There was no point in waiting. Rubble dotted the black slick of space. Twisted pieces of metal jarred against one another as they fell into whatever patterns their velocity at the time of breaking up had been. One piece, still carrying a fragment of the Ada Prime logo—just a sliver of the planet, the gate, and half the orbital lines broken away—drifted into view. The convoy was dead.
He had sent those people to their deaths.
Biran dropped his glass and ran out the door, ignoring the shouts behind him.
INTERLUDE: ALEXANDRA
PRIME HAS NOT YET BECOME A STANDARD
EARTH, DURING A WELL-VIEWED MORNING TIME SLOT
The call had come at 1100 hours, while Alexandra Halston sat on a too-worn couch on a glossy Hollywood talk-show set, flashing her just-right-white teeth at the camera as she joked with a host whose name she would forget the second she stepped offstage.
Ha-ha, isn’t it funny I’ve built a system whose purpose is the collection of asteroids, which are, essentially, dirty snowballs?
Ha-ha, isn’t it funny that the space elevator sits at the equator’s bulge? What a funny word, wink-wink.
Ha-ha, aren’t I secretly a mad genius on a quest to build a massive intergalactic snowman?
Ha. Ha.
Then the flicker, in her ear. An implant nobody but her closest knew about—an emergency line. A soft buzz against her cochlear bone to say: Hey, seriously, something important is happening. Something important. And quiet.
Alexandra’s smile never strained. Her quips did not speed up, signaling a hasty desire to get off the stage and tend to whatever was happening. If anyone ever thought to look back over this footage—throwaway press junket nonsense—they wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t see. No one would ever know that this was the moment humanity’s history skewed, forever. Pushed—nudged—off a track it had not known it had been steadily plodding along until that moment.
She kissed cheeks. She shook hands. She took a moment in the green room to compliment a run-down intern for the excellent coffee they fetched her. No one knew she was in a rush. They never would.
At 2200 hours, Alexandra’s helicopter touched down on a leaf-scattered helipad on Caja de Muertos, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. The sun had long set, stroking the black waves of the ocean with gold, and only the massive lights of Prime Inventive’s compound illuminated the strained faces awaiting her in a white-coated semicircle. White, flanked by various shades of dark camo. This facility was not public. And after Prime had swooped in and got the lights and plumbing back online in Puerto Rico after a disastrous hurricane season, the people—and government—looked the other way.
The restoration of the island had cost Alexandra billions. A drop in the bucket for the loyalty it afforded her now.
She ducked the blades of the chopper and closed the gap to her awaiting team. Dr. Maria Salvez was the first to reach her. The mathematician’s grey hair had blown into a cottony cloud under the wash of the rotor. Alexandra—or Lex, as her closest called her—had seen Salvez unkempt many times before. But she had never seen her eyes so alive, so hungry.
“It’s this way,” the researcher said, waving at Lex to follow her.
Lex fell into step alongside her old friend, hiding a wry smile. “It?”
An uneasy exchange of glances between the others made Lex’s skin itch with anticipation.
“We don’t know what it is. It’s not a natural phenomenon.”
Lex’s heels did not click on the hard floor as they entered the research station. They were rubberized, grippy, a product of materials mined and spun out from the “dirty snowballs” Prime Inventive captured and exploited. Everything Lex wore—from the clips in her hair to the attaché dangling from her wrist—was borne of asteroids, not silk or leather or cashmere.
Her PR people claimed her efforts made her green, and she never corrected them. Lex had stopped seeing green a long time ago—unless in the context of the usefulness of algae for space travel. When she looked at this planet—at Earth—she saw only its inevitable demise, and pointless spending of resources in its conservation.
The Earth would die, eventually. It would be humanity’s choice if they happened to be bound to it when that happened. She would be prepared. Would know how to craft everything they’d ever need out of the dust between the stars.
It wasn’t deforestation that kept Lex up at night. It was the heat death of the universe.
