Originator

by Joel Shepherd

  For a brief moment, Sandy battled the sensation of combat mode descending. Her vision reddened, focusing, targeting. “What have you done to them?” she asked quietly. “Before you brought them back?”

  “A genetic modification,” said Taluq. “A safeguard, for our safety and theirs. It modifies certain mental processes to reduce the effects of the debilitation. It means they are no longer as intelligent as they were, under the influence of drugs and uplinks or not. Sad, but it is an inevitable consequence of Talee psychology that intellect in or out of the state will be impaired.”

  “They found out, didn’t they?” Sandy murmured. Gazing at him, unblinking. “They found out you modified their genome?” She glanced around at the table of watchful alien faces. “That’s what you’re keeping here? Their original genome, safely out of their reach. Nearly three thousand years and all clean genetic remnants have been corrupted on Talee worlds. They can’t know exactly what you’ve changed unless they can get the original back. And you’re keeping it from them.”

  Taluq nodded slowly, watching her. Impressed, it seemed, that she understood so easily.

  “Your genetic technology is advanced enough they could just do their own modifications,” Jane interrupted. Her tone was very flat. These days, she was more expressive, emotions engaging more readily. Now, Sandy heard nothing. That meant combat reflex. “Why don’t they?”

  Taluq made a face. “The psychology is delicate. Modifications need the starting template as a reference point to be sure what they’re doing. Already they’ve attempted what you say and largely made it worse. Even the most advanced technology, you’ll discover, finds the greatest difficulty modelling organic neurology with genetic modification. Brains grow chaotically, and organic genetics only controls the variant of chaos; full control that way is near impossible.”

  “You keep them in the dark about their own genetics,” Sandy said quietly, “and again with regard to relations with foreign species, and now they’re taking their frustrations out on us.”

  “It is necessary to keep controls on them,” Taluq insisted. “They will understand, in time.”

  “Do you feel very ‘in control’ right now?” Sandy asked. “You don’t look it.”

  “Commander, I’m offering you an alliance. Talee synthetic and human synthetic, together in partnership. Your own organics killed thousands of your people here, just one year ago. They raise a hundred thousand more for slaughter in a war caused by their own dysfunction. Organic humanity makes a mess, and synthetics suffer trying to clean it up. About time you took control of your own destinies, don’t you think? We can help you do that. Not immediately, not alarmingly. But very slowly, at a pace that suits you and not them.”

  Sandy smiled. “You’re going to help us become the master race?”

  Taluq nodded as Dara translated it for him. “But you already are. For humanity’s own sake, it is necessary. You know this.”

  It didn’t translate, Sandy realised. Master race. Taluq thought it fine. Dear God, she thought. We’ve been fighting the wrong side. And the incoming Talee organics, racing in from the outer rim, were searching for something that was surely the right of every sentient species, however clumsily pursued. They were about to hit the Federation Fleet in orbit, her friends amongst them, in search of this thing their synthetic “masters” thought to hide from them, deep underground, on a planet even more remote to Talee than it was to humans.

  And perhaps, in some technical sense, Taluq was right. Perhaps his way was smarter, or more efficient, under the circumstances. But it wasn’t the human way, or not lately, because humanity had been doing quite well until the League’s formation had been mismanaged, itself just the result of an inauspicious discovery here on Pantala, all those years ago. Up until then, humanity had been shedding old divisions and conflicts so that open warfare became exceedingly rare. Absolute divisions made absolute conflict; that was the lesson of human history. If the synthetic-organic divide became an absolute division between humans as it had among Talee, it would become a blood-soaked nightmare that would haunt the species for centuries and possibly end it. Whatever she felt for synthetic emancipation, Sandy knew she could not allow it, at any cost. And she was perhaps a little closer to understanding why the Talee had twice become extinct.

  “Dara,” she said calmly, turning her gaze on the translator. “You are familiar with the human concept of ‘rights’?” A cautious look from Dara. “A moral right. The hypothetical, theoretical concept.”

