DUALITY: The World of Lies (31 page)

“Confirmed. And, Mei, no weapons,
right?”

“Agreed, Captain.” She smiled, then left his
chamber and went straight to hers, where she had moved the analog
catch to after the zero-com had been cleared for the prisoner. Full
armor analog suit with space environ capabilities and thruster
power: donned. EMP gun: charged, primed, and wielded.
Ballistic pistols with full clips of ammo. Two: Wielded. Dagger:
Wielded. Mobile resonance disrupter cannon: charged, primed,
and wielded.

Decked out like a solo space marine in an
action war toody (2D), she humped all the gear with her to the
auxiliary bridge and started in to interrogate Kinny about their
vector and position. Kinny answered each query patiently and as
though everything were in normal order. By the time Aru arrived on
deck, she had the EMP gun trained on the main server bank for the
aux bridge, threatening Kinny that she would destroy it and then
next go on to destroy the main server banks that housed the
System's core.

“Put it down, Mei. Now!” She turned
her head to see Aru aiming a tazeray at her. She knew it would
incapacitate her instantly. Still forgoing his mindlink, Aru was
crowned with a halo, through which he was surely instructing the
security bots to come and subdue her with tranqs, and telling Kinny
to stand by with the overhead cannons in the bridge. She paused and
wondered how she'd gotten to this point. It was nuts.
S
he
 was nuts!
Threatening Kinny made absolutely no sense. Even if there
were a way to destroy the highly redundant core of the ship's
system, which there wasn't, they would have no way to control the
vessel after that point. Had she really lost her mind? Well, yes
and no! That's what he couldn't get, what he just couldn't
understand. 
Damn him!

“Damn you!” Her mouth echoed her mind. “Aru,
you just don't understand what's going on here. The way the message
code was botched, it's just not possible for them to make a mistake
like that, and the ship feels wrong. And Ming, he's been different
since that first day. He just squats there so oblivious to
everthing when we enter...”

“Ming has been following the rules I set down
for him that day! Squatting on the far well when we enter to
exchange items. No talking. No eye contact. I set those parameters
Mei. He hasn't changed at all. He is simply being compliant. This
ends now. Do you understa....”

Aru was cut off by an emergency priority one
alarm. “Shock Pods!” announced System. The shock pods in the
auxiliary bridge immediately shot toward their respective
locations. Naturally, they were both surprised at this sudden
announcement, but their training drill instincts took over, and
they both moved instantly for the approaching pods. It was already
too late.

The deck rumbled and quaked. No… not the deck.
The entire ship! A sudden surge of g-force pulled them both firmly
prone onto the floor and grew to such intensity that Mei could not
lift her outstretched arms that were adhered to the floor. Face
down she felt her body compressing and her ribs bending. Her face
was pressed down so hard against the floor she could feel the
strain of it on her cheekbones. Aru was in front of her trying with
all his might to roll from his side onto his back, but it was
futile. For eleven helpless seconds they struggled just to hold on
to the living breath that was being constricted out of
them.

With abrupt relief, gravity normalized. Dizzy
and reeling, they managed to sit themselves upright, choking and
gasping for breath too hard to speak. Mei heard the hiss of gas as
System doused them with oxygen. Her stars began to clear, and she
was able to summon first a cough, then a groan.

“Captain,
Commander,” announced System. “The danger has
passed.”

“What... happened... System?” Aru spat out
between heaving inhalations.

“Forward probes were momentarily taken offline
when they entered the beam of an uncharted cosmic ray and were
unable to warn the Kinetic of a rogue meteor intersecting our
vector at high velocity. It was diverted and fractured into three
parts by ship's laser defenses. One of the fragments struck our
damaged outer shield ring in the lower quadrant of section 7. That
shield panel is still undergoing repairs and repositioning in the
recovery maintenance work since the thermal meltdown. The mislaid
panel was struck at 13 degrees by the meteorite fragment at high
impact force, causing it to dislodge from its frame on the shield
ring. It flipped backwards and the edge of it glanced
off the inner ring, abruptly accelerating it. The panel
rebounded off into space, and our nearprobes are currently
recovering it. The force of that brief interaction between the
layers accelerated the inner ring rotation to a rate that peaked at
43 g units. Because of the thermal damage, the automated emergency
reverse thruster system took longer than it normally would to
correct the rotation rate. The sudden nature of the onset and force
of the incident compels me to request that both you and
the Commander submit to a trauma scan. Your ocular cavities in
particular may be...”

