by C. T. Phipps
“Possibly. It may also ruin the transtellars with alien goods replacing their own. Another reason to avoid it.”
She had me there.
“And the Cognition A.I.?”
“Such a terrible boogeyman you’ve made of those machines,” T’ianna said, making a tsk-tsk noise. “It was humanity’s dependence on such creations, and the malignancy of those who reprogrammed them, that resulted in the Great Collapse. The Chel never abandoned their use and that is why we have technology that dwarfs yours.”
“Except for the starfighters I blew up just a few hours ago.”
T’ianna paused. “That does confuse most of us. It seems the Commonwealth has its own benefactors. Ones who rival our own.”
“And who benefits you?” I asked. “Who has been patronizing you with advanced technology? The Community?”
“That would be telling.”
I frowned. “So, my sister wasn’t building Cognition A.I. for you, she was adapting Chel technology for use by the Commonwealth.”
“Cognition A.I. will allow the fleets we have constructed to operate on a level unmatched by the Commonwealth. Armies formed of everyone who loathes the Commonwealth and mercenaries will crew them. We do not have to defeat the Commonwealth to collapse it. We simply do not have to lose.”
“All to gain revenge for their previous attacks?” I asked.
“Is that not enough?” T’ianna replied.
It would be for any other race. For the Chel? It didn’t seem like it. “No.”
“We have other reasons, but we’ll be keeping those to ourselves.” T’ianna was clearly not afraid of me. Damn her!
I took another breath. “Where is the Revengeance?”
“You think you can find that old dreadnought, destroy it, and the Free Systems Alliance will collapse? The war will be averted.”
“It can’t hurt.”
“Allow me to share why that is a foolish idea,” T’ianna said, reaching out and revealing I’d misjudged just how long her fingers were. The tips of them touched the side of my hand and I fell down in a mixture of agony as well as dread.
In that moment, I saw memories shared from the moment the Chel began recording them with their mixture of biological and cybernetic enhancements. I saw memories stretching back centuries as religious pilgrims, perhaps the same ones which Crius’ Prophet had broken away from, settled into mining colonies around the Kronos III Asteroid Belt.
I saw the strange and bizarre angelic figures that existed in temples devoted to worshiping concepts of transhumanism and aliens as harbingers of a more advanced society. I saw prayers answered as strange races, unlike any I’d seen in the Community databases, seemingly straight from Heaven, came unto them and bestowed knowledge of dead empty worlds they could mine for secrets.
Mine but never settle.
I was a Chel and I understood the Great Work. Crius had paid lip service to the idea of achieving transcendence with science. We spoke of Lucifer as the Giver of Knowledge and the liberator of mankind to be as gods. The Chel, however, believed in that religion wholeheartedly and worked on it with every fiber of their being. Their agents were taken from human beings forcibly converted to their work and sent out amongst humanity to keep abreast of their ways as well as prepare others to their line of thinking.
I realized then she was making me an offer. I had struggled for years, looking for a purpose, and the Chel had a rigidly defined society that provided just that sort of purpose. If I joined them, I would be able to work toward building humanity to a transcendent new world. The Community disdained transspecism, believing every race should remain as they were, and the Commonwealth reflected it, but the Chel promised a new humanity that would become like the Elder Races near the galactic core.
Unfathomable.
Amoral.
Eternal.
Infinite.
Perfect.
I felt all of their joy and fulfillment in this cause. It trivialized my loyalty to Crius.
I started to weep.
“Pain is something that has already left your mind open to new ideas and concepts, Cassius Mass,” T’ianna said. “The pain of losing your world is your crucible. Sabotage this ship to the coordinates we need and send forth a signal to bring my people. I will convert others to your cause and you will know the way of—”
T’ianna was cut off by my putting a plasma bolt through her skull. I then put the gun underneath my throat, preparing to pull the trigger. Right before Clarice slapped it away from me and smacked me across the face.
