Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Plenty took her place,” Alik growled. “There’s still a lot of dark ops teams duking it out with national agencies and corporate security. Her death didn’t change anything.”

  “No big immediate change,” I said. “But you’d never be able to crack New York’s shield files these days. What about Bremble and Onysko?”

  “Secure,” Callum confirmed. “The incident with Cancer made us realize how exposed we were. We use G8Turings to manage and filter our critical networks now. The senior council made the Bureau swallow its pride and set up some exchanges with Sol agencies to share information on activists and fanatics. We developed our own safeguard routines.”

  “So everyone’s a winner,” Alik grumbled. “Except the people whose lives she ruined before you caught up with her.”

  “She won’t ruin any more lives,” Kandara said. “That’s a good result to me.”

  “The people who hired her will just carry on,” Alik said. “Killing her was just a glitch to their plans; it didn’t solve anything.”

  Kandara gave him a frigid stare. “I didn’t kill her. She committed suicide.”

  “You should have made a deal.”

  “I offered.”

  “Not very well, clearly. Genuine law enforcement is about balance. For all her reputation, Cancer was a small fish. Basically, your mirror image.”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  The cabin became very still. A moment that stretched out—

  “We’re almost there,” I said, as the images from the sensors on the front of the Trail Ranger splashed across my tarsus lenses. The last thing I wanted was a fight to break out, which would have soured the atmosphere beyond repair. My suspects were still being open with one another, and I needed that to continue. Somewhere in among all the paranoia that dominated both sides of the Universal–Utopial divide had to be a clue to where it came from. They remained my best hope of finding the origin, the alien.

  Everybody perked up at hearing the trip was coming to an end and started to access the Trail Ranger’s sensors.

  The crash site base had just appeared on the horizon—a cluster of six silver-white geodesic domes, locked together with stubby pressure tubes. Big as they were, they were dwarfed by the inflatable hangar that had been thrown over the alien ship—a rectangle of green-and-red silicone fabric large enough to cover a football field, looking so tight against the structural containment webbing it might burst at any second.

  None of the domes had a garage; that would have been a waste of expensive habitation space. Up in the cab, Sutton Castro and Bee Jain carefully maneuvered the Trail Ranger to an airlock tube sticking out from the side of a dome.

  We all waited while the seal clanked and hissed. Then the “pressure normal” icon splashed up.

  * * *

  —

  Lankin Wharrier, the base commander, was waiting for us on the other side. One of Connexion’s finest troubleshooters, he had an engaging smile that backed up a dynamic air. When he spoke it was with smooth authority, leaving no one in any doubt he was in charge here, no matter what title any of us had stuck on our desks back home.

  “I guess you all want to go straight to see the ship?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Yuri said.

  Lankin gestured down the tube. Like the first Eridanus base, this one gave the impression of being both a rugged pioneer outpost and incredibly expensive. The brief glimpses we got walking past labs and personnel quarters were of every facility and piece of equipment being top-of-the-range, but sitting in the starkest environment possible. I found that reassuring, after a fashion.

  The clean chamber was divided into three sections, which was where corporate technobabble had claimed its fiefdom. We had the Alien Environment Suit (AES) egress room (changing room). Followed by the terra-bio sterilization section (eradicating terrestrial bugs from the surface of the AES before visiting the ship). And finally the xeno-bio decontamination suite, which resembled a bunch of cubicles in a country-club locker room, where you were showered and irradiated after leaving the ship, to make sure no alien pathogens got loose in the base.

  My AES wasn’t as bulky as some space suits I’d worn. For a start there was no need for a radiation layer, nor particle impact armor. The thermal moderator layer was also pretty thin. Basically it was like putting on an overall with an integrated helmet. When I’d slipped in through the long opening up the spine, Sandjay interfaced and the opening sealed up, followed by the collar at the base of the helmet tightening to form an airtight seal around my neck. It took another minute for the rest of the pale-blue fabric to contract around my skin, flushing excess air out. With the suit forming a thick second skin, my freedom of movement noticeably increased. The telemetry splash showed me everything was stable. If I read the display right, the power in the quantum batteries could keep the air recycler module operating for a month.

  The helmets cut down on casual chatter, and the reflective coating hid faces from sight, but I could tell from body posture alone that everyone was keen to get going. They would have read the same thing in my stance.

  We moved into the sterilization section, with three pressure doors closing behind us. Jets of gray-blue gas sprayed down from the ceiling to be sucked away by the grilles in the floor. The procedure took five minutes before Lankin Wharrier led us into the final airlock.

  As soon as they arrived to set up camp, the engineering team and their remotes had scraped the regolith away from around the ship, exposing the bedrock underneath. With that clear, they’d fused the rim of the hangar directly onto the rock before inflating the envelope. A pure nitrogen atmosphere was pumped in, which had slowly been raised from ambient temperature up to ten degrees Celsius to assist the science teams.

