Yellow Eyes lota-8

by John Ringo

  “So, yes,” Dwyer concluded, “Daisy is a member in good standing of the True Faith.”

  “Whew! So she’s human after all. That takes a load off my conscience.”

  “I didn’t say she was human, Captain. I decided she had a soul and, though I don’t think she was in need of salvation, her soul having no portion in original sin, I could hardly refuse her the sacraments of our mutual God.”

  The priest raised his glass and swirled its contents. “Except for the scotch, of course; that’s completely wasted on her. Poor thing.”

  “Well, that doesn’t really help me,” McNair muttered, looking extremely confused and inexpressibly sad, neither of those being expressions he would ever have permitted himself aboard ship.

  Dwyer looked hard at his ship’s captain. “Oh, dear. Tell me it isn’t so.”

  McNair sighed. “It’s so.”

  “For Daisy?”

  “You know anyone else on the ship with a beautiful face, big blue eyes and a thirty-eight inch, D cup chest? That gravity doesn’t affect in the slightest?”

  “Oh, dear,” the priest repeated uselessly.

  Without waiting for Dwyer, McNair reached over, took the bottle, and poured himself another drink.

  “When I awaken, she’s there for me. When I lie down to sleep she’s the last thing I see before I close my eyes. Quite a lot more often than I like to think about, she’s there after I close my eyes and before I open them in the morning.

  “She’s always there to talk, if I need to talk. She’s a great conversationalist, did you know that, Dan?”

  The priest nodded that, yes, he knew.

  “And she takes care of the ship… err, of herself, I suppose. When was the last time a ship’s captain had a ship that took care of all the little things for him?”

  McNair, seeing Dwyer’s glass was empty, added some ice to it and poured.

  The priest looked down into the glass and then, unaccountably, began to giggle. The giggle grew until it became a chortle. The chortle expanded to a laugh. The laugh took him over and shook him until he could barely sit his chair.

  “Oh, I can’t wait to dump this one on His Holiness’ desk.”

  The Indowy were a fairly imperturbable race. This may have explained why they took an immediate liking to the cats Davis had brought in to clean out the ship’s complement of rats. One of those cats, Morgen, purred happily under Sintarleen’s stroking palm.

  Being imperturbable, instead of jumping through his skin when the ship’s avatar appeared beside him, Sintarleen merely bowed his head in recognition.

  “Ship Daisy, may I help you?”

  “Maybe,” Daisy answered, after taking a seat to look the Indowy in the eye. “How familiar are you with cell regeneration and expansion from incomplete DNA samples?”

  The Indowy shrugged. “You refer to what we call, ‘inauspicious cloning.’ I am somewhat familiar with it. Why do you ask?”

  Daisy didn’t answer directly. Instead, she asked, “Have you opened your mail today?”

  Still stroking the cat, the Indowy replied, “Why no, Ship Daisy, I didn’t even check it. I almost never get any missives. My clan is dead, you see, all but the few representatives here aboard this vessel, and about one hundred transfer neuters and females on another planet far away. So there is really no one to write.”

  “No, no,” Daisy said, impatiently. “I mean your mail. Physical mail. Letters. Packages.”

  “Well, I am a little behind on my parts’ accounting and storage…”

  “Check please. There is something, some things, I have had sent to you. I would find them and bring them but…”

  “I understand,” Sintarleen said. “Will you wait here for a moment?”

  When the Indowy returned he was clutching a polka-dotted halter, a pair of high heeled shoes, and a small clear plastic bag containing what appeared to be blonde hair.

  “What are these things?” he asked of the ship’s avatar.

  “They belonged to someone, what the humans would call an ‘actress.’ She is possibly long dead. They are samples which should contain enough DNA, even if only traces, for you to create for me a body. It is amazing what one can find on eBay.”

  “Aiiiii!” the Indowy exclaimed, loudly enough to frighten off Morgen, the kitten. “What you ask is impossible, illegal. Why if the Darhel ever found out, the price they would exact from my clan is too horrible to contemplate.”

