Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) Read online

  “Wasn’t it inevitable that parren would unite against you?” she accused him. “When you picked the most hated man in parren history as your saviour?”

  “Hated by the elites who make our opinions, who write our histories, who recount our current affairs.” Gesul did not sound impressed. He was a tall man for a parren, a full head taller than Lisbeth, and bore a physical presence within his robe that most parren lacked. “Do not be deceived by parren discipline, Lisbeth Debogande. We obey, but we also think for ourselves. Drakhil was the last man to truly lead parren to greatness in the Spiral. Many parren want their greatness back.”

  “You had the Parren Empire,” Lisbeth countered. “It was eight thousand human years, far longer than the few hundred of the drysine-parren alliance. Why not draw inspiration from that?”

  “Most do,” Gesul admitted. “But it was chaotic. Untidy. Do they teach very much of the Parren Empire period on human worlds?”

  “Very little,” Lisbeth admitted. “Humans are rather preoccupied with our own history.”

  “Understandable. Parren make poor governors of species other than our own. We tried, but parren society is dominated by the division of the five houses, and other species do not share our ways. There were many breakups and uprisings, the chah’nas in particular were restive, being the most warlike. We put them down many times, having superior technology then, thanks to the drysines. In truth, the drysines gave us such a large advantage, which we managed to keep others from acquiring, that we were unchallengeable for a long time.

  “The Empire period is not looked upon with particular pride, Lisbeth Debogande. There were too many wars, squabbles and corruptions. When the chah’nas finally overthrew us, it was almost a relief, to some at least. The Spiral became a chah’nas problem, and parren withdrew to what we do best — scheme amongst ourselves.”

  It was a cynicism unsuspected from a parren. Lisbeth recalled his words — ‘we obey, but we also think for ourselves.’ A human would assume that a people who always did as they were told could not think independently. She’d gotten the impression that the tavalai shared this prejudice, internal ill-discipline being something humans and tavalai shared. Aristan might have been a single-minded fanatic, but the description did not appear to fit Gesul.

  “Drakhil would have made parren first among all the Spiral species,” Lisbeth said slowly. “First and unchallengeable, because of drysine power. And the drysines would have let you do what you wanted, among organics. They didn’t care about organics, they’d just tell you guys to keep the other organics out of their way, and if you did that, they’d be happy. Assuming drysines can be happy.”

  Gesul was looking at her again, curiously. “Indeed. Parren would have prospered. The drysines would have crushed any challenger. Many today find it more attractive than the honourless compromises of the Empire.”

  “Assuming another hacksaw civil war didn’t change the drysines’ minds, or wipe them out, and take you with it,” said Lisbeth. “The machines evolved, Gesul, more rapidly even than organics. Give them a few hundred years separated in different parts of the Spiral, two groups of drysines could change so much they’d no longer recognise each other, then would fight to eliminate that foreign threat. I think we’re all better off without them.”

  Gesul might have smiled within his veil. “And does your protector agree?”

  “My protector is tasked with protecting. He has no opinions.” She was pretty sure, anyway. A brain that small surely must be a long way from sentient.

  “And the drysine queen who built him?” Gesul pressed. And might have smiled further at the shock on her face. She tried to hide it, but she’d never been a particularly good actor. “Our information from Kantovan suggests it the most likely possibility. So many odd events, so many unlikely coincidences. Alone, we might not have added them up. But we have you, and your protector, the technology for which is supposed to be long extinct. Possessing the hardware to build one is the first matter. Possessing the software to make it think just the way you want it to… and the consequences if you get it wrong? Hacksaw drones do not program. Only queens. This much knowledge from the old days we have retained.”

  Lisbeth wasn’t sure that was correct — drysine drones seemed a little beyond most of the other hacksaw types. But it did not stop Gesul’s conclusion from being correct. Well, she thought, pulling herself up. She’d decided to be powerful in this place, by showing everyone how much she knew of things that they valued. A hacksaw queen might be overdoing it… but what more harm could it cause now? If Styx had been at Kantovan, and if even distant observers like the Domesh, and like Tobenrah, were suspicious, surely others were as well. The idea had been for Styx to keep a low profile, but if Phoenix was using her in operations, that wasn’t going to last. Styx could do things for which all other explanations were implausible.

  “No,” Lisbeth said finally. “No, she’s very determined to bring her people back from extinction. Phoenix had advanced capabilities even without her. With her, those capabilities increase dramatically.” It was the only threat she could manage, for now. It sounded painfully weak to her own ears. Phoenix was certainly no trifle, but Gesul was second-in-command of the about-to-be most powerful denomination in House Harmony. House Harmony commanded fleets, and comprised tens of billions of souls. This was not a man to be frightened by a single ship. Not even one carrying a hacksaw queen.

  Gesul stared, at her admission. As though, despite his conclusion, it was still a great shock to hear her confirm it. “Does she have a name?” he whispered.

  “They do not use names, amongst themselves. Identification data is encoded in all communications, making names redundant.” Lisbeth took a deep breath. Revealing this information was now surely the right thing to do, but she could not escape the feeling that she was engaging in some treachery. “Aboard Phoenix she is known as Styx. It is the name of a very old Earth goddess. Amongst parren, she says that she was once known as Halgolam.”

