Then a starmap, whirling through time.
She saw a history play out, a single purple world and a great deal of green ones. The green ones flickered into existence slowly, and as patches of green expanded across the starmap, purple blobs suddenly started travelling out from the purple star, in straight lines. Once they reached the green sets of stars, they dimmed them and then sat there.
This happened again and again, across history. A few of the green fields of stars were wiped out completely. Others were reduced, contained, surrounded.
Suddenly the animation stopped, and Cherry spoke into her ear.
The cluster of stars in the upper right is the Union, as well as Earth and Mir.
The Haints were moving fleets towards that cluster of stars even as there were only four systems there. The cluster grew quickly, but when the Haints arrived it suddenly shrank, was attacked, was contained. Two other green dots vanished entirely.
They appear to have discarded Earth and Mir from their strategic considerations, along with four Union planets.
The animation continued, for a long while. Then a green light flickered on again.
Earth. This is the present date. This process has been ongoing for approximately 2600 years.
Ada looked at the starmap, at the purple stars and the faint clusters of green, isolated and under assault. Although… She locked her eyes on one.
“Cherry, can you replay the history again?”
The starmap moved, but the one green dot Ada was looking at never multiplied - and despite being well within Haint territory by now, it was never attacked.
“Gods. They’re protecting their homeworld, aren’t they? They’re afraid expanding civilizations will overrun their homeworld, but they ignore anyone who doesn’t expand.”
Possibly.
“Is it just expansion they’re afraid of? Am I missing something?”
Cherry was silent for an unnaturally long time before reassuring her. I am attempting to establish a technical lexicon by cross-referencing with audiovisuals and known scientific and mathematical principles. I believe I have identified a threat profile for Earth.
“Threat profile.”
The observational data that appears to have led to the decision to flag Earth as a hostile target to be neutralized.
Then the ship fell silent again. She waited, and waited, and started feeling even worse. She turned around, as though the ship were directly behind her - it was still outside, of course. “Well? Cherry, you’re not usually this slow.”
I apologize, Ada. The Haints did identify the warp drive - they did not understand its physics, but knew it to be a strategic threat that raised the possibility of a second wave of colonial expansion. They were also concerned about the capabilities of the shipyards around Earth - the ones that produced me. Their own intelligence suggest far more extensive capabilities than my own records indicate, which is concerning enough. But…
Cherry’s uncertainty was almost more unsettling than anything here. “But what?”
The third and most heavily weighted threat was the twenty-fourth pair of human chromosomes.
She frowned, casting her memory all the way back to the audio recording Sanako had shared with her. She had no idea how that fit into anything. “What - what is that, even?”
This is the source of my… trouble. A chromosome is a molecule of genetic information that shapes a living organism’s final form in response to abiotic environmental cues. I am attempting to run biomolecular simulations on the twenty-fourth pair as found in your own genetic material, Ada, but my simulations are… suffering errors. I have lowered the simulations to more reductive levels, and I still cannot determine the function of most of this chromosome. It does not obey the usual patterns of eukaryotic genetic material.
Ada leaned at the console in front of the starmap. Cherry was stumped? What? How was that possible? “Is there some mistake?”
No. The simulations… and if I cross-reference with Haint data… Ada, the chromosome itself may be causing sub-quantum interference in my simulation algorithms. The Haints concluded it was doing the same for them. Multidimensional errors. I can see the technophage specifically suppresses its expression, but -
“What?” She spun around in the dim room, feeling trapped in this helmet. “Cherry, the technophage had three targets. The gods themselves told me about them. Wipe memories, stop people from reading, and kill children with the whelm. You’re telling me there was a fourth? Why didn’t the gods tell me about that?”
Ada, I had no record of a twenty-fourth pair of chromosomes prior to meeting you. And yet a review of data I scanned in the past suggests it is present in all earthlings, and none of the colonial humans. The technophage was a secretive project - they may have had knowledge of other secret genetic projects, and chosen to stifle this one before it could be implemented. The gods themselves may not know.
She looked at her own hands. “So I’m the only person with a functioning twenty-fourth pair.” She paused. “Me and Isavel. Cherry, can’t you - I don’t know - look at me? See what it does?”
I don’t detect anything. But Ada, all my simulations suggest this genetic material is doing something that interferes with my quantum and string algorithms. I must admit my best efforts at understanding it are fruitless.
What in the name of all the gods had the ancients done?
Ada. The Haints fear this chromosome more than the ability to travel faster than light between arbitrary points. They seemed to think it would endanger their home planet.
She gripped her fists tight and gestured towards the exit. “But everything here is dead, Cherry! What does it matter?! What does a fucking chromosome matter to these dead bodies?”
This really was a nightmare. The Haints themselves didn’t even know what they were doing. They were lost, remnant watchdogs of a civilization that had snuffed itself out millennia ago, striking out into the stars in a vain attempt to protect something that was no longer there. They didn’t even understand - they just feared, and so they lashed out.
Her head swooned, and she tried to steady herself against the console and focus. She looked up at that starmap, that cluster of Union worlds. She recognized the pattern, the eleven remaining worlds of the Union, Earth… And three other stars, on the far side of the Union, a little bit off. She had never seen those in any charts.
“What are those three systems?”
The coordinates of one of those systems matches the coordinates I collected in Chang’e, as the destination of a small element of the Haint fleet.
There was a purple line there, too. Another civilization under assault. Another threat for the Haints to contain. Another alien people about to be extinguished.
