Lucia felt herself dithering, even as the need to make a decision became increasingly urgent. Her I-body ran with Peter as he hurried to the visitors’ evacuation point. A crowd had already gathered there, pressing forward to take the next available hole ship. Mantissa B was beginning to break apart into clumps, shedding smaller hole ship configurations like a vast flower dispersing pollen to the solar winds. An alternative rendezvous point was touted for those who didn’t share Sol’s suicidal imperative. Alkaid itself, the “chief of mourners,” would be where survivors would regroup to discuss further options. At a distance of one hundred light years from Sol, it was farther than most of the remaining engrams had ever traveled.
On my terms, not theirs...
Sol’s decision cut a swathe through the panic. She, at least, offered a resolution to the situation. As terrible as the prospect was of simply resigning oneself to the Starfish’s wrath, at least it would bring an end to the uncertainty and fear. And judging by the clamor of voices Lucia could hear, a lot of people were tempted to follow Sol’s lead. Many had already committed themselves to the journey and were calling on others to join them. In the waiting area on Mantissa B, lots were being cast to decide where the next evacuating tetrad would be going.
Lucia’s I-body watched with impotent despair as Alander voted for Sol, and the motion passed.
“What’s going to happen to them?” she asked Thor. The shining hybrid vessel hadn’t fled yet. It seemed to be holding back, helplessly observing the frantic evacuation, its radiant beams picking out fleeing hole ships as they disengaged from each other and vanished into unspace. “Will the fovea follow them?”
“Individually, their wakes will be difficult to trace,” Thor replied, “But en masse it is likely that their destination will be pinpointed.”
“And what about you, Caryl? Are you going to run, or will you make a stand with Sol?”
Lucia read the silence that followed as uncertainty. But she knew they would have to make a choice soon. It never took the cutters long to appear after the fovea arrived.
Frustration and apprehension sent her into the pov of her I-body as it followed Peter—along with dozens of other android bodies—into the cockpit of the evacuation tetrad assigned to go to Sol. Even through his hair and beard, Lucia could clearly make out his haunted expression.
“I can’t let you do this,” she said to him.
He faced her with a shake of the head. “It’s not up to you, Lucia.”
“This is the wrong decision, Peter! You know that!”
“Right or wrong,” he returned, “it’s my decision.”
“But—” She choked on the words. But what about the stars? she wanted to say. What about us?
The image of the two of them holding hands on Jian Lao was still strong in her mind, even though her survey mission’s colony world had been destroyed along with pi-1 Ursa Major. There would be no sunny future as she imagined it, but that didn’t mean they had to abandon hope, too. She had yet to give up the inbuilt need for that.
As the tetrad detached from Mantissa B and prepared to jump to Sol, she decided to take drastic action. She couldn’t stand by and do nothing while Peter killed himself. Moving her I-body closer to his, she put a translucent arm on his shoulder. Forces flexed, and the I-body lost its shape. Flowing like a raindrop down a pane of glass, it swept over him in a single, smooth rush, quickly covering him and his own I-suit.
“What—?”
She flexed again, applying pressure to clamp his mouth shut.
Her mind stretched out, reaching for and finding the hole ship’s AI. Its core persona belonged to a hole ship christened Huang-di.
“Open the inner airlock door,” she commanded. Ignoring Alander’s protests and the confused stares of the other refugees, she marched Alander through the short corridor leading from the cockpit. “Close the inner airlock door.”
Choking noises emanated from Alander’s clenched teeth. She let up on the pressure slightly to allow him to speak. “Lucia, you can’t do this!” he groaned. It sounded as though his voice was coming from inside her head. “Let me go, for Christ’s sake!”
“Huang-di, evacuate the airlock.”
Background noise faded to a faint murmur communicated only through the soles of her feet. Peter’s voice, however, was still loud.
“I might not be able to fight you, Lucia,” he was saying, “but I can refuse to talk to you! I can slow my thoughts to nothing; I can shut myself down entirely! What use would I be to you, then?”
