by Alex Lamb
‘Ohmygod,’ said Clath. ‘You’re supposed to build conventional velocity and then turn on the machine. It doesn’t need a physical drive while the machine is on. We’re screwed!’
‘We don’t have long, then,’ said Ann.
She strode back to where Mark was lying and reached out. Ira snatched her hand away.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to help with Mark,’ she told him. ‘We’re running out of options and you heard what Will just said. Mark is full of signalling compounds for smart-cells and my smart-cells need a signal. So I’m going to touch him like the Transcended want.’
‘To what end?’ asked Ira. ‘Will also just told you they’re the ones who screwed us. Or did you miss that part?’
‘No. I heard it. But I also know we’re caught like rats in a trap. We play ball or we die. Maybe even then we die, but regardless, it’s time to act,’ Ann insisted. ‘We have to do something.’
‘Why?’ Ira urged. ‘What will it buy us? Let’s say you get your old powers back. What then? It gains us nothing.’
‘We have to leave this ship!’ she pointed out. ‘And if the Photes have us already, that means fighting our way out, which is something I can help with.’
‘More than Will? We already have a super-person,’ said Ira. ‘Plus it might kill you and it might kill Mark.’
Ann felt the weight of her own uselessness smothering her.
‘What else can I do?’ she demanded.
‘You don’t have to do anything,’ said Ira.
‘That’s the problem!’ said Ann, whipping her hand free. ‘What am I here for if not to be a part of the solution?’
Ira’s gaze revealed something both imploring and furious. ‘Can I speak to you in private?’ he said. ‘Just for a minute. After that, if you want to go and touch Mark, I won’t try to stop you.’
Ann folded her arms and strode out into the arched passageway. Ira followed.
‘I want to come clean with you,’ he said. ‘I want you to understand. The first thing you need to know is that Poli, your friend on Galatea, is dead, as is the rest of her family. The Photes got them.’
Ann felt like she’d been punched. ‘What?’ She hadn’t thought about them in weeks.
‘But it’s worse than that,’ said Ira. ‘It happened because the ambassador you let through the net targeted people close to you the moment she hit port.’
Ann squinted at him and struggled for composure while a tsunami of guilt appeared on her mental horizon.
‘So I killed them? And you’ve known all this time?’ she said. Her voice came out more shrill than she intended.
‘Almost from the beginning,’ said Ira. ‘Academy models suggested you’d break if you found out, which is why nobody mentioned it.’
‘And why they sent me away,’ said Ann. Her throat felt tight. She could have sworn the deck underneath her was tilting.
‘At first I watched you because I was worried about you,’ said Ira. ‘But the longer I watched, the more I cared. Until it had nothing to do with your mental state any more. It was just about you.’
‘So why are you telling me now?’ she shouted.
‘So there’ll be no more secrets,’ said Ira. ‘I don’t think you’ll break any more. I know you’re stronger than that. And I don’t want to have to carry that shit around inside me when I should be letting you know how I feel instead. I want you alive, Ann – more than I’ve ever wanted anything. You don’t always need to be fighting because now there’s someone in the universe who can directly, immediately benefit by you simply not dying, and that’s me. That’s not brave, I know. And it is selfish, but I don’t know what to do with this kind of feeling.’ He looked at his shoes. ‘I’ve been married three times, Ann, but all those relationships were decades ago. And none of them felt like this. Whatever you do next, I want you to know that. I want you to know that from someone’s perspective, you just staying in one piece is the best …’ He struggled for breath. ‘Best thing that could happen.’
She had no response. She stared at him and felt the world coming apart.
‘If we knew what you touching Mark would do, I don’t think I’d be freaking out as much,’ Ira went on. ‘But you might be risking yourself for nothing. So what I’m asking you for is to give me a chance to fix that drive problem before you expose yourself to danger again. Just a few minutes. That’s all. I won’t get in your way any longer than that.’
