Then she steeled herself and turned to her work. “Kaustikos, are you there?”

  “Am I where? Uselessly floating? I am. The Weaver of Worlds took your friends – our friends, our very dear friends – into that repurposed asteroid they seem to be using as their main space station. Would you like me to infiltrate?”

  “Not yet,” Lantern said. “Just observe, for now.” She closed off the comm channel. “Shall, what’s the chatter?”

  “Just docking authorizations for their ship… and now they’re alerting someone named Doctor Metcalf that they have subjects for him. I don’t like the sound of ‘subjects,’ Lantern.”

  “I don’t either. I wish I understood what was happening here. I suppose all that matters for now is helping Elena and the others get free. A full frontal assault is probably not the best option, though.”

  “I can cause a lot of destruction, but we’re surrounded by warships, so there’s no way we can win a straight fight. Infiltrating the base might be a good idea, if I can hack their security systems, but they’re not that sloppy – I can’t get into their computers from here. We’d have to risk getting physically onto the station so I could access their systems directly, and, while I’m good at hiding from sensors, I’m not very inconspicuous in this particular body, and if someone saw us…”

  “It’s not like they’d attack their own station with warships, though,” Lantern mused. “We’d have to deal with whatever station security they have there, and you’re likely the equal of those hunter-drones.”

  “If that’s the worst they’ve got, sure, but they could have worse. I saw the terror-drones that protected the Dream, and those would eat this body like a snack.”

  The museum of subjugation had fragments of some Axiom drones; horrible things dubbed harvesters and flensers and even subjugators. “We definitely have to get onto the station, but could we make sure station security is otherwise occupied first?”

  “Draw them to one position while we board at another? Works for me.”

  “If only we had someone we were willing to put in the path of danger.” Lantern opened a comm channel. “Kaustikos? We have a mission for you…”

  Shall floated silently through the darkness of the shipyard, making minute adjustments with reaction wheels and bursts of gas as needed, but mostly setting straight courses and gliding from one position to another. He turned on his magnets when he got close to the last scourge-ship, and accelerated forward, clamping to the side. He made a few deft incisions with a cutting torch and opened part of the hull. It was good that Callie had commandeered one of these vessels – that had enabled Shall to download the schematics and figure out the most vulnerable parts of the ship’s anatomy. Shall unfolded a manipulator arm and pushed the second-to-last explosive charge he had into the hole, in just the right spot to make the ship’s propulsion system turn a big explosion into a catastrophic one.

  “We’re all set,” Shall said.

  “It’s a shame we can only blow up nine of them,” Lantern said. “I was hoping for a nice cascading explosive effect that would take out the whole fleet.”

  “Alas, warships that explode just because ships explode next to them wouldn’t be very practical. There’s something to be said for decimation, though.” Shall considered the scourge-ships hanging all around them. “Or… deci-deci-mation. It’s not like we’re getting a whole tenth of them.”

  “Kaustikos, are you in position?” Lantern said.

  “I am. Your plan is terrible. Specifically the part of the plan that involves likely harm to myself.”

  “You’ve got the best stealth technology,” Lantern said. “Shall’s calculations show you’re the most likely to succeed in your role.”

  That was true, though they’d decided Kaustikos should do it even before Shall ran any such calculations.

  “Also, you don’t care if I live or die.”

  “I grieve the death of any intelligent being,” Lantern said. “But your consciousness is backed up elsewhere.”

  “That’s not much comfort for this particular instantiation of my awareness. Let’s get this over with.”

  “We’re almost ready,” Lantern said. “We’ll signal you when it’s time.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ll know when it’s time.”

  Shall almost laughed at that. “It’s true. Shouldn’t be hard to miss.” He launched away from the scourge-ship, gliding in dark mode toward the great bulk of the space station. It was a huge asteroid, ten times as big as Glauketas, almost as big as Meditreme Station had been. Shall was eager to get into its computer system and feast on information. What other habitations were there in this system? Was this the only military outpost or were there many such shipyards? Also, what the hell was going on around here? How had a human colony system turned into this?

  He maneuvered to the far side of the asteroid, near one of the smaller maintenance airlocks, where repair drones probably came and went. He wouldn’t be able to see the pretty explosions from here, but that was sort of the point. “Whenever you’re ready, Lantern.” He paused at a burst of communications from the station, then laughed. “Wait, wait. Ha. They’re losing their minds in there… apparently Callie has taken a high-ranking member of their staff hostage. The Weaver of Worlds is shouting at everyone to calm down, that they have the situation well in hand. Why am I not surprised our captain didn’t wait for us to save her?”

  “We can help, though,” Lantern said. “A little chaos would doubtless improve her situation. Let’s proceed.”

  Shell remotely detonated the nine charges he’d placed on the scourge-ships, all at once. There was no satisfying boom, but his sensors picked up some nice spikes in radiation, and the station’s communication channels filled with shouting again, even more panicked this time.

  “Now, Kaustikos,” Lantern said.

  Assuming all went well, Kaustikos was uncloaking himself, drawing the attention of the station’s security system toward an obvious saboteur… “They see him,” Shall said. “They’re scrambling ships to intercept.”

