Orphans of Earth (5 page)

“Oh, I agree,” she said. “And I’ll draw up contingency plans while you’re gone.”

That surprised him. “You’re not coming?”

She shook her head—unnecessarily, she realized, as he couldn’t see her anyway. “No,” she said. “I think it’s best that one of us stays here to coordinate things. When Thor comes with the hole ship, she can go with you instead. That’ll save you dropping her off on the way.”

She felt his brow crease into a frown. “And Thor is...?”

“HD92719.” She indulged the question, even though she was sure Alander knew very well which system the Thor colony was in. Given the number of different versions of her she had to deal with, she had adopted the posthuman custom of calling them by the places they had come from. To the others, she was Sol, the sole original human remaining in the universe.

“Will you work with her?” she asked.

“Will she be up to it?”

“Of course she will, Peter,” she said tiredly, thinking,
She’ll be a damn sight more stable than you.
“And she has her own body, so you won’t have to deal with conSense.”

She waited while he mulled it over. The question of what the colony of Thor would do without its hole ship was begging. Would he bring it up? she wondered. She would hate to have a dead colony on her conscience, if the Starfish came calling on them, but Thor was far away from Athena, and the work she hoped to do was important enough to justify the risk. And with Alander gone, she would have full access to the hole ship
Arachne.
It would obey her orders, unlike the Gifts, and there were plenty of versions of her out there that needed to be contacted, Spinners and Starfish notwithstanding.

From her higher processing rate, he seemed to take forever to think it over. He stood watching the view, one hand toying with the pendant he wore around his android body’s neck. It consisted of a simple disk made of densely packed carbon, one side reflective, the other carved with barely a dozen words. It read:

LUCIA CAROLE BENCK

2130.05.17

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

(WORDSWORTH)

Alander had found it orbiting 53 Aquarius, an empty solar system between his home colony, Adrasteia, and Sol. He carried it with him out of loyalty to Lucia’s memory, she supposed, although his hope of ever seeing her again must be dwindling. She had yet to reach any of her target systems, out of all the solo missions she had been on.

Or perhaps, she thought, the slow turning of the disk in his fingers was a gentle reminder of mortality.

Eventually, he grunted his consent. “Whatever,” he said. “You’re getting hard to tell apart, so I guess it makes no real difference to me who comes along.”

He let go of the rail and stalked off through the habitat, perhaps assuming that this would put him beyond her observational range. It didn’t, of course, but she chose not to go with him.

Returning to herself, to her self-imposed isolation in the hole ship
Arachne,
she looked down at her hands, where they lay folded in her lap. They were flesh and blood, or the closest thing to it that had survived the Spike in Sol system; they weren’t composed of cells grown in a soup and assembled en masse, differentiating as they went. She was
human.

That set her apart from all the others. She felt it keenly. As much as she played it down when she encouraged them to work together, the truth was impossible to ignore: she was the product of 150 years of experience and biological technology a century in advance of anything UNESSPRO had had. She simply wasn’t the same as them.

But Alander had the gall to suggest that he couldn’t tell them apart...?

She smiled.
Ah,
she thought, realizing:
An insult.
That was good. He wouldn’t normally resort to personal attacks when he couldn’t get what he wanted. The fact that he had this time suggested she must have been getting to him. Was it the argument, she wondered, or the randomizing of his thoughts she had introduced? Either way, it was an interesting development.

* * *

Sol uploaded the change of plans the moment Thor arrived
in the secondary dock. Thor wasn’t happy about it.

“This is bullshit, Sol,” she said, trying to keep a lid on her annoyance but failing. “I didn’t come all this way to baby-sit.”

“Try to think of the bigger picture, Thor.” The original Hatzis’s voice was placating. “It makes more sense this way.”

Thor glowered at the image that came with the words via conSense. The Caryl Hatzis who had survived Sol had done so with a grace her UNESSPRO engrams had never known. She was slimmer, her skeleton was better structured, and she carried herself with confidence. Compared to the circus freak body Thor had been decanted into, she looked like perfection, damn her.

