“If your engram chose death over absorption, then that’s his problem, not yours. Don’t let his failure drag you down. You’re no longer him, Peter. You’re better than that. Let him go. Whatever you’ve become, you have an obligation to yourself to keep moving on.”
But where am I moving to? he wanted to ask her.
“The only thing holding us back is ourselves, and they only win if we let them.”
The conversation was clear in his mind. It was the first time they’d embraced, again, not out of love or lust but for comfort in the face of terrible circumstances.
“You need to have a clear idea of what it is you’re clinging to,” she’d said. “If your ship is sinking, then you want to at least make sure you’re clinging to a life raft, and not the ship itself, right?”
“And you’re my raft, Caryl?”
The memory of her laugh seemed to fill the hole ship cabin. “Cling to me, Peter, and we may well both go under.”
He nodded to himself. It was true: he had to find his own center of gravity, to haul himself out of his doldrums. And to make the effort worthwhile, he had to help find a way to ensure humanity’s survival. He wasn’t sure that arguing en masse was the solution, but he could see that Hatzis thought it might be. That was her way, her gift. The way she had organized the resistance from Sothis had proved that she was capable of great things and that her ambition was clear. But there were times that he wondered if they might not be better off with someone more like Frank Axford. Until Axford had forced them into it, no one even considered fighting the Starfish.
With good reason, too, Alander told himself. The outcome of that skirmish had left 40 percent of the Yuhl/Goel scavenger fleet destroyed, along with six human colonies, Sothis and Vega included. The Starfish had lost just one of their massive cutter vessels, disk-shaped behemoths that made anything humans had ever built look paltry in comparison. That small victory might have meant something in terms of morale building had it not led to the appearance of an entirely new class of Starfish craft, one so large it made the cutters look as insignificant as motes of dust.
Despite the heavy losses, though, Alander couldn’t help but wonder if it hadn’t been worthwhile. After all, they now knew more about the Starfish than they ever had before, which was undoubtedly why Frank the Ax had done what he’d done. It took a military mind to understand that to determine an enemy’s capabilities, one had to make sacrifices; one had to be prepared to enter into battles that couldn’t necessarily be won. When the Starfish were unknown, they were vast and terrifying. Now, though, there was a sense that maybe this faceless enemy had limitations, after all, which was something of a comfort, even if these limitations were still incomprehensibly vast.
Alander’s thoughts turned increasingly to Axford, wondering what the ex-general might be up to right now. Ever since the Battle of Beid had gone so badly, there had been no sign of the man, in any of his incarnations, and his bases on Vega were in ruins, probably by Axford’s own hand to cover his tracks.
“I have a message for you, Peter,” the cool voice of the hole ship interjected into his thoughts. The hole ship AIs were degrees of magnitude less sophisticated than the Gifts who maintained the legacy of the Spinners, but they were still smartly sophisticated. “The transmission is coming from the hole ship you refer to as Pearl.”
Alander recognized the name immediately. “That’s Thor’s ship, isn’t it?”
“I believe so, Peter.”
“Well, if it’s Sol she’s looking for, tell her—”
“The message is addressed specifically to you,” the AI cut in.
Alander frowned. The copy of Caryl Hatzis from the colony world known as Thor had been missing for days. If she was back, she should have reported to the Caryl Hatzis the engrams called Sol, not him. Maybe she was worried how Sol would react, given that she’d gone off on her own crusade without consulting anyone shortly after her colony had been destroyed. Alander could understand how she felt. He, too, had experienced the emotional trauma of seeing the world of his own mission on the Frank Tipler destroyed, along with all his crewmates. But he doubted that Sol would be as understanding, given the limited resources available to humanity.
“Then I guess you’d better put her through,” he said, climbing to his feet.
He expected a screen to form in the wall to reveal a video image: in that fashion, the hole ships normally enabled their passengers to communicate with one another. What he got, though, was something entirely different.
