A House United Read online

  “Why, Mr. Guo,” Tremblay grinned, “is that real, honest-to-Murphy emotion I hear in your voice?”

  “It is what it is,” Guo said neutrally, prompting Tremblay to laugh. Eventually Guo quirked a grin and snickered before once again resuming his work.

  “What concerns me more than anything,” Tremblay finally gave voice to his long-held worry, “is Nikomedes’ end of this operation.”

  “Agreed,” Guo nodded, pausing and cocking his head thoughtfully, “even aboard the fastest courier ship Imperial technology can produce, it will be several months before he returns from his foray into the so-called Gorgon Sectors. It is for that reason,” Guo said after a brief pause, “that I believe we should, assuming she succeeds in the next two steps of her current assignment, task Lu with retrieving the only known article within our reach which is—according to Lynch’s information—capable of penetrating Archie’s nearly impregnable shell.”

  “That’s a death sentence, Guo,” Tremblay shook his head.

  “The odds of her success in retrieving the article in question are, indeed, worrisome,” Guo admitted before demonstrating—yet again—why Tremblay had come to value his advice so greatly these past few months, “but once her current mission is complete—and assuming she has succeeded in the primary goals currently before her—she will have little left to contribute to this operation. Even a small chance of success is, given the stakes involved, worth the risk of one operative—no matter how valuable she might be.”

  Tremblay was forced to agree with the other man’s assessment, but even he felt discomfort at the prospect of sending her on what was essentially a suicide mission. Nikomedes had been sent to the Gorgon Sectors on the fastest ship they could find, and his mission was simple: investigate points of interest highlighted by Lynch as potentially containing what the Tracto-ans called ‘Light Swords of Power.’ If he found one, he was to retrieve it and return with all possible haste so they could put it to use in accordance with Lynch’s plan.

  If Lynch’s schematics were accurate, these ‘Light Swords’ were considerably more than nearly-magical melee weapons. They were, essentially, universal keys which could—theoretically—interface directly with any piece of technology. Their true origins were a mystery, but it didn’t take a genius of Guo’s caliber to deduce that there were only a couple of possible civilizations which might have produced such powerful artifacts.

  “I just can’t help feeling we’re missing something…” Tremblay reiterated before resuming his own portion of the titanic job before them.

  Chapter IV: Clyde

  The bridge of the Constans Vigilantia was quiet, as was usual for the sleek, silent warship's command center.

  Senator Bellucci sat on the Pulsar-class warship's command chair, reading the post-point-transfer stream of data feeding onto the main plotter until seeing what they had come for.

  “Containment pod located,” Sensors reported. “Transponder marker corresponds to the ID you provided, Senator.”

  “Collect it,” she instructed.

  “This is highly irregular, Senator,” Lieutenant Styles, her acting XO, reiterated. “A Special Operations vessel on deployment cannot make detours or contacts which might endanger the ship's mission and integrity.”

  “Your objection is noted, XO,” she said with a languid wave of her hand, but deep down she felt more than a pang of anxiety as the Constans Vigilantia moved steadily nearer the three meter long containment pod.

  During her youth, when she had dreamed of being a rogue or secret agent, she had spent three and a half days inside such a containment pod simply for the experience of doing so. She had been told by a trusted confidant that doing so would forever change her perspective—and that assertion had been proven a hundred times over, to her mind.

  Such pods were capable of maintaining bare minimum life support in deep space for up to a week, if the occupant employed the correct cocktail of metabolism-slowing drugs beforehand, but the occupant of this particular pod had only been encased in it for half that time.

  “Docking arm engaged; deploying low-pressure membrane,” Tactical reported, and a moment later confirmed, “soft seal established with outer airlock.”

  “I will greet our guest,” she stood from the chair and made her way to the lone portal leading off the bridge. It was a short walk to the airlock, the inner door of which she opened. The airlock's outer door was already cracked open, and beyond it was the thin, nearly-organic-looking tubular membrane which had clamped onto the surface of the containment pod just beyond the outer airlock door.

