by Alex Lamb
Meleta sent across the coordinates. Ann immediately recognised the local vector for Snakepit. No change to Phase Two, then – something else to be thankful for. She watched Yunus’s eyes light up.
‘That’s outside IPSO space!’ he said.
‘Indeed it is,’ said Meleta. ‘Which surprised us, I can tell you. It’s highly suggestive. There’s a star on that bearing on the local shell, too. G-type.’
‘This is momentous!’ said Yunus. ‘That could be their homeworld.’
‘We’re trying not to assume too much,’ said Meleta, ‘but I grant you it’s exciting. Secondly, though, you should know that there’s been a change in the aliens’ activity.’ She passed across a video feed, then added, ‘The system now contains more than four million drones and a low-density cloud of quasi-industrial by-products about six light-minutes wide. Orbital factories have been churning stuff out at a crazy rate.’
The image showed a dense belt of material around Tiwanaku Four, far too heterogeneous to analyse at that distance. Still, it gave Ann pause. They were looking at a very active reflection phase. That particular Nem behaviour clearly hadn’t scaled linearly with target size. She’d have to keep a close eye on it during the hours that followed.
‘There’s also activity down on the planet’s surface,’ said Meleta, ‘but it’s hard to classify. We’re not close enough for a proper look.’
‘This is all interesting stuff,’ said Sam, ‘but we have to remember that it could just be a smokescreen. Nothing in this data so far rules that out.’
He was, Ann thought, a gifted actor. Had she not known, she’d have assumed Sam was completely on the level.
‘And lastly and most weirdly,’ said Meleta, ‘there’s some sporadic weapons fire in-system. We’re not seeing a pattern to it, mind you. It looks random.’
‘Some kind of interior conflict, perhaps,’ said Yunus. ‘Maybe our friends have factions, or are part of a militaristic society.’
‘Or it’s weapons testing,’ said Sam. ‘In any case, if people are shooting, that’s an extra reason for us to stay on our guard.’
‘Agreed,’ said Yunus.
‘I’m sending you the full observation package,’ said Meleta, ‘and forwarding a copy to the Ariel Two. Good luck in there.’
‘Thank you, Samyaza,’ said Yunus. ‘Keep an eye on us. We’re going to make history.’ He was grinning as he flicked off the comm.
The Gulliver adjusted course and headed cautiously in-system. The Ariel Two prowled along behind, as subtle as a tyrannosaur.
Now they had to wait. The Samyaza had better sensors than the Chiyome and would release a coded ping on a League band when they were confident it was safe.
‘Looks like Chesterford’s thoroughly taken the bait,’ said Jaco as they lurked there. ‘It’s hard not to enjoy that. He imagines he’s going to win a trading pact for Earth or something.’ He chuckled. ‘Yet more money for the grasping thieves he represents. It doesn’t even occur to him that he’s ushering in the end of his own vile kleptocracy. That’s fitting, somehow, don’t you think? It’s times like this when the significance of what we’re doing really hits home. It’s the other shoe finally dropping for those bastards at long last.’
Nothing underlined Ann’s discomfort more than this – her relationship with Jaco Brinsen. Ann steered clear of political discussions, while Jaco courted them. For the entire flight, he’d claimed whatever soapbox shipboard conversation supplied and used it to orate about the righteousness of their work. It appeared to be his way of rationalising the dark deeds ahead.
Ann didn’t want moral reassurance. Their job made her sick. Their choices might be driven by unavoidable mathematical facts, but that didn’t make what they had to do any more laudable.
‘That’s enough, Mr Brinsen,’ she said. ‘Let’s not get too proud of ourselves. Nobody planning to kill millions should be too smug. It’s unseemly, wouldn’t you agree?’
Jaco fell quiet for a minute before replying. ‘You’re right, obviously, Captain. We should avoid unseemly behaviour at all costs and stick to the mission plan, right? Just do our jobs and try not to let it affect us too much.’
