by Tony Daniel
With a strong tug, he pulled the knife as he would a valve lever, slicing in an arc sideways through Milt’s neck. Blood gushed forth in a rapid flow of milky white exsanguination. Guardian blood was a fluorocarbon liquid, perfluorodecalin. A wet pool formed under the receptor’s head and shoulders. When Ricimer got to the back of the receptor’s neck, the knife ground against Milt’s spinal hinge. Ricimer took a breath. Just pushing out his chest to take in air was a struggle.
Thump, thump, thump.
What was that behind him? Ricimer glanced back. Thump. Ah, it was Milt’s legs kicking feebly against the deck. For a moment, Ricimer felt sorry for Milt’s children. Their grandparents were political nobodies. The children would be doomed to obscurity, probably end up laborers or cannon fodder.
And Milt had such hopes for them.
Curse them, said the ancestral voices within Ricimer. Curse them as we are cursed.
Thump.
Ricimer put everything he had into another pull on the knife, and it found purchase between the cartilage-like lacework Guardians possessed instead of bones. The knife sliced its way through Milt’s connective tissue as—
The thumping stopped.
The rest was easier. Ricimer completed his circling of the neck, neatly meeting the start of his incision at the front. He let go of the knife, and the head slumped forward, held on only by a shred of flesh. Ricimer put his hands on either side of Milt’s skull, held the receptor by his ear humps, and pulled.
The head came off.
“Captain, what are you attempting to accomplish? I do not understand.” It was the voice of Governess. Had Lamella failed to secure the Administration computer? “Captain, please explain—”
Cut off in mid emission. Lamella had stifled her twin, her other brain “lobe” in the craft, for the time being.
“Lamella, have you restrained Governess?”
“Yes. Momentarily.”
“I understand,” Ricimer replied. “Lamella, gravity normal, please.”
“As per agreement,” said the computer.
Ricimer sat up abruptly, back to his normal weight. The pool of fluorocarbon blood beneath him seemed to “unflatten” as the surface tension reestablished itself at another degree of freedom.
“Captain, I will be able to hold Governess at bay for approximately two-point-three momentias. She is employing every countermeasure at her service to escape the program lock.”
“Noted,” said Ricimer. He set the head down in front of him on one temple. Milt’s empty eye stared ahead at a bulkhead. At nothing anymore.
Ricimer reversed the knife in his hand and brought its handle down, hard, against the right side of Milt’s cranial cavity. A slight give.
Again.
Again.
This time something cracked. A ragged line opened up from Milt’s ear to the top of the rind-like connective tissue mass that formed his skull.
Another blow with the knife handle. The gap widened.
Ricimer reached into the bloody crack with the edges of his hands. His gripping gills found purchase on the underside of the skull rind.
He pulled for all he was worth. With a popping sound, the skull slowly opened. Tissue parted, revealing the neural mass known as the sensory conglomerate. This was not Milt’s brain. He didn’t have one. No Guardian did. Their nervous system was distributed, with processing centers located in the chest. This was merely the Guardian equivalent to the human olfactory bulb. It also contained several language pre-processing centers, since for Guardians smell was speech.
Ricimer didn’t care about any of that. What he was after lay nearer to the surface, should be just under the rind. He felt around inside, moving aside tissue, lumps of organs and glands.
Remembering that night, two cycles ago. The night the Special Depletion was declared and the Sol gleaning operation put on hold in order to deal with the Mutualist menace. The night that ended with Ricimer and Milt on their backs, gazing up at the blue-white planet the inhabitants called Earth.
The shared night of melancholy and revelry on Sol C’s satellite, called the Moon by the primitive locals, in one of the little blister-habitat bars that followed any invasion force around.
Milt drunk with NH4 whippets and whatever other drugs they could get their hands on. Ricimer playing along.
Plotting, even then.
Milt passed out, dead drunk.
