Captain Forster gave no reply, since no one had asked her a direct question.
“There is one other matter that needs answering, and I’m afraid this one is far more serious. You had a spy on board the Inquisitor. I understand that even after waking from stasis you took appropriate measures to isolate the crew from the Inquisitor’s systems, but somehow the spy still managed to give away your location. Is that correct, Miss Forster?”
“Yes.”
“Did you learn who the spy was?”
“We did.”
“And who was that spy?”
“Pandora, our nav bot. She confessed soon after the Faros arrived at the rendezvous.”
“The bot gave you away?” Ellis sounded surprised. “Was it infected with a virus?”
“In a way.”
“And you didn’t consider the possibility sooner? You should have scanned the bot for alterations to its code.”
“We did, but the scans came back clean,” Captain Forster replied.
“Then how did the Faros turn your navigator into a spy?” Ellis asked.
“While we were making first contact with the Faros, they apparently slipped a data probe aboard the Inquisitor and made physical contact with Pandora. They managed to insert another layer to her programming that we were unable to detect, a kind of multiple personality lurking below the level of her primary programming, which was able to take control whenever it liked.”
“I see. Then none of the human or alien crew were responsible for the Faros finding us.”
“No.”
“And the Faros followed you for eight years? Why didn’t they ambush you sooner? While Pandora was at the helm and everyone was in stasis it would have been easy to capture the ship.”
“Their goal was to get to Astralis. They were using the Inquisitor as bait. And they didn’t follow us for eight years. The Farosien Empire appears to span the entire universe beyond the Red Line, so they simply sent the nearest fleet to intercept us once Pandora alerted them to our location.”
Silence fell in the council chamber.
After a few moments of digesting what Captain Forster had said, Ellis spoke in a hushed voice: “You’re telling me that they have an empire spanning tens of billions of light years in all directions?”
“That is what Pandora implied.”
“The bot told you this?”
“We asked how and why they followed us after eight years, and she confirmed that they didn’t have to follow us, because the Farosien Empire is just that big.”
The councilor of Winterside, Corvin Romark, blew out a breath and shook his head. “Then we don’t stand a chance against them!”
“I think that’s a given,” General Graves added. “Look how much trouble they caused on Astralis with just a few hundred soldiers. That proves that even if we had equal numbers, we’d lose.”
“Yes, that seems to be the problem...” Chief Councilor Ellis agreed. “So we avoid contact with the Faros. It’s a big universe. We did it for eight years already after our first battle with them. And if it weren’t for the Inquisitor leading them straight to us, we probably would have gone unmolested for another eight years—or even eight hundred!”
Tyra nodded her agreement, as did several of the other councilors.
Ellis was making that shushing gesture again. Apparently lost in thought contemplating their situation.
They’d established strict safety protocols ever since their first meeting with the Faros had almost resulted in the destruction of Astralis.
The protocols called for sending out disposable probes ahead of Astralis, using them to scan for safe systems. If a probe detected unknown alien starships or technology, it would self-destruct immediately and never live to tell Astralis about it. (They couldn’t risk comm signals being detected and tracked back to either the probe or to Astralis, so comms silence was one of the safety protocols.) If, on the other hand, a probe encountered an uninhabited system, it would jump back to Astralis and report its findings. Astralis would then review the safe systems marked by its probes and pick the one they thought was least likely to result in contact with an advanced alien race.
It was a practically fool-proof system, but one which left little room for exploration along the way. They did get to explore the systems that Astralis jumped to, but all those barren rocks, frozen ice balls, gas giants, and toxic wastelands blurred together over time.
“Doctor Exeter, you may end the probe and wake the patient. Thank you for your assistance,” Councilor Ellis said, having apparently returned from whatever far off place his thoughts had taken him.
The doctor nodded and set about terminating the mind probe. Captain Forster’s head lolled to one side and her eyes fluttered shut. The doctor pushed Captain Forster’s grav chair from the room, and his hover gurney floated along behind him like an obedient pet.
Once they were gone, Chief Councilor Ellis sat forward in his chair. “Next on the agenda... what do we do about the Faros we captured? Almost half of the ones we thought we killed later came back to life during their autopsies. Two of which escaped and were subsequently killed. We’re keeping the surviving prisoners sedated in a maximum security prison, since we can’t figure out how to disarm them.”
“Do we even know how to kill them?” Corvin Romark from Winterside asked.
“The surest way seems to be by cutting off their heads,” Ellis replied.
“Then I move that we behead them all before one of them escapes and finds a way to call for help.”
“I second the motion,” Councilor Kato S’var of District One said; half his face was still bandaged from third degree burns he’d suffered during the fighting.
Ellis shook his head. “They’re too valuable alive. If we can find some way of getting inside their heads, we’ll be able to find out exactly what we’re up against—maybe even which systems are safe for us to travel to, and which ones aren’t.”
“I agree...” Tyra added slowly. It was a risky proposition, and Tyra wasn’t entirely sure it was the right move, but Ellis had a point: they couldn’t afford to pass up the chance to learn something from the prisoners. “We keep them sedated and double their security.”
