He’d grown to resent them, but it was a very soft robe.
Jian crossed the hallway into his bedroom and opened his closet. What to wear? Well, he’d been ordered to dress by his captain, so his crew uniform made the most sense. Yeah, keep it formal, keep his father at arm’s length. He didn’t have any choice about dealing with his CO, but he could send the message loud and clear that “captain” was the only capacity Jian was willing to work with his father in at the moment.
He selected a freshly-cleaned and pressed uniform, and donned it with the sort of careful eye that he hadn’t used since graduating Flight School. Jian ran a lint brush over his sleeves and shoulders, fixed his hair, then took one last look. Satisfied that everything was ready for inspection, he walked out into the living room to find his father resting on his chaise lounge.
“All right, captain, what am I dressed for?”
Chao stood up and walked briskly for the door. “Follow me.”
Jian rolled his eyes, but did as he was told. His father called an elevator. They waited in silence until the car arrived. The doors closed and Chao selected the ground floor.
“I have… news,” Chao said once they were alone in the car. “About Benexx.”
Jian’s eyebrows inched up in anticipation, but his father’s face wasn’t encouraging.
“Yes? Tell me.”
Chao swallowed and squared his shoulders. “Well, it turns out that paranoid lunatic father of zers had implanted a subdermal locator chip in zer when Benexx was a kid and didn’t bother to tell anybody. So as soon as he got out of the hospital, Bryan and Theresa tracked zer chip down to some flop house in the native quarter.”
“Except Benexx wasn’t there,” Jian said, anticipating his father’s next sentence.
Chao shook his head. “No. Someone had removed the chip and implanted it into one of the other Atlantian bombing victims. We haven’t identified the victim yet. The Bensons found zer abandoned in an upstairs room, presumably left there to die. They got zer to the hospital just in time, but ze hasn’t regained consciousness yet. Regardless, it’s obvious now that Benexx isn’t just missing, but has definitely been kidnapped, and by well-organized people who know what they’re doing.”
“If Benson didn’t tell anyone about the chip, how did they know to look for it in the first place?”
“Good question. Maybe they’re just as paranoid as he is.”
“Is that what this is about? Benexx’s kidnappers? They have to be linked to technician Madeja somehow.”
“We’re working that angle up here. We dug through Madeja’s web traffic, search history, correspondence, social connections, all of it and found nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing, until we searched her apartment, and…”
“And what? She was storing files offline?”
“About as far offline as you can get. Paper. She had a bunch of rough-cut paper newsletters from some frothing-at-the-mouth separatist lunatic calling themselves the Voiceless.”
“A member of the crew? Seriously?”
“No, we don’t think so. The paper is Atlantian from Pukal. Whoever’s writing this trash, they’re probably based dirtside and shipped the leaflets up the beanstalk. We never caught wind of them before because nobody ever thought to screen for paper. I mean, paper!? Who even thinks like that?”
“Can I read them?”
“Later. Right now, we’re going to a debriefing about the other unmitigated disaster you stumbled into.”
“The facility?”
Chao nodded. “The facility.”
They reached the ground floor of Jian’s apartment building. It was a quick walk to the nearest spoke lift. In its heyday, it was prime real estate. But now with the Ark supporting one-tenth of the population it had been designed for, there wasn’t much competition for living space anymore, even with Shangri-La module’s towers reduced to permanent shrines to the victims of Kimura and da Silva’s attack.
They entered the lift and headed for the hub a kilometer above their heads. With each passing meter, the apparent gravity acting on Jian’s aching joints and muscles lessened, until the lift glided to a stop. Jian had been so distracted by the view that he’d forgotten to put his feet in the hold-down loops and floated up in the zero gee. His father grabbed his ankle and pulled him back down, arresting his momentum before Jian hit his head on the ceiling.
“I need you present, son. Don’t offer any more than you have to. Stick to the facts alone.”
“I passed the damned BILD scan. Isn’t my trial over?”
“Your innocence may have been proven, but your judgment is still an open question. So if you care about your flight status, stick to the facts. Honestly, Jian, your mother and I raised you to be more level-headed than this.”
“Will you stop bringing up mom every five minutes?” Jian shrieked. “I’m having a shitty enough couple of days as it is.”
Despite his smaller size and advancing years, Chao’s face and arms turned to steel. Before he even knew what was happening, his father had Jian’s back pinned up against the inside of the lift car, his elbow pressed against his throat. So, his father had taken the hint from his uniform. This wasn’t a parent disciplining a child. It was a captain doling out a little bulkhead counseling.
