Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  “You said ‘she,’” I noted.

  “Jael Feogril—my crew here obtained identification from DNA from the handle of that rock hammer we found embedded in your head. You’re lucky to be alive. Had we arrived a day later you wouldn’t have been.”

  “She’s on record?” I inquired, as if I’d never heard of her.

  “Yes—Earth Central Security supplied the details: born on Masada when it was an out-Polity world and made a fortune smuggling weapons to the Separatists. Well connected, augmented with twinned augs as you no doubt saw, and, it would appear, lately branching out into stealing alien artifacts. She’s under a death sentence for an impressive list of crimes. I’ve got it all on crystal if you want it.” “I want it.” It would give me detail.

  He stared at me expressionlessly, wasn’t really capable of doing otherwise.

  “What have you got here?” I asked.

  “My ship and five of the guys,” he said, which accounted for the setting of the environmental controls since he certainly didn’t need Earth-normal. “What are your plans?”

  “I intend to get that memstore back.”

  “How, precisely? You don’t know where she’s gone.”

  “I have contacts, Charles.”

  “Who I’m presuming you haven’t contacted in twenty years.”

  “They’ll remember me.”

  He tilted his head slightly. “You never really told me what you used to do before you joined my little outfit. And I have never been able to find out, despite some quite intensive inquiries.”

  I shrugged, then said, “I’ll require a little assistance in other departments.”

  He didn’t answer for a while. His cigarette had burned right down to his fingers and now there was a slight bacony smell in the air. Then he asked, “What do you require?”

  “A company ship—the Ulriss Fire since it’s fast—some other items I’ll list, and enough credit for the required bribes.”

  “Agreed, Rho,” he said. “I’ll also pay you a substantial bounty for that memstore.”

  “Good,” I replied, thinking the real bounty for me would be getting my hands around Jael Feogril’s neck.

  From what we can tell, the Polity occupies an area of the galaxy once occupied by three other races. They’re called, by us, the Jain, Csorians, and the Atheter. We thought, until only a few years ago, that they were all extinct—wiped out by an aggressive organic technology created by the Jain, which destroyed them and then burgeoned twice more to destroy the other two races—Jain technology. I think we encountered it, too, but information about that is heavily restricted. I think the events surrounding that encounter have something to do with certain Line worlds being under quarantine. I don’t know the details. I won’t know the details until the AIs lift the restrictions, but I do know something I perhaps shouldn’t have been told.

  I found the first five years of my new profession as an xeno-archae-ologist something of a trial, so Jonas Clyde’s arrival on the dust ball I called home came as a welcome relief. He was there direct from Masada— one of those quarantine worlds. He’d come to do some research on the platinum-producing plants, though I rather think he was taking a bit of a rest cure. He shared my home and on plenty of occasions he shared my whisky. The guy was nonstop—physically and mentally adapted to go without sleep—I reckon the alcohol gave him something he was missing.

  One evening, I was speculating about what the Atheter might have looked like when I think something snapped in his head and he started laughing hysterically. He auged into my entertainment unit and showed me some recordings. The first was obviously the view from a gravcar taking off from the roof port of a runcible complex. I recognized the planet Masada at once, for beyond the complex stretched a checkerboard of dikes and ponds that reflected a gas giant hanging low in the aubergine sky.

  “Here the Masadans raised squirms and other unpleasant life-forms for their religious masters,” Jonas told me. “The people on the surface needed an oxygenating parasite attached to their chests to keep them alive. The parasite also shortened their life span.”

  I guessed it was understandable that they rebelled and shouted for help from the Polity. On the recording I saw people down below, but they wore envirosuits and few of them were working the ponds. Here and there I saw aquatic agrobots standing in the water like stilt-legged steel beetles.

  The recording took us beyond the ponds to a wilderness of flute grasses and quagmires. Big fences separated the two. “The best discouragement to some of the nasties out there is that humans aren’t very nutritious for them,” Jonas told me. “Hooders, heroynes, and gabbleducks prefer their fatter natural prey out in the grasses or up in the mountains.” He glanced at me, a little crazily I thought. “Now those monsters have been planted with transponders so everyone knows if something dangerous is getting close, and which direction to run to avoid it.”

