by Barry Kirwan
Marcus came and stood next to Blake. “It’s all set. Four minutes, Zack and I will coordinate on tactical, you, Sir, just…”
“I promise not to touch anything.”
“Commander. Us Genners… I feel we’ve been foolish. Thinking we’re so much smarter, and yet we’re only a level or at most two above you, and out here, that means little.”
Blake nodded. “Enough foolishness to go around.” He turned to Marcus, still a boy, as proud as any sixteen-year-old would be. The Genners had become distanced from their parents, they’d lost something. If Glenda was there, she’d have wrapped her arms around the boy, and hugged him.
“Take your station, Marcus.”
Marcus obeyed. Blake stared into the viewscreen, the dot dead centre where Esperia would suddenly grow large in about four minutes. Glenda, he thought to himself, I’m bringing some friends home. Despite facing almost certain death, he smiled.
Chapter Sixteen
History Lesson
Pierre had spied the majesty of nebulas from a distance many times before, their swirling scarlets, violets and Prussian blues a semi-transparent palette against a canvas of stars. But being inside a nebula was different. Ukrull’s Ice Pick whorled through curtains of energy and dark radiation that made the small ship vibrate. The viewscreen showed vermillion veils buffeting them, and showers of purple super-charged exotic particles that spattered like hail on the hull’s shields. Blood orange lightning stretched thousands of kilometres into the endless distance, only serving to emphasise the strangeness of what was known as the Diamond Nebula.
For Pierre, sights such as these were what he lived for. They more than compensated for the loss of emotional connection with his former companions, including the first and only woman he had ever loved, and the baby he had never seen grow up into the eighteen year old girl she was by now. To him, that whole period had been before, the dark, chaotic and mostly unhappy life of a socially-inept scientist staggering blindly on the hazardous spaceway of complex human social interactions. That was before his nannites interacted with an Ossyrian medical intervention, sending his intellect rocketing from Level Four to Ten.
But Pierre wanted to help his former associates; he felt he owed them that much. Having finally met the Tla Beth, the incumbent rulers and administrators of Grid Society, he and Ukrull were about to meet a Kalarash, the most intelligent beings in the known universe. The one emotion he still allowed himself to manifest was the unbridled and pure scientific joy of discovery, of wonder. A thin smile decorated his flow-metal face.
Ukrull said little, navigating as if bored, searching, hunting according to no discernible pattern. They had come to find Hellera, officially the last Kalarash in the galaxy, given that Kalaran had left eighteen years earlier. He wondered about the relationship between the two, if there was any. The Tla Beth wanted her aid, though the avatar of Kat had suggested a more sinister tactical mission. He’d dismissed it; aside from the very idea that he could capture a Level Nineteen being, it felt… wrong.
He still didn’t know how far Ukrull’s telepathy could penetrate, whether the reptile had detected this other option of trying to kidnap Hellera as a future bargaining chip with Qorall. If so, Ukrull had kept his own counsel. There was no point in Pierre trying to conceal a thought from the Ranger, which Pierre presumed would only serve to amplify it.
Next to the currently dormant Hohash mirror was a holo-display that tapped into the Tla Beth Grid-net, requiring a sub-vocal guttural command for activation. Pierre uttered the grunt, much to Ukrull’s amusement judging by the bout of hacking and spitting that followed, and regarded the display of the galactic war’s progress. Half the galaxy glowed red, including that half’s spiral arms. The inner core blazed white, since there was nothing worth conquering there. The war front was like an unstoppable tsunami wave, tongues of flame licking outward, enveloping systems one by one. Esperia lay like a dusty pearl in its path. Six months, Pierre judged.
“Your offspring there,” Ukrull grunted, tugging with a claw at something the colour of spinach caught between two giant stained incisors.
Pierre said nothing.
“Two days,” Ukrull continued.
