Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

  Everything seemed to slow down for her; the slightest micromotion became perceptible. She could feel muscles tensing and compressing as her legs carried her through the air, over still-writhing torsos and flopping appendages—a video ballerina, operating at some heightened level of awareness, more alert than she could ever recall . . .

  Noise. A shock wave of insane melodies, blasting into her head: the endless mass scream of a thousand terrified people, the deep bass roar of thruster fire and, high above it all, the shrill echoes of fresh victims. And Susan suddenly realized that she was moving closer to those primal cries, closer to the source of death.

  And there he was, not more than ten feet away from her, a madman with a pair of flashing daggers. Susan felt abruptly unreal, as if her body had gone blind, as if this were all just a bad dream, happening in some other place, some other time.

  He looked like a typical ICN banker, wearing a sharply creased gray suit, with a stylish sunshield visor circling his forehead, draping a pair of faintly polarized disks across his eyes. He had short-cropped blond hair, a hooked nose, and a slate-colored blade in each hand.

  And there was something bizarre about the daggers.

  Susan could not focus on them, could not actually see the knives clearly. It was as if she were looking at a kinetic holoprojection with the beams out of alignment, creating blurred edges. A crazed killer with three-dimensional cartoon images clutched in his fists.

  But those images were administering death—real and final.

  He spun to face her and for a fraction of a second, their eyes locked. And then Susan experienced the strangest shock of all, for she saw a spark of recognition play across the killer’s face, and she knew—in one infinitesimal moment—that somehow, somewhere, they had met.

  But even as her eyes confirmed the acquaintance, her mind tried to deny it. I could not know such a monster.

  The moment of recognition passed. His face returned to a blank stare. With frightening speed, he lunged forward, right hand extended, an indistinct blade coming at her, a gray blur seeking her chest. It was too late to react—her forward speed would thrust her straight onto the dagger.

  And she thought: I’m going to die—away from Irrya.

  The Costeau saved her life.

  He lunged at the killer from behind, his beryllium-spike hairdo glimmering weirdly under the terminal’s intense lighting, a serrated dagger poised at his side, ready to strike.

  The killer whirled, and Susan experienced a sense of confusion, for the madman’s movement was unnatural, overly delicate—liquid speed—precise beyond what should have been humanly possible. One of the killer’s daggers seemed to leap forward, as if the blade itself had somehow doubled in length.

  A flash of red—a blur piercing the pirate’s chest. The Costeau fell. The madman spun back to face Susan, but the crowd had changed direction again, and she was enveloped by a wave of screaming people—a primal force with its own sense of orientation.

  She caught one last glimpse of the killer, indistinct knives cutting into new prey, and then the crowd mercifully carried her away.

  The thundering roar of thruster fire came to an abrupt halt. Rising above the wails of the panicked mob, a man yelled:

  “The Paratwa must not return! Long live the Order of the Birch!”

  It was the killer with the knives. Susan was sure of it.

  And from further away, from the source of the thruster fire, came a second male voice: “Long live the Order of the Birch!”

  The horrendous thruster erupted again and the crowd instantly reacted. Susan felt herself being squeezed on all sides, almost lifted into the air by the enormous pressure of the terrified mob. She fought to stay upright, maintain her balance, flow in the direction of the mob, knowing that if she should fall, or attempt to fight this human current, that she would be trampled to death.

  The crowd funneled insanely into one of the exit ramps and she experienced another episode of distorted time. But this time, awareness seemed to descend into some incredibly ancient pathway of body knowledge, and it was as if she had suddenly gained access to a place beyond ordinary memory, a primal environment where only physical rhythm carried meaning. She felt herself struggling for life in that place and she had the sense that she was being squeezed through a womb, fighting to be born. In some strange and inexplicable way, Susan knew that she was actually reliving a fragment of her own birth experience.

