Human, page 30
part #1 of Humanity Ascendant Series
They were showing up the Quailu and it made her uneasy.
But then Eth had approached her, asking if she could man the turret on the lead vehicle, as she had on the way up. At the time, she knew she’d been put in there to keep her safe and out of the way.
This time, he’d asked her because his team was near exhaustion from lack of sleep. It was a gratifying thing to hear. He was tacitly acknowledging a physical advantage of her species. She could rest her brain without losing consciousness.
She couldn’t achieve anything complicated with one of the hemispheres of her brain asleep, but she could spot an enemy and shoot him well enough.
They were entrusting their lives to her hands and it had sown the seeds of a bond.
She drew in a sharp breath as the lead vehicle, in which she rode, grazed against the heavy railing that separated pedestrian and vehicular traffic.
Bau dropped down from the turret and scuttled forward to the driver’s station, grasping Eve by the shoulder and shaking it.
“It’s been two hours, Eve,” she told the exhausted Human. “Stop the vehicle and get into a bunk.”
Bau waited while Eve slowed them to a halt, confirming that the two newly grown vehicles trailing them came to a stop as well.
Auto-follow was a useful algorithm but it had been known to fail at the worst of times. It was a risk they’d decided worth taking if it meant they could bring along the useable nanites from the two crashed enemy shuttles.
As the Human slid into one of the bunks lining the side of the vehicle, Bau moved over to Gleb, looking down at the sleeping Human.
She knew these creatures were all trained killers, but this one seemed to be an actual enthusiast . She’d felt his eagerness as Eth spoke of torture and she couldn’t have missed his glee as her crewmen had been tossed from the descending scout-ship.
Keeping as much of a distance as she could, she reached out and poked him in the shoulder. His eyes opened and focused on her. “Your turn to drive,” she told him when his thoughts had settled.
The trip down to the off-loading docks took several hours and three more drivers, none of whom had been Meesh. Eth had been very clear. Polite but clear.
Meesh needed to get as much rest as possible if they were going to trust their lives to a jury-rigged ship of his making.
Bau understood that. Even the Quailu knew better than to attempt such a feat on hemispherical sleep shifts.
The first thing Meesh did, on arrival at the docks, was to take charge, sending everyone off to scout the area for equipment. They all did so, though not without a fair amount of grumbling. They’d all had less sleep than him, after all.
He’d even asked Bau to join the search and, seeing as Eth had agreed to his own search sector without demur, she agreed to play along. This sudden devolvement of authority was interesting.
A Quailu would have seen it as a threat to authority but these pirates seemed to have no qualms about putting an expert in charge when the situation warranted it.
She’d been assigned an area at the far end of the docks and she chose to take that as a nod to her species’ ability to cover long distances quickly. She felt a certain smug satisfaction at not taking it as an offense to a princess of the empire.
Even at her advanced age, she made it to her area before half the other Humans reached theirs. There wasn’t much there, except for a cargo sledge, a few pallets of some kind of fluid and a locker against the wall with an elaborate security panel.
She chuckled, asking herself what a Human pirate would start with. The fancy lock was the obvious answer. She almost fired a shot into the security panel but, on a whim, placed her hand in the scanner.
She was obscurely disappointed when the panel gave out a friendly chime and the locker door slid down into the floor. She’d wanted to shoot the blasted thing open.
This pirate life was growing on her.
The object inside looked like some kind of gun but it had a strange, articulated head on it, long and narrow. Whatever it was, it was worth locking up, so she pulled it out and set it on the sledge.
She stepped on and activated the sledge’s grav-plates, lifting it off the decking. She turned it back toward where Meesh waited and rode along to where Hela was tossing items out onto the main travel concourse.
The Human turned to find Bau stacking her loot onto the sledge. “Good thinking, My Lady,” Hela said with another of those incomprehensible facial tics the Humans used to accentuate their communications.
Perhaps it was simply a function of her shared dilemma with this small group, but the casual praise gave her a warm glow.
They loaded up and moved along the concourse together, loading up as they passed the others.
Meesh was standing by what appeared to be a large shuttle when they got back. He waved them over.
“Food, water, whatever the hell these are,” he muttered as he pulled items off the sledge. He stopped for a moment.
“You gotta be kidding me!” He grabbed the strange-looking gun that Bau had found. “Do you realize what we have here?”
“I would if you’d just tell us,” Eth replied, getting chuckles from the others.
His tone must have implied something that Bau wasn’t hearing but she was too intrigued by Meesh’s reaction to care.
“It lays down a coating of carbon nanotubules.” Meesh pressed a control and the thing hummed into life. He turned to the shuttle behind him and aimed the gun up at a protruding sensor blister.
With a slightly deeper hum, the gun sprayed a black material, edged with a crisply defined force field.
“The field keeps me from overlapping edges,” Meesh explained. “Otherwise we’d get hundreds of random, visible seams. They use this to coat the replacement heads in the cryo-distillation separators. Newer systems don’t need the coating because the heads project their own force-fields.”
He stepped back, his face unreadable to Bau, but his hand gestured to the sensor blister. “Tell me that doesn’t represent a tactical advantage!”