This was a veiled criticism. Of the crew, only Jaco knew she’d been checking in with Will Monet at their fuelling stars, in contravention of both their Fleet orders and the League plan. As her first officer, he had access to all the same comms records that she did.
Ann let it slide. ‘Exactly, Mr Brinsen. Adherence to the commander’s intent, to the best of our abilities.’
‘Ma’am,’ said Zoti, her sensor-jockey, ‘I’m reading an encrypted local ping from the Samyaza.’
‘Good,’ said Ann. ‘Open a channel on tight-beam, please.’
‘Already on it, ma’am.’
Meleta’s face reappeared in a new window in her display.
‘Chiyome here,’ said Ann. ‘I don’t like the look of that reflection activity. Anything else we need to be watching for?’
‘No, ma’am,’ said Meleta. ‘I don’t believe so. The machines are behaving normally but at the high end of the envelope. We’ve run a few extra scenarios to be sure – I’m sending you the results now. What we’re seeing here is still very similar to what happened after the operation at Nazca. It’s scary to look at, but it’s within anticipated parameters. It does mean we need to keep our eye on the final ingested target size, of course,’ Meleta added. ‘Every extra human sample they get hold of takes us closer to the edge of that envelope. Human costs should be kept to an absolute minimum.’
In other words, try not to get people killed. That would be tricky, of course. The whole point of bringing Will here was to solicit a violent response from him. In the seconds and minutes that followed, some very swift action would be required to make sure that situation didn’t spiral out of control.
‘My goal in any case,’ said Ann. ‘Do you have the package?’
‘Sending it now,’ said Meleta. ‘Drone should be with you in five.’
Ann watched as the tiny stealth-drone containing the all-important biomaterial made its way between the ships. When it finally came to enforcing Will Monet’s compliance, this little package would do more than an entire fleet of starships. She feared the stuff and wished she didn’t have to carry it on her ship.
‘Zoti, a reading on the package, please, as soon as you’re able.’
‘I have it, ma’am. The material has about six days of stability left, which should be enough.’
‘A word from Snakepit on that,’ said Meleta. ‘The bioscience team wanted to stress the need for extreme caution. So far as they know, that stuff won’t interact with ordinary human tissue, but they can’t make any promises. The denaturing process is still in the experimental stage. They say that the genetic code in those cells is so dense there may be petabytes hiding in there that they haven’t noticed yet.’
‘In that case we’ll only use it if we have to,’ said Ann. ‘And on that note, I should be off before my charges get themselves in trouble. If this place is anything like Nazca, that won’t take very long.’
Meleta managed an awkward smile. ‘Rather you than me,’ she said. ‘We’ll be thinking of you. Please be careful.’
‘Thank you, Meleta,’ said Ann. ‘See you at the Pit in a few days, I hope.’
Ann charged her engines and hurried off after the other ships. She couldn’t afford to fall too far behind. The Nems might kick off a defensive surge from the moment they saw company. From this point onwards, every second counted.
6.2: MARK
As Mark headed into the Tiwanaku System, Ash came onto the bridge and took up his position. The mission plan required that they have the subcaptain on standby, which made perfect sense to Mark. Whether headed towards first contact or into the jaws of a sect trap, a second pair of eyes was likely to help.
Ash’s avatar appeared in the helm-arena. Mar
k had swapped out the Zen garden for a direct view of the system ahead, overlaid with colour-coded threat data from Sam’s tactical SAPs. Ash’s avatar stood at the centre of that mess of ruddy icons and looked grim.
Mark turned away from his scans to face his ex-friend. ‘You okay?’
‘Fine,’ said Ash. ‘Just a little apprehensive, that’s all.’
‘Understandable. Want to take over the long-range-threat scanning?’
Ash cracked a smile. ‘You bet.’
‘Between you and me,’ said Mark, ‘all the weird shit the observers reported sounds like a smokescreen. This still feels like a set-up. I’m just waiting for the shooting to start.’
‘Sounds reasonable,’ said Ash, turning to face his displays. ‘I’m not looking forward to this regardless.’ He said nothing for a few seconds, then added, ‘I heard about what happened with the others, by the way. Sorry about that.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Mark. ‘I’m not blaming you. Like you said before, we’re all professionals here.’
