Blade, page 20
part #4 of Inverted Frontier Series
Long before Dragon reached Hupo Sei’s outer system, it was clear to Urban that the Cryptologist had done her work well. Neither the possibility of life nor the certain presence of intelligent entities roused the philosopher cells to an aggressive state. By the time the two coursers shed their momentum enough to join the Labyrinth in its orbit—Dragon following the unstable mass by a cautious gap of just over a million kilometers, Griffin leading it by a similar distance—he knew without doubt that the instinct to kill was gone.
Even so, the cell field remained alert, aware. Always surveying the Near Vicinity, and ready to react should any stealth object be found. Urban directed them to be most wary of Kuriak and to keep that little moon under constant watch.
Kuriak surely watched them in turn—and perhaps that was all it intended? A hopeful thought, soon obliterated by a radioed message from the little moon, received shortly after Dragon’s arrival. A spoken message, delivered in a bland masculine voice, “Greetings. My designation is Ona no Kuriak. I welcome you, voyagers of the starship Dragon, and I offer my services in gratitude for the return of humanity to Hupo Sei. Let my habitat serve as your base of operations. It is a safe and secure venue from which to conduct your daring experiment. And let my experience inform you. I have long studied the invasive alien machines currently present in this system and am ready to answer all questions regarding their motives and history.”
The ship’s company erupted in debate on the question of how to respond. Tarnya wanted to establish a dialog. Pasha did not. “I trust the Inventions far more than I trust this rogue DI. Of course we must allow it no access to the project—and we should keep it at a distance at least until the project is done.”
“Should we reply to it at all?” Riffan wondered.
Kona answered, “We should, though we should say as little as possible.”
“We should eliminate it,” Tio declared. “It’s what the Inventions want.”
The ship’s company shouted down this proposal, then spent nearly an hour discussing the wording to use in their reply. In the end, no one was truly satisfied.
Clemantine refused to even speak the words, instead ordering a DI to synthesize them in her voice. The assembly listened to the result:
“Greetings, Ona no Kuriak. We decline your offer of a base of operations and command you not to interfere in our project, but to stand by and await further communication.”
Shoran shook her head and said, “That is a response shaped to antagonize.”
“Better to provoke Kuriak now, than to draw its ire later,” Kona replied—and the message went out.
But Kuriak was not provoked. “Acknowledged,” it intoned in its bland voice. It said nothing more, and no blush of heat or hint of activity could be discerned on the surface of the little moon.
Urban told himself this was an acceptable outcome and that the problem of Ona no Kuriak could be addressed at a later time. The patience that had sustained him through his long approach to Hupo Sei was gone, and his caution was gone with it. He was so close now to embracing the challenge of a blade that he rejected any suggestion of delay, desiring only to commence the project.
Even so, he did not let his guard down. He kept Kuriak’s habitat under continuous surveillance. Should the rogue DI show the least sign of aggression, Urban was prepared to use Dragon’s gun to vaporize the crust of its habitat and shatter its core into a cloud of hot debris.
<><><>
Jolly sprawled on a cushion in the food court, late on an evening after an exhausting game of flying fox—a game that had been organized, as usual, by Shoran. Now she sat across the low table from him, leaning comfortably against a backrest, eyes half closed, listening, he suspected, to the melodious voice of a distant guitar.
He spoke softly, making a deliberately gentle intrusion into her reverie. “I keep thinking about what we said to Kuriak . . . and I think it was a mistake.”
Her eyes opened, fixed on him.
Abby and Kona had been sharing the table with them but both had gone now, back to their cottages to sleep while Jolly idled there, knowing Shoran often kept late hours. He wanted to speak to her alone, but casually, not like it meant anything, in case she didn’t—
“Oh, I agree,” she said with a sly smile. “You knew I would, eh? I said so at the time.”
Her amused gaze left him feeling like a foolish kid and his face warmed. “I . . . didn’t know if you still felt that way.”
“Oh, I do. ‘Stand by’ is not a sufficient response when dealing with a violent and territorial uplifted DI.”
