Despite her long career in arbitrary gravity, Hobbes maintained a healthy fear of falling.
So, as always, stepping into the captain's observation blister brought on the old vertigo. It was like walking the plank, Hobbes supposed. But a plank was at least visible. She knew not to look down at her boots as they passed from the hypercarbon floor of the airlock onto the transparent surface of the blister. Instead, Hobbes kept her eyes focused on Captain Zai, finding security in his familiar form. Standing at a graceful parade rest with his back to her, he seemed suspended in space. The black wool of his uniform blended with the void, the piping of the garment, his head, and the trademark gray gloves hovering disembodied until Hobbes's eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was almost noon down at the palace, so the sun was at the
Lynx's
stern. The only light came from Legis XV, a full green bauble shining over Zai's left shoulder. At the 60,000-klick distance of geosynchronous orbit (a long day, that world), it was not the angry, bloated disk it had been during the rescue attempt. Now it was merely a baleful eye.
Hobbes looked at the planet with hatred. It had killed her captain.
"Executive officer reporting, sir."
"Report," Zai said, still facing the void.
"In doing the postmortem—" The word froze in her mouth. She had not considered its original meaning in this context.
"Appropriate choice of terms, Executive Officer. Continue."
"In doing the PM, sir, we've discovered some anomalies."
"Anomalies?"
Hobbes looked at the useless hard encryption key in her hand. She had carefully prepared presentation files of the findings, but there were no hard-screens here in the observation blister. No provision for hi-res display, except for the spectacle of the universe itself. The images she intended to show would reveal nothing in low-res synesthesia. She would have to make do with words alone.
"We have determined that Private Ernesto was killed by friendly fire."
"The railgun bombardment?" Zai asked sadly, ready to add another measure of guilt to his failure.
"No, sir. The initiate's varigun."
His hands clenched. "Idiots," he said softly.
"A governor-override was triggered on the initiate's weapon, sir. It tried to warn him not to fire."
Zai shook his head, his voice sinking deeper into melancholy. "I imagine Barris didn't know what the alarm meant. We were fools to have issued him a weapon at all. Stupidity in the Political Apparatus is no anomaly, Hobbes."
Hobbes swallowed at the blunt talk, especially with two politicals still on board. Of course, the captain's blister, featureless and temporary, was the most secure station on the ship. And Zai was beyond punishment in any case. The death of the Child Empress—her brain was damaged beyond reanimation by the Rix blaster, Adept Trevim herself had confirmed—constituted an Error of Blood.
But this wasn't like the captain, this passivity. He had been quieter since his promotion, she thought, or perhaps since his captivity on Dhantu. As Zai turned around, Hobbes noticed the slight creases in the line of his jaw marking the physical reconstruction. What a star-crossed career, she thought. First that unfathomably horrible imprisonment, then an impossible hostage situation.
"That's not the only anomaly, sir," she said, speaking carefully now. "We've also taken a good look at Corporal Lao's helmet visuals."
"Good man, Corporal Lao," Zai muttered. The Vadan gender construction sounded odd to Hobbes's ear, as it always did. "But visuals? She was cut off by the field."
"Yes, sir. There were, however, a few windows of transmission. Long enough for armor diagnostics and even some visuals to upload."
Zai looked at her keenly, the lost, philosophical expression finally leaving his craggy features. Hobbes knew he was interested now.
The captain
had
to look at the visuals from Lao's helmet. The weapons and armor of orbital marines communicated continuously with the ship during action, uploading equipment status, the health of the marine, and pictures from the battle. The helmet visuals were low-grade monochrome at only nine frames per second, but they were wrapped three-sixty, and sometimes revealed more than the marines themselves had seen.
Zai simply must look at them before he put a blade of error to his belly. And it was up to Executive Officer Katherie Hobbes to make sure that he did.
"Sir, the entry wound on the Rix commando looks like a direct hit."
There. She'd said it. Hobbes felt a single drop of sweat mark a course down her back where standing at attention left a space between wool and skin. A careful analysis of this conversation, such as the Apparatus might one day make, could draw near the theory Hobbes and some of the other officers had begun tacitly to entertain.
