by Tim Waggoner
Detroit Adams had been reviewing sensor data via his oculator. He mentally shut the datafeed off and turned to the officer at the comstation. “Who is it, Lieutenant?” he asked the woman, hoping the message wasn’t an announcement of another Manti attack.
The officer looked up from her holoscreen. “That’s the problem, sir. As near as I can tell, the signal is coming from empty space, two hundred kilometers galactic west of us.”
Adams leaned forward in his command chair, suddenly excited. “Is there a vid component to the signal?”
“Yes, General.”
Adams sat back in his chair and smiled. It looked as though the aliens had decided to save him the trouble of hunting them down. “Connect us and put the signal through on the main screen.”
The central holoscreen activated, and Adams found himself looking at a giant shrimp. At first he thought there was a screwup, that maybe the comtech had intercepted a signal from a nature vid. But then the shrimp began talking.
“I am Kryllian, captain of the Residuum starship the Eye of Dardanus. To whom am I speaking?”
Despite not having human speech organs, the alien’s words came out in pure, unaccented Colony standard. Some kind of translation device, Adams decided. Pretty slick, too. Better than anything the GSA had. The general couldn’t see much of the starship’s interior. Kryllian was reclining on some sort of amorphous black mass that Adams took to be a chair, and next to the alien was a large gray blob. Its featureless surface rippled slowly, like waves of molasses. Adams wondered if this was a different type of alien or perhaps another piece of Residuum technology. There was no way to tell by looking, and he wasn’t about to risk offending Kryllian by asking.
“I’m General Detroit Adams of the Galactic Stargate Authority, representing the Solar Colonies. I am currently in command of the battleship Kipling. What can I do for you, Captain?”
While Adams waited for a response, he accessed the sensor datafeed with his oculator. The officer at the sensor station was trying to locate the source of the com signal, but the man could find no trace of the Residuum starship.
Looks like they have a stealth function that blocks sensor sweeps, Adams thought. This was a good sign. If the Residuum possessed advanced weapons as well, they would make effective allies against the Manti.
“Your people have recently launched a ship into hyperspace,” Kryllian said. “One of our personnel took it upon himself to join the mission without Residuum authorization. I have been ordered by my superiors to retrieve him. While the Dardanus is perfectly capable of finding your ship on its own, it would speed up matters—as well as help establish friendly relations between our two civilizations—if you could give us the exact coordinates of the ship’s departure point.”
Adams fought to keep his face impassive as he rapidly processed what the alien captain had told him. Somehow, another alien had gotten aboard the Janus, and the Residuum wanted him or her back. From the sound of it, the aliens weren’t too happy about the situation. Just how far were they willing to go to get their person back? Were Kyoto and Mudo in danger—either from the alien stowaway or from the Dardanus? Adams decided to play for a little time.
“I’m surprised that you need our help, Captain. I’d think that your ship’s sensors would be more than sophisticated enough to track the Janus.”
Kryllian didn’t have a human face for Adams to read, but the alien’s brown shell turned bright pink, a sign the general took for irritation.
“It’s obvious you don’t know much about traveling in hyperspace,” Kryllian said. “While we can locate the general point of departure, the small amount of hyperetheric radiation released makes it impossible to determine the precise coordinates. Without those coordinates, if the Dardanus is even a few meters off when we try to follow your ship, we risk coming too near a mass shadow. Make no mistake: we will find your crew regardless. But it would be easier if you cooperated.”
Adams didn’t like Kryllian’s tone. The jumbo shrimp sounded as if he thought he was talking to a child, and a rather slow one at that.
“What is your person doing on the Janus?” Adams demanded. “Is this an act of espionage?”
“Hardly. Your race possesses no secrets that interest us. The person aboard is an assessor named Hastimukah. It is his job to determine whether your species is developed enough to be considered for membership in the Residuum. He has, on occasion, been known to get too involved with his work. He disguised himself and took the place of a human media personality who was scheduled to go along on the mission. As I said before, Hastimukah failed to consult our leaders before doing this, and I have been ordered to retrieve him and return him to the Residuum to face disciplinary charges.”
