Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Mark, can you articulate for us why you don’t want to keep the ark?’ Ira insisted.

  ‘I just told you!’ Mark said, his voice rising.

  Palla stepped in with raised hands. ‘Enough. Okay, Mark, we’ve heard you, and you’re still mission lead. On the other hand, if I’m not mistaken, we’re short on fuel and it’d be a lot easier to get the ark out once we stop, right?’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Clath. ‘Much easier.’

  ‘So how about this,’ Palla went on. ‘The ark stays where it is for now. In the meantime, we use ember-warp to put more distance between us and the Photes. When we find somewhere decent to fuel, we cut the ark out then, presuming that Mark hasn’t changed his mind. That leaves us a little time for research.’

  ‘But it doesn’t help Ann,’ Ira pointed out. ‘We can’t move her until we drop warp.’

  ‘No, but it does give us time to think about this rationally,’ said Palla. ‘As your great and good SAO, I’m calling this one. Can you handle that, Mark?’

  He folded his arms and stared at the stars.

  ‘I hate it, but I’ll live,’ he said. ‘Two days. That’s all.’

  Palla waited until the others had winked out before speaking again.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ she asked when they were alone.

  ‘Never been more sure in my life,’ he growled. ‘That thing is a curse.’

  Two days passed. Their lead on the Photurians grew while their fuel dwindled. In that time, Mark slept only once, briefly. That night came with a single, incredibly vivid dream. In it, Mark found the answer to ending the war. The Photes were finished. He could go back to Zoe at last. Tears of relief spilled down his cheeks. But when he looked around and saw where he was, it wasn’t Snakepit but the dead ocean on Carter – a world he’d visited years ago.

  Carter had been a dump back then, populated mostly by anti-Earth bigots with an economy based on mining alien remains left by the extinct Fecund. During the First Surge, it had been one of the first worlds claimed by the Photes. It was the last place Mark would have expected to find the solution to all their problems. And it was also just a few light-years from Snakepit – almost on their way. That vision of hope was astonishingly bright and clung to him when he woke.

  That morning, they stopped to use their suntap at a system of Judj’s choosing – a small K-type. Once again, they found a dead ex-Photurian world. What struck Mark as he flew them in close enough to sip energetic nectar from the star was the sheer scale of the enemy’s empire on this side of space. The Photes must have controlled dozens of star systems. And then, after they’d won, they’d all died, for reasons still unknown.

  ‘The scale of decay here is the most advanced we’ve seen yet,’ said Judj as he joined Mark in helm-space for the approach. ‘That might be down to the fact that this world is nearly two Earth masses, or it might not. In any case, it’s deteriorating into an ordinary biosphere. Give it a few million years and it’ll be impossible to tell that the tunnel system was even here. All that matrix material must have been repurposed by the local wildlife. Once the tunnels start to rot, I’m guessing they become a massive, low-grade food source.’

  He posted pictures into the space around them. The surface was a curious mix of tunnel remnants and rugged, algae-swamped coastlines.

  ‘This fits with what we now know about Phote mutation,’ he added. ‘Once there’s a breakdown of their genetic integrity, their hold on a world must unravel rapidly, and differently each time, like biological symmetry breaking. It’s kind of amazing.’

  Mark folded his arms. He suspected that all this talk of biospheres was merely an attempt to soften him up before the real negotiation began.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else that’s amazing—’ Clath started.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Mark. ‘Cheap segue, Clath. Answer’s still no.’

  She exhaled in frustration. ‘Look, Mark, what are you expecting to do if the mission to Snakepit doesn’t go as planned? We both know that could still happen.’

  ‘I have no idea!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’ll fly carefully, okay? If Snakepit turns out to be some kind of godawful death trap, then …’

  He trailed off. It would be a death trap. He felt certain. In fact, he felt exactly the same kind of dread about it that he felt about the ark. It’d make a lot more sense to go somewhere less risky to check out the enemy’s strength first. Somewhere like Carter, for instance.

