Rough draft, excerpt 11: "The Long Watch, volume I," part 3

3.

Ibliss grinned, slightly parting his jaws to show his teeth, taking in the gurgling laughter of those assembled around him.  Glug-glug roar.  Glug-glug roar.  Some light applause, in the form of tooth-clacking and claw-tapping.  And then a slightly jeering voice from near the back of the assembly:  “Very large, very lovely, Ibliss, but size isn’t everything.  Is this seriously what you are exhibiting as a candidate?  It doesn’t even have hands.”  This was true.  The beast Ibliss was showcasing was a typical saurian of the long-necked, long-tailed variety common to much of Aten III.  It was massive, so big that it didn’t have much room to move in its narrow end of the arena, even had it not been tethered by two legs to the floor by its cage.  It was only quasi-bipedal, in that it could rear up on two legs, but it normally walked on all four, which effectively prevented it from holding or manipulating anything.  And its tiny head betrayed the absence of anything like a reasonably large brain, unless it (or a spare) was stored somewhere else in that bulky body.

He stood, moving from his comfy chair in the arena’s central box to the pedestal and its control box.  “No, Orrgthith.  That’s just what we feed the candidate.”  He pressed a cage release button, and at the near end of the arena, an iron grating fell open, exposing one end of one of the larger cages concealed beneath the arena seats.  A snorting exhalation could be heard within the shadowed depths of the cage, and then something stepped out, something huge, yellowy tan with black stripes, and kind of feathery around the head, neck and tail.  It was vaguely Dragon-shaped, like a bizarre cloning experiment gone awry, but much bigger:  maybe four times as tall as Ibliss, and at least three times as long.  But the head was very oversized and the forearms very undersized.  It walked slowly, taking plodding steps, peering upward at the seated Gamers, sniffing the air.  Ibliss had been feeding Rex in this manner for weeks, so it had come to associate the scent of Orrkuttssh with food…he hoped, without actually associating that scent as food.  At first, Rex couldn’t always be counted on to be hungry when there was an audience, but with repeated feedings, and an occasional bit of electrostimulation applied to the prey animal, it began to recognize the routine, and now seemed to enjoy the attention, even to bask in it.  Ibliss knew it had sighted the other beast at the opposite end of the arena, had undoubtedly been aware of it long before its own cage was opened.  But he also knew it would feign disinterest for a few minutes while the prey beast cowered, neck stretched along the ground, before charging.  The arena wasn’t large, and there wasn’t much room to build up speed, just a few hundred paces from end to end (and a quarter of that for a creature the size of Rex).  So Rex had learned to sniff aimlessly around the arena for a few minutes, territorially flexing his plumage, before “discovering” the prey’s scent and taking off at a fast pace in the opposite direction, running along the rim to curve around and “catch the prey from behind.”  The prey animal, unable to run, usually hoisted its tail well above the ground to serve as a defensive lash, and it pulled its long neck into a sinuous curve and began thrashing its head wildly from side to side, presenting as difficult a target as it could.  It made for a good show.

When Rex took off, his body rotated from a sloping, head-up attention position to a near-horizontal attitude, and he ran with amazing speed, especially considering he was tracing a tightly-confined leftward curve rather than a straight line.  Some gaspy hisses emerged from the assembled Gamers, and more laughs.  The creature’s tread was much louder than a Dragon’s, and some of those assembled in the seats jumped with each step, feeling an unaccustomed shock through the floor.  Rex was truly an impressive beast when in motion.  When he encountered the prey animal, rather than leaping onto its back and biting the neck (as was his usual attack mode), this time he stepped on the animal’s neck with one vast three-toed foot, stepping with the other on its tail.  The victim swung its head up to bite ineffectually at his foot and leg.  Then he pivoted at the hips, inclining his body back into that sloped attitude, peering around again and sniffing the air.  “See how triumphant he looks,” said Ibliss.  “He has the instincts of a gladiator.”  Rex then pivoted further downward—he had to, having a rather short neck—and grasped the quivering beast, at the junction of neck and shoulder, in his comically massive jaws.  Wrenching himself upright again, he shook the beast violently, breaking the neck and almost rending the body in twain.  Then he bit down on the neck, which crunched and separated, allowing the corpse to fall to the floor while he snarfed the head and neck noisily down.

Orrgthith spoke up again.  “Very impressive indeed.  You must be proud.”  Rex’ stats appeared on the arena’s central screen, and on the personal viewers at each seat:  dimensions, weight, number of teeth, cranial capacity, running speed, growth rate, maximum size and weight, age, body temperature, and various facts about his metabolism.  Included was a graphic representation of Ibliss’ genetic marker, which had been inserted into Rex’ ancestors centuries ago upon his entry into the Game. There was some tittering as the stats confirmed what was already apparent to the more discerning among the players:  Rex was undoubtedly the largest and most effective predator the local Game had ever produced, but for all that, his brain was disappointingly small, and his arms were so vestigial that it would be completely ineffective at any kind of manual operation.  If you did manage to train him to, say, pull a trigger, he couldn’t even see the gun he was holding, much less draw a bead with it.  There were some promising features, though.  He was quite warm-blooded, at least part of the time, and he had a rather winsome appearance, almost a sardonic grin, granted in part by his quite forward-facing eyes.  Rex’ vision was binocular, a notable feature found in the vast majority of terrestrial and arboreal intelligences.  If Ibliss’ engineers could do something about the arm length, this bloodline might well be poised to develop real intelligence at some point well down the road; warm blood and binocular vision were a pretty good combination for driving it. 

But Orrgthith wasn’t finished.  “I particularly like the…ornamental forearms.  How did you achieve such a stunning effect?”  This drew quiet laughter, from the seating areas (divided between Gamers and spectators and speculators) and the lobby and concession areas.  Ibliss was a lavish benefactor to corporate interests here, and he had his fans among the crowd, but his trivial and nontrivial conflicts with other Orrkuttssh were a major source of entertainment to the literati here.  Where there was, officially, no show business, there was no business like intrigue.

