The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  “What happened?” Callie’s voice was low and calm.

  “The factory came back online. It built something new. Something that moved only partially in observable dimensions. It attacked the insects. Half of their home planet simply vanished, like something had taken a bite out of it and swallowed. The rest of the planet collapsed in complete geological turmoil, of course. Still, the aliens were hardy, and resourceful, and some survived. Then the Axiom machine… sprayed the planet? With a kind of poison, but a sort of resin, too: a preservative. Now, half of their home planet erratically orbits their star. The broken planet is covered in a transparent coating, and inside, you can see the people, frozen in place. We hope they are dead. We are not sure. Afterward, the machine descended back to the gas giant, and the factory went offline again.” Lantern sighed. “The Axiom did not leave many species likely to attain sentience alive, so the problem does not come up often. When we find a planet with life that seems pre-sentient – or is already sentient, but does not yet have space travel – my sect wipes it out. We cleanse it, quickly and humanely. We have to, you see. What if the aliens travel where they should not, and find things that should not be found? What if they wake the Axiom, for more than just a moment? If the universe becomes too crowded, if the Axiom find us troublesome, if they are roused from their slumber and take an active interest in the workings of the universe again… Then we would all die. At best. Or we might be enslaved again. We would no longer be the Free.”

  Callie nodded. “You commit genocide, on a regular basis, to protect yourselves.”

  “Not regularly,” Lantern murmured. “The Axiom were thorough. Space is very big, but the Axiom went everywhere, and destroyed almost every promising garden of life before they even discovered us. We have been forced to cleanse only a handful of planets in the past ten thousand years. With humans, it was too late, and we were forced to take a different approach.”

  “You gave us bridge technology, though,” Callie said. “Why give us even limited keys to the galaxy if you’re afraid we’ll stumble on something we shouldn’t? Wouldn’t it have been better to just ignore us and keep us isolated?”

  “Humans like to explore,” Lantern said. “We discovered this early on. You sent out goldilocks ships. You would have built generation starships, or developed stasis technology, or found a way to upload your minds and send small fast probes full of your ghosts out into the universe. You would have spread out in every direction, endlessly. So we made a calculated choice. We placed fixed bridges at certain points, in systems where we knew there were no Axiom artifacts or facilities, and where there were planets you could colonize, or terraform, with enough resources to keep you busy. We hoped that would be enough. So far, it has been. Humans have been happy to explore those systems, and as a result, they’ve stayed out of more dangerous areas. We have other systems set aside, too, in case you ever grow restless – we can say, look, we discovered a new bridge, have a new world to explore. You see?”

  “You put up baby gates, to keep us from falling down the stairs,” Elena said.

  “I do not understand the metaphor, but if you mean we restricted your movement for your own safety? Yes. But mostly we did it for our own safety. Then you found a point-to-point wormhole generator. We cannot let humans have such a thing. You could go anywhere. Even without your conscious effort, it brought you here, to a factory planet. The sensors below could have noticed us. The Axiom machines may be stirring. It’s bad enough you have a generator, but humans share. They show off, they want to better the lot of their people, they want to sell things and become wealthy. What if you demonstrated the generator for someone else? Or took more ships to the station, and arranged to have those fitted with generators? What if you found a way to replicate the technology yourselves? Usually when we share tech with humans we cripple it, make it stupid, make it self-destruct, or hard to copy. But pure Axiom tech? If you figured out the mechanism, made a fleet of ships with generators, went out into the universe…” That tremble of tentacles again. Elena thought it had to be a shudder. Body language saying: I am afraid to even think about this.

  “Why let the goldilocks ships go on sailing through space at all?” she asked. “Surely that’s dangerous.”

  “The records were lost,” Shall said. “Things on Earth got much worse before they got better, and whole swaths of data were destroyed.”

  “Yes,” Lantern said. “We had no real data. We looked along likely paths, to likely systems, and found nothing, or found ships that had failed long ago. But there were so many, sent in so many directions. We simply hoped for the best. Our hopes were not realized.”

  “You didn’t have to kill anyone,” Callie said. “What you did, it’s monstrous. You could have just talked to us, told us there was a big existential threat, let us know that certain systems were off limits.”

  The Liar made a strange wheezing sound that Elena decided must be laughter. “Oh yes. That always works. Humans never go places they’re forbidden to go. And as I said: the closest thing to a culture my people have now is making up stories. Humans wouldn’t have believed us anyway.”

  Callie was silent for a long moment. “Fair,” she said. “But I still think killing fifty thousand people was indefensible.”

