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From: voyer@notme.com (voyer)
Subject: (Voyer) The Orion Legacy (Part 1) mc nc md mf scifi
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The Orion Legacy Part 1
MF MC NC SCIFI
voyer@notme.com

  Note #1: This story is a fantasy, contains examples of bad
science, adult language and situations, and fictional
characters doing illegal, immoral and/or impossible things to
other fictional characters. If you are under the age of
consent in your community, or find such concepts
distasteful, or try to do these things in real life, please stop
reading now.
  Permission granted to re-post this story to any on-line
medium, provided no fee is charged to view the story, and
this disclaimer and the above e-mail address are not
removed.
  Copyright me, 1998.

  Note #2: This story began its life as a very cheesy scene (I
assume you'll recognize it when you see it..) that somehow
spun further and further out of control and became
something... else. Comments welcome, as always.

******

    It was a room, somewhere, one of a million such
anonymous rooms scattered down through history. A large
metal table dominated its center, standing in a tight, bright,
circle of light. The light emanated from a large globe high
overhead that floated free of the ceiling and walls.
  The room stood empty and still until, from a panel near the
room's only door, a synthetic voice spoke to nobody, its
tones tinged with a trace of syrup:
  "TACHYON LINK ESTABLISHED. ACTIVATING
HOLOFIELD. OPENING CHANNEL M."
  There was a flickering hiss, and a figure appeared in the
shadows at the edge of the table, pixelling quickly but
methodically into existence.
  "TACHYON LINK ESTABLISHED. OPENING
CHANNEL O."
  "TACHYON LINK ESTABLISHED. OPENING
CHANNEL N."
  Two more figures solidified in an identical fashion, seated
at evenly-spaced positions. A glance or two was exchanged
among them, but no words were spoken. They waited.
   Abruptly, silently, the heavy door slid open, and a fourth
man entered the chamber in a more conventional fashion, his
low red shoes noiseless on the thickly-matted floor. A good
match for the room, he was bland, anonymous, a figure only
seen skulking in shadows in crowded taverns and stimjoints,
in the back alleyways of the Strips on a dozen different
border worlds. In rooms like this...
   The door slid shut. A ring of subdued red lights flashed on
around its frame as the various privacy fields kicked into
place. The newcomer stood in front of the table and smiled
at the three waiting men, each of whose physical body sat in
a room that orbited another star, or in one case travelled
forever between the stars, a chamber of exile in more ways
than one... 
   These men, like himself, moved in shadows, although
shadows of a... higher quality. He merely lived in the
darkness built up by the society that surrounded around
him. Men of their calibre cast their own umbras in which to
lurk and spin their galaxy-spanning webs, shadows that
covered whole landmasses, entire star systems. He wasn't
terribly jealous of this fact; these shadows slopped into all
sorts of interesting corners, and usually covered much more
than their creators originally intended...
   "Gentlemen. Thank you for coming. So to speak." A
bland voice, an ordinary voice, a totally forgettable voice. It
had taken him years to cultivate it.
  "This had better be *good*, Smith." one of the figures at
the table growled from behind the pinpoint of a lit
weedcigar. A great deal of greenish smoke wafted around
him, the groping tendrils abruptly disappearing as they
reached the edge of his section of the room's holofield.
  "Have I ever brought you anything that wasn't, Mr. M?" 
Unconcerned, Smith set his slim case on the table so that it
stood upright before him. As soon as it touched down on
the table, the case popped open of its own accord, the cover
peeling itself back with the silent, graceful, symmetry of an
opening flower. "I will venture to say, however, that what I
have to offer today for your consideration... should be even
higher than *my* usual standards."
  "Get on with it." The new voice was, as always, masked
behind an electronic distorter, just as the face that went with
it wore the usual Delnovian voidmask. Smith had been
vaguely tempted, on occasion, to try and ferret out Mr. N's
true identity, but had always squashed such thoughts as
unproductive. Still, one had to wonder... was it just
caution... a personal eccentricity... some well-known
personality... a slumming Tribunal member... Considering
his height, he might even have been a small Rigellian, but
the thought of a member of that species of morally-upright
prudes being an outlaw of N's well-established standing was
rather amusing...
  "Of course, Mr. N. Unfortunately, the item I am offering
for sale today requires a bit of background history in order
to be fully appreciated. May I?" A polite pause. There was
no objection. "Thank you." He produced a lazdis from the
open case and slipped it into the appropriate slot at his edge
of the table, then brushed a few controls with his fingertips.
The holoemitters ringed tightly around the lightglobe
manipulated the field that had brought them all together,
darkening a space above the table and then filling the center
of that space with a gruesome figure. This figure began
rotating slowly against the blackness. It was a short,
scrawny, stooped, greenish humanoid, with bulging red and
yellow eyes, and a lipless mouth filled with sharp teeth.
Pipe-cleaner limbs ending in splayed hands and feet. Bulging
braincase and equally large groin region, both wrapped in a
thick sheet of plasteel. "I assume you gentleman recognize
this creature?"
  "It is what is colloquially, and rather inaccurately, known
as an Orion Pack Raider. The species' name for itself is... or
rather was... quite unpronounceable." Mr. O spoke for the
first time, his narrow aesthetic's face displaying. also for the
first time, any outward sign of interest in the conversation.
O was known as something of gentleman historian and
antiquarian in certain quarters, which was one of the reasons
his hologram had been invited to this room. He continued in
a slightly pedantic tone of  voice. "An extremely...
unpleasant and disharmonious species. It is believed the race
was rendered extinct almost forty standard years ago when
their last known stronghold was comet-bombed by a United
Earth Defense Force fleet. During the height of their power,
some ten years previously, they gave the UEDF quite a...
'run for its dollarbytes,' I believe is the phrase."
  "Perhaps a bit of an understatement, Mr. O." Smith
resumed. "Even now,  the general public is quite unaware of
just how close the Orions came to winning their little war
with the UEDF, and UEDF Central Command has made
quite a sustained effort to keep it that way. A man in my
position, however, hears things." Noting a shifting in his
audience, he smoothly moved on. "One of the things I heard
about was the recent discovery of the remains of a Pack
heavy battlecruiser in Sector... well, it doesn't really matter
what..."
   "Are you saying there are still Orions running around out
there loose?" N broke in. The sizeable figure's electronic
burble was as emotionless as always, but Smith somehow
knew he was excited.

