Undo it?
My heart hammers in my chest. All kinds of questions explode in my mind, none of them getting the chance to take root.
"Before you answer, consider this: The main difference between those aliens and all others humanity has encountered before, is the fact that the Ticks haven't gotten wind of them yet. We have an opportunity—an obligation—to make the best of that. Even if establishing an alliance on diplomatic terms seems to be momentarily unviable, those aliens can still be of use to us. Whatever they did to you, Miss Harber, it puts you in a unique position and gives us an unmatched advantage."
"What are you talking about?"
"Your father and I were colleagues long before you were born, back when Greg and I were still employed by the Trust in the xenobiology department of the Expansion program. He was a smart man, and brave to oppose the TMC when they forced his hand, even though everyone around him faltered. He chose to protect the Dorylinae. Risked his career and his family instead of making a quick buck and living with millions of sentients on his conscience. He did the right thing, Miss Harber. I know you will too."
My hand creeps up to my neck, seeking reassurance from the mandible that's no longer hanging there. I'm not sure where Preston's going with this, but I don't like it.
"It's just a matter of time before the TMC finds that ship," Preston says. "It's still out there, hiding, waiting to make the next move. Am I right?"
I shake my head.
"Don't play dumb with me. They don't take prisoners and release them again if they're uninterested in where they go. They're out there watching us. And you're the straight link between our hopes and the tools to give us back our future. Whether you want it or not, Miss Harber, you don't get to shrug off that responsibility."
"Yes I do." My legs are shaking, heart close to bursting in my chest. "There's no link between me and... them, and I don't owe you anything. You wanted me here to make contact. I did. But they're not interested in talking to us one damn bit, let alone become allies. That means my job here is done. I'm out."
"You don't have a choice." He grins. "Not without a functional synet. You're in our care now, and you're coming with us to San Gabriel. You're going to let us study you, find out what we're really dealing with, and how we can use that knowledge against the TMC. Then, perhaps, we can help rid you of these alien alterations."
The hell I'm going to let him turn me into some lab rat. I won't have some lunatics tamper with the link to Amharr, in the middle of a crowded colony no less. But this may be the only chance I get to escape this alien curse and regain control of my life. And if it means having to humor Preston and his dubious connections, I guess I'll have to stomach it. It's not like I have a choice, not without a working synet. That's one thing Preston's got right.
I take a deep breath and steady myself. "Alright. I'll come with you to San Gabriel, but I'm not part of your team. You can study me, but you can't order me around. And if you ever hurt me in any way, I'll pick you apart piece by tiny goddamn piece. I had good teachers in the hives."
Preston nods with mock courtesy, and opens the door. "Come along, please. There's one more thing we need to discuss."
I follow reluctantly, trying not to listen to the tiny voice inside me yelling that I'm only making things worse for myself.
Preston's office is dark and messy, and smells heavily of chemicals. Every surface is littered with junk, and the shelves lining the walls are stuffed with unrecognizable miscellany. He takes me to the desk in the corner, sits in his tattered chair, and turns on his projector.
Bluish light fills the room and I catch a moving shadow in the corner of my eye. I snap around, gripped by panic at the prospect of immediate suffocation. Then I recognize Bray and turn away, gasping for air and rubbing my neck.
Preston leans back in his chair, sizing us up. "I know you two have had some differences, but I need you to work together now."
Bray avoids my gaze.
"And do what?" I'm increasingly certain I've made the wrong decision to accept Preston's offer.
Preston holds up a hand for silence. "Take a look at this." The projection he calls up is a Kolsamal head. I recognize Gary's stern features underneath the dark green fuzz, and remember his first transmission. He warned us there would be no negotiations. He told us to leave. But we didn't listen. I didn't listen. I see the yellow marks on Gary's face and my stomach tightens.
Preston brings up another projection, a full-body scan of myself, peppered with blue dots and markers. He zooms in on the head, aglow with thousands of sparks and color-coded sections.
