“Sure I do; duty and honor. Responsibility. In another minute, you’re going to be telling me that it doesn’t matter that the corvette was stuck in orbit; that Riordan’s safety was your assignment and that you failed. End of story.”
“And it pretty much does come to that, Ms. Veriden. But it doesn’t stop there. In fact, that doesn’t even begin to touch the surface. That’s the recruiting slogan, the ad jingle; that’s not our life. And that’s the part a civilian, even a civilian combat veteran, is not likely to understand because the only way you get to know it is to live it.
“Look: I like Caine. A lot. But that’s not why I’m here. I’d be here even if I hated his guts. I’ve sat this kind of, well, vigil, I guess you’d call it, more than a few times before. There’s always one of the team there. So your brother or sister doesn’t wake up alone. Or face the dark alone. They might not know you’re there, but you know. That’s what matters. And when everyone in a unit is committed that way, then, when the shit starts hitting the fan and you look around the hole or the hooch or the bunker and you see the fear of death in everyone else’s eyes, you can still hold on to something: each other. It’s the knowledge that we will not break. That our bond is stronger than the death facing us. It has to be, otherwise all hope is lost.”
Rulaine leaned back against the smooth, metallic wall of the Third Silver Tower. “You see, Ms. Veriden, it’s not just about honor and fellowship and brotherhood. It’s about survival, too. You tend the bonds that keep you strong, and not just for yourself or your fallen friend, but for the morale, the sense of unity, that binds the whole unit.” He folded his hands, leaned forward, stared at the oval fusion of machine and plant that held Riordan. “And you tend them most, well, punctiliously, at times like this.”
Veriden physically started when Rulaine used the word “punctilious.” “You’re not just a grunt, are you, Major?”
Bannor shook his head. “Ms. Veriden, that question is wrong in so many ways, including the mere asking of it, that I don’t know where to begin.”
She frowned. “Yeah. I guess that was pretty shitty. Sorry. Didn’t mean it that way.”
Rulaine resisted the urge to ask, “Then just how did you mean it?” and instead speculated that Dora Veriden probably had a long history of putting her foot in her mouth. She did not have a winning way with people and seemed uninterested in improving the related skill sets. Of course, she was a solo operator, so maybe that lack of reliance upon, or even toleration of, other people was a professional advantage. She wouldn’t have been the first field agent whose specialization had been driven by inborn predispositions and personality traits. He turned toward her. “So did you come to keep me company?” As if.
She actually seemed a bit abashed. “No. I’ve got some news.”
“Oh?”
“Thanks to our forensics fan Peter Wu, Ben Hwang found some weird critter in a hermetic cell sealed inside Macmillan’s right boot. Turned to goo the moment he breached the little chamber.”
Bannor nodded. “Like the one you found on Danysh’s body, after the shuttle crashed?”
“Just like that one. Hwang tried to get it into a sealed container, evacuate the air. Didn’t do it in time; after an hour, it was paste. Just like the other one.”
“What else?”
“We found one live clone. We’re delaying the debrief until you give input.”
“No more wounded? Just one alive and the rest dead? That’s pretty peculiar.”
Veriden shook her head. “Not so peculiar when they kill their own. Seven or eight were maimed or incapacitated by the rockets; a few by gunfire. All stabbed in the heart. Real professional, too.”
Bannor nodded. Professionals, indeed. He would have liked to tell Veriden that the moment O’Garran saw the corpses of the two enemy leaders—one by the shuttle, the other in the clearing—he’d identified them as Ktor. But Veriden wasn’t cleared to know that the Ktor were humans, yet. And might never have that clearance. But the charade of Ktor being sub-zero, ammonia-based worms was beginning to wear perilously thin. “Debriefing that clone should be very revealing,” Bannor observed.
“Should be,” Veriden observed with a nod, “as well as tracking down all the serial numbers on all the equipment. But we already know what ship he, and that armored shuttle, were from: the Arbitrage.”
Rulaine frowned. “Isn’t the Arbitrage a CoDevCo shift-carrier? Their newest?”
