by S. J. Ryan
The woman spat and shoved free. Carrot shut her eyes and shook off the acidic spittle. When her vision had cleared, the woman was gone. The Box was still there, but Carrot had no mind to consider the relevance of that. She lusted only for blood.
Outside the room, Carrot sniffed the floor of the passage and caught the scent. She tracked through the maze of the keep with her spine curled as she trotted, so that her hands brushed the floor as if she couldn't decide whether to walk on twos or fours. She reached the threshold of the keep and bolted into what had become dusk.
The moon was low in the twilight sky, a slender crescent phase, the eye of a dragon waking from slumber. Carrot howled in challenge. When it didn't reply, she lost interest. She sniffed the crisp air, but the creature she had fought before was gone without trace.
Then she detected something else . . . prey. And she was hungry.
Howling again, she scampered into the brush, oblivious to all that had once made her human.
6.
To an outside observer, Matt had been comatose under heavy sedation, eyes shut and body motionless, while breathing almost imperceptibly as he lay sprawled upon the patient bed inside the windowless room within the maze of decks inside the airship named Nemesis. Doctors monitored his vital signs with stethoscopes while guards hung at the walls with machine guns strapped to their shoulders.
Inside his skull, Matt was fully conscious. When Matt Four awoke again, Matt continued communicating with his 'clone of a clone of a clone' over their secretive communications link.
“Why didn't you leave a message for me aboard the station?” Matt asked.
“It didn't seem like a big deal,” Matt Four replied. “I honestly thought I'd have a chance to talk to you when you arrived. If I didn't, that meant I was dead, and what was the point of leaving a message then? Anyhow, the last thing I expected was to spend a century in a coma, needing you to rescue me.”
Matt realized that his expectation of a message on the station had been based on his assumption that the station had been sent specifically to rescue him. That assumption seemed arrogant in hindsight. Nothing had been sent to rescue him, everyone assumed he was dead and the station that retrieved him was for a cloneporter tourist trade that had never come to be.
He decided to change the subject. “So what happened when you came to the planet?”
“First thing I did after I was printed aboard the station was to check the cloneporter buffer. Synth's archive file was intact. Maybe I should have printed her immediately, but there we were, light years away from Earth, around a planet that we knew almost nothing about. I thought it would be better to let her 'sleep,' while I went down to check the situation. It was just as dangerous and primitive as I thought it would be. And then it got worse. Athena came.”
Matt knew that Athena hadn't used the station Orbit-to-Surface Vehicles, because only one of the three had been missing before he'd arrived at the station, and that one had been taken by his clone. “So how did she get to the surface?”
“Well, let's think about it. Despite the public version of the incident, she wasn't 'lost in space' while traveling to Tian. It was no accident that she came here, that was her intention all along. But at the time she left Earth, Delta Pavonis didn't have any of the pod retrieval equipment that there is at Alpha Centauri. In order to decelerate into the system and make planetfall, she would need to carry all the accoutrements necessary to visit a star system without a retrieval system in place: a heavy-duty magsail for greater braking from interstellar velocity, retros and fuel to insert into planetary orbit, an independent atmospheric entry vehicle, a robodoc to revive herself from suspension . . . hell, the entire payload must have required multiple catapult launches. I don't know how she kept all that secret, but after all she was 'acting' Project Director at the time.”
“But you got here first.”
“Not by much, but yeah, even though I left Earth much later. The 'miracle of cloneportation.'”
“What happened when you went down to the surface?”
“While I was aboard the station, I had detected the transponder signals from the seeder probes. I decided to investigate. Flip of the coin – a three-sided coin, I guess – I chose to land by the probe in Britan. As soon as I climbed out of the OSV, I was swarmed – I mean that nonviolently – by the locals from a village called Berry Glen – “
“That's near Fish Lake.”
“Fish Lake? Oh yes, there was a hermit who lived there.”
“Now it's a whole village.”
“Continuing with my saga. The locals had seen the OSV descend from the sky and tried to worship me as a god – a 'Lord of Aereoth' – but I decided to demote myself to 'wizard,' because, well, The Man Who Would Be King. I figured that if I claimed godhood and they saw me drunk or stubbing my toe or taking a pee, they'd have questions about the validity of my divinity, and that could lead to disillusionment, and disillusionment can lead to spears in the back. As 'Wizard' I was allowed to be human and still be respected for imparting useful knowledge, like crop rotation and sanitation, to help people. Like I knew Synth would have wanted.”
“Did you find the seeder probe?”
“Oh sure, right away. Pandora Beta was in an underground shrine that the locals had constructed next to the pond where my OSV landed. I had the passcodes – they were in the Star Seed files that Synth had managed to locate and decrypt by herself over the years. So I placed Beta in local mode. Turns out that I also accidentally broke the passcode protection, but that's another story.”
“We've been looking for the probe. Where is it?”
“I don't know where it is now, but when I left Britan, it was being hidden by the mentors. They were going to build a place to keep all the technological stuff I helped introduce, so they called it a 'keep' though technically it's a – “
“Where is the 'keep?'”
