1.0.1
Excerpts from the PID (Personal Information
Directory) of Rob Singh,
UNESSPRO
2160.9.02-03 Standard
Mission Time
[entry]
Everyone has to have a
reason to be. Mine, I think, is to appreciate
the subtlety of the Spinners' work.
Subtlety?
From creatures that do in a day what humanity would struggle for decades
to do? Who flaunt their technological
superiority as we would wave a stick in front of a dog before throwing it to
watch them run?
Yes, subtlety. When we retrieve the stick, we find the hand
that threw it long-gone, utterly disinterested in whether we found it or
not. There has to be something subtle at
play there, or else the universe truly is incomprehensible--and that is something I cannot believe.
The Spinners have been
here for what feels like an eternity, and we have found no obvious explanation
for their mysteries. So I place my faith
in subtlety, and in my all-too-human inability to see it.
For now, anyway. I guess I'll just have to keep looking.
[entry]
Hatzis has gone off to
powwow with the bigwigs from the other colonies, and we don't know when she'll
be back. That's fine with me. She's so damned strict about system resources. At least while she's not here, I can fast-track
to talk to people without inconveniencing them too much.
Ali Genovese has been
left in charge. When I spoke to her
today she looked a tense. It's
understandable. Our current situation is
more than a tad iffy. Psi Capricornus is
smack-bang in the middle of the hot-zone.
If anyone's going to be attacked by the Starfish, it's likely to be
us. And I'm not just being dramatic,
either. Every broadcast brings news of
another colony lost. Yesterday it was
Balder; tomorrow it could be Inari. I
feel like we're sitting on top of a volcano.
"I vote for
firing up the engines and leaving the system," I told Ali when she dropped
by.
"Leave
Inari? You can't be serious, Rob."
"We're sitting
ducks here. If they hit us, we'll never
get away. Not without the hole
ship."
"Even with the
hole ship we probably wouldn't get far," she said glumly. "You heard what happened to
Adrasteia."
Adrasteia was the
first on a list of names I didn't want Inari to join.
"Ah," she
said, then. "It's because you're
bored, isn't it? You want your old job
back."
"Would you blame
me if I did? There's not much use for a
pilot around here."
"You're working
on something," she said. "I see your data-flow. It's all in-bound, all about the gifts. Are you doubling up on our research,
Rob?"
"Tip-toeing
across the cracks."
She pulled a sour
face. "Sometimes I think there's
nothing but cracks," she said.
"Then I'm not
wasting resources."
"No. You have my blessing to keep poking
around."
She didn't leave then,
although she could have. I had what I
wanted and she had more important things to attend to. But she stood for a moment in the
low-maintenance parlor I whipped up for guests, gazing idly into space. She's letting her blonde hair grow out--or
presenting the illusion of growth, at least.
I like it better that way, even though I can never tell what's going on
under it.
Eventually she blinked
and returned. "Sorry about that,
Rob. Got stuck thinking about
home."
I nodded
understanding. We all do, sometimes.
2117.2.18 Standard
Mission Time
(5 November, 2118 UT)
By
the time Lucia Benck realized her friends were dead, the blue-shifted photons
that had carried the news were already a month old. Although she fought to comprehend what the
images were telling her, searching for the remotest possibility that her
interpretation of the data could somehow be wrong, she'd had enough experience
with distance and relativity to know this was no illusion that she could simply
brush aside. Her powerful unwillingness
to believe what she was seeing had more to do with not wanting to accept her
impotence than not believing what she saw.
She wanted to reach out across the vast gulf of space and time that
separated her from her crewmates and warn them, to save them from the fate they
had already suffered.
Deep down she knew
there really was nothing that could be done for the Andrei Linde. All she could
do was watch, accept, and consider what was to be done next . . .
The first thing she
did was return to Chung-5's clock-rate.
During the approach to pi-1 Ursa Major, she had been gradually
accelerating her perception of time from the deep-rest she experienced between
targets to something approximating "normal." Even so, she had been severely behind at that
point in the mission, experiencing barely one second for every ten of the
probes. Once she was back in synch with
the probe--albeit still dilated with respect to Earth and the Linde--she wouldn't waste days pondering
her options. She had the luxury of time,
if not resources.
The second thing she
did was examine the data in meticulous detail.
Could those flashes of light have been the signs of an accident? Was there any chance that the emissions
encircling the planet were atmospheric disturbances? Could a sudden flare-up of pi-1 UMA have
caused the things she saw across the system?
But it was all just speculation, and the absence of any definite answers
to her questions only frustrated her further.
While doubt remained, her options were unclear.
Prior to receipt of
those images, her mission had been proceeding as normal--or as close to normal
as she had decided to maintain, anyway.
