White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

  And he had to choose one of them to take home. He couldn’t tell Kali; she would make him leave them all behind. But from the end of the hour she had given him, until they reached the lander, he would carry the bones of one of these children on his back, guarding them like sacred relics stolen from an ancient holy land.

  Because, in a way, they were.

  ∞

  A few meters down the ridge in the direction of the sea, Kali turned to look back. Fin Mountain buried itself in the concrete sky like a huge, old tree stump propping up another world above. In the graveyard, Toran squatted down to lift a second stone.

  Kali remembered fastening a body bag over the glassy, brown eyes of a young face. She hadn’t thought of that since the day the ship had left Athena—why had the memory come back now? It was obvious: the graveyard, the bones, and the mountain.

  Toran had dug up the past and it made her angry. She’d been tempted to leave him hanging on the cliff, but teamwork mandated she give him at least a second chance. Still, she wasn’t innocent; she’d made mistakes. She should have dragged Alon and Ai along—Alon’s core samples were worthless in the scheme of things, not even reason for him to risk his own life, let alone the rest of the crew’s. She’d screwed up in Haffay and then compounded it back in Einstein. But this mission wasn’t any time to bring up the past on Athena. The dead were gone, and let them be that way. The point was not to join them anytime soon.

  She stood in a channel that led down the ridge to the sea. It closed around her, at shoulder height, as she walked away from the graveyard, to the west. Kali was starting to see things the way Toran saw them—where she’d seen nothing but rocks, now she saw the work of people and machines. It was like that illusion where the eyes of a statue followed you around a room until you realized its face is concave. When you understood the trick, you could see through it. The channel had once been a tunnel covered with rock or diacom—she was certain of it.

  A hundred meters down she saw four piles of rock, two on each side of the channel. Walking up to them, she could see traces of the concrete still holding them together. They were the stanchions for the radio dish. She was sure of that, as well.

  The seeds had variation built into them. Some of that variation was intentional randomness, such as the selection of the First from the set of genetic profiles, differences in the proposed constitution, details of the buildings, and even the names of the children. The designers of the seeds had no way to test the project, so they hedged by programming every seed differently.

  Some variation was algorithmic. In the case of the dish, it could be larger or smaller, depending on the distance it needed to transmit, and its supporting structure would vary with gravity and weather conditions. On Athena, the dishes were all on a single concrete pylon, but on Keto the algorithm must have hit a tipping point on estimated wind speed, and the machines had selected a four-stanchion mount. The dish had stood over the tunnel, straddling it. Now, only its anchors remained.

  Some of the variation in bases was different—artistic instead of algorithmic. The Builders were thinking machines; they were as capable of adapting an artificial structure to the land as a human architect. Sometimes they even listened to the First, and, like doting parents, built things their children asked for.

  The graveyard behind had once been a garden or a viewpoint—Kali wasn’t sure which. Either way, it was the ass-end of things. The channel led to the dome. The dome had to be on the ridge, not in the valley below. Toran was wrong about that—she was sure of it. The Builders had, for whatever reason, built it on the ridge in the direction of the sea.

  Her curiosity piqued, she started walking quickly. Beyond the stanchions of the dish, she passed the left and right entrances of a bisecting tunnel. They may have led to stairs or lift mechanisms down to the valleys on each side of the ridge. The diacom structures had all blown away, or they would have been visible from below. She thought of the flimsy gangways and lift platform of the lander. Sometimes, the extreme strength of diacom was its biggest weakness—it had to be well anchored or it would blow away in the wind.

  A few hundred meters toward the sea, a wall of rock crossed the end of the channel. The wall took up almost the entire surface of the ridge, its wings extending out to each side on a raised foundation. It blocked her view of the sea and the end of the ridge on the other side. The channel stopped at the base of it, and a few broken steps led up to a gap in the wall. Kali hesitated for a moment, afraid to see what was on the other side, before she climbed the stairs and passed through the wall.

  It only took her a moment to realize something was very wrong inside the dome. Where there should have been buildings, there were only piles of rubble. The dorm in the center looked like the peak in the middle of an impact crater. The dome wall curved from behind her in a semicircle, but it didn’t meet in front of her. The smooth floor of the dome went from her feet to the edge of the cliff and stopped. The half of the wall that should have enclosed the other side of the base was gone. Where the truss and triangular tiles of the dome itself would have curved down to the wall, there was nothing but gray sky.

  Kali hurried past the ruined buildings to the end of the ridge. She looked down, her heart beating, to see a sheer cliff with a semi-circle of pillars at its base. The land was scooped out where the rock had fallen away, in a few seconds tearing down millions of tonnes and sending it far out into the sea. The fall had taken with it the hydroponics and storage buildings, the garden, the western half of the dome wall, perhaps even the dome itself, and shook down the remaining buildings. The pillars were all that filled the space left behind; they rimmed the hollow like teeth in a mouth of knives, the mouth that had swallowed half the base.

  Keto had scraped the dome off its surface like the killer whale in the Einstein Zoo scraping a parasite off its back.

