by A. D. Bloom
"The boy I remember was supremely committed. Even then you knew what it took to win a fight. Fighting against a dozen, that boy put a wooden pencil halfway through the first bully's thigh, broke it off, and pointed it at the others until they fled."
"I didn't do that," he said. But he remembered. The ringleader's name had been Todd Averroes. The skin had resisted before it had given way with a pop. Todd shrieked as he snapped the pencil off, and the spurts of blood turned his hand red before he pointed his splintery hate at the others. He remembered the little girl they'd teased for so long he couldn't look away. She stood behind him and trembled but not for fear of him. Not like the rest of them after that. He wasn't the one to be scared of. She knew it. She was the only one that ever knew it.
"Do you remember that time?" She said, "It happened before Harry's memories wiped a lot of yours out. Perhaps you don't. It's why I'm not insulted you didn't remember me at first."
"I don't remember all that much after I got Harry's memories."
"After you rescued me from my tormentors, naturally I was smitten. You didn't want my girl-cooties, giving me no choice but to follow you around and setting me up for a life of spooky employment with 4SI. And then, one day, you didn't come to school and your desk was emptied and nobody knew anything. Your parents disappeared, too. Everyone said you were dead, but I always knew differently. You protected people. Hank wouldn't let them kill his parents. You wouldn't let them kill you either. That's what nine year old me knew in my heart. Was I wrong? Did they kill you?" He looked at her for half a second in silence trying to understand what she meant. "I don't know who Ram Devlin convinced you to pretend to be. You have every right to feel unappreciated by the allies whom fate has placed at your side. They know who you are, but they tell you day after day to be Hank Devlin, not Harry Cozen as if your true nature is something to be reviled by the ingrates who survived the 2164 war only through your cunning and resolve."
She was buttering him, fluffing up his ego. She said, "Ram Devlin gives the orders, but you're the one that makes it happen. You're the one that makes sure corsairs held together with spit-weld and hull paste are ready to steam over the lines and fight the Xihute the second a freighter is spotted. You're the one that manages the entire criminal empire created to obtain or manufacture all you need for your rebellion....all the things that Staas will not sell you. Did Ram Devlin build that infrastructure? No. You did. Who eliminated Ram Devlin's rivals for power without even telling him? You did. Commodore...Governor Ram Devlin and his aging cadre of idealists are the soft face the people of Otherworld rally 'round, but you, you're what makes it happen. You're the rebellion, Harry Cozen."
"If you think you can get me to play both sides, you can't."
"Again, there's no 'my side' and 'your side'. That's not how this works. We're not enemies. Neither are you and Pavic. There's only one side in our business, the side that determines the course of human events. We may differ on the details, but we're all trying to raise Humanity higher. We're all working on the same thing. It's just a bit more of a Hegelian dialectic than most envision. You steered Humanity right twenty-three years ago. I imagine not a soul has ever said that to you, but it's true."
"And you came here to tell me all that?"
"I'm here to open a line of communication between you and Balthus Pavic. Ram Devlin won't talk to him, but you will."
"No, I won't," said Hank. "I don't trust 4SI either."
9
New Madras, Otherworld
Alcyone System, 129 parsecs from Earth
Ram Devlin rode into the chilly maze of Hive Hrt'ee still packed in the shipping containers with hanging sides of raw beef. The bugs liked them air dried so they weren't wrapped in any way. During the descent, his suit lights illuminated the steady rain of blood that flew about the container, beading up on his visor and blinding him until he wiped it away with his glove.
Once he finally stepped out inside the Hive of Hrt'ee the Usurper, he'd been drenched. The sight would have had horrific tones to a human, but not the Shediri. When one of the eight VIP bugs present made the same joke about humans and red meat that Ix had made but this time with the physical gag element of Ram's blood-covered suit, the VIP bugs and the Stripeys present keened so loud and long that he almost shut off his suit mic while they hosed him clean.
After he popped the latches and lifted his helmet off, he felt the tickle of the bugs' neon/oxygen atmo tickle his throat right away. His first words came out only after a cough. "I've made a special detour to come here today."
