Beyond the Sun

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  He couldn’t forgive him.

  But he could. He could let go. He grappled with that hard lump, cracking flakes of it away. He’d made his own mistakes. He could let Carlo have made some too.

  It was enough. It was enough to crack the core into a thousand pieces. Still there, but the edges were bearable now, somehow.

  He blinked away the shards, feeling the layers crack, feeling them fall away. The anger was still with him, the resentments, the frustrations, but they were different now, as though he was looking at them from another point of view, while all around him faces gaped and he swam out of Elsewhere and found himself where he belonged, in his lover’s arms.

  In Simon C. Larter’s action packed tale, a freelancer and his trusty A.I. respond to a distress call from an isolated colony ravaged by indigenous beasts, only to discover the situation is far from what they’d expected. Remember, future colonists, ignore warnings at your own risk!

  INNER SPHERE BLUES

  SIMON C. LARTER

  no matter how you analyzed them, messages were fuzzy near the galactic center. Always. Didn’t matter how many cycles you dedicated to decoding, minimizing noise, static gusted through communications like Jovian wind, blurring them and only ever allowing half the story through, if you were lucky. At least Yu Chen was lucky more often than not.

  He paused and straightened when the ping sounded in his earpiece, letting the crowbar drop to the rock-strewn surface of the asteroid. It fell slowly in the low-grav, bounced lazily, settled. ‘Go ahead,’ he thought.

  Another ping, followed by a burst of static, then the message. Chen listened, watching the slow wheel of the system’s central star as the asteroid executed its ungainly, wobbling orbit, before cueing the transmission once more, and then a third time. Grace repeated the sub-aural tags as the communication replayed: Keywords: colony, life-form, aggressive, assistance, rewards.

  Chen ran it through again, then bent to pick up the crowbar. ‘Run the diagnostics one more time. Compensate for mag interference and G-bend,’ he thought.

  As if I hadn’t done that already? Grace said. They said AI developed a distinct personality after a few years in service. It figured he’d gotten the snarky one. Maybe he brought it out in people. Or computers.

  “Do it again,” he said aloud. “And this time compare and correlate with the transmission from M20-1617-Delta. I don’t want a repeat of that fiasco.”

  Grace sounded irritable. I did that, too. What, no trust?

  ‘Just run another analysis,’ he thought. ‘Normalize and report on all potential errors and their probabilities.’

  If a computer could roll its eyes, Grace would have been straining her ocular muscles. Understood.

  The computation would have been done in microseconds, but, as an advanced AI, Grace knew when to keep silent. Chen bent to pick up the crowbar, muttering silent imprecations, and applied himself once more to the task of breaking the drill bit loose from the metallic deposit in which it was jammed. Robotics had allowed for wonderful advances in innumerable fields, but there was still no substitute for plain old elbow grease in some situations.

  I heard that, Grace said.

  Chen snorted.

  *

  Freelancing was no kind of life anymore, Chen thought. After a few decades of skirting the edges of civilization, picking up piecemeal work, trading in violence and mined exotics, the shine had started to wear off. Freedom from authority was a lifestyle benefit, but a hand-to-mouth existence could only remain exciting for so long. More and more, lately, Chen had found himself longing for a real atmosphere, a comfortable bed, and the predictability of routine. A man of his skills would be able to make himself useful on any number of the fringe worlds, wouldn’t he?

  “Run it by me one more time, Grace,” he said aloud. Thought-communication was faster, certainly, but it didn’t do to let one’s vocal chords atrophy. Singing in the shower did only so much to keep a voice in practice. “And tell me again how we could be wrong.”

  Several different scenarios flickered behind his eyelids as Grace broadcast information to his visual cortex. He’d seen them all before, but since the debacle on M20-1617-Delta, he’d made it standard operating procedure to review distress calls a minimum of ten times before even responding. Depending on how long the jump between systems took, he’d review it several times more before dropping into orbit, too. Anything to avoid litigation, he thought. Litigation was always so awkward.

  “What does the database have to say?” he asked, not for the first time.

