by Alex Lamb
Her remark was punctuated by a deep thud as the shuttle locked on to their ship.
‘Pods are available and the airlock has sealed,’ the shuttle informed them.
‘Just like our fates!’ said Palla with a grin. ‘Last one into the doom boat is a sissy.’
3.3: IRA
Ira floated beside his new shipmates as the docking pod took them down to their vessel and tried not to feel their pain. Nobody spoke, but they might as well have been screaming.
After a lifetime of reading others, Ira had discovered that he couldn’t stop. The problem started after he stood down as Galatean Fleet Admiral in the wake of the Suicide War. The realisation that the human race needed to abandon its entire culture of leadership or die wasn’t an easy one to absorb. The fact that he’d been in the cross hairs of that silent enemy assault had been the least of his concerns. He was more worried about failing everyone else if the Photurian infection claimed him.
So it wasn’t until a few weeks after he’d handed over power to Venetia Sharp’s militarised hydra that he noticed the part of his brain that did people-watching simply wouldn’t shut up.
It was hardly surprising. He was over a hundred years old and had been popping neurostimulants to boost his leadership skills for decades. But the effects were disturbing. Without an everlasting crisis to manage, his own emotions had faded from sight. He could feel nothing of his own opinions but a kind of distant radio static. Everyone else, though, came through like thunder.
Trapped in a confined space like this, even their body language was intolerable. None of them was happy. Then again, why would they be? Palla had made it clear that the mission was a death sentence. Panic was inevitable. But worse for Ira was that each of them insisted on suffering in different ways.
Mark, for instance, kept waging a war inside himself between duty and his sense of outrage, yet didn’t even appear to notice. Little of it showed on his face, thank Gal. He’d finally learned to screen that interior friction and become a relatively polished public figure. These days, he had the just-so salt-and-pepper hair, the powerful physique and the military bearing the media expected. The big giveaway was those eyes that lit up with stubborn fury at the slightest provocation.
Palla, their SAO, meanwhile, was such a poster child for the New Society that Ira didn’t believe it for a minute. During her acid briefing, he’d felt the urgent desire to perform coming off her in waves. The entire mission was still a student project for her, even though she knew she was never coming back from it. So she was going to take all her anger and confusion out on him, because of his record and that big red psych marker in his file. Ira was fine with that if it helped her function. Was that patronising of him? Probably. But age earned you certain liberties.
The other two younger crew members were slightly less awful. Clath was like a precocious schoolgirl who appeared to have missed the fact that she’d been pushed out of the trench holding an unloaded rifle. Most of her discomfort stemmed from the cold shoulder Mark was giving her. The fact that he hadn’t noticed he was hurting her only made it worse. But her pain was, at least, interpersonal.
Judj, meanwhile, radiated as much paranoia as Clath did innocence. He hid it under a veneer of clever scepticism, but his body language betrayed so many obsessive behaviour cues that a SAP could have spotted it. The New Society didn’t leave those traits unhealed without a reason, so something must have broken inside Judj – something useful that was now driving him. Chances were, he’d never find out what that was, but Ira didn’t mind.
It was Ann who made him feel most uncomfortable. She came across as more detached and dangerous than ever. Andromeda Ng-Ludik was blatantly a demigod – more so than Will had ever been. But, just like Will, she inhabited a cloud of sadness.
He’d watched it grow over the decades they’d fought together. Every passing year as a superbeing appeared to come with an emotional cost, and it had turned Ann into something cold and dark. What remained was this smouldering neutron star of a person – all gravity and no light. The barrage of loneliness she radiated was like the shriek of a hurricane.
What a bunch – useful in combination for nothing except creating a giant distraction. But then, he was no better. He was the phone-it-in ex-president – the man who’d overseen the largest acts of genocide in human history with the best of intentions. No wonder they were the people Galatea had decided to sacrifice in their giant game of chess.
