Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  Sergeant Aarhus opened the door and the odor outside assailed my nostrils. I believe we all wished to take exception to Lady Bell’s last statement; but it was too late for cutting remarks.

  Silently, we headed for the receiving bay.

  22

  WHEREIN I BATTLE THE ENEMY WITH PRECIOUS METALS

  Waiting

  When I say we headed out silently, I mean as silently as possible. Though I am excellent at stealth in natural settings, it is most unreasonable to expect hard glass feet not to clack on solid tiles. The noise was enough to make me self-conscious; I also believe Lady Bell was glaring at me, though her lack of a face made it difficult to be certain. I mouthed the words, I am doing my best, then spent the rest of the journey staring down at my feet…which was just as well, considering the quantity of vile substances I had to circumnavigate on the floor.

  Once we reached the receiving bay, we chose separate hiding places close to the airlock door. I took a strategic position between a chest-high crate stacked with platinum ingots, and a container made of blue sheet-metal whose interior was littered with fish skeletons. At one time, the container must have been filled with sea water—the metal was crusted with salt deposits and the dried remains of lacy seaweed—but the water had evaporated and the fish had died of dehydration…or suffocation…or starvation…or sheer lack of hope. I found myself staring at their withered carcasses and feeling most teary-eyed over their undeserved fate; so I forced myself to turn away and grabbed a chunk of platinum from the other box, promising the ghosts of those fish I would hurl the heavy ingot with great strength at someone who truly deserved it.

  I settled down in my place, squeezing the cool platinum while I waited for Shaddill to arrive. It was too bad the hull was no longer transparent—I would have liked to observe the process of being sucked into the bowels of the stick-ship. But such was not to be. I could only crouch in Nervous Anticipation, trying to guess what was going on outside and doing a poor job of it. In my head I would say, Ten seconds from now, I shall hear something; but then I did not hear something, so I thought, Another five seconds and someone will come; but the five seconds passed without incident, whereupon I started counting to see how long it did take for something to occur, but I lost patience when I reached fifteen, so I crossed all my fingers and even my thumbs to force the Shaddill to do something, and I squeezed my eyes shut and everything…then I counted some more, then stared at my reflection in the platinum ingot to see how I looked when I was Fraught With Expectation, but there were too many smudges from my fingers on the metal, and I was just cleaning the ingot on my jacket sleeve when Unfettered Destiny struck something with a thud.

  Hah! I thought to myself, this is it! And despite the terrible wait, I did not let my brain become Tired And Distracted at all.

  The Enemy Arrives

  Events did not transpire immediately. After the bump (which I assumed was our ship settling onto a landing pad), there was a tedious delay of at least ten seconds before I heard noises in the airlock. Then the airlock took an unconscionably long time to perform its function, so that I just knew the awful Shaddill were playing foolish games punching the control buttons for mere entertainment rather than Getting Down To Business. At last, when I was so keyed with frustration I was ready to dash over and rip open the airlock with my bare hands, the door gave a resounding click and swung ponderously inward.

  An object was tossed into the room: a dull silver orb the size of my fist, sailing in a lazy arc upward, then down toward the floor. The object had WEAPON written all over it…not literally (as far as I could see) but I knew something unpleasant would happen when it struck the ground. I squinched quickly behind the crate of ingots, putting all that heavy platinum between me and the silver ball. However, because I was still trying to keep silent, I did not move quite speedily enough—my right arm and shoulder were still exposed when the ball hit the floor with a clink.

  I did not see or hear any spectacular result—no flash, no explosive boom. My unprotected arm simply went numb from shoulder to fingertips. I could see the arm was still there, but it had no sensation at all. Even worse, it had no strength; and that was the hand which had been holding the platinum ingot. Before I realized the danger, the ingot slipped from my limp fingers and dropped to the ground.

  Clunk!

