Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  She had arrived during one of the scheduled playtimes – no great surprise as some group or other were usually at it. Her pod passed over swathes of well-kept lawn where hundreds of adults engaged in flash-mob yoga exercises with ever-changing routines or played complex games of tag. Floating game-boards displayed multivariate scores and whimsical updates on the action. As always, Ann felt something a little forced in all that state-supported fun.

  The new Galatea was not a relaxed society, though it worked hard at keeping itself a functional one. The planet had finally incorporated all the immigrant groups from Earth that it had been forced to absorb after war broke out with the Photes. They’d demolished every pernicious sect division and reduced crime to practically zero. These days, religious congregation was both a duty and a paid leisure activity with hefty bonuses for creative faith-making. Nobody took it seriously.

  Though there was a lot to admire, Ann found the new Galatean society alienating. But through her connection to Poli Najoma’s family, she felt like she at least had a link to the younger generation on this world. That was one reason why she’d thrown in her lot with the Galateans. She felt she understood their values at some level, and at the very least could acknowledge that the social changes they’d implemented were better than the alternative. If your society didn’t stay flexible and cohesive, the Photes found your weaknesses and exploited them. Before you knew what had happened, your planet wound up serving the blindly self-replicatory urge of invasive alien bacteria.

  Ann’s pod followed a track that led into the tiered hillscape on the far side of the valley and through another long expanse of granite. It eventually deposited her at an anonymous meeting space embedded deep within the planet’s crust. She stepped out into the entry vestibule and spat into the bowl by the door. When the light turned green, she passed through the seal. On the other side, Ann washed her hands with her biofilm gloves still on, as politeness required. Galatea was big into washing. And big into gloves, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances.

  The room beyond featured artificial daylight delivered through false skylights, a sunken conversation pit decorated in soft greys and wrap-around wall-panels. As usual for such meetings, those panels showed agitation patterns – a kind of twitching geometric art that nobody exactly liked but which Photes couldn’t stand.

  A girl of about eighteen was waiting for her there. She had a button nose, a rose-tinted buzz cut and a crisp green uniform. Ann’s boss had been changed again, she noticed. This new one was very young. Though she’d have full voting and command rights, Ann couldn’t help but think of her as a kid. Being in your seventies tended to have that effect. In her weaker moments, Ann was forced to admit that she missed having a boss she admired, such as Ira Baron. But those days were never coming back.

  ‘Captain Ludik,’ said the girl, gesturing at the couches. ‘Wow, it’s an honour. Amazing to meet you in person.’ She bounced on her toes. ‘Please, sit down. You can call me Kathy.’

  Kathy wouldn’t be her real name, but the girl delivered the line with the kind of chipper, indestructible confidence Ann had come to expect. All the Autocratic Academy graduates had it.

  The Academy was the pool of high-achieving youth who collectively made top-level decisions for the New Society. These days, executive roles were exclusively given to young people who lacked bias or irrational attachment. Each of them ruled unilaterally like a global dictator. Subsequently, their decisions were aggregated and filtered by an ecology of SAPs engaged in permanent, ferocious competition. The emergent consensus was distributed as martial law. Those who passed their term in the Academy without a strategic failure graduated to some lower, less stressful position. Those who did not found themselves in an different line of work, often after partial memory erasure.

  Ann had long ago stopped being surprised by the age gaps, but the oddness of the set-up still vexed her. She couldn’t help feeling that all these hard-eyed girls and boys she met were losing something by ruling a world before they’d even known love. Behind that unflinching iron will, something tragic surely lurked, even if Ann was never allowed to see it.

  ‘This is a big moment for me,’ said Kathy as Ann sat. ‘I have to deal with high-impact stuff all the time but to actually be in the same room as Ann Ludik? To be the one who gets to have this briefing with you? That’s hyper.’ She shook her head as if amazed at her own good fortune.