“Dunno. Somewhere in the northwest. I helped with designing the security, even programmed Pandy Beta with my hologram projection to let you in, in case you came along. But as to where, and what the keep looks like, those were details I left to others. Guess that doesn't help.”
“Not really. Were you hiding the probe from Athena?”
“Oh yes, by then she was on the planet for some time. She knew someone was here because she had spotted the station in orbit, and saw one of the OSVs was missing. Athena landed on the island of Italia because that was where Eric had planned to establish his revived Roman Empire. She was busy with empire-building for a few years, but eventually she came looking for me.”
“Did she know who you were?”
“Telling everyone in Britan to 'Just call me Matt' probably was a giveaway.”
“Then there was a confrontation between you?”
“Not directly in the beginning, she's changed a lot over the years. The Athena you knew was very blustery and direct, but now she chooses to operate behind the scenes as much as possible, through intermediaries.”
“So what did she do?”
“First she sent spies, then lone agents, then a small mercenary army to capture me. They almost did, but then I realized that their intel on my movements was too good. Athena had to be receiving satellite observation from the station, then transmitting it to the mercs. Luckily, I had thought to hardwire the station to give maximum priority to my commands. I ordered Herman – he's the station keeper – to impose an augmented reality overlay over the regions where I was traveling. After that, her mercs were chasing false imagery all over Britan for years.”
“Then why did you leave Britan?”
“The mercs started torturing people to find out where I was. Oh, I tried to stay and fight. I had organized some villages into an alliance that we called the 'Kingdom of Henogal,' but for reasons that I won't get into now, that didn't quite work out. So, I left Pandy Beta with the mentors in Britan, and sailed across the Western Sea with Stoker's people.”
“Stoker?” Matt recognized the name, but wanted to hear what Matt Fou
r would say unfiltered.
“Stoker, he was my most loyal follower.”
“You had followers.”
“Don't relate that to the religion thing. I had nothing to do with that. The people who were following me were not religiously inclined, and I preached scientific skepticism, not blind faith. I never did anything that could be construed as founding a religion.”
Someone's lying, Matt thought, remembering the statue of 'Saint' Stoker at the fore of the Cathedral at Klun.
“All right,” Matt said. “So you and your followers sailed from Britan across the Western Sea. What happened then?”
“We landed on Amara,” Matt Four replied. “That's the biggest island in the Amero Archipelago. First thing we did was locate Granny – that's Pandora Alpha – so that she wouldn't fall into Athena's hands either. Then our group moved around a lot, like gypsies. As we traveled from village to village, I tried to teach scientific thinking and spread technology, beyond the medieval level that the mentors had already taught them. Of course, the people were impressed at my ability – Ivan's ability – to heal sickness and injury, but I always stressed that I was a man, not a god, and that I didn't want worship or obedience, I just wanted to help them.”
“Like Synth would want.”
“To be honest, I wasn't being entirely unselfish. You see, I came to DP3 heart-broken, but over the years I began thinking of making a life here. I knew my 'new and improved' printed body would wear out after a couple centuries unless the medical technology on the planet was raised to Post-Singularity levels, and I still wanted Synth to be printed and come down and be with me – but not until there was enough technological advancement to prevent her from dying of old age. So yeah, I had personal motives for giving civilization a helping hand.”
“How did you become a prisoner of the Church?”
“That I do not know. Like I said, there wasn't a Church at that time. However, I'm sure Athena was involved in making one. Hell, she already worships Eric. I'm surprised she hasn't founded a church based on that.”
“What do you remember before you were caught?”
“Well, after a few years, Athena came to Amara to personally supervise the manhunt. She had several teams searching for us. We'd flee in one direction, bump into a team, flee in another direction, bump into another team. The intervals between the 'bumps' became briefer, because she was boxing us in. Then one night we were in the woods and our camp was attacked and I could tell from the rate of gunfire that we were outnumbered and all but trapped. I gave Ivan to Stoker, told Stoker to take the others and escape while I led her forces away – you see, I was the one she wanted because she thought I still had Ivan. The very last thing I recall, I was surrounded and I triggered a hypnotic trance state that Ivan and I had developed to keep me from being interrogated. And then . . . here.”
“Did you . . . did you have anything to do with the sky serpents?”
“Heh. So you know of my little 'experiments.'”
“So you had the seeder probes and you used them to bio-engineer . . . . “
“Yeah, I had lots of experience in bio-engineering because that was my job on Tian. It came in handy here, because I could short-cut industrialization by creating an industrial infrastructure without having to first develop an industrial base. For example, on Tian we had created giant snails that naturally generate pavement, and there were trees that absorbed solar energy in daytime to provide street lighting at night – “
“I've seen all that. What about the sky serpents? What were they for?”
“The serpents were part of a suite of biological applications for an integrated system that we used on Tian to prevent biological cross-contamination. I had thought that if I used them to form an environmental isolation zone around the Amero Archipelago, Athena would realize what was happening and leave us alone and return to Rome before she was trapped on what was the 'wrong side' of the planet for her. But being pig-headed is one thing about her that hasn't changed with the centuries.”
Matt wanted to frown, scratch his chin, fold his arms. He could only lie inert on the bed in the airship sickbay, pretending to be comatose.