One of her aides hissed and clicked through a translator. "Interrogative: you believe Hive Hrt'ee does not know you have met with her enemies?"
Ram led the way, making the VIP adviser bugs struggle and fail to catch up with him on their 58 tiny legs. He didn't have time to let them come between him and Hrt'ee for the sake of their own aggrandizement and amusement.
The grand chamber of Hive Hrt'ee's Mother Mastermind was a 160-meter ovoid, chitin-armored womb set deep underground and nested inside two others that protected it like a double-walled outer hull. As he stepped out the last set of iris hatches and into the Grand Chamber itself, the fifty eyes of Hrt'ee the Usurper fell upon him at once. Her eyes were compound and without pupils, he couldn't say for sure she'd seen him but for the fact that her gaze had an almost physical force that pressed between his eyes.
The canting of her gargantuan head rippled the fluids that swelled and stretched the thin, translucent skin below. Ram followed the crest of the wave in her sides all the way down the thirty meters or so that he could see of her. The full length of her body could only be apprehended from the side where curious bugs in waiting never seen in any other function tended to her spouts by the dozens. The ones that fed her waited near the edges of the chamber, standing like five-meter-tall daddy long legs flattened against the curve of the chitin wall.
The scent of socks and almonds was so much stronger in there than anywhere else that he genuinely wished he could have kept his helmet on, but after so many years of dealing with Hrt'ee, he'd learned to respect her protocols. The gesture meant something to her and when negotiating, she'd always remember that.
Hrt'ee swayed above him slowly as he approached, making constant and powerful waves down her sides, and the bugs in waiting that had climbed her to reach higher spouts rose and fell like they floated in the surf. The sharp triple-clack she began with wasn't good and when the translator in his suit finally caught up with the echoing whine and click that came from her meter-wide jaws, Ram almost didn't need it. He caught the words Devlin, plot and Kr'Kuth. "Ram Devlin plots with the Kr'kuth against me. The motherless of dead Regent Kesik are meant to die. They die by our hand or by enemy hands, but they were not meant to rise again."
"They do not intend to threaten you."
"Their actions are threat. Their actions are untruth and blasphemy. No Hive has ever risen again. Hive Kesik must remain dead."
"The big day..."
"The big day..." She repeated it and let the words echo to signal the spread of a new context. "Devlin plans the big day. Hrt'ee will not interfere but Hrt'ee will not help."
"If I win without your help, I will still give you your freedom as a gift. And the gift you will give me...what will it be? The Kr'kuth of dead Kesik wish to be whole again."
She hissed a pale fog. "All depends..."
Hrt'ee was hedging bets. If the 'big day' looked like it was going to be a failure, then she'd attack and help put down the uprising just like the Hive Regent of her homeworld would order. The new Hive Regent that came after the coup against Kesik had never disagreed with Staas Company and the UN before. They'd order Hrt'ee to attack and if it looked like the rebels would lose the larger fight, then she'd do just that.
"Devlin will succeed," he said. "This planet will rule itself. You'll be free of the Homeworld Regent - free to do whatever you want. What will you do with the Kr'kuth if Devlin succeeds?"
"Win or lose, we repay with our actio
ns."
"Action is truth."
*
The detonation occurred only a few seconds after the Shediri Armored Personnel Carrier had cleared the last of the Hive complex gates. Inside the chitin-hulled craft and well away from any windows or controls, he never did see how the first shots got underneath the APC. All Ram Devlin felt was the Shediri mound on which he sat buck him upwards into the high ceiling of the craft.
It rode on a smooth hulled gravity glide and the detonation played the underside of the APC like a drum. He couldn't tell if the neon atmo in the craft fluoresced under the force of the shockwave that reverberated or if the sound just hit him so hard it spanked the flashes out of his optic nerves with the pressure changes. Ram and the three Shediri that Hrt'ee had dispatched to deliver him all hung against the ceiling of the APC's main compartment together, frozen in twisted poses until the deck of the craft flew upwards a second time before coming down and swatting them all with the ceiling.
