“Hello Tanker, Thunder,” Trace said to the door guards, pulling up with a burst of white thrust. “How’s your air?”
“It’s fine Major,” said Lance Corporal Tariq ‘Tanker’ Kamov. “We got refills.”
“Bit creepy in here?” Trace said slyly as she passed between them.
“I dated this new age rock chick in high school,” said Private Leo ‘Thunder’ Sinha. “Her bedroom was a bit like this.”
“Not that he ever got to see her bedroom,” Kamov added. There was light in the walls here at least, not everything was pitch black.
“How did you get the lights on?” Kono asked them, approaching the transparent door. It slid open on approach, smooth and soundless.
“Residual powercell charge,” said Kamov. “Thirty thousand year old batteries, pretty freaky.”
“My god!” Romki exclaimed behind as he got his first clear view of the massive spherical structure. “I don’t believe it!”
“You recognise this, Stan?” Trace asked him. The corridors ahead looked almost organic, white or grey in alternating shades, smoothly finished and inlaid with transparent doors or windows in parts. Where the rest of TK55’s AI base looked harsh and dark, this looked almost delicate and crystalline.
“No, I just… I never imagined hacksaws building anything like this. It’s almost… artistic.”
“Yeah well don’t get too impressed,” Lance Corporal Kamov said grimly. “Find Ensign Hale, she’ll show you what it’s for.”
They followed the winding corridors and 3D junctions, past several large storage rooms and sealed heavy doors, homing on where tacnet gave Ensign Hale’s location, and that of several more Engineering techs. And emerged into a series of open, spherical rooms, each overlapping the next like a series of merging bubbles. The walls of the bubble rooms were bristling with tall, partly transparent canisters, like inward-facing glass bristles. Trace thought it looked a little like caves on Sugauli, deep within the mountains and gleaming with stalagmites and rare minerals.
Further along, some Phoenix techs were working at what might have been a control panel, and several marines were on guard, weapons always ready. Trace gave herself a gentle shove toward a wall, arriving with armoured boots atop a steel capped canister. She flashed an arm light into the glass canisters… and found two thirds of them empty. The other third were filled with withered husks, like dried fruit left too long in the sun. Bodies, she realised. Organic bodies, mummified for endless millennia, surrounded by basic life support that had long since ceased to function.
“Tavalai,” said Romki, having arrived at Trace’s side, pulling himself head-first for a better look. “A few parren, a few sard, but mostly tavalai. Very, very old.”
“It’s a medical research facility,” came Ensign Remy Hale’s voice. Trace glanced to find her drifting across in her heavy suit, various tech-gear dangling off her belt, a burner in one gloved hand. Behind her came Lieutenant Alomaim, a personal armed escort for Engineering’s second-in-command after Second Lieutenant Rooke. “Medical research for organics.”
“These don’t look at all like willing patients,” Romki observed, gazing up and around at the gleaming spherical walls.
“Exactly,” said Hale, halting with a thrust, Alomaim close behind. “There are examination rooms further on. Lots of cutting implements. It’s a gorgeous piece of architecture, but it’s a horror show. They stored live people here, and did experiments on them. By the tens of thousands, these storage rooms go on and on further back. About a quarter full, all told.”
“Mostly tavalai, parren and sard?” asked Romki.
“Actually there’s a few barabo too,” said Hale. Trace thought she looked far less excited than Romki. Horrified, but dealing with it. And she recalled Alomaim saying that Hale had lost a best friend on Joma Station docks. An Engineering tech she’d served with for years. “And barabo were a long way from spacetravel back when this facility was working. So they were snatching undeveloped barabo off their homeworld, like those old Earth stories about UFOs.”
“Wow!” Romki breathed. “Imagine if we found humans here? That would rewrite some history!” Hacksaws had never got that close to human space, but still Trace could see the fascination.
“This is another good reason the Dobruta didn’t want to destroy this base,” she said, staring around. “Tavalai respect their ancestors. This is like holy ground for them.”
