by A. D. Bloom
Once he'd coughed enough that the stuff wasn't forming a bubble over his airway anymore, his first words were a question. "Interrogative. Why are we meeting here? This is too dangerous."
"Because this is where Ram Devlin is." This was just like the cis'tik'kt they'd just drank, but it wasn't awful taste they were enduring. The way the bugs thought about things, all the trouble and risk Ix put up with to come here in person was a gesture meant to demonstrate the importance of what he had to say and obligate Ram to help. It would be bad face for him and them both if he didn't help them after the cis'tik-kt they showed in coming.
"Hive Hrt'ee became aware of our plan for the children of dead Hive Regent Kesik to acquire or clone a broodmother and become...not Kr'Kuth."
"Not? But as I understand it..."
"All of us are Kr'Kuth Kesik the children of the dead regent Kesik who by our ways must also die. As you know, the new regent Tik'kit gave our collective lives to the Legion instead of killing us. That is why some serve under her officers."
"And you want to become not Kr'Kuth?"
"Once there is rebellion and we are free of the control of Shedir we wish to become a living and breeding hive again. Without a broodmother, the other Hives sees us as no threat because our population cannot grow. But Hive Hrt'ee of Otherworld knows our plan to make ourselves whole. She thinks if there is a rebellion we may seize the chance to take revenge. We only wish to be whole. Hive Kesik the Risen will not threaten her. We will continue to serve the Legion. Express this to her for us. We will not attack Hrt'ee. You will tell her personally. It will not be believed without the trouble of the visit. She still refuses audience with all Kr'kuth.
"I have to go to visit the Legion first. Then, I'll see her."
"It is safer to go now," Ix said. "Go with the meat."
7
Absolom, C-Deck, Compartment 6
Samhain found that Ram Devlin's cabin on Hank's ship bore no trace of the man who'd slept there, the man he and Scilla had been sent to stop. Samhain had been hoping for some insight, but the compartment was practically bare.
"This looks like your old cabin," Scilla said after the bug locked them in. "All evidence of any actual personality is safely hidden away."
He liked her take on it better than the loss-averse portrait of him that Pavic had painted, but he couldn't mention that because he didn't feel like telling Hank Devlin and his men about it. It was a practical certainty that the compartment had been bugged.
"Don't feel like talking, eh?" She hopped up and tested Devlin's bed with her ass. Her face blurred with the jarring stop she met from the stiff pad. "Ow. Hard as a rock. He must be more uptight than I thought."
The desk chair had been bolted to the deck, so Samhain spun it to face him and sat. "Are they listening to us? They've got to be. They're watching too maybe."
Scilla shrugged, unlatched the seals on her exosuit, and stripped it and the liner off almost before he could look away. She stood naked for a long time, rooting through her recently searched and disorganized belongings for something comfortable. "I give it even odds either way," she said as she removed the constituent elements of her Amelia Earhart costume from the jumbled pile of clothes and threw them on the bed. "They might listen because of what we'd say, but the Captain knows we're 4SI Operators and thinks whatever we say is likely to be disinformation. He's smart. He's just as likely to deny us that avenue of attack as he is to enable it by ordering them to listen."
He watched her cogitate as she dressed. Once she'd got her jeans and bra on, he said, "So which is it?"
"I'll tell you in a minute or two."
"How's that?"
"Shhhh. Shush now. I'm listening." Suddenly she spoke loudly and with projection like a stage actor. "The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright-- And this was odd, because it was The middle of the night."
Scilla stepped to her opened steamer chest and took her 7-iron in hand. She continued to recite the Carroll poem as she set her grip, addressed a non-existent ball with her club, and drew slowly back to swing. "The moon was shining sulkily, Because she thought the sun Had got no business to be there Af-ter the day was done-- "It's very rude of him," she said, "To come and spoil the fun!" Scilla uncoiled her twisted body and as her hips and body mass shifted, her wrists closed the dirty club-face square. The shaft whipped and the head accelerated.
Samhain winced at the bottom of the swing, expecting the sound of the metal on metal impact to stab at his ears in the enclosed space, but the only sound was the swift tear of her 7-iron cutting the atmo. She grinned, set, and began to draw back for another swing. "The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry. You could not see a cloud, because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead-- There were no birds to fly."
"I thought you said you were listening."
"I am." She unleashed that smooth and whipping swing again and once again he flinched. "I'm listening for the feeling of someone hearing me, someone other than you, I mean."
"But how?"
"They're not listening," she said, "But they're watching. They're watching to make sure we don't do anything dangerous, but I think they must be under orders not to listen for the very reasons I mentioned."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because there's no such thing as a one-way street." She said it like he was supposed to know what that meant.
"What doe-"
"A performer can feel an audience. As far as you're concerned it's a feat of signal detection in a sea of random noise, much like feeling a subject's twinge, but it's a smaller, quieter signal if the subjects are even there to react. When I read the poems and they're listening, they can't help but react. To me, it's like feeling my audience as a repeated pattern of tiny peaks that match the rhythm and cadence of my speech. The listener can't help but sing along - it's a hard-wired, human thing. But they didn't react to the poem."
