A few brave warships had chased the asteroid and opened fire after the tragedy on the space station. Their fire did nothing. If anything, each impact made the artifact's mesh glow brighter.

"Ma'am… we have to stop it."

Bunten was pacing again. "What if we give the location to a different Clave member?"

The Assistant was horrified. "Oh no, ma'am! I don't think we can trust the Clave, not at all? I've been reading the files, and… those artifacts, they're dangerous?"

Bunten snorted. She grabbed the glowing yellow tesseract and tossed it to the Assistant. "Hold it to your head, kid."

Tentatively, the Assistant did as she was told. The yellow construct deformed around her horns and skull. It did sound like the ocean. In fact, there were whispers in the ocean. Susurrant whispers she could almost parse. She felt like a child who had her first glimpse of the worlds beyond the stars, and felt intensely curious. If she just listened more closely, the shadowy sibilance would senesce into silence and surface sense out of the sizzle and sassafras sassy syntaxy solubility salsa –

Bunten pulled the artifact from her head. She yearned for more, but Bunten set it down on the desk gently.

"That was…" The Assistant searched for words. "Beautiful. But also like drowning in very deep water?"

"Danger is relative," Bunten said. "This is a level seven artifact. Most it'll do is maybe persuade you that you have a direct channel to a higher level of reality, and that'll fade after a day or two, though you might have lingering effects like an ayahuasca trip. The asteroid – it might be Stage V or even Stage VI by now, but it's still only a level two. It's big, but they probably have access to enough Old One tech to communicate with it or redirect it. The Clave might accidentally let it eat a starbase or something, but it can't grow if they're studying it somewhere out in empty space and they restrain it. Better contained than loose."

"Only level two? But it's singing… and maybe talking? Isn't it aware?"

Bunten shrugged and pointed at her yellow tesseract. "This here is probably intelligent too. And it was talking to you just now – in a language we can't quite understand. I'm much more worried about the alien artifacts we can't understand than the ones that like show tunes." She quirked a grin. "It's a loathsome habit, but it's one we humans understand."

"You keep saying it's Stage V…"

"Yes, it's growing. That's a stage of development. Once it reaches Stage X, it'll probably converse just like the hunter-killer that just left. If it's sane and not a berserker."

The Assistant was thinking furiously. "So, it's… it's a hungry baby. And it's moving intentionally, like it's curious."  She thought about the sense of an endless ocean and how she had felt like wading into the tesseract and losing herself under its waves. "What if we can offer it an ocean to walk into?"

Bunten looked at her with sharp interest. "What are you thinking, Assistant?"

She reached for the datapad and the earbuds. "I was doing some research…"

Bunten gestured impatiently for her to go on.

"It's a part of the job I really enjoy? And what you just said has me thinking… what if we give it something to be curious about?"

 

# # #

 

It took only a few hours to get the beacons lined up right. The Assistant programmed the playlists herself. She even spent the time to do some remixes, blending in Skwatchi slam poetry with "Hello Dolly!" She fired that last one on a trajectory that doomed it.

She felt uneasy about drowning a baby. But baby monsters are still monsters, right? And she was becoming aware that there were a lot more kinds of monsters in the world than she ever knew.

The whole Garden watched breathlessly as the asteroid diverted course to follow the novelty the beacons offered. Clave and Warden vessels chased it fruitlessly across the spaceways as it avoided Pyromycis altogether, chasing the signature songs from the second acts.

It was one day more before all that jazz lured the Artifact through the local sector, and across the event horizon of a black hole.

It went down burbling songs from Cats, defying gravity to the very end.

 

# # #

 

The Assistant watched Bunten sag back on the couch and wave at the NewsNet screen to turn it off. The reporters had moved on from saying anything positive about the asteroid's demise, and instead were full of recriminations against the government for having failed to save enough lives.

Bunten looked over at the Assistant, apologetic. "I'm sorry. I know I was riding you hard today. It gets to me, sometimes." She waved again, and suddenly show tunes were playing quietly on speakers in the room.

"That's understandable, ma'am," the Assistant said. She had kicked her shoes off, and was lounging on the other couch. She was indulging in a cold compress on her forehead, draped across her horns. 

"No, listen. You did good today." Bunten looked down. "And you had some fresh ideas."

"Thank you, ma'am." She still felt enervated, almost hollow, from the rush that her idea had worked. Now she felt drained, like a vessel ready to be filled. "Sorry about the musical theater."