Two days till Quarantine came down. Pierre didn’t need reminding. He wondered again how Kat and Petra were doing, and Micah and Blake, and the Genned children. But it seemed pointless to speculate, and he’d left it all behind. He noticed that the thought had wiped the smile off his face. Perhaps it was time to carry out another emotional thought-pattern purge.
“Miss them,” Ukrull pursued.
Pierre turned to face Ukrull. Telepaths could be quite annoying, evidently, probably why they never settled down with a mate. “Why are you so talkative all of a sudden? And this flight plan is ridiculous. We’ll never find her.”
“Not flight plan; dance.”
Pierre wondered if his companion had inadvertently drugged himself somehow. Before he could continue, Ukrull took up the lead again.
“To find something must know what looks like.”
Pierre’s mouth opened, but his thoughts overtook him: Ukrull talkative; erratic flight plan; know what you’re looking for; Level Nineteen race…
“Hellera?” he ventured.
Ukrull sat back, and his yellow eyes softened as he folded his fore-claws across his ribbed, sand-coloured underbelly. He – or rather she – seemed to be smiling. “Ukrull gave me permission.”
Pierre stood, despite himself. “How long?”
“A day.”
“Telep –”
“Naturally.”
So, Hellera had been watching him, seeing the Tla Beth plan in his mind, maybe the other one, too. Now she had made her presence known, she faced him square, held his gaze the way Ukrull never did, and had that unperturbed confidence of a superior being. Pierre wanted to know how she could inhabit Ukrull’s body and mind, and where Ukrull was exactly, but all of that was secondary – while she was there, he had more important questions. His excitement ramped up inside himself, unchecked. He was smiling again.
“Will you join the fight against Qorall?”
Ukrull’s voluminous rust-coloured tongue flicked out and rolled over his eyes. “My effort alone would make no substantive difference.”
“Then what is your plan?”
Ukrull made the grunting noise that controlled the galactic display, which shifted into the centre of the cramped cabin, and hung between them.
“History lesson,” Hellera said, “of life in this galaxy. Tell me what you understand.”
The swirl of stars turned slowly about its axis. Time. She was showing him time speeded up at an incredible rate. He calculated the galaxy’s rate of turn and converted it – a million years per second. Nothing happened for a while, then a spark flared in a spiral then snuffed out, signifying a civilisation flourishing and fading into obsolescence and extinction. Several more peppered the display, each one barely registering before fading. For a few seconds, an entire spiral waxed red, and then thousands of star systems glowed violet, indicating a terrible and all-consuming war, then faded to black, a few star systems hanging on before reverting to grey, indicating their civilisations and grand empires had decayed into oblivion.
And so it continued. He worked out where Earth was, and kept half an eye on it, but knew that at this rate of time lapse it would not even show up as having produced sentient life and civilisation. Then a swelling ring of stars lit up around the inner hub, inward of the spirals, flickered precariously, and remained bright. The Grid. The interstellar highway that had fuelled and cemented a galactic society. It lasted a full ten seconds, rippling out to most of the spirals, then froze. Today.
He wanted more. “Hellera, can you fast-forward, please, most likely prediction.”
The reptile’s yellow eyes blinked lazily one at a time, so Hellera never took an eye off him. The stars all returned to their silver-grey pinpricks, all civilisation extinguished, and then the galaxy split apart, shattered into myriad mote
s losing cohesion, imploding, becoming dust, the dark matter and energy forces that bind a galaxy together depleted. Just like before, Pierre thought, according to the legends of the war two billon years ago in the Jannahi galaxy when the Kalarash last joined battle against Qorall.
Pierre sat back. She had asked him to say what he understood, but the shock of knowing the likely end numbed him.
Hellera spoke, the harshness somehow removed from Ukrull’s larynx. “The time between enduring civilisations is very long. You should know this from your own history – four billion years – and humanity has only evolved in the last couple of million, the beginnings of civilisation just dawning before almost being erased.”
She stood, Ukrull’s long tail swiping slowly side to side. “We Kalarash get terribly lonely in those times of darkness. We see the same mistakes over and over again.”