“They suffered a fair bit, the froggies,” Kono conceded heavily. “This kind of shit must have been going on a lot, all through the Machine Age. Damn glad humans missed it.”
Humans always assumed they’d had the worst of it, Trace thought. Looking about now, she wondered if that was actually true. Losing your homeworld when you were still a one-planet species was about as bad as it got… but it had happened once, then humanity had recovered and moved on. The war against the krim had seemed titanic to humans, the all-encompassing, blood soaked nightmare of a five hundred year conflict. But in galactic terms, it had been a small fight involving just a few dozen systems in an unknown corner of the galaxy, between one up-and-coming species, and one mostly insignificant one.
Tavalai had been under the machines for more than twenty thousand years. They’d had no singular catastrophic loss in that time as great as humanity losing Earth, but the slaughter had still been huge, and it had stretched on for such a long time, with no end in sight. Human popular culture was full of stories about the futility of life on Earth under the krim, the violent death of entire communities and cities that followed resistance, and the hopeless drudgery of compliance. The only true resistance had been off-world, and young Earth men and women determined to fight had quickly learned that to truly make a difference, they had to leave Earth, and join the new human Fleet, equipped by the chah’nas, and striking the krim in the places where it truly hurt.
That had continued for a century and a half, with a brief respite only when the tavalai had intervened in a misguided attempt to make a peace that some Earth-bound humans had wanted, but no Fleet-based humans would accept. Fleet had fought the tavalai instead, and when the tavalai finally gave up in disgust, the krim killed Earth as the best way of stemming the flow of Fleet recruits.
Five hundred years of horror, so many lifetimes and generations lost in the maelstrom. But how well would humanity have endured this? Twenty thousand years, beneath the machines? Trace had seen images, never particularly popular among humans, so wrapped up in their own self-righteous victimhood. But still there was a segment of human culture fascinated by the aliens, and their crazy tales of ancient history and AI wars. There were movies, some human, some not. There were even some real images, unfaded as the years would not age digital data.
Concentration camps. Sentient beings herded like farm animals of old, branded, spiked and burned. Screams and sobbing, instant death for those who resisted, slow death for many who didn’t. Mass annihilation for whole peoples who got in the way, for little more than inconvenience. Some beings had been allowed to live undisturbed, for simple luck that the machines had no interest in them. Others were able to be useful. Some periods of relative calm lasted centuries. But always it came back eventually, and the many, many attempts at armed uprising were crushed without mercy or success.
At least humanity took its hit in one fast punch, Trace thought. We got knocked down, then got straight back up again. This endless, living death of hope seemed suddenly far worse. No wonder the Dobruta had been at their task so long. And no wonder they were so scared at the prospect of any of this, even a tiny whisper from the past, coming back.
“And this was a drysine base,” Alomaim reminded them. “The good hacksaws. Just imagine the deepynines.”
“Don’t want to, thanks,” said Hale in a small voice, turning herself to jet back to her work. Alomaim gave her a pat on the shoulder, and they shared a look that Trace could not see past the visors. Hale left in a white thrust-burst, and Romki went off after Hale to join the techs and see what they’d learn
ed.
“Hey,” said Trace to her Lieutenant on direct coms. Alomaim came to her, so she could nearly see his eyes past the heavy visor, above the fearsome visage of armoured combat mask and breather. “How’s she doing?” Nodding after Ensign Hale.
“She’s good. She’s tough. For a spacer.”
“And how are you doing?” Pointedly. There were few secrets on warships, and Ahmed Alomaim and Remy Hale was a relatively open one. It wasn’t interfering with his work here that Trace could see — Hale was senior Phoenix crew currently on the base, and so deserved the most senior protection. He wasn’t ditching responsibilities just to hang with his girl.
“I’m fine Major. I’m doing my job.”
