Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
“Thank you,” she said, oddly touched by the alien’s awkward words. “I hope we return, too. Keep your fingers crossed we do so in one piece and with good news.”
Vrrel/Epan
looked down at his hands, and she left him standing there, puzzled, while she went to get ready.
2.1.0
UEH/ELLIL
Ueh didn’t wait to see Mantissa A depart into unspace.
He
was already moving on the Praxis’s grisly errand.
His first objective was to get out of the places usually occupied by the Praxis’s attendants. This wasn’t easy to do, undetected. The spaces were cramped and crowded, and the lighting was orange-tinted and seemed dark to his human-accustomed eyes. Dozens of double-streamed voices issued from all around him, creating a dense, confused ambience. Lower gravity allowed support staff to occupy positions on walls or ceilings, giving the impression that every available cubic centimeter was thoroughly occupied.
Since when did my own people become so alien to me?
he asked himself, expressing the question in the linear narrative of a human.
Since when did I cease to be one of them?
The sight of his reflection, caught in a curving chitinous bulkhead, surprised him as it so often did these days. His legs were long, and they tended to flex more than they should with each step. His face was a mask he could read perfectly well, just as he could read those of his people around him, but at the same time it was a mask that hid the real person behind it.
What am I, exactly?
he wondered as he watched his faceplates shift.
“You are the newest,” the Praxis had told him. “You have the most potential. And I gave you that potential, Ueh, because I knew a day would come when I would have a use for it.”
“Such as the use you put me to now?” Ueh had said.
“Exactly,” the Praxis had answered.
“But why now?”
“I detect a strange sense of mortality creeping over me, and I am compelled to act.”
Ueh followed the Praxis’s instructions to the letter. As conjugator, he was not stopped or questioned by anyone. Even where his identity was unknown, chemical tags emitted by fresh new glands under his wing sheaths revealed his function to all whose duty it was to check. He moved in a cloud of purpose, assured of passage anywhere in the newly restructured
Mantissa A.
As the collection of hole ships traveled through unspace to its new destination, far outside the bubble humans called Surveyed Space, he wound his way inward, to the heart of his species’ refuge. There, unseen by all and unknown except to the conjugators, lay the heart of the Praxis. As vast as the ark built around it, it beat slowly and steadily down the eons, ticking off hours with each and every pulse.
Vast
, Ueh thought,
and yet so fragile...
Little-used corridors took him to basement tanks storing raw mass for food makers and other devices designed specifically to support the Praxis’s massive body. Unlike the Yuhl, who had grown proficient at biomodification even before the arrival of the Spinners in the home systems, the Praxis embraced his biological imperatives. He ate, he shat, and he slept; he had moods. The precise biology of the Praxis was a closely kept secret, but all knew that he was vulnerable in ways the Yuhl haul abandoned many thousands of long cycles earlier. He grew tired; he was occasionally unwell; it was conceivable that he could die, one day.
The section of
Mantissa A
that Ueh entered was cramped and hot, the air uncomfortably moist. The only light came from long, sticky threads that hung in strands from the ceiling and walls. As Ueh hurried by, some of them stuck to his skin where they slowly faded and turned to gray. He didn’t brush them away. They were cool and reminded him of the treatment he’d received after his wounding in the Battle of Beid. Confined to a fluid tank for more than a single cycle, he’d had numerous punctures and breaks sealed in blissful silence. The isolation had been welcome after the furies of war.
He looked back on the battle now with something approaching disbelief. Confronting the Ambivalence ran contrary to everything he’d been taught. Ever since he had emerged fully conscious from his birth cocoon, he had followed the policies of avoidance practiced by his people. They monitored the dropping of the gifts at the migration’s forward edge and took those that were judged appropriate by the Praxis and the Fit. As the rear of the migration approached, death markers were prepared for the civilizations that failed to survive. The eye of the Ambivalence was avoided at all costs. To draw its attention was to invite death. Not once in all the long cycles of the
Yuhl/Goel
migration had his people ever willingly confronted the cutters, the instruments of the Ambivalence’s wrath. Not until
Frank/Axford
had forced them into it.
Since the bodiless humans had come into their lives, the
Yuhl/Goel
had learned lessons in things until then unheard of. Betrayal from
Frank/Axford,
morality from
Caryl/Hatzis
...
Humanity has concepts such as altruism and sympathy,
she had told the Fit while pleading for help for her people. They would surely die, she had said, if left to fend for themselves.
We would help you, under those circumstances.
It would be safer to say that you would help unless it hurt you too much
, Ueh had responded.
All generosity has its limits. And we know our limitations.
Back then, he had believed what he’d said. But now he wasn’t so sure. Axford had rubbed their limitations in their faces and forced them into a fight they had no chance of winning. And yet they had achieved something Ueh had never thought possible: they had
survived.
