by Tim Lebbon
She learned that the Rage attack had come as a surprise, destroying Yautja habitats and ships, assaulting some of their worlds, and wiping out many strands of their species’ history. The Yautja placed no value on possessions, places, or objects. They carried their stories deep inside, and their heritage was in memory and recollection, tales of journeys undertaken and ancient hunts. With every Yautja death part of that history was snuffed out, and this had been the most damaging assault on their species in living memory.
Over several days Liliya listened to Hashori’s sporadic descriptions of new atrocities she had heard about. Liliya never detected any broadcasts, never saw any sign of communications between this small ship and any other, but Hashori would occasionally mumble to herself, then sit up straight as if listening.
One of the last pieces of information she passed on was that Yautja and humans had entered into an uneasy peace. Initially the Yautja had fled into the Human Sphere. As was their wont, they launched opportunistic hunts as they went. Now something of the truth seemed to have dawned on the panicked humanity—and perhaps, too, the Yautja had seen sense.
It’s just what Beatrix and the Rage wanted, Liliya thought. Test her armies on the Yautja. Spread panic. Confuse the Human Sphere before launching their main assault.
Soon after this, Hashori fell silent.
Liliya continued to attempt communication, but as time went on the alien grew more and more distant. She went through various procedures—checks on the ship, course assessment, a silent communication between her and whatever powered and controlled the vessel. At the same time, she started acting as if Liliya was not even present.
On a larger ship that might not have been a problem, but this vessel was barely more than a bridge, an engine pod, and little else. Liliya assumed there were weapons arrays, a life support unit, some sort of fuel source, and other equipment spaces that she could not see, but it was so different from any of the Rage ships—or anything she had ever seen centuries before she became part of the Founders and the Rage—that she found it difficult to understand.
Hashori’s control panel was a smooth, silvery mass, and whenever she reached for some instrument it coalesced up out of the panel and formed for her hand. There were no communication devices to be seen. Her seat was molded with the floor, fluid and flowing, and the smaller seat she had conjured for Liliya sank down whenever the android moved away. The ship seemed to be more a part of Hashori, than apart from her.
That idea made Liliya feel even more like an invader.
For most of the trip, she kept out of sight.
Liliya spent some time attempting to heal and repair her wounds. Back on the Zeere Za, Hashori had tortured her, using tools, chains, and an insectile creature that laid eggs inside her. Those eggs were hatched and dead now, but the damage they had left behind still remained.
Soon after she had been created and commissioned, Liliya had chosen pain. All androids were given the choice, and she had decided that to be as close to human as possible, she should be able to suffer as a human did.
Huddled in that small room in Hashori’s ship, held down by a makeshift harness because of the zero gravity, she wondered whether she had endured more than any human alive. Perhaps more than anyone could endure before giving in to madness. She repaired physical damage where she could, either signaling her flesh and blood systems to concentrate more healing cells to particular parts of her body or, in a few cases, performing impromptu procedures on the most severe wounds. She used strands of hair to stitch, a shred of one of her nails as a needle. It took a long time, but time was something she had in abundance.
The days passed by, marked only by her internal calendar. She had spent long periods of her existence on her own. This was nothing compared to the decades drifting before the Founders had picked her up, centuries earlier and deep in the Human Sphere. But now, as these days passed, there was an urgency to her existence. A frustration.
From time to time she tried to impress this upon Hashori, but the Yautja remained impassive. She would glance at Liliya and then away again, as if she was not there.
Liliya did not understand, but then, the Yautja were not a species easy to comprehend. They followed no human laws or protocols, and their vaguely humanoid shape and build—two arms, a torso, two legs—was about as near to Homo sapiens as they came. Beyond that similarity in shape lay only mystery.
* * *
On day fifty-two of their journey, Liliya was lying in her small space when Hashori’s shadow fell across her.
“Your people have found us.”
“Alexander,” Liliya said. She stood and floated behind the tall Yautja, back onto the bridge, where the small seat had already emerged from the floor. They sat together at the smooth control panel, and Hashori passed her hand across a raised metallic globe.
The viewing screen darkened, and moments later a three-dimensional map appeared.
There were several glowing points.
“What’s that?” Liliya asked.
“Us,” Hashori said, pointing. She shifted, her seat flowing across the floor, and indicated a small speckle of lights. “Them.”
“How far away?”
“Five billion miles.”
“They know we’re here,” Liliya said. Of course they knew. Being so close could not be coincidence. “You said your ship’s cloaking ability would hide you from anything.”
Hashori hissed softly. Liliya couldn’t translate, and she was not even sure the sounds were words. Perhaps it was a whisper of anger at her ship and talents being questioned.
“How did they find us?” Liliya asked, exasperated. “I don’t understand. It shouldn’t be this hard to hide.”
“Nevertheless, they’ve started to close on us,” Hashori said.