I blinked, sanity slowly returning as the all-consuming sense of oneness faded from me. “Thank you, I needed that.”
Clarice slapped me again.
I blinked. “I didn’t need that.” Clarice was about ready to hit me again before I looked up at her. “No.”
She pulled away and tentatively offered her hand to me. “I told you not to let her touch you.”
“Yes,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Well, clearly I’m going to let her do that again. Oh wait, she’s dead. Oops.”
Clarice took a deep breath. “Now you understand, a little at least.”
“My respect for you was already great.” I tried to shake away the images in my head. “I have no idea how you managed to get past that.”
“I didn’t,” Clarice said. “I numb myself every day with sex, drugs, and alcohol.”
“Good strategy,” I said, feeling ill. “Is it just me or are they the founders of Lucifer’s Church?”
“Yeah, possibly,” Clarice said, picking up my gun and shooting the body two more times. “I wouldn’t have thought a joke religion about transhumanism, alien-worship, and Satanism would be a front for a bunch of near-human fanatics, but there you go.”
I glared at her.
“Oh, right,” Clarice said, looking to one side. “Present company exempted. Uh, did you learn anything new?”
“Only that they have to be stopped and might actually have a chance of winning. The Free Systems Alliance is a proxy war on the Chel’s behalf with funding coming from the transtellars. The Crius Reborn are merely bodies on the ground for them to make use of.”
“Are there enough to be a threat?” Clarice asked.
I paused, thinking about that seriously. “If they recruit commoners, offer them equality, and have enough victories? Yes. Crius was hated by a lot of people, but it was a symbol of power and stability in this region. Albion blasting it to rubble made them enemies where they might have had friends. It won’t be enough to conquer the Commonwealth, but they could destroy enough to weaken its hold on many other systems as well as inspire others to revolt or secession.”
Clarice frowned. “Great, another war. You’d think after the horrors of the last one that people would have learned.”
“I think we can both agree people are infinitely stupid. No matter what their planet.”
Clarice laughed, looking a bit more relaxed. “Come on, Cassius, I’ll buy you a drink. Then we’ll make up with William and Isla before talking about how we’re going to find out if my sister needs to be shot. You know, for things other than all the other reasons she should be shot.”
“How are we making up with William and Isla? I should point out if it’s the way you Commonwealthers do it, we’re going to have to set some ground rules.”
Clarice shook her head. “Not like that Cassius.”
“I suspected as much. I’m just being flippant because all of this terrifies me.”
Clarice shot the Chel’s corpse for a third time.
“I think she’s dead.”
“Can’t be too careful.”
Chapter Twenty
The rest of the night didn’t bear mentioning. Isla was still furious at me. William had forgiven Clarice. Ida had no opinion whatsoever on the dead Chel and I hadn’t talked to her about staying. My sister’s copy remained in her medically-induced coma. Instead, everyone miraculously continued to on with our lives as if nothing had happened.
It
was weird sitting at my station on the Melampus’ bridge after everything which had happened, even stranger doing it sober. There was the captain in her chair, the XO standing at her side, Jun at communications, Brick at the helm, and the ship’s meager armaments handled by Jun’s blue-haired brother Ken.
The bridge was interesting to look at with new eyes. Before, I had only seen the scuff marks and the old jury-rigged equipment. I’d only seen the worn leather on the seats and the monitors that were a good ten-to-fifteen years old. I never paid attention to the fact the interior of the systems contained a great deal of illegal hardware, some military-grade, or that the machines contained interfaces taken from all branches of the Commonwealth, rivaling ships owned by top-tier corporations like Ares Electronics or the CMG.
Or maybe I’d just been too drunk to notice.
Either way, we were coming up on Shogun, and I couldn’t help but spend my time consulting our last jumpnet download of all the news going on around the Commonwealth. As usual, the official networks were useless but the smaller independent ones the crew members subscribed to painted an interesting picture of what was going on throughout the Spiral.