“I know you are. Just remember that she’s a rank below you, and technically it’s fraternisation.” Technically Fleet regs said a lot of things weren’t allowed. In reality, individual ships spent too much time out in deep space on their own to be regularly subjected to outside standards review. Standards were set by the ship’s senior officers, and as the saying went, the standard you walked past was the standard you accepted. Trace had never yet in her entire career walked past a below-par operational standard, and very few at-par ones either, with her marines at least. But most of the time, this kind of thing was different. “Look, I don’t care who you poke while off-duty. If I see the slightest evidence that it’s affecting your field performance, then I’ll care. But I know your professional standards, and I suspect you’d catch it before it got to that.”
Alomaim took a deep breath. “I’ll find somewhere else to guard.”
“I didn’t say that. I just said be careful. It’s already got me paying attention, because I have to pay attention to everything my Lieutenants do. It’s not like I don’t have other things to pay attention to.”
Alomaim nodded slowly. “Yes Major. I’ll be careful.” He turned and jetted away. Regret tried to creep up on Trace unawares. She smacked it down hard. Other people might have the luxury of telling those beneath them to live their lives and be happy. She didn’t. Too much was riding on her Lieutenants not screwing up.
“You know,” said Hiro on close coms, “if the LC just promoted Rooke to a full Lieutenant, then Hale moves up to Second Lieutenant, which is the equal rank to a marine full Lieutenant.”
Trace looked, and found him floating surrepticiously nearby. He just seemed to have that knack of being somewhere without being noticed. “Thank you for explaining the Fleet ranking system to me,” she said. “Were you listening in?” How he’d figured to do that on one-on-one communications, she didn’t know. Spies.
“I’m just saying, Engineering is usually commanded by a full Lieutenant. There’s a lot of people strangely reluctant to give or accept promotions lately.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “Strictly speaking, equally ranked officers aren’t supposed to be banging either.”
“It’s better between marines and spacers, surely?” Hiro pulled himself over, not bothering with the burner. “It’s easier to maintain professional distance when you’re not operating in the same field or sharing the same skillsets. Or even bunking in the same parts of the ship.”
It struck Trace as a strange location to be having the discussion. But then, everything was strange lately. “People think it doesn’t hurt. People want what they want. They justify all things to themselves — one more slice of cake, one more hit of drugs, one more roll in the sack. And then it hurts them, every time.”
“Were you hurt?” Hiro wondered, pulling up before her. His spacer suit had an open visor, exposing more of his face. Looking hard, trying to see her eyes behind the narrower marine visor.
Trace smiled. “A tragic romantic past? Would make a nice story, wouldn’t it? No, I do my job. I am my job.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“You think?” She gestured at the crew about the chamber, her marines amongst them. “Civvies pity me because I don’t do civvie relationships. I pity civvies because they’ll never know the marine family. I’m never alone. And as Kulina, I know that the collective karma of the galaxy rests upon my choices. I’ll leave civvies to waste their lives fretting about romantic love. I’ve got a real life.”
* * *
Lisbeth awoke as Major Thakur opened the door to their quarters, a glare of light from the corridor, and the drone of ventilation and other systems. Then a clank as it shut again, the rustle of clothes being removed, and a closet opened for toiletries to be put away. Lisbeth slitted her eyes open, and saw the Major only in dull silhouette, hair still damp from her shower. A blink on the uplink icon in her lower vision showed her the time — 0210, still four hours of second-shift to go.
“How did it go?” Lisbeth asked.
“We got the deepynine drones back,” said the Major, unwinding some strapping about one hand. Lisbeth hadn’t realised she’d hurt it. Typically of marines, she’d just wrapped it and kept working. “Romki’s dragging them to Engineering, where there’s now a huge debate about whether to let the drysine queen see them now, or whether to process the remains first.” She gave a small shrug. “Not my department.”
“I should get down there and help with that,” said Lisbeth, and dragged herself from her bunk. In civilian life she’d hated to miss sleep, and her sisters had teased her for her slow morning starts. But there was a conscious drysine queen down in Engineering, about to meet one of her ancient enemy deepynines for the first time in eons, albeit a dead one. If a straight-A engineering student couldn’t get out of bed for that, she couldn’t get out of bed for anything.
