Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  What more did they want? She felt powerless to express her anger and frustration. Dodging the furious energies flung at her consumed most of her concentration, but she still had time to wonder at the motives of the twin forces squeezing humanity to destruction between them. Why weren’t the Spinners reacting to the presence of the Starfish, as they had to humanity’s hole ships? And why weren’t the Starfish calling off their advance while they checked the Spinners’ hideout?

  Her first clear glimpse of the band tightening around the sun had given her reason to pause and wonder. She had no idea what it was, either. A power source? A defensive mechanism? Some sort of AI architecture? It was impossible to say.

  Then, suddenly, the north pole of the sun had expanded to almost fill her field of view. Her first panicky thought was that the sun itself was moving, coming right at her. Only when she leapt to a safer spot, with virtual heart hammering, did she see that it wasn’t the star moving at all. It was blowing into two halves, sending two bulging hemispheres of stellar material boiling up and over the ecliptic with impossible speed. Even at her fastest clock rate, and even though the gas was confined to sublight speeds, the rate at which it was expanding was absolutely terrifying. Main Sequence G-type stars just weren’t supposed to behave like that!

  The Starfish fleet close in to the sun vanished into the boiling plasma. Radiation swamped whole electromagnetic bands, blinding her in some senses. She shied away from the billowing shock waves, jumping down into the ecliptic, where the solar winds were less affected by the sudden turmoil. As the explosion ripped the star apart, a fiery ceiling and floor spread out over the system. Within hours, the stellar storm would render the system completely unrecognizable—and uninhabitable for anything unprotected by advanced technology.

  She didn’t know what effect the sudden discharge of matter would have on the orbits of the planets, but Jian Lao would never again be the paradise she had imagined. Its atmosphere would boil away if the fiery clouds came too close, or it would freeze if its orbit shifted too far out and the stellar remnant—if any would remain—cooled. The dream of her and Peter standing together on some gently rolling hills watching the sunset would be lost forever.

  “This is Lucia Benck of the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission 391. Please respond.” She kept up the beacon, hoping against hope for a reply from either the Starfish or Thor. “I repeat: this is Lucia Benck of the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission 391, hailing the visitors to this system. Please respond.”

  Silence was her only reply. What had happened to the mission sent to contact the Starfish remained a mystery. But for Thor’s ftl message and the fact the Starfish had arrived at pi-1 Ursa Major, she would have felt safe assuming them dead. There had been no transmissions since, and no sign of any kind to suggest they were alive.

  She jumped at random around the ecliptic, dodging cutters and Tridents and the weapons they sent after her. She saw no sign of the hole ships that the Unfit and the mission supervisors back at Sagarsee were surely sending to keep an eye on things, but she was diligent in reporting to them by ftl. The continued silence suggested that the entire system was somehow being jammed. That the Starfish were responsible for this, as well as the detonation of the sun, seemed the logical assumption. The ring they had put around the sun’s waist had already altered its chromosphere immediately prior to blowing up. Perhaps they had suspected the Spinners to be sheltering deep in its core—an amazing thought, but again not out of the realms of possibility for these beings—and blowing off the outer layers was intended to flush them out

  She did her best to record what happened, knowing that the astronomers among the engrams would never forgive her for missing such valuable data—if they survived long enough to study it. It was easy enough to chronicle the unfolding of the polar nebulae, although much harder to see through them to what lay within. She detected shapes lurking in the billowing clouds, strange shadows flashing in and out of space-time, sending great bubbles of gas collapsing and expanding. It was impossible to tell what they were. Some looked like Tridents or other Starfish vessels; others were lumpier, more organic in appearance, with sweeping fins and winglike appendages. Exactly like starfish, she thought designed to surf the atmosphere of stars.

  When a second star blossomed in the ecliptic, just outside the first gas giant’s orbit she wondered if she was getting a little out of her depth. Then all hell broke loose, and leaving wasn’t an option she could seriously consider anymore.

  * * *

  Sol had entertained an uneasy suspicion about the location of the Starfish point of view with respect to their own position in the scheme of things. That was confirmed when the roiling bubble of the nova clouds hit their apparent position, as surrounding them in the Trident. Barely a second after everything lit up around them, a faint tremor rolled through the walls, floor, and ceiling of the concealed space containing them.

  “Damn them,” she cursed through gritted teeth. “We’re on the fucking front line!”

  The view changed, not, as she had previously supposed, reflecting a shift in perspective to another viewpoint but probably, she now realized, indicating a real shift in location. The Trident carrying them dropped down into the ecliptic, where space was relatively clear, then up again, into the shock wave’s leading edge. Magnetic field lines snapped and twisted with incredible ferocity as the star came apart from within. Plumes and jets of tortured gas rose and fell around them, as though they were standing on the lip of an active volcano. The Trident rocked as its massive cross-section rode the wave of energy with ill-designed grace. Its distinctive back-scratcher shape, tens of thousands of kilometers long, wasn’t intended for such an environment.

  “Asteroid,” she heard Alander calling. “We want to know what’s going on!”