Ira was ready for that, though. He wanted it. There was nothing worse than being an old psychologist in the land of the young. Everyone around him felt like tiny, noisy, clattering robots. Their every collision was as predictable as it was wince-inducing. Surely it was better to go out doing what you were good at than to live like that. And Ira was damned good at field missions even though they hadn’t let him near one in years.
‘Clath,’ he said, ‘can you tell us anything about our ship before we get down there?’
She blinked at him. ‘Oh! Yes, of course. We’re past the exohull so mission-leak shouldn’t be a problem. It’s called the Edmond Dantes and it was designed specifically to probe the Depleted Zone using design ideas contributed by Mark Ruiz and Zoe Tamar.’
‘That much I’d guessed,’ said Ira. ‘But what can it do?’
‘Well, it’s a hybrid,’ she said. ‘The drive can run in every warp configuration from ember-warp to stealth. And it’s not spherical.’
Ira’s eyebrows rose. ‘It’s not?’
‘No, it’s shaped more like a fat bullet. It has to be because the back is stacked with a ring of massive sub-light engines. There are six, capable of redundant firing. In case we get stuck in the Zone. And we’re carrying drones. A lot of drones. The hangar bays on this thing are huge. We need tons of remote hardware to set up feeler-relays once we’re inside the Flaw.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘Anything else I should know?’
Clath hesitated, clearly unsure of what else to say. ‘We have two habitat cores?’ she offered. ‘One for crew and one for quarantine. But I guess that’s pretty common these days.’
‘How about weapons?’ said Ira. ‘Stealth?’
‘We have both,’ said Clath. ‘Grater-grids, disrupters, the lot. And the main boser is pretty nasty. Setting off a tectonic catastrophe at Snakepit should be easy.’ She snatched another anxious glance at Mark. ‘Presuming we even need to, of course. Which hopefully we won’t.’
The docking pod clunked home and the door opened onto an octagonal chamber not that much bigger than the one they were standing in.
‘What’s this?’ said Ira. ‘The airlock opens into the privacy closet?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Clath. ‘I thought everyone knew. This is it. The cabin, I mean. The mission is running on pure virtual.’
Ira opened his mouth and closed it again. He should have guessed. He’d been out of the loop on military flights for so long, it hadn’t even occurred to him.
Palla slid through into the space beyond and touched a wall. It hissed open, the door sliding upwards to reveal a support-cabinet like a wet mouth with fat-contact and biofeed cables dangling and twitching inside.
‘See you on the other side,’ she said and climbed in. The door shut behind her as the cables began to enclose her body.
Ira felt an unexpected stab of claustrophobia. Back in the day, he’d piloted soft-combat ships with interiors not much larger than this. So why did this situation suddenly make his skin crawl? Perhaps because nobody had ever expected him to fly one from inside a casket.
These days, all military personnel were roboteers after a fashion. Everyone was fitted with a shadow, a piece of wetware modelled after the symbiotic neurosystem that had grown inside Ann after her conversion to posthumanity. Their versions weren’t as sophisticated as Ann’s, of course. They didn’t have personalities or make polite conversation. Instead, a military shadow granted a person access to a specialised interior space that functioned as a mental blackboard of sorts. Use of a shadow had been shown to boost a
person’s IQ by about thirty points without the need for more intrusive cognitive augs.
A person’s shadow also conveniently doubled as an early-warning system for seeded conversion as well as a tool for managing a relatively unhackable virtual environment. Because your shadow was personal, subjective and regrown with each update, it provided a way to be plugged in without making yourself vulnerable to the kind of hacking the old roboteers had faced. Theoretically.
Even though Ira had been fitted with a shadow by Academic Order, he’d barely used it – until now.
He watched Mark drift into the cabin and survey the eight support-cabinets with transparent disgust. There was room for my wife after all, his eyes said.
Ira looked away. What had he expected? Despite his extraordinary record, stuffed with as many reprimands as heroic victories, Mark still somehow managed to be a twit. Hadn’t he seen this coming? Mark, who couldn’t tolerate a calculated hedge, had been turned into one. Ira doubted he saw the irony.