  Dara nodded. “I am, yes.”

  “Does it translate?”

  No reply from Dara. And no attempt to translate her question to Taluq. Sandy felt combat reflex descend entirely, a great red wash of slowing time.

  “You’re talking about violent transition,” Sandy said quietly, turning her attention back on Taluq. “I’m trying to avoid it. You’re encouraging it.”

  “The wave rolls in without you,” Dara translated Taluq’s reply. “The only question is whether you will be on top of it or under it.”

  Sandy took a deep breath. She could not look at Jane now, lest she give the game away. Jane was no moral paragon. If she did not back her here, there would be no chance. She could only hope that Jane had followed the exchange this far and knew what must come next . . . in the one field of technological superiority they had left.

  “In every tale of alien contact told by humans,” said Sandy, “there is emphasis upon the need to comprehend alien psychology. The dangers of miscalculation are great. Usually in those tales, it is we humans who are somehow at fault. On this occasion, you are. You misread us, Taluq. This proposal is unacceptable. Partnership, I welcome, but not to wage war on the majority of my species. Give me a different offer, and I’ll think again.”

  “There is no other offer, Commander,” came Taluq’s reply. “There are only the facts of species evolution and the inevitable superiority of the synthetics. Your choice is whether to accept these facts or to discard them.”

  “But you brought your organics back. You chose to. Why did you need to, if synthetic superiority is absolute? You have every superior advantage except reproduction. But without reproductive superiority, you have nothing, because we’ll always be outnumbered.”

  Taluq made an expression that might have been a smirk. “Reproductive efficiency is for viruses,” he said. “Viruses are organic too.” Right, thought Sandy. That was your last chance. “Commander, you appear to be having difficulty with these concepts. I advise that you take a moment to think on it.”

  “No,” Sandy said coolly. “Your current actions have put my species in danger. I won’t allow it.”

  Taluq made an expression that might have been a frown. Still Sandy did not sense any great alarm amongst the Talee. “I’m quite sure there is nothing you can do about that, Commander. Our network tech advantage here is quite significant. Your own killswitches, which your wonderful organics built into your brains from inception, are not invulnerable here.”

  Sandy smiled. “I’ll chance it.” Quite calmly, she flipped a grenade off her webbing and tossed it under the table toward the far wall, and the room blew up. The explosion blew her backward, already pulling weapons as she rolled on the floor and opened fire on those nearest as they scrambled to recover, then switched to those closer to the blast who’d been scythed sideways and much harder hit. She moved quickly sideways about the room past bodies and shattered furniture as Jane did the same, opening angles past wrecked furniture at point-blank range, not allowing those who recovered fast enough an easy shot. She took three rounds in the armour, and then it was silent, save the ringing in her ears and the slither and groan of those still living.

  “Fuck,” Jane said succinctly, surveying the carnage of blood and debris through the clouds of dust and smoke. She had a cut on her forehead and several bullet strikes in her armour, but nothing worse. “Arrogant little buggers, aren’t they?”

  “Weren’t going to let us leave either,” said Sandy. “Not once we’d
seen all this.”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  And Jane went to the doorway, as Sandy checked the bodies, then a burst of fire from the door, incoming and outgoing as Jane engaged. “Three!” she called, coming back in a crouch as bullets splintered the doorframe behind her. “I got one, but more are coming. You want to risk tacnet?”

  “I think we’d be pushing our luck, in this place,” Sandy suggested, pocketing a couple of interesting-looking network devices. “The whole cave is environmentally controlled, there has to be a central control room. . . .”

  “Does there?” Jane shot back. “They’re a networked society. . . .”

  “And can steal unsecured data too easily. There has to be someplace behind physical barriers where they keep the sensitive stuff.”

  “There was a bigger tower near the center of town, had laser-com arrays of some kind, that’s usually command and control.” Jane pointed in the rough direction they had to take—unable to uplink, they’d have to go old-school with verbal and hand signals. “You believe that stuff about killswitches?”