  “But,” Daisy pointed out, reasonably, “you have just admitted that your clan only exists on this ship, for any practical purpose. Do you not think that I can defend you from anything the Darhel might have?”

  “This is so,” Sintarleen admitted reluctantly. “But even so, there are things I would need to…”

  “The regeneration tank arrives next week,” finished Daisy, with an indecipherable smile. “It’s amazing what you can…”

  “… find on eBay,” the Indowy finished.

  The sun was just beginning to peek over Colon’s low skyline, its rays lighting up Lemon Bay, the Bahia de Limon, in iridescent streaks. The USS Des Moines glowed magnificently in the early morning light.

  Davis stood with the supply officer on the Cristobal pier to which CA-134 was docked, the two of them receipting for supplies.

  “Got to admit it; that yellow awning does look nice.”

  “I don’t mind the awning, Chief,” said the Chop. “I’ll even admit, reluctantly, that it’s kinda pretty. But those goddamned paisley coverings over the brows are just too fucking much.”

  The chief shrugged. “Take the good with the bad,” he said.

  “Speaking of good with bad, what the hell is this?” asked the Chop, pointing at a large box in Galactic packaging, resting on the dock.

  “Dunno, sir. I can’t even read the writing.”

  The chief bent down to look for a shipping label. He found something that might have been one, but the writing on this, too, was indecipherable.

  “Best have Sinbad look this over.”

  Davis pulled a small radio from his pocket. As he was about to press the talk button, he spotted the Indowy walking his way with a half dozen of his clanspeople in tow.

  “Sinbad, can you make this out?’ asked the chief, pointing at what was probably a shipping label.

  “I can,” answered the Indowy, looking down as usual, “but it really isn’t necessary. It’s for me.”

  “Oh. Well, what is it, Mister Sintarleen?”

  “It is hard to explain,” which was the truth. “It is for… manufacturing parts… and… ummm… assemblies. Yes, that’s it: assemblies,” which was also the truth, if not the whole of it.

  “Very well, Sinbad,” agreed the Chop, holding forth a clipboard and pen. “If you will sign here for it.”

  “I can’t see anything,” said Daisy. “I can’t sense anything. Are you sure it’s working?”

  Sintarleen gave an Indowy sigh. “Lady Daisy, you can’t sense or see anything because right now the tank is manipulating and selecting the scraps of DNA we gave it. When it has enough to make a full cell then the process will begin.”

  “And it will make me a body? A real, human, body?”

  “It will, if it works, if we have provided enough material. But I must warn you again, Lady Daisy, that it will have no mind. There are protocols built in to the machine, protocols I can do nothing about, that forbid the creation of colloidal sentiences by artificial means.

  “Instead of a brain it will have something very like your physical self. Simpler of course. Not really able to think on its own. All of its intelligence must come from you.”

  “That will be just fine,” Daisy agreed.

  “There is one further thing,” the Indowy insisted. “You will be connected with this… body… as soon as it starts to grow from a single cell. It will be under accelerated growth, but that growth will be irregular. Moreover, it will be, biologically, a human female body. Even in the tank it will be affected by human physiological processes. Those p
rocesses will affect you, Lady Daisy.”

  One thing you can say for having an AID run your galley, thought Chief Davis, you can be certain that the food is going to be first rate.

  It wasn’t that Daisy Mae physically made the omelets, or boiled the lobster, or flipped the steak. There were cooks and mess boys for that.

  Instead, Daisy bought the very best ingredients out of her slush fund and — while she did not routinely show herself in the galley itself — would appear there suddenly and without warning, cursing like a cavalry trooper over the shamefaced cook if a filet mignon approached half a degree past medium rare when medium rare had been ordered.

  And the coffee was always perfect. She ordered it fresh roasted from a little coffee plantation in the Chiriqui highlands, one of Digna’s family holdings as a matter of fact. Then Daisy insisted that the big brewers be scrubbed to perfection, the water poured in at the perfect temperature, and the brewing stopped at precisely the right moment.

