by A. D. Bloom
Scilla Price was gone from Otherworld. Nobody had told him anything in the hours since he'd woke, but the hum of her mind in the background was fainter now. Up there, he thought as he interrogated the lights in orbit and beyond. She's with him. How long until Hank Devlin figures out he's been Scilla's fool?
Auntie Kill moved quietly, but he saw the moonlight reflect off her as she approached followed by ten bodyguards, painted with red and black stripes over their armor, more Hs'tok. She wore what appeared to be a kind of ceremonial chitin-plate armor with a curving collar that rose high behind her head much like the ones he's seen very important bugs wearing. It reflected light as if made of polished metal as did her breastplate and the pieces strapped to her arms and legs. Between them, her stripe-painted skin was almost entirely bare.
She stopped only a meter from him as if she meant to have an intimate conversation and then simply looked up at the lights in the sky as he had been when she arrived. She said, "Do you see them? I don't."
"Who?"
"Your friend Scilla. And my son."
He didn't know what to say to that. He tried just keeping his mouth shut for once.
"I used to work for Staas Intelligence in that very directorate, you know. I'm not holding it against her. Or you for that matter."
"I wasn't trying to kill Ram Devlin. I came here to save lives not take them. We were talking and then he was having some kind of fit. When I figured that out, I tried to help him."
"He doesn't remember that part. He only remembers a terrific pain in his head and the part where you lunged at him in attack. You're lucky he didn't kill you before he could stop himself."
"I suppose I am."
"He liked the portrait."
"At least I did that much good."
"We're going to be friends, Mr. Samhain. Of this I'm quite sure."
"Why is that?"
"They think so." She nodded her head in the direction of the Hs'tok monks. "You're drawn to it, I think. Like them."
"To what?"
"The Weirdling artifact, of course. It's almost directly under the circle of Hs'tok over there, 90 meters down in a tertiary maintenance bay. We'd let monks closer, but we've got work to do on it....experiments and such." She pointed to six red and black painted monks approaching from the opposite side. They began to drum out their song, and as they did, six that had been there since Samhain had arrived left the circle on fast-twitching legs and made for the main entrance of the hive. "They keep a vigil of sorts over the artifact. Vigil is the best translation from the Shediri word," she said.
"This song, this rhythm they're beating out..."
"It's new."
"The artifact..." He trailed off then, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say about it to her. Telling her it put the song in their minds seemed like a waste of breath. Telling her it called to him would only make her think he was mad.
She said, "The Ekkai of the sixth planet write their stories collectively, a practice with which I'm quite sure you're familiar."
"Every first-year exo-anthropology student learns of their narrative behavioral constructs."
"Such technical words for such mystery. Such brutality, Mr. Samhain. Perhaps you really are an academic."
"They determine desired behavior through collectively-authored fictional examples, didactic tales. There's no mystery to it."
"The Hs'tok monks of this hive tell stories as well."
"Constructs similar in purpose to the Ekkai stories?"
"No." She laughed. "The purpose is entirely different. The Ekkai seek order. The Hs'tok monks seek nothing; through it they touch everything."
"I don't understand."
"Don't you? The monks think you do." She didn't explain what that meant. "They carve a symbolic language into pieces of chitin cut from the shells of their dead. They use the sharp tips of their 'fingers'. I don't think they can hear the wretched sound it makes. It goes right into your nerves if you're human. I get a shiver just thinking about it."
"I've never heard of this."
"I'm not surprised. They don't talk about it. I've got about 350 monks in this hive and they each write a part of the story, carving it into the 'bones' of their dead as I mentioned. It might only be a single symbol and sometimes only bits of them that might form a whole with others. The carved plates are selected and placed in order by the blind and deaf larvae."
"And what kind of story does that make? Can they translate it for you?"
"They say the Weirdling artifact is a weapon and a gift." Those words chilled him. "They say it's alive."
"Excuse me?"