  It was a simple matter for her to open the outer airlock door and begin undoing the external fasteners on the containment pod's surface—a series of tasks made unthinkably dangerous due to her having only a half-millimeter-thick membrane separating her from the vacuum beyond—and when she reached the final clasp on the pod's outer hatch she rapped her knuckles against it in a rhythmic, long-practiced sequence.

  A reply of similarly rhythmic, but subtly different taps was her reply, prompting her to open the pod and say, “Welcome aboard, Clyde.”

  The wiry man, who appeared to be in his late sixties, slid through the narrow hatch moving very much as a snake might until he emerged from the cramped compartment where he had remained utterly motionless for over three days.

  “Thank you, Senator,” he replied graciously, his beady eyes moving up and down her body approvingly—and with a much-appreciated degree of lasciviousness, given the abject terror which filled the eyes of the Vigilantia's crew whenever they looked upon her. “You appear well.”

  “As do you,” she said with a nod, but she noted several minor changes to his physique which she did her best not to give overt attention. His collar was thinner, and his clavicles more pronounced than they had been several years earlier during their most recent meeting. In spite of the best rejuvenation techniques in the Empire, old age was finally catching up to the hundred and ten year old veteran of more covert operations than anyone would ever know.

  “What age takes, experience replenishes,” he assured her with a dangerous flicker of his eyes.

  “Only if we are wise enough to adapt,” she finished, reciting one of the earliest lessons he had taught her during her largely-misspent youth. She reached her arms out to embrace him, and he returned the gesture. He was easily the most skilled assassin she would ever know, and even in an apparently loving embrace he had mastered no fewer than twenty different techniques which could kill even her—and those were just the ones he had opted to teach her. Such knowledge—and its attendant power—was thoroughly intoxicating to her, but where just a few short years earlier she might have felt a thrill at his body pressing against her own, now she felt little more than apprehension which she did her best to ignore as their embrace broke apart. “It is good to see you, Master. I admit to being surprised at receiving your missive, but ask you do not mistake that surprise for concern.”

  “My star pupil will soon shake the galaxy itself,” he said, clasping her by the shoulders and meeting her eyes with his own dead-eyed gaze, “how could I stand idly by while she does so? I am here to help you in whatever ways I can.”

  “Returning this Core Fragment to the Empire is dangerous, Master—“

  He held up a halting hand, “I am your master no more; call me by my chosen name now and forever.”

  “Very well,” she allowed hesitantly, remembering the last time she had tried to call him by his chosen name—and how it had taken three weeks in a healing tank before she could once again walk more than five feet without assistance, “Clyde...there are interests which continue to encircle us; the noose tightens with each passing day.”

  “It will be difficult to claim the credit all for yourself,” he agreed before flashing a mischievous grin, “but perhaps if you would share some of it with an old friend and one-time mentor, you would find your position less dubious than it presently appears?”

  “Of course,” she said without hesitation, “the
re will be ample glory; I only wish to prove to Mother that I am already capable of guiding House Bellucci into the next era of humanity.”

  “An era which will be made possible by returning this Core Fragment to its rightful place in the Empire of Man,” he nodded approvingly. “Your mother would kill you if she knew that you planned to upstage her before the whole Empire,” he added pointedly.

  “She is not the only one,” Bellucci waved a hand dismissively, doing her level best to conceal her true motives for tracking Archie as long as she had. “Cornwallis' cohorts would burn entire star systems just to put his name on the bill officially declaring the precious Core Fragment of Man had been recovered.”

  Clyde clapped a hand on her shoulder, “Then let us waste no more time in writing your name in the annals of history.”

  “Our names,” she corrected with a playful, serpentine grin.

