Heirs of Earth (30 page)

“My parameters reflect those of my maker,” said the sphere, “as do yours.”

“Who is your maker?” asked Gou Mang.

The sphere didn’t respond, and as it disappeared for the fourth time, Alander thought he might be beginning to understand.

“We are copies of our original,” he said. “We are flawed, but we function well enough.”

The sphere returned. “I represent an aspect of my higher self—one of many dispatched to facilitate various duties.”

“I’m going to assume, then, that everything we say is being reported back to that higher self.”

“All data is collated and analyzed for meaning.”

An interesting way of putting it,
Alander thought. He nodded. “My name is Peter Alander.”

“I am called the Asteroid.”

“The Asteroid?” Gou Mang asked. “What sort of name is that?”

The sphere rotated as though to look at her, then disappeared.

Axford laughed out loud. “Good work, Peter. I think we’re finally getting somewhere.”

Gou Mang looked suspiciously between them. “What are you talking about?”

“The Asteroid only responds to statements,” Alander explained. “Specifically, statements about us that it can reciprocate about itself. It ignores questions.”

“Looks like we’ve got the lion by the tail,” said Axford smugly.

“By a hair of the tail, perhaps,” Alander corrected him. He was reluctant to start feeling cocky too soon. “The head is still a long way off.”

“Whatever,” said the ex-general. “Head, hair... The main thing is that Thor must have managed to get
someone
’s attention.”

“We don’t know that,” said Alander.

“He may be right, Peter,” said Sol. “
Asteroid
is actually a synonym for
starfish.
It seems unlikely that this is a coincidence.”

“A synonym, not
one
of them,” said Alander, looking around the immense chamber. It was lifeless and empty, but again he felt as though they hadn’t been abandoned. He sensed minds infinitely larger than his contemplating them, wondering what do next.

“We’re here to talk to the Starfish,” he said. His voice fell echoless into the vast space.

“I am here to talk to you,” said the Asteroid, popping smartly back into existence.

“We have given them information.” Alander recalled what Thor had called herself before firing herself bodily into the sunlike body at the heart of the Starfish fleet. “The Conduit conveyed our message to the Source of All.”

“You were brought here to witness.”

“We’re not seeing much at the moment,” said Axford.

“The information you provided has not yet been verified.”

The chamber
was
a holding a cell, then, Alander thought “We’d like to know what’s going on, though.”

Instead of responding, the Asteroid vanished again.

Axford sighed. “Just when I thought we were starting to get the knack—”

He was cut off as the walls of the chamber disappeared. For a moment everything was utterly black. But not only had the chamber disappeared, but so, too, had
Selene, Eledone,
and the others. Alander was alone, hanging in a terrible, silent void.

Then, suddenly, the tail end of a question from Gou Mang came out of the nothingness:

“—is everybody?”

No one answered, they were too busy staring in breathless awe at the sight before them. They were surrounded by stars, floating apparently naked to the void.

“That’s pi-1 Ursa Major,” said Axford, pointing at a bright sun directly ahead of them. He was a starlit figure to Alander’s left.

“Are we actually there?” Alander asked. “Or just
seeing
it?”

“Just seeing it,” said Sol from
Eledone.
“We haven’t moved.”

“Could the whole Trident have moved?” asked Axford.

“If it moves the same way as the cutters, then we would have felt it, I’m sure,” said Alander.

“Either that or we’re shielded inside it.” Axford waved the issue away as irrelevant. “Whatever. The main thing is that there’s the target. We
are
witnessing after all.”

Gou Mang laughed. “Witnessing
what
? We’re not exactly being swamped with details here.”

That point Alander had to agree with. “Asteroid, we can’t see anything.”

The scarred sphere appeared next to him. “This view is not ideal.”

“We could see if our point of view was closer.”

“I see from the point of view of my maker.”

“You could see better if your maker’s point of view was closer.”

The sphere rotated once.

“Your statement wasn’t about you, so it’s not going to respond,” Axford diagnosed. Then, for the Asteroid: “We are in a hurry, but we’ll be patient until your maker’s point of view improves.”

