Her teacher had shown her a way to overcome that little shortcoming. All she had to do was rewire her synapses, taking entire gray matter clusters and forging new connections between them. All humans did that to some degree, but those changes usually took years, not minutes or seconds. The metabolic cost was extreme; the long-term consequences would be permanent and irreparable. So far, her body was wearing out faster than she was altering her brain.
Somebody who was as smart as she thought she was would have quit already Maybe becoming a Devil Dog had drastically reduced her IQ. Or maybe her damn stubbornness had finally gotten her somewhere from which there was no coming back. FUBAR or not, she wasn’t going to stop now.
She pushed her mind with all she had left, and her body finally quit on her.
Her medical implants came into action when her heart stopped. If she’d still been in the Navy, nothing would have saved her, but Marines carried combat implants designed to keep you going even in the midst of multiple organ failures, if only for long enough to pull a trigger a few more times, or turn a dead man’s ten seconds into a full minute. Electrical shocks kick-started her heart as drugs were released into her bloodstream. Lisbeth’s limp body convulsed once, twice, then fell still again for several moments. Her status carat went from red to black – and then started blinking red again. She came back from the dead, drawing a desperate breath in as she sat up, eyes wide. A few seconds went by, marked only by her labored breathing.
Finally, she giggled. Coming from her parched lips, her laughter sounded like a harsh cackling, or even a death rattle.
It only hurts when I laugh, she thought, and giggled-cackled again.
Her body was tingling all over. Her head was spinning as she saw and understood a whole gaggle of new things. She felt a trickle of energy of unknown origin passing through her and grounding itself on the Corpse-Ship. Systems came to life. One of them was the Mind-Killer. It was a weapon designed to destroy those who couldn’t withstand warp space. A perfect way to get rid of the Snowflakes, in other words. She laughed like the madwoman she’d become.
“Lisbeth.”
An imp call? No, she couldn’t take calls anymore. She was incommunicado; the Scholar had seen to it. The word bounced around inside her head. Incommunicado. Never used it in a sentence before. Probably never use it again. Or the words ‘and’ and ‘the’ for that matter. Where she’d been before her implants brought her back, there were no words. She cackled like the Wicked Witch she had become.
“Lisbeth!”
“Busy,” she said. “No rest for the wicked. Wicket. Sticky wicket. Stinky wicket. Wicked stinky.”
“Snap out of it, Major Zhang!”
The lessons she’d learned during the abbreviated Marine officer’s course had sunk in enough to bring her back to her senses, at least for a little while. Lisbeth found herself inside the shared illusion that Heather had used to reach her, a few hours and a lifetime ago. The spy was back in her armchair; she looked shocked when she saw Lisbeth.
“You look…” Heather said.
“Like death warmed over? Like shit?”
“I was going to say ‘like I feel’ but I don’t think that’s fair to you. Whatever you’re going through is worse.”
Lisbeth giggled. “It’s not so bad. Just finished beating my brain into the right shape.”
She felt… weird. Things that weren’t funny made her want to laugh. Everything seemed… lighter, less important. As if she was living in a simulation, a game, and nothing really mattered all that much. Lisbeth wondered if that was how the Snowflakes felt. That would make them insane and not really responsible for their actions. She would kill them all anyway. After all, she was probably insane and not responsible for her actions, either. She giggled again.
“I hate to ask you for help, Major,” Heather said, maybe hoping using her rank again would help keep Lisbeth steady. Didn’t work. “But we’re running out of time. I found the control center for the entire habitat. A Tah-Leen is in charge of the whole thing. It’s been lobotomized, sort of. But if we can reach it and…”
“Sure,” Lisbeth interrupted her. “No problem. I can handle that.”
She plucked the information right out of Heather’s mind, not noticing her friend’s face contorted in sudden pain. Lisbeth finally had a target, the mind-killer weapon, and a brain that was ready to use it.
The Monitor was as sad as the dead Pathfinder. Maybe even sadder, and worse still, it had no idea why it felt that way. Putting it out of its misery felt like an act of kindness.
“Done.”
“Done with what?” Heather asked.
Why does she look so worried? Lisbeth wondered.
“Done with the Monitor. Done-zo. It’s dead. Dead-o. Killed it like a mad dog. It’s pushing up daisies. Searched and Destroyed, yessir. First to fight. Oorah.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Oh shit indeedio. No, the Pathfinder said that to me. Why ‘oh, shit?’”
“I didn’t want you to kill it! You just destroyed the system administrator of this entire habitat!”
That got through to Lisbeth even in her current semi-insane state.
“Oh, shit.”
* * *
The lights flickered. They flickered everywhere, but Fromm didn’t know that yet. He still figured it was bad news. Redundant systems were supposed to make that sort of thing impossible in a properly-maintained space facility. Any malfunction meant trouble, the kind that could kill you.
