“There are other ways of self-terminating.”
“You’ve got half a ruin and a landslide.” Alon pointed at the pictures of the base on the wall.
“The landslide could have been the product of an explosion.”
“No—we’d see blast effects on the ruin. That’s all seismic damage.”
Setona spoke from the head of the table, “The child was six standard years?”
“Yes,” Toran said. “Manus and I concur, based on teeth eruption, epiphyseal fusion, ossification patterns, and bone lengths. Radiocarbon age is around three thousand standard.”
Setona shuffled some sheets of paper unnecessarily. She looked pale but fit, trim from running around the ring an hour or two a day for weeks. “So the child was First?”
“Yes. If there was any doubt, Ai’s tests remove it.” Toran pointed to a graphic Ai had prepared comparing DNA from the child’s teeth with genetic profiles used by the seeds.
“And there were no older or younger remains?”
“Not at the burial site.”
“But you didn’t see all the remains?” Setona asked.
“Not even close. There must be a lot in the rubble; that’s why I want to go back.”
“Self-termination requires a vote of adults,” Alon said.
“Is there any evidence of adults on Keto?” Setona asked Toran.
“None that I saw.”
“Then there was no self-termination and Alon is right—the mission objective has been achieved.”
Toran turned in frustration to his exhibits—images of the ruined dome, the burial site, and the skeleton of the child assembled on an examination table. He re-arranged them with a few gestures, then leaned over the table and addressed Setona directly, pointedly ignoring Alon.
“We didn’t come here to research the effects of a nuclear blast on diacom buildings. This isn’t a Shinigami mission. We came here to understand Keto and what happened to the people on it. We’ve only begun. We were on the surface for three days, and we spent most of that time running away from the things we should have been studying.”
There was a clattering sound from one corner of the room. Ai’s head popped up through the hatch in the floor of the bridge. She stepped off the ladder and shrugged sheepishly. “Eh, sorry I’m late. Am I interrupting? Did I miss something?”
Setona glared at Ai as she went to the end of the table and sat next to Manus and Galia. On the way, Ai passed displays on the wall of The Child’s position over Keto, and Zansai’s mascon and lidar maps.
“Manus, Galia—what do you think?” Setona asked.
“We’re not going back,” Galia replied firmly.
Manus opened his mouth, then thought better of it. Galia spoke for both of them.
“Ai? Do you want to go back?”
Ai held her open hands up and smiled cheerily. “If you give me the boat, I can take samples out to sea.”
“Are there any giant squid under all that algae?” The boat could operate on the surface or under it.
“I doubt it.”
“Too bad, because you’d end up on the seabed for weeks until the storms pass and we get you back. It takes two flights to recover the whole boat. How much mud do you want to sample?”
Ai wrapped her arms around herself and bit her lip. She looked a little disappointed, but not much. Alon doubted she wanted to go back.
“And what about you?” Setona asked him.
Alon knew he would never find what he wanted on Keto; he was all that more certain it was on Aestas, but they had to leave Keto to go there. “The mission objective’s been achieved. There’s nothing more I can do.”
“Toran,” Setona said, “I’m not taking a vote, but you’re still outweighed. We’re moving on.”
Toran glared at Alon. “This makes no sense. We’ve scratched the surface of a whole world.” He snapped his images closed with a gesture and slid down the ladder to the deck below without using the steps.
Alon and Setona exchanged glances as the sound of Toran’s shoes on the deck plates receded.
“Well, I guess that’s it,” Ai said. “I didn’t miss anything important.” She waved and smiled at Alon.
Setona gathered her papers from the table and stood to leave. “Eresh,” she said, “set course for Aestas as you wish. Burn at will.”
∞
The membranes of the swarm scrubber brushed over Alon as he walked into the Cage, dulling the roar of the sound dampers outside. The scrubber elements penetrated through his clothes and into every hair, follicle, and crease of his skin. He felt a moment of pressure on his eardrums and blinked as the elements passed over the surface of his eyes. He shivered as the swarm left him. At least he could be sure nothing had followed him into the Cage—in particular, any part of Eresh.
“What have you got now?” he asked. He knew it would be about Eresh; Kali was on a war plan against the morph. That wasn’t good.
Kali stood with her back to him, studying a graph on a sheet of paper. She wore a blue exercise skinsuit with a white stripe; it looked sprayed on because that was pretty much how the machine generated it. Alon could see drops of sweat on her bare shoulders, and in between the scars left on the small of her back by an auto-surgeon.
Kali waved the paper. “From Hetal. Our eyes only.”
Alon glanced around. The Cage was a secure environment—the air in it was purified, and its conducting mesh skin blocked all electromagnetic radiation from outside.
“What does it say?”
Kali turned to him. Her hair was tied back and her skin flushed. She’d stopped at the Cage halfway through her morning run.
She read from the paper, “‘Moderate levels of internal damage to both engines. Two minutes of flying time in AHV-201; fifteen to twenty in AHV-202.’ Enough for us to land one HV, not enough to recover with the other.”
