“Aye,” Hollander said.
“Cushioning. Now we know they like cushioning,” Paniet suggested. What a worthless thing to discover.
“Are you sure? Maybe that’s their food supply,” Hollander replied.
Paniet shrugged. The man had a point.
For hours now he’d been studying every scan, every image he could get of the dreadnought’s interior spaces. None of it had made the slightest sense. He was a trained engineer, and he could work out some of the basic mechanisms they had found in the wreckage. Pumps and conduits. Wires and relays. Even those, however, had been much bigger than their human counterparts, and designed in a way he found incomprehensible.
“Listen, Paniet,” Hollander said. “There’s a word I’d have with you. If you’re amenable.”
“Always,” Paniet said, though truth be told he was a bit preoccupied. He took a welding pen from a pocket of his suit and cut into the tangle of wires underneath the broken control console. Maybe he would find something useful there.
“I like you,” Hollander said.
“Well, I like you too, ducky,” Paniet said. He pulled away a bundle of wires. There was something back there, he thought. “I wonder if this is the right time to discuss it, though.”
“Right, well, time is of the essence, as they say.”
As Paniet pulled at the wires something started to slither out and he yanked his hand back.
“I’ve grown fond of you, for a fact, and—”
“Hold on.” The thing that had been stuck in the wires flopped out in one big piece. It was orange and semisolid, about as thick around as his thigh. It glistened in the drone’s light. As he watched, it retracted away from him, almost slithering out of the console, and—
Paniet yelped. He was unashamed of it. That wasn’t a mechanical component.
It was a damned tentacle. A severed tentacle.
“Please don’t let me find a body in here,” he said. “Please don’t let me find a body in here.” Hollander laughed at him, but Paniet didn’t take offense. It was a human sound, and that alone was comforting.
“It’s only, and this is the tricky part, but I’m serious, see. The bond of camaraderie, the esprit de corps and all, is something I’ve always considered a bit of bosh, to be honest. But you’ve been so kind and generous. I’d hate to see something happen to you. For real, like.”
Paniet couldn’t reply.
He’d found the body he’d been dreading.
It was wedged in between two collapsed slabs of white coral. It was orange and—enormous. It just went on and on. Squeezed down to a kind of spindle shape, part of it overhanging the slabs like a colossally large and unpleasant tongue. More tentacles, their flesh crushed down to nearly nothing, flopped limply around Paniet as he got close. It felt like at any moment the jellyfish might come back to life, as if those boneless arms would snap out at him, grab him by all four limbs and pull him toward the alien’s grinding maw.
That … didn’t happen. The alien stayed dead.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry. I just—do you see this, on your displays?”
At least it got Hollander off of his uncomfortable conversational topic. “Hell’s handmaidens, man. What is it?”
“What does it look like? That’s a damned Blue-Blue-White,” Paniet said.
“Should you be touching it?”
“I’m not a doctor. I don’t do autopsies,” Paniet announced. “I just don’t.”
“Above your pay grade,” Hollander sympathized.
Paniet puffed air in and out of his mouth. He couldn’t smell the alien corpse, no, not with his helmet up, but some part of his brain was bracing against a truly righteous stink. He reached forward with the blunt end of his welding pen. Prodded the alien’s dead flesh.
It squirmed. Ripples of soft tissue rolled away from him, up and down the enormous mass of the corpse. The Blue-Blue-White’s skin stretched and wrinkled in a quite alarming way, until a section of it started to split. As Paniet watched, horrified, a tear three meters long opened up in the body’s side and transparent gore started oozing outward, as if it had been under pressure and his slightest touch had popped it like a balloon.
Paniet danced backwards, half pulling himself away with his hands, half using his suit’s jets to maneuver clear of the flowing goop. He was fascinated and nauseated in equal parts as he watched the stuff come loose in globules bigger than his head. Each spherical blob of nastiness gleamed in the light, gleamed—and started to foam.
“That’s … odd,” Paniet said. He reached down and grabbed a handful of the loose floor material. Using it like a sponge, he tried to collect some of the foaming liquid.
The floor material darkened and started to disintegrate almost instantly. Paniet pulled his hand back, wiping it clean of any of the stuff. He snapped his fingers for the sensor drone and had it run a spectrographic analysis.
When he saw the results, he had to whistle in surprise. “Aitch-two-ess-oh-four,” he said, drawing out the syllables in respect.
“You’re kidding me, now,” Hollander said. “Sulfuric acid? Your alien’s guts are soaked in acid?”
Paniet shrugged. “It’s relatively dilute. Not concentrated enough to do more than sting if it got on your skin.” It made a certain amount of sense, really. Every living organism had some kind of liquid solvent as its main ingredient—humans, for instance, being mostly water. But the average temperature of the disk was three hundred Celsius, and liquid water couldn’t exist at that temperature—it would just boil away into vapor almost instantly. The Blue-Blue-White needed some kind of solvent that would stay liquid at that heat. Sulfuric acid had a boiling point of three hundred and thirty-seven degrees.
One of the globules detached from the body and started floating toward him. He kicked off a broken piece of coral to get away from it.
