The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 Read online

  There were any number of ways to handle the situation; all of the gentle ones short of her showing up had been used. The next step after a personal conference would involve lawyers, subterfuge, or force, none of which she was terribly interested in at the moment. No, she’d have to visit him herself.

  She walked to the troll’s suite. There were lifts and personal transports that could have gotten her there faster; she wanted the time to think, and it was good for her employees to see her out and about in the resort instead of stuck in her office. She noted fourteen things that needed her attention along the way, memorizing a mental list as she walked. The entryway to the troll’s suite was the fifteenth; you could tell you were underground while walking down the final corridor to his door. It was damp and cold, as if the climate balancers weren’t reaching it properly, and the approach lacked artistry as well. He was in one of her larger suites; the bare, straight corridor to his door was not up to the degree of decor and class that she expected from what was now her own establishment.

  She stood in front of the door, letting the suite security scan her. Every resident had the right to set rules for who could bother them; the door was soundproofed enough that knocking would do no good. If the guest was interested enough in privacy it would take a small explosion outside their rooms for them to notice it inside. She had an override, of course, as did most of the staff, and the suite would be telling the troll that she was standing outside in moments. If he didn’t let her in, she’d let herself in.

  She gave him three minutes, counting the heartbeats.

  Nothing happened.

  “Open,” she said. “Authorize override Rhundi Tavh’re’muil. Password Darsi.” Darsi was her and Brazel’s firstborn. It wasn’t the most secure password in existence, but the voiceprint and bioscan were proof enough of her identity without it.

  Nothing continued to happen.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” she said. The damn troll had hacked her security software. Well, he hadn’t replaced the door. She’d brought a gun. She pulled it out and aimed it at the latch.

  Wait.

  She reached out and put her hand on the door; gave it an experimental push. The door didn’t give at all. Almost all of the standard doors across the resort were hollow-core but filled with soundproofing gel. There should have been just the tiniest amount of give when she shoved on it.

  “You have replaced the door, you clever bastard,” she said.

  She took a moment to think.

  “Sirrys ban Irtuus bon Alaamac,” she said, using the troll’s threefold, formal name. “I know you are inside and I know you do not wish visitors. I also know that you can hear me. I intend to get inside your room. It is best for both of us if this happens peacefully. If I must force my way inside it will not go well for you.” She was going to have to figure out how to get a tunnel ‘bot into this corridor anyway to widen it; she couldn’t imagine a single thing the troll could have rigged inside his suite that would keep that out. The things were designed for digging through bedrock, and the widened access would be considerably broader than his doorway anyway.

  “You have three minutes,” she said, counting heartbeats again.

  She heard the door click unlocked in two minutes and fifty-six seconds.

  Smug bastard, she thought. He hadn’t bothered to actually open the thing; he’d just unlocked it. She opened the door herself and stepped through.

  It was immediately apparent that the troll hadn’t let housekeeping in in a very, very long time. The smell of poorly-washed troll, as well as rotten odors of old food and some sort of weird chemical and ozone mix, was so thick it was nearly physically crawling into her snout— and gnomes had exceptionally acute senses of smell— an evolutionary perk that she found herself regretting.

  She ignored it. The room was going to be demolished; the smell didn't matter.

  Sirrys ban Irtuus bon Alaamac stood before her. Well, slightly below her, technically; trolls had a remarkably malleable physiology and could go from shorter than a gnome but broader than a dwarf to cadaverously thin but taller than an ogre in a matter of seconds. This troll was scarcely a meter tall at the moment but was actually wider than he was tall; his bluish skin sagged off his body and gathered into rolls at his joints and hips. He had a long, narrow nose and a pointed chin that contrasted sharply with his saggy voluminosity everywhere else, and a shock of stiff straw-colored hair that spread from the top of his head down his back and over his shoulders. In troll style, he wore a loose lower garment gathered at his waist and nothing else on his upper body. It was difficult to design clothing that elongated and contracted with a troll’s upper body, so they often didn’t bother. Pants were simply easier.

  “I have a contract,” the troll whined.

  “It honors me that you do not pretend you don’t know why I’m here,” Rhundi replied. “Your contract is not with me. It is not even with the owners immediately prior to me. And you’ve never actually shown it to me.”

  “It is not to be shown to you,” the troll said, this time in a slightly less plaintive tone of voice.

  “I have no idea what that means, Sirrys ban Irtuus—”

  “Call me Irtuus-bon,” the troll said, his mood— and his size— shifting abruptly. “Come.” He turned on a heel and stalked off, his body lengthening as he walked. Rhundi took a moment to look around. She’d entered into a sitting room; the lights had been switched out for something darker; the troll’s eyes likely worked on a slightly different set of wavelengths from hers. The room looked nearly unused; there was dust on the furniture and the floor, but a clean path from the door to the room that Irtuus-bon— now at his full height— had disappeared into. She spent a moment considering the possibility that the troll had lived in this suite for fifteen years and had never once sat down in the front room.