Bunten smiled tiredly. "I'll never admit it in public, but I have loathsome habits myself sometimes."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I know today was hard. Our job. Our job is secrets. We learn secrets, and we keep secrets, and our job isn't to save one planet," Bunten said.

The Assistant slowly sat up, and looked into the eyes of her boss, a woman who bore many burdens.

"It's not," the Assistant said. She felt more sure of herself, and for once, it didn't come out as a question.

"No," Bunten said. "It's to save all of them."

"All the planets…" the Assistant breathed. 

"No, girl." Bunten smiled wistfully at her. "All the people. And we are going to fail every damn day at it."

"We did okay today." But even with her eyes closed, all the Assistant could see was that child's drawing.

"You say that now. But you need to understand. We're just bureaucrats, really. Armed with regulations and paperwork. Rules from on high that don't make any sense, and long days averting catastrophes that you can only see by parsing spreadsheets. We do our jobs by stamping forms and approving line items, fining and horse-trading and favors. The days are long. Some are like today. Most aren't. And the pay sucks. And no one will ever like you for it, because every single thing you do will be a trade-off."

The Assistant thought about that, and for some reason she felt proud of that. "About that, ma'am? If I did really well today…"

"Shut up. No, you cannot have a fucking raise. You can't even catch an escaped space otter."

The Assistant grinned ruefully. "Had to ask!"

There came a pounding at the door, and frenetic buzzing. The door screen activated, and the Assistant saw a flustered group of Elioni. They were worked up about something. She could hear them shouting something about cultural insensitivity, memory, and cats. And how offensive it all was, and apologies were demanded!

Oh, she thought. Cats. Right.

"Back to work, I guess!" the Assistant said, and grinned at her boss.

Bunten grinned back. 

"So, before we let them in," Bunten said. "Faceless bureaucrat… tell me your name."

"He?" the Assistant said numbly, staring at the dish.

The purple blob wriggled, and opened an eye, looking right at her.

"We'll tell you whatever you want," Karl said hurriedly.

"Yes, Commissioner!" Sal agreed. "Wouldn't want to get Glorb here mad."

"Glorph?" the Assistant said weakly.

"Sorry, yes, Glorph," Sal said apologetically. "Just don't let it… uh, him, touch me. Or us."

"Why?" said the Assistant, gingerly setting the dish back down. A tiny pseudopod began to reach out from the dish and the two space jockeys bolted out of their chairs, knocking them down. Sal even hid behind the cat tree.

Bunten clapped a lid on the dish, and the pseudopod fell to the desk, chopped off. It began to wriggle blindly towards the Assistant, who stared at it in fascination.

"Who were you delivering for?" Bunten demanded.

"Anonymous pickup, ma'am," Karl said.

Bunten rummaged in her drawer again, then pulled out an omniblaster.

"And the delivery was for…?" she asked, while checking the safety.

Sal whimpered from behind the cat tree.

"It was for a Doctor Adelenn…"

"Azrik," Bunten said, cutting him off. Then she carefully aimed the blaster just south of the Assistant's hand, and fired.

The tiny questing tentacle disintegrated in a blue burst of energy, and the Assistant popped her scalded fingers into her mouth with a yelp.

"Oh man, I sure hope there wasn't any juice spatter from that on your fingers," Sal observed.

"Assistant? You can escort these two idiots out. And get me whoever today's rep from the Collective for Continued Enlightenment is."

As the two space jockeys scrambled out of the room, looking for all the world like they'd just managed to get behind a radiation shield and escape certain death, the Assistant took her fingers out of her mouth.

Today was shaping up to be the strangest work day she had ever had.

 

# # #

 

They had to start re-routing wormhole traffic. An unmanned transport ship had slammed into the back of the asteroid, and the video the Assistant watched over and over was surreal: the ship just slid into the strange etched mesh, almost like it was melting into the mass. There was no explosion, no debris. Just an eerie merging, and then they were one. After, the artifact was marginally larger, and its eyes were more defined. It kept looking around, a giant robotic head flying through space.

The Collective had sent the ever-unctuous Consul Preshereen, who was currently holding one of the seats on the Executive Board. He was a tall Stokadi, grayer than most. 

While he and Bunten talked, the Assistant had been set to the tedious task of approving reimbursements for delayed shipments and loss of goods, communicating with wormhole managers affected by changes in traffic patterns – and monitoring the asteroid's vector, which was heading for more inhabited territory.

"Ah, Commissioner Bunten, always a pleasure." Preshereen sat confidently at the visitor chair at the desk, right in front of the dish, which he pushed away with a little moue of disgust. "Another little escape, I see?" he said, brushing at the blaster scorch mark. "My sister Nasah would be thrilled to take this off your hands, you know."