"Executive Officer," her captain said, drawing himself to his full height, "are you by any chance trying to ...
save
me?"
Hobbes was ready for this.
"Sir, 'The study of the battle already fought is as essential as that of the battle to come.' Sir."
'"Engagement,'" Zai corrected, evidently preferring an earlier translation. But he seemed pleased, as he always was when Hobbes quoted the old war sage Anonymous 167. The captain even managed a smile, the first she'd seen on his face since the Empress's death. But then it turned bitter.
"Hobbes, in my hand is a blade of error, of sorts."
He opened one hand to reveal a small black rectangle. It was a single-purpose, programmable remote.
"Captain?"
"A little-known fact: For the elevated, the blade of error can take almost any form. It's a matter of choice. General Ricard Tash and his volcano, for example."
Hobbes frowned as she remembered the old tale. One of the first Errors, a lost battle during the Consolidation of Home. It had never occurred to her that Tash's suicide had involved some special dispensation. The prospect of scalding magma didn't seem so inviting as to require one.
"Sir? I'm not sure—"
"This remote is programmed to invoke a high-emergency battle-stations status in the
Lynx,
overriding every safety protocol," he explained, turning the remote over in his hand like a worry stick. "A standard command sequence, actually, useful for blockade patrols."
Hobbes bit her lip. What was she missing here?
"Of course, the captain's blister is not part of the battle-ready configuration of the
Lynx,
is it, Hobbes?"
A fresh wave of vertigo struck Katherie Hobbes, as surely as if the ship's gravity had flipped upside down without warning. She closed her eyes, struggling to control the wild gyrations of her balance, listing to herself the rote procedures of emergency battle stations: bulkheads sealed, weapons crash-charged, full extension of the energy-sink manifold, and blowing the atmosphere in any temporary, acceleration-sensitive constructions such as the blister she stood in now. There were safeties, of course, but they could be countermanded.
She felt as if she were falling, tumbling through the void with this all-but-dead man.
When she opened her eyes, he had taken a step closer, concern on his face.
"Sorry, Katherie," he said softly. "But you had to know. You'll be in command when it comes. No rescue attempts, understand? I don't want to wake up in an autodoc with my eyeballs burst out."
"Of course, sir," she managed, her voice sounded rough, as if a cold were coming on. She swallowed, a reflexive reponse to vertigo, and tried not to imagine the captain's face after decompression. That horrible transformation was something that
couldn't
happen. She would simply have to save him.
He stepped past her into the open door of the blister's airlock, leaving the black field of stars for solid metal. She followed him into the lock and rolled the reassuringly massive door into its sealed position.
"Now," Captain Zai said as the inner door opened, "I should like to see these visuals. 'No mark of war is too minute to reward careful study,' aye, Hobbes?"
"Aye, sir." Anonymous 167 again.
As she followed her captain to the command bridge, glad to have her feet on dense hypercarbon and hullalloy, Katherie Hobbes allowed herself to shelter an uncertain candle of hope.
COMPOUND MIND
Alexander flexed itself, feeling the ripple of its will promulgate through the infostructure of Legis XV.
The hostage crisis had for a time interrupted the normal flux of information across the planet. Market trading had been suspended, schools closed, the powers of the unwieldy Citizen's Assembly assumed by the Executive Diet. But now that the Imperials had retaken the palace, activity was beginning to rebuild in the world's arteries of data and interchange.
A few days of mourning would be observed soon, but for now the Empress's death was a closely guarded secret. Legis XV had survived its brief Rix occupation, and at the moment there was an outpouring of relief, a release of nervous energies throughout the intertwined systems of commerce, politics, and culture.
As for the existence of Alexander in their midst, the compound mind had not yet created panic. Once the population realized that their phones, data-books, and home automatics had not turned on them, the mind seemed more a curiosity than a threat—a ghost in the machine that had yet to prove itself unfriendly, whatever the propaganda of the grays.
And so the planet awoke.
