by Alex Lamb
Fortunately, Ann hadn’t been human for years. She didn’t get lonely or impatient the way other people did – not since her change. Which was why her ship was taking point for the hardest part of the mission. Still, her team would probably need a little encouragement.
Ann opened her eyes and partially decoupled her mind from the Ariel Two’s helm-space. Her shadow took up the slack while she surveyed her crew at work.
There wasn’t much to look at in the Ariel Two’s main cabin these days. Simple grey wall-screens running neon agitation patterns lined the dimly lit spherical chamber. Set in a ring around the floor were six military-grade support-couches. Each resembled a cross between a recliner and a coffin designed by a committee of art nouveau enthusiasts and paranoid survivalists. Besides Ann’s, only three others were occupied.
Cy Twebo, a muscular, soft-faced young man, ran communications. Phlox Orm, a svelte little herm with dark, intense features covered data aggregation. Urmi Kawasaki, a quiet woman from the lower levels with a giraffe pigment-job, managed their unruly stable of threat models. Ann didn’t know any of them well.
For years now, the Galatean government had been handing her these tightly knit triples to work with, specially trained to pilot the nestship in the supremely unlikely event of her demise. They never stuck around for long. This bunch, at least, accepted the way Ann ran things. Or perhaps they’d simply been briefed to not get in her way this time. There was too much at stake.
‘Team,’ said Ann.
All three opened their eyes in surprise.
‘I’m proud of you all,’ she said. ‘What we’re doing here is beyond difficult. And Phase Three is going to be a bitch. So remember that I admire you all, and that I have the utmost confidence in your abilities. Any comments or recommendations before we go to slow-time?’
They regarded each other with tense, sad eyes.
‘No,’ said Cy, their unofficial spokesperson. ‘We’re good.’
‘Okay,’ said Ann. ‘And does everyone have their amygdala-gating on max?’
Her crew nodded.
‘Good,’ said Ann. ‘Because you’re going to need it.’
She thought about adding, Don’t worry, we’ll get the Earth back. But nobody would have believed her.
‘Let’s get to work,’ she said instead and shut her eyes.
From time to time, someone claimed that the Ariel Two was undermanned or that Ann’s leadership style was too remote. They didn’t know what they were talking about. The cellular augmentation she’d received on Snakepit enabled her to run the entire ship on her own. It was hard enough just finding things for her mandatory three backup officers to do. Having more people aboard only made things worse. They got in the way and reduced her acceleration thresholds. And after all, Ann wasn’t there to chit-chat. She was there to atone. She’d only made one big mistake in her life, but that choice had unleashed the Photes against humanity. As fuck-ups went, hers had been galaxy-class.
She brought up an immersive view of local space to watch the shuttles creeping out to their respective arks. There were three of them in all, each guarded by an attendant battle cruiser. Accompanying the Ariel Two were a couple of new Orson-class planet-busters armed to the teeth with grater-grids and boser canons. They loomed like sinister moons.
‘Cy, signal Angels Two and Three,’ said Ann. ‘Prep for departure. We’ll be going silent in ten. Tell them good luck.’
To minimise risk, Ann’s team had brought dummy arks. Three separate ships would head to different extraction points in the out-system. Only one of them, though, would be carrying people – the one Ann was watching. The other two were decoys, turning the entire operation into a shell game.
As soon as all the shuttles had docked, Ann made her next move.
‘Engaging stealth-cloak,’ she told the others.
For a ship as large as the Ariel Two, a cloak only bought you so much. With two hundred and forty kilometres of elastoceramic alloy hull to hide, they’d still be visible by virtue of their gravity footprint. But that was part of the point. With luck, the escorts would draw attention from the far smaller arks. Their enemies, unfortunately, would be operating under stealth, too. If battle commenced, it would be fought mostly blind.
With stately deliberation, the arks all left orbit and headed out. Ariel and the other two escorts took up position beside their respective charges and left alongside them.
‘Commencing mine-drop sequence,’ she told her crew.
After all, if you were abandoning a habitat world, what was the point of not turning it into a deathtrap on your way out?
