According to the official report, Gaz and Alaya’s actions cost the lives of 1.3 million people aboard Bahl-Mau station IV. They’d dubbed it the Bahl-Mau disaster. If there was good news regarding the event, it was that neither Gaz nor Alaya’s account numbers, face, or IDs were public.
Gaz was no fool. And this wasn’t her first or hundredth brush with the law. If not for the fact their quarry was already headed to one of the Boho clusters, she would have suggested it to Alaya. Few places in the system offered better cover than a cluster. Unlike a station, who had a boss and a corp or Loop nation watching over them, clusters were self-governed. Each captain of a ship ran her ship. If it was colony vessel captain might be elected, ship might self-govern or report to another ship’s captain. Alliances were complicated and varied.
Where the stations and the rock-colonists saw poverty, the clusters were more than happy to maintain the illusion. Truth was something else, Gaz bet. There was nothing stopping a cluster group from building a factory in zero-G and producing nano processors or cyberware. Some of the best off main stuff she’d found was purported to come from a cluster.
Best of all, it was pretty unlikely Gaz would accidentally get more than one or two ships worth of people killed. Who would have thought binding herself to a child and protecting said child would result in her needing to kill far more people in the last five years than in the previous centuries?
The door to the conn popped open and Gaz fell back against the now dark control console. “Oh no, we’ve been boarded!”
Two little girls wearing material printer cast-offs: support material, long, stringy bits of plastic and metal, and panels from the sides of boxes charged into the room with makeshift cutlases in hand. Good thing Yiska had them wait to do this until Alaya was asleep. Gaz set a reminder to mention casually to Marcus in front of Yiska about how Alaya’s parents were killed by pirates.
Fifty percent were killed by me. I should probably not tell her that.
With that guilt weighing her down suddenly, Gaz found herself glued to her seat while the two youngsters wrapped her up in thermal foil. Yiska arrived and barked at them playfully about harassing the pilot while she worked. But Gaz and the two girls parted ways giggling.
Yiska frowned as she unwrapped Gaz. “You cover it well, but something about that troubled you deeply, did it not?”
If she was going to give her such a convenient opening. “Please refrain from pretend piracy around Alaya. She lost her parents to pirates when she was Beth’s age.”
Yiska wasn’t shocked by the information, as if she’d heard far, far worse over her life. “Thanks for letting us know. The girls’ll understand. What about you? Whatever was going on there looked personal.”
How did she know? Gaz took a breath and waited, giving the air a chance to circulate through her lungs. “Alaya is very dear to me. Many of the things which hurt her also hurt me.” It was the truth dyed and twisted into a slightly different shape. Still the truth, but intended to give a different impression.
“I see.” It had been a week and the matron of the Dhingri clan had hardly addressed Gaz or Alaya outside of thanking them for the rescue. But here she said, “Isham tells me it was you who decided to let us into the ship.”
Isham should shut his… Or was he helping? “It was.”
“Then I owe you everything. You ask my family not play pirates in front of your beloved, they will stop playing pirates.” Yiska’s words trailed off, as if to suggest Gaz could ask for either or both of her daughters’ still beating hearts. The mother might offer them. It might have chilled Gaz if not for the alarms ringing in her head about the term Yiska applied to Alaya. The term Gaz had not denied. She opened her mouth and Yiska shook her head. “I do not have your senses or your experience. But please do not deny it. The facts are obvious. I would not betray you by sharing my knowledge with others.”
At that moment, Tammy and Beth roared back into the conn, their costumes trailing a mess of plastic and metal behind. Tammy chased her sister, who screamed with the shrill piercing squeak only kids could manage and reached her mother. True to her word, Yiska led her brood away, already suggesting new costumes for them that had nothing to do with piracy. Both girls came through shortly thereafter in their normal clothes to clean up their mess.
Riggon Cluster was close enough to view through main-spectrum optics, without magnification. When the kids were gone, Gaz sealed up the conn and switched the projections to bubble mode. Technically none of the manual systems in the ship were necessary. History, accessible from her local net, informed her of the odd human insistence on manual override for AI systems. Rarely necessary and then rarely helpful, manual controls were a relic of human fear and superstition. So she sealed those controls away and stood with her hands behind her back, feet shoulder width apart as the ship vanished around her.
