Rough draft, excerpt 13: "The Long Watch, volume I," part 5

5.

Sobek’s first appointment was with Lucipher.  He asked a standard set of questions:  have you witnessed any criminal activity, have you been threatened, has any property gone missing, have you heard rumors of such activity in the neighboring towns, do you do much traveling, when was the last time you were offworld?  He recorded every response, not only for evidential purposes but to provide himself with study material for figuring out primate body language and facial expression.  His computer would analyze the speech for stress patterns to indicate veracity or the absence thereof, and by correlating this analysis with the video playback, he would learn to understand when a flexible therian face was speaking out of both sides of its mouth.  The standard questions and answers required only a few minutes, so after that, Sobek winged it, asking questions about the activity at Eden, its goals, the long-term ambitions of the staff.

Lucipher seemed pretty pleased to be able to talk freely, once the formal Q&A was done, and he rambled on long enough to fill the allotted hour.  “Here at Eden, we’re mostly concerned with studying how biodiversity grows in a wild setting.  We have almost no wild settings these days that we can examine, on a planetary scale, you see.  We know that diversity expands to fill the available container, but the containers that we’ve had for study so far have been much smaller, having had their wild environments so dramatically reduced by urban crowding.  I think most of us signed up for this expedition because we have been away from the jungle, so to speak, for so long.  Most of our people have lived in space for so long that the only green things we’ve ever seen growing were groceries in hydroponics labs.”  This was followed by the sound that Sobek was coming to recognize as laughter.  

He was also becoming familiar with the cadences of Uleni, and would in time become skilled in evaluating the ways in which emotions alter cadences, but for the time being he would have to rely on the computer’s support.  He suspected that Lucipher was speaking in embarrassment at this point, but the computer would later inform him the correct emotion was “rue.”

“I must confess, Professor—is Professor the correct title?  Yes?—that my interest in biology has rarely extended beyond the basics of outdoorsmanship.  But there is a long tradition of hunting and stewardship of the land on my world.  We never developed urbanization to the same degree as other civilizations, and so our jungle remained, not pristine, of course, but still quite green and full.”

“Yes, your world is a source of envy to most of the civilized races in this sector, to be sure.” 

Lucipher trailed off here, as if unsure how to continue.  The loss of Erkhott was a well-known calamity in this spiral arm of the galaxy, but as it hadn’t been occasioned by environmental collapse, as was the general rule in such matters, there was no moralizing to be made from it, and no real blame to be assigned.  It was therefore an awkwardness, an embarrassment, the kind of disaster that had no political value, merely a horrendous presumed death toll, and one that was therefore almost inexcusable to bring up in conversation under almost any circumstance.  It did not occur to him that Sobek was speaking of another planet altogether:  Duat, the current homeworld of his clan.

He recovered quickly, making the wince-ish expression Sobek was recognizing as a smile.  “If only we primates had learned from your example.”

If only the Orrkuttssh had, too.  Sobek had not been present for the loss of Erkhott, but it was still a major calamity for the Dragon racial memory; his parents had actually been there prior to the disaster, and had transmitted to him information about it to which most Dragons weren’t privy.  He tried to lay the matter to rest with what he hoped was a reassurance.  “There are some green planets still left in the galaxy.”  His family owned one, but he didn’t think it would be politic to mention that. 

“Yes, there are.  And although it seems as though they’re all destined to become suburbs for the Empire’s burgeoning population—“ he interrupted his speech with something Sobek’s computer would later identify as a “sigh”—“we can, on rare occasions, find one before that process begins, and we can learn something about how life started in the first place.  Or at least how it started on one particular planet.”

These kinds of questions weren’t meaningless or trivial to Sobek; they were just outside his area of expertise.  But now, thinking about his brief hunting sojourn in the nearby lagoon, they took on a certain novelty.  The food offered by the lagoon had agreed with him; it was flavorful and nutritious, and had not troubled his digestive system.  Evidently the proteins and vitamins on the market here were of a kind with those of his own world, and available in useful concentrations.  This suggested not only that he could survive on the local menu, but also that he—and indeed, all the Ydlenni on the premises—were also grist for the local food chain.  And that engendered a certain excitement of its own.  He’d realized after his hunt, when making a proper, prepared meal of his remaining catch, that there was a secret ingredient that could be offered by Nature that was rarely found in the manufactured, processed, marketed meat that filtered through the Service:  fear.  Prey that was wild-caught, flush with the chase, was full of stress hormones and natural fight-or-flight stimulants.  It was invigorating. 

“I think I can appreciate your interest,” he finally replied. 

“The interest we have in pristine environments informs our entire philosophy,” Lucipher continued.  “The name of our facility reflects that philosophy.  We would prefer not to interfere in the environment here in any way, but that is of course impossible if we are to undertake any serious studies here.  So we do what we can to mitigate our impact, and all our staff are sworn—or rather, contractually obligated—to thoroughly clean up after ourselves when we leave.”

Sobek didn’t need the computer to tell him this sounded just a bit fanatical.  “What does the name mean?”

It evidently took Lucipher a moment to figure out the meaning of the question, since Sobek hadn’t pronounced the name.  “Eden?  It’s the name of a place on our homeworld.  A mythical place, to be sure, but one that is deeply entrenched in the consciousness of my people.  A spiritual touchstone, one might say.  What the anthropology types call an ‘ultimate sacred postulate.’  Several of our religions mention it as the source of life.  Of wildlife, rather…a sort of fountain of biodiversity.”

Sobek guessed that this was an appropriate time to nod, to encourage the primate to continue.  He nodded.

“For us, it has a meaning that transcends the mythological.  The story of Eden is that once, a very long time ago, our ultimate ancestors lived in a state of perfection there.  It was sort of a Garden, a tame jungle where all living things lived in harmony.  All animals ate plants, which never begrudged the loss of a few leaves or fruit.  Nothing ever became sick or died, until one day the Ancestors broke a rule and discovered knowledge hidden by the gods.”  Sobek nodded again; he was by now roughly familiar with the story.  Many, many monkeys, all over the Empire, believed their ancestors had come from such a paradise, having been ejected in anger over some inadvertent sin of hubris.  “We believe that story is a reflection of the way life evolved on our homeworld.  It all begins with single cells, you see.  Single celled-life doesn’t evolve very fast.  I mean, it does adapt quickly, because it can reproduce quickly.  And there are forms of single-celled life that can exchange genes or even scavenge them from other individuals, such as those they consume.”  Sobek knew what genes were, but was mildly startled to find himself considering just how universal the idea was.  Of course the units of heredity were discrete and subject to selection and modification; that was a given in any kind of evolution.  But he’d always assumed that those units took different forms—were composed of different kinds of organic materials—in different kinds of life.  Perhaps that assumption was without merit, given the positive results of his recent hunting expedition.  If the genes of this world were capable of making proteins that he could digest, then the units of heredity of various worlds had more in common than the schools of his homeworld had taught. 

Lucipher continued.  “But for all that, they don’t differentiate very much.  They don’t generate new categories of organism very frequently.  It’s because single-celled life is essentially immortal.  You can’t kill off an organism if a single cell is enough to carry on its line.  Evolution really gets started when organisms become multicellular, because that’s what brings true death into the picture.  But of course that requires sexual reproduction.  So life has to shed its innocence, so to speak.  To discover forbidden knowledge.  Once that happens, death becomes a proper filter.  Natural selection begins to operate.  So the discovery of sex is also the discovery of death, and that ends the deathless life of innocence in the Garden.  This is, we believe, the true meaning of the myth:  it is a metaphor for the advent of the natural-selective, sexual-selective evolutionary process on our planet.  We believe our prophets were aware of this reality long before our scientists awoke to the possibility.  So we seek our answers to our questions in science, but there is also a spiritual framework within which we ask those questions.”

This was something that Sobek could understand and appreciate.  A similar fusion of mysticism and rationality had, by way of uniting them in common purpose and pursuit, propelled his people out among the stars.  But this one also sounded rather like a religious sense of purpose, and those were notoriously effective at nucleating terrorist organizations.  He could understand and appreciate this sentiment, but he still had to suspect it.

“But then that would make the name rather ironic,” he replied, eager to keep the conversation going.  “If evolution cannot proceed while life is still in the Garden, then you would seem to be studying the wrong environment.”

“Yes, well, some of our research takes some rather interesting turns from time to time.  You might be surprised at how apt the name really is.”  Lucipher grinned, an expression Sobek had no trouble recognizing.  Teeth exposed.  Among primates, this was a mode of expression that was almost always bipolar in its intent, either thoroughly friendly or thoroughly hostile, as determined by context.  This conversation was a friendly enough context, and Sobek almost felt the urge to grin in response, although he didn’t think Lucipher would regard the gesture quite so genially.

“I can see that the topic of biology has a way of growing on you,” he said.  “I would like to hear more about your research, if I may.”

