The Spider and the Fly

by C.E. Stalbaum

  Chapter Fourteen

  For the last four years of his life—six, if you went all the way back to the massacre at Mirador—Markus had wanted nothing more than to learn everything he could about human history. So much had been lost when the Tarreen had obliterated Keledon, and over the last century the Hierarchs had done everything in their power to sweep up the remnants. They had so successfully vilified the Sarafan that generations of non-humans were willing to accept the oppressive rule of the Convectorate as a merciful alternative. He had once, too, and Jen still did.

  So when he’d first defected and started his research in full, he’d forced himself to put aside everything he’d been taught during his Spider indoctrination. He also did his best to ignore the various myths and legends about the Dominion that were so often passed off as definitive knowledge. He wanted to focus exclusively on the raw facts of history.

  Of course, the more data he’d gathered, the more he’d realized that there was no such thing as a truly unabridged history. The few ancient Sarafan holos he’d uncovered had been every bit as biased as their Convectorate equivalents, albeit in the opposite direction. Finding actual, factual accounts of the most pivotal moments in Dominion history from the Seraph’s Revolution to the Unification Wars to the Dowd Insurrection had proven nearly impossible. But now, finally, as he stared down at the collection of data crystals they’d salvaged from the Damadus, he was certain he would finally get some real answers.

  It took him all of two hours to disprove that particular theory.

  Markus let out a deep sigh as he untethered his mind from the crystal in his palm. He hadn’t expected a miracle going into this; he’d assumed it would take a great deal of time to properly sift through all the available information. Each crystal contained more data than one person could process in a decade, after all, and even the best search engine still wouldn’t automatically point him to what he wanted to know.

  But this remarkable little piece of technology did. The crystals were storage devices, yes, but they weren’t bound by the laws of conventional technology. He didn’t need to vocalize search terms or tags that he was looking for—all he had to do was think about what he wanted and the crystals “uploaded” everything they knew about the topic directly into his brain. Cyberneticists had been attempting to replicate similar devices for centuries with limited success, and the Sarafan had pulled it off with nothing more than a chunk of rock and the raw power of their minds.

  He should have been absolutely overjoyed at the discovery given how much time it would save, and for the first hour or so he was. Eventually, however, he realized that as amazing as these crystals were, they couldn’t conjure data from scratch. Searching efficiently was all well and good, but that only mattered if the information he wanted was actually there—and as far as he could tell, it wasn’t.

  The crystals were more like encyclopedic archives than active research logs, and while the historical tidbits about the initial outbreak and spread of the disease were fascinating and more than a little disturbing, he couldn’t find a single mention of new avenues of research or potential cures. It was as if the crew of the Damadus had never even started looking.

  Markus stood up from his chair and paced over to the window. His apartment was on the third story of this particular complex, and it looked down upon a small garden his neighbors had finished not long after he’d first arrived. They hadn’t actually grown anything besides grass, but even a little bit of green helped remind them of their homes on Pragia or Zultar or one of the other human colonies they’d been forced to abandon. Many of their children had never seen real plants before this, and without a cure to the Pandrophage, there was a good chance they never would.

  Markus scowled at the thought as a flicker of motion to his left caught his eye. Apparently Mira had awakened from her afternoon nap and was sauntering over to pay him a visit. She’d been especially cuddly since he’d returned from his multi-week hiatus, though he couldn’t quite decide if it was genuine affection or merely a clever ploy to sucker him into synthesizing more treats from the food processor.

  “I’ll give you a bucket of those things if you tell me what really happened on the Damadus,” he told her as she rubbed her face against his outstretched hand. “Did they find a cure? Is it even possible?”

  She yawned in response before curling into a ball at the top of his couch, and he shook his head and sighed. He really wished he could have spent more time on the ship before the Dowd had blown it up. The readings he’d taken from the bodies were interesting but in no way conclusive. The only thing he knew for certain was that Krucius Foln was dead, and that by all appearances he’d been shot in the back. Sadly, could have meant almost anything. Had the crew turned on their leader for some reason? Had the Koro Effect driven them mad despite the ship’s shielding? Or had the inertial dampeners really malfunctioned like Thexyl had suggested?