"According to the monks, it even talks every now and then. It says our enemies will come to kill us now, about which they say it seems excited, and it calls for you specifically."
"Me? All I did was find it. Why me?"
"I think we'd better go find out, don't you? By my estimates we've got less than 20 hours before Staas Company carriers arrive to take their revenge."
"I won't help you destroy company ships."
"Does that mean you don't want to see it?"
*
The artifact hung suspended in an inverse gravity field in the middle of a large bay. Energy shuts dimmed the air nearby, keeping it cold. The visible field around it was gone. Its shifting skin looked wet in places and along its changing edges the colors shifted quickly. From the catwalk outside the lift its fickle form could easily be seen, but now, it looked smaller, seemingly dwarfed by all the panning arrays and consoles reading its every discharge and the collection of masers, x-ray lasers, and small bore particle streams pointed at it. All of the weapons were mounted on tripods. Though none of them were actually manned, it still looked like they were guarding it as if it was a prisoner. Beyond it, at least a dozen pieces of hulled chitin and steel alloy armor had been mounted as test targets. They showed burns and holes blasted clean through. Two sagged in heaps of cooled metal folds.
The Shediri engineer bugs working in a trio nearby looked up at the catwalk, but not at their Auntie Kill. They watched him descend the stairs and approach before going back to their experiment. The one that appeared to be in charge directed another to mount a tiny, hand-held laser meant for rock sample boring on a rig and aim it at the artifact.
"I thought it was a shield. But you turned it into a weapon."
"It wasn't up to us. This device was made to be a weapon. What you saw before was its self-preservation mechanism. As you know, hitting it with omnidirectional energy produces a shield like effect, but no matter what we seem to do, the expanding field fries everything it touches." She gestured to the far side of the bay where the burned and melted equipment had be pushed. The metal and chitin casings were gone as if they'd been vaporized. "It was quite something. I'm glad we began with a small test. The artifact seems to have the remarkable capacity to magnify energy in defiance of even the Shediri's understanding. It's almost as if it comes from a place with different rules. It responds with more practical applicability to localized stimulation, although the results are unpredictable."
The engineers clacked at their Auntie to back up and stand behind the protective shield and, as he expected, she defied them. The test laser fired into a tiny area of the artifact and the beam that unexpectedly emerged from the far side of it was much more powerful. It vaporized enough atmo to burn bright reddish pink and drew a garish line razor-straight and blindingly bright directly into one of the hull patches set up for testing on the other side. The piece of magnetite-doped chitin and steel was as thick as a cutter's hull, but he could tell from the color of the light and the flame that shot out, that the beam had penetrated at least a few centimeters, a goodly bit more than he'd expected from 10% power on a hand tool.
The Shediri clacked out in surprised and chattered at one another while Auntie Kill clasped her hand together and said, "Again!"
He'd edged closer for a better look, but this time they fired before he could get back again and hit it in the middle of its shifting form. T
he beam that shot out the far side and struck the hull plate was nearly twice as bright as the first shot and looked to have penetrated clean through the target plate to score the one behind it.
Auntie Kill smiled at him then and opened her arms as if she wanted to embrace him "Oh, you dear, sweet, beautiful boy. I was so hoping the monks were right and you were the mystery variable."
"What? Me? I don't understand. How did that thing produce a beam so pow-"
"It didn't before. I mean yes, there was a demonstrable power increase in the emergent beam, but it was only around 150% and it was unpredictable. It went up. It went down. It fired best when my hounds were out being fed. We had no idea why. But now we do. It fired better during the time my hounds are fed because that's when you've been taking your air, Mr. Samhain and when you were closest to the artifact. Now that you're right up next to it, the power increase was larger by several orders of magnitude."
"But why should it care if I'm close?"
"Now, let Mr. Samhain fire the same shot," she said to her Shediri test engineers. They understood the words of the machine translator she wore, just not why she wanted it. "Do it," she insisted. "Give him the control box and let him push the button."
