One possibility to explain their presence leapt almost instantly to Kiel's mind. He had shared himself with Danielle in a way that was intimate enough to have 'infected' her with his own nanos. He could not be sure, of course, without a scan, but it was certainly the most likely scenario. He felt certain that she would not have them otherwise.
It seemed to him that Manuta would have detected them in the scan it performed, but then he did not know that it had not since Manuta would not tell him the results. In point of fact, now that he thought of it, the fact that Manuta had not mentioned it seemed to confirm that it had detected them. Manuta had said that the nanos would ensure compatibility.
When he emerged from thought, he discovered that Baen was eyeing him with hostility. Abruptly, he seized him by the throat.
"Fucking hell!" Jalen growled. "He has given her his nanos!"
They might have resumed their battle there and then except that Danielle regained conscious at that moment, sucked in a frightened gasp, and tried to escape. Reluctantly, Baen released his hold on Kiel's throat and leapt forward to hem Danielle in before she could scramble off of the bunk.
Before any of them could think of anything to say that might allay her fears, Danielle disabused them of their confusion as to why she had reacted so seemingly excessively when she could not be a complete stranger to battle.
"What are you?"
Disconcerted, Baen, Kiel, and Jalen exchanged questioning looks. "Danu," Baen responded flatly.
"How did you do that? And don't tell me you didn't all change out there because I saw it! I saw all of you change into … into something else! Some kind of animals!"
Kiel did not know about the others, but he had no idea what she was accusing them of at first. He was downright insulted about the way she had said it when he finally realized that he had been angry enough that he had changed forms to draw upon the strength and agility the animal form gave him. The accusation in her voice made his anger rise, but the revulsion in her tone sent a sickening wave behind it. "We are Danu," he said tightly.
"She cannot change forms," Baen said abruptly. "That is why she was so frightened. She thinks we are beasts … monsters."
"Well fuck!" Jalen snapped in disgust. "It was not bad enough that she knows that we are cyborgs-not natural born? Look what the two of you have gotten us in to now!"
"Do not act as if you are not as much to blame for this as we are!" Baen snapped. "I did not see you holding back!"
"It does not matter what she thinks of us," Kiel said coldly. "We are what we are."
Baen turned to stare at Kiel speculatively when he stalked off but after glancing at Danielle piercingly for a long moment, he turned and left, as well. What was there to say after all? She was appalled by what they were. That was all too obvious. He did not think there was any way to change that and words were unlikely to.
He was still thoroughly pissed off about it, however-all of it, especially the suspicion that Kiel had had the gall to attack him only because he thought he might have touched her when it was as clear as day that Kiel had done a good deal more than scrubbed her back! He would have challenged Kiel again once they were outside the habitat but, upon reflection, decided that it might be best to find a quieter place to work off his anger without quite so many witnesses. "I will meet you before my shift at the riverbank," he growled.
Kiel halted abruptly and turned to look at him. "Fine!" he snapped. "If you think it will make you feel better to get your ass kicked, so be it!"
"It will make me feel better to kick your ass!"
* * * *
It took Danielle a long while to settle down after her discovery about the Danu and the nerve frazzling experience of being chased by them when she had no avenue of escape. The shock and fear almost seemed to drop away in layers, hardly noticeable at first, mostly because she was incapable of coherent thought even after they'd left her alone and she began to descend, slowly, from high alert.
Their absence by itself wasn't enough at first to comfort her. She listened intently for a long time for any sound indicating they might be coming back. After a while, when she began to think they wouldn't, relief began to trickle through her, thawing her, slowing the hectic, chaotic ping-ponging of thoughts through her mind until she began to make some sense of them.
It occurred to her after a long while that, despite the unnerving discovery, there actually was no change in her situation. The fear that she'd been lulled into a false sense of security by their very calm and reasonable attitude began to sprout holes like a crumbling dam.
Why be terrified of them now when she hadn't been before?
It seemed reasonable and yet it took her a while to decide whether she was lying to herself because she needed to believe that or if it actually made sense.
She finally decided it did. They weren't different only because her perception of them had changed. They were either always a terrifying threat to her survival or they never were and still weren't.
She had accepted, at least in her subconscious mind, that they could be a threat to her continued good health. On the surface, she supposed the similarity in their behavior to Gertrude's had lulled her, the knowledge that they were a lot like the AI robots and computers she was familiar with. None of those were a threat to her unless, like Gertrude, they malfunctioned and failed to alert her to danger. They weren't a direct threat, though, because they could not deliberately fail to protect her or ignore a threat and they could not actively pursue harm, could not set out to hurt her, because of the fail-safes programmed into them to protect humans.
She'd known the Danu, as the cyborgs called themselves, didn't entirely fit into the same category. She thought she'd tried to make them fit into what was known to her, though. As she so often did with Gertrude, she had felt comfortable enough to interact with them as if they were actual living beings while, in the back of her mind, she'd assured herself that she was safe to do or say whatever her impulses suggested because there wouldn't, couldn't, be dangerous repercussions.