  “Your people were not enslaved for millennia by beings of vast power and cruelty. And, thanks to the vigilance of my sect? They never will be. I know you think our methods cruel. But sometimes, when a person has the crawling rot, you must chop off their limbs in order to save the body.” She sighed. “Or so I was taught. I was raised and trained to believe that no price was too high to pay, if it even slightly reduced the chance of waking the Axiom machines, let alone the Axiom themselves. But I have my doubts. A few of the younger people in my sect do. I argued against cleansing Meditreme Station. Strenuously. When the engineer you spoke to saw the Axiom artifact, and recognized it for what it was, and fled, along with all the others of our kind, they notified us, at our base in the Oort Cloud. We were divided about how to respond. I argued for taking a small team, and trying to steal the generator back. I wanted to prevent loss of life, but the elders don’t care about that, so I said it was simply safer that way: it would spare us scrutiny. Destroying the station would be too noisy and obvious, I said, and the humans might suspect us, and investigate. But my elders have fresher memories of the Axiom and their machines, and that makes them fearful and decisive. They ordered a full sanction instead. When we realized we’d timed our attack badly, and that you had escaped – that all those humans had died for nothing. Oh, the horror. The shame. The regret. So when I spoke up again, and said they should send a small boarding force, led by myself, to confirm the generator was on board your ship, they were shaken by their earlier mistake, and agreed. Unfortunately, you were better armed than we realized. You destroyed most of the pods. Only mine evaded your attack. I used our stealth displacement technology to create an image of my pod missing its rendezvous with your ship, so you would think I’d passed you by. Before I could get on board, though, the elders panicked, and attacked… which triggered some sort of security protocol in the generator, it seems. Now, here we are.”

  “It’s quite a story,” Callie said. “More internally consistent than most Liar confabulations. But why should I believe anything you say? Our theory about a Liar conspiracy to keep all the goodies in the galaxy for yourselves is a lot simpler and more plausible than all this crap about a godlike race of monster-alien bogeymen.”

  “You should believe me because I didn’t need to tell you anything at all,” Lantern said. “I could escape any time I wish.”

  “Bullshit,” Callie said, but she said it to an empty table, because the Liar had vanished, the restraint straps falling empty to the bed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “See?” They all spun. The Liar was in the corridor outside, floating in a lazy spiral in mid-air, tentacles dangling. “I have technology far beyond your capabilities.”

  Callie unholstered her sidearm an
d pointed it toward her. “But can you do that trick fast enough to avoid me putting a hole in you?”

  “You have seen how quickly I can vanish.” Lantern didn’t sound perturbed. “Here is my proposal: when the wormhole generator is operational again, we will return to your solar system. You will give me the generator for safekeeping. I will then destroy it, and let you go on your way.”

  “What’s to stop us from turning you in?” Callie said. “Telling your story and letting everyone know the truth?”

  “Haven’t we demonstrated how far we’re willing to go to protect the universe from the threat of the Axiom? I would suggest discretion. I will oversee the erasure of your records to remove all information about the Axiom. The destruction of Meditreme Station will be blamed on accidents, or perhaps pirates – there is a notorious group on Glauketas, yes? Surely you see this is the only way for our species to survive. If the Axiom wake, we all die, or worse.”

  Callie shook her head. “I don’t believe it. Even if your story isn’t total bullshit, you can’t let us live, knowing what we know.”

  “My sect is forbidden to speak deliberate untruths, captain. We must be unquestioningly trustworthy, in order to do our work.”

  “So says a Liar. We’re too dangerous a loose end for you to leave us alive. Criminal conspiracies don’t leave witnesses.”

  “Once the evidence is gone, I do not fear your testimony. Who would believe you? As soon as you begin by saying, ‘A Liar told me’, your story will be dismissed.”

  “Even if you’re personally willing to let us survive, the rest of your sect clearly favors overkill, and you said it yourself: you’re a junior member. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my short life worrying about your elders back in the Oort Cloud. No deal. Besides, we still need the generator. We have to rescue Elena’s crew.”

  “You can’t go back to the station!” Lantern said. “It’s bad enough you’re here, in orbit around an Axiom planet. If you return to a place where humans have already interfered once? That increases the chances of attracting Axiom interest.”

  “We didn’t interfere!” Elena said. “We were interfered with.”

  “The Axiom doesn’t know humans exist. Don’t you understand? We’ve kept you from their notice so far. If they find out about your species, and worse, that you’re propagating throughout the universe? They will scour you from the galaxy completely.”

  “Humans are pretty good at surviving,” Callie said. “We’ll take our chances. I’m ready to pass judgment.” She raised her gun. “You are guilty of murder. The sentence is death.”

  “Wait!” the Liar cried.

  Callie walked close to her, the muzzle of her pistol half a meter from the Liar’s body. “What’s wrong? Can’t do your teleportation act again? It’s impressive, but if you could do it any time, as often as you want, you wouldn’t bother with boarding pods, would you? You’d just teleport onto the ships you wanted to infiltrate. My guess is, it’s either a one-use emergency thing, or something that has to recharge, just like the big bridge generator we have wired into this ship. Goodbye, Liar.”

  “I can show you how to use the generator!” Lantern said. “I know how to operate it properly. And, if you insist on returning to the Axiom station, I can help there, too. I am familiar with such places: I have seen the schematics, and consumed neural buds from those who worked in such installations. I insist you take me along. Perhaps I can minimize the damage you do, erase the records of your arrival. We have techniques for avoiding Axiom notice.”

  Callie didn’t lower the sidearm. “How did you do the teleportation trick?”

