Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer, Page 2

  All the man could say was, “Yes, sir.”

  Now was time for Huen to face his destiny. If the mandate of heaven was not his, then so be it. He undogged the door to his stateroom again and entered.

  Shutting it behind him, he looked across the room at the man-mountain standing at a relaxed but correct position of attention, off to the side of his sofa. As large as Artemis was, his captain’s quarters were capacious, deliberately big enough to hold a dinner party.

  As soon as the door shut behind Huen, Shan bowed deeply and then returned to his position, eyes unfocused. The captain returned the bow at a precise and shallower angle appropriate to their social and rank difference, and then opened the conversation. “Do you speak Cantonese?”

  “Yes, Comrade Captain.”

  “Mandarin,” he asked, switching to that dialect.

  “Yes, Comrade Captain.”

  There was no need to ask him if he spoke standard Han Chinese, mandated in the People’s Republic. “How about English?”

  “Yes, Comrade Captain.”

  “You will cease to use the title ‘Comrade,’ especially in English. In that tongue, I am properly called ‘Captain’ or ‘Skipper.’ Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Captain.” The man’s eyes remained unfocused and slightly downcast.

  A Westerner might have interpreted this as stupidity or the result of intimidation, but Huen saw in it nothing more than good manners. Now for the tests. He walked over to stand to the man’s left.

  Shan did not move, not even when Huen slapped him suddenly on the back of the head, as if to a small boy. The captain’s next ploy was an attempt to poke the man in the eye, an attack that might have done some actual damage and certainly would have caused him pain.

  The Chinese cyborg lowered his head slightly, enough that Huen’s fingernail scored a gash on the larger man’s forehead and missed his eye, which immediately opened again.

  Huen then stepped directly in front of Shan, within easy reach of his enormous hands. Even had the man not been a cyborg, Huen would have been placing himself in grave physical danger. “Steward Shan,” he said, “if your orders from your government include doing me harm in any way, I would prefer you carry them out immediately, so that the others may eliminate you and my replacement can continue the mission.”

  A flicker of emotion, just the tiniest shadow, crossed Shan’s face.

  Huen judged the man genuinely young, and thus not fully adept at concealing his feelings in this unusual situation. “You are distressed. I have insulted you.”

  “I would not presume to question my captain,” Shan replied.

  “Not with your mouth, but with your eyes, you already did.”

  The big man said nothing, but bowed deeply and held that position. Huen took the opportunity to step behind him and suddenly slam his shoulder into Shan’s backside with all of his ordinary human strength.

  This maneuver threw Shan slightly off balance in the low gravity, and only because it must have been completely unexpected. The man took a half step forward to catch himself, then reset his feet with a slightly wider stance, not lifting from his bow. Huen was certain he would not be able to budge him again. The captain could see the muscles at the edges of the man’s face move enough to be sure that he was using his peripheral vision to watch more carefully this time.

  “Steward Shan, stand up. I have been testing you. I am satisfied with the results so far. The other stewards may take longer to warm up to you. Do you understand that idiom?”

  Shan stood. “Yes, Captain. My English language training was quite extensive.” His accent was noticeable but his facility appeared better than expected.

  “Then I will only remind you of this once. I have the mandate of heaven.” This was a Chinese saying, one that claimed he had the legitimacy of the gods and ancestors. Less specifically, it meant something like “things are going my way right now.” While the Communists had tried to stamp out all religion, getting rid of five thousand years of cultural history had proved impossible, so this was a shorthand Huen was certain the man understood.

  Huen continued. “The current government of the People’s Republic is not China. It would like you to believe it is, but it is not. It would like you to think it always speaks for greater China, but it does not. As the Communist Party itself correctly teaches, the historical dialectic alters governments constantly, even its own. We have seen the entire world, except for China, change radically in the past two decades. Governments come and go, but China remains. Do you agree?”

  “I would not presume to disagree with one so wise, who retains the mandate of heaven,” Shan replied.

