Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “That doesn’t mean they won’t come back, though,” Genovese added. “We’ve some evidence of back-filling, although the data really is too patchy to be certain. Some of us are under the impression that no one will be safe as long as we’re anywhere that’s likely to be targeted by the Starfish.”

  “So you think we should leave surveyed space entirely?” Hatzis asked her. “Migrate to another section of the galaxy entirely?”

  Genovese looked uncomfortable. “Not in the short term, no. I was thinking more of moving the colonies at risk to the sites the Starfish have already struck. I doubt they’d return to a system they’ve already wiped clean of life, so the risks would have to be greatly reduced. As long as no one breaks communicator silence in one of those systems, we should be safe.”

  Wyra sneered. “Dead systems,” he said.

  “Why not?” Genovese retorted. “Adrasteia, Varuna, Athena, Thor—there are plenty to go around, and most of them are habitable. Yes, some have sustained long-term environmental damage, but that’s not necessarily a problem.”

  “Maybe not for you,” Wyra said. “For me, it’d be like sleeping in someone’s grave.”

  “But isn’t that better than dying yourself? Besides, it’d only be temporary. Once we’re sure the Starfish have gone, we can move back to what’s left.”

  “I’d rather set myself adrift in interstellar space, thanks. No one would find us there.”

  Sol nodded. “That’s a possibility,” she said. “But, Ali, you said there was a third option.”

  Genovese hesitated, a look of uncertainty passing across her face. She glanced at Donald Schievenin, on Hatzis’s right, his artificial body taller than most, his features elongated in a rough approximation of his normal face.

  “You’re not going to like it, Sol,” he said.

  “Well, drawing it out isn’t going to help.” Again she looked around the room. “Is someone going to tell me?”

  “Secession,” said Wyra, the slight sneer on his face giving the word the emphasis of an insult.

  She hesitated for a nanosecond, an instant too small for any of the engrams to notice, even if they were fast-tracking their processing speeds. She knew exactly what he meant by that single word, but she feigned innocence to give herself time to think.

  “Secession from whom, Otto?”

  “From everything,” he said. “From the Spinners; from you.”

  “What difference is that going to make? Ignoring us won’t stop the Starfish from killing you.”

  “They can’t kill us if they don’t know we’re there,” said Genovese. “So far, they’ve only attacked colonies using the gifts. They haven’t visited or harmed the rest. Maybe that’s not a coincidence. Maybe they home in on more than just the communicator broadcasts.”

  “If that was the case,” said Sol, “then we’d all be dead right now.”

  “Maybe it’s the Gifts themselves they see as a threat.” Wyra waved his arms for emphasis. “People are dying out there, Caryl, and we don’t know why. But if we drop the Gifts now, then maybe we can at least give them a few more days to live.”

  “Crap, Otto,” Sol jumped in incredulously. “The Gifts aren’t some hot potato you can simply put down because you’re fingers are getting a little burned.”

  “Don’t throw these trite aphorisms at us, Caryl, please. We’re talking about people here, not—”

  “I know that,” said Sol forcefully. “All I’m saying is that you can’t abandon something just because people are dying right now. Where would we be if humanity had turned its back on electricity following the first electric shock? Or dismantled the telephone system after the first obscene phone call?”

  He scowled at her. “Downplaying the magnitude of this isn’t helping either. We’re not talking about someone getting a goddamn—”

  “You came here in Prometheus, didn’t you?” she cut in.

  Wyra stopped, blinking in confusion at her abrupt change of tack. “So?”

  “What would humanity have been like if we’d refused his gift of fire?”

  He became instantly angered, knowing full well he was being mocked. “To hell with you, Caryl. Some of us don’t have your confidence in the Spinners. They don’t care what’s good for us. They just toss us these baubles to make themselves feel magnanimous as they pass by, on their way to God only knows where! They don’t give a damn whether the gifts end up destroying us. Why should they? There must be thousands of other species out there. Who’ll miss us?”

  Sol stared at him tight-lipped during his rant, wanting him to get it out of his system before she said anything else. In her head, she conducted a hurried, nonverbal conversation with Gou Mang:

  WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME ABOUT THIS?

