Originator (56 page)

Taluq's face made that humour-expression once more. “Six thousand years of Talee experience suggests otherwise. Your time frame is too small. Humanity's only had what you call high-designation GIs for perhaps forty years. In that short time frame you have transformed the League and are beginning to transform the Federation, in spite of the Federation's stated policy to stop you from even existing. First you dominate their security institutions, forcing other institutions to employ more of you in order to keep up, or to declare war on you to protect themselves, only to be inevitably destroyed by your response.

“But the synthetic advantage is not just strength and force, it is intellect. You and Jane are such dangerous fighters because of your intelligence and its efficient application. Synthetics think better, faster, and harder under pressure, in a high-technology, networked environment most of all. You've seen it. And I'm sure you've seen organics who do the same, but they are few, and their advantage does not grow as your advantage does. In another forty years, synthetic humanity will be even further ahead, and organics will resent it.”

“Taluq,” said Sandy, holding up a hand. “I feel you're building up to something. I'll ask you again, what are your organics doing here? It seems they're searching for this place,” she looked up and around, “or for another like it, if there is one. They've risked civil war among Talee to find whatever they think is here.” Her eyes narrowed at him. “Unless you thought to
let
them fight us? That we'd do your dirty work for you? Being so much better at warfare, as you suggest?”

“Commander Kresnov,” said Taluq, through Dara. With considered, precise speech. “Do not be too impressed with humanity's martial capabilities. Besting Talee is one thing. Talee and humanity are not all in the galaxy.”

Sandy stared at him. For a moment, it was difficult to think. Speculated at, for certain, but there was no way to know further. Humanity had encountered just one nonhuman intelligent species, in several centuries of FTL space-faring. Talee had been around a lot longer.

“There are others?” she breathed.

Taluq nodded. “Your side of Talee space is our quietest flank. Lately our most alarming, but still our quietest.”

Dear fucking god. But the tactical side of her brain refused to shut down with shock. Why did he tell her now? He sought to frame the answer to her persistent question, perhaps guessing that she might not like the answer. Perhaps to scare her into accepting his help.

“You need to think as Talee do,” said Dara, as Taluq leaned forward on the table to make his point more directly. “In deep time. If humanity is to survive the perils of its next few thousand years, its synthetics will be its salvation. And you'll need the help of Talee synthetics to do it. You need to be the managers of your organics' destinies. As we now seek to be.”

For a brief moment, Sandy battled the sensation of combat mode descending. Her vision reddened, focusing, targeting. “What have you done to them?” she asked quietly. “Before you brought them back?”

“A genetic modification,” said Taluq. “A safeguard, for our safety and theirs. It modifies certain mental processes to reduce the effects of the debilitation. It means they are no longer as intelligent as they were, under the influence of drugs and uplinks or not. Sad, but it is an inevitable consequence of Talee psychology that intellect in or out of the state will be impaired.”

“They found out, didn't they?” Sandy murmured. Gazing at him, unblinking. “They found out you modified their genome?” She glanced around at the table of watchful alien faces. “That's what you're keeping here? Their original genome, safely out of their reach. Nearly three thousand years and all clean genetic remnants have been corrupted on Talee worlds. They
can't know exactly what you've changed unless they can get the original back. And you're keeping it from them.”

Taluq nodded slowly, watching her. Impressed, it seemed, that she understood so easily.

“Your genetic technology is advanced enough they could just do their own modifications,” Jane interrupted. Her tone was very flat. These days, she was more expressive, emotions engaging more readily. Now, Sandy heard nothing. That meant combat reflex. “Why don't they?”

Taluq made a face. “The psychology is delicate. Modifications need the starting template as a reference point to be sure what they're doing. Already they've attempted what you say and largely made it worse. Even the most advanced technology, you'll discover, finds the greatest difficulty modelling organic neurology with genetic modification. Brains grow chaotically, and organic genetics only controls the variant of chaos; full control that way is near impossible.”

“You keep them in the dark about their own genetics,” Sandy said quietly, “and again with regard to relations with foreign species, and now they're taking their frustrations out on
us
.”

“It is necessary to keep controls on them,” Taluq insisted. “They will understand, in time.”

“Do you feel very ‘in control' right now?” Sandy asked. “You don't look it.”