‘Yes,’ said Ash quietly. ‘I guess we are.’
Mark opened the gated link to the lounge, pulling up a video window.
‘Checking diplomacy team feed,’ he said. The data connection to the lounge had to be routed through the many layers of the Vartian Institute’s secure cut-out bus. It took a surprising amount of work. ‘Do you have my view on the bubble? You should see the helm-arena on screen one and an in-system schematic on two.’
The lounge displays had been set up to provide a window onto the Gulliver’s virtual space along with whatever data the team called for. Mark disliked giving them eyes into his world, but at least this set-up gave him eyes into theirs.
‘We do,’ said Sam. ‘We’re good to go.’
Mark might have been imagining it, but he thought he heard a kind of clipped frustration in Sam’s tone. Yesterday’s tension hadn’t resolved. Still, this was the moment they’d all been waiting for and Mark intended to ace it.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Fine sensors going live in five.’
Almost as soon as Mark activated the fine-sensor mesh, he discovered the broadcasts. Signal-dense low-power transmissions saturated the entire in-system region. They were all the same, and they all sounded like garbage.
Mark forwarded an audio stream to the lounge. A scrambled mess of music, static, data and garbled voices filled the air. Yunus looked delighted, Zoe appalled.
‘What the hell is that?’ she said, holding her hands over her ears. ‘How many channels are you playing at once?’
‘Just the one. But they’re all like that. As far as my subminds can tell, it’s a mix of DNA sequences, pop songs, machine code, Bible readings, enzyme pathways and all kinds of other crap.’
‘But why?’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘What’s it for?’
‘Is there anything recognisably alien in there?’ said Venetia. ‘All I’m hearing so far is mashed human content.’
‘Not unless you count the mashing algorithm,’ said Mark.
‘Could this be an attempt to communicate with us already?’ said Yunus.
‘Unlikely,’ said Mark. ‘There’s no evidence we’ve been spotted. We’re still too far away – light-lag alone pretty much rules out dialogue.’
‘So this is internal traffic,’ said Citra. ‘But why would they be sending each other DNA snippets?’ She started working feverishly at her touchboard, picking the message apart.
‘As yet unclear,’ said Mark. ‘I’m tracking a few outlier objects from the swarm that are close enough for us to look at. They appear to be artificial. Zooming in on one now.’
Mark maxed out the Gulliver’s telescope resolution and took his first look at one of the alien artefacts. The scowling face of the Prophet Sanchez filled the screen.
‘Jesus!’ said Ash. His avatar jumped about three metres across the virtual bridge. ‘I didn’t see that coming.’
Of all the things Mark had imagined they might find, the sour countenance of the man who had kicked off humanity’s first interstellar war was not one of them. The head appeared to be sculpted out of dirty ice and was approximately half a kilometre on each side. It tumbled in the lonely darkness, snarling at the stars.
‘What should we make of this?’ he asked the science team. ‘Are the aliens Truists?’
‘It certainly suggests this is sect activity,’ said Sam. ‘I just didn’t expect to see evidence so soon.’
‘I disagree,’ said Venetia. ‘Look at the styling on that head. See those hair curls? The iconography here is consistent with the Truth Reborn group, the one we suspected of founding the initial colony. Which makes me wonder – why would an invading group decorate the star system with their victims’ religious material? Or are you suggesting that Truth Reborn faked the invasion to protect their own colony?’
‘Okay,’ said Sam, ‘so maybe that thing’s out there because the invaders trashed a temple and tossed it into an elliptical orbit. I grant you we’ll have to look at more artefacts before we reach any conclusions.’
Mark had read about Truth Reborn. It was one of the weirder groups Earth had turned out, but was well funded by its parent sect and hugely successful. Each Flag colony they founded had its own Sanchez clone grown from reconstituted genetic material from the great man himself. Unsurprisingly, the clones lacked independent neural function and only spoke to make religious proclamations on behalf of the sect.
