Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  ‘She leaves just like that?’ said Mark. ‘The moment someone points out what a child she is?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mark,’ Ira snapped. ‘You can barely see straight past your own self-loathing and you’re having a go at her?’

  Mark blinked. An expression of startled disgust appeared on his features.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘I don’t loathe myself.’

  ‘Then don’t be in such a hurry to finish the mission,’ said Ira. ‘You’re still going to be you at the end of it!’

  Ira saw the giveaway panic indicators in Mark’s gaze and knew he’d done more harm than good again.

  ‘The only reason I’m in a hurry is because we need to get away from those Photes while we still have a glimmer of a chance!’ Mark shouted, pointing out to sea behind them with a trembling fingertip.

  ‘Sure,’ said Ira. ‘You’re right. Sorry.’ He sagged into the closest chair, utterly drained.

  This, apparently, was the price of his returning capacity to emote: the ability to screw up, just like he used to. He remembered why he’d spent all those years struggling to perfect his detachment.

  While Ira hung his head, a post-nuclear silence descended in the lounge. Mark stared at the ground for several long seconds before storming out into the synthetic night.

  11.3: MARK

  Mark pushed them hard into uncharted territory, racing through space as fast as the Dantes could manage. As he flew, he took solace in the fact that his ember-warp engines were far superior to those he’d seen the Photes using during their last confrontation. Unless they stopped to build a new carrier, they’d be stuck operating like scouts and nowhere near as fast as him. That knowledge calmed him enough that when Rachel came out of surgery, he took time off from the helm to have breakfast with her.

  Judj had reluctantly awarded her a clean bill of health the morning after they’d fled the gorilla-crab system. She had no hidden Phote clusters, apparently, and no foreign augs – just a bad case of cryo-burn that would need a few months’ recuperation. Mark wasn’t sure how to feel about that. No one on board was more paranoid than Judj so he should have been satisfied, but Mark’s concerns about how they’d found his half-mother refused to subside. He struggled to accept the fact that her escape from the Zone had been entirely natural, even faced with the medical evidence that appeared to prove it.

  They sat together on deck while Rachel peered at things: the sea, her hands, her plate. She said little and made eye contact even less. Inhabiting a virtual world was new for her, he reminded himself. It’d take her a while to get used to synthetic reality. But regardless of the cause, the warmth Mark had hoped for wasn’t happening, so he found himself filling the silence with talk of his life and achievements. He told Rachel about his marriage and the little world he’d built on the Gulliver. He spoke at length about the ways he thought he’d changed over the years and hoped that at least some of it might yield a sense of connection.

  When at last she did ask a question, it wasn’t one he’d expected.

  ‘So now lots of people have these shadows?’

  ‘In the Fleet, yes,’ said Mark. ‘About eighty per cent of operational officers. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that you’re not alone any more, are you?’ she said, peering at him. ‘You don’t have to build a world on your own. So why spend all your time off alone with your wife? Why not … I don’t know … integrate?’

  ‘Having a shadow isn’t the same as being a roboteer, Rach,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But still – you have all this.’ She waved an uncertain arm at the sea. ‘You can do a kind of memory sharing, as I discovered this morning. You can control machines. You’re accepted – a hero, even. So why stay away? Isn’t this whole New Society thing heaven for you? I mean, all your leaders are effectively roboteers, and your scientists.’

  Mark laughed bitterly. ‘Unfortunately, our leaders are smug conformists who don’t hesitate for an instant before putting a price on a life.’

  ‘What about Palla?’ said Rachel, looking confused. ‘She seems nice. She doesn’t strike me as a conformist. She’s kind of plucky.’

  ‘Plucky,’ said Mark.

  ‘Yes. Also flexible and considerate.’

  Mark’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Considerate? Are we talking about the same woman who insulted you for giving me my mods within ten minutes of meeting you?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve often wondered about that. Maybe I deserve the criticism.’

