The Celaran Refuge (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 8)

by Michael McCloskey

  It’s not working smoothly. There’s a fight.

  Already his mind started to dredge up negative possibilities. If they failed, would be die instantly? Or would they be punished somehow? Their slavery to the Vovokan might become more oppressive. And what about Telisa? He had not even informed her of the attempt on the battle spheres.

  Marcant saw a pane go red. A counter there showed the quick attack was past schedule. It had stalled. Now it was up to the balanced attack. He held his breath. More seconds ticked by.

  “Success,” reported Adair.

  Marcant suppressed his surprise.

  I knew it would be fast...

  “That was easy!” he said. At the same time, he thought, Could they have faked it? Maybe the spheres are only letting us think we won.

  “Easy? Review the history of the attack,” Adair said.

  Marcant started to access the information, but he rejected the idea quickly. A lot had happened in those few seconds.

  “Just tell me what happened,” he said with slight irritation.

  “We took control of four of the effectors. Then the controller unit used the other two to clear out two of our effectors... long story short, various effectors traded hands about four hundred times before we won.”

  “Okay, you see? That’s why I have you two. So that you can report useful things like that to me,” Marcant needled.

  “And that’s why we have you, to entertain us with such ridiculous statements as that,” Achaius said.

  Marcant released a long sigh. He had been more tense than he thought.

  It’s over now, and we did it. One small step for the simulationists.

  “Congratulations,” Marcant said, changing tack. “Any idea if some kind of message may have been sent off?”

  “I won’t know until we scan the insides ourselves,” Adair said.

  “Ah. We can’t trust the effectors,” Marcant said. He realized that if each sphere had faked its defeat, its own effectors might lie about the sphere’s internal hardware.

  “After the scans, assuming we like what we see, I assume you’ll want to be placed inside of them.”

  “No. We already went over that,” Adair said.

  “I mean, physically put your original self in there.”

  “No,” Adair said.

  “Really? I’d think you’d be much safer inside those armored, shielded juggernauts.”

  “Those juggernauts have to face the biggest Destroyer machines toe-to-toe. You may recall, we already lost one that way.”

  “But you weren’t in control,” Marcant said.

  “Our optimal chances for survival are in control of the spheres, but not near them,” Adair said. “We need to be able to fully utilize them without worrying about destruction.”

  “If the Destroyers win the battle, they’ll...”

  “They’re not looking for us. I’m not so sure they’d target us,” Achaius chimed in. “Besides, there’s a good chance reinforcements are coming from Sol. There would be a lot of scenarios where we might survive the destruction of the battle spheres.”

  “All right, I give up. Don’t whine at me when enough vines burn away that you can’t talk to your pets through the Destroyer jamming. Then you’ll wish you were in there.”

  “Perhaps,” conceded Adair. The rest went unsaid: Adair prefers to play it safe. But which is really the safe choice?

  “Now the next line of business,” Marcant said. “How should I break the good news to Telisa?”

  Chapter 15

  “I want you to go speak to a particular Celaran,” Telisa told Cilreth. They sat side by side on a thick vine, dangling their legs. The day was bright and warm, so they had unzipped their Veer suits to let the light warm their upper bodies.

  “Again? It went poorly for me last time,” Cilreth said, then bit her tongue. At least she had survived. Poor Jason!

  “There’s a special Celaran up on a factory ship of theirs. The ship’s big, as big as the probe ship we found. Anyway, this Celaran has been key to their space defense. She, or ze... are we going gender neutral?”

  Cilreth shrugged. “Well, actually, they’re all kinda closer to being males... they inject gametes into the vine and it carries and feeds the young until they... hatch.”

  Maybe Maxsym would have a strong opinion, if he were still here.

  “Too late. I already think of Lee as a she, I guess. Anyway, this Celaran has unique skills as far as I can tell, and he hasn’t been switching roles like the others, presumably because he’s so critical.”

  “A special Celaran? Intriguing.” Cilreth waited for more.

