The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Elena reared back and kicked the robot as hard as she could, and managed to break half the spider’s legs, making them stick up at jagged angles. The other half of the legs held on, though, and dug deeper into Sebastien’s head, the spider clamping itself on to his scalp like a tight-fitting skullcap.

  There was a clank, and a piece of metal covered the hole the spider had dropped through. Were the machines out there re-sealing the Anjou’s hull? But why?

  She knelt to look at Sebastien, whose eyes fluttered. She tugged at the spider-thing but couldn’t wrench it free; it was set deep in the bones of his skull. “Sebastien? Are you all right?”

  He groaned and rolled over. He looked at her, blinking. One of his eyes was filmed and glowing red, but the other was clear. “I– Elena, you look so strange…” Silver tendrils began to crawl around his scalp and the sides of his face.

  Elena moved away. “Don’t worry, Sebastien, we’ll– whatever that thing did to you, we’ll fix it, OK?”

  Robin was shouting over the tablet, but Elena couldn’t make out what she was saying, and it couldn’t be more important than whatever was happening to Sebastien, anyway.

  He rose, a little unsteadily. “I have to go. I’m being called. I’m being… I’m learning… I’m becoming… but I think I have a little time.” He reached out to touch her face, and she steeled herself not to flinch away. His fingertips were hot. “I can get you out of here, Elena. I can get you home. You’ll be safe.”

  “Home? To Earth? Sebastien, it would take hundreds of years–”

  “Not anymore. Not now. They thought our ship was broken. They thought we were broken. They fixed it. They fixed us. They’re trying… look.”

  He pointed into the torn-open panel, and she looked through the nest of tangled conduits to see a foreign object wired into the system: a greasy-looking black cube, about half a meter on each side. “That’s your way home.” Sebastien went to the navigation panel and tapped out a rapid series of commands. The cube began to hum, a deep atonal rumble. “There. When the repairs are done, the ship will take you home. Or, close to home, I can’t quite see the math, it wavers at the edges, I’m still changing.”

  “Sebastien, I don’t understand–”

  His head snapped around, like he’d heard something. “They’re coming. They want to fix you, too… the spiders are simple. Thermal, I think. If we get you back in cryosleep, they won’t register you as something they need to repair.” He blinked and rubbed at his good eye. “We have to hurry.”

  “Sebastien, you can go into cryosleep too, they won’t see you–”

  “Too late. It’s in me. They know me as their own. I can’t hide. But let me save you, Elena.” Without waiting for her to answer, he lurched down the corridor, stumbling against walls like a drunk, and she followed.

  Sebastien opened her cryopod and gestured, and Elena climbed inside, because what else could she do? If there was any chance at all to make it home, even if it took hundreds of years, she had to take it, didn’t she? She had to let people know what dangers lurked here, beyond the back of the stars.

  Sebastien hooked her up to the pod’s life support systems, then leaned in and kissed her brow. His lips were so hot she flinched away, but he didn’t notice. His left eye was filmed over now, too, but not yet glowing. “I wish we’d found a new world together, Elena. A better world than this one.”

  “Sebastien…” she began, but he pressed her firmly down into the pod as it filled with swirls of cold vapor, and the needles pierced her skin to deliver the drugs that would slow her metabolic rate. He sealed the lid, and looked down at her, a blurry form behind the glass for a moment, before he vanished.

  Elena listened to the muffled sounds of thumping, cutting, welding, and hammering until the sedatives pulled her down into a darkness she fully expected to be eternal.

  Chapter Eight

  “That’s the last thing I remember before you woke me.” Elena hugged herself, and looked so small and vulnerable that Callie just wanted to wrap her up in a blanket and hold her and tell her everything would be OK, even if that was a lie. Maybe especially if that was a lie.

  “It could still be Liars,” Callie said, half to herself.

  Elena scowled. “The thing that ate Ibn and Hans was the size of a bus. It doesn’t sound much like the aliens you described.”

