The Tabit Genesis

by Tony Gonzales

  ‘Stop it, both of you,’ his mother said. ‘Abby, you’re excused.’

  Abby stabbed the food with her straw and sucked until it vanished.

  ‘Whatever,’ she said, launching herself out of the room.

  Adam sighed.

  ‘We don’t know much about the Arkady,’ his father said, beginning another oft-repeated lecture. ‘We’re the aliens in their world. It’s always best to stay clear.’

  ‘I did try to stay clear,’ Adam snapped. ‘It landed right in front of me. What was I supposed to do?’

  His father’s smile faded, and his head began shaking in erratic jolts.

  ‘When you’re young … lying seems harmless,’ he was stammering. ‘But it gets grown men into serious trouble.’

  The look on Mom’s face made Adam’s stomach drop.

  ‘The logs show that you literally walked off the platform edge,’ she said.

  All information about the mech’s movements, including the orientation of its gyroscopes, was recorded in its datacore. If you played that information back – how many steps it took, when it used its appendages, and – most damningly – how it used them – and transposed that information over a map of the rig platform, it was just as revealing as recorded video.

  ‘For God’s sake, the thing knocked you over!’ Mom exclaimed. ‘You’re lucky to be alive!’

  ‘It was stuck in the intake,’ Adam protested. ‘How else was I supposed to fix it?’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to fix anything under those circumstances!’ Mom snapped. ‘Do you have that little regard for your own life?’

  Adam shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It was dying,’ he said.

  Mom stared at him incredulously.

  ‘Please tell me you understand that it tried to kill you,’ she said.

  ‘No, that’s not true,’ Adam said. ‘It was just … scared.’

  ‘Scared?’ Mom repeated.

  ‘That makes it even more dangerous,’ his father said, still shaking. ‘You’ve got a big heart, but we don’t want to lose you.’

  ‘You mean we can’t afford to lose the dumb ass,’ Abby yelled out from the next room.

  ‘Go to the hangar, please!’ her mother shouted.

  ‘Mmkay, Mom,’ Abby sneered.

  ‘The mech is fixed,’ Adam said. ‘We can start harvesting again.’

  ‘You’re not going back down there,’ Mom declared.

  ‘Uh, yeah he is,’ Abby called out again.

  ‘Abigail!’ Mom shouted.

  ‘If I don’t, how are we going to survive?’ Adam asked. ‘Dad’s hurt, you don’t know how to pilot, and Abby won’t try prostitution.’

  ‘Eat shit,’ his sister yelled, just as the door leading to the hangar closed shut.

  Mom looked as if she might explode.

  ‘The old saying is that a good Three miner is one with a pulse,’ Dad said.

  ‘You are not going back down,’ Mom repeated. ‘Not until the radars and turrets are fixed.’

  ‘Mom,’ Adam said, looking at her thoughtfully. ‘Even I know we can’t afford that.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ was the response. ‘The answer is no.’

  Adam felt anger taking control of him.

  ‘What about the people who hurt Dad?’ he said. ‘We could always ask them for money again.’

  His mother lurched across the table but stopped short of hitting him. Adam’s reflexive flinch launched him off his seat, hurtling him backwards in the microgravity until he struck the bulkhead. She fell back into her seat, her clenched fists trembling, despair and frustration on her face.

  After a few long moments, Adam finally spoke.

  ‘You can’t stop me from going,’ he said. ‘Excuse me.’

  Adam pushed off the wall in a slow drift. He left the small room, leaving Thomas and Dawn Lethos to themselves.

  Both waited until the hatch to Adam’s cabin closed before speaking.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Dawn said. ‘I’ve lost them.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Thomas reassured, his head shakes calming somewhat. ‘But we’re close.’

  ‘We can’t provide them with anything,’ she spat. ‘Not even food.’

  ‘It’s time to let them go,’ he said. ‘Past time, really.’

  ‘Go? To whom? What would they do?’

  ‘They’ll find their way,’ Thomas said wearily. ‘They won’t outlive us staying here. They’ve paid for our sins long enough.’

