“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
“I don’t need to. You want to find it because it’s unknown and thus enticing. Also because you want to understand this place and these aliens.”
She shifted away from him, a little unnerved. He hadn’t been joking when he said he was a master at reading her. “Something like that. I realize we need to hurry—believe me I do—but I feel like it may be important.”
“I agree.”
Her gaze jumped back to him. “You do?”
“Absolutely. I suspect Mnemosyne—Mesme—was largely honest in what it said but there was a prodigious amount it didn’t say. We ought to gather as much information as we can before we return. I doubt we’ll get a second chance.”
She smiled, relieved. She hadn’t relished arguing with him and would probably have relented if he had disagreed with any fervor.
The rumble caused by the atmospheric traversal vanished as they cleared the last remnants of the planet. She arced the ship one hundred eighty degrees and stood to examine the scene outside the viewport.
Nothing. Nothing but the pervasive, empty blackness.
Caleb came to stand beside her. “Alex, how did you know the planet was there? It doesn’t seem possible.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know a planet was there—I only knew something was there. I wish I could explain it better, more concretely than an inherent sense of how space should and should not be. Not sure I’ll ever be able to, though.”
She found the TLF wave on the spectrum analyzer, pulled in navigation and set a course. “The system will tell us as soon as it picks up anything. Come on, let’s get your eVi back up and running.”
He laughed lightly. “That would be outstanding. I find the quiet has worn out its welcome.”
They had barely finished rebooting his eVi and confirming it was operational when an alarm rang out.
“Shit.” Alex bolted to the cockpit and magnified the radar. It displayed ten large red dots approaching. “I guess we get to learn whether the projection shield works sooner than we expected.”
It quickly became apparent the craft were not the smaller squid-like ships but superdreadnoughts.
As the vessels approached, their trajectory never altered. She withdrew to maximum visual distance and watched as ten of the ships flew single-file toward the portal into the Metis Nebula.
Only after the last ship had passed beyond sight did she let out the breath she had been holding. “So that worked.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Damn straight it worked.”
She appreciated the vote of confidence but still frowned. “When we got here the portal was closed, as though they weren’t planning on using it for a while. I wonder why they’re sending additional ships now.”
He leaned against the half wall of the cockpit and crossed his ankles, much as he used to do before he had a chair. His eyes flickered to the radar, then the blackness outside the viewport. “Because we’re fighting back. These are reinforcements. The aliens realized it’s going to take more firepower than expected to subdue us.”
“Then we definitely need to hurry. All our ships can use this new cloaking shield—let them find out how much firepower it takes when they can’t see us.”
Her voice had risen in growing excitement; she wrangled it back under control. One hurdle at a time. “They may be building these ships here in this space, in which case I can extrapolate the location of the shipyard from their trajectory. We should try to determine how many ships they can field and how fast they can crank them out.”
Once underway she leaned back in the chair, though it couldn’t be called a relaxed position. She toed the chair in increasingly wider oscillations. “I’ve been thinking.”
“I can tell.”
She winced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. And what have you been thinking about?”
“The code the aliens use for the cloaking shield.”
“Again?”
The retort earned a look from her. “More. It’s written in a peculiar, distinctive style which is very different than the way we design code. But though it’s highly sophisticated and not solely because it’s written in ternary, it felt rigid. Formulaic. Now, maybe that’s because it’s performing a rote, repetitive function, but….”
She considered the next part a final time before voicing it aloud. “Mesme said the attacking ships were unmanned, run by AIs. What do you suppose the odds are they’re running on the same underlying type of code as the cloaking shield? I don’t mean using the same functions, but written in a similar manner?”
He gave it some consideration as well. “Based on what little we learned about them, I’d say it’s likely. The aliens seem to view machines as built for a specific purpose or to do a specific task. I bet they long ago developed specific methods of implementing both.”
She chewed on her bottom lip while she decided whether she was ready to make the claim. “By studying the code, someone—I doubt I can do it, but a quantum specialist, or if they fail an Artificial—might be able to figure out ways to exploit it. If the code running the ships is designed the same way perhaps we can develop electronic attack routines to disrupt the programming. And should we have the opportunity to interact directly with it there’s a good chance we can corrupt it.”
She shrugged. “It’s just a thought. I’m almost certainly overestimating our capabilities. And we’ll have to get the code to someone who’s legitimately intelligent and not a bureaucrat and they’ll have to get approval—”
“It’s a brilliant idea, Alex.”
Her nose scrunched up. “You think?”
“I do. In fact, if you’re able to pull off what you’re talking about doing—” The beep of the long-range scanner cut him off.
“Did we reach the shipyard already?” She swung to the HUD and magnified the scanner. It displayed a monolithic structure as well as multiple smaller objects. The edifice grew in size until coming into visual view.
“Holy hell.”
The facility stretched ten kilometers in length and six in width. Modular units connected into larger sections until they joined together in a single assembly line dwarfing the ships themselves.