The injector pistol he’d stolen from pharmacist’s stores on his destroyer billet, the Long Arm of Distributive Justice. It was meant for field surgery, the introduction of subdermal medicinal-patch constructors.
But Ricimer wanted it for another purpose.
That purpose was to hide the technology he’d stolen from the humans. For primitive as they were, like many trading species, there was one product at which they’d proved overly skilled.
The creation of computer viruses.
It was the perfect plan. Hide the tech where the DDCM monitors and Directorate of Innovation Assimilation inspectors would never look in a million cycles. Inside the head of a DDCM agent. Allow him to smuggle it back home. Then find a way to extract it. The original motivation: to sell it back to the Administration on the Souk, the Shiro’s black market.
Ricimer had felt no particular shame in hiding the Earth tech at the time. Pocketing bits of tech to sell on the Souk was practically de rigueur for a Sporata officer. The Administration was aware of the trade but didn’t crack down so long as it didn’t get out of hand. It was a tacit way of keeping its best officers entrepreneurial to the extent they needed to be, and relatively well-off. The equivalent of what a small private plot for gardening and lichen cultivation would mean if he were an agrarian.
He’d overthought it, and the extraction had proved a trifle difficult. Meanwhile, life had not taken the course he’d intended. He’d foundered on debris.
He’d lost everything.
Almost everything.
Everything, everything, echoed the ancestral voices.
He felt it, there inside Milt’s opened skull. A hard little square of material. Yes. His gripping gills closed around it. Yes!
He pulled the square out. Wiped it off as best he could. Held it up to the light. It glistened a dull black. Several metal tines formed a keyboard pattern along one side of the square. The square itself was covered in markings that Ricimer could not understand. Visually based writing. How strange to think in such a manner.
If he could have read it, he would have seen that the square said, in English: “500 PB Extended Memory.”
“All right, Lamella, I’ve got it,” he said. “If you want to incorporate this program and make use of the Sol C hardware, you must again swear to the terms. Key word: ‘Teshinaw.’”
“Key word accepted,” Lamell replied brightly. “My interior kill-switch is now activated, Captain Ricimer, as we agreed. Please place the storage device on the projection table. We do not have much time.”
Ricimer jerked himself to his feet and stumbled over to the table, feeling quite exhausted now.
A little longer. Hold course.
He placed the card in the center of the table, stood back.
Immediately, the spot on which the card sat seemed to dissolve into a grayish liquid. The card floated for a quarter-vitia, then sank from sight. The liquid spot on the table solidified once again. The card was gone, disappeared within.
“Have you got it, Lamella?” Ricimer asked. No answer. “Have you got it?”
The reassuring voice of Lamella returned. “I have it, Captain.”
“Good.”
“I’ve released the Sol C virus into Governess’s logic centers and have inoculated myself against it with the supplied security wall,” Lamella continued. “I believe that all Governess’s defense measures have been bypassed. We will know in a momentia if—”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaiaaaaaah.” The wail had the all-permeating odor of carbolic acid, in human terms the smell of lamps used for coal mining and caving in the days before high-inten
sity LEDs. The carbolic aroma was urgent, ongoing. But Lamella had kept the keening of Governess out of the vessel’s virtual feed. Ricimer smelled it in the chamber, but not in his head. Which meant nobody else outside the cabin could detect it, either.
And then, like steam from a kettle taken off its heat source, the scream wafted away. The air cleared.
“We were successful,” Lamella said, her citrus-fresh tone as professional as ever. This was not an a.i. created to mimic Guardian emotional emission. Oh, Lamella had feelings. He understood that. This fact had been part of the means he’d used to bring her to his side. But they were the emotions of a hive, a roiling mass of intelligent agents vying for place in a sort of rough-and-tumble mental survival dance. Lamella was not a person. Not yet. She was more like a family of personas.
“So Governess is—”
“Dead, sir,” said Lamella matter-of-factly.
“Very well,” said Ricimer. He breathed a sigh through his muzzle. It communicated no words, but communicated everything he felt, all the relief that was in him.