The creepy thing about them was that they weren’t life-sized. The sect manufactured them like little Buddha dolls which sat on shrines. Each one was about the size of a three-year-old, but ancient-looking and fierce. Mark could easily imagine such a thing scaring the pants off a congregation of the Following. What a giant replica of one was doing way out here was anybody’s guess.
‘Scanning for another target,’ he told them.
He zoomed in on a new artefact. A rounded triangular structure the size of a tower-block loomed out of the night. It had a shiny, wet-looking mottled surface and flickered occasionally with spastic electricity.
‘What the hell is that?’ said Zoe. ‘Is that a statue of faecal matter?’
‘No,’ said Citra. ‘I can answer that one. It’s a liver.’
‘Actually,’ said Mark, ‘I think it’s a drone reshaped into a human liver.’ He passed them a spectroscopic analysis, disbelieving what it told him even as he did so. ‘Note that this thing has remnants of warp inducers, and appears to still have antimatter containment running.’
Zoe shook her head. ‘I don’t get it. Why disguise a drone as a liver? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.’
He shared her confusion. Whatever was going on here, it didn’t feel right.
‘Targeting again,’ he said. ‘Scanning for consistent themes and patterns this time.’
The Gulliver’s cameras swept the system. One by one, a bewildering array of objects appeared, most of them made out of repurposed munitions twisted and squeezed to resemble everything from body parts to domestic robots.
Mark found what at first appeared to be a survival bubble filled with human corpses. On closer examination, the bodies proved to be four times life-size and fashioned out of frozen hydraulic solution from a Fecund nestship. Their perfectly duplicated faces bore expressions of terror and agony. A model of a domestic cleaner robot he found turned out to be made from compressed human meat, partially carbonised. Grotesque hybrid figures, half-human, half-machine, hung lost between the worlds, like disused mannequins from the staging of a nightmare.
It was as if, Mark thought, someone had taken a medieval artist’s depiction of hell and rendered it in space on an unimaginable scale.
‘It feels like we’re being mocked,’ Mark told Ash over their private channel. ‘Someone’s fucking with us. I don’t like it.’
Ash didn’t reply.
Mark turned his attention ba
ck to the swarm. ‘There’s still no evidence we’ve been spotted,’ he told the team. ‘There’s a lot of drone traffic in here, and none of it has changed course since we arrived. All that clutter around the colony world? That’s drones. I’m seeing some warp flicker, yet we’re not even getting sensor bounce off the hull. It’s as if they’re not interested in us.’
As they closed on the swarm and the planet it enveloped, a team of Mark’s sensor SAPs came back with some digitally resolved images of activity from the surface. Mark posted them on to the team in the lounge.
They showed odd nodes of activity surrounded by what looked like grounded drones. They appeared to be industrial centres of some sort, except they weren’t obviously making anything. The contents of the human colony buildings had been dragged out onto the sand and arranged in aimless spirals or long, meandering lines.
‘I need a deep sweep on that atmosphere,’ said Citra. ‘Look for unusual biomarkers.’
Mark refocused the sensors and posted their data feed to her view.
‘I’m not seeing any,’ he said. ‘Just your ordinary Mars-Plus— No, wait. What the hell is that? Is that biological or industrial?’
He sent Citra the molecular profile of some high-atmosphere residue hovering above the equator. The Gulliver’s analytical SAPs couldn’t make head or tail of it.
‘They’re long chain molecules of some sort,’ he said. ‘That’s about as much as I can tell you.’
‘They’re not matching anything in my database,’ said Citra, her eyes feverish with interest. ‘Which is an excellent start. But this could just be noise. We need to get closer. Much closer.’
‘Wait,’ said Zoe. ‘First can you show us more data on the drone cloud, please? What I’m seeing here is confusing. These things can’t possibly be functional.’
Mark called up a suite of engineering SAPs and blackboarded them together to examine the dense cloud of flickering vehicles. Many of them had been so deformed that they could no longer warp effectively.
