Interim: On the run from the Galactic FTL Police

by P. K. Lentz

  “If you like,” Kearn said, borrowing one of the woman’s own non-replies. “I just want answers.”

  “I see. Why the sudden interest?”

  Kearn had asked the very same thing of her not long ago, less than two hours in her perception, and her words were clearly intended to recall his own. Not long ago his reaction to such wordplay would have been impatience. But for whatever reason, maybe because he’d had enough of solitude, he wasn’t bothered now.

  “Guess I ran out of more interesting problems,” Kearn said.

  Zerouali reached up to grab the handrail and extract herself from the capsule. “Fair enough,” she said. “Mind if I get dressed first?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Setting off toward the crew lockers, Zerouali cast back a particular glance that Kearn had seen plenty of times before, though never from her. It said she knew. She knew he’d been looking, and she didn’t mind. She knew, too, that he would look again now. Perhaps despite his better judgment, Kearn obliged.

  A short time later Zerouali emerged fully dressed from a changing stall and rejoined Kearn by the exit. “I can give you answers,” she said, “but I’m afraid they’ll only invite more questions.”

  Kearn let her precede him through the hatch. “I just want to know what makes you so dangerous,” he said.

  With a backward look, Zerouali smiled. She was doing much more of that lately, maybe even too much. “You think I’m dangerous?”

  “Obviously someone does. Maybe I’m just curious about the competition for my status as Fleet’s most wanted.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” she said, “after Merada I’m quite sure the title is yours.”

  “In which case, you might say our roles have reversed and I’m the one complicating your life.”

  The relative ease Kearn felt with Zerouali now was a pleasant departure from the frustration he’d felt with her not long ago. He couldn’t quite tell whether the new dynamic resulted from changes in her or in him, in their situation, or some combination of them all.

  “I think the distinction might be irrelevant now,” Zerouali said. “Let’s just say our complications are mutual.”

  The conversation lapsed into a not-uncomfortable silence while they made leisurely progress through Lady’s corridors.

  “Where are you from, Captain?” Zerouali asked suddenly at the habitation module’s axial shaft.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re not Reissan. So where were you born?”

  “I thought it was my turn to ask questions.”

  “Then tell me it’s none of my business.”

  They entered the radial lift that would take them down through the concentric layers of the hab module. Kearn didn’t answer immediately.

  “I was born out here,” he admitted at length. “Raised shipboard.” Kearn wasn’t sure why he needed to tell her this. Perhaps once one began purging oneself, it became hard to stop.

  “I see. That’s not common, is it?”

  “No, and for good reason. It’s a lousy way to grow up. Every time we put in at port I wondered if we might stay. I hoped we would. We never did.”

  “You remained a spacer, so I take it you overcame the disappointment.”

  Kearn nodded, feeling mild surprise at how easy it was to speak of these things, and with a stranger no less. Perhaps some degree of comfort came precisely from the fact that he didn’t know Zerouali well and that her presence on Lady seemed a temporary thing.

  As the lift descended, an approximation of gravity tugged them gently toward what would shortly become the floor.

  “Humans didn’t evolve in a void,” Kearn said. “They weren’t meant to grow up in one.”

  And suddenly he wasn’t so comfortable anymore. Those words. He had said almost the same thing to Serenity once, centuries ago, arguing about her pregnancy. And with Ren aboard Lady now, the subject was suddenly relevant again.

  Perhaps Zerouali sensed his sudden disquiet, for she said nothing further until they arrived at her guest quarters.

  The doors there parted to greet them with a blast of foul, putrid air. Zerouali covered her mouth and nose. Kearn was forced to do the same.

  “Did you leave out some food?” he asked irritably.

  Zerouali shook her head. Kearn brushed past her to enter the living area, where the stench was overwhelming. Zerouali came in behind him and within a few seconds was walking purposefully to one corner of the room. She knelt and plucked something from the floor there.

  “What is it?” Kearn asked, coming up behind her.

