Liminal Space (Shadows & Light Book One), page 37
The ship was a few hundred meters in the air when the telltale white-blue light of the Zero Engine flickered and went out. The ship dropped like a stone.
Oh, crap, fifty meters was not far enough away. She sprinted while opening a wormhole to camp. A thunderous roar exploded behind her, and she dove through the wormhole, closing it as she tumbled across the dirt.
When she came to a stop face-up on the ground, Galean was instantly at her side. “Are you hurt?”
“Um…” she patted her torso “…see any blood, or foreign objects jutting out of me?”
His gaze ran down the length of her. “A scrape on your arm is seeping a small amount of blood. Otherwise, no.”
“Great. I think I’m okay.” She pushed up to sitting. When no body parts screamed in protest at her, she rose to her feet.
“You disabled the ship?”
“I did. It was able to take off, but it soon fell out of the sky. Hence the flailing escape.”
“I see.” No longer concerned for her health, his expression darkened, sending his eyes churning into stygian depths. “How dare you trick me! I could have protected you.”
“No, you couldn’t have. If we were discovered, we were both dead. Full stop. Except I’d wake up in a new body in a week or so, and you wouldn’t. No way was I going to take such a terrible risk with your life.”
“I’ve risked my life for a noble cause before. Dozens of times.”
“I realize you have. But I didn’t bring you here to die. In fact, I’d never allow it. You’ve done enough. More than I dared hope for. You’re a hero, and thank you so much for helping me save lives. Not merely today, but in the future. We know who’s behind this now. Or rather, Uncle Richard will be able to find out who the woman is, and then this will all be over.”
He stared at her, sentsores rigid once more. His voice came out low and flat. “I’d like to return home now.”
“Galean, please don’t be angry.”
“I think I will be. You deceived me. You made a decision for me and took away my agency. In doing so, you shamed me.”
“I would never—”
“But you did. Home, please.”
She sighed wearily, but nodded. Her arms burned from multiple abrasions, and her shoulder ached from her rough tumble, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known consequences were certain to flow from her actions. “Thank you again for everything. You’ve made a tremendous difference today. And for what it’s worth, I really enjoyed spending time with you.”
He simply stood there waiting, and after another few seconds of furious silence on his part and increasing resignation on hers, she opened a wormhole to Belarria. As soon as she did, he picked up his bag and walked through it.
She lowered herself to the dirt to rest for a minute. Once he calmed down, hopefully his anger would fade. Once it faded, maybe he’d come around to forgiving her.
She groaned, recognizing the irony at play here. He’d sounded painfully similar to how she used to sound, whining about agency and the unfairness of being sidelined by people who thought they knew what was best for you. And the truth was, they probably had. Just like she did now. She refused to carry his death on her conscience, refused to carve an eternal chasm into Resamane’s soul.
But damn, being the responsible one was not for the faint of heart.
52
* * *
CONCORD HQ
Command
Miriam listened to Richard’s informal report on the events on Mshak with some dismay. “And I thought Alex was fearless. That young woman is…” she chuckled wryly “…I’m forced to admit, rather impressive. I’m relieved to hear she’s unharmed.”
Richard lifted his shoulders in an expressive shrug. “Somehow.”
“Indeed. I’m not certain if David is going to be more horrified or proud when he finds out what she did. Quite possibly proud.” Her expression sobered, though, as she turned her attention to the other revelations Richard had shared.
“When I first learned Ch’mshak were on the loose, I remarked how no one was so bad an actor as to deliver offworld transport to them. But there is one actor whose depravity, no, outright evil, has never found a limit, and that is Olivia Montegreu. We should have realized she would prove to be the only viable answer. I realize you don’t require my approval to take action here, but I’ll give it anyway: do everything in your power to remove her from the firmament, permanently this time.”
Richard opened his mouth to protest, and she held up a hand. “I know. You had every reason to believe she was permanently removed eighteen years ago, and you were justified in believing so. Unshackled Artificials and Prevos and regenesis have done much to improve our world, but they have introduced some dastardly complications as well.”
“You are preaching to the choir, Miriam. In fact, you’re understating the situation by a fair bit. Those advances have made my job all but impossible, and Montegreu is a perfect example. We’ve already set a plan in motion to eliminate her—the living, breathing body we know she’s walking around in. But this is only the beginning of our task. We’re trying to game out every conceivable insurance policy she might have erected around her existence, but the truth of the matter is, she’s smarter than me. She may be smarter than the sum total of all CINT’s resources.”
Then he scoffed. “Forgive me for taking a minute to complain. This is my problem, not yours. The important thing is, we now know how the Ch’mshak are getting off the planet.”
“We do. Now that Marlee’s completed her mission and we have our answers, drop a quantum block on the continent so she can’t pay her shock troops any more visits.”
Richard nodded. “It’ll be in place by the end of the day.”
Miriam stared out the viewport, reweighing the variables with the benefit of this new information. A niggling voice whispered that with the culprit unmasked, the nuclear option was no longer necessary.