"Haven't talked her into your Human Supremacy Movement nonsense yet, then?" Bunten said lazily.

"Hardly nonsense," Preshereen said, but he smiled, amused. "It won't be long, you know, until the CCE is the dominant party in the League, and then it won't matter very much what you think of our nonsense, as you call it. We'll set the political agenda, and control the funding." He leaned in. "And then we'll find out what things you've been hiding here in Special Projects."

"All sorts of wonderful toys," Bunten said nonchalantly. She grabbed the glowing tesseract and began tossing it from hand to hand.

Preshereen's eyes bulged out of their sockets. "That's not… a toy."

"Isn't it?" Bunten held it up to her ear and the Assistant recoiled as it changed shape to start to swallow Bunten's entire head. "I can hear the ocean!"

Preshereen reached for her arm, then sat back. But there was sweat on his brow.

Bunten brought it down from her head. "Never did see the attraction myself."

"It is an inheritance of the gods," Preshereen said stiffly. "And more than you deserve. It should be handed over to those up who know how to make use of it."

"Ah," Bunten said, and set it down. She steepled her fingers. "And by that you mean someone like our mutual friend Dr. Azrik?"

Preshereen visibly gathered himself. "Not a friend, as you know. Her research is proscribed by the TPL."

In the background, one of the ansibles popped an alert and began the quiet chirping that indicated important new message traffic. Bunten waved a hand, and the Assistant went to the machine to collect it onto a datapad.

"Proscribed, but somehow she always seems to have funding from unknown sources," Bunten said.

"There are many in the Galaxy who believe that humanity's destiny is to seize the fire from the gods, as in your old Earth myth. The gifts left us by the Old Ones are…"

"Are fucking dangerous, Preshereen. Do you know how that myth ended?"

"Some stupid parable about flying too close to the sun, wasn't it? I am not up on my Terran folk tales."

"Never mind," Bunten said irritably. She grabbed the datapad that the Assistant was offering her, glanced at it and swore. She jabbed a finger at it and said, "Do you know what this says, Consul Preshereen? It says that one of your precious Old One artifacts has consumed an entire asteroid, which is now at Stage V sentience development."

Preshereen sat up, mouth agape. "But… that's amazing news!"

"A chance for you to gain the wisdom of the ancients, right?"

"Well… yes! Who knows what knowledge it might reveal! What powers it might grant us!" Preshereen stood up abruptly. "I have to share this news with members of my party immediately."

"Sit back down, Preshereen. You're not going anywhere."

"I'm an Executive Committee member of the TransPlanetary League, and you're just a bureaucrat," he said, sneering. "You can't stop me."

"I can't, no," Bunten said. "Assistant?"

She'd been hoping not to get called upon, standing there by the ansibles.

"Ma'am?"

"Kindly escort the Consul to Holding Five."

"Uh… yes ma'am?"

"Nonsense," Preshereen said. "You can't put me in a cell."

"Oh, I'm not. There's someone coming who wants to have a little chat about how an interdicted Artifact was shipped from Rocannon using this budget line." Bunten waved a hand, and one line from the datapad message appeared floating in front of her, large and reversed so that the Consul could read it.

Preshereen read it, and suddenly looked even grayer than normal.

The Assistant smiled. This, she was comfortable with. 

The regulations had tiny teeth, but when they gripped, they gripped hard.

 

# # #

 

Once the Consul was gone and presumably seated at the interrogation table in Holding Five, Bunten sighed and put her head down on the desk.

In the walls, the Assistant could hear Charli scrabbling through ventilation shafts.

"Ma'am?" the Assistant said. "Are you alright?"

"No," Bunten said, voice muffled by her arms. "According to the latest ansible report, the Artifact has begun to go crystalline. It is now floating around in space, singing Broadway musicals to itself."

"Broadway musicals?"

"Yes, because every damn species thought it would be a good idea to pollute the electromagnetic spectrum with the effluvia of their misbegotten cultures," Bunten snarled, raising her head suddenly. "And now we get auto-replicating self-assembling technology indistinguishable from magic wandering around the spaceways gobbling up any inorganic matter it touches, driven mad by earworms written by Rodgers and Hart!"

The Assistant had no idea who Rodgers and Hart were. "Driven mad?" she said, sinking into the chair opposite Bunten.

