135 Skulls on the Throne

[the] [is] [only] [death]

Falmo'o stared at the gravitational pattern and looked at Taynee. "Did you ever try to figure out anything about this gravitational anomaly in the neutron star?" he asked.

Taynee shook her head. "I didn't, but I know other scientists did."

"What did they determine?" Falmo'o asked, staring at the display. It was weird. The tech was so bare on the surface. Mechanical keyboards, crystal laser storage matrix (they used odd spinning platters for it), liquid crystal displays in some places, cathode ray displays in others. Wiring wasn't always super-conductor, in some places it was gold or even copper. But the programming was advanced, data arrays with borderline virtual intelligences, search capacity that returned results in less time then the most advanced computers he had worked for back in civilized space.

She sighed. "We determined that the gravity focus shifts," she looked at Falmo'o and exhaled smoke. "The neutron star changes direction but we're not sure on what basis, it's also used the gravitational lensing to speed up and slow down," she said. "And no, we never figured out where its going."

Falmo'o gritted his teeth together in annoyance then stopped.

Where did I get that habit? I'm Lanaktallan, when we're annoyed we curl our tendrils, he wondered briefly.

"It's hard to figure out when you start going back and forth," Taynee said. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "It's even hard to remember what I did any more."

"What did you do?" Falmo'o asked. "Can you remember?"

She shook her head. "Some days. Some days I can remember. Others days I can't. I'm a technician, but I wasn't always. I was something else, something full of rage, but my rage cooled."

"What kind of technician?" Falmo'o asked. His old instincts were coming back, his old training.

"Mat-Trans science and technology. Advanced sub-atomic particle neo-physics," she looked up. "Quark, boojums, higgs-bosun, all the little particles," she gave a wry chuckle. "We don't fully understand the mat-trans system. How it works even, we just knew that it worked."

She suddenly laughed. "The tech is miniaturized even smaller than originally. Better transmitters, better receptors, but we don't understand why it works, just that does. It shouldn't. I mean, honestly, the math for it is... outrageous."

Falmo'o still couldn't believe that humans had achieved matter transmission before even space-flight. It was one of the major research fields that had never gone anywhere.

Of course the humans figured it out. They probably weaponized it within minutes, he thought to himself.

"Only, it turned out that mat-trans slowly drives you crazy. The further the distance, the faster it makes you crazy," she said. "We use it for orbital insertions against the Mantids."

Could it be the interaction between the mat-trans system and the gravity? Falmo'o wondered. Could that have caused it all?

"What were you working on when everything changed?" Falmo'o asked.

"I... I'm not sure," Tanyee said. "We... we were using the hyperpulse com to talk to New Terra." She lit a cigarette and exhaled. "Um... we were using real-time sub-space coms to interface with Imperium networks, we had transferred down some things to Dark Side One, I don't remember what, but the Combine ship showed up, like twenty years late, and used mat-trans to 'beam' over to the shuttle bay."

Falmo'o nodded. "Then what?"

"Um, everything went down. Half the Combine guys got turned inside out, coms went down and we've never gotten them back up, and..." she paused for a second. "You came around the corner, from behind one of the main computer banks, it got destroyed when you got killed. Then we started seeing you guys everywhere. One of you in Imperium power armor, one of you in Combine armor but he didn't come back after we airlocked him. The one in Imperium armor, he keeps coming back."

Falmo'o made a noise of assent. He kind of remembered that. Remembered trying to talk to the humans and getting gunned down.

Scrabbling slightly, Falmo'o got up, moving across to get a drink of water.

He was thinking about what she had said. All of those happening at once, with the addition of mat-trans technology and whatever arcane mathematics were involved in such a technology.

"Could you build a mat-trans?" he asked.

"Yeah," Tanyee said. "I'm the one that got the one to the surface working again."

"Mm-hmm," Falmo'o said. He poured himself some water, turning around and sipping it, staring at the back of the naked human's head. "How many Terrans here could build one?"

"Just me. The rest of them were on the surface at Dark-Side One," Taynee said. She exhaled smoke. "Shit, I remember this." Her shoulders and neck muscles tightened slightly.

Whispers started in Falmo'o's head but he tightened his neck ruffs and relaxed his tendrils.

Falmo'o stopped from drawing the neural pistol. He took a deep drink and sighed to cover the slight sound of the neural pistol going back into the holster. "How much do you understand about Hellspace mechanics?"

"Hellspace? Quite a bit. Why?" Taynee asked.

"How much overlap is there between mat-trans mechanics and Hellspace?" Falmo'o asked, moving back around in front of her.

"Quite a bit, actually. It's somewhat surprising just how much. The original mat-trans with humans must have invoked legendary nightmares and turned people inside out," Taynee said. She relaxed as Falmo'o moved back in front of her then gave him a weird look.

"What?" Falmo'o asked.

"You should have shot me at the base of the skull. I remember you doing it," she said.

"Well, I'm..." Falmo'o started to say.

Falmo'o himself came around a stack of nutripaste boxes, leveled the neural pistol, and leveled the neural pistol at the back of Taynee's neck.