"You see, I told you the truth." He looks at me over his glinting glasses. "There are alien molecules in your brain, neurotransmitters of some sort. They're unlike anything I've ever seen. I only have preliminary scans to go by, but I'm sure we'll soon discover these alien strains significantly alter your entire organism."
My hands begin to burn. If what he says is true then the link to Amharr is far more complex than I feared. Which makes it even more unpredictable and dangerous to tamper with. And I fear there might not be a way to break it, at least not with whatever hackware Preston's people have.
"So far, the only effect they seem to have is to grant you immunity to biomimetic and electromagnetic fields."
He brings up a recording taken in the medbay, and plays a few seconds of it. I watch myself grab Aaron by the throat, and wince.
"But I think there's more to this than meets the eye. Isn't there, Miss Harber?"
I shake my head as nonchalantly as possible.
"Care to explain the vector of this... infection?"
I really don't. But I'll have to tell them something. So I sketch my encounter with 'the alien leader' in as few words as possible, making its conclusion sound as unavoidable as it seemed at the time. How my stabbing him was self-defense, and that he punished me with this 'infection.' Case closed.
I leave out the link and its deluge of information, or the fact that Amharr is a different species entirely. I can't spill that without having to explain the Ascendancy, and I wouldn't even know where to start.
"I had no control over any of it," I conclude, avoiding eye contact with either of them.
Bray snorts. "You stabbed their leader. That's fucking brilliant."
"What's done is done," Preston says, surprisingly calm about it. "We can't change it now. We need to find a way to make up for it. What I want from you, Miss Harber," Preston continues, "in return for the considerations I am making despite your failure, is that you help Bray with various small tasks on San Gabriel; to put your new ability to overcome energy fields to good use."
"What about letting you study what the aliens did to me?" I ask. "That's not payment enough for your considerations?"
"We'll see."
My hands sting fiercely, right in the center of my palms where Amharr's tendrils would be. It makes me want to gnaw at my own skin, make it stop somehow.
"As long as you're able," Preston says, turning off the projector, "you will repay us with your help. And we'll make sure you continue to be able. Perhaps even get rid of this infection when all is good and done with."
I knew there had to be a catch like that. Sure, they'll help me cut the link eventually, but only after they're done using it to meet their own ends. But unless I pretend to play along, I'm stranded out here in deep space with Amharr prowling in the darkness.
"Thank you, Miss Harber," he adds as I don't break my silence, and waves me and Bray away.
I turn on my heel and glance at Bray. He's breathing hard, a tiny bead of sweat sliding down his temple. I walk around him then out into the corridor, pulse drumming in my ears.
12
General Francis Hurst is forced to wait almost two hours for a connection to his swarms while the large ships go through their post-Jump procedures. He uses the time to crop his white-blond goatee in the crystal mirror opposite his command desk. He inspects the crow's feet that have formed since his last rejuvenation, and the f
urrows between his trimmed eyebrows. He is not pleased.
There are over twenty-one light years between his Command Carrier, the Ares—lagging behind in Sigma Serpentis to refuel—and the swarms he dispatched to enter Epsilon Ophiuchi for preliminary scans. Twenty-one light years is a tremendous distance, though easily annulled by the QECI—the Trust's Quantum Entanglement Communication Interface, more commonly referred to as kesi. Thanks to it, communication and military coordination across interstellar distances is practically instantaneous. What the General is waiting for is not physical distance to be overcome. He's waiting for the humans to regain their feeble grasp of reality, for their unhinged minds to recover from the fugue.
Hurst stands behind his desk, leaning against the backrest of his chair. The large viewscreen on the wall displays a live feed of the refueling activities. A steady trickle of supply drones exits the aft bay of the Ares, heading diagonally upward toward the gas giant's rings. The giant planet is bathed in a myriad of turquoise and salmon hues, speckled here and there with orange and navy blue. Hurst frowns, reminding himself they're just toxic super-storms chasing over the illusive surface of the planet. Out here in space, nothing is what it seems.
He checks the time again. Twelve minutes to kesi readiness.
