CHAPTER 32

  Callie went into the Hypnos parlor and smiled at Drake and Janice, though they were too immersed to smile back. Since the installation of their new assistive technologies, they were able to use a conventional Hypnos pod – the only deviation from the norm was that they had two input cables snaking into the pod instead of one. The healers had done good work. Callie liked the white Liars. They’d talked about taking Elena on for the alien equivalent of an internship at some point, and teaching her some of their techniques. She was in xenobiological bliss at the idea.

  Callie went to an empty pod and connected herself to the Hypnos. She didn’t like virtual reality – being away from this reality always struck her as a dangerous proposition. What if this reality needed her? Callie had put plans in place to cover things during her absence, at least. For one, Ashok was supposed to keep an eye on Kaustikos, and he had the remote to trigger the explosives attached to the probe. For another –

  Well, no use going over it all again. She’d done all she could.

  Callie flicked her eyes over the controls and navigated to the private virtual chamber she’d set up for the meeting. In the Hypnos the only limits to the environment were those of imagination, and she had no doubt that Drake and Janice were soaring over crystal castles or exploring prismatic dreamscapes, but she loaded a setting based on one of the old interrogation rooms she’d occasionally used on Meditreme Station. Gray metal walls appeared, scuffed and scratched, with a black mirror across the back wall, also scratched. A metal table bolted to the dirty metal floor, with metal chairs on either side. The one on her side just looked uncomfortable; the one on the prisoner’s side actually was. She sat down and waited.

  The door opened, and the Benefactor entered. He had to stoop through the doorway because he stood nearly three meters tall. He could have looked like anything he wanted here, but Callie suspected that, like herself, he’d opted for an avatar that reflected his physical reality.

  The Benefactor wore a shapeless brown cloak that made him seem rounded and slumped, but he shrugged that off, and let it puddle onto the floor, then stood silent and upright, gazing down at her.

  He looked very much like the Axiom she’d seen in the stasis tubes, albeit with skin of a mellow gold-tinged green, like the outer rind of a melon. He was missing one of his front-facing eyes – it was an ugly mass of scar tissue – and his other eye shone the bright blue of Cherenkov radiation. He looked at the chair, showed his teeth, and then perched on the edge without apparent discomfort. “Callie.” His voice was smooth and pleasant. He could sound any way he wanted here, of course, but she was not surprised that he sounded just like Kaustikos.

  “Benefactor,” she said. “Or do you prefer Kaustikos?”

  “Either, though the latter is a close approximation of the title I once held in the empire.”

  “One who burns?” Callie said.

  He gave what might have been a modest bow from his seated position. “When did you realize Kaustikos and I were more like twins than colleagues?”

  “Just a guess, until I heard you speak. Once I started to suspect you were Axiom, I wondered if you would really hire an AI based on a human. It seemed more likely you’d want to send a version of your own consciousness along on our mission to the Vanir system.”

  “Human intuition, hmm? Your people do interest me, I confess. You seem to do a great deal of thinking on a subconscious level, and then insights just… bubble up to the surface. I assume it’s because your minds aren’t capable of consciously dealing with all the inputs you receive. My people suffer no such limitations. We see and apprehend all things clearly.”

  “Are you all fucking nudists?” Callie said. “None of you were wearing clothes on the starfish ship either. I’m just glad you don’t have nipples.”

  “Our children are carnivorous and capable of feeding themselves within a day of their birth,” the Benefactor said. “We sometimes wear clothes, to indicate rank or function, or for decorations. I am comfortable this way, however. Would it bother you to be naked in front of an insect?”

  “I’m an insect, huh? An insect you needed to sting your enemies to death. That was the idea, right? For a while we theorized that you must be an Elder among the truth-tellers, someone who’d decided that protecting the Axiom was a stupid plan. Then I started to think, who hates the Axiom more than I do? Who hates the Axiom more than the people they enslaved do? The answer was obvious.” She laced her hands together on the table. “It’s ‘other Axiom.’ You used me to destroy rival factions, didn’t you?”

