The Dying Light (3 page)

The large workroom was designed as an open surgery, with several adjoining chambers available for procedures requiring more sterile environments. Four long tables, uncomfortably like mortuary slabs, awaited patients in states of perpetual readiness, while close by hung numerous multi-jointed waldoes, medical scanners and replacement parts. Along one wall, screens could project views of any operations under way, or retrieve from memory similar situations to compare prognoses. Another wall boasted three holographic “cybercorpses”—human bodies composed entirely of replacement parts, from carbon-fiber bones to synthetic skin—with no single part repeated in any of the “bodies.” Designed for reference, the cybercorpses rotated once every twenty seconds, as though perforating a macabre pirouette. When Roche stepped farther into the room to look for Haid, six glassy, empty eyes seemed to follow her for a moment, then drifted away.

She found him in one of the auxiliary chambers, hardwired into a simulation that was teaching him to use his new support biomesh. After their escape from Sciacca’s World, an immediate priority had been to equip Haid with a body at least approximating the Pristine. Time had been against them, however. The surgery alone required for a total rebuild would have taken several weeks; recovery and readjustment at least the same again. Haid had opted instead for a basic overhaul: an eye to replace his empty socket, the support biomesh to compensate for his lack of an arm and to supplement the strength of his legs, plus new interfaces to control the lot.

The installation, undergone piecemeal, had taken seven days. Another five had seen him on his feet for the first time. The remaining seven had been spent in the simulator, retraining his reflexes to respond to new stimuli.

When Roche found him, he was floating in free-fall, twisting about his center of gravity in an ungainly manner. The glossy black mesh of the exoskeleton stood out against the gray of his undersuit, but perfectly matched the sweat-soaked sheen of his midnight skin. Despite years of abuse and layers of scar tissue millimeters thick, Haid still possessed the distinctive coloring of a Montaban native—along with the rugged good looks.

His eyes were uncovered, but Roche could tell that she was invisible to him—along with the rest of the ship. Placing her left hand on a panel flush to the door frame, she synchronized her own implants to the illusion in which he was enmeshed. The vision through her left eye went gray with static for a moment, then cleared.

With his feet anchored by magnetic soles to the hull of a spacecraft, Haid was trying to thread a gossamer-thin guideline through a moving eyelet. He was naked, apart from the biomesh, and very clumsy. The surface beneath his feet moved without warning, making his judgment unreliable, so every action with his new arm had to be carefully considered. In other simulations that Roche had observed, he had run over burning sand while carrying a glass of water, balanced on a narrow ledge with his old arm behind his back, and attempted to imitate the movements of garishly dressed dancers—all with the critical eye of the rehab AI grading every movement.

Roche gave him five minutes before actively interfering. In that time, he came close to tying a loop through the eyelet, but a sudden shift in the surface beneath his feet cost him his grip on the thread, forcing him to start again. His lips moved silently, cursing under his breath.

“Haid.” Roche tried to keep her voice soft, but its incongruity broke the illusion instantly. “Ameidio, can you hear me?”

Haid sighed; his new skeletal arm, with its black mesh skin, sagged. “Yes, Morgan, I hear you.”

“The Box said you weren’t responding, so I thought I’d better check on you myself. Is everything okay?”

Ignoring her concerns, Haid said: “This rehab AI is a sadist. I
swear
this damn hole is getting smaller.” His eyes gazed blankly into the distance, away from her. It wasn’t just the simulation: he was exhausted. “Next time I’ll get it, though. Next time I’ll—”

“Something’s come up,” she interrupted, trying to keep her voice firm and level—a line dragging him back to reality. “We needed you on the bridge.”

“I felt us come out of hyperspace,” he said. “Are we there already?” He looked around him, as though waking from a dream, and frowned, “No, wait. We jumped again just a moment ago, didn’t we? That wasn’t planned.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She outlined the situation as briefly as she could—that Palasian System appeared to have disappeared—not wanting to worry him, but at the same time reinforcing the fact that he hadn’t been there when she
might
have needed him. If the ship had been under attack—

“I would have noticed instantly.” His voice was calm but there was no disguising his indignation. “There would have been sirens, impacts, power fluctuations. Not even a wire-head could sim through something like that.”

“But if you
had
noticed, it would’ve been too late for you to do anything.”

“Like I could do anything, anyway, with
this
.” Haid raised his new arm and flexed it. The movement was smoother than it had been even a day earlier but was still noticeably jerky.

Roche shook her head, even though Haid wouldn’t see the gesture. “Your other arm is fine. And besides, you don’t need coordination to help on the bridge. Not unless we’re boarded—and I hope it’ll never come to that.”

“Likewise.” He let the arm fall to his side. An instant later, the illusion collapsed around them, brought to an end by his mental command. The zero-g field relaxed, eased him slowly to the floor of the auxiliary chamber. His legs became rigid when they touched the floor, held him upright as his full weight returned. “But the fact remains that you need me in full working order—and that means as much deep-training as possible—”

“It also means getting some rest.” She let go of the touch panel and took a step closer. “You look terrible.”

He grimaced. “Thanks a lot.”

“I’m serious. Take a shower, have something to eat and drink. Then meet me as soon as you can to discuss what’s going on—”

A second wave of disorientation rushed through Roche as the
Ana Vereine
returned to real-space. She moved forward as Haid swayed, but he reached out with his new arm and steadied himself.

“See?” He smiled wryly at his own achievement. “Give me another week and I’ll be wrestling clone warriors barehanded.”

“I sincerely hope not,” she said, turning her back on him and walking out of the simulation room.

