“The Long Watch, vol I: The Beginning”
by Ryan Patrick with Gerald Moore
1.
Sobek was pissed. For those incapable of interpreting the body language of a large, hostile lizard, he helpfully projected a
number of terrifying, hateful noises. He
was also moving quickly, mindful that fast-moving, reptilian predators tend to
inspire a fleeing impulse in most other animals. Everything within earshot was scrambling away
from him, except for the underlings who were obliged to hold their posts. These instead flattened themselves against
the wall and clamped down on their involuntarily muscle responses as best they
could.
In his language, the name of his people was pronounced as a low, rumbling growl punctuated by two sibilant consonant sounds. His own name was pronounced as a hiss followed by a punctuated low roar, joined by a half-articulated guttural noise amplified by his throat resonator. Most other species couldn’t understand their talk, which typically consisted a rapid sequence of finely-timed, clicking pulses modulating the drone of a steady, low-frequency bellow. So those who were in Service, or otherwise exposed to aliens, wore in their armor pectoral amplifiers, or “chestboxes,” that translated it for beings with ordinary ears and projected it from a height appropriate for most other races, and transmitted alien speech translations to their own ears, via headset, or to their internal resonating cavities via electromagnetic induction. The closest most species ever got to pronouncing the name of his people correctly was “Orrkuttssh.” His name was most closely rendered, in his own language, as “Chwbkk.”
Vowels aren’t so much pronounced, in Orrkuttssh, as implied.
The Orrkuttssh use a stiff tongue, rooted in the lower jaw, to approximate sounds that other races make using pursed lips, so their pronunciations necessarily differ from those of others. All that they and most other species could agree upon regarding the name of his race was that it had two fuzzy syllables. No one knew the meaning of “Orrkuttssh”, or its origin; it was widely assumed that it meant “dragon,” as that was the informal name by which his race was known—the name they advertised--throughout the Empire. Since Sobek was one of the Immortal Decorated, a respectful long hiss officially preceded that name, when addressed by most of the other Long-Faces; and the Short-Faces, except for those of exalted military rank, simply mispronounced it, using an equivalent term from their own dialect. Only the highest-ranking Shorts found themselves in a position to address him directly by name, though; Long and Short had separate military hierarchies, actually entirely separate subcultures, generally suited to quite different purposes. Other species’ languages, even those which acknowledged military ranks, had no honorifics specific to positions such as his, but he avoided contact with them anyway, in the interest of interspecies relations. They tended to be terrified of Dragons up close, and he tended to salivate visibly when catching scent of them. When dealing with aliens, he usually identified himself as a Captain, which was the common name of two military ranks he’d achieved, one in the Airmobile Infantry and one in the Stellar Navy; the two ranks differed greatly in magnitude, however, as measured by numbers of men under command, and he had in fact gone on to higher rank in the Infantry since achieving that designation. As a title, it was generic-sounding enough, it conveyed a certain authority that even civilians could respond to, and it was less confusing than the labyrinthine arrangement of ranks and sub-ranks currently subdividing the Service under the Imperial bureaucracy.
His current utterance was a long, rambling grumble set against the rhythmic counterpoint of clacking teeth, which translated to a stream of profanity in the dialect of his homeworld.* He was no less taciturn, normally, than any other mature male of his subspecies, but at the moment quite angry, and an angry Orrk is quite a garrulous reptile, full of hiss and vinegar. During battle, the hulls of their ships fairly thrum with the bass rumble of archosaurian fury. When massed on the ground, they can deliver, via grumbling and stomping, an unnerving seismic vibration well in advance of their movements, drawing immense psychological advantage from the instinctive panicked responses many animal species have to such phenomena as earthquakes and dragon teeth. But military discipline keeps the rank and file relatively quiet most of the time when on duty. It would simply otherwise be impossible to get anything done over the din.
The great benefit to being an Immortal Decorated is that you get to live essentially forever, or at least for as long as you can survive combat. Once you’ve proven yourself Decorated by surviving a hundred battles, you gain periodic access to Sleep privileges. Once you’ve proven yourself Immortal by surviving a thousand battles, your access becomes unlimited. Hundreds of thousands of Decorated—both Orrk and Kuttssh—still slumber in technological Sleep even now, waiting to be awakened, as by the manpower needs of some future war, by contractual obligation to one’s descendants, or by the ceremonial requirements of the State. Due to the natural regenerative capabilities of the Orrkuttssh, given a long enough Sleep, a warrior can emerge from the chamber more youthful than when interred. But this can take hundreds or thousands of years of uninterrupted slumber, and its effectiveness depends on the age of the warrior. So the downside to being an Immortal Decorated is that while your existence may span millions of years, you may well spend thousands of those in deep hibernation, trying to rejuvenate or at least break even on the aging process. And you don’t often get much say in when you’re forcibly awakened. When you are awake, it seems as though you’re always doing something Very Important, something at least Important enough to justify the vast expense of keeping your living corpse half-frozen in a perpetually-maintained Sleep chamber tucked away somewhere in your clan’s crypt. You are being kept Perpetual by the largess of the State, and the State’s needs set your life’s alarm clock and curfew. It’s just like being a soldier always has been, only you can’t look forward to retirement. There is, however, one other perk of the award: exclusivity and the privileges it accords. Since the end of the Age of Legends, the upper limit to the number of Immortal has been kept fixed at one million. In this current age, the Age of Domesticity, very, very few Dragons have earned the award. A position must first be vacated by a death in battle…and battles are scarce nowadays.
