A shadow moved across the crystal fields, approaching from the single entrance. Tavalai, Trace thought, in formal robes. The rolling gait of its walk was less pronounced than she was accustomed to. Most of the tavalai Trace had seen were warriors, physically augmented and heavily muscled. This one’s tread was light. A civilian, then. Like the Pelligavani, but the robes were different. Heavier, multi-layered with a big collar, suggesting a greater importance.
“Major Thakur,” called the tavalai, and Trace repressed a twinge of irritation. Loud speech, in this world of calm. The echoes were tactless, like garbage thrown on the pristine stone floor. “I was told that I would find you here. A place of wonder, is it not?”
Perfect English, Trace noted. None of the Pelligavani spoke English. Tavalai were famously multi-lingual, but mostly with their own tongues. The only tavalai who stooped to learning the barbarian human tongue were those whose work specifically involved aliens. That meant tavalai Fleet, or bureaucrats concerned with alien affairs. Like the State Department.
“It is a place of wonder,” Trace agreed as the tavalai came closer, rounding a still pool of water. “There are many caves on my native homeworld, but none like this.”
“Sugauli,” said the tavalai, stopping before her. This one had a lighter pattern to the mottled skin, and was small in stature. That, plus the smoother voice, suggested a female. The big, triple-lidded eyes swivelled inward, a wide binocular vision. “You Kulina know mountains, and mining. These tunnels must seem almost familiar to you.”
Trace could not disagree. Were she not on duty, she’d have loved to sit here for a few hours in the peace, and meditate. Tranquility, so rare in her life, was a precious thing to waste.
“You are Tropagali Andarachi Mandarinava?” she asked.
The tavalai’s lips pressed thin — a tavalai smile. “You may call it the State Department. I know that Togiri names are difficult for humans.”
“Not difficult,” said Trace. “Just boring.”
The tavalai’s smile hardened, but did not fade. “Please,” she said, gesturing with a hand to the smooth rock about them. “We should sit. In the parren custom, in a place of worship.”
“It’s my custom too,” said Trace, and gave an easy wave to Staff Sergeant Kono, trailing the tavalai bureaucrat to see everything was well. He’d searched her, of course, and knew that his Major had little to fear from a tavalai bureaucrat anyhow. They sat, crosslegged on the rock, and Trace found the posture more simple than the tavalai. “Were those your shuttles following us through de-orbit?”
“Yes,” said the tavalai. She was calm, conversational and unworried. Intensely certain of herself, in the way of high-ranking tavalai. That she was prepared to come in here alone, with no protection, to talk to one of human Fleet’s most notorious warriors from the Triumvirate War, suggested that she had a point to prove. “My name is Jelidanatagani. I am from the Department of Administrative Affairs of the State Department, as you call it. Human Wing.”
“Pleased to meet you Jeli,” said Trace. Jeli did not protest the abbreviation. “Please observe safety protocols around Phoenix vessels in future. I would hate to see a miscommunication.”
“You are in tavalai space,” said Jeli with confidence. “If there are miscommunications, the penalty shall be yours.”
Trace considered her for a moment. ‘Never play chicken with tavalai,’ Captain Pantillo used to say. ‘They’ll die before they flinch.’ The State Department had made it plain they did not want Phoenix here. Until now they’d been making that displeasure known mostly to Makimakala, their Dobruta host. Now they came to Trace directly. Trace wondered why her, and not Erik.
“You meet with the one called Aristan,” said Jeli. “This is most unwise.”
“I was not aware that the State Department speak for the parren,” Trace said calmly. “Parren are an independent species, and can speak for themselves.”
Jeli’s eyes swivelled further inward, a tavalai frown. “Major. Humans have no direct experience of parren. Tavalai have known the parren since before the end of the Machine Age. We have thousands of years of established relations and diplomatic practise. We speak each other’s tongues, we know each other’s minds.”
“You’ve fought wars against each other,” Trace interrupted. “You’ve killed each other by the million. Yet you make it sound so wonderful.”
Jeli’s frown deepened. She gestured with one lightly webbed hand at the fields of crystals. “Do you know why the parren preserve these beautiful spaces? Why they value the calm and quiet? Why they spent such enormous sums on a great temple complex such as the Doma Strana in the first place?
