The Man Who Talked to Suns

by Stephen Andrews

  Ansti felt the Helvyani hex disintegrate under the attack that he and his allies had made. With the threat gone, he returned his focus to the life driving through him and around him. The lives that teemed in the void did not take up space, they were space. Each entity flowed and moved as part of every other, and their collective presence made the void and the rules that governed it. It was wondrous and exhilarating and humbling, but it was not enough. There were small entities with feelings as great as those he now perceived, and they still could not progress without him. Helping them was part of what made him unique, and much as the thought of cramming his psyche back into the tiny sack of flesh and bone that he had sprung from repulsed him, the thought of not doing so would haunt him and diminish him on a scale that matched his new self. His guilt would be infinite.

  The act itself was accomplished with the ease that a person might dress himself. Ansti returned his essence to the confines of a body, and the body to the confines of the pilot’s couch. He felt the ship reach out to him. An experience that had once been awe inspiring was now disappointing in its limits. Only the faintest traces of the nearest sun’s life force washing over the ship gave Ansti relief from the feeling of imprisonment. He reached out to it and felt acknowledgement. There was no waiting for him anymore. Then he reached out to Ashur using the ship’s communications, and after the moments of Ashur’s anger, relief and confusion had passed one central need became clear.

  “Help us Ansti. The enemy is moving. They have a ship prepped to jump. It’s lifting to the jump point now. If it gets to Tash-eh Hruun before us it will warn them. We must eliminate the ship preparing to jump. Ansti we must destroy the enemy ship or everything is lost.”

  Ashur knew what he was asking. He was asking Ansti to break a convention that bound the twelve races together, and to break his own moral code. Did Ashur think Ansti had abandoned it with his change? Ansti sensed the crew, each one a tiny node of thoughts and feelings, and as Ashur spoke, new feelings blossomed amongst them all. For most it was repulsion, and for a scattered few there it was a sense of triumph. For one, the feeling was unique, it was a feeling of victory, of plans fulfilled. Ashur. Ashur wanted this so badly that the desire was almost sexual. He wanted the pornography of forbidden conflict.

  “Ansti, it hasn't cleared the atmosphere. It is not in space and so it can’t be protected by the conventions. Suns-shine-dark, hit it and take us to the jump point. You brought down a Helvyani hex. What did you expect next — peace and reconciliation? You started something with violence, and it has to continue to the end. Hit it Ansti, or we are lost. We can’t do it without you, we’ll never find a way now. Ansti…?”

  Ansti felt the man’s emotions. The intense, urgent desire to succeed and the frustration at being so close to his goal and yet so far from it, and layered over it all, a deep insecurity at losing control of the situation. Ansti could do it. He could reach up with the ship’s weapons and crush the vessel as it lifted up slowly. Its bulk meant it had to shift millions of tons of atmosphere to move up, and not even the power of a ship could do that safely and quickly. It was as vulnerable as an insect in a web. Ansti flicked his attention to it and found familiar human feelings — fear, anger, frustration and even excitement — the people on board knew attack had come and believed they were a move ahead of the enemy. They felt a jump away from finding safety and unleashing great power. They had victory on their mind.

  Ansti watched as it moved up. He probed and found the pilot calming himself and readying for contact with the sun. He was experienced and had confidence in completing one simple task, the jump home. Ansti searched him a little more and to his surprise and delight found that the man was vat grown, but had no military training. Even in the darkest most secret places his race honoured the conventions that opened the galaxy to it. The other lives on board were all human, except one; a Helvyani. It felt Ansti seek it out and brushed his senses with a reflexive exotic invitation to seduction that shocked Ansti with its power and speed. It could not trap him, but the intensity with which it tried revealed capability that humans had not guessed at.