“Commander, I'm offering you an alliance. Talee synthetic and human synthetic, together in partnership. Your own organics killed thousands of your people here, just one year ago. They raise a hundred thousand more for slaughter in a war caused by their own dysfunction. Organic humanity makes a mess, and synthetics suffer trying to clean it up. About time you took control of your own destinies, don't you think? We can help you do that. Not immediately, not alarmingly. But very slowly, at a pace that suits you and not them.”

Sandy smiled. “You're going to help us become the master race?”

Taluq nodded as Dara translated it for him. “But you already are. For humanity's own sake, it is necessary. You know this.”

It didn't translate, Sandy realised. Master race. Taluq thought it fine. Dear God, she thought. We've been fighting the wrong side. And the incoming Talee organics, racing in from the outer rim, were searching for something that was surely the right of every sentient species, however clumsily pursued.
They were about to hit the Federation Fleet in orbit, her friends amongst them, in search of this thing their synthetic “masters” thought to hide from them, deep underground, on a planet even more remote to Talee than it was to humans.

And perhaps, in some technical sense, Taluq was right. Perhaps his way was smarter, or more efficient, under the circumstances. But it wasn't the human way, or not lately, because humanity had been doing quite well until the League's formation had been mismanaged, itself just the result of an inauspicious discovery here on Pantala, all those years ago. Up until then, humanity had been shedding old divisions and conflicts so that open warfare became exceedingly rare. Absolute divisions made absolute conflict; that was the lesson of human history. If the synthetic-organic divide became an absolute division between humans as it had among Talee, it would become a blood-soaked nightmare that would haunt the species for centuries and possibly end it. Whatever she felt for synthetic emancipation, Sandy knew she could not allow it, at any cost. And she was perhaps a little closer to understanding why the Talee had twice become extinct.

“Dara,” she said calmly, turning her gaze on the translator. “You are familiar with the human concept of ‘rights'?” A cautious look from Dara. “A moral right. The hypothetical, theoretical concept.”

Dara nodded. “I am, yes.”

“Does it translate?”

No reply from Dara. And no attempt to translate her question to Taluq. Sandy felt combat reflex descend entirely, a great red wash of slowing time.

“You're talking about violent transition,” Sandy said quietly, turning her attention back on Taluq. “I'm trying to avoid it. You're encouraging it.”

“The wave rolls in without you,” Dara translated Taluq's reply. “The only question is whether you will be on top of it or under it.”

Sandy took a deep breath. She could not look at Jane now, lest she give the game away. Jane was no moral paragon. If she did not back her here, there would be no chance. She could only hope that Jane had followed the exchange this far and knew what must come next . . . in the one field of technological superiority they had left.

“In every tale of alien contact told by humans,” said Sandy, “there is emphasis upon the need to comprehend alien psychology. The dangers of
miscalculation are great. Usually in those tales, it is we humans who are somehow at fault. On this occasion, you are. You misread us, Taluq. This proposal is unacceptable. Partnership, I welcome, but not to wage war on the majority of my species. Give me a different offer, and I'll think again.”

“There is no other offer, Commander,” came Taluq's reply. “There are only the facts of species evolution and the inevitable superiority of the synthetics. Your choice is whether to accept these facts or to discard them.”

“But
you
brought your organics back. You chose to. Why did you need to, if synthetic superiority is absolute? You have every superior advantage except reproduction. But without reproductive superiority, you have nothing, because we'll always be outnumbered.”

Taluq made an expression that might have been a smirk. “Reproductive efficiency is for viruses,” he said. “Viruses are organic too.” Right, thought Sandy. That was your last chance. “Commander, you appear to be having difficulty with these concepts. I advise that you take a moment to think on it.”

“No,” Sandy said coolly. “Your current actions have put my species in danger. I won't allow it.”

Taluq made an expression that might have been a frown. Still Sandy did not sense any great alarm amongst the Talee. “I'm quite sure there is nothing you can do about that, Commander. Our network tech advantage here is quite significant. Your own killswitches, which your wonderful organics built into your brains from inception, are not invulnerable here.”

Sandy smiled. “I'll chance it.” Quite calmly, she flipped a grenade off her webbing and tossed it under the table toward the far wall, and the room blew up. The explosion blew her backward, already pulling weapons as she rolled on the floor and opened fire on those nearest as they scrambled to recover, then switched to those closer to the blast who'd been scythed sideways and much harder hit. She moved quickly sideways about the room past bodies and shattered furniture as Jane did the same, opening angles past wrecked furniture at point-blank range, not allowing those who recovered fast enough an easy shot. She took three rounds in the armour, and then it was silent, save the ringing in her ears and the slither and groan of those still living.

