Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  My hopes for the future of human interstellar exploration were high: I am an optimist, after all, and it was that optimism that led me to devote myself for twenty years to the study of cultures beyond our solar system.

  Over those twenty years I have watched my hopes transformed to horror and anguish. I have come to believe we must end our program of interstellar expansion, before we cause irreparable damage to the rest of sentient space and this fragile universe we all inhabit. I know that most likely you’re the only person who will ever read this—but in case some bureaucrat somewhere finds themselves filing this for the records, I want to be absolutely clear: I reject this galactic Expansion. I reject this future we’ve made. And I will regret my part in making it for the rest of my life.

  The disgusting incident on Charel was just the nail in the coffin for me. I don’t have to tell you the rest. You already know.

  Best,

  Delicia Baker (Del)

  Mose rocked back on his heels, looking at the screen without really seeing it. The vehemence of the Terran scientist’s resignation had caught him by surprise—not least because he hadn’t really considered there might be Terrans who didn’t agree with their Expansion’s ambitions. Perhaps there’d been more dissent in Baker’s era, before the Expansion had to deal with any aggressive, tech-savvy sentients. An external threat did wonders for a species’ solidarity.

  There was something else curious. Baker had only researched the Drevl Char for five years, yet in her letter she mentioned twenty. What had she been doing the other fifteen?

  His eyes went to a block of text below the letter of resignation, which turned out to be a postscript added some years later:

  This letter represents the last published thoughts of xenologist Delicia Baker, PhD, made public shortly after her death in 87 A.E. In her distinguished 30-year career, Baker published over 100 peer-reviewed papers on extraterrestrial life, including the most extensive ecological survey ever done on the Jovian moons and gas giants of Sol System. Her extrasolar research credentials included a 10-year stint in the archaeological research division of the high-profile Rosetta expedition before she headed her own xenological survey on Charel and subsequently retired from space exploration.

  After announcing her intention not to accompany any more extrasolar expeditions, Baker settled on one of Jupiter’s orbital stations to conduct research on the aerial fungi endemic to the upper Jovian atmosphere, where she would remain for the next seven years until her death in a freak skimmer accident. She will be greatly missed.

  The combined brevity and import of that last entry piqued Mose’s curiosity further. The paragraph was no more than a couple of terse lines, yet Mose could see a greater depth of information there than in the whole rest of the Charel archive.

  His investigative instincts prickled with suspicion. Something wasn’t adding up in the record of Baker’s later years: First came her withdrawal from Expansion affairs, so sudden and—if her letter could be believed—so personal, followed by seven years doing seemingly inconsequential research. And then she’d died. An accident. Or . . . ?

  Had she been hiding something, hoping to find protection in the lonely wastes of circum-Jovian space?

  It’s what a seph would do, Mose thought. Track down the target and eliminate them. And there are plenty of things that can go wrong in the atmosphere of a gas giant.

  But seven years after the fact? Though it must have been a hard pill to swallow, the official story of the debacle on Charel seemed to have gone down with the Expansion public. What could she have been hiding that would have made it worthwhile for someone to eliminate her, after she’d made it clear she was retiring from public view?

  On the other hand, seven years wasn’t such a long time, really; not when Terrans could extend their lives twenty, thirty times beyond that. On those timescales, seven years could be the blink of an eye.

  But what if the Charel mission wasn’t the point . . . either of the memory, or of Delicia Baker’s resignation from the public sphere? Maybe it was no more than foreground, a distraction as enticing as it was obvious. Charel was just the nail in the coffin for me. I don’t have to tell you the rest. That was what Baker had written. So what was “the rest” for her?

  Rosetta. Mose sucked air through his teeth and slapped the edge of the screen in triumph. That had to be it: Rosetta was the only other world beyond Sol System where Baker had done research. Mose closed the archive record on Charel and queried Rosetta, shifting in his chair as he did so to relieve some pressure on his hips. They were getting stiff from prolonged sitting, but he didn’t dare get up now.

