by Tim Pratt
“No. I was born there. It’s nice. Things got bad, even worse than they were when you left, but it came back from the brink. But you can catch up on ancient history back on my ship–”
“Did Elena send you?” Now he seemed excited, moving toward the sound of Callie’s voice. “I sent her back, to Earth, or as close as I could. I didn’t understand the language of the machines here as well then, and I was afraid I might have miscalculated. But she made it, and you found her?”
“You got the right solar system, at least. You sent her out by the orbit of Neptune. There is – there was – a human settlement out there, though. Yes, we found her. She asked us to come save you.”
“Mmm. Elena. I miss her. Is she on your ship? Should I bring your ship in here? I think I know how to do that.” He swiveled toward a control panel.
“No!” Callie shouted. “No, she’s here, on the station.” Callie decided Sebastien was in some kind of shock, or the implant was muting his emotional reactions. That was the only explanation for why he wasn’t more excited at the prospect of salvation.
“Ohhh.” He leaned against a wall of screens and let out a long slow exhalation. “Of course she is. She would have insisted on coming in after us personally. I’m so glad. I want to see her.”
“She’s waiting on our transport. Join us and we’ll take you back to our ship. Do you have an environment suit?”
“Oh, it’s around here somewhere.” He gestured vaguely. “Show me Elena first. And maybe show me yourself. Right now you’re a disembodied voice.” He laughed, though it was more of an unhinged titter. “For all I know you’re a hallucination. I’ve been hearing all kinds of voices, but they don’t sound like yours. They’re not in any language I know, but I understand them.” He tapped one of the brain-spider legs, jammed deep into his skull, just above his ear. “They’re mostly messages about the greatness of the race who built this station. Do humans know about them? The ones who made this place?”
“No. We’ve never met them. This station is the first evidence we’ve found of their existence.”
“But not the last. No, no. You’ll learn all about them, the great race. Now, please show yourself, so I know I’m not imagining you. Strange things can happen to the minds of people who find themselves shipwrecked. I read about that in school. I specialized in the psychology of large groups, but large groups are made up of individuals, so I had to learn all that, too.”
Callie checked her non-lethal weapons, just in case, then turned off her camouflage. “I’m in here.” She thought it was prudent to not be in the same room as him, especially if he could control all the doors.
He swiveled, stared at her for a moment, then stood up. “Interesting. Acoustic manipulation. Where’s Elena?”
“Not far.” Callie stepped back, watching him closely as he passed through the door into the storage warehouse. His hands were empty, and there didn’t seem to be anything in his pockets, or at least, nothing big enough to shoot or club her with. “I have to tell you, Sebastien, your whole attitude is really freaking me out.”
“Oh? Oh. I see. You expected tears of joy, shock, elation at rescue, and all that? But consider my situation. I was stranded on an alien space station, and a neural reprogramming device attempted to take over my brain, without success. An alien voice bellows at me constantly inside my head, in an alien language I can nevertheless understand. Now a stranger in an invisible space suit says she’s come to save me, at the behest of a woman I was secretly infatuated with, if not in love with. That seems implausible, so it may not even be real.” He shrugged. “I don’t really understand my own reactions either. I’m probably disassociating pretty hard right now.”
Callie nodded. “That’s fair. Maybe seeing Elena will help ground you.” Now that her suit wasn’t camouflaged and the radio worked again, she said, “I found Sebastien.”
“Is he all right?” Elena’s voice was strained with hope and worry.
“He’s… upright and talking. You know him better than I do. Come and see.” To Sebastien: “She’s on her way. With a couple of others – my engineer Ashok, and a… consultant named Lantern.”
“That’s an odd name. Though I suppose names can change a lot over the centuries.”
“I don’t know. We still have Johns and Marys and Michaels. Lantern isn’t human, though.”
Now he seemed interested. “An intelligent alien species? But not the one that built this station?”
“No, but Lantern can understand their language, pretty much, and she understands how their machines work. We needed to reach the control room so we can turn off the security systems, and get the hangar doors open again so we can leave.”
“You can indeed do all that from the control room.” Sebastien still sounded entirely too serene. “You can take that helmet off, you know. The atmosphere is marvelous in here. I’ve got the mix just right. You’d think you were back on Earth, only without the pollution we had in my day.”
“No thanks. I like to put a layer of tough material between me and any passing brain-spiders.”
“Oh, the neural implants are nothing to fear. Technology is a tool. Not inherently good or bad. All that matters is what you do with it.”
“Right. I’m Captain Machedo, by the way.”
“I don’t care.”
Before Callie could react to that statement, Sebastien shoved past her, throwing his arms wide and shouting, “Elena! Take off that helmet and let me see your pretty face!”
“Sebastien!” Elena unlocked her faceplate and pushed her visor up, which wasn’t quite as bad as taking her whole helmet off, then rushed into Sebastien’s arms and embraced him.
