The second transmission concerned an increase in anomalous contacts along the front and flanks. Someone was dogging new colonies, buzzing close enough to be noticed but never sticking around when contact was attempted. They made no overtly hostile moves, but their dogged lack of communication had ominous overtones.
The third transmission was the most interesting and possibly the most worrying. It opened a whole new swath of possibilities which, when combined with the other two transmissions, cast everything in a very different light.
Hatzis sat through it twice to make sure she absorbed everything correctly. The reports from her other selves came in densely packed files readable only through the Engram Overseer platform on which all the UNESSPRO missions ran. She literally dived into the heads of the person reporting to experience it firsthand. It was a far cry from the multinode consciousness she had experienced in Sol, but it was a step in the right direction, at least. When surveyed space was empty of dangerous aliens, the possibility existed that she might open the channels of all the hole ships, allowing herselves to communicate in real time, even though separated by dozens of light-years. That would be the beginning of something truly amazing, she thought.
Another reason to use the Overseer files lay in the need for caution. She didn’t know if Alander had noticed that the gifts could receive more than one signal at a time and transmit while receiving, but she didn’t want to make it too easy for him to pry into her affairs if he did. Given his tenuous grip on reality, he might balk at the idea of diving into someone else’s mind.
But then, his disapproval was the least of her worries right now.
From the mind of herself from Thor, whom she had dispatched with Alander to explore the front itself, she learned that she had much more pressing matters to deal with: sabotage of UNESSPRO, deliberate destruction of colonies using the Starfish as an unsuspecting weapon, a legion of Francis Axfords, and a race of alien scavengers with two penises, for fuck’s sake! She would have happily dismissed it all as a hoax had the information not come from Thor herself—and she had seen it with her own eyes. Aliens stealing gifts before humans could use them, increased anomalous activity, a missing hole ship—and now Axford, Alander, and Thor were planning to ambush a possible “Roach” attack in 61 Ursa Major, the very same system that she was in. She sighed in frustration. Surveyed space seemed a much more dangerous place, if that was possible: being able to predict where the Spinners might strike next was supposed to make things easier, not more complicated.
At least Thor had managed to warn her beforehand. If humanity was going to declare unofficial war against another alien species, she supposed it was best if she was there as well. Axford had been reluctant to let her stop midjourney simply to listen to the Sothis update, but she’d convinced him otherwise. Not sending a report of her own, she’d said, would only make Sol suspicious, so she had posted a rather bland description of the systems they had visited, not including Vega. Behind that report, she had managed to send a private Overseer transmission that filled in the blanks. Axford, who obviously knew about those transmissions, hadn’t tried to stop her, and Alander had said nothing about it at all.
Maybe he was being coy, she thought. But she doubted it. It wasn’t like him to keep a lid on his disapproval, and the Council of Orphans was almost certain to garner that. She’d always known it would have to go public at some point, but she would have preferred if it had happened at another time. She wasn’t in the mood for a civil war right now.
Sol turned her attention to the data flowing in through Arachne’s sensors. The gifts around Hera were almost complete. Thor, Alander, and Axford would be in 61 Ursa Major soon—and so too, perhaps, would be these “Roaches” Thor had mentioned. She tried to think of a way she could call for backup, but calling via the ftl transmitter would not be an option until the next Sothis report. And if Eos hadn’t gone missing, she might have been able to jump to one of her systems and bring her back.
She silently cursed the Spinners for handing them a means of communication that spoke to everyone each time they used it. It was obviously supposed to teach them the principles of such technology instead of just handing it to them on a plate—but fuck, it made life hard! Sometimes she imagined how things would have been if the Spinners had never come—or if they’d come to Sol first. She wondered what the Vincula would have made of the gifts. Perhaps, with luck, they could have used the technology to communicate with or even repel the Starfish. With a million superior minds working on the problem, rather than a few thousand flawed engrams, things might just have turned out very differently indeed.
* * *
Hera’s primary survey vessel, the Fred Adams, had assumed a cautionary orbit well away from the gifts. In the sixty years since the mission to 61 Ursa Major had arrived, the crew had set up a network of low-orbital facilities around the volcanic planet as well as establishing mines on various asteroids. All were put on alert following the message buoy Thor and Alander had dropped some days ago, but they still weren’t as prepared for their encounter with the Spinners as Hatzis would have hoped. Perhaps the fact that half of the colonists were on the fragile edge of senescence had something to do with it.
The colony itself was run by a sturdy climatologist by the name of Tarsem Jones. His personality breakdown was well established, almost certainly as a result of spending too much of his time thinking faster than the normal clock rate. The pressures of command, Hatzis thought wryly as she addressed the man.
“The Spinners are going to choose one among you to act as a contact,” she explained.
