“Oh. It’s you,” she said disdainfully.
“And you,” he replied.
“What are you doing down here?” she asked.
“I came down to check the percentile. I don’t like to do it from my office,” Gruntgrill replied. “You?”
“The same.”
“Eighty-seven still.”
She nodded and sighed.
“A slight hundredth point above that, but not much. Nothing like the ninety-six we need.”
“Hey, we can solutionize this! We’ll get there!” Gruntgrill said cheerily.
She did not smile.
“It’s taking too long. The vectors are too unreliable to appropriatemently modulify. Without that lost Recorder…”
“I know, I know,” said Gruntgrill. He was disarmed. Allandra Meramati was famous for her cool bearing and executive stamina. Now he could see the trouble and tension behind her mask. We’re all struggling, he thought. Even her. The pressure is immense.
“We will get there,” he said. He reached out his hand and clasped her shoulder. She looked down at the hand and shivered slightly.
“I’m sorry,” said Gruntgrill, withdrawing his hand immediately. “I -tik!- was just trying to be supportive.”
“I realize. Thank you.” She looked at him. “I appreciate it, Arnok, I do. It was just very…I don’t know how to say it. Against social protocol, I suppose, for a high-born Shi’ar to be touched by a…lesser species.”
He nodded.
“I understand. Sorry.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were amazingly green.
“I am sorry,” she said. “Arnok, that was very rude of me. The Shi’ar are born to their ways, to their social dynamics. It is hard for us to unlearn them, and to appreciate the comradeship of a close workspace.”
She held his gaze.
“I truly apologize for the ‘lesser species’ remark. That was unkind,” she said. “I think of you as a friend and colleague, Arnok. I appreciate the comfort you tried to offer in this stressful time. I did not mean to offend you.”
“No -tik!- offense taken!” Gruntgrill replied. “I apologize, too. Inappropriate touching. Last thing I want is a sexual- harassment-in-the-workplace tribunal. -tik!- We Kaliklaki…we have an unfortunate reputation.”
She smiled, still keeping his gaze.
“Ah yes, the ‘lover-bug’ thing. You are a liberal and amorous species.”
“Not all of us,” he smiled. “Not all of us. Some of us can be gentlemanly.”
“I’m sure you can,” she whispered. Her eyes were very, very green.
“Let us just forget this moment,” she suggested. She raised her delicate hand and briefly stroked his cheek. “No one need know. I was never here. How is that? I was never here. That’s the simplest way of moving past this moment. You don’t need to tell anyone we met tonight.”
“That sounds perfect,” Gruntgrill smiled. It was his winningest smile.
She leaned in and brushed his expectant lips with her own, very lightly.
“I’m going home to bed,” she said. “Long day. You get a good rest, too.”
“Sweet dreams,” he sighed.
She nodded. “The sweetest.”
“This never happened. You weren’t here,” he smiled.
She smiled back and walked away.
Hottest Shi’ar ever! Gruntgrill sighed, loosening his collar. He was perspiring despite the air-con systems.
He walked down to the hatch of the Datacore Chamber. More security processes were needed. He was scanned several more times.
The shutter opened.
The Datacore Chamber was immense. It was everything.
Gruntgrill walked out onto a concentric observation walkway.
The Core pulsed beneath him in the tech-lined storage well. Cryogenic circuits lacing the heavy-metal walls of the well bled the generative heat away. Nothing generated more power than raw, unfiltered data. Hot pink light glowed from the Core below him.
He looked down over the rail and glimpsed infinity. Almost infinity, at least. It throbbed like a child star, a pink newborn, encased and supported by the vast technological womb the Special Projects Department had constructed for it.
“Come on,” he whispered, looking down at it. “Grow. Just a little -tik!- bit more.”
He hesitated, remembering something. A thought struck him.
Allandra had said “sweet dreams.” But the Shi’ar didn’t dream. It was a notion they considered unnatural. What the -tik!- flark? Had that just been office flirting? Or…
It was an important revelation. Gruntgrill forgot it a second later as reality unzipped beside him, and the shock wave of twisting cosmic narratives threw him over on the walkway.
