Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  ‘How do you like it when it’s your turn to be husked, motherfucker?’ she crooned. ‘You like that? That’s what you people did to some very good friends of mine. God, you people even put the fucking brains of children into starships. I’ve waited a long time to do this to one of you.’

  The truth, though, was that the ambush felt less satisfying and more morally greasy than she’d originally envisaged. She could only imagine what Ira would make of her actions. But it was too late. She was committed now and still needed a ticket out.

  Ten minutes later, Ann had finished making her Phote-zombies. They stood there motionless, ready for use, their weird Photey emotions silenced to inaudible, introspective screams. She’d also rebooted the shuttle a couple of times and managed to pollute its software enough that it wouldn’t take off without her say-so.

  What had amazed her during the entire process was that the shuttle didn’t appear to be wired into the Phote collective supermind. They all used to be. If this was some new loosely coupled security set-up, it wasn’t very good. This entire crew had been piss-easy to subvert. Not so much a glorious crusade as the mewling remnants of one.

  Ann marched her zombies down the slope to where the drone brain she’d excavated lay waiting and made them pick it up for her.

  ‘You see that?’ she said. ‘You’re going to help me take one of your precious brains back to my ship so I can rip it apart, piece by piece. Does that make you feel joyous and useful? I do hope so!’

  The zombies had no voices with which to reply. Instead, they carried the brain back up the slope on her behalf, all the way to her new ride. At the same time, she signalled the shuttle and instructed it to ping Mark to let him know she was on her way. Overall, Ann was satisfied with the outcome, but somehow no longer felt like humming.

  10.3: MARK

  When Ann’s message arrived in Mark’s sensorium, he took a moment to fill helm-space with his anger.

  ‘What in the name of Furious Fuck am I supposed to do?’ he bellowed. ‘Go back and pick her up because now she’s ready? Like a sect-princess coming home from a goddamned float party?’

  Of course that was what he was going to do, and she knew it. Mark shot a furious glance at Palla. She smirked at him and shrugged, apparently delighted by his outrage.

  ‘Them’s the breaks, I guess,’ she offered brightly.

  Mark shook his head. He was going to need to distract the Photes even more thoroughly than he already had otherwise picking up Ann would be impossible. He was pretty sure he cared more about that than she did, but he refused to let her die just because she so obviously wanted to.

  He checked the struggling Diggory. Rachel’s old scout was accelerating away from four Phote craft that had engaged pursuit while the other ships consolidated their hold on the biosphere world.

  Mark had been so proud of the fact that they hadn’t followed him. The Dantes was forty kilometres wide. Even with its cloak active, it wasn’t easy to hide. You couldn’t really conceal a starship’s mass at this range, particularly when it kept jack-hammering local space with warp-bursts.

  ‘How am I supposed to distract them this time?’ Mark demanded of helm-space.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Palla. ‘Argue with them, maybe? Point at something and say look?’

  With disgust, Mark plotted a course back to Ann’s anticipated rendezvous point. He targeted his furthest relay drone on tight-beam and squeezed a new submind into it. This copy wasn’t like the usual sketches of his identity that he used to run machines. It had as close a mapping to his language centres as he could synthesise at a moment’s notice.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I’m actually taking your joke suggestion. I can’t think of anything else. I’m going to shout at them. That’ll have to do.’

  He had no idea what he could say that would distract dozens of Photurian gunships simultaneously. He just knew he needed to.

  Judj chimed up from the shuttle. ‘I have something that might help,’ he said. He still sounded half-dead from his escape but managed to offer up a memory download of his research findings from the planet.

  Mark grabbed the icon out of helm-space’s virtual air the moment it appeared and swallowed it. He smiled darkly as new knowledge unfurled in his brain.

  With a little renewed optimism, he buffered up all the vitriol he could muster, squirted it into his tailored submind and let it speak for him while he flew. There was no way he’d be able to keep up a real-time dialogue using his own brain without giving the Photes enough data to pinpoint his position through the varying delay times. As it was, the light-lag between replies in any ship-to-ship conversation was going to be measured in tens of seconds.

