by Alex Lamb
‘Did they say anything about how long we have to pass this test?’ asked Ira.
‘Not that I recall, sir.’
Ira grunted. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter a great deal anyway. There’s nothing we can do till we’ve found fuel.’
‘Captain,’ said Rachel, ‘if you don’t need Will, I could use his help trying to set up a temporary buffer configuration.’
‘Fine,’ said Ira.
‘I’m on it,’ said Will, with more than a little relief. Work brought an excuse to escape from the cabin. He gratefully slid his consciousness into the relative sanctuary of the Ariel’s metaphor space.
Rachel’s avatar met him in the Cold War Era situation room Will had made for the buffer maintenance node. The big display board showed buffer panels instead of continents. Three of them were shining bright red and several more were yellow, which meant they were already taking rads. They’d all need days in the scrubbing tanks if they ever got home.
‘I guess we could take some of the intact secondaries and rig them over the damage to the primary sphere,’ he suggested. ‘It won’t work for ever, but it might get us to the next system.’
‘Will, forget all that for a minute,’ said Rachel. ‘Are you all right?’
Will glanced at her avatar. Her eyes were full of urgent appeal. He looked away again, into the glaring board. He’d prefer not to talk about it. But of all the people on the ship, Rachel was the only one whose company he wanted right now, and she deserved an answer.
‘Will?’ she asked again.
‘I’m fine,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’m sharing my brain with aliens, but other than that I’m fine, really. The hardest part of it is how everyone’s looking at me. But I can’t say I blame them.’
‘Ignore them,’ she said quickly. ‘Really. John always laughs at anything that scares him, and Hugo’s a genetically overcooked dork.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine what it must have been like, having your senses stripped away like that.’
Will shrugged. ‘I could deal with that. What worried me was being singled out from the whole human race for a job I can’t do. I’m no saviour, Rachel. I’m just a roboteer.’
‘Bullshit,’ she replied. ‘You were never just a roboteer. There’s not many people who could have gone through what you faced and come out sane.’
Will doubted that, though her compliment warmed him. He was sure Hugo would have been thrilled by the experience. He’d have come out with a lifetime supply of scientific discoveries, though he might have neglected to listen to the warnings.
‘You’re not alone, you know,’ said Rachel. ‘I want to help if I can.’
Will smiled. ‘Thanks.’
‘Do you think …’ She stopped.
‘What?’
‘Do you think they’ve left you alone now? Your mind, I mean?’
This was the one question Will had no desire to face. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. He buried his virtual head in his hands.
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever know again.’
The thought nearly made him laugh. It was so vast and frightening that he couldn’t take it seriously. He’d assumed the aliens had finished with him when he woke up back in the tank. Then the location of the uncharted star had appeared in his head. Now he felt certain they hadn’t.
‘Jeez!’ she said. ‘What a mind-fuck.’ She giggled nervously, as if realising just how apropos her words were.
‘There’s nothing you or I can do about it,’ Will told her bluntly. ‘Right now we wouldn’t have anywhere to go if it wasn’t for the Transcended, so why look a gift horse in the mouth while there are buffers to repair?’
She smiled at him with something like admiration. ‘Okay.’
She appeared to think he was being stoic, when he was just desperate for the sanctuary of denial.
‘I wish I was in there with you,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘In your virtual space, I mean. Or anywhere other than this damned cabin.’
A pang of desire struck at the centre of Will’s chest. He stared dumbly at her blind avatar. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
‘Sorry,’ she said at last. ‘Buffers.’
Will turned gratefully away towards the desk. His eyes skittered distractedly across it, looking for the icons that represented his buffer maintenance SAPs. It took him a minute to realised they weren’t there.
‘Where’d my robots go?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I had to take them offline,’ she said. ‘They started malfunctioning during the alien soft assault and I haven’t been able to fix them yet.’
‘Why don’t I take a look?’ he said.
Rachel unlocked the SAP programs and Will tried them on, one at a time. He could detect no difference in them.
