Nemesis (34 page)

Will spent the next few minutes creating an array of ionic sensors and a suite of tiny microscopic eyes. They wouldn’t be as good as a lab microscope, but he’d at least get to see what he was up against. He offered the organism in the data port some sacrificial cells and watched it try to dismantle them.

Their cellular structure was like nothing he’d ever seen. Each cell had half a dozen kinds of nucleus and something like a Golgi apparatus gone crazy. He watched one of the microscopic aggressors manoeuvre a string of linked vesicles up against one of his cells and present them in turn like parcels on a production line. After every interaction, the aggressor cell changed slightly, as if the results of the microscopic experiment were producing an attendant surge of messaging molecules. He watched the nuclei twist and shift in response. How these machines achieved such a level of orderly responsiveness at the nanoscale was totally beyond him.

Will felt his anger fall away to be replaced by a bright and cleansing fear. The tiny blob of protoplasm before him scared him far more than the drones at Tiwanaku. It indicated a technology centuries in advance of their own. And it had to be a technology. He didn’t believe for a moment that a form of life this twisted could arise without some very subtle engineering. The way it swapped up chemical weapons in sequence against his cells looked too much like software incursion backed by self-modifying code.

He launched more sacrificial cells, this time primed with vesicles full of molecular weapons he’d cached on Davenport, coupled to intelligent defences. The alien cells broke them down almost as fast as they had the unweaponised cells. Something like horizontal gene transfer appeared to be taking place between them, with about five different kinds of genes being exchanged at once.

Will stepped back from his experiment, reflexively wiping his hands on his ship-suit. What would this stuff do on contact with human tissue? He couldn’t believe that anything as gentle as organic life would last a second. But in that case, how come Ann and her crew weren’t already dead? Just breathing the air in this room should have been enough to reduce them to pools of protoplasm.

Something was going on here that he didn’t understand. Who had made this stuff? And what in hell’s name did they want to do with it?

Will had almost laughed in Yunus’s face when he proposed that the Transcended weren’t the only force in the galaxy. Ironically, the pompous ass might have had a point. Will knew then that he, and everyone the conspiracy had ever touched, was in deep, deep shit. Compared to that scale of shit, the threat of all-out war with the sects didn’t even register.

11.3: MARK

Mark had taken them little more than a tenth of a light-year outside the Nerroskovi System before he realised they had a fuel problem. He’d finished up a set of careful warp-scatter manoeuvres and was about to unplug and take a break when the resource-management SAP started shrieking at him about their flight plan. A cursory inspection revealed what had happened. Sam’s bomb had used up a staggering amount of fuel. They didn’t have enough left to reach New Panama.

Mark cried out at the realisation.

‘What is it?’ said Ash, his avatar appearing in the helm-arena.

Mark handed him the data. Ash’s face darkened.

‘Son of a
bitch
!’

Mark opened a video window for the jubilant group in the lounge to interrupt their celebration.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘We have a problem.’

Venetia paused, mid-anecdote. ‘What now?’

‘We’re out of fuel,’ he said simply, then passed them all the data he had.

The joy drained out of everyone’s faces like paint in the rain. Mark felt a surge of frustration towards Sam. The guy had badly overdone it with the antimatter. He should have known better. At the same time, Mark dearly wanted to hold on to that sense of them all operating as a cohesive team. It hurt to lose it.

‘Sam, you fucking
asshole
!’ Ash shouted.

Sam’s brow furrowed in consternation. ‘I was trying to save us. That’s all. I miscalculated. I’m sorry.’

‘You … you … you fucking
idiot
! You’re a fucking liability. Just like you were at Tiwanaku.’

Mark checked the camera on Ash’s bunk below him. The man’s eyes were bugging out of his face in rage. Whatever bond Ash and Sam might have shared, it had clearly broken. He’d never heard Ash make remarks like that to a senior officer before. Then again, there’d never been this much at stake.

For the first time he could remember, Mark found himself in the unlikely position of being the peacemaker.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s in the past now. We have to figure a way out of this new mess. And besides, it’s not all down to Sam. I burned a bunch of fuel getting us out of there. More than I should have.’

