by Alex Lamb
‘But if we don’t know what they want,’ said Bradley, ‘should we automatically assume that their goals are malign?’
Tam nodded like a badly calibrated housebot. ‘We still only know two things about the Transcended. First, that they hand out weapons to younger species. Weapons of unspeakable power. And second, that they use the stellar signature imprinted by those weapons to eradicate any species they don’t like. The only race at peer-level development to humanity that we know of is the Fecund, and our best estimates suggest that the Transcended wiped them out in a coordinated remote assault that took a little under a week. A week! This despite the fact that the Fecund had come to occupy at least twenty different star systems spread over dozens of light-years. The moment a star-faring species begins using the suntap, they essentially hand a kill-switch for their own civilisation to a race of entities about which they know nothing except for the nebulous agenda they choose to promote. Does that sound benign to you? A Faustian bargain is what it sounds like to me – and one we have already foolishly entered into.’
Yunus saw his opportunity to wade in. He waved a hand.
Bradley took note and shifted his attention. ‘Professor Chesterford – you see it differently?’
‘If I may, Brad. I have the utmost respect for both of my colleagues’ positions, but I think there’s room for a middle ground here. Doctor Sharp’s position is the one we’ve grown used to hearing. But as Professor Tam points out, it may be a little naive. I think we’d be crazy to dismiss Professor Tam’s concerns out of hand simply because they sound paranoid to our culturally conditioned ears. The real problem is that we don’t have a frame of reference for this topic. As Doctor Sharp mentioned, we only know of one “galaxy-dominating civilisation”, and quite frankly, we know so little about the Transcended that the actual extent of their abilities remains a mystery. It’s my opinion that we should withhold judgement until we know more. Simple as that.’
‘You appear to be suggesting that there’s more to know,’ said Bradley, one eyebrow arched. ‘Isn’t that the problem, though? That they’re not talking to us?’
‘Who’s to say they’re the only voice out there?’ said Yunus. ‘Perspective might come from anywhere. We only have the Transcended’s word that they’re the ultimate authority in this galaxy, yet we’ve never even laid eyes on them. We only need one data point to disprove their claim. And if that happens, we’ll have to start rethinking human significance in the galaxy. If it turns out that the Transcended are lying to us, as Professor Tam implies, we might have to consider whether some of our own home-grown notions of moral authority might hold a little more weight than those we’ve imported from a supposedly superior race.’
His line wasn’t the Transcendist Church orthodoxy, but that was deliberate. The people Yunus worked with were trying to reseed some of Truism’s better ideas in the public domain, particularly among the upper end of the Following class – the show’s core audience.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Venetia with a sneer, ‘but is this a discussion about aliens or church policy? Because, last I checked, we don’t have that other data point you’re referring to. We have ruins left by one peer-level species – the Fecund – which are ten million years old, and that’s it. Are you honestly proposing another such species exists out there for us to find? A living one?’
Yunus shrugged. ‘I’m proposing that we can’t know the answer to that question yet.’
She smiled darkly. ‘And if there is one, it automatically validates the idea of human supremacy, I take it.’
Yunus frowned. Venetia was leading them off-topic. Her remarks would lower her popularity ratings, which he didn’t mind, but ideally she shouldn’t be poking around so close to the show’s political agenda. Yunus framed a pithy reply but the recording light in his view-field snapped off. A call icon replaced it.
Bradley’s face fell. ‘I’m sorry, everyone,’ he said, glancing about. ‘Looks like we had to suspend recording. Not sure why.’
‘That’s my fault, I’m afraid,’ said Yunus. ‘It came in high priority. I’m sorry. I told them not to ping me here. I’ll be back in a moment.’
He hurried out of the recording lounge, his cheeks burning. The camera-drones darted aside to let him pass. He stopped in the waiting room to take the call.
‘Who is this?’ he said. ‘It really isn’t a good time.’
A call window opened in his contact-display. In it hovered the blandly handsome face of Ezekiel Wei, his top contact in the IPSO House Proportional.
‘Zeke!’ he said, astonished. ‘I’m sorry, I was recording a show. What can I do for you?’
‘Something’s come up,’ said Zeke tersely. ‘Do you have a secure line? You need to see this.’
Yunus glanced around and strode for the nearest privacy chamber. He waited for the anti-surveillance light to come on.
‘I’m clear,’ he said, looking into the nearest camera. ‘Show me.’
‘Word of it only just hit the House,’ said Zeke.
A separate video-window opened in Yunus’s display. In it, Tom Lark’s recording began to play.
Yunus’s skin tingled as he watched – partly in anger and partly in awe. The recording made it obvious that one of Earth’s Houses had engaged in some very public frontier jumping. Under normal circumstances that would have been cause for celebration. Earth would finally have enough political momentum to force IPSO to change the laws around planetary registration or risk war. However, the violent ending ruined everything.
Instead of a clean political lever, they had chaos. IPSO would undoubtedly assume Earth’s sects were responsible for the attack, despite the fact that it muddied Earth’s own cause. They’d point the finger because they could.
