Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

“I’ve been here over seventy years,” Axford was saying as he showed them around. His image was of a slight, gray-haired man dressed in a loose-fitting black suit, with a lined face that belonged to someone’s grandfather, not a high-echelon hatchet man. “Seventy years; remember that. I had all of this in place long before the Spinners arrived.”

  “And when was that, General?” asked Alander.

  “Two weeks ago,” he said.

  Seventy years, Hatzis thought, and not a trace of senescence.

  “What happened to the crew?” she asked.

  ‘They never even made it on board,” he answered. “It was all faked. We made it look like the Thornton left with a full complement, but there was no one else aboard except me and the others, and I soon got rid of them.”

  The offhand manner in which he spoke about killing sickened Hatzis. “You make it sound as if you did little more than delete some unwanted data.”

  He laughed at this. “Well, it could hardly be regarded as murder,” he said. “They were only copies, after all. Look, this was a one-man mission from the start; that was the way I’d originally intended it, and I indulged attempts to change my mind only as a temporary measure.”

  “So you’re basically a stowaway and a mutineer, is that it?”

  He laughed again. “Absolutely,” he said. “But I prefer to think of it in terms of expediency. We were all in this for ourselves. I just acted first.”

  “Who were the others?”

  “Entrainment techs, policy makers, a senior ministerial aide, a dozen or so people from within UNESSPRO itself. No names. I needed them to get me aboard the program. After that, they were irrelevant. One ship was all I asked for, and that’s what they gave me. It didn’t matter where I was going; I just wanted to get out before the Spike hit.”

  “You saw it coming?” asked Alander from the hole ship. Still unable to withstand conSense for too long, he was following their progress by less intrusive means.

  “Everyone with eyes did,” said Axford drolly. “It’s just that no one knew what to do about it. That’s partly why UNESSPRO was founded, you know: to get something out before the crunch came. But there was only so much we could slip past the serious science payloads. A few missions out of the thousand aren’t what they appear to be. Don’t ask me which ones, because I don’t honestly know; the idea was to keep them secret so no one or no thing could follow. If the others survived their journeys, they’ll be working out what to do next, just like me.”

  Hatzis thought of the anomalies seen by such colonies as Perendi in Groombridge 1830. Everyone had assumed that they were of alien origin. Now she wondered whether they could be the work of one of these pre-Spike human outposts. But she doubted it. The first had appeared in the very early days, when only a few Spinner drops had been recorded. That didn’t give anyone enough time to find and modify hole ships in the way that had been observed, and it still left the motive behind the death markers hanging.

  “This is what I wanted to show you,” murmured Axford. They zoomed through an incomprehensibly large gobbet of molten rock and into a startlingly clear space. “This is my hangar, if you like,” he explained. “I keep Mercury, my hole ship, here. Before that, it was a materials repository. The walls are reinforced with a flexible membrane designed to bend with the pressure but not burst. No matter what shape the space within assumes, it’s perfectly safe.”

  Six golden structures occupied the center of the bubble, linked together and anchored to the walls by delicate-looking strands of black material. There was no doubt they were essentially the same as the gifts found elsewhere in surveyed space, different from the others only as a result of their different environment. Their shapes were just as intricate and mysterious, and Hatzis was sure that the contents would have been the same also.

  “You’re telling us that you built this place, not the Spinners?”

  “You don’t have to sound so surprised,” he said with a smile. “Seventy years is a long time, and I didn’t have to put up with interdepartmental arguments to get things done. If I wanted to do something, I just did it. End of story. I actually started redesigning the Thornton in transit. By the time I arrived, I had patterns for fifty of myself ready to transfer into hardware. The first thing to do was find raw material and exploitable energy—and as you can see, Vega has plenty of both. Within a year, all fifty of me were running at triple time, all following the same agenda: better, more, faster. I mass-produced probes, mining vessels, and processors to run them all. I seeded myself everywhere to avoid catastrophic breakdowns. I burrowed into the planetary fragments to diversify as much as possible. Vega is pretty volatile, and even down here, I’ve had problems. But it’s nothing I can’t recover from. I’m spread far and deep enough to bounce back from almost anything. Got three bases now: Hermes, Apollo, and Terpsichore. I hope you won’t take offense if I don’t tell you where the other two are.”

