Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (3 page)

Here on Hiera base would begin humanity’s true foray into space, its seminal presence, its first island colony on a barely-charted sea. Here ships could be repaired, crews could rest, and everything necessary from screws and brackets up to new vessels could eventually be built from the material they would mine from beneath their feet.

Huen oversaw all of this carefully, meticulously, with Shan by his side. Doubtlessly the big man recorded everything his cybernetic eye saw and his enhanced ears heard, but there had been no indication he had passed on anything to his national masters.

If the captain wished total privacy, he ensured he was alone in a secure area. Sometimes he deliberately sent Shan away to be watched by the other stewards, giving him a deliberate opportunity to complete a potential spy mission. Huen never received any report the man did so. In fact, he thought the Americans probably reported to their country more than Shan did.

In short, everyone watched everyone, but at least Huen had done away with the concern about assassination. Not that it wasn’t possible that the hit was merely waiting in abeyance for the right time. Perhaps it was merely a contingency plan, or perhaps such a plan didn’t exist.

Huen put it out of his mind as he sat in his office, wading through the inevitable paperwork on his screens. After two months on Hiera, his role more resembled a factory manager than a military commander. Thousands of workers of all sorts had been shipped up in the hardworking shuttles, twenty at a time, along with several dozen Space Marines of all nations, trained for law enforcement. These last were necessary to keep control of the various enterprises that had sprung up, off-hours businesses selling homemade hooch and supplying shadier forms of entertainment.

His troops didn’t try to root out relatively victimless crimes. If people wanted to supplement their income by selling sex or dealing in soft drugs, he wasn’t going to waste effort – just as long as the only ones exploited were themselves. Prostitution could be tolerated, but he allowed no pimping. Mostly they had to deal with assaults, petty theft, and the occasional drunken joyride on a cargo loader.

Huen assigned Shan the additional duty to coordinate with the military police. It gave the big man something else to do besides bodyguarding, and kept him out of Shades Schaeffer’s fiery red hair. The American now masked his opinion reasonably well, but had obviously not really changed it much.

Or perhaps he had. Schaeffer now watched Huen just as much as he did Shan, probably suspecting some kind of intra-Asian conspiracy. The captain shook his head as he tapped his desk’s smart screens with irritation. Life had seemed far simpler just commanding a wet-navy cruiser.

In this case, it decided that discretion was the better part of valor. It had witnessed the tremendous energies released at the time of the loss of its mother ship, the Survey craft that had set it in place less than one system orbit ago. It had seen the destruction of an asteroid by repeated fusion-fission explosions and, in that selfsame vicinity, the defeat of its parent and controller.

Like a dog left on the side of the road, it felt something close to despair as it saw the Survey ship’s escape probe flee at maximum acceleration in the direction of the approaching Destroyer. Coupled with fear of abandonment and lack of specific instructions, it chose to remain silent about what it saw and to simply gather data, waiting for a time when its enormous and deadly cousin would arrive, rather than risk a report via biolaser transmission. In the meantime, self-preservation overrode all other concerns, for obviously Species 666, the Human inhabitants of this system, were extremely dangerous and inimical.

Besides – and this was an unusually intuitive leap for such a creature – other Sentries must have survived. It distinctly remembered three launching within its sensor range, to stealthily spread out and watch the enemies of the Meme. They would be seeing everything it did, and so as far as it was concerned, they could go ahead and risk themselves by breaking silence and reporting. It would not be so stupid.

Unfortunately for the Empire, all four Sentries had been cloned from the same basic creature, which because of its long journey in close proximity to three Meme, had absorbed an unusual level of intelligence and what a human might term ego, resulting in something approaching cowardice. Therefore all four of them watched and waited for specific orders, each rather hoping that none ever came.

These Sentries were not rebels. No, nothing so overt as that. They simply shirked their duties, in a manner impossible had they been machines.

When she had first proposed using the bioplasm captured on the scout ship, the goo devoid of genetic memory left over from the escaping Meme pure forms, she had thought it might be the answer to many problems. She had thought to apply it to humans and hoped it might confer some abilities of a Blend without the issues associated with joining an alien mind to a human.

She had erred.

Assuming the process would be primarily biomechanical, Rae – she’d taken to calling herself by that nickname – and the human researchers she worked with found themselves utterly at a loss.

It must be the lack of memory molecules
, she’d thought.
Maybe all I have to do is add some of my own, as I did with my children, and we would have almost unlimited Blends.

Powerful temptation indeed, for then each would be in essence an offspring of hers, bound by ties of shared biology, like the children of her blended body. When it came down to it, though, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. At its root, doing so seemed just as immoral: to inject a part of herself into a separate being, as the Meme did when destroying a sentient’s mind and then blending with the empty hulk. It would create partial copies of her, plus the mind of the original human, as pure form Meme did when creating mitoses, but having taken on humanity’s form, she found she had acquired its moral compunctions as well.

Even if the recipients volunteered, it seemed to risk abomination.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first raise up. Temptations of divinity, Rae? At least Alan knew who he was.

Or he used to.

That turned her contemplations to the one she termed
husband
, who was also her ship. Clinging fiercely to that human definition was necessary for her sanity. Any other designation for the relationship would miss its essence. What else could one call a recording of his dead brain’s engram loaded into the nervous system of the vessel that bore his name? Skull, née Alan Denham, was now everything she ever wished him to be.

