Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Five

MacIntyre lowered himself into the hot, swirling water with a groan of relief, then leaned back against the pool's contoured lip and looked around his quarters. Well, the captain's quarters, anyway. He supposed it made sense to make a man assigned to a twenty-five-year deployment comfortable, but this—!

His hot tub was big enough for at least a dozen people and designed for serious relaxation. He set his empty glass on one of the pop-out shelves and watched the built-in auto-bar refill it, then adjusted the water jets with his toes and allowed himself to luxuriate as he sipped.

It was the spaciousness that truly impressed him. The ceiling arched cathedral-high above his hot tub, washed in soft, sourceless light. The walls—he could not for the life of him call them "bulkheads"—gleamed with rich, hand-rubbed wood paneling, and any proletariat-gouging billionaire would envy the art adorning the luxurious chamber. One statue particularly fascinated him. It was a rearing, lynx-eared unicorn, too "real" feeling to be fanciful, and MacIntyre felt a strangely happy sort of awe at seeing the true image of the alien foundation of one of his own world's most enduring myths.

Yet even the furnishings were over-shadowed by the view, for the tub stood on what was effectively a second-story balcony above an enormous atrium. The rich, moist smells of soil and feathery, alien greenery surrounded him as soft breezes stirred fronded branches and vivid blossoms, and the atrium roof was invisible beyond a blue sky that might have been Earth's but for a sun that was just a shade too yellow.

And this, MacIntyre reminded himself, was but one room of his suite. He knew rank had its privileges, but he'd never anticipated such magnificence and space—no doubt because he still thought of Dahak as a ship. Which it was, but on a scale so stupendous as to render his concept of "ship" meaningless.

Yet he'd paid a price for all this splendor, he reflected, thrashing the water with his feet like a little boy to work some of the cramps from his calves. It seemed unfair to be subject to things like cramps after all he'd been through in the past few months. On the other hand, he was still adjusting to the changes Dahak had wrought upon and within him... and if Dahak called them "minor" one more time, he intended to find out if Fleet Regs provided the equivalent of keelhauling a computer.

The life of a NASA command pilot was not a restful thing, but Dahak gave a whole new meaning to the word "strenuous." A much younger Colin MacIntyre had thought Hell Week at Annapolis was bad, but then he'd gone on to Pensacola and known flight school was worst of all... until the competitive eliminations and training schedule of the Prometheus Mission. But all of that had proved the merest setting-up exercise for his training program as Dahak's commander.

Nor was the strain decreased by the inevitable stumbling blocks. Dahak was a machine, when all was said, designed toward an end and shaped by his design. He was also, by dint of sheer length of existence and depth of knowledge, far more cosmopolitan (in the truest possible sense) than his "captain," but he was still a machine.

It gave him a rather different perspective, and that could produce interesting results. For instance, it was axiomatic to Dahak that the Fourth Imperium was the preeminent font of all true authority, automatically superceding such primitive, ephemeral institutions as the United States of America.

But MacIntyre saw things a bit differently, and Dahak had been taken aback by his stubborn refusal to swear any oath that might conflict with his existing one as a naval officer in the service of the said United States.

In the end, he'd also seemed grudgingly pleased, as if it confirmed that MacIntyre was a man of honor, but that hadn't kept him from setting out to change his mind. He'd pointed out that humanity's duty to the Fourth Imperium predated its duty to any purely terrestrial authority—that the United States was, in effect, no more than a temporary governing body set up upon a desert island to regulate the affairs of a mere portion of a shipwrecked crew. He had waxed eloquent, almost poetic, but in vain; MacIntyre remained adamant.

They hammered out a compromise eventually, though Dahak accepted it only grudgingly. After his experience with the conflict between his own "Alpha Priority" orders, he was distinctly unhappy to have his new captain complete his oath "... insofar as obedience to Fleet Central and the Fourth Imperium requires no action or inaction harmful to the United States of America." Still, if those were the only terms on which the ancient warship could get itself a captain, Dahak would accept them, albeit grumpily.

Yet it was only fair for Dahak to face a few surprises of his own. Though MacIntyre had recognized (however dimly) and dreaded the responsibility he'd been asked to assume, he hadn't considered certain other aspects of what he was letting himself in for. Which was probably just as well, since he would have refused point-blank if he had considered them.

