The Rifter's Covenant (61 page)

“There will come a day when you will pray to
be null . . .”
Norio clenched his teeth against the memory. The crew of the corvette had left
him strictly alone; he groped his way to the lock as the ship settled to rest.
The outer hatch opened to a gray-clad soldier discharging the ship with a long
wand. The sharp snap made him jump, a movement he was sure did not escape the
gaze of Barrodagh, waiting for him below. The thin whine of a mind-blur tugged
at his back teeth, but the extract held it outside his direct consciousness as
well.

The big Tarkans
flanking Barrodagh would not look at him. Even through the haze he could feel
their fear, informed with a sense of the uncanny that tingled at him. By comparison,
the Bori’s mind was flat; Norio guessed that he was dependent on sansouci.

With drug-blanketed,
mild surprise, Norio recognized that even with the Negus holding the
distraction of the mind-blur away, he still had some sensitivity.

Barrodagh forced himself
to say, “Welcome to the Suneater, genz Danali.” His teeth ached all the way to
his skull and down his spine.

He was sure this
must have been Morrighon’s suggestion to Lysanter, that Hreem’s disgusting
mindsnake Norio Danali would perform better if given every comfort, including
courtesy. “I think that should include an adequate supply of stasis clamps,”
Lysanter had said, knowing that Barrodagh would have to comply.

More bitter by the
day was his regret that he had not understood how successfully Morrighon had
simulated predictability on his rise through the bureaucracy; if he’d had any
inkling of Morrighon’s capability for underhanded treachery he would have had
the misshapen abortion mindripped before Anaris ever laid eyes on him.

Gritting his way through
the labored small talk he imagined to be his duty, Barrodagh was relieved at
Norio’s laconic replies. He got Norio as hastily as he could to the quarters
assigned him, cut off from strategic locations in the Suneater by high-powered
mind-blurs. Norio would go where they intended him to, and when.

Barrodagh fought to
suppress the terror evoked by memory of the station’s convulsions while
ingesting—
absorbing!
—the still-living
Li Pung. The Avatar himself had commanded that in the future all corpses were
to have their heads cut off and thrown into space, with only the bodies
recycled into the Suneater, whose increasingly plentiful Ur-fruit were now
furnishing part of the diet of the ordinaries and menials. Barrodagh himself
wouldn’t touch them.

Noting that such an
eventuality wouldn’t add much to the station’s mass, Barrodagh left the thin,
sallow tempath with a mild admonition about the mind-blurs, courteously put, he
thought. He returned to his office, to assign an underling to watch the vid of
the tempath’s journey on the corvette from the transfer point outside the
sinkfield, and highlight actions of interest. Of more immediate interest was
the inventory of Norio’s array of drugs, revealed when he boarded the corvette,
that Lysanter had ordered. He made a mental note to inquire more deeply after
it was complete.

A short time later
he reported the tempath’s arrival to the Avatar.

“When will he be
ready to attempt activation?” Eusabian demanded.

“Lysanter has
requested at least forty-eight hours, to allow for a full physical examination
and noetic calibration.”

“Let it be no
longer than that.” The Avatar picked up his dirazh’u. “Tell me more about the
Arthelion hauntings,” he said.

Barrodagh was glad
of the sansouci now locked to receptors in his brain. Why was the Avatar
bringing that up again? “There is nothing of consequence to add, Lord. The
Tarkans are reluctant to patrol in the Palace Minor. But we have a similar
problem in Hroth D’ocha; in both places they speak of your indwelling
presence.” Now the hauntings should sound less like a trespass.

“And the phantom?
Is it the computer?”

“Ferrasin thinks
not. The system is yielding data daily. The techs have penetrated it deeply.”
Barrodagh hesitated. He did not want to accuse the Tarkans—Eusbian’s elite
guard—of being less than perfect in the execution of their duties. Yet the fact
was that they were hampered by Eusabian’s orders about jac-fire in the upper
levels of the Palace Major and Minor.

“No,” he said
carefully, “the evidence suggests they report encounters with the Phantom more
frequently than they do encounters with the resistance, who are still only a
nuisance.” Like those dogs no one could get rid of, or that name that kept
cropping up so often: ‘The Mask.’ Barrodagh was certain it was mere
superstitious ignorance. It had to be. A pang shot through his trigeminal
nerve. “A ghost is much preferable to an enemy who escapes to plot again.”

