Qualea Drop (The Spiral Wars #7), page 43
"It is possible, Corporal," said Styx. "But this planet has always possessed the potential to give away this secret, and the reeh have not destroyed it yet, despite their unconcern for life. One must wonder why."
25
The little girl on the display screen was now a teenager, frizzy-haired, dark-skinned, in torn jeans and a simple blouse. She still had the teddy bear, incongruously, clutched as she sat on what might have been the side of a mattress, gazing into vacant space as she remembered things forgotten for many thousands of years.
"It began nearly two thousand of your years before the final fall," she said, her eyes unfocused as though dazed. "It happened so slowly, for the first thousand years no one really saw it. A few people guessed, usually writers and artists, but no one took them especially seriously. There was just so much going on, all the signals got buried by the much larger things."
Erik sat in the captain's chair, watching the long range feed from Scan out toward Eshir, where reeh ships were gathering. There had been six capital warships insystem before, only one in proximity to Eshir. Now five of those six had repositioned to low orbit, and a number of shuttles from Eshir's four main stations had descended as well. Shuttle movements were hard to observe this far out, but Styx's automated program occupying the bridge of the captured reeh freighter was feeding them millisecond burst transmissions on laser-com too brief and faint for outward-facing reeh sensors to detect, but loud enough for Phoenix and the drysines.
Two hours ago, one of those transmissions had included a message from Styx, telling them that the mission on Qalea was closing in on its objective, but that the reeh were now aware of them, and a fast extraction would likely be necessary within the next day. Given it took six hours for light to reach Phoenix's current position from Eshir, that could mean any moment now, and Phoenix sat on red alert, Kaspowitz busiest of the bridge crew as he ran simulation projections of likely response trajectories to Erik's proposed assault route.
"The Reeh Empire wasn't really even an empire then," the simulated girl in the visuals-box on Erik's left screen continued. "It was the Tanifex Empire, really, though they were fighting with the dogreth and the trento. And there were periods of peace where everyone got along, sort of. But the reeh weren't so big then. Then came the Rehel, who you call a ceephay queen, and everything changed. Reeh technology changed, they tried to keep it a secret so the other races wouldn't see what a big threat they'd become.
"But when they found out, war came. It was inevitable, I suppose. The reeh didn't even want to fight the war, particularly. They just wanted to have an advantage. That's natural, isn't it? To want not to be bullied and beaten any longer?"
"I think so," said Erik, eyes watching Kaspowitz's projected responses to his attack plan.
"The reeh won, eventually. They did a lot of good, at first. Some of the races they'd beaten were pretty nasty to others. A lot of people welcomed the reeh winning. They were liberators. The Rehel was assigned a lot of civil administration tasks, improving cities, economies, finding better ways to run things. She was very good at that."
"Why did the Rehel pick the reeh?" Erik asked. "Why not one of the other species?"
"No one knows," said the ceephay AI posing as a human girl. "I was constructed nearly three hundred years before the last fall, in the worst of the civil war. There were a lot of us, sentient units created to run facilities and strategic strongpoints. I don't know how many survived. Probably very few."
"You were on the Rehel's side in the war?"
"Of course. The other side were the narsid. They were a whole series of groups, actually. The Reeh Empire grew very big from those early successes. Mostly it was an improvement, even a lot of the other races within the Empire thought so. But many took the Rehel's technologies in new directions, and some of those were worrying.
"The behaviour of some changed so slowly, it could not be seen by those at the time. But across the centuries, those changes accumulated. Arguments increased from reeh factions who didn't like it. Mostly those were just political and cultural struggles, nothing so different from what I see in the human histories you've allowed me to access from your own databases.
"The Rehel probably made it worse. She'd come to find civil administration more interesting than war. It's certainly more complicated. From some of my final interactions with her in person, I sensed regret. She'd come to feel something approximating genuine empathy for the plight of the organics within her charge. She was especially interested in finding synergies between the races. Organics called it peace and justice. For an advanced AI, it's just synergy. It makes sense, from an energy preservation perspective. It's efficient. But it created campaigns for greater justice that damaged necessary hierarchies. People got angry, emotions were inflamed.
