Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  What? Just what exactly did they have here? A super-hole ship? What, she asked herself, could this one do that the others could not?

  The new, combined hole ship was similar in shape to the ordinary ones, except for the double-lobed configuration of the cockpit. In cross section, it would look like a figure eight on its side. The extrusions that both Roaches and Axford had added were looking very much the worse for wear, as though they’d been melted, then frozen again. Whether it could perform any advanced maneuvers, she couldn’t tell—nor would she be able to until it was properly tested. And that would only happen if Axford won whatever battle was taking place inside between himself and the Roaches.

  The configuration stabilized. The light and vibrations faded. A long minute passed while everyone in the system—the colonists of Hera; Thor and Alander, Hatzis presumed, in the other hole ship; and Hatzis herself—waited to see what the combined hole ship would do and who would emerge the victor.

  Hatzis steeled herself for a confrontation. If the Roaches had won and they attacked the Fred Adams again, she would defend it herself with what little she had. If they summoned the Starfish, she would do everything in her power to ferry the engrams elsewhere as quickly as possible. If it was a war, she couldn’t just stand by and watch it happen.

  A click announced the beginning of a new broadcast. Hatzis physically leaned closer to the screen, as if doing so would somehow make it easier to hear. Old habits died hard, even for her.

  She jumped when a harsh double shriek echoed through the cockpit. Dissonant, rapid-fire syllables wound around each other in an insane duet, less like mutated birdsong than like a tortured opera recording. It sounded like someone was screaming out of both of them at once in maniacal triumph.

  Two sets of vocal cords, Thor had said.

  Then it stopped, and her ears seemed to ring in the sudden silence.

  “That’s Roach for ‘mission accomplished,’ “ said Axford, and Hatzis sighed at the sound of his voice. “More or less, anyway. Thanks for your cooperation, Peter and Caryl—both Caryls, actually. I suggest we take this powwow back to Hermes and discuss in private what to do next. Axford out.”

  The double hole ship vanished.

  “Both Caryls?” repeated Alander over the same frequency. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “Would someone first like to tell us what’s going on?” asked Tarsem Jones.

  Hatzis shook her head and decided to leave them to it.

  “Arachne,” she said. “Take me to Vega.”

  As the view of Hera faded from the screen, she settled back into the couch to reflect upon their triumph—as well as to consider what to do about the Axford problem.

  1.2.2

  Two brilliant points of light swept across the half yellow, half black sky, dragging Alander’s attention with them. When they were gone, the vista above had fallen into place.

  He was standing on the moon of an enormous gas giant. It was larger than any he’d ever seen before, almost certainly a borderline brown dwarf. It probably had numerous moons, with the one he was on having an atmosphere capable of supporting life. The gas giant clearly occupied an orbit somewhere in the habitable zone of its parent star.

  Alander didn’t know which star it was or what the world he was standing on had been christened. He didn’t even know the mission name that had been sent to it. But he did know whose eyes he was seeing it through.

  Fighting disorientation every second he stayed in conSense, he scanned the contents of the Overseer file that one of Hatzis’s many copies had sent during the daily broadcast from Sothis. Axford’s comment to Hatzis earlier (You really should tell your mother superior to find a better way of broadcasting her secrets) had piqued his curiosity and sent him browsing through the previous transmissions. It hadn’t taken him long to uncover what Axford had been referring to. Many such transmissions had been broadcast from all over surveyed space and marked for the sole attention of Caryl Hatzis, so the interface software wouldn’t allow anyone else to stumble across them. At first, the exact nature of the files had eluded him; none of the various encryption codes he used to crack them had worked. It was only on his way back to Vega when he’d had more time to study them that he realized exactly what they were.

  He had enough trouble dealing with his own engram without delving into someone else’s, but if this was the only way he could find out what Hatzis was up to, then that was what he would do. Clenching his teeth, he concentrated on what he was seeing, all the while trying to make sure he remained himself throughout the process.

  A yellow gas giant roughly ten times larger than Jupiter, a moon world, and, if his guess was right, two space vehicles breaking orbit. A name: Donald Schievenin. And a thought (his or hers; it was hard to separate the two): He’ll be perfect.

  The file ended abruptly with an intense rush of something he could only describe as Hatzis. The first time it had happened, it had left him dazed for almost an hour. Now, he knew better and pulled out from the files before the rush peaked. Still, he was left blinking and disoriented by brief but powerful glimpses of another person’s inner life: an apple orchard somewhere on Earth, before the Spike; a weathered man sitting behind a desk, toying with a paperweight; a dog’s body, cut neatly in half and placed in a cardboard box; a feeling of sorrow so piercing it didn’t leave him for ten minutes.

  He sat on the edge of his cot in the berth Pearl had provided him, breathing deeply as he fought to suppress the residual effects of having dipped into Hatzis’s mind. It was difficult, he found, to sift through her feelings for the relevant information, but he was sure the name Donald Schievenin was the key or point to the transmission. All of the five files he’d so far checked had mentioned names, so it had to be important; he simply didn’t know how important. Or why, for that matter.

