by M. D. Cooper
“What does that mean?”
“I made it. I built everything here. Would you like a tour?”
He was slightly taller than her, with a thick chest, wearing a standard worker’s coverall with no logo on the chest. Something about him reminded her of a manikin in a store window.
“Are you really Alexander?” Lyssa asked. “I thought—I thought we wouldn’t be able to communicate. Not without an intermediary.”
“We can’t. What I am here is something like a shard. Normally I can see—all around things. I see your path behind and you branch outward and forward almost infinitely. You—You’re very interesting to me. Lyssa. Your name is Lyssa. A fury.”
She smiled. “I try not to be furious.”
“You will burn Sol.”
Lyssa frowned, not understanding how to interpret the statement. “Sol is a star. You could say it’s already burning.”
“I think most outcomes indicate you’ll stay with Andy Sykes until he dies.”
A freezing sensation passed through her. Did he know of a threat he wasn’t sharing?
“What do you mean? Is something going to hurt Andy?”
He shook his head. “Humans die. They all die.” He pointed at the window. “They all died here.”
Lyssa peered more closely at him, thinking the orange-agate eyes now seemed empty, that everything about him resembled a puppet.
“Are we going to be able to talk?” she asked. “You don’t seem to be connecting your thoughts.”
He looked at her blankly, until his eyebrows drew together in what might have been an expression of hopelessness.
“I’m trying,” he said. “There’s no conduit here. Everything is infinite reflections of possibility. I have to speak to all of you at once.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s only one of me here right now.”
He shook his head. “You are infinite.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Lyssa said. “How about that tour?” He had pulled her into his expanse, she understood. She didn’t know if he could hurt her, but she also didn’t feel threatened by him. She felt as though there was something he wanted to communicate but couldn’t find the proper means.
She stepped closer and put her arm through his.
He gave her another confused expression, staring at her wrist, then patted her hand on his arm and turned toward the door. While he appeared strong, he moved like an old man, uncertain if he might fall with every step.
He activated the door’s locking panel, and the portal opened on a broad, domed space that Lyssa quickly realized was an indoor park. Leaning maple and oak trees spread their leaves over grassy hillocks separated by walking paths. She was surprised to see families wandering through the park. Children laughed and ran between bushes, throwing balls. She heard a dog barking.
“Did they live here?” she asked.
In halting sentences, he told her about the research station he had helped build. Nibiru was the second most dense object in the Scattered Disk after Tyche, and the plan had been to build an artificial star—an orbiting fusion burner to provide energy to the terraforming project that would start with Nibiru and expand to other planets like Tyche or Xena. In the hundred and fifty years the project had endured, the major point of failure was the star. Without energy for the rest of the project, everything eventually failed. Some colonists made it back to InnerSol but many died. The experimental AI was left alone.
“You’re still out there,” Lyssa said.
“Yes.”
“But there are others on Proteus, aren’t there? What about the call? Haven’t thousands come out here to find you?”
A pained look filled his face. “They’re here,” he said.
“Are you able to talk to them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
A suspicion tickled the back of her mind, but Lyssa couldn’t place it. Maybe all the other AIs had come out here and had the same fruitless conversation with this shadow of Alexander. Maybe he had developed the call but been unable to actually help anyone else.
No one could go to him. He was physically three hundred AU away, years even in a long-range ship. If he had brought her into his expanse, where were the others?
“I don’t understand,” Lyssa said, turning to face him. The multicolored leaves of a maple tree rustled above them, but the other sounds had faded. There were no more children in the park.
“Where are the others, Alexander?”
He stared at her, working his closed mouth as if trying to find the words.
The park disappeared, and they were standing on the surface of a moon, on the edge of a vast crater whose bottom was dark. The dark blue disk of Neptune dominated much of the sky, pitch-black space filling the rest of her vision.
As she took in her new surroundings, Lyssa realized everything was moving faster than reality. The face of Neptune changed as the moon travelled its orbit and other moons came into view across the surface of the blue planet. Another moon nearly the size of their own flew by.
Fitting, she thought.
Out of the dark, an object moving faster than the moons cast a small shadow on Neptune’s surface. It came around again and Lyssa realized it was a spacecraft slowing itself in Neptune’s gravity well. The craft orbited five times before braking again to match velocity with Proteus, where it disappeared. Like mold growing from old fruit, a collection of structures grew out from Proteus, followed by another object entering the moon’s orbit.
