by Richard Fox
“There will be riots. We can’t expect people to just accept these things,” Caruthers said.
“How long?” Garret asked.
“Finally, a pragmatic question,” Ibarra said. “There are one hundred and thirty-seven tubes on the Lehi. Each tube can produce a fully trained man or woman in nine days. There’s an expansion facility under construction in Hawaii. The quantum computer banks are the only limiting factor for now. Once we ramp up, we’ll cross the statistical threshold for surviving the Xaros fleet in ten years, so we’ll have a few years to spare.”
“You aren’t considering this, are you?” Caruthers asked Garret.
“Using these procedurally generated—proccies, from now on they’re proccies. Using proccies makes my skin crawl, but I’ve been through the simulations. We could barely beat a thousand drones right now, and we won’t be much stronger when a hundred times that get here in a few years,” Garret said.
“And you?” she asked Lawrence.
“Incorporating them will require some finesse. We’ll need a plan, a cover story of some kind,” Lawrence said. “Have you even done a study on their long-term viability and stability?”
“There were a few issues with the initial batch, but the second is doing well under field testing,” Ibarra said. “Earth’s population grew by seventy-five people in the last two weeks, and no one even noticed.”
“This is—I can’t even ….” Caruthers stalked off and slapped her palm against the door until Ibarra opened it for her.
“She’ll be a problem,” Ibarra said. “I knew it was a mistake to hire her.”
“Continue work on the Hawaii facility,” Garret said. “We’ll work on Caruthers, at least keep her quiet until the deployment is so far along that it can’t be stopped. And I want a list of your … test subjects.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Ibarra said, waving a finger at him. “Can’t have you poking around my double-blind experiment. Let’s see if any come to your attention as proccies. Validate my hypothesis that they’re indistinguishable from any true-born humans.”
“Marc,” Lawrence said, “could you bring someone back? Load a record of experiences into a new body?”
“No,” Ibarra’s hologram flickered, “the body grows along with the mind as it’s created. Now shall we watch the Breitenfeld make the maiden voyage through our jerry-rigged wormhole lens?”
****
Ibarra, Lawrence and Garret watched the hologram of the Breitenfeld approaching the gaping center of the Crucible. The gigantic interconnected thorns of the Crucible morphed and slid against each other, twisting gravity fields in the center of the station’s wreath. While the Crucible writhed against itself, not even the slightest vibration disturbed the control room.
+You lied to them,+ the probe said to Ibarra, the words coming to Ibarra’s consciousness like a whisper from darkness.
Why aren’t you concentrating on getting that ship to Anthalas? Ibarra sent back to the probe, their conversation hidden from Lawrence and Garrett.
+Conversing with you requires a minimal amount of processing power. Are you evading my observation because of … guilt? You are free of your body’s hormonal restrictions and evolutionary conditioning. I don’t understand why you continue to lie.+
Of course I lied to them. I’ve been lying to them for years, kind of hard to stop now.
+Why? We could bring some humans back. They won’t be perfect but they will meet all expectations.+
You don’t understand humans, Jimmy. Hope can pull us through the worst things imaginable, but it can destroy us too. If they believe, true or not, that I could bring a revenant of their loved ones back, everything will spin out of control. We won’t have the fleet we’ll need to beat the Xaros—we’ll have another planet full of victims.
+Hope. Grief. I don’t understand why you biologics remain encumbered with such notions.+
We can’t all be sentient programs. This is why you keep my mind locked inside you, to keep the plan going, the long game.
+So why did you recreate Martel? Which spectrum of your retained emotions led to that decision?+
Martel has a special set of skills and divorced herself from emotions long before I recruited her. The decision was pragmatic, not emotional.
+Deception detected. You had a history of physiological reactions to her presence noted at the following dates and times. Number one—+
Shut up, Jimmy. Just be glad we have Martel. We’ll need her soon if we can’t get Caruthers to see the light.
