by Lucas Bale
She nodded sharply, unnaturally. An unfamiliar gesture. ‘What we need from you is trust. You must trust us, as your people must trust us. Your Consul will not—indeed, we doubt much of humanity will accept us. Yet without us, you will fail. You need us as much as we want to help you. If you were to come with us now, leave this ship with us, you could help your kind understand and accept us.’
‘I think you overestimate what I can do. Right now, I don’t believe we can even succeed in escaping the Magistratus, let alone your masters when they come. If we run, both will find us, I’m sure of it.’
‘There are systems within which we can hide,’ Sofia said. ‘The universe is a virtually infinite space, and it is expanding. There are boundaries to their territory, and there are vast, empty reaches where their gateway singularities become less ubiquitous, only infrequently travelled. It would be possible to collapse one of those singularities behind us.’
‘Do they have a name?’ Gant asked. ‘Your masters. Does their species, or their culture, have a name?’
‘It is not easy to translate from our language, of course. They call their empire Shakhar Hal’Bichaan. In your language, it might be said to be something like the Children of the Stars.’
‘They gave themselves that name?’
‘Civilisations are often named for the settlement from which they first come, or the conquering leader who built it. Yet the Shakhar Hal’Bichaan did not come from a single settlement, nor did a single individual build their empire. They have always comprised many smaller civilisations who were subsumed into a much larger, ever more complex culture. As the empire grew, and the ruling classes developed, then yes, they gave themselves this name.’
‘They aren’t one people?’
‘No, they are an empire that has for generations subjugated smaller cultures into its own. Most occupy lower ranks within the Shakhar Hal’Bichaan, but some are able to rise to positions of some responsibility. Only much older households occupy the most powerful ranks. Those households that have generations that can be traced back to the beginning of the empire.’
‘An empire you want to escape?’
‘Yes.’
Gant looked through the empty wall beside him, out into space, but he found no answers there. ‘The last chance humanity has is the benevolence of those on this ship—and now, having only just met them, and having listened to you tell me that we need to earn their trust, I’m supposed to betray them? To help you escape?’
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I know this is a lot for you to take in—and a great deal for you to try to understand. To meet the Shakhar for the first time, your first contact with an alien species, and then to be told this. I know how overwhelmed you are.’
‘No,’ Gant said quietly. ‘You can’t possibly know.’
C H A P T E R 32
SHEPHERD SHIELDED his eyes as he lifted the flap to the tent and emerged into the hazy sunlight. He glared around the camp, at the people coming and going between tents, up and down the long planks pressed into the grey sand. Acid bitterness rose inside him. There was no getting around it: if he took off right now—if they even let him—he’d be a threat to them. He’d never get another Bazaar contract. Maybe he could survive without one, eke out a living some other way; maybe he could stay ahead of the Magistratus if he kept moving. He’d done it before, and he could do it again. But for how long? he thought. And shit, that’s no kind of life.
He looked back at the tent and frowned. He had no doubt the people down there wouldn’t kick him loose and allow him remain a risk to them. If there was a war coming, if humanity’s future might be determined by an advanced civilisation intent on annexing what was left after an invasion, how could they? And could he really run from that? Aliens, he thought, fear catching in this throat. You must be kidding me.
A nervous cough came from behind him, and Shepherd turned. A mouse of a man in greasy overalls stood staring at him. The man smiled quickly, then wiped both his oily hands on the front of the overalls and offered one to Shepherd. ‘Uh, hi,’ he said quickly. His nose twitched as he spoke. ‘My name’s, uh… Connor. We—that is you and me—we need to talk about your freighter.’
Shepherd straightened. ‘And what is it you want with my ship, exactly?’ he asked.
‘All they told me is, she needs some work. The rest,’ he waved his hands nervously, ‘that’s not something I know anything about.’
Shepherd frowned. ‘She took some damage, yes. What else?’
