Heirs of Earth (7 page)

Deciding not to wait on Rob’s return. Lucia took the virtual equivalent of a deep breath and urged her pov toward the doorway.

The darkness fell smoothly behind her as she suddenly found herself—or her pov, at least—in bright light.

Embracing this newfound freedom, she began to explore.

1.2.3

A haze of stars surrounded Caryl Hatzis like a glowing mist.
She took a moment to admire it, to bathe in the light of 200 billion suns. When she breathed in, she imagined that she wasn’t breathing ordinary air but the ionized atoms and far-flung molecules that bubbled and roiled in interstellar space. She felt like a god, existing on star stuff, bathing in the primordial fires of creation.

She exhaled, letting the dream go with the breath she’d been holding. It was a dream she had once cherished, of being part of a mind that spanned the galaxy, infinite in possibility and incomprehensible in form. Now she felt she’d be lucky to see out the month in one piece.

“Do you know what a fovea is?”

Kingsley Oborn’s voice came from behind her, followed by the sound of footsteps. She turned to face the biotechnician as he walked down into the pit of the Map Room.

“I’m sorry, Kingsley?”

“A
fovea
,” he repeated. “Have you heard of the term?”

She nodded, still confused. “It’s the part of the eye we look at things with, isn’t it? The part that takes in all the detail?”

“That’s right. The rest of the cornea sees things only vaguely, which is why we move our eyes around a lot without knowing.” Oborn came to a halt in front of her. “The eye is constantly scanning our field of view, filling in the details. That movement is called a
saccade.
Both saccade and fovea evolved in different senses for a number of different animals, mainly in an attempt to keep the mass and complexity of the brain down. If every part of our cornea was as sensitive as the fovea, our heads would have to be fifty times larger to deal with all the information.”

“I presume this is going somewhere.”

He nodded significantly. “I think this is how the Starfish are sweeping the wake for anything—or anyone—we leave behind.”

Hatzis frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”

Oborn seemed almost pleased with himself for having thought of something she hadn’t. “There’s no possible way the Starfish could sweep every cubic centimeter across such a vast front. It would take unimaginable resources to do such a thing. But they may have ways to conduct a low-level survey, looking for suspicious points, then focus in on those points with their equivalent of a fovea. This fovea confirms a suspicious sighting, then the cutters move in and get rid of it.”

Her mind leapt ahead of him. “So if we want to fall behind and not be destroyed, we’re going to have to find a way to evade the fovea.”

He nodded again. “There’s not much we can do about the low-level survey, because we have no idea how that’s being conducted. But the fovea, that’s a different story altogether. Look.”

He held out a hand and she took it, accepting the data that flowed smoothly into her through their palms.

“We’ve seen enough Starfish attacks now to recognize a pattern,” he continued. “There’s always an anomaly shortly beforehand somewhere in the system. See here—this weird radiant point.” He indicated several that had appeared in the previous weeks. “We’ve always assumed that these are symptomatic of the Starfish’s propulsion technology. The cutters come much faster, we suspect, than the hole ship drives would allow; that they are preceded by some sort of reverse echo doesn’t seem impossible. But it’s always bothered me. If the Starfish are so advanced, and so aggressive, then why would they allow something like this to give their arrival away? It doesn’t make sense.” He shook his head. “No. I think what we’re seeing are the fovea—the eyes of the Starfish watching the target as the swords approach. And if we can see them, then maybe we can learn not to be seen
by
them.”

The images folded away, their job done. Oborn leaned back, looking even more self-satisfied than he had before. He had every right to be, too. Like his engram on Juno, Kingsley had been co-opted from other duties to be a leader of the research team probing the gifts for any kind of information or technology that might be of use to them in the battle against the Starfish. Although the Yuhl had been plumbing such knowledge for centuries, their access to the gifts was only secondhand, rarely stopping long enough to access the physical structures themselves and for the most part being forced to rely on recordings. An added complication was that the Gifts followed the same tactic with other species as they did with the human engrams: they chose just one member of the native population to speak with, ignoring all others. Even if the Yuhl did get their hands on one of the installations, they could only explore it, not interact with it.