But too many people had died eleven years ago because she’d hesitated, relying on cautious half measures for too long. They were dying again now, and she must put a stop to it. “I’m still going to deploy the Echo Rift.”
“I don’t blame you. Now that Montegreu’s shown the way, other ambitious criminals may decide they need their own personal Ch’mshak murder squads as well. She exposed a weakness in the blockade we can’t patch. It’s one we didn’t think we needed to worry about, but now we do, and an Echo Rift is the best option we have at our disposal to guarantee their isolation.”
“It is. I won’t put our citizens at further risk, and I certainly won’t ask one additional soldier to die in a futile attempt to pacify a species that takes such glee in refusing to civilize.”
Richard started to stand, then eased back into his chair instead. “It’s been almost a week since we last encountered the Dzhvar. Have they gone quiet?”
“Not in the slightest. They’ve been surfacing far outside the Detection Network, often in galaxies we’ve never even catalogued, much less visited. Advisor Kirumase is dutifully updating the map as she discovers evidence in the kyoseil web of their incursions, but in every case they’re long gone before we can mobilize.
“But every day they don’t hit Concord interests is a day we can better prepare. The Kats almost have a more robust Rift Bubble ready to test, and Advisor Ridani continues to iterate on his faraday cage. If we can capture a sample of Dzhvar, we can begin to understand what they are. If we understand what they are, we can develop new ways to fight them.”
“Do you think a multi-layered Rift Bubble will work to keep them off an asset?”
“For a time. Enough time to evacuate all the residents? No. But every person we get to safety is a victory.” Cognizant it was far too early in this war for her to be growing maudlin and defeatist, she deliberately lifted her shoulders and chin. “There is good news, as well. Alex and Kennedy Rossi say they’ve solved the thorniest problems with the Piega Strai. Connova still has to build and test a prototype, but the progress they’ve made is promising.”
Richard arched an eyebrow. “Sealing away a planet full of people inside a pocket universe? What a choice to make. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Eighteen years ago, I was willing to seal away the entirety of Aurora forever in order to save everyone living there, and it was one of the most agonizing decisions I’ve ever had to make. But if Alex is right—and I struggle to conjure examples of her being wrong, at least when it comes to space—then any such confinement needn’t be forever this time.
“Assuming, of course….” her gaze drifted to the wide viewports, where outside, Concord business carried on as usual. For now, peacefully. “Assuming we ultimately find a way to defeat this enemy. And if we don’t, perhaps those people I seal away will get to live, even if no one else does.”
53
* * *
DOMOR
Olivia perched on the edge of her desk, letting one heeled shoe dangle in the air while her gaze locked on the bare opposite wall of her office. She methodically flicked her forefinger with her thumb; then her middle finger, ring finger, pinkie, then back again. One after the other after the other, like a metronome regulating her racing thoughts.
She had a leak somewhere. Somehow. It should be impossible, since she didn’t consult with anyone regarding her use of the Ch’mshak squads. In fact, she didn’t consult with anyone on any important decisions. She employed the minimum number of underlings required, and they merely carried out her directives. They did not advise. Thus no one knew about her plan to clear out the warehouse on Lethe. Not ahead of time, and not as it occurred. Yet a unit of Machim soldiers had.
Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick.
She did, however, map out and iterate on her strategies as she developed them. Since she was Artificial as much as she was human, arguably more so, records of her analysis persisted in the hardware linked to this body and mind. Which meant said hardware had been compromised.
She’d certainly made enemies in the last year, and her swift and decisive actions across multiple domains of late meant the number of enemies was climbing. Arnal Nikto was dead, but he had allies. He had competitors, who had now become her competitors. The list of people who would eagerly sabotage her work if they were capable of doing so was, she conceded, not zero.
As soon as she’d returned from Mshak, she’d set forensic routines running, but they’d discovered nothing amiss in her internal or external programming or storage.
She was forced to admit a small vulnerability here. There existed aspects of this sprawling new universe that she didn’t fully understand.
The Anaden black-market business was a mature entity with hundreds of thousands of years of experience responding to threats. It was in many ways akin to a living entity, and she may have inadvertently triggered an immune response. CINT, Advocacy Intelligence and SENTRI all employed sophisticated tools, some of which she wasn’t yet educated on. Tools that might be able to escape the notice of what she’d perhaps erroneously believed were her own state-of-the-art routines.
The world had changed while she was gone, and in a few small ways, she was still catching up.
Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick.
The only other conceivable explanation was an elaborate scheme on the part of the Ch’mshak warriors, whereby one member of the squad somehow contacted law enforcement once they reached the mission location. The steps required for this explanation to be true were so convoluted and improbable as to be laughable, but she nonetheless filed away the possibility for further consideration if her data breach investigation turned up nothing.
Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick.
Then there was the troublesome development of the merchant vessel falling out of the sky on Mshak. Modern commercial ships, so long as a reputable company manufactured them, did not fall out of the sky. Thus it must be sabotage.
