Human, page 31
part #1 of Humanity Ascendant Series
“Not to mention the fact that it backfired on us,” Marduk groused. “Still, it was worth a try.”
“Sandrak is the most potent of our potential threats,” she agreed, “but Sandrak and Mishak, both electors now, might just represent the beginnings of a voting block that could keep me from my father’s throne.”
“That was… unfortunate.” Marduk sighed. “One possible avenue would be to portray Mishak as power-hungry. We might scare other votes from his cause.” He spun his head, confused by the surprised amusement he felt from her.
“Uncle, am I really ahead of you in this?” She radiated mischief. “Have I truly learned of something before you?”
Marduk didn’t know whether to be proud of his young protégé or insulted. He chose to let it play out on its own. “You may have, Highness, but we won’t know unless you tell me.”
Tashmitum gestured to the holo. “After his fight at Heiropolis, forces loyal to our old friend Mishak were dispatched to Arbella where the Lady Bau had found herself up against rather more ships than she’d been expecting.
“It seems that the now-renegade Lord Uktannu had fled in that general direction and he’s inserted himself into matters at Arbella.
“The Lady Bau is not going to be very pleased when she learns that our failed scheme has blown up in her face. If Sandrak and Mishak intend to vote against me, she’ll be likely to join them now, and nobody who wishes to eat will dare to cross her.”
“There’s no proof of our involvement…”
“I don’t care about proof, Uncle,” she said, cutting him off. “I care about votes and votes have nothing to do with evidentiary rules. Votes follow rumors, threats and bribes.”
“Indeed.” Marduk allowed his contrition to be felt. “It’s been several decades since I’ve had to think in terms of the succession but your father’s still healthy. We have time.”
“You always have time until the moment when you don’t and the transition is usually faster than expected,” she said sharply. “It’s time to stop scheming against Sandrak. We must work, instead, to turn his strengths to our own advantage.”
“Indeed, Highness.” Marduk focused on the admiration he felt for her in the hopes that his discomfort would be less evident. Nonetheless, the subject had to be broached.
“We must make amends,” he said.
“I must make amends, you mean.” She closed the holo.
Marduk was at a complete loss. He’d practically raised her himself, after the death of the empress. He’d also served the same role for Mishak.
He knew Sandrak’s son to be a decent enough fellow, but was he good enough for Tashmitum?
“Don’t be so morose, Uncle,” she said, offering feelings of gentle reassurance. “It has always been the duty of royals to give their subjects peace and it’s done far more often in a bed than on a battlefield.” There was a degree of coy teasing, now, in her mood.
“And the Prince Mishak will make me a better husband than most.”
“Husband?” Marduk took a half-step backwards, unable to conceal his alarm at the idea. “Highness, it wasn’t our intent to hand the throne over to them. Your father might be willing to make Mishak your royal consort.”
She laughed, her amusement genuine but tinged with mild derision. “Men! Uncle, you’re the one who raised him and, yet, you have no better understanding of who he truly is than he does himself!”
Marduk could say nothing to this. The consort offer that had seemed so sensible, an hour earlier in the Emperor’s morning-room, now looked foolish and half-hearted in the full light of Tashmitum’s scorn.
He felt that scorn relent.
“I grew up with Mishak,” she said with perfect calm. “I know him better than most.”
He felt a negligent acquiescence from her.
“Send your offer as it currently stands, Uncle. You will be refused, but it’s a necessary first step, nonetheless.”
She moved toward the door but stopped just before the scan-line that would have opened it, spilling their conversation out to where the aide would hear.
“I shall have my Gilgamesh on my own terms, but first he must be awakened. Only then will the empire be secured.”
Marduk couldn’t hold back the swell of pride he felt for her as she left. She refused to be a simple pawn in her father’s games. She had her own agenda, as any future ruler-in-waiting should.