  In Western terms, Huen mused, Shan just told him he knew which way the wind was blowing. “Then I believe we understand each other. All I wish is for you to do what is good for the true China, and thus for the world.” Huen hoped that Shan understood his meaning: like “Russia” or “America” or “La France,” China remained ultimately more a concept than a country.

  “Resume your duties, Steward Shan.” Huen pointedly turned his back on the man and opened his door to see a very nervous Senior Steward Schaeffer and his two compatriots. “Come in, gentlemen,” he said, opening the portal wide.

  Schaeffer certainly did not miss the spot of blood on Shan’s already-healing forehead, but he said nothing.

  “Open a bottle of my best sherry, will you? Pour five galsses.”

  Schaeffer flicked his eyes at Steward Clayton, who nodded imperceptibly and then stepped over to the cabin’s dry bar.

  From inside he selected a carefully padded bottle of sherry and soon decanted five drinks in crystal glasses onto a silver tray, all items heirlooms from Huen’s family, tracing back to the days when his city-state had been a British holding. His family had been wealthy then, and remained so to this day, but he accessed such privileges sparingly, preferring this military life.

  Huen took a glass and raised it. “Cheers and good fortune, gentlemen,” he said, and drank. Everyone managed to watch Shan out of the corners of their eyes, but the big man held the delicate crystal without difficulty and sipped as if he was attending a dinner party. Finishing his glass, the captain continued, “All right. Let’s go take a look at our ship and crew.”

  Chapter 3

  Offloading of two million or more tons of equipment onto Atlantis had gone smoothly, although “onto” was an imprecise term. The orbiting ball of liquids and volatiles had no perceptible gravity, and outgassed continuously as sunlight hit it, creating a constant faint cometary tail. In reality, the disgorged gear now floated in space alongside the ice ball.

  Some of that gear included orbital habitat modules housing threescore space construction workers to get things started. Their first order of business was to open up a large more-than-hemispherical geodesic latticework supporting a highly absorptive shroud of film. Along with computers and a dozen thrusters around its rim, it would cup the former comet like ice cream in a scoop, consuming ninety-nine percent of available solar energy and turning it into electricity, dramatically reducing the outgassing and loss of vital materials.

  Triangular panels could be selectively opened if needed, but most of the time the workers would perform their tasks in the light of the cold emitters on its inside.

  Afterward would come the processing plant, a modular setup that would attach to the shroud and sit in the open space like the pupil of an eye. Eventually more film would be extended to complete the golf-ball sphere, once the facility was ready to suck up all the gases and turn them into useful liquids. Each fluid would be stored in enormous tanks, creating an orbital fuelling station to serve the growing shuttle, grabship and tug traffic.

  Artemis’ next stop was at Hiera, the first captive asteroid. Huen understood that other rocks even now wended their slow way in from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, with tiny fusion engines slapped onto them by the half-alien Raphaela in the captured Meme scout ship. Soon Earth would be ringed by dozens of these stepping-ston
es to space.

  But this first one was critical. Whereas Atlantis, an unstable chunk of ices, had to be treated with utmost care, Hiera had been selected as a solid hunk of high metallic content, full of iron, nickel, and many other critical elements. Instead of gently offloading the vast array of supplies into co-orbital space, this time Artemis actually landed.

  Even in microgravity, unloading four million tons of equipment took time, careful weeks in this case. Instead of hastily dropping off habitats and workers to work on their own, this time Artemis became what she was designed for – a vast factory base the size of a hundred aircraft carriers, with machine shops and quarters for the human components of the enormous edifice.

  Here on Hiera base would begin humanity’s true foray into space, its seminal presence, its first island colony on a barely-charted sea. Here ships could be repaired, crews could rest, and everything necessary from screws and brackets up to new vessels could eventually be built from the material they would mine from beneath their feet.

