Echogenesis

by Gary Gibson

  ‘No.’

  ‘I do,’ said Amit, ‘and I can tell you that every word Vic said is utter bullshit.’

  Sam watched as the old man let the knotted wire drop to the floor before turning towards the door.

  Sam kneeled, quickly snatching up Jess’s rifle and bringing it to bear on him. ‘Wait.’

  Amit glanced at him, seemingly unconcerned. ‘Why? Or you’ll shoot me?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Even so, Sam’s hands felt numb from having been tied behind his back for so many hours. The blood came rushing back into his fingers, making it hard to keep the weapon steady.

  Amit laughed. ‘Here’s something none of you know. If you’d interfered with the orbiter in any way, the explosives would have automatically detonated. The only way to keep it from blowing up is if I’m in control.’

  ‘You’re bluffing,’ said Sam. Sweat trickled into his eyes.

  ‘You know,’ said Amit, ‘perhaps I am. Or perhaps I’m not. Are you willing to take the chance?’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Sam, almost pleading now. He could barely hold on to the rifle.

  ‘Goodbye, Sam,’ said Amit. Then he stepped out into the night.

  Sam stared after him and let the barrel of the rifle dip towards the floor. He stepped over to the door, but when he looked out, there was no sign of Amit.

  He glanced back at Jess, her dead eyes staring past him. He had to get out of there before Traynor came back, find Amit and…

  And what? Kill him, or Traynor, or both of them, assuming he even had it in him to point a gun at another human being and pull the trigger?

  Think. What had Amit been planning for all those long hours he’d been lying curled up on the floor, pretending to either be asleep or in some kind of psychotic withdrawal?

  Then he remembered what Amit had said, about how the orbiter was in actuality not much more than a guided missile with room for a passenger…and packed, he now knew, with enough explosives to take out the entire mothership.

  He ran out the door and towards the control shed.

  * * *

  The howling filled the night air like a lament as Sam skirted past the Tokamak. The control shed was empty, although judging by the display running on one of the screens, Amit had already managed to initiate a countdown to a launch, crippled hands or not. Another screen showed Amit hobbling along the path towards the starlit craft, his broken hands held close to his chest.

  Sam ran back out of the building and towards the orbiter. By the time he got there, Amit had already begun to ascend the side of the craft, pushing his elbows through the rungs of the ladder bolted to its hull to avoid having to use his hands. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t got very far.

  Sam aimed his rifle at the old man. ‘Come back down, Amit.’

  Amit glanced around at him. ‘No,’ he said, lifting his foot to another rung.

  ‘Vic’s going to kill you when he finds out what you’re doing. We need to find him first.’

  Amit made a sound like he thought that was funny. He managed to lift himself onto the next rung, his whole body trembling from the effort. ‘Do you know,’ he said, forcing the words out with some difficulty, ‘until a couple of days ago, I thought there might be some hope for us. For humanity. That…maybe we could finally break with the past.’

  Sam glanced around. There was still no sign of Traynor, but it surely wouldn’t be long before he appeared.

  ‘But I was wrong,’ Amit continued. ‘We’re blind to our destructive nature, Sam. I’ve talked about making peace with other species, but how many of my kind have I killed so far in the name of that peace?’ He let out a sound partway between a laugh and a grunt of pain. ‘Imagine my wilful blindness. But it’s not surprising, really,’ he gasped, climbing a little higher again. ‘Expecting anything else would be like expecting a swarm of locusts to engage in meaningful introspection.’

  Sam lowered his rifle. ‘You’re planning to take the orbiter up and destroy the mothership, but without me on board, it’ll blow you out of the sky before you get anywhere near it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Amit, ‘and maybe not.’ He looked exhausted beyond measure, barely able to maintain his grip on the rungs. ‘I won’t really know until I try, will I? I should have done this years ago, instead of waiting for you to come back.’

  ‘Come back down,’ said Sam. ‘You don’t have the strength to—!’