A shimmering field materialized over the empty space within the Crucible, a riot of colored static like a dead TV channel from Ibarra’s youth. The Breitenfeld passed into the field and hung motionless for a moment, then shrank into nothing. The field dissolved and the Crucible stopped moving.
“Gentlemen, the die has been cast,” Ibarra said.
CHAPTER 5
The Breitenfeld’s bridge was eerily silent. Crewmen wearing void helmets and strapped into their workstations looked around, as if they just heard a strange sound.
Sitting in the captain’s chair, Valdar slowly opened a single eye and kept the other squeezed shut. He looked around, then tapped his helmet.
“Was that it?” he asked.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Ericsson said from her perch by the tactical plot.
“Astrogation,” Valdar said to the ensign to his right, “are we where we’re supposed to be?”
“I’ve got readings from six different pulsars … and visible constellations match with what the Ibarra probe predicted. We’re in the Anthalas system, sir,” the ensign said. Camera feeds from around the ship fed into the astrogation pod. The ensign adjusted angles with a small joystick and tapped a keyboard to take screenshots of the star field around them.
“Any sign of Xaros?” Valdar asked.
“Negative, sir. Spotters on all decks report clear skies,” Ericsson said. “Shall we launch the fighters we have on standby?”
“Not yet. Lower blast shields. Let’s see what we’re dealing with,” Valdar said.
Heavy graphene-reinforced armor plates slid from the windows around the bridge and wan red light flooded in, strong enough that Valdar had to throw a hand up in front of his face. He flicked a dial on the control panel attached to an armrest and the window opacity adjusted to block out the offending light.
“Wow,” someone said.
A ruddy star burned in space, dark spots dotting its surface like scabbed-over wounds. For the first time, humans bathed in the light of an alien star.
The star was much older than the sun, larger and cooler as it neared the end of its life. There were only a few hundred million years left before the star went supernova or collapsed into a black hole.
“Lafayette,” Valdar said to the Karigole aside the engineering station. The alien wore only a helmet over his head; the rest of his biomechanical body didn’t need the protection of a space suit. “What’s the status on the ZPE drive?”
“Fifteen percent and charging. We can transit back to Earth in … thirty-five hours. At the soonest. The gravity wormhole will be stable for the next four days and should remain undetectable to the Xaros until we’re ready to leave,” Lafayette said.
“And if they detect it before then?” Valdar asked.
“It will be a very long thirty-five hours,” Lafayette said.
“I’ve got Anthalas, sir,” the astrogation ensign said. “Forty-three mark negative twelve from the prow.”
“Show me,” Valdar said. He pulled a flat screen up from the side of his chair and swung it flat over his lap. On the screen was a picture of Anthalas surrounded by artificial rings of brass-like metal around its equator, the Xaros rig used to move celestial bodies. A small moon the color of smeared blood orbited the planet.
“It’s … a bit farther than we’d projected,” the ensign said. “Transit will take twelve hours with grav drives. If we go full burn, then we can be there in less than an hour.”
Valdar ran though time t
ables in his head. As the captain, he was responsible for the success or failure of this mission, but there were levels of risk he wouldn’t accept.
“Set course under grav drive. Set us in at a Lagrange point with the moon between us and the planet. No need to risk a drone catching a glance of us if we can help it,” Valdar said.
“Sir,” Commander Utrecht said, “take a look. Forward flak cannons saw it first.”
A blurry image of a crown of thorns over Anthalas’ southern pole popped on Valdar’s screen. Another Crucible jump gate.
“Lafayette, what does this mean?” Valdar asked.
“Curious, I had no idea the Xaros had built such a facility in this system,” Lafayette said.
“Answer the question.”
Lafayette shuffled his hands around. “I don’t know. We’ve never seen the Crucibles in use before. I have no idea how long it would take for the gate to become active, or how long it might take to bring in reinforcements.”
