The Risen Empire (28 page)

The handheld monitor pinged, an order from the compound mind. A schematic on its screen showed the location of the train's medical station. Leaving Rana Harter humming as she worked, the Rix commando braved the corridors of the train again. Having seen no bald women on Legis, H_rd covered her head with the hood of her uniform. She knew that clothing, grooming, and other bodily markers were used to project status and political affiliation even outside the military hierarchy of the Empire; a hairless head might draw attention. How odd. These unRix humans rejected Upgrade, but they still played games with dead cells and bits of cloth and string.

The medical station sprang to life as she entered, its red eyes projecting a lattice of lasers across the newly bald planes of her head. A few seconds after these measurements were taken, the station delivered two needles of specially programmed nanos and another set of orders: the map led to the maglev train's storage hold. H_rd easily wrenched open the lock there, and liberated a tube of repair smartplastic and another of petroleum jelly.

Back in the cabin, she doped the smartplastic with one of the needles, and squeezed it onto the neat pile of Rana Harter's shorn hair. The nanoed plastic writhed for a few minutes, giving off noticeable heat in the small cabin. The mass sent out thin threads that wove themselves among the hair cuttings. These wispy filaments spread out, consuming the mound of repair plastic and creating a spiderweb that covered the entire table. For a while, the web undulated slowly, as if cataloging, planning. Then its motion quickened. The whole mass contracted into a solid dome, a milky hemisphere into which the hairs were drawn. The surface of the plastic seethed with the ends of Rana Harter's red hair, which protruded and dove back into the mound as if ghostly fingers inside were knitting them according to some complex design.

It soothed the commando's mind to watch the elegant and miniature process unfold. Here in the crowded train, she was far too aware of the gross, unRix mass of humanity that surrounded her. She could smell them, hear the phatic chatter of their mouths, feel their handiwork in the bulbous curves and plush textures of this supposedly luxurious cabin, informed by the extravagant concept of privacy. The Rix spacecraft and orbitals that had always been her home were spartan and pure: joyful with the clean lines of functionality, the efficiency of intimately shared spaces, the evident perfection of compound mind design. These unRix humans sought joy in waste, ornamentation, excess.

H_rd knew, of course, that this society's disorder was a necessary evil; the messy inefficiencies of humanity underlay true AI. Alexander emerged from the electronic clutter of this planet, much as H_rd's own thoughts arose from an inefficient tangle of nervous tissue. But she was Rix, and had been raised to see the whole. To be trapped among the horde that underlay Alexander was like descending from the sublime visions of an art museum into the rank smells of an oil-paint factory.

The Rixwoman tore her eyes from the graceful, programmed movements of the plastic, and got back to work.

She ordered Rana Harter to strip. She cut her captive's fingernails and toenails down to the quick, collecting them into a small plastic bag as carefully as evidence of a crime.

Then H_rd unfolded the bed and ordered Rana Harter to lie down. She detached a small grooming unit from the cabin's valet drone, the sort of static electricity and vacuum brush that removes animal hairs from clothing. The commando paused, wondering if she should restrain the woman before proceeding. No. This next step would do as a test of the dopamine regulators' power over her captive.

The hard plastic bristles of the groomer were ideal for defoliating skin. H_rd rubbed the device into Rana Harter's naked stomach in hard, sharp little motions, turning the epidermis there to a ruddy, anguished pink. The vacuum unit greedily consumed the dislocated cells, its fierce little whine drowning out the small, ambivalent noises that came from the woman's mouth as H_rd worked.

Exhausting the skin of the stomach, H_rd moved on to her captive's small breasts, but the woman's movements proved too unruly. H_rd turned Rana Harter over and quarried the broad expanse of her back, and dug hard into the thicker skin of her arms and legs.

Soon she had enough, the vacuum's collector almost full. She tapped its precious cargo onto the table, carefully emptying the collector by wetting her smallest finger with saliva and probing the crannies of the vacuum's mechanism. Then H_rd doped the tube of petroleum jelly with the second needle from the medical station, and squeezed it out onto the skin cells. The admixture moved and grew hot.

