure must have been significant.
He considered that it probably still was. Dark matter orbited stars just like regular matter. Clear routes between the stars were often in flux, shifting as matter moved about, both in newtonian space, and in the dark layer.
That was part of what made him nervous. The Kashmere System advertised the clear routes to nearby stars, but the safe exit locations were provided by whatever ships had most recently come from those systems. One had to trust that everyone else was operating in good faith.
It was strange to think that—unless one was inside of a federation of some sort—the speed of information between the stars was determined by the routes of freighters, commercial passenger transports, and light courier ships.
All interstellar data flowed through such ships, and some amount of skepticism had to be given to the quality of said data. It could be out of date, wrong, or maliciously altered.
Yet somehow the whole fabric of human commerce and communication seemed to hold together.
Troy wondered if it was just held in place by sheer willpower. After the many interstellar wars of the last five thousand years—the most recent major conflagration only four hundred years in the past—humans and AIs may just want peace badly enough to make it work.
Yeah. Right, Troy laughed to himself. AIs maybe, humans no.
Rama leant back in her chair and nodded while reviewing the jump trajectory. “Looks good to me, Troy. You sure you want to dump out of the DL eighty AU out at Midditerra? Gonna be a long flight insystem.”
“Well, this and Bollam’s World.”
“Look at you, Troy, being all imprecise and making assumptions! I like it.” Rama grinned up at her little ‘Troy’ figurine she’d made. The optics on the Voyager were too small to see, and Rama said she hated talking to nothing.
Hence the Troy doll that stood atop the center console.
At first it annoyed Troy—granted, most human particularities did—but he’d grown accustomed to it. He’d also placed a small nano drone on the figurine, so that when Rama talked to it, he could watch as though she were talking to him.
Rama laughed. She always did whenever he needled her. “Could be, Troy, could be. I got a prybar and squeezed one in.”
“Ohhh, look who’s talking, Mr. Lumpy Hull.”
“Do I have to separate you two?” Carl asked as he climbed up to the cockpit. “Not that I’m sure how we’d do that.”
“Or pull Troy’s core,” Rama said, grinning widely.
“Fight nice, kids,” Carl grunted. “We ready for the jump?”
Carl chewed on his lip as he looked over the jump calculations. “Stars, this makes me nervous,” he muttered.
“Why’s that, boss?” Rama asked.
Carl shot her an appraising look. “Because we still haven’t worked out the issues with the relays. We just can’t get the specs right on the fabbed ones. We need to buy some, but we don’t have the right credits.”
“I know, Carl, I was messing with you,” Rama rolled her eyes. “You and I have only worked together for a bajillion years. You think you’d know how I roll by now.”
“Sorry,” Carl muttered. “Stress response. Let’s just do this, already.”
Troy activated the grav field generators, and an alternating field of positive and negative gravitons flowed out from the Voyager, dropping it from normal space into the dark layer.
They were on their way to the Midditerra System.
A NEW OUTLOOK
STELLAR DATE: 02.04.8512 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Katrina’s quarters
REGION: Farsa Station, Persia, Midditerra System
Nesella Station lay in orbit of Regula, a smallish ice giant forty-seven AU from Midditerra’s star. It was on the same side of the system primary as Persia, making for a somewhat shorter trip, but not much.
Katrina had spent most of the four days researching everything she could about the stations on the outer rim of the Midditerra system. There were thousands of smaller outposts, but only a few dozen major habitats.
Nesella was one of those.
A collection of toroids, it housed over three-hundred-million humans, making it one of the largest population centers in the Midditerra system.
Kruger ruled it in a semi-democratic fashion: democratic in that he held many plebiscites, ‘semi’ in that he either manipulated the results, or just ignored them.
The man was wily and would make a formidable adversary—which meant Katrina had to ensure he didn’t become one.
The single advantage she had over him was that Admiral Lara had ensured that the station masters in the outer system kept limited fleets. She had taxed them heavily and used that money to bolster the MDF.
The end result were stations that needed the MDF for protection and didn’t have the resources to extricate themselves from that dependency.
Lara, you were one cunning bitch.
Katrina rose from the desk in the stateroom Jordan had granted her, and stared out at the dark blue orb of Regula. They were four hours from docking at Nesella Station, and she had just exchanged brief pleasantries with Kruger.
Officially, she was visiting him as a matter of state, getting to know the man, and discussing how he would fit into the new government she was organizing.
She suspected he knew the other reason she was coming, though it was hard to know for certain. The Verisimilitude was not on record as being docked on the station, and no official logs showed it as having arrived.
It was only through some of Jordan’s own contacts that they knew it was there, tucked on the inside of one of the inner rings, out of sight unless you were deep within the station.
The ship’s docking location alone spoke volumes.
She didn’t know what form the net crawlers took, she’d not asked for further clarification after Demy’s comment referring to them as creepy, but she rather hoped it wasn’t too pleasant.