  Dawn reached forward and wiped the corners of his mouth.

  ‘We had friends, connections,’ she said. ‘Someone must still be willing to help us. We’re firstborns, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Shh,’ Thomas hushed. ‘It’s too dangerous for them to know.’

  ‘It’s their right to know!’ Dawn snapped. ‘They have privileges with corporations and government—’

  ‘We’ve been through this so many times,’ Thomas said, his mouth reaching for the tube that allowed him to control his wheelchair. After a few puffs, the machine withdrew from the table and rolled into the corner. ‘They lost their rights the moment we changed their names.’

  ‘Their real names may be all that saves them the next time someone comes here demanding money,’ she insisted.

  ‘That’s just as likely to get them ransomed or killed,’ Thomas said, as the overhead light flickered. ‘We sold our souls. Sooner or later, the devil gets his due. Adam is safer working a rig than he is anywhere in the Inner Rim. And if any of the roughnecks around here discover that these kids are firstborns …’

  The only record of the Lethos family’s existence was in the Orionis Navy archives, and it had been forged by Ceti hackers who created a fictitious biometric signature designating them as Outer Rim ghosts. In truth, Tomas Straka was descended from the highborn founders of Titan Industries, where both he and his wife Dayla had been executives just ten years earlier.

  Titan was the leading producer of synthetic biology, specialising in the creation of artificial life forms. On the Tabit Genesis, biocybernetic organisms cleaned slush tanks, performed hull repairs, processed radioactive waste, and helped manufacture some of the first gas giant trawlers when the Tabit arrived in Orionis. But on Earth they had levelled cities, enslaved populations, and performed surgical assassinations in the Third World War.

  Synthetic organisms were most often created by combining elements taken from ‘The Catalogue’, the non-human gene pool archive that the Tabit Genesis had brought from Earth. It contained sequencing data for every native species of life that remained in the twenty-second century. As the colonisation of Orionis expanded, parts of the Catalogue were opened for privatisation and corporate investment. With the horrors of war still fresh in the minds of highborn officials, the government acted as both broker and auditor of all sequencing sales, scrutinising every transaction with vigilance.

  House Alyxander, notorious dabblers in genetics and biocybernetic technology, made no secret of their intent to acquire a complete copy of the Earth gene pool, including the sequences used to produce biocybernetic weapons. They were especially active in the black market, always the highest bidders for illegal sequences that could create designer mutations in humans or in exotic creatures to sell as pets. Because of their ties with Ceti and other privateer cartels, Inner Rim corporations were forbidden from conducting business with them.

  Ten years earlier Tomas Straka, then the President at Titan, had stumbled upon a dark discovery: the very corporation his own ancestors founded had obtained the biocybernetic weapon sequences. And the CEO at the time – Argus Fröm – was directly implicated by the evidence. Weighing the ramifications, Tomas had taken the moral high ground and reported his findings to the Navy Police.

  Arriving home an hour later, he had found Abby and Dayla – then eight months pregnant with Adam – bound and unconscious. Before he could take another step, he had been forced to his knees and restrained. Tomas didn’t see the intruder’s face as a gun was pressed to his head. He relived
the experience often.

  ‘Did you tell anyone else what you found?’ a voice asked.

  ‘No,’ Tomas said.

  The gun pressed harder.

  ‘I’ll shoot your daughter first.’

  ‘No!’ Tomas shouted. ‘I didn’t tell anyone else!’

  ‘I believe you,’ the voice said. ‘If I didn’t, she’d be dead already. We need to talk.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The messenger,’ the voice said. Tomas heard the footsteps of other men in the room. ‘When you wake up, you’ll be on a freighter. You’ll find out your options on board.’

  ‘My options?’

  ‘You have enemies. The life you knew is over. This is the only way to save your family. Do you understand? It’s highborn’s luck you aren’t dead already.’

  Those were the last words he heard before awakening in orbit around Zeus. Adam was born soon after, on the Ceti outpost where the Straka family vanished from existence. The cartel had been paid by an anonymous donor to move them from the Inner Rim and to keep their true identities secret.

