Shadowkill

##

Savant 1 entered a note into his data pad. “One forgets they’re intelligent, with all that hair and claws.”

Savant 2 stopped and looked over his shoulder at the two young Dyslaera. “Intelligent? It’s debatable.”

Savant 1 snorted. “Less so than yours, if that’s the way you interpret evidence.”

“Ooooh-oooh, who got out on the wrong side today? You want a cup of kaff?”

“Maybe later, after I get through all these damn reports. What do those techs think we are, memory machines?”

“The boy said it, I’ll give him that. Got to know the beast before you can control it.”

Prisoner 2: Ginny Bows His Head And Plots Revenge

Another room. Ripely elaborate. Designed to be disturbing.

It was a long thin rectangle with a door in one of the narrow ends and a semicircular dais at the other with five throne chairs on the platform.

A guard in gray led Ginbiryol Seyirshi in and ordered him to stand within a black circle inlaid in the white stone of the floor with a double spiral black on white inside it. The floor was translucent, lit from beneath. The only other illumination was a cone of white light shining onto that circled spiral from a single spotlamp dropped from the high dome.

Black basalt walls were carved over every inch in deep relief, nude bodies winding in and out across it, none of them larger than a man’s thumb-here an orgy, there a harrowing of hell, in another place skeletons in a dance of death or crawling like maggots over heap on heap of skulls.

Crawling.

As Ginny shuffled in beside his escort, he found the walls lumpy and unpleasant; as he got farther into the room and saw them more clearly, the tiny writhing figures made him feel itchy, as if his own skin were crawling and pustulous. It didn’t help that he himself was unclean. After he’d done what they wanted, the Omphalites had shoved him into a filthy fetid box and left him there for five days. Left him to contemplate his helplessness and their power.

Logic said he should be rewarded for compliance and encouraged to continue his cooperation. They were using arbitrariness and illogic as a method of breaking him to harness. It was stupid. If they did manage to reduce him to a puppet, they’d destroy what made him valuable to them. He had found it easier and more effective to select his tools to fit the task. He might manipulate their weaknesses and strengths to make them do what he wanted, but he didn’t try to alter them. The failure with the girl was no mark against this system. He understood that failure now. It came from a lack of preparation. He had seized on what seemed like the Lady’s gift without giving himself time to study the girl and get to know her. Ignorance had defeated him. He would not let that happen again.

His jumpsuit was creased and stained, though he had managed to keep from soiling it with his wastes. Lice and other small-lives crawled through his hair and in the crevices of his body-he was convinced they were deliberately introduced into his stinkbox to help erode his self-esteem. He ached all over from the unnatural positions he’d had to maintain, he was dizzy from hunger and shaking from weariness, but he had control over himself still and he meant to do whatever he must to stay alive.

He stood on the spiral and waited for one of the five to speak to him. His shoulders were rounded, his eyes watery and blinking in that blinding light; wisps of his thin brown hair stood up in spikes, a dull halo about his smudgy little face.

The five men sitting on the throne chairs were bulky in their heavy robes, their faces lost in the shadow of their cowls. Their black-gloved fingers were weighted with massive silver rings, one or two on each finger and two on the thumbs; the gems in those rings were the only touches of color in the whole room, shimmering red, green, and blue with every movement of the hands.

The man in the center leaned forward. “Ginbiryol Seyirshi,” he said, voice distorted and amplified. “I am the Gran Chom of Mimishay.”

Seyirshi said nothing, just hunched his shoulders a bit more and bowed his head.

“You will be pleased to hear that we wish you to continue your work. Within certain bounds, of course. Omphalos will choose your targets and control your sales. You will be given considerable creative freedom, but your budgets and methods must be approved by this council.” The Omphalite stopped, waited for a response.

Seyirshi stared at the floor. Rage shook him, but he took care not to show it. When he had control of his voice and veins, he said, “What are my options?”

The Chom touched fingertip to fingertip. “You have none, unless you consider death… hah!… a viable option.”

A soft chuckle, turned sinister by the distorter; Seyirshi stiffened his face. What stupid, pretentious nonsense, he thought. I could do better with nine-tenths of my brain shut down.

“To speak frankly, Seyirshi, you have too much potential for us to kill you outright, but you’re also much too dangerous to turn loose. You have an obsessive vindictiveness that overwhelms your reason and leads you to do things no sane man would contemplate. That flaw in your makeup has cost you your freedom and your wealth; don’t let it cost you your life. You, we won’t drop into a labor levy. You can work for us or we’ll turn you into fishbait.”

