Participant Species: Asher in Ordered Space Volume I Page 5

  When he reached the bottom of the bowl, he was surprised to see that everyone was greeting each other with very little formality. In his experience, government functions were usually tedious, circumspect, and rigorous about form. Among the Cythrans, apparently, none of that held true. The humans had just met the leaders of Marateen, and already Ravkar was extolling the virtues of Hokozana and trying her hardest to sell Ordered Space. “You have no idea,” she said. “Zvezda is a backwoods corp. The tech at Hokozana’s disposal in the core systems is astounding. Our neural nets are light years ahead of theirs. Our downloadable media are better, our transportation tech is better. Really, there’s no comparison.”

  “It is true,” said a large Cythran named Taretameera, “that our people have fallen in love with your technology. Some already wonder how we survived all these many years without it.”

  “And does that concern you?” asked Lori. Ravkar shot her an anxious look.

  “Not at all,” said another Cythran whose name Asher hadn’t caught, “we are fascinated by the changes. We have always been full of curiosity. It is the Cythran way.”

  Ravkar smiled. “Indeed. We have been talking about the amazing ability of your people to overcome technical challenges and learn new skills. I think we can safely say that we have never seen anything like it.”

  Asher was half-listening to the conversation. From the corner of his eye, he spied Jaydrupar wandering off up a ramp that led in the opposite direction to that from which they had entered. He wasn’t sure where the man was going, but it seemed like his duty as a security op to keep an eye on everyone. He signaled Kaz to explain where he was going and then headed up the ramp behind the Intel op.

  When he had caught up, Asher fell in just behind Jaydrupar, who was still climbing the ramp. “Where are we off to?” he asked.

  “Oh, just wandering around,” said Jaydrupar. “I was wondering whether this was another way back to the surface.”

  Wadameetra came shuffling up after them. She caught their attention by lightly tapping Asher’s leg with one of her head-appendages. “Sorry, but you can’t go this way.”

  “Why not?” asked Jaydrupar.

  “It is a sacred place. Only the creche-leaders may enter.”

  Asher was surprised. This was the first mention he had heard of any kind of religion on Cierren Cythra. He consulted his downloads, but none had any information about sacred spaces, rituals, or religious beliefs.

  Jaydrupar made a mollifying gesture. “Very well, we did not mean to break any ritual proscriptions. Come, Asher, let us rejoin the others.”

  The Hokozana-Cythran conclave was apparently going swimmingly. Asher and Kaz stood around the peripheries as Ravkar and Lori talked up a storm with the Cythran leaders. Asher noticed that Jaydrupar was not participating much in the conversation. He was standing in the heart of the group, but he was gazing thoughtfully at the walls and benches of the auditorium rather than joining the discussion.

  The talk went on for perhaps an hour or two, then the group broke up. The Cythrans shuffled up the ramp toward the sacred place. Wadameetra turned to them and smiled. “Shall we go back to town, then? It’s getting late.”

  It was indeed getting late, by Cythran standards. Bright was setting when they reached the surface. They piled back into the buggy and Wadameetra whipped them rapidly across the plain. Despite the speed, they didn’t arrive back in Marateen until after Dimset.

  The mood around the living room that night was generally happy. Ravkar was euphoric. "I can't believe things went so well. I had thought we would be negotiating for weeks or months, maybe even years. Now I'm optimistic that we might be able to cut a deal, with these Marateen Cythrans anyway, in a matter of days."

  "That really was amazing," said Lori. "I've studied just about everything ever written about early-contact exoanthro, but I've never heard of a species so open to change."

  It was Jaydrupar who broke the jovial mood. "I think I will have to go tomorrow," he said.

  Ravkar turned to him in concern. "What? But we only just got here."

  Jaydrupar gave her a rueful smile. "I know. And I do wish you well with the diplomatic approchement, but that is not really my mission."

  "What do you mean? What is your mission?" asked Lori.

  "I was sent to judge whether the Cythrans might offer us any military or political threat."

  "Preposterous, Hasim," said Ravkar. "How could they be a threat?"

