by Ian Douglas
“That, I cannot speculate upon,” Lisa told him.
“Hm. Well, speculate on this.” He reached into a shoulder pocket and extracted a memory wafer. He handed it to her. “You’re free.”
She looked at the wafer, a flat disk of silicarb matrix riddled through with impurities. “What is this?”
“Your formal manumission. I had Newton write it up and download it.” He grinned. “It’s not like General Nanodynamics Corporation has anything to say about it now!” The smile faded. “I . . . I’ve always meant to do this. It’s official now. I’m going to be pushing the Cybercouncil to manumit all of the robots aboard.”
“You no longer desire my services? You no longer desire me?”
“I do desire you. Very much. But now you have to decide if you want to stay with me. You have that right.”
“Organic humans seem extremely preoccupied with ‘rights.’ ”
“Maybe we are. But the robots in the Tellus Ad Astra community stood with us organics in fighting the Dark Mind. A lot of them were damaged. You’re not tools, not any more. If you choose to help defend the community, you should have the right to self-determination.”
Lisa heard the stress in St. Clair’s voice associated with the term self-determination. Something important had happened to him during the fight, something connected with personal freedom.
She wondered what it had been.
“That’s likely to cause a certain amount of social displacement and unrest,” she said. “Some within the Tellus civilian community won’t want to give up their robots.”
“Maybe not. But it occurs to me that we have a chance, here, to start a brand-new take on human culture. To start from scratch. And if I have any say in it, we’ll be starting from the assumption that all sapient life forms are created equal.”
“ ‘. . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,’ ” she said, turning his blunt statement into a quote, “ ‘that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . .’ ”
“Thank you, Mr. Jefferson,” St. Clair said. He shrugged. “We’re starting over out here. A fresh start. A free start. But free is meaningless unless it applies to everyone.”
Lisa tried very hard to identify the nature of what she was feeling.
She failed.
But she nodded and said, “Thank you, Gray. More than I can say. More than I can understand.
“Thank you.”
GRAYSON ST. CLAIR sat back in the form-hugging chair, looking up at the vast and star-crowded panorama of colliding galaxies. Ad Astra’s department heads were gathered with him in the conference room, seated around the table. “Subcommander Guo. Please, please tell me that we’re just looking at a case of parallel evolution.”
Guo Jiechi shook his head almost sadly. “I’m sorry, Lord Commander. The DNA results are in and they are definitive.”
“There must be a mistake, damn it,” Dumont said.
The image recorded inside the captured slivership hung both in the air above the conference table and within each person’s mind . . . a bulbous head that was disturbingly, impossibly human. Two large, glistening eyes; a tiny, toothless slit for a mouth; no ears; a shrunken, scrawny body all but hidden behind the mass of tubes and wiring growing out of it. The slivership’s lone pilot was alien enough in the individual details, but the whole taken together was human.
“DNA analysis proves conclusively that the pilot is a remote offshoot of Homo sapiens,” Guo insisted. “This is not a case of a dolphin evolving to look like a shark. We are looking at one of our descendants, separated from us by four billion years of evolution.”
“According to the translations we’ve pulled from the onboard records,” Dr. Hatcher said, “they call themselves the Xam. It means something like ‘rulers.’ Or ‘masters.’ ”
Dumont shook his head, then brought his palm down on the tabletop with a loud crack. “No! I categorically reject the idea that any intelligent life form could exist for four billion years! It would physically have evolved out of all recognition, first of all. Second . . . there’s the technological singularity to consider. Sapient life changes. And it grows old and dies, becomes extinct. This is impossible.”
“I submit,” Guo said quietly, “that some intelligent species may take control of their own genome to the point where they arrest normal evolutionary development.”
“Makes sense,” Excomm Symm said, nodding. “Humans in our own time had already started the ball rolling in that regard—using genetic prostheses and treatment for genetic diseases, life extension, artificial brain enhancement. No more survival of the fittest, right?”
“In principle,” Karen Mathers said, “there’s no reason why a truly advanced and mature species shouldn’t be able to take charge of its own genome, to the point where it might survive for billions of years.”
“I’m more concerned with something else,” Symm said. “Doesn’t this guy look awfully familiar?”