  The sphere didn’t reappear or respond. A sudden, more energetic jolt was followed almost immediately by a jump to another part of the system. The light there was different: cleaner, more intense than that of the billowing star.

  “That’s the Source of All!” Samson exclaimed, pointing out the hard white, sunlike object blazing to one side.

  “What the hell’s it doing here?” asked Inari.

  The Trident jolted again as something flashed across the field of view—a lime-green, tapering triangle with a glint of silver at its aft end. The thing appeared to be traveling backward.

  “Peter, get yourself back in the hole ship,” she said.

  “Way ahead of you,” said Alander. She could see now that all three of them were already moving.

  Alander stumbled as the floor shook beneath them. Under fire, the Trident jumped yet again, to a point far from the Source. It joined a swarm of cutters and other Tridents gathering near Jian Lao, the planet that would have been the colony world for the Andre Linde. Ghostly webs of energy enveloped the giant ships, glowing like marsh light in the glare of the nebulae. Sol found it almost impossible to make out exactly what was happening.

  “Who blew up the sun?” Inari asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, at this stage,” said Sol. “Eledone! Any readings?”

  “Passive sensors are not detecting anything beyond the walls of this chamber.”

  “I think it’s time we started using active sensors again.” She eyed the view with a feeling of deep misgiving. “Whatever’s going on out there, I want to know about it before it hits us.”

  “Surely we’d be safe in here?” said Samson. That she phrased it as a question indicated her doubt. Sol had no reassurances for her.

  More of the green triangles swept into view, trailing white points of light that scattered and vanished then reappeared in waves aiming for the gathering of Starfish vessels. A responding wave of red darts, blue whips, and other exotic weapons rose up to meet them. Space knotted and writhed as the two waves collided, tangling vicious energies in a multicolored, almost beautiful display. The arena was large enough for light-speed lags to have an effect on how it was reported. Expl
osions that might originally have occurred simultaneously seemed to come in waves: craft appeared out of unspace apparently seconds before they’d moved, in response to distant events that weren’t yet visible.

  Sol did her best to follow it all. The triangles were being picked off with relative ease, but there were many of them. She looked around, trying to locate their source. None was immediately obvious. As dozens of cutters spun to join the attack, the Trident they were in jumped to the outer system, where in frosty darkness a new battle line was forming. The antagonists this time were snakelike threads of a shimmering gray many hundreds of kilometers long that spat bolts of energy from their ends. They looked impossibly thin but were in actual fact dozens of meters across. When severed, they disintegrated into showers of debris loaded with nanotech mines and other traps. Sol saw Starfish vessels explode from the inside out as the mines spread exponentially through them, others flew sluggishly, their guidance systems disrupted and proving easy picking for the green triangles. As more and more of the gray threads were destroyed, the fragments reassembled to replace them, snapping unpredictably out of debris clouds.

  Alander reported from Selene. The three of them had reentered the cockpit and were rotating to merge with the main body.

  “We’re ready to leave whenever you are,” he said, his image in the foreground of the view on one of Eledone’s screens.

  “We wouldn’t last a second out there,” Gou Mang argued from behind him, looking nervous.

  “There’s no time for a discussion on the matter now,” she said. “Merge the ships, and we’ll talk about it afterward.”

  “Merging is a bad idea, Caryl,” said Axford. “If things get ugly, we’ll need to watch each other’s backs.”

  “Nothing we’re carrying could possibly hope to make a difference in all of this.”

  “Still, I insist you consider it.”

  “I have considered it, and I say merge the fucking ships!” Sol tensed as she issued the challenge. “Do you have a problem with that, Frank?”

  “As a matter of fact, Caryl, yes, I do.”

  Behind Alander and Gou Mang, Axford raised his left hand. It was dripping a dark fluid and seemed to be broken. Before Sol could ask what was wrong, there were two sharp, earsplitting cracks, and Alander and Gou Mang were punched to the ground. The view went dead on Axford just as he was turning away to talk to Selene.

  “Peter!” Sol reached to help without thinking, a sickening sensation in her gut. She knew the sound of a PEP discharge when she heard one. “Peter—talk to me!”

  Selene’s cockpit spiraled into the heart of the hole ship, and Sol’s calls went unanswered.

  * * *

  Alander, too, knew what a lethal PEP sounded like, albeit from fictional dramas and documentaries. His original had never had one fired at him before. Nothing in his hand-me-down memories could have prepared him for the sheer physicality of the experience.

  The flash and the sound came simultaneously with the impact. He felt as though a cannonball had hit him in the back of the neck. His I-suit absorbed the energy that would have otherwise turned his hair, skin, and an inch-deep patch of muscle and bone into plasma, but there was still enough punch remaining to knock him off his feet. As the air behind his head exploded, he was flung forward into the wall, hitting it solidly and sliding bonelessly to the ground.

  For a long moment, he couldn’t move, nor could he see or hear. Pain testified that he was still alive, but he couldn’t determine where that pain was coming from. His entire body seamed to be hurting, and it was so intense that he was barely able to think straight. What few thoughts he had he directed toward figuring out what the hell was happening. Clearly he’d been shot from behind, and the fact that Gou Mang had been in eyeshot the whole time meant that Axford must have pulled the trigger. But where had Axford come by a PEP gun, for God’s sake? And why had Axford shot him?