She thought at least part of the mindless panic that had gripped her was due to the fact that that comforting veil of self-deception had been ripped away, revealing the threat she'd been working hard to ignore.
But, beyond illumination, what had really changed?
Nothing. She didn't know what had been used to render her unconscious, but they could certainly have done a lot worse and hadn't. In her mind, she hadn't really done anything to provoke an attack, but it was clear to her now that she'd thoroughly pissed them off and they might've thought they had adequate provocation.
The anger had stunned her. She hadn't been expecting it and that was from trying to fit them into the pigeonhole she was familiar with. She'd leapt from dismissing them as 'smart robots' in that instant to her experience with human behavior-fury plus deadly battle plus 'they're coming back' equaled retaliation.
It hadn't, though.
Why hadn't it? Not that she was complaining, but they were either unpredictable, living beings, or they were logical, predictable robots.
Maybe they really were both-in every sense of the word? That didn't exactly make them a lot different, in that way, from a completely biological organism-humans anyway. Humans were reasoning creatures and as long as emotion didn't get in the way they could be expected to behave reasonably. Piss them off and right away they dropped IQ points and devolved into beasts at the mercy of their instincts.
Maybe it wasn't a bad thing that they'd shocked her out of her complacency even if it had been one of the most unpleasant experiences of her life? She'd thought she was being wary of them but, upon retrospect, she decided she'd taken too much for granted-namely the false sense of security that they couldn't and wouldn't harm her because they were robots and had no reason to.
She needed to keep it in the forefront of her mind that they could be very, very dangerous!
Unfortunately, all that could do was scare the piss out of her. The chase had been enough to convince her
that the prison, even if it wasn't a dark, dank cell, was damned secure. Recalling abruptly the way the 'windows' had reacted when she'd tried to break them, she realized that the only thing that would explain such strange properties was nanos.
That shouldn't have been the shock it was, but there was no getting around the fact that it unnerved her. She was surrounded by robots of all kinds and shapes. This entire world, obviously, was ruled by them.
Nano research, because of the huge potential threat they could represent, had been severely curtailed, though-in their society. To see it used here for something as mundane and commonplace as a viewing screen was extremely unnerving.
Truthfully, she supposed she-pretty much everybody-had almost a phobia about them, maybe even more of a phobia than they had of dangerous micro-organisms-which was completely illogical. Without nano technology, they would never have managed to conquer such deadly diseases as cancer. However, their potential use as a weapon of mass destruction had resulted in limiting the use of them to the most dire circumstances and the government guarded and regulated nano technology more assiduously than biological weapons if possible.
She knew it was purely psychosomatic, but the moment she realized the presence of nanos was the only explanation for the 'windows', she began to itch. Struggling to ignore the urge to scratch, to convince herself that it was purely imagination that she had something crawling on her, she tried to focus on better understanding her situation.
It occurred to her abruptly to wonder if the presence of nanos also explained the Danu ability to change forms at will.
She frowned, considering it, but as likely as that now seemed to her there was still the fact that they'd indicated it was a Danu trait.
So maybe it was nanos that allowed them to change form at will, but natural to the Danu? Or maybe they'd 'inherited' it?
So was that yet another threat that she hadn't considered? Could their nanos change 'hosts' at will?
Not the nano technology that she understood. Due to the fact that nanos were used almost exclusively in medical applications, they were 'programmed' to match their host and only them. Otherwise they would be seen as invaders by the body and wouldn't be able to perform the task set for them-which was usually collecting and destroying cancerous cells.
She wasn't as convinced as she wanted to be even after she'd thought it over long and hard and come to the conclusion that it not only seemed unlikely, but it also seemed that she would've noticed if their nanos had the tendency to migrate from one place to another. They weren't much bigger than a cell, which meant they couldn't actually be seen by the naked eye, but a mass exodus from one host to another would certainly be noticeable. She wasn't any happier about the situation. She wanted to be positive, not pretty sure, but it didn't look like that wish was any more likely to be granted than a swift return home.
Anxiety about her continued absence reared its ugly head at the thought, effectively distracting her from her lingering fears about the Danu and she finally got off the bunk to pace and think-or rather to try escape her thoughts.
Despite what she'd told the Danu, she didn't picture herself as being of great importance to the war effort, but everyone was needed. Beyond that, she had had no news since she'd left base to scout for pockets of Nubiens. She had no idea how much time might have passed since she'd fallen down the wormhole. Like that area of space where she'd been, it was uncharted and a variable that couldn't be calculated. She might be here a month, or years, and still be able to pop back through the wormhole on top of the time she'd left-or hundreds of years earlier or later.
Even if she could leave it might make no difference at all to anyone but her and there might not be a home to go back to, either because the war was lost while she was gone, or she arrived back before anyone had settled Meridie.