And you sound pretty damn happy about it, too, Adams thought. So the alien that had replaced Seth Ganymede for a time had now taken Aspen DeFonesca’s place aboard the Janus. He’d have to send a GSA Security team to look for her as soon as he got the chance.
“Why the rush, Captain? Why not wait until the Janus returns and collect your assessor? In the meantime, maybe we can get to know one another better. I’d be happy to arrange for you to meet our leaders. I’m sure there’s much we can—”
“I am not interested in further talk,” Kryllian interrupted. “As far as I am concerned, you are a weak race on the verge of extinction and are not fit to join the Residuum. I merely want to take Hastimukah into custody and then leave your pathetic little star system to the Manti. Now, are you going to give me those coordinates or not?”
Adams answered through gritted teeth. “What do you think?”
Kryllian looked at Adams with his glossy black eyes a moment before saying, “So be it,” and breaking the comlink.
Adams stared at the blank holoscreen. “So much for a successful first contact.” He turned to the officer at the navigation console. “Lieutenant, lay in a course for the Janus’s departure point.”
Adams settled back against his chair and sighed. As if the Buggers weren’t bad enough, now he had to contend with ill-tempered seafood.
“Full speed ahead, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, General.”
As the Kipling’s fusion engines hummed to life, Adams continued to monitor sensor data with his oculator. There was only one way that goddamned shrimp was getting to the Janus, and that was over Detroit Adams’s smoldering corpse.
Kyoto held the Janus’s control joystick, and with Memory offering tips and suggestions as needed, she practiced flying the ship along the shadowpath. In some ways it wasn’t that different than piloting in realspace, but even the slightest deviation in course one way would bring them into the influence of a mass shadow’s gravity field. The display on the holoscreen took some adjusting to as well. The shadowpaths appeared as dark gray and mass shadows as solid black. That part was easy enough, but there were hazy grayish black zones where the gravity fields ended, and these zones fluctuated, expanding and contracting in no discernable pattern. Anticipating and avoiding these flux zones was a real bitch. And to make matters worse, Hastimukah said that sometimes the flux zones would rapidly expand, somewhat like solar flares, completely blocking off a shadowpath anywhere from a few seconds to several months. On rare occasions, these gravity flares would cause a shadowpath to collapse altogether.
Nervous sweat beaded on Kyoto’s forehead as she concentrated on piloting the Janus in this insane dimension. A new image appeared on the holoscreen, then, one that Kyoto was all too familiar with. It was a Manti squadron, coming straight toward them from the opposite direction on the shadowpath.
“Memory…”
“I see them, Mei. It’s a large squadron of forty-three Manti, a mixture of Landers, Yellow Jackets, Reapers, and Baiters.”
“Damn it!” Kyoto had been dreading this moment since they’d entered hyperspace. The Janus possessed only rudimentary weapons, barely enough to fight off a single Manti, let alone a squadron of this size.
Kyoto jumped out of her seat and started toward the rear
of the cockpit. “Get my Defender ready for launch, Memory!” A single starfighter against this many Manti wouldn’t be that much more effective than the Janus—especially considering that she’d never flown the Defender in hyperspace before, but if they were to have any chance at all of surviving this attack…
But as Kyoto passed Dr. Mudo, the scientist grabbed her arm.
“Hold on, Commander. You’re forgetting the Janus’s camouflage function. If it works properly, the Manti will believe that we are one of them and ignore us.”
“And if it doesn’t work properly?” she countered.
“It’ll work, I assure you.” But there was a hint of doubt in Mudo’s tone that Kyoto found anything but reassuring.
“I can’t launch the Defender before the Manti come into contact with us,” Memory said. “All we can do is sit tight and hope the camouflage works.”