“I’ve let your tongue flap because I know just how hard this has been on you.” Chao pressed his forearm in just a fraction harder. “That ends now. Disrespect me in the privacy of your quarters all you want. But we’re in public now, even if we’re behind closed doors. Whether you’re smart enough to recognize it or not, I am trying to protect you and your future, Jian. And don’t you dare presume to lecture me on ‘shitty days.’ I was already a man when I watched Shangri-La die. Panicked when I didn’t know if you were trapped inside among the damned. Watched your mother, my wife, die. And no matter what you think about it, I loved her, even if in a complicated and unconventional way. I watched it all carrying the guilt that it was my fault, at least in part. Guilt I still carry. Everyday. I don’t need reminders from an insolent child, even if he is technically a man.” Chao took a deep breath before continuing. “I’m going to release you now. And while we are among the rest of the crew, you are going to show the respect befitting of a commander addressing his captain, yes?”
Jian nodded several times in rapid succession.
“Good.” Chao let his forearm drop. “I’m sorry about all this, Jian, really I am, especially the scan. I know how… degrading they can be.”
“Yeah?” Jian rubbed his throat. “And how do you know that?”
“Because I’ve been scanned. By Captain Mahama herself, bless her memory. I hated her for it for months afterward. But in time, I came to recognize that circumstances, and my own actions, had made it not only necessary, but unavoidable.”
“And you think that because you forgave your captain, that I’ll come around and forgive you?”
“Hope springs eternal.” His father keyed the doors to open, then held out a palm. “After you.”
Back to the command module they went. Back through Shangri-La again. Neither of them spoke. Neither wanted to. Soon, they settled into chairs in one of the command module’s conference rooms. Not the one Jian had been scanned in, thankfully, although the only way he could tell was from the room number on the door. Otherwise, they were identical.
Jian glanced around the table as he strapped himself down to keep from floating out of the chair during the meeting. There were already half a dozen people seated in the room in addition to himself and his father, mostly command staff, and a couple of reps from the various science departments, most notably Dr Kania who headed up the Astrophysics unit.
Usually, the crew didn’t bother with the chairs and instead just floated in small alcoves built into the walls while they conducted their business. The only time the chairs were pulled out was as a courtesy to “visiting” dignitaries from Shambhala, who found talking to floating holograms disorienting, even to the point of inducing motion sickness in some with
weaker constitutions.
On cue, ghostly forms began appearing in the chairs one after another as the holo-projectors mounted in the ceiling warmed up. In moments, they solidified and four new people “sat” at the table. Of them, Jian only recognized two people: Agrawal, the city’s current administrator, and Devorah Feynman, the long-serving curator of Shambhala’s museum. The woman had to be pushing ninety by now, but gave no impression of slowing down. Why she’d been invited was a bit of a mystery to Jian, however. She was technically still a crew member, but held no official position and hadn’t since her retirement.
The resolution of the holograms hadn’t been affected much by the accident. While the ribbon had been shut down to lift car traffic and high-voltage power transfer to the surface for fear of further damage, comparatively low-voltage data transmission had been deemed safe by the engineers.
Chao, acting as the chair and host of the meeting, brought it to order with a bang of a gavel, the end of which was tied to the table to keep it from floating away. Some traditions never died.
“Thanks for coming, everyone. We all know what this meeting is about, so let’s just cut right to it, shall we?” A wave of agreeing nods ran around the table. “Good. So, the ‘facility’ as it’s been taken to be called. The question before us is what to do about it. But before we can answer that, first we need to have some idea of what it is in the first place. To that end, I’ve invited Dr Kania, head of the Ark’s Astrophysics Department, and Commander Feng, the only person to have actually explored the facility in person.”
“Only surviving person,” Jian corrected his father reflexively.
Chao shot him a look, but quickly relented and bowed his head. “Of course you’re right. Technician Rakunas’s bravery and sacrifice should not go without mention. Or those of the rest of the Atlantis’s crew. But, we must continue. Dr Kania has prepared a short briefing of what we’ve learned with certainty over the last few days.” Chao ceded the floor.
“Thank you, Captain Feng,” Kania started. “I should start out by saying this briefing will be very brief indeed, as we know almost nothing about the facility with certainty. However, here’s what we can tell you.”
At the center of the table, an image of Varr’s surface surrounding the facility site materialized and started to slowly rotate. “What you’re seeing here is a rendered image of the cave-in entrance and grounds near where the facility was discovered, extrapolated from pictures and video feed recovered among the shuttle’s data and transmissions. We’ve already determined the age of the scene is somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a few million years. We’re confident, based on the differential in the number of impact craters in the immediate scene and the surrounding area that the facility was built inside an excavated hole, and then reburied.”
“Why such a large span in the estimate?” Devorah asked.
“There’s a lot of variability in meteorite impact rates. We’ve managed to date enough craters down on the surface of Gaia and on Varr to know the outer solar system goes through periodic instabilities, probably as a result of some sort of orbital resonance with Tao Ceti F we’re still trying to understand. This causes higher than average meteor activity for a couple thousand years at a time. We’re not sure exactly how many of these storms have taken place since the facility’s construction or how intense they were, hence the wide range of possible dates. But we are very confident that a quarter million years is the least amount of time it could have been there.”
“Fair enough,” Devorah said.
“I’ve heard it suggested that an older civilization of Atlantians may have constructed it,” Chao said. “Is that likely?”
