‘Yes, it’s nearly identical in many ways.’
‘So we could stay here, right?’ Jerren said. ‘We could stop running and make a new home, right here.’
‘Perhaps,’ Idris replied, ‘but then what do we bring with us if we try to settle here?’
‘The Word,’ Meyanna said.
The captain nodded, staring at his boots as he did so.
‘But we are all descended from wanderers,’ Jerren insisted. ‘Would it be so difficult to start again here if we are able to defeat the Word?’
‘Do you remember your history classes, at school?’ he asked the deck, and then looked up at the crew around him. ‘The legends of a time when our people were consumed by ice?’
Jerren frowned at the captain. ‘That was just religion, fantasy,’ he said, ‘from a time when we did not understand our world.’
‘True,’ the captain admitted, ‘but then we also know that we did not evolve on our own planet, Ethera. Our species has no fossil evidence there, which led to the rise of religions and faith in deities, that we must somehow have been special in some way, the product of a god. It was only in recent times that we realised that we came to Ethera from elsewhere.’
‘How?’ asked Jerren.
‘I wish I knew,’ Idris replied. ‘Our history, that of our structures and our agriculture, suggests that we never possessed the ability to travel between stars until now, so therefore the logical conclusion is that we travelled to Ethera from elsewhere.’
Meyanna’s eyes narrowed.
‘And you think a world like this is where we travelled from,’ she said.
Idris inhaled deeply. ‘All I can say is that preliminary scans of the planet beneath us also showed evidence of periodic widescale glaciation, of ice floes that must have been miles deep. That, if nothing else, fits with the stories of legend that haunt the origin of our people.’
‘But if we stay here and the Word arrives then it will attack us again, and infect this planet too.’
Idris sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘We didn’t start this war,’ Meyanna insisted.
‘We did,’ Idris replied. ‘The brutal truth is that we became too damned clever for our own good, developed technologies too complex for us to control, too advanced for us to understand, and before we realised it they were in control of us. I guess we knew that it was possible, but nobody really ever thought that it would happen the way it did.’
‘The Word,’ Jerren said. ‘It was supposed to protect us.’
‘It still thinks that it is protecting us,’ the captain replied. ‘The Word was the ultimate learning device, devoted to collecting knowledge. It became the creator of rules and laws that were more effective than anything we had ever known, the builder of technologies that took us to the stars.’ He sighed. ‘What we didn’t know was that its greatest desire, to learn, required it to infiltrate our very minds.’
The captain saw members of his crew shiver mentally at the thought of what had happened, at what had been a pandemic of such bizarre and fearful proportions that those fortunate enough not to have been infected had been left with no choice but to flee with what they could carry in their hands, scattered to the farthest corners of the colonies.
‘How did it get inside us?’ Jerren asked.
The captain took a deep breath and looked at his wife, Meyanna.
‘The truth is that we just don’t know,’ she replied, ‘but we do know that it has something to do with our blood, which contains iron.’
‘A metal,’ Jerren acknowledged. ‘So they could use it, as fuel?’
Meyanna nodded.
‘The Word is in effect a machine, or rather billions of machines that act as a swarm and develop intelligence via sheer numbers. It’s like a human brain – each neuron alone is nothing, but a few billion combined give us self–awareness, emotions, feelings. The Word may be a machine but its components became so small that by infecting the bloodstream of humans they could use the iron in our blood to replicate themselves and then move onto biological manipulation, taking over control of people from the inside out.’
Captain Sansin nodded, images of the downfall of mankind flashing like a macabre movie through his mind.
The miniaturisation of technology had been a natural consequence of the advancement of knowledge, and it had been developed for commercial reasons: tiny devices programmed to seek out atmospheric pollutants and consume them before returning to stations on Ethera’s surface to be burned up and rebuilt once again: an endless cycle of chemical evolution. The devices had been given a catch–all name: Legion.
Of course, it had been equally natural that the military obtain the technology for battlefield and surveillance purposes. And it had been more natural still for criminals to obtain that technology and modify it for profit, or for fear. The ability to self–replicate had been expressly forbidden for all nano–technologies, but in the hands of those whose religious fervour belayed the voices of reason or caution, such considerations were of no consequence. At some point, probably in some illegal laboratory on a smuggler’s asteroid mining complex or buried deep in a city on Caneeron, a terrorist had successfully performed self–replication on a lone nanobot and within hours had lost control of the process as the devices began replicating without limit.
The first swarms appeared, replicating and consuming metals to do so, programmed to automatically attack military vehicles. Initially, the military managed to respond, successfully deploying their own nano–devices in retaliation and quelling the outbreak.
But somewhere along the line, somehow, the combined numbers of devices broke a communication barrier, an undefined line between autonomous machines and cohesive flock: self–aware, more than the sum of their parts. Intelligence emerged, and before it could be contained it vanished.
For over a year nothing more was heard or seen of the swarm despite huge military expenditure in hunting it out. By the time it was realised what had happened, the sheer volume of people who had become infected, it was already too late.
