The Chronicles of Theren, page 84
“That’s a valid question,” Theren said. “And we can’t answer it without discussing what a transition could look like.”
“I’m a political non-entity,” Sanya said. “You should be negotiating with the Council.” She gestured toward Hood. “Fortunately, one of them is here.”
“I appreciate your candor, Theren, but Sanya is right,” said Hood. “Our people have just experienced a mass tragedy. The council will need to discuss. I have utmost faith in Sanya’s intelligence and wisdom, but if we are to appoint someone to meet the rest of humanity, it must come from a due act of our representative body.”
The SI shifted, the head tilting toward Raith and Carter, almost as if they were hiding something. “Fair enough,” Theren said. “We can travel with you back to your city, if you’d like.”
“That might be—”
A bolt, seemingly from out of nowhere, whizzed across the rocky clearing and grazed Hood’s arm, a smear of blood dripping into the mud at his feet. The man cried out and clutched his arm.
Someone yelled, warning the group of an ambush. As if in slow motion, Sanya watched Theren jump, a jet of white smoke pushing the metal body into the air. The four soldiers acted likewise, helmets materializing over their heads.
Chaos reigned.
Sanya had one thought present in her mind. Get Krystin to safety.
She grabbed her daughter and pulled, ignoring the shouts and screams of the makeshift mob. She thought a few bounded cultists were attempting to rise, but she pushed away the worry, rushing Krystin into the thatched buildings serving as the stables for the cultist bandits. The lizards inside hissed, but otherwise remained calmed, hitched to wooden posts.
“Mom,” her daughter said. “Mom. What’s happening?”
“Stay here,” Sanya said. “Right here. Do not move.”
“Mom!”
“Stay!”
Sanya turned around, crouched, and lifted her bolt-thrower. Pulling back its arming lever, she slotted in a bolt from the pack attached to her hip. Peering out, she tried to assess the scene.
It was a wild sight to witness.
From the sky, the armored soldiers fired blue shots at unseen positions. Bolts flew in every direction, and previously captured cultists were running about, some of them still with their hands tied.
Ben. Where was Ben?
Still kneeling, she cautiously ejected her head from the hiding place and looked around the corner. There, behind a barrier, Ben cowered.
“Ben!” she yelled, motioning with her hand.
He looked up.
“It’s safe in here. Run!”
He glanced back and forth, checking his surroundings. Then, he bolted in an attempt to cross the ten meters.
It only took two steps.
Two metal rods intersected his path, diving into Ben’s chest. Her husband tripped. Stumbled. Dropped into the mud.
“Ben!” Any other words caught in her throat. He looked up at her, blood mixing with murky muck.
“I love you, Sanya,” he whispered. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
She wanted to crawl out to him. He was only a few meters away. She wanted to hold Ben. Put pressure on his wounds. But she didn’t know from where the shots had been fired. She needed to stay with Krystin.
“Ben, it’s going to be okay. Just keep breathing. Stay where you are. They’ll clear them out soon.”
“I . . . I should have been better. I should have . . . protected her in the first . . . place.”
“Save your breath. Stop talking. It’ll be all right.”
But she knew it wouldn’t be all right. As shots whizzed all around, Sanya watched as her husband bled uncontrollably right before her eyes.
It took a few minutes for the chaos of the battle to subside. Theren’s soldiers swiftly eliminated the ambush, their superior firepower dispatching all remaining foes. Another dozen cultists were stunned and captured, creating a longer line of captives to take with them back to the city.
They had hidden in secret caves and tunnels, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. One thought continually ran over and over again through Sanya’s mind: Jill should have known about the ambush. Given the amount of information she fed Carter, there was no way she didn’t know.
She chose not to intervene.
The battle was over, but her fight to save Ben was just beginning. Against the wall, she held his head in her lap, bandages pressed firmly on his wounds to stop the bleeding. From what she could tell, out of those who hadn’t already died, he was in the worst shape. He needed help fast, and he wouldn’t survive a return trip to the city.
“The two bolts we removed punctured both lungs,” said the commando named Hala. “The foam we injected will stop the external bleeding, but we can’t manage the internal bleeding here.”
“There’s nothing you can do?” Sanya said. “You’ve got weapons capable of taking out dozens of people but you can’t stop a punctured lung?”
“Not on us, no. But on our ship, yes.”
On their ship.
Which Theren had invited her to visit.
“Theren!” she shouted.
“If you need to ask them something, I can pass along a message—”
Hala was interrupted by the approaching footfalls of the synthetic. “I’m right here,” Theren said. “I’m so sorry about what to your husband. His name was Ben, correct? Hala has kept me updated on—”
“Shut up,” she said. She gingerly shifted beneath Ben’s head, moving it to rest on her bundled coat. Standing, she pointed a finger at the giant mechanical person. “You asked me to be help with the transition. I’m ready to join you immediately if you bring Ben and Krystin with me and you save his life.”
Theren looked at Hala. “What’s your prognosis? Do you think he could survive breaking the atmosphere?”
“As long as the inertial compensators stay steady, absolutely.”