“We need to vote on it,” Romark said. “All in favor of executing the Faro prisoners?”
Six councilors raised their hands.
“All against?” Ellis asked.
Seven raised their hands, including Ellis himself.
“Then we keep them alive,” Ellis said.
Romark’s eyes narrowed, but he held his tongue.
“Moving on...” Ellis began. “We need to decide our course of action going forward. Do we press on to the new cosmic horizon, or do we turn back and return to the Etherian Empire?”
The councilors voiced their opinions, all of them talking over one another.
Ellis waved a hand for silence, and called on them one at a time, in clockwise fashion, to voice their arguments.
“The mission was to reach the cosmic horizon,” Corvin Romark said, when it was his turn to speak. He shrugged his broad shoulders. “We’ve already done that. It’s time to go home.”
Tyra gaped at him. Unable to wait her turn, she blurted out, “We’ve only begun to explore! Thirty billion light years from here is a big stretch of empty space that we’ve never even conceived of. What is that emptiness? What caused it? For all we know it’s the physical edge of the universe, and anything that goes beyond that point drops off into another dimension! Or maybe it really is just empty space. If so, we don’t know how far that emptiness extends, or even if it is a uniform phenomena that surrounds the universe on all sides. It could be like a lake, or an ocean, and on the other side of it is another part of the universe. Our real mission was to explore and to learn the true nature of the universe, not simply to reach one horizon and stop there. We’ve only just begun our mission, and at this point, home is even farther away than the Big Empty ahead of us.”
“But one direction will take us deep
er into enemy territory, and the other will return us to safe harbor,” Corvin replied.
“Romark is right,” one of the district councilors put in. “Safety should be our primary concern right now.”
Tyra shook her head. “There’s no guarantee that we’ll be safe if we return home, or that we won’t be if we press on, and we only have the word of a spy to say that the Farosien Empire really does span the entire universe beyond the Red Line. It might have been a lie, designed to intimidate us so we wouldn’t try to resist. Just because we can’t conceive of a race so dogged that they would follow us for eight years doesn’t mean they aren’t, in fact, that obsessed with us. The Faros are immortals, and by all indications they’ve always been immortals, which means that they’ve been alive for billions of years. Eight years is a blip to them, as insignificant as a second would be to us. Time is relative. These Faros could be extremely patient beings.”
Several councilors murmured their agreement with that, and a few of the ones who’d come out in favor of turning back looked thoughtful, as if they might be reconsidering their opinions.
“Don’t you want to know what else is out there?” Tyra pressed.
“But that’s just the thing,” Councilor Romark said. “We can’t afford to explore very much along the way, so there’s only so much we can learn. We’ve been forced to jump to uninhabited systems for the past eight years, treating all alien races as if they were equally hostile.”
“What if we change that?” Tyra asked. “Instead of sending out disposable probes to clear a path for Astralis, we could send out galleons again, like we used to.”
“And just look where that got us!” Romark boomed.
“It’s too dangerous,” councilor Gavin Luprine from Summerside added, shaking his head.
Tyra frowned, and Ellis held up a hand to forestall further argument. “I have been thinking a lot about the problem of exploring safely over the years, and I believe there is a way to do what Councilor Ortane is suggesting without putting ourselves at risk. We could use our galleons in the same way we currently use disposable probes.”
Councilor Romark shook his head. “How? We can do that with probes because they’re automated—if we lose one, it’s no big deal, so we can afford to have them self-destruct at the first sign of trouble. Besides, if we change our criteria for what constitutes trouble and allow manned expeditions to inhabited systems, we won’t know what kind of trouble we’re in until it’s too late. We’ll be opening the door for exactly the same kind of ambush that the Inquisitor brought to us. Maybe it won’t be the Faros this time, but it will be someone, sooner or later.”
“Not so,” Ellis replied. “If you’ll allow me to explain, there is a way to accomplish this and still keep Astralis safe.”
Romark sat back and spread his hands in invitation. “By all means, tell us what you’ve come up with.”
Ellis smiled. “Transferring consciousness from one body to another is child’s play to us. We were doing it for ages on Avilon, and then again on New Earth when we left our galaxy. The technology is well understood, but perhaps not fully utilized.”
Tyra leaned forward. “What else could we do with it?”
“Funny that you should ask, Councilor Ortane, since we’ve just resurrected an identical clone of you, giving her equal rights as a citizen of Astralis. This sets a legal precedent for something we could do to conduct safe exploration of civilized alien worlds.”
Councilor Romark snorted. “I don’t see how simultaneous copies of people can help us.”
“You will, Councilor,” Ellis replied, flicking him a smug look. Turning away to address the others, he went on, “We could send out the galleons again, but this time with no bots on board, since we now know that’s how we were compromised the last time. But this time,” Ellis raised a finger to indicate an important point, “the human crews will all be duplicates, identical copies of people already living on Astralis, whom we’ve determined to have the necessary skills and experience.”