‘We’ll get to that, yes,’ he said, nodding vehemently. ‘Absolutely. And we’ll overhaul her reactor, her avionics—every single part of her. We’ve been given detailed schematics. By the time we’re finished she’ll be better than new. She’s a good ship.’
Shepherd rubbed his eyes. ‘What else?’
‘Come with me and I’ll show you.’
‘No, you can tell me right here.’
The mouse shrugged, then looked down and nudged the sand in front of him with his feet. ‘It’s probably better if I show you,’ he murmured.
Shepherd eyed the nervous man in front of him as he guilelessly bit his lip and flicked his gaze around the camp. Anything to avoid looking at him. Eventually, he relented. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said.
Soteria stood in her familiar aggressive landing stance, lit by a dozen arc-lamps on tall, scaffolded towers. Beneath her two mid-ship wings and her two front wings were four lifting loaders on tracks. The two working under her front wings each carried a long, sleek tube that protruded from a much shorter housing. The two beneath the mid-ship wings were larger—multiple tubes arranged in clutch.
Shepherd’s voice caught in his throat as he said, ‘What the hell are those?’
‘We need to weaponise your freighter.’ The mouse bit his lip again.
‘You can’t,’ Shepherd said, shaking his head. ‘She’s never been armed.’
The mouse turned to him and stared. His eyes widened. ‘Of course she has,’ he said. ‘Our schematics are mirrored by mountings that already exist. These aren’t the armaments she was made with, but we don’t need to alter them much, or her, to get them mounted. The problem we have is fire control.’
Shepherd smiled despite himself. Good girl. ‘She won’t let you in,’ he said.
The mouse continued to stare at Shepherd, surprise evident on his face. ‘You knew that?’
‘She’s temperamental that way.’
The mouse nodded. ‘More than you realise.’ He canted his head slightly as he studied Shepherd. ‘You hardly know anything about her, do you?’
There was a time I thought I did. Now, I’m not so sure. ‘So you tell me.’
Connor shook his head. ‘We don’t know much either. She was built to be a Peacekeeper transport, but she was lightly armed, with a heavy, fully sealed armoured hull. She has greater speed than most gunships and an experimental defensive system that uses a hell of a lot of power to run, so mostly it’s kept in a kind of stasis. There’s more, but I guess you could say those are the highlights.’
‘So I’m told.’ Damn preacher knows more than he’s telling me alright.
Connor had the bit between his teeth now. The excitement was evident in every twitch of his sharp face. ‘You know they were battlefield reconnaissance specialists, right? They were fitted with surveillance technology. She still has it all now, but she’s hardly ever used it. You can see that from the condition it’s all in: like new. Cameras that can see in various fields, recording, communications. But the real trick is that she had a comms sub-link into the main intel hub back at the Core. She used to be able to network in through long-range wire transmissions.’
Shepherd stiffened. ‘And you know all this how?’
‘I was a navy tech. I worked on gunships, Peacekeeper transports, cruisers—most everything really. We all heard things over there; there were always stories. I never worked on one of the Soteria-class Armoured Light Transports, but we heard about them just the same.’
‘What are you d
oing, throwing in with the Bazaar?’
The excitement evaporated abruptly. Connor took in a breath and shook his head. He bit his lip again. ‘We don’t ask questions like that here,’ he said quietly. ‘We all have our stories, but most of us don’t choose to tell them. Please don’t ask me again, okay? We’re going to need to work together, you and I, to get her ready. They trust me,’ he indicated the other techs buzzing around the makeshift workshop, ‘and you can trust me. That’s all I want you to know.’
Shepherd stared at the weapons being attached to Soteria’s wing mounts and felt something burn in his throat. ‘I just don’t like guns.’
‘Yet you carry one,’ he said, nodding to Shepherd’s pistol.
Shepherd sighed. ‘And most days, I wish I didn’t have to.’
Connor seemed to accept this. He glanced quickly around the hangar. ‘Do you know where you’re going after this?’ he asked without looking at Shepherd.