  ∞

  Toran knelt by the crushed ruins of the old dorm and tried to count the dead. There was no mistaking the pile for anything natural: corroded I-beams jutted from broken concrete, the eroded steel flaking apart in layers like burnt phyllo pastry. The dorm held two hundred, but only half the pits in the graveyard that Toran had opened contained bones—the others were empty. If the dorm had fallen at night, the rest of the two hundred were still buried in this pile.

  The top layer of the heap had been pulled off and discarded in an effort to find the children crushed underneath. When the dorm collapsed, it had trapped the children and the Mothers together. The children may have been in their rooms or in the dining area. The Builders had torn the rubble apart to save as many as they could. Did they find any children alive? If so, how long did they live afterwards? If even one had survived, the machines would have started the cycle again, building a new base and incubating a second generation. They had no program for euthanasia, and only the adult First could terminate the base. So it was likely none of the children had lived.

  But what had caused the destruction of the base? The landslide ripped the tessellated roof from the base wall and threw it into the ocean; the resulting shock brought down the remaining buildings. But what caused the slide? The failure of the cliff could have been triggered by a storm, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or an explosion—if not of a self-termination, then perhaps of the fast breeder reactor powering the base. There was no way for Toran to tell. He would need Alon’s core sample analysis to identify an eruption or explosion in the right time frame.

  Toran let his glasses record the ruin in front of him, panning over it one more time. Perhaps someone studying the scene at full resolution would see something he couldn’t—bones, the remains of a Mother, or some hint about the collapse.

  The mission clock in the corner of the glasses turned over another hour. The time Kali had given him had almost expired when she’d messaged him from her paper. Why had she waited so long? He’d have seen more if she’d called him immediately. There was so much to understand.

  Why had the machines built the dome on top of a ridge near the oc
ean? Toran had expected it to be in a valley. Perhaps the Builders put it here for aesthetic reasons—the view was sensational. The children would love it, and they would grow up looking at the ocean that dominated Keto. That could have been the reason.

  But it was also possible the machines knew something about Keto. By the time they’d built the dome, the machines had been on the planet for several months. They’d have been through more than one storm. How bad did it get in the valleys—the flooding, the wind tunneling through? Perhaps they’d seen enough to take a chance on the ridge instead.

  Toran stood up and walked around the dorm to the end of the ridge. Kali waited by a rusted pile of metal two steps from the edge of the cliff.

  “We flew right over this,” she said. “I was looking at the horizon.”

  “I didn’t see it, either—I was sure the base was in one of the valleys.”

  “It was insane to build it here.”

  “No more than to come in the first place,” he replied.

  Kali gestured at the clouds in the distance. “If they couldn’t survive in a dome, we’re not going to survive without one.”

  “We don’t know that a storm destroyed it.”

  “How high is the surge? How fast is the wind?” Kali demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  Toran examined the old hulk next to Kali more closely. It was humanoid in shape, but much larger than a man—perhaps four meters tall standing, and unnaturally stocky. Resting on its knees, it was still taller than he was. The fingers of its huge hands were welded together by rust, its chest plate pitted and flaking away, and its head a formless mass with sunken holes for eyes. But its diacom spine and pelvis still gleamed under the rust.

  He stood on his toes to reach its chest and wiped the dirt from the diaglass over its core indicators. The machine was still loaded with uranium. He stepped back.

  It was a Builder. He’d recognized it as soon as he saw it, despite the rust and decay.

  “I want the head of this machine,” he said. “We can get the memory out of it. It saw everything.”

  “No one’s ever gotten anything out of paper more than a few hundred years old. It fails—radiation and sublimation.”

  “If we can even get one percent of what it saw? How long did it stare at the dome like this?” Toran waved his hand through the air to indicate the machine’s field of view.

  “How would you carry it anyway? All the way across the plain?”

  “Hack it open; take the paper out.” He’d put it in his backpack next to the bones of the child.

  Kali shook her head. “If the fuel containment has failed, it’s contaminated. We don’t have the equipment to deal with that.”

  “We have to come back.”

  Kali shrugged. “Barkan can fly that one. I don’t need to see any more. It was cruel to incubate the First here—nothing could ever come of it. This isn’t a planet for people.”

  “Not many are,” Toran said.

  He couldn’t pull himself away from the Builder. It had knelt here, in the remains of the garden in the center of the base, waiting for a signal from Earth, for three thousand years. It still waited, and would until none of it remained, the last metal part corroded away and the last composite element blown across the island. If it could be said to have died, it had died a long slow death, over centuries and millennia. What had it seen in all those years, and when had it last seen the world around it? What was its final thought when the last thread of its consciousness ended? He wanted to know.

  “It did its duty, even if it failed,” Kali said. “If it weren’t so big, I’d bury it or push it off. What time is it?”

  “Eleven hundred.”

  “Oh, shit. Unless you can fit in one of those grave holes, we’re two hours further behind schedule than before. We’re going to get dusted off this island like so much loose gravel.”

  Kali turned to go, but Toran wasn’t ready to leave. He walked to the edge of the cliff and looked over at the waves crashing on the boulders below. Everything the First knew was buried in the graveyard, crushed in the dorm, lost in the memory of the Builder, or spread out in a fan of debris for kilometers in the darkness under the sea.

