by Alex Lamb
He understood Mark’s reluctance to abandon hope in the Transcended. But the memory of what they’d made of him was seared into his psyche. The things he’d seen himself do under their control. Besides all the rational reasons, he was never going to forgive them for that.
When he’d sucked down Mark’s memories in the mind-temple, an even bleaker picture had emerged. Now he knew what the Photurians were for. Photes won their wars slowly, handicapping themselves. They teased their victories out. And they appeared the same way for very different species, whether gentle or warlike. From those facts, one ugly conclusion stood out: they existed to torture civilisations to death.
That realisation had kindled a terrible wrath in him. The Photes were there to provide entertainment for the galaxy’s ancient masters. The human race were toys. Of course they were being allowed to win now. That was how the game was played. Hope was extended right up until a species became truly dangerous, as the Subtle had become. Then they were snuffed out and the next victims bred to sentience.
Sadly, he couldn’t explain this to his friends without leaking knowledge to their real foe. His only chance lay in the course he’d taken – to advertise that he had the misery bomb that would disrupt the Transcendeds’ agenda and wait for the puppet-masters to play their hand.
If, as the Transcended had told Mark, they’d never really been on Snakepit, then they wouldn’t care. He’d release the weapon and the Photes themselves would serve as messengers for their own demise. On the other hand, if the Transcended had been there and were lying about it, they’d try to resist him. Which was why Will was hiding copies of the weapon in the other two ships, coded for timed release. He would keep them out of the battle long enough to ensure that at least one bomb reached its target. Will knew he had to take a stand. The Transcended were afraid of what he’d become, otherwise they’d never have warned Mark away from Snakepit.
Rachel turned to face him. ‘Can I touch you now?’
Will nodded and took her hand. It was cool and soft. It made him ache.
‘I’m back from the dead,’ she told him plainly. ‘And it sucks. Quite frankly, I don’t have anything to live for in this shitty future except being with you. I don’t care if I die. So can’t I travel with you?’
Will had guessed this was coming. It still felt like being stabbed.
‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to wake up powerless and irrelevant in a reality you can’t stand?’ she said. ‘Alone and confused?’
Unfortunately, Will knew exactly that feeling.
‘Rachel,’ he said, trying to walk his way through the words without crying, ‘I’m not a real person any more. I’m a software hive-mind. My body is made of nanoweapons. I don’t eat or sleep. I don’t even breathe.’
‘Can you feel this?’ she said, squeezing his hand.
He nodded.
‘Then you’re still my husband,’ she insisted. ‘I know you don’t need me any more. You’ve lived as some kind of god on your own for the last forty years. I’m just a page out of your history and you can go on without me. So don’t try to protect me from what I want. You did that last time, remember? It didn’t work. I want this, Will. I want to be at the battle for our home as your conscience so you don’t forget what it means to be human. And if I’m crushed to death on the first tight turn you execute, so be it.’
His dead, silicon eyes tried to fill with tears and failed.
‘Okay,’ he said with a heavy heart. ‘You can come.’
Now, at least, he knew which weapon the Transcended would use against him. The one they’d always preferred. His wife.
22.4: MARK
They spent two days living inside the lifter, eating meals of curiously fermented slop intended for Photes which Will insisted were safe. They slept on fabbed blankets on the clammy floor. During that time, they had nothing to do but wait, so they quizzed Will about his experiences as a sentient civilisation. He regaled them with stories of Glitches and Cancers, of twisted cities, virtual carnivals, men reborn as dogs and meadows deep underground. It sounded like a hallucinogenic mess. No wonder Will had ended up so remote and strange. The man seemed to have slid into an uncanny valley of his own creation – more and less than human at the same time.
When Mark had first come to understand the Photes’ weaknesses, he’d felt a kind of clarity and maturity. He’d been able to see past his own crusade and understand why it had never worked. Now, locked in with Will’s smirking duplicates, that sensation of achievement was fast subsiding. He felt more like a child under the care of an incomprehensible adult than a member of a team.