  He shook his head. ‘Rach,’ he said, exasperated, ‘you haven’t seen what they’re like. They’ve taken human society and turned it into this weird lockstep game. There’s no privacy any more. There’s no freedom. Everyone gets orders. Everyone has to play.’

  ‘Except you, apparently.’

  ‘Because I defend my right to be a free operator!’

  Rachel squinted at the horizon and said nothing.

  ‘You’ve gone quiet,’ said Mark.

  She nodded. ‘I have a lot to take in. So much has changed and I’ve barely gone through the history updates Judj gave me. All those years.’ She shook her head. ‘It’ll be a while before I open up, I’m afraid.’ She glanced at him quickly with eyes full of pain. ‘I still feel like I’ve woken up in a nightmare.’

  Mark’s defensiveness crumpled under a snowfall of guilt. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. I’d rather this than the alternative.’

  ‘I hope it’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to make things right.’

  She pulled a sour face. ‘Is mind-raping your enemy normal now?’

  ‘No,’ said Mark.

  ‘That’s what she did, isn’t it? How about trashing biospheres? Do we do that a lot?’

  Mark folded his arms, his face reddening. ‘We don’t normally do that, either. But please note that there’s a big difference between a Phote world and a real one.’

  ‘I see. You know, back when I went into cryo, biospheres were treated like miracles. We made them into nature reserves.’

  ‘The planet we blasted was host to nothing but pond scum,’ Mark insisted. ‘No inhabitants. No victims. Nothing but the leftovers of interspecies genocide. Frankly, we did it a favour. Now at least the Photes won’t try repopulating it with their poison any time soon. It stands a chance of evolving on its own.’

  She shot him a look heavy with veiled disappointment. His insides wound tight. He opened his mouth to say something profound when a loud bang echoed through the virt. The sea froze in towering spikes. Rachel’s breakfast crawled in front of her like a bowl full of beetles. The sky blackened.

  The next thing Mark knew, they’d been dumped back into the starry void of helm-space where engine alerts crowded around, blinking and blaring. Their warp-envelope had died, leaving their entangler field in an almighty mess.

  ‘What happened?’ said Rachel.

  ‘Engines are offline,’ he told her, scanning the blizzard of data. ‘Still figuring out why.’

  Clath appeared beside him. ‘On it,’ she said.

  The others popped into the helm-arena in rapid succession.

  Clath shook her head as diagnostic icons splayed open around her. ‘This doesn’t make any sense. The field just collapsed. There was no warning.’

  ‘Is it disrupters?’ said Ann, striding up to join them. ‘Any sign of a trap?’

  ‘No,’ said Clath. ‘Space is clean. We’re nowhere near anything.’

  ‘It’s the ark,’ said Ira. ‘Take a look at this.’

  He threw them a cluster of icons that Mark had missed in his hurry to understand. They were full of low-level warnings from the mining hold where the alien ship lay clamped in place. Something odd had happened down there. The ship had changed, and so had the buttresses holding it.

  Clath blinked twice at the readings. ‘How it that possible?’ she said. ‘That ship was dead. There were no emissions.’

  ‘How is what possible?’ said Mark.

&nb
sp; ‘Hold on,’ said Clath. ‘Going immersive to check.’

  She disappeared and reappeared a few seconds later looking nervous.

  ‘Okay, here’s how it is. We have major damage to the mining buttresses. And maybe damage to the alien ark. Somehow it moved.’

  ‘It was pinned in place!’ said Mark.

  ‘I know. And now it’s fused into the grappling structure.’

  Clath threw them some view windows. All the buttresses on one side looked as if they’d melted from the top like candles and flowed around the ark. It wasn’t the kind of behaviour you expected to see from armoured, heat-shielded gantries half a kilometre long. The alien ship now resembled a ball of polished rock, coated from end to end with the fused, homogenised remnants of the grapples that had once held it.

  Mark regarded the image in stunned disbelief.

  ‘Well, we’d better cut it out of there, hadn’t we?’ he said. ‘Let’s space that ugly fucking ball before it kills us.’