  Gesul’s eyes went wider still. He turned to stare at the sun-drenched expanse, the great birds circling on thermals. Lisbeth thought he might need a seat. It was a full minute before he spoke again. “Did she know Drakhil?”

  “She said she’d met him. More than that, she did not say.” Lisbeth had actually heard Romki say more, of what Styx had told him of her knowledge of Drakhil. But Gesul belonged to a belief-system built entirely upon a mythologised notion of who Drakhil had been. To destroy that notion, before such a man, was not safe.

  “Incredible,” Gesul murmured. “Halgolam. I thank you, Lisbeth Debogande. When we took you for an Ashara, we had no idea we were acquiring such a treasure trove of ancient knowledge.”

  Lisbeth smiled faintly. “If you think that of me, you should truly meet her one day.”

  “Nothing would give me a more profound satisfaction. I would be content to die immediately after, and feel my life complete. Halgolam.” He murmured the word again, and the translator repeated it phonetically in Lisbeth’s ear, perhaps recognising it as something from parren belief. “I shall speak with you more deeply on this. But first, I must research, in the oldest archives.”

  Gesul indicated to Timoshene, who bowed deeply. “I would accompany you, if it would help?” Lisbeth blurted on impulse. It was a preposterous offer, but she was feeling quite emboldened. To feel as though she had some leverage over her circumstance, after so much fear and uncertainty, was the greatest relief.

  Gesul smiled. “A kind offer, but impractical. Where I must go to research, I not only doubt they would admit you, I fear they shall not admit me.”

  He gave a polite nod, and flowed away in a billow of black.

  3

  The rooms and corridors from Engineering Bulkhead-G were a mess of activity. Spacers ran and shouted, dodging past Erik with handfuls of tools. From various open doorways came the keening and throbbing of alien machines — fabricators — some of human design, others alien. Styx professed that she was not a repository of technical
information, and that her knowledge was only a tiny portion of drysine technology. But she’d spent thousands of years in a hollowed out asteroid in Argitori System, accompanied by a small handful of drones, and a network of advanced fabricators.

  The fabricators had used far more power than the asteroid’s hacksaw inhabitants, for any hacksaw colony required constant maintenance of ageing parts to survive in fighting condition. Styx’s small band of survivors had run those fabricators as a human colony would run lifesupport, fashioning new parts, repairing old ones, evolving the multiple micro sub-systems that were the only way to manufacture or repair sensitive neural or sensory systems. Now, Styx replicated those millennia of expertise on Phoenix, with human crew toiling as her personal workforce of drones.

  All of the technology to be produced was illegal in most parts of the Spiral, but in their present circumstance, up against the opponents they faced, Erik thought Phoenix would need all the help she could get. Lieutenant Rooke, Chief of Engineering, was already salivating at the prospect of some technologies Styx offered, particularly at the fact that they would not require a massive overhaul in a ship base to implement. What Styx would get out of it was a new body… and, though it was said less often, the ability to reanimate the bodies of other destroyed hacksaw drones from Argitori, whose parts Phoenix still held in storage. Already one had been so reconstructed, with results so impressive, Trace opined, that it might be worth pursuing again, for the multiplication of combat power such drones represented for marine units. Trace might have been ready for such drastic developments, but Erik did not think the rest of the crew were. ‘Later’, he’d told her, meaning never. She might be in charge of Phoenix Company, but between deployments, hacksaw drones would have to live in his ship, with his crew. Just no, Trace, for god’s sake.

  He found Stan Romki in B-14 — a storage room with high vertical walls of shelves, cold but insulated. A lot of it was frozen food, and even now Spacer Kuiper was standing on the mobile stepladder to drag frozen slabs from their trays and down to his trolley, for defrosting in the kitchen. Romki sat in the workbay he’d set up — one of the few spares left in Engineering — and puzzled over multiple translation programs running on multiple screens. The data he (or rather Styx) had extracted from the storage cylinder they’d stolen from the Kantovan Vault was not great in size, just in complexity and alien-ness. At an adjoining bench sat Hiro Uno, his posture reminding Erik of Academy students in class after a weekend of football, wincing at every pressure and trying to move as little as possible.

  Hiro turned his head slowly to glance at Erik with his one good eye. The other was swollen shut completely. “Captain.”

  “Should you be out of medbay?” Erik wondered, putting a hand on the spy’s shoulder.

  “Depends who you ask,” Hiro said cryptically, through the clenched teeth of a swollen jaw.

  “Ah,” said Erik. Clearly Hiro hadn’t asked anyone, least of all Doc Suelo. It was the first time he’d seen Hiro since breaking him out of State Department custody on the Tsubarata. “How’s the body?”

  “Nothing broken,” said Hiro. “Be sore for a while. They weren’t trying to cripple me.”

  “I’ll want a report, as soon as you’re able,” Erik told him. Hiro didn’t share much about how he did things. Presumably he’d sworn an oath, while working for federal intelligence agencies, that he would not reveal certain methods even once he’d left the service.

