Heirs of Earth (37 page)

“What good will getting out of the light cone do us?” asked Inari. “We don’t even have a working ftl drive.”

“Yes we do,” said Alander. “Axford’s hole ship is merged with
Eledone,
so we’ll be able to use his.”

Inari nodded but only looked partially convinced. There was still a faraway look to her eyes, as though she’d long since passed the point of being surprised. She was coasting, now, in shock; it would probably take hours, maybe even days, to recover.

They entered the glowing clouds, blue-shifted to higher energies by their velocity. Stellar detritus enclosed them, and strange high-pitched noises came to them through
Eledone’
s walls as particles ricocheted off the shields.

The battle between the Starfish and Spinners vanished into redness behind them. Sol’s last glimpse was of the corrupted Source of All writhing like a nest of snakes as alien ships of wildly different shapes and sizes converged from all sides. The system was alight with the fire of battle. On top of the infrared wash from the explosion of pi-1 Ursa Major, there were thousands of points of higher-frequency light winking on and off in time with the ongoing fight.

There was no sign of pursuit, though and for that she was profoundly grateful.

Then something loomed at them from the radiant clouds: the hulk of a cutter kilometers long. Craters gaped in its hull. Cold and dead, it fell instantly behind without incident.

It wasn’t enough to make her relax, though. Tension filled the cockpit as the convoy sped on, constantly accelerating through the stellar debris. It was hard to believe, Sol thought abstractedly, that the molecules they were colliding with had, just a day ago, been in the heart of a star. And strangely, that thought brought with it a glimmer of hope. With the Starfish taking such a beating, for the first time in a long time, survival didn’t seem so bleak.

Whether or not it was enough, of course, she wouldn’t know until they were within ftl range of the colonies. The mission had cut it horribly fine. Zemyna and Geb had passed their deadline by some hours. If the fovea had arrived even slightly ahead of schedule, Sagarsee could have been attacked, too. The idea of returning to nothing but burning wreckage where the last of the UNESSPRO colonies had been founded chilled her to the core.

In silence they continued to accelerate through the clouds. Gradually these began to thin, and through them brighter stars appeared. Inari openly wept at the sight of them. Sol kept her feelings close to herself, standing apart from Peter and the others, not daring to look away even for a moment.

Then out of the ether came the crackle of human voices:

“... reporting from Demeter that...”

“... fovea sighted at 0920...”

“... decrease in overall activity but hot spots...”

“... no joy...”

“Hail them,” said Sol quickly. “Tell them we’re coming!”

“This is
Eledone
in pi-1 Ursa Major calling all human vessels in the vicinity. Can you hear us?”

“
Eledone?
” came the instantaneous response. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“A long story,” said Sol. “Who are we talking to?”

“This is
Faridah
,” came the reply. “Christ we thought you guys were dead!”

“Far from it,
Faridah.
We’re heading home, if there’s still a home to return to.”

No joy...

“The circle is closing in, but we’re hanging in there. Welcome back—and watch out for signal hunters. They’re all around here.”

Right on cue, something angular and silver appeared alongside Thor. Whips of crimson energy lashed out at her shining hull, tangling themselves in stabbing beams of light.

“Sagarsee,” said Thor, and with a dash she disappeared.

The angular signal hunter turned its attention on the next ship in line. Golden light met crimson as Lucia pushed herself forward between them. Red whips coiled around the spindle and dragged it in.

“
Eledone
,” said Sol, “take us to Sagarsee. Lucia, we’ll meet you there, okay?”

“I’ll leave once you’re gone.”

The energy whips were scoring Lucia’s golden hull. Sol bit her lip, realizing only then that the spindle was defenseless against the alien signal hunter. Mentally she urged
Eledone
to hurry, not wishing to sacrifice Lucia just so their escape could be facilitated. Not for the first time she cursed the blind obedience to ingrained behavioral rules that so often drove engrams to their deaths.

The view winked out, and unspace enfolded them. Instantly, she felt as though the walls of the cockpit were closing in on her.

“We made it,” said Inari, expelling a sigh that was part laugh. “We actually made it!”

“So it would seem,” said Samson. Her own relief seemed more cautious.

“I wouldn’t get too excited too soon,” said Alander with annoying practicality. “We still don’t know what we’re flying back to.”

