“Yes, ma’am,” Callum said.
“Okay then,” Yuri said. “We go ahead with this. Let’s start with a wish list. And, Kandara—personal defense weapons only.”
“Mary, but you really know how to kill a party.”
NEUTRON STAR
MORGAN’S ARRIVAL
The fleet was still two AUs out from the neutron star when Ainsley appeared, velocity matching perfectly so that the elegant white ship held position a thousand kilometers from the Morgan. The duty crew on the bridge had no warning; there wasn’t a single sensor on any ship in the fleet that had detected the giveaway gravitational waves that theoretically should have been coming from Ainsley’s drive as the ship approached.
“A stealthed gravitonic drive,” Yirella muttered as she clambered out of bed. “Who knew?” The alerts zipping into her databud had woken her after only a couple of hours’ sleep. She’d gone to bed expecting to be well awake and refreshed when they finished their deceleration maneuver an estimated million kilometers outside the neutron star’s unnatural ring. So far, contact had been limited: a few messages from the fleet when they were a light-month out, announcing they were coming—in peace. A brief: We know, you are welcome, in reply. And details—what orbit to go into, contact protocols; the neutron star inhabitants were organizing a reception congress to discuss “unified intent.” All reasonably predictable, if a little stark. There were no images of them or their habitats, no explanations of what the thermally active ring particles were.
Then right at the end came the only question the neutron star inhabitants asked: Is Yirella with you?
That was embarrassing.
In a pleasing way.
Dellian was sitting up beside her, a befuddled expression on his face as he scratched his neck, then his arm. Yawned.
“Your other boyfriend’s back, then,” he mumbled as he considered the data rolling through his optik.
Yirella resisted a sigh of exasperation. He was never going to let that go. She’d tried to explain to him that giving the seedships independence and freedom was her idea, her gamble, her responsibility. And she was only too aware, had she confided in him what she’d done, that burden of knowing would’ve chewed him up. Yes, it should have been a formal proposition to the council, duly debated and voted on. Except it would have been voted down. Kenelm’s reaction alone proved that, and he wasn’t the only one with that view on her utter irresponsibility. So every time she tried to mollify Del it came across as petulant and self-serving, which had to stop. She was confident he would ultimately forgive her, or at least stop snarking, given enough time—say, a couple of centuries.
“So it would seem,” she replied.
“What now?”
“Nothing. I expect Ainsley is just confirming we’re not a disguised Olyix attack.”
“What about us making sure this isn’t an Olyix ambush?”
She pressed her teeth together, refusing to show him how that riled her. “Good call. Cinrea is on watch. I’ll tell hir.”
“Don’t suppose I’m needed.”
“Did the bridge call for you?”
“No.”
“That’s good, then; they don’t think we’re about to be shot at.” She quickly put a tunic on and left the cabin. When the door shut, Dellian had rolled over to face the wall, his eyes closed.
“Saints,” she hissed quietly.
A white icon slipped into her optik. “Trouble in paradise?” Ainsley asked.
“And you can go to hell, too,” she snapped at him.
His chortle was immensely annoying. “It’s good to see you. Genuinely. How was the flight?”
“Eventful.” She told him about Kenelm, and the group of Utopial devotees Emilja and Soćko had gathered to steer exodus generations.
“Well, we did think it would be something like that, didn’t we?” Ainsley said. “Two thousand years of political fraudulence, though; gotta admit, that’s impressive. My father used to tell me that when he was a kid, change—in culture and technology—was so endemic that people were complaining no one had a job for life anymore. I wonder if Dad would approve of this particular reincarnation of sinecure.”
Yirella smiled. “I thought politics was a calling, not a job.”
“You’re young. You’ll learn.”
“So what in the sweet Saints have people built here? They changed the star’s rotation rate!”
“Yeah. How better to announce to the whole galaxy: Here we are. This civilization got very smart, and…libertarian isn’t the word, and post-scarcity communism doesn’t fit, either; I’m not quite sure how to describe their politics. Put it this way: They were very argumentative once they started to think properly for themselves. But they did agree to majority consensus. It brought a tear to my eye.”
“So are they going to fight the Olyix?”
“You’ll see. It’s quite a congress they’re putting together for you.”
“They, uh, asked about me.”
“Ah, yeah, about that; I may have pushed your role in our little conspiracy to facilitate their society.”
“Oh, Saints.”
“Don’t go all morose on me. It’ll work in your favor.”
“You think?”
“I predict. But then, predicting is how I made my fortune when I was human.”
“I checked. You inherited a fortune.”
“I inherited a small fortune, and turned it into the greatest accumulation of wealth in history.”
“Yeah, almost as big as your ego. So what next?”
“You finish decelerating, they send a portal over to the Morgan. You all go through to the congress. Simple.”
“Nah, nothing ever is. Not in these times.”
* * *
—
As the fleet approached its negotiated parking orbit a million kilometers out from the ring, the Morgan’s sensors started to capture the warm particles in high resolution. Yirella, Ellici, and Wim formed one analysis team, gathering in a small conference room to pore over the images and data tables compiled by the genten. The room’s walls were all but invisible behind the thick hologram projections—a perspective that seemed to place them at the heart of the little system, sitting on the surface of the neutron star itself.
