Humans Read online

  “They can’t read me,” Gleb cut her off, “unless I let them. I can control what they get from my mind.”

  “This has to do with how you killed them on the Deathstalker,” Mel said quietly, “and how you froze those guys in the hangar.”

  “What are you?” Siri asked hesitantly.

  Gleb could feel their fear and their desire not to offend him but their curiosity was stronger. He approved of that but there was a time and place for everything. “I’m a Human,” he told them. “There’s an explanation for everything you’ve seen but I can’t tell you just yet.”

  “Because you’re going back in?” Mel suggested.

  “That’s right.” Gleb turned to look at them. “I can’t risk you guys getting pinched before I get back here to pick you up. I will tell you everything, but not until we’re all back with the fleet. Mishak’s fleet.”

  He paused, realizing how much he was taking for granted. “I’m assuming you’ll both want to take service with the Prince-presumptive’s forces, I suppose. But it would be a waste if you didn’t. You guys have NCO written all over you.”

  Mel laughed at this. “Human NCO’s, right! Next you’ll be telling us we’ll have our commissions within the year!”

  Gleb almost told them there were already a lot of Humans with the prince’s commission but he held back. Their disbelief would hardly melt in the face of even more outlandish claims.

  If he told them he was a ship’s captain, they’d be certain he was lying. He would come back to Henx Prime only to find they’d disappeared.

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” he began slowly, “but that’s how things work in the prince’s house forces. There are a lot of our people with ratings. The two of you would probably start out as petty officer 3rd class, as long as you start learning how to code while you’re waiting for me to come back.”

  “That’s a contract violation!” Siri exclaimed. “If the shipyards find out, you’d be cut off!”

  “We were cut off three lunars ago,” Gleb admitted, “but who gives a wet fart about something like that? What kind of fool would contract a shipyard when there are so many enemy ships out there, just waiting to change hands?”

  “They can disable your captured ships, along with all the others,” Mel said dryly. “It’s not like they don’t have safeguards against this sort of thing.”

  “That was actually the last straw,” Gleb told them. “One of our programmers, the best of them, actually, managed to kill off all the poison-pill algorithms. He’d already found most of them when he started developing the first scout-class but our lord asked him to make a concerted effort so he could get out from under the Shipbuilder’s Guild’s hoof.

  “The Guild cut us off but it was already too late by then.” Gleb grinned wolfishly. “They shot themselves in the haunch, if you ask me.”

  He went quiet long enough that Mel finally obliged. “OK, I’ll ask you…”

  “When our Guild contract was still in place, they were entitled to keep us out of their designs and coding but they also had the right to lay claim to any innovations we might have come up with and we’ve been very busy.

  “The rules have done a good job of keeping unrest to a minimum. Nobody can build up a technical advantage, as long as they have their Guild privileges… ”

  Gleb looked back at the windows at Siri’s startled yelp and even he recoiled in horror as the gas giant expanded in their view with a brutal speed. He looked down to reassure himself that the pre-set course included a safe insertion into the atmosphere, but it already showed as complete. He looked back up to see a blue haze outside.

  The gravity envelope in the small craft had stabilized but he still felt as though he might like to throw up, just from the fear of their suddenly terrifying approach to the planet. He could feel the cold sweat on his back, though the suit wicked it away for recycling almost immediately.

  “OK, so FYI,” he said shakily, “high-speed, automated approaches to anything can scare the skin right off you.”

  “Yeah,” Siri replied in a small voice. “Timely warning, there, fella.”

  “I don’t know how you guys came up with this design,” Mel said, “but I’d be surprised if you didn’t accidentally kill a lot of test pilots in the process.”

  “Probably took a few years off Hendy’s lifespan.” Gleb started moving the ship back up to a level where they could see out of the haze. “Nobody died, though. Just a lot of gut-emptying fear and physical discomfort.”

  “Funny they didn’t even try to come after us,” Mel mused.

