_____
Tarkos set the ship down next to his partner. Bria sat on her haunches, facing the river and beyond that the city, her armor standing beside her. He opened the starboard door and this time let it extrude a ramp, which he walked slowly down.
Bria’s armor passed him as he approached her. It would dutifully return to its closet in the cruiser, to be cleaned and repaired and recharged.
He nodded at Bria as he passed her. She knew everything he did: she would have studied his suit’s recordings while she waited for him. Later, in three syllable sentences, she would criticize his performance, reviewing his every decision and action. But not now.
A dozen people sat on the ground before the smashed door of the warehouse. They had been tied with their hands behind their back. The soldiers stood nearby, their guns aimed down. Tarkos walked towards them. He saw there the boy he’d stopped in the lunch room. Still alive. And yes, no doubt about it, he had to be Yeats’s brother. The same eyes, the same cheekbones. The lieutenant stood nearby, gun aimed at the ground.
“Sir,” Tarkos said, as he approached, “we will be leaving now if you have no additional use for us.”
The lieutenant laughed, a short bark, and then spat on the ground by Tarkos’s foot.
Tarkos nodded. But as he turned away, the lieutenant said, “You’re going to lose this referendum. And then we’re going to get all the bugs off this planet.” He pointed his chin at Bria as he said this.
Tarkos looked back at him, meeting his eyes. He’d met so many good people here on Earth. Of course he would have to meet a few bad ones also.
“The referendum might come out against joining the Alliance,” Tarkos said. “But there is no going backwards. You can’t make the Earth the center of the universe again. You’ll never drive the galaxy away. There will always be extra-terrestrials on Earth. But you know what you will do?”
He took a step towards the lieutenant. The man stiffened. Tarkos pointed at the ring on the man’s left hand, which curled now into a fist. “You have a spouse? Children?”
“A wife. What’s that to you?”
“There is a war out there, being fought across the galaxy. A war against the Alliance. And if the Alliance loses, your wife and children and everyone you ever loved will either be murdered or will be made a slave. If the referendum turns against joining the Alliance, what you will lose is the chance to do anything about that. Vote to not join the Alliance, and you vote to have someone else decide your fate. That’s what you’ll get, if your side wins: the right to hide, down here in the gravity well. And that makes you a coward. Afraid of the future, afraid of progress, afraid of the fact that you are not the center of the universe.”
He turned his back. Bria rose as he approached. He followed her into their cruiser. Its engines were already whining up to speed. The door slowly closed behind him as they rose into the sky.
CHAPTER 11
“What happened!” Margherita demanded. She stood before the monitor in her ship. It had just gone blank. She had been talking to the nice man and with him the woman who said she was a doctor and more importantly the Sussurat, as huge as a polar bear and twice as frightening. She had been talking to them. And then the screen went gray black and silent.
“I am sorry to report that I have lost the signal,” the ship said.
“Call them back. Call them back! They were going to get my mother! I have to talk to my mother!”
“I have lost the signal.”
“Try the web again,” she said. “Try contacting them through web protocols.”
“I have lost all signals from Earth,” the ship said. “All detectable signals are Rinneret transmissions. There are no human protocols transmitted in local space.”
“No!”
“I apologize,” the ship said. “The transmissions have completely ceased.”
“None of this makes any sense. How could they be there, and then be gone?”
“The transmissions have completely ceased.”
She frowned at the walls. “You’re stupid again, aren’t you ship?”
“I have lost contact with cloud AI services. However, several improvements to my systems remain.”
“Well, you still have no idea what’s going on, do you?” She fought tears. It had felt like she was nearly rescued, to talk like that in real time. To see them, as large as life, and talk with them. And her mother. So close. She had almost talked to her mother.
“But she’s alive, ship. My mother is alive. That’s something. That’s something. And she knows where I am. She’ll come for me.”
“Excuse me?”