   "No, no, Mr. N. Calm yourself. The wreck was over forty
years old. The vessel had evidently been involved in a fire-
fight with UEDF ships, and come out rather decisively on
the losing side. Somehow, it escaped the battle with a
Tachyon Jump, but was mortally crippled, and ended up...
ah... crashing. It was the flagship of a Pack known as the...
Gee-Fagcak? I'm probably mispronouncing it. As Mr. O has
already pointed out, the Orion language was hideously
complicated, and each Pack spoke a different dialect. In any
event, the team that located and scavenged this ship
managed to salvage part of its central datacore. Most of
what was found on the datacore would only be of interest
to... er. Ahem.  ...would be of great interest to historians.
Forgive me, Mr. O." O nodded, waved his hand in a
dismissive fashion. 
   M spoke: "Fine. You can sell O here his Orion T-Drive
maintenance schedules, or whatever the fark the little
vomiters stored on their datacores. Why did you invite the
rest of us here?"
   "I said MOST of the data, Mr. M. Just before their ship
met with an unfortunate accident, the recovery team
recovered one tiny tidbit of information that would be of
great interest to *many* parties. It may, in fact, explain, in
part, why the Orions were able to do so well against the
UEDF for so long." He spun out a moment of hesitation,
unable to resist the dramatic touch. "It appears that the
Orions had... may have had... spies working for them within
the UEDF itself."
  There was a long silence at the table.
  Finally M spoke. Smith noted clinically that even he
sounded slightly aghast. "Humans worked for those things?
After what they did..."
  O spoke, a trifle sadly. "Corruption is infinite. Everyone
has their price, my dear M. You yourself have proven it
time and time again. In more ways then one, if certain
stories are to be believed."
  "But they wanted to kill every last human in existence.
What they did to people they captured...."
  O again: "It is my understanding that the Orions desired to
kill every last human *male*. Their plans for the feminine
half of humanity were, as indicated by my regrettably limited
research in this area... a great deal more unpleasant. The
exact nature of these plans is another fact that the UEDF
has seen fit to conceal from the majority of society, and I
find myself in agreement with this decision. The Packs'
notion of... sexuality... may be... unique.. in the annals of
recorded history." He picked his way through this last
sentence like a man working his way across a razorvine field
during the budding season.
  "In other words, O, they were a bunch of farking
perverted-"
  N cut in, his electronic squeal slicing through the other's
conversation: "To put this discussion back on track, I agree
with M." He pointed emphatically with his clunky metal
gauntlet. "No human in their right mind would work for the
Orions. And even if they did, the psiscans administered by
the UEDF's Internal Security Division, even forty years ago,
would root even the slightest hint of treachery."
  "Exactly, Mr. N. " Smith rubbed his hands, the gesture of a
professional admiring the deft handiwork of a fellow expert
in his field. "No human in their right mind *did* work for
the Orions. And any spies would have passed the standard
loyalty tests of the day with flying colors. It seems that the
Orions had achieved, or more than likely, considering what
little we know even now of the species' history, stolen,
previously unsuspected levels of ingenuity in the field of...
behavior modification."
  There was another long pause. Finally O spoke, the voice
of a poker player finally calling on the man on the other side
of the enormous stack of chips to spread his cards.
  "What exactly, Mr. Smith, was on that datacore?"
  Smith tapped a control. The picture above them changed,
showing now the same view no matter from what direction
it was viewed. A sinister-looking green chamber. Orions
stood in frozen positions around the room's edge, in the
middle of preforming various incomprehensible tasks. 
   In the center of the chamber was a large, purple-colored
tube.
  "It would seem that the Orions constantly recorded what
happened on board their ships, searching much like the
UEDF's own Internal Security Division, I imagine, for
treason and inefficiency. They also recorded... their sexual
exploits. As Mr. O has again pointed out, they were rather
fixated on this particular point, even more so than the
most... er... driven of humans. This is a recording from...
well... maybe you'd better just watch. I've taken the liberty
of punching in the usual semantic overlay on the dialogue..."
Smith started the recording and fell silent.