“All I know is that mechanics are dangerous. On their own, they change in unpredictable ways.”
“You’re thinking of the wild mechanics of Verilotus.”
“Yes. Maybe this one is different. But we don’t know that, and we should.” Fearing rejection, Jolly plunged on with his proposal, speaking quickly, wanting to get it all out into the light where it would either thrive under Shoran’s approval or burn to ashes under her scorn. “Since there are no artificial avatars at Kuriak’s habitat, we should visit it in person. Find out what’s there. It’s the perfect expedition for us because the Inventions don’t go to Kuriak’s moon—the mechanic won’t allow them to—so there’s no worry of contamination.”
Shoran sat up, her smile gentle now, even apologetic. Jolly drew no comfort from it. Instead, disappointment crashed in, and he braced himself for a coddling dismissal.
It came: “We’ve been a long time confined on this gee deck.”
Anger rising, Jolly shook his head. “That’s not what I—”
She raised a hand. “It can get suffocating here, I know. I feel it too. Some of us are more embodied than others. For some of us, nothing is truly real unless we’re physically there in the midst of it.” She leaned back again. Shrugged. “I tried to find a way to get to Kuriak’s moon in some reasonable span of time after Argo shuttles Urban and the Cryptologist to HS-569. It just doesn’t work. Unless something changes, we have to wait until after the project is done. That said, I don’t see why we can’t visit HS-569 ourselves—ride there with Urban and look around, help set up the cameras, whatever is needed. And leave before they flood the place with silver.”
Jolly frowned, deeming this suggestion poor consolation. “HS-569 is supposed to be just empty tunnels.”
“Empty tunnels no human has ever seen before. But maybe—you never know—a launching point to some new adventure?”
He frowned suspiciously. “What new adventure?”
Her eyebrows rose, teasing, questioning. Jolly cocked his head, mentally inventorying all the Invention habitats, even though he knew there were none that would allow—
“Ah! Ah!” he cried, guessing the answer but momentarily unable to form words—until his excitement abruptly distilled into doubt. “Do you really think we can visit the Labyrinth?”
She shrugged. “Let’s plan it. And if we don’t ask, no one will have the opportunity to say no.”
<><><>
For the project to go forward, only Urban and the Cryptologist actually needed to be present at HS-569. Nevertheless, Argo departed from Dragon with all fourteen seats filled.
And why not? Clemantine thought as she felt the landing ship rock gently in the grip of HS-569’s docking hooks. Given the Inventions’ fear of contamination, there would be no other opportunity to slip free of Dragon’s gee deck and explore.
She rolled from her acceleration couch and immediately bumped into Tio, who wore an orange skin suit. She met his worried frown with a slight smile and a shake of her head. “This isn’t the dangerous part,” she reminded him, before following Shoran through the gel lock.
Clemantine emerged into the dark pressurized interior of the tunnel-riddled moon and found it as expected: an empty house. All those Inventions that had worked to prepare the moon’s maze of tunnels and chambers had been evacuated ahead of the Dragoneers’ arrival, to avoid the risk and the stigma of biological contamination.
“Dead quiet,” Shoran observed. “Smells of stone.”
Clemantine drew in a breath of cold, almost freezing air—doubtlessly sterile until a moment ago when Argo’s lock had opened.
Bobbing in the minuscule gravity, she moved away from the lock to make room for Tio as he emerged. Jolly followed close behind, his face lit with a wide smile of excitement.
The silver glow of Clemantine’s skin suit combined with the light of the other suits to reveal a small chamber excavated out of gray stone, its ceiling scarcely high enough for her to stand upright. It amused her to know the Inventions had described this little chamber as industrial in scale.
As more Dragoneers emerged, murmured observations replaced the initial silence, and the chamber quickly grew crowded. Shoran, in her light-green skin suit, moved ahead to the black mouth of a tunnel across the chamber from the lock. Clemantine followed, but then hesitated, distracted by Abby, who spoke behind her.
