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CHAPTER FIVE

Sixteen years earlier…

She was gently kissing the back of a Master’s knees when the harsh buzz of the alarm sounded. Solana looked up at the Master’s face and saw him looking back, just as confused as she was. A voice over the comm network replaced the buzzer.

“Danger! Hab under attack. Not a drill. Get to emergency shelters immediately. Danger!”

“I guess we’d better. Where’s the nearest shelter?” asked the Master. He was a visitor to Kumu habitat, one of hundreds who spent years in hibernation to make the trip for a few weeks of unbridled excess before going back into the freezer for the journey home—possibly with a Qarina in the next berth.

“In the hall,” said Solana, and launched herself at the door. In Kumu’s microgravity environment she could move with ease, but her Master was clumsier. She led him out of the play suite into the corridor. All along it frightened Qarinas and Masters of all sexes emerged from doorways, mostly without clothes. Solana’s own temporary Master suddenly looked self-conscious about being naked and sporting a huge erection. The drug cocktail he’d taken would make sure that wouldn’t fade no matter what happened.

“Clear the way!” A squad of human and mech guards hurried down the hall from the direction of the nearest transport stop, bouncing off walls in their haste. They were accompanied by a swarm of weapon bots. The humans were in armor, currently colored high-vis orange, but the weapon drones were sinister tactical black.

The Qarinas, obedient to a fault, flattened themselves against the sides of the passage, but some of the Masters tried to accost the human troops with questions. The response was a shouted “Shelter! Now!” followed by an augmented-strength shove in the direction of the nearest glowing green door.

A sudden loud bang left Solana unable to hear anything but the ringing in her ears. Ahead she could see a new hole in the ceiling. Mechs and humans came swarming through, all in white marked with a red shi symbol.

The security troops stopped and hesitated for a split second, which was too long. The intruders sent a hail of smart darts and micromissiles down the passage, blasting mechs and bots to scrap and punching holes in the chests and heads of the humans.

They advanced down the hall, separating the panicked crowd as they went. Qarinas were gently but firmly passed back toward the hole in the ceiling. Masters and staff got a needle through the head.

Salibi. Solana had heard about them from one of the trainers. “They’re dangerous fanatics who hate Qarinas like you. If they catch you they’ll lock you away and never let you give pleasure again. But don’t worry, little one. There’s only a few billion of them and they’re down in the Main Swarm. They can’t get you here.”

Solana dove into the nearest open doorway, another play suite set up for restraint. She swung herself around a big pillory in the center of the room and shot into the bathroom. She’d be safe there. The door could be pressure-sealed and she’d have water. Once the guards chased the bad guys away she could come out. She curled herself up into the cabinet under the sink and waited, barely daring to breathe.

She tried to use her comm implant but the Kumu network was dark. It occurred to Solana that the invaders might be able to detect her signal so she silenced it. She waited in the dark, utterly isolated, listening to the shrill noise of alarms, distant explosions, screams, and amplified voices giving orders too garbled to understand.

After a time the noises died away, and Solana began to wonder if it was safe to come out. With no Master, no trainers, nobody to tell her anything, Solana had a rare opportunity to think for herself.

Qarinas didn’t get much education, but Solana was curious and had learned things in her few idle moments. She knew that Kumu was very far from the Main Swarm, far from anything, really. Even a fast sail took a standard year to get from Jupiter to Kumu. There wasn’t really any way to sneak up on the hab undetected. The Salibi must have come in a disguised ship, masquerading as a regular dumb cargo payload.

She had seen a cargo pod being unloaded once. It was certainly big—a couple of thousand cubic meters—but Kumu itself was a kilometer across, thousands of times bigger. Could the Salibi really hope to keep control? Would they even want to?

But leaving an enemy hab left them open to retaliation. What if the trainers got Kumu’s laser working before the Salibi were out of range?

Solana suddenly felt very alert and cold. The Salibi couldn’t leave an intact hab behind, nor could they hold it. Which meant they would likely try to destroy Kumu when they left. Including any little stray Qarinas hiding in cabinets.

She checked the network, to see if there were any announcements. Still dark. After a couple more minutes she crawled out of the cabinet and groped her way to the door. It opened, which meant there was air outside. That was encouraging.

It slid open when she touched the control, and in the quiet it seemed incredibly noisy. The passage beyond was lit by red emergency lights, dazzling after the dark cupboard.

