Chaos Quarter (11 page)

Whatever the case, the fact remained that hyperspace jumps worked. And over the centuries they’d learned much by trial and error. You couldn’t fold space in on itself for any distance less than 1.35 light-years, the minimum distance a ship could jump. You couldn’t send energy waves of any sort through hyperspace. Any communications had to be radioed to a drone or ship. That vessel would then jump to the desired system and retransmit the message to its destination.

Perhaps the most annoying thing was that you couldn’t safely jump within three hundred million miles of a star, or within thirty million miles of an Earth-sized planet. Gravity wells distorted jump paths. If you jumped within those distances, you never ended up where you planned to go. You’d end up light-years off course. Occasionally, as a few early experiments had demonstrated, you reentered normal space inside of a star. You couldn’t jump across a space where a major gravity well sat, so if you wanted to go from one system to another you usually had to go through it and past the star in its center whose gravity would distort your jump path and send you off into oblivion. So most of the time a person spent when traveling through space was in long, boring cruises to a suitable jump point. Once you jumped you again embarked on a new, long, boring cruise to your next destination.

When you had your own jump engine, it wasn’t that bad. Rex could usually jump in not far from the inner solar systems of major stars, avoiding the crazies who tended to infest the moons of gas giants and random rocks floating around at a system’s edge. When you didn’t have a drive, you had to use established jump points. These were space stations or ships stationed in one place that opened jump points that ships could then fly through.

Problem with these was that enemies often disguised their ships as civilian vessels, so most planets in the Quarter built their jump points at the system’s edge, to protect themselves. That left anybody who wanted to travel in the system at the mercy of pirate bands and any petty tyrant you happened to fly past. He hadn’t been able to believe it when he’d first come out here. Back in the commonwealth, commercial jump stations were placed as close to the habitable inner worlds as possible, for quickness of travel. Pirates and tyrants and all that crap just didn’t happen back home.

He spent most of the long cruising time reading books on the viewscreen or watching one of the ten million movies the computer had stored in its memory. He’d run out of fuel before he ran out of entertainment, and he had enough frozen hydrogen to last him six months of hard burn.

“I spoke with her,” Lucius’s voice spoke from behind Rex. He strode onto the bridge, pausing next to Second.

“Why is she sitting on the floor?” he asked.

“I told her she didn’t have to stand there,” Rex replied with an incredulous shake of his head.

“All right…” Lucius replied, moving to his seat. “Perhaps you should have your sick bay examine her?”

“It’s on my to-do list,” Rex replied.

“Well, I can understand why Chakrika appears older than her nineteen years. Her life has not been a pleasant one,” Lucius explained.

“How bad?” Rex asked.

“If you are the honorable man I believe you to be, you would kill without remorse many of the people she has interacted with,” Lucius explained.

“Is she OK?”

“As well as can be expected. When she was young, she was—” Lucius began.

“Did she tell you to tell me this?” Rex asked.

“No.”

“Then I don’t need to know. She trusts you with it. If she meant for me to hear it she would have told me,” said Rex. “Same goes for you.”

“You have mentioned often how my background could cause you trouble,” Lucius recalled. “And you seemed anxious to learn of us in the sick bay after Igbo?”

“Basics, yeah. Private pain doesn’t need to be tossed around like gossip,” Rex continued.

“As you wish,” Lucius acquiesced. He looked to the screen. In the dead center of it sat a scroll of text.

“What is this?” asked Lucius.

“
Ethics of a Free Man
. Joseph Davidson. He was a philosopher four centuries ago. Use to do reports on him in college. Drove my professors nuts. Buncha’ crazy leftists,” Rex said.

“‘…it is beyond doubt that liberty and freedom are, by nature, gifts of the individual soul. Nothing beyond the One can be said to be alive as all groups are mere abstractions containing numerous component individuals, each with their own mind, thoughts, and will. The very idea of a group as a thing exists only in the minds of men, and then only to help them conceptualize the multitudes of individual persons surrounding them…’” Lucius read.

He paused, thinking it over. Rex shifted in his seat and spoke.