  He turned and glanced behind him to the violet data crystal still sitting on his desk. It was the one they’d found clutched in Foln’s hand, and Markus still hadn’t figured out how to access the data stored within it. Linking with the others had been simple; he’d merely needed to touch them and concentrate and the crystals had done the rest. When he touched this one, however, nothing happened.

  Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. He did feel something when he touched it; his mind started to tingle, almost like the subtle vibrations in his psychic web after a Fly used his or her powers. But the sensation never changed, and the crystal didn’t reach out to try and link with him. He had no idea what it meant, nor did he have the slightest clue as to how he was supposed to proceed.

  He considered going to Foln with it but dismissed that idea quickly. The man’s belief in his ancestor’s infallibility combined with his reverence for the Damadus would blind him to any problems, especially now with so much at stake. He would probably insist that Markus continue looking even though there was nothing to find.

  Selaris was another possibility, but he wasn’t sure if her abilities were stable enough yet for him to trust her with anything like this. She had the most volatile mind he’d ever linked with, and he had yet to decide if that raw power could be harnessed safely or not. He hadn’t let her link directly with the station’s power generators for that exact reason, and having her link with the crystals probably wasn’t a good idea, either. Besides, he really wasn’t in the mood to brush off her advances yet again…

  Markus shook his head. When it came right down to it, there wasn’t anyone in this city he felt comfortable speaking with about this. And as sad as it might have been, that left only one real option.

  He pulled out his holopad and keyed for Grier, and a few seconds later her face appeared on the screen. “Coveri?”

  “Are you still watching Vale?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “Yes, she hasn’t left her apartment. She’s been busy accessing the city’s public database.”

  Markus smiled faintly. Always become the master of your surroundings. It was a simple but important lesson the Widow had hammered into both of their heads during their Spider training, and that’s exactly what she was doing now. She probably had Thexyl out scouting the city since he would draw less attention, and then eventually the two would come back together and compare notes.

  “Bring her to my apartment if you would,” he said. “I’d like to speak with her now that she’s had a day to settle.”

  “Yes, I’m sure she’s had a life-changing epiphany since then,” Grier griped. “What about the Kali? You want him too?”

  “Assuming you’ve been keeping tabs on him too, sure.”

  “I know exactly where he is,” she replied haughtily. “I’ll get them together.”

  “Thank you. I’ll see you then.”

  Markus closed the connection and sat down in his chair to wait. The Council might have assigned their own people to watch over both of the newcomers, but Grier would never trust them to do the job correctly.
If there were any other Mire soldiers on the station, she probably would have ordered a whole squad to follow Jen around. As it was, she’d probably recruited some of the combat-trained humans who lived here to do that instead. She was nothing if not thorough, and she trusted most aliens about as much as Foln did—which was to say, not in the slightest.

  Twenty minutes later the apartment’s com panel beeped, and Markus mentally reached out across the room and telekinetically flipped the security switch. The door slid open, and Jen and Thexyl stepped inside.

  “You want something?” she asked.

  “Just to chat and see how the two of you were acclimating.”

  “Right.” Her eyes flicked about the room and froze when they reached his couch. “What the hell is that?”

  Markus glanced over his shoulder and noticed Mira lurking behind him on the headrest. She was still scrunched up in a ball, her green eyes locked directly on Jen and her tail twitching ever so slightly.

  “That’s Mira,” he said. “It’s her apartment, really. I just borrow it from time to time.”

  Jen’s lips twisted in disgust as she turned back at him. “Why?”

  “I assume you mean ‘why do I have a cat?’ I think if I have to answer that, you’re not going to understand it anyway.”

  “I thought the species was extinct,” Thexyl commented. “Did you clone her?”

  “No, there are still plenty of them on Pragia. They’re better at keeping away the local rodents than cheap security mechs. I picked her up about a year ago.”

  Jen’s disgusted glare devolved into outright contempt. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I decided to become a human being. You might want to try it sometime.” Markus gestured to the open couch across from him. “Don’t worry—she won’t attack you. I just wanted to get your opinion on something. I’ve been sifting through these crystals and I have a lot of questions.”

  With obvious effort, Jen eventually managed to tear her eyes away from the cat and take a seat. Thexyl slithered down next to her.

  “I’m not sure why you’d ask us,” Jen said. “Aren’t you supposed to be the expert on these things?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” he murmured, picking up one of the crystals. “They’re definitely not what I expected.”

