by Alex Lamb
Ira thrust a finger at her chest. The tunnel vanished.
Ann burst awake a second time and found herself trapped in the dark, in a warm, wet closet angling slowly towards vertical – her transport casket. She freed her arms and pressed on the door. Nothing happened. It felt absurdly strong to her fingers. She reached for her shadow but found nothing there – no presence or even a hint of a SAP. A small red light above her started to wink. Four seconds later, the casket released her into the cabin.
Ann stumbled out and crumpled to the floor, feeling impossibly weak. They had to be under warp. How many gees must they pulling for her to feel like this? Ira’s casket opened next on the far side of the chamber. He jumped out and ran to her side.
‘Are you okay?’ he said. ‘We were getting life signs but nothing else.’
He ran to the emergency med-kit on the wall and came back to scan her body while Ann lay gazing up at him in bewilderment. How was he moving about when she couldn’t?
‘What happened?’ she wheezed.
‘Your smart-cell matrix has stopped operating,’ he said, ‘as has your interface. Something’s blocking all your interior technology.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘In human terms, you’re perfectly healthy. Normal, in fact. As in pre-Snakepit normal.’
She stared at his face, trying to find room in her head for that idea to fit.
‘Can you reverse the effect?’ she said.
‘How?’ said Ira with a shrug. ‘We have no idea what happened. Your cells look just the same as before, but all the augmentations in them have gone passive. Whatever happened, it’s beyond our technology.’
‘But is it changing?’ she said, struggling to sit up. ‘Are you seeing degradation? How long will this last? Am I going to recover or will this kill me?’ Her voice rose steadily.
‘I have no idea,’ said Ira. ‘It looks stable. Your systems are just … off.’
She understood what he meant: for all they knew, this was permanent. She was normal, as in mortal, as in unspectacular. A caw of broken laughter burst out of her chest. Of all the fates that might have been in store for her, this was not one she’d imagined. Ira saw her tremble and tried to embrace her. She batted his hands away and scooted to the edge of the tiny chamber. She pressed up against the wall and wobbled to her feet.
‘What about an artificial shadow?’ she said. ‘How long will it take to fit me with one?’
Ira watched her closely, like a doctor delivering bad news.
‘I’m not sure we have that option,’ he said. ‘You already have a shadow, the original all ours are based on, and it’s wired in very deep. If we try to bypass it, it might lead to brain-death.’
She glanced around at the minuscule space. This was her home now. A tiny cell to go with the deafening silence in her head. No more awkward internal fights. No more strength. No more duty. She buried her face in her hands and tried not to hyperventilate. It was over. She was over. The curse had been lifted while leaving her very much alive. The next time Ira embraced her, she clung to him.
13.4: IRA
‘It’s stopped,’ said Judj.
Ira blinked himself back to the moment and tried to recall the topic of conversation. He’d been thinking about Ann again.
‘Sorry, what stopped?’ he said.
They floated together in helm-space. Mark and Palla had dropped the ship out of warp after they’d passed onto the lower galactic shell to talk over next steps while they had the chance. Making their way back onto a flat flow had taken them more than a day and required continual adjustments of the ship’s ever-faltering warp field. If Mark had looked drained before, now his avatar appeared almost skeletal. Ira hoped the virt was exaggerating the toll at constant alertness was taking on his body.
‘Transcended subversion,’ said Judj. ‘It slowed down when we uncoupled from the lure world, and then froze the moment Mark woke up. I’ve flushed all the eco-layers that were tainted but have no idea whether our systems are actually clean. That’s annoying but not surprising. This was exactly what happened to the Ariel. If they move, though, I’ll be ready,’ he added, ‘I’m data-mining everything they did to us via our write-once arrays and we know a hell of a lot more about software security than we did the last time we met these guys. This time, they didn’t even make it all the way through our core virt.’
Ira glanced at Mark. He didn’t look particularly pleased to have his ship back, perhaps because their situation was worse than ever. The Photes would undoubtedly keep chasing them and their combat moves at the lure star had dramatically reduced the expected time before the alien ark destroyed a warp conduit.