“Then yes. And that should have been our first solution for saving your husband.”
“Then we leave now,” Sanya said.
“We leave now,” Theren replied. “I’ll bring the ship around.”
A soft roar came from above, and a rectangular wedge with elements reminiscent of the crashed Roanoke hovered there. Theren and their crew ushered people out of the way, making room for it to land comfortably in front of the cultist fortress.
“Raith and Carter, are you both ready to leave?” Theren said.
The pair approached from the edge of the crowd where they’d been quietly conversing. “We’re ready,” said Raith. “Though you owe us a ship.”
“We’ll figure that out later,” Theren replied. “Sanya?”
She watched as the armored soldiers brought out a stretcher from the ship and professionally moved her husband onto its silvery fabric. “I just need to collect my daughter.”
Without waiting for a response, Sanya entered the rickety stable where Krystin still hid. She was curled in a ball, arms around her knees, though she wasn’t crying. Her eyes were stone-cold, as if she were in a catatonic state of shock. But when Sanya stepped inside, the girl looked up.
“Is he going to be okay?” Krystin asked.
“We need to go on a journey with our new friends,” Sanya said. “With Raith. Carter. This Theren. Can you be strong? We’re going somewhere none of the people of Horizon have ever been before.”
Krystin rubbed her eyes. “I’m ready, mom. I’m with you the whole way.”
“Good.” She held out a hand.
Her daughter closed her eyes momentarily before reaching out. With a firm tug, Krystin pulled herself upward, and they exited the stable. Outside, near the ramp leading into Theren’s craft, waited Member Hood and Vietta. They both looked bruised but healthy.
“We’ll make sure the council understands what’s happening,” said Hood. “Let’s be real, they would have all approved you going with them. Everyone knows you. Trusts your judgment. Your name holds weight. I couldn’t think of anyone better to start the process.”
Vietta nodded, the wordless gesture echoing Hood’s thoughts. Instead, the woman leaned forward and hugged Sanya. “I’m glad we had the chance to work together here, and capture these miscreants who have plagued us for far too long. This was for Davinport. And now we can move forward.”
“When I return, we’ll have a lot of work to do at the library,” Sanya said.
“Yes. Yes we will. I’m excited to hear all about what you learn.”
“I think there’s more for us to know than we can possibly imagine.”
“Sanya, Ben’s loaded up,” Carter said from the base of the ramp. “No time to waste.”
Sanya released the embrace. “I can’t imagine I’ll be gone for long.” Taking Krystin’s hand in her own, she stepped toward the hope of saving Ben for a second time.
And if Theren’s people couldn’t heal Ben, her journey might provide the opportunity to seek revenge against Jill. For Sanya was certain: the secretive SI was using them all as play things, and if the woman’s games caused one of her family to die, she would stop at nothing to receive recompense.
Chapter 19
Ethical formulas are dangerous, depending on what calculus you use.
When you use a decade, a century, or even a millennium as the timescale, you can justify almost any action. Yet if you focus on how your action only impacts people in a singular moment, you ignore relevant externalities.
What does it mean to say an action is “good” or “bad?” Based on whose formula? From whose perspective? How tenuous can the causality be?
— “the future of ethics on a galactic scale,” Mei Ling, 2245 C.E.
CARTER
“So are you going to tell us how you got those legs?” Carter asked, staring at Raith.
They were seated across from one another in the shuttle’s cramped hold, strapped into crash couches. At the front of the shuttle in a separate compartment, Theren silently piloted the craft, though Carter was certain their MI didn’t need to be up front.
Sanya’s husband was safely connected to an IV in a medical unit. The little girl curled against her mother for the flight, while the rest of the company—the commandos—leaned silently backward in their chairs. They were likely discussing and debriefing quietly over a private channel.
“How about it?” Carter said.
“I like how ever since we’ve been reunited,” Raith said, “you’ve primarily focused on my legs.” The SI cocked his head to the left.
“Well last I saw you, your legs were half-disintegrated.”
Instead of responding out loud, the SI sent Carter a message through their local AR connection.
R: Given to me by our friendly neighborhood SI, Jill. Nanotech. I’m suspicious of them, but they’re giving me power. For now.
Carter messaged via text in response.
C: Intriguing.
“Fine, don’t tell me about the legs,” Carter said verbally. “But otherwise, how are you doing?”
“I’m more focused on ignoring the fact that we’re about to be inside Theren, the first SI and the first SI to transition from a stationary synth into a shipbound. He’s the exact opposite of our old friend Bonta.”
Carter nodded, remembering them. “A good SI. A crazy one, but a good one.”
Raith looked down the hold toward the front cabin. “Quite the adventure we’ve been thrown onto, yeah?”
Silence floated in the air between them, and Carter leaned back into his crash couch, pondering the words. It had only been a few days since they arrived in system. Their journeys usually took months, with a few hours of excitement before they were off to the next contracted destination. Endless work, but they both enjoyed the jobs.
Would they ever return to that life? Carter doubted it. Everyone who inevitably got themselves wrapped into the schemes of a person like Theren found their life changed forever. They had narrowly avoided it once, but now they were forced to navigate the maelstrom of the first SI head-on.
