Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3

by Luther M. Siler

  Asper stared at Sulkar Nuh.

  "Your guns do not frighten me," xe said. "You offered me a choice a moment ago. I offer you one now. You listen, or more blood will be shed. The choice is yours."

  Sulkar Nuh's expression did not change. "Stand down," he said, and his crew reluctantly put their weapons away.

  "I have heard that Overmorrow died," the dwarf said.

  "In battle," Asper said. "Against the Benevolence."

  "And so your crossing our path was no mistake," Sulkar Nuh said.

  "Correct," Asper said. "Overmorrow controlled a small part of the Noble Opposition's forces. We are scattered across known space, and too many are allowed to claim the name Malevolence. I intend to change that. My parent held a fighting force together. I intend to build an army."

  "And you wish for my little gang of pirates to join you," Sulkar Nuh said. "And fight against the Benevolence. I can only assume that our days of raiding trading routes are over."

  "Perhaps not," Asper said. "But your skills will be put to use against more … interesting targets."

  Sulkar Nuh descended the stairs from the captain's chair, crossing through the pool of blood to stand eye-to-eye with Asper. His tangle of horns towered over the elf's head. Asper met his eyes, every muscle in xir body ready for instant movement if needed. Xe was fairly confident that this dwarf could be beaten in a fight, but to do so with everyone on the bridge taking every clear shot they could find at xir would be a bit more challenging than xe was interesting in. Better to retreat quickly and begin taking the ship apart.

  Sulkar Nuh stared at xir, his eyes strangely sleepy-looking. Then he laughed again.

  "I like you, elf," he said. "We have been plucking ships out of this route for months and never once has anyone thought to threaten me on my own bridge. You have balls. Or … whatever it is you have, they're made of steel." He waved a hand vaguely at Asper's crotch and turned to his crew.

  "We've got a new job, folks. I think there's more money to be made with Asper than in lurking here much longer. Anyone care to disagree?"

  It was as if he'd uttered a code phrase of some kind. The bridge fell silent instantly. No one moved or volunteered to disagree.

  "Well said," he replied. He turned to Asper. "Care to have my navigators lay in coordinates? We should speak in private." He began walking off the bridge without waiting for a response. Asper turned and followed him.

  "Your navigators will be discovering soon that the Shield and Spear has taken control of your ship," Asper said. "And we will be in tunnelspace soon enough." The hacking package was another of Remember's gifts. It didn't allow control of all of the ship's systems, but controlling navigation was often control enough.

  Sulkar Nuh's only reaction was a slight raise of his eyebrows.

  "You make for a formidable opponent, elf," he said. "I am glad that we do not have to be enemies."

  "I'm glad I only had to kill one of your subordinates," Asper replied. "But I am curious: you seem formidable enough. Why give up so easily?"

  "In honesty, I have been looking for you," Sulkar Nuh said. "I have heard that there has been a movement to pull the Malevolence into something more cohesive. Your work has not gone unnoticed in that regard. You command, what, perhaps several hundred soldiers now?"

  His intel was surprisingly up to date. "Close enough," Asper said.

  "Large enough that you will be looking for a deputy," the dwarf said.

  Asper laughed. Of course. "It had occurred to me. Although the word that I would use would be general."

  Sulkar Nuh nodded. "Yes," he said. "I accept."

  Asper stopped walking. "I did not offer," xe said. "I know nothing about you other than that you command these ships."

  "I would have thought that everyone knew of the Horned Dwarf," Sulkar Nuh said, his voice growing grandiose again.

  "Known space is large," Asper said. "I had not, and the merchant who sent me on this voyage made no mention of any specific pirate, horned or otherwise."

  "Soon enough, then," he said. "My name will be known everywhere. Sulkar Nuh, the Horned Dwarf, general of the armies of the Glorious Opposition! I will be as the immortals!"

  "Noble Opposition," Asper said. "You may as well get the name right."

