The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)
Page 1
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
The Broken Third
Digitesque, Vol. 4
Guerric Haché
For everyone who knows who they are
Foreword
I don’t understand this place.
Of course, I do understand it. I’ve been out here for years now, and a dusting of familiarity has settled over everything. I no longer swoon with vertigo when only a pane of glass separates me from an abyss so vast a civilization’s whole history could unspool into it like a tiny fishing line into the ocean. I no longer try to peek around my hand in vain attempts to behold the life-giving hellfire at the heart of every system. I’ve watch great, terrible cities of steel in running shootouts across the hearts of constellations so distant they eluded my eyes in the night sky of Earth, jousting with pillars of light that could boil volcanoes. I just keep my head down.
When I say that I don’t understand this place, I say so because I hope the starkness of such a statement will help you feel how no amount of time can inure me to the strangest of all the things I have seen out here. The people.
Everything has a purpose, out here; a value, an intent, a way of being. Not a religious, divinely ordained purpose; not a utilitarian purpose, a possible use; but a way things are expected to happen, expectations of which violations are severe on a scale I never cease to underestimate.
Perhaps this is their curse. Earth is a world of overabundant plenty, and its children a people of fortitude and strength and, if we are being honest, petulance. We do not bow to those who do not inspire us; we flee and live off the land too easily to be forced into submission. Earth, patient mother to us all, makes it so easy to live alone. Out here there is so much more to see, and yet so much less to be had, that it is a struggle for them all to survive on their own. They fear turning their backs on the struggle because they cannot survive on their own, and that fear feeds the roots of submission. It is an alien thing to me, especially in faces so like mine.
The day is young, though. I may never need to understand it. Our strange touch is too hot for the stars to endure without catching fire. Earth’s blood is vivacious, hungry, defiant - to some a virulent poison, to others a hallowed cure. Oddly appropriate that it was Ada Liu who first reddened the waters with that blood.
Chapter 1
In a moment as brief as any other, Ada slipped across an unimaginable gulf of space. Jupiter’s deep pull puffed away like an inconvenient layer of dust, and she was somewhere different. This was not the silent eternity that swaddled Jupiter. Greyish shapes flitted about, pinning light against the black. Things were alive out here.
Another spacecraft flashed less than a klick outside the great window, hurtling towards the very gate they had come from, startling Ada into stepping back. She bumped into the shorter form of a colonial human. She turned and stared wide-eyed at Felisha Derksen, a leader of sorts on this strange alien ship, age starting to dim and fray the blond hair around her temples. Ada mouthed the words carefully. “Is it going to Earth?”
Felisha frowned, as though Ada had asked her a difficult question. It was Sanako, the younger and friendlier of these alien humans, who answered. “No. The gates go different places at different times. Only we went to Earth and back.”
Ada nodded, grateful their language hadn’t strayed too far from that of the old machines of Earth. Some words were almost the same; others grew more familiar by the hour, and through that familiarity, somehow, her brain beat a path to knowledge. And to speech, halting as it sometimes was. “Where are we? I don’t -”
Even as she turned around to take stock of the ship’s surroundings, she saw a massive absence of absence on the other side of the ship. She turned and jogged around the circular observation room, pressing her face up against the glass that separated them all from nothing.
A n alien world hung suspended in space before her, dusty-grey, marred with dark scars, wrapped in a cautiously yellow haze. It looked at first glance to be as large as Jupiter, but with its richer detail she felt it must be smaller and closer. No friendly blues or greens hid among those details, though, and she could only imagine it was a planetary desert, endless horizons of dunes and rocks stretching across a world that hid no water or woods or cities. A stillborn twin to Earth.
“What is this?” She turned back to the humans following her. Surely this wasn’t their home. Was it? “Is that Freyja?”
Sanako was about to speak when Felisha turned to her, her quick fluency a clear sign she didn’t care whether Ada understood. “Ensign Oshimi, make sure she reports to medical. We’ve already violated quarantine once; we can’t land or dock until we’ve been cleared. We have two days to get her and everyone else checked. Get her to cooperate, no matter what you have to do.”
Sanako nodded silently and made a gesture with her hand and her forehead, and Felisha returned to the ladder and climbed out of the observation room, leaving Ada to puzzle over maddeningly familiar words and sentences that didn’t quite make sense. What did they need to do? Why were they talking about medics?
More spacecraft zipped past the observation deck, great metal towers pushed forward by fire. Frowning, she looked at her feet, and considered the way this ship seemed structured around a central ladder that lead up and down. This ship, too, must be tower-shaped, and must be moving “up.” It was strangely dizzying to think about the lack of clear orientation in space; for all that she had flown her own starship, once, she had never felt this disoriented.
Sanako Oshimi turned to her and laid a hand on Ada’s shoulder. “Ada, please follow me. We need to get you a medical checkup.”
“A what?” Not all the words made sense to her, though they sounded familiar. It couldn’t actually be about medics - she wasn’t injured.
Sanako smiled tightly. “Don’t worry. Just follow me.”