The colony’s engram of Alander was locked down in memory, too unstable to wake even for a day, and there was also no version of her available, either. “This person will probably be a UNESSPRO plant psychologically modified to ensure the mission runs according to regulations. One of those regulations is to report to Earth as soon as alien life is contacted. But you must not let them do this.” She spoke carefully, wanting to impress upon him the importance of doing precisely as she said. “Shut them down as soon as you find out who they are. We’ll deal with that problem later.”
“But surely we should at least talk to them.” Jones’s expression was one of intense indecision. “I mean, they’ve gone to so much trouble to come here in the first place.”
Hatzis thought again of her analogy of a person dropping sugar for ants to collect.
“Maybe they have,” she said distractedly. “But there’s a bigger picture here, Tarsem. You need to do absolutely nothing for a couple of days. Do you understand? Just ignore them. Go about your business as though they weren’t even there.”
“This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to us, and you’re asking—”
“A lot,” she cut in. “I know. But bigger things could yet happen.” She thought for a moment of all the action this system might soon get to see—assuming Thor and Alander were right about the Roaches. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this, Tarsem. But I assure you, you’ll be perfectly safe.”
Or so she hoped, anyway. From what she understood of the Roaches, they had had so far shown no malice when it came to systems that had already appropriated their gifts. They didn’t bring the Starfish down on people they hadn’t stolen from. But all of that might change if they were ever attacked and expelled from a system by force—especially if Axford’s AI-merging idea failed to work and they realized that their data had been stolen.
The weirdest thing—and in many ways the hardest to accept—was that Axford might actually be right. She and the other UNESSPRO colonists weren’t the best people to be dealing with situations involving hostile alien races. They were scientists and civilians; they weren’t used to thinking in terms of military strategies or threats. He had viewed the gifts as an opportunity to make himself stronger; she had seen in them the chance to glean knowledge about the builders themselves. She wasn’t, however, about to hand over charge of the human survivors to the likes of Frank the Ax just yet. That would be
suicide.
Encrypted laser channels conducted all communications between her and the colony, so no one else knew she was present. If Axford was going to try anything, she wanted to see it with her own eyes. When the Spinners finished building the gifts and everything went quiet, she had Hera turn all available instruments to searching for signs of hole ships—any hole ship at all. Somewhere out there she was sure that Thor’s Pearl and Axford’s Mercury would be snooping around.
“Just who exactly are you waiting for, anyway?” asked Jones down the secure line. “I still don’t understand. Are they enemies or allies? I have frightened people here, Caryl; what am I supposed to tell them?”
“You can tell them to be calm,” she said. “Whatever happens, Tarsem, they’re not going to get hurt, okay?”
On the screen before her, the ring of gifts girdled the planet like a thorny crown, glinting brassily in the golden sunlight.
“I’d like to believe you,” said Jones. “But I can’t help feel as though we’re caught in the middle of something here.”
You are, she said to herself. We all are.
But as much as she would have liked to tell Jones everything about the Spinners and the Starfish, in the end she simply didn’t have time. Vector alarms rang loudly and suddenly, indicating that the near-Hera radar monitors had detected objects on impact trajectories. There were two of them, coming from wildly different directions. She fed the data to Arachne which promptly produced much clearer images of both objects. They were hole ships, definitely, each a white point gliding smoothly against the black. As they approached, their cockpits appeared: warped, distorted, alien-looking. Both ships belonged to the Roaches.
When the cockpits were completely free, the hole ships began to change course. This was something she hadn’t seen before, although information in Thor’s report suggested it was possible. The strange additions to the cockpit clearly gave the hole ships some degree of maneuverability, enabling them to swoop in close to the gifts and assume the same altitude without relocating. Still traveling much faster than orbital velocity, however, they swooped around the alien installations as though conducting a rapid survey.
Inspecting the booty, Hatzis thought. Waiting for a response. Axford’s retaliation in Vega must have made them cautious, hence their traveling in pairs. The colony remained passive, broadcasting nothing more than a plea for identification: “This is Tarsem Jones of UNESSPRO Mission 538, Fred Adams. Please state your origins and intentions. I repeat: this is Tarsem Jones of UNESSPRO Mission 538...”
The hole ships didn’t respond, but they did change course again. One angled close to the seventh orbital tower—the one, Hatzis presumed, containing Hera’s hole ship. The other made a close pass over the installation the Fred Adams had evolved into.
“Fred Adams to unknown vessels: we are not a military installation!” Singh’s protest had become shrill. “Our meteorite shielding is purely defensive. If you won’t identify yourselves, then at least maintain minimum safe distance!”
The hole ship closest to the Fred Adams completely ignored the pleas. On its second pass, it braked with astonishing suddenness and came up alongside the installation. The cockpit came around to a point close to the installation. The coral-like protrusions that marred the perfect smoothness of the alien vessel began to stretch, sending pseudopods across the open space that separated it from its target.
“Hatzis.” There was a quiet panic in Singh’s voice. “You promised...”
Although it was difficult, Hatzis held back from attempting to rescue the colonists. She had to assume that Axford, Alander, and Thor knew what they were doing. But if these people died because they left her hanging ...
