False Horizons

by CJ Birch

  “I remember waking to a roar that filled my head even when I clamped my hands to my ears. At first I couldn’t believe they were here. I’d had fantasies about it. I would lead my family to safety and stop the illya once and for all. But the reality of it…” He looks over at Tup and shrugs. “I wet myself when I heard the ships coming over the water. I didn’t even have to guess what the noise was. We all knew.

  “My father rushed in and pulled me from my bed. He hid my mother and me and my three brothers in the attic, while he stayed in the house so he could try to fight them off, keep them from finding us.” Farge’s voice is low, almost a growl. “When my father fell, my oldest brother Tarro slipped out next, ready to defend our family. I watched as the illya raiders cut down one after another of my brothers. My mother tried to stop my brother Hurd, who was only two years older than me, but he slipped out of her grasp and made it out of the attic before she could stop him. His death was the hardest. I couldn’t look, but we heard him cry out almost immediately.

  “When my mother slipped out she made me promise to stay hidden no matter what happened. I was supposed to stay until everyone was gone and not move until morning. I watched through the slats in the vents as she too was killed and carted away. By that time I was numb. You see, they don’t need you alive. They only need a small sample of your cells.” He coughs and swallows hard. “So when you ask if we get to go home often, the answer is no. We won’t have a home until every last illya is killed.”

  I clamp my lips tight. I have no words of comfort to offer, nor do I think they’d be welcome. But Sarka is oblivious to the man’s pain.

  “Why don’t you go far away? To another system?”

  Frage shakes his head. “They would find us.” He picks up his fork and continues to eat. “Your home world is far, yes? Farther than any of us know, but here you are.”

  “We got here by accident,” I say.

  “You sure about that?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Ash

  “What happened to your home world?” Hartley asks, oblivious to the looks Vonn is giving him.

  Bragga again takes Hartley’s curiosity in stride, but it’s obvious the reactions around the table indicate this is a painful subject. “A plague. An organism infected our water, and we can never go back. Millions left our world. Thousands of ships carried our people to another planet to rebuild. But the umquashi forced us to leave. They used it as farmland, and we were unwelcome. A few months into our journey we realized that the plague on our planet had followed us. Soon we numbered a few thousand. We have managed to stop the plague, but it has left us depleted.” His eyes fall to his empty plate, and we all sit in silence. I can sympathize with them. I never lived on Earth, but I’m what’s left of the castoffs. It can’t be easy not belonging anywhere.

  “Why haven’t you settled on the planet we were just at?” Hartley asks.

  Kalve and Bragga exchanged worried looks. “We are afraid we would infect the planet. We still don’t know very much about it.”

  Our crew subtly stops eating and regards each other. A plague? And they have no idea how it’s transmitted?

  Bragga waves away our concern. “Eat. Eat. We can’t spread it to you through the food you share with us. It doesn’t transmit in this manner. You are safe on the ship. I promise you. We wouldn’t have offered to help you if we thought we would harm you in some way.”

  The doctor leans forward in his seat. “Do you know how it’s transmitted? Does it pass on…” He pauses to look for the right word. “To your children?”

  Bragga pauses. “It’s in our DNA. We can procreate only with medical intervention, but even then, it pervades our offspring.”

  “And that’s its only effect? Sterility?”

  Bragga shows his teeth with a gracious smile. “I’m not sure of all the details. Perhaps if I put you in touch with some of our doctors, they will be able to answer all your questions.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. Pandemics fascinate me.” The doctor smiles sympathetically. However, he’s stopped eating.

  “It’s no bother. We encourage curiosity.” As Bragga says this, Kalve and another crew member exchange looks. I suspect the opposite is true. We need to be careful where we stick our noses with these people.

  A man farther down the table thumps his fist on the surface. This is their way of announcing they’d like to speak. He addresses Hartley. “I’ve heard that it’ll take over a month to refit your ship to take the power from the new main computer. Can we be of assistance?”

  I raise my hand to object. No way am I letting a group of illya roam the Persephone, even with an escort. “That’s a very nice gesture, but we can manage on our own.”

  As I speak, Hartley pipes up. “What did you have in mind?”

  “We could assign you some of our nanobots. They could get the job done in a fraction of the time, which would free up your crew to work on other repairs instead of spending all your time on such a tedious task.” As it turns out, the man is the Kudo’s head of engineering, Gadzir. He’s tall for an illya, with elegant gestures. He strikes me more as a diplomat than an engineer. But if I had any doubts, Hartley and Gadzir break into a discussion about robots that lasts almost the entire meal.

  By the end I’m so bored and exhausted from being on for the whole night, I want to vanish as soon as it’s polite.

  As I’m heading toward the door, Hartley stops me. “What do you think, Ash?”

  “About what?” If he’s asking me what I thought about the dinner, the whole thing is a blur. I remember trying everything but couldn’t tell you what anything tasted like.

  “About the nanobots to help with the repairs?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t like the idea of strange machines coming onto our ship and mucking about. We’d have no idea what they were doing.”

  “Okay. Why don’t we have Gadzir give us a demonstration tomorrow, and you can make up your mind after you’ve gotten a little more information. He’s offered to show us.”