  THERE WAS NO TIME—

  YOU DON’T NEED TIME. USE THE OVERSEER CHANNELS. TALK TO ME LIKE THIS.

  I’M SORRY. I DIDN’T—

  IT DOESN’T MATTER. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT I HAVEN’T WORKED OUT HOW TO FIX SENESCENCE YET. JUST REMEMBER WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO HERE, AND BE ON THE BALL. BE AN ASSET.

  I’LL TRY, SOL.

  “—CAN’T EXPECT US TO SIT HERE LIKE IDIOTS WHILE YOU—”

  “That’s enough, Otto.” She felt like a pale midget surrounded by green-skinned giants, but when she spoke,

  Wyra fell quiet, and she knew she had all of their attention. “Your simplistic analysis of the situation has a certain persuasiveness, I’ll admit, and I’ll certainly be interested to know who the others are that agree with you. I’ll also be quite happy to accept whatever gifts you’re planning not to use while you bury your heads in the sand waiting for your asses to be kicked.”

  Wyra and a couple of the others bristled at this, but she went on without giving them chance to voice their indignation.

  “Because that is what will happen, people, I assure you.” She stared around the room, daring any one of them to defy her. “If you aren’t prepared to do anything now, then you aren’t doing humanity any favors, believe me, because clearly what connects you to humanity in the first place has already left you. You’re not human anymore. You’re just some nth-generation copy waiting to be erased. You’re just echoes of the real thing. You might as well just get the Starfish on the blower right now and have them put you out of your misery. You sure as hell aren’t any good to me anymore.”

  In the silence that followed, she breathed heavily through her nose, delivering oxygen to an anger that burned with more heat than even she had expected. “Look, you can do what you want to, Otto, but I’m not going to sit around and watch humanity die again. If fighting for survival means sacrificing a few individuals along the way, then so be it—even if one of those individuals is me.”

  Everyone in the room remained silent, as if hanging on her every word, which gave her the confidence to go on: “I’ll be the first to admit that at this moment in time I haven’t got the faintest idea of what we should be doing, or how we can possibly overcome the odds stacked against us. But I do know this: today I spoke to an alien whose species had been tailing the Starfish for twenty-five hundred years. If they can survive that long, then there’s no reason why we can’t as well.”

  “But in all that time,” said Wyra, in a tone that was more subdued than before, “they haven’t managed to find a solution to the Starfish problem, have they?”

  “No,” said Hatzis simply. “But that’s not to say there isn’t one, either. Look, I’m not trying to tell you that this is going to be easy. It’s not! But I believe it can be done, and to do it I’m going to need all the help I can get. Everyone else, everyone who wants to stand around crying about how unfair life is, you can all go and get the fuck out of here right now, because your whining isn’t helping the situation. If anything, it’s holding the rest of us back. You’re wasting my time, and I don’t need you. None of us do.”

  They stared at her for a good twenty seconds before someone spoke. It was Cleo Samson, of all people, of Hammon.

  “Otto doesn’t spea
k for all of us, Caryl,” she said. “Most of us are willing to do whatever it takes to overcome this problem. Just tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”

  Sol forced herself to be calm, slowing her heart rate and reducing the levels of some of the primitive fight-or-flight hormones rushing through her bloodstream.

  “Okay,” she said after a few seconds. “Then this is what I want. Our biggest problem at the moment is communications. We’re too spread out, and there aren’t enough hole ships to plug the gaps. We’re also vulnerable the way we are, spread out at random across surveyed space. I do agree with Otto in that respect: I simply don’t see the point in making us even more vulnerable, though. I think Ali’s second proposition has some merit, too: we’ve yet to see any Starfish activity in systems that have already been attacked, so they might be good havens, if only temporarily—until the threat has passed.”

  “That would mean leaving the gifts behind,” said Samson.

