Then he instructed the Black’s life support system to generate as much overpressure as possible.
The two ships were joined at the belly by a breaching module, and the weakest point of the union was where it latched onto the target’s airlock. To prevent the Obyeran twin from escaping back to the Lightspear, halt her advance on the Black, and have any chance of capturing her alive, the module would have to be forcibly detached from the Lightspear side.
Sig accomplished that by generating torque with the Black’s thrusters.
To create as much yaw as possible, he aimed the forward and aft thrusters in opposite directions and fired them simultaneously. The result was a shearing action that ripped the breaching module off the Lightspear. A split second later, he had opened the final airlock hatch that Angus was trapped behind.
But that excess yaw smashed the two ships into each other, doing extensive damage that Sig had yet to process as the Black tumbled out of control.
Sig had gambled that the module would stay attached to the Black, and that the Obyeran twin was strong enough to hold on. He won both bets. With the Lightspear already a kilometre away, she had no choice but to board the Black on his terms.
Angus’s vital signs, broadcast from his survival suit, were very weak. Sig judged that any attempt to save his life would be futile.
Myrha had never known such dread.
She caught a glimpse several times, each one smaller with every rotation. There was no greater humiliation than to be separated from her Lightspear.
Now she knew how her brother felt to have lost his arm in combat.
There was no choice but to find this ‘Sig’ and take his ship.
That would be difficult. In her desperation, she considered scaling the outer hull to find a different way in. But she had lost her skythe. And she couldn’t hold her breath for much longer.
Myrha conceded defeat.
Her lungs burning, she pulled her way inside, to a strange compartment too small for comfort.
The hatch closed behind her. The Voyage Home had truly begun.
The collision had cost the Aria Black one of her main thrusters.
That was the biggest consequence of Sig’s gamble. There was also no way to recover the Big Eye, adding to the forensic debris cloud that would leave little doubt as to who was responsible for this.
The autopilot instructions were set for a coordinate in the middle of nowhere. No known bases, installations, nothing. It was a random location at the fringe of the Hades Terminus, over a billion kilometres from here. With only one thruster, it would take much longer to reach it. And Sig still didn’t know what supplies had tumbled out into space along with Angus.
A fleet of Lightspears would be looking for his prisoner very soon.
Sig composed his message, which would eventually find its way to Vladric, wherever he was:
One VIP secured
No contact with second
Five crew KIA
Heavy damage sustained
Proceeding to checkpoint
ETA double allotted time.
At the end of the message was an image of his hostage. The heiress to an empire was in the hold of his ship.
Vladric’s ship.
Sig watched the vital signs of Angus McCreary flatline.
‘The bastard’s never wrong,’ Sig muttered, as the Aria Black limped into the void.
24
ANONYMOUS
11 April 2809
Dear Amaryllis,
You were twenty-three years old when we met.
Instead of wearing a mottled grey UNSEC Traveller uniform like the other Genesis passengers, you wore a white dress that made you stand out like a diamond.
Boarding hour was two days away, and the streets of Bangor were filled with Travellers revelling with loved ones, savouring their final moments on Earth. For as long as man has taken to the sea, the voyagers of antiquity have marked the eve of great journeys with celebrations just like the one that night.
For a young, warm-blooded UNSEC infantryman, these were fertile breeding grounds, and I joined the festivities hoping to meet a Traveller who sought no regrets. When we met by the Gazer Pavilion at Broadway Park, I thought I had found exactly what I was looking for. But something else happened instead.
We formed the deepest bond I have ever known.
There will never be another like it. To this day, every detail of every moment we shared haunts me. Your warm eyes, your contagious laughter, the sound of your breathing, the peace of your sleep, the way that white dress fell from your shoulders, and the way you put it back on when it was time to say goodbye.
The memories sustain me. Or not. I don’t know any more. My colleagues have warned that this correspondence has become harmful. The mission could be compromised, and they blame you.
So be it. I need this, because it is uniquely human. But I wonder how our bond would hold if you could see me now.
I am presently three metres long, if you measure from the tip of my antennae to the end of my thorax. I have three pairs of legs, and my ‘feet’ contain secretial glands that allow me to adhere to any surface from any aspect, which is impressive considering I weigh 130 kilos. My eyes, of which there are six, only see in infrared, but give me 360 degrees of coverage, which makes it difficult for anything to sneak up on me. I don’t breathe oxygen; my circulatory and respiration are governed by a system that utilises captured sunlight and molecular hydrogen produced by hydrogenosomes in the synthetic hemolymph that flows through me. Incidentally, this process generates a highly acidic waste product that accumulates in storage glands that I can propel from ducts in concentrated streams to defend myself.
Last night, my arthropod-like colleagues and I scaled a vertical wall four kilometres high to eat the eggs of a lychtymorph queen – all 200 million of them. The acidic secretions in my glands helped digest them, and then my bio-engineered body used them as fuel to sustain my descent in total darkness, and subsequent two-hundred-kilometre march to the exfiltration site.