  Ansti felt Ashur demanding action. The man was practically shouting his orders. Ansti heard the words and understood the meaning, but Ashur had no power over him. He’d fought for this man and fought with him; fought to be here, fought to move on, but the power had shifted now. Ansti watched the Tash-eh ship rising, and at the same time listened to Ashur ranting. The ship was nearly at the jump point, and Ansti had not moved his allies. He vaguely heard Ashur dispatch armed personnel to the pilot’s room, and he heard Tannen interject, and then Ashur slap him down. The Tash-eh ship would jump before the armed crew reached him, so Ansti had nothing to fear. He persuaded the ship’s little brain to lock its weapons, and felt another shriek of rage from Ashur. Then he moved them.

  There was no rising into the sight of a sun. No need for a gentle perambulation out of atmosphere. Ansti was at the centre of the jump and perfectly present where he wanted to be. He opened his consciousness to possibilities and chose the ones he needed. As he did, he felt the vehicles drifting inert but ready, close to him; bonded in a new understanding. He looked at Tash-eh Hruun as he had once looked at the flanks of a ship, but now he had no fear and no need of man-made things to enhance his senses. He saw a world of sorts and a collection of fearsome defences. He felt people misunderstood and alienated from others of their kind; being different was the same as being less, or so they felt judged. It bred insecurity and anger, and they plotted and planned and strived to be better, to be understood, to be strong if all else failed. Ansti focused his attention on a place. He felt himself dive into the void of life and acknowledge the sun whose system he had chosen. He felt the crew enter slow time and the men sent to coerce him suddenly lose control of themselves. He felt there become here, and he willed Tash-eh Hruun to expand in from of him.

  It was a ring. A cloud of dense gas completely orbiting a young sun. There was no world here, instead the matter that might one day become a worlds was stretched in a ring without beginning or end. In places denser objects spotted the ring; things and places made by life, human life for the most part, circled within the cloud of gas. Other things moved within it. Objects pushed and jetted between locations that were orbital distances apart. The cloud provided shelter from the sun’s radiation and materials with which to build and grow. The resources were scattered, but far more abundant than those of a planet. The ring world of Tash-eh Hruun was a paradise of opportunity for those with the vision to see it. And a few had once had that vision. They had a vision of a different kind of life, one where the vagaries of human genetics no longer dictated human potential. A place to grow and become better. And so eventually the vats were born, and Tash-eh men and women become something at the edge of what others considered human.

  Tannen looked in wonder. The sensors were in passive mode, turned down to camouflage the ship’s presence. Ansti, it seemed, had allowed them that much. Even so the sensors transmitted details, and the ring of life that was Tash-eh Hruun shone before him. From this distance it appeared to be a faint blue string wrapped around the sun. The ship was working to highlight areas of potential habitation or weapons hard points, and markers appeared in rapid succession, moving from tens to hundreds to thousands, as the ship used its small brain to find them. Tannen scanned the image and wondered if everything that was deadly in this universe was also beautiful. Perhaps the Helvyani were better adapted than most races.

  Tannen heard the ship telling him about their own movement. It was gathering velocity and heading towards a section of ring where hundreds of markers clustered. It was staying stealthy and gathering speed towards its target like a hunter. Tannen wondered about the ethics of their attack. With no planet how would they know when they had stopped being in space? Ansti must have a plan. He must have thought through this dilemma. The headlong rush at a single point surely indicated that someone knew when attack was possible. Tannen didn’t. After all the work and pain and h
ardship, he had no idea what would happen now. He was simply an observer.

  The ship hurtled in, gathering velocity and adding data and markers, none of which reassured Tannen. It would hit atmosphere in a few moments and smash it aside in a super-heated rush of burning gases. No one fired, nothing moved. Tannen began to wonder if their surprise was absolute. Perhaps Ansti was shielding them in some way? Suns-shine-dark, that man had become something. Tannen didn't feel the first molecules of atmosphere brush the ship, but the ship did, and it transmitted the sensations to him; a tickling pressure on the skin that grew to the tug of a hurricane.

