by Alex Lamb
‘I guess this was a popular neighbourhood back then,’ Palla remarked.
That was one way of putting it. A million or so years ago, this part of space had evidently been crawling with Photes. The reason for the Depleted Zone was clearer than ever. Mark picked the closest moonlet big enough to hide behind and tethered their ship so that Rachel could restart her cutting.
‘It’s kind of fascinating,’ said Judj while the others got to work. ‘These worlds must all have been claimed during the same civilisation wave, but look at the differentiation in decay. Once a Phote world starts to melt, the change must be extremely rapid in evolutionary terms. Mark, how would you feel if we sent a probe in to sample their atmospheres? We might learn a lot about the decay pathways in Phote biology.’
‘So long as you don’t expect me to follow it, or rescue it, or care,’ said Mark, ‘you can do whatever the hell you like. If it gets back here before we finish repairs, it can come with us, but I’m not hanging around.’
He glanced anxiously at Ann, half-expecting her to demand that they let her fly a shuttle in so that she could stand heroically among the remains. Thankfully, the goddess looked more self-contained than usual. The sombre mood she’d fallen into after their debate still held. Mark cherished that quiet.
Sadly, peace lasted for less than two hours. Then company arrived. Mark stood in helm-space and clutched his head in despair while the system perimeter filled up with arrival bursts. The cutting was already behind schedule.
On the heels of the flashes came the inevitable message. This time, it wasn’t the usual slick advertisement. Instead, Nada Rien addressed them directly.
‘Captain Mark Ruiz of the GSS Edmond Dantes,’ she proclaimed. ‘I have come to save you and your crew. Prepare to receive love into your cold, black heart or face annihilation.’
Mark stared at Palla in disbelief.
‘I’m having a bad day,’ he said, his chest heaving. ‘I think this qualifies as a bad day, don’t you?’ He pinged Clath. ‘How far through are we?’ he said.
Rachel came on the channel instead. ‘Not far enough,’ she replied. ‘The molecular structure of the fused alloy is really weird, which isn’t helping. We’re thinking of just uncoupling the buttresses at their closest telescopic joins instead.’
‘Photes are zeroing in on our part of the debris ring. We probably have minutes to exit. Can you pull that off in time?’
‘Not a hope in hell, unless you want to do more damage to the ship’s internals. We’re talking about severing several hundred metres of fused metal here. We could blast the ark free, but then it’s bye-bye warp conduits. The follow-up repairs would take even longer.’
Mark shut his eyes and breathed deep. How was he supposed to finagle his way out of this one? Estimating from Nada’s insertion point and velocity record, his lead was twelve minutes at most.
In the background, Nada kept talking. ‘Do you even know why you’re running?’ she demanded. ‘You want to be safe – with us you would be safe. You want to be happy – we are always happy! That’s what is so pitiful about you humans. This paradox. This inability to see clearly. Every culture in history has lusted after some vision of heaven. Your kind always crave a faith to follow and the rewards of a loving god. You have squabbled and murdered over that idea since the dawn of history. Yet when the solution is right in front of you, you cannot accept it! Are you designed for misery? We are offering all the things you want! Peace. Order. Health. Uniform love. Effortless discipline. Unquestionable moral absolutes. Joining the Utopia is the only meaningful choice. Anything else makes a soiled lie of the human condition.’
‘Pack up your tools, Clath,’ Mark growled. ‘We’re leaving.’
He knew Nada was goading him but no longer cared. A lifetime of frustration boiled up inside.
‘Would you like to make a stand now?’ said Ann quietly. She sounded almost polite about it.
‘No!’ Mark yelled. ‘I would not like to make a stand. I have come here to do a job and I intend to do it, whether that halfwit automaton insists on creeping around after us or not. We are going to Snakepit!’
As soon as Clath gave him the green light, Mark fired the thrusters and dived the ship straight at the blue star. At the same time, he primed a relay drone, squeezed all his vitriol into a fresh submind copy and threw it back towards the incoming fleet. This time he let the drone decide when it was safe to broadcast.