"So they're not listening."
"They're watching though. They liked my body and they like my swing. That's what made them react." Samhain had to laugh when she struck a parody pin-up pose in front of him. "Funny is hard to resist. Just now, I heard them laugh just like I heard you."
"Because there's no such thing as a one-way street."
"You don't know what that means now, but you will."
"They could still read our lips," he said.
"But they're trying to not hear our words. Too bad. That might have been helpful to us, but apparently, Captain Hank Devlin is smarter than his father. Personally speaking, I'd have chucked us both out the airlock by now."
"Can you make sure they don't do that?"
"Please," she said as if the question was an affront.
An hour passed before the deck gave a tiny shudder that drew Samhain to the porthole in time to spot the spatial breaching charge Absolom had launched. The Shediri device spat bits of crimson out the maneuvering jets that studded every side of its casing.
"They're trying to open a transit point, but I don't think it's the main Aragos/EC-115 transit," he said. "This must be one of the secondary or tertiary points."
"Isn't that daring of them," she said from behind Devlin's copy of Sung's memoirs. "I do hope they get it right. You'll let me know if we're about to be destroyed, yes?"
The spatial breaching charge detonated over a point between the two stars where the inter-dimensional spatial distortions from adjoining hypermasses like Aragos and EC-115 were so close to intersecting already that they only needed a push to create a transit tunnel between the regular space of the two, adjoining star systems.
The Shediri considered simply adding mass/energy to the point (as Squidy and Human particle beams did) to be a crude technique. Their spatial breaching charges didn't put on a fireworks display bright enough to be noticed from a billion Ks out. Instead, they partially phased into the sub-dimension where the distortions occurred before detonation with only a pale blue fizzle
as a result of the charge.
The first was a dud or the position in our space hadn't been right due to poor calculations. More likely the second, Samhain thought. He'd never tried to calculate a secondary or tertiary transit point's location. Unlike the stable primary ones everyone else used, it was always on the move.
"They'd better be good at this game," said Scilla. "I'm not even a navigator and I know this is tough."
The deck under his feet shuddered once more as the second spatial breaching charge disappeared into the starry black. Two heartbeats later, the little fizzle cast him in blue bright enough to catch Scilla's eye.
"Is it working?"
"It's working." The black vacuum tore open in front of his eyes, but covering the wound was the spatial membrane. When you opened an inter-system transit like this, the hellfire inside pushed outwards on one side of the two-dimensional mathematical exception and the exotic particles that sprang into being skated over it, dancing like spit on a hot engine cowl before the membrane burst and the flame whipped out into regular space as if it was trying to snatch them. In another half second, the inferno withdrew to the waving walls of the less than 500-meter-wide passage.
Slender Absolom plummeted down into the mouth of the transit, and licks of plasma danced over the porthole window. If he'd had a helmet on, he could have zoomed ahead to see a warped view of the stars from the adjoining system, but there was no need. Absolom would steam out the other end of the transit and be there in less than six minutes.
*
The knock at the hatch came halfway across the next system, on the way to the EC115-Algol transit. As the hatch wheel spun, Scilla looked as if she knew exactly who's hands were on it. Samhain watched for some discernible threshold in the shine that came off her then as she rose. If she did that trick again he wanted to see it the change happen before his eyes, but as far as he could tell she wasn't bothering to project anything at all. When Captain Hank Devlin swung the hatch open and stepped inside, she didn't even bother to smile. She said, "Captain Hank Devlin has come to interrogate us."
"Actually, just you."
Scilla chose that moment to smile at the Captain with rays that danced over his face. Samhain didn't expect the flare of burning betrayal that lit in his belly when he saw her smile like that at the captain. If the vulgar storms of anger flashing up and down his nervous system were within her power to detect, she didn't show it. With a suddenness as mind-stunning as love at first sight, Samhain knew himself as something irrelevant, a third wheel in a perfect pair. Only two people in the whole universe mattered at this moment and he was neither of them.
Samhain knew the thoughts in his head didn't originate there. They came from Scilla and they were meant for Captain Hank Devlin. He was just collateral damage, but that didn't make it any less wounding. Jesus, why don't you just fuck him right here in front of me.
"We should talk in private, Ms. Price," said Hank. His words seemed to travel down the rays she cast over him. Without breaking eye contact with her, he said, "Mr. Samhain, one of my officers will be bringing you some dinner shortly."
"What about me?" she said.
"You'll eat. But for now, I've got more than a few questions to ask you."
After they left, a Shediri arrived immediately to hand him a plate of half-putrid, fermented beef so pungent and acrid in his nose that even his smallest sinuses burned and his stomach turned upside down and tried to spill its contents on the deck. As soon as the keening bug left and locked the hatch behind him, he flushed it out the waste disposal, but it was already too late. The atmo in the compartment stank of rotting meat. Worse, that smell was now his only companion because he wasn't expecting to see Scilla any time soon.
