InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  So listen, damn it! I am trying to save lives! I’m as human as you.

  She tried her bomb again. Nothing. But not much static, either.

  “What projects?” Carl asked. “What are the Xool trying to accomplish here? How would our travel to another star spoil anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess,” he prompted.

  Could they possibly believe she had never tried? “I don’t know.”

  Carl glared at her. “And if we don’t play along?”

  Armageddon? Her lords were adamant. “For your sake, for humanity’s sake, destroy this ship and forget about my lords.”

  “And why should I care,” the Foremost asked, “about humanity’s sake?”

  “Do you imagine Snakes are any less insignificant?” Grace snapped.

  “They underestimate us at their peril,” the Foremost said.

  The static in Grace’s head dipped a bit further. “And you underestimate me.”

  Regretting only that she could do no more for those she served, Grace triggered her bomb.

  CHAPTER 46

  In the clamorous expanse of the starship’s main dining hall, at the one remaining table of human proportions, Corinne nursed a drink bulb of hot coffee. If she concentrated, she could sometimes separate the voices of individual Snakes from the babble. If she cared, the language module newly downloaded to her neural implant would translate. The few times she bothered, all she got for her trouble were random pleasantries and family squabbles.

  She told herself that commonplace banter was a good portent. She told herself that Joshua, last seen with his head planted up a truly scary medical gizmo, would—eventually!—come out of it okay. She told herself Denise was all too accustomed to her long absences. She told herself Carl’s tardiness for breakfast meant nothing. She told herself that the memory would fade of a head turning before her eyes into a sleet of blood, gray matter, and bone shards, that she would move past the headless, tattered corpse afloat in its padded cell.

  Corinne told herself many things, none of which she believed.

  Fifteen minutes late, Carl came into the dining hall. She waved till she caught his eye. He nodded, then gestured to a coffee urn.

  With his own drink bulb, he joined her at her table. “Didn’t sleep well?” he asked.

  “You know how it is.” That was a simpler explanation than bolting awake, her heart pounding, the few times she had somehow dozed off. Cage bars bowed out … the echoing blast … the gristle and gore spattering and splatting on the camera lens …

  She doubted Grace’s exploding skull would ever leave her dreams.

  “Yeah.” He took a sip, made a face. “Sulfur garnish does nothing for the coffee.”

  “When we get out, I’ll buy you coffee anywhere you want. Hell, I’ll throw in breakfast.” Because Glithwah knew the stakes now. She had to let them go. Didn’t she? “I’m assuming you’ve settled matters with the Foremost. When do I go on air?”

  A high-pitched yammer blared over the PA system. It was in clan speak, and she did not bother to have the announcement translated. A concurrent mind’s ear ping suggested a ship-wide notice had been posted. She ignored it, too.

  “About that.” With his free hand, Carl took hers. “You don’t go on the air. And we don’t go home, either.”

  “So despite everything we’ve revealed to Glithwah, we’re prisoners.” Confirmation of her worst fears came almost as a relief. “The navy will be okay with that?”

  “I’m a UPIA agent, and that’s unambiguous. You showed up at Prometheus despite having had your authorization revoked, and Glithwah can claim you’re a spy. If the navy’s hands weren’t already tied by her holding so many more hostages, you and I would still be stuck. Spies are expendable.”

  “Joshua is no spy!” Not that he was in any condition to leave.

  Carl shrugged. “No one else knows he’s with me, though his grandmother may guess.”

  The PA reawakened, this time sounding a shrill, warbling tone. The electric horn cut off, followed by short Snake words spoken in a quick cadence. As sudden pressure—gentle at first, but building and building—pressed her into her chair, she knew the words had been a countdown.

  They were on their way … where?

  Another ping rang in her mind’s ear, but this one was coded cosmic ultra.

  Carl gave her hand a squeeze. “Bottom line?” he netted. His avatar exhibited none of the original’s patent weariness. “Don’t think of us as prisoners, but more like honored guests who can’t leave.