Like "biotechnic enhancement." The term had bothered him from the start, for as a spacer he'd already endured more than his share of medical guinea pigdom, but the thought of an extended lifespan and enhanced strength had been seductive. Unfortunately, his quaint, twenty-first-century notions of what the Fourth Imperium's medical science could do had proven as outmoded as his idea of what a "ship" was.

His anxiety had become acute when he discovered he was expected to submit to a scalpel-wielding computer, especially after he found out just how radical the "harmless" process was. In effect, Dahak intended to take him apart for reassembly into a new, improved model that incorporated all the advantages of modern technology, and something deep inside had turned nearly hysterical at the notion of becoming, for all intents and purposes, a cyborg. It was as if he feared Doctor Jekyll might emerge as Mister Hyde, and he'd resisted with all the doggedness of sheer, howling terror, but Dahak had been patient. In fact, he'd been so elaborately patient he made MacIntyre feel like a bushman refusing to let the missionary capture his soul in his magic box.

That had been the turning point, he thought now—the point at which he'd truly begun to accept what was happening... and what his own part had to be. For he'd yielded to Dahak's ministrations, though it had taken all his will power even after Dahak pointed out that he knew far more about human physiology than any Terran medical team and was far, far less likely to make a mistake.

MacIntyre had known all that, intellectually, yet he'd felt intensely anxious as he surrendered to the anesthesia, and he'd looked forward rather gloomily to a lengthy stay in bed. He'd been wrong about that part, for he was up and about again after mere days, diving head-first into a physical training program he'd discovered he needed surprisingly badly.

Yet he'd come close to never emerging at all, and that memory was still enough to break a cold sweat upon his brow. Not that he should have had any problems—or, at least, not such severe ones—if he'd thought things through. But he'd neither thought them through nor followed the implications of Dahak's proposed changes to their logical conclusions, and the final results had been almost more appalling than delightful.

When he'd first reopened his eyes, his vision had seemed preternaturally keen, as if he could identify individual dust motes across a tennis court. And he very nearly could, for one of Dahak's simpler alterations permitted him to adjust the focal length of his eyes, not to mention extending his visual range into both the infrared and ultraviolet ranges.

Then there was the "skeletal muscular enhancement." He'd been primitive enough to feel an atavistic shiver at the thought that his bones would be reinforced with the same synthetic alloy from which Dahak was built, but the chill had become raw terror when he encountered the reality of the many "minor" changes the ship had wrought. His muscles now served primarily as actuators for micron-thin sheaths of synthetic tissue tougher than his Beagle and powerful enough to stress his new skeleton to its limit, and his circulatory and respiratory systems had undergone similar transformations. Even his skin had been altered, for it must become tough enough to endure the demands his new strength placed upon it. Yet for all that, his sense of touch—indeed, all his perceptions—had been boosted to excruciating sensitivity.

And all those improvements together had been too much. Dahak had crammed the changes at him too quickly, without any suspicion he was doing so, for neither the computer nor the human had realized the enormous gap between the things they took for granted.

For Dahak, the changes that terrified MacIntyre truly were "minor," routine medical treatments, no more than the Fourth Imperium's equivalent of a new recruit's basic equipment. And because they were so routine—and, perhaps, because for all the power of his intellect Dahak was a machine, inherently susceptible to upgrading and with no experiential referent for "natural limitations"—he had never considered the enormous impact they would have on MacIntyre's concept of himself.

It had been his own fault, too, MacIntyre reflected, leaning forward to massage the persistent cramp in his right calf. He'd been too impressed by Dahak's enormous "lifespan" and his starkly incredible depth of knowledge to recognize his limits. Dahak had analyzed and pondered for fifty millennia. He could predict with frightening accuracy what groups of humans would do and had a grasp of the flow of history and a patience and inflexible determination that were, quite literally, inhuman, but for all that, he was a creature born of the purest of pure intellects.

He himself had warned MacIntyre that "Comp Cent" was sadly lacking in imagination, but the very extent of his apparent humanism had fooled the human. MacIntyre had been prepared to be led by the hand by the near-god who had kidnaped him. Aware of his own ignorance, frightened by the responsibility thrust upon him, he had been almost eager to accept the role of the figurehead authority Dahak needed to break the logjam of his conflicting imperatives, and as part of his acceptance he had assumed Dahak would make allowances in what would be demanded of him.

