* * * *
When I cycled back into the air lock of the Jagvani, Jandai was waiting for me.
“Come,” she said, and I didn’t ask what for, not even when she brought me to the medical bay and sedated me.
When I woke, the ever-present lump on my chest was gone. Jandai sat beside me, and behind her, in a large glass cylinder, was a pulsing orb of tissue. It was covered in little tentacles, like cilia, all waving against its glass prison.
“Why won’t you kill it?” I said.
“It’s been attempted, on other ships,” Jandai said. “It . . . fights back. But that’s of no concern to us, of course. We have strict protocols about preserving life of any kind, I told you. It goes against everything we believe.”
“Why now?” I said. “Because the ship is gone? Because they know I can’t get them out?”
“It will serve a different purpose,” Jandai said.
“How long have you all known what the anomaly was and what these things are?” I asked. “How long did my mother know?”
“We agreed not to tell the third generation,” she said. “It was bad enough for us, living with it. Better for you to believe escape was possible. Better for you to believe you had free will and were not caught in the maw of some monster.”
“Is the anomaly God?” I asked.
“It is a sentient being that is beyond our understanding. I suppose that yes, in a way, it is a god, if not our God.”
I stared at the pulsing thing in the cylinder. “Will it eat the ship, like the others?”
She nodded. “In time. But by devouring the ship it will save us, in a way. We’ll be transformed.”
“It’s turning the ships into living things,” I said. “Real living things.”
“We think it was drawn to them from some . . . other place. It saw them, perhaps, as a species that must be uplifted.”
“Then what were we?”
She grimaced. “Parasites.”
“Why let us think we had no future? Better to know the truth, so we can fight it.”
“Fight a god? No. Your future . . . our future will be in service to these things, as whatever they make us into. People will still live on the ships, but they, too, will become part of it, like any other system on the ship. They can’t leave it without the whole system collapsing. We tried it with some of the early ships. If you remove any of the components it grew around and incorporated when it was birthed, it dies, and so does everyone and everything else aboard. We wanted you to get away while you still could.”
I tried to sit up, but the drugs from the surgery were wearing off, and my chest throbbed. “Why not take it out, then! I could have gone—”
“No,” she said, “Not once you’re infected. You’re a part of it now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this?”
“Because you were our hope,” she said. “If you and the others thought you had no future, you would fight to build one instead of accepting this one. We raised you your whole lives to accept God. How would you have reacted if you thought this was one?”
“Only, Malati got away.”
“I know. I guess it doesn’t matter. It feels like we’re the only human beings in the universe out here, but of course there are many others under many stars. She may arrive to a fully populated world.”
“They’ll rescue us,” I said.
She laughed. “What will they rescue, if we are even still here, once we become like those other sentient ships and putter off to whatever destination they have in store for us? We’re linked to these ships; haven’t you been listening? We’ll become part of these machines, birthing its parts, its organs, like insects. It’s best they don’t come. I don’t want them to see us.” She stood. “You should go now.”
“Why did you finally tell me about all of this?” I asked.
“Your mother didn’t throw herself into the anomaly,” she said. “She was pushed on order of the prophets, because she was going to tell you and your sister that the anomaly was God’s will and we should not fight it. She was going to ruin the grand experiment. So instead, she became a part of it.”
“You kept her from me,” I said. “You made her a prisoner. Made her birth one of these things and told me she was dead.”
“In the end, the process killed her,” Jandai said. “What grew in her did not survive. I’m sorry. But the experiment is over now.”
“These things aren’t the monsters,” I said. “You are. All of you.”
“Maybe so,” she said, and she stood and left the medical bay.
I lay alone in the room with the pulsing alien thing in the jar, the alien that would turn this whole ship into some kind of integrated machine, and I tried to come to grips with the scale of this betrayal. History was a lie. My studies were a lie. My whole life’s purpose, all this work, my mother’s suicide, all a lie. For what? For science. A grand experiment. A last attempt to save us. Our parents’ generation could not live with the truth, so they just never spoke about it.
