Project Sail (45 page)

Much had happened since the alien transmission fried her implant leaving her silent and paralyzed, as her doctors had warned might happen if the microcomputer suffered a software failure.

Ellen was not a brave person. Yet she had risked much by deciding on the implant and then going to great lengths to keep it secret. She hid at home behind drawn shades engaging in virtual meetings from her living room. When she did set sail, she tried to hide again, in the shadow of Leo Wren as if she might disappear behind his loud personality.

And then the transmission from the cylinder filled her mind with a story, told in vivid imagery conveying the history of an entire civilization.

Her disability and that chip had been the key to comprehending that message, one the “normal” people could not understand.

Before she began, she looked up at Wren, but he glanced away, ashamed.

She reached out and took his hand.

“Lazarus is wrong, the artifact is not a library; it’s them.”

Coffman crossed his arms, leaned against the Air Boss’ workstation, and tapped his finger on his chin.

“What, exactly, does that mean, Ellen?”

“The transmission is like a mural telling the story of the people here, where they went, and the gift they left behind.”

Warner—who nervously spun her artificial hand around and around—asked, “What gift?”

Kost saved that answer for later.

“Their technology evolved similar to ours and they faced the same issues we face, including pollution and environmental damage, the side effects of an advancing society. Their cities covered the moon and when they learned to travel through their solar system, they went to other planets to find what they needed to grow and thrive.”

Wren said, “Parallel development is reasonable if they were like us; humanoid and carbon-based.”

“And we were just learning to make fire when they could already travel among the planets and were developing an understanding of consciousness like your friend Lazarus, Commander.”

“They uploaded their consciousness into computers?” Coffman guessed.

Kost held a finger up to stop the questions. She had spent five days lying in bed unable to speak, unable to sort through the story told to her by the cylinder. With her implant functioning, she could now decipher the message properly and felt the urge to do so.

The bridge door slid open and both Soto and Phipps joined the gathering with the former handing a cup of water to Ellen. She thanked him, took a drink, and spoke.

“Their technology advanced in ways we would find familiar, such as nanobots.”

“Ah, yes, well,” Coffman said, “the A-H drive could not function without them. They are constantly repairing the power conduits; otherwise the energy would tear the materials apart.”

Soto said, “They are important in medicine, too. Those microbiome tune-ups you receive inject nanobots to repair the damage space travel does to the organisms living in your body.”

“I saw them on the battlefield,” Hawthorne remembered the swarm first repairing a Goliath and then destroying missile emplacements. “Nasty things.”

She told them, “In this case, we are talking about machines so tiny that an atomic nucleus would seem like a solar system. They developed an understanding of our universe’s basic building blocks, and that opened doors to other planes of existence. They have become the ultimate explorers.”

“Wait a second,” Tommy Starr said. “If I am hearing right, this entire alien civilization is packed up inside that cylinder? Not a whole lot of places to explore in there.”

Wren said, “Something beyond our comprehension, the way space travel would be unimaginable to an ancient human.”

“Or an Alcubierre—Haruto drive to someone as brilliant as Einstein,” Coffman conceded.

“Wait a second, exactly how did they use nanobots to become explorers?” Warner asked.

It was Hawthorne who answered.

“Like Lazarus, they uploaded their minds.”

Kost said, “I think it was more like they evolved in that direction and eventually became a collective consciousness, living almost like an intelligent cloud; a super-organism.”

Coffman told her, “We detected synchrotron radiation, as if the cylinder might be a particle accelerator.”

She said, “We use ships to travel across space, they are using the cylinder to travel across, well, dimensions? Parallel worlds? Whatever it is, they find it far more interesting than the universe.”

“Yes, well, I did see machines and cities destroyed,” Coffman recalled his vision.

“I saw a dead, stripped world,” Wren added.

