Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Too late,’ said Ann. ‘You’re just going to have to trust me. Don’t worry. I’ll keep a comms-link open.’

  This, apparently, was too much for Judj to take.

  ‘Me, trust you?’ he snapped. ‘You don’t even understand your own cellular OS. You’re a liability and a suicidal, hackable mess. Not to mention a grandiose pain in the ass. In God’s name, why can’t you grow up?’

  Ann flinched inwardly. Ira had made the same remark. The bruise on her psyche left by his words still felt fresh. For whatever reason, her old boss’s opinion still mattered to her. She paused, collected herself and tried to explain.

  ‘It’s like this,’ she said quietly. ‘We know this world is dead. We therefore know that there’s no biological risk. But we also have no idea what we’re dealing with. Which is a problem because the existential risks here are huge. The only place on this planet where we’ll find non-organic data storage that might tell us what’s going on is a node. It’s full of equipment designed to withstand warp. And if it can do that, it can definitely withstand a few million years of mild weather. If we want answers, someone has to go in there and look. And I’m the only person qualified.’

  ‘I get that,’ said Judj. ‘But why don’t you put that military brain of yours in gear for a moment and consider the fact that there may be unknown unknowns in there that you can’t handle? Alien tech you haven’t seen before. Carefully laid traps. Threats that might affect someone else in your team.’

  Him, in other words.

  ‘No,’ said Ann.

  ‘No?’ said Judj. ‘That’s your answer?’

  ‘I exist to take risks. Otherwise I might as well be dead.’

  Judj made a long, low hissing noise like a tyre leaking air.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, sounding disgusted. ‘We’ll do it your way, Andromeda Ludik. Imagine that.’

  Ann opened the airlock, climbed out and trudged out across the moist ground without a backward glance. She’d tried to explain. If Judj didn’t want to be happy, she couldn’t make him. Before her, the dark interior of the fissure beckoned, and within it, she was sure, lurked answers.

  7.4: IRA

  Ira watched the wheeling moons grow before them, each filled with some different sparkling novelty, and felt like a child approaching a deserted theme park. An immense candy-bright fantasy had been arrayed for him to explore, full of spheres and arcs and glinting colours. But it felt dead. And wrong. It beckoned and warned him off at the same time.

  He smirked bitterly at himself. Apparently, all he’d needed to start feeling unmuted emotions again was simply a discovery on the kind of scale that defined civilisations, along with the attendant dangers. He wasn’t surprised. He’d grown acclimatised to huge stakes. And now that the stakes were huge again, he could feel things.

  Or maybe he was just inhabiting Clath’s excitement. She was radiating enough of it. And his presence would be the only meaningful check on her science-hunger. Ira synced his shadow-link to Clath’s seat camera to watch her gazing into her displays with fierce intensity.

  ‘Learned anything?’ he asked.

  Clath’s mouth twitched once in startled impatience as she looked up into the camera. Ira saw a wealth of implications in that glance. Behind her optimism, he noticed, she was ambitious. That was why she’d been so ready to give up her life to come out here. She wasn’t just curious, she was driven. He’d missed that before, which surprised him. He hadn’t been paying attention. Clath had been at the bottom of his priority stack.

  ‘Not much,’ she admitted. ‘The bubbles are resisting analysis. If they’re made of anything, it’s a low-density ionised lithium gas, but with negative mass. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a non-answer. We need to get closer.’ She turned back to her data.

  ‘But you must have theories about what we’re looking at,’ said Ira carefully.

  Clath glanced up again, openly frustrated this time, then caught herself in the act of emotional reveal.

  ‘We’ll be more effective if we work as a team,’ he said gently. ‘We haven’t spent much time together on this mission yet. I’m keen on the idea of getting out of here in one piece – want to help me?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Clath, ‘I’m sorry. I’m excited, but also scared. Those bubbles are … tantalising. And yes, I do have a theory. I think we’re looking at some kind of false matter.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Ira. ‘Even if I have no idea what that is.’

