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Dark Mantle by Cthulhu117
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Dark Mantle, Part One
Date: 29 May 2008, 9:29 pm
Dark Mantle
Part One: The Tangent Universe
The Mantle
1. The holders of the Mantle are to protect the orderly flow of space and time.
2. The holders of the Mantle are to protect the races which have been given into their control and protection.
3. The holders of the Mantle are to protect the existence, development and dissemination of organic life in the universe.
4. The holders of the Mantle are to protect the honor and legacy of their forerunners; to abhor the abuse of the Mantle for individual gain.
5. The holders of the Mantle are to protect the single heir-species to maintain and uphold the Mantle after their inevitable closure.
The cold blue flames raged near and yet far below him, a blinding maelstrom of light flaring up from the cold of space and the heat of an artificial paradise turned hell. He was weightless, perfectly poised between life and death, light and dark, lies and truth, on the knife's edge of his own mind.
Outside, liberated from the metal-flesh crucible of his body, the mind wandered through the corridors of frigid gray metal and the liquid currents of violet light poured like cold mercury into the cybernetic junction at the nape of his neck. He saw the revenant-destroyer, seeker of vengeance, fearing for his life for the first time; he saw the atoner, his life and death purified in the flames he had brought upon himself; he saw the raging flood of thought and emotion manifest in many bodies. He saw all this, and more besides; but he did not see past the blue-black door, the tangent vortex from the foundry-world below.
The portal was his barrier, the element that was not his. In this moment he was Destiny, yet he could not see past the door from vacuum-night to vacuum-night. On the other side of the door, even Fate was blind.
The Suppressor's armor was bright white, at first, a mobile chrysalis of metal blazing bright into the darkness of a thousand battlefields. After the one thousand battlefields, after the armor had saved his life a thousand times and taken many thousands of lives that had not belonged to it, the armor was no longer bright white, but brown and green and red with the filth of the thousand battlefields and the thousands of lives. Inside it, however, the Suppressor was still clean.
Across the one thousand and first battlefield, the Suppressor walked, the silver machines clustering about him as a living ablative armor. This was their prime directive, the only responsibility that they could be delegated in battle. The Fourth Mandate prevented their use as killing machines; to utilize their formidable offensive capabilities would be a terrible violation of the trust of the Mantle. Of course, there were few these days who believed that the Mantle held any significance whatsoever; the ancient machines were applied as shock troops on the most dangerous missions, and very few commanders objected. Some even actively disobeyed it, making their own machines in an attempt to duplicate the intricate machinery of the ancient guardians. But none of their results, effective though they were, could duplicate the fluid, compound-mind coordination of the pre-existant machines. Their new machines were inferior copies, nothing but a crude imitation that billions of warriors had come to accept.
But the Suppressor was still white. He believed the Mantle, as he had always been told to, and he upheld it.
For this reason, he had survived a thousand battles.
The first tenet of the Suppression Fleet Training College was "All things are fallible; synthetic things more so." The Suppressor did not depend on machines to fight his battles for him. He let the Precursor sentinels fight whatever battle they chose and did the rest himself.
The thinking dead were all around him as he walked, outside his oblate shield of living machines, and the Suppressor drew his foils slowly, the pulse conductor arrays on the grips sparking to life as the third joint of his fingers curled around the hilts.
The Suppressor took a shallow breath and whistled, a practiced warble that the sentinels knew well. They dispersed in a sudden out-rush of force, leaving him alone in the stormy twilight with no light to guide him and hundreds of foes surrounding him.
It did not matter. He already knew exactly where the enemies were.
His primary thumbs clicked the firing studs of the foils. The half-minded shells of the parasite fell around him, feeble boneless flesh reduced to ash in seconds by the bright blue flames. But more were coming, the tentacular eyestalks in their chests drawn inexorably to the heat even as it seared their predecessors to heaps of charred tissue.
The Suppressor killed them all, and when the conduction filaments of the foils were white-hot and unable to fire, he locked them to his gauntlets and used them as they were meant to be used, blazing hot metal blades against the clammy, boneless whip-arms of the Flood. The perfect weapons to him, although they could have been made more perfect by violation of the Mantle.
But that, to the Suppressor, was the point of the Mantle, the great scrutiny it turned on all people who aspired to it. Only the strong could live under the Mantle, and he was strong, even where others were weak.
