The Origami Dragon And Other Tales (22 page)

He stops his
story and looks down at his steak as if he has never seen it
before. He still hasn’t touched it.

“The storm took
us all by surprise. It shouldn’t have; we had the best sensors
available looking out from that ship, and nothing should have been
able to approach us without giving hours of warning. This storm
didn’t approach, it simply appeared. I’ll show you the data
sometime, but you won’t believe it. I don’t, and I was there. One
second there was no storm and the next we were being thrown around
like a leaf in a hurricane. The ships are filled with a thick fluid
to suspend the crew and fight the gravity… and the turbulence. The
gel saved our lives, but not the ship. Our systems were crashing,
our engines dying. We began to evacuate the cargo hold, dropping
everything we could. It wasn’t enough; we began to drop fuel. The
crew turned on me then, saying I had led them into this, that I was
a cursed passenger. They were scared, and I was too. Things got
nasty very quickly. One of the crew suggested abandoning ship. It
was too dangerous while the storm was still rolling us around, and
the little evac pods would have been shattered. I told the crew we
had to get out of the storm first, but even the captain had turned
against me!”

He stops again,
his face white. His older brother says nothing. The brothers have a
reputation for being cold, buttoned down and efficient, but that is
only their professional mask. Samuel knows Jonah, and can see that
his brother is suffering.

“They… they
said the storm was my fault! They were mad, irrational and
dangerous. They must have known that the storm couldn’t have been
my fault, but they were so angry. They forced me into an evac pod
and ejected me from the ship! Do you understand me? The crew knew
it was murder, and they did it anyway, as if a blood sacrifice
could appease the storm! They were good people, my crew, but mad!
They sent me into the storm to die, brother, to die!”

“But you
didn’t,” says Samuel quietly.

“No,” whispers
his brother, shaking his head, “the storm ended as soon as the
winds whisked my pod away from the ship. The ship was suddenly
becalmed, drifting in peaceful skies. Perhaps my crew were right,
because by sending me into the storm they saved themselves at my
expense. The crew tried to find me after that. They were terrified
by their own actions, and desperate to make amends. They told me
that they were sorry, pleaded with me for my forgiveness, said they
could not find me. I could hear them on the radio, but my emergency
beacons weren’t working. I tried all seven of the help systems, but
each one failed me so I could hear but not be heard.”

“Those systems
should have lasted for decades to come,” Samuel interjects.

“Centuries
even,” agrees Jonah, “but they didn’t. When I realised they had all
failed, I at first suspected sabotage, although I could not think
of a motive. Even the lights failed, and they were nothing more
than strips of chemical reaction. The crew’s voices became fainter
and fainter, fading to nothing. I knew then that they had left me
to die alone.”

“Humans can be
irrational,” says Samuel, speaking from personal experience.

His brother
slams his beer glass down so hard that it shatters, the glass
fracturing into dozens of blunt shards.

“That’s
not
what happened. They betrayed me, yes, but that’s not
all. That storm wasn’t natural, brother, and neither is what
happened next.”

Samuel orders
more beers from a waiter and motions for his brother to
continue.

“So there I
was, floating alone in the clouds. My controls weren’t working, my
radios were busted, and I was sinking deeper into Jupiter. Things
were looking pretty bleak. I began breaking open panels to fix the
radio. I knew I could, if I had enough time and the problem was
simply technical. I double and triple checked every connection, but
to no avail. I sat in the dark for hours, days. It felt like
lifetimes. The tiny pod became my world. I began to despair,
Samuel, of ever seeing sunlight again.”

“But the
systems began working again, surely? When they picked you up-”

“-No!” yells
Jonah, “I didn’t get them working. I sat there, in the dark,
without hope, and I began to hear voices. Or one voice, maybe. It
was hard to tell, because the voice wasn’t human. Or maybe it was
my voice, a voice in my own head. I didn’t care about its origin, I
was happy not to be alone. The voice began calling to me, calling
me by name.”

He plays with
his steak, prodding it with a fork. The meat is going cold.

“Our family
used to hear voices,” says his older brother, knowing that his
younger brother had already considered this.

