As it had before, the auton strode ahead while the humans cautiously inched their way inside. “Here,” it called from somewhere near the center of the room.
A large shape, oblong and ovoid, slowly resolved next to Noah as Nwosu approached. The silhouette reminded the captain of a dinosaur egg, and the comparison made his breath catch.
For, sure enough, inside the translucent outer shell was a shape. Clearly a creature, curled and coiled over itself. The skin—or hair, it was difficult to tell—looked like moss in both color and texture, though he wasn’t sure if that was from decay or not. The thing was clearly flattened, like it had purposely been dehydrated.
It’s mummified, he realized.
There were bones, and at least six limbs if the bumps and protuberances were telling the story he thought they were. But the creature was bent and folded in such a way that it was impossible to tell what the exact structure might be. He couldn’t even identify a head, if indeed it had one.
“Is that . . . is that a Nataré?” Min-Seo gasped.
“We believe so,” Noah said. “We found it traveling in a sharp, elliptical orbit around the star at our last location. We suspect, given our research, that it was originally meant to be on a decaying path—that it was meant to fall into the sun long ago. We believe this is their common burial practice. But a miscalculation must have been made in this case. Instead of falling into the star, it was set to pass through the system once every sixty-two years, like a comet.”
“Can I touch it?” Vega asked.
“Of course. The shell itself is not delicate. In fact, it took us many years to penetrate the ovoid.”
Vega knocked on it. It barely made sound, as though it were exceedingly dense.
“We hoped to discover the biological mechanism by which they manipulated gravitons, but, alas. We could not identify the specific related sequence in its genes. Now, we give it to you. Perhaps you can unlock its secrets.”
“This is amazing,” Nwosu said. “Thank you. Your mission—” He stopped himself. He nearly said, Your mission was a success.
But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a failure, for certain. But with the Web out there, killing, both of their missions felt like folly.
“And now,” Noah said eagerly, “we fight?”
Nwosu nodded, his voice catching in his throat. “Y-yes. Now we must figure out how to combat the Web. Together.”
A week later, the astronomers were confident enough for navigation to lay in a new course. But they were not yet ready to begin their pursuit anew.
“You located us very quickly,” Nwosu said to Noah, who’d come to deliver additional findings, notes, to Infinitum on Holwarda.
“We have learned new tricks.”
“From the Nataré?”
“Their remaining records, yes.”
The mummy currently being scanned and sampled before them—the long ovoid caged deep within an MRI—was the only biological trace of the creatures they’d found. And yet Ultra would not go so far as to assume them extinct.
“We were able to discern which SDs they used for travel,” Noah continued. “Can access several.”
Nwosu didn’t hide his surprise. “That’s—that’s amazing.” There hadn’t been a new travel SD discovered since before the Planet United Missions commenced.
He vaguely remembered that there had been a convoy devoted to SD study. The littlest one. But there’d been an accident, it was destroyed . . .
Had they finally, all these centuries later, accomplished what those poor souls had set out to achieve?
“Yes. Amazing,” Noah agreed. “One of them is much quicker than Convoy Seven’s preferred. Of their machines that we collected, three can be powered by Zetta. One detects ripples created by SD penetration. Gravitons create gravitational waves. So, too, SD bubbles create space-time wakes as they ‘brush’ its surface. We followed your wake. Caught you easily.”
“Can the rest of the ships use this new SD?”
The auton smiled its caricature of a smile. “Yes. Programming is a simple matter. The dreamers will calculate.”
Finally. The twelve ships would dive, together, sharing the same SD bubble. They would be one convoy again.
A technician wearing a medical mask waved Nwosu and Noah over to a monitor. The display resolved to show a three-dimensional map of the mummy. As the captain watched, the technician cut away digital layer after digital layer, revealing the alien to them bit by bit.
There was no part that could be classified as a skull. The creature was headless, and it seemed there might be sense organs up and down its limbs, which, when properly positioned, looked like they might jut outward, like the arms of a starfish.
“Initial reports from chemistry confirm it’s carbon based,” said Lindum Shelby, a geneticist who’d been put in charge of discerning the Nataré’s fundamental building blocks.
“You should find it has deoxyribonucleic acid as well,” said Noah.
Much of what they were doing today was verification of Ultra’s research.
“The samples we found were not stored in a simple double helix, however,” Noah continued. “Supercoils happen regularly inside human cells, making them look like loops or even solid bars. But in the single instance of an uncorrupted molecule we found, the Nataré DNA was a tetrahedron.”
“The shape of a molecule often affects activation and transcription,” Lindum said. “In fact, many supercoils are wound so tightly that some of their base-pair bridges snap apart while they’re being stored in a cell, without any long-term detriment to the molecule. This mechanism, we believe, also helps keep certain traits from being expressed at different times.
“A shape like a tetrahedron might allow for different base-pairs to be ‘unhooked’ at the same time. But not for storage purposes—a tetrahedron wouldn’t be nearly as compact as other available shapes. Could be this is how specific traits are activated, rather than deactivated, and could in part explain why Ultra was unable to pinpoint a genetic sequence related to graviton manipulation, even after decades of life-form modeling. If you only had one fully intact molecule, and after mapping didn’t include the exact placement of the breaks in your models, you could be missing a mountain of information.”
