Predator - Incursion (17 page)

He followed, checked movement sensors, saw nothing. Way ahead of them was one of the docking arms, rising high from the habitat’s surface and reflecting weak starlight from several ships hanging toward its summit. The sight was quite beautiful, but if the craft were manned, the Yautja on board might be watching them even now, running like ants across the surface of their home. They might be preparing weapons, and in a flash barely perceived, the VoidLarks might end.

“Ten o’clock,” Snowdon said, just as a red light flashed in Mains’s view.

“Two of them,” Lieder confirmed.

Two Yautja were standing watching them. A hundred yards apart, they were both wearing their battle helmets and holding long-bladed weapons. They were too far away to make out in detail.

“Split up, but keep running,” Mains said. “We haven’t got time for this.”

The Yautja to the left broke into a run, heading opposite in an effort to flank them. Mains sent an order to his suit, drew his com-rifle, and fired a nano-bot charge. The bots arrowed toward the Yautja, and as it cloaked and flickered from view they dispersed into a wide cloud and ignited. The Yautja appeared again, cloak malfunctioning, going to its knees in a fading bloom of a thousand small explosions. Mains’s suit told him that it was still alive, but wounded.

That would do for now. They had to keep running.

Snowdon had engaged the other Yautja and winged it with a laser blast. It cloaked and dodged, then several blazing shots arced in at them from its shoulder blaster. Snowdon’s suit hardened and deflected one impact, but it sent her sprawling across the gray ground.

Faulkner launched one of his mini-drones. The fist-sized black object darted high and then dived at the Yautja, firing its laser and scoring several lines across the ground.

While it was targeting and fighting the drone, Faulkner hit it with a skillful laser shot.

“Keep running!” Mains said. “Snowdon?”

“I’m good.” She was up and running again, panting hard.

“Frodo?”

“Sorry, Johnny. The
Ochse
thinks this is a good place to meet its end.”

“Thanks, Frodo,” he said. It was as much of a goodbye as he could muster.

“Good luck,” their ship’s computer replied. “Keep up this speed and I calculate you’ll get to the access with seventeen seconds to spare. There’s a tunnel to the left, but go right, then drop down the shaft. That’ll be your best chance.”

A couple of minutes later they reached a gentle hump in the smooth flat ground, around the other side of which was a dark opening. Snowdon paused, panting, hesitant.

“No choice,” Mains said. “Sara?”

Cotronis hadn’t spoken since leaving the ship. Still clasping the defender she staggered and fell.

Faulkner scooped her up and slumped her over his shoulder.

Mains went first, com-rifle at the ready. It was dark, but their suit lights flickered on and illuminated the way. A tunnel began to their left, smooth and sloping gently away. An atmosphere field hazed the air a few yards along, indicating that the habitat’s interior had an atmosphere. No use if it didn’t suit humans, though. To their right, an open shaft headed down, too deep for their lights to penetrate all the way.

They each pulled a filament from their belts, slapped its glue bulb against the wall, and jumped.

In Mains’s view, the countdown hit four. It went no lower.

As the world erupted and he fell, his last thought was,
I wish I could have seen inside.

Testimony

The first hundred years was a true voyage of discovery.

The Founders had commissioned three ships, called
Hamlet, Othello
, and
Macbeth
. When they were delivered the ships were taken to an independent port close to the edge of the Sphere, a place of smugglers, pirates, and mercenaries. This was almost three hundred years ago, around 2400, and the Sphere was a much smaller place then. After the secret FTL drives were retrofitted, the Founders gathered, boarded the ships, and took a drophole to the very edge of known space.

I can still remember that moment well. Wordsworth and I stood on the bridge of the
Othello
, along with a dozen other leading members of the Founders. Beatrix Maloney was there, a different woman back then. More honest, more open and optimistic. There was no great ceremony. After the three ships had moved away from the drophole and its attendant space station, we launched into outer space.

We weren’t the first, of course. The Fiennes ships had already been gone for a long time, vast craft filled with thousands of colonists in cryo-sleep, on a one-way trip toward somewhere that
might
be habitable. In a way, their journey was more terrifying than ours, because these brave people had no inkling of whether or not they would ever wake up.

Some of them know now. They’ve woken into nightmare. But I’ll tell you more about that later. The history of what we were attempting is important to fully understand the dreadful present. Perhaps there will be lessons… or maybe humanity can never learn.

We slept for three years, and traveled one-hundred-and-fifty trillion miles. I was given the option of staying awake. As an artificial human I had no real need of sleep, and Wordsworth liked the idea of me patrolling the
Othello
, communicating with the AIs on board
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
, ensuring that everything was as it should be. Everything was automated, of course. There was nothing I could really do, but although his aims and intentions were grand, Wordsworth was human, and like any human he liked a sense of control over and above the machines he was using.

But I had spent too long awake and alone in the
Evelyn-Tew
’s escape pod, and Wordsworth understood that. So I slept with them, a thousand Founders on each ship settling into a thousand days’ cryo-sleep while the craft took us far beyond the Human Sphere of influence.

There’s a myth about artificial humans that enter cryo-sleep. It’s said that we invade nearby sleepers’ dreams. I’ve never understood the origins of that story, nor the barely veiled fear of us that it displays. Humans made us, after all. Humans made
me
, with their hands and their flesh-cloning methods, and I have long come to accept that. I can confirm that the myth is a lie. First, no human dreams in hyper-sleep, so the story is ridiculous. If a human
did
dream, they would die, because that would mean their body was experiencing temporal anomalies while in the cryo-pod. Growing older. Three years of growing older with no food, drink, or outside influence… it’s well documented how faulty cryo-pods quickly destroy a human mind and body.