Mei had heard enough. “System, silence!” Yes,
she was blinded for a moment and her vision was still terribly
blurred. But already she knew. She knew with certainty. “Aru, I
can't listen to another word of this preposterous report. One
highly improbable coincidence compounded upon another.”

He had picked himself and now kindly offered
her a hand, which she accepted. “Yeah Mei, I... I think you may be
at least partially correct here. Despite the damage the Kinetic has
been recovering from, there were enough sensors online that no
object that size could have penetrated our defensive projectile
grid. No. That was a direct hit if I ever felt one. Maybe even a
ram. But for sure, it was no meteor, not undetected at short range
and at that kind of velocity in this sparse region of the Cearulein
outer heliosphere.”

“You hear that, Kinny? The gig is
up!”

System responded. “Captain, I have neither the
motive nor the capability to deceive you. I think you are still
underestimating the extent our sensor arrays have been functionally
diminished. I shall break down the series of failures that led to
this incident if you will direct your attention to
display.”

“System, be silent!” Aru ordered. He looked at
Mei and she handed him a ballistic pistol. “Ming!” they
simultaneously declared.

She raced ahead, with Aru on her heels, to the
zero-com chamber. They opened the inner door and resealed it with
all possible haste -not that it probably even mattered at this
juncture. They stormed the inner chamber with weapons
drawn.

Ming, for his part, was still following the
protocol set forth for his detainment: crouched at the rear of the
chamber with his head down, hands exposed and open

“Prisoner, stand!” Mei shouted. Her EMP gun
was fixed to its highest setting and trained on Ming.

Ming stood slowly, hands remaining outspread
and eyes down. “Look at me!” she demanded as she approached him to
about a meter, alongside Aru, who had his pistol aimed at Ming's
cranium.

Ming lifted his head. His eyes seemed hollow
and vacant. “Commander, I...”

Mei fired and held the EMP ray on him until
Ming's body fell limp and collapsed onto the floor.

Aru was surprised by her action. “Mei, what
the hell?”

She thrust the EMP gun on him. “Hold this on
him,” she instructed. “That's not Ming.”

Mei knelt over the unconscious form on the
floor and drew her dagger. She grasped the arm, drew up the sleeve,
and sunk her blade deep into the flesh below the inside of the
elbow drawing down to the wrist. As she suspected, there was no
blood. She spread the lacerated skin open like two curtains and
exposed the artificial inner workings.

“Doppleganger?” Aru asked.

“One of our own androids, Aru, refashioned to
his likeness. He escaped this room relatively soon after
capture.”

The Kinetic had twenty-three android units
unprimed in storage, those of the rather androgynous sort. Neither
of them cared much for android crew, preferring to allow bots
fashioned to their tasks to carry out the work of the ship and to
interact directly with System in omniscience mode. They had used
them occasionally in the past as boarding drones and other tasks of
war. So they served their purpose at times, but neither Mei nor Aru
cared for the sight of them.

“EMP it some more,” she instructed. Aru
held the force of the pulse on it, as Mei used the laser rifle to
first decapitate then burn into its head until its core blew out
and melted.

“Fuck, Aru. FUCK!” she cursed in frustration.
“What now?”

“I don't know... I mean, what can we even do
at this point? Maybe we can get to an observation dome and try to
get some bearing on our position.”

“Yeah, ok, let's get you suited up.” Aru
didn't seem to get quite why the suit was necessary, but he didn't
bother to ask about it or ask why she
was bringing the disrupter cannon along.