  “Among other things.”

  “You’re Axiom,” Callie said. “Why use humans to do your dirty work? Why not use a planet-sized deathbot or something to fight your enemies?”

  “Various reasons,” the Benefactor said. “Shall I enumerate them?”

  “Please do.” Callie sat back. She wasn’t surprised he was a talker. Kaustikos never shut up, and Kaustikos was the Benefactor, or at least a hasty sketched copy of his vast consciousness crammed into a drone.

  “For one,” the Benefactor said, “why risk myself or my resources when I have disposable things like you to risk instead? If you succeeded, wonderful. If you’d failed, I would have lost literally nothing of value. For another… I don’t have access to the engines of death my people so deftly created. I am, alas, a faction of one. My… call it ‘crew’ I suppose… was exterminated in the last days of our great war. My allies had a plan to build a time machine and return to the early days of the empire, where we could take over our whole civilization in its infancy. Word got out of our plans, and we’d barely begun construction on our massive, infinitely long cylinder–”

  “Insert dick joke here,” Callie said.

  The Benefactor sighed. “We don’t have… those. Ovipositors are fine for our purposes. The machine we wanted to build was a variant on what humans called a Tipler Cylinder, a theoretical object that can create a frame-dragging effect powerful enough to manipulate space-time and permit the reversal of time’s arrow. Ask your station computer to give you a child’s primer about the science behind it if you’re curious.

  “For the Axiom, such a device was more than theoretical because we have access to dimensions you can’t comprehend. The other Axiom understandably saw our project as an existential threat, and some factions delayed their own hibernation long enough to form a coalition to destroy us. I fled into a wormhole just ahead of the blast wave, and spent millennia hiding in the interstices of known space. Time passes differently in those tunnels, of course, and I needed the time to plan anyway. Imagine my surprise when I saw your ship pass through a wormhole that hadn’t been accessed for thousands of years, and never then by anyone besides our slaves and the Axiom themselves. That’s when I learned about humans.”

  “I saw you watching us.” She could still recall the fear and confusion she’d felt when a portion of the wormhole tunnel slid aside and revealed that one blazing eye gazing at their passage.

  “I meant to be seen. I let another member of your crew glimpse me, too. I had to lay the groundwork for becoming your Benefactor, and being a legend in your mind.”

  “Is that what you think you are. Tell me, how do the wormholes work? Why do they look like tunnels?”

  “I’m not an engineer,” the Benefactor said. “How does your Tanzer drive work?”

  “It’s basically an ion propulsion system, but with the addition of exotic particles–”

  The Benefactor shuddered. “Stop, never mind, forget I asked. I simply stole a master key allowing me to access the wormhole system. I gather it was used by the chief of the maintenance crews that kept the lights on inside. I don’t know how the system works, and I don’t care. I was content to live there and enjoy my freedom.”

  “So why did you come crawling out of the hole?”

  “After you destroyed your first Axiom station I realized you might be valuable, and I tagged along on your journey to the Taliesen system to see how you’d do against a superior threat.”

  “I caught glimpses of you on the ship. Shimmers.”

  “My stealth technology exceeds your own, but it’s not perfect… and as I said, human intuition is very interesting. You couldn’t see me, but some combination of your senses detected my presence, and transmitted that knowledge to your conscious mind as a sense of unease. Your brains are so inefficient. Your suspicions led me to send Kaustikos this time instead. Why try to hide and stow away when I could accompany you in plain sight? I thought it would be amusing to interact with you directly, too, even through an intermediary. Not that leaving you notes wasn’t amusing, too.”

  “How did you know we’d investigate the things you wrote about?”

  “Understanding human psychology is not difficult for me, Callie. Especially yours.”

  She just let the insults roll off her. Being held in contempt by someone you hated was an honor. “So you followed us to Taliesen, and watched us take out the Dream. Your rivals?”

