by A. G. Riddle
“Completely,” Lykos said, without hesitation.
“Then I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She smiled. “Ten thousand years, local time.”
In orbit, Isis couldn’t help but watch as Lykos journeyed back to the small village with the silver cylinder. Just before the shadow of night reached across the world, covering the rocky area that hid the resurrection raft, Lykos ventured back to it empty-handed and stepped inside.
Isis exhaled. Anticipation filled her. She opened a wormhole and returned to world 1701 and the main ship.
Janus instantly recognized her renewed energy and reflected it. “You must have had a good trip.”
“I did.”
“Me too. I loaded the D arc. You won’t believe it.” He brought up a series of images on the screen. “They’re flying reptiles with a photosynthetic dermal layer. They actually become invisible at night when they hunt.”
“Impressive.”
They talked about the exhibit on the homeworld, how the tours would have to be guarded, and how it might reignite excitement for the project, and even inspire a new group of scientists to venture out with them.
Finally, Janus said, “Ready for world 1723?”
Isis nodded, and they again entered their glass tubes, the fog floated up, and time slipped away.
43
The sound of the alarm was Isis’ first indication that something was wrong. The tube opened, and the fog cleared. As usual, she was out of her tube before Janus. She hobbled across the cold metallic floor to the control panel and worked the green cloud of light that emerged, trying to determine what had gone wrong.
“Did the hyperspace tunnel collapse?” Janus asked. He rubbed his eyes and staggered out to join Isis.
“No. We’ve reached world 1723.”
A message over the speaker echoed in the small space. “This world is under a military quarantine. Evacuate immediately.”
Isis and Janus raced to the ship’s bridge. The viewscreen showed the planet below, which looked nothing like it had in the probe’s survey thousands of years ago. Where a lush green, brown, and white world had been, a wasteland lay. Black craters dotted the surface. The oceans were too green, the clouds too yellow, the land only red, brown and light tan.
The ship’s voice boomed in the bridge. “Evacuation course configured. Execute?”
“Negative,” Isis said. “Sigma, silence notifications from military buoys and maintain geosynchronous orbit.”
“This is reckless,” Janus said.
“This world was attacked.”
“That’s not certain.”
“We have to investigate this.”
“It could have been a natural occurrence,” Janus said. “A series of comets or an asteroid field.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You don’t—”
“It wasn’t.” Isis zoomed the viewscreen to one of the impact craters. “A series of roads lead to each crater. There were cities there. This was an attack. Maybe they carved up an asteroid field and used the pieces for the kinetic bombardment.” The viewscreen changed again. A ruined city in a desert landscape took shape, its skyscrapers crumbling. “They let the environmental fallout take care of anyone outside the major cities. There could be answers there.” Isis’ voice was final.
Janus lowered his head. “Take the Beta Lander. It will give you better maneuverability without the arcs.”
Isis set the Beta Lander down just outside the city, reasoning that there could be leftover explosives or any number of dangers inside the ruin. If the lander were destroyed, she would have nowhere to resurrect, and her life would permanently come to an end. Setting down outside was the only safe bet.
She donned her EVA suit and exited the lander, making a direct path for the ruins of the city.
Along the way, she turned the mystery of 1723 over in her mind. The initial survey had shown two hominid subspecies, both closely related. Their evolutionary progress was in line with the other hominids within the Atlantean swath of space, and they had been deemed unremarkable.
But something had happened here. Progress, evolution had ignited. They had made a great leap forward, and an advanced civilization had risen, only to be bombarded, bombed away in an apocalypse. The thought saddened her. This world could have been what the new Atlantean homeworld had longed for: a peer world. Its discovery could re-ignite interest in space exploration. But clearly someone already knew about the world or had discovered it after the collapse: they had placed an Atlantean military beacon in orbit.
There were only two possibilities. The first was that the initial survey results had been incorrect, that the world was already destroyed when it was initially probed. The alternative was that world 1723’s civilization had risen and fallen in the interval, and some Atlantean organization had found it and opted to hide the truth.
Isis had been hiking for almost two hours when Janus’s voice came over her comm, urgent and nervous. “Incoming ship.” He paused. “It’s a sentinel sphere.”
Isis waited. She stared at the sky, as if expecting the sentinel to break the cloud cover.
“It just scanned our ship,” Janus said. “It’s moving on. Isis, I think you should get out of there.”
“Copy.” Isis started for the lander.
“The sphere is releasing something. The object is entering the atmosphere. It’s a kinetic bombardment—”
The comm signal turned to static, and then cut off. Isis saw the burning object break the clouds above her, a burning hot poker streaking through the sky. Isis began to run but stopped. It was no use. She stood there, waiting, wondering why the sentinel would fire on either this world or her.
The heat grew, and she dropped to the ground and curled into a ball. The pain beat down on her, and sweat poured out of her skin for a few seconds, and then evaporated in the baking heat of the suit. The end came quickly after that, and in the next instant, she opened her eyes, staring out of the round resurrection tube in the Beta Lander.
