Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  He briefly considered complying with Caryl Hatzis’s wishes and returning immediately, but then he decided against it.

  To hell with her, he thought. There was no cause to hurry. The aurora was particularly spectacular tonight, and making her wait half an hour while he enjoyed it wasn’t going to kill her. God knew he’d certainly earned the break.

  * * *

  The emissions were coming from a point roughly seven AUs from the Head and twenty-five degrees above the ecliptic. They consisted of a semiregular pulsing in the upper microwave band and didn’t correlate to any satellite, active or inactive, placed in-system by the Mayor. Hatzis had thought it might be a piece of Spinner flotsam, which warranted checking it out. Alander agreed.

  The more the Spinner artifacts were investigated, the clearer it became that the spindles were built by machines, that the Spinners themselves had had nothing actually to do with it. Alander thought that mapping that single fact onto humanity’s experiences with AIs might be misleading, but even he couldn’t resist the assumption that something would inevitably go wrong with any automated process. Somewhere, eventually, the Gifts would make a mistake and leave something behind, some clue that would speak more about their origins than they had ever been willing to reveal.

  The question of whether the Gifts would let him return with anything like a clue occupied his mind as he instructed the hole ship AI to take him to a position closer to the source of the emissions. They were programmed not to reveal the origin of their makers; indeed, at times it seemed as though they didn’t even know it themselves. But were they also programmed to keep that knowledge a secret if the humans were to stumble across it? How far would they go to protect their makers? Alander didn’t know, and it worried him.

  “We’ve had word from Sothis,” Hatzis had said to him when he’d checked back in for duty. “They’ve found three more drops.”

  Drops. Alander remembered his first sight of a Spinner skyhook unraveling its way from orbit and thought the term very apt. Not every Spinner drop had the same number of towers, but title method was the same in each, as were the number of the gifts.

  “Any joy?” he asked.

  “Two markers,” she answered. “One contact.”

  A marker was the euphemism for a destroyed colony, so called because of the strange, inert sculptures left behind in systems visited by the Starfish. These artifacts seemed to serve no function, and some had taken them to be the equivalent of death markers or gravestones. Who planted them, however, remained a mystery. They seemed to employ a similar technology to the hole ships the Spinners left behind, but beyond that, nothing was known.

  “What’s the contact?”

  “Beta Hydras. Borderline senescent, but the Gifts managed to reactivate some of the archived engrams.” She hesitated before adding, “You weren’t one of them.”

  “That was the Carl Sagan,” he said dismissively. “Not one of my missions.”

  Even if it had been one of his missions, the chances of his persona remaining intact for so long would have been minimal. All of the engrams were unstable, but his was particularly so. He would’ve been lucky to last a year, let alone the seventy-four years since the Sagan had arrived.

  “Who did they choose this time?” he asked.

  “Neil Russell. Deep-time physicist; kept himself in extreme slow-mo to observe changes on a larger scale than the human. For him, only a few hours had elapsed since the mission arrived. He wasn’t happy about being dragged back up, apparently.”

  Alander could imagine. He remembered Russell well enough, although they’d never been friends. He’d gone through entrainment on a hard science ticket, whereas Alander had strictly generalized. When he pictured him in his mind, he saw a tall, scraggy man with black, wiry hair, prone to long, furiously defended silences.

  Another difficult contact, Alander mused. If it wasn’t functional unreliability, as in his case, the Spinners seemed to look for people with inbuilt restrictions on information flow. More often than not, they picked the traitors UNESSPRO had insinuated into the missions. How they identified them, though, no one had yet managed to work out.

  “What else did Sothis say?” Have you and the other members of your little cabal voted me out of the loop yet?

  “I’ll fill you in when you get back,” Hatzis said. She rarely appeared in conSense transmissions beyond the confines of the mother ship, but he could hear the smile in her voice.

  “Caryl...” he began.

  “Screwing with your head is one of the few pleasures left to me, Peter,” she said. “At least grant me that.”

  He allowed himself a laugh, then, as she fed him the coordinates and he relayed them to the hole ship AI. The Starfish might have decimated the human race, but there was still hope left. That was what the settlers—the ones who wanted to take what humanity had left and hunker down in the few habitable worlds they’d found—were feeding on. Down that route, the only source of conflict would be between the survivors themselves. Hatzis and Alander were the most prominent of those: the first person to establish contact between one survey team and another, and the sole survivor of Sol. Perhaps it would be best, he thought, to ease back on the arguing—in public, anyway.

  At least she was offering the public something, whereas he had nothing but nebulous fears and equally nebulous plans. Until he had a clear alternative, he supposed that Cleo was right and that he should, perhaps, cut her some slack.

  His train of thought was broken by a sudden lurch of the ship that almost threw him off the couch. The stomach of his artificial body leapt to his throat as the ambient gravity in the cockpit shifted wildly beneath him.

  “What—?” he started, clutching at his seat to keep himself upright.

  “We have arrived,” said the hole ship the same instant the wall screen cleared. Alander saw a wild profusion of angular silver shapes ahead of them: many-pointed stars spinning and exploding in a rush of energy out of a bright central light source coming toward him.