"Many saw genetic technologies as a way to smooth out these conflicts. A way to enforce artificial genetic harmonies, to bring peoples of differing genetics into a greater synchronicity with each other. They thought they were creating a paradise of peace and tolerance. Instead, they created a nightmare."
"Every totalitarian bloodbath begins with a vision of harmonious uniformity," Kaspowitz said darkly as he worked, listening in as they all were.
"About five hundred years before the end, it turned into full blown war," the ceephay girl continued. "Some of the non-reeh species joined the chariya -- that's what the rebels came to be called. All were betrayed and murdered by the billion before the end. The narsid embraced their new genetics and cybernetics technologies even harder as the war grew worse. Their minds began to change even further. Some of those amongst them had moments of... of sios, we called it. Lucidity. When some semblance of an old sanity, a morality, abruptly reemerged, causing a panicked disassociation. I'm searching my memories now, I'm still not particularly good at sorting through and finding things, but you should really see those sios cases, I must still have some in here or else how can I remember them so clearly? They were horrifying, and they explain everything. When the brainwashed and violent person's moral subconscious abruptly reawakens, compelling that person to make a last desperate lunge toward a less evil life.
"The narsid reeh killed those sios cases where they found them. Or dissected them to find what was going wrong. Eventually they became less and less common. Soon the only reeh on the narsid side were what you see today." A simulated tear slid down the girl's cheek. "They were a good people once. The chariya fought so hard to stop the narsid from taking over. So many of them died. Entire planets were laid waste in the war. I think a lot of them were my friends. I sense that they were a similar people to you, Captain, and your crew. You'd have liked them. But they're all gone now. Lost in time."
The scale of the tragedy was beyond comprehension. For far more people than just the reeh. Erik took a deep breath, and forced his attention back to Kaspowitz's trajectories.
"And how did you survive?" Erik asked. "The reeh today have done a pretty comprehensive job of sweeping away all trace of the old Empire. I don't imagine they'd want any trace of what once existed to survive, in case it inspired rebels today."
"I'm still not sure," the ceephay girl admitted. "My long term recollections are increasingly good, but my short term personal memory remains unclear. I think I was taken to that facility to hide. It's a long way out from Eshir, and there's so many ice rocks. The narsid reeh must have had no record of its existence, I can only guess why. But for some reason, I was left there, while my organic companions departed. Perhaps they had another mission, and meant to return, but died before they could. I have vague memories of being all alone for a very long time. I think I was very lonely. Then everything goes blank."
Erik thought of Styx, unable to leave her Argitori asteroid for at least ten thousand years. At least she'd had other drysines for company. But Styx was a queen, and possessed more intellect than her entire Argitori hive combined. Surely she'd been lonely too. What would it be like, to be lonely for thousands of years?
"Wait," said Sasalaka from Helm alongside, also studying the attack plans to come. "You said you were taken to that facility to hide. So you weren't created just to run the facility? You came from elsewhere?"
"Yes. Enough of my systems function has returned that I'm quite clear on that. I'm rather over-qualified to run a refinery rock."
"You would have been designed to do something requiring a lot of interaction with organics," Sasalaka prompted. "Your conversational skills are quite strong." Compared to Styx, she meant. Erik thought that was more a question of style. Styx could surely be chatty and conversational if she chose, but doubtless found utility in maintaining a command distance between herself and all lesser beings. Fleet officers did the same thing.
"It's possible," the ceephay girl admitted. "You know, it might just be a trick of the mind, given where I am right now. But I think I may once have been a warship. Like your drysine friends."
Silence on the bridge. Past the screens and supports, Erik thought a couple of the crew exchanged glances. Then, from Kaspowitz, and between gritted teeth, "That's just great."
"Might explain why Friendship wanted her badly enough to steal her from us," Jiri suggested from Scan Two. "If Friendship studied her and figured immediately what she was."