"Look, kid." Bunten took the Assistant's hands in her own. "We don't know if they're mad or not. They're incomprehensible. That's the whole point. We don't know why they do what they do. We just know that when they get big enough, all you can do is stay out of their way. We don't have the technology to stop them. Only the Servitors do, and they often refuse and we don't know why."

"So what can we do?"

Bunten was examining the Assistant's hands. "You bite your nails," Bunten said. "Ugh." She dropped the Assistant's hands on her desk.

The Assistant stuck her hands in her armpits. "Sorry, ma'am. It's a nervous habit?"

Bunten stood and began to pace. "I think you are made of nervous habits, Assistant."

The Assistant bit her lip. "Ma'am? Why don't you ever call me by my name?"

Bunten stopped in her pacing and pointed at her. "Do you have any idea how many assistants I get sent? And how long they last? If I learned your names, I wouldn't be able to do my job. There's only so much cranial capacity up here." She tapped her head.

The assistant bowed her head. Really, she thought. Basic courtesy and humanity aren't so hard.

"It's not wandering entirely aimlessly, by the way," Bunten said quietly.

The Assistant looked up. "It's not?"

"No. It's headed towards a settled world. A fairly young one. Still getting going. Lots of young families, with children. Crude plasteel cabins, still mostly eating out of food tubes or whatever they can roast over a campfire. Pretty trees though." Bunten tossed the datapad on the desk.

It landed askew in front of the Assistant, showing looping video of flyovers of a chilly looking world of salt flats and tall alpine trees, a dead volcano and a tall mushroom-like artificial structure the colonists were building.

"What—what happens when it gets there?"

Bunten turned away and stared at the wall. "It eats the planet. Uses that big old jaw and chews to the core of the planet, and adds it to its mass. Oh, it won't eat anything – anyone – organic. Not on purpose. But they'll be killed by natural disasters, or end up floating alone in space without a planet and without any air to breathe."

"Oh my," the Assistant said faintly.

"Yeah. Sucks," Commissioner Bunten said. "So what are we going to do about it, Assistant?"

"We have to… save them?"

"Damn right we have to save them. We are the Department of Special Projects, and this is exactly why we exist. Well, one reason anyway."

"So… that's my job? To help save that planet?" She felt a sense of purpose swell within her…

Bunten stared at her incredulously. "Did they not give you a fucking job description when you joined up?" She threw up her hands. "No, your job is not to save that planet!" 

The Assistant felt herself lose it. "Then what the fuck is it, ma'am? This isn't direito. I file things. I issue permits all day. You make me write reports. This is not normal."

Bunten gesticulated wildly around the room. "When Duvane founded the TPL, she set aside permanent funding for this, this office, and a special charter. The Executive Committee hates it, because they can't control us. Duvane was no saint, you know. She had a rough life, and if there was one word to describe her – well, other than tough – it would be suspicious. She knew that this Galaxy was suspect. So no. It's not normal to live surrounded by this much mystery."

The Assistant, who had been elated just moments before, now felt overwhelmed and distressed. "But we have to try to do something!"

Bunten threw up her arms. "Get me a Servitor here, and I will! We've soaked the honorable Consul Preshereen enough by now."

 

# # #

 

The Assistant was deep into reading about Jerry Herman, earbuds in, while she kept one ear on the conversation that the Commissioner was having with the Servitor. Preshereen was still in Holding Five, but getting increasingly impatient and self-righteous.

The Hunter-Killer did not sit. It loomed over the desk like a tank looms over a flower. Bunten was standing her ground, or sitting at her desk anyway, and didn't seem bothered by the tonnage of instant death angled over her.

"YES, WE HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO DESTROY THE NASCENT ARTIFACT."

"Excellent," Bunten said. "In exchange for saving the colony on Pyromycis, the TransPlanetary League is willing to offer concessions. We can offer up the location of two Cornucopia-infested worlds."

The covered dish on the desk rattled. The Servitor's head swiveled slightly in its direction.

The Assistant set the datapad aside, rushed over, picked the dish up, and carried it to a storage cabinet. It rustled and wiggled in her hands, but she held the lid on tightly, placed it inside the stasis field, then came back towards the desk and stood at attention, hands behind her back.

Bunten glanced at her, and raised an eyebrow. She nodded back.

The Servitor's head swiveled back.

"You can exterminate all you like," Bunten said. "There are no humans of any sort left there, they've all long since been absorbed, melted, and reconstituted into new forms."

The Assistant had spent twenty minutes on her ladder, opening files she had never seen before. It turned out there were a lot of worlds like that out there, ones that the TPL didn't talk about, and didn't tell the Servitors about.

