Heirs of Earth (20 page)

“We’ve just been looking in the wrong places, that’s all,” Thor responded. Her expression looked haggard to Alander; beneath her anger lurked deep exhaustion. She was starting to show the pressure they’d all been under since the mission began.

“I don’t think you truly comprehend the scale of what we’re trying to do here, Thor,” said Inari. “We’re like microbes trying to flag down a fucking
whale
!”

“She’s right,” said Gou Mang. “We’re never going to get them to notice us.”

“Not like this, we won’t, no,” Thor agreed.

“Then why have you got us banging our heads against this brick wall? You’re just going to get us all killed!”

“At least we will have died trying!” Thor glared at Gou Mang and Inari, livid at them for defying her. “But we are
not
going back until we’ve explored every option. I won’t allow it.”

“You won’t
allow
it?” Gou Mang echoed. “And what gives you the right to make decisions that affect the rest of us?”

“You did, actually,” said Thor evenly, “when you volunteered.”

“None of us volunteered for a suicide mission,” said Inari. “We came along because we believed we had a chance!”

“Which we still do.”

“Not if you continue the way you’re going.”

Thor opened her mouth to speak, but then shut it again, biting down on her retort. She didn’t have to say a word for Alander to know what she was thinking; it was right there in her eyes. She felt betrayal at the way her command had been questioned and fear that it had been so openly challenged. She might not call it fear but that was what it was. She had been fighting fear of substitution ever since Rasmussen, with her obvious successor only meters away from where she was now standing.

“I don’t see what else Thor could have done,” said Sol. Had Alander been in physical contact with her, he would have urged her to remain quiet, to let the others sort it out without her input. But then, silence wasn’t the Hatzis way, as was evidenced by this ongoing debate.

“We knew before we went in that it was unlikely we’d succeed,” Sol continued, addressing both Inari and Gou Mang. “I don’t think you’re being fair to Thor by recanting now.”

“Things have changed,” said Gou Mang. Sol’s former second-in-command stared at her with uneasy defiance. “When we knew nothing, it was easy to imagine that we had a chance of succeeding. But we know more than we did back then! Continuing on now when we know what we’re up against is both futile and counterproductive.”

Inari nodded in agreement. “The only way we can make this mission count for anything is to return to the others and convey what we’ve learned.”

“And what
have
we learned?” Thor asked. “That we found a couple of warring factions of other aliens existing within the cutter? What could they do with that?”

“They could decide to join them,” said Gou Mang. “We could decide to find a niche of our own in a cutter just like the
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and the Pllix did.”

Thor shook her head as she laughed. “Just like that? We hitch a ride and everything will be fine?”

Gou Mang shrugged. “It’s a possibility, at least. One that the others should be made aware of.”

“And what do you think the others have been doing since we’ve been gone?” said Sol. “Sitting on their hands doing nothing?” She shook her head. “The Unfit will be looking for alternatives, in case we don’t return. They might even attempt to send other missions to try to contact the Starfish. I don’t think we should consider going back until we are absolutely certain that success is not possible. At least this way we save others the anguish and frustration of trying.” She glanced at Thor, to all appearances wary of undermining the other’s authority. “That’s just my opinion, anyway.”

Thor nodded slowly with weary gratitude. “We keep going. That’s my
decision
.”

Gou Mang shook her head. “You’re going to get us all killed, Thor. The Starfish may be the ones holding the gun, but you’re the one hell-bent on pressing our heads against the barrel.”

Gou Mang’s normally olive skin was pale and blotchy, and Alander realized that she was terrified. Not that he could blame her. They’d seen nothing since the battle between the
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and the Pllix that could remotely be described as reassuring. The swathe of destruction left by the demolition crew in the vast body of the cutter led through chambers more enormous than anything humanity had ever managed to build. Roiling energies still surged through the chambers, pouring out of the ragged mouths of severed veins, but the closer to the exterior they moved, the more noticeably quiescent the craft became. They passed through layers of structural material, folded silver sheets stacked in layers dozens deep, shot through with bright blue threads as wide as tree trunks. Bundles of fibers that looked like optical information conduits—but which probably served a very different purpose—spewed forth washes of multicolored light where they’d been roughly severed. The charcoal remains of angular Pllix vessels could be seen everywhere
Eledone
passed. Perhaps as a result of the governors’ destruction by the demolition crews, the hole ship wasn’t challenged or intercepted again. As the
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had promised, the way was clear.