He asked himself if that wasn’t apt—what the humans might call a “truth.” Change was terrible at times, but then so was life. What was the purpose of survival if one was functionally dead?
He came to a pinch in the tube he was following. He squeezed through, unnerved by the fleshiness of the walls. Soon he was crawling on hands and knees, wing sheaths flinching at moisture trickling onto him from above. The surfaces around him resonated with a deep, throbbing vibration. He felt the occasional tremor roll past him, like peristalsis, and he began to worry that he might be crushed or smothered.
Soon enough, though, the passage opened up around him. He stood awkwardly in a space shaped like a tapering seed balanced on one end, long enough for two of him to stand end to end. Three puckered openings led from the chamber, one of which he’d come through. The air was fetid but breathable, and the walls were veined and shining.
Somehow without knowing, somewhere along his journey, he had crossed a boundary. He was no longer inside
Mantissa A,
he realized. He was inside the Praxis!
He waited, thinking.
“I am a complex creature,” the Praxis had told him. “I have needs the
Yuhl/Goel
will never understand. Even the conjugators, to whom I grant new levels of insight into my nature, have not seen the full spectrum of my being. Before commencing my great diaspora, I was literally beyond your comprehension. But the pale shadow you see before you still has the capacity to surprise.”
Ueh didn’t doubt that for a second.
The air fouled around him, and his body switched automatically to internal energy reserves. The only light came from the still faintly glimmering strands clinging to his neck and shoulders, surviving briefly on the moisture that had soaked into his garments. As those last glimmers faded, he remembered a conversation he’d had with
Peter/Alander.
The free flow of information is always desirable
, he had said,
no matter where it leads us. I am here to facilitate discussion between our species. If we come away from this meeting still at war, then I will not have failed.
In your eyes, perhaps
, Alander had replied.
That response had surprised Ueh. That the human had thought it necessary to state such an obvious truth had highlighted a fundamental difference between their two species.
By what/with whose other eyes can I see?
As he pondered this in the deepening darkness of the Praxis’s heart, a single, slender limb slipped out from one of the three puckered orifices, slicing him neatly open from throat to sternum and letting his life organs pour in a terrible rush from within him.
2.1
DESCENT OF ORPHEUS
2160.9.29 Standard Mission Time
(2 September 2163 UT)
2.1.1
The silence seemed to stretch forever. Observing at the highest
possible clock speed, Caryl Hatzis kept a firm grip on her autonomous nervous system. Her heart rate was down, and overactivity of her sebaceous glands was kept to a minimum. Outwardly, she would have been the epitome of calm, inwardly, however, she was screaming. This was it! There would be no turning back after this.
You’d better not be fucking us over, Axford
, she thought.
Because if you are, I swear I’m going track down every last one of your goddamn engrams and—
“I have an energy reading,” said Gou Mang, her announcement dragging Thor from her thoughts.
“Where?” she asked, looking over to Gou Mang at her station in one corner of the ship’s bridge.
Eight hole ships had been combined into a spiky tetrahedral octad dubbed
Eledone.
The resulting bridge was shaped like a square with sides bulging inward and corner crew stations facing toward the center. In the middle of it were seats from which screens on the concave bulges could most easily be seen. On those screens were images from the 200 hole ship pairs, tetrads, and other configurations that had gathered in Asellus Primus, lurking in whatever nooks and crannies they could find: in asteroid belts, Lagrange points, the atmosphere of gas giants, even the solar atmosphere. One view contained the mock gift installation in orbit about the system’s only rocky world, a boiling hellhole too close to the primary. The decoy was radiating in the fashion typical of a gift transmitter, a lure to which the Starfish would inevitably be drawn—or so she hoped.
Gou Mang directed Sol’s attention to one of the screens whose view had changed to show a burning point of energy that had appeared in the inner system, a flaring star of electromagnetism radiating at well-catalogued frequencies.
The fovea
, thought Sol.
Or one of them, anyway.
She felt like an antelope must have in the days when there were still lions and water holes, before the Spike AIs transmuted them all into raw materials for nanotech hell. They were being watched.
Spurred on by Kingsley Oborn’s curiosity, sensors on half the hole ships turned to study the phenomenon while it lasted. As important as it was to scan the skies for the Starfish, every aspect of the aliens’ behavior had to be observed and studied. A better understanding of the fovea might give them an idea of how to avoid the deadly wake—the
saccade,
as Oborn was insisting people call it. It might not help those about to relocate into the whale’s gullet, of course, but the possibility of a Plan B would make her feel less nervous. The idea of humanity’s future resting so precariously on such narrow, unreliable shoulders didn’t sit comfortably with her.