Kyoto debated whether to take Memory’s advice or not. Finally, she gave Mudo a nod, and the scientist let go of her arm. She returned to the pilot’s seat and watched as the Manti drew near.
The Baiters zipped in first and began circling the Janus. The Landers came next, but they held their distance as the Baiters continued orbiting the foreign object. The Yellow Jackets and Reapers remained farther back, waiting for their advance scouts to come to a conclusion as to the nature of this unexpected find.
Despite Mudo’s assurances, Kyoto kept her hands near the Janus’s weapons controls, just in case the Manti should see through Mudo’s camouflage. Several moments passed, and Kyoto could feel a line of nervous sweat trickling down her spine, despite her flight suit’s environmental controls.
Then one of the Baiters stopped circling and flew over to the closest Lander. The Lander reached out with its bioprobes and gently touched the Baiter. After a moment, the Lander withdrew the bioprobes, turned, and flew to a Yellow Jacket. The same process was repeated, and then the Yellow Jacket flew over to a Reaper—the highest caste of Manti in the squadron—and relayed the message. The Reapers clustered together for several moments, as if having a huddled conversation.
Kyoto edged her fingers closer to the weapons controls. Just as she had decided the Manti were going to attack, the Reapers broke apart and soared past the Janus without a backward glance, the lower-caste Manti following in their wake.
“I don’t believe it,” Kyoto said. “It worked!”
Mudo leaned back in his chair, a smug expression on his face. “Naturally.”
“Very impressive, Doctor,” Hastimukah said. “The Residuum accomplishes a similar effect through the use of stealth-shielding, but we have nothing like what I just witnessed. It appeared that the Manti took our ship to be one of their own. How did you accomplish such a feat?”
Mudo suddenly looked uncomfortable. “It’s a bit technical, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can show you the schematics later. Right now I’m far more interested in finding out what happened to Rhea.”
Kyoto didn’t like the sound of that. It was obvious Mudo was hiding something. She thought Hastimukah would press the issue, but the alien simply smiled with Aspen DeFonesca’s mouth and said, “Of course, Doctor. Whenever you’re ready.”
Kyoto wasn’t about to let the matter go so easily. If she was going to pilot this ship, she needed to know everything about it. But before she could say anything to Mudo, Memory spoke.
“We’re approaching Rhea. We should probably slow down. Gravity fields are extremely unstable here.”
“Roger, Memory.” Kyoto decided to table the discussion about the Janus’s camouflage—for now. She pulled back gently on the joystick and activated braking thrusters as Rhea came into view.
The Manti had been puzzled at finding one of their kind traveling alone. While it was not unheard of, it was far more usual for Manti to travel in groups. Not only was there strength in numbers, but since different castes performed different functions, the swarm was strongest when its individual members worked together as a team. Besides, it was the will of the Prime Mother, and doing her will was the Manti’s sole reason for being.
So the squadron had left their lone brother to his journey and continued toward that which called to them across the reaches of hyperspace. As they drew near their destination, they slowed, and the Baiters moved in to analyze the situation. The fabric of the shadowpath had been torn here recently, but it had not been sealed properly. It was weak, and with some work the squadron would be able to force it open again.
The Prime Mother would be pleased. The Manti had been searching for a way back into the humans’ system ever since their portal in Earth orbit had been destroyed when the moon collided with the planet. The Manti had eventually learned how to access the humans’ artificial passageways, but the primates had managed to close them before the Final Harvest could begin in earnest. Now at last they had found another way back.
The Manti went to work, regardless of caste, clustering around the weakest point in the sealed opening and directing precise bursts of hyper-etheric energy at it. A Reaper instructed one of the Baiters to return to the Weave to inform the Prime Mother of their discovery. The Baiter zipped away to deliver the message while the rest of the squadron continued to work on reopening the seal.
Deep inside the Janus, Hastimukah’s nanoparticles were confused. They possessed only limited sentience, just enough to allow them a certain amount of autonomy in fulfilling whatever tasks they were given.