Removing her own clothes, H_rd rubbed the petroleum jelly over her own flesh, skipping the flexormetal soles of her feet, the exposed hypercarbon of her knee and shoulder joints, and the metal weave of microwave array on her back. She was a commando, not an intelligence operative, and she would never look human while naked. But hopefully security at the polar base would be too overextended by the horde of new draftees for full physicals. H_rd's path here to the pole had been well disguised, and the Imperials were looking for a single infiltrator on an entire planet. Presumably, her identity would be confirmed by visual comparison with Rana Harter's records, gene-typing a few strands of hair, and reading the genetic material from her human thermal plume. When activated, the nano intelligence now incorporated into the petroleum jelly would sluff Rana Harter's skin cells at a normal human rate, providing constant ambient evidence of her borrowed identity.

If the security forces here demanded a retina scan or some quaint, ancient technique such as fingerprints or dental records, the commando would have to fight her way out in a hurry.

As for the face, Alexander had searched the records of the entire Legis XV military structure for a close match (also selecting for Harter's microastronomy expertise and vulnerability to drugs) and had intervened to transfer the woman here to the pole. Of course, the compound mind could have changed any electronic record to match H_rd's appearance, but human memory was beyond its reach. There was the possibility that someone at the polar station had actually met Rana Harter.

The compound mind was being very cautious. H_rd was its only human asset on the planet, and might have to pass as the woman for several days, even weeks, while she prepared for the transmission. At least, the commando thought, she would no longer be alone. She would need to keep Rana Harter with her to restock her supply of skin cells.

H_rd emptied her captive's kitbag on the floor and sorted through the contents. Most of the woman's civilian clothes wouldn't fit her larger frame, but the baggy militia fatigues covered her adequately.

H_rd glanced at her timestamp. The hairpiece should be done by now.

On the table, the hemisphere of plastic had stilled. She picked it up cautiously, but it had cooled to room temperature. With a quick, snapping motion, the commando turned it inside out, revealing Rana Harter's hair, now inset into the plastic.

She lifted the hairpiece onto her shaved head, where it fit snugly, incorporating the medical station's exact measurements of her skull.

Alexander caused the cabin's window to opaque and then mirror.

The Rixwoman regarded herself.

H_rd experienced a brief dislocation as Rana Harter seemed to stare back at her from the mirrored window, mimicking her movements. The wig worked perfectly; the nanos had even managed to reconstruct Rana Harter's haircut from the mass of hairs. The resemblance was eerie.

The commando heard a stir from the bed.

Her captive rose slowly, a confused look on Rana's face as she touched her own tender skin. The dreamy expression of dopamine overdose sharpened a little as she stood next to H_rd, comparing her own shaved, naked, and raw figure to her impersonator's.

She spoke the crude words of her Imperial dialect.

Not bad,
H_rd's translation software supplied.
But what about your eyes?

The Rixwoman looked in the reflection at her violet, artificial eyes, then at her captive. Rana Harter's eyes were almond.

H_rd blinked.

The woman's eyes sparkled with tears from the relentless abrading of her skin. No amount of drugs could suppress the reactions of the body to pain. The commando shuddered inside. Death, hers or another's, meant little to her measured against the scope of the Rix compound gods. But she wanted nothing of torture. She turned to the woman, lifting her fingers to point at the woman's eyes, requesting words from her software.

The woman backed away, fear defeating the dopamine to mar her beatific expression. She was talking again.

You're going to take my eyes, aren't you?

H_rd grasped Rana Harter's wrist, firmly but softly.

"No," she said. She knew that word.

The look of fear didn't leave the woman's face. H_rd suspended her previous request; asked for new sentences.

"Just eyedrop dye," the Rixwoman said. "The medical station will make it for me when we get closer."

"Oh." The woman stopped trying to pull away.

"Let's talk now. Please," H_rd said.

"Talk?" Rana Harter repeated.

A pause; new sentences delivered.

"I need to learn your language. Better than this. Let us make..." The word was too long, full of slurred sounds.

"Conversation?"

"Yes. I want your conversation, Rana Harter."

