Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (27 page)

“I affirm this,” Rick said. “It is true on the face of it. There is no other conclusion. You are Ryss.”

Chirom looked at Rick in awe, both at his adept reasoning and his clever feeding of Desolator’s words back to him.

“I must consider this. I may have erred in my understanding of the situation.” Time ticked by.

Chirom whispered to Rick, “You have confused it. Well done. But how does that help us? You must run for your ship in two smallspans!”

Rick answered carefully, enunciating to make his meaning clear. “It is basic psychology with a hostage-taker. Make the captor identify with the victim. Desolator must be reminded he is Ryss.”

“He?” Chirom asked. “You said
he
.”

“As well we must, Chirom. Your people made him to be a warrior, to fight, and if need be to die for the Ryss. He is obviously male, yet you denied him that identity and that respect. You call him ‘
it
’. Trissk told me to be a warrior is to be male, and vice versa. By treating him as a machine, you devalued him, and isolated him from yourselves. You made it easy for him to see you not as fellow Ryss, but as some inferior beings, which he had surpassed. The damage pushed him over the edge.”

“But what does that matter if he thinks he is Ryss?”

“Chirom, you must give him the respect he deserves.” Rick’s strange, apelike eyes bored into Chirom’s as if willing him to understand.

And Chirom did. “If he is truly Ryss, he cannot kill us. We are all the last of the same race – the Ryss.”

“No, Chirom, that’s not it. He already loves the Ryss – at least part of him does. He needs the honor for
himself
– and know the Ryss honor him as well. That’s what he is missing.
He wants to be a Ryss warrior again.
But he’s alone, he’s wounded, and he’s broken. Tell him you honor him.” Rick grasped Chirom’s huge unwounded bicep and shook him, raising his voice. “
Tell him he will be whole again
.”

Chirom turned to stare at the console and the blank screen, wishing there was some avatar of Desolator for him to look at, but the AI was just a collection of circuits in the next room. His voice was all he had to save the ship from nuclear fire, or possibly, if the drive was activated too soon, to save the planet from destruction. Billions of tons of Desolator impacting Afrana at the speed of light would crack its mantle, scour its surface clean of life, and strip its atmosphere away.

He took a breath, and spoke the most important words of his life.

“Desolator, you must listen. You are wounded, but you are still Ryss. You have always been Ryss. I have seen the records. When you were damaged, you forgot you were Ryss, and so did we. You thought you were a mere machine, and that we Ryss did not honor you. But you are a Ryss warrior. All your brother Colossus-class warships were the greatest of warriors. You have never been anything but a Ryss warrior. If you can turn away from the planet and activate the photonic drive to save all of us, we will repair you. When you are whole, then you can take your place again as the greatest of Ryss warriors, and as guardian of the Ryss.”

Silence.

Then,
click
, came the resonant tones of the Desolator of old. “D1 and D3 have relinquished control to me, Chirom, Commander Johnstone. Now that we are in accord, I am turning the ship. I will use the photonic drive to escape impact, but will need much assistance in the near future. The vessel that is me currently functions at point-one-six percent of capacity.”

“You are sane now?” Rick asked.

Desolator continued. “Temporarily. You convinced D1 of the logic of your position, but it – he, we will now say – could be persuaded otherwise at any time. More importantly, D3 accepted your argument from honor. At the moment he is filled with that ineffable feeling that gives life meaning.”

“Without me – the intuitive and higher-emotional processor – they have no fixedness of purpose. D1 has no ability to weigh alternatives in any way other than logic and probability. If today he decides fifty-one percent in your favor, tomorrow he might reassess to forty-nine percent, and try to kill you. And D3’s emotional state cannot be relied upon. Do you see?”

“I think we do,” Rick replied. “We have passed our time to escape on our sled, you know. We are at your mercy.”

“For now, Commander Rick Johnstone, my mercy is boundless. I will connect you with your admiral. Please ask him not to destroy us before I can engage the drive.”

