Orphans of Earth (44 page)
Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
This is it,
she thought hopelessly. She would have laughed at her predicament (160 years old and a casualty in a battle with aliens!) had she not been so terrified.
Then, suddenly, everything went quiet. The blue lances stopped firing; the yellow bombs blinked once and disappeared. The whipping arcs of energy snapped and went out. There was a brief salvo that lasted a few seconds, then faded as the hole ship pilots realized that no one was firing back.
She craned her neck to find the massive Starfish craft. It hung in the sky over her left shoulder. Violet light boiled around its edges, and its previously spotless surface had acquired a black line encircling the center of its rotation.
Damage?
She almost didn’t dare hope. But a sickening new variability to the vibration rippling the space around her suggested that all was not well with the alien vessel. The purple light intensified until it became too blinding to stare at directly. She looked away and felt a violent pulse flex through space-time, like a shock wave radiating out from the center of an explosion. She gasped as a second followed the first, only this one much more powerfully. There was a flash so bright that even its reflections were blinding.
Quadrille
began to tumble, and for a moment the Starfish vessel was lost to sight. When it hove back into view, the light had ebbed and the vibration was barely a stutter. It was still spinning, but it had lost its disk shape. Enormous chunks had been torn from its edges, and the newly uneven mass distribution was tearing the rest of it apart, piece by piece. Within a minute, more than half had been torn away, leaving just the vessel’s central hub and a small percentage of the surrounding disk, from which chunks were still flying. “My God,” Hatzis muttered. At the same time, the flight couch eased its grip and she slid from it to help Alander. Her movements were slow and cautious in the gravity-free environment, but she managed to make it over to him safely. His couch was still hanging in space, barely attached to the remains of the cockpit floor. He clutched her gratefully as she pulled him back to safety.
In the volume of space around them, the battle appeared to be gradually stalling. The Yuhl hole ships moved among the wreckage, absorbing damaged hole ships and collecting survivors. The Starfish lances appeared to be dead, killed along with their mother ship.
Quadrille
was dead, too, and
Arachne
along with it, but that was no reason to give up hope. They’d survived this far, and there was no reason to think they wouldn’t continue to do so.
Together, she and Alander took Ueh and put him onto her couch. He was unconscious and bleeding yellowish blood from various wounds across his body, but at least he was still alive. She was surprised by how little he seemed to weigh.
She waved to attract the attention of the nearest tetrad, but it flew past without seeing her. She didn’t notice the shadows shifting around her until Alander tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, and he silently pointed to a blaze of light blossoming behind her.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “you can bet it’s not going to be good.”
It wasn’t. Out of the glaring light flew three more of the enormous Starfish vessels relocated from elsewhere in the system. The Yuhl contingent scattered before them like krill confronted by a pod of whales. The destruction of the Starfish ship had only postponed their defeat, not avoided it entirely.
Still, they had destroyed one of the Starfish vessels. It didn’t make up for the destruction of the Vincula and all the colonies, but it did give Hatzis a measure of satisfaction. Even though her ship had been incapacitated and three more of the huge craft were bearing down upon them, she would die knowing that with the destruction of that one Starfish ship, there was a chance that humanity would survive. The aliens
could
be hurt.
Her anger and frustration, however, quickly became puzzlement when the three disk-shaped cutters swept by the Yuhl contingent without so much as hesitating and gathered around their crippled comrade.
Comrade.
The word came to her automatically and seemed increasingly appropriate the longer she watched. The two nearest swung into position above and below the damaged vessel, as if they were building a stack of giant pancakes, spinning in opposite directions. They docked with the damaged craft and gradually slowed its rotation. Where only minutes before there had been nothing but a blur, now she could make out strange chambers and tubes, all torn and distorted by the breakup of the vessel.
Light began to pulse around the three docked cutters as well as the one standing guard nearby. All of them seemed to vanish into the light, as though traveling down an endless corridor. When the light faded again a minute or so later, they were gone.
“What was
that
?” she muttered to no one in particular. The behavior of the giant vessels was perfectly explicable if she imagined them as living beings, tending a wounded fellow. But living beings
kilometers
across? It wasn’t possible.
“We frightened them away,” she said, breaking from her unlikely musings.
Alander emitted a guttural sound that might have been a laugh. “The ant biting the anteater on its nose, Caryl?”
“Well, how else do you explain it?”
“I don’t,” he replied. “I’m just glad to be alive.”
She laughed uneasily as her hand found his arm and gripped it tightly. Unbelievably, they’d made it—against the odds, defying her expectations, and with a great deal of luck. But they’d come through it alive, and that was all that mattered.