Well, Dahak had tried to make allowances, but he'd failed, and his failure had shaken MacIntyre into a radical re-evaluation of their relationship.

When MacIntyre awoke after his surgery, he had gone mad in the sheer horror of the intensity with which his environment beat in upon him. His enhanced sense of smell was capable of separating scents with the acuity and precision of a good chemistry lab. His modified eyes could track individual dust motes and even choose which part of the spectrum they would use to see them. He could snap a baseball bat barehanded or pick up a sixteen-inch shell and carry it away and subsist for up to five hours on the oxygen reservoir in his abdomen. Tissue renewal, techniques to scavenge waste products from his blood, surgically-implanted communicators, direct neural links to Dahak and any secondary computer the starship or any of its parasites carried... .

The powers of a god had been given to him, but he hadn't realized he was about to inherit godhood, and he'd had absolutely no idea how to control his new abilities. He couldn't stop seeing and hearing and feeling with a terrible vibrancy and brilliance. He couldn't restrain his new strength, for he had never required the delicacy of touch his enhanced muscles demanded. And as the uproar and terror of the quiet sickbay had crashed in upon him so that he'd flailed his mighty limbs in berserk, uncomprehending horror, smashing sickbay fixtures like matchwood, Dahak had recognized his distress... and made it incomparably worse by activating his neural linkages in an effort to by-pass his intensity-hashed physical senses.

MacIntyre wasn't certain he would have snapped if the computer hadn't recognized his atavistic panic for what it was so quickly, but it had been a very near thing when those alien fingers wove gently into the texture of his shuddering brain.

Yet if Dahak had lacked the imagination to project the consequences, he was a very fast learner, and his memory banks contained a vast amount of information on trauma. He had withdrawn from MacIntyre's consciousness and used the sickbay's emergency medical over-rides to damp his sensory channels and draw him back from the quivering brink of insanity, then combined sedative drugs and soothing sonic therapy to keep him there.

Dahak had driven his terror back without clouding his intellect, and then—excruciatingly slowly to his tormented senses and yet with dazzling rapidity by the standards of the universe—had helped him come to grips with the radically changed environment of his own body. The horror of the neural implants had faded. Dahak was no longer a terrifying alien presence whispering in his brain; he was a friend and mentor, teaching him to adjust and control his newfound abilities until he was their master and not their victim.

But for all Dahak's speed and adaptability, it had been a near thing, and they both knew it. The experience had made Dahak a bit more cautious, but, even more importantly, it had taught MacIntyre that Dahak had limits. He could not assume the machine always knew what it was doing or rely upon it to save him from the consequences of his own folly. The lesson had stuck, and when he emerged from his trauma he discovered that he was the captain, willing to be advised and counseled by his inorganic henchman and crew but starkly aware that his life and fate were as much in his own hands as they had ever been.

It was a frightening thought, but Dahak had been right; MacIntyre had a command mentality. He preferred the possibility of sending himself to hell to the possibility of being condemned to heaven by another, which might not speak well for his humility but meant he could survive—so far, at least—what Dahak demanded of him. He might castigate the computer as a harsh taskmaster, but he knew he was driving himself at least as hard and as fast as Dahak might have.

He sighed again, slumping back in the water as the painful cramp subsided at last. Thank God! Cramps had been bad enough when only his own muscles were involved, but they were pure, distilled hell now. And it seemed a bit unfair his magic muscles could not simply spring full blown from Dahak's brow, as it were. The computer had never warned him they would require exercise just as implacably as the muscle tissues nature had intended him to have, and he felt vaguely cheated by the discovery. Relieved, but cheated.

Of course, the mutineers would feel cheated if they knew everything he'd gotten, for Dahak had spent the last few centuries making "minor" improvements to the standard Fleet implants. MacIntyre suspected the computer had seen it as little more than a way to pass the time, but the results were formidable. He'd started out with a bridge officer's implants, which were already far more sophisticated than the standard Fleet biotechnics, but Dahak had tinkered with almost all of them. He was not only much stronger and tougher, and marginally faster, than any mutineer could possibly be, but the range and acuity of his electronic and enhanced physical senses were two or three hundred percent better. He knew they were, for Dahak had demonstrated by stepping his own implants' capabilities down to match those of the mutineers.