  Huen oversaw all of this carefully, meticulously, with Shan by his side. Doubtlessly the big man recorded everything his cybernetic eye saw and his enhanced ears heard, but there had been no indication he had passed on anything to his national masters.

  If the captain wished total privacy, he ensured he was alone in a secure area. Sometimes he deliberately sent Shan away to be watched by the other stewards, giving him a deliberate opportunity to complete a potential spy mission. Huen never received any report the man did so. In fact, he thought the Americans probably reported to their country more than Shan did.

  In short, everyone watched everyone, but at least Huen had done away with the concern about assassination. Not that it wasn’t possible that the hit was merely waiting in abeyance for the right time. Perhaps it was merely a contingency plan, or perhaps such a plan didn’t exist.

  Huen put it out of his mind as he sat in his office, wading through the inevitable paperwork on his screens. After two months on Hiera, his role more resembled a factory manager than a military commander. Thousands of workers of all sorts had been shipped up in the hardworking shuttles, twenty at a time, along with several dozen Space Marines of all nations, trained for law enforcement. These last were necessary to keep control of the various enterprises that had sprung up, off-hours businesses selling homemade hooch and supplying shadier forms of entertainment.

  His troops didn’t try to root out relatively victimless crimes. If people wanted to supplement their income by selling sex or dealing in soft drugs, he wasn’t going to waste effort – just as long as the only ones exploited were themselves. Prostitution could be tolerated, but he allowed no pimping. Mostly they had to deal with assaults, petty theft, and the occasional drunken joyride on a cargo loader.

  Huen assigned Shan the additional duty to coordinate with the military police. It gave the big man something else to do besides bodyguarding, and kept him out of Shades Schaeffer’s fiery red hair. The American now masked his opinion reasonably well, but had obviously not really changed it much.

  Or perhaps he had. Schaeffer now watched Huen just as much as he did Shan, probably suspecting some kind of intra-Asian conspiracy. The captain shook his head as he tapped his desk’s smart screens with irritation. Life had seemed far simpler just commanding a wet-navy cruiser.

  Chapter 4

  The Meme Sentry hid even from its fellows among hundreds of thousands of asteroids, its rudimentary brain, perhaps as smart as a rat, loaded with compulsions that a machine culture would call programming. Its instructions fulfilled the same function, but as a living creature it enjoyed some advantages and also disadvantages different from an equivalent mechanical device. For one thing, it could experience basic emotions – hunger, fear, curiosity – and like any animal, it could make some decisions for itself.

  In this case, it decided that discretion was the better part of valor. It had witnessed the tremendous energies released at the time of the loss of its mother ship, the Survey craft that had set it in place less than one system orbit ago. It had seen the destruction of an asteroid by repeated fusion-fission explosions and, in that selfsame vicinity, the defeat of its parent and controller.

  Like a dog left on the side of the road, it felt something close to despair as it saw the Survey ship’s escape probe flee at maximum acceleration in the direction of the approaching Destroyer. Coupled with fear of abandonment and lack of specific instructions, it chose to remain silent about what it saw and to simply gather data, waiting for a time when its enormous and deadly cousin would arrive, rather than risk a report via biolaser transmission. In the meantime, self-preservation overrode all other concerns, for obviously Species 666, the Human inhabitants of this system, were extremely dangerous and inimical.

  Besides – and this was an unusually intuitive leap for such a creature – other Sentries must have survived. It distinctly remembered three launching within its sensor range, to stealthily spread out and watch the enemies of the Meme. They would be seeing everything it did, and so as far as it was concerned, they could go ahead and risk themselves by breaking silence and reporting. It would not be so stupid.

  Unfortunately for the Empire, all four Sentries had been cloned from the same basic creature, which because of its long journey in close proximity to three Meme, had absorbed an unusual level of intelligence and what a human might term ego, resulting in something approaching cowardice. Therefore all four of them watched and waited for specific orders, each rather hoping that none ever came.

