Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (39 page)

“Of course not,” Elyria said. Joshua was going to
love
his first century in the Confederation. Even the immigrants from prudish societies broke down and relaxed into the thrill of guilt-free enjoyment. “Some of us are
completely
sex-mad.”

***

Afterwards, she lay on the bed, watching Joshua sleeping like a baby. Enhanced libido or not, he wasn’t up to the same standards as a Confederation citizen for bedroom gymnastics. But then, the Confederation had spent thousands of years improving the baseline human form, streamlining it for pleasure. A male citizen could last for hours, even days, enjoying the multiple orgasms that had once been a purely female advantage. It took decades, even a century, for them to grow out of it... of course, women weren’t much better. And that didn’t include the fun that could be had by changing gender, or bodily form, or even uploading one’s self into a computer for ultra-pleasure.

The thought made her smile, despite the glow suffusing her body. Pre-singularity societies surrounded sex with rules and regulations that were, at bottom, all about control. They wanted to control their children, particularly their daughters, because they felt that maintaining a genetic link was important. The Confederation knew better; what did it matter who sired a child, as long as it was brought up to be loved? Elyria knew who her father was, but two of her half-siblings didn’t – and they’d never cared to investigate. If their father hadn’t wanted them, there were plenty of others who did.

But Darius didn’t have the social system to handle it.

She patted his head thoughtfully, just as she felt an odd twinge flickering through her body. Another earthquake? No, this was different, much more personal. Puzzled, and not a little alarmed, Elyria closed her eyes and tried to meditate. The biomods spliced into the genetic code of every Confederation citizen could be controlled internally, given enough discipline; Elyria had had to master it before she’d been allowed to go down to the surface of any primitive planet. It took several moments to calm herself enough to check her body... and her shock at what she found knocked her right out of the meditative trance. She was pregnant.

It should have been impossible. She hadn’t pushed her reproductive system to start working – and it should have automatically rejected sperm from a less than stellar donor. Joshua, as nice as he was, carried genetic damage inflicted by magic – and that should have convinced her system to reject him as a potential father. But his sperm has passed right through the defences to impregnate an egg that should never have been there. How?

Magic
, she thought, sourly. They’d known that Joshua’s reproductive system had been modified. It had simply never occurred to her that he could alter her body to allow impregnation... no, Joshua hadn’t done it deliberately. Whatever had made the first set of subtle modifications had struck again. And she was pregnant.

She always intended to have children; indeed, there was a definite trend in the Confederation for each citizen to have three or four children. There was no reason why they had to limit themselves when the Confederation could easily have supported trillions upon trillions of humans without stretching itself. But it was rare to have children so young... no,
she
wasn’t young, but
Joshua
was young. Her peers would disapprove strongly, convinced that she’d either tricked him into impregnating her or she’d been criminally careless. The child might well have an unsuitable genetic template that would require heavy modification to allow her to live within the Confederation.

But there was nothing she could do. Now the egg had been fertilized, it would keep growing until the child was ready to be born, unless it was transferred to an external womb. She couldn’t simply abort it; her own genetic structure wouldn’t let her. The whole system assumed that a healthy child was on the way.

And there was no reason to believe that the child
wouldn’t
be healthy.

She shook her head and closed her eyes. Tomorrow, she would have to consider telling Joshua that he was going to be a father. He’d be horrified, given the taboo on impregnating his lovers, but there was no other choice. The baby should be safe enough once away from Darius, if they managed to survive the next few days. And besides, she was not going to kill a child. The whole ethos of the Confederation spoke against it.

When the door started to open, several hours later, it was almost a relief.

CHAPTER
T
HIRTY-
T
WO

There was something oddly regular about the mountain that, according to the watching eyes, was the kidnappers’ final destination.

Dacron studied it thoughtfully, from a distance. Regular shapes occurred in nature, naturally, but this one looked as if someone had been trying to hide something under the rock. A fortress? A castle? Or... he calculated the size of the hidden object and realised that it was around the size of a primitive DY-100 colony ship from the First Expansion Era. There were no sign of the warp nacelles that such a colony ship would have needed to move faster than light, but he’d studied the plans of all likely colony ships and knew that they’d been designed for easy removal once the ship reached its destination. There was almost nothing of the ship visible apart from its covered shape, which explained why orbital observation hadn’t detected it. The ship would be invisible from high overhead.

The ground quivered again as Dacron slipped around the hidden ship, looking for the guards he knew had to be there. There were none – and, as far as he could tell, there were no warning spells either. It made absolutely no sense, unless the colony ship was intended to remain hidden from the planet’s entire population as well as the Confederation. Guards and defensive spells would only attract attention. He completed his circuit and gritted his teeth as he realised that there was only one way into the ship. No doubt there would be a heavy guard just under the overhang, waiting to see who poked their nose into the trap.

He frowned as yet another earthquake shook the ground. They made no sense; the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if the planet’s gravity field was actually flexing, although he couldn’t understand why. The AIs had warned him that the planet was generating gravity pulses; perhaps he was close to the generator that was propelling them out into space. But they had to realise that gravity waves represented no threat to a ship from the First Expansion Era, let alone the Confederation. Or did they? Like so much else on Darius, the gravity waves made no sense.

The bookseller looked up at him as he returned to where the small assault party was hiding. “What did you find?”

“Trouble,” Dacron said, and outlined what he’d seen. “That has to be the ship that brought you to the planet.”

A DY-100 wasn’t a very elaborate starship, he recalled. They’d been cheap, mass-produced to allow thousands of disparate groups a chance at their own homeworld, completely lacking in the luxuries that had helped create the first and most successful colony worlds. It was unlikely that it had carried a computer smart enough to become the source behind magic, let alone a proper AI. And it should never have been able to reach Darius. The primitive warp drives humanity had used during the First Expansion Era could not have propelled them for thousands of light years. No, something else was involved. But what?

