by Alex Lamb
The moment he hit the banks of sand, the setting changed. Now he was on Yonaguni, in a forgettable executive retreat during one of his visits to the Far Frontier – those worlds that had once belonged to the Fecund. Beyond the window lay a view over a landscape of dusty mesas and squat, alien structures. They had bulging sides and no windows except for those that Nature had punched during the intervening ten million years. Will looked the other way to where a basket of genetically belaboured art-fruit sat untouched on the intelligent table.
This memory was from years later, after the death of his friend Gustav and the unravelling of his plans for peace. He vaguely recalled a meeting here – something to do with governmental standards. He’d paid scant attention to the details and been too busy and stressed to care. In the end, it hadn’t mattered how many miracles he offered or threats he made, the human race carried on finding ways to cheat and lie to itself. The Earthers had clung to their awful church while the Colonials kept fulfilling every prediction of selfish behaviour the Truists made up about them. He felt exhausted just seeing this place again.
A man spoke in the next room, his tone strident.
‘Boring boring,’ he said. ‘Blah blah, self-serving fantasy blah.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ a woman replied. ‘After all, babble babble nonsense, conniving rubbish. You can’t aphorism aphorism something just like that.’
They were getting closer. Will ducked into a robot-alcove and closed the door just as a clone in a Surplus Age suit and fedora burst in and glanced around in frustration. Through the crack in the door, Will peered at the newcomer in alarm. The clone noticed the voices in the next room and rapidly disappeared back the way he’d come.
Will knew he had to keep moving. Whether he’d just encountered a facet of Balance or something else, it wasn’t safe here. He picked a mahogany doorway and waved it open, striding through quickly.
He landed in the drab legal offices of the IPSO Fleet on Mars and felt another surge of loneliness even more acute than the one that had grabbed him at the sight of his old school. This was where he’d stumbled through the court hearings about Mark’s bungled rescue of Rachel in the Depleted Zone. He’d lost his wife, and now he was losing his connection with the closest thing he had to a son.
He winced at the pathetic arc his life had taken. No wonder his clones preferred to think of it all as a dream. He heard voices almost immediately and pressed onwards, through the next inward-leading doorway he found.
It took him to the evacuated mesohull of the Ariel Two – the ship the Transcended had given him. Great coiled springs of metal and ceramic the size of tower blocks rose on either side into shadowed darkness. Power-conduit cables trailed down like enormous roots. He ‘stood’ on a sheet of magnetised quasimetal that served as the floor. And the emotion that gripped him was rage.
He’d been fixing a suntap damaged during his last fight – the one at the Tiwanaku System where he’d first encountered Snakepit’s semi-intelligent weapon-swarm. He’d watched Yunus Chesterford die and was ready to make someone pay for it. What he hadn’t known back then was that he was on his way to the planet that would swallow him whole.
The cylindrical protrusion sticking out from the plating ahead was the suntap installation he’d sent robots to repair. Inside that housing, Will knew, would be exactly what he was looking for.
He opened the maintenance hatch and strode inside. The memory beyond seized him with a sense of astonishment and betrayal. He was back in the heart of Snakepit in that terrible moment – except it didn’t look quite the same. He hadn’t been strictly human the last time he’d set eyes on this place. He’d been halfway to a god by then and had seen it with senses that could no longer fit inside his mind.
The way it appeared to him now was as a clearing in a forest of fiercely glowing mechanical trees. Neither the black sky nor the black ground were easy to discern against the shining vegetation. The pipe-like roots from every tree around him converged to a point at the centre of the clearing where a single, incongruous device stood. It was about the size of a coma-casket, covered in dull metal cladding and marked with magnetic warning symbols: a standard-issue suntap device.
Inside that drab housing would be the circuit he was looking for – the data shunt that fed information into Snakepit from somewhere else. He’d been right. Underneath its human trappings, the Willworld was still organised like the Snakepit he’d first visited. The architecture, and the monstrous betrayal it concealed, were still there for him to find.