‘I’m sorry, Nada, but I don’t think you got the memo,’ said the drone. ‘We already have peace, order, health and most of that other shit. And we did it by figuring it out for ourselves rather than having you fuckers force it on us.’
‘Sounds like your submind’s a fan of the New Society,’ said Palla, sliding him a wry glance.
Something of the miserable desperation Mark felt must have leaked out in his gaze because her smile faltered and she turned her attention back to the displays.
‘I’ve spent my whole life resisting people like you, Nada,’ his proxy growled. ‘People with cheap, shitty answers who imagine that heaven can come from the barrel of a gun or the flick of a switch. You know what I think? I think the whole idea of moral absolutes is sick. There is no true religion. The only reason to be alive is to figure things out for yourself. To answer your own damned questions rather than having someone else’s faith poured into your skull like boiling lead. Believing in that shit turns a person into a dead-eyed, bloodthirsty robot, just like you, Nada. Just like you.’
‘How are we bloodthirsty?’ said Nada. ‘We convert. It is humanity that murders whole worlds. You are the ones who insist on resisting the inevitable.’
Mark didn’t have to update his drone. It already knew what to say.
‘If your solution is so great and so inevitable, then why is space on this side of the Zone littered with the corpses of your kind? You should listen to yourself, Nada Rien. For someone who’s always happy, you don’t sound so hot.’
Mark used his scant lead to descend on the closest biosphere world. He armed his boser and fired a glancing sub-second blow through the world’s upper mantle. Such shots had long been determined to create the largest and most devastating seismic shock waves. He’d learned from last time that nothing stalled his enemies like seeing one of their precious biospheres harmed. This one would be recovering for a long time.
‘There,’ he said as he watched the planet’s atmosphere ripple sickly. He didn’t bother hiding the source of his broadcast this time. Given the light-lag involved, it’d reach the Photurians minutes later and by then he intended to be far away. ‘That’s a little human-style present for you,’ he said. ‘You can keep it.’
The first signs of major tectonic devastation were still revealing themselves. Later would come the mantle plumes and the darkness, the lakes of lava and the sterilising winter. The blast he’d delivered equated to about twenty simultaneous dinosaur-killer events. While involving far less mass than a bolide impact, a boser delivered its payload at appalling velocity. Boser discharge made rail-gun bullets look sluggish.
Mark didn’t stay to watch. He tore straight through the depths of the system and out of the other side, his ship still limping at a jaunty angle. Almost as an afterthought, he blasted some debris from the major ring into long elliptical orbits, guaranteeing the biosphere worlds a healthy supply of asteroid collisions for millennia to come.
He didn’t notice everyone in helm-space watching him silently until after they cleared the system’s edge. He saw surprise in their gazes, and unease. Only Ann wasn’t looking at him anxiously. Instead, her eyes held something like pitying camaraderie.
‘What?’ he said. ‘We needed a lead! We have a problem in the hold, remember? And frankly, that place wasn’t special! Dead Phote worlds are a dime a dozen around here, or hadn’t you noticed? What else was I supposed to do?’
‘Was it absolutely necessary to break out the weapons of mass destruction?’ said Rachel.
‘I don’t think you get it,’ said Mark. ‘Nob
ody was harmed.’
‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Did you actually check?’
Mark threw up his arms. ‘What would have been the point? Do you honestly imagine someone was down there? These worlds are graveyards, Rach. The smartest life that place hosted probably used its flagellum to wave hello.’
‘But why?’ she said quietly. ‘Those rocks you knocked on the way out at least gave them a problem to solve. What was blasting that planet going to do except make them hate you? You’re not who you used to be, Mark. You push, just like Will did. Did I lose you, too?’
She turned and tried to find an exit from helm-space. Unfortunately, no one had explained virt-porting to her yet, so Rachel wandered around on the far edge of the disc looking disgusted until Judj helped her leave. It was awful to watch.
‘I didn’t hurt anyone,’ Mark said forlornly after they left.
‘We know,’ said Palla. ‘It was just a bit surprising, that’s all. Everyone else feels your anger, Mark. We understand. Rachel missed the worst bits of history. But let’s focus on flying, shall we? I don’t think we’re getting rid of that ark any time soon, which means we need another solution.’