“There’s some standardization,” Wim observed. “There are thousands of particles that have a similar size and mass; we’ve given them a preliminary type classification. Not that it matters, because they all have exactly the same external skin—that copper color. So we don’t know what any of them actually are.”
“And there’s nothing under a kilometer,” Yirella said. “But their thermal emission ratio is fairly constant across the types.” She studied close-up images of what looked like asteroids but seemed sculpted from polished copper. Their surfaces moved, though—slowly, the bulges and dints undulating with a lethargic arrythmia. As she watched the time-lapse images she had a disturbing flashback to a biology lecture featuring a fetal sac with a teratological embryo shifting around inside.
The thought was deeply uncomfortable, so she gave up and called Ainsley. “What the hell are those things?”
“Habitats, ships, factories, stores of processed materials, labs, experiments, sensors; everything you’d expect from an advanced civilization.”
“But they all have the same surface.”
“It’s a development on the mirrorfabrik shielding you use,” Ainsley said. “The cloak protects them from the neutron star radiation. It’s useful for defense, too.”
“That’s odd,” Ellici said as she pulled up more detailed sensor data. “Really odd. The neutron star has an unsymmetrical gravity field.”
“How can that be?” Wim mused. “There’s no theory that can account for uneven mass distribution inside a star, let alone a neutron star.”
“It’s got to be t
hose inner stations,” Ellici said. “The hundred and fifty big ones. Their gravitational emissions are off the scale. They must be affecting it.”
“We saw what the Resolution ships could do at the Vayan ambush,” Yirella said. “This could be a similar emission. Some kind of directional gravity beam?”
“If enough of them pull at the neutron star’s surface, they might create a wave in the outer crust; it’s only ions and electrons down to about four hundred meters.”
“Love the way you call it ‘only,’ ” Wim said.
“But susceptible to external forces,” Yirella countered. “I wonder if we can get an accurate surface map? See if there are physical waves splashing around down there.”
“They wouldn’t be big,” Wim said. “The neutron star’s only twenty-one kilometers in diameter, so a wave would be maybe a couple of millimeters high. Probably less.”
“We’re missing the main point,” Ellici said. “Why?”
“Because they can?”
“Because they’re weaponizing neutronium would be my guess. Remember, Ainsley has some kind of super-dense weapons we haven’t seen in action yet.”
“And here we are in orbit around two point three solar masses of neutronium,” Yirella said. “Matter that’s just as dense as you can get. Weaponize that, and the Olyix will be in serious trouble.”
“Anyone would be,” Wim said. “That’s a take-over-the-galaxy weapon.”
“I disagree,” Yirella said. “It’s a terrify-the-galaxy weapon, yes, but you can only destroy one thing with it. That doesn’t compel people to submit, just to run away.”
“Or die.”
“Good job they’re on our side, then,” Ellici said.
Yirella grinned over at her friend. “There’s one thing missing from this ring—from the whole system, actually.”
“Which is?”
“The seedships.”
“Then where are they?” Wim said, frowning.
“Inside the museum particle?” Ellici suggested.
“Surplus to requirements,” Wim said. “Plus the ring orbit is uncomfortably close to the neutron star. The radiation down there is dangerous. If we didn’t have mirrorfabrik shells, the fleet wouldn’t be in this parking orbit. We’d be a lot farther out.”
“The seedships were obsolete,” Yirella said. “They didn’t bother maintaining them. Simplest solution applies.”
“Interesting insight into their psychology, then,” Ellici said. “Human cultures normally display a reverence for the past. You know there was a protective dome built over the Apollo Lunar Module at Tranquility to preserve Armstrong and Aldrin’s footprints from overeager tourists.”
“That probably died the day the Olyix super-nuked Theophilus crater. It was a miracle they didn’t crack the whole moon open with that one.”
“Most likely,” Wim said testily. “Your point?”
“This is the first human civilization we know about that has no past, no heritage,” Yirella said. “I deliberately chose not to burden them with expectations and traditions. Their value system is going to be different from ours. And Ainsley told me they were…argumentative at first.
“That indicated they took time establishing the boundaries and behavior profiles that parents normally instill in children. But of course they had to determine those for themselves. So yeah, they’ll probably look at things differently. From a strictly logical point of view, the past is really dead to them, an irrelevance.”
“Sentimentality is an inbuilt human trait,” Wim said.
“Is it?”
“Don’t start bringing up nature versus nurture, not here. Please.”
“Their society, particularly the individuals themselves, aren’t old enough to experience death from old age, not yet,” Yirella said. “They have never known that kind of loss. That must impact their outlook.”
“Saints, what have you created?”
“I have no idea,” she said, and grinned. “Wonderful, isn’t it.”
* * *
—
A small spherical craft with the ubiquitous copper skin flew out of the ring to the Morgan, accelerating and decelerating at twenty gees. When it had maneuvered into the starship’s largest airlock, it opened up to present a single portal, three meters in diameter. Alexandre was standing in front of it, at the head of a delegation of senior officers and fleet captains. They could glimpse a verdant green landscape framed by the glowing blue rim—one that seemed to be mostly rainforest. A human figure walked through.