Chung-5 had been coasting headlong toward pi-1 Ursa Major where the crew
of the Andrei Linde had established a
beachhead around the fifth world out from the primary star. She assumed that her crewmates had christened
it with the name they had agreed upon prior to leaving Sol--Jian Lao--so this
was how she referred to the planet in her own mind. Apart from that she really didn't know a
whole lot more other than. The Linde and its crew had arrived almost
exactly on schedule, Mission Time, seventeen months earlier. She'd seen the braking flare of the ship's
atomic engines reflected off the planet's moon and upper atmosphere, and she occasionally
picked up faint echoes of carrier waves not aimed at her.
With Chung-5's main
dish expanded as wide as possible, and with secondary baseline dishes spread
out in a vast array around her, she had eagerly absorbed the data coming in
from the target system. It boasted
eleven major planets, six of them gas giants.
Two of the giants had ring systems to rival Saturn's, large enough to be
just visible to her interferometers. She
couldn't detect asteroid belts, but she did discern a comet passing close to
the sun, its tail impossibly faint against the deeper darkness of the
background.
As for Jian Lao
itself, its emissions indicated an Earth-like world. In fact, as she watched it slowly resolve,
she realized it couldn't have been more
like Earth. From the vaguest suggestions
she imagined its blue oceans and green forests, dreaming of the
"The tourists
outnumber the truth-seekers," he had said back on Earth, the night before
their engrams had woken. She was a
committed tourist, and she knew it; that was why she was riding a glorified
rocket forty-five light-years away from home, alone. But there was a haunting, tempting truth to
the image of her and Peter that was hard to deny.
But then had come the
flashes from around Jian Lao and its moon, closely followed by smaller
disturbances across the system. Each
flash had been brief but frighteningly bright, reminding her of an anti-matter
containment failure she had witnessed once, back in Sol. She'd watched the flowering of small pockets
of annihilation across the system, thinking of the work the crew of the Linde would have been doing in the years
since its arrival: the satellites that would have perhaps been placed around
the moon and the nearest gas giant, and maybe even the solar poles to watch for
prominences; the installations on Jian Lao itself; the geosynchronous orbit of
the Linde . . .
Christ. Geosynchronous orbit is where
she would have put the Andrei Linde,
and that was where the biggest flash of all, the first, had come from. If the flashes really were explosions, and if
that first flash had been the Linde, all hope that she might ever
stand in that
She was surprised by
how much the thought hurt her, how much the dream had meant. She might not have intended to go back to
him, but it had been important that he was out there, somewhere, waiting for
her. The source of such feelings had to
be other than genetic--since she no longer had any actual genes--but she
couldn't rationalize it. UNESSPRO
wouldn't program the desire to reproduce into a machine, surely? Perhaps
they would. She wouldn't put anything
past UNESSPRO. If they thought something
would increase the chance of the missions succeeding, they'd probably do it.
Whatever. The origin of her confusion was just a
smokescreen for her deepest concern.
Peter was gone, the need went unfulfilled, and she grieved. In the empty spaces of her virtual
coffin--she had long ago dismissed all but the most basic conSense illusion in
preference to the company of stars--she cried tears that felt real, but weren't.
The truth sank
in. She was proud of herself for not
flinching. It would have been easy to
switch off, metaphorically or literally.
Instead she re-examined new data obsessively, looking for clues. Although the stray signals from the Linde had ceased with the flashes, there
were other signals she couldn't interpret.
Over the course of a real-time week, drawing one hundred thousand
kilometers closer with every passing second, she watched as numerous other
energy sources flared and died with irregular rhythms across the system. The smallest of the rocky worlds disappeared;
the infrared signature of one of the gas giants changed.
She was too far away
to tell who might be responsible. A
hostile Earth-government, perhaps, much-advanced in the decades since the Linde had left Sol? The possibility that someone would break the
lightspeed barrier and beat them to the target worlds had been one seriously
considered by the UNESSPRO bigwigs, but out here it was pure speculation. It could just as easily have been
aliens. All she knew was that, whoever
it was, their talent for destruction was startling, and the more she saw, the
more nervous she became.
Then, without warning,
everything stopped. The energy flares
faded and died; the small, rocky world reappeared and the gas giant returned to
normal. It was as though nothing had
happened, as though everything she had watched had been an illusion, after
all--or perhaps a glitch in her instruments.
But there was one
small difference: there were no longer any human signals coming from the
system.
"Okay." She imagined herself pacing to and fro in a
small room. "What have I got,
here?"
Not much, she told
herself. It looked like someone had
flown into pi-1 UMA and blown up the Linde--but
she had no way of confirming that.
"And then
what?" she asked herself.
Someone might have
screwed around with the system for a while afterward--but she couldn't be sure
about that, either.
"So what
now?"
