by B. V. Larson
“Uh-huh,” said Claver, backing up a step and fondling the computer scroll behind his back. I could tell he was going for the key which was no longer there. It was all I could do to suppress a grin.
Claver kept playing it up, smiling and saying polite things. Finally, I figured I’d had enough.
“What are you rustling with back there?” I demanded harshly, stepping forward.
Claver looked innocent. “What? I’m working, do you mind?”
I peered over his shoulder and the guards loomed close.
“He’s got something!” I shouted. “Right there! Guards!”
They’d been bored up until now, but they didn’t hesitate to relieve the tedium once I’d given them an opening. Shock sticks came out, and were raised high crackling with lavender-green power. They came down onto Claver, and he slumped to the deck, twitching.
“Here it is,” I said loudly, holding up the Galactic Key in front of his eyes. “He was after this. Good thing he’s clumsy. Those manacles are foreign-made. He might have released himself with this thing.”
Claver was beyond speech, too stunned by dual touches of the shock-sticks to respond. His eyes, however, tracked the key in my grasp. I was sure he couldn’t believe he’d missed grabbing it or that I’d spotted him. That was just fine by me. He’d killed countless people with his scheme. Having a little fun was the least I could do to avenge the dead.
The guards hauled him rudely to his feet. They were glaring at Claver, and I was smiling.
Only Natasha was frowning at me. She knew me too well.
“James, stop fooling around and fix him. I need his help.”
“All right, all right,” I said. I threw a cup of water into his face and gave him a light slap on the cheek.
“I didn’t say you should beat on him!” Natasha complained.
“He’s fine. Tough as nails. A few kilovolts are nothing a Germanica man can’t bounce back from.”
When Claver could stand on his feet unaided, he glowered at us all.
“I’m done,” he said. “You and the Tau can all burn up for all I care.”
“You’ll die if you don’t cooperate,” I told him. “The Imperator will execute you without a qualm.”
“Don’t you think I know that, fool?” he asked me. Some of his bravado had returned in the form of a gleam in his eye. “I’m not really Claver. I’m a copy. You don’t think I would take all these risks without knowing I couldn’t be taken out, do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s your problem, McGill,” he said. “You think outside the box—but only an inch or so. Me—hell, I don’t even know where the box is, boy.”
I frowned at him not understanding and not at all liking that I wasn’t getting it.
Claver made his move then. He reached backward and grabbed the sidearm of the guard on his left—it was an insane move as his hands were still locked behind him.
He squeezed the trigger and cut a smoking line across the man’s leg. The second guard whipped out his pistol and burned Claver down.
He flipped around onto his back and lay there, gasping.
I put my hands on my knees and bent lower, staring into his face.
“You pretty much killed yourself,” I said. “Who’s the fool now? Turov won’t revive you a second time.”
Claver struggled to speak. The smell of burnt flesh tickled my nose, but I didn’t pull back. I wanted to hear what he had to say.
He managed to lick his lips and wet them with fresh blood. “I’m not Claver,” he said. “Not the real one. Pray you don’t meet me again, McGill.”
That was it. He died on the spot.
Natasha had her arms crossed and her face twisted up into a frown. “You couldn’t have kept him alive for five more minutes?”
I looked at her. “I didn’t grab a gun, he did! He was trying to get himself free before, and I stopped him. Why doesn’t someone else keep their eyes on the ball?”
The two guards looked sheepish. The one with the burnt leg was limping badly, and I ordered him to head for blue deck for a spray of skin cells.
When we were alone, Natasha sighed. “I think I can do this alone,” she said. “He didn’t give me the exact protocols—but he gave me several ideas as to how to find them. I’ll program a loop trying every frequency until I find it. Then I’ll do a combinatory sequence—we’ll find it by brute force if we have to. After all, I’m ninety percent of the way there.”
“Good,” I said. “What do you think he meant about being a copy?”
Natasha looked at me in surprise. “You didn’t get that? He means he’s been duplicated. He’s been revived elsewhere.”
I frowned. “How could he know that?”
She shrugged. “Probably his mind was stored on another system somewhere. Wherever the data has been residing, it’s been updating since his last revive. That’s why he remembered being revived elsewhere, but not dying. Our system picked up the most recent copy of his mind and rebuilt him here.”
The idea horrified me. “What we had here was a clone, then? An illegal copy? That’s a Galactic Offense!”
Natasha shrugged. “Don’t act outraged. You’ve performed a few Galactic crimes yourself. And remember that I might have a clone, too, out in the Zeta Herculis system. She’s probably frozen or fried by now—but we might never know the truth.”
For some reason, this kind of talk disturbed me. I guess I’d believed that I was the one and only true James McGill. That when I died and returned, it was more like I’d dreamed one life and awakened in another. But to accept that there were multiple copies of Claver running around—that dashed my universe to pieces.
“I’ve got to stop thinking about it,” I said, sitting down and rubbing my temples.
Fortunately, a call came in from Imperator Turov that drove away everything else I’d been worrying about.
“McGill,” she said, “report to me immediately.”