“Oh, blast,” he said. “That one nearly got me.”
“Have a care!” Hollander said.
Something touched Paniet’s shoulder. He yelped—again—and jumped away, thinking a tentacle was about to wrap around his chest and squeeze him to death. Instead, when he turned around he saw Hollander, silhouetted against the drone’s light.
“What are you doing?” Paniet demanded. “You nearly frightened me to death! You aren’t supposed to be in here.”
“I needed to talk to you,” Hollander explained. “Where we wouldn’t be overheard.”
Paniet shook his head. He didn’t understand this at all.
“Something is going to happen,” Hollander said.
“What? Here? With that—that body?” Paniet asked.
“No, you fool. Not here. Back on the carrier.”
“What—what kind of thing?” Paniet asked. The look on Hollander’s face scared him more than a dead alien possibly could.
“Something bloody.”
Hollander made a gesture with his hand, and for the first time Paniet noticed that he was holding a pistol.
“Why don’t you back up a hair, then,” the big man said.
Valk was no longer exactly certain where he was.
Or rather, there were so many places he might be, and he was in all of them at once. His suit, his special suit he’d worn since he thought he was still a human named Tannis Valk, was currently in a storage locker in the cruiser’s engineering section. He was technically still in it, in that some part of his consciousness was running on its built-in processors. If someone had found it, though, they would have seen only an empty suit with its helmet down. They wouldn’t see him.
In another sense he was in the cruiser. His thoughts, his senses, suffused the ship’s systems. There wasn’t a line of code, a one or a zero, he wasn’t intimately connected to, that he didn’t feel to be part of himself.
A third perspective: he was no place. He was nowhere. He was in some Platonic realm of pure thought, pure reason.
Perhaps the best possible place to consider one’s failures.
Lanoe
had removed him from his work. In no uncertain terms he’d indicated that Valk was no longer to be trusted, that his functions were no longer required. To this end he had suggested that Valk’s analyses and conclusions were faulty.
Valk knew that couldn’t be the case. He could partition himself, make copies of his entire file structure and check them against diagnostic models he invented for just this purpose. Every time he oversampled himself, every time he checked his checksums, nullified his null loops, he was more and more sure of it—he was operating perfectly.
And yet Lanoe had a point. Valk had failed to understand the language of the Blue-Blue-White. The signals he had picked up from the disk made no sense at all, when compared to the vocabulary database he had picked up from the queenship at Niraya. The strings of colors that should turn into words just … didn’t. He couldn’t even seem to grasp the basic morphemes, much less get a sense of the idioms in use.
Perhaps even more damning—he didn’t know where they were. When they first arrived in this system he had automatically tried to get a fix on their precise position. He had checked with the standard candles—the galactic landmarks—thinking he would triangulate their location and get an exact figure for how far they’d come from human space. Instead, he had sought in vain for anything he recognized in the dome of the sky. The standard candles … just weren’t there.
He had no explanation for either of these problems. His data was not corrupt. His databases, his libraries, his directories, were all intact and did not require repair.
Yet when he attempted to use them, when he tried to help Lanoe—he’d failed both times.
The strangest part was that Lanoe must know this. Valk was certain that if he was malfunctioning in some way he couldn’t self-diagnose (and it was, he had to admit, possible, Gödel’s theorems of incompleteness said as much), if he was broken beyond repair—Lanoe would have no choice but to use the data bomb. To erase him, permanently. He was far too dangerous to be allowed to continue to exist if he was no longer useful.
Yet Lanoe had simply sent him away. Removed him from the cruiser’s controls.
Which meant—this had to be some kind of test.
Lanoe had sent him off to contemplate himself. To run more diagnostics, to understand himself better. To find the fault that led to his two mistakes. This followed directly, by inductive reasoning. It must be true.
Valk had run every test of himself he knew how to perform. He’d checked every corner of his programming, decompiled his most basic code and run it through every debugging routine he could think of. He was incapable of true exasperation now. He could no longer get angry and give up on a problem once he’d started to examine it. Yet he was still human enough—well, he was still running enough of a simulation of what it meant to be human—that when he found himself hitting his head against the same metaphorical wall over and over and over, he knew it wasn’t working. He needed to try to resolve things from a different angle.
It was only after several million runtime cycles that he reached that point. But reach it he did. And in the end, he realized that what he needed to do was to try again from completely new first principles. He would abandon the most logical supposition he could think of, and see how that changed things.
What if it was not himself but the entire universe exterior to himself that was at fault?
This could only be a thought experiment, of course. A ridiculous hypothetical that he would never take seriously. It could not, furthermore, lead to any useful conclusions, because it was patently false. Yet when he ran the numbers, when he fed known data into this new model, something very strange happened.
It sort of made sense.
The numbers added up.
There were many more steps to take from there. He would need to check and double-check and triple-check what he’d found. He sketched out a plan for how he would tackle this new possibility, how he would expand upon it, play with it, until he reached conclusions that he could verify or—infinitely more likely—falsify. He would take this new idea, this impossible paradigm, and run with it until it broke.