  What she held aloft for him to see was a shattered cylinder of glass and metal--a broken specimen vial. Kearn didn’t need to ask what its contents had been, even though not a single drop of Lisset’s blood now appeared on any part of its surface.

  Kearn struggled for a rational explanation. “I don’t suppose it looked like this six months ago?” he suggested in vain.

  Without reply, Zerouali rose and crossed the few paces to the suite’s washroom. Its door slid open on approach, treating them both to a fresh blast of foul air. The smell forced Kearn’s battered senses to admit urine as one certain ingredient in the noxious mix.

  But there was more than foul air behind that door. The broken vial slipped from Zerouali’s suddenly limp fingers. Sprawled in an awkward pose on the washroom floor was a naked female. Her flesh was chalky white, in striking contrast to the wave of vibrant auburn hair that covered her face. Kearn didn’t need to see the face to know who this was. Or, rather, whose corpse.

  “Is that--” Zerouali stopped, gagged, resumed. “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Lisset,” Kearn confirmed.

  As they stood gawking, Zerouali kept one hand clamped tight over her face to stave off another round of retching. Kearn, fighting the same impulse himself, uncovered his mouth long enough to shout an order to the room’s environmental controls. An inrush of cool air announced the start of atmospheric purge.

  “What do we do with her?” Zerouali asked, venturing a few steps forward for a closer look.

  “I’m very much open to suggestions,” Kearn admitted. In fact, he could hardly think. He’d been thrown quite a few surprises lately, but this one easily surpassed them all. At least those other surprises, even seeing Ren again­ , meshed squarely with his perception of the universe, with what one might call reality. This one trampled all over it.

  “Is there someplace we can store her while we wait?” Zerouali asked, rather cryptically. She had grown bold enough by now, or at least inured enough to the odor, to kneel down directly beside the body.

  “Wait?” Kearn echoed. “Wait for what?”

  “For her.” Zerouali’s tone suggested the answer should have been obvious. “To live again.”

  The obvious insanity of this pronouncement served to rouse Kearn from his state of shock. “Listen, I’m somewhat forced to accept that a bottle of blood turned itself into a corpse. But now you tell me it’s going to live again?”

  No longer bothering to cover her face, Zerouali touched one hand to the corpse’s neck and quested for a pulse. “The first of those two leaps is the greater,” she said, with a trace of her prior arrogance resurfacing. “In fact, once you accept the first, the second is almost logical. Anyway, the vial was over there.” She pointed to the corner. “And she’s here. Ergo, she already lived at least long enough to crawl across the room.”

  “Human beings can’t do this,” Kearn said in hopeless denial.

  He guessed immediately how Zerouali would respond, and she failed to disappoint.

  “We’re not dealing with a human,” she said. “At least not one like we know.” She rose, wiped her hands on her shirt and started back into the living area. “Looks like I was right after all when I said there was trouble. Come, Captain. The time has come for those answers you wanted.”

  ***

  Reissa InfoFLUX - Your total news source for Reissa and beyond.

  I.0286.12.16 09:17

&
nbsp; Commonwealth:POLITICS

  Transcript of first policy speech by First Secretary Adm. Karina Althauser (ret.), I.0286.12.16

  Citizens of the Commonwealth, you elected my party on its promise to secure a future of peace and prosperity for your children and for all generations to come. Your voice has been heard, and as your elected leaders we must waste not a moment in heeding the call. Your Assembly has already voted by strong majority to grant this administration the broad authority to do whatever is necessary to fulfill our historic promise.

  At this time when our great Commonwealth finds itself beset on all sides by the forces of chaos, we cannot stand by complacently awaiting the inevitable deathblow. There are at least thirteen translight cores out there, somewhere, in unknown hands. There are also thirteen unique and beautiful worlds in our union. In thirteen moments of horror, the future of our civilization could be erased. Only the hopelessly naive can deny this danger. The flame of humanity must not be allowed to dwindle and fade from this universe that we call home. Yet that is precisely what shall occur if drastic action is not taken, and taken soon.

