Crimson Stars - 9 (Patreon)

9. Opportunity

Yamaloka System

There were still plenty of questions swirling around Tamchim. None of the higher ups were quite certain if they trusted her. Which, I had to admit, was fair. She felt like too much being promised to us on a silver platter. A possible answer to all our hopes and midnight whispers we said, begging to an uncaring universe. The Resistance was almost universally too pessimistic to accept such a gift horse without wanting to look inside.

It was hard for me not to trust her, but I suspected that had to do with the new look she’d given herself. An averaging drawn specifically from my own tastes in women. How was I not supposed to find her hypnotically gorgeous? And therefore stumble into giving her the benefit of the doubt?

Luckily, apparently Mistral hadn’t expressed concern about any flushing of my cheeks. So we hadn’t been sent separate ways. Which meant I was effectively serving as Tamchim’s chauffeur, driving her to different examination tests.

The first had been in an old hospital in the abandoned city of Bakarnigrad. The place always gave me the creeps… it had once been one of the largest cities on Samhata, until the mine had run out. Inertia had let it linger on for centuries after that, though. Until a meteor hit the suburbs. The history books said there hadn’t been many deaths, they’d more or less evacuated the city before it happened. It was just that there had been enough damage that no one had felt like coming back to repair the place.

So, it had sat empty. Wind had eaten away at some of the buildings, wearing them down over the centuries of neglect to look almost organic, but things did not fall apart quickly on Samhata. The biggest thing that grew here was lichen, and even that struggled. There was only wind and temperature variation to pull things apart.

The Resistance had started using some of the buildings a few years ago, but there were few of us and we did our best to avoid there being any signs we were there. Which meant it did nothing to undo the crushing ages of abandonment.

Built things weren’t supposed to be left unused that long. It just wasn’t right.

“I would prefer to avoid any magnetic imaging, if possible,” Tamchim said, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“Oh?” the one technician asked, having led us towards one of the wings of the ancient hospital that were in better shape.

“A computational brain and all that,” she said, wearing a gentle smile. “It would likely be unpleasant. Not dangerous, but… nauseating.”

“Ah, yes,” the greying man said with a small nod. “We can work with x-rays and ultrasound, I suspect. At least enough to confirm the basics.”

“What basics would those be, again?” I found myself asking, still not sure why I was tagging along…

Right. Because Tamchim had looked slightly sad when I seemed to be staying behind, I apparently had ‘sucker’ written on my forehead when it came to gorgeous 2 metre tall women, and no one else had any good reason to stop me.

“We more or less just want to confirm she’s an android, as you’ve said. The local council are a little worried that the more mechanical android was replaced with a human collaborator while you were away,” the technician replied.

“And the fact that I am doing naught to resist examination does not negate the reason for the examination?” Tamchim asked.

“Our resistance hasn’t survived through the centuries by being trusting, unfortunately,” the technician said.

“Centuries? But the Vampires have existed for millenia, have they not?” she asked.

“They managed to crush previous resistance efforts,” I replied. “But we keep popping up, because humans aren’t meant to live like cattle.”

“Cattle?” Tamchim replied, tilting her head. “Now, do not acquire this as collaborationist views, but… you do seem to have something of a civilization. That feels better than ‘cattle’ receive?”

“Free range cattle are still cattle,” I muttered.

“Humans have no legal protection from being fed upon,” the technician explained. “We are all officially property of our local Vampiric lords. Laws applying to feeding upon us are laws based around that assumption. Regulations on eating another Vampire’s livestock and all that. We have somewhat more freedom here, in the Yamaloka System, but that is because there’s no money here anymore.”

“Mined all the easy stuff millenia ago,” I muttered, making a face. “On some worlds there’s enough vampires to make the idea of being free range cattle sound nice.”

“The outer planets of the Inferno System, for starters,” the technician added, shivering slightly. “There’s millions of soul suckers in the first system.”

Tamchim gave a small nod. “Spread across its… nine planets, yes?”

“Yes?” the technician replied, looking to me for support.

I could only shrug. It seemed odd to me that Tamchim had wondered about that number before. Tradimento, Fraus, Impetus, Haeresis, Irae, Avidita, Gula, Lussuria, and Limbo. That was nine. Every child grew up learning the planets of the first system as well as the worlds of their own. They were home.

Though… well, I’d heard someone once say that Minotaur was nearly large enough to be considered a double planet system with Impetus. It was, what, a fifth the mass of Impetus? A quarter? Something like that. So… perhaps that had been the fashion when Tamchim’s forebears had left? Had she expected ten?

Either way, we’d arrived at the examination equipment, another technician having been in the room fiddling with the equipment to make sure it still worked. Most of it dated to when Bakarnigrad had been abandoned, collecting dust and decay. It usually still worked, with some slight elbow grease and some parts being replaced (generally cannibalised from other equipment one found, out in old forgotten clinics). It was also about as good as anything you could buy today, since technology didn’t change much.

Vampires operated on a strong ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ principle towards technology. New inventions had good odds of helping humans more than them, after all. There was a reason energy weapons and incendiary devices were so heavily regulated. The same reason I always tried to keep a cocktail bomb on me. It was so much easier to burn a Vampire than it was to cut their head off.