Picking up the signalling device, he signalled a report to orbit. It was possible that a KEW strike would destroy the source of magic, but it had to be kept as a last resort. Elyria and Joshua were inside and he presumed that they were still alive, although there was no way to know for sure. A power that had thought nothing of murdering over twenty Confederation citizens wouldn’t hesitate at murdering one more – and Joshua. Or maybe they’d seek to force Joshua to join them. It was clear that they included magicians among their numbers.

The bookseller looked at him. “How do we get inside?”

“There’s only one way in,” Dacron said. His eyes, for all of their enhancement, couldn’t peer too far into the darkened overhang. Normally, a few snoops would have allowed them a chance to see what was lying in wait, but they wouldn’t work on Darius. His implants were still completely dead. “We’re going to have to take them all out before they can get off a warning.”

“They’ll be able to communicate mentally,” the bookseller reminded him. “Use spells to prevent them from communicating and you might be able to stop them before it’s too late.”

Dacron nodded, mustering the spells in his mind. One advantage he did have over most humans was that he could cast spells without speaking them aloud, giving his enemies no advance warning of what he intended to do. There were definitely some benefits to being an embodied AI, even if he did feel slow and stupid compared to his half-remembered memories of the
Gestalt
. Carefully, he led the way towards the overhang, wondering how they believed they could keep the colony ship hidden. Up close, it was obvious that there was nothing natural about the flow of stone that had buried the starship.

The overhang loomed up in front of him and he slipped inside, his eyes adapting to the darkness. There was a colossal opening just inside, leading to a pair of guards standing in front of a heavy metal door, very evidently an airlock from a primitive colony ship. Dacron cast the silencing spell and blinked in surprise as it refused to work properly. Bracing himself, he jumped forward, determined not to lose what remained of the advantage of surprise and sliced the first guard’s head off before he could even blink. The second guard lifted a sword, only to recoil in horror as Dacron’s monofilament blade sliced right through it and her arm. Blood spilled down to the ground as she collapsed, gasping in pain.

“Curious,” Dacron muttered. Darius wasn’t a place that accepted women warriors, yet one of them had been a guard. He checked her rapidly, looking for anything else out of place, but found nothing. There was something about her face that made her look vaguely inhuman, yet he couldn’t identify it. A true human would probably have seen it instantly. “Does your guild accept females?”

The bookseller shrugged. “Some women join us, or are married to men who join us,” he said, after a moment. “I don’t think we’ve ever used them as guards.”

Dacron nodded and walked over to the airlock, hunting for the markings he knew were going to be there. All colony ships were extensively marked for later identification, a precaution that had been seen as paranoid during the First Expansion Era and prescient afterwards. It only took several seconds for him to locate a plate stating the ship’s name and destination;
Clarke
, heading for FAS-34234. Dacron wondered if anyone, back when the target star had finally been settled, had wondered what had happened to the
Clarke
and her colonists, or had they merely been relieved at the absence of any other settlers. The early days of interstellar expansion had been chaotic, with worlds claimed by several different groups, sometimes backed up by armed warships. It hadn’t been until the First Interstellar War that order had been imposed on the frontier – and even then, plenty of groups had fled well beyond humanity’s original borders. Some of them had never been found.

He wished, just for a moment, that he still had the use of his implants. A quick check with the records on the
Hamilton
would have told him what, if anything, was known about the
Clarke
and her colonists. He might have been able to establish what sort of world they’d wanted to build, and what sort of tech level they’d intended to allow... he pushed the thought aside with some irritation. Intentions often counted for nothing when dealing with the long-term development of colony worlds. There were thousands of examples of low-tech worlds that had suffered revolutions as the younger generations asked why their parents had abandoned the technology that would have made their lives easier.

But there had been an unseen force on Darius, manipulating and maintaining their society.

Dacron braced himself and pushed at the airlock, forcing it open. There was no power running through the ship, unsurprisingly. Primitive though she was,
Clarke
should have been affected by the Dead Zone too. She was hardly powered by chemical reactions and clockwork, any more than was the
Hamilton
. Forcing the airlock open was difficult, even with his enhanced strength. They’d effectively turned the colony ship into a fortress, simply by leaving the airlock in place. No weapons on Darius could even scratch the hull.

Inside, there was a very faint smell of decay.
Clarke
was ancient, easily the oldest starship Dacron had ever seen, and she hadn’t been maintained in the years since landing on Darius. The metal plating on the floor was damaged, worn down by countless people and horses walking in and out of the ship; the lighting was provided by glowing magical lights, rather than the ship’s internal lighting. It gave the interior an eerie atmosphere that clearly bothered the booksellers. Many of them were already suffering from culture shock.

Dacron mentally reviewed the plans for the DY-100 as the bookseller comforted his allies, reassuring them that their planet’s suffering would soon be over. They were presumably on the lower levels; looking back at the airlock, it was clear that they’d come through one of the personnel entrances rather than the giant cargo airlocks that would have allowed the colonists to unload their supplies and start the hard work of settling the planet. Depending on which airlock they’d actually used, they should keep walking to the right and eventually they’d discover the shafts leading up into the control deck. It was as good a place to start as any.

“Follow me,” he muttered, and led the way down the metal corridor. The sense of two very different cultures only grew stronger as they advanced, with the strange blend of magic and primitive technology combined with the technology of the First Expansion Era. Dacron found himself wondering what someone in a Dead Zone would have thought of a Confederation starship, if one had drifted into a zone and become trapped. It would be completely beyond their comprehension. He stopped and held up a hand, just as they reached what would have been the elevator shaft. Someone was talking in the next room.