“Well, some of what we do here is confidential, as I’m sure you can understand.  Although the Empire granted us a charter, including the land that we operate on, the grant was insufficient to maintain our operations on a continuing basis.  So we have secured financing from certain corporate interests who wish to remain anonymous.  And in order to maintain funding in future, we have to maintain confidentiality as to what they’re investing in.”  This was of course perfectly reasonable, but it presented a bit of an obstacle for Sobek.  If he were really investigating piracy, it would be difficult to justify, on the basis of relevance, the effort to obtain a warrant to search their records.  However, if he were investigating something else, say ecoterrorism, and were at the same time a lawfully-assigned investigator of ecoterrorism acting on behalf of the State,  such records would be very relevant, and he’d be quite justified in pursuing them. 

Best to not reveal anything at all about what he was curious about.  “I do understand.   I ask only from personal interest.  Newfound personal interest, I should say.”

“Perhaps we’ll have occasion to discuss matters further.  Not everything we do is commercial in nature, but unfortunately we so rarely have guests that there isn’t anything like a standard tour or presentation.  I can put something together for passing the time in between interviews, if you like.”

“I would appreciate that, yes.”

“I’ll have something for you in a jiffy.”

The translator choked on “jiffy,” and Sobek concluded that it was a colloquial term for one of the locals’ (presumably imaginary) time intervals.  After further pointless small talk, the meeting was adjourned, and Sobek dozily reviewed his notes while waiting for the next appointment.

Two days later, he’d interviewed five of the high-ranking personnel, and had sampled a fair amount of the local cuisine, and was starting to wonder how he’d deal with his reinforcements when they arrived.  To continue to play along, or to confront them?  If they were under the influence of mind-control drugs, would there be any point in mentioning what he’d found? 

His stock of lagoon prey was running low, and he was wondering how to broach the subject of making another hunting foray as he headed into the office.  Coincidentally, the first appointment of the day was with Alzhor, the female(?) who had complained over his ship-to-shore phone about his hunting in the lagoon.  She didn’t wait for the questions to start; she simply started in on his dining habits.  “Captain Sobek, our security cameras provided us with some footage of you hunting in our lagoon three days ago.  Has no one informed you that this world is a wildlife preserve?”

Sobek would like to see her(?) try to serve him a citation for illegal hunting; the prospect almost made him smile.  “I’m sorry if I inadvertently went poaching on your planet…Alzhor…but unfortunately, it was a matter of necessity rather than leisure.”  Coming clean on this would weaken his position of authority, but he knew from experience he could not juggle more than one lie at a time.  “As it happens, I’ve had a problem with my shipboard stores, and all my food has become contaminated.  I’m going to have to completely restock the ship by the time I’m done here, and that will require several more hunting sessions.  I will also have to replace my water supply.”  What is necessary is legal, at least if it can be rationalized post-facto; the Empire granted, at least to its military personnel, survival dispensation in such matters, but he supposed that wouldn’t necessarily translate to approval on the part of the local primates.

He was right.  “It sounds to me as if there was a planning failure on your part, or on the part of your supervisor,” replied the monkey lady.  “Can’t you restock your galley from  those of your fellow investigators?”  He groaned silently; this was a good catch.  She didn’t have a good grasp of naval terminology, apparently; the translator had hesitated over her wording before deciding that “galley” was closest to her meaning.  But she was right; in an emergency, he should have called on his available support.  This might have been a shrewd trap, and he might just have played right into it.  Nothing could be done but to forge onward, though.

“I have requested assistance, but for the moment it appears as though my staff are all currently indisposed,” he said.  This was his second lie, but it was a lie that branched directly off the first, and should therefore be easy to remember.  He was tempted to make an audio or handwritten note to that effect, but was almost certain that any action on his part other than a direct reply would be seen as incriminating.  “And I do not wish to impose unduly on your hospitality, but of course if you’d rather share some of your own provisions—“

“Here at Eden, we are all vegetarians,” she replied curtly.  His translator stumbled over “vegetarian,” a concept which was rarely expressed in his language except, vaguely, as a mild pejorative for other races, and usually took the form of subtle euphemisms.  It settled on a construct of several words and phrases, combining “indignant,” “flower-eating” and “foodstuff.”  He resisted the urge to laugh, knowing that it would be taken the wrong way, and further that the sound of his laughter would likely send her scampering for the safety of the trees.

“Well, I am not.  I am an obligate carnivore.  Surely you understand this is by nature and not by choice.  We do not choose our natures, or our necessities.”  He resigned himself to experiencing a certain amount of superior attitude.  There is no being more entitled to a sense of enlightenment than a vegetarian.

She was still delivering her reply, which hadn’t yet been translated, when his headset chimed and an annoying holographic heads-up display popped up before his right eye.  “Excuse me, I have to take this call,” he said, and watched her irritably get up from her seat and leave the office.  He remained seated on the plastic refrigerator crate that had been dragged in as a Dragon-sized stool.  Nobody in this sector designed chairs for beings with heavy tails.  Nobody here designed tables or toilets or seats for beings that could step over the designers.  Nobody thought about the natures or necessities of the beings that safeguarded them in their sleep.  Attention to necessities is always the first measure of a culture’s standard of etiquette, and it was clear that the people here, while polite and charming in their own way, were not accustomed to any kind of strangers, any kind of aliens here.

Sobek had really come to understand this on his first day of interviews, when it became apparent that the Ydlenni sanitary facilities had no provision for giant reptiles.  The Orrkuttssh lower digestive tract, being typically reptilian in most regards, is under autonomous rather than conscious control.  Most Dragons, even adults, never learn to hold their bowels indefinitely.  Sobek’s clan’s tradition of mind-over-matter meditation prescribed practices that helped in this regard, so he, his kin and his mate were among the few who could.  For most, evacuation was an unplanned event, one that tended to occur spontaneously when they entered water.  This was one reason why skinny-dipping had never had a particularly erotic appeal for his kind, and why the vast majority of all military Dragons wore, as the first undergarment layer of their armored uniforms, an elastic cloth diaper.  Sobek didn’t need any replacement diapers, but the absence of the familiar metal dispensers in the restrooms was one of those frequent reminders that he wasn’t on Duat, or any respectable military outpost, any more.  But then, the racial dependence on diapers wasn’t exactly something that was publicized to other races.

Once the office door had closed, Sobek activated a full-scale projection of the message on his headset.  A soothing synthetic voice—a female’s breathy baritone—augmented the display with the particulars:  a Talon’s transponder, bearing the code of Ibliss’ sub-fleet, had entered orbit and made contact with his own Talon.  The transponder was reporting the other ship’s altitude and position over the planet, as well as ID numbers representing its own registration and the identity of the pilot.  His shipboard computer, whether by virtue of Ibliss’ design, or of having been scrubbed by Sobek, had no lookup values for the IDs, so they were displayed as raw numbers.

Questions presented themselves:  was this the support Ibliss had hinted, but not promised, he would be sending?  Was it another ship on a different clandestine mission altogether?  Was it someone sent to keep an eye on Sobek?  Someone sent to clean up the mess after he’d discovered he’d been drugged?  Had he not performed a system purge on his shipboard computer, it wouldn’t now be notifying him of the transponder signal.  Had the newcomer’s computer been similarly crippled?  Did they even know he was here?

A Dragon’s sigh is much throatier, deeper and evil-sounding than a primate’s, and he got some small satisfaction from the suspicion that the nearby Ydlenni were freezing in their tracks at the sound of his.  A day in the life of a Dragon is always being broken by interesting interruptions, challenges piled atop challenges, but of course there are no “problems,” only “situations.”  Duty always interferes with duty in an impossible-to-prioritize tangle, because a soldier’s life of discipline demands impossibilities to encounter and tame.  But there was not much difficulty to the prioritizing here.  This was too big to ignore; he had to go back to his ship to monitor the situation.  He made cursory apologies to the twitchy apewoman in the hall and plodded back out to the landing pad.

The computer hadn’t reported the other Talon’s registration and pilot because he’d inadvertently disabled much of its access to the subfleet database.  It took him an unpleasant amount of time to figure out how to restore access without reactivating any of the programs he wasn’t sure about.  By the time he was able to pull up the ship’s records, it was deorbiting.  He traced its course until it passed below the horizon:  it was gliding in for a landing somewhere on the tropical continent to the south.

The ship ID corresponded to a heavily modified Talon, a configuration variously used for civilian transport or as a carrier for an aerospace sub-unit:  voluminous, heavy on the comforts, light on armament.  The pilot was one Aphep, a Short-Face Sobek had never met or heard of.  The ship’s database held a stub record for each of Ibliss’ crew rated to fly, operate or maintain it—and a logbook of those who had—but it did not carry complete personnel records. 

He was unable to find out more at this point, but this turn of events reminded him of a task he had let lapse since discovering the drug in his ship’s stores:  cracking the facility’s security system.  He still thought it would be a good idea to understand how to gain access to the system, but now felt any actual intrusion would be unwarranted.

Now he had to give it more thought.  If hostilities developed between himself and another Talon pilot, he may need to gain access to a safe refuge in a big hurry.

