by Meridian
Keeler thought. “Is it coming from Meridian?”
“I’ll try to find its source… Hold on a minute. Keeler watched as Alkema measured the strength of the signal around the ships. “This could take a while.”
Keeler nodded, fidgeted slightly.
Kayliegh Driver called out, “Sir, Yorick is picking up another signal.”
“The same signal that’s enveloping the ship?”
“Neg, they think it’s from the landing party.”
“Put it on.”
“Relaying now.”
“This is Tactical Tyro Commander Philip John Miller Redfire of the Alliance Pathfinder Ship Pegasus, transmitting from the Excursion Vehicle Prudence on the surface of the planet Meridian…”
The remainder of the transmission was as Flight Captain Jordan had heard earlier. “Message ends.” Driver reported. “There’s also Mission Logs from Prudence.” Keeler asked to review them. They saw everything recorded from descent to the point Redfire, Driver, and Roebuck left the ship.
“What do you make of it?” Alkema asked when it was over.
Keeler looked thoughtful “Tyro Commander Redfire’s report corroborates what Caliph was trying to tell us about the planet and its inhabitants. Redfire speculates about a totalitarian regime hungering for new technology. They don’t have space travel, but they do have artificial intelligence, and they may be capable of using some kind of aggressive cybernetic virus to take over our ship.”
“What’s a totalitarian regime?” Alkema asked.
Keeler crossed his arms, and straightened, to better lecture the bridge. “A totalitarian regime is one in which it is the duty of everyone and everything to serve the state.” Alkema scowled. “Why would people want to do that?”
“They don’t, the totalitarian state is maintained by the exercise of force and violence. Such states have arisen throughout human history and have been the cause of most of our major wars, since their aggression inevitably turns outward as well as inward.
“The Second Global War of ancient Earth, for example, came about when a totalitarian government arose in a powerful ancient state called Germany fell under the leadership of a totalitarian cult known as the Nasties. The Nasties conquered many of the nations of the world and were only stopped by the use of the first nuclear fission weapons, which were developed by the Japanese Empire and used by a country called America.”
Alkema shook his head, it sounded insane. He checked his sensor analysis. “I’ve isolated the source of the signal. Directed electromagnetic-wavestreams; like a spotlight shining right on the ship. This is strange, its profile and signature are actually pretty close to the natural magnetic field of a planet, almost like it’s natural in origin.”
Perhaps Caliph had been right. Neg, Keeler forced himself to admit, she had been right. He took no comfort in that revelation. It only meant that when they did reach the planet, they might find themselves in the thrall of something even more dangerous and overpowering than the entity they had banished from their ship.
chapter seventeen
Meridian — Outside the Arco-Tower
Partridge opened his eyes and saw the blurry form of a Merid leaning over him and a very bright light in the background. He closed his eyes again, hoping it would go away.
“Partridge, wake up!” a voice hissed.
He slowly opened his eyes again. His vision cleared, and he saw that the light was the sun, strained through a gauzy layer of pea-green clouds, and the Merid was Tyro Commander Redfire in smelly, poorly fitted armor. Partridge sighed, “Oh, by God, you’re alive.”
He then recalled his last memory before unconsciousness. “By God, I’m alive.” Redfire stuck out his hand and helped him up. “Welcome to the Bush of Whispering Ghosts. Some Shadow-men helped us rescue you from the Regulators… in accordance with prophecy.” Partridge contemplated this for a moment then said, “What?”
“I’ll explain it to you more when you’ve recovered a little bit. We understand the circumstances of your rescue were rather strenuous.”
“Rescue? Is Taurus all right?”
“Dislocated her arm, twisted her knee, you may want to have a look at her. We had to make sure you were unconscious when you fell down the shaft. If you were tense or flailed on the way down, you might have been seriously injured when you hit the paranets.”
“Paranets?”
“From the landing packs. We stretched paranets across the shaft near where we broke out of the tower. They absorbed enough energy to keep you from bouncing. Flight Lt. Driver calculated the tension.
He’s very precise.”
“If we had landed on our necks, we could have died”
“The alternative was letting the Merids have you. After what they did to Halliburton, we decided that might be worse.”
“What did they do to Halliburton?”
“They tortured him for several hours, then sliced him up for meat…. we think anyway, we can not be sure, but it seems likely.”
Jersey Partridge felt like he was going to lose consciousness again. Redfire grabbed him by the shoulders and shook vigorously. “Stay with me, Partridge.”
Partridge kept himself from passing out by breathing fast and hard. He raised his eyes. They were very high up, on some kind of half-ruined battlement that encircled the tower like a collar, about 400
meters below the summit. “Are you hungry?” Redfire asked. The tactical officer seemed to be in uncommonly good spirits.
“I am starving,” Partridge complained.
“You have a choice, my friend.” Redfire held out a silvery packet and a steaming black bowl. “You can have the bland contents of this landing kit survival pack, or this bowl of a local Meridian delicacy.” Partridge took the delicacy because he felt like he needed something hot. It turned out to be some kind of noodles. He began digging in with the spork Redfire provided him.
“What’s Taurus’s condition?” Partridge asked.
