Predator - Incursion

by Tim Lebbon

  While it was targeting and fighting the drone, Faulkner hit it with a skillful laser shot.

  “Keep running!” Mains said. “Snowdon?”

  “I’m good.” She was up and running again, panting hard.

  “Frodo?”

  “Sorry, Johnny. The Ochse thinks this is a good place to meet its end.”

  “Thanks, Frodo,” he said. It was as much of a goodbye as he could muster.

  “Good luck,” their ship’s computer replied. “Keep up this speed and I calculate you’ll get to the access with seventeen seconds to spare. There’s a tunnel to the left, but go right, then drop down the shaft. That’ll be your best chance.”

  A couple of minutes later they reached a gentle hump in the smooth flat ground, around the other side of which was a dark opening. Snowdon paused, panting, hesitant.

  “No choice,” Mains said. “Sara?”

  Cotronis hadn’t spoken since leaving the ship. Still clasping the defender she staggered and fell.

  Faulkner scooped her up and slumped her over his shoulder.

  Mains went first, com-rifle at the ready. It was dark, but their suit lights flickered on and illuminated the way. A tunnel began to their left, smooth and sloping gently away. An atmosphere field hazed the air a few yards along, indicating that the habitat’s interior had an atmosphere. No use if it didn’t suit humans, though. To their right, an open shaft headed down, too deep for their lights to penetrate all the way.

  They each pulled a filament from their belts, slapped its glue bulb against the wall, and jumped.

  In Mains’s view, the countdown hit four. It went no lower.

  As the world erupted and he fell, his last thought was, I wish I could have seen inside.

  11

  LILIYA

  Testimony

  The first hundred years was a true voyage of discovery.

  The Founders had commissioned three ships, called Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. When they were delivered the ships were taken to an independent port close to the edge of the Sphere, a place of smugglers, pirates, and mercenaries. This was almost three hundred years ago, around 2400, and the Sphere was a much smaller place then. After the secret FTL drives were retrofitted, the Founders gathered, boarded the ships, and took a drophole to the very edge of known space.

  I can still remember that moment well. Wordsworth and I stood on the bridge of the Othello, along with a dozen other leading members of the Founders. Beatrix Maloney was there, a different woman back then. More honest, more open and optimistic. There was no great ceremony. After the three ships had moved away from the drophole and its attendant space station, we launched into outer space.

  We weren’t the first, of course. The Fiennes ships had already been gone for a long time, vast craft filled with thousands of colonists in cryo-sleep, on a one-way trip toward somewhere that might be habitable. In a way, their journey was more terrifying than ours, because these brave people had no inkling of whether or not they would ever wake up.

  Some of them know now. They’ve woken into nightmare. But I’ll tell you more about that later. The history of what we were attempting is important to fully understand the dreadful present. Perhaps there will be lessons… or maybe humanity can never learn.

  We slept for three years, and traveled one-hundred-and-fifty trillion miles. I was given the option of staying awake. As an artificial human I had no real need of sleep, and Wordsworth liked the idea of me patrolling the Othello, communicating with the AIs on board Hamlet and Macbeth, ensuring that everything was as it should be. Everything was automated, of course. There was nothing I could really do, but although his aims and intentions were grand, Wordsworth was human, and like any human he liked a sense of control over and above the machines he was using.

  But I had spent too long awake and alone in the Evelyn-Tew’s escape pod, and Wordsworth understood that. So I slept with them, a thousand Founders on each ship settling into a thousand days’ cryo-sleep while the craft took us far beyond the Human Sphere of influence.

  There’s a myth about artificial humans that enter cryo-sleep. It’s said that we invade nearby sleepers’ dreams. I’ve never understood the origins of that story, nor the barely veiled fear of us that it displays. Humans made us, after all. Humans made me, with their hands and their flesh-cloning methods, and I have long come to accept that. I can confirm that the myth is a lie. First, no human dreams in hyper-sleep, so the story is ridiculous. If a human did dream, they would die, because that would mean their body was experiencing temporal anomalies while in the cryo-pod. Growing older. Three years of growing older with no food, drink, or outside influence… it’s well documented how faulty cryo-pods quickly destroy a human mind and body.

  It’s a lie also because I inhabit only my own dreams, which I am not meant to have. I cannot sleep in any way that a human would recognize, and even in cryo-suspension my mind exists on lower planes than it is easy to understand. It’s not as… awful as sitting awake in that escape pod, but it is very different.

  I can’t recall my dreams from that time. That troubled me to begin with, because I have total recall, and forgetting something meant that I was not functioning to my full capacity. However, I soon came to relish the fact that those dreams were hazy, at best. It made me feel more human.

  I shared these thoughts with Wordsworth, later, when things were going bad, and he embraced me and called me daughter.

  After three years, the computers began waking us up.

  Hamlet was gone. Othello’s computer could not tell us what had happened, and Macbeth’s AI had no record or recollection of the Hamlet ever having existed. The vagaries of FTL travel at work. We never did discover what happened to the ship’s thousand sleeping souls.