  It probably didn’t hurt that she was paying the cooks a small bonus under the table. Then again, good cooks took pride in their work. Having the best materials to work with, to produce a better meal, only fed that pride.

  Actually, the coffee puzzled the chief. It was on the rationed list. And high end, gourmet coffee was on the serious rationed list. But there was always plenty of it and it was always perfect.

  The chief took his cup, placed it under the spigot and poured, half quivering with aesthetic joy as the rich aroma arose around him. Yum!

  Davis took his accustomed place at his customary table to a chorus of, “Mornin’, Chief…” “Hiya Chief…” “Good eats, Chief…” Nose stuck in that good, good cup of under-the-table coffee, Davis acknowledged the salutations with an informal wave of his hand.

  Without having to be told, one of the mess boys set a plate before Davis, the plate piled high with fried potatoes, a thick ham steak, and eggs over easy.

  Before the chief could dig in Daisy materialized in the seat opposite his. She may have rarely appeared in the galley, unless something was about to go wrong, but she made a point of making the rounds of the messes.

  “How’s breakfast, Chief Davis?’ she inquired.

  “First rate, as always, Daisy Mae. How’s our ship?”

  Daisy felt a little tingle, somewhere in her crystalline mind. Our ship. After subjective millennia of utter loneliness it meant more than she could say to belong, and not to be alone. This was true of both parts of her. That part which was the original CA-134 had spent a miserable couple of decades uncared for, unwanted and unloved as well.

  “I’m fine,” Daisy answered. “Well, mostly I am. But I think a couple of the ball bearings in number two turret need replacing. I was testing it last night and heard a squeak that really ought not to be.”

  “Get someone on it right after breakfast,” said the chief around half a mouthful of eggs.

  “And the deck between the PBMRs could use some cleaning,” she added innocently.

  Sintarleen checked the progress of the growing form in the tank. If I am reading this rightly, everything is perfect for this stage of development.

  Still, I don’t like the temperature fluctuations. And the hormonal surges are sometimes out of control. How do these people, the female ones anyway, maintain their sanity under these circumstances?

  As any human father could have told the Indowy, if asked, “the female ones, anyway,” typically did not. Nor did any males forced into close company with a thirteen-year-old girl.

  A happy mess made for a happy ship, believed Davis. Thus, he didn’t immediately understand the problem, the sour faces and grim expressions that met him in the chief’s mess.

  He shrugged and went to pour himself a cup of coffee. He could check into it later. He might even learn something about the problem at breakfast.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar and took a healthy sip.

  And immediately spat it out again. “Gah! That’s awful. What the fu — ”

  He stopped as his eyes came to rest on the calendar posted over the pot. Four dates were circled on that calendar.

  In red.

  Davis went to the sink and poured out the coffee without regret. Then he got on the ship’s intercom and announced, “Swarinski, I was looking over the Nuke deck earlier this morning. It’s filthy. Take a crew and get on it. Now.”

  The answer came back, “Chief Davis, I’m standing here, looking at it. The deck’s spotless.”

  “Scrub it anyway, Swarinski.”

  Interlude

  Boredom was for a time of unending routine. Boredom was not for the time after word had returned telling of the outright massacre of the first fleet to reach the new world of the threshkreen.

  Face buried in the Aldenat’ mush, Guanamarioch sensed something new in his messmates, similarly feeding around him. It was not anticipation, this new thing. It was something… something… something Guanamarioch remembered only dimly from his time in the pens as a nestling.

  The Kessentai thought back, trying to recall memories he had long suppressed, memories of his small nestling hindquarters against the wall of the pen, fighting for his life against a horde of siblings who had decided he looked much like lunch. He remembered the flashing needlelike teeth, the yellow blood that flowed from a dozen tiny slashes on his face, neck and flanks. He remembered a lucky slash of his own that had disemboweled one of those who sought to eat him.