Charlie Company was making its way towards the small inhabited section of the gargantuan space station. Heather had informed him that the Tah-Leen numbered less than a hundred individuals, although each of them controlled as many as several dozen bodies. For all that, there were too few of them to occupy more than a tiny fraction of the massive structure. Most of the aliens were gathered in a relatively contained area, along with however many Lampreys were still alive. From what Heather had said, there wouldn’t be many of the latter. Even as they sent the zombie drones after his company, the Snowflakes had been busily torturing the remaining Lampreys to death.
The Tah-Leen were fairly close to the Brunhild, where the rest of their human ‘guests’ had retired for the night. The plan was to take the aliens out before they knew what was happening. It assumed that a pack of Marines armed with improvised melee weapons could overpower aliens equipped with technology that put normal Starfarers to shame. But he was willing to give it a go. Heather was inside their system and she had a few cards up her sleeve.
If that flickering had happened all over the habitat, they’d just lost the element of surprise.
Heather called him a few moments later and confirmed his fears.
“Just had a hiccup,” she said. “The Tah-Leen know something is going on.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Keep following the route I sent you. I’m going to try and clear the way for you, and keep the Snowflakes too busy to hurt anybody. I may hit some snags along the way, though.”
Fromm wondered how many casualties those ‘snags’ would inflict on his command, but didn’t bring it up. Everybody was doing what they could.
“Be careful,” he told her.
“I will. June’s running interception for me, and Zhang’s gone on a killing spree. If everything goes well, you guys won’t have anything to do by the time you get here.”
“Wouldn’t mind that one bit.”
“Not making any promises, though.”
“No worries. See you soon.”
He could tell she wanted to scold him for making promises he might not live to keep.
“Okay, Peter,” she said instead “See you soon.”
Fourteen
The Hierophant was planning the next stage of the games when the lights went out.
All that was left of Syndic Boosha was a collection of internal organs, neatly organized on a metal table covered with the former leader’s uncured hide. A cleaning robot vacuumed off the last unseemly droplets of vascular
fluid that had spilled out during the procedure. The Lhan Arkh had lived through most of disassembling process, until the Hierophant grew bored and put an end to the miserable creature’s existence.
Lampreys weren’t very satisfying victims. Their perpetually grim outlook on life was to blame; the Lhan Arkh saw existence itself as a series of struggles between competing memes and species, culminating in temporary victories that soon devolved into new struggles. Beneath that cyclical worldview was a dejected certainty that there was no meaning to existence: nothing really mattered, and entropy ruled reality. Torturing the aliens only produced a modicum of animal suffering, followed by catatonia. Syndic Boosha had been beyond pain before the Hierophants – five of its twenty-seven expressions of individuality had been involved in the operation – had gotten even halfway through the organ removal process. The other twenty-two reported similarly unsatisfying results on other victims. A hurried melding allowed them all to share their experiences and hold a virtual conference to discuss what to do with the Americans.
The zombie attack – the concept itself, borrowed from the Earthlings’ own charming mythology, had been amusing in a quaint way – hadn’t done as much damage as they’d expected. In fact, the damned Marines’ survival rate had been as surprising as it had been frustrating. And the damn human warriors had dared to cheat. That still sent ripples of rage through all the Hierophant’s personas.
The Americans would pay for that, and their suffering would not be over any time soon. The Tah-Leen’s medical technology could keep a toy alive for quite some time, and unlike Lampreys, humans didn’t have the option to flee into catatonia. With a little finesse and a sprinkling of hope here and there, one could prolong their torment almost indefinitely.
They’d played with humans a few times before – small merchant vessels that as far as anyone outside Xanadu knew had vanished without a trace – and they’d learned quite a bit from them before using them up. They’d already started on a few select victims they’d picked up during the welcoming party. Former ambassador Llewellyn had been one of the lucky few who died during the first day.
Suffering was all the Celebration of Special Uniqueness had left. That, and an eternity trapped with their peers in this palace turned prison. The best way to lessen one’s misery was to spread it among others, and the Tah-Leen had made an art form out of it.
“Cowboys and Indians,” one of its personas suggested. “We can ride to battle as heroic braves and introduce the Marines to the tortures the noble Native Americans inflicted on the monsters who dared steal their ancestral lands.” A bit of mock-outrage and self-righteousness always added some spice to their games. His personas had spent some time listing the Lampreys’ many sins in between rounds of physical torture; humans were even more vulnerable to that sort of psychological torment.
“That might be nice,” said another one, a human female version, and everyone else knew the words meant she thought it was a subpar proposal and that what she was about to offer would be much better. “Although I would like to have them fight among themselves instead. Divide the Marines into two teams and have them battle each other to the death. Threatening the civilians would probably be inducement enough. A few demonstrations, like what we did to their traitor, might be required, but that would be amusing in itself.”
“Dear selves, if I may change the subject for a moment, I need to bring something to your attention,” another one said. He – he was regrettably stuck on a single gender, across every form he picked – was something of a stick-in-the-mud. “I’ve been monitoring the activities of the Scholar and the Seeker. It is clear that they are using human pawns against each other, rather than for the amusement of the Especially Unique.”
