“We’ve seen enough Starfish attacks now to recognize a pattern,” he continued. “There’s always an anomaly shortly beforehand somewhere in the system. See here—this weird radiant point.” He indicated several that had appeared in the previous weeks. “We’ve always assumed that these are symptomatic of the Starfish’s propulsion technology. The cutters come much faster, we suspect, than the hole ship drives would allow; that they are preceded by some sort of reverse echo doesn’t seem impossible. But it’s always bothered me. If the Starfish are so advanced, and so aggressive, then why would they allow something like this to give their arrival away? It doesn’t make sense.” He shook his head. “No. I think what we’re seeing are the fovea—the eyes of the Starfish watching the target as the swords approach. And if we can see them, then maybe we can learn not to be seen by them.”
The images folded away, their job done. Oborn leaned back, looking even more self-satisfied than he had before. He had every right to be, too. Like his engram on Juno, Kingsley had been co-opted from other duties to be a leader of the research team probing the gifts for any kind of information or technology that might be of use to them in the battle against the Starfish. Although the Yuhl had been plumbing such knowledge for centuries, their access to the gifts was only secondhand, rarely stopping long enough to access the physical structures themselves and for the most part being forced to rely on recordings. An added complication was that the Gifts followed the same tactic with other species as they did with the human engrams: they chose just one member of the native population to speak with, ignoring all others. Even if the Yuhl did get their hands on one of the installations, they could only explore it, not interact with it.
“Good work, Kingsley,” she said. “You’ve done well.”
He inclined his head in acknowledgment of her praise. “Obviously we’re still a long way from a working evasion technique, but we’re getting there. It’d be good to have a Plan B available in case Plan A fails.”
She agreed wholeheartedly, if silently, with this. “Speaking of which,” she said, “I came here to look at the systems in question. Are you able to run me through them?”
The biotechnician beamed. “Of course. It’d be an honor.”
Hatzis waved him forward. All the Oborns had something of a crush on her and they worked best when rewarded with personal contact. She was happy to provide it but wary of taking anything further. One of her engrams had been tempted, long before the arrival of the Spinners, but had found that the Kingsley Oborn engram became unstable if indulged. He’d been programmed with a deep-seated fear of intimacy that took precedence over any physical desires.
That didn’t prevent a slight twinge of guilt, though. She had used the Oborn on Juno to head her previous research effort, and he had flown quite happily into the horror of Beid to protect her—and died in the effort. She had no room in her philosophy for noble sacrifice and was reluctant to encourage it in others.
She took the passive role as Oborn wheeled the massive star map around her. An utterly seamless and detailed three-dimensional image, the map was another of the amazing gifts from the Spinners. It showed the location and vector of every major body in the galaxy. Known objects were accurate against Earth astronomical charts: many of the previously unknown objects explained anomalous observations through dust clouds or around the galactic core. Even if it was only mostly complete—there were unexplained gaps hiding, some people thought, information the Spinners considered too sensitive for primitives—it was a boon for astronomers and astrophysicists.
“Here.” The view ballooned around them, expanding and focusing on one bright white star in particular. “That’s Asellus Primus. Variable F-type star; should have been visited by the Shelley Wright decades ago, but they didn’t make it. Not that they would’ve found much if they had. It’s a bit of a dud, really.”
Hatzis knew her star maps as well as anyone. “Perhaps they kept on going to Asellus Secundus, hoping for better luck.”
“If so, then they’re still on their way.” He smiled at her as though thanking her for an alternative and happier explanation for the Wright’s absence. “We’re already preparing the contact point in here, orbiting the fourth planet. I think we can guarantee a fair degree of verisimilitude.”
She nodded. One of the greatest concerns over the plan was that the trial run might have alerted the Starfish, put their guard up when it came to suspicious signals. Everything depended on the cutters behaving as normal in the face of an ftl transmission. If they hesitated just for a moment or failed to come at all...
“The map data is accurate?” she asked, shying away from the thought. It didn’t serve any purpose to dwell on negative possibilities right now.
“Down to single-figure percentiles, I’m told.”
“Good. And the other?”
The star map spun around her again. The second target was much more familiar to her. She instantly recognized its color and its position with respect to its nearest neighbors.
“Pi-2 Ursa Major,” he said. “Five rocky worlds, six gas giants, two asteroid belts, and the usual cometary clouds. The fifth world out was the one to be colonized. You can even see the oxygen levels recorded in the map. I overheard Otto Wyra talking about this the other day. Data is actually encoded in the map image at all frequencies. The visual appearance of each image matches what we would see in the visual spectrum, but if you look outside those bounds, you can find all sorts of—” He stopped, noticing that he was drifting from the topic. “Anyway, there’s nothing unusual recorded in the map. It all looks kosher.”
“So do you think we’re doing the right thing, Kingsley?”
He glanced at her uncertainly. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“The question is simple enough: Are we doing the right thing?”
He appeared suddenly flustered. “Well—I wouldn’t presume to comment on something you had already—I mean. I’d only be confusing the issue, wouldn’t I? And what would be the point of—?”
