Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “Yes, Peter.”

  It was still dark, but the level of illumination in the cockpit gradually returned, brightening like a winter dawn until he made out the wary expression on Gou Mang’s android face.

  “Eledone,” Thor called, rising to her feet. “Are you fully operational?”

  “I apologize for my dysfunction,” returned the voice of the alien AI. Alander couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so relieved. “I have sustained damage.”

  “What sort of damage, exactly?”

  “My primary systems have been disrupted, resulting in substantial loss of ability. I am currently operating on thirty percent capacity.”

  “Give us the details,” Sol requested.

  “Forget details,” said Thor. “Can you tell us where we are?”

  “Not at present. I will within one minute, however.”

  “What about motive power?” asked Samson. “Can we go anywhere?”

  “I will soon be able to restore limited NRT capacity.”

  “Ftl? Can you get us back to Rasmussen?”

  “I will be unable to accommodate that request.”

  “Why not?” Samson pressed. “Your drives don’t work? You don’t know the way? What?”

  The AI hesitated before answering. “My systems are not isolated. There is much overlap, and damage has been extensive. All systems have been affected.”

  “But you’re fixing yourself, right?” said Samson. “I mean, you’ve fixed yourself this far. When your repairs are complete, will you then be able to get us out of here?”

  “No.” The single word echoed flatly in the cockpit. “I will need additional resources to effect such repairs.”

  “What sort of resources?” asked Sol.

  “I will require access to a Dry Dock.”

  “Like the gifts have?”

  “Yes.”

  Thor laughed humorlessly. “So we need to get you back to Rasmussen in order to get you fixed, but we can’t get you back to Rasmussen because you need to be fixed. That’s just great.”

  “We’re trapped,” said Samson dully.

  “Somewhere,” added Gou Mang, looking around at the dead screens.

  “Do you have any sensory capabilities back yet?” asked Sol. “Are you able to look outside, at least?”

  “Yes, Caryl, in some frequencies.” Around them, the screens flickered to life. “I have been attempting to locate any of the probes or navigational beacons. At present, none appear to have survived. I will advise you if I receive a transmission, but I will not broadcast anything myself, as per your original instructions.”

  “Good,” said Thor. “Keep it that way until I tell you otherwise.”

  “Yes, Caryl.”

  The self-repaired AI was having trouble distinguishing one Hatzis from another. Alander noted the fact, assuming it was a symptom of the hole ship’s reduced capacity, while his attention turned to the screens and what they revealed about Eledone’s environment. The interior of the crippled cutter was still a raging turmoil of heat and energies. Surface temperature readings brought back peak figures in excess of several hundred degrees as gases and molten compounds roiled around the hole ship. Eledone advised that it was allowing itself to tumble with the chaotic flow of superheated fluids buffeting it. No motion was apparent from inside the hole ship, a fact for which Alander was extremely grateful.

  “Do we know where exactly inside the cutter we are?” Thor asked.

  “I am unable to determine that without using active sensors,” the AI replied. “Doing so would reveal our location.”

  “What about the probes you brought with you? Are you able to use them?”

  “Three probes are functional and ready to launch.”

  “Then send one. There’s not much we can do until we know where we are.”

  “Yes, Caryl.”

  “What caused the damage, Eledone?” asked Axford calmly from one side.

  “The disruption resulted from an unexpected hyperdimensional translation.”

  “The cutter drive, in other words,” Axford said. “It wasn’t a deliberate attack.”

  “That would be the most likely assumption, given that I appear not to have been harmed since.”

  “That’s very reassuring,” said Inari bitterly. “I, for one, think it’s good to know we’re lost in the middle of this thing and can’t get home.”

  “We’ll find a way,” said Thor.

  “How? Call for help? Even if our transmitter works, that’d make us sitting ducks. Remember where we are, Thor. We’re inside the cutter!”

  Thor glared at her. “Do you have any ideas yourself?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then please don’t criticize others for not having anything to offer.”

  “All I’m saying is—”

  “I can get us out,” interrupted Axford.

  Everyone faced the ex-general.

  “You heard me,” he said in response to Thor’s unspoken question. “If I have to, I can get us out of here. But only as a last resort, when there’s no other choice.”

  “How?” asked Thor.

  “I prefer not to say at the moment.”

  She sighed. “Then for the moment, the information really isn’t that helpful.”

  “If it means that we can forestall a petty squabble,” Axford returned, “then I’d say it is helpful, Caryl.” He faced Inari. “Based on my assurance that I can get us out of here, would you be happy to drop the matter for now?”

  Inari hesitated before nodding. Her expression wasn’t a trusting one. “I guess so.”

  “Then that’s sorted.” Axford turned back to Thor. “Maybe you lot can calm down now and get something constructive done.”

  “Probe away,” announced Eledone, sending the equivalent of one full hole ship off on an exploratory mission. “I have instructed it to let our courses naturally diverge for one minute before activating its internal propulsion and moving farther away. It will commence surveying our location in five minutes.”

  “Out of curiosity, Eledone,” said Axford, “just what self-defensive capacity have you managed to retain?”

