by Alex Lamb
‘Damn. They are smarter.’
He handed off everything but piloting to Ash and keyed in another suite of evasives, this time using his full attention to keep inventing new vector combinations. He swapped bursts of conventional acceleration with semi-random surges of warp whenever he had enough clear space to manage it. Faced with unalloyed human creativity, the Photurians lost ground.
Suddenly, Mark’s fine-sensor SAP came back with an image of something ahead, half an AU further out. Two knobbled, matt-black discs hung in space, spinning in tandem and linked by six feathery strands of some impossibly fine fibre. He’d never seen anything like it. It looked like a pair of night-coloured jellyfish joined at the tips of their tentacles, waltzing in space. He forwarded the image to Zoe.
‘I think we found it,’ he said.
‘That’s it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Wait. No. How? That’s not a ship. I don’t get it.’
Mark didn’t hang around for a technical discussion. He recast their trajectory into a Levy flight with an oscillating fractal dimension and stochastically inserted directed jumps towards their goal. With the baffled drones still falling behind, Mark swapped their course out for a straight dive and raced for the mysterious craft at maximum warp.
‘Fuck how it works,’ he said as the drive hammered him into his couch. ‘It’s where you said it would be and it looks fragile.’
‘But this can’t be it,’ Zoe subvoked. ‘It’s too small. How do you fit fifteen thousand drones inside that?’
She had a point. Each disc would be able to hold about a hundred at most. If they somehow packed drones in the space between the discs, they’d still have had trouble fitting everything in. The gap between the two ships was only about fifty kilometres wide.
‘Right now, I don’t care,’ said Mark.
As he neared their target he threw the ship around, dropped warp and dumped power into the thrusters, braking hard. The jelly-ships raced up to meet them. At the last moment, Mark rammed the warp back on, deliberately mistiming his bursts with rotating alignment. In effect, his drive became a gravity chainsaw.
The Gulliver plunged straight between the discs, mangling the delicate fronds and sending the alien ships juddering apart as the space between them ruptured in a hundred horrible ways. The Gulliver shot out of the other side of the gap leaving the tentacles of the jelly-ships mangled. Just two of the slender threads remained. The others drifted in broken tatters.
‘Good enough?’ he said.
Fresh cheering broke out in the Gulliver’s lounge. Mark grinned. His enemies might be smarter than before, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still lick them.
‘That was awesome!’ Zoe yelled. ‘I didn’t know you could do that with a starship!’
‘Neither did I,’ said Mark. ‘But it worked.’
Ash passed back control of the ship’s subsystems with a wry smile. ‘Nice flying,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think we’d make it.’
‘You just got used to not having me about,’ Mark retorted. ‘The impossible is my speciality.’
For the first time since Earth, it felt like everyone aboard – or everyone conscious, at least – was on the same side.
They headed on out of the system, leaving a flickering mass of panicked drones in their wake.
‘New Panama, here we come,’ Mark said. ‘At last.’
11.2: WILL
Will waited in the privacy chamber for the kick of the Chiyome’s drives to signal that the crew were distracted. They were fools, every one of them. But Ann – Ann was a viper.
He’d respected her. He’d had faith in her. He couldn’t believe how wrong he’d been. When they talked back at Triton, he could have sworn he’d seen something golden there – a kind of honest, ethical pragmatism that he had badly missed. But he’d been projecting, seeing echoes of Rachel because he wanted to. He was disgusted with himself that he’d become so gullible. Andromeda Ludik was a different kind of creature altogether. Nelson had told him as much. In retrospect, his former friend’s words held far more import than Will had realised at the time. The pathetic traitor had actually been trying to warn him.
She and Nelson were alike, apparently. Both were ready to engage in the worst kind of betrayal for some self-aggrandising notion of their own moral duty. Neither had fought in the last war and lacked even the first inkling of what trust meant. Did they not see that they were repeating one of the worst episodes of history? Well, now he was going to make their lives as difficult as possible. Maybe they’d grow up a bit.