Ira had enjoyed that flying far more than he had any right to and giving up control had left him changed. Rather than flashes of bright emotion, he now felt a slow, steady pulse of discomfort. That pulse had gathered pace after he’d helped Ann gather her wits in the ship’s tiny habitat core.
When he held her, his world had shifted again. All the despair held tight inside him since the war had burst upwards, desperate to dispel itself through that human connection. The only other person in the universe who understood what he’d been through was in his arms. And she needed him. He hadn’t wanted to leave that cabin, no matter what she thought of him. Imagining her down there alone made his chest ache, and it had been happening a lot. When he wasn’t thinking about flying again, he was thinking about her.
‘How long do we have left?’ said Palla.
Clath pulled a face. ‘Given the way the ark is moving, a day at most.’
‘What about the program I gave you?’ said Mark. ‘Can’t you do anything with it?’
As they were flying around the tightest part of the lobe, Mark had passed Judj an enormous SAP model that the Transcended had deposited in his sensorium.
‘If the way they ran machines bears any resemblance to the way they rode hosts, we’re in with a good chance of being able to hook up to their kit,’ said Judj. ‘But where? How? Unless you expect me to fly it from the airlock, we’re still screwed. Isn’t there anything else you can give us?’
Mark shook his head bitterly. ‘No. Nothing.’ His brow creased. Ira saw the expression markers of a man doubting his own sanity. ‘Make that a yes,’ he said quietly. He looked to Ira. ‘Do you still have those Subtle spacesuits you picked up?’
‘Subtle?’ said Ira.
‘You know, the gorilla-crabs. That’s what they call themselves. Do you still have the samples?’
‘Of course,’ said Ira.
‘Try touching the airlock stud in the ark with one of those.’ He looked appalled. Borrowed intuition clearly did not sit well with him. ‘It’s just a hunch.’
Ira knew all about Transcended-inspired hunches – they never missed.
Clath’s eyes went wide. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘We should have tried that already. The moment we figured their system was secured, we should have looked for keys.’
‘That’s awesome, Mark,’ said Palla, slapping his shoulder. ‘That could be our answer.’
Mark didn’t look cheered. His face said it all: the idea had appeared in his head, reminding him that the Transcended were lurking there. They were going to drip-feed him clues in return for being a good boy. Still, Ira thought, that’s what he’d signed up for. What had he expected?
Unable to rouse Mark to enthusiasm, Palla pressed on. ‘Okay, that’s our next step. Before we wrap up, though, tell me, Ira – how’s Ann doing?’
Ira’s heart clenched again. ‘As well as can be expected,’ he said. ‘She’s still playing the rational agent, trying to hold herself together through sheer willpower. I’m going to fab her up a touchboard so she can work more easily. That’s what she wants most. Right now, she’s confined to using the wall-displays. Even if she can’t operate critical systems in her condition, she could still research that Phote brain she found.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ said Palla. ‘I’ll get that started for you. Meanwhile, you guys head down to that ark and try out Mark’s hun
ch. Captain Bock, are you going with them?’
She glanced over at Rachel, who was staring at Mark with a despairing expression. Her conviction that she’d woken into the worst of all possible futures seemed to have strengthened since Mark’s mental hijacking.
‘Sure,’ she said bitterly. ‘Why not?’
Ira felt a fierce desire to tell Mark to get a few hours’ rest. He’d take the helm himself. Then Mark and Rachel could talk things through while he flew using the Ariel simulation Palla had revealed. The idea tugged at him, but he knew better than to voice it. Mark would never agree and neither would Rachel.
‘We’re set, then,’ said Palla. ‘Let’s do this.’
Ira found himself dumped into the ark team’s research space. Judj didn’t come with them. He still had security clean-up to do.
‘This time, I’m swapping the display to ghost-immersive,’ said Clath, bringing up controls. ‘Given how easy it was to lose robots in there last time, that has to be a more stable visualisation. There’ll be less perspective-jumping if our rides get diced.’
