Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  The transmission carried a picture of a modified hole ship, its black cockpit encrusted with strange growths similar to barnacles or coral. It was shown silhouetted against the bright gold hull of one of the spindles, blurred as though in fast motion.

  The message went on, “As usual, the anomaly departed when hailed, but not before giving the colonists a bit of a fright. They’ll keep an eye on the colony in 61 UMA to see if the Spinners or the anomalies go there next. Who knows? We might be able to get the jump on them, this time.”

  “And do what?” said Alander dubiously.

  Hatzis didn’t reply; she was listening to the continuing message: “Peter, in your last report, you expressed a degree of uncertainty for the benefits of continuing your mission. But I’m asking you to seriously reconsider coming back too soon. We need scouts along the front—now more than ever, in fact. You are our closest agents to 61 Ursa Major and a possible Spinner/anomaly occupation. Please stay in the area for a while longer. If we do get any news, we may need to act quickly.”

  And that was that. There was nothing more he could do, unless he planned to hog-tie Thor and take command of Pearl. He waited restlessly as she broadcast a brief reply to accompany the little information they had discovered on the system. When she had finished, he sat down beside her on the couch.

  “So,” he said, “where to next?”

  “You choose,” she said. Her mood was subdued and morose. “Somewhere nearby, though. I don’t want to be too long out of contact.”

  Yes, he thought, mustn’t disobey orders.

  “I need a change,” she said. “All these systems are starting to look the same to me.”

  He consulted the star chart in the hole ship’s memory and compared it against the UNESSPRO mission register. One name stood out. He changed the view to external cameras, then panned around until he had found the direction he was looking for.

  “There,” he said, pointing to the brightest star in the sky. “That’s where I want to go.”

  “Vega?” she said, frowning. “But there won’t be much to see. Any proplyd would have been dispersed long ago—”

  “I know that,” he said. “And UNESSPRO knew that, too, but they sent a mission just the same. The truth seekers won out on this one, I guess.”

  She was about to say something, but he cut her off. “Anyway, that’s my decision, Caryl.”

  She shrugged. “Data is data, I guess.”

  “Exactly,” he said. Then, not wanting to give her the chance to change her mind, he addressed the ship’s AI: “Pearl, take us to Vega, twice standard orbital insertion.” He didn’t know the habitable zones of a blue AOV variable, and he wasn’t about to take any chances. They were still unsure just how much punishment the hole ships could take. “Advise ETA.”

  “Two point nine hours,” the AI reported. “External.”

  “Okay, Pearl,” he said. “Do it.”

  The screen went blank as the hole ship got under way. He turned to Hatzis next to him, wondering what she intended to do during the three-hour trip, and caught her staring vacantly toward the empty screen, her gaze lost somewhere between her and it.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She came to life, then, meeting his eyes. “What?” she asked distractedly. “Oh, I was just reviewing data.”

  “Are you sure?” Even though he had known several incarnations of Caryl Hatzis, Alander found it hard sometimes to read the woman as an android. The muscles of the face were a profoundly complex and subtle barometer of personality; and the slightest change could have a profound effect. Half the time he didn’t recognize her at all, let alone know what she was thinking. Or when she was lying.

  She stood. “I’ll be in my cabin.”

  “Reviewing the data?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” she said and walked from the cockpit.

  * * *

  Alander came to get her before they relocated. He had spent the jump lying on the cockpit couch listening to a selection of music from various alien races, courtesy of the Gifts’ Library, piped directly to his ears from the hole ship’s AI. He wasn’t so much enjoying the unusual sounds as fascinated by how much they differed from what his own species regarded as music.

  She opened her eyes when she noticed him watching her from the archway to her tiny cabin.

  “You look relaxed,” she said.

  “Just conserving my energy,” he said. It sounded better than bored out of my mind.

  She laughed lightly. “For what?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows what we might find in Vega?”

  “It’s an astronomical curiosity at best,” she said. “We’ll be lucky if anything remains of the cloud it coalesced from.”

  He rolled his eyes and went back to the cockpit, calling over his shoulder: “We’ll be there in five minutes!”

  He was performing stretching exercises when she appeared. Sitting on the couch while he utilized the empty space behind her, she crossed her legs and waited.

  “The Matthew Thornton, wasn’t it?” he asked, fishing for conversation.

  She nodded. “Registered as UNESSPRO six six six, believe it or not.”

  “Really?” He hadn’t noticed that. “How would you feel getting that mission?”

  “Out of 1,000 missions, one of them had to have that number; 23 Bootis got unlucky thirteen. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  He touched his toes. “Maybe the devil himself will be there to greet us.”

  Hatzis didn’t comment. She just kept her attention fixed on the screen.

  “Relocating,” said Pearl.

  Vega blossomed on the screen, a powerful blue white star with a highly variable output that peaked every three hours or so. Alander couldn’t tell if it was on an up- or downswing of its cycle, but was nonetheless impressed with its brightness. Hatzis had been right, of course: with that sort of energy blasting through the solar atmosphere, it was unlikely the cloud of gas it had condensed from would have been stable enough to form planets of any kind.