  He forced himself to open his eyes. At first, all he saw was red. Then his eyes focused, and he realized that what he was seeing was blood: a spreading pool of it all over the cockpit’s floor. In the middle of it lay Gou Mang. She wasn’t moving.

  He winced. The first PEP shot must have been aimed at him, for he hadn’t heard a second aimed at her. Although he couldn’t immediately see how badly she was wounded, the sheer quantity of blood indicated that it was serious.

  Axford 1313 strode into view, and Alander saw where the blood was actually coming from.

  Axford’s lower arm had burst open to reveal not just a stubby PEP weapon at the base of his wrist but several other new limbs that unfolded like legs from an insect’s carapace. Axford knelt on the floor at the center of the cockpit and thrust the ruin of his arm, with the mess of slender, new limbs fully extended, before him. Strange digits slid with surgical precision into the floor. Alander heard the ex-general grunt, followed by a strange sighing sound. When Axford stood again, his arm was part of the hole ship. The floor stretched up with him like white molasses, forming a perfectly geometric line. Knobs and protrusions grew at seemingly random points, and these extended into branches that Alander recognized. Axford had grown himself a control stalk.

  Arm and stalk separated with a sucking sound, and blood dripped to the floor from both. Axford seemed in no way inconvenienced by the wound; his face was set in concentration as he worked.

  Alander considered his options. Axford obviously wasn’t expecting him to wake so soon, or he would have taken more precautions. That gave him the edge of surprise, if he wanted to take it. But physically overpowering Axford wasn’t something Alander wanted to try in a hurry. He assumed there were more tricks hidden in the ex-general’s body, some perhaps more lethal than a PEP gun.

  He could try talking Axford out of whatever he was doing, but his unprovoked attack on Alander and Gou Mang suggested that a verbal approach would be pointless. He clearly wasn’t in a talkative mood.

  Alander lay still, trying to work out what to do. If he could access the hole ship, he would be able to wrench control from Axford. But there was no way to access the AI without speaking and thereby giving himself away.

  He had to do something soon, though. Gou Mang still wasn’t moving, nor did she appear to be breathing.

  “I am receiving a communication from Caryl Hatzis,” the hole ship announced in a voice identical to Eledone’s.

  “Ignore it,” Axford said. “Give me manual control.”

  “I am authorized only to obey only Peter Alander.”

  “Well, Peter’s dead, so stop being a pedant and give me control of the ship. I can’t run everything on my own.”

  “You are mistaken,” Selene cut in. “Peter Alander is not dead. He is perfectly conscious.”

  Axford’s eyes snapped to where Alander lay on his side in the spreading pool of blood. The gory crystal eye of the PEP gun came up again, aimed directly at him. Alander lifted and rolled, not fast enough to avoid the shot. It glanced off his shoulder with sufficient force to spin him into the wall, but it lacked the surprise of the first shot. He was only stunned, not knocked out again, as Axford would have no doubt liked.

  Smoke boiled from where the deflected energy boiled blood to plasma. That gave him a second to recover before Axford tried again. The laser pulse would be less effective through smoke, and his aim would be impaired. Alander shook his head and told himself to stand up while he had the chance.

  He lifted his eyes just as another shot cracked out of the smoke and knocked him back down. He blinked a few times, trying to lose the stars that were blurring his vision.

  “Jesus Christ!” he gasped, raising a hand in a vain attempt to ward off another shot. “Enough, already!”

  “Then stay the hell down!” Axford loomed out of the smoke and pressed the muzzle of the PEP gun against the back of Alander’s head.

  “Listen to me,” Alander started, but stopped when the gun was pushed harder against him.

  “You’ve nothing to say that could possibly interest me, Peter.”

  The
world turned white with pain as a noise like thunder sounded in Alander’s ears. The acrid smell of burning blood filled his nostrils.

  Is that mine? he wondered. Have my brains been charbroiled?

  He would have laughed at the idiocy of the notion had he not been in so much pain. Of course it wasn’t his brain. The fact that he could think at all should have told him that.

  He opened his eyes, and through the intense pain he saw Axford turn and move away, grunting with satisfaction.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that,” Alander managed. His arms flailed for purchase on the slippery floor as he forced himself upright.

  Axford 1313 swiveled. The eye of the PEP gun fell on him again, but this time it didn’t fire.

  “That’s not possible,” the ex-general said. “I designed this to punch through the I-suits. There’s enough residual kinetic energy in each shot to turn your internal organs to jelly. Like hers!”

  He kicked Gou Mang’s android body where it lay on the floor by his feet. She didn’t respond.

  “She’s dead?” said Alander, freezing in the act of trying to stand.

  “Of course she’s dead! I couldn’t afford to have her getting in the way—no more than I can afford to have you getting in my way, either. Now do me the favor of staying down!”

  The eye of the PEP flashed in Alander’s face, and the sudden impact of the blast snapped his head back. He felt the crunch of vertebrae in his neck, tasted blood in his mouth. To his amazement, though, he didn’t fall back down. He’d withstood the shot.