  These Sentries were not rebels. No, nothing so overt as that. They simply shirked their duties, in a manner impossible had they been machines.

  Chapter 5

  Year Two

  The mother of a new human race, Raphaela thought as she rubbed her swollen belly. Comfortably ensconced aboard her ship and mate Alan Denham, she put that temptation aside once again, feeling the Meme part of her as a beguiling serpent, holding out the apple even now.

  When she had first proposed using the bioplasm captured on the scout ship, the goo devoid of genetic memory left over from the escaping Meme pure forms, she had thought it might be the answer to many problems. She had thought to apply it to humans and hoped it might confer some abilities of a Blend without the issues associated with joining an alien mind to a human.

  She had erred.

  Assuming the process would be primarily biomechanical, Rae – she’d taken to calling herself by that nickname – and the human researchers she worked with found themselves utterly at a loss.

  It must be the lack of memory molecules, she’d thought. Maybe all I have to do is add some of my own, as I did with my children, and we would have almost unlimited Blends.

  Powerful temptation indeed, for then each would be in essence an offspring of hers, bound by ties of shared biology, like the children of her blended body. When it came down to it, though, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. At its root, doing so seemed just as immoral: to inject a part of herself into a separate being, as the Meme did when destroying a sentient’s mind and then blending with the empty hulk. It would create partial copies of her, plus the mind of the original human, as pure form Meme did when creating mitoses, but having taken on humanity’s form, she found she had acquired its moral compunctions as well.

  Even if the recipients volunteered, it seemed to risk abomination.

  Whom the gods would destroy, they first raise up. Temptations of divinity, Rae? At least Alan knew who he was.

  Or he used to.

  That turned her contemplations to the one she termed husband, who was also her ship. Clinging fiercely to that human definition was necessary for her sanity. Any other designation for the relationship would miss its essence. What else could one call a recording of his dead brain’s engram loaded into the nervous system of the vessel that bore his name? Skull, née Alan Denham, was now everything she ever wished him to be.

  And yet…that emptiness. Was it really wise to get exactly what I wanted? As always that quest
ion remained unanswerable, and in any case the simplest way to drive it out of her mind was to revisit the distracting pleasure she had engineered.

  Some would call it addiction, if they knew.

  Query: How else could refusing to face reality, but rather retreating into artfully-constructed ecstasy, be defined?

  Answer: I’m not ready to find out yet.

  Rae reached for the console to lay her hand upon it, a scientific necromancy.

  ***

  “Hello, love,” Alan, who had been Skull, said to her as he entered the room. At that moment he inhabited his avatar, looking exactly as she remembered him from before his death. “How are the children?”

  “You know very well how they are, Alan,” Rae said. “Better than I perhaps, with all the senses you can bring to bear inside yourself. Yet you always ask. That is so sweet.”

  That niggling sensation bothered her again, but she pushed it aside.

  “How can I be anything but sweet when my love is so near?” The thing that was now him, but less, came into her arms. “But to be connected to them as you are…” He placed a hand on her belly, sensing four heartbeats.

  “You will be, soon enough. With Ezekiel I had only a primitive crèche on an aged and dying shuttle. I had to do everything myself. But your ship’s body is young, and you’ll have plenty of interface time with them. From birth they will be able to communicate molecularly – in fact they will know nothing else until you teach them.”

  Alan laughed. “Closest I’ll ever be to a mother.” He considered discussing his own ship-body then, thoughts such as, if I can gestate a semi-intelligent missile, or another of these Memetech ships, could I gestate a fully sentient creature? Contemplating doing so made him uneasy, though, so he put it out of his mind.

  He knew this relaxed and easy conversation seemed like heaven to Rae after the bickering of their relationship’s beginnings. Part of that had been his own fears about how much of her was human and how much was not. Ironically for all that he had feared and accused her of alien dominance, it was the woman who had proved the stronger personality by far.