  Another flurry of images: colonists; a bubble town; quadrupedal indigenous beasts—all claws, fangs, and fur; dead bodies; crematorium chimneys. It’s too fringe for Central to investigate further. Colonists are members of a religious sect. They’d been warned not to settle, but ignored the communiqués. Problems ensued, naturally. Grace had a knack for making her sub-aural transmissions sound annoyed. Granted, Chen’s newfound cautious streak had to be bothersome for an AI used to reaching nanosecond conclusions and moving directly to the execution stage, but there were situations that even superbly-programmed machines couldn’t adequately parse. Intuition hadn’t been rendered into code yet.

  It all seemed straightforward. Still, Chen had seen too many inner-sphere communications go wrong to believe his first impressions of any given transmission.

  Time to destination, twelve hours, thirty-six minutes, Grace said.

  “Good. Wake me in ten hours.” Chen dimmed the lights and relaxed against his pillow. “Earlier, if anything goes wrong.”

  I’ll let your discorporated atoms know if we hit the galactic core, Grace said.

  *

  The planet glimmered gray and blue against the black recesses of space as the Chance oriented her thrusters and decelerated toward a synchronous orbit. Chen watched as masses of cloud moved against a vast sea broken only by the occasional brown-green patch—islands in a world-spanning ocean. The pressure of the restraint straps eased, then disappeared as Grace cut the reverse thrusters, the Chance settling silently into orbit.

  ‘Let’s find out what these colonists want us to do for them, shall we?’ he thought. ‘Open a channel to the main settlement.’

  A brief quiet ensued, during which Chen watched the slow swirl of clouds below. He’d seen some stunning sights in his time near the core—glittering clouds of stellar ejecta, dead star cores with molten mineral crusts, micro-black holes shining synchrotron beams every which way—but the sheer beauty and variety of planetary systems never failed to amaze him.

  The silence stretched. Clouds swirled. Chen waited.

  “Uh . . . Grace?” he said.

  They’re not responding.

  Chen blinked. “No response at all? Are they still there?”

  The equipment is functional. They’re receiving the hail, but aren’t opening the channel.

  “That’s a first.”

  I tried the emergency channel too, but it’s set to auto-respond with a ‘No assistance required’ code.

  “Then why the distress call? Are the operators on coffee break.”

  Grace offered no response other than a silence that could only be characterized as “frosty.” Chen had yet to figure out how she managed that, being a mere silicon neural network. “Do you think we’re too late?”

  Catastrophic colony failure unlikely.

  “And you can’t scan them through the atmosphere.”

  No.

  Chen stood and headed for the galley. “Coffee sounds good, actually. Keep trying to open that channel.”

  Of course.

  The scent of freshly-brewed caffeine began to permeate the cabin as Chen walked back toward the beverage unit. Stimulant inhalants were all well and good, he thought as he curled his fingers around the warm mug, but sometimes the old-fashioned methods offered comforts lacking in modern forms of delivery. Returning to his chair at the console, he took a long sip and settled in to wait.

  *

  Nothing. An entire two hours o
f nothing. Chen had nursed two cups of coffee, speed-viewed three lectures on the history of galactic imperialism, and indulged in a lengthy shower, but the colonists had remained frustratingly silent. The cams trained in the direction of the settlement showed nothing but slowly milling clouds, broken by the occasional glimpse of green. Presentiments of disaster had been flitting through Chen’s brain for the past hour. That and possible overcaffeination combined to make for a vague nervousness that refused to dissipate no matter how many mantras he chanted.

  He exhaled slowly. The cloud-strewn expanse of ocean shimmered placidly below him. Chen tossed back the dregs of his cold coffee and tucked the mug into the netting on the side of his seat. “All right, Grace, enough waiting. Take us down, but keep the channel open.”

  Gentle acceleration pressed Chen back in his seat. In the viewscreen, the planet swelled. He breathed deeply, deliberately, and watched the near-uniform grey blur of the clouds resolve into sharp-focus peaks and valleys.