  ‘You remember the world that orbits the lure star near that first gate you found? The one that leads down to Fecund space?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ira. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Well, do you remember anything weird about it?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It was smooth.’

  ‘Right. Well, there were dozens of landings on that planet after the Interstellar War. Not one of them could analyse that surface, even when they were sitting on it. It appeared to be rock surrounded by some kind of protective shell. The only thing they could detect about it was the faintest hint of lithium-like energy transitions.’ She started to smile. ‘Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Ira.

  ‘Since the Photes got out, there haven’t been any missions to that system. It’s too dangerous. And that’s a shame because now we have ember-warp. There are certain curious similarities between the properties of an ember-warp envelope and the skin on that lure planet.’

  He watched her eyes light up as she spoke and envied her freshness. Ambitious or not, Clath Ataro had retained her sense of awe.

  ‘What if you could make something like a warp-envelope that stood still and didn’t need a support field?’ she said. ‘You might get something like this.’

  Ira pondered the implications. ‘So you think we’re looking at Transcended ruins?’

  Clath shook her head. ‘That’s possible, but it wouldn’t be my first assessment. Remember, there’s another lure star nearby. I think whoever lived here just learned to copy that Transcended trick. Or at least I hope that’s what happened. Because if they could do it, maybe the human race can, too. It could mean everything for us. Unbreakable ships. Safe habitats. New weapons. You name it.’

  Ira caught sight of two more veiled emotions then: urgency and pride. Clath wanted to win the war with science, personally. For her, this wasn’t Mark’s mission. It had always been hers. After all, she’d done the cognitive heavy lifting that had made it possible, hadn’t she?

  He wondered, suddenly, whether Zoe’s exclusion from the mission was entirely down to the Academy and felt a tremor of concern. He decided he needed a better handle on Clath’s motivations to predict her actions when they hit the ruins. It was time to twang her thought-stream to see what dropped out.

  ‘What’s the deal with your relationship with Judj?’ he said smoothly.

  He watched her process surprise. A host of vulnerability markers flew across her features like birds taking flight from a tree. So she was lonely, then. Well, of course she was. The ambitious usually were.

  ‘I need to know what matters to you,’ he said. ‘It’s a psych-officer thing.’

  It looked for a moment like she wouldn’t speak, but Clath had grown up with the New Society. She had too much respect for the therapeutic process to keep secrets.

  ‘He makes me laugh,’ she said quietly. ‘For all the acid he displays in public, Judj is kind and funny. And sometimes very sad. Besides, on the first day out, we discovered we were both SAP-play enthusiasts.’

  ‘SAP-play?’ said Ira, bemused.

  ‘You know, making up - full of SAPs as characters. Funny little plays that write themselves. It helps vent some of the pressure.’ She smiled shyly. ‘Some of our characters are parodies of the crew members. In fact, no, I lie. All of them are. But it’s hard not to. They’re too easy to laugh at.’

  ‘Am I in there?’ said Ira.

  Clath blushed. ‘Of course.’

  Ira smile
d back. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to be left out.’

  Paying Clath so little attention had been a mistake. He should be spending more time around her. She wasn’t crazy or sad or broken and he didn’t have enough contact with people like that. He suspected she’d be good company when they hit the inevitable weird shit.

  Their survey SAP pinged them, drawing their attention back to the morbid wonderland. ‘I have identified a nearby artefact on an elliptical orbit around the super-Jovian,’ it said. ‘If desired, I can adjust our vector to permit direct investigation within the next fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Does it have bubble features?’ said Clath.

  ‘No,’ the SAP told them. ‘But I am reading possible biological remains.’

  Clath’s expression darkened. ‘Then we should probably check it out anyway.’

  Ira invoked a visual close-up as they reorientated to match vectors and found himself looking at something like a mash-up of an evac-ark and a ring-orbital – maybe a ferry of some kind. There were puncture marks in its flank and the bulbous remains of a Photurian harvester ship still hanging off the side like a bloated tick.