There were countless more of the skinwalking creatures there, hordes of mindless husks desiring his body and mind, but none posed a threat to him. The foils were bathed in the gray-green lifeblood—so to speak—of the parasites, and he was careful to scrupulously sterilize them before dimending them. They were, after all, Precursor workmanship, one of the few original paired sets of foils still in active use.
When operations concluded after eleven hours, he was one of the last few to enter a cleanship. His combat skin, a class six, was largely unharmed, but as soon as he was aboard the cleanship, he shed it anyway, the waxy viridian coating flaking off and purging through the armor—plating of his battle harness. Such was procedure.
It was on the cleanship, in the control module, that the Suppressor met her, and it was on the cleanship, in the control module, that he spoke for the first time in many years. The tenets of the Suppression Fleet Training College discouraged verbal communication with organics, and almost always forbade verbal communication with non-combat personnel.
Nonetheless, her beauty presupposed exceptional circumstances.
With the sort of nervousness that only non-combatant females produced in him, he cleared his throat. "Reverent greeting," he said. His voice did not sound like he had remembered; it was slightly lower, with a rasping note and a profound hopelessness to it.
She turned with fluid grace, and he realized by the flickers of light under the edges of the skull that she was wearing a platform interface skin, no doubt a highly synchronized level. Any interface skin higher than a class four precluded the possibility of verbal communication; it was something of a mockery to speak to anyone wearing a high-level skin. They were also difficult to remove or replace, so he merely lowered his eyes and reflected calmly on the foolishness of his actions.
After a few seconds, she turned back away and returned to her work, her hands flitting over the cleanship's control surfaces with blinding speed and precision. It was indeed a very synchronized interface skin, probably optimized for this particular ship, and he nodded in approval before opening the control module door and entering the dimended recreational hall of the cleanship.
Most modern vessels, even warships, had considerable environmental development in recreational areas. Some had whole, unique ecosystems possible nowhere else in the universe. But since the opening of the present conflict and the first uses of cleanships, the level of biodiversity had dropped steeply into the cavernous, sterile rooms he saw before him.
The hall contained few other soldiers, most from Suppression Fleets like his own, but at least one of them was wearing the pale gray informal-activity skin that marked them as a planetary Security Fleet officer. Unlike the Suppressors, the Securitors did not carry foils, and they seldom wore battle harness unless circumstances were regularly extreme. This operation had been the result of planetary ambush, and there had been no extreme circumstances to worry about prior to attack. The nearest was sitting, or rather floating, several feet above the current ventral surface, his anterior limbs folded in a position of meditation. But he was shaking slightly, the minute vibrations that would have been all but invisible to an untrained eye obvious and unsettling to the high trained eyes of a Suppressor.
The Suppressor gave no sign of emotion—dynamic facial expression was frowned upon by the Suppressor Fleet Training College—but he was slightly displeased. Even Securitors, the loosest branch of the military, were expected to be utterly impassive in even the most dire situations. Emergency-Circumstance soldiers were not only utterly impassive with regards to emotion, but with regards to virtually all stimuli. They were unthinking juggernauts, perpetually embalmed in prime-class combat skins that neutralized the sensory neurons. They could continue to fight until they were all but dead; and when they were all but dead, they could still continue to fight until their vital organ clusters were divorced from their limbs.
There were none of them here. The situation was not dire enough for that.
The cleanship's coordinating construct flickered to life in midair before him, a mote of deep blue light that pulsed in time with its toneless voice. "All personnel, prepare for planetary reclamation operations."
The Suppressor crossed and uncrossed his primary thumbs, displaying his palms to the construct's avatar in a mute gesture of acknowledgement. Several seconds later, there was a brief tensing in the ship's vibrations, and a crackle of energy flowed across the Suppressor's informal-activity skin. "Planetary reclamation operations" was the official terminology used for coordinated orbital bombardment. Cleanships were not heavily armed, being more dreadnought-affiliated transport vessels than independent warships, but, if necessary, the ship's external layer could configure itself into a slipspace-pulse conductor not unlike an upscaled version of Suppressor foils. Their effect was similar, although obviously with far more destructive capacity.
