Chaos Quarter (12 page)

“You said your people value freedom. Why would they do that to a person if they had the chance to free her?” Chakrika asked.

“Most of my people wouldn’t hesitate. But spies and intelligence people, they never follow the same rules as the rest of society. Doesn’t matter what nation you go to.”

“Then you have to make sure she’s fixed,” Chakrika spoke firmly, her voice leaving no room to question. “Before we reach your nation.”

“I’m supposed to be working for these people,” Rex spoke. “If I could get her to fake being a person long enough…I-I don’t know.”

“Find a way,” Chakrika seethed, her fingers grasping and digging into the back of his chair.

“Yeah,” Rex said, uncertain. “Well, first thing we have to do is find some place to patch up the armor. You want to learn how to jump the ship?”

“Do I have a choice?” she asked.

“Yes. But I’ll keep bugging you if you don’t,” he replied.

She sighed, moving next to him.

“See that little box on the console screen?” Rex asked.

She looked between the two control levers, to the small computer screen. A tiny red field with the word “JUMP” sat in the upper left corner.

“Tap it please.”

She struck it with her fingertips. Rex felt the familiar fuzzy feeling in his shoulders and chest. The stars before them shifted, a new pattern emerging in a heart-beat.

“
Jump complete. According to charts acquired from Cordelia’s servers we are now in the Ceredigion System
.”

Rex smiled at Chakrika.

“That’s all there is to it. You’re picking this up very quickly.”

She laughed and walked out of the room. Rex poked at his noodles with a fork, wondering what in the world she had made the sauce out of.

* * *

Wreckage drifted above Cordelia, a twisted, jagged, blackened mess of slaver ships and local fighters. Control had just been regained when the newcomer appeared.

It didn’t resemble any vessel seen in Explored Space. It looked like the unholy offspring of a whale and a crab. Its massive hull stretched nearly a thousand feet in length. Its bulging front was cylindrical, three hundred feet in diameter. It tapered as it stretched back toward its engines. The entire thing was covered in a carapace of material that looked like a metalized form of chitin. Claw-like protrusions extended perpendicularly, before bending forward at a ninety-degree angle. The ends of the “claws” were covered in round protrusions, orifices of some sort. Nothing about it looked mechanical. It looked organic, like something
grown
.

The ship stayed out of the atmosphere, pulling above the smoldering city of Khors. Small, clam-like objects detached from the vessel, plunging into the atmosphere. An hour passed, local vessels hailing the ship to no avail. It did not answer. It had no intention of answering.

Inside of it, Blair stood within a control pod. Its warm walls cocooned around his naked flesh, supporting his weight so he would not need to stand. Stringy white tendrils attached to his eyes, connecting him with the War-beast’s ocular membranes. He saw nothing but the green world below and the mechanical monstrosities that flew around his ship like so many annoying insects. How a man, even a primitive animal like
homo sapiens
, could work within such a cold, hard environment was beyond him.

“Magnify on the ambassador’s settlement,” he ordered.

The ocular organs contracted, zooming in on the city local primitives called “Khors.” Half of the city was rubble, marked by pockets of fire and a heavy, dark haze of smoke. The message from the jump-beast had stated that the ambassador’s settlement was under attack. Blair cared little for the corpses littering the rubble. He focused on the settlement’s spaceport.

His Warriors hulked across it. Eleven feet tall, their muscular, bipedal frames were covered in dark hair. Chitinous plates bulged under their skin, pressing the hair out at odd angles while protecting the muscle within. One effortlessly carried a local primitive in clawed hands. The man flailed wildly, but could not break the beast’s grasp.

He focused on the man’s clothing.
So backward, they cannot even regulate their body temperature!
He had seen primitives in clothing before. They had been trespassers, brought before him for judgment. He had examined their bodies for days before sending them off to be hunted, fascinated by the crudeness of evolution’s design and the awkwardness they felt over nudity. He’d passed it off as trying to protect the only body they would ever have, but it still unsettled him. He could only imagine how the Ambassador Cody must have felt, being forced to wear clothing day in and day out so as not to upset the natives.