  Sol nodded. “But I’m not suggesting we abandon the gifts entirely. I know we can’t afford to do that.” She thought as quickly as she could, formulating a blueprint for survival on the hop. “We’re going to tackle this three ways. One: colonies at risk will up ship and regroup in two or three of the dead colony systems. No more than that because we need to reduce the number of hole ships we have committed to communications. I know it’ll take time to find a way to move the Overseer cores and any other hardware we need, so I suggest we get moving on that right away. Two: any colony that has a problem with occupying a dead system will come here, to Sothis. And, three: there are holes in our knowledge of the gifts. That’s become obvious to me in the last day. We’ll need to conduct an intensive search through the Libraries for more practical applications of the Spinner technology. I suggest we concentrate that research in one system close to the front, where the Starfish have yet to reach. Juno, perhaps, in Gamma Serpens. You’re from there, right, Jayme?”

  Jayme Sivio stirred at the rear of the gathering from where he’d been watching the argument. “That’s right,” he said. “And I’m sure you’d be welcome there.”

  “Who’s your SMC? It’s not me, is it?”

  “No, it’s Donald.” Sivio nodded at the version of Schievenin from Fujin. “Our contact is Kingsley Oborn.”

  And he’s also your UNESSPRO traitor, Hatzis confirmed to herself. “Perfect,” she said aloud. “While the evacuations are under way, all volunteers for this project should make themselves known. We can reclaim Overseer resources from the senescent colonies, so processing time shouldn’t be a problem. We must make sure, however, that everything is mobile so it can be pulled out at a moment’s notice. While it’s all very well to make the leap to permanent bodies—” She indicated the crowd of similar faces before her, cursing Peter Alander for setting the precedent. “—I still think we need to remember that we’re more at risk this way. Legs can only run so fast; free engrams can travel at the speed of light. Any questions?”

  “What about the other aliens?” asked Wyra, his posture and tone no longer so confrontational. “You haven’t told us how we’re going to deal with them, on top of everything else.”

  “I’ve already taken steps to explore that problem, and I expect word to come soon.” Assuming Axford doesn’t cock everything up, she added to herself. “We have a report on our books of a hole ship that went missing near pi-1 Ursa Major. I’d like to send a mission to investigate the disappearance. If there are more, they could constitute evidence of direct aggression. We might have already been at war for some time without even knowing it,”

  She thought of the systems supposedly raided by the Yuhl then destroyed by Starfish that had come following their call. If this was true, the Yuhl had a lot to answer for. But she didn’t know how far she could trust Frank Axford. He might have reasons for encouraging aggression between the human survivors and the Yuhl. Perhaps he hoped to pick up the pieces once everything settled down.

  The eyes of the small crowd were still on her. “Otto, if you or anyone genuinely don’t want to be part of this, I’m not going to force you. You know that. I’m not a tyrant. You are all free to follow your own counsel. Just remember this: we are all that’s left of the human race. If we fail, everything dies with us. Not just our hopes for the future, but the memories of the past as well. Everything that makes us unique will end up as a footnote in a Spinner Library for some other alien species to read about someday—and I don’t want that. If we can survive this, we can survive anything the universe throws at us.” Heads were nodding. Enough of the rhetoric, she thought. “We have work to do, people.”

  The crowd broke up into smaller groups, muttering among themselves. Not everyone was satisfied, but the crisis had been averted for the moment, at least. Hatzis sensed a flurry of electromagnetic communications as hole ships were summoned. She left the room, happy to leave the logistics of docking and loading passengers to her various selves on Sothis and off. Opening a link to Gou Mang, she said, I WANT EVERY SPARE HOLE SHIP HERE

  WITHIN THE DAY. HOW MANY DO WE HAVE NOW?

  SEVEN.

  AND WHEN THE COLONIES GROUP HERE, WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE THAT DOUBLE FIGURES AT LEAST.

  She pondered how Axford had created a larger hole ship by merging two into one. Using that sort of technique, moving whole colonies around would be a lot simpler.

  BROADCAST A REQUEST TO ALL COLONIES TO CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING SYSTEMS FOR RECOLONIZATION: UPSILON AQUARIUS, HD194640, 94 AQUARIUS, AND BSC8477.

  THE FIRST ONES ATTACKED?