  The headphones and lenses of the console’s VR rig provided a comforting pressure as Mose flew past towers of gold and silver that stretched into a sheer, artificial canyon as far up as he could see. The dizzying drop below made his stomach pitch, even though he could still feel the hard chair under his belly. Sleek, finned aircraft glided through the air around him, silent and imposing as clouds, riding the winds that whistled through the city’s canyons. The aerial procession rounded a tower of gleaming white metal and emerged above a city square easily a dozen kilometers in area. Despite himself, Mose caught his breath: Beyond a belt of open parkland, a helical pyramid of burnished metal and creamy ceramic rose above layers of sculpted green and golden foliage, the whole edifice flashing like a jewel in the light of the planet’s yellow sun.

  The cloud of silent aircraft forked, jetting away into two streams of traffic around the perimeter of the square. Mose’s viewpoint floated gently downward, settling him on the soft-looking grass of the open square just beyond the massive superstructures of the city proper. Outside the sim, Mose dug the fingernails of one hand into his other arm, let the pain remind him where he really was.

  “Rosetta.” The Terran male voice was bold, loud. Mose jumped before he realized it was a recording.

  “This is a simulation of what the civilization we call Rosetta may have looked like in its prime,” the narrator continued. “Many people think of a puzzle when they hear the word

  ‘Rosetta’—a mystery, an enigma. But for the expedition who first made planetfall here in 64 A.E., what they found seemed more like the answers.” A dramatic pause. “The answers to questions that have plagued humanity since before the dawn of space travel.”

  Humanity? Mose didn’t know the word. Before he could figure out how to rewind, the simulation around him changed.

  The gorgeous parkland disappeared, replaced by black space.

  To his left, artificially illuminated in the sim, hovered a swarm of spiky, dark violet ovoids. Terran Exodus ships. “Below” his viewpoint, a ring of metallic material framed the vacuum. Its bronzed circumference was studded with the small black pustules of exotic matter generators. Mose recognized the thing instantly; after all, he’d passed through them hundreds of times.

  It was an utterly ordinary object.

  It was an utterly extraordinary object.

  A hyperstream gate.

  “Is it possible to cross interstellar distances through hyper-space? Can information be conveyed instantly from one place to another using quantum entanglement? Can matter be teleported as information and reconstituted?” The narrator gave a fake hearty laugh. “While we’re still working on the teleportation part, the artifacts at Rosetta gave scientists the answers to all these questions and more.”

  One by one, the ovoid Exodus ships glided through the gate, seeming for an illusory moment to stretch to infinity as they crossed its invisible boundary before the gate shot them light-years away. In an effect that must have been calculated to impress, Mose’s own viewpoint moved “down” and through the hyperstream gate, the floating bronze ring looming larger in his vision until he found himself back in the simulated Rosettan park plaza.

  “Since the first deep-space telescopes returned images of superstructures on Rosetta that stunned researchers, archaeological expeditions have unearthed technologies that turned the theory of relativity on its ear. R
elativity Defiant technology now rests at the core of some of our greatest achievements: fast and affordable interstellar travel; quantum-based information-sharing applications; and of course, the hyperwave communications technology that sets the Expansion apart in the wider galaxy. Even the nanotechnology we use every day in engineering and medicine has gotten a leg up from the reverse engineering of Rosettan artifacts.”

  The marketed cheer was beginning to wear on Mose when the narrator’s tone grew somber. “However, for as many answers as we’ve gotten from the artifacts at Rosetta, there will always be more questions.” The manicured sim landscape around Mose changed: grass withered away to bare rock under his feet; around the park, the huge sleek towers twisted into jagged, broken ruins, their shapes eroded by a wind that had been blowing for millennia. Above him, the clouds of graceful ships disappeared from a dark sky, the sun setting in a pool of crimson light.

