Orphans of Earth (12 page)

1.2
THE COMPANY OF STARS

2160.9.11 Standard Mission Time

(10 August, 2163 UT)

1.2.1

The golden light of alien industry played like flames across
Caryl Hatzis’s face. She’d heard eyewitness reports and seen conSense footage, but this was the first time she was actually
seeing
the Spinners with her own eyes.
It’s like watching God in action,
she thought.

Sixty-one Ursa Major boasted no Jupiter-sized gas giant, so the inner system was a mess of post-planetary formation rubble. The major terrestrial world, Hera, had several smallish moons and suffered constant bombardment. A smaller world in a nearby orbit, Eileithyia, had probably been knocked from Hera at some point in the distant past. Hera’s surface was a mess of impact craters distorted by tectonic movement and volcanic activity. It was a world of fire, from the furious swirling of its magnetic field to the rumblings of its still-hot core.

Hatzis had anchored herself to one of Hera’s small moons. It had an orbital period of nineteen hours with a high eccentricity and was presently the closest solid body to the fourth spindle being built in Hera’s geosynchronous orbit. The hole ship was hidden in a nearby fissure. She sat on the outside of the moon, protected by an I-suit and using the senses of her modified body to view the act of creation taking place above her.

The spindle seemed to be growing out of the vacuum: great sheets of golden matter spread and overlapped, creating cavities that seemed—before they were closed from her view—to be filling up with gray masses of creeping technology. Silver cables snaked across yawning gulfs to snap home on distant surfaces to create unusual conjunctions of planes and curves, while around the planet’ s equator, the incomprehensible length of the orbital antenna reached for the next spindle along. Somewhere above all of this lurked a small mountain of hyperdense material that would act as the tower’s counterweight—a dark counterpoint to the awesome golden spectacle below.

No, she decided on reflection. This was
better
than God. Miracles needed no explanation beyond divine grace, whereas science could be explained. She’d seen vast works performed in Sol during and after the Spike, and they, too, had filled her with wonder. The Spinners might have been on a completely different level than the rogue AIs of Sol, but what they were doing here was no miracle. This level of science
was
achievable; the fact that she was watching it now was proof of that. And if it could be done once, then there was no reason why it couldn’t be done again.

She nodded quietly to herself as she continued to look on at the unfolding extravaganza taking place on Hera. This was what she wanted for humanity, to attain this level of sophistication, not to be scratching out an existence from the ruins of her civilization. She wanted something
permanent.

In fact, she wanted more than what the Spinners had achieved here. To look at their wonders being created, it was almost inconceivable that they could ever be destroyed, and yet somehow the Starfish had managed to do just that with seemingly little effort, suggesting a level of technological advancement that paled into insignificance the efforts of the Spinners. If humanity was going to survive and prosper in this harsh universe, then it was to the Starfish that they would need to aspire.

For now, though, she’d be happy to just be able to make contact with either of these two superspecies.

She’d seen what happened to satellites that had strayed too close to the spindles: they were destroyed out of hand.

That, she suspected, was an automatic reaction, no different in essence from the survey vessels’ automatic meteor defense systems. But there had to be
some
form of intelligence driving construction, even if it was artificial. If she could disrupt construction in a nonlethal but significant way, she might be able to attract attention to herself. And would the minds behind the building then stop in their relentless push through surveyed space just because of one failure out of the many systems contacted? She could only hope so.

But how was she supposed to disrupt construction? Take
Arachne
and relocate into the heart of one of the spindles? She didn’t know if the hole ship could withstand the furious energies it might find in such an environment. It probably wouldn’t even allow such a jump if there was the possibility of risk involved.

And if she could get in there, then what? Transmit a message? Deposit an explosive device that might hopefully bring a halt to the whole construction process? She simply didn’t know. With every new contact with the Spinners, she felt less as though humanity was being favored by some alien benefactors and more as though they were merely ants trying to attract the attention of a passing human who hadn’t realized that the bag of sugar they were carrying was leaking.

Part of her wanted to take the hole ship
now,
to end the frustration of waiting and wondering. If she was killed, then so be it. At least it would be over. Humanity would be reduced to little more than a few scattered engrams, marking time until they died. The responsibility of wanting to preserve and re-create would be gone, for there would be no one left to carry the torch. The race would be effectively finished.

But she didn’t move. Her eyes remained fixed on the golden splendor unraveling before her while her fingers grasped comet dust and primordial ash. Her body hadn’t needed food for many decades, but right at this moment her insides were burning with a terrible hunger.

If only I could transmit this feeling to the Spinners, she thought. Surely someone among them could understand this hunger for knowledge.

* * *

Midday on Sothis arrived, and the transmission went out
on schedule. She had left Gou Mang, still wide-eyed from the stealth attacks on Athena and the other colonies, to maintain the service. She returned to
Arachne
when the hole ship signaled that all the reports were in. Settling back onto the couch, she flicked through them, one by one. There had been two new Spinner drops, not counting Hera. Five more colonies attacked by the Starfish, three of them without provocation, and nine other senescent or failed colonies had been found close to Sol. Statistical analysis conducted by one of her older engrams confirmed that the Spinners were following a slightly curved path through surveyed space, so their origins couldn’t be extrapolated with any great precision. The Starfish stuck to that path like deer to a track—except for the recent stealth attacks, and the attack on Sol, which had taken them many light-years out of their way. The new attacks concentrated on the trailing edge of the Spinners’ path, as though the Starfish were systematically searching for colonies where their concentration of kills was the highest. That made sense, she thought, in a grim sort of way.

