“Actually, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Lucien said. “Space is a vacuum. The particle density of deep space is so minuscule that you’d never even notice the matter-antimatter annihilations going on around you. The Faros could potentially still attack Etheria if they can find a way to cross the great divide at the rim of the universe, or whatever barrier is at the center. What they definitely can’t do is conquer or enslave the Etherian people. That would require close contact. But they could bombard Etherian planets from extreme range.”
“Why bother?” Garek asked. “All they have to do is crash a few of their ships into the atmospheres of Etherian worlds. The annihilation of that much matter would release so much energy it would probably blast their atmospheres into the next solar system and crack the planets in half. Every ship in their fleet will become a planet-busting super weapon.”
Lucien felt horror twist inside of him with Garek’s conclusion. “Maybe we should warn the chief councilor to back out of the negotiations.”
“Here we go again...” Garek said.
“They need to know that Etheria might still be at risk! Etherus told us how to beat the Faros, and with the wormhole restricting entry to Laniakea, our forces should be able to hold them off long enough for us to find the Forge.”
Garek swiveled the pilot’s chair to face him. “And then what? How are we supposed to destroy it?”
“Etherus didn’t tell us to negotiate with the enemy for a reason. If the Faros could be dissuaded by simple diplomacy, don’t you think he would have told us to do that instead?”
“Not if he’s hiding something—like the fact that Etheria really can be reached, and they really are in danger.”
“Maybe because if we knew that, then we wouldn’t agree to defend them,” Lucien suggested.
Addy turned around now, too. “If Etherus lied to us, then he deserves what’s coming.”
Garek snorted. “I guess time will tell, won’t it?” He turned his chair back to the fore and nodded to the cockpit canopy. “We’re coming up on the edge of the interdiction field. Risk of scattering is down to five percent... four... three...”
“Still no reaction from the enemy ships,” Addy declared.
“And they haven’t tried to hail us?” Lucien asked.
“No,” she replied.
“Zero percent,” Garek said. “We can jump away safely now.”
Lucien eyed the five enemy ships still cruising toward the wormhole. “We can’t risk powering our jump drive yet. Those ships will spot us.”
“Etherian sensors can see clear across the universe, with no propagation delay—what are the odds that they haven’t already seen us through our cloaking shield?” Garek asked.
“I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean we should go around broadcasting our location. We wait for them to cross the throat of the wormhole. Then we jump,” Lucien said. The throat was an impenetrable barrier to quantum and electromagnetic signals, so they’d be safe from detection as soon as those five ships crossed the wormhole.
“Fine,” Garek replied. “Better get comfortable. It could be a while.”
Lucien sat on the deck behind Addy, watching stars through a viewport in the port side of the cockpit. Garek and Addy passed the time in silence.
Twenty minutes later, Garek spoke up: “They’re through. Let’s get out of here before someone else shows up.”
Lucien stood up and went to look over Garek’s shoulder. A star map glittered on his primary display. He selected stars at random and checked the recorded data, skipping from one to another like they were channels on the holonet.
“Any ideas about where should we jump to first?”
Addy leaned over from her seat to examine the map. Lucien was just about to suggest a star system when a bright flash of light illuminated the cockpit. He whirled around, searching for the source of the light—
And saw a ghostly apparition lurking behind them. Glowing tentacles waved lazily in an unseen breeze. Garek and Addy both turned to look at the creature—a Polypus, one of the squid-like extra-dimensional aliens who’d occasionally appeared to help them since leaving the Red Line. If it weren’t for them, they’d never have found the Lost Fleet.
Among their many mysterious qualities, the Polypuses had revealed that they could move through physical barriers. They were seemingly unaffected by the physical world, ghosts in all but name, yet they’d demonstrated that they could also read people’s thoughts and interact with the physical world when they chose.
“What’s it doing here?” Addy whispered.
Lucien shook his head, watching as the creature drifted toward them. He hurried to get out of the way before it could pass through him, and Garek leaned as far over in his chair as he could without falling out. The Polypus floated up to the star map and slowly extended one tentacle to point at a particular star system.
“I think it wants us to go there,” Addy whispered, her blue eyes huge and unblinking.
Before any of them could say anything else, the apparition floated out through the cockpit canopy and into space. It dwindled to a pinprick, blending in with the stars, and then they lost sight of it entirely.
“What system was that?” Lucien whispered.
Garek tapped the star the Polypus had indicated, and a list of details appeared, along with a name: The Fortuna System. It was only fifteen light years away. Calculating a jump there would take less than a second.
“Powering the jump drive,” Garek announced.
“Punch it,” Lucien replied.
Brak walked in, covering a giant yawn, as if he’d just woken up. “Are we there yet?”
They all stared at the Gor.
“What? What do I miss?” Brak asked, his eyes darting between them.
Only a Gor could sleep at a time like this. Nothing seemed to rattle their nerves.