“They were comparable to us—human beings—in that their civilization had vast energy needs. But after their technological singularity, they mined the quantum vacuum for energy, used foglets—polymorphic substances--to create whatever object or tools they wanted, and understood existence not as stars and planets, but bosons and fermions. Like Lazarus, their intelligence was no longer hostage to physical bodies, joining with their technology but at a subatomic level. They no longer needed this moon or the resources they mined on 581g; they don’t need this universe at all.”

Hawthorne said, “So the people on G-Moon became something similar to Lazarus?”

He thought of Lazarus’ “ascension” through technological wizardry and how it fundamentally changed his being, but also the many ways in which he did not change; violent, self-absorbed. It seemed technology could change a body, but not change a person.

“So they left, okay, then who the hell tore down their buildings and destroyed their machines?” Wren asked.

“They did,” she paused to let that sink in. “I said they left a gift behind. G-Moon is that gift. They used their technology to take apart the remnants of their civilization piece by piece, to erase it. I think they understood the rarity and importance of habitable worlds.”

“Let me get this straight,” Hawthorne said. “The people who lived here moved on, they went someplace else. But before they left, they cleaned up their mess in case someone else wanted to live in this world?”

Kost nodded.

Hawthorne was nearly stunned into silence but he thought again of Lazarus’ ascension and told her, “You are wrong, Ellen, the people who lived here weren’t anything like human beings.”

Warner asked, “And the signal the cylinder gives off, what is that about?”

“It tells their story and is an invitation to follow them,” Kost said. “If the day comes that we advance into a sentient cloud, then we can follow that signal and meet them in, well, another plane of existence.”

“So it’s like a guideline to them,” Hawthorne inferred.

“Yes,” she smiled. “But I think it might be ten thousand years until we are ready to follow.”

“Dr. Kost,” he said, “Lazarus has equipment that he thinks can suck out the knowledge, all the stuff, inside that cylinder. If he can do that, the alien race who left this gift-world for us might find themselves absorbed into his consciousness; the way he absorbed and imprisoned the other uploads.”

She opened her mouth but then closed it again, speechless.

Coffman said, “Thirty-five minutes until the cylinder emits its signal again.”

Hawthorne translated, “You mean until they reach out their hand of friendship, and find Lazarus waiting to grab them.”

48. Rally

The cylinder-shaped alien artifact stood dormant over a quartet of dead bodies.

New visitors broke the silence as two robots painted in safety yellow with black stripes rolled in on caterpillar tracks with their heavy-duty clamps pulling a thick cord. They stopped five feet in front of the artifact and dropped their offering. A third mechanical worker joined them, this one a flatbed carrier hauling a white orb. The three then attached the orb to the cable and propped it on a stand.

With the collector in place and the transmission dish pointed at the orbiting battleship, Lazarus and his armada of automated slaves need only wait.

---

“Twenty-eight minutes,” Coffman counted down.

Fisk said, “Recall Thomas and King so we can leave.”

Hawthorne ignored him and looked to Wren who stood at Kost’s shoulder as she sat in the XO’s chair. It seemed Wren would be standing by Kost’s shoulder for a long time, assuming they survived. He did not know what had changed, but Ellen Kost was not the only one who experienced a revival when Phipps and Soto rebooted her implant.

“You had a program that found the virus inside the probe, right?”

Wren nodded toward Warner and answered, “I used Leanne’s program.”

Hawthorne turned to her and said, “Run that program on our systems; start with the external lighting. If you find an incursion, isolate it but do nothing; do not tip anyone off that we found it.”

Fisk nearly shouted, “Why bother with that? Lazarus said we could go.”

“Lazarus killed those technicians who were suspicious about someone hacking the probe’s QE link, he told me he destroyed Oberon UVI, he slaughtered the crew of that battleship, wiped out the EA cruiser, and nuked their ground force. He will not let us sail away.”

Coffman tilted his head and reasoned, “Jonathan, if you are correct, why would Lazarus bother with a computer incursion when he has such firepower at his command?”