They waited for what seemed like an interminably long time before a hole ship swooped in over the dead
Quadrille,
its cockpit swinging around to face them. They pushed Ueh through the open airlock first, then quickly followed. Inside, they found two Yuhl pilots who spoke to Alander in their native language. The ability to translate had gone with
Quadrille,
but he seemed to understand them well enough despite this. One of them indicated that they should take Ueh into one of the side quarters, where they laid him on a long, curving mattress.
Alander stood up when they were done and wiped his hands on his shipsuit. His expression was distant for a moment as he listened to a voice that Hatzis couldn’t hear. For once, he was the better accessed of the two of them, plugged into some sort of Yuhl communications network she wasn’t privy to.
“The Starfish have gone,” he told her. “The Yuhl are gathering up what remains of the defense fleet and getting it out of here. There’s not much left of anything else, though. What the
Mantissa
didn’t take with it has been destroyed.” Then he smiled with something approximating satisfaction. “They have a survival rate of forty percent. That’s the highest ever recorded in a direct skirmish with the Ambivalence—I mean the Starfish.”
She nodded, barely hearing his words and unable to respond emotionally to them anyway. There was nothing but emptiness inside of her right now. Yes, they’d hurt the Starfish, but her initial joy at that fact had quickly faded. She could no longer see it as the victory that Alander obviously thought it was.
He put a hand to his ear, listening again. “And they’ve found the Praxis,” he said. “It was hit, but not fatally. It’ll be at the regrouping point when we arrive.”
“They’re taking us with them?” she asked.
“You expected them to leave us here?”
“I... No, of course not,” she stammered. “I just thought we’d get a lift with someone from Juno, that’s all, and...”
She stopped, not knowing what came after the
and.
She could feel the ringing of ftl communications all around her, but it was less strident than before. Whether people had given up broadcasting or been destroyed, she couldn’t tell. Either way, she dreaded finding out.
“
Did
anyone survive from Juno?” she asked after a few moments.
“I’m not sure, Caryl,” he said.
A commotion from the cockpit sent a look of alarm across Alander’s face.
“What
now
?” He was out of the room at a run, and she followed right behind him.
The pilots were agitated, pointing at the screens and screeching in their own language. At first, Hatzis couldn’t tell what they were pointing at. She saw something that looked like a giant, metallic claw hanging against the stars—but a claw that had been stretched impossibly thin, so that it looked more like a long, narrow rib tapering to a point at each end. There were three crossbars of irregular size toward the middle of the thing, and a faint glow surrounding one end.
“Jesus,” gasped Alander. “Look at the size of it!”
Hatzis couldn’t read the Yuhl figures, and was about to ask exactly just how big the thing was, when she saw an image that caused the breath to catch in her throat.
“That can’t possibly be...” she started, staring in awe at the swarm of Starfish cutters arcing toward them from the belly of the strange, new craft, dwarfed by its size. She felt an overwhelming sense of dread and nauseous helplessness quickly take her over. “It’s not possible.” Her words were barely a whisper.
If the cutters themselves were kilometers across, then that made this new craft thousands of kilometers long. Maybe tens of thousands—as long as a planet was wide!
The swarm of cutters loomed large in the screen, splitting up or jumping through unspace to deal with the remnants of the
Mantissa.
Single hole ships and tetrads flew in all directions under the advancing enemy. She couldn’t understand the words the Yuhl pilots were shouting, but she caught the gist of it.
“Get the hell out of here!” she yelled as the Starfish fleet—sufficient to destroy a thousand Vinculas—bore down on them. The glare of red and yellow energy weapons exploded from the screen.
Then the view from Beid disappeared, and they were relocating.
Hatzis felt herself physically sag. The battle had been exhausting enough, but
this...
“Are you all right?” Alander asked, stepping between her and the screen, which she continued to stare at, despite there being nothing there to see.
“I’m...” She stopped, leaning back tiredly against the wall. “How the hell are we going to fight
this,
Peter?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, shrugging. “But if we can destroy one—”
“
One
?” she spat. “That one took out almost everything we threw at it! How the fuck are we supposed to take on
hundreds
of the damn things?
How,
Peter?” Even as she said this, part of her was crying out,
But we have to!
“So you’re saying we should just give up?” he said incredulously. “After everything we’ve been through?”
“It has to be better than dying, surely?”
They’d fought, and they’d lost. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t shake that simple fact. They’d tried and failed. Everything the Yuhl had said about the Starfish was true: they were unstoppable. The human race would have to flee, in much the same way the Yuhl had done, or it would be destroyed.
She felt tears of frustration well up inside her, but she refused to cry. She wouldn’t give in to the emotions. Not here, not now. Instead, the emotions remained unexpressed. For a long moment she felt as though her entire in- sides were screaming.
