“Looks like we’ve got the lion by the tail,” said Axford smugly.
“By a hair of the tail, perhaps,” Alander corrected him. He was reluctant to start feeling cocky too soon. “The head is still a long way off.”
“Whatever,” said the ex-general. “Head, hair... The main thing is that Thor must have managed to get someone’s attention.”
“We don’t know that,” said Alander.
“He may be right, Peter,” said Sol. “Asteroid is actually a synonym for starfish. It seems unlikely that this is a coincidence.”
“A synonym, not one of them,” said Alander, looking around the immense chamber. It was lifeless and empty, but again he felt as though they hadn’t been abandoned. He sensed minds infinitely larger than his contemplating them, wondering what do next.
“We’re here to talk to the Starfish,” he said. His voice fell echoless into the vast space.
“I am here to talk to you,” said the Asteroid, popping smartly back into existence.
“We have given them information.” Alander recalled what Thor had called herself before firing herself bodily into the sunlike body at the heart of the Starfish fleet. “The Conduit conveyed our message to the Source of All.”
“You were brought here to witness.”
“We’re not seeing much at the moment,” said Axford.
“The information you provided has not yet been verified.”
The chamber was a holding a cell, then, Alander thought “We’d like to know what’s going on, though.”
Instead of responding, the Asteroid vanished again.
Axford sighed. “Just when I thought we were starting to get the knack—”
He was cut off as the walls of the chamber disappeared. For a moment everything was utterly black. But not only had the chamber disappeared, but so, too, had Selene, Eledone, and the others. Alander was alone, hanging in a terrible, silent void.
Then, suddenly, the tail end of a question from Gou Mang came out of the nothingness:
“—is everybody?”
No one answered, they were too busy staring in breathless awe at the sight before them. They were surrounded by stars, floating apparently naked to the void.
“That’s pi-1 Ursa Major,” said Axford, pointing at a bright sun directly ahead of them. He was a starlit figure to Alander’s left.
“Are we actually there?” Alander asked. “Or just seeing it?”
“Just seeing it,” said Sol from Eledone. “We haven’t moved.”
“Could the whole Trident have moved?” asked Axford.
“If it moves the same way as the cutters, then we would have felt it, I’m sure,” said Alander.
“Either that or we’re shielded inside it.” Axford waved the issue away as irrelevant. “Whatever. The main thing is that there’s the target. We are witnessing after all.”
Gou Mang laughed. “Witnessing what? We’re not exactly being swamped with details here.”
That point Alander had to agree with. “Asteroid, we can’t see anything.”
The scarred sphere appeared next to him. “This view is not ideal.”
“We could see if our point of view was closer.”
“I see from the point of view of my maker.”
“You could see better if your maker’s point of view was closer.”
The sphere rotated once.
“Your statement wasn’t about you, so it’s not going to respond,” Axford diagnosed. Then, for the Asteroid: “We are in a hurry, but we’ll be patient until your maker’s point of view improves.”
“Time is irrelevant.”
“To you, maybe,” said Gou Mang. There was no hiding her frustration. “But our people are going to die if you don’t get a move on!”
“Your people are of no consequence.”
“Well, they damn well should be!”
Again, the sphere ignored a general statement. Alander rubbed at his temples, feeling his head beginning to ache. He thought carefully about his next words, making sure they would result in a reply.
“Asteroid, this system has proven extremely dangerous to scouts we’ve sent to investigate it,” he said. “I hope your maker is being careful.”
“My maker has many ways of minimizing danger to itself.”
“We believe that whoever’s hiding in here is your enemy, the ones you’ve been chasing.”
“My makers are attempting to ascertain the truth.”
“It is our hope that, if it does prove true, your maker will cease the attacks on our colonies.”
“I cannot speak for my makers.”
“But you discuss their capacity happily enough. How—?” Alander reminded himself to keep his comments specifically tailored to himself but also phrased to get an informative response. “We—my people speak in terms of questions and answers. I find this manner of conversing difficult.”