  And then the lights dimmed and the pressure relented and there was space to breathe again as the screaming mob plunged out through the pagoda archway, onto the Yamaguchi street. Birth memories dissolved under Honshu Colony’s noonday sun and she was in the present again—alive. The golden light of Sol, repeated in triplicate through the three strips of cosmishield glass, splashed across her face, burning away the madness and fear.

  Alive!

  Susan did not stop to savor the emotion. She kept running, until she was far from the terminal.

  O}o{O

  It was an ancient chamber, a twenty-sided room built in the days of the pre-Apocalypse, when Irrya was still new and the colonization of space still a challenge to technological ingenuity. In the waning years of the twenty-first century, few realized that the Colonies would become a final sanctuary for the survivors of a devastated planet; the Council of Irrya, a governing body for all that remained of the human race.

  Yet even then, the designers had infested the chamber with tradition. Each leather-veneered wall held a grouping of old Earth paintings, artworks so valuable that they had been sealed behind glare-free humidity partitions over a quarter of a millennium ago. In the center of the chamber, a massive prism chandelier, supported by wire mesh, hung from the darkness of the high arched ceiling, pouring soft golden light onto the polished round table, which dominated the room. Ten chairs encircled the thick oak slab. Five of the chairs, intended only for temporary occupancy, had been constructed with deliberate austerity; ritual complements to the other set, the five lushly padded seats that supported the councilors of Irrya.

  The Lion of Alexander had tenured one of the permanent seats for the past two years. But still, after all that time, this chamber—on the heavily guarded sixteenth floor of the Irryan Capitol building—remained alien to him. It was as if he was a guest in some rich colonial home, where the trappings were so valuable, so important in and of themselves, that they dared not be touched. Although the Lion had not been born a Costeau, he had lived most of his sixty-eight years as one, and a spartan lifestyle appealed to him in a fundamental way. He feared that this council chamber, reeking of wealth, would forever seem unnatural.

  But it was not merely the royalty of this room, the sanctified dispassion, that made him feel like a stranger. More so, it had to do with the basic fact that he was a Costeau.

  Although pirates were officially welcomed throughout colonial society, and although this very Council strongly supported the mainstreaming of Costeau culture—the so-called Grand Infusion—subtle bigotries remained, some so ethereal that only a complete outsider could hope to identify them. Someday, the Lion realized, a new generation of councilors would sit in this chamber, totally free of prejudices. But he did not think that he would be alive to witness that achievement. The Costeaus had remained beyond colonial culture for too long—over two centuries of isolation. Much more time would have to pass before a pirate could truly feel at home here.

  He suspected that Inez Hernandez felt the same way, though for different reasons.

  She sat across from him, her delicate fifty-year-old face aglow with bacterial skin toners. She had thick black hair styled in a pageboy, dark pupils nearly overwhelmed by massive eyebrows, and white fluff earrings that appeared ready to fly from her lobes if she turned her head too quickly.

  She caught him staring, and looked up from her monitor.

  “Inez,” the Lion offered, “did you know that a young Costeau once asked me why La Gloria de la Ciencia behaves so arrogantly?”

  She smiled. “He must
have been very young.”

  “He was. But the answer I gave to him perhaps betrays my own age. I said that La Gloria de la Ciencia acted that way because society allows them the privilege.”

  Inez laughed. “Just as it allows the Costeaus the privilege of remaining outlaws to colonial society.”

  “True enough. But I wonder why it is that our two institutions are permitted the liberty of arrogance while the rest of society must conform to more rigid standards of behavior?”

  That got Doyle Blumhaven’s attention, as the Lion had intended. The E-Tech councilor glared at them, his baby-fat face slowly shaping itself into a frown.

  “No one is permitted to wear the mantle of arrogance. Certain individuals—and organizations—choose to crown themselves with it.”

  “But only in self-defense,” prodded the Lion.

  Blumhaven bristled. “Defense against what?”

  “Social inequities . . . what is perceived by some as a lack of justice, a dearth of fair opportunities.”

  The E-Tech councilor raised his hand and pointed a finger to his head. “Up here,” he said, tapping the finger against waves of cleanly styled brown hair. “Here is where these so-called social inequities exist—in the minds of Costeaus.”

