Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  [Why are you parked here?] she demanded. [Where is the target vessel? Report!]

  [We could not drop warp adjacent to the advance force due to the expected strength of our arrival burst,] Leng reminded her as his avatar-bead arrived in the comms cavern. [Optical lag on dialogue will be three hundred and ninety-four seconds.]

  The report packets she received when the coordinator finally replied were densely packed and smeared with surprise.

  [The target vessel entered the Alpha Flaw before our arrival,] he explained. [Our combat configuration only supports ember-warp, which would be unusable inside the Flaw. Consequently we are securing the exit to prevent their escape.]

  [Escape? What if they do not wish to escape? Why did you not re-cluster to form scout-ships to maintain pursuit?] Nada demanded.

  While she awaited his next reply, she instructed the Infinite Order to abandon its carrier and converge on the advance force’s position with all haste.

  [Why would he re-cluster?] said Leng. [This is the Depleted Zone. Further travel incurs extreme risk and he had no such instructions.]

  [Our default assumption was that you would not want to waste units,] said the coordinator, sounding entirely confused. [Was this incorrect?]

  Nada ground her teeth. Did nobody else understand their situation? Before she could frame a reply to communicate her disapproval, the coordinator sent a second message.

  [Note that we have good news!] he said quickly. [We located an evac-ark and saved eighty-three humans. Thirty-seven died irretrievably before rescue could be completed, but the remainder are full of delight at their conversion and eagerly await any surgery you might bestow. We have already questioned them. They were overjoyed to yield their memories for usage and rewrite. They have no knowledge of the missing Earth population and have seen no arks entering the Flaw at any time during the last four years.]

  [I have no interest in the converts!] Nada sent. [You have wasted precious time!] She followed up her message with a series of update packets to spur feelings of panic and determination.

  Down in meatspace, a hand landed on her arm and gripped it firmly. Nada’s eyes flicked open to find Leng staring at her.

  ‘Superior Nada, I propose that we wait a moment before further action,’ he said. An asymmetrical smile quivered on his features. ‘From this point onwards, our strategic course is irreversible.’

  ‘We have covered this,’ Nada snapped.

  ‘Yes,’ said Leng, ‘and you wish to enter the Flaw. That much is evident. But consider: with extra converts, we would be able to spare our depleted units. Furthermore, the lag time required while we reformat our fleet for optimum Flaw traversal would give our existing units the chance to commune that they require for continued function.’

  Nada drew deep breaths. The thought of more waiting made her want to rip her own face off, but he was right.

  ‘You do not contest our entry to the Flaw?’ she said.

  Leng made a high-pitched whimpering sound before answering. ‘I have reflected on your priorities,’ he said. ‘It is clear that the Yunus made paramount the destruction of the Abomination in your edits. Completion of that act now requires that we enter the Alpha Flaw, regardless of the cost.’

  ‘That is correct,’ said Nada, somewhat relieved to hear him say it. ‘I also reluctantly accede to your assessment. Reconfiguration is required, in any case. We should make efficient use of the unavoidable delay.’

  Leng’s eyes filled with tears. ‘My joy is restabilised,’ he said. ‘When would you like to commence communion?’

  Nada shuddered. ‘I cannot tolerate the implied waiting,’ she said. ‘I will place myself in deep-flush until progress is resumed. You must commune without me.’

  Leng’s face fell. ‘But you are our superior node,’ he said. ‘Communing with you will help us align with you. I have been waiting to resonate in your temple-cavern.’

  Nada saw the implications. He had no doubt hoped that collective realignment might soften her zeal and cause her to think twice about leading so many ships into the Flaw. It was more likely, of course, that her zeal would bolster his. It made little difference in any case. Whatever the Yunus had done to her, it made the prospect of idle mind-song with her fellow Saved painful rather than seductive.

  She looked around and noticed the hungry eyes of the rest of the crew – watching her, hoping. They craved reconciliation with her perspective.

  ‘I will have to disappoint you,’ she told them.

  ‘No,’ said Leng. His grip on her arm became a squeeze. ‘Recent behaviour suggests you risk destabilisation.’