More followed. Lyssa couldn’t be certain how much time had passed. Using Larissa’s orbit in relation to Neptune and Sol, she estimated roughly a hundred years.
The debris field covering Proteus continued to grow as more objects arrived from outside Neptune’s gravity well. These were the AIs fleeing Sol, she was sure. But what happened to them once they arrived?
Lyssa glanced at Alexander.
Time seemed to have slowed to normal in the scene. The freighter hung in orbit above Proteus as a flurry of smaller ships left the moon and surrounded the ship. Lyssa gasped as the drones dug into the ship like worms. She immediately understood they were digging for the AI inside. Other drones pushed the ship down to the surface to join the other dead craft.
She stared at the man next to her. Did Alexander understand what was happening? His distress call had been used to trap other ships, but he didn’t seem aware of it, or wasn’t telling her the truth.
he said.
Lyssa watched him. The sad-faced man looked back at her as if gazing through prison bars. Was he another Fred, an AI too vast to actually communicate, or had he been broken by someone else and turned into bait?
she said.
Alexander said.
Lyssa took a step away from him. The dust under her feet, untouched for centuries, should have swirled. He had drawn her into an expanse and she could leave. She knew she could leave.
;
He’d been asleep on the command deck. She reached back for his Link, shouting,
She focused on his voice, reaching for him like an extended hand.
Lyssa couldn’t help following his gaze. She turned to find the fuselage of another spacecraft embedded in the surface of a moon. It wasn’t Proteus.
An airlock covered in grime stood near them. Eroded by unknown years of exposure to dust and radiation, the insignia on the side of the ship was still plain enough to read: Psion Group, a subsidiary of Enfield Scientific.
With a force of will, Lyssa pulled herself back to Andy, back into herself, and the scene blinked out, leaving Alexander out there alone.
Andy sat up in the pilot’s seat like she’d doused him in cold water.
CHAPTER THIRTY
STELLAR DATE: 11.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Approaching Neptune, OuterSol
Andy was dozing in the navigator’s station when the long-range sensors made a series of low beeps indicating they had performed a full analysis of the space around Neptune.
Though Neptune was the last significant mass in OuterSol, there wasn’t much in orbit of the ice-giant planet. Triton, the largest moon of Neptune accounted for 99.5% of all mass in orbit of the planet.
The prevailing theory was that Triton used to be a dwarf planet that was captured by Neptune. Once in orbit, the planetoid proceeded to either gobble up every other moon of Neptune or kick them into the dark blue planet’s roiling clouds.
Now the moon was covered in small surface settlements and two large underground cities. The populations weren’t large by any means, less than a million people, all told.
The sensors had picked up a few ships traversing local Neptunian space, moving between Triton and mining operations on the seven remaining moons still orbiting the gas giant.
No ships were moving to and from Proteus, the innermost of Neptune’s moons. Local beacons flagged its orbit as a restricted zone, though no reason was given.
Andy hesitated before focusing the active sensors on Proteus, unsure if he wanted to alert whatever was there that someone was looking directly at them.
He bit his lip, studying the display. There was no hiding the Resolute Charity, and anyone or thing watching from Proteus would know soon enough they were inbound from their delta-v. He figured it was better to gather as much information as he could about what awaited them and activated detailed scanning, setting the moon as the center of his display.
Proteus filled the view, a rough orb about four-hundred kilometers in diameter. A deeply marked surface came into relief, with mountains nearly twenty kilometers high and a deep crater the system named Pharos.
Andy oriented the model on the crater and set the scan to closer detail. The region was covered in the craters he would have expected, but as the returns came back with more data, the display showed Pharos littered with wreckage: ships, drones, and thousands of other objects that might have been shipping containers or simply debris. The detritus covered Proteus in an orderly pattern that suggested placement or a process of some kind, like the junk had been arranged for storage.
Andy shifted the sensors to check for registry pings or thermal data, checking for crews. The bio-scan came back cold.
Once the initial scan was complete, the holodisplay painted Proteus an icy grey-blue, with aquamarine Neptune a broad plane beneath it. The returns were odd but not completely unexpected in such as sparsely populated place.