‘Okay, everyone,’ she said, ‘we’ll be running in shifts from here to Jupiter orbit. Somebody take a nap.’
Ann handed off as much control to her shadow as she dared and put her mind on slow. There was no point burning mental cycles on dead time when half her brain could be resting.
Their progress appeared to accelerate dramatically. As the Earth shrank behind them, Ann watched it through electronic eyes and whispered goodbye to the famous cradle of humanity.
As she did so, a memory sprang to mind: the moment years ago when she left her flat on Galatea to move to New Panama. She’d stood on the threshold and looked back across the scruffy floor-turf at the soft marks where her furniture had so recently stood. That moment had filled her with an unexpected wistfulness even though she’d been madly keen to leave. This moment had a lot in common with that, once you factored in the dread of impending combat.
She bit back a sigh. It was at times like this that she missed Poli and the kids the most. They probably weren’t missing her, thankfully. Nobody missed weird Aunt Andromeda that much. She was gone too often.
[It’s ridiculous,] she told her shadow. [Why should I feel sad? The Earth’s been barren for decades. The ocean trenches host more life than the surface. It’s just another colony.]
[Symbolism,] it replied. Ann still heard it speaking in Will’s voice, though her shadow had long since become more an echo of her own mind than his. [Plus, it’s depressing. If you don’t look too close, it’s hard to tell that intelligent life was ever here. We didn’t exactly make much of a mark on this system in the end. Ceres is a mess, of course, but that’s been true since the first war. And Saturn’s rings are all fucked up, but they were delicate in the first place. They weren’t even doing well before the Photes arrived.] These days, the planet only had a band of haze. [Even Mars looks practically untouched,] her shadow said bitterly. [The bomb craters are just like all the others.]
[Wow, you’re a comfort,] she told it.
[I’m part of you. What did you expect?]
Ann snorted in amusement. Her sadness was blurring into optimism as the minutes raced past without attack. Amazingly, no one had fired on them yet and fifty hours had passed already.
On cue, her ship made its last pseudo-random course-correction and emitted another decoy drone designed to leak a dummy engine signature. Then it began its final deceleration. As the time since Earth departure closed in on three objective days, Ann approached their rendezvous point.
They were two hours behind schedule by then. Which meant that things were amazingly quiet. In fact, now that she thought about it, they were too quiet. On the upside, nobody – barring the inevitable attrition victims – had died. On the downside, it suggested that something sinister was going on that they hadn’t accounted for. Again.
Ann reluctantly swapped to normal time.
‘Cy,’ she said. ‘Any sign of a signal?’
She had to wait a moment for her communications officer to return to undiluted awareness. She listened to him groan. Ordinary humans didn’t take well to radical changes in mental pacing, not even those with military-grade shadow support.
‘Not yet,’ he croaked. ‘Resampling now.’
Ann scowled. Given the immense areas involved and the horrific difficulties of arranging schedules over interstellar distances, some slack in the system was to be expected. Particularly with Mark Ruiz as the carrier pilot.
The delay, though, was not welcome.
Ann lay scowling for an hour or so, checking her systems and surveying the dark, knowing full well it was pointless. Reluctantly, she slid her mind back into a slower gear to wait. She regretted it almost instantly as the blinding flare of a carrier burst appeared.
Ann kicked herself up into combat time, cursing. The flash had originated relatively close to where Mark was supposed to show, but was still light-minutes away from the expected target. That far out, it was hard to tell the difference between a friendly carrier and a deadly one.
‘Cy,’ she said. ‘Scan it. Everyone on full alert.’
The ship’s main audio chattered briefly as Cy’s signal-processing SAPs scrambled over their EM buffers. Then a soft voice started oozing through the cabin’s speakers.
‘In Photuria, there is no fear, no pain, no death,’ it whispered. ‘Instead, there is perfect love and perfect joy.’ Images appeared on the wall-screen of blissed-out couples walking hand in hand through soft, white tunnels, tears of happiness running down their handsome faces.