  Ann felt unmoved by the girl’s excitement. Fame had never sat well with her. Her role in human history hadn’t exactly been glorious. A long time ago, she’d been part of a conspiracy – a foolish one. They’d been trying to head off a war by faking attacks by another species. They’d achieved that by making reckless use of technology they didn’t understand which they’d found out at the Far Frontier. Then they’d watched in horror when the tame-looking tech they’d resurrected had fused with the people it was fighting to take on a life of its own. The rest was history.

  Ann’s job in the notorious Rumfoord League had been to distract humanity’s only superbeing: Will Monet. Once a lowly roboteer, Will had been changed during humanity’s first alien contact when the ancient Transcended race opened up the Far Frontier to human access. The enigmatic aliens charged Will with responsibility for delivering their terms to the human race and empowered him accordingly. He’d since become a self-appointed guardian of the species. Sadly for Will, that role had left him with all the responsibility but little power to influence except through brute force. By the time Ann had gone to work on him, he was already desperately lonely and easy to manipulate.

  In the end, Will had sacrificed himself trying to stop the monstrous hybrid race Ann’s people had spawned. His last act before being swallowed by the alien world they’d abused was to save Ann’s life and transfer his powers to her. Now she was the superbeing. The unkillable machine. The lonely monster. She had Will’s ship, Will’s skills and Will’s voice in her head for company until the day the enemy finally took her. She’d been fighting ever since. To her mind, fame was part of the punishment. Because, by rights, the fame was Will’s, too.

  ‘I’m glad you’re pleased,’ said Ann briskly. ‘It’s nice to meet you. Forgive me for asking, but why are we meeting? I take it you’ve seen my report. My memory dumps were exhaustive. There’s nothing I can add.’

  ‘I’ve seen the report,’ said Kathy, ‘but that’s not what we’re here for. I’m here to talk about your new assignment, not your performance on the last one.’

  Ann blinked. ‘You mean the relocation project?’

  ‘You’re not working on that any more. We need you for something else.’

  Ann stood up, her throat tightening. ‘You can’t redeploy me. I was given assurances.’

  She’d been slated to manage the Earth Two Project and had made promises on that basis. It was the first time in years that she’d been able to secure a work advantage for Poli. She and the whole Najoma family would be coming with her to the new site, where Poli’s environmental-management skills could finally be properly used.

  Ann had been looking for ways to help the Najoma family since the start of the war. One of her first acts after her transformation on Snakepit had been to send her ship’s engineer, Kuril Najoma, on the mission that had killed him. When she’d belatedly discovered that the man had a daughter, she’d done everything in her power to fix that damage. Poli had grown up never quite knowing what to do with Ann’s urgent desire to help, but they’d eventually become close. Now Poli had two kids of her own and was stuck in a job she disliked. Ann had seen a chance to make a difference and leapt at it. It was the first thing besides cleaning that she’d cared about in years.

  ‘Is this a punishment?’ said Ann.

  ‘Captain Ludik, please,’ said Kathy with a laugh. She rolled her eyes like a teenager. ‘You know we don’t do punishment. We examine opportunities. Relax.’ She gestured for Ann to sit. ‘There won’t be an Earth Two for a while. We’re still tracking down the new spy network Ambassador Shue s
tarted, which changes the timeline for everything else.’

  ‘No Earth Two?’ said Ann, slumping into her seat. ‘I don’t get it. What are you going to do with all those people? They have to live somewhere.’

  ‘That’s not your problem,’ said Kathy. ‘Given the situation, I’m sure you can figure out why you’re not going to be involved in any interim planning.’

  ‘Because I was targeted,’ said Ann. Grim understanding settled over her. Her own actions had disqualified her from the one project she cared about.

  ‘That’s right. You and the Gulliver team finally developed weaknesses the Photes can exploit.’

  Ann blushed for the first time in about twenty years. She didn’t need Kathy to spell it out. She’d become a liability. Something creaked inside her like an enormous weight shifting.

  ‘But don’t sweat it,’ said Kathy. ‘Every thrust reveals a weakness, right? The Earth extraction yielded gobs of useful data. For starters, there’s enough evidence here that we can be certain of a new surge.’