  And then they were pushing into the atmosphere, the subtle red of thermal glow creeping at the edges of the monitors as friction heated the shields faster than the ship’s computers could compensate for the distortion. A diffuse river of white flowed past, flickering, streaked with grey, a turbulent blindness. Chen had seen it a hundred times, each of them disconcerting.

  Grace tickled his subconscious with an offer of mild sedation—standard procedure. He rejected it—standard procedure. Let younger spacers ride the waves of chemical hormone modulation—Chen was old enough to believe in the value of the endocrine system. Millenia of evolution couldn’t be that wrong, after all. There was only so much a silicone-based intellect could understand about biological phenomena.

  I heard that, Grace said.

  *

  The main colony structure came into view by degrees—the clouds dissipating slowly as the Chance descended, streamers and wisps of cloud seeming to graze the viewscreen, blurring the distant dome of the energy shield. Grace reversed thrust, slowing them and banking into a long, slow loop over what was now revealed as a sizable complex of buildings arrayed in a spoke-and-wheel pattern around three central plazas dominated by large, circular pools of water. Broad avenues radiated outward, lined with tall trees and high, waving stands of grassy plants.

  Not a single human was visible.

  “Grace?”

  The buildings are heavily insulated. Thermal scans aren’t returning anything useful.

  “Take us in closer.”

  The Chance angled into a steeper bank, bringing them down to just a few hundred meters above the shimmering energy field. Chen magnified the view until individual fronds of foliage could be seen on the trees, but the only visible non-plant life forms were occasional small, rodent-like creatures that scurried into the shadows whenever light broke through the clouds. The gleaming white stone of the sidewalks were carved with wide, spiraling designs that looked for all the world as though they’d never seen the passage of a single bootheel. Everything appeared spotless.

  Everything appeared abandoned.

  “Are they underground, do you think?” he asked aloud.

  Scans indicate significant underground cavities, but I get the same results from the surrounding jungle. Appears to be a function of local geology.

  “And still no response to the hail?”

  None.

  The Chance was now passing over the landing platform outside the energy barrier. Chen twiddled the controls on his chair’s armpad, zooming the cameras for a better view. It wasn’t encouraging. Between the rust spots like lesions on the steel grating, the broken signal lamps, and the vegetation that had grown across at least a third of the pad, it looked as though it hadn’t seen use in years.

  “When was the last known resupply shipment, Grace?”

  The colonists discontinued resupply shortly after settling. Self-sufficiency is apparently one of the prime tenets of their faith.

  “Can’t fault them for that,” Chen mumbled. He’d been operating on the same principle for two decades, now. “Suppose there’s no need to maintain a landing platform you don’t use. Still,” he said, “I don’t like this. We should have seen someone by now.”

  There could be another explanation.

  “What, they all nap at this time of day? Prayer time at the temple? Ritual indoor food fights?”

  They continued their circuit above the colony. A movement on the screen caught Chen’s eye. ‘Lock on that,’ he thought, and the screen image shifted suddenly, zeroing in on a small, robotic cleaner unit that had just exited its dock at the base of one of the buildings. Chen watched as it whirred across the sidewalk, scooping up invisible flecks of dirt and pausing now and then to perhaps work at some recalcitrant stain, until his view was blocked by intervening buildings, the Chance’s flight path carrying him onward. The camera panned back out, and now Chen could see thousands of the tiny cleaner bots hurrying to and fro, scrubbing the pathways and roads of the empty city.

  “Well, if something disastrous did happen here, the evidence certainly wouldn’t last long,” he said.

  Within minutes, the bots had fulfilled their programmed directive and scooted back into their docking stations, the avenues of the city returning to sterility once more. Street after empty street passed under Chen’s camera’s lens, the only movement the slow swaying of the vegetation, the furtive darting of the rodentia. By the fourth circuit, he had had enough.

  ‘Set us down on the landing platform on the next pass, Grace,’ he thought.

