The Man Who Talked to Suns

by Stephen Andrews

  The ship still fed him images from outside. It had held focus on the vehicle, but as Tannen pushed at the door and tried overrides the view changed suddenly, accompanied by an alert signal and flash of concern from the ship that made him focus on it. Before them loomed the giant metropolis. It closed with them slowly and gently; their meeting would be more like a lovers kiss than an enemy’s charge. In fact, as Tannen watched, he noticed the ship was entering a large bay. Under other circumstances he would have said they were docking, but that was unthinkable. Unless, the enemy believed it had neutralised all life on board, and now steered its captured artefact into custody. Perhaps the vehicles were not sent by Ansti at all, but were Tash-eh things. Perhaps the one inside the ship, had been all along. Tannen could now believe anything was possible.

  Chapter 22.

  In another life Ansti had listened to a man of power and passion tell him a secret. It had happened after their relationship had reached a crisis point. The man, who called himself Ashur, had come to Ansti intoxicated. Perhaps he said more than he should, or perhaps he had feigned his vulnerability so he could manipulate Ansti? It did not matter now. But the secret did, because the secret disguised a lie.

  Work with me, the man had pleaded. Help me to free our people and rejoin your family. Help me to return you to your calling. Do a thing for me now and your reward will be freedom to move amongst the stars again. It had not convinced Ansti totally, but it had sowed enough seeds of doubt for him to go along. The man had begged and cajoled and appealed to Ansti’s morals. The emotional tugs had half worked too. Then there was a breakdown in trust. It was recent and painful, and Ansti had not wished to repair it fully. And so the man had become conspiratorial and had opened a window on a secret and invited Ansti to look.

  A look could not hurt as long as Ansti did not tell. Few knew, fewer still would understand, and many could be agents of the enemy. Look but never tell he had said. Look so you understand. If you do not trust me, then trust what you see. The man had unfolded a device; a reader like those that children use before their guide patch is installed. He knew that Ansti was disabled. He also knew the reader could be isolated from the ship’s mind and therefore from the rest of the crew. A child’s toy was a safe place to keep a dangerous secret.

  The man operated the toy and a story started. It was one familiar to Ansti; a story of war and defeat and a flight to safety. It was the story of hiding and then recall to duty. It was also the story of others who built and schemed and dreamt of revenge and freedom. Ansti frowned. This was no secret, it was a story he already knew. Have patience the man had said. Let it unfold, a new twist will emerge. There was a ship and a space for a pilot, but there was also a crew. The crew was an enigma. What were they there for in a machine that kept itself? Ansti had wondered before, but the company of humans was welcome and he was busy. He had not let the enquiry draw him in.

  The secret was the crew. They had functions and performed tasks, none of which were needed. Each thought their role unique and necessary, and it was, but not in the way they believed. They had been chosen for their ignorance of ships and fighting. Those who knew the military, or the life of ships, would ask pointed questions. They would need satisfying answers to informed queries. They would wonder, as Ansti had, why they did things a simple machine could do. Such thoughts were dangerous here. The crew had no need of such thinking. Make-work kept them busy until they were ready to intervene in the man’s great game.

  The man had shut down the reader and looked at Ansti deep and hard. Here is the secret, he had said, and left a pregnant pause. The crew are this ship’s weapon. Of course it has weapons you would know, but they are not enough to win, not even with you and the vehicle embedded. He had smiled; see, you’re not quite the super hero you might now think yourself. This (he gestured around indicating the ship), and you will get us to Tash-eh Hruun. That’s your job. When we get there the crew will be unleashed. He had not blinked once, his gaze stayed locked on Ansti.

  The crew were gene-spliced. Each member carried a small part of code in his or her DNA. It was wrapped and hidden, but each and every cell had it embedded. Individually the code was nothing. Collectively it was genocide.

  The man had chosen words well; he had chosen them with precision and power and selected them to influence. It was working. We will arrive on Tash-eh Hruun he had said, and we will be captured. The Tash-eh won’t kill us, they’ll want to understand how we brushed passed their defences and Helvyani allies. We will be taken and locked in vats and our minds and bodies disassembled until they know everything. They will uncoil our DNA and suck pictures and feelings and data from our minds. They will make it hurt, even though it does not need to. We will be interrogated and punished, and the very essence of each of us will drip into their collective knowledge.

  And that is how our the poison will find them. Each part will find the other just as sperm seeks an egg. They will join and the weapon will form. Call it a virus or poison or a radicalising idea. Once it is formed the poison will spread amongst their infants in the vats. They will be corrupted and deformed. They will be born to die, just as your ancestors were. A generation will die Ansti. At least they might. The man had smiled, and continued. They might die if the enemy does not agree to our demands. If they do, then we will provide a key. It will be the key to life, a short life and one that can only be prolonged with another key. You see it now, the path to our victory? The crew are components of a weapon. Each must die to make the weapon function. They must give their lives so that billions can be free, but they cannot know, because life is selfish, Ansti. It always wants to survive.