  The landscape in view shaded from white to a dark brown with black earth gullies cutting between islands of this vegetation. It wasn’t long before I saw something galumphing through the grasses with the gait of a bear, though on Earth you don’t get bears weighing in at about a thousand kilos. Of course I recognized it, who hasn’t seen a recording of these things and the other weird and wonderful creatures of that world? The gravcar view drew lower and kept circling above the creature. Eventually it seemed to get bored with running, halted, then slumped back on its rump to sit like some immense pyramidal Buddha. It opened its composite forelimbs into their two sets of three “sublimbs” for the sum purpose of scratching its stomach. It yawned, opening its big duck bill to expose thorny teeth inside. It gazed up at the gravcar with seeming disinterest, some of the tiara of green eyes arcing across its domed head blinking as if it was so bored it just wanted to sleep.

  “A gabbleduck,” I said to Jonas.

  He shook his head and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. “No,” he told me, “that’s one of the Atheter.”

  Lubricated on its way by a pint of whisky the story came out piece by piece thereafter. During his research on Masada he had discovered something amazing and quite horrible. That research had later been confirmed by an artifact recovered from a world called Shayden’s Find. Jain technology had destroyed the Jain and the Csorians. It apparently destroyed technical civilizations—that was its very purpose. The Atheter had ducked the blow, forgoing civilization, intelligence, reducing themselves to animals, to gabbleducks. Tricone mollusks in the soil of Masada crunched up anything that remained of their technology, monstrous creatures like giant millipedes ate every last scrap of each gabbleduck when it died. It was an appalling and utterly alien nihilism.

  The information inside the Atheter memstore Jael had stolen was worth millions. But who was prepared to pay those millions? Polity AIs would, but her chances of selling it to them without ECS coming down on her like a hammer were remote. Also, from what Jonas told me, the Polity had obtained something substantially more useful than a mere memstore, for the artifact from Shayden’s Find held an Atheter AI. So who else? Well, I knew about her, though until she’d stuck a narcotic needle in my chest, I had never met her, and I knew that she had dealings with the Pra-dor, that she sold them stuff, sometimes living stuff, sometimes human captives—for there was a black market for such in the Prador Third Kingdom. It was why the Polity AIs were so ticked off about her.

  Another thing about Jael was that she was the kind of person who found things out, secret things. She was a Masadan by birth so probably had a lot of contacts on her home world. I wasn’t so arrogant as to assume that what Jonas Clyde had blabbed to me had not been blabbed elsewhere. I felt certain she knew about the gabbleducks. And I felt certain she was out for the big killing. The Prador would pay billions to someone who delivered into their claws a living, breathing, thinking Atheter.

  A tenuous logic chain? No, not really. Even as my consciousness had faded, I’d hear her last comment.

  The place stank like a sea cave in which dead fish were decaying
. Jael brought her foot down hard, but the ship louse tried to crawl out from under it. She put all her weight down on it and twisted, and her foot sank down with a satisfying crunch, spattering glutinous ichor across the crusted filthy floor. Almost as if this were some kind of signal, the wide made-for-something-other-than-human door split diagonally, the two halves revolving up into the wall with a grinding shriek.

  The tunnel beyond was dank and dark, weedy growths sprouting like dead man’s fingers from the uneven walls. With a chitinous clattering, a flattened-pear carapace scuttling on too many legs appeared and came charging out. It headed straight toward her but she didn’t allow herself to react. At the last moment it skidded to a halt then clattered sideways. Prador second-child, one eye-palp missing and a crack healing in its carapace, a rail-gun clutched in one of its underhands, with power cables and a projectile belt-feed trailing back to a box mounted underneath it. While she eyed it, it fed some scrap of flesh held in one of its foreclaws into its mandibles and chomped away enthusiastically.