  “Lead them on a nice chase before you disappear, Kaustikos,” Lantern said.

  “I know my role,” Kaustikos snapped.

  Shall began cutting into the maintenance hatch and soon had an opening big enough to crawl through. They clambered through a dark tunnel, clearly never meant for biological organisms to traverse and correspondingly lacking in amenities like lights or artificial gravity. Shall sent out small pings to radar-map the immediate area and got a sense of the array of tunnels around them. There was a machine room a hundred meters or so forward and down, and there would probably be a terminal there –

  “Huh,” he said. “The Weaver of Worlds is on the comms, talking to someone in another station, I think… he says ‘the rebels have attacked the shipyard.’”

  “There are rebels?” Lantern said.

  “Long live the glorious heroes of the revolution,” Shall said.

  CHAPTER 14

  “I’m sorry, but it’s just impractical.” Ashok gestured helplessly toward Metcalf, who dangled unconscious from makeshift restraints that attached his wrists to the ceiling. His lower half was entirely unbound. “Have you ever tried to tie up a bunch of tentacles? All his lower limbs taper to a point, cap. You can’t put handcuffs or zip ties on them, and rope wouldn’t be much better, and anyway all I have is wire, which is definitely no good… We’re just going to have to stand clear of the pseudopods.”

  “Fine.” Callie crossed her arms. “Throw some water on him or whatever.”

  Ashok went to the sink, turned the knob, and sighed when nothing happened. “We don’t have any water. They shut it off.”

  “I thought you had control of their systems?”

  “I have control of this room. They turned off the water somewhere beyond the boundaries of this room. It’s probably just a valve and someone turned an actual wheel to shut it off.”

  “I don’t expect we’ll be here long enough to die of thirst, anyway.” Callie looked around, picked up a beaker, and threw it at Metcalf’s chest, where it bounced off and landed on the floor with an unbreakable clunk. He stirred, so she threw another, and he opened his eyes, blinking at them in confusion.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “We took you hostage,” Callie said.

  “But… why?” Metcalf stared at her in open bafflement.

  “How hard did he hit his head when you zapped him?” Callie said.

  Ashok shrugged. “Did you want the answer in newtons, or?”

  “Is his brain scrambled, Elena?”

  Elena started toward Metcalf, and Callie grabbed her arm. “Don’t get within range of his tentacles.”

  Elena sighed and squinted. “His pupils look okay from here, but that’s about the limit of my diagnostic abilities at this distance.”

  Callie nodded. He was just that clueless, then. “We took you hostage, Dr Metcalf, because we aren’t interested in being the subjects of horrifying medical experiments.”

  “Been there, done that,” Janice said.

  “Oh. But… this installation is heavily guarded. You can’t possibly escape.”

  “Gosh, I hope you’re wrong,” Callie said. “Because if taking you hostage doesn’t provide enough leverage to get us out of here, then you’re not much use to us alive.”

  Metcalf struggled, pulling at his arm restraints, and lashing out with his lower tentacles. After a flurry of violent activity he went suddenly still. “All right. I’ll talk to the Weaver–”

  “I’ve already got him fetching me a division head,” Callie said. “No offense, but you’re a little low in the hierarchy for my purposes.” She pulled a stool over and sat down on it. “You can, however, answer some questions for me while we’re waiting.”

  “I am not in a very cooperative frame of mind, Captain. We could have just talked.”

  “You like to have conversations with the people you’re vivisecting? That’s friendly of you. Cooperate, or your cooperation will be compelled. You’ve got value as a hostage when you’re alive, absolutely, but your value doesn’t diminish if we have to damage you a little. In fact, cutting a few pieces off you could even serve to strengthen our position with your superiors. It would let them know we’re serious.” She gave a little nod to Ashok, and he obligingly held up his prosthetic arm. The nest of manipulator arms at the end flattened out into a disc and began to spin with a high-pitched whine.

  The manipulators whirled around like that so Ashok could use them as a cooling fan for times when work in the machine shop got too hot, but the noise they made sure sounded like a buzz saw.

  “What is it you’d like to know?” Metcalf sounded admirably calm.

  “A short history of the Vanir system would be nice. What the hell happened here? When your grandpa or whoever emigrated here a hundred-some years ago, this was a fledgling colony system with a promising couple of planets. At some point in the intervening years it became a military dictatorship–”

  “A technocratic meritocracy,” Metcalf said. “Or a meritocratic technocracy.”

  “You say tomato, I say alien junta,” Callie said. “How did you get here from there?”

  “First of all,” Metcalf said, “it wasn’t my grandfather who emigrated here. It was me personally. I came here through the wormhole gate form the Jovian Imperative myself, one hundred and twenty years ago.”

  Human lifespans routinely exceeded a hundred years these days, but even if Metcalf had come through as an infant… Callie shook her head. “Sorry. You don’t look a day over sixty to me.”