Ellis went on, “These clones will explore as safely as they possibly can, and then fall back to pre-determined safe systems where we will have disposable probes waiting to receive a data-only transfer of the memories and consciousness of the crews. The probes will then return to Astralis with the data, and their copies living on Astralis will integrate the new memories with their own, so that we can learn what they learned. Once they’ve been debriefed, we’ll send their consciousness back out there to the galleons they left waiting, and their memories will be re-integrated with their bodies aboard the galleons. They will then continue exploring, with updated instructions and mandates from Astralis, and new pre-determined safe rendezvous with the disposable probes further along Astralis’s path.
“Like that, the Galleons need never physically return to Astralis. They don’t even need to know where Astralis is—only where the disposable transfer probes are waiting for them, and those probes will self-destruct at the first sign of trouble, so they can’t possibly be hijacked. If that should happen, the galleons will be on their own until we can re-establish contact and set up a new rendezvous with another disposable probe. In the very worst case, we’ll lose contact with a few galleons and their crews, but life will go on as usual for their clones living on Astralis, so there’s technically no risk to them or their families.”
Silence reigned in the council chamber as everyone processed the implications of that plan. Unlike the Etherian Empire, they had no religious or moral compunctions about creating simultaneous copies of people, so it was really just a matter of over-turning old laws, and placing limits on new ones to prevent people from copying themselves for unethical or criminal purposes.
“What if one of the galleons is captured and the Faros hijack the system to transmit themselves to Astralis?” The woman who’d asked was the councilor from Sub-District Three, Jilian Kia.
Ellis answered her, “It wouldn’t do them any good. As soon as we receive the data from one of the returning crews, we’ll compare it to their last backups in the Resurrection Center, look for differences, and then analyze those differences to make sure that we aren’t integrating an alien consciousness with one of our citizens. It’s exactly the same system we just used to clear myself, Admiral Stavos, and General Graves for duty after our contact with the Faros.”
Tyra nodded and added, “They performed the same procedure with my daughter, too.”
A few of the councilors glanced her way before returning their attention to Ellis.
“When did you come up with this plan?” Corvin Romark asked.
“As I said, I’ve been working on this idea for years already, but the pieces all finally snapped into place with recent events.”
“It sounds fool-proof,” Tyra said. “I can’t think of a way that this would place us at any additional risk. It’s really just an extension of the safety protocols we’ve observed over the past eight years. Our only point of contact is still with disposable probes.”
“Probes that could be hacked to give us away,” Romark said.
“How?” Tyra demanded.
“A virus could piggyback in on one of the data transfers from the crews, masquerading as a memory.”
Ellis shook his head. “That’s not so easy, but we can make sure that all of data goes to isolated storage inside the probes and that it remains in isolated storage when it reaches Astralis. We’ll submit the data to rigorous checks before we integrate it with anyone. We could even devise a system whereby the explorers don’t need to be integrated or resurrected on this end for us to be able to debrief them—some kind of virtual brain, perhaps.”
“You mean an AI,” Tyra said.
“More like a VI—a virtual intelligence,” Ellis replied. “But another possibility is to keep cloned bodies waiting in stasis on this end and use them to resurrect the crews so that we can debrief them. Then when they leave, those bodies go back into stasis.”
Several councilors nodded and voiced their agreement. They alrea
dy had the mechanism in place for that system, so it would be the easiest and fastest to implement.
Tyra thought to add, “That way their copies living here on Astralis won’t be affected by their experiences, and we’ll also be able to physically isolate them, just in case something goes wrong.”
“What kind of life is that?” Romark demanded. “Who would ever agree to become such an explorer? They’ll effectively be exiled from their own homes. We’ll be using them like bots.”
Ellis shifted in his chair. “Wouldn’t you agree to allow a copy of yourself to be created for the purposes of exploring the universe, if you knew that doing so would never affect you personally?”
“No,” Romark replied. “Because someday that copy will have to come home, and then it might think it has some legal claim to my life.”
Tyra nodded along with that. “That’s exactly what the judicial department ruled in my case. I’m going to have to share my assets from eight years ago with my clone.”
Ellis waved a hand at her. “That’s different. She left Astralis with legal ownership of your assets, and when she returned, one could make the case that you are the clone who stole her life.”
“Except that she wasn’t meant to live. She should have died when her timer implant ran down,” Tyra said.
“Obviously your case is more complicated than what I am proposing,” Ellis said. “These clones would be created with the express purpose of exploring the universe safely, and we can have them sign away any legal claims they may think they have to their other halves’ possessions and lives. That way, when the time does someday come to integrate them with the population, there won’t be any problems.”
“What about their freedoms?” Corvin Romark asked. “We can’t force them to explore until we decide they should stop.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Ellis said. “We won’t have to. All you need to do is ask the originals if they want to go, and then get them to sign on for a specific period of time with the Navy or the Marines. Because they and their clones will be one and the same—one mind in two bodies—they’ll make all of the same choices, so no one should have a change of heart. And besides, anyone who wants out of the Navy early would be guilty of desertion. If they want out after their commission or term of enlistment is up, well, then they should be allowed to leave and re-join the population—after appropriate security checks, of course.”
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 39