  He froze, staring at the glass plate beneath his virtual feet as an ugly realisation crawled into his thoughts. His dread of Snakepit hadn’t been there five minutes ago. It didn’t belong to him. And by extrapolation, his feelings about the ark probably didn’t originate in his mind, either – or not all of them, at least.

  ‘Mark,’ said Palla. ‘Are you okay?’

  Mark felt a freight train of fury heading through him, gathering ominous steam.

  ‘Let’s keep the ark,’ he said in a low, bitter growl. ‘In fact, let’s prioritise that research.’

  The others now stared at him in open confusion. Rachel stood at the back, looking more convinced than ever that he’d lost his mind.

  ‘The Transcended are shaping my thoughts,’ he said slowly. ‘They don’t want us to keep the ark. So we’re fucking keeping it.’

  The others swapped glances.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Clath. ‘Why wouldn’t they? They led us to that place. This is just like Will picking up the Ariel Two, surely?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Ira. ‘Maybe we were supposed to look this time but not touch. Or find something else. That ark didn’t want to leave, remember? It was seriously attached to its location. And it hasn’t exactly helped us since.’

  ‘No,’ said Clath, her brow furrowed. ‘But they gave us the SAP for the Subtle ark. They told us how to get in.’

  ‘Maybe they thought they were telling us how to get rid of it,’ Judj offered. ‘They didn’t have a lot of options. We wanted to pilot it out. They showed us how.’

  Clath looked desperate. Now she couldn’t believe in a benign Transcended agenda and keep the ark. Mark felt darkly amused. He’d burst her optimism-bubble by green-lighting her pet project.

  ‘But …’ said Clath. ‘Wait, why cripple Ann? They must have known—’

  ‘Ann was interfering with their download to Mark,’ said Ira. ‘They might have shut her down to stop her.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Judj. ‘So if we keep the ark, we’re dissing our hosts.’

  ‘They’re not hosts,’ Mark snarled. ‘They’re parasites. If they want to come clean with me about their agenda, I’ll consider supporting it. Until that happens, they’re not calling the shots. And we’re definitely not going to Carter.’

  The others looked at him in confusion.

  ‘Carter?’ said Palla.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Mark growled. ‘Not going to happen.’

  Ira exhaled. ‘I agree with Mark,’ he said. ‘I don’t trust them any more.’

  ‘I never trusted them,’ said Judj. ‘But do I need to remind you all that we’re talking about a civilisation that detonates stars on a whim? Are you seriously considering crossing them?’

  ‘I’m not crossing them,’ Mark snapped back. ‘I’m inviting them to stop acting like cowards.’

  Nobody in helm-space enjoyed the uncomfortable silence that followed.

  Clath rubbed her scalp. ‘Yay, I guess,’ she said morosely.

  After the others had retreated to their research space, Palla watched Mark staring at the floor as a wave of uncertainty broke inside him. Was he insane to go against the same entities that had just let him use their gate? But if they meant well, why couldn’t they just explain themselves?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘Is this the right thing to do? Am I being stupid?’

  ‘Do you want to head for Carter instead?’ she asked.

  ‘Hell no! I feel like telling them to go fuck themselves.’

  ‘So fine, that’s what we’ll do. I know
how it feels, Mark,’ she added gently. ‘I felt that way about the Academy.’

  Mark caught her gaze, surprised by the remark.

  ‘Resist,’ she said. ‘Don’t let the bastards push you about. If their intentions are good, they’ll talk.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘I mean resistance is worth it,’ she said, looking amused. ‘The opposite of futile. If we don’t press the Transcended for answers while we can, our species is dead anyway.’

  ‘No. About the Academy. I thought you were tight with them. Wasn’t that the whole point?’

  ‘Oh, that!’ she said with a wry smile. ‘Did you ever ask, Mark? No, I spent a lot of time advocating for missions behind enemy lines to Phote stars. Spy-runs, basically. They blocked me every time. An insufficient risk-to-reward ratio, apparently. Then they shoved me on this boat. What’s that face for, Mark? Am I ruining your vision of the New Society as a lockstep utopia?’

  ‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘Why keep fighting? I thought that was something your kind of people didn’t do?’

  She rolled her eyes at him. ‘My kind of people? If I was their kind of people, do you think they’d have sent me out here?’

  Mark shook his head. ‘But you’re an Autograd.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Palla with a snort. ‘After a fashion. The New Society isn’t as orderly as you seem to think, Mark. Maybe it looks that way from the comfy bridge of the Gulliver, but I assure you that the reality is just as bitchy and difficult as ever.’ She shot him an amused glance. ‘Can’t you guess whose career I modelled mine after?’

  Mark didn’t speak.

  ‘Yours,’ she said, a little sadness creeping into her smile. ‘You were my hero.’ She shook her head, amused at herself. ‘The great Mark Ruiz, maverick captain extraordinaire.’ Her voice dripped self-scorn.

  ‘I …’ said Mark, blushing.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Even Autograds are allowed to have heroes, you know. It’s not banned.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Mark finished. ‘That you chose me, I mean. I’m not …’

  She laughed at him. ‘It’s not that bad. You have your moments. You might be a cantankerous asshat, but flying with you is …’ Words suddenly failed her. ‘Is special. Let’s leave it at that.’ She looked him up and down, her amusement blending into concern. ‘Look, you’re clearly knackered. Why don’t you take a little downtime? You don’t need to watch those engines any more. And you deserve it.’

  She was exhausted, too, he knew. He stared at her, feeling grateful and supremely awkward.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, looking away. ‘You’ve been very kind to me.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ said Palla, slapping his shoulder. ‘It’s nothing.’ Her brightness sounded hollow. ‘We’re in this together.’

  What he wanted to tell her then was that he was still married. But maybe, despite the way the air around her seemed to crackle, she was just trying to be his friend. If he opened his mouth, he risked ruining the moment, as usual. So Mark ducked out to sleep and prayed that his next dream would be his own. Going head to head with a billion-year-old galactic civilisation inside his own skull wasn’t likely to be pleasant. He’d need all the rest he could get.

  14.4: NADA

  The messages from their pursuit ships grew less frequent as the distance stretched. The humans had made it safely down onto the lower galactic shell, she learned, and increased their speed. She struggled with the ghastly feeling that they were getting away, even though their destination was no longer in doubt. Meanwhile, thankfully, their research was delivering marvels.

  On the fourth day of their repairs, Engineering Officer Kitu, one of Leng’s subnodes, called for assistance at their main excavation site. Nada took her avatar-bead to the cavern for Kitu’s mind and looked out through the eyes of the robot her engineer was piloting. Leng and Nanimo escorted her.

  The robot hung in the dark interstitial space they’d burrowed deep in the flank of one of the alien moonlets. All around them, hundreds more drones toiled in a jagged cavern a quarter-kilometre across, dismantling components where the curious bubbles did not obstruct them and cataloguing them otherwise. Their gliding searchlights pushed little pools of illumination around between the immense, warted knuckles of ancient machine parts. The site of such persistent, diligent activity brought a surge of hopeful joy to Nada’s heart.

  It had not been easy to get inside one of the artefacts. Their indestructible shells prevented most kinds of access. But in one case, the enclosing bubble had simply vanished, scorching the surface machinery but otherwise leaving the device intact. They had been mining it ever since.

  Kitu’s robot pointed at a spherical object twenty metres wide where the protective bubble left room for a single, thick umbilicus of what appeared to be ordinary fibre-optic cable. It sat lodged in a dense cliff of piping and struts that they were chewing back component by component.

  [Explain,] said Nada.

  [I believe we have discovered a repair database,] said Kitu. [This device is wired into the robot management assemblies we identified, leaving little room for confusion. Using it might accelerate the process of reverse-engineering the new boser weapon. However, it may also contain other, unwanted innovations, such as the technology for creating false-matter bubbles.]