For once, Ram was glad to be a soft-bodied thing because the wet and popping chitin cracks he heard all around him didn't come from the shell of the APC that had been blasted. That was the terrible sound Shediri exoskeletons fracturing critically enough for their insides to come out. It was merciful the way their fluids blinded him with a vision of pale blue, just a color, no light or dark. That unbroken field was all he could see while the third blast detonated against the top of the APC and cracked it open like Hrt'ee's Stripeys. The fourth hit threw the craft on its left side and spat a ragdoll Ram Devlin out and into the blast-fused noonday dust of New Madras City's Shediri sector.
The world refused to turn from sideways, but through the clouds that drifted so slowly and quietly around him and the wreckage of the APC he made out the bright flash that came from the silhouette line of the twisting bug towers against the sky.
He'd almost scrambled to his feet before the Shediri grenade hit. This time, the blast threw him even further away from the wreck and against one of the towers outside the gates. Ram scrambled to his feet and ran through the dust using the smoothly undulating surface of the tower for guidance. Within a few seconds, he'd reached one of the ovoid thresholds leading inside and hidden in the doorway with five bugs.
Ram peeked out in time to see the targeting beams from Hrt'ee's complex burn multiple sheaths of plasma in the atmo before the cannon discharged at the towers from which Ram had seen the attack come. Almost the instant the reddish color of the plasma registered on Ram's brain, the capacitors released fat lightning bolts that followed the plasma to target. After the flash, all that was left of that section of the tower was a holed and burning husk.
He had no idea how many of her own people Hrt'ee had killed with that response and he didn't want to stay and count. It was too much, Ram thought as he popped the chest seals and ducked the ring on his exosuit to remove it.
The five Shediri there could have been with any faction. There was no way for him to tell. They twitched nervously as he blocked them in the doorway undressing. When he was finally standing in nothing but the suit liner, he held out the suit by the collar, offering it to one of them while nodding his head upwards at the woven wrap the Shediri wore around its torso and thorax and under its four arms.
The bug understood right away. It had traded without words before. It knew how to seize an advantage, too. The bug nodded its head and clacked its jaws at Ram's suit liner and hissed until he took it off as well and made it part of the deal.
He couldn't get the alien wrap to fit a human body quite right, but it fit well enough that he could rub the reddish, iron-rich dirt from the ground on his body to cover his paleness, wear the Shediri robe, and pass for one of the ascetic Human disciples of the Shediri Hs'tok fighting schools if nobody looked too closely.
Hrt'ee's soldier bugs would be out looking for him since they didn't find a body. So would the unknown bugs that blew up his APC. Ram wasn't good enough at telling the difference between them to risk running into either set today.
The good news was that he was a meatbag now. Without electronics on his person and limited biometric monitoring stations in New Madras it would be hard to track him. The bad news was it was at least ten Ks across the Shediri sector and the Hybrid Zone until he got to the Eastern edge of the city and the fringes of the veterans' quarter.
Shadows of leather-winged, Otherworld birds riding afternoon thermals above New Madras stalked him, skating silent across the crowd as he flowed with it through the Staas checkpoint, avoiding the random checks by crossing when the security men were all busy inspecting and searching and scanning eyeballs. New eyeballs were the first thing he'd gotten. The Doc took a centimeter from his tibia and fused it back together. It had made his back hurt on hikes, but now, his slightly limping steps didn't trigger recognition from the AIs patched into the checkpoint video feeds.
The windowless, fast-printed, blocky buildings of the veterans' sector were always under some scrutiny from Staas Intelligence. Too much of his face was still his own to look anywhere but at the reddish dirt between his feet until the dirt changed to the shaded tile of the north-eastern bazaar. He pushed through the stalls and crowd there where mostly worthless things were sold.
The only thing that was worth any money on this planet was the minerals and Staas wouldn't let anyone else near those. It was the only thing worth investing in so all outside money coming in went into Cynium or Rhode's metal. Actual cash had gotten rare over the years. Most of the people under the nets in the NE Bazaar were there to barter.