The chambers weren’t fully enclosed, and hundreds—possibly thousands—of mechs bustled around inside. Forty squid patrolled the perimeter in defensive formations. Guarding against them?
Two complete superdreadnoughts hovered outside, presumably waiting on the ship currently being assembled and some number thereafter. It appeared they moved in packs.
“More reinforcements.”
“Afraid so.”
The hull of the ship under construction materialized as they hovered there, the mechs working at a level of precision and speed she had never witnessed. Twelve minutes after their arrival the superdreadnought slid out of the chamber and joined its brethren to wait.
“So a lot, and quickly.”
“Yep.”
“Caleb, if the aliens can produce ships this fast we won’t stand a chance. Even if the cloaking shield provides us an advantage, the aliens will simply replace whatever we destroy within hours.”
“Maybe we can shut down the portal somehow. Prevent them from coming through or blockade it.”
“I doubt we’ll be able to spare the ships. But it’s a problem to tackle after other problems.” She kneaded her temples, then waved at a faint blip on the screen behind the facility. “Want to bet this is the aliens’ portal?”
“No way am I betting against you.”
“Smart man.” She leveled a final dark glare at the shipyard and pulled away, giving it a wide berth as she eased past.
“Ni khuya sebe….”
“That is one way to put it….”
A portal hung suspended in space before them. Easily ten times larger than the one leading to the Metis Nebula, the scale defied comprehension.
It differed in several other respects as well. The ring alone spanned over a kilometer in diame
ter, comprising nearly a quarter of the structure.
Woven into the ring were multiple threads of white luminescence. She hazarded a guess they represented artifacts of a power distribution or operating system.
The material filling the ring was the glacier blue hue of Mesme and Hyperion. Also, the material wasn’t plasma exactly but more akin to a throng of lightning leaping among conductors.
Her fingertips drummed on the dash. The initial shock was beginning to wear off and her mind raced in a jumble of tangled loops. “So Mesme’s universe is through there.”
“I expect it is.” His hand landed atop hers on the dash, halting the erratic rhythm. “Alex, we cannot go through it.”
She stared at the flashing, dancing plasma lightning filling the portal. It sat there, open and inviting. “I know.”
“We have to get home. Galaxy to save and all?”
“I know.”
“People are dying.”
Dammit. She didn’t want to be the savior of humanity. She never had. She didn’t want to be the vanguard—of destruction or salvation. What she had really wanted was to be a girl whose father lived to show her the stars. Instead she had been left to wander them alone. Until she discovered someone who saw the stars as she did.
“I know. Okay, we’ll…hang on.” The incredible phenomenon in front of her was forgotten as she zoomed the spectrum analyzer. She filtered out the noise and decreased the band to measure the lowest tenth of the spectrum. “No fucking way.”
“Is this what I think it is?”
“Depends on what you think it is.”
“I think it’s our TLF wave being sent out on multiple trajectories.”
“Then no, it isn’t what you think it is.”
“Wait, it isn’t?”
“No. It is fifty-one unique TLF waves fanning out in three semicircles, vertically spaced 45° apart and horizontally every 10°, each one shifted 0.001 Hz up or down the spectrum. Except for the final signals on each end of the fundamental plane, which repeat our 0.0419 Hz frequency.”
The TLF wave they had followed from the Metis portal continued in a direct horizontal line to the middle of the far more colossal one. She was unable to measure the signal beyond this point, so she couldn’t say whether it continued on. Her instincts told her it was being generated by the ring itself. This was its origin point. Especially considering it also served as the origin point for fifty additional TLF waves.
“I admit this changes things.”
Attempting to understand the phenomenon better, she fidgeted with various settings. “Yes, it does. Why didn’t I pick these up when we first came through? Do the signals not extend very far?”
She reached for the controls. “Let’s follow one, see where it ends.”
Caleb leaned in beside her to study the readout “The first horizontal one, on the far right. We should be methodical about it.”
“But the first one’s the same frequency as ours. We might end up caught in an infinite loop or something. Let’s follow the second one.”
She swung the ship around, again briefly awed at the scale and complexity of the immense ring as they passed by, then lined up on top of the selected TLF signal and followed it….
…until it vanished.
Nothing but unending blackness in all directions. The signal simply terminated. Which, of course, was impossible.
“You don’t suppose….”
“Hell yes I suppose.” She centered the ship and sent the gamma wave which had opened their portal.
A ring identical to their own sprung forth to fill with luminescent golden plasma.
She took a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips, giving her brain time to rearrange not only its notions of space but the nature of the cosmos itself.
“We’re not the only ones.”
“No, it appears we are not.”
“I don’t….” Her hand rose to work at her jaw. “Caleb, do you have any idea what this means?”
“I have several, of varying degrees of nefariousness and amorality. A couple swing the opposite direction to inspiring, bordering on transcendental.”
She stood, grabbed his hand and took him with her to the data center. “Rather than repeat this process another forty-nine times, I’m going to go ahead and map it out real quick.”