  Thexyl’s scales rippled a thoughtful black. “I was under the impression that Sarafan data crystals functioned similarly to standard electronic storage devices. Are you not able to access them?”

  “I can link with them just fine, I’m just a little surprised by what I’ve found.” He twirled the crystal in his fingers. “Or rather, what I haven’t found. The crew stockpiled all kinds of notes and early studies on the disease just like you’d expect for a research vessel. The trouble is that none of them seem to have been updated.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean it looks like the crew never actually did any research,” he explained. “No test results, no lab work, not even any hand-waving theorization. These crystals seem like archival records the crew brought with them.”

  “Curious,” the Kali murmured. “You’ve examined all of them?”

  “Yes, and I haven’t found anything.”

  Jen grunted and crossed her arms. “So there’s no miracle cure after all, huh? I guess you won’t be able to start your little war, then.”

  “There’s something else,” Markus went on. “I spent a few hours going over the original infection reports—which planets reported outbreaks and when, that sort of thing. It’s all very specific. I doubt even the Hierarchy has access to this information.”

  “The only records I’ve seen are rather vague,” Thexyl said. “I’ve always been curious how the disease could have spread so quickly.”

  “That’s just it—I don’t think it did.”

  Jen’s eyebrows twitched upwards despite her best efforts to feign indifference. “What are you talking about?”

  “The disease hit almost every Dominion world at the same time—the time delay between the first reports of infections from core worlds like Eladrell all the way out to fringe planets like Angelus or Neyris was minutes.”

  “Sounds like a pretty well coordinated assault,” she said. “I imagine the Tarreen had agents spread all over—”

  “No,” Markus interrupted. “This wasn’t just a coordinated assault. I don’t care how brilliant the Hierarchy thinks they are—no one could pull this off. I’m talking about a perfectly simultaneous infection of Sarafan spread across a hundred different planets thousands upon thousands of light-years apart. Even the Spiders couldn’t manage anything like that, and this was way before they had us.”

  A grim silence settled over the room as they digested his words. The same silence, Markus mused, that he had confronted himself just a few hours ago. And it hadn’t given him any answers then, either.

  “Ostensibly, the pathogen is highly contagious but not lethal; the creators didn’t want it to burn itself out,” Thexyl said after a moment. “If we assume that’s true, there’s still no way the infection could have spread so quickly without an impressive delivery system. Even if the Tarreen managed to introduce the pathogen into a centralized water supply, it would still have taken a significant amount of time to reach threatening saturation levels.”

  “Maybe they dumped it directly into the atmosphere instead,” Jen suggested.

  “There’s no record of anything like that from any of the infected planets,” Markus said. “You’d think someone would have noticed.”

  “Records are easily doctored,” Jen pointed out. “I wouldn’t take any Sarafan information at face value.”

  “What would they gain by forging reports? This was a ship full of scientists seeking a cure. Altering their own records would have been counterproductive.”

  “Then maybe the Damadus wasn’t really a science ship. Maybe it was just a nice little red herring for anyone who happened to find it.”

  “You realize how preposterous that sounds.”

  Jen snorted. “What I know is that I don’t really care. So your mystical little science ship never actually developed a cure. Well, too bad for you and your glorious revolution.”

  Markus sighed and rubbed at his forehead. “Look, do you remember all those conversations we had about the Pandrophage before I left? You told me that you’d always wondered how the Hierarchy had never figured out a way to mutate the base pathogen over the course of an entire century. You’d think that over all that time they’d have introduced a new strain to weed out those who were born immune to the original one. They had access to the Spiders—they had all our genetic information to help them figure out why the disease wasn’t affecting us. Shouldn’t the people who designed this thing have figured out a way to improve it in all that time?”

  “Maybe they did,” Jen said. “Who knows how many modifications they’ve added over the years? Maybe there used to be a lot more Flies. It’s not like they’d make a public announcement about infecting everyone all over again.”

  “Possibly,” Thexyl mused, “but if they did develop that kind of control, why would they bother recruiting Spiders out of the seemingly random population of Flies spread across the galaxy? Couldn’t they simply create their own agents at that point?”