“I popped her arm back into position and gave her a sedative, some pain suppressers, and a healing accelerator. She’ll be fine.”
“So, how did you rescue us from the Meridians?”
“There are … what shall we call them, subversive agents within Merid Society. They’re called
‘Shadow-men.’ They belong to a kind of resistance movement that has been fighting the Regulators for thousands of years, and losing. They rescued you.”
The noodles had a gamy flavor, with a light satisfying crunch. “How did you find out about them?”
“After leaving the tower, we captured a Merid so we could analyze her brainwaves and figure out the language, and were quite surprised to find that she was human… mostly human anyway. Meanwhile, our camp got surrounded by hostiles. How is the food?”
“This isn’t bad. What is it? Some kind of noodles?”
Redfire reached into the bowl and lifted a single noodle to the light, and Partridge saw that at one end were three tiny closed eyes, and a triple set of jaws with tiny little teeth. “Baby Meridian eelworms,” Redfire explained. “Anyway, we presume they’re Meridian. Our ancestors moved a lot of stuff from world to world as they went around the galaxy.”
“Did you eat this?”
“Far be it for me to pass judgment on local cuisine. I’m an artist, not a critic.”
“What about Driver and Roebuck?”
“They were concerned how their bodies would respond to the alien proteins. If you’re still conscious in eight hours, they might try some.”
Partridge reached for his medical pack, and thanked God when he found it still strapped to his person.
“Anyway,” Redfire went on. “We were facing off against about, two score Merids, armed with a variety of weapons, pacing us, like the stalking cats of the Jutland Savannah, preparing to strike, even had a slight yellow glow to their eyes. I told Driver and Roebuck to set their pulse cannons for a burrowing charge, full yield. I was going to blow the floor out from under them.
“Suddenly,
we hear these shots… plasma weapons. A couple of Merids go down. The rest of them scatter. We thought we were about to be captured, but then this other group of people in black robes and hoods came forward. This man steps out in front of the crowd with his arms raised, speaking in a dialect the lingotron recognized. He introduced himself as Shouts-Loudly-Against-Oppression, the leader of the Witnesses.”
“I thought you said they were called ‘Shadow-men.”
“Neg, the Shadow-men are like secret agents who work inside the towers. The Witnesses are peaceful, their main purpose is to preserve the memory of life before the Regulators.”
“What about the ones who were going to attack you?”
“Those were what the Witnesses call ‘throwbacks.’ They aren’t really human… more like …
unacceptable genetic mutations that have been exiled from the city, hence the name. They live in the ruins around the tower, surviving on whatever the Merids throw out. They are savage and primitive… you don’t want to be with them.”
Partridge nodded. “The Merids told us about the Throwbacks. They also said that they were the colonists, the Merids inside the tower, that they had evolved.”
“That’s partially true.”
“Then, they’re not aliens.”
“Actually, they are aliens… sort of… in a way. The explanation gets rather difficult and bizarre from this point.”
“Difficult and bizarre?”
“Difficult in the sense that the Merids are not really aliens, but they’re not really human either.
Bizarre in the sense that the Witnesses have been expecting us. Our coming had been prophesied for centuries. If the prophecy holds, we have a lot of work to do.”
“What kind of work?”
“I’ll put it this way, have you ever fantasized about leading a desperate people in a revolution against an evil and oppressive government? I know I have.” Redfire began to grin so hard it looked like is cheeks were about to be pushed into his earlobes. “I have to keep pinching myself just to know I’m not dreaming.”
Meridian — Inside the Arco-Tower
The laboratory the Merids supplied Tyro Commander Lear was the best on all of Meridian, which put it only a few centuries behind the average primary school on Republic. Nevertheless, it was adequate to the task ahead. The Meridians had also supplied her with a cadre of their best interfaces. The interfaces followed her work intensely, it being their job to explain her designs to the Regulators.
“… therefore, the translation into TPT language is straightforward,” Lear finished.
The interfaces acknowledged. “The process of translating the Regulator protocols into TPT language has begun. We estimate completion in 2.7 hours.”
“I must say, I greatly admire the efficiency with which your world operates,” Lear told the interfaces.
“We are nothing without the Regulators’ guidance.”
“Would you have the Regulators review this preliminary schematic,” she brought up a representation on the primitive, two-dimensional, solid-state, plasma screen. Scanning beams shot out from the eyes of the interfaces.
When they finished, the interfaces reported. “The Regulators will assign facilitators to its construction at once.”
“I believe the internal structure of the tower can be used as a signal amplifier, but the flow of energy throughout the tower will have to be adjusted. These calculations will enable you to direct those changes.”
“The Regulators will study and implement the changes.”
She smiled. So efficient. “Have my compatriots returned?”
“The Regulators instruct me to tell you that your companions have been terminated. Do you still require access to your ship?”
Lear knew she should be disturbed by this news, but for some reason it failed to register as anything other than information. For that matter, she felt the need for neither food nor rest. Curious, that. “I believe the material available in this laboratory will be sufficient.”
“The Regulators wish to know how long construction of this device will take.”
“I think you will be pleasantly surprised.”
“The Regulators request specific data.”