“This woman, ‘Second,’ she got me thinking. She keeps saying she served the Master’s will, that now she serves
my
will. She wasn’t even using first person pronouns until I ordered her to. It got me thinking back to this stuff.”

“Should we speak of her when she’s sitting right behind us?” Lucius asked.

Rex rolled his eyes and turned in his chair to face Second.

“Second, do you mind that we’re talking about you?” Rex asked.

Her head tilted mechanically toward Rex.

“I do not understand,” she replied.

“See?” Rex said, glancing over at Lucius. “Second, will you tell anybody what we’ve said about you?”

“Do you wish that I tell somebody?” she asked.

“No,” Rex replied.

“Then I will not,” she answered.

“Your name is really ‘Second?’” Lucius asked.

“This servant’s designation is Second,” she replied.

“I told you to use pronouns,” Rex pointed out.

“I was not speaking with you, Master. Is it your will that this servant refer to itself with pronouns while speaking to others?” she asked, her voice disturbingly innocent.

“Yes,” Rex replied.
Itself?

Second looked straight at Lucius and said, “Then I will do so.”

They spun back forward, leaving her to sit motionless in place.

“It is as if she does not have a will of her own,” Lucius observed.

“Yeah. Get more personality out of the computer. Isn’t that right?”

“
I am incapable of personality
,” the computer replied.

“It bothers me,” Rex said, with a troubled breath. “Even a slave has an inner world, has something that’s
theirs
. In their own heads, ya’ know? But how do you strip a human being of humanity?”

“I do not know,” Lucius replied with a shrug.

Rex nodded to himself, saying, “We should find out.”

He got up, pacing out of the bridge. Second followed without a word. Lucius hurried to catch up, following Rex down the main corridor. They descended the steps into the common area, spotting Chakrika in the kitchen area preparing something.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Usually,” Rex replied sarcastically and turned into the sick bay.

Once inside, he ordered Second to the free bed. She sat down. He walked over to the other. The medical scanner had descended, resting a mere foot from the corpse of the ambassador. Plastiglass doors had emerged from the scanner, slotting into grooves on the floor and wall, creating an air-tight seal around the body.

“Is the scan finished?” Rex asked.

“
Yes
,” the computer replied, “
Abnormalities are present
.”

“Abnormalities?” Lucius asked, pulling up beside Rex.

“
Physiological abnormalities abound. I will require a DNA sample to further analyze
.”

“Open it up then,” Rex ordered. The plastic glass slid back into the scanner, which retracted back to the ceiling. Rex fiddled in a cabinet under the computer terminal on the rear wall, retrieving a pair of scissors and a syringe. He handed the scissors to Lucius.

“Cut his clothes off,” Rex ordered.

Lucius went to work while Rex drew blood. He filled a syringe and deposited it in the medical console. A faint hum filled the room as it was removed and analyzed.

“
DNA inconsistent with
homo sapiens
sapiens
,
” the machine replied.

“He’s not a neanderthal, just look at him,” Rex spoke.

“
DNA is also inconsistent with
homo sapiens neanderthalensis
,” said the computer.

“Wait, neanderthals? Weren’t they primitive men? Before God formed modern humans?” Lucius asked.

“Some fool on Earth illegally cloned them a few centuries ago. There’s a few million scattered throughout the Commonwealth. And don’t ever call one primitive, they get pretty mad when you do that,” Rex explained.

“You’ve interacted with them?!” Lucius exclaimed.

“Hell, I had one as a cadet. Bob Montreaux, great pilot,” Rex spoke, “Could drink like a fish…”

“Unfathomable,” Lucius said with a disbelieving shake, cutting up the corpse’s pant. “How can you—”

His voice stopped dead. Rex turned at the sudden pause. Lucius’s eyes had gone bug-wide, fixed on the ambassador’s groin.

“You going bi on me? Cause that’s not my thing,” Rex spoke.

“Your computer is correct,” Lucius spoke, pointing.

Rex moved a bit to see. Sure enough, between the ambassador’s legs lay a six-inch-long, flaccid penis. His generous endowment hadn’t been the source of Lucius’s shock, though. Just behind the penis was a fully formed vagina.

“Is that—” Rex began.

“Yes,” Lucius replied.

Rex turned to Second, who sat motionlessly on the bed.