If Thor was feeling the strain, she wasn’t letting it show. She stood in the center of the bridge staring at the screen with her arms folded across her chest, the very picture of calm authority. Her solid android frame was clad in a formfitting black jumpsuit with numerous pockets. Over the top of that was the almost invisible shimmer of an I-suit, protecting her more thoroughly from harm than any human-made suit could ever hope to.
All seven team members were wearing identical or similar uniforms. Each had protective hoods that could be raised to cover the head, with sensory information shunted directly into the relevant nerves by induction, and each was able to recycle fluids should they be cut off from the hole ship. There was enough food to last a week should they need to, although Sol didn’t need a suit to last that long; she had been biomodified almost a century ago to reduce her dependence on physical resources. She could go months without a drink and days without even breathing. Although she had rarely had to put it to the test, her survival time in hard vacuum was measured in hours, not minutes.
Thor, Gou Mang, and Inari had added colored patches—red, white, and green respectively—to distinguish them from each other. Sol’s human body didn’t need differentiation, and neither did Alander and Cleo Samson. Axford 1313’s uniform was shot through with threads of liquid silver, as though mercury had been woven into the fabric, but he had declined to explain what they were for. Sol didn’t doubt that it was something he’d retrieved from the Vega Library before it was destroyed by the Starfish—some archived technology that would increase his chances of survival in the coming mission.
They were as ready as they ever would be, given the constraints upon them. If they’d had time, she didn’t doubt that they could have assembled a far more potent—and consolidated—team, but at this stage she figured anything was better than nothing.
“Contacts—three of them,” Gou Mang reported as a flurry of data began to pour in.
“I keep forgetting how big they are,” said Cleo Samson anxiously. “We’re like mosquitoes next to them.”
“That’s all right,” Axford muttered. “Many a human died from mosquito bites, in the past.”
“Seven more contacts,” said Gou Mang.
“That’s more than usual,” said Alander. “They’re suspicious.”
“Of course they are,” said Inari. “They’re not idiots.”
Thor shushed everyone to silence. She didn’t order the attack, though. She didn’t need to. Everyone knew what they had to do. The human/Yuhl fleet would be ready the moment those razor-sharp edges of the cutters sliced their way out of unspace.
Eledone
relocated to a superior vantage point as ftl sensors began relaying information on the disposition of the Starfish. The flurry of ftl signals prompted a splitting of the incoming formation into three: two cutters disappeared to investigate activity around the largest gas giant; four dispersed across the system, appearing and disappearing in an apparently random but actually highly synchronized pattern; those remaining swooped down on the decoy Spinner installation, strafing it with arcane weapons.
Samson took the controls, and Sol braced herself as
Eledone
relocated into position. A red marker appeared next to one of the two cutters that had jumped to the gas giant, singled out by observers in the area as the one most vulnerable.
Hatzis almost laughed aloud at the notion. Against the Starfish,
vulnerable
was a strictly relative concept. The entire hole ship fleet lying in wait for them was almost insignificant in the face of their ten cutters. The most they’d be able to do, Sol knew, was perhaps delay the inevitable. But then, a delay was all they needed.
Dozens more of the compound hole ships suddenly relocated. On the screens around her, Sol saw white spheres breaking apart and vanishing, hurling themselves into the breach. Relying on the data gained during the zeta Dorado ambush, almost a third of the hole ship fleet sacrificed itself to take the vulnerable cutter apart from the inside. Points designated weak—without even the slightest knowledge of what they were for—were targeted first, followed by major structural locations, such as the hubs at the top and bottom of the spinning vessel.
Eledone
jumped to avoid the near-instantaneous backlash—in the form of bright blue sheets that swept space clear of everything they touched—and reappeared in time to see a flicker of widely dispersed white flashes dance across the alien hull. The distorted space-time around its edge wavered, giving the starry backdrop a rippling effect. Sol imagined that she could almost hear the distress of the giant ship as the attack tore it apart from within.
The remainder of the hole ships dispersed. The tactic was simple and effective but costly, too; if the human/Yuhl fleet had millions of hole ships at their disposal, then
maybe
they might have been able to take out all ten of the cutters. But the simple fact was that there weren’t enough hole ships in what remained of Surveyed Space to tackle even half of what was attacking them now.
One is all we need
, Sol reminded herself.
Just one...
As the rest of the fleet went to create a distraction elsewhere.
Eledone
relocated from point to point around the stricken cutter, gathering data. Between dodging Starfish attacks, Thor’s team was able to glimpse what was happening to the target. Not all of the hole ship fragments had been destroyed immediately upon entering the cutter. Some lingered, broadcasting a wide range of telemetry to the waiting observers. Storms of energy poured through the craft’s many chambers, with seismic waves propagating in wild and irregular surges. The relativistic velocities at the cutter’s knife-sharp edge began to take their toll. Rising temperatures sent plasma coursing through chambers that had otherwise held vacuum. Clearly, the cutter was sorely damaged, perhaps dying.