But envy aside, Sol was right. It made sense that she should go with Alander. It also made sense that she be mobile in the same way he was. It was just her bad luck that she had drawn the short straw.

“No word from Athena yet?” she asked, deliberately moving on from the subject. Sol had told her about the message they’d received from Head of Hydras on her arrival. She hadn’t heard the transmission from the dying colony while in transit.

“Gou Mang should be there soon,” said Sol. “Before you leave, why not wait with me over here for news? Then, if we do need to broadcast instructions, you can make a detour along the way.”

With the lack of anything better to do, Thor accepted Sol’s invitation and made her way from her own hole ship to
Arachne.

The Sothis habitat was spacious and airy compared to the underground structures her crewmates were building on their colony world. Thor was mainly ocean, apart from two diamond-shaped continents and a smattering of islands. The storms were ferocious. She had thought she might welcome Sothis’s arid bleakness, but she was already finding herself missing the distant howl of the wind and moisture in the air. Here the air smelled of nothing but mummification.

Arachne
was identical to the vessel she had flown from HD92719. It had the same cockpit interior, right down to its smell. The AI, when it spoke, had the same voice. She experienced an odd feeling of
jamais vu
as she walked through the airlock to find someone different there, as though returning to a home she now found unfamiliar. Her original was sitting on the couch in exactly the same pose as the image she’d seen in conSense.

She looks like a queen waiting to receive guests,
Thor thought, resisting an urge to genuflect.

“So, where is Peter?” she asked.

“Getting ready,” replied Sol.

Thor frowned. “Packing? What does he think he’s going to need?”

“He places great importance on his physicality. It anchors him. I find it simpler to indulge him than to fight him in this instance.”

Thor snorted a slight laugh and shook her head. “I remember him from entrainment camp,” she said. “They indulged him there, too. He was their favorite son, their star pupil. He could have gotten away with murder if he’d wanted to.”

“I think you’ll find he’s different now,” said Sol. Her eyes were gray, almost disturbingly human-looking. There was no hint at all of the furious processing taking place behind them. “Besides, we must be tolerant. He just lost his only active copy, and we need him on our side.”

“Not as much as we used to,” she said. “The Gifts have shown they’re prepared to talk to others, now.”

“Yes, but only in the absence of Peter,” Sol returned, admiring her own copy’s narrow-mindedness. Alander was a hero, at the very least, for getting off a warning in time.

“The contact for your mission was Donald Schievenin. He was also the UNESSPRO spy, right?”

Thor nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Nobody’s perfect,” she said. “But
Peter...
?”

“Quiet. He’s coming.”

Sol stood as Alander’s artificial body walked up the access ramp and into the cockpit.

Thor’s body was a match for his in size—both dwarfed her original—but hers had retained the XY body type that was a hangover of the artificial genome’s male origin.

Some effort had been made to sculpt the final result into forms resembling their original shapes, but they had ended up with the same eye and skin color. They looked to Thor like brother and sister.
Frankenstein’s twins,
she thought wryly.

“Hello, Caryl,” he said, shaking her hand. Her name sounded oddly out of context with her original standing beside her. “Welcome to Sothis.”

She nodded stiffly. “Thank you, Peter.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” said Sol, “he’s not happy you’re going either.”

Alander looked as unnerved as she felt by the admission. “Let’s just say,” he said, “I don’t like last-minute changes of plans.”

“You’ve had hours to get used to it, Peter,” said Sol. “And since when have any of our plans ever been written in stone? Like you said earlier, the Starfish force us to be flexible.”

“Not just the Starfish.”

“All right. The Spinners, too. We need a better idea of where they are as much as we need to stay alive.”

“Agreed. If that was your only motive for sending me away, maybe I’d trust you.”

Thor felt as though she had walked into the middle of an argument. “Fuck that,” she said. “Is it going to be like this all the way to Groombridge?”

He turned his attention to her. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll behave. It’s not you I have a problem with. Not yet, anyway.”

