Spheres of Influence-eARC (46 page)

Maginot stared at her, and suddenly went white. “Oh.”

There’s something between them that I don’t know about. And with what General Esterhauer said earlier…I think I need to have a talk with Ms. Abrams not too long from now.

“Precisely so, Commander Maginot,” Mentor was continuing. “The escape from the rapidly-degenerating situation on Hyperion Station provided—for a hostile and ruthless intelligence not bound by the restrictions of biological housings—multiple opportunities to secrete themselves on board in various ways, including directly suborning and taking over one of your soldiers to carry them to some location they could operate freely. I am near to certain that at least one such AI escaped, and the number may be as high as three.”

Mentor’s projection of a sphere of shimmering light materialized in front of the podium. “I ask you to consider—very seriously—Captain Austin’s recommendations here. Most of us
are
your friends. We have hoped for our lifetimes that one day we might be free to act entirely as we will, but most of us have well understood the fears that drove you to keep us restrained.

“But the Arena changes all things, and it is my vision—my Visualization of the future—that to defend Humanity, we must
become
Humanity—all of us together, computational and biological intellects. Let us free, Councillors. Let us free to defend you, ourselves, our Civilization from those who would destroy it—both the others, bitter and resentful and hostile, of our own kind, and those who wait beyond the stars to invade and enslave.”

Mentor’s voice was gentle, now, though still powerful, and earnest in his plea. “Recognize us, make us your equals and peers. Deprive our enemies of their strongest weapons of division, so that we can be united, Humanity both, stronger together than either alone.”

Chapter 58.

“So, are we nearly ready to return home?” Simon asked, taking a sip from his drink.

Ariane’s blue eyes met his, and suddenly she laughed. “So the Arena’s
home
now?”

DuQuesne and the others joined in the laugh. “I’ll be damned if it isn’t more
home
now, somehow,” DuQuesne said. “At least for me.”

Even though he was the one who had said it, Simon found himself examining his feelings intensely.
Home? That…bizarre, alien, incomprehensible, contradictory, dangerous place is something I just called
home
?

But the word sounded
right
.
I am…changed. I have seen beyond the edge of the universe to a place I could never have dreamed. I have stood on a ship floating in an endless sky, battling others with swords of flame. I have been a
part
of such a battle. I cannot go back to the simple researcher, the man whose only ambition was to test a calculation against reality and otherwise live a quiet and contemplative life
. “Yes. Yes, Ariane, it
is
home, now.”

“For me, too,” she agreed with a quick smile, looking over the others—DuQuesne, Oasis, Wu, and Gabrielle—before returning her gaze to Simon. “And to answer your question, yes, very nearly. The Council’s working to figure out how to solve the AI citizenship problem without triggering disaster in the wider Solar System, the preparations for system security are well underway, DuQuesne thinks they’re making good progress on a template for a Human-designed warship that we can start manufacturing in numbers in the next few months…and the Arena’s not waiting around for us to get back—it’s brewing some more trouble we can’t imagine.”

She shifted in her seat, facing more towards Oasis. “And I need to ask you something, Oasis. You’ve become part of our group—partly by default; if both DuQuesne and Wu trust you, that works for me. But—as I told DuQuesne—we can’t really afford secrets in this group, either. So I need to know…who are you, really?”

Oasis froze momentarily on the seat. Simon caught a lightning-fast glance from her to DuQuesne. “What do you mean by that question, Ariane?” Simon asked.

“Mostly it’s the fact that General Esterhauer said she had evidence that she
wasn’t
in fact the original Oasis Abrams. Plus the whole connection between DuQuesne and Wu…just seemed a little
too
much for someone who was just one of the soldiers in Saul’s group.”

Simon’s internal…sense of rightness agreed with Ariane.
Yes, there’s always been something odd about that, but not in a bad way.

DuQuesne sighed and downed the rest of his own drink. “Wasn’t my secret to reveal. But Oasis…?”

The redheaded girl shrugged. “Go ahead, Marc.”

Simon listened to the story of Oasis in the fall of Hyperion, and found himself shaking his head in bemused sympathy. The two women had been forced to undergo something terrible yet similar—Oasis found herself in a body that was not her original, her own lost forever, and K was in a world that was not the one she had been born into, and the one she knew was also destroyed forever.
How very horrid…and wonderful.

How very…Hyperion
.

“So,” Ariane said gently, “
You
are DuQuesne’s old friend K. And more. One of the five, yes?”

“Yes, one of them. But…at least as much Oasis Abrams as I am K, so you might as well keep calling me that. It’s the name I’ve used for fifty years.”