  That possibility became a certainty the moment she followed him. The troll led her into one of the bedrooms. These were generally all furnished in similar fashion; one oversized or two smaller beds, a couple of desks, a couple of dressers, a large mirror, and one to three seats of varying degrees of softness for sitting or reclining. There was a cot in a corner of the room. The rest of it was dedicated to computer equipment; an entire wall had been given over to an enormous monitor displaying several dozen data readouts and a handful of maps, simultaneously.

  Her first thought, ridiculously, was how did we not notice the power drain?

  Her second thought was to wonder where the enormous hole in the wall opposite her led to. It wasn’t supposed to be there, and the troll had never bothered to finish his renovations. There was simply a large hole dug through the wall and into what was supposed to be bedrock behind it. The damn troll had expanded his living space. Her partners had either never known about it or simply hadn’t bothered to inform her of it.

  Mental note: deal with extreme rage issues later.

  She followed the troll into his hole, going down a half-flight of stairs into the cavern he’d somehow managed to open behind his apartment. It looked as if at least part of it was natural, but over the years he’d reinforced the roof and managed to power and light the entire thing. There were more computer consoles and wall monitors all around the space, which was roughly circular and perhaps ten meters wide, with a five-meter ceiling, more than high enough for an ogre or a troll at his tallest to feel perfectly comfortable. A hollow in the wall led to yet another cavern beyond theirs.

  Irtuus-bon stood in the center of the room, next to a holomap that had to have cost a sizeable portion of Rhundi’s annual income. He pushed a button and the thing burst into live, spreading a map of what looked like most of known space across the room. Bits of it were shaded red, glowing. Benevolence space.

  “What do you know of the Benevolence?” he asked.

  Rhundi went cold. This couldn’t be a setup. He’d been there far too long for that to be possible, living right under her nose. It couldn’t be a setup.

  “Only what everyone knows,�
� she said. “They don’t bother us out here, so we get along fine.”

  “Sssss ...” the troll answered. “A most … political response. You are cautious. This is good. I know what you are, Rhundi Tavh’re’muil, and I know what your husband and his most interesting halfogre partner are as well. I have known for ... a long time ... and I have not betrayed you yet. I will not be starting tonight. But, as you can see, I cannot acquiesce to your desire that I relocate, either.”

  She took a moment to take this all in. Brazel and Grond’s activities were hardly a carefully guarded secret but she hadn’t thought they’d ever been clear to the tenants before.

  Focus on the important parts, she thought. Figure out the rest later.

  “What have you been doing here?” she asked.

  “This way,” he beckoned, and disappeared into the hollow.

  Rhundi adjusted her gun and followed.

  The chamber the troll led her into was even larger than the one they’d left. Again, it looked as if Irtuus-bon had enlarged and reinforced a natural cavity in the rock. This one, however, contained no technology beyond that needed to light the room. This room contained artifacts. Hundreds of them, on shelves built into the wall and freestanding shelves and tables scattered around. Some of the objects were stone or wood or bone; others were made of materials harder to recognize. Many of them bore clear symbols or sigils etched or painted on them. One caught Rhundi’s eye; there was a section near her devoted to dozens of symbols that bore a faint resemblance to an insect, an eight-legged monstrosity with one central eye.

  “Do you recognize these?” the troll said.

  Rhundi looked around, trying to find anything familiar.

  “I do not,” she said.

  He brought her a ruined, broken piece of alloy; whatever the material was they made the outer hulls of ships from.. The spider symbol was painted on it-- hurriedly, it seemed, as it had dripped in places before it dried.

  “This, perhaps?”

  “It’s a piece of metal,” she said. “Wreckage, or salvage. It could have come from anything.”

  “From a ship, in fact,” he said. “A ship you knew very well.”

  Rhundi let her lip curl derisively.

  “You can’t possibly be serious.” It was part of a ship, and the paint job, though pitted and scratched, was the right color, but--

  “Ah, so you do know it,” the troll replied.

  “This is not a piece of the Incandescent,” Rhundi insisted calmly. “That ship was blown to bits half a lifetime ago, practically on the other side of the galaxy. Just because it’s the right goddamn color doesn’t make it the same ship. You’re not fooling me, Irtuus-bon.” Her hand drifted toward her gun again. What was his game? Just to rattle her? This was too stupid to work. She was better at that than the troll was. She’d rattled with the best of them.

  “I collect things,” the troll said, ignoring her. “Sometimes people bring me interesting things, or send them to me, and sometimes I hear of events and I make requests. You know the Benevolence; better than you have admitted to me. You know of them better than most do, in fact. But not better than I; no, not at all. I know the Benevolence, and I know their magic, and I know their gods, Rhundi Tavh’re’muil. Each of these artifacts is a story; some of death, some of rebirth, some of stranger things. Your ship was not destroyed by accident. It was cursed. This symbol is the proof.”

  “Anyone could have painted that on the wreckage afterwards. And I’m far from convinced that it’s even a piece of my ship.”

  “Believe what you will,” the troll said. “I say this to you: the Benevolence do believe. And their beliefs have been known to ... change things.”

  She blinked. I've let him change the subject, she thought.

  “You haven't actually answered me,” she said. “Although I appreciate the attempt to distract me with superstitious nonsense. I'll not ask a third time, Irtuus-bon: what are you doing at my resort?”