They did not summon transport or request
anything of System as they dashed along the inner ring on foot,
first to her chamber where Aru suited up and she re-geared, then on
into Spoke 3. Spoke 3's observation dome was, supposedly,
operational now. They entered the spoke and thrust up to the side
hatch entrance to the dome. The dome was positioned lateral to the
spoke and should still have about a half-gravity. She wondered why
System or Ming or whatever ran the ship would even bother keeping
up the charade by this point, and was a bit surprised when the
hatchway promptly opened at Aru's tactile entry order.

They stepped into the small
nanocarbonfiberized glass observation dome closing the hatch behind
them. The ship was laterally turning. From this inner view they
could not see the previously claimed outer shield ring damage, but
she did see Cearulei brightly dawn over the radial horizon at the
proper size and brightness for their position. She gauged the
spacing and position of the Trapezium relative to Cearulei, and
then back to Ignis Rubeli as it circled into view. Everything was
as exactly as it should be for their position and vector heading.
From the looks of things they were right where they should be on
their set course.

She commed Aru, pointing at his feet.
“Gravlock and get ready.”

Aru tried to dissuade her, even as he executed
her instructions and locked his boots into the floor. “Mei, if we
depressurize, we could end up stuck out here.”

Mei scoffed. Ming had a thousand ways to kill
them inside or outside the ship. She primed the disrupter cannon,
aimed it at a high section of the dome, and fired. The disrupter
first analyzed the materia it was being cast at,
nanocarbon-fiberized glass, and calculated its resonant frequency.
It then projected an expanding red plasma beam that lit a large
radius of the upper viewing dome. Mei held it in place as the
disrupter signal whistled into the frequency range until the layer
of glass that separated them from space shattered -along with the
illusion they had been held under.

The shining fragments of the dome tumbled away
into space taking with them all the air in the chamber. As the
shimmering mass of it cleared, the true image of their surrounding
space unveiled itself. The two surveyed their new environs as the
Kinetic continued its slow lateral turn, but amid a much different
star picture. Mei gasped. This was... this was simply
impossible!

Again, she spotted Cearulei, now dim and
distant, and not half an arm’s length away from it was Ignis
Rubeli. How was she seeing both of them that close together?! They
were not just off course; they were no longer in the
Taiji!

Shafts of bright white light were breaking
through the spokes from the farside of the Kinetic. “Look!” Aru
commed to her, pointing first to the sphere and then up to another
point in the sky that were connected by a bright blue line
emanating from the sphere... a particle beam? The point in the sky
was bursting outward radially in long strands of spark and light as
it blew apart. The beam ceased and debris fragments from the
explosion sailed over their heads. A ship! Or what was left of one.
The lights and flares of weapon fire flashed at a dozen other
points in the sky, and more rays discharged from the
sphere.

“We're in the
throes of battle!” announced Aru over the com,
incredulously.

The gray mass of a titanic cylinder covered in
a grid of lights that numbered in the tens of thousands slowly
lurched up and over the ship's view horizon. Emblazoned on it, in
numerals the size of which dwarfed the Kinetic 100 times over, were
the numbers 66 -the exiled Carousel they had fought to defeat in
cruel and bloody warfare years ago. And just to drive the final
point home, a blinding white disk of light followed behind it,
bathing everything in its path with intense solar radiation,
forcing their helm photon shields down: the white dwarf, PoleStar
North.

P
yre was a
land of extreme scarcity on the shores of a void of utter
desolation. The dry heat was brutal in his first days of camp, and
every venomous thing that slithered or crawled sought shade in his
belongings. He suffered two scorpion stings on the first morn
alone. Gahre trekked that day not 5 kilometers into the desert and
returned with a bone dry canteen and signs of heatstroke. There was
simply no shade to be had that one did not carry with him. He
continued on south along the curving coast of life and death,
between green and sand, because he knew this was one terrain that
could not be conquered by intrepid will alone. All the will in his
soul would not conjure up a single drop of water out there. He
would need guidance, he would need gear, and to obtain these
things, he would need at least a vestige of civilization to draw
from.