  Markus nodded. “Exactly. A hundred years is a long time to learn how to mutate a pathogen well enough to intentionally breed their own Spiders and weed out all but a pittance of stragglers. You could even take it a bit further—why not wipe out humans completely except for a few lab-bred Spiders? It’s not like anyone would protest. Hell, the Dowd would volunteer to do it for them.”

  Jen leaned back on the couch and threw up her hands. “I don’t know. Where are you going with all of this?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted with a sigh. “But based on what I’ve found in these data crystals, I’m starting to think that maybe the Pandrophage isn’t as simple as we’ve been led to believe. That and the fact we found the whole crew dead and the ship
’s lead researcher murdered on the bridge…” He shook his head. “There has to be more to it.”

  Her eyes bored into his for several long seconds. “Why tell me this?”

  “I wanted your input. Both of you.”

  “And?”

  Markus grunted and smiled faintly. He should have known better than to think he could hide his intentions from her. Even without her telepathy—even though he hadn’t seen her in almost four years—she still knew him as well as anyone. Probably better.

  “This violet crystal we found,” he said, pulling it out of his storage case. “It’s the only one I wasn’t able to access. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was encrypted.”

  “How do you encrypt telepathic data?” Jen asked. “It’s not a computer program.”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t get inside.” He rubbed his hands together. “It’s supposed to be a personal storage log.”

  “Couldn’t it simply be empty?” Thexyl suggested.

  “Violet means there’s something on it,” Markus said. “Unless it’s some type of special data crystal that doesn’t follow the usual coding, which I suppose is possible. But the fact that Foln was clutching it in his hand makes me think it’s important.”

  Jen shrugged. “Well, I have no idea. And I don’t know what you expect us to do about it.”

  He pressed his lips together. “I was going to try again later, but if I can’t get in, I was hoping I could convince you to give it a try.”

  She didn’t flinch or cough or anything so obvious, but he knew exactly what she was thinking: in order for her to try to link with the crystal, he would have to take off her restraining collar. And the moment he did that, she would have her chance to escape. Where she could possibly go, of course, was another matter. Short of embarking on a petty killing spree or mind-controlling random citizens, there wasn’t much else she could do. And while she might have still been loyal to the Convectorate, she wasn’t a psychopath. The risks were minimal.

  Dimly, Markus wondered if she’d had the same thoughts back on the Damadus when they’d been about to fire up the psionic power core. She had no way of knowing that he’d be able to exploit that window of opportunity to contact Foln then, and maybe she had some trick up her sleeve now where she could do the same. But he doubted it. Trapped here in astral space, there was no one for her to call and nowhere for her to run.

  Besides, maybe showing her that bit of trust would help the process of convincing her that the Mire weren’t just a bunch of murderous savages. Or maybe that was just more wishful thinking on his part.

  “I could try,” Jen said eventually, “though I’m not sure why you think I’d have any more luck with it. You’re the expert on psi-tech here, not me.”

  “You used the door controls on the Damadus just fine,” Markus reminded her. “It’s not much different; the technology was designed to be instinctive.”

  She shrugged and glanced over to the violet crystal. “So do you want me to try right now or do you have to check with your master first?”

  “I haven’t run it past Foln or the Council yet, but I figured I’d test the waters with you.”

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere,” she said, standing up. “Are we finished?”

  “I suppose so. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  With a last contemptuous glance at Mira, Jen shook her head and strode over to the door, Thexyl in tow. Once they were gone, Markus leaned back on the couch and let out a long, slow breath.

  If this didn’t work and she couldn’t access the crystal either, then he didn’t know what they were going to do. The blow to morale would be nothing short of catastrophic. Some would believe the cure was lost on the ship before it was destroyed, while others would just feel like the rug had been pulled out from under them. The cure to the Pandrophage was the Seraph’s Blade of their time, the dim, fleeting hope that humans across the stars used to endure their miserable existence. Without it…

  Well, Varm still had his research, and according to Foln he was closer than ever. Markus didn’t understand how, given that Varm had never been able to track down the specific pathogen, but the results spoke for themselves. And even if that didn’t work, he could always head out and comb the galaxy for more Flies. Selaris and the others had plenty of potential, and with time he could turn them into something. Not an army, perhaps, but something.

  Markus opened his eyes and picked up one of the crystals again. It was late and he still had plenty of sleep to catch up on, but he figured he might as well give these things another quick pass. Maybe this time he would get lucky.