Just as the pseudopods had gained a firm grip on the Fred Adams, something happened. Hatzis watched as a second hole ship began to swell into existence at a point close in to the first. The Roach vessel went to withdraw, but the pseudopods held it fast. The second hole ship— Mercury? Pearl?—attained full size and had extruded its cockpit before the first was able to disengage from the human installation and attempt to relocate. Or perhaps it simply wasn’t able to. Perhaps the close proximity of the two ships prevented it from using that means of escape.
The cockpit of the second hole ship had been modified, although its additions seemed minor in comparison to the first. It swept after the alien vessel, matching vectors with inhuman precision. The Roach ship soon proved its superior maneuverability with two seemingly suicidal swoops into Hera’s atmosphere. The friction didn’t even bring a glow to the alien hulls.
When they emerged from the second pass, the Roach had a considerable lead on the second craft and, having achieved that lead, its cockpit began to withdraw as it was clearly opting for escape over a course change.
The second hole ship beat it to the jump, however, relocating in an instant to match velocities again.
It was only then that the Roach hole ship retaliated. An angular shape grew out of the side of its cockpit and spat a fiery trail of darts at the hole ship on its tail. The darts sparked where they hit its hull, producing a fiery ball of gas from the extrusion attached to its cockpit.
The extrusions are engines, Hatzis realized. And weapons! They’d been added to the original designs in much the same way people back on Earth used to add extensions to existing houses. That way, they didn’t need to interfere with or even understand the original design.
The Roach ship pulled away and readied for relocation. Undamaged but unsuccessful in its mission to raid the colony around Hera, it was quickly attempting to beat an early retreat. Did that count as a victory for the humans? It would depend, Hatzis imagined, on whether or not the hole ship harassing the Roaches had had enough time to steal the information they needed.
A sudden blast of noise came over the cockpit’s speakers, startling her. Someone had broken radio silence! Hatzis searched the data displayed on her screen for the source of the transmission.
“What the fuck is going on?” she muttered, barely able to believe what she was seeing. During the skirmish around the Fred Adams installation, she’d totally forgotten about the second Roach hole ship. It had placed itself in a high polar orbit, watching while its twin had gone about its business. It had done nothing to assist its partner, probably assuming that it could handle itself against the relatively poorly equipped human hole ship. It had simply waited, just in case it was needed. Perhaps the incident at Vega, when they had lost one of their ships to Axford, had made them more cautious.
Only now it was under attack. A bright light played across its hull while its cockpit swung in erratic circles. Strange tremors vibrated through it, as though a mighty and invisible hand was shaking it. The transmission sounded like a roomful of very large, very angry birds all screeching at once, presumably the Roaches within, calling for help. Then the impossible happened: a second cockpit grew out of the side of the ailing hole ship. It spun in an increasing arc to match orbits with the first, while behind it, the core body of the hole ship seemed to swell in size.
“Oh, my God,” she mumbled in growing disbelief. Somebody had relocated a ship inside it.
And she knew instinctively that there could only be one somebody fool enough to try something as dangerous as this: General Francis T. Axford. It had to be.
The screeching from the Roaches reached a higher note as the two cockpits chased each other around the violently merged body of the hole ship. Hatzis kept track of them but only with great difficulty. Axford’s ship might not have been the best equipped, but he’d made up for that with surprise.
Two rapid course changes brought his cockpit in contact with the Roach’s, and suddenly it was all over. The alien vessels merged into one like two droplets of oil colliding. Once the meniscus was breached, there were no longer two vessels. There was just the one. And then the screeching stopped. A minute later, the other Roach hole ship—which had hung to one side, observing—disappeared.
Hatzis couldn’t see what was taking place inside the new, l
arger cockpit. No doubt Axford was taking control of the situation as best he could. Despite his lack of a physical body, she had no doubts that he was, nevertheless, quite capable of attacking the unprepared Roaches. She smiled to herself as she pictured him as he might have looked in olden days, swinging on a rope between tall ships with a cutlass clasped between his teeth. He was a modern-day pirate, to be sure.
Would he take prisoners, this time? She imagined that would depend entirely on how much resistance they offered.
If he did win, there could be no denying that this was a major coup. Not only had he realized the alien AIs could merge, but he’d taken it one step further to attempt to merge the actual physical aspects of the hole ships, too. She was impressed, but she wasn’t necessarily surprised. Spinner technology was so advanced, after all; why shouldn’t they be able to merge materials and structures like they were made of putty? Whether it was the result of nanotech or a deeper comprehension of the nature of matter, she didn’t know. Nor did she care right now. The end result was the important thing.
And Axford had planned it from the beginning. Merging AIs had been a good enough plan—and a convincing one. It would have been enough to satisfy her. But he’d had bigger stakes in mind. This way, he not only got his hands on the information they needed, but also on a—
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