The Dark Imbalance (30 page)

Roche could tell where it was heading. she said dryly.

she remembered.

Roche fought the urge to argue that the anti-Interventionists’ stance neither made sense nor was fair.

The Box didn’t sound as smug as she might have expected. mainly
passive, for the moment. They have access to the little information available regarding the enemy, and although they are not, strictly speaking, allowed to spread that information, they can ensure that the right people come across it at the right time.>

will
support it, if it is made in the agreed fashion.>

Roche thought of the thousands of people dying every minute in Sol System, and wondered what was happening outside the system.

can
we do, then?>

She conceded the point.

There was a lengthy pause.

The Box’s tone made her nervous again. why,
Box? Why am I so important?>

have
thought about it!>

The light above her suddenly went out, and the Box fell silent. Roche sat bolt upright, looking in alarm to where the Box’s light had been. It was suddenly very quiet, and the sense of threat from beyond the sphere returned.

Her skin tingled all over as a patch of air one meter in front of her clouded over, as though a self-contained mist had suddenly formed out of nowhere. It swirled around itself for a moment, becoming thicker and darker, then faded to reveal a three-dimensional tank not dissimilar to the instrument displays on the
Ana Vereine.
Inside was a single, flashing icon, shaped like a gold key.

There being no other visible way to interface with the display, she reached in and touched the key.

It turned into an embedded document containing numerous chapters and headings. The glossary was full of references to things she had never heard of before. There were links to diagrams and charts, statistics and formulae. There were texts from the fields of biology, sociology, anthropology, and archaeology. There were maps of regions long since distorted by millennia of stellar movements, and others so up to date that they included the destruction of Palasian System. There was even a mention of her, although when she touched the link, the display returned a message saying: “Access Denied.”

She sat back with her legs crossed, the display following her every move. Then when she was relatively relaxed, she began to browse....

* * *

The second name she recognized was that of Adoni Cane. There were several Canes listed, and some with aliases; one was the Cane she knew, his activities extensively chronicled thanks to the Box’s proximity. Other Adoni Canes had appeared in diverse parts of the galaxy, always to sow chaos, then to disappear. One had left a swath of disorder from the core to the Middle Reaches, his path pointing directly to Sol System. Where they were now was not listed, although the anonymous authors of the text speculated that at least some of them had made it to Sol System already.

She followed two links from that article. One led to the original Adoni Cane. The other explored the history of Humanity, as near to its origins as the High Humans could get. She was amazed to learn that even they didn’t know for certain where their progenitors came from. She had always assumed that there was nothing they didn’t know—or couldn’t find out, if they wanted to. But clearly that wasn’t the case.

Humanity had diverged from the original, Pristine genetic strain somewhere between five and six hundred thousand years ago. Its dispersal throughout the galaxy could be plotted by studying the aging of certain anchor points known to have been constructed at that time. Anchor points didn’t decay like matter; over hundreds of thousands of years, they dissipated back into the universe’s natural background vacuum fluctuations in gradual, known ways. The remnants of the network that had first allowed Humanity to spread outward into the galaxy later gave archaeologists a rough guide to how that expansion had taken place.

By following it backward, a vague approximation could be made as to where it had all started.

The study of the propagation of the four known Primordial Castes suggested that the original Human homeworld had once been located near the space currently occupied by the Commonwealth of Empires. This region itself was now totally empty, with any ruins that might have existed long since removed or destroyed. No hard evidence remained to isolate a single system out of the many possibilities, but around twenty had been singled out as likely possibilities.

Sol System was one of them, despite its emptiness. The proponents of this theory raised the history of the system as their main evidence. Time and time again, it had become the focus for fringe groups or obsessive cults as though a subconscious collective memory guided them there. The Sol Apotheosis Movement was just one of many that had used the empty system as a home base, free from observation and interference. The system’s name had accrued a certain notoriety among the High Caste observers, and the current convergence only added to that.

From Roche’s point of view, the difficulty lay in knowing whether the convergence occurred because of the system’s history, or regardless of the fact. The Box had admitted that the Crescend sowed rumors of the enemy’s origins in order to draw people to the system, but the reasons for his doing this were unclear. Roche wasn’t sure whether the rumors had been started
because
the enemy was already converging there, or whether the enemy had been lured there by the rumors, along with everyone else.

The history of the system itself, though, did intrigue her. It had once possessed a number of planets—at least eight, if the records were accurate, plus a large number of dark bodies, an asteroid field, and a cometary halo. Their fate was a mystery, although one observer grimly hypothesized that the composition and mass of the ring suggested that the entire system had somehow been ground to dust and put in orbit around the primary. Why anyone would want to do this remained unknown.