He spent the next few hours trying to match elements of what he’d seen of the Ydlenni security setup to what he’d been able to research en route to the planet.  They’d evidently done some heavy customizing, as there were recognizable features in the quarantine airlock, the walls and gate that he’d so far seen, but they were arranged oddly, away from obvious power conduits and wireless retransmitters.  Sobek suspected this amounted to something akin to security through obscurity, or rather a concealment of capability, like keeping a fully-functional security shack on the landing grounds without any visible personnel.

Concealed capability.  Ambush predators thought in such ways.  He could get to like these monkeys…but before he could go making friends with the locals, he first had to finish betraying their trust.

He had used his armor’s built-in apparatus to surreptitiously photograph, videorecord and radioscan as much of the facility’s public areas as he’d been able to visit, and was using the computer to assemble a rough three-dimensional map of the interior.  On this map he marked roughly where he’d found conduits, retransmitters, antennae and nodes suggesting the placement of cameras and scanners.

A familiarity to the arrangement emerged once he was able to see it in three dimensions.  This was a Khunjeee structure.  Not just the security, but the energy, ventilation and communications infrastructures:  all were arranged in a netlike system, based a hexagonal grid wrapped around the corridors, which were themselves hexagonal in section.  In all likelihood, there was intelligent regeneration of all signals at the nodes, which could automatically reroute around destroyed or marginal nodes.  This was an arrangement suitable to the absolute mission-criticality of fierce, deep-space combat, and to the brute-force methodologies typical of newly-spaceborne, aggressive races on forced migration. 

The underground portion of the facility appeared to be a Khunjeee Bullet Ship, either entire or salvaged and repaired.  Possibly it was one of their attack or transport craft, but the cavernous interior argued against it being either of these in any of the standard sizes Sobek had encountered.

An inadvertent growl boiled up from within.  Whatever fondness he might develop for the monkey people, he could never feel anything but fathomless hatred for the Khunjeee.

The saga of the Khunjeee Bullet Ships was an especially significant and well-known chapter of galactic history, or at least had been prior to Sobek’s first interment.  Shortly after the Orrkuttssh had ceded control of the galaxy’s settled territories to a coalition of primate civilizations—forming the galaxy’s first, de-facto Republic—the Ships had burst through known space, radiating outward in a vast arc from parts unknown, consuming what they needed and burning what they couldn’t take.  They destroyed civilizations on a dozen worlds before anyone could even catch up to them.  Their vast cylindrical ships were carting their entire population away from their own ruined homeworld, each Bullet a city atop truly mammoth rockets, following nominally linear paths toward target stars as if fired from cyclopean cannons.  The first few Bullets to be encountered were quite primitive machines, cobbled together with less craft than muscle; they used chemical rockets whose fuel requirements were such that the bulk of their interior volume was dedicated to fuel storage.  The explosive nature of this arrangement accounted for the mass and thickness of their external armor.  But as the invasion progressed, more advanced Bullets were encountered, with ion and, eventually, nuclear rockets; and the armor in these was updated  to serve as heat radiators and as reflective, defensive armament. 

The Khunjeee were large therians with the lactating, furry skin of mammals:  hot-blooded, fast-reproducing, fast-growing, and predaceous.  As had the Orrkuttssh before them, they regarded all other species in the universe as prey; unlike the Orrkuttssh, they were impervious to reason, and would not accept surrender or parley.  When one of their city ships encountered an inhabited planet, they settled in orbit around it, sent down troop ships and cargo ships, and wiped out any resistance they encountered.  Then they looted it for petrochemicals, water, metals and industrial raw materials, and any animal life—including surviving sentients—that could reasonably be brought aboard for study, storage and zooculture.  They were not an organized nation; each ship was its own society, headed in its own direction, and once well underway, they did not coordinate their activities.  They simply wanted to pass as quickly as possible through civilized space, taking what supplies they could, each en route to some separate destiny well outside the frontier. 

Although the advance of their propulsion and military technology suggested communication and coordination early on, once the onslaught had settled into its final form, the fleet—if it could be called that—fell into disorganization, as each Bullet appeared to prefer autonomy to community.  Their lack of social unity became their downfall.  If a single Khunjeee ship could be surrounded, it could be destroyed, although an inordinate amount of time and energy was often required to penetrate its armor.  No matter how long it took, though, you could pretty much count on reinforcements never showing up.  The Bullets themselves were not heavily armed, just vast and solidly built; but each was a carrier for dozens of warships, stunningly well-armed and maneuverable.  The most effective means of fighting a Bullet Ship was to mount or launch a strategic thermonuke at either of its weakest points, the mammoth rocket arrays at each end of the cylinder.  Their smallest warships—believed to be unpiloted drones—threw themselves in front of each such attempt, and had to be dispensed with first with lasers, projectiles and missiles.  It was arduous and costly.  No Khunjeee were ever taken alive, nor were any ships captured in one piece.  They could, however, be compelled to break off the attack and flee.  The Bullets accelerated a lot less rapidly than their projectile namesakes, but could accelerate steadily for months or years at a time, achieving stupendous interstellar velocities.  They had no known means of hypertransport; whatever destination they were heading toward, it would probably have to be settled by the distant descendants of the current crews.  By that time, a profound radial speciation would have taken place, superimposed on the radial migration; each Bullet would carry a distinct daughter population, presumably to settle some unfortunate planet in its own uniquely vicious way.

Their long-term strategy was unfathomable at first to many who lived on the planets most vulnerable to attack—and the rare survivor of those that had been attacked—until enough of them had been encountered to trace back trajectories to their presumed source, a lonesome star in resource-poor void well outside the inner frontier, largely surrounded by obscuring nebulae.  Life-sustaining planets were rare in that region, and there were no previously-known civilizations.  It was surmised that the Khunjeee had civilized and then depleted their planet in total isolation, unaware of the interstellar politics playing out around them, of the assistance that could have been theirs had they set out in amity rather than conquest.  They had set out to relieve their overpopulation in much the same manner a supernova relieves its excess mass, by ejecting it outward in a roughly spherical shell.  Presumably most of the Bullets passed through the void into unsettled regions and never again encountered civilization; those relative few who passed through the developing Republic were culturally unprepared for first contact, and did not regard diplomacy as a reasonable option.  Their ships and machines bore a warlike design and purpose, a clear indication of the warlike design and purpose of the beings manning them.  They were xenophobic on a scale that set the standard for evil in all the legends and tales, told in print or on stage and screen, for centuries to come.  They were genocidal maniacs, destroyers of worlds, the enemy of all that was good and pure and peaceful in the universe.  The only good that could be said to have come from their existence was the fact that the Orrkuttssh were no longer regarded as the galaxy’s most hostile race, nor its most destructive.  In fact, the role the Dragons played in organizing the sector defenses had won them high acclaim, and cemented their position as the republic’s military force.  But for all the goodwill they’d banked, it was still the Capstone that came out on top; the Republic, once having come together, was almost immediately replaced by Empire.

It was previously assumed that pillaging a wild planet would be, on average, easier than pillaging a civilized one, because there was no possibility of effective defense.  The Khunjeee were proving that it was easier to pillage a civilized one, because all the infrastructure necessary to obtain, transport, process and consolidate resources was already in place, and because agricultural and zoocultural sectors had usually already hyperextended the land’s natural carrying capacity to levels useful to conquering hordes.  Local populations could be enslaved long enough to do the processing and loading, and then they could be herded into pens for study and husbandry.  Hundreds of millions of therians—billions, even—had been killed or kidnapped, and after the first dozen rescue attempts ended in dismal failure, the contain-and-board policy regarding the Bullets was permanently changed to destroy-on-sight.

Duat had never come under Khunjeee attack, but its sister planet Ahwut had.  The Bullet Ship had been forced to break off its attack after it was heavily damaged in a nuclear strike; many of Duat’s ships, piloted by Sobek’s close kin, had participated in the defense.  Before fleeing the system—and later being harried to destruction by some of the survivors—it had launched a retaliatory missile strike on Duat.  None of its cities were hit, but an orbiting defense station, manned by his paternal relatives, was destroyed.  The battle had claimed half the Duat fleet and had crippled Ahwut’s economy.  The resulting reversal in fortunes, much of which had continued to take place after his first interment, had cost Sobek’s family much of its standing…which was probably, in retrospect, all these generations later, why a fattened venal oligarch like Ibliss had been able to secure his Awakening.

The tumult of the Bullet Ship era passed as quickly as it came.  Once the first wave of ships had been destroyed or had passed through settled space, no more followed.  They had conquered and settled no planets, and claimed no territory; they were simply gone, with naught but chaos and death in their wake.  But they had catalyzed the onset of Empire, substantially depopulated an entire sector, and frightened many nations into permanently changing the way they engaged with others.  Sobek had lost friends, cousins, uncles, and siblings in the fight.  And there was no way to take vengeance, no enemy stronghold to storm, no monarch to be brought to his knees and decapitated the old-fashioned way, with a slow bite to the base of the neck. 