  ‘Well, that clinches it,’ said Ira grimly. ‘No more imagination required to guess what happened here.’

  The story couldn’t have been clearer. The bubble-makers had found themselves caught up in a fight with a Phote world just like humanity, and they had lost. Ira frowned. The last time the Transcended had messed with his life, they’d been handing out weapons. This time, it was painfully clear that none of the tools on offer would cut it against the foe they faced. Logically, then, they weren’t supposed to be looking for guns or ships, but something else. A clue to escaping their fate, perhaps, or just a glimpse of a shitty future? Or maybe, this time, the weapons weren’t meant for humanity but for their predators instead.

  With misgivings writhing inside him, he sent a couple of waldobots across to explore. Around the ferry hung a barely detectable haze of dust that might have once been tissue and bits of frozen bone. Inside the closest hull breach he found a square chamber full of smashed machinery where the dust density was a fraction higher. A pair of robots or vac-suits sat clipped to the wall. They were shaped like gorillas but with weird, bulbous helmet domes. Ira regarded them with a sour sense of déjà vu. He’d done alien corpses before. It hadn’t been fun the last time around.

  ‘Those might be bodies,’ said Ira. ‘I’m bringing them aboard.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Clath uneasily. ‘Of course. We should probably do that.’

  He could tell that the reality of their situation was starting to sink in for her. Despite the system’s promised miracles, they were examining a mass grave.

  ‘I’ve done this before, remember?’ he told her. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  What he didn’t share was just how unpleasantly different this moment felt. When they’d discovered the Fecund years ago, they had barely understood what they were looking at. It had all been so foreign. This time, they knew exactly what had happened. The oozing familiarity of the situation scared him more than the unknown ever could have.

  ‘Where do you want to go next?’ said Ira, once he had the samples aboard.

  ‘There,’ said Clath. She sent him a course to the outermost of the planet’s major moons. ‘So far as I can see, it’s in the best condition of anything in the system.’

  ‘Done,’ said Ira.

  He set the course and took them towards it.

  In physical make-up, the nameless moon was your average airless ball of rock and ice, but that was where its normality ended. The equator had been decorated with dozens of orbital tethers. Some of them had structures at the end while others dangled like threads of party string.

  Scattered across the surface like Escherite toys were structures made of mirrored domes and loops – suspended spheres, glass doughnuts and braided knots. It was as if a geometry teacher had been given his own planet to play with and a thousand years of spare time. The surface showed no battle-scarring to speak of. Ira wondered why.

  ‘Let’s go there,’ said Clath, offering a landing vector.

  The site she’d picked was a huge crater from which four orbital tethers extended in a line. Each was attached to something like a ship – either a large evac-ark or a small starship. They wore surface-shells made of contoured bubbles.

  ‘How about that structure in the centre?’ she said and pointed at a building shaped like a pyramid of quicksilver foam.

  They descended and touched down carefully. Sparkling plumes of ice and dust billowed up from their landing thrusters and drifted back to the surface under the moon’s feeble gravity.

  Ira sent out their waldobots again, this time with a couple of surface crawlers and sensor drones for company. They set up shop near the structure’s flawless reflecting wall and began their tests.

  Clath grinned as the results poured in. ‘It is false matter,’ she told him. ‘It has to be. I’m seeing gravitic abnormalities on short scales, just like for an ember-warp envelope. And the radiative properties are crazy. In some wavelengths, this stuff is utterly reflective. In others it’s nearly perfectly transparent. But it differs from bubble to bubble. They must have had some way to trap the shells in specific quantum states while they were making them. And get this! These things can’t be more than nanometres thick but nothing I’m probing them with is even making a dent. So far as I can tell, they’re indestructible. And near-frictionless. No wonder they still look so good.’

  ‘Nothing’s indestructible,’ said Ira.

  ‘No,’ said Clath. ‘I guess not. But I’m not seeing any scratches, either.’

  ‘So do you think this was a building, or just abstract art? Because if it’s a building, it would have needed a door.’