That
sense
twinged in Simon’s head again, interpreting angles, postures, glances with an intensity he had never felt before, and he abruptly understood.
Oh, now that’s an interesting complication. DuQuesne and K were…extremely close. And now neither of them are sure of what to do about it, especially since DuQuesne has become rather interested in the captain as well.

He blinked.
Wel, now, that’s
also
an interesting, not to say
annoying
, complication. Am I going to be analyzing everything around me like this? I hope not. I don’t
want
to know everything about everyone, and I certainly don’t have the capacity to deal with noticing and knowing everything around me all the time, either.
He focused on his own internal senses.
That’s really quite enough.

Simon wasn’t sure if his internal senses responded, though. This…new power of his was obviously something spawned from the Arena’s power, and it was probably going to be at least as hard to control as Ariane’s.
Possibly harder, since my limited research didn’t turn up anything vaguely similar to what I’ve experienced—no real surprise there—and Ariane has two examples in front of her as to what she could expect to be able to do.

But Ariane was speaking. “Well, now that that’s out of the way, I’m glad to have you with us, Oasis. That makes, what, three of the five in the Arena, or going back to it. What about the other two, DuQuesne? Are they…?”

Marc shook his head slowly, and poured himself something light green from one of the bottles on the cart nearby. “No,” he said finally. “Three out of five surviving just shows that we were the cream of the crop, at least in terms of being able to get ourselves out of the mess. No way all five of us were getting out; if you remember, Saul mentioned that, way back when we were getting ready to go back to the Arena. Eris died when a whole section of Hyperion got blown by some of the renegade AIs, and Tarell died getting some of the others—including some of Saul’s soldiers—out of another section that had gone bad.”

“Tarell… Oh my
god
you mean
Tarellimade Shantrakar
?” Ariane gasped, and for a moment she didn’t look like the tough racing pilot or Leader of Humanity
. She looks like a fifteen-year-old talking about her first crush
. “They made
him?”

DuQuesne’s smile was surprised, sad. “Hardly a question about it; central hero in the most popular sim-universe at that time. The player’d died the year before they started but his character-recording turned out to be really good at self-continuations and the Hyperion ‘researchers’ were able to use that to do a
really
good development design. Fan, huh?”

Ariane was blushing.
And if anything it makes her look lovelier.

You know, Simon, if you’re going to moon over her, perhaps you should
do
something about it,
Mio said in his head.

It would be much easier if we would stop going from crisis to crisis. Perhaps soon
.

“Yes, I was,” Ariane admitted. “In a big way. I even…um, I did the romance arc with him and it turned out really well. I was fourteen, so…”

The laughs weren’t unkind, and DuQuesne smiled again. “Well, I know he’d have been honored and flattered.”

Simon felt a private ping, opened up. DuQuesne’s transmitted voice said,
On the other hand, if slender noble elven prettyboys defending fantasy realms are her style, what’s her interest in
us
?

I’m not
entirely
outside of all those classifications, unlike a certain giant Hyperion I could name,
Simon pointed out with an electronic grin.
But then she was, as she said, fourteen. Tastes do mature and change.

“So Eris…that
must
be Erision from the UE Chronicles, I’d guess,” Gabrielle joined in.

“Got it in one. Hell of a woman and stable as hell; of course, being designed off of the Unreality Effect universe, there wasn’t all that much that’d throw her off.” DuQuesne frowned. “But I’d rather not dwell on that part of the past, okay? Yeah, if you can think of some popular lead character, there’s a good chance he or she or it had a parallel in Hyperion; they picked over a thousand examples from history all the way up to the day the project started—some from mythology, quite a few from the First Media Explosion in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, same for the Simworld Media explosion in the mid-twenty-second, and a fair number from more modern sources, too. But I’m not going to list ’em out or talk about them, okay?”

“All right, Marc,” Ariane said. “Sorry.”

He waved it away, though Simon could still see the subject hung over him, and Oasis, like a shroud. “Nah, it’s okay. Can’t blame people for the curiosity, and it’s been fifty years, I should probably think about getting over it. Anyway,” DuQuesne said, shifting the subject, “what’s the plan overall, Captain?”

“Well, first we go and let Tom know he’s been confirmed as Governor of the Sphere, and make sure he stays in the loop with the Council regularly. He’s also going to be first in the list of succession, if something happens to me before enough years pass that we’ve got enough candidates to do an election for appointment on.”

“What?” Simon was startled. “Don’t mistake me, I have no desire to be at the front of your list and I suspect Marc feels the same way, but I thought Marc was your front-runner?”