It had worked, absolutely. Malati was free. But should she be? I didn’t know. If we all died here, was it so terrible, in the grand scheme of things? What happens next, when you realize everything is a lie, and life has no purpose?
* * * *
When I was recovered, I went down to the lake and peered into the anomaly. My mother’s generation knew what I did, now, and they had chosen secrecy, and despondency, and suicide. But they had forgotten that we were the same people who had left a blighted, overcrowded planet three generations before to take a risk on a new life among the stars. We were made from stronger stuff than they imagined.
It would take my whole life, I knew, but I would figure out a way to control what we were becoming. If I could not stop it, I could figure out how to influence it. I was an engineer of massive organic systems. I had done what the best of us, Pavitra, had not managed: I had powered a ship away from the Legion. There was nothing I wasn’t capable of.
“You cannot break us,” I said. “No god ever has.”
And I climbed back upstairs to the medical bay and got to work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAMERON HURLEY is the author of The Mirror Empire, Empire Ascendant, the God’s War trilogy, and the forthcoming The Stars Are Legion. Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer; she has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, British Fantasy Award, Gemmell Morningstar Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Popular Science, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and Meeting Infinity. Her nonfiction has been featured in the Atlantic, Bitch magazine, Entertainment Weekly, the Huffington Post, Locus magazine, and the collection The Geek Feminist Revolution.
THE FROST GIANT’S DATA
DAN ABNETT
It was the first time Dwire had been back to Nox since he’d built the place. Built it tight so no one could get in.
Now he was coming back at seventy-three times the speed of light.
* * * *
“Wake up,” he said, and the CLoans woke. He watched them closely, monitoring their startup patterns. They blinked, writhed blindly, and gulped like newborns in their bags as the amnioteks drained out. He’d asked for eight, and the clients had sourced five for him. One of them, an ex-shockwar unit that had probably been sloughed too many times, was having febrile convulsions and its stats were tanking. He shut it down.
Four. He’d have to manage with four.
The CLoans had cost a lot to procure. The CLoans, and the fightware. The ship had cost more. The clients hadn’t bought the ship; it was a borrow. But even borrowing an intersystem packet ship had put a dent the size of Mare Imbrium in the mission budget, and bribing an ITA official to certify its eight-parsec detour had cost ten times that.
The detour wasn’t much. Just a little wobble in the packet ship’s routine monthly mail run. Just a little jink that put it in viable photon-sling range of Nox.
>
A four-hour range window. Four CLoan tacbodies. Dwire’s insider knowledge.
Put together, it might do the trick.
There was a lot riding on it. The clients had been crystal about that.
* * * *
Dwire flopped into the velocity cot he’d been nesting in since the packet ship launched. Eight days’ worth of squeezed-out juice-meals lay scattered on the deck around it. The air smelled of oranges. A twitch of his fingers hapted up a datarray, and he brushed through the images hanging in the air. He knew it all. He knew it backward. He snapped his fingers and centered an image of Nox, enhanced for visual and overlaid with specs: a black orb, a cold, dead heart, out in the middle of nowhere at all, bothering no one. If anyone could crack it open and get at the meat, it was him.
He’d built it.
Not the structure. Indentured Formoid constructors had hollowed out the crust and machine-drilled the subsurface vaults. Some of the stacks were eighteen miles deep. Lucian Vironeers, in cryohazard armor, had installed the immense climate vanes. Nox was stabilized at about nine points off absolute zee. The whole contract had been financed by a property development conglom out of Kuiper City. Dwire had been hired toward the end of the project to design the security package. He’d named his own price and he’d done his best work.
At Dwire’s level of the game, you didn’t leave back doors. That kind of sentimental disregard for comprehensive security architecture got you fired and never hired again. Just because he’d built it didn’t mean he’d left a way in.
