Chaos Quarter (18 page)

“I’m sorry,” Chakrika said.

“So am I. And if she had survived, perhaps something more would have come. But I am not sorry that I met you, Chakrika,” he spoke, “And you can stay at my ‘farm’ however long you wish.”

She smiled and got up.

“Keep it on course, computer,” she declared and walked to Lucius. She slid behind his chair, sitting on the ledge of the bridge’s upper tier. Her hands found his shoulders and began working into the muscle.

“By God’s grace,” said Lucius, “You are good at that.”

She smiled and continued massaging.

* * *

Rex was dimly aware of somebody entering the common room. He chewed on one of the five thousand pieces of beef jerky Lucius had picked up on Helvetia. The toughness of the dried meat offered him a primitive sense of accomplishment.
Your dried animal flesh is no match for my human pre-molars
, he thought, then wondered where the hell a thought like that came from. And why did it feel so satisfying?

“Rex,” he heard Chakrika’s voice say. “What is that?”

She referred to the holographic projection floating above the table. The image of a planet, four feet in diameter, hovered in the air. Small structures, the detail invisible unless you squinted, seemed to swarm around it.

“Earth,” he replied.

Chakrika moved to the couch, sitting in the seat beside him. There was a reverence in her eyes as she stared at the projection.

“That’s Earth?” she asked, awestruck. “That’s the homeworld?”

“That’s it,” Rex replied. “Doesn’t look much different from the rest of them, does it?”

“All other worlds are made in its image,” Chakrika said in a reverent whisper.

“Most of them,” Rex said, motioning to his left. Second stood at the rear of the room, next to the kitchen. Her eyes watched with their usual blank stare. God knew what Hegemon worlds looked like.

“Can I see it? Does your computer have images of it?” Chakrika asked.

“Sure. Updated the maps before I left,” he replied.

A confused look met his words. He smiled patiently.

“Zoom in on my old house,” he spoke.

The computer soared down to the surface, passing space stations and defensive satellites. It broke into the blue of Earth’s sky, through fluffy and not-so-fluffy clouds, down to a suburb of Annapolis, Maryland.

“Used to live here,” he said. “When I was an instructor for the fleet.”

A three-story home, done up in cedar-plank siding, sat on an acre of lawn. Woodland ran from the back of the property, thickening to hardwood forest. A swimming pool and Jacuzzi dominated the back yard. Rex frowned. Whoever had bought the property after his transfer to Pershing Station had taken down his hammock.

“Your home is huge,” Chakrika replied. ”It’s almost a mansion!”

“Fairly standard where I come from,” Rex replied. “Dreamt about it the other day. Shift to Paphlygon, Mecong Isle.”

Earth dissolved, getting a cry of protest from Chaki. Paphlygon took its place. He paused the projection for a moment, letting Chakrika see his homeworld.

From space Paphlygonia looked overwhelmingly blue, with only broken lines of green drawn across it. Three archipelagos dominated his world, each over two thousand miles long. Two began at the same point near the North Pole and then stretched in different directions toward the equator. Another in the southern hemisphere tried to wrap the planet’s circumference just inside the sub-tropical zone, but died off far short of its goal.

Not one island on the planet was bigger than one hundred miles by eighty, but there were so damn many of them that they still made up 13 percent of the world’s surface. Tens of thousands of smaller islands, similar in size to Earth’s Hawaiian chain, clustered around the larger islands. Millions of even smaller islands, many without fresh water sources, dotted the lengths of the archipelagos.

He ordered the projection to continue on and focused upon Mecong, his childhood home. It was a mid-sized island nearly thirty miles across, almost entirely covered in forest. Vast redwoods and sequoias stretched hundreds of feet into the air. Entire villages existed beneath them, obscured from sight. He could see the peninsula where his family had their home, perched above three-hundred-foot-high sea cliffs, the house protruding from the hill dramatically. His father, the architect, didn’t do subtle. Nearby, the small town where he’d gone to school and loitered with his friends sat in a break in the forest. Fields, some for farming and others for sports, clustered around the village. Across the islands another small town clung to the coast, home to his high school’s implacably evil football rivals.