Ada didn’t know what else to do. Here she was, standing in an alien spaceship crewed by oddly short and sickly humans and pointy-eared, furry mirrans who hadn’t seen or heard from Earth in a thousand years. There was a subdued strangeness to everything conversation they had, one she had yet to make sense of. She was so far from everything she understood. She followed.
Sanako led her down the ship’s spine of a ladder, down to another level and into an absurdly clean-looking white room. There was another human standing there who exchanged words with Sanako too quick and quiet for Ada to truly grasp, then the ensign turned and smiled. “Ada, would you like me to stay?”
“Yes.” Ada frowned. “Keep talking, slow. I need to learn.”
Sanako nodded and sat on a bench as the other woman introduced herself. She was pale, golden-haired, and looked quite old, with wrinkles starting to form on her skin and odd blotches on her hands. Ada wondered if the reason the ship seemed mostly packed with people a few years from death was because they considered visiting Earth a suicide mission. “Ada Liu, is that right? My name is Cheren. Could you take that suit off?”
Undress? Ada stared at Sanako, who had blinked in equal surprise, as though she hadn’t thought this through. “What? Why?”
Cheren tapped a device i
n her hand. “We need to check your skin for diseases, allergies, health issues.”
She understood only diseases; it wasn’t the first time that word had come up. Ada had seen diseased animals and trees and farmwood crops, and she knew any living thing could theoretically get sick. The technophage that had leveled Earth civilization was a sort of disease, after all. But for all that, she had never known a human to suffer any disease besides old age. It was absurd. “I’m fine.”
Sanako pursed her lips. “Even then, you might have something dangerous to us .”
Ada looked at Sanako, youthful but oddly short; she considered aging Cheren and aging Felisha and at the general… frumpiness of the people she had seen here. Suddenly everything made sense. “Are you all sick?”
Cheren exchanged an odd glance with Sanako. “No, don’t worry. You’re safe.”
She frowned, more worried for the colonials than herself. Why was everyone short or ugly or both if they hadn’t been ravaged by disease? She opened her mouth, then she considered that question might not go over very well. Fine. If they were frail and scared of her, she might as well help them see she was no threat.
She stood up and reached into her pocket, gripping her locator stone firmly in one hand. With her other she reached behind her neck, holding onto the suit’s vertebrae as the inky black material oozed and sloughed off her body, back into the metal that she placed neatly onto the white countertop. “Okay. Check me.”
Sanako seemed to blush a bit and turned her head, but the older woman was nonplussed, guiding her to stand on a square on the floor. When Ada stood on it, numbers appeared on a previously inconspicuous part of the wall, and Cheren read them under her breath, as though only for herself. “204 centimeters tall, heart rate… 42 beats per minute, weight...”
She frowned, and turned to Ada.
“Step off, then on again.”
Ada didn’t know what was going on, but the were numbers about her, so she couldn’t help but be curious. She complied, and the numbers appeared again. Cheren seemed to scowl, though, and turned to her again. “Can you let your arms fall slack?”
“What about my arms?”
Cheren mimed letting her arms fall limp to her side, so Ada did that. The doctor reached over and tried to lift her arm, and her eyes widened as she let it drop again. “Good god.” She peered up at Ada. “You actually do weigh 105.”
“What’s that?”
“105 kilograms is very heavy. But you don’t look heavy.” Cheren took a step back, contemplative. “I wonder if it’s bone or muscle. Maybe a bit of both.”
She glanced at Sanako. “What is she doing? Is this going to take long?”
Sanako glanced between them. “Just checking little things. Doctor, please continue, I’ll keep her occupied. Ada, do you have a family?”
Family. The word made her think of the locator stone in her palm, even though Isavel wasn’t family. Maybe she could have been. Cheren started guiding her to another machine, and Ada let her do what she wanted, posing her as necessary. “No. Dead.”
Sanako looked surprised. “Oh… I’m sorry. No brothers? Sisters? Spouse?”
Sister sounded like her word for sibling, so perhaps brother was a cousin. She couldn’t guess anything for spouse , and was still wondering why Cheren was fussing over numbers. “Nobody. What’s a spouse?”
“Someone you married.”
Another meaningless word, one that didn’t even vaguely resemble anything Ada knew. She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t think so?”
Sanako gave a light snort of amusement, then mimed with her hands at Ada’s closed fist. “What’s that?”
Ada held it up, struggling to imagine what she should call it. “It helps me remember someone I…”
She thought about it. She wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence, but Sanako tried for her. “Loved?”
“I don’t know. It’s complicated. She’s gone.”
Sanako looked sad. “Dead?”
“No, she’s alive - but -” It was not a conversation she wanted to have in any language. “ I’m gone. Here.”
Sanako nodded and laid an arm on her shoulder, though the doctor shooed her away as she lead Ada to yet another machine. The ensign reached into her own pockets and pulled something out, a flat rectangular device that flashed and displayed an image on it. It was the one Ada had seen earlier, of Sanako and her family. Her mothers and her sister. “This is my family.”
Ada glanced at it again, seeing the clear pride in her mothers’ faces. “They look nice. Who is your father?”