  “Ten percent.”

  “And how much offensive capacity?”

  “None.”

  Axford nodded as his gaze swept the room to address them all. “Which means we’re already sitting ducks, people. If that probe gives us away, we’re as good as dead. Just thought you might like to know that.”

  “What makes you think the probe will give us away?” asked Samson. “There’s nothing to lead it back to us.”

  “We just launched it, remember?” he said, explaining as though to a child. “It’s not traveling ftl because we no longer have that ability. It’s going to be using NRTs, and I don’t think giving it a minute is long enough. Eledone should have consulted us before making that decision.”

  “It’s not the ship’s fault,” said Thor tightly. “It was acting in accordance with operational guidelines. We told it before we left what provisions to take. It didn’t need to consult us because it already knew.”

  “And you knew—how?” Axford snorted. “We have no idea what the Starfish can do or see in here. Who’s to say that some automated system isn’t watching us right now, just waiting for us to do something exactly like this?”

  “What’s your point, Frank?” said Thor irritably.

  “My point is that I think we’re being careless. I don’t believe that operational parameters laid down before we started this mission should be allowed to dictate what risks you take with my life now.”

  “It’s not just your life,” Thor reminded him.

  “Which only makes my point even more valid, wouldn’t you say?” Again, Axford looked around the room, as though for support.

  Alander asked, “What do you suggest we do?”

  “We should divide the ship,” Axford said, facing him. “That way we can maximize our chances of survival.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good i
dea.” Sol stepped between them. “Not right away, at least—not until we know where we are and what our options might be. After all, should we go our separate ways, we might not be able to contact each other again.”

  Thor looked grateful for the support but disgruntled that Sol had offered it without being asked. “Does that sound reasonable to you, Frank?”

  “Reasonable enough.” He scowled at both of them. “But I don’t want to have this discussion again. Any decision this hole ship makes from here on in is to be done only after input from the rest of us. We’ve got just one shot at this. Let’s not screw it up.”

  “All right.” Thor conceded the point with some grace and instructed Eledone to advise them of all the details of future actions. The hole ship acknowledged the order without apparent rancor.

  “I have incoming data.” Eledone’s screens rearranged themselves to accommodate the information. From radar, lidar, and other active means of exploring around itself, the probe was building a much more detailed picture of its environment. It appeared to be the interior of a flattened tube approximately thirty meters across. The walls were curved and folded, as though crushed by great pressure, leaving a narrow channel that was ten times as wide as it was high and an unknown distance long. Gases and molten metals surged along that channel in turbulent streams, with the probe tugged along for the ride.

  Alander noted that none of the superheated fluids raging around the probe were pooling or gathering at any point along the channel. It was probably designed that way, he supposed, like the chambers of a heart. What looked deformed or dysfunctional to a human eye was simply efficient, almost organic in nature. A vein, he thought.

  Beyond the vein itself, there was nothing else to see. With no risk-free way to talk to the probe, they had to wait for it to move at its own schedule on to other means of gathering data. The picture that emerged was of an increasingly perplexing environment, one that had an analogue in neither biology nor machine.

  The vein slid and kinked through a region comprised of rigid, load-bearing structures, each a long strut that was oval in cross-section. The struts seemed almost haphazardly arranged between undulating floor and ceiling, crisscrossing like the wires on a mesh fence, although never actually touching. The space around the struts was filled with an inert foamy material, nearly transparent to radar but riddled with vacuum-filled bubbles that cast back sparkling reflections. Probably insulating material, Alander decided, with the foam filling the gaps between floor and ceiling, as well as the larger spaces beyond.

  The picture from those larger spaces was patchy and incomplete. Each successive increase in observational range increased the odds of the probe being seen, and it was programmed only to take chances at irregular intervals. Two enormous chambers abutted each other, almost touching but for the wall keeping them separate. What was in those chambers, exactly, was difficult to see. Vast, shadowy structures, neither rigid nor fluid, loomed at the fringes of the probe’s sensors. Some were angular and asymmetrical, others flowing with an eerie grace. They could have been radar artifacts, shadows thrown by indistinct surfaces just out of range, or they could have been distinct things moving through those cavernous spaces. Whether they were machines, life-forms—perhaps even the Starfish themselves—it was impossible to tell. Alander regarded them with awe, feeling like a virus caught in a human body, wondering at the scale of the organs around him.

  He cautioned himself to resist the biological metaphor. It had some value—for putting his size in perspective, if nothing else—but he was wary of jumping to incorrect conclusions because of it. The cutter within which they had stowed wasn’t a human, and indeed might not be in any sense of the word alive. It was a space-faring vessel of war. The interior was a mess of tubes, chambers, and solid forms that didn’t immediately succumb to his desire for symmetry, form, and function. The shadowy shapes he glimpsed could have been weapons systems, stirring restlessly, ready for combat—but what he perceived as purposeful and ordered was just as likely to be the exact opposite, and vice versa. He couldn’t let his assumptions color the data lest he miss a crucial point.

