Message-ID: <17250eli$9811170433@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Archived-At: From: voyer@notme.com (voyer) Subject: (Voyer) The Orion Legacy (Part 1) mc nc md mf scifi Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d Reply-To: voyer@notme.com Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-ID: <364fa777.40493950@sos.sos.net> The Orion Legacy Part 1 MF MC NC SCIFI voyer@notme.com Note #1: This story is a fantasy, contains examples of bad science, adult language and situations, and fictional characters doing illegal, immoral and/or impossible things to other fictional characters. If you are under the age of consent in your community, or find such concepts distasteful, or try to do these things in real life, please stop reading now. Permission granted to re-post this story to any on-line medium, provided no fee is charged to view the story, and this disclaimer and the above e-mail address are not removed. Copyright me, 1998. Note #2: This story began its life as a very cheesy scene (I assume you'll recognize it when you see it..) that somehow spun further and further out of control and became something... else. Comments welcome, as always. ****** It was a room, somewhere, one of a million such anonymous rooms scattered down through history. A large metal table dominated its center, standing in a tight, bright, circle of light. The light emanated from a large globe high overhead that floated free of the ceiling and walls. The room stood empty and still until, from a panel near the room's only door, a synthetic voice spoke to nobody, its tones tinged with a trace of syrup: "TACHYON LINK ESTABLISHED. ACTIVATING HOLOFIELD. OPENING CHANNEL M." There was a flickering hiss, and a figure appeared in the shadows at the edge of the table, pixelling quickly but methodically into existence. "TACHYON LINK ESTABLISHED. OPENING CHANNEL O." "TACHYON LINK ESTABLISHED. OPENING CHANNEL N." Two more figures solidified in an identical fashion, seated at evenly-spaced positions. A glance or two was exchanged among them, but no words were spoken. They waited. Abruptly, silently, the heavy door slid open, and a fourth man entered the chamber in a more conventional fashion, his low red shoes noiseless on the thickly-matted floor. A good match for the room, he was bland, anonymous, a figure only seen skulking in shadows in crowded taverns and stimjoints, in the back alleyways of the Strips on a dozen different border worlds. In rooms like this... The door slid shut. A ring of subdued red lights flashed on around its frame as the various privacy fields kicked into place. The newcomer stood in front of the table and smiled at the three waiting men, each of whose physical body sat in a room that orbited another star, or in one case travelled forever between the stars, a chamber of exile in more ways than one... These men, like himself, moved in shadows, although shadows of a... higher quality. He merely lived in the darkness built up by the society that surrounded around him. Men of their calibre cast their own umbras in which to lurk and spin their galaxy-spanning webs, shadows that covered whole landmasses, entire star systems. He wasn't terribly jealous of this fact; these shadows slopped into all sorts of interesting corners, and usually covered much more than their creators originally intended... "Gentlemen. Thank you for coming. So to speak." A bland voice, an ordinary voice, a totally forgettable voice. It had taken him years to cultivate it. "This had better be *good*, Smith." one of the figures at the table growled from behind the pinpoint of a lit weedcigar. A great deal of greenish smoke wafted around him, the groping tendrils abruptly disappearing as they reached the edge of his section of the room's holofield. "Have I ever brought you anything that wasn't, Mr. M?" Unconcerned, Smith set his slim case on the table so that it stood upright before him. As soon as it touched down on the table, the case popped open of its own accord, the cover peeling itself back with the silent, graceful, symmetry of an opening flower. "I will venture to say, however, that what I have to offer today for your consideration... should be even higher than *my* usual standards." "Get on with it." The new voice was, as always, masked behind an electronic distorter, just as the face that went with it wore the usual Delnovian voidmask. Smith had been vaguely tempted, on occasion, to try and ferret out Mr. N's true identity, but had always squashed such thoughts as unproductive. Still, one had to wonder... was it just caution... a personal eccentricity... some well-known personality... a slumming Tribunal member... Considering his height, he might even have been a small Rigellian, but the thought of a member of that species of morally-upright prudes being an outlaw of N's well-established standing was rather amusing... "Of course, Mr. N. Unfortunately, the item I am offering for sale today requires a bit of background history in order to be fully appreciated. May I?" A polite pause. There was no objection. "Thank you." He produced a lazdis from the open case and slipped it into the appropriate slot at his edge of the table, then brushed a few controls with his fingertips. The holoemitters ringed tightly around the lightglobe manipulated the field that had brought them all together, darkening a space above the table and then filling the center of that space with a gruesome figure. This figure began rotating slowly against the blackness. It was a