*                *                  *

  The two thin creatures jerked into the high-ceilinged
chamber deep in the bowels of what appeared to be a
spaceship.  They jabbered softly and gesticulated, their
skinny arms glistening in the dim green lights. Others of
their kind worked hurriedly in the darkness at the edge of
the room.
  In the center of the melted, blurred, space stood a tall,
transparent tube. Inside the tube, a multitude of thick,
bruise-colored, strands swirled up from the deck below,
half-tentacle, half-vapor. They held up in their clammy grasp
a naked human female.
  She hung limply in midair, limbs akimbo, her small cloud
of jet-black hair twisting in the flowing color. Her thick
lashes fluttered spasmodically, half-closed, her full lips
frozen somewhere between a smile and a scream. A
throbbing strand of purple easily penetrated deep between
her strong, twitching, legs. In and out, in and out, deeper
and deeper into her body with every thrust... a half-dozen
smaller coils slid greedily and endlessly around her large,
firm breasts, fingering her nipples. Others held her aloft,
wrapped tightly around her legs and arms.
  The two small beings stood silently, their goggling red and
yellow eyes watching her body twitch and spasm for several
long seconds. Then the taller of the newcomers flashed a
black tongue across a narrow lipless mouth, and spoke
loudly enough for the surveillance microphones, or their
Orion equivalent, to have recorded him clearly. 
  "Is she... prepared?" Smith's overlay flickered through and
around his words, imparting meaning without replacing the
actual sounds. It also sent out near-subliminal flashes of
meaning about the scene itself; for instance, the speaker was
labelled: PACK-LEADER.
   One of the peripheral figures (CHIEF BEAST-TAMER)
immediately smarmed his way across the spotlessly
sterilized deckplates to where the Pack-Leader stood.
"Thoroughly, oh Terrible One. We apologize again for the
unconscionable delay, we, none of us, are not worthy to lick
the vomit off of our leader's boots, but her will was one of
the strongest we have yet encount..."
  The Pack-Leader irritably waved him to silence with a
hand the size and shape of half of a crumpled umbrella.
  "Yes, yes. All of what you say is true. Perhaps the Pack
will punish you someday, in the event a more efficient
Beast-Tamer is found to take your place. Begin."
   "Yes, thank you, your Worshipfulness." The underling
reverse-grovelled to where his team hovered, and began
snapping out orders. There was a frantic scramble to obey.
      The purple strands flickered, began to shift,
withdrawing reluctantly from their captive and lowering her
gently to the ground. The last to pull free, with an ugly
slurping sound, was the massive central vapor that had
speared her. In moments, the tube was clear, each of the
long, mindless, rapists caged back in its cramped,
reinforced, holding pen, waiting eagerly, hungrily for the
next victim. The tube abruptly cracked into four neat
segments, the previously-invisible divisions running up and
down the object's length. The four pieces slid away from
each other with an audible 'clunk', and then swiftly lowered
themselves out of sight beneath the deck. The tube's top
remained floating overhead, casting a pale, sickly, yellow
light down on the women who stood beneath, unmoving. 
   Her eyes remained closed, her hands now dangled limply
at her sides, her chin resting on her chest. Her hair was
sticky and tangled, her body still coated with the slimy
residue left by the strands. Her chest rose and fell, evenly.
Occasionally, a drip of slime slithered off her and fell to the
padded floor of the tube.
  The Beast-Tamer spoke, hesitantly: "Her activation phrase
is 
 
The holoemitter fuzzed and hissed, sound and picture
vanishing for a moment in a white spray.

   , Oh Mighty One. As always, only your voice will trigger
her."
  The Pack-Leader's bulging eyes narrowed to amazingly
thin yellow slits. He smiled, showing, as with the earlier
hologram, overlapping rows of sharp teeth. "

 fuzzhiss

."
  The woman's head rose, and her eyes snapped open. While
still composed of an iris, and pupil, and cornea, they were
not human eyes. Not enough light was reflected back out- at
the very center was a point of endless, absolute, blackness.
Her stance was wrong, head too far forward, her arms bent
unnaturally..
  "Who are you?" The Pack-Leader's voice was cold, dead,
gloating.
  "I have no name. I am the property of the glorious Pack
G'Fgcac. I exist only as an extension of the will of the
mighty Pack G'Fgcac. My sole purpose is to expand the
power and the glory of the Pack, and thus that of all Packs
everywhere. Hail the Pack." The dripping, squirming Orion
phrases somehow flowed effortlessly from her lips. Her dark
violet eyes burned with absolute fanaticism.
  "And enemies of the Pack?"
  "All enemies of the Pack must be *destroyed*." She hissed
the last word. Seeing her expression, the (SUB PACK-
LEADER) took an involuntary step backwards. Next to
him, the Pack-Leader smiled, wider than before
    "Excellent. Her dedication to Earth must have been truly
impressive. It is almost a shame we were not destined to
meet in battle. Beast-Tamer! What is her spy activation
phrase?"
  "
squawkscratch