Everything was back to
normal, no different than it had been a month ago.
Except for the Linde.
The silence from the
mothership was complete. No echoes. No stray beacons. No engine flashes.
"Shit." She stopped pacing and worried at a virtual
hangnail. The only way to confirm what
had happened was to get closer, which she was already doing. In twenty days, whether she wanted to or not,
she would flash across the system at a sizeable percentage of the speed of
light. If there was anything there, she would see it clearly enough. But it might also see her, and that was the problem.
She had a bad feeling
that had nothing whatsoever to do with genes.
But what was she supposed to do?
Her options were limited. If she
was wrong about her gut feeling and she went out of her way to act on it, what
was the worst that could happen? She
might feel foolish. Whereas if she ignored
her gut feeling, then whatever killed the Linde
and her friends might kill her also.
The thought was a
sobering one, and made the argument pretty clear-cut, from her point of
view. No one else had to know if she was
wrong. And if she was right, she would
still be alive.
Simple.
The problem was that
only way to be sure she wouldn't be noticed was to switch herself off.
She thought back to
her days on Earth spent training for her mission to the stars. In reality, she was going on many missions at
once, since she consisted of over two hundred duplicates all kitted up in
nearly identical probe vessels, each craft little more than engines with
instrument packages attached. While the
main missions would go directly to the target systems, the various versions of
herself would flyby the numerous smaller and failed stars along the way,
surveying brown and white dwarfs, protostars and stellar remnants, seeking out
curiosities rather than Sol-like environments.
She was proud to have been chosen for these missions, since they were
the dangerous ones--both physically and psychologically. She would be alone for the entire time,
completely out of contact with Earth and her crewmates. If something went wrong, there would be no
one to help her.
That thought had never
bothered her before. She had learned to
rely on herself, and was as independent as a person could be. In the end, on this particular mission, she
had come to like it--being alone on the new frontiers, seeing things no one
else would see. The thought of going
back had in fact filled her with a kind of dread. Once the novelty of watching sunsets with
Peter wore off on Jian Lao, what would she have to do?
Risking suicide wasn't
something she'd planned, though.
Shutting herself down certainly hadn't been on the agenda. She could build a simple molecular timer and
switch to power herself back up again, but nothing was perfectly reliable. What if it failed to restart the systems? What would happen to her, then? The question was meaningless. Frozen in time like an old photo, doomed to
decay into stardust, "she" would no longer exist. She would never even know what had happened
to her. But who was she, anyway? The solo
missions incorporated three hard copies of the driving personality into the
hardframe, in case of degradation or damage, and she knew that at least one of
hers had been compromised in the past.
At best she was a piecemeal version of herself; at worst, a completely
new template seamlessly taking over where the old one had left off. Not even her "memories" of life
before the program were really hers in the first place . . .
Try as she might,
whichever way she looked at it she could come up with no reasonable argument
against disconnection. She didn't
believe in God, so the idea of suicide certainly didn't pose any moral dilemma
for her. And on the balance of things,
surely it was better to go that way than at the hands of some interstellar
murderer.
And that was that.
Decided, she didn't
waste any more time. She started
immediately with a detailed stocktake of the Chung-5's system and
resources. Although she had left Sol
sixty-seven years earlier, relativity meant that the probe had only aged about
forty. (She herself had aged barely a
year, which made it hard to remember, sometimes, how long it had actually
been.) Radiation had damaged a thousand
little things in those forty years, and she needed everything to be working
when she shot herself down.
What she could do
without, she switched off, concentrating all her resources on several key areas
and letting the rest lie dormant.
Nanorepair systems could look at those later. If the engines never started again, that was
a fair trade to ensure that she
didn't die.
With eighteen days to
go to Jian Lao, she retracted the wide-array gain antennae that doubled as the
probe's transmitter and receiver, along with the baseline dishes. She converted their mass to an extra layer of
porous material around the probe, and radically restructured the interior. When she finished, the most precious parts of
the probe were protected from the outside by more material shielding than
before. Nothing would stop a direct hit,
but this would take some of the sting out of turning off the magnetic
deflectors. She wanted be as sure as she
could be that she wouldn't be torn apart on the way through the system.
Next, in one, randomly
chosen corner of the probe's new shell, she hollowed out a small crater, little
more than a pockmark on its rugged, gray surface. At the bottom of the crater, she placed a
small camera, the design for which she had dredged out of the UNESSPRO
archives. Its non-reflective lens, metal
shutter and silver halide film seemed almost ludicrously obsolete compared to
the instruments the probe had once possessed, but she didn't want to use chips
or CCD arrays. Anything more than dead
matter might give her away. A mechanical
trigger would activate the camera at key points in the coming days. The pictures it took would be her only record
of the probe's journey through pi-1 Ursa Major.
