Challenge of Steel

by James David Victor

  He was looking at a clone.

  “I…I thought that was still at the speculative stage…” he stammered, unable to stop himself.

  “Are you calling me a ‘that’?” the woman said.

  The ethics of cloning were still highly debatable amongst the wider intellectual community. There were even different factions of Gene-Seers who advocated that no such attempt should be made.

  But there are legends, aren’t there? He had heard the old tales in the academy that humanity had cracked the secret of cloning a long, long time ago. Sometime in the twenty-second or twenty-third century, if it was to be believed. But then something had happened. The Age of the Corporations had ended, and with it had stopped all of the cloning research.

  Or so they said.

  And if this woman was a clone, with all the genetic enhancements that gene therapy could provide, then that meant she was extremely expensive. Probably worth more than this entire facility and all the therapies that it contained!

  And only the Golden Throne itself could afford that, the manager thought. No wonder her security clearance was high enough to be able to take over the entire facility defense, just like that.

  “I am so sorry, madam. I didn’t mean to cause offense.” The manager ducked his head. It wasn’t just political awe he was feeling, but an almost sort of religious one as well. He was looking at one of the most difficult, highest endeavors of his art. The full creation of a human being, and not just the cookie-cutter copying of earlier cloning attempts. Instead, this was the full development of every singular part of the person’s DNA, from the true cyan type of her eyes to the density of her bones.

  “None taken.” She turned abruptly back to the screens. The assassin had never really seen the need for offense or indignation. Those were the emotions of people who had something to lose.

  “But… Can I ask why you let them go?” the manager said.

  Just a little while earlier, the woman had arrived to ‘help’ with the break-in, and she had paused the klaxons for the time it took for the Ilythian and the lieutenant to meet and talk.

  She had let them get away, the facility manager had thought.

  No response came to answer the man’s questions. Instead, she just tapped the holo-feeds and claimed them for her own nodes. The facility manager noticed that their files were completely scrubbed from the system behind their removal, as well.

  “I should think that you have a lot of repair work to do, Manager.” The woman nodded to the alarm-red parts of the facility schematic—the archives—where a lot of people’s precious genetic data was kept. “You had a terrible industrial accident, didn’t you?” She paused by the door.

  “I, uh… Of course.” The facility manager nodded enthusiastically.

  Deep in thought, the operative left the Gene Seer facility. Now she not only had the military officer to kill, but a member of an alien civilization as well. She activated her personal privacy field as the elevator took her to one of the small landing pads on the side of the facility tower, where her one-person shuttle—a small dart of a thing that looked as mean as it really was—waited for her.

  “Private channel to Commander-General Cread,” she said into her communication node. “I have located Lieutenant Corsigon, and it appears that our leak is a part of a much wider network than we had previously thought… The Ilythians.”

  There was the sound of a cough from the other side of the node’s communication network.

  “The plan is already in motion. We cannot stop it now,” the commander-general replied.

  10

  Aurora Borealis, Northern Hemisphere

  The Ilythian’s shuttle had a pointed prow, and even though its metals were dark, they had that same iridescent sheen of greens, purples, and blues that all Ilythian ships had.

  In fact, the ship did not look so much fabricated as almost grown in the way that its segments pieced together. Two long metal ‘tendrils’ unlocked out behind the shuttle as it had taken off, like the arms of some kind of deep-sea creature. They didn’t move, but their tips glowed a pure white light, and Anders realized that it must be some kind of field-generator.

  “Have you ever been inside an Ilythian vessel before, Lieutenant?” asked the woman as she sat up front in the central chair—a reclining control seat with a variety of solid screens arching over and in front of her.

  “No,” Anders laughed. As if a lowly MPB officer like him would ever be selected for diplomatic duties!

  “All the principles are the same,” the woman said matter-of-factly, which made the lieutenant wonder how she knew this. She clearly had been on more human vessels than he had been on alien ones.