All that was known of Khunjeee spacecraft design had come from a single crashed Bullet on Ahwut, recovered by the clan of Borchuk, his friend and sometime copilot.  In compensation for the Bek clan’s losses in defense of the Chuk clan, they had a share in the salvage, although the machine had been burned and mangled by reentry and impact.  So far as Sobek knew, it was the only recovered Khunjeee craft of any kind, and no one else in the Empire knew the Chuks had it.  It had never flown again, but aspects of its design had been reverse-engineered and retrofitted onto various Chuk and Bek ships, including Sobek’s personal transports (although, not, unfortunately, onto the Talon that Ibliss had retrofitted for his use).  His innocuous-looking puddle jumpers could do some serious damage, and were all but impervious to energy weapons.  Their power requirements were astounding, but could be managed with available fusion reactor technology and some fat tritium tanks.  The Khunjeee technology wasn’t particularly exotic; it was just very, very tough, as hostile and unyielding as its creators.  The hull of a Bullet was constructed of layer after layer of assorted teeth, claws and other nastiness, each section a self-contained booby trap designed to eject or kill boarders, or to inflict maximum destruction in a ramming or self-destruct scenario.  Such a ship could catastrophically sacrifice substantial portions of itself and still keep moving and fighting, although they had no maneuverability whatsoever and were far too clumsy to serve as warships.  They could set a course by the stars at launch time, and then could only accelerate toward a target star until it was time to reverse thrust and begin decelerating.  The Bullets were not fighters in themselves; they were hollow mini-planets housing war fleets.  The most interesting Khunjeee technologies—their weapons—were more well-represented in those fleets than in the Bullets, but so far as anybody knew, every single one of their unvictorious warships had been destroyed in battle or scuttled to radioactive dust.

Evidently, the Ydlenni also had a Bullet Ship.  They were far too big to move around without being noticed, so in all likelihood this was a ship that had crashed here during or after the Khunjeee wars and had eventually been buried under sediment, to be discovered centuries later by the Ydlenni.

The planet suddenly appeared a great deal more valuable.  But that added value was contingent upon someone, anyone, knowing what was buried here, and on their ability to safeguard and study or export it clandestinely.  There was still no indication that there was any inordinate interest on the part of anyone out here.  But he certainly now would have a stronger pretext for investigating piracy, if he could make that case without tipping his hand.

Towhret, like Sobek, had been within Ibliss’ sphere of influence for a much briefer duration than had Aphep, and like Sobek, had never become saturated with Soma or overwhelmed with subliminal suggestions.  Arriving in high orbit, she was dispatched by her husband to  a resort facility, Blue Away, on one of the more southerly continents, while he saw to shuttling down Gamers and their retinues.  After a day spent in quarantine—as a non-frequent flier to this planet, she wasn’t entitled to the expedited quarantine available to Aphep and his minions—she was beginning to shake off the effects of the drug.  She was intended to meet with Ibliss’ water source and attempt to stall acceptance of the next tank, on the pretext of having technical problems with the tanker.  She was unaware of the purpose of the ruse, only that Ibliss frequently engaged in such for reasons that had as much to do with political misdirection as with military commerce.  Unexpectedly ill, having undergone a miserable night of withdrawal, she called ahead early, before the start of business activity, to make her apologies.  With no one manning communications at their end, she left a recorded message. The request was ignored; the ground crew already had the order placed and the tank filled, and wanted to move it out to reclaim the space.  Calls were made to her Talon, which went unanswered; then a high-priority call went out to Dread, which was still in high orbit.  Eventually, nearly a full day after the meeting was to have taken place, notice reached Aphep.

He didn’t regard it as actionable, since the whole point of the exercise had been to delay the shipment; if he simply “forgot” to call back until the next morning (local ground time), so much the better.  The next morning, however, rather than call back, he allowed himself to become caught up in the ceremony of shuttling down another load of Gamers and their retinues.  Orrkuttssh aren’t known for taking intoxicating drink, but they do sometimes, ceremonially, eat prey that has been stimulated into producing intoxicating stress hormones.  Aphep was throwing just such a revel for the last shuttleload of Gamers, all friends of his.  They were all still Soma-saturated, and this intensified the intoxication.

Later in the day, shortly before operations shut down, a high-priority call went out on a commercial channel to the fleet communications satellite orbiting Aten III.  It was encrypted by the satellite and then rebroadcast on a secure military channel to which all the craft in Ibliss’ fleet were tuned.  Ordinarily, the security hacks installed in his ships would prevent anyone other than his inner circle from receiving the most privileged communications, including messages to and from his Game contacts.  But Sobek’s partially-repaired Talon was now capable of receiving and logging the transmission.  And Towhret, although less skilled in technical matters than Sobek, was already conducting her own investigation of the hacked systems on her Talon.  She wasn’t confident that she’d yet found and disabled all the malware in the ship’s computer, but it was at least logging incoming communications from the relay satellite. 

She wouldn’t actually find the communication until the following morning, and only after much more effort would she be able to decrypt it.  In the meantime, she had one more interesting message in the queue, one she was able to decipher much more quickly:  an automatic acknowledgement-of-message receipt from another Talon somewhere on the planet, a ship that had not shown up on her instruments when she’d landed hers.

Sobek was conducting the last interview of the day—with Akhamet, Chief of Botany—when his headset display notified him of the satellite rebroadcast from the supply station.  This was another primate female, prim but less irritable (and irritating) than Alzhor, and the conversation was closer to pleasant.  He didn’t have to interrupt the meeting this time, because he’d anticipated followup traffic and had the Talon’s computer operating at an improved capacity.  He was reasonably sure that his ship would not automatically acknowledge any messages it received while in his custom “communications standby” mode, and also that the message would be properly logged, tagged and deciphered by the time he got back to hear it.

“Sorry about that,” he said, dismissing the headset hologram.  “You were saying?”

“I was explaining the funding,” she replied.  “Each department here is independently funded by corporate and private sponsors.  We also have a general fund into which each department contributes, and that helps cover the entire facility’s overhead, as well as any gaps in any group’s operations, if needed.  Some of our patrons instead contribute directly to another general fund and leave it to our staff to determine departmental distribution.  So there may be multiple layers of agreements to deal with, and the arrangements and agreements may vary from department to department, but I’m pretty sure that in all cases, you’ll find a confidentiality clause protecting those interests.  And I certainly can’t speak on behalf of any other group.  I don’t think you’re going to get any more—excuse me…”

She was receiving a call on her own headset.  She listened for a few seconds, then nodded absently to herself and stood up.  “I’m sorry, Captain Sobek, but there is a situation in my laboratory.  I’m afraid I have to leave you for now.  Would you…would you be willing to see yourself out?  We can resume the interview tomorrow, if you find that acceptable.”

He stood.  “If there is not anything I can assist with, yes, that would suit me.”

“No, thank you.  It is not an emergency, I think, but it will keep me and my staff occupied for the remainder of the evening.”  

He agreed, and she took her leave.  Headed back toward the elevator, he paid attention to how many primates were in the corridors, the directions they were moving in, and whether they took any special notice of him.  There was nothing in the way of hurried gait or general movement in a specific direction, or any indication that there was a “situation” demanding much of the facility’s attention, but there was a tension and an alertness in those he passed.  When he approached the elevator, it identified his PDD and admitted him into the expedited, non-quarantine entrance, allowing him quick exit.

He didn’t go directly back to the ship, but plodded toward the lagoon and removed his boots for some toes-in-mud relaxation.  He gazed up at the stars and considered the situation.

He was closer to his home planet here than to the galactic capital at Abob, which lay in a region of space much closer to the galactic center; there were features of the night sky that were recognizable to him, although most were distorted or the wrong size, making them dreamily unfamiliar.  Having noticed this during that first eventful week, he had made use of the Talon’s observatory to scan and photograph the more intriguing constellations.  Baa and Kaa were both visible from this world.  The Nightbird, one of the brighter constellations of the Duat zodiac, showed up here in almost perfect agreement, only much larger, consuming so much of the sky that it was disorienting, even mildly alarming, to recognize it, as if the canopy of stars was falling toward the ground.  The Dragon, a coal-black dust nebula, was also visible here (albeit only telescopically), but from this angle, it was subtly different in a way that settled, in Sobek’s opinion, an age-old cultural debate among the Orrkuttssh; from this angle, the length of the muzzle was more clearly defined.  The Dragon, contrary to Kuttssh popular belief, was a Long-Face.  All the popular astronomy books that fancifully illustrated the Dragon as wearing a round Short-Face helmet would have to be rewritten.

And there was something about the moon here.  He’d never languished beneath such a giant, bright ball of stone, and it was disconcerting and romantic at the same time.  It seemed to bulge downward at him through the cool night air, so low that he might bump his head on it if he jumped too high.  It cast its own light over the landscape, illuminating it in a way that he had only seen done via artificial light on his own world.  There, the moons were tiny chips of flint, not shiny swelling spheres, and there was no romance about them.