“The parren are ruled by Houses. Each House rules a particular parren psychology. Parren psychologies change, Major. Some change voluntarily, others by exposure to trauma or to major life events, others with age or phase of life. But parren can almost change entire personalities, apparently at random. This biological oddity has dominated their politics, and created an obsession amongst the parren with the question of ‘how to live’. For humans or tavalai, the question is philosophical. For parren, it is… how do you say? Bread and butter? It is fundamental to their daily lives, and they’ve fought wars over states-of-mind as humans have fought wars over political ideology.
“Today the dominant House is House Fortitude. House Enquiry rules second, then House Harmony. In the Age of the Machines, House Harmony was dominant. It was the philosophy of harmony that lead the great Harmony leaders of the day to seek harmonious relations with the dominant AI-factions. The machines were not always interested, but the drysine faction was. They created the drysine-parren alliance, and drysine and parren fought side by side in the Great Machine War against the deepynines.
“When the final victory came, a parren named Drakhil was the leader of House Harmony. The other parren houses were persuaded by other species, particularly the chah’nas and the tavalai, to turn on their drysine masters following their terrible casualties against the deepynines. All turned, save for one faction of House Harmony — that faction led by Drakhil. The Tahrae, they were called — the ‘chosen people’. Drakhil fought with the drysines against all the other parren, and the tavalai, and the chah’nas and others. He helped the machines to inflict some catastrophic losses upon his fellow parren. Today, Drakhil’s name among parren is mud. He is a tyrant, a monster, a mass-murderer and traitor of the highest order.
“But your new friend Aristan worships him. Aristan is House Harmony, but he is of the Domesh denomination, and considers himself the heir to Drakhil and the Tahrae. The Domesh insist that Drakhil was strong, as parren today are not. They say that the parren could once again become the dominant species in the Spiral, if only they were to follow the teachings of Drakhil once more. Not only do all the parren Houses consider Aristan their enemy, the current leaders of House Harmony, Aristan’s own house, also consider him an enemy. Only parren etiquette and laws prevent them from killing him directly. That, and the fear of Aristan’s followers. He has billions, and they are fanatical.
“And now, the infamous UFS Phoenix invites this unstable and dangerous man to Stoya III, to meet and talk with him on matters that could destabilise not only tavalai-parren relations, but parren inter-House relations also. So forgive me if the State Department is a little blunt in our displeasure, but we wish to know what this is all about, before Phoenix leaves yet another trail of destruction in her wake.”
Trace knew that she could discuss no such thing. The Dobruta were not the only tavalai institution utterly committed to keeping hacksaw technology under control. There were far more old AI bases and remnants from the Machine Age still out there, in under-explored regions of space, than most beings cared to admit. If tavalai and human leadership could agree on one thing, it was that lifting the restrictions on that old tech would start an arms race amongst the competing species of the Spiral, leading to an inevitable reemergence of sentient-level AI. Previous Spiral history showed that was a terrible idea, to be pr
evented at all costs.
The Dobruta drew their authority from the core legal institutions at the heart of tavalai society. Those law-bodies, taken collectively, constituted most of what humans would call a legislature. If they found out that Phoenix was attempting to acquire an old drysine data core, they’d have Phoenix destroyed at once, whatever Phoenix’s pleading of a deadly new threat from alo space. Arguing with individual tavalai was like arguing with a rock. Arguing with entire tavalai legal institutions was like arguing with mountains.
Phoenix was on a mission to track down and find the data core, under the tavalai’s noses, without letting them know what it was they were searching for. As if that weren’t hard enough, they also had to do it without letting the parren know — Aristan included. From all that she’d heard and read, Trace had no doubt that Jeli’s assessment of Aristan was correct. The data core, falling into his hands, would be a disaster.
“Phoenix is in tavalai space on the invitation of the Dobruta,” Trace said calmly. “Makimakala knows our business, and can vouch for our peaceful intentions.”
Jeli looked deeply displeased. Trace might have expected her to argue further. Instead she gazed about, at the fields of crystal.
