EMPIRE: THE DENEB IV CHRONICLES
1
Bring on the night
Deneb IV, 2400 CE.
The shift in power from the Sol System to Deneb System, and the conflicts of the era seem inevitable from our long view back. For someone living in the twenty-fifth Century, however, the violence and sudden reversals and advances among the worlds must have most certainly seemed a jarring billiards game of worlds. It was an obscure Medical Research facility on one of a hundred bustling boom-worlds that would come to define the age. A dashing young scientist, Lourdes Cassandra appears on the Galactic stage as if at a weightless moment of an apogee…
-Princess Clairissa Maggio, Caldris “Deneb IV, Empire of Light and Darkness.”
Lourdes Charlotte Cassandra watched the construction rigs from her air-taxi over the busting metropolis of Pink Town with a curious disdain as she made her way to the Medical Center. A mysterious government medical research agency had summoned her. The last of Deneb’s blinding daylight, and she was off.
Bring on the night…
As the world turned away from the light of Deneb (which is far too brilliant for the human eye to bear) she made her course; away from the searing light. Replacing eyes was one of Deneb IV’s great skills among the worlds of the galaxy, skills learned out of grim necessity. The world turns away, night falls and the activity of Humanity on Deneb IV begins. Mankind here nocturnal, coming out of its caves of steel into the starlight, busying itself.
The last of the light still silvered on the far horizon, frightening in its aspect. Blindness gleamed there. The Medical Center was further out, past Pink town, alone in an area newly developing among the shallow inland Black Sea.
The planet had been building cities without pause as long as Lourdes could remember, back into the misty memories of childhood as she had peered out of her Grandmother Chen Ping’s aircar decades before. Aircars and construction cranes were two constants in her life. It seemed she was always in one, looking out at the other.
Pink Town, Lancelot Station, Clement Gardens, Simmons City: a building juggernaut of three centuries, with each thirty year plan the previous estimates of growth are outdone by an order of magnitude. The reality was now a megalopolis stretching along the Southern Shore of the Black Sea across half the planet.
The Medical Center, however, had been founded originally on a large Island as a private concern before being entrusted to the government. It sat alone after a fashion. There were still wide stretches of marshlands, carelessly created with terraforming, and now just as carelessly being eaten up by developers. The pristine ecological care given to some worlds where life was indigenous was less often the case on a terraformed world.
She had been informed suddenly, unexpectedly, that the position she was asked to interview for was classified. She was not to discuss it with anyone. A mild apprehension ran through her at that, breaking her ordinarily serene composure. There was an aspect of sudden adventure-the kinds of things she had seen on the news-clashes of corporations and governments and technologies ending in wars and rumors of wars.
She was a neurologist, an expert in Organic Chemistry.What possible ugly secret use could the government of Deneb System want with her? Her air-taxi broke through a cloud, and she approached the Medical Center in a series of drops through various traffic streams. Her mind drifted through current events that might bode trouble for the government.
Mercury Nearside City had dominated the economic and political life of the Solar system for several bright and beautiful centuries of progress; the rise of Deneb IV had been closely watched and carefully guided at the hands of the Mercurians-always behind the scenes, with a patronizing, somewhat scoffing attitude-less scoffing in the last century, however. Trade routes has always given rise to great cities, and Deneb was in line with the majority of ship routes along the Orion Spiral Arm of the galaxy.
Among the other star systems there was an inconsistent quality to Humankind’s developing cultures, some noble, some corrupt, some downright depraved. At the Deep Frontier, and further-Outspace, a profound lawlessness and epic criminal set of warlords came and went.
A warlord would rise up, claim a world, begin committing atrocities in the name of glory, or a twisted take on religion, and Mercury Nearside City would rally the Solar system to send troops and bring order. The pattern had happened so often it was considered a fifty/fifty chance any longer as a settlement somewhere developed.
Still, it was a stretch to imagine they would call upon a Neurologist in such matters.
Onto the Art deco parapets and landing portals, then she was greeted by a taciturn man, Dr. Scalotta , aged somewhat ungracefully for one with access to the best medical services, she mused.
“Dr. Cassandra, thank you for coming. Right this way.” he gestured with a tired, stooped walk and was wearing optical displays-a conceit, she surmised, but kept the question open-why such disregard for his person? His wearing of antiquated optics, apparent aging without youth re-boosting, these smacked of a creep factor.
“Thank you, Dr., Thoughtful of you to come up and greet me personally.” She smiled with an earnest glow she knew well had melted many a man’s heart, but the old man seemed barely to notice. A cursory nod. Instead, Dr. Scalotta peered at the world beyond the landing pad with a curious reverie. Blinding daylight gone now, Deneb IV was a beehive of activity, and all that activity visible in the lights of towers and vehicles.