“I am programmed to communicate within strict confines regarding the dissemination of information,” said the sphere. “Data must be traded; information must flow equably.”
“I’d assumed that you’d read our minds. Your makers could probably do it without even thinking.”
“You’re assuming a little too much, there, Peter,” said Axford. “They probably obtained English from Thor, when she spoke to them. Even if they could read our minds, why would they? It’s arrogant to assume that we are worthy of their regard.”
He nodded. The sphere had turned to Axford at the sound of his voice, then rotated back to Alander. While there was in no sense a face on the scarred sphere, its movements did suggest the turning of attention to one person or another.
He wasn’t expecting the sphere to respond to his previous question/statement, so was surprised when it said, “Reading minds is not my function. I exist to facilitate the process of ascertaining your nature. Few come before my makers and are regarded. Those who make the decisions do not have time to perform such tasks.”
Alander was trying to work out what tack to try next when the view shifted. There was no sense of motion or transition; suddenly he was seeing from a different viewpoint, one much closer to pi-1 Ursa Major. The effect was dizzying, and for a moment he lost his balance.
“That wasn’t there before,” said Gou Mang, pointing at a glowing ring surrounding the star.
“It’s new,” agreed Sol from Eledone. “Asteroid, what we’re seeing doesn’t match our astronomical data.”
“The phenomena you are witnessing is the work of my makers.”
“I can’t tell what they’re doing,” said Alander.
“Much of my makers’ works will no doubt seem mysterious to you.”
Alander nodded. “There is an awful lot of information we’d like to trade for. Is there any other way we can do it than this?”
He mentally kicked himself when the Asteroid spun once and disappeared.
“I’m wondering,” Sol jumped in quickly, “if your makers aren’t deliberately making it harder for us to work out the truth.”
The Asteroid returned. “I am under no compunction to stop you from wondering about my makers’ motives.”
Axford barked out a laugh as the viewpoint shifted again. This time they were hanging from a point above the ecliptic, looking down on the sun and its new ring. Dark sunspots swirled in the solar atmosphere; magnetic field lines flexed and snapped, sending great gobbets of energy aloft in the deep gravity well. Alander had never seen such an amazing sight before.
The ring of lights resolved into purple-hot balls of light trailing glowing tails, moving at speed around the star’s equator, their spiraling wakes twisting and turning around each other. The star’s atmosphere was responding, bowing under invisible energies and forming a shallow trench girdling the star, as though it had tightened its belt.
The Asteroid, which had vanished during the short silence, reappeared. Still slightly giddy, Alander almost imagined it to be a distant, battered world orbiting pi-1 Ursa Major rather than a small object at close quarters.
/> “My makers have found no evidence of that which your emissary described.”
It took Alander a moment to realize that the Asteroid was referring to Thor. “Our hole ships were attacked when we came here,” he said.
“My makers have found no evidence—”
“But Lucia reported that she saw evidence of activity on a massive scale. That’s what we came here to tell your makers.”
“There is evidence of past activity,” the Asteroid said.
“Then the Spinners must have left,” said Gou Mang.
“So it would seem.” Axford’s voice had lost all trace of humor. “Maybe your friend Lucia scared them away.”
The thought struck Alander as ridiculous enough to be true. If the Spinners were completely paranoid about their security, they might have left as soon as she happened by. But why then destroy the more recent hole ships? Why not destroy her as well?
“I can’t believe there’s nothing here,” he said to the slowly spinning Asteroid.
“There is something,” it said. A rapid sequence of images flashed by, appearing in windows against the starscape, then sliding away into black. They showed hole ships materializing out of unspace, taking the barest glimpse of the system, then disappearing. The extrusions were impossibly small, just centimeters across, barely enough for sensors to take the slightest reading, but they were there. It was incredible that the Starfish fleet, even as advanced as it was, could notice such tiny invasions in the incomprehensibly huge volume of a solar system.