‘They feel perfectly fine to me.’
Rachel frowned. ‘How come?’ She ran through her diagnostics. ‘Amazing. I checked them not half an hour before you woke and their awareness cycles were all over the place.’
Will ached inside as he recognised an expression of fading trust on her face.
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about that,’ he told her stiffly. ‘They’re working now, and that’s what matters.’
Without waiting for her to comment further, he hurled himself into the mind of a buffer-jack and started work.
Will worked on repairs for the next two days as the Ariel pushed deeper into unknown space. Amy checked his body for infections from time to time and reported him miraculously cured. The others regarded him warily. They all had plenty of questions about his experiences, particularly Hugo. Unfortunately, Will didn’t have any more answers. He found that the tank-time Ira had made him endure on the trip out was fast becoming a habit of his own. It was a refuge from the crew’s attention.
Though he hid from them, Will hated the gulf that appeared to have opened afresh between him and his shipmates. Far from proving himself a part of the team, he felt as if he’d become a liability. In his spare time he ran diagnostic programs on himself in the vain hope of ferreting out more alien memories. He reasoned that if he could determine the origin of the foreign thoughts, he could purge them somehow and pronounce himself cured. But his programs revealed nothing. According to his memory logs, he’d known about the star ahead of them since childhood.
Then, as their fuel supplies dipped miserably into the red, their destination presented itself. It was a K-class star, a little elderly but still on its main sequence. Will found it ironic that, in simple physical terms, although they were just a few light-years from Zuni, the location couldn’t have felt more remote.
Ira dropped warp outside the system and craned his head out of his bunk to speak with Will.
‘Will,’ he said sternly. ‘I need to know. Should we be coming in on stealth?’
Will shook his head. ‘I don’t think there’s any need.’ He wished he knew why. It was hard to advise your captain with only a hunch to go on. ‘I’d come in slow, though,’ he added randomly.
Ira nodded. ‘Slow it is.’
They cruised gently into the system. They’d barely gone further than the Oort cloud before Amy spoke up in a tense voice.
‘Ira, I’m getting readings. Massive ones. And they’re definitely artificial, not planetesimals.’
‘Any signs of an intercept course?’ said Ira.
‘No. They appear to be in stable orbits – maybe habitats of some kind.’
‘Keep your eyes open,’ said the captain. ‘John, I want you ready with torpedoes and countermeasures, just in case.’
Will had an urge to tell them that defences wouldn’t be necessary, but chose not to open his mouth. He had nothing to base his opinions on other than a guess with suspicious origins.
They decelerated in-system and took up an orbit around the star. Ira cut the gravity drive so they could have a proper look around.
‘Give me close-ups of those ships,’ he said.
‘Scanning now,’ Amy reported.
Immers
ed in the Ariel’s astrogation node, Will was treated to the best possible view. It took his breath away.
They were surrounded by ruins. Lying all around them in vast profusion were the remains of a civilisation. They were gothic and immense – vast, dark, twisting shapes covered with rows of curving spikes. It was as if titanic brambles had grown wild in space. The Ariel, a full kilometre on a side, could have passed easily through one of the holes punctured in their weirdly textured hulls.
Greater than the sense of scale was the mood of the place. It had about it a tremendous sense of melancholy, as if tragedy had been wrought there on a scale too great for human comprehension. Will felt like a child trespassing through a giants’ graveyard. And yet, beneath the weight of awe and despair, Will found himself touched by a sense of rightness as keen as a child’s excitement.
Yes, said a voice inside him. This where you are supposed to be.
‘Amy, give me a system profile,’ Ira said into the hushed cabin.
Amy cleared her throat and spoke almost in a whisper. ‘Four gas giants. Two solid planets, one V-rated, one M. One debris ring. Four hundred and seventeen alien habitats currently detected and counting.’
‘Will,’ said Ira, ‘were these the people who made Ulanu’s planet?’