Will walked around the device. Without opening the housing, he couldn’t get to the thing inside. He couldn’t see the truth. He knew that if he opened it, he’d find the circuit pulling data out of nowhere and the lie would be exposed. Better still, he might be able to turn the hateful thing off.
Moneko had warned him not to touch, but as he stood there, infused with the prior emotion of that moment, he felt a furious, irrational sense of purpose growing inside him like a tide. He resisted it but it clamoured in his chest, making his hands itch for action. He knew what he needed to do. John had talked to him about incontestable truths. Well, now he had one of his own: the need to smash this thing. To rip the heart out of it and free the world of its secret poison. Just looking at it and trying not to act was like holding his breath underwater.
Unable to resist a moment longer, Will grabbed the housing and tore it open. It shredded like paper in his grasp. When he looked within, though, he found nothing but empty space. The suntap itself was missing. Will blinked at the void and started to suspect that more was at work in this place than he’d guessed.
He glanced around anxiously for a portal but couldn’t see one, of course. This memory was the end of the line. He’d made a serious mistake. The wail of a police siren sounded suddenly in the distance, somewhere off between the shining trees. It rapidly got louder.
7.2: MARK
Mark and Palla remained in helm-space after the others had winked out. The IPS Diggory hung before them, silhouetted against the grey and white crescent of the biosphere world below. Its emitter brollies and survey antennas lay retracted behind their protective shields, making the ghost ship resemble a filthy golf ball tumbling in space.
‘You ready for this?’ said Palla.
Mark nodded without meeting her eye. He had the sense that she hoped to wring some camaraderie from that moment of collaboration, but he had none to give.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because you don’t exactly look enthusiastic. Something tells me that you’d rather be staring at ruins with Ira.’
Mark snorted and shook his head. ‘No thank you.’
When he’d first set eyes on those glassy artefacts, he’d felt a rush of awe. But then the bigger picture had emerged – the Phote world, the signs of conflict, the silence. He’d seen systems like this on the human side of the Zone that were just as broken and just as dead.
To his mind, whoever had lived here had lost a battle with the Photes, just like the human race was doing. When he realised that, he’d lost interest in the miracles and the place had started to depress him. It was like looking into their own failed future. The rainbow bubbles and engineering magic only made it worse. Impressive technology hadn’t helped this race, which meant that salvation wasn’t to be found here. If it lay anywhere, it was at Snakepit, just as he’d always supposed. He only hoped this side excursion didn’t waste too much of their valuable time.
Though it pained him to admit it, he felt the same about Rachel’s ship. A childish part of him even resented the Diggory for being there. It wasn’t as if there’d be anything but corpses aboard. He’d just be made to revisit pain he’d long since buried. Still, closure was closure. And if this was how he finally said goodbye to the woman responsible for his creation, so be it. It was better than remaining haunted by memories of his former selfishness.
He watched as his lead probe closed on Rachel’s ship. The metallic landscape of the hull showed surprisingly little damage considering how long it
had hung there. His lead robot manoeuvred until it was over the ship’s primary comms cluster and sent a wake-up request. The ship responded instantly, sending a full status report. Mark’s skin tingled a little at the abruptness of the response. Rather than absorbing the message directly, he made it unpack in a secure buffer. Then he ran it through a round of malware filters and gave pieces of it to an army of sandboxed subminds to read. As understanding trickled into his head, he explained to Palla.
‘The ship’s in good working order,’ he said. ‘It’s had a suntap running on slow drip for twenty years and so has a full charge. There’ve been no impacts or conflicts to deal with since the crew lay down for cryo-coma.’
Palla eyed him nervously. ‘Anything in the ship’s core say how they got here?’
Mark queried the ship.