However, unlike a foil, a cleanship was not a weapon, simply a weaponized transport. Its pulse arrays were not nearly as efficient—or, proportionally speaking, powerful—as those inherent to a foil. Its fire would not purge the world, although it would sterilize large areas of the surface. It would be the dreadnought in high orbit, or more properly its seven pulse arrays, that would eradicate not only the Flood below but everything tainted by their presence. The world of DR h 2189 would be stripped of its planetary crust, and after the ninth volley, even that was usually nothing more than a shell of molten rock clinging tenuously to the planet's core. It was brutally, mechanically efficient, although it always gave the Suppressor an odd feeling, as though all his life's work had been invalidated in seconds.
The Suppressor set his first fingers perpendicular to each other and tapped the tips together to summon the cleanship's construct. The mote of light popped back into existence, and he spoke to it in his measured, yet grating voice. "Provide an operation report," he ordered calmly.
Almost immediately, the construct displayed a screen to him, full of various statistics on ships summoned, troops engaged, combat timelines and so forth. But three numbers at the bottom were of particular interest to him.
PRE-CATACLYSM POPULATION [CIVILIAN/MILITARY]: 498,443,206
CASUALTIES [MILITARY]: 10,928,602
CASUALTIES [CIVILIAN]: 472,699,003
The Suppressor tapped his jaw thoughtfully, then clenched his fists and placed the knuckles together in a dismissal order. The mote of light winked out, and the death tolls vanished into the ether.
The living were his business. The dead were now irrelevant.
The Suppressor crossed his anterior limbs and began to meditate.
Dark Mantle, Part Two
Date: 19 June 2008, 10:27 pm
Dark Mantle
Part Two: Water and Metal
The First Mandate: An Explication
The First Mandate: The holders of the Mantle are to protect the orderly flow of space and time.
What does the First Mandate of the Galactic Mantle mean?
That the orderly proceeding of the myriad dimensions of the universe, including (although not limited to) three-dimensional space and four-dimensional time-space, is sacred inasmuch as anything is; that the holders of the Mantle are not to abuse the power which has been given to them in order to manipulate, pervert or damage these dimensions; most importantly, that we do not pursue the shaping and reshaping of time to further our own goals and beliefs.
Why must we obey the First Mandate?
To the holders of the Mantle has been given a share of power, unnaturally great in all regards. The Mantle charges us with self-regulation of that power; although this is evident in all Mandates, it is made most obvious in the First. To us and us alone is given the power to perceive and manipulate space and time; we must not abuse this power, lest we violate other Mandates.
What are the consequences for failing to uphold the First Mandate?
The holders of the Mantle are charged with self-sacrifice for the benefit of those they protect; therefore, we must not abuse the power given to us. However, in the case of the First Mandate, more direct and fateful consequences of violation are obvious. Time and space form the very fabric of the visible real; beneath them are less definite dimensions which comprise the invisible real; and, some say, beneath even those are still less definite dimensions—one calls to mind the reports of crystalline slipstream space—which constitute the invisible unreal. Interference in such things is highly inadvisable—its effects on the visible real are obvious and devastating; its effects on the invisible real only slightly less so. But it is the invisible unreal which is most profoundly affected by failure to uphold the First Mandate. Every action is connected to every other action by fractal cause-and-effect. The greater the impetus, the greater the result.
From behind, the white light, the purge, illumined the path before him. He saw that there was only one path, and that was the path that he could take, but he could take more than one path. By his new sight, to his new eyes, existence was simple—stimulus, deterrent, stimulus, response—and yet infinite complicated.
He saw the paths, every possible particle expanding along every possible quantum track through the infinitely tangential universe, and realized that the paths converged and the particles ate the paths. He saw the tracks of the white light, blazing into his eyes through metal and flesh and metal and bone and flesh again, and knew every consequence of it and every path it had already taken.
And he realized with detached clarity that the fate-blinded vortex would be preferable to the path that led down into the light.
He stepped through the door.
He heard her before he saw her; the expanding inverse-sphere that was his mind unfocused and shattered with a failing in composure that would have caused his Collegiate Mentor to glare disapprovingly at him. Her footsteps were muted by the dampening field of the interface skin, which was why he noticed her at all; it was not the sound but its unusuality that alerted him.
Her eyes, he knew before he acknowledged her, were more curious than anything else.
The Suppressor uncrossed his legs and lowered them to the ground, his body unfolding in a delicate, practiced dance of flesh and metal. It was impressive and entirely unnecessary. His conditioning scratched against the back of his mind in warning.
