by Alex Lamb
Even as he pondered that oversight on his enemy’s part, the reason for it became clear – a robotic messenger drone darted out of the Earther research ship and accelerated away in the direction of Zuni-Dehel.
Terrific. In a matter of days there’d be thousands of drones for Ira to hide from, not just a few dozen. The whole lobe would be teeming with munitions before he could get off it. The messenger flared to brilliance and then tore out of the system, its drive winking ever more slowly as it gathered warp.
‘I need those engines now, Rachel,’ said Ira, as calmly as he could.
She gasped her frustration. ‘The diagnostics still aren’t running properly! I can give you about fifty-per-cent power safely, no more.’
Ira watched as the inevitable disrupters started sliding out of ports in the gunships’ sides in long, snaking lines. ‘That’ll have to do. We just ran out of time. Strap in, everybody.’
Ira had to move, and there was only one direction he could go: in-system. Closer to the star, his more efficient Galatean engines would have a distinct advantage over the Earther drones, even at half-power. It’d do him no favours when it came to escaping the system, but at least they wouldn’t get frozen in place.
As soon as Rachel said the word, Ira hit the button and threw the ship into a mad sunward dive. The hammer-blows of the gravity drive slammed him into his couch.
As the Ariel fled, its limited sensors struggled to build a schematic of what was happening around him. But Ira didn’t need to be told. He could feel those drones racing after him.
Ira pushed the drives as far as he could take them.
‘Engines exceeding safety limits,’ Rachel warned.
Fuck the safety limits. The only safety limit that made any difference now was the radius around the star beneath which the drones couldn’t warp.
Gratifyingly, he saw the enemy munitions start to fall behind.
‘Ha!’ he shouted. ‘Eat that!’
He waited till he was confident they were no longer within drone range and then cut his engines. There was no point in letting the Earthers know exactly how close to the star he could get. They were nice and close already. Against its glare, they’d be even harder to see.
‘Rachel, collapse the drive stalks. I want us invisible.’
He turned on the fusion torches and pushed them gently further in.
‘The enemy drones are reconfiguring,’ said Amy. ‘They’re taking up a defensive spread.’
Ira scowled. He’d expected a response like that, but not so quickly. That damned Ulanu didn’t miss a trick. His weapons were moving into orbital patterns aligned with the local shell, with the highest drone density in the direction of human space. If Ira tried to leave the system, he’d have a choice: fly straight into them or make a violent course alteration after he hit the heliopause that would make him a lot easier to intercept.
He tweaked his thrusters, putting the Ariel on a parabolic dive around the star that would at least have them coming out running. Unfortunately, it pointed him straight towards the uncharted space of the Penfield Lobe. The good news was that it looked as if they’d be safe now until they reached the other side of the star.
‘Any chance of full engine power in the next couple of hours?’ he asked Rachel.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied tightly. ‘I found part of the problem with the engines – the maintenance robots are all running active programs, but none of them are the ones I asked for. The damned things are wandering around in the mesohull like wild animals. I think Will is still interacting with them.’
Ira blinked. ‘Still interacting? Didn’t we sever his link to the ship?’
‘No,’ said Amy. ‘I kept it open on purpose. The way his vital signs were looking, I was worried it might kill him. There’s a tremendous amount of neural feedback going on in there, and it’s increasing.’
Ira grimaced. ‘Is there anything you can do?’
‘There might be,’ Amy replied. ‘I’ve identified the focus of the activity, at least. Rachel, do you know much about micromachines?’
‘Enough. Can I help?’
‘Maybe. Take a look at this.’
There was a pause. Then Rachel spoke again. ‘Oh my God!’
‘What?’ Ira demanded. ‘Let me see it, whatever it is.’
Amy sent him a scan of Will’s head. It showed a huge amount of cellular activity around his interface site. Ira had no clue what it meant, but he didn’t like it.
‘What’s going on in there?’ he asked.