, Exalted One."
  "
squawkscratch

."
  The woman blinked for a long moment. When her eyes
opened, they were human. Her stance shifted, and she stood
at military attention.
  "Who are you?"
  "Sir! Lieutenant Marla St. Clair, United Earth Space
Marines, UE Sharehold Number 1253-U5-98001, Sir!" She
was now speaking Human Global Standard, and the
overlay's translation faded away when she spoke
  "And what is your mission, Lieutenant?" Overlay.
  "Sir! To protect and defend the citizens of United Earth
against all threats, external and internal, Sir!"
  "And your specific mission?"
  "Sir! To defend against incursions by Orion Pack Raiders
into Earth space, Sir!"
  "And what is your *personal* opinion of Pack Raiders,
Lieutenant Marla St. Clair?"
  Her eyes narrowed to icy slits, but she remained stiffly
erect, hands straight at her sides.
  "They're vermin, Sir! They need to be hunted down and
annihilated, every last one of them! They live only to kidnap
females of other species and make them into sex slaves! We
must.."
  "Enough, Lieutenant. Tell me, where are you at this
moment?"
  "Sir? I'm.." She stopped and looked around for the first
time. Her eyes widened in fear, which almost instantly
turned to anger. "Oh, my God. Orions... You little..."
   " 
fuzzhiss
   ."
  The property stood awaiting further orders, her eyes dead
and burning.
  The Pack-Leader licked his non-lips again. "I'm sorely
tempted to keep this one, Nidgd. But our Oracle has spoken
to me from His darkness, and the Pack shall heed His
words. The Past Ones have placed her in the claws the Pack
as one of their great tests. And it is a test that I will pass.
She will be of much more use to the Pack as our spy in the
Earth's Space Marines. With the extra ambition and talents
we have programmed into her, she should rise quickly in
their ranks."
  "When Earth and its armies lie broken at  the feet of the
Pack-Leaders and the Past Ones, great leader, you can have
a dozen, a hundred, like her, and better." The Sub Pack-
Leader paused, consulted the read-out clinging damply to
his wrist. "...And, in the meantime, the.. former... Lt. St.
Clair is not due back from her unstructured time for
another.." he paused again, salaciously, "..six days. Surely
even the Past Ones, and their representative, will allow their
loyal servant a... small reward."
  "Mmmm..." At a specific touch, the Pack-Leader's metal
codpiece slid apart, and his massive, ridged, member bulged
out into the light, squirming and glistening.
  "Come here, property, and perform your function." The
thing now inhabiting a woman's mind and body stepped off
the platform, and crossed the room, smiling, but only with
its mouth. The other pack members quickly crowded
around, at a respectful distance, to watch. Perhaps the Pack
Leader would be generous, and share his property once he
was through with it...

*              *              *

   Smith froze the display, thought better of it, and turned it
off all together. He spoke without emotion. 
  "Six Orion days were about four Earth Standard. Every
minute of those next four days is recorded on the datacore.
It's not particularly pleasant to watch, and not relevant to
our discussion."
  "Marla St. Clair."
  Something peeped inside the case on the table. Smith
glanced down for a moment, continued in a carefully
nonchalant tone.
 "Yes, gentlemen. Marla St. Clair. Former UEDF Space
Marine Brigadier General Marla St. Clair. UE Senator
Marla St. Clair. And, if the current psipolls are any
indication, the next President of United Earth. You will
have no doubt noted that certain words have been excised
from this holofootage. Those words, gentlemen, is what is
for sale in this room today. Those words, and total,
absolute, control of Marla Louise St. Clair."