Bau could make out no details on the blister at all. She knew there’d been bumps and protrusions all over it, but they’d all disappeared into the black, shapeless lump of the blister itself.
Only by moving to the side could she see the protruding silhouettes of the various parts.
“The nanotubes stand like blades of grass,” Meesh said. “There’s no surface that light can bounce off from. It just ricochets down between the tubes.”
“What about emission management?” Eth asked. “All that trapped light will add to your thermal signature.”
Meesh’s head bobbled up and down and Bau could feel his agreement. “Should be manageable,” he replied, “but it might take some extra gear.”
“Worth trying,” Eth allowed. He nodded at the shuttle. “Do we have something worth putting it on in the first place?”
That head-bobble again, which Bau now realized to be a gesture of agreement. She was starting to understand these creatures.
“Should be able to get those engines to work,” Meesh said. “We’ll have to use our nanites to pull the shuttle apart, though; the main bus is corroded beyond repair.”
“How long are we looking at?”
“I can get the nanites busy on disassembly right now.” Meesh scratched at the back of his head, which Bau took to be a gesture of concentration. “Best part of today to finalize the details of the design, two days for assembly and a day to test…”
“We’re cutting it close,” Eth warned. “If we miss the rendezvous with our forces, they might move on to Arbella to look for us there. I don’t want to go traipsing across the system in this piece of garbage.”
Meesh chewed at the inside of his lip, staring up at the shuttle’s hull. Some of these gestures are incredibly subtle, Bau thought.
“I’d have my reservations as well,” Meesh admitted. “Best to assume a little extra risk in the short term, if it gets us out into orbit in time to find our friends. Greater chance of dying if we try to take this thing all the way back to Arbella.”
“Well, let’s get at it,” Eth ordered. “This thing ain’t gonna build itself.”
Meesh made another face, his mood mischievous. “Technically, using nanites…”
“Just shut your pie-hole and get started.”
Middle finger extended, Bau noticed, sensing the engineer’s feelings. Gesture of good-natured acknowledgement.
Search & Rescue
O liv waved away a holo of the gas giant where she’d been forced to leave Eth. Unlike a rocky planet, this monster hid its secrets well. The fifteen-hundred kilometer per hour winds below her flotilla left no traces of what had happened here while she was fighting alongside Tilsen at Bau’s home world.
She resisted the urge to step over to the tactical station she usually shared with Lil. She was anxious to find Eth and get him back to running their growing forces but it didn’t do to show anxiety when you were in command. “Still no sign of our friends, Lil?”
“Nothing on wide-survey,” Lil replied, “but our scout-ships have a very narrow EM cross-section. It’s going to take a while to find them – assuming…” She trailed off, face red.
“Hard, not being able to send out an omni-directional call,” Glen said.
“Yeah,” Oliv agreed, glad to avoid discussing the probability that their old friend was dead, “but we don’t know this area’s truly clear. Uktannu might have left some stay-back units. We start calling for our people and those units will realize we’re here to rescue a high-value target.”
They were ‘regrouping’ as far as any intercepted signals between their ships were concerned. The smaller ships provided a security screen while the Mouse sat with her forward hangar shielding down. A plan Oliv had started referring to as pulling a Coronado .
It was how they’d tended to recover their teams from raids, back before joining the house military. A freighter, usually the old Coronado in the case of Eth’s team, would sit in parking orbit with their hangar shielding down, waiting for the team to slip inside.
Oliv fervently hoped there was someone to pick up though hopes were dwindling fast after the first half hour.
Maybe it was time to consider a more active search?
“Attention on deck!” a voice rang out, startling Oliv out of her seat and into a position of respect. She still possessed the presence of mind to come to attention facing the voice and what she saw nearly made her abandon discipline altogether.
Eth’s grin bordered on the idiotic. “All hands, render respects for a princess of the realm!”
Oliv realized she’d been on the verge of saying something because she was drawing breath for it. She had no idea what it might have been and now she’d never find out because the entire bridge crew snapped to immediate immobility.
He’d managed to save the Lady Bau!
“Please,” Bau demurred, “I’d say you’ve earned the right of familiarity by now.”
The electress approached Oliv as the crew erupted into celebration. “General Tilsen?” She asked.
“We caught the enemy over your capital, My Lady,” Oliv told her. “We scattered them but the general believes enough remain in the system to pose a serious threat. He wanted to come search for you, but he felt it was necessary to stay and hunt down the remnants of the enemy forces.”
She handed Bau a small headset. “The general recorded this for you before we left.”
Bau put on the headset and activated the polarized holo that was viewable only from a narrow field of view.
Oliv turned her attention back to Eth. “Very glad to see you,” she said warmly. “Now, how the hells did you get aboard without my knowing about it?”
Eth called up a video feed from the forward hangar, one that looked out the hangar door. “We found an old piece of equipment that, though it has obvious uses, is no longer being made in the empire. If they still made them, we’d have heard of it by now.”
Oliv looked at the video feed. “What am I supposed to be looking at? All I see is stars.”