‘That’s what I’m trying to work out,’ she replied. ‘I wanted to diagnose it properly before worrying anyone with speculation.’
Ira didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Why?’
‘Because it has all the hallmarks of a violent viral infection. But it can’t be that,’ she added quickly.
‘A virus,’ said Ira flatly. More good news. Something infectious in a ship this size would kill them all.
‘Don’t worry,’ Amy insisted. ‘It can’t be. There’s no way he could have contracted anything. The alien data might have been dangerous, but it wasn’t magic. You can’t turn data into protein. You just can’t.’
Ira winced. What was magic but technology you didn’t understand yet?
‘Amy,’ he said, ‘I want you to concentrate on Will till we get around the star. Rachel, help her if she needs it. Hugo, you’ll have to take over Amy’s scanners for a while and keep an eye on those drones.’
‘But, Captain,’ said Hugo, ‘I’ve been looking at the suntap schematic—’
‘It’ll have to wait, Hugo,’ Ira growled. ‘I want you on the scanners.’
‘But I’m not qualified!’ said Hugo.
‘Enough!’ Ira shouted. ‘I’ve put up with a lot from you, Vartian, but now it has to stop. You’re drafted to full crew duty until we get the hell out of here. That means following orders and shutting the fuck up when I tell you to. It’s that or coma. Do you understand me?’
‘Y-yes, but I don’t know how to—’
‘You’re a genius, aren’t you?’ Ira bellowed. ‘So learn!’
For the next hour, he watched Ulanu’s weapons slowly adjust their positions to prevent his escape. The only piece of good news he could glean from their strategy was that they’d lost sight of their quarry and were having to cover all their bases. That spread them thin, though not thin enough for comfort.
His observations were interrupted by a call from Amy at the bottom of the cabin.
‘Ira,’ she said softly.
He looked out of his bunk into her upturned face. She and Rachel had brought Will out of his tank, though his body was still covered in gel and stim-needles.
‘Turns out I was wrong.’ She sighed. ‘It is a virus.’
Ira felt the pit of his stomach fall away.
‘Somehow,’ said Amy, ‘and don’t ask me how it’s possible … but his micromachines have started assembling virions from the DNA in his own nerve cells, and they’re attacking his immune system.’
‘Will he live?’ Ira asked hollowly.
Tears sprang to the corners of Amy’s eyes. ‘I have no idea,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Rachel firmly. ‘Because we’re not going to let him die.’
Ira examined the edge of his bunk for a moment while he tried to think his way around this new addition to his woes. ‘Is it infectious?’ he asked at last.
Amy shook her head. ‘We don’t know. But if it’s passed by contact, then Rachel and I have already got it.’
7.4: WILL
Will awoke with a snap, but his senses didn’t come with him. He floated in darkness, silent and all-consuming. He had no awareness of his body, or of the internal spaces synthesised by his interface.
He tried to stay calm. Being disembodied didn’t bother him – he’d done it to himself many times while calibrating his interface. What worried him was that someone – or something – had the power to strip his senses from him. He knew that if he spent too long in deprivation,
he’d start to experience toxic feedback. The human awareness loop wasn’t designed to take that kind of cognitive pressure.
As the isolation dragged on, Will’s panic slowly mounted. It was impossible to gauge the passage of time trapped like this. It occurred to him that perhaps this wasn’t the result of some alien force being applied to his brain. The alien might have departed already, leaving him like this permanently – trapped in the empty, senseless dark until his mind ripped itself to pieces. Terror gripped him. He knew his heart should be racing, but just like the rest of him, it was missing.
Then, abruptly, his senses started coming back online. They appeared one by one, like modules of a rebooting computer, smell first. Will gasped with relief. However, by the time he’d been given back his sight, he knew something was wrong. Though he was lying in his bunk aboard the Ariel, his experience of it had the flat, plastic quality of a recorded memory. His gratitude soured quickly into unease.
‘Captain?’ he said.