  AND THE FARTHEST AWAY. WE MIGHT BE PUTTING OUR EGGS IN ONE OR TWO BASKETS, BUT AT LEAST THOSE BASKETS WILL BE A GOOD DISTANCE APART. WE’LL KEEP A BARE MINIMUM OF HOLE SHIPS STATIONED IN EACH REFUGEE SYSTEM: ENOUGH TO PULL OUT IF SOMETHING DOES HAPPEN, PLUS A COUPLE TO PROVIDE COMMUNICATIONS RELAYS. THAT SHOULD INCREASE THE NUMBER AT OUR DISPOSAL.

  THE NEWER COLONIES WON’T BE EASY TO MOVE: PERENDI, HERA, MEDEINE, JUMIS...

  I KNOW.

  Sol pondered this all the way back to Arachne. The novelty of the gifts inevitably led to an increased feeling of invulnerability. It was hard to believe, with so many age-old questions being answered everywhere they looked, that the ultimate one—of killing or being killed—was still being asked.

  They’ll learn, she thought to herself. They’ll have to. One can only take baby-sitting so far.

  * * *

  By the time the next midday deadline arrived, she had prepared a long report detailing her experiences with Francis Axford and the Yuhl. It told the colonies everything they needed to know about the situation and closed with a personal plea for both calm and levelheadedness. The last thing the survivors needed was to panic or to cut themselves off from the support networks they would need in order to survive the coming weeks.

  Preparations for the evacuations were already under way. Hole ships had been sent to the four proposed refugee systems to ensure they were still fallow. Dormant facilities on and around Sothis were coming back to full operation in readiness for an influx of colonists in both physical and virtual form. Hatzis expected around a third of the remaining colonies to take up her offer of sanctuary. About half would opt for hiding out in the refugee systems. The rest would either do as Wyra suggested—hunker down and hope no one noticed them—or they would follow some other scheme. She wouldn’t be surprised if more than one fell apart under the strain, either from internal conflict within the colony or from engram failure. Such losses would be regretted, but there was little she could do about them except make sure no resources were lost in the process.

  One of the first things she did was send an envoy to Juno in Gamma Serpens to discuss the establishment of an intensive library search in the system. She doubted she’d meet much resistance; it did mean more resources for the colony, after all, even if it did also slightly increase the risk of a Starfish attack (with so much flowing through the system, the chances of a slipup would be higher). But she wasn’t worried about a sneak attack at the moment. The Starfish front was sti
ll seventy to eighty light-years behind that of the Spinners. If everyone was careful, they should be safe for a couple of weeks yet.

  The hard-to-shift recent colonies weren’t a problem for the same reason, although it did make things difficult in other ways. While she had no doubt that colonies like Aretia in Van Maanen 2, which had been buzzed by the Yuhl, would be more than happy to contribute to the effort, they were also farther away from the action than she would have liked them to be. Supply lines would be stretched as a result. But, again, they would manage. She could bring in nongift resources from senescent colonies like New France in Tau Ceti. Some of them had nanofactured a great deal of equipment, as the colonists had on Sothis, that was otherwise lying around rotting or being stolen by the Yuhl.

  Only one thing irked her. During the broadcast of the last midday message, a short report had arrived from Thor. Sol had assumed that her engram was still with Axford and Alander, but the report indicated otherwise. Thor had left them planning to investigate the site of a possible alien staging point. Why she had left them wasn’t exactly clear, but she did say where she was going. She was heading to pi-1 Ursa Major to see if she could find any concrete evidence of Yuhl aggression. As Sol herself had reasoned, they couldn’t take Axford’s word carte blanche. She personally thought the aliens were as guilty as hell, but until she had a smoking gun, she couldn’t very well expect anyone to believe her, either.

  It all made a kind of sense. The trouble was, though, that Sol had already sent someone to pi-1 Ursa Major. Her engram from Tatenen, flying a hole ship liberated from the destruction of the colony in HD113283, had been happy to check out what had happened to her engram from Eos. The likelihood of both missions arriving at the same time was reasonably high, so Oosphere and Tatenen would most likely find nothing but Pearl and Thor, and both trips would have been a waste of time.

  When Thor finally did return, she would have words with her in regards to wasting valuable resources. She could understand her engram’s grief at the loss of her home colony, but still, if humanity was to survive, then everyone was going to have to put aside their personal needs and remain rational at all times. This type of impulsive behavior had the potential to put others at risk. If Sol realized that, why didn’t Thor?