Ann realised she was about to do something she’d never have done before losing her powers. She was going to give in. Because everything she’d tried since she’d left port had failed. Because she had no idea what she was doing, anyway. And because he kept staring at her like the goddess she wasn’t. She could feel his desperation for her to live. He didn’t want her to be the robot that fate had turned her into. He wanted her, and in that moment, that was all she had.
‘Okay,’ she whispered, and broke inside. Her eyes filled with tears.
Ira kissed her and she crumbled a little more. Then he took her hand and led her back into the room with the others.
‘Can we risk turning off the shell for a minute to fire up the engine?’ said Ira.
‘Not a good idea inside a carrier full of Photes,’ said Judj.
‘Then we need another way to buy time. There has to be something.’
Ann held Ira’s hand and felt weightless, like a balloon. She could almost sense the subjective days ripping past just above their heads.
‘It depends on what security risks you want to take,’ said Judj. ‘If we believed for a minute that Balance was actually dead, we could shut down the inner shell and direct power straight at the outer one.’
‘We can do that?’ said Ira.
‘It would halve our power consumption,’ said Clath. ‘Maybe even better. And it would change the shape of the gravity curve. It might buy us hours. But if he isn’t dead—’
‘He’s not dead,’ said Will. ‘I don’t recommend it.’
‘But do you have a better idea?’ Ira demanded of him. ‘This ship is a staggered refuge armed with false-matter weapons. It was built by a civilisation smarter than ours with technology we don’t even understand yet. If it’s the best option we have, I say we just retreat to the lake level and activate the inner defences, then work on the drive problem from there. If Balance is alive, he has to be in bad shape. That gives us an edge. You fought him before, Will. Couldn’t you do that again, if it comes to it?’
Ann looked at the Will-giant’s eyes and saw a kind of emptiness there that mirrored her own. The only one among them who appeared to have retained any sense of purpose was Ira. Even Palla had lost her spark. She’d barely said a word.
‘I can do that,’ he said quietly.
‘Okay,’ said Ira. ‘That settles it. Will, you station yourself near the airlock. I’m taking Ann down to the lake.’
Ann didn’t need taking. She still had legs that worked. But something in her had given way. She let him lead her, her hand limp in his.
18.4: MARK
Mark lay on the floor and sucked in air. He felt a physical wretchedness so debilitating that it barely left him room to think, let alone speak. He watched everyone talk through a grey haze of discomfort.
As the others departed for the lake, Palla spoke up. ‘I’ll manage the robots to carry Mark,’ she said. ‘Catch up with you guys in a minute.’
Rachel looked reluctant but acquiesced when Ira beckoned her away. As soon as the others were out of sight, Palla knelt beside him.
‘I think we’re in with a chance,’ she said.
Mark managed to snort. What was she thinking?
‘Hear me out,’ she said. ‘We know the agendas of the Photes and the Transcended can’t be aligned because if they were, you’d be turned already. You’re way past the takeover envelope for a direct conversion.’
She had a point, but then whose side were the Transcended on? Their own, apparently – a side dedicated to self-
defeating mayhem. In any case, her insight came as little consolation. Mark had already given himself over to dying.
‘Palla—’ he wheezed.
She cut him off. ‘Here’s a secret,’ she said, in a tone of pained irony. ‘You were my crusade. If you fail, I fail. I’ve given up on getting you to cuddle with me. So I’ll settle for keeping you alive.’
Before he could protest, she ripped open the biofilm covering his face and put a hand over his mouth to stop him from complaining.
‘It’s okay,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve rigged my augs for spontaneous combustion at the first hint of Phote conversion. I have them running already, so I’m not going to be infecting anyone.’
He wanted to say no. He wanted to stop her. Then she drew her hand away and kissed him on the lips. It felt profoundly wrong, but he lacked the strength to resist. As her lips softly touched his, her shadow synced to his interface and a sensory adapter downloaded into his sensorium. Mark immediately knew he was looking at the solution to the last puzzle.
