by Alex Lamb
He sat blinking in his couch, staring at Palla.
‘What happened?’ he said.
‘No idea,’ she started. ‘I—’
Their engines died. Warnings rippled through his sensorium about edits to their ship’s database. Mark leapt back into the ship’s virt to find flight records and weapon controls evaporating by the hundred.
‘We’re losing helm control!’ said Clath.
The only thing they weren’t losing was sensors. In their main display, Will’s ship started moving on its own again. Mark messaged him.
‘Will? Is that you?’
There was no reply. Instead, Will’s ship whisked effortlessly across the system to stop next to Ira and Ann’s. Then it extruded a peculiar-looking ember-warp field around the two ships, like a wobbling bubble of oil and milk.
The situation had escalated far enough beyond the normal that Mark could only think of a single culprit: the Transcended. Was this the punchline of their incomprehensible agenda finally revealed? He forced every submind he had to seek out remaining power-pathways in the ship before they all disappeared. They slipped through his grasp like digital soap.
‘Will, we’re having trouble,’ said Mark. ‘The ship is not responding. Is this a Transcended attack? Are you okay? Will, please respond.’
Will responded. He appeared in helm-space, wreathed in smiles. Rachel stood beside him, and near them, Ann and Ira, looking more than a little surprised.
‘Hi, Mark,’ said Will. He nodded to Clath and Palla. ‘We’re fine. And no, this isn’t a trick. You won. But the struggle has to continue, I’m afraid. Some of the Phote worlds are already rebuilding and I’m not going to be able to help you with them. Neither are my clones, or Ann and Ira. You won’t be hearing from any of us again, which is a shame. I think you’d have got a kick out of Moneko.’
‘Wait, what?’ said Mark. He checked the sensors again. The Willworld Navy were heading for exit vectors, departing as unexpectedly as they’d arrived.
‘Why are you doing this?’ said Mark. ‘What’s going on?’
‘What’s going on is that we’re leaving,’ said Will. ‘The Transcended and I have come to an arrangement that allows the human race to thrive. There’ll be no more Snakepit, and no more Nada to worry about. No more risk from suntap novas, either. I am leaving you with a lingering Phote problem but I feel certain you know how to handle them now. The secret isn’t some kind of gun, or bomb, or a special drive. It’s just courage.’ He winked at Palla, who blushed.
‘Why do you have to go?’ Mark demanded. ‘What did they force you to do?’
Will laughed at that. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We cut a deal, that’s all. They’re not benevolent gods, but they’re not evil, either.’
‘What are they, then?’ Clath urged.
Will’s only response to that was a smile. ‘As for where I’m going? Just away. I’ve spent too long on the human stage. The race needs a chance to learn to operate without my shadow hanging over them. You too, Mark.’
‘No,’ said Mark as it dawned on him that Will really wasn’t coming back. ‘I barely got to know you.’
‘And for that, I’m truly sorry,’ said Will. ‘Oh, and be careful. A lot of the new technology you’re using is going to shut itself down. That ship you’re in will take you as far as Galatea but no further. You don’t get to keep it, unfortunately.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Okay, time to go, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to Ira and Ann.
‘Um,’ said Ira, looking pained. ‘I’m going to miss all three of you. And Judj, too.’
Clath grabbed her hair. ‘I don’t believe this.’
Ann just stared. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, and squeezed more fragile emotion into that word than Mark would have believed she could muster.
‘Thank you for coming for us, Mark,’ said Rachel, beaming. ‘We love you, and we’re very proud of you. That will never change.’
‘Don’t,’ said Mark. His eyes filled with tears. ‘Why are you doing this? Don’t leave.’
‘You did great,’ said Will. ‘You are great. Just keep at it and you can’t go wrong.’
They waved at him, smiling as if he were getting on the transit to go to college. Then they popped like daydreams, leaving only quiet behind.
‘No,’ said Mark again, unable to believe that after everything, the end had been so sudden. After he’d lost hope and gone to all the trouble of regaining it.
