by Neil Clarke
One step from Earth.
When Sinadhuja entered the wormhole to Sol, the Earth fleet resorted to their last hope. A firewall bomb. It cauterized the wormhole connection. Killed Sinadhuja, saved the hearth of the human species, and left the rest of mankind out there in the dark.
That’s how the Federation and the Alliance became separate things—sometimes that’s how you define yourself, in the space when you are separated, when you have abandoned all hope of reunion.
One night, waiting for al-Alimah to appear and task her with another massacre, clawing up gibbets of her gel mattress and then smoothing them back so they vanish into the whole, Laporte realizes that she knows Simms is dead. She has to be. It’s naive to think she survived the radiation. Naive to imagine an end to the war, a happy reunion, a quiet retreat where they can tend to each other’s wounds. Simms is dead.
It would be worse if she were alive. She would hate the monster Laporte, and she would hate herself for leaving Laporte to the monsters. Simms is a hell of a soldier, a superb pilot. That’s how she defines herself. A good pilot never leaves her wingman.
What do you call this? The decision to know something not because it is true, but because it’s useful?
Out there alone the Alliance survived. Thirty-two years they prepared for the Nemesis to strike a second time. Certain that victory would secure the future of mankind in the cosmos. Certain that defeat would mean extinction.
capella 4/8
She falls engine-first towards the black hole and Atreus falls after her with its torch aflame and missiles ramifying out into the space between them in search of the kill geometry, the way to confine her, the solution to Laporte.
Steele’s ship outguns her by orders of magnitude. The Alliance fought Nemesis twice. They learned war-craft the Federation has never matched.
Atreus’ missiles can make their own jumps. Leap from their first burn straight to Laporte across a stitch of folded space. But the singularity they’re all falling for warps space, which makes it hard to jump. So the missiles come at her drunk and corkscrewing or they die in the jump and shear themselves open like fireflies burning too hot.
Not all of them, though. Not all of them. A few make it into terminal attack.
Laporte talks to Simms under her breath. Reporting the situation. Boss, Morrigan, am spiked, stingray stingray, vampires inbound. Music on. Defending now.
She rolls her shoulders and arms her coilguns and starts killing the things come to kill her.
And down there, down beneath her, in the groaning maelstrom where space-time frays and shears and starts to fall, where the course of events balances on the edge of inevitable convergence towards a central point, something wakes.
The light of a stardrive, peeling free of the fire. The huge dark mass of something mighty. Molting out of the black hole’s accretion disc. Climbing up to meet her.
Ken says, in a voice as young as summer gardens, as old as ants:
Hello, Miss Laporte.
nagari 7/10
“The Alliance started the second Nemesis incursion,” al-Alimah says.
They’re having dinner together. Laporte’s sure this is a dream, but because she sleeps with her nervous system braided into NAGARI’s communal dreamscape, it’s probably also real.
Al-Alimah wants to talk about Ken.
Laporte picks up her fork and eats. They’re in a rooftop cafe and there’s a warm wet wind, storm wind, coming from the north and west. The meal is salmon sous-vide cut into translucent panes of flesh. Like the pages of a carnage book.
When she touches the salmon with her fork it curls up around the tines. “The Alliance attacked the Nemesis?”
“There was an insurrection.” Al-Alimah’s a long woman, breakable-looking, tall like Simms but not trained to bear her own weight under acceleration. In dreamland she’s traded her gray uniform for a rail-slim black gown. She looks like a flechette. A projectile. “Someone broke ranks.”
After the first incursion, Nemesis behavior was the province of military intelligence. By political necessity, or perhaps out of some sense of Lovecraftian self-preservation, the Alliance tried to keep the pieces of the puzzle widely separated. But one of their Admirals, Haywain van Aken, finally unified the clues into a grand theory.
“What was it?” Laporte interrupts. The tines of her fork are hypodermic-sharp but she doesn’t notice until she’s already pierced herself, three points of blood on her lips, inside her cheek.
“We don’t know.” Al-Alimah shrugs with her hands. The tendons in her wrists are as fine as piano wire. “Not yet. But we know what he did.”