Sobek was irate about his current
circumstances. His official interment
contract stipulated that his wife would
always be Awakened when he was. She was
also Immortal, and together they were one of a handful of pair-bonded couples
to be awarded a shared tomb. To be
revived in solitude was an indication of an unofficial Awakening. As he’d initially suspected, the mission he
had been Awakened for was clandestine, and solitary, and he’d been unretired
with none of the usual ceremony or paperwork.
He’d been rushed into service with only a couple of weeks’ restoration
activity, and he was still stiff in the bones and soft in the skin. And he would have no time with his beloved.
In the old days, fifty thousand years or so ago, he might have eaten an underling or two, or at least bitten off a tail to satisfy his temper. In these more civilized times, there was no relief he could sink his teeth into. It was all counseling, relaxation exercises and team-building games these days. After a solemn but token farewell to the sleeping Wadjet in his family crypt, he slipped into one of his less-armed, more-innocent looking personal transports and departed from his clan’s fiefdom, a warm jungle planet named Duat. His immediate objective was the clan’s orbiting Transport platform, which would teleport his craft to the Hero’s Platform in orbit over the empire’s current planetary seat, Abob, or “Amun” as lip-bearing aliens pronounced it. His personal weapons, his uniform and space suit, his tools and survival gear had been packed into crates and sent separately.
Minions were waiting for him at Abob, and he was rushed from the platform into a stealth transport before he could adjust to the temperature and humidity. At least he was no longer piloting, so he was able to snack on some frozen therians. It was his first meal in four hundred years.
Members of the Orrkuttssh state, as the Empire’s military, police, and security population, composed the bulk of the galaxy’s official state traffic, but the teleportation technology known commercially as Transport had been developed by their overlords, the Arch. It had in fact been the technological advantage that made their dominion over this part of the galaxy possible. (They rarely travelled much themselves any more, preferring to remain within their vast disk craft orbiting at cold distances from selected red stars; they had no homeworld, at least none known to still exist.) There was also, among the other alien races, an immense commercial traffic, and a certain amount of scientific and leisure travel, all of which was taxed at Arch rates. The Orrkuttssh didn’t often engage in frivolities like leisure travel. Almost all their travel was on the government’s needs these days. Ever since the loss of their original homeworld, the once-mighty warrior race had lost the pioneering spirit. They had carved out the known regions of space, forging the earliest incarnation of the Empire, but since those days, or rather since the days in which the Arch wrested those regions from Orrkuttssh control, its volume had not expanded further.
Travelling officially had its advantages, in terms of cost and of priority, but was sometimes higher-profile than he cared for; travelling unofficially, while often more casual and private, meant sacrificing some of those advantages. Clandestinely moving a Hero assumed by the masses to be long dead shouldn’t prove too difficult in a society whose members all looked more or less alike, unless that Hero’s battle scars are so distinctive that entire legend cycles have grown up around them in the centuries since they were inflicted. Sobek’s iridescent black-and-dark-green neck, back fringe and tail bore piercings and gashes from the mandibles and pincers of Kasmani warriors and tank bugs, and his claws and some of his back plates bore the characteristic chatoyance of accumulated micro-fissures caused by all manner of traumatic stress, impact, and exposure to the vacuum of deep space. It might be possible to conceal his identity by use of adornment and clothing, but the minions appeared to have made no such provision in their planning, and Sobek was still wearing the light-duty uniform he’d been Awakened in. It exposed his face, his tail, his neck and all his claws. In any event, he was conspicuous by virtue of his size; he’d been large for an Orrk during the Age of Legends, and to judge by what he’d seen so far, the People seemed smaller these days. The minions solved the problem by purchasing a vast, plain cloak and camouflaging Sobek as a chaplain on pilgrimage; he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, and the degree to which he was temporally unconnected with this, the present world, might conceal itself as an ascetic’s detachment. But traditionally, pilgrims forsook good accommodations, taking the lowest priority on all Transports. So in order to complete the illusion, there was much waiting to accomplish.
It was said that it had taken millions of years for the Transport network to be set up, that ordinary rocketry and gravity propulsion and ion sails had to be used to move the platforms across many star systems to their final destinations. It was also said that there was an upper limit to the range and accuracy of Transport, and that as the range increased, so did the number of particles missing from your body, teleported into parallel universes or lost to unpredictable interactions with other particles. To mitigate physical damage, Transport was used, at least under non-emergency conditions, over shorter distances whenever possible. It was theoretically possible to cross a quarter of the galaxy in absolutely no time at all, but in practice it took a couple of dozen hops, and there was waiting to be done at each stop.
