“And synthetics don’t get it,” Vanessa finished.
“No. We—synthetic Talee—suspect that synthetic humans will also prove less susceptible to such group thinking among humans. Such as the disorders that we see growing in the region of human space you call the League.”
“We’ve noticed as much,” Sandy agreed. Vanessa looked at her warily. “Dara, what were they doing here? What were they searching for? And if you synths are in control of Talee foreign policy, why are the organics suddenly rebelling?”
Her coms blinked before Dara could reply. She put it on speaker. “Kresnov.”
Pause for several seconds, then, “Commander, it’s Captain Reichardt.” She could see that, but Dara didn’t have that uplink . . . and with their recent upgrades, might not be able to get it without permission. Maybe. “Just got a message from Bursteimer, putting it through now.” Captain Bursteimer had gone off in pursuit of retreating Talee ships, following as they jumped from the system. Now he was another twenty-minutes-light farther out, and this message had been travelling that long.
“We’ve been analysing their jump signatures,” came Bursteimer’s voice, crackling with solar static. “We’ve seen this pattern before, I don’t think they were full charged for jump. I’m ninety percent sure they cut it short, in which case they’re just out of the system, possibly regathering. We’ve seen that before too, and if they’ve got reinforcements out there, assuming these guys picked up a few smarts from Kresnov’s synthetic Talee friends, they’ll be back in a few hours, maybe less. We surprised the heck out of them coming in here like that, but Talee ships on inbound assault trajectories aren’t anything we can really handle. I’d recommend that Kresnov finds whatever the hell she’s looking for down there, and gets the hell out before we cop it in the neck.”
That transmission cut and was replaced by Reichardt. “Sandy?”
“I’m working on it,” she said, looking Dara calmly in the eyes. “If you’re going to get smashed, retreat, and pull the same stunt on them, don’t get shot up on our account. We can take care of ourselves down here, and if the Talee want to come back down and start that ground fight again, let’s just say my concern will be limited.”
A transmission pause as that went out. Vanessa sipped her water, looking scarcely more bothered than Jane, who was typically unreadable. No one giving anything away in front of their guest.
“Copy that,” said Reichardt. “However, if they’ve finished with Droze, and have no further use for it, they might just make a large smoking crater out of the corporate zone, which we won’t be able to stop if we’re not here. Recommend you make plans to head for the hills. Reichardt out.”
“Doing that too, Kresnov out.” She raised eyebrows at Dara.
“Come with me,” said Dara, “and I’ll show you.”
“Show me what?”
“What you’re looking for. What they are looking for. The thing that defines the struggle of the Talee race, and that might lay clear the future path of yours.”
Twenty minutes later, Sandy stood out on the big Dhamsel landing pads alongside one of their assault shuttles, heavy pumps roaring as they struggled to refuel. Loading vehicles rumbled past, taking more ammo to the HQ, and guide lights blinked against the oncoming dark. Jane stood with her in light armour, while Vanessa loomed above them in hopper armour, as were ten others spaced around the pad perimeter, awaiting the vehicle Dara said was incoming. Bereft of sunlight, the air was cooling fast, and the sharpening wind stung with flying sand.
“You realise we don’t have any atmospheric radar coverage?” Vanessa shouted at Sandy above the noise. “The network wasn’t very good to begin with, but now it’s out almost completely, and Fleet say they can’t track fast-moving atmospheric vehicles from orbit!”
“I don’t think it’s an accident that the grid’s out,” Jane remarked, checking her rifle, wary of the blowing sand. “No way Dara’s alone here. And Droze tech isn’t upgraded like ours.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get cocky about those upgrades either,” Vanessa retorted. “I doubt they’ve shown us everything they can do, and we know Cai kept secrets.”
Sandy nodded. “We’ll be careful.”
Tacnet showed something on the edge of visual range, moving very fast. They waited, pleased at least that Home Guard weren’t about to drop a shell on their heads, and watched the blip decelerate as it approached.