  But that doesn’t mean the system won’t be of interest, Alander mused silently as he viewed the various images the hole ship had taken in the seconds since its arrival. It was a thought that proved true more quickly than he could have imagined.

  “What’s this?” he said, unnecessarily taking a step closer to the wall screen. The image was of a tortured blob of gas off to one side of the star.

  “Pearl,” said Hatzis from the couch behind him, “zoom in on that feature.”

  “What the hell is it?” asked Alander, taking a step back again as the image on the screen magnified.

  “It looks like a dust cloud,” said Hatzis. “Falling into the star against the solar wind.”

  It did have that look about it—like a sail collapsing slowly to the ground on a windy day. But there was a dense core that made him think it contained more than just gas.

  “And look there,” he said, indicating another image from a more distant part of the system. “Another one.”

  This blob had a definite solid core but still trailed a wispy cloud through the intense radiance of the star. It looked almost like a comet.

  “Planetary fragment?” Hatzis suggested.

  “Perhaps.” He called up other images, touching the screen as though it were a manual keyboard. Even up close, the resolution was perfect. “Jupiter mass, maybe not native. A protostar with a solid core that drifted into the system and is being torn about by tides. Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Possible, yes. Likely?” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Within five minutes, they found four more fragments of varying sizes and a spreading band of rubble that might have become an asteroid belt in an ordinary system. Here, the intense and variable solar wind was causing all sorts of havoc. The fragments were being blasted by radiation and particle winds more dense than anything the planets of Sol would have experienced, even during the worst solar storms. The larger fragment closer in was being blown apart by t
he wind as much as by the tides, while those farther out were in the process of losing significant percentages of their atmosphere every hour, hence the striking tails trailing away from the primary. Within a few decades, it would all be gone; Alander and Hatzis had timed their visit just right for a truly cosmic spectacle.

  It was only while studying the details of the rubble cloud that Alander noticed the tiny flashes of light winking and darting through the debris.

  “Do you see that,” he asked, “or are my eyes playing tricks on me?”

  This time, Hatzis got up to take a closer look at the expanded image. “Little ships,” she said breathlessly. “Fuck, Peter, there’s somebody here!” “But that’s not possible, surely? I mean, none of the other missions built ships like that.”

  Their eyes met for a second; she wasn’t alarmed yet, but she was ready to be. “Perhaps you should start broadcasting your hellos, now.”

  Before she could open her mouth, an alert sounded.

  “Proximity alert,” said Pearl, its voice even-toned but urgent.

  “Where?” Hatzis demanded.

  The view changed to point at the sun, but there was nothing visible.

  “Pearl, what the hell are we meant to be looking—?”

  “Wait,” said Alander, taking her arm. “There!”

  At the center of the star was a slightly different white from the rest of its surface, and the discolored patch was growing rapidly, spreading like a stain. It looked to Alander as though something impossibly white was rushing toward them. Or—

  The hole ship exploded out of the screen, perfectly white and perfectly spherical, completely visible only once it had grown larger than the star behind it. The smaller, black sphere of its cockpit spun around it like a bola, trailing sparkling motes in its wake.

  “Impact alert,” Pearl warned.

  “Can we dodge it?” asked Hatzis, staring fixedly at the screen as the hole ship swelled to fill it.

  “Taking evasive action,” said the AI. Pearl relocated, but not before a swarm of motes emitted by the attacking hole ship rattled across its hull. There was a sound like hail falling on a tin roof.

  “Are we damaged?” she asked, alarmed.

  “No.”

  “But we were attacked?”

  “From the data available,” reported the AI, “the best answer to that question would be yes.”

  “What the hell is going on?” said Hatzis to no one in particular. She was prowling anxiously around the couch, glancing at the screen in anticipation of them reentering real space. When they did, it was barely a kilometer away from their departure point, and the hostile hole ship was nowhere to be seen.

  “Pearl, broadcast the following message,” said Hatzis. “This is Caryl Hatzis of UNESSPRO Mission one five four hailing UNESSPRO Mission six six six. We are peaceful envoys representing the survivors of Sol system. Do you read me? I repeat: we are peaceful envoys representing the survivors of Sol system. Please cease all hostilities immediately, or—”

  The hole ship reappeared at frighteningly close quarters, emitting another wave of the sparkling darts. They struck with the same furious staccato as before but again did little more than cause the floor to vibrate beneath them.

  “Or what?” asked Alander dryly.

  Before Hatzis could reply, the attack abruptly ceased. The attacking hole ship stopped dead before them, its midnight black cockpit orbiting rapidly around a pristine central sphere.

  A male voice issued into the cockpit: “You’re human?”

  Hatzis’s jaw dropped open in surprise.

  “Of course we are,” Alander said. “What were you expecting?”

  There was a pause that felt much longer than it actually was.

  “Pearl,” Alander said. “That transmission—it came from that hole ship, right?”