  Jaydrupar smiled again. "That is exactly what the tenor of my report will be. My mission appears to be a waste of time. Still, the report must be made. Since all communications from the surface have to be relayed through Zvezda satellites, I think it would be better for the sake of security if I were picked up by a shuttle from the Cormorant so I can make my report directly on a Hokozana secure line. I have a beacon that will summon a shuttle.”

  Ravkar snorted. "I suppose if you must make your report now, you must. I'm pretty sure Lori and I can handle the negotiations, anyway."

  "Very good," said Jaydrupar. "I have, in fact, already signaled the ship. A shuttle will be at the spaceport at about 0230 hours. I will try not to disturb anyone on my way out. In fact, I should probably sleep down here tonight, just to make things easier."

  "Fine," said Ravkar. Asher got the distinct impression she was happy to be rid of Jaydrupar. That was odd, as he had not noticed any tension before. Still, he knew from experience that the man was not to be trusted. Perhaps he had a reputation in Intel. Lori, her eyes still gleaming with the exoanthro exploits of the day, didn't seem to much care what Jaydrupar did.

  The two women soon retired upstairs, still talking about the events of the day. Asker, Kaz, and Jaydrupar were left alone in the living room. There was an awkward silence for a while. Then Jaydrupar spoke up. "You don't really like me, do you Asher?"

  "I don't really know you."

  "That's not an answer."

  Asher sighed. "Well no. I guess I don’t like you much. It was that whole Ferether thing."

  "What about it?" asked Jaydrupar.

  "I don't know really. It all just left a bad taste in my mouth."

  Jaydrupar smiled as if at a private joke. "Too bad. I thought you were one of the smarter ones."

  Asher stiffened. "You want to know my problem? Okay, then. I think you blew up a ship full of Ferethers for no good reason."

  Kaz made a sort of hiccuping noise. "He did what?"

  Jaydrupar laughed, a short staccato sound in the darkening room. "Oh, but what if I had a very good reason?"

  "So you did it?" asked Kaz.

  "Yes, but believe me, it was necessary."

  "Why?" asked Asher.

  "I'll tell you when you come with me to the shuttle."

  "What? I'm not going anywhere. My orders are to stay with the diplomatic mission."

  Jaydrupar reached into the breast pocket of his uniform and pulled out a pin drive, flashing the familiar Hokozana dull blue. "Those were your orders." He handed the pin drive to Asher.

  Chapter Five

  The shuttle made a neat touchdown right at the end of the runway. Unlike the Sissilbeni, Slider was capable of vertical take-offs and landings. A gangway rolled down, and Asher and Jaydrupar climbed aboard.

  The pin drive had been clear. It contained explicit orders from Drienner Marcolis attaching Asher to Jaydrupar. The Intel man was now his immediate superior for the duration of the Cierren Cythra assignment. Luckily, that assignment would end as soon as they got back to Cormorant.

  They strapped into comfortable crash-seats, far better that the rickety steel frames on Qwadaleemia’s ship. Other than the three flight crew from Fleet Ops, who were forward in the crew cabin, they were alone on the ship. “All right,” said Asher. “Let’s hear it. What the hell is going on?”

  “I told you I would explain the Ferether thing, didn’t I?” said Jaydrupar.

  “Yeah. I guess that would be a place to start.”

  The Intel man smiled thinly. “What do you k
now of the Ferethers?” he asked.

  Asher thought about it. In reality, he knew very little about them. He saw them every now and then, especially in frontier systems. He knew that their home system was somewhere outside Ordered Space. Some scout company had assembled a jumpgate there generations ago, but the Ferethers had quickly expelled all humans from the system and taken control of the gate for themselves. “I don’t really know very much. I’m not even sure where their home system is.”

  “Exactly. That seems to be intentional on their part. You know how you see them wandering frontier and disordered systems? Well, we found that one thing they’ve been doing in their wanderings is intentionally erasing any mention of the discovery of their home-system from the databanks of the various scout companies and minor corps.”