  “They don’t have anything fast enough to catch us,” Gleb slowed their ascent giving Mel time to work out the tactical implications. “Remember, we combined two pitch-drives. When they’re calibrated properly, they put out an incredibly strong gradient.

  “They’d have to use their path-drives and, even if they micro-path to the right spot and catch us up, we can just run from them all over again. Even their missiles can’t catch us because they rely on pitch technology to fall toward us.”

  They emerged from the denser levels of the atmosphere and Gleb breathed a sigh of relief. “They’re already gone.”

  “Not surprised,” Siri enlarged the image. “We were on a high-alert status because you never know when you might get jumped. No sense sitting around in the same place if you’ve just had someone scamper off with the coordinates for every one of your ships.”

  “We’d do the same,” Gleb confirmed, “if anyone ever ran off, that is.”

  “You’ve never had deserters?” Mel laughed. “You’ve been taking the official line a little too seriously, don’t you think?”

  “Operational fleets can get pretty boring when you’re not busy tossing missiles around,” Gleb replied. “Gossip is one of the few distractions. If we had someone desert, I can’t imagine it staying quiet for very long.”

  Mel’s amused snort showed his opinion of that and Gleb decided to let it go. “Let’s fall down-well to Henx Prime.” He set the new course and velocity. “But let’s go at a more leisurely pace. At three-quarters speed, we’ll still get there damned fast but without the intestinal gymnastics.”

  He activated the new course and the haze was whipped away in a heartbeat. He got up. “I’ve got time for a nice long nap. I’m gonna go stretch out in the back.”

  “The first batch is just around this corner, sire,” the security officer said, his mind shivering with formless dread.

  Memnon followed him into the side corridor where a holographic screen surrounded a Quailu who, at first glance, appeared to be sitting on the deck, leaned up against a bulkhead taking a nap. The holo-screen had a security warning scrolling across it and Memnon waved it away to get a better look.

  “How did he die?”

  “How do most folks die? Lack of oxygen to the brain.” The security officer stared at the body. “The thing that unsettles me, though, is the scans don’t show any underlying reason for that. No wounds, no congenital defects, no cardiac events. He’s just a Quailu in the prime of his life…”

  “A glitch in the shield matrix during a local stellar flare perhaps?” Memnon suggested.

  “No signs of radiation, sire. Like I said, he was in perfect health and he just died.”

  “And how many more have you found?”

  Another mental shudder. “There’s three of them in the central corridor, one back near engineering, three Humans in the aft comms suite and an officer in main comms. All of them sitting like this, except for the lieutenant…”

  “Who seems to have shot out the containment unit before shuffling off his mortal coil,” Memnon cut in.

  “It’s as if someone or… something used them and then just took their souls…” The security officer trailed off under Memnon’s scorn.

  “There’s always an explanation, lieutenant, no matter how incredible the evidence may seem, so let’s go to the hangar and talk to our only live witness.”

  He let his scorn continue to radiate a
s they followed the ramp down to the flight operations deck. He didn’t want this credulous fool reverting to his supernatural theories, so he made sure his own feelings were clearly known.

  They entered the hangar bay to find the flight-deck duty officer sitting on a pallet of water condensers, rubbing at the back of his head and neck. The ship’s surgeon was fussing over him with one of his trinkets but he moved aside as Memnon approached.

  He checked in his stride for a heartbeat as he picked up the officer’s emotions. Whatever had taken place down here, he’d been through a profoundly terrifying experience.

  For the first time since he’d been paged by security, Memnon began to feel a trickle of fear himself. He almost didn’t want to question the witness but he imagined how Sandrak would react to such a sentiment and forced himself to keep walking toward the injured officer.

  “I’m told you met our unwelcome guest,” he said. “Did you see his face?”

  The officer let out a shuddering sigh and Memnon nearly recoiled from the emotions that came roiling out with the exhalation. “No, sire. I saw nothing. I felt him, though. He was less than an arm’s reach behind me.”

