by Nick Webb
He did a double take. That was, in fact, exactly what he was about to say. “Well look at you. Mrs. Reads-my-mind-a-lot. Can I call you that?”
“Call me what you will, Human-who-talks-much.”
He snorted a quick laugh and went on. “See, the translation program and database that I and the IDF translation team built up for the Trits—that’s you, by the way—is incomplete. Or at least, it must be, since it could never quite understand one hundred percent of what you guys say, especially Klollogesh, may the Trit god rest his soul—say, I’m willing to bet you worship some sort of trinity. Am I right?”
“God? I’m sorry, Human-who-talks-much, the translator is not making sense of that word to me.”
He shrugged. “Anyway, I’m getting distracted. Look, my point was that I tried a new approach—I combined the three manuscripts in a way that maybe didn’t give me a pattern, but gave me a range of possible patterns of what could be missing. It’s a multi-dimensional space, to be sure, but fortunately many of the variables are codependent. And I thought to myself, self, why not use the range of possible patterns of missing context and cross-reference that with the Trit language database, and see if there’s something there that helps. And I responded to myself, self, you’re fucking brilliant, you know that?”
“Do you often talk to yourself in this manner?” she said.
“All the time, darling, all the time. Now, like I was saying—that’s what I was trying to do, but, gosh-durn-it, it just wasn’t giving me anything intelligible, which is why I mentioned to you that my concern is that the translation database simply isn’t complete.” He tapped a few buttons on his handheld and scrolled through some of the translation package source code, looking for possible discrepancies.
“Isn’t it?” she replied. “I understand everything you say, with the exception of certain words for which we have no analogue. Such as . . . god. But the translator simply renders it in my language as supreme cosmic intelligence, so in truth the translator is working just fine.”
Qwerty’s head jolted up, and he dropped the handheld. “Ho . . . ly . . . shit. You’re right. The translator program understands you just fine. But you know who it always had problems with? Klollogesh. I could only ever understand maybe half of what that guy ever said.”
“You and me both,” she said.
“You’re shitting me.”
The look on her face was priceless. “Human-who-talks-much! I would never, ever consider taking the action you describe. Defecating on another—”
“No, no! Just an expression. But you can’t understand half his words either? That just took my hypothesis into theory territory. Maybe Klollogesh was the key, but not in the way we thought. You said he was the keeper of certain knowledge that had been passed down from leader to leader, ever since Granger was among you a long time ago, correct?”
“Correct.”
“But he never passed this knowledge on to you?”
“Correct. He knew the time had come to use the knowledge, rather than pass it along. He was insistent that he would be the final caretaker of what Granger gave to us long ago.”
“And then he died, willingly, without passing it along. Seems odd, don’t you think? Here’s what I think: he did pass it along.” He’d picked up his handheld and scrolled through old recordings the device had taken of conversations with the Trit leader. He listened to several minute’s worth.
“What are you doing, Human-who-talks-much? The conversations you’re listening to have nothing to do with the hidden knowledge.”
“Except they do. Listen. Notice anything odd?”
She listened to the playback of Klollogesh.
“Okay, now, I’m going to fast forward to a few minutes later,” he said, and played the recording.
She continued to listen, “He repeated himself. The same gibberish, again, in the same order as before, interspersed with the actual words he was saying. I never noticed the pattern before. I always thought it was a verbal tic. Like how I’ve noticed many humans make the sound um a lot.”
Qwerty grabbed the file of the recording, entered a few lines of code, and parsed through the lines, sending the entire collected lines of gibberish to the translation software. “Okay, this is what he says, when it’s all put together. Ghingza gryk klollog, ghunza tlosh, ghingza gryk tallog sta, fligli ghosh, dhash shoglin, fliglish ghash, plohlosh shlogun, dharmasha ghosh, ghilimsha ghoshaga, rholishlik ghoshantik ghash, tlohthla shoghosh, ghoshaga tloth, tlohthla ghoshag sa shaltha, dhloshlag gloshlag sa sha, ginzaga glosh, gloshag tlitlith.” He looked up at her. “Understand any of that?”
“I do not. It is gibberish, as you say. To both of us.”
He nodded. “Okay, about what I expected. But now, I’m going to decompose what he says into Trit letters, and then use that as a signal that I then add into the missing pattern from the other three manuscripts, and see what happens.”
A few more entered commands and some more parsing, and finally he sent it over to the combined files.
“And there we have it.” He watched the text start to come alive. Patterns emerging where before there was just randomness. A few minutes later, he was reading actual words. English words.
And they were . . . concerning. “I— I think I need to show this to Granger. Like, right now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Il Nido Sector
Far Side of Paradiso’s Moon
ISS Defiance
Bridge
Jasper wasn’t sure how he managed to convince the Eru who Varioosh had named Emphatic to shuttle him over to the Defiance. The pilot of the shuttle was as silent as a stone, which was just as well since he couldn’t understand a word of their language, but at least gestures were universal, it seemed. The being waved goodbye once they landed in the Defiance’s shuttle bay and then motioned toward the hatch.