  “How can they do that?” asked Asher. “Surely, even minor corps have good data security.”

  Jaydrupar snorted. “It’s variable, but among some of them it’s a joke. Anyway, it turns out that the Ferethers are really good at developing viruses and worms to affect human-made systems.”

  “Okay,” said Asher, “I can accept that they’re destroying information about themselves, but so what? They can’t get to the databanks on the core systems, can they?”

  “They’ve tried. The problem is that it’s hard for a Ferether to be inconspicuous anywhere except on the edge of Ordered Space. Anywhere in the core, they would stand out like a sore thumb. Still, they have a diplomatic presence with some of the larger corps, including DiJeRiCo and—until recently—Hokozana.”

  “And their diplomats try to subvert our systems?”

  “Yes,” said Jaydrupar. “That’s why Intel started a major program to understand the Ferethers about ten years ago. I was assigned to it as a one-bar right out of the academy. We had people watching the Ferether diplomats and others following any Ferethers that showed up in out-of-the-way systems. Then, of course, we had a bunch of people in Research going through every record of Ferether interaction we could find.”

  “And what did we learn?”

  Jaydrupar shrugged. “Very little, really. The Ferethers are consummate isolationists. They are very good at keeping their secrets, and they are willing to play some very subtle games to do so.”

  “What games?”

  “Let me illustrate by explaining my role. I was brought into the program and assigned to a team that was researching Ferether space craft. Part of my job was to catch any instance I could of a Ferether ship appearing in video or other imagery. Well, as it turns out, some jumpgates are actually set up to provide video imagery of ships as they come through, and I spent a lot of time watching Ferether ships jump into Ordered Space at a border system called Inakata, which is the location of the gate linked to the one that was initially installed in the Ferethers’ home system, so it is the one place all their ships must pass through if they are to operate in Ordered Space.”

  To Asher, it seemed that they were getting further and further from the topic at hand. “I still don’t understand. What do the Ferethers, however sneaky they are, have to do with Cierren Cythra?”

  “I am trying to explain, Asher, but it takes some time.” Jaydrupar linked his fingers and cracked the knuckles of his hands. “You see, what I discovered by watching the video from that jumpgate is that Ferether ships were not coming through it at all.”

  “What? But I’ve seen them. They are definitely in Ordered Space.” In fact, thought Asher, I just saw one on Zvezda One.

  “Indeed, but what I saw, and was able to prove to my and my superiors’ satisfaction, is that Ferether ships actually materialized in space a small distance away from the jumpgate.”

  Asher sat back heavily. His mind worked quickly to figure out the implications of this information. “So,” he said, “that means that the Ferethers—”

  “Don’t require a jumpgate to move through hyperspace,” said Jaydrupar. “But, they still bring their ships out of hyperspace immediately in front of the jumpgate because they want us to think that they do. As I said, they are subtle. This game has apparently being going on for at least the past forty years.”

  “But why?” asked Asher. “What do they hope to gain?”

  “Honestly, we have no idea. There are some who think they are just secretive by nature. Others think that they are seeking an economic advantage through their hyperdrive system—which is what we decided to call it—but just haven’t figured out how to realize it yet.”

  “And you?” asked Asher.

  “I am one of a group that thinks the Ferethers may be the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. The military and economic implications of the hyperdrive change the game for everyone. I know that if Hokozana had that kind of technology, we could use it to destroy our major competitors. I believe that we have to assume the Ferethers are thinking the same way.”

  Asher whistled. “So that ‘salvage’ operation on that disabled Ferether ship. You were trying to steal it, weren’t you?”

  “Of course.” Jaydrupar sat back and stretched his arms out to his sides. “We saw a chance to take a galaxy-changing technology. What should we have done?”

  “But something went wrong.”

  “Yes,” said Jaydrupar. “We triggered some kind of mechanism that destroyed the ship. Or perhaps one of the remaining Ferether crew did. Regardless, an explosive fail-safe of some kind was detonated. We were lucky to escape.”

