Author's Note: Let He Who Is Without Sin is a direct sequel to the story Lonely Autopilot! But you don't need to have read that to grok what's going on. It might help, though...
###
Vinos smiled as he stepped back from the vineyard. The grapes were coming in well this year -- the crop would be rich and flavorful. He brushed his hands along his hair as the low whirr of an electric car engine cut into his sense of timeless joy. Stepping away from the trestles and into the warm light of mid-afternoon on Atlantis, he shadowed his eyes to get a better view of the car zipping towards him. The device had the smooth, almost organic look of most technology on L'Terre. After thousands of years of refinement rather than advancement, everything clicked together like something evolved and then gently bred towards perfection. There were no hard angles, no missed steps, no annoying eccentricities.
Vinos loved such cars and hated them with the same passion of most people who lived on L'Terre. He loved the fact they were easy to use -- something that working with archeotech on a semi-regular basis reminded him daily. But he also hated the lack of...well, character. An ancient electric car was riddled with illogical bells and whistles. For centuries, humanity had associated
power
with the roar of a gasoline burner kicking into full gear. So, for decades after the last gas burner had been recycled and the carbon sequestration projects had been putting atmospheric carbon back underground where humanity preferred it, electric cars had been made to
sound
like gas burning cars.
Who cared if it was illogical and more than a little annoying.
People liked what they liked.
The electric car came to the side of his vineyard while Vinos was woolgathering. The woman behind the wheel grinned as she leaned her head out. "Vinos!" she said. "Did you hear the news?"
"What news is there? This is L'Terre! Nothing has happened for five thousand years," Vinos said, chuckling as he spread his arms. "Everyone has enough to eat, everyone has a hobby, and everyone is just nauseatingly happy."
"Everyone save for poor Vinos," Gwen said, shaking her head. "But no -- the asteroid scopes, they picked up
something
in orbit."
"L'Terre has had a space program longer than most civilizations existed," Vinos said, shaking his head as he walked along the small stone wall that demarcated the edge of his land from the road. "Of course there..." he stopped. Something cold slipped along his back -- a glacier, not an ice cube. His whole skin felt as if it had become pricked with needles and tugged on. His eyes widened and he breathed slowly in. "A Concord ship? But they-"
"Yes -- well, no, but...yes!" Gwen said, sliding from the car. "That's just it. It's a Concord ship but they
just
detected it."
"Stealth-" Vinos started.
"Remember the first law of Concord visits?" Gwen clucked her tongue. "There is no stealth in space."
Vinos pursed his lips. "Forgive me, Gwen. I am a mere humble farmer-"
Gwen scoffed.
"-and I believe the Concord has technologies that have been banned on L'Terre. Technologies that would
easily
fool our telescopes." He frowned. "Unless the Demarchy Council has combined artificial intelligences with their telescopes."
Gwen coughed into her hand. "That's why they sent me."
Vinos sighed.
He had known, from the instant he had seen Gwen's face. This was not a social call. There was something absurd about being the sworn protector of a planet -- a planet on the far end of an uninteresting galaxy, in a universe where the cold rules of lightspeed and reaction mass forced every interstellar war to be essentially fought via telegrams and proxies. In the grand totality of humanity's multi-millenial lifespan as a space faring species, there had been
one intra
solar war -- fought in the heyday of their first tentative steps beyond Mars and the Belt.
There had never been a war fought between solar systems. It was just absurd.
But the Demarchy planned for absurdities from time to time. It gave them something to do, for one thing.
"They want you to come to Geneva," Gwen said, her voice soft. "The ships appeared in orbit suddenly, with a massive burst of Cerenkov radiation."
Vinos pursed his lips. His knees ached. He decided to sit down on the stone wall surrounding his land, and looked up at Gwen. He watched her face as she worked her jaw, then sighed. She laid it out, brutal and to the point.
"In other words, we believe it used faster than light travel."
