Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

Axford chuckled softly. “Beating us at our own backstabbing game,” he said, shaking his head. “Damn. You just can’t trust anyone these days, can you?”

  Alander turned away from the screen after a moment, fighting a feeling of foreboding that was developing in his gut. As difficult as things could be at times with Hatzis, he would have preferred to have her in front of him, where he could see what she was doing.

  “I guess it’s just you and me now, partner,” said Axford.

  “Yeah.” He nodded numbly. “I guess so.”

  * * *

  Alsafi was less than fourteen light-years from Vega. Had Axford’s home star not been such a fluctuating show-off, it would have been one of the brightest stars in the sky. It still staggered Alander that, thanks to the generosity of the Spinners with their gifts, they could now cross such vast distances without even feeling as if they were traveling. Unspace, as someone had recently quipped, was a nonevent.

  During the four hours they spent in transit, he and Axford went over the resources they’d brought with them. The merging of the hole ships gave them a little more than double the capacity for haulage. Frank the Ax, naturally, had used that extra space to load up on exotic weapons and defensive systems. Much of the equipment that had come with the Yuhl had been ditched. Until Axford had time to examine it more closely—or until he returned and communicated with the copies of himself who would do so while the newly embodied Axford went to Alsafi—he wouldn’t even be able to tell which pieces were damaged and which were supposed to look that way. The coral structures that had adorned the original Yuhl cockpit now had a half-melted look.

  The Yuhl prisoners remained on board, however, and although they were still hidden behind the bulkhead, their presence on the ship unsettled Alander. He kept thinking of what the one had done to Hatzis in that brief fracas, and how it had come for him, too.

  Nevertheless, on a couple of occasions through the trip, he did attempt to open a dialogue with them. They remained stubbornly silent, even between themselves. In the end, he contented himself with conducting a noninvasive exploration of their anatomy instead, using the subtle senses of the hole ship to examine the aliens’ bodies from the inside out. It felt good to lose himself in science and forget about everything else that was going on, even if it was just for a short time.

  “I think you got the genders wrong,” he told Axford at one point.

  Frank the Ax’s new body—a sleeker version of Alander’s but with an identical hairlessness and a closer resemblance to his original—looked up from an internal rumination. “Oh?”

  “The structure you identified as a penis is more likely to be an ovipositor. Female insects and some species of fish use such organs to lay their eggs on—”

  “I know what an ovipositor is, Peter,” he said. “But what makes you think we have one here, rather than a double penis? Double-barreled species aren’t unheard of, back home.”

  “The ducts servicing the organ lead to structures more reminiscent of ovaries than testes,” Alander said, indicating finely detailed scans taken of the more passive alien’s interior. “See? Large numbers of identical cells, not a production line like you’d see with most males. Whereas this alien—”

  “We have both sexes here?”

  “I think so,” said Alander.

  “Fancy that,” Axford mused. “Hey, if we ever find a way to house-train these Roaches, maybe we should look into breeding them.”

  The humor was in poor taste, Alander felt, so he didn’t honor the comment with a response. “This one has a stunted version of the same external organ,” he went on, “indicating that it is perhaps a variant on the other’s basic genotype—just like human males are of human females. This organ has numerous pores connected to vesicles containing exactly the sort of cellular powerhouse you’d expect of the species’ male. My guess is the pores open under stimulation to release the spermatic analogue—”

  “They sweat semen?”

  “Only around their sexual organ.”

  “Where the female lays the egg?”

  “Maybe,” said Alander thoughtfully. “Or perhaps there could be an intermediary involved. A host.”

  Axford stared at him for a long time. “Are we talking parasitic wasps, here?”

  “I don’t know,” Alander admitted. “I’m just trying to understand them at their most basic level. How their hearts beat is just fluid mechanics; but how they reproduce will have a bearing on every aspect of their psyches.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” said Axford indifferently.

