Humans Page 8

  Gleb slid his legs over the edge and hopped down, an undignified maneuver when nude, regardless of gender. He stepped into the foot-pads of his armor and pushed his heels back to activate it.

  He saw that the other tech was staring past him and he turned to follow his gaze as his suit closed up. A blanket was pushed up in a hump and it was moving rhythmically, small gasps coming from beneath the tattered fabric.

  The force of their feelings hit Gleb before he could think to block it; the desperate desire to block out their dull existence, even if only for a few moments. It was empty, soulless, and Gleb was more shocked by it than he had been by the casual execution, a few hours earlier.

  And he was no stranger to casual mattress maneuvers.

  He shuddered. “I thought we were in a rush to report for duty?” he demanded.

  The other man snorted. “They have you chem-laced or something?” he asked. He started for the exit hatch. “That how they punish Humans on the Bilbao? Take away your ability to get a rise?”

  “I just don’t want a bullet in the head on my first day.” Gleb didn’t care for what he could feel in the man’s mind.

  They passed through an unnaturally quiet ship. Most of the crew would be sleeping and the few who weren’t were either on their way to start a shift or waiting for someone to come relieve them.

  The communications suite was just aft of the bridge. The feeds from all external sensors fed through this room before linking to the bridge workstations.

  The data core was also here, which was why Gleb had shown up wearing blue stripes. He nodded to the man who was standing at a data interface holo.

  “Show the new guy how things work in here, Mel,” Gleb’s erstwhile guide ordered, though he wore no rank that Gleb could see. “I’ll be aft, checking on the backup systems.”

  “What he means,” Mel explained after the portal had closed again, leaving them alone, “is he’ll be aft, backing Siri up against a bulkhead.”

  “During his duty shift?”

  Mel grimaced. “What universe did you just drop out of? Duty shifts are the easiest time for him to get someone into his clutches. All he has to do is move our duty stations around. The aft section was already understaffed and, yet, he puts you in here with me?”

  “How’s he doing that?” Gleb asked before considering how much he might be putting his own ignorance on display but he pushed on anyway because he was far more comfortable with the way Mel’s mind felt. “I see no rank on his suit.”

  “Just like on any ship,” Mel said, staring at Gleb thoughtfully for a few seconds. “You know how it is; shit always seems to stay at the top of the composter. Davu is just another officer’s pet.

  “Look,” he continued, “I don’t know how things worked on your last ship, but stay out of his way, right? Malik got in his way and now he’s dead. Late for duty, my ass.”

  “Shit!” Gleb exclaimed. “You mean that guy who got shot a few hours ago? I saw that happen.”

  Mel nodded. “Malik and Siri liked each other, well enough to not mind sharing a single bunk from time to time. Davu took an interest in her. Malik caught him shoving her up onto a data table in aft comms. He’d already shut off her armor but Malik arrived just in time to go berserk and put a stop to it.

  Mel shrugged sadly. “Gave the bastard a well-deserved beating, which was a mistake, of course.”

  “I’ll say,” Gleb agreed mildly. “He should have killed him and shoved his corpse out an airlock.”

  Mel nodded thoughtfully. “It’s probably not what I would have done but, now, having thought it through…” He looked up at Gleb, “Definitely what I will do if I ever find myself in that kind of situation.

  “In the meantime, you have to give him a tenth of your ration credit every day.”

  “My rations?” Gleb burst out before remembering he was supposed to be used to this fleet and its ways.

  “Nice try,” Mel chuckled, “but you’re not convincing me and you certainly won’t be fooling Davu with that act. There’s not a ship in the fleet that doesn’t reward their pet Humans with unofficial perks.”

  “Worth a try.” Gleb pointed to the back of the compartment. “I’ll take that back station, if you aren’t using it for anything.”

  “Help yourself,” Mel declared grandly. “All of the starboard half shall be your dominion! May the cheevers cower in fear as they climb through your storage banks and electrocute their furry little asses on the power-scrubbers!”