  “You’re the contact, then,” said Alander. “The Spinners chose you when they came?”

  “There was no one else to choose from,” said Axford with a sly grin. “They had to talk to me.”

  Hatzis shook her head, still trying to come to terms with what Axford was telling them.

  “So you’re a group mind?” she said. “A gestalt?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said indignantly. “They’re all me. I don’t want to be anything I’m not. That’s the surest way of losing control.” His expression sobered. “That’s how I noticed the old-age problem, you know. It showed up very early on because I was fast-tracking. My earliest copies started to behave improperly. The later ones worked out what was going on and erased the corrupted ones, the failures. Kept the memories, of course, and installed them in fresher copies, so I haven’t lost anything. We’re a team, here, and we don’t tolerate weak links.”

  They paused in their wild flight around the gifts long enough for Axford to lean in closer to Hatzis and to part his hair, revealing a numeric tattoo on his scalp.

  “That’s my iteration number,” he said. “One thousand twenty-second Francis T. Axford to roll off the production line. You can have any color, as long as its blood is pure.”

  “But you’re—” Hatzis started, but was quickly cut off by Axford.

  “I’m talking metaphorically here, Caryl,” he said in a tone that suggested he was disappointed he’d had to point this out. “And I’m not racist, either, in case you’re wondering. The only ideal I believe in is me.”

  So I see, she thought.

  “What are your long-term plans?” asked Alander.

  Axford smiled innocently, as if to say, What makes you think I have a plan?

  “To survive, of course,” he said. “Isn’t that what everyone wants?”

  “Yes, but not everyone uses the same methods,” said Alander.

  Axford laughed. “You’re wondering if I’m going to stay put here in my little pocket of space, is that it? Or whether I might burst out of here like a cancer and spread like a contagion across your own region of space.” His smile widened. “I’m tempted, you know, just to see your reaction. And how you would deal with something like that. If you handle me as badly as you’re handling the bug-eyed monsters, I’d be all over you within a decade.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Hatzis.

  “Ever since I turned on my communicator, I’ve been listening in on your broadcasts. How you guys have managed to last as long as you have is beyond me. They’re slaughtering you out there.”

  “So, how should we be handling this, then?” said Hatzis with irritation. His smugness was rapidly starting to piss her off.

  Frank Axford didn’t answer straightaway. Instead, their inward plummet came to a halt—or seemed to, anyway. The journey had been entirely conSense-generated; Hatzis’s body was still in Pearl, sitting on the couch. The hole ship itself was docked next to Axford’s Mercury in the very bubble they had just reached, virtually.

  The illusion folded around them, became a spare, gunmetal-gray room,
as bare of personality as an interrogation room, with two aluminum chairs for them to sit on and a 3-D tank for Alander. Axford’s physical presence was slight compared to Hatzis’s artificial body, but his personality more than made up for that.

  “To start with,” he said, “the Spinners gave you gifts, which you have used to blithely announce your presence to all and sundry throughout the galaxy. You might just as well have sent a message saying, ‘Here we are, please come and get us.’ It was the stupidest thing you could have done.”

  “We’ve been extremely cautious with the messages we’ve been sending out lately,” Hatzis said, defending Sol automatically.

  “Yeah, but only after you had your butts kicked a couple of times,” Axford shot back. “And look at the cost of your recklessness! Those Spinner installations are enormously valuable—more valuable than the colonies, if you want my opinion. Humans can be copied; the gifts can’t. What’s the current estimate of the leading edge of the Spinner migration, 61 Ursa Major? At that rate, they’ll be gone in weeks. And once they’re gone, it seems pretty clear that they’re not going to be coming back. If we lose what we have, that’s it. Mommy’s not going to take pity on us if we drop our ice cream in the dirt, no matter how unfair we think they’re being.

