Human, p.7
Human, page 7
part #1 of Humanity Ascendant Series
And they would savage any force sent against them. Sandrak would be able to destroy a single fleet, but the forces sent to do it would be severely weakened and surrounded by hostile fiefs, all of them let off the hook by Sandrak’s attack on imperial guardsmen. He nodded in satisfaction and drained his mug.
All it would take is a few words in the right ears. A few promises and a few threats.
He accessed his assistant’s workstation and asked for his next guest to be sent in.
The door opened and Kuri, one of his dark-operatives, waiting in the outer office, got out of his chair but, before he took a single step, another Quailu rushed into Marduk’s office, the assistant following him in a rage.
The young fellow didn’t go so far as to place hands on the intruder because he was an accredited court diplomat, but he looked as though he’d like to punch him below the third stomach.
“I apologize, My Lord,” the assistant said. “I had no idea he’d do such an un… that he’d rush in like this.” He seemed slightly mollified by Marduk’s mood.
Anger at the representative from Chiron but approval that the assistant had stopped himself from insulting a diplomat .
Marduk waved the assistant out before looking back to his display. There was a three-dimensional newsfeed now hovering over his desk. He hadn’t saved his work…
New anger.
The Chironian seemed to shrink slightly but then he composed himself. “My Lord, I am pleased to announce that we are ready to dissolve our coalition against Mishak, Governor of the Kish system.”
Cosmetic paint on a sack of fresh droppings .
Marduk didn’t need empathic senses to read this fool. He was presenting a dry savannah as a lush paradise. He let his anger reach out.
The Chironian’s gaze darted nervously away and back again several times. He lifted his heels as if to move back but mastered the reflex. He seemed to realize that his position was stronger if he could keep his mouth shut but he didn’t have Marduk’s experience.
“We have managed to negotiate a settlement with our enemy,” he offered. “In doing so, we have spared countless lives on both sides!”
More cosmetics .
Marduk stared right through the fool. The Chironians were supposed to tie up Sandrak’s attention for months while he schemed at the other end of his holdings. Still, if they’d won so quickly, perhaps they still held leverage over their opponents. “What concessions did you win? Have you taken hostages to secure their compliance?”
Having young Mishak in their clutches might work very well although…
Consternation, embarrassment .
The ambassador flapped his hands helplessly. “A ship.”
“A ship?” he asked darkly. “No hostages? Just promises and a ship?”
“No promises, My Lord… just a ship. The ship that carried our delegation to Kish.”
Humiliation, shame.
Marduk came out of his chair and the ambassador took two steps back in the face of the anger that radiated from the imperial chief of staff. “You mean that your people went there, and, though you possess twenty-five times the force of your opponent, you let him take your ship? By Aralu’s divine gonads! Mishak’s broken the code of civilized conduct and you come here pretending otherwise?”
Perhaps he was wrong about Sandrak’s son. He certainly seems to have developed a taste for risk.
“No, sire,” the ambassador insisted desperately, hands reaching out across the desk. “The forms were observed.”
Marduk leaned forward, fists on his desk, the news display coloring his face. “Did the little prick accept on the spot?”
Affirmation .
Then Mishak had used some unexpected weapon. He must have remembered his tutoring sessions at Marduk’s knee. He had something on the Chironians; something big enough to terrify them. Would they be foolish enough to give that secret to this halfwit?
“What does Mishak know that frightens your lord so much?”
Helpless ignorance.
“The coalition will be struck from the imperial roll of conflict,” he grated, waving a hand at the door, “now get out!”
Alone again, he began to pace. This would, of course, change the equations in his plans. Perhaps it was just as well he’d lost his earlier work. He turned back to his desk and re-opened the base map of his targeted region. He had to admit his anger at this turn of events was tempered somewhat by feelings of almost-paternal pride.
Whatever his former student had done, he’d done it well.
The Learning Curve
E th stepped back from the damage control workstation and turned to Kinziru, the master’s mate. Like Eth, he held a warrant rather than a commission. It was the highest rank-plateau open to citizens of the mushkenu class.
In the various Quailu house-forces, the master’s mates were responsible primarily for navigation but also for the training of new crewmen. Kinziru, a mushkenu, could eventually become a master, ranking among the junior officers, though he’d always be at the bottom of that particular ladder unless his master, in this case Mishak, registered a patent of dispensation so he could hold a full commission.
It rarely ended well. A non-noble, cut off from his lower-class familiars and forced to associate with the upper class usually ended up disgracing himself in one way or another.
Kinziru brought up a holo-projection in front of his left eye, calling a halt to the exercise. “So,” he growled, “let’s recap. You’ve managed to isolate the coolant breach in engineering, you’ve stabilized the decaying orbit and you rigged the ship for combat, opening the outer hull shunts and venting the ship before the expanding coolant could blow out half the ship’s belly…”
Eth was no empath, but he could sense a trap in the relatively impassive master’s mate. “Yes, sir.”
Kinziru leaned in slightly. “Where did the volley of missiles strike us? Where exactly?”
Eth frowned, thinking back to the hectic rush of the exercise. “Engineering-6-ventral…” He suddenly shook his head. “Fornication!”
