No—they couldn’t count on Earth to do anything. Either they finally caught up to the Killer, or their planet would be no more.
You better redeem yourself, little girl, said her father’s voice. Don’t be like those failures before you.
Maybe I already am, she thought bitterly.
August 15, 1254
If they changed course immediately, they could intercept it within a decade. At least their mistake had given them the opportunity to head it off instead of continuously trailing after it.
Small victories.
She sat in her office. Pictures of each of Mira’s captains hung on the walls, judging her. It was not eerie to find previous versions of herself staring back, nor was it strange to see only eight different profiles in the myriads of portraits. Some of their expressions seemed full of pity, others appeared to share her guilt. They’d each made decisions that had led to this moment, for better or worse.
She often played a thought game with herself. She tried to imagine what it was like for the first travelers—she didn’t simply think about them, she tried to embody them. She tapped the continuum and reached back as far as she could, trying to touch the first members. How had they felt, blasting away to discover what made that far-off star twinkle as it did? They must have been encouraged by their prospects, but slightly sad, knowing that their world would change while they were gone, knowing that it would not belong to them once they left.
But they couldn’t have anticipated this. They couldn’t have imagined that by leaving home they could destroy it.
And what about Reggie Straifer of Earth? The ultimate Revealer of all—though also the most ignorant of all. Noumenon he’d named it. Ha! Insubstantial, untouchable things can’t kill you. The truth of a thing couldn’t kill you. Death itself might be a thing impossible to hold in your hand, but causes of death were measurable. She’d seen the recordings—his plea of a speech to those voting for the Planet United Missions. He’d been so passionate, so enthralled with the mystery. Hope and wonder had oozed from his every pore in an ethereal cloud. She wished she could suck it into her bones, use it as a steeling agent.
What a wonderful thing not knowing was. It built an artificial world where mythical things like hope could live.
She wanted to find his original mindset and claim it for herself. The only thing she’d ever felt while in pursuit was sadness and urgency. This was no great quest, nothing to be romanticized. Correcting a dire mistake was no heroic feat.
Trying to appease an angry man’s ghost wasn’t exactly a courageous endeavor, either.
Damn ignorant idiots. She didn’t think her attitude toward former phases of the convoy was unjustly bleak. The current crew felt far more pressure than the Explorers or the Builders ever had. She and her Chasers had every right to question the actions of those who came before, and she would hear no argument to the contrary.
Joanna strolled up to one of the portraits and stared down the individual’s likeness. “How different would my life be if they had listened to you?” She asked Reginald Straifer IV, the only one to prophesize this Armageddon. History said he’d been ill, Revealing said he was a saint . . .
Joanna thought him a harbinger of doom.
She looked internally, hoping the members of her continuum could drown out the frenzy of her thoughts and let her genetic instincts shine through. “We can intercept it before it reaches another target. But can we stop it? Will destroying a tentacle kill it?”
She pulled a chair from the desk and sat facing the portrait. With her elbows on her knees, she clasped her hands as if she were praying. Her eyes remained locked with Reginald’s. “The devices were on when you found them. It wasn’t dead then, just dormant. Is that what the Nest—the alien ship—was after? Does the Seed need to be destroyed for the Web to die forever?”
Her gut told her yes. The universe would never be rid of the Killer unless they put its hub out of commission.
They had years to figure out how to do that—it was their sole mission now.
Soon we won’t be Chasers. Soon we’ll be Destroyers.
March 11, 1263 Relaunch
8406 CE
They had been wrong, again.
Joanna could hardly stand it, not knowing what the Web would do next. How could she fight it if it behaved inconsistently? At least the previous iterations of her line had been able to count on its hunger for star matter.
And that was truly what it appeared to be: hunger. It consumed stars. Ate them. Sometimes she thought it behaved far more like a creature than a weapon.
On its presumed way to Earth, though, the Web traveled into a small nebula. A rather insignificant swath of dust and gas—so much so that they’d thought its proximity to the Web’s path coincidental.
No one on board so much as speculated that the nebula—which they could find no earthly designation for—was the Web’s intended destination.
Yet, when it reached the nebula, it immersed itself in the cloud, settling in. It did not globe its limbs, or take another shape. Instead it just sat there, biding its time . . . as if waiting for the convoy to catch up.
And now they finally had.
Today the convoy would come within range. The ships would be close enough to deploy their long-distance weapon. Despite Anatoly’s original promise, it wasn’t effective up to a light-year. They’d only been able to reach a fraction of the distance, seven billion kilometers, but that would have to do.
Joanna went over the newly collected data in her ready room. The most recent snapshots revealed that the Web’s intrusion into the cloud had triggered a sort of condensation effect. Molecules coalesced along the length of its arms and the Seed’s body, drawn in by its sizable gravitational pull. Considering the Web’s new behavioral changes, Joanna had to examine the inkling that rested at the back of her mind—the one suggesting the Web might be more creature than automaton. Since it appeared to be making choices, rather than simply following a set of directives, the artifact could be possessed of its own intelligence. Not unlike I.C.C.