Rumors aside, repeated Transport definitely inflicted various traumas on the body. The possibility of genetic mutation, of protein malformation and of metabolic disorder limited the willingness of most races to use the technology repeatedly. Cancer-resistant species such as the Orrkuttssh seemed to be able to tolerate it quite well, for years or even centuries at a stretch, but they were extraordinary in that regard. For a long-lived, slow-maturing species, they had adapted rather quickly to space travel and to permanent existence in high-radiation, low-gravity environments. As a spacebound Orrkuttssh ages, he deposits crystalline layers of boron and carbon in his back plates, a biological response evidently unknown to his planetbound ancestors. The longer an Orrkuttssh is in space, the thicker his built-in protection against ionizing radiation. Several specimens, including Sobek, are known to have survived the total vacuum and cosmic ray environment of deep space for at least a few minutes by rolling their scaly backs and tails around their softer underbellies and holding breath. Whatever damage they incur at the hands of cosmic rays, they seem to be able to deal with regeneratively; it is just another aspect of their ability to defy aging, an accidental marvel of preadaptation. They are ideal for handling the rigors of a life in space. Were it not for the Arch’ access to wide-scale, instantaneous Transport, their biological advantages might well have outweighed everyone else’s technological advantages in the race to dominate the galaxy. They had in fact conquered a volume comprising nearly a sixty-four-hundredth of the galaxy’s total disk, and were solidifying their position by unifying the infrastructures and governmental systems of their subject races, when the Arch swept in on their Transport technology, purportedly millions of years in the making, assisted by their caste of rabid warriors descended from the Khunjeee. These, as warlike as the Orrkuttssh, but warmer-blooded and fast-reproducing, were bred to serve the Arch, fanatically and without question. Their biological advantages met and balanced those of Erkhott’s giant bipedal reptiles, and the Transport network proved to be the overwhelming technological advantage that turned the tide. The little mushroom men peopling the Capstone—another unpronounceable name to many species, but just a simple growl—“Hrorngd”—for the Orrkuttssh—just sat back in their spacecraft and pushed buttons, and once the dust had cleared, the galaxy’s settled regions were theirs for the taking.
For political cartographic purposes, the Galaxy was defined as a vast spherical volume centered on its central black hole; this sphere was partitioned into two hemispheres, north and south, their boundary bisecting the central disk. Each hemisphere was further divided into quarters, or quadrants, and each quadrant was divided into 800 concentric rings; each ring was divided, grid-fashion, into a varying number of sectors, with the outermost rings having the most. The settled territories occupied some forty sectors, distributed across dozens of rings, mostly along one particular spiral arm. What was living in the unexplored territories was still unknown; as of the time of the Capstone conquest, no radio signals or other indication of life had been detected from without, although the Khunjeee homeworld had to be out there somewhere, as did the undiscovered remnants of the Kasmani Empire.
It was widely assumed by recent
generations that the Orrkuttssh homeworld had been lost during that war, the
greatest conflict so far in the history of the Arch Empire. It was known to those of Sobek’s generation
that it had been lost much earlier, in one of the wars of conquest during which
his people began their first expansion beyond their home system, and it was
also known that there was a historical connection between those two wars. But the galaxy’s official history now began
with the coming of the Arch, and so the role his people had played in
establishing the galaxy’s first massively multi-system civilization was
consigned to just the memories of those who had lived through it.
One thing the Orrk ilk had learned eons ago was that although conquest was a fine unifying force for civilization, and success a great motivator for personal achievement, under most conditions that a hostile universe could throw at you, survival was pretty much as good as it gets. The name of his people was a contraction of the names of the two predominant races (or subspecies, to the bleeding gizzards who decried the word “race”) of his species, whom together occupied the planet’s top predator niche. And much of the traditional trappings of their planet’s culture reflected this curious bifold nature; the public-facing elements were generally composed of some sort of fusion of their languages, while at the same time, each subsociety’s internal expressions exalted itself and derided the other. The shared elements of their culture were all rooted in war, all initially forged as the short-faced drylanders savagely defended their continents against wave upon wave of long-faces, just emerging from the sea after millennia spent in a free-swimming, marine existence. The former had already mastered fire, steam, zooculture, petrochemical energy and electricity, and were beginning to develop extensive overland transportation mechanisms; the latter had never manufactured or used tools of any kind, and had a rudimentary language more geared toward the vagaries of long-distance moonlight navigation and pack hunting than technology or accounting. It was a brutal war of pure viciousness against overwhelming technological advantage, boiling eventually down to numbers: the numbers that could be grown in a short time on land, fed by farms full of nutritious, fast-growing therians, versus the numbers that could be supported over many generations by the endless bounty of the sea. It was a war of attrition, a war fought only to stalemate, a stalemate that even now, millions of years later, quietly simmered beneath the brows of long and short faces alike. While outsiders were never given enough depth and detail in their understanding of the Orrk / Kuttssh cultural dynamic, it was fair to say that their society’s unifying principle was a near-even mix of mutual respect and hatred. The original national symbol was a stylized representation of two forces, like swirling bodies of water pushing on opposing vanes of a water wheel. Over several iterations of the advance and decline of their global civilization, the symbol was modified, increasingly simplified, eventually stylized as a disk composed of two curving water droplets, drawn in contrasting colors, circling a common center. The philosophical implication (one which had at various times been expressed in various idioms as the national motto) was that all coherent motion arises from the friction between opposing forces. It was a philosophy that all Orrkuttssh, however diverse in theology, ideology or economic sensibility, believed to at least some extent.