Yunus felt sure he had enough traction with Earth’s leadership to know the attack wasn’t Earth’s doing, and he doubted the Colonies would pull a stunt like this. It wasn’t their style. Which meant this was it – the big moment his career had been leading up to. He could forget grubbing around in Fecund garbage heaps. This event would change the human race for ever.
‘There’ll have to be a diplomatic mission,’ said Yunus breathlessly.
‘Without a doubt,’ said Zeke.
‘I want to be on it,’ said Yunus. ‘Whatever it takes, I want a place on that ship. I’m calling in my favours, Zeke. All of them. Earth’s going to need a representative.’
Zeke smiled. ‘We were hoping you’d say that. Your name was top of our list, along with Citra’s, of course. I’ll talk details with you later but for the time being, keep this quiet, okay? We can’t afford for it to go public on our watch.’
‘Of course,’ said Yunus. ‘I understand.’
As soon as the call dropped, Yunus reached for his wife’s icon and pinged her with the priority ramped to the max. Her face appeared, backed by shelves full of lab equipment.
‘Yuni?’ she said, looking confused.
‘Citra, dear,’ he said. ‘Get to a privacy box, quickly. You’re never going to believe this.’
2.4: ANN
Ann watched impatiently through her display as the Griffin slid towards port. She’d made the run from Yonaguni in record time but still feared it wasn’t fast enough. Ahead of them loomed the ungainly octopus that was the local Fleet HQ, straddled between the vast, dark masses of starships and buzzing with shuttles. Hundreds of kilometres below, orbital habitats formed a glittering band of pearls around their parent world: New Panama, jewel of the Far Frontier.
Despite being so close to her adopted home, Ann’s stomach refused to settle. It churned in anticipation of her meeting. The cloak-and-dagger nonsense her Rumfoord League work required sat poorly with her. Policing the Frontier had been difficult enough before she’d been required to start lying to her own people.
She’d have given anything for a day off on the surface. New Panama was, to her mind, the most optimist
ic of worlds – close to what she’d hoped the future would be like as a child. Bryant City was all broad, domed spaces and habitat canyons. None of the horrid supertowers that blighted other worlds. On rest days, she liked to visit the McKlusky Museum and attend the public talks. Everyone there appeared to be making deals or showing up with some new discovery. The mood of excitement the place contained just from being the gateway between the old and new frontiers hung in the air like fragrant smoke.
Before Baron and Monet’s fateful voyage, humanity had been restricted to an onion-skin layer of stars all the same distance from the galactic core – a region defined by the limitations of warp drive. But with the discovery of the nearby Penfield Lobe, everything had changed. Now they had access to a second layer of stars crammed with the ruins of the Fecund civilisation. New Panama lay at that solitary junction, a hub for trade, science and exploration.
Bryant City had half a dozen different research institutions just for studying the lobe and a dozen more dedicated to the alien remains that littered the outer system. The place had come a long way since Monet’s discovery of it. And business decrypting the Fecund technology found in the new territories never stopped booming. Ann loved the world for the hope it offered when the rest of the Far Frontier seemed so squalid.
Slowly, Fleet HQ slid up to obscure the view. Ann found herself looking out at a silver-grey horizon of metal and ceramic struts that stretched for dozens of kilometres. Here and there, sensor towers rose like gothic spires into the star-spattered sky.
The Griffin slid to a gentle halt and a soft bonging sound filled the cabin as the locks engaged. Ann fought down another wave of excited unease as she unclipped from her bunk and drifted into the cabin’s central well.
‘I’m proud of all of you,’ she told her crew. ‘We did a great job.’
They’d already guessed she had some kind of important meeting to attend. She could see the curiosity written in their eyes.
‘I’ll be gone for a while,’ she said. ‘Hours, maybe, so please shut down without me. And in case you finish before I get back, enjoy your break. You all deserve it.’
She tried for a winning smile and fought down a stab of jealousy towards her own team.
River shot her a concerned look as she made for the airlock. ‘Hope it goes well,’ he said.
‘Me, too,’ said Ann as she sealed herself in.
The Griffin’s docking pod slid up through the ship’s mesohull and mated with the standard-issue transit pod waiting at the end of the tethering arm. As the doors swung open, Ann glided across from one bland, biocarpeted interior to the other.
‘Welcome back, Captain Ludik,’ said the transit in a friendly, feminine voice as it accelerated away from the ship. The main screen showed her a map of her location on the station and various useful facilities she might want to visit.
‘Where would you like to go?’ it asked eagerly. ‘I can deliver you to your office in four-point-eight minutes or the officers’ lounge in five.’
‘There’s a project I need to check on first,’ said Ann. ‘The details are here.’
She pressed the chip in the back of her hand against the reader in the transit’s wall.
An ungainly pause ensued. The pod momentarily slowed and then accelerated again as its usual identity went to sleep and another one woke up.
‘Secure reboot complete,’ said the SAP in a new voice – one with a deeper, more directive tone. ‘Lie back, please, Captain. Transit will be swift.’