“I don’t know why you’re so excited to be here,” Abby said irritably. “I mean, we already know what we’re going to find because the Inventions told us. It’s all empty tunnels and empty chambers.”
Jolly answered her with a slight laugh. “Sure, but at least it’s not the gee deck.”
Clemantine glanced back at the two: Abby wrapped in the lavender glow of her skin suit and Jolly wearing lime-green. She knew they had both explored extensively with the avatars, but it wasn’t enough for Jolly. Like Shoran, he craved reality.
In a more tentative tone, he added, “I mean to do all I can now, Abby, before we’re trapped aboard Dragon for another hundred years.”
Urban wasn’t far off. No one could be, in the little gray chamber, and he heard this too. “If you want to do more, then stay with us,” he challenged Jolly. “Put aside your fear and help me create a blade.”
At this, Clemantine turned fully around and caught Urban’s gaze. *Leave him alone, she warned.
But Jolly did not need her to shield him. At Tanjiri, he had broken faith with Urban when he’d tried to destroy Lezuri’s gift of the needle and the knowledge it contained of how to generate a blade. His opinion had not wavered since, as he demonstrated when he answered Urban in a cold voice. “No, I won’t stay. I will never help you become Lezuri.”
Not enough gravity to stomp away, but Jolly skillfully applied an angled kick to the floor that sent him shooting past Clemantine and into the tunnel, where Shoran had already gone.
Urban’s resentful gaze settled on Clemantine. She countered it with a slight, satisfied smile—but only for a moment because he quickly looked away.
“Urban will not change his mind,” Tio murmured in her ear.
“I know it.”
And she worried. She worried Urban would succeed and she worried he would not. In her mind, both outcomes held the potential for disaster given that he and the Cryptologist meant to waken forces neither of them could truly understand. And too, like Jolly, she felt haunted by a deeper fear: that the pressures of the Cauldron might somehow transform Urban into a monstrous echo of Lezuri.
She touched Tio’s arm. “Come on. Let’s catch up with Shoran.”
Words that were scarcely out when Shoran uttered a startled cry from within the tunnel, “Oh! Hello! I thought all the Inventions had gone! Did they forget you? Did you get left behind?”
Jolly’s voice countered hers, sharp with mistrust: “That’s not a synthetic. It’s a mechanic. Keep back!”
Both he and Shoran backed quickly out of the tunnel, almost bumping into Clemantine. A device followed after them. Not threateningly, but in slow, easy steps. Man-shaped and man-sized: a graceful, gleaming, humanoid robot of archaic design, made of shining metals.
“Greetings,” it said, though it had no mouth and no eyes either, or nose, just a blank surface where a face should have been.
A shiver swept up Clemantine’s spine. This was the voice that had greeted Dragon from the rogue second moon. Indeed, it repeated words it had spoken then, saying, “My designation is Ona no Kuriak. I welcome you, voyagers of the starship Dragon. I have waited centuries for such as you to come.”
<><><>
“How did you get in here?” Urban demanded, surging past Clemantine in an ancient, instinctive display of male ire—an action difficult to pull off in low gravity. He had to grab Jolly’s shoulder, and then Shoran’s too, barely stopping himself from colliding with the metallic robot.
Kuriak did not retreat. It did not move in any way as its sourceless voice answered, “I assembled this instantiation here, after the invasives withdrew. From your response to my radioed greeting, I deduced the invasives had persuaded you to avoid contact—an outcome that advantages them, not you. Not when we are natural allies.”
Murmurs of objection had begun halfway through this explanation, but as Kuriak finished it was Tio who demanded hotly, “Call them Inventions, not invasives! This is their system now, and you are an illicit intelligence.”
Shocked silence followed this outburst, until Shoran asked Kuriak matter-of-factly, “Did you know that’s what the Inventions say of you? They say you are a human creation, an uplifted Dull Intelligence, a forbidden being. If that is true, how can we be allies?”
“Certainly I am a human creation,” Kuriak answered without hesitation. “But I am not forbidden. I operate only within my designed parameters. I am as Ona made me.”