“And that Sussurat said she was coming for me,” Margherita said. “No Rinneret could stop that Sussurat. No. They’re in so much trouble.”
But she fell back against the cabinet and slid to the floor, weeping. She knew how far from Earth she had come. It would be a long, long while before anyone came there. Too long.
_____
A horrible scraping sound awoke her. She had fallen asleep there, on the floor. Her head ached. Her eyes had swollen.
Again, the metal-on-metal screech. It made her shiver. She looked to the door.
The horrible black eyes of Weapon-Maker nodded outside the little window on the door. It lifted a single arm, its end capped with a steel hook, and scraped at the door. Screech.
“What do you want!” she shrieked. She told the ship to transmit to the Rinneret. “What do you want? Go away.”
“The human traitor is likely dead,” it croaked, its voice a shattering of glass. “The Earth mission failed. Very expensive. Six-Traveler will lose status. It may become Thirteen-Traveler. Or lower. Lower.”
“Go away!”
“He will sell you soon. Come now. It will be easier.”
“Go away.”
The Rinneret hissed, leaving a spray of yellow mucus on the window. “I come back soon for you. I will own you. I will test you.”
“Go away.”
It slid out of view. She crouched a long time, shaking with fear and hatred and anger, waiting for that scraping sound to return.
After long minutes of silence, she asked the computer to show her the outside views. She caught sight of two long black legs of Weapon-Maker—to Margherita, Rinneret always seemed to her to be dragging their back legs—leaving by the airlock.
So the traitor was dead. “Good!” she said. But she did not mean it. She hadn’t meant to get him killed. Just arrested. She wanted to know how he died. She wanted to be sure that she had not caused it. But she had no connection anymore to the web. She would never know.
And now. And now. What use did Six-Traveler have for her? She had done one thing for Six-Traveler: translate Alfonso DiAngelo’s vulgar diatribes into something a Rinneret could understand. Now Six-Traveler would have no use for her. He would sell her to Weapon-Maker. That was inevitable.
But her mother lived! Her mother would come for her. Her mother would find her and come for her.
But no. Months would pass, if not years, before a ship came here. Those people had said that her mother was on Earth. Margherita knew that Weapon-Maker would kill her long before her mother could get here. She would die in an experiment that taught the Rinneret how to kill other human beings.
“I don’t have any choice, ship,” she whispered. “I don’t have any choice.”
_____
She put on her suit. It protested when she removed it from the closet, signaling that its air and power were not fully recharged. She ignored the warnings. She did not need air or power. Behind the suit, she pulled the only emergency jet she had left, an awkward hand-held unit. She tied it to her glove.
“I’m going outside, ship,” she said.
The ship did not reply.
“Ship, don’t answer any questions that Rinnerets ask, alright?”
“Yes, Margherita.”
“Don’t talk to any of them. If Earth calls, you can talk to them. Tell them what you can.”
“Yes, Mar
gherita.”
“Be good, ship.”
“Excuse me?”
She shook her head. “Still stupid,” she said.
She cycled through the airlock. She started crying then, though she tried as hard as she could not to do it. But she couldn’t prevent it. And with the helmet on, it infuriated her. To have tears crowd her eyes and not be able to do anything about it.
She jumped from the open airlock door, taking no precautions. It was easy, given the low apparent gravity. She did not try to hide, to move with stealth. She walked to the floor airlock and cycled it open, again pushing the buttons in their narrow slot using a screwdriver on the tool belt.
When inside, in the ugly blue light of Rinneret controls, she told the airlock to cycle at emergency speed. The door slipped open and the remaining atmosphere thrust her out into space.
She tumbled. She looked back at Six-Traveler’s asteroid. Black and silver, spinning away from her. The airlock was already out of view.
She reached her arm out, gripped the hand rocket, and pulled the trigger. It pulled her away at a quarter of a gee. She held it tight, squeezing the trigger, till the fuel all burned. Then she untied it and tossed it away.