It’s a lie also because I inhabit only my own dreams, which I am not meant to have. I cannot sleep in any way that a human would recognize, and even in cryo-suspension my mind exists on lower planes than it is easy to understand. It’s not as… awful as sitting awake in that escape pod, but it
is
very different.

I can’t recall my dreams from that time. That troubled me to begin with, because I have total recall, and forgetting something meant that I was not functioning to my full capacity. However, I soon came to relish the fact that those dreams were hazy, at best. It made me feel more human.

I shared these thoughts with Wordsworth, later, when things were going bad, and he embraced me and called me daughter.

After three years, the computers began waking us up.

Hamlet
was gone.
Othello
’s computer could not tell us what had happened, and
Macbeth
’s AI had no record or recollection of the
Hamlet
ever having existed. The vagaries of FTL travel at work. We never did discover what happened to the ship’s thousand sleeping souls.

With the Founders reduced to two thousand in number, we began our journey in earnest. We were beyond any human reach now, past even where the very earliest Fiennes ships, with their basic light-speed drives, might have reached. We were in deepest, darkest space, and traveling among stars that would look very different back home.

Free from interference, Wordsworth and the Founders continued with their experiments. In one of
Othello
’s three holds, preparations were made to begin using some of the research I had stolen from the
Evelyn-Tew
. All we needed were samples, and that was what drove our next thirty years of travel.

Always heading away from the Human Sphere, we explored, curiosity taking us to some amazing places. A small moon where silica deposits swayed and pulsed like living things. A gas giant where we found drifting masses the size of continents, self-warming, sparking electrical charges beyond measure, which might have been a form of life beyond our comprehension. A star system where seven planets shared roughly the same orbit, along with a cloud of billions of asteroids that might once have been sister worlds.

We took dropships down to a dozen planets and moons. Wordsworth said we were looking for somewhere to live, and I believed that—we all did, but we were also looking for something else. Samples on which we could use that stolen research, to develop something deadly—a weapon to protect us through all our travels.

On one planet we found a derelict spaceship. It was very old, and much of it had decayed beyond recognition in the planet’s acidic atmosphere. We remained there for thirty days, but discovered nothing of any use or interest. No bodies, no sign of the beings that had crewed the ship, no technology that any of us could even begin to understand. It was a strange feeling leaving that wreck behind. For most of humanity, such a find would have been something to celebrate, a turning point in our history and understanding of the universe.

For us, it was one more step into the unknown.

All the while, the Founders continued the experiments that had attracted persecution from within the Human Sphere. I understood some of it, but not all. Genetic sampling, quantum quantification, multiverse balancing, quark replacement therapy. Cutting edge theories, brought to life in the labs contained in the holds of the
Othello
and
Macbeth
. Many of the Founders indulged in these experiments, while others found their roles in maintaining and running the ships themselves. It was a peaceful time. I’m not sure how to convey the feeling better than that. No one was forced into any particular role. The ship’s AIs ran themselves, to an extent, but there were still tasks to be carried out. Otherwise our continued existence would have been unsustainable.

On
Othello
, a vast green pod was created where plants and foodstuffs were grown, and a group of people took that upon themselves. Another group experimented in creating a reliable and non-mechanical artificial gravity. It was as if the seed of a flourishing community had boarded those ships decades before, and in blooming, the flower it produced was close to perfection.

For a while, Wordsworth and the Founders existed in something approaching the utopia they had left the Human Sphere to seek.

As time went on, their genetic research, dabbling in longevity, became more serious. Wordsworth was an old man then, almost a hundred years old, and an air of desperation hung around him. Illnesses were dealt with quickly, and in the space of four years he had a heart-and-lung transplant, bone-marrow transplant, four cancers removed, and a brain rejuvenation.

He was dying, and he surprised me by being terrified.

“It’s not that there’s nothing beyond death,” he told me one day. I was in his cabin. We’d taken to drinking ship-brewed whiskey together in the evenings, although my internals meant that the alcohol was bled instantly from my system. It made him quiet and contemplative. Maudlin, even. “It’s not that at all. I want to go on, Liliya, and see what else there is to see. Can you understand that? The Founders followed me out here because we were looking for a kind of freedom, and somewhere to call home.”

I told him we already had that.

“Freedom, yes,” he said. “In a sense, but I’ll never call a spaceship home.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

That hurt me, but I let it go. I still looked exactly as I had seventy years before, when he first sent me to the
Evelyn-Tew
.

One day we fell into orbit around a star, following the orbital path of its third planet, and Wordsworth found what he wanted. Down on the planet there were seas of a jelly-like substance. It was analyzed and found to have remarkable properties. Rejuvenation. Medical applications for whole libraries full of illnesses. Even, when adapted over time, the reversal of aging.

They should have spent longer testing it, of course, but some of the original Founders had already died, and although there were births on both ships, and our population of two thousand was stable, the originals who were still alive were growing very old. Almost all of them wanted to pursue the aim they had started with, and so they created a medicine from the gel. Brought up vast quantities of it, built vats in the holds, and produced a daily dose that would hopefully help them to live longer.