The Tabit Genesis

by Tony Gonzales

  Vespa glanced at the flashing icon on her corelink for a moment, then picked it up.

  ‘Vladric Mors,’ she said, ‘this is Chancellor Vespa Jade. I know you’re listening. I know your fleet is approaching. And I know that your goals may be achieved without violence. Surely a man charged with the welfare of so many has the courage to try dialogue. For the sake of those under your command, I challenge you to take the higher ground.’

  Vespa terminated the connection.

  ‘We’ll adjourn for now,’ she said. ‘Admiral Hedricks, if he hasn’t answered by the time he’s in range of your guns, then by all means, defend Orionis.’

  ‘Thank you, Chancellor. Senators.’

  The moment his image vanished, Senator Roddick slammed his fist.

  ‘I want that son of a bitch thrown in jail.’

  Senator Brusceau was shaking her head.

  ‘Chancellor, I wish we had discussed this beforehand,’ she said.

  Vespa nodded.

  ‘I know how it looks,’ she said, ‘but this government has a moral obligation to reveal what the Admiral was hiding. Better to pre-empt this on our own terms before someone spots their fleet. Liza is about to release a statement that puts the danger in perspective. She’ll answer questions until I can address the nation.’

  Vespa breathed deeply.

  ‘I accept full responsibility for Hedricks’s insubordination,’ She admitted. ‘I should have reined him in sooner. It will be dealt with once this invasion mess is sorted.’

  Admiral Lao suddenly cursed. All heads turned towards him.

  ‘It’s him,’ he said. ‘Vladric Mors. We’re tracing it.’

  Vespa was shocked.

  She picked up her corelink again.

  ‘Vladric?’

  There was no video. Only a deep, scratchy voice.

  ‘Chancellor.’

  ‘You heard my offer?’ she asked.

  ‘I heard a plea for mercy,’ Vladric said.

  ‘On behalf of your own people,’ she said.

  ‘My conscience is clear, Vespa. How is yours?’

  ‘You can’t win,’ she said. ‘Not without my help.’

  ‘I’ve already won,’ he said. ‘Orionis knows the truth about you now.’

  ‘And what truth is that?’ Vespa asked.

  ‘That you believe in ghosts.’

  ‘Don’t talk in semantics. I’m trying to save people’s lives.’

  ‘Heritage destroyed more lives than I ever could,’ Vladric said. ‘I’ve taken every unwanted synthetic foetus of highborn society and raised them as my own. What have you raised?’

  ‘Humankind, in a sensible, sustainable way,’ Vespa snapped. ‘You know why that policy exists. Years of breathing recycled air should have made the point. There is a solution, and Ceti can be part of it, but it will take time to get there and war will put the destination out of reach. Please, Vladric. I’m willing to compromise here. Let me help you.’

  ‘Time, you say?’ Vladric said. ‘For the longest time you refused to acknowledge us. Now that we’re at your gates, you’ll make the time for a ghost? Alright, Chancellor. One more chance. Abolish the Heritage Act, here and now, before all of humanity. Say the words, and the ghosts you care about so much will suffer no harm.’

  The fires on Tabit were raging in Vespa’s mind.

  ‘Abolishing Heritage with the snap of my fingers is impossible,’ she said. ‘But we can find a way. Walk with me, Vladric. Please.’

  For a time, there was silence. Then, he answered.

  ‘Very well, Chancellor. Let us take our first step together by dispelling a myth.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The myth that ghosts can’t hurt you.’

  30

  ANONYMOUS

  21 May 2809

  Dear Amaryllis,

  I have a wonderful vision of you doing something human right now.

  I picture you brushing your hair, perfectly arranging every detail of your appearance just before meeting a friend for tea, and perhaps a stroll among the shops of Tabit Prime. I imagine your thoughts are consumed by the day’s chores and work or family. You have aspirations and dreams, goals to strive for and achievements to celebrate. I hope that you have found love, and that a lifetime of beautiful moments awaits. To me, you will be young for ever.

  Those thoughts would make me smile, if only I could.

