by Tim Lebbon
Liliya had a script but did not need it. The messages were memorized the first time Beatrix recited them to her, and the lies were clearer than ever as she spoke them aloud. Her words were recorded into the transmission bubble, alive in the air before her, loaded and ready to send.
There was something else in the transmission bubble that her words could not have put there. An infestation, like a smear on the air. Perhaps Beatrix assumed she would never see it, and if Liliya hadn’t been so suspicious, so jaded by all that was happening and what she suspected would happen in the near future, maybe she wouldn’t have seen it.
Her senses were more open and alert than ever before, looking for deception, and her mind was so much greater than it had ever been. Beatrix had seen to that, almost without realizing it. More than three hundred years old, Liliya might well be the oldest synthetic in the galaxy. In her unnaturally long existence, she had learned so much.
“For now, our return is your secret, and it must remain so,” she said, her words coalescing and dancing, merging with the errant message in the transmission bubble, readying to be sent.
How did I not notice this before? she thought. If it was there all those other times, how could I not see it? Maybe she hadn’t been looking with enough suspicion, and with such corrupted thoughts.
Everything that should have been right had gone wrong.
“Listen to these words. Revel in them. They are your prayer.”
Her speech finished, Liliya stepped back to the edge of the room and whispered, “Store.” The transmission bubble shrank down to nothing, and then the unit at the center of the chamber issued a soft red glow. The message was ready.
Liliya paused.
What else was in there?
Her orders were to dictate the message, and then send it immediately, and like every other time, she almost did just that.
Almost.
But in her three centuries, she had also become cranky. She had her own mind, her own desires, and following orders was something she only did if she saw fit. She always gave the impression that she was doing as instructed, but sometimes she paused, took a breath, and analyzed her actions.
Even after so long, she was still becoming human.
She accessed the ship’s Brain and assessed where Beatrix was right now. Close, and moving toward her. But not too close.
Liliya crossed the room and pressed her hand against the glowing unit. She closed her eyes and retreated into her own mind, that old computerized consciousness that now merged with the even more complex element that she liked to call her soul. She probed deep, listening to the speech she had just spoken.
Deeper, and there was something else there, arcane and confusing. At first she thought the message was corrupted, and that perhaps the alien technology the Rage had adopted was intruding into their reality once more.
But then she analyzed what she found, and realized that this was in fact a very human subversion.
She gasped and stepped back, wiping her hand on her trousers. Biological programming! Alien technology, far beyond the comprehension of any of them. Too dangerous, too unknown to be used—but Beatrix Maloney was using it anyway.
“Stupid,” Liliya said. Biological programming was the building and programming of nano-devices crafted from existing living matter. The prompt-coding could be applied in many ways—directly, intravenously, by airborne contagion…
Or by suggestion.
Buried beneath the surface message of hope her transmission carried was a command. Liliya did her best to understand it, and her suspicions of what to expect probably helped. Combined with her spoken message, the covert transmission would initiate a process of nano-construction, control, and eventual destruction.
“All lies,” she said, and then she heard the familiar sound of Beatrix Maloney’s approach. The gentle hum of her platform drifting through the air and then, as she grew closer, the gurgle and swish of her suspension system.
“Liliya?” she called even before she entered the room. “Have you finished?”
“No,” Liliya said, “and I won’t.”
Beatrix entered. Her platform floated through the doorway and hovered, holding the thin, ancient woman two feet above the floor. Propped in a sitting position, torso and limbs suspended in the clear gel containment suit, she presented a pathetic image, but Liliya knew that she was anything but pathetic. With strength came power, and Beatrix had plenty of both.
“Won’t?”
“Beatrix,” Liliya said sadly, shaking her head.
“You’ve known all along,” the old woman said. “Since Wordsworth died and I took over, you’ve always known what my final aim would be.”
“I’ve always known that returning was your plan,” Liliya responded. “Of course, but not like this. What message are you sending? What are you asking people to do? I never expected our return to be so aggressive.”
“And why not?” Maloney countered. “They drove us away in the first place. Banished us to deep space—to the cold, the dangers.”
“The Founders fled of their own accord!”
“Do you really think that, Liliya?”
“I know that. I was there.”
“And so was I. While you were floating in your escape pod for decades, I saw what it was like for the Founders, two centuries ago. Persecuted. Vilified for their beliefs. Driven out, and now we’re taking back what should always have been ours.”
“Wordsworth would have never done it like this.”
“Wordsworth is dead!” Maloney spat, her suspension fluid bubbling as if in reaction to her mood. “And he was weak.”
“If what you say is true, we should return in peace. Share what we’ve found… all that knowledge, that technology.”
Beatrix laughed, a surprisingly light, airy sound from someone so old, so strange.
“You think they’ll welcome us with open arms?”
“Why not? We’ll be bringing technology and advances the likes of which they can’t dream.”