Where to go? The shelter door at the end of the corridor had a big black-edged hole cut in it. She could see bodies inside, spattered with blood. None of them moved.

What was the safest place in Kumu? Where could any survivors hold out? Well, the hab couldn’t survive without power, so the fusion reactors were in the core of the structure, with literally all of Kumu as armor against damage. She went to the nearest vertical shaft and pushed herself down. She fell very slowly—Kumu’s mass was just a million tons, so she weighed just a few millionths of a newton—and with each deck she dropped the force pulling her diminished.

The security bots had tried to hold this shaft. About a hundred meters down Solana came to a barricade. They’d closed a pressure hatch and then backed it up with layers of construction foam and graphene. But the attackers had cut through the wall into a laboratory, cut two decks down, and outflanked the defenders. Solana followed their trail and found the next section of the vertical shaft riddled with holes and scorch marks. A few shattered bots clung to the walls.

Down near the core she found another defense line, also breached. Blood-spattered corpses in armor outnumbered the broken bots. None of them were Salibi. Surely Kumu’s defenders had managed to kill at least a few? Maybe the invaders had taken their dead. Solana remembered something else she’d heard from her trainer: the Salibi claimed that every dead person’s mind was archived by an infinitely high-level intelligence existing outside of normal spacetime, and at some point in the future all the dead would be reactivated. That was why even human Salibi fought like disposable mechs.

The shaft ended at Deck 4. Below that was the armored sphere holding Kumu’s power reactors and oxygen reserves. There was only one entrance, and she didn’t know where it was. Qarinas weren’t allowed down here, at least not normally. Solana found a door into a passage around the equator of the core. It looked like a control space. More signs of fighting.

A mech with an armored white hemisphere shell came scuttling around a big coolant pump and stopped. “May I help you, child? This area is not safe for biologicals. There are toxins and unexploded warheads.”

She turned to run but the mech caught her with a burst of machine speed. Arms popped out of armored ports and grabbed her by ankle and elbow. Solana writhed and fought, flailing with her free limbs. The mech carried her back to the vertical shaft, and she saw a pair of white-armored humans descending to meet them.

“Found another,” said the mech. “Poor thing was trying to join those despicable creatures inside the core.”

“I don’t despise them,” said one of the humans. “They are cunning and strong, and glory in their sins. I hate them. May God forgive them because I certainly can’t.”

“Amen,” said the mech. “Now take her to the staging area. I have to finish planting charges.”

Solana hadn’t tried to fight the mech, but humans were different. They could feel pain. As soon as the mech released its grip she aimed a kick at one human’s abdomen. When the other one tried to grab her she bit and punched and wriggled. These two were not frontline troops. They were wearing protective suits, not heavy combat armor, so a foot in the groin from a girl in perfect physical condition could actually hurt.

For one glorious moment she struggled free and launched herself down the corridor. Then behind her she heard the muffled pop of a launch pistol, and a tranq round hit her bare back. It spread out and she felt a faint prickle. Then her muscles stopped obeying her, and all she could feel was an overwhelming desire for sleep. The very last thing she heard before sinking into darkness was the voice of one human. “Poor things. They’ll fight to the death to stay slaves.”

She woke once, briefly, in a converted storeroom where a couple of human medics were moving among dozens of unconscious Qarinas lying on stretchers. Solana tried to move, but there were medical sensors stuck to her skin in a dozen places, and the humans noticed at once. They had clear face masks on, to avoid spreading microorganisms, but as soon as they turned they made the masks opaque, a blank white field with a red shi.

“Don’t worry, child,” said one. Her voice was calming. “No harm will come to you. We’re just prepping you all for hibernation. Soon we will all be out of this hellish place.”

“No,” she murmured and kept struggling to get up. Her muscles were weak and didn’t do what she wanted.

“Nothing but death for you here,” said the other. While he spoke the first one touched a patch to Solana’s bare chest, and in just a couple of seconds everything faded away.


When she woke again she was about five kilos thinner, sitting in a chair with soft but unbreakable restraints keeping her in place. She felt the tug of Mars-level gravity, pressing her down into the seat. The room looked like a medical clinic, and a human wearing white coveralls and a face-concealing mirrored visor stood just out of arm’s reach.