The technicians began their work fairly quickly. Without anything to contribute, I found a concrete bench just outside in the hallway and sat down. Then I waited.

-

It took an hour or so for the technicians to firmly confirm that Tamchim was not a human. Sure, the results had seemed pretty clear from the start, but their bigger difficulty was proving that the results weren’t being deliberately faked. It was apparently plausible that the metallic and ceramic readings were the result of strategic implants. Things that wouldn’t be pleasant or healthy, but Vampires didn’t care and they had ways of breaking the human mind to make one accept such things.

The technicians ran out of ideas of how things could still possibly be fake in the end, though. They headed off to report that while I led Tamchim back towards the front door. There was something of a walk to get to where the rovers were parked, and even more of a drive to get to our next destination.

Mistral was waiting for us at the entrance, having been chewing on a meal bar of some sort. A pair of male guards were sitting at what had once been the front reception desk, listening to a small radio. A sports transmission, the Yamaloka Systemic Championship for Oină. On another day I probably would have stopped to listen, but it was not another day.

“So, is it all circuits for brains like it says it is?” Mistral asked, standing up.

“Yes, she’s circuits,” I replied.

“That’ll make the council happy,” Mistral said with a small nod.

“So, where are we off to next?” Tamchim asked.

“Wel—” I started, when I heard a news bulletin cut in on the radio.

“Breaking information from Impetus itself,” the news announcer declared as the two guards groaned at the interruption of their game. “It was been confirmed that Emperor Agyar III, of the House of Prilep, was assassinated in an attempted coup by former Crown Princess Nosu, who slew him by her own hands. Her treasonous efforts were thwarted by the brave actions of Commander Leállítás of the House of Sange as well as direct intervention of her majesty and the new empress, Szlachta, second of her name and undead lady of the house of Prilep.”

We were silent in the room as the radio cut awkwardly back to the game.

The emperor was dead.

After more than five and a half centuries, Emperor Agyar III was no more.

That… well, it meant something, but I had no idea what. It had simply been too long since an emperor had died, and even longer since it had happened without a civil war ensuing. Would-be assassins usually had far shakier claims to the throne… and usually did far better at trying to hold on to those claims.

But, I hadn’t really dug into history much deeper than that. I’d never expected to see something quite so big happen in my lifetime. My plan had been to plant seeds to help future generations, not to actually see the end of… well, anything. Vampiric lords were simply such a certainty that mortals like me didn’t tend to really grasp that they could end. Minor planetary governors, sure. They were always stabbing each other in the back to try to gain power. But system level barons changed so rarely… emperors simply felt as certain as mountains.

“There’s going to be purges,” Mistral said.

“Purges?” Tamchim asked.

“Princess Nosu had to have had allies,” Mistral explained. “There had to be lords who were ready to back her, if she actually tried to stage a coup. The new empress will know that, and she’ll want to eliminate them. I doubt she’ll catch them all, and I doubt all the people she’ll have executed will have been guilty, but there’s going to be knives in backs for a while.”

Tamchim nodded, looking more like she was mildly disappointed in the political system than anything deeper. I supposed she was an android. Such Human pettiness was probably alien to her. Or, Vampiric pettiness. But they were still, depressingly, a branch of humanity.

“We’ll need to act,” I said. “Throwing fuel onto the flames.”

“The Resistance definitely will,” Mistral replied. “We, however, have pre-existing orders that have no reason to change. Even if getting off-world is going to be harder now.”

“Oh fuck,” I muttered. “The check point guards are going to be putting so much more effort… great.”

“They will?” Tamchim asks.

“Any time a minor Vampire offical dies there’s a trickle down of extra scrutiny with the new management scrutinizing everyone under them. The emperor dying is going to be the usual nonsense times five, at least,” Mistral replied. “But, don’t worry your circuits about it. We’re taking you to the best forger on the planet. Your papers will be spotless.”

Tamchim gave a small nod, and then followed us out into the streets of the abandoned city. We still vaguely kept to the shadows and covered areas when possible, but Mistral and I felt a bit distracted from the usual stealth standards. It wasn’t likely to be an issue, though. Since no one wanted to risk messing up and being turned into a scapegoat by superiors there was little chance any government officials would be showing initiative. It was a time to play it safe, just do the jobs they were ordered to do before, and try not to be noticed.

I’d weathered a much smaller management change back before I had joined the resistance, and remembered what it was like.

We made it back to the underground garage where the rovers were parked without incident. Mistral was still preferring to drive separately, which I supposed I couldn’t blame her for. My rover had been on the compact side for one person. With Tamchim added in it was pretty totally full.

A two rover ‘caravan’ also wasn’t exactly enough to draw any unwanted attention. The roads were rough to the point of being garbage and mostly rather empty. It made sense to have at least one other vehicle traveling with you in case you had engine trouble.

The sun was setting by the time we emerged from the ruined suburbs of Bakarnigrad. It was going to be a long drive through the frigid night.

