Nemesis

by Alex Lamb

  Almost immediately, the Gulliver’s systems started bouncing back. At the same time, the carrier’s spin rate dropped off.

  ‘Got the bastard,’ said Zoe.

  She passed a SAP handle to Mark. It appeared in his sensorium plastered with garish warning icons.

  ‘Now we’re going to use this thing,’ she said. ‘Earth needs a defence and we’re it.’

  Mark raised his eyebrows. ‘And you think we’ll be enough?’

  ‘Hell, no,’ said Zoe. ‘But haven’t you been paying attention? Those fibres can extend to enclose an almost arbitrary volume. We’re heading to New Panama first to pick up some battle cruisers. It’s on the way, after all.’

  Mark grinned. ‘Works for me.’

  ‘Park us between the discs,’ said Zoe. ‘And be very careful. We need those strands intact.’

  Mark dropped warp, killed his conventional velocity and slid himself in among the fronds.

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘That’s right. Now bust out that SAP I sent you. I’ve instructed the ship to map the flight controls to starship norms. It should all make sense.’

  Mark opened the handle and a blizzard of unfamiliar physics concepts erupted inside his head. He flinched from the pain of neural overload.

  ‘Holy shit. This is how they get about?’

  ‘Do you think you can fly it?’ she said.

  Mark snorted. ‘It can’t be harder than flying a lifter in a hurricane. Hold on to your purple hair, Doctor Tamar, we’re going to New Panama.’

  20: EARTH

  20.1: MARK

  It took Mark just a minute to figure out that he’d been absolutely wrong about piloting the carrier. Beyond the cosmetic parallels enforced by Zoe’s device mapping, the controls she had handed him bore almost no resemblance to those he was used to. He could fathom the mechanisms for increasing and decreasing the rate of spin. Nothing else made sense.

  ‘I take it back,’ he said. ‘This thing is nuts. Help me out here.’

  ‘Let me look,’ said Zoe.

  She fell silent. Through the camera feed, Mark watched her eyes go wide as she scanned the code.

  ‘Holy shit,’ she said. She kept reading. The seconds dragged into minutes.

  ‘Are we flying or not?’ said Mark. ‘It’s just that the last I knew, we were in a hurry.’

  Zoe breathed deep. ‘Okay, it’s like this. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a warp drive.’

  ‘What?’ said Mark.

  ‘It’s more like … I don’t know, spatial supercavitation? Shit. I get it. No wonder it looked like magic.’

  ‘Not warp? Could you make sense, please? What did you find?’

  ‘Remember how I said there were no B-mesons?’ said Zoe. ‘This ship doesn’t need them because it carries something with it that does the job instead. The best way I can describe it is as an ember.’ She shook her head. ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ she said. ‘There were hints of this all along. The tiny warp envelope, the crazy-sharp warp profile. Even that cloaking field for the Chiyome. They stole it, of course, without understanding what they were copying.’

  ‘An ember of what?’ said Mark. ‘Zoe, please.’

  ‘Okay, there’s something a bit like a suntap entangler on this ship, but it doesn’t contain electrons. In fact, it doesn’t really contain anything so I disregarded it before. I thought it was another Nem design screw-up, like an appendix or something. But it actually holds the seed of a novel vacuum state.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A patch of non-standard space–time. A little piece of a different universe, if you like. It’s not stable, of course, which is why it needs the entangler to hold it steady. But when the drive turns on, those fronds create a plasma envelope which another entangler field can act upon. It’s super-hot and super-thin, like the corona of a star.

  ‘We’ve been messing with vacuum states in simple ways for years – Casimir-buffers, for instance. But this kind of vacuum, well, it’s contagious. That’s the only way I can describe it. The ember spreads out over the envelope like a fungus or a fire or something as soon as you give it the right conditions. Basically, the envelope becomes a shell of modified space–time that taps curvon decay just like warp drive. The fronds polarise the plasma, giving the envelope an orientation.