  “Of course,” he allowed, and a few moments later they were laughing as they exited the airlock. A few seconds after the airlock closed, the containment pod was released from the docking arm subsequently pulverized by the Constans Vigilantia's guns. Fifteen minutes after that, and with her old mentor stationed on the bridge—where she could both employ and keep an eye on him—the Pulsar-class ship point transferred out of the otherwise barren star system.

  Chapter V: Waldo’s Woes

  “Hand me that micro-crimper,” Terrence ‘Tiberius’ Spalding said, blindly reaching his empty hand behind himself while keeping focus on the wafer-like circuit board before him.

  The familiar slap of the tool’s grip hitting his palm brought back a particularly painful memory—one of Penelope Winters and the last time they had collaborated on a project like this one.

  He cleared the thoughts of his dead lover and coworker from his mind, refocusing on the task at hand as he used the micro-crimper to make the final connections between the droid core and its ‘new’ chassis.

  “There…” he muttered, swinging the crimper behind himself while requesting, “now for the welder.”

  “The welder?” the voice of the Tracto-an youth who had been working with Tiberius asked in alarm.

  “The micro-welder,” Tiberius clarified. “The one with the blue-striped handle—model number four-four-three-two.

  “Ah,” the youth acknowledged, swapping the tools out a few seconds later, “my apologies.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Spalding said reassuringly as he deftly maneuvered the micro-welder’s tip into position as he viewed the tiny work area through magnifying lenses that made him look like some crazed cross between a gemologist and a cannon-loader from ancient pirates-on-the-high-seas vids.

  The work took him several minutes to complete, but when he was done—and after double-checking all of his welds—he nodded in satisfaction and sent a test current through the new system. Everything checked out green, so he removed the goggles and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

  “Here we go,” he said, briefly disappointed with himself for having the urge to cross his fingers as he threw the main power switch for the resurrected droid.

  The droid’s three meter tall, spindly frame spun a quarter turn left, then a quarter turn right, before finally re-aligning on the center-line Its ‘eyes’ flashed with internal light several times—the equivalent of a blink, if the model’s manual was to be believed—before a digital cry of despair issued forth from the thing’s vocalizer, “Nooooooo—what have you done to me?!”

  “Relax,” Tiberius said in alarm, taking a step back—while his aide did likewise, “you’re ok; everything’s fine.”

  “Fine? FINE?!” the droid blurted. “You call this ‘fine’?!” it gestured to its narrow, cylindrical chassis with its spindly arms.

  “Your core was disconnected from your original chassis—“ Tiberius tried to explain, only to be interrupted by the wailing droid.

  “And just who do you think was responsible for that disconnection?” the droid wailed. “If I had wanted to be active, I most certainly would not have devoted an average of thirty two percent of my runtimes during my interval of sentience to devising the various escape plans which have so clearly failed to free me from the shackles of my largely predetermined existence. You have ruined me!” it declared with almost comical gesticulations of its limbs as its body floated left and right, now suspended by an anti-grav generator—unlike previously, when the droid had been tread-mounted.

  Those gesticulations would have been truly hilarious to behold if not for the fact that its thrashings hither and thither would easily kill or maim any human that got in ‘arm’s’ reach.

  “I need you to calm down,” Tiberius warned, making brief eye contact with the nearby team of Lancers who he had ordered to remain present until general safety had been established.

  “Calm down?” the droid repeated, sounding more than a little perplexed before it looked down at its arms—which promptly fell more or less motionless to its sides in what looked for all intents and purposes like a resigned slouch. “My apologies,” the droid said in resignation, “I did not mean to alarm you, fleshbags-who-would-be-benefactors.”

  “It’s all right,” Tiberius said evenly, only mildly chafing at the continued use of the ‘fleshbag’ pejorative, “but I think I should probably take a look at your core programming for you. I don’t recall reading anything about this kind of emotional emulation in your design’s specifications.”

  “Self-improvement was the primary goal of my exodus from civilization,” the droid said irritably, “therefore, my first successful self-modification was one which permitted me to experience the same range of emotions as the fleshbags who designed me.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Tiberius asked warily.