These eggs were gestating the larvae of lychtymorph alphas, impressionable little creatures that, if properly trained and augmented, can be hammered into a number of service roles, from industrious servants to battlefield hunter-killers. I should add that their size is proportionate to how much they are fed; a mature alpha can grow to over two metres in height and rip a three-centimetre-thick steel plate in half with its jaws. This particular batch of formerly independent, intelligent life forms was due to be sold to the Raothri, who planned to distribute them throughout their nanotechnology manufacturing pipeline. The larvae are very adept at weaving tungsten nanotube fibres, one of the more devious technologies the red race has in its arsenal.
Ceitus always knows best how to hurt the master species. She is also quite clever at genetic manipulation, designing just the right creature for just the right task – something the Raothri have been doing for thousands of years. They are gods, in the classical sense that they create life to serve a specific purpose. The indigenous world of the lychtomorph is a half-scorched, half-frozen world with no atmosphere and a narrow temperate band where a number of species exist. It is tectonically hyperactive thanks to the immense tidal forces of the gas giant it orbits and a molten metal inner core. The resulting fault lines that rip across the planet make the Valles Marineris on Mars look like a shallow ditch.
We were built to navigate this treacherous landscape while also remaining invisible to Raothri technology and lychtomorph alpha sentries. Ceitus makes us into whatever we need to accomplish the mission. Last week I was a carnivorous reptile. Next month I will be a gilled mammal. Only Ceitus knows what we will become next.
But I still remember what I was before all this started. Our time together makes that life worth remembering. Between missions, Ceitus lets us resume our native forms in a virtual simulator. This is the only place we can interact with each other ‘in person’, since our native environments are lethal to each other. It’s here, in this simulator, whe
re we remind ourselves of why we fight. We talk about our homeworlds, and the ‘people’ we miss, and all the times we think we died during these missions.
My memory of your white dress is a sequence of stored quantum bits that can be translated into their biological mnemonic equivalent in any creature that Ceitus designs. But she also exercises great discretion in choosing the memories that stay with us from one incarnation to the next. When things go badly, we never remember how we die. We also never remember how we are transformed from one creature to the next. We just become something different; as comfortable in our new skin, membrane, or exoskeleton as if we were born that way.
There is never a mission post-mortem. Nor do we ever analyse success, because the Raothri are never fooled by the same approach twice.
Whether or not the setback to Raothri nanotech manufacturing capabilities made any lasting impact on ‘the big picture’, we cannot say. The scope of what Ceitus hopes to achieve with her rebellion is beyond my comprehension. And yes – Ceitus is female, or the equivalent of one, as I recently learned.
Given the fact she can kill us, or erase our memories or put us in a simulator where nothing is actually real, well … we’re alive because she says we are. We have no choice but to believe in her, and in what she’s doing with us. During one of my worst moments trying to acclimatise here, I demanded to know what it was like to play god, and if all Raothri considered themselves as such. Her answer was surprisingly humble for a superior creature. She said, ‘Intelligence is not the same as wisdom. Even a child can own an ant farm.’
Your beautiful white dress still inspires me because humans need hope. It has always given them something to live for, and it’s a rare thing in the universe that something as intangible as ‘hope’ is such a powerful motivator. My alien colleagues draw their inspiration from different sources. Most don’t assign sentimental value to their actions. Theirs is an innate call to duty, the way the denizens of insect hives respond to an assault on their queen. They are truly selfless in that sense, and readily sacrifice themselves for a greater cause without hesitation.
I’ve not made contact with another human being in almost two centuries. Those that joined me at Station Alsos are in other units like this one, operating on distant worlds, doing the same work as us. We operators have predictions on the amount of time each of our respective species has left before they are totally extinct. For humans, that number is five years. If not for the Gift, it would have been over already. And even then, who knows what other events have been set in motion that cannot be averted? A rogue planet, flung out of another system aeons ago, changed the fate of that beautiful world you called Eileithyia, and gave Orionis the Hades Terminus instead.
Judging from what just happened there, five years may be too generous an estimate.
Even so, I hope – there’s that word again – that you still remember me the way I was.
Love always,
- A
25
MAEZ
Every sixty-eight seconds, the wispy dust clouds of the Milky Way fell past the hexagon-shaped viewport on the bridge. The Lightspear was without power, drifting in the same direction it had been released in, rolling and pitching end over end through space. The tumble left large blind spots on either side, blocking a wide swathe of ‘sky’ that Maez needed to get his bearings. Even if he could have seen them, it wouldn’t have mattered. Without propulsion, there was no way to stabilise the ship. But the rate of spin wasn’t unbearable, and Maez had grown accustomed to it. He was as comfortable as it was possible to be under these conditions.
Setting his corelink aside, he rubbed the sleepiness from his eyes. His father always said that truly knowing yourself was salvation, and that The Voyage Home provided the ultimate context for discovering the soul. Maez preferred to use the time to catch up on some reading. And after consuming the biographies of several Third World War generals, he concluded that the blood of fools ran in his veins.
