3. The Cold Birth

Of People and Events

“Density factors equal point seven nine,” the voice said, mechanical, screeching in her ear. “Blood plasma stable. Neural implant available for communication protocol zero zero one.”

She reached out with her hand, feeling the cold surface. Very cold, and solid.

“She will be waking up in a moment,” another voice said, normal, soothing, old and confident.

“Beginning communication protocol zero zero one.”

RageChild woke and felt the ship spin slightly of course. She paused for a moment to let the encapsulating gel catch up with her waking mind. The gel supported her inside the ship’s pod, her rifter now turning on its final attitude to begin the warp. She wiggled her fingers in the gel, and felt comforted by answering the ship’s inquiries. She and Airgoidh had just lifted off from Amamake VI, and she scolded herself for having dozed off somewhere in the troposphere.

“Sister?” The voice said, her sister in the rifter than followed hers.

“I am all right. Just caught a nap it seems.”

“A nap? After that bumpy ride?”

The atmosphere of the planet had become charged electrically, and the energy became a burden for the ships as they approached escape velocity. Even the gel hadn’t been fully capable or relieving the stresses on the ship from being passed down to them. RageChild wondered how she had managed the nap.

Their rifters began the warp sequence, and in moments the ships vanished from the tracking systems of the Amamake Concord stations. The Temple of Unity beacon appeared in the HUD, and the rifters slowed to sublight speeds as they approached. The Temple remained, which the two sisters had hoped. Someone had looted the underground town, and they didn’t know what to expect out here. Of course, such a construction as this Temple would be rather difficult to remove, but the events of the last week were heavy on them.

“Sister, may I ask about the tube?” Airgoidh’s voice played in her head, and she did not answer immediately. Instead, she maneuvered her rifter in close to her sister-of-faith and attached the umbilical tethers. She willed the gel to interface with her sister, and the two were linked ship-to-ship, mind-to-mind via their neural interfaces. Though purely mechanical in the link, they heard each other when they wished it, but RageChild felt instantly enclosed by her sister as if she were a bug inside her hand.

“Do not fear it sister,” Airgoidh said, seeming to ease up a little on the link.

RageChild breathed more heavily, and realized she wasn’t breathing gel. She stood on the slopes of a dune, like those of Amamake VI, but the sun was cooler, the air not so hot. She looked around, seeing no one, but she could definitely feel the sand under her feet.

“Do not fear,” Airgoidh said again, and RageChild spun. Nothing. She did not see her sister. She willed the link to create an image of her sister for her to see, but only the dunes remained out to the horizon.

“I am the dunes, sister. I am the sun and the air.”

“How is this possible? What is this? This is madness!”

“No sister. It is not space madness.” The air became sweet, like honeysuckle. “I am projecting this image of the dunes into the gel, and it is creating this image for us. It is not real, although as you know the mind cannot tell the difference between a real and an imagined event.”

"How have you done this?” RageChild stooped down to one knee, and ran her hand through the sand. Most of the sand fell between her fingers, but there, just a little of it was thicker, more like gel. She was obviously still in her rifter, floating in the pod’s gel. But she was also here in an image created by her sister’s mind.

“Sister Gaelbhan gave me a specialized skill pack. She gave it to me a year ago, and told me I should not use it until I had achieved much more experience in other areas first. That was after she rescued me from Sehmy, after we escaped, just before she got me into the Republic Military School.”

RageChild wandered down the dune, letting the sun warm her as she walked. If this image was her sister, then she could go anywhere and be with her no matter the distance. “So you trained it anyway.”

“I waited as long as I could, learning from the teachers and using the skill packs necessary to use it. But I couldn’t wait any longer. Gaelbhan said that only experience would prepare me for the pack.”

“She is right. You can learn the basic strategies of missile launchers from skill packs, but to understand in what ways they can help or hinder you, that is experience. What skill pack did she give you?”

A hesitation, when the voice spoke as if from every grain of sand, ever bit of air, even from the sun itself. “It was an SOCT Advanced Awareness pack called Clarity.”

RageChild felt a chill along her spine, and she stopped walking. She had heard of those skill packs, but never thought of them or even wanted one. Rumors had said the Jovians had assisted SOCT in their development of these skills. She spun on her heels, looking in wonder and fear at the image of the desert. Her sister-of-faith had created it. She had built it with her mind and then her neural link made it effectively real.