  Gleb chuckled as he opened up an interface, then stifled a mild curse. The systems on this ship were standard, fresh-out-of-graving-dock installs. It was the case on most ships but Gleb was accustomed to Noa’s custom creations. Most of the error codes he saw on his screen were unheard of in Eth’s and Mishak’s forces.

  The companies that programmed the systems would be upset at that but it was highly unlikely that any of their representatives would ever set foot on those ships again. Looking at the workload piled up in his terminal, Gleb wished it were the case on this ship as well.

  He needed time to pull out a data extract but he was going to have his hands full fixing errors in the data-stream.

  He was no Noa, but he knew enough coding to consider fixing a few bugs. No, screw that. I don’t want to leave this ship working better than I found it. He considered adding in a few bugs of his own, but he didn’t have the skill to avoid getting caught and he just didn’t have time.

  Plus, he was fairly certain they’d make Mel pay for any mischief in the comms suite and Mel seemed like a decent guy.

  Why the hells were these Humans on Memnon’s ships?

  He opened up a link to the data logs and inserted a coding anomaly that Noa had prepared for him.

  “The trick,” Noa had explained in a muffled voice, his head buried inside a generator housing, “is to fool the system into thinking it’s picked up a virus. It’ll trigger a dump into a series of separate, offline storage banks. If you’re sitting in the comms suite at the time, you’ll be able to skim a copy as it flows through the room.”

  Gleb had a pretty good cover, seeing as it put him exactly where he needed to be in order to get the data, but he’d have to wait until the end of his shift before he could review it.

  “Worst coding I’ve ever seen,” he grumbled, looking up when he felt Mel’s surprise. “Or at least it feels that way. So much tracing to do.”

  “Pace yourself,” Mel advised. “We only need to meet an eighty-percent clean rating. What kind of ship did you come from if you think you need to catch it all?”

  Gleb was saved from answering by an alarm chime. “Hells!” Mel exclaimed. “Something nasty got loose in the system. Godsdamned blockers never work. We get one of these at least twice a week. Help me lock it down!”

  “Sure, Mel,” Gleb said, bringing up a screen to see how much of the ship’s database he was downloading. “I’m on it!” He could see that he was going to be pulling far more data than his suit’s system could hold so he cut out anything older than two months.

  He glanced up at the hatch, a look of distaste on his face. He shut off the progress screen and started shutting down the primary keys that connected the various data banks.

  The hatch slid open and Davu stormed in. “What the devils?”

  “Low-level virus,” Mel said, eyes still on his work. “We’re cutting the keys right now.”

  Gleb could feel Davu’s lack of comprehension. How had this idiot ended up in comms? He sighed. Officer’s pet. He could also feel Davu’s desire to leave this in their hands and resume his trip to the backup bank where Siri worked.

  He was giving serious thought to following Davu and killing him but he couldn’t afford to indulge in emotions, not when he’d come here for a purpose.

  Still…

  He reached out, feeling Davu’s form but, instead of looking for something like his cranial artery, he went lower, almost grinning at what he found in his kidneys. There was a moderately large chunk of calcium oxalate in there, n
ot quite ready to cause mischief but if Gleb was to give it a little nudge…

  Davu shivered. “You don’t have to keep it so cold in here,” he complained. He grabbed Mel’s coffee mug and drained it. “I’ll be at the backup if you need me.”

  “Probably the first time,” Mel said after the hatch closed, “that I wished he’d stick around longer.”

  “You mean… Siri?” Gleb asked. “I find the universe tends to balance itself in most things. Davu’s built up a lot of bad kismet. He’ll be paying it off with interest, I think.”

  “Why would you thi…” Mel jumped at the sound of a blood-curdling scream from out in the corridor. “What the hells?”

  Gleb smiled, knowing Siri was safe for the immediate future. “If I had to guess, I’d say that Manu has just called in his marker on Davu. Sounded like Davu, anyway.”

  “You reckon the god of fate is out there torturing him right now?” Mel grinned broadly.