*      *      *

  There was another short, stunned, pause, but the
individuals around the table recovered quickly. All of them
had seen, ordered, done worse things in their lives.
   "You have proof that this recording is genuine?" O was
the first to speak. "Senator St. Clair's political opponents,
particularly Ingersoll and his vile little Reconstructionists,
would not hesitate for an instant to fake such a scene, if
they felt they could get away with it, since it would of
course destroy her career if it were to become public, and
was believed to be real."
   "I'm deeply hurt that you would think of such a thing, Mr.
O. My reputation..."
   "The Corporate Councils back the Reconstructionists, Mr.
Smith. They have very deep pockets, and a burning desire to
reclaim what they feel the founders of the UE stole from
them." O parried blandly. "It has been my personal
experience that money, when applied in sufficient quantities,
offers a wonderful salve when one's... reputation... has been
injured."
    "I have in my possession the remains of the original Orion
datacore from which this recording was taken. It can of
course be tested for authenticity by the purchaser." 
   "Not good enough, Smith." M snapped. "*If* this is the
real goods, then whoever gets it will pay through the farking
nose. Fair enough. But until we have proof that this isn't
some Reconstructionist scheme to use us to do their vomit
work, you either give us something better, or.." 
   "Or?"
   "...Or you can expect a significant reduction in your fee.
Destroying the illustrious senator's career, while... an
interesting notion in certain respects... is not worth a
fraction of the price of controlling her." O finished. He
glanced at something or someone outside of the range of the
holofield at his end of the meeting, and frowned slightly.
Shook his head.
   "I see. And Mr. N?" He looked at the dark, blank-faced
figure who sat silently, inscrutably. "Do you agree with this
sentiment?"
   The armored giant remained motionless a moment longer,
then nodded, once, silently, his mask shimmering.
   Smith sighed in an exaggerated fashion, then clasped his
hands in a purposeful manner.
   "Very well. As I see it, there is only one way that we can
prove to your satisfaction that what I offer is on a true
vector. It is risky, and rather complicated, but with your
gentlemen's resources and connections, I think..." 
   "If one did not know better, Mr. Smith, one would
suspect that you were prepared all along for our skepticism,
and that your previous protestations were a dishonorable
attempt to reduce your expenses."
   "I..." Smith again broke off and looked down as
something new beeped in the depths of his case, with a
greater sense of urgency than before. He silently studied
whatever had made the noise and frowned. "I see again.
Unfortunately, gentlemen, it appears that we will have to
reconvene this meeting at a later date." He looked up, his
face hard. "And it also appears that one of you will not be
present at that meeting. This is of course regrettable, but I
have standards to maintain." He pulled the lazdis out of the
slot, and casually crushed it in his hand. The silvery slip
crumbled to powder, which began to turn to smoke and
drift away as Smith rubbed it out of his fingers. He tapped
the top of his case, which smoothly closed up.
   "I will be in touch, gentlemen. Good day."
   He and the case left the room, moving quickly but
confidently. Somewhere off in the distance, something
began to wail, a noise that fell almost instantly into the
general category of 'siren.' The sound began to grow louder,
as if others were kicking in as well.
   The three at the table exchanged a final set of glances, and
disappeared from the room, almost simultaneously.

    "CHANNELS O, M AND N TERMINATED.
TACHYON LINKS DISCONTINUED. HOLOFIELD
DEACTIVATED. THANK YOU FOR USING
'MOONBEAM' TACHYON HOLO-CONFERENCING
SERVICES. HAVE A PRODUCTIVE DAY."

