Free Raising Caine - eARC by Charles E. Gannon

margins. He would have preferred to immediately peruse the dossiers of the frontier group in detail, but it was urgent that he conclude his contact with the Autarchs swiftly. He restricted himself to one cautionary observation regarding the detached observation team: “It is unwise to leave behind any groups with technology that, if it were to fall into the hands of the Aboriginals, would help them achieve parity with us. Your hands will be forfeit if you have been careless, ’vah.”
    Olsirkos smiled shrewdly. “In this particular, you need have no misgivings, Fearsome Srin. While the frontier team does have advanced technology with them, it is impossible for the Aboriginals to acquire it.”
    “That is a most confident, but also a most improbable, statement. Serendipity favors all combatants equally. How is it, then, that the Aboriginals could not, under some odd inversion of likely outcomes, lay hold to the technology possessed by the frontier team?”
    Olsirkos smiled more widely. “Because I put the technology, and the team, someplace that the Aboriginals cannot reach.”
    Shethkador did not show the extent to which Olsirkos’ mysterious comment and confidence intrigued him. He stopped before the entry to the Sensorium. “I require that the honor guard precede me and sweep for any anomalies before I enter.” Olsirkos gestured the guards through an iris valve that opened upon a circular, dimly lit chamber. A pong of thick, unctuous musk and decaying incense wafted out.
    “I will want a complete operational report when I am done here. Be sure that it is extremely detailed,” Shethkador warned Olsirkos. “I may have need of the smallest particulars.” His honor guard, finished with their sweep, stood aside at rigid attention as he entered the reeking, domed chamber.
    After the antique iris valve rasped closed, Shethkador sealed it with his personal code and crossed to the small, featureless panel where the Catalysites were stored. He passed his hand over the panel, which, sensing the requisite amount of Symbiot in his bloodstream, slid open. He removed one of the tightly sealed opaque vials waiting in a row, tapped for the panel to self-seal, and positioned himself on the cushions he had selected.
    Among the Awakened, who were the unofficial meritocrats of the Evolved, some relished the power and reach of a Catalysite-assisted Reification, claiming it to be the ultimate dominative euphoria. Shethkador was not among their number, and secretly contemned such Awakened as weak-minded sybarites. After all, they reveled in the dominion enabled by the Symbiot without bothering to reflect that they were relying upon an external source to attain that acme of power. Well, no matter: that weakness would eventually be their undoing when the genelines of their Houses came to contend with another that was populated by fewer lotos-eaters.
    Shethkador elected to forego the meditative preparations: it was traditional superstition rather than effective practice, in his opinion. He popped open the vial and inserted his finger into the complex microecology within until it met the sluglike dermis of the Catalysite.
    He contemplated a quadratic equation until the perfusive flood of burning had swept out into his body. It left a singed tingling in its wake and a perception of the universe as a hierarchy of pressure-sensitive control cells, each cluster of which was itself but a small cell in still greater control clusters, and which all expanded upward and outward into a limitless whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, and through which his awareness grew and expanded, rushing toward an infinitely receding periphery that was the demarcation line of—
    All things stopped. Were frozen in the impossibly small spatio-temporal lacunae that separated every action from every reaction, even on the level of entangled quanta. Guided by instinct and the Symbiot within him—and he detested being uncertain of where the former ended and