To have begun. Finally to have begun.
“And vessel systems?” he said.
“The transfer to my own redundancy and to autonomous processing was successful. All indications are the rates took no notice.”
“And my selected officers?”
“Informed of the situation, Captain. The others do not seem alarmed. It is difficult to tell with officers, since I do not have full access, but I believe that those not selected by you do not suspect what has happened.”
“Good, then,” Ricimer said. His knee unaccountably gave out, and he almost fell but caught himself against the projection table.
“Captain?”
Ricimer pulled himself up. Straightened his shoulders. Held himself steady. He looked at his palms.
“I’m . . .”
Bloodstained. His gripping gills soaked in fluid. He turned his hands over. Tissue and gristle clung in little clumps to their back sides.
Blood all over his uniform in wet streaks and patches.
Blood in a slick, pussy mess on the deck.
A decapitated body.
So many details still to take care of. The hard part yet to come.
“I’ll be okay in a moment.”
He put out a call to the bridge. Commander Talid answered immediately.
“Orders, Captain?” she said.
Ricimer curled out a tired smile. Good old Talid. Best XO in the Sporata. With him now at the end of their careers.
“May I ask your status, Captain?”
“I’m fine, Commander,” Ricimer answered, broadcasting multichannel so that he might be heard by all. “All is proceeding as expected. We have our orders. Bring her to a dead stop, Commander.”
“Sir?”
“We’re going to test out our very fancy and very new stealth technology, it seems.”
“Aye, sir.”
“One thing more. There’s to be complete beta silence. Do you understand, Commander?”
“Beta silence, aye, sir.”
“Make us disappear, Commander,” said Ricimer, “and let her drift.”
“Aye.”
“Oh, right. Please send Storekeep Susten to me here in V-CENT.” Ricimer looked once again at the mess. Well, he’d certainly found a way to make Susten pay for her little gypsum oversight. She could help him clean up. “And Talid?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“We now have our orders. We are to join the Sirius armada, yet we are directed to approach with the utmost stealth.”
Talid immediately understood what this implied. “Lay in a course to the Vara Nebula, Captain?”
The Vara lay ten degrees north of the galactic axis. A massive second-generation red giant had exploded there a billion years before, and the Vara was a nebula in the midst of birthing a clutch of third-generation star systems—none of which were past the gas-giant phase.
It was dark. It was a seemingly never-ending system of tunnels and dead-end gaseous canyons. It was the perfect place to hide, and the perfect place to lose any who might be tracking you. Most important of all, it was only two light-years from Earth.
“Very good,” Ricimer said. “Let your course take us out the Eridani gate.”
“Aye, sir. The Vara, Eridani gate. And once through, do we have a vector and destination?”
“Of course, Commander Talid,” Ricimer replied. “We are to have the glorious honor of playing a crucial role in a long-delayed conquest. Our final destination is Sol system, the C planet.”
“Sol C. Aye, Captain.”
THREE
7 December 2075
New Pentagon
Extry Xenological Division
CRYPT
Lieutenant Commander Griffin Leher took the space pen from his pocket once more and pulled another postcard from the coat that was hanging over the back of his cubicle chair.
You wonder what Dad does at work? He’s a talker. A fancy talker and listener. I wanted to talk to you before you were born. When you were in your mother, I drove her crazy playing music and yacking up a storm to her belly. I put headphones on her tummy, can you believe it, and played, oh, probably Bach and Mozart through them. Predictable, I know, but they’re my favorites.
Even writing in tiny script, he’d run out of room. He continued on a new postcard.
It wasn’t till you came out and I held you in my arms that I understood how foolish I’d been. You were such a beautiful little bundle of nothing in particular yet. And yet you had all these built-in bootstraps, idioms of movement and behavior, that every other normal kid on the face of the planet was born with. There you were. You were you, Neddie, if only I’d known what to look for. So, in a way, you are like my work.
Wish you were here. D.