Sobek stepped off the Transport
platform at Station Dread—“Thog” in the Orrkuttssh Common language—one of
two orbiting platforms now under the command of the newly-minted Sub-Admiral
Ibliss. Although fearsome in offensive
capability, neither platform was as fast or mobile as any attack craft in the
fleet; they were designated as sub-strategic combat elements, designed to orbit
planetary hotspots and provide defensive cover or offensive support for troops
engaged in surface combat, bridging the logistical gap between purely-tactical
and purely-strategic installations. Like
many career military Kuttssh, Ibliss had long ago chosen a career path that
kept him in the sub-command zone; this had excluded him from many of the larger
campaigns, and so his glory and rate of ascension had been limited, at least by
comparison to career deep-space warriors such as Sobek. But it afforded him greater commercial
opportunity, by way of keeping him in an occupation administration role in
frontier regions. For decades he had
overseen Terror Station— “Thok”—which
had been engaged in providing security and police services for commercial
interests mining iron and nickel in the asteroid field of Aten, a middle-aged standard
white star near the galaxy’s rim, well beyond the Empire’s settled
territory.
This system was interesting for a number of reasons: several vast gas planets, with radio, magnetic and gravitational energy to spare, and more hydrogen and simple hydrocarbons than an entire military fleet could dream of burning in a Saint’s lifetime; abundant rocky and iron-nickel asteroids for raw materials; a dense cloud of comets and microplanets with more water, in a frozen state, than their homeworld had in oceans. And there was a particularly warm, swampy, green world nestled among the rocky planets, a world very much like their own world Erkhott had been when Sobek had been hatched. There had been almost no expansion of the Empire in this direction for centuries; most new territories were long, slender arcs of space that curved generally inward, toward the galactic disk, where stellar density—and that of solid raw materials—was greater. There was no population pressure here, only exploratory mining operations and scattered camps of pioneers trying to avoid the notice of State oversight. There were resorts on the swamp planet where miners, security drones and camp followers could vacation, but they were afforded only a very tiny slice of the available terrain and ocean. Most of the planet was designated “preserve”: officially a wildlife refuge unto itself, with small portions of the surface set aside as safe landing zones for victims of space accident or mining disaster. But because of its rapidly-evolving ecosystem and impressive biodiversity, it was of great scientific interest, and therefore off-limits to permanent settlement except for scientific observers. It was only one of three sites in the system where life was known to have existed, although it could be found in only a primitive state on an ice moon of Aten V and had died out entirely, perhaps a hundred million years ago, on Aten IV, coldest of the rocky planets. Per a strict reading of Arch law (which barely applied out here anyway), all of the settlements, other than the scientific facilities, were illegal.
There was only light traffic to the swamp planet Aten III (known to the resort community as “Home,” and to the extended mining community as “Away” or “Blue Away.”). Every few weeks or so a transport carrying furloughed work crews came in, and a few weeks later it came back out. There was some cargo shipping to support the resorts and the scientific research station. On something like an annual basis, some scientists left and new ones arrived. It was scarcely enough transit to merit much imperial infrastructure, and as yet there had been no move to grace the system with a Transport platform. All shipping was local; long-range, deep-space craft happened by only once every few decades. Chemical rockets, gravity-assist launches, ion thrusters and solar sails were the commonly-available technologies this far out in the suburbs, and these operated on the order of months and years. Some of the Arch personnel—Sobek thought of them as “mushroom men”—kept craft with more exotic propulsion methods, such as magnetic displacement and gravity repulsion, but these were never sold or traded to outsiders, and few knew their purposes or capabilities. Some of the Hrorngd ships had been reported by reliable witnesses to simply disappear at will, as if they carried within built-in Transport stations and could teleport themselves. However weak and inconsequential the Greys seemed on an individual basis, their technology was undeniably formidable, and in groups, where they could reinforce each others’ psionic capabilities, they were nigh invincible. It was said of these little balloon-headed plant people that they could, with some combination of mind and machine, cloud the minds of any other species, that they could inflict fear and insanity at will. Awe had been successfully used, by many thousands of societies, for many millions of years, to counter the potentially destructive power of curiosity, but the Capstone species had perfected the practice, made a complete science of it, and based their propaganda Machine on it. They self-proclaimed to be just another brick in the Arch, no bigger or heavier than any other, but the galaxy’s dependence on their Transport made them the one without which the entire structure would collapse. They were all-benevolent, to all appearances—and according to all their public relations campaigns—but all-feared nonetheless.