The virt shifted, leaving them floating beside the dormant waldobots parked in the airlock on the alien ship. This way, they’d be able to travel as virtual phantoms alongside the robots to anywhere their machines could see. The ship’s software would handle the difficulties of turning the images from robot cameras into a navigable simulation.
Clath also had one of the ancient suits ferried up from the lab-blister at the back of the mining bay where they had sat unanalysed since she and Ira made their escape.
‘Jesus,’ she said as schematics from the suit’s gloves started appearing around her. ‘Why didn’t we think of this? See – that thing has tiny contacts built into the palm. I can’t believe we missed that. We didn’t even look.’ She shook her head in self-disgust.
‘We were busy,’ Ira reminded her. ‘Very, very busy.’
Clath had a waldobot hold the suit’s glove up to the airlock stud. This time when the button depressed, it lit up.
‘That’s different,’ said Ira. ‘Maybe we’re in with a chance.’
He shot Rachel an optimistic glance. She stared back at him more like a stranger than someone who’d been a friend for years. Rachel clearly loathed what the war had done to all of them. Only the younger crew were immune to her contempt. She didn’t understand. She hadn’t been there.
This time, when they advanced into the grey tunnel, the knives did not come out.
‘Woohoo!’ Clath cried. ‘We’re in!’
‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up yet,’ Ira warned. He let Palla and the others know anyway.
The far hatch opened without incident. Ahead of them lay the floor of a lightless corridor as wide as a city street.
‘Why does this look weird to me?’ said Clath, peering at the scene.
‘Because it’s the wrong way up,’ said Rachel. ‘We’re pushing in through the hull of an ark. If this thing was designed to operate under spin, we’d be coming up through the floor.’
Clath shot her an excited look. ‘Of course! Do you know what that says to me? Artificial gravity. Not pseudo-gravity from a warp field. The real deal.’
‘Let’s not get too jazzed,’ said Ira. ‘Remember, we’re here to jettison this thing, not celebrate it. Further evidence that this ship is a gravitational disaster waiting to happen only makes that more necessary. Let’s find a way to eject it and get the hell out.’
He wondered at his own demeanour and realised he was channelling Ann. She wasn’t with them so he’d brought a piece of her inside him. She should have been a part of this. He shivered as the memory of holding her rattled through his head again.
They floated into the spacious corridor. It had an arched roof made of woven fibres that glittered as their searchlights passed across it. Compared to the confined environments they were used to seeing aboard human ships, this passageway looked profligate in scale – more like an unused habitat cavern.
‘It’s roomy,’ he noted.
‘And why not?’ said Clath. ‘They had near-perfect rad-shielding, so habitable space wasn’t costly. This ship may be tiny compared to the Dantes, but the Dantes is huge in human terms and the warp machinery takes up most of the space inside. You could probably store a decent-sized human colony in this ark’s habitable volume. If it’s all like this, you could put fifty thousand people in it easily.’
‘Or several thousand robots,’ said Rachel, pointing into the distance.
Ira spotted a row of sinister shapes waiting in the shadows. They drifted closer and found themselves facing the alien analogues of titan mechs – gorilloid robots six metres tall, armed with false-matter armour and extra scythe arms. Fortunately, the machines remained motionless and inactive, clamped to the floor.
‘I wouldn’t want to tangle with one of those things,’ said Clath as they drifted past.
There were dozens of them parked in the corridor in rows of six, ready for a battle that had never come.
‘Agreed,’ said Ira. If the arms were as sharp as the knives they’d witnessed, just drifting a robot into one was likely to lose it a limb.
They slid down a ramp to another level of tunnels where they found a chamber full of egg-shaped cups on white stalks. Each cup would have been about the right size to hold a football. It looked to Ira like a storage room for outsized wine glasses.
‘That’s weird,’ said Rachel, stopping to stare. ‘What do you suppose this was for?’
Clath drifted in and pointed a drone camera at one of the cups.