  That was huge news. ‘Are you sure?’ said Ann.

  ‘Absolutely. The cost-benefit models are clear. The mutant strain Shue brought aboard your ship must have come at an outrageous price for the Photes. You know how slow they are to mutate. They can suck up material and strategies from foreign biospheres in hours, but always by breaking down and recoding the content. Their molecular architecture doesn’t change. At least, not the way we’ve seen in your samples from Lieutenant Twebo. Our best guess is that they most likely dumped thousands of ex-human hosts into a habitat filled with stolen cultures of your weaponised smart-cells and waited to see if any of them survived. And that must have taken them years. Just stealing the material out of our labs would have been hard enough. The Photes don’t throw bodies at a project like that unless they’re up to something. But, for the obvious reasons, you can’t be a part of the main thrust of our response.’

  Ann spread her hands. ‘Then what in Gal’s name do you expect me to do? I’m still the best weapon you have.’

  ‘I’m glad you asked,’ said Kathy brightly. ‘We’re going to follow up on Captain Ruiz’s plan to traverse Backspace.’

  Ann’s face froze. ‘You what?’

  Mark’s plan had been a joke in strategy circles for years.

  ‘Think about it,’ said Kathy, ignoring the look of cold alarm building in Ann’s eyes. ‘It’s just about the best thing you could do for us right now.’

  Mark had submitted the plan years ago and never shut up about it since. In essence, it proposed that the Galatean forces make an end run around Phote-occupied space to access Snakepit from the far side. Once at Snakepit, they’d be in a position to either boser the surface, or, perhaps more usefully, wake the world to activity on behalf of the human race.

  All previous missions to access Snakepit had run afoul of Phote blockades. That part of space was fiercely defended. Consequently, nobody had reached the place since the start of the war. However, intelligence gathered from the interrogation of Phote prisoners made it clear that the Utopia didn’t have access to it, either.

  Furthermore, Photurian goals hinged on one day finding the strength to retake the planet from whatever defensive system Will Monet’s last acts had spawned there. Psych-warfare specialists had speculated that losing their erstwhile homeworld might cripple the Photurian race so badly that their will to fight might simply vanish.

  In its intent, then, Mark’s plan made total sense. There were just one or two tiny wrinkles that made success unlikely. The first was that Snakepit was on a different galactic shell. Warp-drive only permitted superluminal velocities at tangents to the galactic hub, which meant that star systems only a few light-years further in or out from the core than Galatea were effectively unreachable without a gate. And the human race only ever had access to one gate, which these days was blocked by the Photes.

  To get around this problem, Mark’s plan called for the use of a second gate – one that had been identified through careful astronomical surveys. And therein lay the other problem. That gate lay on the other side of a vast swathe of space known as the Depleted Zone where warp engines didn’t work. This made the shortest straight crossing something measured in centuries.

  ‘We’ve been mapping the Alpha Flaw in the Depleted Zone for years,’ said Kathy. ‘Ever since Rachel Bock got lost in it. You may not know this, but it’s been growing.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’ Ann snapped. ‘Flaws are death traps.’

  Ever since the discovery that the Zone was not a uniform wall and that cracks of a sort existed in it, people had tried to sneak through to explore the other side. Will Monet’s wife, Rachel Bock, had been one of the first explorers to try, and certainly the most famous. Her loss had convinced almost everyone that it wasn’t doable.

  These days, people considered the Depleted Zone as much an alien artefact as the Penfield Lobe gates. No evidence existed, but the presence of a dead, impenetrable barrier hundreds of light-years wide smacked of Transcended involvement. It also helped convince most that even trying to break through the boundary wasn’t a great idea. The Transcended had a nasty habit of obliterating races they didn’t like, as they had the poor Fecund a mere ten million years ago.