‘Fine,’ Mark said instead. ‘Okay. Let’s go, then.’ He slotted himself into a cabinet.
Ira hovered and watched them slip inside one by one until only he and Judj remained.
Judj eyed him. ‘You first,’ he said, with a crimped half-smile. ‘I insist.’
Ira found himself grinning. He almost laughed.
‘My pleasure.’
As he let the cables wrap around him, something that might have been joy briefly lit inside him for the first time in years. Here he was, headed into the jaws of almost certain death, but also outside his comfort zone. It had the unexpected consequence of reminding him that he was still alive. Even if they only made it five light-years out of port, just being here and taking part was surely still worth it. If the Photes wanted to chase them, let them come. He’d be ready.
3.4: NADA
Nada existed as a floating bead nestled in a warm, mottled cavern like the inside of a speckled egg. Light entered through a small hole in the ceiling which admitted a brilliant white glow as if from a noonday sun. Other similar – but darker – holes lay dotted around the perimeter of the egg, with several more clustered at the bottom.
Her perspective hovered near the centre of the space. From there, she could read the complex, shifting patterns of black and white on the cavern walls and listen to the reverberating, joyful song of the place. The egg represented that part of the mind-temple belonging to the persona of her cabin gardener. Nada was hard at work rewriting him so that he no longer dreamed of crushing his hands in an airlock door.
Upon leaving Noether, she had rallied her ships and brought them here, to Tsaburu-Kos, a tiny brown dwarf near Galatea which she had turned into her new base of operations. In the days that followed, she’d spun her web – establishing relay lines around the colony tight enough to detect passing ships yet loose enough to not reveal her strength. Her fleet had been out on survey runs ever since, monitoring every piece of Galatean traffic big enough to warp. They’d been at it for almost three weeks and the strain was showing.
Each messenger drone that reached Nada’s ship brought more silence from the Galateans and ever-lengthening reports of difficulties from her own crews. That was a problem because Nada couldn’t afford to stop. Ever since the Yunus had restructured her identity, rest had proven difficult. Ambition gnawed at her like an open wound. And if she reduced the survey runs, something important might slip through her grasp. That thought made her tremble.
Unfortunately, keeping small crews bottled up in tiny raiding ships for long periods had serious consequences. Even under enforced individuality, Photurians needed community. It was baked into the sacred Protocol they ran on. And since they’d been banned from the complete integration they craved, peer interaction had to suffice.
When they spent too much time alone, all the benefits they’d gained from imposing selfhood started to reverse themselves. Units got strange ideas. They started looking for shortcuts to bliss. Left to their own devices, the crews of such ships often merged into ad hoc hives before succumbing entirely to Fatigue.
Consequently, Nada had taken to policing the minds of her staff whenever they came close enough to edit and sending out blind rewrites to those stationed further afield. Maintaining her fleet’s emotional landscape was fast becoming a full-time job.
Her gardener was her most recent and most disappointing discovery. Right under her nose, he’d spent the last eight days idly fantasising about what would happen if he accidentally caught his hands in the cabin’s pressurised door. He’d be rendered temporarily useless and, out here, a candidate for cannibalisation into ship parts – a one-way ticket to merged bliss in a starship’s computing substrate. He’d been quietly training his deputy to take over without admitting to himself what he was planning. Nada had spotted the identity drift and spent the last half-hour scrubbing his personality for him.
She wished for the thousandth time that her staff were as committed to action as she’d become. Sadly, the Yunus’s rewrite of her did not extend to a will to impose the straitjacket of ambition onto her shipmates. So instead, she was stuck tinkering with their emotions around the edges, erasing their impatience and loneliness, quietly bolstering their diligence and urgency.
While she worked, two other beads slid into the cavern through one of the equatorial holes – one red, one blue. They represented her lead reports for harvesting and analytics, Zilch and Leng Rien.