  They had turned on that other one, then, turned on it and ripped it apart. That feeding had taken a long time, with the wounded one’s pitiful cries growing weaker as dozens clustered around, each taking a small bite.

  Guanamarioch too had eaten, lunging in to sink his teeth into his brother’s hams before shaking his tiny head and tearing a bloody gob of warm, dripping meat from the body.

  The God King had retreated to a corner then, bloody prize locked in the claws and jaws. There he had sat, trembling, alternately chewing and looking up to snarl and warn off any of the others who might seek to steal his prize.

  He remembered being afraid then, afraid that someone would take his meal and afraid, even more, that in the frenzy he might too be ripped apart while still living.

  Guanamarioch lifted his massive head from his mush bowl and looked around the mess room. No, there was no tremblings of fear among his clanskin. But then, neither was Guanamarioch shaking.

  Then something happened, something in itself trivial. A God King of about the same rank as Guanamarioch nudged the mush bowl of one slightly superior. The latter then immediately turned and tore the throat from the clumsy one. All the others present immediately grabbed their bowls and backed up towards the nearest wall or other vertical surface, each one snarling as he did so.

  Guanamarioch did the same, and realized, as he backed his haunches to the wall, that the news of these new thresh had them all terrified.

  He understood though. Never before had a fleet of the People met serious resistance from any but their own. To have a fleet, even a small one, almost completely destroyed was terrifying indeed.

  A door into the mess deck slid open with a slight whoosh. Through the door passed an oddly shaped robotic device. This glided across the deck silently. It then hovered lightly over the yellow-blood-soaked area of the mess where the clumsy Kessentai had had his throat torn open by another. The device fit the dimensions of the ship’s corridors and compartments well, leading Guanamarioch to think that this, too, was Aldenat’ technology.

  Singly and by twos, the others cleared out from the mess and formed in the corridor adjacent the mess. In a few minutes, only Guanamarioch and the killer remained, the latter staring madly at the corpse, apparently in contemplation of eating it. This was not, in itself, forbidden, of course; the ethos of the People demanded that thresh not be wasted.

  It was, however, forbidden to kill aboard ship during migration without permission.

  A senior God King, not the lord of the clan but a close assistant entered the mess
, followed by two cosslain, the superior normals that filled the job of noncommissioned officers within the Posleen host. The senior took in the entire compartment in a single sweeping glance before resting his yellow eyes on the corpse and the nearby killer.

  “Did you see what happened, Junior?” the demi-lord demanded.

  Guanamarioch bowed his head in respect. “I saw it, lord, but I did not understand it.”

  The senior turned his attention back to the killer. “For what reason did you break the shiplaw and kill this one?” he asked calmly.

  With apparent difficulty the murderer looked upward, away from the corpse, answering, “He nudged my feeding bowl.”

  “It is my judgment that this is insufficient reason to break the law of the People. It is further my judgment that this conduct merits termination of existence. Have you anything to say?”

  Sensing death, and unwilling to die without a struggle, the killer launched itself at the senior Kessentai, claws outstretched and fangs bared. The senior, however, had not reached his position within the clan by being slow and indecisive. Even while the lower God King began his leap, the senior had drawn his boma blade and begun to swing. The blade passed through the thick neck almost as if it were not there. When the body struck it did so in two pieces, dead.

  The senior looked at Guanamarioch as if measuring him for the recycling bins. At length, he decided that Guanamarioch had more value as a future leader than as a current meal.

  “This is not to be spoken of further,” the senior announced as he turned to leave.

  Chapter 8

  Diplomats are useful only in fair weather.

  As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.

  — Charles de Gaulle

  Department of State, Washington, DC

  The early morning sun shone brightly off the Potomac, sending scattered rays of light to bathe the Lincoln Memorial and the National Academy of Sciences. Some of that light, and it was perhaps the only brightness to the place, indirectly lit the walls of the Department of State where a meeting, judged by some to be important, was taking place.