Besides, the architecture was fluid. He’d designed it to evolve. By definition, it wasn’t the beast he’d created anymore. But he knew how that evolution was supposed to work. That was his edge. That was what the clients were counting on.
On completion, the Nox development had been bought outright by the Frost Giant. Huge payday for the Kuiper boys. The Frost Giant had made Nox one of his primary data claves, a storage facility for the currency that had made him the richest man in the Spiral Arm.
The datarray pinged. The window was about to open. Dwire hoisted himself up.
Time to go.
* * * *
He ejected from the ship. Just him, riding a thrust-rig. Boosted photon sling, superluminal. He’d routed the datarray feed to retinal display, and it crowded his vision with furious info streams. He couldn’t see Nox anyway, only black on black. As expected, the Nox AI had seen the packet ship and queried its close approach. Routine handshakes, clearing codes. The ITA approval seemed like a reasonable excuse. The Intersystem Transit Authority was famously clean.
Dwire was infinitely smaller than the mile-long mass of the packet ship, just a human body, plus the superlight thruster rig, no bigger than an atmospheric drone or a piece of debris. The AI would spot him, but it would dismiss him as dust, or an asteroidal cannoned out by the packet’s wake, or an imaging artifact.
He’d jinked his trajectory with a randomizer. The extra distance of the erratic course would eat his time, but the upside was it would take the AI much longer to recognize him as a deliberately approaching contact rather than a speck of crap spinning past.
Photon sling was no way to travel. The vibration was a bitch. His teeth hurt. There was blood in his sinuses. Dwire had borrowed velocity from the packet ship and amped it with thrust from the superlight rig. He had saved reserve energy for course-correction burns plus decel, and hoped it was enough. It would suck to discover it wasn’t once he was diving head first toward an artificially cooled rock the size of Mercury.
Eight minutes.
He passed out four times. The derm-sensors monitoring his vitals felt him gray-away each time, and flooded his body with stims that woke him like a slap in the face.
“I’m awake,” he growled, tasting bitter metal and chemicals.
He could make out the hard blue shadow of Nox rushing up against the starfield. It was still pretty much nothing in nothing, an eclipsed eclipse, a whisper in a noisy hall. There was a faint halo of luminescence, thin as an arced chalk line, where the light of the starfield bent in Nox’s thin atmosphere.
His retinal display flickered. The AI had noticed him and was taking an interest. Finally, buddy. Took your sweet time.
Soft-pass scans flooded his way. He was being analyzed. Mass and composition assays. Trajectory analysis. Dwire had about seven seconds before the AI recognized pattern and intention in his randomized course.
He prepared to light the thruster rig for the final burn and dump the fusion mine. It would go off like a small sun. Big, shiny noise. Maximum distraction.
An autosnipe turret on Nox’s polar highlands woke up and pinked off a single tachyon hyperkinetic.
Dwire had no time to curse, no time to register disappointment, no time to even feel paternal pride that his AI-governed architecture had evolved so finely, it had cut the target pattern recognition time down to three seconds.
The impact mashed him and the rig into a molecular fog.
* * * *
The hyperkinetic round touched off the fusion mine. A star winked on and off, hard bright and painful to look at. Nox’s perceptor arrays damped protectively, rebooted, and retrained, focusing their attention on the patch of space now occupied by a radioactive heat bloom and a vapor of organic debris.
Dwire watched the distraction with satisfaction. He had expected to have to sacrifice the first CLoan tacbody. He was impressed the AI had caught it so fast. At the moment of body death, the gestalter engine on the packet ship had saved his crashed consciousness and reinstalled it in the skull of the second tacbody, which was now executing a burn-approach on the far side of Nox.