  I nod and agree only to end the conversation. I’m itching to get out of there. I really need a run, but they don’t have a track on board the Kudo, and I doubt donning an enviro-suit to use our track would be a hot idea.

  The next morning I meet Hartley at the entrance to engineering. I’ve decided it’s a good idea to keep an open mind about what they can do. After all, the sooner we can get off this ship, the better. He’s already been here a few times. I think he demanded a tour as soon as we were brought on board. But it doesn’t stop him from bouncing around in giddy anticipation. Sometimes Hartley reminds me of a puppy. Nothing ever fazes him; he’s this ball of pure enthusiastic optimism.

  When the doors part I can see why he’s so excited. It’s ginormous. Like their bridge, the room is multiple floors, I count at least five. Up the center is—according to Hartley—their dark-matter engine. He delves into an explanation that I immediately tune out. I step close to the edge of our deck and peer down. From my untrained eye it looks like a glass tube filled with liquid light. Some sort of substance inside flows in and around itself. It’s all colors and no colors and glows a comforting hue that casts the length of engineering in sunshine.

  Gadzir greets us. Coming around the circular deck bathed in the drive’s light, he looks happier than any person I’ve ever seen, especially from this species. Happy people make me nervous.

  “Welcome,” he shouts. “Come. I have lots to show you.” He leads us down a side corridor and into another room off main engineering. The ceiling isn’t very high, but the length is impressive. Down one side is a bank of computers. Inside you can see energy zipping through circuits. “Captain, take a look at this.”

  I think for a moment I misheard him, but when he says it again, I stop him. “I’m not the captain.”

  “You’re in charge of your ship, yes?”

  “Temporarily. Until we find our captain.”

  I look over at Hartley, whose eyes won’t meet mine. He doesn�
��t think we’ll find her. I don’t know why or how, but that one gesture destroys my confidence. I’ve never actually allowed myself to think we won’t find her.

  “What happened to your captain?”

  I turn away as Hartley explains the situation and walk to one of the computer banks. Up close they don’t look like computers at all. Inside, the circuits look organic, not mechanical. It’s as if millions of tiny machines are zipping along roadways of their own making, the more used the brighter the line. I see a number of different colors, but the blue stands out the sharpest.

  “These are our nanobots,” Gadzir says.

  I nearly jump out of my skin, so absorbed I hadn’t noticed his approach. “Those are robots?”

  He places his palm on the glass covering. He has long, elegant fingers that taper to sharp points. “Microscopic robots. The cover acts as a magnifying glass. They’re actually much smaller than this.”

  Humans once experimented with nanotechnology. Back in the mid twenty-first century we created nanomachinery to devour plastic. But before the project was even off the ground, things started going wrong. They began eating more than the plastic. At first it was other materials in their habitats, then it was their enclosures, and soon they were eating anything they came in contact with—even each other. If they hadn’t become cannibalistic, Earth would have faced a very different end.

  “How do you keep them from evolving and taking over?” asks Hartley.

  “That’s a good question.” Gadzir’s face brightens, and he beckons us to another station halfway down the long hallway. “Early experiments showed that if made to reproduce themselves, they would evolve too quickly for us to maintain control.” He brings up a map system on the console in front of him. It’s laid out like a bees’ hive, millions of brightly colored tunnels running in every direction. “So we engineered them to be like olmigas—tiny insects on our home world that organize themselves into a hive society. They have a queen who is the only female, and all reproduction is done through her. So that’s what we did.” Gadzir zooms in on the map to one section at the far end. “We created a queen that all reproduction and instructions go through. This way, we only have to control one nanobot, not billions.”

  Hartley bends down to examine the microscopic queen. Even though she’s twice the size of the other nanobots, she’s still so small, a comparison is unfathomable. The only way to make the comparison is to reverse it. I once had an instructor at the academy use this example: let’s say if a nanoparticle is the size of a pineapple, then a virus would be the size of a chicken, and a human would be the size of planet Earth.

  So imagine how impossible it would be to stop something that small from destroying the planet if it ever had a mind to. With the prevalence of AI at the time, nanotechnology was soon outlawed.

  Hartley almost has his nose pressed up to the map watching as the hive goes about its day. “Are they self-aware?”

  Gadzir shakes his head. “We feed them simple yes / no instructions. They’re not built to learn—only to take orders from the queen.”

  “Then how do you propose they’ll help us build new power converters if they can’t problem-solve?”

  “We feed them the exact specifications.”

  Hartley and I exchange looks. “Not all our systems are identical. Some require more power, some less. If they have the same set of instructions, then some systems will overload.”

  “It’s not a perfect system, that’s true. We’ll have to tweak the output manually.” He taps on the glass in front of him, as if the nanobots are animals stuck in a cage. “Otherwise, they’d overtake us in a matter of days. We lost an entire ship that way. When we went to investigate, nothing was left. No trace. The nanobots had consumed every last particle of matter on the ship and dispersed into space. I still have nightmares that we’ll run into a giant mass drifting through space.”

  “Like driver ants,” Hartley says. The look of horror on his face stops me from asking, but Gadzir doesn’t hesitate.