  Ansti had wondered at the man’s ambition and the ease with which he spent others lives. He had pondered the morals and asked himself if the revulsion he felt was justified. Soldiers die in wars, and those in power send them to their death. So it had been for millennia; was this any different? The question was, did he wish to be part of it, and what would be his fate once the crew were used? How would the man ensure Ansti never let his secret out? For a man of power, there must be only one way to ensure eternal silence; the silence of the grave. Ansti had thought it all through, even his own fate, and in the end decided, yes, he would go on so that his people might be free again. He had resigned himself to die for others. He was the only one on board who made the choice knowing the facts.

  And then he had been offered a new choice. The par-born had offered him a different way of being, and in so doing given him an option that he had given up; the choice to fight and live. He took it and revelled in it. His new being was beyond the power of the man, and Ansti could save his people and himself. That he could do, but he could not save the crew. He felt the pain of their inevitable death. It went with him as he travelled in new places, and grew to match the scale of his new life.

  In his new form, Ansti knew himself with more insight then he had ever done before. His ego dissolved and the barriers to true understanding went with it. As he found himself he also found new ways to see others. He found a clarity and saw feelings, motives and thoughts with precision; not through words spoken but through the messages that minds and bodies kept hidden. Ansti had returned his focus to the conversation with the man of power, and searched it. He had examined every unspoken signal, and found new meaning. He was not surprised to discover he had been told a lie. Such was the nature of the man.

  The truth shone from the man, for those with the means to see it, and the truth had a name. It was called betrayal. Like all good lies there was a great deal that was true, but the truth ended with the crew. Their role was not to give their lives, their role was to take on new ones. The man had bought power for himself by colluding with the enemy. Together they would achieve something that neither could do alone. It had started in the depths of defeat when the man had been negotiating with the enemy. Stop, he had been telling them. Stop, we surrender. The enemy had not listened. They had the upper hand, and there was nothing for the man to bargain with. They could take all they
wanted and destroy that which they didn’t. He was bereft and powerless.

  The man did not give up. He sought a lever and schemed. He had ambition and did not want to see it die with his people. It was his ambition that found the answer. A marriage of kinds was proposed. At first it was met with derision, and then dismissed and then half believed. It was finally grasped with fervour and greed. It took decades, years in which the man had to prove his intent time and time again to the conquerors, and stay hidden too. If they found him they would simply take what they needed. He danced with a deadly predator and offered it morsels.

  The proposal was astonishing. He opened with his offer. I can bring you the means to create pilots in your vats, he had said. I know you have tried and largely failed and I know why. I can bring you the secrets of selection, DNA splicing training and ship/pilot empathy texts. I can do it so you can grow pilots in your vats with the technology you understand. You will never fear the power of pilots again, because the power will be yours. You will grow pilots as easily as you rear your children. There is more, he had said. There is a thing you can do that no other race has been able to. You can create warrior pilots. Your vats can train them and teach them. The vats can subvert the moral blockages that our pilots have, and they in turn can poison ship’s minds. Imagine the power that would be yours. Together we can dominate everything. Alone we can only struggle against each other.

  His desire was simple. He wished to lead his people. He wanted to correct the mistakes of regimes he had served and come to despise for their weakness and heady pacifist moralising. He wanted power so that he might reshape those who needed to be reshaped. His power would be guaranteed by the enemy’s new warships. He would be their partner in a new order. They had sought to limit the power of others, but now together the enemy and the man could wield more power than either had imagined. There would be a union, and its new born would be fighting ships that would dominate the space between worlds.

  He was met with deep scepticism at first. There were many Tash-eh leaders who scoffed at his claims and doubted his ability to deliver. Most asked why they would negotiate at all when they had already won so much? And, yet, if he was telling even a partial truth, the new power would be immense. A little trust backed up with a good deal of safeguards might unlock a new age. So the Tash-eh set the man to proving himself. He had to work hard. He gave enough to build trust without giving away all his secrets. The enemy was sceptical but it was also reasonable and intrigued; eventually a plan was made.

  The plan was simple in idea and fraught with problems in execution. The man would deliver what the Tash-eh needed to grow warrior-pilots. He would deliver specimens of his race that had the genetic and emotional qualities to be pilots; the coding and organic binding tracers that would open their genes to the right influences without losing their abilities. He would bring experienced pilots, with memories of jumps and ship-pilot empathy and the hushed negotiations with suns. He would bring the warrior spirit of the sun-blessed vehicles, the closest thing to a fighting ship that existed, and the key to striding across the deep without a sun’s permission. Finally he would bring the one and only thing the enemy could not find for itself; his knowledge. It was knowledge he had not earned. He had stolen it from those who had believed themselves working for a greater cause. They were dead now, and Ashur had covered his tracks.

