Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  “I know our proposal must strike you as strange.” Del’s voice is warm with understanding. “I’d ask you to see things from our point of view, but I don’t have to—that’s the point! It must seem ordinary to you to communicate mind to mind, but to us it’s a miracle. To instantly understand and connect with another sentient being, beyond language, beyond biology . . . it’s a miracle. There’s no better word for it.”

  «So what would you have us do?» Dur’s thought tone is wary and intrigued.

  Del Baker sighs. Like a ripple in still air, Pri feels the Soft One’s distressed thoughts attenuate to pale strings of tension as Del shoves them aside. “We decided that you three would make the best ambassadors to relay our proposal to the rest of the Stone Hearths. So that all the People of the Sand have a chance to decide if they want to join us.”

  «Join you in what?» Pri and her companions can sense the pieces falling into place, revealing the form of this Terran fervor.

  All three Terrans stand. “To spread out into the wider universe, Terrans and Drevl Char together.” Behind them, simulated stars spill across the jet-black wings of their craft. “We’ve come to ask you to join our galactic Expansion.”

  Eddies of sand from the departing ship’s backwash are still swirling in the amphitheater when Pri lightly touches Dur and Bef’s minds to get their attention. The two of them are already ahead of her, toiling upward on the stony path leading out of the depression. They acknowledge her contact without stopping.«I felt it too,» Bef sends before Pri can ask. «Del was overcome by great distress when you mentioned Rosetta.»

  «I sensed grief and guilt,» Dur concurs. «But its object seemed formless.»

  «Then neither of you saw it?» she asks unnecessarily—the puzzlement burbling through their shared mental space is all the answer Pri needs. «I caught an image»—she does not want to commit to the word memory—«from Del.» She shares the image of those almost Terran-like eyes with them.

  Dur withdraws from their shared space for the time it takes them to gain the rocky amphitheater’s rim, his mind a closed stone. His renewed mental touch is cautious. «Pri. You’ve spent more time among the Soft Ones than any of us. What do you think Del’s thoughts mean?»

  She formulates her thoughts behind her own shield. The thought of how much rides on her answer looms over her like an unstable cliff formation. In his role as speaker for all Stone Hearths, Dur asked the Terran envoys for time to discuss their offer with the far-flung Hearths of the People. The potential benefits and risks of accepting the Terrans’ promise of star travel will take cycles to weigh before a consensus can be reached. There is so much the People don’t know about the world beyond their home, so much that must be learned before they can understand the magnitude of the decision they must make. And it’s become clear that among the things they don’t yet understand are the Terrans themselves.

  «We know many of the Gnosis crew, including Del, were on Rosetta,» she says. «We know what they told us they found there. But these—thoughts of Del’s suggest to me there are things she and the others have not told us.» The Drevl Char language, a blend of glyphs transmitted to the brain’s visual centers and underlaid with traces of intuited meaning, has no word for lying. Rather than use the imported Terran term, she uses the phrase for omitting information. So far, Pri isn’t certain more than that is going on. «We must learn more about Rosetta,» she sends. «Until we discover what they have kept from us and why.»

  Mose awoke so suddenly it felt as if the sheets had risen up and slapped him in the face. He jerked his snout away from the blankets; he’d drooled on them in his sleep, and they were unpleasantly moist and sour. The smartwalls around him were a blank gray, confirming the Hub’s day cycle hadn’t begun yet.

  Rolling onto his back, Mose stared at the ceiling of his tiny, still-dark room as he ran the contents of the bizarre dream through his mind.

  The nanites Pri had injected him with had to be a delivery system of some kind—perhaps one not so different from the nano-boosters Vernsky administered periodically to regulate his mood. Though he’d never heard of psychotherapeutic nanites being used to implant memories before. The concept made him vaguely uneasy, and he turned from contemplating the method of Pri’s message to its content.

  That the memories were authentic, Mose had no doubt.

