“Almost there!” groaned Thor through the anti-impact field. The team members were liberally scattered through the cockpit now, some touching the ground, some suspended in midair. Sol had just enough time to think how ridiculous they must have looked when the final shot hit, and every screen around them went white.
There was a moment of disconnection as Eledone rocketed through the tear with considerable momentum, flashing past the bugs and through any field effects that might have tried to impede them. Sol was frozen, unable to move and helpless to assist in any way. The hole ship was flying blind, the last shot having left its instruments dead. She could only pray that the effect was temporary.
Soon the anti-impact field eased enough for Sol to turn her head and look at Thor.
“Eledone,” Thor ground out through clenched teeth. “Report!”
“I have sustained damage,” replied the AI, its voice more wooden than normal. “Repairs are under way.”
“How long until we can see again?”
“Ten seconds.”
Sol anxiously counted them down, living ten seconds for every one. It seemed to take forever, but at the end of it, Eledone was as good as its word, and the screens flickered back to life.
Sol strained against the anti-impact field, not immediately comprehending exactly what she was seeing. Images in numerous frequencies conveyed strange, contradictory impressions that, when combined, made her dizzy. There was something that looked like a planet; at least, it was as big as two Earths combined, but in some frequencies it was riddled with holes, and in others it seemed to balloon outward in a massive torus. Tapering filaments stretched across the sky, which was rippling just as it had been when glimpsed through the tear.
Camouflage, Sol thought, wondering what the effect looked like from the outside.
A shape reminiscent of the Trident hung superimposed across the rippling starscape, lit from below, with streams of ships flowing to and from it. Three more of the giant vessels were visible in the distance; one appeared to be hunchbacked, sporting two extra horns or tines midway along its spine. There were other things Sol couldn’t immediately identify: a blowing plasma bubble that oscillated every two or three seconds, sprouting numerous thin, elongated arms that whipped out to touch passing vessels; a net of stressed space-time that filled the bubble of space contained by the camouflage field, giving the vacuum a wavy, gridlike aspect unlike anything she’d seen before in the natural universe; a liberal dusting of hyperdense objects that darted to and fro under impossible accelerations; a distant point of light that looked like an artificial star sending vast, looping magnetic field lines across everything.
Like a God bestowing benedictions, she thought with a shudder.
It looked like chaos to Sol, but she knew instinctively that this wasn’t the case. It was just beyond her understanding. She had no doubt that she was seeing just the tip of the iceberg, and that there was much more taking place out there that she wasn’t able to see. That she was seeing the Starfish fleet itself she could only hope was the case, because if this wasn’t it, then the scale of the actual thing would have been something a mere human could never hope to grasp.
What astonished her more than anything, though, was the fact that this fleet must have been moving every day or so to keep up with the front. Her mind boggled at the thought of the energy that such a maneuver would take.
Alander was studying the view behind them. The cutter was floating alone in space, disconnected from the siblings who had brought it home. It had puffed up and split radially in numerous places, bursting like an overripe mango. Energy and matter poured through the splits, sucked or propelled outward by shepherding points of light that were, Sol assumed, yet another species caught in the Starfish biosphere. The intensity of their industry appalled and amazed her. An undertaking like this would have taken even the Vincula months to accomplish; here, the Starfish scavengers were taking the cutter apart in just days. What they would do with the raw materials when it was gone, there was no way of telling—and she hoped Thor wasn’t thinking of sticking around to find out. She didn’t want Eledone to be mistaken for a floating piece of space junk and recycled.
“What now?” asked Gou Mang as the cutter was left behind them and the anti-impact field receded.
Thor tore her eyes away from the screens. “Now we try to find someone in charge.”
“And hope we don’t fall foul of the local security forces,” said Axford.
“Any idea how we do that?” asked Gou Mang.
Thor shrugged as she looked around at everyone in the cockpit. “All suggestions are welcome.”
“I still say we should try to get back to Rasmussen,” said Inari.
“Yes, well, until we stumble across a working ftl drive, then I’m afraid that idea will have to go on the back burner.” Thor cast a dismissive glance at Inari. “Anything else?”
“First things first,” said Sol. “If we’re going to try to speak to the Starfish, then we’re going to need to find some sort of command nexus or communications conduit. If we can tap into either of those without getting ourselves killed—”
“Too late for that,” said Axford, nodding at one of the screens.
Sol turned to see what he was looking at. At first she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but then she caught it: a black shadow sliding across the stars—a gnarled branch of something much larger, looming hard over the hole ship.
“Cleo, get us out of here!”
Samson obeyed Thor instantly, twisting the control stalk and sending the hole ship away from the shadow, hard and fast on an invisible wake of energy.
The shadow responded equally fast. Clutching branches twisted across the rippling stars, expanding and stretching to engulf the sky. Sol felt like a mosquito about to be swatted by a giant hand as the branches edged closer, blocking the view of the Starfish fleet. Blackness swallowed them—complete on all frequencies.
“Are we still moving?” asked Thor, staring numbly at the black screens.