  The Chance slowed and settled as they looped around for the last time, dipping lower, until the waving tips of the jungle were bare meters beneath the star-hardened skin of the spacecraft. And then, with a gentle burst of reverse thrust, a hiss of hydraulics, and a slight lurch, Chen’s ship touched down. The engines’ steady thrum faded. Metal ticked and creaked as gravity asserted itself. Chen released the restraints and stood, stretching.

  “Right,” he said. “Now how do I get through that energy shield?”

  *

  Despite his many experiments with nullifying agents, cleaners, and absorbent filters, the air in Chen’s rebreather still tasted of plastic. If the fringe-jumpers’ message boards were any indication, he wasn’t the only one with this problem. Stabilizers notwithstanding, it appeared as though some mildly distasteful interaction between polymer, oxygen, and human tastebuds was inevitable, despite the prodigious number of AI cycles that had been dedicated to the problem.

  I—

  ‘Yes, I know you heard that, Grace,’ he thought, smiling. ‘But you’d be famous the galaxy over if you could find a solution for it.’

  A frosty silence. Again. She couldn’t fix the plastic taste of rebreathers, but she could certainly imbue a non-response with the scent of disapproval. Perhaps she could patent that.

  Very funny.

  ‘I thought it was.’

  The humid air was an almost physical force, palpable even through his en-suit as Chen walked down the ramp. He gripped his rifle firmly, scanning the undergrowth on either side of the landing platform for unexpected movement. Unfamiliar sounds filtered through the earpieces on his helmet—strange tweets and chirps, dry rattles, the swish of vegetation in foreign winds, the far-off susurration of waves on a distant shore. His boots raised tiny clouds of pollen with each step. The desiccating inserts in his gloves were working overtime in the tropical heat.

  ‘So what do these problem carnivores sound like?’ he thought.

  Grace broadcast directly to his auditory cortex. It was a low, grunting sound, a bass rumble that grew to a high-pitched shriek, the kind of noise that, if heard in the dark of an alien jungle, would freeze a man in his tracks. Chen rolled his shoulders.

  ‘I’d really rather not hear that first hand,’ he thought. ‘Do me a favor, Grace, and tell me if anything larger than a Chihuahua approaches.’

  Naturally.

  He checked the energy stores in his rifle for at least the fourth time, exhaled slowly, then stepp
ed out and away from his ship, toward the city.

  The vines draping the platform and walkway curled and gripped the grating, claiming it for their own. Thin, vegetative feelers, rippling in the desultory breeze, gave the plants a questing air as Chen passed, as though they were scenting an intruder. Part of the walkway had succumbed to rust and collapsed, the steel gone, flecks of ceramic coating disappearing into the thick humus coating the jungle floor. If it weren’t for the faintly-glowing barrier at the end of the walkway and the sterile perfection of the colony beyond, Chen would have found it easy to believe that civilization, here on this forgotten planet near the core, was succumbing to entropy, an uncaring world absorbing and discarding humanity like so much refuse. He walked on.

  This close to the shield, Chen could feel it in his gut. The vibration in the air reached through his en-suit to shiver his skin, the hair on his arms and legs prickling with the proximity. He reached for his belt and grabbed the transmitter.

  ‘Go ahead, Grace.’

  He held the device up, moving it close to the wall of force. His fingertips tingled. Somewhere beyond his perception, electronics flickered and produced a localized emission intended to nullify the barrier. The forcefield glimmered briefly, beginning to fade...then snapped back again. Chen reached his free hand toward it, only to feel an uncomfortable tingling in his fingertips.

  ‘Grace?’

  It changed frequencies. She sounded annoyed.

  ‘So follow it.’

  I’m trying. It’s started to autorange.

  Chen frowned. ‘Any recourse?’

  Give me a minute.

  He glanced over his shoulde at the jungle. The vegetation writhed, ever-shifting. For a brief second, the sun broke through the cloud cover to slash light across the landscape. The autodim of his visor kicked in, but still Chen had to blink away the afterimages. In the full-strength sunlight, the trees seemed to stand taller, their branches straining skyward, as though the entire landscape were inhaling.