Pierre sensed the despair of a goddess whose children were forever doomed. He wanted to counter this pessimism. “But this is different, Hellera. The Grid is something spectacular, a glue to fix society into the galaxy’s fabric, make it sustainable, and Qorall threatens it all. Why? And how can you not fight him, while there is still a chance, even if remote?”
Ukrull’s head shook. “Listen to yourself. You are supposed to be Level Ten. Do you care for the ants around your feet?”
“I might if I had cultivated them for generations.”
She snorted, a stream of salty snot issuing forward from one nostril, drenching a console that immediately exuded a resinous cleaning compound. But she grew more serious. “We fought his race, killed all of them, Qorall is the last. It takes a long time to get to Level Nineteen. As you already have guessed, the higher the species, the lower the successful reproduction rate – the maturation takes so long, too many mutations along the way. A natural negative feedback loop.” Her voice became distant. “Your Level Three companions might consider it God’s little joke on us, perhaps, and maybe just as well, we are not easy to get along with. Still, Kalaran and I tried…” Her tail swished out and struck a boxed equipment item, denting it. “Qorall cannot create mates or his own kind. But he can exact revenge.”
“Yet he doesn’t target you directly.” But Pierre already understood. Qorall wanted to make the Kalarash suffer first. And yet it still seemed wrong, as if Qorall had another agenda. Something Kat had said a long time ago. Pierre needed to backtrack. He didn’t know how much time he would have with Hellera, and sensed her growing impatience, perhaps boredom. After all, he was effectively just another ant. “Why did you go to war with Qorall the first time?”
Ukrull’s tongue flicked over his eyes again, as the large reptile settled back into its chair. “Guess.”
Pierre went straight at it. “The Level Eighteen race. It’s to do with them, isn’t it?”
“You are quite smart for a Level Ten. But there is a piece you have not yet understood, a key question you have not yet asked. What would Kat ask if she were here?”
It seemed such a non sequitur, but Pierre obliged, not hiding the fact that he thought the question derisory. “Well… she’d probably ask what you looked like.”
“Yes, she would. Not quite the right question, though. It does not concern what we look like.”
Pierre’s sight went black, before him a uniform darkness. Something blue and metallic began forming out of the ether in front of him. Two bars extended horizontally, an oval ring above them at their mid-point, with a long stalk protruding downwards. The ring, shaped like the outline of a hood, contained a thin stretched film of rapidly changing colours, moving faster than his sight could follow, not unlike a Hohash display. Suddenly the flickering colours stilled into a single ivory and blue eye, which vanished.
What remained before him, blue-silver, was a shape familiar to any historian back on Earth. It was the ancient Egyptian ankh symbol of life and water. But it wasn’t only a shape, he could sense an order, a way of thinking; the only analogy he could bring to mind was an old-style computer operating system.
His eyes opened again. So what? It was interesting, but what was so significant about this shape and its underlying ‘programming’?
“Template,” Hellera said. “Basic form, instinctive reactions and thought processes.” She sighed as if Pierre was a dullard. “Inter-species genetic paradigm.”
Pierre’s mouth fell open. He closed his eyes and called up every alien image he’d studied in Grid history, mapping them against the physical and cognitive ankh template, humans included. He integrated all available information about their thinking strategies up to Level Ten, as he couldn’t comprehend beyond that point. Still, he tried to extrapolate all the way up to Level Seventeen. The template was like a genetic prime number. One species stood apart. “Tla Beth,” he said.
“Changed now, originally they fit the template.”
“Qorall?”
“No. He is from a distant galaxy, his species brought back by a travelling Kalarash named Bareel.”
Pierre pondered the implications. She’d somehow moved into Ukrull’s mind. If most intelligent life in the galaxy had been seeded by the Kalarash, probably after watching it stutter and stall too many times on its own, then it would also give the Kalarash a way in, like a DNA key, to any of those species. A control mechanism, bringing order. It was also a failsafe device in case of rebellion. He recalled what the Grid races called the Kalarash – the Progenitors. How apt. It made it clearer why Qorall would be content to destroy all life in the galaxy.