He became aware of lifeforms around him, moving, seeking each other out, engaging in the reptilian pursuits of their animal lives.  There were sounds of insects calling to mates, male amphibians and reptiles warning other males away from their patches of turf, and the splashes and lumberings of larger creatures hunting and evading.  His eyes had adjusted to the moonlit darkness while he mused, but he only now cast them over the tree-lined mudscape of the lagoon, and he saw myriad criss-crossing tracks on the ground, ripples and splashes on the water, and the bumbling, almost planktonic co-orbiting of insects following airborne pheromone trails.  He could smell muddy water and blood and the secretions of all manner of living things, including the madly-flowering plants unfurling in the moonlight, and the dimmer scents of other flowers that had closed with the sunset.  Open flowers dipped and danced as the heavy bodies of pollinating insects alighted and took off from them, and their buzzings, wafting in and out of awareness, accented the symphony playing around him. Although much of the noise had stilled as he’d approached and settled into this particular spot, it had subtly risen back to the normal nighttime cacophony over the past few minutes, and now, with his ears attentive to the noises, it was surprisingly loud, battering his unshielded eardrums from all sides.  

The tableau of life and death reminded him that he was hungry.  He resisted the temptation to wade into the water for some fast food, and put his mind back to the situation at hand.  He reactivated his headset to employ its noise-cancelling feature. 

What was he doing here?  He’d been sent on a mission that he had long suspected and was now, obviously, a smokescreen for something else.  He was no longer ostensibly investigating piracy; he was not even investigating ecoterrorism.  He was now investigating his own investigation, trying to figure out what was going on before he became irretrievably trapped in it.  There was no way he was going to be able to keep up the pretense of interviewing the staff one at a time; they would quickly realize he was simply stalling for time.  He would have to start dealing with them en masse, and would have to do so in such a way as to not tip his hand that backup wasn’t on the way.

Priority:  discover what was really going on here, if possible.  His next move would depend on the tactical situation.

He now had to assume he’d missed his window for a clean escape; with another Talon somewhere in the hemisphere, he’d be unable to take off without being detected.  One potential saving grace was that he had not found any beacons or transponders in the military orbit lanes indicating a permanent presence here, not a support platform or fueling station.  If he took off low and flat, keeping a horizon between him and the other Talon, he could possibly reach orbit before being noticed, but it would be a low orbit, and he’d be stuck there without some kind of additional launch assist. 

Priority:  escape velocity.  A vertical takeoff would get him to a decent altitude, even an escape orbit, but would be detectable by the other Talon.  Unless he could be sure it posed no threat, or could be disabled or jammed during takeoff, he needed a way to keep the planet between it and himself.  This was impossible, given the weight and fuel capacity of his ship.  He needed strap-on boosters, or an extended fuel tank, or an accessible low-orbit assist stage to dock with.  Alternatively, he could substantially lighten the load by removing armor, cargo containers and troop bunks, and the structural reinforcements that secured them.  But without a crew, that was a depressingly daunting task.  And he was very unhappy at the prospect of scrapping any weapons, ammunition or supplies, all of which could be removed with far less effort.

Another possibility would be to fly nape of the planet in the direction of the other ship, low enough to evade detection, to find it and either destroy it on the ground or jam its communications long enough to effect a vertical takeoff; but he didn’t much like the idea of engaging in hostilities until he knew they were actually in effect.  And depending on how distant it was, he might waste too much fuel looking for it to make liftoff.

Priority:  discover the intentions of the other Talon…find out whether it was a threat, or just another rube on a mission for Ibliss. 

His headset chimed, alerting him to another incoming call.  It was time to get back to the ship.

The call was still in progress when he arrived in the cockpit.  “…heavy 32 calling heavy 216.  Talon Constrictor, this is Talon Pelagic; please acknowledge.”

It was a female voice, a Kuttssh voice, all breathy sibilants and high pitches.  Sobek let it prattle on while he quickly reviewed the recording and traced the call.  There was nothing of note in the audio log, just a repeated, urgent request for him to acknowledge the transmission.  The call was being bounced from a geosynchronous commsat, the only satellite, of the dozens currently orbiting, that seemed to be active here.  Sobek suddenly realized that all the settlements he’d previously detected were in a narrow swath of longitudes in this hemisphere; there was evidently only one communications satellite servicing the entire planet, and every inhabited region was situated somewhere beneath it.

He sighed and pressed the Acknowledge key, and then began transmitting his response.  “Talon 32, this is Talon 216, acknowledging.  Is there an emergency I can assist you with?”

“Captain Sobek, is that you?  This is Towhret.  I’m an attaché to Aphep, under Ibliss’ command.  Are you familiar with me?”

“No, madam.  I’m afraid you’re a bit after my time.”  Her name had not come up during his research into the other vessel, but to mention this would be to reveal too much.  She had not provided a rank, so he fell back on the default assumption that she outranked him.

“Well, I’m familiar with you.”  No surprise there.  “And I’m familiar with your current mission.  I have information to pass on to you immediately.  Are you alone, and is this line secure?”

“I am alone.  To my knowledge, no one is listening in.” 

“Before going any further, I need you to confirm something.  Can you please scan my signal and let me know whether my MILRET key is being transmitted?”

Sobek had already disabled the MILRET key in his own radio, and assumed Towhret had done the same, or tried to.  The military-retransmission key was an embedded signal that signaled any relaying satellites to retransmit the broadcast, at a much higher power level, outward, to any fleet ships in the surrounding solar system.  Unless Ibliss had embedded an additional, encrypted retransmit key in such a way that Sobek was unable to find it, his ship was now incapable of using the satellite to relay his signal, until such time as he reactivated the key.  “Acknowledged.  Please transmit voice or data for analysis.”  She responded by uploading a benign, banal data stream, a dump of her ship’s manifest.  Performing a quick waveform analysis on Towhret’s transmission, he determined that she had (probably) correctly disabled the key on her ship.  “I confirm your ship is not broadcasting MILRET.”  Or at least that I’m not receiving it.  As disconcerting as this other possibility was, it was pointless to bring it up.

“Good.  Listen carefully.  You may wish to record this conversation.”

I am already recording.  “Proceed.”

A brief pause while she composed herself, then:  “Ibliss has a weapon capable of destroying the planet, and I think he intends to use it.  Here, soon.  We are far out of range of anyone who could assist, and there is no other authority to appeal to prevent the attack.  I believe we need to evacuate anybody we can, immediately.  But I don’t know how to get evacuation underway on a planetary scale, or how to avoid tipping him off in the process.”

Sobek’s mind began silently contemplating that prospect while his ears continued to listen.  He thought it best not to interrupt with questions until she was finished.  Judging by her cadence and formality, she had probably rehearsed this presentation, and in true soldierly economy had designed it to deliver all the information he needed with minimal exposition.

“Ibliss has been engaged in criminal activity on this planet, and has been employing mind-control technology on his men in order to keep it secret.  I suspect he has been accumulating wealth, influence and weaponry in order to foment a rebellion.  He may be trying to establish a breakaway republic.  I’m not sure what the end game is.  In any event, he definitely has a functional planet-killer missile, and I have reason to believe it has been armed and is targeting this planet.  I think he may be trying to destroy potential threats to his plan, including, possibly, evidence of his operations.  Possibly he intends to occupy this planet after all settlement has been eradicated.”

He thought, and continued listening.

“Your mission is a ruse.  You were intended to discover the identities of—or at least confirm the existence of—a person or persons on the planet who could expose or disrupt his long-term plan.  I gather that it has taken you longer to accomplish this than he expected.  If my information is correct, he has decided to move forward anyway, probably because he is beginning to suspect that either your mission has failed, or you have discovered its true purpose.”

Sobek had begun to feel comfortable with the surmise that the mission was intended to fail from the outset, that he’d never been intended to discover anything; that he was only here to hack into the primate base and lower its defenses.  If instead he actually had been intended to succeed, then whatever happened here—whatever calamity Ibliss had set in motion for this place—was his proximate fault.  Because he had been slow to move, slow to figure things out, the primates’ facility—all the settlements here—could be wiped out.  This quickly became the foremost thought in his mind.

He continued listening.

“Ibliss has probably built safeguards for his mission into your ship.  I understand you like to fly with a specific set of modifications.  I would expect him to work countermeasures into those modifications, and possibly to cripple some of them.  I would recommend that you thoroughly inspect the ship for sabotage and clandestine monitoring devices, but unfortunately I don’t know if you have enough time.”

His mind wandered a bit at this point, as she was not bringing to his attention anything new.  He ran down a mental checklist of subsystems that might still bear scrutiny.  He gave thought to whether any aspect of his mission retained any priority whatsoever…whether it was worth keeping up any pretense at all of continuing an investigation.  He ran through a hasty inventory of the equipment and armament that would be at his disposal if he had access to Towhret’s ship as well as his own, and wondered whether there would be anything that could save this planet.  Maybe there was something here on the ground—maybe even in the primates’ salvaged Bullet—that could help. 

At the very least, he didn’t have to worry about avoiding the other Talon or concealing his liftoff.  If nothing else, he could just fly away, leaving the entire mess behind.  And then…

And then what?  He wouldn’t have enough fuel for a controlled flight back Outer, and he had no chance of rejoining Fleet if he could.  He could at best arrange a long, slow transfer orbit to another planet, but there was nowhere to go to ground anywhere else in this solar system.  To get away from here, he had to find a bridge gate for his ship or a teleport platform that he or the ship could use.  To get away from here, he had to get back to one of Ibliss’ Fear stations.