  It is with this firm conviction in mind, as well as with love for the ideals upon which this Commonwealth was founded that I announce the start of Operation Freedom’s Reign. This sweeping initiative is designed to deliver enduring peace and security for all of humankind by seeking out and eliminating forces of evil and chaos throughout known space. By removing such elements, which can only be called ticking bombs, from humanity’s starscape, we open the door to a new epoch in the history of our species, an epoch of unprecedented peace. Civilization will be free to flourish as it has never done before.

  It may pain us some among us to extinguish the lives of those who have yet to raise a hand against us. Such compassion is admirable, and indeed is part of what makes us human. However, it is that same compassion, along with healthy measures of pragmatism, intellect, and foresight that inspires and necessitates Freedom’s Reign.

  For centuries now, that noblest of all endeavors, our Interim, has stood firm between our Commonwealth and the yawning abyss of History, between order and chaos, civilization and anarchy. Now we must make the sad--nay, painful--admission that this shield which has protected us so well for so long has been pierced. Forces far outside our control now wield the ultimate powers of life and death, powers they will inevitably one day choose to deploy against us. They have already done so to devastating effect, extinguishing in seventy-five gruesome moments the lives of thousands of our brave, innocent brothers and sisters serving on Fleet voidships. Should we wait now idly for the next, even more brutal attack by those who are jealous of our freedom and prosperity? How long before we take notice, before we rise up and say to their terror, ‘Never again’?

  This government’s emphatic answer--your answer--is that we will not wait. Freedom’s Reign is our answer. The line has been drawn and we are called upon to step up to it, or else perish. The plans are made, the stage is set, and the curtain is soon to rise on a bright new age.

  My fellow lovers of peace, I thank you.

  [END]

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sallat sank into despair upon reading the fresh communiqué from Reissa. Whisper of Death was to put in at Ayara, the nearest Commonwealth world, to be outfitted with a full ordnance payload for its part in an operation dubbed ‘Freedom’s Reign.’ He would be given a list of inhabited planets to pacify.

  Pacify by cleansing. By genocide.

  He had sensed it coming, but never dreamed it would be so soon. Until this moment he had even maintained some hope that the people and leadership of the Commonwealth might come to their senses in time to avert catastrophe. At very least he had believed there might be time enough yet for he and his co-conspirators to discover the yet-undetermined correlation between the Embassy virus and the mania that had swept Althauser and her warhawks to power.

  As a Fleet captain, Sallat was by far, to his knowledge, the highest-level convert among the fledgling resistance. He brought with him a largely uninfected crew, for he had maneuvered to keep his roster thus since Merada, and potentially the immense power of a Penumbra-class voidship. He had scarcely imagined he might be called upon to use that power for overt insurrection--but then neither had he quite believed it would ever come to this, to the orders he now scanned for the hundredth time. To the wholesale destruction of worlds.

  Now Sallat faced a fateful decision. Whisper was a powerful weapon, his weapon, and with a single order he could bring it to bear against the full might of Fleet.

  The Demon Drive granted an attacker terrifying advantage, the very reason the Interim’s founders had so feared its misuse. With it, a vessel could arrive completely unannounced, deliver a planetary deathblow, and vanish without trace. Cleansing a world was child’s play, and defending against it all but impossible.

  But one vessel might still make a difference. Even if Whisper could not directly prevent the death of a single world, it might take some of the exterminators by surprise. Destroying a voidship meant sparing all those worlds further down its appointed list of targets.

  Ultimately, though, facing the full strength and infinite resources of the Commonwealth, an isolated resistor was doomed to failure. If Fleet’s leaders were determined to sterilize a sizable chunk of human space, nothing could stop them, certainly not one ship.