Sol nodded, sympathizing with his unwillingness to celebrate while the events of the previous days were so fresh.

No joy...

The words rang through her thoughts. Ramping her clock rate right down, she took a seat and waited out the trip home in frozen silence.

2.3.6

They came out of unspace over Sagarsee’s north pole.
After
the close confines of
Eledone
and the chaotic madness of pi-1 Ursa Major, the simple, uncomplicated sunlight of BSCS 148 was like a visual breath of fresh air. Sagarsee hung bold and blue beneath them, its clouds swirling in a thick spiral over ice and frozen seas. The stars above were clear and unobstructed by stellar debris or the detritus of warfare. It wasn’t Earth, but for Alander, it was the next best thing.

Barely had they reentered the real universe when voices clamored for their attention.

“Sol! You made it!” Cleo Samson looked up wearily from her position by
Eledone
’s command stalk at the sound of her own voice and the appearance of her own face on one of the screens.

“We made it,” Sol confirmed, stirring from her position on the couch. “As did you, obviously.”

“Only by the skin of our teeth.” The mission supervisor of the
Frank Drake
suddenly lost all sense of relief, and her expression became serious. “We lost Zemyna and Demeter and the last we heard was that Geb was under attack. But Lucia tells us that the Starfish are getting their collective ass kicked in pi-1 Ursa Major, so all of this should stop now, right?”

Alander studied the vessels clumped around Sagarsee’s gifts.

There were dozens of hole ships in various configurations; the larger were most likely craft belonging to the Unfit, combined to form traveling habitats. Orbiting close to the Hub was Lucia’s spindle. She must have made the jump much more quickly than
Eledone
to have already secured an orbit.

“Let’s hope so,” said Sol. “Thor could probably tell you more, though.”

“She’s here,” said Samson. There was a look on Samson’s face that suggested she wasn’t too sure about this new, improved Thor. “Somewhere, anyway. The last we saw of her, she was scouting the edge of the system. God only knows what she’s looking for. She never explained—”

“Can we talk about this later?” Sol cut in tiredly. “I need to get out of this fucking tin can.”

Samson nodded and offered an apologetic smile.

“Sure. Just give us five minutes to clear the Dry Dock, and it’s all yours.”

Samson closed the line then, and Alander watched the screen in anticipation, waiting for the face he
knew
would appear there next.

He didn’t have to wait long.

“Hello, Peter,” said Lucia. In the screen she looked the same as she had more than a century earlier, back on Earth. Her deep brown eyes stared at him with warmth and playful intelligence. It was like watching a photograph come to life.

And just like a photograph, he sensed the two-dimensionality behind it. She was an image beginning to lose her resolution from being copied too many times. Despite everything that had happened to her since leaving Earth, she was trying to be exactly the same as she used to be, and looked strained because of it.

“Hello, Lucia,” he said. “I’m glad you made it out okay.”

She smiled. “I didn’t think I was going to for a while there.”

“None of us did.”

A fleeting look of anxiety crossed her face, then vanished. “Who would’ve thought that we’d end up here, eh, Peter? We’ve done things our originals could never have imagined in a thousand years.”

“And then some.”

She smiled again, this time more naturally, as if relaxing into the conversation.

“I guess it’s something to be proud of, anyway,” she said.

He nodded. “It is.”

She hesitated, and Alander sensed her attention shifting. “I was talking to Thor,” she said. “She told me I should speak to Sol.”

The original Hatzis stepped up beside Alander. “I’m here, Lucia.”

“I—” The anxious look returned.

Hatzis glanced at Alander, then back to the screen. “What is it, Lucia?”

She seemed to steel herself then against her uncertainties. “I want to change, Caryl.”

Hatzis frowned.
“
Change?
In what way?”

“Thor said you could help me like you tried to help her.”

The corners of Sol’s eyes tightened fractionally. “What did she tell you about that, exactly?”

“Just that you were reprogramming all of your engrams to make them more flexible.”