  Clath’s eyebrows rose. ‘Good point!’

  She sent their robots wandering around the perimeter, probing for features on the immaculate surface. It didn’t take long for them to find something like an airlock. It was a perfectly circular opening a dozen centimetres deep and eight metres wide blocked by another slightly convex disc of featureless silver. A ring-shaped groove ran around the outside of the aperture, about five centimetres from the edge.

  They stared at it, a little paralysed by its promise.

  ‘Pandora’s bubble-stack,’ said Ira.

  Clath probed the door with a waldobot. Nothing happened until she applied some serious thrust against one edge. A gust of vapour abruptly jetted out from the rim. She quickly backed the robot away before its digits could get caught in the crack.

  ‘I know what this is,’ she said. ‘It’s a pressure seal. There’s only so many kinds of mechanism that could work with building materials this strange. The gas pressure inside keeps the door shut. And because the door and the doorway are both perfect on submolecular scales, no gas ever gets in or out. If we equalise the pressure with what’s on the other side, we can open the door.’

  ‘And what do you suppose is going to be on the other side?’ said Ira.

  ‘Exactly what we detected from our surveys of the other moons,’ she told him confidently. ‘Something between point-five and point-seven atmospheres of helium-neon mix.’

  Ira smiled. ‘I mean other than gas. What are you expecting content-wise?’

  Clath’s face fell. ‘Oh. I have no idea,’ she said. ‘Answers?’

  ‘You want to go in, then?’

  She beamed at him. ‘Of course.’

  Over the next two hours, they rigged a pressure tent around the doorway. It took longer than expected because adhering anything to the surface of the building proved impossible. Tools just slid off. It got easier when they figured out the purpose of the groove. It featured a narrow lip on the inside that enabled something to be fastened to the surface.

  While the shuttle’s fabbers printed the final pieces of their improvised pressure lock, Clath identified their second problem.

  ‘Comms inside is going to be tricky,’ she said. ‘These false-matter shells g
ive almost perfect rad-shielding. Even if we use the wavelengths this thing is transparent in, it’ll still cut our bandwidth down to almost nothing. We’re going to have to keep the door open and position some kind of line-of-sight relays.’

  ‘We can do that,’ said Ira. ‘We could stick microsats on tripods. The shuttle has some in the survey stores.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Clath. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ said Ira. ‘Let’s make this quick. We go in. We scan for advantage. We get out. Agreed?’

  Clath nodded.

  ‘Should I break out the simulants?’ he suggested. ‘Fancy taking a walk in a haunted house?’ He grinned at her to keep the mood light, even while little slivers of grim anticipation started sliding around in his gut.

  ‘Sounds awesome,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait.’

  8: COMPLICATION

  8.1: WILL

  Will glanced around at the glowing trees in alarm and tried to make out which direction the sirens were coming from. He couldn’t. Agents were closing in from everywhere. He checked his hands and was relieved to find them still transparent.

  He backed carefully away from the suntap housing, but before he could take a second step, a door opened in the air just a few metres away. Through it, Will could see a weirdly telescoping search corridor made of scaffolding and pistons, down which raced a squad of Balance’s minions.

  Will froze as they leapt into the clearing. They moved like lightning to secure the perimeter and stood like sentinels for a second, their porcelain faces blank. Then they started changing. Their bodies morphed, deforming into menacing multi-limbed monstrosities – Hindu demons wearing masks of his face. Their hands flexed in unison. They started closing in.

  Will regarded the ring of agents in astonished alarm and wondered why in hell’s name he’d been so stupid as to manhandle the suntap just like Moneko had told him not to. Thankfully the monsters didn’t seem able to see him. They began to sniff the air and lunge like dogs.

  Will’s surprise abated enough for him to remember his emergency exit trigger. He held his breath and started counting. The seconds crept by while the agents drew ever closer, pushing him back against the suntap housing. With just three seconds left, Will was forced to clamber inside the empty cavity to avoid their blind clutches.