He closed his eyes and relaxed, smiling faintly as his body half-floated. He'd assumed all those modifications would increase his weight vastly, yet they hadn't. His body density had gone up dramatically, but the Fourth Imperium's synthetics were unbelievably light for their strength. His implants had added no more than fifteen kilos—and he'd sweated off at least that much fat in return, he thought wryly.

"Dahak," he said without opening his eyes.

"Yes, Colin?"

MacIntyre's smile deepened at the form of address. That was another thing Dahak had resisted, but MacIntyre was damned if he was going to be called "Captain" and "Sir" every time his solitary subordinate spoke to him, even if he did command a starship a quarter the size of his homeworld.

"What's the status on the search mission?"

"They have recovered many fragments from the crash site, including the serial number plates we detached from your craft. Colonel Tillotson remains dissatisfied by the absence of any organic remains, but General Yakolev has decided to terminate operations."

"Good," MacIntyre grunted, and wondered if he meant it. The Joint Command crash investigation had dragged on longer than expected, and he was touched by Sandy's determination to find "him," but he thought he was truly relieved it was over. It was a bit frightening, like the snipping of his last umbilical, but it had to happen if he and Dahak were to have a chance of success.

"Any sign of a reaction from Anu's people?"

"None," Dahak replied. There was a brief pause, and then the computer went on just a bit plaintively. "Colin, you could acquire data much more rapidly if you would simply rely upon your neural interface."

"Humor me," MacIntyre said, opening one eye and watching clouds drift across his atrium's projected sky. "And don't tell me your other crews used their implants all the time, either, because I don't believe it."

"No," Dahak admitted, "but they made much greater use of them than you do. Vocalization is often necessary for deliberate cognitive manipulation of data, Colin—human thought processes are, after all, inextricably bound up in and focused by syntax and semantics—yet it can be a cumbersome process, and it is not an efficient way to acquire data."

"Dahak," MacIntyre said patiently, "you could dump your whole damn memory core into my brain through this implant—"

"Incorrect, Colin. The capacity of your brain is severely limited. I calculate that no more than—"

"Shut up," Colin said with a reluctant twinkle. If Dahak's long sojourn in Earth orbit hadn't made him truly human, it had come close in many ways. He rather doubted Comp Cent's designers had meant Dahak to have a sense of humor.

"Yes, Colin," Dahak said so meekly that MacIntyre knew the computer was indulging in the electronic equivalent of silent laughter.

"Thank you. Now, what I meant is that you can pour information into my brain with a funnel, but that doesn't make it mine. It's like a... an encyclopedia. It's a reference source to look things up in, not something that pops into my mind when I need it. Besides, it tickles."

"Human brain tissue is not susceptible to physical sensation, Colin," Dahak said rather primly.

"I speak symbolically," MacIntyre replied, pushing a wave across his tub and wiggling his toes. "Consider it a psychosomatic manifestation."

"I do not understand psychosomatic phenomena," Dahak reminded him.

"Then just take my word for it. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but until I do, I'll go right on asking questions. Rank, after all, hath its privileges."

"I suppose you think that concept is unique to your own culture."

"You suppose wrongly. Unless I miss my guess, it's endemic to the human condition, wherever the humans came from."

"That has been my own observation."

"You cannot imagine how much that reassures me, oh Dahak."

"Of course I cannot. Many things humans find reassuring defy logical analysis."

"True, true." MacIntyre consulted the ship's chronometer through his implant and sighed resignedly. His rest period was about over, and it was time for his next session with the fire control simulator. After that, he was due on the hand weapon range, followed by a few relaxing hours acquiring the rudiments of supralight astrogation and ending with two hours working out against one of Dahak's hand-to-hand combat training remotes. If rank had its privileges, it also had its obligations. Now there was a profound thought.

He climbed out and wrapped himself in a thick towel. He could have asked Dahak to dry him with a swirl of warmed air. For that matter, his new internal equipment could have built a repellent force field on the surface of his skin to shed water like a duck, but he enjoyed the towel's soft sensuality, and he luxuriated shamelessly in it as he padded off to his bedroom to dress.

"Back to the salt mines, Dahak," he sighed aloud.

"Yes, Colin," the computer said obediently.