Through the helm’s main display, he watched Will’s ship and Ann’s begin to travel out of the system fast and in an impossible direction – directly towards the galactic core. Mark watched them recede until only a pinpoint of light was left, and then it was gone. Palla held him while he wept.
24: REBIRTH
24.1: MARK
After Will left, the ship’s engines turned back on. Mark had no control and could only watch passively as the Dantes Two carried them in-system to high orbit around Galatea. As they flew, Mark found the startled sadness in him being overlaid by a new emotion – panic. He’d been away from Zoe for too long. Was she even alive? He had no idea. With that feeling came a weight of guilt that his mind had been so full of problems to solve that he’d hardly spared a thought for his wife for days.
A docking pod opened. Clath regarded it with dismay.
‘I guess this is where the pumpkin coach drops us off,’ she said.
‘Looks like it,’ Palla agreed.
Of the three of them, only Mark was keen to climb inside.
The D-Two’s miraculous false-matter shuttle took them down through Galatea’s endless swirling storms to a location on the surface that it chose for itself. No explanation for the landing site was provided – the shuttle remained stoically silent to their every request.
In the end, it landed vertically, with featherlight precision, on a flat-topped basalt outcrop no different from any of the others they’d skimmed over. A gloomy landscape of blackened, half-glassed desert swept away in every direction. Umber clouds galloped past overhead.
‘What now?’ said Clath, peering out at the miserable scene.
A minute and a half later, a drilling machine broke the surface half a kilometre away and promptly signalled them.
‘Friendly shuttle, your message was received. Everyone is cheering down here, I can tell you. And to answer your question, no, the losses haven’t been that bad, considering. We were getting worried, though.’
‘Did Will set this up?’ said Palla.
‘We have to assume so,’ said Mark. ‘He does that kind of shit.’
He shook his head. The lingering, controlling touch of his half-father’s influence apparently persisted even after he’d left human space. Somehow, Mark knew he’d grow to miss it.
A port opened in the side of the drilling machine, disgorging an armoured rover that set off through the endless dust storm in their direction. Mark watched it approach with his heart in his throat.
Palla reached around in her seat to grip his hand.
‘She’ll be fine,’ she said.
The rover bounced up to the side of their shuttle and extended a docking arm. This time, when the airlock opened, Mark was last to leave. He sat in his couch with his insides churning, suddenly terrified of the reality that lay beyond the door.
‘Are you coming?’ said Palla.
With a heavy intake of breath, Mark rose, made his way to the exit tube and climbed through.
Zoe was waiting for him on the other side, dressed in a green environment-suit liner, her hair a mess. She was thinner than when he’d left her, but Mark had never seen a more beautiful sight in his life.
He seized her in his arms and held her and breathed in the smell of her dusty hair while his heart threatened to burst with the swirl of emotions it was trying to contain. And then he kissed her, and lost himself in it.
‘I’m never leaving you again,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she said, beaming with happiness, and kissed him again.
24.2: IRA
Ira sat on his p
atio with a mug of coffee in his hand and took in the sprawling sight of his farm. He still didn’t quite believe it. Him, the great Ira Baron, space hero, ex-admiral and Suicide War burnout, now lived in a rural idyll. It looked ridiculous to him – like something out of a history book.
There were two cottages, both covered in grape ivy – one for him and Ann, the other for Will and Rachel. In the fields, orange vines grew above ground on long trellises, and prote that grew in beans rather than a vat. They even had goats that gave them milk and eggs.
The houses had solar-tiled roofs and bioluminescent lamps growing from the walls. They came stocked with cups and plates and sheets woven out of something like spider-silk. And everything had been ready for them when they got there, with no sign of who’d constructed it, or when. Which was, he thought, just a little creepy. But he could handle creepy.
