“No. What?”
“I will be four hundred years old. And, if you don’t mind, I’d actually like to reach that particular birthday.” His gaze slid back to her thighs, and he smiled comfortably. “Mind you, as my dad would have said: What a way to go.”
Mellanie just managed to suppress a shudder at the notion. “I was talking about another currency. The one you trade in.”
“I doubt that. No offense, but you’re just a soft porn star who made good.”
“I want you to run an observation routine on my old boss, Alessandra Baron. The results will benefit both of us.”
Paul pulled a fresh cigarette from the packet, and lit it against the stump of the old. “How?”
“Because there’s something you don’t know. There is information out there in the unisphere that’s critically important to the Commonwealth. Information that will let you deal yourself back into that life you enjoy so much on this planet. Those doors that got shut against you will spring right open again if you use this properly. Somebody your age knows exactly how to do that.”
“All right. You have my attention. Why should I go out and buy myself a new array?”
“The Starflyer is real. It exists, just like the Guardians always said.”
Paul started coughing again. “You’re shitting me.”
“No.” She could have given him a whole list of reasons why she was right, but one thing she’d learned about coping with the real elderly was that they didn’t respond well to emotionally charged arguments. So silent conviction it was.
Paul shifted around uncomfortably, starting a small pendulum motion in the wicker chair. “Then how does watching Baron…Oh, Jeezus, you’ve got to be kidding. She’s part of it?”
“The chief cheerleader against our navy. What do you think?”
“Bloody hell.”
“I need to know who she gets in touch with. The important stuff will be encrypted traffic to onetime unisphere addresses. Crack the codes for me, find out who’s with her, backtrack their communications. I want to know what she’s up to, I want to know what the Starflyer’s next move is. It’ll be difficult. She’s got her own team of webheads; or the Starflyer has. I know they’re good. They altered some of Earth’s official financial records without anyone ever realizing. And if you get caught, it won’t be a police visit; they’ll send that man who killed Senator Burnelli and the Guardian agent at LA Galactic.”
“I don’t know, Mellanie. This is really heavy-duty shit. I mean…seriously. Go to the navy with what you’ve got. Senate Security, maybe.”
“The navy fired Paula Myo. And I know she believes in the Starflyer.”
Paul took a worried drag on his cigarette.
“Look.” Mellanie stood up and smoothed down her little skirt. “If you won’t do this, you must know someone else who can. Just give me a name. I’ll stop them reaching their four hundredth birthday.”
“And I’m way too old for reverse psychology, as well.”
“Then give me your answer.”
“If you’re right—”
“I am. I just need the evidence.”
“Tell me why your protector won’t give it to you. And no bullshit, please.”
“I don’t know. It says it doesn’t want to be involved in physical events. Or it doesn’t care. Or it’s cheering for the other side. Or it wants us to stand up for ourselves. Or all of those. I think. I don’t really understand. The Barsoomian warned me not to trust it.”
Paul gave her a surprised look. “Barsoomian? You’ve been to Far Away?”
“Just got back.”
“You get around, these days, don’t you?”
“You mean for a soft porn star?”
“I remember when I first met you. Some party on Resal’s yacht. Sweet little thing, you were back then.”
Mellanie shrugged. “That was about four hundred years ago. Seems like, anyway.”
“Okay. I’ll run an observation on Baron’s unisphere use for you. See what turns up. And, hey, when I get out of rejuvenation…”
“Yeah, I’ll make very sure you never reach five hundred.”
***
Dawn was a pale gray wash creeping up over the Dau’sing Mountains, allowing the peaks to cut a sharp black serration into the base of the bland sky. Simon Rand stood in the narrow mouth of the cave to stare at the insipid light, and sighed. Once, he used to welcome every day in this land with a sense of pride and contentment. Now, he could only greet each new morning with a shiver of trepidation at what sacrilege it might bring.
In the first few weeks since the alien landing there had been little visible activity. More of the giant conical ships had landed and taken off from Lake Trine’ba, producing hurricanes of steam that spun out to smother the entire surface of the water. The cloud would cool rapidly after the incandescent fusion fire vanished from the air, but still expanding, sloshing against the confining rock walls of the giant mountains that surrounded the Trine’ba. Each flight resulted in a cloying fog that lingered for days, or sometimes weeks as it was continually replenished by further flights.
Such dank miserable weather had made it easy for the few remaining humans to move cautiously around the adjacent valleys. The thick mist hindered most of the sensors that the aliens possessed. So they crept in close to the new structures and machines that were being assembled amid the ruins of Randtown, and left their crude bombs before vanishing back into the safety of the perpetual swirling veil. They never knew if they’d done much damage, but the encouragement each strike gave to Simon’s little band of resistance fighters kept their morale high.
There were no ships left now. The last one had launched over three weeks ago, shooting back up to one of the alien wormholes orbiting Elan. The last wisps of unnatural fog had drifted away during the days that followed, leaving eyes and sensors with a clear view for kilometers as the clean mountain air swept back down over the massive lake.