But Cody had always been a strange person. Blair had met him several times and always found him too fascinated with mechanical technology and the outdated species that infested far too much of space. He supposed those skills had made him ideal for tolerating life amongst the primitives, but he still felt little respect for it. And while he’d never particularly liked Cody, the situation demanded a response. Death was unthinkable, even for an eccentric fool like the ambassador. Death at the hands of these throw-backs? That could not be tolerated under any circumstance.

His landing-beasts loaded up the last of his Warriors. They metabolized their fuel into a bluish flame, rising through the planet’s atmosphere. As they docked with the War-beast, Blair pulled the connections from his eyes. They retracted back into the spongy tissue of the control pod. The pod, itself a creature, opened when he turned. He stepped into a corridor. Massive arching bones rose, holding up the writhing pink muscle of the ship. That muscle felt warm under his feet as he waited.

A minute or two passed before Flynn appeared. A Master like Blair, Flynn had chosen an externally female body for this mission. It was a pale-skinned form with firm breasts and gently curving hips. A long phallus hung between his tapered thighs, concealing more feminine parts behind it. It was pleasant to gaze upon, amongst other things.

Blair had always liked Flynn. On the trip out, he had been a willing lover, both giving and accepting. Nights curled around him and the slight body he’d chosen had made this voyage into the wilderness bearable. More importantly, Flynn followed orders. Unlike most Masters he didn’t grumble about being a subordinate when the situation called for it.

Flynn led a procession of a half-dozen Warriors. One Warrior carried a primitive man over his shoulder. Blair nodded and moved down another hallway. The others followed. It twisted past blood vessels, coming to a large cavity. An open pit, an acid sack built to dispose of aging tissues and worn-out servants, dominated the room. Its corrosive contents swirled in a slow whirlpool, wafting a pungent odor throughout the chamber.

The Warriors grunted angrily, and one dropped the captive primitive man on the floor near the pit. Blair couldn’t blame the Warriors for their frustration. They were engineered to kill males on sight. The only orders that overrode that were those from a Master. Following Flynn’s orders not to kill the primitive must have been hell on the hulking bipeds.

“This one has a device,” Flynn said. “Like an eye. It records things.”

The Cordelian man staggered to his feet. He was covered in blood, his face puffy and swollen. Blair noticed that Flynn was holding a mechanical object. He couldn’t imagine what that must be like. Masters should not touch such things directly. It was bad enough that buried deep within the tissues of this ship, mechanical jump drives, engines, rail-guns, and gravity generators were at work. No effort of biological manipulation had allowed them to replicate these technologies with living tissue, so the mechanical aberrations remained, out of necessity only. The Crimeans had built them for his people, a skeleton onto which the War-beast would graft and grow.

Flynn handed the device to the primitive man. The injured primitive grasped it woozily, staring at it.

“Show what you recorded!” Flynn demanded. A Warrior stepped behind the primitive man, twice the poor animal’s size. A throaty growl filled the cavity.

The primitive punched something on the mechanical device. An image appeared in thin air, a projection of some sort.

“Eye!” Blair shouted.

From a recess in the ceiling, a strand of muscle descended, snaking down toward the projection. A compound eye the size of a fist waited at one end. It stared at the projection, unblinking.

“Observe for later recall,” Blair ordered.

The holographic projection began to play. It showed a landing pad, dominated by a large metal ship. The mere sight of it grated on Blair. Sharp angles and static hulls; useless,
dead
things. Approaching the ship was some sort of mechanical device, a wheeled thing clearly made for ground travel. The back of the device held a large, shallow bay. In it was the unmistakable, if crushed, body of the ambassador. His second huddled beside him. The vehicle drove into the ship, which then took off. The image flickered and vanished.

“Can we trace the excretions of the vessel?” asked Blair.

Flynn thought for a moment before replying. “If we compared the engine exhaust from the image to the particle paths surrounding this world, we might be able to pick it up.”

“Have the sifters do so,” Blair spoke. He moved to leave, stopping only to kiss Flynn. As he walked away, he shouted back, “Deliver our response to the world, and dispose of that animal!”

The primitive’s tortured cries echoed down the passage as the Warriors tossed him into the acid pit.

Unable even to control their own pain
, he thought clinically. It seemed to be a common trait amongst their kind. He’d have to run more experiments on that when this was over.