  “Glithwah has worked for years to free her clan. Not even the Xool and their minions will dissuade her. Quite the opposite, in fact: since the Xool don’t want humans ‘wandering,’ Glithwah would be a fool not to scram before the Xool find a way to destroy this ship.”

  And Glithwah was nobody’s fool.

  “I get it. She can break away while keeping us.” Corinne chewed on that notion for awhile. “But why hold us? And why not let me broadcast?”

  “She has good reasons.” In the real world, Carl managed a brief, crooked smile. “At least once you’ve played enough b’tok.

  “My big plan, not knowing who to trust, was to use this ship’s big transmitter and your celebrity to get out word about the Xool.” Okay, he’d come to accept that he had had other motivations. Rescuing her. Keeping the starship from Glithwah, even before knowing it needed rescue. He had failed at both, and saw no gain in admitting either. “Bypass their hidden agents, their moles in government, their penetrations of our networks. Make everyone aware. Get everyone focused on the problem of rooting them out. Spread the news beyond any possibility of suppression. Take back control of human destiny.”

  “It still sounds like a plan,” she netted.

  “The thing is …”

  “What?”

  “Something Grace said: ‘My lords will not allow you to spoil projects underway for eons.’ It’s a decent bet that unmasking the Xool after all their efforts at secrecy won’t further their projects.”

  Corinne sighed. “And Glithwah cares what happens on Earth?”

  “Assume the Xool take action against Earth and Earth-settled worlds. They might go after anyone else who could have heard.”

  Such as the clan of Snakes fleeing the scene, Corinne completed the thought.

  Carl went on, “Whatever else I may think of Glithwah, I can’t see her as a fan of genocide. Though she doesn’t admit it, maybe she’s protecting us from ourselves.”

  In the physical world, Snakes were abandoning their tiny tables, streaming from the dining hall. Headed for duty posts, Corinne wondered, or just seeking more comfortable places to take the acceleration?

  “Okay,” she netted. “So Glithwah doesn’t let me broadcast. Why not let us go? Given the bigger picture, keeping me prisoner just seems petty. And what did Joshua ever do to her?”

  “Suppose she lets us off the ship. How does she know we won’t find another megaphone somewhere?” Carl laughed bitterly. “That’s if someone like Grace doesn’t kill us first. I should be flattered Glithwah worries we might survive to talk.”

  Corinne slumped in her chair, and the still-building acceleration was only the least part of it. “So we’re off to … where? The Snake home system?”

  Carl gave her hand a squeeze. “I’m told we have years before we need to know where.”

  • • • •

  Examine any isolated part of a meat brain, and it is glacially slow. But meat brains overall are not slow. Consider the entirety of a meat brain—its billons of neurons, its trillions of synapses—and you discover evolution’s clever solution: massive parallelism.

  Although in fairness, Joshua had to concede, all that parallelism might be a clever solution of the Xool.

  Biochips compact and low-powered enough to tuck within the crannies of a meat brain were slow, too. But stimulate the brain to create enough new synapses and the biochip/brain interface also became massively parallel. Thus interconnected
, brain and biochips spoke—exchanging data, information, knowledge, wisdom, even insight—at prodigious rates.

  But not without training. Not without probing every niche and nuance of those trillions of synapses, and of Tacitus’ uploaded memories besides.

  Not without re-experiencing and re-imagining everything.

  The majesty of the tides. The textures of distant nebulae. Centuries of Yorkshire property records, curiously evocative. The rustle of grass in the breeze, the mathematics of a Beethoven sonata, and the mouth shape of every word Joshua had ever heard spoken. The taste of every food imaginable, in unimaginable combinations.

  All that took time. Weeks, typically, and two months were not unheard of, because neurons could not be rushed. Per the real-time clock that was the merest fraction of the functionality of just one of the chips newly embedded in his brain, he and Tacitus were but two days into the process.