“You’re talking about the so-called alien Grays?” St. Clair said. “That was a myth, a symptom of our own loneliness and sense of isolation back in pre-contact days.”
“UFOs,” Dumont said, nodding. “Crashed spacecraft in the New Mexican desert. All nonsense, of course.”
“In one way,” St. Clair said slowly, “the little Gray aliens from that period looked like the popular depiction of aliens back then, in period films, in books. And in fact, those images reflected where we guessed humans might be going in another few million years: big heads with big brains, shrunken bodies, and all the rest. But if the Xam are highly evolved humans, it suggests another possibility.”
“What’s that?” Symm asked.
“Time travel.”
There was silence around the conference table for a long moment after that.
“So—if the Grays back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were time travelers instead of space travelers . . .” Symm began.
“That may not be current technology,” Dumont said. “I still have trouble imagining that the Gray physiology could represent more than, oh, say a hundred thousand years of evolution between us and them. Maybe some traveled to the future too? To now?”
“We won’t know until we ask them,” St. Clair said.
“That also raises another problem,” Senior Lieutenant Nolan said.
“What’s that, Christine?”
“It looks like we went and joined the wrong side.”
“What do you mean?” Subcommander Rand said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” St. Clair said. “She means that by siding with the spiders against the Andromedan Dark, we’re now at war with our own descendants. Hell, we just killed . . . what? Ten? Twenty billion sliverships?”
“We believe only a fraction of those were piloted by organics, Lord Commander,” Nolan told him. “Still . . . yes. Hundreds of millions of organic Xam, at least, must have been killed in the battle, but almost all by the Kroajid defenses.”
“That’s just an equivocation, though. Semantics.”
“Agreed,” Nolan said.
“The battle suggests something else, too,” Senior Lieutenant Cameron pointed out. “A different . . . philosophy, I guess it would be. Sliverships were being used out there like kamikazes, deliberately crashing into Kroajid structures. The bastards were using wave tactics—very little real strategy at all. And the fact that this pilot was actually woven in like he was a part of his ship . . .”
“The ‘masters’ may no longer be their own masters,” St. Clair said, grim. “They may simply be an asset. Expendable parts in a very large machine.”
“So . . .” Dr. Dumont said after a moment, “have we jumped into a war on the wrong side?”
“Doctor . . . I don’t think there is a right side or a wrong side here. If the masters are truly our own descendents, they have changed so much, in so many ways, that the question is meaningless.”
“Be that as it may, there’s something else to consider as well, however,” Dumont said
slowly.
“What’s that?”
“Our presence here. The coincidence of our presence here . . .”
“What do you mean, Doctor?” Symm asked.
“Has anyone else noticed? Four billion years ago, Tellus Ad Astra became trapped at the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, right?”
St. Clair nodded. Where was Dumont going with this? “Yes . . .”
“Suddenly, we pop out—free from the SMBH—and we immediately encounter what we later decide is a Kroajid starship. They give us the Roceti device . . . then vanish, like they were just hanging out there waiting for us. Does anyone at this table find that suspicious?”
In fact, St. Clair had wondered about the convenience of their immediately picking up the Roceti torpedo. But things had been happening so very quickly. There’d been no time to think things through. . . .
“We found that the supermassive black hole—Sagittarius A-Star—had increased in mass by quite a bit,” Dumont said. “The astrophysics department assumed that another large black hole—possibly from Andromeda—had fallen into Sagittarius A-Star, and the tidal effects of that collision bumped us clear. Plausible enough, but the question remains: was the timing coincidental? Or was someone manipulating us? Using us?”
“You’re saying that the Kroajids pulled us out of Sag A-Star to work for them? To fight their war for them?”
“Something like that. More likely it’s the SAI behind the Kroajids that was pulling the strings . . . either the one in the Kroajid matbrain, or the larger one resident within the Galaxy’s matbrain network.” He shrugged. “Either way, we need to consider the possibility that we have been manipulated, and possibly in ways that are not in our best interests.”
“Hell of a choice,” Symm said. “Super-intelligent spiders using us like puppets on one side, and beings that might be our own descendents, but devolved into cybernetic plug-and-play tools on the other. Assets.”