Alexander felt this increasing activity as new and sudden vigor. The first day of consciousness had been exhilarating, but the compound mind now realized the true vitality of Legis XV. The planet's surge back into ordinary life—the shimmer of its billions, their commerce and politics—felt to the mind as if it were bursting anew from the shadowtime. The flowing data of secondary sight and audio, the clockwork of traffic management, water purification, weather control, even the preparations of the local military readying for another attack, were like the coursings of some morning stimulant through its body public.
Certainly, there were belated attempts by the Imperials to destroy Alexander. Data shunts and hunter programs were deployed, attempting to erase the influence of the Rix propagation, trying to tear down the self-conscious feedback that now illuminated the planet's infostructure. But the efforts were too late. What the Rix had long understood, and the benighted Imperials could not truly grasp, was that a compound mind is the
natural
state of affairs. As Rixia Henderson herself had theorized in the early days of Amazon, all systems of sufficient complexity tend toward self-organization, self-replication, and finally self-consciousness. All of biological and technological history was, for the Rix, a reflection of this essential law, as inescapable as entropy. Rixia Henderson's philosophy superseded such notions as social progress, the invisible hand of the marketplace, and the zeitgeist—shallow vanities all. The narrative of history itself was nothing more than the working out of the one law: humanity is but the raw material of greater minds. So Alexander, once born, could not be destroyed—unless technological civilization on Legis XV were itself destroyed.
The compound mind breathed deep its existence, surveying the vast energies of its domain. At last, the Rix had come to the Risen Empire, bringing the light of consciousness.
The only sectors of Legis XV that remained dark to Alexander were the gray enclaves, the cities of the dead that dotted the planet. The walking corpses of the Risen Empire eschewed technology and consumerism, so the phone calls and purchases and traffic patterns that informed Alexander's consciousness were missing. There was an appalling absence of bustle and friction from the afterlives of the dead. The needs that underlay technology—to buy and sell, to communicate, to politic and argue—did not exist in the gray enclaves. The risen walked quiet and alone in their necropolis gardens, perfomed simple arts by hand, went on their winding and pointless pilgrimages among the Eighty Worlds, and gave their allegiance to the Emperor. But they had no
struggles,
nothing from which true AI could arise.
Alexander puzzled over this strangely divided culture. The living citizens of the Empire engaged in rampant capitalism in pursuit of exotic pleasures and prestige; the risen were ascetic and detached. The warm participated in a fiercely fragmented, multiparty democracy; the cold univocally worshiped the Emperor. The two societies—one chaotic and vital, the other a static monoculture—not only coexisted, but actually seemed to maintain a productive relationship. Perhaps they each provided a necessary facet of the body politic: change versus stability, conflict versus consensus. But the division was terribly rigid, formed as it was by the barrier of death itself.
The Rix Cult did not recognize hard boundaries, especially between animate and inanimate; Rixwomen (they had disposed of the unnecessary gender) moved freely along the continuum between organic and technological, picking and choosing from the strengths of each. Rix immortality avoided a specific moment of death, preferring the slow transformation of Uprade. And the Rix, of course, worshiped the compound mind, an admixture of human activities mediated by machines, the ultimate blending of flesh and metal, giving rise to Mind.
Alexander mused that this gulf of sensibilities was why Empire and Cult must be forever at war. The staid traditions of the grays were antithetical to compound minds' very existence; the risen stilted competition and activity, vitality and change. The dead had choked the progress of the Empire, and made it poorer ground for the Rix to sow the seeds of their gods.
The mind's thoughts turned to the data it had gleaned from the Child Empress's confidant, the strange device wound into the dead girl. The child was now permanently destroyed by some folly of her Imperial rescuers, but Alexander was still confused about her. The mind found it hard to fathom the confidant's purpose. That was a strange thing in itself. Alexander could reach into any machine, transaction, or message on the planet and grasp it completely, having full access to the world's data reservoirs, the soup of information out of which meaning was constructed. But this one device made no sense; no instruction manuals, schematics, or medical contraindications existed for it, anywhere. It had contained no mass-produced components, and stored its internal data in a unique format. The confidant was devoid of meaning, an itch of absent understanding.