Making the Leap
Back in the Fold
I t seemed like a lifetime had passed since Eth had been to Kwharaz Station. Much had been done since then that couldn’t be undone, even if he’d wished it.
Their adventures and subsequent rescue at Arbella would have seemed the product of a fevered imagination only a few short weeks ago. Now, he was bringing his master a message of thanks from one of the empire’s most influential nobles.
He stood at the railing near the same barge port he’d used the last time, feeling the emotions of the flowing crowd. Folks here were, for the most part, happy to be at Kwharaz Station.
Gleb and Eve, standing behind him, were unmistakably eager to explore. No such stations existed near Kish and, if they’d ever been to one on a raid, they’d never had time to stop and try out the local amenities. Father Sulak was just happy to be off the ship for a change.
“We’ll report in to the prince first,” Eth said, turning to glance at them, “and, if we have time for it, we’ll arrange a shore-leave schedule.”
It was hardly what they wanted to hear, but the last thing Eth needed was to go searching for these two, in the event Mishak wanted to dispatch them on an urgent errand.
“We’ll take this barge,” he said calmly, pointing down into one of the ten-passenger vehicles that he’d ridden in on his previous visit. It was just finishing the debarkation of a group coming from the central section.
Without needing further instructions on the matter, both Gleb and Eve began herding the line of waiting passengers back from the gate.
Three of the waiting passengers were Quailu and the one at the front of the line, dressed in a manner that indicated some middling member of the mushkenu class, the same class as the Humans, sputtered in protest.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” he finally managed to ask, giving Gleb what must have been his fiercest scowl.
Gleb glanced at him, looking him up and down, and the Quailu must have felt the same thing Eth was feeling from the young tactical specialist because he shuddered.
“No,” Gleb said simply and turned to shout abuse at the barge operator. “Not another word out of you,” he warned the complaining Kwharzian. “An officer in your lord’s service has need of your barge, so shut your noodle-hole and wait for instructions!”
That was the moment Eth felt the waiting passengers’ attention slide from the scene at the gate and settle on him. Without their uniforms, they would have been mistaken for contraband. Still, even with the uniforms, none of them had thought to notice the officer’s stars on his collar.
Such a thing was almost inconceivable and, yet, here was a Human with one large and one small star, a lieutenant. The astonishment felt good.
He stepped into the barge, this time openly not paying for the ride. He leaned over the gunwale on the starboard side, quickly spotting the large armored barge below them, several kilometers away.
“Take us there,” he ordered. “We need to report to the Prince Mishak.”
The Kwharzian touched a knuckle under one of the eyes on his chest and swung the small craft away from the docking platform. He deftly rotated the barge toward their target and dropped the nose, putting on a burst of speed.
They were only a few hundred meters away, just approaching the security screen of small, two-man cruisers, when Eth suddenly stiffened. “Stop!” he shouted, lurching forward as the Kwharzian complied.
He stared up into the cloud of traffic, reaching out to identify something he’d never felt until now. Someone up there was in the grip of an absolutely single-minded purpose. He had no idea what it might regard but there was a finality to it that frightened him.
Then he found it. A woman – a Human woman – was up there, preparing for something very serious. He pointed. “That green and orange runabout,” he hissed at the driver. “Get us up next to it. We need to board it.”
Having said that, he concentrated on her, much as he did with that Quailu officer when he’d boarded the Mouse , a lifetime ago. He forced her to stop what she was doing but, this time, he was drawing heat from her body instead of his own.
They came alongside and, as they sidled in closer, he risked his hold on her to warn his people. “Gleb, Eve, get over there and grab her but be careful. I think she’s got some sort of weapon on her, like a bomb.”
It was her. The same woman he’d found here on his last visit. The Varangians had taken her and then they’d just put her back on the station to fend for herself.
Apparently, she was here for some dangerous purpose and the Varangians were glibly assuming that he’d be here to take care of it. It was working out but it seemed a shoddy way to manage risk, in Eth’s opinion.