Eventually, a shuttle descended to bear them aloft to the new ships that awaited. The shuttle itself was an unsettling sight – made of silver and glass warpium with curious swept-back wings, all shot through with veins of pulsing smart-matter. Very little of the craft appeared to have been built from human-style technology.
The walls inside were blood-warm to the touch. The crash couches reshaped themselves as their occupants approached, far too much like the Photurian anemones in the lifter cabin to be comfortable.
‘Will, how did you do all this?’ Clath asked. ‘Where did you get this stuff?’
‘I grew it, mostly,’ said Will. ‘The hard parts were setting up false-matter forges and pseudo-life breeder stations in orbit. That process was miserable and required way too many repairs to Nada’s smashed-up defensive node. After that, the ships themselves were fairly easy. Plus, you guys left me an awesome store of false matter in that crater you made.’
The two craft that waited for them in orbit weren’t any more reassuring. They were tiny – each no more than a quarter of a kilometre across. These, too, were shells of translucent glass peppered with fungal pseudo-life growths. They hung amid a motionless blizzard of old machine parts, blobs of fluid and warpium bubbles.
‘How can they be so small?’ said Clath as they approached.
‘New engines,’ said Will. ‘They use a variant of ember-warp technology. Plus both the accelerators and the antimatter containers are made from fused false matter, which saves a lot of room. They look great from here, but that’s only because you can’t see the shitty bits where I had to repurpose old ship parts. Believe me, one reason the Subtle used false matter was because it’s faster to work with once you know what you’re doing.’
‘Will, where’s your ride?’ said Ira.
‘Not finished yet. I’m still building. But I have the cabin ready for Rachel and me. We’ll live there while the rest of the ship puts itself together.’
Ira looked confused. ‘Then where’s the carrier?’
‘I’m still building that, too,’ said Will. ‘Give me a few hours.’
There was no point doubting him.
Mark shared a ship with Clath and Palla. Ira and Ann took the other. They christened their ships the Dantes Two and Three respectively, in honour of their lost vessel. The docking pod to the D-Two’s cabin was like a glass elevator from a children’s fantasy, passing down between filmy organs, crystalline tendons and layers like rafts of compressed jellyfish. Yet despite the ship’s small size, there turned out to be more space inside than Mark knew what to do with.
Their vessel had three huge cabins, a lounge that doubled as a bridge like the one on the Gulliver, and a dedicated dining-space. There was also something that might have been a med-bay, but it was so filled with questing tentacles that Mark felt reluctant to explore it.
‘I didn’t see anything like this in the ark,’ said Mark as he drifted through the elegant, glittering spaces.
‘I think he’s beyond that now,’ said Clath. ‘Will’s taken Snakepit’s tech and Subtle tech, merged them and extrapolated. He’s making it up as he goes along.’
She sounded as nervous about it as Mark felt. They were in uncharted territory and there was no getting away from it. Mark had a sense of what the Transcended had actually been scared of when they’d warned him away from Snakepit. It was Will himself.
Wi
ll linked them into the ship’s shared virt, which was just as impressive as the cabin. It looked much like the helm-space they’d had on the Dantes but ran as smooth as butter and anticipated their requests with uncanny precision. His avatar was waiting for them there.
‘Nada took her own database with her,’ said Will, ‘and she has a much bigger supply of raw material. She left us the dregs of this system and she’ll be extending her technological reach just as I am. Fortunately, she appears to have missed the significance of the pseudo-life research I’d been doing on the Willworld. However, she may have clued in by now – she had plenty of my data to work from. This means that my main focus on the flight will be pushing the limits of my own weapons tech, so you’ll have to entertain yourselves.
‘There’s plenty to keep you busy over the next week, though. Familiarise yourself with your ship’s systems. Nada will almost certainly be using vacuum-state weapons by the time we get there – distortion beams, exotic gravity bombs, that sort of thing – so it’ll be especially important for us to keep the fight away from the in-system. Just like it’ll be important for you to lie low. Good luck with your in-flight training and ping me if you need anything.’
