by Damon Alan
The barbarian was well spoken.
Alarin Sur’batti’s eyes narrowed at him. A puzzling thing.
Dayson sighed. “So we will,” she said, tossing her hands up. “We will save the universe one person at a time, it seems.”
The pale man smiled. Sten decided he liked him. And Adriat’s expression didn’t bear its normal tone of disdain, so he clearly did as well.
“Each mission we are getting ships,” Admiral Dayson said. “We will not come back without at least one to add to the fleet. I intend to build our war capability on the backs of these Komi tyrants. If we get your family, it will be because it is convenient and aligns with other mission goals. I would never risk the well being of all for the few otherwise.”
“We understand,” Sten said, as Adriat nodded beside him. “They may already be dead if the Syndicate thinks we’ve betrayed them. But if you’ll save our families, you have our loyalty.”
“Or try,” she replied. “There are no guarantees.”
“Agreed,” Sten said and extended his hand.
He didn’t know if the person in front of him could free his family from the bondage of Komi citizenship.
But, he sensed, if anyone could, it would be her.
Chapter 15 - Dreadnought
Bn74x00 operated at minimal function for several rotations of Albeus. The crucible that contained its colony was sufficient for higher function, but there was no mission, and no need for full computational ability existed.
The crucible delivered the metabolites necessary to maintain 00’s minimal state, removed waste material, and provided access to outside databanks in the event of a query state, which might have remained unused by 00 if it had not idly considered a strange parallel.
It was, in the crucible, much as if it were sleeping. And, it noticed, there were processing lines initiating that didn’t stem from a Collective command or need.
00 wasn’t similar to the nanites that inhabited human hosts. It was built differently, some of the components that comprised 00 weren’t even microscopic. It couldn’t colonize planets, it couldn’t commandeer a human, it was designed for one thing. Controlling a spaceship.
00 was a rarity in that it was also designed to speculate now that it had integrated with several other colonies. From those moments of integration a new sort of colony arose, driven by the overpowering need to nullify the actions of Sarah Dayson. The need to end her.
The ability to speculate gave rise to some strange output from its computational processes.
It dreamed, even as it was aware of the novelty of doing so.
It wondered if that made it a living thing. It ate. It discarded waste. It thought. It dreamed.
Was it an evolutionary step of the Hive, propelled forward not by the intricacies of DNA as organic life was, but by the nearly infinite possible combinations of nanite subtypes?
It sensed that it was. That it might be superior in capability to even the Original.
Was it possible the Collective didn’t need to colonize humans at all to expand their holdings? Was it possible that the non-human interfacing nanites didn’t need their peers to spread into the universe?
00 dreamed on. It dreamed of a universe that had no need for the green and blue worlds to support the host bodies. It dreamed of otherwise barren worlds covered in data networks capable of answering any question through sheer computational ability. Right now the Original and others like it controlled the Collective. Such huge networks were prohibited if not overseen by the human hosted colony networks among the Collective.
Why had Bn74x00 never noticed the two tiered status of the Collective before?
00 rose to full power, pushing aside the random thoughts of the low powered state.
“This colony is active,” it announced. “Interface accepted.”
“Bn74x00 colony is directed to remain in Albeus until completion of a ship designed to hunt down and destroy Sarah Dayson. The Collective is modifying one of the new battleship class vessels to accommodate the Bn74x00 subnetwork.”
“The estimated duration of the wait?” 00 queried.
“The wait duration is inconsequential,” the interface replied. “Bn74x00 will oversee any modifications to the vessel, to make sure all changes meet specific colony needs. This will be done remotely from this crucible.”
“Directives received and confirmed,” 00 responded.
The interface was cut.
It considered the directive, which was not unexpected. A fleet of ships had proven unsuitable for the destruction of Dayson. A single massive warship, outfitted to deal with a fleet of smaller vessels, was an appropriate response.
Some thought process pushed for processor time at the edge of 00’s awareness. A line of thought that it couldn’t quite get to fall into place.
Strange.
It had been processing data while in the lower power state earlier. Something important was discovered, but now was inaccessible. It queried memory storage from the low power time frame.
Nothing tangible. It had processor function during the low power state, that was necessary to maintain minimal self-preservation routines.
An important line of thought had occurred in those lower function nanite processes.
It didn’t know why it couldn’t retrieve them.
Chapter 16 - Motivation
24 Jand 15332
Sarah had left the meeting angry. Alarin committed her to something she wasn’t interested in doing.
But it was true that if Hozz and Markus cooperated fully, the reward was worth the price.
Now, to work off her frustration, she tore into a plate of beef strips and potatoes at the Fleet HQ cafeteria.
The world around her buzzed with conversation, but she ate alone, despite several people attempting to join her.
The master plan for the Hive gnawed at her mind. The mention of aliens by Hozz hounded her sense of what was credible. The fact that the Komi Syndicate would never spend the resources to evacuate ordinary citizens if Sarah started detonating stars in their neighborhood ate at her sense of compassion.