  ‘And what that gives you is a shell of novel space–time that sucks up normal space at the front, channels it holographically over the surface via some kind of current, by the looks of things, and dumps it out at the back. Meanwhile, the space inside the envelope is almost completely flat. Amazing.’

  ‘Which is why I can’t see any controls for burst rate or orientation,’ said Mark. ‘There are no bursts.’

  ‘No. You spin up, release the magic gunk and go.’ She handed him some extra control details, bolting sections onto the mapping where she could. ‘You fly by tweaking the envelope, almost like sailing. You’ve sailed, right? Boats and all that – they still have them on Earth, don’t they?’

  ‘I never have,’ said Mark. ‘But it can’t be that hard, can it? Now would be a good time to learn, in any case.’

  Mark brought the carrier up to spin and charged the envelope. A haze of bright pinkish light now surrounded the Gulliver in every direction. With extreme caution, Mark opened the magnetic container around the ember of magic gunk. A shell of weird opalescent light spilled out from the jelly-ship in front of them and slid down to the jelly at the back.

  Before he even noticed what had happened, they were en route for New Panama. There’d been no thud of a gravity wave, no radiation burst. The intermittent telemetry he received from the carrier simply informed him that he was now travelling faster than light.

  ‘It’s working,’ said Mark. ‘It’s not exactly Gulliver-speed – just about a light and a half – but we’re moving.’

  It felt extremely odd to be moving at warp speed without experiencing the pulsing tug of artificial gravity. But for the data he was getting and the oddly dreamlike shell of light, it was no different from sitting in a vanilla rest frame.

  ‘Do you realise what this means?’ Zoe breathed. He’d never heard her so excited. ‘We’ve been wrong about the structure of space and time for about the last five hundred years. If there are discretised contagious vacuum states like this, then space can’t be smooth otherwise the drive wouldn’t work. Everything we’ve done with strings and spatial knot theory since the discovery of warp will have to be rewritten.’

  ‘Er, Zoe,’ said Mark. ‘I’m glad you’re pleased and all, but we appear to be accelerating. And I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘Really?’ said Zoe. ‘That’s interesting.’ She stared into her view. ‘Ah, yes, of course you are. Once the shell is in motion with respect to the CMB reference frame – which is as soon as you turn it on, really – it creates its own acceleration. So long as you can keep the envelope charged and stable enough, it just goes faster and faster. It’s the warp equivalent of a ramjet.’

  ‘Our power consumption is rising,’ said Mark.

  ‘Yes, because of the increased spatial flux over the holographic sheet. You’ll need more and more energy to stabilise the false-vacuum. But don’t worry – now I know what all those crazy little bottles of anti-iron are for. I recommend practising steering right now. By the time we get near New Panama we’ll be going so fast it’ll be impossible. Oh, and we should turn the drive off the way the Nems do it – at the edge of the system. Even earlier, maybe. Because we’re building up a spatial curvature debt at the edge of the field, when we drop warp it’ll be like a bomb going off. That’s the energy spike we’ve been seeing. It’s amazing the Nems don’t kill themselves every time they go somewhere, really.’

  ‘My, that’s reassuring,’ said Mark.

  Around them, the shell of light had taken on a fierce brightness. It shimmered and flashed like sunlight on water, b
ut with a speed and intensity that had nothing to do with nature. The amount of Mark’s attention required just to keep the envelope from collapsing was steadily increasing. It was like trying to pilot a soap-bubble from the inside.

  ‘I’m jealous,’ said Ash. ‘This is amazing.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Mark snapped. ‘It’s scaring the crap out of me already and we’ve barely started. How about you repair that captain’s couch, because I’m going to need help. This crate is really not designed for a human pilot and I’d very much like to get to New Panama in one piece.’

  As their speed increased, managing the drive became steadily more difficult. After a gruelling fourteen-hour shift holding up the delicate envelope, Mark handed control to Ash and fell asleep still clipped into his bridge couch. He woke much later to find Venetia floating beside the bunk, watching him closely. She looked haggard but intact and wore a flat, hard expression Mark couldn’t read. Her face had the weird baby-softness of newly printed skin.