“You are afraid, sister,” Airgoidh said. The image faded. “I do not want you to be afraid.”

“It is a strange thing, sister.” She felt more secure now as the image faded, and she could feel her ship in her mind. The systems were working, the ship resting in space. Those were things she knew. She had been afraid, a little.

“It is not real,” Airgoidh began. “It is just an image, like the HUD. It has no substance in reality, and no strength to harm or help.”

RageChild smiled. “Of course, sister. I am being stupid and childish, but I do not think you should have trained on that pack yet. Gaelbhan had made her wishes clear.”

A short pause. “You do speak the truth of it. I trained the required skills to learn it, but this training has made my perceptions broader than they were. Too fast perhaps. I will admit to finding my dreams in the gel disconcerting.”

“Your dreams? Do they play in the gel?”

“They play in the gel often when I am awake. My mind is interacting with the gel even on a subconscious level. Is this the way Jovians think and interact with their environments?”

RageChild said nothing for a time. The two sisters looked out into space via their HUD, watched as the Temple of Unity spun on its axis, and all the while thought of their sister in the hands of the Amarr.

RageChild spoke. “Sister. Can you create images from other people’s thoughts?”

“No sister, not directly,” she said, lying. “I . . . I have tried to read your thoughts through our comm-interlink, but it seems more primal than that. Our genetic connection is the answer I think. If we were not Paratwa, then I don’t think I would be able to do that at all. When we were leaving the planet, I felt you in my mind, but only now do I realize that it was because you were sleeping. Your mind allowed me entry. You were dreaming. I asked you about your birth awakening earlier . . . do you remember?”

“I remember. I wonder . . . would you try that again with me. I often have that dream. Perhaps you can tell me what you see.”

Airgoidh paused, then, “I do not think I will see anything. It was more that I understood perceptually what was happening as you experienced it. But we can try.” Again, lying. She would not scare her sister any more than necessary, even if it meant she had to lie about just how many of those SOCT Advanced packs she had trained.

“Thank you sister.” RageChild set the rifter to sleep mode, and waited while the autonomic systems became her lifeline to reality. The rifter managed all of the effort to keep the ship in place, to keep the comm-interlink open and stable, as well as monitoring the comms channels and even the targeting scanners. Whomever had looted the underground town might well seek to find more items of interest here, assuming they could get the Sun Warden Panel to work.

**

Walking methodically behind the line of monks at the terminal stations, the Acharya watched the monks verbally dictating notes into their PADS, who themselves watched the monitors. These terminals displayed people and places throughout the worlds of New Eden, events as they unfolded, and the monks made notes. The monastery housed dozens of such rooms, high on the granite cliffs amidst the tropical forest prevalent in many rural areas of Onga.

On some monitors, Curse Alliance did battle with enemies new and old, while in the Caldari systems, GalNet cams viewed nothing but the marketplaces. All of these various activities were history in the making, but the monks' job was to connect the dots. Perhaps a Caldari soldier would be seen one day at a marketplace buying candy for his three year old son, only to be connected to the sale of arms to Matari dissidents -- while also providing intelligence of those mercenary movements to the Amarr – connected to these events simply because a small bag of candy lay on the table where these events happened; all in view of one of the innumerable GalNet cams. The Acharya’s job, as head of the religious order of Beyond Reach, was to oversee this unconventional portion of the order’s operations. Unfiltered access to raw data often fueled him with new insights of the big picture.

". . . the seven Amarri frigates were located at the dark side of Amarr VIII Moon 9 . . . " the monk said into his PAD. The Acharya stopped, turning back to look at the monk, then the monitor. A video stream coded Amarr Navy showed seven frigates sitting in a baseline formation in orbit of that moon. They looked abandoned.

"Replay," The Acharya said to the monk, who obediently reset the incoming video stream. The Navy ship ended the warp, the video beginning with a jitter. The moon filled the whole monitor, but the camera drones adjusted the view to the seven objects in lower orbit. Zooming, the seven frigates appeared.

"Replay," The Acharya said to the monk, who again obediently reset the video. "That's not typical Navy drone action."

"You mean the video isn't from the Amarr fleet?" The monk asked, replaying it several times. "Ah yes, the jitter is from a destabilized drone system, not like the Navy equipment at all." "Let me hear the feed."

