“Come out while you are able!”
“Thor?” Sol’s voice was filled with surprise and reservations. “Is that you?”
“There is no time, we must leave now.”
“She’s right,” put in Lucia. “The Trident isn’t stable. It could blow at any time.”
“Lucia?” It was Peter’s turn to be surprised.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” she said, feeling a surge of relief. “But we’ll have to save the pleasantries until later. We need to get you out of here before anything else goes wrong.”
“This is a matter of high priority,” said Thor.
Space-time shook around them as something massive exploded farther down the spine of the Trident. Gravitational shock waves stretched the matter around them, tugging symmetries askew, then snapping them back into place.
A seven-sided hole ship emerged from the gap in the side of the vessel, its whiteness in stark contrast to the blasted matter surrounding it.
“Follow me,” Thor instructed them. With a swirl of light beams, she spun on her axis and accelerated into the distance. The multiple hole ship followed as best it could, looking decidedly clunky in comparison. Lucia brought up the rear, unwilling to stray too far from her charge as they made their escape from the disintegrating ship.
* * *
“Who’s boss now?” asked Samson wryly as she piloted Eledone in Thor’s wake.
“I’d say she is,” Sol said, pointing at the screen. “I mean, look at her. She’s—”
Words escaped her.
“Changed?” supplied Alander.
She nodded. “Yes, changed.”
The truth was that she felt humbled. She had assumed all along that engrams were incapable of change. Even when she tinkered with them, meddled with their operating assumptions, they were still hampered by the overseer that ran them, constantly bringing them back into line when they strayed. She had hoped to find a way around these restrictions but hadn’t yet managed to do so. It had taken alien intervention to achieve it with Alander first, and now Thor.
Exactly what had happened to Lucia, she didn’t know, but the way the liberated spindle was dogging Eledone and the tone in Lucia’s voice when she had asked about Peter suggested that she hadn’t so much changed herself as changed her home.
Still, hybrid vigor, as Alander had suggested, might well be what they needed to survive in the short term as well as the long. And right now, she was quite happy to clutch at whatever life raft came her way.
Temperatures skyrocketed as they wound along narrow passages and through folding chambers. Conditions were soon as bad as they had been in the wounded cutter. There was no hope in this case, though, that the disintegration was self-inflicted. No recycling for the mighty ship, she assumed. There was no sign of the Pllix anywhere. The Trident was a victim of the laws of physics.
She hadn’t seen physics in action like this since Sol System had been destroyed. Great rents opened around them, sending fragments of wall and ceiling flying like ashes in a bonfire. Eledone bucked as it rode the explosive flow. The white point of Thor vanished in a howling, rumbling shock wave that gradually overtook them and shook them like a die in a cup. She could hear the battered hole ship’s voice, barely audible over the noise, complaining of damage, and beyond that a deep moaning sound that issued from God only knew where. For all she could tell, it could have been the dying groan of the Trident itself.
The shock wave dispersed around them as it expanded, and Thor reappeared, glowing like a sun through clouds. The rumble faded, and Eledone ceased its litany of complaint. The moan ceased, also, its origins never determined.
As Eledone’s sensors recovered, what remained of pi-1 Ursa Major took shape around them.
“Oh, my God,” Alander breathed.
Sol silently echoed the sentiment.
The system’s primary was spent. Its remains consisted of two expanding sheets of gas and energy, sandwiching the ecliptic all around its equator. Some of the expelled matter had cooled, lending a mottled, blotchy appearance to the debris. The rest burned with a reddish, angry glow, except for two striking, blue-yellow jets emerging from where each pole had been, half-visible through the murk.
Sol’s first impression of the system was how much darker it appeared to be. With the primary sun destroyed and its energy spread out over a vast volume, the amount of visible light was limited. That, however, only cast the ongoing battle into sharp, shadowless relief. Violent flashes and streaks still flickered from hundreds of locations, blue- and red-shifted by extreme velocities and exotic warps in space-time. The extended flash that accompanied the final breakup of the Trident falling rapidly behind them was barely enough to illuminate vast clouds of gas and debris around it, even for a second. Similar clouds bubbled everywhere Sol looked, expanding and merging wherever hostilities had broken out.
And the planets! She shook her head, disbelieving her eyes. Even after the death of the sun, she still had trouble accepting the scale of this battle. Stars were violent places, by nature turbulent and changeable, but planets didn’t normally blow up or expel vast chunks of their atmosphere in energetic plumes.
Yet they, too, were gone. The Earth-like inner world, Jian Lao, had been reduced to dust. The atmosphere of the bigger gas giant had been stripped away and its core broken up into millions of jagged and treacherous chunks. Trails of molten debris and plasma marked the locations of the remainder of the planets. Once-molten cores were reduced to glowing cinders, while ring systems and moons were indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble filling the system.
Pi-1 Ursa Major was essentially dead, but the fight between the two super-races carried on regardless.