  “Yeah, sure. Hey, have you got one? I never asked.”

  “Big enough to blow my head off. I give us one chance in ten.”

  Sandy made a face. “Generous,” she judged. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait,” said Jane, and Sandy paused, hearing shouting from outside. Still no shots coming through the walls—despite their uplink tech, the Talee still seemed unaware that the only people functional in here were human. Like the organic Talee they disdained, the synths seemed not to have fully conceived the uses to which the highest-designation synthetic soldiers might be put in combat. “We’re after the organic Talee genome?” Sandy nodded. “What if that’s a mistake? They’re worse than this lot.”

  “They’re desperate and ignorant,” Sandy corrected. “Maybe they’ll get better. But it’s irrelevant—if we can get it we’ll save Reichardt from getting smashed in orbit, if we can tell them we’ve got it.”

  “Tell them how? We don’t have communications, we don’t even know where we are.”

  “Then we need to take this place over. All of it.”

  With just two of them. Jane shrugged. “Cool,” she said.

  They ran upstairs, along a stone-panelled corridor, then past windows overlooking streets, and immediately drew fire. Sandy hit a doorway, kicked a hole in a wall with a thud that brought ceiling panels down, and found herself with more floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the next street, another building ahead, an unpredictable structure like this one, full of cubist blocks and add-ons—the streets were gridwork, but Talee architects seemed to dislike straight lines. The next room jutted out like a diving platform over the street, so she ran through it and got a run-up, smashed through the window, flew eight meters through the opposite building window, and rolled on floor matting.

  Shots behind showed that Jane was covering, and she paused on an angle to minimise her own exposure, covering near streets as Jane jumped . . . a Talee ran up the adjoining road, trying to make the intersection, and Sandy shot him in the neck. Being synthetic, he might survive it or might not—either way, she hated it but had no illusions of what she had come here to do. These Talee synths were fighting for synthetic superiority over organics, while she was opposed to it, and that was that. That this eventuality hadn’t occurred to their hosts, either the fighting or that it might go badly for them indicated something increasingly scary about Talee, synthetic or organic. An inflexibility, perhaps a lack of imagination. It fit with a species prone to self-destruction. And, in the surreal slow-motion of combat reflex, she wondered if Cai had been trying to warn her of exactly this from the beginning. He’d been one of the synths, like Dara, but had been unable to discuss this organic-synth division even obliquely. No doubt the likes of Taluq had treated him well, like a brother, as they’d tried to treat her like a sister . . . while condemning many of her best friends, and indeed her children, to sub-humanity and servitude. Had Cai warned them of her proclivities? Would he have warned her, if he hadn’t been killed at Sadar Institute, of what Taluq and company’s grand plan actually was? So many troubles on both sides caused by ignorance. Perhaps the smartest thing the synth Talee had ever done was to avoid humanity as much as possible. Or perhaps if they hadn’t, if they’d thrown themselves into full engagement, with trade, cultural exchange, perhaps even at the level of ordinary citizens beneath the government, better understanding would have been reached, and she wouldn’t currently be shooting people she’d much rather have shared a drink with.

  Jane crashed through what was left of the window and took the lead, rushing through corridors, while Sandy brought up the rear. They continued like that, moving fast through buildings, changing floors to mix it up for their pursuers, and sometimes changing direction. Talee followed up adjoining streets, not game to rush the buildings, and knowing they’d probably be too late anyway, at the speed the humans were moving. If the Talee had heavy weapons, they didn’t appear to want to use them on their own buildings, and within what was essentially a giant underground cavern, there was no airborne surveillance or armament to be seen.