  With the Founders reduced to two thousand in number, we began our journey in earnest. We were beyond any human reach now, past even where the very earliest Fiennes ships, with their basic light-speed drives, might have reached. We were in deepest, darkest space, and traveling among stars that would look very different back home.

  Free from interference, Wordsworth and the Founders continued with their experiments. In one of Othello’s three holds, preparations were made to begin using some of the research I had stolen from the Evelyn-Tew. All we needed were samples, and that was what drove our next thirty years of travel.

  Always heading away from the Human Sphere, we explored, curiosity taking us to some amazing places. A small moon where silica deposits swayed and pulsed like living things. A gas giant where we found drifting masses the size of continents, self-warming, sparking electrical charges beyond measure, which might have been a form of life beyond our comprehension. A star system where seven planets shared roughly the same orbit, along with a cloud of billions of asteroids that might once have been sister worlds.

  We took dropships down to a dozen planets and moons. Wordsworth said we were looking for somewhere to live, and I believed that—we all did, but we were also looking for something else. Samples on which we could use that stolen research, to develop something deadly—a weapon to protect us through all our travels.

  On one planet we found a derelict spaceship. It was very old, and much of it had decayed beyond recognition in the planet’s acidic atmosphere. We remained there for thirty days, but discovered nothing of any use or interest. No bodies, no sign of the beings that had crewed the ship, no technology that any of us could even begin to understand. It was a strange feeling leaving that wreck behind. For most of humanity, such a find would have been something to celebrate, a turning point in our history and understanding of the universe.

  For us, it was one more step into the unknown.

  All the while, the Founders continued the experiments that had attracted persecution from within the Human Sphere. I understood some of it, but not all. Genetic sampling, quantum quantification, multiverse balancing, quark replacement therapy. Cutting edge theories, brought to life in the labs contained in the holds of the Othello and Macbeth. Many of the Founders in
dulged in these experiments, while others found their roles in maintaining and running the ships themselves. It was a peaceful time. I’m not sure how to convey the feeling better than that. No one was forced into any particular role. The ship’s AIs ran themselves, to an extent, but there were still tasks to be carried out. Otherwise our continued existence would have been unsustainable.

  On Othello, a vast green pod was created where plants and foodstuffs were grown, and a group of people took that upon themselves. Another group experimented in creating a reliable and non-mechanical artificial gravity. It was as if the seed of a flourishing community had boarded those ships decades before, and in blooming, the flower it produced was close to perfection.

  For a while, Wordsworth and the Founders existed in something approaching the utopia they had left the Human Sphere to seek.

  As time went on, their genetic research, dabbling in longevity, became more serious. Wordsworth was an old man then, almost a hundred years old, and an air of desperation hung around him. Illnesses were dealt with quickly, and in the space of four years he had a heart-and-lung transplant, bone-marrow transplant, four cancers removed, and a brain rejuvenation.

  He was dying, and he surprised me by being terrified.

  “It’s not that there’s nothing beyond death,” he told me one day. I was in his cabin. We’d taken to drinking ship-brewed whiskey together in the evenings, although my internals meant that the alcohol was bled instantly from my system. It made him quiet and contemplative. Maudlin, even. “It’s not that at all. I want to go on, Liliya, and see what else there is to see. Can you understand that? The Founders followed me out here because we were looking for a kind of freedom, and somewhere to call home.”

  I told him we already had that.

  “Freedom, yes,” he said. “In a sense, but I’ll never call a spaceship home.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  That hurt me, but I let it go. I still looked exactly as I had seventy years before, when he first sent me to the Evelyn-Tew.

  One day we fell into orbit around a star, following the orbital path of its third planet, and Wordsworth found what he wanted. Down on the planet there were seas of a jelly-like substance. It was analyzed and found to have remarkable properties. Rejuvenation. Medical applications for whole libraries full of illnesses. Even, when adapted over time, the reversal of aging.

  They should have spent longer testing it, of course, but some of the original Founders had already died, and although there were births on both ships, and our population of two thousand was stable, the originals who were still alive were growing very old. Almost all of them wanted to pursue the aim they had started with, and so they created a medicine from the gel. Brought up vast quantities of it, built vats in the holds, and produced a daily dose that would hopefully help them to live longer.

  Against all odds, and despite my stark misgivings, it actually worked—for a time. For long enough to find the place we called “Midsummer.” At first we thought it was a small moon, but then it became clear that it was artificial. An alien space habitat, perhaps five million years old. Long dead, or so we thought, but deep beneath the surface, in places I wish we had not ventured, we found something else.

  They were asleep, and should have been left that way.

  But Wordsworth woke them up.

  12

  LILIYA

  Beyond the Human Sphere

  July 2692 AD

  Macbeth was a much different ship from the one that fled the Human Sphere two hundred years before. Faster, larger, changed beyond recognition, it would have taken Liliya a standard day to walk from bow to stern—and she knew every inch of it, including where to hide.