“We appear to be,” Samson answered, but her face was a tangle of conflicting emotions. Clearly she wasn’t sure.
“Eledone, I want you to broadcast the following message on all frequencies, including ftl,” said Thor. Her lips were white. “This is Caryl Hatzis of the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission 154, S. V. Krasnikov, to HD92719. I am the leader of a diplomatic mission to the race we refer to as the Starfish. We have tactical information for you regarding the people you’re following. They’re hiding in a system among the ones we have surveyed. If you are prepared to speak with us, we will give you this information. All we ask is that you stop killing our people! Please respond!”
“Message sent,” Eledone said.
“Do you really think that will do it?” asked Gou Mang.
Thor’s eyes didn’t leave the blackness filling the displays. “I have no idea,” she said. “But what else can we do?”
“There’s something coming,” said Inari. A screen zoomed to show a thin sliver of white moving at an incredible speed and headed straight for them. Within a matter of seconds, the sliver had grown impossibly large on the screen.
Thor spun around to face Samson. “Cleo, what—?”
But that was all she got to say as the hole ship lurched beneath them, throwing them into the air. The anti-impact field caught them and held them suspended above the floor.
“I am sustaining damage,” said Eledone unnecessarily as, with a scream of energies, something long, perfectly straight, and gleaming silver stabbed through the cockpit wall and skewered Thor right between the eyes.
2.2.3
Lucia walked among the engrams as an angel would among mortals. And yet, even in the seemingly magical garment of her I-body, she felt flawed, fragile. The limitations of her mind were severe. Until she escaped the confines of her engram, and of her original, she would never be free.
I feel more like a golem than an angel, she thought. A creature of dust and clay, animated b
y words alone.
There was little time for introspection, however. She had four colonies to save, the last four in Surveyed Space: Zemyna, Demeter, Geb, and Sagarsee, due for extinction in that order.
“You’re asking us to leave everything we’ve built here and take a chance on you,” said Vince Mohler, civilian supervisor of the James J. Funaro, the mission sent to Zemyna. “It’s a big ask.”
“It’s either that or die,” countered Ali Genovese, military supervisor from Demeter.
“I know, but—” Ali’s civilian counterpart, Owen Norsworthy, sought the words to express his confusion. “It just seems so wrong.”
“It runs counter to programming.” Lucia said, stating the truth bluntly. All the mission supervisors had dedication to their missions programmed into them. They were bound by a powerful and partly artificial sense of duty to ensure that the missions ran according to the rules. That meant not abandoning them until a threat was clear and unavoidable and not even the certain knowledge of the destruction of every other colony was enough to satisfy those constraints. Until the Starfish actually appeared and began reducing the gifts to rubble, the mission supervisors were bound by their programming to try to keep things running as they had to date.
She had only noticed this on convening the meeting of the surviving mission supervisors. Earlier, after the mass gathering in Rasmussen, she had wondered how Sol had managed to convince so many of the remaining colonists to stay, while most of the survivors from destroyed worlds had chosen to leave. Why hadn’t it been the other way around? Surely those who stood in the firing line would be most likely to feel the threat, while those who had suffered losses would be most interested in staying to take revenge? It hadn’t made sense.
But now, watching the mission supervisors balk at abandoning their posts, even though they knew that death awaited them if they didn’t, the reasons were obvious.
“It runs counter to programming,” she repeated, “and that programming will kill you if you let it.”
“And how can we be sure you won’t run like you did in Rasmussen?”
Lucia turned to Cleo Samson, civilian supervisor of Sagarsee, who had voiced the challenge that must have been on all their minds. She wasn’t offended by the question—in fact she had anticipated it—but she doubted her transparent features would have conveyed that.
“You can’t,” she answered simply and honestly. “Nor can I guarantee that I won’t. Which is why I will need your help to ensure that I don’t.”
She had thought it through very carefully, analyzing her feelings during and after the attack of the Starfish and her awakening in Sol System. Just because her mind had a new home didn’t mean she wasn’t subject to the same programming as the other engrams. In principle, she was as much a machine as they were, driven by desires and needs that were hardwired directly into her mind. Her needs were different, that was all.
“Help you?” Cleo echoed dubiously. “How?”
“I need to know if a hole ship called Klotho was among of the survivors of Rasmussen,” she answered.
“Sol’s ship?” Cleo frowned. “We’re still cataloguing the survivors, so I can’t say for certain. What with the Unfit still gathering here and the stragglers coming in from other colonies, it’s something of a mess right now.”
“What do you want with Klotho?” asked Donald Schievenin, Cleo’s military counterpart.
“I don’t want it,” she replied. “I want something that’s in it.” Her shrug was an attempt at nonchalance intended to hide a deep desperation. “If it didn’t survive, there might be another way. But I’ll talk about that only if I need to.”
