Nemesis

by Alex Lamb

  ‘One minute,’ he said. ‘Incoming data.’ He swapped his focus back to Ash. ‘Go ahead.’

  A link appeared in Mark’s sensorium. He knocked it back. Awful knowledge blossomed in his head. His jaw fell open.

  ‘Ugh,’ he said as understanding dawned.

  He felt a surge of anger towards Ash. The man had sold Mark out in court to bargain his way into the League, then been complicit in the entire plot that followed. But that emotion thinned to nothing next to the terrible realisation of what was coming. Death wasn’t an outside chance for Carter. It was a certainty. Just as it was for his home. His face distorted from the pressure of the knowledge coursing through his head.

  ‘No,’ he croaked.

  The next thing he knew, Venetia and Zoe were standing over him, holding his hands and shouting.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Venetia.

  Zoe was more direct. ‘Please tell us what the fuck is going on!’

  ‘We’re leaving,’ said Mark, rising uncertainly to his feet. His heart pounded from the weight of imposed panic that had come with the download. ‘Ash, can you get us out of this room?’

  The door slid open.

  ‘You need to move to a lower level using the emergency stairs,’ said Ash. ‘If a pod comes up to this floor, they’ll be on to us.’

  ‘How far down? We’re two hundred stories up.’

  ‘Just past the occupied ones,’ said Ash. ‘If these plans are right, that’s the eleventh below you. If you get down that far I can pick you up on a maintenance routing. But we don’t have long. The Gulliver will be over your horizon again in a minute, which means I’ll have to bounce via relay. I’m going to keep comms to a minimum in case they spot us. Just go. I’ll pick you up.’

  Mark turned to the others. ‘Okay, let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘We’re taking the stairs.’

  13.4: ANN

  Rather than heading for her station suite, Ann made her way to the nearest bank of private study-spaces and picked a cubicle. The walls sprang into life as she stepped inside, bringing up her personal displays copied over from the Chiyome. A touchboard shelf slid out to meet her hands.

  ‘Give me war modelling,’ she told the room.

  Senator Voss might not want to talk about backup options, but that didn’t stop Ann from looking for one. Maybe the senator would be easier to persuade with a better way to handle the Nem threat sitting in front of her.

  She should have guessed that Brinsen would try to undermine her the moment they docked. The jackbooted little rat must have been desperate to keep his own record clean. No matter that she’d got it right from the outset. They should have listened to Will more from the start. They should have trusted him. She fought back a throat-clotting surge of regret and got to work.

  The room brought up a system map laying out all her work on simulations of the impending sect/colony crisis. Ann knew the map well – it represented years of obsessive effort on her part. She’d crafted her own political SAPs, work most people would have left to a machine-intelligence specialist, and combed through years of political data to build her model constraints. The evolutionary coding engine that created fresh software implementations for every run had been off-the-shelf, admittedly, but almost everything else she’d coded herself.

  The war models had been Ann’s greatest pride and greatest source of nightmares for years now. When she joined the League, those models had been expanded. The extensive simulations the League scientists ran to predict the Nems were coupled to her code and the union of the two used to design the home system post-attack strategy – the most important part of the plan. Without a reliable way to vanquish the Nems and unite humanity in the aftermath, the League would be little more than butchers.

  On many occasions, Ann had gone back to her models, tweaking variables here and there to look for ways to avoid the need for a Nem assault altogether. She’d never found one. With luck, coming up with a way to minimise the response they’d already initiated would prove easier.

  She hesitated, her fingers hovering over the touchboard. Theoretically speaking, she wasn’t supposed to be looking at any of this. Sam had specifically requested a moratorium on further analysis. He’d pointed out weeks ago that once the League’s core mission began, further tinkering with the code would simply distract people from the difficult reality unfolding around them.

  ‘We’ve reached the point where extra checking over details amounts to paranoia,’ he’d said in his last team briefing. ‘It’s time to stop obsessing and start improvising.’

  She’d agreed with him. Under the circumstances, though, she could hardly imagine him complaining. Their own models hadn’t predicted him lost aboard the Gulliver, for a start. Still, it didn’t make any sense for her to announce her actions before she had something to show.

  ‘Block outgoing monitor traffic,’ she told the room. ‘Security code Ludik-three. Let me know if someone’s looking over my shoulder.’

  ‘Code accepted,’ said the room.

  ‘Now show me the failure cases, organised by risk index.’

  The room brought back a spread of hundreds of results icons, symbolically coded for easy recognition. Each represented a possible simulated future in which the League failed to stop the Nem swarm it had started. Most of them were dark red, the colour of disaster – an army of possible futures wet with blood.

  In those cases, a familiar grim story unfolded. If the Nems couldn’t be stopped after they attacked Earth, every human colony would be at risk until containment was completed. Snakepit would be boser-blasted to prevent further drone releases while humanity re-established itself with populations sequestered in sub-light evac-arks. The League had hidden agents on every human world armed with the blueprints for Nem-cloaking systems in preparation for that contingency. If the worst happened, they would immediately release their knowledge to the public.