The double jerked upright, going stiff, when Falmo'o's shot hit it in the forehead, then collapsed. Taynee had leaned to the side to avoid Falmo'o's shot and finished coming to her feet.

Falmo'o moved forward as Taynee turned and looked.

"Crap," she said.

The replacement version of Falmo'o was completely covered in worms and insect larvae. As Falmo'o watched the entire body decayed away, even the bones and cartilage rotting away, leaving nothing behind but a stain.

"Falmo'o, that isn't what I remember," Taynee said slowly.

"Hellspace," Falmo'o said slowly. "How did the Combine ship arrive?"

Taynee nodded. "Hellspace Rift, even though nobody uses it. We didn't get a chance to ask them why they used that."

"How did you know they were Combine?" Falmo'o asked, tapping the pistol against his leg.

"Combine Era ship, old style Combine Marine body mods, Combine armor," Taynee said slowly. "Combine codes."

"Who built this place?" Falmo'o said.

"Keel plate is down here in engineering. I assumed it was Imperium," Taynee said. She turned away, motioning him to follow. "It should be down here."

They moved back past the environmental systems, through hallways. The lights flickered several times but the station stayed in good condition. The air began to smell better, although it took Falmo'o a few minutes to realize it. After a little bit they reached a room, marked "ENGINEERING MAINTENANCE CORE - NO ADMITTANCE" above the door.

Falmo'o deliberately "looked away" as she punched in the door code, knowing that Taynee wouldn't realize that he was watching through one of his rear eyes. It was a simple code, only eight digits.

Easy number to remember, he thought to himself.

The door slid open, revealing some of the core systems. The graviton generator, which kept the facility on station as well as monitored grav waves, the main environmental system, the three power plants, and a couple of ones that Falmo'o didn't recognize.

"It'll be back here," Taynee said. She moved between several large pieces of machinery and Falmo'o followed, remembering what the labels were. There were two computer core towers that disappeared above the ceiling and were twelve meters across. They were mostly dark, which made Falmo'o wonder just how much computing power the station had at its disposal if all the computational power needed to keep everything running that had to run at all times barely touched the computer systems.

"Here," she said. She reached out and touched it. "My God." She tapped two places. "DARPA and Overproject Whisper."

"What?" Falmo'o asked. It was a simple looking logo. A simple blue oval marked with longitude and latitude lines with DARPA printed on it. Underneath was was written "OVERPROJECT WHISPER" not that he could read either text.

"That's impossible," Taynee said. She shook her head. "There's no way that logo should even be here."

"What does it mean?" Falmo'o said. To him, one logo from a primitive species was like another, but whatever it was, it had shaken Taynee up.

But Taynee hadn't figured out, in all the time she had been here, what was going on.

Falmo'o had an idea.

"It's a pre-diasporia government agency. This plaque shouldn't be here," Taynee said. "There's no way..."

She moved over to the computer terminal and began typing. It beeped within seconds and she shook her head.

"No. It's impossible," she said. She turned and looked at Falmo'o. "Do you have any governments or government agencies that people don't even speak about in whispers any more?"

Falmo'o shook his head. "No."

The Executor Covert Action Agency is one, he thought to himself.

"Look, these guys were bad news. We're talking old pre-diasporia guys. The big ones. You know, the nuclear guys," she lit a cigarette, her hands shaking. She looked up. "These guys, back then, Falmy, they were ruthless. I mean, they make the Combine and the Imperium look like kids. Those guys back then, those nations back then, Falmy? They'd have ripped off your head, cracked open your skull, and sucked out your thoughts with a vacuum, kicked your body into a ditch, then stared your family in the eyes and said you never existed."

Falmo'o nodded. He could understand that. He'd done that. "So, they employed agents to do so?"

She shook her head. "No. Your average factory worker would if they were told to," she sighed. "Look, Falmy, they drug us to keep us from being like that any more. If I was like human were back then? I'd hollow you out like a canoe and use your skull to paddle myself back to Earth."

Nation states like that usually destroy their own world. At the most, they'd need a little push from someone like me. How the Terrans survived that is something I must research, must understand. It is statistically improbable and may be the key to understanding humans, Falmo'o thought to himself.

Since he'd seen the humans panic, right before they killed him, since he'd come to grips with the fact that he could be killed again and again and would keep coming back, he'd found that he was no longer afraid of getting killed.

Now I know why humans are so fearless. It's beyond that SUDS device, they truly have no fear of death if it serves a perceived higher purpose, he thought. He stared at the plaque. Gone thousands of years and still inspires fear, Falmo'o mused.

"So why shouldn't it be here? Do you know who built this place?" Falmo'o asked.

Taynee shook her head. "We assumed the Combine did, or maybe the Federation or the Republic. There's no way these guys built it," she said. She exhaled smoke and Falmo'o noticed her hands were no longer shaking.

"So we're in a space station, around a neutron star that whispers, that uses a mat-trans, that you have no idea who built, that you have no idea what purpose it had or has now. Am I correct?" Falmo'o asked.

Tanyee nodded. "Well, I just know my job was to upgrade the mat-trans and keep it calibrated."

"The base, who built it?" Falmo'o asked.