In truth, he had used nowhere near as much as Sam had put in the bomb. No wonder the entire swarm had spasmed in the wake of it. Sam had dumped enough radiation into that star system to leave it hot for the rest of time. He was amazed it hadn’t taken them with it.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ said Sam, his expression desperate. ‘How bad is it? Is there anywhere we can still get to?’

Mark sighed as he surveyed the options and threw them a star map.

‘I’m seeing one New Frontier colony within range – a place called Carter. I’ve got no idea what their facilities are like.’

‘I know it,’ said Sam. ‘I’ve worked with the defence minister there. It’s a simple place, a bit rough and ready, but they’ll have fuel and messenger drones.’

‘I know Carter, too,’ said Venetia. ‘I worked there for a few months. Didn’t like it much, but that’s beside the point. Wherever we head, we have to think about the implications. It’s clear now that the Photurians follow warp trails. That’s probably how they got to Tiwanaku in the first place. And they’ll repair that transport of theirs eventually. We have no idea how good the Photurians’ deep-space scanning is. We could be handing everyone in the Carter System a death sentence if we go there. There are hundreds of thousands of people living there and no defences to speak of other than the occasional Fleet check-up.’

Everyone fell quiet.

‘I could scan for brown dwarves,’ Mark said eventually. ‘Maybe one of those secret Fecund fuelling stops is close enough. If we find one, I can’t believe the sects would turn us away – not with the kind of information we’re carrying. Their politics might be at odds with the Fleet’s but they’re still human.’

‘And what if you fail? What then?’ said Sam. ‘We’ll be dead. And we’ll lose our last chance to warn Earth, where there are
billions
of people counting on us. Remember, it’s easier to follow the warp trail of an arriving ship than a departing one. And if they could follow us to Nerroskovi, who’s to say they can’t make it to Earth? We left breadcrumbs running straight back to the home system –
Ariel Two
-sized breadcrumbs.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘Imagine that.’

Sam shook his head. ‘It’s grim, but we need to be realistic here. At least the population of Carter is relatively small. If we’re clear with them up front, they’ll have enough time to prep an evacuation ark.’

‘Evacuate the whole
planet
?’ said Venetia. ‘That won’t be easy. There are Flag settlements there for a start. Big ones. Are you expecting the colonists to lay on accommodation for them, too?’

Sam sighed. ‘I don’t know what to say. This whole situation’s a mess. I can’t apologise enough for that. But as Mark pointed out before – we have a mission plan and we have our duty. The sooner we’re fuelled up and on our way to New Panama, the better it will be for everyone. We can use the message drones at Carter to send advance warning to Earth. And if we’re lucky with our timing, the Fleet will be able to send a gunship constellation back there before any trouble starts.’

‘Presuming they don’t shoot the messenger first,’ said Venetia. ‘Remember, we’re not going to be welcome. First we show up demanding fuel and then announce that we may be trailing killer aliens behind us. Then we tell them that the best they can hope for is hiding out in a sub-light barge for three months while the Fleet dukes it out with some unknown invaders to stop their whole world from burning. They aren’t going to love it.’

‘I’ll square it with the local leadership,’ said Sam. ‘Given the trouble I’ve caused here, it’s the least I can do. And besides, we have overrides and a Fleet mandate to sequester fuel. They couldn’t stop us even if they wanted to.’

‘Nice attitude,’ said Venetia. ‘And let’s not forget we have an ongoing attempted murder inquiry, huh?’

‘How could we possibly forget?’ said Ash, his avatar scowling. ‘Here’s the thing, though. If we don’t make it to Carter, we all die. So it doesn’t matter who is captain now, because Carter’s the only place we can go. Which means that whoever is responsible for that clownish fuck-up with the neurotoxin should be able to put down their bullshit grievances for long enough to save their own neck.’

‘Are you proposing we wake Citra?’ said Venetia.

Ash threw up his hands. ‘Hell, no. We don’t need a biologist to get to Carter and we might as well spare the poor woman the grief. Plus, if anyone tries anything else that stupid, we’ll know it wasn’t her, won’t we?’

His tone threw another pall of silence over the group. Mark glanced nervously at him. If Ash had once been a rival, now he’d become something completely different. A voice of hope, perhaps, if a weirdly angry one.

‘My point, I guess,’ said Venetia, ‘is that our domestic problem isn’t exactly going to make us look good at Carter, either. And if we don’t wake Citra now, we’ll have to wake her there. I can’t imagine she’ll be happy.’