  When he had once again established where he began and the memories of Caryl Hatzis stopped, he tried another file, dipping under the surface of her experience with all the nervousness of a new swimmer.

  This time, a double star. No colony world, only dead stations scattered throughout a widely dispersed halo of comets. And a thought: Barren, but the resources should be useful. No name.

  Alander timed it better, opting out of the file before the rush of Hatzis came on. He seemed to have tapped into some sort of catalogue of colonies, but he couldn’t figure out why she was conducting it in secret. What the hell was she trying to hide?

  The next and last—he could feel the cracks in his mind spreading each time he dipped into her—took him to a world that was almost the spitting image of Earth. Blue skies, white clouds, 70 percent ocean. His/Hatzis’s heart ached to see it from his/her position in geosynchronous orbit. The gifts stood out as golden glints of light in a sparkling starscape, illuminated by a yellow sun that could easily have been Sol, as long as he/she didn’t look too closely.

  Another Cleo Samson, came the thought. At least we know what to expect from her.

  Then the rush, and he was carried away by feelings of resentment and annoyance. Samson and Hatzis were polar opposites in many respects, and Alander found it strange that so much of his recent life had been bound up with either or both of them. Neither was a romantic entanglement; the one person he longed to see again, in that context, was the one they’d yet to find in any target system: Lucia Benck. His hand reached for the pendant hanging against his chest. Bliss was it in that dawn...? Lucia’s absence was increasingly puzzling for Alander, and it did nothing to ease the ache in his heart.

  Cleo Samson’s name stayed with him as he came down from the recording. At least we know what to expect from her. Hatzis’s words echoed in his thoughts. What had she meant? What was special about Samson in the mission he had just visited? In Adrasteia, he’d been forced to erase her engram when she sabotaged the mission. Driven to psychosis by orders buried in her subconscious by UNESSPRO itself, she had been compelled to attempt to force Alander to return to Earth in order to notify her superiors of the discovery of
alien life. The overpowering conflict between her orders and those of the mission supervisor, Caryl Hatzis, had split her mind apart like a walnut, almost killing everyone in the process.

  No one had known who the traitors were at the beginning of each mission. Some had frozen when news arrived that Earth had been destroyed, unable to operate around orders insisting that they report to superiors that no longer existed. Others were still unknown. Alander didn’t doubt that out of the thousand survey missions, he himself could have been one such UNESSPRO operative. It could have literally been any one of the sixty surveyors—even Hatzis, although he was sure she would see herself above such treachery.

  Donald Schievenin...

  Maybe this wasn’t a catalog of colonies and colonists, after all, he thought, but rather a roll call of traitors. Was that what Hatzis was disseminating among the various versions of herself?

  He had thought that the Congress of Orphans Axford had referred to might be the beginnings of a group mind composed of the fragments of her engrams. The original Caryl Hatzis had, after all, been a part of a much larger being in Sol, a being composed of many diverse parts and as far beyond his comprehension as he was to a dog, so it wouldn’t have surprised him if it turned out she wanted to establish a similar network again. But this didn’t seem to have anything to do with it—unless that was what the emotive rash at the end was all about? He shook his head firmly. No. The Congress had to be something else.

  He didn’t know. Whatever these files were cataloguing, it was unlikely he’d find any answers in a hurry. The version of Hatzis from Thor had already informed her original that he knew about the secret transmissions (he had scanned her report and found that out all too easily, confirming his suspicion that she had been doing much more than “reviewing the data” after each midday broadcast), so chances were that it wasn’t going to be so easy in the future to access such information. He idly considered confronting either or both of them with what he had learned but decided that would gain him little at the moment.

  Arachne patiently put the transmissions back into storage for him to access later. Not arguing with Thor throughout their mission together had probably confounded her expectations, and not coming out firing over this would no doubt do the same. There were better ways, he decided, to get her back up.

  * * *

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  He did his best to sound angry as he walked along the pressurized gangplank that Axford had rigged up to connect Arachne to Pearl. Still wary of the ex-general, Sol had refused to enter the main compound in Hermes, fearing a trap similar to the one that had disposed of the alien hole ship that had attempted to steal Axford’s gifts. Instead, their host had provided an unused base in the middle of nowhere, rapidly refurbished by nanotech to accommodate the two hole ships.

  The original Caryl Hatzis looked up from her habitual position on the couch. “I don’t have to explain anything to you, Peter.”

  “You put the exercise at risk,” he growled. “As well as yourself! I mean, what if they’d seen you? What if we’d thought you were them? It was stupid and irresponsible!”

  She tried to affect a casual, dismissive shrug, but he could tell she was annoyed by his attack. “What can I say? Curiosity got the better of me, I guess.”

  “Don’t give me that shit,” he said. “I want to know what were you doing there in the first place. There’s no way you could’ve come from Sothis in time. You must’ve been there already—or at least in the area. Don’t you trust us to do our work properly? Is that it? Were you snooping around, checking up on us?”

  That point struck a chord with the Hatzis from Thor, who followed him into Arachne and stood sullenly behind him, her arms tightly folded.

  The original Hatzis stood. “Since when is it your right to question what I do?”

  “Since you started putting other people’s lives at risk,” he shot back. “There are precious few of us left as it is, without you pulling that sort of crap.”