“Good work, Kingsley,” she said. “You’ve done well.”

He inclined his head in acknowledgment of her praise. “Obviously we’re still a long way from a working evasion technique, but we’re getting there. It’d be good to have a Plan B available in case Plan A fails.”

She agreed wholeheartedly, if silently, with this. “Speaking of which,” she said, “I came here to look at the systems in question. Are you able to run me through them?”

The biotechnician beamed. “Of course. It’d be an honor.”

Hatzis waved him forward. All the Oborns had something of a crush on her and they worked best when rewarded with personal contact. She was happy to provide it but wary of taking anything further. One of her engrams had been tempted, long before the arrival of the Spinners, but had found that the Kingsley Oborn engram became unstable if indulged. He’d been programmed with a deep-seated fear of intimacy that took precedence over any physical desires.

That didn’t prevent a slight twinge of guilt, though. She had used the Oborn on Juno to head her previous research effort, and he had flown quite happily into the horror of Beid to protect her—and died in the effort. She had no room in her philosophy for noble sacrifice and was reluctant to encourage it in others.

She took the passive role as Oborn wheeled the massive star map around her. An utterly seamless and detailed three-dimensional image, the map was another of the amazing gifts from the Spinners. It showed the location and vector of every major body in the galaxy. Known objects were accurate against Earth astronomical charts: many of the previously unknown objects explained anomalous observations through dust clouds or around the galactic core. Even if it was only mostly complete—there were unexplained gaps hiding, some people thought, information the Spinners considered too sensitive for primitives—it was a boon for astronomers and astrophysicists.

“Here.” The view ballooned around them, expanding and focusing on one bright white star in particular. “That’s Asellus Primus. Variable F-type star; should have been visited by the
Shelley Wright
decades ago, but they didn’t make it. Not that they would’ve found much if they had. It’s a bit of a dud, really.”

Hatzis knew her star maps as well as anyone. “Perhaps they kept on going to Asellus Secundus, hoping for better luck.”

“If so, then they’re still on their way.” He smiled at her as though thanking her for an alternative and happier explanation for the
Wright
’s absence. “We’re already preparing the contact point in here, orbiting the fourth planet. I think we can guarantee a fair degree of verisimilitude.”

She nodded. One of the greatest concerns over the plan was that the trial run might have alerted the Starfish, put their guard up when it came to suspicious signals. Everything depended on the cutters behaving as normal in the face of an ftl transmission. If they hesitated just for a moment or failed to come at all...

“The map data is accurate?” she asked, shying away from the thought. It didn’t serve any purpose to dwell on negative possibilities right now.

“Down to single-figure percentiles, I’m told.”

“Good. And the other?”

The star map spun around her again. The second target was much more familiar to her. She instantly recognized its color and its position with respect to its nearest neighbors.

“Pi-2 Ursa Major,” he said. “Five rocky worlds, six gas giants, two asteroid belts, and the usual cometary clouds. The fifth world out was the one to be colonized. You can even see the oxygen levels recorded in the map. I overheard Otto Wyra talking about this the other day. Data is actually encoded in the map image at all frequencies. The visual appearance of each image matches what we would see in the visual spectrum, but if you look outside those bounds, you can find all sorts of—” He stopped, noticing that he was drifting from the topic. “Anyway, there’s nothing unusual recorded in the map. It all looks kosher.”

“So do you think we’re doing the right thing, Kingsley?”

He glanced at her uncertainly. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“The question is simple enough: Are we doing the right thing?”

He appeared suddenly flustered. “Well—I wouldn’t presume to comment on something you had already—I mean. I’d only be confusing the issue, wouldn’t I? And what would be the point of—?”

“Come on, Kingsley. Indulge me, won’t you? I just want your opinion on this, rather than mine parroted back to me. If it makes it any easier, I’m
ordering
you to do it.”

He swallowed uncomfortably before: “To be honest, Caryl, I’m absolutely terrified.”