For the most part, it was the same depressing news that was always on the stations not focused on gossip, pornography, scandal, and propaganda:
300,000 were killed in a food riot on Charybdis.
Parliament was loosening laws restricting debt servitude contracts.
10,000 more uninhabited worlds were approved for core-stripping to alleviate the Resource Crisis.
The Coral Prophets on a goodwill visit to Albion preached a message of universal tolerance as well as veneration for the Elder Species.
The total environmental collapse of Horus.
The Church of Lucifer had achieved recognition for theocratic governorship on fifteen Commonwealth Protectorates.
A mass purge of bioroids on Ford Mining Station was conducted by union-backed rioters.
Thousands dead on Chimera due to a Nova Syndicate terrorist attack involving nuclear weapons.
There were bits, though, spread through all of the Commonwealth’s attempts to stay ahead of collapse that backed up T’ianna’s story. Bigger government contracts with the transtellars―ironic―and the commissioning of new fleets had been announced. Other fleets were listed as on secret missions and maneuvers, which might be a cover for heavy casualties. There were also heavy redeployments around Sector 8.
One of the most concerning rumors was the fact that Ares Electronics had finally been approved to deploy its security units in the service of the military. If the Commonwealth had finally gotten over its fear of deploying mechs in combat or security roles, then they were running dangerously low on troops even with recent conscripts.
Did I want this?
There was a time when I would have danced on the Commonwealth’s grave and I still hated the people who destroyed my world, but I was starting to wonder if plunging the Spiral into anarchy was an acceptable trade-off for my revenge. Maybe it was as Clarice said. I was so desperate for a cause to devote myself to; I would prefer to work for the people that murdered my family than no one at all.
“Navigator?” Ida said, calling over from her chair.
“Yes, Captain?” I looked up from the news feeds I’d been reading for the past few hours.
“What are you up to? You’ve been unusually quiet.”
“Watching pornography,” I said, closing out the newsfeed.
“That’s good,” Ida said. “What’s our ETA to Shogun?”
I didn’t need to look it up due to my cybernetics. I could run a hundred different processes simultaneously without losing any performance power. “Five more minutes until we reach the jump beacon.”
“Any issues we should know about?”
“I’ve made the usual course corrections,” I said, highlighting the need for navigators in the first place. The tides of energy in jumpspace and gravity shadows made every journey potentially a death sentence.
“Good,” Ida said, still acting the part of the grandmotherly captain. “Will you be departing our loving family when we hit Shogun?”
I almost snorted at the description of loving family. Even before I’d discovered half of the ship was working for the Watchers, it had been a collection of misfits and refuse from Sector 7. It was brilliant, really, as the people here had nothing to lose and anything they told anyone would be looked at with skepticism anyway. Assuming any survived to leave. No, it was best not to be paranoid.
Even if they were out to get you.
“Oh, you can’t, Mister Mass!” Jun said, looking up from her console. “We just learned your real name!”
“And someone tried to kill him,” Brick said, not bothering to look up. “Not to mention all the other craziness we’ve been dealing with in these past few days.”
“Don’t let it get you down, Mister Mass!” Jun said. “Remember, when life gives you punga fruit, make punga fruit juice.”
“Or run away before someone kills you,” Ken said at the console. “Should we expect more shooting at us in the near future, Captain?”
“Might be,” Ida said, not bothering to look that way. “Is that a problem, Ken?”
“It might be,” Ken said. “Jun and I didn’t sign up for this.”
“I can speak for myself, Ken,” Jun said.
“Both of you would have been sold on the prison market for pleasure service to work off your parents’ debts if not for me,” Ida said, looking between them. “I helped raise you two from the juveniles I found you as into the adults you are. You can leave any time you want but I’ll need some heads up.”