‘Fuck,’ Ann snarled. The Photes always sent a love letter before they started harvesting. They didn’t seem able to prevent themselves from announcing their arrival. So, these days, they did it as quietly as they could.
Light was slow. In the time it had taken the message to reach them, the Photes had no doubt been stealing out across the system with warp-enabled munitions, locking it down. The question was where to head for. Ann selected Mark’s backup coordinates and prayed he wasn’t already dead. She tight-beamed the course-correction to her ark and fired off a fresh set of decoys. Then she woke the titan mechs slumbering in her outer mesohull and prepped them for close-quarters combat.
Unless Mark showed up soon, they were screwed. All their careful planning would be for nothing. They’d be dead. In fact, they’d be worse than dead. The Photes would have thirty million new bodies to play with.
1.3: MARK
Mark Ruiz paced the drawing room, hands clasped tightly behind his back. His eyes darted to the grandfather clock in the corner every few seconds. From the antique sofa near the bay window that looked out across the grounds, his wife Zoe eyed him anxiously as she sipped her tea.
‘Marching about won’t get us there any faster, you know,’ she said, rearranging her skirts. ‘Why don’t you come and sit with me? We can play cards.’
‘I can’t sit,’ said Mark. ‘Not even virtually.’
She set her cup down. ‘Fine. Do you want to drop back into physical? Would that help? We have to be down to minutes, anyway.’
Mark shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t make any difference. Besides, we’ll have to be fully dunked the moment we drop warp.’
Zoe sighed and stared off across the lawn to where a flock of geese were alighting on the lake. In truth, their shared fiction was doing as little for her mood as it was for his.
Their butler stepped in bearing a silver tray and another china teapot. ‘Would sir and madam like a second cup?’
‘Not now, Shaw,’ said Zoe and offlined his program with a click of her fingers. ‘Honestly,’ she muttered, ‘you can’t get the help these days.’ She rubbed her virtual eyes.
Beyond the imaginary confines of his home, Mark reclined on an immersion-couch in the tiny main cabin of the GSS Gulliver, a forty-kilometre-wide starship. Surrounding the Gulliver lay the immense, filigree-delicate warp-envelope of the embership Kraken, which Mark was urgently piloting with an army of subminds.
The Kraken was more soap bubble than starship. Six insubstantial strands of rotating ion-deployment cable maintained a sphere of tailored pseudo-vacuum about six nanometres thick and nine hundred kilometres across. While he fretted, they tore across space at several kilolights, on their way to rescue the population of Earth. And they were late.
Mark hated that he’d missed his arrival window. But the fury he felt at the Galatean government’s antics dwarfed that self-loathing. He’d made the right choice, for all the trouble it had brought him.
Just hours before he was due to depart, Mark had received a private briefing composed by Ann’s lead diplomat, marked for his eyes only. It contained a detailed summary of the battle plan’s final version, along with a little supplementary data.
Buried within that data had lain evidence that the Earth’s population was being quietly split. A hundred thousand volunteers had been allocated to one of the dummy evac-arks. That way, the government had reasoned, whichever of the arks the Photes focused their attack on, some people were likely to get out alive. And from the survivors, Galatea would be able to reconstruct the Photes’ new infection pattern, potentially saving millions more.
The decision made sense in a high-handed kind of way. Galatea stood to gain vital tactical information at the estimated cost of a mere hundred thousand innocents – peanuts in terms of recent losses.
Mark, however, wasn’t ready to sacrifice those lives. The decision smacked to him of exactly the sort of cold, mechanical logic that the remaining human societies had been driven to. The moment he realised the plan’s intent, he’d made up his mind to rescue everyone, not just the people the government had picked to survive. And when he showed the details to Zoe, it had taken him all of about one second to convince her.
‘Fuck that shit,’ she’d growled. ‘They bait-and-switched us again? Everyone’s leaving with us. Where can we get more guns?’
So Mark had detoured to St Andrews, which was almost en route, called in the necessary favours and loaded the Kraken’s envelope full of warp-enabled attack drones. In doing so, he’d burned up all the spare time incorporated into the meticulously engineered Galatean plan.