  The report from a rifle cracked across the clearing, and Amit jerked, flopping to one side. One arm was still pushed through a rung, keeping him from falling. A second shot finally loosed his grip, and he tumbled onto the blackened soil beneath the orbiter like a pile of untidy rags.

  Sam turned to see Traynor standing at the end of the path, a rifle still raised to his shoulder. He turned to face Sam, his face a mask of fury, his knuckles already whitening as he squeezed the trigger.

  There wasn’t time for Sam to return fire. He ducked to one side, and Traynor’s shot went wide. Sam ran towards the nearest trees, a branch ahead of him exploding into splinters as another shot missed.

  He dived through the undergrowth and kept on running, the sound of more shots following behind him as he fled. Something in Traynor’s expression convinced Sam he was out of control, beyond reason.

  Sam burst back out of the trees and into the clearing where the buildings were. He glimpsed the path leading back to the tunnel and the drawbridge and headed that way. He could hear Traynor crashing through the undergrowth behind him, shouting incoherently.

  Another shot kicked up dirt close by Sam’s feet as he ran. He veered from the path, hoping to lose Traynor in the trees, and fought his way through dense undergrowth.

  He came to the edge of the mesa almost before he realised it, barely managing to grab hold of a branch and keep himself from tumbling down to the surging river far below.

  Gravel and dirt slid out from under his feet and over the cliff. The forest still burned all the way out to the horizon, and the sound of howling was much clearer now. He saw the Howlers far below, huddled along the edge of the gorge. Even from a distance, they made for a terrifying sight.

  Sam heard a click and turned to find Traynor facing him, his rifle pointed straight at his chest.

  ‘I didn’t kill Jess, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ said Sam. He couldn’t stop thinking about the gulf of air behind his back, the long drop to the river.

  ‘Because you’d never have the guts to kill her,’ said Traynor, his eyes bright and hard and utterly without mercy. ‘You didn’t try to stop Amit from doing it for you either.’ He motioned at Sam’s rifle. ‘Drop it.’

  Sam made to drop it on the ground, but Traynor stopped him. ‘Not there.’ He nodded towards the cliff. ‘Throw it that way.’

  With great reluctance, Sam did as he was told. He threw the rifle out into the void, hearing it clatter against the rocks as it tumbled into the gorge.

  He turned to face Traynor, remembering what Amit had said about how they had all lived before and how they would all live again. What had he called it…? Echogenesis.

  He tried to take some kind of comfort from the thought, but couldn’t. If he died here, he died forever.

  ‘If you kill me,’ he said, forcing himself to turn back around and face Traynor, ‘it’s all over. I can control the mothership. You can’t.’

  Traynor looked at him in surprise, then laughed in apparent disbelief. ‘Of course. He would have told you that, wouldn’t he?’ Traynor shook his head. ‘We were all fools for believing him, Sam. There’s hardly a word he said to either of us that’s true.’

  Sam stared at him, thunderstruck. ‘You’re saying he was lying?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. He was telling the truth about you having the authority to control the mothership. But, as it turns out, so do I.’

  Sam tried to process this information but found he couldn’t. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You can see why he wouldn’t want me to know,’ said Traynor. ‘And I’ll give him this—no matter how
much we hurt him, he didn’t let on. I only just managed to work it out, reading through some of those journals of his. So it looks like I didn’t need you after all, Sam. I—’ He frowned. ‘What are you doing?’

  Something had been niggling at Sam: some small but important detail he’d seen but not been consciously aware of when he’d looked down at the Howlers gathered by the gorge. As Traynor spoke, he had glanced down again, his eyes growing wide.

  ‘What in damnation is it?’ Traynor demanded.

  ‘He let them in.’

  ‘Let what in?’

  ‘The drawbridge,’ said Sam, looking back around at him. ‘Amit’s lowered it.’

  Traynor stared back at him with a look of perplexed bafflement. He opened his mouth to say something else, but whatever he’d been about to say was made inaudible by a howl, terrifying in its proximity.