“Any news on that front?” Haid asked, moving stiffly after her. Picking up a towel from a bench by the door, he wiped the skin of his upper body dry, where the active fabric of his absorbent undersuit was unable to reach.

“None,” she said. “We’re still too far away.”

“Unless the disappearance of the system is a related event.” Haid put the towel aside. “Does anybody know how advanced the Sol Apotheosis Movement was? Maybe they found a way to camouflage an entire system.”

“I doubt it,” she said, although the possibility wasn’t one she had considered. “If they’d possessed that sort of tech, they wouldn’t have been destroyed so easily. They could have camouflaged their base and escaped the siege any time they wanted.”

“Siege?” Haid shook his head. “A simple ‘no’ would have done, Morgan. You know history isn’t my strong point.”

“Nor mine,” she said. “It took me days to find what little there was available. I’ve condensed it into a single file and placed it in the open datapool. You can access it later, if you want.”

“Maybe.” The ship rolled beneath them again. Haid’s oddly mismatched eyes—one much like a monocle covering the entire socket, and the other, the recent addition, a crystal sphere where a normal eye would sit—lifted in surprise to meet hers. “The Box is not wasting any time, is it?”

“It’s found something it doesn’t understand, and doesn’t like it.”

Haid chuckled softly. “So trying to make me feel guilty about not responding is just your way of taking out on me your frustration with
it
.”

Roche smiled in return, ignoring the gibe. “I’m heading back to the bridge,” she said. “When you’re ready, join us there. We could use your input.”

The ex-mercenary nodded as she headed for the door. “At least it looks like we might have something to do, for a change.”

* * *

Haid’s parting comment pursued her after she left the rehab unit. Eighteen days on the run, fearing a COE Intelligence betrayal every step of the way; major surgery, followed by recovery and intense rehabilitation; a destination about which they knew little, except for the fact that it had nearly been destroyed by the deadliest warrior to grace the galaxy in two and a half thousand years—and Haid was complaining about being
bored
?

Roche didn’t need that sort of excitement in her life. In fact, an uninterrupted sleep would have suited her much better.

A familiar mind-touch greeted her as she headed back to the bridge:

Startled by the unexpected intrusion upon her thoughts, Roche missed a step.

The reave’s voice carried with it a faint tinge of grief. Hardly surprising, Roche thought; the girl had had so little time to adjust to the death of her mentor, Veden. As his ward, she had earned the right to recite the ritual leave-taking during the ceremony on Walan Third, but she had declined, both reluctant to appear in public and conscious of time pressing.

Privately, Roche was amazed that the girl thought she could detect anything at all.

said Maii.

Roche walked on, trying to fight the weariness slowing her stride.

observed Maii.

She nodded unnecessarily.

As an accompaniment to her words, Maii sent a brief image of an underwater scene: a coral reef lit by mottled green sunlight with large gray fish lightly brushing against her body. Despite the constant motion, the endless cycle of life and death swirling around her, the mood generated by the image was one of peace and inner calm.

A healing dream, designed to ease the girl’s own path through grief.

Roche hesitated before answering. As uncomfortable as she still was with epsense therapy, she had to admit that the offer was made with the best intentions. That made a flat “no” much harder to pronounce.

she said eventually.

Even though she disliked being away from the heart of the action, the offer was appealing. It could be her last chance for a long while.

A mental smile accompanied her next words:

Roche hurried to the officers’ mess, two levels up from the rehab facility. There she ordered a nondescript breakfast and took a seat at one of the many empty tables filling the room. The dispenser provided her with a good imitation of eggs, cereal, and fruit juice. She forced herself to eat slowly, chewing each bite rather than gulping it down.

Every ten minutes the ship rolled as it moved from one universe to the next, edging closer to the anomaly each time.

She couldn’t help but wonder what the Box was learning along the way, but she refrained from asking for an update. If anything happened, someone would be sure to call her. Until they did, all she had to do was relax.

After a couple more mouthfuls, she realized that she couldn’t relax. There was too much at stake—and too little known about the situation to help her guess at what she had to do.

There was something she
could
do, however. Midway through the small meal, she routed a display through her implants and selected the file she had collated on the Sol Apotheosis Movement from the combined data resources of the Commonwealth of Empires and the Dato Bloc. Somewhere in the file, she hoped, was a clue regarding the technological prowess of her enemy.

Whether she would find anything useful was unlikely, though. The history of the Sol Apotheosis Movement was poorly documented until the time of its destruction. It had been founded early in the 36th millennium, ‘325 EN, by a visionary whose name was no longer recorded. The Movement’s aim had been to achieve Transcendence by means of genetic manipulation and biomodification, rather than by downloading living minds into AI networks, as was usual. By bucking both tradition and common sense, its adherents were ostracized and banned by their native government—also unnamed—so they sought and found an empty system deep in the backwaters of their region of the galaxy. Acquiring the system by the expediency of simply moving in and adopting its name, they devoted their considerable energy to consolidating their position rather than taking their message any farther—for a while.

By ‘836 of the following millennium, they had established trade with the Eckandar Trade Axis which, along with the Commonwealth of Empires, had begun expansion into the area surrounding them. With trade came a new openness, and it wasn’t long before biomodified prophets began to spread through neighboring regions, looking for converts.

Some of these prophets were early versions of the Movement’s crowning—and most deadly—achievement: the Sol Wunderkind, a genetically modified combat soldier with abilities far superior to any known Caste. Word began to spread, and within decades their existence was well-known, as was the threat they represented.