The Bonaventura. Coria City-state, Free Space.
Captain Benjamin Arany winced as the bio-sealer worked to close the slash on his arm and glared at Kopitar. “Careful, Marcel.”
Kopitar scowled back. “It wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d let me deal with it when it was fresh.”
“Too much to do,” Arany said, returning his attention to the screen. He manipulated the controls with his free hand, backed up the data stream and ran it again, watching the river of tiny aircraft emerge from the guts of the big Eriuman cruiser, like a river of deadly gnats. “This new tactic of the Republic’s is a killer.”
“Demonstrably not,” Kopitar replied. “You’re still alive.” He put the sealer down and prodded the seal with the tips of his fingers, testing the new flesh. The mental forefinger was cold against the skin, making Arany shiver.
“We’re alive only by an atom or two,” Arany said. He beckoned Natasa over.
She held out the pad. “Everyone accounted for except one.”
“How many dead?” Arany asked.
“Twelve,” she admitted, her narrow shoulders falling.
“Thirteen,” Kopitar said, straightening up. “Shore died just before I came to find you. Sorry.”
All three of them paused to absorb that loss, while the bridge around them hissed and steamed, venting plasma and more, as techs and engineers worked furiously to make basic repairs and get the ship moving again.
“Who’s missing?” Arany asked, recalling Natasa’s comment.
“Georgina.”
Arany frowned. “Georgina? How could she be missing? She’s not even front line. She lives in the galley!”
“I don’t know, boss,” Natasa said calmly. “I’ve gone through the ship’s roster three times. I’ve checked every squeezable space on board.”
“What about the crawl space under the engine housings?” Kopitar said, picking up the sealer. “Kids like to get under there and Georgie is little enough.”
“Including the crawl spaces,” Natasa finished. “She is not onboard.”
“We need one of those remote tracking systems,” Arany groused. “This sort of exercise is a waste of time.”
“Granted,” Natasa said. “When we have the spare credits I’ll rush out and buy one. In the meantime, I count noses. Georgina is missing and I can’t account for how she left the ship. We’ve been in vacuum since the Eriumans appeared and granted, it was a bit chaotic for a while, but none of the sensors record airlocks opening, which would be one way she could leave.”
Arany followed what Natasa had not said well enough. “A ship attached to us during the fight?”
“Not that we noticed,” Natasa said. “I would say, not at all. In order to do that and not have us spot them, the pilot would have to have super-human reactions to lock on and not nudge us while they’re doing it. They’d have to hack into the computer core’s vault to get at the airlock controls and wipe any trace of them entering and leaving.”
“No one can hack a core vault, can they?” Kopiter asked curiously.
“No,” Natasa said. “That’s why I don’t think it happened.”
Arany found his attention drawn back to the still image on the little screen. The river of ships, each of them vulnerable to heavy armaments, yet nothing could wipe out that whole cloud—not even the city-killers the Karassians were developing.
“Fleets of ships…” Arany breathed, as ideas popped.
Natasa bent to look at the screen, then at him. “No. Stupid idea, boss.”
“Why?” he demanded.
“For a start, freeships are called freeships for a reason. A trader from Cerce would rather spit on a Laurasian freighter. The Luathian twin cities haven’t stopped fighting in over a century.”
“There’s a reason I left New Veles, too,” Kopitar added.
Natasa pointed at him. “Exactly. The Cheng-Huang disembowel anyone from Veles, no questions asked. You seriously think any of them would cooperate with any of the others, even to fight the Republic or the Homogeny?”
“What about fighting both of them off?” Arany asked calmly.
“Both?” Natasa laughed.
“I’m serious,” Arany said.
“Those Republic ships are coordinated. The pilots trained to work together,” Kopitar pointed out. “I don’t think any freeship captain has military training or knows how to take orders, which they would have to do, for something like this to work.”
Arany dismissed the screen while the image lingered in his mind. “Something has to change,” he said morosely. “We can’t keep going on this way. We fight and fall back, fight and run away to watch from a distance as the Eriumans or the Karassians claim another city state. We’re supposed to be free, damn it.”
Natasa and Kopitar did not laugh. They lived with the harsh reality every day.
“Boss, even if you figured out a way to get everyone to agree to fight together, do you have any idea how many ships you’d need to make the Republic sit up and take notice?”
“A lot,” Arany said in agreement.
“Everyone,” Natasa said flatly. “Every ship capable of firing a weapon would have to join in. I’m talking about every known free state out there and there’s a hell of a lot more we don’t know about, too.”
“Exactly,” Arany said. “There are vast tracts of the galaxy that the Republic and the Homogeny have not yet taken for themselves. That’s free space. You think anyone who lives here wouldn’t want to hold the bullies off?”
“It’s impossible,” Kopiter added.
“No, it’s a goal,” Arany said softly.
* * * * *
Pushyani Wastelands, Pushyani, moon of Pushyan (Ovid II), Free Space.
Nearly a standard century ago, the Eriumans had flirted with folding space, racing to beat the Karassians and be the first and therefore the only patent holders of a workable bridge forge. It would have made the current null-space generators and lengthy interstellar journeys obsolete and given the Eriumans a genuine advantage in both war and economics.
The working bridge forge engine had been massive, taking up most of the surface of the Pushyani moon. It had perked up the economy of Pushyan for over five years, drawing on workers and resources, plus entertainment and distraction for the Eriumans working on the moon.
