by Jason Letts
Loris grimaced.
“I don’t think so, not when you take into account loyalty and propriety. The winner should be the one who has done the most to support the safety and the prosperity of the others. If someone from the crowd rose up and attacked the one who protected them, we’d unanimously call that despicable.”
Quade shook his head with a smug grin.
“Your idealistic notions are always charming, but that’s not how things really work.”
“Our loyalty to each other is what allowed us to strike back against the Detonans. That’s why we’re winning against them,” Loris said.
Quade, slightly taller and older, reached out and set a hand on Loris’s shoulder.
“The only reason we struck back at them is because you were hell bent on it. That’s the power of one motivated individual. And I wouldn’t call getting run out of the system in a matter of weeks winning.”
Somehow, despite the technology and the virtual environment, Quade got the message that he should remove his hand. A moment later everything went black.
“Anyway, that’s what I’ve been working on,” Brina said, cuing them to remove their masks. After visiting that radiant setting, the room full of wires and cords seemed even more depressing.
“Do you think you’re going to be able to figure it out?” Loris asked.
Brina pursed her lips and looked at the headset she twirled around her wrist.
“I’ll be able to figure something out. Whether or not it’s how people are or a fiction I’ve created in my mind is another story. The horrible realization I’ve had is that the only way to get it right is through trial and error, making a person and seeing if they act normally or not, which again is a subjective endeavor fraught with chances for bias and error.”
Quade dropped his mask on the floor and took a step toward the exit.
“I’ve made some more discoveries about the Agarthanons. Maybe we should let you get back to your work,” he said to her.
“I guess,” she said, not hiding how disappointed she was at the prospect of their leaving. Loris wished it was something he could blow off, or that they could spend her entire pregnancy playing house and being a happy couple for once, but their lives were depending on it.
“I’m impressed with what a great job you’re doing. I’ll check in with you again once we get moving. Sorry to go,” he said, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze. She conjured a weak smile and nodded.
Quade took him back to the control room, where they stopped in front of a strange looking terminal. The keypad had only a dozen buttons, none of which were labeled. The screen had a number of flashing symbols appearing on it.
“I don’t want to say I have respect for the Detonans, but operating their machines requires a tremendous amount of mental acuity and concentration. You have to remember perfectly what everything is and what you’ve done, and this is all in an alien language arranged into code. There’s not another person I could think of, living or dead, who’d be able to operate it so well. And it’s all for this,” Quade explained.
He pulled one of their tablets from his back pocket. It displayed an image of a barren rock floating in space.
“That’s not the moon, is it?” Loris wondered.
“No, of course it’s not the moon. Why would you even guess that? This is a lush, lively planet after the Agarthanons visited it. Here’s another one. And another. The Detonans seem to have been keeping an eye on them and their movements, probably afraid that sooner or later they’d come home. I’ve uncovered some more details about what they do. Their ability to consume energy is mostly thermal in nature, but they can also break down any organic matter as they hunt for mitochondria at the cellular level,” he said.
Loris cringed at the thought of these creatures devouring and absorbing everything.
“How many of them did it take to do this to a planet?” he asked.
Quade scratched his neck and sucked his teeth as he thought.
“That question is impossible to answer. It depends on how much energy they had, because they grow or shrink. There are hundreds of them, but if they were full of energy, a dozen could cover a planet. Once they reach that size, they’re able to asexually reproduce by dividing themselves in half.”
Loris waited for him to go on, but apparently that was the end of his briefing. Trying to figure out how to defeat these things without expending any of the energy they could possibly consume would be an incredible feat, and doing so right near a tropical planet teeming with life would make it impossible. This wouldn’t be a fight they could win.
“Unless there’s another miraculous discovery that even the Detonans couldn’t come up with, we’re going to have to get in and out before they arrive at Nova. Good thing we have this giant ship to house everybody.”
“I have really enjoyed the quiet around here. If there was any other way…” Quade muttered, making Loris wonder if he was really weighing his personal solitude against the lives of ninety percent of humanity.
“If it means that much to you, find a way to beat them.”
CHAPTER 5
Once Loris returned to the Magellan and the repairs were completed, he went in search of his own solutions to their impending problems. The most likely path to success led him to the medical wing. The boy had been moved from an intensive care bed to a simple room, and Loris arrived to find the small alien sitting against the wall on the floor in what appeared to be a meditative posture.
“I’m sorry to interrupt. I need to speak with you,” he said.
He waited for the disconcerting but now familiar sensation of having the boy speak directly into his mind, but nothing came. He waited a few moments, called again, and even came up and shook his shoulder without garnering any kind of a reaction. It made Loris wonder if he’d gone back into a coma. After a half hour, Loris began contemplating leaving and returning another time, but as soon as he got up, the boy lifted his eyelids and took a deep, gasping breath.
“Were you somewhere else?” Loris asked.
