“What if we did?” Ranulf stuck out his chin. “I’m supposed to tell you where? Will that be before or after you carve out my eyeballs with a boot?”
“I said a shoe.” Thorstein gave him a dubious look. “Who the hells would carve out an eyeball with a boot? Pull yourself together, man. You’re not making any sense!” He looked around the therapy center before leaning in.
“I can offer you a trade.” He nodded down at the mechanical leg. “Friend of mine had the same problem as you. He had no success because he was trying to use the leg.”
“Isn’t that the whole idea?”
“Norns spare me!” Thorstein aimed his next nod a little higher and more central. “It’s like your ‘third leg’. If you’re trying to use it, sooner or later, you’ll end up red in the face and mumbling some bullshit like ‘this never happens’, or ‘let’s just cuddle’.”
Ranulf just stared at him.
Thorstein sighed. “I can see I’m not getting through to you.” He came around the end of the support railing, his right hand held low, fingers forming a cup shape. “When you’re not expecting it, a little contact can bring it straight to attention…”
Ranulf sprang back, knocking the cupped hand off its approach trajectory. “Hells! What’s wrong with you?”
“C’mon!” Thorstein continued his advance, hand closing in again. “It’s for science!”
“Get away from me!” Ranulf shouted. “I don’t lean that way!”
“No,” Thorstein stopped his approach, grinning now. “You don’t lean at all, do you?” He pointed at the prosthetic leg. “Look at you, jumping around on that thing like you were born with it.”
“Shit!” Ranulf looked down. “You’re not nearly as stupid as you look!”
Thorstein grinned at him. “Maybe you’re not so annoying after all.”
“’Course I’m not, you coolant-sniffer.” Ranulf sniffed. “My captain probably cashiered me out of the crew because he’s green.”
“Ahh…” Thorstein nodded. “A real alpha, was he?”
“Too scared to take advice,” Ranulf confirmed. “Worried it would make him look weak.”
“That how you lost the leg?”
Ranulf chuckled ruefully. “Nah. That’s on me. We were waiting to meet insurgents on 3566 and I went behind the bushes to take a dump.” He paused. “Well, some bushes, a large rock outcropping and then a dense thicket. There was this young woman on the crew…”
“And you didn’t want her hearing… or smelling what you were up to,” Thorstein finished for him.
“Right. Wouldn’t have helped my chances. Anyway, soon as I get myself set up, a platoon of Dactari irregulars comes blundering in. There I was, running back to the LZ with half my under-armor suit hanging out the back of my armor and I stepped on micro-mine.”
“Shit!”
“Exactly.” Ranulf shrugged. “You can’t really control that when you’ve just lost a leg…”
Thorstein processed that for a moment and then broke out laughing. Ranulf joined in.
“Gods!” Thorstein wheezed. “Thanks so much for that image! Since you’ve stuck that in my brain, I should tell you that, for a few days, my friend still went down like a sack of rocks anytime he thought about the new leg.”
“Fornication!” Ranulf yelled, falling to the floor, clattering metal and thudding flesh.
“It’s all in your head,” Thorstein reminded him, an evil grin on his face. “You’ve still got all the same neural circuitry running; it’s just partially artificial now.”
Ranulf made a cautious attempt to lever himself back to his feet, lost his balance and fell on his ass again. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a few heartbeats and then opened them again as he sprang back to his feet.
“All in your head,” Thorstein repeated, “and speaking of the contents of your head, we’d like to know where those dumps were set up.” He glanced down at the leg. “Seeing as you’re a free agent right now, why not ship out with us?”
He watched Ranulf’s face. “By now you’re thinking ‘but I just signed a contract on a shitty apartment cause I don’t know when my leg will be ready for use in a combat situation…’”
“A good shitty apartment is hard to find,” Ranulf countered, not even half serious. “Why give that up for a clean bunk, three squares a day and a lack of mind-numbing boredom?” He leaned in. “What’s the job? Something profitable?”
“We usually keep an eye out for that sort of thing,” Thorstein said, “but, right now, we’re trying out this whole ‘daring heroics’ thing.”
“Uh huh.” Ranulf’s head tilted back, eyes boring into Thorstein. “This is about more than the dumps, isn’t it? You know about my old captain’s obsession with the World That Isn’t.”
“A happy coincidence,” Thorstein conceded, “but, yes, we’re running down a few rumors…”
Research
Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic
“Abbot M’None,” Rick greeted the monk who’d been trying to sneak up on him. He opened his eyes but remained seated, legs crossed in a pose of meditation. M’none had no hostile intent. He was just trying to pull the usual mysterious-monk bullshit.
On the lord of his planet, a man with a 14-second precognitive view of his own future.
The monk gave up his attempt at a silent approach and slid the light carbon shoji-screen open. “Lord,” he replied with a wry grimace, embarrassed at being so easily caught in his theatrics.
“It amazes me,” Rick said, watching the monk seat himself across from him in the small audience chamber, “that your order can be such a repository of information, down here in the lowest levels.”
“The city above us acts as a filter, you might say,” M’None replied. “The chaff floats to the top while the matters of weight quickly find their way down to us. Nobody down here cares about celebrity gossip.”