Her breath came loud in her helmet. She could not see stars, except through the haze of dust and debris. This Second Green Disk system was ugly because of that, she thought. The dust or whatever that occluded it hid most of the stars. A few twinkled dimly. But it made the sky sad and dark. As if the universe were empty.
She looked toward the sun. A green haze glowed around it, a cloud of pale light. That, she knew, was not gas but the reflection of the billions of rocks orbiting the sun, forming a wide disk that reached two AU out. Mindless machines and bugs lived down there, symbionts surviving together in the rings. Her mother and father had wanted to go down there and study them. But other things moved down there, in the green light. And while her parent’s had hesitated, deciding if they could approach the sun, all was lost.
Well, the whole story is over now, she thought. Even my story.
She stared at the sun, and the green glow, until her air ended, and her vision went black.
CHAPTER 12
Bria steered the Cruiser outside of Paris, pushing speeds illegal for commercial airships. She deaccelerated over green fields, where the pale spires of a seventeenth century manor, surrounded by white pebble roadways, stood boldly in a vast manicured garden.
Tarkos read the data their security network fed them: the building was an outpost of French intelligence. The French government was using it for a special U.N. program—something to do with artificial intelligence. But now, they had also used the facility for another purpose: to protect an endangered French citizen. This is where they had put Tarkos’s mother.
The ship set down in the green grass before the front doors of the manor. Tarkos leapt to the soft lawn as the engines of their cruiser whined down. McDonough stood on the steps a dozen paces away. He waved.
“Your mother is out back, enjoying the garden,” he said to Tarkos. He nodded to Bria. “Good to see you’ve recovered from your mistreatment, Commander. Please accept my apologies for the moral failings of some of my fellow humans.”
Bria huffed once in reply.
They started up the stone steps. “I should tell you one thing,” McDonough said. “I know you’re eager to see your mother. But this facility, well….” He hesitated, his hand on the door. Then he shrugged and said, “Better to just show you.”
He pulled the big door open. Tarkos stepped through, and Bria squeezed through behind him. They had entered a long hall, lined on one side with windows, on the other side with oil paintings in eighteenth century style. And between the two walls stood two rows of metal sculptures.
No. Not sculptures. For they all moved now, turning their heads to look at Tarkos. Robots. There were probably forty of them, of many different designs. Some like Neelee, some like Kirt, others of more artificial appearance. All of them of metal, shining or brushed or black. Alien autonomous artificial intelligences.
“This is where the UN is debriefing most of those robots that you saved in Neelee space,” McDonough said. He stood close to Tarkos, and spoke in a hushed voice. And it seemed to Tarkos that he was right to do so. There was something very solemn in the attitude of the robots.
Suddenly, as one, they all bent forward. A bow, Tarkos realized. They all bowed.
“They wanted to thank you,” McDonough said. “To thank you for freeing them. They insisted on it, when they learned you were coming. I was surprised. I didn’t expect….”
Tarkos nodded. He took a step forward, and as he did so, the first robots in the two rows stood erect, to gaze at him with silver eyes threaded with black spots.
The rest of the robots rose then, in a wave, as he walked past. Thin robots and wide ones, a huge lifting bot and frail robots meant to work only in space, robots that moved as smoothly as an animal, and others that flickered in motion faster than sight could capture. But all of them waiting there, to honor him.
At the end of the two lines he turned. “Thank you,” he said to each of them, to all of them. His voice broke with emotion. They all faced him now, with their strange, ancient eyes. Some of these robots were older than human civilization. And here they did him this honor. He paused, and tried again, forcing his voice to be loud. “Thank you! Thank you for all the help you gave us, at Neelee-ornor. Thank you for the help you give to the human race, now.”
“Come,” McDonough whispered. He put his hand on Tarkos’s elbow and pulled him toward another door. “Your mother is waiting.”
