Over the next few weeks Rene went through a blistering crash course in what felt like absolutely everything. Astrophysics, biochemistry, electrical engineering, piloting fixed-wing aircraft, 21st century battle doctrine, political theory—regardless of the topic Mrs. Figgy rode him hard, pushing the nootropics and memetics to their absolute limits.

The Commodore only let him out of the audiomemetic module to eat, sleep, defecate and occasionally chat up the prisoners.

Neroth and Zildiz spent that time locked up in the brig, a storage room that had been stripped bare of electronics, the ventilation grilles taken out and replaced with welded squares of titanium alloy, its only window a snow-encrusted airlock that opened directly into the frigid lunar surface. They were fed protein paste through two sippy straw nozzles that came out of the wall, and slept on plastic cargo pallets with tarpaulins for blankets. In short it seemed a perfect little dungeon where a man could lose his mind in short order. Rene made sure to mention that to the Commodore in between his lessons.

“They’re going kill each other in there, you know,” he said, the memory of his latest false death still fresh in his mind. He and the mujahideen had been scaling the mountains of Kandahar when the Amits had come for them, their Hind gunships chasing them out of the ruddy cliffsides with unguided iron bombs. Abubakar hadn’t been able to get the Stinger to lock onto the heat signatures in time, and their patrol was subsequently eaten up by Yak-B gatling guns.

“For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Catechism 3, ensign. They brought it on themselves,” the Commodore lectured him.

“All I’m saying is, if the idea is to win them over to our side, then—”

“Whose idea is that, exactly?” the Commodore said sharply. He paused his eternal warsims on the holographic table and turned to glare at Rene.

Rene put up his hands and replied somewhat defensively:

“You and I make a great team and all, but at the end of the day we’re just two measly people up against a living planet. How exactly can we reconquer Arachnea without help?”

“Your Fleet has a population in the millions. That’s plenty of manpower.”

“Yes, but you said it yourself: compared to the opposition they’re a bunch of savages flinging turds around.”

The Commodore shook his head obstinately.

“The catapult strikes will neutralize most of the Vitalus’ central command structure and buy us some time. We just need your people to survive the initial counterattacks. Then we can rearm them and bring them up to speed with modern warfare.”

“You ask too much of them,” Rene countered, “It would take years of research and development for them to catch up to the concepts I’m learning through audiomemetics.”

“Which is why I’m sending you back there, to give them a boost,” the Commodore lounged lazily back into his gun carriage’s harness.

“Wait. You’re sending me back to Arachnea?”

“Obviously. We can’t win a war without boots on the ground. You’ve got to bring the Fleet’s arsenal up to par.”

“But I’m no engineer! You can’t expect me to jumpstart all these technological breakthroughs all by myself.”

“Au contraire. Here,” the Commodore tossed him a digital sketch pad, “Draw me a diagram of a Vickers machinegun.”

Rene took it and stared at the screen, which was just as blank as his mind. Then he tasted dried fruit and heard snatches of Mrs. Figgy’s voice in his head, reciting:

“…the Vickers is a fully automatic belt-fed gun fired from a closed bolt. When firing, a round is in the chamber and the working parts and the breechblock assembly are forward. It has a recoil operated, floating action comparable to a German pistol of the same period…”

Complete three-dimensional schematics came flooding back through his mind. He began to draw like a man possessed, the sketch pad’s stylus flying across the screen. When he was done, he clicked play and the fully worked animation began, perfectly illustrating the gun’s inner workings. The Commodore saw his slack-jawed expression and raised a withered eyebrow as if to say: ‘I told you so’.

“I had no idea that was still in there,” Rene said in astonishment, “So do the lessons never leave me?”

“Not after the nootropics and memetic imagery have cemented the engrams into place.”

“How does all that information fit into my skull?”

“It’s an additional region of the brain that the Exodians edited into their genes. Every homo vagus develops it as they mature, among other things.”

“Like what?”

“Did you feel sick when you first got onto this moon?”

“Not really,” Rene shrugged, “I guess I didn’t like the chow from the food synthesizer at first. It gave me the runs.”

“First of all, gross,” the Commodore wrinkled his nose, “Second, that’s because your body is designed to compensate for sudden changes in gravity. Without those adaptations your muscles and bones would atrophy and you would weaken and die in a few years. That’d be unacceptable for the homo vagus, a culture that evolved to survive slow-than-light travel.”

Homo vagus. That was Latin, another one of old Terra’s dead languages. Rene had taken to learning it because so much of the Exodian sciences used it in their nomenclature. The name meant ‘the wandering man’, he thought.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

“When you’re stuck for centuries inside a seed ship strapped to some laser sails, retaining the sum total of human knowledge is of paramount importance. The kindreds take this a step further: they can pass on massive amounts of data through their gilt helix.

“Do the people I see in the simulations belong to an older species?”

“Subspecies. Homo sapiens,” the Commodore corrected. He nudged the holographic table and ran another attack campaign, cursing when the clustered blue dots were wiped out one after another.

“What happened to them?”

The Commodore paused briefly, then said:

“They were belligerent. Thankfully their experiences will teach you a great deal about violence and its uses.”

“My mother always said that violence can’t solve all problems.”

“Then she wasn’t using enough of it. I’m being glib, of course,” the Commodore grinned. Recently he’d become a lot more comfortable around Rene, cracking maudlin jokes when Rene wasn’t expecting them, “There’s a time and a place for diplomacy. Especially when one side has the upper hand and the other party is looking for a way to save face. But that only applies to human adversaries. Inhuman enemies require inhuman methods.”

“Maybe for the Vitalus that’s true. But Zildiz and Neroth are as human as we are. Two eyes, two hands, two feet. The works,” Rene pointed out. The Commodore groaned:

“Again, they’re cosmophages, ensign. Bioweapons that can adapt to any environment.”