“If all goes optimally, we can begin tests before the end of the day. If the tests go well, I see no reason why we should not be able to transmit tomorrow.”
Meridian — Outside the Arco-Tower
When Partridge could eat no more, which wasn’t long, Redfire led him to another part of the camp, where Roebuck, and Taurus sat in the midst of a group of people in black and gray clothing of a kind of robe-and-tunic construction; the Witnesses. Driver stood off to the side, staring out over the city from the edge of the battlement.
An old man was addressing them as he sat on a ruined parapet. He was dressed in a kind of black jumpsuit, not unlike what the Merid troopers had worn under their armor. It was immaculately clean, if threadbare in places. He was large and strong-looking, on the front end of old age. What that meant in local years was anyone’s guess, but he had at least a pair of decades on Prime Commander Keeler. His hair was covered beneath his hood, but his beard was gray as stone. His language struck Partridge’s ear like a too-rapid rendition of the chanting he had once heard in an Arcadian monastery. The monks, through centuries of repetition and passage of an oral tradition, had preserved some of the ancient language of Earth from which all the dialects of Sapphire were descended. Hearing the old man speak, Partridge realized that these people, were speaking a variant of that same ancient Earth language.
Redfire linked into Partridge’s translation module. “The Lingotron has worked up a pretty good translation of the local tongue. It still sounds a little off, but you get used to it.” A small voice in Partridge’s ear translated as Shouts-Loudly-Against-Oppression spoke. “You thieved armor from the enforcers. Did you make physical examination of the bodies?”
“Neg, the smell was bad enough outside the uniforms,” Roebuck answered. He was getting on quite well with the Witnesses since discovering they had women, drink, and non-eelworm-based food.
“You possibly then are interested to know that they possessed no reproductive organs,” Shouts said without a smile.
“No slag!” Roebuck said.
“No, the excretory systems are being fully intact. The Regulators eliminate sexual distinctions. They seek to combine the physical strength of the male with the emotional temperament of the female.”
“My cousin Kiko is the same way,” said Roebuck.
“How do they reproduce?” Partridge asked.
“Females of small number are allocated to develop normally. They are lobotomized shortly after birth, then sustained until eggs can be harvested from their ovaries. The eggs are fertilized with genetic materials from existing stocks.”
Roebuck shuddered. “This is, without a doubt, the nastiest planet I have ever been on, including Republic.”
Partridge examined Taurus’s arm while she rested in the embrace of her sedative. She, Driver, and Roebuck appeared to be fine, and despite a certain psychosomatic squirming he felt in his stomach, Partridge was beginning to recover some of his native optimism.
The old man approached Partridge. “It is thankful that you were recovered from the custody of the Regulators.”
Redfire handled the introductions. “Shouts, this is Medical Specialist Jersey Partridge.”
“Well-met Medical Specialist Jersey Partridge,” the old man sat down with Taurus and Partridge, and repeated the history he had earlier shared with Redfire, Roebuck, and Driver.
“When our world was banished from the rest of humanity, there were scarcely 80,000 souls on this planet. Our water was undrinkable minus processing. Crop failures were 90%. After the Earth ships stopped coming, drastic measures were necessitated… or else…”
“…or else when we got here,” Redfire cut in. “Your planet would have been a very quiet place.” The old man grunted. “Within a century of the abandoning, our machines began break
ing down… the water processors, the weather modulators, the artifactories, the… the things we lost the names for…all failing. No one knew how to repair them. Or, those who did know, were in cities thousands of kilometers away with no way of getting where they were needed.”
Partridge broke in. “That is similar to what the Regulators told us. They said the Regulators had to invent cybernetic systems to regulate crops and so forth on the planet.” Shouts smoldered with anger. “The Regulators propound a false and self-serving version of history.
Ours is the true history of the planet, passed by oral tradition.” Seeing his anger, Partridge resolved to keep himself quiet. The old man continued. “According to our history, the solution did not come from the leaders of our planet. It was farmers using a computer network to share information on crops and weather linked to a powerful central computer at the Agriculture Division. Agriculture Division disseminated information throughout the planet; which crops to plant, best techniques for making crops grow.
“Witnessing their success, other Divisions… Communications, Transport, Industry, Commerce, Housing… initiated the same protocol. It brought us back from the brink of oblivion. Eventually, all protocols combined together into Integrated Planetary Management System. IPMS. IPMS distributed resources, determined taxation levels, decided where to build energy stations. The role of our Governing Council soon diminished to carrying out the directives of the IPMS. For hundreds of years, that’s the way this world was run.”
“Is that how you all ended up living in these arcologies?” Partridge asked.
Shouts shook his head. “No, no. At first, IPMS liberated us to live and behave as we chose. In time, though, we became dependent. We no longer made our own decisions, but trusted the IPMS. Complete stagnation was the result. Once the IPMS achieved social, economic, and environmental equilibrium, no further advancement was allowed. Designers of the system had never calculated beyond a certain level of sustainment. Once all had enough, but no more, no alteration to the system could be made.
“In the time before before the Dark Angel fell on our world, there was a secret society. Some say it was part of the Council, some say it was an ancient order dating to colonial times, called the Shadow-men.
