Heirs of Earth (19 page)

2.2
THE JUDAS ALTERNATIVE

2160.9.30 Standard Mission Time

(3 September 2163 UT)

2.2.1

Lucia Benck woke bathed in the light of a new sun.

Her mind took some time to disentangle itself from the assumption that she should be dead. The last things she remembered were the Starfish coming to Rasmussen, the destruction of the
Marcus Chown
and the spindles, the deaths of Rob Singh and the others, and her desperate flight to the Dark Room. It was burned into her memory like some grim, ghastly snapshot of mortality.

But here she was, still very much alive, and most definitely somewhere other than Rasmussen. Rasmussen’s sun, BSC5070 was a bright G-type star with eleven planets, whereas the system she was in now had seven worlds ranging from dense, rocky balls to vast, turbulent gas giants with impossibly fragile- looking ring systems. How she actually “saw” them, though, she didn’t really understand. The knowledge was present in her mind like something she’d always known, like a memory of something familiar. And the more she thought about it, the more she came to realize that it
was
familiar—as familiar to her as her body had once been.

It was Sol System.

Something was different, though. Jupiter and Saturn and all the outer planets were instantly recognizable, as were Mars and Mercury. Most of the Kuiper bodies were exactly where they should have been. The sun itself glowed a familiar blotchy yellow, exhibiting all the sunspot activity Lucia would have expected of neither a solar maximum nor a solar minimum.

There was, however, a huge gap between Mercury and Mars, occupied by just one small world. It wasn’t even a planet, really. It was dead and lifeless, its surface littered with scorch marks and newly formed craters. It took Lucia a long moment to identify it, and she did so only by locating the site of the old Chinese Yi Base on what had once been known as the small world’s dark side. Now all sides were dark, except for the one facing the sun. Earthlight no longer shone on Luna, for the Earth itself was gone.

Lucia had heard the stories from Thor and the others, but the reality had never truly sunk in. Seeing it now with her own eyes—or whatever it was she was seeing with—brought home the terrible truth.

Home?

Home was gone, and would never be again. All the things she recalled about it—her childhood in Dalarna, following the Strzelecki Track, her selection to UNESSPRO and entrain- ment—it was all
gone.
As were her family and friends; as was her original. Everything, everyone—really, truly gone.

All that remained were great clouds of dust from the massive post-Spike construction the original Caryl Hatzis had referred to as the Frame. The Starfish had reduced the lot back to atoms. Not one self-replicating molecule remained to allow even a token attempt at reconstructing her home.

Home...

She cautioned herself to stop thinking of it that way, for although it would always be her point of origin, there was nothing of home about it anymore. The only artifact in the entire system was a Yuhl grave marker in close orbit about the sun, an almost insignificant reminder that once upon a time life had existed here. Right now she was the only life in this dead system.

And she remained unsure, exactly, what she
was,
still.

That she remained Lucia Benck was indisputable, but her exact
being
was unclear. She had no clear sense of a body. She felt limbs when she moved, certainly, but they weren’t remotely like her old ones. These were strange and entirely too numerous. Some of them stretched in directions that didn’t exist in the real universe; others touched things that couldn’t possibly be felt, like the heart of atomic nuclei, or the vacuum, rich in zero-point energy. She was like some arcane, highly evolved octopus, swimming in seas beyond comprehension.

What’s happened to me?

Her voice echoed into the void, but was not answered. She felt a great emptiness settle upon her. Even tourists needed somewhere to return to—an anchor, a point of reference. But she no longer had that, and the absence of it was, in a way, far worse than losing the ability to travel.

Her attention was suddenly attracted to a disturbance in the empty system—a disturbance where just nanoseconds before there had been only inactivity. A point of light blossomed in the darkness. Feathery energy sprayed into the solar wind, causing strange ripple effects to sway and bend around it, like the corona during a total eclipse.