  “This is what Rosetta looks like today. A ruined world that’s offered up only a handful of its secrets, even after three centuries of investigation. Just as the Rosetta Stone unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt, the discovery of Rosetta has unlocked many secrets of the universe for humankind. Yet we still know almost nothing about the Rosettans themselves: what did they look like? What was their society like beyond their technology?

  And perhaps most importantly, where did they go?

  “We may never know all the answers to these questions, but thanks to generous conservation grants from the Core Worlds Government Commission on Cultural Artifacts, Sol Industry United, and the non-denominational Universal Church headquartered in the Rosettan site of Jericho, Rosetta will survive as an Expansion heritage site for generations to come.”

  Like the bleed of light through thin paper, the simulated ruins faded to white in his VR goggles. He carefully removed the goggles and headphones, gripping the edge of the desk as a stab of transitional vertigo took him. He hung his head as he waited for the disorientation to pass.

  Just to be thorough, he dug around the archive a little more.

  The obliging search engine turned up reams of articles on Rosetta’s excavation, reams more on the technological rewards the Expansion had reaped from it . . . though nothing on how Relativity Defiant tech worked, which was of course a Terran state secret. All of it told him no more than the initial presentation had. Certainly he could find no hints about what had happened to radicalize the Terran scientist Baker.

  He’d been convinced Rosetta had been the right track.

  Mose was far from ready to abandon that hunch. But if Pri’s memories hadn’t been directing him toward the public record, what had she been trying to show him?

  This was all beginning to feel like one of the analysis exercises Mose had gone through as a trainee intelligence operative, and which, later, he’d run other trainees through. Sift through a mountain of raw data and try to figure out what relates to the investigation. Filter out the white noise. Ninety percent was usually white noise. What he’d been trained to look for through the static was patterns.

  So what was the pattern that connected Charel and Rosetta?

  A wisp of an idea came to him. He let out his breath slowly, as though not to scare it away. What if, underneath the official Terran record, there was more to both worlds’ first contacts? He knew there was more in Charel’s case, if Pri’s memories were authentic. Was there more to Rosetta, too?

  Mose was no stranger to propaganda and slick PR jobs. In contrast to the stripped-down Charel archive, the presentation on Rosetta carried an air of self-congratulatory promotion.

  The ruined world’s discovery and exploitation was a point of Terran pride, an accomplishment to be vaunted with the best simulation technology credits could buy.

  At least, the official version was. What had Vernsky said at the bar—history was written by the victors? With an animosity that still burned, Mose recalled the official Terran spin on the fall of Za, repeated endlessly in newsfeed recaps of the Fate’s Shears near-miss in Neo-Chicago. If the Terran powers that be could delude themselves by repetition that the nanovirus attack on Za had been a necessity instead of an atrocity, it was well within their power to twist other histories to suit their own ends.

  Mose had been sitting still long enough for his hands and feet to get cold; he rose and paced, working off some of the nervous energy that had come over him. His skin felt simultaneously chilled and electric with the possibilities running through his mind. If there was an alternate history of Rosetta, it seemed it was one someone had been willing to kill to protect—at least singly, and possibly on a genocidal scale. If his suspicions about Baker’s death were right. If Charel was connected by more than the unhappy accident of being next on the Gnosis’s first contact list. If, if, if.

  He wished Pri would make contact again, and soon, suns take it. He could feel the yawning abyss of unknown centuries stretching under him, defying illumination by his little pocket of insights. He half hoped his suppositions were wild, totally off the mark.

  Because if they weren’t, then he, as the ShadowStalker, wasn’t just committing murders but abetting them.

  Chapter Nine

  Daikar wasn’t on shift when the Council’s intelligencers received Pri’s message by tightbeam at 4:26 A.M., Anmerresh time. He staggered down to the offices after receiving their page, to read her terse message for himself with bleary eyes:

  I just passed the Teluk gate. I made contact with Mose Attarrish and delivered the schema as planned. He is receptive to our offer.