Will was about to tell them he didn’t know. But then, with a revolted shudder, he realised he did. He’d found another new memory. It was like discovering a pulsing lump of something foreign under the skin of his mind.
‘No,’ he said. Admitting the alien knowledge felt like a guilty confession. ‘These were the last people to find it,’ he explained. ‘They were given suntap technology and then wiped out.’
‘For being destructive?’ asked Rachel.
‘Yes,’ said Will, surprising himself. It was like making up lies and discovering he had utter confidence in them. ‘They controlled dozens of star systems and denuded every one. Left to their own devices, they would have swept through the galaxy. They would have reached Earth.’
The fact alarmed him even as he said it. ‘If they’d lived, the human race would never have evolved,’ he added in a hushed voice.
‘Evolved?’ said Amy. ‘How old are these things?’
‘About ten million years,’ said Will awkwardly.
There were gasps from the others.
‘To the Transcended, the Earther crusade looks no different from these Fecund,’ he told them.
‘The Fecund,’ Ira echoed. ‘Is that the name of these people?’
‘I think so.’ Like the rest of his explanation, the name had just popped into his head.
‘What else do you know about this place?’ asked Hugo suspiciously.
‘Nothing!’ Will replied quickly. Then, less defensively, ‘I … I don’t know.’
John chuckled to himself on his bunk.
‘Ira,’ said Amy, ‘I’ve just completed a thermal scan and I can’t find a single live energy signature in the whole system. There are plenty of blast sites that might have been caused by containment failure, but there’s no actual antimatter.’
Of course there wasn’t, Will realised with sudden chilling certainty. There was never going to be. This place had run out of antimatter while humans were still living in the trees. The pit of his stomach fell away. It appeared he’d brought them here to die.
Why? he asked himself. Why had the Transcended let him think they might find fuel here when it couldn’t possibly be true? Why had they been brought here at all, if not for that? Simply to be made to understand humanity’s fate, and then stand by while it was extinguished?
Will started to consider the things he’d been told in a different light. What if it was all lies, the test and everything? He couldn’t be sure he knew what the thing in his head wanted, he realised, or what it intended to do with them.
‘Unfortunate,’ Ira rumbled. ‘Well, people, I’m sure you’re aware of the position that leaves us in. If we can’t find juice here, we’d better hope that M-type planet is comfy, because there’s no going home now. We just wasted what fuel we had left getting here.’
Will cringed at the bitterness in Ira’s tone.
John burst into sudden hoots of laughter.
‘What’s so funny, John?’ Rachel demanded.
‘This ride!’ he replied. ‘The aliens fucked us over. Now there’s a surprise! This has got to be the shittiest mission in the history of spaceflight. We should get a prize or something.’
‘Quiet!’ Ira snapped. ‘I haven’t finished.’
John’s laughter dulled to suppressed sniggers.
‘Amy,’ Ira growled, ‘check the whole system again. Make sure there’s nothing we can use. Make triple sure. Rachel, look for buffer materials. Just because we can’t find juice is no reason not to make repairs. There should be plenty of ship parts around here to cannibalise. Assuming they’re not too old, and assuming we can tell what the fuck we’re looking at. John, find what passes for a computer in this place, if there’s anything left after all this time, and trawl it. That could save us a lot of search time. And Hugo, keep your eyes open for weapons. Since we’re here, we might as well find out what these aliens could do. If we ever get home, it might win us the war. I want you all to report back to me the moment you find anything,’ the captain told them. ‘Do you understand me?’
There was a chorus of ayes. Ira fell silent.
Will waited for half an anxious, miserable minute before he opened his mouth. ‘Sir, what should I do?’
‘I don’t know, Will,’ Ira replied wearily. He sounded more disappointed than angry. ‘Help Rachel. And if any way out of this fucking mess pops into your head, let me know.’