She hesitated, but only slightly. If she forced him to survive, at least there’d be a chance he might change his mind. But if he was dead, there was no hope at all. It wasn’t a difficult choice to make.
“Open the outer door, Huang-di.”
The last vestige of air tickled by as it rushed into the void. The burning light of the fovea greeted her as she folded Alander’s resistant legs beneath her and hurled both of them out into space.
* * *
She jumped pov to the spindle. Huang-di was a tiny dot against the starscape, and Peter an even smaller dot drifting away from it. Firing up her reactionless thrusters, she sent herself careering through the chaos of hole ships just as a cold blue flash heralded the arrival of the cutters.
Panic reached a fever pitch among humanity’s survivors, and Lucia heard desperate entreaties, hollow threats, even prayers hurled at the Starfish—all, of course, to no avail. The last complete set of Spinner gifts gleamed in golden sunlight as razor-edged destruction hurtled toward them. Lucia knew, as did everyone, that there was nothing that could be done now to make a difference. All anyone could do was try to stay alive.
Energy fields with the thickness of butterfly wings and the strength of titanium snatched at Alander and the encompassing I-body as the spindle swept by. Lucia gathered him up, drawing him into her sanctuary. Where exactly she was going to go, she still hadn’t decided. Without knowing what had happened to the Praxis, she couldn’t automatically assume that jumping ahead was the best option. But there had to be some direction she could jump that would be safe. At some point, there had to be a boundary beyond which the threat of destruction dropped to zero.
Almost in response to her quandary, Thor suddenly announced: “I HAVE DECIDED. I AM GOING TO BSC5581.”
Her voice came to Lucia as more than half of the remaining refugees fled in one sudden wave, Huang-di among them.
“Why?” Lucia asked, but the bright point that was Thor had already vanished.
The cutters swooped low and fast over Sagarsee, snapping towers as easily as if they were little more than twigs. There wasn’t time to think; she just had to act. Like a signature, each of the alien ships had a different way of bending space—the cutters, the Trident, and the more exotic Starfish craft. The strange creature Thor had become was no exception, and as she moved through unspace, she left a distinct ripple in the hyperspatial continuum, making it easy for Lucia to follow her, just as she had from pi-1 Ursa Major.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Peter as they traversed space-time’s more subtle geometries. “I had no choice.”
“Spare me the apologies, Lucia.” he snapped. Free of her I-body, he was still trapped in the spindle. She gave him full access to her telemetry, but he wasn’t interested. “You don’t give a damn about me, so you can quit with the bullshit!”
“But I do care—” she started.
“If you did,” he said, “you wouldn’t have taken me against my will. And don’t give me any of that crap about how you did it for my own good, or for the good of the others. I’m not buying it. You only did it because you need me to keep you going.”
The accusation stung because it simply wasn’t true. But there was no time to reason with him. They had emerged from unspace in BSC5581. The world called Geb was still burning. Alander fell silent, reminded perhaps that there were bigger issues to worry about than his own personal liberty.
Lucia and Thor were alone, the only ships in the system. If a
ny survivors had followed, they had yet to arrive, hole ship propulsion being considerably slower than the means she and Thor enjoyed.
“Now what?” she asked.
Thor said nothing. Instead, she sent out bright white beams across the ruined world below them, testing its smoky atmosphere. Lucia thought of insect antennae again and wondered if she would ever know what Thor was thinking.
Then a light blossomed high over the ecliptic, and Lucia’s heart sank. The fovea had followed them.
Thor didn’t waste time on discussions.
“HD132142,” she said. Before Lucia could comment, Thor had already gone, leaving Lucia’s spindle alone under the harsh, cold glare of the fovea.
“If we’re going to follow her,” said Peter after a few heartbeats, “then I don’t recommend you pause for thought, Lucia.”
Still lacking a viable alternative, Lucia did as he suggested. Before the cutters had chance to slice their way into the real universe, she was once again trailing Thor at a discreet distance.