Garek snorted and shook his head. Lucien looked away just as Garek executed the jump. The stars beyond the viewport vanished in a bright flash of light, and as the glare faded, three bright specks of varying sizes appeared around a dazzling blue sun.
“Report,” Lucien said.
Chapter 16
The Lost Etherian Fleet
“Abaddon,” Tyra said, trying not to let her revulsion and hatred show. She wasn’t surprised that he had decided to join the Faros’ expedition personally. He had enough clones that he could afford to risk the lives of a few. “I see that you have accepted our terms.”
“For now,” Abaddon replied. “If you are lying and stalling for time, you will regret it.”
“We are simply relaying what Etherus told us.”
“And what makes you think he told you the truth?” Abaddon challenged.
Before Tyra could reply to that, he waved his hand to dismiss whatever she might have said.
“Send five of your own vessels, the same class and size as our own to accompany us. We will wait for them to join us behind your lines.”
Tyra hesitated. “We may not be able to find five of the exact same ships.”
Abaddon scowled. “No? I see plenty of the same ship classes in your fleet. I can choose them for you if you like.”
“That won’t be necessary. We’ll find them.”
“The same ships, Councilor. We’ll be waiting.”
With that, the alien king vanished from Tyra’s holo display, and she turned to face Admiral Wheeler. “Do we have five identical ships?”
The admiral nodded. “Yes.”
“Good. Who are we going to send to command them?”
“I think both of us should go,” Admiral Wheeler replied.
Tyra frowned and shook her head. “I’m needed here to continue the negotiations, and you’re needed to coordinate our defense.”
“New Earth is on its way. They’ll be in charge as soon as they arrive.”
“They won’t be here for at least another week,” Tyra objected.
Admiral Wheeler nodded. “Fighting won’t break out before we return. And even if
it does, we’ll be able to jump back here in a matter of hours. Besides, Etherian comms are instant, so we can always coordinate negotiations and defense strategy from a distance before we arrive.”
“Not if you’re dead,” Colonel Drask replied.
“We’ll be evenly matched. Their five ships to ours. I like those odds. It’s better than what we’ll be facing here,” Wheeler replied. “Besides, we can’t trust anyone else with these negotiations. Who else can we send? We need a competent commander in case they decide to double-cross us, and we need an experienced diplomat to help us delay the war for as long as we can.”
Or to manage the fall out if the Faros discover that Etherus was lying about Etheria being unreachable, Tyra thought. She gave in with a reluctant nod. “All right, but I’m taking my kids with me.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you to do otherwise,” Admiral Wheeler replied, rising from her control station. “Colonel Drask, you have the conn until I return.”
“Aye, ma’am,” he replied.
* * *
Aboard the Captured Faro Shuttle
“There are ships all over this system...” Addy said. “Some of them are registering friendly—which I’m assuming means they’re Faros; others are neutral—native species of aliens, maybe?”
“None of them is headed toward us, so our disguise must be working,” Garek said. “Where to, Commander?”
Lucien regarded Garek for a moment. “We need to make contact with the locals to see what we can learn about the Forge. Take us to whatever planet seems the busiest.”
Garek nodded and turned back to his displays. “That would be... Meson I and Meson II.”
“Meson?”
Garek shrugged. “Don’t ask me. The Faros probably named those planets.” He magnified them on the main forward display, and Lucien gaped at the scene: two worlds of almost equal size locked in an impossibly-close orbit around each other. They were so close that their atmospheres were actually touching, warped by their mutual gravity into a strange, wispy hourglass shape that glowed brightly in the system’s sun.
“Are we watching two planets collide?” Addy whispered.
“It is amazing,” Brak added.
Lucien shook his head. “What are the odds that we’d arrive just in time to witness a catastrophic collision between two planets? Besides, we’d be able to see them getting closer to each other, but both planets are still separated, defying gravity in some kind of impossible equilibrium.”
“I’m getting some very strange gravimetric readings at lagrange one,” Garek said.
“Lagrange one?” Brak asked. “What is this?”
“The point between the two planets where their gravity cancels out,” Lucien replied.
“There’s some kind of facility there,” Garek added. He touched a button on his displays, and the image zoomed in on the hourglass-shaped band of atmosphere between the two planets.
A hazy, donut-shaped space station appeared floating in the center of the hourglass.
“That space station must be stabilizing the gravity fields,” Lucien said.
“What’s that?” Addy pointed to a darker, thicker column of air running through the hole in the center of the facility.
“I’m not sure...” Garek replied. He zoomed back out, and suddenly Lucien saw that column for what it was—it ran straight from the blue, water-covered planet to the blue freckle on the desert planet below.
“It’s water...” Lucien said. “They’re siphoning off water to the desert planet. Whoever built that facility and moved those planets into such a close orbit must have done it to make the desert planet more habitable.”
“How do you move a planet?” Addy asked.
“Etherus did it with Origin,” Lucien pointed out.
“And we still don’t know how he did that,” Addy replied.
“Interesting,” Garek said, “but not relevant to our mission. Which planet should we go to first? My vote is for the desert planet. The water-stealers probably know more than whatever aquatic creatures evolved on the other planet.”
