“This ship does not use the same propulsive technology we do, but its hull is the same materials, and we have detected tachyon-punch signatures of other vessels attempting to keep up with it.”
It can’t be. Octavio stared at the hologram as ZDX continued.
“It is not a Matrix vessel but is based on the same design heritage and technology. We believe, Captain Octavio Catalan, that we are looking at one of our Creators’ relativistic colony ships.”
“Because the tachyon punch was fatal to organics,” Octavio reminded himself aloud. “They had to follow in ships like this…but this course makes no sense, then.”
There was no clear destination for the ship. Its course seemed to have been selected to avoid any stars in the region—any stars where there would have been Constructed Worlds.
“Shouldn’t they be looking for Matrices?” he asked.
“While we are not in full contact with the rest of the Regional Construction Matrices, none of the nodes we are in contact with have ever encountered the Creators,” ZDX told them. “Some of those nodes are closer to what we believe to be our origin zone. If the Creators were trying to colonize the Constructed Worlds, those nodes should have encountered them first.”
“What if they know about the Rogues?” Renaud asked.
“Then they might be trying to avoid the Matrices and the Constructed Worlds,” Octavio realized. “Then the course makes sense—they’re trying to outpace the expansion of their own creations.”
He shook his head.
“They’d have to go a long damn way to be clear of the Matrices, though. I wouldn’t be comfortable being less than three or four hundred light-years clear of you guys if I knew the Rogues existed and I had a choice.”
ZDX didn’t seem particularly offended by that.
“That conclusion fits with our data,” it said after several moments of processing. “We had not predicted that potential reaction on the part of our Creators. Your perspective is invaluable, Captain Octavio Catalan, Commander Aisha Renaud.
“That value only adds to what we must ask of you.”
Octavio traded a look with Renaud. They had a lot going on there, but the chance to meet with the Matrices’ Creators…that was a big deal.
“What do you need?” he finally asked.
“We require your assistance in the construction of a vessel specially designed to intercept the Creator ship and slow it down to a velocity where we can speak to its crew. Our intent was to provide the vessel with a Matrix core to avoid the necessity for an organic crew, but your point regarding the Rogues has been considered by XR-13-9, and that intention is no longer optimal.”
“You need someone to board the ship and talk to your Creators who isn’t you,” Renaud interpreted. “Because they’ll assume you are Rogues and try to kill you.”
“Exactly. Our propulsive systems cannot reach the velocity demonstrated by the Creator vessel, but our analysis suggests that yours are capable of reaching a matching vector in approximately thirty-four hours.”
“Thirty-four hours that will be over fifty days for the crew,” Octavio pointed out. “And another fifty days to decelerate. And it’s not like we have a ship with multiples of cee in delta-v.”
Scorpion was designed for missions of massive duration, including vast amounts of maneuvering and acceleration. She had the capacity to produce her own fuel, but her total delta-v aboard was only about half lightspeed in total.
Any long-distance flights were expected to be done under warp drive.
“If we pull them into warped space once we match vectors, we’re at least no longer time-dilated,” Renaud pointed out. “That would let us have a conversation with them and at least ask if they want to be slowed down.”
“Can’t you talk to them by tachyon coms?” Octavio asked.
“We have attempted. Their tachyon-communication system appears to be receiving, but there has been no response, even accounting for time dilation. We would presume a ship of our Creators to have some AI aboard, but we have not even received basic ping information we would have expected from that.
“The ship does appear to have companions using repeated tachyon punches to keep up with it. We are not sure of their purpose, but we presume they are escorts.”
“So, let me make sure I’m assessing the right request here,” Octavio said. “You want us to build a ship, from scratch, using our engines and a massive fuel tank, to match velocities with a cee-fractional slowboat your Creators are using to try and outrun you. Then you want us to convince them to talk to you?”
“We will construct the hull and provide the fuel. We will require Captain Octavio Catalan to provide the engines and warp drive. We estimate this will take approximately two thousand five hundred hours, plus/minus one hundred hours.”
Three months. Lestroud would be there by then, which would help keep Vista safe—plus, over half of the evacuation would be completed by then.
“What about the habitat project?” he asked.
“The interceptor vessel will be constructed in Refuge,” ZDX replied. “Construction projects here in Hearthfire will not be impacted. We would be prepared to hand the vessel, including its Matrix core, over to your command.”
That had potential all on its own. The Matrices had generally been very leery about letting humans anywhere near a core. One with instructions to be loyal to and cooperate with humans could help them leap their AI tech forward by generations.
“I still have to ask what’s in it for us,” Octavio admitted. The chance to talk to the Matrices’ Creators was huge, but he only had so many resources. To build this interceptor, he’d have to send the best warp-drive and propulsion engineers he had to Refuge…which meant he’d have to take command of that expedition himself.
There was only one person in the Republic of Exilium who understood warp drives better than Octavio Catalan, and Lyle Reinhardt wasn’t a warship Captain.