  This sense of futility was precisely what had led the resistance to kidnap Simon Ascher. Some amongst them, not least Sallat himself, had hoped Ascher might provide some insight into the cause of this nameless threat, thus perhaps allowing them to strike at its root. After all, Ascher’s court martial testimony amounted to the only non-circumstantial evidence that the virus was even something malign. More importantly, his story hinted at an intelligence--his ‘phantom’--that was aware of the virus at an early stage, and actively opposing it. Maybe they could even somehow enlist the phantom’s aid.

  It had been a long shot which, in the end, hadn’t paid off. Ascher really didn’t know anything more than he had told the tribunal in his defense. The only plausible theory in Sallat’s mind was that this phantom had been someone at a very high level aboard Hunter in the Dark at Merada, or perhaps a powerful intruder, who had detected the problem and moved to act against it. Ascher had claimed that the phantom’s intention was to destroy Hunter. That the months following Merada had witnessed the unexplained destruction of dozens of other Fleet voidships, then, hardly seemed coincidental.

  Realistically, a force that could achieve this level of destruction had to represent more than a lone individual. Certainly it was not Kearn, whom most Commonwealth officials now linked, at least publicly, to the so-called terrorist attacks. No, this phantom was a true force for resistance in every sense of the term, and almost certainly the only one with the remotest hope of success.

  It remained a mystery among mysteries why the phantom’s priority aboard Hunter had been to rescue Serenity Martijn. An interview with her might shed some light, but unfortunately she and the Lady of Chaos on which she’d escaped had not been sighted in the months since Merada.

  Of course, none of this theorizing helped Sallat one iota to make the more immediate decision at hand. One thing was sure: he could not participate in the wholesale execution of entire worlds. It did not take him much longer to conclude that neither could he stand idly by while others did the same. He had to stand against Fleet, however futile the effort.

  Maybe, just maybe, there were other captains out there who would make the same decision. The resistance kept its branches largely ignorant of one another to ensure that the entire network could not be easily compromised. Thus far the precaution had proved unnecessary, since no visible moves had been taken against them. Sallat saw three possible explanations for this: one, there was no guiding intelligence behind Embassy; two, it hadn’t discovered the resistance yet; or three, it simply didn’t consider them a threat.

  Now it would pose a threat, if only briefly. Whisper would b
attle impossible odds, and in the end would fail. Sallat’s actions may not halt Fleet’s inexorable march, but he might yet grant billions of innocents a short stay of execution.

  Soon he would issue the order to imprison all of Whisper’s crew known to be infected, a careful list of which was locked securely in Sallat’s own flesh and blood memory. He would then allow his uninfected crewmembers, individually, the option of remaining aboard for the coming conflagration or disembarking somewhere outside the Commonwealth.

  Most would stay on, Sallat was sure. For soon, even the deck of a renegade Fleet warship would be far safer than the surface of any non-Commonwealth world.

  Right now, at least, the course was clear.

  To Ayara, to arm.

  ***

  It was in something of a stupor that Kearn sat on the couch across from Zerouali in her guest quarters. He hardly knew what to think--about Lisset, about Zerouali, about anything. Luckily he didn’t have to think too hard because an unusually animated Zerouali took charge of the conversation.

  “I told you already I was a researcher on Prophet,” she said. “That’s what the Interim scholars on the first translight expeditions there unofficially named the Artifact, in kind of a deliberate swipe at religion. Had they known what lay ahead, they might have been more careful.

  “Prophet turned out to hold a few surprises not to the Interim’s liking. For starters, there were buried signals in its electromagnetic emissions, and, as it turned out, in those from the translight cores as well.” Zerouali’s dark eyes lit. “Coded layers in both contained unmistakable references to pre-Crossing Earth--art, literature, music. Have you heard of something called ‘the Beatles’?”

  Kearn shook his head.

  “Me either. Ancient Terran musicians, evidently. Songs of theirs were found encoded in the cores’ EM signatures. Along with much more. The patterns were easy to find once you noticed them, so after the first was discovered, thousands more came pouring out. Most of the references are so obscure as to be absent from datastores. By the time I left, only a fraction had been identified.”