Three transmissions created a new connection in her mind. Gou Mang reported that a hole ship sent to investigate the forward flank of the Spinner advance had failed to report back on time. She couldn’t pin down the exact location of the disappearance, but her best guess was that it had vanished somewhere in the vicinity of pi-1 Ursa Major. Hera was in 61 Ursa Major. The similarity of system names made her automatically check her mental star map. Pi-1 Ursa Major was thirty light-years away. The missing mission—piloted by a version of her from Eos in BSC7914—had been due to finish the previous day. That it hadn’t returned or reported was unusual (after all, she was nothing if not reliable), and she couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she had arrived during a Starfish attack and been unable to escape in time.

The second transmission concerned an increase in anomalous contacts along the front and flanks. Someone was dogging new colonies, buzzing close enough to be noticed but never sticking around when contact was attempted. They made no overtly hostile moves, but their dogged lack of communication had ominous overtones.

The third transmission was the most interesting and possibly the most worrying. It opened a whole new swath of possibilities which, when combined with the other two transmissions, cast everything in a very different light.

Hatzis sat through it twice to make sure she absorbed everything correctly. The reports from her other selves came in densely packed files readable only through the Engram Overseer platform on which all the UNESSPRO missions ran. She literally dived into the heads of the person reporting to experience it firsthand. It was a far cry from the multinode consciousness she had experienced in Sol, but it was a step in the right direction, at least. When surveyed space was empty of dangerous aliens, the possibility existed that she might open the channels of all the hole ships, allowing herselves to communicate in real time, even though separated by dozens of light-years. That would be the beginning of something truly amazing, she thought.

Another reason to use the Overseer files lay in the need for caution. She didn’t know if Alander had noticed that the gifts could receive more than one signal at a time and transmit while receiving, but she didn’t want to make it too easy for him to pry into her affairs if he did. Given his tenuous grip on reality, he might balk at the idea of diving into someone else’s mind.

But then, his disapproval was the least of her worries right now.

From the mind of herself from Thor, whom she had dispatched with Alander to explore the front itself, she learned that she had much more pressing matters to deal with: sabotage of UNESSPRO, deliberate destruction of colonies using the Starfish as an unsuspecting weapon, a legion of Francis Axfords,
and
a race of alien scavengers with two penises, for fuck’s sake! She would have happily dismissed it all as a hoax had the information not come from Thor herself—and she had seen it with her own eyes. Aliens stealing gifts before humans could use them, increased anomalous activity, a missing hole ship—and now Axford, Alander, and Thor were planning to ambush a possible “Roach” attack in 61 Ursa Major, the very same system that she was in. She sighed in frustration. Surveyed space seemed a much more dangerous place, if that was possible: being able to predict where the Spinners might strike next was supposed to make things easier, not more complicated.

At least Thor had managed to warn her beforehand. If humanity was going to declare unofficial war against
another
alien species, she supposed it was best if she was there as well. Axford had been reluctant to let her stop midjourney simply to listen to the Sothis update, but she’d convinced him otherwise.
Not
sending a report of her own, she’d said, would only make Sol suspicious, so she had posted a rather bland description of the systems they had visited, not including Vega. Behind that report, she had managed to send a private Overseer transmission that filled in the blanks. Axford, who obviously knew about those transmissions, hadn’t tried to stop her, and Alander had said nothing about it at all.

Maybe he was being coy, she thought. But she doubted it. It wasn’t like him to keep a lid on his disapproval, and the Council of Orphans was almost certain to garner
that.
She’d always known it would have to go public at some point, but she would have preferred if it had happened at another time. She wasn’t in the mood for a civil war right now.

Sol turned her attention to the data flowing in through
Arachne’
s sensors. The gifts around Hera were almost complete. Thor, Alander, and Axford would be in 61 Ursa Major soon—and so too, perhaps, would be these “Roaches” Thor had mentioned. She tried to think of a way she could call for backup, but calling via the ftl transmitter would not be an option until the next Sothis report. And if Eos hadn’t gone missing, she might have been able to jump to one of her systems and bring her back.

She silently cursed the Spinners for handing them a means of communication that spoke to
everyone
each time they used it. It was obviously supposed to teach them the principles of such technology instead of just handing it to them on a plate—but fuck, it made life hard! Sometimes she imagined how things would have been if the Spinners had never come—or if they’d come to Sol first. She wondered what the Vincula would have made of the gifts. Perhaps, with luck, they could have used the technology to communicate with or even repel the Starfish. With a million superior minds working on the problem, rather than a few thousand flawed engrams, things might just have turned out very differently indeed.

* * *

Hera’s primary survey vessel, the
Fred Adams,
had
assumed a cautionary orbit well away from the gifts. In the sixty years since the mission to 61 Ursa Major had arrived, the crew had set up a network of low-orbital facilities around the volcanic planet as well as establishing mines on various asteroids. All were put on alert following the message buoy Thor and Alander had dropped some days ago, but they still weren’t as prepared for their encounter with the Spinners as Hatzis would have hoped. Perhaps the fact that half of the colonists were on the fragile edge of senescence had something to do with it.

The colony itself was run by a sturdy climatologist by the name of Tarsem Jones. His personality breakdown was well established, almost certainly as a result of spending too much of his time thinking faster than the normal clock rate.
The pressures of command,
Hatzis thought wryly as she addressed the man.

“The Spinners are going to choose one among you to act as a contact,” she explained.

The colony’s engram of Alander was locked down in memory, too unstable to wake even for a day, and there was also no version of her available, either. “This person will probably be a UNESSPRO plant psychologically modified to ensure the mission runs according to regulations. One of those regulations is to report to Earth as soon as alien life is contacted. But you must not let them do this.” She spoke carefully, wanting to impress upon him the importance of doing precisely as she said. “Shut them down as soon as you find out who they are. We’ll deal with that problem later.”

“But surely we should at least
talk
to them.” Jones’s expression was one of intense indecision. “I mean, they’ve gone to so much trouble to come here in the first place.”