Axford’s eyes glittered as he watched the events unfold. Sol marveled at the man’s cool assessment of the situation. He was taking everything in, not missing a single datum. She wondered what he would do if Thor made a wrong decision. Although she hadn’t detected back doors other than her own in any of the engrams, there were undoubtedly other ways in. She wouldn’t put it past him to try to stop her by force, if he deemed it necessary. The copy of him called 1313 had a freshness about him that indicated a newly minted body, and Sol was sure that Axford 1041 wouldn’t have missed the chance to incorporate new technology into his one, best shot at survival.
“We have a locus,” said Gou Mang with a mix of excitement and apprehension.
A blurry schematic of the crippled cutter appeared in one of the screens. Two-thirds in from the edge, slightly above the vertical midpoint, a green light was flashing. Gou Mang zoomed in on it. The point was on the edge of a shadowy space shaped roughly like a kidney that had been pinched at both ends and stretched to twice its normal length. The space appeared to be considerably less active than those around it, although getting a clear picture wasn’t easy.
Eledone
jumped again, and again, as the team examined the data. Hundreds of blue darts and red dots followed them from point to point, swarming like furiously high-tech gnats intent on destroying them. Irritated, Thor ordered Samson to take them out of the light cone of the Starfish for a moment so she could think.
Thor narrowed her eyes as Sol watched her engram consider her next move. It wasn’t an easy decision. If the locus wasn’t as innocent as it looked, she could be sending them to their deaths. But if she waited for another one to appear, then the Starfish might get lucky and hit the octad, effectively ending the mission before it had even begun.
“We have incoming cutters,” reported Gou Mang on ftl data from the other hole ships. “The same as in Beid.”
Sol examined the images. Two of the massive craft were coming to the aid of their stricken sibling. As the damaged cutter spun down, they maneuvered above and below it, preparing to dock at the poles.
“And there’s the Trident!” exclaimed Axford, pointing. Everything seemed to come to a halt as the massive, incongruously slender craft slid out of the starscape and surveyed the scene.
“Okay,” said Thor, breaking the moment. “No more fucking around; send the evacuation signal and take us in.”
Sol’s eyes were fixed to the image of the Trident and the swarms of cutters issuing from multiple openings in its side. The image was so intimidating that for a moment she considered evacuating with the others.
Who are we trying to kid?
she wanted to say.
There’s no way we can possibly fight this thing!
But her mouth stayed shut as the orders went out to the hole ship fleet, now depleted to half the size it had been before. Asellus Primus was a graveyard of radiation and hole ship debris.
Slowly at first, and then with great speed, the hole ships began to wink out.
“Godspeed, Caryl,” came the voice of Kingsley Oborn over the ftl communicator.
Then
Eledone
was jumping, too, and they were committed.
* * *
Alander felt a moment of déjà vu.
Just under three weeks earlier, in the
Mantissa,
the Praxis had sucked him into his gullet and smothered him. As
Eledone
relocated into the heart of the damaged cutter, there was no sense of suffocation or pressure—or indeed of any movement at all, for the hole ships traveled unspace with no sense of motion—but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were diving into the belly of some vast beast to be eaten again.
What they would find there was anyone’s guess. For all the probes and sensors dispatched in zeta Dorado and Asellus Primus, the interior of the cutter was as alien as the heart of the sun. There could be anything inside it—anything at all...
A vibration suddenly shook the cockpit, as though the hole ship was countering resistance in unspace. Sol looked at him, and he met her gaze helplessly. They both knew that for the moment there was nothing they could do. The team had taken every possible precaution. All they could do now was wait.
Eledone
shuddered again.
Thor glanced over to Samson. “Is everything all right?”
“We’re entering a highly turbulent region of space-time,” she said. “Perhaps the task is too difficult for
Eledone.
The locus is moving in a circle at many thousands of kilometers per second.”
“
Eledone
,” Thor addressed the hole ship. “Will we be able to occupy the coordinates you were given?”
“That is presently unknown.”
“Then should we fall back and try somewhere else?”
“That is not possible,” said the hole ship. “My course is set, and it cannot be changed.”
Thor frowned. “What happens if we can’t make it?”
“The voyage will remain open-ended.”
“Which means what?”
“It means,” said Axford, “that we’ll never arrive at our destination.”
Alander watched Thor’s eyes widen at this, and sympathized. The possibility that a hole ship might fail in a jump had simply never arisen before.
“We’ll be trapped in unspace?” she asked.
“That is correct,” said
Eledone.
“Someone should’ve thought of this before we left.”
“Agreed,” said Cleo Samson. “I didn’t even bring a good book to read.”