  “The BEMs you call the Starfish don’t care about us, either. And they’re not stupid. For whatever reason, they want us gone—totally and unequivocally gone. They don’t even wait anymore for your invites; they’re actively seeking us out, and that’s a scary notion. These are superintelligent beings, remember. It’s not like they’re going to miss a system here and there. They are not going to stop until we’ve been eradicated from every single system. Yet you guys jaunt about surveyed space like you’re on some divine mission and don’t do a goddamn thing about it! You’re ignoring the real problem, and until you face that problem, it’s just going to keep coming back and biting you on the ass.”

  Hatzis did her best to keep a lid on a rising tide of resentment. “So what’s your solution? Wait it out? Hide while everyone else suffers? Great scheme, Frank.”

  “Hey, don’t knock it, lady,” said Axford with a smile. “It sure beats sitting around like ducks and painting little targets on yourselves. Besides, I’m talking to you now, aren’t I?”

  “And we’re listening,” said Alander, casting a cautionary glance in Hatzis’s direction. Axford’s chair creaked as he sank back into it.

  “Okay, good, because I have an opinion I’d like to share with you. I think you’re wasting valuable opportunities—or at least you seem to be, if the information in your broadcasts is anything to go by. None of you are treating the situation as a military threat, which is precisely what this is. And until you do, you’re always going to be at a disadvantage.” Glancing over to her, he quickly added, “I’m sorry, Caryl, but it’s true.”

  It was his tone that bothered her more than anything else, she decided, and not necessarily what he was actually saying.

  “Go on,” she forced herself to say.

  “Okay,” he said, shifting his position to fully face her. “Look again at the Spinners; bug-eyed monsters number one.” An image of the drop in Vega appeared behind him, rotating to highlight key points as he spoke. “Ten obvious gifts, among them a communicator, a hole ship, a library, an art gallery, a map, a surgery, a science hall, and a materials lab. The hardware makes up the rest of the gifts: the Gifts themselves, a machine for making the skyhook cables, the instantaneous transport system. But what’s all this stuff for? What’s it supposed to teach us? Judging by your transmissions, you lot look at it and see knowledge for its own sake. You search the library for answers to questions, rather than solutions to problems.”

  “But the Gifts don’t know anything about the Starfish,” she protested. “We’ve already asked.”

  “A number of times, actually,” Alander added.

  “As did I,” said Axford. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t help. Look.” He leaned forward. “Me, I’m an old army man, right? I’ve been trained to think certain ways. That makes me one-eyed and obsessive, agreed, but it also gives me a tremendous focus in situations like this. Whether you like it or not, this is a military situation, and it needs a military mind to cut through it. When I look at the hole ship, I don’t see a convenient means to contact neighbors and issue invitations; I see a scout vessel that is superbly designed for covert operations. When I browse the materials lab, it’s not to marvel at strange forms of matter and energy we barely suspected existed; I’m looking for something as hard as the spindle hulls, just in case we ever need to get through one of them. And when I search the library, it’s not for information on alien cultures or the black hole at the center of the Milky Way; it’s for anything I can use to throw at the enemy, whoever they are and whenever they come. Because, believe me, they will come. And when they do, I want to be as ready for them as humanly possible.”

  Something like revulsion rushed through her. “You’re using the gifts as weapons?”

  “Absolutely,” he said without shame or apology. “Where did you think I got that trick with the darts I used on you when you arrived here? It didn’t work, but it might have. Give me another day, and I’ll have something else. There are hundreds of me working simultaneously on this: researching, building, testing. Laser batteries I already have—in fact, I’ve had them since 2080, just in case something came this way after the Spike. In a week, I’ll replace them with something much more powerful. Something, maybe, to make the next visitors I get think twice about staying.”