[Communications Officer Ekkert has a report for you,] said Leng.
Yet another cumbersome direct delivery. As always, she wished that the information had simply been pressed into her via the temple metaphor, but her people had to keep to the rituals. All non-urgent information was delivered in person now.
[Bring him,] she replied.
As a human, she’d used text and audio messages for such interactions all the time. How painful it was that they couldn’t even do that, when so much more intimacy should have been available. She whimpered and, with reluctance, opened her eyes.
The physical reality Nada inhabited was not that different from the egg in her sensorium. Her body lay embedded in the soft wall of the leadership vesicle aboard the Infinite Order. While far more cramped than a chamber of the mind-temple, the vesicle was roughly the same shape and similarly lit. The main difference to a casual observer would have been the presence of several hundred crablike maintenance lice crawling over the vesicle walls, along with the exposed parts of her face and body.
Leng’s blue hand squeezed through the sphincter from the ship’s central bulb, followed by the rest of him, Zilch and Ekkert close behind. They crowded into the tiny chamber and adopted foetal positions to save space. Nada had instructed Leng to dye himself blue for easy identification as, since her conversion, she sometimes struggled to recognise faces. Zilch was coloured red for the same reason. Nada detached her arms from the wall and rotated Ekkert’s floating body until she could see his features to concentrate on them.
‘Speak,’ she ordered.
Ekkert’s doughy face stared past her as he delivered his report.
‘We have received fresh messenger-drone data from our relay team on the main Drexler trade route.’
Hope surged in Nada’s chest. ‘Have they tracked down the missing population?’
‘No,’ said Ekkert.
Nada contemplated smashing in Ekkert’s face. He wouldn’t mind and it might reduce the build-up of anxiety inside her. But she knew better than to impair the effectiveness of her own crew. Ekkert would likely use the damage as an excuse to be recycled. So instead she keened softly until emotional equilibrium reasserted itself.
How did you hide an entire planetary population, anyway? And why did the humans always need to innovate and mislead rather than simply making themselves and everyone else happy? It was exasperating. At this rate, the Yunus would keep her mind isolated for ever.
‘What, then?’ she said at last.
‘They encountered a drone bearing information that appears to have come from a new spy
network on Galatea. One spawned by our recent mutant seed release.’
She could hear the prejudice in Ekkert’s voice. The Saved instinctively mistrusted all mutations, even those compatible with their biome. Nada, however, was delighted. Apparently their work at Earth hadn’t been a complete failure after all.
‘With what intelligence?’
‘Galatean Flight Control was handed exit-prep orders for two simultaneous missions,’ said Ekkert. ‘Both vessels have now departed. One is an ember-warp carrier that was being loaded with colony-building equipment. The logged route for that mission shows it going at right angles to the border with the Photurian domain, towards no known habitable system.’
‘Did they provide a vector?’ said Nada.
‘They did and I have examined it,’ Leng put in. ‘A significant course-correction will be required to take the carrier to any system of strategic value.’
‘This is not unusual,’ said Nada. ‘Humans always hide their true objectives. What is the other mission?’
‘It is for a ship of previously unregistered design,’ said Ekkert. ‘It was concealed within a Galatean construction swarm until crew boarding commenced. It then departed under unstealthed meson-warp. It is unclear whether the vessel is even equipped with tau-chargers. It is headed directly away from the border with Photuria.’
‘How large is this ship?’ said Nada.
‘Approximately forty kilometres wide. It is estimated to support a crew of fifty at most.’
‘Logically, one of these ships will be a feint and the other a mission aimed at relocating the missing population,’ she said. ‘It appears obvious which is which. A ship that size can be of little use to thirty million people.’
‘That was also my initial assessment,’ said Leng. ‘However, there is more. Ekkert, outline the crew manifest for the second mission.’
‘Among others, the crew includes the Abomination, Andromeda Ludik; the Butcher, Ira Baron; and the Thief of Souls, Mark Ruiz,’ said Ekkert.