short, scrawny, stooped, greenish humanoid, with bulging red and yellow eyes, and a lipless mouth filled with sharp teeth. Pipe-cleaner limbs ending in splayed hands and feet. Bulging braincase and equally large groin region, both wrapped in a thick sheet of plasteel. "I assume you gentleman recognize this creature?" "It is what is colloquially, and rather inaccurately, known as an Orion Pack Raider. The species' name for itself is... or rather was... quite unpronounceable." Mr. O spoke for the first time, his narrow aesthetic's face displaying. also for the first time, any outward sign of interest in the conversation. O was known as something of gentleman historian and antiquarian in certain quarters, which was one of the reasons his hologram had been invited to this room. He continued in a slightly pedantic tone of voice. "An extremely... unpleasant and disharmonious species. It is believed the race was rendered extinct almost forty standard years ago when their last known stronghold was comet-bombed by a United Earth Defense Force fleet. During the height of their power, some ten years previously, they gave the UEDF quite a... 'run for its dollarbytes,' I believe is the phrase." "Perhaps a bit of an understatement, Mr. O." Smith resumed. "Even now, the general public is quite unaware of just how close the Orions came to winning their little war with the UEDF, and UEDF Central Command has made quite a sustained effort to keep it that way. A man in my position, however, hears things." Noting a shifting in his audience, he smoothly moved on. "One of the things I heard about was the recent discovery of the remains of a Pack heavy battlecruiser in Sector... well, it doesn't really matter what..." "Are you saying there are still Orions running around out there loose?" N broke in. The sizeable figure's electronic burble was as emotionless as always, but Smith somehow knew he was excited. "No, no, Mr. N. Calm yourself. The wreck was over forty years old. The vessel had evidently been involved in a fire- fight with UEDF ships, and come out rather decisively on the losing side. Somehow, it escaped the battle with a Tachyon Jump, but was mortally crippled, and ended up... ah... crashing. It was the flagship of a Pack known as the... Gee-Fagcak? I'm probably mispronouncing it. As Mr. O has already pointed out, the Orion language was hideously complicated, and each Pack spoke a different dialect. In any event, the team that located and scavenged this ship managed to salvage part of its central datacore. Most of what was found on the datacore would only be of interest to... er. Ahem. ...would be of great interest to historians. Forgive me, Mr. O." O nodded, waved his hand in a dismissive fashion. M spoke: "Fine. You can sell O here his Orion T-Drive maintenance schedules, or whatever the fark the little vomiters stored on their datacores. Why did you invite the rest of us here?" "I said MOST of the data, Mr. M. Just before their ship met with an unfortunate accident, the recovery team recovered one tiny tidbit of information that would be of great interest to *many* parties. It may, in fact, explain, in part, why the Orions were able to do so well against the UEDF for so long." He spun out a moment of hesitation, unable to resist the dramatic touch. "It appears that the Orions had... may have had... spies working for them within the UEDF itself." There was a long silence at the table. Finally M spoke. Smith noted clinically that even he sounded slightly aghast. "Humans worked for those things? After what they did..." O spoke, a trifle sadly. "Corruption is infinite. Everyone has their price, my dear M. You yourself have proven it time and time again. In more ways then one, if certain stories are to be believed." "But they wanted to kill every last human in existence. What they did to people they captured...." O again: "It is my understanding that the Orions desired to kill every last human *male*. Their plans for the feminine half of humanity were, as indicated by my regrettably limited research in this area... a great deal more unpleasant. The exact nature of these plans is another fact that the UEDF has seen fit to conceal from the majority of society, and I find myself in agreement with this decision. The Packs' notion of... sexuality... may be... unique.. in the annals of recorded history." He picked his way through this last sentence like a man working his way across a razorvine field during the budding season. "In other words, O, they were a bunch of farking perverted-" N cut in, his electronic squeal slicing through the other's conversation: "To put this discussion back on track, I agree with M." He pointed emphatically with his clunky metal gauntlet. "No human in their right mind would work for the Orions. And even if they did, the psiscans administered by the UEDF's Internal Security Division, even forty years ago, would root even the slightest hint of treachery." "Exactly, Mr. N. " Smith rubbed his hands, the gesture of a professional admiring the deft handiwork of a fellow expert in his field. "No human in their right mind *did* work for the Orions. And any spies would have passed the standard loyalty tests of the day with flying colors. It seems that the Orions had achieved, or more than likely, considering what little we know even now of the species' history, stolen, previously unsuspected levels of ingenuity in the field of... behavior modification." There was another long pause. Finally O spoke, the voice of a poker player