Ibliss wasn’t particularly stung by the barb.  The fact of the matter was that embryonic development was a process fraught with economy, and to encourage the development of, say, a massive skull or long, muscular legs, cellular material has to be sacrificed from somewhere else.  The forearm diminuition, having occurred over dozens of generations, was simply a continuation of a process of refinement that Nature had already begun, although feedback loops accidentally created by Ibliss’ engineers had vastly accelerated that process.  Orrgthith, as a Gamer himself, would already know this.  His engineers had undoubtedly encountered similar unexpected tradeoffs.  Evolution’s random elements were what made the Game partly a game of chance.  All the formulas and mathematical laws in the universe weren’t proof against unseen interactions and unexpected mutations.  “It was a calculated move,” Ibliss lied.  “We thought it simpler to miniaturize his hands, for purposes of manipulating our machinery, than to design and build giant versions for him.”  He knew few of them would accept this at face value—and indeed, there was a burst of laughter, indicating some took it as a joke—but then again, the rules didn’t require anybody to be honest about their methods, their successes or failures.  The most important rule was that other than the initial injection of the genetic marker, there could be no direct manipulation of the candidate’s genes.  All evolution had to take place “naturally,” via environmental pressures.  It was of course legal to genetically engineer other species in the environment, in order to apply and direct those pressures, but every additional species tweaked by the engineers was another expense in the liability column, and every species thusly involved dramatically increased the odds of unexpected perturbations taking the process in completely unwanted directions.  Ibliss’ team had implanted Rex’ long-dead paternal ancestor, along with his siblings, with this marker many generations previously; this meeting was at the century mark since the last one, and at the millennium mark since this Game had begun.  He wasn’t just working against the vagaries of the hot, humid, swampy environment and its ever-changing cast of competitors; he was working against the efforts of the other Gamers and their candidate animals.

All manner of technological weaponry could be employed, outside of direct genetic engineering.  

Each team deployed constellations of weather satellites, all battling it out to influence their own patches of planet beneath and to overcome the influence of others.  One team would sink boreholes into the crust to encourage volcanic activity and the venting of greenhouse gases, and another would use high-power lasers to heat the ground and water, provoking vast electrical storms; these could be tuned to cause wildfires whose particulate output would counteract global warming, or to drop vast amounts of water in areas rendered arid by someone else’s activity.  One team would artificially fertilize grasslands along riverbanks, causing cascading effects including toxic algal blooms in lagoons and bays, altering food chains in sometimes unpredictable ways; another would alter convection patterns, by way of lasers or aerosols, causing long-term shifts in precipitation that encouraged rock weathering, in turn encouraging changes to seawater composition.  The impact of any policy on the candidates was required to be second-order at best.

The rules were hazy on some points, granting a great deal of leeway to those who took a broad reading of them (and allowing for endless variation on House Rules).  You couldn’t create a new pathogen and administer it directly to anybody’s candidate animal, but you could try to modify existing pathogens in other animals in its biome.  You couldn’t directly overhunt or overfish a candidate’s prey species into extinction, but you could nudge that prey species’ primary food source into unsustainable scarcity by “encouraging” the incursion of an invasive competitor.  You couldn’t change the parent star’s output, or alter the planet’s orbit, or provoke a supernova nearby, or envelop the planet’s orbit in dust clouds, but there was no rule against, say, lobbing a comet at the planet, at least if you could make it look like an Act of Gods.  It was, however, common sense not to take such drastic measures, as they tended to eliminate not just the competition but one’s own candidate.  Nobody wanted to get knocked back to the first square on the board after sinking billions of tokens into the Game.  And nobody would ever play again with a competitor who’d resorted to such action.  

While not addressed specifically in the Rules, it was still counter to the spirit of the game, and therefore regarded, in most civilized quarters, as a cheat.

The primary goal was to develop the first candidate on a given planet to achieve intelligence.  “Intelligence,” for purposes of the Game, was defined as the ability and willingness to be trained to serve as menial labor.  So a secondary objective was to produce a labor force, and a ternary objective was to produce gladiatorial combatants.  Cash prizes would be granted from the ever-growing pool, for each measure of success, and there would be additional prizes for the winners of gladiatorial exhibitions and various forced-labor activities.  For that reason, most players, while striving to encourage intelligence-friendly selective pressures, also strove for domestication-friendly preadaptations, to make it easier to assimilate the finished product into the actual workforce.  Ibliss tended not to concern himself with such things, thinking they got in the way of actually tweaking the beast into existence.  He figured he would be able to more rapidly advance his monster to the final phase if he focused just on brain size, and then would use whatever force necessary to housebreak it afterward.

“Go swallow lightstone,” added Ibliss, under his breath, using a euphemism for the semi-fossilized dung that infant and imbecile Orrkuttssh sometimes attempted to use as cropstone.  Then, more loudly, “Your graciousness is so appreciated.  Please, it is your turn to show us what you have.”

Orrgthith nodded toward the referee box.  “Shouldn’t you cage your beast first, Ibliss?”

An opportunity for a gladiatorial challenge, this was.  “Should I?”

Ibliss watched Orrgthith considering this.  The loss of a single specimen would of course have negligible impact on the Game’s outcome, but publicly, it could result in a corresponding loss of face.  And Orrgthith, as a fellow Short-Face, prized face more than wealth.  Most of the time.

“Let them in,” the latter replied, and another gate control button was pushed by one of his minions before the referee could object.  Rex had yet to really dig in to his prey; he’d been busy basking in adulation.  Now he swiveled into a position of attention, head level, eyes peering forward at another of the cage doors at this end of the arena, which had just opened.  Nothing further happened for another couple of seconds, then a quiet chorus of twittering chirps emanated from within the opened cage.  Then two, four, six tiny bursts of feathered fury erupted from the cage, trotting in a chaotic but roughly circular fashion around the scene of Rex and his feast.  Rex snorted and growled deeply.  The sound filled the air, resonating through the arena seating.  It was an instinctively, primordially intimidating sound, even to a top-ranking male Dragon.  Many less-dominant Orrkuttssh in the crowd suffered involuntary cloacal eversion, the standing among them having then to quietly and awkwardly take their seats.