Gaz stood as if floating in space, hovering on an empty platform headed toward a bristling tangled mass of exposed wiring, poorly assembled cyberware, and bits of spinning metal bones. She laughed at the metaphors conjured by the appearance of Riggon’s cluster: a mobile amoeba of ships, construction, and tube-ways. Below the solar plane grew a mass of vegetation, clumped there and visibly expanding even from this scale, the vegetation had direct access to unobstructed solar light off of the plane of rotation. The food here… her coprocessors finished some initial calculations and tendered their reports. Gaz laughed at herself. The food here would be identical with the food everywhere else, unless she found it cooked by a vendor. Those trees and plants growing out there in the middle of the void were further away from the main cluster than Gaz presently was. Unless someone had setup teleportation networks — expensive and unlikely — then the produce from those plants probably didn’t make it out of their local branches, aside from exotics which would be expensive.
The rest of the cluster was metal and really did resemble something like Gaz’s own body. Unlike other cyborgs most of her systems were fluid. Aside from regular structures she maintained such as her lungs, nanoswarm hives, and her drone modules, she kept her body adaptive. What passed for kidneys might be hanging out in her skull, or transiting from her leg to her chest. Or melting into a different organ entirely. The organic flesh of her brain and the cyberware augments which comprised her cyberbrain were the only things strictly forbidden from dissolving into the rest of her. Thus, when viewed from a powerful enough scanner, Gaz would have resembled Riggon’s Cluster.
She shook herself, the internal focus probably the result of her guilt. Riggon’s Cluster promised freedom and an end to Alaya’s quest. There was another source of Gaz’s anxiety, something which her cyberware immediately set about chemically resolving. But as the emotion associated with her thoughts faded, the fact remained. When Alaya caught up with Kowal, he would tell her everything. His only chance was death. Gaz wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Alaya. Therefore Gaz’s only chance to keep what she’d done secret from Alaya was to kill Kowal herself. Then kill Mateos and then Mal himself. She’d have to burn the whole pirate empire down.
One step at a time. Riggon cluster was a million times larger than Bahl-Mau. Larger, but far less massive than any Loop corp or Loop nation with an energy budget she guessed lower than a tenth the size of the smallest corp.
With those details in mind, Gaz had trouble fathoming how people could live out here. Recycling being what it was, and the availability of classical energy systems out here might make subsistence feasible, but industry? How did anyone have time for anything but drudgery? Their lives were likely as menial as the lowest had been aboard the Bahl-Mau.
Coprocessors shifted over to the local bands, Gaz discovered an open infoNet in the sector. It bore a Riggon origin signal so she opened it on a segregated computer system in case it tried to upload a virus or their ship tried to send a sneaky distress signal or theft alert.
Seconds after downloading and analyzing the contents of the infoNet broadcast, Gaz shook her head. Their ship was armed and able to defend itself. But according to the infoNet broadcast, no one would be locking down their weapons. At the same discharge of weapons within half an AU of the signal origin would result in all local ships receiving firing clearance for the offender’s vessel and a rep bounty being placed on them.
“In other words: “disable your shipboard weapons before you approach. Mistakes mean we erase your ship.” Check.” Gaz entered a command sequence verbally, conveying the restriction to their AI and adding a burnable 10-second delay charge on their weapons. Even the AI would have to wait to fire once those locks were in place.
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There was also a note about ships under a certain tonnage, which unless occupied, could be legally claimed by anyone as valid salvage. The warning strongly recommended homesteading any such small vessels if they were the only ship visitors owned.
Visitors. How many people decided to vacation in a cluster? Easily the most dangerous part of the solar system. Or maybe Gaz had it wrong. What she knew she’d learned at the feet of corporations heavily invested in the Loop and Credit system. There was always the chance these people had it figured out. Only one way to know, and that was to check herself.
While the ship was defanged, Gaz would fly into the cluster armed.
Alaya slept and didn’t talk to Gaz much when she was awake for the rest of their course into the cluster. That infoNet beacon also provided a set of coordinates for high rep docking ships or even stations known for treating visitors well. It would have been nice to head for one of those. But Kowal and their ship laid a trajectory into the deeper part of the cluster, just at the edge of the solar plane where the mass of vegetation bloomed out into the void.