“Way to guilt us,” Ken muttered, going back to his console. He had been severely reprimanded for his performance during the battle against the faux-Chel fighters. It was weighing on the boy that he wasn’t up to the standard they needed.
How little he knew.
“It’s my job as the ship’s official mother, grandmother, captain, and Queen Bitch,” Ida said. “You still haven’t answered, Cassius.”
William hadn’t, noticeably, commented on whether he wanted me to stay or not. I suspected he thought it would have been better for everyone, him most of all, if I departed the Melampus and never tried to contact its crew again. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with him, but I had nowhere else to go where I gave the slightest about anyone. That, more than politics, was the big decider.
“I’m here for as long as the…issue…with my sister is unresolved,” I said, letting the implications hang in the air.
“Glad to hear it,” Ida said, reacting to the statement as if it was far less ambiguous. “I’ll expect you to take a team down to Shogun in order to speak with Matriarch Rin-O’Harra.”
That got William speaking. “You want him to speak with the Lady of Shogun?”
“I want you to go along with Clarice and any others you think need to go. I’d send her alone but I’m pretty sure we’d never see her again,” Ida explained.
“Clarice wouldn’t abandon the Melampus,” I said.
“I’m afraid they’d lock her up in an island mansion somewhere, under heavy guard, so she doesn’t fuck up the family’s situation any worse than she already has,” Ida said. “I know the Rin-O’Harra clan better than both of you and they’ll do just about anything for family. The just about ending where interfering with money or position start.”
“Criminals are like that,” William said, straightening his posture. “Untrustworthy and duplicitous.”
“You really live in your own little world, don’t you, William?” Jun said, looking up from her console.
“We’re not criminals,” William said, surprising me with his rejoinder. “We’re differently legal.”
I smiled at that.
Seconds later, the jump alarm echoed throughout the ship and we lurched from that dimension back to real space.
“Ah, leaving jumpspace,” Ida said, shaking her head. “No matter how many times you do it, you always want to throw u
p afterward. You know, in my day, we always used to keep little plastilight bags handy everywhere for any crew members who got sick.”
William shook his head. “Why did you stop?”
“Slightly cheaper just to clean up the mess,” Ida said.
Brick snorted. “Grounders.”
Honestly, jump travel didn’t bother me but I’d been modified like most long-term spacers to endure the problems related to it without difficulty. The fact there were still plenty of planetborn baseline human beings who took up trades in space despite the potential medical damage from persistent zero-g exposure, jump drive exposure, and other conditions spoke to how ubiquitous the concept of escaping your world was. Also, how few people could afford the things I took for granted as one of Crius’ elite.
“Oh well,” I said, typing away at the console. Seconds later, an image of Shogun appeared on the viewscreen.
Shogun was a blue world with no real continents per se, but millions of tiny islands spread across the planet’s surface. They’d actually lowered the sea level considerably by using superhaulers to carry frozen portions of the ocean up to the moon in order to terraform it. Even from space, though, artificial superstructures were visible that were far larger than anything nature had produced. The planet was lit up with millions of lights and countless ships were visible traveling to and from the planet as well as its innumerable space stations.
Shogun was one of the oldest settled worlds in Sector 7, rivaling Crius in terms of prestige and probably had been the world, which the original settlers who went on to form both my people as well as the Chel, had traveled through. It was a port planet that managed to maintain its neutrality not only during the war but also from the previous Crius expansions. The fact it had sworn allegiance to the Commonwealth when the dust settled reminded me of another fact my father had drilled into my head growing up. Shogun’s government had only one loyalty: money.
“The Slavers’ Planet,” William said, shaking his head. “Funny how I managed to always avoid setting foot on the actual world. Now, it looks like I’m not going to be able to avoid it any longer.”
“Nice of you to paint an entire world with such a broad brush, Baldur,” Ida said, her voice showing the slightest hint of disapproval. Ida rarely referred to anyone by name when on duty, but William remained the exception. Even then, it was always by his last name.