“Welcome to Jiaohui,” the human said. Her voice was pleasant but wary. “If you’re willing to behave yourself I’ll release you.”

“Let me go!”

The woman just waited.

“I won’t try to fight,” said Solana.

The woman’s head nodded and a second later the restraints withdrew into the chair.

“You’ve been hibernating for two standard years, and right now you’re in the Main Swarm. Do you know what that means?”

“A long way from Kumu. Near the Sun.”

“Very good. I confess I’ve been shocked by how ignorant some of the other children we rescued are. Now, do you know why I’m wearing this?” The woman tapped her faceplate. “I could make it transparent. Show you my face and order you to behave. Why didn’t I do that?”

Solana didn’t know. None of this made sense. When trainers wanted obedience, they gave orders, and sometimes backed it up with punishment. These lunatics had taken her prisoner, hauled her across the solar system, and now were…pleading with her? It was insane. She shook her head mutely.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. In the meantime we’re going to educate you. Teach you some basic knowledge about the world and how to live in it. Give you tools to help overcome your conditioning. Once that’s done, you can decide what you want to do.”

“I want to go home. I want to go back to Kumu.”

“That’s one thing I’m afraid you can’t do. It’s a dead hab now. We made sure of that. All the slavers are dead, the genomes destroyed. We did take off a lot of financial data, and some friendly high-level minds are trying to crack the encryption. Find out who their customers were, their suppliers, their backers. Find any other operations in the same filthy trade. But Kumu itself is nothing but cold scrap full of vacuum.”

That hit Solana like a blow. She had never known any place but Kumu. The dormitories, the playrooms, the training center, the Masters’ suites, and the cafeteria had been her entire universe. The scents, the images, the infinite variety of textures and sensations. Now? This silent white-painted place wasn’t home. It would never be home.

The mirror-faced woman seemed to understand what she was thinking. “I’m sure you’re sad right now. Leaving home is hard, no matter what kind of a place it is. But we’ve brought you out of that so you can have a better life. See more than the inside of a sex dungeon.”

Solana’s surge of anger surprised even herself. She leaped at the woman, teeth bared and fists clenched. If her coverall hadn’t been tough carbon fiber Solana might have been able to do some damage. As it was she flailed and struggled and eventually the restraints reached out of the chair and hauled her back.

“Fighting will get you nothing,” said the woman, shaking her head. “Harming yourself won’t accomplish anything, either, so please don’t try anything like that. If you really want to leave, cooperate. Learn. Show you can get by on your own and we’ll let you go. I can see you’re quite intelligent. This should be easy for you.”

“What if I don’t? What will you do?”

“We’ll feed you and take care of you and keep you from harming yourself or others. And we’ll wait.”

Madness!

She decided to trick them. She’d pretend to go along with their crazy scheme. Do what they wanted her to do, learn the things they wanted to teach her, and fool them into letting her go. And then…then she would find a Master. Do what she was meant to do. Serve, and obey.

After a sleep and food—the food was surprisingly good, though the spices were different from what Solana was used to—she found herself facing the same masked woman again.

“What do you want me to do?” Solana asked.

“Well, today I thought we could start teaching you. You’re literate, but I don’t know what else you know. What shall we study—numbers, history, tech? Or something else?”

Solana was nearly paralyzed. How could she please this woman? She gave no orders, her face and body were hidden, and even her tone of voice was unnaturally even. For nearly a minute Solana simply stared at her.

Finally she just picked the first thing the woman had said. “Numbers.”

“Of course. Let’s begin with the basics and see how much you already know.”

For the next couple of hours Solana explored a new world. She could count, and had a vague understanding of adding and taking away. The mirror-masked woman taught her about dividing numbers and multiplying them, and how they were really the same thing, just in reverse.

She actually felt a little disappointment when the masked woman sighed and stretched and said, “I’m sorry, Solana, I’m afraid we’ll have to stop for now. My voice is giving out and I haven’t had a drink since I woke up. Would you like to continue tomorrow?”

“Yes!” she said—and then remembered that this was all still part of her plan to trick them. “I mean, whatever you want.”

“Perhaps we can try solving some basic problems tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m giving you access to the instruction we’ve been doing. You can play with it as much as you wish. Unlike me, it won’t wear out.”