  Nada grasped the implications immediately and squirmed at the fresh injection of tension they brought. Without their time constraints, the correct choice would have been obvious: to ignore the device unless absolutely necessary. However, they desperately needed to complete their upgrades quickly if they wanted to catch the humans before it was too late.

  [How is research progressing on the boser assembly?] she said.

  [It goes well,] said Kitu. [If there are no further obstructions, a functional tear-down of the mechanism should be complete within forty hours.]

  Another two days wasted when the answer she craved might be right in front of them. She felt that familiar dissonance pulsing behind her eyes.

  [I advise against using the database,] said Leng. [It is not necessary. We were not attacked by the false-matter shells so we do not need to absorb their template. Furthermore, the effort involved in decrypting the database may take longer than analysing the boser itself. Our research should remain focused.]

  Nada knew he was right, but this decision defined another painful edge to Photurian philosophy. Why was it so morally repugnant to secure a strong technical advantage before it was needed? Was it always right to wait until after the humans made discoveries before adapting to compensate? If the survival of a homeworld hung in the balance, did that not justify preventative measures?

  Leng appeared to notice her hesitation. Or perhaps her dissonance had simply leaked as far as his temple-cavern already.

  [Exploring the database would be wrong,] he insisted. [Our aim is to save humanity, not obliterate it.]

  [I concur,] said Nanimo. [The clean and joyous path is clear. This device is alien and therefore irrelevant to our holy mission.]

  [Accepted,] said Nada uncomfortably.

  At the same time she saw the need for radical action – to inhabit the knife-edge between goodness and innovation, just as the Yunus had urged her to. Only that kind of thinking would get them out of their existential mess.

  [However, the core will be removed and retained,] she added. [We will transport it without examining it. This will accelerate our path to adaptation if the humans acquire the alien technology.]

  The others paused uncomfortably as they absorbed this diktat.

  [An unorthodox command,] said Nanimo, [but one I adhere to with blind delight.]

  Leng’s avatar-bead hesitated longer. [I love you,] he said at last. [You will lead us into glory. The database will never be relevant.]

  Nada hoped he was right. The time they had left before Mark Ruiz burned their homeworld was shrinking, and her doubts about humanity’s future were not going away.

  14.5: ANN

  On the same day that th
ey stopped to fuel, Ann relocated to the ark. A docking pod took her halfway up to the exohull before a team of heavy-duty waldobots uncoupled it from its track and rerouted it to the mining bay. She watched their progress on the pod’s vid-screen, full of anxious anticipation. She was getting out at last.

  At first, Ira’s plan to relocate her had felt like another patronising act of charity. But then had come that unexpected moment of intimacy. In the wake of it, Ann felt keener to leave the cabin than ever. Moving was the only logical choice now. Inside the ark, Ira would be unable to visit while they remained in warp, giving her room to sort out her feelings.

  She’d spent almost a week trapped in that tiny cabin. It was funny how that time had shrunk to insignificance compared to how the experience had ended. In retrospect, Ann felt that she’d let her hunger for human contact get the better of her. She’d been blindsided by not acknowledging to herself that the hunger was there. With her smart-cells operating, she’d always been able to suppress human urges she considered distracting or irrelevant. Without them, she was once again at the mercy of her own id.

  She shivered when she thought back to that spasm of connection. At first, she felt sure, she’d kissed Ira to prevent him from saying anything else awful. After that, she’d done it because she was enjoying it and saw no need to bow to expectations by stopping. And then, as their lovemaking reached a frenzy, she had felt the shell of her old self fall away and something bright emerge.

  One truth about Ira could no longer be ignored: he understood her. That unwelcome fact had become increasingly obvious over their weeks in flight. He knew what she’d been through like nobody else alive and he actually cared. His passivity was scar tissue, just like her own brittleness. And, as it turned out, through human contact they could scrub those scars away. That prospect excited her intensely as the man she’d once found such compelling company was clearly still in there somewhere. She’d felt a flash of raw happiness in their union – a commodity she’d long considered utterly beyond reach.