“If I am to do a halfway adequate job, I need my ship and my pilot.”

“Sorry, can’t do that. Your ship was destroyed when the Hole went Nova. Your pilot happened to be aboard at the time. Unfortunate, but there it is. We will provide what support you need-transport, technicians, equipment.” He shrugged, drawing a muted rasp from his robe as fold rubbed on fold.

Seyirshi shivered. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it. His energy levels were low and this was something he hadn’t expected. Talk about stupid! For a moment he didn’t believe them. It was braindead to waste so wantonly the rich lodes of information in his kephalos, to say nothing of Ajeri and her skills and her memory. It was doubly humiliating to be brought so low by such men as this.

He thought again and knew it was true. His ship was gone. Why else would they question him about his accounts? He had done a little test on them, given them less than half and nothing about Ta’hai Tolla where he had his Xanadu and his complete records and a considerable horde of portable wealth. They took the truncated report as truth and the whole truth. One look in his kephalos by a halfway competent decoder would have made a liar of him.

The ship, yes. Ajeri, no. She was in the Hole when Omphalos took it, nowhere near the ship. She might be dead, but if she was, they killed her here.

His stomach knotted, but he was cold, cold and calm. Watch them. Note their weaknesses. Study them like you have studied your target worlds.

Already he had a growing list of soft spots. They prioritized wrongly, put self-service above all else including the projects most important to them. They were willfully blind to the realities of emotional response. Threat, coercion, pain, these things contained their own rot; short term they seemed to work, in the end they failed. Blind spot. How many times had he used that blind mind-set to crack a world apart? Sooner or later, he would crack the House of Omphalos. The sooner the better. And this business with the Dyslaerors. Tchah! They saw claws and teeth and told themselves here were beasts not men; Dyslaera history and culture meant nothing to them. Blind spot. They worked from abstractions born out of theory developed more from what they desired than from careful and detailed observation. Theory and their desires told them that threats would drive him. HIM. Ginbiryol Seyirshi. Blind, oh, blind!

From the moment he achieved self-awareness, there was one thing Ginny had refused to permit. NO ONE gave him orders. Several times he had been where he was now, a prisoner with no options. He had fought free and destroyed utterly those who had attempted to control him. These fatheads thought so long as he could keep making his flakes, he would let them give the orders, set the goals. They thought he did the productions solely for the money they brought him. They did not see that he would fight to the death before he would let them pollute his vision, before he would wear the bridle they had fashioned for him. Blind, blind, blind.

The Chom set a thumb ring into a socket on the arm of his chair and a screen rose in front of the wall to Ginny’s left. A twist of the ring and a world was suddenly there, turning against a thick background of stars.

“Bol Mutiar,” the Omphalite said. “On the edge of the Callidara Pseudo-Cluster. There are two small moons, you can’t see them now, they’re on the far side. No bigger than asteroids, not good for much but spy platforms. Warm water world. Very little land area, mostly small islands and island chains. Low in metals. No shells or pearls. Jungle. Rain forests. The wood’s low grade, spongy, not worth bothering with. Savant Tetrayd, continue.”

The Omphalite at the left end of the arc took up the tale. “Bol Mutiar was found and settled by a bunch of rabbity Cousins in the first Diaspora. And promptly lost again when the settlers went back to pre-stone savagery. Found in this century by a drug prospector who came across it when she was nosing through the Cluster fringes. She hacked about some, found a few bulbs she thought could lead to something, nothing important, nothing to interest the Pharmaceuticals. And she got out alive, which is more than most the others did, the ones that came after her.” He settled into a morose silence as the Chom fiddled with the sensor board and the image shifted to a fat yellow tuber with a tangle of vine growing from the top.

“Savant Tierce,” the Chom said.

The next man over started talking. “Doesn’t look like much, does it? The locals call it Tung Akar. It apparently grows everywhere, equator to arctic. The Pandai-that’s what they call themselves, they eat it at least once a day throughout the year. It has… aaah… changed them. One outcome of that change was the fact that bringing that plant offworld cost us fifty lives.” He sat back, laced his gloved fingers across his middle.

Ginny blinked at the image, interested despite his preoccupations. “Why bother?”