‘Yes,’ he said, scanning the results. ‘There appears to have been a SAP conflict. When they first hit the bulk, they set the ship to navigate them home and not wake them till it got back to human space. It was supposed to drop breadcrumbs to make them easier to find. But they failed to give the SAP complete executive control. It looks like there was a sloppily written management file. When the ship found itself unexpectedly back in the Flaw due to a propagating kink, the original programming took over. It flew on autopilot in fits and starts down the Flaw for what looks like over twenty years. When it found itself at the other end, the ship took them to the first available research site. But because they still weren’t in human space, it never woke the crew up.’
Palla’s eyes narrowed. ‘My, now that’s crazy convenient,’ she said. ‘Do you believe it for an instant?’
Mark shook his head. The logic was technically consistent but too much of a stretch. Getting the ship this far required a perfect kind of error. Any other mistake in that same management file would have lost the ship in space for ever. In a way, having such a tidy answer for the Diggory’s presence just made it feel all the more sinister.
‘How about everything else?’ she asked. ‘What’s the status?’
‘The radiation buffers have degraded and some of the more delicate organic components are shot, but frankly, given about two days of careful repair with material from that planet she’s orbiting, she could be out of here. And there are easily enough functional robots left aboard to do that work.’
It was like Ira had said: the hand just out of sight.
Palla’s eyes gleamed. ‘How about we send in a little bait?’
Mark nodded. He guided maintenance robots up to the main hull ports and requested entry. The ship gave them access without a whisper of complaint. He let them wander about in the mesohull, checking systems. Everything was locked down, orderly, quiet.
‘All clear,’ said Mark.
‘Then let’s take it to the next level,’ said Palla. ‘We look at the core.’
He sent a shuttle over to the Diggory carrying a couple of biorobotic simulants in environment suits. As per Judj’s protocols, they were indistinguishable from people under a coarse scan, but designed to explode and fill the air with Phote-poison at the first hint of an ambush.
Once the shuttle docked, he and Palla twinned their perspectives with the simulants and rode the ship’s docking pod down to the habitat core.
‘This is creepy,’ said Palla with a grin as she hung next to him.
Mark chose not to reply. He clung to one of the pod’s handles and tried to still the storm of jagged emotions roiling inside him as he waited for it to arrive.
The doors opened and lights came on. Mark glided out into a main cabin in almost perfect condition. A haze of light dust hung in the empty space. The air had been vented, but other than that, it looked as if the crew had stepped out only yesterday.
Mark felt a surge of eerie nostalgia as he glanced about. He remembered when starships had looked like this – all spongy white wall-padding and clunky emergency visors clipped into wall-slots. It was like stepping into the past.
‘I guess we should get this over with,’ said Mark.
‘Not having fun yet?’ said Palla. ‘Come on, don’t you like mysteries?’
He suppressed the urge to snap at her. Dredging up old tragedies did not put him in a playful frame of mind.
They made their way cautiously to the med-bay in the bottom chamber where the end of the story surely lay. Set into the floor was a row of coma-caskets clad in 2D-screens showing old-fashioned readout data. Astonishingly, there was still a trickle of power going into one of them.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Palla. ‘This thing’s still running.’ The glee appeared to be draining out of her.
She started tapping at the display, bringing up information about the occupant. As she did so, a leaden feeling of certainty built in Mark’s gut. He knew whose casket it would be before Palla even said it.
‘It’s Rachel’s box,’ she told him breathlessly, ‘and it’s working! I’m seeing biosigns still in the yellow. Fuck. This is wrong.’
Of course it was Rachel’s. Mark stared at it, and then around at the silent walls of the cabin. He had the profound sense of being watched.
‘It’s in bad shape,’ Palla added. ‘If we were dependent on tech from her day, she’d be as good as dead. But we have modern medical kit aboard and I’m trained to use it.’ She looked Mark in the eye. ‘Bringing her back shouldn’t be a problem. If that’s what you want, I mean.’
She seemed to be belatedly cluing in to the emotional weight that the mission held for him. He wasn’t sure how to respond.
‘Are you sure it’s her?’ he said. ‘Because I’m not.’