One of which was supposedly on its way here.  It may already be in orbit.  It may—

It could be the mother ship for Towhret’s Talon, and he’d ask her about it when she had completed her presentation.  He had a new priority:  locate the station, whether still en route or in orbit, and make arrangements to dock…to assault and take it by force, if necessary.  This would require a tactical plan, something that would require time and modelling effort at a tactical console.  A Talon is heavily outmatched by a Fear station, but they probably wouldn’t be expecting him to drive right down their throat…

Tactical planning on top of wrapping up his mission, and possibly engaging in warning, evacuation, and planetary defense operations.  He’d really been hoping to eat this day.  Sleep was a fading possibility too.  Traditionally, each soldier was permitted time for self-pity, as long as it was kept entirely private.  When you have a whole ship to yourself, there’s no need to hold back.  Sobek loaded up a lungful of air, readying a dispirited growl—

“Sobek, are you there?”

Belay that growl.  He held one lung for the time being, allowing the other to exhale as he replied.  “I am here.  Can you repeat your last?”

She sighed audibly.  “Take a look at that data dump.  When planning your next move, remember that the most important consideration right now is the degree to which you might still be influenced by his mind-control apparatus.  For that reason, I urge you to consider allowing me to plan the evacuation, while you wrap up operations there.  I…I didn’t want to have to contact you about this at all, but I think time is running out and I had no other options.”

“What do you think the time frame is?  Best guess.”

“Best guess?  Our window began two days ago, local time, and could run another two years.  Local time.”

“Fantastic.  Have you no way of detecting the missile?  Can we retask any equipment here without raising unnecessary alarm?”

“I don’t see how.  I can contact someone in one of the settlements and have them point some dishes outward, but eventually he’ll start asking questions.  We could distribute the search to every settlement if we want to improve the odds, but we would also multiply the questions.”

“Fair enough.  Yes, put something together, and if time permits later, we can compare notes.  Until then, consider me under Ibliss’ influence and act accordingly, until such time as you’re sure the effect has worn off.”

“Another possibility occurs to me with respect to detecting the missile.  I do still have the option of commandeering Aphep’s Fear station.  It should be able to spot the missile, and possibly to destroy it.”  She immediately regretted saying this, as it was in violation of Sobek’s last order.  But surely he’d already considered the possibility.

“How easily do you think you could accomplish that?” he asked. 

She hesitated.  Her impulse was to reply that she alone among the crew was not mind-controlled, and if she could gain control of the Drone apparatus sending subliminal signals to them, she could take control of the ship.  “By way of improvisation, I suppose I could manage pretty easily,” she said, guardedly.

“You catch on fast,” he said.  “I’m transmitting my ship’s command codes and my personal authentication credentials to you now.  Use them if you feel you have to commandeer my ship.”

He cut off the call after the transmission, leaving her to recover her dignity while he pored over the data dump.  Right away he saw some useful information:  Talon Pelagic was base-configured as an air wing subcarrier, capable of carrying sixteen one-man fighters, two luxury shuttles, four medium bomber / troop transport ships, four utility aircraft and a mobile hospital.  This base configuration had, since its initial delivery, been modified to carry liquid chemical and water tanks, which left room only for a portion of the hospital, one transport, one shuttle and one fighter, but this included a reasonable store of fuel and supplies for each.  However, he carried no one capable of crewing the bombers.  Sobek could pilot any of the machines—had earned much of his youthful legend in an Incisor fighter, and had begun his flight career as a Prehensor copilot, flying search-and-rescues in that first war, so very long ago--but could not manage all of the functions of a Carnassial bomber without a weapons officer.  Perhaps specific actions could be preprogrammed, though, and perhaps the Talon’s complement of aircraft could be remote-piloted in an assault against Dread.  All except the Tropic shuttle, which would have no offensive capability, and the Chorion hospital enclosure, which probably wouldn’t be in a complete enough state to fly.

But it was the start of a tactical unit.  With some time and planning, this tiny fleet could provide assault, support and security elements.  And between the two Talons, there was substantial volume to evacuate a great many Ydlenni-sized locals.

This turned his thoughts back to the matter at hand.  He needed to take his leave of the original investigation, and make an effort to assist in any detection-and-destruction or evacuation operations to be undertaken sometime in the next two years.  He should make a last-ditch effort to find whomever he could trust here at Eden and then reveal to them what he’d learned.  He wasn’t in the mood for a Q&A, and found himself particularly irritated by primate jabber when tired.

He released the growl.

He rinsed off his feet and got back into uniform.  He felt a need for formality about this, and opted for a clean parade-class uniform, with boots that hadn’t yet been stained in the lagoon.  He recalled a line from the recruit indoctrination program’s training manual:  “A gentleman retains his sword by his side even in clement times” [Combat Verses, SITUATIONAL VARIABILITY 16].  Full parade dress calls for a ribbon strip to summarize combat awards, a long sword strapped to the utility belt and an additional short sword slung over the back:  the Scars, the Tooth and the Claw.  His short sword had recently been used to clean bushmeat carcasses for refrigeration, and he thought it should undergo ritual cleaning before being publicly presented, so he hoped the Ydlenni wouldn’t mind its omission (or that of the ribbons, which he simply didn’t have on hand).  He slung the long sword and his combustion pistol and checked himself in a surround mirror, having just invented yet another practical variation on the Orrkuttssh infantry uniform:  the Semi-Dress Tactical.

Before heading out, he paused at a terminal to execute the probe program that he’d previously assembled.  A blast of radio waves of various frequencies bathed the exposed portions of the Bullet Ship and surrounding facility.  A wave of data came back for the probe to laboriously analyze, in the form of analog reflection-and-ranging as well as of digital responses transmitted by any wireless communications devices within range.  He was startled to see the overhead lights flicker a moment after the probe’s activation.  He would have to check the Talon’s power systems when he returned.

A small delegation was waiting for him in the foyer when the elevator descended into the quarantine box.  Although the time was well past what Sobek assumed to be the end of the work day, the warehouselike interior was just as brightly-lit as ever, and he heard or sensed what felt like a flurry of rapid activity behind all the partitions and in the rooms and offices around and beneath the area.

The Ydlenni were not happy to see him, and chattered quietly among themselves while regarding him.  He suddenly felt conspicuously spiffy, sort of ostentatiously exposed.  The gleaming white and reflective red of his fresh uniform contrasted with his more accustomed mud-and-foliage-colored fatigues, and he knew he was highly visible to both primate eyes and security systems.  His sword harness and the new, unbroken boots limited his mobility, and the quarantine continued to confine him even after the elevator ascended.  For the first time since he’d thrashed his way out of the incubation chamber into which his egg had been deposited, he felt claustrophobic.

“The door appears to be stuck,” he said, mildly but guardedly.

“The door will not be opening, Captain Sobek,” said Lucipher, stepping to the front of the delegation.  “Your investigation is at an end, as is ours.  You have fulfilled your master’s programming, and have confirmed to us that you are acting on behalf of his Gaming interests.  Before we decide what to do with you, we want you to witness something, a presentation our Ecoactivism Department has put together for you.”

Sobek resisted the urge to protest.  No sense opening his mouth until he knew what the Sokharr was going on.  But he tensed muscles in his legs and all along his spine, subtly preparing his body to be swung as a club against the quarantine walls.

“Obviously you know that our facility is built on a derelict Bullet Ship.  Obviously you know we are tracking and attempting to counteract Gamer activity on this planet.  So obviously your probe was intended to disrupt our activity here.  I just want you to know that you have failed, and that we have a longer reach than you do.”

Lucipher nodded toward one of the others, who produced a remote control device, ridiculously tiny to Sobek’s eyes, which (s)he used to activate a large concealed transparent viewscreen, recessed into the high ceiling.  It descended to a level within the primates’ field of view, a bit low for Sobek’s comfort but still readable.  The screen flashed and settled into a multifunction display, with a large, blank window in the middle surrounded by several smaller, rectangular windows, all depicting some arcane digital operation rendered in unfamiliar Uleni script.  “Take a look at Ibliss’ base, seen through the eyes of one of his own abominations.”

Sobek’s eyes focused on the middle of the screen, but he began slowly, subtly closing down his auditory meati in preparation for the blast his combustion pistol would make in these close quarters when he drew it and fired.  He was starting to understand what the Ydlenni were accusing him of, and it made sense; in retrospect, he had no idea why he’d activated the probe or dressed in new formal clothing before coming over.  Ibliss evidently still had some kind of control over him.  They were right to fear him, but they assumed too much in regarding him as allied with Ibliss, and he hoped for a means, an insight perhaps gleaned from the current situation, to help him make that point with a minimum of violence.

The screen began to register an image, which was very dark and indistinct, and appeared to be patchy and irregularly-constructed, with shifting discontinuities and blank regions.  Sobek held one lung full and ready for explosive action while the other slowly respired, keeping his brain fully-oxygenated.  Other than maintaining his alert, semi-horizontal action posture, he did nothing to betray the outward calm he was laboring to project. 