She laid a hand on the battle-harness's dorsal locking collar—physical speech was obviously a temporary impossibility for her—and words, not as enunciated syllables but as rapid, luminous glyphs, poured like liquid into his mind. His recreation skin was not optimized for communication, but he could nonetheless receive cross-platform input. Her writing-voice, such as it was, was cold and sharp, a refreshing spike in the base of his skull.
Why did you breach protocol?
Unlike hers, his skin was neither optimized nor designed for communicative output. He had no resort but to speak to her. He wondered briefly if by speaking to him, she was intending to humiliate him by forcing him to verbally communicate with a citizen, and a female citizen at that. It would be just like a military-intelligence attaché to do such a thing, and anyone with such a high level of interface skin could only be a citizen working with intelligence groups.
He opened his mouth, but was not quite sure what to say. After a few moments, he said, "Sincerest apology. An error caused by ignorance. The error will not be repeated."
She placed a single glyph into his mind. You misunderstand.
"Repeated apology," he said, his words dully sliding out of his mouth. He had committed serious breaches of protocol by now; he would be lucky to make it out of this situation with his rank intact.
I do not seek apology but assistance.
The Suppressor frowned slightly. A military intelligence officer in need of assistance was a bad sign.
Your inability to suppress basic hormonal stimuli is unusual for a Suppression Officer, but it may be crucial to the success of the project.
He mutely contemplated the inherent contradiction in this statement and waited for continuation.
Are you familiar with the Contention Project? Of course you are not. But I assure you, you will become highly familiar with it immediately hereafter. I require the assistance of a Fleet Officer in this matter, and you possess all required characteristics for the role. You will follow me.
The Suppressor drew two fingers down the front of his face. Although she could not properly see the gesture, anyone would recognize the raised left arm as a sign of denial.
With a hiss, he felt a slight heat against the small of his back. He recognized a charged foil all too well. I neither solicited nor required your input.
He briefly contemplated killing her where she stood. It would be entirely possible for him to use his posterior limbs to smash the foil out of the way long enough for him to turn and strike her a probably-fatal blow with his own foils, but without an accurate idea at her skill with the weapon, he could not say for sure whether or not he could avoid being hit long enough to finish her off. Besides, it would be regarded as high treason; he would be executed on the spot by any soldier who witnessed the act and any who encountered him thereafter. Even if he could evade the Fleets by hiding outside the Sphere, he doubted his ability to escape this room.
And of course, even if he triumphed over all odds to escape the Sphere, there would still be the Flood.
He relaxed slightly and twined his thumbs together. The foil's prickling warmth dimmed. I am glad that you are not fool enough to attempt violence. I hope that this will be not entirely unpleasant.
And she turned and walked away.
He contemplated what had been said for a moment. An idea flickered through his mind. It was his very first memory, hundreds of years old now. A Handler was leaning over him as he waited, penitent, for a corporal-discipline that never came. The Handler had twisted his fingertips together in an irritated gesture of worry and then set down the training foil usually used for flogging in violations of the Fleet Trainee Code. Then the Handler had crouched by the downcast child and said, "Your difficulty, child, is that you know no discretion. You do not know when to run."
With a boldness that vanquished guilt, he had replied, "A Suppressor never runs."
He had been whipped for that. But the Handler had been right. He did not know when to run. He was currently getting a feeling from the part of his subconscious he had spent decades ignoring that he should be running from her, running as far as he could run, and then running further until there was no possible way she could find him.
He smashed these thoughts as he had smashed the thinking-dead before and followed her.
She was waiting for him where he had first seen her, in the control module, her interface skin flickering again as lines of code rushed across it. She did not look up as he entered, but her arm flashed out to grip his wrist, and he saw: Seal the room.
He turned to the room door and set it to seal indefinitely, with a random key-code of six digits. Technically, the procedural minimum for a private discussion of a military-sensitive nature was a sixteen-digit code, but his skin had limited interface capabilities. He wanted to be able to get out quickly if he had to. Although physically he was more than a match for her, she was military-intelligence. If she was carrying a dimended weapon, she could incinerate him before he could even draw his foils. Two hundred years of conditioning and precision training were, unfortunately, no match for simple technological advantage.
She turned to him and shed the skin. It slid off her like wax to disintegrate into the ambient energy fields of the cleanship. Beneath it, she wore no battle-harness, but the neat, dark, ablative robe of a homeworld counselor. She wore no rank insignia, but by the cut of the robe, he guessed she was at least a Prefect. A Prefect would never come this far out from the Sphere. Never. Not unless the fundamental safety of the homeworld was at stake.
