Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  The darkness seemed to swallow them up for a long moment, before a second globe of light flickered to life, revealing metallic walls and signs written in English. Elyria cursed herself for a fool; the moment she’d seen the mountain, she should have guessed what it was. Mountains that regular simply didn’t occur in nature. The writing – AIRLOCK FOUR – only confirmed it. She was entering the colony ship that had brought the locals to Darius. In hindsight, they should have spotted it from orbit and marked it down for investigation... but maybe it looked different from high overhead. The snoops wouldn’t have worked in the Dead Zone.

  Joshua gasped, trying to wet his mouth. “Where... where are we?”

  “I’m not sure,” Elyria lied. She didn’t want to mention the colony ship out loud, not when there were so many listening ears. Just what the hell was going on? “Their base, I assume.”

  The interior of the colony ship felt weird. Elyria had studied early colony ships and knew their basic outlines; but the locals had added their own stamp to the metallic hull. Magical lanterns lit the corridors, rather than standard lighting; the metallic deck was marked from horses being taken in and out of the craft. And the air stank of something she couldn’t identify. It struck her, suddenly, that the locals hadn’t really realised what they were doing at all. They’d colonised the ship as effectively as a tiny crab might colonise a discarded shell from a larger animal. But they couldn’t build her like for themselves; they might not even realise what she actually was.

  That wasn’t unprecedented. Some colony worlds had turned the early colony ships into temples, or palaces, knowing that no weapons they possessed were capable of breaking through their metal hulls. Others had simply stripped the ships and then left them as monuments to the achievements of their ancestors, or turned them into museums. Darius, it seemed, had hidden the ship and then turned it into... what? A base for rogue Scions?

  Joshua looked around, rather dazed. “It’s like your station, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Elyria said, flatly. Joshua was far from stupid – and he knew, thanks to her, that Darius’s population wasn’t native to their world. It wasn’t hard to deduce what the colony ship was, once one made that mental leap. “I think it is.”

  If their captors realised what that implied, they said nothing. Instead, they stopped outside a heavy metal door and pushed it open with naked force, rather than the systems that would have opened the door automatically. Inside, there was a large room, a bed and a small amount of fruits and vegetables. In one corner, she saw a stone bath filled with water. The entire scene was illuminated by a glowing ball of light floating up near the ceiling. She recoiled as her hands were grabbed, just before her captor slashed through her bonds and pushed her into the room. A moment later, Joshua’s hands were also free and he was shoved inside. The captors took one last look at them and then pushed the door shut, slamming it with an ominous thud. It only took a single glance to realise that pushing it open would be difficult, even for her.

  She caught sight of Joshua’s wrists and cursed. “I think you need to soak,” she said, after a quick examination. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but cutting off his circulation for so long would be bound to have unpleasant effects. And his body was covered in bruises. She poked a finger into the bathtub and discovered that it was surprisingly warm. “Can you use magic?”

  Joshua shook his head, grimly. “I can’t even light a candle,” he said. “Master Faye...”

  He looked up at her. “Do you think they were telling the truth?”

  “I’m not certain,” Elyria said, reluctantly. She rather suspected that the Scion had been telling the truth, if only because it fitted the known facts. And yet it was clear that they hadn’t known as much as they thought about Darius. The whole operation would definitely go down in the history books, right under the heading ‘how not to do it.’ It wasn’t a pleasant thought. “Get undressed and into the tub. Now.”

  Joshua gave her a sharp look as she helped him to undress – his fingers weren’t working very well – and lifted him up, lowering his body into the water. Hopefully, the heat would encourage his circulation to start flowing again, while she looked around to see if their captors had overlooked anything. A set of cupboards revealed nothing more interesting than tiny piles of rags, which might have been left there since the colony ship had landed. There were no weapons or even edged tools she could have used to try to escape. A quick check revealed that there were no air vents or Jeffries tubes in the compartment. The only way out was through the heavy door.

  “Trapped,” she said, finally. “What happens to make you unable to use magic?”

  “I’m not sure,” Joshua admitted. His voice sounded more composed, now that the bath was slowly soaking out his aches and pains. “Master Faye never taught me the spells. One of them prevents anyone else from using magic in a particular room, another can be cast on an individual, but needs to be constantly replenished. It doesn’t last for very long.”

  Elyria considered it for a long moment. “How long does it last?”

  “Depends on the magician,” Joshua said. “I understand that the more powerful ones can free themselves, given enough time to concentrate, but I don’t know how long it takes to just wear off.”

  “Too long, I suspect,” Elyria said. “Although if they just wanted to kill us, they could have done it by now.”

  She stood up and started to pace the compartment. One group of Scions – perhaps under the orders of Master Faye – had shot down the shuttle, presumably intending to kill them. When they’d discovered that the occupants were still alive, they’d captured them with the avowed intent of turning them into harmless slaves – and then another group had attacked the first group, intent on capturing Elyria and Joshua for themselves. That group had taken them right to the colony ship and then... what?