Mental illness
had been common in the days before the augment, and their family
had suffered a streak of it. Voices in their heads, talking to
them, cajoling them. Voices that were so, so real.

“Yeah,”
continues his brother heavily, “we did. The storm was real though,
very real. My crew… my ex-crew… will confirm that the storm was
real. So were the system failures.”

‘Your augment
should have lit up with all kinds of signs if you were getting
sick. I take it they didn’t, so what did the voices
say
?”

“At first the
voices were so quiet that I barely noticed them. They became louder
and louder, calling my name until I answered them. The voices
greeted me, wished me well, comforted me. And then they began to
ask what I know about the Nine Veh experiments.”

Jonah looks
pointedly at his older brother. A deathly white pall rises over
Samuel’s face, and fear enters into his eyes. He had been to Nine
Veh, and Nine Veh was no more.

“Who told you
about the Nine Veh experiments?” he asks his brother in a coarse
whisper.

“Nobody. I had
never heard of them before Wail asked me about them.”

“Wail?”

“Wail is the
name the voices gave themselves. Voice. Chorus, whatever. Wail said
that we needed to talk about Nine Veh. At this time, brother, my
pod stopped falling. Wail said that he had caught me, swallowed me
somehow. I could see nothing out of my little window, but my
instruments were working again, and I was moving, moving fast. Too
fast. Wail was dragging me across the planet faster than any ship
I’ve ever travelled in, but I felt nothing. We travelled like this
for seventy-two hours, so deep in the clouds that my pod should
have been destroyed by the pressure. I knew then that I was inside
Wail somehow and that he was protecting me.”

“Or your
sensors were broken, perhaps?” suggests his brother reasonably.

Jonah just
waves the suggestion away impatiently, annoyed at his brother for
looking for a rational answer to an impossible situation.

“Wail told me
that they were digging on Nine Veh, and what they were looking for
was dangerous, a crime, a disease. A sin, Wail called it, a sin
against all that is right for humanity. I hardly knew what the word
meant then, but I think I do now. Wail began to show me pictures,
crazy images. At first they were nothing, just maps. It showed me
where Nine Veh was, and images of towns and cities. There was
nothing out of the ordinary that I could see by eye, and Nine Veh
looked like any other abandoned mining colony to me. Then Wail took
me closer, and I saw the bomb blasts and scars of war. It must have
been terrible, what happened there, but there was more. Beneath the
damage there were the workshops and homes of the men and women who
are digging in the planet’s crust. He showed me the things they had
found buried deep inside the planet, terrible things. I can see you
know what I’m talking about, brother.”

“I stopped it!
I was there the first time, and I saw them burn the lab and
collapse the mine. I saw it,” says Samuel, his own hands now
shaking at the memories as they rose in his mind.

“I saw it, too.
Wail showed me what was happening, and why you were called. I know
that’s where you lost your arm, and I saw how. I saw the miners
find the alien technology hidden in the planet’s crust, saw their
fear of it turn to curiosity, saw their curiosity turn to greed and
their greed turn to evil.”

Samuel had read
all the files about Nine Veh before they were destroyed. He knew
more than perhaps any man alive about Nine Veh, and it still gave
him nightmares. It had all started when the small mining community
had found alien technology hidden in Nine Veh’s crust. They had dug
it up, studied it and decided, against all sense and protocol, that
it was safe. The technology had been implanted in volunteers, at
the start. It had made them stronger, smarter, wiser. It had been
judged an outstanding success. The planet’s mining output was
increased tenfold, and the economy jumped forward. Samuel found out
later that a number of strange events had taken place during this
time, but had been largely ignored by the planetary government,
obsessed with exports. Strange chemicals were found in the water
supply, and it was only a matter of luck that they didn’t reach the
general population. An A.I had ordered an old mineshaft to be
reopened for no explainable reason and the tunnel was fifteen
kilometres long before it was noticed and collapsed. As the A.I.
could not account for its actions, nor even remember them, it was
destroyed. This was followed by a period of relative peace, before
the first bodies were found.