“If we homo vagus edited our genes to adapt to subluminal space travel, then why is it wrong for them to do the same?”

“There are…limits,” the Commodore said testily, “Both moral and biological. Think about it Rene: if every person could change their bodies on a whim, there would be nothing preventing us from colonizing every semihabitable planet within reach. Eventually we would become unstoppable.”

“And that would be wrong, because?”

“Because at that point we wouldn’t be people anymore, Rene. We’d be gods, unfettered by the limitations that nature has placed upon us. But what happens in a society of godlings living in a perfect utopia?”

“They eat candy and live happily ever after?” Rene guessed.

“Not quite. They get bored. And bored godlings begin acting out their fantasies, no matter how depraved and insane they may be. When there are no more physical constraints, morality itself ceases to exist.”

The Commodore’s voice took on a hoarse growl, as if he were wrestling with some troubling remembrance. Rene decided that the conversation had taken a bleak tone, and switched the topic:

“Those limitations are going to make winning this war impossible. Even if I teach those eggheads at the Gunnery Department how to make glide bombs and MLRS systems, they don’t have the tools to mass produce them. Everything will have to be made from scratch.”

“I’ve already considered that,” the Commodore said, “This base has industrial grade printers. We just need to break them down and reassemble them on the ground. No, the real bottleneck will be raw materials.”

He flicked a finger at the holographic display and brought up the orrery, zooming in on the asteroid belt between the planet Brahe and Arachnea.

“Po Chai is abundant in water but low on minerals and hydrocarbons. But the roider communes out in the belt gathered thousands of metric tons of that stuff for the projects on the inner planets. It’ll be a simple matter of stopping by there on our way to Arachnea and taking what we need.”

“That’s cosmonaut work,” Rene said, “Drones are all very good, but when they break down, you’ll need all hands on deck to get them working again. Human hands,” he added pointedly.

The Commodore rolled his eyes. Or at least Rene thought he did; the multispectral goggles fused to his cranium made it hard to tell.

“I’m not bringing those race traitors into my operation. There’s no way to deprogram generations of religious indoctrination. Just ask the PACT forces when they tried to suppress the Remembrancer insurgency.”

“I haven’t played through that section yet,” Rene said.

“Hell, I’m still trying to figure out how their magnetosynaptic organs managed to override my control of the drones,” the Commodore went on, paying little attention to him, “They simply can’t generate the level of signal strength to cause all that havoc…”

The Commodore stroked his ratty beard, lost in thought. Rene hemmed and hawed, trying to distract him by deliberately being annoying:

“Maybe you should ask the cosmophages how they work.”

“My, you’re really not giving this up, are you?”

“No. Did your iteration even try talking to the kindreds?”

“Of course. The few times we got through to them, the Vitalus reached out crushed any chance of diplomacy.”

“Why? What is the Vitalus after? What does it even want?”

The Commodore sighed and steepled his digits, looking like a misshapen spider curled up in its web of wirings.

“I suppose it’s inevitable that you’ll keep pestering me with questions. Clearly, I’ll never have any peace until I give you answers.”

“I concur.”

“Don’t be a smartass. Alright, fine. You go ahead and tell your friends that if they keep their noses clean, they can start reporting in for audiomemetic lessons too.”

“Why the sudden change of heart?”

The Commodore’s face broke into an evil smile.

“You brought up a good point earlier. If I give them the impression that I’m beginning to trust them, then they might just slip up. I think I’ve got a pretty good idea where the major nodes are now. For your next assignment, ensign, I want you to find out exactly where the Gallivants and Leapers live.”

#

Rene rode the catapult to the brig, taking his sketch pad with him and scribbling furiously. He still couldn’t believe the sheer amount of information he had imbibed and the fluidity of his mental calculations. He did notice that his newfound brilliance tended to fade the longer he was away from the learning module, fine details becoming harder to recall.

He was looking forward to seeing their reactions when they found the good turn he had done them, and was in a fine mood when he got to the brig.

It didn’t last. The sentry drone on duty rolled aside to let him in, dragging its fibre optic cable out from a winch in the wall. Rene stepped into the bare room and almost immediately tripped over the furious melee taking place on the floor.

Zildiz had Neroth in a headlock from behind, applying the exact same chokehold he had once used to make her unconscious. But the teen’s short neck was making this a tricky proposition, that and the fact that Neroth was actively trying to sink his teeth into her forearm.

One of the Commodore’s silver giants squatted on its haunches in the corner and looked on impassively.

“Star of Sol, can’t I leave you people alone for five minutes without you trying to kill someone!” Rene shouted, equally frustrated with the Commodore’s callousness as he was with the two bioweapons. He broke up the fight by kicking at them both till they stood up.

“He crossed into my side of the room,” Zildiz licked at her fat lip.

“What are you talking about?”

She pointed to the panelled floor, where a straight line cutting the room in half had been painted on with some dried brown fluid the nature of which Rene did not even want to speculate on.

“I was just checking to see if she made the line straight!” Neroth raged, clutching at a swollen eye, “She keeps rubbing it out and drawing it closer when she thinks I’m not looking!”

Rene pinched the bridge of his nose and held up a hand, saying:

“I’m not interested in any of this. Just wanted to let you know that the Commodore’s decided to give you all a few hours of outdoor exercise. Well, more like indoor exercise, really.”

The pair gave him heated stares.

“What, you mean outside?” Zildiz asked testily.

“No, in here. You can climb all over the walls and smear crap on the floor like always. What’s wrong with you, of course I mean outside. Hey, wait! Where do you think you’re going?” he added as the pair elbowed him aside made a break for the door, jostling to see who got out first.