  “And it never occurred to you to simply turn around and look?” Memnon demanded acidly.

  “That’s just it, sire! I wanted to, but I couldn’t move a muscle!” He jumped up from the pallet at the feeling of scorn from his commanding officer. “No, sire. It wasn’t from fear. I was simply frozen in place, which was certainly disconcerting, but I was stuck like that for a few moments before I ever felt him.”

  “Felt him?”

  “That’s right, sire. There was nothing at all and then, all of a sudden, I felt him, right behind me, full of menace, he was. He was powerful and he wanted to tear me to pieces. He wanted chaos, pain, destruction…”

  “But who the devils was he?”

  “He… he seemed to feel that he was…”

  “Yes?”

  “Nergal, sire.”

  Memnon had to force down a wave of fear. Look at the facts! he told himself as he stepped away from the flight-deck officer, seeking some distance from the turmoil in his mind.

  He wasn’t sure how to handle something like this but he could imagine what his pragmatic father would do. Whatever Memnon might or might not believe about this mess, he had to make his crew believe that he put his faith in a logical explanation, even if he didn’t have one.

  He watched the surgeon’s mate, who’d finally gotten around to releasing the three Humans they’d found behind some pallets of supplies. He stepped over to them, ignoring their apprehension, and he bent down to pick up one of the cut restraints.

  He left them rubbing their wrists and he walked back over to his two officers. “You feel that Nergal came here and showed you his mind?” he asked mildly.

  “It’s how it seemed, sire.”

  “And it doesn’t seem the least odd,” Memnon asked sarcastically, “that the lord of the underworld, the god of chaos and war, uses the same brand of prisoner restraints as half the empire’s forces?”

  Both junior officers stared at the restraint as though shocked that such a thing could exist in a rational universe. In truth, they were probably surprised to find such a mundane element in their otherwise supernatural narrative.

  “Did neither of you find it disappointingly pedestrian that a god would need to borrow two of our shuttles?” he continued. “Perhaps he also uses public transit?”

  Memnon wasn’t entirely sure he was convincing them, but he was certainly starting to convince himself. “There are endless possible explanations for all of this,” he insisted. “An odorless gas that causes temporary paralysis. Maybe it even causes death, if used improperly.”

  “But the officer in forward comms, sire?” the security officer asked. “He shot the containment unit. Blinded our sensors…”

  “And why would a god need to blind our sensors? Couldn’t he simply transit back to the underworld, rather than sneaking off with our shuttles?” Memnon waved his hand in a broad arc to dismiss the idea.

  “Someone killed that officer and posed him to look like he did it. They blinded our sensors and then ran off in our shuttles.

  “Mark my words, gentlemen. Some unremarkable explanation lies at the bottom of all this but I don’t care enough to waste time and energy trying to figure it out. It’s done and the cost is a few crewmen and a couple of shuttles. Whoever did this is long gone, so let’s concentrate on our own tasks.”

  He turned and stalked out of the hangar before cracks could form in the aura of confidence he’d been projecting. He kept his mind as blank as possible until the hatch to his quarters slid shut.

  He dropped into a chair and sighed at the ceiling.

  What the hells happened on this ship?

  Risk and Reward

  Oracles

  The Mouse, Ataqlat system

  Eth opened his eyes and looked around the ready room. He let out a sharp breath, looking down at the floor.

  “You can’t force it,” Scylla told him.

  “Maybe I can’t do it at all,” he said, shrugging.

  “I know you can,” she stated flatly. “I can see into your mind, remember, and I can feel your readiness for this. Few of the minds on this ship are open to this level of transposition and most could never do it with a lifetime of preparation but you’re ready. You just need to see that yourself.”