"Ah," Vinos said. "A failed dream. Well, I-"
And then Vinos, quite suddenly, was not sitting on the side of his vineyard in the comfortable warmth of what had once been northern France on a planet that had been called many things but would always
be
Homeworld. Instead, he was sitting on the edge of a bench carved from bone and muscle, looking at a woman without eyes, as she spoke in the most heavily accented English that he had ever heard, hands planted on hips that came to sharp edged points.
"I still don't think it'll work," she said, scowling at something right above Vinos' head. Vinos took a few moments to reflect on the situation -- the woman was
beautiful
if one had an exceptionally alien perspective on the universe. Her eyes were covered with bone-carapace caps, while her hair grew into narrow spine-points. Her ears were elongated and the same slightly-glistening gray of her skin, while her neck was surrounded by a ridged, ribbed black collar that flowed smoothly into a black body-hugging suit that seemed more grown than woven or built. The suit hugged her body so tightly that Vinos could see the cleft of her ass, the tips of her nipples, the way that some of her bones seemed to have become a few sizes too large and strained against her skin. And yet, it all looked natural on her.
"Well, if it doesn't work," an amused, male voice came from the walls. "Why is he right there?"
"Well
fuck
my donkey," the woman said, looking down at Vinos. She cocked her head. "Hello! Uh, this might seem to be a bit of a shock. My name is Sin and-"
Vinos saw something behind Sin. He saw it...and he screamed.
He screamed and screamed and screamed until he passed out.
Sin -- with her hands on her hips -- looked up at the ceiling. She sighed, quietly.
"I told you this would happen," the voice from the walls said.
"Nimbus, no one likes a smarmy A.I."
"Oh, sorry. I was trying for wry-"
"Nimbus,
no
one likes an
apologetic
A.I."
"Sorry, I-"
"Nimbus, just...just...whip up a simspace, okay? I'll need to prep the other one before...well..."
"All right."
There was a short pause, and then Sin sighed. "Sorry for snapping Sin. I'm just a bit nervous."
She looked down at the unconscious Vinos, reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Remember back when life was simple and we didn't have to put all of our hopes on a sixty year old guy with a pot belly?"
###
They had moved from a localized threat to an existential one -- from a threat to a Threat. A mutation, unexpected. A new vector, spreading. Projections along the inner edge of the brane made it very clear -- the Threat would emerge into the Harbinger's space by the end of the fifth manifold. The life span of a single G class star. But the Threat was a curious one. It lacked a localized superstructure. This made it...
Alien.
Unintelligible.
Fragile.
Target the center of their nexus, yes.
It was as easy as shifting some gravitational constants...
Child's play.
###
"Hey, wake up..."
Vinos sat up, gasping. He was laying in a field of poppy flowers -- the red blooms looking like blood. The grass between the flowers rustled as breezes blew past him. Vinos looked down at himself and breathed out a slow sigh of relief. At least he had his legs and his feet and his hands. He had too many awful thoughts about what someone could do to him in a VR space to torture him -- just being armless was being gentle. He scrambled to his feet and spun around. On the second spun around -- looking in every direction, the woman appeared. She was there like a badly animated video game: One moment, there was empty air. The next, the woman was there.
She was beautiful -- her skin was coal black, her eyes looked like stars, and her hair flowed around her like a nebula cloud that had been combed into a barely controlled mane. Her nipples were pale white and looked like they were hard as diamonds. She floated above the poppies, her beauty ethereal and yet so intensely
human
that it almost took his breath away. He reached out without thinking and his palm touched her breast.
She looked at him. "Whoa! Hey!"
Vinos jerked his hand back. "S-Sorry, please, forgive me." He bowed to her, his cheeks bright red.
When he stood up again, the woman stood on the ground. She was dressed in a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans, while her skin had become a pale Eurasian hue, her hair turning to a luminous purple mane. She grinned at him and despite being some kind of simulation, Vinos noticed that she had an artfully adorable gap between her front teeth. She nodded to him. "Hello, Mr. Picard. Welcome to the C.S.S
Xenophile,
humanity's first fully functional faster than light starship."
"Please," Vinos said, quietly. "Don't call me Mr. Picard."