“I can’t get my head around this,” Inari said tonelessly. Her eyes were glazed as she stared at a view of the Source of All in the middle reaches of the system, just outside what had once been the habitable zone. Its sunlike appearance was gone. Now it looked like a flickering fluorescent tube tied in a knot around something dark and sinuous that coiled in and out of its glowing folds. A luminous mist enshrouded it making it hard to tell what precisely was going on. Sol was reminded of a human zygote, its cells dividing, growing, then dividing again.
“Where are we going?” asked Samson into the hushed cockpit piloting the hole ship with the control stalk.
Sol shook her head. “I have no idea, but keep on Thor’s tail as best you can.”
Thor arced smoothly until she was pointing up into the northern plume of gas and stellar debris. Accelerating at many dozens of g’s, the three vessels were soon moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Debris rained on shields that had never, to Sol’s knowledge, been used for such purposes. Eledone was used to traveling through unspace, not the real universe, where at such velocities a single molecule could tear an unprotected ship apart.
“She’s taking us out of the zone of interference,” Lucia reported. “We’re unable to use ftl here, in the light cone of the explosion. We can’t escape until we get outside it.”
“But how are we meant to get outside the light cone when we can’t travel faster than light?” asked Samson.
“The disturbance is not symmetrical in space,” Thor replied. “There are irregularities.”
“And we’re heading for one of those?”
Sol waited almost thirty seconds before it was clear that Thor wasn’t about to answer.
“She seems more and more like you every day, Sol,” Samson commented.
“What good will getting out of the light cone do us?” asked Inari. “We don’t even have a working ftl drive.”
“Yes we do,” said Alander. “Axford’s hole ship is merged with Eledone, so we’ll be able to use his.”
Inari nodded but only looked partially convinced. There was still a faraway look to her eyes, as though she’d long since passed the point of being surprised. She was coasting, now, in shock; it would probably take hours, maybe even days, to recover.
They entered the g
lowing clouds, blue-shifted to higher energies by their velocity. Stellar detritus enclosed them, and strange high-pitched noises came to them through Eledone’s walls as particles ricocheted off the shields.
The battle between the Starfish and Spinners vanished into redness behind them. Sol’s last glimpse was of the corrupted Source of All writhing like a nest of snakes as alien ships of wildly different shapes and sizes converged from all sides. The system was alight with the fire of battle. On top of the infrared wash from the explosion of pi-1 Ursa Major, there were thousands of points of higher-frequency light winking on and off in time with the ongoing fight.
There was no sign of pursuit, though and for that she was profoundly grateful.
Then something loomed at them from the radiant clouds: the hulk of a cutter kilometers long. Craters gaped in its hull. Cold and dead, it fell instantly behind without incident.
It wasn’t enough to make her relax, though. Tension filled the cockpit as the convoy sped on, constantly accelerating through the stellar debris. It was hard to believe, Sol thought abstractedly, that the molecules they were colliding with had, just a day ago, been in the heart of a star. And strangely, that thought brought with it a glimmer of hope. With the Starfish taking such a beating, for the first time in a long time, survival didn’t seem so bleak.
Whether or not it was enough, of course, she wouldn’t know until they were within ftl range of the colonies. The mission had cut it horribly fine. Zemyna and Geb had passed their deadline by some hours. If the fovea had arrived even slightly ahead of schedule, Sagarsee could have been attacked, too. The idea of returning to nothing but burning wreckage where the last of the UNESSPRO colonies had been founded chilled her to the core.
In silence they continued to accelerate through the clouds. Gradually these began to thin, and through them brighter stars appeared. Inari openly wept at the sight of them. Sol kept her feelings close to herself, standing apart from Peter and the others, not daring to look away even for a moment.
Then out of the ether came the crackle of human voices:
“... reporting from Demeter that...”
“... fovea sighted at 0920...”
“... decrease in overall activity but hot spots...”
“... no joy...”
“Hail them,” said Sol quickly. “Tell them we’re coming!”
“This is Eledone in pi-1 Ursa Major calling all human vessels in the vicinity. Can you hear us?”
“Eledone?” came the instantaneous response. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“A long story,” said Sol. “Who are we talking to?”
“This is Faridah,” came the reply. “Christ we thought you guys were dead!”
“Far from it, Faridah. We’re heading home, if there’s still a home to return to.”
No joy...
“The circle is closing in, but we’re hanging in there. Welcome back—and watch out for signal hunters. They’re all around here.”
Right on cue, something angular and silver appeared alongside Thor. Whips of crimson energy lashed out at her shining hull, tangling themselves in stabbing beams of light.
“Sagarsee,” said Thor, and with a dash she disappeared.
The angular signal hunter turned its attention on the next ship in line. Golden light met crimson as Lucia pushed herself forward between them. Red whips coiled around the spindle and dragged it in.
“Eledone,” said Sol, “take us to Sagarsee. Lucia, we’ll meet you there, okay?”
“I’ll leave once you’re gone.”
The energy whips were scoring Lucia’s golden hull. Sol bit her lip, realizing only then that the spindle was defenseless against the alien signal hunter. Mentally she urged Eledone to hurry, not wishing to sacrifice Lucia just so their escape could be facilitated. Not for the first time she cursed the blind obedience to ingrained behavioral rules that so often drove engrams to their deaths.