Pierre tried again. “The Level Eighteen race?”
“A particular brand of machine intelligence.”
Pierre nodded. He’d often wondered about the Tla Beth’s imposed limitations on drone intelligence. “Went bad?”
Hellera cleared the other nostril. “That adjective doesn’t really cover it.”
“So, your plan?”
“To leave.”
Pierre had hoped for more, and let the disappointment ring loud inside his mind, in case it would have an effect. It did. She was gone. He knew it even before Ukrull started growling, and then howling with a deafening roar, the din ricocheting off the walls, making Pierre clamp his hands over his ears, his nannite-enhanced physiology not protecting him as it usually did. Hellera’s doing, he assumed. His entire skin tingled from head to toe as if ants were crawling over him and chewing at him with formic-acid-coated mandibles, and he wondered how long Hellera would make it endure. After a minute it abated.
“You dumb!” Ukrull said, kicking a range of controls that sent them spinning back towards the nebula’s edge. “Why ask wrong questions?”
Pierre scratched the last itch from his chin and managed not to glare at Ukrull. “What would you have asked?”
Ukrull leant back, and held his fore-claws above his rib-cage, as if holding a ball. “Why Esperia?”
Ah, yes, that question had been on his list.
“Doesn’t matter, know now,” Ukrull said.
Pierre looked at his companion. “You do?” He could never tell when Ukrull was grinning, but a couple of larger incisors thrust out beyond the Ranger’s mangled mud-coloured lips more than usual.
Ukrull grunted a command, and a new holo popped up between them. He muttered something and an image of Shimsha from Hazzards’ Ridge arose. Pierre watched the spiders milling about. Okay, what was so special about the spiders? The template. They didn’t fit the template, neither in shape nor in thought format. “Wait, you mean they’ve evolved here separately?”
Ukrull did the eye-licking thing, which Pierre presumed equated with eye-rolling. Then he got it.
“Not from this galaxy,” Ukrull said. “Kalaran brought spiders here.”
Pierre sat back, reeling from the implications. “But they are only Level Four! They have no weapons, no real tech, how can they help? What threat can they be to Qorall?”
“Level only meaningful inside template. Spiders outside. Qorall knows now they are threat. Will destroy them, autopsy later. We get back first. Find out.”
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At that moment the Hohash flashed into life, and they both turned to stare at its display. Pierre’s heart, such as it was after so much physiological evolution, sank at what he saw in Esperia’s sky, evidently viewed from a Hohash still on the planet. The quarantine barrier shimmered and effervesced, and then it was gone. Early. They’ve taken it down early. “How fast can we get there?” Pierre noticed his physiological components were erratic… as if he was worried.
Ukrull growled. “Will be late. Maybe too late.”
Pierre stared at the viewscreen. He suddenly, ridiculously, felt like a father on a business trip who was going to miss his little daughter’s birthday party. Hellera had augmented his emotions, that much was certain, perhaps in retaliation for his daring to try and make her feel remorse. He stood and kicked at the equipment.
Ukrull turned his yellow eyes on him, cocking his head. “Never kick my ship. Only I kick. You sit. I make us go faster. Will hurt. Want?”
Pierre sat. He nodded. His lover, his daughter, images and projections of what Kat and Petra might look like now, flooded his mind. He’d abandoned them… for what? To look at pretty nebulae? He felt an old enemy emotion wash over him – guilt. But the underlying feeling stressing his entire system was worry, concern, and… with a sinking, defeated feeling, he realised it was love. He watched and felt Hellera’s handiwork, like a virus sweeping over eighteen years of careful cognitive management and emotional excision. There was nothing he could do to stop the onslaught, the re-writing of his mind’s software, and the longer it went on, the more he knew he would not want it to stop. His whole being wanted to be there on Esperia. Despite all his Level Ten processes, all he could think about was Kat and Petra, Micah, Blake, and all the others. His people were in terrible danger.