He's deployed all five sweeper swarms at his disposal to Epsilon Ophiuchi, the next check-mark waiting to happen on his appointed resource acquisition chart. Three more after it, and this odious task will be done, his punishment fulfilled.
Hurst taps his foot on the hand-woven, natural fiber carpet that stretches over the entire floor of his command deck. Nine minutes.
The swarms' AIs must have already launched the remote sensor arrays and FTL probes, and run preliminary diagnostics of the new system. This happens automatically in the time it takes the debilitated crew to resume its duty. But even though AIs have become astonishingly efficient over the past decades, real-time FTL communication and Swarm coordination are still privileges enjoyed exclusively by humans. And most likely always will be. Even if that means Hurst has to waste precious time waiting for his captains to be addressable.
He scratches his chin. Five minutes.
Despite the recent leaps in technological advancement, TMC scientists haven't been able to reproduce the human brain computing abilities faithfully, as the intelligent but insipid AIs demonstrate time and again. The human consciousness has remained inimitable in its complexity, and Hurst feels reassured by that. That human minds—like his—are magnificently unique.
Two minutes to kesi readiness.
Every second seems to pass slower than the previous one, so Hurst opens the channel one minute early. The lead ship of the SSV3 is the first to respond.
Hurst takes a deep breath and straightens his uniform, brushes imaginary lint off his arms, and checks the insignias lined up on his chest in a decade-old reflex. Then sits down stiffly, straight-backed. The projector builds a model of the Epsilon Ophiuchi system with its seven planets and three asteroid belts, superimposed by the translucent, three-dimensional projection of the SSV3 captain's head.
"Captain Ernesto Mori of the Sweeper Swarm Vigor Three reporting," the projection says.
Mori's auburn hair is disheveled. Three new, deep scratches run down the left side of his face, eyelid to chin, the blood just starting to clot.
"Status, Captain." Hurst resumes tapping his foot under the desk.
Captain Mori looks sideways, a little disoriented, his disembodied head turning in the air above Hurst's desk. Hurst sighs and minimizes the captain's projection. He inspects the discovered planets one by one, reading the survey results.
"There's an... uhm..." The Captain rubs his face in an attempt to clear his thoughts. He winces as he unwittingly tears the tender skin open again. "There's a potential resource in the second orbit, sir. A solid planet, spiking up in EM measurements."
Hurst brings the planet to the forefront. It's a green dwarf, four thousand two clicks in diameter, in a point twenty-three AU orbit around Ophiuchi's star. There are no elevations and no craters of any size; no differences in the coloration of its surface either. Nothing to indicate an atmosphere that might explain the smoothness.
"Did you say solid?" Hurst asks, eying the captain suspiciously.
Mori hesitates and frowns at something beyond the projector's range.
Hurst slams his hand on the desk. "Get a grip, damn it. You'll have enough time to sort out your fugue after you deploy the Swarm. I don't have all day to give a simple order."
"Yes sir." Captain Mori stares straight ahead, as if he's reciting by rote. "The result of our preliminary survey indicates a high concentration of metal ore in the planet's crust, sir. Very high probability of pyrochlore and platinum, maybe even up to four percent of the planet's total mass, sir."
"Well I'll be damned." A wide grin stretches its way across Hurst's face.
Such an enormous quantity of pyrochlore can give him enough niobium to build himself a private fortress, to refurbish his entire fleet—a total of sixty-seven ships—and still have enough left to hawk throughout the Confederacy. He'd regain his status within the TMC, too, and put a swift end to the tedious resource acquisition duty he's been sentenced to after the Ceti fiasco.
"Take the swarms down to that planet, Captain."
"Yes sir. ETA is forty-five minutes, in-system transfer time. Energy cost within upper range. We have a Go for all swarms. Repeat, we have a Go. Thank you, sir. Captain Mori out."
Hurst nods to himself, and leans back in his chair.
It's been over ten years since the clash with those aliens in the Tau Ceti system. Back then, he was in command of the xeno-diplomatic contingent established there immediately after the Dorylinae were discovered. Freelance scientists from all over the Confederacy poured in as news of the aliens leaked into the Web. They disrupted everything, from the TMC's communication and barter attempts, right on down through their hive cartography.