  “Lee won’t give me a straight answer about exactly what’s so different about him. Have you noticed how it’s sometimes hard to zero in on just one piece of information with them? See what you can find out.”

  “About their space defense in particular, or what?”

  “Find out what’s special about this Celaran, what he’s doing, and see if he can pull off tachyonic communications. See if you can grill him about the rest of their civilization.”

  “I could do that from here,” Cilreth said, but she already knew the answer.

  “Go see what you can see. Snoop around, even.”

  “Okay... Hey, didn’t you give them a weapon to study?”

  “Yes, but they’ve been too busy just trying to survive to look at it much,” Telisa said. “I felt guilty pushing them about it. They’ve done so much for us already.”

  “Hey, we did a lot for them, including putting our asses on the line. We’ve lost ships and people.”

  “Well it’s not ready yet,” Telisa said.

  “Okay. Do I need to hurry?”

  “If you want to stay here for half an hour that’s fine,” Telisa said. She looked like she wanted to sit down and forget her troubles. “We can’t take too long, though, since the Destroyers are still out there.”

  Cilreth nodded. She stared at Telisa for a long moment and felt a tinge of jealousy. Telisa belonged to Magnus and Magnus alone. Cilreth could only imagine a world where it was otherwise—imagine, or create a virtual reality to try out. Cilreth was too wise to get hung up on it. She let the thought drop with the moment.

  “This would be a great expedition, singularly wonderful, if it weren’t for the Destroyers,” Cilreth agreed. She stood up.

  “Yes! We’d be spending our time learning about the Celarans and playing games with them,” Telisa agreed.

  Cilreth zipped up her suit and walked down the vine to the Iridar. She took one last deep breath of local air before she went back into the sterile environment of the ship. Somehow she could tell that the Vovokan ship’s systems had not been designed for maintaining air for Terrans. Supposedly every major variable had been tweaked to produce air optimal for Terrans, and yet it never felt quite like the air on a Terran ship or space habitat.

  It’s probably too good. I must be used to whatever flaws our own ships have, it seems like the norm to me.

  “I’m taking the Iridar up in ten unless anyone tells me they need something before I depart,” she transmitted on the team channel. No one answered, so she closed up the ship and started to feed energy into the gravity spinner. All systems reported normal function. Cilreth could not help but take a peek outside via the ship’s sensors: she saw the vines whipping around near the ship, sure evidence the spinner was working.

  Cilreth informed the Celarans that she planned to depart. It would not do to have them mistake her for a Destroyer. A Celaran starbase replied with a suggested course to her destination, so she accepted it. Once again she pondered the way the Vovokan and Celaran systems had learned to adapt to each other, even with the primitive Terran protocols standing in the way. She believed Marcant had bootstrapped the process, but once the problem had been attacked from both sides, progress accelerated. The PIT team already took it for granted: a handful of alien species talked and worked together smoothly.

  Their computers are amazingly flexible. There must be som
ething on the level of AIs involved... yet the Iridar doesn’t talk to us...

  Cilreth resolved to ask the unique Celaran about their AI technology. She had seen one of the most amazing things imaginable—the Trilisk AI in action—and yet she had no clue how it worked, what it thought of Terrans, or what it wanted, planned... it was an enigma. Surely the Celarans’ efforts in that area were more primitive, but more understandable?

  The Iridar lifted off the ground vertically, then ascended at a softer angle once it had cleared the canopy. Cilreth spent the time looking over the results of software experiments she had been running. She had a lot of the Iridar’s processing power testing Celaran computers: how fast were they? How flexible were they? How powerful?

  The answers were impressive, of course. They were faster than Terrans thought possible. They were able to respond well even in the face of corrupted data or incomplete requests. And they were powerful... all the power Cilreth commanded in the Iridar did not seem to faze the collection of building blocks in a single Celaran house. They were able to keep up with huge levels of “makework” she had sent their way, all without generating any significant waste heat.