Van Aken became convinced he could communicate with the Nemesis. He built a signaling system—almost a weapon, a cousin of the Alliance’s missiles: it jumped high-energy particles directly into the mass of the target. Then he went rogue. Hurtling off past the Capella colony and into unexplored space. Possessed by a messianic conviction that he could find the Nemesis and end the war.
Laporte cracks her neck and leans back. Watches Alliance warships moving through the clouds around them, pursuing van Aken into Nemesis territory, overcoming disorganized Nemesis resistance with determination and skill. On the horizon a voice that isn’t Admiral Steele’s begins to murmur about the possibility of real victory.
“Forward reconnaissance found van Aken’s ship adrift in a supernova remnant.” Al-Alimah swallows something Laporte never saw her bite. She has a little piercing in her tongue. It’s strange to imagine her going to get her tongue pierced. Maybe she put it in herself. “His crew had mutinied. An outbreak of psychosis.” The sky flickers with records of violence, directionless, obscene. “Then the Nemesis boarded his ship. They took him.”
“What?” Laporte stops chewing. It shocks her to imagine the Nemesis claiming a single human being. That isn’t their logic. That’s human logic.
“Yes. The Alliance had the same question.” Al-Alimah points to the sky. Jawed shadows gather on the sun, four-kilometer reapers studded with foamed neutronium. “Three days later, scouts sighted the first of eighty-six Sinadhuja world-killers converging on human space.”
The Alliance fought a harrowing retreat but the Nemesis poured after them, insane, inscrutable, an avalanche of noise. No central point of failure to target, like the single Sinadhuja in the first incursion. Nowhere for the Alliance to aim its might. It was like trying to kill a beehive with a rifle. Except that each bee, each Sinadhuja, was a match for half the Alliance fleet.
Al-Alimah flashes two peace signs at Laporte. Four stars glimmer on her fingertips: two binary stars. “The war ended in Capella. The Alliance had a colony there. They decided to hold the line long enough to evacuate.” Tiny model Sinadhuja warships climb out of the webs of her hands, jaws gaping. Like scarabs. Like sharks. “The Nemesis fleet did something to the system’s stars. Altered their orbits. It’s tempting to read it as a demonstration of power, an act of intimidation or rebuke. Except that the Nemesis never used symbolic violence before.”
Four stars roll off her fingertips and spiral down into each other. Supernova light pops, rebounds off al-Alimah’s eyes, and collapses into a pinpoint devourer. The black hole.
“A hundred million civilians.” Al-Alimah taps her two forefingers together, as if to telegraph the number. “A quarter of their fleet. All lost.”
And something more important, too. The thing you lose when you realize that victory is impossible no matter how hard you fight.
Monsters win, Laporte.
Laporte thinks about grand strategy. The Nemesis might return anywhere, at any time. The Alliance needed ships, and weapons, and brilliant science, and something to offer its citizens as proof against despair—a new victory to fight for. So the Alliance did the only thing it could. It set to work rebuilding the way home: reopening the Serpentis-Earth wormhole with Nemesis technology.
And when that home refused to join the great work, the project of human survival, the Alliance resorted to war.
“And so w
e come to now,” al-Alimah says. She leans back, as if she has discharged her duty, and drinks her wine. “Our great predicament.”
The war between an Alliance driven by exigency, by the utilitarian, amoral need for survival, and a Federation built on humane compassion, on the idea that you do the right thing no matter the circumstance. How do you fight that war, if you’re the Federation? If you can’t listen to the Alliance argument without a scream of sympathy?
You make something like NAGARI. A cadre of monsters to do what you cannot.
The sky has changed again. It’s Simms up there now. She has a face of triangles and planes, a faceted thing, and it pulls on Laporte, it engages her. Combat pilots decompose all things into geometry: threats, targets, and the potential energies between them.
“Your old Captain.” Al-Alimah looks up at her too. “We never wanted to recruit her. Too conventional.”
Laporte looks away from Simms, and voices the apocalypse option.