  Next a bigger shape loomed in the tunnel and advanced at a more leisurely pace, its sharp feet hitting the floor with a sound like hydraulic chisels. The first-child was big—the size of a small gravcar—its carapace wider and flatter and looking as hard as iron. The upper turret of its carapace sported a collection of ruby eyes and sprouting above them it retained both of its palp-eyes, all of which gave it superb vision—the eyesight of a carnivore, a predator. Underneath its grating mandibles and the nightmare mouth they exposed, mechanisms had been shell-welded to its carapace. Jael hoped one of these was a translator.

  “I didn’t want to speak to you at a distance, since, even using your codes, an AI might have been listening in,” she said.

  After a brief pause to grate its mandibles together, one of the hexagonal boxes attached underneath it spoke, for some reason in a thick Marsman accent. “Our codes are unbreakable.”

  Jael sighed to herself. Despite having fought the Polity for forty years, some Prador were no closer to understanding that to AIs, no code was unbreakable. Of course all Prador weren’t so dumb—the clever ones now ruled the Third Kingdom. This first-child was just aping its father, who was a Prador down at the bottom of the hierarchy and scrabbling to find some advantage to climb higher. However, that father had acquired enough wealth to be able to send its first-child off in a cruiser like this, and would probably be able to acquire more by cutting deals with its competitors—all Prador were competitors. The first-child would need to make those deals, for what Jael hoped to sell the father of this creature it might not be able to afford by itself.

  “I will soon be acquiring something that could be of great value to you,” she said. Mentioning the Atheter memstore aboard Kobashi would have been suicide—Prador only made deals for things they could not take by force.

  “Continue,” said the first-child.

  “I can, for the sum of ten billion New Carth Shillings or the equivalent in any stable currency, including Prador diamond slate, provide you with a living, breathing Atheter.”

  The Prador dipped its carapace—perhaps the equivalent of a man tilting his head to listen to a private aug communication. Its father must be talking to it. Finally it straightened up again and replied, “The Atheter are without mind.”

  Jael instinctively concealed her surprise, though that was a pointless exercise since this Prador could no more read her expression than she could read its. How had it acquired that knowledge? She only picked it up by running some very complicated search programs through all the reports coming from the taxonomic and genetic research station on Masada. Whatever—she would have to deal with it.

  “True, they are, but I have a mind to give to one of them,” she replied. “I have acquired an Atheter memstore.”

  The first-child advanced a little. “That is very interesting,” said the Marsman voice—utterly without inflection.

  “Which I of course have not been so foolish as to bring here—it is securely stored in a Polity bank vault.”

  “That is also interesting.” The first-child stepped back again and Jael rather suspected something had been lost in translation. It tilted its carapace forward again and just froze in place, even its mandibles ceasing their constant motion.

  Jael considered returning to her ship for the duration. The first-child’s father would now be making its negotiations, striking deals, planning betrayals—the whole complex and vicious rigmarole of Prador politics and economics. She began a slow pacing, spotted another ship louse making its way toward her boots and went over to step on that. She could return to Kobashi, but would only pace there. She played some games in her twinned augs, sketching out fight scenarios in this very room, between her and the two Prador, and solving them. She stepped on four more ship lice, then accessed a downloaded catalog and studied the numerous items she would like to buy. Eventually the first-child heaved itself back upright.

  “We will provide payment in the form of one half diamond slate, one quarter a cargo of armor scales, and the remainder in Polity currencies,” it said.

  Jael balked a little at the armor scales. Prador exotic metal armor was a valuable commodity, but bulky. She decided to accept, reckoning she could cache the scales somewhere in the Graveyard and make a remote sale by giving the coordinates to the buyer.

  “That’s acceptable,” she said.

  “Now we must discuss the details of the sale.”

  Jael nodded to herself. This was where it got rather difficult.organizing a sale of something to the Prador was like working out how to hand-feed white sharks while in the water with them.