Higher, and bathing the landscape in a form of moon glow, space stations and orbiting solar farms reflected strange geometries in the heavens. At length he finally responded, “Well, buried in my work as I am, it’s a welcome break to be reminded there is a world still out there.”
She raised her eyebrows. The old Wizard was poking his head up from his library and incantations. They made their way to a lift and dropped quickly and deeply into the bowels of the tower. It opened onto a brightly lit lab full of researchers, robots, and discordantly-two military police, apparently cyborged, scarred battle veterans.
Lourdes glanced at Dr. Scalotta nervously.
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry, they come with the territory. Some of the research we are doing here has been deemed less than popular by certain ‘activist’ groups”
He shambled, staggering somewhat, “No worries, Miss Cassandra. You’ll receive no harm from them,” he winked, “they’d take fire before failing by their duty, rest assured, and their duty is to protect us.”
“Protect us from whom exactly?” she asked aloud, but he seemed not to hear her, and they were moving along into the research labs directly.
The giant power facilities surprised her. Apparently they were at ground level now, and a great interior space was busy with the comings and going of aircars and ground trains and maglevs.
Eventually he turned his strange visage squarely at her, “The Luddites and Philistines, heh, heh. My research here has not always been warmly received. There have been threats. But I am not deterred. Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.We will win.”
“What am I getting myself into?” she smiled nervously as they continued deeper into the cavernous bowels of the complex. “Who are these groups? Will they come after me at my home, should I join the research team here?” The lab bustled with activity and she had a sense of a moment turning as in a river, when her last chance to grab the shore was passing.
“Wing nuts from various worlds who spend too much time on Hypercasts, berating technology while living off it. They scream for Humanity’s demise, and say we are a scourge on the pristine Universe. They want us all dead, as it were.”
Finally Lourdes stopped in her tracks. “Doctor, the rumor is you’re creating a better AI, one that goes beyond a Touring test and is truly sentient. Your goal, an actual Transhuman entity. You want to cheat death.”
He smiled beneath his anachronistic optical displays, “Yes, cheating Death. Something of an obsession of mine.”
“This kind of research has been going on for centuries, with really no way to prove if the AI is actually self-aware, or not.”
“Oh my young Neurologist, I can assure you I’m quite unaware,” They approached a figure on a table and she came to the sudden shock and recognition of seeing Dr. Scalotta was quite dead, very dead, and laying on the table. She had been conversing with a hologram AI, “because I’m already dead.” The Scalotta hologram said.
The hologram AI of Dr. Scalotta smiled, and seeing her frown, raised a hand.
“Wait, wait, indulge me…the program is quite capable of carrying on as well as I would if I were actually alive.”
Uncertain of how to continue, she raised her chin and waited.
“I anticipated that I may have expired before the objective was met, anticipated our latest developments wouldn’t allow for my actual sentience to survive before you arrived, and we are quite on the proper path. You see, it is not our scientific research on the Transhuman system housing I wish you to work on, it is…this.”
They came to another wing in the laboratories, and among the giant machines, cavernous spaces, bustling robots, guards, and researchers she saw another table. On the table was a broken, metallic bone. She drew closer. No, not a bone at all, bone-like, seemingly organic-but rather, sculpted to appear organic-the object was mineral. Metal, glass, intricate. Technology such as she had never seen.
“This is from preceding our era, my Dear, preceding our civilization, preceding every word ever spoken by the mouths of Human kind; every thought before a single name, from any single place we have known was spoken, this was first-other words of elder gods, so to speak. Things preceded us.”
“This is alien technology! These predecessors…how long before us?” Her eyes were very wide. She wanted to touch it. Mankind had long assumed now that it was the lone species of higher sentience. Centuries of exploration had not revealed other sentient species capable of technology like this resting before her.
Until now.
The AI program was unable to replicate Dr. Scalotta’s own typical reaction, and so he seemed to bounce around excitedly now, “Millions of years. Many millions of years.”
She was silent for a moment, then asked, “Why are you showing it to me?”
“Well, we believe it had the ability to interface with the organisms that created it, as well as function without them-such that it may have in fact actually been sentient itself. If that is the case, then all this facility,” his hologram arms waived at the buildings around them, “may have finally found a solution to the sentience issue. Genuine Transhumanism may finally be possible.”
“So…if it was once sentient, how do you know it wasn’t the machine that killed off the creators that made it?”