  And there, thought the Lion, there lies the core of anti-Costeau bigotry.

  Many shared Blumhaven’s attitude. They simply blinded themselves to the existence of the problem, as if their refusing to recognize that prejudice still existed would somehow make it disappear.

  The Lion also realized that his own gentle provocations toward the E-Tech councilor did nothing to bridge the wide gap between their beliefs. On one level, the Lion’s provocations remained insignificant; they would never alter Blumhaven’s attitude. Still, it was not good politics to constantly taunt the man. Yet the Lion seemed unable to control himself.

  We are all servants of our passions. Despite the counterproductiveness of such an action, the Lion knew that he would continue to antagonize Doyle Blumhaven. The only alternative would be to release his true feelings, his wrath—a Costeau’s wrath—to lash out at the stupidity of those who failed to perceive the outlines of the world around them. But he could no longer afford such displays. He was the Lion of Alexander, chief of the United Clans, but he was also a councilor of Irrya, a role in which he was expected to bring harmony and understanding to the billion-plus citizens of the Colonies.

  It remained difficult.

  Maria Losef, the fourth and final person seated at the table, brought the session to order.

  “Council of Irrya, August 2nd, 2363,” she spoke for the computerized recorders. “Confidential database, standard access.”

  Maria Losef was the council president. More important, she was the director of the ICN—the Intercolonial Credit Net—the powerful banking and finance consortium that totally controlled the Colonies’ monetary system.

  “First order of business will be the Van Ostrand report.”

  The Lion stared at the petite woman for a moment, trying vainly, as usual, to see into those cold blue eyes, to read some display of emotion on her pale elfin face.

  Eminent individuals usually presented a careful public image, using their style of dress or their manner of speaking or the very expressions on their faces to put forth a gestalt that the so-called average citizen could identify with. Maria Losef ignored such inanities and the Lion grudgingly respected her for that. But Losef carried lack of pretension to extremes. She dressed plainly, spoke plainly, and kept her blond hair unfashionably shaved in an ancient male style known as a “DI.” Freelancers dubbed her “the ice dyke,” in reference to both her public and private lives. She did not seem to care.

  Losef turned to the center of the table, to the five-sided metallic box that squatted there in obvious contrast to the rest of the room. “Van Ostrand . . . are you ready?”

  The small pentagon dissolved into a quintet of monitor screens. An instant later, the screens themselves dissolved into multiple images of Jon Van Ostrand, the fifth councilor, supreme commander of the Intercolonial Guardians. Hidden speakers supplied a deep voice to complement the handsome and distinguished face.

  “I’m here, Losef. Clean video at my end today. No interference problems. However, I’m afraid I can’t stay at the FTL for more than a few minutes. Admiral Kilofski and I are preparing for liftoff—we’re doing another security inspection. Have to make sure everyone keeps on their toes.”

  The Lion repressed a sigh. He liked Van Ostrand and the man was certainly competent enough. Yet the Guardian commander seemed to have deliberately crippled his effectiveness as an Irryan councilor by establishing his floating base of operations out beyond the orbit of Jupiter. It would have made more sense for Van Ostrand to command his people from these chambers.

  The commander had left the Capitol five months ago, headed for the massive network of detection satellites that the Colonies had installed along the outer reaches of the solar system, a network slowly put in place over the past fifty-six years, in preparation for the return of the Paratwa.

  The Paratwa—the genetically engineered creatures who had been in no small way responsible for the decimation of the Earth, the mind-linked killers and assassins who had escaped from the solar system over two hundred and fifty years ago, seeking sanctuary amid the stars. The Paratwa—bred for destruction, created by Homo sapiens in the madness of the final days, that terrible thirty-year period preceding the Apocalypse. And among those presumably hundreds, perhaps thousands of assassins who had escaped in the great starships, would be their leaders, the two surviving members of the Royal Caste—Sappho and Theophrastus of the Ash Ock.