  We trooped down the ramp into a bright glare thrown by lights studding the hangar fabric. The ship they illuminated was a dark botanical red, like a once-vibrant flower losing its bloom. It measured about sixty meters long and thirty wide. At its highest it rose maybe twenty-five meters above the ground. But those were only the overall dimensions. The fuselage itself was probably fifteen percent smaller, a basic truncated cone shape with a flattened belly. The extra dimensions were made up from protrusions—call them small wings or fins—nearly three hundred of them sticking out from every part of the ship. Quite a few were bent or broken off, showing the kind of damage it’d suffered from its hard landing. From what I could see, it had struck the ground along its port side before coming to rest more or less flat on its belly.

  A hatch was open near the front, where three of the stumpy fins had twisted out of alignment to clear a route to it. The hatch itself used electromechanical actuators, nothing too different from human technology.

  “The ship’s atmosphere had bled out,” Lankin said, “so the techs just allowed it to fill with nitrogen; it’s a good neutral, nonreactive gas. So far we haven’t monitored any adverse reaction in the structure.”

  “Do you know what the original atmosphere was?” Loi asked.

  “Preliminary examination of the life support indicates an oxygen nitrogen mix. The percentages seem to be different from Earth, but not much; slightly heavier on the oxygen percentage.”

  “What are all the wing-things?” Callum asked. “Are they functional?”

  “They have a core of material similar to our active-molecular technology. As near as the physics team can figure it, they’re negative energy conductors.”

  “Negative energy? You mean exotic matter? Wormholes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it is an FTL drive?” Eldlund said excitedly.

  “Possibly.”

  “Possibly?”

  “The fins are only conductors,” Lankin said. “We think they were used to channel a flow of negative energy. So far we haven’t found anything on board that can create negative energy.”

  “So how did it fly?
”

  “Best guess, it rode along a wormhole the way trains used to ride along railway tracks.”

  “But something went wrong,” Yuri said suddenly. “It jumped the rails.”

  “Most likely. If it fell out of the wormhole somehow, and emerged back into space-time, it might not have been able to get back in. There are fusion chambers in the aft section, which would serve as rockets as well as generators.”

  “So…it dropped out of a wormhole tunnel into interstellar space, then flew here on a fusion drive?”

  “That’s pretty much the consensus here, yes.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “And you said there are humans on board,” Loi said. “Which means there’s an alien wormhole terminus open in a human star system?”

  “Yes,” Lankin said. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “The amount of energy required to create a wormhole is phenomenal,” Loi continued, as if he was voicing thoughts as they formed. “Even the combined output of Sol’s solarwells would probably fall short. It would take a type two civilization on the Kardashev scale to generate the power levels required.”

  “Again, yes.”

  “Oh, Je-zus wept,” Alik hissed. “Are you telling me the conspiracy crazies were right all along? We’re being fucking spied on by little green men? We have been since the 1950s? And they do shove things up our ass when they abduct us?”

  “Oh, no,” Lankin said in a darkly amused tone. “They do much worse than that.”

  “What the actual fuck—?”

  “Let’s go in, shall we?”

  We followed him inside. The hatch opened into a simple airlock chamber. Engineers had removed the inner door, allowing a dozen power and data cables to snake through and work their way into the ship, branching at every junction.

  Sandjay splashed up a schematic of the ship; ninety percent of it had been mapped. The missing sections were mainly big chunks of machinery, like the fusion tubes and various tanks. Corridors were wide tubes, illuminated with strings of lights threaded along them, stuck into place by dobs of takhesive. A human ship would have corridors running the length of the fuselage with branches at right angles. This ship had them in overlapping circles, some of which were inclined steeply, with the cylindrical chambers arranged in clusters.

  Lankin took us to the central compartment, which ran the full height of the ship. It was divided into three levels by walkway grids, but without any handrails. All the bulkhead walls were made of a smooth, dull metal that looked like it had been extruded as a single unit, with no displays or control panels visible anywhere. The only breaks in its surface were small life-support grilles.

  Several science techs were working inside, their instruments stuck to the bulkheads. Optical cables formed a messy spider’s web, hanging between them and three G8Turings encased in their protective black metal cases, ribbed by cooling fins.

  Lankin climbed a rope ladder up to the middle walkway.

  “We’re calling this the bridge,” he said, “because this is what seemed to be in charge.”

  There was a two-meter-diameter sphere suspended in the center of the chamber by ten radial rods as wide as my hand. We crowded around it, feet close to the edge of the walkway. It was as blank as the rest of the structure, giving nothing away. Except now it had about twenty sensor pads stuck to it, and some big 3-D screens resting precariously on the rods. The image they were showing was like a deep scan of a big egg.

  “Okay,” Yuri said wearily. “What is it?”

  “An organic neural processor unit,” Lankin said. “Or to put it bluntly, the ship’s brain. The onboard network isn’t optical, or even digital. It’s neurological.” He patted the rods. “These are a combination of nerve conduits and nutrient feeds; think of them as the spine. The nerve fibers link every piece of machinery, and plenty of them are biomechanical.”

  “Is it still alive?” Kandara asked in alarm.