He sighed, “Well, we don’t. That’s what the radicals are upset about and why we’ve had to heighten security. Some feel we are creating a monster, heheh. Summoning the Demon. Yet, If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.” He chuckled, oblivious to how truly creepy he was being.
Then she saw his laughter was at the irony of his current state, speaking to her while dead, about monsters.
“Well, I’m sure there is nothing I can help you discover from this fragment of the Predecessor Beings’ technology, that you couldn’t discover with all this facility at your disposal. I must decline the offer to work on this with you, Doctor. I have a career plan-thank you, but no thank you.”
She rather abruptly turned to leave when he called out and pointed to a wall screen, “That is true, Dr. Cassandra, but it is not the fragment we wish you to examine.”
The wall screen came alive with the image of a series of structures and a densely packed configuration of stars. “We’ve discovered an intact base of these Predecessor beings. We want you to go there. To the center of the Galaxy. To an intact alien base.”
Lourdes Charlotte Cassandra stood silent and looked for a long moment at the alien structures, perfect and wondrous on the screen. It was a city of dreams to explore, how many millions of years old? Danger or no, she felt a wanderlust then, and a burning curiosity to know the minds that had made it. She beamed.
“But of course. When shall we begin?” she said.
One of the young guards approached her, a brutally handsome thing in a fresh camouflage Battle Dress Uniform. She noted the name on his breastplate, Scalotta 2X. “We already have, my Dear.” The guard said.
The older, shambling version of Scalotta nodded quietly and moved away. The young guard smiled and gave her a level gaze. “I’ll be escorting you from here on out in a Cyborg form. A younger version of me.”
Lourdes found herself strangely amused at the AI then-it seemed almost to have a sense of humor-and an uncanny sense of what a living person would want to see next. First the grand-fatherly scientist to calm her about the Scientific Assignment, next a stalwart tin soldier to guide her along her journey among the stars.
Sunrider
As Humankind spread out from the Solar system and into the Orion Galactic Spiral Arm of the Milky Way, the great Silk Road of old occurred in a new form, in a myriad of paths traced not by feet and wheels, but by the Star Ships.
Lumbering and slow, they bent space at first crudely and painfully time consuming by contemporary standards. Colony ships, then trade ships of various rare ores and even rarer pieces of other worlds, the Star Ways crowded as the Silk Road.
The Main Orion flight paths pushed centrally along the Orion Arm, and also inward toward the Sagittarius Galactic Spiral Arm, and the Central Galactic Region.
Where the two great conglomerations of flight paths merged sat Ophelia System and Ophelia’s World. Rivaling Deneb IV in sheer economic juggernaut, Ophelia’s world quickly evolved a certain pomp and Baroque Flourish.
The Aristocracy there, keenly aware that they represented the largest aggregation of Human endeavor at the far end of Space, made an extra effort that their cities and developing industries were ever more covered with a patina of artful ornamentation. A hundred and fifty story tower housing state of the art computing and manufacturing center would be clothed in the architectural embellishments of applied ornamental sculptures, and alighting from deep space a traveler might be greeted by angels in the architecture…
-Princess Clairissa Maggio, Caldris-
“Ophelia’s World, Gilded Oasis of the Galactic Stairways”
Their ship, the Colossus, was a brilliant white Sunrider 2400 gunboat, the pride of the Deneb Space Navy. It was greeted at the system outskirts with a formal fireworks salute and several dignitaries. Lourdes was a little surprised, but it turned out her appointment was more than mere research, and the good doctor back at Deneb IV had made her Director of the Institute, which now granted her a certain status.
She watched Ophelia’s world come in to view from the command deck of the mighty Sunrider, and saw the vast solar power array panels in wide orbit. They gleamed in the star’s light-a plethora of stations and service ships buzzing about, like insects around a great hive. She realized the worlds she knew, the great burgeoning civilizations Humankind was creating among the stars, were all but oases in the deep void. Still, the Herculean engineering of the stations and power array dwarfed a mere Human by the gargantuan scale. Still, their complex machine geometries fascinated in their gem-like mirroring of the organic. As the great Sunrider made its slow descent down world, its mighty gravity repulsion in a calculated trigonometry of navigational ease now, she glowed with a certain pride and determination to be part of this grand adventure in progress that Humanity was achieving
Dr. Scalotta had chosen her to direct the research and archaeology at the alien base for a reason. He saw something in her-something to stand against the tide of wicked chaos that was also accompanying Humankind’s progress in the galaxy…
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers,
“‘Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott.”