  When they had completed their synthesis, would they find Corinne and Carl still aboard? Joshua hoped not, but supposed otherwise. He could see no reason Glithwah would ever let them go. He expected Carl saw that, too. Either way—or even if his friends could go, but his inability to leave made them choose to stay—in the bigger picture, them ending up aboard mattered not a whit. Something had to be done about the Xool, and it meant taking the confrontation to them. This was the only available starship, and Glithwah would never give it back.

  After everything he had been through, he would see this to its end. Whatever it took.

  “Integration is proceeding nicely,” Galen netted.

  “Glad to hear it,” Joshua said back. In theory, anyway; what he heard come out of his mouth was an inarticulate gurgle. Was that because the new him couldn’t yet produce speech, or couldn’t properly interpret the sounds? Indeterminate. All he knew for certain was that within his skull, rewiring proceeded.

  And from deep within the maelstrom of neural rewiring, in kaleidoscopic glimpses of everything he and Tacitus had ever experienced, patterns beckoned ….

  CHAPTER 47

  The hostages on Prometheus had been freed, the last castaways rescued from Ariel and Caliban and even scattered Kuiper Belt objects. The last UP navy vessel, its fuel reserves exhausted, had stopped shadowing the departing Snakes and turned for home. The last clan escort ship had docked on Discovery. To stern, the Sun was but one bright light among many.

  As for the red dwarf sun dead ahead, its sullen glow scarcely registered in a telescope. Their destination would be invisible to the naked eye for years.

  • • • •

  An expectant hush came over Invincible’s bridge. On the main tactical display—blurry with distance, subtly distorted by five cascades of photomultipliers—a knobby mass of ice and rock grew moment by moment. The image was being repeated on displays across the ship.

  “Status?” Glithwah asked aloud.

  Carl’s implant translated the terse request. Anyone aboard could as easily monitor operations by implant, and at much greater depth than spoken words permitted. Only this was not about immersion in details, but rather some kind of shared experience for everyone.

  Apart from a brusque summons, minutes earlier, Glithwah hadn’t shared squat with him.

  “Yes, Foremost.” Pimal, the clan’s chief tactical officer, straightened in his chair. “Hermes on final approach. Radar lock on target. Impact forecast as per schedule.”

  Hermes? Impact?

  “Excellent,” Glithwah answered. “Latest characterization of target?”

  “As per earlier determinations,” Pimal said. “Comparable in mass to Invincible. Typical cometary-belt object.”

  “Excellent. Authorization for completion.”

  At Carl’s side, Corinne was riveted to the telescopic close-up of the Oort Cloud object. “Billions of years it’s been out here, alone and untouched. What happens to it now?”

  “It gets touched,” Carl guessed.

  “Do you perceive the point?” Glithwah asked, switching to English. “We have a couple of minutes.”

  The b’tok master tests her protégé? Carl took in a deep breath, then exhaled sharply. “Let’s see. To begin with, Hermes is perhaps the fastest ship you have.”

  Where sky peeked around the rim of the distant snowball, the star field matched what he recalled of their view ahead. Images saved in his implant agreed. So Hermes had been sent racing ahead to some random snowball along their course. Why bother?

  With nothing coming to mind, he looked around for inspiration. He saw Snakes at their duty stations. Instrument consoles, none revealing anything amiss. Tactical displays, none showing pursuit. Other displays, showing star fields.

  A different star field than provided backdrop for the featured snowball.

  “When did we change course?” he asked Glithwah.

  “Two days ago,” she told Carl. “You are on the right track.”

  Three days ago, by his best guess, they had departed the range of UP naval sensors.

  Hermes continuing along their former course. A snowball comparable in mass to this ship. Impact, Pimal had said.

  “You’re faking our destruction,” Carl said.

  “How?” Glithwah asked calmly.

  He took that as confirmation. So must have Corinne, from the way she paled.

  On the main display, the snowball loomed ever larger. Hermes was almost upon it.

  So: Hermes hits the snowball, like a bullet smacking into a wall. There would be debris, sure, and maybe a brief flash. But would anyone deeper in the Solar System even notice?