  Little else about the deal had turned out favourably for the Lethos family ever since. Tomas would never know for certain who had betrayed him – or who had rescued them from danger.

  ‘I didn’t sell our souls,’ Dayla snarled. ‘You did.’

  ‘If our children survive, it will be because of their natural gifts, not what a plutocracy says their name entitles them to,’ Tomas said. ‘They’ll have to make their own names here.’

  Dayla was despondent.

  ‘I hate your damned altruisms,’ she growled. ‘I always have.’

  Tomas’s head began to shake erratically again.

  ‘What kind of people do you want your children to become?’ he asked.

  ‘Not like us!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I mean not like this! Living in poverty, when by rights we should be living like—’

  ‘Criminals,’ he said. ‘We would be criminals, Dayla. Titan has the weapons which nearly annihilated mankind. We would be guilty of—’

  ‘We are not criminals,’ Dayla snapped. ‘You had nothing do to with it.’

  ‘I would have been guilty of not stopping the inevitable atrocity while I had the chance.’

  ‘Look at all the good your guilt has done for us!’

  The shout rang throughout their metal home, striking every bulkhead, smashing her anguish upon everything they owned.

  The echo took for ever to subside.

  ‘I wanted our children to have a conscience,’ Tomas said finally, his voice wavering. ‘I wanted them to have a father who stood for what was right.’

  Dayla pushed away from the table.

  ‘I just wanted them to have a good life,’ she muttered, gliding towards the door.

  10

  WYLLYM

  Corinth Naval Yards was a bulbous monstrosity distinguished by its four spinning ‘onion’ habitat domes, each over a thousand metres in diameter. Wyllym was seated in the observation tower high above them, at the end of the structural ‘z’ axis that formed the centreline of the station. Reserved for the supervision of fleet training exercises, the deck had been cleared for him; he was alone in a vast hall glowing with volumetric displays of ship telemetry. Four large transparent blisters gave him an unobstructed view of space, though from this vantage point the Archangel and her construction yard were out of sight, some twenty kilometres below.

  Confirming Wyllym’s own suspicions, Grand Admiral Hedricks had indeed recalled him to assert his control over the Gryphons. Not only that, but he had also moved the entire training infrastructure to the proving grounds at Corinth, integrating them with Navy fleet exercises without waiting for a recommendation from Wyllym to do so. The fighters, equipment and support personnel had arrived days after he did. The Admiral never apologised, explaining that the move had been kept confidential for security reasons. Furthermore, he was expected to continue in his role as flight instructor, only now he’d be doing so under the scrutiny of the entire Navy command structure.

  That was fine with Wyllym. They were welcome to relieve him anytime they wished.

  With the naked eye he could only see the sporadic blue pulses of ship thrusters and the white blossoms of explosions as live rounds struck their targets far downrange. There were three proving grounds outside Corinth, each one a cube five hundred kilometres across. The largest objects in the ranges threw reflections of sunlight that might have been mistaken for dust. But these were the profiles of cruisers, frigates, asteroids, and eerie-looking structures called The Red Graves: kilometres of twisting, turning stone and metal walls modelled after the deadly, semi-aware Raothri protostruct swarms.

  The AR controls allowed him to slip into the cockpit of any Gryphon and observe the action through the eyes of the pilot. Wyllym was watching several of the fighters at once; a gruelling mental exercise in command multitasking, only marginally preferable to the physical ordeals of being inside a Gryphon. The disadvantage was that although he could experience the decisions of his pilots, he couldn’t sense how they were using the Gift to guide their choices. For that, he needed to physically be there, in combat alongside of them.

  It was why the Gryphon needed a human pilot in the first place. No drone could react faster than those with the Gift, and no code could simulate what the Gift could provide. But when two fighters armed with such talent met in combat, the advantage was neutralised, and the result was a brutal exhibition of raw physical endurance. Wyllym switched into one such dogfight; the two Gryphons were turning in tight circles just under a kilometre in diameter at blazing speeds, their manoeuvring thrusters turning, firing, turning, firing, struggling to get the craft’s weapons to point in a direction ahead of where their target would be. In another exercise, a pair of Gryphons were dismantling a capital ship – in this case, the ONW Monmouth, a Navy cruiser. Her long-range guns failed to bring the fighters down from afar; the nimble craft seemed to know the exact moment when the dummy shell would be fired, thrusting laterally or vertically to foil the targeting solution as they closed to within range of their own weapons.