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
-Lord Alfred Tennyson
As a rule, Lance Purusha didn’t care the politics of his marks. He was a professional, and his work was to take them out of this world. The rationale behind his client’s desired kills interested him not at all. Something about this target bothered him, however. She was apolitical, a research scientist in medicine, and there was something dirty in the notion of killing her that he quite simply couldn’t shake this time. Watching the massive Sunrider make its way down to the luxurious hotels along the shore, he reviewed his info on her again and again looking for something she had done that could justify taking her out.
There wasn’t anything. She had recently been appointed Director of innocuous research on Artificial Intelligence and Human computer interfaces. His clients saw all Artificial Intelligence as a threat, he himself did not. It just made better robots to fix his house chef systems or change the grav units in his aircar. In as many centuries as people had been predicting the doom of mankind from AI menace, nothing had transpired but mundane menial tasks, or equally mundane sophisticated data processing made easier.
His molecular disruptor, a top of the line custom job, commonly referred to as a “Disser”, included a silencer and a scope, with a tight beam focus and half a kilometre range, if his interface was spot on. The same interface technology his employers railed against, they saw no problem in using to destroy those creating the technologies.
He had seen the likes of his employers on the hypercasts, though he would never actually meet them since he was hired through an intermediary. The anti-technology and anti-AI movement, glowering back at the main thrust of Human civilization from backwater worlds, were always completely comfortable with utilizing the technologies of the current day while lamenting earlier, simpler times. The hypocrisy was so thick you could dance on it.
The atrocities they propagated on lawless worlds abounded with as much variety and imagination as one could create-accept that, truly you couldn’t make that stuff up. You just had to dig in to the news casts. Cults abounded where child brides and Human slavery flourished, in the name of ideology, or religion. Basic Human Rights, common for millennia even before the dawn of the Space Ages, ignored and violated with impunity.
Those were the people who were now paying him to get close enough to kill the dashing, lovely woman, so much better than they in every way-intellectually, socially, ethically. They were the people now paying him to point his weapon at her lovely brain, to fire the molecular disruptor and take that small, beautiful mass of some the most well organized organic matter in the universe and quickly boil it into nothing, and leave her a steaming mass of horror.
It was a job, just a job. He could even make out port holes and command windows on the gallant Sunrider now, as it eased into the water of the inland sea adjacent to the grand hotels. Perhaps she even now looked out in joyous apprehension, anticipating the wonderful future he was about to steal from her.
It was a job. He had run a hundred such hits. Ever and always before though, they were scoundrels every one-mobsters, rival cult leaders, dealer in illicit substances. This was the first time he was actually killing a worthwhile person, innocent of any wrongdoing. There was something dirty in the notion of killing her, something ugly and wrong, that even his hardened heart, born fighting, raised in the random violence of the frontier, something even he couldn’t shake.
He didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all. It was, however, his job. He ran a cloth over his disruptor, Old Painless, and wondered how long this kill would haunt him. The target was so lovely, in every aspect both inside and out. He knew this wasn’t supposed to matter. He was a professional and it was his job to kill her.
Scalotta 2X, the younger and strikingly handsome version of the older good Dr. Scalotta, eyed the bay and hotels from a variety of security holo-screens with a certain inhuman patience. The old Scalotta had graced this clone with Military training programs. He carried with him various skills and experiences he hadn’t actually lived, but which felt second nature. Thus his mind was an amalgamation of Colonial Marines, hard-core Space Navy Rangers, and a variety of seasoned Detectives. He knew this was one of the highest risk points of the journey, for various reasons.
Ophelia’s world was a symbol of everything the Independent freebooter colonies despised. They hated its ties to the older economies of Deneb IV and the Sol System. They loathed the Central Federal System’s Authority. Ophelia’s World, to them, was too Liberal, too technocratic, too corporate, and too godless. Its wealth and flowering prestige stood out in elegant contrast to the hardscrabble frontier’s savagery and grim Warlords.
The fabulous Art Nouveau skyscraper hotels along the sea here loomed gracious and delightful. A visual fantasia, and a security nightmare. Water ships, starships, aircars, ground cars, maglev trains-what were they thinking having numerous public officials in a time of terrorism at the frontier meet in a place as such easy targets? There were even numerous slow moving airships pleasure cruising along the shore.
2X’s eyes darkened. Here was either a pompous hubris, or a set up. Worried about terrorists, he realized they had not considered at all the possibility of internal factions in the Ophelia’s World political and business elite.
Lourdes, long and lovely, walked in a luminist glow at his side as they stepped off the Sunrider and waved to the crowds along the huge pier. A massive robotic giant in the shape of Mercury lifted a torch and brilliant flames shot out to honor her-part of the terraforming, no doubt, but a nice touch. Scalotta 2X adjusted his force field somewhat wider and stronger than might be considered polite. Flames and giants. Some deep gland in his brain didn’t care for either.