  “Get us out of here! Now!”

  The view went black as the hole ship jumped. It lurched again, only this time the entire ship shuddered violently. The noise in the cockpit and the vibrations he could feel through the floor suggested someone was scraping a giant saw across the alien vessel’s smooth hull.

  “I have suffered minor damage,” announced the hole ship blandly.

  “Can you still relocate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then take us back to Athena—quickly! If we’re lucky, we might still be able to beat them there.”

  He got up from the couch, every muscle in his body quivering. Adrenaline coursed through his body as he replayed the fleeting image of the silver ships over and over in his mind.

  Starfish.

  Despite only getting a brief glimpse, he had no doubts about this. There was no mistaking the knife-slim lines of those ships; even measuring kilometers across, they were lightning fast and as maneuverable as anything Alander had ever seen. The emissions were either a trap or a side effect of their arrival in the system. But where had they come from? What had brought them to Head of Hydras? And why now?

  The journey back, as with the journey there, would only take less than a minute, but for Alander it was an intolerably long time. He paced about the cockpit, racking his brain to understand what was happening while waiting impatiently for the wall screen to clear. This was the only indication that they were at the end of a journey. During the jumps themselves, there was no actual suggestion that the ship was even moving at all. He was protected in the heart of the ship like a mollycoddled child, ignorant of just about everything important to do with the world around him.

  When the hole ship did finally emerge from wherever it went between locations in the real universe—some physicists had coined the term unspace to describe the state—Alander was rigid with tension, holding his breath as he stared at the wall screen. As soon as he saw the silver and black framework of the Michel Mayor hanging before him, apparently
undamaged, he was gesticulating, boiling off his excess energy in a vain pretense that it would make a difference to how quickly things happened next.

  “I want a line opened immediately to Caryl Hatzis!” Maybe there was still time—if they moved quickly enough.

  Her image appeared in the screen: dark, stocky, and frowning.

  “You’re early,” she said with surprise. “I thought—”

  “The Starfish are here!” he cut in urgently. “We need to upload the Mayor immediately!”

  “Starfish?” Her frown deepened. “But we haven’t used the communicator. They couldn’t have—”

  “Let’s not analyze this now, okay, Caryl? They’re on their way, and I don’t know how much time we have. We need to move, Caryl—now!”

  Time was moving so slowly for him that when she hesitated just for an instant, as though she was about to question his judgment, he found himself balling his fists and wanting to scream his frustration at her: Move it, or you’ll all die! But then she was suddenly moving faster than he, ramping up to four times the natural clock rate of the Mayor, spouting orders in unintelligible gibberish too fast for him to even follow.

  A window opened in the wall screen, indicating that information had started to flow from the Mayor to the hole ship. He glanced anxiously at it and found biological and astronomical data, not people. He almost called Hatzis to say, What about the people? Get them out first! But time was of the essence, and he had no idea how long it would take to upload the contents of the survey vessel’s memory banks to the alien storage devices. Perhaps it would only take minutes. Or perhaps, he thought, the gifts could do it more quickly. A minute was a long time under the circumstances; any time he could save might be crucial.

  He was halfway through the first syllable of an inquiry to the hole ship when the first of the Starfish appeared around Athena.

  The screen flickered as the hole ship announced: “Taking evasive action.”

  “No, wait—”

  The view changed as they jumped to a higher orbit, away from the survey vessel. The upload from the Mayor ceased, broken in midflow. Alander gripped the back of the couch as the first Starfish killing vessel was joined by two more. The three of them streaked around the blue white globe below them in a display of fearful energy, peppering the biosphere and inner orbits with red darts that burned white when they exploded. The ten orbital towers of the gifts with their golden spindles in geosynchronous orbit came under heavy fire, three of them blossoming in quick succession like short-lived nova.

  “Take us back to the Mayor!” Alander shouted. “We have to do something!”

  The hole ship relocated just in time to catch the edge of one of the darts. The screen went blue, then black. The hole ship seemed to roll end over end for an instant, then relocated again.

  “Taking evasive action,” the hole ship repeated.

  “What happened?”

  “The Michel Mayor has been destroyed,” the AI replied shortly. “We are under attack.”

  The hole ship bucked beneath him. Battered, disoriented, Alander clung to the couch as though it was a life jacket.

  “Caryl?” he called. “Cleo?” It was futile, he knew, because they were already dead—as he would be, too, if he didn’t get out of there fast.

  The screen flickered back to life. For a moment he saw nothing but stars—just long enough to think that they might have outrun the alien ships—but the brief peace was shattered by the arrival of a weapon last seen in Sol system: a sphere of oddly shaped silver missiles popping into existence around the hole ship, high-energy weapons at the ready, closing in like white cells around an invading virus.

  “Taking evasive action.” The hole ship’s mantra was barely audible over the deep rumbling that shook the entire craft. It felt to Alander as though the walls were being torn apart around him. “I have suffered damage.”