She gave the probe a
slight tumble. This, combined with its
irregular shape, low density and lack of electrical activity, would, she hoped,
convince a casual observer that the Chung-5 was a perfectly ordinary lump of
rock drifting through from out-system.
She converted the outlets of the thrusters when the tumble was
established, and added its mass to the shielding, thinking:
What if I'm wrong? What if I'm
being paranoid? I could be burying
myself alive for nothing!
But there was no point
going down that path again. Such a train
of thought was counterproductive. For
peace of mind she had to assume that she was being prudent. If she woke up and viewed the pictures to
find nothing out of the ordinary, then
she could call herself foolish and paranoid.
And an idiot. She could laugh
about it later, when it was over.
Once her disguise was
in place, there was only one thing left to do.
Before that, though,
she took a moment to say goodbye to the stars.
Pi-1 Ursa Major was
growing brighter every day and easily outshone the brightest of its
neighbours. If that was the last thing
she ever saw, she didn't really have any right to complain. At least she had a chance of surviving,
unlike the crew of the Andrei Linde. And if she did survive, the universe was her
oyster. Originally she had planned to
keep going to Muscida, the next major star out from Sol--but her ambitions
hadn't been satisfied with that thought for long. A course-change or two could take her out to
rho UMA, then by a number of stars in the Hipparcos catalogue and on her way
out of the galaxy. If the probe held
up--and she wasn't really naïve enough to hope that it would, although the
dream was romantic--the end of that journey promised Bode's Nebula and the galaxies
M82, NGC3077, NGC2976, IC2574, millions of light-years away . . .
Although she didn't
pray as she shut herself down for the long sleep through pi-1 Ursa Major, but
she did express a hope to the universe in general that she might at least
survive.
For you, Peter, she thought, as darkness closed around
her. For
all you truth-seekers. I hope we get to
compare notes, one day . . .
1.1 Planets in their Stations
2160.9.3 Standard
(30 July, 2163 UT)
1.1.1
The
Head was setting with a wild profusion of purples and blues into the western
horizon while Achernar, a brilliant blue star, watched coldly from the
north. To the south auroras whipped
through the upper atmosphere, humming and crackling with startling energy. Opposite the sunset, setting around the far
side of Athena, was the glint of light that was all that could be seen of the Mayor; directly above that hung another
speck of light: the alien installation designated Spindle Nine. In between, at the summit of a mighty chunk
of rock and ice thirty kilometers high, stood Peter Alander.
The potential
extinction of his species had never concerned him less than at that precise
moment.
Athena was an unusual
world--but then, he thought, they all were.
In most respects--radius, mass, density, gravity, etc--this one was up
the scale from Earth. Its sun was the
B3V star called Head of Hydrus, bluer and more intense than Sol. Athena's magnetic field was bombarded by all
manner of radiation and particles every one of its seventeen and a half hour
days, and Alander would have been dangerously exposed to the interplanetary
elements so high up in the atmosphere, had he not been wearing a Spinner
Immortality Suit--or "I-suit," as they were increasingly being
called. Several hundred kilometers to
his left crouched the base of the orbital tower connecting the planet to the
Spindle above. Where he stood, on the
highest point of the planet, was just one of several very large and very tall
mountain-islands girdling the equator.
But for the solar weather, Athena could have been made for skyhooks.
The planet's signature
quirk revolved around those mountainous islands, jutting out of the surface of
the planet like strange volcanic growths.
Over many millions of years, the seas had evaporated into the upper atmosphere
and deposited themselves as ice on the mountains, increasing their bulk even
more. As a result, most of the planet's
water had been trapped in solid form, leaving only a thin, salty scum of an
ocean behind. Life blossomed around the
bases of the giant islands in strange, linear landscapes. Caught between salt and ice, and separated by
great distances, each coastal biozone had become home to enough wildly diverse
phyla to keep a whole army of xenobiologists busy for centuries. A handful of them that had been scooped up
and examined by robotic probes from the Michael
Mayor had shown such unique chemistry that they would have caused a
scientific revolution back home--had the Earth existed any longer, that is.
Alander watched the
sunset fade from deep purple to black.
Stars were starting to poke through the growing darkness, twinkle-free
in the thin air. He had seen nights fall
on more than a dozen different planets, but this one beat them all for sheer
splendor. The night sky was so vivid
that if he stood absolutely still and tilted his head back so that all he could
see was the stars, it felt as if he was actually in space . . .
"You cooled off
yet?" said a voice in his ear.
He didn't allow
himself a smile. Cleo would note the
expression from his bio-readings, and he wasn't going to give her the
satisfaction.
"This isn't just
a bad mood," he said. "You
realize that, don't you?"
"I realize more
than you give me credit for," she replied.
"You hate being outvoted, for one."