“This observation is sound,” Noah said. “Perhaps you will find more viable molecules and be able to apply your theory.”
“Just imagine what we could do with this,” Lindum said to Nwosu. “If their DNA is at all similar to terrestrial DNA in expression, then we could clone our own Nataré. Or engineer something entirely new, using alien and Earth-origin—”
Nwosu laughed and slapped Lindum on the back. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. We have bigger things to worry about than splicing genes.”
“This could be useful,” Lindum pointed out. “That’s all I’m saying. Think what we could accomplish if we could fly.”
Once the SD drives had been properly reprogrammed and retrofitted to allow access to this new Nataré travel SD, Nwosu wasted no time returning to the chase. He knew they had to change the way their convoy functioned. No longer were they scientists and explorers, builders and dreamers. Now they were warriors, and they had to start behaving as such.
We must become what we were first created to avoid, he realized. All those years ago, the Planet United missions had been built to bond all nations together, to push everyone away from Mutually Assured Destruction and toward Mutually Assured Cooperation. Earth built science convoys to avoid building military ones.
The change would require greater discipline, and he knew Joanna was the one to enact the shift.
And they’d need new tools, to develop new weapons and strategies. But, most importantly, they needed to learn from the Nataré’s mistakes.
Noumenon Ultra still had a fractured understanding of the war that had decimated the aliens. But they’d been able to piece together a picture related to the Web.
The Nest crew had likely been comprised of survivors. They were not the original
designers of the Web, but hapless builders, just like the humans. They had worked on the Web at the planemo where Convoy Seven had separated, and that was where they’d activated it.
Their war seemed to have begun because of other megastructures in the galaxy—megastructures which clearly predated the Nataré. Someone had originally designed and begun all of these massive machines, and yet whoever it was didn’t appear to be around to claim them. The Nataré had stumbled upon them, just as the humans had, and conflict had ensued over whether to decommission the constructs or continue to build them. Different factions had reached different conclusions about the megastructures’ purpose—some saw them as controllable war machines, others as useful tools (as the humans had), and yet others saw them for what they were: as destructive and uncaring as any force of nature.
When the Web was activated, it spurred the decommission faction into action. Others tried to stop them.
Whether the Web and other devices had destroyed their civilization, or if the Nataré had done that to themselves, was a mystery. Had the megastructures been utilized as weapons during the conflict? Or were they simply the catalysts for conflict? The record was incomplete.
Either way, the structures were a proven danger. There could be no arguments against stopping them.
But Noumenon Infinitum wasn’t the only group that needed to learn from the past, to buckle down and change in the face of their adversary.
Noumenon Ultra would also need to evolve. At least some of the dreamers would have to wake, to focus on lucidly controlling an army of autons if nothing more.
Their two missions had to mesh once more. To learn from each other, to dive headlong into darkness together.
It had been six months, eleven hours, and thirteen minutes since the two convoys had merged.
And today, Captain Michael Nwosu would receive his second Revealer mark.
He’d invited a special guest to attend the ceremony: Noah’s operator.
He traveled from Mira to Shambhala to retrieve the individual himself. Waiting with their shuttle in the dim spotlight, Nwosu held his breath as the bay entrance opened and the operator was unveiled.
In truth, he half expected the individual to send Noah again. Perhaps it would be too much, revealing themselves.
But no, the man who approached was flesh and blood. He walked with the aid of an exoskeleton, his coppery skin flush under fine brown curls, the exertion of remaining awake evident in the constant droop of his eyelids.
The man stopped three feet from Nwosu and saluted. “Doctor Ivan Baraka. Permission to come aboard, Captain?”
“Of course, Noumenon Ultra,” he said with a smile, extending a dark hand to shake Dr. Baraka’s. “You are all welcome here.”
Chapter Nine
Steve: Into the Suffering City
Convoy Twelve
Six Hundred and Seventeen Days Since the Accident
“Motherfuckers!” Steve yelled as soon as he was alone, secure in his quarters. “Goddamned sons of dogs! What in the ever-loving, shit bag—” He railed on and on, yelling at nothing and everything at once.
Those freaks weren’t aliens—they’d let the convoy believe that, though, which was as good as lying. They’d hemmed in Twelve, pushed them around, prodded and implanted and not even had the decency to tell the fucking truth about who they were.
But they weren’t human either, no. He didn’t care what Dr. Jax said. They might be based on the same stupid molecules, but they’d changed. They’d thrown away the bits that made humans humans, as far as he could tell. If they’d thought human bodies so inferior, so unacceptable, then why wouldn’t they think the same of all the rest? All the feelings and morality that made a regular person a person.
Tearing at his hair, breathing through flared nostrils like an angry bull, Steve turned around in his entryway, looking for something to throw or punch. His eyes landed on the doorjamb.
Above all, he wished he could slam his door. That used to be one little thing he could control. Mad at the boss? Slam a door. Want to punch some jerk’s face in? Slam a door. About to chuck a defective appliance out a fourth story window?