When a burst of warp knocked him gently against the wall, Will began. They’d have the wall cameras active, no doubt, but the kind of work Will had in mind wasn’t the sort you could see.
First, he tested the limits of the space with his interface. It had been well screened – exceptionally well, in fact. Three long seconds into his investigation, Will realised he wasn’t getting anywhere. It was as if the Chiyome’s designers had built the privacy chamber specifically with him in mind, surrounding it with layers of buffers and cut-offs that no amount of hacking would unpick. On reflection, he thought, they probably had.
A fresh tide of anger threatened to rise up and swallow him, so he reminded himself that Ann had promised as much. He already knew this conspiracy ran deep otherwise they’d never have been able to get him this far. Orchestrating the construction of a single ship was surely a trivial task in comparison to engineering something like the Tiwanaku Event.
Will let his mind fall back to a resting state and breathed deep. His entire body was comprised of smart-cells and he’d not yet met an environment he couldn’t adapt to. He moved to the hatch and pressed his hand against the interface port next to the manual exit stub. Then he extruded a biofilament into the port and started exploring.
Will’s head filled with blinding pain. He recoiled in shock, the filament dangling from his finger like a piece of limp string. He regarded it in bewilderment as the smart-cells within it shrank and died. The necrotic strand snapped off and fell to the floor where it greyed and melted into the padding.
Will examined his fingertip in alarm as his mind scrambled to make sense of what had just happened. Had the Fleet developed bioweapons that worked against him? If so, that was nothing short of astonishing. There’d never been any sign of it. Not a hint that their science was even in the same century as that which made up his new body, despite the hundreds of tissue samples he’d provided for Fleet scientists to examine. For the first time in years, Will started to feel genuinely trapped.
He probed again, this time more cautiously, using tailored dead tissue crammed with inert polymers as a sensing surface. Microscopic surface channels allowed him to get a sanitised taste of what lay beyond. What he found amazed him. If this data port was anything to go by, the room had been sealed against him using something half-alive and wildly antagonistic. It employed a kind of molecular technology he’d never encountered. He could feel a cascade of teasing enzymes rattling against his probe, twiddling the charges on the surface like a hacker prying apart a firewall.
The Fleet had never come up with this. They must have found it down on that planet. Which meant the conspirators had gone and sealed the room using alien bacteria they didn’t understand. Will groaned aloud at the insanity of it. They couldn’t have taken a more suicidal step if they’d tried.
Will spent the next few minutes creating an array of ionic sensors and a suite of tiny microscopic eyes. They wouldn’t be as good as a lab microscope, but he’d at least get to see what he was up against. He offered the organism in the data port some sacrificial cells and watched it try to dismantle them.
Their cellular structure was like nothing he’d ever seen. Each cell had half a dozen kinds of nucleus and something like a Golgi apparatus gone crazy. He watched one of the microscopic aggressors manoeuvre a string of linked vesicles up against one of his cells and present them in turn like parcels
on a production line. After every interaction, the aggressor cell changed slightly, as if the results of the microscopic experiment were producing an attendant surge of messaging molecules. He watched the nuclei twist and shift in response. How these machines achieved such a level of orderly responsiveness at the nanoscale was totally beyond him.
Will felt his anger fall away to be replaced by a bright and cleansing fear. The tiny blob of protoplasm before him scared him far more than the drones at Tiwanaku. It indicated a technology centuries in advance of their own. And it had to be a technology. He didn’t believe for a moment that a form of life this twisted could arise without some very subtle engineering. The way it swapped up chemical weapons in sequence against his cells looked too much like software incursion backed by self-modifying code.
He launched more sacrificial cells, this time primed with vesicles full of molecular weapons he’d cached on Davenport, coupled to intelligent defences. The alien cells broke them down almost as fast as they had the unweaponised cells. Something like horizontal gene transfer appeared to be taking place between them, with about five different kinds of genes being exchanged at once.