She nodded her approval and thanks. “Okay, now tell me
why
.”

“Because it’s bloody dangerous, that’s why. I don’t know who’s going to volunteer for this mission, but they’d have to be half bloody crazy to even bloody consider it.”

She noted the repetition of the swear word and wondered if she might be pushing him into unstable territory, “I’ll be volunteering, Kingsley.”

“What? You can’t be serious!”

“How can I expect my colleagues to do something that I’m not prepared to do myself?”

“But Thor’s going. Surely that’s enough?”

“Thor’s going? How do you know that?”

“It’s not a secret.”

“It’s a secret from me, obviously.” She swallowed her confusion and the question:
What the fuck is Thor hoping to gain by broadcasting this?

He nodded warily. “But that means you don’t have to go, right?”

“I’m afraid not.” She risked touching him, reassuring him with a squeeze to the shoulder. “You don’t have to worry about my safety, Kingsley, and neither should anyone else. The colonies have enough concerns as it is.”

“I can’t help it, Sol.” His eyes avoided hers. “You’re all that’s left. If we lose you, what’s there to fight for?”

“Plenty,” she said as firmly as possible. “You just keep working on Plan B and let me take care of the rest, okay?”

Starting with Thor,
she added to herself as she turned and left the map—and the illusion of godhood—behind her.

* * *

The data from the trial run flowed like honey through the high-level
simulation. Thor bathed in it, letting the raw information pour over in a slow, dense avalanche. She was assisted in the process by Marduk and Mahatala, two other Hatzis engrams who seemed happy enough to take her orders. They acted as primary filters for the data stream, weeding the information so she wouldn’t be overloaded. Even at her fastest clock rate, there was too much for a single mind to absorb in one sitting.

But that didn’t stop her trying. She needed to understand firsthand what she was getting into. It was all very well to take Sol’s tame expert’s word for what might be found in the morass of details, but she wanted to see it for herself. If she was going to leap into the fire, she wanted to know exactly how extensive the resulting burns would be.

Dozens of probes had penetrated the skins of the Starfish cutters and transmitted a wealth of data back to the waiting observers. She saw in exquisite detail everything they had experienced as they died. Explosions prompted massive and immediate defensive measures, sealing breaches and smothering fires with invisible, irresistible fingers. Lasers provoked mirror fields of perfect reflective index, sending the energy back at the probes, while chemical attacks slid off suddenly inert surfaces and were absorbed. Only the sudden annihilation of matter seemed to release enough energy to damage the cutters from within. If any serious harm was to be achieved, then it was going to require antimatter bombs and mass-superposition weapons, or the like.

At least that was the conclusion she came to from studying the up-front attacks. More subtle intrusions generated more ambiguous data. Probes that remained quiescent in their niches were for the most part ignored during the time of the test; others that had been programmed to explore their surroundings had been immediately set upon by security systems. Feeds from the dying probes reported crushing pressure, electromagnetic interference, along with anomalous readings of a dozen kinds.

Nowhere in any of the data did Thor glimpse anything that looked like it might be an alien, suggesting that perhaps the defense systems themselves might have been automatic. Although she hadn’t dared hope for a glimpse of one of the mysterious Starfish, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. To be the first to sight one of the aliens would have been a great moment for her and a real slap in the face for Sol.

Ever since that moment of revelation in the ruins of Sothis, when she had understood that Sol wasn’t capable of the decisions required to save humanity from the Starfish, she had felt curiously—almost alarmingly—free of any loyalty to her original. If she was going to survive, she realized now, she would have to take the steps herself. That seemed logical enough to her, although it obviously wasn’t to the others.

Why me?
she wondered.
What sets me apart from the other copies of me? Why am I the only one who stands up to her?

Perhaps it was selective pressure in action. Only the strongest would survive the coming of the Starfish. While a biological species might evolve by accruing mutations in its genes, engrams could only experience copying errors through the program that ran them. Hers, she was beginning to assume, had just such an error—only her error made her stronger, more independent, than the others.