  His mood changed again, and he lost half of his height in an eyeblink. He cackled. “Clever, you are, so clever. Sirrys ban Irtuus bon Alaamac is proud. Shall I give you the truth, this time?”

  “I believe you have given me some of the truth already,” she said. “But not enough.”

  “More, then,” he said.

  “More. My patience is growing short. I would not like this to end impolitely.”

  He cackled again, staring at her. She returned the stare, impassive. He turned away, stomping out of the room. She followed to find him rummaging through a pile of data pads. He produced one for her. It looked as if he had had it for some time.

  “My contract,” he said.

  She powered it on and scrolled through. It didn't take long; it wasn't especially complicated.

  “This entitles you to a long-term lease;” she said. “There is no mention of this particular suite, no mention of any conditions that prevent me from entering, and-- rather importantly-- absolutely nothing that entitles you to carve holes in my walls or run an unauthorized ... whatever all this is.”

  “Old owners never looked,” he said. “Fooled them.”

  “I think I want Irtuus-bon back,” she said. “I liked him more.”

  The troll blinked a couple of times, shrugged, and grew.

  “Your other incarnations are rather childish,” Rhundi said.

  “As must they be,” Irtuus-bon replied. “My people contain multitudes.”

  “My people are somewhat more straightforward. You will reveal to me in simple language what you have been doing in this room for all these years, with no subterfuge or misdirection, and you will do it now, or I will forcibly evict you and turn these things you're harboring over to the Benevolence.”

  The troll's eyes narrowed. “Sss. Overplaying your hand, I think. You would not… willingly draw the attention of Benevolence, not out here. There are very good reasons I chose your planet to do my work; the disinclination of the Benevolence to come anywhere near it is a large portion of those reasons.”

  Rhundi reached for her gun, and the troll raised a hand, continuing. “I do, however, believe the threat of force. I am a researcher and a collector and a historian. I watch the Benevolence, Rhundi Tavh're'muil. I collect their scraps when they come into my possession and I collect knowledge of their movements from ... well, everywhere I can. Trolls, as it turns out, are exceptionally good at this sort of thing. It may be that we are not taken as seriously by the Benevolence as perhaps we should.”

  “Tell me something I don't know.”

  “Would the current location of the Testament be sufficient?”

  Oh my. The Testament was the Benevolence's flagship. There were any number of reasons why having a handle on its location might be useful.

  “It would, if you could prove it.”

  Irtuus-bon sighed. “Well, you could go to it and see, but by then it would likely be elsewhere.”

  “Try again, then.”

  “You have in your possession a suit of Benevolence armor and some of their weaponry, yes?”

  No use denying it. “I do.” She'd thought about trying to move the items, but had held on to them instead. You never knew when something like that might come in handy.

  “And you have had no luck in getting their weapons to fire.”

  “Also correct.” Grond had gotten curious one day and had taken one of the rifles out for some target practice. He'd come back frustrated, the rifle nearly entirely disassembled, with no clue what was preventing it from firing. “These are, however, things that I know. I believe I specified the opposite.”

  “I am about to hand you a weapon. Do not panic.” The troll stretched to his full height, reaching behind one of the displays mounted on the wall. He revealed a Benevolence rifle, a near-identical model to the ones that Grond and Brazel had brought back to her.

  “I would ask that you not fire this in my room,” he said, “but you should be able to verify that it will. Use … a light touch on the trigger.” He held out the weapon to her
, butt-first, taking care to never point the business end of the thing at her. In fact, he was keeping it pointed at his own chest.

  Rhundi stifled back a snort. She'd been handling weapons since before she could swim; she wasn't about to accidentally fire any Benevolence hardware in her own place no matter how much she wanted to renovate. She applied the barest touch of pressure to the trigger and felt the gun warm up to her touch. Benevolence weaponry, like most weapons that fired energy instead of projectiles, generated ammunition as the trigger was pulled. She could feel the subtle vibrations of the thing starting to warm up and could smell the tell-tale, burnt-ozone scent that it produced. The gun would work. Grond hadn't even been able to get his trigger to move.

  “How?”

  “A combination of a number of things,” the troll replied, “all of which I will be happy to share with you once the matter of my rooms is settled. Needless to say, I can convert most of their weaponry to general use, at least in theory. Actual working examples to test are ... sss ... as you might imagine, somewhat difficult to come by.”

  “I cannot allow you to remain here,” Rhundi replied. “That is not negotiable. You are moving.”

  A sudden movement on his part, as the troll tried to snatch the rifle away and reverse it. He counted on his greater strength to help him. It proved less than useful, as Rhundi simply let her feet leave the ground and let the troll's own movement pull her off the ground and into his body. She wrapped a hand around his neck-- which was, at the moment, thin-- and scrambled onto his back, her gun pressed firmly against his temple.

  “That was foolish,” she said. “If your neck starts feeling too thick for me to break easily, you can expect me to start shooting. Get on your knees. Now.”

  Irtuus-bon complied.

  “Drop the rifle. In fact, toss it across the room.”

  He followed those instructions as well.