"I'm glad you
noticed. That's one of the few human traits
I have left."
"Not so few. You also hate feeling like an idiot."
He shivered from
purely psychosomatic cold, but didn't say anything.
"And you love a
good argument for its own sake," she went on. "You love
picking fights--and I dare you to tell me otherwise!"
He swallowed an
automatic retort. "I think you're
mistaking me for Caryl Hatzis."
"Some people
would take that as a compliment, you know."
"Would you?"
He heard a faint noise
from behind him, and turned to see her image walking to join him across the
crusty high-altitude ice pack. She
wasn't really there, being the product of a conSense illusion piped into his
artificial nerve-endings by the processors on the Mayor, but he would have been hard-pressed to tell the difference,
had she still had a physical body to
compare it to. He could even
"hear" her feet crunching in the ice as she approached.
"You know how I
voted," she said, coming to a halt in front of him, her blonde hair
buffeted by the wind. She was wearing a
khaki oversuit sealed at wrists and ankles; her face was exposed and caught the
light of the auroras in a convincingly eerie way. "Doesn't that count for anything?"
"After
Adrasteia--"
"I know what
you're going to say, Peter," she interrupted. "After Adrasteia, you don't trust anyone. Well, that's something you need to get over,
pal. With UNESSPRO gone, there are no
traitors in the system any more. You
know that. They either owned up or went
psychotic. And if it's me you're worried about--"
"It's not you,
Cleo," he cut in quickly.
"I was going to
say that if it was me you're worried
about, then you can go to hell," she said.
"Because even if you didn't already know that Otto was the rotten
apple in the Michel Mayor, I think
I've proved myself a dozen times over.
I'm on your side, Peter--except when you're obviously wrong, or just
being an idiot."
He raised one hand to
brush the hair out of her face. Although
she was nothing more than an illusion, his fingers registered every pressure,
texture and temperature he would have expected of the real thing.
"Am I being an idiot?"
Her expression
softened. "In the long-run, no, I
don't think you are," she said.
"But things are changing too fast for the rest to focus on anything
but the short-term--the present. Christ,
Peter, in a single day the Spinners came and gave them gifts beyond their
wildest dreams. Then they heard about
the Starfish. First, they were given everything, and now they're being told
they've lost everything. You can't blame them for not liking what
you've got to say--or at least for being resistant to it. They want a future." She paused to sigh. "Besides, I don't think they're even
listening to what you have to say; they're just hearing the voice of the person
saying it. It's you again: the oracle of
doom and gloom. Believe me, Peter,
pushing isn't going to help."
He knew she was right,
and she knew he knew, too. He could see
it in her expression. There was no point
arguing when they were both, more or less, on the same side.
She leaned in close to
put her arms around him. He wanted to
hold her back, but conSense hadn't quite perfected a convincing full-body
squeeze. Her illusory warmth was enough
to take some of the chill out of the brisk night wind, and he was comforted by
the contact--even though part of him still thought of Lucia with regret, and
probably always would.
"This could be
our home, if we let it," she said, her voice slightly muffled by his
shoulder. "We can expand the
existing bases, put habitats down on the strands, build more bodies--"
"I know how it
goes, Cleo. Dig in, delve into the
Gifts, build up resources until we're able to diversify, disseminate the human
race across the stars." The four Ds
made perfect sense on the surface, and he felt their calling more deeply than
maybe even Cleo imagined. The argument
was fundamentally flawed, though: it assumed that nothing would get in the way
of the dream becoming reality. "But
can we do this with the Starfish still out there? Would you be prepared to take a chance on
raising children here without ever really knowing whether or not they'll be
back to finish us off?"
"Children?" She pulled away from him so she could look at
his face. "Who's talking about
children?"
"Some of them
are," he said.
"But I'm not one of them." She frowned.
"I thought that was already established. I just want a little time to heal."
"I'm not denying
anyone that."
"Yes you are, Peter. You want us to make a decision that will
affect the rest of our lives. You want
us to avoid settling down on the grounds that it might not be safe. But what are you offering instead? Can you tell us when it will be safe?"
He shook his head,
tight-lipped.
"I think I know
what my decision will be," she went on, "but I'm not ready to make it
right now. Not yet. I don't want to commit myself to anything
before I feel as though I can support it one hundred percent. Especially something like this, which will
affect my entire future."
"If we have
one--"
She cut him off with a
sigh. "Save the speeches for the
next meeting," she said, letting go and stepping back.
"I'm sorry."
She hugged herself,
rubbing her arms as though cold. On
another world, in another time, her lean frame, broad face and high cheekbones
would have leant her enough of a Nordic air that he might have been surprised
by her apparent chill. On Athena,
though, seventy light-years from the remains of Earth, at thirty below
freezing, Alander was very aware that, his hypnotized nerve-endings aside, he
was interacting with little more than a phantom, invisible to anybody else but
him.