  Sulkar Nuh waved off xir correction. "My opposition will be glorious. But that is a debate for later. You say you do not know of Sulkar Nuh. What do you wish to know?" The dwarf's eyes practically twinkled. He was obviously enjoying the conversation tremendously. The two of them entered into a common area furnished with tables and low couches. Sulkar Nuh gestured at a knot of crew members sitting around a table and playing cards. They took one look at him and Asper and quickly fled the room.

  Asper stared at Sulkar Nuh. The dwarf seemed to radiate jollity and menace in equal amounts. He was a walking contradiction. A walking, enormous contradiction.

  "Sulkar Nuh is no dwarven name," xe said.

  The dwarf roared with laughter again. "Most people ask about the horns," he said. "But you are too smart! You go straight to the real questions, questions of identity. Clever."

  "And you did not answer," Asper said pointedly.

  "I was getting to it," he replied. "My mother was a criminal, exiled from dwarven civilization. I was a natural birth."

  Asper barely controlled xir surprise. Dwarven society had almost entirely done away with natural birth. In fact, had Sulkar Nuh not just claimed to have been naturally born, xe would have sworn no dwarf had been pregnant in generations.

  "Does the name have a meaning?" xe asked.

  "I have no idea," he replied. "But for whatever reason she declined to name me Peb or Xuh or some other dwarven male name, and we were not remotely of a caste where a highborn name was appropriate for me."

  "Whatever reason? She never told you?"

  "I killed her on the way out," he said. "It turns out that generations of gestating infants in vats has made dwarves terrible midwives. Even more so when the dwarves are on the run and have little access to useful medical technology."

  Asper could not prevent the wince from crossing xir face.

  "It wasn't the horns," Sulkar Nuh said. "Those came later. Years later, in fact. But I was as … robust of an infant as I am a grown man. I was raised by a succession of exiled 'uncles' and 'aunts,' most of whom never knew my mother."

  "You do not know where they came from?" xe asked.

  "I know they make me mighty," he replied. He said it completely seriously. Asper concentrated on the horns, trying to determine if there was anything magical about them. Xe saw nothing. If the horns truly made Sulkar Nuh mighty, they were doing so psychosomatically.

  "If you say so," xe said.

  "I do," the dwarf answered. "And they will make you mighty through me. I wish to halt the Benevolence before they overtake dwarfspace. Because conquering dwarfspace is my destiny. I will help you destroy the Benevolence. And then you will help me destroy the dwarves."

  He's a madman, xe thought. But a damned charismatic one.

  "I agree to one war, not two," Asper said. "And you have dwarves under your command. You are the only male I have seen on board, in fact. They agree to this?"

  "I don't care if they do," he replied. "But any dwarf who travels with Sulkar Nuh has reasons to wish to smash the matriarchy. We may not all agree on what comes next. But no matter. I will convince you when the time comes. Until then, I will help you to destroy the Benevolence."

  "You may wish to notify the crew of your decision," Asper said. "We should be together when it happens."

  Sulkar Nuh gestured at his face.

  "You may want to clean off all the blood first," he said.

  Asper wiped a hand across xir face, momentarily surprised by the gore on xir fingers. Sulkar Nuh was right. Perhaps a shower would be in order. And then, the formidable task of beginning to meld this gang of pirates into xir army.

  The Benevolence would hear from them soon enough.

  * * *

  The Custome
r

  The casino floor smelled terrible. It had a lot of other things going on too— it was loud, brightly lit, packed with people, more than a little bit disorienting— but mostly it just smelled. The gnome took a deep breath, picking out the scent of seven— no, eight— different kinds of dried plant being smoked in her near vicinity. The eighth was subtle, but there were at least two different varieties of Carolid tobacco being enjoyed out there on the floor somewhere. The crowd was crazily diverse— mostly gnomes, of course, but only barely, and she spotted all of the Known Races plus a few beings of unclear origin in her first lazy glance across the floor. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. She'd been in casinos before where the prevailing mood was a mix of depression and weary acceptance, where even the winners seemed to know that walking out penniless had only been delayed, not prevented. This one, though? The crowd was having a good time. The house was winning, of course. It always did. But the players thought they were getting their money's worth out of their time. And this wasn't even where the high-rollers played. That casino would probably smell better.