  I gazed out through the screen at a world swathed in cloud, encircled by a glittering ring shepherded by a sulphurous moon, which itself trailed a cometary tail resulting from impacts on its surface a hundred and twenty years old—less than an eye blink in interstellar terms. The first settlers, leaving just before the Quiet War in the Solar System, had called the world Paris—probably because of a strong French contingent amid them and probably because Paradise had been overused. Their civilization was hardly out of the cradle when the Polity arrived in a big way and subsumed them. After a further hundred years the population of this place surpassed a billion. It thrived, great satellite space stations were built, and huge high-tech industries sprang up in them and in the arid equatorial deserts down below. This place was rich in every resource—surrounding space also swarming with asteroids that were heavy in rare metals. Then, a hundred and twenty years ago, the Prador came. It took them less than a day to depopulate the planet and turn it into the hell I saw before me, and to turn the stations into that glittering ring.

  “Ship on approach,” said a voice over com. “Follow the vector I give you and do not deviate. At the pick-up point shut down to minimal life support and a grabship will bring you in. Do otherwise and you’re smeared. Understood?”

  “I understand perfectly,” I replied.

  Holofiction producers called this borderland between Prador and human space the Badlands. The people who haunted this region, hunting for salvage, called it the Graveyard and knew themselves to be grave robbers. Polity AIs had not tried to civilize the area. All the habitable worlds were still smoking, and why populate any space that acted as a buffer zone between them and a bunch of nasty clawed fuckers who might decide at any moment on a further attempt to exterminate the human race?

  “You got the vector, Ulriss?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” replied my ship’s AI. It wasn’t being very talkative since I’d refused its suggestion that we approach using the chameleonware recently installed aboard. I eyed the new instruments to my left on the console, remembering that Earth Central Security did not look kindly on anyone but them using their stealth technology. Despite ECS being thin on the ground out here, I had no intention of putting this ship into “stealth mode” unless really necessary. Way back, when I wasn’t a xeno-archae-ologist, I’d heard rumors about those using inadequate chameleonware ending up on the bad end of an ECS
rail-gun test firing. “Sorry, we just didn’t see you,” was the usual epitaph.

  My destination rose over Paris’s horizon, cast into silhouette by the bile-yellow sun beyond it. Adjusting the main screen display to give me the best view, I soon discerned the massive conglomeration of station bubble units and docked ships that made up the “Free Republic of Montmartre”—the kind of place that in Earth’s past would have been described as a banana republic, though perhaps not so nice. Soon we reached the place designated, and, main power shut down, the emergency lights flickered on. The main screen powered down too, going fully transparent with a photoreactive smear of blackness blotting out the sun’s glare and most of the space station. I briefly glimpsed the grabship approaching—basically a one-man vessel with a massive engine to the rear and a hydrau-lically operated triclaw extending from the nose—before it disappeared back into the smear. They used such ships here since a large-enough proportion of their visitors weren’t to be trusted to get simple docking maneuvers right, and wrong moves in that respect could demolish the relatively fragile bubble units and kill those inside.

  A clanging against the hull followed by a lurch told me the grabship now had hold of Ulriss Fire and was taking us in. It would have been nice to check all this with exterior cameras—throwing up images on the row of subscreens below the main one—but I had to be very careful about power usage on approach. The Free Republic had been fired on before now, and any ship that showed energy usage above the level-enabling weapons, usually ended up on the mincing end of the infamous rail-gun.

  Experience told me that in about twenty minutes the ship would be docked, so I unstrapped and propelled myself into the rear cabin where, in zero-g, I began pulling on my gear. Like many visitors here I took the precaution of putting on a light spacesuit of the kind that didn’t constrict movement, but would keep me alive if there was a blowout. I’d scanned through their rules file, but found nothing much different from when I’d last read it: basically you brought nothing aboard that could cause a breach—this mainly concerned weaponry—nor any dangerous biolog-icals. You paid a docking tax and a departure tax. And anything you did in the intervening time was your own business so long as it didn’t harm station personnel or the station itself. I strapped a heavy carbide knife to my boot, and at my waist holstered a pepper-pot stun gun. It could get rough in there sometimes.