  Traynor gasped and swung his rifle around in a circle, looking for the source of the howl. Sam could see he was already lost to panic. Something padded through the undergrowth only metres from where they stood.

  Sam saw his chance. He ducked around the far side of a tree growing close to the cliff edge and began to run in the opposite direction from where the howl had come. He heard Traynor curse from behind him as he fled, followed by the sound of several shots.

  He crouched low as he ran, but something told Sam the shots weren’t directed at him. Then he heard a sound to chill his blood—the cry of a Howler at close range, followed by a very human scream that abruptly cut off.

  Sam somehow found his way back onto one of the stone-lined paths and pounded along it, hearing something enormous rumble and crash in his wake. He kept going until he reached the orbiter, stepping past Amit’s body and scaling the ladder bolted to the side of the craft as fast as he could. The door to the crew module swung open automatically as soon as he reached it.

  More howls echoed across the mesa as Sam pulled himself inside the module. Most of the interior was taken up by a single, heavily padded chair, bolted to the floor and angled back so that its occupant would face towards the ceiling and a series of tilted monitors. The rest of the cabin was bare and utilitarian.

  That was when he knew with absolute certainty that whatever he did, he was going to die. Either he stayed behind and waited for the Howlers to kill him—or he took his chances with the mothership.

  There was no third option.

  He pulled himself into the chair and strapped in. A menu automatically appeared on a screen before him, reading: READY FOR LAUNCH—YES/NO?

  Sam reached out and selected YES.

  Something clunked and shifted deep within the craft’s bowels, followed by a sharp electric hum. Then came a series of verbal instructions, delivered by a bland, computerised voice that emerged from a metal grille to his right.

  The door of the capsule swung shut on its own, blanketing him in sudden, unexpected silence. There were more, faraway clunks, and a liquid draining sound, and he envisioned the craft exploding on lift-off, or, more likely, sitting right where it was and going nowhere.

  A screen on his left flickered into life, showing two views of the orbiter from different parts of the clearing. As he watched, light blossomed under the base of the orbiter, sending fire washing across Amit’s body and incinerating it in moments. Cables detached themselves automatically from the lower fuselage.

  The capsule lurched violently around him, and Sam felt his chair press into the small of his back with sudden and unexpected force. He felt his stomach flip around and prayed he didn’t throw up. If Amit had thought to provide a sick bag, he couldn’t see where it might be.

  Then he glanced back at the screens before him and experienced a moment of profound shock: the mesa was already far below him and dwindling rapidly, almost lost amidst a burning forest that appeared to go on forever.

  He clung to the armrests, closed his eyes and, for the first time in this life or any other he remembered, Sam Newman prayed.

  31

  THE TSIOLKOVSKY

  The acceleration grew stronger, pushing Sam deep into the upholstered surroundings of the chair. His teeth chattered from sheer terror. From time to time he heard more metallic clunks, and the orbiter would jerk upwards, pressing him yet deeper into the seat.

  Then, at last, came weightlessness, and with it, a heavy drug-like sleep born of exhaustion. His limbs floated loosely around him, and he dreamed of making his way home to Earth across the light-years only to find dusty, abandoned ruins and lifeless oceans.

  Technical information, unseen and incomprehensible to him even if he had been aware of it, clicked across the screens.

  He woke much later to a blinking icon and a raging thirst. When he reached out to touch the icon, it expanded into a camera view of darkness with something small and pale floating at its centre.

  He unbuckled himself from the chair so he could more easily reach and operate the screen. He searched through options until he found a way to increase the magnification. The small, pale dot became a world of blue oceans, green and red mottled continents swaddling its equator: Aranyani.

  His hand crept into a pocket and found the interface card Amit had given him. He took it out and hung it around his neck as he worked.

  After a while, he figured out how to locate the mothership through the orbiter’s cameras. It appeared on a separate screen, showing as an irregular shape against the stellar darkness. When he adjusted the magnification, it showed him a lump of charred-looking rock with something crablike clinging to its contours and valleys.