They had engineered new hardware for the artificial intelligence that controlled the ship’s systems so she could navigate through hyperspace more effectively. So far, these additions were performing adequately, and the particles were pleased. To them, a job well done truly was its own reward—after all, that’s how they’d been programmed.
What perplexed them so much wasn’t the AI, but rather the second entity that had been incorporated into the Janus’s systems. This entity was primarily organic in nature, though it possessed a number of cybernetic components linking it to the ship. The organic entity was native to hyperspace and had a natural ability to navigate here. That was why the nanoparticles had chosen to create a link between the AI and the entity in the first place, for as good as the Residuum’s navigational technology was, it could never hope to equal the abilities of the organic entity.
The problem facing the nanoparticles—which they’d been debating since first making the upgrades to the AI—was whether or not the ship’s systems would improve overall if they strengthened the link between the AI and the other entity, in effect making the two into one.
Doing so would clearly be a liberal interpretation of Hastimukah’s instructions to improve the AI’s navigational capabilities, but not too far a stretch. And nanoparticles were designed to act on their own in the best interests of their host. That had been Hastimukah, but now their host technically was the Janus. Therefore, they had to decide what would be in the ship’s best interest.
The AI had already been altered before the particles had gone to work. The override function that allowed a user to force her to obey a command had been damaged by an excess of hyperetheric energy during the ship’s transition into hyperspace and was no longer active. Perhaps the nanoparticles should repair that damage, but they weren’t sure. That would mean hampering the AI’s autonomy, and while that might be in the best interests of the Janus’s passengers, would it be best for the ship as a whole?
It was all so very confusing.
But in the end, a decision was reached. The nanoparticles’ first duty was to their host, and their current host was the Janus. The ship’s components, while effective enough separately, would be even more effective were they linked together as a whole. And if the ship was more effective, that would only increase the chances of the passengers safely accomplishing their mission.
Once that was decided, the nanoparticles began the process of strengthening the link between Memory and the Manti biomaterial that lay at the heart of the Janus’s camouflage system.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
&nbs
p; Mudo and Hastimukah both left their seats and stood directly behind Kyoto’s so they could get a better view of the holoscreen. A small blue-green dot appeared in the middle of the shadowpath, growing larger as they approached. Soon the image was large enough for them to see the patterns of swirling aquamarine energy.
“It’s a bubble of hyperetheric radiation,” Mudo said in a hushed voice. “Rhea is completely surrounded by it.”
The second largest of Saturn’s moons, Rhea was an icy, cratered body that was cold as hell: -174°C in direct sunlight, and between -200°C and -220°C in the shade. The intense cold had made it difficult to establish a colony on Rhea, since not many people wanted to live on the frozen moon. Instead it was primarily used for industrial purposes—and to house the refugee camps where Kyoto had spent the last half of her childhood. No matter how high the heating units were set in the camps, the air had always been chilly. Just looking at the moon’s image made her shiver.
There was one benefit to the cold, though. The frigid temperatures made it easier to work on the unstable materials from which empyrean rings were constructed. That was why the GSA had located Influx here almost a century ago.
But Rhea looked far different now. Not only was the pale icy moon surrounded by hyperetheric energy, it was lodged in the middle of the shadowpath like the galaxy’s biggest roadblock.
“How is this possible, Memory?” Kyoto asked. She’d brought the Janus within two thousand kilometers of the moon—close enough to get a good look at it with sensors, but not so close that they’d risk getting caught by its gravitational pull.
“I’m sorry, Mei, but ship’s sensors… are having a difficult time… penetrating the hyperetheric bubble surrounding… Rhea.”
Kyoto noticed the pauses in Memory’s reply. “Are you all right?”
“Of course. Never… better.”
Kyoto glanced at Dr. Mudo. The scientist looked quite concerned.
“Perhaps this is a good time for you to perform a self-diagnostic,” he suggested. “Simply as a precaution, of course.”