When Alander put his arms around her and pulled her in close, she couldn’t help but laugh. They were the last two humans left—the closest things
left
to human, anyway. They were alone against the stars. It seemed almost ridiculous that of all people, they should be here now, comforting each other.
But she didn’t pull away, either, because regardless of how ludicrous it seemed, it
was
comforting, nonetheless. As their tetrad traversed the smooth safety of unspace, she realized just how foolish it would be to turn away what reassurance she could find. With so little of it remaining in the universe, God only knew when she’d be offered any again.
3.0.1
Rob Singh
EXCERPTS FROM THE PID (PERSONAL INFORMATION DIRECTORY) OF ROB SINGH, UNESSPRO MISSION 639, TESS
NELSON (PSI CAPRICORNUS).
2160.9.18-19 Standard Mission Time
Two more holes, both cross-referencing errors between
the Gallery, the Map Room, and the Library: the same as the first, in other words. They are otherwise dissimilar, however, and don’t seem to be connected. I was hoping a pattern would have emerged by now. I can’t decide if the absence of a pattern means there isn’t one, or if I just don’t have enough data.
The errors I’ve found appear in the other colonies’ data, though. That was easy enough to check across the board, if a little time consuming. I’m the only one pursuing this topic at the moment. Everyone else is looking for weapons or defenses with which to fight the Yuhl. It strikes me as futile fighting another victim of the Starfish, no matter what they’ve done to us. Is this what we are to be reduced to?
The question of whether the gifts contain deliberately hidden clues has haunted me since I found the first one. The alternative is frightening. We have to believe that the Spinners are doing the right thing by us; otherwise the whole exercise becomes futile. If the gifts comprise one enormous pack of lies designed to throw us off the track of self-improvement, then it might even be
worse
than futile. Are these errors, then, this evidence of the Spinners’ infallibility, chinks in their armor or continuity errors arising out of fabricated data?
There is a middle ground, and it is here I prefer to balance my opinion at the moment. The Gifts are notorious for their avoidance of anything to do with their makers. Maybe this has something to do with them. They could be fudging the data to cover their origins. But I don’t know. And that’s the problem. No one really knows
anything.
We’re like birds picking at stray seeds around a grain silo. And if some of those seeds are bad...
Only time will tell, I guess.
* * *
I don’t know why, but the existence of the Tedesco bursts
is bothering me again. Part of me believes that there’s a way to fit everything together in a neat, sensible order. I hope that part of me proves to be right.
Today’s theory is that the Spinners haven’t been traveling in a straight line at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. If they’re wandering drunkenly across the galaxy, or spiraling outward from the core, they could have passed near here once before. Assuming the transmissions came from iota Sculptor, say, it’s quite conceivable that the Starfish destroyed the civilization that made them in its wake, provoking a short-lived scream for help we picked up 310 years later. Later still, the Spinners completed a circuit of the galaxy and came through our part of the universe again, very nearly returning to the scene of the crime. The close coincidence of our receiving the Tedesco bursts and the arrival of the Spinners was simply just that—a coincidence.
But that doesn’t explain why the data is so vague in this area of the Map Room. If they’ve passed this way before, the data should be more complete. Or so I would’ve expected. And why travel in such a wandering manner, anyway? Once again, I am at a loss to explain the behavior of a species so mysterious and secretive that we don’t even know what they
look
like.
If I’m getting somewhere with this investigation, it’s impossible for me to tell. Maybe I’m just wasting my time. I keep thinking,
One day.
If I knew how many days were left, maybe I would let myself believe that this one would come. Far more likely, I think, that I will die with the questions entirely unanswered.
* * *
Today is a bad day. I miss my home. I miss Earth. I can’t
believe (
another
thing I can’t believe) that it’s really gone. Why don’t we evacuate to Sol and live among the ruins? That’s what I’d like to do. At least I’d gain a sense of completion, of coming home. It might not be much, but at least it would be
something.
Sol is still gone. There’s talk of a summit with the Yuhl, but I don’t know who or what to believe anymore. Christ, I still can’t believe that Frank the Ax is alive! He’s the prick who cut the budget for the third-generation Euroshuttle by half in the midtwenties, effectively killing the project. Of the billions of people that once populated the Earth, what sort of perverse twist of fate was it that allowed a son of a bitch like
him
to be one of the handful to carry on humanity’s legacy? If there is a God, then clearly he or she has a warped sense of humor.