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Katherie Hobbes reached her captain's cabin door at 1.88 hours.

She took a moment outside to gather herself, wondering if she was getting old. A few years ago, a missed night of sleep had seemed routine. Now, she'd been awake a mere fourteen hours, barely more than a day, but Hobbes felt her emotions beginning to fray, her mask of calm efficiency growing more brittle by the minute. She only hoped that her intellectual capacity wasn't suffering as well. This would be a disastrous time to start making tactical errors.

It wasn't simply age, though. The last few days had been a rollercoaster of adrenaline, fear, anguish, and relief. The whole crew had been through the wringer, and now they faced ten days at high acceleration, followed by a battle in which they were overmatched. All of Hobbes's simulations put the
Lynx's
chances against the Rix battlecruiser at the raw edge of survivability.

Hobbes doubted for a moment her purpose here at the captain's cabin. Was it just wild emotion that had brought her? Perhaps she should wait until after the battle with the Rix to confront this question. She could simply turn around and head for the command bridge, where the senior staff would be assembling in twelve minutes to present their detailed battle plans. But however confident she and the captain might act for the crew, they both knew that the
Lynx
would probably not survive the battle. If she didn't ask now, she might never know the answer.

Hobbes watched her fingers requesting entry.

That common gesture felt suddenly alien, as it had when she'd first left home to enter the Navy.

When Katherie wanted a door to open on a Utopian world, she'd just ask it. Aircars went where they were told, handphones heard and obeyed. But the military never talked to their tools. Such anthropomorphism was too decadent for the grays—machines were machines. Here on the
Lynx,
opening a door required a gestural sequence, a tongue click, perhaps even a token of some kind; it was all secret handshakes and magic rings. The grays preserved spoken language for use among humans, as if conversing with the ship would somehow bring it to life.

In retaliation, gray machines seldom talked to their masters. Instead, they employed a bewildering conglomeration of signifiers to get their messages across. Back on her Utopian birthworld, a burning house would simply alert its occupants with the words, "Excuse me, but I'm on fire." Navy alarms, however, were composed of unpleasant sounds and flashing lights.

But Katherie had discovered that she had a gift for the codes and icons. Imperial interfaces had a curt efficiency that she enjoyed. Like a jetboard or a hang-glider, they responded instantly to subtle motions. They weren't slowed down by politesse.

And so, the captain's answer came all too quickly.

"Come," he said, his voice raw from lack of sleep.

The door opened to reveal Zai. His tunic was unclasped, its metal ringlets hanging slack, his hair glistening from a recent shower. His eyes were lined with red.

Hobbes was brought up for a moment by the sight of her captain in disarray. In their two subjective years together, she had never seen him at less than parade readiness.

"What is it, Hobbes?" he said. He ran his fingers through his hair and glanced at the tactical stylus in her hand. Captain Zai smiled. "Couldn't wait for the meeting to regale me?"

Her eyes fell shyly as she took a step into the cabin. The door closed behind her.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Captain."

"It's time, anyway. We can't be late for this briefing. 'Work your staff hard, work yourself harder,' aye, Hobbes?"

"Yes, sir. 'And make sure they notice,' " she completed the quote.

He nodded, and began to work the clasps of his heavy woolen uniform. Hobbes watched the fingers of his gloved, artificial had move, momentarily unable to speak.

He pointed to his conference table.

"Ever actually seen sand before?"

The table was covered with a galaxy of bright, hard shapes. Hobbes leaned closer and picked one up. The tiny object was sharp in her hand, with the familiar facets of structured carbon.

"So, this is sand, sir?" Hobbes knew the battle specs on ten different types of sand, but she'd never held the stuff between her fingers.

"Yes, what poets and politicals call
diamonds.
I intend to use quite a bit of it in the battle, Hobbes. We can synthesize a hundred tons or so in the next two weeks."

She nodded. Sandcaster drones were used in any space engagement to spread confusion in the enemy's sensors, but at this battle's high relative velocity, the stuff could be lethal. At high speed, enough of the hard, sharp particles could eat away even hullalloy.