  “Oh, I was almost sixty when I left,” Metcalf said. “I was a geneticist, with a specialty in adaptive gene therapies. I emigrated as an employee of the charter company that set up the colony on Vanaheim. It’s a beautiful planet, full of green jungles, and simply teeming with opportunistic microorganisms. I was part of a team charged with developing vaccines and antibiotics to prevent alien illnesses from taking root in the human colonists. Fascinating work, truly. There’s one parasite, something like a tapeworm or a fluke, that really likes living inside the human gut biome, but it grows to such tremendous size that it literally bursts out of the body and then goes slithering away. We call it the Jörmungandr-worm, after the world-serpent from Norse mythology–”

  At a glance from Callie, Ashok revved up his saw.

  Metcalf winced. “Yes, fine. I was leading a team to develop anti-parasitics and vaccines, and we made sure the colony’s babies were born with a set of inserted immunities so they could run around freely in the fields and forests of Vanaheim without picking up anything too nasty. The microorganisms on the planet had a distressing tendency to mutate, to a degree none of my team had ever encountered before, so there was always plenty of work to be done, and a distressingly high mortality rate among the general population. The other planet in the system, Niflheim, didn’t have as many biological issues, but it’s a less fertile place, mostly rockier and more austere, with an atmosphere that frankly always smelled a bit like vinegar to me. It was left mostly to mining concerns, because of its mineral resources, but everyone wanted to live on Vanaheim… if we could get rid of the nasty bug.

  “One day, about ten years after my arrival, I was out hiking in Freya’s Gorge – there’s a petrified waterfall there, it’s quite beautiful – mostly just enjoying the day, but also collecting biological samples. We still haven’t fully catalogued the plant life there. I crested a hill… and saw an alien collecting samples of his own. It was a Liar, but with skin a deep shade of red I’d never seen before. There were very few aliens on Vanaheim at the time, so I was surprised, but not distressed. I greeted him, but he didn’t speak the language, which struck me as peculiar. Most Liars are so adept at language, but he acted as if he’d never even seen a human before – scuttling around me, gesturing, attempting to communicate in pantomime. Our attempts to talk were unsuccessful, and he darted forward, plucked a hair from my head – follicle and all, of course – and then scurried off.

  “A moment later I saw a strange ship, shaped a bit like a crayfish – a sort of elongated bubble with various manipulators dangling off the bottom like legs – take off into the atmosphere. I know now it was a scientific sampling vessel. I watched it ascend, and saw something shimmer, high in the clouds. I got just a glimpse of one of the starfish-shaped vessels we usually associate with Liars, and then it shimmered into invisibility again. Stealth technology.

  “Well, Liars are strange and unpredictable, so I didn’t think much of the encounter, though I was surprised to see one of their ships. I returned home and mentioned the experience to my colleagues, who didn’t know what to make of it either.

  “I still vividly remember the day the wormhole gate closed, just a few months after that encounter. My friend Margaret, who was head of reproductive therapies, burst into my lab and said something was wrong with the wormhole. She was supposed to go home to help her daughter after the birth of her first child, but the port authority had canceled all outgoing trips due to ‘technical difficulties.’ Margaret was friendly with a highly placed member of the intergalactic trade union, though, and he told her the wormhole was malfunctioning. The radiation sequence that caused the bridge to open had simply stopped working, and, while they were trying other variants, they didn’t have any success. It’s not surprising. The possible combinations are close enough to infinite that it makes no difference.

  “Our colony was self-sufficient in terms of food, but there were many manufactured items and luxuries and specialty goods, not to mention technological items, that we imported from other systems. We didn’t panic when the gate went down, not exactly, but everyone worried. No one could figure out why the bridge wouldn’t open. The few Liars in the system were the engineers who’d taught humans how to operate the bridge, and, being Liars, their explanations were not very helpful – they blamed everything from evil spirits to the incompetence of their human counterparts.

  “Then, to our surprise, a scheduled supply ship arrived! We realized then that our bridge still worked from the outside. We were locked in, but others could enter. The captain and crew of that ship were pretty unhappy, as you might imagine, to find themselves trapped here instead of taking back a load of ore to sell. We couldn’t even send messages home. We’re so remote out here, if we’d sent a probe to the nearest colony world the day the gate closed, it would still be centuries away from arriving now.

  “The next day, all our communication systems were overridden, and all our screens displayed the same thing: a Liar, wearing dark robes patterned with golden stars and swirls. ‘Greetings,’ the Liar said. ‘My people are known as the Exalted. We are scientists, healers, and researchers. You have disrupted one of our long-term experiments, but we are not angry. Indeed, we hope you will join us in our great endeavor: to further our knowledge and understanding of the limits and capabilities of biological life.’ Then he paused, and after a moment said, ‘Those who resist will be euthanized.’

  “Oh, the uproar! No one could tell where the transmission had come from, and we were locked out of our own communication systems, which made coordination difficult. Our lab, being one of the more advanced facilities on the surface of Vanaheim, was one of the first to be occupied. First we were flooded by bio-drones – they looked a bit like Liars, but Liars bonded with machines. Those machines are exoskeletons, of a sort, using the flesh bodies as onboard computers for visual processing and threat assessment, and as a failsafe in case of mechanical problems. They lack higher brain functions, however. The drones seized control of the entire hospital, the research labs, everything. Margaret wept, I remember, when they took the newborns away.