Father laughed. He held me tighter. I do not know if he believed me or not, but I think it scared him, that I might mean exactly what I said.
* * *
And now you come.
You recognise me, as he would not have done, but only because you knew me as an adult. You and I never spoke, and our sole meeting consisted of a single smile, a single friendly glance as I welcomed the passengers onto my ship, all nineteen thousand of them streaming through the embarkation lock—twenty if you include the Conjoiners.
Try as I might, I can’t picture you.
But you say you were one of them, and for a moment at least I’m inclined to give you the time of day. You say that you were one of the few thousand who came back on the ship, and that’s possible—I could check your name against the Equinoctial’s passenger manifest, eventually—and that you were one of the still fewer who did not suffer irreversible damage due to the prolonged nature of our crossing. But you say that even then it was difficult. When they brought you out of reefersleep, you barely had a personality, let alone a functioning set of memories.
How did I do so well, when the others did not? Luck was part of it. But when it was decreed that I should survive, every measure was taken to protect me against the side-effects of such a long exposure to sleep. The servitors intervened many times, to correct malfunctions and give me the best chance of coming through. More than once I was warmed to partial life, then submitted to the auto-surgeon, just to correct incipient frost damage. I remember none of that, but obviously it succeeded. That effort could never have been spread across the entire manifest, though. The rest of you had to take your chances—in more ways than one.
Come with me to the window for a moment. I like this time of day. This is my home now, Chasm City. I’ll never see Fand again, and it’s rare for me to leave these rooms. But it’s not such a bad place, Yellowstone, once you get used to the poison skies, the starless nights.
Do you see the lights coming on? A million windows, a million other lives. The lights remain, most of the time, but still they remind me of the glints against the Shroud, the way they sparked, one after the other. I remember standing there with Magadis and Doctor Grellet, finally understanding what it was they were showing me—and what it meant. Beautiful little synaptic flashes, like thoughts sparking across the galactic darkness of the mind.
But you saw none of that.
* * *
Let me tell you how it started. You’ll hear other accounts, other theories, but this is how it was for me.
To begin with no one needed to tell me that something was wrong. All the indications were there as soon as I opened my eyes, groping my way to alertness. Red walls, red lights, a soft pulsing alarm tone, the air too cold for comfort. The Equinoctial was supposed to warm itself prior to the mass revival sequence, when we reached Yellowstone. It would only be this chilly if I had been brought out of hibernation at emergency speed.
“Rauma,” a voice said. “Captain Bernsdottir. Can you understand me?”
It was my second-in-command, leaning in over my half-open reefersleep casket. He was blurred out, looming swollen and pale.
“Struma.” My mouth was dry, my tongue and lips uncooperative. “What’s happened? Where are we?”
“Mid-crossing, and in a bad way.”
“Give me the worst.”
“We’ve stopped. Engines damaged, no control. We’ve got a slow drift, a few kilometres per second against the local rest frame.”
“No,” I said flatly, as if I was having to explain something to a child. “That doesn’t happen. Ships don’t just stop.”
“They do if it’s deliberate action.” Struma bent down and helped me struggle out of the casket, every articulation of bone and muscle sending a fresh spike of pain to my brain. Reefersleep revival was never pleasant, but rapid revival came with its own litany of discomforts. “It’s sabotage, Captain.”
“What?”
“The Spiders…” He corrected himself. “The Conjoiners woke up mid-flight and took control of the ship. Broke out of their area, commandeered the controls. Flipped us around, slowed us down to just a crawl.”
He helped me hobble to a chair and a table. He had prepared a bowl of pink gelatinous pap, designed to restore my metabolic balance.
“How…” I had too many questions and they were tripping over themselves trying to get out of my head. But a good captain jumped to the immediate priorities, then backtracked. “Status of the ship. Tell me.”
“Damaged. No main drive or thruster authority. Comms lost.” He swallowed, like he had more to say.
I spooned the bad-tasting pink pap into myself. “Tell me we can repair this damage, and get going again.”
“It can all be fixed—given time. We’re looking at the repair schedules now.”
“We?”
“Six of your executive officers, including me. The ship brought us out first. That’s standard procedure: only wake the captain under dire circumstances. There are six more passengers coming out of freeze, under the same emergency protocol.”
Struma was slowly swimming into focus. My second-in-command had been with me on two crossings, but he still looked far too young and eager to my eyes. Strong, boyish features, an easy smile, arched eyebrows, short, dark curls neatly combed even in a crisis.
“And the…” I frowned, trying to wish away the unwelcome news he had already told me. “The Conjoiners. What about them. If you’re speaking to me, the takeover can’t have been successful.”
“No, it wasn’t. They knew the ship pretty well, but not all of the security procedures. We woke up in time to contain and isolate the takeover.” He set his jaw. “It was brutal, though. They’re fast and sly, and of course they outnumbered us a hundred to one. But we had weapons, and most of the security systems were dumb enough to keep on our side, not theirs.”
“Where are they now?”