finally calling on the man on the other side of the enormous stack of chips to spread his cards. "What exactly, Mr. Smith, was on that datacore?" Smith tapped a control. The picture above them changed, showing now the same view no matter from what direction it was viewed. A sinister-looking green chamber. Orions stood in frozen positions around the room's edge, in the middle of preforming various incomprehensible tasks. In the center of the chamber was a large, purple-colored tube. "It would seem that the Orions constantly recorded what happened on board their ships, searching much like the UEDF's own Internal Security Division, I imagine, for treason and inefficiency. They also recorded... their sexual exploits. As Mr. O has again pointed out, they were rather fixated on this particular point, even more so than the most... er... driven of humans. This is a recording from... well... maybe you'd better just watch. I've taken the liberty of punching in the usual semantic overlay on the dialogue..." Smith started the recording and fell silent. * * * The two thin creatures jerked into the high-ceilinged chamber deep in the bowels of what appeared to be a spaceship. They jabbered softly and gesticulated, their skinny arms glistening in the dim green lights. Others of their kind worked hurriedly in the darkness at the edge of the room. In the center of the melted, blurred, space stood a tall, transparent tube. Inside the tube, a multitude of thick, bruise-colored, strands swirled up from the deck below, half-tentacle, half-vapor. They held up in their clammy grasp a naked human female. She hung limply in midair, limbs akimbo, her small cloud of jet-black hair twisting in the flowing color. Her thick lashes fluttered spasmodically, half-closed, her full lips frozen somewhere between a smile and a scream. A throbbing strand of purple easily penetrated deep between her strong, twitching, legs. In and out, in and out, deeper and deeper into her body with every thrust... a half-dozen smaller coils slid greedily and endlessly around her large, firm breasts, fingering her nipples. Others held her aloft, wrapped tightly around her legs and arms. The two small beings stood silently, their goggling red and yellow eyes watching her body twitch and spasm for several long seconds. Then the taller of the newcomers flashed a black tongue across a narrow lipless mouth, and spoke loudly enough for the surveillance microphones, or their Orion equivalent, to have recorded him clearly. "Is she... prepared?" Smith's overlay flickered through and around his words, imparting meaning without replacing the actual sounds. It also sent out near-subliminal flashes of meaning about the scene itself; for instance, the speaker was labelled: PACK-LEADER. One of the peripheral figures (CHIEF BEAST-TAMER) immediately smarmed his way across the spotlessly sterilized deckplates to where the Pack-Leader stood. "Thoroughly, oh Terrible One. We apologize again for the unconscionable delay, we, none of us, are not worthy to lick the vomit off of our leader's boots, but her will was one of the strongest we have yet encount..." The Pack-Leader irritably waved him to silence with a hand the size and shape of half of a crumpled umbrella. "Yes, yes. All of what you say is true. Perhaps the Pack will punish you someday, in the event a more efficient Beast-Tamer is found to take your place. Begin." "Yes, thank you, your Worshipfulness." The underling reverse-grovelled to where his team hovered, and began snapping out orders. There was a frantic scramble to obey. The purple strands flickered, began to shift, withdrawing reluctantly from their captive and lowering her gently to the ground. The last to pull free, with an ugly slurping sound, was the massive central vapor that had speared her. In moments, the tube was clear, each of the long, mindless, rapists caged back in its cramped, reinforced, holding pen, waiting eagerly, hungrily for the next victim. The tube abruptly cracked into four neat segments, the previously-invisible divisions running up and down the object's length. The four pieces slid away from each other with an audible 'clunk', and then swiftly lowered themselves out of sight beneath the deck. The tube's top remained floating overhead, casting a pale, sickly, yellow light down on the women who stood beneath, unmoving. Her eyes remained closed, her hands now dangled limply at her sides, her chin resting on her chest. Her hair was sticky and tangled, her body still coated with the slimy residue left by the strands. Her chest rose and fell, evenly. Occasionally, a drip of slime slithered off her and fell to the padded floor of the tube. The Beast-Tamer spoke, hesitantly: "Her activation phrase is The holoemitter fuzzed and hissed, sound and picture vanishing for a moment in a white spray. , Oh Mighty One. As always, only your voice will trigger her." The Pack-Leader's bulging eyes narrowed to amazingly thin yellow slits. He smiled, showing, as with the earlier hologram, overlapping rows of sharp teeth. " fuzzhiss ." The woman's head rose, and her eyes snapped open. While still composed of an iris, and pupil, and cornea, they were not human eyes. Not enough light was reflected back out- at the very center was a point of endless, absolute, blackness. Her stance was wrong, head too far forward, her arms bent unnaturally.. "Who are you?" The Pack-Leader's voice was cold, dead, gloating. "I have no name. I am the property of the glorious Pack G'Fgcac. I exist only as an