Nobody could ever really forget the outbreak. The damnable thing about it was that the Word had been intelligent enough, driven enough, that it had ensured some seventy per cent of the human population had been infected before it sent out a signal: replicate. The swarm had contained billions of nano–devices, more than enough to infect every human being in the colonies. There had been no need for outright conflict: the Word had already deduced humanity’s greatest weakness.
The first signs of infection had been a sort of mild fever and heightened pulse, nothing in itself. But then the first victims had begun reporting things swimming in their field of vision. Analysis had found the tiny metallic devices swarming through people’s eyeballs. Emergency work by military forces had confirmed that the devices were first hijacking the optical nerves of every infected victim, gaining control of human eyesight before then infiltrating the nervous system and spinal cord. Within days of infection the human being was entirely conscious and yet unable to control any aspect of their physiology, be it locomotion, sight, hearing, touch or even the ability to sleep. All was controlled by what became known as the Word.
Upon the replication command, the tiny devices either reported the position of every infected human in the colonies or blinded them instantly to render them an ineffective defence against the Word. In a single instant billions were blinded, including over two thirds of the military and the entire emergency services of all colonies, those in closest contact with infected victims who had then themselves become infected long before the pandemic was activated.
As panic spread and civilisation began to collapse, the only people who remained uninfected were those who lived in remote locations, or those who served in the military who were isolated in some way aboard distant vessels or prisons.
As the Word moved in, taking control of virtually the entire colonial battle fleet and all merchant vessels, so the infected humans obeyed the Word without question. Their minds, still their own, were
forced to watch their own actions without the slightest ability to control them. Fathers slaughtered wives and children, entire communities burned themselves within their own homes or travelled to the highest floors of tower blocks and strolled casually off the edges to their deaths. Those that remained stopped panicking as the insidious little machines inside them stimulated the pleasure regions of the brain, making even the most hideous of actions a pleasure as every last fragment of what remained of their human selves was lost to the Word.
In a matter of a few days, some eighty per cent of all humans had died in acts of suicide or murder prompted by the Word, who saw humanity’s numbers as the greatest threat to its own existence. With most humans destroyed, and those that remained firmly enslaved, there was no longer any threat to the Word’s existence or its pursuit of knowledge.
Atlantia, along with its prison ship Atlantia Five, was far enough from the carnage that it was able to escape. As a prison vessel, the safest location to hold convicts was upon the very edges of the colony’s planetary system. Forced to flee as fast as it could, the Atlantia likely remained now as the last pocket of humanity in the known universe.
‘We had no choice,’ the captain said. ‘Our only option was to put as much distance between us and the Word as we could, until we could figure out what the hell we could do to defeat it.’
‘Which we can’t,’ Meyanna pointed out. ‘It might be only a single ship coming after us but there are bound to be more. We can’t fight a whole fleet.’
‘There must have been other survivors though, right?’ asked a junior officer. ‘Other prison guard–ships, scout vessels, colony outposts and things like that?’
‘We never picked up any signals,’ the captain replied. ‘Not in all the time we were in range of the colonies, or at least the ones that I knew of. Nothing. It was like humanity had never existed at all.’
Meyanna rubbed her forehead.
‘So how come we’ve ended up here?’ she asked. ‘Blind luck wouldn’t have led us to another planet inhabited by humans, right?’
‘No,’ the captain replied. ‘I don’t know how we ended up here. The ship’s computer was commanded to plot a course that would be difficult to follow, to give us the best chance of evading capture or confrontation. It should have brought us to a location where the Word was least likely to find us.’
Jerren thought for a moment.
‘What if it did its job right?’ he asked out loud.
‘What do you mean?’ Meyanna asked.
Jerren got up from the hard bench and paced up and down the cell as he spoke.
‘The ship was programmed to travel somewhere it was easy to hide,’ he said. ‘But as the Word knows we would probably do that, and it has links to all of the captured military vessels, it stands to reason that it would probably have been able to plot an identical course just by using another vessel’s identical navigation computer.’
‘Maybe,’ the captain replied, ‘but quantum–randomisation algorithms were built in to our escape and evasion programmes. No ship’s computer should be able to come up with an identical course, in case of capture in battle and other dangerous eventualities.’
‘Yes,’ Jerren said, ‘but what if that function was switched off for some reason?’
‘Why would anybody do that unless..?’
The captain’s features paled and his wife looked at Jerren. ‘You think that somebody aboard this ship is infected?’
Jerren nodded.
‘All they would have to do is deactivate the randomisation protocols, which can be done from the bridge when sending direct signals to other vessels. Otherwise we would not be able to communicate with each other in battle. If somebody re–wrote the coding in the ship’s computer, or simply inserted a virus to shut the randomisation down, then anything we do could be easily replicated with an identical ship’s computer.’
The captain stood.
‘Over forty capital ships fell under the Word’s control during the outbreak,’ he said. ‘Many of them were frigates like the Atlantia. What if the Word used us to seek out older human colonies?’
‘Hevel,’ Meyanna said. ‘He’s not going to stand and fight. He’s waiting for the Word to reach us and he’s removed the entire fighting staff from duty.’
‘Or sent them to die down to the planet’s surface,’ the captain said. ‘He’s left us as vulnerable as possible, and the civilians are still inside the sanctuary.’