Yirella couldn’t stop her lips twitching as she regarded the neutron star human in fascination. The visitor was an easy three meters tall, and she thought probably omnia; something about the sharp facial features elicited the instinctual assumption. Gender—if there was one—was hard to determine, what with the colorful ribbons of cloth that were wound spiral-style around its body—and which seemed to be moving as if still being wound. It was a perception issue, as if her eyes couldn’t quite resolve the subtle motion. The bands of color were also traveling along the fabric in the opposite direction to the—apparent—physical motion. Then there were the visitor’s eyes, which were pale golden orbs, not at all biological. Also unusual was their skin, which was black but not as dark as her own, and had a kind of indigo mottling as if some reptilian DNA had somehow seeped in. The whole reptile theory was enhanced by the tail, over a meter long and sinuous, with strong muscle bands swishing it from side to side in a controlled pendulum motion that suggested it was anything but vestigial.
Dellian leaned in toward her and whispered: “Is that how you designed them?”
“No. The initiators were set to produce standard binary humans. There’s been plenty of body modification going on here.”
“Free to do what they like, huh?”
Yirella was about to give him a really glance when the exotic visitor turned to face Alexandre, who was beginning hir official welcome speech. The cloth strips on its back parted to flow around five metallic sockets protruding from the spine. Yirella couldn’t figure those out at all; they were quite brutalist, given the technology level on show in the ring.
“I am Immanueel,” the visitor said in a high voice that hinted at amusement. “I thank you for your greeting. This is a momentous occasion for us.” Immanueel began to look around at the people lined up behind Alexandre, searching—then drew a breath and walked straight to Yirella. Everyone parted to give them a clear path.
Yirella wasn’t used to looking up at people. Of all Immanueel’s modified aspects, she found their height the most unsettling.
“The genesis human,” Immanueel said reverentially, and bowed. “I am honored. You created us unbound—the greatest gift sentience can be given. We thank you for our lives and freedom.”
Yirella opened Ainsley’s white icon. “What in the Saints have you done?”
A mocking chortle came back at her. “Everyone needs a creation myth. Don’t blow it. Messiah.”
“Oh, crap.” She composed a gracious smile for Immanueel. “It is I who am flattered by this encounter. This ring and what you have done to the neutron star is extraordinarily impressive. You must be rightly proud of your accomplishments.”
“Thank you. We have built a habitat suitable for you. The congress of determination can be held as soon as you are ready.”
Yirella glanced over at Alexandre, who seemed more entertained than upset that Immanueel was treating her as if she were in charge. “I believe we are ready now,” she said politely.
Immanueel turned and gestured at the portal—a pose Yirella associated with a medieval courtier ushering their royal charge. “Then I would be delighted if you would accompany me.”
“Of course.” There was the tiniest specter of doubt itching away in her mind that this might be some luxurious trap—which made her annoyed with herself. This is what happens w
hen you’re brought up to believe everything outside the fence is your enemy.
* * *
—
The habitat that the portal led to might have had a terrestrial environment, but visually Yirella found it disorienting. She’d been expecting to come out in one of the many larger cylindrical particles that the fleet’s sensors had found in the ring. But Immanueel had said: We built a habitat for you.
Should’ve paid attention.
The portal opened onto a wide plaza of stone slabs. Their surface was infused with lichen blooms, while moss was packed tight in the cracks. They looked old, as if they’d been laid many decades ago, if not longer. But then, ordinarily, she would have thought the thick woodland of bald cypress and oak trees surrounding the plaza must have been well over a century old, given their size. Whatever fast-grow genetic tweaks that’d been made to their seeds had produced an authentically ancient-looking biosphere. We could have done with that on Vayan.
On the other side of the plaza from the portal was a disk-shaped building, suspended thirty meters off the ground on fluted columns. The supports were twirled by wisteria trunks almost as thick as the nearby trees. They swamped the building, decorating it in deep violet flower clusters so that only the disk’s window band rim was visible. It left her with the impression of something sacred that had been abandoned to nature, like one of old Earth’s pre-industrial temples.
Finally, her subconscious hauled her gaze up beyond the tree canopy so she was looking along the bulk of the habitat. A frown crept onto her face. The cylinder bent along its length—a long curve that put the endcaps out of direct sight. So…considerably longer than any of those cylinders the fleet had categorized orbiting the neutron star. It took a moment for her to work out what was wrong with what she was seeing. She was standing on the floor of a cylinder with a landscape curving above her in defiance of any planetary geography, its apex hidden behind an axial strand of glaring light. It was the typical layout of big human habitats like Sisaket, which they’d left behind at the start of the FinalStrike flight. Such habitats rotated around their long axis to provide Coriolis gravity on the floor of the shell—except this wasn’t a simple cylindrical geometry. Instead she was standing inside a tube that circled around on itself to form a toroid, so it couldn’t be rotating around the axial sun tube.
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