“Thank you,” he said, and made a motion with his hands that he hoped best approximated his gratitude and not something crazy like I want to fight you.
He raced up to the bridge and found Commander Rice at the tactical station, conferring with one of the officers. “Jasper? What is it? You said it was urgent. Is Granger in trouble?”
“Yeah. It’s bad. I’ve never seen him this despondent.”
Rice nodded. “He’s taken quite a blow. Knowing all those people are dying for him.”
“It’s awful. And he’s just basically locked himself in a room and refuses to come out. Says he’s soul searching, or whatever that means.”
Rice shrugged. “Not much we can do about that right now. We’ve got other, more immediate problems. The Findiri flagship just showed up in orbit around Paradiso. We’re trying to figure out why. I’m worried they’ve detected us.”
“Isn’t the EM interference from the moon hiding us?”
“That’s the hope. But hope isn’t a strategy, I’m afraid. I think it’s best we get the hell out of here, in spite of what Shin-Wentworth thinks.”
Jasper nervously clenched and unclenched his fists. “Look. We can’t just sit around and wait for something to happen. Dad’s got it in him, I know it. Vestige has been waiting and planning for this moment, and we need to seize it. I’ve got an idea. Can you get me back to San Martin? If we activate the Vestige fleet, maybe we can do something at Earth. Like maybe, since there’s so many of our ships, even though they’re small, maybe we can evade their momentum transfer shield and evacuate as many loyalists as we can and—”
Rice had stood up ramrod straight. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“The Vestige fleet. It’s just a big collection of secondhand mothballed cruisers, but we do have a few old IDF gunships in it, all manned by loyal veterans, and just waiting for the call to be activated into service and fight alongside Granger.”
“No, not that part.” Rice was looking at him very oddly. “Dad?”
“Oh. Yeah, heh. Long story, but yeah.” He shrugged. “I just told him yesterday. Been through a lot together already. He was as surpr
ised as you are.”
“Indeed,” said Rice, who seemed to be lost in thought for awhile. “We’re talking, literal, flesh-and-blood offspring here? This isn’t just a term of endearment?”
“Took a DNA test and everything. Proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. Surprised the hell out of him. Anyway, if you throw in the Vestige fleet with whatever Proctor can come up with, that’s nothing to sneeze at. Maybe we can—”
Rice had nodded at someone behind Jasper, and suddenly strong hands clamped down on his arms and wrenched his wrists around behind his back. He felt restraints click into place. “Subdue him. Or drug him. I don’t care. We need to get him to Oppenheimer and Talus. Now. Before more people needlessly die.”
He was about to yell, to scream at the traitor, standing there smug, smiling. But a needle plunged into his arm, and soon no amount of struggle could keep his eyes open.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Il Nido Sector
Far Side of Paradiso’s Moon
Eru Generation Ship
“So, if this interpretation of the code is correct, the solution to all our problems is for me to just go turn myself in,” said Granger.
“More or less, Captain. Your instructions you left yourself were clear. You left yourself, what, like five extra identical bodies on that Skiohra ship in those stasis chambers? That was your plan. You had accumulated detailed knowledge of how to permanently defeat the Swarm, as well as how to stop the Findiri. And that knowledge was too valuable to risk getting into either of their hands. So you made the plan to basically give up your body that you’d had for eons, transfer your consciousness up into the remains of the ISS Victory that you’d been using to fly around the galaxy, and manufactured new bodies that you stored aboard the Skiohra ship.”
Granger paced back and forth. “Bodies containing altered DNA. You’re saying I encoded a Findiri self-destruct pattern into my DNA, such that, when harvested by the Findiri to fix their Corporeal reproduction chambers, the altered code would be uploaded into their damaged source code, and the results would essentially kill them all.”
Qwerty nodded. “In a nutshell. Your strategy seemed to be, give them what they want, and use that as a Trojan horse, so to speak.”
Granger stroked his chin. “So my solution was to die, and take the Findiri with me.”
“Well . . . kinda, but no. You did leave yourself other bodies on the Skiohra ship. No reason you can’t just repeat the process you went through and use one of those.”
Not bloody likely, he thought. Finally, he saw his end.
He would finally get to rest.
This time, safe in the knowledge that the Findiri threat was solved, and that the Swarm was finally vanquished. Wait, the Swarm . . .
“What about that last Swarm ship? What was my final solution for them?”
Qwerty glanced down at his handheld. “Well, the algorithm I made to parse through the texts and find the patterns resulting in intelligible meaning is not quite done yet. It seems the code gets more computationally intensive as you get towards the end. Go figure.”
“How long?”
Qwerty shrugged. “A few hours? Unless the speed of information decryption is asymptoting to zero, then it depends on how fast it’s asymptoting to zero and how that compares to the rate of decryption, and—”
“Skip to the good part, Mr. Qwerty. Do I need to be waiting around for this last piece, or can I go and do what I need to regarding the Findiri? There’s a whole line of thousands of innocent people depending on this answer.”