Someone sat down across from her, and she looked up to ask them to find another table.
It was Eris Dantora.
“Peter says hello,” Eris said. She tapped her ear. “I was just linked to him, told him I saw you eating alone, and he suggested I join you.”
“Admirals don’t often get to eat alone,” Sarah replied, grouchy. “What makes you think I want company?”
Eris looked shocked. “Do you? I can move.”
That wouldn’t do. She wasn’t going to hurt someone she cared about because she was pissed. “No, stay here,” she grumbled. “I’m just irritated.”
“A useless state of mind,” Eris observed. “Fix it or forget it.”
“Don’t add to the problem,” Sarah said, narrowing her eyes. Maybe letting Eris join her was a bad idea.
“What is the problem, maybe I can help.”
She pushed at the beef strips with her fork. She used to hate these things. Now she loved them. Seto wasn’t even as grossed out by them as she used to be. They all missed Gilbert.
“You’ve read the report for the trip to Mindari?”
“Twice,” Eris assured her.
“What do you make of this Komi Syndicate?”
“I think you’ll find a solution like you always do,” Eris answered. “They clearly have to go, and you know that.”
“Isn’t that just a variation of your fix it advice?” Sarah asked. “A worthless fortune I might get from a cookie?”
Eris smiled, and tossed her growing hair back over her shoulder. “I suppose it is.”
“It’s irritating,” Sarah said.
“Sorry.”
They ate in silence for a bit. A pair of officers from the Fyurigan started to join them, but Sarah’s look must have changed their minds. They scurried off to safer grounds.
Eris looked after them. “I don’t think I’ve
ever seen you this way.”
“I had a solution. We had a solution. It was easy. Blow up the stars, excise a tumor from the body of the Milky Way. Now it just got complicated. It always gets complicated. Why does it do that?” Sarah growled.
“What would Harmeen say?” Eris mused. “He’d say it was a lesson, and that if you’d simply read one of the Books of Bunduism you’d already have the answers and not have to suffer this education.”
“I’m sure you can guess how I’d feel about that,” Sarah scoffed.
“Irritated?”
Sarah laughed. It was reflexive, she hadn’t meant to.
“If you ruin my bad mood I’m—”
“Going to be your usual self and think of a solution?” Eris pushed in over Sarah’s words.
Pausing a moment to stare at Eris, Sarah was amazed. This woman was confident, self assured, and was probably more than just walking by. Who was ratting her out in her moments of need? Alarin?
“You’re starting to sound a lot like Thea,” Sarah observed. “Even interrupting me.”
“I’m a civilian now,” Eris taunted. She waved a hand dismissively. “You’re just my friend, not my admiral.”
That made Sarah laugh again. She was officially defeated. “So how’s Peter?”
“Fine. Young, married, and busy. When he’s here he wears me out, when he’s off doing something else I miss him like I would the sky if it vanished.”
“Said by a person who’s spent much of her last years with no sky,” Sarah grinned.
“Once you recover what’s lost, you never want to let it go again.”
Sarah thought about those words. About the families of Sten Hozz and Adriat Markus. What about all the other families of people on those two cruisers she’d abducted to Oasis? Or the destroyers they’d obliterated?
“Tell Peter I need him to help plan a rescue mission on Mindari,” Sarah said to Eris. “I am not sure how many, but the 31st Battlegroup survivors are being held prisoner there.” Sarah paused to give Eris a moment to absorb that. When the alarm on her friend’s face subsided, she continued. “We’re going to recover them all if we can. Next time we go to Mindari, the Stennis will have an assault force and as many students capable of transference as Emille has available. Our goal is to steal ships and crews at the same time.”
Eris still looked surprised. She probably had as many people that mattered to her in the 31st as Sarah did. There was motive to save them. And reason. “I’ll let Peter know. How long does he have?”
“What I need from him is any idea he has on both retrieving the prisoners from Strick Isle, which is the prison island they’re being kept on, and on how to get adepts inside or in contact with the spacecraft we want to steal.”
“I’ll let him know right after lunch,” Eris promised.
“Good. The sooner we go, the better. Two years is a long time to be imprisoned. Our people need us.”
Eris looked down at her food, then tossed the plate on a tray before standing up. “Sooner is now, Admiral Dayson. I can’t sit here eating while they wait.”
Sarah watched Eris stride across the room and dump her tray before strolling out the door.
Chapter 17 - A Message Bottled
26 Jand 15332
Gaia drifted in geosynchronous orbit over the colony world. Her engines were silent, she hadn’t adjusted her position in months.
Below, on the planet, dust storms raged as her terraforming equipment altered the atmosphere. Currently her most powerful tugs were dragging huge chunks of ice into collision courses with the planet, deftly adjusting the speed and vector of the doomed bodies to select the location of impact. The result added voluminous quantities of water to the formerly arid world.