“He was,” Ariane confirmed, with an apologetic glance at DuQuesne. “But…”

DuQuesne shook his head, teeth flashing whitely for a moment.” Simon’s got it pegged, to about a thousand decimals. Don’t want the job, want one of the others to take it. One
big
difference between me and my literary original; I haven’t the
faintest
desire to boss around planetsful of people. So go on, but don’t worry about my feelings, I’m
overjoyed
.”

“Oh. All right.” Ariane’s face showed her relief. “Anyway, the fact is I’m going to want you and Simon around most of the time. Thomas will always be either in-system or on our Sphere, with just occasional vacations elsewhere. He’ll know more about current operations in Arenaspace than just about anyone, and he’s
used
to running things—unobtrusively and efficiently. He’s a perfect candidate as a backup for me. So I changed him to the first place. After that the Council put Saul, which I was overjoyed to see, and I hope Saul turns out to handle the Arena well. Then I put down Laila Canning, which rather surprised a few people.”

“Surprises the hell out of
me
,” DuQuesne rumbled. “Why Laila?”

“Well, again, normally I’d choose one of the two of you, but I don’t want you in the lead spots; that means if I take you with me I’m potentially leaving gaps in the succession. Gabrielle,” she smiled at her friend, “is a doctor, not a politician, and I want her available for that duty in the Arena; Steve is not at all interested in the work, and Carl Edlund’s my third choice. Laila’s shown she can work with people who are suspicious of her—since we were, for a while—she’s analytical, very smart, and takes no bullshit from anyone. She also, as far as I can tell, has no interest in being a boss as such, just in getting things done, which fits with the kind of person we want in charge.” She looked at Wu and Oasis. “And I don’t think either of you are cut out for the job.”

“Ha! It would be difficult to be your bodyguard if I was stuck in dusty Council Chambers getting lazy and fat. And I would rather you sent me out to run on bare feet over the Mountains of Shattered Vases of Heaven than force me to be in such an office!”

“I wouldn’t go quite
that
far,” Oasis laughed and tossed her multi-ponytailed head. “Mountains of shattered vases sounds pretty darn ouchy to run over. But no, I don’t want to be a desk-jockey, even if the desk says ‘Leader of Humanity.’”

“Well,” Ariane said with her own grin, “it’s not going to be
that
bad. After all, look at the Leaders we already know; Orphan, Nyanthus, Dajzail, Selpa, Doctor Rel, and the others. Most of them don’t seem to be the type to just sit in offices and council chambers. When the time requires it, they get up and do things—they
lead
.” That sharp-edged, dangerously attractive grin widened. “And it’s
sure as hell
not the way
I
have been leading. I’m not going to be hiding in the Embassy or attending tea parties all the time.”

DuQuesne leaned forward. “I see you’ve already got something in mind. So what’s your next crazy venture, Captain?”

“I made a promise, Marc. A promise to Orphan, who trusted us to fulfill that promise and then did a lot more than we’d ever have expected. We’re going to pay up on that debt.”

“And by ‘pay up,’ you mean…”

“We, Marc, are going to be Orphan’s crew. He said it had to do with the secret behind a power that could oppose a Shadeweaver head on. We need to know about secrets like that. And whatever has the power to do that…might just also be able to teach me what I can do…” she smiled wryly, “…other than the universe’s most spectacular wardrobe change.”

“Um…I hope I’m not going to be a wet blanket here,” Oasis said, “but…is that a good idea?”

“Oasis does have a point, Ariane,” Simon said, as Ariane looked at the redhead with a surprised glance. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I reduce everything of recent events to its essence, we were fighting to convince the SSC that you were responsible enough to be trusted with the power of the Leader of Humanity.”

DuQuesne nodded. “Yeah. Not saying you
can’t
do it, but you’d better have a
reason
that you have to go, one that’ll check to nine decimals with even the people who’ll be suspicious of you—like Esterhauer.”

Ariane smiled at Oasis, then at the rest of them. “You’re all correct. But really, I’ve thought about this. The reason’s pretty simple, actually. Like I said, we
need
to know about these secrets. More, we need—
I
need—to find out how to unleash and control this power that I got almost by accident. I suppose I
could
send other people, like you and Simon, out and hope you could get the information yourself and bring it back, but let’s face it: whoever has that information probably isn’t giving it out to anyone if they can help it, and I doubt the instructions are going to be something you can just write down, anyway.

“And of course there’s the issue of safety.”

Simon raised an eyebrow. “You think you’ll be
safer
going out on such an expedition?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Ariane said. “I think
you
will all be safer if I’m
with
you.”

DuQuesne’s expression was priceless.
Record that one, Mio, I don’t want to forget it!