"If you need to
talk to me about anything else," she said, "you know where I'll
be."
"Thanks,
Cleo," he said, meaning it.
She walked around him,
having learned the habit of vanishing when she was out of sight so as not to
disorient him. His mental state was
still disturbingly fragile at times.
"By the
way," she said at the last moment.
"Caryl wants you to bring the hole ship back. There are some emissions she wants you to
check out."
He shook his head,
amazed by the woman's arrogance.
"I'm not her goddamn dogs body, Cleo," he said without facing
her.
"Neither am
I," she said. "Nevertheless,
here we are."
He turned then,
expecting to see her standing there smiling at him. But she had already gone, her disappearance
leaving him seemingly isolated on the giant mountaintop, although in reality he
was no more alone than he had been before.
Slowly, reluctantly,
he returned to where he'd left the hole ship.
Apparently unaffected by gravity and whiter than the snow it hung above,
the enormous spherical mass of the craft floated over a shallow rift about a
hundred meters away. The black
"cockpit" was ready for his return with the light from its open
airlock now easily the brightest thing in the landscape around him.
He briefly considered
complying with Caryl Hatzis's wishes and returning immediately, but then
decided against it.
To hell with her, he thought. There was no
cause to hurry. The aurora was
particularly spectacular tonight, and making her wait half an hour while he
enjoyed it wasn't going to kill her. God
knew he'd certainly earned the break.
#
The
emissions were coming from a point roughly seven AUs from the Head and
twenty-five degrees above the ecliptic.
They consisted of a semi-regular pulsing in the upper microwave band and
didn't correlate to any satellite, active or inactive, placed in-system by the Mayor.
Hatzis had thought it might be a piece of Spinner flotsam, which
warranted checking it out. Alander
agreed.
The more the Spinner
artifacts were investigated, the clearer it became that the spindles were built
by machines, that the Spinners themselves had had nothing actually to do with
it. Alander thought that mapping that
single fact onto humanity's experiences with AIs might be misleading, but even
he couldn't resist the assumption that something would inevitably go wrong with
any automated process. Somewhere,
eventually, the Gifts would make a mistake and leave something behind, some
clue that would speak more about their origins than they had ever been willing
to reveal.
The question of
whether the Gifts would let him return with anything like a clue occupied his
mind as he instructed the hole ship AI to take him to a position closer to the
source of the emissions. They were
programmed not to reveal the origin of their makers; indeed, at times it seemed
as though they didn't even know it themselves.
But were they also programmed to keep that knowledge a secret if the
humans were to stumble across it? How
far would they go to protect their makers?
Alander didn't know, and it worried him.
"We've had word
from Sothis," Hatzis had said to him when he'd checked back in for
duty. "They've found three more
drops."
Drops. Alander remembered his first
sight of a Spinner skyhook unraveling its way from orbit and thought the term
very apt. Not every Spinner drop had the
same number of towers, but the method was the same in each--as were the number
of the gifts.
"Any joy?"
he asked.
"Two
markers," she answered. "One
contact."
A marker was the euphemism for a destroyed colony, so-called because
of the strange, inert sculptures left behind in systems visited by the
Starfish. These artifacts seemed to
serve no function and some had taken them to be the equivalent of
death-markers, or gravestones. Who
planted them, however, remained a mystery.
They seemed to employ a similar technology to the hole ships the
Spinners left behind, but beyond that nothing was known.
"What's the
contact?"
"Beta
Hydrus. Borderline senescent, but the
Gifts managed to reactivate some of the archived engrams." She hesitated before adding: "You
weren't one of them."
"That was the Carl Sagan," he said
dismissively. "Not one of my
missions."
Even if it had been
one of his missions, the chances of his persona remaining intact for so long
would have been minimal. All of the
engrams were unstable, but his was particularly so. He would've been lucky to last a year, let
alone the 74 years since the Sagan
had arrived.
"Who did they
choose this time?" he asked.
"Neil
Russell. Deep time physicist; kept
himself in extreme slow-mo to observe changes on a larger scale than the
human. For him, only a few hours had
elapsed since the mission arrived. He
wasn't happy about being dragged back up, apparently."
Alander could
imagine. He remembered Russell well
enough, although they'd never been friends.
He'd gone through entrainment on a hard science ticket, whereas Alander
had strictly generalized. When he
pictured him in his mind he saw tall, scraggy man with black, wiry hair, prone
to long, furiously defended silences.
Another difficult contact, Alander mused.
If it wasn't functional unreliability, as in his case, the Spinners
seemed to look for people with inbuilt restrictions on information flow. More often than not, they picked the traitors
UNESSPRO had insinuated into the missions.