Callie paused a moment to decide if her unfavorable reaction to that sight was jealousy, and decided it wasn’t, or at least, not exclusively. Elena’s affection for Sebastien had been clear in her stories, and Callie didn’t begrudge her joy at seeing an old friend she’d once (and maybe still) had feelings for… but the problem was, Sebastien struck Callie as a giant asshole, disassociation or not.
“Oh, Sebastien, your poor head.” Elena touched the side of his face. “Ashok has some ideas about how we can get these things out of you.”
“Really? Ashok is the one with the metal face? It seems like he’d approve of my implants, if only as a fashion choice.”
“My hardware was all installed by choice or necessity,” Ashok said. “Yours… not so much. Once we get to the ship’s infirmary I can take a look and see how things are hooked up in there and get you fixed up.”
“Mmm.” Sebastien looked down at Lantern, who was creeping past him, toward the control room door. He suddenly lunged and kicked the Liar, his boot hooking under her belly, sending her flying up and back, almost hard enough to flip her over. Lantern let out a yelp of alarm and scuttled away. “Stay out of my control room, vermin.”
“Sebastien!” Elena shouted. “Lantern is my friend.”
He looked at the Liar for a moment, blank-faced, then turned back to Elena and beamed. “No, I’m your friend, and I’m so pleased to see you. Come.” He grabbed Elena by the arm, pivoted, and shoved her through the opening into the control room, then stepped in after her. Callie lifted her non-lethal arm, but the door irised shut with a slam before she could even try to line up a shot.
“Elena!” she shouted, but there was no response. Their comms were cut off again. Callie turned. “The kaiju!” She ran through the warehouse, back to their only source of escape.
The hatch out of the warehouse was closed, and no amount of fiddling with Lantern’s sphere or cutting with Ashok’s torches or kicking with Callie’s boots made even the slightest bit of difference.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Let’s get that helmet off you.” Sebastien carefully unhooked the latches and lifted off Elena’s helmet, then tossed it onto the floor. The clatter made Elena wince. She needed that helmet intact to get off this station.
“There, isn’t that better?” He smoothed her hair, tucking a lock b
ehind her ear, a gesture that would have made her liquefy inside if he’d done it during their training or voyage, but that made her shudder now.
She backed away. “What’s happening here? Why did you lock the door?”
Sebastien squatted down and brushed his fingers over an irregular ellipsoid of a screen, causing lights to shift and cascade on the display. “Those people are strangers. And their little squid, too. I don’t know them. I can’t risk letting them interfere with what I’m trying to achieve here.”
“They’re my friends, Sebastien.”
He looked over his shoulder, and smiled reassuringly, and paternalistically. Like she was a child, worried about foolish things. “No. They may as well be aliens. They’re so different from what I am. Besides, I’m the only friend you need, and the best one you’ll ever have. If they really are good people, like they’ve convinced you they are, then they’ll join in the great work eventually. This is just… a very delicate moment. I can’t take the risk of unpredictable variables.” His fingers danced busily across the screen.
“Sebastien, what are you doing there?”
“Making sure your so-called friends can’t scurry away, that’s all. I can control the whole station from here, though it’s mostly self-regulating.”
“I don’t understand what you’re doing. We came to save you!”
“It was very kind of you to come back for me. I didn’t expect that. I just wanted you to be safe.”
She looked around at the displays. “If you can really control everything from here, why didn’t you help Hans and Ibn? Or Robin? Or Uzoma?”
He looked at her blankly. “Oh. I don’t know. I was distracted, I suppose. I always did get distracted by my work. You know how it is. You get your teeth into a problem, you find a solution, you decide to implement it, and the next thing you know, hours have flown by.”
“What work are you talking about?” She was trying to make sense of the information displayed on the screens, but it was all unfamiliar shapes in an alien alphabet.
“The great work. Work that truly matters. A project on a scale unprecedented in human history – back in our era, anyway. But I doubt humanity has managed anything bigger and better than what I have planned since we left. You remember my specialty? Large infrastructure, city planning, formulating sustainable social systems – that was my purpose on the colony ship. My area of expertise. Oh, but I was wasted on that mission. I see that now. Come with me. You can witness the beginning of everything.” He grabbed her hand, squeezed it, and beamed at her, though his once-lovely face seemed sinister with the metal spider-legs dug into his skull on either side. “Come on.”
He dragged her, harder than she liked, through a door that opened seamlessly in a wall of screens at his approach. He dragged her along a corridor, into an intersecting hallway, around another corner – eventually she lost track of their turnings, and wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her way back. Finally he stopped in a long, narrow rectangular room. He took her shoulders and turned her so she faced a smooth, dark wall. Then he put his arm around her and drew her in close. “Behold.”