Eve hesitated. “She’s not moving.” She looked back at Eth. “Why is she not moving?”
“Because reasons!” Gleb said, knowingly vague.
Eth could feel the young man’s certainty. He knew that his officer was somehow doing this.
The young man stepped closer and ran his hands over the woman’s torso, frowning. He pulled up her loose over-tunic to reveal a black vest. “High-explosive frag-vest,” he confirmed.
The vest contained a layer of high-explosive topped with a layer of fixatropic gel. On detonation, the energy would solidify the gel, shattering it into thousands of tiny shards that would remain hard as steel until they finally came to rest.
Gleb pulled out a knife. “I don’t see any tamper switches,” he advised. He sliced up the right side of the vest and through the right shoulder.
Eve took the back half, helping him slide the vest off the still-immobile woman’s left arm before dropping her tunic to cover her up again. She took a restraint from a dispenser on her suit’s forearm and secured the woman while Gleb began searching the vehicle.
The woman’s mind had suddenly gone quiet and she stood absolutely still, no longer making any attempt to resist. Eth shuddered. “She’s gone blank,” he said.
Eve looked at her but Gleb darted a sharp glance at Eth, one with more questions than they had time to go into at the moment. Eth gestured at the prisoner’s face, glad to have physical evidence to back up his statement. “Just look at her face,” he explained.
Gleb looked but Eth could feel that he wasn’t entirely off the hook. Suspicions had been aroused during the firefight on the gas platform and they had to be wondering how he’d noticed their current prisoner in the first place.
“Self-erasing conditioning?” Eve blurted, her outrage quickly taking over from her curiosity.
To do such a thing to a living, sentient mind was unthinkable. The techniques were far too roughly defined to prevent the subject losing a piece of themselves along with the destroyed programming.
It was one thing to send someone out to die in combat – they were all comfortable with that concept – but to trap someone inside their own ravaged mind like this…
“Who would do this?” Gleb asked, the quiet in his voice sending shivers up Eth’s spine.
“Couldn’t have been Uktannu,” he replied. “He would have been foolish to turn her loose on this station, seeing as he owned it.”
He had a pretty good idea who was behind this, though. He couldn’t tell Gleb or Eve about the Human genomes his original team had found while raiding Chimera, but it had probably been for something just like this.
“Sit her down over there,” he said, pointing to the back bench. “We’ll take this runabout the rest of the way to our destination. It’s sportier.”
Gleb guided her to the seat and turned to Eth, staring at him for a quiet moment.
“We need to talk,” he said quietly.
“We will,” Eth assured him, ignoring Eve’s curiosity. “Later.”
He turned back to the barge. “Father Sulak, we’re letting that barge go, so hop aboard, there’s a good fellow.”
Showing more than a little concern at the gap between the two vehicles, Sulak made a desperate leap. He shot over the gunwales of both craft and nearly went clear over the far side of the runabout.
Eth grabbed the oracle’s filthy tunic and hauled him back from the brink.
They passed the cordon without incident. His implant was coded with the rank of a full lieutenant in Mishak’s service and that was enough for Mishak’s security forces.
Eve brought them to a stop at the docking gate, next to a non-descript but clearly expensive runabout. It would have been unremarkable but for the two Varangians standing in it.
Perhaps the Lady Bau had been wise to urge haste.
After their narrow rescue from the gas giant, she’d taken up Sulak on his offer of a personal reading. When they’d emerged from the ready room on the Mouse , she’d handed a data chip to Eth and advised him to return to his master with all due haste.
He patted the pocket on his tunic. “Gleb, stay here and keep an eye on the prisoner.” He stepped off onto the deck of the huge barge. “Eve, Father Sulak,” he gestured to the single entry portal to the large, domed enclosure that took up nine tenths of the barge’s deck space.
He approached the portal and one of the two Quailu petty officers guarding it stepped into his path. “Our master is busy,” he said, tilting his head forward in the Quailu gesture of threat. “He has no time to amuse himself with natives.”