“Let’s get in and out of here without poking that hornet nest,” Valdar said. He flipped a cover off a button on his control panel and held the bottom down with his thumb.
“Now hear this. Now hear this,” echoed through the ship.
“Breitenfeld, this is your captain. The ship is in the Anthalas system and we are underway to take up orbit around the planet’s moon. We will remain under silent running conditions until further notice. Ground insertion will commence once IR buoys are in place. Remain alert and ready. Gott mit uns.” Valdar ended his address with the ship’s motto.
“Astrogation,” Valdar said to the ensign, who had a pile of slide rules and a large tablet out on his workstation. The ensign looked up at the captain, sweat on the young officer’s face. “You can do the Lagrange point calculations without the computer,” Valdar stated.
“Yes, sir, of course. It’s just manual celestial mechanics of an unexplored solar system. Give me an hour,” the ensign said. He squinted at the equations on his tablet, grimaced, and then erased something.
“I have full faith in your abilities,” Valdar said quietly. His last astrogation officer, Stacey Ibarra, could do the equations in her head. He’d been spoiled by such a talented officer. Yet, from everything that happened on Earth and on the Crucible, there’d been much more to her than met the eye.
“Silent running, everyone,” Ericsson said to the bridge. “One wrong electromagnetic fart and we’ll be up to our neck in Xaros. Think quietly, just to be careful.”
****
Bastion, as Stacy Ibarra had decided to call the space station where she represented the human race to the amalgam of sentient species allied to fight the Xaros, did its best to make her feel comfortable. The temperature and humidity of her quarters were always perfect, like she was in a Hawaiian bungalow and not crammed deep within an alien fortress that fed her recycled air. The food was whatever she desired, but no matter how much pecan and caramel ice cream she ate, she never seemed to gain any weight. Sleep came uncharacteristically easy for her, despite bouts of insomnia brought on anytime her mind caught on to some new and interesting idea. If there was one thing Bastion had to offer, it was the new and interesting.
Despite all the creature comforts, Stacey always felt ill at ease, as if something was constantly watching her beyond the edge of her vision. The harder Bastion tried to make her comfortable, the more the artificial nature of her surroundings stuck out.
Walking the hallways made it worse, always.
Stacey held a data slate against her chest as she turned down a long hallway. The slightly domed ceiling reminded her of the interior of the Crucible where a Xaros drone had killed a Marine right in front of her and had almost torn her apart to get at the alien probe embedded within her hand. The lighting was natural, as if she was walking around her alma mater at the California Institute of Technology, which was not the truth. She should have seen the planet Bastion orbited, an enormous gas giant with an atmosphere so active it made Jupiter’s look like drying paint in comparison, out of every window on this side of the station.
“Bastion, set windows to true view,” she said. The station complied and the gas giant appeared.
The station always did exactly as she asked, even changing its name from Rendezvous to Bastion at her request. After a few days on the station and learning its purpose, the new name seemed more fitting.
Another ambassador came down the hallway, and it looked like a perfectly normal human being. He was in his mid-thirties, losing some hair and had a slight paunch. The ambassador nodded and smiled to Stacey as they passed by.
What the ambassador truly looked like, Stacey had no idea. She could have stopped and chatted with him, and Bastion would have translated her image and words to perfectly convey what she said to the alien in terms and language it could understand. Thanks to Bastion’s conversion field, that’s how it was here: every other ambassador looked like a human to Stacey. And every other ambassador saw her as one of its own species.
She’d made the mistake of disabling the conversion field once and decided to walk around and see the ambassadors as they really were. The first one she saw looked like an eight-armed slug with a fanged maw and four eyes attached to stalks. She managed to hold her composure, then she turned a corner and nearly ran into a floating alien that was a gaping skull held aloft by writhing tentacles.
She’d screamed. She’d ran. She screamed louder when the skull chased after her, asking in a very human and caring voice what the matter was. She shuddered from the memory, as much out of embarrassment as fear.