“If we can find some way to make the Nemesis return,” she says, “and then collapse the Earth-Serpentis wormhole again, we can let the Nemesis wipe out the Alliance and end the invasion.”
If they collapse the wormhole so the Nemesis can’t get in, then the Federation will survive. Guarded by light-years of real space. All it will cost is a few billion human lives.
Everything can go back to the way it was. Human paradise. A confined peace.
al-Alimah is still waiting. Lips curled in amusement. Gunmetal eyes infected with the blind crawling light of distant computation. “That’s just utilitarian strategy,” she says. “Doesn’t take a dream to make that connection. Tell me, Laporte, why do you think I brought you here? What endgame do you think all those terror missions were training you for?”
Ken. A childhood name for a childhood friend.
A man thought he could communicate with the Nemesis. Admiral Haywain van Aken.
Laporte puts her fork through her cheek. In the dream, it doesn’t hurt.
capella 5/8
Atreus must see the monster rising behind Laporte. Steele must see the shape of the demon she’s conjured up out of the accretion disc. The Sinadhuja world-killer is the insignia of everything the Alliance stands against. The monster in the mist. Atreus was built in hope of killing it.
Perhaps Steele will target his missiles at the Sinadhuja.
Laporte coilguns another incoming missile and it flashes into annihilation so bright her canopy has to black it out like a negative sun. And Steele keeps firing at her. Atreus keeps accelerating. If he sees the Sinadhuja he doesn’t maneuver in response.
Once Steele said, about the war, about his strategy against the Federation:
I employ overwhelming violence. Because my enemies are gentle, humane, compassionate people. Their Ubuntu philosophy cannot endure open war. And the faster I stop the war, the faster I stop the killing. So my conscience asks me to use every tool available.
And Laporte answers him. Look what you conjured up, you brilliant, ruthless bastard. Look what you made. Someone willing to use every available tool to fight back.
Once Simms said, about her wingman, about Laporte:
You’re insane. I’m glad you’re on my side.
Laporte dances between the vectors of the missiles come to kill her and when they come too close she expends her guns on them and they intersect the snarl of the tracers and die like lightning. It’s mindless, beautiful work. Like a dream. She talks to Simms:
Boss, Morrigan. It’s almost done.
Ken stirs from his deep place to save his prize.
nagari 8/10
By now it’s clear that the Federation will surrender. No conventional military action can defeat Steele’s war logic, his simulation farm, his psychological pressure, his willingness to dive past ethical crush depth.
So NAGARI plans to make contact with Nemesis.
“Send me in first,” Laporte says.
Consider semiosis—the assignment of symbols to things, and the manipulation of those symbols to communicate and predict change. That’s how intelligent life works. Build a model of the universe, test your ideas in the model, and find the best way to change the world.
Only the Nemesis don’t have any recognizable semiosis. They’re a whirlwind traversing the Lacanian desert, a fatal mirage, recognizable only by the ruin of its passage.
Until Admiral Haywain van Aken sacrificed himself. Until he somehow convinced the Nemesis to take him in.
And ever since, the Nemesis have been speaking. Or attacking. It’s hard to know.
For more than a decade the Nemesis have been broadcasting the apparition of Admiral Haywain van Aken into human minds. The Nemesis organisms communicate by direct nerve induction at a distance. Particles wormholed into the tissue of the target. (There is, of course, no possibility that the Nemesis are a product of natural evolution.)
“If they can do that,” Laporte protests, “they can just murder us all. Cook our skulls from light-years away.” Or read the brainstates of human commanders, predict everything they do, the way Laporte and Simms could predict each other.
“No. Not without van Aken.” Al-Alimah lays out NAGARI’s hypothesis: the Nemesis have no mentality. They cannot conceive of other minds to predict or destroy. Their war is algorithmic, a procedure of matter against matter, spawning tactics by mutation and chance and iterating them in the field. They never leap straight to the optimal strategy, because a smart foe predicts the optimal. Their war logic is hardened by chaos. Noise.
Van Aken is their beachhead in the land of human thought.
“He wants you,” al-Alimah says, her long fingers on Laporte’s wrist again. “You in particular are valuable to him. We want you to serve as an ambassador.”