Alon had helped Kali and Hetal take apart the engine from 201. He’d applied some tools from his own kit but found nothing interesting. Hetal had taken over the rest of the analysis. “Then you were right to walk it out.”
“Eresh brought us down—I know it.”
“Why?”
“We saw exactly what she wanted and nothing else,” Kali said.
“But why?”
“I don’t know, but this report proves it.”
“Hetal found pieces of Eresh?” Alon asked.
“No, but if the run-up before landing damaged the engines, there’d be systemic breakdown all through the cores. There’s no explanation for this damage—cold soak didn’t do it.”
Alon circled the edge of the Cage. A line of glow panels ran around the inside of the sphere at its widest point. The light they gave off had a faint blue cast.
He needed to calm Kali down. Whatever the report said, it was too soon—and too dangerous—to go after the morph. “If there’s no trace of Eresh, you can’t prove it.”
“Do you have any doubt about it?”
“As a scientist, or as a…?” Even in the Cage, he wouldn’t say the name.
“I don’t care. Your professional opinion.”
“You’ll never prove anything from those engines. Pack ’em up and send ’em to GAD—they’ll sort it out.”
“If we put the engines in storage, they’ll disappear. They won’t make it back.”
“You’re going to drive yourself Syncretic,” Alon said. “Go talk to Toran—hand of god in everything.”
“Fuck you.” Kali glared at him. She opened her mouth as if to say something more, then thought better of it.
Alon wondered what it was, but it must not have been important or she would’ve said it. She took one last look at the paper then crumpled it and tossed it into the nearest memory hole. The sheet would have erased itself before it even hit the recycler.
“Don’t get lost in the gaps—they never end,” he said.
Kali turned and strode through the scrubber, the membranes wiping the sweat off her body as she went. Alon couldn’t hear her footsteps
as she jogged out of the Cage into the corridor; the sound damping suppressed them.
He paused for a moment before going out. Kali was right that the engines had been rigged, but no one would find any evidence of Eresh on them. Alon knew how these things were done. Often it wasn’t possible to hide the fact that a piece of equipment had been sabotaged, but it was usually possible to leave no trace of who’d done it. An arranged failure had to get the right result but it didn’t have to be above suspicion. Someone always suspected something anyway, even after a real accident.
What Alon didn’t understand was why. Eresh wanted to make sure they found the base—that was the easy explanation, but it wasn’t good enough. There was something missing. He didn’t know what it was.
Eventually, the crew would have to oppose Eresh, but it wasn’t time yet. When their missions diverged, there’d be a showdown. Until that happened, the Athenians needed to maintain the appearance of trust in the morph. Taking it down would be immensely difficult and dangerous—it would only be possible at the right moment.
Alon stepped out of the cage into the corridor and turned toward the dojo. He stopped short; a figure in the shadows blocked his way.
Ai glared up at him with folded arms. “Did you get what you wanted from her?”
“Some of it.”
“There’s always more for later,” Ai growled.
“It was all business.”
“Yeah, business. You’ve been doing a lot of business together lately.”
“Diagnosing the engine. Hetal was there.”
“Oh, great.”
Alon couldn’t tell Ai what Kali had said even if he took her into the Cage. He sighed. “You can’t own anyone.” The idea was drummed into school children—other people aren’t yours to control. If they want to be with you, they will be; otherwise not.
“No, I can’t,” Ai snapped. “So I’ll see you on Aestas.” She spun on her heel and stalked away.
Alon watched her go. He wondered how long she would refuse to talk to him—if she’d make it to Aestas or forget about it by tomorrow. The two of them had data to analyze and papers to write: a joint study on biota in selected lava bombs from Helicopter Valley, and another on his core samples. They needed to summarize the results before The Child left the system in order to send a contingency data set to Athena. If the ship didn’t make it back, the data transmitted by radio would be their legacy.
Alon watched Ai disappear into the half-lit corridor. He needed to keep moving. The ship would burn out of Keto orbit in less than an hour.
∞
Alon rested on his knees in the dojo as Keto spun by on the other side of the module’s transparent wall. He closed his eyes to reduce the vertigo from the planet swinging around him, and concentrated on slowing his breathing and listening carefully.
After the last practice set, he’d left the fighting dummy turned on, and now it was trying to kill him. But he didn’t know yet if it was approaching from left or right, or directly from behind.
His heart rate had almost slowed to normal, and he felt his skin cool as the sweat wicked away through the layers of his training suit. The floor of the dojo could simulate walls, doors, chairs, tables, even innocent bystanders, with real and tangible objects, not virtual ones. But these were all gone; the dojo was empty and his view out the wall of the module unobstructed. The modules of the hab ring circled the spine of the ship, and centripetal force kept him pressed to the floor. The Child held its spine parallel to the surface of the planet in order to point scientific instruments at it. As a result, the limb of Keto passed through the window in front of Alon each time the module passed below the ship.
He thought he heard the sound of a foot on the mat behind; his fingers tightened on the handle of the knife at his waist.