  Alander kept his attention fixed on the images before him. “I think they’re infertile,” he said after a few moments’ reflection. “Either that, or they’ve deliberately suspended their reproductive activity. You’d expect that of an advanced species.”

  He stopped when he realized that Axford wasn’t really listening anymore. The ex-general was clearly only interested in science he could use, and Alander left Axford to his thoughts. The joint thrills of discovery and the unknown kept him occupied for most of the remainder of the trip. Only when they were due to arrive did he put aside the images and concentrate on what Axford considered to be more important.

  “We don’t have much of an idea what we’re going into.” Axford directed Alander’s attention to the partly decrypted data from the Yuhl hole ship that was flowing in streams down the screens. “I’m going to bring us in well out-system,” he said. “And then only briefly. If they’ve dug themselves in, they could have all sorts of counterintelligence defense systems in place.”

  Alander faced him. “Does the system have planets?”

  “I checked the map in the gifts before we left,” he said.

  “It shows a couple of large gas giants in close orbits, but nothing more than that. But that’s not entirely conclusive, either. I agree with your survey team when they said that the data in the maps represent a quick glance rather than a detailed exploration. Given the Spinners’ technology, they might have compiled the data while they were kiloparsecs from here. Or farther. We have no idea how far they’ve come.”

  “Or how they’re traveling,” Alander added. “I mean, we can’t assume they’re using hole ship technology. No one’s managed to locate the actual front yet, so we have no idea how they’re getting around.”

  Axford shrugged: irrelevant, for now. “My guess is that Alsafi is a staging base for the Yuhl, designed to service this area of the front. It won’t contain anything too permanent,” he said. “And not because it’s especially dangerous, either, but because they know we’re scouting around here. The longer they can delay a confrontation, the better. I’m willing to bet their actual base will be somewhere else. Not behind, because that’s where the Starfish are. It’s more likely to be to one side of the front—and possibly around a non-G-type star, like Alsafi, since the Gs are where the Starfish will be concentrating their search for us. Somewhere out of the way.”

  “Somewhere we’ll probably only manage to find them by stumbling upon it by chance,” said Alander.

  Axford nodded. “Exactly.”

  Alander thought of the hole ship that had gone missing near pi-1 Ursa Major and wondered if someone already had.

  “We’re not going in to attack, are we?” he asked. “We’re going in to try to open communications, right?”

  Axford’s expression was hard to read. “I’m not going to try anything crazy, if that’s what you’re worried about. This is my only hole ship, remember.”

  And this is the only version of me, Alander wanted to add.

  “Relocation in one minute,” announced Mercury.

  Alander took a calming breath and told himself to relax.

  A wave of dizziness rolled through him. The more debilitating effects of his engram instability had eased off in recent weeks, and he experienced only occasional attacks of vertigo. There were times when he almost forgot how crippled he had been on Adrasteia, when any moment might have brought on the forgetfulness or disorientation, to the poin
t where he had feared for his very sanity. Those days seemed awfully long ago, but the return of his symptoms made them feel fresh again.

  Or perhaps it was just a feeling of going into the unknown, as he had that first time with the Gifts, not knowing who or what might be waiting for him on the other side.

  Mercury’s screen cleared, and he caught his first glimpse of the Alsafi system.

  Two gas giants: the gifts’ maps had been right about that, at least. Of roughly equal size, they were locked in resonant orbits, the innermost straddling the system’s habitable zone, taking precisely half as long to circle the system’s primary. Each had a number of small moons, but none had any significant water or oxygen emission lines. There seemed to be no terrestrial bodies in the system.

  “Anything?” Alander asked.

  From Axford’s glazed expression, he suspected that the ex-general had found a way to interface directly with the hole ship’s senses.

  “Not yet. Everything seems quiet. Unless... Hold on. We’re jumping again.”

