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The Stareye of Liritashis
They were always trying out new explosives, and they were very taken with trying them out on public office buildings on Millimillenary. Just about all of the buildings at ground level - the most expensive real estate - were Dominion public service; good targets for terrorists. At first, I thought it was odd the way the bottom two or three floors would be destroyed and the rest of the building would just float there. But I got used to it. Even got up the nerve to walk underneath them a couple of times. When the embassy went up - I don't remember whose -their latest explosive broke the building into chunks and then threw them at high speed into (and through) the sides of the surrounding buildings. Very messy. Final casualty count was 19.3, which works out to about two hundred and forty humans; of course, most of the casualties were Parkry office workers and Bythian milita. They spent weeks cleaning up after that one. A chunk of building about the size of a twenty-seater dining-room table went through the wall of the office directly above ours. On the way through it broke into smaller pieces, one of which fell through the floor and landed in a corner of my office, where it crushed my water distillation rig. When the milita got around to recovering all of the pieces, they told me it had been a safety deposit box and that some of the contents were still missing. They didn't need to tell me that I couldn't hide any of the contents if I found them; everyone was under constant surveillance. Even so, six days had passed before I found something they'd missed. It had rolled into a pile of dirty clothes in the other corner, and the militia had left them alone because they thought the clothes had some religious significance. I was gathering them up with a view to taking them over to the Ukhur embassy for a wash when I found a sphere about the size of my fist, wrapped in a cloth of blue metal fish-scales. It took almost ten minutes to figure out how to open it; a glossy black sphere fell into my lap. I picked it up and held it up to the light. It was subtly translucent; the display from my desk showed through with a blue-green tinge, inverted as if through a lens. I stared at it for a while, and the colour shifted towards indigo, then back to blue-green. I held it to my ear and shook it gently; from within came the faint sound of hissing, microfilament contacts brushing against each other. I took it to a Tertiary Interface and asked what it was. There wasn't any of the usual delay; it came right back and told me. It was the focusing element from a pre-Dominion Parkry Star Queen's optical system. A giant insect eyeball. Apparently, when the Parkry had been beaten into submission, the Queen caste had become extinct, and these spheres had become popular as a trade item. This one - one of the largest Parkry Star Queen eyes known to exist - had come from a hiveship that had struck deep into what had been Moridani territory, establishing a beachhead on Liritashis. The Star Queen had lived to see the Dominion sweep in, destroy all of the hives she'd established and then kill all of the Moridani that were battling the Parkry on that world (typical NoSaNoOs solution, that - when you have a dispute between two races, kill them both); she was almost three thousand years old by then, and her eyes had been taken by the Bythian commander as prizes. They'd changed hands several times since then, but I could say that I'd held the stareye of Liritashis in my hand for a few hours. Then I handed it to a passing Bythian, who would know what to do with it. |
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