  The probe, growing bolder, cast the edges of its senses as far as it could. Distant outlines of the cutter began to take shape, revealing that the vein it was following was approximately one- third out from the cutter’s central hub and slightly above its horizontal midpoint. The direction of the fluid was roughly clockwise around the hub and seemed to be spiraling inward. The cutter itself was still docked to the two that had rescued it, and all residual rotation had been completely dampened. Outside it was as still and quiet as a grave.

  Within, Alander searched for some sense of structure to the cutter. It didn’t help that the damage from the attack had laid waste to large regions of the craft. Burst veins pumped fluid en masse into chambers that might otherwise have been empty; load-bearing structures hung slumped and disconnected spearing painfully through softer foam and “muscle.” The smoothly defined, sharp edge of the cutter was itself warped in places, lending the entire thing a twisted, warped look. That it would ever fly again, he sincerely doubted.

  There was nowhere that he could immediately see that looked like a centralized command area, analogous to a brain, or the equivalent of a bridge, where living officers might congregate to command the giant vessel. There had to be such a point, and automatic assumptions sent him to the center of the craft, looking for a spine connecting the poles or some sort of interior disk from which such an operation might be coordinated. But nothing leapt out at him. There, as everywhere else, he saw only a tightly compressed tangle of spaces and structures, profoundly knocked about by the stresses of battle.

  “Something up ahead.”

  Samson’s voice wrenched his attention back to Eledone. At first he thought she meant that something was approaching them, but she was watching a different aspect of the probe’s telemetry than he was. She was pointing at the region ahead of the probe, in the vein. The turbulence was increasing steadily, and radar showed the edges of what might be a tear in the vein wall ahead.

  “It’s being sucked in,” she said.

  “Can’t it fight the flow?” Alander asked.

  “Fighting the flow would draw more attention to it than simply going with it,” Thor replied. “There’s no evidence to suggest that following it would be dangerous.”

  “Personally,” said Sol, “a change of scenery would be good. I think it’s learned as much as it’s going to where it is.”

  Alander nodded, although he felt uneasy about the change of environment. Thus far, the probe hadn’t been attacked in the vein, and it had managed to supply them with some excellent data. It would be a shame to lose that advantage too soon.

  As the probe drew nearer the tear, telemetry brought back glimpses in visible frequencies of another chamber beyond. This one had been breached and hung open to vacuum. The superheated fluid filling the vein sprayed in a violent stream from the tear, filling the vacuum with crystalline particles and cooling plasma. Shadowy, insubstantial wisps hung around the tear, drifting like seaweed with residual momentum. Again Alander couldn’t make out if they were actual things or artifacts of the radar. Strange electromagnetic emissions growing stronger around the probe didn’t provide an answer either way.

  The turbulence increased as the probe was caught by the current pouring through the rent, and Alander found himself briefly reaching out to balance himself as the ragged walls fell by in a blurred and giddying rush. Then they were past, and the probe was tumbling in free fall through a glittering vacuum, gathering a dizzying view of the space around it. He glimpsed dark, ribbed, cathedral-like walls slumped in alien angles under a ceiling of spikes and hooks, many of them melted or shattered. He received the distinct impression of myriad eyes gleaming back at him from the dark spaces of that crowded, complicated topography, although he was sure he had to be imagining them. There was no sign of the vast, hanging things that he’d glimpsed on radar, but there were several floating structures that
hung independent of the walls in the center of the space. Like elongated, lozenge-shaped barges, they extruded hairlike structures that glinted at their tips, seeming to signal in alien frequencies with unimaginable rhythms.

  He switched from the radar to the visual view, letting his eyes digest the scene more naturally, but a bright flash on the radar drew his attention back. When his gaze had settled there again, the source of the flash was gone.

  “Did you see that?” asked Gou Mang.

  “I’m not sure,” said Alander. “I think—”

  He stopped when the flash came again: a hard, well-defined image that appeared in an instant, then disappeared as quickly, leaving an echo behind it like the afterglow of phosphor dots.

  “What the fuck is it?” Thor muttered after the thing appeared a third and fourth time, on each occasion in a different part of the probe’s field of view.

  Almost as though it’s circling the probe, thought Alander.

  “This doesn’t look good,” said Axford.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you on that one, Frank,” said Thor.

  “Is there any way to call the probe back?” asked Samson as the hard echoes increased in frequency. The glimpses were beginning to overlap, creating the impression that the probe was surrounded by myriad strange, bright points.

  Thor shook her head. “Not without giving ourselves away.”

  The probe obeyed its internal instructions as best it could. When allowing itself to tumble innocently didn’t divert attention, it fired its NRTs to move away from the mysterious objects. The glimpses followed it, seeming, if anything, to become more urgent and more closely defined. Alander began to feel distinctly threatened on behalf of the probe. Hard and metallic, the flickering shell was unlikely to be a welcoming party.

  The end, when it came, was sudden. Two hard echoes jumped progressively closer to the probe, as though testing for a reaction. There was little the probe could do to defend itself. When attempting to run away failed a second time, the hard echoes contracted around the probe in an abrupt, bright rush, then the feed went dead. Every screen in the hole ship froze at the last recorded frames, then slowly faded to black.