  Problem was, he had no idea where this feeling of absolute conviction came from. The meeting between the Drevl Char and representatives of the newly formed Expansion was undisputed fact. Whether there’d been a young xenologist named Pri at that historic event was harder to determine. Mose had recognized Dur by name as the Drevl Char elected to lead the Stone Hearths in their first contact with another sentient species. Dead now, of course, along with most of the population of that desert world. Then again, most beings who’d been alive to see that first conflict of the Expansion were dead: after all, it had occurred almost two hundred and fifty years ago.

  I am harboring the memories of a ghost, Mose thought It seemed the Drevl Char were a much longer-lived species than anyone suspected. He imagined carrying a grudge as deep as the one Pri must bear across the centuries. It made his own accomplishment look almost paltry.

  But there was too much in shadows here; too much of his thoughts rested on conjecture rather than cold, hard fact. Mose would have to rectify that.

  The room was lightening as its smartwalls sensed the approaching day cycle. Alex Vernsky would soon be in to administer the first of several rounds of medications, but after that he could be counted on to leave Mose alone. Today would be an ordinary day, with no scheduled briefings or psych sessions.

  A day with plenty of free time to dispense with as he liked, in other words.

  Mose figured it was time he did some research.

  His quarters came with a built-in desk and console setup, separated from the sleeping area by a mesh privacy screen that hemmed it in its own cubicle. “Privacy screen” was something of a joke—even if the security cameras embedded in the ceiling hadn’t covered every angle of his room, Vernsky or any of the medical techs could access his computer log at any time. But Vernsky had said they weren’t monitoring his room or console anymore.

  Mose wasn’t sure he believed it. A test was in order, before he went any farther. He settled on the cubicle’s chair, at an angle he knew was covered by at least two cameras, and unsheathed one blade to half length. His initial impulse was to hold the blade’s edge above his other wrist, but no—his watchers, if they were still watching, had to think he was serious. Mose lifted the blade to his throat and held it lightly against the large artery in his neck, drawing his lips back from his teeth in what he hoped was believable anguish.

  He experienced a strange dislocation as he waited for medtechs and guards to invade his room and stop the apparent suicide attempt. It was bizarre to be pantomiming the same actions he had carried nearly to completion in earnest while feeling none of their emotional weight—or not nearly as much.

  His breath quickened at the sharp bone edge against his skin, and his teeth started to ache from being bared, but that was it.

  It wasn’t death he sought this time, but solitude.

  Mose held the pose a full five minutes, counted in breaths, but no alarmed Project employees burst in to save him from himself. It looked like he was alone after all.

  By habit, he drew the screen’s walls nearly closed behind him before accessing the local net. The spartan interface of Greenwich Hub’s library archives appeared onscreen. Mose input the planet’s name into the ancient text-based search engine and waited actual seconds for the algorithms to return the record.

  Rumors were the archive hadn’t been upgraded since its installation, when Greenwich Hub had been founded in the first wave of the Terran Exodus some two hundred years before.

  While the rest of settled space had moved on to brighter hyperwave futures, the archive at Greenwich Hub languished, held back by relays that handled data at a glacial rate of gigabytes per second,
even though the archive still had to filter billions of data packets from all over Terran space. Mose suspected the Greenwich archive had been allowed to become obsolete largely through indifference. There were faster archives elsewhere; why waste capital on a system whose only fault was that it was a little slow?

  The archive record for Charel appeared, with subheaders listing basic stats about the planet’s geology, history, and ecology. Mose snorted a humorless laugh. Its ecology—that was a good one, for those with an ironic sense of humor.

  Scanning down the page, he selected the header “A Brief History of Charel.” His eyes skimmed over the words, barely registering the English characters. Mose already knew what he’d find in this historical account. It was a story every citizen of Teluk had burned into them from childhood.