  The screen faded to black for a minute, and when it cleared, it showed a much closer view of the second gas giant out from Alsafi. To someone who had seen dozens of gas giants in recent weeks, it was unremarkable in almost every way: the usual tumultuous atmosphere, swirled in orange, gold, and red; intense electrical activity lighting up the night side; a powerful magnetic field blasting out radio waves as it interacted with the solar wind. It was almost too huge to comprehend and too fluid to get a grip on. As with most gas giants, its satellites provided the foreground landscape against which it simply loomed large in the background.

  The view depicted on the hole ship’s screen jumped from satellite to satellite, zooming in on cratered rock, fractured ice, bubbling volcanoes, smooth plains of solidified lava...

  “Want to tell me what we’re looking for here?” Alander asked edgily. He still wasn’t sure what Axford was up to.

  “I’m not sure exactly,” the ex-general replied. “I picked up some unusual emissions from around this area, but they’ve stopped now. Everything seems quiet.”

  “Too quiet?”

  “Perhaps. I’m going to jump again, just in case. It doesn’t hurt to keep moving.”

  They reappeared on the far side of the giant. Three more moons hove into view, each as unremarkable as the next. Two were little more than captured asteroids, whereas the third was a smooth, icy ball roughly 800 kilometers across. A routine scan revealed a faint magnetic field, suggestive of a liquid ocean somewhere under the bright surface.

  “Damn,” Axford whispered after a moment. “I think they’ve gone to ground.”

  “They know we’re here?”

  Axford didn’t respond immediately, which didn’t help Alander’s growing anxiety. When he did finally speak, it was slowly, thoughtfully, as he said, “Something’s tipped them off.”

  “Could they have detected us when we first arrived?”

  “It’s possible.” Axford shrugged. “The hole ships trigger all sorts of space-time distortions when they relocate. I’ve a rudimentary detector myself back in Vega. Unless they have advanced...” Axford trailed off.

  “What is it?”

  The view in the hole ship screen zoomed in on the icy ball before them. “Why, those sons of bitches.”

  “You’ve found them? Where? On that moon?”

  “Look again,” Axford demanded, although he didn’t give Alander a chance to see whatever it was he was meant to be seeing before he added, “They are the goddamn moon.”

  “What—?”

  Alander watched in amazement as what looked from a distance like an innocent high-albedo rock resolved into a perfectly smooth, white sphere, identical in every respect to a hole ship—except, of course, for its immense size.

  “It can’t be,” he muttered, fighting back his apprehensions.

  “Don’t forget they’ve been following the Starfish for twenty-five hundred years,” said Axford. “Think how many hole ships they could’ve stolen in that time! Imagine what that might look like if you added them all together!”

  Alander didn’t need to imagine; the evidence—barely comprehensible though it was—floated in space before them.

  “What do we do?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t do anything,” said Axford. “Maybe we should just let them make the next move.”

  “What if they attack us?” Alander was thinking of how Axford had taken over the Yuhl ship in 61 Ursa Major. If the Yuhl performed the same maneuver, they could be inside Mercury before they even knew it.

  “Relax, Peter,” he said, obviously sensing his anxiety. “I’m keeping an eye on them. I’m fairly confident there aren’t any other ships loose within the system, otherwise we would have spotted them moving by now. And if anything from this mother tries to come at us, I’m pretty sure we’ll notice. There’s a correlation between the number of component hole ships and the size of the final vessel. Take one away, and you change its radius.”

  “Very slightly,” Alander pointed out, thinking of the immense number that must comprise the moon.

  “It would be enough for Mercury to notice.” Axford turned to look at Alander. “Want to say something to them?”

  “It seems the next logical step. But what?”

  “Perhaps we should ask them.” Axford inclined his head in the direction of the bulkhead behind which was housed the two Yuhl captives.

  Alander knew the importance of what their first words here could mean to future relationships with the Yuhl, and the weight of that responsibility increased a hundredfold when Alander remembered what had taken place earlier with their captives. It occurred to him that their brethren might not be too impressed to learn of how they’d been attacked—even if Hatzis had come off second best.