The seller had delivered the ship to a docking bay she’d rented on a human world, Demeter, as Anadens didn’t often purchase ships from human-owned companies. She’d chosen human merchant ships for two reasons: they offered VI control packages comprehensive enough that even the Ch’mshak couldn’t screw up flying the vessels—another way Anaden use of synthetic intelligence continued to lag behind—and of course diversification and misdirection. Investigators wouldn’t think to link human ships to an Anaden criminal organization…or so she’d thought?
The ship had sat in the bay on Demeter for less than an hour before she moved it into orbit above an uninhabitable rock in a backwater system, and there it stayed until she sent it to Mshak.
Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick.
The opportunities for sabotage were narrow, to say the least. But her ship purchases were also recorded in her hardware, and thus vulnerable to discovery by an infiltrating program. Security at the docking bay was tight, but in dead space, somewhat less so. Effecting such a sabotage would be difficult, but not impossible.
Though she could prevent such a mishap from occurring in the future by installing active security countermeasures on each ship, she wasn’t convinced it was worth the trouble. For one, the risk vanished when she uncovered the malware at the root of all these breaches and its source. For another, she was almost done with the Ch’mshak. Their brutality had proved most effective at sending the messages she’d desired to the appropriate targets, but now that those messages had been suitably delivered, she expected to be able to handle future situations by more conventional means.
Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick.
She evaluated several options for the best method to uncover the malware in such a manner that would also reveal who had deployed it.
Then she sent Padron Lanael a message.
Mr. Lanael,
I require a best-in-class foreign code detection and quarantine program. Nothing off the shelf, as my security routines are already robust, and I run a great deal of custom code. Give me several options, as well as your recommendations.
— Teresa Piras
Lanael claimed to have extensive experience navigating illegal markets and criminal enterprises, and he seemed to know every player, no matter the business. If he couldn’t provide what she needed directly, he should know where to go to acquire it.
She acknowledged the additional benefit of this course of action. It provided another opportunity for her to test both his skills and his trustworthiness. Another opportunity to bring him into her presence and evaluate the offer he’d set before her.
Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick.
INTERMEZZO
III
700,019 YEARS AGO
INTERGALACTIC SPACE
The three generation ships neared the end of their long journey across the void as the spiral arms of the Gennisi galaxy loomed sweeping and majestic on the cosmic horizon. The weary rebels would soon find their home—but they had a fateful stop to make first.
It was an act of serendipitous luck that the ships always passed close enough to the planetoid the Asterions named ‘Proele’ to detect its rich mineral profile, leading them to divert there to refill the coffers of their greedy fabrication machines. Unless the kyoseil exerted a rare and momentous act of volition and somehow used its wave form to nudge either the ships or the planetoid, thus engineering their arrival? But the kyoseil did not deign to share its secrets, not even with me.
I hadn’t visited Nicolette since the day the SAI Rebellion began. I’d intended to witness Loshi’s death on the battlefield, as it felt like an important gesture, a way of honoring his sacrifice. But after becoming overwhelmed by emotions I could not constrain at the sight of Dashiel’s ancestor, I determined I was not up to the challenge of facing my brother’s death. Such an experience was certain to break me, perhaps irreparably so, and I pursued a mission both grander and more significant than honoring the already dead. So I’d stayed away as the rebels fought bravely against a mighty Anaden military led by Corradeo Praesidis. Fought and too often perished, until they made the only choice left to them: flee and live.
But this task, here, I truly did need to perform. Miaon had done so before me, and the previous iteration had done so before them. Some lost number of cycles in the past, an earlier Mnemosyne had identified an opportunity and acted. Or, I assumed they had. Perhaps the rebels and kyoseil had found one another on their own, and my intervention wasn’t required at all. But I couldn’t take that chance. This was too important.
Nicolette never set foot on Proele, so I indulged my weakness and stole a peek in on her on board her generation ship before its arrival.
She and Steven cuddled together on the sofa in their stateroom, listening to music and discussing the politics of keeping thousands of refugees comfortable, sane and healthy while confined to an ark for centuries.
I’d girded my defenses since my failure on Asterion Prime, and I was able to observe them now without losing my senses. They wouldn’t be happy forever—if Steven hadn’t ultimately proved to be unworthy of her love, there would be no Dashiel—but they seemed happy now. If not with the world, at least with the sanctuary holding each other close provided.
Comforted by the knowledge that heartbreak was safely behind her for many millennia, I gave them their privacy and sped onward to Proele to make preparations.
GENNISI GALAXY
The planetoid was glutted with kyoseil, but the primordial life form had burrowed deep here, as it had on countless other planetary objects, in order to hide and persevere. To hide from the Dzhvar? Another mystery for which I’d never found an answer. As such, no kyoseil resided atop the surface where it might be serendipitously discovered.
I traveled to an open plain rimmed on one side by jutting cliffs. The region was unusually rich in platinum and silica, thus the miners were going to choose it for excavation. I knew this because Miaon knew this.