It had been made for larger, Shediri hands, two-fingered and long-thumbed, but when the reluctant engineer handed him the control unit, he managed to hold it in one hand so that he could initiate the experimental laser shot with the other. "This one?" he said, pointing at the topmost knob like a two-position radial switch.
She said, "You depress the safety flush to the case first. It's the button next to it. Any time you're ready, Mr. Samhain."
He thumbed the safety down and felt the knob release under his fingers. "Firing in 3...2...1...fire in the hole." He turned the knob to the second position, and the test laser fired, striking the artifact at its shifting midsection. The beam that fired out the opposite side in response blinded them and showered the bay in sparks. The deck shook beneath Samhain's feet and Auntie Kill steadied herself on his arm as they all fought to stay standing, even the four-legged Shediri. It took a few seconds for the emergency vents to kick in and suck the smoke from the room. When they did, only the bottom half of the meter-long target patch remained. The top half had been vaporized as had most of a workbench and the plates behind it. Where it struck the bulkhead it cut a hole almost a meter wide. "That doped chitin is almost as tough as a ship's hull," she said.
The engineers clacked and hissed as they looked through the smoking hole in the bulkhead into a storage bay beyond "Burned through two more bays. Hole in external rock. Depth unknown. Exponential power increase using subject Mr. Samhain difficult to calculate."
"But there was no change to the input power whatsoever. That makes no logical sense. All I did was initiate the burst."
"There's no question about the output being greater when you're near and exponentially greater when you initiate the action."
"That's not..."
"It likes you, Mr. Samhain. In this uncanny universe is that so difficult to accept?"
"But why me? I'm not special."
"This weapon disagrees," she said. "It wants to be wielded by you." The smile still graced her face, but she was resolved. "Despite what we do not understand, this is simply another piece of alien technology. The sooner you accept this the better."
He said, "I won't use it on Company ships."
"You told Ram Devlin they'd come here and slaughter us." He nodded. "I believe it," she said. "You told me you came to this planet to save lives. Is that really true, Mr. Samhain?"
24
ICV Doxy
In orbit with Otherworld's second moon
Over Garlan Foet's shoulder, through the bow-facing windows of the Doxy's bridge, the twelve, stolen UNS destroyers held station in a circle around his ship with less than a kilometer between their armored sides, waiting for their railguns to arrive and be fitted by the Doxy's work crews. Three Shediri light cruisers only slightly larger than the destroyers had parked further out, waiting for captured Xihute particle beams they planned to mount. The space around the Doxy was crowded enough without the cloud of small ships growing around their ad hoc shipyard looking for guns.
He'd managed to convince Ix, Hive Kill's Ambassador to War, to monitor the hasty arming of the stolen destroyer squadron from his own tactical center in the heart of the Doxy's chitin superstructure instead of the bridge. Governor Ram Devlin had been more difficult to persuade. Even now, Devlin was getting in Singh's way at tactical. It wasn't that he was a large man, but men of importance like him often managed to get in the way just by being there. His bridge crew already had enough to handle coordinating the traffic, the inventory, and the work crews for the massive effort to arm the destroyers in less than 20 hours along with any other ship that could steam a cannon into battle.
Ram Devlin leaned in as he tried to read the transponders of the fifty plus small freighters, haulers, and tugs coming around the irregular limb of the moon. "There's the Listhoff there and the Blackfriar." Devlin said. Singh nodded.
"We show them bringing in the bulk of the New Madras factory copies of the Staas railgun blocks."
"All the others..."
"Half of them are here to arm up. We've had to shanghai every crew we knew about to pull off this much work at once. This little operation of ours is no secret. We've even got tugs showing up asking for a scattergun to mount or torpedoes they can sling from under their hulls."
"Don't give them torpedoes."
"Everyone knows not to give away torpedoes. You spelled out clearly who gets what and every Chief out there knows what they're supposed to do and not do."
