But as he stepped forward, Nicola murmured in his ear. ‘Jophiel. Remember you’re software. If you can send a message through the wormhole link to the Cauchy, do it now. Before the Ghosts disable the interface, or—’
‘Good thinking.’ He closed his eyes, focused, and broke his consistency protocols again, digging into his own source code to open a channel to the Cauchy. He began to dump down a situation summary, raw data – and a plea for help. This kind of cheating was physically painful, and making a request for help to his faux sibling was galling. He did it anyhow.
He looked up at the Ghost – for he was sure that identification was correct. ‘I am Poole.’
‘Michael Poole.’
‘He— I am a projection of the original. As you are, of your own original, apparently. How do you know me? Why are you here?’
‘Actually you came to us,’ the Ghost pointed out. Almost drily, Jophiel thought, bemused. ‘We waited until you had clearly indicated your knowledge of our location, and that of your conspecifics.’
‘We came in peace—’
‘We take control.’
A flash of light beyond the hull. The floor shuddered. An alarm wailed, and lights flickered.
Jophiel was unaffected, but the crew around him stumbled, grabbed at the zero-gravity guide ropes, gathered into little groups, helping each other.
Jophiel glanced over at Nicola, who was pawing at a softscreen. ‘Tell me what it’s done.’
‘Lethe. The spine has been severed, below the lifedome. Just like that.’ She stared at him, horrified. ‘They decapitated the ship, Jophiel.’
Jophiel felt a deep, sick reaction to that news – almost as if he had been injured himself.
Something new moved in the sky, beyond the Ghost’s bulk, beyond the dome. Jophiel stared up. A kind of silver tangle, along whose threads droplets of molten silver moved. More Ghosts? Some kind of ship?
‘Your conspecifics believed you would come to save them, Poole,’ the Ghost said now, its voice booming over the rising clamour.
Jophiel yelled back, ‘You mean, humans? On another ship?’
‘They have called for you. For over a thousand years.’
Shadows shifted, cast by the raw sunlight of this system. They were being moved, then.
Jophiel turned to his seniors. ‘Get this dome secured. And the crew. Skinsuits and tethers. Move.’
They moved.
13
An hour later.
Inside the dome, the crew were in airtight shelters, or out in the open, buckled to guide ropes. All of them were in their skinsuits.
Still the starscape shifted. Still the dome was being dragged through space.
Where? To the planet, Goober c? One of the moons? And how? Jophiel saw no physical linkage between the detached lifedome and the surrounding Ghost ships. There was no sense of acceleration. Yet they seemed to be moving quickly, deeper into the stellar system.
And Jophiel’s ship was gone.
It was like a traumatic wound. Like Cauchy and Gea, the Island had been based on a sketch design of an interstellar exploration vessel that had been in Michael Poole’s notebooks long before the Xeelee incursion of the Solar System. A dream of boyhood, almost. And Poole had got to build it, though not in the circumstances he’d imagined. Now, after twenty years of flight, Island had been casually destroyed, just minutes after its first encounter with these Ghosts. The severed spine, the GUTdrive pod, ice mined from a Kuiper object in the Solar System, now relics to be curiously examined, perhaps, by alien beings more than a thousand light years from Sol.
And the crew, hushed, were staring up at the Ghost vessels.
If that was what they were. Sliding past the lifedome, they were tangles of what looked like silvery rope, along which ran trains of glinting spherical droplets. Were the droplets the Ghosts themselves? If so they must be immune to raw space, to the vacuum, to stellar and cosmic radiation.
Each of the ships was a rough ovoid, Jophiel supposed, but he could see no clear symmetries. And, as he studied blown-up images, he made out what looked like equipment embedded in the deep tangle: boxes and spheroids, some apparently transparent. In one such box he glimpsed a murky green, like water from a shallow ocean. He could see nothing that looked obviously like a drive unit – nothing like the Island’s GUTdrive, a massive rocket engine that had been mounted on a kilometres-long spine. It was hard to see how those loose, tangled structures could withstand even the smallest acceleration. Yet here these ships were, drifting around the wreck of his own vessel, the best humanity could offer.