The monk flipped the switch to external speaker and reset the video again. "We've discovered seven frigates in orbit of the ninth moon of Amarr VIII. Although we were able to activate the ship's onboard AI system remotely, the ships were otherwise powered down and all active systems filtered to prevent detection. The ships' black box revealed an Imperial Academy graduate named Jafi Aphuka had piloted them to this location. They look to have been abandoned."

"The video feed isn't live. It was recorded."

"Acharya? How can you know that?"

He pointed to the farthest ship, its running lights active, only possible when a pilot was interfaced with the ship. "Someone was on that ship when this video was taking place. Maybe even our young Amarri pilot."

The feed continued after a pause, the Navy ship sending down a boarding party. The video now appeared to be the personal cam of the Navy Captain sent to investigate the frigates. The Archarya felt more doubt as the video played. He didn't think the people on the video were even Amarr, but still cleverly played.

"Captain," one voice said, "Nothing in the cargo hold, and the systems are unaffected. Nothing to report from damage control."

"Very good, Sergeant. Continue the sweep of the other six ships. Keep the channel open." Another voice, a female. "Captain, the ships’ logs show that they were intended to travel from this location to various stations in Amarr, Sehmy and others . . . on auto-pilot."

"Auto-pilot? Then what? Just sit and wait? Get me answers."

The Archarya and the monk watched as the video played through to the last ship. The first six ships' cargo holds were empty, the ships seemingly abandoned, and the systems checked satisfactory.

"Sir! We found a body!"

The Captain moved down the corridor to the cargo hold of the seventh ship, RIN Soul of Amarr, bypassing personnel whose heads always managed to be turned away or not in the frame. The body of an Amarr lay in the hold, curled into a ball, looking very ashen. "Who is it?"

"ID tags say it's Jafi Aphuka. And sir? The salvage teams are reporting they found some objects onboard the other ships now. We found one too, over there."

"What kind of objects?" The Captain asked, his cam moving toward the direction pointed. The screen panned the floor, then on an object attached to the wall of the hold. As the lights all gathered in that corner, they illuminated a large scepter like object, with a sun flaring at the top of a long rod; a Khumaak.

"Well, now I've seen everything." The Captain waited a moment more for the cam to conveniently catch a few more moments of the Khumaak, and then he reached down to the body, turning it slightly onto its side. Of course, the cam never showed the Captain's face, mounted on the shoulder, but it did catch the Amarr pilot's face full frame. The Captain backed up, yelling. "Who checked for virals? Well?"

"Standard checks Sir. Nothing."

The Archarya replayed that last sequence, stopping the video just as the face of Jafi Aphuka appeared on screen. Ashen face and blue lips indicated a standard viral agent, but why were the ears also blue? He had never seen a viral with that additional epidermal symptom. The Acharya stepped back to the wall, thinking. Odd set of circumstances, and some chilling results yet to be seen, he thought. Why would an Amarr pilot have seven ships sitting in orbit on the far side of a moon? These ships were destined for populated stations, and a viral agent was involved, so somehow the young Amarr had become mixed up in terrorist activities – but whose activities? Matari? What was the significance of the Khumaak?

Not just one Khumaak, but seven . . .

Whereas one might suppose Matari terrorists based on that, the Acharya never jumped to a conclusion. He snapped his fingers -- a couple of weeks ago, a Matari terrorist had fired on and left ships to burn outside the Emperor's Station in Sehmy. Then there was that other incident . . . where was that? "Pull up file 37-A21."

"Yes, Acharya." The monitor replayed an incident in Aranir in which a Matari ship self-destructed just outside a station there. The Matari, named Ajahn, appeared in the screen speaking his last few words before the ship became debris.

"I make this sacrifice for my brothers and sisters in bondage to you foul Amarr! The virus you inflict on the Matari will hold us no more!"

The screen went black, and Archarya replayed it once more. The Matari's face was ashen, his lips and ears were blue. "He has the same symptoms," the monk said, and the Acharya nodded. "What does he mean, the virus won't hold the Matari no more?"

"Of course!" The Acharya strode down the corridor to his study, leaving the monks to ponder his bright, upbeat attitude.

On the monitor that played the faked Navy video, the crew had returned to their ships, calling for medical quarantine. Despite the hubbub of people running and medical condition Alpha Red blaring, a voice managed to be heard over the vessel's intercom.

"Captain, a ship is approaching. It bears the signature of PIE. They’re saying they’ve received a delayed communication escrowed to them by the Amarr pilot."

cont...