CHAPTER 12

“Want.” Ashok moved forward to meet him, circling around the doctor, looking in awe at his pseudopods. “Those are amazing.”

“You should see me tap dance.” Dr Metcalf giggled. Ashok liked him instantly, which he realized didn’t mean much. He liked everyone, because everyone was interesting on some level, and he liked being interested. The others weren’t taking Metcalf’s augmentations as well, though. Callie looked grossed-out, and Elena was doing that thing where she vivisected you with her eyes.

Now it was Metcalf’s turn to circle Ashok, who posed obligingly with his arms outstretched. “You are remarkable yourself! We do a little bit of biomechanical work here, but our focus is more firmly biological, and this level of integration – it’s amazing.”

“See, back home, nobody is creative like this,” Ashok gestured. “We can regrow a lost limb, get new organs cloned off old ones, stuff like that, but cross-species biological body hacking? I think there are about a million laws against even trying it in most polities.”

“People are so short-sighted,” Metcalf said. “We’re great believers in scientific liberty here in the Vanir system. No avenue to advancement should ever be closed.”

“Couldn’t agree more, doc,” Ashok said. “And let me applaud your self-experimentation.”

“Hmm? Oh, the legs? No, we perfected this before I submitted to it myself. These sort of upgrades are strongly encouraged if you want to rise through the ranks of the Exalted. They show dedication to the vision of our leaders. Not that I haven’t tried out a few innovations first on myself, you know – sometimes you come up with a wonderful idea and you don’t want someone else to do it first–”

“Not to break up the mutual appreciation society, but what are we doing here?” Callie said. “I need to see someone in authority. I’m a goddamn diplomat.”

Metcalf pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Oh, of course, please, I just need to do some basic medical scans, just a moment.” Metcalf scuttled over to a terminal covered in Axiom symbols, tapped at the screen, then said, “This might sting.”

“What might sting,” Callie said, and then they all winced as the room pulsed with blinding white and purple light. Ashok’s exposed flesh – what there was of it – went cold, then hot, then horripilated, and then for just an instant felt like it was being scraped off with a vegetable peeler. It must have been worse for the people with more skin, because Elena screamed and Callie grunted like someone had punched her and Drake and Janice keened in harmony. The agony was brief but memorable, and Ashok shivered all over when it subsided.

“There, it only hurt a moment,” Metcalf said cheerfully.

“The whole room is a body scanner?” Elena wobbled, then her legs gave way and she sat down hard on the floor.

“Oh yes,” Metcalf said. “I scan myself daily. Some of the things we play with just love turning into cancer, and it’s best to catch the tumors early, of course. Now let’s see… Oh. Oh, my.” He turned. “Doctor Oh, is it? Where are you from?”

“Earth.”

“Yes. Right. Earth. In that case – when are you from?”

“You don’t have to tell him anything, Elena,” Callie said. She’d remained upright through the scan, but she was grinding her teeth, and she had an expression Ashok had seen before. It made him want to hide behind a bulkhead for safety.

Metcalf cocked his head. “Are you upset? I’m just trying to take a medical history. My scans show evidence of a long stint in cryo-sleep, followed by a much shorter one, and she’s just full of contaminants and antibodies that haven’t existed on Earth since long before our system chose to withdraw from galactic commerce to focus our energies inward. I’d hazard a guess that she was on the crew of a goldilocks ship, perhaps even from one of the first waves sent out in the 22nd century. Am I close?”

“Close enough,” Elena said.

“And you, Ashok, you’re even more remarkable than I’d expected.” He flicked at the screen, scanning alien symbols. “The anti-rejection medications developed to keep your body from treating your mechanical implants like foreign objects, they must be far beyond anything we have here. We do little tricks with gene therapy for our biological implants, but this is an entirely different paradigm… oh, my, heads are going to spin when the other scientists get a look at you.”

“I am an amazing machine man,” Ashok agreed.

“And Drake and Janice…”

“We don’t want to talk about it,” Janice said. Ashok knew he didn’t have the keenest insight into the emotional lives of others, but it occurred to him that all this medical stuff was probably especially unpleasant for Drake and Janice, given their own history as the subjects of medical experiments.

“Your case is very interesting, too, then,” Metcalf said. “I’ll leave it at that.”

“What about me?” Callie said.

“You’re a baseline human. Healthy enough, though I’d keep an eye on your bone density. You’re past your reproductive peak, and you never bothered with that anyway. There are minor variations in your immune system as compared to our local population, but it’s not extreme.” He shrugged. “Nothing of interest.”

“You’ve got quite the bedside manner there, Metcalf.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything rude – I’m sorry. You are useful as a control subject, to show what baseline humans are like in the Sol system currently, though we have some samples that came through the bridge last year.”