  ‘I do not,’ said Nada. ‘The Yunus’s edits are perfect! You are not concerned about my stability.’ She reached into his head and made sure it was true.

  When Leng’s body finished thrashing around, she gave him fresh orders.

  ‘Wake me once pursuit within the Flaw has already commenced,’ she told him. Then she retreated to her vesicle, writhed back into her wall-slot and shut herself off.

  No time seemed to pass before Leng roused her. His blue body hung before her, his face slack. Nada’s mind felt cluttered and insufficiently flushed. She definitely did not feel replenished.

  ‘What is the status?’ she demanded. ‘Where is the gravity? Why can I not hear warp-hammer?’ The ship felt eerily still.

  ‘Our engines have already died,’ said Leng flatly.

  Nada’s skin crawled. ‘How is that possible? Their SAP-navigation is no match for our ship-brains. Why did we not simply follow their warp-trail? Our tools are superior.’

  ‘The human warp-trail led directly into a depleted reef,’ said Leng. ‘Most of our pilot brains did not realise in time. There was no warning.’

  Nada’s breath caught. It felt as if something inside her was tearing.

  Leng’s features slowly crawled into a sickly grin which seemed to say, I told you so.

  Nada clawed her way past him and out of the vesicle again. Leng came after her.

  ‘Zilch,’ she said. ‘What is the status of the fleet?’

  ‘Most are scattered into the bulk,’ he replied. ‘A full diagnostic exists in my temple-cavern. We have also found an ion trail leading deeper into the Zone.’

  Leng pushed past her and punched Zilch in the eye. Zilch’s large, squareish head jerked backwards.

  ‘Superior Nada, I recommend that we do not bother with the ion trail,’ said Leng. ‘It is just another opportunistically set trap.’ His puny lungs heaved.

  Nada weighed her options while the ripping feeling inside her went on and on. It didn’t matter that her ship was trapped. What upset her was that her quarry was now getting away.

  ‘We must push forward, despite the costs,’ she said. ‘The Abomination would not be in here without good reason. And I would rather live for ever than return to the Yunus empty-handed a second time.’

  Leng’s eyes bugged out of his face. ‘Push forward with what possible reason?’ he warbled. ‘The warp-trail we followed was clearly that of a ship making a navigational error. How is copying that error a viable strategy?’

  ‘The ship made the error in its desire to escape our pursuit,’ said Nada, ‘which implies that its escape has strategic merit.’

  ‘The escape may have merit,’ said Leng. ‘The error cannot. Remember that it is standard procedure to consider the entire strategy landscape in situations of this complexity. Our best route to destroying the Abomination may be to backtrack out of the bulk and scout the Flaw to cut them off before they can re-enter it. We have many ships. They have only one.’

  Nada shut her eyes. Once again, Leng was right. Before the Yunus’s edits, reasoning of that sort had been easier for her. She caught herself and banished that ugly thought. It was beneath her attention.

  ‘You are right,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Leng.

  Nada swapped focus to her avatar-bead and ported to Fleetwide Strategic Reasoning where her ship-brains were already hard at work. The Photurian Protocol
was a dense, polyphonous chorus here, crammed with higher-dimensional overtones. The glyph surface on the walls crawled with meaning that pressed itself into her mind. Leng’s blue bead appeared beside hers as Nada desperately scoured the walls for viable scenarios.

  [It is as I suspected,] said Leng. [There are no good outcomes here that involve continued pursuit.]

  [Be silent!] said Nada. [I am still looking.]

  Eventually, she found a plan tucked down between two lines of grotesque failure scenarios.

  [Look,] she told Leng with a surge of relief. [This is the program we will undertake. Full coverage of the Flaw is all but guaranteed.]

  His bead remained mute.

  [You may speak,] she said.

  [This solution is costly,] he pointed out. [Examine the implications.] Nada immediately wished she’d kept him quiet. [Sixty per cent of our ships will be destroyed. Those that remain will expend most of their antimatter reserves. Stealth-warp will be impossible from then on. Our crews will suffer. Many units will die without knowing Total Union. For those that still live, the benefits of our recent communion will be lost. Emergency compensation measures will be required.]