“A refining team found it at the Elequatorial processing facility. They didn’t see it, mind you. Just noted an anomaly and sent it to us for further investigation.”
Salvez was dodging. A word, a word she did not want to say, thickened the air in the hallway as they passed through layer upon onion layer of security.
“Once we cracked open the ice core, well, it’s been pretty beat-up, but it’s mostly intact. We think it must have taken a solid hit at some time, gotten knocked out of whatever orbit it was in. We haven’t gotten its mass dialed in yet, but it’s about a basketball in size. Hell of a thing. Smaller chance than finding a particular needle in a needle stack.”
It, it, it. Lex didn’t press. She liked the anticipation.
Double doors slid open at the end of a hallway, a blast of air from above knocking particulate matter off of their bodies. Lex stepped to the edge of a walkway and peered down through the plex that separated her from what looked very much like an operating theater below. Robots, controlled by researchers just as cordoned off as she, probed carefully into the mass of a slushy asteroid heart, the room below cold enough to keep the ice from melting except where they wanted it to.
Half-exposed, in the center of the ice like a pit in a peach, a dome of metal. Silvery—worn. Dents pocked the surface of the material, and while many were obvious impact sites, the camera feed suspended above the room gave her a close-up view. Text, unknown to her. Some strange way of marking out what looked like ones and zeros. Her breath caught. She pressed her palm against the plex and stared at the object below, boring every last detail into her memory.
Not strange. Alien.
“It’s entirely possible the Russians or the Chinese lost something—”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No.”
“What does it say?”
“Pardon?”
“The text—what does it say?”
“We don’t know yet. A lot of it is interrupted by damage. We’re looking into it, but right now it looks like parts of, uh… Schematics.”
“Schematics? For what?”
“I don’t know. Something big. Really, really big.”
CHAPTER 21
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3771
BOOZE HELPS THE TIME PASS (AND THERE’S A LOT OF TIME TO PASS)
Tomas stuck out his chest, put one foot on the table, corrected a sway, and lifted his glass to the ceiling of the mess hall. “I,” he declared, “wanted to be a dancer!”
Sanda snorted rum midsip and collapsed into a coughing fit. “Bullllllshit,” she sang when she choked back some not-too-fiery air. “Bullllshit.”
“It’s true!” He plopped to a seat on the tabletop with enough force to make the rum bottle jump. Bero hadn’t been able to produce them anything palatable, but Sanda’d found a bottle of old Caneridge duct-taped to the underside of a researcher’s mattress. That’s what you got when you disallowed vice on a spaceship—ingenuity.
“You are such a liar.” She kicked at the ground with her good foot, making the swivel chair spin, and pointed her cup at him as she spun through his eyeline. “No way. No fucking way. Look at those feet o’ yours. Big hog’s feet is what those are. Only dancing you’d be doing was on heads, I bet.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You don’t make sense.”
They giggled together, and Tomas doled out a few more drops into her cup as she shook it at him.
“What do you know about dancing, anyway?” he demanded. “You got them tiny feet, no way you could dan
ce on those.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with my foot.”
“You mean feet.” He enunciated slowly, like an overhyped professor on a grammar kick.
“Naw.” She ran a thumb along the seam of her jumpsuit down by the knee, peeling the flex open, and showed him her cobbled-together prosthetic. “I mean foot.”
Whatever polite response he might have come up with under other circumstances burned clear away under the influence of alcohol. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“War.” She sniffed and pushed hair off her forehead. “Icarion railgun, pew!” She made metal-crunching noises and mimed a big hunk of steel chopping her leg in half. “Never even saw the fucker on radar. Must have been early relative-speed research shit, now I’m thinking about it.”
“Holy fuck. What’d you do?”