Lourdes noted his action as they continued along the pier, the tall lamp standards and palms and glowing croatans incongruous with this young, death dealing soldier version of the Good Doctor Scalotta. “Really,” she said, “We are among friends!”
The Premier and his entourage were drawing closer.
“Friends are like the jaws and teeth of a beautiful pet. If you are not careful, you will find them chewing you up.” He replied taciturnly, but then they were among the entourage, and hugs and kisses and welcoming greetings were spilling out from a dozen voices along with the roar of the crowd.
“Civilization! Reason and order!” The premier boomed, turning back to the crowd after his embrace of Lourdes, “Welcome to the far frontier Director Cassandra!”
He held out a golden key to the star system, smiled, and genuflected artfully.
Lance Purusha ran his scanners of the various defence fields on the pier. The Kingdom of Ophelia’s system had made a number of defensive measures to protect the dignitaries, and Lourdes’s bodyguard was including his own. That, however, was what professionals were hired for. To have the next level of technology that would circumvent such protections, and he did.
Ironically, it was a form of AI included in his travel bags that was now furiously scanning the flux and flow of the protecting fields for a path, using the fields themselves as a means to his target, the lovely Lourdes Charlotte Cassandra who would soon be a boiling, stinking mess of horror on the pier.
Something reflected from one of the other hotels and Lance’s instinct quickly steeled him back from the window. He peered slowy as the source of the reflection’s movement and increased magnification, closer, closer, closer his vision moved to that source and wonder upon insidious wonder, there was another sniper.
The “second bomb” scenario. Either a less expensive back up, in case he missed and bungled the job, or merely some slob to fire wildly at the dignitaries and crowd to mask the importance of the real target.
The other sniper was careless, truly-reflective surfaces among one’s equipment? Lance watched the man leaning forward, he saw the reflective surfaces were in fact poorly camouflaged cyborg units-ugh! The careless amateur was now leaning out the window. He would probably not even kill her cleanly, and she would die in a horrible violent, painful, violation. Laying on the pier knowing she was dying in a disgusting mess.
In a violent lifetime of neglect and abuse since his birth, Lance had never backed away from a fight. There was, however a code of his own and the thought of the incredible young research scientist, innocent of any vice and steeled in virtue and discipline, dying at the hands of such a clod, well, that thought violated his codes.
Lance quietly took aim. For a long moment the two snipers immersed in their separate technologies and weapons took a careful measure and unbeknownst to them, the entire future of the Galaxy and Humanity lay in the quality of their aim.
Two shots fired silently, very nearly simultaneously, and two explosions of human flesh eprupted. Lance, whose aim was perfect, took out the other sniper in a clean burst that decorated the interior of the sniper’s hotel room with a geometric pattern of blood. The second shot, deflected by Lance, missed Lourdes and took the Premier’s hand off.
The crowd and security apparatus erupted, Scalotta 2X grabbing Lourdes and leaping into an open aircar that was cruising along the pier with an onlooking couple.
Lance, checking on his handiwork of the other sniper, smiled. Not you, headless dick. He watched Scalotta 2X and Lourdes make away from the pier, and for one brief moment in his life he knew love, he loved the young research scientist like a daughter, and watched her make away into a future he would never be a part of, except that by the strange confluence of circumstances, he determined that her future would happen at all. What she would make of it, would now depend on her.
He of course, was now a dead man walking. But not today, and not without a fight.
The open aircar sped wildly over the tops of the gentle waves in a long arc around the bay. Lourdes eyed the shore angrily, and Scalotta 2X assured the unfortunate couple whose aircar he had just commandeered that everything would be fine. Ophelia’s sun was small, but the terraforming panels in the sky bathed her in a heat, and she smelled the perfume of the aircars owner, the spray of the sea, and a copper aroma of Scalotta 2X’s military gear. She saw construction cranes of new hotels going up along the shore.
Aircars and construction cranes; two contents in her life, even now.
They had swung around the bay and there was no evidence they were being followed. Scalotta 2X didn’t slow down however and a wall of building along the shore loomed as their approach drew closer. Lourdes and the unfortunate couple sat peevishly in the rear of the aircar and watched the massive structures grow larger and larger. Lourdes realized what they were from her reading on the Ophelia’s World-grain elevators, more accurately super massive food production and storage.