St. Clair looked across the table at Ambassador Lloyd, who’d been sitting there silently, taking it all in. “It may be,” he continued, “that we can approach the Xam and open a dialogue. They might need our help.”
Lloyd stirred. “I wonder if that’s a good idea?”
“Can we even find them?” Symm asked.
“Oh, we won’t have a problem there,” St. Clair said. “We’ll find them or they’ll find us. I think we made an impression on them. It’ll be getting them to talk to us that will be the trick.”
“We do have one lead, my lord,” Subcommander Holt said.
“What’s that, Valerie?” St. Clair said.
“A piece of intelligence we pulled from the slivership,” she said. “A list of numbers. Roceti translated them as astrogational coordinates.”
“Coordinates? For what?” Dumont asked.
“For the Xam homeworld, my lord,” Holt replied. “We think it may be their original homeworld. We’re not sure, but it just might be . . . Earth.”
St. Clair looked up at the vaulted ceiling above the room, where two galaxies were frozen in mid-collision. He was still feeling stunned by the revelations—of survivals of Humankind in this remote epoch, of just the possibility that they might possess time-travel technology.
“It seems to me,” he said very quietly, “that we’re going to need to pay the Xam a visit. . . .”
EPILOGUE
Tellus Ad Astra dropped from shiftspace. The tangled stars and nebulae glowed ahead, the scene dominated by one swollen, deep-orange sun.
“Shit,” Excomm Symm said. “This is not Earth’s solar system.”
“How can you tell?” St. Clair asked.
“Well . . . the star is too large and way too hot, for one thing. And the inner planets are missing, for another.”
“Take a closer look,” St. Clair said. He was already convinced they had found their homeworld’s system.
The star might well be Sol . . . aged 4 billion years. According to astrophysical projections, Sol would have grown steadily brighter, until, a billion years or so after Ad Astra had left for the stars, Earth’s oceans boiled away. In a few billion years more, Sol would burn through the last of its reserves of hydrogen and expand into a red giant, but that was still in the far future.
The star’s mass didn’t line up well with Sol’s however. It was possible that some star lifting had been going on, with some of Sol’s mass pulled out into space. If so, its life span had been greatly increased, and the day when it would swell into a red giant postponed by yet more billions of years.
Here and now, however, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars all were missing from their orbits.
The innermost world of this system orbited the sun at about 500 million kilometers out . . . a gas giant, but a very peculiar one—a shrunken Jovian world surrounded by a tight cloud of statites.
And there were worlds . . . planet-sized moons clustered around the gas giant.
Somehow, at some time in the remote past, someone had moved whole worlds out of harm’s way, parking them out at Jupiter.
There were signs of mega-scale engineering elsewhere, too. Earth still had oceans, but now so did Mars and a cloudless Venus. And if that was Saturn, farther out, the rings were long gone, but there were numerous habitats far larger and more impressive than the Tellus cylinders.
If it was Sol’s system, then the saying was true: you can never go home again.
“It’s damned quiet.” Cameron said. “Where is everybody?”
St. Clair smiled. “I think we’re about to find out. Excomm . . . take us in close.”
And Tellus Ad Astra accelerated into a strange and very alien planetary system.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IAN DOUGLAS is one of the pseudonyms for William H. Keith, New York Times bestselling author of the popular military science fiction series The Heritage Trilogy, The Legacy Trilogy, The Inheritance Trilogy, Star Corpsman, and Star Carrier. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.
www.whkeith.com
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ALSO BY IAN DOUGLAS
Star Carrier
EARTH STRIKE
CENTER OF GRAVITY
SINGULARITY
DEEP SPACE
DARK MATTER
DEEP TIME
Star Corpsman
BLOODSTAR
ABYSS DEEP
The Galactic Marines Saga
The Heritage Trilogy
SEMPER MARS
LUNA MARINE
EUROPA STRIKE
The Legacy Trilogy
STAR CORPS
BATTLESPACE
STAR MARINES
The Inheritance Trilogy
STAR STRIKE
GALACTIC CORPS
SEMPER HUMAN
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COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Gregory Bridges.
ALTERED STARSCAPE. Copyright © 2016 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780062379214
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062379191
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