‘Oh my god!’ she said. ‘I think they’re workstations. Ira, come and look at this.’
In the bottom of each oval depression was a pair of soft brown pads lined with something like the gentler half of a Velcro fastening.
He didn’t get it. ‘Why workstations?’
‘Don’t you remember those gorilla-crab bodies we saw? These cups look like their skull cavities. And the isopods had those funny flat tails. Judj told me he thought they were neural interface surfaces. Who knows, this might even be the bridge.’
Clath waved her hand to bring up a dialogue window on Judj’s workspace.
‘I think we have a possible data-access site,’ she told him. She sent him pictures. ‘Think we can fab up some kind of investigative array?’
‘I’m on it,’ he said. ‘Bringing fresh drones now. You guys keep exploring. If you find something that’s more obviously a network hub, let me know immediately.’
The next room they encountered was equally peculiar. Three silver warpium spheres, each about the size of a Galatean apartment module, sat in cradles under tubes that ascended into the ceiling.
‘What do you think these are?’ said Rachel.
‘They look like escape pods to me,’ said Ira. ‘Right next to a bridge, too – it makes sense.’
‘Why so few, then?’ she said. ‘If this is an ark, wouldn’t they have more?’
Ira shrugged. ‘Maybe message drones, then? Or bombs? I have no idea. I’m not even sure this ship actually is an ark. We’re still guessing.’
After that, they came to another set of armoured hatches, behind which lay another army of robots.
‘This whole ship is a series of tiered refuges,’ said Clath. ‘Jesus. Talk about paranoid. What was this thing supposed to do?’
‘Keep someone alive, whatever the odds,’ said Ira. ‘It’s tragic, if you think about it. They built it but never used it. The Photes got to them first.’
He suddenly felt sure he understood that first system they’d found. It had been the last stand for this species. Their final attempt to circle the wagons before the monsters came for them – at a star that quite literally had its back up against the wall.
Each level they descended attenuated their line-of-sight comms further. Ira started to worry about how much deeper they’d be able to go without bringing in a lot more supplies from other parts of the Dantes’ mesohull. Then, behind the last set of armoured bulkheads lay a helical ramp that descended
through a transparent tower into total darkness. Their robots’ searchlights could make out nothing in the gloom but a complex lattice of ceramic struts beyond the glass.
‘Let’s get some proper light in here,’ said Clath.
They sent for illuminator drones and more batches of microsats to bolster their digital breadcrumb trail to the rest of the ship.
When the drones finally arrived to bathe the space in light, Ira found himself gazing out onto a forest of immense artificial trees reaching up out of a frozen lake fifty metres below. It looked much like the one he’d seen on the moon colony. As before, the trees clutched strange polygonal homes in their branches, linked by fanciful walkways.
The key difference here was the lake itself – it wrapped the surface of the sphere beneath them that made up the core of the ship. Ira noticed that the trees doubled as supporting columns, their myriad branches merging with the silvery ceiling overhead.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Rachel, awed.
Ira had felt that way about the first alien refuge he’d explored, but this time, all he could feel was the ship’s heaviness – both as a failed lifeboat and as a ball and chain for their own mission.
‘It’s nice,’ said Clath, ‘but I want to know what’s down there.’ She pointed ahead, to the curving lake-sphere. ‘What’s underneath?’
Ira felt a stab of annoyance at Clath. Was she here to get rid of the ark or worship it? No matter how wondrous it was, it still held their lives on a one-day fuse.
‘Aren’t we supposed to be looking for control rooms?’ he pointed out.
‘Unless we find something better,’ she said.
They followed the spiral ramp down to the surface of the core and below to another hatch and another warpium airlock.
‘I guess they keep the centre evacuated,’ said Ira. ‘Or under pressure, maybe. No controls down there.’
‘Of course it’s evacuated!’ said Clath excitedly. ‘That’s where they keep the machine!’
Ira shot her a dry glance.
‘You’ll see,’ she said.
‘Fine,’ Ira growled. ‘Look if you must, but I’m going to keep exploring.’