  Charel had been first contact for the Expansion. No one counted Rosetta. While that ruined world may have given the Terrans the hyperstream and ’wave technologies that knit the Expansion together, Charel had given them something more—

  proof that they were not expanding into a dead, deserted universe, but into one alive with other civilizations. How the Terrans approached contact with Charel would set the seal on their galactic reputation for centuries to come.

  Intensely aware of this, the Gnosis expedition had been all courtesy with the Drevl Char. For about five standard years, the Terran expedition set up camp on the planet’s surface and made a concerted xenological study of the Drevl Char. By tentative degrees, the xenologists established diplomatic relations with the tribes—the Stone Hearths of the recorded memory—

  scattered around the desert, gathering informants and allies among the insectoid telepaths. In return for their participation in the xenological survey, the Gnosis expedition had carefully introduced donated Terran technology into the Stone Hearths.

  Trinkets to the Terrans, the technologies had been a revelation to the Drevl Char: high-speed land vehicles, mining and refining equipment, weather satellites, telecoms infrastructure, vacuum-capable supersonic craft . . . In a few revolutions, the Drevl Char had gone from fashioning stone tools to making plans for their first space elevator.

  The burgeoning alliance had been full of promise; then, for reasons no one knew, the Drevl Char ended it. Early in the morning on the day of their short-lived rebellion, total comms silence fell across Charel’s airwaves as hundreds of Stone Hearths cut transmissions. The crew aboard the Gnosis were still trying to troubleshoot the problem, under the assumption it was a sandstorm-induced comms failure, when the first of several remotely piloted vacuum-capable craft slammed into the expedition ship’s hull.

  The pilots had been Drevl Char.

  According to the historical account, five of the remote controlled ships evaded the Gnosis’s ballistic asteroid defenses to collide with the hull. Twenty-three Terran crew had been killed in the resulting explosion and decompression of the rear compartments. It hadn’t ever occurred to Mose that the Terran side had casualties. What happened next made those few deaths pale into insignificance.

  Charel’s fate had come down to a quirk of its atmospheric balance. Though sandstorms and volcanic activity had been a regular part of the planet’s history, the atmosphere’s relatively low oxygen concentration had limited natural fires to small areas, despite the high concentration of methane that could have fueled their spread.

  But the Gnosis had not been alone in its orbit around Charel. Following in its wake—as was later discovered, following far too close for safety regulations—was an automated manufactory and refueling station the crew used for maintaining spacecraft, drop shuttles, and other mission-critical equipment. Caught in the debris cloud from the stern of Gnosis and the remote craft its anti-collision guns managed to dispatch, the orbital manufactory destabilized into a decaying orbit and plunged into Charel’s atmosphere—dragging with it more than a thousand tonnes of triethylaluminium and liquid oxygen rocket fuel. Mose knew triethylaluminium was no longer used in orbital boosters, with good reason: The volatile compound ignites explosively when exposed to oxygen.

  The disintegrating manufactory had drawn a line of fire across the planet that quickly expanded to a wave the horrified crew of Gnosis could see from space, as its liquid oxygen reserves warmed quickly to a gas in Charel’s atmosphere and ignited the triethylaluminium. The result had been a continent-sized wildfire the likes of which Charel hadn’t seen since an earlier extinction-level event—recorded, ironically, by Terran geologists—when a meteor had struck the frozen methane-water ice at the planet’s north pole and released thousands of tonnes of flammable oxygen into the atmosphere.

  Though smaller in scale, the atmospheric upset caused by the liquid oxygen-triethylaluminium fuel’s release had been in some ways worse, a catalyst for scrub fires that raged for months across seventy-five percent of the planet’s landmass, according to some estimates. Hundreds of Stone Hearths had been overwhelmed by the fires, tens of thousands of Drevl Char killed, despite the Gnosis’s desperate, wholly inadequate evacuation efforts. They were only one ship, after all—enough to kill a world, perhaps, but not to save it.