She saw only masked Salibi for two weeks, until they were sure she wasn’t dangerous. Then Solana was moved to a room with three other female Qarinas about her age: Alipina, Lele, and Laruan. All four were starved for skin contact and the conditioned reward of giving pleasure. The Salibi wisely left them alone until they were sated.

But Solana began to tire of their endless play after a couple of days, and when her next numbers lesson came up she went off enthusiastically to work with the masked woman.

From numbers they moved on to the workings of the physical world—the motions of planets and habs, the behavior of photons and electrons, energy in all its shifting forms, and the iron laws of conservation and entropy. Solana found she could lose herself in that magnificent complexity just as well as in the rules of numbers. The way that just a few simple principles could generate, well, everything in the Universe, was endlessly fascinating.

Of course, all of that was just a game she was playing. Everything she learned was a cover for her secret plan to escape. Her training back at Kumu was good preparation. Many times she had been ordered to do things she hated, and the trainers made sure to punish any signs of resentment or resistance. Solana had learned to find something, some tiny element she could put herself in, apart from the awfulness.

The same principle worked here: she found a refuge in the things the Salibi wanted her to learn. She taught herself to use numbers, to understand physics, and to manipulate tools at the nano scale. They thought she was expanding her horizons, becoming a new person, but she was fooling them. Hidden deep inside herself she held to her plan: get out of Jiaohui, find a Master, and never worry about anything again.


She was studying one evening in her dormitory, exploring a virtual world of molecules and chemical bonds via her data implant, when she became aware of shouts and jolts happening in the physical world. Lele and Laruan were fighting and Alipina sat in the middle of the floor, crying loudly.

“All of you hold still and be silent!” Solana shouted. The other three obediently shut up. “Lele, tell me what happened.”

“I just wanted to play with Alipina, but Laruan didn’t want to share.”

Solana could see Laruan looking furious and impatient. “All right, Lele, you keep still. Laruan, tell me what happened.”

“She’s lying! ’Pina was listening to music and dancing by herself, and Lele started bossing her around like a Master. I told her to stop, she told me to quit interfering, so I told her she couldn’t touch Alipina. That’s when she slapped me.”

“All right, stop. Alipina, let’s hear from you.”

’Pina was the youngest of them, a very sweet girl who hated to see others disagree. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I just wanted to dance. I wish Lele and Laruan wouldn’t fight all the time. I’ll play with Lele if she wants, I guess.”

Solana tried to be patient. “None of you should be doing anything you don’t like. ’Pina, you can dance all you want. Lele, you shouldn’t have hit Laruan and you shouldn’t use Alipina like a toy. And Laruan, even when you’re right you sound incredibly annoying. Now, I would appreciate it very much if you three could try not to fight while I’m studying.”

She dropped back into her virtual environment, but couldn’t concentrate. The other three were being quiet, so what was the matter? With a physical sense of shock she realized that she had sounded just like the Salibi—insisting on free choice, telling the younger girls not to use each other for pleasure by command.

And she realized she wasn’t just doing it to fool anyone. Somehow in the past few weeks she had started thinking like a Salibi, without realizing it.

So where was Solana? What did she really want?

Halfway through the next session her teacher paused the instruction and turned her mirror mask to Solana. “When you got here I asked you a question: Why don’t I show you my face and give you orders? I could make you a believer in five minutes. Have you figured out why I haven’t?”

“You believe we should make choices,” said Solana.

“Exactly. Ordering you to believe won’t save your soul. I’d be no better than those selfish bastards who created you.”

Soul was a word the Salibi used a lot. It meant personality, and identity, and even the capacity for independent action. In their ideology it existed as a separate thing from the brain, even separate from a person’s knowledge. The Salibi spent a lot of time worrying about their souls—far more than they bothered about their bodies. After Kumu, where bodies were everything, it was hard for Solana to understand.

“Is there any way for me to change my brain? Make it so I don’t have to obey every human I see?”

“Oh, it’s possible. Your brain is just matter, after all. What can be done can be undone. Now, we don’t have access to the tools and knowledge to do it here in Jiaohui, but I’m sure you could find someone who does, in some other hab or world. We don’t do that sort of thing. There are philosophical objections.”

“Philosophical?”

“Your brain may have been built by a gang of sadistic perverts, but it’s the one you’ve got. Our faith teaches that brain alteration of any kind is unnatural, and therefore contrary to God’s will. Even to correct other tinkering like what was done to you. These are tests. Faith will help you endure it.”