Erik nodded thoughtfully. "Well you may be a warship," he said, "but you'll stay out of Phoenix's systems unless specifically instructed otherwise. Do you understand?"
The girl on the screen managed a faint smile. "Don't worry Captain. At the moment I could barely fly a paper aeroplane."
It was just after midnight when Trace thundered across the Qwailash Quarter border once more. This time she was following Chasa of the Akcho amidst a long, middle-altitude rush of traffic through a huge valley junction, tail lights blinking, visor giving her a warning every time some crazy biker overtook her on the outside without sufficient spacing.
The growing party were travelling all strung out through Qalea's midnight traffic lest growing reeh surveillance spot a suspicious group and query further. Other party members were being summonsed from elsewhere, Trace gathered, and it was alarming to realise just how fast the momentum was gathering. But Styx reported that the reeh had hit five separate locations in Qalea just in the past hour, clearly looking for something. All of those assaults had involved reeh shocktroops, not slave species. If reeh were doing their own dirty work, things were serious.
Halfway up the canyon, about five kilometres south of where she'd come tearing through two days ago with the Zeladnists in pursuit, she found the Trecharik Stadium, which was as near a translation as anyone had come in the qwailash tongue. It sat upon a ledge of cityscape, thick like some old bunker built to withstand artillery. It glowed now with floodlights, shining like a jewel above a sea of industrial grime upon the valley floor, flanked by hunched concrete accommodations.
Trace checked carefully over her shoulder as she drifted from the skylane, descending and slowing with a shudder as the speed brakes deployed. The visor showed her a path ahead toward underground parking, slowing all the while and staring at the huge steel framework of gantries and walkways from neighbouring buildings that surrounded the stadium like some rusting spiderweb. Nothing seemed new in Qalea, in any district, and nothing shone without the assistance of electric lights. She thought of asking Styx how old the stadium was, but Styx had instructed them all to use coms only in emergencies lest the reeh hunters trace them.
Past the entrance was a wide parking bay, presumably for VIPs to the stadium's entertainments. Dull lights flickered, casting a yellow wash upon oil-stained concrete, the repulsor din echoing off the enclosed walls as she steered her bike toward where Rael, Arime, Rolonde and Wang were already waiting. She quickly unstrapped, shedding flying coat and helmet into the rear storage while retrieving her rifle. Near the marines were Chasa and four dogreth by their own bikes, similarly arming while talking amongst each other in low grunts.
"Taj is next, then Styx," Trace told Rael as she worked. "Another five reeh assault shuttles just descended, Styx says we might only have until morning, if that."
"She's sent another message to Phoenix?" Rael asked, looking at least half his marine-self in body armour beneath his coat.
"She says Phoenix and Friendship will have seen the reeh fleet activity heading for Eshir. They'll be here soon. Timing it will be the concern."
Down in the Amakti Los base, or whatever it had been, they'd found a bunch of additional books, within which were well-preserved documents and photographs. The bugs had scanned it all for Styx, who now insisted she knew where the former regime headquarters had been. How that all worked, even Romki hadn't been able to guess, beyond muttering about crazy voodoo drysine logic. When Styx accumulated simulations, she was able to establish probabilities not merely in the extrapolated second and third-order complexities beyond the immediate data, but in the fourteenth and fifteenth-order complexities as well. There had been techs aboard Phoenix who distrusted such extreme extrapolations, saying it was like attempting to forecast the weather on a particular day ten years in advance. But beyond saying that those techs were woefully under-equipped to understand the nature of the mathematics involved, Styx hadn't volunteered more.
Now everyone was coming here. The Akcho were bringing a party of dogreth, some tanifex and others, the Purists were bringing some humans, and the qwailash, whose territory this was, would surely turn up at some point. Trace had asked politely why they wished to bring so many soldiers, and the dogreth had just pointed to the spot on the map that Styx had indicated, as though that explained everything. It wasn't safe, they'd said, and Styx had agreed. From all of the network data she'd accumulated, this particular region beneath Qwailash Quarter was little explored and rarely ventured into. Those who tried usually got eaten, she'd explained.