‘Not yet. You?’
‘No,’ the mouse said, shaking his head. ‘They don’t tell us anything more than we need to know to get the ships and vehicles running and keep them running. I know why I’m here, what’s coming and… all of that, but I don’t know specifics. Truth is, I don’t really want to know. I just do my part, and maybe we all survive.’
‘You know who the older guy is? Little overweight, dressed badly. Likes to throw a few threats around?’
‘You mean Rankin.’
‘Rankin,’ Shepherd said. ‘That’s his name?’
‘We aren’t supposed to talk about them. They’re pretty clear about that.’
‘Listen, you’re up to your shoulders in the guts of my ship. You’re putting weapons on her and putting my life at risk. I think I’m entitled to know who I’m throwing in with.’
The mouse studied the ground. ‘Rankin and his team aren’t from the Bazaar, but you probably guessed that. I don’t know where they’re from, but they’re connected. Clever guys, they know how to keep things to themselves, you know? They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re organised, and they don’t tell anyone anything. All I know is, they’re serious about all this. They’ll do anything to protect the operation. So we don’t talk about them. I mean, at all.’
Shepherd looked over at his ship. Memories of the systems coming online in the mountains on Herse were fresh and vivid in his mind. He could almost feel the jerk in his hands as the controls took on a life of their own. As she protected me. ‘What do you know about her core systems?’
‘You mean the central processing?’
‘Well, that’s kind of what I mean…’ Shepherd stopped and took in a breath, almost feeling… crazy to say it. No, he couldn’t even bring himself to say it. He stared at the freighter, watching techs mount the final weapon system.
The mouse spoke quietly, glancing to either side of him, when he said, ‘She feels like she’s… alive?’ He nodded, looking for reassurance.
Shepherd turned to him, still holding his breath. He shook his head slowly, like he couldn’t believe what the man was saying. But it’s true, isn’t it, he thought. You’ve known it for a while. You talk to her like she can hear you. She protects you, you know that. ‘How is that possible?’ he murmured.
‘The Magistratus has often experimented with artificial intelligence. Not as much as you might think—it prefers to have complete control over its technology, and us, I guess. But it made advances. I don’t know how, I don’t know what happens on the moons in the Core, but it used them. Some frigates have AI-automated firing systems, some cruisers too. I think the Soteria class has AI in its defensive systems. Algorithms that choose when to deploy and fine-tune defensive manoeuvres.’
‘I think it’s more than that,’ Shepherd said numbly.
‘You’ve had her a long time?’
Shepherd nodded.
‘She knows you,’ the mouse continued. ‘She’s… used to you. You’ve looked after her. All self-aware systems, organic or tetrabit, have an instinct for survival. It’s preprogrammed, right? If you didn’t look after her, she wouldn’t stick around. But you do look after her. Maybe she respects that.’
‘She’s just a machine.’ Do you really believe that? You were there on Herse. You saw what happened.
‘Aren’t we all? She’s metal, you’re flesh and bone. We’re all just machines.’
‘You sound crazy talking like that.’
Connor laughed nervously. ‘Working here does that to you.’
‘What do you need from me?’
‘She just needs to let us in,’ he said. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head, smiling wryly, when he said, ‘I think maybe she’s waiting for you to tell her it’s okay.’
‘You’ve got some nerve, preacher,’ Shepherd said as the old man entered the bridge. His hands tightened on the new firing system Connor had added to the flight control column. Behind the preacher came the navigator—back in the underground room, the guy waving a gun around had called her Natasha. Shepherd had seen people like her before: on edge, liable to detonate any second. Erratic and volatile. Maybe it was stim—he could see traces of withdrawal on her ivory skin—or maybe it was the tunnels. Either way, she made him nervous. Last thing you needed on a ship in space was anything that might explode.
‘We need to talk,’ the preacher said. ‘May I sit?’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘We don’t have anything left to say to each other.’