Their spacecraft technology was clearly more advanced than anything used by most of the other member races, and as such constituted the only security and property concerns of the Arch in this system. In the backwaters, they expended vast amounts of technology in order to conceal vast amounts of technology, maintaining a vast amount of outer territory in order to maintain a vast interior territory. In more heavily-peopled regions, the mystique engendered by the near-total, godlike degree of separation they normally imposed between themselves and their member nations was enough, under most circumstances, to secure their property. The closer the proximity of any one being to a Grey, the greater the sense—the certainty—that his mind was being constantly monitored for any sign of larcenous or treasonous intent.
This was an unspoiled region, one
with unlimited development potential, but it was one the Greys did not inhabit,
being perhaps too distant from their seats of power. There was little in the way of protective
technology here, and little in the way of mystique. With none of their own population to support,
the Arch had never bothered with building any of their own habitat here, nor
any of a general-purpose nature. It had
all been left to the commercial interests and whatever settlers they’d been
able to attract, and was therefore piecemeal, patchy and species-specific.
But there was also the Game. And the Game generated wealth. Eventually the Empire would take notice of this wealth and begin civilizing the region. There would be success and prosperity to be made when that happened, but of course there was also plenty to be made before then, of the kind that would inevitably stop when law and order were imposed. Those making the money now, and who stayed on too long, would become the examples the Empire later made by way of imposing law and order.
Sobek was able to peruse a few outdated newsmagazines along the way, and asked his traveling minions strategic questions, and so began to piece together some of the geopolitical situation. There had been recent reports of violent criminal activity—piracy—in the vicinity, and because the Empire had been more concerned with probing its way toward the galactic center than with pacifying the frayed edges of frontier out here, they had simply given Ibliss a field promotion and an additional Fear platform and tasked him with straightening it out himself. Evidently Ibliss had then used his connections to coerce the current leadership of Sobek’s clan to Awaken him for some covert operations. This was, he suspected, a mission that would neither arouse the Empire’s notice nor merit its support should things go awry. In that event, he could expect to be disavowed and abandoned.
Now fresh and alert, having rested and eaten, he had succeeded in obtaining a clean utility uniform, and had applied his standard customizations thereto. (Whatever else a soldier might be, he is always also a tinker and a tailor.) His instructions, now opened and read, were to pilot the new platform from Dragonmouth IX, the Kuttssh military outpost near the young blue star Kaa, and deliver it to Ibliss at one of the gravitational equilibrium points along the orbit of the largest gas giant, Aten V. From there, presumably, Ibliss would deploy it to orbit around Aten III, and Sobek would receive his next instructions.
Sobek’s first major military citation, awarded after the conclusion of the first campaign of the Kasmani Insurrection, had been for his skill in pacifying a planet with a mixed xenomorph population, and he figured that factored into his selection for this mission. Most of his subsequent military victories had been after pitched battles with Kasmani fleets in deep space, but he doubted that experience would be relevant here. He was pretty sure there would be some crowd control involved.
He gave himself a few minutes to breathe and adjust. Each way station in the military network, as was the case in the diplomatic, commercial and recreational transportation networks, had a staged environmental transition section for allowing travelers to adapt to prevailing local conditions; each stage was equipped to provide a multitude of varying condition sets, to allow travelers to preadapt to any number of latitudes and climate regimes that might be found on any number of the network’s serviced planetary bodies. Sobek’s instructions had been to preadapt to a moist subtropical climate in a warm-zone planetary belt for a white-to-yellowish sun. This suggested he wouldn’t be spending much time rock-hopping in the asteroid belt.
Standing felt good. Three solid points of contact: two paddle-webbed, clawed feet and one heavy
tail. Using muscle was good for a
Sleep-addled soul. He stood and
continued to breathe deeply. The minutes
stretched into hours. He meditated. Then he slept. He remained motionless.
The only way to move a craft the
size of a Fear station from star to star in useful time, without a Transport
station large enough for the whole thing to sit on, is to use a spacetime
bridge. It is expensive, troublesome,
and scary, but it isn’t teleportation, so you can be assured of having all your
body parts when you arrive…if you succeed in departing in the first place. It does require a great deal more preparation
and coordination than teleportation. The
sending station has to contact the destination in realtime, which can’t be done
using anything as slow as radio. A
low-powered version of Transport, TransNet, is used to request the connection
instantaneously, by teleporting the communication itself, and to send timing
signals that synchronize the clocks and flatten the gravitational gradient
across the link. At the receiving end,
gravitational and temporal corrections are applied, based on those timings, in
order to minimize problems imposed by the lack of absolute simultaneity across
such vast regions of space. Then at a
predetermined interval, both stations create miniature gravitational
singularities, which are used to generate the hyperspatial bridge between them.
Then it’s a simple matter of accelerating the craft along a
precisely-determined course skimming a singularity’s event horizon, and hoping
the bridge remains stable for the fractions of a second required to enter the
bridge. The energy requirements are
immense, not least to provide adequate radiation shielding for the black hole;
to rapidly accelerate an object the size of a Fear platform requires more
energy than the Orrkuttssh have ever been able to harness. They use a high-throughput source of what
they suspect to be vacuum energy, purchased from the Capstone Greys, to power their bridge generators; and because
these generators require the creation of temporary free singularities, they can
only be operated in safe zones far away from habitable systems. The exception to this rule is their own
military settlements, most of which are also serviced by Transport
platforms. The People have never been
particularly averse to living near danger.