The Chom spoke. “Something very odd has happened on Bol Mutiar. Involving that tuber. According to a researcher on University who acquired one of those tubers somehow, it has mutagens laced through it along with some complex organics that match nothing he’s seen before. In the millennium since the world was first settled, that plant has reshaped a ragtag bunch of scourings from a dozen different races and cultures into genetic homogeneity. It’s a low-tech world and likely to stay that way, no continents, just a lot of islands and island chains, you saw that. No flight. Waterships are powered by wind and sail. Everything they own is handmade, no factories, no machines, no printing presses. But…” He paused for effect, then said slowly, impressively, “Ideas, even information, diffuse throughout ALL the islands in less than a month. Remember, the only way to get ideas or information from island to island is by written message or mouth to ear. This is not telepathy, that’s been investigated; not a wiggle on any of the most sensitive detects available to a University scholar. Which brings up the second aspect of interest to us. The scholar I’m talking about made this world his project and has spent thirty some years studying the people and the rest of it; he had no trouble from the locals or the livestock. On the other hand…” He touched the sensor panel again and images began to pulse and shift, flashes of squat brown people, of white sand and blue water, of sailing canoes and fish with hyper-developed fins, of plants and beasts and birds.

“Savant Deuce.”

The Omphalite at the right end of the arc leaned forward. “We obtained a viewing of his reports and we determined to send a team in. There were amazing, possibilities, I’m sure you can see a number of them without half trying. The team leader was one of our best propagandists. He had a light hand, a quick and clever mind, he had operated on a score of worlds without missing a beat. He put down on one of the larger islands and opened communications with the locals. Six days later he was dead. Everyone on the team was dead except the lander pilot and he was so shaky he had the devil of a time getting the bodies offworld. And he breathed his last the minute the lander was securely docked.”

“Savant Prime.”

Except for the direction of the sound and the different body postures, there was so little difference between the men Seyirshi had a hard time understanding why the Chom bothered to introduce the speakers. The voice distorters smothered individual tones and even to some degree different rhythms-or the Omphalites made a practice of suppressing such differences when talking to outsiders. Ginny noted all this and set it aside for later consideration. At the moment it seemed neither a weakness nor a strength, merely a peculiarity of this aggregation of individuals.

“Naturally the ship’s crew sealed the bodies into an isolation chamber,” Savant Prime said. “Then they brought them back here. Our best researchers found nothing organically wrong with the men, only a slightly lower than usual residue of chemical and electrical energy.” He fell silent, turned his head toward the Chom.

Images on the screen:

bodies and more bodies. There is no blood, nothing but the emptiness of the flesh to show that these men are very dead indeed.

“We were annoyed,” the Chom said. “We sent a larger force, filtors.”

An island rushes toward them as the POV shifts rapidly downward, a cloud of dust, smoke, tongues of fire, chaotic snaps of death and destruction.

“They set up a security dome, filtered the air, didn’t go outside unarmored. They erased the Pandai on that island except for a few saved out to be questioned. These they kept in a sterile Cell sealed off from everything, them included. You know the procedures.”

Half a dozen bewildered Pandai four square brown men, two women, one young and pretty enough in a chunky way, one an old hag with snag teeth and coarse white hair and everything drooping. At first they seem confused and uncertain, then terrified, then they huddle together, pressing against each other.

“The locals were dead in less than an hour. They just sat down, closed their eyes, and died. The filtors cremated them, burned out the Cell. More Pandai showed up. Didn’t do anything, just squatted in a circle staring at the dome.”

Men with heads shaved and blue markings on their faces. The POV sweeps around the, circle, hesitating a little at each so each impassive face is clearly visible.

Someone from the dome begins shooting. Five Pandai fall over. The rifle explodes in the hands of the shooter. Five new Pandai take the places of the dead.

“The filtors started dying. The shields went down. Instruments and weapons had their charges drained without warning. Or the weapons exploded, killing anyone who happened to be about. The dome was rotting about the filtors. They were rotting, too. Team leader gathered his men and got offworld; just barely got off. He wanted to drop a hell-burner on the place, but the ship’s captain shoved him and the remnant of his force into isolation. Later the captain had to put them all in restraints, then drop them into stasis pods when they continued to deteriorate physically and mentally. They were all dead when time came to remove them. Again with nothing to show why.”

POV moves from pod to pod, showing bloated, rot-blackened corpses.

“Whoever can control that force… mp! I leave to your imagination the possibilities. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to exploit the Pandai without losing men and materiel. We want you to devise a way we can handle them and their weapon. Turn them around so we can live down there and take control of that world.