The storm Galia called “Alpha” was still over the island—Alon could see it on the limb of Keto. It wouldn’t pass until after the ship left orbit. On an impulse, he made a small gesture to open a display. It showed the view of Helicopter Valley from the camera he’d installed on the wall above the lava tunnel, captured in realtime. To recover the lander from a low equatorial orbit, The Child had been forced to leave polar orbit around Keto and re-enter above the equator. Now the island passed below once an orbit and the camera could transmit to the ship every hundred minutes.
Helicopter Valley was flooded and the waves had covered the abandoned Hummingbird a few hours ago. A constant stream of spray billowed past the tunnel entrance at a couple hundred kilometers an hour, obscuring the view and shaking the camera. As he watched, a portion of the valley wall on the opposite side gave way, the rock slowly collapsing into the waves and forcing them back.
Alon felt a sideways lurch and an increase in his weight. The view out the module shifted slightly, and the limb of Keto was higher the next time it swung by. The ship’s engine had started firing and its thrust was slowly increasing. At the same time, the hab ring was slowing down and its modules rotating ninety degrees. When the engine reached one G of thrust, the hab ring would stop turning, and the floor of the dojo and the other modules would be aligned with its thrust vector. Alon would stay firmly planted to the floor throughout the transition. Full thrust could be phased in and out, and a crew member walking down the main corridor would hardly notice the difference.
At the moment the engine started, Alon heard a soft thump on the mat, as if the kill dummy had shifted its stance to stay upright. He resisted the urge to turn; it was too soon.
The display in front of him shook and went blank. After a few seconds, he dismissed it with a gesture. Either the camera mount had failed, or the cliff face had collapsed. The difference mattered to him, but only abstractly. Would he and Ai have survived if they’d stayed? There was no way to know. The ship wouldn’t be in orbit long enough to image the island in sufficient detail to tell.
Keto passed through his vision again, this time more slowly. Alpha had left behind a trail of smashed algae mats and clear blue water, and Omega, the second storm, was following in its path. Alon thought that no one who’d watched Keto for a few weeks from orbit could consider it habitable. The children of the First Generation didn’t have a chance—they would have died in the end, no matter what. They would have been beaten by storm after storm.
He heard the unmistakable sound of a footstep behind. In one smooth motion, he rose from his knees and spun, swinging the knife through the air. Its blade instantly extended to over a meter. He felt a jolt through the handle as the blade cut its target in two.
The kill dummy’s cranium and upper jaw fell to the floor and rolled away. A token splat of fake blood shot out of the dummy’s neck and immediately dried on its shoulders, looking more like the pieces of a burst balloon than gore. The machine stood upright, still holding its rubber knife in one hand, all its vital organs glowing through its transparent skin. Its heart, kidneys, clavicle, jugular, and genitals all pulsed in color, every weak point of its body highlighted. A combat-dummy was the essential Shinigami tool for training to kill—unlike a human opponent, it could be killed over and over again. It would heal and be ready to fight again in seconds.
“Disable,” Alon said.
“You’re no fun,” the dummy replied. “I’m still down a hundred twenty points.”
“Suck it up. ’Till next time.”
The dummy went to pick up its missing head. The blade was a weapon Alon practiced for fun—to get in the flow at the start of a session or to cool down at the end. It wasn’t practical; even in Senta, a blade was just a faster way to get shot. But he appreciated its elegance, insofar as hacking up a human body could be considered elegant.
He returned to sitting on his heels, slipping the knife into its sheath without looking down. Now that the hab ring had stopped and the modules finished rotating, he looked straight down on the planet. The storms hovered in the green sea directly in front of him. Slowly, as the ship picked up speed, they slipped toward the bottom of the window.
The Child would sp
end the next few weeks under thrust, pushing out of the gravity wells of Keto Prime and leaving behind the dust and trash of the system. If it jumped too early, moving between levels of gravitational potential, the loss or gain of energy would be converted to heat, freezing or vaporizing the ship. If it jumped into an asteroid, The Child would blow up. Either way, the ship needed to get away from Keto Prime on fusion before it could start the wormhole drive.
A few weeks climbing out, a few weeks between the stars, and a few weeks circling back into the system on the other side. Before long, they would be on Aestas. Alon knew what he was looking for wasn’t on Keto; it never had been. But he was sure it was on Aestas—it had to be. It was worth the lives of millions.
When he’d taken the mission from Kaera, he’d had his own mission in mind—a mission within the mission. Three thousand years ago, Aestas had been like Athena, but now it was even less habitable than Keto. There was a reason for that.
And if he could find evidence of it, he could take down Kaera and save Athena from itself.
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Coming Soon!
Please enjoy this sample from a draft of
Seed World Two, Black Seed.
BLACK SEED
Part VI — Aestas: The Sublimated World
The Fallen
Alon ran the fingertips of his gloved hand over the blue-gray gravel, turning over bone-white chips and brushing away the sooty dust between them. The fragments ground against each other like broken bits of tempered glass, and he felt more of them pressing through his cold suit into the skin of his knees.
White Seed Page 23