  Clath’s features squirmed as she got used to the idea of throwing away a major scientific find.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Survival first.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ said Ann. ‘It’s possible this act was deliberate. If so, we should be ready to respond.’

  Mark winced. Great, a pitched battle inside his own hull.

  ‘How long will you need?’ he said.

  Clath frowned at the damage reports. ‘Given that level of carnage, about five hours.’

  Mark shook his head. ‘We don’t have that kind of a lead. Can you do it under warp?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied uncomfortably. ‘Not easily, though. If that thing reacts again, we might lose our cutting robots. I recommend that we at least swap to trad-warp till we can get the ark out.’

  Mark moaned inwardly as he pictured the distance between them and the Phote armada shrinking.

  ‘Won’t that put more gravity load on the mining gear?’ he said.

  Clath nodded. ‘Undoubtedly, but if I had to guess what caused this, I’d say it was some kind of warp-feedback. We took an object made out of ember-warp states and shoved it inside our transport field. That’s probably the gravitational equivalent of putting a bunch of metal in a microwave oven – on reflection, not a great idea. If we go trad, it will at least minimise the chance of exotic interactions between the two fields.’

  Mark felt grateful that she wasn’t pointing out how reckless he’d been when he’d absconded with the vessel in the first place. She didn’t need to. He was already regretting it. And if he hadn’t been in such a hurry to put distance between them and the enemy, they’d have dumped it already, Clath’s complaints notwithstanding.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s better than nothing.’

  Clath performed a quick stress-modelling of the mess in the mining bay and passed him the results. With great trepidation, he restarted the drive, keeping their burst rate low. If she’d measured the expected forces incorrectly, the alien ship would shear off the damaged buttresses and slam into the wall of the mining bay, possibly ploughing through some of the antimatter conduits beyond. If that happened, they wouldn’t have long to contemplate failure.

  With the first thuds of warp, the mining gear strained, flooding the helm with fresh warnings, but the structure held. Mark slowly ramped their burst rate, watching the readouts from the bay the entire time. He gave thanks that his electronic eyes didn’t need to blink.

  When they reached about a quarter of a gee of pseudo-gravity, Clath told him to stop.

  ‘I wouldn’t take it higher if I were you. Not until we’re done cutting.’

  They were barely going fifty lights.

  ‘Christ,’ said Mark. ‘Let’s hope this is enough.’

  ‘Okay, here’s how we do it,’ said Palla. ‘We’re forming two teams. Mark and I will manage flight. Clath, Ira, Ann, Judj – you guys solve the ark problem. Clath takes the lead because this is an engineering issue.’

  ‘What about me?’ said Rachel.

  Palla regarded her blankly. ‘Right now, Captain Bock, you’re a passenger. What would you like to do?’

  ‘Help, of course,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m a Fleet engineer. My tech is out of date, but I doubt buttress designs have changed that much.’

  ‘Fair point,’ said Palla. ‘However, please note that your physical body is still stored in our quarantine core and we can’t move it under warp, which means there’s only so much you can do. You don’t have access to the ship’s primary systems.’

  ‘Can I still pilot robots?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then I can help.’

  Palla smiled. ‘Okay, ask Clath what she needs. I’m activating a dedicated workspace for you all now.’

  The others vanished. Mark turned his attention back to the Dantes and flew on tenterhooks while Palla kept an eye on the mining-bay readouts.

  ‘Do you think Ann is stable?’ she asked as she reorganised her displays. ‘Can we rely on her to help? She barely been out of her room since our fight yet she’s behaving as if nothing happened. I don’t buy it.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Mark. ‘She likes this kind of shit. Immediate threats are her thing.’

  ‘And how about you?’ said Palla gently. ‘You doing okay?’

  Mark frowned as he worked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you’ve been wound up tight since we got out of that system.’

  ‘We’re being chased,’ Mark said tersely. ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘Not sure,’ she said. ‘But frankly, I’ve been worried about you ever since Ira made that self-loathing remark.’