  The ship was being slowed by atmospheric pressure, and the density of gas was rising to something approaching planetary levels. If anything could be called the surface of this mass then they were approaching it, fast. Still nothing happened. Tannen felt his jaw clenched tight, and consciously relaxed it. Around them the dark of space had been replaced with the cyan of sky. It felt like they had touched down, but there was nothing below. A massive conurbation drifted to their left. It was the size of a city, moving in perfect harmony within the ring, and as far as the ship could tell, manufactured. As the ship probed it, several new markers popped up. Tannen didn't recognise them. The ship had spotted something new, or was telling them something in a new way. As they came into view he felt an emotional shift; it was Ashur. He leaked triumph and excitement. It shot from him in waves of powerful joy. He’d found something that the others did not recognise, something which he alone was delighted to see.

  Tannen was taken aback by Ashur’s feelings. How could he be pleased to find something here, in a place that none of them had any knowledge of? As he wondered at the man’s web of hidden agendas he felt the ship lurch violently to port. It had changed course with such instantaneous drama that even its power could not protect the crew from the laws of momentum. For a brief moment Tannen felt gee forces. It shocked and alarmed him, and sent new pain into his wounds and broken limbs. Their course now aimed directly for the city. Tannen did not have time to wonder if they were going to hit it; real events were overtaking his capacity to imagine doom.

  More events demanded Tannen’s attention. The Tash-eh ship had emerged in the system, and warning markers and engagement options flicked into his consciousness, and then, just a quickly, they disappeared. Ansti had stopped the ship from locking on this target. Tannen wondered if Ansti was prepared to die or perhaps was now unafraid of what might happen to his body. Whatever the motivation, there would be no attack initiated on a ship in space, even if it meant that the small group in Ansti’s charge were now caught between an enemy in front and an enemy behind. But, it was an enemy that did not fight. For all their fear and awe at the defences of this place, the crew remained untroubled by attack. The waiting was almost worse than any act of violence that could be aimed at them. At least that is what they had imagined, until attack came.

  It started with a sense of weight. It was as if the air inside the ship was becoming more dense. It reminded Tannen of the quality of air before a storm — still, but rich with the promise of movement and anger. Breathing became harder, it required effort to pull in lungfuls and exhale them again. Every member of the crew felt it. Alarm flashed through the ship as people shared anxiety and sought reassurance from each other. It reminded one or two of respiratory illnesses they had suffered from, and they prickled with sweaty fear at the memory of struggling for breath. Another had nearly drowned as a child and his memories of fear and choking seeped in to add to the climate of growing panic. The enemy was moving again, and they did not know how.

  Tannen had been attuned to the ship’s course and velocity, and to his relief it was slowing even if it still headed straight for the floating city. He had feared a collision more than he feared attack, but now those fears exchanged importance. He shifted his focus away from the ship and the world outside, and back into the room. He had closed his eyes previously, letting the ship feed him images directly, and now he opened his eyes and what he saw chilled him. The air was full of threads. Thin black lines like short pieces of cotton drifted all around. They fell slowly towards the deck where they stuck fast and solidified. He watched one fall onto the arm of his couch and attempted to brush it off, but it would not budge. Another landed on his wrist and one end dropped onto the chair connecting the two. It too anchored itself with a force that Tannen would not have believed possible. It took most of his strength to free his wrist from this one thin thread. This was the attack they had feared.

  The threads fell and fell. Tannen could not see where they came from, but he could feel and hear the crew reacting as he was; with a growing sense of alarm. Ashur tried to take control, and his combination of reassurance and rebuke worked for a while, restoring order where it was stretched thin. But it could not last. The threads bound everything they touched. Men and woman cried as eyes were sealed shut, bodies locked to seats, mouths caught half open or worse still fully closed. Some were already locked fast in their seats, waiting for the slow inexorable suffocation that loomed. Some had wriggled free and now moved spastically, trying to avoid being pinned in place, but the air was becoming thick with tiny rows of death and soon their struggles were confined to one spot and the parts of their bodies that remained free.