The ships were magnificent. But of an utterly inhuman design.
‘Jophiel.’ Nicola stood before him.
‘Some kind of inertial control,’ he murmured.
‘What?’
‘Those ships. No apparent internal support. Just as there’s nothing visibly gripping the lifedome. As if all this is contained in some invisible shell, or field.’
‘Jophiel—’
‘We experimented with such things, on a smaller scale, at Poole Industries. Inertia-control fields. Massively power-hungry—’
She punched him in the head.
Her fist passed through his face, his skull, and his vision broke up into shards of pixels, as if he was looking through a smashed window. The pain was extraordinary – like an electric shock, delivered deep inside his head. But when she withdrew, he recovered quickly, the consistency-protocol violation pain triggers fading.
His vision cleared. ‘Ow. That hurt.’
‘Good. Look – we rehearsed procedures for all kinds of contingencies, but not something like this. Lead us.’
He looked around now, at the interior of the lifedome. The green grass. Ponds glassed over for conditions of microgravity. A confused-looking chicken flapping in the air, upside down. And the people, the crew, still clinging to their guide ropes, gathered together in knots, as if for mutual protection. They were all silent, passive.
‘I’m no leader,’ he murmured to Nicola. ‘Not like this. I suppose Michael was. Or at least he looked like he was, from the outside. On the inside was – me. I’m the embodiment of Poole’s doubt, remember. His hesitation. That’s why I exist.’
She shrugged. ‘So what? You’re all we’ve got. Your orders?’
He looked at the drifting crew, their faces empty, turned to him.
Think, Poole.
‘Tangleships.’
‘What?’
He pointed at the Ghost vessels. ‘Tangleships. Name a thing and you begin the process of controlling it. That’s what my mother taught me. Humans named the lightning, and eventually tamed it. In the end, we moved the whole Earth.’
‘You did that, strictly speaking.’
His head was starting to work again. ‘You know, if they were going to kill us quickly they’d have done so already. And they could, easily. Even accidentally.’
‘They may know more about us than you think,’ Nicola said. ‘They did send a message with human content, remember. That’s what brought us here . . . Or, lured us.’
‘True. But whether they intend to kill us or not, until then we’re going to need life support.’
‘Correct. Your orders, Jophiel?’
‘We start preparing for the long term. And this dome is all we have left.’
‘So?’
‘So we prioritise.’
They started with power.
The lifedome had drawn all its primary energy from the GUTdrive engine, now lost. But it had backup stores of its own, including GUTpods and compact fusion generators. Jophiel sent teams scurrying to check that those backups had all come online as they should have. He ordered that the medical systems be secured, and asked for an inventory of supplies. Special priority was to be given to the two pregnant women in the crew, and the children born during the cruise. He ask
ed for a roster of food and water stores, with a rationing system to be implemented immediately. In the longer term they needed to secure their means of food production, from the heavy-duty food printers to, as a backup, the small low-tech fields of potatoes and corn that had been meant as recreational experiments in farming, a technology abandoned a thousand years before Cold Earth.
Still more basic life-support systems, whose integrity might have been compromised by the severance from the spine, had to be checked out and secured. Water. Air. Heating.
Nicola muttered to Jophiel, ‘Also data processors. Unless you want to pop out of existence—’
‘You’re right, of course. I hope we can sell that to the Ghosts – oof.’
The lifedome had lurched sideways, abruptly. Nicola grabbed for a guide rope. The Virtual consistency protocols were enough to let Jophiel feel a sharp jolt.
He glanced up at the dome. A huge planetscape was sliding by, detail slowly expanding – bare, rocky uplands scattered with the lights of what might be habitation, and deeper features, ocean basins, rift valleys: huge geological scars that brimmed with murky air, turbid water.