These feathered furies were something altogether different.  Completely covered in feathers, very rapid in movement and annoyingly high-pitched in vocalization, they were clearly hot-blooded, clearly social, and even better, clearly pack hunters.  Small they were, but their brains were undoubtedly quite large for their size.  “I give you Sly and the gang,” said Orrgthith, introducing his candidate species.  “Please forgive the irregularity of me bringing an entire pack for exhibition.  I think you can best appreciate their intelligence if you see them working together.”

Ibliss didn’t think there was any threat there at all.  None of the little critters was large enough to pose the slightest problem to Rex.  He could stomp any one of them to death with minimal effort.  But their movements seemed to be confusing him.  They were roving around him and the kill, occasionally darting in between, trying to establish a perimeter around the prey.  Each moved in a semirandom way, often following the one in front so closely that Rex was unable to discern where one ended and the other began.  Their feathers, iridescent and silvery-green, broke up their outlines.  And they tittered madly the whole time, taunting him.  He wasn’t quite sure how to handle this, as only other similarly-large males of his kind ever stood up to him, and the standard behavioral response to that contingency couldn’t apply here; these weird birds were far too small to head-butt properly.  He planted both feet widely, using his tail for balance, then pivoted downward to put his head menacingly close to the interlopers.  He hissed, and then growled again.

The mean little running birds didn’t stop.  They kept running, in a bifurcated sort of loop, now in front of him, now behind him, now twittering more loudly.  He blinked, snorted, and then settled into a pattern of loudly, snortily inhaling, alternating with slow, loud hissing, grading into growls.  Ibliss could hear cheering going on in the seats; evidently a new spate of side bets had broken out.  He began to worry that one of the creatures would leap at Rex’ face and damage one of his eyes.  At least his own monster seemed smart enough to resist the urge to snap fruitlessly at them, but so far his threat posture wasn’t impressing them.  Eventually, Rex appeared to tire of watching them, perhaps deciding that he wasn’t that hungry at all.  He took a couple of steps back, then snorted again before turning away to claim the other half of the arena floor.  After yawning capaciously, he curled up on the floor, back ostentatiously presented to the feathered furies, with his tail covering his eyes.  The furies stopped twittering and began their feast.  Two of them, including the largest and most brightly-feathered specimen, headed toward the neck stump, where red flesh was readily available, and began tearing the skin back to expose more.  The other four arrayed themselves around those two, facing generally outward but with particular attention to Rex’ position.  They balanced their long bodies on their slender legs, with tailtips just brushing the other two tearing into the prey animal.  When any of the guards sensed the faintest motion from Rex, their alerting was sensed, through their tails, by the two eaters, who would in turn alert and watch for movement.  After the two eaters had their fill, they rotated onto the perimeter, and two others went in to feed.  After all six had eaten, the cycle was repeated, each pair going back for seconds. 

Rex snored.

More cheers and laughter from the crowd.  More money changed claws.  Ibliss sighed.  Orrgthith gloated.  The referee signaled for participants to clear their candidates from the field.  Rex awoke and trod back into his cage at the sound of a prerecorded call, just as he’d been trained.  The mean little birds left the carcass when Rex stood up, and trotted into their cage without further prompting.  The victim was left in place for now; both cages closed back up and were retracted back within their respective walls.  Ibliss, having read Sly’s statistics, now had some cause for concern.  That little species was also binocular, and also large brained, and they had a pack-hunting mentality; and that put them at or near the high end of the current intelligence scale for Aten III.

Ibliss was aware that the wee beasties were of a line that was in decline, according to paleontological evidence provided to him by his engineers.  They had expressed a suspicion that the original line had already gone extinct and been revived by inserting old genetic material into modern bodies, a form of cloning that would almost certainly be ruled against by the Game council.  He resolved not to bring this up immediately; there were other candidates to view while he revised his stratagems.  It was entirely possible that Orrgthith’s candidates, as smart and ornery as they were, were simply unsuited to the environment, and dying out naturally such that Ibliss’ engineers were unable to find specimens during their surveys.  If so, Orrgthith would be summarily removed from the game in reasonably short order.  Conversely, it was possible that a relict population was thriving in some heretofore undiscovered corner of the planet, and this was the source of his exhibition pack.  Ibliss would have to expand his ground exploration operations.

The next candidate, belonging to Sigsorr, was interesting for a different reason.  This beast, much larger than the angry birds but much smaller than Rex, was longer in neck than the typical predator of this world.  It almost looked like one of the plodding, mindless vegetarians of the unfortunate prey beast’s species, but it was obviously built for spending more time in an upright posture.  And its head was larger and with a more pronounced braincase.  The standout feature, though, was the forearms.  They represented the other extreme of the continuum from Rex’ puny, two-fingered arms:  robust, long, with wicked reaping claws, and set well forward on the chest.  Such a beast, if it could be trained, would have no trouble operating machinery, although its claws would have to be kept trimmed.  It put up a disappointing show, however.  It showed no interest whatsoever in the prey beast, and simply shuffled around the arena floor, sniffing the air.  Ibliss surmised that it was a plant-eater, or at best omnivorous.  Not particularly threatening to Rex’ niche; Ibliss’ monster was top predator in its environs, and a clear contender for global top predator.  Sigsorr had nicknamed his monster Handy, and there was a reasonably appreciative murmur from the crowd as his stats came onscreen.  Handy was capable of grasping tree branches and pulling them toward his mouth.  That did bode well for eventual machinery testing, although his intelligence was still marginal at best.  So far, Handy had resisted all efforts at training and domestication, and was possibly the stupidest animal to be exhibited here today.