extension of the will of the mighty Pack G'Fgcac. My sole purpose is to expand the power and the glory of the Pack, and thus that of all Packs everywhere. Hail the Pack." The dripping, squirming Orion phrases somehow flowed effortlessly from her lips. Her dark violet eyes burned with absolute fanaticism. "And enemies of the Pack?" "All enemies of the Pack must be *destroyed*." She hissed the last word. Seeing her expression, the (SUB PACK- LEADER) took an involuntary step backwards. Next to him, the Pack-Leader smiled, wider than before "Excellent. Her dedication to Earth must have been truly impressive. It is almost a shame we were not destined to meet in battle. Beast-Tamer! What is her spy activation phrase?" " squawkscratch , Exalted One." " squawkscratch ." The woman blinked for a long moment. When her eyes opened, they were human. Her stance shifted, and she stood at military attention. "Who are you?" "Sir! Lieutenant Marla St. Clair, United Earth Space Marines, UE Sharehold Number 1253-U5-98001, Sir!" She was now speaking Human Global Standard, and the overlay's translation faded away when she spoke "And what is your mission, Lieutenant?" Overlay. "Sir! To protect and defend the citizens of United Earth against all threats, external and internal, Sir!" "And your specific mission?" "Sir! To defend against incursions by Orion Pack Raiders into Earth space, Sir!" "And what is your *personal* opinion of Pack Raiders, Lieutenant Marla St. Clair?" Her eyes narrowed to icy slits, but she remained stiffly erect, hands straight at her sides. "They're vermin, Sir! They need to be hunted down and annihilated, every last one of them! They live only to kidnap females of other species and make them into sex slaves! We must.." "Enough, Lieutenant. Tell me, where are you at this moment?" "Sir? I'm.." She stopped and looked around for the first time. Her eyes widened in fear, which almost instantly turned to anger. "Oh, my God. Orions... You little..." " fuzzhiss ." The property stood awaiting further orders, her eyes dead and burning. The Pack-Leader licked his non-lips again. "I'm sorely tempted to keep this one, Nidgd. But our Oracle has spoken to me from His darkness, and the Pack shall heed His words. The Past Ones have placed her in the claws the Pack as one of their great tests. And it is a test that I will pass. She will be of much more use to the Pack as our spy in the Earth's Space Marines. With the extra ambition and talents we have programmed into her, she should rise quickly in their ranks." "When Earth and its armies lie broken at the feet of the Pack-Leaders and the Past Ones, great leader, you can have a dozen, a hundred, like her, and better." The Sub Pack- Leader paused, consulted the read-out clinging damply to his wrist. "...And, in the meantime, the.. former... Lt. St. Clair is not due back from her unstructured time for another.." he paused again, salaciously, "..six days. Surely even the Past Ones, and their representative, will allow their loyal servant a... small reward." "Mmmm..." At a specific touch, the Pack-Leader's metal codpiece slid apart, and his massive, ridged, member bulged out into the light, squirming and glistening. "Come here, property, and perform your function." The thing now inhabiting a woman's mind and body stepped off the platform, and crossed the room, smiling, but only with its mouth. The other pack members quickly crowded around, at a respectful distance, to watch. Perhaps the Pack Leader would be generous, and share his property once he was through with it... * * * Smith froze the display, thought better of it, and turned it off all together. He spoke without emotion. "Six Orion days were about four Earth Standard. Every minute of those next four days is recorded on the datacore. It's not particularly pleasant to watch, and not relevant to our discussion." "Marla St. Clair." Something peeped inside the case on the table. Smith glanced down for a moment, continued in a carefully nonchalant tone. "Yes, gentlemen. Marla St. Clair. Former UEDF Space Marine Brigadier General Marla St. Clair. UE Senator Marla St. Clair. And, if the current psipolls are any indication, the next President of United Earth. You will have no doubt noted that certain words have been excised from this holofootage. Those words, gentlemen, is what is for sale in this room today. Those words, and total, absolute, control of Marla Louise St. Clair." * * * There was another short, stunned, pause, but the individuals around the table recovered quickly. All of them had seen, ordered, done worse things in their lives. "You have proof that this recording is genuine?" O was the first to speak. "Senator St. Clair's political opponents, particularly Ingersoll and his vile little Reconstructionists, would not hesitate for an instant to fake such a scene, if they felt they could get away with it, since it would of course destroy her career if it were to become public, and was believed to be real." "I'm deeply hurt that you would think of such a thing, Mr. O. My reputation..." "The Corporate Councils back the Reconstructionists, Mr. Smith. They have very deep pockets, and a burning desire to reclaim what they feel the founders of the UE stole from them." O parried blandly. "It has been my personal experience that money, when applied in sufficient quantities, offers a wonderful salve when one's... reputation... has been injured." "I have in my possession the remains of the original Orion datacore from which this recording was taken. It