  Ann understood that fallback scenario thoroughly. What she didn’t know yet was how much room there was to adapt it. She was hoping to find a kind of halfway-house – a handbrake for the project that didn’t result in wholesale disaster.

  She zoomed in on the least dramatic scenarios – a field of amber icons off at one edge of the sea of red. The icons welled up to fill the screen, expanding into summary glyphs. They looked a little different from the last time she’d scanned them, but that was only to be expected. Sam’s team had been rerunning the models with every new piece of Nem data they collected, right up until the instigation of the Tiwanaku swarm. She picked the cases where the target size at Tiwanaku grew a little too big for comfort, just as she’d experienced. Then she started adapting them.

  ‘Give me scenario modelling,’ she told the room.

  The walls filled with software components. SAP diagrams hung like surrealist chandeliers on her left, one for each political eigengenda in the IPSO Congress. Causal networks sprawled on her right, looking like crosses between transit maps and clumps of dangled spaghetti. Bright colour-coded points of interaction events studded them from end to end. Her modelling tools hovered on either side, ready for use.

  Ann reached out to the walls and started building, dragging pieces this way and that. She constructed a file for each of the different backup scenarios she could think of, whether she liked them or not. She began with one in which the League confessed its actions outright, and added a second where Will Monet added his public support. She built scenarios for the League’s home system response team going into pre-emptive action as soon as they could get word out, and others corresponding to daily intervals thereafter. When she could no longer think of possible solutions, she handed the entire batch to a dedicated planning SAP and instructed it to extrapolate more. With the new suite of scenarios ready, Ann set them running on low resolution. At full-res, the models would take weeks to complete, but Ann didn’t need details, just the big picture. In a matter of minutes, she started getting
results.

  They looked awful. Red icons spelling disaster for the League began to pop up all around her. She rocked back in her chair, her heart sinking. Senator Voss had been right after all. There was nothing to do but soldier on with the programme they’d started. Meddling with the mission only made things worse. A lot worse.

  A few ambers belatedly appeared. Ann zoomed in on them, but they weren’t exactly appealing, either. The visualisation SAP displayed org-charts of the League for her, marked with risk flags. Leadership figures like Sam and Parisa absorbed the lion’s share of the blame every time. All that differed were the number of League underlings imprisoned or executed along with them. And in every case, life on Earth was completely destroyed, often taking Mars along with it.

  Ann blinked at the results. They didn’t make sense. How could revealing the attack in advance actually increase the death toll in the home system? She scrolled back through the data. In all the new runs she’d created, the target size at Tiwanaku caused the feared phase-change in Nem behaviour, resulting in a massive spike in aggressive potential.

  Why? They hadn’t seen that in the original data set. She’d deliberately picked amber cases to work from.

  Ann built a sanity-check – a duplicate of the original simulation case she’d extrapolated from, without modification – and ran a fresh batch of scenarios. The results looked very much like the ones she’d just invented. The Nems underwent the same surge of development for a target size right around the one they’d experienced. And in almost every case, life on Earth was wiped out. After the League counter-attack, the home system became a tragic backwater in human affairs – little more than a memorial.

  Ann’s skin prickled. Why was she getting different answers for her copy of the simulation from the identical one on file? She pulled up the original runs she’d started with and scrolled through them, step by step. They all appeared to be in order.

  She folded her arms, worried now. In one set of results, everything looked predictable. In the other, they were staring down the barrel of a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions – the end of the human homeworld and the loss of at least fifteen billion lives. They couldn’t both be true.

  Was the discrepancy a quirk of the model resolution? Such errors were rare, but she’d seen them from time to time. She ran the offending scenario again with the resolution bumped way up and a priority flag on it to ensure rapid completion. That would burn a huge share of the station’s processing power but it had to be worth it even if they spotted her. Using so many resources wouldn’t make her popular but the League could hardly object. This was their future, after all. While the simulation ran, Ann struggled to think of an explanation for the discrepancy.

  ‘Room, show me the log files for the last official run batch,’ she said. ‘The most recent ones from before my current session.’

  Would the logs still be there? The science team was supposed to clear them out periodically. A cluster of files appeared. Ann exhaled in relief.

  ‘Open them all, please.’

  Millions of lines of output streamed up. Ann wrinkled her nose at the mess.

  ‘Collate and summarise,’ she said. ‘Show me a status diagram for each run.’

  A massive tiled array of icons appeared – thousands upon thousands of them reaching away into infinity. Ann’s brow furrowed again. Why so many?

  ‘Correlate using timestamp,’ she told the room. ‘Match log glyphs to result files.’

  The icons swam around into ordered pairs. She could see no logic to why certain runs had made it into the results and not others. They appeared to be scattered throughout the log. Then she noticed the marker spikes for risk levels.

  Her breath caught. The official results on file were legitimate all right. They’d just been cherry-picked from a much bigger set to show a safe-looking result. Every other run in the set had resulted in a horror story. Ann couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Someone had falsified the simulation results. And they had done so for exactly the target scale Tiwanaku had experienced.