Will stepped back from his experiment, reflexively wiping his hands on his ship-suit. What would this stuff do on contact with human tissue? He couldn’t believe that anything as gentle as organic life would last a second. But in that case, how come Ann and her crew weren’t already dead? Just breathing the air in this room should have been enough to reduce them to pools of protoplasm.
Something was going on here that he didn’t understand. Who had made this stuff? And what in hell’s name did they want to do with it?
Will had almost laughed in Yunus’s face when he proposed that the Transcended weren’t the only force in the galaxy. Ironically, the pompous ass might have had a point. Will knew then that he, and everyone the conspiracy had ever touched, was in deep, deep shit. Compared to that scale of shit, the threat of all-out war with the sects didn’t even register.
11.3: MARK
Mark had taken them little more than a tenth of a light-year outside the Nerroskovi System before he realised they had a fuel problem. He’d finished up a set of careful warp-scatter manoeuvres and was about to unplug and take a break when the resource-management SAP started shrieking at him about their flight plan. A cursory inspection revealed what had happened. Sam’s bomb had used up a staggering amount of fuel. They didn’t have enough left to reach New Panama.
Mark cried out at the realisation.
‘What is it?’ said Ash, his avatar appearing in the helm-arena.
Mark handed him the data. Ash’s face darkened.
‘Son of a bitch!’
Mark opened a video window for the jubilant group in the lounge to interrupt their celebration.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘We have a problem.’
Venetia paused, mid-anecdote. ‘What now?’
‘We’re out of fuel,’ he said simply, then passed them all the data he had.
The joy drained out of everyone’s faces like paint in the rain. Mark felt a surge of frustration towards Sam. The guy had badly overdone it with the antimatter. He should have known better. At the same time, Mark dearly wanted to hold on to that sense of them all operating as a cohesive team. It hurt to lose it.
‘Sam, you fucking asshole!’ Ash shouted.
Sam’s brow furrowed in consternation. ‘I was trying to save us. That’s all. I miscalculated. I’m sorry.’
‘You … you … you fucking idiot! You’re a fucking liability. Just like you were at Tiwanaku.’
Mark checked the camera on Ash’s bunk below him. The man’s eyes were bugging out of his face in rage. Whatever bond Ash and Sam might have shared, it had clearly broken. He’d never heard Ash make remarks like that to a senior officer before. Then again, there’d never been this much at stake.
For the first time he could remember, Mark found himself in the unlikely position of being the peacemaker.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s in the past now. We have to figure a way out of this new mess. And besides, it’s not all down to Sam. I burned a bunch of fuel getting us out of there. More than I should have.’
In truth, he had used nowhere near as much as Sam had put in the bomb. No wonder the entire swarm had spasmed in the wake of it. Sam had dumped enough radiation into that star system to leave it hot for the rest of time. He was amazed it hadn’t taken them with it.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ said Sam, his expression desperate. ‘How bad is it? Is there anywhere we can still get to?’
Mark sighed as he surveyed the options and threw them a star map.
‘I’m seeing one New Frontier colony within range – a place called Carter. I’ve got no idea what their facilities are like.’
‘I know it,’ said Sam. ‘I’ve worked with the defence minister there. It’s a simple place, a bit rough and ready, but they’ll have fuel and messenger drones.’
‘I know Carter, too,’ said Venetia. ‘I worked there for a few months. Didn’t like it much, but that’s beside the point. Wherever we head, we have to think about the implications. It’s clear now that the Photurians follow warp trails. That’s probably how they got to Tiwanaku in the first place. And they’ll repair that transport of theirs eventually. We have no idea how good the Photurians’ deep-space scanning is. We could be handing everyone in the Carter System a death sentence if we go there. There are hundreds of thousands of people living there and no defences to speak of other than the occasional Fleet check-up.’
Everyone fell quiet.