“What’s that?” Liliya asked. There was another shape on the wide display, a glowing blue circle an equal distance from their ship in the opposite direction.
“Our destination, and now our only chance,” Hashori said. “A human drophole.”
“We’re close to the Outer Rim?” Suddenly Liliya felt excitement, and a sense of fear. She had departed the Human Sphere almost three centuries ago, with the Founders, seeking a better existence elsewhere. She was returning at the forefront of a war. Arriving here wasn’t the end of anything, but the beginning of what might be the most painful part of her life, and the most destructive conflict humanity had ever faced.
Guilt bit in deep. She had never felt so human.
“It’s one of the outermost dropholes.”
“Can we beat them there?” Liliya asked.
That hissing again, as if Hashori was offended that Liliya had cast doubt on the abilities of her ship.
“We’ll have to communicate with the drophole’s control center,” Liliya said. “I know some codes. We can probably even operate it remotely, if your ship has the correct broadcast configuration.”
“Here.” Hashori stretched past Liliya and touched the smooth silver control panel. Mounds formed, then sharper edges, and in moments an array of controls and display screens manifested in front of Liliya.
She looked at Hashori.
The Yautja offered what might have been a shrug. “I’m flying.”
Liliya turned her fluid seat toward the controls and grinned. It felt strange on her face, stretching skin unused to stretching. She could not remember last time she’d had cause to smile.
Glancing up at the big display, she realized that the cluster of Rage ships was already significantly closer. Alexander had found her, somehow, and he and his army of monsters were coming for her. Alive or dead, they would not let her escape without a fight.
The drophole drew nearer, but it already seemed as if they would be intercepted before reaching that point.
“Hashori—”
“Silence,” the Yautja said. Her hands danced across the controls, the desk flexing, forming, flattening again beneath her touch as controls rose to her command. “You have your task. Leave me to mi
ne.” The ship vibrated, but it was the gentlest of movements.
“What was that?” Liliya asked.
Hashori did not reply.
So Liliya set to her task, attempting to bypass the drophole control base and access the advanced computers controlling the hole itself. She had a sinking feeling in her gut, knowing that she was leading the attacking force toward those who were protecting the drophole. She might be dooming them, but buried beneath that was the hope that Alexander and his army might even be stopped, repelled, or defeated, especially if the Colonial Marines were now protecting these Outer Rim dropholes, following the Yautja assaults.
The codes and information she possessed didn’t work, and seemed obsolete. She tried again. Still there was no response.
For years, Liliya had been gathering information about the drophole expansion. Even so far away from the Human Sphere, she had hacked into quantum folds and collected any errant transmissions concerning drophole access, use, and initiation. She had built a fractured picture of how their design was advancing and changing, and how the holes worked. It had been something of a personal project of hers. She had been quite open about her research, and Beatrix Maloney had considered it valuable.
Liliya now knew why.
But before fleeing Maloney and the Rage, she had retained far more information than she had ever shared. As her suspicions about Maloney’s aims had grown, so had the ever-more-human part of her mind that allowed deception and secrecy. The structure of her brain—the network of her mind—was similar to a human being’s, except that she could retrieve any information stored in there, accessing it at any time. She was an android, after all.
She tried a different set of codes, at the same time attempting to identify the drophole.
“Where’s your navigation?” she asked. Distracted and concentrating, Hashori waved a hand and brought up a complex set of screens.
Liliya looked at the big display again and saw one less Rage ship closing on them.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize we were in a space battle.”
The ship shuddered again. She hoped the Yautja was shooting, and not being shot.
She tried to access the navigational computer, and succeeded. Once online, it was surprisingly easy to use. She quickly established which sector of the Outer Rim they were in, and which drophole they were approaching. It was Gamma 23. She consulted her own deep memory and brought up what she needed. Completed four years ago, Gamma 23 had been built between the sixth and seventh planets of a star system, its control base on the sixth planet’s moon a million miles from the hole. There were also several orbiting stations closer to the hole, some home to independent space farers, one a base for a Colonial Marine Spaceborne unit.
She listened for chatter. Anyone on the moon or stations would have detected the ships now—theirs and the Rage’s—but she heard nothing.
“Strange,” she said.
“Can we use the drophole?” Hashori asked, a surprising edge of urgency to her voice.
“I hope so,” Liliya said. She sent command codes to the moon base, expecting an instant response from flight control. There was nothing, not even an automated response. If the codes she was using were outdated or had recently been changed, they would have been queried.
“We need to drop,” Hashori said.
“Can you do that?” Liliya asked. Humans required suspension pods to use a drophole, their minds and physiologies unable to cope with the dimension-twisting aspects of the physics involved. She could survive a drop, even remain awake, and had done so before. But even for an android it was an unsettling experience.
“You know nothing about Yautja,” Hashori said.
“Don’t slow down,” Liliya said. “I’ll have the drophole ready. How long until we hit?”
“At this speed, seventy seconds.”