The last candidate, named Busy, was remarkable in a number of ways.  Bred by Gronrr, it was of small size, between Handy and Sly, and with an interesting mix of characteristics.  He had grasping hands, although smaller than Handy’s; he had long arms, although also shorter than Handy’s and mounted more dorsally on the torso; he had a large braincase, larger for his size than any of the others; and he had definite forward-facing eyes, giving him probably the most superior binocularity (and possibly the best vision overall) of all the candidates.  According to the stats, Busy’s species was capable of pack hunting, but individuals such as himself survived just fine on their own.  And he had been trained, albeit not terribly usefully yet.  He was able to respond to different audio tones by moving to different parts of his enclosure, and showed a remarkable degree of sensitivity to color, indicating some distant potential for being able to read written language and indicator lights.

He also evidently had some pride.  He sniffed the prey animal—grasping the neck with his foreclaws and lifting it to his nose, rather than dipping all the way toward it—then apparently determined it was too cold to be delicious, and turned his back on it.  Most predators weren’t reticent about consuming carrion, but each had preferences regarding just how far gone was too far gone.  Lots of scavengers were “scavenger” by virtue of occasionally taking previously-killed prey, but did so only when the prey was freshly killed enough to still be bleeding, and when the initial predator could be driven from the kill before too many mouthfuls were missing.  Sly’s angry bird troop was skilled at this, but they weren’t exclusively scavengers, being able, as a pack, to take down live prey much larger than themselves.  This carrion was less than an hour old, but it had been chewed on by others, and that seemed reason enough for Busy to snub it. 

What Ibliss found most disconcerting about Busy was his eyes.  They were large and inquisitive, and they seemed to look through the glare off the plastic / glass laminate separating the arena floor from the seating, right into the eyes of those seated there.  Like Rex, he was aware of having an audience.  But unlike Rex, he seemed not to enjoy the attention.  He spent a lot of time looking at individual members in the audience, making eye contact and sniffing, as if trying to match owner to scent.  To Ibliss, it was like looking into the deep past, into the face of a troglodytic ancestor so remote that it was more likely to regard you as prey than as kin.

Busy stared at Ibliss, evidently lost in thought.  Ibliss stared at Busy, most definitely lost in his. 

After the presentation, the Gamers scheduled the next meet.  This was often a complicated process; since each candidate species reproduced at a unique rate, they couldn’t just agree on a set number of generations, and since the candidates originated on different continents, in slightly different climate regimes, they couldn’t just agree on a set number of seasons or years.  The compromise that had been worked out for this particular Game centuries ago set the pattern:  each meeting was held at intervals of roughly one hundred years (in local time for the candidate animals, meaning in Aten III years), to be adjusted for major climatic, geological and astronomical events.  There had been no major solar events during the time this Game had been running, so the century mark, to the day, was agreed to be the next meeting point, barring any intervening extinction events.

The diurnal cycle on Terror matched that of Aten III, and that of Dread was being continuously adjusted, over several weeks, to follow suit as part of its post-shakedown maintenance.  Dread was taking on a Class III restock of ammunition and supplies, in accordance with a low-threat-intensity, long-duration monitoring mission.  Ibliss, comfortable in his lavish office, had now to give serious thought to whether the mission profile would be changing in the immediate future, as that would impact the resupply operation.  The Gamers had retired to their semipermanent guest quarters on Terror, but the expedition to Aten III would be leaving within the next couple of days, to replenish foodstocks for the exhibition candidates, to obtain chemical and biological samples from the candidates’ biomes, and to reintroduce the bloodlines’ current candidate specimens, freshly-tagged, to their home environments.  Each team would have observers watching the other teams, to ensure that all reintroduction occurred according to protocol and that no direct genetic manipulation occurred between exhibition time and release.

One benefit to hosting the exhibitions was the use of a more expansive set of facilities than might be granted to the guests.  This arrangement made it possible for Ibliss to exhibit one specimen, Rex, while breeding (and returning) several others, no less biologically capable but less expensive in terms of training.  Rex was a potential gladiator, and was currently more useful as a showpiece than a breeder.

Another benefit was the ability to secure genetic samples from the other candidates.  Each competitor was required to submit prepared samples to the judgment staff, but Ibliss’ bioengineers liked to have unsolicited, raw samples against which to confirm their veracity.  They also liked having complete, unprocessed cells, in order to examine proteins and genetic material from non-nuclear organelles, to perform isotope analysis on the elements found throughout, and to perform chemical and cellular analysis on droppings collected over several days.  These measurements would confirm details of origin and details of diet, and might possibly reveal details of methodology.

What Ibliss’ bioengineers had determined, on the basis of all the assembled evidence, was that Busy had an evolutionary lead that would be difficult to narrow within a century’s time, or even a millennium.  His brain was by far the most advanced of the bunch, and he was the most hot-blooded and binocular.  His species bred faster than Rex’, so might adapt faster to whatever pressure Gronrr’s team applied.  Rex, meanwhile, was on the verge of becoming an expensive failure.  So far, every effort intended to induce a longer forearm reach had backfired.  He was smarter than the average saurian of this world, but had a mean streak and was almost impossible to train in any meaningful way.  Ibliss’ operational costs had run higher than normal on this beast, largely because of the damage captive specimens caused and the number of personnel that had to be replaced.  He was showy and intimidating, and a tempting prospect for combat, but looking less and less like a reasonable candidate for domesticability.  And it was unreasonably difficult to keep enough prey on hand for him; his livestock facilities were now devoting as much space and resources to his prey animals as to the whole of the crew’s food requirements.

There were other factors to consider.  The Daughters’ antimateriel campaign had scored some significant victories, not only against Ibliss’ satellites but those of several competitors.  The Game was becoming more expensive than the potential payoff.  And in another century’s time, the Empire may well have brought settlement into this system, ending it before the final round.