“Keep Patana alive,” said Sandy to Vanessa grimly. “He knows a lot of pieces in the GI research program puzzle I’d like filled in. But that won’t matter to some of our GIs if they suspect our debrief and legal process could take years, which it will. He might be useful enough we never get around to executing him. Some of us won’t like that.”
“Hell, I don’t like it,” said Vanessa. “But I’ll do what I can.” Meaning that if one of their own GIs was angry and determined enough, Vanessa wasn’t about to stop them with force. Sandy nodded.
“You don’t want him dead?” Jane asked Sandy. With that impenetrable stare beneath the brim of her cap.
“Personally? Sure. But ‘personally’ doesn’t come into this. We need to know what the hell League are doing with their GIs and where their medical research program is at. Against that, my desire to blow his head off is insignificant.” Jane nodded, looking off beyond the pad, through blowing sand. Sandy frowned at her. “What?”
“I tried rage once. After you nearly killed me, then let me go. I don’t think I understood it, at the time. But it felt right, and as I read things, it seemed that rage was appropriate, for a warrior.”
“Lots of ‘an eye for an eye’ in the Koran,” Sandy suggested.
Jane shrugged. “Bible too. Most religions. But that’s not it. Rage just didn’t take, with me. I didn’t kill the people I’ve killed from rage. It was something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Identity, maybe.”
“Hell of a price they paid for your search to find yourself,” Vanessa said sourly.
“These Talee too,” Jane replied. “That you just killed, because you couldn’t handle being left at home with your babies.”
Vanessa’s expression darkened. Sandy held up a hand to forestall the retort she knew was coming, and Vanessa held her tongue with difficulty. “You’re not responsible for how they made you,” she told Jane. “GIs can’t be held responsible at that age. You were a child, and killing was your only playtime, and blood your sugar rush. Someone else put that in you. It’s their fault, not yours.”
“Fault, sure. But it’s still what I am. What you are. And when they put me on the legal stand, I couldn’t put my hand on the book and deny that I love it.” From somewhere high in the darkening sky came the shrill of approaching engines. “It’s not rage. It’s lust.”
“There won’t be a legal stand,” said Sandy. She could see it now, the little black delta-wing. It was razor thin, nearly lost against the sky. “They don’t have a case against young GIs, and they know it.”
“The law was made for organics, not synthetics,” Jane said calmly. “The guilty must be punished, and deterrents established. And I’m certainly guilty.” She smiled faintly. “But that’s okay. The book loves a martyr too.”
The delta-wing approached with a shriek of engines. Tacnet only saw it on visual, radar gave no response, even the corporate zone’s electro-mag and multiphase arrays, which would cut through most forms of structural stealth to give at least some signal, found nothing. It didn’t look so different from VTOL hypersonics humans used, save for a few more angular lines and low-velocity extensions as it descended. But if you weren’t looking straight at it, it was invisible, to human tech at least. Once night fell completely, even the highest-range visuals would be useless beyond a few kilometres range.
“Well, good luck with that,” Vanessa murmured, gazing at it. Dara walked onto the big empty pad, and zone scanners detected a faint light pulse, active scanning. Sandy wondered if it was manned. If manned was even a word yo
u could use with aliens.
It landed with a howl of blowing sand, and no visible windshield above the wedge-shaped nose. A door appeared on one black side, a spot of light from inside, and a small stairway dropped to the tarmac. Dara looked back at them, waiting.
“Good luck,” said Vanessa. “Most of us have to die before we go to meet our maker.”
Sandy smiled at her. “No more them than Takewashi,” she said. “Don’t screw up my command without me.” And she walked, with Jane, toward the angular black craft. She and Vanessa would say no more, pondering on possibilities was bad luck.