“Makes sense,” Rick conceded. “Was that by design, or did you just come down here for the low rent and got lucky?”
A waggle of the head. “We were thirty-two levels higher but we ran into financial difficulty. Not long after we took this location, we noticed a marked increase in the quality of the information we collected.” He smiled. “And there’s a perverse pleasure in making a home down here in such an inhospitable environment.”
“As long as the overpressure system keeps the outside air from getting in and slowly killing you…”
“Nothing in life is risk-free, Lord.”
“Which is why we must do all we can to mitigate risk,” Rick said. “This is why I’ve come here.”
“Certainly,” the monk nodded solemnly. “If milord could tell me what he’s looking for…”
“No.” Rick shook his head curtly. The Alliance knew he and Freya were taking their forces out to support an aligned faction in one of the dozens of third-party frontier conflicts. If he could help it, that would be all they knew until it was too late to do anything about it.
Even one monk knowing what he wanted was a risk. He wanted to minimize the exposure, extend the time before the truth got out.
“Let me meet with your division masters,” he said calmly, the tone one used when a lack of compliance wasn’t even a concern.
The monk nodded. “I must admit, your request caused a stir in our little community.” He gestured to a door behind Rick. “If milord will step through that door, our leaders are assembled.”
Rick got up and turned to the door. It slid and he stepped through to find eighteen cowled monks waiting for him in a loose group.
Rick moved into the group, exploring fourteen seconds of questions and answers with each monk though he never uttered an actual word. His precognitive ability let him ask without having to really ask as long as the questions were carefully imagined so as to provide useful information within that time limit.
The stroll through their midst was more than cheap theatrics, though Rick enjoyed how it seemed to unsettle them. His fourteen-second range could easi
ly get eaten up by walking time. If he wanted to explore a possible future conversation with a monk on the far side of the crowd, he had to first see the seven or eight seconds that he would have to waste in walking over to him. Strolling past each one gave him the maximum possible time to examine their possible future responses to his questions.
From the monks’ perspective, he was simply moving quietly through their midst, mysteriously silent. Whatever they had been expecting to see at this odd assembly, it wasn’t this.
Rick finished with all eighteen before coming back to number seven. “Your division has the information I need,” he told the man, ignoring the startled glances the others were sharing.
“We do?” the man asked, too confused to remember the honorific due to a lord of the Midgaard, the lord of this particular planet.
The abbot recovered his own wits more quickly and hissed an admonition.
“You would meet with them now, Lord?” the monk said hurriedly, covering his lapse commendably well.
“I would, Brother Alno’th.” Rick gestured to one of the doors at the back of the room, having already ascertained the fellow’s name and where his division was located.
Alno’th led the way through a maze of visually unappealing hallways until they reached his division. It consisted of a central lounge surrounded by two concentric rings of workstations.
“Standalone network?” Rick asked over his shoulder.
“Yes, Lord.” Alno’th closed the entry screen and moved to stand beside him. “A shielding matrix is built into every structural element and the entire monastery is surrounded by a randomized electrical lattice. No outsider has ever gained access to our systems.”
And few had ever gained an audience. The information held here was incredibly expensive and, correspondingly, incredibly dangerous. News-shapers knew better than to ask for access and low-level political operators were similarly shut out.
As a lord and, nominally, the owner of Chaco Benthic, Rick stood a much better chance, but it was still no guarantee. That Abbot M’None had granted an audience-in-depth like this was something of a vote of confidence in Rick and Freya.
More in Freya, he mused. Her service in the LRG while her contemporaries were out enriching themselves on simple smash-and-grab raids spoke well of her character.
Rick explored the situation, looking at several possible approaches to this phase of his research, and found that he couldn’t simply launch into a stroll past the monks while they sat at their stations. Unrelated data needed to be safeguarded first.
“Brother Alno’th,” he began, turning to face the monk. “Please have the monitors blanked. I’ll be walking between the two rows and you wouldn’t want me seeing everything they’re working on.”
“Ah…,” the flustered monk opined before recovering and waving a gesture at the monks, who were all watching them by now and who could easily hear them. The monitors of both rings shut down, the holographic interfaces shimmering away to nothingness.
Rick got to work, unsettling this new batch of monks who hadn’t seen his previous performance with the division heads. He made a first circuit, almost-asking base-level questions about their areas of specialization before finding two who spent some of their time dealing with information about the Great Bled.
He had expected a need to blindfold himself and have them re-start their monitors. The relevant data might be buried in some obscure directory and it might have taken longer than fourteen seconds to start the interface and get to it.
It proved unnecessary, however, as both monks were aficionados of all things related to the lost system. They most likely sat next to each other so they could explore the legends together.
Rick stood between the two, exploring various questions, first at the superficial level and then delving into the origins of the story from a more detailed perspective. As usual in legends of this sort, this one appeared to have started with a mentally unhinged shipwreck survivor.
More than three thousand years back, a crewman drifted out of the Bled in a heavily damaged cargo-lander. He’d been on death’s door and, though his body recovered, his mind, apparently, didn’t.