  She fought down panic and tried to think the situation through. Perhaps the simulations had been altered after the fact. Someone at Snakepit had been responsible for the delay to the Tiwanaku Nem swarm. That delay had caused the loss of the Reynard and the Horton. Whoever made that mistake might have looked at the models to check the likely consequences. On finding them, it would be natural to try to hide the results. They might have wanted to conceal the evidence, or simply feared the impact on morale.

  But that explanation didn’t fit. The timestamps showed a date prior to the Tiwanaku Event. The implication horrified her. Had the release of the Nems been delayed on purpose? Had someone wanted the Horton captured by the Nems, knowing Earth would die because of it?

  Ann clutched her hands together to stop them from trembling. Something unspeakable had just occurred to her.

  ‘Room,’ she said, her voice cracking, ‘access my private files using code Seldon-Fogel and open secure box FiveClan Job, please.’

  The software patches from the lowly trial-rigger the fixer had given her appeared on the wall. She scanned the labels.

  ‘Activate the program labelled wake-before-install.’

  She dared not think. Ann sat there in the darkened room, sweating, as she waited for something to happen. While she waited, she allowed herself to believe she’d been wrong. Things couldn’t be this bad. Then the dialogue appeared.

  SmoovRig has uncloaked for update, it said. Do you want to upgrade now?

  Ann struggled to breathe. Sam had subverted his own conspiracy. He’d set up the League to end life on Earth and cripple the home system for ever. And he’d sucked her into it.

  While she sat mutely gawping at the screen, a new window opened up on the wall. It showed Parisa Voss’s anger-twisted face.

  ‘Apologies for the lack of warning,’ said the room. ‘Senator Voss invoked override.’

  ‘Why are you hiding, Captain Ludik? I thought I asked you to rest?’

  ‘You did, ma’am,’ said Ann. She saw no point in dissembling. This had to come out.

  ‘Then why can I see your name on the batch jobs filling our servers right now? My scientists can’t track surface activity.’

  An icon appeared informing Ann that Senator Voss wanted a view of her workspace. She clicked accept.

  ‘I went to put my mind at rest, ma’am,’ said Ann, trying to steady her voice. ‘I wanted to present you with a working backup scenario.’

  Senator Voss’s face darkened further. ‘Captain Ludik, your actions were in direct contravention of my request. Furthermore, you appear to have conveniently forgotten Overcaptain Shah’s ban on model use.’

  Of course Sam had banned the models. He hadn’t wanted anyone to go looking.

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Ann quickly, ‘we have a serious security problem. The impacts of the scenario we’re currently facing were falsified in our models by Sam Shah before the Tiwanaku Event. That scenario results in the complete loss of Earth and probable loss of Mars.’

  Voss’s brow wrinkled for a moment, then her expression froze. She peered at Ann.

  ‘What are you saying, Captain?’

  Ann thought she could see uncertainty in the senator’s eyes. She hoped she could.

  ‘I’m saying it appears that Overcaptain Shah may have had foreknowledge of the so-called accident that happened at Tiwanaku, ma’am. The one that put the Horton’s passengers into the Nems’ hands. And he appears to have purposefully hidden the consequences of that act.’

  Parisa Voss struggled visibly for words. ‘Do I need to point out to you that Sam Shah risked his life for the League?’ she said. ‘Or that his actions were instrumental in allowing all this to be possible? That without Sam Shah, there would not have been a League?’

  ‘I accept that, ma’am. I am merely reporting my findings and attendant concerns. Pl
ease, look at the data yourself. Draw your own conclusions.’

  Ann watched as Senator Voss scanned the pages of results.

  ‘What’s this?’ said the senator, her pointer highlighting the org-chart diagrams Ann still had open. The hardness had come back on in her eyes. She understood the meaning of the charts, of course. Her own name marked with a red death-flag topped every diagram.

  ‘These studies were part of my attempt to put my mind at rest, ma’am,’ Ann said defiantly. ‘That was how I discovered the tampering.’

  ‘I see,’ said Voss. ‘So you decided to check all these scenarios in which the League is tactically sold out. And while you did so, you also happened to encounter evidence of Sam Shah supposedly undermining the very organisation he created.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Ann. ‘Exactly that.’

  ‘I am stripping you of your League security rating as of this moment,’ said Senator Voss. ‘I am reducing you to advisor status.’

  Ann sprang to her feet. ‘Senator!’

  ‘You constitute an unacceptable security risk to this project and I cannot afford that at this delicate time.’

  ‘We’re talking about the death of a world here!’ Ann shouted.

  ‘And if I hear another word of sedition out of your mouth, I will have you shot,’ Voss finished. ‘Not one more word. Do you understand me?’

  ‘No!’ said Ann. ‘I do not!’

  The window showing Parisa Voss’s face winked out. Then, around it, Ann’s other work vanished, too, plot by plot.

  She leapt for the cubicle door. It opened from the other side before she could reach it. Two guards stood beyond. Both were Spatials augmented with killtech. To resist would be suicide.

  ‘Captain Ludik,’ said the first. ‘You are hereby under house arrest. Maintain silence until we reach your quarters or we have orders to shoot.’

  13.5: MARK

  Mark led them down the echoing hallway to the emergency door panel at the far end.