Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Something was happening to him. He could feel it in his arms and legs. There was something crawling under his skin, twisting into knots and then untangling. He felt his back hunch, then straighten. He blinked and shook his head as if to dispel a dream.

  “Looks like you’re going to need a little more firepower,” he said, climbing cautiously to his feet.

  “Clearly.” Axford was watching him without fear. His expression was one of wary assessment. “What am I going to do about you, Peter? I could keep shooting you, but I’m not one for pointless gestures.”

  Alander felt strength flowing through him, invigorating him. He fought a sense of invulnerability. Just because he could resist PEP bolts at extremely close range didn’t mean he was indestructible.

  “If it’s pointless, Frank, why don’t you lower the gun?”

  “As a deterrent, it still has some value. Remember, while your body has unanticipated reserves, so does mine. I’d advise against coming any closer.”

  Alander paused. The two of them faced off against each other with blood-smoke swirling around them.

  “Okay, Frank,” he said. “It’s over, either way. Selene, open a line to Caryl Hatzis.”

  “Peter!” Sol’s reply was instantaneous. “What the hell’s going on over there?”

  “It’s Axford,” he said, adding with a shake of his head, “Again.”

  “Jesus, Peter,” said Sol. “What happened to you?”

  He realized only then how he would look to her eyes: blood-spattered and knocked around by too many PEP shots. “I’m okay, but Gou Mang’s dead. Axford went off the rails there for a while, but I think everything’s under control now.” He looked at Axford again. “Is it, Frank?”

  The ex-general shook his head as though disappointed. “You’re letting yourself be dragged down by her, Peter. I thought you had more sense than that.”

  “Well, I guess we’re both full of surprises today, aren’t we? Selene—uh!”

  That was all he managed to get out. Axford lunged at him with his many-tooled arm; wickedly sharp instruments stabbed with gleaming precision. Nanodrills and cutting lasers flashed. Backed up by the flash and grunt of the PEP weapon, Axford threw himself physically forward, a lethal monster masquerading as human.

  Alander felt himself move with near impossible speed. He leaned to his left at the same time as his right forearm came up to deflect the bulk of the attack. They were moves his original had learned in a self-defense course, decades before entrainment, and they’d been instilled in him along with everything else. He had never used them before, yet he moved now with a finesse and ease that suggested he’d practiced the moves every day of his life.

  The PEP gun flashed again. It knocked his left shoulder back, nothing more. Whatever was happening to him, it was advancing at a rapid rate. Axford 1313, murderous yet blank-faced, seemed to hang motionless in the air as Alander pivoted around his center of gravity and eased aside the arm with its deadly cargo. His left leg kicked up and out, striking Axford firmly in the chest. The blow wasn’t intended to injure the ex-general, just to ward him off. Nevertheless, there was a loud crack of bones as his foot connected.

  Alander’s foot crumpled along with Axford’s chest and the two of them rebounded apart with surprising force. Alander fell to the floor, the pain in his foot hurting more than all of the PEP shots combined. Axford had seemed to weigh tons.

  “Christ!” he cried out, rolling away.

  As time returned to its usual rate, he clutched his injured leg and wondered at the burning sensations racing along his limbs.

  “I’m merging the two ships,” he heard Sol saying somewhere beyond the pain.

  “No, wait” Alander said. He wanted to make sure the ex-general was no longer a threat to the others and their mission before the ship conjoined again. “Give me a second, Caryl.”

  Axford had fallen face forward to the floor. Alander slid painfully away from him, wary of his shattered foot, expecting the man to get up and attack again at any moment.

  “Selene—” He hesitated on the brink of ordering the hole ship to eject Axford 1313 from the ship. Instead, he clambered onto his one good leg and limped to where the man lay. He squatted next to the ex-general and reached out to prod his shoulder. There was no response, so he rolled Axford onto his back.

  Or tried to, anyway. Axford weighed considerably more than he should. Alander had to brace himself firmly and heave before the body rolled.