11.4: NADA
Nada was in the crew-bulb with the others when the humans fled again. She hung quietly, listening to her crew wail and watching their bodies flail on the ends of their umbilici. Somehow, she’d lost her capacity for horror back at the first homeworld they’d encountered. Now she felt only brooding dislocation.
The Yunus’s edits still dragged on her psyche. She craved an ending to the Abomination. But that ambition now pulled in opposition to a renewed yearning to connect with a functioning homeworld – one that would last. And somewhere, in the midst of that tension, her hunger to end the war had taken on a more introspective quality.
The Yunus had promised that when she succeeded there’d be no more human-farming, or false homes, or enforced individuality. The era of compromise would be at an end, he’d said. But what value did such words have if even the Yunus didn’t know how to secure lasting harmony?
Sickening though it was, the odious Ruiz had a point. The Yunus had christened him ‘Thief of Souls’ many years ago because of his habit of absconding with large numbers of hosts that would otherwise have been saved. For Nada, though, Ruiz had become the thief of certainty.
All that really mattered was whether Backspace contained some clue to what would arrest her own people’s rate of decay. If it did not, then nothing they found was relevant and neither were Ruiz’s repellent acts. In that case, the Thief of Souls was right. They were only visiting graveyards.
‘Why are the humans so terrible?’ cried Leng. He thrashed back and forth, tears wobbling free of his good eye with every jerk of his head. The maintenance louse rebuilding his face looked hard-pressed to stay attached.
Nada reached through the mind-temple and edited him into calm. His eye flicked open. His anguish fell away.
‘Report,’ she said wearily.
Leng took a moment to adapt. ‘We were fortunate,’ he said, recovering his breath.
He spoke so quietly that Nada struggled to hear over the noise of the others lamenting. She issued a broadcast wave of enforced peace. The shrieks and whimpers abruptly subsided.
‘Continue,’ said Nada. ‘Audibly this time.’
‘The humans targeted the world in a more advanced state of decay,’ he said. ‘This leaves us with another corrupted homeworld to examine, but one in superior condition.’
‘Are you recommending that we do so?’ she said, astonished at her own indifference.
Leng didn’t reply. Instead, his face broke slowly into a nauseated grin. His good eye slid from side to side.
‘Yes,’ said a voice from across the room.
Nada looked around, confused, and found Communications Officer Ekkert staring at her.
‘Yes. It is unfortunate, but delay and research are now necessary,’ said Ekkert. ‘The humans created an asteroidal threat to the remaining homeworld that will need to be resolved if the planet is to survive. This presents an opportunity for refuelling and communion.’
‘You are a subnode of Leng’s,’ said Nada. ‘Your opinion was not sought.’
‘A homeworld is at risk,’ he said. ‘Spiritual imperatives override hierarchy.’
Nada regarded him with curiosity. ‘Incorrect,’ she said. ‘An inoperative homeworld is at risk. Become submissive,’ she added, and made him so.
Ekkert folded inwards and grew quiet.
She returned her attention to Leng. ‘Report,’ she said.
At the same time, she examined his branch of the mind-temple. The Protocol there was emitting a surprising level of systemic dissonance. Instead of a single, harmonious song guiding his thoughts, there were conflicting strands of cognitive melody. It was undoubtedly the consequence of recent revelations. One dead homeworld was difficult enough to countenance. To find three of them? It unbalanced the mind.
‘Stabilise,’ she told him. ‘Become focused.’
‘I do not agree with Ekkert as I have acquired fresh information,’ said Leng. ‘I have determined the trajectory of the Dantes and extrapolated,’ he said. ‘They have found a lure star.’
Nada twitched in surprise. No wonder Leng was malfunctioning.
‘Prior to their departure from this system, I had inadequate evidence,’ he said, ‘but their haphazard course-correction after this exit removed my doubts. The implication is that the target of the human mission may not be in Backspace at all.’
‘Accepted,’ said Nada.