Lucien considered that. “Let’s try the space station first.”
Garek’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re assuming they’ll allow us on board.”
Lucien shrugged. “If they don’t, then we head for the surface.”
“All right. Hang on.” Garek powered their engines and worked the shuttle’s controls.
“Everyone activate your holoskins,” Lucien said. “If someone hails us, we’d better be looking like Faros or this mission will be over before it starts.”
No one replied, but Lucien saw the air shimmer around both Garek and Addy. When it cleared, they had the smooth blue skin of Faros. Lucien nodded to Brak. “Hood up, buddy.”
Brak bared his black teeth with displeasure, but he reached behind his head and pulled his shadow robe’s shapeless hood over his head, concealing his features.
Lucien gazed out the forward viewport at the bright, oblong speck of their destination—the binary planets of Meson I and Meson II.
What kind of alien species lived on those worlds? he wondered. And would they be slaves or free? If they were slaves, they might not be for much longer.
“If we pull this off, we’re going to pave the way to freedom for a lot of slaves,” Lucien said.
“I’m not sure that matters anymore,” Addy said.
Lucien stared at her in shock. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” How could freeing untold trillions of sentient beings not matter?
Addy went on to explain what Etherus had said about all of the aliens beyond the Red Line being nothing but soulless bots—copies of the Faros’ own consciousness stripped of their memories and repeated endlessly. She explained that that was why Etherus hadn’t intervened to set the Faros’ slaves free.
Lucien didn’t like that explanation. “So it would be okay to clone myself without my memories and enslave that clone to me?”
Addy shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’m just the messenger.”
“If it’s true, then the argument for freeing the Faros’ slaves is the same as the one advocating freedom for artificial intelligence,” Garek said. “Are they really alive, or just pretending to be?”
“What about animals or pets? They don’t have souls?” Lucien pressed.
“Etherus seemed to be implying that only the life he didn’t create is soulless,” Garek said. “So basically, everything outside of the Red Line.”
That still troubled Lucien. “Did he say what souls are?”
“Nope,” Garek replied. “But he did say that souls are what makes us free—that without them we’re slaves to determinism, but that sounds like an old cop-out to me. There’s no way we can prove that free will does or doesn’t exist, so if he ties the existence of souls to the existence of free will, both become equally unprovable.”
“That’s not exactly true,” Lucien replied. “We have run experiments to test for the existence of immaterial souls, and we did find something.”
“Something random,” Garek replied. “That doesn’t make us free.”
“Something unpredictable, not necessarily random,” Lucien argued.
Before they’d met Etherus, a human-built AI called Omnius had ruled humanity, and Omnius had found that if he could kill someone and resurrect them in a cloned body, then they would become entirely predictable. That led Omnius to look for and ultimately find the missing piece of the puzzle—the sleeping Etherians whose minds were linked to human bodies on Origin. But not all humans had been linked to Etherians, and nowadays none of them were.
More recent tests conducted on Astralis by the Academy of Science seemed to corroborate Omnius’s results. Cloned minds were predictable, and the originals were not, but if the originals died leaving the clones to live on in their stead, then those clones became just as unpredictable as the originals. It was as if only one copy of a person could possess their soul, and that soul didn’t move to a new body unless its current body died.
T
hose tests seemed to prove the existence of a soul, and it was the proof most often cited to support Etherus’s law against creating simultaneous copies of people.
But given Lucien’s own experience with living a double life through clones, he was beginning to wonder what difference a soul really made, and if it even mattered. In theory, only one of his bodies could have retained his soul, and it was probably the original Lucien, the one who’d found the lost fleet and whose body he currently inhabited. Yet his memories from Astralis felt equally real and significant—if not more significant—so how did not having a soul make a person less alive, or any less deserving of their fundamental rights?
Lucien shook his head to clear it, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling that the lives of hypothetically soulless beings were just as important as the lives of soulful beings.
“They deserve to be free,” Lucien decided.
Garek shook his head. “Even if we set them free from the Faros, they’ll still be slaves to determinism. Unless Etherus was lying, in which case all bets are off.”
Lucien wasn’t ready to call Etherus a liar, but was it that simple? No soul equals no freedom, only the illusion of it? Lucien wished he could test the aliens beyond the Red Line for predictability, to see if their behavior really was subject to determinism.
“They are all slaves to the universe,” Brak mused. “Perhaps the universe is the one we should be fighting....”
Lucien smiled at the unlikely image Brak’s suggestion triggered in his mind, of stars and planets rallying into fleets for a cosmic war.
“Well, this is all very fascinating gents and lady, but it’s not important,” Garek said. “We can’t afford to waste time setting aliens free, so hypothetically asking ourselves whether or not they actually can be free is pointless.”
Lucien sighed. “It doesn’t bother you that we might have some kind of immaterial ghosts guiding our behavior, and we don’t even know where they come from or what they are?”
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 74