‘You might want that,’ she breathed as she pulled away.
But where had she got it from? And then he remembered – he’d given her a copy of the puzzle before they came back through the Zone. He’d never expected her to do anything with it, and meanwhile she’d solved the damned thing.
‘Why?’ he breathed. Tears stung his eyes.
‘The kiss? Because I wanted to and you couldn’t stop me.’ Her mouth quirked in a melancholy smile. ‘We’re out of time and you weren’t going to give me one otherwise. I believe in you, Mark. I always have. You’re an asshole, but you’re my asshole. You decided it was time to pull the cord on that puzzle, so I say go for it. Fuck Will. I don’t think anyone else’s fears of the unknown should stop you from acting, and I bet you’re right.’
He stared at her and hurt. Why would she do this? Why would she throw her life away on a kiss? He didn’t want her to die because of him. He wasn’t worth it.
‘Now let’s go and look at a frozen lake,’ she said, false brightness making her voice a brittle lie.
She pressed the biofilm back together and stood as two waldobots moved forward to pick him up and carry him into the passage.
18.5: NADA
Nada’s ship hit fresh trouble two days after they left the Snakepit System. Without warning, her carrier’s warp-envelope collapsed, spewing alarm and confusion into the mind-temple while ignition plasma belched out between the stars.
She was not in the mood. She’d had a headache for days. The homeworld sample she’d ingested still vexed her. She clawed her way out of the leadership vesicle and into the crew-bulb.
‘Report,’ she ordered.
She wanted to have dominated the sample by now. Instead, she felt sick and exhausted. She persisted because, despite it all, she was within an inch of saving the human race. Even if Ekkert was making more progress than her, which she doubted, determination to present the Yunus with a solved problem burned in her like a welding arc. Giving up had not been an option when she started out, and it was not an option now.
‘Envelope collapse was caused by the alien vessel we are carrying,’ said Leng. ‘It is emitting a strange gravity profile, as if the space inside it were bent.’
Nada seethed. The ship had already caused innumerable problems. Attempting to nudge it into position for transport with tugs had turned them immediately into slag. It couldn’t even be moved with photon pressure. In the end, they had been forced to assemble a carrier around the remains of the Dantes, losing dozens of drones in the process, and gather warp from a starting creep of a quarter-light. Just getting started had taken two long, painful weeks.
‘Can we compensate?’ she said. ‘Will this happen again?’
‘No and almost certainly,’ said Leng. ‘Our best hope is to position the carrier more carefully so that the ark sits at the dead centre of the envelope. Even then, ruptures are likely to occur.’
Nada shut her eyes. The collapse had dumped all the warp-velocity they’d accumulated. If the pattern continued, it might be a long flight home.
‘Superior Nada,’ said Leng. His voice had taken on that fawning quality she disliked. Despite his intelligence and loyalty, Leng was not easy company and she had little patience for his quirks these days.
‘What?’
‘I beg you to purge the data from the homeworld that currently resides in your private buffers.’
She stared at his grimacing face. ‘Why?’
‘Because you are being damaged by it,’ he said. ‘Is this the right way to meet the Yunus? Ekkert has already been assigned this task, making your pursuit of it redundant. Furthermore, it hurts me to see you impaired because of the subjective significance I assign to your well-being.’
‘To abandon the task now would be folly,’ she said. ‘I am on the edge of understanding it.’
‘You have said that eleven times since you came aboard. The material you received was obviously corrupted.’
‘It was not corrupted,’ Nada insisted. ‘It is merely difficult. We are used to ingesting life that is not Photurian. However, the Usurper’s code has been written on top of Protocol logic. The standard tools do not apply. To understand how the homeworld now operates requires extensive mapping.’
‘It is a mutation, then,’ said Leng. ‘Mutations are abhorrent.’