  He imagined millions of tonnes of rubble falling away, driving a wave hundreds of meters high. It would have surged out, its arc expanding with each kilometer, but its crest sinking lower and lower, until it was nothing but a ripple, insignificant in the global ocean. He imagined the last of the radio waves streaming from Keto to Earth, becoming lost in the unimaginable distances of interstellar space. There would never be an answer.

  He turned from the ocean and joined Kali. She led the way out of the ruined dome, through a broad opening in the wall that had once been the main entrance.

  As he passed through the wall, Toran heard a noise from behind. It was the sound of rust cracking as it broke.

  Part IV — Athena: The Wheel of Syncwar

  Fighting

  Year 5307

  S-Second Plus Three Hours

  Kali’s world was a blur of black and white. The instrument panel was an dark, matte surface and the horizon above it stuck in perpetual left turn. She reached for the side-stick and pulled, but nothing happened. As her vision cleared, she saw columns of smoke rising from gray buildings—it had to be one of Chon’s missile emplacements. In a panic, she flipped the master-arm switch and selected the cannon, but there was no ammo display. She selected the air-to-ground missiles, but the targeting indicator didn’t come up.

  Dammit! Why wouldn’t this thing fly? She didn’t have time for this—she had to get Chon.

  A bolt of pain shot up her back and down her legs. She cried out and moved to ease the pain, but something cracked in her rib cage as she strained against her seat belt. She twisted the quick release buckle and tried to rise from the seat by leaning on the center console. The pain subsided in her back, but her heels hurt as if she’d jump-kicked a concrete wall. The Vertel would have to fly itself—she needed to breathe. She pulled her helmet off and wiped her forehead. Her hand came away red with blood and she stared at it. What was that about?

  Over the glare shield, the snow stretched out until it met the sky. Clouds drifted over the lopsided horizon. Her eyes focused on the columns of smoke she’d seen before and they resolved into the towers of the wind farm’s turbines. The wind farm—the gray blocks were its buildings, she realized. The Vertel was dug into the snow short of it. Just as well the cannon didn’t work or she’d have blown the nose off. But the wind farm was a problem—the Athenian ground forces had bypassed the farm and it was hostile ground. Chon’s Provies would be there, and it wouldn’t take them long to walk out here.

  Kali leaned forward to look out of the side window. She could see the red-tipped warheads of two air-to-ground missiles still hanging off the rails. There were two more on the other side. It was unlikely small arms fire would set off the AGMs—the explosive in them was very stable—but a small, well-placed armor-piercing incendiary could set off the fractal batteries in the hull of the Vertel. As the airframe burned down, the AGMs would almost certainly cook off. The explosion would blow them off the hillside all the way back to Bruno; Chon would have a hearty laugh as their disassociated body parts rained down on the slums.

  Kali looked over at the empty co-pilot’s seat. Where the fuck was Maki? There was a moaning sound coming from the other side of the armored bulkhead behind her. She rose slowly from her seat, turned carefully to avoid twisting her spine, and rested one knee on the seat cushion. Her chair was noticeably lower than before, compressed into its shock-absorbers in the crash. Maki was rolling around in the cabin on the other side of the bulkhead, gripping one leg while groaning and swearing.

  “Fuck!” he said, hammering the floor of the Vertel with the side of his fist. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Kali stumbled out of the cockpit into the cabin. Her lower back muscles cramped as she tried to stand up straight.

  “Shut up and tell me something,” she
said.

  Maki opened his eyes and looked at her. “You’re all fucked up,” he said.

  “Yeah, you too.”

  “Tell me about it—ankle’s broken. Twisted my wrist…”

  Kali unsnapped the first aid kit from the bulkhead and dropped it by Maki.

  “Wrap it up,” she said. “And stick to local. Keep your trigger finger awake.” She pointed at the short-assault rifle strapped behind the armored wing of the co-pilot’s seat. “You know how to use that?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “We’re not done yet. We still have to get Chon.”

  The light streamed in the top windows of the Vertel and lit up bright red smears on the deck where the special forces operator had rolled in. He lay in the shadows in the back, strapped to a pullout gurney. Kali limped over and dropped carefully to one knee beside him.

  “Hades,” she read from the faint gray name tag on one side of his chest. On his shoulder, a unit patch in similar low contrast gray showed a laughing face—an evil clown with thick lips, a toothy grin, and a spiked shock of hair. There was no other writing there—no unit name or motto. Kali knew what that meant: Hades was Shinigami.

  The front of his combat suit was smeared with something too red to be blood—perhaps a working fluid of the suit. His face, the stubble on his chin, and the hair swept back over his head were stained with real, dark blood. Rivulets and spatters of it extended over his chest, name tag, and the clown face on his shoulder patch. Kali could see that his right arm—on the side by the window—was exposed, the suit sleeve torn to the shoulder. In places, the flesh was ripped off his arm and patches of bone showed through. Judging by the angle, his arm was broken at least twice. The suit was mostly intact over his chest, but punctured in several places by shrapnel. It would take a lot of force to damage a combat suit like that; he was lucky to be in one piece.