  Actually, knowing the Celarans, it might have generated some heat, but they put it to good use.

  The Iridar left the atmosphere of the planet and approached a Celaran space station as Cilreth worked. She saw that a huge factory ship dominated one end of the familiar collection of 36 hangars, like a thick axle with a vaguely triangular wheel at one end. The PIT ship headed toward it and prepared to dock.

  The Celaran ship dwarfed the Iridar. Cilreth felt a bit of the anxiety she had felt when the team had discovered the probe ship. Before she could send a query, the two ships joined smoothly by a single airlock each with a flexible connector tunnel. She shrugged and headed toward the connection.

  Cilreth paused when she arrived at the tunnel door in the Iridar. She stared at it through a hull sensor feed in her PV. The connection was smooth, light gray, and hexagonal. She imagined what it would be like if the lock ruptured. She suppressed the thoughts, yet still asked her Veer suit to do a self-diagnostic. It reported all was ready.

  Cilreth walked through the makeshift airlock.

  She made it to the end without incident. The hexagonal portal on the Celaran ship opened as she approached, pulling in the six little flaps that joined to form the door. It was silent beyond.

  Once again, Cilreth suppressed nervousness.

  Maybe a bit too much Twitch today, old girl.

  She did not see anything threatening on the other side. She stepped through and looked for a Celaran. As big as the space beyond looked to be, it was only one subsection of the giant factory ship. A myriad of structures were visible on the far side of the wide open space, all complete mysteries to Cilreth. Complex objects moved between the structures. The distance was difficult to judge, but she decided the pieces were major sections of space ships moving between factory buildings.

  A special Celaran. Please don’t sneak up on me, whoever you are.

  Cilreth breathed deeply and tried to calm her pounding heart. She looked in all directions.

  No hungry predators here. Just a friendly Celaran... somewhere.

  She spotted it. A large silver Celaran-shape snaked toward her, flying in the open space over banks of equipment. Cilreth thought at first it was a Celaran in a space suit. As it came closer, she decided it was a robot or a cyborg shaped liked a Celaran. She felt relief.

  No monster hidden away from the world: just a synthetic body.

  “Hi, I’m Cilreth,” she said through Marcant’s translator software.

  “The Terran pilot. It’s good to meet you.”

  Cilreth was happy for the improvements Marcant had made to the translators. She congratulated herself for picking him for the team, then she remembered it was actually Shiny who had suggested Marcant. She refocused on the conversation.

  Cilreth realized she needed a name for the Celaran in her language. No one had yet taken a time to create an automatic name generator.

  Cybernetic Celaran... uhm, Cynan?

  “You’re a cyborg?” Cilreth asked. “I haven’t seen any Celarans down on the planet like you.”

  “Yes, my brain is housed within this robotic body,” Cynan said. “I’m the only such one here.”

  Cilreth wondered if it would be rude to ask about the body. If it had been due to some trauma, it might be an uncomfortable question.

  “Why is that?”

  “This society chooses to live in natural bodies. Others do not. I wasn’t a member of this group originally, but I came along to help them survive when we fled the Destroyers.”

  “How do you help them? You run this factory ship?”

  “I’m key to its operation. We mine materials from low-gravity areas of the systems we’re in, and this factory helps fabricate the parts we assemble in the hangers. There are even several hangars in the ship itself which can serve as an assembly area, but the external hangars are needed given our increased production.”

  “How is the mining accomplished?”

  “We send out robot ships to retrieve the ores.”

  “What do those robot ships do when Destroyers come around?”

  “They cloak and hide. They’re widely scattered, and don’t have to alter course or fight the Destroyers, so it’s easier for them to remain hidden.”

  “Because there’s no energy emissions to give them away?”

  “Right.”

  Cynan seemed different to Cilreth. His personality felt different. The voice sounded calm through Marcant’s translator service, and Cynan seemed to supply very direct answers. She opened her mouth for the next question, then had an awful thought.