“When this place was built,” she said, “the tavalai were just a small species on a handful of worlds, struggling to survive in the Age of Machines. Humanity was pre-technological on Earth, just beginning to experiment with farming. The parren became a great species by collaborating with the machines. This temple was built with the technology from that collaboration. It would be hard to build it today. In many ways, the technology of the machines was superior to what we have today.”
Trace refrained from nodding. Styx was adamant on that point.
“There are always those prepared to sacrifice civilised principles for personal gain,” Jeli continued, with a hard stare. “And it is the job of civilised peoples and institutions to stop them. We will find out what you’re up to, Phoenix. You and Makimakala, the Dobruta are not nearly so pleased with Makimakala’s actions as they’ve led you to believe, do not be fooled. Captain Pramodenium is not as authoritative as he’s led you to believe, and we have means of forcing him to talk. Do not spend too long looking at the pretty crystals. Your time here is limited.”
After dinner, the Phoenix officers gathered in the quarters prepared for them. Erik thought the silky black minimalism halfway between wonderful and creepy. The floors and walls were smooth black stone, and everything gleamed in the soft light. Low black bunks, thin mattresses, and black sheets, naturally. Only the outlines of doorways glowed soft white. He’d wanted more colour and vibrancy, after so long on ship. But Doma Strana seemed designed for sensory deprivation.
“Tomorrow, they say,” said Erik. He’d been talking to Aristan’s representatives, black cloaked and impassive like their master. “Aristan’s meditating. Perhaps the morning.”
“He’s checking us out,” said Trace. “Like we are him.” She sat cross-legged on her bunk, calm and confident, almost serene. Erik could see that she loved it here. Sitting with them on the bunks were Lieutenant Chester Zhi of Echo Platoon, Lieutenant Wei Shilu of First Shift, and Second Lieutenant Kendal Abacha of Second Shift. More had wanted to come, but places were limited. Shilu was present because he was Phoenix’s senior coms officer, and his legal training could be useful amongst the litigious tavalai. Abacha came because he’d drawn a lucky short straw.
“And what’s with the robes?” Zhi asked. He was about Trace’s age, and would probably have risen faster through the ranks had he been on any other ship than Phoenix. There, his abilities might have been conspicuous. But all the Phoenix Company officers were agreed that they’d rather be average players on a champion team than superstars on a team that never made the playoffs. “Most parren don’t dress like that.”
“Aristan is Domesh,” Trace explained. “There’s five big Houses, and each House has many denominations. Like how the Christian Church isn’t just Christians, it’s Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, etc. The Domesh are one of those. They say they’re returning to the old ways of House Harmony, the way things were done in Drakhil’s day. To find true harmony, you must be at peace with yourself, which means rejecting pleasures, emotions, extraneous thought.”
“So you gotta wear a sack?” Abacha wondered.
“Appearance matters to parren,” said Erik. “To most parren, anyway. They care about how they look. But the Domesh don’t care, they reject all that stuff. Concealing themselves means refusing to care about appearance, divorcing themselves from vanity, attraction.”
“Utterly ridiculous,” Shilu sniffed. The Coms Officer had been a dancer in his younger years, and was always elegant, in or out of uniform.
“It’s not ridiculous,” said Trace. “It’s something I’ve wrestled with myself. Robes just take it a bit far.”
“And they’d be a bugger to wear in armour,” said Zhi.
“Or no,” Trace corrected herself. “They don’t take it too far, they miss the point. To find true peace you have to solve the problem, not hide it.”
“I’m glad you don’t wear them, Major,” Erik said innocently. “I’d miss your pleasant scowl.” Trace gave him a sly sideways look, as the others chortled. And surprised Erik by allowing him to have the final word.
A door hummed open, and Hiro passed through the doorway light. Hiro was present because he was a spy, and if there was ever a time and place for a spy, this was it. “Right,” he said without preamble, tucking up his sleeves to sit comfortably at Trace’s side. Erik noted that choice with a faint smile. “The good news is that I don’t think anyone’s positioning to kill us just yet, though my reach is limited.”