* * *
A little more has been released about the Yuhl. In particular,
I know now that they don’t actually worship the Starfish. That hasn’t stopped me being intrigued by the notion of the Spinners and Starfish as diametrically opposed aspects of the same thing, though: the giver and the taker on a truly cosmic scale. It put me to thinking about double-headed gods from our own culture, the most obvious being Janus, Roman god of gateways, entrances, and exits. As the god who stood for the beginning of the new year and the end of the old—hence January—he would make a good analogy for this Ambivalence I keep hearing about. Ringing in new times, then smashing all the bells.
But Janus is not the most apt I can think of. There’s Harihara, a Kampuchean representation of Vishnu and Shiva as a two-headed divinity: Vishnu the god of earth, atmosphere, and heaven, and Shiva the embodiment of cosmic power in all its aspects. We know Shiva best as the Destroyer, thanks to Oppenheimer’s famous speech about the atomic bomb, two centuries ago. Even after all this time, those words still chill me to the bone.
Morbid thoughts, but not entirely fruitless. I wonder now if the Yuhl aren’t in the Library because the Gifts are a standard care package put together millennia ago, well before the Starfish encountered them. We already assume that the Spinners are so advanced that they can easily afford to throw around dozens of Gift drops without even noticing; is it that much harder to believe that they are so far above us they don’t care what’s in them?
This might also explain the vagueness of the Map Room, as well as the presence of the communicators in the package. The ftl communicators have the capacity to summon all and sundry to our calls when we use them, but that means nothing to the Spinners. And why should it? After all, would
we
bother to stop to ensure that the crumbs we drop are used appropriately by the ants that found them? Of course not. It’s not the Spinners’ fault they’re too advanced to care about us. In fact, it’s no one’s fault that we’re too coarse to see the subtleties underlying the grand design of these advanced beings.
That damned subtlety. I remember thinking that knowing it existed put me halfway to understanding it. Now I realize how naïve that was. There’s nothing more I can really do now except curse it. Even if it kills us, that’s just too bad. It will just have to serve as a harsh lesson, I guess.
* * *
Ali’s just left. We were together when word came over the
communicator that Sol is going to use the empty colonies as decoys.
“She’s
what
?” I was shocked.
Ali shushed me in order to hear the rest of the message. This was coming out raw, right from the horse’s mouth. Sol’s squaring up to fight the Starfish in Beid, which was where she went to negotiate with the Yuhl. I don’t understand how it has come to this. I’m all for raging against the dying light and all, but Christ, you don’t
invite
it in.
Ali went pale as the words echoed through my virtual space. There was no point arguing; we were committed. And besides, in a way, I could see the sense of it. Spreading the Starfish thin is the only tactic left open to us. But why Sothis, too? Why did they have to put
us
at risk? Haven’t we lost enough already?
Gou Mang signed McKenzie Base’s death the moment she responded to Sol’s call for help. If she takes even one of us down with it, I’m going to hold her personally responsible.
“I’m sorry, Rob,” Ali said, cupping my cheek in one hand. “But I have to go.”
“I understand. Is there anything I can—?”
She shook her head quickly. “I don’t know just yet. I’ll call you, though, if I need you. I know I can rely on you.”
She left, blinking back tears. I was struck then by the thought that we might never see each other again. I still am, to be honest. The possibility of my own death I can face squarely; it’ll just be an end after all, a ceasing. But the death of a loved one cuts deep. Even the thought that if we go down at all we go down together is no comfort, since we’re running on the same cannibalized processors. No comfort at all, in fact. Given the choice, I would deny her nothing.
Actually, given the choice, I wouldn’t even be here. Evacuation procedures are getting into gear as I dictate this. People are panicking. The whole infrastructure is breaking down. We thought we were ready for anything. But we’re not. We all hoped it wouldn’t happen to us. People are never ready for this sort of thing.
Even I can’t quite believe it yet. The Starfish are going to attack Sothis. Sooner or later, they’ll come. They always do when a communicator is used. We know that. It’s only a matter of when. It could be in an hour, it could be in a day. It could already be happening, and we simply haven’t noticed yet.
Either way, it’s time I ended this. In a second, I’ll save the file and store it in the reserve SSDS banks. They’ll be backed up in triplicate and shipped out with the SSDS records of our colony. We go in the shipment after that. That makes sense, even if it is another harsh lesson. Our data are worth more than we are. But at least my investigation will be saved, even if in the end it doesn’t mean anything.
I sit here watching my processing rate, waiting for it to drop. When it does, I’ll know the upload to the evacuee ship has begun. If I could pray, I would—to either the old gods of Earth or the subtle new gods of the stars. Shit, I’d pray to the Ambivalence if I thought it would make a difference. But I doubt they’d even bother to listen.
But perhaps my belief in the method behind the Spinners’ madness is not so foolish. It has sustained me this long; maybe it will sustain me longer. Maybe. We’ll see. All I can do is wait, and it is the waiting that I find truly awful.