Kate opened her eyes. She too was in the Beta Lander, on the same world, thousands of years after the memory. She also stared out of a round glass tube, this one a vat of yellow light in the research bay.
She lay on the floor, her head in Milo’s lap. The vat where she had floated, watching, experiencing the memories of Isis lay open, a pool of blood on the floor. Her blood. Isis’ death on the world outside thousands of years ago had felt real, and it had done damage, Kate knew it instinctively. She could barely move.
Paul and Mary stood over her, and the fear on their faces confirmed her assessment.
44
When Kate opened her eyes again, she was on her back on a flat metallic table. She recognized it. It was the same type of surgical table she had awoken upon in the Alpha Lander, just after the surgery there.
Paul looked down at her, worry on his face. “That was close, Kate. Beta says your life expectancy is now less than one day.”
Kate sat up. “I saw what happened here.” She realized Mary and Milo were also in the room. She spoke to the three of them, recounting what she had seen on the Atlantean homeworld, how their society had fractured.
“Why did the sentinel attack Isis on this world?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know,” Kate replied. “I think the next memory will reveal that.” She read the apprehensiveness on their faces. “I have to. We’ve been over this.” She decided to change the subject. “Any progress on the code?”
“If you want to call it that.” Paul walked to the wall panel and pulled up an image that looked like a single frame of TV static but in color. Kate was amazed at how well Paul worked the panel. She wondered how long she had been in the vat. Either way, she elevated her opinion of his intelligence.
“This image is a translation of the four base codes to CMYK. We tried RGB—red, green, blue—with a null terminator, but it was even worse. We’ve also ruled out a video and several other scenarios.”
“The running joke,” Mary said, “is that it
might be like one of those pictures where you stare at it long enough and it transforms into some image.”
“But we’ve been staring at it awhile, and it hasn’t changed.” Paul said, completing her thought. “Our working theory is that it’s a genome sequence. My guess is a retrovirus.”
“I bet you’re right,” Kate said. “It could be some sort of therapy that changes brain wiring, even allows for communication over distance. Or it could work like a quantum beacon in subspace.”
“Creating a quantum entanglement,” Mary said.
“Yes,” Kate agreed. “We inject the virus, and a return signal comes in for whoever sent it.”
“Do you know what it is?” Paul asked.
“No. But…” Kate thought about the retrovirus Isis had administered to the Exiles and about the sentinels and the Serpentine war with the Atlanteans. “I think I’m close. It could be in the next memory.”
Before anyone could object, Kate ushered them out of the adaptive research lab, down the corridor and into a medical lab. She explained the genome synthesis systems and again was impressed at how quickly Paul learned.
When the sequence was loaded, Beta began counting down the construction phase. In a little less than three hours, they would have the retrovirus in the signal, and Kate hoped she would know the full truth of the Atlantis World.
She returned to the vat, donned the silver helmet, and delved back into the memories Janus had tried to erase.
The Beta Lander shook violently from the earthquakes after the impact, but to Isis’ relief, it remained intact. When the tremors subsided, the doors to the resurrection bay slid open and Janus ran in. He must have ported to the lander right after the impact, Isis thought. It wasn’t like him to take such a risk.
The tube opened, and Isis staggered out. Janus held his arms out to catch her, but she waved him away with her hand. “I’m okay.”
“We need to go.”
He led her to the portal, and they stepped out onto their main ship. Janus quickly keyed the next destination and opened a hyperspace window before they could reach their stasis chambers.
“Why did the sentinel attack me?” Isis asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe the world was invaded by the Serpentine Army.”
“Impossible,” Isis said. “They would have had to break the sentinel line. If so, they would have reached our homeworld a long time ago. The ruins on 1723 were old.”
“We need to report this.”
“Too risky. Besides, we were told not to approach any world quarantined by a military beacon.” By Ares, Isis thought. She mulled that over for a moment.
“What if the sentinels are malfunctioning?” Janus asked.
“Unlikely. I think someone programmed the sentinels to annihilate the inhabitants of 1723.”
“That’s a big accusation.”
“It was a big civilization.”
Neither said anything after that. Isis’ thoughts drifted to the Exile world and to Lykos, lying in the stasis chamber in the resurrection raft. She decided to alter her plan, to get back there sooner than she had promised, just in case. “Let’s take some time to think about this. And let’s move on while we do. What’s our destination?”
“2319”
Isis pulled up the survey details, focusing on 2319’s location. It was too far away from the Exile world; she couldn’t reach it in the Delta Lander. She searched the database of planets that would work.
“What about 1918? It had three hominid species during the initial survey. It could be interesting to do a comparative evolutionary study.”
Janus thought for a moment. “Yes. I agree.”