  “No. However, two of the smaller fusion tubes are still functioning, so there is power. And as far as we can tell, the nutrient organ system that supports the brain was undamaged before it froze. We’re theorizing the brain must have been alive to pilot the ship from when it fell out of the wormhole to Nkya, then died sometime after the landing. Cause of death unknown, but we’re thinking one of the first systems that failed was the life-support heating.”

  “A brain this size couldn’t work out how to fix a heating circuit?” Callum said skeptically. “Bollocks.”

  “It depends on what else was damaged by the landing. And this is where our alien’s biology starts to get really interesting. We sampled the brain cells, of course. The genetic molecule has a similar functionality to Kcells.”

  “Shit, this is an Olyix ship?”

  “I said similar. My team is telling me this is a lot more sophisticated than Olyix biogenetics. All the traits this alien molecule contains seem to be equally valid. There is no equivalent to the junk chromosome we have in human DNA, which effectively gives every cell the ability to become any type of cell required by the designer. It’s like a super stem cell; any function can be switched on by the correct chemical activant code. As long as you have a valid pattern, you can build yourself whatever you want. In this case they chose to build a brain.”

  “Christ almighty!”

  “It gets better. Some of the tanks on board are full of these cells in neutral mode. All dead now, of course.”

  “Enough,” Alik snapped. “What about the fucking crew? Where are their bodies?”

  “There aren’t any,” Lankin said. “None that we’ve found, anyway.”

  “Hell, man, that makes no sense,” Callum said. “Okay, I get this isn’t how we’d design a spaceship, for a start I have serious problems with the lack of redundancy. But if the brain didn’t need a crew, why are there all these compartments?”

  “Our working theory is that the brain simply builds itself whatever crew it needs out of the cells in the tanks, like biological Turing remotes. Our major onboard investigation is now focusing on the equipment that the tanks fed, which we’re assuming is some kind of biomechanical womb. When the ship crashed here, something in that mechanism broke down. The brain couldn’t build itself anything that could repair the other systems.”

  “No,” Alik said bluntly. “That’s wrong. You said the hatch was open when you got here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That implies something left the ship after it arrived. The brain had no reason to open it otherwise. Some kind of mobile thinking alien was on board. Have you searched the surrounding area?”

  “Right now there are over fifteen hundred drones outside, looking for any trace of activity that’s taken place on the surface. So far they’ve covered just over a thousand square kilometers. There’s nothing, not a dint that looks like a footprint—or hoofprint, claw mark, or tentacle squiggle—no line that could be some kind of wheel track, or a blast pit from a rocket exhaust. Nothing! If an alien left this ship, it flew off into the sky without touching the ground.”

  “If it’d been rescued, they wouldn’t have left the distress beacon on,” Callum said.

  “We’re dealing with alien psychology,” Eldlund said. “You can’t make assumptions like that.”

  “If they were rescued, why leave the cargo behind?” Lankin countered.

  “Speaking of which,” Yuri said, “I want to see them next.”

  “Of course.”

  The cargo section was the largest aft compartment, another cylinder, wider than the “bridge.” This one was divided up into four levels. The walkways were a lot narrower to accommodate the hibernation pods. Several medical technicians were occupied examining the alien apparatus and the sensors that were probing their secrets.

  “No atmosphere,” Lankin said. “But the power has remained on for the hibernation systems.”

 
“Lucky for them,” Kandara said.

  “Depends on your point of view,” Lankin muttered.

  The corridor had brought us out onto the compartment’s second level. I glanced around at the hibernation pods, which were bulky sarcophagi with a smooth, curving, transparent front. They were all dark and cold, unoccupied.

  “These look like something a human designed,” Loi said.

  “They’re designed to accommodate humans,” Lankin told him, “which is providing you with a visual bias. But I can assure you the components are of alien manufacture. Whoever made the ship produced them. You’ll see why on the next level.”

  One by one we followed him up the rope ladder that had been rigged to connect the walkways.

  “How did the hypothetical crew get up and down?” Eldlund muttered as he swung about.

  “The compartments are all positioned at right angles to the assumed direction of flight,” Lankin said. “So our conclusion was that there is no acceleration force while it flies along the inside of the wormhole, and that the docks at both ends are in free-fall.”

  I was last up the rope ladder. It was only when I was halfway up to the third level that I noticed everyone had fallen silent. When I stepped onto the walkway grid, the assessment team was bathed in the pale blue-white light shining out of the units. They were all staring in. And I could hear the awkward sounds of people trying to control their gag reflex.

  The hibernation units did contain humans—just not complete ones. Their limbs had been removed, leaving the torsos and heads almost intact. They were held in place against the rear of the hibernation chamber by a blue-tinted membrane that looked as if it had been shrink-wrapped around them. It was translucent, revealing that the original skin had also been removed. The quadriplegic bodies were like medical anatomy models, with all their sinew, bones, blood vessels, and organs visible. The eye sockets were empty, and the ears had also been detached, along with any genitals. Four alien organics, resembling umbilical cords, were attached to the empty hip and shoulder sockets, their veins and arteries pulsing slowly as blood circulated in and out. They were connected to external organs that rested like flaccid cushions of flesh down the side of the hibernation unit.