  Then he switched to a pair of pilots flying through The Red Graves, the most dangerous exercise by far because of the very real collision hazard. Some Raothri technology behaved like it was alive; physical structures that seemed to ‘grow’ quickly from a synthetic proto-material and assemble into the latticework that could later become a ship, a station, or an obstacle designed to protect another structure. That information was as classified as the technology of the Archangel, and no one with his level of clearance knew how it had been obtained. Wyllym experienced a rush as the pilot deftly weaved through the structure as it tried to kill him, changing its shape and closing off course solutions as he adjusted. The Gryphon eventually made it through, successfully managing to take down each of its targets in between turns.

  But the pilot behind him made a critical mistake. Wyllym switched into his cockpit just in time to see – even feel – one of the fighter’s three ‘wings’ get pulverised as it clipped an obstacle. Recognising there could be no recovery from this catastrophe, a series of automated disaster mitigation systems engaged in picosecond succession; a hardening crash foam solution filled the cockpit to protect the pilot from further trauma as the Gryphon shut itself down.

  The pilot – his name was Lieutenant Trace Vanders – was rendered unconscious by the impact, his body thrashed by wicked G-forces as the fighter careened out of control. An ice-cold plasma solution packed with anti-inflammatory agents was injected into his bloodstream, slowing his heartbeat and halting his body’s potentially pathogenic response to the trauma. Flash-frozen and encased in a tomb of foam that included the seat, he was ejected from the Gryphon. Rocket motors ignited to stabilise the seat’s spin through space as it hurled away from the crippled fighter, blasting distress beacons for rescue ships to follow.

  ‘Lieutenant Vanders’s day is over,’ a gruff voice said, startling Wyllym
. ‘How many fuck-ups is that for him now?’

  Wyllym backed his mind out of the doomed pilot’s link, feeling a moment of vertigo. Even the virtual experience of being ejected from a spacecraft travelling a few hundred metres per second was unpleasant. Clearing his eyes, he saw Orionis Navy Police Chief Augustus Tyrell standing at the room entrance.

  ‘Who let you in here?’ Wyllym demanded.

  ‘The same fool who promoted you to captain,’ Augustus said, striding in on magnetic greaves and offering his hand. Wyllym took it, bracing for his hand to be crushed. He wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘Good to see you,’ he said, trying to remember the last time they’d met.

  ‘Likewise,’ Augustus said. But he was all business, nodding towards the displays that were tracking Lieutenant Vanders’s life pod tumbling through space.

  ‘So how many is that?’ he repeated.

  ‘This makes three,’ Wyllym said, leaning back in his seat. The pilot’s vitals were weak, but within an acceptable range for someone in early stage cryosleep. ‘I have to expel him. Assuming he lives.’

  Chief Tyrell grunted.

  ‘If he wakes up, he’s mine.’

  ‘Admiral Hedricks said the washouts are still assigned to the Archangel,’ Wyllym said, stifling a yawn. He’d lost track of how long he’d been up there.

  ‘I don’t give a shit what he wants,’ Augustus said. ‘Your trash belongs to me, not him.’

  Wyllym lifted an eyebrow. His friend was among the most divisive figures in the Navy, despised by corporations, privateers and criminal cartels alike. But he was feared by all. Augustus had been the figurehead crime fighter in Orionis for the last twenty years, and his brand of justice was essentially martial law. In the Inner Rim, which was all the space up to Hera and her moons, Augustus had almost singlehandedly established a fortress of peace and order. The police presence around population centres was intimidating; no matter where a person ventured, a pair of formidably armed officers was patrolling nearby. He was an evangelistic believer that deterrence was the most effective peace-keeping tactic, and that force, when necessary, must always be brutally decisive.