And yet…that emptiness.
Was it really wise to get exactly what I wanted?
As always that question remained unanswerable, and in any case the simplest way to drive it out of her mind was to revisit the distracting pleasure she had engineered.

Some would call it addiction, if they knew.

Query:
How else could refusing to face reality, but rather retreating into artfully-constructed ecstasy, be defined?

Answer:
I’m not ready to find out yet.

Rae reached for the console to lay her hand upon it, a scientific necromancy.

“Hello, love,” Alan, who had been Skull, said to her as he entered the room. At that moment he inhabited his avatar, looking exactly as she remembered him from before his death. “How are the children?”

“You know very well how they are, Alan,” Rae said. “Better than I perhaps, with all the senses you can bring to bear inside yourself. Yet you always ask. That is so sweet.”

That niggling sensation bothered her again, but she pushed it aside.

“How can I be anything but sweet when my love is so near?” The thing that was now him, but less, came into her arms. “But to be connected to them as you are…” He placed a hand on her belly, sensing four heartbeats.

“You will be, soon enough. With Ezekiel I had only a primitive crèche on an aged and dying shuttle. I had to do everything myself. But your ship’s body is young, and you’ll have plenty of interface time with them. From birth they will be able to communicate molecularly – in fact they will know nothing else until you teach them.”

Alan laughed. “Closest I’ll ever be to a mother.” He considered discussing his own ship-body then, thoughts such as,
if I can gestate a semi-intelligent missile, or another of these Memetech ships, could I gestate a fully sentient creature?
Contemplating doing so made him uneasy, though, so he put it out of his mind.

He knew this relaxed and easy conversation seemed like heaven to Rae after the bickering of their relationship’s beginnings. Part of that had been his own fears about how much of her was human and how much was not. Ironically for all that he had feared and accused her of alien dominance, it was the woman who had proved the stronger personality by far.

“I love you,” she recited simply as their bodies melded.
One flesh…if only they knew.

For a time she became him and he her, the avatar of the ship and the half-alien woman. An uncritical watcher would have seen a nude and perfect man-form oddly joined by the soles of his feet to the living deck, and an equally unclothed and perfect female not so limited, meet in an embracing fusion describable only as a statue of flesh.

Slowly the two-in-one leaned, to meet a rising bedlike platform that cushioned them as they lay, for lay they did, though not so crudely as humans of Adam’s kind. Rather, within themselves their nervous systems joined directly and shared a level of intimacy that included, surrounded and subsumed sex as the ocean swamps a child’s bucket full of sea.

Floating in the deep between the orbits of Earth and Mars but near neither planet, they stayed this way for uncounted hours.

During this time, the ship
Alan Denham
was left to the devices of its animal brain as the consciousness of the original Skull played at being human. For a time it was happy to be unsupervised, like a dog who manages to escape the yard, but after a time it became concerned and subtly made its anxiety known to its mental symbiote.

Withdrawal came then, not with the sickness of the lotus-eater or poppy-smoker, nor that of a self-enslaving mainline junkie, but only to a feeling of undefined emptiness. Aware of that absence, Rae lay there
next to
him, and
inside of
him – in all literalness, as Alan was the ship and the ship, Alan – and wept for all she had done.

Alan sent his ship-self a soothing thought, but kept most of his attention on his wife. “Why do you cry?” he asked, knowing full well the answer, also knowing that the question would bring Rae one step closer to admitting her crime, what she had done to his mind.

“Only because we are again apart, my love,” she answered dishonestly. Now that they were no longer melded, dissembling was possible…in theory. Willfully blind, she allowed herself to believe she fooled him with this half-answer.

“We can be together forever, if you wish,” he said. “As Ilona blended with Raphael, so might we.”

That apple again.

“We’ve been over this before! It wouldn’t be the same!” Her anger rose as it always did, scabbing over the hurt of their separation as he knew it would, repudiating his offering.

He smiled inwardly.
If she only knew,
he thought,
that I know what she did when she remade me, trying to remove what she didn’t like. If only she knew she failed even while succeeding, and I do not care. In the remaking, I have been made whole. You healed me once, Rae, and now it is up to me to heal you, when you are ready.
“All right, my love. Whatever your heart desires.”

“No! No, no, no, I am sick of having whatever my heart desires. People were not made to have everything they want, even if they want it. Not even people like us.” She sat up and stared into the eyes of the avatar, who was as much Alan as any other part of the living ship – and sadly, as little.

“Everything? With so much to be done in the coming years, how can you say that you have everything? With our children to raise and death on its way…are you feeling guilty about your own happiness?” He hoped to lead her ever closer to forgiving herself for something she really hadn’t done. She’d tried, but failed, which should actually make her feel better, if she knew. He knew she thought she had done something horrible in editing his mind, but she’d missed his soul, his essence – or perhaps there was more to a consciousness than even she knew, that had dodged her psychic surgery.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.

“Not at any of that, no…” Rae fell silent, unable to approach the thing she had done to him – to what was left of him.
Desecration
. Gorge rose in her throat as deep revulsion bubbled to the surface from both sides of her biology.

Humanity
decreed the dead were sacred, even a dead mind, not to be cut up for twisted self-fulfillment. Notwithstanding all of the exceptions, that is what she knew in her heart of hearts.

Meme
told her that to remove, to excise without permission the molecules of memory was a great crime. Raphael had passed down this concept to her:
to add is sacred; to remove, evil.
To Meme, murder was a lesser crime than editing the mind of another of the Pure Race.