*            *               *

   M turned thoughtfully in the middle of the spherical
chamber, the green smoke twirling around his painfully thin
body and streaming slowly off his dangling, useless, legs.
(Apart from his coloration, and his shrivelled hands and feet,
his resemblance to an Orion was actually quite pronounced.
His eyes even bulged in the same way.)  He took a last,
long, puff of weedgar and then weakly flicked the butt away
from him, his fingertips pointed and sparkling. From the
(figurative) corner of the room, something long, thin and
grey lashed out through the shifting micro-gravity fields,
neatly hooked the discarded object with a set of delicately
nailed finger-tendrils, and reeled it in. Compared to the
purple monstrosities that M had just been watching with his
T-beam relay, the grasping tentacle looked almost cuddly.
On the other hand, the weedgar remnant, still smoldering,
was flipped down into a circular mouth lined with
interlocking teeth that made an Orion's smile seem actually
pleasant and subdued. Those teeth went to work, and the
tentacle retracted to rest.
   M turned again, so that his oddly mild blue eyes passed
over some of the multitude of active holoscreens that lined
the 'walls' of the room, blaring color. A shot of a seemingly
endless field of weedleaf, meticulously tended by a
roboharvester under a sky that was tinged an unpleasant
orange-red color. A corporate duelling field with robot
hovertanks blasting one another into smoking rubble. A
small dark-haired man 'wearing' nothing but a grin and a
crudely-chromapainted sign reading "LivE from NeW
tokYo". A scene from the popular interactive holosim
soapera 'Ring Around The Sky.' Finally, a screen that
showed two large semi-transparent Zill, both with the usual
four arms and clusters of glowing green eyes, engaged in an
activity that resembled a cross between a ballet and a
chainsaw duel. M stopped here.
   If he had wanted, none of this was really necessary,
technologically speaking. He could have had a single
biocircuitry implant installed in his skull, and be able to flip
through all of these channels, and more, right inside his
head.
   But data can flow both ways in such an arrangement, and
he was not a man to take chances. (Moonbeam, in fact,
made its dollarbytes with its technologically-outdated holo-
confrencing equipment, by specifically catering to
individuals like M.) His mind and the sea of interstellar data
remained separate, and, further, he remained locked in the
damaged body he had been born with, not for a moment
trusting the Nanosurgeon's Guild enough to allow any of its
members to inject their microscopic healing robots into his
wasted frame.
  He wiggled his fingers at the Zills' screen in a seemingly
vague fashion. The scene abruptly shifted, zooming in close
on a grim, bald human, his face and body covered with
scars, biocircuitry inserts, and tattoos. The tattoos moved
and flickered oddly in the light of the transmission, giving
the man the distinct appearance of having maggots crawl
over large portions of his skin. His silvery cybereyes looked
up from whatever he was working on, and he rumbled:
   "Yeah, Boss?"
   M lolled his enormous head (almost as bald as the man on
the screen's, but not as a fashion statement...) so that it was
looking at yet another nearby display, filled with words,
numbers, and other, less identifiable, symbols. He silently
watched the data flow, layer on layer. A phrase lit up in red.
His weak neck rotated back.
   "Jerves. What do we have on Sirius Station 3 in the way
of negotiation teams?" As witnessed in his conversation
with Smith, his voice was surprisingly forceful, deep and
focused. It seemed impossible that his body could hold and
use that voice without exploding.
    The tattooed man glanced sideways for a moment, not
looking at a screen but pulling up the needed information
from its storage place somewhere inside of himself. M did
not use such things, but he had no objection to his
employees doing so.
   "Esherick and his bunch, Boss. N'Gota, although he's
sorta busy right now with that merger with..."
   "Yeah, yeah. Never mind. Esherick will do."
   "Who's the target, Boss?"
   M sighed and looked 'upward.' Another flexing of metal
fingertips, more data flowing, and another sideways glance
from Jerves. The underling's eyes widened for a moment,
then narrowed. The shifty caution showed, even through the
lack of pupils. "You sure, Boss? You know he's done us
right in the.." He broke off upon seeing M's expression. "I'll
get right onnit, Boss."
   "You do that." M waved a fragile hand one last time, and
broke the connection. The Zills resumed their activity. He
clicked his fingertips in a impatient fashion, and something
long, thin and grey darted towards him, holding a new, lit,
weedgar. M took the offering, and spun once again, now
looking at another, much larger, field of data, bright and
multicolored and tightly-bunched, masses of dollarbytes
being lost and made. Lives, fortunes, empires, rising and
falling in the sea of raw information. The self-stranded
castaway stared out across that sea, his fetus of a body
curled up in the womb he had caused to be hollowed out of
rock, and set adrift among the mingled stars and tachyons...

*           *            *

   There was a melodic buzzing, and the thin, prim-looking
woman looked up from her Spartan desk, in the middle of
her broom-closet of a room.  She delicately pushed her wide
glasses back up on the bridge of her narrow nose, their
deeply mirrored surfaces hiding her eyes. As well as the
tightly-packed masses of biocircuitry that lurked inside the
lenses.
   "Yes, sir?"
   A sardonic, cultured, voice spoke out of the thin air near
one of the blank walls.
   "Ah, Miss Thurnton. It would appear that the game is, as
they say, afoot. You've confirmed the target's location?"
   Miss Thurnton looked down at the blank table before her,
seeing something that wasn't there. Stroked a long, pointed,
fingernail across a few centimeters of polished wood in an
almost sensuous fashion. Returned her sparkling gaze to the
empty place on the wall.
   "Yes, sir. About three kilometers to the east of our
present location, just as you suspected."
    A mild sigh. "Some individuals are not nearly as clever as
they think they are. Give our friend the needed data, and tell
him that he and his associates may begin."
   "At once, sir." The woman flashed a feral smile and again
outlined the woodgrain with her darting fingers.