  He drew her attention to the unpleasant neurological consequences of her choice. Every unit in her fleet would require a carefully engineered regimen of pain stimulation to remind them of their ongoing failure and nudge them away from the siren song of bliss. The alternative was pervasive Fatigue – irreversible neural shutdown on a fleet-wide scale.

  At the same time, the communion that Nada had so fervently avoided would become inescapable, regardless of the risks to her sanity. They would have to suffer together as well as apart.

  Nada writhed as she took it all in. Why did she have to resort to doing such awful things in the name of love? Couldn’t humans just accept the joy that came from conversion and get it over with? Had she really been like that once – a creature twisted and crippled inside by discomfort and hate and loneliness?

  She retreated into her body for a moment to weep, even while the joy of her own conversion coursed through her veins. She wished that her people weren’t so dependent on the humans. Their progenitor race had no soul. No faith. No meaning. She might as well be chasing rats.

  When she’d regained stable function, she returned to the temple where Leng waited.

  [This is unfortunate,] she told him stiffly, [but one of the Yunus’s core goals will be achieved. And this is the only scenario for which that is true.]

  [I understand,] said Leng in strangled tones. [We must strive to assist the Yunus. I will prepare a suitable torture regimen for your perusal.]

  5.4: MARK

  In the becalmed emptiness of the Zone, Mark’s thoughts spiralled in on themselves. Zoe sprang to mind with ever-increasing frequency. She’d been right. He’d come in here chasing the memory of Rachel only to fall into the same trap that had swallowed his half-mother. Again. As they travelled further into the bank of dead space with no hint of a way out, his hope sputtered. In the end, he could stand it no more. He called a meeting.

  They gathered at eight p.m. ship-time, in the lounge where the faux-deco sconces cast weirdly misaligned shadows up the walls. The others sprawled on the uncomfortable scarlet sofas while Mark paced before them.

  ‘I’ve been considering our situation,’ he said, ‘and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s crazy to keep going forward. For the last two days we’ve dived further into this bank and made no real progress. While we expected Phote pursuit, it made sense to put distance between them and us, but they’re not here. We haven’t seen a single burst of warp-light. And meanwhile, we’re burning antimatter on conventional thrust, which is crazy. We need to face facts. This bank is not small. I think it’s time to backtrack.’

  He surveyed their unmoved expressions and wondered if they’d even been listening. Palla was lying on a sofa, dangling her legs over the end and regarding him with something like pitying indifference. Of them all, only Clath actually looked engaged.

  ‘Clath,’ he said hopefully. ‘Any thoughts?’

  ‘If they are following us, they could be right on top of us by the time we get out of the bulk,’ she said.

  Mark waved her comment away. ‘Sure, but where are they, then? Our pursuit models told us they were on top of us already but we haven’t seen a single arrival. Isn’t it more likely that they just didn’t take the bait? There comes a point when hanging around in here is wasting our chances of finishing the mission.’

  Clath smiled stiffly while her eyes leaked discomfort. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But I think there are other solutions of a more technical nature that might be safer.’

  ‘Go on—’

  Ann cut in before she could explain. ‘I agree with Mark,’ she said, staring at the floor. ‘We should reverse thrust. I’m not surprised we haven’t seen anything. My models predicted this. The Photes aren’t stupid – they won’t race into the Zone just because we did. But this conversation is moot, in any case.’ She slid her gaze in his direction. ‘I think you’ll find that we’re under orders to not go back. Try and you’ll be vetoed.’

  Mark frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Academy expected us to run into a bank,’ said Ann. ‘Palla told me the other day. They were counting on it to optimise their trap. Ergo, they’d almost certainly like us to remain inside the bulk.’

  Mark looked to Palla as a familiar sense of betrayal burbled up inside him.

  ‘Is this true?’ he said.

  Palla nodded slowly. ‘Yep. Sorry. We were expected to run adrift. It was a calculated risk, but not a hard one to gauge. We’re talking about the Zone, after all – of course we were going to run into a bank. I was planning to tell you this evening but Ann just beat me to it.’