They regard a chronic absence of danger as potentially fatal to their long-term
survival prospects, and they choose settlements on the fringes of the most
dangerous, radiation-heavy regions:
nebulae, globular clusters, stellar nurseries. Dragons are drawn to the places where the
galaxy guards her fiercest beauty.
Sobek, as Dread’s interim commander, had the privilege of helming it out of dock and onto the programmed course, whereupon the autopilot would ordinarily take over and careen it toward the singularity. But he did not like that kind of piloting; he likened it to the stationkeeping maneuvers of an unmanned satellite. A Fear station is capable of slow interplanetary flight, but most, deployed in planetary orbit above an occupied planet, rarely fire thrusters other than their orbital correction jets. Sobek liked flying. He liked speed. He liked acceleration. He left the housekeeping to the minions, whenever the opportunity arose, and put his claws on a joystick.
He remained inert, disciplining himself, cycling between meditation and alertness, as the station was moved onto course. Bridge travel was not instantaneous; Kaa was about 30 astronomical years from Aten, so the trip could be expected to take several hours from his point of view. During that time, the station’s minions would be modifying one of its Talon transports to his weapons-heavy specifications. He preferred to always have one heavy lifter that could really fight its way into or out of a scrap. The Talon was ordinarily used to land ground troops and equipment on a planet, and normally carried light armament. Sobek’s required customizations turned it into a flying garrison, or alternately a flying jail, one that could, say, attack a hardened prison camp, stage a breakout, and escape to space with minimal outward damage. The more powerful weaponry and added armor made the craft much heavier than originally engineered, and altered its flight characteristics in a way that made piloting it rather a dark art. And it guzzled fuel on takeoff, rendering impractical any attempt to escape quickly to anything other than low orbit without launch assist. But it could be managed by a single experienced pilot, which suited those like Sobek who liked flying alone.
The atmosphere on Ibliss’
platform was cooler and dryer than the climate settings on Dread had been. The
Sub-Admiral evidently spent little to no time on the swamp planet, and kept
conditions within a cold desert climatic regime similar to those experienced by
many of the mining facilities. Sobek had
to surmise that either he spent a lot of time on those facilities, or hosted
mining personnel on Terror fairly
frequently. A Fear platform was equipped
and roomy enough to take on additional personnel, such as refugee populations
and even entire garrisons, for reasonably short layovers. They weren’t ordinarily particularly
comfortable accommodations, but Sobek supposed it was possible, with a bit of
capital outlay, to modify the quarters and common areas to be less spartan and
more friendly to civilians. He guessed
that the public areas had a warmer, lusher climate than what he’d be able to
experience while on board.
Sobek had never played the Game. He had heard of it, but he considered the Orrkuttssh, or at least his own clan, to be above such things. Constant decadence was the one thing corrupt aristocrats and ignorant subjects had in common; soldiers had the good sense to blow off steam episodically, when on leave, and live a disciplined, focused life the rest of the time.
He had no conception of how corruption and vice are drawn to frontier regions, nor why Aten III was such an attractive prospect for Gamers. Wealth had never been an end goal for himself or any of his recent ancestors; competition, the Fight, was his reason for living. Wealth is just one convenient means of measuring success in the Fight. But so are rank promotion and military glory, and he regarded these as altogether superior in the warrior’s way of life. Sobek saw the pursuit of wealth as a lesser pursuit, one for those incapable of truly fighting their way through life the way Nature intended: a pursuit for civilians and bureaucrats. And although his contempt for civilians was altogether more benign and indulgent than his contempt for soldiers of fortune, it shared with that, and with his contempt of Gamers, one principle. Nature plays only one game. And survival is the only way to win. To exceed that mandate, in the opinions of many duty-minded Dragons, is to needlessly contribute to the hastening of the universe’s ultimate heat death.
Sobek reported to the landing
deck officer, having used the Talon Constrictor
to transfer from Dread to Terror.
Ibliss’ deck crews busied themselves with securing, refueling and
checking up on the Talon; the deck officer gave Sobek a passcard and told him
to report to the officer of the day. Ibliss, it seemed, was not available, and
would summon Sobek when a meeting was possible.
In the meanwhile, he should check in to temporary quarters and avail
himself of the cafeteria, gymnasium and pool to regain his flexibility and
conditioning.
He grew impatient that first day,
but was happy for the relative relaxation his private quarters afforded
him. By the second day he was feeling
quite invigorated, even mildly euphoric, and found himself altogether more patient
and accepting. It was on his third day
of residence on Terror that the
summons arrived, in the form of a minion tasked with escorting Sobek to the
bridge. At the bridge, he found instead
an executive officer who told him Ibliss could be found in his office-cum-observation deck, which adjoined the
bridge via a private elevator. The
minion was dismissed, and Sobek granted access to the reception area. His suspicions were increasingly confirmed by
the circumstances of this visit. Ibliss
wanted to meet in a covert manner, away from the ship’s log and the video
recording devices on the bridge.