  “You put antimatter canisters aboard,” Carl guessed.

  Glithwah didn’t comment.

  Once more, from the top. Ship smacks much larger snowball. Ship comes to a sudden stop, flattened. Everything inside ship crumples, too—including the canisters that isolated the antimatter. The merest instant after the electromagnets in the canisters fail, some of the antimatter makes contact with normal matter, and—

  Boom!

  “Gamma rays,” Carl said. Because gamma rays of very specific wavelengths were the hallmark of matter/antimatter explosions. “That’s what will get people’s attention. And when they turn telescopes toward the source of the pulse, they’ll see plenty of glowing gas and dust.”

  Glithwah licked her lips, as if daring him to imply more.

  “Ten seconds until impact,” Pimal alerted them. “Switchover to Invincible’s telescope.”

  The snowball image became a dim point, more ordinary than ever—only in a moment, for just a moment, it would become (if you could see gamma rays) the brightest thing around.

  “Three … two … one …”

  Flash!

  The visible spark from the impact soon faded.

  “Very good,” Glithwah announced with a raised voice.

  The bridge crew responded with a roar of approval. But at Carl’s side, Corinne was fighting back tears.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “Denise will think I’m dead. Blown up. Vaporized. Splattered across space.”

  “Perhaps that’s a mercy,” Carl said softly. “We’re never coming back.”

  Shaking her head, at a loss for words, Corinne sank into herself.

  “So, why, Carl?” Glithwah asked. “What do we gain by sacrificing your fine little ship?”

  Spies aren’t allowed feelings, he told himself. In that bitter reflection he found his answer. “No one is going to believe Invincible just happened to blow up.”

  “No, they won’t,” Glithwah agreed.

  “My former colleagues at the UPIA will suppose I somehow did it.” He thought some more. “And any Xool or Xool agents left back in the Solar System will think Grace pulled it off.”

  “Let us hope so,” Glithwah said. “The Xool don’t want us wandering.”

  “Then it’s over. Years from now, light-years from here, you’ll colonize someplace no one will ever come looking for you.”

  Leaving humanity in their billions, across the Solar System, to fend
for themselves.

  “At best, it’s over for now,” Glithwah said. “Radio chatter in our new solar system will eventually betray our presence. Nothing can truly be over till we have had a heart-to-heart conversation with the Xool. But for that to happen, first we must find them.”

  “That’s all right,” a familiar-yet-changed voice said. Joshua! He stood at the main hatch onto the bridge. “Ir know where we can find them.”

  • • • •

  Joshua/Tacitus felt all eyes boring into them. Joshua explained, “Ir is the Augmented first person.”

  “Never mind grammar,” Corinne said. “You gave us a fright. How are you feeling?”

  At the same time, more to the point, Carl asked, “Where?”

  At the same time Glithwah demanded, “Humans to my ready room, now.”

  “Ir am fine,” Tacitus told Corinne. Health-maintenance software provided by Galen was already tweaking and tuning their hormone levels, orchestrating isometric exercises, recommending optimizations for their next nutritional intake, growing cranial stubble out to proper hair. “Foremost, to call mir human is not exactly correct.”

  “Walk,” Glithwah growled.

  They walked.

  As soon as the ready-room doors closed, Tacitus took over. “Where? It has been right in front of us all along, though it would be best to have the mole confirm.”

  Corinne averted her eyes. “Grace killed herself.”

  No matter, then, Tacitus thought. And also, what else had happened while he had been out of the loop.

  “Ir am sorry,” Joshua said. “Despite everything, Ir know you considered her as a friend.”

  “Where?” Carl tried again.

  “A star more or less as bright as Sol,” Joshua began, laying the groundwork. “We know the illumination levels at the lunar base. We saw Xool and their agents were equally comfortable in Earthlike room lighting. The illumination did not change when gravity bumped to what we surmised was Xool-normal. That all suggests their native world orbits an F-, G-, or K-class star.”