Most importantly, perhaps, Ibliss’ underground operation was in imminent danger of being stymied or exposed.  The psychotropic he’d been drugging his crew with could not be manufactured on Terror, for reasons of security; it had to be shipped in, as an adulterant in food or water.  Water shipped from Aten III took longer to arrive, allowing some of the adulterant to denature en route, but water shipped from the nearby gas giants and their moons was prohibitively expensive, owing to the radiation hazard and greater difficulty of clandestinely spiking it at the source within the scope of Imperial operations.  A small crew of assorted Orrkuttssh operated in one of the resort towns, manufacturing the drug, mixing it with water and meat products, and sending it via automatic transfer-orbit rockets out to Terror.  And that itself was a problem, should the Empire’s prying eyes fall across any of his paperwork.  A Fear station is designed for self-sufficiency, including fairly efficient water reclamation.  A substantial portion of its armor consists of vast tanks of water arrayed around the perimeter; much of this is allowed to freeze solid and to serve as a radiation shield, primarily, and as an emergency water reservoir secondarily.  It also makes good ballast and reaction-control steam, to be ejected as needed to maintain a given orbital profile without stationkeeping fuel expenditure.  Terror’s position at a libration point, orbiting the sun rather than a planet, helped limit the need for stationkeeping, but he nonetheless used water at an excessive rate.  The vicissitudes of the Game and of maintaining an extravagant hoteliery and entertainment complex, in addition to the station’s standard military structures, were more than the original engineering could manage.  The water expense would be difficult to explain on paper, but it would be worse if a full inspection of Terror were ever ordered.  Ibliss covered off-the-books expenses from his personal accounts, but the station’s automatic logs still tracked each resupply, and these took place at something like one and a half times the normal rate.

Aten III was gradually being settled, in defiance of the Empire’s decree.  That process would only accelerate over time, and it would draw politics and litigation into this system.  This was partly Ibliss’ fault, having used it as a base for Gaming and for leisure for so long.  He suspected the system was only a few decades away from having its own Transport platform—his sources at Dragonmouth had informed him that plans for construction were already being filed—and once that occurred, this system would be ripe for full annexation and settlement.  The Game would be over, with no clear victor.  And the planet’s mineral wealth would come to light, rendering the asteroid mining operation—his cover for both the Game and his mining operations on Aten III—moot.

If only the Capstone hadn’t declared the planet off-limits.  The decree was part of a larger regulatory scheme in which all newly-discovered “living planets,” those with well-established ecosystems but absent sentient life, were to be regarded indefinitely as wildlife preserves until such time as a complete biological survey could be performed by the Arch government.  They were notoriously slow at getting around to completing such surveys, so dozens of frontier planets had been kept on indefinite settlement hold for the past several centuries.  Expansive populations such as the Orrkuttssh had been confined against the frontier, and that was presumably the point, or a big part of it.  The Capstone were apparently searching for something, searching world by world, and they could afford to take their time, willing to simply outlast other societies, other entire species, in order to control the message and the rate at which the frontier moved.

And up until fairly recently, so could the Orrkuttssh.  That, however, was changing.

Regrettably, it was time to switch to a secondary plan.  Operation Cover Your Tail was now in effect.  Ibliss’ minions would not know either way, as long as the psychotropic remained in their systems.  They were easily ordered about in ways that would raise alarms on a normally-functioning military base.  They could be given conflicting instructions, inconsistent work schedules, and nonsensical training regimens, and upon application of post-dosage suggestion, would entirely forget, or would remember events as specified in the suggestion; would, at the very least, confabulate, without prompting, notional chains of events to account for their unexplained whereabouts.

Ibliss took his station on the bridge and began issuing orders.  The resupply of Dread would be adjusted, and a new interim crew would be assigned.  The husband-wife military / mercenary team of Aphep and Towhret would command the vessel, and aside from two tactical teams for ground strikes, the remainder of the population would be maintenance, monitoring and defense.  Dread, initially tasked to provide cover and security for asteroid belt mining operations, would become an orbiting siege machine, ready to drop death and to repel attack from below. 

But it would also be ferrying the Gamers, and their Candidates, back to Aten III.  It was heavily loaded with potential eyewitnesses.

So it appeared as though Ibliss would no longer be receiving shipments of Soma.  If he were going to cover his tracks, it would have to be within the next few days, before his crew woke up from their extended trance.  Each of the special teams he’d assembled for his own purposes would be disbanded, and all their special skills would evaporate along with their memories of their special training.  He already had a post-trance suggestion ready for that recovery:  a sudden emergency aboard the platform that had forced everyone into temporary hibernation in order to preserve life-support capacity.  He would have to arrange for the unfortunate loss of those heroic individuals who’d volunteered to put everyone into stasis before succumbing, tragically, to vacuum anoxia.

But first, he had to see to his checklist.  Item 1:  see to the departure of Dread.  He couldn’t rush the schedule without ruffling some scales among his guests, so this was a gating concern.  Item 2 would have to wait until the platform was at least one day away, to prevent those onboard from witnessing the next step.

Two diurnal cycles later, Dread was far enough out that—his engineers assured him—the next step would go unnoticed.  This was the chanciest part of the whole plan, and the most subject to perturbation.  He had a very narrow window within which to launch Nemesis, if he were to make use of it during this orbital period.  Fortunately, this portion of the plan met requirements for plausibility; since it occurred during the waning period of the crew’s last dose of Soma, this was important, as it would be the first thing they remembered upon awakening afterward, and the haziness between these events and their last clear memories—those made prior to the onset of the first full effective dose—could be explained as a side effect of Sleep, especially if unspecified “technical issues” had occurred to Sleep support while the crew was under.

So the launch of Nemesis was masked as a training exercise.  In the first phase, Terror left his gravitationally-moored position at Libration Point 1, en route to a heliocentric orbit within the asteroid belt.  There, it would encounter the approaching Nemesis, just nearing its aphelion.

Several weeks later, Dread was nearing the halfway point in its journey, and Terror was nearing the first stop in its own.  The bridge was alerted to the next task in the “training mission,” and Ibliss took his position behind the helm.  He’d put the crew on reduced duty, knowing that during this time of withdrawal, many would be exhausted.  Those still on duty on the bridge, pushed a bit past their normal shift, were somewhat more giddy than usual.