The hum of the soft, off-white walls was exactly as it should have been, as was the muted electronic cheeping of the crew consoles. However, there was no reply.
Will levered himself out of his bunk and looked around. The rest of the cabin was empty. No one home. The crew bunks were flat and bare, with visors and keyboards left unclipped from the walls, as if their occupants had floated out just moments ago.
Will drifted up to the meeting chamber and opened the hatch. No one in there, either. The meeting tablet hung loose in the centre of the room.
Increasingly he had the sense that someone had created a perfect simulation of the Ariel, just to keep him isolated within it. If that were true, then pretty soon it’d become as claustrophobic as sensory deprivation.
‘This is a pile of nano!’ Will shouted at the walls. ‘This isn’t the ship. It’s a fake!’
He slapped a bunk frame with his open hand, but it remained resolutely solid.
‘Give me back my mind!’ Will raged.
There was no reply.
Will shut his eyes and tried to introspect instead. He visualised his home node, but it refused to appear. His senses resolutely told him he was already there.
In desperation, Will started yanking open cabinets and hatches. If this was indeed his own mind, then surely there would be some symbol or cue he could use to reassert control over it. He needed something iconic to focus on – something imbued with the power of personal memory. He scrabbled madly through the cabin, shouting curses at his invisible captor all the while.
‘Who are you, you bastard?’ he demanded of the air. What’s going on?’
The cabin walls hummed softly back at him. Will’s movements became more and more frantic. Eventually, his search brought him to the privacy chamber. As the door slid back, Will found something which proved beyond any doubt that this version of the Ariel wasn’t real.
It was a SAP pattern. The hairs on the back of Will’s neck stood straight up.
The pattern floated in the middle of the little chamber like a huge piece of surrealist jewellery, a metre across. At its heart was a consciousness loop large enough to wear like a necklace, with fans of sense and action modules branching off the main throughput trunk on either side. Each module bore a sheaf of closely packed recall trees thick with memories like pearls held together with spider-silk links. Seen in this incongruously real setting, the program looked beautiful, and far more sinister than it had any right to be.
With a deep and crawling sense of unease, Will climbed slowly into the chamber beside it. He checked all around the SAP for any kind of clue as to its nature. The first thing he noticed was that it wasn’t one of his.
He’d never lay a sense map out that way. It was weird. And the closer he looked, the weirder it appeared to be. It had the broad, many-fronded profile of a robot mind, and a highly sophisticated one at that, but the senses didn’t correspond to any robot type he’d ever seen. Things that looked like taste and hearing analogues were all jumbled up. Some of the action trees ended in twisted little self-referential clusters like gnarled hands. It didn’t take a great deal of smarts to realise that this thing wasn’t the product of a human imagination.
‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ Will demanded of the walls.
Though he asked, he could already guess. He was supposed to run the thing – plug his own mind into it and see what happened. What else was there to do with an SAP?
He wondered what it would do to him. However, whatever its effect would be, the alien had already disassembled him once. It didn’t need permission to mess with his head. At least if he played along, he might have a chance of finding out what was going on.
‘All right,’ he said nervously. ‘I get the idea.’
He moved around the program. If he was going to run it, he’d have to fit adapter blocks onto its consciousness aperture. There was no way he’d be able to read those weird senses directly.
The components of his adapter toolkit appeared suddenly in the space above his head.
Will lurched back. His heart pounded, and this time he could definitely feel it. At least what he was supposed to do with the SAP was no longer in any doubt, he thought, as his pulse returned to normal. Whoever was in charge here, they definitely wanted him to run it.
‘I’ll need more than that,’ he said carefully. ‘I’ll need a sense-analogue library for a start.’
All at once, the little chamber filled with a motionless blizzard of manifested software chunks. Will flinched less this time.
‘Thanks,’ he muttered.