  “With a Ferether,” said Asher. “I saw you bring a supposedly injured operative on board. Even in the suit, I could tell there was something wrong about him. He was too tall and thin.”

  Jaydrupar smiled. “Good to know I have not completely misjudged your intelligence. Yes, we captured a Ferether. We have held him in a secret location for three years now, in the hopes of learning something new about them.’

  “And have you learned anything?”

  “I don’t know Asher. I may be right at the heart of this, but I’m still just a Three-Bar. A lot of things are still well above my rank. I know that if they have learned anything new, they haven’t seen any reason to tell me about it yet.”

  “Well, that’s not very reassuring. Anyway, I still don’t see what any of this has to do with the present situation. I mean, I know there are a couple of Ferethers on Zvezda One, but so what? We’re on Cierren Cythra, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  Jaydrupar leaned close. “What if I told you that the auditorium we went to yesterday wasn’t ancient at all?”

  “What do you mean? The Cythrans said it was at least three hundred years old,” said Asher.

  “But I scanned the wall surface with LIDAR—a mapping system that works by analyzing the reflection of a laser beam. I can tell you for certain that that auditorium was carved using titanium saws and laser cutting technology.”

  “How can that be?” asked Asher. “Are you saying the Cythrans had advanced tech three hundred years ago but have just forgotten about it now?”

  “No,” said Jaydrupar. “I’m saying that the Cythrans have had advanced tech for a much shorter time and are hiding it from us.”

  “But why?”

  “Here’s where we have to speculate, but I’d be willing to bet that they’re working with the Ferethers. It’s even possible that they were genetically engineered by the Ferethers in the first place. I mean, are we seriously meant to accept that a race with one genius gender and one stupid one evolved naturally?”

  Asher thought about Sarudeero and Qwadaleemia. The differences between them were definitely strange, but a lot of strange things happened in the universe. “Lori seems to think they’re on the up-and-up, and she’s a Lang and Cult expert.”

  Jaydrupar shook his head. “Lori is captivated by the idea of the Cythrans being the great new Participant Species. Look at Ravkar. She thinks she’ll make her career by bringing the Cythrans into Hokozana.”

  “And you’re saying what, exactly?”

  “That someone has been pulling the wool over their eyes. Over all our eyes. This whole pla
ce is some kind of game, and the Ferethers are at the heart of it.”

  Asher considered this. He was tempted to dismiss Jaydrupar as a monomaniac, seeing Ferether-centered conspiracies everywhere. On the other hand, he had to admit that a lot of what they’d found on Cierren Cythra did seem pretty far fetched. The idea of a species with a natural or intuitive grasp of technology many centuries beyond their own just seemed wrong to him. It went against everything his father had taught him about the way evolution worked. Genes and proteins and cellular structure and all those particulars of the evolution of life on Earth weren’t necessary—and were in fact entirely unique. However, every species, no matter its physiology, had to have some way to reproduce itself, and there had to be a mechanism so that that reproduction could result in offspring with a differential chance of adapting to changes in the environment. The specifics of biological evolution might change—or even be thrown out the window entirely, as with mineral species like the Lillican Rocks—but the principle of descent with modification and the mechanism of natural selection couldn’t be avoided. It was the only process by which simpler species could develop into more complex ones over time. Without such complexity, sentience just wasn’t possible. If that was taken as a given, then the Cythrans’ ability to grasp new tech was more than an anomaly, it seemed nearly an evolutionary impossibility.

  “Okay,” he said after a while. “I think I can see your concern. I’m still not sure about the Ferether connection, but I can see that there’s something we don’t yet understand about the Cythrans. So, what do you plan to do about it?”

  “Well, first we’re going to reach Cormorant and I’m going to make a full report without going through Zvezda One’s systems, which the Ferethers and maybe even DiJeRiCo have probably compromised by now. Then, I want to kidnap a Cythran. Or preferably two, one male and one female.”

  Asher wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. Whatever secret they might be hiding, the Cythrans were still sentient. It seemed wrong to be thinking about capturing another sentient for what Asher assumed would be medical testing and experimentation. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”