The aliens proved resistant to human language and other means of complex communication. Deciphering their primitive percussion and ultrasound language proved to be a waste of time as well. That's why Hurst calls them 'Klackers,' because of the repetitive, nonsensical click-clacking of their mandibles.
As more and more of his resources were spent on the alien issue with no recognizable result, he decided to put the scientists to good use and employ their services directly. Equipped with TMC technology and unhindered by guards, the hobby savants set up camps inside the Klacker hives. They soon delivered streams of information and samples—all of which proved an even bigger waste of time. The beasts were un-technological and primitive, and Hurst eventually decided to move on.
The scientists refused to evacuate. When armed troops stormed their camps to remove them by force, the Klackers intervened with murderous violence. Hurst didn't hesitate to reply in kind and crush the alien menace—and, as it turned out, his own career in the process.
Captain Mori hails him via kesi five minutes after the swarms' arrival on target. His confusion has become concern: "Close range scans give us heavy electromagnetic interference. It's likely caused by some unidentified, planet-wide kinetic movement similar to shifts in tectonic plates, but perfectly uniform. And we get approximately fifty eight quadrillion life-signs, of even distribution." He swallows. "Sir, the planet is teeming with life."
Hurst huffs and leans forward. "Any signs of advanced technology, Captain? Transmissions? Satellites?"
"No, sir, nothing so far."
"Well, then. Don't wet your suit over some alien fauna."
"Yes sir. I mean, no sir."
"Is the pyrochlore confirmed?"
"Yes. Our initial estimations were modest. A good eleven percent of the planet's total mass is made of pyrochlore, two percent microlite and zircon, and additional traces of silver, platinum and gold."
"Excellent." Hurst grins. "Prepare a sweep."
"Sir, what about the aliens?"
"I don't care about alien critters, Captain. D
o your job."
"We need extensive scans of the planet, sir, preferably from close orbit flights. The interference—given the planet's tight rotation around its sun, we assume that—"
"Of course there's interference," Hurst says. "The whole planet's nothing but a bug-infested ball of superconductive ore. Set all five swarms in position for an immediate sweep, that's an order."
"Yes sir."
Hurst turns his armchair toward the viewscreen. The force field surrounding the Ares sizzles with the prickle of dust and stray particles pelting down from the gas giant's rings. The surge of incoming supply drones has lessened, and none of them fly out again. A Keres warship is turning over lazily atop the aft bay, preparing to dock and power down once the inflow of drones has stopped and the ship's defenses are on standby.
"General, sir," Captain Mori calls in. "All swarms are in position, awaiting orders."
Hurst opens the armored cabinet of his desk and glares at the object inside: a filigree synaptic wire helmet, with nanotube casings and a field-protected nitrogen cooling system, as artistically crafted as a hemispherical crown. The synaptic strands are woven into a meshwork of tiny hexagons, adorned with thousands of fine protrusions like silvery hairs. They disperse the fine electrostatic halo generated by the helmet as it expands and accelerates the brain's functions through its direct hyper-band relay into the synet.
The helmet creates an almost seamless interface between one human mind and another, light-years away. The connection is mitigated by the TMC Nexus—the latest technology in a decade-long, billion-credit effort. Only a handful of generals have Nexus interfaces, and a very few others who can afford to buy into the exclusivity, or blackmail their way in. It's one of those rare, exquisite things that make Hurst's influence worthwhile, and he enjoys every minute of it.
He takes the helmet out of the cabinet and twists it between the tips of his fingers. Then lifts the helmet above his head and crowns himself, an eager smile tugging at his lips.
The helmet registers the proximity of an adapted synet and finds the tiny socket array at the base of his neatly cropped hairline. Sixty-six micron-thin filaments unfurl out of a band at the base of the helmet to plug into the socket array, connecting Hurst's synet to the helmet, and through the Nexus right to Captain Mori's helmet and thus his synet, twenty-one light years away.
The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) Page 8