Presumably the deck officer and crew were either under orders to ignore
everything they witnessed, or had been bribed to look the other way…even if, as
he assumed, they had no idea who he was.
He rang the office door by
presenting his passcard to the scanner.
After a moment, the door chimed and flashed and opened. Sobek stepped into the presence of his new,
erstwhile commander. “Reporting as
ordered,” he grumbled loudly. The office
was dimly lit and had an expansive curved desk.
The dramatically high-backed chair on the other side of the desk was
turned away, toward the observation port, which filled the rear wall of the
office. He could hear Ibliss’ breathing,
and surmised that the commander was simply extracting all available pomp from
the available meeting time. Then he
caught the faint whiff of skin polish and realized he was also hearing the
faint whine of a grooming buffer. Ibliss
was primping, shining his scales. After
a few seconds of waiting at the position of Attention—three points of contact
with the floor, and the tail smartly curved so the tip pointed up at a
half-right angle—the chair rotated to face the desk, bringing the short face of
a Kuttssh land-dweller into view.
“Ssssobek,” said the commander. Short-faces had funny ways of pronouncing things, and it seemed that accents and dialects had a way of changing while he was Sleeping the centuries away. He expected to have to strain to understand things for a while until his ears and brain caught up with the times.
“Commander,” replied the soldier. Ibliss was neither in Sobek’s natural chain of command, nor was he on official active duty, so he did not reply formally with the otherwise obligatory “sir.” His participation in this mission was a matter of contractual obligation, not of ordinary service.
And there was rarely much military formality, he knew, in an off-the-books mission. It was one of the perks of clandestine work.
“I trust you have acclimated well?”
“I have, Commander. Pardon, but have we previously met?”
“No, Captain.” As expected, Ibliss, a Naval officer, was addressing him by his Naval rank, not his officially higher Infantry rank. “But my clan has had some history with yours in the days since you first fought, and your deeds, although increasingly a well-kept secret of the Empire, are of great renown among their descendants. I have need for someone with your skill and resolve.” It wasn’t strictly necessary to use Sobek’s rank in address, given the informal nature of the mission. A reminder of past glories, perhaps, to pander to his sense of duty. Or an ostentatious familiarity to put him at ease.
“What you’re saying is that some of my recent relatives owe something to you, or to your recent relatives.” Blood debt was an acceptable reason for a secret Awakening, or at least it had been when Sobek last went under. Not that he much cared for the notion, but it was something you agreed to when you clawed your imprint onto the bottom line.
“Something like that, yes. I’m not Ancient like you, as it happens. The debt took place before I was hatched, and now I’m just a party to it, same as yourself.”
“I understand.” The sins of the sons are visited on the father. Tradition is tradition.
“You probably do, at least to a point. But the universe has changed since you were last abroad. The influence of the Orrkuttssh nation is waning. The little grrorrknn”—this was a military euphemism roughly meaning mushroom monkeys—“have been squeezing everybody else out of the Empire’s inner apparatus. We maintain a military presence at Kaa, and we still play a role on the frontier, but we are fewer and more thinly distributed than at any point in your previous lives. To fill the population gap, Ancients are being Awakened in greater numbers than ever before, at any time since the days of the first Crypts. For the first time in perhaps a hundred thousand years, there are more Orrkuttssh awake than asleep. It may become necessary for everyone to come alive again and make a stand to preserve our races. We are becoming rare. Many debts are being called in, and many new kinships are being forged. You and I are simply caught up in the flow of events.”
“I see. I must make a study of history and current events.” Ibliss was laying the drama on rather thick, he thought, but somehow he found it rather thrilling. This was how you pushed a Warrior’s buttons.
“You should. Much won’t be relevant to the task at hand, but in the context of the greater arc trending around us, yes, you will find it of great interest. You will have time to get caught up while en route to your objective.”
“Are you suggesting that we may have to make a play against the Empire?” That would be one very good reason for keeping the mission under wraps. An Orrkuttssh warrior was always a loyal servant of the state, except when that loyalty came into conflict with his loyalty to his species. According to the official history, though, that had never happened.
“No, of course not. We may eventually have to find our destiny outside the Empire; who knows what the future might bring? Right now, as always, we’re just scenting the air.” This was an old military euphemism for determining as to whether Fight or Flight is the best course of action; in peacetime, it had little import, and could translate to simply maintaining constant vigilance. “But the Empire is always desirous of territory, and before it brings an official presence to my little corner of the universe, it wants to see how well I can produce order.”
“And my mission serves that end.”
