Heirs of Earth (40 page)

There was a flicker in the sky behind Thor’s radiant beams of light as a new star blossomed in the sky.

“No,” said Thor, “you are not.”

“Oh, fuck,” said one of the engram Hatzises as the conSense view zoomed in on the new light. It was feathery and brilliant and seemed to be moving in its heart. “The fovea...”

“My God,” Sol mumbled. There was no mistaking the disillusionment in her voice, the hopelessness, the futility. Every syllable was steeped in it. “You know the drill, everyone. Evacuation stations—
now
!”

“But where are we to go?” asked one of the other engrams. “There’s nowhere left to run!”

Sol didn’t answer immediately, and the silence became tense as the gathering waited to hear what advice the last true human alive had to offer.

“I’m going back to Sol,” she said finally. “The rest of you can do what you want.”

“
Sol?
” someone cried out. “But—”

Sol didn’t give the person time to finish.

“I’m not going to keep on running like some goddamn animal,” she said. “If I have to die, then it’s going to be on
my
terms, not theirs.” She hesitated only fractionally before adding, “If I’m going to die, I’m going to do it at home.”

Alander was torn between weeping and cheering as, with a click, Sol exited the simulation, leaving the engrams in an uproar behind her.

2.3.7

A sense of mortal dread washed over Lucia upon seeing the
fovea. Her first instinct was to flee along with all the others. Although she was tired of running, she knew she could outpace the fovea easily enough. If she kept moving, it wouldn’t keep up with her.

Dread turned to horror, however, when she remembered that Peter wasn’t physically with her. He was on
Mantissa B,
two jumps and a hole ship journey away from safety.

That horror was only compounded by Sol’s announcement.
I’m not going to keep on running like some goddamn animal.
If Peter went with Sol or Lucia was unable to rescue him, she would be cut free, adrift. Lost. Time seemed to slow as she confronted the difficult decision of what to do next.

She didn’t have time to dwell on it. Her attention was drawn back to the panic consuming Sagarsee. The airwaves were cluttered with shouting voices, a crazy mix of questions, suggestions, and recriminations. There was a terrible edge of desperation to the voices, too, that Lucia could all too well relate to. Predominant was disbelief at the impending attack from the Starfish. What had happened to the reprieve? Despite the sense of uncertainty Thor and the others had brought back with them, the remaining engrams had thought they were through the worst of it. But now...

Through the panicked cries flooding the airwaves, Lucia noted that Frank Axford’s name was being mentioned a lot. It was hardly surprising, given how he had called in the Starfish back at Beid. He wouldn’t think twice about betraying putative allies if it suited him, and that the Starfish were about to come down upon Sagarsee so quickly after Axford had made an appearance would have only confirmed this suspicion in people’s minds.

But despite these feelings, Lucia knew that in this case, at least, Axford wasn’t to blame. There had been no ftl transmissions from anywhere near Sagarsee. And if the Starfish
had
called off the attack on human colonies because of Thor’s message, then it didn’t make sense that a simple communication would prompt them to start up again on their genocidal rampage.

Lucia felt herself dithering, even as the need to make a decision became increasingly urgent. Her I-body ran with Peter as he hurried to the visitors’ evacuation point. A crowd had already gathered there, pressing forward to take the next available hole ship.
Mantissa B
was beginning to break apart into clumps, shedding smaller hole ship configurations like a vast flower dispersing pollen to the solar winds. An alternative rendezvous point was touted for those who didn’t share Sol’s suicidal imperative. Alkaid itself, the “chief of mourners,” would be where survivors would regroup to discuss further options. At a distance of one hundred light years from Sol, it was farther than most of the remaining engrams had ever traveled.

On my terms, not theirs...

Sol’s decision cut a swathe through the panic. She, at least, offered a resolution to the situation. As terrible as the prospect was of simply resigning oneself to the Starfish’s wrath, at least it would bring an end to the uncertainty and fear. And judging by the clamor of voices Lucia could hear, a lot of people were tempted to follow Sol’s lead. Many had already committed themselves to the journey and were calling on others to join them. In the waiting area on
Mantissa B,
lots were being cast to decide where the next evacuating tetrad would be going.