The walls, floor, and ceiling retreated around him until he and the bed seemed to be hanging in a vast and giddying void. Through the darkness he sensed black shapes moving, strange limbs touching, complex senses interacting in an arcane, private dance. Then a woman stepped out of that darkness, her movements steady and assured, the smile on her face gentle and affectionate.
The shock of recognition that rushed through him was like a physical force. She was wearing a green UNESSPRO shipsuit. Her hair was highlighted in gold just the way he remembered. Her skin had a similar honeyish hue that shone in nonexistent light. Her brown eyes stared at him out of that impossible space, no less powerful for being virtual.
He climbed slowly to his feet, his jaw hanging hopelessly open as he struggled for words.
“Hello, Peter,” said Lucia Benck. “It’s been a long time.”
1.1.2
Rasmussen was a beautiful world: green and temperate around the equator, with an even split between ocean and landmass. Both poles were icebound and surrounded by turbulent berg-filled oceans; the air was high in oxygen, supporting a diverse ecosystem that boasted insects large enough to bite an android in two and tree trunks dozens of meters across. Its primary, BSC5070, was a G6V star slightly redder than Earth’s; Rasmussen orbited close to the center of its habitable zone. Marcus Chown, the UNESSPRO mission sent to explore the system, had arrived fifteen years earlier and established an extensive orbital complex from which detailed biological and geological examinations had been made. Under the leadership of Rob Singh, terrestrial contamination of the environment was kept to an absolute minimum. Even during the arrival of the Gifts, the pristine ecosystem had barely been disturbed. To all intents and purposes, it was a paradise, which was what made it so hard for Caryl Hatzis to deliver her pronouncement.
“In five days,” she said, “this planet and everything on it will die.”
The assembly was silent.
“Three days later,” she went on, “Zemyna and Demeter will follow then Geb and Sagarsee. And then—” She paused, allowing a faint echo to underline the significance of the silence with which she presaged her next words. “And then there will be no more colonies left. Everything UNESSPRO shrove to achieve will be gone. All that will remain of humanity will be our ash and dust on the worlds we once visited.”
Hatzis felt the pressure of eyes on her, virtual and red.
The meeting had been called at Rasmussen to coincide with the arrival of the Spinners at Sagarsee, the colony world of the BSC5148 system, the last of five loosely clustered systems known as the Alkaid Group on the opposite side of the sphere of space humanity had explored from where the Spinners had first appeared. Unless humanity’s enigmatic benefactors abruptly changed their modus operandi, Sagarsee and the rest of the Alkaid Group would be the last worlds visited by the Spinners—and the last attacked by the Starfish. If humanity was to survive, then this was where Caryl Hatzis and her ragtag band of engrams would have to make their stand.
She forced herself to speak with dignity and poise when all she wanted to do was to scream out her frustration and outrage.
“We have tried communicating with the Spinners, and they haven’t responded. We’ve tried communicating with the Starfish, and they, too, have ignored us. We’ve tried resisting the Starfish, and that almost got us killed. So now we have to figure out what we do next.
“If we do nothing,” she said, “we die. We’ve seen it happen to the ostrich colonies—the ones who tried hi
ding in systems that had already been attacked or on worlds the Spinners hadn’t visited. They thought they would be safe, that the Starfish wouldn’t consider them a threat. But they were wrong, and they paid for it with their lives. To that end, should any colony represented here today choose that option, you will forfeit your gifts and your ftl communicators. This is not open to discussion; if the human race is to have any chance at all, it requires every resource it can lay its hands on.”
She paused, half-expecting a reaction to this, but there was none. Everyone was fully, finally aware of the harsh reality of their situation.
“One of the options open to us is to follow the lead of the Yuhl and remain in the wake of the Spinners. We can use the gifts to fashion arks large enough to contain all our hardware, all the processors required to run the engrams and contain our memories of Earth. We can merge the hole ships, and like the Yuhl we can jump from system to system, taking what we need to keep our fleet functioning. According to the Praxis, our new friends have been doing this for two and a half thousand years, so there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it, too.