His avatar vanished, leaving Mark feeling like a little boy left at the controls of an airliner.
‘Does anyone else here feel sort of irrelevant?’ he said.
Palla squeezed his hand. ‘Feeling a little outclassed by the older generation, Mark?’ she said with a dry smile. ‘Welcome to my world.’
22.5: WILL
Will dropped warp before hitting Galatea’s heliopause and deployed telescopes. His heart sank as he took in the tragic, unrecognisable mess that his home system had become. He saw drones everywhere and the nascent biosphere in ruins. The system’s carefully husbanded supply of lighter elements had been squandered and its once-majestic gas giants cloud-scraped. He fought to dissipate the roar of fury that rose from his more aggressive threads. A ruin with a siege under way was better than the alternative. It meant there were still people to rescue.
He glanced at Rachel, seated next to his disposable bio-instance down in the cabin. The look on her face as she examined the damage was one of outraged dismay.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘We’ll rebuild.’
‘It won’t be the same,’ she said.
‘No,’ Will told her. ‘It’ll be better.’
Nada’s ship was obvious, even from light-hours away. The nestship-sized, false-matter-infused sphere she’d built was swarmed by an immense cloud of flickering drones, starships and factory habitats. Any conflict between Nada and her former superiors had already passed in the fleeting manner of Photurian disputes. He saw the clustered signatures of many small warpium objects headed in-system and suspected Subtle-tech drilling machines en route to the surface. He knew he didn’t have a moment to waste.
He drew his carrier forward, descending on Nada’s position, and tossed his friends’ ships out at what he hoped was a safe but still relevant distance. He closed the rest of the gap between himself and the battle cruiser under ember-warp and appeared just light-seconds away from it, at the edge of the drone cloud.
‘Get ready,’ he said to Rachel. ‘This is where it gets scary.’
He messaged his foe. ‘Surprise! Nice to see you, Nada.’
Nada didn’t reply. Her first act was to fire a super-boser at him, along with an attempt to assert primacy. Will activated his standing-warp shield and let the beam’s power slew around it before returning fire with a shot of matching potency. There was no point showing his hand just yet. Nada blocked with a shield almost as good as his own.
Her defence told him everything he needed to know. His science had come further than hers in less time. Which meant that she must still be computing on a Phote matrix, whereas he’d been able to cram his research threads into intelligent pseudo-life.
Will teased her with a broadcast memory of her Meta at New Panama succumbing to Mark’s control-key and subsiding into submissive delight.
‘That did not happen!’ Nada messaged back. ‘You are the Usurper. You lie. I already own your world and I am sick of you getting in the way of humanity’s future. You are the past. You are a disease. You are a failure.’
‘And you are clueless,’ Will retorted.
Nada broke out her heavy weapons. She fired a distortion beam at him, propagating curvon-collapse at a little over three times the speed of light and trashing the fabric of space along the way. The beam changed the decay properties of baryonic matter and would have really messed with his mesohull structure had it hit. But while the beam was impossible to see coming, Will had already anticipated the move and tossed out a spray of vacuum-twisting bombs. Her beam fizzed into nothingness as the local spatial geometry underwent some very unlikely knot-transitions. Several kinds of exotic particle pairs flickered in and out of existence. The stars seen through that part of space briefly turned an unhappy shade of carmine.
Will slewed around the drone cloud, making sure not to kill his wife under the acceleration, and replied with a glancing distortion beam of his own. Nada’s shielding fared less well than his. He watched her exohull ripple as nuclear blasts in her mesohull took out some of her accelerator pathways. He was glad he hadn’t tried for a direct shot. That would have ended her too soon.
‘I have her,’ he said. ‘She’s vulnerable. It’s despair-bomb time.’
Will doubted he needed to articulate his intent but had to be sure he’d given the Transcended a reason to act. He brought up the tight-beam targeting system and aimed for Nada’s primary sensor-arrays.