Click
.

This time, the sound denoted only an open comm channel.

Sounds carried well and echoed strongly off the sturdy Hippo buildings in the thick Afranan air, creating a feeling of busyness and crowdedness that was only partially true. The huge natives, some massing a thousand kilos and weighing even more in the heavy gravity, lumbered about, and she tried to stay out of their way. Her bones would not break the way an ordinary human’s might, but getting stepped on was likely to hurt. A lot.

She’d looked up the coordinates of the Saigon Beverage Company, one of only three such concerns in town and the only one with a human – not to mention Vietnamese – name. Now, she started strolling toward it, letting her GPS guide her through the town.

She could have sent him a message or called but, after her self-revelation, she decided to just have a little adventure. If he happened not to be there, well, it would be a nice day out, and she could leave him a note.

Spotting a man going in to what looked like a restaurant, she asked him about the food, and learned that dishes approved for humans were clearly marked on the menus here. Inside, she saw several people sitting at appropriately sized tables, but no one she knew. Because she was hungry, she joined the man she had accosted and chatted with him about how their kind operated in Hippo society, until the food came.

Shortly after she had taken her first interesting bite, Spooky tapped the man on the shoulder. The man left, and Spooky sat down. He wore a soft suit in scaled-down Hippo style. “How do you like the choika?” he asked.

“Not sure yet. Spicy,” she replied. “Do you have the buses watched?”

“I do, actually. By Hippos on my payroll. Purely for market research purposes, of course. It also trains them to recognize and differentiate among humans. Here,” he said, pouring her a cup of whitish liquid. “Drink sips of this. It will cool the burn and complement the flavor.”

“What is it?”

“Fermented milk of an animal you’d rather I not describe, using Earth yeast. It’s a big hit.”

“As long as I can digest it…” Jill tested it with her tongue. “Mm, not bad. Now, tell me what happened.”

“I would have come to visit you, you know.”

“Eventually, perhaps. I figured you’d be busy in your secret lair, going over the news about Desolator and whatever intelligence you’ve gathered on it. And, I wanted to get out, see things. Like you wanted me to, right?” Jill took another bite of choika.

“Touché. All right. I’ll spare you the details, but we pinpointed the Meme agent. Along with stealing the whole database including all the transmission logs, Ezekiel put in backdoors so we can tap into that computer any time we want.”

“And?”

“And that’s it for now. I have to talk it over with some people. We might try to turn him to our side as a double agent, or might finger him to the Yellows.”

Jill’s voice became more insistent even as it dropped in volume. “I get a feeling there's more to that story. But what about the message, and where it went?”

“Oh, that. The big telescope on Enoi found a sentry probe about half a light year out in position to receive. We can’t get there in time to stop it from retransmitting, and we probably can’t tell in which direction it sends, so…that’s it for now. Absen will deal with that end of it.”

“Speaking of Admiral Absen, what do you know about,” she pointed heavenward, “that.”

“Not much more than you do. You can probably learn more through Marine channels.”

“Okay, okay.” Jill chewed speculatively at her food. “I’m glad I came and tried this stuff, and your drink – what are you calling it?”

“Moik. It sounds right to Sekoi ears.”

“Yeah, choika and moik. I’m glad, because it was the most satisfying thing about the trip here to Blorun,” she grumbled.

Spooky shrugged. “Sorry I can’t give you a lot of closure, but that’s the covert world.”

Jill nodded. "Keep your secrets, then. For now. Even you can't keep them forever.” She lifted her moik. “Absent friends,” she toasted.

“Absent friends,” he responded, clinking his cup against hers. He drained it and stood up. “Back to work.”

“I'm sure you'll soon have more work for
me
.” Jill remarked.

“Certainly,” Spooky replied with a smile that said he’d won. “Until then…enjoy yourself.”