The master’s mate scratched at a long shrapnel scar that ran from his forehead, down across his nasal ridges, all the way to the tip of his chin. “You and your Humans would be the only ones doing any fornicating,” he said calmly. “The computer estimates a ninety-eight percent probability that the modules controlling the hull/suit interlock were knocked out.
“Sure, all our suits closed up as they reacted to the simulated pressure differential, but opening the shunts makes for a very quickly-growing differential, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, sir,” Eth responded miserably.
“And stop calling me ‘sir’, you ape! We both hold warrants. I don’t give a pile of droppings what species you are as long as you don’t get me killed!
“And I might wish myself dead,” he ground on, “after my auditory membranes and eyeballs burst. I’d rather freeze out than sit here in the dark waiting for you to sort out your next step.”
It was the closest Eth had heard to an admission that Humans were better at anything. The Quailu had evolved on the coastal savannahs of their world, rarely venturing to the higher elevations.
Their eyes had very thin corneas. They were fine for normal atmospheric use but vulnerable to any changes in pressure. Likewise, their ears relied on gas diffusion to equalize pressures and didn’t fare well in rapid pressure fluctuation.
He took care to avoid any feelings of satisfaction over this, as Kinziru would have felt it as plainly as if he’d spoken it aloud. He forced himself to focus on his own performance. “I failed to fully assess the damage properly,” he admitted. “I should transmit a suit-close imperative before rigging the hull for combat in a situation like this…”
“Or you could have vented only the affected section,” the master’s mate offered. “With the coolant vaporizing, you’d hardly have done any further damage to the Quailu crewmen caught in there.”
Eth nodded diplomatically. “Of course, we were under attack at the time. The next salvo might have breached a central corridor or a hangar bay. The resulting explosive venting would have blown valuable crew out through the breach.”
Kinziru grunted.
Eth had screwed up; there was no denying it, but so had the master’s mate in suggesting a course of action more in keeping with a peacetime accident than a hostile attack.
“Let’s go review your people before we stand down from the drill.” He waved Eth toward the aft hatch.
Eth shuddered at the sight of a PLC team in the corridor. They were working out the kinks that accompany any ship’s regrowth but it disturbed him to know they were working aboard a ship that might suddenly separate into its components. He didn’t like being reminded that almost all of this heavy cruiser, aside from the warheads and the main power bus, was composed of microscopic robots.
They made the rounds, med bay, weapons; Humans were dispersed throughout the ship and many were standing by to fight fires or repair critical systems. The hatch to Engineering-6-v snapped open in front of them with a speed that Eth still wasn’t quite used to. The hatches on the old Coronado were far more leisurely, but then she hadn’t been built with combat in mind.
The engineering team, six Quailu and four Humans, were sitting on the deck next to the ‘patch’ they’d put on the coolant leak.
“How’d they do?” Kinziru asked the team leader, a petty officer, 1st class.
“Well enough,” the old Quailu allowed. “Though this one here’s full of ideas for a raw hand.” He waved a hand toward Noa.
Eth looked at Kinziru but he looked as though he intended to leave the compartment and call it a day. Noa was looking intently at Eth, clearly itching for a chance to speak.
Eth decided to give him an opening. “What’s on your mind?”
“I’ve already told him to keep it to himself,” the petty officer snapped.
Eth turned to him, slowly enough to get a quick look at the master’s mate. Kinziru looked mildly annoyed, though whether it was at Eth or at his fellow Quailu wasn’t clear.
Screw it. No sense having a rank if you let someone piss on it. “Don’t interrupt my conversations, if you please, petty officer.” He turned back to Noa, who was clearly fighting to suppress a grin. That might work among Humans, but the underlying emotions would cost him after Eth left the compartment.
“Sir,” Noa began pointing a thumb over his shoulder, “that module over there is responsible for closing up suits when we rig for combat. Seeing as it got taken out in the attack, we’d have lost half our crewmates to blindness and hearing loss.”
Eth already knew this and it wasn’t helping him much to hear it again, especially in front of that now-smirking PO. Laugh it up, pal. You’d be unable to hear your own laughter .
“It would be a simple matter to set up a redundant module on the other side of the ship somewhere, so we have a backup.”
Eth forgot all about the PO. “And you can program that?”
“Sure,” Noa shrugged. “We have a copy of the whole ship’s plan up on the bridge in the damage control station, but we also have local copies in each individual module.”
“Sheckter droppings!” the PO exclaimed. “Check your pattern manuals, sonny. They keep the data under strict copyright control. One copy per ship and it’s at damage control where there’s always a record of all activity.”
“And if the main bus takes a hit?” Noa demanded. “You think a damaged module is going to regrow without pattern access?”
“No,” the PO insisted, “it won’t and we’d all be properly dead because there are no local copies on modules.”
“And how much demand will there be for your ship patterns,” Noa asked as he got up and walked over to the interlock unit, “if they’re always on the losing side?” He pressed a control and the front panel slid open. “See this little bump?” he pointed.
The PO got up and walked over, squinting into the opening.