*          *          *

  The figure in the Voidmask broke the holoconnection, and
the 'table' he had been sitting at splintered away to nothing,
except for a small curved  piece directly in front of him. A
short phrase blinked redly in the space that remained:
"Sirius Station 3. Module 4. Section 35a. Block 231." He
slipped a finger of his gauntlet through a sideways groove in
the mask's control unit, which was mounted on his suit's
chest. The featureless, eye-watering, surface of the mask
began to blotch and crumble, melting away until only a
framework of thin metal bars remained. Another groove set
below the first was navigated, and the arm twitched oddly,
sank down, came to rest on the arm of the heavy chair in
which the figure sat.
   The blonde woman behind the bars waited impassively as
the chair started to rotate. The bulky suit opened like a giant
black clamshell; the bars of the Voidmask sliding apart, the
chest and legs opening so she could extract herself from
within its interior. She uncrossed her slender but muscular
arms from in front of her well-formed body. The jelly-like
cyberganglic nodes that lined the inside of the suit made a
wet sticky noise as she pulled her bare neck and shoulders
free of them. Wearing only a silvery, single-piece garment
that clung tightly to the slender contours of her body, she
rose from the cracked-open remains of her disguise.
Something peeped in the control panel, and a lazdis popped
up from a slot. She took the slip, and left the small room on
bare feet, her eyes cold and grim. Down a bare plasteel
corridor two or three steps, and into another room, much
like the one she had just vacated. The door closed behind
her, and lights almost identical to the ones in the recently
vacated conference room flashed on around its frame. The
woman slid into a more normal chair, and powered up
another communication unit by offering up a small sample
of her DNA as a sacrifice. The device made a discrete gong
sound, and she put the lazdis into a slot much like the one
from which it had just been extracted. There was whirring
silence for a moment, and then a relentlessly flat computer
voice spoke:
   "TACHYON CHANNEL OPENED. CHANNEL
CONFIRMED. CHANNEL SECURED." More silence,
followed by: "TRANSMISSION COMPLETE. CHANNEL
CLOSED. PLEASE STAND BY." The lazdis disintegrated,
and the resulting smoke was efficiently sucked away.
   Not following the voice's instructions, she rose again to
her feet, and left the room, the lights winking off as the door
slid open. The bathroom, and its utilitarian vibrashower,
were just down the hall, and it didn't take her long to peel
off the silvery garment, unpin her hair and let it flow down
her back, revealing the thin electric-green strand of
permadye that streaked away from each temple. Entering
the shower's field, she scrubbed away the final remnants of
the C-gang slime from her skin. Cleansed, she returned to
the second communication room, wearing a austere black
bathrobe, again sealing herself inside. 
   She seated herself once more, and waited. While true
waiting is not something that comes naturally to most
humans, a multitude of distractions creeping into the body
and monkey-mind, it can be taught. 
   She had always been a good student.
   Finally, the device again sprang to life, flashing lights and
peeping in a peremptory manner. Once again, she stroked
her fingertip across the DNA verifier. The device did not
establish any sort of  hologrammatic presence, or even a
voice. After a moment, there another short tone. In reply to
this, she slid her splayed-out fingers into a set of slots before
her. More tiny C-gangs slithered forward, gently linked up
with the nerve endings in her fingertips.
   The basic resemblance of this to what she had just
witnessed on her holoscreen did not escape her.
    The woman in the chair, like M, did not have a
biocircuitry implant hooked into her mind, and her reason
was basically the same. Cut off from the cyberworld of
humanity's collected data, she was dropped back a step on
the technological ladder, C-Gangs only able to touch her
nerves, not her thoughts. But those thoughts were thus one
step back as well, and that was the important thing. She
twitched the tips of her fingers in a certain way, following a
certain pattern, and impulses flew back and forth. Lights
flashed. Noises softly sighed and pinged and hummed.
Thoughts were exchanged at almost a telepathic level.
  Emphasis on the almost.
  The conversation was very short and, after translation, ran
roughly along these lines:
  -This is Central Command. Identify.-
  -Captain Phelps reporting in.-
  Short pause.
  -Identity confirmed. Channel secured. Go ahead Phelps.-
  -Holofootage received?-
  -Confirmed.-
  -Shall N attempt to re-contact Smith?-
  -Unnecessary. No longer your problem. Counter-efforts
already underway.-
  -Understood. Any further orders?-
  -No. Proceed with standard duties.- Another pause. -
Unless Smith re-contacts N. If so, buy the datacore. Price
no object.-
  -Understood.-
  -Central out.-
  -Phelps out.-

    Captain Angelica Phelps extracted her fingers from the C-
gangs' grip, powered down the communicator, and leaned
back in the chair, still stretching the last of the kinks out her
body. ISD Central Command had known. She of course
hadn't asked, and of course they hadn't told her, but long
experience had taught her how to read the nuances and
pauses of  the tone code quite well. They had already
known, probably not about Senator St. Clair specifically,
but about the Orions and their spies. (Plural. Presumably
there had been others, since it appeared from what Smith
said that the then-Lieutenant St. Clair had never gotten the
chance to report back to her programmers before her Orion
captors were all killed.)
    While the prompt vibrashower hadn't been just to remove
the *physical* filth Smith's scene had left her with, she
wasn't terribly surprised. It was well-known in UEDF circles
that, during the war, the Orions had occasionally shown
sudden bursts of either stunning good luck or brilliant
strategic foresight, abruptly turning up where they could do
the most damage. The thought of someone actually
*spying* for the little monsters hadn't occurred to most
people, including herself.
   But the ISD trained whole regiments of personnel,
programmed bank after bank of biocomputers, to think of
things that didn't occur to most people; some of them right
now would be trying to decide what 'N', a fictitious man
who ran a real crime empire, would do next. It was just part
of her duties, at the moment, to do N's 'public appearances',
when they were required. Maybe it would have been easier
and more efficient to have him operate out of a central
location, but tachyon links could be traced, and jumping him
around to the four corners of UE space gave him that much
more added mystique. Angelica knew that there were at
least four other people who took turns being N, although
she had no idea where they currently were, or even what
their names were. The use of N had reeled in more
lawbreakers and smashed more interstellar crime-rings than
two dozen regular investigations combined, and the twisted
genius (long retired now) who had come up with the idea of
creating him was still something of a demigod in Internal
Security...
   She went to the bedroom at the other end of the cramped,
one-person, bunker, and began to get dressed, pulling on
underwear, rugged pants and blouse, gloves, red
syntholeather boots, wide-brimmed hat. She finished by
concealing various clandestine items around her person,
items which all appeared even to fairly careful scrutiny to be
more common, less lethal, objects. They lay in neat rows on
a nearby tray, awaiting her grasp. 
   As she did these things, she wondered idly exactly what
'counterefforts' were underway. It probably wouldn't be
anything remotely pleasant. Presumably they'd try to get to
Smith on Sirius S-3 before whoever had tripped the station
alarm did. Failing that...?
       She shrugged a trifle uncomfortably, and left to work
her usual contacts down by the city's waterfront. (If you
could fairly call the acidic soup that filled Tarquain VI's
shallow seas 'water'...) There were reports of another new
batch of clandestine razorvine nurseries being set up in the
hinterlands near Bridgehead City, and it was something that
had to be investigated.