The changes it revealed were slight, perhaps imperceptible to someone who hadn’t lived with that same view for over fifty years. It was late summer on the Ryceel continent, a time when the vines were picked clean and the crops harvested under wide sunny skies. Now, those skies were almost constantly clouded over, bringing unseasonable gusty winds and hailstorms. Usually the thick permanent snowfields that coated the peaks had retreated as far as they ever would. This time they’d shrunk back farther than ever before, thawing before the tides of warm mist pouring out from the lake and the intolerable radiance of the fusion drives. When the ships were flying, the temperature of the whole district had risen by several degrees. Simon could have lived with that; nature would have reasserted herself by next year, pushing the winter snowfall back to its traditional boundaries. But no mantle of snow, however deep, could disguise the damage caused to the Regents. Where the nuclear explosion had wiped out the navy detector station, the profile of the surrounding peaks had been altered. Rock slides, pressure waves, and raw nuclear heat had pummeled the mountains into twisted parodies of their original selves. Only recently had snow and ice begun to crystallize and settle there again. The heat from the blast had finally radiated away from the new crater that had formed, though it would take generations for the fallout to abate.
Down in the town and its neighboring valleys, the aliens were systematically creating a different kind of disaster. For fifty years the humans who’d been drawn to this land had been meticulous how they cared for it. Simon’s Green ethos had guaranteed a respect for their native environment; terrestrial crops had been grown along with some imported grasses and trees on the slopes, but that had been done in sympathy with the scant covering of existing plants. And Lake Trine’ba with its precious, unique marine ecology had been protected from any contaminants or material exploitation.
All that meticulous preservation was being wiped out by the aliens. Their flyers had ferried all manner of equipment and vehicles ashore from the big spaceships: engines and generators spewing out fumes and oily contaminate pollutant
s. They also brought increasing numbers of their own kind, each one defecating straight into the Trine’ba. As the new buildings were rising out of the remains of Randtown, so rubble and wreckage were simply bulldozed into massive piles where organic detritus festered and oozed into rancid puddles before soaking into the streams and brooks that fed the beautiful lake.
This morning, something new was happening over in Randtown. Simon used his retinal inserts to zoom in on the town, five kilometers away down the shoreline, producing a slightly nebulous image of the shiny metallic hardware just above the quayside. The force field the aliens were using to protect Randtown fuzzed the air slightly, making details unclear. Nothing he could do would bring them into sharp resolution.
Not for the first time since the invasion, he cursed the inadequacy of his organic circuitry and inserts. During his previous lives he never bothered to upgrade and modernize the way most Commonwealth citizens did when each new refinement was shoved out onto the market; all he ever wanted were a few simple systems that could interface him with the unisphere and help manage the day-to-day running of his estate. He’d always made do with whatever was available at the time he finished rejuvenation.
But despite the lack of perfect visual clarity, he could easily make out the thick torrent of dark blue-gray liquid jetting out from the bottom of the largest tower of machinery. It was as if the aliens had struck oil beneath the town and hadn’t yet managed to cap the bore hole. Then the size of what he was seeing registered. The column of liquid was at least four meters across where it left the nozzle in the machinery. It curved down to splash into a broad concrete gully they’d built roughly where the main mall used to be, allowing the liquid to gurgle down to the broken quayside. The force field had been modified somehow to let the liquid through. A vast murky stain was spreading out into the pure waters of the Trine’ba.
“Bastards,” Simon exclaimed.
He heard someone scrambling along the damp rock behind him. The cave where they sheltered began as a simple vertical fissure that extended below the waterline, forcing them to cling to the side for several meters until it opened out. Napo Langsal had told them about it; he often used to take tourists there on his tour boat during the summer. From the outside it looked like any other crevice in the cliff, which made it an excellent hideaway.
It was David Dunbavand edging his way along the slick rock. That the vine nursery owner had stayed behind after the wormhole closed in the Turquino Valley always surprised Simon. He hadn’t thought of David as a partisan fighter. But then who among us is? David was two hundred years old, which made him one of the calmest heads in their little group. As soon as he was satisfied his current wife and their children had escaped, he was quite content to stay behind. “Some things you just have to make a stand on,” he’d said at the time.
“What’s up?” David asked as he reached Simon.
“That,” Simon pointed. “Can you make it out?”
David wriggled around Simon, and zoomed in on the torrent of dark liquid. “Wrong color to be crude oil. In any case why transport crude oil all this way, then dump it into the water? My guess would be something biological. Some kind of algae they eat, maybe?”
“What do you mean, transport?”
“That big machine it’s coming out of; it’s got to be a wormhole gateway. The liquid is coming straight from their home planet.”
Simon frowned, and looked at the machine again. David was probably right, he conceded. “It’ll wreck the Trine’ba,” he said. “Permanently.”
“I know.” David pressed a hand on Simon’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know how much this place meant to you. I loved it as well.”
Simon stared grimly at the alien pollution. “I cannot let them get away with that. They have to know it’s wrong.”
“It’ll be tough trying to stop them. We can’t get to the gateway; it’s too well protected by the force field. And even if we did mount some kind of attack, those flyers of theirs are always on patrol. We know how lethal they are.”