“This is a viable option, but for me it’s not an attractive one. Many of you, I know, are still grappling with the fact that Earth was destroyed in the Spike, over a century ago. I have shown you what took its place; you’ve seen what the Starfish destroyed when they came to Sol.” On the heels of Peter Alander, she added silently to herself, unable to completely suppress a twinge of resentment, even though deep down she knew it wasn’t really his fault. “There’s nothing left for us there, but it is still our birthplace. And for that reason I am loath to give up on it entirely.
“We still have some days left, and we have the resources of the gifts at our disposal. There might be something we haven’t thought of yet, something that we might yet do to ensure our species’ survival with dignity intact. We may yet, at the eleventh hour, find an alternative, a way in which our species could survive and somehow reclaim that which has been lost.
“We are here to decide whether to take the chance or not. We are the sole survivors of the human race; it is upon our shoulders that the future of our species rests. You must think long and hard about what you wish to do now. We must reach consensus, or we must divide.
“I ask you to consider this: to live as the Yuhl do now would mean that our future descendants, whatever they may be, will inherit nothing from us but our fear and obeisance. We will have run from our greatest challenge, and that will be our only legacy. But if today, together, we can find an alternative, then perhaps our descendants will inherit something more. If we can live through these next few days, then we could reclaim Sol System and rebuild our species, and our descendants may be heirs to a new Earth.”
With that, as the echoes of her words filled the virtual meeting hall, she stepped back from the spotlight glad to remove herself from the decision-making process. The sentiments she’d expressed were genuine, but in truth she didn’t know for certain what was the best thing for humanity right now. Abandoning Surveyed Space for a life roaming the galaxy, caught between one alien race and another, sounded a lot like a prison sentence to her—one with no chance of parole. But was it worse than the death sentence humanity might face if they attempted to fight back?
Sol understood Alander’s point all too well; she, too, was tired of endless spats, constant claims and counterclaims, petty ascendancies and power struggles. She wished her higher self, the one destroyed with the Vincula in Sol System, could magically reappear and take over. She would know what to do. With the resources of a post-Spike, twenty-second century humanity behind them, maybe the engrams would have had something of a chance at least.
Then again, she reminded herself, it hadn’t really helped the Vincula. The Starfish had cut through its defenses like a hot knife through butter. The memory of the destruction of her home was indelibly burned into her mind, and like a recently formed scar, it itched terribly.
“We can’t leave here,” someone was insisting. “This is our home!”
“Then we must find a way to contact them—to reason with them,” said another.
“The Starfish don’t care about that,” came the instant reply. “If we stay here, they’ll destroy us as easily as they destroyed Sol.”
“But who says Sol was actually destroyed?” said a third voice, entering the debate. “All we have is her word for that. It could be a fake designed to make us leave, to empty the colonies to allow her to take over!”
And there it was in a nutshell: all three possible responses to the situation. The engrams could refuse to accept the harsh reality and die; they could bite the bullet and leave; or they could doubt that it was even happening. The last was particularly symptomatic of newer colonies, especially those who’d been skipped by the Spinners and had yet to see any evidence of alien activity beyond the hole ships. And she could understand that. Conspiracy was so much easier to accept than the harsh reality of humanity’s genocide.
Fortunately, though, survivors of Starfish attacks significantly outnumbered the newbies. Of the 1,000-odd remaining engrams attending the meeting, approximately 800 had lost homes and missions to the aliens. While they may not have seen the destruction firsthand since few had and managed to do so and survive, they were left in no doubt as to the desperate nature of humanity’s plight.
Run or die, she thought to herself. It’s not a choice; it’s an ultimatum.
“I have to say, I’ve never been one for ultimatums.”