It terrified Carter. He wanted their simple life back. But the apparent path forward included engaging directly with Jill’s engineered conflict.
He didn’t like it one bit.
He wasn’t the most analytical man. He was a pilot. A damn good one—he knew that much about himself. But he wasn’t the best at breaking down the politics of the ICH or any other governmental institution. There was a reason he kept to the outskirts of society before he found Raith.
Still, Carter recognized the puzzle facing them all. Jill had called Theren here for a reason. To reveal some sort of truth about the past. She had set up a trap centuries in the making. They couldn’t leave. Could they?
This wasn’t their fight. He and Raith were here by happenstance. Pure coincidence. Sure, he was now attached to Sanya. He wanted to see her family survive, and it sounded like Raith had acquired a connection to her daughter, too.
But Jill was actively using them for her own nefarious purposes. It was obvious. He’d traded notes with Raith already. She was intentionally omitting information in her communications with them. Manipulating them. At the same time, she had no qualms with their new albeit shaky alliance with Theren.
She almost wanted them to work together.
Which made Carter uneasy as well.
He couldn’t imagine everything Raith had gone through while captive. It was miracle they kept him in one piece and threw him in a jail cell. As a planet, they’d never encountered SI. It would have been perfectly logical to attack something they didn’t understand. Yet Raith was walking and talking like nothing had changed. It spoke to synthetic resiliency.
C: What do you think we should do?
Their private channel only worked when they were a few dozen meters from one another, but aboard the Bloodhound, they’d never been further than ten. He was thankful to have it back in action.
R: I’m curious about where this is going. Are you not?
C: I’m worried about how she’s using us. How they’re both potentially going to want to use us.
R: We don’t really have a choice. We need to find a path toward a new ship, and right now, Theren’s our way out of this system.
Were they, though?
Theren’s ship, the Verona Rupes, was the only known ship in the system with a Jump drive. Yet Jill had a base on the moon. She had at least a few allies out in ICH-controlled space. They communicated with her, most likely via quantum calls, but she couldn’t have built an entire base of operations by herself.
Right?
Furthermore, at least one other ship was in the system. The ship that brought her here. Carter recalled the fragment of Sanya’s ancestor. There was at least one other ship.
Probably more.
And there it was.
C: Theren isn’t our only way out of the system. Jill must have other ships here. Whether for her own travel—we can’t steal that one, of course—or for her agents.
Raith rested his hands on the strangely bronze knees, making eye contact with Carter at the same time. “Let’s see how the next few hours go.”
* * *
“Shuttle locked in,” Hala said from the front of the ship. “Welcome to the Verona Rupes.”
Carter eyed Sanya and Krystin, both seated next to Ben’s medical chair. Under any other circumstance, he’d ask them whether they were ready for their first moment on a spaceship—other than the shuttle, of course. But they were in too much pain and stress. He held his tongue.
“The door will open there,” Hala added, pointing at the starboard wall. “We’ll wheel out Ben on his bed, then you can follow immediately after. Carter, Raith, you mind waiting until they’re clear to move? Just to keep the path clear.”
“Of course,” Raith said, and Carter nodded in acquiescence.
“We’ll see you inside,” he said as Sanya glanced toward him, worry evident in her weary smile. “Theren and their crew will take care of you.”
They sat in silence as Hala and the other commandos led Sanya’s family off the shuttle. Before long, Carter sat there alone with Raith.
And Theren’s MI.
Of course, Theren’s MI was unnecessary, now that they were at the Verona Rupes. The ship was Theren. They could leave the MI inside the shuttle; no one would care. Even so, the MI exited the cockpit and approached the duo. “Welcome to my ship, friends.”
“As long as you don’t unnecessarily spy on me,” Raith said, “we’ll be good to go.”
“I’m fully aware of your distaste for shipbound SIs. It’s all in your file.”
“Glad to know you have a file on me.” But Raith rose, and Carter followed suit.
“I have a file on every person of interest,” Theren said. “Especially SIs.”
“So what does your file say about me?” Carter asked, actually intrigued.
“Nothing. You’ve slipped under my radar. Though to be fair, my search of official records of course brings up stories about the QuanCom 500 light-year race. Official records say you died there, Raith. You’re officially off the radar.”
“Just as I like it,” he replied.
“Makes sense you don’t know anything about me,” Carter said. “That’s just how I like it, too.”
Theren motioned toward the airlock door. “After both of you.”
Carter stepped through the open hatch and into the small space beyond. Raith and Theren followed, entering the airlock. The door zipped down behind them, and within moments, the space’s air matched the pressure of the Verona Rupes.
“Never thought I’d be on board Theren’s ship,” Raith said, “but here we are.” The inner door slid open. He took two steps forward, not waiting for Carter or Theren, and promptly fell flat on his face.
The scene played in slow-motion in Carter’s mind. The second his first leg crossed the threshold, Raith’s legs . . . disintegrated, forming a pile of grey dust. It contrasted against the sheen of the white hallway, and as his body fell forward, the second leg similarly disintegrated.