“Come on, Kingsley. Indulge me, won’t you? I just want your opinion on this, rather than mine parroted back to me. If it makes it any easier, I’m ordering you to do it.”
He swallowed uncomfortably before: “To be honest, Caryl, I’m absolutely terrified.”
She nodded her approval and thanks. “Okay, now tell me why.”
“Because it’s bloody dangerous, that’s why. I don’t know who’s going to volunteer for this mission, but they’d have to be half bloody crazy to even bloody consider it.”
She noted the repetition of the swear word and wondered if she might be pushing him into unstable territory, “I’ll be volunteering, Kingsley.”
“What? You can’t be serious!”
“How can I expect my colleagues to do something that I’m not prepared to do myself?”
“But Thor’s going. Surely that’s enough?”
“Thor’s going? How do you know that?”
“It’s not a secret.”
“It’s a secret from me, obviously.” She swallowed her confusion and the question: What the fuck is Thor hoping to gain by broadcasting this?
He nodded warily. “But that means you don’t have to go, right?”
“I’m afraid not.” She risked touching him, reassuring him with a squeeze to the shoulder. “You don’t have to worry about my safety, Kingsley, and neither should anyone else. The colonies have enough concerns as it is.”
“I can’t help it, Sol.” His eyes avoided hers. “You’re all that’s left. If we lose you, what’s there to fight for?”
“Plenty,” she said as firmly as possible. “You just keep working on Plan B and let me take care of the rest, okay?”
Starting with Thor, she added to herself as she turned and left the map—and the illusion of godhood—behind her.
* * *
The data from the trial run flowed like honey through the high-level simulation. Thor bathed in it, letting the raw information pour over in a slow, dense aval
anche. She was assisted in the process by Marduk and Mahatala, two other Hatzis engrams who seemed happy enough to take her orders. They acted as primary filters for the data stream, weeding the information so she wouldn’t be overloaded. Even at her fastest clock rate, there was too much for a single mind to absorb in one sitting.
But that didn’t stop her trying. She needed to understand firsthand what she was getting into. It was all very well to take Sol’s tame expert’s word for what might be found in the morass of details, but she wanted to see it for herself. If she was going to leap into the fire, she wanted to know exactly how extensive the resulting burns would be.
Dozens of probes had penetrated the skins of the Starfish cutters and transmitted a wealth of data back to the waiting observers. She saw in exquisite detail everything they had experienced as they died. Explosions prompted massive and immediate defensive measures, sealing breaches and smothering fires with invisible, irresistible fingers. Lasers provoked mirror fields of perfect reflective index, sending the energy back at the probes, while chemical attacks slid off suddenly inert surfaces and were absorbed. Only the sudden annihilation of matter seemed to release enough energy to damage the cutters from within. If any serious harm was to be achieved, then it was going to require antimatter bombs and mass-superposition weapons, or the like.
At least that was the conclusion she came to from studying the up-front attacks. More subtle intrusions generated more ambiguous data. Probes that remained quiescent in their niches were for the most part ignored during the time of the test; others that had been programmed to explore their surroundings had been immediately set upon by security systems. Feeds from the dying probes reported crushing pressure, electromagnetic interference, along with anomalous readings of a dozen kinds.
Nowhere in any of the data did Thor glimpse anything that looked like it might be an alien, suggesting that perhaps the defense systems themselves might have been automatic. Although she hadn’t dared hope for a glimpse of one of the mysterious Starfish, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. To be the first to sight one of the aliens would have been a great moment for her and a real slap in the face for Sol.
Ever since that moment of revelation in the ruins of Sothis, when she had understood that Sol wasn’t capable of the decisions required to save humanity from the Starfish, she had felt curiously—almost alarmingly—free of any loyalty to her original. If she was going to survive, she realized now, she would have to take the steps herself. That seemed logical enough to her, although it obviously wasn’t to the others.
Why me? she wondered. What sets me apart from the other copies of me? Why am I the only one who stands up to her?
Perhaps it was selective pressure in action. Only the strongest would survive the coming of the Starfish. While a biological species might evolve by accruing mutations in its genes, engrams could only experience copying errors through the program that ran them. Hers, she was beginning to assume, had just such an error—only her error made her stronger, more independent, than the others.
And if there was anything wrong with that, she couldn’t see it.
She returned her attention to the sluggish rush of information. Of the many probes that had been sent, only twelve had remained in operation at the end of the experiment. The behavior of those probes would be examined in the finest possible detail to ascertain what, exactly, had enabled them to survive for so long in the hostile environment of a cutter while the others had failed. Was it the location they found themselves in, perhaps? Or the way they behaved? Whatever the reason, she was determined to find it. No possibility would go unexplored; every piece of information would be thoroughly investigated.
The only thing they couldn’t know was how long those probes had survived for. When the cutters had left zeta Dorado, all ftl transmissions from the probes had ceased, meaning either they’d been taken out of range or simultaneously destroyed. Thor was keeping her fingers firmly crossed for the former. She wasn’t intent on throwing herself into the lion’s mouth without having at least some hope of getting out again afterward.
“Is there something you’d like to get off your chest?”