This Combat-Loan tactical body happened to be female. It felt fragile now that he inhabited it, though Dwire knew they were all built to the same level of mil-grade durability. Besides, he was too busy vomiting. Microdrains in his faceplate sucked the fluid out fast. His loaned organs hurt. Point-of-death save-and-installs were high-trauma experiences. Military specialists took a mandatory eight months’ leave to recover from emergency gestalter saves in the field.
No such luxury for him. Stims rushed him again, brought him up, made him sharp. This tacbody would be ready for scrap after the stress he was running it through. He had toxins in his muscles and his blood, necrosis, organ damage.
He felt like shit.
His ret-feed updated. More autosnipes were waking up, their matte-gray mushroom domes rising from the powdered dust of the equatorial plains. Dwire had insisted on installing the best: Maxima Grande Gauss Automatic Marksman assemblies, grav-stabilized, mounted with Kemperer Weaponsuites, all slaved to the AI. For a target as close and fast as he was, they would select fluid-dynamic prediction algorithms. That’s how he’d programmed them, anyway. Had they evolved? Had they been upgraded or reset?
He was counting on “no.” He had switched the drivers of his superlight rig to execute an anti-Mandelbrot recursive descent, embellished with some randomizer jink-turns he’d copied from watching the flight patterns of butcher wasps on Chryse.
The snipes started firing. Hyperkinetics. Jacketed photonics. From somewhere around the curve of the horizon, a spiner cannon started to cut the sky apart with hard-beam ripper shots.
Dwire evaded. The Nox AI hadn’t had to ward off this kind of invasive approach much in its lifetime, so it hadn’t evolved new ways of doing it. Its targeting protocols were as box-fresh as the day he’d loaded them.
Ret-feed gave him six possible landfalls. He selected the closest. The sky wasn’t somewhere you wanted to be any longer than you had to.
He triggered the auto-release that would shed the hard-burning rig and allow him to soar clear. It failed. Fired it again. Fail.
The AI was jamming electronic signals. There was a manual release for the thruster rig, but that fact was moot.
You clever bastard, he thought in the nanosecond before he hit the surface at three times the speed of light.
“You want me to . . . what? Stop the peace accord?” Dwire aske
d.
“No, no, Mr. Dwire. Not precisely,” Oliphant had replied. “We want to . . . inspect the treaty details.”
“With a view toward stopping it?”
They had taken a stealth table in a restaurant overlooking the Bay of Naples. The view was magnificent. No one outside even knew they were there.
“Open war could become protracted and cause massive damage to the Sodality’s economy.”
“Hurting your business,” asked Dwire. “Which is . . .”
Oliphant smiled. He was a small man with big ideas and a very patient voice.
“Concerned parties within the Sodality believe the peace accord could have unforeseen consequences. Don’t get me wrong. The war would be bad. The war would damage the economy, perhaps beyond the point of recovery. Mr. Dwire, the Sodality is the greatest expression of human civilization, a truly galactic superculture. It behooves us to take its survival very seriously.”
“Right.” Dwire nodded. “So, stopping a war with the Ushuns seems to be a good idea.”
“Indeed.” Oliphant raised his wineglass, but did not drink. “A vastly smaller culture than ours. Numerically . . . insignificant.”
“But total fuckers when it comes to a fight.”
Oliphant shrugged.
“They are tenacious. And ferocious. Their mindset is one of absolutes. They will fight until they die, or until they wound us so badly we bleed out.”
“That’s been predicted since first contact,” said Dwire. “Which is why this chance of a peace agreement is so precious. That the Ushuns even considered negotiation . . .”
“The treaty will be signed in fifty days,” said Oliphant. “We want to make sure that what our leaders are signing is actually peace.”
“Because?” asked Dwire.
“The treaty is four trillion words long. It has taken nineteen years of negotiation through diplomatic back channels. It was framed to allow for all eventualities and in consideration, at their specific request, of the Ushuns’ absolute attention to detail. The complex particulars of the document form the foundation for any hope of lasting peace. Fifty percent of it is written in Ushun.”
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