Lucia’s I-body watched with impotent despair as Alander voted for Sol, and the motion passed.

“What’s going to happen to them?” she asked Thor. The shining hybrid vessel hadn’t fled yet. It seemed to be holding back, helplessly observing the frantic evacuation, its radiant beams picking out fleeing hole ships as they disengaged from each other and vanished into unspace. “Will the fovea follow them?”

“Individually, their wakes will be difficult to trace,” Thor replied, “But en masse it is likely that their destination will be pinpointed.”

“And what about you, Caryl? Are you going to run, or will you make a stand with Sol?”

Lucia read the silence that followed as uncertainty. But she knew they would have to make a choice soon. It never took the cutters long to appear after the fovea arrived.

Frustration and apprehension sent her into the pov of her I-body as it followed Peter—along with dozens of other android bodies—into the cockpit of the evacuation tetrad assigned to go to Sol. Even through his hair and beard, Lucia could clearly make out his haunted expression.

“I can’t let you do this,” she said to him.

He faced her with a shake of the head. “It’s not up to you, Lucia.”

“This is the wrong decision, Peter! You know that!”

“Right or wrong,” he returned, “it’s
my
decision.”

“But—” She choked on the words.
But what about the stars?
she wanted to say.
What about us?

The image of the two of them holding hands on Jian Lao was still strong in her mind, even though her survey mission’s colony world had been destroyed along with pi-1 Ursa Major. There would be no sunny future as she imagined it, but that didn’t mean they had to abandon hope, too. She had yet to give up the inbuilt need for that.

As the tetrad detached from
Mantissa B
and prepared to jump to Sol, she decided to take drastic action. She couldn’t stand by and do nothing while Peter killed himself. Moving her I-body closer to his, she put a translucent arm on his shoulder. Forces flexed, and the I-body lost its shape. Flowing like a raindrop down a pane of glass, it swept over him in a single, smooth rush, quickly covering him and his own I-suit.

“What—?”

She flexed again, applying pressure to clamp his mouth shut.

Her mind stretched out, reaching for and finding the hole ship’s AI. Its core persona belonged to a hole ship christened
Huang-di.

“Open the inner airlock door,” she commanded. Ignoring Alander’s protests and the confused stares of the other refugees, she marched Alander through the short corridor leading from the cockpit. “Close the inner airlock door.”

Choking noises emanated from Alander’s clenched teeth. She let up on the pressure slightly to allow him to speak. “Lucia, you can’t do this!” he groaned. It sounded as though his voice was coming from inside her head. “Let me go, for Christ’s sake!”

“
Huang-di
, evacuate the airlock.”

Background noise faded to a faint murmur communicated only through the soles of her feet. Peter’s voice, however, was still loud.

“I might not be able to fight you, Lucia,” he was saying, “but I can refuse to talk to you! I can slow my thoughts to nothing; I can shut myself down entirely! What use would I be to you, then?”

She hesitated, but only slightly. If she forced him to survive, at least there’d be a chance he might change his mind. But if he was dead, there was no hope at all. It wasn’t a difficult choice to make.

“Open the outer door,
Huang-di
.”

The last vestige of air tickled by as it rushed into the void. The burning light of the fovea greeted her as she folded Alander’s resistant legs beneath her and hurled both of them out into space.

* * *

She jumped pov to the spindle.
Huang-di
was a tiny dot against
the starscape, and Peter an even smaller dot drifting away from it. Firing up her reactionless thrusters, she sent herself careering through the chaos of hole ships just as a cold blue flash heralded the arrival of the cutters.

Panic reached a fever pitch among humanity’s survivors, and Lucia heard desperate entreaties, hollow threats, even prayers hurled at the Starfish—all, of course, to no avail. The last complete set of Spinner gifts gleamed in golden sunlight as razor-edged destruction hurtled toward them. Lucia knew, as did everyone, that there was nothing that could be done now to make a difference. All anyone could do was try to stay alive.