And so they'd come to the Trecharik Stadium. Against what resided in the part of Qalea they were heading to, even military firepower was probably not enough. Luckily (a term Jokono had used with irony) the Akcho had contacts among the qwailash willing to help out. Contacts who did go into those regions from time to time, and came out again alive, and could arrange for others to do the same, they said... for a price.
Taj arrived in a howl of thrust, followed two minutes later, in the spacing they were observing, by the big twin-engined cruiser with Jokono, Romki, Styx and Peanut. "Joker," said Trace, leaning in the cockpit door of the big cruiser, "going to need you to stay with the cruiser."
"I agree," said Jokono, checking his cockpit screens for a scan of the local region. "I'm going to miss this bucket of bolts when we leave."
"It won't be any safer up top," Trace cautioned him, as a steel door at the rear of the carpark squealed open. "With the reeh hunters looking for us, you might need to come chasing us underground. Just keep an eye on all the new arrivals, I understand it could get crowded over the next half hour."
"Understood Major."
Trace looked back at the door, where a pair of qwailash had emerged, hard-shelled and scuttling toward the dogreth. Immediately, her alien expert was at her shoulder, walking with her toward the new arrivals. "Just remember not to look them in the eye," Romki reminded her. "Their own eyes are multidirectional -- unidirectional vision upsets them for some reason. They also smell rather bad, so be prepared."
"Marines are always prepared for bad smells in particular," said Trace. "No bows or other customs?"
"No. They do wave their claws around a lot, though. In combat I gather it's a distraction, you know, watch the right claw while the left grabs your throat."
"What about manners?"
"Nearly every species in Qalea finds them unpleasant to deal with in person. They're one of the rare species that are much more agreeable in groups than as individuals."
"Like marine officers," Rael quipped, joining Trace's other side. "If it goes wrong, where do I shoot?"
"Center of mass will do fine, Sergeant," Romki said drily. "It's a polysaccharide shell, not ballistic armour plate."
Efraim joined them, close behind as they approached the aliens, Chasa turning with his dogreth, perhaps to introduce the qwailash to Trace. Both qwailash were tall, giant land crustaceans with triple-segmented bodies. The rear segment was flat to the ground, with four scuttling legs for propulsion. Above that, the main body stood, with four more big arms, two of them huge with wide claws, and a head that was barely recognisable as belonging to a sentient being, mostly compound eyes on stalks, multiple long antennae and a cluster of small claws about armoured mouthparts. Awkward on land, they preferred water, swishing with their big tails. Much of Qwailash Quarter was water tanks and connecting aqua-tunnels, but few non-qwailash ever got to see it.
"You know the problem with big kick-ass crustaceans?" Carville asked cheerfully. "All prawn and no brains." Trace gave him a look. His Sergeant elbowed him in the ribs.
"This one runs the stadium," said Chasa, as Trace resigned herself to another multi-translated conversation. "She is a friend to the Akcho." Trace recalled that female qwailash were significantly larger than males. This second, smaller companion was probably male, then.
The big female spoke, a disconcerting clatter of vibrating mouthparts. "More ugly humans," said the earpiece. "They don't look any more special than the others."
"We're short of time," Trace replied. "Our drysine queen says that at the rate the reeh are moving, we may only have until morning before they track us."
The qwailash's long-stemmed eyes rotated, an odd refraction of light off their surface. "And for whose benefit do we perform these tasks, worm?"
Trace nearly smiled. She knew some chah'nas sub-cultures that insulted strangers on purpose, as a rite of passage before earning respect. It reminded her of dealing with drill sergeants in boot camp, and she was fine with it. While other cadets had sweated and panicked to be screamed at by someone who apparently hated their guts for no reason, she'd always found it simple to switch off her emotional response and focus on saying what she needed in order to achieve the result she wanted. Sometimes, compared to complicated interactions with regular people, she even preferred it.