  “That kind of thing would be outside their normal range. And the technology you describe is way beyond anything we’ve seen before, even from Liars. Artificial gravity?” Callie’s initial impulse was skeptical disbelief, but the story Elena told did fit with the available facts, outlandish as it was at its heart. “So. You remember what happened. What would you like to do with this information?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Callie shrugged. “You may have made contact with a new race of aliens, who are either hostile or inscrutable. What do you want to do next?”

  “I suppose I should tell the authorities?”

  Callie nodded. “Right. But which authorities?”

  “I’m not sure. You’re like police, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you know?”

  “I am a sworn officer of the Trans-Neptunian Authority security forces, on a part-time freelance basis, which is a little different from being police as you understand it. You’re from the One World Emergency Government era, right?”

  Elena nodded. “The goldilocks ships were one of the first major OWEG projects, right after the desalinization initiative.”

  “Right. Earth is still ruled by a version of that organization, the OWG, but its influence doesn’t extend beyond the Karman Line. The Luna colony has been independent for centuries, though they’re still close allies of Earth, and Mars is its whole thing. Mercury is an energy farm, barely populated. Together, they form a loose coalition called the Inner Planets Governing Council. Venus, like I said, is reclusive Liar territory. The asteroid belt is a disputed zone between Mars and the Jovian Imperative, and a couple of Jupiter’s moons keep stubbornly insisting they’re independent, despite much evidence to the contrary. The Jovian Imperative is arguably as powerful as the inner planets, since they control the only bridgehead in this solar system, but they all pretty much get along, because there’s more money to be made that way.”

  “So way out here, the Trans-Neptunian Authority is in charge?”

  “The TNA is the big power here, the governing body. But it’s a corporation, run by a CEO and a CFO and a board, not by an elected official. If you want a voice in the government out here, you’d better be a shareholder. Still, the TNA makes and enforces the law, and keeps things running smoothly commerce-wise.” When it can, she thought. A lot of people fled to the edges of the solar system to get away from rules, and resented having the rules follow them way out here into the dark. Hence the need for people like Callie to make them cooperate, or chase them off. “So when you say ‘authorities’ that gets a little wobbly. I can get a meeting with just about anybody in the TNA, but their influence stops near the orbit of Jupiter. The Jovian Imperative is more like a corporation than a nation-state, too. If we told the Jovian Imperative or the TNA your story, they’d just try to figure out how they could profit from it, if they believed you at all. We could upload your testimony to the Tangle, and let everybody know what you found out there–”

  “What’s the Tangle?”

  “Oh. You called it, um, the net? The web?”

  Elena nodded. “You ruined the net? You got it all tangled?”

  “It still works a lot like your net did. There’s news, entertainment, gossip, complaining, jokes, music, images. There are also secret levels, dark commerce, weird cults, and Liar sites that do strange stuff to human brains when we look at them. Seizures are the least of it. Those dangerous sites are interdicted, but there are plenty of places in the galaxy where nothing is interdicted, and sometimes the consequences are ugly. Then you’ve got the AI, who do their own thing on the Tangle too, and the whole alternate-reality contingent, and rumors of the broken ghosts o
f experimental uploaded minds building their own raggedy sensoriums, stealing power where they can…” She shrugged. “All together, it’s the Tangle. But if we upload the sensational story of a woman from five hundred years ago who met previously unknown aliens, with proper proofs and verifications, we’d get all sorts of attention. Some corporate king or resource-rich polity would probably try to investigate, as far as their resources would allow.”

  “But you don’t think it’s a good idea?”

  Callie chewed her lower lip. “It’s just… the bigger issue is the bridge generator. That greasy black cube full of time-and-space-bending power. We found the generator on your ship, so it belongs to you. If it does what you’ve described, and what Ashok says it does, you’ll either get rich, or arrested, or assassinated, or all three, in some order. Assassination last, probably.”

  Elena’s eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought about that. But you’re right. If that device can be reproduced, it would upend whole economies, wouldn’t it?”

  “And if it can’t be reproduced, if it’s one of a kind, the tech too far beyond us to reverse engineer successfully?” Callie whistled. “Whole other set of issues there. Whoever has it owns the universe, basically. It’s not like you have to decide right now, but you’ll have to eventually figure out what you want to do.”