Liliya got to work. With no response from the control base, it was still possible to initiate the drophole herself. It all depended on whether the complex network of codes she attempted to use were still current. If she sent a wrong code, it might result in the hole being closed down pending rebooting from the base. She wouldn’t know whether or not she had the correct code until she sent it.
After a few seconds preparing the brief transmission, she sent some more exploratory messages toward the base and orbiting stations. Still no response. She scanned frequencies, touching a local quantum fold, as well, and that was where she found the split-second message. It was on a cycle, repeated every three seconds, and less than half a second long.
But it was enough.
Liliya absorbed the transmission and slowed it down, seeing the pain and destruction, hearing the desperate voice that had no time to do anything but scream.
“They’ve been here already,” she said. “The control base has been taken. I think the stations are destroyed. If there is anyone left alive, they’ll be hiding.”
“So we can’t use the drophole,” Hashori said. She steeled herself, bringing up a whole new array of controls that Liliya thought must have been weapons.
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “How long?”
“Twenty-five seconds.”
“Don’t slow down.”
“If the drophole is not open—”
“It will be.” Liliya knew the implications of striking the drophole at speed if it was still locked. At least neither of them would feel anything.
She checked the code she had entered one more time, paused for a second, then sent it.
For an agonizing few seconds nothing happened. There was no acknowledgement, and no automated response denying access.
A glowing mass the size of her fist lifted from the control panel, and Hashori sighed heavily.
“It’s open,” she said. “Six seconds.”
Liliya entered a random code and prepared another transmission, timing it to send the instant they passed into the drophole. If her timing was accurate, the hole would receive the new, incorrect transmission and immediately deactivate. It might give them a head start, at least. But she knew that Alexander and his army would eventually follow her through. The Rage had already taken the control base on the moon. They would not have been stupid enough to destroy it.
“Two seconds,” Hashori said. Liliya saw her lean back in her seat, the structure flexing with her body and cupping around her to keep her still. She gripped the armrests, her long-clawed hands clasping tight. She even heard the Yautja take in a deep breath… and then let it out slowly, like a final exhalation before death.
In the viewing screen, the drophole structure appeared before them. It grew rapidly in size as they approached. It had been a long, long time since Liliya had been through one of these, and she had a second to marvel at its size, complexity, and beauty.
Then she, too, prepared. Smashing through a hole, awake and at this speed would destroy a human mind, drive the person mad with the twisted slew of dimensional disturbance and deep time. For the first time in a long while she tried not to think of herself as human.
A second later, she could not think at all.
* * *
Wake up.
The voice might have been inside her mind. It had the sound of an echo, perhaps drifting in from hundreds of years ago. They captured the lifeboat, opened it up, pulled her out and tried to wake her. Decades alone and she had fallen into a strange fugue, deeper than sleep, not quite death.
Wake up.
Wordsworth had been there when she eventually came around. Reality came into focus, slowly finding its way through the other hallucinations. It took her a while to make out which was which. Though she didn’t know it then, a time would come when she would wish they had never found her at all.
Wake up, human.
Liliya opened her eyes.
Beside her, the Yautja slumped in her chair. Her face was splattered with blood. She was breathing heavily, releasing a labored sound.
Before them, the wider viewing screen displayed star systems she did not rec
ognize.
“We’re through,” Liliya said breathlessly. Hashori did not reply, and she took that as confirmation.
Liliya stood from her seat, drifting to a side wall, holding on and stretching, hearing joints click and feeling muscles stretch. It felt as if she’d been prone in that chair for a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.
“And them?” she asked.
“No sign that they followed,” Hashori said. She pointed at the control panel, indicating that Liliya should check. It was she who’d activated the drophole, after all.
She pushed off and landed in her seat, and it took only moments to confirm what she had hoped was true. Her random transmission at the instant of dropping had been timed perfectly, causing the drophole to close behind them.
“How long do we have?” Hashori asked.
Liliya thought it through. Every Rage ship—from Macbeth and Othello, to the captured Fiennes ships, to those battle vessels built specifically for war—was equipped with drophole intelligence, but her knowledge about drophole tech had been expanding faster than she had shared it with Maloney and the Rage. Even back then she’d known that something terrible was looming.
“Probably not long,” she admitted. “The hole will have closed when wrong info was sent, but once Alexander and his crew filter out the correct codes…” She shrugged. She didn’t know, and with the control base already taken out, all it would require was a visit to the moon.
“We’ll be long gone,” Hashori said.
“How far did we jump?”
“Seven light years.”
“I wish that felt far enough,” Liliya said.
“I have something,” Hashori said. She was sitting up straighter now, and if she was in pain the Yautja did not show it.
How long did it seem to her? Liliya wondered, but Hashori was right—in truth, she knew little about the Yautja.
Hashori pointed toward the control board and an image rose on the screen, accompanied with a haze of information written in Yautja.