“Time is irrelevant.”

“To you, maybe,” said Gou Mang. There was no hiding her frustration. “But our people are going to die if you don’t get a move on!”

“Your people are of no consequence.”

“Well, they damn well should be!”

Again, the sphere ignored a general statement. Alander rubbed at his temples, feeling his head beginning to ache. He thought carefully about his next words, making sure they would result in a reply.

“Asteroid, this system has proven extremely dangerous to scouts we’ve sent to investigate it,” he said. “I hope your maker is being careful.”

“My maker has many ways of minimizing danger to itself.”

“We believe that whoever’s hiding in here is your enemy, the ones you’ve been chasing.”

“My makers are attempting to ascertain the truth.”

“It is our hope that, if it does prove true, your maker will cease the attacks on our colonies.”

“I cannot speak for my makers.”

“But you discuss their capacity happily enough. How—?” Alander reminded himself to keep his comments specifically tailored to himself but also phrased to get an informative response. “We—my people speak in terms of questions and answers. I find this manner of conversing difficult.”

“I am programmed to communicate within strict confines regarding the dissemination of information,” said the sphere. “Data must be traded; information must flow equably.”

“I’d assumed that you’d read our minds. Your makers could probably do it without even thinking.”

“You’re assuming a little too much, there, Peter,” said Axford. “They probably obtained English from Thor, when she spoke to them. Even if they could read our minds, why
would
they? It’s arrogant to assume that we are worthy of their regard.”

He nodded. The sphere had turned to Axford at the sound of his voice, then rotated back to Alander. While there was in no sense a face on the scarred sphere, its movements did suggest the turning of attention to one person or another.

He wasn’t expecting the sphere to respond to his previous question/statement, so was surprised when it said, “Reading minds is not my function. I exist to facilitate the process of ascertaining your nature. Few come before my makers and are regarded. Those who make the decisions do not have time to perform such tasks.”

Alander was trying to work out what tack to try next when the view shifted. There was no sense of motion or transition; suddenly he was seeing from a different viewpoint, one much closer to pi-1 Ursa Major. The effect was dizzying, and for a moment he lost his balance.

“
That
wasn’t there before,” said Gou Mang, pointing at a glowing ring surrounding the star.

“It’s new,” agreed Sol from
Eledone.
“Asteroid, what we’re seeing doesn’t match our astronomical data.”

“The phenomena you are witnessing is the work of my makers.”

“I can’t tell what they’re doing,” said Alander.

“Much of my makers’ works will no doubt seem mysterious to you.”

Alander nodded. “There is an awful lot of information we’d like to trade for. Is there any other way we can do it than this?”

He mentally kicked himself when the Asteroid spun once and disappeared.

“I’m wondering,” Sol jumped in quickly, “if your makers aren’t deliberately making it harder for us to work out the truth.”

The Asteroid returned. “I am under no compunction to stop you from wondering about my makers’ motives.”

Axford barked out a laugh as the viewpoint shifted again. This time they were hanging from a point above the ecliptic, looking down on the sun and its new ring. Dark sunspots swirled in the solar atmosphere; magnetic field lines flexed and snapped, sending great gobbets of energy aloft in the deep gravity well. Alander had never seen such an amazing sight before.

The ring of lights resolved into purple-hot balls of light trailing glowing tails, moving at speed around the star’s equator, their spiraling wakes twisting and turning around each other. The star’s atmosphere was responding, bowing under invisible energies and forming a shallow trench girdling the star, as though it had tightened its belt.

The Asteroid, which had vanished during the short silence, reappeared. Still slightly giddy, Alander almost imagined it to be a distant, battered world orbiting pi-1 Ursa Major rather than a small object at close quarters.

“My makers have found no evidence of that which your emissary described.”

It took Alander a moment to realize that the Asteroid was referring to Thor. “Our hole ships were attacked when we came here,” he said.

“My makers have found no evidence—”

“But Lucia reported that she saw evidence of activity on a massive scale. That’s what we came here to tell your makers.”