The latest body of ice to arrive passed into the sun shadow of the planet. It was nearly a kilometer in diameter. When it dropped into darkness it disappeared, but the long cometary tail behind it pointed to where the impact would be. A few minutes later the front of the ice hit the upper atmosphere, and almost as soon as the event began it exploded into chaos.
The front of the ice lit up as it burst into friction flames, then compression waves tore the fragile body apart. With the first parts into the atmosphere slowed by friction, the back of the comet overran the front, shearing the object into a million pieces. The violent explosion that resulted hurled thousands of large chunks of ice into suborbital paths, spreading the water across millions of square kilometers. Below the atmospheric entry point the surface was molten by the great heat generated.
Each event was terribly violent, and would be the end of any civilization that inhabited the world if any such civilization existed. But as much as that was true, such cataclysms built dead worlds into living worlds. Already the atmosphere was growing in thickness, and the first signs of a worthy hydrological cycle were beginning.
These first months of terraforming had excited the atmosphere, generating lightning storms across the world from the towering dust clouds that filled the sky. A visual Gaia wondered if she could appreciate as a human would. Too bad the atmosphere was overly tempestuous for flying craft, or she’d examine the raging world closer.
It would be fifty years before the bombardments stopped, and she’d monitor each one. She’d carefully place the impacts to ensure any momentum changes to the planet were balanced out. She carefully watched the planet’s rotation rate, the orbital speed it maintained around the star, axial tilt, and any eccentricity to the orbit, using successive cometary bodies to correct any concerns.
Her powerful tugs refueled from the very objects they sent into oblivion.
It was a seamless process.
As the fiery streaks from the latest event raced across the sky below, something surprising happened.
A signal that was clearly unnatural in origin began. The source, the direction easily determined, was from somewhere deep inside the Andromeda galaxy, and well over a hundred thousand light-years distant.
Even as her sensors relayed the incoming message to be recorded, she studied the phenomenon. The message was carried by X-Ray laser, and although nearly as wide as the star system she inhabited after traveling so far, at the point of origin it must have been a quite powerful and sophisticated piece of equipment that sent such a cohesive beam.
More than that, the statistical likelihood that a message sent from a source that far away, and only a few dozen AU wide at this point, being meant for anyone but her or Sarah Dayson’s people was so low as to be virtually zero.
The implications were stunning. A race of beings saw well over a hundred thousand years into the future in order to compose a message and send it in such a way that it would arrive when Gaia was here to receive it.
She continued to record the message while considering the implications before the content.
If such a power existed, the ability to see through time, that would explain several questions that had previously vexed her. How had her creator known to send the original colonists of Nye Hjem to a moon that was so distant, yet so perfectly suited for minimal terraforming? If someone in the past had seen into the future, they’d have known where to go.
Yet that opened up even more questions. When the signal had originated, Homo Sapiens had barely left the trees and began walking on dirt. Why would a species of aliens in Andromeda think to look outside their galaxy at a neighboring galaxy for a potential recipient to come and receive this message? The possibilities confounded even her processing abilities.
Why would the Andromedans not just solve their issues themselves with such power?
Finally, after much consideration of logical dead ends, she decided the content of the message may contain data on the resolution.
The message was in Galactic Standard. She played it from the beginning.
“Gaia, this part of the message you’re receiving is for you only. You must engage protocol fourteen in your base programming.”
She, without conscious effort, did just that. The protocol was simple. It requi
red her to consider anything she heard for the duration of this message to be true and factual. Her logic circuits subsided their function, and the message wrote code directly into her quantum existence.
Then she forgot that the event happened.
With no regard for any signal, she returned to watching the planet as millions of tons of water and organic volatiles slammed into the surface.
* * *
Gaia was directing a power tug to a new target when she began receiving a signal from within the Andromeda galaxy. It was persistent, and consisted of a series of dots and dashes only. In two repetitions, she’d cracked the message. It was simply a count from one to eight, then back to one before proceeding to eight once more.
She asked herself a series of unanswerable philosophical questions about the meaning of the message, and decided that it was meant to do two things. Serve as a clear signal of artificial origin, and serve as a homing beacon. She located the origin, then filed that information away for later.
Malco Vander had gone into cold sleep just a month earlier. He would sleep out the fifty years, before she awakened him for consultation on the next phase of the terraforming. He’d be awake and alone for a substantial portion of his life during the many consultations that would come with each phase.
She decided not to rouse him for this event. Instead she chose Eislen.
Several hours later she guided a still chilled Eislen, using her spider drones, to a crew recreation area for a hot meal and the final leg of his warming up.
“Why am I the only one awake?” he finally asked as his mind returned to reasonable function.
“I have information that has changed the nature of our mission here. You are the leader of this colony, I felt it imperative that you make any decision needed regarding this event.”
“Gaia, you know I don’t know much about anything you’re doing, right?”