The significant implications of his last thought vanished.
He was looking at Roamer.
The matte-black figure rose from his knees and clutched the handrail for support. The Spaceknight’s armor was dented and buckled.
“There you are,” Roamer wheezed.
Gruntgrill got up.
“Are you okay?” he asked, not wishing to get any closer to the Galadoran than was absolutely necessary.
“Of course.”
“Look…Roamer, you shouldn’t be here. Not here. I don’t even know how you got in here without setting the alarms off.”
Still leaning, and without looking around at Gruntgrill, the Spaceknight tapped the device secured to his back-plate.
“This gets me anywhere.”
He turned, rising to his full height.
“I was looking for you,” he said.
“Me?”
“Yes. From our last meeting, I realize you know more about the interpolator device than anyone else.”
“Oh, no no!” Gruntgrill replied. “I just said it was dangerous! I’m no expert. I just said we shouldn’t be using it.”
“But you understand how it works?” asked Roamer.
“Yes, I guess.”
“Gruntgrill…your name is Gruntgrill, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“I have now used this device three times. Each time, I have failed in my retrieval. I want to do this job. I am sworn to it. But I fear that if I return to that vermin Hanxchamp empty-handed again, he will fire me.”
“Absolutely not!” Gruntgrill said. He thought about it. “But he might get Xorb Xorbux to get the Security Department to kill you.”
“I do not fear him. I do not fear them.”
“Because you’re tough, yeah, I get that. But Timely Inc. has eighty-five thousand security staffers, some of them body-tank armored. I don’t care how tough you are, they’d incinerate you.”
“They could try.”
“I’m trying to help you!” Gruntgrill said.
“My point is simple,” replied Roamer. “I do not wish to fail again. I am sworn to this task. Tell me why this device keeps failing me!”
Gruntgrill took a nervous step back.
“Gee, I’d -tik!- love to. I really would. But all I can tell you is what I told you the last time. That -tik!- interpolator is a crazy pack of tech. It drops you into the unspoken cosmic narrative at moments of dramatic significance. Each time you fire it up, it plants you foursquare in the most dramatic sequences of the Recorder’s existence.”
“And each time, though I do not mean to, I end up saving him or facilitating his escape from danger. On Xarth, I took a kill-shot meant for him. On Xandar, I effectively distracted the Nova Corps. On Adjufar, I occupied the Shi’ar Imperial Guard while he made his escape. Explain that!”
“May I -tik!- take a -tik!- look?” asked Gruntgrill.
The Spaceknight nodded and turned his back to the Kaliklaki exec. Gruntgrill bent down and examined the interpolator unit.
“Well,” he said, “It looks like it’s working perfectly…as far as that goes. It’s a crazy, untested piece of kit. I guess I have a question.”
“Ask it.”
“You claim to be a ronin, sir. You claim to be
a merc.”
“I am. I have no master.”
“Well…and this is just a guess, you understand…I don’t think the interpolator reads you that way. It sees you as a…I dunno…a hero. It reads your inherent character traits and interpolates you into the Recorder’s narrative accordingly.”
“It’s choosing sides for me? It is deciding my place in this action?”
“I’d say so.” Gruntgrill shrugged. “I think it knows your true self better than you do. I think it wants you to be…a Spaceknight. Not a motherless killer for hire.”
The Spaceknight looked down at Gruntgrill. His visor pulsed with red-hot light.
“That is not acceptable. I turned my back on the edicts of Galador. I am my own man.”
Gruntgrill pursed his green lips.
“I think the interpolator has a problem with that. I think it knows your real self. I think it wants you to be something else. Maybe the thing you really want to be. Maybe the essential part of yourself that you are denying. It’s not a subtle instrument.”
“I am true to myself!” Roamer cried.
“Easy now—”
“I am not denying my ethical nature!”
“Sure, okay, forget I even said it!”