“I wouldn’t bet a bucket of reheated tofu on it,” Devorah said. “The sort of civilization that’s progressed far enough to develop a heavy lift to orbit capacity and large-scale, space-based construction would leave a footprint on the world that would last for many tens of millions of years. Roads, dams, erosive effects of agricultural clearing, mining sites, the kind of advanced industrial capacity that can build a multi-stage rocket would have to be massive. Yet outside of their road network and villages, we’ve seen no archeological evidence anywhere on the surface of Gaia that any prior Atlantian society had advanced even as far as the current one has.”
“My department’s findings concur with Director Feynman,” Kania said.
“Anyway,” Devorah resumed. “Combine that with the fact any civilization that could build an underground complex on their own moon would also have the capability to deflect or destroy any incoming asteroids and avoid being knocked back to the stone age in the first place.”
“That may be,” Chao said, “but it wouldn’t necessarily protect them from disease, famine, or war. There are a lot of ways to collapse a civilization. We should know, having tried most of them ourselves at one point or another.”
“That is certainly true,” Devorah conceded. “But again, there would be some evidence of the previous civilization. Not only that, but we’ve found no mention of any prior advancement beyond their current level of technology in either the Atlantian oral or written traditions. But they’ve got a buttload of stories about Cuut getting pissed and shoving a big rock up their asses every few thousand years. Awfully tough to break out of the stone age when the reset button keeps getting hit every couple of eons.”
“Why don’t we just ask them?” Jian said. The room turned and cast disapproving looks at the disruption. He ignored them. “In fact, why aren’t any Atlantians sitting in on this meeting? It’s their moon we’re talking about, one of their Gods. Shouldn’t they be hearing this?”
Devorah’s hologram smiled. “You know what? That’s a really interesting question. One I’d like an answer to myself.”
An uncomfortable silence blanketed the room as the nominal leaders of humanity glanced at each other, scrambling for an answer. It was Administrator Agrawal that found her voice first.
“We will be only too happy to brief our Atlantian citizens and allies on what we have discovered, once we have ascertained exactly what it is, and our investigation has arrived at appropriate… recommendations for how best to handle the situation.”
“You mean once you’ve already decided on a course of action,” Devorah snapped back. “That’s what this is all about, right?”
“We wouldn’t presume to act unilaterally without the consent of our allies on their territory.”
“There are a lot of ways to extract ‘consent’,” Jian said.
“Any decision will be arrived at in a completely transparent manner in accordance with all applicable agreements and treaties,” Chao said impatiently. “And I would remind the commander that Dr Kania has the floor.”
The good doctor nodded her thanks, then hit a couple of buttons on her tablet. The hologram above the table shifted and dove through the collapsed roof and into the pit before settling on the facility entrance. To the left, footage captured by Rakunas’s suit camera looped the fragment of video showing the door sucking Jian inside.
“This is where we go from solid science into pretty heavy speculation. Most of the tech Commander Feng’s team encountered during their brief expedition inside the facility appears to be nano-based, far and away more advanced than anything we’ve developed up to this point. But that’s not to say we can’t learn from it. Their version of an airlock, for example, is brilliantly simple and eliminates any air loss during transfers. Our own nanotech is up to the task already, it’s just a matter of implementing it. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing none of us thought of the application before now. We should have a test rig ready to evaluate for the Alcubierre
prototype within a couple of weeks. But, moving on…”
The hologram changed again to the feed from Jian’s own camera once they’d entered the facility. Swarms of Polly’s brethren poured out of the walls and went about their work, ignoring him and Rakunas entirely. Even still, several of those present visibly recoiled from the hologram as if the robotic alien bugs were in the room with them. No matter how much time passed or how advanced humanity got, there would always be something about critters with more than four legs that screamed nope! at an instinctual level.
“What you’re seeing here are non-biological, autonomous, drones. They appear to be made of roughly the same nanomaterial as the airlock, just repurposed and imbued with some level of virtual intelligence to manage their tasks.”
“‘Imbued’ is a strange word for a scientist of your stature to use, Dr Kania,” Administrator Agrawal’s hologram said. “With its mystical connotations and all.”
Kania shrugged. “It’s a reflection of our ignorance at this point. We don’t have the first idea how any of this is being accomplished. All we’ve learned so far from the sample is the individual nano particles seem to be held together and manipulated through a combination of electromagnetism and exploiting van der Waals’ forces. But insofar as how they establish and maintain their neural computing networks, or even where the hell their power is being drawn from, we don’t have the first idea.”
“Hold on, time out,” Agrawal said. “Sample? You have one of these things on board the Ark?”
Kania paused and awkwardly glanced to her captain. Chao gave her a slight nod, giving her permission to proceed.
“Yes,” Kania said. “Commander Feng, ah… captured one of them and brought it back to the shuttle. Our recovery team transferred it to one of our labs yesterday afternoon. We’ve only just begun our initial survey, but expect to learn an immense amount about the material, given enough time. And resources, of course.”
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