  A relative handful of Drevl Char were evacuated to the Gnosis, around one hundred fifty individuals including informants and Hearth representatives who’d been living on the ship at the time. After the catastrophe planetside, those few survivors had been provided for at the expense of the Expansion—given lifetime pensions and, for those who showed aptitude, positions in CoG’s Sentient Relations divisions on multispecies worlds like Aival. It was a pathetically small gesture of recompense, and the Terrans knew it. They’d caused the death of a world; nothing they could do for the Drevl Char would ever be enough after that.

  Mose flipped through the old holophotos of the destruction, all of them taken from orbit, thankful the main archive didn’t include any pictures on the ground. The smoldering orange swathes on the planet’s curve were enough to make his skin crawl in pyrophobic sympathy. He was seized with a wild impulse to apologize to Pri, when next he saw her—and he was sure there would be a next time. I almost burned her alive, with the rest of Gau’s followers. If he’d known what she’d gone through . . .

  He would have what? Shown mercy, and thrown away his chance to stop Gau? Mose didn’t follow that thought any further. He was unwilling to lie to himself.

  Mose closed the window. The overview made no reference to the individuals Mose had dreamed about last night. It seemed he would have to do a more in-depth search to discover where they fit into this sad tale.

  He returned to the query screen and did a quick and dirty search for any information linked to the three Drevl Char names from his dream. This time the archive calculated for less than a second before delivering its records.

  As he’d expected, the Hearth leader Dur came up first in the rankings. A series of titles, mostly articles written by the research head, Delicia Baker, followed the Drevl Char’s name.

  Mose made a mental note to look into them further; they might be useful to cross-reference with his other searches.

  Bef didn’t appear in the record at all, but that didn’t surprise Mose; he’d sensed even in that snippet of memory that the trader’s involvement with the Terrans had been tangential at best.

  More surprisingly, there was no record of Pri, either. In the memory, Mose had felt sure Pri was the real link between the species, yet as far as the archive was concerned, Pri did not exist. At least, she’d received no mention in the historical account of first contact, the rebellion, or its aftermath. And—he typed a quick query—neither was she listed on the Gnosis’s passenger manifest among the hundred fifty-odd Drevl Char survivors.

  Now that’s interesting. Mose had assumed, from the moment he’d first seen her beside Gau in the Embassy building’s hangar, that Pri was the descendant of a Gnosis refugee. It seemed he was going to have to rethink some basic assumptions. For one, if she really was as old as the memory suggested and she hadn’t been on the Gnosis, that left only one option. Pri must be part of t
he contingent of Drevl Char rescued from Charel’s volcanic caverns by an exploratory mission from Teluk.

  Mose had met his first Drevl Char on Teluk. He knew their story well enough: They were the planetside survivors of Charel’s destruction, those who’d been able to flee the wildfires into the extensive system of lava tunnels crisscrossing the planet’s crust. They’d languished there for centuries, living on cave mold and subterranean worms, until Baskar explorers from Teluk discovered them less than fifty standard years ago. For Teluk the mission had been a publicity stunt, a venture to restore the citizenry’s faith in the High Council. For the trapped Drevl Char, it had been salvation.

  But that couldn’t be what Mose was supposed to find. It was too obvious. Pri—and the Osk who remained a silhouette behind their meeting—wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of implanting Mose with a history he already knew. His gaze danced back over the list of Drevl Char names, like syllables in a language he didn’t know. On a whim, Mose scrolled back to

  “Dur” and selected the name. He was the only one of the three the archive had any record of; perhaps there was something relevant there.

  He opened the window with the list of articles by Baker.

  Mose scrolled down their dry titles until an entry near the bottom of the page caught his interest.

  Statement of Resignation

  Tendered to Department of Xenology, Extrasolar Division, University of Titan, 80 A.E.

  Delicia C. Baker, PhD

  Dear Sam [ed.: Director of Xenology],

  I am writing to tender my resignation from the university’s extrasolar research division. Believe me when I say I have not come to this decision easily. I write this only after a long process of deliberation and personal introspection. But I cannot with good conscience keep silent any longer.