Where do they get the water?
More and more time passed each day alone as Gaz stood and flew between the ships of the cluster. Beacons on and broadcasting, no one stopped them and challenged their obviously stolen and hacked vessel.
Above their own ship, larger than them by at least five times, a flotilla of small one-person ships trundled by. The way they moved and their placement had at first convinced Gaz and their ship AI this was nothing more than a swarm of small void ships. But as they watched them float by, there was a repetition to the movement of those smaller ships, a hard limit to how far they strayed. Recalculations complete, Gaz called up the AI’s guess about the “flotilla.” It was a massive floating creature, the way it moved suggested an eel or serpent rather than a cetacean. But none of their sensors picked it up. Only extrapolation showed them the outline of the serpent. The infoNet broadcast had been less specific on swallowing up other vessels.
Factory ships floated into view, large open magnetic rings pulled in material fed from the edges and used massive reactors, boilers, and fabricators to recycle and generate product. Barrels upon barrels of unidentified goods shot out of the opposite end of the large wheeled factory ship and propelled themselves on their own target vectors.
Ships circled the factories, pulling barrels out of their ostensible trajectories. Sometimes they shot the barrel back into the recycler, mostly they fired it back into its original trajectory. Gaz stared up at the interplay, amazed. Again, it reminded her of her own body as she stared. Strange to think.
The pirates used a much more energy-intensive process for the small amount of fabrication they performed. And the trends within the inner belt tended toward small scale distributed factories with either the process or the schematic protected by the corps and licensed for profit. An expensive schem might cut power costs in half and might produce a blazing piece of proprietary tech. But then only once before the schem burned itself out.
Gaz bet all of Alaya’s debt this place used pirate schems and paid no one for them. Back in the inner ring MilCas would have blown this place out of the void after a perfunctory hearing. Dozens of other ships, from frigate class to larger explorer class vessels with a few void colony ships thrown in, flew by Gaz’s own ship with a ping and a clear path for themselves. MilCas would have trouble simply bombarding such a mass of vessels. The sheer variety impressed. Delicate, streamlined Venetian fliers — a squadron of them — flew maneuvers gracefully by Gaz’s ship as if to welcome them to the cluster.
Someone had cobbled together an old Martian military cruiser with a brand new Earth force military ship. In a way it was almost sad how far humanity’s cradle had fallen. Four hundred years of development separated the Martian ship from the Earth ship. And even from here Gaz could tell the red-tinted Martian armor was superior to the Earth hull’s. The engines on the Earth ship were far under-utilized. At least for the purpose of driving that weird conglomeration. Even with the added mass of the Martian ship. But scans showed the ship’s drive at full 80% power. Either they were doing some serious energy-intensive work aboard that ship or they were broadcasting their power elsewhere.
A knock sounded on the conn door. Gaz considered ignoring it. Though engrossed in the view, she’d left a processor watching cams and security. She’d known Marcus was there before he knocked. Had seen him take a deep breath and smooth his orange robes before he knocked. Knocking made him nervous. Why? Gaz could not fathom what made the man nervous.
Curiosity — a force more potent than her drive to solitude — demanded she open the door. “Marcus, how can I help you?”
Her voice originated from the speaker at the door.
“Ah.” His voice faded for a second as he wistfully stared into the void. “Would I um, be imposing if I asked to view the cluster?”
“Are you asking me to leave?”
He chuckled nervously and shook his head. “Oh no. No no. Please, I just wish to view the One Root from well, from here would be more than adequate.”
“The One Root?”
Marcus took a step up the stairs and pointed toward the bottom of the view. “The great mass of flora. Some also call it the First Root.”
“I had wondered about it. Please come in.” Gaz considered the mass of trees and the old man. “Will you tell me about the One Root?”
“Little would please me more.” He smiled and nodded, his mannerisms at once relaxed the moment he stepped into the circle next to Gaz, though he stood as far from her as he could without bumping into the walls. “What do you know of the old Earth religions?”