Veriden nodded. “It is. Which is going to make questioning the clone all that much more interesting.”
A long silence passed. The distant hum of the medical monitors at Riordan’s bed-side—or would that be pod-side?—was the only sound.
Veriden sighed, leaned forward so her head was parallel with Rulaine’s. “That’s all the news I’ve got to report.”
“Thanks.”
More silence. Then: “Okay, aren’t you going to ask me?”
Here it comes. “Ask you what?”
She sounded gratifyingly annoyed. “Ask me when I became a part of IRIS? Shit, when I dropped that little secret on you just before we left the clearing you barely blinked.”
“Were you hoping I’d go slack-jawed or do something equally melodramatic?”
“Damn it, you’re a hard case.” She moved to leave.
“There is one thing I’d like to know.”
She stayed put. “Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you tell me at the start? Why didn’t you tell any of us?”
Pandora sighed, leaned back. “Because I was only supposed to tell Riordan. Well, Downing, too—I was recruited after he’d left Earth—but who knew things would happen so quickly? Or that I’d wake up inside Slaasriithi space, instead of at Sigma Draconis?”
“Yeah, well, since the rules of the game had changed, and we traveled together for a few weeks, don’t you think you might have been able to slip it in somewhere along the way?”
“No, because the whole damn mission was so irregular and last-second that there was no way to separate the crazy stuff going on from the hinky stuff.”
“What ‘hinky stuff’?”
“Hinky stuff like the way I woke up, checked the legation records, and discovered that the secure EU shuttle that was supposed to transfer all our cold cells to Yiithrii’ah’aash’s ship had last second ‘engine trouble.’ Hinky like there was a TOCIO shuttle that just happened to have been cleared for operations and was on call, but without any particular flight order pending. Hinky that most of the personnel who staffed the legation were transferred as corpsicles, so there was no way for Downing to eyeball and debrief them, or to see if they acted in the flesh as they were written on paper. And then we lost Buckley, which might or might not have been a result of his being a saboteur, or running afoul of one.”
“So, now I understand why you chased after the response team Caine led to rescue Buckley: to protect Riordan. But at least Buckley doesn’t seem to be part of the conspiracy.”
“Yeah, as it turns out. But that’s hindsight. So, to answer your question about why I didn’t announce my credentials: after all that, and not having a crystal ball, I figured I’d better play it cool.”
“And not tell Caine. Or anyone else.”
“Precisely. Look: Riordan’s okay, I guess, but he’s not a pro. If I had just sidled up to him and said, ‘Hey, I’m on your side,’ and showed him my credentials, he might not have even believed me. Actually, that would have been the most professional thing he could have done, because he’s not experienced enough to pick out a genuine solo operator from a crowd. Don’t give me that look, Rulaine. Yeah, I know Caine’s got good instincts. But he’s been pretty lucky, too. Given his lack of training, he could have been dead three or four times if he didn’t think quickly on his feet.”
“Thinking quickly is a skill in itself.” Bannor offered the rebuttal more out of loyalty to Riordan than conviction in its accuracy.
“Well, yeah, sure, it is. But that skill wasn’t the one Riordan had to have if I was goin
g to tip my hand and tell him I was on his team. Because if he had believed me, then he would probably have given me away to the real traitors in the group.”
“How so?”
“By changing the way he behaved toward me.”
“In what way?”
“See? This is what I mean: you’re a professional field operator, but you still don’t get it because you’re just a striker. My world is different. And here’s how Riordan would have messed up my world: if I had revealed my identity, he’d probably become careless in ways he wouldn’t realize. He’d start showing an unwonted trust in me, casual speech, relaxed body language, all that. If an enemy pro had infiltrated our team, he or she would spot those changes, and so, would have sniffed me out. Or Caine would have been too careful, would start distancing himself from me—and again, a rival pro would have sensed that over-compensatory reaction and I’d be fingered. So my motto in these cases—better safe than sorry—meant not revealing who I was.”
Rulaine nodded slowly. “Okay, I get it. But I have to tell you: between that strategy and your, well, winning ways around people, I was half-convinced you were our traitor.”