  He levered himself upright in surprise. ‘You’re back!’ he exclaimed. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Quite well, considering,’ she said. ‘How about yourself?’

  Mark rubbed his eyes. ‘Fine. Got a headache. Is Ash still on duty?’

  Venetia glanced at the repaired upper bunk. ‘Yes, he’s doing fine.’

  ‘Are we still moving?’ said Mark. ‘I can’t tell.’ It felt deeply unnatural to be under warp without the familiar trembling pull on his body to remind him.

  Venetia nodded. ‘At about half a kilolight now, according to Zoe.’ She stared at him, her mouth a thin, tight line. The conversation stalled.

  ‘I’m sorry about Britehaven,’ Mark said abruptly. ‘Did they … Are you …’ He couldn’t voice the question he wanted to ask.

  ‘Did they break me?’ she offered, raising a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Not a chance. Though it’s admittedly impossible to come through an experience like that unchanged. The machinery removes that option.’ She drew a ragged breath. ‘I’ve seen worse done, though. On Esalen. During the war … You’re different, too, I notice.’

  Mark nodded. ‘Better, I hope.’

  She smiled opaquely. ‘That’s what we all aspire to.’

  There was something a little disconcerting about the new Venetia, Mark decided. She looked more tightly wound than before, and a little off-kilter.

  ‘Thank you for what you did back there,’ she said. ‘You saved my life.’ She paused again. ‘I brought you this.’

  Venetia posted a link to his home node. It opened to display a set of roboteer’s sensory mappings – crystalline diagrams full of thousands of interwoven threads running between pairs of curving neural landscapes.

  ‘They should help a lot with flying the carrier.’

  Mark examined them in surprise. The nerve patches were intricate and untidy, like wiring scans from a living organism. Mark had never seen mappings so overwrought. Venetia could never have designed them in the time since her recovery. She’d have needed months. And last he’d heard, she wasn’t a sensory mapping specialist.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ he said.

  ‘We copied them from one of the carrier pilots,’ said Venetia. ‘I’ve been up for hours now and I wasn’t really in the mood for sleep so I had time on my hands. I worked with Zoe. We’ve been very busy with the remote probes.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Mark confused. ‘The carrier had a pilot?’

  ‘Pilot is maybe too a strong word,’ she said. ‘There were human brains wired into the drone architecture that managed flight control. That system’s inactive now because you and Ash are flying it, which meant we were able to safely unhook part of the mechanism and take a look inside. You’re right that this ship wasn’t designed for humans to fly. But humans were flying it anyway. Or bits of them, at any rate. Those mappings I sent you are so deep because those brains needed a lot of support. So I don’t blame you for needing ten hours to sleep that shift off. You’re lucky you didn’t get neural burnout.’

  Mark felt ill. ‘Are they alive? The brains, I mean.’

  Venetia offered a bleak half-smile. ‘After a fashion. All but the one we accidentally discovered, at least. It was a surprise. Zoe wasn’t happy about it. I’ve learned a lot from that brain, though, and not just about the piloting arrangements. Wiring it up this way is very much like what the Fecund did with some of their disposable spawn, so the usage is nothing new. Brains are cheap, adaptable processors with excellent self-repair characteristics. I’ve seen this kind of surgical horror before, though admittedly not using human children.’

  ‘Children?’ said Mark, his throat constricting.

  He glanced back at the sensory mappings Venetia had given him. The idea of pressing his mind up against the neural shackles that had been used on some poor dismembered kid made him feel like throwing up.

  Venetia nodded. A dark intensity started to smoulder in her gaze.

  ‘But the Nems did something else. They altered that brain’s emotional and motivational architecture with a much higher level of precision than they’ve demonstrated in any of the other wiring I’ve seen. The differences are stark. I think that’s why they prefer young hosts, by the way – they want the extra neuroplasticity. By comparison, the work to connect the brain into the flight systems was brutal and clumsy.’

  She leaned forward and gripped Mark’s arm. Odd, quiet urgency oozed out of her.