can of course be tested for authenticity by the purchaser." "Not good enough, Smith." M snapped. "*If* this is the real goods, then whoever gets it will pay through the farking nose. Fair enough. But until we have proof that this isn't some Reconstructionist scheme to use us to do their vomit work, you either give us something better, or.." "Or?" "...Or you can expect a significant reduction in your fee. Destroying the illustrious senator's career, while... an interesting notion in certain respects... is not worth a fraction of the price of controlling her." O finished. He glanced at something or someone outside of the range of the holofield at his end of the meeting, and frowned slightly. Shook his head. "I see. And Mr. N?" He looked at the dark, blank-faced figure who sat silently, inscrutably. "Do you agree with this sentiment?" The armored giant remained motionless a moment longer, then nodded, once, silently, his mask shimmering. Smith sighed in an exaggerated fashion, then clasped his hands in a purposeful manner. "Very well. As I see it, there is only one way that we can prove to your satisfaction that what I offer is on a true vector. It is risky, and rather complicated, but with your gentlemen's resources and connections, I think..." "If one did not know better, Mr. Smith, one would suspect that you were prepared all along for our skepticism, and that your previous protestations were a dishonorable attempt to reduce your expenses." "I..." Smith again broke off and looked down as something new beeped in the depths of his case, with a greater sense of urgency than before. He silently studied whatever had made the noise and frowned. "I see again. Unfortunately, gentlemen, it appears that we will have to reconvene this meeting at a later date." He looked up, his face hard. "And it also appears that one of you will not be present at that meeting. This is of course regrettable, but I have standards to maintain." He pulled the lazdis out of the slot, and casually crushed it in his hand. The silvery slip crumbled to powder, which began to turn to smoke and drift away as Smith rubbed it out of his fingers. He tapped the top of his case, which smoothly closed up. "I will be in touch, gentlemen. Good day." He and the case left the room, moving quickly but confidently. Somewhere off in the distance, something began to wail, a noise that fell almost instantly into the general category of 'siren.' The sound began to grow louder, as if others were kicking in as well. The three at the table exchanged a final set of glances, and disappeared from the room, almost simultaneously. "CHANNELS O, M AND N TERMINATED. TACHYON LINKS DISCONTINUED. HOLOFIELD DEACTIVATED. THANK YOU FOR USING 'MOONBEAM' TACHYON HOLO-CONFERENCING SERVICES. HAVE A PRODUCTIVE DAY." * * * M turned thoughtfully in the middle of the spherical chamber, the green smoke twirling around his painfully thin body and streaming slowly off his dangling, useless, legs. (Apart from his coloration, and his shrivelled hands and feet, his resemblance to an Orion was actually quite pronounced. His eyes even bulged in the same way.) He took a last, long, puff of weedgar and then weakly flicked the butt away from him, his fingertips pointed and sparkling. From the (figurative) corner of the room, something long, thin and grey lashed out through the shifting micro-gravity fields, neatly hooked the discarded object with a set of delicately nailed finger-tendrils, and reeled it in. Compared to the purple monstrosities that M had just been watching with his T-beam relay, the grasping tentacle looked almost cuddly. On the other hand, the weedgar remnant, still smoldering, was flipped down into a circular mouth lined with interlocking teeth that made an Orion's smile seem actually pleasant and subdued. Those teeth went to work, and the tentacle retracted to rest. M turned again, so that his oddly mild blue eyes passed over some of the multitude of active holoscreens that lined the 'walls' of the room, blaring color. A shot of a seemingly endless field of weedleaf, meticulously tended by a roboharvester under a sky that was tinged an unpleasant orange-red color. A corporate duelling field with robot hovertanks blasting one another into smoking rubble. A small dark-haired man 'wearing' nothing but a grin and a crudely-chromapainted sign reading "LivE from NeW tokYo". A scene from the popular interactive holosim soapera 'Ring Around The Sky.' Finally, a screen that showed two large semi-transparent Zill, both with the usual four arms and clusters of glowing green eyes, engaged in an activity that resembled a cross between a ballet and a chainsaw duel. M stopped here. If he had wanted, none of this was really necessary, technologically speaking. He could have had a single biocircuitry implant installed in his skull, and be able to flip through all of these channels, and more, right inside his head. But data can flow both ways in such an arrangement, and he was not a man to take chances. (Moonbeam, in fact, made its dollarbytes with its technologically-outdated holo- confrencing equipment, by specifically catering to individuals like M.) His mind and the sea of interstellar data remained separate, and, further, he remained locked in the damaged body he had been born with, not for a moment trusting the Nanosurgeon's Guild enough to allow any of its members to inject their microscopic healing robots into his wasted frame. He wiggled his fingers at the Zills' screen in a seemingly vague fashion. The