Superego (6 page)

“Dip, I am growing impatient.”

My view of Nar Valdum currently took up most of my ship's windshield. Blue and green with white at the poles, it was the stereotypical habitable planet for my species. It was not a home world for any sentient species, which meant it was in much more pristine condition than many other planets, having only been developed with modern sensibilities. It's not like planets are the most limited resource anymore, but people only like to strip-mine the ones that aren't green. It seems a little discriminatory.

Being so civilized, Nar Valdum fully monitored all traffic entering its atmosphere. Landing on the planet was not simple. Pretty much everything about being civilized is unnecessarily cumbersome. That's why I stick the edges of civilization. I don't really fit in with civilized people.

“Would you like to play twenty questions, Rico? You think of something, and then I'll try to guess it. It will help me learn.”

“No, Dip, I want ground control. Any indication of how much longer we'll have to wait?”

“They simply say we are in a queue, and they will get to us soon. So do you want to play twenty questions?”

Didn't have much else to do. “Fine. I thought of something.”

“Is it animal, vegetable, mineral, or other?”

“Other.”

“Is it violence?”

“Yes.”

Dip processed silently for a moment. “That game did not help me learn anything.”

“Life is full of disappointments, Dip. Perhaps you learned that.”

“I previously derived that knowledge, Rico. I have good news for you, though: Ground control is hailing us.”

“Patch them through.”

“This is Nar Valdum ground control,” said a male voice over the ship's speakers. “What is your business here?”

My guess was that a normal person would be a little irate at this point, so I decided to go with that…since I actually was quite irate. “Landing…not just floating here all day.” I was starting to worry I'd be late for my meeting with my contact (contacts?), and I had no idea what would happen then. Very frustrating.

“We are sorry for the wait, but security measures have been increased for the conference. Are you here for that?”

“Yes.” So many species in one area would be something. I imagined firing into a crowd full of diverse species and making a rainbow of blood splatters. It would be like art.

“How long is your planned stay?”

Once again, I had no idea. “Seven days.”

“How many sentients are aboard your vessel?”

“Just me.”

“Species?”

“Human. Haven't you scanned my ship?”

“Just confirming data. Does your ship have weaponry?”

None they would find. “Just basic defensive measures…if you'd call them weapons.”

“Your course for landing and your ship identification are being sent to you. Please keep the ship identification in your memory bank for the length of your stay.”

I checked the onscreen map. This was not good. “That's a completely different continent from the conference!”

“Security measures,” ground control answered. He sounded weary.

“It's good to know I'll be safe, at least.” I did not hide the sarcasm as I cut communications. Whatever I would be doing down there, I would lack an easy escape. “Dip, take her down. I'll need you to find out as much as you can about their aerial security and whether you might be able to bring the ship in closer if needed. I'd like a better escape plan than having to tunnel straight through the planet to get back to you. I think I'll need your full pretend intelligence on this.”

“Can't you assume those you will be working with will help with your escape?”

“That is likely, but I don't take anything for granted. Try and come up with your own solution.”

“Certainly. Thank you for this task. It should make full use of my programming and be a good learning experience for helping you in the future…or whoever owns me in the future.”

“Are you trying to imply that I might not survive this?”

“Exactly! It's good to know that my attempt at an implication led to a correct inference. Anyway, it's difficult to calculate your odds of survival without knowing the details of your mission, but factoring in the public impact of your usual jobs and the fact that you'll be surrounded by the highest security you're likely to see in a single city, it's hard to come up with a scenario in which you emerge from this alive.”

He had a point. “True, but don't forget one thing: People are stupid. There are always angles to exploit.”

“Aren't you people, Rico?”

“That's debatable.”

“While we're landing, I have something for you to try guessing in twenty questions, Rico.”

I manually accessed Dip's memory buffer and looked for an unusual sequence repeated over and over.

“Are you thinking of a shoe?”

“You cheated.”

“I hope you learned something from that.”

CHAPTER 6

I had to land my ship about 9,000 miles from the capital city. My large store of items that make killing fun and easy would not be readily accessible, so I was forced to put whatever I might need into a couple of bags that I could carry with me.

My favorite firearms are Arco X5 blasters that burn nice, large holes through organic matter. One shot to anywhere on the torso will almost always be instantly lethal. The blasters are highly illegal. Even militaries tend not to use them as small arms, since a shot from one can rip through a creature and keep right on going through a school, a hospital, and an orphanage before finally dissipating (I haven't actually tested that in the field, but if I ever got that shot lined up, it would be hard not to take it). If you're someone like me who is incapable of caring about collateral damage on some planet he never plans to visit again, they're perfect.

Now, technically, all weapons deadlier than small knives were forbidden in the capital. But of course my interest was more in what security might be able to detect. There was no way they could individually search everyone coming into the city, but Dip found that I would have to pass through some mass scanners when taking the inbound trams. They'd be looking for large power sources that could be nuclear bombs or worse; and unfortunately, the X5 blaster uses a pretty insane power source that basically screams that you're there to kill everyone. So those had to stay with Dip. Instead I'd be taking some Shiro pistols as my main weapons. Their power source isn't much bigger than what you'd find in a lot of common electronics, but they also only burn small holes through people—often not even all the way through. A single shot is pretty survivable, but they can be fired quite fast, which allows me to put a lot of shots into a target.