  “I thought you’d die there, honestly. The nano-swarm, the terror-drones… the defenses there include some of our best work. Your plan to infiltrate the virtual reality of the Dream was clever, and the way you defeated the Axiom there by leading an uprising of the suffering slime… that was a bit of a blind-spot for us. Mass cooperation has never been the strong suit of our species, though I believe our competitive spirit is what led us to become rulers of the galaxy.”

  “Former rulers,” Callie said.

  “Time will tell, won’t it?” The Benefactor showed his teeth again. “The Dream was just entertainment to keep that faction occupied while they booted up something we called a reality engine, a device meant to change fundamental universal constants. The engine would have enabled that faction to survive the heat death of the universe… but it would have also collapsed the wormholes, where I’d been living, so I couldn’t have that. I’m not particularly attached to this universe, but I am devoted to surviving in it, and beyond.”

  “What about the station with the pentachoron key? Why did you send us there?”

  “So you could destroy it. I like your willingness to eradicate things you don’t understand. It’s an excellent quality in an attack dog. The key was necessary to further the plans of another faction. I’m glad you launched it into a star.”

  Callie nodded. “Fine. So what do you have against the Cleansing Corps? With a name like Kaustikos that seems like it should be your squad.”

  The Benefactor’s face twisted into an unreadable expression. “The Cleansing Corps… are exterminators venerated on your homeworld? The Corps exists to kill infestations. At some point they decided they were important, powerful, guardians of Axiom purity, ha! Leadership by rat-catchers? I think not.”

  “If you weren’t in the Cleansing Corps, what did you do for the Axiom?”

  “I was the acid spat by emperors, Callie. I rooted out dissension and treachery, which is always a problem among my people. I served several rulers as personal enforcer, interrogator, and investigator. Unfortunately, during the latter days of the empire, those I served were forced from power. I had many enemies among the newly ascendant factions. Mostly because I’d tortured their former leaders to death. I can’t blame them. My position was suddenly precarious. As I said, my allies sought a return to the glory days, to reestablish our unending empire. I still had spies, though, and I got word of the coming attack in time to slip away and save myself.” He spread his claws on the table before him. “There. Now you have my life story, or as much of it as you’re capable of comprehending.”

  “So. Where do we go from here? It would be hard for me to work with you now that I know you think I’m an insect. I also can’t help but wonder about your goals.”

  “Peace and quiet are all I want, captain. I used the spies and sources I mentioned to compile an exhaustive map of every Axiom installation, and a bit of research here and there showed me where the truth-tellers are hiding, too – including their leading council. You don’t need me anymore, really. Now that you’ve joined forces with your friends from Jupiter, you can make a concerted attack on my remaining enemies. Then I’ll have the satisfaction of being the last Axiom left alive.”

  “At which point, what, you’ll go back to building your time machine?”

  “I was an investigator, like you, not an engineer. My satisfaction is wholly negative, not at all positive. I don’t get to succeed. I just get to make sure none of the rest of the Axiom do, either. It is some satisfaction all the same.”

  “That’s it? We part ways, and you fade back into the dark?”

  “The alternative is you try to hunt me down. That would be amusing. But I can go anywhere, and be anywhere, and hiding from you is so trivial I have stood in your cabin and watched you and your little girlfriend sleep. I suggest you enjoy your success, your acclaim, and your fame. Make the best anthill possible for your fellow insects, and leave me to gloat over the ruins of my enemies.”

  “I think you’re full of shit,” Callie said. “I think if anything you just told me was true, it was just cover, to make the lies plausible. I think–”

  The Benefactor interrupted. “Ah, but do you know what I think? I think we’re done here. I kept you occupied long enough for Kaustikos to complete his mission. I won’t see you again, Captain Machedo. I left your people alive, mostly, as thanks for your help… but I would say your goodbyes to them soon. Your universe won’t be around much longer.”

  The Benefactor’s avatar flashed out of existence, and Callie ripped herself out of the Hypnos in cold terror at what she might find in the reality beyond.