  Finding pilots was the hardest part. His new allies had been too efficient in hunting them down. But he had also played his own games and drawn spirals in spirals and spirited away a few. One he found again, and knew how to make return. A kiss had started the recall, and Ashur had his final piece; Ansti. He had made it just hard enough for Ansti to return. Hard enough for Ansti to believe he was in danger from the enemy and on a quest of great importance. He had felt as he should; hunted. At one point Ashur feared he had played the game too well and killed the man he needed. He had wanted to keep it real, so Ansti’s hunters had not been told they should fail. They had very nearly delivered a real death, but Ansti had survived. Even great manipulators needed a little luck.

  Equipped with everything he needed Ashur had set off for his rendezvous. He’d planned and schemed and agonised over every last detail. There would be surprises and traps to negotiate en route. Just as Ansti had been played, so the crew would too. They would feel the enemy’s power reaching for them and respond with courage and determination. They would struggle to deliver themselves willingly to their own doom. Ashur had spent a second life scheming it seemed, and he kept the joy he felt at plans fulfilled buried deep so he could not betray himself. He’d thought of everything he could, but there was no way he could have thought of the par-born. They had changed Ansti and changed everything, but still Ashur had plans, and they arrived on Tash-eh Hruun, deep inside the trap.

  Chapter 23.

  Tannen was trying overrides, ordering the ship to listen and obey despite what it believed or had been told by others. Its mind was too small to reason with, and it left Tannen with no option but to flash simple codes and logic loops, none of which worked. Finally he resorted to desperate, frustrated hammering on the door and shouting for help. Neither drew any response from ship or crew. He was in solitary confinement. For a moment he feared that he was trapped inside the ship’s corpse, but it was not dead. Filtered air reached him and lights illuminated the room. It may have been damaged but it was not killed. Tannen’s mouth wrinkled into a wry smile. It seemed he and the ship shared something in common; both were hard to kill.

  If he could not be an actor, at least he could be an observer. Tannen ordered the ship to flash images to him. The place they had been drawn into was vast. Atmosphere greyed the edges of monolithic blocks that formed the boundaries of a massive box. The floating blocks held station with each other without touching. Lines of light penetrated the gaps between and revealed the thickness of the objects. None had any features except the roughened stone like texture of their surface. Tannen panned and zoomed looking for anything that might offer hope of escape. There was nothing. An unwelcome thought pushed itself to the front of his consciousness; could this be a kind of coffin for a ship? Pushing the thought away was not easy but Tannen managed. Then, as if the suggestion itself and gained traction, the blocks began to move together.

  The shock was so deep that Tannen twitched. Gaps of light were becoming thin lines and in places they had disappeared altogether. Objects with billions of times the mass of Tannen were moving serenely to form a tomb. Tannen switched view, and to his relief he saw that the space through which the ship had entered remained open. Something deep and animalistic inside him was reassured that there was still a way out. Above, below, in front and to the side, there were no longer gaps through which light could shine. The ship was now inside a massive square structure that was solid and dense on all but one side.

  For a moment all was still, and then parts of the bay started to glow. Sections took on the appearance of coals, glowing with soft red and amber light from beneath the surface. Parts began to melt and twist and reform into new shapes. The interior of the monolithic structure was moving and curdling. It replaced bare surface with intricate designs of overlapping geometric lines. They formed softly at first with melted looking edges, and then as they cooled they took on more definition. Suddenly the interior looked as if an army of sculptors had been at work. It became a cathedral to some Tesh-eh design that was tantalisingly and terrifyingly close to fruition.

  Orange and red hues bathed the ship and seeped into Tannen’s consciousness. Everywhere had taken on the colours of heat and fire. Everywhere that was, except a small circular area ahead of the ship. Like an ice cube surviving an inferno, it glowed cool blue, in defiance of the dominating colours around it. Tannen noticed it and zoomed in. On closer inspection he saw details; radial lines moving out from the centre to the circumference pulsed with deep blues and violets, each framed in ice blue coolness. The object appeared to be tiny in the context of its surroundings, but it was easily the same size as the ship. Ta
nnen let the ship’s visual sensors drift over it and close on it, adding more definition as they did. His senses were filled with blue now and the object showed depth and structure. He was mesmerised by its beauty, and gazed long and hard. It was that gaze that spotted a mark, a depression in the structure close to the centre. Tannen stopped the drifting search and simply looked at the indentation. Its shape was unmistakeable; arms outstretched, legs slightly parted, head held erect; a human would fit perfectly.

  Tannen told the ship to search for similar indentations and it found more. Set at equal angles around an interior circumferences were a number of the same marks. But, the ship reported they were not exactly the same size. The height and general body shape varied. The arms and legs differed in size and the so did the depth of the indentations. There were thirty of them — just three fewer than the ship’s compliment. Tannen felt a gnawing anxiety tugging at him, and asked the ship to perform a simple match. It returned an affirmative answer; each one of the crew would fit exactly into one of the waiting places. Each one that is except for Tannen, Ashur and Ansti. The Tash-eh had been waiting for them. They had known exactly who was coming and when. Tannen’s stomach churned; they had fought and struggled their way into a trap. Tannen felt tears sting his eyes, and a deep uncontrollable sobbing wrench at his torso. They had been played, and now they brought the enemy a great prize; the ship and its secrets.