Noa dragged a holo screen into existence between his hands and pulled a search link down from it to the area of the small bump. Seventeen returns appeared and number seven had no label, just a blank space. He selected it and a long string of programmable logic controls began scrolling across the interface.
“Simple risk management, PO,” he said with a mildly apologetic shrug. “The programmers would have seen the possibility of a breach in the connection between the bridge pattern and the rest of the ship. If it can’t regenerate, it gets destroyed, like you said, so they risk hiding local copies for each module, allowing the ship can repair itself. They weigh the risk to their copyrights against the potential gains from having a design that wins more fights.”
“You’ve seen this before?” the master’s mate demanded.
“No, sir, but when you’re a student of programming, you hear a lot of surprising stuff.” Noa closed out the interface. “I’ve met a few ship designers through prog-net that gave me the inside loop on how they really work. In fact, we still have some PLC boys aboard. If we bring this idea to them, they’ll do it for us, nice and legal, and they’ll pass it back to the designers so it can be sold to other customers.”
“Customers we might have to fight,” Kinziru mused. “You can do this yourself and not get found out?”
“Well, sure, sir.” Noa closed the panel. “We’d have to wait until the contractors are gone and we’d need to put together a mining unit, down on the surface, to provide the extra material. If you can get me an old shuttle or something, I can crank out the instructions for a mineral extractor and handle the reconfig from up here.”
“Good, get started on everything you can do while the contractors are still here and I want this done for the whole fleet after they’ve been regrown.” Kinziru jabbed a finger at Noa. “Make sure those nodes are grown somewhere they won’t be noticed if anyone comes aboard for a quick code adjustment or inspection. We don’t want to get caught and we don’t want our advantages sold to our enemies.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Any other ideas about improving our combat effectiveness, you talk it over with the PO and then bring it to me or to Warrant Eth. Understood?”
Eth noticed that the PO had nodded his agreement while Noa was responding. Clearly, the master’s mate had recognized the resistance at play within this department and he’d aimed his message at all present.
“Excellent!” Kinziru rubbed his hands. “I think we can call an end to a very useful drill!”
He started turning away but stopped and looked back at Noa. “What is it?”
“Well, sir, I…” Noa suddenly grinned and held up a hand, asking for a moment. He turned to his supervisor. “PO, as ordered, I should mention to you that I was thinking we could put in a few ladder chutes to speed movement between decks.”
“What the devils is a ladder?” the petty officer asked peevishly.
“They have them on arboreal vessels,” Kinziru said. “Tree-climbers. Useless for Quailu.”
The Quailu weren’t big on climbing. Their leg joints were adapted for migrating across their ancestral plains rather than for life among trees. They tended to look at arboreal tendencies with disdain.
“Are we even keeping these monkeys?” The petty officer asked Kinziru. “Why should we change the ship to accommodate them?”
Noa scrambled atop a large condenser housing. “We monkeys can get into place to do a repair pretty quickly,” he countered. “If I have to follow a long ramp to route around a disabled lift, I might not get there in time. Getting to a repair quickly can mean the difference between life and death in a battle.”
The master’s mate looked slightly disgusted. “It makes enough sense to go ahead with,” he admitted. He started for the forward hatch but wheeled around before he reached it. “Make very sure no outsiders hear of this either,” he ordered. “I don’t want us becoming a laughing stock.”
Eth was having a hard time holding in his resentment. Changes to make the best use of Human crewmen shouldn’t be an embarrassment. When the master’s mate turned left in the main companionway, he turned right, moving quickly to get out of his range.
His path took him to the senior NCO’s mess without his even realizing it. It wasn’t his favorite place on the ship by a long shot. A surgeon’s mate stuck out a heavy foot to trip him up as he steered toward the bar and he shifted his gait enough to step heavily on the fool’s primary tarsal tendon.
The mate hissed with pain. “Watch where you’re going, ape!”
Eth spun around, letting his feelings have full sway and the NCO backed away, hands coming up in the universal gesture for peace. A willingness to do harm could be far more effective than a verbal threat.
He stopped at the bar, the steward, 3rd class, clearly wanting to defy him despite the massive difference in rank.
Eth held up two fingers. “Malted,” he demanded.
Now faced with the direct attention of the Human, the steward suddenly lost interest in defiance. He sliced off a strip of the high-quality alcoholic fat and handed it over.
Eth looked down at it, suddenly remembering the words of the handler who’d accosted him when they’d arrived on board. One moment of stress and here he was, ordering intoxicants. He picked it up, nodding to the steward, and turned for the exit. He passed the surgeon’s mate, handing him the fat. “Next time, I’ll be more careful,” he growled on his way out the hatch.
The Money
M arduk shaded his eyes. The suns, penetrating the glazed ceiling of the throne room, shone directly in his face and the coxswain corrected his lapse of attention at once, turning the barge to place its awnings between the chief of staff and the suns.
They were almost a kilometer from the nearest side of the huge room and several from either end. The floor of the chamber, some two hundred meters below, was a lush green and orange savannah.
Marduk lowered his hand and watched the stately ballet of imperial court politics. Other barges, usually five by ten meters in size, were continuously coalescing into small groups as their diplomatic passengers crossed extendable gangways to confer.