“XR-13-9 is prepared to provide a full transfer of the entirety of our data archives: technical, astrographic, scientific and historical,” ZDX told him. “If you help us reach our Creators, we will give you everything.”
Octavio exhaled sharply, wincing against the pain in his shoulder as he looked back at Renaud.
“We’ll have to work out a schedule of when we’ll need to send propulsion and warp-drive people to Refuge, then,” he told her. “And I’ll have to accompany the warp-drive team. I’ll take command of Interceptor myself.”
He realized he’d already given the ship a name. He’d agreed to the project while he was still arguing.
What else could he do? It was the engineering challenge of a lifetime—with a chance to meet the people who’d built the Matrices at the end of it!
34
The stable gravity points around Vista were starting to resemble unfertilized egg sacs to Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters. Vista’s orbital industry had been turned to one purpose only, and the immense fabricators concealed inside the Matrices’ ships had proven incredibly useful.
Nine habitats a week had managed to become fifteen. Now, as they reached the hundred-day mark since the Impact, over halfway through the half-orbit they’d estimated Vista would remain habitable, clusters of habitats hung above her world.
Over a hundred immense orbital habitats orbited under the guns of her fleet. Almost a quarter of her surviving people lived aboard those stations now, forcing themselves to continue some semblance of normal life—as if the stations could be their permanent home.
“We’re going to need to divert some of our construction capacity to food-production facilities,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies told her, the younger male manipulating a datasong she was only half-paying attention to.
Her Voice-Of-Gunnery had become her Voice-Of-Choirs. She hadn’t had a second-in-command before, preferring to spread the tasks across the staff assembled to lead the Guardian-Star-Choir.
As the true First-Among-Singers of all spacecraft of the Vistan people, however, she’d learned s
he needed someone to lean on. That someone had been Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies, whose youthful green skin concealed one of the cleverest minds she had encountered.
“How bad is it looking?” she trilled back at him.
“Production at the greenhouse-augmented farms at the surface is falling over thirty percent below projections,” he told her. “Worse, the temperatures in our growing regions dropped faster than we expected. We’ve just confirmed the full damage, First-Among-Singers. We lost the entire crop.”
“Darkest waters consume us,” she hissed. They’d hoped to get one last crop out of the farmland remaining—enough food to feed the entire surviving population for over a year. Without that crop, their ability to feed the people on the habitats dropped drastically.
They had always been going to run out of food before they could get enough food production online in space to feed a billion people. She’d known that; it was part of why evacuation to Refuge was really the only option.
“Do we have any updates on the farming projects on Refuge?” she asked.
“Mixed news so far,” Swimmer replied. “They’re going well enough that the evacuees are self-sufficient, but there’s still only four hundred thousand of them. Some of the reports we got with the last round-trip of the evac fleet suggested some concern over expanding the farms fast enough.”
So, there was no way they could extract food from the new colony in enough quantity to keep the habitats fed. The habitats themselves were far too large for the human’s warp drives to transport—she’d asked.
Only the warp-drive freighters provided by the humans were moving people so far. The Matrices and humans were working with her engineers to build some test-bed warp-drive craft there in Hearthfire, but the technology was beyond her people—and, amusingly enough to her, apparently beyond the Matrices themselves.
“We’ll have to re-task the production working on the bombers,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters finally decided.
They’d built just over two hundred of the tiny, two-Vistan attack craft. Each carried two of the bomb-pumped lasers that armed her guardships, but nobody had any illusions about their survivability.
They were suicide ships and the Vistans piloting them knew it. Sings hoped to get one salvo from them before they were flagged as a threat. Once the Rogue Matrices started engaging them at any range at all, the bombers would never get close enough to hurt them.
“I’m not sure that production will even be useful,” Swimmer warned. “Those are smaller facilities, ones not big enough to build large stations.”
“We don’t need large stations,” Sings replied. “We need strings of orbital greenhouses. It doesn’t matter if those greenhouses are only ten meters long; we just need enough space to stuff a hydroponic crop pod in them.
“Everything we have left that isn’t building orbitals starts building hydroponic greenhouses,” she ordered. “However large the facility can build them. It doesn’t help us if we get a billion people into orbit and ready to evacuate if they starve before we move them to Refuge!”
Despite her harsh words, though, the datasong she was running gave her hope. They should be able to get enough hydroponics online to buy them enough time. Not enough to feed everyone forever but enough to spin out their existing food supplies to get everyone to Refuge.
Every day that passed, every habitat that came online, every milestone her people hit on the new evacuation ships…the math in her datasongs looked better.
It was starting to look like they might just pull this off…and in her heart of hearts, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters hadn’t truly believed they would.
A shuttle delivered Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters to the newest of the orbital habitats several hours later. The inspection tours were a formality, really. To complete the true inspections in the time needed took teams of thousands, poring over every nook and cranny of the space station in barely two days.