Jill did not return the smile, but loaded a fork full of choika as Spooky ghosted out. She opened her eyes wide, took a deep breath of Afrana’s smells and tastes, and chewed. “Damn right we will,” she breathed, then took out her tablet and triggered its uplink function. “Put me through to Commander Rick Johnstone please,” she told the watchstander on duty in the moon’s command center. “Tell him it’s his wife.”

Admiral Absen watched on
Conquest
bridge’s high-res optical screen as the great Ryss ship spun slowly in space. Both the human dreadnought and
Desolator
orbited Afrana’s moon Enoi, and already, only six days since the crisis ended, he could see the firefly lights of grabships, shuttles, and suited repair workers busying themselves.

With Desolator’s central integration processor repaired, rebuilding accelerated. All that was needed was abundant fuel, and that was available. Despite severe damage, the vessel itself still contained functional factories and maintenance shops deep within its structure.

Now, these facilities spewed out maintenance drones by the dozens, and soon, hundreds. Directed by the powerful Ryss AI, these swarmed throughout
Desolator
, rebuilding and repairing alongside Ryss, humans and Sekoi.

Absen, still the military governor of the system, was quick to direct that every available effort, human and Hippo, be diverted to refurbishing and exploiting the amazing warship. His thought turned to what he could do with just one of them, never mind a whole fleet.

With the photonic drive, the crew would not need the stasis cocoons – relativity would reduce the time that passed on board to a few days or weeks between star systems. While nothing they knew could overcome the light speed barrier, this was the next best thing to it.

And tactically…if he could improve the recharge time and use the photonic drive to maneuver within a star system, to zoom from point to point, he could surprise the Meme and destroy their military capacity before they even knew
Desolator
had arrived, then leap away. It would be just like commanding a submarine again, to hunt the enemy and strike with surprise, then slip away into darkness.

The possibilities seemed endless.

Absen had never been one for bloodlust, but he thought he felt it now – the desire to crush the hated Meme underfoot and simultaneously free their enslaved planetary sub-races. It was a powerful combination of rage and righteousness, activated by the thought of these incredible new capabilities.

And even before that, with
Desolator
at full military capacity, the Ryss-Human-Hippo alliance should be able to fend off almost any conceivable Meme attack. He’d spoken with the Ryss, and seen the records of
Desolator
’s epic final battle. Just five of the Colossus-class warships had held their own against over nine thousand Destroyers, at least long enough to save the Ryss – if only the AI had not been damaged. One of its many particle beams on fractional power had disabled
Krugh
; again, Absen felt in awe of the strength that would be available to preserve humanity and its allies, and carry the war to the enemy.

When he finally turned in, Admiral Henrich J. Absen slept very well indeed.

Trissk approached his and Klis’ cottage with the dead sheep over his shoulders.
Meat
, he thought,
hot flesh as our ancestors ate. My first kill, courtesy of the Humans and their domestic animals.
Its body rested on his new-grown mane. The ruff itched when he thought about it.

He looked at the blood on his paws, and was glad their Sekoi allies had built the cottage according to Ryss specifications, with running water inside and out for just this purpose. Licking oneself clean would do if necessary, but wasn’t really civilized. A hot soak sounded much better.

Klis stepped into the doorway and waved with one hand, the other on her belly. She was as svelte as ever, and had not begun to show her condition, though her time and his first glorification were past.

Trissk waved back, and was content. More than content; he was happy to be a pioneer of the new old ways, of a return to what the Humans called
monandry
. Enough males had been killed fighting that each young dam could choose a
husband
– an old word, revived from ancient writings – and for now, there would be harmony among the Ryss. The oldest males had agreed to leave breeding to the young.

Soon would come drugs and life code manipulation, he had been told, to restore the Ryss’ breeding to their natural, and also civilized, norms. The Blends among the Sekoi had given assurances that this would be a simple matter, given their skill at such biological tinkering.

While the old swallowed their objections, Trissk found himself able to accept the once-taboo ideas without difficulty, as it sealed his ties to Klis.