“Sorry sir,” I said, wincing.
“For what?”
“Sorry about Claver. We couldn’t stop him from killing himself.”
“I don’t care about that. The ship that’s been lurking around the system has made contact. I need you here immediately.”
I got to my feet and headed to the door. It opened, and I took long strides toward the lift.
“On my way to the command module, sir,” I said into my headset.
“No—come to tactical command. That’s where I am.”
I frowned. I hadn’t even checked my tapper to locate her, but now that I did I saw she was indeed in tactical control.
“What’s going on, Imperator?” I asked. “What do the Nairbs want?”
“It’s not the Nairbs, James,” she said. “It’s not the Galactics, either. I need your help because you’ve talked to these people before. Get to my position. Turov out.”
Alarmed, I clanked quickly toward tactical control. If the ship wasn’t from the Empire, who could it be? What could Turov possibly mean by saying I’d talked to them before?
An answer formed in my mind that I didn’t like—but which I felt in my heart had to be correct.
I picked up the pace, running full speed through the passages. Engaging my exoskeleton, I could barely control the pounding metal legs.
I crashed past a pair of light troopers, dashing them into the walls and shouting I was sorry—but I didn’t slow down.
If I was right, there was no time to lose.
-37-
When I reached tactical control, Turov was waiting for me. The screen on the aft wall showed the situation clearly—she didn’t have to say a word.
A looming figure filled the screen. It was alien and bulky. There was an indescribable aura of menace about the being. Something about the way its thick dark tentacles drifted and rasped the deck around it was menacing.
The being was a cephalopod—better known to the troops of legion Varus as a “space squid”. I’d believed them all to be wiped o
ut. A year back, I’d witnessed hell-burners falling on their ocean-covered world. The life there had been removed leaving it ready for what the Galactics called a “reseeding.”
Every commanding officer we’d managed to revive thus far was present in fire control. Turov, Graves and even Leeson were there. No wonder they’d called for me. Except possibly for Turov herself, I couldn’t think of three less capable diplomats. They were fighters—killers—but they hardly knew how to schmooze.
I looked at Turov, and her dark eyes returned my gaze steadily. I could tell she was scared but hiding it well. She looked too young to wear such a calculated expression.
“Specialist McGill,” she said officiously. She waved toward the creature on her wall. “Meet Ambassador Glide—at least, that’s how our translation systems have interpreted the meaning of his name.”
“Your Excellency,” I said, nodding to the image on the wall.
Turov flashed me a tiny smile. I knew that she was happy I’d responded diplomatically.
“Let me explain the situation,” she said. “The Cephalopod warship in this system has come to visit us unannounced. Due to past associations and possible misunderstandings, they feel that they’re technically at war with the Galactic Empire.”
My eyes were as big around as boiled eggs by this time. The squid vessel was a warship? That meant the planet the Nairbs had burned away had to be a colony, not a homeworld. Further, the presence of a warship indicated they had to have another basis of operations in the area.
My mind jumped to conclusions. What if when we’d met up with the squids we’d made a terrible miscalculation? We’d assumed they were a single-planet species. In Frontier 921, multi-world civilizations were very rare. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, Earth with her lone small colony outpost on Zeta Herculis was the only level 2 civilization in the region.
Could all of that have been a mistake? Looking at the squid which so far had remained silent, I could see he was indeed in a ship built for his kind. There was a sloshing tank of water under his body, buoying him up. Cephalopods were amphibious but more at home in water than on land.
“It was only one of their colonies…” I said aloud.
Graves and Turov looked alarmed while Leeson squinted his eyes at me suspiciously.
“Specialist,” Turov said loudly. “Let me explain why you’re here. The Ambassador demanded to meet everyone who’d witnessed the events that occurred at Zeta Herculis, and refuses to believe only Graves here was aware of the details—”
The squid lifted a single thick tentacle and spoke. “Wait.”
We all looked at him.
“Let the large being speak,” the squid said. “I wish to follow its thought processes by sifting through its output directly.”
Turov cast me a worried look. I was pretty sure she was already regretting giving me an invitation to her party.
“Very well,” she said. “Explain yourself, McGill.”
“I was just theorizing aloud,” I said. “My apologies. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”
“You have interrupted,” said the squid, “but that’s immaterial as the proceedings thus far have been fruitless. Complete your statement, being.”
“Uh…well, I was going to say that it all makes sense to me now. If you squids had one large spaceship back in the Zeta Herculis system, we should have known you might have more of them. Since you were capable of travel between local planets at speed, you might well have been capable of traveling between the stars as well.”
“I see,” the squid said. “Therefore, you have surmised that my race populates at least two worlds—and perhaps several.”
“That now seems logical, sir.”
The squid turned an accusatory pair of bulging eyes toward my officers. “Was this the nature of your miscalculation?” he demanded. “Has your underling put his appendage on the crux of the issue? Did simple incompetence drive you to believe you could strike with impunity against our kingdom?”
Turov stepped forward. “We ordered no strike against your people,” she said firmly. “That was the Nairbs and Chief Inspector Xlur. They are direct representatives of the Empire.”