Among the ancient records that did remain from the older days of Humanity were scraps pertaining to the present situation. The name Adoni Cane was among those scraps, as were the other names the Box had mentioned in Palasian System. They had once been real people.

On a list of military honors, Field Admiral Adoni Cane of the Old Earth Advance Guard had received a Military Star for extraordinary acts of valor against the enemy. General Jelena Heidik distinguished herself against the same enemy in a place called Alpha Aurigae and received a Mars St. Selwyn Medal for her trouble. Vani Wehr was a civilian whose quick thinking on the Clarke Cylinder thwarted an enemy incursion and earned him an Honorable Mention. Captain Sadoc Lleshi was one of many Ground Corps officers posthumously recognized for excellence in battle after the long and bitter campaign had ended with the enemy’s defeat. And so on.

Although there was no explanation for the names of the medals awarded or places mentioned, and nothing placing the battles in any context, Roche recognized the pattern immediately. The names used by the present enemy were all taken from those distinguished in the battle against them in the distant past. No doubt it was intended as an insult or a grand irony. That lent credence to the theory that the “enemy” referred to but never actually named in the old records was indeed the source of Adoni Cane and his siblings—but it didn’t really tell her anything new about the enemy, past or present. There were still no recognizable names or locations, no descriptions, no clues at all as to where they came from or what they had looked like.

There were some tantalizing snippets, however. One concerned the command language Linegar Rufo had used in his attempts to communicate with the clone warrior in Palasian System. It appeared to be an actual language, not specifically restricted to military applications—although, again, its origins were clouded. Whether the Box had lied when it denied recognizing the language upon first hearing it, or whether this was new information added since then, Roche couldn’t tell. Either way, its unique syntax and dissimilarity to any tongue currently in use marked it as enigmatic. Why it remained when so little else did was not explained, and Roche had a feeling that if she pursued the matter, she would run up against another Access Denied warning.

When she hunted for a genetic reference to the ancient enemy, she also found no data available. That didn’t surprise her as such—if the records didn’t contain even a name, then a DNA record was too much to hope for—but it did disappoint her. Hard evidence of a connection between the ancient enemy and the new would have been good. It would have silenced the doubt that nagged at her even now, asking her how it was possible for a connection to exist across such a gulf of time.

But then she remembered that to people like Adoni Cane, no time at all had really passed. The capsules that had created them had been drifting through the galaxy for over half a million years, their contents frozen, waiting for the moment to loose a new clone warrior. Their creators had programmed them and set them loose, then been destroyed forever. The legacy of their clone warriors was all that remained.

As such, their own genetic code was of particular interest to the High Humans. Were the unique intron passages somehow responsible for the unusual structures in Cane’s brain that had baffled Sylvester Teh on Sciacca’s World? These in turn might have been related to their odd n-space impression. But how? Minds greater than hers had grappled with these problems and had come to no firm conclusions. All were convinced that the introns of the enemy contained important information or played a critical role, but no one knew exactly how.

After what felt like an eternity browsing through the file, Roche closed her eyes and leaned back on the yielding floor of the sphere. She really wasn’t learning terribly much. Yes, there had been a war in the distant past, whose losers had seeded this peculiar revenge. And yes, Adoni Cane was one of them. But she still didn’t know who the enemy was, and she still didn’t know how she fit into it all.

The Box had asked her to think about why she alone could detect the enemy. She was no closer to the answer than when she had started, and she suspected that no amount of random browsing would find it, either. But if she knew that, then the Box knew it too. It obviously hadn’t meant that she would find the answer there.

But where, then?

She got up again and began to pace. The misty screen followed her for a while, then collapsed to a fuzzy point and fell behind. There was nothing else in the sphere. It was as featureless as ever, its air perfectly breathable and temperature perfectly comfortable. Her only distraction was the occasional urge to sleep, which she resisted. Even if such urges meant that the Box was having problems running her on its components, she didn’t care. Its components were part of
her.
She had every right to use them, too...

She stopped in mid-pace, struck by an idea.

Was
that
what the Box had meant? Could it be so simple?

The galaxy she knew was about to be destroyed by a relatively small number of superior warriors partly because Humanity lacked the ability to tell these warriors from their own. If the High Humans did in fact possess the ability to wipe out the enemy, then presumably they also knew how to find them. But if the Crescend wasn’t allowed to intervene directly, he also couldn’t stand back and let Humanity be slaughtered. He therefore had to find another way to help.