  She had broken away from the guards as they were taking her toward a secure cell. Shipborn, they still held her in awe, an old woman who did not show her years, an artificial person who could not be told apart from any other human. With all the things they had discovered on Midsummer, Liliya thought she would have been regarded as relatively normal. Yet still she was considered extraordinary, and such a wonder closer to home was more powerful than one found in the depths of space.

  The man and woman were so afraid of her that they almost didn’t fight when she broke her bindings. Almost. She put them down as gently as she could, and then she fled. Down through the bowels of the Macbeth’s accommodation levels, past the dining and recreation rooms, she made her way through the transformed vessel like a virus through a giant’s veins.

  On Midsummer they had discovered incredible technologies, many of them so advanced that machine and biology were difficult to tell apart. After a long time spent studying and analyzing, it had become clear that the habitat itself was still growing, new areas extruded from huge slug-like creatures they had found deep beneath the giant, spherical habitat’s outer crust.

  One of those creatures had been brought on board Macbeth, and it wandered the ship at will, unhindered and unfettered. Unknowable, untouchable by any means of communication they had tried, it had quickly begun to expand and improve upon the ship’s structure and design. It built not only structural and solid portions of the ship, but controls, electronics, and other more arcane tech whose uses were even now still being learned. Over a century it had remade the ship from the inside out, extruding material from its various appendages and forming, molding, refining, and hardening it in place.

  They still did not know whether it was truly a creature or a machine. It resembled a large slug but had mechanical parts. It fed and excreted, but also had a constantly recharging power source. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, its reason for being was to build.

  The modern Macbeth looked more like it had been grown, instead of built, and it was faster and more efficient than ever. Liliya moved through these strange spaces now—once corridors and vestibules and doorways, now tunnels and valves, hollows and atriums. Taking the creature on board had been a risk with which she had not agreed, but by then Wordsworth was dead and Beatrix Maloney was in charge.

  The whole dynamic of the Founders had changed.

  No longer Founders… they had become the Rage.

  Her suspicions had been building for some time. Maloney’s insistence that they return to the Human Sphere, her renaming of their dwindling, troubled civilization, and now the messages they had been sending with covert meanings, all pointed toward something Liliya hated even considering. Maloney had virtually admitted herself that this could not be a peaceful return.

  Like a web cast through the interior of the Macbeth, feeding along its tunnels and hidden places, Liliya’s reach had spread and expanded more than anyone knew. She had kept quiet the scope of her influence and knowledge. Being friendly with one person did not mean she had to tell another. Having a hand in one man’s research did not preclude her from stealing from a woman’s gathering knowledge. In the center of the web Liliya, the spider, watched and waited, spied and shivered as the picture grew of what was happening, where, and why.

  She knew that the violence had already commenced. Still beyond the Human Sphere, attacks had been launched on another species. Trials, Maloney and her Inner Sanctum had called them. Mock assaults, testing the weapons at their disposal before the real attack began and the true purpose of the Rage would be revealed.

  The insidious message Maloney had asked her to send had been the last straw. Liliya should have rebelled years ago, fought against everything she saw happening and knew might happen in the coming months and years, but loyalty ran deep, and her commitment to the Founders and the philosophy upon which they were based was implanted way down in her artificial memory.

  She had long ago moved beyond the simple matter of programming. Her years in the escape pod had both damaged her and made her more… human. She had become her own agent, as much an individual as any other person, with goals and aims, likes and dislikes, but a steadily building sense of dread about the Rage and what they planned had shadowed her existence for years.

  It was time to slip out from b
eneath those shadows.

  The irony of what she planned was not lost on her. Almost three hundred years ago, she had stolen the prized research from a special ship, doomed it and its occupants, and launched herself into space. The difference this time was that she fully intended to be the captain of her own destiny. She would steal as before, and leave the ship from which she stole. But she had a destination in mind.

  The Rage was going home.

  Liliya had to reach there faster.

  Maloney and her Founders would know of her escape soon enough. Floating in their support structures, enveloped in the rejuvenating gel, their old minds would come together in agreement—Liliya would have to be stopped.

  She’s known me for forever, Liliya thought, remembering again and again how she had shoved Beatrix Maloney across the room and into the wall. Such aggression was unheard of, committed against a friend and ally, and it had set her synapses sparking in confusion, but she wasn’t sure Maloney was still a friend. Perhaps she never had been.

  Heading toward the rear of the ship, she passed one of the original Founders, Erika Simons, submerged in her gel tank aboard the robotic walking support structure she favored. Her eyes looked swollen through the magnifying gel, all body movement slow as the contraption took her wherever she commanded. She looked at Liliya, corners of her mouth turning up in something resembling a smile. Her skin was a pasty white, hair a startled sculpture in the thick fluid, her wasted, naked body shriveled and sickly. The gel kept her alive and functioning, and Liliya knew not to let appearances deceive. Simons might be more than three hundred years old, but her mind was as sharp as a knife.

  Liliya smiled as they passed by in the narrow tunnel, watching for any sign that Erika knew of her escape. There were no indications, at least outwardly. The woman’s walker carried her away, insect-like and almost totally silent.