“I have some unfortunate news,” came a voice unbidden into his mind. “The Detonans were not content to let us die out on our own, so they recommenced their bombings. Perhaps they were feeling vindictive, wounded, and needed to lash out at something weaker than they are. None of the rest of my kind survived.”
Loris’s lips parted, empathizing with the sorrow he must be feeling behind those big, dark green eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” the boy cut him off from saying more, sounding impatient. “It’s because of you that I’m alive. I have a dream of outliving the Detonans, and if that were to succeed, it would also be because of you, but I feel that may be too much to wish for. I was very young when you found me, but this trip to Nova will consume a quarter of my life. Half of it would be exhausted if we were to immediately return to Detonus, but I feel that is not the way the course of events will lead, and you are not prepared to do so.”
Loris’s pity grew deeper. He wished that extinguishing the Detonans within a year would be possible, but the boy was right that their armada was far too much for them to handle.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. The Detonans seem to be calling all their other creations in to assist them, and we need your help to find a way to not just survive but grow stronger, strong enough to make it back to Detonus and finish the job. My dream is finding a place to live in peace, and there’s no way to achieve that until the Detonans are wiped out,” Loris said.
The boy stared blankly at him. His hair was a shade of brown that still seemed bleached by the sun. His skin and proportions were so much the same, only smaller. There was a high probability that the Detonans recycled quite a bit when they moved on to creating humanity.
“Have I not always helped in what ways I can? I admit that help is not as potent as I might have wanted. This odyssey has forced me to recognize the vastness of my ignorance. The origin of the probe pricks at my mind. My limitations hav
e never been more glaring. A mind is not like an open book to flip through and read. It’s like a well where only the most pressing thoughts and feelings can be drawn.”
“Then let’s focus on something a little easier,” Loris suggested. “We encountered a squadron of Silica that must’ve been coming from Nova. Are the humans on Nova alive?”
For a second Loris wondered what he’d do if he’d heard they’d all been killed.
“Some are.”
Loris closed his eyes, feeling relieved that the worst had been avoided. Maybe some of the Novans had gotten away or even been able to fight off the Silica.
“OK, here’s another question. This is an important one. The beings we’re calling the Argathanons, is there any way for you to communicate with them? Can you convince them to leave Nova alone, or even to turn against the Detonans?”
At this, the boy shook his head.
“The Argathanons have only the simplest of neural networks. They have the capacity to understand one concept, which occupies them entirely. That concept is hunger. It can’t be reasoned with or argued against. It can’t be directed, by the Detonans or anyone else. They wander in search of the next green planet or star to consume. Eventually, they will grow and grow until they can threaten every energy source in the universe, only to die out as soon as their food supply withers.”
“That wasn’t the answer I was looking for,” Loris said, shaking his head and cringing. His potential solution to the problem at hand had been emphatically, leaving them with no choice but to find a way to deal with them on their own.
“I admit that I’m nervous about drawing near to them,” the boy added. “There are no walls that can keep them away, only distance.”
Loris took comfort knowing they only had a month and a half left of learning how impenetrable the Agarthanons were before coming up against them.
“I’m sure you’re aware that we’ve been working with some of the Detonans’ life-creation technology. Would it be any comfort for you to try to replicate some of your own species?”
For all the stars in space, Loris would’ve guessed that possibility would be a welcome prospect, but from the look on the boy’s face, he would’ve lost badly.
“Trying to reengineer my species would be a lost cause, since the Detonans long ago destroyed the signature code used to make us more intelligent than they are. While the program to design human behavior consists of hundreds of fragments, ours has thousands in a tableau of infinite intricacy. There’s no guarantee I’d finish before I faded away, even if I had perfectly uninterrupted conditions in which to work.”
“Sure, I understand,” Loris said, wishing he’d been able to get something more useful out of this conversation. He was ready to go, but one more thought struck him. “How come you told Brina about her pregnancy but not me?”
“Because I wasn’t sure if you were the father.”
The image of the boy’s placid face as those words trickled through Loris’s mind stayed eerily present as he left the medical wing and traveled through the station. The idea that he wasn’t the father came with only one galling implication, one he couldn’t yet raise even in his mind.
It put him in a sour mood when he visited the offices of the scientific research team for his last chance to find a way to survive an encounter against the Agarthanons. At this point Riki Lala was his best hope, and it turned out he wasn’t the only one to feel that way. Panic was already there, trying to mine her for information as well.
They were seated at the long table with a few staff members. Loris slid into a chair, trying not to interrupt.
“From a purely chemical standpoint, a cloud of dust on a humid day has ninety-five percent of what it takes to form a human. If you can conceptualize that kind of composition, you have a good idea of the form of these creatures. So to call them a gas is somewhat disingenuous. They can be amorphous and transparent, but there are solid molecules in there that are receiving and sending signals to others in a way that defines the cohesiveness of the organism,” Lala explained.