  A dull quiver ran through the ship and she stopped, dead. Could they be powering the ship up? No, that had to be impossible. Her implants were still dead... and if the Dead Zone had relaxed its grip, there was no way that the colony ship was still operable. Centuries of decay wouldn’t be a problem for the hull, but the control systems and drives would be completely useless. The Confederation would never try to reactive the ship just to get it back into orbit.

  “Curious,” she said, finally. As absurd as it seemed, it had almost felt like a very faint shift in the internal gravity field. Except there was no gravity field inside the ship. Why would they bother when the planet’s own gravity would be more than sufficient? “Did you feel that?”

  “There have always been small earthquakes out in the badlands,” Joshua said. He shook his head. “I don’t think they ever occurred inside the bailiwicks.”

  Elyria frowned. She wasn’t an expert on tectonic effects – and the first surveys had suggested that Darius was geologically inactive – but she rather doubted that earthquakes were respecters of political borders. Natural disasters didn’t remain confined to one country unless the entire continent was politically united. On the other hand, the surveys could have missed something. The magic certainly meddled with the results sent back by the more advanced sensors.

  “Odd, to say the least,” Elyria said, finally. A thought struck her and her eyes narrowed. “Or did Master Faye ever do anything to keep the earthquakes away from the city?”

  Joshua looked honestly puzzled. “He was always happy to tell me how much he did for the population,” he said. “You’d think he’d tell me about earthquake deflection if he actually did it.”

  Elyria nodded. Earthquakes could become powerful weapons with a little imagination; the capability to deflect an earthquake might also generate one to strike a particular target. If Master Faye or the other Pillars had had that capability, they would probably have used it on their rivals by now. Maybe self-interest had kept them in check, but self-interest hadn’t stopped Master Faye turning on the Confederation. And he’d murdered upwards of twenty Confederation citizens if he really had destroyed both base
s.

  She shook her head. The simplest explanation was that something else was causing the earthquakes, keeping them limited to the badlands. But what? And why?

  “You should join me in the bath,” Joshua said, suddenly. Elyria blinked, and then realised that he seemed to be back to full health. “You need a wash too.”

  And probably something else, Elyria thought, with a certain amount of amusement. Joshua was so... obvious, but then he was barely seventeen standard years old. And physically mature, as the Confederation defined it. And it wasn’t as if they had much else to do.

  She hesitated for a long moment, and then made up her mind. It was easy enough to remove what remained of her outfit – between the captivity and the long ride the local fabrics had been tattered to the point where they barely preserved her modesty. Joshua’s eyes went wide as he saw her naked for the first time, staring at her breasts as they were exposed to his gaze. To him, she had to appear almost perfect, despite the faint scars on her face. There was no doubt that she was far healthier than anyone born on Darius.

  Carefully, she climbed into the bath and smiled at his eager gaze. “Relax,” she said, finding the attention oddly flattering. Outside a newly-mature adolescent from the Confederation, it was rare to be worshipped so openly. The Confederation’s citizens often became unimpressed with physical form; after all, it was easy to reshape one’s body to fit a personal aesthetic. “There’s plenty of time for fun.”

  Joshua’s breathing deepened, reminding her of his enhanced libido. Or maybe he was just being a normal teenage boy from an unenhanced society. Quite why anyone had thought that enhancing sexual desire – and the production of sperm – was a good idea bemused her, unless they’d wanted more children born to magicians. But the locals had developed what amounted to a taboo against them... it made no sense, almost as if something was manipulating their society without quite understanding it. Or maybe without caring what else happened as long as it met its obligations.

  His hands snaked forward to her breasts and Elyria smiled, unable to repress a thrill. It felt like it had been a very long time since anyone had touched her – and humans needed physical contact.

  “Tell me something,” Joshua breathed, as he slipped closer. “Are all the women in the Confederation like you?”

  “Of course not,” Elyria said. Joshua was going to love his first century in the Confederation. Even the immigrants from prudish societies broke down and relaxed into the thrill of guilt-free enjoyment. “Some of us are completely sex-mad.”

  ***

  Afterwards, she lay on the bed, watching Joshua sleeping like a baby. Enhanced libido or not, he wasn’t up to the same standards as a Confederation citizen for bedroom gymnastics. But then, the Confederation had spent thousands of years improving the baseline human form, streamlining it for pleasure. A male citizen could last for hours, even days, enjoying the multiple orgasms that had once been a purely female advantage. It took decades, even a century, for them to grow out of it... of course, women weren’t much better. And that didn’t include the fun that could be had by changing gender, or bodily form, or even uploading one’s self into a computer for ultra-pleasure.

  The thought made her smile, despite the glow suffusing her body. Pre-singularity societies surrounded sex with rules and regulations that were, at bottom, all about control. They wanted to control their children, particularly their daughters, because they felt that maintaining a genetic link was important. The Confederation knew better; what did it matter who sired a child, as long as it was brought up to be loved? Elyria knew who her father was, but two of her half-siblings didn’t – and they’d never cared to investigate. If their father hadn’t wanted them, there were plenty of others who did.