He began issuing orders.  “Weapons, go hot.”  The weapons officer placed his targeting and tracking console into Live mode.  “Comms, open a scanning channel and search for micro-class locator beacons.” 

For several years, Terror had been running orbital plots on various asteroids in the belt, having registered them as points of tactical (and commercial) interest.  The Nemesis contingency had been prepared well in advance, but of course it was “officially hoped” that things would never come to this point.  By now, at aphelion, Nemesis’ onboard beacon would have been activated, and momentarily the communications console confirmed this.  “Locate source of beacon.  Main screen.”  Nemesis was right where Terror had plotted it to be, but at this range, it was just a white speck against the black.  “Magnify one thousand times.”  The asteroid filled the main screen.  As suspected, it was tumbling slowly, so there would be no one feature to lock on to that would remain at or near the center of the picture.  This would have to be done the old-fashioned way.  “Target the center of the asteroid.  Paint the target.”  A powerful green laser was fired from Terror’s foremost weapons bank, and much less than a second later a bright point blossomed on the viewscreen, dead center of the asteroid.  The targeting system tracked the asteroid’s slow progress, continually adjusting the laser’s position to maintain the dot at the center point, compensating for the irregular, shifting contour of the rotating rock. 

The next step was not to be found in any training manual or procedure guide.  This was something Ibliss and his combat engineers had put together themselves, as a byproduct of their substantial modifications to Terror.  Like all combat platforms, he had a strong magnetic field that could be used to deflect incoming ferromagnetic bolides and to accelerate charged particles harmlessly away from essential areas.  This provided some protection from projectiles and energy weapons, but was of course useless against non-magnetic objects and electromagnetic radiation.  Fear platforms are essentially bulging domes fixed to either side of a vast disc, enclosing a central deck whose rotation provides the internal gravity that provides for a stable, psychologically-viable long term space habitat.  The same motors that generate that motion also generate the magnetic field enrobing the station; this field can be intensified greatly under combat conditions, and still more to meet the requirements of a particularly demanding assault.  But Orrkuttssh have never been privy to the nature of the fairly unlimited energy sources monopolized by the Greys, and there is always a tradeoff to be made during combat.  Sometimes, for instance, internal gravity would suffer as the motors’ rotation was retasked to deliver more power to the shield.  What Ibliss had set out to do, using his then-only platform as a test bed, was to upgrade it to something more comparable to the Capstone technological standard, to reverse-engineer some of their capabilities and maybe achieve some kind of threat parity with at least their smallest, most mobile combat platforms.

So he’d undertaken an extremely hazardous sideline trade in Capstone weapons and transport technology.  In order to finance this—and his participation in the Game—he’d also invested in some illegal mining on Aten III.  Some of the materials gathered there were useful in research and development, and the rest was simply a compact, convenient source of instant wealth.  To insulate himself from involvement with the quite prominent mines on two of the planet’s continents, he’d set up a refinery at a considerable distance from them, away from prying eyes, over on Aten IV.  After having completed it, he couldn’t help but have it adorned with a number of homey touches, including a large monolithic sculpture of the canonical Ideal Kuttssh short face, surrounded by various temple structures arrayed at geometrically-significant distances and angles.  It was intended to appear as nothing more than a religious and cultural center for Dragons on furlough.  Mining had never fully got underway on this planet, despite its lack of protected status (it having no extant life of any kind), because of the combination of the sheer inhospitability of the surface and the relative scarcity of useful minerals at the surface.  (Asteroid mining was no more hospitable, but the yield was higher, and the fuel cost of liftoff much less.)  There could be no hunting on Aten IV, and it was too cold and miserable a place for any resorts.  It was, all in all, a fairly secure site for the kinds of activity that went on there.

Among the discoveries that his engineers had made was part of the secret of Capstone unlimited power.  It was still unknown how their power was generated, but it was believed to involve extracting electricity from vacuum energy, presumably at one or more massive-yet-secret facilities.  Then it was directed into streams and simply teleported directly to the power systems of Capstone craft, bases, cities and industrial structures.  The key to obtaining access to an energy stream was to hack together a TransNet receiver:  to set up a miniature Transport platform, with a Capstone transponder that would identify it to the source as a valid consumer of Arch energy.  The engineering team had got things underway by obtaining a salvaged small scout craft, long derelict, from a drifting graveyard of ships and debris left by an ancient deep-space battle along another, quite distant frontier.  From this, they were able to figure out how to store the power and deliver it, but the learning process took quite some time.  When active, this power supply could boost the available power on board Terror by several times over.  It could intensify the magnetic shielding, power additional weapons, and—most importantly—could drive another of his engineers’ achievements, an upscale version of the Greys’ magnetic drive.  This was only practical on reasonably small ships, and Terror was right at the practical limit, but the principle was pretty straightforward.  A conductive disc, rapidly spun in the presence of a planetary magnetic field, would be subject to the induction of eddy currents, which would in turn induce an opposing magnetic field.  This could quickly and noiselessly drive a ship from a planet’s surface, without the need for rockets or other high-profile propulsion.  The strength of the field could be varied by varying the rotation rate; rapid changes to the rate could be used to redirect the resulting force vector, causing the ship to slide erratically in three dimensions as it flew.  This was quite useful in evasive situations, and that darting kind of movement was a hallmark of the Greys’ tactical craft.  Terror had been retrofitted with just such a disk, embedded within its own, saucerlike central disk; and it had been tested in the powerful magnetic fields of the two largest gas giants, Atens V and VI.  It was effective at departing from the vicinity of a reasonably massive planet, but Terror’s mass was too great to allow the kinds of maneuverability seen in the Greys’ more gracile ships, especially in the weaker field of a rocky planet.

But there was one additional dividend to be gained from this experimentation.  Terror’s central mass-driver cannon could now quite effectively accelerate a small ferromagnetic asteroid, for use as a potentially devastating weapon.