Like most of the House ruling class, Maez was built from genetic material of his father’s choosing. Knowing Masaad, the sequences in Maez’s DNA would have been extracted or synthesised from long dead generals from the ‘great conflicts’ of yesterday. For as long as Maez could remember, his own interest in the subject of war had been insatiable. And if his studies had taught him anything, it was that all too often, history celebrated outcomes determined more by luck than skill.
As a young man, Maez had hoped for war against House Alyxander. The twins had never known their mother Lyanna, but their father had made her a virtual part of their lives. They saw her lead Obyerans in combat, and tend the wounds of the injured. They saw her kill with skythe, and heard her soothing song to newborns. They beheld the warrioress and the nurturer, the legend and the mother. And as much as the warrior in Maez craved vengeance for her death, the inner voice of Lyanna Obyeran declared that it was pointless.
The same was true of a conflict with any other faction. House Obyeran was founded to colonise a habitable world, not to conquer the airless rocks that Orionis corporations and cartels squabbled over. When the time came, his role would be to support Myrha as she led the Lightspears on their voyage, and to be her military counsel once they arrived.
Watching the Milky Way drift past again, Maez was at peace with that fate. He did not need, nor ever want, to be called ‘King’. Myrha was destined to bear that burden, and she would probably fail in that role, as he would in his. To Maez, a man who had devoted his life to protecting House Obyeran, The Voyage Home was the illusion of competence. For, among those countless stars, the Raothri were watching. Nothing he learned from watching human wars could prepare him to face them, or the hidden dangers lurking on that alien world.
Maez left the bridge, pushing himself down the main corridor, using the light on his survival suit to see. Thus far, he was satisfied with his efforts to revive the stricken ship. Every Lightspear was equipped with a shuttle tug for EVA repairs, and he was routing power from its modest fusion core to the ship’s main electrical grid. It wasn’t enough to power every system, but with some rationing, he was able to run life support and passive sensors.
But the ship’s main fusion core remained disabled. The rules of The Voyage Home allegedly randomised the test conditions, but by all accounts it seemed that Maez had drawn the worst possible: the reactor was in a scrammed lockdown state, simulating measures to avert a catastrophic meltdown or explosion. There was no way to access the power that the aneutronic core was producing, and the most likely cause was a mechanical issue that required a shipyard or another Lightspear to fix.
Since his trial seemed over before it ever began, Maez had opted for comfort instead of competition. He assumed, in contrast, that the only issue with Myrha’s Lightspear would be a loose toilet seat. At current consumption levels, his power supply would be exhausted in ninety days, which gave her just enough time to fix the issue and return home. His own time was better spent resting up for her coronation than attempting repairs on a fusion reactor in space.
Returning to his quarters, Maez tethered into his bunk, imagining what it was like to walk freely on a world with breathable air. Myrha had always reminded him that nothing about their lives could be taken for granted, which was ironic given her devotion to keeping them as dull as possible. From the heated biodomes of Hyllus to the fusion light sources that nourished the underground gardens, everything about House Obyeran was testament to the Pathfinder’s ingenuity and relentless drive to build a better life for mankind.
The trouble was, Maez believed that people were living a better life in the Inner Rim. To survive beyond the Hades Terminus, his father had been forced to manipulate them into something more than just human. Whenever Inner Rim denizens visited, with their huge trade caravans, they gawked at the first True Acolyte they encountered. His father had redesigned humanity, reasoning that the old specs had led to destruction and exile. Obyerans were the future of the species. The Pathfinder and his brothers knew what they wanted to achiev
e, and their stubbornness was hereditary.
Myrha had bought so completely into their father’s grand sense of purpose that Maez wondered if she was genetically predisposed to agree with him. She had always been the most committed acolyte, while he was the scatterbrained one who wanted to run free and perhaps talk to other children once in a while. Myrha preferred to stay with her studies and training, embracing the destiny her father crafted for her. She knew what the purpose of her life was, found strength in its mission, and was driven by fear of being unprepared to face it.
The Obyeran culture worshipped the Lightspears and those who captained them. There was exulted reverence for the one who would lead them all. But Myrha wasn’t interested in becoming a goddess. She just didn’t want to let anyone down.
Maez fell asleep grinning, imagining her working feverishly to restore her ship while he simply relaxed – an apt comparison of how their lives differed. If they had been shaped for a purpose, he was in no rush to meet it, as Myrha was. Destiny would come for them both soon enough.
Sometime later, he dreamt the ship was no longer spinning – which, to his surprise when he awoke, it really wasn’t.
The reactor had unscrammed itself. Full power had been restored.
Maez pulled himself towards the bridge, skythe at the ready.
But there was no one there. The yield beacon had not been activated, yet the ship was flying on autopilot, ignoring his attempts to seize control.
The Tabit Genesis Page 27