‘Lethe,’ Asher said. ‘That’s Goober c. They took us across a thousand astronomical units in ninety minutes. A GUTship would have taken ninety days. A thousand AU is, what, five light-days? . . .’ Her eyes widened as she worked it out. ‘Oh.’
Nicola smiled coldly. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of faster-than-light travel.’
Another jolt.
Asher growled, ‘FTL or not, feels like their magic inertial control field needs a little work.’
‘They’re obviously bringing us down to the planet,’ Jophiel said. ‘The whole dome. No matter how smart they are, they can’t have done this too often.’
‘If we’re heading for a bumpy landing, we need to get to the couches,’ Ben Goober said.
‘Yes. Good idea. The whole crew. The work can wait . . .’
Following brisk orders, the fifty-strong crew scattered to their cabins, all of which had crash couches. But Jophiel was gratified to see that a number of the crew dragged out their couches and fixed them to the open deck – as Asher and Nicola did – so they could see where they were being taken to.
The dome, accompanied by its tangleship escorts, seemed to level out in its flight now. An imposing horizon stretched wide, and the ground of Goober c fled beneath the dome’s leading edge.
Nicola, strapped into her own couch alongside Jophiel, peered ahead, trying to see. ‘That thick air is like an ocean, and a murky one. But – look there, and there.’ Shadows that seemed to rise above the air itself. ‘Floating islands?’
Jophiel growled, ‘Not that. Super-Earths keep their inner heat better than Earth, and despite the gravity you must get some spectacular geology. We were told it’s more like a super-Mars, remember?’
‘Oh. And on Mars, Olympus Mons sticks out of the atmosphere.’
‘Right. So it is here, I think. Huge aerial continents.’ He found he was grinning. ‘Imagine climbing one of those features – like that big one, the plateau just ahead. You’d have to carry a pressure suit for the final stages. As if you had climbed up from the Earth by some ladder to the Moon.’
‘You always were one for spectacle, weren’t you? Even now. You exhilarated idiot.’
‘We’re descending. Heading for that big plateau. I think we’re going to land on top of that feature . . .’
14
In the last stages, a cratered ground fled beneath the prow of the lifedome. Goober’s Star cast long shadows. Above, at this altitude, only thin clouds were draped over a black sky – ice clouds, perhaps, very high, Jophiel realised. This really was like descending on Mars, on Olympus Mons.
But the landscapes ahead were extensive. Asher had reported that the plateau they were approaching was itself the size of India, the size of a subcontinent – and Jophiel’s mind quailed at the thought of the tectonic forces required to uplift such a mass against the strong gravity of this world. Such vast raised landmasses must disrupt any air circulation systems, he mused. Perhaps this plateau cast a rain shadow halfway around the planet. Or, on the other hand, that massive atmosphere was so dense and heavy that it might behave more sluggishly, more like an ocean than air. Jophiel imagined permanent wind systems, like ocean currents . . .
‘A lot of detail down there,’ Nicola murmured. ‘The ground is heavily cratered, almost moonlike. We thought impactors had been cleaned out of this system, didn’t we?’
Asher said, ‘I think those craters below us are caldera features. Volcanoes, not impacts. I saw a plume, to starboard. Maybe some of them are active. Like Olympus Mons, again. As if this whole feature is one vast supervolcano – and not particularly dormant—’
‘Ghosts,’ Nicola said now. ‘Or Ghost structures anyhow, down on the ground. Passing over them now. There, and there . . .’
Jophiel saw them, especially where shadows sheltered them from the brilliant sunlight. More knots of silver wire, without order or symmetry evident to the human eye, clinging to the rocky surface.
Nicola asked, ‘Grounded ships?’
‘I don’t think so. Too big for that. Cities, maybe? Colonies?’
They passed directly over one of these – communities? There was still no evident symmetry, but at the rough centre Jophiel made out a slim tower rising above the tangle, surmounted by a clear blue light. He pointed this out. ‘Some kind of monument?’