The preacher remained standing and his voice softened. ‘I want to tell you why I brought you here.’
‘You gonna tell her why she’s here too?’ Shepherd nodded to the navigator.
‘I need both of you. She must come with us.’
Shepherd looked away from them, out of the bridge’s windows at the crew working on his ship. They were bolting more armour plating to the hull. Sparks kicked across the fuselage as it was first cut to size, then welded to seal it. Is this even my ship anymore?
‘Us?’ he said. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not taking you anywhere.’
‘We must to go to the Core.’
‘Didn’t you hear, preacher?’ Shepherd said bitterly. ‘Thanks in large part to you, my ship and I are wanted criminals. I can’t go back to the Core. Doubt I’ll ever go back there again.’
‘But we are going. All three of us.’
Shepherd turned back to him. ‘What could you possibly want there?’
‘The truth.’ The preacher’s face hardly registered any emotion as he spoke. There was no edge to it at all. Going back to the Core, all of us wanted by the Magistratus. It’s insanity, but you’re not nervous about that at all. Why?
‘Is it possible for you to speak plainly?’ Shepherd said, studying the preacher’s eyes.
‘I told you before that you’ve been lied to. That the history sold to the citizens of the Republic by the Quorum is false.’
‘I seem to remember a lecture back in the woods.’
‘Much of what I told you was true, but there was something more. Something I couldn’t tell you until you knew what was coming.’ The preacher paused and laid a hand on the console. Then he nodded. ‘When mankind fled what befell Earth, what is now called the First Cataclysm, the corporation took with it a vast archive of data. Almost everything humanity has ever known, for as long as records have been kept. The truth of your antecedents. When civil war then tore apart humanity, fear allowed the Republic to be formed. People just wanted to be safe. The Magistratus took control and hid the truth away. They surrounded it with every protection they could devise. Then they constructed a deceit that would allow them to keep systems in line. Citizens found fear in every lie spun for them—how the war started, what caused the insurrection in the first place—they began to fear what lay beyond the Wall. What’s out there.’ The preacher nodded towards the sky. ‘The purpose was to make people believe that, without the protection of the Magistratus, war would come again and more people would die. The truth would dilute that message.
‘The archive has been
kept for centuries on a moon that orbits Theia. The Quorum calls it the Registry. The servers that store it are themselves only networked to each other. There is no way into that network apart from a direct uplink on the physical landscape of the moon itself.’
Shepherd closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘If you’re going to tell me you want to break in there—’
‘That’s precisely what we have to do,’ the preacher said. He patted the console gently and smiled. ‘It’s why we need this freighter. Alongside naval frigates and cruisers, she’s the only private ship in the whole Republic that can uplink to the Registry. And as you can see, we don’t have any naval ships lying around here.’
‘You’re crazy. All of you. All of this. It’s all crazy. And what about her?’ Shepherd nodded to the navigator. ‘Why is she here?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious. There’s more than one tunnel into and out of the Core. We must have an escape route.’
Shepherd turned to Natasha. ‘You’ve agreed to this?’
Her expression didn’t change. ‘Seems neither of us has much choice,’ she said.
‘There’s always a choice,’ Shepherd murmured, more to himself than to her.
‘I don’t want to blackmail you,’ the preacher said. ‘But I will. There’s too much at stake for you to refuse. You’ll be well paid for your efforts.’
‘What good is coin going to be if what you say is true?’
‘If I am telling the truth—and you really should believe I am—then you would do well to pick the right side as early as you can. There will be new colonies, beyond the Wall, and therefore a great deal of work to be done. You’ll have a position of responsibility and the trappings that go with it. Your life will be considerably better than it is here and now. That alone must be worth fighting for?’
‘You knew you needed my ship the moment you commissioned me,’ Shepherd said.
The preacher nodded.
Shepherd’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know the ship. What you said to me, that some tech told you about the Soteria class—it was all bullshit.’