Slam.
A.
Door.
But no, up here everything was automated—the doors slid politely aside and then back again.
He could go to his gym, wail on a heavy bag. Maybe the one with the Lùhng likeness . . .
They should all have Post-Fucking-Human faces.
He let out another frustrated growl.
Why would the Lùhng hide this shit? Why not greet them with open arms and a polite, Oh, hi fellow people of Earth? Why all the manipulative bull crap?
And now they weren’t even answering Tan. He and Sotomayor were composing new messages every day, confronting them with the facts, and the Lùhng wouldn’t even reply.
If the last away team’s outburst had spooked them, good. They deserved to feel some of the terror they’d thrust upon him that first outing. With them pushing, prodding, implanting, stripping—knocking them all unconscious, for fuck’s sake.
The smell of vomit returned to him, as it did every time he thought about the indignities of that mission. He ran to his kitchenette, bent over the sink and retched dryly.
Dr. Jax was on his side before all this. But now she thought the fact that they were base-human made things better. He didn’t see how.
He guzzled a few ounces of water, changed into his off-duty workout gear, and grabbed an extra pat of chalk.
Every single punching bag was getting a Lùhng, and when he’d punched all their faces into smears of white powder, he’d draw them on again.
When he arrived on Breath and made his way up to the gym from the shuttle bay, the place was already packed. A line curled out the door. Frustration furrowed brows and clenched fists.
Acting as proprietor rather than patron, he pushed his way past the queue, and realized the line was for the original Lùhng bag. Nothing was a state secret aboard the convoy, and the Lùhng news was no different. Someone had already taken the liberty of adding another face to a speed bag, this one in red lacquer, and a line was forming there as well. A smudge on the left side of its evil smile indicated they hadn’t even let the paint dry before taking a swing.
They all need faces. Every last one.
With a grim smile, he went to work breaking up the chalk he’d brought, coating his fingers in the dust before spreading it on the artificial hide of the next nearest bag.
He hadn’t drawn the first face, nor the second. But he’d draw them again and again until he and his crewmates stopped wanting to punch them—if that meant never, so be it.
The resentment in his chest only grew with each grainy line. He felt like the indignation had no end, would never ebb.
The steady thwap-thwap-thwap of punches landing nearby was more poignant than usual. It matched the outraged thump-thump-thump of his heavy heartbeat.
A light chatter eked its way into Steve’s ears as he drew, bits of conversation, grumbled exclamations of outrage.
“. . . I mean, Captain said they’ve got human DNA in them, and they didn’t tell us. What else are they lying about?”
“. . . damn dragons.”
“. . . I bet they did something that brought us here. Accident my ass.”
“. . . you know those implants, the ones that are supposedly for radiation-protection-something-or-other?”
Steve paused his drawing to glance at the orange light in his arm. He was already on the third bag and his first two effigies were currently being put to good use.
The voice he’d heard continued. “You ever see a sci-fi movie where they put some kind of little explosive or cyanide cap in a person? Bet that’s what they really do. They’re little pet trackers, but if we get out of line—bam!”
Steve cringed, and his grip on the chalk pat tightened, crumbling it in his palm.
“Why did they give us a bunch of raw materials instead of food?” Dalisay Ocampo, who worked on Dr. Jax�
�s farm, mused nearby. “If they were human, they’d know what constitutes real food, and a pile of sugar doesn’t count. Were they testing us? ‘Let’s see if the apes can figure out what to do with this? And if they die in the process, oh, well’?”
He almost turned to reply with Dr. Jax’s assumption—that maybe it had something to do with the way they synthesized their own food. It was on the tip of his tongue before he realized how alien the explanation was.
And then—mortified—he realized he’d been about to defend them, and he swallowed his words completely.
He ducked his head and tried to close his ears, but the theories kept raining down around him.
“. . . I think they’re experimenting on us. We’re like rats in a little maze, scurrying after their proffered cheese. Maybe we’d be home by now if it wasn’t for them. Maybe a future-Earth rescue team already came, but the Lùhng kept us.”
“. . . for all we know, there’s a war going on between the real humans and the post-humans, and we’re political prisoners and we don’t even know it.”
“Maybe that’s what those megastructures are—war machines.”
“Or maybe the war is over and all of the real humans are dead.”
Steve started to get lightheaded, and he realized he was breathing too quickly, hyperventilating. Finishing the last stroke on his fifth drawing, he dropped his chalk and stumbled over to a bench. He sat down heavily, bending over to dip his head between his knees.
It’s just speculation. All of it, he told himself in an attempt to calm down.
But why shouldn’t they think the Lùhng were malevolent?
He smelled vomit again, and then he was back on the Lùhng ship, puking into his helmet. But then another memory forced its way between his teeth, another time he’d been pushed around and no one did anything . . .
The specifics were foggy—because of the concussion. It was sixth grade and that asshole, Trevor, had punched him so hard his ears rang, he threw up, and he passed out. The worst part was the guy walking his dog who’d just stared. Grown man had watched some kid knock another unconscious and hadn’t done a goddamned thing.
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