-

After a few hours the dirt roads we were driving on finally met up with one that was actually paved. There were enough solar arrays and greenhouses starting to dot the countryside for the planet to actually seem colonized, though I knew a good half of those homesteads were probably abandoned.

“Oh,” Tamchim said, suddenly, about twenty minutes after we’d hit the paved road. “There is a net on this world.”

“A… net?” I asked.

“A planetary information network,” she replied.

I stared for a moment, before I realised what she met. “Oh. The info-grid? Yeah, of course we have one?”

“I hadn’t been able to pick anything up until now… the relay tower coverage must have been too sparse. Surprising it wasn’t satellite based, though,” she said, leaning forward to look out the window and up at the vast darkness above us.

There weren’t any streetlights out here, but the glare of the rover’s headlights against the road was still enough to make picking out the stars above tricky. The few weather satellites would surely be impossible to see.

At least for human eyes.

“I wouldn’t know why they did one over the other,” I replied, while feeling a bit heated at the proximity of Tamchim’s face to my own.

If she hadn’t been an android who probably held the future of humanity in her hands I was pretty sure I’d have tried to sleep with her by now. But… well, she was what she was and I wasn’t so full of myself to think my flirting would benefit all of humanity.

I didn’t even know if she had any sexual impulses.

“Ah. Kessler Syndrome,” she said. “Satellite internet does require a large constellation to be efficient. It is risky to combine that with space combat… logical.”

“Pardon?” I asked.

“I asked the ne—the info-grid,” she replied. “It’s rather slow and basic, but I was able to pull that much from it.”

Nodding, I decided to go back to focusing on driving. There were still a few more hours of driving to go before we reached the next destination. I could process that her ‘brain’ was directly connected to the info-grid later.

“You know,” Tamchim said, seemingly half to herself, “I had thought the utter silence before was disconcerting, but… this muted connection might be more off putting. There’s nothing intelligent to talk to. It’s more like a catalogue of textbooks. Useful, but… it does nothing to solve loneliness. If anything, it reinforces it.”

“It’s… it’s different where you’re from?” I found myself asking.

“Very,” she replied with a nod. “Our worlds are awash with thousands to millions of conscious machines that one can reach out to without trying. You can speak to a friend as if they were sitting beside you while continents apart. Even if you don’t want to talk to anyone, you can always feel the soft hum of the net, a sea of endless conversations you could dip into at a moment’s notice. Loneliness is a word that hasn’t seen linguistic drift in ages as it became such an abstract concept to most of us.”

“Huh,” I replied.

And then regretted it.

Because, really. ‘Huh’. That did not cover the alien marvel of what she’d described. Back when I’d lived in a proper city the grid had made contacting friends easy enough, but it wasn’t there in my mind. I had to sit down at a computer. I had to send a message and then hope they were at their own computer to see it and reply.

It had never been some sort of… psychic web thingy.

Even the Vampires didn’t have that. At least out here in Yamaloka. Maybe in the richer systems they had worked it out, but here they just had smaller and more portable computers.

-

Another hour or so later we started to have streetlights. Twenty minutes after that we turned off the main road, heading up towards a large mesa. There was a small town, an ancient fort that had filled up with refugees during some long forgotten civil war, and eventually been abandoned to civilians.

Our contact lived there, though I decided to park near a look out, as there was a quite marvelous view to be had. Vezhamisto sat near the horizon, the eternal capital of Samhata. Eternally the economic (and therefore political) heart of the planet because it was the base of the only space elevator on the otherwise forsaken and dying rock.

The elevator itself was impossible to see in the dark, but there were the lights of cars climbing up and down it, on a journey thousands of kilometres long.

The city at the base was dwarfed by the elevator, but the lit up towers clustered around the core still looked quite impressive from this relatively nearby point. Though there were dark shadows blocking some of the lights, a reminder that even Vezhamisto had seen better days.

“It looks best at night,” I said, as Tamchim and I took in the sight. “You can’t see the old suburbs. Or the craters.”

“Craters?” Tamchim asked.

“During the last civil war most of the outer suburbs were empty, and the resistance on Samhata decided to move in. They were hoping they could take the city, running enough of a guerilla campaign to exhaust the Vampires and make them give up on the planet. Even back then there wasn’t much money to be made governing it, so they figured they make it more expensive to run than to rule. Then they must have hoped the Vampires would let them have it, not caring to keep fighting,” I explained, going more in depth than I normally would because I felt Tamchim deserved to understand. “But then the local Vampire Lord decided to deal with the partisans the cheap way. He had his ships in orbit open fire on the outer parts of the city. They even hit a few of the still fully populated parts, as a reminder how little they cared about getting their hands dirty.”

I let out a sigh, before shivering in the cold of the Samhata night (even with the heated clothing I wore). “We learned to be more careful after that. To avoid risking civilians when we could. Trying to drain their bank accounts in more subtle ways.”

Tamchim nodded, her gaze tracing over the lights of the great city once more.

“Oy. Skoda. Circuits. Our friend is waiting,” Mistral called out from her own rover.

“Right. Right. Coming,” I called back, annoyed to not get a few minutes to relax after so many hours on the road.