At the edge of the fields, the alien forest began – a thirty-metre-tall mix of gloomy purples and greens, heavy with shadows. Weird screeching sounds and ghostly lights emanated from the vegetation at night. Ira wasn’t sure he liked having it there. The weather, on the other hand, was perfect.
They never got allergy attacks or local infections, which should have been impossible in an alien biosphere. Ann claimed that something had been done to their cells when they’d arrived, in the same wave of mild infection that had stripped her of all her powers. Ira had initially wondered if that meant they could never leave, but soon realised he had no such intentions.
In short, their new home was somewhere between ideal and gently unsettling. Their biggest problem, though, wasn’t anything to do with the setting. It was getting used to the profound lack of crisis. Sometimes, he noticed Will waving his hands in front of his face, testing for virt-lag to reassure himself that the place was actually real. Ira wasn’t sure it mattered. He suspected that some day, the human race would find them. But until then, things were going to be very, very quiet, and he’d just have to get used to it.
As he sipped, he caught sight of Ann in the distance, marching out of the forest she loved so much with something lizard-like and dead strung on her spear. Dinner, no doubt, not that they needed surplus. He smiled, enjoying the sight of her lithe body. She looked much better to him with her original height and features.
Ann strode straight to the farm, ignoring the friendly hail from Rachel across the way. He experienced a flicker of concern. That wasn’t like her. Furthermore, the expression on Ann’s face was one of deadly earnest. What had happened in there? What had she seen?
He stood as she approached. Her gaze was intense as she tossed down her kill, dropped heavily into the chair opposite and took a heavy swig of his coffee.
‘What?’ said Ira. ‘What happened?’
‘I’m going to have to stop hunting,’ Ann said grimly.
‘Why?’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she replied.
Ira’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Okay!’ he said, finding his chair. He searched her face for clues as to the right thing to ask next. For once, he had absolutely no idea.
‘I want to keep it,’ she said, ‘but I’ll make a terrible mother. You have to help.’ There was a hint of menace in her tone.
Ira laughed out loud. ‘Okay, then. That’s a decision. It looks like we’re going to build a little colony here.’
Maybe it wouldn’t be quite so quiet after all. Ann slowly broke into smiles.
24.3: WILL
Will used what little was left of his roboteering talent to instruct the farm’s lizard-monkeys to plant a new crop of prote-beans. He wasn’t sure if they were actually animals. Their thoughts were a little too crisp and predictable. But in any case, he was glad they’d left him something to play with. Will had been born a roboteer. Without a sensorium and something to do with it, he’d have gone crazy already.
It was just one of the ways in which their tiny utopia was underpinned by an apparently unending supply of happy accidents. But that was how his benefactors had always operated. And this was, after all, his payoff, even though he suspected it’d never sit easily with him.
He frowned as he thought through the news that Ira had brought that morning. Was Ann right to have a child in this place? She wasn’t likely to give a fig what he thought one way or another, so maybe he shouldn’t even care. But still, it bothered him.
He wondered, not for the first time, if he’d made the right choice to go for this chocolate-box retirement. It wasn’t really him. It was so peaceful and gentle, even if the forest kept him up at night. He still remembered enough to know that for a while, he’d been very much more than a man. Maybe he should have pushed for something better. He still missed his annoying half-son, and Moneko, and all the other characters from his old lives.
Rachel came out of the cottage carrying two glasses of juice. She saw his expression.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said as she pressed a drink into his hand.
Will shook his head. ‘Ira and Ann are all excited, but what kind of life will their child have?’ he said. ‘What are they going to do when we finally drop dead?’
She eyed him with dry amusement.
‘First,’ she said, ‘it’s not clear that we will. We don’t have the first notion of how ageing works in this place, so it’s possible they’ll have more of our company than they want. And secondly, who knows what kind of life they’ll have? The main problem that Ann’s kid will face is having no peers of the same age. That’ll be very isolating.’ She gave him a serious look. ‘What are you prepared to do to resolve that crisis? Somebody’s future needs saving, Will. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be good at?’