They flew for more than an hour, reclined on comfortable seats that became less comfortable in light armour. To judge by the sound, Sandy reckoned they might be flying at somewhat more than the hypersonic standard Mach-6 she was used to. High in the atmosphere, hypersonic vehicles could theoretically travel much faster, but complications of deceleration and heat shielding meant that human designers found Mach-6 the optimum speed. If Talee had found a way to push that out to Mach-10, an hour’s travel could put them anywhere on Pantala. At Mach-6, it still covered half the planet.
With no windows, she had no way of telling if they remained on the night side, though she suspected they did. Which suggested a location eastward, against the planet’s spin, though as far as she knew, they could be flying in circles to disorient them. Fleet were positioned against predicted incoming attack, and planetary surveillance satellites were down, and besides, were not upgraded to Talee-proof standard. Even if Fleet did have eyes in position to monitor them, it was doubtful they’d see a black hypersonic ship against a dark planet, given the limited view of orbital visuals and the nasty interference the system’s magnetics and radiation threw up against other forms of scanning. She and Jane were on their own, and she had no doubt that the Talee intended it precisely that way.
An hour and twenty-one minutes after ascension, they slowed and began a mildly bumpy transition to lower velocities and altitudes. Shortly after, Sandy felt the flight surfaces change, flaps and increased surface area biting the air. Then VTOL, the beginnings of vertical thrust, and a slow descent. This ship needed no runway and could drop into a hole in the ground if required. To judge from the amount of turbulent backwash during the unusually long vertical descent, that was exactly what she judged was happening.
Then a bounce, as wheels touched ground, and the whining decline of the engines. Dara simply waited patiently by the door, as he had been patient through the flight, as Sandy boosted her armour to full mobility once more, checked her weapon, and racked it on her back. Jane saw and copied. Dara made no protest, nor any expression that he thought her insistence on arms bad manners.
“So you’ve been here the entire time,” said Sandy, as they waited for the door. No pilots emerged from the cockpit. Perhaps it was automated. “Living on Pantala under the noses of human settlers, for . . . what is it now? A century plus?”
Dara smiled and said nothing.
“Surveillance tech can be hacked,” Jane reasoned. “Even a century ago, people’s uplinks weren’t nearly as advanced, Talee wouldn’t have been able to hack eyes and brains, there was nothing to hack. But I bet they could hack orbital ships and satellites, probably used League’s first orbital networks against them. Made them see whatever they wanted them to see.”
“And League didn’t encourage wide-scale settlement of Pantala, so most of the planet’s never really been explored on foot,” Sandy added. “Just a lot of aerial and orbital surveillance, looking for Talee outposts. How did they find the first one? Did you miss something, forget to hack them in time?”
Dara shook his head. “We weren’t here.” Sandy was mildly surprised to get a reply. “We were initially. Two thousand years ago, before the second Catastrophe. Being out here is what saved us. We still don’t know exactly why Pantala was settled. We think it was a research base of some kind, but the planet itself is not that remarkable, save for a lot of minerals suitable for manufacturing industries. But it’s even farther from main Talee space than it is from the League.
“We think perhaps it was doing something very similar to what League were doing here. Doing research that was politically unsuitable, and frowned upon. We know very little still of the nature of the conflict that destroyed us and have only a rough idea of Talee society at that time. It makes Pantala’s nature hard to guess. What we do know is that Pantala was the only location to survive, and its only occupants were synthetic. Everyone else was dead. Billions upon billions of lives. And here, perhaps a few thousand, no more.
“But it was a research base, with many scientific tools and with one ship only, still in orbit. One ship and a pair of shuttles to reach it. No stations; we were not so permanent. So first, the population here decided to boost their numbers. We had insufficient knowledge of organic Talee to resequence their genetic material and grow a new population, but we could make our own kind. And so that is what we did, for a century or more. We grew very good at it, and a number of centres on Pantala specialised in the creation of synthetics.”
“Ah,” said Jane. It did explain a lot.