“How then might your role in this matter be classified?” the squid demanded.
I had to speak up. Sometimes the urge just bubbles inside me. Ask anyone who’s told me to shut up more than once—the list of such individuals is long and distinguished.
“We’re mercenaries, Ambassador,” I said.
The squid turned back toward me and lifted a tentacle higher. “That term—Ambassador—I’ve been unable to translate it until now. I’m not an Ambassador.”
I had a few more choice names for him, but I managed to hold my tongue like the others who were staring nervously.
“If you’re not an Ambassador, what are you?” Turov asked bluntly.
“I’m a Conqueror. It’s my function to coordinate the enslavement of all beings that I meet.”
Slavers, I thought. That figured. The first time I’d met up with the squids they’d had a ship full of altered humans. They’d treated them like slaves, too.
“Your fear is visible,” the alien said, studying us. “This fact cools my flesh. There is no pleasure in subjugating beings that do not understand their peril.”
“There is no need for violence,” Turov said. “However, you should know that this ship is capable of defending herself.”
The Cephalopod made a slashing gesture with his uplifted tentacle. “Nonsense. If you had effective weapons, you would have used them to destroy us upon detecting our entrance into this system. Instead, you’ve shown weakness at every turn. The orbital habitat nearby teems with life, but you do not control it. Instead, it has attacked your ship. This is clear evidence of pathetic weakness.”
“We haven’t struck the station because we value it. We wish to regain control of it—not destroy it.”
“Ah!” boomed Glide. “You admit that you do not control the habitat? Excellent. Weakness, yet again. You’ve demonstrated it at every turn. I can scarcely believe such abject beings held back the full fury of the Cephalopods during our previous encounter.”
“Listen, squid,” I said. “We’re quite capable of defending ourselves, but we should get one thing straight—we didn’t bomb your world at Zeta Herculis. The Nairbs ran that ship, and they did it without asking our opinion of the action. Inspector Xlur must have ordered the attack.”
“How do you know this?” the squid asked.
“I was there. I looked out the window as our ship rolled over. I watched the hell-burners drop—nine of them.”
“Interesting. Your account matches perfectly with recordings transmitted from the colonists during their final moments. Let us assume for a moment that I believe you witnessed the genocide personally. What I find inexplicable is your repeated implicit claim that you’re beings apart from the Galactics and their fading Empire. You’ve called yourself mercenaries. You’ve said you didn’t order the strike. Neutrality? Rebellion? Do these terms describe your political status in regard to the Galactics?”
We all looked at Turov. I’d said enough—even I knew that.
She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said. “We’re independent. We have dealings with the Empire, but our worlds aren’t to be blamed for their actions.”
I stared at her thinking over her words. She’d lied, of course. We were an active part of the Empire. Hell, we’d recently taken on the role of local Enforcers. By all rights we were obligated to repel this squid ship and protect the local population, but Turov wasn’t interested in sticking her neck out. She rarely was.
“You place me in a difficult position,” the squid said. “I’d hoped my decisions would be clarified by this communication, but instead you have muddied the waters further.”
“We should take this opportunity to talk,” Turov said. “We have no love for the Empire. We stand apart from it. You can gain much from our cooperation—from our gathered data.”
Turov�
��s words surprised me. She was selling out. Maybe she knew more about the situation than I did—but I doubted that.
As far as I could tell she was playing it safe. I had to agree with her move. After all, Earth was quite possibly at risk in this situation. Battle Fleet 921 was gone, called back to the Core Systems. On the other hand, the squids were here with a warship. Maybe it was their only one—or maybe they had a thousand more.
“I will consider your words, being,” Conqueror Glide said. “Do not provoke us. Do not approach this ship. We will not allow it.”
“I’m glad you haven’t yet forced us to destroy your vessel,” Turov said. “That would be unfortunate. Please answer a question, Glide. How many star systems are populated by your species?”
The squid’s tentacles churned briefly. “We swim on many worlds. More than do your legged beasts—but not so many as are controlled by the Galactics.”
Turov accepted this answer even though it was pretty vague. The squid had placed his Kingdom at somewhere between three and a million star systems in size.
“We invite you to talk to us again at a later date,” Turov said.
“If it is convenient for us, we shall do so,” said the squid, and the screen went dark.
Immediately the three officers let out a collective sigh and separated, shaking their heads.
“I told you we shouldn’t have brought McGill to the party,” Leeson said. “We were almost squid-meat.”
“Adjunct Leeson,” Turov said. “You’re dismissed.”
Leeson looked at her in surprise then at me. He left, shaking his head and muttering.
Graves studied the ship on a projected display of the system. “They’re lingering in far orbit. Too bad Minotaur isn’t a real battlecruiser. We could take them out quickly if we were geared for space-superiority. But Minotaur is more about troop-support than anything else. God only knows what kind of armament they have.”
Turov turned to me. “McGill, you were undiplomatic as usual, but you did give the squid what it wanted to hear. Your description of the bombing convinced it you were a witness.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I hope that bought us some time. What’s the plan, Imperator?”