“Contained, what’s left of them. Maybe eight hundred still frozen. Two hundred or so in the breakout party—we don’t have exact numbers. But we ate into them. By my estimate there can’t be more than about sixty still warm, and we’ve got them isolated behind heavy bulkheads and electrostatic shields.”
“How did the ship get so torn up?”
“It was desperate. They were prepared to go down fighting. That’s when most of the damage was done. Normal pacification measures were never going to hold them. We had to break out the heavy excimers, and they’ll put a hole right through the hull, out to space and anything that gets in the way—including drive and navigation systems.”
“We were carrying excimers?”
“Standard procedure, Captain. We’ve just never needed them before.”
“I can’t believe this. A century of peaceful cooperation. Mutual advancement through shared science and technology. Why would they throw it all away now, and on my watch?”
“I’ll show you why,” Struma said.
Supporting my unsteady frame, he walked me to an observation port and opened the radiation shutters. Then he turned off the red emergency lighting so that my eyes had a better chance of adjusting to the outside view.
I saw stars. They were moving slowly from left to right, not because the ship was moving as a whole but because we were now on centrifugal gravity and our part of the Equinoctial was rotating. The stars were scattered into loose associations and constellations, some of them changed almost beyond recognition, but others—made up of more distant stars—not too different than those I remembered from my childhood.
“They’re just stars,” I told Struma, unsurprised by the view. “I don’t…”
“Wait.”
A black wall slid into view. Its boundary was a definite edge, beyond which there were no stars at all. The more we rotated, the more blackness came into our line of sight. It wasn’t just an absence of nearby stars. The Milky Way, that hobbled spine of galactic light, made up of tens of millions of stars, many thousands of light years away, came arcing across the normal par
t of the sky then reached an abrupt termination, just as if I were looking out at the horizon above a sunless black sea.
For a few seconds all I could do was stare, unable to process what I was seeing, or what it meant. My training had prepared me for many operational contingencies—almost everything that could ever go wrong on an interstellar crossing. But not this.
Half the sky was gone.
“What the hell is it?”
Struma looked at me. There was a long silence. “Good question.”
* * *
You were not one of the six passenger-delegates. That would be too neat, too unlikely, given the odds. And I would have remembered your face as soon as you came to my door.
I met them in one of the mass revival areas. It was similar to the crew facilities, but much larger and more luxurious in its furnishings. Here, at the end of our voyage, passengers would have been thawed out in groups of a few hundred at a time, expecting to find themselves in a new solar system, at the start of a new phase in their lives.
The six were going through the same process of adjustment I had experienced only a few hours earlier. Discomfort, confusion—and a generous helping of resentment, that the crossing had not gone as smoothly as the brochures had promised.
“Here’s what I know,” I said, addressing the gathering as they sat around a hexagonal table, eating and drinking restoratives. “At some point after we left Fand there was an attempted takeover by the Conjoiners. From what we can gather one or two hundred of them broke out of reefersleep while the rest of us were frozen. They commandeered the drive systems and brought the ship to a standstill. We’re near an object or phenomenon of unknown origin. It’s a black sphere about the same size as a star, and we’re only fifty thousand kilometres from its surface.” I raised a hand before the obvious questions started raining in. “It’s not a black hole. A black hole this large would be of galactic mass, and there’s no way we’d have missed something like that in our immediate neighbourhood. Besides, it’s not pulling at us. It’s just sitting there, with no gravitational attraction that our instruments can register. Right up to its edge we can see that the stars aren’t suffering any aberration or redshift… Yes?”
One of the passengers had also raised a hand. The gesture was so polite, so civil, that it stopped me in my tracks.
“This can’t have been an accident, can it?”
“Might I know your name, sir?”
He was a small man, mostly bald, with a high voice and perceptive, piercing eyes.
“Grellet. Doctor Grellet. I’m a physician.”
“That’s lucky,” I said. “We might well end up needing a doctor.”
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, Captain Bernsdottir. The protocol always ensures that there’s a physician among the emergency revival cohort.”
I had no doubt that he was right, but it was a minor point of procedure and I felt I could be forgiven for forgetting it.
“I’ll still be glad of your expertise, if we have difficulties.”
He looked back at me, something in his mild, undemonstrative manner beginning to grate on me. “Are we expecting difficulties?”
“That’ll depend. But to go back to your question, it doesn’t seem likely that the Conjoiners just stumbled on this object, artefact, whatever we want to call it. They must have known of its location, then put a plan in place to gain control of the ship.”
“To what end?” Doctor Grellet asked.
I decided truthfulness was the best policy. “I don’t know. Some form of intelligence gathering, I suppose. Maybe a unilateral first contact attempt, against the terms of the Europa Accords. Whatever the plan was, it’s been thwarted. But that’s not been without a cost. The ship is damaged. The Equinoctial’s own repair systems will put things right, but they’ll need time for that.”
“Then we sit and wait,” said another passenger, a woman this time. “That’s all we have to do, isn’t it? Then we can be on our way again.”