Samples, Callie thought. Did that mean dead soldiers from the last exploratory mission the Imperative sent? “Is there a big boss arch-healer?” Callie said. “What I’m looking for is your emperor, president, prime minister, king, high priest, whatever. I’m a diplomat. I need to do some diplomacy here.”

Metcalf stroked his beard. “The system is ruled by a triumvirate of Exalted. The head of surgery, the head of research, and the head of operations. It’s possible the first two would be interested in seeing you. I marked your scan results as urgent, so I’m sure they’ll be notified about your presence soon. This is very exciting! I don’t usually get to do much here at the shipyard besides the routine augmentations we give the pilots. You’ve all really livened up my day!”

“Are you important here, doc?” Callie said.

“I like to think so.”

She rubbed her temples. “What I mean is, are you a high-ranking whatever, healer in this technocracy?”

Metcalf drew himself up on his pseudopods. “I am. As I said, I am head of surgery for this facility, which is crucial for system security. I stand in the upper echelons of the third rank.”

“Which means… what?”

“The first rank consists of the three division heads I mentioned, who set policy for the system. The second rank is made up of their assistant directors and deputies, two for each division head. The third rank includes the directors of facilities, and there are twelve of us in each division – just a handful of us in that rank are human or chimeras like myself, of course, only the very highest achievers. I am part of the surgical division, though of course I dabble in research. You’ve met my associate, the Weaver, who runs operations here–”

“So you’re one of the fifty most important people in the local government?” Callie interrupted.

“Forty-five most, actually. It would be difficult to rank me precisely, as the lines of succession are a bit muddled after you get past the second rank, not that the problem has ever come up–”

“Good enough,” Callie said. “Ashok, take him hostage.”

Ashok, who’d maneuvered close to the doctor against this very eventuality, reached out with his hand full of articulated manipulators and delivered a precisely calibrated electric shock. Doctor Metcalf’s eyes rolled back, his tentacles drummed on the floor – how about that for tap dancing – and then he slumped, unconscious.

“Now what?” Elena said.

“Now, we negotiate,” Callie said. “I’m a diplomat. That’s what we do.”

Ashok managed to take control of the room’s systems without too much trouble, but he couldn’t get beyond that. “The station is really compartmentalized. Probably so a failure in one area doesn’t become a failure in others, which means I can’t seize control of station-wide security or anything. Those doors won’t open until we want them to, though. Shall could do more, but I’m only about one-third machine by volume, so I’ve got limits.”

“I can’t believe they just left us alone in here with a senior official,” Callie said. “I know they haven’t met me before, but still.”

“We are trapped on a space station, though,” Elena said. “I haven’t been in a lot of these situations, but don’t these things usually end badly for the hostage-takers?”

“Only if they’re stupid,” Callie said. “We aren’t stupid. We also have a high-value hostage, which helps. Now we just need a way to call the Weaver.”

“There’s a communication system here,” Janice said. “Ashok patched me into it already. It’s not as compartmentalized as the other systems. I can say whatever you want to anybody you want. I can even communicate with other facilities in the system… though I don’t know what any of them are because their names are mostly written in that creepy Axiom language.”

“I’m supplying translations as fast as I can,” Ashok said.

“Oh good. ‘Central Processing’ sounds reasonable enough, if vague, same with ‘Stasis Center’ and ‘Experimental Protocol Division,’ but are you sure you’ve translated these others correctly? ‘Blood Circus’? ‘The Temple of Rending’? ‘The Hall of Teeth’?”

“Lantern is a lot better at their language than I am,” Ashok said. “I don’t get the idioms at all. I barely understand human idioms, to be fair.”

“Let’s just call the Weaver first,” Callie said. “If he’s no help, we’ll go over his head.”

“I’m just… hell, I’ll put you on station-wide public address, good enough?” Janice said.

“Works for me. I do well with an audience.” Callie cleared her throat. “Hey, Double-Double! Captain Machedo here. I’d like to talk to the ruling triumvirate, and I mean now. We’ve got your man Doctor Metcalf here, and the thing is, I, personally, never took the Hippocratic oath.”

The speakers in the room hissed emptily for a moment, and then the Weaver spoke. “You are very annoying. I am going to send some people to kill you.”

“No you aren’t. The doc says we’re very special and important, full of fascinating medical innovations, and you’d get in big trouble if you wasted us. Besides, the doc would die in the process, and he’s your colleague, right? I assume you’re in the third rank too, in the operations division?”