  “Metaphorically, at least,” Gleb said, returning the grin. He opened a security holo and moved it over to hover between him and Mel.

  It showed Davu, doubled up on the decking with both hands grasping his groin. He was breathing rapidly.

  Gleb was a little surprised it had moved down so quickly. He’d figured it would start with back pain, but who could tell when you moved the stone on purpose?

  “Should we go out there?” Mel asked.

  “I don’t think laughing at him in person would be any better for him than what we’re doing now,” Gleb countered. “Besides, I just got this seat nice and warm. If we go out there, all that ass-heat will be lost.”

  “That’s a very good point.” Mel nodded solemnly. “You gotta conserve ass-heat. It’s the only heat that gives so much back to you.”

  His eyebrows lowered in the middle, just a tiny fraction but enough to confirm the speculative feeling that Gleb was getting from him.

  “Pretty weird timing, wasn’t it,” Gleb said, trying to stay ahead of the curve. “I say he’s got some payback coming and then BAM, down he goes like a sack of turds.” He suddenly remembered Eth doing the same thing when Gleb had begun to suspect him of having unusual abilities.

  It hadn’t worked for very long and now Gleb, exposed to his leader’s expanded understanding of the universe, found himself wondering how long he could keep from being exposed.

  He had to ease up on using his abilities and he certainly should refrain from the urge to take credit for such acts. His speech about kismet and Manu, the god of kismet, served nothing but his own ego.

  Still, the holo of Davu writhing on the deck was just too satisfying. He knew he wouldn’t have done anything different if he had the chance.

  Except maybe keeping his mouth shut.

  “I’m linking Siri’s station to this feed,” Mel said. “She’s probably back there dreading the moment when her hatch opens. This should give her a little relief, for this shift at least.”

  Gleb could feel Mel’s affection for her. “Malik is tormenting her.” He said without any doubt. “And you’d like to rid her of him.”

  Mel shook his head ruefully. He finished sending the link so Siri could watch her tormenter’s agony. “Pretty transparent, aren’t I? Sadly, it takes more than wishes.”

  “It also takes a willingness to get murdered by an officer’s pet, apparently.” Gleb reopened his progress screen to see he’d be able to get a complete set of data. “What do you think’s wrong with the bastard? Genital parasites, maybe?”

  “We can only hope,” Mel said. “On a less satisfying note, it looks like we’ve got that viral code isolated to a maintenance data sub-bank. The older backup is clean and it hasn’t been written to since the virus showed up, so I’m gonna go ahead and kill the original and replace it with the older version.”

  “Well, I suppose we can spend more time watching Davu now.” Gleb shut down the link to his suit and erased the link trace. “Maybe he’s just into interpretive dance?”

  “Oh! Maybe you’re onto something there,” Mel chuckled. “Very artistic, brilliant nuance from old Davu! I really think he’s captured the emotions, the sheer pathos of getting a really solid kick in the balls.”

  “Believable and utterly gratifying,” Gleb added. “I’d recommend this performance to anyone, though I’d love to see him tackle a really difficult subject matter. Something like ‘asphyxiating in space’ would really be a fitting challenge for a performer of his caliber.”

  “Perhaps with the right producer we could get a show like that up and running.” Mel’s tone was suddenly darker and Gleb could feel how much the man would like to see Davu gone.

  He risked another link and used it to project a holo linked to his suit’s data core. Mel was far too interested in Davu’s predicament to notice what his co-worker was doing.

  “Look at that!” Mel exulted. A Quailu was stepping around the writhing Human and continuing on as if there wasn’t a crewman in agony in the middle of the corridor.

  “Everybody’s an art critic,” Gleb said, trying to make sense of the data. One folder was named ‘Leverage’. Let’s start with that. He opened it to find dozens of sub-folders, each with a system name and each filled with similar economic data-points.

  He created a table and used it to pull up the data from each folder. It showed a long list of expenditures and revenues. He filtered out any data that didn’t relate to the Meleke Corporation.