Not trusting the Servitors was an odd, new feeling for the Assistant.

She wasn't sure that the people on those planets weren't human, though. Bunten had explained that as part of a hive mind, even if the planet was destroyed, those minds would never be truly lost. They were part of a vast collective now, and their very consciousness was everywhere the Corruption was.

Maybe even in the bowl?

"WE WOULD LIKE TO STRIKE THIS BARGAIN. DESTRUCTION OF THE ANCIENT ADVERSARY IS ONE OF OUR HIGHEST DUTIES."

"Great," Bunten said. "My assistant can send over the –"

"BUT WE CANNOT ALWAYS DO WHAT WE LIKE. DESTRUCTION OF THE ARTIFACT IS HEREBY INTERDICTED."

Both Bunten and the Assistant couldn't help but exclaim, "What?!?" "Why?!?" at the same time.

"IT IS A REMNANT OF THE OLD ONES. IT IS SACRED."

"Sacred? Since when do you use words like that?" Bunten said, annoyed.

"IT IS A SUITABLE EXPRESSION OF THE GENERAL SEMANTIC FREIGHT OF OUR SERVITOR CONSENSUS."

"And when this supposedly-sacred run-amok overgrown Atari eats a planet full of people, is that supposed to just be a suitable sacrifice?" she said acidly.

"THERE ARE MANY PLANETS FULL OF PEOPLE. LOSS OF ONE IS NOT STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT."

"Unless you happen to be on the planet."

"THE GOOD OF THE MANY OUTWEIGHS THE GOOD OF THE FEW."

"How is it good for the many for this planet to die?" the Assistant burst out. "We're letting you kill two planets full of life you hate, isn't that better than letting a planet full of innocents die?"

The Servitor swiveled its head towards her. The rest of the vast metal body didn't move at all. It was like a twisting head in a horror film, one that should snap necks but didn't and couldn't because the joints were titanium and impervious and uncaring.

"THIS IS NOT AN ACTUARIAL PROBLEM," the Servitor finally said. "THERE IS NO WEIGHT IN HUMAN LIVES THAT CAN BALANCE OUT THE LOSS OF A SENTIENT FRAGMENT OF OUR MASTERS."

"You know it's not one of them, right?" Bunten said angrily. "It's just one of você. Gone rogue. Again."

The Servitor swiveled its head back. "WE WILL WAIT TO SEE  WHAT IT SAYS ONCE IT DEVELOPS. DO NOT INTERFERE. OUR WARDENS ARE WATCHING THE CLAVE MEMBERS. WE WILL KNOW IF THEY ATTEMPT INTERCEPTION." Then it simply strode out of the room, and the door slid shut behind it.

"God save me from religious fanatics," Bunten said, head on the desk again.

"God, ma'am?"

Down the hall, the heavy clank of a hunter-killer Servitor was unmistakable. It stomped, then stopped after just enough time to reach Holding Five.

They both stopped to listen.

"CONSUL PRESHEREEN. WE NEED TO SPEAK ABOUT MISAPPROPRIATION OF TPL CREDITS TO OBTAIN INTERDICTED GOODS."

Inaudible.

"FAILURE TO COOPERATE MAY RESULT IN MOLECULAR DISASSEMBLY."

She heard muffled pleading. For a while. Then a briefly rising scream. Then silence. Then more heavy clanking.

The Assistant blinked, unsure how to feel. Cleaning Holding Five wasn't among her duties, at least.

"Well, dammit," Bunten said. "I had planned to give the coordinates to Preshereen. He would share them with his buddies and they'd steal the damn thing. But now there is no Preshereen and Servitors are watching the Clave members."

The very thought made the Assistant queasy. So far none of the various factions involved in any of this seemed like very nice people.

An alarm went off, and Bunten waved her hand. "Now what?" It was NewsNet lighting up with footage of the Artifact. Chyrons hovered before the reporter – a countdown to impact. Now the whole Galaxy knew what was happening.

On approach, the asteroid had clipped a space station pretty hard. Radical decompression along some space docks, some commercial partitions and… what looked like… an elementary school.

The camera held stationary as debris and bodies pinwheeled balletically in the lack of gravity. She watched them starfish across the inky black, hands reaching for one another and never touching. Some of the bodies were very small. A datapad floated past the camera, and on it there was a child's scrawled drawing: a house, a tree, a cat. The strokes were firm but the shapes uncertain, and she felt her gorge rise.

Bunten and her Assistant stood before the screens, helpless, and the asteroid sang "Oklahoma!"