“They’ll steal it from us. All of it—you know that as well as me. Better than me. You were there when it all began, and if it weren’t for you—”
“Don’t say that. Don’t pretend I’m responsible.”
“I’m not pretending, Liliya. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t have them!”
Them, Liliya thought bitterly. I can’t accept that I made them.
“Send the message, Liliya.”
“And what will happen?”
“It will smooth our return.” The old woman smiled, a wrinkled grimace that split her face.
“It’ll corrupt those who hear it. You know it will build biologically based nano-bots to reprogram their minds. What will it make them do? What destruction will it cause?”
Beatrix floated closer, and Liliya stepped between her and the unit. The room felt suddenly much smaller, as if the walls had grown inward. This old woman, this one-time friend, now meant her harm. Liliya could see that in her eyes. She could see madness there, too, had recognized that for some time. In her foolishness she’d believed that she might be able to temper it.
“What’s the point in finding utopia if you can’t take it home?” Beatrix said.
“You call this utopia?” Liliya laughed, shoving against the floating platform and sending Beatrix clattering against the wall. They both froze. Liliya had never struck out at her before.
“Liliya—”
“I won’t allow it,” Liliya said. “I can’t!”
“You’ll do as I tell you.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not cowed by you, Beatrix. I’m not a machine, like your followers.”
Maloney sneered, but then seemed to see something in Liliya’s expression that gave her doubt.
“Guards,” she whispered.
* * *
Liliya could have fought. She might even have been able to take down the two Rage troopers and cancel the sub-space broadcast, but she couldn’t halt it forever, and right then a new idea was already
blooming. In truth, it had been there since Wordsworth’s murder by this woman’s hand.
Liliya allowed herself to be pulled aside and watched as Beatrix drifted forward, reached out with her gel-supported arm, and sent the message.
“We’ll be there soon,” the Rage leader said to Liliya. “Make up your mind.”
I already have, Liliya thought.
It was time to steal, and flee again.
9
ISA PALANT
Love Grove Base, Research Station, LV-1529
July 2692 AD
“So is he as much of a prick as you’d feared?”
“I can’t help liking him.” Isa shrugged and took another swig from Rogers’s hip flask. She imported coffee beans, he brought in single malt. As he sometimes said, they were made for each other. “He’s a Company man through and through, but he’s as excited about the Yautja as I am.”
“Weird,” Rogers said, seat reclined, feet on the rover’s steering column. “I can just picture the two of you, alone in that lab. Those dead things there, naked. Your dilated pupils, those surgical gloves…”
“Shit, Rogers, is there anything on your mind other than sex?”
“Only occasionally,” he said. He frowned, staring through the windscreen at the storm raging outside. The rover rocked slightly where it was parked.
Palant took another swig, then passed the hip flask back to her friend. He saluted her and drank—kept looking at her and smiling, and she knew that he’d missed her. It took a trip away from the base to make her realize that she’d missed him, too. Almost fifty days had passed since the two dead Yautja had been delivered, and she had worked every day since, sometimes fourteen hours each day.
Milt McIlveen had arrived twelve days after Marshall’s communication with her, and had worked with her ever since. Her entire existence had become focused on the bodies. For a while, she forgot where she was.
It had taken a lot of persuading from Rogers to get her out here again, but now she was so glad that she’d relented.
“You look pale,” he said. “Tired and overworked.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Why do you think I pull this duty as much as I can?”
“Oh, yes, aren’t we supposed to be patrolling the boundary?”
“Nothing to patrol it against.”
“There’s always something,” Palant said, and she heard her father’s voice again, telling her that space would never truly be known to humanity. That they were trespassing there.
“So what do you think happened to Svenlap?”
“It’s weird,” Palant said. “I saw her the day before she disappeared. Last time you and I were out here together, the day the dead Yautja arrived. She seemed fine then, if a little tired, and she loved her job, was as passionate about their history and society as I am about their physiology and tech. Then, nothing. Her rooms were ransacked, but there’s no sign of where she went, or why.”
“Yeah, weird.”
“I’m still hoping she’ll be found. It’s been a long time, but Love Grove is a big place, and there are lots of sections that have been shut off for a while. Since the processor construction was finished, in fact.”
“Those sections have been searched,” Rogers said. Isa knew that. He and the other indies had done much of the searching, with nothing to report apart from empty rooms and failing structures.
“Still, she might be hiding.”
“No,” he said, “she’s gone.” He took another drink and passed it back to her. Isa could feel the warm glow permeating her torso, the gentle tiredness settling over her. She didn’t want to get drunk because she had so much work still to do, yet sitting out here with Rogers, isolated in the rover, getting drunk seemed like a good idea. Isa had many colleagues, but he felt like a true friend. Warmth in the coldness of space.
“What do you mean?”
He waved at the windscreen. They couldn’t see much, because today’s storm was harsher than most. Sand scoured the transparent surface, grit rasped against the rover’s hull. Its exhaust had been fixed, but the chassis still creaked and groaned in complaint.