The gathered mission supervisors, android bodies with barely anthropomorphized faces, stared at her with wary expressions. She wanted to reassure them, but she wasn’t willing to expose her vulnerability any more than she had to. They were a war council united more by frailty than strength. They were the scarred survivors of a horrific extermination campaign, but they were also the victims of necessary pragmatism. UNESSPRO had used every trick in the book to ensure that their missions succeeded; the fact that many missions hadn’t succeeded, even before the arrival of the Starfish, suggested that maybe their extreme means had been necessary.
There was no point taking the discussion any further. Until they trusted her, it was just air.
“Get back to me regarding Klotho,” she said, “then we’ll talk some more. You know what I’m proposing. The offer will remain open.”
“We haven’t heard from Thor yet,” said Cleo Samson.
“The Starfish are due at Zemyna within twenty hours,” said Vince Mohler. The nervousness he felt for his colony—and the conflict that caused within his programming—showed openly on his face. She felt sorry for him, even if she couldn’t help him.
“Then you’d better think fast,” she said, getting up and walking soundlessly from the room.
* * *
Her plan was simple. Ever since she’d awoken inside Spindle Ten, she had been struck by its superiority to the hole ships. It was larger and faster by far than the relatively tiny bubbles on which the engrams wafted between stars. It was not, however, as flexible in terms of size and shape, and it was clearly not designed for fighting. It had no built-in defensive systems, and she doubted that the Libraries would tell her how to equip it with such. The Tenth Spindle wasn’t a warship by any stretch of the imagination, but it could, she thought, make a perfectly good ark.
This was where the mission supervisors balked. Why should she succeed where other similar missions had failed? Numerous hole ships had been expended on attempts to jump past the Starfish wake in all directions. None of them had ever returned.
That was because, she countered, the hole ships were like ants trying to outrun stomping feet. It simply wasn’t feasible. Spindle Ten might not be even remotely close to the Starfish’s capabilities, but it did improve their chances of survival, and that was all that mattered. It had enough room for everyone, including the Unfit. If they could dodge the fovea for long enough, they could escape the deadly wake and return to Sagarsee when it had passed. With the Starfish gone, there would be nothing left to fear. They would be free to begin the recolonization of any star system they chose.
“That’s if it works,” said Rob Singh, with whom she’d shared her thoughts on the matter. Speaking through a telepresence robot similar to the one around Rasmussen, the local version of him had joined her at her request in the halls of Spindle Ten, which was currently docked near Sagarsee’s Hub.
“You weren’t invited here for your pessimism, Rob,” she responded, watching him through the eyes of her I-body. Although her engram was still running somewhere in the Dark Room, she was able to project her pov through any available source.
“Why did you ask me here, anyway?” he asked, glassy, penetrating eyes swiveling to watch her transparent face.
“For company,” she said. “And because I feel bad about what happened to you in Rasmussen.”
“That wasn’t me,” he said. “It was another me.”
“You know what I mean. Besides, you all seem the same to me. You’re even doing the same things. You’re poking into the gifts, right? Looking for discrepancies?”
“Just like the one of me from Inari, yeah.” Spindly arms twitched. “And look where that got him.”
Killed, she remembered, in the fall of Sothis. “But he didn’t die because of that, Rob. And neither did the copy of you in Rasmussen.”
“It didn’t help, though, did it? I’m beginning to think I’ve—we’ve been wasting our time. Even if there are any more secrets here, if the errors I’ve found aren’t just mistakes, then there simply isn’t time to work it all out. What’s the point?”
“There’s always a point, Rob,” she said. “The more we learn, the better our chances are. If you throw the towel in and concede defeat, then we will die. If you keep looking, keep fighting, we might survive. That slim hope of continued existence is worth fighting for.”
<
br /> He though about this for a moment, the telepresence robot completely motionless. Then: “You do give me hope, Lucia. I’ll grant you that. I’d volunteer for one of the Dark Room missions myself, if only Donald would let me.”
“I’ve already put in a good word for you.”
“Yet here I remain. Tumbling sidekick to—well, whatever it is you are now. No offense, Lucia, but I know where I’d rather be.”
As they spoke, in Sagarsee and all the remaining colonies, attempts were under way to explore the other remaining Dark Rooms. If there were others who could liberate more of the Spindles, then that increased the carrying capacity of Lucia’s ark plan, and that had to work in their favor.
She didn’t let the fact that no one had so far been successful in this venture dampen her enthusiasm.
“Can I ask you something, Rob?” She didn’t wait for his permission. “You’ve looked into this more than anyone. How do you suppose the Gifts knew what language to use when they first came to us? They addressed us in English, and the Unfit say that they spoke to their ancestors in their own tongue.”
“We assume they scanned the early probes for information on our culture before making contact.”
“Which would suggest they must have been watching us before revealing themselves, right?”
“Maybe, but probably not. Christ, Lucia, these beings are so much more advanced than we could ever hope to be. I suspect they’d be able to understand a culture in less time than it took me to say a single sentence.”
She nodded. It was a scary though but a believable one, given everything she’d seen.
“That must be how they knew about Peter,” she said. “Why they always choose him, if they can, to be the interface between us and them.”
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