“Do? Can’t do anything when your spaceship’s all shot to shit. I was probably busy dying when the evac pod initiated.” She grinned at him with all her teeth. “Something you Icarions forgot about. Instead of keeping the pods in a dedicated room, we fit up all our gunships so every seat on deck has a pod ready to spring on it at the slightest hint of crashing vitals or depressurization. No scrambling to jump into pods for us. Though I admit our command decks look a whole lot uglier with all those eggs around. Like a bunch of bisected cockroaches.”
“Gross.”
“Cheaper than training new talent, and better than dyin’.”
“True enough.” He slid from the table onto a swivel chair and spun around, counter to her spin. Each time they passed each other, they clinked plastic glasses and took a drink.
“An’ you woke up here? Really?”
“Oooh, yeah, Bero found me kicking around outside the edge of the debris field for Dralee and dragged me in. Only damned pod still blinking green in the system, apparently—save yours, o’course. Good luck for Bero, too. He’d never make it out-system without a human around to give him a hand.” She wiggled her thumbs at the ceiling cameras. “Primate power!”
“I am beginning to rethink that necessity,” Bero deadpanned.
“Blah blah.” Sanda grinned up at the cameras. “You and Grippy like me, admit it.”
“You have a certain rudimentary charm.”
“Hah! See! Practically in love.”
“Whoa, whoa. Who’s Grippy?”
“Repair bot. Didn’t you notice? Been your roommate in the medibay all this time.”
“No way. I swept that place top to bottom. Would have noticed.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“Your search was less than complete, Mr. Cepko,” Bero said.
“Call me Tomas, Mr. Spaceship.”
“Tomas,” Bero said frostily.
Sand giggled. “Awww, c’mon you two. We’re all on the same team, right? Gotta get along, because it’s what—a couple hundred years to Atrux?”
“Merely seventy-five years,” Bero said.
“Merely on your timescale, Big B.”
“About that.” Tomas halted the spin of his chair and leaned forward, attempting to adopt a serious expression. With the rum slackening his facial muscles, he looked like he’d had a stroke, but Sanda endeavored to humor him and tried her own serious expression. He grinned in response. So, she probably looked like a stroke victim, too.
“Pods aren’t tested out for that many years, ya know? The Imm Project was inconclusive. If the world’s elite can’t make evac pods preserve a person longer than—what was the longest, seven months?—then what makes you think we can do it?”
“Yeah, inconclusive, not completely scrapped. They made a big deal about that on the news.” She rubbed her temples between two fingers, struggling to rustle up the mental energy to explain her thinking to him.
“So a buncha rich people piled their cash together to test the pods’ preservation ability and got nowhere. So what? All of those test subjects went in old, or otherwise terminal. Waived their right to life away and went to sleep hoping they’d wake up in—what was it? Five years? A couple of them did wake up. Most didn’t, and the rich people of the world decided immortality may not be so convenient after all.
“We got two rounds of evidence—you and I—that say, for whatever reason, our physiologies mesh well with the preservation system in the evac pods. It’s not pretty research, but it’s all we got. We made it two hundred–something years in those things. I think we can make it a little more.”
“You seem real sure about this.”
“Gotta be, don’t I? ’Cause I don’t see the fucking choice. It’s the pod, or dying of old age before Bero gets within reasonable transmission distance of Atrux.” She snorted. “Eight percent c. What good is that, anyway? Oh, yeah, aside from blowing all of civilization to bits.”
“Whoa now, they didn’t set out to make bombs. They just wanted some FTL of their own.”
“They, they, they. You keep saying they, Tomas, but for you it’s we. Right? Can you”—she hiccuped—“can you even explain it to me? I mean, I get independence and not paying the tariffs and planets’ rights and blah-fucking-blah but we, we, took damn good care of those gates and we didn’t charge much at the end of the day. Even you Icarions gotta agree with that. So what the fuck? I guess I get that it’s a political pissing match, but you were all so, so fervent about it.”
His expression went dark. She bit off her next stream of words, cursing the alcohol that lubricated the path between her brain and her tongue. Damn stupid thing to do, piling the death of two whole planets at her new ally’s feet and asking him why. He wasn’t there. He didn’t really know, probably didn’t even approve of the whole mess. He was just a grunt like her, working to protect himself and his family within whatever system he’d been born into.