“Your home?” Chakrika ventured.

“Yes,” Rex replied. “Mecong Island, northern district of the Ross Archipelago, planet of Paphlygonia.”

“It looks beautiful,” she spoke. “Why would you leave it to come out here?”

“I left it because I didn’t want to be a fisherman and didn’t have the grades to get into a college worth paying for,” Rex replied. “The fleet offered decent pay and a chance to get out, see Explored Space for myself.”

“Do you regret it? Your fleet tossed you out here,” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t regret it. At first I did. Basic training was hell, took six months to learn combat drills only infantry uses before they’d let me test for Annapolis. Felt like quitting every day. Then I had five years of school before they even put me on a training ship.”

“Why’d you do it? Wouldn’t fishing have been easier?”

“Much easier,” he replied. “But the longer I stayed in, the more I found myself believing all the things they said. About country and service. It all used to seem like slogans you hear on TV, but it began to make sense. I learned how much effort it takes to stay free and protect a nation. Even felt a little angry at my old friends for taking what they had for granted.

“Then when I got sent to the fleet, I’d see Europan refugees, fleeing across the void in any space-worthy piece of junk they could steal. Peasants…the serfs Lucius once had. I’d hear horror stories of how they were treated. All second-hand of course, or translations, since the serfs are only allowed to learn French. But all that talk about freedom, all the stuff they’d made us read, started to make sense. I felt compelled to protect it. I felt responsible for it. All I’ve seen out here, all these tyrants and pirates and crazies…just makes me miss it all the more.”

“Even though your superiors turned on you?” she asked.

“I hate Commodore Gutierrez, but I don’t hate what I do. Yeah, I’d like an easier assignment. But I have orders and so I’m here. I could’ve quit—”

“Wait, you could have quit and you
chose
to go into the Quarter?!”

“Yes.”

“You’ve done all this out of
patriotism
?”

“I wanted to serve,” he said. “These were my orders. As much as it sucks, I can’t just turn my back on it. Especially now. What Second told us…we’ve never faced an enemy with
living
ships. I mean, for all I know, they can heal themselves!”

“The organic components of the War-beasts are self-healing,” Second said from her spot.

“See? We’ve never fought an enemy that isn’t human, even if they call themselves
homo betterthanus
or whatever,” Rex spoke.

“
Homo superioris
,” Second corrected.

“So as crazy as it sounds, I am here because despite all the shit they’ve put me through, I still want to serve.”

“You’re still a soldier,” Chakrika surmised.

“I don’t think you ever
stop
being a soldier,” Rex said. “Even if you want to. Just look at Lucius. Didn’t even hesitate the first time he jumped into my gunner’s seat. Did what was necessary.”

Rex sighed, realizing that he had half come out of his seat. He leaned back against the couch.

“Want to see more?” he asked.

“How many worlds does your Commonwealth have?” she asked innocently.

“One hundred twenty-two terraformed worlds plus Earth. Four hundred sixty-four systems, about two-thirds of which have been colonized. We’ve still got some empty space we’re exploring.”

Her mouth gaped at the numbers.

“One hundred and twenty-three worlds? My people barely controlled one!”

“Well, then you have a lot of learning to do,” he smiled, then cleared his throat. “Computer, let’s start her on Venus, Hartell Resort.”

Arrogance, you say? Foolish primitive, it isn’t arrogance if you’re right!

-Master Aaron of New Timor, to a particularly defiant primitive shortly before a hunt

“The Sifters say this is the one,” Flynn spoke.

They were not in the command pods. Instead, they sat in a large cavity colored with bioluminescent cells. With a command they could flash a wide spectrum of colors, creating any image desired.

Blair tilted back, a tongue-like muscle twice his height cushioning him. He looked out on an image of space, projected from the War-beast’s memory. A red path had been projected by the sifters to show their quarry’s escape route.

“And you are sure this is the ship we are looking for?” Blair asked.

“Dispersal patterns are consistent with the time period they were here. The asteroid infestation’s recording devices showed a mechanical vessel matching the description following this path,” Flynn explained.