  So much for lurking in secret. Without hesitation, I let forth a gasp of Poignant Distress and slumped into an aesthetically pleasing sprawl on the floor. Since I had accidentally revealed my presence to the Shaddill, I would let them believe they had bested me with their numbness device; that way they might not embark upon more drastic action to overpower me or my comrades. When they came to collect my unconscious body, I could still take them by surprise and rain punches on their villainous noses.

  I lay where I was, cleverly opening my eyes in tiny slits to observe what was going on. At first, I saw nothing; but I heard heavy footsteps walk cautiously out of the airlock and advance in my direction.

  None of my hidden comrades attacked. I did not know if they had fallen victim to numbness themselves or if they had been sufficiently shielded behind crates and were simply biding their time, waiting for the Shaddill to advance farther into the room. It was also possible there were multiple Shaddills to consider—if a single one ventured into the receiving bay while others remained in the airlock to provide covering fire, the situation required delicate handling. As for me, all I could do was lie still and wait…until I saw a pair of feet step around a box some four paces away.

  They appeared to be human feet. More precisely, they were feet wearing human-style boots—very much like the boots both Festina and Aarhus wore.

  Sturdy navy-issue boots.

  A Ghastly Realization

  The boots took a step toward me. My head lay at an angle that prevented me from seeing more than the person’s legs…but they looked very much like human legs enclosed in human trousers. Gray trousers. Gray trousers exactly like Festina’s—the color that denotes an admiral in the human fleet.

  I suspected this was not just an Eerie Coincidence.

  The person in gray made rustling noises: I could not see what this person was doing, but it sounded as if he or she was rooting inside a jacket pocket. Then a man’s voice said in conversational tones, “It’s Oar. We’ve got her.”

  No doubt he was speaking to someone else via a communication device. This in itself was enough to give me chills—confirmation that these people were looking for me in particular. But even more terrifying was how he spoke: not in English, but in my own language. The tongue I had learned from infancy, the language of my mother and my sister and all the teaching machines on Melaquin.

  Suddenly, I had a terrible thought. Those teaching machines had been built by the Shaddill…and I knew our current language was not what my ancestors spoke when they first arrived from Earth.

  What if all this time—from my very birth and from the births of untold generations of my glass predecessors—we had been speaking the Shaddill’s own tongue? What if they had created the teaching machines to make us over in their own image? Our flesh-and-blood ancestors could not have prevented it; they were mortals who died in their natural time, and after that, our only instructors were the machines. Perhaps somewhere on Melaquin, in some well-lit Ancestral Tower, members of the first glass generation still remembered words from ancient human tongues…but those ancestors had not made sufficient effort to pass on the words to subsequent generations, and now we were thoroughly immersed in the language of our enemy.

  In a horrid way, I was a Shaddill.

  I hoped that beneath the gray pants, the man in front of me did not have glass legs.

  I Make First Contact With The Shaddill

  The man stepped closer. Indeed, he came near enough to nudge me with his foot. I let him do so; he gave a satisfied grunt, then turned away. That was the moment I swept my right leg in front of his ankles, while kicking at the back of his knees with my other foot. His knees buckled most s
atisfactorily—he fell backward on top of me, his head striking my stomach with a satisfying thump.

  It was an Earthling head with genuine hair. Not my lovely glass species at all.

  My right arm was still entirely numb. However, I threw my left around the man’s throat in an arm-bar and squeezed tight. He tried to yell, but could draw no air. Desperately, he grabbed my arm with both hands and tried to pull it away. If I had possessed a functional right hand to reinforce the armbar, he never would have pried me loose. As it was, he still had to work hard for it—after five seconds, he was just able to inhale, readying himself for a shout, when a large orange hand clamped down hard on his mouth.

  Lajoolie. I had not heard the tiniest whisper of her approach.

  She was not quite so silent in finishing the man off—one cannot throw eight successive palm-heels into a man’s solar plexus without making noticeable thumps, not to mention the “Whuf!” sounds that emerge from a man’s mouth no matter how thoroughly you have him muffled—but the noises were scuffly and vague, rather than clear-cut evidence of a fight. If other persons were listening, I hoped they would think the man was merely struggling to drag my unconscious body out into the open…and indeed, a moment later, a woman’s voice called, “Do you need a hand with her?”