The Haints were not going to be stopped. They had cleared out a swathe of hundreds of stars around their homeworld, aggressively shutting down anything that tried to grow, all the more violently the more it dared flourish. There was nothing living within dozens of parsecs of the Haint homeworld.
If they were lucky, the Haints might consider them contained after a few beatings. A sense of dread filled her, like she was standing on the top of a hill, looking out across a vast plain with nothing separating her from a dark, looming enemy.
“We have to get out of here. Some stupid old chromosome isn’t going to help us. There’s nothing we can do except ask the Union and Earth to cut off their jumpgates.” She glanced at the starmap one last time. “And maybe warn those people on the other side.”
She found her way outside, back into Cherry’s cockpit, feeling a sense of urgency tearing at her chest. She laid back in the ship as it sealed around her, breathed deeply the familiar air that nourished her lungs, and closed her eyes as she reconnected with the ship.
Isavel was out there, somewhere, and the Haints could destroy her if they decided Earth was a threat. But there was a whole Union, too, that needed Ada to survive. She couldn’t rush back to Earth and risk drawing Haint attention while the Union was dying.
But she wanted to. She gripped the locator stone in her hand, felt her chest and spine tighten, felt blood rushing up her neck and through her brain. She felt her whole self, felt Isavel’s, and wondered what secret their bodies shared that was so dangerous the Haints would burn entire planets to stop it.
Isavel . It was madness; madness as pointless as that which drove others to prayer. But somehow she was convinced Isavel was out there, listening, looking. Isavel, I’m here.
Where was Isavel, now? Her mind played out the possibilities - drowned in the sea, lost in the forest, sitting on a throne in Glass Peaks. Each possibility flickered before her and vanished, unreal. All but one.
They’re afraid of us.
A desert, an eerie blend of ochre and rust. Isavel standing in the shadow of gods and ruins, buffeted by a cold wind - as always. Isavel was condemned, it seemed, to always stand in their shadows.
Together. We could do this together.
The cold air of Cherry’s cockpit and that imagined desert brushed against her skin. The colours - the splashes of the soil complemented Isavel’s hues too well, the sky seemed determined to pull the bronzed olive tones from her skin. There was something magnetic, intoxicating in such a fantastical image. The longing plunged hooks into her heart and pulled her forward by the chest across the stars.
She blacked out, and she dreamt she was standing next to Isavel in that desert. Isavel breathed deeply, and Ada clasped Isavel’s left hand with her right. She felt weak and drowsy, but Isavel pulled her forward, walking straight into a storm. In the strange way of dreams, the world seemed to shift and twist, and the storm only glanced around them.
But the winds grew stronger, and Ada grew tired. Isavel was stronger in the face of this strange dream, and soon Ada collapsed into the desert. Isavel looked down at her and spoke, but she heard nothing, and then she opened her eyes to Cherry’s silent cockpit.
She blinked. She felt strange. Groggy, perhaps, or dizzy. “Did I just… what happened?”
Cherry’s voice was unusually quick. “I am uncertain. I believe you fainted for twenty-seven minutes, but through our neural link I was also able to perceive what appeared to be dreams, though you were not in the proper sleep stage for dreaming. Ada, are you feeling unusually stressed?”
She groaned and leaned back against the seat. She looked at her hands, not sure what she expected. She was upset and frustrated and even a little scared, of course, but the sudden dizziness that had overpowered her was just plain strange. “Of course. The Haints are going to kill everyone and everything I know, for no good reason, and I can’t stop them. What do you mean, appeared to be dreams?”
“They were fragmentary, as dreams are, but they included questions that seemed personally directed at me. Your dreams have never been responsive to our neural interface before, or indeed to your surroundings at all.”
She frowned. She was dreaming at Cherry? “What does that mean? Wait, why are you talking out loud?”
“Because I am concerned my functioning may be impaired. Or that there may be active Haint technology in the area interfering with the base mechanics of consciousness, causing your strange brain states and my inability to run certain simulations. Ada, I strongly suggest we leave this planet immediately, keeping neural interactions to a minimum.”
She wiped her face, surprised at the sheen of sweat. “Cherry, am I okay?”
“I believe so. But I remain uncertain.”
That was a disturbing admission. Ada took a deep breath and laid her bare hands back into the controls, then jerked away. The cool, mathematical world of her ship’s movements might be a soothing balm on her strangely panicked mind, but if Cherry was right… “Just fly us out of here.”
They blasted off into the sky, between greying pillars of cloud, up out of the atmosphere, past veiled Haint stations building their engines of war. Looking out upon those as they cleared the atmosphere, she remembered the utter destruction of Chang’e that awaited every other world. Including Earth, sooner or later.
She let Cherry set a course for Tlaloc; gods only knew what would happen in her absence. She settled in for the long trip back, quietly playing with the locator stone between her fingers, the galaxy smearing past her in a haze. There was nothing they could do. The Haints had been doing this for thousands of years. Dozens of alien civilizations had failed to stop them.
All they could hope for was the mercy of negligence.
About the Author
Guerric Haché grew up bilingual in a small town in Québec, but now lives on the edge of the Pacific in Vancouver, BC, which has lead to experience working in videogame development, volunteering at the Vancouver Aquarium, and pursuing a passion for writing. The Digitesque stories are born of a love of science-fantasy as well as a deep draw towards all things liminal, eclectic, and transitional.
Independent authors always appreciate reviews, positive or negative, not only for the visibility but also because they provide valuable feedback that helps them improve their writing!
Guerric can be found on Goodreads, as well as on Twitter as @GarrickWinter.
Copyright © 2017 by Guerric Haché
All rights reserved
Cover art by Keezy Young
The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4) Page 36