“Yes, we do, don’t we. Very well, let’s inform the others about this latest development. Perhaps they can think of what our response should be.”
***
The Prime motile emerged through the gateway during the night, several hours before MorningLightMountain switched it to pumping in fluid saturated with base cells. It waddled its four legs along the broken street of enzyme-bonded concrete, observing the flattened foundations on both sides that were all that was left of the human buildings at the center of the conquered town. Fragments of glass twinkled dully from every crack while flakes of ash swirled aimlessly in the gusts of fast-moving vehicles. There were large areas of the street’s remaining surface that were stained a curious dark color. Eventually, the motile realized that it was human blood that tarnished the concrete. There must have been an awful lot of it washing down the slope toward the lake for the discoloration to be so widespread.
One of the flattened human buildings, a store, was covered by squashed boxes. As the motile walked past it saw several company logos and product names printed on the crumpled cardboard. It was the first human writing the motile had seen with its four eyes, and it was pleased it could read them.
The original layout of the town was almost obscured now. MorningLightMountain was busy establishing its outpost on this world. The little communications device attached to one of the motile’s nerve receptor stalks was discharging a torrent of information and instructions to all the local motiles. Somewhere amid the stream of data was this world’s human designation: Elan, and the outpost’s position: Randtown. When the motile’s sensor stalks peered up at the night sky beyond the force field, the thoughts of Dudley Bose identified the constellations that included the prominent Zemplar cross formation, which could only be seen from the planet’s southern hemisphere. A further confirmation that his personality survived relatively intact.
The Dudley Bose that had hijacked the motile body knew he didn’t have all his old memories, that pieces of his earlier self were missing. That his new personality wasn’t the same as the old went without question. He accepted that without a qualm, for in this strange way, he continued to exist. For an individual, that was really all that mattered.
His escape had been ridiculously easy. MorningLightMountain, for all its massive mental power, really couldn’t understand concepts that weren’t its own; in fact, it rejected and hated the very notion. That refutation was the core of its Prime personality. In that respect, Dudley considered it to be a proper little Nazi, obsessed with its own purity.
That lack of understanding had been simple to exploit. When MorningLightMountain had downloaded Dudley’s memories into an isolated immotile unit for analysis, it had placed safeguards into the communications links with itself to prevent what it considered contamination leaking back out into the main group cluster of immotiles. What it had never envisaged, because the concept was completely outside its intellectual grasp, was that Dudley could utilize a motile. As nature on Dyson Alpha had ordained that immotiles could command motiles through the use of their more sophisticated thought routines, the notion of a disobedient motile was impossible. It simply was not part of the order of things. Motiles were subservient subsidiary organisms, receptacles for the greater Prime intellect. Nothing could change that.
Human thoughts, however, came from a brain that was, at most, fractionally smaller than a motile’s. And human minds were all completely independent, to a degree that MorningLightMountain could never truly appreciate.
Sitting alone in his damp, cozy chamber in the gigantic building that housed the rest of MorningLightMountain’s main group cluster, the immotile that contained Dudley’s thoughts was served food by motiles in the same way as all the other immotiles. Out of its twelve nerve receptor stalks, only four were fitted with communications interface devices to link it to the main thought routines of MorningLightMountain. All Dudley had to do was wait until he was visited by a motile bringing food, and bend one of the un
used nerve receptor stalks to make contact with the equivalent stalk on the motile.
Dudley’s mind slipped along the joined stalks into the motile’s brain, duplicating his memories and thoughts within the new neuron structure. Resting inside his fresh host, he felt the general pressure of MorningLightMountain’s orders and directives press against his personality as they issued out of the communications device. He simply ignored them. He could do that because he wanted to. That was the difference between him and a motile’s “personality.” It had no self-determination. Dudley, as a fully self-aware and thoroughly pissed-off human mind, had a ton of it.
For months he had wandered around the valley that was MorningLightMountain’s original home. He ate the sloppy food pap from troughs like all the other motiles, bided his time, and gathered what information and understanding he could. In that respect, the communications device that gave him access to MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines was an unparalleled source of information. He felt like a small child peering out of a hidden room into an adult’s life.
Although it didn’t have the reasoning to foresee Dudley’s method of escape, MorningLightMountain was a terrifyingly formidable intelligence. One that from a human perspective was warped to a deadly degree.
Dudley’s quiet roving mind listened in to MorningLightMountain formulating its plans, perceived the universal genocide it wanted to commit against the Commonwealth and all the other non-Prime aliens that his, Dudley’s own, memories had told it about. And there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He couldn’t drop even the tiniest monkey wrench in the works.
Emotions were one of the more human aspects that didn’t seem to function particularly well in his stolen Prime motile brain. He knew the principle, knew what he should be feeling, without actually experiencing the feeling itself, a failure that he wrote off to a very different neurochemistry. So he watched impassively as the wormholes opened within the Commonwealth, knowing he should be weeping and screaming, clenching his quad pincers and batting his four curving one-piece arms against his chest as the destruction began. In actuality he spent the day walking along the side of a congregation lake, keeping out of the way of the troop of motiles who assisted the newly formed to walk out of the water.