*           *             *

   "All right, Smith, that's far 'nough."
   Smith turned away from the doorlock he was cracking.
Somewhere in the distance, the sirens still wailed, signifying
total station lockdown, sealing all doors between Modules
and even Sections while the station security personnel
(human and otherwise) searched for a dangerous, wanted,
fugitive.
   At least in theory. 
   Four or five figures stood in the pulsing light of the
corridor-cum-alleyway behind him, arriving on the scene
with the same suddenness as the three crimelords'
holograms in the Moonbeam meeting room. Something
hinted, however, that the individuals now present were quite
solid. Smith smiled blandly.
   "Yes? Can I help you, gentlemen?"
   "Goin' the meetin' in person was crack-brained, Smith, but
even you wouldn't be dreebish enough to carry it around
withya. So you're gonna to take us to it. Right farkin' now.
Or we get tah do it the fun way." The speaker smiled,
showing a set of teeth blackened by choco addiction. There
was a flicker among the members of the group, and various
lethal-looking items were unsheathed. Some were held in
loose but professional grips, others floated smoothly up into
the air under their own power, humming in an ominous
fashion.
   Smith looked at them as the station lights flashed, his
brown eyes rapidly calculating the odd... probabilities..
costs...
   A voice abruptly spoke up inside his mind, leading to a
conversation that was much like Captain Phelp's
communications with UEDF-ISD Central Command, only
shorter in real-time duration and in even greater need of
interpretation...
   -Bad news, Smith. You've just become redundant.-
   -Oh?-
   -The charming individual with the beady eyes and sloping
forehead is, surprisingly perhaps, quite right. I *wouldn't*
have been... ah... 'dreebish' enough to take the activation
codes to the meeting. Since I've seen the codes, that would
include taking them to the meeting inside my brain. Ergo,
you're not Smith at all. Just an imperfect copy.-
   -Oh. I see. I'm some kind of vatdroid?-
   -Basically. With one or two special modifications. Me, for
example.-
   -And who *are* you, exactly?-
   -I'm you, of course. Well, part of you. To cut a long story
short, the two of us were packed into the same skull, and
given just enough of Mr. Smith's DNA, talents, memories
and personality to ensure a successful negotiation. I was
sent along... to keep an eye on you. And to conceal certain
facts that you didn't really need to know.-
   -You call this a successful negotiation? Someone's trying
to double-cross you. Me. Us. Mr. Smith.-
   -My dear fellow, I'd have been deeply disappointed if they
hadn't. After all, you *did* notice how carefully no one
mentioned what was *really* for sale in that room, didn't
you?-
   -I don't understand. I was selling Marla St. Clair.-
   -Ah yes. Of *course* you were.- (If the voice had come
equipped with a hand, it would have absently patted Smith
on the head as it said this.) -I must admit though, I expected
them to at least wait for a little proof of authenticity before
moving in for the kill. It appears Mr. M has decided to jump
the gun. Only he would be so gauche as to sic station
security *and* this bunch on us. A full report of the
situation has already been T-beamed our... ah... heh... 
father. That duty complete, I now have only one more to
preform:  to point out to our dear Mr. M the error in his
ways. You know what to do now.-
   -You know, this sucks. This sucks big hairy Zill balls.-
   -Zills have neither hair nor balls, but otherwise that is an
excellent summary of the situation. Remember, Mr. Smith,
in the most literal of senses, we are in this together. To the
bitter end.-
   The 'droid surfaced from this internal dialogue, and again
smiled at the man who had just spoken.
   "Mr. Smith sends his regards."
   A couple of the marginally brighter members of the goon
squad realized what this meant and opened fire, but it was
of course far too late. The 'droid simultaneously learned
about and clicked a switch buried down inside his chest,
shielded by special vat-grown tissue so that the ordinary
street-level scanners, at least, couldn't detect it.

   The blast splattered debris across and through three cubic
Blocks of  the station. Even with total station lockdown
already in effect, it took almost two days to stave off hull
rupture of the effected Module. The station operation crew
finally had to drain off the atmosphere to put out all of the 
fires.

(end part 1)


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