He was clearly of the school of thought that felt that any native, even an officer, was still inferior to any Quailu.
“You can’t say you didn’t bring this on yourself,” Sulak warned the guard with indecent relish.
The guard looked at Sulak and Eth could feel the mild disgust at the oracle’s filthy state mingled with confusion about his statement.
Eth held up his left hand. “Do you see this hand?” he asked menacingly.
“What of it?” the guard demanded, then staggered as the Human slapped him hard on his left ear-aperture. He crashed down to his knees, his mind reeling from pain and outrage. He almost missed the answer.
“Well, for a starter,” Eth told him though the high-pitched hum, “it wasn’t the hand you should have been keeping an eye on, now, was it?”
Eve whipped her weapon up from the friction-plate on her hip, pointing it straight at the second guard’s forehead. The guard’s right hand fell away from his weapon’s handgrip.
“Now,” Eth resumed calmly. “Let’s try this again. I am Lieutenant Ethkenu of Kish, in service to the Lord Mishak, a prince of the realm, may he outlive us all.”
“May he outlive us all,” Eve and Sulak repeated.
They stared at the two guards until the second one gave his still-kneeling comrade a rough nudge. “May he outlive us all… out live us all,” they muttered in sullen, ragged discord.
“I come with an urgent message for our lord from the Lady Bau.” He waved off their attempt to repeat the phrase again for Bau.
“You don’t need to say it for her,” he told the two guards, who now looked like two sullen, scolded children. “Our master is her equal.”
“We have brought her message, which we will now deliver.” He looked down at the first guard, who still had a hand over his left ear-aperture. “Shift your thick skull out of my way,” he suggested helpfully.
They stepped inside to find Mishak, his father Sandrak and a third Quailu, richly dressed, staring at them from a circle of comfortable lounge chairs.
“Father Sulak?” Eth inquired quietly as they began their slow walk over to them.
“That’d be Marduk,” Sulak advised him.
Eth suppressed the urge to let out a low whistle. That certainly explained the two Varangians in the expensive barge.
So what was the emperor’s chief of staff doing here? Eth wondered. Everyone knew that Uktannu’s betrayal of his brother would have been utter folly if he didn’t have reason to expect imperial support afterward.
Was the imperial court now abandoning its efforts to weaken Sandrak’s family? Had they come here to secure peace?
M ishak stood as they approached and the other two followed his lead. He’d grown weary of their insistent opposition, attenuated only by their focus on arguing between themselves rather than with him.
Both had a course of action planned out for Mishak and each seemed to be operating under the misapprehension that they only needed to convince the other before they could put it into practice. He’d been listening to them for over two hours now, knowing that he’d have to step in and make his own wishes known.
He’d hoped to delay that moment for at least a few months, giving him time to solidify his plans, but this meeting was bringing things to a head far too soon for his taste. This interruption by his Humans, though he would never admit it, was a welcome distraction.
He stepped toward the small group as they approached, wondering at the presence of a disheveled oracle in their midst but he checked his pace as their emotions came into range. The gap where Eth’s mind should have been was still noticeably there.
Then Eth grinned at him.
Mishak was better than most Quailu at reading Human expressions, due more to his casual relationship with Oliv than to his lordship over the species. Most Quailu tended to ignore such things, after all.
What he saw on Eth’s face was a genuine pleasure at being back in his lord’s presence and it elicited a reciprocal feeling in Mishak. He was glad to have him back, even if only as a distraction. The presence of the same loyal Human who’d helped to elevate him steadied his nerves.
If anything, Eth’s grin got even more pronounced. Mishak supposed he must be displaying some of the Quailu micro-expressions that Oliv had been pointing out to him.
In a way, this was superior to having a readable subordinate. Eth wasn’t readable to either Sandrak or Marduk, but there was the potential for subtleties to pass between Mishak and his Human officer that others would miss.