‘I could scan for brown dwarves,’ Mark said eventually. ‘Maybe one of those secret Fecund fuelling stops is close enough. If we find one, I can’t believe the sects would turn us away – not with the kind of information we’re carrying. Their politics might be at odds with the Fleet’s but they’re still human.’
‘And what if you fail? What then?’ said Sam. ‘We’ll be dead. And we’ll lose our last chance to warn Earth, where there are billions of people counting on us. Remember, it’s easier to follow the warp trail of an arriving ship than a departing one. And if they could follow us to Nerroskovi, who’s to say they can’t make it to Earth? We left breadcrumbs running straight back to the home system – Ariel Two-sized breadcrumbs.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘Imagine that.’
Sam shook his head. ‘It’s grim, but we need to be realistic here. At least the population of Carter is relatively small. If we’re clear with them up front, they’ll have enough time to prep an evacuation ark.’
‘Evacuate the whole planet?’ said Venetia. ‘That won’t be easy. There are Flag settlements there for a start. Big ones. Are you expecting the colonists to lay on accommodation for them, too?’
Sam sighed. ‘I don’t know what to say. This whole situation’s a mess. I can’t apologise enough for that. But as Mark pointed out before – we have a mission plan and we have our duty. The sooner we’re fuelled up and on our way to New Panama, the better it will be for everyone. We can use the message drones at Carter to send advance warning to Earth. And if we’re lucky with our timing, the Fleet will be able to send a gunship constellation back there before any trouble starts.’
‘Presuming they don’t shoot the messenger first,’ said Venetia. ‘Remember, we’re not going to be welcome. First we show up demanding fuel and then announce that we may be trailing killer aliens behind us. Then we tell them that the best they can hope for is hiding out in a sub-light barge for three months while the Fleet dukes it out with some unknown invaders to stop their whole world from burning. They aren’t going to love it.’
‘I’ll square it with the local leadership,’ said Sam. ‘Given the trouble I’ve caused here, it’s the least I can do. And besides, we have overrides and a Fleet mandate to sequester fuel. They couldn’t stop us even if they wanted to.’
‘Nice attitude,’ said Venetia. ‘
And let’s not forget we have an ongoing attempted murder inquiry, huh?’
‘How could we possibly forget?’ said Ash, his avatar scowling. ‘Here’s the thing, though. If we don’t make it to Carter, we all die. So it doesn’t matter who is captain now, because Carter’s the only place we can go. Which means that whoever is responsible for that clownish fuck-up with the neurotoxin should be able to put down their bullshit grievances for long enough to save their own neck.’
‘Are you proposing we wake Citra?’ said Venetia.
Ash threw up his hands. ‘Hell, no. We don’t need a biologist to get to Carter and we might as well spare the poor woman the grief. Plus, if anyone tries anything else that stupid, we’ll know it wasn’t her, won’t we?’
His tone threw another pall of silence over the group. Mark glanced nervously at him. If Ash had once been a rival, now he’d become something completely different. A voice of hope, perhaps, if a weirdly angry one.
‘My point, I guess,’ said Venetia, ‘is that our domestic problem isn’t exactly going to make us look good at Carter, either. And if we don’t wake Citra now, we’ll have to wake her there. I can’t imagine she’ll be happy.’
‘I can’t imagine she’ll give a shit,’ said Ash. ‘We all know what she’s going to do – accuse Mark. And she’d rather do that on a planet than trapped on a ship. But in any case, we don’t appear to have any choices left here. Our route has been decided for us.’
‘Agreed,’ said Mark.
He glanced at the glum faces of his shipmates and realised that of all of them, only Zoe hadn’t said a word. She’d sat there, pensive throughout, idly tapping at her touchboard as if they’d been discussing the ship’s privacy rota.
‘Hey, Zoe,’ he said. ‘Any thoughts?’
She stared up at his camera, her reverie broken. ‘Plenty. I’m just not worrying about what you’re worrying about.’
Venetia raised an eyebrow. ‘Life and death aren’t sufficiently pertinent?’