There was undoubtedly much more potential for the pirated Capstone energy, but his people were still working out the possibilities.  From a close examination of the salvaged ship, they’d learned that the Greys didn’t use ordinary conductive wire or optical cables to transmit power.  Rather, electrical and electromagnetic energy flowed through ever-shifting, self-organizing channels, which his engineers termed “meridians,” embedded within the material of the infrastructure and hull.  This appeared to be an aspect of their self-healing technology.  As to the mechanisms whereby the metals and composites actually repaired themselves, that was still unknown…as was the mechanism whereby the meridians automatically shifted around discontinuities in their semiconductive matrix. 

It would be a substantial coup to figure it all out.  The Greys’ ships could take catastrophic damage and continue operating, even sometimes surviving uncontrolled reentry.  Orrkuttssh ships are heavy, clunky chunks of metal, and although their armor can withstand a great deal of incoming fire, they require manual repair, and accumulated damage dramatically alters their flight characteristics.  Their technological impetus has always been toward raw power and brute force rather than finesse and exotica.  Their aesthetic has never run short on elegance, however; throughout the Empire, their name can be used as a metaphor for any pleasing combination of force and subtlety, whether in technology, art, or architecture.  And this shows in the designs of their ships and weapons, which are, in the opinions of many people of many different races, quite beautiful.  Their technology nonetheless appears quaint by the standards of many; whereas the Greys use a direct psychic link between their brains and their equipment, and primates (indeed, most animals with fingers) like gesture interfaces, touch displays, keyboards and holographic projections, the Dragons have always preferred knobs, buttons, levers, and joysticks, things they can wrap their rough but sensitive claws around.  Their sculpture bears the claw marks and squeezed materials of a strong, reptilian grip, as well as a merging of sinuous and blocky forms, which to the Orrkuttssh psyche represents aspects of self, of development, of growth.

Ibliss was not an artist.  He was a businessman, a Gamer, an organized crime boss, and an insurgent, all cloaked in the uniform of an upstanding, traditional warrior.  He knew fighting, he knew stealing, and he knew cheating.  Aesthetics was something he kept experts on hand for, to tell him what was a good idea to like or dislike.

“Ready the bolide,” he commanded.  The weapons officer executed a command script that simultaneously activated a magnetic tractor and opened a bay door.  Within the bay was a small nickel-iron asteroid; held by the tractor beam, it remained stationary.  Once the system was confirmed by the mass-driver computer as stable, the tractor reversed itself into a repulsor and guided the object into the breech of the mass cannon.  When the process was complete, an indicator light confirmed this on the officer’s panel.

“Weapons, what says your console?”

“The board is green, sir.”

“Then we’re go for launch.”

Now came the tricky part.  The projectile asteroid Marrdukk was large enough to cause local devastation, but that was just about it.  For total destruction, he needed Nemesis.  But it was far too massive to be accelerated by the mass driver.  A precise hit by Marrdukk could deflect Nemesis into an inbound transfer orbit, and would conveniently vaporize or eject Marrdukk completely from the asteroid belt, destroying and dissipating the evidence of manipulation while preserving evidence of collision:  a “natural” phenomenon to any who investigated the incident later.  But the transfer orbit would be unreasonably slow unless augmented by very powerful engines, the kinds of engines that leave very obvious traces of exhaust as they power their way through space.  The kinds of engines that would have to be compensated for with very exotic stealth technology.  The solution to this had also come from the salvaged scout ship, although Ibliss had preferred to hold on to the technology for much longer, as it might come in handy should a campaign against the Greys become necessary.  

This was a technology the Greys guarded as jealously as their Transport, a technology few Orrkuttssh even knew existed, an offshoot of the ancient Capstone quantum computer experiments:  a dual-navigator metaphasal quantum cloak.  Such a device exploited the native tendency of Capstone quantum computers to distribute their operations across multiple parallel universes, as well as their self-organizational ability to incorporate nearby solid matter, especially highly-ordered matter, into their physical memory and computational processors.  A basic navigator computer could utilize all the crystals embedded in the materials comprising its support infrastructure, and thusly armed with what was essentially, now, an extrasensory grasp of the surrounding universe and its near neighbors, could precognitively react to circumstances that had yet to become real threats.  A side effect of this operation was that the navigated craft had a tendency to wander, partially, from universe to universe, in effect distributing its existence through several at once and vastly mitigating its potential for discovery in any one of them.  This made for a very effective built-in stealth capability, but had the downside that the craft didn’t necessarily end up in the same universe it had started off in.  To correct for this, modern stealth rigs utilized two quantum computers with pre-entangled cognitive units.  One could remain at home, so to speak, operating at the base or on the carrier that launched the ship; alternately, both could be installed on the ship, where they could operate from a single power source and share a single ordered-matter computational matrix.  When operating synchronously, they served to mutually compensate for phasal drift, keeping the ship’s distributed set of spacetime courses centered on the universe in which it was launched.  The differential output of both members could be tuned to weaken or strengthen the corrective action, allowing a stealth ship to disappear altogether from this universe, if desired, for essentially the duration of its journey, at which point it could snap back into full existence.

Nemesis had been outfitted with enormous chemical rockets and a cannibalized metaphasal rig, earning him the status of a fully-qualified planetary ship and qualifying him for a designation and a gender.  He awaited only the establishment of a final course, which would be partially determined by its deflection in the upcoming collision...and partially determined by the decision Ibliss now had to make:  to spiral in gently, preserving as much as possible the appearance of a natural disaster, or dive straight toward the center of the system and quickly lose any possibility of recall or of plausibility?  He had a feeling he wouldn’t know until the last minute.  Although the engines on the Nemesis packed plenty of fuel, it was a truly massive object, and its initial acceleration would not easily be overcome should a course correction be required.  Once underway, the nav system couldn’t really steer, just subtly curve the path already in progress.  This was in part by design, to keep the nav computers happily ignorant through the bulk of the journey, and in part due to limitations of the ship’s system integration, which was crippled by the use of a suboptimal power supply.  The salvaged Capstone power source was supplying Terror’s expanded weapons capabilities, hospitality, and research and development operations, and even were it available for dismantling and further study, there was simply not enough understanding of the device or its materials to produce a serviceable duplicate.  The best his engineers had been able to come up with for Nemesis was a small fusion reactor, but without a handy Capstone radiation converter to produce usable power with, it had to drive an old-fashioned circulation turbine system instead.  That system had now been operating for many years, through several full orbits of Nemesis, and was in need of both maintenance and fuel. 