Yeast vats, in vitro artificial meats, grain-every manner of human and even pet nutrition. The Bread basket of Humanity at the far end of civilization. At the moment, aircar hazards. Scalotta 2X sent the car up, and up, and they dove among bridges between the structures, head houses and long houses perched atop hundred storey rises of pure unbroken white. Airships and starship and air trucks and a flurry of robotic activity at the level above the sea suddenly devoid of the swarming humans at the beach and resort hotels. Scalotta 2X was using the industrial and service areas now to weed out would be suspects that might still trail and seek to harm Lourdes.
Quickly, and with as sudden a motion as the rise to the heights of the Silo City, he dropped toward the ground again, around and through the behemoth structures, down and down and then-parallel to a freight maglev he hugged the path along the ground. The huge, red maglev was streamlined like the aircar and they both swept along.
Incongruously Lourdes noticed small residential neighbourhoods among the various mega structures-they world had grown haphazard and with unexpected turns of booming-it was worse a conglomeration than Deneb IV she realized, and then they were speeding over another stretch of a different sort of industrial patchwork of hugeness, black and surreal like giant insectoid robots, and then (again incongruously) someone had laid out a series of parks, she saw abruptly a fabulous cascade of epic falls, a kilometre and more across, with giant sculptures of white Lions and hugging the cliff sides nearby, more hotels.
Then more structures again: aqueducts, trestles, and ramparts that supported the industrial complex. More buildings and crowded streets, Lourdes smiled sardonically, what a way to see the frontier. A large stacked art deco transportation centre was spun out from a middle tower of a hundred storeys of pink stone, a vast sea shell design that wound up in splintering geometric fractals. It rose in sharp leaps toward the heavens. Daring, splendid, and bold-it was alive with myriads of Mag-levs and ground cars and air cars and its spires crowded with the slow and casual drift of airships. At its base, a rainforest had been planted and the towers and the nature were wound together such that the transportation center might have been a natural outgrowth.
The aircar made its way into an open portal and came to a slow glide to the floor of a parking level. Scalotta 2X made a quick apology, and the owners of the aircar sat gaping quietly: they still had not said a word through the whole strange ride. Lourdes bowed slightly and was pulled away as the young cyborg clone took imperious control.
They stepped through a giant archway, into the immense vaulted halls of the maglev station. Delightful murals of sporty tourists arriving on world covered a stretch of wall. Tropical scenes and galaxies. This was central hub for all the cities around the inland seas, and three other metropolises along the New Midas Ocean to the East. Many Hundreds of thousands were now moving through the multi-modal transportation hub.
Suddenly the stress of it all seemed to hit Lourdes with a wave of nausea and exhaustion. She fell into the young cyborg’s arms and they stepped away from the crowds and maglevs rushing through the station and found a bench. “Officer Scalotta,” she rasped, “do you have a first name?”
“Tutu….it was an inside joke. Number two, rhymes with Italian “Tu”. Dr. Scalotta’s grandfather was called “Tu-tu”, from an Italian expression of endearment, ‘You! You!’” He loved his grandfather very much…. “and me being 2X, well— “
“May I call you that then?”
“Absolutely, Maam.”
“Lourdes. Just Lourdes.”
He smiled and the crowds and trains rushed by, oblivious of two small people who a few moments before were being broadcast across the planet in a now infamous Historic event. Both knew, however, they were sure to be soon recognized-by both the crowd and the security apparatus that had just failed so miserably, and that could mean any number of good or bad things.
“We have to get back to the ship.” He said solemnly. He eyed one of the Mag Levs. “We don’t know who to trust here. We may have just aircarred out of the frying pan and into the fire, you know. We’re all over the live casts, it’s amazing no one is noticing us here right now. The ship has been hailing me since we fled the scene of the shooting and the Diplomatic Corps as well, from both worlds.”
“We have an Embassy here?”
“Yes, and it’s now a toss-up; the ship or the Embassy, but whoever shot the Premier was actually gunning for you, I think, and there may be more shooters on our trail.”
“The Embassy.” She said with authority then, taking control for the first time since the blood had spattered her and the hand gone flying.
“Roger that.” He looked to the hologram screens and something in his eyes flickered, a cybernetic data base.
They took the A train and it was an elegant refrain from an otherwise tormenting flight. Service bots brought food and drinks, ladies lounged in gossamer gowns with handsome young suitors in semi-formal garb and no one on the A train seemed aware of anything beyond their personal dramas and concerns. That was a good thing, she observed, and let the alternating views of tunnels, high city scapes, and passing stations distract her.
Tutu never let his eyes stop watching, his granite face a mask of determined potential death dealing. Always ready to kill, the perfect contradiction inherent in a soldier; protector of some, destroyer of others. He would not hesitate.