“But I don’t want to endure it! I want it fixed!”

“It’s your choice, and I certainly won’t stop you. In fact I’ll pray for you. What I won’t do is help you edit your brain.”

“What’s your name?” Solana asked her.

The woman hesitated. “We’re not supposed to form attachments. It’s too much like what you were rescued from.”

“Please? I want to know.”

“I’m called Jian. But I am just your teacher and therapist. That is the full extent of our relationship. Am I clear?”

“Yes,” said Solana.


Time passed. Solana moved to a little solo room where the others couldn’t disturb her. She adjusted to wearing clothes all the time, although she still ditched them whenever she could. She learned. And six months after waking her up, Jian came to Solana as she finished a day absorbed in microcircuit repair.

“How are you progressing?”

“I finished the Level Ten instruction today!”

“That’s enough to get certified as a tech in some habs. Wonderful!” Jian sat down next to Solana, maintaining a ten-centimeter separation as always. She held a box in her left hand. “I think you’ve learned about as much as we can teach you here. For better or worse, you’re done.”

Solana blinked. Done? “What happens now?”

“Now you’ve got a choice to make. You can join our order and stay here. Help us save others, and devote yourself to God.” She looked at Solana and shook her head. “I think your answer to that is no. Correct?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Solana. “You’ve been very kind, and I owe you everything. But I can’t make myself believe the way you do.”

“I hope that will change someday. You still have two other options. You’ve heard of Biara? It’s a hab entirely populated by Qarinas. They obey nobody but each other. Up in the Neptune Trojans. I’ve heard it’s a nice place. A completely altruistic society. You’d be safe there.”

“No,” Solana said with decision.

“May I ask why not? If you don’t mind, that is.”

“Will you keep this a secret?”

“Everything you’ve ever said to me is confidential.”

“All right. It’s just…I don’t really like being around other Qarinas very much. They wear me out. They’re too…too…”

“Needy?”

“Yes! I mean, they’re always nice. But sometimes I just want them all to leave me alone. And then I feel terrible.”

Jian’s voice had a smile in it. “It’s perfectly fine for you to feel that way. A lot of the legacy humans and cyborgs here have the same problem—and more than a few of your fellow Qarinas, too. That’s one reason we rotate staff to other projects.”

“If I don’t want to stay here and I don’t want to go to Biara, what does that leave?”

“Everything else. There’s a billion worlds out there. Go out and find what God has prepared for you. You’ll need visual filters to protect yourself—or spend all your time away from humans. It will be hard, and your freedom will be in danger all the time.”

Solana was silent for a few seconds. “I think that’s what I want.”

“I expected that,” said Jian. “From the first time we spoke together. I’m so proud of you, Solana! I don’t think anyone has managed the transition to full autonomy as quickly as you have.”

Solana laughed aloud. “You know why? It was all a trick. Back when we started I decided I was going to fool you. Make you think I was making choices for myself, but really I was just doing it to get out of here, so I could find a Master and go back to being a proper Qarina.”

Jian’s masked head tilted. “And will you do that? At this point I don’t think I can stop you.”

This time Solana laughed aloud. “You were teaching me not to take orders, and I was secretly trying to disobey you! It’s crazy!”

Jian laughed with her.

“Will you do one thing for me?” asked Solana.

“Anything.”

“Show me your face. I just want to see what you look like.”

Jian hesitated, then she pulled the mask off. Solana was surprised at how creased and loose the skin of her face was, how thin and gray her hair was.

“You’re crying,” said Solana. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“Not sad,” said Jian. She kept wiping away tears but she was smiling. “I’m so proud of you, my dear.” Very tentatively, she reached out and patted the back of Solana’s hand, then pulled away as if she was afraid Solana’s skin might burn her.

“This is yours now,” she said, passing Solana the box. It opened at her touch, revealing a pair of multifunction goggles. “They’ve got image filters. Try—I mean, I think you’ll be pleased when you try them on.”

Solana touched them to her face and felt the edge mold itself to the skin around her eye sockets. Everything was a little bit brighter, a little sharper. She looked at Jian and was startled to see a skin-tone oval with two black dots for eyes in place of Jian’s face.

“These will protect you,” said Jian. “If you wear them whenever you’re around humans, nobody can make you do anything against your will. Your choices will be your own. May God protect you.”


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