  Each one showed an extinct-species surcharge for their wardu purchases. There were other commonalities, but this seemed the most promising.

  Many worlds in the HQE had never developed sentient life but still had perfectly habitable biospheres. In such a case, the ruling lord could contract with the Meleke Corporation to take over the rights to a suitable, extinct species for use as wardu.

  The corporation maintained a host of explorers who conducted deep expeditions outside of HQE space. There was no shortage of planets where a species rose to pre-eminence and then managed to destroy their world’s ability to support them but they had to be found and their genes catalogued for sale.

  What if they’d gotten lazy? Could the lords in this file be vulnerable because their wardu populations weren’t extinct? Gleb looked up in response to a chuckle from Mel. The holo showed Davu on his feet, one hand against the bulkhead, trying to make his way in the direction of sick-bay.

  Could pressure be applied individually if an ‘outed’ lord was willing to expose the Meleke Corporation’s role? They’d almost certainly claim innocence and they’d be believable. Gleb certainly would have believed them. Who the hells would choose a non-extinct species when there were so many extinct ones to choose from? He frowned.

  Weren’t there?

  A Useful Idiot

  The Mulge, Eridu System

  “Normalization complete,” the helmsman announced.

  “No unexpected activity,” the tactical officer advised. “We are clear to begin falling in to the primary planet.”

  Ilgi could feel the eagerness from his bridge crew and he fed it right back to them. Finally let off the leash! He gave a silent prayer to the gods, thanking them for bringing Memnon to their tiny holdings.

  Ilgi’s illustrious father had been content to sit on his two-world fief, despite all the churning conflict infesting the empire. Ilgi had scorned the old man in secret and, when Memnon had come suggesting expansion, openly for all to hear.

  As a third son in a two-planet fief, he stood to inherit nothing. He’d be a penniless awilu, unless the family grabbed whatever they could while the grabbing was good.

  After an hour closeted with Sandrak’s new heir, the old man had surprised his entire court by announcing he would press a claim against Eridu. It had caused a stir. The old fool had been musing with the idea of letting the claim lapse last year so he could save the handful of credits it cost to keep it registered.

  And now he was sending Ilgi to Eridu.

  And this would just be the start! Memnon had favored Ilgi with a chat before the
empire’s richest heir had departed for Throne-World. He’d hinted at a string of small holdings that would, if taken quickly, put their family on the voting roll for the next emperor.

  Memnon had said nothing explicitly, but he’d hinted at the possibility of assassination. Nothing too overt, but the idea of moving Ilgi up the ladder was clearly on the wealthy visitor’s mind. It was incredible, the young noble had said, how many unexpected young awilu were rising to the rank of elector in these tumultuous times.

  “Engage the pitch drives,” Ilgi commanded. “Bring the fleet into attack range.”

  An elector! Ilgi thought. A prince of the empire, and it starts here. His father had turned him loose with a small fleet. He had orders to take Eridu with the understanding that Ilgi would become its new lord.

  But he’d said nothing about taking any other systems! Once they were done here, he planned to leave a token holding force, conscript the local forces and use them to help take the next world in his grand scheme.

  Fallow and graze, he thought. Repeat the process enough times and he’d be on his way to greatness. He had an older brother and sister to deal with but he’d find a way to get rid of them.

  The crew, of course, didn’t know exactly what he was thinking but they could feel his aggressive optimism and they were amped up for the fight ahead, which fed back into Ilgi’s wild optimism. The loop was interrupted abruptly when an intrusion alarm sounded and everyone jumped in surprise and their helmets flowed shut with a series of loud clacks.

  His dreams of glory stepped politely aside, making room for the fear that now assaulted him, amplified, of course, by his relatively green crew. “How could there be intruders out here?” he demanded.

  The tactical officer was glaring down at his displays. “We saw no evidence of ships in the area,” he insisted. “No vessels approaching…”

  Every head on the bridge turned to a hole that flowed open on the starboard side of the bridge. Only one of the crew thought to pull out a sidearm and she had it halfway raised when she simply froze.