  That Axford was very dead was obvious once he’d managed to get him onto his back. Where his foot had struck, there was a deep impression left in staved-in ribs and internal armor. Neither skin nor I-suit had been punctured, but the damage couldn’t be hidden. Axford looked as though he’d been crushed by a falling pylon.

  How the fuck did I do this? Alander asked himself. What in God’s name am I?

  He moved back from Axford’s body. Dead he might be, but Alander still didn’t trust the man. “Selene, I want you to isolate him from the rest of us. Don’t let anything in or out unless Caryl Hatzis or I specifically tell you to. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Peter.”

  The boundary was already forming when he turned to check Gou Mang. As Axford had said, the PEP blast had killed her—or at least stopped the android that she occupied from working. If the organic circuitry running the android wasn’t too badly damaged, there was a chance her engram could be recovered.

  “Peter?” Sol’s voice broke into the cockpit quiet. “Is it safe to merge yet?”

  “Yes,” he said, feeling numbness settle over him like an anesthetic. “I guess so.”

  Alien technology flexed around him, but he barely noticed. Slumping back on the floor, he felt all his new strength drain out of him. Whatever the Praxis had given him—and it had to be the Praxis—wasn’t permanent. That was abundantly clear. Also clear was the fact that it hadn’t solved anything. Yes, he had survived Axford’s attempted mutiny, but what surety did that give him? His crushed foot was healing itself practically before his eyes. He didn’t need to look at the screens around him, at the fight in pi-1 Ursa Major heating up, to realize that he had never been so far away from home as he was at that very moment.

  2.3.4

  Lucia dodged a wave of green triangles. Deceptively small from a distance, they had turned out to be half again as long as she was. They tended to ignore her, angling for larger game unless she blundered across their path—which she was careful to make sure she didn’t. A very small fish in a very crowded ocean, she was doing her best to keep a low profile.

  All around her, on every bandwidth, in every form of radiation known to her, pi-1 Ursa Major teemed with emissions. Explosions rocked space-time as exotic weapons found their mark. She was buffeted by forces she was unable to comprehend. Dazzled, frightened, feeling depths of ignorance and danger in equal measures opening up beneath her, she fought a growing sense of certainty that her luck had to run out soon.

  She should have fled when she had the chance, she told herself—before the sun blew, when she was blithely wasting time trying to contact the Starfish. Christ, they didn’t care about her or humanity. She knew the only way to survive was to run, and to keep running.

  But she also knew that this was just her programming talking. It supported any excuse to run. That she agreed with it this time didn’t change the selfishness behind the urge—and neither did it mean that she could actually do it. All her ftl capabilities had been disrupted following the explosion of the sun. Flexures of space-time such as that must surely, she assumed, have an effect on something. She could no more leave now than she could turn back time, and the ftl bands were still full of garbage. She’d seen too many other vessels disintegrate while attempting an ftl jump to attempt one herself.

  That the Spinners might have blown up the sun simply to give them an edge in the battle was a notion almost too large to comprehend. Blowing up stars as a tactical maneuver? The idea made her feel even more small and inconsequential than she already di
d.

  Keeping her new senses peeled for any sign of Thor’s mission, she dodged on reactionless thrusters past a conflagration involving a cutter and what looked like a giant squid made from glowing rings. The rings pulsed in waves down to the tips of kilometer-long tentacles, sending lances of purple energy into the cutter’s spinning hull. Most of these were deflected, although enough struck home to paint bright red streaks that spewed gas and debris into the vacuum. It dodged and swooped, but there was no escaping the energy squid. Finally it disintegrated into an expanding disk, sending trillions of highly energetic fragments slicing across the system. The squid was torn apart, exploding an instant later with a dazzling, novalike flash.