  Elena chewed her lower lip, and even though the situation was fraught, she looked so cute Callie wanted to pull her into her lap and kiss her and nip that lower lip between her own teeth. After a long moment Elena said, “I want to rescue my friends. Can you help me do that?”

  Callie blinked. “Uh, I appreciate the whole leave-no-person-behind ethos, but you escaped an alien mind control space anthill and you want to go back?”

  “Robin could still be alive, and… unaffected. It’s only been days, Callie. Her suit has sufficient reserves of water, and it can recycle her waste when that’s gone, to give her a bit more time. The atmosphere inside the station was breathable. Sebastien wasn’t fully transformed, either, he was fighting the changes, so he might be recoverable, too. And who knows what happened to Ibn and Hans? That thing might not have been an alien at all. It might have been a biological equivalent of a forklift, or a cargo truck. Maybe they weren’t digested; maybe they were just stored. Uzoma… well. Perhaps we can help them too. Maybe the change can be reversed.”

  “I– That’s a big ask, Elena. We chase smugglers and murderers, and yeah, we’ve done search and rescue, but this is way beyond.”

  Elena nodded once, conceding that particular point, but conceding nothing else. “Help me save my crew, and I’ll give you my bridge generator.”

  Callie leaned back. “What?”

  “As you said, it’s incredibly valuable. Perhaps the most valuable thing in the system, if not the galaxy. Giving you the generator seems like a fair trade.”

  “It also takes a big problem out of your lap and drops it in mine.”

  Elena shrugged. “I’m a primitive from the darker ages. You’re a modern sophisticate, better equipped to handle such complexities anyway. I’m over here with sticks and rocks and you’ve discovered fire and the forge.”

  “This… isn’t something I can decide on my own. A mission like that, I’d need a crew. I’ll have to talk to my people.”

  “By all means.” Elena yawned. “I’m going back to my quarters, if that’s all right. I’m still groggy from… well, cryosleep, I suppose.”

  “Sure,” Callie said. “Sweet dreams.”

  Elena gave her a blank look. “That seems very unlikely.”

  * * *

  “I love a family meeting.” Ashok spun around in his chair, until Stephen reached out and firmly stopped the rotation. Drake and Janice were there too, sitting in their mobility device, a gyroscopic egg-shaped seat they seldom emerged from in the presence of others. They had their silver privacy screen down now, which suggested Drake was on the ascendant; he was more self-conscious about their physical appearance than Janice was.

  “Everyone heard Elena’s story, right?” Callie asked. The ship’s computer recorded every word spoken in public areas of the ship as a matter of course, unless privacy was requested, and Callie had asked the crew to review the recordings or transcripts before the meeting.

  “She’s crazy,” Janice said, voice emerging from a speaker set into the top of their chair. “Sorry. I know it’s not nice, and she’s been through a traumatic experience, and all that, but: clear-cut case of space madness. She probably murdered her crew and jettisoned them out the airlock.”

  “She may not be insane,” Drake said. “It’s possible she’s simply lying. Maybe she’s from the Jovian Imperative, looking to get famous with a ridiculous story. She found a mothballed antique ship, welded some spikes onto it, and messed around with the navigational data. Remember that rock-jockey who said he’d discovered an antigravity generator, but it was all just lies and falsified data?”

  “That bridge generator though.” Ashok made a buzzing sound that might have been meant as an appreciative whistle.

  “You haven’t seen the thing generate a bridge,” Janice said. “It’s just a greasy black box playing tricks on the computer.”

  “I’m not that easily tricked,” the computer objected, but they all ignored him.

  “The stuff the box is made of is weird, I’ll grant you that,” Janice went on, “but it could be some industrial material cooked up in an R&D lab and abandoned because it’s too nasty-looking for commercial use.”

  “Let’s address the possibilities,” Callie said. “What are the odds this is an elaborate hoax? Ashok, does her ship check out?”