“Nice to see you’re alone in here,” the Major observed.
Lisbeth frowned quizzically, fishing her fresh jumpsuit from the under-bunk storage locker. “Who would I be with?”
“I have no idea. I find it alarming just how little idea I have, with some of my marines.”
Lisbeth repressed a yawn as she stripped off the old jumpsuit and pulled on the new, somewhat flattered that the Major was bothering to share this with her at all. “Does it really matter if crew sleep with each other?”
“I’ve seen it completely screw up working relationships between marines. Completely. If it happens within one of my platoons, I’ll transfer them to different platoons immediately, and different ships if possible. Though that’s no longer an option now. Marines shouldn’t screw around with other marines — that’s what spacers are for.”
“People don’t really have any control over who they fall in love with, though,” Lisbeth reasoned.
“Yes they do,” said the Major, climbing past Lisbeth onto the top bunk. “That’s one of these soft rationalisations people make to excuse their lack of willpower. It’s easy to control.”
“Have you ever found yourself attracted to men and not acting on it?” Lisbeth asked, standing to pull on and clip her spacer harness.
Face on her pillows, the Major smiled. “You don’t inspect my locker for vibrating electric objects, I won’t inspect yours.”
Lisbeth grinned. “Well no, that’s not actually what I was asking.”
“I know what you were asking. Of course I have. I’m human. The only thing that makes Kulina different from anyone else is discipline. Most people have to force themselves to discipline, but Kulina couldn’t live without it, we’ve never known anything else. Women in the corps are outnumbered, and there are a lot of very impressive men around. You might have noticed.”
Lisbeth smiled self-consciously. “I might have.”
“You still get a few people making a fuss about mixing genders in the forces. They say that it hurts too much for men to see women get hurt or killed. They say men get protective. It’s possibly even true, but then we’re supposed to risk our necks for each other, gender aside.” All amusement faded from her face, her eyes distant. “What they never talk about is that it cuts both ways. When I was a young Lieutenant in my first action, I had a couple of great young guys in my command have… very bad things happen to them. Combat things. I hadn’t even rea
lised I’d had a slight crush on either of them until I saw them… wrecked like that. And I realised that it’s bad enough losing any friends without those kinds of extra attachments. Never again.”
“Can you really just switch that off, though?” Lisbeth asked quietly.
“No,” the Major said tiredly. “No, maybe you can’t. Maybe we’re all just playing pretend. But I’m very good at pretending, and I’ve had a lot of practise. I’m so good I can even fool myself. And I like it that way.” Her eyes met Lisbeth’s. “Go on, you’ll miss the great AI cataclysm. You can tell me about it if anyone’s still alive when I wake up.” She closed her eyes.
“Major? It’s probably a silly question, but I’d been meaning to ask…” Thakur’s eyes opened once more, waiting calmly. “Has it been harder for you? As a woman? I mean, you’re the only living female Liberty Star recipient, for one thing.”
“It’s always harder for women,” said Thakur. “So what?”
“Well it’s just… my family. I mean my mother, she’s very strong on gender roles, and I wanted to be an engineer, and… well let’s say it’s been an issue. And mine’s not the only family like that. So many things are still unfair.”
“In this life,” said the Major, “there are obstacles, and there are forces that overcome obstacles. You can be either one, or the other. No in-betweens. If you refuse to even try and clear an obstacle, then you become the obstacle. You yourself. So you have to decide which one you are. The obstacle? Or the force that overcomes obstacles. Don’t complain. Just choose. And then once you’ve chosen, and are honest with yourself about which you’ve chosen, you’ll know that whatever the outcome of what comes next, it was meant to be.”
Lisbeth blinked at her. “But what if the outcome is that I’m killed while attempting to clear an obstacle that was never clearable in the first place?”
The Major smiled, closing her eyes once more. “Exactly. Now you understand.”
Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) Page 35