If the alien was prepared to give him access to tools like these, perhaps there was a chance he could use the code to break its hold over him. Unlikely, though, given that the thing was probably monitoring his awareness loop, and therefore privy to every thought that ran through his head. Still, it was something to bear in mind.
Cautiously, Will set to work. He mentally instructed two adapters to join and watched them fly across the room to snap together. Apparently not all of his roboteer talents had been stripped from him. The alien was still letting him access those that served its purpose.
The adapters weren’t hard to build, and within what felt like about half an hour Will was ready to go. It was just a matter of instructing the SAP to run and then dropping his perception into the harness icon he’d prepared for himself.
Except that now he was about to start, Will found he was afraid. He glanced around at the walls one last time.
‘This is what you want me to do, isn’t it?’ he asked, but the walls steadfastly refused to reply.
Well, what else was he supposed to do? He couldn’t stay trapped in this plastic cabin for ever.
Screwing up his courage, Will told the SAP to run. Flickers of light coursed through its memory pearls. Obviously the program was receiving sensory input from somewhere, though where, Will couldn’t say. He fixed the harness icon in his mind and pushed his perception into it.
Will stood outside his breeding bower on the Plain of Second Chances. The mother sun was overhead in the sky, as it would be for the next four fathers. In the distance, beyond the whispering yesblade, he could see the empty, crumbling bowers of his long-dead uncles.
Will looked down at himself and saw something yellow with a dozen stick-thin limbs. He shivered, and all his body segments shuddered in sequence. It was the most peculiar sensation, even for a roboteer who’d inhabited countless artificial forms.
‘Will,’ said a clear female voice off to one side.
It sounded disturbingly like Rachel, despite the fact that he knew the words were spoken in the whistling Tongue of History. He turned to face the speaker, his limbs moving beneath him in a curiously fluid and perfectly intuitive way.
The speaker was a mottled blue thing, like a caterpillar raised up on spiny legs with four narrow arms hanging down in front. She was a Fertile of foreign lineage. With strange and joyful certainty, Will knew that her legs would break off after he impregnated her. She’d attach herself to
a rock to produce larvae, and he would feed her till she died, as was right and proper. He felt the emotion powerfully, though it was not his own. His fear came back redoubled.
‘What is this?’ he asked the female. ‘What’s going on?’ He waved his front two limb-pairs to illustrate.
‘Listen to me, Will, if you want to avoid the destruction of your species,’ the female said.
For a moment, Will could think of nothing to say. He peered at her through four different eyes. Destruction of my species? His human instinct was to frown, but this body couldn’t do that. Instead, he secreted the Odour of Perplexity.
‘What are you talking about?’
Those were very high stakes to open a conversation with – the kind that made you immediately suspicious.
‘Your species has been granted access to a technology you refer to as the suntap. This gift was initially granted with the purpose of destroying you.’
Will didn’t want to accept that. Nevertheless, he had a grim, sinking feeling in his abdomen. He’d wondered why the alien planet had so willingly handed out the secret of unlimited power. It had almost seemed in a hurry to tell them.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. He paused. ‘How?’
‘Continued use of the suntap creates a clearly identifiable signature in the heart of a star. It is then straightforward for my kind to target those stars and manipulate them, just as the lure star that brought you here was manipulated. The resultant shock waves will kill all life near those targets.’
‘Targeting stars?’ Will repeated stupidly.
‘It should not be difficult for you to believe,’ said the alien. ‘Examination of the suntap schematic will show you that we have the power to instantaneously sample and affect a stellar context at a distance. The lure star is sufficient proof of our power to tune stellar radiation to our needs. Do you suppose that, given access to suntap technology, humanity will prove restrained enough to never use it? Four human-occupied stars have already begun to show tapping signatures: the ones you call Zuni-Dehel and Memburi, along with two others your species use for fuelling.’
Will began to believe, and to be afraid. Four whole star systems that these aliens could snuff out at will. The moment the Earthers used a suntap in the home system, most of the human race would be at risk. Anger welled inside him.