  I am writing from the cabin of a Raothri spacecraft travelling at one-quarter of the speed of light. For unspecified reasons, Ceitus is sending us to the Ch1 Orionis AB system. We will learn our mission after setting orbit around its second planet. There are twelve of us, and for a change we are all sporting vaguely humanoid forms, with a pair of burly arms and legs, elongated heads resembling a horseshoe crab’s carapace, complete with fangs and claws for battling and consuming the native mammal species found on the surface of the human-habitable ice world we’re visiting.

  For nostalgia’s sake, I hope we can land there, just so I can breathe the air.

  Our ship is travelling to a Lagrange point, at which time it will engage a smaller version of the same ‘abaryon drive’ that the Archangel has. In an instant we’ll be vaulted across some immeasurable distance of spacetime; we’ll pause to allow the drive to recover from the jump, and then continue our journey across the stars.

  As I gaze through a portal at the black veil of nothingness beyond, I see no movement in the stars. The universe taunts my utter insignificance; I am travelling ‘fast’ yet going nowhere, living a thousand lifetimes while fixating only on the one I shared so briefly with you.

  Wherever you are right now, take inventory of your surroundings, and pick a solitary object to focus on. Your stability is an illusion; you and everything around you are moving at dizzying speeds, with no control of the direction or destination. As infants we get our bearings in a world full of stationary objects. Later on we grasp the relativity of existence; that our home is a spinning sphere orbiting a moving sun among countless stars all hurtling towards some ‘Great Attractor’ of incomprehensible magnitude, an orderly chaos set in motion by the colossal event ingloriously named the ‘Big Bang’ by humans.

  You would be surprised at the reverence other alien species have for that moment. All the good and misery that ever happened to any life form, anywhere and at any time, was born in that instant. Some attribute existence to divinity, others just the pure luck of nature. But the fact is this: in the beginning, we were all dealt the same hand. You and I, the Raothri, the Shadows, all of us; we’re all different shades of the same life force, made from the exact same stuff.

  The twenty-first-century version of humanity was the intellectual equivalent of a delusional teenager convinced he knows everything. Astronomers spotted a few exoplanets in the cosmos and remained unconvinced that alien intelligence existed. Some even postulated that no civilisation could be more advanced than ours, given the amount of time it took for complex life forms to develop from the Big Bang.

  Such presumption assumed every intelligent species was just as fallible as our own.

  The Raothri didn’t make the same mistakes humans did. Their ‘Library at Alexandria’ never burned. They suffered no Dark Ages. There were no religions threatened by the discovery of truth in the cosmos. Theirs was a relentless, unimpeded advance towards a super intelligence.

  From the beginning, they knew their days were numbered. The parent star that gave birth to intelligent life on their homeworld was a red giant in the final stages of its life. The Raothri rose from a world that was a dark and frigid hell for millennia, thawed only when its solar system literally began to die. Urgency is in their DNA. By the time Homo sapiens took their first steps, the Raothri had colonised their own solar system, retreating from a world about to be consumed by the sun. By the time humans learned how to cast bronze, the Raothri had learned to travel between the stars.

  Dark energy was born with the Big Bang, and like all the energy released in that moment, it still surges throughout th
e universe like the waters of a delta. These ‘waters’ are teeming with Planck-scale wormholes that appear and disappear at random. But some become stable, and part of what humans infer from observable space as the presence of ‘dark matter’ is in fact a sea of pathways connecting remote locations of the universe.

  As masters of femtotechnology, the Raothri manufacture exotic matter that can expand these wormholes large enough for ships to travel through – and can keep them open indefinitely. For millennia, they have sent starships staggering distances to trawl the cosmos for sites to build these ‘abaryonic gates’: non-baryonic conduits of baryonic matter that any starship with adequate shielding can use.

  Ceitus tells us that in several years, the dark matter “tides” of our galaxy will shift, engulfing Sol. When that happens, the birthplace of humankind will become the Orion Arm waypoint of an interstellar transportation network that spans the Milky Way. If this is true, then you should take heart, Amaryllis. There are other worlds, and they are within reach.