  She walked past rows of tables where people were playing games involving cards and boards and chits and tokens— some games she knew, some she didn't. Everywhere had their own local specialties, of course, games that weren't played anywhere else. The other side of the casino was all holo and touchscreen games. No living dealers. Those were the ones she wanted.

  She chose a machine sized for bigs since there were more of those available and climbed up onto the stool in front of it. She looked it over. A simple random match game, themed after some well-known local entertainment franchise that she didn't recognize. It would do.

  She fed a chit into the machine and blinked hard at it, activating a trigger implanted into an eyelid. The trigger brought sensors in her retinas and fingertips online, probing carefully at the machine in front of her, looking for vulnerabilities in the code keeping it running. A thin yellow halo appeared around the machine. It was a signal, one only she could see. She was in.

  She kept her first few bets conservative, winning small amounts of money and then deliberately losing it again to make sure everything was working as she thought it would. Only after she was certain did she go for a big win, pulling in what was probably a day's salary for most of the employees at the casino. A chorus of beeps and flashing lights erupted from her machine, a few holographic fireworks exploding over her head for good measure.

  Shit. She wasn't interested in drawing a crowd, although only a few looked her way. A couple more of those displays and she'd have onlookers gathered around her, people hoping to pick up some of her luck by osmosis and maybe one or two who thought they could magic it out of her.

  If this was the kind of casino she thought it was, though, she wasn't going to have time to have a problem.

  Two minutes later, she'd won enough money to run a small city for a week.

  Two and a half minutes later, there was another gnome standing directly at her shoulder.

  "You're having a remarkable string of luck," the other gnome said.

  "I have days like that sometimes," she responded.

  "Remarkable enough that the owner would like to congratulate you personally," she said. "She likes to meet all of her best customers."

  "I'd love to," she said, smiling brightly. "So, are you just security, or somebody more important than that?" She turned around on the stool, surprised to note that despite being on a stool sized for bigs the other gnome was nearly tall enough to look her in the eyes.

  "I run security around here," she said. "Name's Tarrysh. You planning on being trouble?"

  "Wasn't planning to, unless you need me to be."

  "It's been a long day."

  "I don't know if that's a yes or a no."

  "Let's keep it that way," Tarrysh said. "You coming, or do I need to escort you?"

  "I'm coming," she said, moving to eject her credit chit.

  "You'll find it's not in there anymore," Tarrysh said. "Our system is holding onto it, for safekeeping."

  "Safekeeping."

  "Yep."

  She nodded. This was the right kind of casino after all.

  "Let's go meet your boss, then."

  * * *

  Surprisingly, no one bothered to hit her on the way to the interrogation room. Tarrysh called it her "accommodations" just before locking her inside, but that was a polite fiction at best, as the room featured a handful of chairs, a metal table, and absolutely nothing else in the way of furnishing. The floor was poured concrete and the walls cheap paneling, probably over some sort of stone or metal. One wall was mirrored, of course. The lighting overhead— way overhead; the ceiling seemed higher than it needed to be— was stark white and harsh. It was every interrogation room she'd ever been in, basically. What it wasn't, luckily, was a torture chamber: no suspect drains in the corners, no weird stains no one had bothered to clean up or cover. Tarrysh hadn't even bothered to cuff her to anything or pat her down.

  Which probably means I've been scanned a dozen different times on the way down here. She wasn't carrying any weapons anyway beyond a simple utility knife that would probably be a bit worse than useless in a fight. She had some personal biotech beyond the hacking package, but nothing dangerous, and she couldn't find any external signals anyway. Not even any comms. The room was shielded. The entire floor probably was.

  She pulled two of the chairs together and stretched out on them. She was probably going to be here for a while, and she was either going to be dead very soon or was about as safe as she could possibly be on this planet. There was no reason not to take a nap.