She nodded back. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Sure. Figure it out, genius: I wanted to be the one that no one trusts. I wanted any spoken or unspoken suspicion centered on me. Because if it was, then everyone else isn’t so worried about someone watching them—including the real traitor. Humans, even pros in my field, tend to have that blind spot; they presume that someone who is under scrutiny is too worried about proving their own innocence to be watching anyone else. Problem was, Macmillan didn’t tip his hand, didn’t give me much to go on. Probably the only thing he ever did that might have given him away I wasn’t on hand to see.”
“Which was?”
“When he sabotaged Riordan’s filter mask. I’m guessing he did that right after we crashed. During our salvage work, we had to take off our masks to keep them from getting soaked. I’ll bet in all the activity, and then the confusion after Hirano was attacked by those pirhannows, he had plenty of opportunity to take care of Riordan’s mask. It was a shrewd plan: let Caine sicken by degrees, weaken the group by taking out our leader—who we’re not likely to leave behind—and freeze us in place. But the water-striders ruined it. Suddenly we had mobility independent of effort. But Macmillan never tipped his hand after that.”
“Where’d you learn your field craft?”
“Officially? I spent some weeks in training with the DGSE at Noisy-le-Sec, but mostly at the School of Hard Knocks.”
“Starting in early childhood, if Mr. Gaspard is correct.”
“He is, although the bastard has no right to talk about it.”
“It doesn’t sound as though you like your employer very much. Well, your ostensible employer.”
“Oh, he’s my real employer, all right. I took his coin and I took IRIS’ and didn’t much mind; I deserved them both, and more besides. But no, why should I like him? He’s a prissy classist manbitch who thinks the world was better off when everyone who doesn’t share his complexion was safely under the administration of colonial masters.”
“Gaspard?”
“Sure. Part of the post-war wave of NeoImperialists.”
Rulaine scratched his head. “I’m not even sure what that refers to.”
“That’s because you were on the counter-invasion fleet to Sigma Draconis. Those of us who lagged behind, even by a few weeks, got an earful of rhetoric about how humanity could no longer afford the inequities and inefficiencies which had plagued humankind for so long. So what’s their answer? Any country that they felt couldn’t pull its weight or hadn’t been able to create an orderly government was essentially put on probation.”
“Probation?”
“Yeah; as in, ‘fix your shit or we’re coming in and fixing it for you.’ Coño, if that’s how it was going to be, why the hell did the Western powers ever leave their colonies? They lost almost two centuries of fun oppressing, raping, and exploiting.” Her terribly bright smile was as bitter and vitriolic as Bannor had ever seen on a human face.
He shrugged. “Then what’s your answer? If we do get into another scrap with our new interstellar neighbors, and that seems likely, then how do we get everyone mobilized, working toward the common goal of survival, of speciate sovereignty?”
“I don’t know, but you sure as shit don’t accomplish it by taking away some of your own peoples’ national sovereignty!”
Rulaine sighed. “Gaspard is a pragmatist. And he probably has a better sense than we do about how much time we have to get our house in order before the wolf comes sniffing around the door again.”
“Yeah, well, it took centuries to make this mess. Only seems fair that it would take centuries to un-make it.”
Bannor nodded. “I get that. But what if we don’t have centuries?”
“Look, I’m not saying I’ve got the answers. But the five blocs are going about this all wrong, and they’re not losing a lot of sleep over it, either. The only thing they’ve all been able to agree on is that they should take the unproductive nations out behind the shed and whup them. Yeah, just like old times.”
“So, you hate the nation-states. Surprised you’re not working for the megacorporations.”
“Them?” Bannor thought Dora might have expectorated along with her utterance of that word. “Look: nations screw-up like people do; sometimes they mean well, sometimes they’re selfish or delusional bitches on a spree, and sometimes they just plain make mistakes. But the megacorporations don’t make mistakes; if they do damage, it’s because they like the cost-to-benefit ratios, dead innocents notwithstanding. Nations are bulls in the global china shop; corporations are sharks.”
“Yeah, but what about the—?”