Panic leaned forward and set her elbows on the table. From where he sat, Loris couldn’t help but notice the difference in size between these two women. Panic could’ve picked up Lala and thrown her across the room.
“But how is it possible for something like that to be alive?”
“Sitting here on a station that is essentially riding light waves over vast distances, it might seem ridiculous that we don’t have an airtight definition of the difference between something that’s alive and something that isn’t, but that’s the truth of it. Not even the most basic tenets apply in all cases, like the capacity for reproduction or ability to react to an external environment. We don’t know what sort of relationship these creatures have with the universe,” Lala said.
This may have been the one time Loris knew something she didn’t, and he wasn’t about to let it go to waste.
“Actually, the boy was telling me that the Agarthanons are driven by a feeling of hunger,” he said.
Lala looked at him and then appeared to look through him in that way she did when she was thinking.
“That makes sense, and really it’s no different from any other common animal we’re familiar with that lives by a constant search for food. But instead of deriving nutrition from solids that are then internally broken down into polypeptide chains, these beings bypass all of that bulky physical matter and directly absorb the flow of electrons. According to the texts Trynton Quade has uncovered, the compass that guides them is thermal in nature. Their favorite thing to eat is heat,” Lala explained.
“Is there a way we can use that knowledge to fight them?” Panic quickly asked.
Lala exhaled and swallowed.
“Assuming that they detected heat using the same kinds of infrared sensing we do, I don’t think anything other than blowing the core would even get their attention, and that couldn’t be maintained for very long. Short of manufacturing a supernova, it’s unlikely we could distract them from a meal so close to being within their grasp.”
“Oh,” Panic said, deflated.
“I’ll tell you how not to fight them,” she went on. “The Detonans attempted to use electromagnetic pulses in the hopes of paralyzing their neural net. That apparently wasn’t enough to kill them, and all of the Detonans involved died. When we say they absorb energy, that stroke is a little too broad to be believed. Presumably, they’d gobble up the heat from a flamethrower, but would they absorb the kinetic energy if you swung a baseball bat through them? What about energy in the form of radiation coming from a nuclear blast? What about chemical energy? Even gravity is a form of energy. I find it hard to believe they’d be able to instantly synthesize such a varied assortment of energy sources, but rapidly figuring out what they are vulnerable to and then throwing it at hundreds of them over a large area isn’t feasible.”
Loris exchanged a look with Panic, whose concerns were written all over her face. He could tell she wanted to win, that she would do anything it took, but she’d been put in a position where failure was inevitable.
He sat back in the seat and groped for any kind of an answer, no matter how stupid it seemed.
“Is there any way to suck the energy out of them? If they like heat, what about freezing them?”
When Lala opened her mouth and then stopped herself, it was a promising sign that she didn’t dismiss him right away.
“The cosmic background temperature of space is about minus two-hundred and seventy degrees Celsius. They are apparently comfortable with that. Liquid helium is nearly as cold at two hundred sixty-nine. Liquid nitrogen is minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees. Maybe it would be possible to freeze them, but not while they were used to the temperatures of space.
“As for trying to drain them of their energy, it’s an interesting theory. Energy travels from places of abundance to places of deficit. That is how the Agarthanons move themselves. If there was a way to put something with a very positive charge nearby, it might t
rigger a discharge of electrons from these beings, but what that would do to them or how much of a discharge would be required to starve them is unknowable.”
“Well, it’s something to think about at least,” Loris said, figuring more questions to ponder could only lead them closer to a solution. “Maybe there would be some way to experiment with liquid helium.”
Lala shrugged her indifference.
“It’s a good thing I have a tank of helium gas that I use to make balloon animals for childrens’ birthday parties,” she said, possibly making a very dry joke. “Testing anything without having the object we’re testing on is going to be fruitless. We can’t even locate them, as you asked me to do, partially because we don’t know their chemical composition. The other part is because they are virtually invisible in the vastness of space.”
Loris stood up and looked to the door, but he turned back to the group seated at the table. The message Lala attempted to convey stung his ears. It hung over the table, a grim reality he refused to recognize. It was a lost cause. They had no means to fight. Loris couldn’t accept it.
“We’re running out of time. Those on Nova who endured the Silican attack are counting down the days until the disaster they know is coming arrives. We have to get there first. We have to have a plan. We have to survive. Attack this problem like the fate of humanity depends on it, because it does.”
Loris left the room and stepped out into the hall, where other people walked by as they went about the business of operating the station. He felt like he needed to blow off steam. It seemed like the singular force of his will was the only thing keeping the fight alive.
After taking a few steps, he felt a hand on his shoulder. Panic had come after him.
“I’m not going to give up hope,” she said.
“That’s exactly what a great Chief of Defense would say.”
CHAPTER 6
The Magellan closed the last stretch to Nova as fast as it possibly could. There was no telling what they’d find when they got there, leaving Loris feeling apprehensive that every minute they spent approaching the tiny blue dot would be a minute too late.