  “Driver ants?”

  “On Earth—our home world—we had creatures called ants—very tiny insects that could combine themselves into structures. They could create towers and bridges to reach prey. Driver ants are carnivorous and can devour human flesh in a matter of hours. They were one of the deadliest species on our planet.” Hartley holds his thumb and index finger a little less than a centimeter apart. “Tiny but deadly.”

  “Jesus, Hartley.” As if I don’t have enough nightmares to contend with now, I’m going to be worrying about flesh-eating nanobots coming for us in our sleep.

  He shrugs, sheepish. “Sorry, Ash. It’s not like they even exist anymore. Nothing exists on Earth anymore.”

  “Would you like to see a demonstration?” Gadzir asks.

  Hartley and I both nod. I might be reluctant to let this technology loose on the Persephone, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what it can do.

  Gadzir leads us to a simulation room at the end of the hall, and as it turns out, what it can do is better than Hartley or I could ever have dreamed of. Less than a minute after Gadzir gives the nanobots instructions, they’ve not only fixed a power supply to take the new energy settings, but they’ve also built a new power module from scratch. It looks like the thing appeared from thin air as if by magic.

  “How is that even possible?”

  Gadzir grins. “The same way the biological reproduces. By dividing what already exists.”

  “Vague. But I doubt I’d understand an in-depth explanation.”

  In the end I decide to allow the nanobots onto the Persephone. We’ll still have to do a lot of the work manually, but that means we’ll be able to maintain some control of the situation, which eases my mind.

  Two weeks later and we’re days away from finishing the repairs, almost three weeks ahead of schedule. Hartley and I are in engineering going over the last-minute repairs before we can bring the new computer online. The main bench is scattered with bits and pieces of electronics. Hartley’s somewhat of a tinkerer. He likes to take things apart and rebuild them bigger and meaner than before. Most of his projects have been pushed aside for the time being. It’s hard to do much with the gloves of our suits.

  I’ll be glad when we can stop working in our enviro-suits. They’re hot and suffocating, and unbearable.

  I nudge Hartley for the second time during our discussion to get his attention. “What’s up with you? You’ve been zoning out for the past ten minutes.”

  “Have you noticed Yakovich acting strangely lately?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I was supposed to have dinner with her last night.”

  We both widen our eyes at the same time, Hartley’s to assure me it wasn’t a date and mine because I definitely think it was supposed to be a date.

  “And she didn’t show?”

  “She came very late, then was distracted the whole time. I’m not always the greatest interacting with other people. But I know when I’m being tuned out. If I’ve learned anything from years of dealing with people, it’s how to tell they aren’t paying attention to me anymore.”

  I feel like I should be patting him on the shoulder at this point, but that would be more awkward than it’s worth. “We’re all under tremendous stress. And Yakovich is spending a lot of her time guarding Vasa. I still have a rotation going, so she’s probably exhausted. Don’t worry. It’ll be better when we get back on the Persephone. We’ll be able to use the brig again and won’t have to keep watch on his quarters.”

  Hartley shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s that. She mentioned something he’d said that sounded very strange.”

  “What did he say?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me.”

  I’ve been avoiding Vasa, but it may be time to pay him a visit, see if I can’t get something out of him. I know both Yakovich and Jordan questioned him and came up empty. Maybe he’ll feel guilty and tell me.

  Hartley drifts off again. This time when I nudge him
, he turns to me, white as a sheet, and faints.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jordan

  Sarka’s fist comes toward my face. I duck at the last second, and he misses. “I’ve made a couple of contacts, and I know how to get us out of here.” He pivots around me, looking for an opening.

  “Shhh.” I bounce back a few feet to get out of range. “Someone might hear you.”

  We’re on a mat in one of the training rooms partnered to work on our hand-to-hand combat. It’s clear that Sarka is levels above me. I’m bruised and sore, and he’s going easy on me.

  The next time Sarka gets close he says, “We need to start a revolt.”

  “What?” I say it a little too loud and lower my voice. “A revolt?”

  “We’ll discuss it at lunch, but think about it.”

  I don’t have to think about anything. I don’t want to help start a revolt. I only want to get the hell out of here. We’ve been stuck here for almost three weeks now. Our daily routine consists of preparing for battle, eating, and sleeping. That’s all. The breen are the most gung-ho, war-hungry people I’ve ever met. They eat, sleep, and breathe battle. I made the mistake of asking one of our tablemates about his armor the other day at lunch. He gave me a demonstration of all the weapons you don’t leave your bunk without.

  Their uniforms include a jacket, but most of the breen don’t wear it because it gets in the way of their weapons. No breen should leave their quarters without at least five weapons. They include two knives, one for throwing and the other for when the thrown knife doesn’t come back.

  “How do you get any of them to come back?” I asked.

  “Usually the person you’re throwing it at is coming for you. You just pull it out when they drop at your feet.” Sarka is eating this all up. I even catch him checking out the pockets in his own uniform, assessing which weapons will fit best in each pocket. That’s if we’re ever given any. I hope not. The second Sarka gets a weapon, we’re all in trouble.