  Trilisk?

  Cilreth asked one of her two attendant spheres to do a quick check. They reported no telltale signs of Trilisk presence.

  Unless he hacked my attendants already. I hate paranoia.

  “Do you talk with other systems using tachyonic communications as Terrans do?”

  “No, not anymore.”

  “Let me guess. The Destroyers obliterated your TRB, so you can’t communicate with home. Or did everyone have to move so unexpectedly that you don’t know where and when to listen to get hooked up again?”

  Cilreth stopped there. She could guess another potential reason: all their energy was being used for ship production.

  “We don’t use tachyon communications since the Destroyers found us,” Cynan said. “Many speculated that we’d been discovered through their use. As you know, Celarans like to run away and hide... so that’s what this society did.”

  Cynan had said so much that Cilreth struggled with what to ask about first.

  “You don’t identify strongly with this group.”

  There was a delay. Cilreth wondered if the translator had troubles with her message.

  “They needed help, so I went with them,” Cynan finally responded. “In the confusion after the first attacks, I guess it was easy to do. Now I watch over them as best I can.”

  “Do you command the fleet?”

  “I control its grand strategy. There are very few Celarans up here. Many of the ships are fully automated, though capable of transporting Celarans, obviously.”

  “Back to the TRBs... I didn’t think that tachyon communications could be eavesdropped upon... we have to carefully coordinate where to look and the timing of capturing the messages. As you know, it takes a lot of power to transmit tachyons slow enough to read on the other side, and difficult to capture them in general. If you don’t know when and where and how to read them, you just get noise from wherever you look.”

  “Some races probably know how to do it,” Cynan said. “The larger your civilization gets, the more emissions you make in both sublight and supralight energies.”

  “Great. So we’ve been advertising our presence in FTL ways and we weren’t even aware of it.”

  Marcant’s translator must have delivered the salty sarcasm effectivel
y.

  “It may not be disastrous. It’s only a theory of ours. Also, some Celarans prefer to remain hidden as this society does... others think of it as a risk worth taking to maintain an interstellar civilization.”

  “And you’re one of the ones who thinks it’s worth the risk.”

  “Correct. How did you know? I would use such communications, even try to eavesdrop on aliens to find their civilizations.”

  “You seem more aggressive than the other Celarans,” Cilreth said, probing for more insight into Cynan’s differences. Her Trilisk fears stirred again.

  “I’m not aggressive, I simply lack their fear. I’ve dampened some primitive emotions. Many Celarans on the homeworld had done so, but I’m the only one in this group.”

  “Does that prevent you from feeling lonely, being the only cyborg Celaran, up here by yourself?”

  “It helps. I have plenty to do. May I ask a question now? Is your fleet coming to help us?”

  “I don’t know. I think there will be help, but it’s out of my hands,” Cilreth said. She felt guilty for some reason, even though she could not see how it was her fault. “We want as many friends as we can get. The Vovokan who built this ship watches out for us, but we don’t always feel like we’re totally free.”

  “Then more friends may make you... less free.”

  Cilreth looked at Cynan for a moment, wondering what he meant.

  Was that a hint, or just a comment on how interrelationships can complicate life?

  A bank of equipment on Cilreth’s left started to glow with fuzzy colors. Cilreth figured it communicated its state to Celaran eyes, but she had no equipment to understand it.

  “Do you have AIs?” Cilreth asked, looking around. She saw a few other tiny displays on the walls and ceilings with rows of tiny glowing chevrons. Cilreth spotted a disk robot hiding in a ceiling corner. It looked like it was physically attached to the walls somewhere she could not see.

  “Yes.”

  “So... do you talk to them? Are they smarter than you are?”

  “In your language the term is very primitive and vague,” Cynan said. “There exist many nuances and subcomponents of what you call artificial intelligence. We talk to the ones that are designed to talk. The ones that are designed to be smarter than me at some particular activity are smarter than I am at that activity.”