  But, as Anders looked around the central cabin that was at once storage, kitchen, and personal living space, he could get a sense of what she meant. He’d done his basic flying skills when he had first entered the academy of course, but when he had swapped over to the ‘civilian’ duties of an MPB after four years, he had left his flying days behind him. He wondered if he would still even be able to remember it all.

  The Ilythian agent had taken them through Hectamon 7’s atmosphere, initiating some sort of cloak that must have shielded them from the satellites, then ‘parked’ them near the north pole of this world, riding along the top of a scintillating wave of green and purple particles.

  “So, you know my name, but I don’t know yours,” Anders said to the strange woman.

  The Ilythian turned in her chair and looked at him solemnly. For a moment, he thought that she was going to ignore him completely, but then she nodded very slowly and raised a hand to her forehead.

  “Dchllyiealoparisaan of the Sixth Family,” she said, taking off her glove and extending her hand, making Anders look at it awkwardly for a moment.

  “Uh, are you going to do that thing again?” he asked a little nervously as he also took off his glove. His first experience of being in an Ilythian ship was also the first experience he’d had of PK—or psychokinetic abilities—as it was extremely rare in humans.

  “It is customary amongst my peoples to share our histories, if we are to share our trust,” the alien said seriously.

  “Fair enough…” Anders shook her hand—

  —and was instantly transported to a time when the sky was full of birds. He gasped deeply, realizing that this was some memory buried deep in the alien’s heart. She had stood on a precipice, looking out over a vast waterfall. The sides of the cliffs were clustered with dripping greenery and the birds in the air were similar to the ones he had seen on Hecta—creatures with two or four wings that shone with fantastic colors.

  “Ready?” a voice said, and the Ilythian had turned to see behind her a conglomeration of other Ilythians in fashions that made them look like butterflies. Anders knew instinctively from the woman’s memory that this was some sort of graduation ceremony, and that four of the people standing there she regarded as her parents.

  Four? How is that possible?

  And then the memory-self that he rode turned and looked over the wild cliff. Terror grabbed at her heart and panic almost undid her knees. She knew what she had to do. What every Ilythian before her had done, and would do after her, too.

  She jumped.

  “Ugh!” Anders jumped up from the black material seat. For just a moment, he had felt mortal fear, and worse than that—mortal uncertainty.

  “You could not control it.” The woman was now standing up across from him, and Anders knew that the emotion he was reading in her cerulean eyes was one of deep compassion.

  “What do you mean?” Anders snapped at her, hurriedly putting his glove back on.

  “It is the acceptance of everything that you cannot control. Chaos. Change. Death.” Her eyes slid to the floor. “Just as you saw my greatest challenge, I saw yours. The day you lost Cassandra and Sibbi—”

  “You don’t get to say their names!” Anders turned to look out of the porthole, struggling with the intense emotions rolling through him right now. It wasn
’t just the physical terror that he had felt from the plunge toward death. In some ways, he felt like the day that he had lost his family was his plunge into the unknown. A terrifying unknown that he had not been able to stop nor control.

  The Ilythian behind him said nothing and waited for the him to regain his composure.

  “You have seen my greatest trial, and I have seen yours. We can now be allies,” she said formally.

  Anders was still breathing deep and hard, but perhaps some of the peace of this strange people had also passed into him. He nodded. “I understand,” he said. “But I don’t think that I am ever going to be able to pronounce your name…”

  “Dchllyiealoparisaan?” A small smile quirked the edges of her mouth. “We could shorten it for human use. Dchllyiealo?” she suggested.

  “I was thinking Dalia,” Anders said wryly, and this time, the small smile turned into a grin.

  “Done.”

  “It’s not a complete gene construct, but it’s close,” said Moriarty, his voice amplified as Dalia had allowed the S.I. to attach itself to her ship’s computers.

  “It’s a clone?” Anders frowned.