  We don’t miss Earth because it’s home. We miss it because it’s all we know.

  As we approached the final jump in our journey, I learned that Vladric Mors and his entire fleet have slipped undetected into the Inner Rim. They will be within strike range of Corinth in hours. Against my judgement, I asked Ceitus if we could intervene. She said there are too many forces at work to make any difference.

  I am scared for you, Amaryllis.

  Please, don’t end. Not like this.

  - A

  31

  WYLLYM

  All throughout the evolution of weapons technology, the fundamental objective of combat has remained the same: deliver some quantity of force to a specific location at a precise moment in time. When applying that principle to scales on the order of solar systems, the distances and velocities involved provide ample opportunity to manufacture apocalyptic destruction.

  The Battle of Brotherhood left millions of individual bits of shrapnel hurtling through space at blistering speeds. From grains of scrap to freighter keels a kilometre in length, every fragment was a lethal satellite packing a terrifying amount of kinetic energy. The largest such concentration of debris was trapped in high, unstable orbits around the moon Lethe, slowly pulling away towards Zeus. The second largest field was close to the inner boundary of the Belt itself, where the Navy had clashed with Ceti and mercenary privateers, and where Wyllym had made his name as a warrior.

  With the right timing – and an added quantity of directional thrust – a body forced from either debris cloud could intersect with orbits in the Inner Rim. Had their contents been catalogued only months ago, even a casual observer today would have noticed a substantial loss of inventory.

  The opening shots of the Archangel War were not fired from cannons; they were fired from the depths of history. In one last stab from the grave, the ghosts of Brotherhood lashed out, slamming their dead, twisted starships into Navy targets with enough force to atomise metal.

  *

  Wyllym was aboard a Navy Police gunship when he learned the war had begun.

  ‘Fuck,’ Augustus fumed, banging a heavy fist against his knee. ‘Another Big Eye just died.’

  Three hours earlier, Wyllym had been awakened in his cell by a middle-aged soldier dressed in a combat exosuit who identified himself only as ‘Mike’. He had brought a Gryphon flight exosuit with him; the electronic nametag embedded within would identify the wearer as one Lieutenant Vronn Tarkon.

  Mike was quiet but moved with urgency, speaking only to issue terse instructions to other guards. They journeyed to Corinth’s hangar bay, where they were met by Augustus and twenty police Omniwar Specialists. These soldiers, called OMSPECs, had been wearing combat exosuits nearly identical to Wyllym’s and were carrying enough firepower to level a city block.

  ‘Rail fire?’ Wyllym asked, squirming. Outside of a Gryphon, his flight suit was uncomfortable and cumbersome, especially within the confines of the Navy gunship. It dawned on him that the exosuits everyone was wearing reflected the grim likelihood that they would all end up in space at some point.

  ‘Collision,’ Augustus spat, pressing his earpiece in as he listened to the comm chatter. Like the other soldiers, he was wearing mechanised ballistic armour.

  Wyllym had to turn his shoulders to look at him.

  ‘With what?’ he repeated.

  Augustus tapped his earpiece.

  ‘The ONW Auckland, apparently.’

  Wyllym blinked.

  ‘The Auckland was lost at Brotherhood twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘That is correct,’ Augustus said, handing him his corelink. ‘Here.’

  The former Navy frigate had been one of the last pre-colonial UNSEC designs in the fleet, refitted a dozen times and scheduled to be decommissioned. Its hull was conspicuously unique among the arsenal of modern warships; a flying crucifix in which each arm was a rotating engine and its ‘head’ was the primary weapons bay.

  A Navy captain assigned to patrol the Big Eye platforms between Eris and the Belt witnessed the Auckland – what was left of her – hurl past his position on its way to impacting with the sensor post, utterly pulverising it and the eight-man crew stationed there. Radar logs confirmed that it was indeed the Auckland that had struck the fatal blow.

  ‘Big Eyes aren’t the most agile things,’ Augustus grumbled. ‘Point defences popped off a few rounds. About as effective as throwing turds at a mech.’