When she arrived at HD132142, she found it empty apart from Thor hovering over another destroyed colony. The fires were cooling, but smoke still cast a thick pall over the world’s surface. Gloom would reign for months yet, maybe even years.
Within moments of her arrival, the fovea burst over the clouded world like a new sun.
“BSC5423,” Thor said, and vanished again.
This time Lucia didn’t hesitate. Deep in Thor’s unspace wake, she followed.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Peter said. His tone was resentful, but at least he was talking to her without anger. “Keep going like this and you’re just going to end up back at Sol anyway. We might as well get there early and avoid all of this jumping around.”
Lucia had noted Thor’s progression, too. HD132142 was the system containing Demeter, the third most recent colony attacked by the Starfish. Zemyna, the next in the series, was in BSC5423. Thor was clearly working her way backward through the chain of colonies. But why?
Soon after they arrived at the ruins that had once been Zemyna, the fovea appeared again. Thor was gone in an instant, and Lucia was close on her tail, heading for Rasmussen in BSC5070.
“What the hell are you doing, Caryl?” she asked Thor immediately upon their arrival. “What are you trying to achieve?”
“Symmetry,” came the reply.
“Symmetry? What the fuck does that—?”
But the fovea’s arrival cut short the conversation, and Thor disappeared again.
Lucia followed; she had no choice. If there was a purpose to Thor’s movements, then she wanted to know what it was.
“What do you mean by symmetry?” she asked again in lambda Auriga.
“Every thread has two ends,” Thor said, then was gone once more.
In Theta Perseus, Lucia tried again. “Are you talking about Rob’s causally locked thread?”
“Your lexicon is insufficient.”
Peter chuckled bitterly to himself on the way back to 10 Taurus, the next system on the roll call of the dead.
“She always was an arrogant bitch,” he said. “But if she thinks the Starfish are going to follow her back the way they came—”
“I don’t think that’s what she’s trying to do,” Lucia cut in. She had difficulty even considering the possibility that had occurred to her. Thor was only half-right. It wasn’t just the English lexicon that was lacking; Lucia’s mind simply didn’t have the capacity to contain such thoughts.
Presumably, Thor’s did. Under the reddish light of Luyten’s Star, Lucia watched as Thor jumped closer to the fovea, braving its intense radiation. The fovea flared brightly, threateningly, and then Thor was on her way again to the next system. Lucia followed, with the fovea close behind her.
At Groombridge 1830, Thor tried again and was similarly rebuffed; in iota Boötis, she seemed to get a little closer before being forced away; at chi Hercules, the fovea came out almost on top of Thor, forcing her to retreat before making the attempt. And so it continued. It was like watching a strange kind of game, Lucia thought, a game of hopscotch conducted across solar systems with the threat of the cutters never far behind.
“What is she up to?” Alander asked on the way to the next system. “Trying to merge with it, for Christ’s sake?”
“That would be taking hybridization a little too far, perhaps,” said Lucia. “But I don’t think that’s what she’s doing. The fovea probably isn’t even the kind of thing you could merge with.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything has its own signature when it jumps through unspace. Everything except the fovea. The fovea doesn’t leave a wake of any kind. There’s no sensation of it traveling at all; it just appears.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I don’t believe it’s a ship.”
Alander frowned. “Then what is it?”
“I think it’s the mouth of a wormhole.”
In beta Cane Venatici they watched as the fovea blossomed over another dead world. Now that the idea had occurred to her, it seemed obvious: why send ships to investigate systems when peeking through space-time would be enough? Given the other wonders of the Spinners and the Starfish, wormhole technology wasn’t too much of a stretch for the imagination. If the Starfish didn’t want to get too close, for whatever reason, all they had to do was open a hole in the system they wanted to examine, see what awaited them there, then send in the cutters if necessary. The radiation was simply a by-product of the hole, like blood from a wound.
The question was: what was on the other side of that mouth? Where did it lead? And what did the intelligences watching through it make of Thor’s strange dance?