While Katrina wanted Malorie as an ally, she didn’t want the woman to think she was absolved of past crimes. Just like she had turned Lord Troan into her creature, she would do the same to Malorie.
Demy chuckled.
Katrina turned from the window and surveyed her stateroom, ensuring that everything was in order before striding from the room and out into the passageway.
The Castigation had started life as a military cruiser, and as such, her stateroom was in officer country. The engineering bays were twenty-two decks down, four-hundred meters aft, and she set off at a brisk pace, moving as quickly as she could while still exhibiting decorum.
She passed a few Adders in the passageways, the pirates moving aside, but none saluting—that was not their way. She did get respectful nods and looks of respect, though.
A few of fear, as well.
That suited Katrina. Loyalty was earned. She’d get there. For now, respect and fear would have to do.
She stopped in the galley to grab an apple, and was still eating it when she arrived in the bay Demy had appropriated for what she joked about as her ‘mad scientist experiment’.
“Holy shit,” Katrina almost choked on the bite she had just taken of her apple as she saw the thing in the middle of the room.
The first observation she made—other than ‘that is one bright red bot’—was that there were a lot of legs.
“Well,” Demy said, standing beside what Katrina would now have to think of as Malorie. “What do you think?”
The netcrawler’s body was a long, flattened oval that was covered in chitinous scales. It twisted side to side, almost seeming to flow as much as move as it turned to face her.
Attached to the oval were eight long, articulated legs, each with a hook and hasp on the end. They were long, thick, and strong in appearance.
One end of the oval tapered to a point, with several nozzle-like protuberances coming from it. The other end narrowed and angled upward, almost like a long neck, though it had two more appendages on each side.
Arms, Katrina supposed.
Atop the ‘neck’ was a flattened orb with a red light running its circumference, though there was also a stylized V on one side that Katrina supposed must be the front of the head.
It bobbed up and down, then Malorie’s voice emitted from the thing.
“How hideous am I?” she asked, sounding far less certain of herself than Katrina had ever heard before.
Katrina didn’t reply as she walked toward Malorie, examining her new body more closely. The main, eight-legged section was nearly two meters long, with the legs stretching out a meter in all directions.
She imagined Malorie’s full reach would be over three meters in any direction if she stretched her limbs out. With her limbs mostly folded in—as they were right now—her ‘body’ was only fifty centimeters or so off the ground. Her neck stretched up nearly a meter, the arm-like appendages on it half a meter long—which put her ‘head’ at chest height.
“You’re not what I expected, that’s for sure,” Katrina replied as she approached. “Honestly, I was expecting something a bit more…grotesque, considering your warning, Demy.
Demy shrugged. “I could have left her black with some of the strange protuberances that the Crossbar designers had put on, but I figured we don’t want to scare people too much. Plus, red is more Malorie’s color than black.”
“You pick it?” Katrina asked.
“No,” Malorie replied. “I did.”
“I’ll admit, it’s a weird crawler design,” Katrina said as she trailed a finger along Malorie’s neck. “I’ve never seen one with a head.”
“It didn’t have one,” Demy replied. “It just had a pod-like thing with those four arms. Without the head, she seemed far too insectile. Not to mention she kept bumping into things, with her optics that low.”
“Plus my eyes were crotch-height on everyone,” Malorie added, rotating her ‘head’ side to side.
Demy nodded. “And those arms that are now on her neck were angled up from the front of the body. It honestly looked like she was going to disembowel people…or at least grab them in the ass. Anyway, I fabbed up the head and neck bit. It’s a little odd looking, but it’s slender and flexible, and can fold forward or back, so she can still get into tight spaces if needed.”
Katrina laughed. “Demy, I’m not planning on putting her to work in Rockhall. She doesn’t need to actually go skittering around
on the cargo nets.”
“You never know,” Demy shrugged. “If you don’t like it, we can change her.”
“No…please,” Malorie said, almost pleading. “I’m just finally getting used to this, let’s not go changing me up just yet.”
“She had some really bad vertigo at first,” Demy explained. “Felt like she was throwing up constantly.”
“Which really sucks when you’re imagining the whole thing,” Malorie added.
“Where’s her brain?” Katrina asked. “Down in the body?”
“Yeah,” Demy pointed at the forward section. “In there, along with reserve nutrients and backup life-support systems. I left her in the braincase, just used its external connections to link into the crawler’s systems. She’s still working on coordination, though.”
“Standing is hard,” Malorie replied. “Walking is almost impossible. So many legs….”
Katrina chuckled. “I didn’t expect something quite like this, Malorie. If you don’t like it, we can get a bipedal automaton frame for you eventually. I don’t know if there are any decent ones to be had in Midditerra, though.”
“No!” Malorie almost shouted. “I mean, no…I’m fine.”
Demy said.