The voice intruding upon her thoughts, reading her thoughts, startled her. She knew immediately to whom the voice belonged, and it was this more than anything that surprised her. She quickly sent her senses through the assembly, trying to find the source of the voice, seeking out the owner. Try as she might though, she couldn’t find him.
“That’s because I’m not there, Caryl,” Frank the Ax said with amusement. “The others can’t hear me; I’m speaking only to you, because right now yours is the only opinion that matters.”
“And I’m supposed to be flattered by that, Frank?”
She heard a low chuckle. “Is that animosity I detect, Caryl?”
“I don’t know. Why should I harbor any ill feelings toward you?” She couldn’t restrain her sarcasm. “That stunt you pulled back at Beid didn’t hurt us at all.”
While she spoke, she ramped up her internal processing speed to its fastest setting, determined to outthink the man who’d brought so much death and destruction to humanity and its allies. But he was telling the truth: he wasn’t at the meeting. There was no sign of him in the assembly nor in any of the networks attached to it. The array of hole ships docked in the upper orbits of Rasmussen was empty of his spoor, as were the gifts themselves. The only other possible place in orbit around the planet was the Marcus Chown, looking boxy and antiquated against the superior technology of the Spinners. It hung innocent and isolated at a lower altitude, glinting brightly in the sunlight.
“Got you,” she said. His transmission was coming from the gutted survey ship, the relic of Earth that had been abandoned as soon as the Gifts arrived.
“You think I’m that stupid, Caryl?” Axford replied. “It’s just a relay. I could be anywhere in the system.”
“You can’t be far away: your transmission lag is low.”
“And what would you do if you found me, Caryl? Take me out? I’m only one of many, remember? You’d still be left with hundreds more Frank Axfords to contend with.”
“That sounds like a threat, Frank.”
“Listen, Caryl: either you’re going to hear what I’ve got to say, or I’m going to leave.” His voice was cool behind the amusement
“And why should I—or anyone, for that matter—care if you stay or go? You’ve done nothing but hurt us in the past: stolen from the colonies, used the Starfish to cover up your thefts, sent the Yuhl almost to their deaths—”
“And saved your collective ass,” he interjected. “You just don’t know it yet.”
Hatzis la
ughed at this. “I must have missed that part. I guess I was too busy fighting off the Starfish you set upon us.”
“You seemed to do all right.”
“Christ, Frank, do you even know how many people we lost because of you?”
“Of course I do. I was watching. The data I gleaned were exceedingly valuable.”
“I’m glad the massacre gave you some amusement.”
“Oh, come on, Caryl! Put your hostilities to rest and just listen to what I have to say. We’re all in the same boat here. If we go down, we go down together.”
“So your threat to leave was empty?”
“I need you nowhere near as much as you need me,” he returned. “In a few days, we’re all going to be on the run from the enemy, and from that point on, there’ll be no turning back. Trust me, I’m your only shot at deflecting the Starfish.”
No turning back, she echoed in her mind, tasting the notion and finding its bitterness appalling. The Yuhl had run, and were survivors as a result—but they were also scavengers, slowly devolving to the status of superstitious pirates. They practically worshiped the Spinner/Starfish migration, which they referred to in combination as the Ambivalence. Did a familiar fate now await humanity?
“Okay, Frank. I’ll listen.”
“But are you open to suggestions?”
She sighed to herself. “If you’re going to suggest that we attack the Starfish again—”
“Fighting back is our only chance of survival, Caryl.”
“You saw what happened when you forced us into doing that before.”
“Look, I’m not stupid, Caryl. I know you won’t stand any chance at all if you try going head-to-head with the big guns. I mean, that new ship of theirs—the Trident—that thing’s so big you could use it to skewer the Moon! There’s no way we’d be able to take one of those things out with anything we’ve got. A solar flare might do it, but there’s nothing in the gifts to show how we might generate one—or how to get the Starfish to bring one of their Tridents close enough for us to even be able to use it.”
Heirs of Earth Page 2