  ‘Hey, Photurians, glad you could join us,’ said Mark’s drone replica over the public channel. ‘This is Captain Mark Ruiz of the GSS Edmond Dantes. It’s great that you’ve come all the way out here to hang with us. Shame it had to be to stare at a dead world. A fucking graveyard. I mean, that’s got to hurt, right? But it’s interesting, isn’t it? It makes me wonder. All those promises you make about everlasting love and happiness – they look kind of like bullshit now, don’t you think? As if everything you ever told us was just one big dirty lie.’

  Even though it was a copy of him speaking, Mark found articulating his opinions to the enemy absurdly satisfying. How ironic that when he finally had a chance to tell them how he felt, it wasn’t exactly him doing it.

  ‘This isn’t going to work,’ said Palla.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  The Photes didn’t talk except to advertise. He expected no reply from the swarm-mind, so was startled when he got one.

  ‘Captain Ruiz!’ came a woman’s voice. She sounded hoarse, as if she’d been shouting too much recently. ‘What did you do to the homeworld?’

  Mark blinked in confusion. This voice was very far from the tailored messages he was used to hearing. It was clotted with raw and surprisingly human-sounding emotion.

  ‘Wow. I was so wrong,’ said Palla.

  Mark held his breath, desperately hoping his submind had enough smarts to bluff. He hurriedly sent it a fresh update as he brought his ship around, even though he knew that it’d reply seconds before his edits reached it.

  ‘Who am I speaking to, please?’ said Mark’s replica. ‘How can we have a proper conversation unless you’re capable of adhering to even the most basic inter-ship communication standards?’

  Mark guffawed. Thank the heavens for machines’ love of clear information.

  ‘I am Nada Rien,’ said the Phote, ‘but my name is irrelevant. I command. What did you do to the homeworld? I order you to reply honestly!’

  ‘What did I do to it?’ said Mark’s replica. ‘Why do you want to know what I did? Can’t you figure it out for yourself?’

  Mark laughed out loud. Score one for the Ruiz-patented automated chatbot. Maybe he should always use a SAP to have arguments on his behalf.

  ‘This is great, but they’re not moving yet,’ said Palla.

  She sent him a map of the Photurian fleet positions. Besides entertaining him, his distraction engine was having little effect. It certainly wasn’t clearing a return vector for the Dantes.

  ‘We need something else,’ she added.

  Mark ordered the relay drone to commence a very visible set of warp-manoeuvres.

  ‘If you want to know what I did, you’ll have to catch me first,’ his replica said.

  That was a little better. There were a couple of ships following his bait now. Mark primed the drone to self-destruct and readied his second relay to continue the conversation. He updated his conversation model accordingly.

  He used the convergence of Phote ships and the torrent of g-ray fire they poured on the little drone to shield his own course-correction as he slid back into an elliptical capture path for Ann’s shuttle. Then he kicked the second relay into chat mode.

  ‘You know what I think you offer?’ said his replica. ‘I don’t think it’s peace. I think it’s death. And
you? You’re nothing but an undead junkie, living off squirts of pleasure meted out by a clutch of parasitic germs.’

  ‘We are neither dead nor addicts!’ Nada shouted back.

  Mark’s eyebrows went up at the weird vehemence behind his adversary’s words. Apparently, he’d struck a nerve.

  ‘We are what you will be when you grow up!’ she went on. Her ships pivoted, seeking out the second drone. ‘Are you actually incapable of seeing what we have that you lack? We have harmony. We have unity. We have purpose! We do not bicker or steal or fight. We do not perpetrate injustices or crimes!’

  ‘Neither do we,’ said the replica. ‘In case you didn’t notice, the human race hasn’t had crime problems for decades. There have been no murders on Galatea for one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight days. There have been no robberies on Galatea for—’

  ‘Only because you are constantly challenged by something better than yourselves!’ Nada yelled.

  Mark winced at his double’s slide into precision facting, but Nada didn’t appear to spot it. She was either too blind or too wound up to spot the slip, presuming she even cared.