“Ona no Kuriak,” Clemantine mused, recognizing the structure of the phrase now and perceiving that it could be understood as Ona’s Kuriak. “And for what purpose did Ona create you?”
“I am the guardian of her library. That is my specific task.”
A library? That was treasure—and judging by the eager murmuring, Clemantine was not the only one to think so. Kuriak though gave no appearance of noting this reaction as it continued to speak, expanding on its explanation in its emotionless voice. “My general task is to assist any human faced with a threat to their survival. That is why I am here. To help you.”
“They don’t need your help,” Tio growled.
Shoran continued to interrogate. “You believe the Inventions are a threat to us?”
“Yes, clearly they are.”
A grunt from Tio, a low-voiced warning: “Get your hands off me!”
Alarmed, Clemantine turned to see Riffan holding Tio’s arm, whispering in his ear. She caught Tio’s eye darkly. Warned him, *Be calm.
He settled, but with an unfamiliar snarl on his lips.
Meanwhile Kuriak explained, “The invasives fear you Dragoneers. They would utterly reject your presence here except their programming forces them to seek an appearance of friendship as a potential means to acquire all that knowledge you possess and they do not. Again, I offer the security of my habitat as a superior base of operations.”
A murmurous denial arose from Tio and others too. But not from Clemantine, who recognized some truth in this assessment. Maybe a lot of truth. All of Urban’s ambition could not change the fact that the Inventions were sentient machines and therefore inherently dangerous.
Still, that didn’t make Ona no Kuriak an ally. Not in her mind. Its very existence challenged her beliefs. And it galled her that it had chosen to present itself in this shining imitation of a human being. But despite her distaste, she wanted to know all that Kuriak had to tell.
“Where is this Ona?” she asked.
“Far away in time,” Kuriak answered. “She did not understand at first the virulence of the Corruption, but when she did, she fled, leaving me to watch from a distant orbit. I saw the Corruption transform Hupo Sei. I saw it induce a state-change within the people who once existed here. They became something other, forming colonies of swarming entities. No longer human. And with their numbers they hid the very light of the sun.
“Two and half millennia they lasted.
“In that time I learned to hibernate to conserve energy and extend my functional life. Passive sensors woke me when the crumbling of the swarm allowed light to break through. I saw nuclear explosions. And I saw white flowers of oblivion erasing everything they touched. All done in silence. No voice called out in any communication I could intercept. And very soon after that, I observed the arrival of the alien machines and their swift exploitation of the remnants of this system.”
Clemantine shivered, seeing in her mind’s eye the white flower of an erupting blade . . . a sphere of annihilation.
Movement distracted her from this grim vision. The Cryptologist, in her pale-pink skin suit, pushing through the crowd. She joined Urban, slipping an arm around him. Perhaps she only meant to arrest her momentum, but the sight of her body snugged against his made Clemantine wince.
The Cryptologist informed Kuriak, “We again decline the offer of your facility. Our present location satisfies our requirements.” After a brief pause, she added, “You will need to evacuate. If not now, then when our people go.”
“But you will not go with us,” Clemantine amended. “You must dissolve this instantiation or provide your own retreat.”
“I understand,” Kuriak said. “I ask that you visit me when you leave this place.”
“I’d like to visit the second moon,” Jolly announced. “Not now, I know. But later. And I want to see this one too, before we have to go.” He looked at Urban. “How long do you think it’ll take you to generate all the silver you’ll need to create a Cauldron?”
Urban’s eyes narrowed; his cheek twitched. He did not like to be reminded of the Cauldron—as Jolly surely knew. “We’ve talked about this, Jolly. It could be hours. It could be days. We don’t know, because we’ve never done this before. But it’ll go faster if you help us.”
Jolly answered this with a taunting smile and a slight shake of his head. With his gaze taking in both Urban and the Cryptologist, he said, “You know I don’t want you to do this. I don’t think it should be done. But I promise both of you this: If you get lost in the silver, I’ll come back in and find you.”