The first and only trial of the bridge forge had been a success for the better part of a second. The materials used to build the generators disintegrated as soon as the hole formed, collapsing the hole and destroying the moon, including everyone on it. The radiation the forge had spilled across the system killed everyone who could not leave Pushyan quickly enough.
It was the last time a free city state worked in cooperation with either the Republic or the Homogeny.
The Karassians had laughed themselves sick over the disaster as they quietly packed away their own bridge generator prototype.
Now, all that was left was the ruins of a small city on Pushyan and a growing asteroid belt around it, as what was left of the moon spread out in a long tail of rubble. The Pushyani Wastelands were a metaphor for shameful disasters and overreaching. No one went there voluntarily.
Which was why Ferid used the ruined city as a base. He was never disturbed there. The system sentries had long since shut down, their energy depleted. There were no lenses, which he had found took time to get used to. The silence was broken only by cold winds whistling through girders and ruins.
The girl proved troublesome for such a small, unenhanced human. She refused to talk despite Ferid’s encouragement. He even pulled up a speech translator and installed it on his second server and spoke to her in her native language, the server molding his tone into soothing, relaxing cadences, yet still she refused to speak.
Using his full array of techniques upon her would quickly break down her fragile body, but Ferid was creative, which was why the Karassian military was paying him so well. He found a small room with four walls and a roof. He built a door over the opening, then took away her clothes and locked her in.
After three days he went back to see what progress had been made.
The stench was overpowering. At first he was alarmed, because the girl lay still among the excrement. He brought water and she showed signs of life, so he held it away from her, until finally, she agreed to talk.
The cold and the lack of water had taken away her voice. He gave her a pad and stylus. Her hand moved slowly, with long pauses while she figured out the coordination necessary for each word.
What do you want to know?
He had already learned a great deal from his foray into the Bonaventura, where he had found her, although he had not had time to download the datacore while he was rooting around in it, so he had taken her instead.
He began with simple questions. Ship’s compliment. Crew structure. Nothing that could not be learned by observation and educated guesses. Nothing that alarmed her, that might trigger her resistance. As her answers came more swiftly, along with demands for water, Ferid slipped in one question among the innocuous ones.
Where is Arany’s base?
She threw down the stylus and crossed her arms over her small breasts.
“I will find it,” he assured her.
She shook her head.
“You will tell me.”
She shattered the pad and drove one of the shards into her eye and beyond it, into the brain.
Ferid stood over the cooling body for a long while, enjoying his astonishment. She had surprised him. She was a small creature from a race of little people of no account to anyone but themselves, yet she had made a grand gesture, a heroic one.
This was the third time he had tried to coax Benjamin Arany’s people into revealing where Arany and his ships could be found when they weren’t out harassing Karassian deployments. The first two had been equally as determined not to give such a simple fact away.
For a small moment and in an abstract way, he appreciated their fierce loyalty and dedication to Arany. If all his people were of this caliber, tracking down the troublesome free-stater’s base would not be as easy as Ferid had first assumed it would be.
What would a whole army of such people be able to achieve?
His computational array told him that this was the primary reason the Karassian military had given him the contract. They were proactively working to destroy Arany before he even thought of building such an army. That was why the free-stater was on their most-wanted list.
Ferid went back to his ship to meditate and compute his next step. He was proud of having reasoned out the Homogeny’s motives. Their military would not have come up with this idea on their own. There were rumors that the largest portion of the overwhelming military budget was used to purchase Bureau advice and predictions.
The actual processes the Wyan Oushxiu Generation 98 used to arrive at their predictions was a closely guarded secret. Ferid had collected bytes of data about their operations for years. He suspected the Wyan Oushxiu Bureau used AIs in clusters to make intelligent neural nodes, with the nodes all linked, building into a gestalt that generated super intelligence. Predictive social analysis was their specialty. It would take a staggering amount of computing power to arrive at some of the startling—and correct—conclusions the Bureau offered their clients.
Yet he, Ferid, a simple biocomp, had reached the same conclusion.
He really was very good at his job.
* * * * *
Kachmarain City, Kachmar Sodality, The Karassian Homogeny.
When Khalil’s best guess matched Sang’s prediction, they both agreed the probability was great enough to commit themselves to the next step.
Sang looked at the dot glowing on the overlay map. The small island was part of an archipelago that had been bought by a research corporation that, once the tiers of ownership were traced back, was ultimately owned by Appurtenance Services Inc., which in turn was a subsidiary of the commercial development arm of the Karassian military.
“There’s only the two of us and you can’t fight,” she said. “The security surrounding the island will be immense.”
“And unimaginative,” Khalil said curtly, glowering at her assessment of his combat abilities. “They’ve been running this place for nearly seventy years. They’re complacent. They’ve never once had someone come back to haunt them.”
Sang frowned. Khalil used unique phrases sometimes.
“They know their memory wiping works,” Khalil added. “Once they tossed me back on the street, they forgot about me.” He tapped his forehead. “I have all the security codes here, still.”
“They would have changed them.”
“Why? They know memory deletion works. They know it in their bones because not one word of this place has ever been heard. Why bother changing codes for something that will never happen?”
“I would.”
Khalil sighed. “No, you wouldn’t. Not if you were human and complacent. Trust me on this.”
Sang considered the request. “Very well, we will do it your way, but we will build redundancy strategies, too.”
“Spoken like a good little computer.”
“Now you’re being insulting. I am a sentient, fully functional citizen of Erium.”
“With no matronymic.”
Sang glared at him.
That seemed to make Khalil happy.