Doc Ibora sat cross-legged over a basket of roots like tiny, gnarled fingers or pieces of bone. "That ginseng?" said Ram. The rainbow-winged alien flies buzzed and chased each other in the air between them for a whole second before Doc Ibora recognized him and grinned.
He whispered. "Inside now. Come with me. Everyone is going crazy looking for you."
"Don't tell them you found me just yet. Is Chun around?"
Ram found Chun Ye Men some twenty meters under the bazaar, stacking crates of melons in the smooth walled tunnels that had been cut under the city for the atmospheric condensers. Some were too narrow, but the wider ones made handy avenues to move contraband. Once he'd arrived, Chun had extended the tunnels to meet the ones being dug by the Legionnaire enlisted and NCOs so they might slowly siphon the weapons they'd need out of the Legion's stockpiles over the course of the last decade.
Chun threw a cigarette so loosely rolled that it came apart before it even hit the ground. "The Company Guards found the bodies of Royalist Shediri from the homeworld in the rubble of the tower after the attack on the APC. They said so on comms anyway."
"How did the royalists even know I was inside?"
"You're supposed to be the devious one," said Chun. "You tell me."
"Hrt'ee probably told the homeworld herself. She's never played just one side. To stay out of the coming conflict, she needs an assurance we'll win."
"We will," Chun said. "20 years of preparation and 20 years of Staas casting away their veterans ensures it. All of us have our backs to the wall already. After all the time we spent at .3 artificial gees...we can't go back to Earth. All we can afford on some tin shack station is a windowless box. This is all we've got and the way things are now under Staas Company Authority, we can't survive. The Legionnaires...they're glad to be out of prison, but they can see this war isn't about to end. When they look at the discarded vets they know that's their future. They want better contracts and the last time Staas used the Legion to bust the strikes twelve years ago, better contracts never appeared for anyone. They remember that. We'll succeed because Staas Company and the Secretary General's blind eye have given our people no other choice."
"Are the Five fingers of the Legion still in place for the meeting?"
"They made up an excuse to stay another day to wait for you. They want to brief you on the current disposition of forces and give you a ride in one of the new orbital assault fighters."
"They've been in service for a decade. What's ne
w?"
"This squadron is running our software. If Staas thinks they can remote pilot our planes or shut us down whenever they want using back doors, they've got a surprise coming. The flash-load is ready for the other birds as well. They're applying new software to everything we can think of as we speak, exosuits as well."
"That was the last piece of the puzzle we needed," Ram said in a whisper. "It could happen any day now." It was so stunning to see it all fall into place that he almost shivered.
"That's not quite the final piece of the puzzle. You promised me a ship. Where is it?"
"I've got it. But there's a catch. You're going to have to help me steal it."
10
Absolom
Alcyone system
Absolom opened the last transit from Beta Draconis and reentered the Alcyone system out past the orbit of the eight planet, a gas giant that had once sported at least six, large moons. Their ruins, chunks of ice, gas, and debris, now followed the planet at its trailing Lagrange, orbiting about a point of gravitational equilibrium and occasionally smashing into each other. It was a far more densely packed region than the Jupiter Trojans. The name of the banded blue gas giant he'd forgotten, but the archipelago of fragmented moons in its wake had been named the Grinder.
Samhain had visited Otherworld years ago with Anne and her father, Dr. Gellanden. The troubles had only been a minor distraction at the time, but even back then, they'd been warned to beware the eighth planet's trojans. They said the system's worst criminals had carved out caves in the low albedo rocks of the Grinder and made themselves a redoubt from which they could not be driven, stealing what they needed to survive.
The bug that had brought him food for the last two days had a distinctive way of drumming its four feet down the belt-iron steel deck on its way to the hatch. It had been the same six times over two days, but now, the Shediri footfalls sounded off-rhythm as if it was about to trip over itself. The human steps that followed drew his ear because although he'd never thought about what the sound of Scilla's walk was, when he heard it, he instantly knew it was her.