“What is this?” he asked.

She got up and moved to see what her new “Master” was motioning at.

“This body was designed to have both male and female genetalia with heightened nerve density to increase the Master’s sexual pleasure,” she informed him.

“Designed?” Lucius spoke, “As in, this man was engineered genetically?”

She said nothing.

“Answer his questions when asked, answer
all
of my crew’s questions when asked,” Rex said with a sigh.

“This body was genetically engineered,” she replied.

“The ambassador’s body, not yours,” Rex spoke, trying to clarify.

“His body was truly engineered. Mine was given only minor modifications,” she spoke.

“Why was your body given minor modifications?” Rex asked.

“To facilitate interaction with primitives. I was made as close to their image as deemed acceptable by the Masters,” she informed.

“You don’t have a penis, do you?” Rex spoke.

“No. Female forms are more useful when dealing with diplomats, who are generally male,” Second spoke.

“So what is different about you?” asked Lucius.

“My language and memory centers are improved to facilitate communications,” she replied.

Rex turned back to the ambassador’s corpse.

“Computer, what else is different about him?”

“
Muscle density at three times human normal. Bone density at five times human normal. Nodes not present in a human brain are present within. A reflecting membrane is present on the backs of his eyes. His blood type matches no known type. At least two hearts are present; both larger than human normal and more densely muscled. Fifteen feet of additional small intestine are present. Several tissues and organs of unknown purpose are present.
”

“Compare the genome to human normal, isolate the differences. Reseal the body,” Rex spoke. He looked at the body. He could have sworn he remembered seeing a rib poking out at an odd angle, nearly puncturing the skin. Shaking it off as a trick of the mind, he turned to Second.

“Lie down on the bed,” he ordered.

She did so.

“Computer, scan Second,” Rex said. As the machine lowered, he found another syringe and took a sample of her blood. He dropped it into one of the computer console’s slots and turned back to Lucius.

“I’d ask if your government had anything to do with this, but they have troubles mastering missile guidance,” he remarked.

“
Former
government,” Lucius stressed. “And no. I heard of nothing like this in Europa, or from anywhere in the Quarter.”

“Guess ‘they’ have good reason to be so secretive,” Rex said, staring at the corpse.

“What the hell are you?”

* * *

“She was telling the truth…” Rex said to the empty bridge.

“Who was? The strange girl?” Chakrika asked.

He turned. She was carrying a tray steaming with food. Rex extended a tray table from the right armrest of his chair. Chakrika slid the tray onto it. A half-dozen pieces of cube steak, cut small to be crammed into a can, and a large pile of noodles in a brown sauce awaited him.

“Yeah, Strange Girl. Look,” he said, pointing to the projection sphere. Instead of tracking surrounding objects, the computer broadcasted images from the scan. A cut-away view of Second’s brain floated steadily before them.

“Scan says most of her brain is normal, except this part down here,” he said, pointing.

A small bulge rested near the base of her brain, between the spine and the muscles of the neck, where the neck joined the skull.

“According to the computer, it’s connected by a dozen nerve fibers,” Rex explained.

“That part isn’t normal?” Chakrika asked.

“According to the computer, no. But I’m no doctor,” he replied.

“
That growth is not present on any human known to Commonwealth medical science
,” the computer spoke.

“Whatever this thing is, has turned what should be a normal woman with a gift for languages into a biological computer, basically,” he explained.

“She’s a computer?”

“Might as well be,” Rex said. “She has no will of her own, acts only on directives. She’s a person turned into a machine and has absolutely no idea that it’s wrong or abnormal.”

“So she’s a slave,” Chakrika said darkly.

“Yeah,” Rex sighed, “She is the perfect slave.”

“Can you fix it?” Chakrika asked.

“No,” he replied, frustrated. “I can’t. Maybe a neurosurgeon could, but I can’t, and the computer doesn’t do surgery.”

“When we get her back to the Commonwealth, could they fix her?” she asked hopefully.

“Maybe, if they would. I work for intelligence, Chaki. Some of them might see her as a
thing
. She’ll tell me anything. They could take her and interrogate her endlessly to learn about wherever it is she came from,” he spoke.