The screen image changed dramatically, registering a bright spot that washed out much of the view.  Then the screen compensated, and the image resolved into the interior of a room—no, the interior of a shipping container, the door (or front wall) of which was opening by swinging downward and away from the point of view.  The container’s interior was dark; the light flooding the scene was coming in from the opening.  Once the door had completely opened, the scene became static, with no further change for the better part of a minute.  But the light—the entire scene—was sporadically interrupted by a sliding darkness that momentarily blanked the entire display every few seconds, and Sobek found himself blinking in sympathy with the interruptions.  Then he realized that what he was seeing was blinking.  The screen was showing a scene through the eyes of someone else.  Or something else.

Then the point of view began to move.  The motion was not linear, but bumpy and rhythmic.  The observer in which the eyes resided was walking.  Judging by the scale provided by the interior of the cargo container, the strides were long.  Long and dragonlike.  Bipedal, semi-erect, and tall.

As the scene moved with the point of view, Sobek noticed that portions of the screen remained patchy and unresolved, such as an ovoid section toward the bottom.  It occurred to him that rather than looking out through embedded eye cameras, he was in fact seeing a translation of the neuronal perception of the visual field; the screen was capturing video from the visual cortex of whatever was walking out of the container.  The blurry regions and discontinuities were translation errors, presumably caused by the observer’s attention wandering through the visual field as well as by the lack of focus at the periphery of its vision.  The observer was, like Sobek, mostly binocular but with a wider field of view and less central overlap.  The blur at the bottom of the screen was the hump of the observer’s snout, with its nostrils indistinct and out of focus, and shaped intriguingly like Sobek’s own usually-unnoticed snout blur.  Blurry irregularities at the periphery were the transparent artifacts of the side of that same snout, cast by each eye:  one to the left, seen by the right eye but not by the left, and vice versa.

This development was so interesting Sobek found himself transfixed; he began to relax slightly, opening one auditory meatus.  But he kept his spine and legs tensed.

The observer blinked a few times once fully out of the container and in the light of the surrounding area; Sobek recognized this as a cargo hold, probably from a very large Orrkuttssh ship.  The observer turned back at the container it had just vacated; its eyes were well-suited to dimness, but not to full darkness, and, already adjusting to the light, found the interior of the container to be a featureless blackness.  The video was sharper in fully-lit surroundings, but Sobek was able to notice that its color response was flatter than his own.  What he presumed to be the standard brownish-red of the container was rendered as a sepia tone, and the deep blue of the floor markings was a dull blue-gray.

“Have you yet discerned what you are witnessing?” asked Lucipher, with a faintly mocking tone that the translator didn’t pick up on, but which Sobek’s now-trained ears didn’t miss.  That was the most disconcerting thing about the entire surreal situation:  the degree to which the Ydlenni appeared to have turned on him.  Evidently they’d hidden a talent for deception behind that pleasant, humble demeanor.  And evidently he’d not bonded with them to the degree he had supposed.

“At a guess, this is the interior of a command station or a cargo ship,” he replied.  “But I’m not sure what is recording the video.”

Lucipher’s expression softened from sardonic pleasure to mild curiosity, as if wondering whether Sobek’s response could be trusted.  “What you are seeing, or rather seeing through, is one of the animals Ibliss has criminally distorted for use in the Game.  His men have taken indigenous life from this planet and made monsters.  This one, kidnapped from this very preserve and modified in his laboratory, is being let out of its indecently-small enclosure for its daily exercise, after which it will be fed and then returned to darkness.  They have trained it so that it moves about on cue; it is the only way they can direct its movements and actions on a daily basis without putting themselves at risk.  It is a very big monster, you see.

“The scene is the cargo hold of Ibliss’ command station, the portion that he has converted to a kennel.  Adjacent to this kennel is a genetics laboratory where he cooks up his monsters, a breeding lab where he incubates them, and an abattoir where he dissects the failures and prepares meals to serve the victors.  Adjacent to this entire complex is the arena in which his monsters are exhibited, and where they sometimes engage in battle for the delight of his paying spectators.

“We have contrived to implant some of the most impressive specimens of this planet’s fauna with TransCom Entanglement Communications Devices.  What you are seeing is realtime, not a radio transmission.”  Sobek understood this to mean that the monster had a brain implant somewhat like a miniature TransNet station.  “Through their eyes, we have mapped much of his facility, and have determined a great deal about his methods.  We know who is participating in his Game, where they obtain their animals, and how they’re modifying them.  We know routines, procedures, and schedules.

“And, because our entanglement communications are two-way, we know precisely what this beast is about to do.”  He turned his attention to another Ydlenni seated at a desk in a partially-enclosed cubicle in a shadowy recess where the wall met the floor, well off to Sobek’s left.  “Agin, is the command channel active?”

Agin consulted his console.  “Green is the color, sir.”

“Proceed.”

Agin activated something on his control panel and the viewscreen subtly changed, taking on a red border.  The action abruptly changed too, as the point of view rapidly swept through the observer’s space, panning from left to right and back again, then shot forward with a much faster version of that bumpy gait.  The monster was running.

Ibliss was brooding in his sinister high-backed chair, suitably adorned with horns and wings and other icons of dragonhood intended to subdue inferiors and visitors.  It was a maxim of command that subordinate Orrkuttssh were generally amenable to cowing via visual stimuli.  Whereas in the Good Old Days a sudden flush of bright color in the neck folds or a sharply raised dorsal crest would induce the intended awe and submission, these days the formality of civilization and of Service required that the cues be somewhat softened and standardized.  Iconography was employed throughout any military vessel to reinforce the inferiority of the underclasses, and to exalt the superiority of the higher ranks.  But Dragon shapes and symbols, while often intimidating to other species, didn’t invoke quite the same mental processes, and could be counterproductive.  The proper employment of propaganda was a fundamental aspect of Orrkuttssh Service, an essential component of officer training, and frankly, something that the Kuttssh did better than the Orrks.  For this reason, the Short-Faces were obviously better suited to command than the Long-Faces.  No officer that cannot lie convincingly should ever be given command over anything more than a handful of close confederates.  Long-Faces, with their pyschological disposition toward utter honesty, could lead troops in small-unit combat, but were not to be trusted with warships.  But regardless of one’s skills, misleading, or euphemizing, was a more difficult business when directed at aliens, whose body language tended to focus on different anatomical features, and were generally more adept at reading faces than skeleto-muscular flexings. 

He was unhappy with current events, and half-hoped that some underling would rush to his office, interrupting his thoughts, so that he could deliberately rotate the chair toward the intruder and deny whatever request followed.  He so loved the theater that his accommodations provided for his command style. 

His intelligence agents operating within the sphere of Capstone centers of power were quite effective at returning information to him, but, he suspected, were hampered in their ability to sow disinformation precisely because of the barriers their reptilian communication methodologies imposed to interspecies understanding.  He had hoped that those agents would, by now, have successfully recruited a wide variety of aliens sympathetic to his cause, but most other species out there seemed to be truly awed and unwilling to cross the Greys; perhaps there simply were no aliens sympathetic to the cause.  Maybe every living being in the universe, outside of the Orrkuttssh, truly believed their overlords were benevolent and that an all-powerful government was in everybody’s best interest.

Whatever the case, Ibliss was running out of time.  He had reacted too hastily to what he’d perceived the lack of usable intelligence; in the time since launching Nemesis, he’d learned enough about the goings-on elesewhere in the Empire to give him cause to rethink that decision.  But the very nature of the operation—to conceal a planetwide attack by disguising the weapon as a natural phenomenon—made a recall impossible.  The asteroid was en route, and it could not be stopped.  Its path would be traced back to the belt, and the collision that had set it in motion would be extrapolated.  As long as Terror was very distant from the site of that collision when the investigation took place, there would be nothing to connect him to the event.

All he could do was deal with the aftermath.  The destruction of Aten III would take place, and the Capstone would have to be alerted when it happened.  They would have to send envoys and investigators, and Ibliss would be questioned over his inability to detect and stop the disaster.  But his men would be long free of any chemical and psychological traces of Soma, and would remember nothing of the “training mission” that had set the collision into motion.  There would be nothing except his own memory to betray its purpose, and as a sub-command officer of the Navy, he should be exempt from coercive interrogation for as long as he gave them no reason whatsoever to suspect direct involvement.  The station log had already been doctored to show Terror occupying the gas giant’s opposing libration point, at a considerable distance from the impact that had ostensibly set the asteroid on its collision course toward III.

His long practice as a performer of Navy propaganda should serve him well in that regard.  It was the primary reason why he had maneuvered himself into sub-command in such a remote backwater.  His compatriots elsewhere in the Empire were all engaged in more civilized regions, in more civilized pursuits.  Their job was to blend in comfortably, to garner trust and goodwill, and then to sow confusion and disorder when the time came; his job was to finance the operations, determine when that time had come, and then to put things in motion.