  “I have a device. A variant on the point-to-point generator: it opens a small portal and draws me through, but far more rapidly than the larger versions, so quickly it is difficult to perceive the transition.”

  “Can you use this device to get back to our solar system?”

  “No. I told you, we forbid the use of bridge generators because they open up the universe in a dangerous way. This device is very short-range. It can transport someone a distance of a few kilometers at most. Its mass limitations are also much greater than the device that transports your ship. My sect restricts the use of these devices heavily, even so. We don’t want humans to have these, because they might reverse-engineer the technology, and then develop more long-range instantaneous travel.”

  “Give the device to me.”

  “I can’t. We are forbidden to let humans have them.”

  “You can give it to me, or I can take it off your corpse.”

  A beat. “All right. My sect is pragmatic.” The Liar did something, and the suit went slack, the helmet portion unsealing. Lantern slithered out of the suit. Callie hadn’t seen many Liars in the bare flesh. Lantern’s skin was the slick gray of a dolphin’s, and she had over a dozen eyes scattered around the domelike bulge of her “head”, with 360-degree vision, quite likely offering insight into parts of the spectrum invisible to Callie, if not Ashok. Lantern had seven tentacles, five of them thick, two of them finer and more delicate, the latter lined with suckers. She had a small cube-shaped device attached to one of the thin tentacles, halfway up, held on with a strap not unlike that of a wristwatch. Lantern slid off the device and offered it to Callie.

  She spoke through another device, this one a small silver circular grille, that seemed embedded just below her largest eyes: the simulated voicebox Liars used to talk to humans. “The device can only be used once every three-point-eight-seven hours. It has a slightly faster recharge time than the bridge generator on your ship.”

  “How does it work?” Callie strapped the teleporter onto her own arm – there was some chance it was a trick or a bomb or something, but she thought the odds were low. She wasn’t the only person on the ship with a gun, after all, and Lantern seemed to value her own life.

  Lantern, resigned, showed her how the sides of the cube responded to touch, and how to input relative direction and distance for desired travel, and how to activate it, when it was recharged. “I’ll test this in a few hours, and it had better work the way you claim,” Callie said.

  “I do not lie.”

  Callie grunted, and then stared at the thing on her wrist with dawning horror. “Wait. Could you… could this – is it a weapon? The way the bridge generator opened a portal in the middle of your ship and tore it apart, could you do the same thing with this? To a ship? Or a person?”

  Lantern waved her tentacles in apparent agitation. “No. That would be monstrous. There are failsafes in place. We had no idea your generator would activate an emergency protocol and tear us apart. We never would have tried to fire on you if we’d suspected. I told you, such devices are forbidden among our people, and our lore about their functions must be incomplete. Or else when the Axiom ruled, there was never a threat sufficient to make that emergency protocol activate.”

  Callie nodded. The Liar’s story was a bunch of implausibilities wrapped around a handful of outright impossibilities, but Callie had a wormhole generator in her ship, and another one on her wrist, so it was time to take the impossible seriously. “Ashok, take our prisoner to the machine shop. Don’t let her touch anything unless it’s absolutely necessary. See if she can give you any useful information about the generator. She lives as long as she’s more use to us alive than satisfying to me dead.”

  “Will do, cap.” Ashok held out his prosthetic hand and, after a moment, Lantern wrapped one tentacle around it. The cyborg clumped out of the medical bay with Lantern drifting along in microgravity behind him, looking like a bizarre novelty balloon.

  Callie floated in a corner of the infirmary and looked at Stephen and Elena in turn. “What do we think about all that?”

  “The story was internally consistent,” Stephen said. “Liar stories aren’t, usually. They never bother to be all that rigorous or convincing. Even the first Liars, the ones who tricked our ancestors, told stories full of contradictions and bizarre digressions, but they were dismissed in the excitement as unimpo
rtant or translation errors.”

  “The story Lantern told does seem to fit the available evidence,” Elena said. “That doesn’t mean it’s true, but, it could be.”

  Callie fiddled with the device on her wrist. The surface was greasy-looking but smooth and dry, just like the bridge generator. “Believing a Liar just seems ridiculous, though.”

  “Lantern says she never lies,” the computer said. “I will monitor her carefully. If we catch her in a lie, even a trivial one, then we know she isn’t telling the truth. Though even when she tried to deceive you about being able to teleport before you could shoot her, she was careful not to speak any untruths.”

  “Whether her story is true or not, it doesn’t really change our short-term plans,” Callie said. “We still need to save the crew of the Anjou. Whether we’re saving them from a secret cabal of Liars or an automated space station created by a race of uplifted super-monsters doesn’t affect our operation all that much.” She yawned. “Ridiculous as it sounds, I’m going to get some sleep, or try. You two should as well. Once the generator is recharged, we’re going straight to that alien station to get Elena’s crew back. Drake, maybe park us back around on the night side of the planet? Just in case Lantern is telling the truth, let’s try to be a little less noticeable.”

  “Initiating ‘run and hide’ protocols,” Drake said.