Had Mark and Zoe been full Galatean citizens, their act would already have constituted a war crime. But the Kraken flew under the diplomatic colours of the Vartian Institute, which gave him a little room to manoeuvre.
Unfortunately, he knew that once he rendezvoused with Ann, she’d make it impossible for him to go back for the others. Ann was a stickler for process, as inflexible as she was remote. So the secret volunteers had to be rescued first, and fast enough that there would still be a primary ark to collect once he’d finished. If he couldn’t manage that, all his efforts would be for nothing. Mark’s desperate gambit required split-second timing of a sort that had already gone badly wrong.
Of all his recent disagreements with the Galatean government, this would undoubtedly prove the most divisive. But weren’t they supposed to be human beings, for crying out loud, not dead-eyed Photes? Wasn’t compassion what defined them? If they couldn’t preserve their humanity, what was the point of fighting?
And therein lay the irony. After forty years of unrelenting social change, Mark didn’t like the humans he was saving all that much. Most of them bought into the same jackbooted bullshit he despised. The human cultures he worked to protect had all adopted the same militarised outlook to survive. They barely noticed how blinkered they’d become.
So Mark and Zoe had used the freedom their station in life afforded them to build a kingdom of two aboard the Gulliver. While running errands for the Galateans, they’d stuck to their own ideal of what society could be and invited others to join them. The risk profile of their existence dissuaded most. Yet, ironically, they’d remained young and alive while most of their friends had died.
Their tiny kingdom was based on tolerance. Zoe tolerated his moods, just as she always had. And he tolerated her distance, even when she retreated into silent study for days on end. That was how it should be with everyone, he reasoned. He didn’t need to understand people to want them alive and neither did she. It took all sorts to make a world, and so he was going to save as many sorts as he could.
He felt the tremor of impending arrival like a shiver of dread and glanced across to where Zoe slouched glumly in her Edwardian evening gown.
‘Get ready,’ he told her.
As the Kraken reached its first insertion point, Mark dropped out of his virtual home and into the Gulliver’s he
lm-arena with Zoe alongside him. The drawing room vanished, replaced by an immersive tactical display of local space.
A spray of red markers filled the air like the blood-spatter of a particularly nasty crime scene. The place was crawling with Phote drones, and those were only the ones he could see. Hundreds more undoubtedly still lay cloaked. Most of the trouble swarmed around the green disc of the Orson-class guardian ship, thank Gal. The ark – Mark’s prize – hung off to the side, as yet unseen. If there was one thing evac-arks were good at, it was remaining unnoticed.
Zoe initiated a release burst, firing a thousand drones of their own into the fray – all of them on intercept vectors. She couldn’t resist adding a Phote-style arrival message of her own.
‘Good morning, undead fuckwits,’ she announced cheerfully. ‘Here’s some pain to go with your endless joy.’
That got their attention. Two hundred Phote munitions dropped into visibility and powered towards the Kraken at full warp.
An ordinary pilot would have lost their lunch in that moment. A carrier was an appallingly fragile piece of technology. Two disc-shaped ships joined by six feathered skipping ropes spun about a shared axis. Manoeuvring without warp was almost impossible. Manoeuvring with warp was nearly as challenging. Mark wasn’t worried. He had more years of practice than any other person alive and a roboteer brain designed for space combat. He could make an embership dance like a hummingbird.
He threw the Kraken back into high spin, sealed up the warp-envelope and dived on the drifting evac-ark. He opened the envelope for less than a second to let the ship slide between his ferociously whirling inducer-fronds and sneaked back into warp before the ark pilot even knew what had happened.
Finding itself suddenly enclosed, the ark thruster-braked frantically in an attempt to zero its conventional velocity.
While Mark raced outwards again to his second pickup location, the ark’s captain yelled at him over the audio channel.
‘Embership Kraken! What in Gal’s name are you doing?’ she shouted. ‘This action is off-mission and highly dangerous. I repeat: off-mission!’