When 1918 came into view, Isis knew she had made a good choice. The world was the third planet in its solar system, had a single, uninhabited, rocky moon, and had recently undergone a significant global climate change. A small isthmus had risen between two of the minor continents in the northern and southern hemisphere, dividing the planet’s massive ocean into two smaller bodies of water, altering sea currents and the habitats of several species of primates on the central continent. Several hominids were venturing out of their ancestral jungle habitats onto the plains. The environmental and dietary changes were causing permanent changes to their genomes.
“I’m now reading four genetically distinct hominid populations,” Janus said. “Assigning catalog numbers. They’ll be subspecies 8468, 8469, 8470, and 8471.”
They spent a few more hours conducting their pre-landing surveys. The beacon that hid the world was fully functional and passed all its system checks. Per protocol, they began making arrangements to bury their primary ship deep under the dark side of the world’s moon.
“I’d like to take the Alpha Lander down,” Janus said. “It’s overkill, but the C arc is empty, and I think there might be an opportunity.”
Isis agreed; she only needed the Delta Lander for her purposes.
On the surface, they took DNA samples and conducted a series of experiments, comparing the data with the initial survey.
“The progress is amazing,” Janus said. “And the diversity.”
“Indeed. I’d like to do a longitudinal study.” She tried not to appear nervous while she waited for Janus’ answer. “I don’t think anyone on the homeworld would mind. They haven’t seemed to miss us lately.”
“I agree. And a longer-term comparison would be interesting. Suggested sample interval?”
“Ten thousand years?”
Janus compared the recent data and the initial survey. “That should work well.” He smiled. “I’ll advise the science council not to expect us anytime soon.
The two scientists prepped and retired to their stasis chambers. Just before she stepped in, Isis set her own countdown for five thousand years. When she awoke, she would port back to the main ship, then take the Delta Lander to check in on the Exile world, just to make sure.
But the five thousand years awakening sequence never came.
Isis once again awoke to an alarm—an urgent encrypted communication. She checked the hibernation log. Only 3482 years had passed. She and Janus raced to the Alpha Lander’s communications bay.
The first message was an urgent advisory that their homeworld was under attack. Immediately, the memory of the sentinel attack that had killed her on world 1723 ran through Isis’ mind.
“Look,” Janus said. “There’s a sentinel directive here, commanding all sentinels not on the line to rally to the homeworld.”
Isis paced the room.
“It must be a Serpentine invasion,” Janus whispered.
“Then we’re not safe here.”
“True. But we can’t leave either.”
They ate after that, neither saying much. Isis’ thoughts drifted from her own world to the Exile world.
The comm alert went off again, and they rushed back to the communications bay.
The new message was even shorter. Their world had fallen. They were ordered to simply hide and await further instructions.
“We’re marooned then,” Janus said.
Where sadness should have been, Isis sensed only contentment from Janus.
45
Dorian had almost regained his strength. The hours in the conference booth reliving Ares’ past were taking an increasing toll on him. He sat, staring out at the sentinel assembly line that stretched into the blackness of space. He was close to unraveling the full truth behind Ares, including his motivations and why he had come to Earth, what he wanted with humanity.
Dorian had been impressed with how Ares had handled the revolt on his own world. It hadn’t been as dramatic as Ares’ flood of Earth and the plague before it, but nevertheless, Ares had proved a proficient soldier.
Dorian stepped into the conference booth and loaded Ares’ final memories.
After the Exile, the deep sense of emptiness had returned for Ares. He once again found himself in a world where he had no place. He was an outsider in a world he had created. The irony wasn’t lost on him, but he knew
that he had done what had to be done. That was the thread that ran through his entire disjointed existence. Around him, the intellectual utopia his world had always longed to become rapidly took shape.
While the world around him was changing, Ares was staying the same. He was truly a relic, a man out of time and out of touch.
There were no battles left for him to fight, no great campaign, no reason to exist.
He once again requested to be allowed to die, and once again, his request was denied. He once more took the long walk to the tomb that held the ancient resurrection ship, the celebration even larger this time, the crowd packed to the brim, the noise deafening, the camera flashes blinding.
Nothingness followed. Only the curve of glass and wisps of fog within the tube, and the faint tickle of the turning of time.
Around him, the ship shook. An earthquake? Ares wondered. Impossible. Any tectonic anomalies would never be allowed to progress.
His tube opened, and Ares ran out of the ancient ark. The sky was dark except for flashes in the distance and large, triangular ships descending. Blasts erupted in the city before him. The skywalks severed and buildings collapsed. The entire metropolis was coming down.
Heat issued forth, and the cacophony engulfed him, disorienting him. It was as if time were standing still, as if he were in a dream, a nightmare. The world Ares had sacrificed so much for was falling, crumbling before his very eyes in a wave of heat and light and thunder. The roar rattled him to his core, and he staggered backwards involuntarily. This was not a situation he could handle. In that moment, he felt utterly powerless, alone against an unknown force, an enemy with no equal he had ever seen.
A ship landed just outside the ark and masked soldiers poured out, surrounding him.