Recognition came with a thrill of fear. She had heard of such things. Kingsley Oborn, back on Rasmussen, had posted theories in the conSense discussion rooms concerning what he called the
fovea,
the forerunning spooks of the Starfish. Where the fovea came and saw signs of life, death soon followed.

Would this one see
her
? she wondered. She didn’t know. She didn’t know if she
could
be seen anymore. The last thing she remembered was pleading with the Gifts to move, and then hearing a voice, “this is the final gift we bring.”

What that meant, she had no idea at all. But it was the last thing she remembered, and for that reason alone it was probably significant.

The final gift... ?

I think it’s time to get moving again,
she said, feeling myriad mouths echo the words through her, broadcasting the message a thousand ways.
We’ve been rumbled.

There was no answer. Unlike the last time she had called for help, there was no sense of eyes watching her, of vast intelligences lurking just beyond the edge of shadow. Now there was just her, alone but for the eye of the Starfish.

She could feel it drilling into her, dissecting her and analyzing her every detail. What was it seeing? she wondered. There was no way of knowing. But it knew she was there. Of that, at least, she was certain. And it was calling for the killers.

If you’re going to do something, now would be the time,
she nervously told the void, hoping that whoever had heard her pleas on Rasmussen would hear her now.

But silence again was her only response. If it had been the Gifts that had lifted her out of Rasmussen, then they hadn’t really helped her at all by dumping her here in Sol System. Far from saving her, they’d just left her helpless in exactly the same situation she’d been in before. The only difference was the setting.

The fovea flickered and flared, the chaotic rhythms of its powerful glare seeming to taunt her.

Just wait a little longer, and your concerns will be over
, it seemed to be saying.
Just a little longer, and we’ll put you out of your misery.

But I don’t want to die!
Her cry of defiance resounded through the nothingness surrounding her strange new body.
Not without knowing what I am!
If the Starfish were going to put a finish to the charade that had been her recent life, she at least wanted to see what it was they were killing.

With a small mental effort, she managed to persuade part of herself to disengage itself from “her” and leave, looking back as it did so. She wasn’t entirely sure what was going on as she did this, nor even
how
she was managing to do it. Many conflicting senses vied for attention; information flowed into her in ways she had trouble understanding, let alone comprehending.

But when she saw what the sputtering fovea had noticed in the quiet ruins of Sol System—when she finally realized what she had become—she understood everything.

“THIS IS THE FINAL GIFT WE BRING.”

Excitement and appreciation for her new self swept through her as she turned her attention to the fovea. It was still watching her. She wondered if it could sense her flexing her new wings.

Catch me if you can, she goaded it.

Then she disappeared from Sol System.

* * *

Her first jump took her back to Rasmussen, where the ruins of
the gifts and the
Marcus Chown
still bloomed in infrared frequencies. Rasmussen’s perfectly preserved ecosystem was in flames where orbital towers had crashed through the atmosphere and slammed into the crust. The Starfish weren’t long gone, and she had no desire to attract their attention again. With the gentlest flex of her will, she moved on once more.

She was wary at first of wasting time. In the hole ships, faster-than-light travel wasn’t instantaneous; a day’s travel in the real universe corresponded to approximately eighty light- years, and two days’ time relative to the passengers. She soon realized, however, that her new means of getting around was a
lot
faster than that. The journey from Sol to Rasmussen took barely an hour, real time. This alone was enough to dispel any lingering doubts she may have had as to the veracity of where she now found herself. Not that this made her situation any less incredible.

The mind that had spoken to her before the Starfish had destroyed Rasmussen was gone. All she had with her now were smaller subroutines and underlings designed to facilitate her will. She was barely aware of them, unless she really dug deep.

She worked outward from Sol, looking for survivors, tracing the terrible wake of the Starfish, and seeing for herself what they’d done. Groombridge 1830, lambda Auriga, Theta Perseus, and many, many others were all barren of life. The last segment of humanity’s bold exploration of the space around its home was dwindling, almost vanishing as she watched.