Thankfully, there were several humanoid species on Bastion, and she was going to visit one now.
She knocked on the door, a slightly domed impression against a beige wall, and waited.
It slid aside without a sound, revealing absolute darkness within.
“Pa’lon? You in there?” Stacey asked.
“Come in. I have a holo running,” a man’s voice answered.
Stacey stepped into his room, and the door slid shut behind her. She was in total darkness for a moment, then the floor fell away. She found herself surrounded by stars and nothing else. She froze, too shocked to move a muscle. She could still feel a floor beneath her feat, but other than that she was standing in deep, dark space.
“Pa’lon! Damn you, give me a floor!” Stacey shrieked.
“Oh, my apologies.” A walkway appeared beneath her feet and led toward semicircle of waist-high control stations. A Nordic-looking man smiled to her and waved her over. “I thought you were a spacer, Stacey. Why the panic?”
“Space is just fine when I’m in a suit or surrounded by a giant cozy pressurized ship.” She held her hands out for balance as she took small steps toward the control stations. She glanced over the edge of the walkway and saw that it was a very long way down. Her mind knew the reality of her situation—she was in her friend’s quarters surrounded by a very safe space station—but her eyes saw something very different and for now her senses were overriding what her brain knew to be true.
She jumped the last two feet and let out a sigh of relief.
“It is nice to see you again,” Pa’lon said.
“Same, I figured I’d come say hi as you’re about to portal home for a little bit, right?”
“That’s right. Bastion came up with a solution to an agricultural issue that should boost food production by nine percent. The planet we’re on isn’t friendly to agriculture from my home world, but a slight tweak to a protein combination will act as a natural insecticide to a species of mites,” he said.
“Oh boy … mites.” Stacey raised her eyebrows and nodded slowly.
“Not everything is a life-or-death struggle against the Xaros, young Miss Ibarra.”
“For me it is,” she said.
“I admire your conviction. I was born in a colony ship long after the Xaros took my home world. I was fortunate enough not to see the devastation firsthand,” Pa’lon said. “Perhaps that’s why I like your passion.”
�
�Right, lucky you. What are you doing and why is your conversion field up? I thought we had an agreement. Bastion, drop his visual field,” she said. An error buzzer sounded from the ceiling.
“Member species has requested conversion field remain in place,” a modulated voice said.
“It’s fine for her,” Pa’lon said, tilting his chin up slightly.
The hologram over his body vanished, revealing a five-foot-tall, green-skinned Dotok. Thick black tendrils fell back from a high forehead and his mouth was a blunt beak with a point centered on a slight underbite. Despite not having a visible nose, the skin on the upper half of his face and his eyes was almost human.
“Are you shy?” Stacey asked.
“Cultural habit. We wear masks when we mingle with other groups in a political setting. Keeping the field up at all times feels appropriate,” he said.
“I didn’t come here for politics. Thought I might ask you a few questions about the next assembly,” she said.
“Ask away.” Pa’lon swiped a fingertip over a screen and the view shifted wildly, zooming in on a shattered comet, its tail stretching deep into space. Gas and dust boiled away from the giant lumps of rock that had a semi-coherent shape of a single large comet core.
“Ugh … I’m going to be sick,” Stacey said.
“Wuss,” Pa’lon hit a button and they slowly moved closer to the comet.
“Did your species evolve with a cast-iron stomach? Anyway, there’s a vote next assembly about contacting a species named ….” She looked at her data slate and frowned. The name was twenty letters long and contained no vowels.
“Yes, I know it,” Pa’lon said.
“I’m not on the voting list, and neither are you.”
“We wouldn’t be. The species will encounter the Xaros in the next two hundred years, but it is on the far edge of Alliance space. There is no way Earth or my world can send aid to, or receive aid from, that world before the Xaros reach us. Even with jump engines there’s no way we can interact with that species before the issue is largely moot.”