Roamer glared at Gruntgrill. The Spaceknight was huge and malevolent. His visor pulsed with dead-star light.
“I will prove this,” he said. “I will find the Recorder. Find him, kill him, and bring his head to you. I will do this for you, and for myself.”
Gruntgrill nodded.
“Totally works for me,” he said. “Go be the badass we -tik!- hired. I’ll be waiting for you. Buddy, you do this, we can change the Galaxy. Forever. Change it. Resolutionate it.”
Roamer looked down into the glowing pink well.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Corporate secret, pal. You shouldn’t even be here.”
Roamer looked back at Gruntgrill. He activated the device.
“This time, I will not fail,” he said.
He vanished in a flash of cliffhanger and shock reveal.
Gruntgrill got back on his feet.
“Good talk,” he said.
• CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE •
JUST ANOTHER DAY ON ALPHA CENTAURI
He looked down at the Core.
“Almost there,” he whispered. “That Spaceknight does the business, and we’re there.”
ALPHA Centauri. The big A. C. Business as usual. Big business.
As one might expect, gentle reader, a cosmic hub-world like Alpha C, governing as it does almost thirty systems and trillions of lives, is a hectic place. In an average day period, eight hundred thousand vessels dock at the world’s massive ports, and a similar number depart. The daily through-traffic is around nine million beings: businesspersons, tourists, visitors, workers. And that’s not counting the two million more who come and go by transmat, or the one trillion who visit or link via telepresence or deep-space real-time coms.
At times, the low-orbit space above Alpha C is positively jostling with starships: bulk traders, megafreighters, warships, liners, warp shuttles, express clippers, tourist barges, jump freighters, ambassadorial vessels, day-trippers, executive yachts, produce shippers, probes, support tenders, tugs, garbage scows…
You get the picture. I am told that the job of Orbital Traffic Control at Alpha C is one of the most stressful in the Galaxy. It has a very high burnout rate, despite the massive guidance systems and predictive tracking devices—all quantum-based or semi-sentient—designed to assist in the task. On a recent list, published in the Octvember 2014 issue of Galactic Data-Digest, “Being an Orbital Traffic Controller at Alpha C” came in fifth on the list of “most high-stress occupations” behind “Ruling the Shi’ar Empire” (at four), “Working in the fighting pits of Sakaar” (at three), “Brood Oral Hygienist” (at two), and at number one, “Having anything whatsoever to do with Galactus.”
At sixth, just behind it, was “Being a Kree or Skrull soldier during a Kree-Skrull war.” The article went on to remark that it was odd, on balance, that there were only ever “Kree-Skrull” wars and never any “Skrull-Kree” ones.
I note that neither “Guarding the Galaxy” or “Being a Rigellian Recorder” made the list at all.
But I digress (“As usual!” I hear you cry). Anyway, it’s a busy place. A small ship—say, for example, a Timely Inc. delivery courier—could get quite lost and go unremarked in all that hubbub.
Timely Inc. has its corporate headquarters on Alpha C, along with significant portions of its manufactory plants and packaging divisions (I say significant, and I understate: The latter divisions cover almost sixty-one percent of the planet’s primary landmass). Indeed, between consumables deliveries in and freight shipping out—along with executive transfers, business trips, and guided tours of the HQ—Timely Inc. alone counts for almost a third of the planet’s daily traffic.
So now, on this busy day, as busy as any other, a small delivery-courier ship skims in toward the soaring edifice of Timely Inc. Headquarters.
The sun is setting over the sprawling metropolis, its dying orange rays glinting off the billion windows of the vast skytowers, each structure a city in itself.
The courier is small and boxy. It has been cleared and checked as per regs by Orbital Traffic Control, and its spec and registration have been confirmed by Timely freight-handling. It sports the Timely Inc. logo on its side panels. It is carrying, according to its manifest, forty-eight tons of fresh zunks for the corporate hospitality juicing bar on floor seven thousand and six.
All of those facts are lies.
It is actually a Xandarian prowl cruiser cloaked by a Rynebian tech-cloaker device.