“That’s stupid.” Laporte may be a monster but she is not some other monster’s spawn. “Are you saying I was purpose-built?”
“No. Far more likely that you were selected because you’re somehow amenable to the Nemesis.” Al-Alimah leans forward with her lips parted as if to admit her own monster secret. “Laporte, the third Nemesis incursion is already underway. Not with warships and weapons, not this time, nothing so crude. The Nemesis are attacking the command and control systems behind those assets.”
Language. Plans. People.
“What are the mission parameters?” The Alliance has control of the Sol-Serpentis wormhole. Laporte can’t just fly out to Capella. “How do we use this to save the Federation?”
Al-Alimah stands and her gown whips in the rising wind. “We drug you and mate your brain to a computer network. You will enter a traumatic dream state and communicate with van Aken—with Ken. We keep dosing you until you learn how to trigger a Nemesis attack on the Alliance. Or until you go mad.” Her gunmetal eyes, looking down at Laporte, never blink. “You will be the third attempt. There were two prior candidates. They seized apart.”
Laporte leans back in her chair and looks up at the woman.
She can be the necessary monster. She could call down genocide on the Alliance and save her beloved home. If she believes the Federation is the only hope for a compassionate, peaceful, loving future, then, logically, she should be willing to kill for it. If she has a button that says ‘kill ten billion civilians, gain utopia,’ she should press it.
She could win the war, for the memory of Simms. And Simms is dead, right? The dead can’t be ashamed.
“Okay,” Laporte says. “I’m in. I volunteer.”
They will connect her to the NAGARI dreamscape and to the salvaged corpses of Nemesis organisms from the first incursion. They will scar messages into her brain. They will wait for the Nemesis, for the ghost of Haywain van Aken, to read them and reply.
Surgeons crown her in waveguides that ram through her skull and penetrate the gyrae of her brain. Cold drug slurry pumps the length of her spine: entheogens, to tear down the barriers between Laporte’s psyche and outside stimuli. She goes under. She dreams.
simms 6/9
nagari 9/10
“Curry’s ready,” Simms says, and Laporte’s stomach growls out loud. They grin at each other. Simms looks at Laporte’s armored tooth and her grin falters just a little.
They eat their trash-cooked chicken curry side by side with their hips squashed together. Laporte tries not to jostle Simms’ ribs with her sharp little elbows. Simms crunches on a bit of bone, makes a face, and gets juice on Laporte’s buzzed hair. There is no shampoo anywhere on the ship so this is a bit of a disaster. Simms mops her up with blood cloth from the triage kit.
“Tell me why it’s bad if monsters don’t win,” Simms says, blotting at the back of her neck.
Laporte leans on her for a moment, because she adores Simms’ desire to hear this story again, especially the end. “I met Ken,” she says, “he was in the dream, and he was real. They could see him in my mind. Something triggering nerve potentials.”
She went into seizure almost instantly. The NAGARI surgeons let it happen.
Laporte stood in the garden in Tandale with the hose in her hand and pollen itching her nose. Ants crawled over her bare feet. From the house came the smell of her parents’ cooking, impatient and burnt. She looked down at herself and laughed: she was in her favorite caraval cat t-shirt.
“Ah, Miss Laporte,” Ken said. “You made it.”
She looked for him but all she could was the ants fighting, killing, generating new castes, mutating themselves into acid bombs and huge-headed tunnel plugs. “Admiral,” she said. “Is that you?”
“Delighted to speak with you again. Let me briefly outline the necessary intelligence. A short history of all life. Then we can arrange our covenant.”
Whatever Ken said to her must have been some kind of code, parasitic and adaptable, because it expressed itself as a love story. A story about Laporte and Simms.
Imagine this, Ken said, imagine a universe of Laportes and Simmses. Lorna Simms has rules. She builds communities, like her squadron, or like a network of wormholes. She takes the wildcat aces and the ne’er-do-wells, the timid and the berserk, and she teaches them all how to work together. When that work is done, Simms would like to leave you with a nice set of rules describing a world that makes sense. Simms is a Maker.