Sol didn’t react to a sharp look Inari cast in her direction. “That’s not entirely true, Lucia,” Sol said. “I’ve introduced a few random changes to the parameters to see if any of them helped, certainly. But that’s about it. I’m not sure I have the know-how to rewrite everyone from the inside out. I’m hoping I’ll find something simple that will keep you all together longer. If I can’t—” She shrugged, glancing around the cockpit. “Well, I guess it’ll get kind of lonely around here in a few years.”

“I
want
to change, Caryl,” Lucia said again. “The spindle can keep me alive forever, but what’s the point if I simply vegetate in here? Peter’s Graveyard—” Her eyes flicked to him with something akin to apology. Then she sighed. “All the Peters are gone, I’m afraid.”

Alander frowned. “What do you mean, they’re
gone
?”

“They’re all frozen,” she said. “I’m sorry, Peter. It’s just that I needed them. I needed their company, I needed...
you
.”

A strange feeling swept through Alander, as though someone had, quite literally, walked over his grave. Lucia had drained the last few moments of coherence from the fading echoes of him like some bizarre sanity vampire. Part of him wanted to be angry, but a bigger part didn’t see the point. Those other versions of him weren’t him anymore; not really. They were just faulty reflections of his original; copies that had lost their resolution in much the same way that he regarded the image of Lucia staring back at him from the screen now. The fact that he had once been one of them didn’t necessarily make him feel any closer to them. He could only empathize with what they’d been going through.

Still, the desperation in her to do something like that...

“I don’t know how to fix them,” Lucia was saying with growing panic. “Or even if they
can
be fixed. And I don’t want to run away now just because I can’t stop feeling the way I—”

“It’s okay, Lucia,” Sol cut in. “We understand what you’re saying. And I’m happy to try to help you, but I can’t make any promises.”

“If you like,” said Alander, “I can come across and be with you in the meantime.”

Her virtual image expressed clear relief. “That would be... appreciated, Peter. Thank you.”

Alander caught a sharp look from Sol. He wondered if she thought he was reverting to his own old routines, now he had the chance. If challenged, he could honestly say that he wasn’t. He was helping Lucia because he wanted to, not because he had to. When he looked into himself, he saw only himself, not the bones of a long-dead man.

And the Praxis, he reminded himself. His limbs had reverted to normal once his foot had healed. There was none of the strange tingling that had followed the attack on Axford 1313. He could almost pretend that nothing had happened. Almost...

Hatzis nodded, either in resignation or acceptance, and looked away. Her eyes were red, and her face had lines that hadn’t been there days earlier.

Cleo Samson of Sagarsee broke in to announce that their berth was ready. Cleo Samson of
Eledone
acknowledged and smoothly took them home.

* * *

The gifts of Sagarsee weren’t full, but they were definitely
crowded. A large number of Yuhl were present in the flesh, coordinating the activities of the Unfit with the makeshift engram infrastructure. Most of the humans weren’t physically present, but the airways were thick with conSense transmissions. Numerous oddly shaped telepresence robots scurried, rolled, climbed, or even flew through the corridors. The return of Thor and her mission to the Starfish brought last-minute preparations for evacuation to a halt. The members of the mission split up almost immediately, heading for numerous debriefing sessions.

Alander, however, pleaded senescence in order to avoid all the meetings. For all that he’d done in recent weeks, he was still looked upon by many as something of a washout. The stigma of so many breakdowns was hard to erase, and for once he was happy to use it to his advantage.

Jumping through the Hub to Lucia’s spindle, he sank gratefully into silence.

“Hello, Peter,” she said immediately upon his arrival, a liquid shimmer casting rainbows out of thin air.

He didn’t jump, but the urge to do so was strong. “Hello again, Lucia.” He squinted at the half-seen shape before him. “Is that what I think it is?”

“An I-suit.” She opened her arms as though showing off a new outfit. “Would you like one, too?”

“Would I—?” He stopped, staring at her ghostly image. “You can actually do that? You can make them to order?”

“The gifts are more complex than you could possibly imagine.”

That I can believe
, he thought.

A small silence fell then, with Alander not knowing what to say. He longed for the ease with which he’d once been able to speak with her, but that was in the past. He wasn’t that person anymore; his feelings had changed, become something very different from what they’d once been. Her feelings for him, however, hadn’t changed, but he suspected they hadn’t been that strong in the first place. He was sure she could live without him as long as she had the stars to keep her company. He had struggled just to live.