Eth indicated an area to the right side of the opening.
“Less stars?” she asked him.
“No stars at all.” He grinned at her. “There should be stars there…”
Isolation
M aking the Ashurapol Bombings the only such ‘terrorist’ attack in the sector for the last five centuries,” the holographic reporter asserted with breathless excitement. “This intrepid reporter finds it far too convenient, especially in the light of a recent meeting held in the neighboring Chusak system.”
Mishak chuckled as a holo of a hotel lobby appeared, focusing on a sign advising that a meeting of infrastructure conglomerates was being held in the Imperial Room. He’d been quite pleased with himself, arranging for the meeting to take place in such a suggestively named room.
Two security goons approached the camera drone, swatting it down but not before it captured a good dataset from their faces. The news cooperative rewound to a decent still of the two and the biometrics populated the screen, identifying them both as Buchnadel employees.
“You might wonder,” the reporter mused dramatically, “why a company that makes fifty-eight percent of its revenues from war-zone reconstruction is suddenly attending a meeting here on Chusak. You might also wonder why their delegates, and those of most other attendees, came here via Ashurapol.”
“Unless you know that Chusak’s too small for its own path-hub and has to route most of its traffic through Ashurapol,” Mishak gloated.
“I, for one, find this all to be more than a simple coincidence.”
“It certainly is,” Mishak agreed, though the reporter, of course, couldn’t hear him. Nonetheless, he was enjoying this little half-dialog immensely.
“The attack on Ashurapol may seem insignificant, but I believe we’re seeing the early stages of imperial pretext planning here. In the days to come, we can expect to see a massive over-reaction by outside forces, arriving to ‘help ensure the safety of Ashurapolitan citizens’.”
The reporter leaned in. “Make no mistake. If I’m correct, this will spiral into massive violence, leading to the need for lucrative reconstruction contracts. How ‘fortunate’ for the Ashurapolitans that the emperor, may he outlive us all, has his cousin, an executive vice-president of Buchnadel, a short hop away at Chusak…”
“One wonders what the Lord Anos could have done to bring down our sovereign’s wrath, but this reporter will ponder that question from another system. I have no intention of being here when the fighting starts in earnest. This is Zaidu, reporting for the Galactic Constant – telling truth to power for seventeen centuries.”
The image faded into a commercial and Mishak sat back, pleased with his results. Anos, a moderately powerful elector, was marshaling his forces and it seemed likely that he’d be positioning himself as a bulwark against Mishak’s father.
His apparent support for the emperor and his expected opposition to Sandrak, who the public viewed with growing unease, might be his own ploy to edge closer to the throne. When Tir Uttur died, he might be hoping to gain enough votes to succeed the emperor over his daughter.
However you sliced it, Anos was a potential threat. Far better for him to start looking over his own shoulder, to start wondering if the emperor was coming after him .
The best thing about planting a story for a reporter to find was that they could be counted on to miss the deeper story. Reporters only wanted enough information to prove they knew more than the general public. Few of them actually did any investigative work.
Mishak could arrange for a headline-getting attack and a conference, and someone like Zaidu would never bother to find out the smaller details such as who booked the room for the conference. It would have been an alias and that meant a lot of work to find the truth .
The light playing across his face from the holo-commercial suddenly dimmed and he looked up to see a small image of his father sticking out of the engine compartment of a small luxury runabout that a group of sexy models were trying to sell.
Mishak had to force himself not to laugh. It looked, for all the worlds, as though his father was being adored by the sales models.
The mood quickly faded as the recorded message played.
“You’ve had enough leisure time in your uncle’s palace. It’s time for you to make yourself useful. Meet me at Kwharaz Station as soon as you can get there.” The image disappeared from the middle of the ad.
“Uktannu’s palace?’ Mishak reared his head. “It’s my palace, my damn systems, you old ingrate! I took them while saving your rump, thank-you very much!”
He sighed, sitting back in his chair. What use was there in raving at a commercial?
He missed Abdu. The old Human had been a valuable, if secret, source of counsel. The old fighter had taken Eth under his wing and it showed. Mishak could use Eth’s steadying influence now, but he’d left the Heiropolis system and never shown up at Dur.
Had his loyal Humans deserted him?
Royal Duty
M arduk slowed slightly, picking up the warning in his aid’s mood. Someone was in his office, but it was someone friendly, or relatively so.
The door snapped open for him, revealing the crown princess, Tashmitum, standing in the middle of an elaborately connected holographic map of the empire.
“Highness,” he greeted her, not-so-secretly pleased at her boldness.
“You’ve been naughty, Uncle,” she admonished, her feelings taking any insult from the words.
“Well, I am your father’s chief of staff,” he allowed, “so that’s a pretty safe assumption for you to make.” He came to stand beside her, noting that the lines in the holo ran between, among other things Arbella, Heiropolis and Dur. “Can you be more specific?”
“Your attempt to weaken Sandrak.”
“Were we that obvious?” He felt mild scorn.
“Having the Varangians nearby, on whatever coincidental pretext you must have cooked up, was a touch heavy-handed.”