“What do you think?” she asked the AI. “Does it know what it’s doing?”
“A fair question,” it said after a barely noticeable pause. “And though I don’t have any definitive proof, I do not think so.”
“Why not?” she asked, scribbling commands onto a ‘flex-sheet with a stylus. She still wasn’t sure which approach was best. Should they try to cripple the Web first, or concentrate all of their fire power on the Seed? If it was intelligent, as she suspected, it might be able to evade their attack.
“Because I have made repeated attempts to contact it.”
“You have?” She looked up from the sheets and subconsciously put a fingertip in her mouth to chew the cuticle. “Who put in the request?”
“No one. I performed the task via my own initiative, certain someone would inquire in the future. I did not want to wait. If you’d asked me to begin now, I would not have enough time to compile sufficient data to make a sound judgment as to its sentience before you wish to act.”
“And you think it isn’t because it didn’t respond?”
“And because it doesn’t seem to be ignoring our pursuit so much as it seems unaware of our pursuit. It does not notice, let alone understand.”
“Understand,” she mumbled, noticing her finger in her mouth and whipping it away. “What I wouldn’t give for a distilled drop of True Understanding.”
“There are hints of uncertainty in your vocalizations.”
“Hints? Is that all?” she said sarcastically. Now that the time has come, I must not falter. I must not second-guess myself. I must finish the job my ancestors could not. I must not—
“Are you questioning its function?” asked I.C.C.
“As what?”
“A weapon.”
“No.”
“Your words say one thing, your inflection another.”
“It’s just that . . .” She let out a large sigh and slumped against her ready room’
s rear wall. The paint smelled musty. She thought that if her life had a smell it would be similar—aged, with a hint of mold. Her life and the room needed a good scrubbing. Better yet, a good gutting. “It hasn’t hurt anything. Nothing living. It’s simply used matter—like we do. We mine for repairs, break things up and break things down into things we can use. We’re not considered ‘killers,’ are we? So, why do we call it the Killer? I mean, what has it actually killed?”
“But there has been nothing in the vicinity to kill—nothing except Earth. Does the fact that it has yet to complete its task make it any less dangerous?”
“But is that its task? That’s still just our speculation. And that’s all we’ve been doing for the past two thousand years. Speculating. But let’s ask another question: Why hasn’t it made for Earth yet, for real? As a weapon, it’s extremely inefficient. If it was meant to destroy a fledgling intelligence, why take so much time? Why give that intelligence the chance to develop? To grow? To perhaps reach a technological tipping point where they could save themselves—which is exactly where we’re at.”
She shivered and contemplated asking I.C.C. to raise the room’s temperature. But there was nothing wrong with the climate controls—the chill came from inside. And it was not the cold of letting a killer escape. It was the type of internal frigidity that earned a pause, required thoughtfulness.
“Perhaps its original builders did not expect its parade through systems to halt,” I.C.C. suggested. “There might have been no accounting for the Nest’s crew.”
“I suppose that should be proof enough for me—someone else thought it a danger. But the Nataré assumed as we did, both before and after construction. But here’s the thing . . .” She picked herself off the wall and began to pace. The carpet beneath her feet was worn, with a treaded path clearly visible across the weave. Joannas prior had walked the same stretch of floor. Had they contemplated the same things? Not daring to enter them into the record for fear they would appear cowardly or lazy? Or had they always trusted their mission, at the same time knowing they were never in a position to truly do anything about it anyway?
“You trailed off,” I.C.C. said.
“Right . . . I’m just wondering. Why rely on other civilizations to build your weapon for you? How could you count on them?”
“The fact that we completed it should be proof enough of their plan’s effectiveness.”
Joanna stopped. She’d never heard I.C.C. use “we” in that context before. “You remember—” she said “—what it was like during the building days, the discovery days.”
“I remember . . . everything,” it said softly. “Back. Long back, when I was young. Even when I was more my parts than the sum of my parts . . .”
That seemed to mean so much to Joanna, and yet so little. She had spent innumerable hours reaching for the beginning of her genetic line, trying to grasp their lives and their feelings through the ether of time and space. And here was a contemporary of them all. The only convoy member who was the convoy. The only consciousness aboard who had lived through everything.
“You are greater than the sum of your parts, aren’t you? You’re the sum of us all, I.C.C. What do you think we should do when we come within range?”
“I don’t think we should leave the universe in worse shape than we found it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t think our legacy should be nine disappeared systems and a hunk of immobile metal.”
It was being cryptic. She hated when it was cryptic. It always did that when it had an opinion, but wanted you to reach its conclusion on your own. “The alternative legacy is the destruction of Earth.”
“Not necessarily.”
“So you don’t think it’s a genocide machine, then?”
It didn’t answer. Whether because it thought its opinion didn’t matter to her, or because it wanted her to take the silence as its own answer, she wasn’t sure.