Sebastien waved his hand, and the wall lightened and became transparent. Beyond the glass was a huge shipbuilding bay, easily fifty stories high and just as wide, full of mechanical arms, floating drones, and unfinished ships floating in weightlessness, in the process of being built. The ships looked a little like the thing the Anjou had been made into: fat spheroids bristling with angular fins and spikes, like sand spurs, or the spiked heads of maces, each one the size of a house. Elena started to count the ships and stopped when she got to fifty. There were at least ten times that many.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Sebastien said. “Every one equipped with a point-to-point wormhole generator, ready to be dispatched to our solar system. My initial plan was to gather intelligence from Earth, and then move on to any other colony systems, founded by goldilocks ships or other means. You’ve simplified things, though, by bringing me natives of this time. They’ll provide information about other inhabited worlds. There are doubtless maps and navigation details in their ship. We have expanded to the stars, I assume? Surely some of the goldilocks ships reached their destinations?”
“I… There are twenty-nine inhabited systems, or so I’m told. But one of them is unreachable, because it’s controlled by… Wait. Sebastien. What are all these ships for? One would be enough to get you home. Why do you need a fleet?”
“My home crumbled to dust centuries ago, Elena, and I turned my back on it before that, when I joined our mission. The past holds minimal interest for me, except as a cautionary tale. I’m looking to the future. That’s not a fleet. That’s evolution. Once I understood how the station worked, setting all this in motion was simplicity itself. Creating an armada like this is a trivial use of the power available to me here, and this station is itself an insignificant backwater facility of no particular distinction. Once we have access to the full resources of the empire, think what we can achieve.”
“The empire?”
He rubbed the back of his head, caressing the silver spider’s back. “Of course. You don’t know anything about them. The beings who made this station. In our language we might call them… the First Principle? The Underlying?”
“The Axiom?” Elena said.
Sebastien smiled. “I like that. Yes. The Axiom. I’m sure their egos would have approved of such a designation.”
“I know a little bit about the Axiom, Sebastien. We shouldn’t play with their technology. It’s dangerous.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “Or, rather, of course it’s dangerous, but not to me, or at least, not significantly. There’s some risk in standing behind a cannon, but most of the risk accrues to those standing in front of it. No, I’m safe enough. The Axiom have receded into the other realms. All that remains in this universe is their shadow, which they hope is enough to frighten everyone away. But I’m not afraid. I’ve seen the records in the deep archives.”
“Do you know where the Axiom went?”
“That’s not as simple a question as you think. The Axiom were on the verge of extinction, and retreated so they could gather their strength, and allow some of their long-term projects to come to fruition. There were factions among the Axiom, too, and since every one of them had powers we would consider godlike, they all set various plans in motion. At this point it’s a contest, of sorts, to see which of their plans will come to pass successfully. There are great clouds of smart matter forming in distant systems, sparkling diamonds with secret intentions. There are places where physical constants don’t behave as they should anymore, and that’s just the beginning. There are factories in the hearts of gas giants constructing the components for larger factories that will consume whole star systems for fuel. Any of those projects would mean the end of the paltry smear of humankind.”
“That’s… terrifying, Sebastien, but how is building a fleet of warships the solution?”
“These aren’t warships. There will be no fighting.” He smiled, and his eyes shone: literally, with the implant’s light.
“If they aren’t warships, what are they?”
“Seed ships,” Sebastien said. “I got the idea from the Anjou, actually. Our ship was filled with biological samples and sophisticated technology, so that if we found a habitable world, we could fill it with all the plants and wildlife, microscopic and macro, necessary to create our own Eden – all the best parts of Earth, exported. In the same way, these ships are filled with the seeds of our future. I studied societies, Elena. Infrastructure. I know the sort of things large groups can accomplish, when they put their petty distractions and divisions aside. Once we combine human ambition with Axiom technology, once we kill the old gods… we will become gods ourselves.”
Elena wondered if the madness had been in Sebastien all along, or if it was the fault of the implants. “I still don’t understand. What do you mean, seeds? Apart from the bio-drones, I haven’t seen much at all alive here.”
> “Must you be so literal?” He gave her body a shake. “These are seeds of thought. Seeds of mind.” Sebastien tapped his temple, fingernail against metal. “The implant. It filled me with an understanding of the glory of the Axiom, the majesty of their works, the fearsomeness of their power, all that. I think that information was meant to overawe me, to make me feel insignificant in comparison to their grandeur, but that didn’t work – my brain is not the sort of brain this implant was meant to manipulate. I didn’t feel unimportant. I felt inspired. There’s no reason humanity can’t rival, or even exceed, the accomplishments of the Axiom. They weren’t better than us. They were just older, and willing to make the necessary effort to achieve their goals. It’s difficult to make people – humans – set aside their differences and convince them to focus on the common good. I described that problem to the station’s expert systems, which aren’t exactly intelligent, but are capable of solving straightforward problems in practical ways. The station made some modification to the neural modification drones–”
“The brain-spiders?”
“How cute. Yes, the spiders. The station studied my brain, and made new spiders, designed for interfacing with humans. The ships are filled with those implants, plus fabrication equipment to produce more. The first wave of converts will secretly bring material to feed the fabricators, and to build more fabricators, and soon there will be enough implants for every human in every system.”
Elena exhaled. “You want to infect humankind with brain-spiders, and make them do what?”