How they identified them, though, no one had yet managed to work out.
"What else did
Sothis say?" Have you and the other members of your little cabal voted me out of the
loop yet?
"I'll fill you in
when you get back," Hatzis said. She
rarely appeared in conSense transmissions beyond the confines of the
mothership, but he could hear the smile in her voice.
"Caryl," he
began.
"Screwing with
your head is one of the few pleasures left to me, Peter," she said. "At least grant me that."
He allowed himself a
laugh, then, as she fed him the coordinates and he relayed them to the hole
ship AI. The Starfish might have
decimated the human race, but there was still hope left. That was what the settlers--the ones who
wanted to take what humanity had left and hunker down in the few habitable
worlds they'd found--were feeding on.
Down that route, the only source of conflict would be between the
survivors themselves. Hatzis and Alander
were the most prominent of those: the first person to establish contact between
one survey team and another, and the sole survivor of Sol. Perhaps it would be best, he thought, for
ease back on the arguing--in public, anyway.
At least she was
offering the public something, whereas he had nothing but nebulous fears and
equally nebulous plans. Until he had a
clear alternative, he supposed that Cleo was right and that he should, perhaps,
cut her some slack . . .
His train of thought
was broken by a sudden lurch to the ship that almost threw him off the
couch. The stomach of his artificial
body leapt to his throat as the ambient gravity in the cockpit shifted wildly
beneath him.
"What--?" he
started, clutching at his seat to keep himself upright.
"We have
arrived," said the hole ship the same instant the wall-screen cleared. Alander saw wild profusion of angular silver
shapes ahead of them--many-pointed stars spinning and exploding in a rush of
energy out of a bright central light-source toward him.
"Get us out of
here! Now!"
The view went black as
the hole ship jumped. It lurched again,
only this time the entire ship shuddered violently. The noise in the cockpit and the vibrations
he could feel through the floor suggested someone was scraping a giant saw
across the alien vessel's smooth hull.
"I have suffered
minor damage," announced the hole ship blandly.
"Can you still
relocate?"
"Yes."
"Then take us
back to Athena--quickly! If we're lucky
we might still be able to beat them there."
He got up from the
couch, every muscle in his body quivering.
Adrenalin coursed through his body as he replayed the fleeting image of
the silver ships over and over in his mind.
Starfish.
Despite only getting a
brief glimpse, he had no doubts about this.
There was no mistaking the knife-slim lines of those ships; even
measuring kilometers across, they were lightning fast and as maneuverable as
anything Alander had ever seen. The
emissions were either a trap or a side effect of their arrival in the
system. But where had they come
from? What had brought them to Head of
Hydrus? And why now?
The journey back, as
with the journey there, would only take less than a minute, but for Alander it
was an intolerably long time. He paced
about the cockpit racking his brain to understand what was happening while waiting
impatiently for the wall-screen to clear.
This was the only indication that they were at the end of a
journey. During the jumps themselves
there was no actual suggestion that the ship was even moving at all. He was protected in the heart of the ship
like a molly-coddled child, ignorant of just about everything important to do
with the world around him.
When the hole ship did
finally emerge from wherever it went between locations in the real
universe--some physicists had coined the term "unspace" to describe
the state--Alander was rigid with tension, holding his breath as he stared at
the wall-screen. As soon as he saw the
silver-and-black framework of the Michel
Mayor hanging before him, apparently undamaged, he was gesticulating,
boiling off his excess energy in a vain pretence that it would make a
difference to how quickly things happened next.
"I want a line
opened immediately to Caryl
Hatzis!" Maybe there was still
time--if they moved quickly enough.
Her image appeared in
the screen: dark, stocky and frowning.
"You're early,"
she said with surprise. "I
thought--"
"The Starfish are
here!" he cut in urgently. "We
need to upload the Mayor
immediately!"
"Starfish?" Her frown deepened. "But we haven't used the
communicator. They couldn't have--"
"Let's not
analyze this now, okay, Caryl? They're
on their way, and I don't know how much time we have. We need to move, Caryl--now!"
Time was moving so
slowly for him that when she hesitated just for an instant, as though she was
about to question his judgment, he found himself balling his fists and wanting
to scream his frustration at her--Move
it, or you'll all die! But then she
was suddenly moving faster than himself, ramping up to four times the natural
clock rate of the Mayor, spouting
orders in unintelligible gibberish too fast for him to even follow.
A window opened in the
wall-screen, indicating that information had started to flow from the Mayor to the hole ship. He glanced anxiously at it and found
biological and astronomical data, not people.
He almost called Hatzis to say: What
about the people? Get them out first! But time was of the essence, and he had no
idea how long it would take to upload the contents of the survey vessel's
memory banks to the alien storage devices.