  ‘You live in pointless turmoil while we are happy!’ she said.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘No!’ Nada insisted. ‘We are always happy! You claim to want happiness, but you avoid it when we try to help you!’

  ‘If you’re always happy, it’s not happiness, is it?’ said Mark’s replica. This was an impressive piece of insight for a submind SAP, but sometimes artificial minds managed to surprise.

  ‘Can you not conceive of a state in which joy is everlasting and impervious?’ said Nada.

  ‘No. Because that’s not joy.’

  ‘I AM FEELING IT AND IT IS JOY!’ Nada shouted.

  The second drone exploded in a burst of coordinated fire.

  Mark closed on Ann’s rendezvous point and grabbed the vehicle he found there as he whipped past. He didn’t slow to reduce impact speed. His receiver bay lit up with warnings as a shuttle slammed through its impact netting like so much cobweb and buried itself in the aerofoam wall. A normal human would have been instantly pulped by such an arrival. Ann, he suspected, would just receive some of the uncomfortable bruises she deserved.

  ‘Ludik!’ he barked at the shuttle.

  ‘Pickup acknowledged,’ said Ann coolly.

  Mark shut the channel and yelled names at her.

  ‘You may not be designed for joy but that does not mean you cannot be made to have it!’ Nada proclaimed. ‘What is wrong with you that you cannot accept joy when it is offered and proven? What is wrong with yearning for unity and Total Love?’

  Mark fired off a third drone prepped with more pithy responses. The drone was dangerously close to their hull when it made its first reply. Mark cursed. In his anger, he’d failed to add a suitable delay to the release time.

  ‘Because it’s a fucking lie!’ his new replica said. ‘Because if you have to force it via surgery, it’s not real!’

  ‘Mark, I think we’ve been spotted,’ said Palla. ‘That launch was a little obvious.’

  Mark groaned to himself as he watched the Photes close on his position. One moment of hot-headedness was all it took. Nada had used his own ruse against him.

  ‘It is real, Captain Ruiz!’ said Nada. ‘I am always happy and I always love everyone. That makes you the liar. And now I know where you really are!’

  Mark felt the brush of a g-ray grater-grid searching for bounces off his shield and desperately tried to think of another angle in the seconds he had left. Then a fresh update from the Diggory arrived. Amazingly, the old ship wasn’t dead yet. Seventy per cent of its primary systems had failed due to energy-weapon assault, but the damned thing was still flying.

  Mark sent it a fresh upload. He retargeted its remaining weapons on the biosphere and sent it into a suicide dive. While Nada closed on the Dantes, the Diggory fired. A patch of equatorial ocean began to boil.

  ‘Jesus, Mark!’ said Palla. ‘You sure about that?’

  The Photes quickly refocused their efforts on Rachel’s old ship, desperate to knock it out of the sky, but the light-lag was too great. By the time they pierced its antimatter containment, it was already closing on the planet. A shell of brilliant white light erupted where the Diggory had formerly been.

  The blast wasn’t close enough to kill the biosphere outright, but the planet wasn’t exactly happy, either. The atmosphere on one side took on a weird rosy hue as rippling blast-waves of exploding air spread out sluggishly around the globe. Life on the ex-Phote world was likely to need a few thousand years to pick up the pieces.

  ‘No!’ yelled Nada over the audio channel. ‘No! No! No!’

  The Phote ships dropped warp and hung around the dispersing ion cloud like stunned bees.

  Mark took the opportunity and piled on speed. Now he had a decent lead, but picking up the others would have to be exceedingly quick. He pinged Ira with an encrypted pulse, warning him to get ready for exit, and waited for a reply as he barrelled towards the super-Jovian. None came.

  Mark tried again on other frequencies, cycling all the options Ira might have used. The silence dragged. Mark wondered what could have happened. The Photes didn’t appear to have paid the slightest attention to the ruins, so why wasn’t Ira getting ready to leave? Had he discovered something dangerous out there? Was he dead already?

  With mounting alarm, Mark realised that this was the most likely option. He’d already lost his old mentor and hadn’t even noticed.