Ann clipped herself into the furry lining of the pod using pull-out straps from the wall and held on tight as the transit routed her out of the human pod channels and into the ones designed for freight. Freight-pods didn’t operate under the same acceleration limits, which meant the ride could be rough.
‘Do I have a meeting point?’ she asked as she was jounced and jerked through a complex web of girders between boxes of machine parts and canisters of coolant. The shadows of tubes and walkways flashed past on the monitors.
‘Yes. Your end point is confirmed. Your contact is waiting for you. Surveillance cover for this meeting has also been arranged. Details will be deposited in your chip on your return trip.’
When Ann or one of the other members of the Rumfoord League needed to take time out, they were simply listed as not available, which usually meant working on one of IPSO’s secure projects. And there were enough such projects in the Fleet that the conspiracy was easy to hide, particularly with the high-level support the League commanded. But that didn’t stop Ann hating every minute of the subterfuge.
The pod lurched to a halt, tilted ninety degrees and slid her under the carapace of a large crab-shaped maintenance robot. The screens’ view swapped to the crab’s primary cameras. Ann felt a surge of acceleration as the robot sped away from the Fleet station and out into empty space.
Though she felt badly in need of conversation, she knew better than to try to talk with the pod. The stealth SAP now in charge of it had deliberately filtered access to information and was designed to flag a warning if she asked too many unexpected questions.
‘Can I get a status update?’ she said instead.
‘One has been prepared for you,’ said the SAP. ‘Passive-vid will play it on screen two.’
The screen flared into life as the SAP began its presentation. The League’s stylised Taj Mahal logo showed briefly, followed by dense tables of statistics.
‘Our Nemesis machine deployment at Tiwanaku achieved objectives but with unanticipated losses,’ it said.
Ann groaned. The Nems made her nervous, but she wasn’t alone in that.
‘Human error caused a delay in initiating the swarm surge. Consequently, warp exodus was delayed by approximately one standard day. Rather than encountering a system in post-swarm fugue, the Reynard and Horton arrived prior to engagement. Both ships were lost. Fortunately, swift action on the part of the Reynard’s captain meant that knowledge of the event still passed to Fleet control.’
Ann shook her head at the awful waste. That was some terrible timing. The Horton had been full of families. She reminded herself that a lot more innocent people would die before the project was over. Their loss would make this tragedy a footnote by comparison.
‘Nemesis machine activity ran entirely as predicted by the mean standard model with the exception of a single behaviour – the incorporation of a broadcast message into the attack pattern.’
The presentation played the message loop. Ann watched the terrified boy backing away from whatever piece of alien machinery had come to get him and nausea rose as she imagined what must have happened next. She put a hand over her mouth.
The fact that the message appeared to represent a certain level of autonomous intelligence – not to mention malice – disturbed her, but she knew that wasn’t a fully rational response. There’d always been evidence that the Nems were smart. They appeared to be almost on a par with human SAP technology. What they weren’t, though, was flexible, creative or self-aware. The League would never have dared use them if they had been.
The last war had brought hard lessons about the misuse of alien technology. The League overcompensated by modelling and testing everything to the nth degree. Some of the conspirators called it overkill. Ann called it wise.
The Nems always incorporated a small amount of foreign material into their matrix after each attack, and this showed up as subsequent modifications to their behaviour. To Ann’s mind this meant you could never be too careful. Thankfully, the Nems’ overall sophistication never wavered.
‘The message has been subject to significant subsequent analysis,’ said the SAP, as if picking up on her alarm. ‘Concerns were raised that it constituted an entirely new behaviour. However, closer examination of the records of previous Nemesis machine operations reveals that a broadcast message has always been associated with attacks. Prior analysis had erroneously assumed this message was s
ome kind of targeting signal. In fact, what occurred during this attack was a translation from the Nemesis machine language to an approximation of our own, using material culled from the protocols of co-opted machines.’
That came as something of a relief, though it did little to quell Ann’s overall sense of unease.
‘The one remaining concern regarding the attack was that the presence of the two extra ships increased the size of the target, and therefore the mutation risk incurred through ingestion. The League notes, however, that recent scans of the Tiwanaku System suggest that the machines are operating entirely within tolerances. The presence of extra biological samples does not appear to have distorted machine behaviour patterns. This may be because the samples in question were destroyed during acquisition.’
In other words, everyone died before the machines could get to them. Ann hoped so, for their sake. Not for the first time, she shuddered at what she’d become involved with. Had she not considered it absolutely necessary, she never would have joined the Rumfoord League. But the discovery of the Snakepit System and its attendant technologies had left the conspirators in an impossible position.
It had started with the realisation that Earth’s sects had been keeping discoveries in Fecund space secret from IPSO, a move clearly aimed at strengthening their hand if war broke out. After that, it was only a matter of time before certain Fleet captains had started doing a little off-the-books exploring for themselves to even the odds. They’d only been looking for an extra Fecund secret or two, but the world they found changed everything. After that, keeping their discoveries secret became a necessity. Had they made it public, the debate over control of Snakepit would have sparked a conflict all by itself. The planet was, as Sam had put it once, ‘the dirty great toyshop the Transcended always meant us to find’.