scene abruptly shifted, zooming in close on a grim, bald human, his face and body covered with scars, biocircuitry inserts, and tattoos. The tattoos moved and flickered oddly in the light of the transmission, giving the man the distinct appearance of having maggots crawl over large portions of his skin. His silvery cybereyes looked up from whatever he was working on, and he rumbled: "Yeah, Boss?" M lolled his enormous head (almost as bald as the man on the screen's, but not as a fashion statement...) so that it was looking at yet another nearby display, filled with words, numbers, and other, less identifiable, symbols. He silently watched the data flow, layer on layer. A phrase lit up in red. His weak neck rotated back. "Jerves. What do we have on Sirius Station 3 in the way of negotiation teams?" As witnessed in his conversation with Smith, his voice was surprisingly forceful, deep and focused. It seemed impossible that his body could hold and use that voice without exploding. The tattooed man glanced sideways for a moment, not looking at a screen but pulling up the needed information from its storage place somewhere inside of himself. M did not use such things, but he had no objection to his employees doing so. "Esherick and his bunch, Boss. N'Gota, although he's sorta busy right now with that merger with..." "Yeah, yeah. Never mind. Esherick will do." "Who's the target, Boss?" M sighed and looked 'upward.' Another flexing of metal fingertips, more data flowing, and another sideways glance from Jerves. The underling's eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed. The shifty caution showed, even through the lack of pupils. "You sure, Boss? You know he's done us right in the.." He broke off upon seeing M's expression. "I'll get right onnit, Boss." "You do that." M waved a fragile hand one last time, and broke the connection. The Zills resumed their activity. He clicked his fingertips in a impatient fashion, and something long, thin and grey darted towards him, holding a new, lit, weedgar. M took the offering, and spun once again, now looking at another, much larger, field of data, bright and multicolored and tightly-bunched, masses of dollarbytes being lost and made. Lives, fortunes, empires, rising and falling in the sea of raw information. The self-stranded castaway stared out across that sea, his fetus of a body curled up in the womb he had caused to be hollowed out of rock, and set adrift among the mingled stars and tachyons... * * * There was a melodic buzzing, and the thin, prim-looking woman looked up from her Spartan desk, in the middle of her broom-closet of a room. She delicately pushed her wide glasses back up on the bridge of her narrow nose, their deeply mirrored surfaces hiding her eyes. As well as the tightly-packed masses of biocircuitry that lurked inside the lenses. "Yes, sir?" A sardonic, cultured, voice spoke out of the thin air near one of the blank walls. "Ah, Miss Thurnton. It would appear that the game is, as they say, afoot. You've confirmed the target's location?" Miss Thurnton looked down at the blank table before her, seeing something that wasn't there. Stroked a long, pointed, fingernail across a few centimeters of polished wood in an almost sensuous fashion. Returned her sparkling gaze to the empty place on the wall. "Yes, sir. About three kilometers to the east of our present location, just as you suspected." A mild sigh. "Some individuals are not nearly as clever as they think they are. Give our friend the needed data, and tell him that he and his associates may begin." "At once, sir." The woman flashed a feral smile and again outlined the woodgrain with her darting fingers. * * * The figure in the Voidmask broke the holoconnection, and the 'table' he had been sitting at splintered away to nothing, except for a small curved piece directly in front of him. A short phrase blinked redly in the space that remained: "Sirius Station 3. Module 4. Section 35a. Block 231." He slipped a finger of his gauntlet through a sideways groove in the mask's control unit, which was mounted on his suit's chest. The featureless, eye-watering, surface of the mask began to blotch and crumble, melting away until only a framework of thin metal bars remained. Another groove set below the first was navigated, and the arm twitched oddly, sank down, came to rest on the arm of the heavy chair in which the figure sat. The blonde woman behind the bars waited impassively as the chair started to rotate. The bulky suit opened like a giant black clamshell; the bars of the Voidmask sliding apart, the chest and legs opening so she could extract herself from within its interior. She uncrossed her slender but muscular arms from in front of her well-formed body. The jelly-like cyberganglic nodes that lined the inside of the suit made a wet sticky noise as she pulled her bare neck and shoulders free of them. Wearing only a silvery, single-piece garment that clung tightly to the slender contours of her body, she rose from the cracked-open remains of her disguise. Something peeped in the control panel, and a lazdis popped up from a slot. She took the slip, and left the small room on bare feet, her eyes cold and grim. Down a bare plasteel corridor two or three steps, and into another room, much like the one she had just vacated. The door closed behind her, and lights almost identical to the ones in the recently vacated conference room flashed on around its frame. The woman slid into a more normal chair, and powered up another