‘I can’t imagine she’ll give a shit,’ said Ash. ‘We all know what she’s going to do – accuse Mark. And she’d rather do that on a planet than trapped on a ship. But in any case, we don’t appear to have any choices left here. Our route has been decided for us.’

‘Agreed,’ said Mark.

He glanced at the glum faces of his shipmates and realised that of all of them, only Zoe hadn’t said a word. She’d sat there, pensive throughout, idly tapping at her touchboard as if they’d been discussing the ship’s privacy rota.

‘Hey, Zoe,’ he said. ‘Any thoughts?’

She stared up at his camera, her reverie broken. ‘Plenty. I’m just not worrying about what you’re worrying about.’

Venetia raised an eyebrow. ‘Life and death aren’t sufficiently pertinent?’

‘Oh no,’ said Zoe. ‘They’re pertinent, all right, but it’s not like we have a choice any more. And I think we have a bigger problem.’

‘Worse than being chased by killer aliens while short on fuel?’ said Venetia.

Zoe shrugged. ‘Maybe yes. I’ve been looking over the data we gathered from that jelly-ship thing. Those strands were showing passive emissions before we trashed them and we got a good look at their profile. It’s freaking me out. The rest of the Photurian tech we’ve found so far has been foreign, but it’s not magic. In fact, most of it’s just been lame. I can’t make head or tail of the biotech, of course, but there’s no reason to suspect it’s anything special. It just sits there. The jelly-ship, though, is a giant, screaming non-compute.’

Mark struggled with an urge to shut Zoe’s technical chatter down. He was starting to find her obsession with alien drive systems trying. However, so far she’d been consistently right about the threats facing them, and they wouldn’t have made it out of Nerroskovi without her ingenuity. He decided to give her room to talk.

‘Go on,’ he said gently.

Zoe glanced his way with a grateful expression. ‘There’s a difference between foreign tech and what you might call
miracle tech
,’ she said. ‘Foreign tech can be weird and surprising – all the parts look jumbled up and the design priorities feel backwards. That’s what it’s like when you examine at the Fecund stuff. With miracle tech, though, it’s more like trying to scale a wall of ice. There’s nothing to grab on to. You just scrabble around on the surface. You look at the machinery for answers and your mind just comes back blank. The suntap is like that. There are no answers for you to find. It’s been designed that way. The fact that we’ve found that kind of tech here changes the whole scale of the game we’re playing. And it makes me wonder if maybe the Transcended are involved after all. That would be the good outcome.’

‘This again?’ said Ash.

She shot his avatar a withering look. ‘Either that or some species of equivalent power.’

‘That sounds like a stretch to me,’ said Ash, ‘given how dumb their drones are.’

She glared at him. ‘We’d be
very stupid
to be making any assumptions about these machines right now. Anyone examining Fecund technology for the first time would see a mixture of dumb and miraculous there, too. Those drones might look clumsy, but the devil’s in the details.’

‘Can you help us understand how this is relevant?’ said Mark. ‘I mean, either we can beat them or we can’t. Right?’

Zoe sighed. ‘There’s no way to explain without getting technical.’

‘Then get technical,’ said Mark. ‘We’re not idiots. It’s okay. Tell us what we’re dealing with.’

Zoe peered up into his camera. ‘Do you know what B-mesons are?’

‘Sure. Primer particles. The warp emitters fire them – we use them to trigger curvon decay.’

She nodded. ‘They’re also called doorway particles. Most of the universe we see is governed by the physics of the Standard Model, or low-order physics. But to achieve anything like warp effects, you have to use particles sensitive to higher-order interactions – the kind that govern spatial curvature and particle decay. The whole Higgs-Weak interaction landscape. B-meson pathways are the cheapest, easiest route out of the StanMod domain. That trick, plus decay forcing, underpins almost all modern drive technology.’

‘I fail to see where this is going,’ said Sam.

‘You will if you give me a fucking minute,’ said Zoe. ‘The point is, you
can’t get
curvon decay without B-mesons or something like them. You can’t do
anything
without them. But that jelly-drive? No B-mesons. No tau-primers, either, so it can’t be a pure stealth drive. I saw evidence of plasma-forcing, but everything else is missing.’