But that still didn’t make it easy. There were frequent hazards: dead ends where punctured chambers had begun to collapse; rivers of energy that even
Eledone
had to skirt, weird ripples in space-time that swept through the ruins as incomprehensible field effects failed. The last came and went like ghosts in a digital image, and were all the more startling for it. Thus far none had come too close. Alander was glad not to know what effects they might have on the damaged hole ship.

“Your point is moot, anyway,” said Axford 1313, standing to address Gou Mang. “We don’t have the means to go anywhere at the moment. We’re stuck here whether we like it or not.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t at least
try
to find a way.” Grim defiance carved her mouth into a sharp line. “We could hitch a ride with another cutter, perhaps, or convince the
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to repair us.”

Axford dismissed her comment with a self-righteous smirk and a shake of the head. “What makes you think we could succeed where others before us have clearly failed? They’ve kept to themselves for God only knows how many millennia; they’re clearly not interested in being contacted.”

“The Praxis knew about them,” said Inari, glancing at Alander.

“All the Praxis knew,” Axford said, “or thought he knew, was that the
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had been destroyed by the Starfish. He obviously didn’t know they’d survived; otherwise he would have mentioned them—right, Peter?”

Alander shrugged but didn’t say anything. The fact that the Praxis had invaded his memories as well as his mind and body still unnerved him. There had been no subsequent revelations since his conversation with the
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and he had consoled himself with the thought that there might be no more until something in his environment triggered a match in the data he had been given. But just because he had been granted access to certain information didn’t automatically make him an expert on what the Praxis did or didn’t know.

What other surprises lurked inside him was of greater concern.

“This is the kind of knowledge that could come in handy for the others,” Gou Mang insisted. “They should be told about it!”

A small silence filled the cockpit as Samson continued to navigate through the ravaged interior of the cutter.

“That, at least, I will concede is a valid point,” said Thor after some thought. “But I’m still not prepared to give up on this mission just yet. While we look for some way to speak to the Starfish, we’ll also look for a way to get back. That way, if the former fails, we can still have a shot at the latter. Is that an acceptable compromise, Gou Mang? Inari?”

The two nodded reluctantly, although Gou Mang was clearly not convinced. She might know when an argument was lost, but she was also a Hatzis. Alander had no doubt that the issue would surface again. He’d known Caryl Hatzis long enough to know that an argument was never lost completely, only temporarily.

“How close are we to the outside?” Alander asked Samson, filling the tense quiet.

“At this rate,” she replied, “we should reach our destination in about one hour.”

“Right, then I’m going to shut down for half an hour,” said Thor. “Gou Mang, you’re in charge until I wake up.”

Gou Mang looked surprised at the request, but accepted the responsibility with a nod.

Sol came over to sit beside Alander, touching palms so that she could speak to him in private.

Clever, don’t you think?
she said.
Conceding command to Gou Mang doesn’t give her anything, but it allows her to save face. I would have done the same thing, I think

Would you have pulled the plug on her if she’d decided to go back?
he shot back.

I’m not sure. It would’ve been more interesting to see what Frank would do first. There’s a whole heap of stuff he’s not telling us—stuff I’m very keen to learn more about.

When do you intend to do that?

When everything is a little more quiet, perhaps. Or more dangerous still than it has been.

Alander looked over to Thor.
Do you think she’s really shut down?

Yeah, she’s out, all right. Gone into fast mode to get as many z’s as she can.