She pulled in the readings taken at the primary portal and, extrapolating from the distance this signal and their own propagated, estimated the presumed termination points of the remaining waves. The result was three perfect semicircles divided into equal segments, with portals dotting the perimeter and their own sitting opposite the master one.
“Damn.” He wrapped his arms around her from behind.
She chuckled faintly and drew a hand along his arm. “So I agree we shouldn’t go through the big portal. Frightening implications, likely kill us, etcetera, etcetera. But…can we go through this one?”
“Alex, baby…” she felt him sigh against her ear “…yes. As if I could stop you.”
“Excellent.” Instantly she was headed back to the cockpit and strapping in. She rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. “No time to waste.”
She gunned the engine straight into the middle of the ring—
—the sensation of vertigo was overpowering. The world literally flipped downward ninety degrees.
It wasn’t in her head, either. The axes of the world did shift, the proper loci of ‘up’ and ‘down’ moving to points off-kilter to where they previously resided.
“Woah….” Her hands came up to grip her head, as if to make sure her brain remained inside it. She spun to Caleb, eyes wide. “Are we good?”
“I have no idea.” His head shook roughly. “Check it out, the scenery’s no different here.”
She peered out the viewport. Indeed, nothing but endless blackness. She was almost getting used to it.
“The TLF wave continues, apparently in a straight line…the way everything shifted, I can’t be positive. But let’s see where it leads.”
Where it led was an exact replica of the colossal, electric blue portal they had believed the ‘master’ portal. The ring emitted more TLF waves in three stacked semicircles.
But it wasn’t more waves. It was the same waves, only the order and repetition had changed. Now, the wave they followed was the final horizontal one to the left along the fan-like distribution. ‘Their’ wave was located halfway past center.
“If we follow our frequency, we’ll end up back where we were, won’t we?”
“In our lobby? Likely at a different point. Probably the termination point of one of the waves which were at either end…because this is some kind of elaborate, interlocking tunnel network.”
She exhaled harshly. “Fifty-one lobbies…each one containing a portal opposite the master one that leads to a universe. Fifty-one universes…I don’t suppose you could tell me a couple of those inspiring ideas you had?”
He gazed out the viewport. “Mesme believes humans have the potential to ‘deliver the very answers’ they seek. What do you think it is they’re looking for?”
“I imagine the same answers we’re looking for: What’s the meaning of life, of our existence? Is this all there is? Do we have souls which live on after death? Does a higher power exist? What’s the—”
He leapt out of the chair and hurried through the cabin. “We need to go back.”
“I agree we do, but what—”
He was fishing around in his pack, previously tossed in the corner for eventual unloading, and came out with one of the tech repulsion orbs.
“We need to destroy that ship factory, and I know how we can do it.”
57
ROMANE
INDEPENDENT COLONY
* * *
NEW MAYA HAS CEASED COMMUNICATIONS as of fourteen minutes ago.
Mia bit back a frown as she dumped the contents of the grocery bag on the counter and fished her pack out of the closet. “Thank you, Meno. Keep me updated.”
I
always do.
The MREs, energy bars and nutrient-fortified drinks had cost a small fortune. She should have acquired them last week before the entire galaxy knew about the aliens. Now merchants were taking full advantage of the steadily elevating panic.
She couldn’t decide whether it was blatant extortion or shrewd capitalism at work; she’d forked over the credits regardless. The time for taking a stand on high-minded philosophical principle had long since passed.
The news feed had burst to life as soon as she’d entered the house. She increased the volume so she was able to hear it while she went into the bedroom to collect some clothes. Her prior emergency pack was now graduating to a full-scale long-term survival pack.
“I’m honored to welcome Earth Alliance Prime Minister Brennon, Senecan Federation Chairman Vranas and all the representatives of their governments to Romane, though I deeply regret the circumstances which have brought you here. Romane values its role as a peaceful, prosperous independent world. I hope the spirit of our colony can help you reach a place of mutual respect and understanding and guide you to your own peace.”
She chuckled a little to herself—two…no, three comfortable work pants—at Ledesme’s grand speech. The governor executed a masterful stroke when she volunteered Romane to serve as the host for this Peace Summit. Coupled with her generous sharing of their analysis of the alien ships with both sides, in a matter of days the governor had increased Romane’s standing exponentially. Mia might have helped a tiny bit.
The Summit almost hadn’t happened here, for one simple reason: the aliens were close. But their progress west was slowing. New Maya wasn’t located appreciably farther west than other colonies which had already fallen. Romane sat nearly a day closer to both Seneca and Earth than the sole viable alternative, Atlantis, and there was no time to waste. Four tanks, one turtleneck, a pullover….
She wasn’t running but she was preparing. As thanks for her efforts in this whole disaster the governor had offered her a seat on the administration’s transport should a full-scale evacuation be ordered. Mia felt extremely grateful but was also cognizant of the frequent fate of best-laid plans.
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