His surprise was not evident, but the back of his mind shrieked even louder at him. There were no words, but the message was clear. Get out while you can.
He did not leave. After a few moments, the shrieking stopped.
When she spoke, her speaking-voice perfectly duplicated her writing-voice—the bitingly cold, sardonic tone was even more evident than it had been. "You are confused," she said.
He acknowledged this.
"Unfortunately," she said, "you are most likely to continue being confused. The more you know, the more we might potentially use. If this is painful, I apologize in advance."
She moved with a speed that should have been impossible for anyone, even him, even if he had been harnessed. There was a sudden hiss against his informal-activity skin, and he felt a bitter cold against the deltoid modules of his battle-harness. He waited silent as it entered his bloodstream through a thousand tiny links from machine to meat, wondering what compound she had used and what its effects were. From the darkening of his vision, he guessed it was a sedative or a blanker.
He thought he might have had the chemical's name for a second, but then it and everything else slipped away.
When he woke, he was a hundred million miles away from safety, and the water, dark and oily and foul, was starting to soak thickly into his skin.
He nearly panicked, nearly screamed, but his mind would not allow him to open his mouth. Nonetheless, he conceded, his situation was most unpleasant. He was slowly sinking downwards, presumably, into water that was not in the least wholesome in an entirely unfamiliar environment. Furthermore, he had no rated skin, no battle-harness and a dull throb in his bones from the sedative.
He calmed himself, measuring the steady pulse of his circulatory system and the shallow oxygen he had begun to recycle. His ancestors had been creatures of water. Their most ancient sacred text had been called The Litany of the Sea. He attempted to recall it; memorizing it was mandatory for the "Genocultural Heritage and Philosophy" course at the College, but that was not a course he had ever taken. However, he had heard the ancient, no-longer-holy words repeated enough times that they had made an impression in his memory.
Water is the blood of the universe.
His posterior limbs, scarcely used by most modern fighters, extended. They were weak, or felt weak, anyway; compared to the rest of his body, the force they exerted was pathetically feeble.
Water is the blood of the universe.
He did not possess the experience and the adaptations of his evolutionary ancestors. His breaths grew shallower and faster. He was beginning to hyperventilate. He repeated the first line in his mind like a mantra, attempting to recall the second line.
Water is the blood of the universe...know that...know that water...
Perhaps given ideal conditions, an entirely silent room where he could meditate, he could recall the line. But not here. Not while he fought for his life. Not in the blue-black oblivion where the water itself crushed him down and he did not even know which way was up.
Water is the blood of the universe. Know also that water is the blood of all life and that all life springs from water.
All life springs from water.
There was light above.
He surfaced into pale light, shining from above, illuminating a dark, cold cavern of metal, an artificial cavern, a triumph of mass craftsmanship. He glanced around, took a single deep breath. Before he could take another, he had already heard the cries of the Parasite, desperate howls for flesh and sustenance, and slipped, purposefully this time, back into the blood of the universe.
Dark Mantle, Part Three
Date: 24 July 2008, 5:51 pm
Dark Mantle
Part Three: The Vortex
The Second Mandate: An Explication
The Second Mandate: The holders of the Mantle are to protect the races which have been given into their control and protection.
What does the Second Mandate of the Galactic Mantle mean?
That the power inherent in the Mantle (more specifically, the possession thereof) is a thing granting dominion, both over the natural and artificial, and that by dominion over these things, dominion over life is included. It is impermissible to allow this dominion to be challenged, even from within, for as long as the Mantle is maintained. Because all species in this sphere, and perhaps this universe, are under one Eternal Empire, that Empire must not deal unfairly or harshly with them.
Why must we obey the Second Mandate?
To the holders of the Mantle has been given a share of power, unnaturally great in all regards. The Mantle charges us with self-regulation of that power. In the Second Mandate, that charge manifests in the ethical mean implied in the Mandate: as we shall not abandon the peoples of the universe to their foes, so we shall not treat them with harshness or with cruelty.
What are the consequences for failing to uphold the Second Mandate?