  It was all happening too quickly. Alander’s thoughts were disjointed and confused. The hole ship was in real danger of being destroyed if he stuck around any longer. Should he run? Save his own skin? Could he run, given that the Starfish seemed to be following him everywhere he went in the system? How far did their light cone spread? he wondered. He might jump into another trap—and just one more might be enough to finish off the damaged hole ship. He would have to jump a long way to feel safe, and that would take time. And while he was jumping, he couldn’t send a message.

  There was only one reason to stick around that he could see. It was vital, too, but was it worth dying for?

  While the hole ship jumped through unspace, he thought about the sunset from the high point of Athena. Perhaps if he hadn’t stayed there so long, if he had investigated the emissions earlier, as Caryl had asked, they might have had more time to do something about the Starfish attack. He might have saved the others. The thought that he had brought about the deaths of his friends and colleagues simply by being stubborn made him feel nauseous, but it also helped him with his decision about what to do. He would have no more deaths on his conscience.

  “Send a message to Sothis,” he instructed the alien AI. “Tell them...” He stopped to think. Timing was everything. He didn’t know how long the hole ship would last if he told it to stay put long enough to send a message. They were getting only a second or less between each relocation. He would have to keep it brief.

  “Tell them the Starfish have attacked Head of Hydras without provocation,” he said. “Their tactics have changed.” He added, “No one is safe anymore,” before instructing the hole ship to compress and send the message next time they relocated.

  He didn’t have long to wait. The screen cleared to reveal scenes of wild energy release. Strange forces roiled around the hole ship, tossing it like a soap bubble in a hurricane. Around him, Alander felt rather than heard the gonglike ringing of the ftl communicator as the message was sent, as though he was in the middle of a giant church bell. The ringing stuttered momentarily, and the interior illumination of the cockpit dimmed. Then the hole ship seemed to gather itself and the ringing resumed. A second later, it was done.

  Alander’s uncertainty cleared that very instant. He had done his duty. Now he could get the hell out of there.

  On the screen, vast silver shapes overlapped like scales as they swooped in for the kill.

  “Get us out of here!” he shouted. “As far away as you can!”

  “Taking evasive action,” said the hole ship. “Sustaining damage.” Alander lost his grip on the couch as internal gravity failed entirely. “Concentrating available resources on emergency priority maintenance. Unable to take evasive action. Sustaining—”

  The screen flickered and died at the same instant as the hole ship’s voice. The lights turned red. One segment of the cockpit tore away, leaving him exposed to the blistering energies of the attack.

  The last thing he saw was the invisible membrane of the I-suit boiling away under a purple light and his right forearm melting painlessly back to the bone.

  1.1.2

  Sixty-seven light-years away, but at the very same moment, the message from Athena arrived. The hole ship permanently stationed in the heart of McKenzie Base, Sothis’s main habitation complex, resonated like a drum and conveyed Peter Alander’s voice to the one person listening.

  Caryl Hatzis felt her legs lose their strength for a moment, and she sat on the couch to listen uneasily to Alander’s troubled words.

  “The Starfish have attacked Head of Hydrus without provocation. Their tactics have changed.” A slight hesitation conveyed any number or emotions—tension, fear, determination, perhaps even resignation—then: “No one is safe anymore.”

  And then silence.

  Hatzis clenched her flesh-and-blood fist and brought it to her chin.

  “Fuck,” she said after a few moments of thinking it through. The message had been intended for her, she was sure, but it had also reached every ear within two hundred light-years. There was no recalling it now.

  The hole ship resonated again as
another message suddenly thrilled through the hole ship’s chassis.

  “This is Gou Mang.” It was Hatzis’s own voice, belonging to an older engram from the system 58 Eridani. “Message received.”

  Nothing more was said.

  The message was brief and to the point, but it was all the Starfish would need to get a fix on their location. She just hoped that her engram from Gou Mang hadn’t been fool enough to have called from anywhere important. But then, if she couldn’t trust herself, who could she trust?

  She waited in silence for a response to come in from Head of Hydras, from the colony called Athena. But as the seconds ticked by into minutes, she knew there would be no reply from Alander. He was already dead, along with everyone else in the colony.

  She also knew that Gou Mang, or maybe even someone closer, would check out the Head as soon as possible to verify the contact. The earliest she could expect such verification, though, would be in a few hours. The closest colony was in HD203244, thirty-odd light-years away. Even at a hole ship’s impressive rate of speed, it would take half a day to get there.

  For now, she would have to take Alander’s message at face value. Everything had changed, and no one was safe anymore.

  “Fuck,” she said again, driving her fist into the couch.

  Out of the 1,000 UNESSPRO missions, barely 100 had been catalogued in the two weeks since the fall of Sol.

  To date, there had been 60 failed missions; 21 Spinner drops; 13 Starfish kills, complete with markers; and six missions that had arrived intact and been untainted by alien contact. Nine missions had experienced anomalous contacts that were still under examination. With every Spinner drop discovered, the facility of the human remnants to examine the status of the remaining survey missions increased dramatically, and the job became that much more achievable—if not still daunting, in the face of the odds. Even with alien technology on their side, and with the number of catalogued systems increasing rapidly, they were still only a handful of survivors in various states of decay.