“You do not understand him but neither did I until now. This isn’t just about his pursuit of immortality, it is about showing off how clever he is,” Hawthorne paced and felt anger boil inside like a teapot ready to whistle. “When I visited him on Pan, he told me his entire plan. He told me about the battleship he stole, how he manipulated the Chinese into taking out the
Niobe
, and how he killed the technicians.”

Hawthorne pounded a fist into the nearest console and growled, “He told me his entire goddamn plan, put it right in front of me and dared me to figure it out! He will steal what is in that artifact, but his biggest victory was when he surprised me aboard the
Sergey Gorshkov
.”

He glanced around the bridge and saw his crewmates staring at him through wide, scared eyes.

“He won’t blast us with missiles from his battleship, he will wait until we think we have escaped, and then his last surprise will pop up and smother us.”

Hawthorne moved to Leanne Warner’s shoulder as she started loading her security program.

Fisk said, “So find the virus or whatever and get out of here!”

Hawthorne did not judge Reagan Fisk a coward and he was correct; if there was an incursion into the computer and they could neutralize it, they might escape.

However, just as Dr. Kost’s revival had changed Leo Wren, the revelation that the artifact was a lifeline to the civilization that once lived here changed Jonathan Hawthorne.

“We can’t leave!”

Everyone on the bridge gawked at the Commander.

In a softer voice he explained, “Don’t you understand? They cleaned up their mess and moved on to something better, something more than a bunch of petty barbarians squabbling about land or hydrocarbon harvesting.”

Jonathan Hawthorne remembered thousands dying around Jupiter; he remembered Russian and American armies playing tug-of-war around the lakes of Titan.

The owners of G-Moon gave away the most valuable ball of real estate within thirty light-years of Earth, and they also took out the trash and wiped up the spills as if they owed a debt to the next tenants.

In the weeks since arriving, mankind already stained the place and now Lazarus threatened to drag the former residents back into humanity’s filthy universe.

“Whoever these people are, they are better than us. Now Lazarus will turn their gesture of kindness against them, perhaps even destroy whatever life they are leading on this, well, plane of existence or whatever. I saw what he did to the other uploaded humans.”

“Jonathan,” Coffman said, “they are a far more advanced civilization than us, or even Lazarus for that matter, they can protect themselves.”

Fisk jumped, “Yes, right, they can take care of themselves.”

Wren did not agree.

“Christ, if they are as evolved as Ellen says, they may have forgotten what it was like to be a barbarian, they might not realize what he is doing until it is too late. But even if this Lazarus fucker fails, what happens if he pisses off a civilization that can mine the quantum vacuum? I know what I would do if one of you assholes woke me from a good dream.”

Hawthorne insisted, “For the first time in my life, I feel I cannot walk away, that I should not walk away. Not because I am brave or because I want to be a hero, but because we caused this mess.”

He walked over to Reagan and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Before we left, you told me you believed in this mission because we were doing something worthwhile, and the future could be new and different.”

“I was naive.”

“You were right and I was wrong, the people who lived here are proof. They changed and became something amazing.”

Reagan fumbled to say, “Yes, their technology is beyond ours. I understand that.”

“They did not evolve because of their technology!” Hawthorne argued. “Look at Lazarus. The technology that transformed him is incredible, but it only changed his physical form. He is still a petty, nasty person.”

Coffman wagged his finger and said, “Yes, well, I see your point Jonathan. The race who built that cylinder has technology, but they also have something else. I suppose you can say they matured.”

Hawthorne nodded and told them, “We can take our first step toward that for ourselves, but first we have to do what they did; we have to clean up our mess. Lazarus is that mess.”

Coffman said, “Even if I agree, we only have twenty-five minutes until that cylinder broadcasts its signal again.”

Fisk spat, “You are going to get us killed because you are mad at an old friend for outsmarting you.”

“He didn’t just outsmart us, Reagan; he killed hundreds including Henderson and everyone at Oberon station. If he succeeds here, think of how powerful he will become and how many more he will murder.”

Hawthorne then turned to Coffman and said, “Professor, I need to hurt that battleship. Leanne, I need a secure link to Lieutenant Thomas on the surface…”