The voice—hers from another’s mouth—snapped her out of the data flow. With quicksilver smoothness, her pov was back in her android body and staring at her original.
So much more beautiful and capable, came the involuntary thought. So much more... me.
Thor forced it down.
“I thought you were going to let others make the decisions,” she said as she sat up. “That was the deal after Beid, right?”
“And it’s still the deal,” Sol replied. “Unless you’d prefer me to be in charge?”
Thor tore her eyes from Sol’s forearms and their shockingly natural skin tones. Human flesh was available in abundance by conSense, the communal illusion inhabited by most of the engrams, but in the real world its scarcity was a source of constant despair.
“You are in charge, Sol,” Thor said. “And well you know it, too. Worse, you encourage it. Everything’s gone back to the way it was on Sothis. You let them worship you like a goddess.”
Something flickered across the face of her original, then, and Thor smiled smugly for a moment, convinced she’d hit a nerve. But Sol’s next words took her by surprise.
“What if it was you they worshiped, Thor? Would that please you more?”
She didn’t have to think to answer that question, but it did take her a second to decide whether to say it aloud. Marduk and Mahatala were watching over Sol’s shoulder, just as nervous and compliant as all the others were around Sol.
“Yes,” Thor admitted finally. “I guess it would.”
“And you think you could do a better job than me?”
It was uncertainty that made her hesitate this time. “I guess we’ll never know, will we?”
Sol shrugged. “I never asked for this job, Thor, nor do I particularly want it.” Her perfectly white eyes regarded Thor intently. “I was serious about leaving it up to someone else after Beid, but no one else stepped forward. You could’ve presented Axford’s plan yourself to the Survivors’ Council, but instead you went through me. And they listened to me, as you knew they would. And they’re still listening to me, whether I want them to or not. But it’s not too late. I’ll happily step down any time you want me to. I’ll endorse your leadership. That’ll be the last order I give.”
Thor studied her in return for a long moment. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?”
“No, Thor, I’m not. It would be a relief to be rid of the responsibility.”
“Very well.” Thor felt a slight tremor run through her. She couldn’t tell if it was fear or excitement. “Then I shall relieve you of the burden.”
Sol nodded once as she extended a hand. Thor took it instinctively, doubt flaring briefly in her gut as Sol’s expression hardened as their palms locked together.
“But first” said a voice in Thor’s head, “you’re going to need this.”
An explosion of memories and emotions blossomed in her mind. Thoughts, touches, doubts, tastes... The details poured through the channel Sol had opened between them, each one linking up to dozens more, catapulting her headlong into her original’s experiences. The rush was inexorable and wild. It was far more intense and detailed than the high-level simulation of the test in zeta Dorado—and far more authentic than the patchwork approximation that substituted for an engram’s activation memories. These were the intimate, firsthand experiences of a woman who had lived over 150 years, and they were pouring into Thor’s head like a flood unleashed from a broken dam, sweeping everything away in its path.
But it wasn’t like she was being invaded or being subsumed by another’s mind. This came from her—or at least another version of her—and in a very real sense these memories already belonged to her. And because of this, the initial shock and fright of the experience soon wore off, and she found herself welcoming these aspects of herself.
Still, there was far too m
uch information to assimilate. Image after image flowed through her, bringing all manner of emotional baggage with it. Seeing Sol fall to the Starfish and feeling her higher self die, piece by piece, was the culmination of a great knot of emotional scar tissue that had begun in the vicious turmoil of the Spike, during which she had witnessed the destruction of Earth and all her loved ones: her mother, her sister, her father.
Her father! She confronted a memory that had no analogue in her own mind. She remembered her father with great sadness. She had loved him, worshiped him, before his death on Io. It was that loss from which her grief sprang—or so she had always thought.
But there was so much she had never known. A tangle of memories unfolded before her now, filling spaces in her mind that until that moment she’d never realized had even been empty, each one more tragic than the last: the long and painful death of her dog, Scotty, after someone had fed him broken glass; the death of a teenage boyfriend in a car crash, and herself trapped in the wreckage with her body up against his for four hours as authorities tried to get her out; her sister on the sofa sobbing after telling her mother and father that she’d been molested by her uncle...
Her uncle? Until that moment she never even knew she’d had an uncle. He was ruddy and short with thick hair and hazel eyes. Something of a drifter, he had come to stay at the Hatzis property to “recuperate” from some grueling job. Young Caryl remembered his hands. They were smooth-skinned and pale; his fingers were tapered and slim. They were not the hands of a hard worker; they were the hands of a pedophile.
After her sister’s teary and embarrassing admission, her father had chased Uncle Ren into the orchard and shot him. Young Caryl had witnessed the murder from behind the gray trunk of an apple tree. She remembered the feel of the bark against her clutching fingers, the sickness in her gut and hot tears on her cheeks, the flash of bright red that coincided with the crack of a gunshot.
She had buried the memory as deeply as she could, keeping it from her engrams when the time came to construct their activation memories. The shame of her family was a secret she did not want spread throughout the galaxy. It was a memory too ugly to be shared with anyone else.
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