Dara nodded. “It takes many resources to make synthetic life, as you know. We bent everything to the task. Our ship made runs back to our worlds and reported the devastation. But we found some salvageable ships and stations there and set about repairing those. With a space foothold above our old worlds, we began spreading our presence, and when planetary conditions allowed, we finally began resettlement. Once there, we had no further use for Pantala. We shifted much of our reproductive capability back, but not all, just in case. That remaining facility was the one that Chancelry Corporation discovered when they arrived here over a century ago.”
“And this place?” asked Sandy, nodding to whatever was on the other side of the door.
“This place,” said Dara, “we resettled after humans arrived. They had not found it yet, and we did not wish it found. We were foolish to have left Pantala unclaimed and to allow humans to claim it . . . but by the time we found out, several years had passed, and it was already too late. We were not numerous and in no position to wrestle with humanity over a world. So we moved back here and used our technology, as Jane suggests—blinding League with their own technology so they could not find us, nor spot our occasional comings and goings.”
The door hummed, then thumped. And cracked open, spilling light and cold air from the outside. Dara went first, down the unfolding stairs and into a dim-lit hangar. Robots trundled on the tarmac, scanning the shuttle exterior, manoeuvring refuel and recharge connections from elevators in the floor. There were several more shuttles and a cavernous stone roof overhead, spotted with small lights. Overhead, a large retractable door, currently closed. The air smelled of landing fumes, and there was no sign of other life.
Sandy and Jane followed Dara, and a small door opened in the wall as they approached. Security systems were not conspicuous. Sandy guessed they hadn’t had a lot of visitors.
“What’s your power source?” Jane asked as they walked up the narrow corridor.
“Fusion,” said Dara. “And various other systems, as you’ll see.”
“Population?”
“Classified,” said Dara, smiling.
A door at the far end opened, this one the first of two—an airlock. They stepped in, and a familiar system scanned them for contaminants. Then it hissed, and Sandy’s ears popped a little. She’d been told that pressure differential felt much more profound to organic humans, another weakness she didn’t have . . .
. . . and she stepped onto a platform overlooking a cavern. It was enormous, and green, filled with trees. Brilliant green, as huge banks of overhead lights gleamed through filters Sandy didn’t recognise and came somewhere close to replicating sunlight. Beneath it were buildings, gleaming with exposed glass and interior gardens, some tall and complex, others low and simple. They lined streets, which in turn ran through small parks, with little flowerbeds that lined paths and verges. She did not
recognise any of the plant species. Some equally strange-looking birds flew past, with bright-orange plumage and long tails. Or perhaps they were reptiles, she thought, noting teeth and more scales than feathers on the neck.
On the far side of the enormous cavern, the better part of a kilometre away, water fell in a frothing spray from a stony wall, into a lake amidst trees. The air smelled fresh, far fresher than the usual Droze air outside and scented with plant smells she could not put name to. She hadn’t known what to expect . . . a military base, a sterile lab, some berths with bunks for long-term habitat. Nothing like this. This looked like a small, carefully constructed paradise.
“Wow,” she said finally. She had to keep her reserve, uncertain yet that she was among friends. But this was impressive, friends or not, and deserved its due. “You built all this up, after you came back? It’s recent?”
“Plants and animals from the homeworlds,” said Dara. “From the genetic material we’d recovered. Most of those worlds were dead when we returned to them. A few only had surviving insects, feeding on algae and each other. In two thousand years we’ve done a lot of terraforming and regeneration of species. The homeworld is our greatest triumph. It looks much like this, in parts.”
Even Jane looked impressed, mouth open as she gazed across the scene. “It took a long time to get the ecosystems back up again, yeah?”
“Life is quite resilient,” said Dara. “We introduced a lot of algaes and bacteria boosters to filter the atmosphere first, then when that grew to a plague we started with the plants, then progressed through the animals. There was a lot of genetic material left, we accumulated libraries of millions of species and cloned them. Homeworld was looking quite green and peaceful within five hundred years. Within a thousand, you’d barely know there was a Catastrophe at all . . . until you saw the urban ruins, reclaimed by the forests and home to animals.”
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