  Daikar thanked the other officers for alerting him and stumbled back to his nest feeling lighter than he had in weeks.

  Pri was safe. She was coming back to them. As for the content of her message, he would think about that later. He fell almost immediately into a deep sleep until true dawn woke him.

  The lightness in him had almost entirely vanished by the evening. A leaden heaviness had replaced it as his elevator sank into the vault beneath Anmerresh’s surface to meet Shomoro and Councilors Whalg-General and Yurll. His stomach almost forgot to lurch at the vast arch of the vault’s ceiling as he emerged from the elevator bay onto a mezzanine level. From there, he reached one of the smaller residential facilities by an open-air train-car ride that normally would have had him looking resolutely at the floor to avoid glimpsing the gulf that separated the train track from the cavern floor. He still looked at the floor on the ride, but out of habit and a need to distract himself from the sinking in his gut.

  Daikar met Shomoro and the councilors on the rooftop of the agreed-upon residence. It was one of the smaller buildings among the vault’s housing options, containing only a few units and a small infirmary. More of a guesthouse, really, for visiting dignitaries and Council assets with the clearance to know about the vault. The Council had floated the idea of sticking Shomoro here for her safety. Though she’d elected to remain in her surfaceside apartments, it was Shomoro who’d come up with the idea of confining Mose to one of these same apartments once they had him.

  As his car slowed to a stop on the platform and the doors opened, Daikar saw four rather than the expected three people waiting for him. Shomoro was there, and beside her Whalg-General and Yurll, imposing in their Council robes—

  and on Whalg-General’s left, the slim central stalk and sea frond-like head of a Veert. As he came closer, Daikar recognized the subtle gray patterning on the Veert’s foot-body and the tendrils surrounding their head.

  “Stone,” he greeted the Veert with a bow. “What brings you down here?”

  “The wishes of the Council.” The aquatic alien’s voice came from a translator box strapped over their speaking organ. Veert used infrared pulses to talk. “Consulting on the feasibility of certain modifications to be made to the appointed unit.”

  “Now you’re here, we can get started,” Yurll said. “Follow me.” She directed this last to Stone with a nod of her crested head, but they all fell in line behind the Arashal as she led them inside the building. Most of the top level
was given over to a single suite; Yurll skirted this and led them down the perimeter hallway to an elevator bank, where the five of them crowded into a car. As it started to descend, Daikar touched Shomoro’s hand to get her attention.

  “Pri should be back in a few days,” he said quietly.

  Shomoro smiled. “I saw her message. Her report was . . . encouraging.”

  He is receptive to our offer. That had been part of her message, but six words didn’t make a report. Nor was a brief impression, even a Drevl Char’s impression, necessarily reliable. But Daikar said nothing beyond a noncommittal jab that could have been taken for agreement.

  On the fifth floor, Yurll palmed the door open on a standard three-room apartment. The floor plan wasn’t dissimilar from Daikar’s allotted apartment: a large living room with a kitchenette on the right and a window along the back wall. To the left, a door led to a small bathroom cubicle and sleeping room.

  But where Daikar’s apartment looked out on the terracing of the middle city, this window had a view of the vault’s square kilometers of empty buildings. The huge supporting columns stretched upward between smaller buildings like branchless tree trunks.

  Whalg-General made a show of looking around, arms akimbo. “This should do.” He looked at Stone. “Once you’ve made the appropriate, ah, modifications.”

  Daikar’s curiosity got the better of him. “What are these modifications?”

  “We’re going to coat the interior surfaces with spitstone.

  It was Stone’s suggestion,” Yurll said. She rapped the picture window with two broad knuckles. “This window should be reinforced as well,” she said to Stone.

  Shomoro ran a hand along the edge of the kitchenette’s counter. “This counter’s edge will need to be blunted.” The Veert bobbed their head and hopped over to the counter, measuring its length with a tendril.