  So, this was how the Tash-eh would fight, thought Tannen. There were no searing beams of energy or hyper-velocity projectiles. There were no elaborate and deadly games. There was simply violation of their ship by a multitude of mindless and unstoppable little objects, each able to form an almost unbreakable bond with anything it touched. The slow, black blizzard would cover everything until the inside of the ship looked like it had been sprayed black with textured paint. People would be trapped under a layer of material through which they could not breathe and from which they could not escape.

  Tannen had the wits to open his mouth slightly, even as he felt himself being locked rigid by the threads. The room was thick with them and the light was fading as they covered the softly glowing walls. Tannen knew he could not help himself. He was too battered and broken, and even fully fit there was no physical way to fight the strength of these things. Instead he turned his attention to the most powerful thing he knew; Ansti. He let his feelings and internal voice flood the ship’s communications. It was breach of discipline to be so loud, but soon there would be no one on board left alive, and the still discipline of death would police them all. He searched for Ansti’s presence and could not find it. The ship showed a body in the pilot’s couch when Tannen willed it displayed. At least there was the shape of a body in the couch. He saw it covered in a black shroud. A shroud that was a premonition of his own fate.

  How many times can a human being face the end and still find the will to fight for life? Tannen asked himself this question as he drew breaths through a mask of threads and the constricting bindings of those that had settled on his chest. Each breath was a struggle, and with each inhalation the effort increased. His head was already swimming and panic and desperation were rising. And yet he still fought to breathe and to find salvation. He called in thought and feeling for Ansti to come. He had faith that the man was there somewhere. He may be a different man, but the essence must be there. Ansti would not bring them here to die and offer absolution afterwards. What an easy bargain that would be with; one that a dead man could not possibly hold him to.

  Part of Tannen’s attention was still focused on the schematics the ship provided. It continued to drift forward, closing on the giant metropolis with as much grace and power as it had before he started dying. It did not care. But, something did. Contact alerts jumped into view and the ship broadcast multiple collision or divert warnings to things that had appeared from nowhere. They punctured atmosphere with velocities only usually found in space, and lurched to a halt with an abruptness that defied all laws of momentum. They ringed the ship, and with a power Tannen did not understand, they did something to reality. He felt it in his sinuses and in his blood. There was a shift, and for just a moment he
heard his internal organs pumping and pulsing, and felt the blood flow through his veins. He felt himself living.

  There was a snap and then the vague smell of cut grass and animal urine filled the air, before the threads lost their adhesive power and dropped. They fell to the ground just as their dimensions and weight suggested they should. The threads had lost their powers. Tannen gasped and brushed the things from him. They formed a deep carpet but were no more threatening than that the dark pieces of string that they resembled. Ansti must have had heard him and sent something to intervene. Tannen told the ship to zoom in on the objects stationed around them. He was exerting himself, re-inflating lungs squashed empty of air, and paying attention to the images fed into his visual cortex at the same time.

  An example of the things outside zoomed at him and then held steady; it was a vehicle like the one that Ansti has brought on board. It could have been the one Ansti rode and worked with, Tannen couldn’t tell, but he recognised the chiseled lines and the ergonomic design. There was not a soul on this one, but it seemed to know what it wanted to do. Tannen told the ship to look around. There were dozens of the things holding station with the ship in layered rings. None of them had riders. Tannen examined a few and each was a replica of the next. He thought of the vehicle as something unique and manufactured by the labs of his people. It occurred to him for the first time that they were always something else and had now become an extension of Ansti’s will; little things that were part of a larger entity.

  Tannen tried to raise Ashur and failed. He sought out other crew members and received only dull absence. He was alive, surely others must be too, surely others, stronger and fitter must have survived the threads? He told the ship to flick on internal images, but it would not. It offered no explanation but simply did not respond. He ordered the couch to move towards the door, and it did not. Tannen feared the attack had damaged the ship’s systems. There was little option but to rise from the cosseting comfort of the couch and explore. Pain reminded him that he had survived but not healed, and the couch protested his foolishness. Despite the pain and motherly robotic warning he rose and trudged through an ankle deep layer of dead threads to reach the door. He willed it open and it did not move. Tannen was trapped.