Accidents of geography: setting perfectly ordinary people at one another’s throats since the Stone Age.
“Dios, Tomas, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
He shook his head and slumped in the chair, twisting listlessly. “Don’t apologize for having questions. I get it. You’ve probably been rolling all those thoughts over the whole time you’ve been on Bero, and haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer, right? Naw, don’t answer—really, it’s okay. The truth is, I don’t know. I wasn’t born Icarion. I came through Ada’s Casimir Gate on a freighter out of the Pallar system. Landed on Icarion and found work that fit me well, so I stayed. Only thing I know is, Icarions just don’t trust the plans. Can’t really blame them.”
“What plans?”
He waved a hand. “Whatever you call them—the, uh, the blueprints? The little pieces of construction specs your Keepers have chipped into their brains. Icarion doesn’t trust the source.”
“What, you mean the original research? Alexandra Halston’s breakthrough?”
“Yeah, Halston. She was brilliant, I’ve read the histories. But her company—Prime Inventive—they weren’t on track for anything like the Casimir Gates, and then boom, Alexandra’s made this huge breakthrough and she’s building the sucker, throwing all her money at it, and the first prototype works? Gotta admit, that sounds like bullshit.”
“Oh, please. Alexandra’s twenty-second century, ancient history. For all we know there were half a dozen prototypes she never publicized and the Charon gate was just the first that worked.”
“I’m just saying, it’s suspicious.”
She snorted. “Please. It was about the gate taxes, and you know it. An overblown trade war. You’re not one of those alien-tech conspiracy nuts, are you?”
He grimaced and shifted his weight. She braced herself. “Not exactly. I mean, I don’t really know what I believe. It seems strange, right? Consider the Drake equation—why, out of all the systems the gates have dumped us into, haven’t we met anyone else out there yet? Not so much as a microbe? It feels like someone’s pushing us along a set path, like we’re jumping to someone else’s tune.”
“If we’re following a set path, it’s a poor one. You know how many gates have opened on systems we can’t
even use? Nothing Earth-like to land on, no dwarf planet or moon at the optimum range to build another gate on. Huge waste of resources. If someone’s pulling our strings, they’ve got a sick sense of humor.”
“I’m just saying, it’s suspicious the way your people keep their info to themselves. Fertile ground for conspiracy, ya know?”
“We keep it to ourselves, because as soon as that first gate opened, Alexandra had what—a dozen or so kidnapping attempts made against her? Not to mention the assassination attempts, and corporate espionage went through the fucking roof. You can’t tell me the Corp Wars were a good thing. Implementing the Keeper system put a stop to all that bullshit.”
“Did it? ’Cause I kinda think we’re alone now because of all that bullshit.”
She grimaced and sucked down the last of her rum. “Not Prime’s fault.”
“If they were more forthright—”
“Stop.” She held up one hand and cradled her head with the other. “We’re not going anywhere with this, ya know?”
He gave her outstretched hand a sloppy high five. “Right. Gotcha. Sorry. You and me against the ’verse first, and then, when we’re safe in Atrux, I’ll buy you a proper drink and we’ll hash it out over a home-cooked meal. Deal?”
She grinned. “Fucking deal.”
“Ahem,” Bero said.
They laughed. “All right.” Sanda held her empty glass up to Bero’s camera. “You and me and Bero against the ’verse.”
“Better.”
“Speaking of,” Tomas said, “what’s the deal with the evac pods? They’re kinda single use, aren’t they? Does Bero have spares aboard?”
“Ah.” Sanda pushed unsteadily to her feet and scraped hair back from her eyes with one hand. Apparently, just the thought of coldsleep brought back her residual headache. “Come on.” She thrust a hand down at him and hauled him to his feet. “I guess it’s time I introduce you to problem numero uno.”
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