“How limited?” asked Zhi, still damp from his shower after a long period in full armour. While the officers had gone to dinner, he’d been guarding hallways. The Pelligavani had politely not remarked on such suspicion, and provided all soldiers with meals in their quarters.
“Well,” said Hiro, and flipped his glasses down to his eyes. The others copied, and holographic images appeared upon the lenses, filling the space between them. It was the Doma Strana, or a good portion of it, at least. The scale was incredible, with hundreds of levels all joined by long, vertical elevator shafts. “We’re here.” A portion of the graphic glowed, a series of levels illuminating. “As near as I can make out, Aristan’s contingent and all their House Harmony people are here.” Another series of rooms lit up, very close and a little lower.
“And you know this how?” Erik asked.
“I’ll get to that. All the rest here is Pelligavani,” and most of the rooms and levels glowed. “Lots of activity, lots of vehicular travel, mostly to Troiham for administrative purposes, a few cargo lifts. Definitely the potential for security issues there.
“We and the House Harmony folks aren’t the only guests. Most of it’s regular Pelligavani business, I’m trying to run down those records now, but the guests look legitimate so far. I’d say there could be a few hundred… including our State Department friends.”
“So the bugs work then?” Zhi asked.
Hiro smiled, reached to a pocket and produced something very small, with wings. It crawled upon his hand — an insect, barely the size of his fingernail. Its wings buzzed, and it hovered a moment, then settled. “Pretty cute huh?” Hiro suggested, with a glance at Trace. “I’m calling this one Trevor.”
Erik recalled the security briefing he’d only half-attended, relying on others’ expertise to keep everyone safe off-ship, and being preoccupied with other things. Bugs. Bugs? He blinked. “That’s not… is that synthetic? Did Styx make that?”
“I’ve got about six of them flying through the corridors,” Hiro affirmed. “They compile data back to my network, which of course rides on the marines’ network. They only need a little sunlight to recharge, and that’s being beamed into the temple via outside optics.”
“Aren’t the security features here pretty well equipped to handle micro-machines?” S
econd Lieutenant Abacha queried. “When I was on staff at Aiken Station HQ I remember they had zappers in the corridors to fry things like that.”
“Sure, they can recognise any known micro-infiltration tech,” Hiro affirmed. “This stuff is hacksaw. These little guys fly straight through multi-phase defensive grids, I’ve seen it. They may as well be invisible, our tech can’t recognise it.”
“That’s because they hack into defensive systems and blind them from the inside,” said Trace. “They’re assassin bugs. Hacksaws made them during the Machine Age to kill organics as much as spy on them. They’d arm them with nerve agents, probably stuff developed in research labs like we saw at TK55 a month ago. You can’t defend against it if you can’t see it coming. A few of them could wipe out a base, or cripple a ship.”
“Much cheaper than a firefight,” Shilu supposed.
And now we’re using them, thought Erik. He’d been in Bay 17C, had seen the new machines working there. Most of those machines had been made by other machines, and were now engaged in making more machines. Styx couldn’t make what she wanted with current manufacturing tech on Phoenix. Ideally she’d have liked an entire city’s worth of tech, but that wasn’t possible. Instead she’d laid out to Engineering Commander Lieutenant Rooke a multi-phase plan, where she’d make the machines that would make the machines that could finally achieve what she wanted.
Phoenix would get out of it a whole shopping list of new technology. New coms, weapons, sensor gear. Reactive armour, she’d promised — sensor-embedded and nearly living. And new capabilities in hundreds of small components that had techs from all of Phoenix’s engineering and systems divisions salivating at the prospect.
What Styx would get out of it, eventually, was a body. She’d be more useful, she insisted — a capable and able-bodied addition to the crew. Where the hell they’d keep a full-bodied hacksaw aboard Phoenix, Erik had no idea. Engineering’s issue — Engineering’s problem. The thought of having one of those flesh-tearing mechanical spiders roaming aboard Phoenix filled him with dread. Probably more dread than was wise, he knew. Styx was deadly enough now, in her ability to manipulate the lower-tech that surrounded. To be frightened of a scary silhouette was stupid. It wasn’t Styx’s limbs that would kill — it was her brain.
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 3