He blinked at her in surprise. Rachel smiled at him slyly, grabbed his shirt and pulled him gently back towards the house.
No, he thought. He’d been right to take this option. This was what he’d never got to have – this simple happiness. Responsibility for nobody except those he loved. He had a lot of catching up to do.
He stalled under the grape ivy, tugged her close and kissed her, while his forgotten orange juice spilled slowly into the warm, alien soil.
24.4: MARK
After his multi-day debrief, they brought Mark and Zoe to a spartan meeting room in the side of the Sharptown Subterra Complex to discuss next steps. Windows looked out over the main cavern where repairs were under way. Robots climbed the walls filling cracks while others sprayed the air or relaid turf on the playing grounds. Dust tinted the light beyond the diamond panes a grimy yellow that reminded Mark a little too much of New Panama.
From Zoe, he’d learned that life over the last few months had been brutal for Galatea. Most of their settlements had endured multiple seismic attacks. Their survival had hinged on that most refined of local talents – the ability to weather environmental catastrophe. Even so, everything had gone down to the wire – food, air, biocontainment. Mark and his friends had arrived just in time.
He grinned as he caught sight of Palla arriving and strode up to hug her. It was the first time he’d set eyes on her since they’d landed.
Zoe followed suit. ‘You’re Palla Muri,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for looking after my husband. It’s great to meet you properly at last.’
Palla shrugged. ‘Don’t mention it. It was fun,’ she said. ‘In a cheating-death-all-day kind of way.’
‘He’s good at that,’ said Zoe, nudging his ribs. ‘It’s one of the reasons I keep him around.’
When Mark had first explained to Zoe about kissing Palla, she’d laughed at him.
‘You have two chaste snogs with a college kid to save each other’s lives and you thought I might be worried?’ she’d said. She squeezed his face. ‘I love how earnest you are. So bloody earnest! Did aliens force you to hold hands as well?’
Mark had eventually laughed, too.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked Palla.
‘Okay,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Still not believing it’s over.’
His expression faltered. He understood what she meant.
&nbs
p; ‘Spending a lot of time with Clath,’ she added. ‘She’s still getting over Judj. Did you hear? She’s scored a new position heading up a vacuum-state research team.’
‘I suspect that’ll go well,’ said Mark.
Palla smirked. ‘You think? My guess is she’ll have nailed warpium inside of six months, even without a Subtle database to help. I’m expecting miracles. Literally.’
‘Could everyone take a seat please,’ said a young man, standing by the table. He had a teenager’s flawless cheeks and flat, blue eyes. ‘Unfortunately, time is short, as usual.’ He introduced himself as the others settled. ‘I’m Autograd Zip Cogen. Thank you all for coming.’
Besides Mark, Zoe and Palla, there were half a dozen other Fleet-types Mark didn’t recognise.
‘We’re here to make a formal offer to Captain Mark Ruiz and Professor Zoe Tamar,’ said Zip, ‘and to talk over the details of that arrangement. As many of you are aware, both the Gulliver and the Kraken were destroyed during the recent siege, along with ninety per cent of our operating Fleet strength.’
Mark had already heard this from Zoe. He’d lost his pocket kingdom. It upset him less than he’d expected. The only home that mattered was his wife.
‘However, during the high-speed rebuild that’s currently under way, we’re prepared to offer new ships of equivalent class, and to reinstate you both under your original contracts as independent operators.’
Mark smiled. It was a great offer and he wanted to take it, but it wouldn’t do to let the Academy off the hook so easily.
‘That depends,’ he said. ‘What strategy are you planning now? What mission do you want us for? And what will Palla be doing?’
Zip shot Palla a quick glance. ‘In the light of your recommendations, Captain Ruiz, the Academy unanimously voted to place Autograd Muri in charge of a dedicated strike force, with full responsibility for selecting her own missions. She’ll be leading the charge against the Photes. We know that the remaining enemy will be regrouping fast and decisive strikes will be vital.’