Her head began to throb with the round of thoughts and it finally occurred to her that she hadn't eaten anything. Tension and useless thought was enough to account for the headache, but food couldn't hurt, she decided, heading into the food preparation area to see what she could find.
It was only when she began to take the meals from the shelf to examine them that she recalled slamming her fist into Kiel's jaw. Pausing mid-action, she withdrew her hand and examined it. It didn't even look bruised!
Frowning, she struggled to think back to just before she'd blacked out. It seemed to her that she could recall excruciating pain exploding through her entire hand and all the way up to her shoulder, but she couldn't detect even a twinge now.
Her belly lurched, but she fought the thought that had made nausea waft through her.
She couldn't remember anything clearly! She might not have hit him at all, might have only managed a glancing blow! She couldn't leap to the conclusion that they'd used nanos to heal the damage to her hand when she wasn't even sure she'd hurt herself!
* * * *
"The Earth woman is faring well in captivity?"
Discomfort wafted through Kiel since he had not seen Danielle in two day cycles-not since they had terrorized her by showing her that they were so different from her species. In retrospect, he supposed he should have considered the possibility since she was clearly of another race if not an entirely different species, but she had appeared so similar to them ….
On the other hand, he had no reason to suppose she was not faring well. She had everything that she needed. No doubt, she was still terrified, but they had kept their distance so as not to exacerbate the situation.
Actually, he supposed the others had kept their distance for very much the same reason he had-which was not as much for her comfort as his own. It was illogical to allow her perception of him to alter his perception of himself, but there was no getting around the fact that it had. Manuta considered them superior creatures. It had even hinted from time to time that it considered them more superior than their parent race since it had eliminated the weaknesses of the parent race to damage and disease in constructing them. It was absurd to feel that he was defective now, when he knew better, only because Danielle looked upon them as monsters-not merely beasts, which would have been bad enough, but unnatural, nightmarish creatures.
"We have kept her confined. I thought it best until we understood her presence here and also for the sake of order in the colony, but she has all that she needs. She is doing well."
"And yet somehow she has managed to disrupt the peace anyway," Manuta responded.
Kiel flushed. "Some disruption was only to be expected. Having an alien among us, especially under the circumstance, requires some adjustment to our routine, but there has been no disorder … per se."
"The cybernetic units have been instructed to execute random acts of violence for some reason?"
Kiel felt the heat in his face increase. He shifted uncomfortably. "There have been a few incidents of … spontaneous sparring. The primitives are not creatures of logic, as you well know. They are given to random impulses. We thought it wise to adjust our responses accordingly."
Manuta was silent for so long that Kiel felt an unaccountable resentment begin to rise within him. It was illogical to feel it when he was well aware that he had spoken complete untruths and shaded the truths he did voice, but he felt it nonetheless.
"This is a byproduct of your biological makeup," Manuta said finally. "There is no more logic to it than the actions of the primitives. I have determined after much consideration that it is natural to living beings, a part of the mating process. The males strive to convince the female that their genetics are superior to that of others to entice her to mate by challenging the other males.
"It is neither 'wrong' nor 'right', but the way of natural beings and I cannot fault any of the cybernetic units for behaving as nature compels them. However, it is far more disruptive to order and peace than I had anticipated. I believe I erred in not considering that, by making the units physically superior I was also creating beings far more dangerous than their completely natural counterparts.
"Logically, on
e would assume that if there were more females there would be less competition, but I fear that would not be the case. You are not all precisely identical because each of you has a variation of the DNA entrusted to me. If you were, there would be no reason to try to prove your superiority over one another to capture the interest of females.
"In any case, the creation of cybernetic units was never considered ideal, merely a failsafe to ensure that Danu inhabited the colonies built for them. Apart from the threat of disorder, producing other females using the Earth woman's DNA would only further corrupt the strain which I have already corrupted by introducing cybernetics in to. It was not an ideal solution to begin with, creation of Danu cyborgs, although I believed so at the time. Given the situation, it was a logical decision. Partly because it made the units stronger and virtually immune to any sort of invasion by micro-organisms and partly because purely biological entities would have required nurturing for many years before they reached maturity and I was well aware that I was inadequately prepared for that task."
Kiel could not completely identify the emotions churning inside him at Manuta's assessment, but the combination brought a wave of nausea with it. He swallowed a little convulsively. "You will not use the woman's genetics to create mates?"
"As I said, it would not be the most desirable situation. In any case, I should have expired long ago and I could not undertake such a task when it seems the likelihood is far greater that I could not complete it than it is that I could. There are six hundred units in Manu alone-ten settlements with six hundred each. Producing only a fraction of those needed might well lead to a total breakdown of the society created here and destroy it. There is a great possibility that it could even if I succeeded if the sampling of behavior in less than one week is anything to go by.
"I feel that the female represents a far better solution to our dilemma, regardless. She has brought a ship to us that was designed for long distance space travel and by doing so has given me a workable design. I have carefully analyzed the materials and parts and redesigned the craft to accommodate more.
The Forgotten Three Page 3