The holders of the Mantle are charged with self-sacrifice for the benefit of those they protect; therefore, we must not abuse the power given to us. In the case of the Second Mandate, the consequences of failure are temporary yet severe. One may call to mind the extinction of the Nakh; though they wished to hold the Mantle jointly, they were unable to do so. Their species, of course, is no longer extant; their construct-descendants the Huragok remain, mute and savant, a reminder of our failures. Although the consequences of failing the Second Mandate are universally less terrible than those of the First Mandate, in many ways they are equally grievous.
On the other side of the door, it was very different.
For an infinitesimal fraction of a moment, he moved, spoke, felt, slept. Then it was cold and unfamiliar again, and he followed the subatomic paths back into his mind and out again as he projected himself across the galaxy. Then, with a spark of malfunction, it was cold but familiar, and the subatomic paths shattered into minute crystals of the invisible unreal, and below him on the other side of the closed door was a sphere, dark and strange and sinister, and blue lights flickered across its surface.
There was no fear, no hate, no surprise—yet here there was no guidance. No destiny but what he made. No reality but what he imagined.
In many ways, it was more real than the reality he had left behind.
By the time he dared to again lift his head above the surface to breathe the recycled, oily air once more, the webs of skin between the digits of his posterior limbs were already aching terribly. He had pushed himself too far; he had become overtaxed by simple exercise for the first time in his adult life. The sedative was partly to blame, but also, he worried, an inability to plan ahead. He had never thought he would need to swim as a Suppressor. Most battle-harnesses possessed enough autonomous motive power to avoid water too deep to wade, and a combat skin usually repulsed water anyway. He had failed to anticipate the worst.
The Training College had a tenet: "When there is no threat, you must fear the worst. When there is a threat, it will therefore not be the worst."
He flexed the muscles of his back, spreading his cramped arms, and fully surfaced for a moment to get a clear look at his surroundings. They did not tell him much. He was alone, without armor or skin, submerged in a synthetic environment, with one or more Flood within howl-distance. It was the worst, whatever the Training College's tenets said.
As his arms, more powerful and trained than his other limbs, pushed him cleanly through the water towards the shore, he could not shake the feeling that there was more than merely the Flood to deal with.
The others had long since left the observation suite, but she remained. The microscopic imager she had injected with the sedative was not particularly powerful, but it provided real-time visual data in a considerable arc, just wider than the Suppressor's natural vision would have allowed. The imager itself would only produce vague shapes and sizes, nothing specific enough for the brain to build a clear idea of the Suppressor's surroundings. But the imager was not working alone. The translation was a test for the Contender, and the construct was exceeding specifications in a way that both pleased and worried her.
She was happy that the compound mind, the thing that was psychologically her child and the child of many others, was so powerful. The rest of them had told her that the raw processing ability of the thing was unrivaled, but she'd had no opportunity to observe that until now. The accuracy and detail of the rendered image was unbelievable. Considering that the Contender had, until now, never been introduced to visual input, it was a genius. It was perceiving the world, she realized, in a way that no one had ever perceived it before. In a way, it was its own little deity, creating a universe from nothing.
On the other hand, the fact of its ingenuity, even the idea that it could interpret and create this accurately, was alarming as well. Previous Contenders had failed miserably to adapt to the power they had been granted. The first two seed types of the program had failed to produce even one viable intelligence. The third had spawned a chaotic input-output system that was internally fascinating but no use whatsoever. The fourth had been built off the third, and was efficient, brilliant, adaptive and stupid beyond imagining. It behaved like a computer; not even a construct, but an old, non-sapient processing unit, albeit on a tremendous scale.
But this was the prize, the fruit of decades of labor. It made observations, processed data, drew conclusions, and then thought about them. The reason why was entirely unclear. It was only one of forty-two subjects constructed on that production run alone, and none of its brothers had even begun to develop noticeable sentience.
This Contender was the only one of its kind, but she hoped that it would not always be. There were teams working constantly, even now, to use 05-032's basic neurological construction to reproduce the effect: a compound intelligence; infinite minds in finite form. For now, this one was alone and barely beginning to develop. She had set it to work with the most complex system she could requisition: a survival game, one Suppressor against all the non-essential Flood specimens she had obtained. There were fewer of the things than she'd expected, so she had confiscated the Suppressor's weapons to give Contender a chance to observe.
She could only hope that the observation was making it think, because she had no idea how to respond to a construct that had gotten bored, especially this construct.
She was not looking forward to the day it learned to speak.
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