Hours later, left alone with nothing but the sketchbook, he naturally wandered there, but once his mind fell into the medium, he was distracted by what seemed like cries on the horizon, distant, but distinct against the buzzing background. It was Scilla and what came from her was wordless, bursting, radiating expression of physicality that terrified him because it was almost like screams and he thought at first they were cries of pain.
Once Samhain understood what was really happening, he slammed the sketchbook shut and smoldered.
8
Absolom, C-Deck
Captain Hank Devlin marched Scilla Price down the passageways to the central shaft of Absolom's command tower and the lifts. He did his best not to admire her figure or watch the shift of her hips as her heels struck out a drumbeat on the steel deck in front of him. Behind the closed lift doors, her scent seemed to rise and find his nose, and he put the thought of her skin out of his mind.
"We're not going to the command deck?" she said when she saw the direction he'd shifted the d-lever.
"No."
"You're taking me to your quarters? I'm not sure that's appropriate."
"I'm quite sure it's not appropriate. But it's private."
"Now what could either of us have to hide from anyone?"
The woman freely admitted working for Balthus Pavic; there wasn't much Hank wanted to ask that he imagined she'd tell him without torture and even then, she probably had multiple layers of linked post-hypnotic suggestions that would blank her memory.
She stepped out of the lift first and kept going without breaking stride as if she already knew what cabin he'd claimed for his own. Scilla Price, he decided, must be well-informed. Her heels confidently drummed out the path until she stood in front of his hatch. She knocked on the belt-iron steel with her rings while grinning at him. "Well, can I come in?"
He had chosen this cabin because it had no portholes and didn't adjoin anything but machine compartments. Once inside, he offered her a seat on the padded bench that passed for a couch.
Instead, she crossed the small compartment and helped herself to his scotch. "I'm taking the one, actual piece of crystal you have left since I'm your guest and it's the only one that looks clean." Twice he heard the bodied splash of the liquor and somehow, the golden color of it washed over his vision like a haze until he blinked it away to see her holding a glass out to him, already drinking from the one he considered his.
"Set it on my desk. I'll get to it."
She shrugged and set it on the steel as he pulled the case from his desk drawer and removed the six multispectral noisemakers. She didn't ask what he was doing as he placed the halved robin's eggs on the bulkheads of his quarters, standing on the desk to affix the last one above them. Once the suite of counter-surveillance devices activated and bathed them in the soft and comforting buzz of privacy, he almost felt safe.
"It's as if you don't trust anyone, Hank? Why is that?"
"It's not that I don't trust them. They don't need to hear this. This is private. This doesn't concern them."
She sat and drank slowly with her eyebrows raised. She said. "But it concerns me."
"Yes."
"I did tell you I worked for Pavic didn't I?"
"You did."
"And you're not happy we're here."
"It's not wise to give your ear to the enemy."
"There are no enemies, Hank, only parts of a dialectic. We're all working together."
"Who exactly is we?"
"It's not just coincidence that Pavic sent me. That's what you really want to know about isn't it? You understand why Pavic sent boring Martin Samhain to see your father. But why did Balthus Pavic send me?"
A lifetime and a half of experience told Hank Devlin to only trust himself, but despite all he suspected her of being, her face had begun to look familiar now. When he reached back, groping into his mind one more time to the blank place where he thought his lost memories lay, there was something there. It was Scilla's face.
"My name was Sonya then."
There was a mischief in the arrangement of her features that he knew from decades ago. The parts had changed, aged, but that underlying arrangement remained like a song he'd recognize no matter what instrument played it. "Yes...I do know you."
"Pavic s
ent me because I knew you before the lifetime of new memories came, Hank. I know what you are now. I know all about you."
"What am I?"
"You're Hank Goodchild, aka, Hank Devlin, second incarnation of Staas Company VP and Privateer Admiral Harry Cozen, war hero and father of Staas Company's military contracting wing."
"Harry Cozen died on the last day of the Squidy War, 32 years ago."
"That is correct. And you are all he was save his last minutes. Hank Goodchild's body...your body was conceived and birthed as a clone for Harry Cozen to receive his memories upon his death. You were cared for by a foster family not dissimilar to Harry Cozen's own. At age five, you received an implant q-linked to one in Harry Cozen's brain. His memories were always recorded and transmitted to your implant where they were stored until the last update before Cozen's death. Then, one day in late 2165 he was killed, triggering your implant to write the engrams to your mind, the only one that could read them. When that happened, those memories all became yours. After that, the foes Cozen made over his career were on your little heels. Matilda Witt's own mnemonic clone spirited you into the hands of the only man that wouldn't have killed you both, Commodore Ram Devlin."
Hank willed his face inscrutable. He refused to give this woman the confirmation she wanted by reacting to her bait. She said, "Now as far as I'm concerned, on a personal level, you're the little boy I knew since first grade who was my protector against playground bullies."
"When the new memories came, there wasn't room for all the old ones. I lost some. Mine. Hank's."
"That's what I'm here to tell you about. That's why Pavic sent me."
"I know who I am."
"Do you? The boy I remember was different than you are now. They changed you somehow."
"I was nine. Of course I changed."