communication unit by offering up a small sample of her DNA as a sacrifice. The device made a discrete gong sound, and she put the lazdis into a slot much like the one from which it had just been extracted. There was whirring silence for a moment, and then a relentlessly flat computer voice spoke: "TACHYON CHANNEL OPENED. CHANNEL CONFIRMED. CHANNEL SECURED." More silence, followed by: "TRANSMISSION COMPLETE. CHANNEL CLOSED. PLEASE STAND BY." The lazdis disintegrated, and the resulting smoke was efficiently sucked away. Not following the voice's instructions, she rose again to her feet, and left the room, the lights winking off as the door slid open. The bathroom, and its utilitarian vibrashower, were just down the hall, and it didn't take her long to peel off the silvery garment, unpin her hair and let it flow down her back, revealing the thin electric-green strand of permadye that streaked away from each temple. Entering the shower's field, she scrubbed away the final remnants of the C-gang slime from her skin. Cleansed, she returned to the second communication room, wearing a austere black bathrobe, again sealing herself inside. She seated herself once more, and waited. While true waiting is not something that comes naturally to most humans, a multitude of distractions creeping into the body and monkey-mind, it can be taught. She had always been a good student. Finally, the device again sprang to life, flashing lights and peeping in a peremptory manner. Once again, she stroked her fingertip across the DNA verifier. The device did not establish any sort of hologrammatic presence, or even a voice. After a moment, there another short tone. In reply to this, she slid her splayed-out fingers into a set of slots before her. More tiny C-gangs slithered forward, gently linked up with the nerve endings in her fingertips. The basic resemblance of this to what she had just witnessed on her holoscreen did not escape her. The woman in the chair, like M, did not have a biocircuitry implant hooked into her mind, and her reason was basically the same. Cut off from the cyberworld of humanity's collected data, she was dropped back a step on the technological ladder, C-Gangs only able to touch her nerves, not her thoughts. But those thoughts were thus one step back as well, and that was the important thing. She twitched the tips of her fingers in a certain way, following a certain pattern, and impulses flew back and forth. Lights flashed. Noises softly sighed and pinged and hummed. Thoughts were exchanged at almost a telepathic level. Emphasis on the almost. The conversation was very short and, after translation, ran roughly along these lines: -This is Central Command. Identify.- -Captain Phelps reporting in.- Short pause. -Identity confirmed. Channel secured. Go ahead Phelps.- -Holofootage received?- -Confirmed.- -Shall N attempt to re-contact Smith?- -Unnecessary. No longer your problem. Counter-efforts already underway.- -Understood. Any further orders?- -No. Proceed with standard duties.- Another pause. - Unless Smith re-contacts N. If so, buy the datacore. Price no object.- -Understood.- -Central out.- -Phelps out.- Captain Angelica Phelps extracted her fingers from the C- gangs' grip, powered down the communicator, and leaned back in the chair, still stretching the last of the kinks out her body. ISD Central Command had known. She of course hadn't asked, and of course they hadn't told her, but long experience had taught her how to read the nuances and pauses of the tone code quite well. They had already known, probably not about Senator St. Clair specifically, but about the Orions and their spies. (Plural. Presumably there had been others, since it appeared from what Smith said that the then-Lieutenant St. Clair had never gotten the chance to report back to her programmers before her Orion captors were all killed.) While the prompt vibrashower hadn't been just to remove the *physical* filth Smith's scene had left her with, she wasn't terribly surprised. It was well-known in UEDF circles that, during the war, the Orions had occasionally shown sudden bursts of either stunning good luck or brilliant strategic foresight, abruptly turning up where they could do the most damage. The thought of someone actually *spying* for the little monsters hadn't occurred to most people, including herself. But the ISD trained whole regiments of personnel, programmed bank after bank of biocomputers, to think of things that didn't occur to most people; some of them right now would be trying to decide what 'N', a fictitious man who ran a real crime empire, would do next. It was just part of her duties, at the moment, to do N's 'public appearances', when they were required. Maybe it would have been easier and more efficient to have him operate out of a central location, but tachyon links could be traced, and jumping him around to the four corners of UE space gave him that much more added mystique. Angelica knew that there were at least four other people who took turns being N, although she had no idea where they currently were, or even what their names were. The use of N had reeled in more lawbreakers and smashed more interstellar crime-rings than two dozen regular investigations combined, and the twisted genius (long retired now) who had come up with the idea of creating him was still something of a demigod in Internal Security... She went to the bedroom at the other end of the cramped, one-person, bunker, and began to get dressed, pulling on underwear, rugged pants