Leaving the station, they came up to an open plaza. Various statues to dignitaries and founding settlers ringed a central obelisk if quartz. Tutu eyes the space with a bitter darkness.
“Great. Another place we are an easy target.” He said, and she sensed he was making adjustments to the defensive fields his suit generated. “Time to go. Come on, move quickly.”
She didn’t hesitate and they strode purposefully but without the frantic speed that would alert anyone watching that they were fleeing danger. The gates of the embassy gleamed with a metallic sheen of astercrete. She realized they had been imported from the Deneb system by their high grade molecular kiln signature and felt a quick moment of pride-she was sure there was nothing quite like it this far on the frontier, regardless of how many fabulous structures Ophelia’s world had made.
Civilization, her civilization, where assassins and war lords dared not exist openly.
“Director Cassandra!” the ambassador rushed forward. “I, I am at a loss for words. We knew the War Lords of the Frontier would take note of a Deneb Dignitary, but that they would stoop to this…was unexpected.” Ambassador Charles Omm was visibly shaken.
Tutu was carefully scanning and recording the Ambassadors vital signals for later analysis.
“Apparently they were quite ready, and the Ophelians were not.” She replied.
He flushed. “Yes…yes, indeed.”
Incongruously, a woman appeared with a baby. A golden haired infant.
The Ambassador forced a smile, wrapped his arm around the woman and with another reached out to Lourdes. “Director, my wife, Bestla, and our son David.”
Bestla dipped her forehead slightly, “Director Cassandra-my deepest apologies for what you have just gone through. I saw the whole terrible event on the holocasts.”
“And the Premier?” Tutu wondered aloud.
The Ambassador turned to his wife, “Bestla, this is Officer Scalotta, whose heroic and quick action saved the director today.” And then to Tutu, “The entire star system is making awed by your daring action, officer.” He turned to one of a number of holo-screens in the ballroom where Tutu was spiriting Lourdes away into an open air car, over and over again with talking heads making commentary.
“The premier is fine and scheduled to make an address to the Star system later today.” Bestla spoke in a soothing tone, a true ambassadorial wife.
Scalotta 2X brooded, “I require an armoured air escort back to the Sunrider Immediately. If the feeling against the Director in this Spiral Arm are this hostile, the gunship ship should make haste.”
“Yes,” Lourdes agreed, “a lovely world and I would so much like to return at some point and explore it. Discretion next trip will have us come more incognito and with less fanfare.”
“Yes. Yes, Right away.” Charles seemed deflated, but he bowed and went away to arrange the transport to the Sunrider.
Bestla held David warmly, and gestured to the Embassy halls, “Shall we provide you some privacy until Charles is back? Come, there are drawing rooms this way with refreshments.”
Scalotta 2X paced the whole time, scanning, scowling, and otherwise looking dangerous.
“Relax, Tutu. This is our Embassy!” Lourdes pleaded.
“Yes it is…yes it is. Reports coming back to ship security are indicating there is talk on the airwaves already-two shooters.”
His cyborg implants, she thought. He is never disconnected to the media…
She didn’t sense a moments calm until they were off the armoured transport back to the Sunrider and making preparations to leave the system “The press in providing more information and analysis that the Ophelian officials. The big question here appears to be who was the second shooter, as the second took out the first, whose shot was apparently deflected. YOU were the target, NOT the premier.” He said coldly.
“So…the Ophelian security saved the day? The second shooter?”
Scalotta turned and drilled her with a thousand-yard stare, pausing for effect, then: “No, Maam, it wasn’t one of ours or one of theirs. Someone saved your life today-killed for you, actually. But it appears to have been a shot that almost never happened.
“Guess I should thank them.” She said in a confused tone.
“I don’t think you’ll ever get the chance. This is starting to add up to an assassination gone sideways. A shooter gone rogue. Either, he took out the other to secure his kill payday, or something else.”
“But why not continue firing?”
Tutu looked at the lovely young woman in full flower of beauty and brilliance stretched worn, and somewhat languid on the divan. He smiled darkly, the shadows of an idea taking form, and then a sense of connection to the mysterious shooter solidifying in his mind.
“I think he threw this one back, Maam. Too pretty to kill.”
She blushed. “Kind of strange for an assassin, one would think.” She replied.
“No. Someone who has killed the rotten monsters among mankind, time and again, might very well come to cherish a worthwhile life in ways the ordinary person cannot quite conceive of.
“To redeem themselves perhaps?
He reflected sombrely for a long moment, “Probably not redemption. But perhaps, at the end of the day, to define themselves.”
