Splinter Faction, page 20
“That’s an option—if you want an interstellar war,” Perry said.
I gave a glum nod. The Ceti might dither a little, but the Eridani wouldn’t. Within a few days of them learning about this fleet, they’d be launching an attack on NTX to destroy it. And the Ceti would eventually decide to do the same. But if we told one of them, we’d effectively be telling both, since each had spies well-placed in the others military apparatus. And while they might even choose to cooperate, at least initially, putting their fleets together in the same region of space in a firefight could easily and very quickly spin way out of control. Relations between the Eridani and the Ceti were fragile at best, so the thought of sending both of them off to fight the same war absolutely gave me the shivers.
“Shit meet fan, I think. Yeah, we don’t want that,” I finally said.
“There’s another issue. Rektorr is starting to worry about being detected. More ships means more chances of one of them catching a glimpse of the Prowler, even a fleeting one. And these are warships, so we’re talking military scanners, not civilian ones. He’s not worried about his own safety, because he can just twist away.”
I winced. “But he’s worried about being compromised, so the bad guys know their cover’s been blown. Yeah, it’s a fair point.”
I studied the imagery. We should pull Rektorr out before he was detected. But if we did, we’d lose our eyes on the situation in NTX, and I really didn’t want that. We were going to have to deal with this fleet one way or another, but it would be a while yet before the Swens would be able to start twisting. And we needed their numbers and firepower if we were going to have a chance of taking on this fleet on even equal terms.
“Okay, how about a compromise?” I asked. “We have Rektorr take the Prowler in for short spells, an hour or even less, two or three times a day? That way, he’s not there most of the time, so his chances of being detected are correspondingly reduced.”
Netty spoke up. “That’s a lot of twisting, so he’s going to burn a lot of fuel. We’ll need to have a ship standing by at the spot he’s going to twist away to, so the Prowler can be refueled as needed.”
“Sounds good,” I said, standing. “I’ll let you guys work out the details with Rektorr. In the meantime—”
A voice from back near the airlock interrupted me. It said, “Oh dear.” Then a pause, and then, “Oh—DEAR!”
“I think somebody just walked face-first into Icky’s ass,” Perry said.
“NO NO NO NO!”
I put my hands on my hips and nodded. “Yeah, she’s going to have put up a warning sign or something.”
18
While Funboy recovered from his trauma, I got an odd call. Netty alerted me to it.
“Van, there’s a Peacemaker about to arrive in Earth orbit. Her name is Si’bault,” Netty said.
I looked up from the desk terminal in my office. “Si’bault. Hmm.” I shook my head. “I recognize the name, so I’ve seen it before, but—” I shrugged. “Sorry, not placing this person.”
Netty flashed a dossier up on my screen. It was the Guild personnel file for one Si’bault, a female S’rall, apparently a minor scion of a noble family. But she was an eighth child, meaning seven siblings in front of her for ascension to the family’s ancestral title and the (many) privileges and (few) responsibilities that went with it. We had a few Peacemakers like that, people who’d never inherit the family business, fortune, or station and joined the Guild instead. They often turned out to be mediocre Peacemakers, but this Si’bault wasn’t mediocre at all. Just a cursory skim of her cases showed a ninety-plus percent clearance rate, an almost eighty percent conviction rate, and at least a dozen honors and awards, including two for bravery in the course of her duties.
I sat back. “Okay, I’m impressed. Did she say why she’s here?”
I assumed she was delivering something, sensitive documents or critical data or something that someone like Alic, Volffin, or Bester thought should be personally hand-delivered to me. But, if she was, she was going about it in a roundabout way. “She only said that she needs to meet with you in person, Van, aboard her ship. She’s carrying something that’s apparently problematic—her word.”
I sighed. My to-do list was not getting any shorter. In fact, I’d had enough interruptions over the past couple of days that it had actually gotten longer. “Netty, open up a comm channel to her, please.”
“Just a sec.”
I waited.