‘Maybe,’ Nicola said. ‘We don’t know anything about these creatures – what’s functional, what’s ornamental or ceremonial. Or maybe it’s all mixed up, as with humans. Like the Crusaders, who wore the cross of Christ on their chest as a kind of divine armour when going into battle.’
Asher grinned. ‘And that is authentic Nicola Emry.’
‘Always eager to please.’
Jophiel tried to memorise the detail he was seeing. And, thinking about that, he put out a general call to the crew. ‘Some day we may need to find our way out of this place. Record everything. Make sketches – tuck them into your pocket, in case our equipment gets taken off us . . . Remember. That’s all.’
He got murmured acknowledgements.
Nicola nodded. ‘Max Ward would have approved. No matter how helpless you are, even if you are imprisoned, as long as you can think and observe, you can still work. Count the days on your cell wall. Still advance towards your goals.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘Make the most of it.’
‘Jophiel.’ Harris Kemp’s voice. ‘Look down. Port side.’
Jophiel subvocalised a command, and a part of the deck turned Virtual-transparent. He saw that the lifedome was now being flown over a particularly large and deep caldera; steam rose from hot rocks – and Jophiel saw what looked like a mud pool, bubbling.
‘Surely the air pressure is too low for liquid.’
Harris said, ‘I think there’s a dome over the whole area. Almost transparent, but not quite. Might not even be material, some kind of force field.’
Now Jophiel saw a crowd of Ghosts, silver droplets like spilled mercury, gathered around the vent. They were lined up in almost orderly queues, all around the vent, filing into the heat.
‘I’ve been watching for a while,’ Harris reported. ‘The Ghosts seem to be taking turns to immerse themselves in that pool of hot mud, or whatever. And when they do they seem to – decompose.’
Nicola raised an eyebrow. ‘Decompose?’
‘That’s what it looks like.’
Since his stint as a junior technician on Larunda Station, in what now felt like another life, Harris had specialised in medicine and biology. Now he began to speculate on entirely alien life forms.
‘That silver skin peels back. Some kind of internal structures are released – they look like body parts. They spill out into the mud, like
independent entities. Swimming away. Even the skin. But when they are done they recombine, zipping up inside the spherical skin sac, and then join the lines to pass out of the pool area.’
Nicola said, ‘Jophiel, I think we saw something like this before. The Wormhole Ghost in Jupiter orbit.’
Jophiel nodded. ‘After my father shot it. The skin split open, and out tumbled what looked like multiple organs. Even multiple organisms.’
Harris said, ‘Maybe these Ghosts aren’t unified creatures as we are. Maybe each of them is a kind of community, of symbiotic creatures of different orders. Why, I’m looking at magnified images that show what look like vegetable components in there too, masses of lichen which must complete the ecological loops of respiration and waste processing.’
Nicola put in, ‘And the significance of the hot mud pool?’
‘Maybe we’re seeing some reflection of the Ghosts’ origins. Maybe they need to return to a simulacrum of the oceanic environment where they evolved, or the tidal pools, whatever. Their dependent organisms may need to be released, regularly, to stock up on essential nutrients, even to breed among their own kind. Or perhaps to be replaced, in the overall Ghost autarky, if a component ages or is injured.’
Nicola raised her eyebrows. ‘“Autarky.” Word of the day.’
‘In my team we’re debating all this, observing, recording. We don’t know how useful this might be but—’
‘Good work, Harris,’ Jophiel said. ‘This kind of knowledge is going to be essential if we’re to find an edge here. And—’
Another jolt of the lifedome.
‘I think we’re descending,’ Nicola muttered.
Jophiel spoke to the crew. ‘Everybody brace for impact. We don’t know how gentle our Ghost pilots are going to be.’
Ben Goober called, ‘I think I can see where they’re bringing us down, sir. Right next to the other one.’
‘The other what?’
‘The other lifedome.’
15
The other lifedome was a cylinder twice the width and height of the Island’s relatively modest hemisphere, and multiple decks showed within its interior.
Xeelee Redemption Page 9