Devlin just nodded at that and stared into the tactical projection over the console like men stared into campfires. "ETA on Absolom, Split Aces and the rest of them?"
"They're only a few million Ks out. They'll be here soon."
"Make sure you park them at least a couple Ks out."
"If you think I'm going to risk one of those miserable spit-welded reactors from your battle-damaged war-sloops cook off near the shiny new destroyer fleet, you're sorely mistaken."
"You're the one that spit-welded them."
"That's why I know how dangerous they are."
The two haulers bringing the bulk of the railgun modules from New Madras settled into the slots they'd been given in front of the destroyers and it was as if all twelve captains aboard all twelve ships had seen them at once. Graves moaned at the OPs console as he saw the channels light up with a dozen different comms requests. They all knew Governor Ram Devlin was on his bridge.
"I can guarantee you they all want to know where their guns are," said Graves. "Do I need to answer them?"
"Patch them all through to Chief Carnaby," Garlan said. "We've got other things to worry about here."
"But...one is Chun Ye Men and one is Dana Sellis," said Graves. "And both of them used my name."
Devlin nodded to him. "Captains Chun and Sellis have to wait like everyone else." He almost looked disappointed in them.
"They're only thinking of their crews," said Garlan. "If I was waiting to get the guns installed on my ships, I wouldn't let you brush me off so easily. I'd be out there in my suit and helmet, pounding on the windows of the bridge."
"Mounting the guns and squaring these ships is taking longer than I planned. And from here I can't even get a good enough overview of what's coming in to help manage it," said Devlin.
"We're not set up to show you what you want to see here. Come with me. We'll be able to get a better overview from outside." From the way Devlin's eyebrows went up it seemed the Commodore knew it was a lie, but Devlin followed Garlan off the bridge.
He made a point to walk briskly and keep Devlin at his back on the way down to the small bay set two decks below the Doxy's bridge. All the things he really needed to tell the Commodore had to be said on a private channel so while they grabbed their helmets and checked seals he told Devlin the story about the time his crew were
stuck in Sagan Yards without any money and locked a crew of welders in a hold so they could ghost their shifts.
By the time they got through the lock and flew out the open doors of the Doxy's small bay, he'd initiated a private comms channel between their suits using only the point-to-point IR laser. He heard the triple-beep in his helmet as he saw Devlin gesture in front of his visor and establish the channel.
"We can see best from up here," Garlan said as he let out a short burst of gas and flew up the bow face of the Doxy's command module. The pitted blue paint of the external hull blurred only meters in front of his face. His shadow stayed crisp-edged as it chased him past the windows of the bridge along with Ram Devlin. Garlan gestured for a full stop and the belt puffed out staccato bursts to arrest his motion a few meters over the topside of the command module.
Devlin came to a stop only a meter above him and pointed at a trio of orbital lifters. They weren't much more than sleds with field coils and some surplus engines for harder orbital maneuvers, but they'd formed up as part of the queue of small ships that was beginning to form a second ring around the Doxy. "I know those three ships. Those are private lifters for a food import company. The owner is loyal to the company."
"Then I suspect we don't want to check the ownership registrations."
It took him a second to figure out how he wanted to say it and in that moment, Devlin was on to him. "I can't really see any better from out here. What did you really bring me out here to tell me?"
"Mr. Devlin, you're getting in our way. You've told us what to do and our crews are doing it. You're the one that told me once how management's greatest failure wasn't ever in decision-making. You said it was in making decisions when none needed to be made and in supervising people and processes that required no supervision. You said bad managers do it because they're afraid it'll look like nobody needs them."
"While I appreciate your honesty, I don't really think that's what I'm doing. I'm not afraid of things going well without me."
"Maybe you're doing it for a different reason. It doesn't matter. The truth is, this isn't where you're needed right now. There," he said, pointing to Otherworld, "There is where they need to hear from Governor Ram Devlin."