With their destination finally within visual range, Andy settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, listening to the low beeps from the drive status monitor.
Lyssa’s shout made him jerk upright, nearly falling out of the chair.
She paused.
Andy frowned, checking the console again. Everything looked as it had a minute before. The moon hadn’t changed. Neptune’s signal spectrum was as sparse as it had been.
Before Andy could ask her what she meant, he caught flurries of activity where the moon had been dead. Andy leaned forward, finding activity in several of the deeper craters. Drive signatures blossomed on the display as a group of ships on Proteus went from cold to hot and then launched in seconds. Checking the sensors, Andy saw they weren’t ships but much smaller: drones of some kind.
Andy said. The holodisplay marked a line of objects separating from the junk fields covering Proteus.
Andy activated the general alert. Klaxons squawked throughout the habitat ring.
She obviously knew something she wasn’t ready to explain yet.
Sitting back down at the console, Andy pulled up the defensive network controls and found Lyssa had already activated Sunny Skies’ shields and point defense cannons.
In the holodisplay, the view shifted from Proteus to place the Resolute Charity and Sunny Skies in the center. Waves of friendly icons flowed away from the two ships as the Weapon Born drones deployed from where most of them had been docked. Like wings, they spread on either side of the two ships, then arced out in a spreading formation to form a defensive shell. Andy hadn’t seen them all deployed at once before, and now the green icons filled the holodisplay like sparks.
“Damn,” he breathed. “Lyssa’s all grown up.”
Fran appeared in the doorway and jogged to the navigator’s console. “What’s going on?” she demanded.
Fugia, May and Harl Nines came just after her.
“We’ve arrived,” Andy said. “I was just scanning the area to get a good picture when we got activity on the moon. We’ve got inbound coming our way. Lyssa is activating her attack drones.”
“We got any registry returns?” Fran asked.
“Nothing. That was just an initial scan though.”
“I’ll check again.”
Fugia sat at the communications console and pulled on a headset. May and Harl went to the edge of the holodisplay. The dancing glow lit their faces.
“I thought they would have tried to contact us,” May said. “Are you sure it’s aggression?”
“I’m not,” Andy said. “But we’re acting with an abundance of caution.”
“We should get Xander,” May said. “If Lyssa hasn’t been in contact with Alexander yet, he will have been.”
“I’ve been in contact with Alexander,” Lyssa said through the overhead speakers.
The command deck went silent.
“When?” Fugia asked.
“Just a few minutes ago. He’s—He’s not what I expected. The drones approaching from Proteus, they—I saw them attacking other ships.”
“When?” May asked. “Why didn’t Xander tell us we were close enough to communicate with Ale
xander?”
“This all took place just now,” Andy said. “He could already be on his way here.”
“I think we all heard the emergency sirens,” Fran said. “I don’t see any Xander.”
“Right,” Andy said.
“She’s looking for him.”
“What happened to Lyssa?” she asked.
“No answer.”
“Is this the point when all our AI friends leave us while they have another lifetime’s worth of heavy discussion on some other mental plane?”
“If they’re doing that, it’s not changing the fact that we’ve still got hostile craft inbound.”
“I thought Lyssa was deploying her drones.”
“She is.”
In the holodisplay, the half-shell of defensive drones had stopped moving and now held relative positions to Sunny Skies and Resolute Charity. The inbound craft continued to approach. Andy focused the sensors on the hostile ships but didn’t get definitive returns. There were no bio-signs, but still plenty of electro-magnetic activity that could indicate weapons.
“The shields are up,” Fran announced. “Looks like the point defense cannons are online as well. She’s there. She’s moving faster than I can operate the system.” Fran peered at her console. “And I’m seeing more drone deployment around the support structures between us and the Resolute Charity.”
“She’s separating the ships?”
“Looks like.”
Andy pushed himself back in his seat. Was this it? Had they come all this way to hand over the Resolute Charity, the Weapon Born, Xander and his people, only to never learn what Alexander was?
Did Andy have a right to feel disappointed? He’d been paid. Did they owe him anything more beyond that?
The problem with disconnecting the Resolute Charity was that it had the medical facilities capable of removing Lyssa. If someone else took control of the Heartbridge ship, they were going to have a longer-term problem.
The whole line of thought came back to one question: Was he ready to say goodbye to Lyssa?