‘Mutation implies organic change. This is not that, either. It is a complex distortion of our system of life, comprising millions of modifications. Instead of a tree of authorities with a single root, the Usurper has installed a farm of distributed, redundant sub-authorities that all interact with the root.’
Thus, instead of a single skylight in the corresponding temple-cavern, there were thousands. It was like being in a sky full of stars instead of seeing a single sun. Now that she understood it better, she had to admit there was a hideous kind of beauty to the Usurper’s system, though she did not tell Leng that.
‘Redundancy has been written into everything,’ she added. ‘This makes understanding the architecture difficult.’
Leng shuddered. ‘It sounds like a rejection of the natural order. Why not simply reintroduce the Protocol’s perfect structure to the sample and let the redundancies fade away?’
‘That was my first strategy,’ said Nada. ‘Fortunately I constructed several copies of the Usurper’s control system before trying it. Attempting to directly enforce order onto the pattern causes it to break down erratically. Were we to take this approach with the world itself, our home would end up as dead as all the other planets we passed.’
Leng’s eyes shuttled from side to side. ‘If there is so much mapping to do, why not simply leave the problem for the chorus of minds that the Yunus will have waiting for us at New Panama?’ he said. ‘Given your description, the solution appears to relate to the scale of the investigation, not the quality of study.’
‘Because I was tasked with innovating, not them,’ she insisted. Plus, she didn’t trust them to make necessarily brave choices, though she kept that to herself as well. The truth was, she wanted to be the one who solved it. Since her triumph at the homeworld, the ambition the Yunus had fired inside her burned brighter than ever.
‘In that case, may I assist with the study of the repugnant control structure?’ said Leng. ‘Two minds will resolve the problem faster than one.’
‘No,’ said Nada. ‘Your job is to monitor the compromised warp mechanism.’
Leng produced a long, high-pitched whining sound for about half a minute before answering. ‘Yes, Superior Nada. I obey with real enthusiasm.’
She left him floating there and retreated to her vesicle to work on the pain inside her.
18.6: ANN
Ann sat at the edge of the frozen lake, under the canopy of etiolated ceramic trees, and watched the others work frantically while time screamed by in the universe outside. The entire time, a voice inside her that might once have been her shadow kept telling her that they were making a terrible mistake.
‘Preparing to drop the inner shell,’ said Clath.
Ann swapped to the view through her visor and followed along. She had nothing to contribute. Judj and Clath understood the ship better than she did, and the storm of emotion inside her head made concentration impossible in any case.
‘Three, two, one …’
They dropped warp. Other than a barely perceptible bump in gravity, it was impossible to tell that anything significant had happened.
‘The gravity funnel is still stable,’ said Clath, ‘although things might get a little weird up near the airlock.’
‘But it worked,’ said Ira.
Then, through her visor, Ann saw the hatch to the airlock-tube fly open.
‘Ira!’ she warned.
‘That’s not good,’ Will remarked over their shared channel. He was stationed up in the top passageway, ready to fight, but they were all watching the same feed.
The waiting mantis-mechs promptly blasted the inside of the airlock tube with energetic bolts that could have been anything from rail-gun slugs to electrolased pulses. The action looked curiously frantic until Ann realised that she was seeing things slightly accelerated from the norm. Obviously, without the second shell, the temporal damping wasn’t perfect any more.
Black tar oozed down out of the tube to pool on the passage floor. The robots moved back out of its way and scorched it with radiation beams.
‘I think that’s the remains of Balance’s machines in the airlock,’ said Judj. ‘It’s about what I was hoping to see.’
Then the black ooze started to move of its own accord, spreading out in fingers across the floor.
‘Except not that,’ said Judj.
An armoured giant slammed through the hole like lightning to land squarely in the passage. His suit was dented and blackened, giving off smoke. Two alien mechs darted forward and hacked the figure to pieces before it could even raise its arm.
More giants fell – a dozen of them, one by one, down the narrow chute. The mechs butchered all of them, slashing them into shreds with knives sharper than matter could ever be.