“Okay, you’re on, Van,” Netty said, and an image opened on my desk terminal, showing a S’rall, still in her species’ immature phase, which roughly equated to a young human adult. She was pushing maturity, though, which to the S’rall meant that she was about to become fertile, and would remain that way for about a decade or so. This concept, maturity, was a major driver and shaper of S’rall society, which wasn’t surprising when your females only had about ten child-bearing years, and that was it.
“Master Tudor, I’m so sorry to arrive unannounced like this,” she said, “but I think you’ll understand when you come aboard my ship.”
“Is that really necessary, Adept? I’m buried in work as it is, and the pile’s slowly getting deeper—”
“I think it is, Master,” she replied. “I’ve got… someone you’ll want to meet on board.”
That perked me up. “Someone? I see. I gather it’s someone you can’t just put on the comm, then.”
“It is not. Not without some risk.”
I nodded. That meant a prisoner. She had someone in her ship’s holding cell she wanted me to see.
“Alright. I’ll come up in the Frankie. Give me… about an hour.”
“I’ll be here.”
Not that I didn’t trust Si’bault, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I wore my b-suit, of course but kept my helmet handy and carried both The Drop and the Moonsword. I also brought along Funboy, Icky, and Perry. Better safe than sorry, as they say.
We rendezvoused with Si’bault’s ship over the western Pacific, it and the Frankie spectacularly backdropped by the sprawl of Malaysia below, and I had to smile.
“Boy, this brings back memories,” I said, stepping through the airlock. “This is basically the Fafnir, that night you first took me into the barn and I stepped aboard her.”
Perry nodded. “Almost the same configuration, yeah. Seems pretty small now, doesn’t it?”
“Sure does.” I glanced around. The Fafnir today seemed absolutely lavish, almost extravagant in her available space, compared to this cramped little Dragonet. But this had been the Fafnir then, practically right down to the individual runs of cabling.
It seemed so very long ago now, and an entirely different life—
“Master Tudor? Welcome aboard.”
I nodded at Si’bault. “Good to be aboard, thanks. Okay, so what—or who—do you want to show me?”
She gestured for me to follow her aft, back past the airlock, to the holding cells. She tapped at the small monitor set in the bulkhead beside the door of one, revealing its occupant.
It was a Wulgor.
My eyes widened, and I glanced at her. “Where—?”
“One moment, Master. That’s not all,” she said, moving to the other cell and tapping at its monitor. This one contained a… man. Human. Dressed in a sleek, black outfit, but his boots were gone, which was standard procedure. He had a hard, flat face, with even harder eyes, and they were fixed on the monitor as though he was looking right at me.
“Who the hell is that?” Icky asked.
“A Stillness agent,” Si’bault replied. “A Shadow.”
I turned to her, surprised. No, more like stunned. “You’ve managed to arrest and confine a Wulgor and a Shadow? What, have you got Godzilla locked up in your cargo hold? Sauron in handcuffs somewhere?”
“I’m sorry, Master Tudor, I don’t recognize those names? Are they on the Guild’s most-wanted list?”
I smiled and shook my head. “No, but if they were, I suspect you’d find a way to grab them.” I gestured at the two cells. “Anyway, how? How did you nab these two? They’re both freakin’ killing machines in their own very bloody ways. One will rip you limb from limb, the other will kill you dead and vanish without a trace before your corpse even hits the floor.”
“Honestly, Master, I got lucky. I twisted into the Reticulum system, where I was supposed to meet a contact. As soon as we arrived, though, we detected a faint contact out on the margin of the system. No emissions, no distress beacon, just a faint thermal signature and a weak spectral return for oxygen and nitrogen, like someone had lost atmospheric integrity. I decided to check it out and found a wrecked class 7, an upgraded fast courier. She’d been beaten up by something. Anyway, I decided to board her and found these two. The Shadow’s pretty badly injured, was actually unconscious when we found him.” She gave me a smile and a shrug. “So taking him into custody was easy, we just had to carry him.”
