The Princess of Caldris (8 page)

Coco-butter Parsons' eyes
went dark. "Come on, I'm you're dancin' dolphin. Come
on!"

Hammerstein shot him an icy
look, but his underlying emotion under his granite face was pity.
Coco-butter, he knew, would die valiantly-but still die.
Hammerstein was beginning to grasp the layers of menace. The
Imperials wouldn't want evidence that their genocide in the
Arcturian War had been a premeditated horror on a bunch of
disorganized Ranchero colonials. Who knew how far, even now, they
would go to maintain the fiction otherwise? The corporations,
tapping the old technologies the Imperials had let slip for a
millennium, they would not want word toxic sentient programs were
loose in the technologies frying brains for sport.

Princess Maggio had
uncovered an eel's nest at the edge of an undersea lava flow, and
we, apparently, were her dive buddies.

He sensed my fear, and he
responded with a camaraderie. Not that I was in any less danger,
rather, he was letting me in on a secret-the tools of the trade, as
it were, facing dangers, “Look, kid it’s like this If the entire
Caldris system, it's Navy, and worlds and industries and culture,
be overwhelmed-take heart, little man. Neither the Imperial
Transhuman Overlords, nor the Multi-Star-system mega corporations,
are truly united within themselves. There is their weakness-within
each Colossus are in fact various competing sub interests-iron vs.
copper, copper vs. tin, tin vs. clay-and thus a small dedicated
force with subterfuge may divide and conquer the giant
idol."

His stone features creaked,
a visage that spoke of eons, patience, and geological deep time.
"We will find them out, root them out, then set them upon one
another."

Now it was I with an icy
look covering pity. No, I thought.
Like
Coco-butter Parsons, you will make a valiant stand then
die.

Perhaps my young mind was
too deep in a gloom. Parsons had just slammed the ship that hit us
with the wormhole shock-wave. Hammerstein was producing leads with
my assistance. Yet the time for me to view the Sunrider relic was
close at hand and even from the mess hall I could feel its grim
presence,
emanating hopelessness.
My body seemed caught in thickening cement, an
astercrete mined from the loneliest asteroid in the darkest corner
of the cosmos
.

Something wrong, something
that ate human ambition and dreams, something that whispered, "All
is lost; look now upon the wreckage of your species’ aspirations,
and weep.”

Gloom indeed.

Ecclesiastes, vanity,
vanity, all is vanity. It drummed upon my mind. Early in my
obsession with history and its repetitions I went into a virtual
reality play, commonly know as a virtreel, and found myself at the
fall of Troy. It was a splendid virtreel, carefully crafted by its
makers with the most accurate details of the period recreated in
all their Bronze Age glories. After the commonly known drama
unfolded, I found myself as one of the refugees making haste away
on a water ship. The land shrunk with distance and as the last
light of day ebbed, there was only the water, the ships, and the
sky. Ominously, even from that distance in the fading light one
could see the smoke of Troy's burning like a funeral
pyre.

Today we made more scans
of the Sunrider lodged into the side of the O'Neil station at the
Arcturian colonies and found myself wondering what the refugees
from that war might have seen and felt looking back. –Princess
Clairissa Maggio.

Roy Rudder

V

Hangar 3

In the morning, station
time, we made for Hangar 3 and the relic Sunrider. My sense of
foreboding increased with every step. I could sense with the beefed
up security who knew it was there, and who merely knew something
was amiss in the hangar. Few knew. Very few. Even the guards at the
outer locks didn't know.

Inside, we'd been given
wide berth. There were no techs poking and prodding at the thing,
and it sat in all its streamlined glory as one era's ultimate
killing machine. Hammerstein watched me like the proverbial hawk
waiting for a sign when too much became too much.

Yet for all my foreboding,
curiosity was having its way with me now. Like any boy of twelve
seeing a great and mysterious warship, my mind raced with a
ridiculous excitement. It was a frigate, large indeed but no more
so than some of the great space planes which it resembled after a
fashion. My first impressions were the quantum echoes of its lost
crew-they had been proud. They had been convinced they were serving
their Imperial defense from the menace of the Colonials.

Then I sensed their shock,
still echoing-sheer confusion like a firestorm-something
wrong. Terribly wrong,
it
had fractured their sanity in a wild snap, and there was only chaos
in its wake. The chaos still lingered, somehow, I knew, like a
spider fallen into a hot pan, squirming.

The chaos that hated
mankind
.

It had hated the Imperials,
hated the Colonials, hated us all-
no,
hated all living things with an outrage, a disgust, a lust for
destruction.
"You will do well to keep your
techs from the vessel's neural net and computers." I said. I had
spoken involuntarily. "I suggest rudimentary bots only-nothing
approaching even a modicum of an AI should even touch it. Toxic is
too mild a word."

"An Imperial trap?" Hammerstein asked dryly,
wishing it were so.

I gave him a look beyond my years, "No.
Something is here which demolished the minds of strong, brave,
hardened Imperial Cyborgs. It was not of their making. Nothing
could have broken those men, no ordinary tribulation. Here is a
poison which perhaps the very, very fewest of men could have
endured."