She left him them and made for her quarters, lingering by the port hole and looking out to the sea.
The flight path to Tangeonprioc at the galactic core veered above the galactic plane, away from the Sagittarius Galactic Spiral Arm. There were less stars as they rose higher and higher above the disc of the galaxy, but the core was taller, and the galactic plume loomed out into the galactic halo. Lourdes watched the reconstruction holograms at the ship bridgewith the Command crew, fascinated; the whole massive pool of stars like a toy, filling a full holo-chamber.
She walked the the galaxy with a saunter, and its complex form ingrained itself in her memory like a part of her over the coming weeks. She looked at it in different wavelengths, and brooded. She looked at political maps, and saw the wicked, chaotic, hysterial break from the heart of civilization into warlords. Only Ophelia’s World and a string of Arcturian trade routes held order.
The rest of the lines were a grotesque mad man’s scribbling.
Then, strangely out of place, one of the systems at the edge of the core reflected a series of worlds and stations in a completely unified order. The Tangeonprioc system was united, organized, and lawful. Apparently the good Doctor Scalatta senior had been busy a while there. The Predecessor alien ruins had been known of for a while by the institute, yet even with their methodical searching they did not expect to find an entire intact base.
As the months passed the crew watched for signs in the hyperstreams of other ships, of possible subterfuge, of hostiles. Tell tale ripples in the gravity waves, signals on the hyper-casts. Rumors and worries came and went but the speed and ferocity of the Sunrider was something outworlder warlords and anti-technology fanantics would not wish to confront. The farther from the more densely settles spaces the Sunrider went, the less infrastructure existed to built ships that could make a stand against it.
Lourdes was growing convinced the dastardly attempt on her life may have been their only attempt.
The Sunrider rode on. Deeper toward the Galactic Center. The high number and density of stars in what is in all reality a single super massice star cluster drove stellar winds like nowhere else in the galaxy. The wind collissions produced strong x-ray flares, the super massive black holes enhanced the stellar density around it, further driving the frequency of the storms.
Like all ships venturing into the core region, the Sunrider had acquired additional shielding and upgrades in force fields. Lourdes watched the helium outflow from the storms, and an unusual plethora of blue stars among the cluster. Flares in the luminosity of the plumes and acretions disc seemed poetic from the bridge, but she knew they were deadly. Life, even in it’s most promitive forms, was almost nonexistent among the stars systems of the core. The ancient alien predecessors that had built their bases here would have had some other motivation than the discovery of biomes and species which typically flourished in the galactic spiral arms.
Yet the core still teemed with life. Human life, starships, androids. Like an island on a world, notorious as a trading hub among divergent and sometimes hostile cultures, the core had drawn in a small swarm of riotous Humanity in the “relic rush”. She could watch the hypercasts and it wasn’t pretty. Today’s news on the casts: The Tangeonprioc elections continued in a circus of mudslinging and meanspirited arguing-what to do with prospector families that run out of resources? “Push them out of the air locks for a good shake and bake” was the popular slogan of one party. One candidate had even changed the lock codes on a woman returning to base. She was eighty-nine, and had fallen behind on booster meds. This, even as finance rates were down.
In other news, several of the domes were threatened by raging fires as a primitive form of moss that covered some of the geography apparently was prone to periodically flare up.
A serial killer was finally captured who had been haunting prospector camps for a couple decades. Fifty-eight people had sentences commuted, presumably some who had been previously coinvicted in what the evidence turned out to be the serial killer. A whole bank of communications went missing in the state department of the second largest settlements.
It was going to be a long trip.
Tutu Scalotta found a strange sense of familiarity with the the Sunrider that he knew must have come from memory RNA he was created with, memory copied from previous Airmen. He took to the ship with an instinctive enjoyment-a love of sorts-that ran into deep levels of his subconsciousness. So it was with his life. He was three years old, and continually finding himself familiar with things military at a level of decades of experience.
His thoughts regarding Lourdes however were disconcerting-his training and willingness to sacrifice himself as a soldier he accepted. That she weas a lovely woman he accepted as well-he was, clone or no, just a man. He wondered if his original, the good doctor, had put an extra spin in the mix to ensure he go above and beyond the call of duty.
That would piss him off he realized-which was preposterous, in retrospect-he was created, with imperatives. It’s what he was.
Making his way onto the command bridge of the Sunrider he sensed the whole mess of disconnected individuals unlinked presented a combat scenario that could be improved. Linking humans had not passed through any Parlimentary or Legislative bodies in known space. It was, in fact, mostly done in research labs and outlaw colonies.
DANTE D’ANTHONY