He’d claimed the ship had tumbled into some kind of difficulty – being a cargo handler, he wasn’t privy to the kind of information a deck officer might have had – and fell into the hands of a previously unknown civilization.
The crew were kept separate from each other and told they had no choice but to make a life for themselves where they were. The crewman, however, quickly fell afoul of the locals and barely made his escape.
The Dactari interrogators quickly gave up on sorting out his story, as it morphed so easily. If an officer suggested he might be lying, the man immediately agreed, only to recant later when confronted with a record of his original testimony.
Apparently, he not only pulled off a desperate escape from a hostile world that nobody had ever heard of – there were no worlds in the Bled – but he was also responsible for one investigator’s sandwich going missing from the precinct break-room eight years earlier.
Clearly insane…
And yet, where were his ship and crewmates? Even in the Bled, losing a three-and-a-half-million-ton-cargo carrier with no trace was a bit of an accomplishment.
And the implant was, if true, a bit of a sticking point. Though no records existed of an implant, it was said that something was showing up in scans. An organic device was described in the sketchiest of terms based on third- or fourth-hand knowledge and always with a large dose of ‘you didn’t hear this from me’.
It sounded like something that could be either fabrication or confirmation. It was key, Rick decided, and so he crafted a quick algorithm to search the open historical database while he stood there between the two nervous monks.
And then his eyes grew wide. “Huh!” He stood there for a few moments longer, chewing on his lip and staring idly at a monk he didn’t even seem to notice. “Well,” he said abruptly, causing a few small twitches of alarm after the long, strange silence, “that’s me done here.
“Brother Alno’th, my thanks for your time. I’d appreciate if you could have someone see me out to your cashier.”
“Ah, yes, Lord,” Alno’th stammered. “So glad to be of…” He frowned. “… assistance?” He broke out in a relieved nod at Rick’s confirming smile. “Excellent! Yes… Uh, Brother N’Midian will see you back out to the front office.”
Rick followed the young monk. What he’d found seemed like one hell of a coincidence but, in his experience, coincidences were rarely so interesting. The Universe had a dramatic flair to it, after all. He grinned.
There was definitely a lost world out there and, based on the rumors, it might just sit in a spot that would make a trip through the Bled possible.
Entropic States
Mutiny Redux
Solomon, capital of Planet 3428
Viggo Rickson watched the drone-cloud without really watching it. The new spaceport, hazed by the humid jungle air, grew as he stared but his thoughts were elsewhere.
With Rick and Freya gone on another LRG mission, he was technically in charge of the planet. In charge but not because of anything I did to earn the responsibility, he thought.
Everyone in the ops center pretty much just kept doing what they always did anyway. It wasn’t like Viggo was especially taxed by the responsibility, which was why he had the time to stand out on this open walkway and feel useless in the first place.
Whenever someone in the ops center looked his way, he was certain they were thinking he was only there because this world belonged to his parents’ fief. Which is true, he admitted glumly. It was theirs because they’d taken it. It was only Viggo’s because he was born to them.
And to make matters worse, his best friend, Tim, had shipped out with Viggo’s dad. “Probably saving some cute green hottie from rampaging Dactarii right now,” he groused to himself, “and I’m stuck here playing the useless figurehead.”
He glanced left and
turned away from his view of the jungle, his heartrate increasing. He leaned back against the railing, trying to look as though the move had nothing to do with the sudden burst of laughter that was about to erupt from the main concourse. He knew he’d recognize that voice and wanted to be in a position to see her when she came around the corner.
He felt a momentary flutter of panic. What the hells was he supposed to be doing now, just staring across the concourse at the far wall? Great move, idiot! This looks SO much more natural than watching the drone-cloud build our spaceport.
After two decades of work, the construction complex brought to 3428 had built up an impressive settlement. The main arco, a massive building that contained all of the colony’s industry, commerce and housing in one structural system, had been fully habitable for the last twelve years. The spaceport was one of the last things to go up and it was a few kilometers away in order to keep orbital traffic clear from the main arco.
It was far more believable that he’d be watching the construction than keeping an eye on a random patch of wall. Funny how often young men with no idea of how to indicate their interest in a girl managed to do so without even realizing it.
With its usual fiendish sense of timing, the Universe brought Hallie Fletcher around the corner with two of her friends, already laughing. Viggo wondered if they were laughing at him, having known he’d be standing here looking at the wall like an idiot.
Viggo suppressed a sigh. Maybe they were laughing because the three of them knew that Hallie was madly in love with him and couldn’t imagine a future without him? Were they giggling now because they’d known her crush was here?
Unlikely, he thought. Maybe she…
“Hi, Viggo!” Hallie’s voice surprised him out of his self-absorbed musings.
“Uh, hey, Hallie,” he replied with all the suave charm of your typical seventeen-year-old. “What’s up?” His heart was pounding.
She held up a bruised arm. “Just coming back from edged weapons, block three.” She dropped the arm. “Got a few others,” she said, shrugging, “but I can hardly show them to you, now, can I?”
Asymmetry Page 2