An impulse took her to iota Boötis, where the colony had been called Candamius in honor of its rugged mountains. The Can, as she’d heard some of the colonists refer to it, had been a harsh world, not dissimilar to Peter’s old home of Adrasteia, but people had lived and worked there for many years, nonetheless. The human compulsion to explore and make familiar, to own, had taken root there as firmly as anywhere else. And from there, too, it had been expunged just as ruthlessly as with every other colony.

A terrible fatalism swept over her then.
What is the point?
she thought. The Starfish were indefatigable. Whether the engrams stayed behind or ran, the Starfish would catch up with them eventually. There was no hope, no future. The history of humanity had come to an abrupt end—something that not even the terrors of the Spike had managed to achieve.

But she couldn’t let go. Although theoretically she could have run at any time, she felt a kinship with the survivors. She had been plucked from death at the last moment; what they were facing, she had somehow endured—if only by being in the right place at the right time. She would rather ascribe her continued existence to luck than to any special quality within her. And even if it
was
just dumb luck, she couldn’t walk away from it. It felt as though she should make it mean something.

She was supposed to be a tourist, but every tourist needed a home to return to, or else what was the point? Similarly, she was supposed to want to be with Peter, despite her decision to explore the universe without him. How could that definition of herself survive his rejection of her? She needed new definitions now, and she needed to find a way to write them into her old overseer. To do that, she needed other people; she needed alternatives.

The only alternatives open at the moment remained in the Alkaid Group, probably the last human-occupied systems left in all of Surveyed Space. Rasmussen was gone, but it was the closest of the five. The other four had two or three days left before the Starfish would reach them. She knew the order of them, as did anyone who had been on Rasmussen. After BSC5070 came BSC5423 and Zemyna, then HD132142 and Demeter. They were the next two in the firing line. After them came BSC5581 and Geb; then, last of all, BSC5148 and Sagarsee. Familiar names with familiar fates awaiting them. If she could replicate her success and offer them a way out of their predicament, perhaps they could help her find peace of mind.

With this thought, she jumped straight to Sagarsee, translating without effort into a polar orbit around its seething atmosphere, rich in protolife. She was scanned instantly upon arrival and felt alarms go off all around her. The colonists, having heard about Rasmussen, were understandably jumpy and regarded any unexpected arrival as a potential threat. The fact that she looked so familiar didn’t ease their concerns.

Some of Lucia’s new limbs reached easily into the command systems of the colony’s survey ship, the
Frank Drake,
and shut off the alarms. With the sirens silent, a clamor of voices rose around her, wanting to know what she was and what she was doing there. She could understand their confusion; she didn’t fully comprehend how she had come to be this way either.

Hole ships flickered in and out of real space around her, probing her, testing her defenses. She effortlessly kept them at bay as she pondered the best way to introduce herself. There were no easy options. Through their senses, she could see what she looked like to them: half a kilometer long, shaped roughly like a cylinder tapering at both ends, with tiny dimples and indentations dotted seemingly at random across her surface. She was gold in color, and an identical twin to another in geosynchronous orbit around the planet below.

She was Spindle Ten, the Dark Room. She was the final gift the Spinners had left for humanity.

2.2.2

An argument filled the cockpit of
Eledone
.
This was nothing
new, and Alander might have been tempted to switch himself off to it, slow down his clock rate until it was resolved and everyone could move on, had it not been for two important facts. The first was that there was too much to see: In the background, Cleo Samson was guiding the hole ship along the path given to them by the demolition crew, and the scenery was just incredible. The second was that the argument taking place wasn’t among the usual suspects; it involved all four Hatzises, and that’s what made it so compelling. Axford obviously agreed, as he sat off to one side, watching with a look of supreme satisfaction on his face.

“There are no obvious command structures and no clear lines of communication,” Gou Mang was saying heatedly. “How the fuck are we going to talk to someone in charge if we can’t even
find
them?”