  They were looking at the projection of the data gleaned from Gene Key 430101. Anders saw things that he recognized as DNA helixes—kind of—with lines of code flashing and indicating various parts of the sequence.

  “These bodies, both of them, are genetically identical, but they do not appear to have any single throne identity registered to them.” Moriarty said.

  “What do you mean ‘single’ throne identity?”

  “What you are looking at is the result of several hundred different registered Golden Throne humans, or their base DNA, anyway,” Moriarty explained.

  “A chimera?” Dalia asked.

  “I can deduce that someone has spliced together several different DNA families to make this individual. To make both of them,” Moriarty said.

  “But that’s impossible, isn’t it?” Anders was still frowning. Cloning was a legend. A myth. But here he wasn’t looking just at cloning, but at the creation of an entire human construct from multiple groups of people.

  “Clearly not impossible, Lieutenant,” Dalia said. “But I do not understand why the creation of a new type of human in any way threatens the entire galaxy, and why my people have had to be involved in this.”

  “They all bear the latent markers for PK abilities,” Moriarty said.

  “The Gene Seers are creating PK Clones?” Anders shook his head. He was getting out of his depth, very quickly.

  “Ah, excuse me, sir. This construct was not PK active, but I believe that the process might eventually result in a PK-active human-based construct,” Moriarty explained.

  “A human PK army…” Dalia nodded to herself. “That would be a cause for Ilythian concern.”

  “Whatever they were, whomever they were…” Anders started to glower deeply at the simulation. “I saw the footage of the first one’s death. It had emotions. It had fear. Even if it wasn’t a natural human, it was a person.” He looked up at Dalia. “And those two, along with the Terevesin envoy, were killed in my city.”

  The lieutenant looked out across the dome of the planet, out to where there was a distant glowing spot, brighter than the others. Given their position, that would be Hecta 3, the home of the Challenge, and the place where Uskol Hecatia was probably heading to right now.

  “And I am not going to let him get away with it,” Anders said.

  11

  Challenge Hub, part 1

  Hecta 3

  “There she is…” Anders breathed, leaning over Dalia’s forward chair.

  Ahead of them was the Challenge Hub that floated over Hecta 3. It was a snowflake-shaped platform with a large crystal-glass dome in its center and five radiating fractal arms. Already, these arms were filled with a variety of ships, from bulbous to boxy. Mostly Golden Throne ships, Anders thought. But there were at least two of the Secari ‘doughnut’ ships and one of the larger Mondrauk ‘bulldog’ arm-craft.

  “Sir, might I remind you that technically you do not have operational jurisdiction here?” Moriarty pointed out.

  “I’m still an MPB officer,” Anders growled as he checked his laser pistol. Fully charged. He knew that he would be one of the few people here who was actually allowed to carry one.

  And happily, the lieutenant thought. Dalia also wouldn’t be a problem here, as the place would be writhing with different cultures and races from all across the sentient galaxy.

  The Ilythian’s scout ship slowed in a wide arc as it requested permission to dock. From the outside, it would appear as though the ship’s two backward tentacles flexed almost organically as it slowed to the waiting port, lit up in a bright hexagon.

  “Ready?” Anders asked Dalia, who just raised two perfectly sculpted eyebrows as if the question was ridiculous.

  “Okay.” He shrugged and waited for the porthole door to petal open.

  Revealing one of the Challenge guards in full regalia, with his heavy blaster already leveled.

  The Challenge Hub was the first point of entry to the tiny world below it. It was at once the place where all the contestants docked, and where the most dedicated fans—who had bought the platinum passes—would be allowed to stay and view the events below for the few days that it would take.

  Hecta 3 itself was a green and gray orb. In fact, the planet was far too small to sustain any sort of complex life, or even hold an atmosphere that was viable for humans and many of the other more advanced civilizations.