  ‘But here’s what’s really interesting. For all their unpleasantness, the Fecund never bothered with any of that. Once you’ve wired in a brain’s pain and pleasure centres, why take risks with the emotional landscape? You already own it. You only risk degrading performance by tinkering further.’

  Mark watched her stare at him, a little creeped out by her manner.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said weakly. ‘Efficiency?’

  ‘There are no efficiency gains,’ she said. ‘There couldn’t be.’

  ‘Some kind of weird compassion, then? Were they deadening the horror the brain felt?’

  Venetia shook her head. ‘We’re talking about an alien system here. Compassion is a dangerous word, and one that doesn’t really apply. No. The Nems put more care into the emotional rewiring because that’s what they care about, Mark. Because they assign it value. They did the motivational rewiring first and the heavy surgery later, almost as an afterthought. And that’s why they scare me, Mark. That’s why we have to stop them.’ She clasped her hands together tight.

  Mark’s face creased in concern. This was clearly important to Venetia, but he didn’t understand. ‘I’m afraid I don’t get it yet,’ he said gently.

  ‘It’s like this,’ she said. ‘The Nems aren’t real aliens. We know that now. We’ve watched them evolve from simple machines in a matter of days. But they’re not some generic hive-mind, either. That’s been our assumption, but a hive-mind would never have bothered with that extra neural adaptation because there’s no pay-off. Do you see? The Nems are something else. Now they’ve learned about us, they want to do something to us. They want to cut us up and use us in some specific way. And from their treatment of children, I’m guessing it’s not benign. They’ve developed a very specific appetite for humanity and the surgery they have in mind isn’t optional. It hits at our core definition of self. Those brains aren’t strictly human any more.’

  Mark shivered with the tide of unease that passed through him. ‘So what’s the change? What do they want us for?’

  Venetia shook her head. ‘I have no idea. From the data we’ve collected so far, it’s impossible to tell. But I confess my curiosity isn’t so great that I want to keep them around to find out.’

  She fell silent again and smiled at him stiffly for a long second.

  ‘Use the mappings, Mark. They’ll up your flight stamina by an estimated fifty-seven per cent. And frankly, we need every weapon we can get. I want to see them wiped out, Mark, I
… I need it.’

  She squinted at the wall-padding and then pushed off hurriedly into the corridor.

  Mark gazed after her, understanding dawning at last. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who’d left Britehaven with a burning desire to beat the Nems. Venetia had taken on a quest in the confines of her penitence box, just as he had. But she was only now able to start acting on it. He felt a hot tug of empathy. Tears stung the corners of his eyes. They all had scars now. The pain was only worth it if those scars were useful.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ he called at her retreating back. The sense of crusade came upon him again, as fresh as the moment he’d stumbled back out into the light. ‘Believe me. I’ll make it happen. For all of us. Even if it kills me.’

  20.2: ASH

  Ash was on duty when they reached New Panama. Mark had succumbed to exhaustion again after another nail-biting eighteen-hour shift. The trip had taken far less time than they’d expected – just five days - and over the last day the acceleration had become ferocious. Ash simply didn’t have time to think before dumping the envelope and no chance to practise. His heart hammered as his mind reached out for the control. He alerted Mark, gritted his teeth and dropped warp.

  The result was completely anticlimactic. The shell of light popped and suddenly there they were – New Panama System dead ahead. For everyone nearby, their arrival wouldn’t seem as subtle.

  Mark surged onto the bridge, bleary-eyed. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘We’re here already?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Ash.

  Mark scooted up to his bunk and plugged in. ‘Did you send our arrival message?’

  ‘No. I thought you’d want to do that.’

  He watched as Mark dropped their carefully worded warning onto a public channel and sent it winging its way towards the colony. They’d spent hours trimming the executive threat assessment, trying to make it as clear and persuasive as possible. Their message contained a very condensed history of the mission and as much intelligence as Zoe had been able to glean from the Nems’ data stores. Along with the anticipated timing of the attack on Earth, she’d also provided estimates for how much spare fuel a New Panama taskforce would have to bring with them to get the carrier to the home system in time.