Yet they had, and the fact added credence to their statement that there was no sign of the Spinners. If they could spot a tennis ball-sized dot from millions of kilometers away, then they could surely spot an alien fleet, no matter how well hidden.
“They’re from our people,” Sol said. “They’ve noticed your presence here.”
“My makers have made the connection between them and you. Their presence here is a distraction.”
“We can tell them to leave, if you’d let us. We’re jammed in here, as I’m sure you realize.”
“It is not necessary for you to communicate with the others of your kind. They are being deterred.”
“You’re attacking them?” The question escaped Alander’s lips before he could stop it. The Asteroid disappeared once again.
“Shit,” Sol cursed.
“You can say that again,” said Gou Mang. “We fucked up. If we’d come in time, maybe we could have done something, but now...”
The dull resignation in her voice was awful to hear.
“Not necessarily,” Alander said.
She turned on him, her android face ugly with despair. “How can you say that? Didn’t you hear what the floating rock said? The Spinners have gone, Peter! The Starfish aren’t going to stop looking for them. In fact, they’re probably going to look even harder, now they know the trail is hot. I’d say our chances of surviving something like that are even closer to zero than they were—”
“They’re not zero,” Axford interrupted. “We can still run.”
“Yeah, if they let us go,” she said. “And if we can fix the hole ship. And if we can find the Praxis without bringing the Starfish down on it, too. If, if, fucking if!”
Gou Mang shook her head and went to walk back to Selene, striding surreally across empty air through the illusion of pi-1 Ursa Major.
She hadn’t taken ten paces when the Asteroid reappeared unprompted.
“There is something,” it said, as it had before. A new image appeared in the void. It was blurred and glowing with wild energy flows, as though caught in the act of some powerful transformation while hanging above the world that the colonists who had traveled to pi-1 Ursa Major had called Jian Lao. Despite the blurring and the discharges, it was instantly recognizable.
Alander stared at the golden spindle in confusion. “I don’t know how that got here,” he said, respecting the Asteroid’s protocol for information exchange.
“My makers recognize the architecture of this artifact as a product of those we seek.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “We call them the Spinners. They were the ones who built these things and gave them to us. We call them the gifts.”
“If you’ve found one here,” said Sol, “then surely that vindicates us.”
The sphere rotated to face her. “This artifact is not indigenous to this system.”
Gou Mang returned to Peter’s side. “Not indigenous?” she whispered to him. “That can’t be right.”
He shook his head and addressed the Asteroid again: “We’ve never known the gifts to move of their own volition before.”
“This artifact is radiating in frequencies you use for communication purposes,” said the Asteroid.
“What’s—?” Alander stopped to rephrase the question as a statement. “We’d very much like to hear what it’s saying.”
A new voice filled the void around them. That it was one Alander knew well rocked him to the very core of his being.
“This is Lucia Benck of the UNESSPRO Mission 391 hailing the visitors to this system. Please respond. I repeat this is Lucia Benck of the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission 391. Please respond.”
Lucia? He felt dizzy for a moment. The presence of the spindle was a great enough mystery on its own, but that it was broadcasting Lucia’s voice was an even greater one—one he couldn’t immediately get his head around. How had she persuaded one of the mighty spindles to break orbit and travel to pi-1 Ursa Major? What the hell had happened since they’d left the Alkaid Group?
The view shifted yet again. They were hanging near one of the inner worlds. Four massive Trident ships were visible at varying distances and attitudes, silhouetted against the sun. There were myriad other vessels gleaming in the bright light. The ring around the star continued to bind its waist tight, although the effect was less visible from a distance. The only obvious symptom was a flaring of coronas from the poles. Vast feathers of multicolored energy stretched with deceptive laziness out of the stellar atmosphere, reaching for the stars.