9.2: IRA
While the crew prepped for a robotic survey of the ruins, Ira stared out at the grim panorama of tumbling wreckage, his mind churning. He’d read about what happened on stranded starships. Admittedly the conditions had never been quite this extreme, but a single common factor stood out among all those that survived: morale. If there was one good thing about their situation, it was that Ira suddenly had time on his hands, which meant a chance to address the interpersonal issues he’d let slide since they’d hit Zuni.
‘John,’ he said, propelling himself out of his bunk, ‘meeting room, right now.’
A smirking John slid into the chamber behind him. Ira sealed the hatch.
‘What’s up, Captain?’
‘You,’ said Ira. ‘With respect, John, your cracks are showing.’
John’s face stiffened.
‘Ever since we got hacked you’ve been ratcheting up the laughs. You’re not sounding balanced any more.’
John shrugged. ‘Should I? They hacked my ship. What do you expect?’ He shot Ira a meaningful glance.
They both knew what John’s psych report said – high-functioning sociopath with a strong loyalty complex offsetting severe interpersonal limitations. Level-three obsessive behaviour around security and control themes that is beneficial when suitably motivated. Ira knew because he’d been briefed. John knew because he’d hacked the senior-officers’ database years ago. There was an understanding between them that nobody kept secrets from John for long.
‘I need you to put a lid on it,’ said Ira. ‘I know you can do it.’
John was an excellent officer – a man who literally laughed in the face of death and functioned coolly under the most incredible pressure. The fact that those talents came with certain behavioural consequences was something both he and the Fleet had been happy to overlook. After all, it didn’t make him that odd. About thirty per cent of Galateans had a personality disorder of some sort by pre-diaspora standards. John was simply a starker case than most.
‘Of course,’ said John. ‘You can count on me. You know that – Galatea comes first. I’ll find another way to manage it, no matter how fucked up this trip gets. But while we’re in here …’
Ira waited for him to finish.
John’s face twitched. He smoothed his hair. ‘We have a slight security problem, woul
dn’t you say? That’s what I thought you wanted to talk about.’
‘Agreed,’ said Ira. ‘But I don’t see a way to fix it right now.’
‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to limit it. It doesn’t mean there aren’t steps we can take.’
‘What do you mean, exactly?’
‘Having a hacked ship I can fix,’ said John. ‘Lying next to a hacked person—’
‘I know this isn’t easy,’ said Ira.
‘How am I supposed to clear out the soft core when his fucking head is plugged into it all the time? It’s like trying to clear the rat shit out of a ship full of rats without killing the fucking rats.’
Ira sighed. ‘Remember, John, he’s still your crewmate. It’s your job to protect him as well as everyone else.’
‘Sure. But that fucking alien is using him for cover, which makes him a human shield,’ said John. ‘And the Galatean Fleet has a policy on human shields.’
Ira was about to reply, but a ping from Amy sounded first. He touched the comm. ‘What is it?’
‘The robots are away,’ said Amy. ‘I think you’re going to want to see this.’
‘We’ll pick this up later,’ he told John as he slid back through the hatch. ‘And thank you for listening. I mean it.’
With reluctance, Ira swung back into his bunk and pushed his visor on. His sense of claustrophobia returned as his field of vision filled with the view from the lead robot. The vast thicket of alien tatters lay straight ahead and a sense of wrongness at stepping into this awful graveyard gripped him like a palpable force. There was no room in his heart for excitement or curiosity. While he rifled through the ruins of another civilisation’s dead, the Earthers were mobilising to invade his home world and turn it into a copy of the lifeless disaster that lay before him.
‘Gah!’ Amy exclaimed. ‘I can’t find anything that looks like an actual ship in this mess! There’s nothing with a proper exohull, or even brollies.’
‘There,’ said Will, and dropped a marker into the display field. ‘That’s one.’
Ira zoomed in for a better view. It looked like the bud of some exotic flower floating in space. Delicate ferns of lacy, branching material arced forwards from a rounded base to surround a rust-red bulb. He could see no feature that made it look remotely like a ship. Ira’s concern that his roboteer was no longer completely human increased another notch.