Outside, the ship turned, bringing its front around to face the planet. Without warning, a dozen large metal spheres shot from within, two at a time. They streaked into the atmosphere, straight for the city, trailing fire behind them. The Cordelian fighters broke to attack, only to find smaller spheres lobbed at them, tearing through them. The larger spheres tore into the city of Khors with incredible force. The city erupted, engulfed by massive explosions. Curtains of dirt and chunks of ruined buildings flew through towers of fire, flying for miles through the atmosphere before plunging to the rain forest. The earth shook from the force of the impact.

Several days later, when the fires died down and the dust cleared from the air, nothing remained of the Cordelian capital but charred steel and a half-dozen overlapping craters.

If humans are naturally evolved creatures, then what their minds come up with is, logically, also natural. Nobody would question the natural nature of a termite mound or a beaver dam. It’s what they do. So it doesn’t really matter if you’re building a robot dog or engineering cold-resistant wheat, because that’s what humans do. They reason, build, and experiment. They come up with ways to solve problems like any other animal. They just do it much, much better.

Self-awareness has taken the biological aspects of evolution out of the process. Perhaps the fact that no other species has evolved beyond the standard evolutional process makes us seem odd by comparison, but ultimately when it comes to the ability to alter the world around us, it is a question of degrees. The deer strips young trees of leaves and bark. The beaver floods forests to make ponds. The bee builds a hive. The man straps on a rocket and mines asteroids.’

-Joseph Davidson, Excerpt from ‘All That Is Natural,’
Collected Essays
, 2071

“I told you, we are en route to Boundary carrying
fucking
wheat!
” Rex seethed.

“How are we to know you’re not carrying weapons? The Aruthins are known to hide weapons in food shipments,” a voice replied over his comms.

“Who the hell are the Aruthins?!” Rex demanded.

“Slow your ship for boarding,” the voice replied, ignoring his question.

“I told you already. I’ll pay your damn tolls but you’re not getting on my ship,” he replied.

“We will take it by force if you do not slow and prepare for inspection. Our price for passage has just doubled—”

A single blast of white light streaked from
Long Haul
’s pulse cannon. The channel went dead. The two fighters in his view screen, one an actual fighter designed as such (if beaten up a bit), the other a life-boat with electromagnetic machine guns welded to the side, slowly pulled back from his ship. Rex glanced over to Lucius, who shrugged, the slightest hint of a grin on his face.

“Still want to inspect?” Rex asked.

“Eject the toll and get out of our space,” a much surlier voice replied.

Rex tossed a gold coin to Lucius.

“Throw that out the observation blister,” he spoke.

Lucius disappeared back into the hallway. Second, standing in her normal spot at the back of the bridge, watched him go.

“
Coin ejected
,” the computer informed him.

“Current position?”

“
Nine hundred thirty five million miles from system’s star. Red star. Gas giants, four in number, close to the star. Large asteroid belts between them, dominating the inner system
.”

“Stay away from the inner system, alert me when the jump drives have recharged,” Rex spoke. He pressed down on the accelerator, pushing the ship up to .09C. He leaned back in his chair and watched the two fighters disappear from his radar sphere.

Lucius reappeared, retaking his seat.

“Back to boring,” Rex spoke.

“Those fighter craft posed no serious threat, even with the damage to our forward armor,” Lucius pointed out.

“They may have friends, no use picking a fight when a bribe will do,” Rex replied.

Lucius nodded his understanding, but still looked a bit upset by the thought. He turned back to the screen.

“This planet we’re going to, Boundary, what is its importance? I’ve heard the name before,” Lucius asked.

“Computer, project information on Boundary,” Rex replied.

A large three-dimensional planet hovered above them. Stats and figures floated in the air around it. It looked like most terraformed worlds, predominantly blue due to its large oceans. Three Africa-sized continents, give or take a few hundred square miles, sat isolated amidst the waters. Countless rugged islands seemed to radiate away from the continents in ray-like archipelagos, the tops of what had been great mountain chains before humanity had transformed the world. Ice-caps, smaller than Earth’s, rested at each pole. Both poles were surrounded by open water.