Another empty hiss. “Metcalf always did like to hear himself talk. I see from the outgoing communications that you are, indeed, of medical interest. It’s unclear whether you need to be alive to be of use to our researchers, but for the time being I’ll refrain from euthanizing you. Let’s open negotiations, shall we?”

“They’re trying to cut the oxygen to the room,” Ashok said. “I am not obliging them.”

“Stop trying to knock us out, Doubles,” Callie said. “We’ve got this room on lockdown. This station is from when the colony was founded. Your computer technology looks like wooden blocks and popsicle sticks to us. If you aren’t going to negotiate in good faith, we might have to start cutting off some of the doc’s extra limbs. We’ve got some pretty great self-cauterizing saws down here, it looks like. It’s strange – people never think about how similar infirmaries are to armories.”

“What do you want, Machedo?”

“To talk to the organ grinder, and not the monkey.”

“What would you say to the division heads, if they were here? I can’t just summon them. Could you get the president of the Trans-Neptunian Authority on an open channel on a whim?”

“Sure I could, but I’m a diplomat, and you’re a traffic light, so I understand we’re not of equal rank and dignity. As for what I’d say – I’d ask them to sit down with me and tell me what the hell is going on in this system, why you isolated yourselves, what happened to the original colonists, what happened to everyone we sent through the bridge to check on you, and a few other pointed questions. Then I’d tell them to give me my ship back so I could return home and inform my president. After that, this whole situation is someone else’s problem. But you don’t lock up diplomats, and you don’t treat us like medical curiosities either. That’s the kind of shit that starts wars, Doubles. Do you want a war with us, now that you know we have the technology to come visit? This time the ship was full of diplomacy. Next time it might be full of guns.”

“I’ll send a request for my division head’s attention, Captain Machedo. I’ll let you know if she replies. In the meantime, perhaps we could pass the time in conversation. How did your people come to possess ship-sized wormhole technology? Or is that a state secret?”

“We found an abandoned space station out in the middle of nowhere on a long-range expedition. Nobody alive on board, though there was evidence that your people had been there, once upon a time. Turned out it was a ship-building facility, and a lot of the automated systems still worked. It took a little time, but we got the machinery switched on, and damned if it didn’t start building bridge generators!” That was all true; it just wasn’t the whole truth. “Really blew our minds.” Also true, and in reality, they’d blown up the whole facility to keep the generators from falling into the wrong hands and drawing the attention of the Axiom to humanity. “The TNA tried to keep the tech for ourselves, of course, but secrets like that leak, and we ended up making a lucrative licensing deal with the Jovian Imperative and another with the inner planets… I didn’t pay attention to all the ins and outs on the economic side. We don’t know how to make the generators, but we know how to turn on the machine that does make them, so we’ve got a monopoly, and the TNA is a major power in the Sol system now.”

“And with the power to go anywhere, you decided to come here?”

“Like I said. This system is a mystery box, and we love a mystery. There are also still a few very old people who remember relatives who emigrated to the system, hardcore life-extension cases, and of course, they’re the richest of the rich, people powerfully connected in government, like that. Did you think you’d be left alone forever?”

“Not forever. For long enough, we hoped. It’s a big, dangerous universe, Captain Machedo. Did you humans ever consider that the ability to go anywhere in the galaxy just offers the opportunity to die in ever more distant places?”

“The kind of people who take on missions like this aren’t too afraid of dying, no. It’s a sort of self-selection criteria.”

“Mmm. How long before we can expect more visitors, do you think? Not that they’d get any farther than the outside of the fence we set up. Just because you jumped it doesn’t mean other people will be able to.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Callie said. “We sent a lifeboat back home with navigational data before we came to the shipyard here.”

“What.” The syllable was flat.

Callie had gotten the idea for this lie from the scourge-ship’s escape pod, returning to tattle on them. “Well, sure. Sending the lifeboat back meant we only had one bridge generator on board my ship, which isn’t ideal, but it seemed like pretty important information to send home, don’t you think? I sent a little video message, too – ‘Hi, Captain Machedo here, the Vanir system is still inhabited and they’re trying to murder us and they can disrupt our wormholes but here’s the way to get around that.’”

“You might have mentioned this communication before, captain.”

“I might have, if I’d been talking to someone important, instead of the guy who stands in the intersection with white gloves and a little whistle waving the cars through.”

“I do not understand that reference.”

“That’s okay,” Callie said. “It’s enough for you to know it’s insulting. I’m done talking to you. Get me someone with actual authority.” She made a cutting-her-throat gesture and Janice ended the communication.

Callie turned toward Metcalf. “Let’s get him secured. I’m betting there are plenty of restraints in this room somewhere. Then we’ll wake him up and find out what the hell has been happening here for the past hundred years.”