Blair groaned.
Relying on primitives and their machine technology
, he thought with the normal amount of contempt. His Warriors had managed to capture the spaceport of this odd infestation, bored out of the rock of an asteroid. The Warriors had gotten no further, though. He had but four dozen warriors on this beast, and the primitives had rallied in large numbers, with the mechanical ‘guns’ that they seemed to carry everywhere they went. The subcutaneous bones, plates, and thick hair of the warriors were designed to resist such weapons, but even they could only take so many hits. Sure, they could kill the first five primitives that started shooting at them, but by the time they got to the sixth, enough metal bullets would break their protective skeleton and rip through their organs. Had he a Haul-beast carrying a few hundred Warriors and some Runners, they would have overrun the infested asteroid and feasted on the flesh of their defeated foes. Instead, he’d been forced to call them back once they had transmitted the data from the asteroid to the War-beast.

“But we cannot be completely certain,” Blair questioned.

“No. This primitive is probably one of the smarter ones. He managed to kill one of our kind and obscure his trail,” Flynn answered.

“Do not ascribe intelligence to them where there is none. That city was on fire when we arrived. We don’t know if this primitive is responsible for the ambassador or if it was done in the attack. And we have no way of knowing how much damage was actually done,” Blair asserted. “And changing your fuel supply does not require excessive intelligence.”

“Well, whoever he is, it is likely this path is his. This is our best chance of recovering the ambassador,” Flynn said.

Blair sighed heavily. The tongue-muscle undulated beneath him, villi on its surface massaging his body’s tensing muscles.

“If his mind is not damaged, we can still—”

“I know!” Blair snapped. Flynn shrunk back. Blair knew him well enough to know that it was a temporary show of acquiescence. Give Flynn a moment and he’d push his point again. His ability to withstand such pressure was one of the reasons Blair had chosen him for this flight.

Flynn, though he was in a more masculine body at the time, had worked with Blair on a previous trip. An Achaean transport had jumped off course, one light-year inside of Hegemony space. Flynn had served ably then, supporting his decision to capture the crew. It had been one of Blair’s better moments. The terrified crew had made for good sport in the forests around his home, drawing Masters from three worlds for the hunt. And the one he’d kept to dissect had taught him much about the limits of the species when taken from a wild setting.

“Blair?” Flynn pushed.

“Set course to follow,” he spoke. “And destroy the infestation. The fact that they sheltered this man who so flippantly disrespects our superiority…they must pay for their short-sightedness.”

Flynn nodded and moved off toward one of the command pods.

“To be home…” Blair spoke wistfully to nobody in particular. The tongue continued its massage, adequately enough, given the circumstances. The damned War-beast didn’t know his muscle structure or what he liked in a massage.
To be home on New Timor
, he thought. He could see his honeycomb-like home in his mind and see the dwelling slowly growing out a new wing. The Ultimate Mind had just approved resources for it. By the time he got home, it would probably be done. Hell, if they managed to actually find Cody’s body, He would probably be rewarded with another wing, with more servants, with whatever He felt was a sustainable reward for a mission completed.

The thought pleased Blair. Returning Cody meant protecting the anonymity of the Hegemony, which was worth a large reward. This was the greatest breach of security his people had ever faced. A War-beast would not have been sent out into the worlds of the primitives otherwise.

But the Masters decided that glimpses of what, to the primitives, would be an unexplained ship posed the lesser threat. If the body of Cody got into the hands of the Europans, or the Terrans, or even one of the smaller nations, then the truth of their worlds would be revealed. The primitives would not understand the Perfection they had achieved, they never did. All the prisoners ever brought back for the hunt had only shown fear, terror, and disgust at the servants the Masters had created. If the primitive nations moved against them before they had the strength to destroy them, then all could be lost. Their mechanical abominations would arrive and burn each of the Hegemony’s worlds to a cinder.

“We are firing,” the ship wheezed through the cavity’s speaking orifice.

“Let me see it,” Cody replied.

The image shifted from the corpse-stealer’s path to the infested asteroid. Wrecked ships, small craft that had attacked them when they’d dispatched the Warriors, floated helplessly in space around them. Landing-beasts carrying his warriors streaked from the asteroid, approaching the War-beast as its two large rail-guns opened fire.