“What about the Wulgor?”
“He was definitely more of a problem. Even with guns pointed, my Auxiliaries and I had our hands full. We ended up having to hit him with a goo-gun a few times, stick real guns in his face, make a lot of threats. One of my Auxiliaries still ended up with a broken wrist, and I got smashed against a bulkhead hard enough to crack a rib… or six. Kind of hoping you’ll take him off my hands, Master Tudor.”
“Oh, we will, for sure. Well, this is damned good work, Si’bault. Although, what prompted you to bring them here, instead of straight to Anvil Dark?”
“That was Candler’s doing, sir. When I reported we were bringing these two in, he suggested bringing them here instead. That you’d want to interrogate them personally.”
“And he was right.” I considered what to do with these two. My first thought was to bring them down to the Nexus and interrogate them there. But that entailed transferring two profoundly dangerous prisoners from Si’bault’s ship to the holding cells in the Nexus. People could get hurt in the process, and although it wasn’t likely, if the Wulgor managed to escape custody, we’d end up with a real-life werewolf rampaging through Pony Hollow and environs.
No, the most logical course was to leave them both right where they were, safely locked up. We could interrogate them here, in orbit, then Si’bault could take them to Anvil Dark to be processed and booked.
“We’ll start with the wounded Shadow,” I said, turning to Funboy. “While we’re questioning him, you can treat his injuries.”
“There’s one more thing,” Si’bault said, leading us to her evidence locker. From it she extracted an evidence case, which she unsealed, revealing the contents. It was a device about the size of a large hardcover book. “This was the only piece we found on their ship that we couldn’t identify. It was locked away on its own. All we’ve been able to determine about it is that it’s not a weapon, an explosive device or anything like that. It seems to have something to do with a twist drive, but that’s as far as we were able to get with it.”
I frowned at the device. It was different than the thing that had been planted on the Fafnir to sabotage the combi-drive. I wondered if this device was nonetheless similar.
“Perry, I’ll leave this to you, Netty-P, and whomever else you want to bring to bear on it,” I said. “Let’s just make sure we use all due caution when we examine it.”
“Done and done, boss. We’ll do it here, aboard Si’bault’s ship.”
I nodded and gave Si’bault a shrug. “Looks like you’ll be hanging around Earth for a while, Peacemaker.”
“That’s okay, sir. The bounty on a Wulgor and a Shadow makes it all worthwhile.”
She was right about that. The payout Si’bault earned for bringing in a Wulgor and a Stillness Shadow beat my own personal best bounty, back in my early days as a Peacemaker, and beat it even more when you factored in the salvage value of the wrecked Stillness ship. Unfortunately, that was all the derelict ship gave up. Si’bault had tried to retrieve any useful information from her archives or computer core, but unlike the smugglers that had offered such valuable intel, these ones had been thoroughly wiped.
Still, we had a potentially huge intelligence haul in the respective forms of the Wulgor and the Shadow, if we could get them to talk. And that was something much easier said than done.
I decided to start with the Shadow. He was, frankly, the less likely of the two to crack and offer anything useful. I’d had only a few run-ins with Stillness Shadows over the years, and I knew them to be supremely deadly warriors and assassins, but that was about it. However, the Stillness didn’t recruit Shadows—they created them.
One of the effects of this creation was to evoke in them an almost preternaturally cold, implacable resolve. It made them almost impossible to stop without actually killing them, but it also made them as resistant to interrogation as a brick wall. A Shadow wasn’t just an agent.
They were a wall of silence.
And, sure enough, all of our questions were answered with stony silence. Even the Shadow’s injuries, which included a leg broken in one place, an arm in two, and several other painful-looking cuts and contusions didn’t elicit more than a tautness around his mouth and eyes.
“Maybe we should, you know, get a little direct,” Icky said, nudging the Shadow’s broken leg. The tightness around his mouth got a little tighter, but that was it. I shook my head.