  Wyllym was incredulous. Five Big Eyes had vanished in the last twenty minutes. Somehow, they had missed an incoming spread of junkyard buckshot a hundred kilometres across whose contents included a frigate.

  ‘This is impossible,’ he said, reading the captain’s report. ‘Those mirrors are half a click wide, they should have seen this coming from—’

  ‘“Should” and “have” are the operative words there,’ Augustus said, unholstering his sidearm and making sure a round was chambered. ‘Right now I’m wondering if they ever worked at all.’

  Wyllym eyed the weapon.

  ‘You don’t think you’re going to need that, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘Getting you into a Gryphon might require some persuading,’ Augustus answered.

  Wyllym opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it.

  ‘What?’ Augustus asked.

  ‘Nothing, this is just …’ Wyllym started. ‘I’m a soldier of Orionis, for God’s sake.’

  ‘You were,’ Augustus corrected. ‘Now you’re an enemy of the state.’

  ‘What does that make you?’

  ‘An oath keeper,’ Augustus said.

  Mike’s eyes were closed as he listened to the chaos on the comm channels. The general alarm had been sounded – all Navy personnel were reporting to battle stations, and the Archangel was priming her engines to leave port.

  The Gryphons, now following orders directly from Admiral Hedricks, were preparing to scramble.

  ‘You can’t persuade anyone that I’m Vronn Tarkon, even with that,’ Wyllym said.

  ‘You two are the same height, the rest is easy,’ Augustus joked. ‘Relax, my techs put a filter in your mask. You’ll modulate to sound just like him. Just keep the damn helmet on.’

  The gunship rotated on its wing several degrees; Wyllym felt the retro thrusters fire. They were close.

  ‘Where is Vronn now?’ Wyllym asked.

  ‘On his way to the medbay with a very serious medical condition.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a diversion,’ Augustus said. ‘Gave him a pill to take. The medbay personnel are mine and telling Hedricks he’ll be good to go momentarily. Flight ops is holding his wing on deck, so we’re in great shape.’

  The pilot interrupted him on the intercom.

  ‘Sir, Archangel Harbour Control is challenging us,’ she warned. ‘You’re up.’

  Wyllym froze. Augustus snatched his corelink out of his hands.

  ‘Control, this is Commander Tyrell, Navy Police,’ Augustus growled. ‘Let us on b
oard. Government business.’

  ‘Your craft is not on the flight manifest—’

  ‘We are boarding the Archangel by order of the Chancellor on official government business. Clear our approach or you’ll be in a brig.’

  A different voice jumped on the channel.

  ‘What’s with the hardware, Commander?’

  ‘Chancellorship orders to take Vladric Mors alive, if possible. We’ll brief Hedricks on board.’

  ‘Cleared two-two-west.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Wyllym exhaled nervously as the gunship executed another turn.

  ‘You’re not remotely worried about this?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve spent the last thirty years infiltrating Ceti,’ Augustus said. ‘I’m sure I can sneak you onto a Navy ship.’

  Wyllym nodded towards the soldiers, most of whom were leaning back in their armour catching some last-minute rest.

  ‘Then why do they need to be here?’

  Augustus smiled.

  ‘Like I said, for the possibility of taking Vladric Mors alive,’ he said. ‘Make him face justice.’

  Another burst of deceleration rattled the hull. Wyllym didn’t feel like he was about to land on a friendly ship. He felt like he was readying to invade a hostile one. The Archangel’s looming, colossal, alien appearance was more menacing than ever before: its ebony armour was glowing white in places as energy coursed through it, and the massive rings in the centre were spinning in counter-rotational directions as occasional electrostatic arcs ran up the four towers.

  Wyllym still had trouble accepting that this was a ship at all. Even with the mothership classification, the Archangel was just huge; it seemed larger than Corinth itself. As the gunship aligned with an open hangar bay, he could see orderly processions of shuttles and freighters approaching other hangar bays on the ship, their navigation lights casting hull strobes all the way back to Able Station.