  “You can’t really think that fighting the Starfish will work,” said Hatzis.

  “I’m not talking about the Starfish right now.”

  “Then who are you talking about? One of the other colonies?” she said. “You’re in contact with someone else?”

  “He’s not talking about the other colonists,” said Alander, a look of realization on his face. “Tell me, General, just who exactly did you think we were when you attacked us earlier?”

  “Exactly?” said Axford. “That I don’t know. Do you?”

  “What the hell are you two talking about?” Hatzis asked irritably.

  “The anomalies,” Alander answered. Then, to Axford: “If we’re talking about the same thing, then yes, we’ve seen them—but we have no idea who or what they might be. We think they leave artifacts behind in systems that have been destroyed by the Starfish.”

  “And they’ve been here?” Hatzis asked.

  Frank the Axe nodded. “Even tried to take my gifts,” he said. “They didn’t manage it, of course, but I thought they might try again—maybe even come back with reinforcements. Then you two appeared. I was better prepared this time. You were lucky I called off the attack when I did.”

  “You fought them?” Hatzis exclaimed.

  “I had to,” said Axford. “The bastards were trying to take what was mine. Just because I was lying low, waiting to see what they were, they thought I wouldn’t be able to resist. But they were wrong. I don’t like people who prey on the weak.”

  Hatzis wondered if there was anyone Axford did like.

  “Would we be able to look at your data on their hole ships?” Alander asked.

  “I’ll do one better than that,” said Axford, the sly grin returning. “I can even let you take a look at the sample I managed to capture.”

  1.1.5

  The hole ship looked little different than any other. It appeared in the far reaches of the system, hung there for a second as though looking around, then relocated closer in. A twisted, strangely modified cockpit issued from its side, orbiting in a disconcerting ever-changing fashion. It radiated an air of readiness, like a fencer shifting restlessly, with sword upraised.

  Then it moved. With no noticeable emissions, it went from standing still to blurring motion in less than a second. The image wobbled as its source tried to keep the hole ship in view. It failed just as the craft’s destination came into view: a blue black world under a yellow sun.


  “Impressive,” said Alander. “We’ve been looking for attitude controls in the ones we have.”

  “You won’t find them,” said Axford, freezing the view. “They have to be added. But it isn’t as difficult as you might think. The hole ships actually have an inertialess switch you can activate to make it easier to push them around. Although I’m guessing you haven’t found that, either?”

  Alander nodded. There was no point lying. One look at Pearl would have told Axford that already.

  “Where was this footage taken?” asked Hatzis.

  “Van Maanen 2,” said Axford. “One of the inner systems; not far from your McKenzie Base, in fact—”

  “I know it,” said Hatzis. “We’ve been there.”

  Alander didn’t correct her. He and her original had been there in the very early days, when scouting for a location for their headquarters, but this version of Hatzis never had. Van Maanen 2 was a dwarf G-type star not far from Tau Ceti and Sirius.

  “The mission was dead,” Alander elaborated. “But we left a beacon in case someone else came through.”

  “They did.” Axford switched to another image. This one showed the same planet but from another position. In the foreground was one of the golden spindles left by the Spinners. “The usual configuration,” Axford went on. “Ten towers, ten installations, one orbital ring. They must have revived someone to act as contact. From your reports I’ve listened in on, I gather they do this sometimes.”

  “They do,” said Hatzis. “We’ve had the occasional response from colonies given up for dead. Not this one, though.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have.” Another image, another point of view. This one showed an orbital installation of human origin. “This is what they turned their ship into.”

  “The Steven Weinberg,” Hatzis supplied.

  “As you no doubt saw, they were busy before they died out,” said Axford. “But they died out just the same. Watch.”

  The strange hole ship flashed into view, heading on an apparent collision course with the human installation. A split second before impact, however, it vanished.