  * * *

  It felt like she slept for perhaps an hour before a change in the room awakened her. There was another gnome sitting across the table from where she'd built her couch— this one a male, dressed expensively but not ostentatiously. He had the look of a businessman, or at least the clothing of one, but there was something harder underneath it.

  Tarrysh had called the owner "she," though. Not the one in charge. But close enough.

  "So," he said.

  She sat up, shoving the extra chair to the side. "So," she answered.

  "Let's not do the thing where you lie to me a lot before we find out the truth," he said, his voice calm. "I prefer honesty. My name's Brazel. This is my wife's place. Who are you?"

  "Aisra," she said.

  "Hi, Aisra," Brazel said. "Got a family name?"

  "Inhivra'asti," she said.

  Brazel nodded. "Good. Starting off with the truth. Mind telling me why you were trying to hack into my wife's machines?"

  They knew who she was already. That could be good news or it could be bad.

  "Trying?" she said. "I succeeded. If I'd left after the first transaction you'd never have noticed me."

  "We noticed you before you came inside," Brazel said. "We pinged your tech at the starport. We've been watching you ever since waiting for you to use it. I'm revising my opinion of your talents downward right now."

  "How come it worked, then?" she asked. "You found me remotely but couldn't harden your casino tech well enough to keep me out?"

  The gnome's eyes flicked behind her for just a split second, barely long enough for her to duck and cover her head. A fist crashed through the table in front of her, nearly breaking it in half. She hit the floor.

  Shit. There was a goddamned halfogre standing behind her. She hadn't heard him. She hadn't smelled him. How the hell had that happened?

  "Because we don't always like revealing all of our secrets right away," Brazel said, guessing her thoughts.

  Fuck this, she thought. She still wasn't chained or cuffed, and she'd fought bigs before. She grabbed the halfogre's ankle, pulling herself close to him, then tried to scramble up his leg and onto his back. She'd choked out plenty of bigs who weren't prepared for this move in the past.

  This one … was. The halfogre did something, and he did it so fast she barely even knew what was happening, and then suddenly she was bei
ng held up over his head and her back was on the ceiling and his giant hand was around her neck and between gravity and the hand it was really hard to breathe and the thought oh, that's why the ceilings are at that height floated through her head and it was a ridiculous thing to think but maybe that's what your brain does to you when it's dying from lack of oxygen.

  "Kcch," she said.

  "What's that?" Brazel said. "Grond, you're choking her. Stop that."

  The halfogre shifted his grip, and air flooded back into her lungs. It still wasn't comfortable by any stretch of the imagination but she was pretty sure that dying in the next two or three minutes wasn't as likely any longer.

  "So here's the thing, Aisra," Brazel said. "We know who you are. We know you've gone by the name Diode in hacker circles before. We know you've been at least mostly retired for a couple of years, and we know that you just tried to steal an awful lot of money from us, but you did it in a really stupid and obvious sort of way that makes us wonder if you're just that rusty or if you were trying to get our attention on purpose. Any of this sounding good?"

  She nodded energetically. Her chest was starting to compress; it was getting hard to breathe again.

  "Put her down," Brazel said, and Grond dumped her back into her chair again.

  "Now," Brazel said. "I'm going to ask you why again. And you're going to do me the honor of giving me a straight answer, or I'm going to let Rhundi in here to talk to you, and you're going to discover that all this time you've been talking to the good cops. So. Why were you trying to hack into my wife's machines?"

  "Because I need your help," she said.

  * * *

  "Stealing from me is a very odd way to get my help," Rhundi said. Or, at least, Aisra assumed this was Rhundi. The other gnome and the halfogre had conferred silently for a moment and left the room, returning a few minutes later. Neither of them had spoken. The new gnome had dyed her fur in red stripes and carried herself with enough authority that if she wasn't the boss she probably would be soon. Yes, this was Rhundi. It had to be.