“Meaningless superstitions employed as pacification and control systems before neural locks and ego-viruses came into popularity.”
“An answer worthy of a college exam.” Marcus stared down at the One Root. “But did you know, as the science of Theurgy progressed, the Gods of old Earth began to answer prayers?”
“More or less, I suppose.” Outsiders knew little of the ways of Theurgy. The same with the Arcane sciences. “I thought any god, even made up ones answered prayers.”
“Hmm, after a fashion I suppose. I won’t bore you with the details of theurgy, just a legend then….
“Millennia before the first implant, before the first human set foot upon the surface of the moon, religion had marked vegetation as significant. Makes sense, of course. Trees bore fruit, fruit was the difference between life and death. Some fruits preserved life, others ended it. A few major faiths placed trees as significant in their rituals and some marked them as harbingers of the fall. The parallels go on and on. Even into the age of enlightenment, after the death of faith was proclaimed, and science deemed the victor, flora held a special place in human minds.
“I say all of this to make the background clear. When the first theurges whispered the first prayers, the Gods answered in one voice. Plant the root, tend the root, spread the root. Everyone fought over the metaphor and when the divine science finally completed its apotheosis the Gods refused to comment on their first proclamation.
“Centuries passed and humanity continued to mistake the Gods’ initial meaning.” He tapped his finger toward the One Root and it magnified and closed with him. “Nearly all of us believe this is what the Gods meant. This is what will save humanity.”
“You believe it too?”
Marcus raised his hands. “Once we planted the first seeds, the Gods announced their approval. The daikinis are adamant. The Root must grow and spread.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing more than a simple series of plants. Food, water, medicine, and finally air. Packaged up with nanostructures linked on every codon. The DNA strands bear homilies to every God whose name we know. Provided energy either by way of sunlight or even a heat differential three degrees above the zero, the plants will grow. Their only purpose is to feed and house life. They should adapt over time the way some cyborgs do.”
Gaz walked a suddenly narrow path. She resisted the urge to lock her reactions down, it was apparently a dead giveaway. So she tried cycling her breathing, heartbeat, all autonomic functions to use the same rhythm as they’d been using seconds before. Hard to tell if she was successful. But now that she’d had the experience, she added a subroutine to run those systems on repeat. It should help. “To what end?”
“Think about the void.” Marcus stepped back from the plants and they shrank back into their place among the distant pieces of cluster. “About how unimaginably large it is. Space is a desert, with the most concentrated oases sprinkled within imaginable reality” Where had Gaz heard that before? Normally her mnemonic recall would be near-perfect. But something was missing.
Alarms went off internally as Gaz performed a systems check.
Marcus continued. “With the One Root as the seed, humanity will soon have access to a system-spanning network for travel, all of the food and water they need, and medicine to treat any ailment. The plants themselves identify pathogens and develop not just their own antibodies, but they fortify the food they produce with bioavailable antigens.”
It sounded lovely to Gaz. A strange counterpoint to a solid half of her mental processes experiencing a panic. Memory addresses, hard coded into both her flesh and her cyberneural interface had gone missing. No signs of intrusion, no indication of a local virus, but something had erased a small sector of Gaz’s memory. Tiny bits, fragments of moments spread through her life. It amounted to less than ten seconds of her three centuries.
But it had never happened before.
Gaz recorded and reviewed his words as she ran a full system analysis. “Most theurgists respect the work of the Root or simply do not interfere. A great many of us support it. And a tiny minority oppose.” He chuckled. “It’s perhaps the most unified project the theurgists have ever engaged in short of the discovery of the divine science itself.”
Then he fell silent. His mood, joyful and contemplative, might have infected others. But Gaz had reached full panic mode.
Not only had she lost memories, her own scans showed her body and mind as fine. Undamaged, no foreign infections, no intrusions. Just a mental gap. “Marcus, please feel free to remain at the conn. I need to check on a personal matter. Excuse me.”
She mentally sent instructions to the ship not to change course unless their target did and to plot a follow trajectory and warn her of any deviations or intercept vessels. The moment the door to the conn shut, Gaz sprinted with all of the speed her chassis could muster to the medical exam room. Cyborgs of her class simply did not forget anything.
Something was wrong.