  However, that had been before the engineers and technicians of the Eternal Empress had got their hands on it. Being the third planet from Hecta’s sun, it already had a lot of heat hitting its surface, creating active internal geologies that would spew carbon monoxide and sulfur at regular intervals from fissures in the rocky mantle.

  The techniques of terraforming had already been well in place by the time the Eternal Empress had chosen Hecta 3. First, the small world was bombarded from space with carbon and ice-laden asteroids. This changed the face of the planet to create new landmasses, ridges, and mountains. The water and organic particles were distributed across the surface, and then kept from evaporating by the imposition of a world-wide field system, kept in place by satellites and the Challenge Hub itself.

  With the artificial gravity and atmosphere added, the real work could begin. Missiles packed with microbial and rhizome bio-forms bombarded the planet. These created the base layer for the rest of the subsequent evolution. Drones spent years roaming the surface, depositing more organic material as well as genetically enhanced seed groups.

  Finally, after this ‘preparation’ work was done, the job of real landscaping began. Teams of actual humans were sent down with their giant mining drones to create caves and complexes, channels and streams, as well as planting copses, groves, windbreaks, and cover plants.

  The work of Hecta 3 was a long and laborious one, but then again, the Eternal Empress wasn’t trying to do what other throne planets had done. She wasn’t seeking to create a garden world like Terevesin. As soon as the strange, newly evolved, and genetically enhanced trees and scrublands grew and the waters started to flow, she inaugurated the first of the Challenges.

  Ever since then, the world of Hecta 3 had been in a state of constant biological flux. New species were periodically introduced, mostly small prey species for the ultra-predators that were imported. New traps and environments were constantly in the stage of either being decommissioned or built, as each year a new spectacle was demanded by the bloodthirsty audiences.

  Hecta 3 had been designed to be dangerous.

  “Whoa there, big fella,” Anders growled at the guard. He didn’t have time to draw his laser pistol after he had re-holstered it, but his hand hovered near his hip just the same.

  “Big lady-fella, to you,” the woman said, nodding so that the automatic visor raised from her helmet. It was indeed a lady with dark hair inside the battle armor, adding thirty pounds
or so to her build as well as a good six inches to her height.

  The Challenge guards all wore battle armor, the same fundamental suit that the Throne Marines wore and even the people of the Red Guards. This was no surprise as the Challenge guards were technically part of the Imperial Armies, although a very unique part of the throne forces who were only stationed here at Hecta 3.

  That meant that in his borrowed, oversized clothes, Anders didn’t stand a chance against the woman with gigantic plates of woven metal all over her body. Every part of her would have been nigh impenetrable to anything other than the heavy blasters that she herself carried. Ander’s tiny little pistol would do very little other than knock her back.

  “You don’t have tickets,” the woman growled. “And your ship hasn’t been registered with the hub’s computers.”

  “I’m here under the jurisdiction of the Military Police Bureau, as serving Lieutenant Anders Corsigon,” he said, raising his gloved hand in front of the blaster.

  Anders saw the woman scowl as she flickered a glance between Anders and the Ilythian. This was all highly irregular.

  But then again, it was Challenge season. Crazy things happened across the Hecta System. “Nodes,” the guard growled, gesturing with the blaster for Anders to raise his forearm.

  There was a customary blip from the guard’s HUD system in the cowl of her helmet. The lieutenant’s node checked out.

  “And…” The guard looked at the Ilythian. Her people didn’t have nodes, and any personal identifiers that they might have were certainly not a part of the Golden Throne database.

  “She’s with me, soldier,” Anders said heavily.

  “Special Challenge Jurisdiction,” the woman at least tried to pull regulations over him. “This space is under special rules…”

  “I said that she’s with me.” Anders held his glare at her. He wasn’t going to back down. There is a murderer in there, and I am going to find him. “Do I have to get the captain of the local MPB on call here, solider?” Anders asked. He knew that was way out of his depth and he had no idea if the captain would even have the authority to do anything at all…