He estimated it would take a very long time to complete his action plan. To invalidate his invalid premise. It would take not millions of runtime cycles but billions. Perhaps hundreds of billions.
In objective time it might take as much as three hours.
Lanoe called together a meeting of his senior officers. He knew some of them were preoccupied, but it was crucial that they discuss what came next. Rather than forcing them to come to him, he simply conferenced them all in to the bridge of the carrier. Shulkin’s, Candless’s, and Ehta’s faces appeared before him as floating holograms, none of them looking particularly pleased to see him.
“Where’s Valk?” Ehta asked, once Lanoe had them all together.
“He’s not invited to this briefing,” Lanoe told her. “Where’s Paniet?” he asked, but nobody had an answer. “Never mind—whatever he’s doing, it’s probably important. He’s probably busy fixing something that’s keeping us all alive.” He tried a little smile, but didn’t get much in the way of reaction.
“Very well,” he said. “We need to talk about what we’ve learned here, and how we move forward. We’ve bought ourselves a little time. The other two dreadnoughts are still inside the disk’s atmosphere. For the moment we aren’t being chased, and there’s no danger of an immediate attack. We need to talk about what we’re going to do with this opportunity.”
“Opportunity?” Candless asked. “You see the present situation as an opportunity? I must say I admire your optimism.”
“The battle didn’t go as well as I’d hoped—”
Candless made a noise. Some small snort of derision.
He chose to ignore it. “We lost a number of resources. Several pilots, along with their cataphracts. On the other hand, the cruiser and the carrier came through without sustaining new damage, and on the whole I think we proved some valuable things. The dreadnoughts aren’t as tough as they look, for one. A couple of good fighter pilots can take one of those things down, even as big as they are.”
“That’s why we didn’t fire the guns?” Ehta asked.
He stared at her image, refusing to let her derail him.
“Sorry,” she said. “That’s why you didn’t use the guns, sir? To prove that fact?”
Lanoe waved a hand in impatience. “I’m not interested in questions right now,” he said. “Just listen, will you? This is important.”
“I think no one here doubts the importance of your briefing,” Candless said, a hint of her old sarcastic self coming through. Despite himself, Lanoe had missed her caustic snark. “We simply wish to know why we’ve made so many sacrifices. What we hope to accomplish here.”
“The goal hasn’t changed,” Lanoe told her. “We’re here to get justice for all the species the Blue-Blue-White have exterminated over the eons. We’re here to make sure humanity stays safe from future invasions by their drone fleets. We’re here—”
“To murder the beggars,” Shulkin said. “When do we get back to that?”
Lanoe breathed in deeply, through his nose. Counted to ten in his head.
“That,” he said, “is why I called this meeting. We’re going to talk about Plan B.”
Candless raised an eyebrow. “Plan B. Can you remind me exactly when we discussed a Plan A?”
“Enough!” Lanoe said. “I’m in command here. I didn’t think I needed to remind any of you of that. I’m perfectly happy to throw all three of you in the brig if that’s what you want. Or,” he said, looking from one face to the next, “you can shut up and listen, damn you. You can let me talk.”
He got the silence he was after. If he’d hoped for the three of them to give him looks of respect, well, perhaps that was too much to ask for.
For far too long he’d been running this operation as if his underlings were friends. As if they were all equals, peers who had an equal say. That needed to change—now.
Shulkin opened his mou
th as if he were about to say something.
“The next person who interrupts me is relieved of duty,” he said.
Shulkin closed his mouth.
Lanoe waited awhile. Let them stew. Gave them a chance to decide if objecting to his orders was more important than keeping their jobs. When they went a suitable interval without opening their mouths, he continued.
“Plan A was to try to talk to the Blue-Blue-White. Failing that, we engaged with them in a series of naval battles. Our losses were high. So were theirs. However, we have failed to accomplish our goals simply through ship-to-ship fighting. So we’re going to move on to Plan B.”
He swiped open a display that showed the disk, whirling with infinitesimal slowness. White dots appeared inside the gyring clouds—hundreds of them, scattered seemingly at random.
“These are the cities of the Blue-Blue-White. Some of those dots are bigger than others—some of the cities are as big as landmasses on Earth, some not much bigger than our actual cities. It’s my working hypothesis, though, that they’re pretty much the same as the one I saw when I took out the laser emplacement. Which means that they’re largely deserted. Maybe one full-sized adult lives in each city, with a brood of thousands of juveniles. There’s no correlation on that, but as an operating assumption it’ll do.”
He brought up another display, this one showing video of his flight through the Blue-Blue-White city in the Z.XIX. The display had been enhanced until it was a false-color image of what one of those cities might look like if it wasn’t buried under obscuring clouds. “We do know that the cities are all built the same way. You see these long pylons? They’re made of something like coral. I’m pretty sure they’re grown rather than built—though I don’t know much about the jellyfishes’ life cycle, it looks like when they’re born they start out in a kind of polyp form, which secretes a layer of concretelike shell for protection. Those shells are abandoned when the polyps get too big, but the next generation builds their own shells on the substrate the previous generation left behind. Over the years, over millennia, over millions of years, all those polyps build up something very similar to a coral reef.
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