  Lajoolie looked at me helplessly. The words had been spoken in my own language; Lajoolie did not know what had been said, and no doubt feared it was something like, “I know you have pummeled my partner, and now I will shoot you like dogs.”

  I gave Lajoolie a reassuring smile and called back in a throaty whisper, “Yes, come help.” One would never pretend it sounded exactly like the man, but my performance was good enough to fool the unseen woman—her footsteps came slowly out of the airlock, moving in our direction.

  As she approached, there was time to inspect the man Lajoolie and I had just bludgeoned. His hair was jet black, cut close to the skull, and he sported a fussily trimmed goatee; his skin was golden, about halfway between Aarhus’s light pinkness and Festina’s deep tan. As for his clothes, they were indeed a Technocracy admiral’s uniform—something that raised important questions, but I had no time to ponder such issues. The man’s female colleague would soon be upon us and…

  And…

  The man was not breathing. In fact, he had gone quite limp; I could not remember him moving so much as an eyelid since Lajoolie finished hitting him.

  Oh dear, I thought, the League of Peoples is not going to like this.

  I Make Second Contact With The Shaddill

  The man’s female partner was almost upon us. Silently, Lajoolie slipped out of sight behind the crate of platinum. As for me, I was left as I had been while trying to choke the foe: lying on my back with the man slumped on top of me.

  Knowing that any second, the Shaddill woman would come around the corner and see what had happened, I used my good hand to snatch up the ingot I had dropped earlier. When the woman appeared—a beefy red-faced human with hair of stringy white, her body clad in admiral’s gray—I hurled the chunk of metal with all my strength straight into her stomach.

  The impact made a satisfying thump. Her shoulders jerked in a sharp spasm, but she did not buckle over. Instead, she reached toward her belt where a pistol hung in a holster; I recognized the gun as a hypersonic stunner, the type carried by human Explorers. Such a weapon had murdered my sister and nearly killed me as well. Therefore, I was desperately trying to roll away from the line of fire, when a slim brown hand slammed the pistol out of the woman’s fingers.

  The slim brown hand was attached to Festina’s arm.

  A moment later, a slim brown fist attached to Festina’s other arm caught the woman with a cracking blow to the jaw. The woman’s head snapped sideways, but she showed no sign of being hurt. In fact, it was Festina who yelled, “Fuck!” and jerked her fist away as if in great pain. Even so, my Faithful Sidekick went back on the offensive within a split-second: she slammed her forearm across the woman’s chest while simultaneously sweeping a leg behind the woman’s knees. The alien admiral woman toppled backward, striking the floor with a bang. Then Aarhus and Uclod were there, pounding and stomping and generally committing mayhem until the woman lay still.

  “Damn!” Uclod panted. “That was one tough honey.”

  “Her partner was not tough at all,” I said. “He is no longer breathing.”

  “Christ!” Festina cried. She raced toward me and dropped to her knees, touching her fingers to the fallen man’s throat. Her face turned even more anxious; after probing the man’s neck at several points, she said, “I can’t find a pulse. Shit!”

  With desperate urgency, she dragged the man off me, flat onto the floor. Kneeling beside him, she tipped back his head, blew two breaths into his mouth, then began pushing down on his chest. Under her breath she whispered, “One and two and three and four and five and…”

  “Oh, missy,” Uclod said, hovering behind Festina’s shoulder, “this is not good. They only had zappers and stun-grenades. We had no justification for using deadly force…”

  Lajoolie, still crouching beside the crate of platinum, let forth an anguished sob. “I just…” She buried her face in her hands.

  Uclod rushed to her side, calling out to the whole room, “It’s not her fault. She didn’t know her own strength.”

  “I do,” she moaned, “I do know my own strength. Over and over again, they told me never to hit people or else…or else my brother…” She sobbed and crumpled.