“I . . . think you should go. In the instructions you’ve made it seem that the final solution to the Swarm doesn’t necessarily depend on you being around.”
“All I needed to hear.” Granger stood up from the computer terminal right as Varioosh and Emphatic walked in.
“Old-man-et-cetera. You must come quickly. Something has happened,” said Varioosh.
“What?”
“Your ship, the Defiance, has left soon after your offspring boarded it.”
“What?” he repeated, this time more urgently.
“And the other starship, the Volz, just q-jumped away and into orbit around Paradiso. We’re detecting a massive surge of meta-space energy being projected out from the ship and toward the planet.”
“Captain,” said Qwerty, “I’m tapping into the IDF meta-space comms network, and there’s some strange chatter. All Findiri ships seem to be leaving their posts and arriving at Earth. Turns out the Defiance is there, too. Docked with the Resolute. Looks like Oppenheimer has Jasper.”
His heart sank. He was out of options. The Defiance had left for Earth, and Rice had taken Jasper to Oppenheimer, the traitor. He should have never trusted him. And Shin-Wentworth had apparently gone off the deep end and was taking matters into his own hands. All he had was a damn Eru generation ship full of Itharan refugees, and no idea of where Shelby was.
He turned to Qwerty. “Meta-space message to Admiral Diaz on San Martin. Quickly.”
Qwerty fumbled with his handheld. “Okay, I think I’ve piggybacked onto the Eru meta-space projector.”
“Good. Message as follows. Joachin, it’s Granger. You were right. Jasper was right. I’m ready for my goddamn fleet.” He thought through what had just happened, the possibilites before him. There was really only one. “Have them meet me at Earth. Talus has taken Jasper, and I think I know what he’s is trying to do. And how to stop him.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Poincaré Sector
World IXF-459
Low Orbit
The Swarm were coming, and fast. He/they could feel it—all ten million plus individuals and counting. They’d been multiplying at a furious pace in the months since their eviction from the bodies of the IDF fleet, in preparation for this moment.
“Adjust orbit to take us over this location on the surface,” said Decker, pointing to a map of the planet. There was a large opening in the ground there, and he/they assumed that was one of the locations of the robot’s self-replication centers. Granger had been thorough, and had probably made dozens of backup locations scattered across the planet, but this was the largest site, and where there was the most activity.
“Done,” said the helmsman. He was just a pilot of a private freighter that had just happened to be making a regular delivery to the lab on Kyoto Three when he got caught up in the Revolution.
Revolution. Is that what they were calling it? The Rebirth? The Uprising?
No. The Liberation. It was the moment when the Valarisi finally took matters into their own hands instead of depending on secondary races to set the agenda.
Own hands. That was never an idiom of the Valarisi. It was human. The fact that all the progenitors of their current race were born upon the introduction of Valarisi matter into a human had had a pronounced effect on them. Human mannerisms, culture, vocabulary, hopes and dreams, fears, paranoias—all these had they inherited, and now passed down to their millions of offspring.
They were almost more human than the humans.
They just lacked bodies.
“We’re nearly over the location you indicated. Shall I engage the thrusters to hold this position?”
“Yes. Thank you, pilot.”
“You’re very welcome,” he replied, cheerfully. The Valarisi inside him needed to use very little influence on this man—he was naturally good natured. A people pleaser.
They’re here. A million voices within him spoke at once. He glanced down at the console in front of him and manipulated control of the ship’s cameras to get a good visual.
On the monitor, the Swarm ship was bearing down on the planet, fast. It had the little freighter in its sights, and no doubt meant to capture it and corrupt the Valarisi for their own ends, once again. Make them slaves like they’d been for millennia.
Not this time.
Fuckers, the human part of him added.
“Activity from the surface?”
The man he’d assigned to one of the other consoles on
the tiny bridge examined the readouts. He was a scientist by training, so should have some idea of what was going on with the sensor readings. “Sure enough, there they come. Lots of them. But . . . only hundreds.” The scientist looked up, a glum expression on his face. Decker couldn’t tell at first if that was the human or the Valarisi.
He reached out through the Ligature and found it was both.
“Don’t worry. Once the Swarm begin their attack, the dormant manufacturing base will kick in. With a vengeance. You’ll see.”
The Swarm ship neared the planet and closed in on the little freighter holding a stationary position several hundred kilometers above the surface. And the hundreds of flying robotic sentinels flew upward.
They would meet in the middle. Right at the location of the freighter. Good.
“Time to intercept?”
“Thirty seconds,” said the scientist.
Perfect.
Time for phase two of the plan.
“Comms. Send a meta-space distress call to Admiral Proctor on the ISS Independence. I think you’ll find her relatively close at the world of Paradiso. Tell her we’ve found the Swarm ship, and that we’re under attack and require immediate assistance.”
He paused, considering. “And that if she doesn’t, there will be dire consequences for all of humanity, since there is a powerful weapon here we must not let fall into the hands of the Swarm.”
The weapon was him, of course. But she didn’t need to know that until later.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Il Nido Sector
Far Side of Paradiso’s Moon
Eru Generation Ship