"And the Princess and her
archaeological team were exploring it unawares. Perhaps our nemeses
are after it as a weapon?"

The smile on my face, at that, set poor
Hammerstein aback. I looked like a Devil myself then. "Fools beyond
measure if they do."

Fools beyond
measure
...

"The ship itself is a
Sunrider 3062 Frigate. It's equipped with five drive systems and
backups for various flight conditions. The center of the system is
the antigravitational, or gravitational antipolar response field- a
helicon magnetic plasma sail system for emergency fuel efficiency
and movement in and out of heliopauses-a hyperstring enabling
system to negate mass through five dimensional wormhole hyper
streams-a super ion drive Buzzard ramjet array for normal space
bursts through complex field distortion areas-and emergency use
limited standard rocket backup fail safes. Navigation systems are
collated through eighty quasar emissions and the galactic
plume..."

I stopped and stepped back-I had
inadvertently begun reading from ship's data core.

"Easy boy!" Hammerstein stepped forward and
instinctively placed himself between I and the relic.

"Rather well engineered, weren't they." I
quipped sardonically, seeking to add a note of levity. "Must have
been a nasty surprise to the poor Arcturian Air corps when these
monsters showed up."

"Yes, yes indeed," Hammerstein smiled,
"although nasty, I think, was probably not the expletive the poor
buggers must have lipped when they engaged."

"And now we have one,
nearly intact, and still packing the poison that brought her
down."

"After the war the Imperials stopped using
Cyborged crews. They raised an entire new caste of soldiers-not
linked to their Hive mind at all." Hammerstein said quietly. "It
was the last Great War of multiple systems. Since then there have
only been small inter system wars. No one dared challenge the
Imperials again."

Gabriel Montagudo, Stefano
Tsai

"I think Princess Clairissa
Maggio may have found the Arcturians were not, in fact, threatening
the Imperials. Whatever echo still lingers in the neural net of
that ships computer systems, well, I think that is something more
menacing that a galaxy full of feisty Colonials. Both factors
provide your motive-and it falls doubly on the Cyborgian Central
Command Economies-the Empire. As for the other as yet unknown
suspects, we'll have to wait for them to strike again." I offered
coolly.

Hammerstein glowered
impatience and looked at the relic. "We've got a crew picking the
remains of Parsons' kill in the Oort now. There will be something.
There always is."

We made back to the
Officers mess for a breakfast of cakes and coffees. At least that's
what they called it. I ate silently, knowing Hammerstein had
already requisitioned the bots I suggested from a com. By lunch the
bots would be scouring the relic.

The wreckage salvaged from
the wormhole attack had arrived at the Hangar as well, and the
techs were happily after that for clues. I could sense Hammerstein
was pushing back an idea that had validity, so I drilled him with
my little kid eyes and he knew that I knew.

"So what is it detective? What is it about
the wormhole attack that you don't want to face?'

He chortled a grumbling laugh that bordered
on a burp, and looked at me with a bitter sweet half smile. "No
hiding anything from you, aye?" His eyes darkened and I felt a rush
of emotion he'd walled up for decades suddenly opening up, and its
impact was palpable to me.

His sense of self from that long ago decade
was profoundly different-he had been young, a handful of years
older than I. His self image from that time impacted me like a
strange reflection of the man in front of me-leaner, with swift
hair, a reckless step, and an unquenchable awe and thirst for
adventure. Youth. Caldris had been in a territorial dispute with
the Paramon Republic near the Pleiades.

Paramon was always
disputing some silly rock, and this time it was one of our
Kingdom's trade stations near Baal One, a horrid seared rock of
soullessness-but our trade station orbited it and operated
important business with Chrysalis Isla, deep in the Pleiades
Confederation.

Hammerstein's memories came
at me-
the flight deck of his first
assignment, glorying in the sight of the Kingdom's ships of the
line at the ready. Anticipation, joy, a thrill of imminent
combat-and then the impossible, the unheard of-a wormhole deep in
the gravity well of Baal One sweeping at at them like a cobra, hard
and fast and the young Hammerstein watched as the ships of the
line-and all of his friends were on those ships-disintegrated in
the irresistible shock wave.

He was nineteen and alone. The only real
family he had ever known had been those fellows on the other ships.
He had been transferred from one of those very ships that
morning.

There was an awkward moment
as the face of the young Hammerstein morphed into the older iron
man in front of me, more muscled, more scarred, more resolute.
Suddenly, I knew, he was still carrying his nineteen year old self
around,
standing forever on that flight
deck watching his friends die, and an indescribable loneliness
taking their place for the rest of his life.

"Paramon and wormhole shock waves." I said,
breaching the subject like pulling a patch from a wound-quickly so
as not to drag out the inevitable.

Most people would have
barely perceived the slightest flicker in his eye. For me,
however
, it was as if the line of ships
once again ruptured in violent sequence across his
soul
.