  Lucia outran both explosions to take refuge near one of the system’s less noteworthy asteroids. Not that she felt any easier there. While she wasn’t likely to be targeted if she kept out of the way, she could still be killed in the crossfire. The system was full of combatants, their weapons, and the spillage from those weapons. All it would take was one clumsy move, and she could kiss existence good-bye.

  With survival in mind, she activated the engram of Peter Alander 17. She didn’t feel happy about doing it, but she was rapidly running out of options.

  “I don’t understand what you think I can do,” he said when she had apprised him of the situation. His image was fragile in the face of the alien battle. At least she hadn’t had to explain who she was again; he remembered her well enough from their previous encounter.

  “You can help me think of a way out of here,” she said.

  “How? I know less about the Spinners than you do. You’re practically one of them, now.”

  “Hardly.” She felt herself withdraw from the accusation, even as it provoked a strong sense of wonder in her. “All they’ve done is toss me a glass bead, and it’s about as useless in the face of a missile.”

  “But you’ve got hybrid vigor, Lucia.”

  “I’ve got what?”

  “Hybrid vigor. Mixing two things can sometimes result in a new thing that’s stronger than the two you started with.”

  “You’re talking about synergy?”

  His image shook. “Don’t write yourself off just yet, that’s all I’m saying. You have an opportunity, here. Don’t waste it”

  He froze in midframe.

  “Peter?”

  But the engram didn’t respond. She quickly erased it from the overseer, then tried reloading it and starting again. It wouldn’t take. Garbage and memory fragments were all that issued from the conSense interface.

  //tangled in the metaphysics//

  How could I not want that?

  //swallowed by the sea//

  Right here in this moment, Lucia, you and I are—

  Remembering the end of that sentence, she killed the garbled simulation. Nonexistent tears pricked the eyes of her persistent self-image. She was a ghost haunting an empty alien tomb. She wasn’t real. She was as dead as Peter Alander 17 seemed to be now—as all the Peter Alanders were. They simply had the good sense to know when to lie down and accept the fact.

  With his passing, her confidence and sense of self were severely undermined.

  Hybrid vigor, my ass, she thought.

  A ping on the spindle’s equivalent of sonar brought her out of her funk. The spindle’s sensors had detected a hole ship nearby. Rousing herself, she sent her attention outward, to where the ping had returned from. There was a Trident heaving to nearby, its deceptively slender cross section and three curving tines crawling with electrical discharges of some kind. The ping was coming from the base of the center tine, where the long body swelled and divided. It was coming from at least two hole ships.

  Thor, she thought. And maybe the others...

  Something black oozed across the star field and touched the Trident along its extended tail. What it was she couldn’t tell, but the effect was immediate. The Trident buckled and began to fold into two pieces. Ponderous mass responded to irresistible forces. Gas and debris spewed into the void.

  The dark shape withdrew, presumably to strike elsewhere. Lucia didn’t know whether to thank it or damn it as it went. Her friends were in the crippled ship somewhere. But at least, she told herself, it had solved the problem of how she was going to get inside.

  * * *

  Sol looked up from the merger of the two hole ships as the Starfish display outside winked and fizzled out. The view of the battle vanished, and they were suddenly back in the bonelike chamber.

  One of the views from the hole ship was directed up at the ceiling. Sol couldn’t feel it, but the “chandelier”—the dangling arrangement of slender, strawlike threads that might have projected the illusion—was trembling.

  “I think we might be in trouble,” she muttered uneasily.

  “Seismic readings are up,” said Samson. “There was a hefty jolt a few seconds ago. I’m guessing we’ve been hit.”

  “The question is, how badly?”

  The meniscus separating the two cockpits peeled back, and the smell of burnt blood rolled over them. Sol didn’t flinch from the gore. She hurried to where Alander sat, propped against the couch, staring at his leg. His skin was ruddy under his beard and hair, his gaze focused on a point slightly above his exposed ankle.

  “Peter?” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and bending into his line of sight. “Are you all right?”