  More hours passed. Sam drifted in the zero gravity like kelp caught in an ocean current. There had to be a way to find out exactly how much air he had left—how many hours and minutes before he inevitably suffocated. And yet he lacked the will or the desire to find out; either Amit had given him enough air to survive the outward bound trip, or he had not.

  To Sam’s surprise, now that he knew he was going to die, he was entirely calm. There was, after all, nothing he could do but wait.

  And wait.

  The scarred chunk of rock grew incrementally larger as the hours ticked past. The crablike structure gradually resolved into a cluster of artificial structures—autonomous factories, he had learned from old Amit’s journals, much of it formed from the raw materials of the asteroid itself and converted into landers, air, and even people as and when the need arose. There were long arrays of silver tubes and a forest of solar panels. Small metal shapes moved here and there about the asteroid’s irregular surface, like mites crawling across the hide of some animal.

  To his brief bewilderment, points of bright light suddenly shimmered into existence all around him, in appearance like soap bubbles glowing with some internal light. He reached out to touch one of them, and it expanded into a cluster of labelled boxes, each linked to the other by faintly luminescent lines. He worked his way through the menus, each item expanding to show him tight clusters of technical information beyond his comprehension.

  As suddenly as they had appeared, the menus were sucked away, leaving only a single soap bubble that expanded to show a human face, warm and female and apparently in its middle years. It had been carefully crafted to be convincing, but not so convincing he couldn’t immediately see that the face was generated rather than natural.

  ‘Commander Newman,’ said the face, in a voice tailor-made to convey warmth and reassurance.

  ‘Who—what—are you?’

  A small smile appeared on the face, leavened with puzzlement. ‘I am the Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Sam.’

  ‘The…’ He blinked. ‘So you’re the mothership?’

  ‘Yes.’ The smile edged into a frown. ‘Is everything quite all right, Commander?’

  ‘Yes.’ He cleared his throat. ‘No. No, it’s not. I don’t remember anything.’

  For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, Sam thought he saw the face freeze before coming back to animated life. He was talking to an AI, although he couldn’t begin to guess how smart a computer, built several
decades after he last remembered, might be.

  The constellation of soap bubbles reappeared and arranged themselves all around him.

  ‘What do you remember, Commander?’ asked the machine.

  * * *

  The asteroid slowly grew to fill the screens as Sam conversed with the Tsiolkovsky for what felt like a long, long time.

  Despite the fact he was dealing with a machine, Sam was careful in describing the nature of his mission, aware as he was that it had been compromised. He was allowed to dock, he learned, by virtue of his clearance level, and when he enquired about Vic Traynor, he found that he indeed shared the same clearance.

  He was not, however, permitted to make any fundamental changes to the mothership’s mission programming without first obtaining the permission of a list of individuals and Initiative subsidiary companies located in Geneva, the names of which the AI read out to him one after another in pedantic fashion.

  More than once Sam reached up to touch the interface card hanging by a wire cord around his neck. The hard limits of the machine’s intelligence became clear when he tried to query it regarding the fate of the previous expeditions. Trying to argue with it led nowhere: he’d have been as well arguing philosophy with a dog.

  Then, at long last, the orbiter docked with the Tsiolkovsky. Sam, warned by the AI to strap back in, experienced the docking procedure as a series of faint hums and rumbles, followed by a single, booming thud from somewhere beneath his feet.

  The hatch to his right swung open, revealing a narrow metal tube that extended for several metres. He swallowed despite his dry throat, then unstrapped before pulling himself along the tube. The soap bubbles followed in his wake, making the whole experience feel strangely aquatic.

  The tube terminated inside a space that reminded him of the lander’s command deck, except that it was arranged in multiple dimensions. There were chairs attached to both the floor and ceiling, and physical orientation was more of a personal choice than anything else, given the asteroid’s minuscule gravity. The room also had a strong chemical scent, like something that had only just been unwrapped after being kept in some airless cupboard for a very long time.