  “I thought I answered to Major Thakur on off-ship operations,” Hiro said defensively.

  “You see that rank you now wear?” Erik asked him. “That’s ‘Ensign’. It’s a spacer rank, because you’re now a spacer. That means you answer to me first, on all things.”

  “Yes Captain,” Hiro said without enthusiasm. “I’ll dictate it as soon as I’ve got nothing better to do.” It wasn’t worth the argument, Erik thought. Hiro and Jokono were former intelligence and law enforcement respectively, and only wore the uniform now by accident and necessity. They did good work and were as brave as anyone. Bitching about their lack of military etiquette, particularly Hiro’s, would not help anything.

  “Ensign Uno is displeased at being rescued,” came Styx’s synthetic, feminine voice from the room speakers. Up on his stepladder, Spacer Kuiper nearly dropped his frozen trays. Not all of Phoenix’s crew had yet heard her in person. “I do not believe he would have preferred to die, but he appears determined to be displeased at being rescued. It is not a productive attitude.”

  “Yeah, thanks Gorgeous,” Hiro retorted. Hiro and Styx had coordinated closely in breaking into State Department HQ on the Tsubarata, Erik knew. If Hiro wouldn’t tell him how he’d done it, perhaps Styx would. “And thanks a bundle for offering to stick me with the pointy end of an assassin bug, too.”

  “It gave me no pleasure,” Styx said mildly. “I do not advocate the elimination of valuable assets lightly. I am a strategic planner, and that strategy seemed advantageous over risking the Captain’s life to save you. But on this ship I am a servant, and I follow orders.”

  A while back she’d described herself as a slave, Erik recalled. Styx was far too meticulous for that change in terminology to be accidental. Evidently her estimation of herself, and her role on Phoenix, was increasing.

  “Stan?” said Erik, looking at Romki. The Professor continued to stare at his screens, making corrections to the scroll of text and murmuring to himself. “How’s the progress? Stan?” Romki genuinely had not heard him. Probably he didn’t even know Erik was in the room.

  “Human intelligence is a curious thing,” Styx observed. Erik and Hiro exchanged glances. “Professor, the Captain wishes to speak with you.”

  Romki blinked in surprise, and looked about. So he only responded to her voice now, Erik wondered? “Oh, Captain. Yes. Um, good progress. I think I have it pinpointed, but there’s…” He slumped back in his chair, pushed the glasses up his bald head, and rubbed his eyes. “There’s just so much here. Drakhil’s diary, it’s just… it’s the greatest scholarly discovery of this millennia, I think. By this species or any other. I feel I’ve been blessed and cursed at the same time, this is too much for any one person to process.”

  “When was the last time you slept?” Erik asked suspiciously. There was a coffee flask in the workbench drink holder. “Or ate, for that matter?”

  “I’ll sleep when I have my presentation ready,” Romki said irritably. “When do I need it done by?”

  “Yesterday,” Erik said flatly. “Styx, since you’re assisting the Professor on his translations, could you please be certain that he does not get too distracted on all this other scholarly stuff? We need to know the location of the data-core, that’s all.”

  “Oh we have the location of the data-core,” Romki retorted. “It’s just that we have it on twenty five thousand year old maps. We need up-to-date maps and charts, and those are simply not available. We need Aristan’s help. A lot of this stuff…” Romki waved a finger at the glowing lines of text on his screen, “…this is verbal description, it’s not scientific, we just have to trust that the things that Drakhil describes are still there after all this time.”

  “Captain,” said Styx. “If I may, please do not blame the Professor for my shortcomings. As many in your crew have observed, spoken language is not my native skill, and I calculate correct speech mostly by observed probability. This is possible where I am in possession of all the variables, like advanced English dictionaries, and many examples of their use. But where those variables are missing, as in the Klyran language, my ability to decipher meaning becomes quite limited.”

  “She’s being modest,” Romki sighed. “I mean, she’s the only reason I can do this at all. We know the rules of phonetics and pronunciation, and thousands of the most common words, but we’re constantly running into new words that have no foundation in anything known. Styx is running every parren dictionary and language file we have, simultaneously, and cross-referencing against new klyran words… that’s billions of calculations,
and she’s still only right about half the time because not every klyran word is related to something still in use today. The rest of the time we have to leave a blank and move on, then come back when we’ve got new information.”

  “But even once translated,” Styx continued, “the style of writing is so imprecise that I cannot be sure of the meaning, while Professor Romki seems to find an answer almost instinctively. It is actually quite intriguing. Drysines have always proclaimed complete intellectual superiority over organics. In fact, I now discover that in some of the skills for which it is specifically designed, the human mind can outperform my own.”

  “Humans are good at guessing,” said Hiro. The spy was the only other person on the ship whose fluency in alien tongues came close to Romki’s. He was also a whiz with encryption, and it made sense he’d be useful here. “AIs don’t like to guess because they value precision. They’re victims of their own high expectations, while humans expect to be wrong, so we don’t mind wading out into the unknown while we figure it out.”

  “An intriguing supposition,” Styx admitted. “Entirely inaccurate, I suspect, but intriguing.”

  Hiro smiled, and popped a breath mint. “Thanks Babe.”