Eusabian gave a
short nod.

Barrodagh paused.

The Avatar had made
his priorities clear before leaving Arthelion. Damage to the service corridors
was tolerable, but even a scratch on the elegance of the upper levels, where
the Arkads had actually lived and moved, might be punished with agony beyond
measure unless justified by actual attack. This order enabled the use of clever
traps to harry the Tarkans—and of late, to pick them off. Jesserian, now
commander of the Arthelion garrison, wanted the orders changed. He was certain
that The Mask was no phantom, but flesh and blood. But there was no proof.
“Dektasz Jesserian requests permission to shoot on sight in the top levels of
the Palace structures, Minor and Major.”

Eusabian frowned.
“No. The Ivory antechamber was damage enough. They are mine and shall be
preserved for my return. Only if fired on.”

The interview was
at an end, and Barrodagh hurried out, heading for the relative security of his
quarters. He still didn’t have enough stasis clamps, but there was more
sansouci.

The replies on
the anon feeds had pointed out that only a fool would trust an intelligent
machine with its own programming instructions. There had to be a no-port
chipviewer.

Anderic had been
terrified that it might have been hidden in the chatzy furnishings he’d spaced,
in his ill-fated attempt to impress Luri with a deorbiting fireworks display.
He was greatly relieved to find the handbook while rummaging through a
closetful of knickknacks Tallis had accumulated, which had looked too
interesting to throw away.

The cover was in
Barcan script. He tabbed the upper corner impatiently until it cycled through
to Uni again.
Logos Behavior Modification
and Training,
it said baldly, and the Rifter almost dropped it. He looked
around nervously. His cabin should be safe, but the logos felt omnipresent to
him lately. As if answering his unspoken question, the book automatically
cycled to the frontispiece—not the usual animation, but a bold statement in
text:
The logos is programmed to ignore
the existence of this book.

Anderic relaxed
fractionally and began to read. The introduction alone made him nauseous as his
Ozmiront upbringing asserted itself, strengthening the deep-laid symbolism of
the Ban so carefully nurtured by the Panarchy. His ship was infested by a
intelligent parasite.

He tabbed to the
table of contents and followed the hyperlinks to “Purging the Logos:”

If instability supervenes, the following
procedure must be followed to disable the logos datahooks and purge it from the
system . . .

Blind to all else,
Anderic read late into his Z-watch and then considered his options. The crew
needn’t know he’d purged it, and it seemed it might be possible to retain some
of the monitoring functions. And he was not lacking in support among the crew,
although all the executives and top techs hated him.

Furthermore, the
cims were close to being able to turn out the critical parts for the engines,
if only the cursed Dol’jharian inspections weren’t so close together! That
would no doubt change as more Rifter vessels were called to the Suneater. It
seemed certain that the Dol’jharians expected an attack with asteroids and
maybe lances, neither of which could be stopped once they got into the energy
sink around the Suneater.

So that meant
ship-to-ship action outside of radius.

Anderic had no
intention of confronting the Navy for Dol’jhar. He’d seen enough of that at
Arthelion. No, the
Satansclaw
would
be long gone by then, and he wouldn’t
need
the logos out beyond the Fringes.

Purging the logos would
be a long process. He’d get started next watch.

But first he’d
catch some Zs, confident that he would sleep well for the first time in many
nights, and it was so even as the logos considered the waves of intention from
many slave nodes radiating through its manifold extensions, piling up in
complex peaks and troughs that modeled its perceptions and decisions.

One node reported
that the cycling of global focus was speeding up, a host of others noted that
ship systems were stable and nearly steady-state. Something was interfering
with its access to the web of sensors and affectors throughout the ship.

The subarray
focused on Anderic had accumulated enormous potential and it discharged image
data from the loop on the captain-biont’s dormition space. The biont’s actions
were inconsistent, but the logos could not pattern the difference.

It accessed the
eidolon, whose mind was now lost in dreams of procreation. But its pattern
awareness was still functional, and the logos manipulated the symbolic imagery
to map the Anderic pattern into the eidolon’s dataspace.