“No. That’s the kind of thing they’d do,” I said, nodding toward the Shadow. “And that means it’s exactly the kind of thing we won’t.” I shrugged. “Who knows, maybe after Funboy here is finished treating his wounds, he’ll show a little gratitude.”
Icky scoffed. “Pfft. Yeah, right.”
I sniffed. “No, I don’t think so, either. If nothing else, though, it’s one fewer Shadow out there to make the galaxy miserable—”
“Van, can I have a word?” Funboy cut in. He’d been treating the Shadow, who’d been letting him, though I was under no illusions as to why. Icky had rightly sneered at the idea of him being grateful. I wasn’t sure a Shadow was even capable of it. No, he was happy to accept Funboy’s treatment because he likely reasoned it would make any future escape attempts that much easier. It wouldn’t, not where we were going to put him, in a special, extreme-security facility we’d built on Anvil Dark specifically to house high-risk prisoners like Stillness Shadows. But I’m sure that’s how his mind was working right now.
I nodded to Funboy. “Sure.”
“Not in here,” Funboy said, gesturing for Icky and me to follow him. We did, both backing out of the cell with weapons ready, then sealing it behind us.
“What’s up?” I asked Funboy, who was studying his medi-scanner with a puzzled frown. “You look like you’ve seen something weird on there.”
Icky nodded. “Yeah. What’s wrong, is he actually a Gajur in disguise?”
I glanced at Icky and rolled my eyes. She and Funboy had recently been caught up in a convoluted murder plot on Dranuc Station in the Spindrift system, and she was making a sidelong reference to that. Funboy, though, merely shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
That made me frown. “You’re not sure? What, he might actually be a Gajur in disguise?”
He looked up from his medi-scanner. “What? No. No, of course he’s not a disguised Gajur. I’m just not sure what he actually is.”
“Uh, duh, he’s a human?” Icky said. “At least, he sure looks like one to me.”
“Yes, he looks like a human. His physiology is that of a human. All of his internal organs, their arrangement, are characteristic of a human.”
I crossed my arms. “But, despite all that, he’s not a human?”
“I’ve employed several therapies to treat his wounds,” Funboy replied. “They are straightforward and, in medical terms, widely used. None of them were effective. I might as well have been administering doses of saline solution for all the good they did. So I decided to look more closely, to determine if his genetics might offer some clue regarding what was going on.”
“Okay, and?”
He turned the medi-scanner to face me. The display was supposedly showing me data about the Shadow’s genetic profile, but instead of data it simply displayed an error message.
Genetic analysis not conducted. No useable genetic material is present or is only present in quantities below detection limits.
I looked from it to Funboy. “What does that mean?”
“Yeah, is there something wrong with your scanner maybe?” Icky put in.
Funboy shook his head. “It detects and analyzes my own genetic profile correctly, as it does yours, Icky.”
“You were scanning my genetic stuff without asking me? What the hell?”
He lifted one corner of his lip at her. “Icky, I have treated you more than any other member of the Fafnir’s crew. I delivered your children—an event that is still seared into my memory in much more detail than necessary. I practically have your genetic profile memorized. Which is why you make such an effective control, and it allows me to say that this scanner is working perfectly well.” He looked back at me. “No, this isn’t merely an error. Somehow, that Shadow, that man, has no DNA in his cells.”
I blinked in surprise. “No DNA?”
“None.”
“How is that even possible?”
“It’s not.”
“And yet, there he is.”
Funboy nodded. “And there he is indeed.”
Icky snorted. “Huh. That answers my question about that scumbag at least.”
“Question?” Funboy prompted.
Icky waved airily. “Yeah. The sumbitch doesn’t have a belly button.”
We brought a team in from Pont Alus Kyr, and they confirmed it. The Shadow in Si’bault’s lockup looked like a human in almost every respect, from his hair and skin right down to his bones. But none of his cells contained any DNA. Not a single double-helix in sight.