  The intensity of his expression dissipated. “Yeah, I’m fine. Check Gou Mang.”

  Sol went to where Inari was already inspecting the body to see if anything could be done for the android. Gou Mang’s neck had been broken by a close-range PEP shot. Her I-suit had protected her from the heat and the laser itself, but it had only absorbed a proportion of the impact. The shock wave had spread up into her brainpan and down her spine. There wasn’t much left, but Sol did her best.

  Putting a hand on still-active infrared ports scattered across the android’s skin, she accessed emergency preservation systems. A snapshot of every independent engram was stored in nonvolatile memory, deep in each android’s thorax. The miniature SSDS system was shaken, but it did still contain data. Lacking the time to check it in detail, Sol uploaded it into her considerably more sophisticated data storage systems. She would examine it later to see how much had survived.

  Either way, the body itself was a write-off. As was Axford’s. Through the membrane keeping him at a distance from everyone else, she could see the hunched posture of the body where Alander had collapsed its rib cage. Its shoulder had pulled in, as though guarding a secret.

  “I’ll lay odds that the son of a bitch isn’t really dead,” said Samson from behind them.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you,” said Sol. She turned away, grimacing at the blood. “Eledone, I want this mess cleaned up immediately. Then I want to find a way out of this fucking place. Cleo, will you look into that?”

  Samson nodded and went back to her post at the command stalk. Sol returned to Peter’s side; he was staring again at his leg.

  “Peter? Are you sure you’re okay?”

  He looked up, a bemused expression on his face. “What am I, Caryl?” He indicated his ankle. “This thing crumpled when I kicked Frank, and now look at it—it’s fine. You’ve seen his chest what I did to it. Christ he shot me god knows how many times, and yet it took just one shot to kill Gou Mang. What the fuck did the Praxis do to me?”

  The question came with such emotion that she felt almost guilty that she couldn’t give him an answer. “I honestly don’t know, Peter,” she said, standing.

  “I’m different; he changed me. I’m not who I was when...” He trailed off uncertainly.

  “None of us are the same as we were in entrainment camp,” she finished for him.

  “That’s not what I was going to say.” There was a weariness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before: the weariness of a man struggling with his own identity and maybe growing tired of the fight. “I’m not the same as I was before he ate me. He made me into flesh and tissue, C
aryl. He said he was remaking me in my own image, but I think the fucker threw some of himself into the mix, too.” He stood up with surprising speed and flexed the leg. It moved with both strength and grace, causing him to laugh uneasily. “Jesus, I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to be me, you know?”

  That surprised her. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “The old me would’ve had an opinion on how best to get us out of here. And he probably wouldn’t have cared too much if you made it out with me or not.”

  She smiled at this. “I’d happily take the new you over the old you, any day.”

  He came closer and put a hand on her upper arm and squeezed. She was wary of his new strength but forced herself not to flinch.

  “Thanks, Caryl.”

  “There’s no need to thank me, Peter. We’re both monsters, you and I. Sports.” Her smiled tightened. “We’d make a good pair, under happier circumstances.”

  He smiled awkwardly and took his hand away. She felt a sadness she hadn’t expected.

  “I’m not finding anything,” Samson interrupted. Sol broke away from Alander’s stare and faced her.

  “You’ve looked everywhere?”

  Samson nodded, then shrugged. “There are no breaks or seams, no unexplained bulges.”

  “What about up there?” She pointed at the bone straws overhead.

  “Nothing. Look for yourself, if you want.”

  Sol rejected the offer with a curt shake of the head. “Then we’ll just have to try cutting our way out. Eledone.” Sol studied the screens before her. “Take us to this point, here.” She randomly picked a point where the floor swept up to become a wall. “See if you can cut through it.”

  Light flared on the screens as one of the hole ship’s more exotic tools sliced into the smooth surface. Crystalline streaks of light ricocheted in all directions.

  After almost a minute, Sol asked. “Is it making any progress?”