  Mark shook his head, sickened at how convoluted the strategy had become.

  Palla winked at him. ‘You’re cute when you’re angry,’ she said.

  Mark lacked the energy to swear at her. ‘Why weren’t we told this before?’ he said.

  ‘There had to be no warning indicators in our warp-trail,’ said Palla. ‘It had to look natural. Otherwise we might take out fewer Photes.’

  ‘But we didn’t catch any,’ Mark pointed out bitterly.

  ‘Hey,’ said Palla. ‘You’re the one who flew us in here. Perfect job, by the way. We couldn’t have made a more spectacular blunder if I’d flown the ship myself.’

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ said Mark. ‘So now what? Are we allowed to know the next shitty little twist in the master plan?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ said Palla. ‘This is as far as the Academy got. Everything is yours now, so long as you don’t try to back out of the bulk and compromise the trap we just laid.’

  ‘Great,’ said Mark. ‘A lot of options, then.’

  ‘We’re still alive,’ said Palla, ‘and I’m still keen on your mission even if you aren’t. At this point, your goals and the Academy’s are perfectly aligned.’

  ‘And what do the Academy’s models predict?’

  ‘That the bank will be large, like you said,’ said Palla with a sigh. ‘That we’ll sit here until we know for sure that we’ve pulled in as many Photes as we can. And once we think we’ve taken out as many as we’re going to get, we keep pushing forward for another month or two on slow-time, in case we can escape. When that doesn’t work, I pull the plug. But don’t worry, I’ll shut down the hab core first. It’ll be painless.’

  ‘That’s it?’ said Mark. ‘Days to live and nothing to do?’

  ‘So let’s make them count,’ said Palla. ‘There’s plenty of virtual champagne in the bar. Who wants to party?’ She pulled a ludicrous smile.

  Clath and Judj both let out bleak peals of laughter.

  Their mirth was cut off by the squeal of a radiation alert. Without further warning, their sofas were dropped straight onto the glass disc in helm-space. The others leapt to their feet as the light-burst of a warp arrival flared behind them, followed by another and another, until all o
f space appeared to be exploding. In warp terms, those bursts were horribly close. It was as if their enemies had hit an invisible wall just metres away.

  ‘Holy shit!’ said Palla.

  Mark’s skin prickled as he took in the data from the burst spread. There were over a hundred signatures – big ones. They had been followed. Initiating a reverse burn would have achieved nothing except wasted fuel.

  Ann let out an anguished caw of mirth as she stared at the results.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she breathed. ‘We got lots of them. How did the Academy out-predict my models?’

  ‘By panicking and overthinking everything,’ said Palla. ‘What they do best.’

  The rest of them were silent as the analytical SAPs churned out reams of assessment data. At least eighty of the bursts showed the telltale quenching of a ship hitting depleted space. Their role as a decoy couldn’t have been more successful.

  ‘Well,’ said Palla, swallowing. ‘It appears we’ve exceeded expectations.’

  Mark stared. ‘I don’t get it. They delay for days and then send in an entire fleet?’

  ‘What can I say?’ said Palla. ‘We knew that putting Ann on the ship would be a big draw for the Photes, but at best we hoped to delay or split them, not take down so many. We either radically underestimated the number they had watching Galatea, or for some reason they all followed us in. In Fleet terms, it’s a win. So good job, everybody.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Posthumous medals all round.’ She began a slow clap. Tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, brushing them away. ‘Sitting on this plan has not been a happy experience. My apologies to all of you; particularly you, Mark – it was your mission.’

  He had no idea what to say to that, or even what to feel. The passion that had driven him this far had lurched into free fall. What was he supposed to do now? Just die?

  Palla sagged into a sofa and suddenly looked a lot smaller. Clath moved quickly to her side and put an arm around her. Mark glanced about at the others. Ann was contemplating the Phote spread with a kind of tragic awe. Ira was peering at her anxiously. Judj appeared to be locked in some private amusement, one side of his narrow face kinked weirdly upwards.