"Whoever built this place it," she shook her head. "That plaque has to be wrong. A joke or something."

Falmo'o nodded. "I'm sure. Your people have a strange sense of humor."

He clopped over to the computer, looking down at it. The language was strange, not one he was used to seeing. He had learned Terran as part of his job to try to figure out a way to destabilize their government.

This language was different. Falmo'o looked it over, applying the lessons he'd learned.

Paranoid. Recursive. Multiple terms per word depending on subject context, reader situation, and author intent and situation. Limited letters, but infinitely combinable. Simple on the face, but a lot different then he expected. He had been expecting hieroglyphic type. Letter combinations on the surface made little sense, a self-encoded language. Multiple phonetic types, many words appearing to have been taken from other languages.

Paranoid.

"Can you read that?" Tanyee asked.

"No. Can you?" Falmo'o asked.

"No," she said. "I can read the math, though."

"Is there any way to learn it?" He asked. He was curious as to the document.

"I wouldn't know where to start. All the computers in the older section use that language," she said.

"Who put up the new language for the signs?" Falmo'o asked.

"It's something called 'viewer adaptive"," she said.

"How does it work?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Beats me."

"I thought you were an engineer," Falmo'o said.

"I am. Mat-trans technology, Hellspace mechanics, sub-quantum particle mathematics and stuff like that. It's fairly focused, Falmy," she said, shrugging.

Falmo'o nodded slowly. He wasn't surprised that she was willing to work with him. Pack bonding. He'd died enough times around her and with her for her to trust him.

The more savage ones, the ones who attack me, those are the ones before pack bonding, Falmo'o thought to himself, holding back a sneer.

Tanyee lit a new cigarette and looked at the pack. "Halfway empty."

I must find a way to control her acquisition of that drug. Her dependency upon it and addiction can work in my favor. Perhaps even allow me to convince her to give up the secrets of matter transmission, Falmo'o thought to himself. There has to be a psychological issue with her nudity. If I can discover it, I can exploit it.

He looked around. There had to be a way to figure all of it out. There had to be reason that he would be reformed after being killed. There was no such thing as magic, no such thing as immortality. Even the human's ability to recover from death had to do with quantum neural mapping somehow.

There had to be some kind of technology at work. Some kind of previously unknown interaction between the dangerous technologies the humans insisted upon exploring.

"Is there a Hellcore on this station?" Falmo'o asked.

Tanyee nodded. "Top of the station, main maintenance up there, but you can only get there from here," she said. She pointed across the room. "Maintenance elevator would probably be the most comfortable for you. When they reached it she punched in a quick code. Again, he memorized it.

He kept back his smile as they entered the elevator.

"Only one problem," she said.

"What?" He asked.

"It'll stop at medical. It always stops at medical," she said, blowing smoke. "You cross medical to the other elevator."

"Why's that a problem?" Falmo'o asked as the elevator jerked into motion.

"You'll see," Tanyee said. She flicked ash on the floor and took another drag, staring at him with her blue eyes. "You'll see."

Falmo'o snorted. "I was in medical. There are multiple hallways."

"Not this medical," Tanyee said.

The elevator stopped and opened.

Falmo'o stared. There were primitive cryo-tubes. Two rows of them, one to either side. They were covered in frost, concealing who or what was inside. The bottom foot of the floor or so was covered in a thick mist.

They started moving through, Falmo'o looking around him. More of that primitive, paranoid language. He saw a sign and pointed at it. "What does that say?"

She glanced up. "Project Morpheus, part of Project Nyx and Project Erebus."

"What kind of projects are they?" Falmo'o asked. "Is it related to this cryogenic system?"

Tanyee shrugged. "I don't know. We don't know what half of this stuff even is."

Falmo'o shook his head. He wished he'd cultivated someone a little more knowledgeable, but he'd deal with the contact he had. Humans were obviously very mono-focused.

Perhaps that's how they advance so quickly? Like the Mantids, they have dedicated science and engineering castes? Falmo'o wondered.

She stopped next to an elevator, punching in a code. The door opened and he trotted in. She got in next to him, still puffing on the cigarette. Finally the door closed and the elevator started moving.

"You really wanna see the Hellcore, Falmy?" she asked as it slowly came to a stop.

"Of course. Perhaps it will provide a key to our problem, a key as to what is going on," Falmo'o said. "Perhaps we can stop it."

"There's a lot of projects going on, Falmy, are you sure you want to try to stop it?" she asked.

The door slid open, revealing a chamber of matte black durachrome. In the middle of the room was a black durachome tube, a ring of computers around it, all with CRT monitors and mechanical keyboards. The few working screens were showing complex systems monitors.

"If it will get us out of here, we should stop the project," Falmo'o said. He stopped into the room and turned, noticing that she had not followed him.

"What?" He asked.

Movement made him look up. A small round bubble on the wall had extruded a tube.

There was a bright flash, and everything went dark.

---------------------

He woke up, face down on the floor. It took him a moment to realize he was wearing his infiltration armor and was laying on the floor of the umbilicus. Around him the corpses of the infiltration team were laying, their bodies torn apart, their chests torn open.

"Fuck."