  But Darius didn’t have the social system to handle it.

  She patted his head thoughtfully, just as she felt an odd twinge flickering through her body. Another earthquake? No, this was different, much more personal. Puzzled, and not a little alarmed, Elyria closed her eyes and tried to meditate. The biomods spliced into the genetic code of every Confederation citizen could be controlled internally, given enough discipline; Elyria had had to master it before she’d been allowed to go down to the surface of any primitive planet. It took several moments to calm herself enough to check her body... and her shock at what she found knocked her right out of the meditative trance. She was pregnant.

  It should have been impossible. She hadn’t pushed her reproductive system to start working – and it should have automatically rejected sperm from a less than stellar donor. Joshua, as nice as he was, carried genetic damage inflicted by magic – and that should have convinced her system to reject him as a potential father. But his sperm has passed right through the defences to impregnate an egg that should never have been there. How?

  Magic, she thought, sourly. They’d known that Joshua’s reproductive system had been modified. It had simply never occurred to her that he could alter her body to allow impregnation... no, Joshua hadn’t done it deliberately. Whatever had made the first set of subtle modifications had struck again. And she was pregnant.

  She always intended to have children; indeed, there was a definite trend in the Confederation for each citizen to have three or four children. There was no reason why they had to limit themselves when the Confederation could easily have supported trillions upon trillions of humans without stretching itself. But it was rare to have children so young... no, she wasn’t young, but Joshua was young. Her peers would disapprove strongly, convinced that she’d either tricked him into impregnating her or she’d been criminally careless. The child might well have an unsuitable genetic template that would require heavy modification to allow her to live within the Confederation.

  But there was nothing she could do. Now the egg had been fertilized, it would keep growing until the child was ready to be born, unless it was transferred to an external womb. She couldn’t simply abort it; her own genetic structure wouldn’t let her. The whole system assumed that a healthy child was on the way.

  And there was no reason to believe that the child wouldn’t be healthy.

  She shook her head and closed her eyes. Tomorrow, she would have to consider telling Joshua that he was going to be a father. He’d be horrified, given the taboo on impregnating his lovers, but there was no other choice. The baby should be safe enough once away from Darius, if they managed to survive the next few days. And besides, she was not going to kill a child. The whole ethos of the Confederation spoke against it.

  When the door started to open, several hours later, it was almost a relief.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  There was something oddly regular about the mountain that, according to the watching eyes, was the kidnappers’ final destination.

  Dacron studied it thoughtfully, from a distance. Regular shapes occurred in nature, naturally, but this one looked as if someone had been trying to hide something under the rock. A fortress? A castle? Or... he calculated the size of the hidden object and realised that it was around the size of a primitive DY-100 colony ship from the First Expansion Era. There were no sign of the warp nacelles that such a colony ship would have needed to move faster than light, but he’d studied the plans of all likely colony ships and knew that they’d been designed for easy removal once the ship reached its destination. There was almost nothing of the ship visible apart from its covered shape, which explained why orbital observation hadn’t detected it. The ship would be invisible from high overhead.

  The ground quivered again as Dacron slipped around the hidden ship, looking for the guards he knew had to be there. There were none – and, as far as he could tell, there were no warning spells either. It made absolutely no sense, unless the colony ship was intended to remain hidden from the planet’s entire population as well as the Confederation. Guards and defensive spells would only attract attention. He completed his circuit and gritted his teeth as he realised that there was only one way into the ship. No doubt there would be a heavy
guard just under the overhang, waiting to see who poked their nose into the trap.

  He frowned as yet another earthquake shook the ground. They made no sense; the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if the planet’s gravity field was actually flexing, although he couldn’t understand why. The AIs had warned him that the planet was generating gravity pulses; perhaps he was close to the generator that was propelling them out into space. But they had to realise that gravity waves represented no threat to a ship from the First Expansion Era, let alone the Confederation. Or did they? Like so much else on Darius, the gravity waves made no sense.

  The bookseller looked up at him as he returned to where the small assault party was hiding. “What did you find?”

  “Trouble,” Dacron said, and outlined what he’d seen. “That has to be the ship that brought you to the planet.”

  A DY-100 wasn’t a very elaborate starship, he recalled. They’d been cheap, mass-produced to allow thousands of disparate groups a chance at their own homeworld, completely lacking in the luxuries that had helped create the first and most successful colony worlds. It was unlikely that it had carried a computer smart enough to become the source behind magic, let alone a proper AI. And it should never have been able to reach Darius. The primitive warp drives humanity had used during the First Expansion Era could not have propelled them for thousands of light years. No, something else was involved. But what?

  Picking up the signalling device, he signalled a report to orbit. It was possible that a KEW strike would destroy the source of magic, but it had to be kept as a last resort. Elyria and Joshua were inside and he presumed that they were still alive, although there was no way to know for sure. A power that had thought nothing of murdering over twenty Confederation citizens wouldn’t hesitate at murdering one more – and Joshua. Or maybe they’d seek to force Joshua to join them. It was clear that they included magicians among their numbers.