and blouse, gloves, red syntholeather boots, wide-brimmed hat. She finished by concealing various clandestine items around her person, items which all appeared even to fairly careful scrutiny to be more common, less lethal, objects. They lay in neat rows on a nearby tray, awaiting her grasp. As she did these things, she wondered idly exactly what 'counterefforts' were underway. It probably wouldn't be anything remotely pleasant. Presumably they'd try to get to Smith on Sirius S-3 before whoever had tripped the station alarm did. Failing that...? She shrugged a trifle uncomfortably, and left to work her usual contacts down by the city's waterfront. (If you could fairly call the acidic soup that filled Tarquain VI's shallow seas 'water'...) There were reports of another new batch of clandestine razorvine nurseries being set up in the hinterlands near Bridgehead City, and it was something that had to be investigated. * * * "All right, Smith, that's far 'nough." Smith turned away from the doorlock he was cracking. Somewhere in the distance, the sirens still wailed, signifying total station lockdown, sealing all doors between Modules and even Sections while the station security personnel (human and otherwise) searched for a dangerous, wanted, fugitive. At least in theory. Four or five figures stood in the pulsing light of the corridor-cum-alleyway behind him, arriving on the scene with the same suddenness as the three crimelords' holograms in the Moonbeam meeting room. Something hinted, however, that the individuals now present were quite solid. Smith smiled blandly. "Yes? Can I help you, gentlemen?" "Goin' the meetin' in person was crack-brained, Smith, but even you wouldn't be dreebish enough to carry it around withya. So you're gonna to take us to it. Right farkin' now. Or we get tah do it the fun way." The speaker smiled, showing a set of teeth blackened by choco addiction. There was a flicker among the members of the group, and various lethal-looking items were unsheathed. Some were held in loose but professional grips, others floated smoothly up into the air under their own power, humming in an ominous fashion. Smith looked at them as the station lights flashed, his brown eyes rapidly calculating the odd... probabilities.. costs... A voice abruptly spoke up inside his mind, leading to a conversation that was much like Captain Phelp's communications with UEDF-ISD Central Command, only shorter in real-time duration and in even greater need of interpretation... -Bad news, Smith. You've just become redundant.- -Oh?- -The charming individual with the beady eyes and sloping forehead is, surprisingly perhaps, quite right. I *wouldn't* have been... ah... 'dreebish' enough to take the activation codes to the meeting. Since I've seen the codes, that would include taking them to the meeting inside my brain. Ergo, you're not Smith at all. Just an imperfect copy.- -Oh. I see. I'm some kind of vatdroid?- -Basically. With one or two special modifications. Me, for example.- -And who *are* you, exactly?- -I'm you, of course. Well, part of you. To cut a long story short, the two of us were packed into the same skull, and given just enough of Mr. Smith's DNA, talents, memories and personality to ensure a successful negotiation. I was sent along... to keep an eye on you. And to conceal certain facts that you didn't really need to know.- -You call this a successful negotiation? Someone's trying to double-cross you. Me. Us. Mr. Smith.- -My dear fellow, I'd have been deeply disappointed if they hadn't. After all, you *did* notice how carefully no one mentioned what was *really* for sale in that room, didn't you?- -I don't understand. I was selling Marla St. Clair.- -Ah yes. Of *course* you were.- (If the voice had come equipped with a hand, it would have absently patted Smith on the head as it said this.) -I must admit though, I expected them to at least wait for a little proof of authenticity before moving in for the kill. It appears Mr. M has decided to jump the gun. Only he would be so gauche as to sic station security *and* this bunch on us. A full report of the situation has already been T-beamed our... ah... heh... father. That duty complete, I now have only one more to preform: to point out to our dear Mr. M the error in his ways. You know what to do now.- -You know, this sucks. This sucks big hairy Zill balls.- -Zills have neither hair nor balls, but otherwise that is an excellent summary of the situation. Remember, Mr. Smith, in the most literal of senses, we are in this together. To the bitter end.- The 'droid surfaced from this internal dialogue, and again smiled at the man who had just spoken. "Mr. Smith sends his regards." A couple of the marginally brighter members of the goon squad realized what this meant and opened fire, but it was of course far too late. The 'droid simultaneously learned about and clicked a switch buried down inside his chest, shielded by special vat-grown tissue so that the ordinary street-level scanners, at least, couldn't detect it. The blast splattered debris across and through three cubic Blocks of the station. Even with total station lockdown already in effect, it took almost two days to stave off hull rupture of the effected Module. The station operation crew finally had to drain off the atmosphere to put out all of the fires. (end part 1) -- +----------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `--------------+ | | | | Archive site +----------------------+--------------------+ Newsgroup FAQ | ----