In case I was going to enter any buildings where I might be specifically scanned, I was bringing two pistols that worked on the old explosive powder design. Completely mechanical, a spring-loaded magazine feeds bullets into the barrel. A bullet is basically a piece of lead with explosive powder packed behind it. A physical strike to the back of the bullet explodes the powder and projects the piece of lead forward at a high speed while causing the top part of the gun to slide backward and load another bullet from the magazine. The lead pieces have hollow tips, so they flatten on impact and do major soft tissue damage. An ingenious ancient design (these were called 1911s, which refers to the approximate year of their invention), they work well and, lacking electronic power sources, they are completely invisible to most weapon scans. Each pistol fires only eight shots before the magazine has to be replaced, but they're accurate enough in short ranges that I can make each of those shots count. They're very loud, but that does help with intimidation.

As backup, I always carry a revolver—an even older design. It keeps six bullets in rotating chambers, which click into place with each trigger pull. It's a last resort, and I have deployed it before to good effect.

I packed those weapons (I'd be carrying two of the Shiro pistols on my person for the trip) along with some clothes and toiletries and minor explosives. “Will you be able to easily communicate with me from here?” I asked Dip as I prepared to leave the ship.

“I should be able to use relays to communicate with you directly as needed, Rico. Please be careful, though. If you need an emergency pickup, I calculate approximately a ninety-two percent chance of my being shot out of the sky were I to even approach the city.”

“I'll do my best not to get into random gunfights, but keep trying to find an alternate way past air traffic security. I'll see what my contact here knows.”

“Hopefully, he will have useful knowledge, but I will continue to work on the problem. In fact, by factoring in some maneuvers I'm capable of making, I now calculate a nearly ten percent chance of my being able to land in the capital. Even if I am successful at that, though, our chances of taking off and escaping atmosphere are incalculably small.”

“Fun times.” I would essentially be trapped in the city if something did go wrong. I hoped my contact had that figured out, but it was starting to look like I was going to be late to meet him. I quickly left the ship and headed for the tram. There was some diversity of alien species on the train, but I saw more humans and Corridians than any other. Humans have gotten along pretty well with Corridians because they are what some people call “Star Trek” aliens. Those are aliens that kinda look like they could be humans in makeup. Despite all the PSAs about not judging sentients by appearances, most people get nervous standing next to something that looks like a giant insect. They want to smash in its head. Nothing wrong with that; it's just instinct. Humans can anthropomorphize anything, but it helps if the species throws us a bone by at least having a face.

Almost every sentient species I've bothered to research had racial battles before they advanced to the point of interstellar travel, and they tend to look at interaction between alien species with that frame of mind. But it's not the same; the physiological differences are huge. People take it as a matter of faith that all sentient species are equal, but in the back of their heads they know there is no rational basis for that assumption. All the sentients evolved separately on separate worlds with separately developed brains; any similarities really are by chance. But we want all intelligent things to be equal, as if by wanting it we could make it so. If we just got into some big wars where we wiped out and conquered each other, it would seem a lot more honest to me than trying to live together.

I like honesty. You hardly ever see real honesty in the universe. Nothing scares people more.

“Are you here for the conference?” asked some creature I didn't recognize.

He/she/it had interrupted my train of thought—I was trying to figure out how long it would take to kill everyone on the train (a routine mental exercise I do). I rarely kill so indiscriminately, but my instinct would be to go for the children last. They are smaller targets, but their survival instincts are usually very poor, and they probably wouldn't even know to run and hide. “I've got a headache. I'm not really in a talking mood.” I decided to be a jerk while I'm here. That means I don't have to concentrate as much on social niceties, but I still don't have to worry about standing out, because jerks are very common throughout the universe.

The tram slowed as it neared the capital. Like many large cities, it had slums with all the alien diversity you could want and plenty of crime and violence (guess which people tend to flee colonies of their own species?), and then things became much more monolithic as you got closer to the city center. Nar Valdum was our first attempt to colonize a planet in concert with another species and was roughly half human and half Corridian, which was supposed to prove some point I'm sure no one could coherently explain. They're trying to hold it up as a positive example of different species coexisting—i.e., uncomfortably but without outright violence—but it just seems asinine to me.

It takes a beam of light one hundred thousand years to travel from one edge of the Milky Way to the other, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. There is enough room for all species to have plenty of colonized planets and never have to run into each other. But I guess that's just too simple. Still, I'm not complaining. Chaos and stupidity make things easier for me.

I was starting to feel a bit nervous as the tram took me farther away from my only means of escape. I was trapped here, and if somehow my masked slipped, I wouldn't be able to shoot my way to safety. You might think being inconspicuous would be as simple as just following the laws, but most people don't know the laws by actually memorizing them. They know what feels wrong and that what feels really wrong is probably against the law. No action I take feels different than another for me, so I constantly have to check everything I'm doing against a little list of social mores and laws I've memorized. I had gotten pretty good at it, but it was never easy.

I arrived in the city with some time before my lunch meeting, so I went to the hotel room Dip had reserved. Not too cheap, not too expensive. Staying there said absolutely nothing about me. Inconspicuous. After I dropped off my luggage, I headed to the café—a fancy little place that seemed to cater evenly to humans and Corridians. I arrived at the proper time and, just as I had feared, had no idea what to do next. No one immediately approached me, and no one stood out in the crowd (I would hope whoever it was would be smart enough not to), so I got a table outside and decided to wait. I ordered some tea and brought up the local news on my reader. I wasn't actually planning to read, but I wanted to try this new thing I had been working on.

My brain being split was mainly advantageous when I took on two targets at once, but I had found that I could also have one of the parts do simple tasks while I focused elsewhere. What I had tried to break down into a simple task this time was the appearance of reading news. News reading is more difficult to fake than book reading, because I'm not just reading cover to cover. I have to pretend to scan for stories that interest me, then slow down to focus more on certain parts. It's a minor distinction, but what if another trained observer like me was looking for something out of place? If I'm going to pretend to be normal, I might as well commit to it fully. Nothing is more suspicious than something that's just a bit off.