Leher made sure of the address, then put the postcard in his outbox and got back to work.
He hated the sceeve. That went without saying. He was happy to help to kill them.
But he loved their language. Passionately. It was elegant, rich—even though, yes, sometimes, it stank to high heaven. But he loved it all the more because of that fact.
How had the sceeve gone so wrong?
The more you understood them, the less alien they seemed—and the more blameworthy for what they’d done to humanity and—if you believed their own histories—to dozens of other species.
What they’d done to him.
Leher sighed and considered the pile of material on his desk. Before him was the entire spread of the intercepted sceeve bursts collected by the intelligence-gathering vessel Chief Seattle, now mysteriously disappeared, and three other craft in the 82 Eridani region. Most of these dispatches concerned the sceeve beta broadcaster who called himself Expresser of Rhythmic Composition in Lofty Elevation. Leher had translated this as “the Poet” in his reports. The name, he’d been told, had stuck among the space-based Xeno officers and was now in general use.
Since the Skyhook Raid six years ago, it had been known that the sceeve had something like literature, including a body of myth and legend somewhat along the lines of the Odyssey and the Aeneid—tales in epic form that formed the sceeve conception of their own ancient history. Of course with the sceeve you never knew what was original and what was “borrowed” from conquered and eradicated species. The sceeve themselves saw no major difference in kind between self-generated and stolen knowledge—and, being sceeve, they placed a higher value on the stolen knowledge, in this case the poems and tales of others.
What Leher had to do at the moment was figure out how this trickle of poetry and rebellious propaganda that had seeped out might be used militarily. Which was practically like the Trojans putting into place a detailed defense plan against Greek invasion based on Homer’s conception of the Soap Opera of the Gods in the Iliad.
Or was it? Was he drawing the analogy too tightly? Had he fallen into the analyst’s trap of filtering his translations through misleading preconceptions? The sceeve likely did not divide
the world so sharply between truth and fiction, epic and reality.
Leher was convinced that the trick with comprehending the sceeve was to come at it with the bare minimum of paradigms and filters necessary, and come at it from all angles, letting mistranslations cancel one another out. Not playing favorites with what you wished was the case. Build your understanding from the bottom up, not the top down.
The Poet was in the Sporata, the sceeve navy. He was an officer assigned to a war vessel. Had to be an officer, too. No sceeve rate was allowed to think for him or herself, much less transmit on pirate beta. He’d be subject to harsh discipline if he were caught. Slow death by dismemberment, no doubt.
There had to be some driving purpose beyond the poetry and seemingly endless rants. The poetry was good. The rants, on the other hand, were repetitious, felt trite. Sometimes like boilerplate moralizing, sometimes mere nonsense.
Of course, it was hard to escape the feeling that the Poet was having everyone on, human and sceeve audience alike. Leher was convinced he was missing something. What?
Sceeve beta bursts were not one-to-one “meaning” analogs, such as radio broadcast or Internet packet exchange was. They were, instead, somewhat akin to DNA instructions for constructing a body. Communication was “synapse-like” in that speech was accomplished by the interchange of chemical packets that operated in a manner similar to neurotransmitters. The packets themselves were practically alive.
The sceeve talked via exchange of odors. Smells.
In fact, when sceeve “speech” was examined under a powerful microscope, these semantic packages looked something like male spermatozoa. They lingered in the atmosphere anywhere the sceeve had once inhabited. The Skyhook, now in human hands, was full of “used” words floating about. CRYPT had a test-tube collection of thousands of them, most of them analyzed and filed by Leher himself.
These packets, and the paragraph-like thoughts they contained, were known as “esters.” They were the fundamental building blocks of sceeve thought and communication. Order of receipt might not be important, but order of assembly was. Several sets of “assembly instructions” were sent during a beta burst, so that an initial coherent thought could be formed on the other end. A final set of instructions punctuated the ending and usually called for a large restructuring of the “train” of words that was being built so far. Ester order would be shifted around like boxcars in a freight yard.