_____
They passed through several rooms, to a broad glass door opening to a long lawn behind the manor. A dozen meters away, Tarkos’s mother sat at a table surrounded by metal chairs, her bare feet on the grass. Tarkos ran to her. She stood and hugged him tightly.
“Maman,” he said, “I am so sorry to have endangered you.”
His mother snorted in derision at the thought. “I’m in no danger. Look at this place! Besides, it’s an honor to be an enemy of those people.” She held to his shoulders. “You look strong. Too thin. But strong.”
She looked past his shoulder. Tarkos heard Bria huff deeply, almost a purr, a sound she made when pleased. He turned. “Mother, this is Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess, Commander of the Harmonizers.”
Bria lowered her head close to the ground and held all four eyes wide. “Mother to mother,” she hissed, in passable English, “honor and greetings.”
When Bria sat back on her haunches, Tarkos’s mother shocked him by stepping forward and embracing Bria. Even more shocking, Bria allowed it.
“Thank you for keeping my son alive,” she said.
Bria huffed again, and blinked all four eyes.
_____
They talked for an hour in the sun, while McDonough looked on patiently. Tarkos wanted only news of Earth, but his mother had different ideas. She pulled her dark hair behind her ears and, in a mix of English and Galactic, asked Bria a long series of questions, most of them about her family, which Bria answered in monosyllabic replies.
At the first question—“Tell me do you have children?”—Tarkos had cringed, but his mother said to him, “What? These are the questions that mothers ask of each other!” And, indeed, it seemed to Tarkos as the questions went on, the Sussurat felt this perfectly normal. Bria would have given him face scars, he suspected, if he asked half these questions. But, he realized, Bria had really meant it when she said mothers were sacred.
When am I going to learn, he told himself, that Bria always means everything she says, and she means it in earnest.
Eventually McDonough cleared his throat.
“I must go inside,” Tarkos’s mother said. “Your Gaelic officer here warned me that he would shoo me away eventually. We will talk later.”
They watched her walk away, her bearing proud and somehow still young.
“There is one excellent human being,” McDonough said. B
ria blinked.
“Thank you,” Tarkos said. He switched to Galactic. “But it saddens me that we meet at a time when we learn such terrible news.”
“I’m sorry to say there is much bad news.” McDonough said. “What news would you be speaking of?”
“That the Ulltrians have wormhole technology.”
“Aye,” McDonough said, “it seems they do. But regarding that: there are several hard mysteries here. First, how did Dr. Calvino get through?”
“They must have brought her.”
“You mean you’re assuming that the Ulltrians came through the wormhole.”
“Of course.”
“But they had an FTL capable ship. You saw it.”
“That’s what they flew through the wormhole.”
“Perhaps. But why bring the woman? And then, how could they bring her to Earth, and then lose her? And, in any case, that wormhole could not have been the one that she came through. She’s been awake for several hours. She’s very confused. She has extensive brain damage. But she insists that she, and she alone—and here I’m quoting—‘Walked to the Amazon.’”
“Suppose that were true, in some sense,” Tarkos said. “Then there were two wormholes. Or the wormhole moved.”
“Which is very strange indeed. And, on top of that, we have a second mystery. They let a young human girl transmit through the wormhole.”
“Yes,” Tarkos agreed. “That makes no sense. In a way, that’s stranger to me than the prospect that somehow someone created, after eons of failure by other Galactics, a stable wormhole. Why create something so important, and leave it so… unattended?”
Bria gave a thoughtful purr. Then she said, “Ulltrians do not control wormhole.”
McDonough nodded. “Aye. I wondered about that myself. It seemed daft at first, but the more I thought about it the more it seems plausible. So, suppose they don’t. Someone else, something else, controls it. And so what would that mean?”
“Well,” Tarkos said, “if we assume that the Ulltrians know about it, then it at least means that the Ulltrians want to control it. So we should think of it as a race. We have to get to wherever was on the other side of that wormhole, before the Ulltrians get control of the technology. But where is the other side?”
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