  ‘This isn’t public knowledge,’ said Kathy, ‘but we’ve been pretty sure we could make it through the Zone for the last couple of years. It just hasn’t been super high on our priority stack. It’s a cost-intensive operation and risking new existential threats at a time like this hasn’t seemed awesome. Plus, our best candidates for that mission have always been out fighting. But now you’re free!’

  Kathy tried for a look of optimistic exuberance, but all Ann could see on those perky features was the cold, appraising intelligence that lay behind them.

  ‘We can’t use you in our primary fightback, so this is a great fit. Plus, you’re a product of the adventuring age. This is naturally the kind of mission that you and Mark are best at – one where huge asymmetrical talents can really make a difference.’

  The subtext couldn’t have been clearer. She and Mark were dinosaurs – poorly suited to fighting an enemy that gamed every individual weakness. The human race was shedding its heroes for the same reason it had dumped all its charismatic senior leaders: because they were more trouble than they were worth. This time, though, they weren’t waiting for disaster to strike. One near miss was enough.

  ‘I don’t want to turn tail and go exploring,’ said Ann bitterly. ‘I have a purpose, and that’s to fight.’

  ‘But you will be helping us fight,’ said Kathy, her tone meaningful. She waited for Ann to join the dots.

  Ann opened her mouth and closed it as she saw the whole picture. There could only be one real reason to pursue a mission like Mark’s now, given its shockingly low viability scores: to draw Phote attention. The Photes had targeted her, so Galatea was going to use that and turn her into bait.

  ‘You’re sending me to die,’ said Ann quietly. After all she’d done for the human race, it hurt.

  ‘No, we’re sending you on a risky mission, like we always have,’ said Kathy. ‘It’s just that this time you’ll be the feint rather than the thrust because that’s the only option left. And if that feint pays off, then yay! Because we’ve picked one with side benefits.’ Of course they had. The Autocratic Academy was nothing if not efficient in their deployment of resources.

  Ann sagged. Galatea clearly had their own plans which couldn’t include her. And neither she nor Mark would be told what they were. She could ignore the order, of course. As the most powerful person in human space, she had more bio-threat capacity in one hand than Sharptown had in its phage-banks. Nobody could make her do anything. But that wouldn’t convince the Galateans to change tack. She’d just isolate herself, much as Mark had.

  She almost said, You need me, but knew it wasn’t true. After the Suicide War, the Galatean government had made sure that nobody was indispensable – not even her. Plus she knew that a lot of youn
ger people considered her and her peers tainted by what they’d done in that conflict. It had just been a matter of time before they found a way to slide her out of the picture.

  Now that she thought about it, she’d been surprised that the Fleet had given Mark and herself the job of managing such a high-profile mission as the Earth evacuation in the first place. With a precipitous sense of uncertainty, she began to wonder if the Academy had engineered the whole thing.

  ‘Look,’ said Kathy, ‘let me lay it straight. We need you on this. We’re losing, Ann. Unless we can take the heat off and dump Earth’s population soon, we’ll be dead in the water. Four colonies is below even the optimistic model estimates for species survival. Those people need to be moved fast. But a mission like this with you on it? That’d be impossible for us to keep secret. It’d flush those spies right out. We’d get value from your involvement before you even left port. Now, of course, you’re not an ordinary officer, so I can’t have you killed if you refuse, which makes our treatment of you kind of unfair. But we’ll be very disappointed. And worse, we’ll have to find someone who’ll pretend to be you. They’ll be less qualified. They’ll probably die. And without your strengths, the whole feint will probably fail. Those thirty mil you rescued? They’ll be dead anyway.’

  Ann felt empty. She stared at the far wall. ‘When you put it that way,’ she said, ‘how can I refuse? But I’ll need time to explain things to some friends.’

  ‘The Najoma family have been informed,’ said Kathy. ‘They’re offworld already.’

  Ann shut her eyes. The rest of the rug had already been pulled from under her, apparently.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Can I leave them a message?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Kathy. ‘So long as you don’t reveal any planetary secrets. You can use this room’s network after I’ve gone. I take it we have your consent to proceed to the next steps?’