Slig disguisers work on the basic principle that a person or being sees what he or she or it expects to see. The inconspicuity field it generates psionically links into any observer’s apprehension senses, identifies what said observer is expecting, and then emphasizes that notion in his, or her, or its mind. It even works for technological systems, provided they are quantum-based or semi-sentient, by supplying blank data that the system then innocently fills in for itself.
We set down on upper landing-dock port 3447 high in the Timely Inc. HQ’s main tower, with wince-inducing views over the vast metropolis below. We are just another delivery ship. No one on the busy landing pad pays us a second glance. A battered, workaday, standard-issue Timely jump courier? Why would they?
They see what they expect to see, down to the heavily scuffed rear freight footplate, the slightly peeling side logos, and the sliding cockpit door that is a bit battered from a lifetime of banging open and shut every quick-down, quick-door-knock, and quick-off-again-after-signature.
Rocket Raccoon sits back in the pilot’s seat, steeples the fingers of his disconcertingly human-like hands, and grins.
“Right in through the front door. Pip the Troll has done us right,” he says.
Pip the Troll, whoever that is, clearly has—but it has not been plain sailing in the two days since we left Adjufar very, very fast.
Several things have happened.
First of all—though this is, in comparison to the other events, probably less significant—I have begun to sing.
Popular tunes, for the most part. The “pop” music, as the young people say, of quite a number of different cultures: beat-combo hits, ballads, torch songs, number-one smashes, one-hit wonders, old-time classics, a little Z’Nox thrash-crunch, some stroppy Laxidazian rascal-punk, some Mekkan industrial-mash, a little Acanti easy listening, some Country and Western-Spiral Arm selections (including the peerless “I’m only a little white dwarf, but one day I’ll be a big red giant for you”), some vigorous Makluan brash-metal, some Kaliklaki tik!-tik!, a cosmo-trance mix of Mephitisoid jumpa-rumpa, some screeching Nymenian howler-growler, and some Zen-Whoberian froth-rock (including “Inga-Binga-Freakout” by the Gamagan Quintet).
I have been told to shut up sixty-eight times. By everyone. Including Groot. And the automa
tic voice.
The singing is, I realize, a legacy of my last, mournful download contact with poor Recorder 336 on Adjufar. The vivid memories of her miraculous lifetime’s odyssey stay in my mind. But the songs she stored as a jukebox for Pandubundy, which I downloaded along with those aching recordings, just won’t quit.
Of course, I apologize profusely each time I start to sing. Then it happens again. On one occasion, Rocket cried, “I don’t care how much he’s worth or what’s at stake, we’re kicking him out of the flarking hatch!” and had to be restrained.
On another, Gamora looked at me, and then looked at her swords, in order to stop me singing “Inga-Binga-Freakout.”
On another, Groot sat down beside me and took my hand in his massive branchlike palm.
“I am Groot,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I don’t think I have any Planet X tunes in my storage. ‘I’ll be stumped if you leaf me’? How does that go again?”
“I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Gro-ooot.”
“Uh. No, sorry.”
Anyway, as I said, several things have happened, and much more important than my singing is the state of the prowl cruiser.
It is behaving more strangely than me, for a start. Our escape from Adjufar was inexplicable. It gurgles and chunters to itself from time to time. It is also talking in a much more…colloquial way.
“Inbound to Alpha C at hypermax plus ten, pals!” the automatic voice declared at one point. “Flark, we’re shifting now! Feel the speed! Put away your tray tables and set your seat-backs to upright! This is gonna be white-knuckle!”
Rocket has deduced, from a close study of the main system-diagnostic display, that Imperial Guardsman Ebon’s parting shot burned out part of the prowl cruiser’s sentient control systems—basically, its self-control and sense of regulation, as per the Code of Xandar. It is now liberated. It is not bound by Xandar, or the rules of the Nova Corps. In fact, it does not seem to be bound by anything. It is reckless. Its previously inhibited urge to join us on our adventures is now unfettered and freed.