“So . . . you think we're going to see Athena now?”
“I think she was using me as bait to capture you.”
“Who does this airship belong to? Is it hers, or what?”
“I have no idea. I've been asleep a hundred years. At the time I went into trance, water wheels and flintlocks were state of the art technology. Now they've got airships. I'm completely bewildered. You know a lot more about the recent history of this world than I do.”
Matt didn't say anything. He'd browsed in a bookshop in the city of Hafik, he'd scanned countless pages – but since then, he had spent his time fidgeting instead of studying. History hadn't seemed important to his mission.
“Kid, if you don't mind, I'm going to rest again.”
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
Consulting Ivan's telemetry archives from the time in the bookshop in Hafik, Matt started to read the biography about the Queen of Pavonia. He was no history buff, but the references to Queen, Parliament, and Empire sounded suspiciously familiar. That in turn led to other suspicions.
A couple hours later, Ivan announced, “Matt. Savora has entered the room.”
While Matt's eyes were shut, Ivan's skin-embedded microcameras had been monitoring the sickbay all along, presenting Matt with a windowed view hovering in his field of vision. The door had opened and in stepped Savora, dressed in an insignia- and rank-designation free version of the uniform worn by the men in the room.
The senior officer gave her a sour appraisal. “Miss, you have no business here. You'll have to leave.”
The woman who seemed no older than a green lieutenant – in a military organization that appeared not to admit women at all – smoothly replied, “Contact the bridge. Inform the Captain that I am here.”
“I'll not waste the Captain's time.“ However, the sight of Savora's steady, supremely confident gaze must have unsettled him. Scowling, he went to the wall, to a small box that was mounted about shoulder height, and lifted an oblong device that was resting on a cradle at the side. An insulated cable swung between the box and the device as he placed the device to ear and mouth and spoke into it. A moment later, he listened to a response.
“Yes, I see. I will, sir.” He hung up the handset and faced Savora. His tone was as deferential as his expression: “The Captain says that I am to treat your orders as his own.”
Savora smiled thinly. “I will take the prisoner now.”
The doctor, who had been watching the exchange, interjected forcefully: “Not right away you won't. The sedative will require hours to wear off.“
“Step away.”
The doctor retreated with the senior officer's nod. Savora approached the bed, unbuttoned Matt's shirt and laid a hand over his chest.
“Matt,” Ivan said. “Savora's neural implant has extended manipulators into your tissue. Do you want me to repulse them?”
“No. I don't think she's trying to harm us this time.”
In a status window that Ivan provided behind Matt's shut eyes, a graph displayed the declining concentration of the sedative. Matt waited until the number went to zero, took that as his cue and began to stir. He fluttered his eyes open, locked onto Savora's face.
She retracted her hand and undid the restraints. “Get up. Follow me.”
Matt did his best emulation of a bleary-minded patient: “Where . . . where are we going?”
“Not far. Don't try anything.”
Matt made a show of staggering to his feet. Savora refused the senior officer's offer of an armed escort. She nudged Matt to the door into an electrically-lit passage. Her grip on his arm was light as she guided him toward the intersection, then to a stairwell.
“Matt,” Ivan said. “I am not able to initiate hypermode at this time.”
“I know how it works,” Matt subvocaled. Since his capture, he had not been properly
fed and so hypermode capability had not been replenished. Savora, though, likely had topped off her reservoir of hypermode capability.
After enough meanderings to confuse an implantless human, they arrived at another door. The guards stepped aside, apparently already aware of Savora's special authority. Savora unlocked and opened the door and turned on the light. The lone occupant in the bare compartment sat on the floor against the corner, head buried in a tangle of long hair and flowing beard drooped over his chest, drool emitting from his mouth.
“Hello, kid,” the voice of Matt Four said in Matt's head, while the lips and limbs of the figure on the floor remained motionless. “She doesn't know I have your partition. That's to our advantage. Let's play dumb.”
I have lots of practice at that, Matt almost replied.
Savora faced Matt. “Wake him.”
Playing dumb: “What's the matter with him?”
“He's in a self-induced coma.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Attempt to wake him.”
“What if I can't?”
“Then he will be of no use to us and I have been ordered to kill him.”
Not terminate. Not execute. Kill. That sounded like it came from Athena all right. She wasn't one for a long word when a short one would do.
“Play along, kid,” Matt Four subvocaled, his inert body still a seeming rag. Loftily: “I too shall endeavor toward a convincing portrayal.”
Matt knelt, and with pretended hesitancy, brushed away the hair and placed his hand on his clone-descendant's forehead. The touch was less weird than he thought it would be.
“Shazam,” Matt subvocaled, not knowing what else to say.
Matt Four twitched, stirred, groaned, rolled open his eyes. He lolled his head lethargically and made a show of attempting to focus on his visitors. In a slurring voice, he said, “Where . . . where am I?”
“Get up,” Savora said.
“Who are you?” he mumbled.
“That's not important. Get up.”
Matt Four wobbled erect. Eyelids drooped, he turned to Matt. “You look vaguely familiar.”