Perhaps it would only take minutes.
Or perhaps, he thought, the Gifts could do it more quickly. A minute was a long time under the
circumstances; any time he could save might be crucial.
He was halfway through
the first syllable of an inquiry to the hole ship when the first of the
Starfish appeared around Athena.
The screen flickered
as the hole ship announced: "Taking evasive action."
"No, wait--"
The view changed as
they jumped to a higher orbit, away from the survey vessel. The upload from the Mayor ceased, broken in mid-flow.
Alander gripped the back of the couch as the first Starfish killing
vessel was joined by two more. The three
of them streaked around the blue-white globe below them in a display of fearful
energy, peppering the biosphere and inner orbits with red darts that burned
white when they exploded. The ten
orbital towers of the Gifts with their golden spindles in geosynchronous orbit
came under heavy fire, three of them blossoming in quick succession like
short-lived nova.
"Take us back to
the Mayor!" Alander
shouted. "We have to do
something!"
The hole ship
relocated just in time to catch the edge of one of the darts. The screen went blue, then black. The hole ship seemed to roll end over end for
an instant, then relocated again.
"Taking evasive
action," the hole ship repeated.
"What
happened?"
"The Michel Mayor has been destroyed,"
the AI replied shortly. "We are
under attack."
The hole ship bucked
beneath him. Battered, disoriented,
Alander clung to the couch as though it was a life jacket.
"Caryl?" he
called. "Cleo?" It was futile, he knew, because they were
already dead--as he would be too if he didn't get out of there fast.
The screen flickered
back to life. For a moment he saw
nothing but stars--just long enough to think that they might have outrun the
alien ships--but the brief peace was shattered by the arrival of a weapon last
seen in Sol system: a sphere of oddly-shaped silver missiles popping into
existence around the hole ship, high-energy weapons at the ready, closing in
like white cells around an invading virus--
"Taking evasive
action." The hole ship's mantra was
barely audible over the deep rumbling that shook the entire craft. It felt to Alander as though the walls were
being torn apart around him. "I
have suffered damage."
It was all happening
too quickly. Alander's thoughts were
disjointed and confused. The hole ship
was in real danger of being destroyed if he stuck around any longer. Should he run? Save his own skin? Could
he run, given that the Starfish seemed to be following him everywhere he went
in the system? How far did their
light-cone spread? he wondered. He might
jump into another trap--and just one more might be enough to finish off the
damaged hole ship. He would have to jump
a long way to feel safe, and that would take time. And while he was jumping he couldn't send a
message.
There was only one
reason to stick around that he could see.
It was vital, too, but was it worth dying for?
While the hole ship
jumped through unspace, he thought about the sunset from the highpoint of
Athena. Perhaps if he hadn't stayed
there so long, if he had investigated the emissions earlier, as Caryl had
asked, they might have had more time to do something about the Starfish
attack. He might have saved the
others. The thought that he had brought
about the deaths of his friends and colleagues simply by being stubborn made
him feel nauseous, but it also helped him with his decision about what to
do. He would have no more deaths on his
conscience . . .
"Send a message
to Sothis," he instructed the alien AI.
"Tell them . . . " He
stopped to think. Timing was
everything. He didn't know how long the
hole ship would last if he told it to stay put long enough to send a
message. They were getting only a second
or less between each relocation. He
would have to keep it brief.
"Tell them the
Starfish have attacked Head of Hydrus without provocation," he said. "Their tactics have changed." He added, "No one is safe any more,"
before instructing the hole ship to compress and send the message, next time
they relocated.
He didn't have long to
wait. The screen cleared to reveal
scenes of wild energy-release. Strange
forces roiled around the hole ship, tossing it like a soap bubble in a hurricane. Around him, Alander felt rather than heard
the gong-like ringing of the ftl communicator as the message was sent, as
though he was in the middle of a giant church bell. The ringing stuttered momentarily and the
interior illumination of the cockpit dimmed.
Then the hole ship seemed to gather itself and the ringing resumed. A second later, it was done.
Alander's uncertainty
cleared that very instant. He had done
his duty. Now he could get the hell out of there.
On the screen, vast
silver shapes overlapped like scales as they swooped in for the kill.
"Get us out of here!"
he shouted. "As far away as you
can!"
"Taking evasive
action," said the hole ship.
"Sustaining damage."
Alander lost his grip on the couch as internal gravity failed entirely. "Concentrating available resources on
emergency priority maintenance. Unable
to take evasive action.
Sustaining--"
The screen flickered
and died at the same instant as the hole ship's voice. The lights turned red. One segment of the cockpit tore away, leaving
him exposed to the blistering energies of the attack.
The last thing he saw
was the invisible membrane of the I-suit boiling away under a purple light and
his right forearm melting painlessly back to the bone.