“Tangentially. Currently there is no Imperial presence here other than this isolated Sub-Command. In the absence of a civilian government, power rests in the region’s ranking military command, whose commander is de-facto Governor until any formal organization takes place to supersede it. In order to consolidate our position in this system, I need to clean it up. There is little law and order on the inner planets, and there is an economic cost to anarchy. If we are to have a society here on the fringes, even a temporary society, we must either eliminate the criminal element, or drive it out.” Sobek wasn’t sure he agreed with this. If more Orrkuttssh were coming here, then there should be ample dragonpower and equipment to root out pirates when they arrived. Most likely, Ibliss had a still more covert agenda that he was not sharing in full, but it was of course his privilege to withhold intelligence as he saw fit. If there were others working on this mission from different angles, information would necessarily be compartmentalized.
Ibliss paused, ostensibly to fidget with his desktop keyboard, but more probably to let this sink in. Sobek resisted the urge to clack his teeth together; he was still at the position of Attention. But the situation was becoming interesting enough to engage his warrior’s sense of righteousness. Instilling frontier justice wasn’t exactly full-scale warfare, but it did at least sound as though he’d get to stage an invasion of sorts.
Ibliss finished tapping on his keyboard and picked up a small personal data device, presumably having just finished programming it. He stood up. “At ease, Sobek.” The other relaxed somewhat, enough to lean forward and grasp the PDD profferred in Ibliss’ three-clawed hand. “I would like you to take a Talon to Aten III. Most of the planet is reserved for biological preserve, but it has some settlements that provide recreational services to the miners here. There is some property crime, but a bigger concern to me is ecoterrorism. My sources inform me that in the towns, and possibly within the major biological research site, there are cells whose purpose is to undermine and destroy any semblance of civilization on the planet. Their agenda is to keep the planet entirely wild. It evidently has some religious significance to them. The planet itself is of little strategic or commercial value at the moment, but that could change if the mining operations here expand. Currently the workforce is quite small, mostly Brutes and Leggers and robots, but it could grow to include softer-bodied bureaucrats and salesmen one day, and they’ll need someplace warm and wet. So presumably the terrorists’ aim is to deny the use of the planet, should it eventually be cleared for settlement. The mission parameters are on the PDD, and navigation data will be transferred to your ship. And I will have your library computer updated with history and news reports. The journey will take several months by rocket, and you will be able to use the time to study and get into shape.”
“So I am to perform an antiterrorism operation? By myself?”
“Nothing so elaborate, to begin with. First, you are to infiltrate the biological research center by posing as an investigator in search of pirates. I will have documents prepared that will identify you as an agent of the Empire, on hand to inspect the premises for safety and security issues, under the guise of regional welfare policy. You will use your time there to identify potential terrorist threats, and to examine the facility’s early-warning and defensive systems in case I have to land a garrison there in support of your mission. We plan to launch investigations into the various resort towns as well. While you are en route, I will be performing modifications to this station, and once those are complete, I will be moving my entire command to Aten III as well. If counterinsurgency operations are required at that point, my entire garrison will be at your disposal. Until that time, it is crucial that the terrorists not be aware that Dread is coming. If you can prevent them from detecting my approach, I will settle into orbit at the libration point on the far side of their moon. Depending on the situation, you may remain on the planet, as a one-man toehold, or you may opt to take your Talon back into orbit. Once you’ve identified any threats, you will have a great deal of discretion as to how to proceed. However, Dread will not be in a position to follow, much less to monitor or assist, for as long as three months. You will have to be self-sufficient during that time. I suggest that your inspection be thorough and convincing. The cover that we have provided for you in the documentation is a piracy investigation. You may familiarize yourself with the details en route.” He was subtly implying that security systems and sensor arrays had no doubt undergone substantial improvement since his initial training on the subject.
Sobek inserted the PDD into a slot on his body armor, interfacing it with his personal systems and instantly uploading the mission profile to his ship. “Understood. I will make way as soon as maintenance is complete on the Talon.”
“There is no great hurry, Sobek. You may stay a night or two and enjoy the amenities here, if you wish. I’ve done some hosting of civilians and dignitaries, and Terror has some pleasures to offer.”
“No, thank you, Commander. I’m too soft already from disuse. I’ll enjoy life when the mission is over.”
“As you wish, Sobek. But while you’re there, do take some time to take in the wonder of that world. There’s something about it that I think will appeal to your sense of mystery. And also be sure to check out the moon. There’s something about it, too. I’ll include coordinates to a known-good landing site there, to use as a rally point.”
Sobek nodded, came to Attention, and then backed a few steps away from the desk before wheeling back toward the door. Orrk had longer tails than Kuttssh, and Sobek needed more clearance than Ibliss’ office had been designed for.
He did wander a bit through the
station, looking for the athletic facilities.
He could use some limbering up, and thought a good long swim would be
just the thing. While poking through the
public areas, he got some indication of the size and scope of the
“amenities.” The station had, by way of
a substantially-retasked cargo hold, a rather enormous hotel section, with game
rooms, theaters, shops and an arena, which was currently secured, closed
against all but high-ranking guests. He
got his swim in, but ignored the other facilities. This was not the time for distractions.
Now that he could bring himself
to feel there was a legitimate purpose to his being here, he was no longer
particularly unhappy to be Awake, just lonesome without Wadjet. He would have to wake her up and show her
around the new universe when he got back.
They hadn’t spent much time together in more than four hundred years.
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