  “I’ve got bad news,” Sergeant Aarhus called from a few paces away. “This woman isn’t breathing either.”

  He was squatting beside the red-faced admiral; he had placed his hand on her throat in the same manner as Festina had touched the man. “No pulse,” he said.

  “Both of them?” Festina broke off pumping the man’s chest and sat back on her heels. “Shit—the League is going to love this.”

  “Yes,” agreed Aarhus. “To lose one opponent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

  Festina stared at the man she had just been attempting to revive. “How the hell could we kill them both?”

  “Perhaps these Shaddill are shamefully weak and fragile,” I suggested.

  “These people aren’t Shaddill,” she told me. “This man is Jhimal Rhee, Admiral of the Brown. The woman is Gunsa Macleod, Admiral of the Orange. They’re members of the navy’s High Council; I’ve met them a few times.”

  “Oh goody,” Aarhus said, “I just helped snuff a high admiral. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ll bet that’s a court-martial offense.”

  “Rhee and Macleod?” Uclod asked. “Killing them isn’t an offense, it’s a humanitarian service. We should all get a bounty.”

  The little man was holding Lajoolie, stroking her shoulders…and for once, she was no taller than he, for she had sunk to her knees and was hunched over almost to the floor. She wept piteously—the sort of weeping when the weeper seems terrified to make the tiniest sound, so it is all choked whimpers and sniffles. Uclod squeezed her and spoke gently. “It’s all right, sweetheart, you don’t have to worry. You’ve read the files on these bastards. Rhee and Macleod were two of the worst on the council. Rhee arranged for that colony to starve to death, remember? He tampered with the food shipment schedules. When the colonists were dead, he sent in settlers of his own and claimed the whole planet for himself. As for Macleod, she killed her first three husbands for their money. The files absolutely proved it. Remember that, honey? Rhee and Macleod were both dangerous nonsentients, and the League doesn’t give a self-righteous crap what you do to them.”

  “I do not understand,” I whispered to Festina. “If these humans were dangerous non-sentients, how could they journey through space? Would the League not prevent them from doing so?”

  “Damn right it would.”

  She stared at the man, Admiral Rhee, lying motionless before her. Suddenly, she reached for his jacket, ripped up the slap-tab, and tore open his shirt. In the pit of his
stomach, where Lajoolie had struck him so many times, his skin had burst under the force of the blows. Beneath lay a crushed mass of wires and electronic circuitry.

  “Okay,” she said to everyone in the room, “I have good news and bad news…”

  The Shaddill And The Admiralty

  It did not take long to ascertain that the red-faced woman was also a person of mechanical construction—Aarhus rubbed her arm hard against the sharp edge of a sheet metal container and the woman’s skin split open, revealing a collection of shiny steel armatures.

  “You see, honey?” Uclod murmured to Lajoolie. “They were just robots. You didn’t do anything wrong. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”

  Lajoolie made an indeterminate noise.

  “Makes me feel better,” Festina said. “I thought I was losing my edge when I socked that bitch in the jaw and damned near broke my fist.”

  “Of course,” Aarhus said, “you have to wonder why the Shaddill have perfect copies of two Technocracy admirals.” He touched his fingertips to the robot woman’s cheek. “The skin feels amazingly authentic—best meat-puppet I’ve ever seen. Bet she even had a neck-pulse before we bashed the crap out of her.”

  “What I’d like to know,” Festina said, “is whether the real Rhee and Macleod are still back on New Earth…or if they’ve actually been missing for years.”

  Uclod blinked. “You think these robots had replaced the real admirals? Like…the originals had been bumped off and these robots were the ones sitting on the High Council?”

  “It’s possible,” Festina said. “Your files claim the original Rhee and Macleod were both murderers. Okay: that means they weren’t sentient. The Shaddill could cold-bloodedly kill the two of them without upsetting the League. Once the real Rhee and Macleod were gone, android duplicates could quietly step in.”