There would be no time to board Nemesis and see to these matters before Soma withdrawals completely disrupted operations.  There were supplementary solar collectors on board, but those would only become particularly productive once well within the orbit of Aten IV.  This would perhaps be able to boost the nav computers’ precogsense somewhat as it neared destination, but not enough—his engineers had calculated—to endanger the objective.  The computers needed to be able to compensate for unexpected circumstances during the journey, but they were better kept in the dark as to the final destination.  By the time they determined that collision was inevitable, there would be too much velocity and too little fuel to change the outcome.  This was assured, the engineers told him, by the Soma analogue they had fed each computer:  a series of obsessive, interminable mathematical distractions intended to degrade those aspects of their performance pertinent to avoiding planetary bodies.  They were effectively brainwashed into believing that only objects smaller than the host asteroid were threats to their trajectory.

“Navigation, open a command channel to Nemesis and prepare the system to accept preprogrammed course via voice command.” Orrkuttssh do like voice-control technology as well, but then, pretty much every sentient race does.  In actuality, Terror had always had an open channel to Nemesis, and the nav technician had only to route the signal to his active console and issue a macro command.  The console chimed when Nemesis’ nav computers were confirmed in standby mode.

Ibliss stood up.  He knew that if he issued the order to head straight in, he’d immediately regret it.  And he knew that if he issued the order for a slow spiral, he’d regret it much later.  He closed his eyes.  “Set the controls for the heart of the sun.”

Nemesis’ nav computers accepted this as a valid course command, and went into launch standby.  Ibliss issued the next command:  “Launch upon impact.  Coordinate impact targeting with Nemesis.”

Nemesis’ nav system began coordinating targeting with Terror’s mass driver.  Based on the desired initial trajectory, and Terror’s position, the computers determined an optimal impact site on Nemesis’ surface, and illuminated a set of beacons marking the impact site.  The main screen displayed the target, a red dot, and some tabular data indicating the optimal launch time, just a few minutes away.  The red dot indicating the target was slowly drifting into the center of the screen, surrounded by a red circle.  As expected, Nemesis’ rotational axis was tilted, so the red circle would never coincide with the green, but it would of course cross the same meridian, and the nav / targeting computer system would compensate for latitude. 

“Weapons, surrender launch control to the nav computer.”  Another chime confirmed that this was done; launch would occur when the boundary of the red circle intersected the green dot’s meridian.  Without further input from anyone on the bridge, the cannon made a final adjustment to its aim and fired.  The projectile, an asteroid the size of a small city, began accelerating down the long magnetic ramp of a weapons platform the size of a small moon, en route to a collision with an asteroid the size of a small continent.

“Projectile is away,” reported the weapons officer, “away…away…away…away,” the last repetition coinciding with the moment the projectile cleared the breech of the cannon.  The bolide, now ballistic, continued on a straight line for several minutes, and the larger asteroid continued its oblivious curving path right into that line. 

It was all in Marrdukk’s hands now. 

A series of beeping tones from the weapons console indicated the bolide’s progress, increasing in frequency as it neared the target.  “Dim main screen,” Ibliss ordered when the tones became close enough to merge into a single beep. 

The screen darkened.  A moment later, a brilliant flash took place at its center, quickly spreading to fill the screen before fading again.  The visible impact event lasted only seconds.  “Normal brightness,” he commanded.  The screen was returned to normal, and there was Nemesis, with the central region somewhat obscured by a dust plume.  Marrdukk itself was gone, obliterated in the impact.  Nemesis’ path had been visibly perturbed by the collision; now its surface bore clear scars of having been struck by another asteroid, and this region of the belt would shortly be littered with ejecta.  The evidence had been planted.  When the nav computers’ seismic sensors felt the strike, they went active, and the immense rockets embedded in the asteroid flared to life.  Another indicator light and tone informed the crew that this had taken place, and a few moments later, as the asteroid yawed and pitched its way onto the proper heading, the glare of rocket exhaust became visible on the view screen. 

“Engage stealth mode,” he commanded. 

The navigation officer sent this final command to the nav computers, and momentarily the asteroid disappeared from view.  It was now thinly spread out over many adjacent parallel universes, occupying each for only a vanishingly small moment at a time, and its optical, radio and gravitational signatures would now be close to nil in any of them.  The radio ranging console now registered an empty space where Nemesis had been, and the communications uplink was severed.  The asteroid had yet to build up any momentum along the assigned course; it hadn’t even appreciably slowed down its progress along its initial course.  But within the hour, its trajectory would have been dramatically altered, and it would have begun the long parabolic curve toward its final destination.

“Report,” he commanded.  The weapons officer and navigation officer each reported broken contact with the target, indicating a successful stealth engagement.  At almost the same moment, an incoming alert from the medical department arrived on his own console, indicating widespread exhaustion and illness throughout the crew.  The time had come to shut everything down.

“Suspend all operations,” he ordered.  “Clear the bridge.  All personnel dismissed.”  He would complete the cleanup himself and then allow the station to go cold for a period of several days while the men slept off their Soma hangovers.  A prerecorded hail response would be activated, so that any approaching ships would be warned of an ongoing medical emergency entailing “quarantine conditions” on board.  Any intervening civilian emergencies would have to be diverted to the civilian mining operations, as Terror would be out of range for the duration.  He felt fairly secure that no military emergencies would ensue, but was still glad he wouldn’t have to sleep it off himself.  He would serve as a skeleton crew of one, and Terror would remain in standby mode, until such time as a full shift of the crew had recovered enough to resume their stations.