  Sandy and Jane’s greatest vulnerability was in jumping across roads, but the Talee were having difficulty getting people into good fire positions to hit them in their leaps. At first they put people exposed on the street, but those were quickly shot, so the next took cover farther away but weren’t quite high-enough designation to hit a leaping target at sixty-plus meters that was only exposed for a second at most. There were unarmed Talee on the streets now, some running, others ordering or directing—Sandy and Jane only fired on those who were armed and apparently hostile. But the buildings they moved through were clearly residential, with furniture, display screens, and wall art, and a few times they encountered Talee in the buildings, unarmed and frightened, whom they simply ignored.

  A hail of bullets announced their approach to the target tower, Sandy immediately skidding for cover behind a support wall as fire kicked over furniture and splintered doorways. Jane covered nearby, then rolled into an adjoining room to peer briefly through a window on a new angle.

  “It’s a block away!” Jane announced. “They’ve stacked up the defences.” And rolled again as fire came close, punching through walls.

  And they’d opened fire too far out, Sandy thought . . . though another two meters and she’d have spotted them anyway. Maybe they were right to try their luck. Suddenly her vision flashed, and she half-flipped into cyberspace, internal visual showing a massive barrier assault . . . but Cai’s defences were responsive and kicked in with some fast adaptations that absorbed what was thrown at them and put up new barriers to replace the ones torn down.

  “Jane!” she called as her vision cleared. “Jane, you feel that?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I figure it’ll get worse as we get closer. We gonna flank them?”

  “You jump over to the next building, we crossfire the defences, draw fire for each other, I think they’ll only take the shorter-range shot.”

  “Gotcha.” And Jane rolled, then crawled, then ran as she reached the hall and back the way she’d come, then down some stairs, searching for better cover to get to the next building. Sandy went left, incoming fire seemed random, she didn’t think they’d seen her and were just shooting at shadows. A thump told her someone had come down on the roof—counter-manoeuver, she hadn’t seen much of that yet. Intense fire from ahead told her someone had spotted Jane’s leap and opened up, but her hearing gave her the position down to a meter, and she rolled to a good window angle. Popped up and nailed a head shot, then rolled and scampered away as return fire shredded walls and windows around her. Behind a support wall, she pulled her pistol and aimed it around the corner . . . the targeting sight engaged another fire source in half a second, and she rapidly compressed the trigger, putting five rounds on target, saw another head snap back.

  These Talee were fast and deadly, but she could see the lines of possible fire well before they did, and
their numerical superiority only gave her more targets. They presumed to use their superior firepower and so weren’t taking sufficient cover, looking instead to get the first shot off without realising that exposure only got them killed before they could do so. No one was as fast as her or Jane, not even Talee synthetics, who were theoretically the same designation . . . but not only was she the same technology, she was shaped and advanced by a thirty-year war that the Talee had not gone through. The Talee had all the tech but struggled to put it all together, like a football team filled with star players but no coach and no game plan. They guessed what came next. She knew.

  Charges blew the ceiling down the hall behind her, and she dropped the first Talee who fell through the hole, then raced low across to the building’s far side and dropped another one coming down a corridor as she flashed across it. That brought her to stairs, and she leaped down a floor, then braced against a supporting wall to look diagonally across the street at the defences now facing Jane. Jane’s fire opened up on the defences facing her, each of them covered against the targets closest to them, and the Talee lost another four soldiers in a few seconds.

  Sandy put three grenades in quick succession into the opposing wall and took a running leap across the road and into the blinding dust and smoke. Crashed into a half-demolished wall and bounced up, moving fast and crouched down the hall and shooting another Talee in a passing doorway who simply wasn’t fast enough. She could hear them shouting now, could hear the fear—even a people as heavily uplinked as synthetic Talee resorted to vocals in panic. This was instructive for everyone—Talee synth-tech had been taken by humans, and instead of getting worse, in this one lethal respect it had gotten much, much better. They hadn’t realised soldiers could be this dangerous, that warfare against them could be this lopsided, and now came the oldest horror story, the fear of dangerous aliens that no local technology could stop . . . only here the aliens were humans, the most deadly species in all known space.