  The barrier separating them from the captives faded away. The more aggressive of the two was seated in very much the same position it had been hours earlier; it didn’t react to the change. The other was pacing and looked up when the wall cleared.

  “Do you want to go home?” Axford asked it. The hole ship automatically translated his words.

  Its reply appeared on the screen.

  [UNKNOWN] NO LONGER EXISTS.

  WE HAVE NOTHING BUT [UNKNOWN], AMBIVALENCE WILLING.

  “The first term is probably the name of their home planet,” Axford said. “Or government or system or something. And the second term loosely translates as mantissa.”

  “Could that be the name of their ship?” Alander directed the alien to the image of the massive ship on the screen. “Mantissa?” he asked. “Your ship?”

  The aggressive alien snarled something untranslatable, but its partner remained calm as it answered: “Our ship is Mantissa is what you see.”

  “How do we hail it?” said Alander.

  “Speak, and it will hear,” both vocal streams chorused smoothly.

  Alander looked at Axford, who shrugged and said, “I guess we’ve nothing to lose.”

  He opened an all-frequencies broadcast and addressed the alien vessel, instructing Mercury to translate it into the alien language. “This is Francis Axford of Earth calling the Yuhl-slash-Goel vessel Mantissa,” he said. “We have two of your people aboard, as well as the body of a third in storage. Please respond.”

  The response came quicker than Alander had expected, almost as though the Yuhl had been anticipating the communique.

  [UNKNOWN] REQUIRES IMMEDIATE RETURN OF HOSTAGES.

  THE YUHL/GOEL DO NOT TRAFFIC WITH THE

  ALREADY-DEAD.

  “Smug bastards,” Axford muttered. To the alien vessel, he said, “I never said your two friends were hostages. I just said I had them on board. But should you attack me, then I won’t hesitate to use them as a shield. Do you understand?”

  YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED BY THE YUHL/GOEL.

  [UNKNOWN] REQUIRES IMMEDIATE RETURN OF HOSTAGES.

  “Sure,” Axford snorted. “We hand over your friends, and you call in the Ambivalence. That’s how you guys li
ke to fight your battles, isn’t it?” This time, he didn’t even give them a chance to respond: “Listen, if you want these two back, then ‘trafficking’ with us is exactly what you’re going to have to do.”

  The response took longer that time.

  [UNKNOWN] DOES NOT REQUIRE US TO COMPROMISE.

  RETURN THE HOSTAGES IMMEDIATELY.

  “What’s this ‘unknown’ it keeps referring to?”

  “I’m not sure.” Axford looked thoughtful. “The word seems to mean something along the lines of common sense, but it also appears to be a reference to an entity rather than an actual concept. Call it the Praxis for now, then we’ll see if we can work it out later.”

  “Perhaps this is just their way of telling us it’s common sense to hand over the captives,” Alander suggested. “I mean, it’s not as if we have much to bargain with, especially if they don’t have the moral sense as we do.”

  Axford shook his head. “I don’t buy that. If that was the case, they would have simply attacked by now.”

  “Okay, then what about an exchange? Split the ship; we take one each. One of us goes in while—”

  Axford’s laugh cut him short. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “But you won’t catch me putting my hand up to volunteer.”

  “No, I didn’t think you would,” said Alander.

  Axford’s disposition sobered quickly. “Hey, it has nothing to do with me being afraid, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Mercury is the only hole ship I have, and I’m not prepared to give it away yet; that’s all.”

  Alander shrugged dismissively. “Okay, then. If someone has to go, I guess it’s going to be me.”

  Axford’s artificial body faced him in an almost challenging pose. “With the express intentions of opening communications, right?” he said gruffly. “Nothing else?”

  Alander forced a smile. “I can’t decide what I’m going to do until we know more. This is a fact-finding mission, after all. I’ll follow my own counsel, taking your wishes into account. That’s the most I can promise.”