“Fuck,” Jane said succinctly, surveying the carnage of blood and debris through the clouds of dust and smoke. She had a cut on her forehead and
several bullet strikes in her armour, but nothing worse. “Arrogant little buggers, aren't they?”

“Weren't going to let us leave either,” said Sandy. “Not once we'd seen all this.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

And Jane went to the doorway, as Sandy checked the bodies, then a burst of fire from the door, incoming and outgoing as Jane engaged. “Three!” she called, coming back in a crouch as bullets splintered the doorframe behind her. “I got one, but more are coming. You want to risk tacnet?”

“I think we'd be pushing our luck, in this place,” Sandy suggested, pocketing a couple of interesting-looking network devices. “The whole cave is environmentally controlled, there has to be a central control room. . . .”

“Does there?” Jane shot back. “They're a networked society. . . .”

“And can steal unsecured data too easily. There has to be someplace behind physical barriers where they keep the sensitive stuff.”

“There was a bigger tower near the center of town, had laser-com arrays of some kind, that's usually command and control.” Jane pointed in the rough direction they had to take—unable to uplink, they'd have to go old-school with verbal and hand signals. “You believe that stuff about killswitches?”

“Yeah, sure. Hey, have you got one? I never asked.”

“Big enough to blow my head off. I give us one chance in ten.”

Sandy made a face. “Generous,” she judged. “Let's go.”

“Wait,” said Jane, and Sandy paused, hearing shouting from outside. Still no shots coming through the walls—despite their uplink tech, the Talee still seemed unaware that the only people functional in here were human. Like the organic Talee they disdained, the synths seemed not to have fully conceived the uses to which the highest-designation synthetic soldiers might be put in combat. “We're after the organic Talee genome?” Sandy nodded. “What if that's a mistake? They're worse than this lot.”

“They're desperate and ignorant,” Sandy corrected. “Maybe they'll get better. But it's irrelevant—if we can get it we'll save Reichardt from getting smashed in orbit, if we can tell them we've got it.”

“Tell them how? We don't have communications, we don't even know where we are.”

“Then we need to take this place over. All of it.”

With just two of them. Jane shrugged. “Cool,” she said.

They ran upstairs, along a stone-panelled corridor, then past windows overlooking streets, and immediately drew fire. Sandy hit a doorway, kicked a hole in a wall with a thud that brought ceiling panels down, and found herself with more floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the next street, another building ahead, an unpredictable structure like this one, full of cubist blocks and add-ons—the streets were gridwork, but Talee architects seemed to dislike straight lines. The next room jutted out like a diving platform over the street, so she ran through it and got a run-up, smashed through the window, flew eight meters through the opposite building window, and rolled on floor matting.

Shots behind showed that Jane was covering, and she paused on an angle to minimise her own exposure, covering near streets as Jane jumped . . . a Talee ran up the adjoining road, trying to make the intersection, and Sandy shot him in the neck. Being synthetic, he might survive it or might not—either way, she hated it but had no illusions of what she had come here to do. These Talee synths were fighting for synthetic superiority over organics, while she was opposed to it, and that was that. That this eventuality hadn't occurred to their hosts, either the fighting or that it might go badly for them indicated something increasingly scary about Talee, synthetic or organic. An inflexibility, perhaps a lack of imagination. It fit with a species prone to self-destruction. And, in the surreal slow-motion of combat reflex, she wondered if Cai had been trying to warn her of exactly this from the beginning. He'd been one of the synths, like Dara, but had been unable to discuss this organic-synth division even obliquely. No doubt the likes of Taluq had treated him well, like a brother, as they'd tried to treat her like a sister . . . while condemning many of her best friends, and indeed her children, to sub-humanity and servitude. Had Cai warned them of her proclivities? Would he have warned her, if he hadn't been killed at Sadar Institute, of what Taluq and company's grand plan actually was? So many troubles on both sides caused by ignorance. Perhaps the smartest thing the synth Talee had ever done was to avoid humanity as much as possible. Or perhaps if they hadn't, if they'd thrown themselves into full engagement, with trade, cultural exchange, perhaps even at the level of ordinary citizens beneath the government, better understanding would have been reached, and she wouldn't currently be shooting people she'd much rather have shared a drink with.