Energy fields with the thickness of butterfly wings and the strength of titanium snatched at Alander and the encompassing I-body as the spindle swept by. Lucia gathered him up, drawing him into her sanctuary. Where exactly she was going to go, she still hadn’t decided. Without knowing what had happened to the Praxis, she couldn’t automatically assume that jumping ahead was the best option. But there had to be
some
direction she could jump that would be safe. At some point, there had to be a boundary beyond which the threat of destruction dropped to zero.

Almost in response to her quandary, Thor suddenly announced: “I HAVE DECIDED. I AM GOING TO BSC5581.”

Her voice came to Lucia as more than half of the remaining refugees fled in one sudden wave,
Huang-di
among them.

“Why?” Lucia asked, but the bright point that was Thor had already vanished.

The cutters swooped low and fast over Sagarsee, snapping towers as easily as if they were little more than twigs. There wasn’t time to think; she just had to act. Like a signature, each of the alien ships had a different way of bending space—the cutters, the Trident, and the more exotic Starfish craft. The strange creature Thor had become was no exception, and as she moved through unspace, she left a distinct ripple in the hyperspatial continuum, making it easy for Lucia to follow her, just as she had from pi-1 Ursa Major.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Peter as they traversed space-time’s more subtle geometries. “I had no choice.”

“Spare me the apologies, Lucia.” he snapped. Free of her I-body, he was still trapped in the spindle. She gave him full access to her telemetry, but he wasn’t interested. “You don’t give a damn about me, so you can quit with the bullshit!”

“But I
do
care—” she started.

“If you did,” he said, “you wouldn’t have taken me against my will. And don’t give me any of that crap about how you did it for my own good, or for the good of the others. I’m not buying it. You only did it because you need me to keep you going.”

The accusation stung because it simply wasn’t true. But there was no time to reason with him. They had emerged from unspace in BSC5581. The world called Geb was still burning. Alander fell silent, reminded perhaps that there were bigger issues to worry about than his own personal liberty.

Lucia and Thor were alone, the only ships in the system. If any survivors had followed, they had yet to arrive, hole ship propulsion being considerably slower than the means she and Thor enjoyed.

“Now what?” she asked.

Thor said nothing. Instead, she sent out bright white beams across the ruined world below them, testing its smoky atmosphere. Lucia thought of insect antennae again and wondered if she would ever know what Thor was thinking.

Then a light blossomed high over the ecliptic, and Lucia’s heart sank. The fovea had followed them.

Thor didn’t waste time on discussions.

“HD132142,” she said. Before Lucia could comment, Thor had already gone, leaving Lucia’s spindle alone under the harsh, cold glare of the fovea.

“If we’re going to follow her,” said Peter after a few heartbeats, “then I don’t recommend you pause for thought, Lucia.”

Still lacking a viable alternative, Lucia did as he suggested. Before the cutters had chance to slice their way into the real universe, she was once again trailing Thor at a discreet distance.

When she arrived at HD132142, she found it empty apart from Thor hovering over another destroyed colony. The fires were cooling, but smoke still cast a thick pall over the world’s surface. Gloom would reign for months yet, maybe even years.

Within moments of her arrival, the fovea burst over the clouded world like a new sun.

“BSC5423,” Thor said, and vanished again.

This time Lucia didn’t hesitate. Deep in Thor’s unspace wake, she followed.

“This is getting us nowhere,” Peter said. His tone was resentful, but at least he was talking to her without anger. “Keep going like this and you’re just going to end up back at Sol anyway. We might as well get there early and avoid all of this jumping around.”

Lucia had noted Thor’s progression, too. HD132142 was the system containing Demeter, the third most recent colony attacked by the Starfish. Zemyna, the next in the series, was in BSC5423. Thor was clearly working her way backward through the chain of colonies. But
why
?

Soon after they arrived at the ruins that had once been Zemyna, the fovea appeared again. Thor was gone in an instant, and Lucia was close on her tail, heading for Rasmussen in BSC5070.

“What the hell are you doing, Caryl?” she asked Thor immediately upon their arrival. “What are you trying to achieve?”

“Symmetry,” came the reply.

“
Symmetry?
What the fuck does that—?”

But the fovea’s arrival cut short the conversation, and Thor disappeared again.

Lucia followed; she had no choice. If there was a purpose to Thor’s movements, then she wanted to know what it was.