  CHAPTER 33

  Callie leapt out of the Hypnos pod, but nothing was immediately wrong – no red emergency lights flashed, no klaxons blared, and there were no urgent messages in her comms. Janice and Drake were still in their pod, and a glance at the monitor showed their vitals signs were fine.

  Was the Benefactor just screwing with her? Messing with her head out of pure sadism?

  “Shall, is everything okay here?” Shall didn’t answer, and the cold at her core spread a little farther. “Shall, answer me. Shall!” She went to a terminal on the wall, in case she was having issues with her comms, but Shall didn’t respond to that, either, not even when she input her priority-override-pay-attention-to-me-now code.

  She was able to command override the Hypnos pod Janice and Drake were in, leading to confused queries from the latter and swearing from the former. They sat up, pulling away their input leads, and then saw Callie’s face. They jumped out of the pod and stood at attention in seconds. “What’s the situation?” they spoke with one voice.

  “Shall’s offline. I think Kaustikos did something to him.” I left your people alive, mostly. “Get to the command center and figure out what’s happening. I’m going to check on… everyone.”

  She went to Elena first. She couldn’t have done otherwise. When she reached the infirmary she heard pounding and shouting on the other side, and though she couldn’t make out the words she recognized Elena’s voice. That thawed the ice in her chest, at least a little. The door wouldn’t respond – it had been set on quarantine mode, sealing the infirmary off from the station, and it took every command access code she had to make it unlock.

  The door slid open, and Elena stood on the other side, sweaty and disheveled and annoyed. She grabbed onto Callie and hugged her, then stepped back with narrowed eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “Kaustikos,” Callie said. “The Benefactor. They’re up to some shit. Go join Drake and Janice in the command center, okay?” That was the most secure part of the station if they came under attack. Callie had no idea what to expect. She’d thought she was so smart, and she’d prepared for some eventualities, but clearly not all of them.

  Callie went to the cargo bay first, then moved on to the machine shop, where she found Ashok.

  She moaned, and everything slowed down. The walk toward him felt like she was moving through heavy water instead of thin air. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.” She didn’t even call for Elena. She could tell there was no point.

  Callie knelt by Ashok. He sprawled on his side, arms and legs at strange angles. He had a burn hole the diameter of a fingertip drilled right between the nests of lenses he had for eyes. Smoke still rose from the hole, and from the corresponding hole on the back of his head.

  Ashok had a backup heart. He had two livers. His lungs were self-sealing. He took risks, but he also took precautions, and he could survive a lot.

  He could not survive an energy beam passing through his brain.

  The extra hearts did not beat, and the improved lungs did not rise and fall. Callie put her face against his chest, and reached with her hand to touch his chin – that part of him was still flesh, and she felt the stubble there, and the coldness of his skin.

  Callie allowed herself a single choking sob, and a single stream of fleeting thought – first member of my crew, with me since the salvage days, when his only augmentations were a radiation detector in the back of one hand and a magnetic field detector in the other, my oldest friend, he’s gone – and then she blinked tears away and tried to think like an investigator.

  Why had Kaustikos killed Ashok? Because he had his finger on the probe’s bomb? Or was there another reason? She stood up and looked around the machine shop. A curve of metal rested on the floor – it was the bomb they’d attached to Kaustikos. He’d removed it, somehow. They’d never had a good sense of what resources existed inside his sphere of a body – apparently nano-solvent was part of it. Kaustikos probably could have gotten away any time he wanted. They hadn’t realized he was Axiom at first. They hadn’t realized what capabilities he might have.

  There was a crude eye burned into the surface of the workbench, and when Callie saw it, her heart went dark and hard.

  She went to Ashok’s safe – they were the only two people who knew the code – and saw it had been sliced open by the same weapon that killed Ashok. That was why Ashok had died. He would have fought to protect the contents of that safe. The dimensional ripper, the device they’d used to enter the pocket dimension that held the strange vault, was gone. Callie groaned, and raced for her room.