But it made even those teams feel better to have the top leaders go through and look at their work. This one had been built by Vistans, too, so there was a morale factor in making them feel their work was equal to the stations being built by the Matrices.
Once the shuttle was latched on, the rotating force of the cylindrical habitat pushed Sings against the floor of the shuttlecraft. The habitats were running a pseudo-force of about eighty percent of Vista’s gravity, easy enough to walk against but still an adjustment from the zero-gravity shuttle or the sixty percent her guardships used in their rotating habitat sections.
Uniformed Shining Spears were waiting for her. The Shining Mother had insisted that Sings be escorted at all times…and when Sings had admitted that the Star-Choirs didn’t have the Spears for it, she’d sent up her own troops.
“Welcome to Sleepy-Sunset Station, First-Among-Singers,” a tall Vistan Mother greeted Sings. The female was middle-aged, the distinct mottling of age present across her entire body but not dominant yet. “I am Walks-In-Moonlight, the Voice-Of-Builders of the inspection team.”
“It’s always a pleasure to see our latest hope,” Sings replied. “Where would you like to begin, Voice-Of-Builders?”
“The entryway has an observation space, to help our new residents understand just what they’re dealing with,” the Mother replied. “Follow me!”
Walks-In-Moonlight led the way along the curved surface of the station. From her movements, she was as used to zero gravity as to the strange pseudoforce a spinning station used in place of gravity. She’d clearly been working on the projects for a while.
They kept expanding, added more teams and more slips as they freed up new resources. Sings had been amazed at just how many of the stations her people could build. It was going to save them all, and still her people had taken up the task with more enthusiasm and drive than she’d expected.
Survival was an incredible motivator, and it seemed Sings had underestimated her people.
Walks-In-Moonlight led them through a large set of sliding doors into an unwalled atrium that looked out over the entire cylinder. Carefully designed acoustics carried the echolocation patterns of the entire station into this room, allowing a Vistan to take it all in.
Sings swallowed as she studied it. She’d been aboard seven of the stations by now, but they still hurt her heart every time she “saw” them. The old datasongs and sculptures of what an orbital habitat would look like had called for water and beauty and life and grace.
These stations had water. Ice asteroids had been melted down to fill vast regions of the outermost hull with water and allow for streams and ponds throughout the cold metal.
That was it. The “buildings” were designed to resemble the domes and structures of a surface settlement, but it was a poor resemblance. The station had four habitable levels, three of them only sixty percent complete to allow for some esthetic effect.
Water ran over all four levels, providing the warm humidity that her people craved, but there were only handfuls of plants and trees. If they’d had time, a habitat of this size could have had a self-sustaining ecosystem, at least as far as plant life and air were concerned.
They didn’t have time. The stations were designed to hold two million souls. Comfort had been a factor, but survival came first. Food and water would come from off-station, from the infrastructure and storage that hung in closer orbit around Vista still.
Every time she went over the numbers, part of her wondered why they couldn’t just stay here, in stations that could at least see their homeworld. As she stood in the observation space, though, she understood why.
These were immense and safe refugee camps. They could become homes in theory, but there was nowhere left to source the plant and animal life of Vista beyond their hydroponics farms—and those plants were needed to feed everyone.
In time, perhaps a few would be transformed into permanent homes for a contingent that remained. Enough of her people were still refusing to leave the surface that Sings was grimly sure they’d have some who would stay in the habitats.
&
nbsp; The rest, though, would serve as temporary homes and be abandoned. Potentially stripped for parts to keep the remaining ones going.
Immense as the stations were, after all, it wasn’t like they were being designed for the kind of working lifespan a true habitat required.
They were halfway out onto the outer floor of the habitat when Sings’s communicator chimed. So did the one carried by the aide escorting her.
She didn’t hear the Spears’ communicator chiming, but she saw their reaction. Unlike her or her aide, they simply got the message. They went from a casual-seeming honor guard into a weapons-bristling phalanx before Sings even reached her communicator.
There was a solid circle of soldiers around her and her aide. Walks-In-Moonlight was included in the circle, and she clearly had no idea what was going on. She hadn’t received the message—she’d just been standing inside the close-protection radius of Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters and hadn’t been classified as a threat.
Sings tapped a command.
“This is an emergency alert to all vessels in orbit,” a voice declared. It wasn’t quite right, clearly one of the voices of the human translators. Those translators tried to create unique voices for each human, but she didn’t recognize this one.
“We have confirmed unscheduled tachyon signatures in the outer system. Current estimate is eight unidentified Matrix units.” The speaker paused. “Large Matrix units. Potential Rogues,” they concluded.
“All ships are to go to Status Two. Matrix recon nodes are proceeding to investigate the units. Stand by for further communications.
“Repeat, all ships are to go to Status Two and stand by for further communications. We have a potential Rogue Matrix incursion.”
Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters had been fully briefed on everything the humans had learned about their Matrix allies and enemies. “Large units” would mean either Construction Matrices or Combat Matrices.
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