  “It’s a real goldilocks ship, and the stuff done to it matches the stuff she says was done to it. The hull is patched up with some unknown silvery-gray metal, and those bits of the ship were resistant to analysis from every sensor I pointed at them. Plus, like Shall says, he’s not that easy to trick. We’ve poked that alien cube real good, and it reacts the same way, consistently, throughout many thousands of iterative virtual environments. We’ve got the keys to the galaxy, cap. Let’s go for a spin.”

  “Stephen? What’s your take on Elena? Do you think she’s trustworthy, or are we being scammed?”

  Stephen stirred, leaning forward and lacing his immense hands together on the table top. “Elena is genuinely from the twenty-second century, judging by the antibodies in her blood – or, rather, the lack of what are now quite common antibodies.” Stephen was as placid and unbothered as always; or, well, as usual. When he was in the midst of his religious devotions, he was different. “I’ve given her a full suite of vaccinations, but before that she was definitely an artifact of another era. I detected traces of pollutants in her system that were purged from Earth long ago, as well. She is, at least, not lying about her origin.” He paused. “There is another reason to believe the device is genuine, or genuinely alien, though: it frightened away the Liars. They fled the station when they saw it.”

  Callie nodded. She’d been thinking the same thing.

  Stephen went on. “The device clearly does something, and potentially something dangerous, judging by the reaction of the aliens. When I was visiting with my congregation earlier… You know that some of the members of my church do alien outreach, because we believe all life is one life, and all consciousnesses are connected? My friend Glinda, who works in the recycling division, said a Liar on her crew who comes to services sometimes stopped to say goodbye on his way off the station, and urged her to leave, too. She asked him why he was leaving, and he said, ‘Your faith is a beautiful one, and I believe it a little. But there are much uglier faiths, and I believe those a lot.’ Then he ran off.”

  Callie grunted. “So, what, bridge generators are religious artifacts to the Liars? Did we pry the sacred jewel out of the head of the idol or something here?”

  “I have no idea,” Stephen said.

  “OK. Liars say weird things. I don’t want to get hung up on that. Suppose the bridge generator works. Elena has offere
d to trade this unprecedented propulsion technology–”

  “Technically not propulsion,” Ashok interrupted. “It’s more of a spatial manipulator but… ah right OK captain I’ll shut up now.”

  Callie kept glaring at him for a moment, because sometimes Ashok relapsed in the absence of continual reinforcement. “Elena has offered to give us this alien artifact in exchange for us running a search-and-rescue mission to recover any of her crew that might still be alive, wherever they are. We don’t even have to succeed to get the generator. We just have to make the effort.”

  “Her crew got eaten,” Janice said. “I mean, they didn’t, they got thrown out an airlock by a crazy person, but if we’re taking her ridiculous story seriously, why would we go back to that place? Why would we stand a better chance than her crew did?”

  “Because we’re from the future.” Ashok spun around again. “They were past people from the disaster times. Send a Neanderthal to rob a casino and he’s not going to get too far. The pretty lights and ringing chimes and short shorts on the cocktail servers are going to get him all dizzy and distracted. But send a bunch of hardcore jaded future folk like us, with the right hardware of the killing kind? We’ll win for sure.”

  “Could we even keep the generator for ourselves?” Drake said. “Aren’t there guidelines about the discovery of unknown alien technology under the rules of salvage?”

  Ashok made another buzzing noise, this one indicative of derision. “You mean those rules nobody would ever know if we broke, but for some reason we follow them?”

  “We’re not pirates, Ashok. What is the legal status, computer?”

  That damnably familiar voice said, “The TNA statute says that if unknown Liar technology is discovered within their sphere of influence, it should be promptly surrendered to the authorities. The person or persons who discovered the tech will be paid either a flat rate, as determined by an appraisal AI, or receive a variable percentage of profits if the technology can be successfully reproduced and monetized. The relevant words here are ‘sphere of influence’: this bridge generator was apparently found by Elena in a system far beyond the reach of the Trans-Neptunian Authority, or indeed any polity based in this system, or any of the twenty-nine colony systems. Elena subsequently brought the device to Trans-Neptunian Space, but that doesn’t give the TNA a claim on the technology, at least, not as the statute is written.”