  Then, as he was about to adjust course to leave the system, a response arrived. It was incredibly faint and picked out one of the alien ships held at the end of a glass tether. Ira himself remained silent.

  ‘Where the fuck is he?’ Mark blurted. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

  ‘Just pick up the whole damned ship,’ said Palla. ‘We have room for it. It’s tiny compared to the Dantes. It can’t be more than half a kilometre wide and we have bay doors bigger than that.’

  Mark shot her an incredulous look. ‘That won’t be quiet or fast. We’ll have to dump velocity like crazy and sit on it like a fucking cushion.’

  ‘Do you care?’ said Palla. ‘Do we have any other options? Whatever we do, you have to hurry.’

  Mark initiated the mother of all fusion burns, made a braking orbit around the super-Jovian and parked the Dantes on a dime to swallow the alien ship whole. As his loading-bay doors slid glacially together around the glass tether, he hit the base of the structure with g-rays to blast it clear. They had zero effect. The rock beneath them ran like butter but the tether shrugged off the onslaught like a gentle breeze.

  While Mark stared stupidly at the stalk that wasn’t even bothering to radiate heat, Ira came on the channel.

  ‘Mark, what’s going on? You got our beacon?’

  ‘Where in fuck’s name are you?’ said Mark. ‘Inside that thing? The first moment I hear from you and you’re already aboard?’

  ‘This ship has some heavy-duty rad-shielding,’ Ira explained. ‘We had no idea how good it was. We didn’t hear a damned thing until just now.’

  ‘Fine!’ said Mark. ‘Stay put. Your ark is already inside the Dantes. We’re leaving with the whole thing.’

  Clath came on the channel. ‘Mark! I don’t recommend that.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Mark.

  The doors stared to close, reached the glass tether and promptly fouled. They clenched around it without closing.

  ‘Sure! Stay open, doors!’ said Mark. ‘See if I care!’

  He used mining buttresses to brace the alien ark while several dozen Photurian ships warped up through the system to meet him.

  ‘That’ll do!’ he yelled as soon as the alien ark was grappled.

  He hit the fusion torches. Astonishingly, the Dantes didn’t move. Instead, it strained. He started getting pressure warnings from his buttresses. It was as if they were trying to drag the entire moon with them.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Mark. ‘You think t
hat’s all I got?’

  He kicked on the warp engines.

  ‘Mark!’ said Palla. ‘Are you nuts?’

  ‘What you’re doing is extremely dangerous!’ Clath shouted.

  An ignition field sparked around the Dantes, building strength. Against all the laws of nature, the tether resisted and played havoc with the haze of ions gathering around his ship. Space quivered like something sickly.

  Suddenly there was a crack of light and the tether vanished, along with a large piece of their bay doors. The mining-bay sensors screamed alerts at him. The alien ark, by contrast, looked perfectly intact.

  ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ Clath exclaimed. ‘We had no idea what the thermal-limit behaviour for false matter was like! You could have blown up the entire ship!’

  ‘Got us loose, didn’t I?’ said Mark. ‘Everybody strap down, we’re leaving.’

  With that, he took them out, straight into the wilds of Backspace and away from the clutches of the Photes as fast as he could.

  10.4: WILL

  The second time that Moneko took Will to the Carnevale di Peste, it sounded like a brawl was happening. He glanced towards the festival that lurked below the night-time balcony.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Moneko. ‘Please. This place is extremely dangerous. You’ve seen how powerful their stealthware is. You really don’t want to attract their attention.’

  Will let it slide. He had no desire to kick off a repeat of the monk episode. If he’d learned anything over the last few days, it was to take Moneko’s advice seriously. What he’d seen in the testing arena made his options clear. He could work with the Underground and build on the achievements of the other Glitches or squander that chance. He wasn’t angry enough to do that yet – not by a long shot.

  He mutely followed her to the next search corridor and out into a dusty museum with a Greco-Roman theme. They strode down an endless arcade of imposing rooms with marble floors and superfluous Doric columns. Light fell in shafts like bolts of spiritual illumination. In alcoves around the walls, memories played in which toga-clad clones pontificated.