Veriden rose. “Rulaine, I didn’t come here to debate politics, the world, and everything. I came to make a report, explain why I didn’t let anyone know I was IRIS, and try to get along. But as you’ve pointed out, I don’t do that very well.” She looked over her shoulder at Caine. “I hope he pulls through. But there doesn’t seem much chance of it now.” She turned and padded away, dwindling down the long hallway that was shaped by walls which swept up into high and impenetrable shadows.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The Third Silver Tower; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)
Mriif’vaal approached the Rapport Sphere and thought: Twice in the same week; this is unprecedented in the annals of Disparity. Woe that I should live in such times.
He touched the outer layer of the sphere. The transparent membrane began allowing his tendrils to move through it. Moving very slowly, his whole body passed to the other side of the barrier much as oxygen passed through it by osmosis.
Between the osmotic Outer Sphere, and the hard, hermetic Inner Sphere, the air was thick: an overpressure environment that ensured that none of the spores and pheromones within the Inner Sphere would escape when the seam into it was opened. Mriif’vaal sighed, stared at the swirling vapors on the other side of the hard, clear surface. Those many airborne transmitters and receptors of meaning were not to be braved by the unprepared. The unrestricted sensory wave that perfused both the body and mind of any Slaasriithi that entered was powerful, paralyzing to the untrained.
Mriif’vaal did not welcome his imminent contact with the OverWatchling’s mind. He did not know any ratiocinator that did. And none of the other taxae had contact with it at all. Indeed, it was probably wrong to even think of the OverWatchling as having a mind. It was more akin to a highly detailed awareness. It deduced, but hardly reasoned; it learned, but was rarely capable of generalizing lessons learned within one domain of knowledge to any other; and while it was capable of change, it was disposed to resist it, in the interest of maintaining the stability of the polytaxic order and the synergies of macroevolution.
But this was not what made the consciousness of the OverWatchling such a ubiquitous source of discomfort among ratiocinatorae; it was the
unsettling impression that its awareness could have been a mind, but had not been allowed to become one. This invariably led any perspicacious ratiocinator to wonder what dark path of inducement had produced this biomechanical hybrid, this being that was not a being. It did not help matters that the source of the OverWatchlings was not shared with the whole of the Slaasriithi polytaxon, not even with all Senior Ratiocinatorae. It was only known to those Prime Ratiocinatorae whose domains of responsibility transcended the boundaries of an individual world and extended into the interconnections between planets, star systems, and species. It was they who delivered new OverWatchlings to planets that had been sufficiently bioformed to warrant one. They did not divulge where the OverWatchlings originated, or how their biological and mechanical parts were, ultimately, fused. None of which helped diminish the unrest that other ratiocinatorae felt when in contact with the awareness of these pseudo-sophonts. Mriif’vaal splayed his tendrils wide across the Inner Sphere. A seam opened where none had been evident; he entered the pungent miasma.
Moments after he had seated himself, Mriif’vaal smelled a change in the pheromones; Disparity’s newly reactivated satellite grid had linked this chamber of the Third Silver Tower to that one which housed the OverWatchling beneath the First Silver Tower. The room’s audio converter and playback systems activated, but they were rarely significant in communicating with the OverWatchling. Having no mouth, no real body, it could communicate quantitatively through data streams or, when qualitative comparisons or discussions were required, through remote manipulation of the organic emissions within the Inner Chamber. Given the nature of this particular contact, the latter would predominate, or possibly be the sole vector of exchange.
“I am aware of your situation, Senior Ratiocinator Mriif’vaal,” was the verbal equivalent of what the OverWatchling conveyed, albeit over the period of half a minute: it took considerable time for the Inner Sphere’s changed spores to perfuse Mriif’vaal’s receptors, then stimulate electrochemical changes the same way that sights and sounds produced meaning in one’s brain. And in referring to “this situation,” the OverWatchling transmitted meaning that went far beyond that simple word, but invoked a signification-matrix that encompassed all the relevant reports, data, lists, and analyses that were resident in its awareness. Resident, but mostly inert, since its prior experience had not prepared it for such a complicated and nuanced situation as the one it now faced.
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