“My makers are concerned,” said the Asteroid.
“We’ve given them no reason to be concerned,” assured Axford.
“There is reason to suspect that we have been misled.”
“We haven’t misled you!” Gou Mang’s expression was one of outrage.
“I can see why they might believe we have,” said Axford, half-turning to address her. “We tell them the Spinners are here in pi-1 Ursa Major. We send them god knows how far to investigate, and there’s nothing here. Then a spindle shows up, trying to hail them. That creates a connection between the Spinners and us that already existed before—on all the colonies they’ve destroyed.”
“They think we’re the Spinners?” said Gou Mang, her tone caught between incredulity and amusement.
“Probably not.” Axford shrugged. “But we could be evidence of something more than just coincidence.”
The Asteroid spun back and forth for several seconds. “My makers suspect you have led us into a trap.”
Alander shook his head, a feeling of unreality creeping over him. “That wasn’t our intention, I assure you.”
“We’re just trying to save our people,” said Sol from Eledone.
“My makers were lured here.”
“We didn’t lure them anywhere!” Alander could feel the situation quickly slipping out of their hands.
“If you believe that we did,” said Gou Mang carelessly, “why don’t you just leave and be done with it?”
The Asteroid promptly disappeared at the question, leaving Alander to supply the obvious answer.
“Because the makers don’t see any real threat here.”
“None they can’t handle,” added Axford. The ex-general indicated the incredible view. It was shifting with increasing frequency, taking in all the major worlds and many of the Lagrange points. There were cutters and Tridents everywhere, mingling among ships of an infinite variety of shapes and sizes. It seemed inconc
eivable that such a fleet could ever be seriously threatened by anyone or anything.
The changeable view made Alander feel light-headed and uneasy.
“Asteroid, you said there was nothing in the system,” said Axford, his voice seeming to come from a great distance away.
The Asteroid returned but, strangely, didn’t respond.
“I wonder if you’ve considered threats from outside the system,” Axford pressed. “That strikes me as an obvious source of attack.”
The Asteroid spun as though seeking a response to a dialogue it wasn’t designed to pursue.
Behind it, the viewpoint of the Starfish returned to pi-1 Ursa Major’s primary, the blinding, yellow-hot star and its belt of lights. Energy streamed from the poles in gouts of blue and green. Whatever the Starfish were doing, it was going to have a lasting effect on the sun, its magnetic properties, and the flow of its solar wind. The rounded, stubby prongs of a Trident vessel hung silhouetted against the fiery atmosphere, moving slowly across the view.
Alander knew something was going to happen seconds before it did. He could feel it in his bones, in the instincts his engram was supposed to have left behind with his original body on Earth. The engram entrapment program was supposed to have been the final proof of the nonexistence of the soul, of psychic phenomena—for how, the researchers had said, could they re-create human minds with such accuracy and verisimilitude out of nothing but numbers if the originals they were copying consisted of anything more than that?
And yet, Alander knew.
He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but it was too late. Behind the Trident, the sun swelled like a dumbbell-shaped balloon, impossibly fast, swelling out and around the ring of lights about its waist and sending two enormous globes of novalike energy exploding across the system. The Trident silhouetted against it vanished in a wave of energy, and the viewpoint of the Starfish shook violently.
“What the fuck—?” Gou Mang exclaimed, staggering back from the blaze of energy.
“It has begun,” said the Asteroid.
2.3.3
The explosion of pi-1 Ursa Major took Lucia completely by surprise. She had just arrived at a new location, almost directly above the sun’s north pole, and was marveling at her new perspective on the system. There wasn’t time to sightsee, though. Her ftl “ears” were still ringing with the destruction of Zemyna, which had been hit by the Starfish within an hour of her arrival at pi-1 Ursa Major. Jumping backward and forward in an attempt to avoid the Starfish defenses, she’d been doing her best ever since both to hail the aliens and warn them off.
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