“There is evidence of past activity,” the Asteroid said.

“Then the Spinners must have left,” said Gou Mang.

“So it would seem.” Axford’s voice had lost all trace of humor. “Maybe your friend Lucia scared them away.”

The thought struck Alander as ridiculous enough to be true. If the Spinners were completely paranoid about their security, they might have left as soon as she happened by. But why then destroy the more recent hole ships? Why not destroy her as well?

“I can’t believe there’s nothing here,” he said to the slowly spinning Asteroid.

“There is something,” it said. A rapid sequence of images flashed by, appearing in windows against the starscape, then sliding away into black. They showed hole ships materializing out of unspace, taking the barest glimpse of the system, then disappearing. The extrusions were impossibly small, just centimeters across, barely enough for sensors to take the slightest reading, but they were there. It was incredible that the Starfish fleet, even as advanced as it was, could notice such tiny invasions in the incomprehensibly huge volume of a solar system.

Yet they had, and the fact added credence to their statement that there was no sign of the Spinners. If they could spot a tennis ball-sized dot from millions of kilometers away, then they could surely spot an alien fleet, no matter how well hidden.

“They’re from our people,” Sol said. “They’ve noticed your presence here.”

“My makers have made the connection between them and you. Their presence here is a distraction.”

“We can tell them to leave, if you’d let us. We’re jammed in here, as I’m sure you realize.”

“It is not necessary for you to communicate with the others of your kind. They are being deterred.”

“You’re attacking them?” The question escaped Alander’s lips before he could stop it. The Asteroid disappeared once again.

“
Shit
,” Sol cursed.

“You can say that again,” said Gou Mang. “We fucked up. If we’d come in time, maybe we could have done something, but now...”

The dull resignation in her voice was awful to hear.

“Not necessarily,” Alander said.

She turned on him, her android face ugly with despair. “How can you say that? Didn’t you hear what the floating rock said? The Spinners have
gone,
Peter! The Starfish aren’t going to stop looking for them. In fact, they’re probably going to look even harder, now they know the trail is hot. I’d say our chances of surviving something like that are even closer to zero than they were—”

“They’re not zero,” Axford interrupted. “We can still run.”

“Yeah,
if
they let us go,” she said. “And
if
we can fix the hole ship. And
if
we can find the Praxis without bringing the Starfish down on it, too. If, if, fucking
if
!”

Gou Mang shook her head and went to walk back to
Selene,
striding surreally across empty air through the illusion of pi-1 Ursa Major.

She hadn’t taken ten paces when the Asteroid reappeared unprompted.

“There is something,” it said, as it had before. A new image appeared in the void. It was blurred and glowing with wild energy flows, as though caught in the act of some powerful transformation while hanging above the world that the colonists who had traveled to pi-1 Ursa Major had called Jian Lao. Despite the blurring and the discharges, it was instantly recognizable.

Alander stared at the golden spindle in confusion. “I don’t know how that got here,” he said, respecting the Asteroid’s protocol for information exchange.

“My makers recognize the architecture of this artifact as a product of those we seek.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “We call them the Spinners. They were the ones who built these things and gave them to us. We call them the gifts.”

“If you’ve found one here,” said Sol, “then surely that vindicates us.”

The sphere rotated to face her. “This artifact is not indigenous to this system.”

Gou Mang returned to Peter’s side. “Not indigenous?” she whispered to him. “That can’t be right.”

He shook his head and addressed the Asteroid again: “We’ve never known the gifts to move of their own volition before.”

“This artifact is radiating in frequencies you use for communication purposes,” said the Asteroid.

“What’s—?” Alander stopped to rephrase the question as a statement. “We’d very much like to hear what it’s saying.”

A new voice filled the void around them. That it was one Alander knew well rocked him to the very core of his being.

“This is Lucia Benck of the UNESSPRO Mission 391 hailing the visitors to this system. Please respond. I repeat this is Lucia Benck of the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission 391. Please respond.”