So what if the Web might not be a weapon? They couldn’t risk the chance that it was.
Right?
It was a shame to think I.C.C.’s life would add up to be as meaningless as hers. Scientific missions shouldn’t have zero sums. No one builds things just to knock them down again. But what was Noumenon Infinitum but the anti-Noumenon? The two missions annihilated one another. Canceled each other out as explosively as matter and antimatter.
I.C.C.’s experience of the hope and wonder made the pain of failure all the more pointed, she was sure.
The AI had spent millennia waiting to see the end of this human endeavor. She shouldn’t be surprised that it was hesitant to shoot the artifact out of dead space. It didn’t want everything to end how it began: shrouded in mystery, daunting and unknowable.
But I.C.C. did not make choices rooted in sentimentality—or did it? Now she wasn’t sure. It definitely did not act off assumptions. It acted based on what it knew, not what it didn’t know.
It knew it didn’t understand the Web. And that . . . worried it?
“I want to wait,” she blurted. “I want to see if it gives up its secrets.”
“But what if it slithers off again?”
“Then we’ll keep chasing.”
“You might miss your one chance to stop it.”
She gulped past a knot in her throat. “I know.”
How dare you? asked her father’s ghost.
She wished she had an answer that would satisfy him.
Thirty-Eight Years Previous
The normal buzzing and whirs of the ship faded out, and all Joanna could hear were her father’s insults. It was like the sound version of tunnel vision. Everything else in the family cabin slipped away.
“We’re not genetically suited for this mission, okay?” she yelled at him, hiding her eyes behind shaking fingers. “All I was ever meant to be was an overseer. I’m supposed to keep construction on track, not lead a military campaign. No one meant for me to head a charge after some apocalyptic enemy.”
“Our system has made us weak,” he spat back. “You think people back on Earth are only expected to perform if they’re genetically suited? No. None of us were picked for this, but who gives a crap? Things have to get done, whether we’re the best ones to do them or not. We’re the only ones here, damn it.” The hard, twisted ridges of his face slumped. The wrinkled skin looked like it was about to melt off his ragged face.
“If there’s one thing your bitch of an ancestor did right, it was to take control. She knew it took initiative, decisiveness. She knew that if the damn board hadn’t sat around philosophizing they could have cut the Web down before it got anywhere. You might not have been picked for this by some nerdy gaggle from Earth, but you damn well were by her. She accepted executive powers, she formed the cabinet, bore the title of fleet admiral like the badge it was. And look what the rest of your line have done with her foresight. Now you shit on her memory. I’m sure she’s extricated herself from your continuum.”
He grabbed her wrists, forcing her hands to her sides. “This is why your mother died, because none of you have ever been able to take responsibility. She believed in your line. I tried to convince her we shouldn’t accept one of you to raise, but she insisted. It was an honor to raise a fleet admiral, she said.”
Tears rolled down Joanna’s cheeks, hot as the oil from an overworked motor. “But, she thought I—”
“She thought you’d never have to be one. She thought the beast would be exterminated in our lifetime. She believed it so fully she couldn’t go on once she realized she’d been living in a fantasy land. And it’s your line’s fault for not making it happen. It should have happened generations ago, when the damn thing came to life.” He threw her hands away from him, as though they burned his palms. “She killed herself today because of you.”
Joanna tried to suppress the memory, but the more she tried to banish it, the more it engraved itself on her mind. The relationship between her and her father had always been tenuous, but when her mother committed suicide
it shattered. Any love they might have shared died with her.
Joanna hadn’t even been appointed admiral yet when he’d poured his boiling rage on her head. They’d missed the Web once again, and the entire fleet had watched it lumber off into the night for the sixth time.
Joanna’s mother had been positive their horrid endeavor was about to end. When it proved a continued battle, she denied it for days. She pretended the quest was over. She even threw a party that no one came to.
When reality hit, she just couldn’t bear it.
Joanna knew it wasn’t her fault. Knew in her marrow. But it was her father’s wrath that made her wonder if her mother had known. Joanna was just an apprentice, in charge of nothing but her continuing education. But had her mother realized? Or was the only reason her father blamed her because her mother had lost hold of reality long ago?
She’d never asked her father, and now he was gone. Retired ages ago. She was older now than he’d been when he lost his wife.
If she failed to stop the Web, wouldn’t she be proving him right? A weak line would take the easy way out, waffle on the decision, let inaction call the shots.
But in this situation, waiting was the hard decision. If she was wrong, she could damn every last human being.
A buzz at her ready room door roused her from introspection. “Come in.”
Mira’s Captain Nakamura emerged from the other side. “We’re within range. Standing by for tactical orders.”
“Hold weapons,” she said simply. “Continue to approach, half-speed with caution.”
“Hold weapons?”
“That’s what I said.” Joanna rose and ushered the captain out onto the bridge. “We watch and we wait.”
“For what?” She was flabbergasted.
“A reason to believe this hasn’t all been in vain.”
Noumenon Infinity Page 46