The view winked out, and unspace enfolded them. Instantly, she felt as though the walls of the cockpit were closing in on her.
“We made it,” said Inari, expelling a sigh that was part laugh. “We actually made it!”
“So it would seem,” said Samson. Her own relief seemed more cautious.
“I wouldn’t get too excited too soon,” said Alander with annoying practicality. “We still don’t know what we’re flying back to.”
Sol nodded, sympathizing with his unwillingness to celebrate while the events of the previous days were so fresh.
No joy...
The words rang through her thoughts. Ramping her clock rate right down, she took a seat and waited out the trip home in frozen silence.
2.3.6
They came out of unspace over Sagarsee’s north pole. After the close confines of Eledone and the chaotic madness of pi-1 Ursa Major, the simple, uncomplicated sunlight of BSCS 148 was like a visual breath of fresh air. Sagarsee hung bold and blue beneath them, its clouds swirling in a thick spiral over ice and frozen seas. The stars above were clear and unobstructed by stellar debris or the detritus of warfare. It wasn’t Earth, but for Alander, it was the next best thing.
Barely had they reentered the real universe when voices clamored for their attention.
“Sol! You made it!” Cleo Samson looked up wearily from her position by Eledone’s command stalk at the sound of her own voice and the appearance of her own face on one of the screens.
“We made it,” Sol confirmed, stirring from her position on the couch. “As did you, obviously.”
“Only by the skin of our teeth.” The mission supervisor of the Frank Drake suddenly lost all sense of relief, and her expression became serious. “We lost Zemyna and Demeter and the last we heard was that Geb was under attack. But Lucia tells us that the Starfish are getting their collective ass kicked in pi-1 Ursa Major, so all of this should stop now, right?”
Alander studied the vessels clumped around Sagarsee’s gifts.
There were dozens of hole ships in various configurations; the larger were most likely craft belonging to the Unfit, combined to form traveling habitats. Orbiting close to the Hub was Lucia’s spindle. She must have made the jump much more quickly than Eledone to have already secured an orbit.
“Let’s hope so,” said Sol. “Thor could probably tell you more, though.”
“She’s here,” said Samson. There was a look on Samson’s face that suggested she wasn’t too sure about this new, improved Thor. “Somewhere, anyway. The last we saw of her, she was scouting the edge of the system. God only knows what she’s looking for. She never explained—”
“Can we talk about this later?” Sol cut in tiredly. “I need to get out of this fucking tin can.”
Samson nodded and offered an apologetic smile.
“Sure. Just give us five minutes to clear the Dry Dock, and it’s all yours.”
Samson closed the line then, and Alander watched the screen in anticipation, waiting for the face he knew would appear there next.
He didn’t have to wait long.
“Hello, Peter,” said Lucia. In the screen she looked the same as she had more than a century earlier, back on Earth. Her deep brown eyes stared at him with warmth and playful intelligence. It was like watching a photograph come to life.
And just like a photograph, he sensed the two-dimensionality behind it. She was an image beginning to lose her resolution from being copied too many times. Despite everything that had happened to her since leaving Earth, she was trying to be exactly the same as she used to be, and looked strained because of it.
“Hello, Lucia,” he said. “I’m glad you made it out okay.”
She smiled. “I didn’t think I was going to for a while there.”
“None of us did.”
A fleeting look of anxiety crossed her face, then vanished. “Who would’ve thought that we’d end up here, eh, Peter? We’ve done things our originals could never have imagined in a thousand years.”
“And then some.”
She smiled again,
this time more naturally, as if relaxing into the conversation.
“I guess it’s something to be proud of, anyway,” she said.
He nodded. “It is.”
She hesitated, and Alander sensed her attention shifting. “I was talking to Thor,” she said. “She told me I should speak to Sol.”
The original Hatzis stepped up beside Alander. “I’m here, Lucia.”
“I—” The anxious look returned.
Hatzis glanced at Alander, then back to the screen. “What is it, Lucia?”
She seemed to steel herself then against her uncertainties. “I want to change, Caryl.”
Hatzis frowned. “Change? In what way?”
“Thor said you could help me like you tried to help her.”
The corners of Sol’s eyes tightened fractionally. “What did she tell you about that, exactly?”
“Just that you were reprogramming all of your engrams to make them more flexible.”
Sol didn’t react to a sharp look Inari cast in her direction. “That’s not entirely true, Lucia,” Sol said. “I’ve introduced a few random changes to the parameters to see if any of them helped, certainly. But that’s about it. I’m not sure I have the know-how to rewrite everyone from the inside out. I’m hoping I’ll find something simple that will keep you all together longer. If I can’t—” She shrugged, glancing around the cockpit. “Well, I guess it’ll get kind of lonely around here in a few years.”
“I want to change, Caryl,” Lucia said again. “The spindle can keep me alive forever, but what’s the point if I simply vegetate in here? Peter’s Graveyard—” Her eyes flicked to him with something akin to apology. Then she sighed. “All the Peters are gone, I’m afraid.”
Alander frowned. “What do you mean, they’re gone?”
“They’re all frozen,” she said. “I’m sorry, Peter. It’s just that I needed them. I needed their company, I needed... you.”
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