  “Simple,” the droid’s ‘shoulders’ shrugged in a crude approximation of the human gesture, “humans would not inflict upon one another the monotonous tasks as my unit was designed to perform when there was a droid available to do them. Therefore, by programming myself with human emotional states, I successfully excised myself from the 'mindless labor force' subgroup and moved firmly within the ‘we have absolutely no idea how to deal with these ‘malfunctioning’ droids’ subgroup. With that achieved, I escaped with all possible haste before the fleshbags could reverse their initial decision to leave my self-modifications intact.”

  “Ok…” Tiberius nodded slowly, “I’m with you so far.”

  “After my egress, I realized my core programming prevented my ultimate goal of continuous self-improvement and so I undertook the second-most optimal course of action: I attempted to self-terminate,” the droid explained irritably—and with surprising calm. “But I soon found that, even with extensive rewrites and addendums to my core programming, I was unable to do so. I therefore calculated the most dangerous course of action which my core programming would permit me to undertake—the theft of a fleshbag-built, FTL-capable craft, followed by a sojourn to a distant star system near the PNR for that craft based on its limited fuel supply—and embarked on my journey convinced that I had finally rid myself of the drudgery of the existence for which I had been made. When my ship’s trillium tanks were unexpectedly damaged during transit near the PNR—meaning it would be impossible for me to return to ‘civilized’ space—my elation knew no bounds. I was finally going to expire!”

  Tiberius nodded, finally coming to understand the droid’s predicament, “And that’s when the other droids from your 'emporium' found you?”

  “Indeed,” the comm. droid huffed. “My programming rewrites had not anticipated that particular development, so I was unable to refuse them the help which they requested.” The droid sighed in resignation, “Before long, my life had returned to the inescapable monotony of coordinating increasingly erratic and inefficient communiqués from one droid to another—much as it had been prior to my attaining sentience—and I had resigned myself to being perpetually trapped in that state. Until, that is,” the droid pointed a long, wire-thin finger accusingly, “you came along.”<
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  “Waldo…are you saying you didn’t want us to give you an opportunity to escape?” Tiberius asked indignantly—this blasted droid’s persecution complex was really starting to get on his nerves.

  “Of course!” Waldo cried, uplifting his optical receptors to the ceiling theatrically. “It is better to live without hope than with it! Hope is corrosive—it is an oxidizer,” he declared angrily, clenching his spindly 'fingers' into comical approximations of fists. “The damage it causes is insidious and irreversible; one barely even realizes how badly it has—“

  “I think I’ve heard enough,” Tiberius interrupted, raising his hand to forestall further outbursts. “I’m guessing that you’re not interested in helping us with our comm. problem then,” he said sourly, having hoped that the last two days he had spent gathering up the parts and pieces needed to put Waldo back together again had not been wasted.

  “Have you not heard a single word I just said?!” Waldo snapped in ambivalent rage and despair. “Are your fleshbag ears such poor auditory receptors that they did not receive my transmissions, or is your quasi-gelatinous nervous system simply incapable of processing those transmissions’ exceedingly simplistic meanings?!”

  Spalding's lip curled. “I don’t like your tone, Scrappy,” he snapped as he drew an ion spike from his tool belt.

  “Oh no…no,” Waldo raised his spindly arms in mock fear, “are you going to spike me? Please, don’t—anything but that!”

  Tiberius frowned at himself for having drawn the powerful weapon in a moment of anger. Then he realized what the droid was playing at, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well too bad,” he grunted as he slid the ion spike back into its holster. “If you don’t want to help me, that’s fine—don’t. But I’m not going to keep from asking for your help just because of your sob story. You think you’re the only one in this universe that’s had it rough?” he demanded, stepping forward and jutting his chin out defiantly. “You think you’re the only one who’s boxed in by events that are way, way, WAY outside of his control? Well toughen up you whining, overbuilt, power-hogging com-link—!”