In fact, it was now very obvious that the converse was true. And only one target in Photurian space would be worth the risk: their own home where the vile Monet still squatted. Given Ruiz’s track record, his intent seemed clear. He meant to burn it. She shivered. It was an astonishing discovery.
‘The logical course of action at this point is to follow the humans discreetly rather than pursuing them for immediate conversion,’ Leng went on. ‘That way, the humans will guide us back through the Flaw. This will be far easier than having to navigate it for ourselves. Subsequent capture of the Dantes in Photurian space will be easy to achieve as reinforcements will be available. This will permit the destruction of the Abomination while retaining our capacity to report to the Yunus.’
‘We are Photurians!’ another voice proclaimed. This one came from Munitions Coordinator Nanimo, one of Zilch’s reports. ‘We do not hesitate to save others! To delay is tantamount to human-farming. This strategy is disgusting.’
Nada silenced her, too, while taking note of the disturbing change in the crew’s operating pattern. She moved her avatar-bead to Zilch’s mind and examined his thoughts. She found the dissonance pattern there, too.
She drifted over to where her tactician lay straight as a board, his forehead pressed into the wall-mucus. He still trembled, despite her directive.
‘I heard Leng’s assessment,’ said Zilch, his voice muffled by the wall. ‘I disagree.’
‘You are experiencing interior dissonance,’ said Nada. ‘Become calm. Resolve your subnodes.’
Zilch’s body sagged.
‘Continue,’ she told Leng. Meanwhile, worry at their collective instability churned inside her.
‘Extrapolation suggests that there are many homes in this region,’ he said. ‘A charted course from Photurian space to the new domain would enable a programme of organised exploration. In addition, the timeline for departure from Backspace and return is likely to be shorter than the orbital decay time of the debris in this system, which will be measured in centuries. Therefore the risk to this homeworld may be temporarily dismissed.’
‘A reasonable assessment,’ said Nada. ‘While abstaining from our goal entails further pain, tracking the Dantes quietly is the correct choice. It better fulfils the will of the Yunus.’
She glanced nervously at Ekkert, who had started squirming again.
‘Let us confer with Zilch,’ she proposed.
‘Why
?’ said Leng.
‘Something is wrong.’
‘Capture of the Dantes should not be delayed,’ Zilch told her. ‘We should save it now.’
Leng’s eye twitched. ‘This is an unsurprising remark given Zilch’s record. Our choice is to protect dead homes or act to protect our own world which currently hosts a hideous usurper who may yet poison it to make it like these others.’
‘State your reasoning,’ Nada told Zilch.
‘To defer destruction of the Abomination is unacceptable,’ he said. ‘It is unjoyous.’
‘That is not reasoning,’ said Nada. ‘You are still experiencing dissonance. Why have you not rectified this matter?’
‘I am not the source of the dissonance,’ said Zilch. ‘You are. Consider your temple-cavern.’
Nada levelled up to her own cognitive representation and was astonished to find that he was right. The origin of the competing mental themes was the Yunus-informed tension in her own psyche. Zilch’s avatar-bead already hung there. No wonder she was seeing a repeat pattern in both of her primary branches. The source of the problem was herself.
‘Since the departure of the Dantes from Galatea, we have done nothing but attempt to claim it,’ said Leng. ‘We have consistently failed and now we are weaker than ever. To repeat a failed pattern is folly.’
‘No!’ Zilch thundered. ‘Now we are stronger than ever! With fewer options comes greater clarity.’
‘Endless chasing is tantamount to idiocy,’ Leng insisted.
Zilch slapped him. Leng tumbled sideways into the wall, blood spilling from his mouth.
‘The Yunus’s vision must be maintained cleanly,’ said Zilch. ‘Deferring action only sullies the goal.’ He swivelled to face Nada. ‘In order to arrest dissonance in my branch, I must adjust your node.’
He shouldn’t have wanted to. His mental programming excluded such desires by default. That was how Photurians operated. Obedience was pleasure. Dissent was revolting. Recent events must have altered his interior balance.
‘That is not appropriate,’ she said as he started to tinker.