Something shifted imperceptibly on Sanako’s face, and she pursed her lips. “I don’t have a father. Just two mothers.”
Ada frowned. Some people didn’t like to talk about one parent or the other, of course. But She got the sense this was different. She also didn’t have the words to ask. “How, um…”
Sanako gestured vaguely at the equipment around them. “Machines.”
Ada blinked. Machines. Machines could make a child from two mothers? Without somebody going through a geneforge to do the deed? It sounded like a fairy tale; for once, finally, her mouth hung open in awe. She reached out to touch Sanako’s face, wondering if maybe, in another life… “Machines?”
Sanako looked visibly uncomfortable, though, and pushed Ada’s hand away. “Ada, this is a ... I’m a regular person. It’s not important.”
Cheren gave a snort. “I’m a doctor, ensign, not a fundamentalist. Don’t worry about me.”
Ada didn’t understand the comment - her best guess was that there were people like Venshi out here as well, people who hated technology and anything that came of it, even people who came of it. Fundamentalist , was it? She wasn’t one of those either. She tried to smile at Sanako. “I think it’s wonderful.”
Sanako blinked, suddenly disarmed and confused, and gave a faltering smile. “Oh. Um. Thank you?”
The ensign clearly wanted to talk about other things, though, so Ada obliged. “Where are we going?”
“Freyja. A planet, a colder planet. The capital city of the Union is called Daneer.”
“The Union?”
Cheren was running something through Ada’s hair - it was a struggle for her to reach so high. “Hold on, we’ve got a lot to run through. Miss Liu - Ada - have you been sick recently?”
Ada smirked. “I’m not a cow.”
The doctor stared at her for a moment. “Headaches? Fever? Nausea? Rashes?”
Completely foreign words. Ada glanced at Sanako, who hummed at the difficulty of translating when clearly Ada knew nothing about this. Had another weapon like the technophage made everybody here prone to illness? “I’m fine.”
Cheren shook her head tiredly at Sanako as she picked through Ada’s hair. Sanako shrugged the subject off entirely. “The Colonial Union is the, um, government… there are twelve planets. Together. And the Union is all of them.”
This was more relevant information. “Twelve worlds.” Ada was simultaneously astounded - twelve new Earths? - and relieved. Only twelve. It could be a lot worse. “What’s a government?”
Sanako blinked. “Oh, um, well, it’s a group of people who pass laws, and regulate the economy and the military, and… you know, make big decisions.”
She repeated the ones she couldn’t guess. “Pass laws? Regulate? Economy? Military?”
“I, um…” Sanako glanced at the doctor, who shook her head.
“Specifically, ensign, I’m a doctor of epidemiology. Not political theory.”
Sanako’s laugh was dry and unamushed, but if it wasn’t straightforward it might be best to learn those words later. Ada waved her hand. “Okay. So the Union is twelve planets.”
“Yes. Oh, right!” Suddenly Sanako lit up, something childlike coming over her. “Freyja and Athena are the most influential worlds. Tlaloc, Raijin, Vesta and Caishen are also pretty big. The other worlds are a little smaller - there’s Ishtar, Chang’e, Ganesha, Osiris, Inti, and Perun. Each world has a mirran name, t
oo. There are nineteen billion people in the Union.”
There was a lilt to the way she pronounced the planets’ names, like they were fragments of a song. Ada could ask about that later, but for now she focused on the more obvious gaps in her vocabulary. “What’s a billion?”
Sanako blinked. “Do you know what a million is?”
She knew it was a vast number, but it wasn’t specific the way a thousand was a ten hundreds and a hundred was ten tens. “Yes? It’s a big number.”
“Well, a billion is a thousand millions.”
“How many thousands?”
“Um…” She started counting on her fingers. “A million is a thousand thousands. A billion is a thousand millions. So a thousand thousand… thousands.”
Ada burst out laughing. She could barely comprehend what Sanako was saying. Did she actually mean - really , literally - that there were nineteen thousand thousand thousand people across these twelve planets? She looked up at the doctor, who was staring blankly at her, and suppressed her laughter. “Sorry, I - well. That’s a lot.”
Sanako’s lips curled. “How many people are there on Earth?”
Ada thought back, and sobered a bit when she realized she had no idea. How should she know that? She had never asked Cherry or the gods, come to think of it. “I don’t know. The biggest city I know is Glass Peaks. It has… maybe ten thousand people?”
It was Sanako’s turn to laugh, and she did so with wide eyes and a strange look of glee. “Ten thousand? ”
Ada nodded, as Cheren ran something odd and scraping down the skin of her arm. “Your cities must be bigger.”
Sanako made an odd head-tilting gesture that almost looked mirran. “Daneer has eighty-six million people. Biggest city on all the twelve.”
Ada leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. Eighty-six million people in a single city? She couldn’t even begin to imagine what eighty-six million people was . Where did they all come from? How did they find room to live? How did they feed themselves? They must have thousands of farm towers all around the city, or whole swathes of planet covered in farmwood or fields.