  He squinted at her, chin up. “Why are you always the same when you… transpose? You use the analogy of a finger being pulled out of two dimensional space and then reinserted elsewhere. Wouldn’t some circle watching this notice you starting out small and then increasing in size as the finger is inserted?”

  “It’s an imperfect analogy,” she admitted. “You can’t expect every aspect to carry over completely to a higher order of complexity. That circle would see a line appear and then increase its presence as the two dimensional plane moves up to a wider part of the finger.

  “Surely, you’ve noticed that my own presence has changed since you first saw me looking for scraps in Kwharaz?”

  “Well, you’re free of your conditioning, and you have an understanding of the universe that exceeds my own…”

  “That understanding,” she said with the slightest of interrogative tones, “that represents a change in the length of my line segment, if you will. Though it’s still far from a perfect analogy.”

  “Yeah,” Eth agreed. “Like, if you pull your finger back out, the line shrinks again.”

  “I could shrink,” she countered. “If I lose faith in what I know, if I suffer from a blow to the head, I could revert to what I was or even less. The factors in our three-dimensional realm are far more complex than a collection of line segments, after all. The differences grow exponentially when you move to the fourth dimension.

  “The changes you’ve seen in me are in the dimension that our biology leads us to view as time. We all change in this dimension but I see it as something that time doesn’t quite explain.”

  “What’s wrong with time?” Eth asked, feeling a hint of the same dread he’d known while visiting the Varangians, like tendrils of a late-morning mist.

  “Time doesn’t explain how I can see into your mind,” she said. “If you come back to the fingers, for a moment,” she suggested, sticking an index finger down through an imaginary two-dimensional space, “and add another finger…” She lowered the adjacent finger and then tapped her palm with the index finger of her other hand.

  “What is this?” she asked rhetorically. “These fingers belong to the same hand; they’re connected.” She held the hand in place, giving Eth time to absorb what she was implying.

  “You’re saying you can see into my mind because we’re two parts of the same lifeform? A lifeform that projects parts of itself into our three-dimensional realm as individual Humans?”

  “Not all of your mind, apparently,” Abdu whispered.

  “That’s right.” She lowered her hands and leaned in. “If you’
re going to understand how that works, you need to let go of your biologically informed perception of time.”

  “But I believe you,” he insisted. “Why am I still stuck?”

  She blew out a sigh, head shaking slightly from side to side as her breath whistled out between her teeth like a pressure release valve. “Maybe I’m being unfair. Did I simply understand and believe or did I see it while among the Varangians before I was able to believe it?

  “Maybe I need to make you see before you can truly believe…”

  She grasped his shoulders, pressed her forehead to his and closed her eyes.

  “Scylla, what…”

  “Shut your noodle-hole,” she urged patiently. “Don’t fight this.”

  That’s not alarming at all, he thought dryly.

  Okay, maybe my ‘head-side’ manner can use a little work, she admitted.

  Eth shivered. He could feel her – her thoughts, her way of thinking, her presence. She was in his mind. What is this?

  This is me, she replied, her calm reaching across to his mind. I’m reaching back through our connection in, for lack of a better description, four dimensional space.

  Her mind, experienced so intimately, was terrifying. It was almost like stepping through the portal on the Varangian ship. She’d had a gentle mind but it had been overlaid with terrible knowledge. It knew things that would give most of her fellow Humans nightmares and there were ragged tears in her mind where the Chironian conditioning had erased parts of her.

  She’d retrieved most of what was lost, but the scars were still there, livid rifts in the flow of her thoughts.

  It’s a mess, she agreed. Your own mind is quite soothing, like leaving a war-zone for a vacation on a nice passenger liner.

  Sorry, he thought, momentarily forgetting his fear, I didn’t mean to insult you. I just didn’t expect our minds to suddenly join like this.

  You weren’t thinking with malice, she replied, and none of it was untrue. There’s no need to apologize. There’s no way to hide thoughts when we’re linked like this.

  “Are you sure?” Abdu asked sweetly.