In that second, Rachel unpacked. Something deep inside her, hidden between the atoms of her tissues, reached out and seized control of the ship’s processors where his meta-thread resided. She’d been full of microscopic warpium bubbles, Will saw, as the controls were ripped from his grasp. They were probably linked quantum-processors of some kind, invisible to any scan and no doubt ferociously intelligent. She couldn’t even have known they were there.
Will felt his consciousness being sucked into some virtual domain that had been running inside his wife until now. That was fine. He’d expected it. As the Transcended reeled him in, buried parts of himself scattered throughout the ship which he’d left purposefully dormant sprang into wakefulness, forcing his enemy to scrabble for dominance.
‘That’s right, motherfuckers,’ he growled. ‘Suck it up. I’m not going to make it easy for you.’
As they forced him into their featureless meeting space, he focused his energies on wresting ownership of the metaphor. Rachel appeared before him, her form fritzing as he fought them. As soon as Will had decided on his course of action, he’d set instances of himself looking back over every Transcended dream and puzzle that he or Mark had ever experienced, hunting for implementation clues he could exploit. Now his collective mind was throwing out hacks as fast as he could think.
‘Stop!’ she told him. ‘The weapons you’re using are dangerous.’
‘No, you lying bastards, it’s the information that’s dangerous. You don’t want it getting out.’
‘That’s also true,’ said Rachel. ‘In Gal’s name, let this virt stabilise. We need to talk.’
‘Damn right,’ said Will. ‘Funny how that only ever happens when your neck is on the line, though, isn’t it?’
He reached out and forced the metaphor to morph. Rachel’s face became Nada’s.
‘There, that’s a little more appropriate, don’t you think?’
‘Don’t fight us this way!’ Nada urged. ‘You have no idea what you’re doing.’
She slammed a hold on the metaphor. Will wriggled out of it.
‘Oh no?’ said Will. ‘Here’s my guess: you’re playing with species for fun and making fresh biospheres on the side to keep your game running. We’re just pets to you, and we’re not supposed to bite the sacred hand. Well, fuck that. Consider yourself bitten. You’re fools if you think I haven’t taken out insurance. Holding me here wins
you nothing. I’ve made sure of that.’
‘We’ve made mistakes,’ said Nada, ‘that much is clear. But we can promise the survival of the human race if you back off and leave the Photurians alone. We will take responsibility for closing down the ones in this system.’
‘Nice try,’ said Will. ‘But guess what? I don’t trust you! You’ve murdered billions! And your control is much more tenuous than you want us to believe, isn’t it? Otherwise we wouldn’t even be talking.’
‘You’re a fool if you think our hesitation is on our own behalf,’ said Nada.
‘I want the truth,’ Will demanded. ‘Now and unconditionally. Who are you? What do you want with the human race?’
‘No deal,’ said Nada. ‘If you want a stand-off, you can have one. It’s your loss.’
22.6: MARK
Will dropped the D-Two at the edge of the Galatean System and leapt back into warp a fraction of a second later. Mark sat in the glassy lounge and stared at his retreating signal.
‘So that’s it?’ he said. ‘Now we sit and watch?’
‘Fuck that,’ said Palla.
‘My thoughts exactly. Let’s see if we have any weapons on this bucket.’
As it turned out, they had lots. Mark swapped his focus to helm-space and watched the options scrolling up around him. What were twist-bombs and distorter-beams?
‘If this is what purely defensive looks like, I hate to think what Will’s carrying,’ Palla remarked.
‘Let’s go and find out.’
He let his subminds smear into the ship and took them straight in after Will. The D-Two was absurdly responsive. It was more like sliding an avatar around in a software interface than physical flying. There was no resistance at all.
‘Sensors suggest that Ann and Ira may be doing exactly what we’re doing,’ Clath observed.
Mark snorted. ‘Now there’s a surprise.’
‘What do you mean, may be?’ said Palla.
‘It’s difficult to tell,’ said Clath. ‘These ships fly under stealth by default. Will didn’t bother hiding but our sister ship is practically invisible, even with all the crazy new cameras we have.’