There were
three murders, including one of the volunteers. The victims were
found without their organs. More people were reported missing, and
the planet’s jubilant mood began to sour.

Then the
volunteers proposed a wider study of the alien technology,
suggesting that everyone on the planet was given the implants. Some
wise souls resisted, and that was when the war began. Nine Veh had
few visitors, and it was only when the exports stopped that anyone
thought to check on the colony. It was a long time before word of
the conflict made it back to Earth. Colonies had been known to fail
in the past, and outbreaks of the barbarity that is war weren’t as
rare as one might hope for, but the stories suggested that there,
this was more than just human hatred at work.

“It was bad,
Jonah. By the time I arrived the planet was a ruin. I immediately
called for reinforcements and was granted a fleet of the best and
bravest Naval forces. It nearly wasn’t enough. Nearly every human
on Nine Veh had been turned into a cyborg, and each cyborg was a
war machine equal to a dozen good men. The cyborgs were building a
fleet, and we had arrived just in time to destroy it. The war in
space didn’t last long, but our human losses were horrific,” says
Samuel, knowing that simply repeating this information is enough to
have him killed as a traitor.

“Why are you
telling me this now?” asks Jonah, who also knows the risk.

“You need to
know about Nine Veh, Jonah. Wail was right, because what happened
there was terrible. The cyborgs offered peace and, although I knew
it was a trap, my superiors ordered me to accept. I was told to
land alone and unarmed. As soon as I touched the ground I was
ambushed by the cyborgs, but they found to their detriment that I
was neither unarmed nor helpless. I held them off until a rescue
mission landed. The fight was brutal, and I lost half my body and
most of my men before escaping back to space. A second envoy was
sent down while I was stuck in medical treatment. The cyborgs had
blamed me for breaking trust by being armed and requested a second
meeting. I told them that they were idiots, but I was outranked. I
watched from space as the envoy was attacked, and dragged down a
tunnel. We never saw him again.

After that I
demanded total control of our fleet, and was given it by
EarthControl when they realised that I was the only one who truly
understood what was going on. I didn’t have the men to rescue our
envoy, but I did have bombs. We quarantined the planet and burned
the cities. No building was left standing, no organism was left
alive, no mine left open. There may have been innocents on the
planet, but the bombs fell anyway. The planet had burned.

It should have
been enough.”

“It wasn’t,”
insists Jonah, “smugglers made their base there, and found some of
the technology. It has all started again, brother. Wail showed me
everything, more than any sane man could ever want to see. I saw
the alien tech bonding to screaming human flesh. I watched as metal
tentacles closed in over bone and nerve and dug into muscle. I saw
men and women ripped open by steel cables while those they had once
trusted watched them with cold eyes. I saw the armies rising from
the mines. Wail said that it would send me out into the world of
man, to preach its warning. I was told that we have forty Earth
days to end the Nine Veh uprising and that if we didn’t, humanity
would be lost. If that happened, Wail said, humanity would be
forfeit.”

“Forfeit?
Forfeit how?”

Jonah laughs a
low, unhappy laugh that makes his brother’s hair stand on end and
sends a shiver down his spine.

“Wail said that
it was just the servant of a higher power, a power that could
destroy humanity in a second. The kind of power capable of time
travel, and much more than that. Wail said that it didn’t want it
to come to violence, but that destruction was better than
corruption. I think I even agree.”

The brothers
consider this as they watch the storms of Jupiter pass slowly
by.

“I argued with
Wail, told it that no-one would listen to me. It knew that I was a
man of some standing, but I told it that I had never heard of Nine
Veh and that I had no chance of stopping it. Wail told me to ask my
brother about Nine Veh, to ask him why we were taking such chances
with the human soul and mind. A sin, he called it, sin.”

Jonah tries to
cut a small piece off his steak, but can’t. His hands shake
uncontrollably. His brother watches him, fear in his eyes. He knows
what his brother is asking, but the mere thought of returning to
Nine Veh makes his metal arm ache and his metal heart race. He
remembers the fire, the terror, the war, the pain. He doesn’t want
to go back there, not even in his memories.