“We are all aware,” the Prime Hierophant said, a note of warning in its voice as it took over the Grinning Budai and made him its own. Unlike the rest of its personas, the Prime had no gender and few set characteristics. It had perfected the development of fluid identities beyond what its peers or even its lesser manifestations could achieve. It could be everything and everyone, changing at the slightest whim. On occasion, it wondered why such power hadn’t resulted in anything resembling happiness. It was never satisfied with what it was, never content and complete. At this point, its only source of solace was the exercise of power over others, including other versions of itself.
All its individual expressions feared the Prime, for it alone could create and dismiss them. The discards only lived on as shared memories, never to experience freedom again. It was as close to death as any Tah-Leen had faced since the Fall had stranded ninety-three warp-intolerant survivors in Xanadu. Having forgone procreation millennia before, those eternally-unhappy few were all the Tah-Leen that would ever live. And for seventy-nine thousand years, they had dwelt in the Habitat and played their games.
The Prime considered the situation. This particular event had been more exciting than most, in no small part because of the quarrel between the Scholar and the Seeker, but it would all be over soon, except for the extended torture session at the end. After that, the struggle to make each day even slightly different from the previous one would start anew.
“I do not see a problem,” it finally said. That should have been the end of the discussion.
“I think you are overlooking a few things,” the annoyingly pragmatic persona pressed on. “For one, these renegades are giving their pawns more access to our secrets than is prudent or safe. They are endangering the entire Celebration.”
“Some barely-sapient primitives cannot pose a threat,” the Prime said.
“Perhaps. But consider this, Greatest of All Selves: I believe the Scholar and the Seeker plot to do more than reduce each other’s status. I think at least one of them is seeking to commit murder. To slay a Prime, not just a few extensions.”
They killed each other for sport all the time, but the Primes were held sacrosanct. To fully destroy one of them would be a crime beyond their most depraved urges. Even the Monitor, the worst of them all, had been spared that fate. The Diversity must be preserved; there were only ninety-three True Individuals in a galaxy filled with meaningless hordes of lesser beings, and diminishing that number diminished them all.
“Let me see,” the Prime ordered. The stubbornly male extension opened his mind, allowing the Hierophant to access not only his memories but his entire thought processes. The upstart’s theory had some merit, but the way this expression of itself had evolved was… undesirable. Individuality could only be carried so far, and by refusing to accept the fluidity of gender and the importance of the games, this one had proved himself to be unworthy. The body collapsed like a suddenly unstrung puppet as his memories were fully absorbed into the Prime. His personality was simply erased from the Core, ceasing to exist altogether.
“That was unpleasant,” it said when it was done digesting the mental meal. Everyone else agreed heartily. “He had a point, mind you. Three of you will abandon the games and proceed to investigate the matter. The rest of us will…”
The lights went out. The sudden darkness lasted for a fraction of a second, but that was long enough to send a thrill of terror through the Hierophant in all its manifestations.
The lights never flickered at the Habitat. No major systems had failed for even an instant for untold millennia. True, maintenance had grown lax, and much of the volume of their great palace had been abandoned to make sure the rest continued to function normally. Even by the most pessimistic estimates, however, the Tah-Leen could expect to live in the style they were accustomed to for no less than another hundred thousand years. Invaders, saboteurs and spies had all failed to disturb the peaceful harmony of the True Individuals. Until now.
The Hierophant saw the shock and near-panic it felt reflected in the expressions of all its personas. Its first move, when it managed to overcome its paralysis, was to contact the Monitor, only to discover that the guardian and keeper of the entire Habitat for Unique Diversity was dead.
Two of its extensio
ns fainted outright at the news. The rest were nearly as traumatized. It was as if Oblivion itself had finally come, an uninvited guest in the midst of all their celebrations, here to finish what the Fall had begun.
The Monitor’s death was not immediately catastrophic. All systems in the habitat were automated, of course, and essentially ran themselves. The Monitor’s chief function was to handle any eventualities that mindless machines couldn’t deal with, and to ensure the security of the whole. With it gone, however, Xanadu was hideously vulnerable to malicious interference and the ravages of entropy.
The time for games was over. The Hierophant sent out a mental command to activate the Executioner devices scattered throughout the station. Their killing signals would destroy all the noxious Americans in the Habitat and in the civilian vessel docked to it; the destroyers would be dealt with later. It felt wasteful to kill them so swiftly, but the damn apes must be stopped before they caused any further damage.
Nothing happened. It tried again, to no avail. Something was blocking him. Or someone. Humans were loose in the Conduit!
That cold realization was swiftly followed by a second murder. A fully actualized Tah-Leen this time. The dead individual and all its extensions were gone, its uniqueness extinguished. Whoever had done the deed had struck at the Prime Core that contained its very essence. Each Core was jealously guarded and protected. Destroying them was impossible, and yet it had happened.
Only ninety-one Tah-Leen remained.
What plague had the humans brought to Xanadu?
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 25
