Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 46 - Leverage

Episode 46

“They will arrest you,” said Cha Dzeeny.

The Shaajis did not respond. Linuka Omga had returned from Prral’s surface, hardly speaking to anyone, keeping to herself. The funeral hadn’t given her the closure Cha had hoped for. Maybe it had given her the unflattering clarity to comprehend the many layers of trouble their illustrious band was caught up in.

“And they probably ship Vriishany straight back to her royal prison on Dziilaa Sok,” he added.

A heated argument would be better than the silent treatment.

Linuka nodded absently while her hands glided over the thin wire coiled around the tube casing of the causality bomb. The Hikshuur’s cold storage held all nine of the alien weapons they could retrieve from the Võmémééř wreckage in the Prral system. The inner lining of the room snuffed out any sound from the surrounding ship, and with the reactor on standby, no hum, crew chat, no vibration, nothing alive distracted from the alien cylinders. The technological legacy of a people who destroyed galaxies.

Cha turned to Tswa sni sni, hovering nearby. “Are these safe to touch?”

Tswa sni sni had scanned the bombs with everything at the AI core’s disposal.

“The devices are not interacting with the crates or floor panels they rest on, and there is no measurable surface stress due to the temperature differential between space and the ship’s interior.”

“I meant, is it safe for the Shaajis to touch them?”

“Forgive me if I was not clear,” said the Isonomih in the most motherly female voice. “Despite our ability to handle them, the devices do not seem to further interact with anything in this reality. I am uncertain if Linuka’s gesture even qualifies as touching.”

Cha didn’t hate the intelligent machines like so many of the nreedz-talking humans out there. But he dreaded asking them questions, for every answer they gave, they created more riddles.

“It feels like touching my own hand,” said Linuka. “The temperature of my skin. The pressure I apply to what looks like the surface, perfectly matched.”

Linuka retracted her hand, turned to Cha, a content smile on her face, as if the basic human instinct to touch the unknown had filled the last gaps in understanding the incomprehensible weapons.

“You should try it, Commander.”

Marines learned early to treat every surface in a spaceship as hostile. Nothing was to be touched with bare hands. You never knew if a piece of metal hadn’t been exposed to space just a few passes earlier. Freeze burns were the most common injury during basic training.

“The optical illusions during our inter-galactic excursion fully satisfied my appetite for Võmémééř weirdness, Shaajis. Despite what Tswa sni sni determined, I’m not convinced that 1200-orbit-old salvaged ordnance can be safe.”

“Be assured,” said the AI core, “the devices are inert. This is not the type of weapon prone to accidental discharge due to age or handling.”

I’ll take your word for it, thought Cha. Actually, I don’t.

“Shaajis, if I can’t talk you out of cozying up to these bombs, may I continue trying to talk you out of returning to the Assembly world?”

“You may, Commander, but get in line.”

Cha didn’t understand.

“Everyone is trying to talk me out of it,” said Linuka. “My own Uurmi, as one mangled bunk frame can attest. The skipper thinks it’s a bad idea. You don’t want me to go. And the Assembly: they are trying everything to keep me away.”

“I thought the Assembly lady who contacted you made good on her promise to have your father declared dead.”

“She did. She was very convincing. But she’s a front for the major drivers of galactic power. She was chosen to unsettle me, impress me, then lull me. They sent a copy of my mother’s likeness to convince me I wasn’t alone. That I had friends on Omech Chaa. A fellow female, appalled by the atrocities committed by Lotnuuk Rrupteemaa.”

“You’re not alone, Shaajis. Never were.”

She touched Cha’s shoulder. “That’s not how I meant it. This Rige woman knew exactly what she was doing. She gave me what I wanted. But why? To keep me away from their center of intrigue and power. After this minor concession, they went back to fighting me every step of the way.”

The Shaajis’ hand still rested on Cha’s shoulder. Was it part of how she navigated her world, the myriad of realities she had access to? She often talked about world lines and how they touched. Maybe it wasn’t a metaphor, and touch was part of her watching the future. What looked to him like careless absentmindedness could have been the Shaajis examining the past of the ancient Võmémééř bomb. Or its future. Had she been any other person, Cha would have called her determination to fly straight into the enemy’s stronghold stubbornness, but for her, it might be the logical conclusion of what she saw.

“You still think you can convince them to put the young lady Vriishany through the immortality rite? Install her in the Assembly? And get a fair deal for all of us?”

“Convince?” asked Linuka. “No.”

She retracted her hand.

“Planning on facing the Assembly with open hands, gestures of good-will, a peace offering, was naive. Childish. I’m not ignoring your concerns, Commander; I’m taking them dead-serious. When my father first went to the Assembly with a peace plan, they ridiculed him, shunned him. When he returned commanding an Isonomih battle fleet and Traaz ground forces, they listened.”

“And you want to force them to listen? Using the Remnant battlecruiser?”

“No,” said Linuka. “The Chéé is something they can see, understand, fight—match, even. We need a bigger threat.”

Cha’s stomach dropped.

“You want to use the causality bombs as leverage. We didn’t collect them to take them out of circulation. We added them to our arsenal.”

Linuka’s smile vanished. “These bombs waver just enough into our reality to be touched. Hardly visible in broad light, enigmatic, alien. Everything the Assembly fears. Something they don’t understand how to fight, and—worse—how to control.”

She made a waving gesture across the grayish pods. “These… optical illusions? Uncontrollable for them. They fear nothing more than loss of control. And that fear is our leverage. It’s my insurance. It’s why it’s safe for Vriishany and me to go.”

Cha frowned. “And it’s why you want us to stay. To guard the leverage. Give the Assembly the impression we could deploy the bombs. Do you believe they’ll buy it?”

Tswa sni sni had declared the weapons dead. Safe. ‘Inert,’ she called it. Worse than the Assembly believing they had uncontrollable weapons of unfathomable destruction was them assuming the Shaajis sat on some 1200-orbit-old duds.

“Oh, they’ll absolutely buy it,” said Linuka. “We got everything here on the Hikshuur to make our threat credible.”

“Forgive me, Shaajis, but I don’t think Tswa sni sni scans could reveal how to operate these things.”

“I can confirm this assessment,” said the AI core. “It would take an expert team considerable time to establish even basic operational procedures for the devices.”

Linuka’s smile returned. “Good for us, we have just such a team in our memory banks. The slave AIs we freed from the sphere drive research station? A bunch of the foremost experts in Võmémééř tech in the galaxy. They spent orbits deciphering non-integer dimension systems. I’m sure they could make sense out of our loot.”

No one had touched the cold storage’s controls, but Cha shivered.

“And even if not… ” said Linuka, “the Assembly couldn’t risk that.”

Cha shook his head. What if the slave AIs discovered how to use the weapons? The causality bombs had blighted the galaxy with untold destruction, worse than space debris and surface craters. Unseen, incomprehensible. Laws of nature, negated, twisted, gone.

The Assembly certainly couldn’t risk that.

The real question was: Could we?

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