  “Not as such,” was the reply—not from the AI, but from the male voice that had spoken before. “I’ve temporarily linked our ships—made them semi-independent nodes of the same mind, if you like. That makes it easier to communicate.”

  “How—?” Hatzis started.

  “Hole ships have the ability to cross-talk when sufficiently close. You didn’t know they could do this?”

  “No. Who are you?” she asked, looking around the cockpit as if the answer to her confusion might be found there. “And how the hell do you know?”

  “The name’s Axford,” he answered. The voice held a mixture of amusement and challenge. “General Francis T. Axford. And now’s not the time to stand around chatting. Even if you hadn’t just told me, I’d know where you came from. Only a bunch of incompetent scientists like you would go about things in such a crazy, half-assed fashion.”

  Alander’s memory worked furiously. The name rang a bell, but it wasn’t on any of the mission registers he had memorized, and he didn’t recall a ranking general qualifying for the survey program. All the military officers were trained for administrative command. Unless...

  “Frank the Ax?” he asked incredulously.

  The man let out a low chuckle. “My reputation clearly precedes me,” he said. “Or outlived me, depending on how you look at it. Either way, I’m—”

  “But you can’t be,” Alander cut in again. “It’s not possible.”

  “Can be, is, and I am,” said the man. “Listen, I don’t particularly like sitting around in the open for long, so if you want to continue this conversation, then I suggest we go somewhere less conspicuous.”

  “Where exactly would that be?” he asked.

  “Your hole ship has the coordinates, Dr. Alander,” said Axford. “I can’t actually command its guidance system, but I can tell it where to go. Just give the word, and it will take you there. Don’t bother asking it for the exact destination, because I’ve already instructed it not to tell you.”

  Alander frowned. “Wait a minute. How did you know that I was—?”

  “Your expression. Like I said, the ships can cross-talk,” he replied with obvious irritability. “They can exchange data. But I haven’t got time for this right now, people. If you want to talk, then you’ve got to instruct your ship to follow me in.”

  “Where?” said Hatzis.

  “Hermes Base,” he said. “My headquarters. Can’t you see it?”

  Both looked simultaneously at the hellish solar vista on the screen.

  “No,” said Alander after a moment.

  “Good,” said Axford. “That’s just the way I like it.”

  1.1.4

  It took some convincing to get Hatzis to follow the ex-general after the hole ship on the wall screen disappeared. Alander appreciated her apprehensions (making a blind jump into God only knew where, he said, didn’t much appeal to him, either), but he argued that the presence of the hole ship indicated that there had been a Spinner drop, and they should find out what they could about it—especially given the fact that nowhere else in the system had they found any evidence of the Gifts. There were no normal planets around which to anchor orbital towers, so they must have used a new design. At least in systems containing alternate gift configurations, the Spinners had had a solid planet to work with. But it was the presence of Axford—former military cost cutter, then senior financial advisor to UNESSPRO—that seemed the greatest lure for Alander. Everyone who had argued for funding prior to launch had crossed swords with him, usually to their loss. There had long been rumors about shady deals and favoritism—but Axford had never been on the survey team register. He hadn’t been at entrainment camp. There was no way Hatzis could think of that could have brought Frank the Ax to Vega. Alander, of course, had to hear the explanation.

  “It’d be criminal not to,” he said. “We have to know what he’s doing here—and how he knew about the hole ships merging. And the weapon systems he has...” He stopped, waved his hands as though lost for words. “The system is a Spinner drop,” he said instead. “We’re obliged to make contact.”

  That was an argument she could accept, if not wholeheartedly. “Pearl, you
have a destination?” she asked.

  “Yes, Caryl.”

  “Can you tell us where it is?”

  “I have been instructed not to.”

  She shook her head, resigning herself to the fact that she couldn’t leave in good conscience. “Take us there, then.”

  Barely a minute later, they relocated in hell.

  * * *

  Light of every frequency assailed the hole ship. Giant upwellings of gas or liquid—Hatzis couldn’t tell which— circulated around her with surprising turns of speed. If the information Axford provided was accurate, then the scale of what she was seeing was enormous. And while she didn’t believe everything he said, she was sure he had no reason to lie about this.

  Hermes Base was inside the largest planetary fragment, close in to the pounding brightness of Vega. Its immediate surroundings consisted of a turbulent mix of elements, stirred by the tides and its own internal collapse. Torn between coalescing into a new planetoid and breaking apart altogether, it seemed the most unlikely place in which anyone would ever consider hiding a base. Which was exactly why Francis Axford had chosen it, she imagined.

  She and Alander followed him via conSense deep into the fragment’s churning interior, letting him take her on a sightseeing tour designed more to impress than to actually inform. Hermes Base turned out to be not so much a base as a distributed network of work points that combined to perform all the functions of something more rigid. Parts failed constantly, but there were so many replacements at hand, and more constantly being built by nanomachines, that the loss was barely noticed. The fierce melting pot of the fragment was a rich source of elements and energy for the manufacturing process.