They passed Vega and Sothis, two sacrifices of the Battle of Beid. Axford and Sol had both lost their headquarters in the fallout of that skirmish—a minor one in what, to the Starfish, was a much larger war. Or so Lucia imagined it. But the fovea showed no sign of recognition as it passed by the ruins, and the dance continued, with Thor edging closer and closer to the mouth of the wormhole as though daring it to swallow her.
“Wormhole or not, I don’t see the point of all this,” said Alander. “Once the fovea reaches Sol and the others, the cutters will come, and that’ll be the end of it.”
Lucia agreed, and she suspected Thor did, too. As they swept through systems and Sol came ever closer, the dance took on an urgent note. Constantly testing the perimeter around the wormhole mouth, Thor no longer paid Lucia and Alander any attention at all. She ignored Lucia’s questions and simply assumed that she would be followed. Lucia felt like a spectator, a witness to something she could never hope to understand.
They arrived at HD92719, a system that at first seemed no different than the others: alien worlds turned under an alien sun, and ash darkened the face of the one planet most like Earth.
Then, unexpectedly, Thor spoke.
“I am home,” she said in the few seconds before the fovea appeared. “Here is where it begins.”
Lucia didn’t understand what Thor meant by “home” until she checked the UNESSPRO records. HD92719 had contained the colony after which Thor was named.
“What do you mean, Caryl?” asked Alander. “This is where what begins?”
Thor had no time to reply, if she had ever intended to. The fovea opened up above them, blazing like a supernova. It loomed over them, taking up a quarter of the sky. It seemed larger than it had before, and at first Lucia thought that this was just an optical illusion. But then she realized that it actually was expanding.
“Holy shit,” Alander muttered, noticing it, too.
Thor vanished with a flash of white light as the edge of the fovea swept nearer. Lucia was ready to follow to the next system, but according to Thor’s wake, that wasn’t where she was headed. The ripples in unspace denoting her passage were aimed directly into the heart of the wormhole.
Radiation boiled through vacuum as the fovea swept outward, its roiling surface tearing and bursting.
Lucia’s Spinner-enhanced senses caught glimpses of arcane geometries and tortured space-time. The interior of the wormhole seemed almost alive, rippling with symmetries she wasn’t equipped to comprehend.
Then, abruptly, something lashed out at them—a tongue of pure white energy. She felt motion, acceleration, penetration, reorientation—
Time passed in an unmarked blur. It seemed to Lucia as though her internal clock had slowed right down to zero, freezing her in place while the universe moved around her.
Then all was quiet, and the fovea was gone. Lucia looked about her, confused as to what had just happened to them.
“Are we—?” Alander stopped, his question unasked. The view outside the spindle rendered all inquiries meaningless.
They weren’t in HD92719 anymore; they’d moved again. Thor’s home system was gone, and in place of its central star hung a maelstrom of unleashed energy. The system they were in had changed dramatically in the previous two days, but Lucia recognized it immediately.
“Pi-1 Ursa Major,” she said.
“How the hell did we get here?”
“Maybe this was where the wormhole led.”
“So where are the Starfish? What happened to the battle?”
Lucia examined the system in every frequency, but it was completely empty.
“They’ve gone,” she said.
“I can see that, Lucia. The question is where?”
“How the hell should I know, Peter?” she snapped. Her confusion was making her less tolerant than she normally might have been.
Peter ran a hand through his hair, sighing. He looked haggard, much older than his rejuvenated body had before. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”
He stopped.
“It’s just what, Peter?”
“It’s just that it seems so empty,” he said after a moment. “So quiet. And I don’t want to hope that—” He stopped again and shook his head. “I just don’t want to hope, that’s all.”
She did know what he meant. As they searched the system, looking for any sign of alien activity, the same thought occurred to her, too. Just because they found nothing—no Source, no Tridents, no cutters—did that mean that the aliens had really gone? Was it too much to hope that Thor’s strange dance had somehow saved them?
Heirs of Earth Page 34