  Mark’s shoulders hunched. ‘Palla, please. I’m not in need of a New Society therapy session right now. I don’t loathe myself or anyone else.’

  She paused before replying. ‘Could have fooled me,’ she said quietly.

  Mark pretended he hadn’t heard.

  Just a few hours later, it happened again. The warp field slammed flat and alerts burst back into cacophony. Mark opened a channel to Clath’s workspace.

  ‘How bad?’ he said.

  ‘Much less severe,’ she said. ‘It zeroed our work but we only lost six cutters. Rachel was very careful. And now we know how it happens. The ark goes into a kind of quantum spasm. Anything in contact with the outer shell flows around it like a superfluid. And it’s fast. The whole thing happens in milliseconds. I’m sorry,’ she said heavily. ‘If I’d been thinking straight I might have predicted something like this. That shell is made of a warp-matter mix. When we dump spatial distortion onto it, it probably accumulates until there are tiny vacuum-quakes. When that happens, anything in contact is channelled across the surface just like space–time under ember-warp. The resultant shock wave nukes the local flow.’

  ‘So what’s the solution?’ said Mark.

  ‘We have to drop warp completely to cut it out,’ said Clath. ‘Rachel agrees. Otherwise that thing stays with us, which would be bad because it keeps shifting towards the ship’s centre where the distortion landscape peaks. That means it’ll eventually liquidise the habitat core with us in it. We need somewhere to stop and make proper repairs.’

  Mark rubbed his eyes. ‘Great.’

  ‘Okay, how about this?’ said Palla, throwing him a navigational display. ‘It’s a Class-A star less than a light-year from here – a huge system and relatively young. There should be plenty of debris to hide in.’

  ‘Sounds super,’ Mark growled. ‘I love a good Class A. So blue and shiny. Why the fuck not?’

  He laid in a course and restarted the engines, ramping warp gently even though he had no idea whether it was helping.

  Hobbling to their new destination burned another twenty hours. Mark pumped his body full of fatigue suppressors and refused to take a moment off watch. By then, thankfully, he’d figured out a way to fly that minimised the effect of the vacuum-quakes. He piloted the ship at an angle so that the gravitational drag on the alien ark compensated for the yanking effect it caused every time
it shifted. On a spherical ship, that would have been easy. But the Dantes had giant sub-light thrusters to drag around, so maintaining a stable warp-envelope required constant rebalancing. He couldn’t wait to get the damned ark off his ship.

  He alerted the others as the Dantes staggered into range of the new star and dropped to sub-light.

  ‘Target ahead,’ he told them, exhausted. ‘Get ready for insertion manoeuvres. Let’s fix this quickly.’

  ‘Scanning the neighbourhood,’ said Palla. ‘I’ll find you a hiding place in no time.’ But instead of coming back with a vector for him, her shoulders sagged. ‘Actually, scratch that,’ she said. ‘We’d better get Judj in here.’

  Mark could have wept. ‘What is it now?’

  She tossed him some diagnostics to look at. The system had plenty of debris, as promised – almost all of it clustered in a single outer belt that was also dotted with false-matter miracles of gorilla-crab construction. Further in, the star’s broad Goldilocks zone had been scoured perfectly clean of troublesome rocks. Two biosphere worlds swung there in tidy circular orbits – both were Photurian.

  ‘You’re fucking kidding,’ said Mark. ‘More of them? Here? This isn’t even a nice star.’

  He couldn’t believe it. He felt his hopes for the mission unravelling, thread by thread. With a sick feeling in his throat, he refocused the telescopes for threat assessment and was relieved to discover that both planets were inert. One world showed holes in its tunnel-matrix so big that a third of the planet looked almost normal. The other was in better shape than the first one they’d found, though still bearing the hallmarks of decay.

  ‘All this around a Class A?’ said Judj as he rejoined them. ‘That’s just wrong. It’s a miracle those planets were even cool enough for the Photes to use.’