“Out there… Wandered out, got lost, died. Doubt there’s much left of her now.”
“I don’t believe that,” Palant said, even though it had always been a possibility. She’d spent some time considering whether it could have happened, and she didn’t like where her imagination took her. Angela would have likely suffocated from the low oxygen levels before anything else killed her—the cold, thirst, the violent storms.
“Seen it before,” Rogers said. “Space madness. Sometimes people start dwelling on where we are and how far away everything else is. The scale and scope of things get inside your head, the pressure of nothing, and your mind goes pop.”
“‘Pop?’ That a scientific term?”
He smiled sadly. “We should be getting back.” He started the rover, and the growl of its motor was a friendly sound.
Palant watched from her window as they moved across the desolate landscape, imagining Svenlap lying out there somewhere, almost buried in dust. It would be a sad end for a clever woman, but space madness was a very real condition. Sometimes it got to her, too—the mere contemplation of the insignificance of things. It occasionally made her jealous of the few who still clung onto old religions, but mostly she saw through their belief to the cold fears underneath.
Everyone had their way of handling things.
It took twenty minutes to crawl back to Love Grove Base, and in that time Palant’s mind went from the missing scientist to the work that still awaited her back in her labs. She’d left McIlveen toiling there, and hoped that by now he might have retired for the night. It was true, she couldn’t help liking him, but she liked working on her own more.
“O’Malley’s?” Rogers asked. Isa hadn’t been for some time, and she’d feared that he would suggest it. Though she had been determined to turn him down, she nodded and smiled. Maybe the single malt had chilled her more than she’d realized, but right then a glass of the indies’ potent brew and a game of air pool felt like the best idea ever.
“I don’t think I could do this without you,” she said. The statement surprised her, though the words’ honesty did not. It wasn’t like her to open herself up like this. She thought of it as one of her faults, being closed in and introverted, and she supposed it went with her work. Such an obsession, such focus, removed her from the world.
“Pussy,” Rogers said.
“You wish.” She smiled, he laughed, and the rover hit a rock and jolted them both against their restraints. “I so fucking wish you’d learn to drive properly.”
“You want a go, Yautja-girl?”
“You ask me now, when we’re back.”
“Sit on my lap and I’ll let you park.”
The banter continued as they approached the ramp leading down to the subterranean garages. Isa loved being out with her friend, loved even more returning to the base. The desolate wasteland of LV-1529 frightened her, and some time back she’d pushed a proposal to name the planet. Nobody really wanted to. The terraformers who had built the processors fifty years before hadn’t bothered, so why should a bunch of scientists and indies? Rogers had mocked her. A name would make the planet seem somehow tamer?
Really?
“Open the doors please, navigator.”
“Yes, Sir. Right away, Sir.” Isa flipped the switch that sent a signal to open the garage doors, and Rogers drove quickly down toward the ramp. Isa winced. Every time she expected the rising ramp to scrape across the top of the rover, and every time Rogers timed it perfectly.
Inside, the screaming winds and abrasive, grit-laden atmosphere disappeared, replaced with the comforting drone of the rover’s engine. Lights flickered on in the cavernous space, shadows danced.
One of them moved.
“What’s that?” Palant asked.
“What?”
“Over by the fuel tanks. There, again!” She pointed. The shadow flitt
ed between two of the larger fuel tanks, then appeared again beyond, slinking along the base of a wall toward one of the doors that led up into the single-level base.
Rogers sounded the rover’s siren. A brief, shattering horn, it echoed within the garage space, amplified and repeating.
“Svenlap,” he said.
“You’re sure?” Palant squinted, leaned to the side to get a better view through the dust-smeared windscreen. He was right, it was Svenlap, but she was a wretched wraith of the woman she had been. “What the hell…”
“She’s let herself go,” Rogers said quietly. “Come on. She looks scared, we’ll take it easy.”
He cut the engine and the rover’s glaring headlamps died out, leaving the garage bathed in the softer ceiling and wall lights.
The woman had reached a door. Svenlap tugged at the handle, but it would not open. Personal ID tags were needed to open most electronic doors throughout the complex, and everyone wore them on a small bracelet almost without thinking. Svenlap must have lost hers—but more than that, she must have forgotten that it was even required.
Palant jumped from the cab. A gust of wind struck her right side, carrying dust and sand that stung the exposed skin on her arm and face. She gasped, squinted, and glanced that way. The rover was still within the heavy garage door’s sensor zone, and the door was only halfway closed.
“Angela,” she called, facing forward again. She took a few steps forward, leaving the rover ticking and creaking behind her as it cooled down. Svenlap turned and crouched, her stance so animalistic that Palant caught her breath and stopped walking.
“Lost it,” Rogers said from just behind her. “And what was she doing by the fuel tanks?”
“Hiding,” Palant whispered.