The time would come, it now seemed, when Nemesis hit Aten III.  He only had to decide whether to launch a galaxy-wide ambush at that time, seizing upon the moment of greatest confusion to gain the element of surprise, or to wait for the ensuing investigation to take place, hoping to draw enough resources away from the command centers to assist his confederates in their sabotage efforts.  It suddenly seemed a great shame that there was only one planet in this system worth destroying; to think of the diversion he could cause with more!

Still better, to think what a diversion he could cause with several Nemeses in civilized space!

He was still pondering how best to pull the trigger on the insurrection when the general alarm sounded.  He activated the intercom to the bridge.  “Report!”

“Sir, we have reports of an attack in the cargo hold.”

Did the Capstone already know of his plan?

“Have we been boarded?” 

“Unclear, sir.  The animal handlers are scrambling, and security teams are still en route.  There is no situational report yet.”

“The animal handlers?”

“Yes, sir.  The livestock hold is the scene of the…attack.”

“Is it an animal that’s attacking?”

“It seems that way, sir.  Actually…several.”

Sabotage.  Definitely.

“Have an escort team meet me at Lift 98,” he commanded, directing them to the nearest personnel elevator to his office.  “I’m going down to check on this myself.”

Ibliss and four of his personal guards arrived on the scene two minutes later, and found a scene of destruction that was unprecedented, in his experience, on a Fear station during peacetime.  Rex had rampaged through the animal hold, stomping and biting at least ten of his minions to death.  He had then used his head and tail to smash open several other containers, freeing the surreptitiously-cloned descendants of the candidates Ibliss had previously hosted here, including Busy, Handy, and Sly’s gang.  At least nine other monsters, of various sizes, were roaming the hold; some were merely seeking concealment or safety in numbers, but others were actively attacking the animal handlers who came within range, out of either hunger or territorial rage.  Ibliss witnessed Rex charging and bashing open the door securing his feed animals in their own enclosure, but rather than setting upon any of these, he turned tail and charged back out, allowing them to make their escape.  Most of them were too timid and lethargic to take action, but two of them, panicked by Rex’ appearance and the noise out in the hold, bolted, and in their passing they damaged other enclosure doors, knocking over monitoring terminals and stacks of supplies.  Two more of Ibliss’ personnel were trampled to death as he watched.

The obvious solution would be to simply open one of the nearby large cargo-container airlocks and flush the local atmosphere and any loose animals out into space.  But this would cost Ibliss more men and some of the other animals that had not yet broken free, in addition to the supplies and unrelated cargo that had not yet been moved to its destination since being brought aboard.  To minimize damage, he instead resolved to destroy Rex and recapture as many of the other animals as possible.

Sobek was transfixed.  He was watching a scene of such admirable destruction, from a point of view so convincingly draconian, that it was almost possible to imagine he were perpetrating it.  He cleared his throat—the rumble startled several of his captors—and asked, “Are you controlling it?”

Agin glanced at Lucipher, who turned from the display screen.  “Rex cannot really be controlled.  He can at best be…suggested.  But there are others there fully under our control, creatures that were also outfitted with miniature TransCom terminals before Ibliss poached them from our facility.”  He turned back to the screen, and at a second glance from Agin, nodded.

Ibliss was barking orders, but his voice was lost in the noise of the rampage, and he had left his headset on his desk.  He seized the set from the nearest underling, which was wirelessly connected to the hold’s intercom system, rather than to the entire shipboard system, as was the case with his own.  He pointed at Rex, some distance away and making toward the arena, scattering the poorly-armed veterinary staff to his front.  “Bring it down!  Kill it!”  The investment in Rex was substantial, but the damage potential was astronomical, and Ibliss couldn’t even imagine the potential consequences of a deep investigation of his animal husbandry practices.  Perhaps it was just as well at this point that Nemesis was irrevocably committed, as the only way out of this situation seemed to be forward.  “Shoot it in the body.  Save the head for study!”  The remaining two ambulatory handlers flanked the monster and fired tranquilizer grappler launchers, each lodging a barbed hook into one of the shoulders, weighing him down with heavy cables anchored to the launchers, which began pumping paralytics while they struggled to hold him down.

Upon feeling this, or perhaps on hearing Ibliss’ last command, Rex seemed to understand; he paused, turned toward Ibliss and began running with terrifying speed.  At the same time, several other of the nearby animals hesitated, then burst into a flurry of seemingly deliberate destructive activity, ramming personnel, smashing equipment, and clawing open control pedestals.

Upon hearing the translation from his headset, Agin manipulated some controls on his console, and then turned to Lucipher.  “Ibliss has just issued a command to kill the beast in such a way as to preserve the brain.  I have attempted to redirect its attack toward him.  I hope to provoke a defensive response that destroys the ECD.”

Sobek spoke up again.  “So you are ecoterrorists.  Ibliss wasn’t lying to me.”

Lucipher spoke without turning.  “Terrorists, by his definition, perhaps.  But engaged in a righteous cause.”  Now he turned to face his captive.  “We don’t know yet what, if anything, he lied to you about, but we will find out shortly.” 

Sobek wasn’t eager to be interrogated.  He’d seen plenty of “righteous causes” in his career and had learned that conscience and a desire for justice—however defined by the individual or group doing the defining—could lead to some pretty horrendous consequences any time they were driven by anger.  As the others remained focused on the display screen, he again tensed his body, waiting for a moment of powerful-enough distraction to grant him the initiative.  He had certainly underestimated these furries; they had seemed nothing more than flower-eating, nature-obsessed appetizers, and he had become complacent in their company.  But those who think with their hearts instead of their heads are always easy tools for those who think with their teeth and claws, and evidently there were some carnivores among the command structure here.  There is nothing so easily led around by his ideals than an idealist.  Still, none of the little snacks was visibly carrying a weapon, and he could fight his way out if only he could break containment…

As the two keepers tried to drag him down, Rex stomped his way toward a retreating Ibliss, who ducked behind a control console.  The paralytics seemed to finally be having an effect, as Rex’ stride was slowing.  One of his security escort took the opportunity to step between them, using a grenade launcher to lob a small high-explosive charge into the beast’s abdomen.

Like the Dragons of Erkhott, Rex had a light armor of abdominal ribs, but these were not anchored to his spine, and were not proof against explosion.  A moment after the round penetrated the soft flesh, it detonated.  One of the animal keepers was obliterated by bone shrapnel, and as Rex toppled forward, he fell on and crushed the other.  But large reptiles do not die easily or quickly, and as Rex made contact with the floor, his back and neck arched and his head swept backward, bringing his jaws into contact with Ibliss.

Ibliss bit back.  The two of them thrashed interminably while his guards tried to manhandle the jaws back open. 

As the smoke cleared on the scene of demolition, Rex was curling backward in premature rigor as the paralytic agents loosened all muscles save those along his spine and hind legs, which were in spasm; Ibliss was staggering to his feet, his tail nearly severed at the base, left arm mangled, left leg crushed, and left eye punctured; a small herd of the long-necked quadrupeds was stampeding among the containers; and the broken remains of more than a dozen of his dead and dying crew members continued writhing and flopping on the floor.

Limping badly, without the use of his tail to provide support for his savaged leg, Ibliss worked his way around Rex’ head, to peer into the left eye of the beast, now staring without comprehension into the cavernosity of the livestock hold.  Ibliss leaned down, shaking and bleeding, and stared into the unseen face of whomever was still watching.

The screen faded on Ibliss’ visage, to a dark red, then to black.  The remote ECD was still transmitting, but as Rex’ consciousness faded from massive blood loss, his sensoria ceased reporting their impressions to it.  Agin was receiving an empty channel.

“Keep that channel open,” Lucipher commanded.  “Ibliss will—“

A loud crack rent the air as Sobek’s tail made contact with the glass wall, and several of the mammals, including Lucipher, jumped most gratifyingly.  Before they could react further, Sobek swung his body in the opposite direction, clubbing the quarantine’s other wall with his tail, this one with his head.  Neither wall budged, nor showed any damage, but he had reason to hope that he was weakening the seals between the walls and ceiling; that noise had sounded to him like fasteners and adhesive breaking.  He swung a third time.  He didn’t notice Lucipher touching his headset to activate the security channel, and didn’t hear the command that brought fifteen uniformed and heavily-armed Ydlenni running into the room from a nearby armory (which had been described to him by his hosts, and registered by Sobek’s previous scans, as a storage closet).  Nor did he see the lone, unclothed Grey that accompanied them.

“Stop that,” Lucipher ordered. 

The Grey stepped forward and stridulated some splattering noise, which Sobek heard in between swings.  He paused to check out this new development, and a moment later his chestbox succeeded in translating the wet, rubbery speech:  “I have him.”

Instantly, Agin left his seat, and he and the others standing in the vicinity quickly moved behind the newcomer, arraying themselves in a curious wedge shape, two lines meeting in a near-right angle a pace or two to his rear.

The Grey splattered again, and before Sobek’s chestbox could come up with the translation, he felt peculiar, as if tired and intoxicated at the same time.  Having never undergone surgical anasthesia, he didn’t recognize the sensation of being put to sleep.  As he lost muscular control, collapsing onto his right side, his chestbox offered its rendition of what was presumably a reasonable facsimile of a Uleni command:  “Rest.”