  The Lion corrected himself. Actually, three of the Ash Ock still survived. But no one at this table, and perhaps no one alive today in the Colonies, knew about the third member of the Royal Caste. And the Lion had no intention of divulging that particular secret.

  The gray-haired Van Ostrand went on. “Actually, I have nothing new to add to Wednesday’s report. We are now two hundred and four days into the FTL window—only five weeks remain.” He paused. “We should detect something soon. Unless, of course, our calculations are wrong.”

  “Our calculations are correct,” insisted Blumhaven. “Fifty-six years ago, when E-Tech captured the FTL from Codrus, those calculations were initially performed. Since then, they have been repeatedly checked and double-checked—thousands of times over the past half century. You know that.”

  Inez Hernandez agreed. “Our scientists have an excellent understanding of FTL technology, Jon. I wish we could convince you of that.”

  “Linked pairs,” proclaimed Blumhaven. “With these FTL transmitters operating as two parts of a whole, it becomes possible to calculate certain ratios of each particular linkage. We can’t know where this other Ash Ock transmitter is located, but we can know when the two transmitters will be in physical conjunction with one another. And we are absolutely certain that the Star-Edge transmitter will enter our detection grid within the next five weeks.”

  Van Ostrand offered a skeptical shrug. The Lion understood—and to some extent shared—the Guardian commander’s misgivings. To those without advanced training in protophysics, superluminal science remained a very puzzling concept; a working technology brimming with contradictory theorems and bizarre notions. FTLs, for instance, did not receive information—using correct scientific nomenclature, they only transmitted, even though individuals at each end of an FTL linkage could communicate back and forth with one another. To the Lion, such incongruities remained maddeningly elusive.

  Among the councilors, only Blumhaven and Inez possessed enough training to truly grasp FTL theory. Yet even Inez admitted—privately—that some aspects of faster-than-light technology still confused her.

  And the Lion knew that Jon Van Ostrand harbored another grave doubt: namely, that the Colonies possessed such meager information about Paratwa technology in general that any firm conclusions had to be suspect. The latest opinion polls hinte
d that such uncertainties lay deep in the minds of many colonists.

  We should detect something within the next five weeks. But that entire line of reasoning—their very rationale for the massive and outrageously expensive detection/defense grid—assumed that Paratwa science had remained essentially comprehensible.

  Unknown technology. That was humanity’s greatest fear, a fear that had been propelling this Council and the supporting Irryan Senate for the past fifty-six years.

  When the Paratwa had escaped from Earth at the end of the twenty-first century, in those dark years of runaway technology which had led to the Apocalypse of 2099, E-Tech—the organization that now existed to control the pace of scientific growth—had been a fledgling group of citizens concerned with the unhealthy effects of unlimited technological progress. E-Tech had succeeded, over the years, in gaining and maintaining firm control over the advancement of science within the Colonies. This worthy goal had provided two centuries of relative peace for Earth’s survivors: a chance for humanity to rebuild, rejuvenate itself.

  Then, fifty-six years ago, it was learned that two of the Ash Ock Paratwa, and hordes of their minions, had survived the Apocalypse by retreating from the Solar System in a great fleet of spaceships—the Star-Edge Project. The Colonies had been forced to acknowledge the possibility that the returning Paratwa might be, technologically, two hundred years more advanced.

  And there were real grounds to support such fears. This FTL transmitter, the guts of which were housed in a large room below street level, allowed the Council to instantaneously communicate with Van Ostrand. FTLs, it was assumed, had been invented by Theophrastus—the Ash Ock whose great talents lay in the realm of scientific research.

  And no one had the faintest idea what else Theophrastus might have invented.

  The Lion glanced at Inez, noted her frown. It was Inez’s organization, La Gloria de la Ciencia—the once radical outlaw group, which had preached for a return to the great technological achievements of the twenty-first century—that was today officially responsible for “catching up” with suspected advancements in Paratwa science. The Lion did not envy her the task.