7.3: ANN
The world that Ann thought of as Bock Two swelled in her camera-view – a grey and indigo sphere studded with swirls of pretty white cloud. Rachel Bock, legally speaking, had been the captain responsible for its discovery, so the title was hers. Ann was glad of that. There weren’t enough star systems named after women. She watched the globe beneath her grow, mesmerised not so much by its beauty as by its military promise.
All Phote colonies featured habitat-tubes. But most of them were new, having been stolen from the human race mere decades ago. The slowly spreading thickets of roots were no larger than human tent-cities. The only other planet humanity had seen smothered by tubes on every continent was Snakepit. But Bock Two sported a feature that Snakepit didn’t have: holes.
Curious circular patches ranging from a few kilometres wide to a few hundred marred the tunnel pattern. It didn’t look as though the tunnels had grown around these features, or that impacts or weapons fire had blasted the habitats away. Instead, the tunnel-sprawl just stopped. In the larger gaps, circles of grey-green vegetation hunkered at the centre.
Ann’s scans had also revealed fascinating differences in atmospheric composition. The air here was much thicker than on Snakepit. It looked like the atmosphere of a natural, exposed biome rather than a Phote world. Ann couldn’t help wondering if the gases that had been carefully husbanded in those myriad layers of hollow roots had leaked out – perhaps because of whatever made the holes. After the fierce disappointment of the flight out, Bock Two was a welcome surprise.
Looking back on it, Ann recognised that she’d entered emotional free fall after her failed attempt at self-destruction. For the whole of her second life, there’d always been another battle waiting. Without a fight she felt aimless, and resurrecting other talents that had lain dormant for forty years wasn’t easy. She felt like she’d just lost those pieces of herself somewhere along the way. But Bock Two gave her a reason to exist. As Ira had said, she’d been a scientist and an investigator once. Maybe she could be again.
[You were wrong, then,] said her shadow. [There is something for you to do out here other than die.]
[Perhaps,] Ann admitted. [That assessment presumes the positive resolution of two outstanding problems. First, we’ll have to identify enough tactical gain to make the discovery worthwhile. And second, I’ll have to convince Palla to let us take whatever we find back to Galatea rather
than finishing this bullshit mission.]
[Can you conceive of the idea that if you were wrong about the value of Backspace, you might be wrong about other things, too? Like turning back, for instance?]
Ann frowned. [Where is this interrogation going, ghost?] she demanded. [Are you expecting me to apologise for trusting my data?]
[I’m just saying that maybe you should try learning the larger lesson rather than the smaller one. Maybe this place is more than just another way to kill Photes.]
[Well, if I do find a new way to kill Photes,] Ann said, [then there’ll be plenty of time for me to be chipper and philosophical later, won’t there?]
Her shadow sighed. [I exist to support you, Ann,] it said. [I’m made out of you. There’s practically nothing of Will left in here. So why do you insist on resisting my help unless it’s what you want to hear?]
It worried her that she seemed to be falling out of step with her own shadow. To be at odds with a manifestation of her own subconscious felt both ludicrous and unsettling. Fortunately, despite the quality of the illusion, her shadow was sub-sentient. She was not obliged to converse with it.
‘So, what’s your plan?’ said Judj as they slid through geosynchronous orbit.
‘To improvise,’ said Ann bluntly.
‘That’s it?’ said Judj.
‘My knowledge of Phote chemistry is stored in subminds. I haven’t had the time to delve extensively into microbiology, so my grasp of the enemy’s cellular operation remains intuitive. Fortunately, that’s never been a problem. My shadow handles it for me. What I need to do is go down there and expose my smart-cells to the planet so that it can process what I find.’
‘Rely on your shadow, huh?’ he said. ‘Great idea. After all, that’s been working so well for you recently.’
‘You’ll notice that this time, the only person I’m prepared to put at risk is myself,’ she replied tersely.
‘You assume,’ he said.
‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ she retorted. ‘And besides, after forty-one years, the Photes found one way around the defences that Will built into me. Because they invested tens of thousands of lives and who knows how much research time. This planet has never met me. Frankly, I’m not worried.’