  “You don’t need to remind me about how few of us are left. I remember that better than you ever could.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that your world was gone the day you left on the Frank Tipler. You turned your back on everything you knew quite willingly and with no hope of ever returning. But I had everything ripped out from under me—and not once, but twice.” Her eyes blazed. “So don’t ever accuse me of not appreciating how little is left, Peter, because I know better than anyone exactly how much has been lost.”

  The intensity of her response startled him. He walked around the cockpit, shaking his head.

  “Listen, Caryl,” he said patiently. “I said I’d behave before I left Sothis. How about you? If you expect me to believe that you truly have all of our interests at heart, then you’re going to have to start caring about more than just yourself.”

  Her glare intensified; he’d obviously hit a nerve.

  Before she had a chance to respond, however, a small chime announced the arrival of Axford’s hybrid hole ship, Mercury, on the far side of the modified hangar.

  Just far enough away so that the AI lobes can’t merge, Alander thought. He thinks we’re going to try the same trick he taught us.

  “Greetings!” Axford’s voice issued from the hole ship’s internal speakers. The screen behind Hatzis showed a multi-angle view of Vega, with close-ups on the planetary fragments and Hermes in particular. Suddenly, in the center, a new window opened from where Axford’s face beamed. “And a special welcome to you, Caryl Hatzis of Sol. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Although I expended a large amount of personal energy trying to avoid the Spike, I’m genuinely fascinated to be meeting one of its by-products.”

  Alander could see that this comment from Axford only riled Hatzis even more.

  “I’m not a product of the Spike,” she said frostily. “I’m a victim of it.”

  Axford laughed. “That’s a fine distinction, don’t you think? One might even be tempted to call it pedantry.” He raised a hand to ward off an angry retort, continuing quickly with: “I’ve been listening to your reports with interest, Caryl, and I feel I’ve gotten to know you quite well. But I’d consider it an honor to have the opportunity to get to know you even better, and to that end, I’d like to invite you over here to join me in Mercury. It would give you a chance to meet my guests, too.”

  She shook her head. “There’s no way I’m leaving this hole ship, Axford,” she said. “Not with you anywhere nearby.”

  “Are you certain?” He didn’t seem to have taken offense at her comment. ‘This will be a historic occasion, after all.”

  “Peter and Thor will go,” said Hatzis. “History can remember them instead.”

  Alander smiled, amused by the interplay between Axford and Hatzis. He had no doubt that Frank the Ax would love to get his hands on the subtle technologies present in the original Cary Hatzis’s body. She knew it, too, and she wasn’t going to give him the opportunity. He might have feared the destructive transition of the Spike itself, but Alander was certain that he wouldn’t have had any qualms about reaping some of its benefits.

  “Once again, we’re the ones going over the top,” Alander said dryly.

  “This isn’t trench warfare, Peter,” the original Hatzis said irritably.

  “But it’s still our lives being put on the line, isn’t it, Caryl?” He made the point more for Thor’s benefit than for Sol’s. Truth was, there was no way he’d want to miss the opportunity to speak to an alien species. Nevertheless, it did peeve him that the original Hatzis had felt it was her place to speak for him and her copy.

  He waved Thor toward to the exit. “After you.”

  Thor nodded stiffly and led the way out of Arachne. Another pressurized tube had formed, connecting the first tube to Mercury. They tugged themselves along it in free fall, their artificial bodies having no problems with the lack of gravity. Inner-ear design had been a major consideration when their genomes had been tailored for spac
e. Alander vividly remembered—or felt that he did— his first orbital flight while training for the UNESSPRO missions. He’d thrown up almost immediately and spent the rest of the flight nauseous. Being able to enjoy the absence of gravity was something, at least, that he could appreciate about his new life.

  The airlock of Mercury’s hybrid cockpit hung invitingly open. The massive bulk of its central sphere, twice as voluminous as before, hid Arachne and Pearl from view. Alander had a strange feeling of stepping into the unknown as he walked across the threshold. At first glance, the cockpit interior appeared much the same as any other hole ship, except that there were two couches and two screens. The original design was perfectly adaptable, though, so that was no great change. There was simply a greater capacity for space, Alander assumed; if they wanted more room, it could be easily accommodated. A section of his field of view shimmered, and a conSense projection of Francis Axford appeared before him.

  “Thank you for your help,” he said. “Your assistance was absolutely crucial in the success of this plan.”

  “You were intending to do this all along,” said Thor. “Weren’t you?”

  “Of course he was,” put in Alander. “Overlapping AIs would have been too modest an objective for Frank the Ax. Right, General? Especially when records in the gifts told you that so much more was possible.”

  Axford smiled and shrugged. “They did suggest it, yes,” he admitted. “Although I didn’t know for certain. But I suspect that a much deeper understanding of matter is at play here—as well as energy. The hulls of these ships deny analysis. Who’s to say they’re made of matter at all? And if they’re not, why can’t they be manipulated as easily as we would mould a magnetic field?” His voice reflected his obvious excitement. “These hole ships are like building blocks! Aren’t you curious to see just how much larger they can go?”