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” I answered, looking at them all in turn. “We have a residual drift toward the object. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem—we’d just use the main engines or steering thrusters to neutralise the motion. But we have no means of controlling the engines, and we won’t get it until the repair schedule is well advanced.”
“How long?” Doctor Grellet asked.
“To regain the use of the engines? My executive officers say four weeks at the bare minimum. Even if we shaved a week off that, though, it wouldn’t help us. At our present rate of drift we’ll reach the surface of the object in twelve days.”
There was a silence. It echoed my own, when Struma had first informed me of our predicament.
“What will happen?” another passenger asked.
“We don’t know. We don’t even know what that surface is made of, whether it’s a solid wall or some kind of screen or discontinuity. All we do know is that it blocks all radiation at an immeasurably high efficiency, and that its temperature is exactly the same as the cosmic microwave background. If it’s a Dyson sphere… or something similar… we’d expect to see it pumping out in the infrared. But it doesn’t. It just sits there being almost invisible. If you wanted to hide something, to conceal yourself in interstellar space… impossibly hard to detect, until you’re almost on top of it… this would be the thing. It’s like camouflage, a cloak, or—”
“A shroud,” Doctor Grellet said.
“Someone else will get the pleasure of naming it,” I said. “Our concern is what it will do. I’ve ordered the launch of a small instrument package, aimed straight at the object. It’s nothing too scientific—we’re not equipped for that. Just a redundant spacesuit with some sensors. But it will give us an idea what to expect.”
“When will it arrive?”
“In a little under twenty-six hours.”
“You should have consulted with the revival party before taking this action, Captain,” Doctor Grellet said.
“Why?”
“You’ve fired a missile at an object of unknown origin. You know it isn’t a missile, and so do we. But the object?”
“We don’t know that it has a mind,” I responded.
“Yet,” Doctor Grellet said.
* * *
I spent the next six hours with Struma, reviewing the condition of the ship at first hand. We travelled up and down the length of the hull, inside and out, cataloguing the damage and making sure there were no additional surprises. Inside was bearable. But while we were outside, travelling in single-person inspection pods, I had that black wall at my back the whole time.
“Are you sure there weren’t easier ways of containing them, other than peppering the ship with blast holes?”
“Have you had a lot of experience with Conjoiner uprisings, Captain?”
“Not especially.”
“I studied the tactics they used on Mars, back at the start of the last century. They’re ruthless, unafraid of death, and totally uninterested in surrender.”
“Mars was ancient history, Struma.”
“Lessons can still be drawn. You can’t treat them as a rational adversary, willing to accept a negotiated settlement. They’re more like a nerve gas, trying to reach you by any means. Our objective was to push them back into an area of the ship that we could seal and vent if needed. We succeeded—but at a cost to the ship.” From the other inspection pod, cruising parallel to mine, his face regarded me with a stern and stoic resolve. “It had to be done. I didn’t like any part of it. But I also knew the ship was fully capable of repairing itself.”
“It’s a good job we have all the time in the world,” I said, cocking my own head at the black surface. At our present rate of drift, it was three kilometres nearer for every minute that passed.
“What would you have had me do?” Struma asked. “Allow them to complete their takeover, and butcher the rest of us?”
“You don’t know that that was their intention.”
“I do,” Struma
said. “Because Magadis told me.”
I let him enjoy his moment before replying.
“Who is Magadis?”
“The one we captured. I wouldn’t call her a leader. They don’t have leaders, as such. But they do have command echelons, figures trusted with a higher level of intelligence processing and decision-making. She’s one of them.”
“You didn’t mention this until now?”
“You asked for priorities, Captain. I gave you priorities. Anyway, Magadis got knocked around when she was captured. She’s been in and out of consciousness ever since, not always lucid. She has no value as a hostage, so her ultimate usefulness to us isn’t clear. Perhaps we should just kill her now and be done with it.”
“I want to see her.”
“I thought you might,” Struma said.
Our pods steered for the open aperture of a docking bay.
* * *
By the time I got to Magadis she was awake and responsive. Struma and the other officers had secured her in a room at the far end of the ship from the other Conjoiners, and then arranged an improvised cage of electrostatic baffles around the room’s walls, to screen out any possible neural traffic between Magadis and the other Conjoiners.
They had her strapped into a couch, taking no chances with that. She was shackled at the waist, the upper torso, the wrists, ankles, and neck. Stepping into that room, I still felt unnerved by her close proximity. I had never distrusted Conjoiners before, but Struma’s mention of Mars had unlocked a head’s worth of rumour and memory. Bad things had been done to them, but they had not been shy in returning the favour. They were human, too, but only at the extreme edge of the definition. Human physiology, but boosted for a high tolerance of adverse environments. Human brain structure, but infiltrated with a cobweb of neural enhancements, far beyond anything carried by Demarchists. Their minds were cross-linked, their sense of identity blurred across the glassy boundaries of skulls and bodies.
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