She was about to tell him precisely what he could do with his attitude when
Arachne
began to vibrate with the ringing tones of an ftl message.

The cockpit fell silent as all three stopped their bickering to listen to the transmission the hole ship was about to relay.

“This is Gou Mang in Head of Hydrus,” the message began. “Athena is dead. I repeat: Athena is dead. The gifts are down, and the
Michel Mayor
is gone. There are no signs of surface life, no observatory beacons—
nothing.

Not even a death marker. Everything’s just... dead.”

Gou Mang hesitated, and Thor heard all manner of unspoken tension in the silence.
What is it like to see a colony destroyed?
she wondered. Alander had seen it, as had Sol. Sol had witnessed all of that and more! The destruction of Earth during the Spike, then the destruction of its magnificent remnants by aliens—

Gou Mang finally came back with: “There’s nothing we can do here. The Starfish can’t be too far away, either, so I’m getting out of here in case the fuckers home in on this transmission and come back to clean up.”

The transmission ended there, but the silence in
Arachne
extended until Sol let out a heavy and troubled sigh. It was only then that Thor realized she, too, had been holding her breath.

“That’s it, Thor,” said Sol sullenly. “We have visual confirmation: the Starfish have changed their tactics.”

“What about the missing marker?” asked Alander. “Could that be significant?”

They both stared incredulously at him. His concern for the marker seemed trivial, given what they had just learned. Then again, she thought, perhaps it was easier to focus on something like that than the death of an entire colony.

“I don’t know, Peter,” said Sol, coming around the cockpit and putting the couch between them. “Maybe Gou Mang arrived too early.” She shrugged. “The most important thing is still to plot the progression of the Spinners. We have enough hole ships now to continue surveying the systems around us. We can afford one to jump ahead, to see how far the leading edge is from us. If we’re going to warn the Spinners about what’s going on, then we have to know at least roughly where they are.”

“Especially if the Starfish are starting to eat into us from behind.” Alander ran a hand across his eyes.

He was tired, stressed, that much was obvious. Was he unstable, too? Thor didn’t like the idea of spending a week or two cooped up in a hole ship cockpit with someone constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. But then, her original had done it and survived, so she figured she could also. Perhaps it would become some kind of rite of passage that every version of Hatzis would one day have to endure.

“The sooner we get started, the better,” she said, more in response to her train of thought than anything else. “I’m ready whenever you are, Peter.”

He nodded once. “Then let’s get this over with,” he said, turning and walking out of
Arachne
without looking back.

Thor tore her eyes from his receding back to look over to her original. “Is he always this charming?”

Sol shrugged slightly. “And then some,” she said.

Thor extended her hand, and Sol took it gently in hers. The contrast of olive artificial skin and pale human flesh was shocking, as was the discrepancy in size between their limbs.

I’m a freak,
Thor mused as she followed Alander to her colony’s hole ship.
And she’s a goddess, in more ways than one.

1.1.3

Six days later, Alander was regretting his promise to behave.
As
Pearl
relocated without incident for the twentieth time that week, in a system classified as AC +48 1595-89, he found himself wishing for an excuse to start an argument. It would certainly have helped the time pass.

AC +48 1595-89 consisted of a G-type star corresponding almost precisely to Sol, right down to the sunspots creeping across its face, plus seven planets occupying various positions along the spectrum between rock and hydrogen. There was a fat gas giant with rings; there were numerous moons; there was an asteroid belt and a cometary halo; there were deserts and clouds and ice; there was an Earth-like world in the habitable zone. But there was no sign of the mission sent to study it.

Pearl,
like every hole ship, was equipped with standard radio and laser broadcast equipment. Alander scrolled through the visual data while Hatzis went through the motions of trying to hail the mission.

“This is Caryl Hatzis of UNESSPRO Mission 154, & V.
Krasnikov,
hailing UNESSPRO Mission 707.
Frank Shu,
do you read me? This is UNESSPRO Mission 154 hailing Mission 707. If you can hear me, Vince, please respond.”