Alander nodded.
That’s not a bad idea at the moment. We’ve no idea what we ‘re going to find on the outside of this thing.
He was trying not to think that far ahead, but it was hard not to dwell on it. If the
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had adapted into demolition crews designed to take damaged cutters apart, who were they working for? The Starfish themselves, or someone else higher on the ladder?

He assumed that they were about to find out and was unsure how he felt about it. When he thought about the possible roads the mission could take, he kept getting stuck on a terrible vision of them following a chain from species to species in a vain hope of finding one that might offer them a direct link to the Starfish, until one day a thousand years from now another species would stumble upon them, and they would have found their own niche in the world of the cutters, perhaps becoming a race known to others as the Seekers or something similar.

And what if there were no Starfish to find, anyway? What if the aliens had died out eons ago, and the destructive fleet they were exploring was advancing purely on momentum—machines programmed by designers long since extinct, inhabited by parasites, and now impossible to shut down?

Time would tell, he supposed—time that was passing all too quickly. If they didn’t find an answer soon, it would be too late to make a difference in Surveyed Space, and what happened to
Eledone
and its crew would be irrelevant.

Sol withdrew her hand from his, perhaps sensing that he wasn’t in the mood to talk. He felt disappointment for a moment, having taken some comfort from the physical contact, if nothing else, but didn’t move to reclaim it. Whatever their relationship had been or was, just then was undoubtedly the wrong time to test its boundaries.

Alone in his mind, Alander settled back to sit out the hour in silence.

* * *

Eledone
passed through a region crowded with structures that
looked like purple stalactites and stalagmites. Giant interlocking cones stretched from floor to ceiling and back again, culminating in tapered, perfectly geometric tips. The tips of stalactites and stalagmites didn’t match, however, so the peak of one formation pressed into the trough of another. To Sol,
Eledone
seemed like a bread crumb gliding through the teeth of unimaginably large beasts.

“There’s less damage here than in previous regions,” Alander noted.

Sol nodded in silent agreement. There was still the occasional molten blister bulging from the otherwise seamless surfaces, and even a few long, curling scars where energy weapons had been discharged, but they were indeed fewer in number than she’d seen in other areas. There was none of the roiling turbulence of the veins, either. Clearly, as they neared the outer layers of the giant vessel, the environment was becoming increasingly calmer.

“Check that out,” said Axford, coming to stand beside her in the center of the cockpit.

Sol looked to where Axford was pointing. It was a dark patch off to one side. “It looks like an impact site,” she said.

Axford nodded. “And it looks old, too—not fresh.”

Inari came up alongside them also. “Which means what, exactly?”

“Even ships this advanced would have to get hit by space junk now and then,” explained Sol. “If that is the site of such a collision, it means we really are getting closer to the outside.”

She knew no more about their environment than any of the others, but the notion was a reassuring one, anyway, and she found herself embracing the hope,
wanting
it to be true. As to what they might find outside when they reached it, she had no idea. It could very well be a case of flying out of the frying pan and into the fires of hell.

They had passed through sections of the ship where giant portions appeared to have been sheared away and removed. Vast reefs of detritus marked their passing, but there was no indication of who had done the actual work. She didn’t know if the
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or some other, as yet unidentified niche dweller was responsible.

She was beginning to think of the cutter as less an animal and more a kind of cell. It was roughly the right shape, for starters, and lacked many of the things she would normally associate with an independent creature. The thought that various alien races might be absorbed into its functions was not so peculiar, given that her cells had absorbed other creatures during their evolution in order to function more efficiently. Whether it was gut flora or mitochondria, the absorption of the lesser into a greater whole seemed to be a biological paradigm.

She was certain, however, that she didn’t want to be absorbed. Even in Sol, before the Starfish came, when she had been just part of the much larger mind that was Caryl Hatzis, she’d had a clear sense of her own identity, as a separate, independent being. Did the Pllix have that? she wondered. Or the
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She didn’t want to find out the hard way that they were in fact slaves to the Starfish overmind—if such a thing existed.