“So you’re going to give me Clarissa, just like that? No arguments? No battles? No dirty tricks?”
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“Kind of hard for me to swallow.”
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“Questions about what?”
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“That doesn’t count!”
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Opal angrily inhaled the increasingly harsh gases in her helmet. She wanted to sit and rest, but that would look like the weakness it was.
If these were the rules of engagement, fine, she could work with them.
Except ... where to start? They’d already said they were bringing Clarissa. Time would tell on that one. So where could she focus her feelings, her curiosity?
“You say you’re not an enemy,” Opal said. Then she added, hurriedly: “That’s not a question.”
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“Good. So here’s my first – no, second – question: who is responsible for Clarissa ending up here?” It would be handy to know where payback might be due.
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Opal frowned, and only just bit down on the impulse to say Me? They’d probably count that as a question too. “Please ... erm, clarify.” That’s what she’d say to a simplistic AI with communication issues.
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“Opal,” said Aegis. “Please can I contribute? We have such possibilities here.”
Aegis spoke directly to Opal rather than over the loudspeaker. Opal made sure her replies were equally contained. It might be for nothing, but even the thought of having privacy was comforting.
“What do you suggest?”
“There’s so much I’d like to know from these Oracles! The cause of Null-C navigation errors they mentioned ... how local conditions tie in to the quantum matrix ... if I can expand my processing power and autonomy without relying on Athene’s whims ... whether the Sills-Platoric Equation can be solved in an actionable manner ...”
“That’s not stuff that I’ll understand or be able to apply, though. I’m wary of using questions in that way, unless we’ve found out all I want to know about what’s going on, how it might affect Clarissa, and how I’m going to get her home.”
“True. Okay, I’ll just chip in if I think of anything.” Though Aegis sounded disappointed.
“Do that. And speak only to me,”
Back to loudspeaker. “Okay. People end up here.” She paused to take another stale breath. The colossal structures on the horizon kept drawing her gaze, so that she didn’t have to look at the disconcerting shapes that wiggled within the brightness when the Oracles spoke. Were those titanic constructions storage? “What do you do with those people?”
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“Selfless motivation. You like to paint yourselves that way. We’ll see how truthful that ...”
She wheezed, tried to take a deep breath, felt an edge of panic when it wouldn’t come. A shallow one, then. A message on the HUD showed that the suit was prepping the oxygen molecule injection. Oh joy. “I think I ...” Her voice was hoarse.
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The air shimmered. It was a dome extending from the shifting red-blue sands and forming over her. It rippled in rainbow shades like a soap bubble.
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“It’s true,” said Aegis. “The local atmosphere is altering. Nitrogen and oxygen both increasing – oxygen about half normal at ten per cent, but at this rate it will soon approach something that is comfortable to breathe. I’m extracting, testing, filtering, condensing and storing oxygen as we speak. It seems to be the real deal.”
A few seconds later and Opal breathed easier as fresh air entered her lungs in place of the increasing staleness she’d endured. Like food after a fast; water after a desert; she gulped greedily. So, these Oracles could support human life. That made things look more hopeful. Maybe they told the truth after all, or at least part of it. Maybe they were bringing Clarissa.
But Opal didn’t dare give in to hope yet. Too many times it was a sucker punch.
“Thank you for the air,” she said.
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Yeah, she’d see about that.
“Opal,” said Aegis. “They mentioned Topias, which might be the name of their world. It could be useful to find out more about the nature of our location.”
She nodded, then said, “Tell me more about this place.”
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Damn, they were sneaky.
“Fine.”
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“Sounds like a prison.”
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“This place was made?”
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“If the place was actually made to hold you all, that’s maybe more like a zoo than a prison. We were wondering about that earlier.”
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“I don’t like this talk of being trapped. So let’s say you do bring my sister. How will I get us back to my world?”
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“Right. The Lost Ships. If it’s just some big experiment, why do you make them so fucking dangerous?”
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“That’s quite some faux pas when I nearly get my face eaten. What’s that, a kiss gone wrong? No, don’t count that as a question, it was a joke!”
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“Deletion? No, ignore that, keep telling me about the creatures on Lost Ships.”
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“You cobble together life rafts, and they swarm aboard. Damn, I was right all along. I’m feeling a bit better now I know you have working craft.”
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“I don’t see the problem.”
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“What the fuck? And no, that’s not a question. But if you haven’t been successful yet how can you get us back if this is all guesswork? I don’t want to come all this way then kill my sister in a bloody train wreck.”
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“Opal,” said Aegis. “It may be useful to find out where they’ll send you. Especially if there’s any choice in the matter. We don’t want them to land you in the middle of UFS mil-space, or far beyond Athene’s rescue range.”
“Good point.” Then, via the loudspeaker: “So where will you send us?”
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“Maybe they’re talking about the neutron stars or nebulas,” said Aegis. “It would explain why some places seem to have more legends of Lost Ships.”
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“Kind of like my experience here.”
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“It’s not an easy thing for me to believe. That Clarissa is alive. That I can see her. That there’s a way back for us, after what we’ve been through. That I’m not dreaming, and am just going to wake up from a nightmare to find myself in a cramped bunk on a warship, or pumped with tranqs on a surgery table in a field hospital, or strapped to a bed in a psych eval unit. You can’t know how impossible this all seems to me, even after all I’ve seen and done. You can’t know how I’m just waiting for the trick, the reveal, the lie, the mess.”
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“I definitely wouldn’t pick you to write speeches.”
Opal glanced down again at sand-Clarissa’s progress. It was maybe halfway to Opal now.
“I notice you keep looking at the map,” interrupted Aegis. “If you like, I could calculate the ETA and make it into a display on your HUD?”
Opal’s eyes didn’t leave the living representation on the ground in front of her.
Loudspeaker off. “No, thank you,” she said. “This is fine.”
She preferred to see that physical movement of shapes. She could picture it as two sisters coming together from the perspective of a god who sees all. More of a feeling of solidity and therefore certainty existed in a real object’s passage than in changing sequences made up of the same ten symbols, regardless of whether they measured time, temperature, or speed. Sometimes the abstract is just not enough to hold on to.
“Aegis, have you kept track of the number of questions I’ve asked? I’m kinda lost.”
“Of course. You have asked nine, so have four left.”
“I’ve asked the stuff I needed to know about, any advice?”
“Well, based on the communication and translation issues I think you were right not to get too technical. It would be a recipe for disaster. ‘Oh, we use decimal points differently over here,’ they said, as our newly-designed Null-C drive ignites to three megakelvin and we cease to exist.”
“You really know how to brighten the mood.”
“Earlier, the Oracles mentioned research during the ‘birth and death of stars’. I’m curious about the Oracles’ longevity. It could be relevant in a number of ways. Ask them if the observed passage of time differs between the Topias and where we came from.”
Opal repeated the question over the loudspeaker.
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“I think that confirms my suspicions of time dilation, though I’m not sure if they’re being mildly evasive, or just having difficulty communicating,” said Aegis. “It may explain why it is possible to predict the location of Lost Ships in our world, even though they seem to be a rare event. Can you also ask them about the ‘deletion’ they referred to earlier.”
Opal nodded, inhaled the air which had freshened up considerably now that Aegis had been able to filter and recompress oxygen, and asked the question.
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“The darkness like awful burning chemicals that I experienced in one of the biomes ... sorry, the Topias.”
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“Why is it doing this, and where did it come from? Maybe if you know some of that you can stop it.”
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“That’s the bit that makes me nervous.”
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Chasing Solace Page 28