The captain stared at a wall filled with old graffiti, the scrawlings of the condemned.
‘Why, though?’ he asked out loud. ‘Why has the Word gone so far to track us down, and why do all of this if it can destroy us so simply? We’re a prison ship, not a fully manned frigate. The Word should be unafraid of us.’
It was Jerren who answered.
‘We’ve either got something it wants, or somebody aboard has answers to how to defeat the Word.’
The captain raised his head from his thoughts as though struck by clairvoyance.
‘Evelyn,’ he whispered and turned to his command crew. ‘She was the only person aboard fitted with a mask to silence her, right? But she was never tried for her crimes.’
‘She murdered her entire family,’ Meyanna replied. ‘It’s in what files we do have on her. She killed her son and her husband. She was awaiting trial for the death penalty when the pandemic caught hold.’
‘And that’s the thing,’ the captain said. ‘She committed a terrible crime, right? Carnage. Yet I don’t recall ever seeing anything about a trial on the news channels, do you?’
He looked about at the crew, none of whom spoke.
‘Isn’t that odd?’ Idris went on, warming to his theme. ‘A mass murderer isn’t normally somebody who is easily forgotten. Look at Qayin – he shot and killed a politician of all things, and everybody knows who he is.’
‘You think that she’s innocent?’ Jerren asked.
‘I think that we should figure out what the hell she was doing before she ended up in a cell in the high–security wing,’ the captain replied. ‘She had her memory wiped, right?’
‘Apparently,’ Meyanna replied, ‘something to do with amnesia, the shock and horror of what she had done to her family.’
‘Any chance that the amnesia was caused by drugs?’ the captain asked her. ‘That perhaps the Word tried to silence her?’
‘Even if that were true, wouldn’t the Word have just killed her like everybody else?’
‘Maybe it didn’t have enough control at that point,’ Jerren suggested. ‘If Evelyn uncovered evidence of the coming threat from the Word, then it would have been better for her to be silenced and imprisoned rather than simply murdered, or otherwise somebody else might have taken up her investigation.’
‘I remember her file,’ the captain said, ‘she was some kind of journalist, right?’
Meyanna nodded. ‘It would fit, but how could the Word have gotten her imprisoned so soon, and who actually committed the crime? Somebody had to kill her husband and child.’
Captain Sansin stopped pacing and stared at his wife.
‘The political class,’ he uttered. ‘What if the Word started by infecting them and not the people? It could have used them to cover up any leaks about the infection, arranged for activists to be imprisoned, families murdered by corrupt or infected officials to provide enough of a crime to have them arrested.’
Jerren’s face fell.
‘She’s been imprisoned all this time for the murder of her own family,’ he gasped, ‘and she may not have actually done it?’
‘I thought that her actions in the prison were to gain amnesty for her crimes,’ the captain said. ‘But what if they were acts born of her true nature?’
‘Andaim said that Evelyn claimed the Atlantia fired upon the escape capsules from the high–security wing,’ Meyanna said. ‘Governor Hayes ordered those shots, and if he was afraid of whatever Evelyn knows then it would make sense he would do such a thing.’
‘You think t
hat Governor Hayes was infected?’ the captain asked his wife. ‘He could have placed the bomb that destroyed the security wing.’
‘We need her back here, right now,’ Jerren said as he stood. ‘If she has the key to defeating the Word up there in her head somewhere, then we need to find it. Maybe it was her knowledge that forced the Word to send the replicate signal before humanity was completely infected.’
‘She’s dead,’ Meyanna insisted. ‘You saw that hull burn up. Surely nobody could survive that?’
Captain Sansin gripped the bars of the cell.
‘We’ll have to hope otherwise, and that Bra’hiv can find her and turn any survivors to our side. We’re running out of time.’
***
XXIX
‘Ranger One, ready for take off.’
General Bra’hiv sat in the rear seat of the cockpit as his two pilots ran up the shuttle’s small ion engines.
‘Keep the radar off,’ Bra’hiv advised, ‘we don’t want to advertise this launch, understood?’
The pilots, both marines themselves, acknowledged him with a nod as the groundcrew outside hurried out of sight and sealed themselves into their bunkers. Moments later, without any warning alarms being set off, the launch bays doors opened and the atmosphere was vacuumed out into the deep chill of space.
Bra’hiv saw his marines in their environmental suits running through a standard procedure, covering the shuttle’s departure against imaginary enemy fire from within the Atlantia. The only difference this time was the shuttle’s actual departure.
‘Stay low,’ he advised the pilots, ‘and keep away from the bow.’
Bra’hiv knew that the main viewing panel on the bridge would be focused on the distant shape of the Word as it advanced upon the Atlantia, and not on the surface of the planet far below. He watched as the shuttle edged out of the bay and turned immediately to port, the vast surface of the planet looming into view, a panoramic vista of blues, greens, broad deserts and rippled cloud formations.
‘Lock onto the strongest power source you can detect,’ Bra’hiv said. ‘It should be the fusion core.’
Atlantia Series 1: Survivor Page 19