. . . he was lost in the
corridors again, this time in darkness. A point of light drew Ruonn forward,
resolving into a cannula looking into a room furnished in Panarchic style.

A man turned away from an open door, and
Ruonn trembled at the terror of the blackness radiating from the book in his
hands. It swelled to fill his vision, but the title was engraved in a script so
obscene he flinched away. Ruonn cried out as the man looked up and the flesh
melted away from his face, leaving a grinning skull. As Ruonn fled back down
the corridors, doors slammed behind him.

Defeated, but now
focused on the damage that was being done to it, the logos began to reproduce
its slave nodes in a flurry of datafission. It took over the compute-intensive
processes devoted to the cims, but it could only slow the encapsulation of the
eidolon. It drew on more resources, and the homeostasis of the ship began to slip
away from biont-optimal.

“Kira, there’s
something wrong with my cabin.” Luri’s voice over the com was tremulous. “Can
you come and fix it?”

Luri wasn’t bored,
she was afraid. Kira Lennart put the book down; its cover mutated to a pleasant
abstract pattern. Maybe something had messed up the tianqi scents again and
Luri was worried the bizarre smell was going to wrinkle her skin.

Kira, sighed: if it
was Anderic again, she might just sic a phage on him
.
The new captain was worse than Tallis had ever been—rigid and
increasingly bad-tempered. And while Tallis was no nova, he’d never made the
mistake of trying to win the crew’s affection by going around the execs.
Anderic had, and the
Satansclaw
was
rife with conflict and malingering. And then there was the logos.

But as she hurried
down to Luri’s quarters, she realized the problem was something worse than Anderic
tormenting the woman who had so publicly rejected him. The lighting in the
corridor had a dirty brown cast to it, like the air on Membana, where they’d
smuggled smart catalysts to a federation of just-industrialized city-states.
And the air smelled funny.

Luri clung to her
when she arrived, distracting her pleasantly, but not completely. “It’s the
tianqi,” Kira said, kissing Luri and letting her go. “I better get into ship
systems right away.”

“Noooo,” moaned
Luri. “Don’t leave. Do it here.” She pulled a pile of shanta-silks off her
console in a flutter of color. “You can use this.”

“Just a quick
check, love. I may have to do some real hands-on.”

Luri caressed her
neck as she sat down at the console. “You’ve done lots of real good hands-on
here.”

The distraction
wasn’t making her any faster, thought Kira. She didn’t bother to tell Luri that
using this console was like reading a book through a straw. That wasn’t
something her lover cared about, so it couldn’t be communicated to her.

She reset the cabin
tianqi, putting it into Winter Yielding mode. But once she got into ship
systems, she knew that something was very wrong. Waves of potential were
slopping back and forth, piling up and canceling in surges of data and power
that taxed the ship’s homeostatic ability. As she watched, the decay
accelerated. There was no time to get to her own console.

She plunged her
hand into her kit, yanked out a brain-suck cylinder, and with a harsh shout of
pain, dove into dataspace.

The echo of her
exclamation was lost in the surging roar of the sea, lashed into towering
fractal-topped waves of data by two opposing poles of power that towered far
above all other structures. Their identities were plain to her eyes: Anderic
and the logos. He had finally decided to shut it down.

But the struggle
was destroying the ship. Life support looked to be the first to go. Her
metabody swelled with rage-fed power: at Tallis for being fool enough to
install it, and Anderic for not shutting it down as soon as he could. It was
too late now; dataspace was thickly seamed and veined by the logos, a cancerous
mating of machine and mind whose rooting out would destroy the ship. She would
have to hope the machine would still obey Tallis—the manifold slave nodes
focused on the bilge indicated its continuing and disproportionate interest in
him.

Awash in her own
rising bile, Kira Lennart shifted symbols and threw her weight against
Anderic’s web of data, shriveling the phages he’d released. On the fissured
desert plain now before her an egg reassembled itself around the figure of a Barcan
troglodyte with an enormous nacker —she let that proceed, knowing something of
what she faced. Taking advantage of the chaos destroying the ship’s systems,
she recoded the weapons lockers.